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Not all developers take 19 years to update their software. That’s how long WinDirStat users had to wait for a major new version (see Issue 696, page 18). The best programs get significant updates every year or so, with smaller releases in between to fix flaws and add tools. But how do you know when those updates are available? You could keep checking the software’s download page for new versions, but that must be near the top of most people’s ‘things I can’t be bothered to do’ list. Much better is to follow Robert Irvine’s advice in our Cover Feature. His 14 tips represent nothing less than a masterclass in updating software so you’re always running the latest version – and if you’re doing that you’re almost certainly running the…

LEAD CASE Can Amazon refuse to replace ‘lost’ goods? Q I bought a pair of headphones and a carbattery charger from Amazon that were being sold by third-party sellers. However, I’ve never received them despite delivery tracking showing they’d been sent out. Amazon has listed them as ‘may be lost’ and is offering me a refund, but I still want the items not a refund. Can it refuse to honour the sale? Ron Killick A It’s not actually in Amazon’s power to refuse to honour the sale. This responsibility lies with the sellers of the items. Amazon is acting as the fulfilment agent in this case, which means it handles the payment, delivery, returns and refunds of the third-party seller. It calls this ‘Fulfilment by Amazon’ (FBA) and explains to…

In South Africa on 11 October 1899 the Boers, refusing to submit to British rule, besieged colonial settlements, leading to the Second Boer War. The British eventually declared victory on 31 May 1902, but casualty rates were high on both sides from disease as well as from combat. Find soldiers on AngloBoerWar.com One of the best places to research the conflict is AngloBoerWar.com (www.angloboerwar.com), which has records on 753,000 soldiers, both British and Boer. It’s run by Dr David Biggins, author of four books on the Boer War, and is free to use. After registering, you can also post on the active forum, which has a dedicated genealogy section. To find an ancestor click ‘Name search’ at the top of the home page, then add as much information as you…

How can I search text across multiple PDFs? Q I need to search for specific keywords across hundreds of PDFs stored in about 20 folders. What’s the most efficient way to do this? Simon Grays A The free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader (www.snipca.com/52520) searches all PDFs within a folder. It would make sense to organise each of those folders within a larger parent folder, if possible, and use that as the directory through which you want Reader to search. If that’s not possible but the PDFs are in sub-folders of Documents, search your Documents library. Likewise, if they’re in the Downloads folder, make that the target location instead. Launch Acrobat Reader, click Menu top left, then hover over Search and click ‘Advanced search’. At the top of the box…

What does it do? OCuLink is a type of port found on a mini PC and some laptops, connecting directly to the PCIe section of the motherboard, where you’d typically find internal graphics and other expansion cards on a desktop PC. By connecting a PCIe dock – such as the Minisforum DEG1 (£95 from www.snipca.com/52622, pictured) – to the OCuLink port using a compatible cable, you can connect a graphics card to a PC that wouldn’t normally be able to accommodate one. Most desktopOCuLink ports because it’s easier to make the necessary upgrade internally. How does it work? Unlike USB ports, which need controller hardware inside the devices to manage the flow of power and data in and out of the port, OCuLink bypasses this requirement, which makes it faster…

The Ultimate Ears brand is owned by Swiss firm Logitech, renowned for its wireless keyboards and mice. But they also produce impressive speakers and the Wonderboom 4 is a portable Bluetooth unit that’s small enough to carry with you wherever you go, but pumps out surprisingly punchy audio. Its compact size is reflected in its modest £90 price tag, which makes this an affordable option if you’re looking for decent audio both around the house and beyond. Its IP67 ingress rating means it’s completely waterproof, and if dropped into water will float to the surface. It will also survive falling on to harder surfaces from heights of up to 1.5 metres. Sound quality is excellent. Bass output has no business being so punchy for such a small speaker, while both…

What is it? Razer’s Firefly V2 Pro is a new illuminated mouse mat that’s made of plastic and costs £99.99 (www.snipca.com/52640, pictured). What does it do? It has an ultra-smooth surface marked with a minuscule pattern that helps make the mouse more accurate. It also has 15 zones of RGB lighting that illuminate the entire mat, so you can change its colours to suit your taste or mood. What’s the catch? There may be more expensive mouse mats available, but we’ve never seen one. This is certainly a high-quality product, but you’re paying a lot of money for some mood lighting. So can I do without it? Yes, it’s a lot of money to pay for what feels like a gimmick.…

14 pages of easy-to-follow workshops and expert tips What you need: Clipchamp, OpenShot or VideoLouder Time required: 30 minutes A good-quality video needs two things: well-exposed images and clear sound. The latter is more important than you might think because poor audio can have a negative impact on the viewers’ perception of the video as a whole video, particularly if the action is fast moving. A muffled or quiet soundtrack can mean a viewer is focusing more on trying to work out the dialogue than on enjoying the images. If you want to create compelling videos, you need to make sure what people hear is as impactful as what they see. But how do you do that if the original recording was too quiet? Here, we’ll explain several ways to…

CHROME Disable the new‘toast’ notifications Aside from killing off the popular content blocker uBlock Origin (see our news story in Issue 696, page 7), Google has made some odd decisions with Chrome this year. It removed the side-panel button just as most users had grown accustomed to the feature; relocated the ‘Search tabs’ button to the less convenient top-left corner; and – as we reported in Issue 696 (page 42) – replaced its ‘Search image with Google’ option with Google Lens. Google’s latest wheeze is to show pop-up messages, known as ‘toast notifications’, when you perform certain actions in Chrome. Introduced in version 130 (released in October), they currently appear when you copy a link or image to your clipboard, and add a tab to your reading list (1 in our…

ONLYOFFICE Set your own columns in documents By default, OnlyOffice gives you five column options to lay out text in a document – you’ll see these by clicking Layout at the top, then the Columns dropdown menu. If none of them suit your purposes, click ‘Custom columns’ to create your own. In the box that appears choose the number of columns (1 in our screenshot below) then their width 2 and how much space you want between them 3. You can also choose to have equal column widths and a line dividing the columns 4. Click OK to confirm. In our example, we highlighted the text to select it, then choose four columns of equal width, with 0.56 centimetres between them. We also clicked the View tab, then Fit To Width…

Most of us are aware of the importance of keeping Windows up to date, to protect us against the latest security threats and fix newly identified bugs. This task is generally handled well by Windows Update, which means we don’t need to worry about installing updates ourselves (at least until Windows 10 support ends next October). The same applies to antivirus software, which quietly downloads new malware definitions in the background. Sadly, many of the other programs on our PCs aren’t as efficient or reliable at updating themselves automatically. Even those that promise to check for updates don’t always install them until we choose that option. This typically entails going into the About section of the Help menu or Settings to see if a new version is available, then downloading…

Having a problem with our recommended software or expert tips? Email editor@computeractive.co.uk and we’ll do our best to help Why can’t I colour my emails in Outlook? Q In Issue 691’s Make Office Better (page 47) you explain how to organise emails in Outlook using coloured categories. I followed the first three steps in your screenshot, but after clicking the Settings icon, followed by Accounts, my Outlook page doesn’t show the five options you show. I run Windows 11 with a Microsoft 365 subscription. Chris Edwards A Unfortunately, Microsoft has caused much confusion by using ‘Outlook’ to refer to at least three different email products. Not only is it the name of the new version of the email client that comes built into Windows, but it’s also the name of…

ANKER TO RELEASE USB-C CHARGERS Anker is planning to release five new chargers that have USB-C slots only, according to images leaked on Reddit (www.snipca.com/52760). online. They range from 30W to 240W, including a four-port wall charger (pictured). Anker hasn’t commented on the leak, so availability and prices are unknown. PARAMOUNT+ ADDS ‘BASIC WITH ADS’ PLAN Paramount has launched a ‘Basic With Ads’ plan that gives full access to its content for £4.99 a month. It’s now the cheapest Paramount+ tier, letting you stream Full HD on one device at a time. To watch without adverts you’ll have to pay £7.99 or £10.99 a month for the Standard or Premium tiers. Previously, Paramount offered just a single tier, priced £6.99 for Full HD on up to two devices. TURN IMAGES…

WATCH OUT FOR… ‘Claim £2,300 per month’ Budget stories What’s the threat? Scammers have created websites showing fake BBC News stories claiming changes in the recent Budget means Brits can claim regular income from taxes. The headline reads: ‘By the order of Rachel Reeves, UK residents will start receiving income from taxes’ (1 in our screenshot) and continues below with ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer highlighted that everyone is entitled to payments of up to £2,300 per month’ 2. It tries to create a sense of urgency by claiming there are only 800 “free places” left on the scheme, and says you should register for an account “even if you haven’t decided yet whether you want to receive compensation from the state”. Doing this hands over your personal details to…

Broadband provider Octaplus (www.octaplus.co.uk) has told reader Mustafa Muflehi he can cancel without paying a fee and has given him £150 to spend on Amazon as an apology, after ombudsman CISAS ruled in his favour. As we explained in Issue 695, Mustafa reported Octaplus to CISAS because the company provided a consistently unreliable service for more than a year, thereby potentially breaking its contractual obligations. He was on a 500Mbps contract, but his connection suffered from severe latency, which is a measure of how quickly your devices can communicate with each other. He had tried to improve this using Wi-Fi boosters, and moving his router to different locations around his home, but nothing worked. Octaplus appealed against the ruling, but also offered Mustafa £100 in Amazon vouchers. When he refused…

FILE-SHARING TOOL LocalSend 1.16.1 www.snipca.com/52690 What you need: Windows 10 or 11, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS Sharing photos, videos, documents and other files between your PC and phone usually involves either sending them as email attachments or uploading them to an online-storage service. LocalSend offers a much easier solution by letting you share files directly across your Wi-Fi network, without using an intermediary service. It works in the same way as Apple’s AirDrop feature and Google’s Quick Share, but is cross-platform, which means it works across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS devices. LocalSend is completely free to use and you don’t even need to sign up for an account. Simply download the Windows program from www.snipca.com/52686, and install the LocalSend app for Android (www.snipca.com/52687) or iOS (www.snipca.com/52688) on…

SOFTWARE WARNING! Clean Planner’s scaremongering adverts Search for ‘cleaner’ in Google’s Play Store and you’ll be inundated with icons bearing the hallmark brush against a variety of background colours. Clean Planner (www.snipca.com/52650) is no different, though its brush looks more like something Tom Sawyer would use to whitewash a picket fence than anything you’d find handy in a messy kitchen. It has plenty of positive reviews and has shot into Google’s top 20 free tools. It also claims to be “the faithful butler of your mobile phone”, which made me wonder whether Ask Jeeves was making a comeback. I decided to give it a go, but was underwhelmed by its main tool, the Junk Cleaner, which found a measly 167KB of data to remove. But before I even had the…

iOS Get roadside assistance via satellite A year after it launched in the US, Apple has made its ‘Roadside Assistance via Satellite’ emergency feature available in the UK – slightly too late for our ‘10 apps that could save your life’ feature in Issue 695 (page 60). This allows you to contact Green Flag when when you’re having trouble with your car and can’t get a reliable mobile or Wi-Fi signal. As the name suggests, ‘Roadside Assistance via Satellite’ works by connecting your iPhone to a satellite so you can make calls and send messages. You must be outside “with a clear view of the sky and horizon”. To use the feature, you need an iPhone 14 or newer, running iOS 17 or later. To access it, swipe down from…

Create a newsletter template in Word There’s no shortage of ready-made templates you could use for your club newsletter, but creating your own gives you much more control over how it looks. Microsoft Word provides everything you need, as we’ll explain. Choose columns and spacing First open a document in Word then choose a layout. Do this by clicking Layouts at the top then Columns. Word gives you five options: one, two or three columns equally spaced, or two columns with the left wider than the right and vice versa. You can customise your columns by clicking More and changing the width and spacing (also see the tip on page 47 to do the same in OnlyOffice). For our newsletter, we’ve chosen the Left option, which gives us two columns…

ChatGPT has added online search as it aims to attract users away from Google, though for now it’s available only in the paid-for version of the AI tool. Open AI, which runs ChatGPT, said the search tool gives you “fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources”. It added that getting answers on the web using traditional search engines “can take a lot of effort” and “often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you”. It claims ChatGPT’s search lets you “ask a question in a more natural, conversational way”, and you can ask follow-up questions that allows ChatGPT to “consider the full context of your chat to get a better answer for you”. On its blog (www.snipca.com/52758) it gives…

Amazon has suspended deliveries of its first colour Kindle e-reader to fix problems that are causing a yellow tint on the screen. The company launched the Colorsoft by boasting it had “rich, paper-like colour” and that it uses LEDs made from nitride to “enhance colour and increase brightness, all without washing out details”. But some early buyers of the Colorsoft in the US have complained about a yellowish tinge at the bottom of the screen. One person posted a photo on Reddit (www.snipca.com/52692, pictured) saying the yellow tint is “incredibly noticeable when the device is supposed to be evenly lit and coloured like a piece of paper”. Several buyers replied to say their Colorsoft also has a yellow tinge, while others said the tinge appears along a vertical edge too.…

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is now available to buy, coming with new planes, missions, careers and a Challenge League to play against other pilots. The game, which was released on 19 November, has the “most detailed re-creation of planet Earth to date”, Microsoft says, with 500 cities and more than 100,000 square kilometres of countryside. There are over 125 aircraft – more than 40 of which are new – as well as 160 airports, but which ones you get depends on the edition you buy. It comes in four editions: Standard (£69.99), Deluxe (£99.99), Premium Deluxe (£129.99) and Aviator (£199.99). The Standard version comes with Xbox Game Pass and includes 70 aircraft and 150 airports; Deluxe increases this to 80 and 155 respectively; Premium Deluxe goes to 95 and 160;…

I was wanting to upgrade my mobile phone to a Nokia XR21. I had researched it and some reviews suggested it was capable of taking a microSD card, while other reviews said it couldn’t. I noticed it was reduced from £400 to £370 on Argos’s site, so I checked the specifications and it clearly stated you could expand the memory with an microSD card. However, when the phone arrived I discovered it didn’t have a microSD card slot. I rang the Argos helpline and explained the problem. I told them I was considering returning the device because it was not as advertised. However, I said I’d be happy to keep it if they were willing to offer a discount as compensation. I was immediately offered a refund of £75, which…

TreeSize Personal www.snipca.com/52683 Price: €25.95 (£21.77) Free trial: 30 days What you need: Windows 10 or 11 Similar to WinDirStat (www.snipca.com/52543 – see Issue 696, page 18), TreeSize is a disk-space analyser that reveals which files and folders take up the most room on your PC. Unlike that program, it offers a choice of Free, Personal and Professional editions, with the latter aimed at businesses. Unsurprisingly, TreeSize Free is the simplest to use, automatically scanning your main hard drive to detect how much space files and folders are consuming. It displays its results as both a list of items (from largest to smallest) and a ‘tree map’ that presents the information visually in the form of proportionately sized blocks – click the View tab then Show Treemap Chart to see…

Smartwatches and fitness bands are great at measuring your heart rate and counting how many steps you’ve taken, but they’ve been less reliable at gauging more complicated medical data such as blood pressure. This watch from Chinese manufacturer Huawei changes that. The company has focused on making blood-pressure measurement a primary feature and has developed wrist-mounted technology that brings medical-level monitoring to the device. To perform this feat, the Watch D2 has an airbag strip that runs along the inside of the strap. At first we thought this might feel uncomfortable and get in the way, but it sits unobtrusively under the strap and, if anything, provides an extra layer of cushioning. The watch inflates the airbag to take a reading, then deflates it again when it’s finished. You can…

The EZVIZ BC1C 2K+ security camera is a 100% wire-free camera with up to 270 days of battery life and crystal-clear 2K+ video quality. Extremely easy to install, it has 32GB of storage, so you won’t need to buy a separate expensive storage card. Alternatively, you can save videos online with a EZVIZ CloudPlay service subscription. Thanks to two built-in spotlights, the BC1C can render vivid colour imaging, even in the dark, allowing you to see every detail that might otherwise be lost. What’s more, integrating a PIR sensor and person-shape detecting algorithm, the camera can distinguish human movement from other moving objects, keeping you safe while also reducing unwanted notifications. Upon detection of a moving person, the camera will set off a loud siren and flash two spotlights for…

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Block porn and gambling on Windscribe VPN Issue 692’s Cover Feature on VPNs came at just the right time for me because I’d been wondering for several months which tool I should use. I chose Windscribe because I liked the sound of its R.O.B.E.R.T. system for blocking unsavoury elements online. You mentioned it blocks adverts and online trackers, but there are also options to block porn and gambling websites. These are available at www.windscribe.com once you’ve created an account. Click the R.O.B.E.R.T. heading (1 in our screenshot right) then click the sliders so they turn green 2. The other Windscribe setting I’d recommend is ‘Cookie Go Away’ in its Chrome browser extension (www.snipca.com/51764). You’ll find this by clicking the browser extension’s icon then the top-left menu…

WINDOWS 11 INSIDER Copy and paste whatever Narrator says Microsoft has added a keyboard shortcut to Narrator that copies whatever it last read to your clipboard, so you can paste it as text elsewhere. The option is available in Preview Build 26120.2130 to Insiders signed up to the Dev Channel. To turn it on, first press Windows key+I to open Settings, then click Accessibility on the left followed by Narrator on the right. Now make sure the sliders for both Narrator and ‘Keyboard shortcut for Narrator’ are switched on. Next, scroll down and click the Narrator dropdown menu and choose Caps Lock or Insert as your shortcut key – or leave the default as either (see screenshot above). Now press Windows key+Ctrl+Enter to make Narrator read what’s on screen. To…

Amazon Fire TV (43in, 4-series) www.snipca.com/52655 RRP £430 Expected discount price £230 (£200 saving) In our ‘Don’t buy the wrong smart TV’ Cover Feature in Issue 694, we recommended the Amazon Fire TV as the best budget set for under £500. This deal isn’t the same Omni model – it lacks built-in Alexa voice control (this is still available on the remote control) and is LED rather than QLED – but similarly offers all the main streaming apps and free-to-air channels in 4K Ultra HD (where available). The price of this 43in TV (50in and 55in versions are also available) dropped to £230 at the start of October, and could be even lower on Black Friday. All-new Kindle Paperwhite www.snipca.com/52652 RRP £170 (without ads) Expected discount price £130 (£40 saving)…

Email us your problem and we’ll try to help: noproblem@computeractive.co.uk PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT Can I ditch broadband for mobile data? Q Sky’s broadband service provides me with a VoIP landline and download speeds of around 75Mbps, which is ample for my needs. I also have a Samsung Galaxy A14 phone supplied by Tesco Mobile. I’m wondering if it’s possible to get reasonable broadband speeds using just my mobile connection. I only use my computer and iPad for general web browsing and the like. If this is possible, what equipment would I need and how much is it likely to cost? Alan Bell A If you mean you’d like to ditch Sky and your VoIP phone and rely on your mobile phone and its internet connection instead, that’s certainly possible…

1080p High-definition video: 1920x1080 pixels. 1440p High-definition video: 2560x1440 pixels. 32bit/64bit A measure of how much data a PC can process at once. Most older computers are 32bit, more modern ones are 64bit. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. Active noise cancelling Method for reducing unwanted sound by adding a second sound specifically designed to cancel the first. Administrator Someone who can make changes to a computer that will affect others who also use it. AMOLED Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode. An alternative technology to LCD for creating flat-panel displays. Most commonly used in smartphones, tablets and smartwatches. Antivirus engine The core component of an antivirus program that detects malware. Architecture A set of rules and language that govern how hardware and software work. ARC Audio return…