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How quickly life can change. When the Computeractive team first discussed this issue’s Cover Feature, we had no idea we’d be writing, editing and designing it all from home. Our office is closed while the world fights the Coronavirus. It’s disruptive, but we’ll cope. We’ve put in emergency measures to guarantee that issues reach the shops, and subscribers get their copies early in the post. Life must go on. You can be sure that Windows updates will continue amid the crisis. I accept that they may not be your top priority at the moment, but it’s always useful to learn how to manage them. We explain how you can postpone them, install them, remove them and above all stop them messing up your computer. These are strange, unsettling times. Nobody…

Microsoft appears to have fixed a flaw in Windows Defender that was causing the antivirus tool to skip malware when scanning PCs. It was caused by the KB4052623 update, released on 5 March. Microsoft released a new version of the update on 24 March, updating Windows Defender to version 4.18.2003.8. Check whether it’s been updated by going to Settings, ‘Update & Security’, Windows Security, ‘Virus & threat protection’, ‘Virus & threat protection updates’, then ‘Check for updates’. DISNEY LAUNCHES TV-STREAMING SERVICE Disney has launched its TV-streaming service in the UK, offering hundreds of its films and TV shows, plus titles from Pixar, Marvel, National Geographic and more. Called Disney Plus, it costs £5.99 a month or £59.99 a year. There is a free seven-day trial, but you’ll be charged automatically…

WATCH OUT FOR… ‘Friend’s naked girlfriend’ email scam What’s the threat? Just when you think you’ve got the measure of a scam, crooks find new ways to trick you with it. Previously, sextortion scams worked by threatening to email explicit pictures of you to people in your contacts list unless you paid a ransom. They hoped the shame and embarrassment of being exposed in this way would panic victims into sending money. Now, however, users are being targeted by emails claiming that a friend has already fallen victim to a sextortion scam but has not paid the ransom. As a supposed punishment, the scammers are sending compromising photos of the friend – or their girlfriend – to their contacts. These emails come with Word attachments which, when opened, reveals a…

Email: letters@computeractive.co.uk Facebook: www.facebook.com/computeractive Twitter: @ComputerActive www.twitter.com/computeractive As a 76-year-old with a dodgy ticker (or “underlying health problem”, as the medical boffins call it), I’ve quarantined myself until the Coronavirus dies down. I faced weeks of boring TV and re-reading books until Issue 576 landed on my doormat. The Cover Feature (‘Don’t Bin Your Old Desktop PC’) was perfect timing. I’ve got four unused PCs that I’ve always wanted to bring out of hibernation. Your feature, combined with my self-isolation, gave me the motivation to do so. PC number one is now a videostreaming server, as you suggested. I installed Plex (www.snipca.com/34204) and now use it to access my large library of home videos. It brings memories of happier times than we’re living through now. Moving on, PC number two…

SYSTEM TOOL Gammy 0.9 www.snipca.com/34385 What you need: Windows 8.1 or 10 Most laptops include a small ambient light sensor, allowing them to adjust the screen brightness depending on nearby lighting (in low light, brightness is reduced, for example). Few desktop monitors have this feature, though, meaning you have to use your monitor’s buttons to adjust the brightness – and if you’ve ever tried this, you’ll know how fiddly they are. Gammy is a free tool that takes a different approach to adjusting your screen’s brightness. Instead of monitoring light levels, it constantly tracks the windows you have open. If they’re predominantly white, Gammy will reduce your screen’s brightness. If they’re darker (such as the black background of Command Prompt), brightness increases. As well as adjusting your screen’s brightness levels,…

PHONE | £642 from Amazon www.snipca.com/34363 The Xperia 5 is about twice as expensive as the Xperia 10, which replaced the Xperia XA2 – so let’s not start trying to fathom Sony’s maths. It’s really a lowercost version of last year’s Xperia 1, knocking down the size and specs but still feeling like a top-end device. The sharp 6.1in screen covers both sRGB and the wider DCI-P3 colour space with effectively infinite contrast. It’s HDR-ready, although limited brightness compromises the full effect. This is a fantastic screen for a phone significantly cheaper than flagship models like Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra (see page 26). The shiny Gorilla Glass 6 case is a bit of a grease magnet, but well made, showing Sony’s typical squared-off minimalism. Small borders above and below the…

Find out what other products we liked. Buy our new 2019 Back Issue CD: £15 from www.snipca.com/33711 LAPTOP PRICE DROP HP Envy 13 (2019) £880 from www.snipca.com/Tested Issue 568 Thanks to eighth-gen Intel processors and dedicated Nvidia MX250 graphics, this sleek aluminium laptop offers a practical combination of all-round processing power and portability, topped off by 8 hours 30 minutes battery life – and the touchscreen is now excellent too. ALTERNATIVE Dell XPS 13 Gets the most out of Intel CPUs, now tenthgen, but there’s no GPU option and the cheapest sensible configuration is £949 from www.snipca.com/33309 ANDROID TABLET Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 9.7 £347 from www.snipca.com/30707 Tested Issue 501 Now discounted and with a stylus included, this full-size HDR tablet is a better deal than the new Tab S4…

For years I’ve used Google Chrome (and Firefox before that), but I tried Microsoft’s revamped Edge in January and loved how fast and simple it is. That same day I signed up for the ‘Canary’ version of Edge (from www.snipca.com/34250), which lets you try its new features before they’re made available to everyone. So, as an Edge ‘insider’, I’d like to recommend the ‘picture-in-picture’ button. When you’re watching video, this appears in your browser toolbar (it’s a musical note next to the three horizontal lines). Click it and you’ll see what’s playing in your browser. It’s a quick way of jumping to this content when you have lots of tabs open. To activate this in Edge Canary, type edge://flags in the browser bar (1 in the screenshot), then type Global…

iOS Use new text-selection improvements in iOS 13 There’s a hidden touchpad in iOS 13, just like the one on your laptop. Tap on some text, roughly where you want to drop the cursor, then press the spacebar for a few seconds until the letters on the keys above it fade away (see screenshot below). Now, just drag your finger around. The cursor will move in sync with your finger and, because your finger isn’t directly on top of it, it will always remain in view, making it easy to let go when it’s in the right position. It’s easy to overlook taps, swipes and gestures like this, however Apple has now made it much easier to handle text selection in iOS 13. Long-press a word to select it, then…

WINDOWS 10 Make the most of your touchpad It’s easy to ignore it when you have a perfectly good mouse, but for those times when you use your touchpad, it pays to get the most out of it. If your laptop is less than five or so years old, you can almost certainly use multi-finger gestures. You probably already know the basic ones, such as pinching two fingers together to zoom out and moving them apart to zoom in, but you can also set up additional gestures within Windows. First, go to your Touchpad settings window (Settings, Devices, then Touchpad). Now scroll down the righthand side of the screen to the ‘Three finger gestures’ section. The default setting here lets you show the desktop by swiping down with three fingers…

If you need to combine the contents of multiple columns in your spreadsheet so that they display in another column, get the powerful Concatenate function to do the hard work for you. In our example, we have one column with forenames and another with surnames. What we want is to have a single column (called Full Name) that combines the Forename and Surname cells for each row. The Concatenate function tells your program which cells you want to combine, separating each with commas. In our example, Forname cells don’t include a space at the end. So if we type the formula =CONCATENATE(A1,B1) in cell C2, it combines the contents of A2 and B2 successfully, but doesn’t leave a space between them. To fix this, we need to add the space…

Do you suffer from update dread? It’s that sinking feeling you get when you see a notification telling you updates are ready to install on your PC. And that dread is often justified because updates will inevitably involve a disruption of some kind. It may just mean a reboot that interrupts whatever you’re doing. But at worst, the update could fail or even stop your PC working altogether. Microsoft’s strategy for upgrading Windows 10 involves different levels of update. Critical updates and security updates are issued whenever they’re needed to fix sudden problems or vulnerabilities. Quality updates (also referred to as ‘cumulative’ updates) arrive on a monthly basis (usually on the second Tuesday of each month, known as ‘Patch Tuesday’), though sometimes you may see these being issued more frequently.…

1080p High-definition video: 1920x1080 pixels. 32bit/64bit Measure of how much data a PC can process at once. Older PCs are 32bit. 3G/4G/5G Technologies that deliver faster mobile broadband. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 8K Video with a resolution of 7680x4320 pixels. Accelerometer A sensor that detects movement. AMOLED Alternative technology to LCD for creating flat-panel screens. Architecture A set of rules and language that govern how hardware and software work. Bandwidth A measure of how much data can be transferred through a connection at one time. Benchmarking Comparing products with an accepted standard. BIOS Software built into every PC that connects components. Cache A temporary space for storing information. Client A program that acts as an interface between PC and server. Core Units on a…

BILL GATES LEAVES MICROSOFT BOARD Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (pictured) is stepping down from the company’s board to concentrate on his charity foundation, which he runs with his wife Melinda. Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen, who died in 2018. He remained as Microsoft CEO until 2000 when he was succeeded by Steve Ballmer. With a fortune of $103.6bn (£84.4bn), he’s currently the world’s second richest man behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Read his statement at www.snipca.com/34323. CARPHONE WAREHOUSE SHUTS SMALL SHOPS Carphone Warehouse has closed all 531 stores that sell only phones, leaving 2,900 people without a job. It said the decision was not caused by the Coronavirus, but by changes in how people shop. Boss Alex Baldock said customers were increasingly buying phones…

Amazon binned my MP3s, so what are my rights? LEAD CASE Q I lost several MP3 files ordered through Amazon Digital Services because Amazon says it no longer has agreements with record companies. Amazon won’t refund me for these lost MP3 files. I’m not sure what my rights are. Can you tell me whether there’s any way I can retrieve my music? Tim Ball A We’re afraid there’s little protection for consumers in cases like these. If Amazon no longer has a business agreement with record companies to let people stream or download these files, then it can’t offer them to customers. It’s important to recognise the difference between buying a physical CD and ‘renting’ access to digital services. Once you buy a CD, it’s yours to keep. The retailer…

HOW I USE… Not so long ago, ditching Google Chrome as my default web browser was almost unthinkable. It’s had a permanent spot on my taskbar for over 10 years now and although I’ve flirted with alternatives such as Firefox and the hugely customisable Vivaldi (www.vivaldi.com), neither has come close to replacing it. But all that changed when Microsoft released a completely new version of Edge earlier this year. Based on Chromium (the open-source engine behind Chrome), it’s familiar enough for me to feel comfortable, but with the added benefit of being more streamlined and loaded with great new features. One of my biggest gripes with Chrome is the amount of system resources it scoffs – when my laptop slows and its fan ramps up, it’s usually Chrome showing up…

SMART SPEAKER | £180 from Harman www.snipca.com/34369 Tech companies like Google and Amazon have steadily improved the audio quality of their smart speakers, but Harman Kardon has been making hi-fi gear since the 1950s, and the Citation One promises ‘rich, room-filling sound’. Don’t pay too much attention to the heritage origins: the firm is now owned by Samsung, and this is a mass-market consumer product that draws on the same kind of current technology as its rivals. But it does sound pretty good. “Rich, room-filling sounds, though the bass is a tad heavy” Available in grey, black, dark blue or pink, the fabric-covered unit is similar in size, shape and specification to other premium smart speakers. The smart part is courtesy of Google Assistant, set up in the Google Home…

Compatible with all major gaming and mobile devices, Gioteck’s TX50 stereo headset has a soft-touch, rubberised finish to deliver the very best in style and comfort to gamers of all ages. The over-ear soft Alacantara cushions allow for precise delivery of sound, blended with extreme comfort for long gaming sessions, allowing you to get fully immersed. The 50mm high-impact drivers let you track every footstep in your game, while the flexible metal mic guarantees that you hear every command. Whether you play on a Nintend Switch, PlayStation or Xbox, or o your mobile phone, the TX50 brings your game to life with realistic sounds and rich, detailed audio. To enter this competition, email your details to cacomp@dennis.co.uk with ‘Gioteck’ in the subject line by midnight 21 April. Good luck! You…

Family Tree Maker At one time, I used Family Tree Maker, but found the charts unwieldy. A chart is only useful if others can easily access it. And what I use instead… I now use TreeDraw (£19.99 from https://treedraw.spansoft.org), which lets me arrange my charts in family groups on A4 pages, along with notes and links to other pages. As a bonus, pages can be produced as PDFs, making it easy to produce pages others can read. I’ve no doubt that much of this could be achieved using spreadsheets, but TreeDraw is more convenient. I’ve included a screenshot of my family tree. Tell us why you stopped using a website, app or program: letters@computeractive.co.uk…

Pholorize iOS £4.99 www.snipca.com/34356 Android £2.89 www.snipca.com/34357 There’s something magical about this app. Open a black-and-white photo from your library and Pholorize uses AI to detect its contents and add colour. More explanation would be good (we wrongly thought it had frozen on a few occasions) but the results, while not always spot on, are worth the wait and bring life to even your oldest shots. GPS Route Planner iOS Free www.snipca.com/34358 Go beyond regular route planning by mapping out a journey that may include multiple stops and working out the best way to get between them. The app automatically optimises your journey so you avoid traffic. Less sitting around in a line of static vehicles also means you’re burning less fuel, which is good for both the environment and…

If you want to send a folder of files to another computer on your network, it’s a lot easier to share it over your network rather than sending it by email. To do this, open File Explorer (Windows+E), then right-click the folder you want to share. Click Properties, select the Sharing tab at the top, then click the Share button. The next window lets you choose which users on your network to share your folder with. You can enter an individual username or click the down arrow at the right of the box and select Everyone (giving all users access to your folder), then click Add. By default, other users will only be able to read files from your shared folder (in other words, open or copy them). If you…

Send group emails in Gmail Even if you only run a small club, sending group emails to your members can be fraught with problems. You may forget to include people, enter the wrong email addresses or even email previous members who have since left the club. As we’ll show you here, Gmail lets you create a definitive mailing list for your club members, which you can use to reach all the people you need to. Create a Gmail label Gmail uses what it calls ‘labels’ to organise your inbox, doing a similar job to folders in Microsoft Outlook. It also lets you apply labels to your contacts, and we will use this ability to create our mailing list. The first step is to create a label for your mailing list.…

• Sky has made Sky Go Extra free for all its customers: www.snipca.com/34396. • Mobile networks are removing data charges for accessing NHS websites: www.snipca.com/34399. • Audible is providing free audiobooks for children for “as long as schools are closed”: www.snipca.com/34398. • The National Theatre is streaming plays online for free: www.snipca.com/34400. • Smartify is making all audio tours of museums and galleries free for the rest of 2020: https://smartify.org. • Amazon Prime has made all episodes of Fireman Sam and Peppa Pig free to watch: www.amazon.co.uk/amazonprime. • Dashlane is offering free 90-day trials of the Premium version of its password manager: www.snipca.com/34402. • BBC is adding new TV series to iPlayer, including Spooks (pictured), Waking The Dead and Wallander: www.snipca.com/34398.…

I agree with Paul Davies (Letters, Issue 576) that many people in the UK would be delighted to get 11Mbps. But he shouldn’t be too harsh on those who think that 11Mbps is still a ‘pitiful’ speed, as John Ian Haley said in Issue 575. In my opinion, Paul and John are both right. It is correct to complain about 11Mbps when other countries are so much faster. Sweden, for example, has an average of 55Mbps. In Spain, where I used to live, it’s 36Mbps. In New Zealand, it’s 32Mbps. Our average is a lamentable 22Mbps, so 11Mbps is half the norm and can be rightly described as pitiful. But how should we describe Paul’s speed of just 2.5Mbps? It’s worse than pitiful. Woeful, perhaps, or wretched? I’d call it…

Link RootsMagic to Ancestry Reader John Blakemore emailed to tell us of his struggles linking his Legacy Family Tree file to the Ancestry website. He said that his photos don’t appear when he exports a GEDCOM file. He’s also unable to simply “update” his tree to Ancestry – a new tree is created instead. He was hoping we could help, but sadly images can’t be transferred to Ancestry via a GEDCOM file, and neither can the file be used to overwrite or update an existing tree. If you want to link your tree to Ancestry to be able to update it, you’ll have to switch to a program that supports this feature: either Family Tree Maker (£79.95, https://software.mackiev.com/ftm) or RootsMagic (£19.95, www.rootsmagic.co.uk). Switch to RootsMagic Let’s go with the cheaper…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD Junk offender: Auslogics Disk Defrag There are some software companies I can rely on time and time again to fill up my hard drive with junk. And good old Auslogics never fails to disappoint. Last year, I named and shamed the Australian company’s Duplicate File Finder program for trying to load my PC with rubbish I didn’t need. And it turns out that Auslogics Disk Defrag is just as bad – perhaps even worse. Launch the free tool’s installer and you’ll be greeted with a big green ‘Agree and install’ button. It’s all too easy to miss the less prominent ‘Custom install’ option below, but if you don’t choose this you’ll end up installing Disk Defrag with its default settings, which means the program will launch in…

TABLET | £999 from Microsoft Store www.snipca.com/34330 Despite running smartphone software on a mobile processor, Apple’s iPad was immediately far more successful than Microsoft’s Tablet PC, which ran Windows on desktop PC processors. This hardware divide goes back to the decades-old rivalry between CISC (complex instruction set computer) and RISC (reduced instruction set computer) technology. The former includes the x86 processors on which PCs are based, while the latter (popularised by British company Arm) dominates the ‘system on a chip’ (SoC) processors used in phones and tablets. “A Windows 10 tablet that struggles to run Windows apps” Today, you can choose an Apple or Android tablet that runs compatible apps on its RISC hardware, or something like Microsoft’s Surface Pro 7 (see our review, Issue 569, page 23), which runs…

FITNESS WATCH | £140 from Amazon www.snipca.com/34365 This affordable fitness watch from Honor (owned by Huawei) comes in a traditional round-faced style and a choice of two sizes, 42 or 46mm. We tested the latter, which is on the big side but not uncomfortably thick, and has twice the battery life, at up to 14 days. Even using the built-in GPS regularly, we got ten days, much better than a fancier device such as an Apple Watch, despite the bright and detailed AMOLED screen. The downside is you can’t install apps to expand what it does, but plenty is included. Besides GPS, which we found accurate, there’s an optical heart-rate monitor that detects the pulse in your wrist. There’s also an accelerometer and gyroscopes, which allow the MagicWatch to record…

What was it? Launched in January 2004, the Digital Jukebox (DJ, pictured) was a rival to the iPod based on hardware from UK company Creative Technology Built around a tiny hard drive, it came with 15 or 20GB capacity at $249 or $299 (today, about £290-£350 without VAT). This was relatively cheap at the time, but by the summer, Apple’s fourth-generation iPod matched the price for a 20GB player weighing 30 per cent less. Dell went on to release the Pocket DJ, a more compact device offering 5GB of storage for the same $199 as Apple’s 4GB iPod Mini. Why did it die? Sales didn’t catch fire. While the first Digital Jukebox was praised for its solid build and long battery life, it lacked the FM radio and line-in features…

Being a self-confessed geek, my New Year’s resolution for 2020 wasn’t drinking less or becoming a vegan. No, it was to buy a NAS drive and set it up around my home office to share files quickly and securely. Your review of NAS drives in Issue 573 (pages 24-25) was timely. I was impressed with the Synology DS218+, which you gave five stars to, but as a NAS beginner I opted for the “easy basic” WD My Cloud Home Duo. I’m also familiar with how WD software works, which gave me confidence. It was an excellent choice. WD’s My Cloud app is simple to use, and while the 2TB storage isn’t huge, it’s enough for me. It’s transformed my network. Everyone should buy a NAS drive! Want to recommend hardware…

Blinkist Free (subscriptions from £4.99 per month) iOS & Android blinkist.comii Blinkist summarises some of the best non-fiction titles down to their key points, so you can read them in around 15 minutes. It’s a shortcut to sounding smarter and being better-read. Best For Opinionated readers SprintReader Free iOS www.snipca.com/34361 SprintReader displays a single word at a time, with a single highlighted letter to catch your eye. It’s up to you how quickly the word changes as it works its way through the text file you’ve fed it, but we soon reached 500 words per minute. Several books are built in, and you can add your own plain-text novels (from gutenberg.org, for example) via Dropbox. Best For Time-strapped readers Serial Reader Free iOS www.snipca.com/34359 Android www.snipca.com/34360 Catch up with the…

MICROSOFT WORD Prevent inadvertently overwriting text You’re frantically editing a document in Word, only to glance up at the screen and realise that what you’ve just typed has overwritten existing text. The culprit? Word’s Overtype feature. We’ll explain how to avoid this happening in future, but first you need to be able to restore the text you’ve overwitten without having to retype everything you’ve just put in. To do this, highlight all the text you’ve just typed, then press Ctrl+C to copy it. Now undo your typing by pressing Ctrl+Z repeatedly until your original text is restored. Finally, press the Insert key to turn Overtype mode off, then press Ctrl+V to paste the new text back in (this time it won’t overwrite your existing text). To make sure this doesn’t…

What is it? It’s a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that can recognise smells, using hardware based on the structure of the brain. How can it do that? By using algorithms that mimic what happens in your brain when you smell something. When an odour reaches the olfactory cells in our nose, they send signals to a collection of neurons in the brain that control smell. This cluster, called the olfactory bulb, bounces the signal to other parts of the brain, allowing us to recognise a range of smells, whether pleasant or repugnant. Scientists understand this system much more accurately than they do other areas of the brain, which has helped them build processors that work in a similar way. And what could it be used for? To detect scents…

How do I clone for free? Q I thought AOMEI Backupper (How To, Issue 574, page 35) would be just the thing for me. However, I soon hit a snag. When clicking Start Clone I see a request to upgrade to the Pro version in order to continue. As far as I can see, there’s no option to continue without upgrading. Any advice on how I can create that bootable clone and use the hard drive as I intended, without paying for an upgrade? David White A Yours was one of several similar emails, so we went back and checked our instructions with a fine-tooth comb–and everything seems in order. Several Computeractive staff members did this independently, to ensure that we weren’t missing something. And then it dawned on us:…

Times of temporary crisis can lead to permanent change. The Black Death led to the end of serfdom, as scarcity of labour allowed peasants to demand higher wages. In 1916, the Government introduced British Summer Time to allow more working hours in daylight. Later, in 1942, the Beveridge Report proposed the welfare state to put an end to “Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness”. The rest is history. “For years I’ve proofed pages on A3 printouts, but had to find an alternative when the Coronavirus forced our office to close” And then, on Monday 23 March, 2020, at approximately half past two on a gorgeous spring day, I edited my first PDF online. I doubt in years to come my decision will be momentous enough to warrant its own Wikipedia…