Table of contents for 726 in Computeractive

Amazon has removed a tool from its app store that allows you to install banned apps on its Fire TV Stick. The company has a list of blocked apps that it prevents you from installing, but App Cloner lets you clone and rename apps so Amazon can’t detect them. App Cloner was built as a way of running multiple editions of the same app with different settings, such as two versions of a messaging service logged into different accounts. But many people have used it recently to bypass Amazon’s tougher stance on apps it says are breaking its policies. This is part of a wider crackdown on apps that let users watch paid-for content for free on their Fire TV Sticks. Amazon’s new Fire TV Stick 4K Select, for example,…

Only 35 per cent of people think they can share their opinions online as freely as offline, according to Ofcom’s latest study into the UK’s internet habits. The Online Nation survey (www.snipca.com/57401), which was conducted in May, also saw a sharp fall in the proportion of adults who think the internet is good for society – down from 40 to 33 per cent. There’s a fall too in the proportion who think the benefits of being online outweighs the risks – from 71 per cent two years ago to 65 per cent in 2025. On average, though, adults are spending 10 minutes longer online than in 2024, at four and a half hours a day. Women spend 26 minutes a day longer online than men, at 4 hours 43 minutes.…

If Amazon allows sideloading, £20 for new Stick is a bargain I completely agree with your two-star verdict on Amazon’s new Fire TV Stick 4K Select (Issue 725, page 29, pictured right). Banning sideloading is the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut. It stigmatises all those people who sideload apps for legal purposes, not to watch Premier League football without paying. But might Amazon backtrack on this stupid decision? It’s already done so to allow VPNs (Issue 725, page 7). If you think it will, then the current price of just £19.99 for the device (www.snipca.com/57247), down from £49.99, could prove to be a bargain. I might take a punt. Jim Howard CA SAYS We understand Jim’s reasoning, but we doubt Amazon will reverse its ban on sideloading. This was…

SMART SPEAKER | £100 from Amazon www.snipca.com/57318 Fully rounded After 11 years and several redesigns, the Amazon Echo has been replaced by a super-sized Echo Dot. Still roughly spherical with one chunk of the sphere lopped off to form the base, the Echo Dot Max is 109mm in diameter, and so only slightly larger than the existing 100mm Dot. But where the Dot incorporates a single 11.73in front-firing speaker, the Max features a 2.5in subwoofer and a 0.8in tweeter to deliver room-filling sound. An inset panel on the front gives you playback, volume and mute controls, and is surrounded by a glowing LED ring to provide status feedback. “It looks and sounds better than previous Echo speakers” Cleverly, it analyses the acoustics of the room (size, shape, furniture and surface…

SMART TV  | £239 from Amazon www.snipca.com/57351 Cheap thrills Samsung used to dominate the low-cost TV market, but has found it harder in recent years to compete with budget brands such as TCL and Hisense. The new U8000F series is its attempt to make up lost ground. With sizes from 43in to 85in at prices from £239 to £1,100, it’s surprisingly affordable for a major brand TV with a 4K screen and HDR10+ support. The 43in UE43U8000F we’re testing here has a trim, matte-finish black frame. It’s strikingly slim at the rear – albeit with a chunkier section near the bottom – and the only sign of cost-cutting is the stunted slot-in feet. It comes with two remote controls – one larger with the full button count; the other a…

What you need: AdGuard DNS for iOS or Android Time required: 30 minutes Whenever your phone downloads something from the internet – whether it’s an image, an email or an ad embedded in a web page – it finds that item by searching for the numerical address of the domain that hosts it using a DNS server. As long as that server knows which domains host ads, trackers and other unwanted items, it canblock your phone’s access to those domains while still retrieving the rest of the web page or email that contains these unwanted elements. The result is web content largely free of adverts. AdGuard is one such DNS server, and its new mobile app makes blocking ads on your phone easier than ever. Here, we explain how to…

When the first Android tablets and iPads went on sale in 2010, some tech experts predicted they would replace PCs and laptops altogether. But as smartphones became larger and more powerful, attention was diverted from tablets and that prediction failed to come to fruition. Things are changing, however, and we believe 2026 will be the year of the tablet. Not only are they becoming more popular – with sales up nine per cent on 2024 (www.snipca.com/57392) – but there are now more superb devices to choose from. These cater to all budgets and mobile computing requirements, and make replacing your laptop with a tablet a more viable prospect than ever before. Tablets are no longer just big phones that can’t make calls, but portable PCs with high-quality screens, sophisticated operating…

1 Wintoys www.snipca.com/55189 Wintoys was by far your most-downloaded tool of 2025, rising from 12th place in 2024. This brilliant system-optimisation app (it’s only available from the Microsoft Store) was updated throughout the year and made frequent appearances in our Best Free Software section. However, it was Wintoys’ inclusion in our ‘Best free software you’ll master in minutes’ Cover Feature in Issue 713 (pictured above) that attracted the majority of your clicks. Here we praised the app’s simple but feature-packed design, which saves you installing several separate PC-cleanup programs. Wintoys’ Cleanup options delete junk files, browser caches, old Windows updates and system-restore points, and its ‘Fast startup’ setting can speed up your boot time by 50 per cent. We particularly like its Tweaks tab (see screenshot below left), which lets…

A cross-party group of peers in the House of Lords has tabled an amendment to the Online Safety Act that would ban children in the UK from using VPNs. If passed, the Government would have to enforce the restrictions within 12 months. It comes in response to the huge rise in people using VPNs to beat age checks on porn sites, which were introduced in July. Under the proposals VPN providers would be forced to verify the age of all UK users, using “highly effective” age-checking methods to make sure no one using the service is under 18. It would apply to any VPN that markets itself to users in the UK or is used by a “significant number” of people in the country. In their explanatory note, the peers…

Apple and Google are working together to make it easier to switch between Android phones and iPhones. A feature in the latest Canary build of Android simplifies the process of moving your data as you set up an Android device or iPhone/iPad. Canary builds are preview versions of Android that Google makes available to developers and more adventurous users. If Canary features work as desired they typically appear in Android betas before being added to the full operating system. The new option appears when you tap ‘Pair with iPhone or iPad’ (see screenshot 1) followed by ‘Copy data’ 2. Currently, the easiest way to switch between Android and iOS is to use either Apple’s ‘Move to iOS’ app (www.snipca.com/57397) or Google’s Android Switch (www.snipca.com/57398). However, these methods are far from…

When even the makers of Raspberry Pi are warning about big price rises you know times are tough. Their mission is to make computing affordable for all, but in early December they said that due to the “unprecedented rise” in the cost of PC memory they’re increasing the price of Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 products. They blamed competition from tech giants wanting high-performance DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory, pictured below) for their vast data centres, which they need to power their increasingly ambitious AI projects. This has seen prices rise around 170 per cent since 2024, and more than double since the summer. At the other end of the scale Lenovo, the world’s biggest PC manufacturer, also called the rise in memory prices “unprecedented”. It has started stockpiling memory so…

Search British Army Service records In October 2024, Ancestry released the first batch of World War 2 service records for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (www.snipca.com/57165). In November 2025, it added 106,000 new infantry records to its existing ‘UK, Military Service Records, 1939–1959’ collection, covering non-commissioned officers and other ranks (officers are not included). These records let you trace your ancestors’ movements during their service and reveal details such as the medals they earned. They’re part of a wider, ongoing project to digitise Ministry of Defence records and make them available online, though for legal reasons only records for people born more than 100 years ago can be accessed. The collection will continue to grow as more documents are digitised and transferred to the National Archives. Explore Ancestry’s new…

LAPTOP | £1,599 from Amazon www.snipca.com/57363 Mint chip Apple’s MacBook Pro remains the benchmark laptop for creative users, even if little except for the processor has changed since the M3 model. This year it’s back with Apple’s new M5 chip, but the core design remains much the same. This isn’t necessarily cause to grumble. It’s a well-built and attractive laptop, especially in the stylish Space Black finish. At 22mm thick and weighing 1.6kg, it’s light and portable for such a powerful device. The keyboard is excellent, and the trackpad large, smooth and responsive. Like last year’s model, it has three Thunderbolt 4/USB 4.0 ports with speeds of up to 40Gb/s, plus an HDMI port for connecting to a 4K screen. The only disappointment is that it still has Wi-Fi 6E…

KEYBOARD | £40 from Currys www.snipca.com/57357 Right click Cherry’s wireless RGB-lit keyboard might fool you into thinking you’re working on a premium keyboard with mechanical keys, thanks to the substantial ‘click’ each produces when you hit it and the longer-than-usual travel. Yet it’s actually what Cherry calls a ‘Mem-chanical’ keyboard, with each key mounted on a plastic plunger that hits the membrane layer below. This mimics the feel of a mechanical keyboard, but for the price of a cheaper membrane keyboard. Normally you’d have to pay much more than £40 for this quality. The Xtrfy 33 packs the most crucial keys of a full-sized keyboard into a compact design just 30cm wide. It’s light to carry yet its its construction is up to Cherry’s usual high standards. In fact, it’s…

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Read all ebook formats with ReadEra In your answer to Tom Rathbone’s question about ebook formats (Issue 724, page 69) you could have mentioned the app ReadEra (https://readera.org). I installed it on my iPad earlier this year and it supports so many different ebook formats that I’ve not found one I can’t open. You just import a book then read. Most of its features are free and there are also options to convert the text into audio through the ‘Text to Speech’ feature. There are some handy customisation settings including making the font thicker and changing the line spacing (pictured). Incidentally, I’m not the only fan of ReadEra. While installing it on my wife’s Android phone I noticed it has a 4.9-star rating on the Google…

Use ChatGPT’s group chat to collaborate When you’re planning club business – whether it’s organising an event, comparing venue options or simply managing day-to-day tasks – collaboration with other members is often essential. But have you ever found yourself wishing there was someone in the group who could instantly look things up, check facts or pull together ideas while you all chat? If so, ChatGPT’s new ‘group chat’ tool could provide an innovative solution. It works a bit like a WhatsApp group, but with one extra (and very helpful) participant: ChatGPT itself. You and your fellow club members can chat normally, but whenever you need help, you can simply tag ChatGPT to ask it a question. It can look up venues for club events, rewrite your meeting notes, compare budget…

There’s mounting evidence to suggest that more people than ever are switching to Linux. Take the recent announcement from the makers of Zorin OS – the most Windows-like Linux distro – that it had been downloaded more than one million times in the past month, breaking all records (see www.snipca.com/57336). One reason people are switching to Linux is the end of Microsoft’s support for Windows 10 in October, leaving millions of older PCs that can’t run Windows 11 effectively obsolete. Linux gives these users a cost-free way to keep their machines usable and secure. However, the switch to Linux isn’t always without bumps in the road. Crucially, not every old PC has the horsepower (or compatible components) to run modern Linux smoothly, while errors during installation or configuration can be…

Add calendar events using AI I’m always happy to receive a wall calendar for Christmas, and not just to cover the crack in my kitchen wall. Although I’ve lost the childhood excitement of flipping over a page to a new month and picture, it’s still the best way to keep track of birthdays, medical appointments and other important events. That may be why I’ve never fully embraced Google Calendar or other digital calendar services. I know they sync your schedule across devices, remind you about imminent events and make it easy to amend information without having to scribble it in biro, but they feel too much like work to be fun. “It extracts event info from screenshots, photos and flyers” So I was intrigued to discover a new app called…

£227 MINI PC CAN WORK AS A NAS DRIVE Chinese manufacturer YouYeeToo has released a mini PC with four SSD slots and two 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, effectively making it work as a NAS drive too. Each slot on the NestDisk (pictured above) is M.2 PCIe 3.0 and lets you fit a 1TB SSD, bringing overall storage to 4TB. It’s available on Amazon for £227 (www.snipca.com/57438). EE BECOMES FIRST ISP TO OFFER Wi-Fi 7 TO ALL EE has become the first broadband provider to offer Wi-Fi 7 across all its plans. For speeds up to 1Gbps customers will get EE’s Smart Hub 7 Plus router and the optional WiFi Extender 7 Plus. Customers on 1.6Gbps broadband will get the tri-band Smart Hub 7 Pro. For details and prices visit www.snipca.com/57431. MOTO…

The first Freely TV box, Netgem’s PLEIO, is back in stock after selling out and now gives you 12 months’ free access to more than 250 online games and over 150 extra channels. When PLEIO launched in November you only got three months free before deciding whether to pay £9.99 a month to continue the subscription. It also contains all the normal Freely channels and radio stations without a subscription. These include the channels you also get on Freeview and Freesat, such as BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 as well as U&Dave and U&Yesterday (see the full list at www.snipca.com/57419). Because it runs Google’s Android TV operating system you can install TV-streaming apps from the Play Store, including for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney+ and Paramount+…

LAPTOP | £1,799 from Dell www.snipca.com/57396 Alienware 16X Aurora Next level Alienware doesn’t deal in cheap laptops, but the Aurora range makes Dell’s prestige gaming brand a little more affordable. The designs are as eye-catching and robust as ever, with the 16X Aurora reviewed here wrapped in a refined aluminium chassis finished in a deep blue ‘Interstellar Indigo’ colour, with a luminous Alienware logo on the lid (pictured below). There’s no shortage of connectivity options, with two USB-A ports, Ethernet and HDMI 2.1 ports, a fast USB-C port (with 10Gbps transfer speeds), and an even faster Thunderbolt 4 port. It’s big and heavy, like most high-performance gaming laptops, but also great for everyday use. “Screen gets bright enough to make photos, videos and games look fantastic” Unlike more expensive Alienware…

DASH CAM | £450 from Amazon www.snipca.com/57358 Eyes on the road Most dash cams are great at capturing the cars in front of you but less use if you’re rear-ended. The 70mai Dash Cam 4K T800 covers all angles with three cameras and some serious shooting power. The main unit includes a 4K windscreen-facing camera (pictured top right) and a 1080p cockpit camera. Meanwhile, a smaller, rear-facing camera (pictured right) attaches to your car’s back windscreen, capturing everything behind you in glorious 4K. The cameras are easy to install on their adhesive mounts and can be powered from your 12V socket or wired into the car’s electrics using an optional kit (£49 from www.snipca.com/57356). The main unit is relatively unobtrusive if you fit it near the rear-view mirror, and features…

What are they? It’s an insult used to describe AI tools and robots that don’t perform as well as intended. It’s become increasingly popular online in 2025, as people question whether technology is heading in the right direction amid a growing AI backlash. So definitely nothing to do with Clangers then? No, they remain as adorable as when Oliver Postgate first invited us to meet them in the late 1960s. By contrast, clankers are chatbots that always give you incorrect answers; AI tools that clutter your browser and desktop; and domestic robots that frequently malfunction. I get the AI frustration, but do people really use domestic robots? Well, not the humanoid kind that can perform household chores. But a clanker can be a robot hoover that gets wedged under your…

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PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT Are there any no-contract SIM cards? Q Like many people, I’ve ditched my landline phone and now rely on my mobile. Being the belt-and-braces type, I have a second mobile phone that I want to keep as a backup for emergencies. As such, I’d like a SIM card that doesn’t expire or necessitate a monthly contract. Any ideas? John Scoote A Once upon a time, a ‘pay as you go’ (PAYG) SIM deal meant exactly that: you’d just pay for the calls or data you used, with no commitment. The provider might eventually have deactivated a SIM that hadn’t been used in a while, but these ‘expiry dates’ tended to be measured in years. So you could put a PAYG SIM in a phone, add a…

Has Amazon removed option to customise Kindle screensaver? Q On page 56 of Issue 723’s Cover Feature (‘Ultimate hacks for Amazon’) you explain how to customise a Kindle e-reader screensaver to show the book you’re currently reading. You say to choose Settings then ‘Screen and brightness’. I have the latest Kindle (12th Edition) but on my ‘Screen and brightness’ page there’s no option to customise the screen. Has Amazon removed this? George Chappell A No, but perhaps you haven’t updated your Kindle in a while. Amazon moved the option you want to the ‘Screen and brightness’ page in the 5.16.6 firmware update, released in early 2024. If you’re running an earlier version of the Kindle software then you need to look in Settings, Device Options, then Display Cover. However, it…