Computeractive

Group Editor Daniel Booth Deputy Editor Will Stapley Production Editor Graham Brown Art Editor Katie Peat Contributors Adam Banks, Dinah Greek, Jonathan Parkyn, Nick Peers, Nik Rawlinson Group Advertising Director Andrea Mason Deputy Ad Manager Rebec

Walkies might soon become more interesting for your dog. The US Army is testing augmented reality goggles for dogs in war zones so they can follow orders at a distance and scout ahead to sniff out explosives. Here they are being modelled by Mater the

PayPal users have been urged to log into their accounts before 16 December to avoid paying an ‘inactivity fee’ of up to £12. The company is introducing the annual charge for accounts that have been inactive for 12 consecutive months. It defines “inac

I recently had an error warning on my Epson XP 600 printer telling me the ink pads had run out and needed replacing. I duly went online to find out how easy the job was. I’m an engineer and found to my surprise that it was well within my capabilities

Motorists won’t be able to touch their phones while driving for any reason under a law the Government hopes to pass early next year, following a consultation. It would close a loophole that currently allows drivers to take photos, scroll through musi

If you use Chrome to browse the web on your phone or tablet, you’ll now see alerts telling you when your passwords have been stolen. When you sign into a site, Chrome will send an encrypted version of the username and password to Google’s servers, wh

Junk offender: Browser notification spammers Junk doesn’t just sneak on to your PC through software – it can also catch you unawares while you browse the web. I was reminded of this while looking for a tool called AC3 Filter. This used to be a truste

When people started to panic-buy hand sanitisers earlier this year, the bosses at Digital Growth Experts Ltd (DGEL) thought they were quids in. The London-based firm, which sells health and pet care products on Amazon and other sites, sent 16,190 spa

LEAD CASE Q In July, I sold a brand new pair of Bang & Olufsen headphones on eBay for £49.95 (£57.45 including postage). The buyer in France returned them via eBay’s return process saying they were defective. I didn’t examine them properly when they

Reader David Cale recently discovered that his South Africanborn mother, who died in 1980, was born four years earlier than he previously believed: “As a result her death certificate information is now wrong,” he writes. “I would like to correct it t

Which is the world’s tallest building? After Lincoln Cathedral seized the title in 1311, breaking the Great Pyramid of Giza’s 3,800-year run, competition rapidly intensified, with Stralsund, Strasbourg, Beauvais, Hamburg, Rouen, Cologne and Ulm claim

Back in the late 1990s, some bright spark wired up a memory card reader to a small LCD screen, stuck a border round it and called it a digital photo frame. Plug in your pictures and they’d display one after another. Today, we have more advanced optio

This inkjet printer/scanner/copier is small and cheap – if you’re comparing it with office colour lasers. And it would be entirely reasonable to compare it with office colour lasers. It’s fast, has a full set of connections, and takes big tubes of in

Q My Packard Bell EasyNote TE, bought in 2012, is not so fast now, and sometimes freezes. A local PC engineer tells me it’s “past its best” and impractical to upgrade, unlike a desktop PC. But all I need is something for web browsing, emails, Excel a

What does it do? Memory, also known as main memory or RAM, holds the information your PC is using right now – all the programs that are open, the features of Windows they’re using and the files they’re working on. Your PC’s processor (CPU) only sees

SMART WATCH | From £269 from Apple www.snipca.com/36305 Time for a compromise? Apart from being tied to the iPhone, the biggest limitation to the Apple Watch’s appeal is its price, a problem that’s long been addressed by keeping a discounted older mo

What is it? E Ink’s Kaleido is similar to the screens on ebook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, but in colour. It’s becoming available in devices like the PocketBook Color (about £240, see www.snipca.com/36313, pictured). How does it work? The transm

What you need: Windows 10 Time required: 20 minutes Windows provides a search function built into the taskbar, but it’s neither the fastest nor the most flexible option available. If you want near-instantaneous search results, more search customisati

Winner of a five-star Buy It! Award in Issue 590 (page 29), RHA’s TrueConnect 2 are Scotland’s answer to Apple’s AirPods. Designed in Glasgow, this second edition brings significant improvements to an already impressive product. Battery life in each

Find out what other products we liked. Buy our new 2019 Back Issue CD: £15 from www.snipca.com/33711 PRICE DROP Honor MagicBook 14 £498 from www.snipca.com/Tested Issue 580 Using an AMD Ryzen 3500U processor, this lightweight metal laptop beat Micros

What you need: Google Photos; Android or iOS phone Time required: 15 minutes Ever found yourself looking at a passage of printed text that you’d like to save to another document – for example, an article in a newspaper or magazine that you’d like to

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT I’d had enough of Facebook. I didn’t trust it anymore with my data (if I ever did), and it’s full of over-sensitive people moaning. Could I find a way of moving my photos and videos from Facebook to my Dropbox storage account? Ye

What is it? A supercomputer being built in Cambridge to help medical specialists use artificial intelligence (AI) during research. It will be Britain’s most powerful computer. Wonderful. And how will that rank globally? It’ll be the world’s 29th most

iOS One of the more significant changes in iOS 14 is the introduction of widgets, which show live data like stock prices, the time and weather forecasts among your app icons. The free Sticky Widgets app (www.snipca.com/36244) makes one of the best us

All PCs get slower as they age. Sometimes this is caused by hard drives degrading, but more often it’s because we expect them to run more demanding software, or we let them get cluttered with junk. My seven-year-old HP Envy Rove 20 PC, which came wit

With the rise of instant messaging, you might think email’s days are numbered. Far from it. According to industry analysts Statista, nearly 294bn emails were sent last year – a figure that’s predicted to increase to 350bn by 2023. But are your emails

Q In Issue 587’s How To, Nik Rawlinson used Windows Media Player (WMP) to rip CDs and to import the disc and track info. I followed his advice but get told the artist is unknown, and no track names. Am I missing something? Keep up the good work. Gord

2G/3G/4G/5G Generations of technologies that deliver mobile broadband. 32bit/64bit A measure of how much data a PC can process at once. Most older computers are 32bit, more modern ones are 64bit. 802.11ac A standard for wireless networks that allows

Android www.snipca.com/36257 The popular media player has been updated with features that make accessing and managing your media easier. As well as automatically detecting video and audio on your phone, it can connect to media servers on your network

WINDOWS 10 Open File Explorer (press Windows key+E) and you’ll see a ‘Quick access’ section in the left-hand sidebar that lets you open recently accessed folders (if you can’t see this sidebar, click the View tab, then ‘Navigation pane’ and make sure

While research to develop a COVID-19 vaccine is clearly important, I hope that someone somewhere is also trying to fix 2020’s second biggest problem: how to make photo software recognise faces wearing masks. If not, then cataloguing photos taken in t

When does justified concern become paranoia? It’s a tough question to answer in the internet age because there are so many different ways you can be attacked. For example, you’re not being paranoid if you think you’ll be targeted by email scams. If y

Players of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2020 game are replacing some of the poorly rendered images with more accurate pictures from Google Maps. While the game’s graphics have been widely praised, Microsoft did have problems recreating some landmarks

You can now send parcels without leaving your home using the Royal Mail’s new online pick-up service. To use it, visit https://send.royalmail.com then enter your details in the Parcel Collect section. You need to print a label then stick it to the pa

Microsoft has launched a new-look “streamlined” Start menu as part of the Windows 10 October 2020 Update (codenamed 20H2), which is now being rolled out to computers. It has replaced the solid colour background for tiles with a partially transparent

You’ll soon be able to check online whether escalators and lifts are out of order at train stations after Network Rail released technical data to software developers. Network Rail hopes software companies will use this info to build apps and websites

I received a text message telling me I’d been summoned for jury service, but could pay £34.99 to postpone it for six months. For a brief second I was caught unawares, thinking it was real. I’m more used to Amazon and HMRC scams, and had never receive

Time spent talking on mobile phones rose sharply during lockdown, as people stayed in touch with friends and loved ones. Figures from Ofcom’s Mobile Matters survey (www.snipca.com/36330) show that the average time spent on a mobile call rose from thr

Q I often use YouTube’s playback settings to slow down videos. Is there a tool that will let me do this for other video and audio sources? Jeff Probst A If the video or audio is stored on your hard drive, VLC is the best tool to use (download it free

Facebook is donating £1m to the Bletchley Park Trust to help save jobs at the charity, which is in financial trouble as a result of the coronavirus lockdown. In August, the Trust said it was heading for a £2m deficit this year due to the prolonged cl

Currys has stuck to its guns in Ernest Dempsey’s case to get a refund for the £45 it charged him to fix his computer. As we explained in Issue 588, Currys said the problem with his PC was an “operating fault”, and therefore not covered by its warrant

Beware the creeping power of computer algorithms. Facebook’s automated filters banned this photo of onions for showing the vegetables in a “sexually suggestive manner”. That came as a surprise to Canadian firm The Seed Company, which was simply tryin

WATCH OUT FOR… What’s the threat? Scammers are stealing Amazon customers’ details by sending emails that claim they need to “verify” their account to fix a problem. The emails contain Amazon logos, and are written in a similar font and layout to thos