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There are some DIY jobs that you should always leave to real experts. If, for example, you want to add a door to the inside of a Torquay hotel, you probably shouldn’t hire a cowboy builder called O’Reilly, particularly if you’re married to an umbrella-wielding woman called Sybil (see YouTube for proof: www.snipca.com/21451). But if you want to repair your PC, you should definitely try to fix it yourself first. In our Cover Feature (page 50) we reveal 14 hardware problems that don’t require an expensive visit to the local computer shop. Some repairs are more complicated than others, but you can do them all without needing to call upon an expert. On another note, for some time I’ve been receiving emails from readers keen to know when our next…

WATCH OUT FOR… QuadRooter flaw in your Android tablet What’s the threat? No fewer than four security holes in Android phones and tablets that are powered by the Qualcomm processor. Popular phones such as the Nexus and Samsung Galaxy are among those at risk. In total around 900 million devices worldwide are thought to be vulnerable. The flaws, discovered by Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point, can be exploited by hackers to give them ‘root access’ to a phone or tablet. This lets them control the device, see any information on it, and even record audio and video. An attacker needs to exploit only one of the flaws to gain access. As now seems standard when security scares are discovered, Check Point has given the flaw a name: QuadRooter. After working…

PRINTER | £90 from Currys www.snipca.com/21500 “Its big document feeder lets you print and scan in bulk” First there were inkjet printers, offering full-colour output from your PC in your own home or office. Then came multifunction printers (MFPs), with a scanner built into the lid, so the same machine could get digital files on to paper and paper into digital files. The final step towards complete convenience is MFPs with ADF (automatic document feed), so when you need to scan or photocopy a long document you can put all the pages in at once, rather than having to place them on the glass one by one. You’d think printer manufacturers would charge extra for all these features, but as fast as they add them they seem to figure out…

HOME-SECURITY CAMERA | £120 from Amazon www.snipca.com/21475 “A doddle to set up, discreet enough to hide away, and sensible storage deals” Cameras that watch your home while you’re out have been around since the dawn of video tape, but they’ve become a lot easier and cheaper in recent years. In that time, the ‘internet of things’ concept – the idea of every gadget being connected to the web – has brought a number of advanced but affordable surveillance cameras, such as the Netgear Arlo (see our review, Issue 454), Nest Cam (Issue 457), Canary and Netatmo Welcome (both Issue 478). Unlike these relative newcomers, the Y-cam Evo is from a company that’s been selling internet-connected security cameras for years. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t make such a song and dance…

Win 1 of 4 Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 365 Winner of a five-star ‘Buy It!’ award in Issue 482, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 365 remains our favourite all-round design software. It combines image editing and vector graphics, so you can use the software to edit photos, paint pictures with brush tools, and draw scalable graphics. Once you buy it, you can install upgrades for free for a year. To enter, email your address to cacomp@dennis.co.uk with ‘xara’ in the subject line by midnight 13 September. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 365 is available to buy now priced £50 from Xara’s website: www.snipca.com/19280. For more info on Xara’s products follow @XaraGroup on Twitter and visit Xara’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/XaraVideo.…

ANDROID & iOS Add a ‘lens blur’ effect to your photos Lens blur is an effect used by photographers to put a sharp focus on the subject of a picture while blurring everything else around it. Snapseed (Android www.snipca.com/21534; iOS www.snipca.com/21535), one of the best free photo-editing apps, lets you apply this effect to photos with a few simple taps and swipes. Open the app, tap ‘Open photo’, ‘Open from device’, then select a photo from your device. Next, tap the pen icon at the bottom right to see a choice of editing tools, then tap the Lens Blur option in the Filters section. Tap Elliptical at the bottom to switch between a circular and rectangular effect. According to your selection, you’ll see two circular or rectangular lines on your…

Set your default account eM Client (www.emclient.com) is a great free program that lets you handle multiple email accounts in one place. The first thing you should do is set your default account, meaning any email you send from eM Client is sent from that one. To do this, click Menu, Tools, then Accounts. Select your preferred email, click the star icon at the bottom of the screen, then OK. Also note, you can add extra accounts from this menu by clicking the plus icon. Stop personal emails going to your junk folder Occasionally, genuine emails from someone you know may get redirected to your junk email folder. If this becomes a regular problem, it might be because the sender has somehow been added to your blacklist. To check, click…

CCleaner Professional Format: Windows Website: www.piriform.com/ccleaner Price: £19.95 CCleaner has more useful tools than a Swiss Army knife. It’s my go-to utility whenever my PC is creaking under the weight of temporary internet files and browser extensions, and has prolonged the life of more than a few of the PCs we prod, tweak and experiment on here at Computeractive. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I upgraded to CCleaner Professional only to find that its paid-for features barely added anything to the free version of the program I’d been using for years. Nothing to see here In truth, I was fearing as much as I read Piriform’s description of what to expect from CCleaner Professional. The first two entries in its bullet-point list of features – Faster Computer and Privacy Protection…

Can’t open files properly in Word By default, LibreOffice documents save in the OpenDocument Text (or.odt) format. Although broadly compatible with Word, ODT documents can lose some of their formatting or other elements (such as tracked changes) when opened in Microsoft Office. This can cause problems when you share documents with people who only use Word. To solve this you can make LibreOffice save in Word’s.docx format. Select Tools, Options, doubleclick Load/Save and click General. In the ‘Always save as’ dropdown menu choose ‘Microsoft Word 2007-2013 XML’ (see screenshot below) and click OK. To add further compatibility between LibreOffice and Word click Tools, Options then Load/Save, but this time click Microsoft Office. Make sure the first four Embedded Objects boxes are ticked (see screenshot below), then click OK. Images stretched…

64bit A technology that processes information in larger chunks. Most modern computers are 64bit. AHCI Advanced Host Controller Interface. Intel technology that determines how SATA adapters work. 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. AZW3 An Amazon file format for ebooks, succeeding AZW. Also known as KF8 (Kindle Format 8). Biometric Using measurable personal characteristics, such as fingerprints, for identification. BIOS Basic Input-Output System. Essential software built into every PC that connects the vital components. Blacklist A list of files, email addresses or websites known to be malicious. Browser hijackers Programs that change your default browser, its homepage and search engine, without prior warning, when you install them. Clamshell A type of design that uses…

Tell us what’s on your mind Email: letters@computeractive.co.uk Facebook: www.facebook.com/computeractive Twitter: @ComputerActive www.twitter.com/computeractive Don’t back up using Windows 10’s tool I read your Cover Feature in Issue 480 about doing backups (pictured right), and found it interesting, but felt I was safe because I kept monthly backups using Windows 10’s tool, and weekly backups to a NAS drive. But it did prompt me to tidy up where my backups were saved to. So I plugged in an external hard drive to a USB port on my PC, then – for reasons best known to itself – it decided to display the Blue Screen of Death, and then refused to boot. I tried a system repair, but that failed. I then attempted a system restore, but after twiddling its thumbs for…

SYSTEM TOOL GPU-Z 1.10 www.snipca.com/21449 What you need: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8/8.1 or 10 1 GPU-Z opens on the Graphics Card tab. If you have multiple cards, click the dropdown menu to see info about them. 2 Click the camera icon to take and save a screenshot. Click Lookup to see even more information about your installed GPU. This will open in a browser window. 3 If your PC supports BIOS reading, click the export icon to create a backup of your GP’s BIOS data. You can save the backup to your PC or store it online. 4 Click the Sensors tab to see how your graphics card is performing. Higher readings are indicated by thicker red lines. Click the top-right menu icon for Settings. You might assume that…

Clever tips for every version WINDOWS 7, 8, 10 Highlight important elements in a photo or screenshot Microsoft’s built-in image-editing program Paint is really useful when you want to highlight something in a photo or screenshot. Navigate to the photo on your PC, right-click it, move your cursor to ‘Open with’, then select Paint. To highlight something select a shape from the Shapes dropdown menu. Next, click the Size dropdown menu and select one that best suits your purposes. Finally, select a colour from the Color section. Now click and drag your cursor over the image in the area you want to insert your highlighting shape. Next, click inside the shape (your cursor becomes a crosshairs symbol), then click and drag this to reposition the shape on your image (see…

What is it? Google’s latest front in its brutal war against passwords. It has teamed up with Dashlane, one of the world’s most popular password managers, to build a system that makes it easier for you to sign into your Android apps. What does YOLO stand for? ‘You only login once’, which sums it up perfectly. Once you’ve created a master password through Dashlane, signing in with it gives you access to all your apps on your phone and tablet. It means that you won’t need to type a username or password every time you want to use an app. The ‘open’ part of the name refers to it being an open-source project, which means that other companies can use it to build their own systems. Is it safe? Yes…

KEN RIGSBY is Computeractive’s Mr Angry “If you can convince enough bellyachers to sign an online petition, you can compel MPs to debate it in Parliament” I’m an old grump, so I remember when the Great British public knew its place. As exemplified by the famous Frost Report sketch starring John Cleese and The Two Ronnies, we knew who to look up to and who to look down on. We also knew to leave big, important decisions to big, important people. Sure, every few years we’d vote for a new government. And OK, on occasion the populace might get a bit uppity about something and then there’d be strikes or riots. But, on the whole, life was reliably predictable. We’d vote, and then let our elected representatives get on with…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD (OR IS THERE?) Junk defendant: PC Tasks Optimizer PC Tasks Optimizer, which featured in last issue’s Best Free Software, may be carrying junk that’s so well hidden it’s not visible in the installer or even on your PC afterwards. Or my PC, at least. Some of you emailed us with a different tale to tell. I found the program easy to install and use. Its installer contained no tick boxes or hidden sections, and the program file wasn’t blocked by Chrome, Windows 7, Windows 10, Kaspersky or Avast (I installed it on two PCs for good measure). As ever, I restarted the PCs and checked their browsers, then ran my favourite junk-scanner, AdwCleaner (www.snipca.com/21484). No sign of trouble. However some readers said that Malwarebytes and Chrome had…

Have I waited too long to get a laptop refund? Q I bought a laptop from Laptops Direct on 6 June. I explained that I wouldn’t be at home to take delivery, so it was delivered to a neighbour, from whom I collected it on 28 June. But it’s the wrong laptop – it’s only got a 1TB drive rather than 2TB, and the speaker system is missing. I contacted Laptops Direct on 30 June, but was told I was too late to return it for a full refund. Is that right? Jack Pilkington A In a word, no. Jack should have been given a full refund because when he registered his complaint he still had six days before the 30-day deadline expired before which he could demand a full…

Find out what other products we liked. Buy our new 2015 Back Issue CD: £15 fromwww.snipca.com/19124 NEW ENTRY LAPTOP Asus ZenBook UX305CA £533 from www.snipca.com/21509 Tested: Issue 475 This metal-cased ‘ultrabook’ looks much more expensive than it is. There’s no touchscreen or 36-degree hinge, just great quality all round and an ultra-sharp display. The M3 processor is adequate for most tasks, though not gaming. ALTERNATIVE Dell Inspiron 15 5000 If you need a full-size Windows 10 laptop with a DVD drive and a desktop PC-level i5 processor, this is a solid choice. £579 from www.snipca.com/21467 ANDROID TABLET Samsung Galaxy S2 9.7 £350 from www.snipca.com/20438 Tested: Issue 462 The Sony Xperia Z4 is too expensive and Google’s cheaper Nexus 9 has been discontinued, leaving the 32GB S2 9.7 as the best…

What you need: Vidiot, Any Windows version (XP to 10) Time required: 35 minutes Most video-editing programs have advanced options that are often surplus to requirements. In contrast, Vidiot is a free, back-to-basics program that lets you edit and merge several clips into a montage with minimum effort. It has a simple interface featuring all the editing features most of us will ever need, including options to straighten videos shot at the wrong angle and boost your volume level. We’ll show you how to edit your video and add a soundtrack to it. STEP 1 First, save the video clips you want to use to a folder on your PC. Rename these clips using numbers (001, 002, 003, etc) according to the order you want them to appear in the…

Email us your tips: letters@computeractive.co.uk TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Share files instantly over your Wi-Finetwork Whenever I need to transfer files from my PC to my phone, I connect my phone to my PC via a USB cable, then copy and paste the files. This is fine when you’re transferring files in bulk, but not when you want to quickly transfer just one or two files. I came across a new website called Simple.Savr that lets you share as many files as you want (maximum of 25MB) provided your phone and PC are using the same Wi-Finetwork. Go to www.ssavr.com on your PC, where you’ll see a text field, and upload and download buttons. You can type (or copy and paste) anything into the text field that you want to…

Expert tips for every program OUTLOOK Make email searches easier by creating folders If you regularly search for particular emails (from specific people) or certain types of emails (containing attachments), it’s a good idea to create what’s known as a ‘search folder’ for these criteria. This shows these search results within a folder in your left-hand-pane (below your Inbox). To do this, click the Folder tab, then click New Search Folder at the top left. This window displays several categories (Reading Mail, ‘Mails from People and Lists’, etc) with a number of options in each (see screenshot). Select the option that matches your search requirements. For example, selecting ‘Mail from specific people’ displays a Choose button at the bottom. Click this and select which contacts’ emails you want to search…