Table of contents for 714 in Computeractive

You know a company is serious about privacy when it stores your data in a decommissioned military bunker under a Swiss mountain. Proton did precisely that when it launched, before moving its servers to equally secure locations in Zurich. When it released its first tool (Proton Mail) in 2015 I thought its focus on security was overkill. But not now. As tech giants (especially Google) become more reliant on advertising, it’s clear we need alternatives that won’t sell your details to the highest bidder. Impregnable security would be pointless if the tools were hard to use, but Proton makes them wonderfully simple – and it’s easy to switch from Gmail and Google Drive. I’ve done both this year, having already moved to its password manager in 2024. Next, I’ll try…

Anker has recalled five power banks sold in the UK because of the risk they could catch fire. The Chinese firm said anyone who owns an affected model should stop using it immediately “due to the risk of overheating, melting, smoke or fire”. It said the problem comes from faulty lithium-ion battery cells. “While the likelihood of malfunction is considered minimal, out of an abundance of caution, we have decided to initiate a voluntary global recall of several Anker power bank models,” it added. To check whether you own one of the five power banks (see box left) look at the bottom or on one side for a model and serial number. Anker also lists the affected models at www.snipca.com/55443, and provides instructions on how to dispose of the faulty…

‘Update Disney+ payment’ I haven’t watched a Disney film since I was a little girl, so I was surprised to receive an email telling me that I had to update my payment to Disney+. I don’t subscribe to any streaming service, so I knew it was a scam straight away. Still, I was a little worried that someone might have signed me up using stolen details, but no payments had come out of my bank account. Like most scans these days the email was well written, with no spelling mistakes, and had the correct Disney+ logo (see www.snipca.com/55241). I’m sure some genuine Disney+ viewers will fall for it. Warn your fellow readers about scams at letters@computeractive.co.uk…

What can I replace Skype with for international calls? Q Just about every article I read about replacing Skype refers to calling family and friends who also had Skype. But I used Skype to make a smallish number of international calls to people I didn’t know and many of these were businesses with landlines. In the early days, £10 of Skype credit lasted me years and more recently Skype credit was included with my Microsoft 365 package. What’s the best replacement that lets me make around 20 to 30 mins of international calls a month? Chris Read A Viber (www.viber.com) is the natural alternative to Skype for those like Chris who wish to make calls to overseas landlines and mobile phones. Its Viber Out packages work in the same way as…

Better emulate than never As you’d expect, the Surface Laptop 13in fully meets Microsoft’s Copilot+ standard. Its Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus processor includes a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that enhances performance with AI-powered tools. The laptop also runs a special version of Windows that comes with exclusive AI features, such as the Cocreater app, which can generate impressive artwork from simple sketches. “A sleek laptop with a great screen and battery, but limitations will curb appeal” Because it uses a Qualcomm chip, this Surface Laptop runs a different version of Windows from Intel- or AMD-based machines. As a result, it relies on an emulator for certain programs, and some software — particularly security tools and games — may not work at all. Qualcomm maintains a list of compatible software at…

What are they? Touchscreens are panels that let you interact directly with what’s on screen by touching it with a finger, stylus or other object. How do they work? Most touchscreens are capacitive, meaning they have a transparent conductor between the screen’s surface and the pixels below that uses the conductive properties of human skin to detect whether the surface is being touched. There are also resistive touchscreens on printers and sat-navs that aren’t as sensitive or responsive. These require you to apply more pressure to the screen’s surface, which then bends to make a connection with another layer below. These screens can’t detect more nuanced gestures such as swipes. What are the specs? The most important component is the number of multi-touch points on the screen, which you’ll find…

What is it? The Lenovo Chromebook 14 (from £549, pictured) is powered by the new MediaTek Kompanio Ultra processor. Equipped with an NPU and GPU, it delivers impressive AI-processing capabilities that outperform most Copilot+ Windows PCs with a rating of 50 TOPS. How does it work? It features a special edition of ChromeOS with a version of Google’s Gemini AI that can run locally on the device, eliminating the need for online processing. It also has handy features like Smart Grouping, which uses AI to organise tabs, documents and apps by category. It can intelligently extract text from images and includes a new AI-powered photo-editing tool in the Gallery app. What’s the catch? We can’t really see one. The price is reasonable and it’s well equipped, including its smart OLED…

FIREFOX Preview links before you open them Firefox has a handy new AI-powered feature called Link Previews, which shows previews of web pages before you open them. These summarise the key points of a page’s content, to save you visiting irrelevant sites and opening new tabs unnecessarily. Link Previews is currently an experiment in Firefox Labs. To activate it, click the browser’s three-line menu button and choose Settings, Firefox Labs, then switch on the ‘Link previews’ option. To see a preview of a web page, hover your cursor over a link to it and press Shift+Alt. This will open a pop-up box containing an image and summary of the content (see screenshot below). The preview may also contain an estimated reading time for the page, and a link to ‘Visit…

WINDOWS 11 INSIDER Turn your Snipping Tool videos into GIFs Microsoft has updated Snipping Tool so it now can turn your videos into GIFs. The feature, available to Windows Insiders on the Dev or Canary Channel, is in version 11.2505.21.0 of Snipping Tool. Check if you have this by clicking the Start button then searching for Snipping Tool, right-clicking the result and selecting ‘App settings’. Now look for the number next to Version. If yours is lower than the number above, check Windows Update to see if there’s an update waiting to be installed. If you have the latest version, record a video in Snipping Tool as you normally would. When it’s finished, click the GIF button at the top right (see screenshot 1 below) and you’ll see options to…

Is it now safe to install Windows 11 24H2? Q Back in Issue 703’s ‘Break Windows’ worst rules’ Cover Feature you explained how the app GRC InControl (www.snipca.com/53585) keeps your version of Windows on the current build, while still allowing urgent security updates. I used this app to prevent Windows 11 24H2 from being installed – because you said it was causing problems – and keep my PC running 23H2. Has Microsoft now fixed enough of the bugs in 24H2 to make it worth installing? And if so, is there anything particular to watch for if I unleash it? Andrew Wells A Since we published Issue 703 (12 February) Microsoft has released several key updates to fix bugs in 24H2. However, it’s still causing some problems, as Microsoft found out…

Microsoft has made the surprise decision to extend Windows 10 support for free for 12 months, but only if you turn on and use Windows Backup. It’s a major U-turn by the company, which has been urging users to upgrade to Windows 11 before it ends support for Windows 10 on 14 October. The company is already offering paid-for support for a further 12 months with its Extended Security Updates (ESU) scheme (www.snipca.com/55368). This involves a one-off purchase of $30 or a “local currency equivalent plus applicable tax”, meaning it’s likely to cost around £22 to £27 in the UK. But the new offer doesn’t cost anything – you just need to turn on Windows Backup, which syncs key folders like Desktop, Documents and Pictures to your OneDrive account, automatically…

Pornhub, the UK’s most popular pornography site, will soon introduce age-verification checks to stop children watching sex. Aylo, the site’s parent company, confirmed it will comply with Ofcom’s new rules, which force all adult sites to use “highly effective age checks”. The measures, due to be implemented on 25 July as part of the Online Safety Act, also cover social media, search and gaming services that provide access to sexual content. Other sites that have said they’ll start checking age include LiveHDCams, RedTube, Tube8 and YouPorn. Pornhub didn’t say how it would verify age, but methods used by other sites include photo ID, credit-card checks and using a phone app to estimate age. In June, Aylo temporarily disabled Pornhub and its other adult sites in France to protest about similar…

WATCH OUT FOR… Fake Apple, HP, Microsoft and Netflix support phone numbers What’s the threat? Scammers are tricking victims into visiting real customer-support pages but showing a fake phone number to call. The scam begins with a fake advert in Google when you search for tech support. It looks convincing because it contains a genuine URL, such as https://help.netflix.com (see screenshot 1). Clicking it takes you to the real page for Netflix support but has a false number in the search box 2. Calling it takes you to a scammer who asks for your passwords and requests remote access to your PC. The scam was spotted by Malwarebytes’ Senior Director of Research, Jérôme Segura, who took both screenshots. The second shows Malwarebytes’ Browser Guard extension warning about the scam. The…

IMAGE CONVERTER Converseen 0.15 www.snipca.com/55409 What you need: Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11, macOS or Linux There are few things more tedious than having to work through a huge set of images to make the same adjustment to each one individually. This task may involve converting the pictures to a different format, changing their file names or resizing images that are too large to share. Converseen is an open-source tool that makes batch-processing images much easier. It supports more than 100 image formats, including JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, WEBP, AVIF and the new JPEG XL (see ‘What’s All the Fuss About’ in Issue 707, page 49). The main purpose of the program is to convert multiple images to another format in one go. Select a format in the…

SOFTWARE WARNING! Apple’s spammy F1 offer drives iPhone users mad When it comes to motor racing I’d much rather play Mario Kart on my Nintendo Switch than spend a day at Silverstone, so the new film F1 has largely passed me by (at around 150mph). But I’d have found it impossible to ignore if I were an iPhone user in the US. At the end of June Apple’s Wallet app sent an alert offering a $10 discount on F1 tickets through the movie-booking site Fandango – but only if you paid through Apple Pay (see screenshot 1). This couldn’t have annoyed people more if Brad Pitt (the film’s star) had spent hours tailgating them, before overtaking on the inside while flicking V-signs. These alerts, called push notifications, appear on your…

Give it a wrist Samsung doesn’t typically focus on budget products, so this fitness watch stands out. Its £59 price tag significantly undercuts rivals such as our current favourite, the Fitbit Charge 6 (£140 from www.snipca.com/48198). Samsung includes all its services and its Health app in the price, so there are no hidden subscriptions needed to access more services. Note, however, that there’s no iPhone version of its app, so it’s for Android users only for now. The Fit3 has a large, bright AMOLED screen that can accommodate plenty of data. It monitors a range of fitness stats including steps walked, calories burned, heart rate, stress levels and sleep. It also offers smartwatch-style notifications and music controls, plus weather information and a collection of customisable watch faces. Navigating through screens…

GEMINI Upload videos for analysis Google has expanded Gemini’s file-analysis capabilities to let you upload videos, as well as images and documents. The new option is available to all users of Gemini’s website and mobile apps, using the 2.5 Flash and Pro models. To upload a video, click or tap the plus-sign button and select ‘Upload files’ (in Gemini’s web version – see screenshot below) or Files (in the app). You can also paste the links of YouTube videos. Ask a question about the video, then click or tap Send and Gemini will analyse its content and provide an answer. Gemini can process videos of up to 2GB in size and 45 minutes in length with audio, or one hour without. The larger the video, the more tokens required to…

MICROSOFT WORD Show text boundaries for cleaner layouts If you’ve ever wondered why a heading looks off-centre or why text isn’t quite lining up with the edge of a column, Word’s ‘Show text boundaries’ option can help. It adds faint dotted lines around the areas where text can appear (1 in our screenshot), including the main body, headers, footers and columns. It’s especially useful when you’re working on forms, newsletters or anything with multiple sections. Instead of guessing where the margins are, or fiddling with spacing, you get a clear view of where text should sit. To turn it on, go to File, Options, Advanced 2, then scroll down to the ‘Show document content’ heading and tick ‘Show text boundaries’ 3. It’s not something to leave on all the time…

Despite fierce competition from Amazon, Meta and TikTok, Google remains the most notorious tech company for invading its users’ privacy. It tracks you around the web, across your devices and even in the real world, collecting your data so its ‘partners’ can target you with personalised ads. In previous cover features, we’ve recommended ditching Google Search for more private search engines such as DuckDuckGo, and Chrome for a a less intrusive browser like Brave (or DuckDuckGo again). But what about other Google tools such as Gmail, Google Drive and Google Password Manager? These store sensitive data including your emails, personal files and passwords, but Google infamously doesn’t protect that data using end-to-end encryption. Although there are alternative tools that do, they can be tricky to master and you’ll need to…

1080p High-definition video: 1920x1080 pixels. 2FA See ‘Two-factor authentication’. 32bit/64bit A measure of how much data a 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. AAC Advanced Audio Coding. A type of music file. AMOLED An alternative technology to LCD for creating flat panel displays. Aspect ratio A measurement of the shape of a screen. Traditional PC screens are 4:3. Widescreen displays are 16:9 or 16:10. Benchmarking Comparing software and products with an accepted standard. BIOS Software built into every PC that connects the vital components. BitLocker Security feature in Windows 10 and 11 Pro that encrypts drives. Bootable Describes a device or disc with system…

As security tools get better at blocking malware and phishing attacks, cybercriminals are increasingly using fake adverts and virus alerts to trick you. These can be highly convincing, with URLs that impersonate legitimate software and retailers, and pop-ups that mimic genuine warnings. DuckDuckGo is aware of this rising threat and has updated its browser’s Scam Blocker accordingly. As well as conventional threats, it now warns you about “sham e-commerce sites” (fake online shops) and “scareware” (fake warnings of exaggerated threats). It also now detects surveys that promise you money, and cryptocurrency scams – see screenshot for what the warnings look like. Scam Blocker is activated by default in the browser and runs in the background (on both the desktop and mobile version). To update its warnings DuckDuckGo uses data from…

Why won’t AliExpress accept evidence of faulty watch? LEAD CASE Q I bought a watch from AliExpress (www.aliexpress.com, pictured), which arrived within two weeks. When I noticed that the GMT hand doesn’t work, I contacted AliExpress for help. They asked me to send photos and videos, which I did, but they’ve told me this isn’t sufficient evidence. I thought you could return faulty goods for a full refund with or without evidence, or doesn’t this apply to AliExpress? Darren Arbon A Darren’s suspicions are right – the UK’s 30-day deadline to ask for a full refund doesn’t apply to AliExpress. This is because, like Amazon Marketplace and eBay, it’s a global selling platform, mainly for Chinese retailers to sell internationally. That means responsibility for getting a refund lies with the…

Opera VPN Pro www.snipca.com/55402 Price: £7 a month or £40 a year Free trial: 7 days What you need: Windows 10 or 11, macOS or Android Opera was the first browser to offer a free VPN, though technically this is a proxy that only encrypts data within the browser. The paid-for Opera VPN Pro protects your whole device by encrypting all internet traffic. It was recently upgraded to improve its performance and offer more flexibility. VPN Pro now lets you connect to servers in 48 locations – 15 more than previously – offering maximum speeds of 10Gbps, with no monthly data limit. That sounds impressive, but most paid-for VPNs have servers in over 100 countries. You don’t need to install any software to use VPN Pro, but it’s only available…

Q I am going away in December and would like to install an internal security camera or two, so we can view the feed on our phone to check in on what our cats are up to. What would you recommend? Hugh Rogers A Most indoor security cameras have a fairly wide field of view, but if you really want to keep an eye on your cats, it might be worth buying a camera that can pan and tilt. This lets you control the camera and point it toward corners of the room that would otherwise be out of sight. We recommend the Tapo TC70 (£24.99 from www.snipca.com/55373, pictured), which averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from nearly 20,000 reviews. It has a motorised base that rotates it…

Winner of a Recommended award in Issue 713 (page 25), Acer’s Predator Connect T7 is an incredibly fast and stable Wi-Fi 7 router, delivering speeds up to 5,764Mbps (5.8Gbps). This makes it perfect for gaming, streaming video in 8K and downloading massive files in a flash. As a tri-band router, it uses the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands to regulate traffic on your network. And there’s even a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, if you prefer to use a wired connection. Acer’s Load Balance and Failover features ensure uninterrupted performance across your mesh network, for a superior online experience. With a high-powered quad-core 1.5GHz ARM Cortex processor, 1GB RAM and 512MB flash storage, the Predator Connect T7 can handle multiple tasks simultaneously with ease, resulting in quicker load times, smoother streaming and…

ANDROID & iOS Add songs and collages to your WhatsApp status As we reported in Issue 713 (page 7), WhatsApp has started showing ads on its Updates tab. That provides a good reason to avoid the tab, but WhatsApp is hoping to make Updates more appealing with several improvements to its Status feature. This option, which you access by pressing ‘Add status’ on the Updates tab, originally let you post text updates that expired after 24 hours. It was then expanded to include images, videos, emojis and voice notes. The upgraded Status feature lets you include songs in your updates, by tapping the Music button (1 in our screenshot below left) and searching for a track or artist. Press the arrow icon next to a song to add it to your…

Manage membership fees with Excel’s Name Manager Spreadsheets are brilliant for anything involving numbers, especially keeping track of your club’s membership fees. With a few formulas, you can automate fiddly calculations and generate up-to-date summaries of how many people haven’t paid, how much is owed, and so on. The trouble is that even the simplest spreadsheet can quickly get messy, particularly when you’re juggling lots of details at the same time. And as your spreadsheet grows, so does the chance of making mistakes. That’s where Excel’s Name Manager comes in. By letting you give meaningful names to cells or ranges – like ‘Members’ or ‘PaymentStatus’ instead of plain references like ‘B2:B21’ – Name Manager makes your spreadsheets easier to read and update, and less prone to errors. Here, we’ll show…

Different CR batteries? Q My ageing desktop computer displayed a message recently telling me its CMOS battery needed replacing. I opened the case and found that the old battery was a CR2032 button cell. I went rummaging through the drawer where I keep my batteries and found a pair of CR2025 batteries, still unused in their blister pack. I have no idea when I bought them, or what they were for. I popped one out of the packet and it looked almost identical to the CR2032 battery in my PC, although perhaps a little thinner. This made me wonder what the difference is technically? Could I use one of these CR2025 batteries in my computer without causing any damage? Stephen Hall A These batteries (pictured) look very similar, as you…