Table of contents for 628 in Computeractive

Forgive me if I ramble a little: I’ve just seen my new broadband bill and I’m feeling faint. It’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have checked it on the same morning that I also opened my new gas, electricity, mobile and council tax bills. I would extract my gold teeth to pay for them, but I can’t afford the dentist. At least I can save some money by cancelling (or ‘unbundling’) my TV from my broadband, as Robert Irvine reveals in our Cover Feature. He explains how to switch permanently to streaming, whether that’s through an online service like iPlayer or a device such as Roku. If you choose to unbundle, don’t forget to also haggle for a cheaper broadband deal when you speak to your provider. They’ve got more…

AMAZON ‘MADE IT HARD’ TO CANCEL PRIME Amazon deliberately made it hard for customers to cancel their Prime account, according to internal documents obtained by US website Insider (https://www.insider.com). They show that Amazon created multiple layers of questions and offers to deter people from closing their account, leading to a 14 per cent drop in cancellations. WORDLE ARCHIVE TAKEN OFF THE WEB Wordle’s owners the New York Times have forced an unofficial archive of the game to close. The site, launched in January, let you play previous versions of the daily puzzle, but visiting it now just shows a message (www.snipca.com/41327) saying that it has been taken down as requested by the newspaper. However, at the time of press another unofficial archive was still working: www.snipca.com/40765.…

Tesco’s ‘free groceries’ worth £500 I’m always looking for competitions to enter, so I looked twice at an email claiming I’d been selected as “one of our potential winners of free groceries” worth £500 from Tesco. Not only that, but you get “free home delivery” too! That gave it away. If you’re going to win free groceries, you’d hardly expect to pay for delivery, so why bother mentioning it? Then there’s the ‘Quiztionnaire’ you have to answer. That has to be the ugliest made-up marketing word I’ve ever seen. I notice that Action Fraud warned about it on Twitter: www.snipca.com/41166. What a pathetic scam. Warn your fellow readers about scams at letters@computeractive.co.uk…

Western Digital (WD) has refunded reader Neil Murray in full, after making him wait for replacement hard drives that in the end never came. This is a good outcome because Neil has owned the drives for a while – buying the first batch in 2020, then more in 2021 – meaning WD would have been allowed to deduct some money from the refund. We must credit Neil for his persistence in pursuing a refund from WD. When he contacted us in January he had already been chasing the company for three months. Neil is happy with the refund, but it followed months of frustration. Probably his lowest point was when two new hard drives WD sent as replacements also failed, and further drives it sent weren’t right for his needs.…

My grandfather Charles John Baker was born in 1893 in Sussex, but I can’t find him in the 1921 census. He was married in Cheltenham the following year. Stuart Baker The marriage record Stuart has shows that Charles lived at Mantlemas Cottages in Turners Hill, Sussex. Searching for Mantlemas Cottages in Findmypast’s Address box, with no names added, returned 19 results. Two are for ‘Charles John Barker’ – one born in 1865, and the other in 1893. It appears that Baker has been mistranscribed as Barker. Stuart should buy this record to confirm. Have a genealogy question for Chris? Email letters@computeractive.co.uk with ‘Grow Your Family Tree’ in the subject line.…

Two of the most important lessons I’ve learned from more than three decades of computing are: you can never have too much security, and it’s worth going that extra mile to make your internet more reliable. That’s why I use OpenDNS (www.opendns.com) on my home network. OpenDNS is an alternative Domain Name System (DNS). All computers use DNS servers, which are like internet directories. When you browse the internet you’ll usually type an address that makes sense to a human: getcomputeractive.co.uk, for example. In the background, your computer asks the DNS server what the IP address of the website is, and connects using this information. Problems with a DNS server can make your internet connection seem slow or broken. OpenDNS solves this – for me, at least – by working…

I have never used dating site Tinder (my other half would probably object), but I imagine it’s not often frequented by playboy millionaires. Alas, 38-year-old fraudster Richard Dexter managed to convince his vulnerable victim he was a private-jet owning multi-millionaire before conning her out of almost £150,000. The father of two from Hampshire told the victim he was on the verge of a windfall from his investments in biopharmaceutical tech. He convinced her to send him £141,500, with the promise of huge interest in return, even begging her for money when she was seriously ill in hospital. The victim eventually went to the police and Dexter was convicted of fraud, forging patent documents and perverting the course of justice. He was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison, where the only…

There must be something in the air this issue, as we have not one but two new favourites on our Buy It pages (see page 30). Alongside the Chillblast Sentinel RTX 3050 PC (see page 22) we also have a new best printer. The EcoTank ET-1810 puts Epson’s brilliant ink-tank system to an affordable printer that’s also very cheap to run. “A basic inkjet that only prints, but does it remarkably well and very cheaply” Ink-tank printers have always been popular with us because they break away from the dubious marketing concept of selling cheap printers only to charge users exorbitant prices for replacement ink cartridges. Tank printers draw replacement ink from cheap bottles (as pictured below) and store it in large-capacity reserves, providing enough ink to print thousands of…

The iPhone 13 Pro is a similar gradual step forward in smartphone technology as we saw in the iPhone 13 (reviewed in Issue 627). If you already have an iPhone 12 Pro, you might wonder what’s changed, with both phones having a superficially similar appearance. However, if your current iPhone is an older model, the changes start to stack up and become increasingly appealing. The iPhone 13 Pro is almost identical in size to the iPhone 13, except for a slightly different rear camera (pictured below). This is because as well as the 12-megapixel main camera and the 12-megapixel ultrawide lens you’ll find on the iPhone 13, the Pro also has a 12-megapixel 3x telephoto camera, which lets you zoom in on subjects optically, rather than digitally. Photo quality is…

Microsoft has launched a couple of headsets that you can use with its Modern Webcam (which we reviewed in Issue 626) or any other webcam to improve the sound of your video calls. Here we’re taking a look at the wireless version, which connects to a computer using Bluetooth, though there’s also a wired USB-C version that’s essentially the same design (£50 from Currys at www.snipca.com/41224). The wireless model has two 28mm speaker drivers, which sound fine for video calls and other voice-related activity, but we wouldn’t recommend them for listening to music because they lack sufficient bass. The speakers are padded, which makes them comfortable to wear – even if you need to keep them on for hours at a time. They sit on – rather than over –…

Find out what other products we liked. Buy our new 2020 Back Issue CD: £15 from www.snipca.com/38164 LAPTOP Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 (256GB) £634 from www.snipca.com/41099 Tested Issue 601 Weighing just 1.16kg, this is an excellent lightweight laptop with a great screen and an AMD processor faster than many Intel rivals. It has two USB-C ports, two USB 3.0 ports and a microSD card reader. Battery lasts nearly 16 hours. ALTERNATIVE Dell XPS 13 New Intel CPUs and a taller screen make this a more powerful, all-round slim laptop. Prices start at £899 from www.snipca.com/40042 ANDROID TABLET PRICE DROP Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 £650 (256GB) www.snipca.com/41100 Tested Issue 623 This performed so well in our most recent tests that it has ousted the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro as our favourite.…

Telegram Free Android www.snipca.com/41292 iOS www.snipca.com/41293 This secure messaging app has been updated with several new features, including a download manager that lets you speed up specific file downloads by longpressing them, and the ability to stream live video in your chats. You can also now allow people to message you without revealing your Telegram username. PhotoShade Free* iOS www.snipca.com/41298 Rather than search pictures by date, place or subject, PhotoShade lets you browse them by colour. Grant the app access to your photo library, then use the slider at the top of the screen to select a colour. All images containing that shade or similar will be displayed below, from where you can share them or add them to an album. Odysee Free Android www.snipca.com/41299 Odysee is a YouTube alternative…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER & MICROSOFT WORD Add hyperlinks to shapes The latest version of LibreOffice (7.3, released in February) lets you add hyperlinks to shapes you create in Writer. First, add your shape by clicking the Insert tab and selecting Shapes. Now click Insert again, select Hyperlink, then type your URL in the field that appears (1 in our screenshot) before clicking OK 2. It’s an almost identical process in Microsoft Word. Click Insert, Shapes, then choose your shape. Click ‘Insert’ again, select Hyperlink, then type the URL in the address field of the box that appears. MICROSOFT OUTLOOK Create ‘Search Folders’ for frequent email searches If you frequently search for the same term in Outlook, you should create a search folder to perform the task automatically. Click the Folder tab…

Can you justify buying a new computer? It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves, and we’ve often explained how you can extend an ageing PC’s lifespan. By and large, this strategy can deal only with the clutter that accumulates on an ageing computer. Eventually, however, the operating system or software you rely on will need an update that your PC’s specifications can’t handle. At that point, your only option is a new machine, so it pays to plan for such an eventuality. And if you know for sure your PC is starting to struggle, you can keep an eye out for bargains over the coming months, rather than being forced to buy whatever you find when the problem arises. That’s where the free software CPU-Z comes into its own. It…

One major concern about using Google and Apple Pay is that criminals could hack payment terminals to steal your card details. But they’re actually more secure than making contactless payments with a physical card. When you add a card to either app, its details are encrypted and stored only on your Android phone or iPhone, not on Google’s or Apple’s servers. Your card information is replaced with a unique token (virtual account number), which means the real details are never revealed during transactions. Tokens are encrypted so they can’t be intercepted or used without access to your phone. Naturally, there’s also a risk that if your phone is lost or stolen, someone could take it on a spending spree. However, both Google and Apple let you remotely lock your device,…

Currys is giving customers at least £5 to spend in store if they bring in old, broken or unwanted devices, in a scheme to promote recycling. The size of the voucher will be based on the worth of your item, as assessed by staff. Vouchers are limited to one per person, not the number of devices you bring in. The ‘Cash for Trash’ offer runs until 15 April. You have until 30 April to use the voucher, and you must spend a minimum of £25 in store. However, you won’t be able to use the voucher on every item on sale in store. Currys says that gift cards and gaming consoles are excluded, as are iPads and AirPods. The items you bring in can have been bought from any retailer,…

Apple has released its first new iPad Air for 18 months, adding 5G and a USB-C port that can transfer data at 10Gbps – twice as fast as before. It comes with Apple’s M1 processor, which the company says is up to 60 per cent faster than the A14 Bionic processor found in the previous model. It has twice the graphics power, too. Like its predecessor, it works with the Apple Pencil stylus (£89 or £119 from www.snipca.com/41273). The cheapest version, priced £569, is a 64GB model with Wi-Fi only. Adding cellular connection, so you can make phone calls, increases the price to £719. The 256GB model costs £719 with Wi-Fi only, and £869 with cellular connection. It’s available in five colours: space grey, pink, purple, blue and starlight (pictured).…

I was having trouble with my Dell laptop. I half suspected the problem was that I didn’t have the right drivers installed, but I’ve always been bamboozled by drivers and have never felt confident installing them. I phoned Dell’s customer support hoping someone would be able to hold my hand through the process. I was delighted to speak to an assistant who sympathised with the confusion caused by drivers. He told me what to click in Windows to check whether I had drivers that needed installing – turns out I did. He then explained how to install them. What really impressed me is that he was happy to stay on the line while I finished installing. He even rang back the following day to check that the laptop was working…

VIDEO EDITOR MiniTool MovieMaker Free 4.0 www.snipca.com/41330 What you need: Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 With the exception of web browsers, you usually need to wait at least a year between major releases of software, so we’re both surprised and pleased that MiniTool MovieMaker Free 4.0 has arrived only five months after version 3.0 (see Issue 619, page 19). Clearly, the developer couldn’t wait to unveil the latest additions to the program, which let you customise your videos using animated elements. These consist of emoji-style cartoon graphics of animals, objects and facial expressions that you can overlay on videos. It’s not a feature you’ll find in professional video editors such as Kdenlive (https://kdenlive.org), but MovieMaker has always been targeted at home users looking to create something simple and fun,…

Barry Collins puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-spouting companies and software trying to trick you Cap doffed to reader Rob Nicolls for identifying this scoundrel, which has been plaguing his Samsung Galaxy tablet with unwanted notifications. He read my vented fury at the Microsoft-copycat Word Office in Issue 626 and said he’d discovered a similar Android app that was taking the Michael. All appears well when you first look up ‘All Document Reader and Viewer’ in the Google Play Store (www.snipca.com/41168). A 4.6 out of 5 rating (at the time of writing) and a ‘TrustedApp’ logo from Google suggests this “free” app should be a winner. But when you look more closely at the reviews, there’s an awful lot of recently submitted one stars, suggesting something’s gone wrong here.…

The Palicomp Intel Mercury has been our favourite desktop PC since we reviewed it in Issue 576. However, while we still think it’s a great budget PC, we’ve found a new model that’s even better. Enter the Chillblast Sentinel RTX 3050 Gaming PC. “The perfect compromise between powerful performance and reasonable price” Don’t let the name put you off if you aren’t particularly interested in games. Its RTX 3050 graphics card actually sits at the bottom end of Nvidia’s RTX 3000 range, so would be a compromise for hardcore gamers. However, it certainly copes well when running 3D games, if you like to dabble in Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example. It’s also very useful for helping Windows with other demanding graphical tasks, such as running multiple monitors or speeding up…

In this competition, leading mouse and keyboard manufacturer CHERRY is offering two £195 gaming bundles as prizes, each containing a state-of-the-art keyboard, mouse and headset. The keyboard is the G80-3000N RGB TKL – a wired model without a number pad, which means you can use your mouse nearer the keyboard, helping you adopt a more ergonomic posture. Also included is CHERRY’s MC 2.1 mouse, which has a rubberised, translucent mouse wheel with tactile ribs for the best possible grip. Because it’s transparent, it shows off the full colour spectrum with 16.8 million colours (RGB) and various lighting effects. Completing the thrilling gaming experience is the HC 2.2 headset, which has virtual 7.1 surround sound. To enter this competition, answer the question at www.snipca.com/41313 and submit your details. It runs until…

Create your own Wordle-style quiz Wordle (www.snipca.com/40782) has taken the world by storm. In case you’ve missed this phenomenon, the online game challenges you to work out a five-letter word within six guesses. It helps you by highlighting correct letters – green for those in the correct place, orange for the right letter in the wrong place. It’s like a letter-based equivalent of the classic Mastermind game (www.snipca.com/41215). Here, we’ll explain how to use Excel to create a similar game for club members. Apply formatting to your quiz Our game is inspired by Wordle, but is different in a number of ways. First, we enter several words with missing letters into cells. Players then have as many guesses as they want. The cell containing the word will remain red until…

PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT What properties won’t Windows copy? Q I’ve got a question that has intrigued me for quite a while. If I copy an EXE file (with a.exe file extension) from my PC to a USB memory stick, a message pops up to ask if I want to continue to copy, because all of its properties can’t be copied – whatever that means. I’ve gone ahead many times and found the file runs perfectly when transferred to another PC. So, my question is: why is this question asked? It’s also asked when coping Excel files, but again they seem to work fine elsewhere. Keep up the great magazine. Keith Holman A This is more common than you might imagine. It happens because many USB sticks are supplied pre-formatted…

Brave has doubled the number of people – from two to four – you can chat to for free using its Talk video tool. Visit the link above and click ‘Start free call’, or open a new tab page in Brave (click Ctrl+N), then click the video icon at the bottom right. Give Brave permission to use your camera and microphone, then enter your name and click either the blue ‘Join meeting’ button or the ‘Invite people’ icon (1 in our screenshot). Choosing the latter brings up a box with the meeting link 2. To send it, either cut and paste it into a text or email message, or click one of the options in the ‘Share meeting invitation’ dropdown menu 3. If you click the blue ‘Join meeting’ button,…

Can Amazon fob me off to Music Magpie? LEAD CASE Q In October 2021, I bought a £470 refurbished Samsung S20+ phone (pictured) from MusicMagpie’s store on Amazon (www.snipca.com/41063), which came with a one-year Amazon guarantee. The Wi-Fi is faulty, but because I work in the Merchant Navy, I could only report this when I returned from sea, some months after purchase. Amazon refuses to give me a refund, saying I must contact Music Magpie, who won’t reply to my emails. Can you help? Graham Ash A We’ll try, because under the Consumer Rights Act (CRA) – assuming the phone is inherently faulty – Graham is entitled to a repair or a replacement. If these aren’t possible, he’s due a full refund. Graham is unhappy that Amazon refused his request…

MyHeritage (www.myheritage.com) has released a new collection of 5.8 million Jewish records, sourced from 28 different collections held in New York by the Museum of Jewish Heritage (https://mjhnyc.org), and its affiliate JewishGen (www.jewishgen.org) – a non-profit organisation founded in 1987. As well as the UK and Ireland, the collection contains records from Belarus, Bessarabia (in today’s Ukraine and Moldova), Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and the US. These include birth, marriage and death records, as well as records created during the Holocaust, tax lists, voter rolls, immigration records, and more. For the United Kingdom, the collections include just under 80,000 death and burial records from 1733-2012, while a collection of over 60,000 birth records from Ireland is also available. The collections are a significant addition to MyHeritage, which is…

Q Your Workshop in Issue 626 (page 38), ‘Delay start-up tools to boot your PC faster’, prompted me to wonder if you can recommend a tool that deals with a similar problem but from the opposite direction. I want to get a program to run at a specific time on a day I have set in advance, for example, at 7am every Wednesday. I have looked at Task Scheduler in Windows 10, but I need a tool that’s easier to use. Paul Bradshaw A We agree that the Task Scheduler built into Windows isn’t very user-friendly, though it does offer the option you’re looking for. Click ‘Create Basic Task’ in its Actions list, enter a name for the task, such as ‘Run BleachBit’, then choose when you want to perform…

WHAT THEY SAY Lenovo on its new ThinkBooks www.snipca.com/41180 “By leveraging technology, they can produce unthinkable things that resonate and empower businesses and audiences around the world. ThinkBook is designed to be an integral part of the inspiration to build better businesses and enhance communities through individual accomplishments and globally recognized unthinkable achievements.” WHAT THEY MEAN What’s truly unthinkable is the idea that we can get away with such nonsense.…

What is it? Whether it’s a standalone unit or built into a printer, a scanner always has a maximum resolution. Measured in dpi (dots per inch), it indicates how much detail the scanner can reproduce from the page it’s scanning. This is particularly important when scanning small, detailed pictures, but less so if you’re just looking for a device that makes quick copies. How does it work? A scanner functions a bit like a printer but in reverse, effectively taking a photograph of the item you’ve placed in the scanner bed and reproducing it on your computer. It does this using a bank of sensors that build up an image pixel by pixel, line by line. What are the specs? Scanner resolutions can vary significantly. Typically, a scanner on a…

What is it? New technology from Microsoft that lets the latest generation of superfast SSDs communicate directly with the GPU on your graphics card. This should make the slow loading of demanding games a thing of the past. How does it work? Microsoft has updated DirectX, a component of Windows, to allow games to make the most of the latest storage hardware. It needs a PC with fourth-generation PCIe technology and a compatible NVMe SSD – such as the Seagate FireCuda 530, pictured, which costs £154 for 1TB from www.snipca.com/41311 and works in Windows 10 and 11. What’s the catch? Many developers still haven’t written it into their games. There’s only one game that is compatible so far – Forspoken (www.snipca.com/41310) - and that’s not due to be launched until…

What you need: Grandstream HandyTone HT801, BT to RJ11 adapter, VoIP account Time required: Two hours Your landline’s days are numbered – at least in its current form. In December 2025, BT will switch off the UK’s analogue phone network. Although you may still have a phone connected by cable to a socket on your wall, it will be digital – end to end. You should be able to keep your existing number, and your phone company should be in touch between now and switch-off day to explain the change. However it’s connected, from that date your phone calls will pass over the internet using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) rather than the public switched telephone network (PSTN). VoIP is already widely used in business, as it allows organisations to…

CHROME Stop Chrome 100 breaking the web Chrome has just released its 100th version (or will do on 29 March, if you’re reading this early as a subscriber) and is celebrating its centenary by breaking thousands of websites. That’s the worry, at least, because some sites may be unable to recognise the browser’s first three-digit version number, which will stop them loading pages correctly. The problem is caused by a piece of code called the ‘User Agent string’, which tells websites which browser version you’re using, for example ‘Chrome/99.0.4844.51’. Some websites, especially older ones, only read the first two digits after the browser name, so they’ll detect ‘Chrome/100.0.4896.20’ as version 10 and try – and fail – to display content accordingly. It’s similar to the infamous Millennium (Y2K) bug, which…

ANDROID Interact more easily with iOS users Google has updated its Messages app for Android phones to make it easier to interact by text message with friends and family who use iMessage on iPhones. Most notably, it has fixed a long-standing problem with emoji ‘reactions’. Previously when an iOS user reacted to one of your messages with, for example, a thumbs-up emoji, you’d receive a separate message to tell you that the person ‘liked’ your message. Now, the Messages app will detect and display the relevant emoji in the same way as when you chat to someone on an Android device – when you tap the emoji, it will say ‘Translated from iPhone’. It’s a small but welcome tweak that brings the two mobile operating systems closer together. Another change…

WINDOWS 11 Run VirtualBox without problems Microsoft has removed the ‘safeguard hold’ that was preventing Windows 11 users from running virtualisation software VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) when they had Hyper-V or the Windows Hypervisor installed. It had been blocking VirtualBox since Windows 11 launched because it said the software wouldn’t run smoothly in the operating system. As Microsoft explains (www.snipca.com/41309), the reason it has removed the block is because Oracle, which makes VirtualBox, has updated its program to eradicate incompatibility problems. It made the change in version 6.1.28, so if you’re running that, or a later version, check to see whether it now works. If you’ve not installed it, visit VirtualBox’s download site (www.snipca.com/41308) and click the ‘Windows hosts’ link. At the time of press, version 6.1.32 was the most recent version…

Can I get ‘Google-style’ search bar in Brave? Q I’m trying the Brave browser (https://brave.com) as an alternative to Firefox, following your advice in Issue 625’s ‘Never Get Tracked Online’ Cover Feature. While experimenting, I’m sure I managed to get a Brave ‘Google-style’ search bar in the centre of the browser, which was great as I prefer using that to the address (URL) bar at the top. Do you know how to get this back in the centre of the screen when opening the Brave browser? Howard L Smith A Yes we do. First, click the threeline menu at the top right and select Settings, then click ‘Get started’ on the left and select ‘Open a specific page or set of pages’ on the right (1 in our screenshot below).…