Table of contents for 673 in Computeractive

At this time of joy and goodwill, spare a thought for CCleaner. Once the world’s best junk-wiping tool, it will be spending this Christmas alone and unloved. It’ll also be a bleak time for WinRAR, abandoned following recent Windows updates. And don’t forget poor old LastPass, which many people wouldn’t trust to protect their figgy pudding, let alone their passwords. These are just three of the tools that we urge you to uninstall as we head into 2024. Robert Irvine has found plenty of other phone apps, browser extensions and Windows tools that should be avoided like mince pies licked by Rudolph. He recommends superior replacements for each, and also reveals which is the best program for removing stuff from your PC. I’d like to thank you all for reading…

Microsoft extend Windows 10 support? That’s wishful thinking I admire Ben Arnold’s optimism (Letters, Issue 672), but his hope Microsoft will extend Windows 10 support is wishful thinking. I was surprised when Microsoft said it would add Copilot to Windows 10, and can see why some people interpreted it as a sign that support would go beyond 2025. But Microsoft’s decision surely has more to do with encouraging people to use Copilot than to offer extended support for what by then will be a 10-year-old operating system. Microsoft is betting big on Copilot transforming how people use Windows and wants users to become reliant on it. That gives it the opportunity to say in 2025 that it can no longer support it in Windows 10, and that people must upgrade…

I’d like to say thanks to the software company Ashampoo for excellent service. Many years ago, when I had a Palm Pilot, I bought some software from them based on recommendations in Computeractive. I still use some Ashampoo programs now, including Soundstage 2020 (www.snipca.com/48432), Snap 15 (www.snipca.com/48439) and Burning Studio 23 (www.snipca.com/48433, pictured). They’re all easy to use and do everything I need. When I bought these recently, Ashampoo were able to furnish me with the original activation keys for all the software I had purchased over the years. All these were sent to me in an email. This was a great help. After all, we all misplace product keys sometimes. They also made sure I had updates and the support I needed. Its customer service is always courteous. We…

Stardock DeskScapes 11 www.snipca.com/48557 Price: £3.99 Free trial: 30 days What you need: Windows 10 or 11 Windows includes only a few alternative wallpapers for your desktop, which you’ve probably already tried and tired of. Stardock DeskScapes offers a more versatile and sophisticated way to personalise your workspace. The program’s simple interface lets you browse thousands of free, high-quality desktop wallpapers from sources including Bing’s ‘Image of the day’ collection, Windows’ own library and the thriving DeskScapes community. These include both static and animated backgrounds (see screenshot), and span categories including Abstract, Weather, Space, Vehicles, Landscapes, Seascapes and Animals. Applying a picture to your desktop is as easy as clicking ‘Download background’ then ‘Apply background’. You can choose whether to display the image on all your monitors or just the…

Celebrity pranks have become a lot nastier since the days when Jeremy Beadle would stick on dark glasses and dress up as a traffic warden. His larks were harmless compared with Mizzy’s habit of cycling through supermarkets and invading people’s homes, then posting the video on TikTok. Mizzy, real name Bacari-Bronze O’Garro, has now been jailed for 18 weeks after breaching a criminal behaviour order forbidding him from filming people without their consent. Judge Matthew Bone spoke for the whole country when he told the 19-year-old: “put bluntly your pranks are not funny”. Thankfully we’ll see a lot less of him after he’s released because he’s been banned from posting clips online for two years. And that’s no joke, Mizzy – a bit like your videos in fact.…

PHONE | £219 from Oppo www.snipca.com/48455 This is one of the cheapest phones around, but feels and looks more expensive. While it has a few obvious budget features, such as the flat-edge design and the tear-drop notch that hosts the front camera, it feels more like a premium phone than many rivals at this price. For instance, there’s no cheap, tacky plastic case. Instead, its glossy, textured rear panel accommodates a fingerprint scanner that works well. Its IP54 rating means it’s fairly resistant to water and dust – it can cope with being splashed but not submerged in water, for example. The A78 also runs surprisingly smoothly, despite its relatively low-end processor and modest 4GB of RAM. In our gaming tests, which involve the most demanding software, it functioned with…

ANDROID & iOS Find documents faster in Google Photos The latest update to Google Photos improves the app’s organisation of screenshots and photos you take of items containing text – including documents, posters and receipts. It now uses AI to better identify and categorise these images and sort them into appropriate albums. This makes it much easier to find text-based pictures without having to scroll through your whole photo library. Tap the Search tab at the bottom of the Photos app and you’ll see a new Documents section between the Places and Things rows (see screenshot below left). Here you’ll find albums with labels such as Screenshots, Posters, Menus, ‘Book cover’ and ‘Identity document’. If you find – as we did – that Google has placed some images in the…

Presenter view in Microsoft PowerPoint makes it easy to deliver all kinds of material – from photo slideshows to background information like an itinerary or statistics. But what if you’re not in the room when your presentation is being delivered? Or you’re delivering it over the internet? In these situations you can use PowerPoint’s Cameo tool to insert yourself into the presentation via a live webcam feed. First, you need to set up your webcam to use in PowerPoint. In Windows 10 or 11, open Settings and click ‘Bluetooth & devices’ followed by Cameras. Selecting your camera should open a preview window that lets you make changes like brightness, contrast, sharpness and saturation (see screenshot below). Once done, scroll down to click Camera Privacy Settings and check that ‘Let desktop…

How can I digitise mounted 35mm slides? Q In Issue 670’s ‘What Should I Buy?’ (page 26), reader AS Darlington asked which film scanner you’d recommend for digitising 127mm and 120mm negatives, as well as 35mm slides. You suggested buying the Lomography DigitaLIZA Max, priced £85 from www.snipca.com/47949. I have the same requirement, but I also need to digitise mounted 35mm slides as well as strips of negatives. Having visited Lomography’s website, it’s not clear to me whether the DigitaLIZA Max is capable of processing mounted slides. Can you find out for me please? Gordon Bell A We asked Lomography, and it told us that you can’t scan 35mm mounted slides with the DigitaLIZA Max, adding that the masks are designed only to insert/feed the film. It doesn’t currently make…

Can Expert Telecom nearly double my broadband bill? LEAD CASE Q In October my internet provider Expert Telecom (www.experttelecom.co.uk) phoned me to say it was trying to keep costs down. Within three weeks my monthly bill had gone up from £35.77 to £63.97. Can it do this? Colin Sander A It can increase prices, but under Ofcom rules it has to email customers with at least 30 days’ notice. This may have ended up in Colin’s spam folder, so we’ve asked him to check. If a provider doesn’t email notice of a price rise, then you can cancel without paying a fee. You’re also allowed to leave without a fee if your provider increases your bills mid-contract without stating in the terms and conditions that it might do this. We…

How can I remove duplicate music files? Q My 20-year-old music library is in a mess. In the past I’ve used both MediaMonkey (www.mediamonkey.com) and MusicBee (www.getmusicbee.com) to manage it, but after the arrival of Windows 11 just about everything is duplicated. What can I use to sort this out? Hugh Manuel A You need a program dedicated to removing duplicates. We’d suggest AllDup, which is free from www.snipca.com/48355. Before launching it, back up your music folder to be on the safe side. Open AllDup, then click the Source Folders button and choose ‘Add folder’ from the dropdown menu. Select your Music folder or navigate to the folder containing your messy library, then click OK. Next, click Search Method followed by the ‘Find duplicate files on the basis of their…

DIGITAL CAMERA | £499 from Amazon www.snipca.com/48523 The one problem with having your phone as your only means of taking photos is that there may be occasions when you don’t want to risk using it. Taking holiday snaps on the beach or in the driving rain after hiking up a mountain could expose your smartphone to hazardous amounts of sand or water. “It takes photos in places your phone may fear to tread” OM System (previously known as Olympus) solves the problem with a robust, waterproof digital camera that harks back to the compact models that were popular before the advent of smartphones. As its name suggests, it can withstand a certain amount of rough handling, including being dropped from up to two metres and getting crushed by weights of…

Winner of a Recommended award in Issue 669, Anker’s soundcore Space One headphones are expertly crafted to block mid to high-frequency sounds, delivering an unparalleled noise-reduction performance. They have adaptive noise-cancelling (ANC) to detects external sounds and sound leakage. It means you can enjoy flawless music whether on a noisy train, in a crowded café, or even when your Bluetooth headphones are not perfectly positioned on your ears. The 40mm customised dynamic drivers to help produce high-resolution audio, with LDAC compatibility that offers a sound experience three times as detailed as standard Bluetooth. And with 40 hours of ANC play time, you can listen to the headphones on long journeys without worrying that the battery will run out. Play time is even longer (55 hours) with ANC turned off. Once…

SOFTWARE Copy file paths in Sumatra PDF editor As a follow-up to Rob Haslam’s tip (see Issue 672) on keyboard shortcuts for the PDF editor Sumatra (www.snipca.com/48052), here’s a tip for copying a file path to your clipboard to make it easy to paste somewhere. Press Ctrl+K, then click Copy File Path (see screenshot below left). And that’s it. Before I discovered this shortcut I was pressing Ctrl+D then clicking Copy To Clipboard, which would copy all the information about the PDF. That can be useful too, but mostly I just need the file path. Mike Randall PHONES Add ‘ICE’ before the names of emergency contacts Sarah Palmer’s idea to add ICE (which stands for ‘In Case of Emergency’) after names in phone contacts is a great idea (Issue 671,…

WINDOWS 11 Install version 23H2 via the Media Creation Tool Microsoft has now made its 23H2 update available as a clean install using its Media Creation Tool. This lets you download Windows to a USB stick or disc so you can reinstall it. Visit Microsoft’s website (www.snipca.com/48409), then click Download Now under Create Windows 11 Installation Media (1 in our screenshot below). You’ll now download the 10MB file ‘MediaCreationTool_Win11_23H2.exe’ 2. Double-click the file, click Accept, then click Next. In the ‘Choose which media to use’ menu select ‘USB flash drive’ or ‘ISO file’ 3. Click Next again, select your file path, and you’ll begin downloading Windows 11 version 23H2. WINDOWS 10 & 11 Add a ‘maximum volume’ keyboard shortcut Most computer keyboards come with shortcuts that let you increase/decrease your PC’s…

What is it? A new tool in Microsoft’s Paint app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to turn your typed suggestions into images. It’s powered by the pioneering AI technology DALL·E 3 (www.snipca.com/48530). Can it turn anything into an image? It certainly has a good stab at it. Feeling festive, we typed ‘Father Christmas using a laptop while drinking mulled wine in a pub’, and chose the Oil Painting style. Thirty seconds later it produced three images, the best of which was the picture you see on the right. It’s a suitably cosy scene, though Santa is asking for trouble by balancing his drink on his laptop. From our tests, Cocreator is fast, accurate and easy to use. That’s the good news. What’s the bad news? It’s only available in Windows…

Microsoft will release Windows 12 in June 2024, according to Taiwan’s biggest financial newspaper Commercial Times. It made the claim based on comments by Acer boss Jason Chen and Quanta boss Barry Lam at the Taiwan Medical Technology Exhibition in December. Quanta is a PC and hardware manufacturer based in Taiwan. They also said that “AI computers” will launch in 2024. These will have AI capabilities built into the processor. Microsoft hasn’t commented officially on whether it’s planning to release Windows 12, but company sources have told our sister site Windows Central that it’s working on a new version of the operating system that’s powered by AI. This will include an “advanced Copilot” that runs constantly in the background to enhance searches and perform tasks faster, they said. There’s talk…

WATCH OUT FOR… Fake emails from ‘Booking.com’ What’s the threat? Scammers are increasingly targeting Booking.com customers after stealing their details from hotels they’ve stayed at. First, they email the hotel a link to Google Drive, saying it contains an image of an item they accidentally left in their room. Clicking this infects the hotel’s computer with the malware Vidar Infostealer, letting the attackers access Booking.com’s reservations. The scammers can then email customers from Booking.com’s official app and trick them into sending money. It’s such a convincing scam that it almost fooled security expert Graham Cluley. In October, he blogged about a scam message that asked him to click a link to verify his payment card (www.snipca.com/48581, see screenshot). He realised it was a scam when clicking the link took him…

Mobile networks offer so many packages that it’s easy to get confused, as reader John Johnston found out. He thought he had put £10 for calls on his old ‘emergency’ pay-as-you-go (PAYG) phone with O2, only to find that he had added data instead (see Issue 672). This meant John was unable to contact his wife during a short stay in hospital. John wondered whether O2 had taken the £10 as an unauthorised payment, but we thought it was more likely that a mistake had been made. We spoke to O2 and it confirmed that John had accidentally bought one of its Big Bundle deals (www.snipca.com/48237). To its credit, O2 refunded this payment to John. It also cancelled the rolling subscription for the deal, so he wouldn’t lose another £10.…

SYSTEM TOOL Microsoft PowerToys 0.76 www.snipca.com/48576 What you need: Windows 10 or 11 Microsoft has regularly updated PowerToys in 2023, though it has – perhaps thankfully – resisted the temptation to add its Copilot AI assistant to the system-utility suite. PowerToys 0.76 rounds off the year with a raft of improvements and useful new options, across its ever-expanding range of tools. Several of these have been redesigned to give them a more ‘modern look’, including PowerToys Run and the floating toolbars for the Quick Accent and Text Extractor tools. Quick Accent, which lets you type accented characters for different languages, now supports Finnish, Greek and Welsh, as well as numerical fractions. Curiously, Text Extractor, which uses OCR to copy text from images, is now disabled by default in Windows 11…

SOFTWARE WARNING! YouTube’s ‘unblockable’ ads that scam you Google’s war on ad-blockers is having mixed results. Some ad-blockers like Adblock Plus (adblockplus.org) still work – or it did for me at least, at the time of writing – while all it takes to prevent ads in Brave is to open it in Private Browsing mode (by pressing Ctrl+Shift+N). Google is also sending mixed messages. Researchers at Malwarebytes spotted that one advert YouTube is currently showing is for the browser extension Total Adblock. So, to get this straight – it doesn’t want you to block ads, but is taking money from companies that let you do just that. Malwarebytes wonders whether such inconsistency is a sign that YouTube doesn’t have a grip on which companies it allows to advertise (see www.snipca.com/48484).…

Night vision What does it do? Night vision lets your security camera see in the dark, so it can record video footage and images in low light and through the night. Most security cameras come with some form of night vision, including Google’s Nest Cam (pictured). How does it work? There are two types of night vision. Put simply, one type can record in colour and the other can’t. Colour night vision uses an extremely sensitive sensor to pick up whatever information and detail it can from minimal levels of light. The most effective of these cameras can function fairly well on a moonlit night, but may struggle in pitch darkness. Black-and-white night vision can work in absolute pitch blackness, because it uses its own LEDs to flood the viewing…

What is it? Keyboard manufacturer Lofree has launched a flatter mechanical keyboard for those who want the mechanical feel without the chunky dimensions. What does it do? The Lofree Flow (£136 from www.snipca.com/48505, pictured) uses shallow Kailh Phantom Tactile switches that are smaller and have less travel than regular mechanical switches. This helps create a lower profile. What’s the catch? By reducing the distinctive feel of a mechanical keyboard it won’t feel as satisfying to type on. If having a flat keyboard is essential, then consider cheaper models with membrane switches, such as the Logitech K380 (£31 from www.snipca.com/44356). So can I do without it? Yes. You just need to decide what’s more important – how typing feels or how thick your keyboard is.…

14 pages of easy-to-follow workshops and expert tips What you need: Audio cassettes; cassette player; leads; Audacity software Time required: 20 minutes for setup; several hours for recording and editing Cassette tapes are enjoying a renaissance. Popular artists are releasing new albums on the format – alongside downloads, vinyl and streaming – in the knowledge that their most loyal fans will buy one of each to complete their collections. Many will be packed away in a cupboard for safekeeping, never to be played. But what about the cassettes we’ve all hung on to from the past? Many of these are irreplaceable. They may be albums that are no longer in production, or precious home recordings featuring voices from loved ones who have since passed on. One day you might no…

CHROME Enable or disable Chrome’s 2023 redesign Google waited until September to roll out Chrome’s 2023 redesign, to coincide with the browser’s 15th birthday (and Google’s 25th). However, some users still don’t have the new look, which gives Chrome a brighter and more modern appearance, with rounded corners, clearer icons and more spacious menus. Other users have received the Material Design update, but prefer the way Chrome looked before. Thankfully, it’s possible to enable or disable the new design, depending on your preference – though the option may eventually be removed from the browser. Type chrome://flags into the address bar and press Enter to load the Experiments page. Find the entry Chrome Refresh 2023 (see screenshot below) and click the dropdown menu next to it (you can ignore the other…

MICROSOFT WORD Change the page size of your document After you’ve created your document, you can change the size of the page at any time. This is useful if, for example, you need to resize it so you can print in a specific format. Click the Layout tab then the Size dropdown button. In our example, we set our page to A5 (1 in our screenshot below). Click ‘More Paper Sizes…’ 2 to open the Page Setup settings menu and change options, including margins and page orientation. LIBREOFFICE WRITER & MICROSOFT WORD Turn text into a table When adding a table to a document, it feels natural to create an empty table then add your data. But both LibreOffice Writer and Microsoft Word let you type your data first and then…

WHAT YOU CAN DO • Permanently remove Microsoft Edge from your PC • Banish the new Copilot tool from Windows 10 and 11 • Open files in RAR format without using WinRAR • Edit and sign PDFs without paying for bloated software • Ditch ‘free’ programs that keep nagging you to pay • Stop using useless video downloaders and ad blockers • Uninstall dangerous mobile apps that spy on you In our ‘Best Free Downloads for 2024’ Cover Feature in Issue 672, we recommended lots of fantastic programs, apps and other freebies you’ll be able to download in the coming year. However, the start of a new year is also the perfect time to start planning what to get rid of – not only to make room for the good…

4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 1080p Of the common types of high-definition video, this is the best quality: 1920x1080 pixels. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. AI Artificial intelligence. Intelligence demonstrated by a machine rather than a person. Often used to describe technology that can perform human-like tasks. APK Android Package Kit. The file format Android uses to install apps. Bandwidth A measure of how much data can be transferred through a connection at one time. Benchmarking Comparing software and products with an accepted standard. Bloatware Unwanted software built into a new device. Browser hijackers Programs that change your default browser, its homepage and search engine, without prior warning, when you install them. Cache A temporary space for storing data. Can…