Table of contents for 625 in Computeractive

Can you tell what this is: “Click, click, click, click, argh”? No? It’s the sound of someone closing countless pop-up adverts, then losing the will to live. More specifically, it’s the sound I made almost every day from about 2015 while browsing the web in Chrome, before switching to Brave last year. Brave tells me it has blocked 561,067 trackers and adverts since I installed the browser, saving me nearly eight hours of browsing time. But what’s harder to measure is the satisfying sense of feeling more private online. As Robert Irvine explains in our Cover Feature, no trackers means you don’t get followed by those creepy adverts that seem to know your shopping habits better than you do. Robert also reveals how Tor and Firefox can keep you private…

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has made an important decision that helps to clarify what kind of protection consumers get when using online payment providers such as PayPal or Worldpay. It has ordered Lloyds Bank to reimburse Alex Dawson from Monmouth for a credit-card payment made through PayPal after it had refused to consider his claim under Section 75 of The Consumer Credit Act. Section 75 places equal liability on the retailer, service provider and bank, and can be extremely strong protection when things go wrong. However, using a payment provider has typically been seen as breaking the link between consumer and retailer, invalidating claims made under Section 75. The reason the FOS ruled in Alex’s favour is because he used a PayPal ‘guest checkout’, which lets customers use the…

OFFICE SUITE LibreOffice 7.3 www.snipca.com/40820 What you need: Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11 The best free alternative to Microsoft Office has released a major new version, soon after we suggested that OnlyOffice (www.snipca.com/40689) could steal its crown (see Issue 624, page 18). LibreOffice 7.3 further improves the suite’s compatibility with Office file formats such as DOCX (Word) and XLSX (Excel), which means that imported files will open more quickly and suffer fewer formatting errors. Similarly, Word and Excel will be able to open documents and spreadsheets saved in LibreOffice’s ODT and ODF formats with less hassle. LibreOffice’s word processor, Writer, now lets you attach hyperlinks to shapes, so that they open web pages when clicked, and improvements have been made to its Track Changes feature. For example, text you’ve…

SOFTWARE WARNING! Reader for Reading Kindle Ebooks There’s no official Kindle app in the Microsoft Store, but there’s plenty of lookalike junk that’s doing its best to convince you there is. The appallingly named ‘Reader for Reading Kindle Ebooks’ is one such app – it even does a poor man’s Photoshop of the Kindle logo (see above) to hoodwink customers into thinking it’s official. The app description says it “supports reading Kindle ebooks”, which is a bit of a cock-and-bull story. It’s true, you can use the app to log into your Amazon account and read your books in its browser, but you can do that for free from any web browser at https://read.amazon.com. You don’t need to pay the special offer price of £4.19 for the pleasure. Yes, there’s…

ANDROID & iOS Encrypt group chats in Facebook Messenger Facebook – or Meta, as the company is now called – has added a useful privacy feature to its Messenger app that lets you encrypt your group chats and voice and video calls, so nobody can eavesdrop on your conversations. The new option is disabled by default, but is easy to turn on. To start an encrypted chat with a group of friends, simply press the Compose (pencil) icon in the top-right corner of the Chats screen, switch on the padlock and select the people you want to chat privately to. Alternatively, tap the ‘i’ icon in the top-right corner of an existing chat and choose ‘Start end-to end encrypted chat’. For private group calls, tap the Compose icon, select ‘Create…

WINDOWS 10 & 11 Turn Command Prompt into an aquarium This tip doesn’t exactly make Windows better, but it’s a lot of fun. Using the Telnet feature in Windows, you can turn Command Prompt into an aquarium created in ASCII. In Windows search type turn Windows features, then click ‘Turn Windows features on or off’. In the box that appears, scroll down and tick Telnet Client, then click OK. Close this box, then open Command Prompt by typing cmd into Windows search, then clicking Open. Next, type telnet telehack.com and press Enter. Now type aquarium and press Enter. You should now see fish, whales, swans and ducks gliding across your screen. We even enjoyed a rare sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, too (see top of screenshot). WINDOWS 11 Install…

Vivaldi https://vivaldi.com Vivaldi has so many features that it doesn’t shout about its privacy tools, but they’re quite impressive. Delve into the Privacy section of its Settings panel (press Ctrl+F12 to open this) and you’ll find options for blocking trackers and adverts, all third-party cookies and ‘ads on abusive sites’ (which means things like pop-ups that trick you into clicking them). It also includes the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo and Startpage in its list of search engines, and makes it easy to review and delete all your stored cookies in one click (see screenshot). Opera www.opera.com With its built-in ad and tracker blockers and free VPN, Opera should be a shoo-in for a place in our top three private browsers. However, its VPN (see screenshot) is really just a proxy, which doesn’t…

Enable Super Duper Secure Mode in Edge Edge may not have earned a place in our top six private browsers, but Microsoft is making a welcome effort to boost its protection against hidden elements on web pages that compromise your privacy and security. As we reported in Issue 621 (page 11), this includes beefing up Edge’s ‘Tracking prevention’ feature with what Microsoft has dubbed Super Duper Secure Mode. This disables the web tool Just-In-Time (JIT), which is used to speed up JavaScript code on web pages, but can also be used by hackers to spread malware and steal your data. To enable the new mode in Edge, click the three-dot menu button in the top-right corner and choose Settings, then ‘Privacy, search and services’. Ensure that ‘Tracking prevention’ is switched…

Email us your problem and we’ll try to help: noproblem@computeractive.co.uk PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT Why can’t I watch 4K videos? Q My PC plays high-definition (HD) 1080p YouTube videos without any problems. However, quite a few videos are now in 4K, and when I try to play them, all I get is buffering and freezing. I use VLC Media Player for playback. Any ideas? Terry Colleen A There are a couple of possibilities, either of which could be contributing to your problem. First, it’s important to understand that there are a few differences between HD and 4K video – about six million of them, in fact. Each frame of HD video is made up of a little over two million pixels, but a 4K video has over eight million pixels…

Microsoft has released an update for Windows 10 that appears to have fixed problems that were making the operating system slow. The update, numbered KB5009596, is optional, so isn’t installed automatically. However, it was due to be part of Microsoft’s ‘Patch Tuesday’ - released on 8 February - which is compulsory. The problems started with the KB5009543 update, released on 11 January. Frustrated users reported that their computers were taking longer to start - up to 30 minutes in some cases - and that launching software and opening the Start menu had become much slower. Microsoft released KB5009596 on 25 January primarily to fix errors with highly technical parts of Windows, including virtualisation tool Hyper-V. But users have said that the update seems to have solved the problems caused by…

A Taiwanese company has conducted the world’s first test of Wi-Fi 7 and claims it’ll be so fast that you’ll never need to use Ethernet cables again. MediaTek is currently demonstrating its tests to industry partners, claiming the technology will make Wi-Fi a practical alternative to Ethernet even for software and services that require a lot of bandwidth. Wi-Fi 7 has a theoretical peak speed of 40Gbps (40,000Mbps), which is four times as fast as Wi-Fi 6. MediaTek says it managed to achieve a speed that was “2.4x faster” than Wi-Fi – around 24Gbps – making it fast enough to become the “backbone of home, office and industrial networks” and provide “seamless connectivity” for tasks such as online gaming and streaming in 4K. It added that the tests show Wi-Fi…

All this fuss about broadband prices rising made me check what I was paying every month. I have to confess that I’d been with Virgin for so long that I’d become complacent, and had no idea what I was paying. It was just another bill going out of my account. It’s easy to forget, I suppose. I was shocked when I discovered that I paid over £100 a month for 200Mbps broadband, plus TV (that I never watch) and landline (that I never use). I’m sure I wasn’t paying anything near that when I first signed up, about 10 years ago. An inflation-busting increase of nine per cent would send my bill nearer to £110, which I thought was eye-wateringly expensive for a service that I never use to its…

My broadband is arranged through John Lewis, who get it supplied by Plusnet. After experiencing a few brief occurrences of my internet connection going down, I phoned the John Lewis Broadband support line (which is an 0800 number, so is free from mobile phones and landlines). My call was answered very quickly by a technician. After doing some line checks he confirmed that my internet had disconnected on a number of occasions. He said he’d book a visit by Openreach and said there was a slot available the next day between 8am and 1pm. Sure enough, the next morning (at 8am!) the engineer came and carried out tests on my internal wiring, and then left to make some tests externally. I later had an email to confirm the fault had…

Q I have a lot of icons on my desktop, but know roughly where everything is when I need to open a folder or launch a program. However, Windows keeps shuffling the icons around, which makes them harder to find. Is there any software that can ‘lock’ them in place? David Arden A It’s likely that Windows keeps moving your desktop icons because you have its ‘Auto arrange’ feature turned on, and it’s sorting them by name, size, type or last modified. To disable this, right-click a blank area of your desktop, select View and untick ‘Auto arrange icons’. Alternatively, select ‘Sort by’ and choose your preferred method of arranging icons. An even better option is to use a tiny free tool called DesktopOK (www.snipca.com/40825), which was recently updated to…

The diskAshur M2 from UK company iStorage lets you protect your files behind a 7 to 15-digit PIN, so only you will be able to open them. When the drive is disconnected, all data is encrypted using AES-XTS 256-bit hardware encryption. You don’t need any software to use it – just plug it into any device with a USB port. It’s extremely rugged, and would survive a drop of up to four metres on to a concrete surface. It’s both waterproof (up to 1.5 metres) and crushproof (up to 2.7 tons), and isn’t affected by dust, dirt and sand. Weighing just 65 grams without the sleeve (and 86 grams with) it’s extremely portable, and is smaller than a phone. File-transfer speeds are impressive also – up to 370MB/s when both…

Handy hints and tips from your fellow readers Email us your tips: letters@computeractive.co.uk SECURITY Store your camera footage on a USB stick I was interested in your How To on using the Blink Mini security system (Issue 623, page 35) because I use it too – and it’s excellent. To save on the online-subscription fees you mentioned you can buy a Blink Sync Module 2 from Amazon for £30 (www.snipca.com/40719, pictured left). This lets you store your captured footage locally on a USB stick. It also syncs multiple cameras. Roger Fearnside APPS Use Procreate to draw and paint on iPad Having enjoyed your feature on which styluses to use (Issue 624, pages 62-63), I’d like to recommend the app Procreate (www.snipca.com/40718, pictured below), which is an excellent drawing app for…

SmartRedial Free* Android www.snipca.com/40767 If you’ve ever wasted an hour trying to contact your GP, you’ll appreciate this app, which keeps redialling a number until somebody answers the phone. Simply enter a number or choose one from your contacts list, specify how many attempts to make and how long to wait between calls, then tap the Call button to start ringing. Triple A - Touch Visualizer Free* iOS www.snipca.com/40771 Currently the most popular entertainment app in the Apple App Store, Triple A consists of thousands of tiny particles, which respond to your touch by changing colour and forming dazzling visual formations, like an on-screen firework display. It’s very therapeutic and you can change the size and number of particles, and the soundtrack. Pret A Manger Free Android www.snipca.com/40768 iOS www.snipca.com/40769…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER & MICROSOFT WORD Add bookmarks to documents Both Word and Writer let you add bookmarks to your documents to help you jump to specific points. This can be particularly useful when you have to frequently hop between sections of a large document. In Word, select where you want your bookmark – either by positioning your cursor or highlighting some text. Next, click the Insert tab (1 in our screenshot), then Bookmark 2 in the Links section. Now give the bookmark a name 3 – it must begin with a letter, and can’t contain spaces. When you’ve added your bookmarks, you can find them using Word’s Go To tool. Open it by pressing Windows key+G, or by clicking Home, then the Find dropdown arrow and selecting Go To. Select…

All six of the private browsers we’ve reviewed here are also available on your phone or tablet, and their mobile apps offer extra privacy tools. For example, the Brave app for Android (www.snipca.com/40730) includes a feature called ‘Privacy report’ (see screenshot below) that goes further than its desktop counterpart by listing the domains of all the trackers and ad servers it’s blocked, so you can identify repeat offenders. Brave’s iOS app (www.snipca.com/40733) is even more powerful, boosting the privacy and security of your entire iPhone or iPad through its combined firewall and VPN, though this costs $9.99 (£7.50) per month or $99.99 ($75) a year, after a seven-day free trial. Tor Browser doesn’t have an official iOS app, but the Tor Project recommends using Onion Browser (www.snipca.com/40732), which is powered…

WHAT YOU GET Real-time malware protection Secure VPN 75GB PC Cloud Backup Webcam hack alerts PLUS Monitors the dark web for your personal information Norton is made by NortonLifeLock Inc – a standalone company dedicated to consumer cyber safety. It has always performed strongly in Computeractive antivirus tests, so we highly recommend it. 10 devices for two years NOW ONLY £24.99* Normally £179.99 Buy it from our Software Store at www.snipca.com/33247 *while stocks last…

Three new criminal offences to combat “harmful” and “threatening” emails and social-media posts are to be added to the Government’s online safety bill. Digital secretary Nadine Dorries has accepted proposals from the Law Commission that she says will “bring the full weight of the law against those who use the internet as a weapon to ruin people’s lives”. The most serious offence, of sending or posting a message that carries a threat of serious harm, will have a maximum five-year jail sentence. It will also be an offence to send a communication meant to cause harm without a reasonable excuse, and will be based on the psychological distress it causes the victim, rather than the specific content of the message. It carries a maximum two-year jail sentence. Those found guilty…

WATCH OUT FOR… Fake redelivery texts from Post Office What’s the threat? Criminals are sending fake texts asking you to arrange redelivery of a Post Office parcel. One of the texts asks you to “book a new date” to receive your parcel, while another says your item has been returned “to your local branch”. Both texts contain links to tap. Doing so takes you to a site that mimics the Post Office’s site, with the heading ‘Missed a delivery?’. You’re asked to enter your postcode then click a red ‘Continue’ button, which takes you to a page where you can type personal details including name, delivery address and mobilephone number, giving the scammers enough information to steal your identity. If you type these, you’re then prompted to pay a ‘Redelivery…

LEAD CASE Do you have 14 or 28 days to reject items? Q In Anne Smith’s case in Issue 623 you say that under the Consumer Rights Act (CRA) you’re allowed to return items within 30 days of purchase, and that this shouldn’t be confused with the 28 days allowed under the Consumer Contract Regulations (CCR) to reject unwanted items bought online. But I thought this latter period was only 14 days from when you receive an item. Am I mistaken? Robert Hemmings A Robert has got it half right. The CCRs give you the right to reject items bought when you’ve not had time to physically examine them, such as buying over the phone, or via the internet or a catalogue. The 28-day period is split into two 14-day…

To borrow that old adage about children, a PC should be seen but not heard. I learned this when I switched to working from home. Without the background hum of air conditioning and general office hubbub, I’ve become acutely aware of how loud my PC is. Desktop PCs are loud because of the whirring made by fans that keep them cool. But before splashing out on a new, quieter model, I find it’s best to tweak the fan-controller settings on your motherboard’s BIOS (or UEFI – it works the same on both). Modern PCs like mine usually have Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) fans. That’s a fancy way of saying that you can control the fan’s speed through the BIOS. By default, all fans run at top speed, but via the…

To the power of 12 If you’ve been waiting to see Intel’s brand new 12th-generation processors out in the wild, your wait is over. This desktop PC from PC Specialist has been built around an i5 version of the new Core i5-12600KF chip, which gives it a significant speed boost. It’s not cheap, but if you want the very latest components, this is the sort of price you can expect to pay. Play demanding games at higher resolutions However, there’s no denying that this is fast. In our benchmark test it managed a lofty score of 8,023. Compare this to our previous record-holding desktop PC, the PC Specialist Fusion Supreme (reviewed in Issue 621), which is built around AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X processor and achieved 7,787 in the same test.…

What are they? The screens on ebook readers are different to those on smartphones, PCs and tablets, because they use EInk to emulate the appearance of printed paper rather than the photographic realism recreated on the screens of tablets and smartphones. How do they work? Each pixel of an EInk screen is actually a tiny capsule, filled with particles of two colours – usually black and white – on a monochrome screen. The two colours have different electric charges - one positive, one negative. By applying an external charge to each pixel, either the dark or light particles will rise to the top of the capsule, depending on whether a positive or negative charge is applied. The charge is then held until it’s changed again, which is why ebook readers…

What is it? Chinese manufacturer BOE has announced a prototype 27in monitor with a refresh rate of 500Hz. This is a significant leap forward from current models, which operate at a maximum of 360Hz. What does it do? If your graphics hardware is powerful enough to handle it, the monitor can display a new image 500 times per second. The higher this refresh rate is, the smoother things look on screen. It seems likely that this particular screen will be aimed at serious gamers. What’s the catch? The prototype has a relatively low resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, particularly for a 27in screen, so it sacrifices detail for speed. 27in screens usually have 2560x1440 pixels. It’s also worth remembering that you’ll need a powerful PC and graphics card to send that…

CHROME Add passwords to Chrome manually Chrome’s built-in password manager saves you having to install a third-party tool such as LastPass, and helpfully offers to save your login details when you register with websites. Version 98 of the browser, released earlier this month, introduces the option to add passwords manually, which is useful if you didn’t store your credentials when you signed up with a site. The feature is currently still an ‘experiment’, so you’ll need to enable it in Chrome. Type chrome://flags into the address bar, press Enter and search for the entry Add passwords in settings. Select ‘Enabled’ in the dropdown menu and relaunch the browser. To add a password for a website to Chrome’s password manager, go to chrome://settings/passwords or click the three-line menu and choose Settings,…

Reelgood Free Android www.snipca.com/40772 iOS www.snipca.com/40773 Reelgood helps you find TV series and films to watch across all the main streaming services, including Netflix, Now TV, Prime Video, BBC iPlayer, Disney Plus and BritBox. You can quickly see what’s new, save content to watch later, view user and IMDb ratings, and control nearby Roku devices using the app’s on-screen remote. Best For Browsing streaming services On TV Tonight Free Android www.snipca.com/40775 iOS www.snipca.com/40774 Rather than flick through a TV magazine, this app lets you peruse listings for the next week on your phone or tablet, and view information about each programme. Set your location to see all free digital channels available in your area, hide those you never watch and save shows as favourites to receive alerts before they are…

As good as PowerPoint is at displaying key information, the bulk of a presentation comes down to one person speaking. To cater to the hard of hearing and generally make things clearer for everyone, you may want to show live subtitles in your presentation. These can be in English or translated into another language for when you have an international audience. In our example, we have a World War 2 historical society giving a talk on the role of the Fairey Battle aeroplane during bombing raids in France in 1940. The presentation will be carried out in both England and France, so will need to use PowerPoint’s translation feature. Use English or foreign-language subtitles Using subtitles in PowerPoint requires two things: a microphone and an internet connection. The more clearly…

GOLD AWARD Brave www.brave.com WHAT WE LIKE Once regarded as an underdog in the battle of the browsers - or an ‘under-lion’, in keeping with its logo - Brave’s popularity has doubled in the last year and it now claims to have more than 50 million monthly users (see www.snipca.com/40717). Although Brave is based on the same Chromium code as Chrome and Edge, its focus on privacy makes it significantly different to those browsers and is a major reason for its success. It’s also why we believe Brave to be the most private browser available for everyday use. From the moment you install it, Brave automatically blocks elements that track you online – unlike rival browsers, which require you install extensions (see page 57) to get the same protection. It…

In this special offer you can buy Windows 11 Home for £59.99 – that’s £60 cheaper than Microsoft’s full price of £119.99. To buy Windows 11 Home, visit www.snipca.com/40534 and click the red Buy Now button on the right. If you have any questions about your order please email editor@computeractive.co.uk JUST SO YOU KNOW… This offer can be used by one person only, and expires at midnight on 1 March, 2022. It’s a lifetime licence for one computer.…

The Do Not Track option in browsers is notoriously useless because most websites simply ignore the request. Privacy groups and browser developers are hoping a new system called Global Privacy Control (GPC) will succeed where Do Not Track failed, by telling sites that you don’t want your data to be collected and shared – and making this legally binding. Brave and Firefox now enable GPC by default, as do Privacy Badger and DuckDuckGo (which helped create the standard). To check your browser, visit https://globalprivacycontrol.org and look at the top of the page to see if a GPC signal is detected. The main problem is that websites aren’t currently obliged to honour Global Privacy Control and the system itself is still being developed. Last November, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) stated…

Why can’t I change Edge’s search engine? Q I followed the advice in Issue 623’s Browser Tips (page 43) to change the default search engine for Edge’s address bar. However, try as I might, I could not set it to Google UK (www.google.co.uk). I want to try to reduce the number of US-skewed results that I get, but when I open a new browser tab it does not show up in the relevant settings as available for me to select. If I try to enter the details manually, I can no longer search from the address bar! Are you able to help? Dr P Barone A For whatever reason, Edge doesn’t seem to automatically detect www.google.co.uk as a valid search engine, so while opening a desired search engine in a…

1080p Of the common types of high-definition video, this is the best quality: 1920x1080 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. 3G/4G/5G Technologies that deliver faster mobile broadband. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 720p/1080p/1440p Common types of high-definition video of 1280x720, 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 pixels respectively. Add-on A program that adds extra features to your browser. 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. ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Represents each character on a PC…