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From the moment in June when Boris Johnson, then campaigning to be Conservative leader, called for full-fibre broadband in every home by 2025, I thought the issue of broadband would play a big part in the next election. But I still wasn’t expecting Labour to respond by pledging to nationalise Openreach and deliver free internet access for all. It was a bold ambition that forced broadband on to the political agenda like never before – though it didn’t quite trump the other ‘B’ word in the concerns of the public. I read lots of contrasting opinions on Labour’s policy – some saying it would be a vital investment in future generations, others claiming it was economically unviable and would cripple Openreach’s rivals. With Labour’s heavy election loss, free broadband won’t…

BT has called for Boris Johnson to cut red tape holding back broadband infrastructure, following his emphatic victory in December’s General Election. Philip Jansen, the firm’s boss, said that few things are more important to the UK than “speeding up the delivery of full-fibre broadband”. He claimed the Government could take some “simple, immediate steps” to slash regulation and help BT “build like the clappers”. In August Jansen said BT was ready to deliver on Johnson’s pledge to make full-fibre broadband available to all homes and businesses by 2025. His call to cut regulation echoes industry feeling that the law makes it too hard to lay broadband cables. Companies are currently required to obtain “wayleave agreements” to install equipment on private land, but property owners often don’t respond. The Internet…

Contact us so we can investigate your case Email: consumeractive@computeractive.co.uk Please include your name, phone number and address. LEAD CASE Can I cancel because Sky undercharged me? Q I have a problem with my 24-month Sky contract for TV, broadband and phone. When I took it out in March 2019, I was told it would be £42 a month for 18 months, going up to £76.99 for the final six months. In late October, I received an email saying Sky had made a mistake and I’d been underpaying, so my bill would go up to £56.15 until the 18 months was up. Can I cancel my contract without any charges because of this error? Paul Thornton A Yes, for two reasons. First, anyone who is hit with a mid-contract price…

What can I use to view NEF files? Q I recently bought a second-hand Nikon 3100D camera and am enjoying experimenting with its settings. However, some photos I’ve taken are saved as NEF files, which won’t open on my ageing PC (still running Windows 7 Home Premium). Assuming these are indeed photos, what can I use to view them? Oliver Banks A NEF files are photos taken using the camera’s RAW mode. They contain the data captured by your camera’s sensor, before any adjustments such as white balance, colour balance and exposure are applied. In contrast, photos taken in JPEG and TIFF formats have these adjustments applied and are compressed, which slightly reduces their quality (though often not noticeably so). The advantage of shooting RAW photos is that you can…

MESH ROUTER ❘ £230 from Currys www.snipca.com/33546 We mentioned when we tested the cheaper Orbi RBK40 mesh routers (see our review, Issue 532, page 25) that Netgear’s top-end RBK50, originally costing around £400 for a two-pack, had been discounted. At the time of writing, it had been slashed even further to £230 in many outlets and just £210 on Amazon. That offer was already finishing as we went to press, but if the price settled at about this level, the RBK50 could be five-star value. It’s going to have to be quick to take its turn in the limelight, though, because 2020 will be the year of 802.11ax, aka Wi-Fi 6 – the new wireless protocol that’s bringing even better speed and reception to devices that can take advantage, including…

TV-STREAMER/SMART SPEAKER ❘ £110 from Amazon www.snipca.com/33583 While updating its other TV and smart-speaker products at the end of 2019, Amazon also introduced this curiosity to the UK. Previously available in the States, the updated Fire TV Cube basically does both jobs. You could say it’s a Fire TV Stick 4K Ultra HD (£50 from Amazon www.snipca.com/31149, see our review, Issue 551, page 29) combined with an Echo Dot (£50 from Amazon www.snipca.com/33584, see Issue 540, page 28). And if you were wondering where your extra tenner went, it’s also a universal remote control, allowing you to operate your cable box, sound bar and so on from a single included handset. The cube looks neat, but if you prefer to hide it, an infra-red re dongle is provided that you…

EXTENSIONS Take screenshots in Chrome using Nimbus ✓ Why is taking and saving screenshots so fiddly? I’ve used and uninstalled countless programs in the past. They all ended up frustrating me. But maybe I’ve finally found something easy enough to use. It’s not a program, but a Chrome extension called Nimbus. Get it from the Chrome Web Store (www.snipca.com/33472). Click ‘Add to Chrome’ and you’ll see its icon (a blue N inside a dotted square) in your browser bar. Click it and you’ll see loads of options (see screenshot left), such as taking a screenshot of an entire page or just part of it. At the bottom there’s a dropdown menu letting you decide what to do with the grab – for example, edit it or save it to Dropbox.…

Voice Recorder Free (£2.99 to remove ads) Android www.snipca.com/33530 Voice Recorder gets straight down to business: its home screen is a mic button and a soundwave. Tap to record, tap again to stop, and the result is added to the app’s internal library. You can export the recording to online storage, other apps or contacts, and even set it as your ringtone, alarm sound or notification alert. Best for Fuss-free recordings Voice Record Pro Free (£6.99 to remove ads) iOS www.snipca.com/33531 Set bookmarks as you record so you can jump straight to them when playing back; save your files to online storage including Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive; share recordings by email and text, or download them from your phone over Wi-Fi. It’s packed with features but has an easy-to-use…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER Set the tab order in forms Writer lets you create fillable forms by adding fields from the Form menu (such as tickboxes and option buttons), then exporting the document as a PDF (File, Export, Export As, ‘Export Directly as PDF’). However, you may find that pressing the Tab key while viewing the PDF shifts between fields in a seemingly random order. To sort this, return to your form in Writer, then double-click one of the fields within it. In the General tab of the Properties window that appears, you’ll notice a ‘Tab order’ setting. It’s this that sets the order in which the Tab key shifts between them in the finished form. You can go through your fields and adjust the ‘Tab order’ in each, but it’s easier…

What is it? The new version of Microsoft’s Office 365 Personal and Home suite of tools, rumoured to launch in the spring. Remind me, what’s Office 365? Launched in 2011, it’s a subscription service to online versions of Office tools. You can use these only for as long as you pay the subscription. This is the main difference compared with the traditional Office versions named after years (2013, 2016, 2019, for example), which you download to your PC after paying a one-off price and can keep for as long as you like. What do I get in Office 365? Everything that’s in Office 2019, plus some tempting extras. So as well as online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, you’ll get 1TB of storage space in OneDrive and 60…

If you’re on a low income and receive benefits, you may be eligible for a cheap, no-frills broadband service from BT. It’s called BT Basic + Broadband and costs just £9.95 per month. There’s no connection charge and the monthly fee includes line rental, making it about half the price of similar deals. It’s an ADSL service, so average speeds are fairly low at 10Mbps. More concerning, however, is the 15GB data cap, so you’ll need to keep an eye on how much you’re using each month. You also need to prove you’re on a low income, such as income-related Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support or Pensions Credit (Guaranteed Credit). See more details at www.snipca.com/33498.…

Many readers have asked us whether their antivirus software will keep them safe after Windows 7 ends. It’s a great question. After all, the inherent effectiveness of security software doesn’t depend on whether an operating system is supported. But all antivirus has its limits. With support axed, Microsoft won’t automatically fix new flaws found in Windows 7 (though it may do so if the threat is severe enough). This leaves parts of the system forever broken, beyond the reach of antivirus programs to fix. Hackers will still look for such flaws, and exploit them if found. Keeping to the house analogy we started this feature with, if Windows 7 is a neglected but still-inhabited house, then the paint might crumble or tiles might fall from the roof, but those things…

2.1 Stereo speakers with a separate subwoofer. 32bit/64bit A measure of how much dataa PC can process at once. Most older computers are 32bit, more modern ones are 64bit. 3G/4G/5G Technologies that deliver faster mobile broadband. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard with speeds up to 10 times faster than 802.11ac. Also called Wi-Fi 6. ADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. A technology that converts a standard phone line into a broadband internet connection. AMOLED Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode. An alternative technology to LCD for creating flat-panel displays. Backhaul The process of sending data to a wired access point to reach the wider internet. Bandwidth A measure of how much data can be transferred through a connection at one time. Biometrics Using measurable personal…

PIN WEBSITES TO WINDOWS TASKBAR Microsoft is testing a feature in Windows 10 that lets you pin websites to the taskbar. It’s currently being trialled in preview versions of its Edge browser, which will relaunch on 15 January. When you select the option, you see a list of Microsoft services that can be pinned, such as Bing and Office, and any websites you’ve got open in Edge. IPHONE PHOTO APP IS APPLE’S BEST OF 2019 Apple has named an app that helps you take long-exposure photos as the best iPhone app of 2019. Spectre Camera, which costs £2.99, uses artificial intelligence to perform various tricks, such as remove crowds and draw light trails. Apple’s best iPad app of the year is Flow, from notebook makers Moleskine, which lets you use…

Two England sporting finals – one victorious, one not – dominated Google searches in the UK during 2019. The company’s annual ‘Year in Search’ results showed that the Rugby World Cup was the highest trending subject for the year, followed in second place by the Cricket World Cup. England lost the rugby final to South Africa, but beat New Zealand at Lord’s to become cricket world champions for the first time. Further down the list, TV and film feature heavily. The fantasy TV series Game of Thrones came third, as viewers sought information about the final season, while the films Avengers Endgame and Joker were also popular. Only one news event made the top 10: the fire at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris in April. Apple’s launch of the iPhone…

Add headshots to your family tree Whether you’re working on your tree or printing a chart to share with someone else, having people’s faces next to their entry helps to bring your research to life – and makes it look more attractive too. The ideal photo is a headshot, but having to manually crop photos in your image editor is time-consuming and tricky. Thankfully, a growing number of genealogy tools now let you generate headshots from your existing photos without you having to edit them. Create multiple headshots from one photo One of the first programs to add this tool was Family Historian (www.family-historian.co.uk). This is still the best option as it lets you create multiple headshots from a single image for both individuals and family groups. You’ll be prompted…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD Junk offender: JDownloader 2 I loathe sitting at my desk staring at progress bars, which is why I often use download managers. These are tools that can help to speed up download times and make the process as painless as possible, while giving you control over aspects such as how many files you can download simultaneously, where they are stored and so on. You can even use download managers to schedule downloads for specific times, so they don’t hog your bandwidth when you need it most. If that sounds useful, then bear in mind that not all download managers have your best interests at heart. JDownloader (http://jdownloader.org), for example, offers a lot of handy features, but will also attempt to download junk on your PC before you’ve…

LAPTOP ❘ £999 from Microsoft www.snipca.com/33501 Why can tech companies never stick to their naming schemes? Everybody knows the Microsoft Surface is a tablet – although some of us are old enough to remember when it was a prototype the size of a coffee table. Both the Surface Go and Surface Pro preserve the format of a Windows 10 computer built entirely into a touchscreen, with optional keyboard and pen. The Surface Book is also a sort of tablet, but comes with a laptop-style keyboard section that can be detached when you’re not typing. “This will do most jobs and comes with an excellent screen” The Microsoft Surface Laptop, on the other hand, is a laptop. In fairness, we can’t complain they made the name too cryptic. But they could…

PHONE ❘ £245 from Amazon www.snipca.com/33549 Were Batman and Superman ever to fight, it would probably be an even match. But that doesn’t mean they’re similar. As a superhero, Batman is basically a bloke with some tools. Superman comes from the planet Krypton and can fly around the world so fast he turns back time. Off duty, on the other hand, Batman is Gotham City’s most eligible billionaire. Superman merely works on the local paper. Apple and Samsung, likewise, are rivals, but seem to belong to different universes. They both make expensive phones with astounding technology. When they’re not doing that, Apple goes back to its secret underground palace and tinkers with even more expensive stuff. Samsung – well, Samsung makes cheap(ish) phones. Like the A50. Launched at £309, it’s…

Find out what other products we liked. Buy our new 2018 Back Issue CD: £15 from www.snipca.com/30307 LAPTOP HP Envy 13 (2019) £1,149 from www.snipca.com/33308 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 £1,199. www.snipca.com/33309 DESKTOP PC Palicomp AMD Impulse RYZ7 £500 from www.snipca.com/32913 Tested Issue 565 This could be the best £500 you’ve ever spent. It’s fast, has a powerful SSD and dedicated graphics card - something its budget…

It was nice to see you recommend Google Keep in your answer to Miles Jenkins’ question about which phone app could turn his device into a dictaphone (Issue 568, page 19). Google is obviously best known for its search engine and Chrome, but Keep is one of its best-kept secrets. It’s the simplest note-taking tool I’ve ever used. Gmail users may not know that as you read your emails you can make notes that sync with your online Keep account (https://keep.google.com). To see what I mean, open an email in Gmail, then look for the Keep logo on the right (the yellow lightbulb). If you don’t see it, click the ‘Show side panel’ arrow at the bottom right. Click the lightbulb, then click ‘Take a note’ (see screenshot). Write your…

iOS Automatically close Safari tabs Tap the right-most icon on the mobile Safari toolbar and you’ll see all of the pages you have open at the moment. If you’re anything like us, the list of active windows is probably longer than you expected, because it’s been added to every time you’ve long-pressed a link and chosen ‘Open in New Tab’ (see screenshot right). It’s a handy way to make sure you can always get back to the page you were linked from, but it’s a bad habit to fall into, and a hard habit to break. Stacks of pages can build up, leaving you with several active tabs that not only reveal what you’ve been browsing, but also slow your phone by drawing down updates in the background when Safari…

WINDOWS 7, 8.1 & 10 Learn new shortcuts You can’t have enough keyboard shortcuts. Not only are they faster than constantly reaching for the mouse, but if you lose your mouse or it runs out of batteries, you’ll still be able to work your way around Windows. Using a little-known feature in Windows, you can learn new shortcuts in all sorts of menus. To switch it on in Windows 8.1 or 10, go to Settings (Windows key+I), ‘Ease of Access’, then select Keyboard from the list on the left. Now scroll down the right side until you reach the ‘Change how keyboard shortcuts work’ section and turn on ‘Underline access keys when available’ (see screenshot below). In Windows 7, click Start, Control Panel, ‘Ease of Access’, followed by the ‘Change…

Traditional post-it notes are great for jotting down quick reminders and to-do lists – until they lose their stickiness and get lost, that is. Far better to use digital sticky notes instead. Windows 10 comes with a Sticky Notes app pre-installed, which you can access by clicking Start, then typing sticky notes. A new Outlook.com feature means you can view, edit and create sticky notes while browsing email online. If you’re signed into the same Microsoft account on Outlook.com as on your PC, the two will sync, so you can see your sticky notes no matter where you are. To access sticky notes on Outlook.com, expand the Folders menu on the left, then select Notes. You can edit existing notes by clicking on them, or create new ones by clicking…

In the run-up to the General Election last month, Labour announced a bold plan to provide free broadband to every home and business in the UK. By nationalising Openreach (the subsidiary of BT that maintains the UK’s broadband infrastructure) and embarking on a £20 billion upgrade, it said it would provide high-speed, full-fibre broadband across the country by 2030. Needless to say, reaction was mixed (not least on our Facebook page www.snipca.com/33598). Some welcomed the idea, saying that it would bring much-needed investment into the UK’s broadband network and finally provide high-speed connections to homes and businesses in rural locations. And with the average home spending around £360 on broadband annually, it would have also represented a significant saving. Critics, however, argued that investment into the UK’s broadband service is…

NEW! In our new Reader Offer we’re selling Laplink PCmover Professional 11 at half price – just £24.95. It transfers your software, files and personal data to a brand new Windows 10 PC. As the ONLY Microsoft-approved program for transferring your files, it’s a must-use tool for people upgrading from Windows 7 to 10. Remember – Microsoft ends support for Windows 7 on 14 January! WHAT IT DOES ✓ Moves all your software, files and data from Windows 7 to a new Windows10PC ✓ Transfers your files automatically ✓ Works out the fastest way to transfer your files PLUS Free advice from a UK-based support team Laplink PCmover Professional 11 NOW ONLY £24.95* *Normally £49.95 Buy it on our Software Store at www.snipca.com/33470…

My favourite ‘PowerToy’ when I was a kid was the Evel Knievel wind-up stunt cycle. The TV advert (www.snipca.com/33581) made it look like it could outrun Barry Sheene, perform a dozen wheelies then jump over 50 double-decker buses. In reality, it just teetered for a few feet, then flopped on the floor (thankfully with no broken bones). I still loved it though. Microsoft’s PowerToys aren’t as much fun, but they’re infinitely more useful. They were launched a quarter of a century ago (blimey!) as a pack of 15 tools for Windows 95. These days, you can download plenty of different tools from the web, from the quirky to the practical. But before most of us had the internet, PowerToys felt like an exciting bonus, akin to finding an extra present…

More than half of NHS computers are still running Windows 7, with less than a fortnight to go until Microsoft ends support for the 10-year-old operating system. However, the NHS has arranged with Microsoft to receive free security updates for another year, giving trusts longer to upgrade. The number of Windows 7 computers has dropped sharply since July, when over a million machines were still running it. Around 2,000 were even using Windows XP, for which support ended in 2014. The latest figures come from a Freedom of Information request made by cloud-computing firm Citrix. It showed that 231,057 machines out of 447,619 are now running Windows 7. Nearly 123,000 are running Windows 10, with the remaining devices being Android and iOS phones and tablets. Citrix asked 98 NHS trusts…

Email: letters@computeractive.co.uk Facebook: www.facebook.com/computeractive Twitter: @ComputerActive www.twitter.com/computeractive Don’t fall for Windows 7 ‘project fear’ I find Keith Bowden’s definition of the word ‘inevitable’ highly questionable (Star Letter, Issue 569, pictured). He urges all Windows 7 users to upgrade to Windows 10 because, apparently, there’s no other choice. But I’d like to point out to Keith that back in 2014 I heard the same voices imploring us to upgrade from XP because imminent disaster awaited us all. I sensed ‘project fear’ so, while I took some precautions, I continued to use XP for a couple more years without any harm. I’m now a contented Windows 7 user. Again, I can hear the alarm bells ringing louder than they need to. Despite all of Microsoft’s warnings, around 500 million computers still run…

SYSTEM TOOL WinUpdatesView www.snipca.com/33593 What you need: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 The number of Windows updates Microsoft releases shows no sign of decreasing, but at least they’ve become less annoying. Last year, Windows gained an Active Hours feature that prevents updates from being installed when you’re most likely to be using your PC. To change when Windows can install updates, go to Settings, ‘Update & Security’, then ‘Change active hours’. Some Windows updates make your PC more secure, others add new features or fix bugs, but knowing exactly which updates were installed and when isn’t always easy. Enter WinUpdatesView (another terrific new tool from Nirsoft), which gives you a detailed overview of all Windows update activity on your PC. On our laptop (which underwent a clean install of Windows…

HaloPDF Free iOS www.snipca.com/33526 PDFs can be opened on any device, and look the same in any compatible app, whether that’s a browser, ebook reader or dedicated PDF program. HaloPDF converts photos to PDF, so you can snap a document and send it to a contact with the certainty that it will be accurately reproduced on their tablet, phone or computer. It’s quicker and easier than using dedicated page-layout software. Own It Free iOS www.snipca.com/33527 Android www.snipca.com/33528 The BBC’s Own It app, aimed at kids, replaces a phone’s default keyboard with something smarter, giving speedy access to icons and GIFs and, more importantly, help. If a kid types ‘I’m being bullied’, it will offer assistance, with tips on dealing with the problem. Type ‘I hate you’, and it will suggest…

Microsoft is working on eye-tracking for Windows (read more at www.snipca.com/33592), but you’ll need to buy special hardware to use it. An alternative is to use a free tool called Enable Viacam (download from www.snipca.com/33588). Instead of using your eyes to control the mouse cursor, it uses the slightly less accurate – but still impressive – method of tracking head movements. Although primarily designed as an accessibility tool to help people with reduced mobility, it’s an interesting tool that anyone can experiment with – you’ll just need a webcam on your computer. After loading the program, a toolbar appears along the top of the screen, along with a separate window showing your webcam feed (if you don’t see this window, click the far-right button on the top toolbar). In this…

Email, online forms and other types of digital communication all help reduce the amount of paperwork you have to deal with when running a club. But there is often still plenty of paper documents that you need to digitise. Here we look at how you can scan documents more easily. Use your phone Thanks to their high-quality cameras, smartphones can double up as portable scanners. However, if you simply take a photo of a document using your phone’s camera app, it’ll be saved as a JPEG file alongside your personal photos and it won’t always be easy to crop out the background. There is a better way. If you don’t already have a Google account, create one for free at www.snipca.com/33511. Next, install and sign into the Google Drive app…

You can cancel a new broadband contract within 14 days, but in most cases you’ll be well into your contract before being tempted by deals elsewhere. Last year, the six biggest ISPs (BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin) signed up to an Ofcom code of practice that lets you terminate your contract if your speeds drop below what was advertised when you signed up. Once you’ve flagged up the slow speeds to your ISP, it will have 30 days to resolve the problem. If it fails, you’ll be able to leave immediately without having to pay any early-termination fees. If you plan to switch ISP during your contract period, it’s therefore worth running a speed test (as explained on page 51) and comparing it with your promised speeds. Poor…

Before we explain how to continue using Windows 7 safely, we should make one thing clear: it will never again be as safe as Windows 10. There’s no getting around this uncomfortable truth. Microsoft providing security support for an operating system is the single biggest factor determining how safe it is, regardless of which antivirus or other security tools you use. By removing support, Microsoft is sending an unequivocal message: you should upgrade to Windows 10. However, computing-like most things in life - is a constant compromise between risk and convenience. When we go to bed at night, most of us are happy to spend a few minutes double-locking doors and windows, but wouldn’t waste hours building a brick wall outside our front door, knowing we’d have to demolish it…

Why does Everything request permission to run? Q I installed the Everything search tool from www.voidtools.com, as suggested in Issue 566’s Cover Feature. It’s a brilliant program that finds files instantly, like magic! What you failed to mention, though, was that as it launches when Windows starts, it triggers the ‘Are you sure you want this program to make changes?’ box. In my case it also minimises this so it sits on the taskbar, waiting for a reply. I often don’t notice it for ages. Is there any way round this without reducing the security settings? Alan Bailey A Everything doesn’t actually need administrator privileges to run, but it will demand them if during installation you selected the ‘Run as administrator’ option. This option does have its purposes – for…