Computer Active India - March 2014

Download huge files faster

How you can run XP FOREVER

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March 2014, Vol. 9, Issue 3

Hack Your

Own PC

Don’t be scared by the complexity of the Registry and Command Prompt. Our easy-to-follow tweaks show you how to make Windows work better for you

Plus

Apple iPad Mini with Retina Display The mini tablet now comes with pixels galore

Motorola Moto G

If you’re looking for a great budget Android phone, buy this now

Brought to you in India by...

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Welcome From the Editor In the increasingly technological and complex world, getting scared of atttempting complicated tasks is not an option. This month’s cover story has easy to follow tweaks, that take the complexity out of the Registry and command prompt of your computer.

Other features detail apps and games to keep your mind agile, download huge files faster and play all your music anywhere you like. Do let us know what you liked, or hated in this issue. Till next month, Happy reading.

Vol. 9 Issue 3 Editor & Publisher Amit Tewari Senior Feature Writer Kunal Gangar Contributors Daniel Booth, Alian Lu, Sherwin Coetho, James Temperton, Scott Colvey, Graham Brown

Amit Tewari, Editor [email protected]

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Creative Director & Head Production Atul Bandekar Designer Prakash Gavnang Image Desk Deepak Narkar, Ravi Parmar Illustrators Ian Jackson, Nick Palmer, Tom Steyer, Ajay Paradkar Photography Mahesh Reddy, Sharonjit Samrai Asstt. Operations Manager Circulation Sanjeev Roy

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Asstt. Circulation Manager Kapil Kaushik, Delhi Subscription Supervisor - Print Sachin Kelkar Tel: +91-22-43525220 Fax: +91-22-24955394 Email: [email protected]

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Branch offices Ahmedabad 305, 3rd Floor, AEON Complex Near Angira Society, Vijay Cross Roads, Navrangpura, Ahmedabad 380009 Tel: + 91 79 26405061/2/3 Bengaluru Unit No. 509, 5th Floor ‘B’ Wing, Mittal Towers, MG Road, Bangalore -560001, India Tel: +91 80 66110116/17 Fax: + 91 80 41472574 Chennai Unit No. 20, 3rd Floor, Modern Towers, No. 35/23 West Cott Road, Royapettah, Chennai 600014. Tel: + 91 44 39149889 Fax: + 91 44 39149892 Hyderabad Richard G.C., Territory Sales Incharge (Circulation) Mobile no. 09949217127

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Editorial email addresses Sorry, but we can only give technical help and consumer advice through published replies in the magazine – we cannot take phone calls or answer letters personally. For subscription enquiries, see the details above. For editorial enquiries, please write at the email addresses given below.

Opinion, feedback and enquiries: [email protected] Technical help: [email protected]

Visit our website: www.computeractive.in 4

Computer active March 2014

Apple Newsstand & Magzter Queries: [email protected] Zinio Subscriptions Queries: http://in.zinio.com/help/index.jsp For Pocket Mags Queries: [email protected] DISCLAIMER Readers are reminded that the opinions expressed, and the results published in connection with reviews and/or laboratory test reports carried out on computing systems and/or related items, are confined to, and are representative of, only those goods as supplied and should not be construed as a recommendation to purchase. Whilst every precaution is taken to ensure that reliability and good business practices prevail, the Publisher cannot be held responsible for the overall trading activities of any supplier referred to, or advertising within, this publication. Next Gen Publishing Ltd. 2nd Floor, C Wing , Trade World, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013 Tel: +91-22-43525252 Fax: +91-22-24955394 Email: [email protected]

© 2013 Dennis Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. Published with the permission of Dennis Publishing Ltd. Reproduction in any manner in any language in whole or in part without prior written permission from Dennis Publishing Ltd & NGPL with regard to their respective content is prohibited. Printed by Amit Tewari Next Gen Publishing Ltd., 2nd Floor, C Wing, Trade World, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013. Published by Amit Tewari on behalf of Next Gen Publishing Ltd., 2nd Floor, C Wing, Trade World, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Mar, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013. Printed at Kalajyothi Process Pvt. Ltd, 1-1-60/5 RTCX Roads, Hyderabad - 20. Published at Next Gen Publishing Ltd., 2nd Floor, C Wing, Trade World, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013.

Editor : Amit Tewari

Contents

March 2014 [ Issue 3

In this issue…

Hack Your

Hack Your Own PC 44 Don’t be scared by the complexity of the Registry and Command Prompt. Our easy-tofollow tweaks show you how to make Windows work better for you How you can run XP 52 FOREVER Two months from now Microsoft will withdraw all support for Windows XP. We explain how to keep XP running safely beyond that point Keep Your Mind Active 54 Fatigue and advancing years take their toll on our mental agility, but

Own PC

Don’t be scared by the complexity of the Registry and Command Prompt. Our easy-to-follow tweaks show you how to make Windows work better for you

apps and games can help. Download huge files faster 56 It can be a trial getting large files to download. we look at ways to speed up the process

In every issue… 4

Welcome

86 Problems Solved

8

Letters

92 Fast Fixes

10 News

93 Jargon Buster

26 Protect Your Tech

94 The Final Straw

29 Best Free Software

95 IMS QUIZ

59 What’s All the Fuss About?

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Keep Your Mind Active p54

How you can run XP FOREVER p52

Contents Reviews 30 Google Nexus 5 32 Motorola Moto G 34 Apple iPad Mini with Retina Display 36 Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom

Google Nexus 5

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Motorola Moto G

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37 iBall Andi Uddaan Seagate Backup Plus (3TB) 38 RescueTime 39 Asus PB278Q Nokia Lumia 1320 40 Transcend JetFlash 380G (32GB) Galaxy Grand 2 41 Ashampoo Burning Studio 14

Apple iPad Mini p34

Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom p36

42 Livescribe 3

Workshops 24 pages of brilliant workshops 61 64 67 69

Use a webcam with your Raspberry Pi Create your own free online comics Make Excel charts look more exciting Keep emails private for free with Thunderbird and Enigmail 72 Organise notes and webpages with Evernote 75 Get the most Firefox for Android

77 Read Kindle books on any device 79 Track fundraising progress with a free Excel template 80 Readers’ Tips 81 Tablet & Phone Tips 83 Make Windows Better 84 Make Office Better 85 Defraggler

March 2014 Computer active

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Letters Web shopping is ‘closing local stores’ I read with interest the letter from the reader who wants to return a digital camera to his local high-street shop because he has found it cheaper online. The store says they can’t because he couldn’t produce a receipt. I quite agree with Computeractive’s answer, and the shop is quite right. I think I has been very cheeky asking the shop for a refund because he found the camera cheaper online. That’s tough – his problem! He should have looked online in the first place! I have no sympathy for him. This is the reason why local shops are closing down. We no longer have a photography shop in our town. We bought our first digital camera from a photography shop in our high street many years ago. We had problems with it and received an excellent, first-class service. The shop owner went over and above the call of duty and got the problems sorted out for us. Some time after this, the shop owner told me that he was closing down. People were going in to look at the equipment, leaving without buying, and going off to buy it over the internet. Sudeep Bahua

Transferring books meant ‘jumping through hoops’ When e-readers first came out, I wasn’t sure that I would use one often enough to make it worthwhile buying one. It wasn’t until earlier this year that I decided it actually was something that would let me rekindle my love of reading, especially as I have mobility problems which make leaving the house awkward, and the prohibitive postage cost on books made me lose my love of the written word. Earlier in the year I saw a nice wee Sony PRS-300 (www.snipca.com/10077) which was just ideal. However, as it had no backlight, my hubby kept moaning when he was trying to sleep, and I was reading with the light on. When I saw a Nook GlowLight (www.snipca.com/10079) I decided this was the answer. What I didn’t appreciate was the hoops I would have to jump through to transfer my ebooks from the Sony PRS-300 to the Nook. When I buy a printed book from a shop, I’m not asked where I’m going to be reading it so I can be sold the correct version for the intended reading location. Once a physical book has been bought I can do more or less what I want to with it, except lend it for profit. As an ebook costs almost the same cover price as its printed edition, to say I was ‘pure miffed’ is more than a slight understatement. I ended up trawling through many websites and watching a host of YouTube lessons to find out what to do, and how to do it – Adobe Digital Editions (www.snipca.com/10080) came out tops for me. In the end transferring my ebooks was a fairly straightforward procedure, but as I am only just computer literate I think a young child, or an elderly person, may find the whole caboodle too much hassle. Ajay R Kumar

Tell us what’s on your mind Email: [email protected] Post: Letters,CA, Next Gen Publishing Ltd., 2nd Floor, C Wing, Trade World, Kamala Mills Compound, S. B. Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013. We cannot offer technical assistance or reply personally to correspondence but all letters are read by our staff. Letters and emails may be edited for publication on this page. Please mark your message ‘not for publication’ if you would prefer it not to be shared.

STAR LETTER

There’s ‘no advantage’ in upgrading I sympathise with Stuart Andrews’ tirade against Windows 8 There is a fundamental problem with Windows 8. It’s a marketing one and it’s likely to persist. Microsoft has tried to emulate touchscreen smartphone and tablet operations on desktop PCs and it hasn’t worked. The market reaction speaks for itself. The illusion is created that for desktop PC users, such as myself, Windows 8 may confer some useful advantage over its predecessor and that it may be a good idea to upgrade. But it doesn’t offer any useful advantage and there’s no point in upgrading. Windows 7 is well suited to desktops and Windows 8 is a confusing backward step. The 8.1 enhancement highlights the difficulty Microsoft is having in satisfying traditional expectations and those of people who use touchscreens. In retrospect, Microsoft should have developed two distinct product streams for two distinct markets. After reading all the reviews, and talking to people who have used Windows 8, I’ll not be moving to it any time soon. If support for Windows 7 should cease, then I’ll move to Apple, whatever the cost. Nitish cheda

Last month’s winner: Ramcharan T N

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News

Round up of the top stories of the month

Microsoft Board names Satya Nadella as CEO B

ill Gates steps up to new role as Technology Advisor; John Thompson assumes role as Chairman of Board of Directors. Microsoft Corp has announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Satya Nadella as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors effective immediately. Nadella previously held the position of Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group. Since joining the company in 1992, Nadella has spearheaded major strategy and technical shifts across the company’s portfolio of products and services, most notably the company’s move to the cloud and the development of one of the largest

cloud infrastructures in the world supporting Bing, Xbox, Office and other services. During his tenure overseeing Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business, the division outperformed the market and took share from competitors. Microsoft also announced that Bill Gates, previously Chairman of the Board of Directors, will assume a new role on the Board as Founder and Technology Advisor, and will devote more time to the company, supporting Nadella in shaping technology and product direction. John Thompson, lead independent director for the Board of Directors, will assume the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors and remain an independent director on the Board.

LG Launches World’s First Curved, Flexible Smartphone in India Establishing a new milestone in the evolution of smartphones, LG Electronics has launched its flagship curved smartphone LG G Flex in India. LG G Flex, the latest device in LG’s premium G Series, is the first smartphone that is designed to fit the palm of the hand and follow the contour of the face. It incorporates proprietary innovations from other LG companies in the form of never-seen-before display and battery, and also boasts of a new User Experience (UX) that takes advantage of its curved form factor. The vertically curved design of the LG GFLEX, in landscape mode, offers a true immersive cinematic viewing pleasure. It bestows the most comfortable viewing angle for watching videos or playing games. After analyzing the findings of exhaustive studies, LG designed the G Flex to curve from top to bottom, which facilitates a comfortable grip, better comfort and excellent call & sound volume quality. The vertical curve creates an environment where users can

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easily be immersed when viewing videos or playing games in landscape mode. The vertically curved design of the LG G Flex reduces the distance between one’s mouth to the microphone when the device is held against the ear, as traditional telephone handsets used to. The LG G Flex employs a curvature arc that is optimized for the average face, to deliver improved voice and sound quality. The curved form increases the sound level by 3dB compared to typical flat smartphones. The curved design also offers a more reassuring grip and fits more comfortably in one’s back pocket. LG G Flex also features the Rear Key that was first introduced in the LG G2. Devoid of any buttons on the sides, there is less chance of accidentally powering off the phone and the convenience of using one’s index finger to adjust the volume when talking over the phone. The Rear Key gives intuitive user experience where users can operate the power button and volume rocker using

their index finger, without the need to actually see them while holding the device in one hand. The LG G Flex will be available in India starting February 2014 and is priced at MRPRs. 69,999/-

Facebook to Acquire WhatsApp Facebook has announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross-platform mobile messaging company, for a total of approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion worth of Facebook shares. The agreement also provides for an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s

founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing. The acquisition supports Facebook and WhatsApp’s shared mission to bring more connectivity and utility to the world by delivering core internet services efficiently and affordably. The combination will help accelerate growth and user engagement across both companies.

Lenovo to Acquire Motorola Mobility from Google Lenovo and Google have entered into a definitive agreement under which Lenovo plans to acquire the Motorola Mobility smartphone business. With a strong PC business and a fast-growing smartphone business, this agreement will significantly strengthen Lenovo’s position in the smartphone market. In addition, Lenovo will gain a strong market presence in North America and Latin America, as well as a foothold in Western Europe, to complement its strong, fast-growing smartphone business in emerging markets around the world. The purchase price is approximately US$2.91 billion (subject to certain adjustments), including US$1.41 billion paid at close, comprised of US$660 million in cash and US$750 million in Lenovo ordinary shares (subject to a share cap/floor). The remaining US$1.5 billion will be paid in the form of a

three-year promissory note. Lenovo, which in 2005 acquired IBM’s PC business and its legendary PC brand, will now acquire world-renowned Motorola Mobility, including the MOTOROLA brand and Motorola Mobility’s portfolio of innovative smartphones like the Moto X and Moto G and the DROID™ Ultra series. In addition to current products, Lenovo will take ownership of the future Motorola Mobility product roadmap. Google will maintain ownership of the vast majority of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, including current patent applications and invention disclosures. As part of its ongoing relationship with Google, Lenovo will receive a license to this rich portfolio of patents and other intellectual property. Additionally Lenovo will receive over 2,000 patent assets, as well as the Motorola Mobility brand and trademark portfolio.

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News FEEL THE POWER VIBE The much-awaited Lenovo Vibe Z – the latest addition to the premium Lenovo Vibe series of smartphones, is an ideal combination of striking looks, exquisite design, captivating performance and cutting-edge technology to help you to “Do more” in lesser time. Equipped with high-speed LTE (4G) connectivity, astoundingly fast processor, advanced cameras and brilliant 5.5” 20/20 vision display, Vibe Z is just the right choice for people, who want the best of everything; be it work or play. Vibe Z’s super-sleek, ultra-light form factor is certainly a head-turner. With a thickness of 7.9 mm and weighing just 147 grams, Vibe Z is ultra-light for a 5.5 inch display smartphone and certainly has the looks-to- die-for coupled with advanced features. Promising supreme-efficiency, Vibe Z packs Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor that helps you run all your apps and multi-task at a flashing-

speed of 2.2 GHz. Vibe Z comes packed with advanced optics; sports a 13 MP rear camera with BSI sensor and dual LED flash. Lenovo has fitted the Vibe Z camera with a large f/1.8 aperture lens. With the largest aperture lens available on a smartphone, the Vibe Z promises an enhanced exposure to low light for better imagery when the conditions are not optimal. It also sports a 5MP front camera with 84 degree wide viewing angle allowing you to capture all your memories in supreme clarity and vivid colours you will cherish forever. To handle all these functions and to ensure that you easily get by your day, the Vibe Z is powered by an integrated 3000 mAh battery. The smartphone also sports USB OTG that enables you to access data from pen drive while on the go or even charge other smartphones. This exceptionally thin, blazing-fast device complete with gesture controls, photo

enhancement software, premium technologies and in-demand innovative features is sure to steal the limelight in the premium smartphone category. The Vibe Z smartphone is priced at INR 35,999 for the Indian market and will be available across the country through Lenovo Exclusive Stores (LES), LFRs, leading multi-brand outlets and thedostore.com from February this year.

DECLARATION Statement about ownership and other particulars about Computer active, as required to be published in the first issue of every year after the last day of February. Form IV (See rule 8) (Press and Reg. Of Books Act, 1867) Place of Publication : Trade World, C-Wing, 2nd Floor, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013 Periodicity of Publication : Monthly Printers Name : Mr. Amit Tewari, Nationality : Indian, and printed at Kala Jyothi Process Pvt. Ltd, 1-1-60/5 RTCX Roads, Hyderabad - 20 Publisher’s Name : Mr. Amit Tewari, Nationality: Indian, Address: Next Gen Publishing Limited, Trade World, C-Wing, 2nd Floor, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013 Editor’s Name : Mr. Amit Tewari, Nationality: Indian, Address: Next Gen Publishing Limited, Trade World, C-Wing, 2nd Floor, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013 Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than 1% of the total paid up equity capital: Next Gen Publishing Limited, Trade World, C-Wing, 2nd Floor, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013

Details of shareholders of Next Gen Publishing Limited who are holding more than 1% paid up equity capital of the company as on January 31, 2014. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

Shapoorji Pallonji & Company Limited, 70, Nagindas Master Road, Fort, Mumbai 400023 HDFC Limited, 5th Floor, Ramon House, H. T. Parekh Marg, Backbay Reclamation, Mumbai 400 020 Rajpal Singh Sethi, Green Gate, 693, Flat 702, Perry Cross Road, Bandra, Mumbai 400 050 Zubin N. Kamdin (Executor of Estate of late Sam Nariman Polishwala), 29/A, Naoroji Seth Street, Thakurdwar, Mumbai 400 002 Aditya Chitale-(Executor of Estate of late C.N.Mistry), F-19,0-1, Bridge View C.H.S.Ltd., Sector-10, Airoli, Navi Mumbai 400 708 Hoshang Billimoria, B-221, Grand Paradi,572, Dadyseth Hill, August Kranti Marg, Mumbai 400 036

I, Amit Tewari hereby declare that all particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Date: January 31, 2014

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Sd/ Amit Tewari Signature of the Publisher

News Samsung unveils Galaxy S5 to focus on what matters most to consumers The company’s 5th generation Galaxy S redefines how technology innovation enhances our lives Samsung Electronics has announced the fifth generation of the Galaxy S series, the Galaxy S5, designed for what matters most to consumers. The new Galaxy S5 offers consumers a refined experience with innovation of essential features for day-to-day use. The Galaxy S5 combines an advanced camera, the fast network connectivity, dedicated fitness tools and enhanced device protection features as consumers stay fit and connected in style. The Galaxy S5 offers the world’s fastest autofocus speed up to 0.3 seconds and the advanced High Dynamic Range (HDR), reproduce natural light and color with striking intensity at any circumstances. Also new Selective Focus feature allows users to focus on a specific area of an object while simultaneously blurring out the background. With this capability, consumers no longer need a special lens kit to create a shallow depth of field (DOF) effect. The Galaxy S5 offers the most advanced LTE experience and Wi-Fi performance

available today, ensuring blazing fast data speeds for unrivalled media consumption and productivity. With the enhanced S Health 3.0, the new Galaxy S5 offers more tools to help people stay fit and well. It provides a comprehensive personal fitness tracker to help users monitor and manage their behavior, along with additional tools including a pedometer, diet and exercise records, and a new,

built-in heart rate monitor. Galaxy S5 users can further customize their experience with an enriched third party app ecosystem and the ability to pair with next generation Gear products for real-time fitness coaching. The Galaxy S5 blends iconic Samsung design with modern trends to appeal to a range of consumer tastes and interests. The Galaxy S5 features a perforated pattern on the back cover creating a modern glam look. Its new sleek, contoured shape comes in an array of vivid colors, including charcoal Black, shimmery White, electric Blue and copper Gold, to complement the style of the individual consumer. The Galaxy S5 is IP67 dust and water resistant. It also offers a Finger Scanner, providing a secure, biometric screen locking feature and a seamless and safe mobile payment experience to consumers. The Ultra Power Saving Mode turns the display to black and white, and shuts down all unnecessary features to minimize the battery consumption. The device will be available globally through Samsung’s retail channels, e-commerce and carriers in April.

LaCie Fuel Expands iPad Capacity to 1TB LaCie has announced Fuel: a go-anywhere wireless hard drive for iPad, iPhone and Mac. Without requiring Internet access, the LaCie Fuel adds 1TB of external storage capacity to compatible mobile devices. Users can store up to 500 movies, 160,000 songs or 190,000 photos, and share them with up to five devices at a time. What’s more, AirPlay compatibility means users can easily stream movies onto the big screen via Apple TV or music to compatible speakers. The LaCie Fuel lets users access enormous media libraries right from their iPad. With 1TB of storage at their fingertips, they don’t need to pick and choose what they load

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onto their mobile device. Not only does the LaCie Fuel let them access all their media files while they’re on the go, it also has plenty of extra space to accommodate future needs. LaCie Fuel marks the first product collaboration between Seagate and LaCie. The wireless hard drive features streamlined file access, thanks to the free Seagate Media app – available for iOS, Android, and Amazon Kindle. It automatically organizes files by type, making them easy to browse. Users can stream videos or music, open office documents, and enjoy full-screen navigation. The app makes browsing a

media library a visual experience with support for photo and video thumbnails, plus cover art for music. The Lacie fuel is available at a MRP of Rs. 25000.

News At the Samsung Southwest Asia Forum 2014, Samsung Puts the Curve into UHD, Customization into Your Kitchen and the Best Viewing and Productivity into Your Tablets Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, showcased a range of category-defining products in TVs, home appliances, printing and mobile devices at its Southwest Asia Forum . Through its broad product range, Samsung demonstrated how it is bringing consumers seamless navigation, intuitive control and smart solutions into the home and workplace. Samsung’s key products shown at its Southwest Asia Forum include: The 78-inch U9000 Samsung Curved UHD TV is the most curved TV in the world with 4,200 radii for the perfect viewing experience. The UD590 is Samsung’s 2014 Ultra High Definition (UHD) monitor that delivers detailed, high-pixel imaging and stunningly realistic colors. The UD590 delivers unrivaled detail color quality as it is capable of displaying one billion colors,

which is 64 times more colors than the standard monitor. It also includes UHD up-scaling technology that converts low resolution content to UHD-level picture quality and creates sharper images. For easy, on-the-go printing that combines NFC and Wi-Fi Direct technologies, Samsung unveiled a complete range of new mono laser printers and multi-function printers: the Xpress M2885 Series, as well as its series of color laser printers and multi-function printers, the Xpress C1860 Series. Samsung’s 12.2-inch Galaxy NotePRO presents mobile users with an industryleading WQ-XGA display, offering crystal clear resolution with more than 4 million pixels, for a best-in-class tablet experience for both content consumption and powerful productivity. Galaxy NotePRO tablet is running the most

recent version of Android 4.4. The NX30 interchangeable-lens camera has an advanced 20.3 MP APS-C CMOS Sensor, Tiltable Electronic Viewfinder (EVF) and exceptionally fast 1/8000 sec Shutter Speed and 9 FPS continuous shooting capability, to create high quality images with faster than ever performance. The NX30 features NFC and Wi-Fi capabilities—including the ‘Tag & Go’ function—that lets users tap to share memories instantly and easily when paired with NFC enabled mobile devices. Furthermore, the Galaxy Camera 2 captures images quickly and beautifully with revolutionary technology for instant sharing capabilities, thanks to its 16.3 effective megapixel BSI CMOS sensor, 21x optical zoom lens, 1.6GHz Quad Core processor and the Android platform.

SANDISK INTRODUCES WORLD’S HIGHEST CAPACITY microSDXC MEMORY CARD AT 128GB SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, has announced the new 128GB2 SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I memory card, the world’s largest capacity microSD card. Smaller than the size of a fingernail, the new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card enables consumers to use their phones and tablets as if storage limitations were never a concern, allowing users to capture thousands of songs and photos, and hours of video on a single, removable card. Designed for Android smartphones and tablets, the new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card provides consumers the highest storage

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capacity available in a removable form factor. Ideal for shooting Full HD video and

high-quality pictures, the 128GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card delivers twice the speed of ordinary microSD memory cards and offers the highest video recording performance available. Compared to when the microSD card format was first launched in 2004 with 128MB of capacity, SanDisk has increased storage capacity of microSD cards 1,000 times over in less than a decade with the 128GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card. To enable 128GB of storage on a removable microSD card, SanDisk developed an innovative proprietary technique that allows for 16 memory die to be vertically stacked, each shaved to be thinner than a strand of hair.

News Nokia connects the next billion with affordable smartphones Introduces full portfolio including Nokia X, Nokia X+ and Nokia XL smartphones to bring Internet and cloud services to ‘next billion’ At Mobile World Congress, Nokia underscored its commitment to connecting the next billion to the Internet by releasing five new affordable handsets, including Nokia X, a family of smartphones that run Android(TM) apps, Microsoft services and signature Nokia experiences. The Nokia X family features Nokia’s renowned handset quality and design, with a fresh, tile-based user interface inspired by our Lumia family. All devices come with Fastlane, a screen which lets people switch between their favorite apps more smoothly. People can access curated, quality-tested apps from Nokia Store, more than a dozen thirdparty app stores and by sideloading. Out of the box, they can enjoy signature Nokia experiences including free HERE Maps, with true offline maps and integrated turn-by-turn navigation, and Nokia MixRadio for free music streaming and downloadable playlists. All devices are also pre-loaded with a variety of third-party apps and games. The Nokia X family is also an

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affordable introduction to popular Microsoft services, including free cloud

storage using OneDrive. With the purchase of any Nokia X family smartphone in select markets, people will get one month of Skype’s Unlimited World Subscription for a limited time, ideal to make international calls to landlines in more than 60 countries and to mobile phones in 8 countries. The first device, the Nokia X, comes with a 4” IPS capacitive display and 3MP camera. The Nokia X+ is optimised for multimedia enthusiasts, who can enjoy even more games, music, photos and video thanks to more memory and storage. Both the Nokia X and Nokia X+ will be available in bright green, bright red, cyan, yellow, black and white. The third family member, the Nokia XL, boasts a 5” display with 2MP front-facing camera - ideal for Skype video calls - and a 5MP rear-facing, autofocus camera with flash. The Nokia XL will be available in bright green, orange, cyan, yellow, black and white. The entire Nokia X family is powered by the Qualcomm® Snapdragon(TM) dual core processor and supports Dual SIM, letting people switch SIM cards to get better tariffs. The Nokia X will go on sale immediately, in Asia-Pacific, Europe, India, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The Nokia X+ and Nokia XL are expected to roll out in these markets starting early second quarter.

News Kingston Introduces Fastest UHS-I Speed Class 3 (U3) Flash Card in India for 4K and Ultra-HD Video Capture Kingston, the independent world leader in memory products, today announced its fastest addition to the Secure Digital product line. The new SDHC/SDXC UHS-I Speed Class 3 (U3) card allows professionals and consumers to capture 4K and other Ultra-HD video resolutions. The new card is available in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities. The SD Association’s latest specification, UHS-I U3 (Ultra High-Speed Bus, Speed Class 3), guarantees performance of at least 30MB/s read and write, enough bandwidth to record and playback 4K video without

interruption. Kingston’s SDHC/ SDXC UHS-I Speed Class 3 card provides speeds of 90MB/s read and 80MB/s write, which is up to 9x faster (read) and up to 8x

upload time especially when using USB 3.0 card readers. The SDHC/SDXC UHS-I Speed Class 3 is compatible with all SDHC and SDXC host devices. It

faster (write) than standard Class 10 SD cards. The faster speeds ensure the best video and photo integrity by reducing stutter as well as faster PC

allows users to capture cinema quality Full HD (1080p), Ultra HD (2160p), 3D, and 4K2K videos on high-performance cameras such as Digital Single

Lens Reflex (D-SLR), Digital Single Lens Mirrorless (DSLM), camcorders and video cameras. In addition to 4K video capture, it can also be used for high-density photograph capture in burst or continuous capture mode, television recording, and live broadcasts. Users can capture up to 60 minutes of 4K HD video or shoot high-density image files in RAW or JPEG (up to 8,000 24MP images) on a 64GB card. The SDHC/SDXC UHS-I Speed Class 3 is backed by a lifetime warranty and free technical support.

ASRock M8 has Won an iF Product Design Award 2014

For 60 years, the iF product design award has been an internationally recognized label for award-winning design and the iF brand has become a symbol for

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outstanding achievements in design. ASRock M8 was entered in the computer category then won an iF product design award 2014 and will be recognized with

the renowned iF label! ASRock’s M8 features an aluminum exterior, while hidden magnets hold the whole case together. On the front, there’s a control knob and monitor hybrid called A-Command for users to setup their unique gaming rig. Inside the box lies a Z87 mini-ITX motherboard for advanced portability and space efficiency.

The functionality of this gaming PC lives up to its awesome appearance too. The case may contain any standard mini-ITX for future upgrades, and M8 is sold as a barebone system so that gamers have the freedom of choosing their own components, such as swappable DDR3 DIMMs, any standard PCIe x16 graphics card, and also has 6 SATA3 ports lined up for storage.

News ZOTAC Combines 3rd Generation Intel Core i3 with NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 ZOTAC International, a global innovator and manufacturer of graphics cards, mainboards and mini-PCs, has combined the power of 3rd Generation Intel Core i3 processing with NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 graphics to create the ultimate 4K ready HTPC. The new ZBOX ID45 series delivers the perfect synergy of energyefficiency and high-quality video processing in a compact form factor. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 graphics enhances the video playback capabilities of the ZOTAC ZBOX ID45 series with high-quality HD processing and 4K video decode capabilities for a superior HTPC experience. An Intel Core i3 3227U processor delivers outstanding CPU performance with dual processor cores and Intel HyperThreading technology for unmatched multitasking responsiveness and quick video transcoding capabilities. Dual Gigabit Ethernet enables

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excellent wired networking capabilities for redundant connectivity or to transform the ZBOX ID45 series into a high-performance network router.

Wireless 802.11ac networking technology delivers a wireless experience that’s comparable to wired Ethernet on the ZOTAC ZBOX ID45 series. The ZOTAC ZBOX ID45 series ships as a barebones and as a PLUS

version with 4GB DDR3 and 500GB hard drive preinstalled. Users can install a variety of operating systems on the ZOTAC ZBOX ID45 series including Windows 7, 8 and OpenELEC.

Protect Your Tech Scams and threats to avoid, plus new security tools WATCH OUT FOR…

Internet Explorer flaws What happened? Microsoft warned that hackers successfully exploited a previously unseen flaw that could affect all supported versions of Internet Explorer. Although it said there had only been a “limited number” of attacks targeted at Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9, the company rushed to issue a fix, saying the hole could hit IE 6 to 10.

The flaw allows remote code execution if a user visits a malicious site from a vulnerable browser. “This would typically occur when an attacker compromises the security of trusted websites regularly frequented, or convinces someone to click on a link in an email or instant message,” said Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t reveal how many attacks had been reported and said it was still monitoring the problem.

What should I do? Install the CVE-2013-3893 MSHTML Shim Workaround (www.snipca. com/10119), which Microsoft issued as a temporary fix. It’s important you do this yourself because Microsoft won’t do it automatically. The company is working on a full security update. Microsoft also said you should set your

New tools Bitdefender’s Safepay is a browser with a difference. Unlike Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox it operates from your Desktop and doesn’t interact with any other software and add-ons. As you browse, it checks webpages for malware and phishing attacks, and stops websites tracking what you do online. There’s also a virtual keyboard (see image) that prevents keylogging, making it

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internet and local security zone settings to “high”. Do this by clicking the top-right cog in IE, ‘Internet options’, then the Security tab. Move the slider to High. The company admits this “may affect usability”, so you should add sites you trust, and visit often, to the IE trusted sites zone. Do this by visiting a site you trust, then clicking the top-right cog in IE, ‘Internet options’, then the Security tab. Next, click the green ‘Trusted sites’ arrow, then the Sites button and click Add in the box that appears (see screen grab left). You’ll need to make sure the URL suffix is ‘https://’ You can, of course, use Chrome, Firefox or Opera until Microsoft releases a permanent security fix.

Bitdefender Safepay www.snipca.com/10115

ultra-safe for shopping and banking online when you need to type personal details such as credit-card numbers. It does all this for free, but there’s a paid-for version that adds protection for Wi-Fi hotspots and costs £3.25, £9.95 and £23.95 for a one-week, one-month and one-year pass respectively. Safepay is still in beta, so read the testers’ guide first if you’re not sure of anything: www.snipca. com/10118.

The COMPUTEX d&i awards present...

1 TAICHI Ultrabook with dual screens ASUSTek Computer Inc.

award winners

going around the world! The winning products for

And the winners are...

COMPUTEX TAIPEI design & innovation awards are going on a

For COMPUTEX d&i awards 2013, the jury

global tour by visiting every major

selected 90 d&i award winners which

ICT show, including IFA (Berlin),

included five Gold awards.

2 iPin Laser Presente Mobile accessory CONARY ENTERPRISE CO., LTD.

GITEX (Dubai), CES (Las Vegas), Mobile World Congress (Barcelona) and CeBIT (Hannover).

The Golds went to... 1

TAICHI

2

iPin laser presenter

COMPUTEX TAIPEI, the year’s most

3

The NEW HTC ONE

important ICT event, was held from

4

OAXIS LOOP

5

Air Penetrator AP123

June 4th to 8th in 2013. That’s where the ICT world met and mingled as 1,724 top exhibitors used 5,042 booths to attract 131,300 ICT professionals, including 38,300 international visitors (6% increase on last year) from 173 countries.

Included among the 90 d&i winning products were the wireless hard disc drive by ASUS; a

3 The NEW HTC ONE Smartphone HTC

mobile scanner by Avision; and Pebble, the Smart Watch by Foxlink. The winning list also had several outstanding POS terminals & systems and accessories.

COMPUTEX d&i awards represent the core of COMPUTEX TAIPEI. Since 2008, these awards have won industry acclaim for ushering in a

See the global greats unfold with a glow for innovation, quality &

new wave of design concepts. The

design...

last event welcomed 254 product

COMPUTEX d&i awards WORLD TOURS:

entries from 101 manufacturers, an

Mobile World Congress Feb. 24th to 27th , 2014 Hall 7 / Booth 7n67

4 OAXIS LOOP Android TV box OAXIS Holdings Pte. Ltd.

increase of 24% and 16% respectively from the previous year.

CeBIT March 10th to 14th , 2014 Hall 17 / Stand H04

The winners, the crème de la crème

IFA Sept. 5th to 10th , 2014

of ICT, were selected upon such

GITEX October 12th to 16th, 2014 Hall 8 / Booth E8-20

criteria as design quality, degree of

CES January 7th to 10th , 2015 ,South Hall 1 / Booth 21642, LVCC

innovation, utility, functionality, safety, environmental friendliness

5 Air Penetrator AP123 Computer fan SilverStone Technology Co., Ltd.

and workmanship, and judged by an independent jury organized by the Hannover-based iF International Forum Design.

Registration open till 31th March, 2014 The Future ICT Begins with Your Leading Innovation Today For more info on COMPUTEX d&i awards: www.ComputexTaipei.com.tw

CD Contents From the Editor Dear Readers, This month’s CD contains a wide mix of software and utilities for everyday use. We hope you will find these useful. Do let us know your views on the selection. EDITOR PS:-Please reach us on [email protected] with your suggestions. Some of the software provided on this disc requires a product key from the publisher.

Full Software ASHAMPOO UNINSTALLER 5 Ashampoo UnInstaller 5 comes with additional cleaning tools toremove redundant registry entries and clean your drives. OS Supported : Windows XP/Vista/7/8.

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Computer active March 2014

March 2014

Best Free Software Our pick of the most interesting websites, articles and videos from around the world Music Manager

Freemake Music Box 1.0 www.snipca.com/10004 What you need: Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8 Freemake Music Box is a music manager that combines a Spotify-style music-streaming service with your own music collection, including your iTunes library. The desktop player will even play audio tracks from YouTube (previous glitches with this feature have now been fixed). Not only is the program free, but you don’t need to register or log in, and there are no annoying embedded adverts. But make sure you decline the extra software when you install it. Type songs, artists or musical genres into Music Box’s search field and it will try to find them online. Music Box then shows you a selection of tracks and albums (it only finds legal music). Click the play icon to listen to a

song online or press ‘+’ to add it to your Music Box library. You can’t download or buy songs through Music Box, but it will save songs so you can stream and play tracks online. To play music stored on your PC, click ‘Add files’ then the tracks you want to add to your library. You can create playlists, and import and combine playlists you’ve made in Winamp and VLC Player. Freemake’s range of supported music formats (Ogg, Flac, AIFF, WAV, MP3 and MP4, WMA and M4A) is more

Online Privacy

Ghostery 5.0

limited than VLC’s, but the program’s mix of streamed music and tracks saved on your PC works well. An Android app is in the pipeline.

Security

AVG AntiVirus Free 2014

www.ghostery.com

What you need: Internet Explorer 10, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari

www.avg.com

Ghostery monitors what online trackers are up to and blocks their attempts to track your web movements. Rather than blocking all cookies and trackers, Ghostery encourages you to find out more about the tracking organisations. New to version 5.0 are options to allow website comment feeds on a site-by-site basis, so, for example, you can

AVG AntiVirus Free 2014 is a brilliant free antivirus program. Its new File Shredder completely deletes any malware it finds, while the new PrivacyFix tool warns you if our acebook page or Google settings are leaving you exposed. As part of its browser protection, AVG provides a malicious-link checker and blocks any spyware that attempts to install on your computer. When you restart your PC, a pop-up message tells you how much faster your PC starts up now AVG is installed.

have Disqus active only on your favourite blog. Ghostery has not yet launched a version for IE11.

Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8

Program uninstaller

IObit Uninstaller 3.0 beta 1 www.snipca.com/10013 What you need: Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8 (you may need to run as an administrator to get IObit to work)

Uninstaller 3.0 obliterates software that the Windows Uninstall Programs tool can’t shift and deletes leftover files. A particularly useful addition to version 3.0 also deletes unwanted browser add-ons from Internet

Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Start IObit, click the add-on you want to uninstall then click Remove. Next, click Powerful Scan to remove any leftover files. and click Next. IObit will automatically quit once it’s finished.

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Reviews SMARTPHONE

Google Nexus 5 Google’s affordable 4G phone with the latest version of Android

New Android smartphones with the latest features usually cost Rs.40,000 or even more, but that isn’t the case with the new Google Nexus 5. While this latest model isn’t quite as cheap as the previous Nexus 4, which cost just about Rs.20,000 when it was released last year, it is still affordable. It costs Rs.20,000 for the 16GB version or Rs.33,000 for the 32GB version.

Hardware Surprisingly few corners have been cut to keep the price low. There’s no SD card slot and the phone is made out of black or white plastic, instead of metal like the similarly priced HTC One Mini, but this phone feels robust and not at all cheap. The rear has a soft rubbery touch to it which makes it feel like a Nexus 7 tablet, although the Nexus 5 isn’t as curvy with a boxier shape than its tablet counterpart. The Nexus 4 was a 3G-only phone, but the Nexus 5 also works on 4G. We used the phone for making calls, browsing the web, navigating the streets using Google Maps and taking photos. On Vodafone’s 3G network in central Mumbai the battery lasted just over 21 hours. This is in line with other 3G phones, although the admittedly much heavier and larger Nokia Lumia 625 managed 21 hours. Although better, other phones can last

even longer on 3G. Battery life when playing videos continuously was particularly disappointing at just under eight hours. The Nexus 5 is the first Nexus phone to have a 5in screen, but this means the phone is too wide to hold and use comfortably if you have small hands. The screen does at least look good – it’s dazzlingly bright with vivid colours, while text looks sharp thanks to the high 1080p resolution. One of the biggest flaws with the Nexus 4 was its mediocre camera. The Nexus 5 has a much better eightmegapixel camera – colours are fairly accurate, details are reasonably sharp and low-light photos are respectable thanks to the optical stabilisation.

WHEN WILL I GET ANDROID 4.4 KITKAT? It can take a long time for Android phones to get updated to the latest version of the operating system, so you may have to be patient. Some phones will never be upgraded to 4.4 KitKat. One notable example is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which won’t receive any more Android updates, leaving it stuck on 4.3 Jelly Bean. Here’s a list of phones publicly confirmed by their manufacturers

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to get KitKat. If your phone isn’t listed, it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t get KitKat – just that the manufacturer has yet to confirm it. NOW Google Nexus 4. JANUARY 2014 Motorola Moto G, HTC One (2013), HTC One Mini and HTC One Max. SPRING 2014 LG G2. Sony Xperia Z, ZL, Z Ultra and Z1.

It’s not as good as the cameras found in the iPhone 5s or the HTC One Mini, which produced sharper, more detailed photos and have quicker focus, especially in low light. The camera app was slow to open and surprisingly sluggish when trying to quickly take action shots one after the other. A lot of older Android smartphones suffer from poor responsiveness, where the touchscreen can’t quite keep up with finger movements, which we find very annoying. That isn’t a problem with the Nexus 5, though. Apart from a handful of occasions, it was just as responsive as the iPhone 5s and the best Windows Phone handsets.This is thanks, in part, to the fast 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor which sped through our demanding 3D graphics and webpageloading benchmark tests.

New Products tested by our experts Android KitKat The slick responsiveness of the Nexus 5 is also due to numerous under-the-bonnet improvements in the new version of Android, 4.4 KitKat. The Nexus 5 is the first and, currently, the only Android phone to come with KitKat pre-installed. Although most of the improvements in KitKat, named after the chocolate bar, are very technical ones aimed at developers, there are more visual changes too. Google has largely replaced the black and blue theme used by Android since 3.0 Honeycomb with a brighter look that uses transparent graphics, such as the status bar and the button bar at the top and bottom of the home screen respectively. One of our favourite features is Google Now, which tries to make your life easier using the phone’s sensors, online data and information you’ve shared with Google through its services and apps although it works best with fast internet connections. If you have an appointment in your Google Calendar, Now will remind you about it and show you directions for getting there. Google Now also recognises your speech, so you can tell it to call people, set reminders, transcribe what you say and more. Although it’s much faster than Siri (iOS)at recognising what you say, you have to phrase your requests more carefully. For example, saying “Show me my calendar” works, but asking “Do I have any meetings today?” doesn’t. These are quirks in Now’s design, which will be ironed out over time. Disappointingly, the ability to trigger Google Now simply by saying ‘OK Google’ when at the home screen is currently limited to people in the US, but it’s still much easier to get to the main Google Now interface than in older Android versions. Simply swipe left from the first home screen. The phone app tries to integrate Google’s web search in two ways. You can do a Google search for phone numbers within the phone app, although it’s not that clever - searching for ‘curry’ lists nearby electronics stores rather than Indian restaurants. The phone app also attempts to match unknown incoming phone numbers with business names by automatically searching the web when you get a call, but in our tests the accuracy of these results wasn’t great. Typing on the onscreen keyboard is now more convenient thanks to improved spelling corrections. Simply tapping a word

HOW WE TEST Computeractive’s reviewers follow strict guidelines to ensure the opinions expressed in the magazine are fair, accurate and independent. Every product or service we review is thoroughly examined and tested by experts. The manufacturer has no involvement in our tests and is never told the result of a review prior to publication. Please note that our reviews grade products, not customer service. We welcome feedback on our reviews – send us an email to [email protected]

OUR STAR RATINGS We provide a clear verdict for every product we review. Each verdict is accompanied by a star rating. Here’s what those stars mean: Android 4.4 has a new brighter look with more transparent graphics

brings up a bar just above the keyboard with spelling suggestions. This is much less fiddly to tap than the small bubbles that pop up above words in iOS. The old text-messaging app has been replaced by the new Hangouts app which can also send messages for free through Google+. The interface is cluttered and confusing, though. For example, the app lists Google+ and text messages from the same person separately rather than collected together. It can, however, be replaced with another texting app from the Google Play store, such as 8sms (www.snipca.com/10758).

An excellent purchase ★★★★★ A good purchase ★★★★☆ OK by us ★★★☆☆ Below average quality ★★☆☆☆ Very poor quality ★☆☆☆☆

OUR STAMP OF APPROVAL Our Buy It! stamp of approval is a sign that BUY IT! a product has ★★★★★ exceeded our high expectations in both quality and value. If you see the Buy It! logo you know we were impressed with the product and we think you will be too. The Try It! Stamp is our equivalent award for software and services that are free of charge.

PRICES

Conclusion The Nexus 5 is a great phone. It has the fastest performance and responsiveness of any Android phone we’ve seen, a good quality screen and some useful software features. It’s let down by its disappointing battery life and average camera, though, so it just misses out on a Buy It! award. VERDICT: A good Android phone at a great price, but let down by a couple of flaws

The prices we print are the suggested retail prices set by the manufacturer. Products can often be found much cheaper on the internet or in shops.

TECHNICAL TERMS AND JARGON While we try to keep our reviews free from technical language or jargon, it is sometimes unavoidable. See the Jargon Buster column for concise explanations of highlighted words.

★★★★☆ INFO: www.google.co.in

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Reviews SMARTPHONE

Motorola Moto G If you’re looking for a great budget Android phone, buy this now

The Moto G changes everything. Until now most sub Rs.14,000 Android phones have been complete rubbish, with slow processors, meagre amounts of memory, terrible screens and poor battery life. The Moto G bucks this trend entirely, giving a lie to the platitude ‘you get what you pay for’.

Hardware For a phone that costs just Rs. 12,500 the Moto G makes surprisingly few compromises. The only things you’ll give up are 4G, an SD card slot and the amount of built-in storage. The 8GB of storage won’t be enough for some, but the 50GB of Google Drive cloud-storage space (included free for two years) helps make up for this. If you need more on-board storage the 16GB Moto G costs Rs. 14,000. Unlike more expensive phones crafted from glass and metal, the Moto G is made from colourful plastic, which is cheerful without feeling or looking cheap. A selection of multi-coloured interchangeable covers (called shells – see lemon shell, right) are sold separately for which means you can liven up the phone with a splash of white, yellow, purple, red or blue. The 4.5in screen is very bright, and while its 720p resolution isn’t as high as the 1080p screens on more expensive phones, text is still crisp, while photos and videos are sharp and vivid. A common complaint aimed at cheap Android phones is the delay between tapping the screen and anything happening. This isn’t the case with the Moto G, which is very responsive. It’s also fast, racing along in our 3D graphics and webpage- loading benchmark

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tests thanks to its quad-core processor and 1GB of memory.

Android Jelly Bean The responsiveness of the Moto G is helped along by a lack of superfluous apps and add-ons. While other manufacturers slow their devices down with pointless customisations you can’t remove, Motorola has made very few changes to Android 4.3 Jelly Bean on the Moto G. An update to Android 4.4 KitKat – the latest version – has been promised for early BUY IT! 2014. ★★★★★ The few tweaks Motorola has made to Android are for the better. When you turn on the Moto G for the first time, a service called Motorola Migrate offers to wirelessly transfer all your texts, call records, photos and settings from your old phone. This only works if your old phone runs Android and both phones are connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Thanks to Migrate we were up and running much more quickly than expected. The Motorola Assist app works with your calendar app, automatically silencing your phone when you’re busy – in a meeting, for example – so you’re not disturbed. You can also set Assist to automatically text any callers to let them know that you can’t answer the phone at that moment. It can also silence the phone when you’re sleeping unless it’s a call from contacts you specify, such as your kids or elderly relatives. The idea is that you can sleep safe in the knowledge that your phone will

only ring if someone urgently needed to get in touch. Finally, Moto Care is a brilliant app filled with tutorials on how to use your phone. It can suggest beneficial changes to the settings and even make those changes for you. For example, it told us we could increase battery life by setting the screen brightness to automatic and having it enter standby after 30 seconds rather than two minutes. There’s also a free text-chat service where you can ask for help from a friendly Motorola technicalsupport advisor.

Call and photo quality Call quality on the Moto G is impressive. We could clearly hear the person we were speaking to, and received no complaints

New Products tested by our experts of poor call quality from family and friends when chatting. Battery life was an exemplary 41 hours when making calls, taking photos, browsing the web and using GPS. When playing videos continuously, it lasted nine

The Motorola Migrate app wirelessly transfers everything from your old phone

hours 15 minutes, which is what we’d expect. The Moto G’s biggest flaw is its fivemegapixel camera. The photos we took often looked too dark with The Assist app checks your inaccurate calendar and silences your colours and phone so you’re not disturbed fuzzy details. Low-lit photos were especially bad and more or less unusable. Using the flash didn’t help as it made photos too harsh and bright. This is a shame, because the camera app works well. There’s no camera button, so you have to tap the screen to take pictures. Holding down on the screen takes a burst of photos, which is handy if you’re trying to get the perfect action shot or capture people smiling naturally rather than grinning awkwardly. If you want more control over focus and exposure you can drag

a small green target icon around the screen. These settings are then adjusted depending on the icon’s position. This works especially well for macro shots and scenes with a significant contrast between dark and light. The camera app also features an easy-to-use panorama mode for taking photos of epic scenery.

Conclusion At Rs. 14,000 the Moto G is excellent value. It looks great, works brilliantly and has specifications comparable to smartphones costing twice as much. In short, the Moto G is an absolute steal. If your budget won’t stretch to the even better HTC One Mini or Nexus 5 respectively, then this is without a doubt the Android phone to get.

VERDICT: Better than many phones that cost twice as much, the Moto G is the best budget Android phone available

★★★★★ INFO: www.snipca.com/10815

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Reviews TABLET

Apple iPad Mini with Retina Display The mini tablet now comes with pixels galore

Our biggest criticism of the original Apple iPad Mini was that its 8in screen, with its low 1024x768- pixel resolution, wasn’t as sharp as rival mini tablets. That’s no longer a problem with this latest model, which now has a whopping resolution of 2048x1536 pixels. The new display makes this new iPad Mini much easier on the eyes. Text is now very sharp, where it was blurry on the original, while photos and high-definition video are vibrant and detailed. Colour accuracy is slightly off compared to the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and the Asus Nexus 7 In particular, blue skies in landscape photos look a little washed out, but this is barely noticeable, so it’s still a great tablet screen. The other big new feature is the A7 1.3GHz dual-core processor. While the A5 chip in the original iPad Mini was no slouch, the A7 is even faster and blitzed through our webpage-loading and 3D graphics benchmark tests, making this Mini the fastest tablet under 10 inches we’ve seen. The super-high resolution screen and fast processor require a bigger battery than that found in the original Mini, so this new model is slightly thicker and heavier to accommodate that. The Wi-Fi-only model weighs 331g, which is 30g more than its predecessor, but it’s still light for a mini tablet. The battery lasted just under 10- and-a-half hours when playing video continuously, which is in line with Apple’s claims. Although that’s two hours less than the original Mini, it’s still good. While the metal design feels rigid and looks classy, the thin border on the leftand right-hand edges of the screen (when held vertically) makes it somewhat tricky

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to hold. Although Apple maintains that the screen can intelligently detect when your thumb is resting on the screen’s edge –

BUY IT!

★★★★★

rather than actively swiping or tapping – it was a little unpredictable and in our tests correctly ignored our thumb presses only 75 per cent of the time. A slightly thicker border would be more effective and make life easier. Like all iPads, the Mini has access to Apple’s App Store which is full of quality apps designed for its high-resolution screen. This – along with its long battery life, blistering performance and sturdy build quality – gives it an edge over the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9. However, all this comes at a price – the cheapest Wi-Fi-only Mini is Rs. 28,900 more expensive than the equivalent

Nexus 7. Add 3G to the mix, and the Mini is Rs. 37,900 more expensive than the equivalent Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire HDX. If you’re likely to make heavy use of apps then this premium is worth paying, but if you only want a tablet for watching video and reading then the Nexus 7 is the one to get.

VERDICT: An excellent mini tablet, but its great design and wide selection of apps come at a high price

★★★★★ INFO: www.snipca.com/11264

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Reviews SMARTPHONE

Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom An Android phone that tries to be a proper camera

Many people take more photos with their smartphone than with a dedicated camera. Not because it’s better quality (most unlikely), but because it’s the camera they carry with them wherever they go. This usually means foregoing an optical zoom, but not if you have a Galaxy S4 Zoom – the new Android smartphone with a 10x zoom lens. Its phone specifications are almost identical to those of the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini It has the same 4.3in screen with 960x540- pixel resolution. While this is small compared to other Android phones, it’s larger and more detailed than the screens you’ll find on most compact cameras. The dual-core processor runs at 1.5GHz instead of 1.7GHz, but there’s little difference in performance – the Android 4.2 interface and most apps ran smoothly in our test. However, unlike the Mini, it only supports 3G rather than 4G. The biggest difference between the Mini and the Zoom is the latter’s camera, which has specifications similar to dedicated compact cameras. The 10x zoom lens has optical stabilisation to counteract hand shake and the 16-megapixel sensor is larger than most smartphones’ sensors, which should have boosted image quality, particularly in low light. Sadly, however, image quality falls short compared to dedicated cameras with 10x zooms. Photos we took in bright daylight looked fine at first glance, but close scrutiny revealed a lack of detail and a slight graininess. This noise became more prominent when shooting in low light, putting image quality on a par with other similarly priced smartphones. However, the 10x zoom makes it easier to frame subjects more creatively and capture distant subjects without the compromise to image quality that comes with a digital zoom. The Zoom’s camera controls work

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elegantly. The ring surrounding the lens controls zooming, plus there are well-organised touchscreen menus for all the functions we’d expect to find on a dedicated compact camera. Oddly though, you have to unlock the phone before you can use the camera, which makes it harder to capture fleeting and spontaneous moments. Performance isn’t bad, capturing a photo every 1.6 seconds. The inevitable downside is that the zoom makes it roughly twice as heavy and three times as chunky as a conventional smartphone, and we got a few strange looks in public when holding what appeared to be a camera to our ears. But we didn’t find it excessively cumbersome to use as a phone, even if the lens makes it relatively uncomfortable to hold when reading and watching videos. It’s easy to take photos with the zoom, thanks to the handgrip, something most phones lack. But it’s not as comfortable to use as a camera because there’s not VERDICT: An average alternative to a separate camera and phone

★★★☆☆ INFO: www.snipca.com/11072

much at the back to hold onto because the screen virtually fills the entire back. There’s just 5.3GB of available storage, but a micro SD slot lets you add more. Battery life was a little below average, lasting 17-and-a-half hours when taking photos, browsing the web, making calls and navigating with GPS, but the battery is easily replaceable so you can take a spare along with you. Call quality on O2 in central London was poor – voices often sounded harsh and distorted, especially at high volumes, and the phone didn’t do a very good job of blocking out background noise. The Galaxy S4 Zoom is neither the best smartphone nor the best camera. In fact, you could spend the same amount on the Motorola Moto G and a better quality camera such as the Fujifilm XF1 If you want the convenience of one device to carry and charge, as well as seamless sharing of photos online, the Nokia Lumia 1020 is a better choice. It has generally better image quality, especially in low light, and isn’t as chunky.

New Products tested by our experts SMARTPHONE

iBall Andi Uddaan A budget phone with safety features Unfortunately, women’s safety has become a serious issue in our country with harrowing incidents on the rise over the past few months. There are a few companies that are trying to contribute towards curbing this menace and one of them is iBall, who recently launched a device dedicated to this cause. Dubbed Andi Uddaan, the phone integrates an SOS button, tracking, geo-fencing and ICE (In case of Emergency) functionality aiding in the task of keeping women safe. The device comes in white, but is clearly targeted at the female crowd. The home button is adorned with a Swarovski Zirconia Crystal while the SOS button at the back is heartshaped. If these design cues weren’t enough to announce its target market boldly, iBall even bundles a back cover, flip cover and a small purse, all in pink. The default theme on the phone is also in pink and shiny to match the physical look. The phone features a respectable 5-inch IPS display and supports qHD resolution (960x540), which is decent for a phone at this price point. It is powered by a 1.3GHz dual-core MediaTek processor and has 512MB RAM,

given the limited resources, the phone performs well barring occasional lag and slow performance. The phone has an 8MP camera at the back with dual LED flash and BSI sensor, this improves pictures taken in low light, claims iBall. However, we found the image quality to be average in low light situations, with a visible amount of noise. The front facing camera is a 5MP one and also faces the same issue in low light. On the video front, the main camera is capable of recording at 720p while the front camera records at VGA resolution. Moving onto Andi Uddaan’s USP – security features. First is the Emergency Help app that allows users to input all the vital details like blood group, medical history, details of persons to be contacted in emergency and so on. Next up is the SOS app that activates when the SOS button at the back is pushed or the app is activated on screen. The app switches on a

loud siren to alert the people nearby and sends messages or calls to the five pre-defined contacts. It can also post an update on Facebook. The Locate app enables tracking of the user by up to 10 people and supports geo-fencing, if the user goes ot of a predefined area, an email or SMS can be sent to pre defined contacts. To sum up, we feel Andi Uddaan is a good effort with the tracking, SOS, emergency help and the feminine design, but it comes up short on performance and features. If tracking and checking the whereabouts of your loved one is all it matters, Andi Uddaan won’t disappoint you. Price: Rs. 8,999

VERDICT: Handy safety features with mediocre smartphone performance

★★★☆☆ INFO: www.iball.co.in

HARDWARE

Seagate Backup Plus (3TB)

VERDICT: Won’t disappoint if backing up social media content is a priority

An external hard drive with a social media twist!

INFO: www.seagate.com/in/en/

How do you differentiate your product from the clutter when there’s a wide choice for consumers to choose from? Some companies rely on the aesthetics, while others like Seagate rely on the software and the hardware combo. The Backup Plus range from Seagate allows users to store their data on its capacious hard drive while its software works to automatically backup data from social media networks. This month, we take a look at Seagate’s Desktop edition of Backup Plus.

On the face of it, Backup Plus looks like a run-of-the-mill desktop hard drive but there is a surprise at the bottom end. The bottom of the hard drive is detachable, it allows the user to use an interface of his choice. For instance, the default interface supported by the drive is USB 3.0 but you can swap it with a FireWire 800 or a Thunderbolt adapter, that are sold separately. Speaking of USB 3.0, in our tests the Backup Plus averaged around 115MB/s and 110MB/s read/write speeds respectively. Moving onto the software, Seagate bundles

★★★★☆

the Seagate Dashboard software with the Backup Plus. The software is easy to configure and supports automatic backup of content from Facebook, Flickr and YouTube social networks. It even allows direct sharing directly from the external or the user’s internal drive. To sum up, Backup Plus from Seagate is just another external hard drive but it’s the software that makes it different. if you want to store and safeguard your online data locally, seamlessly, Backup Plus is the way to go. March 2014 Computer active

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Reviews TIMEMANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

RescueTime A program that stops you wasting time and helps you be more productive

If both your work and personal life revolve around computers, it’s easy to let the lines between the two get blurred. Online shopping and social-media activity can eat into your working hours, which can leave you working late and wondering where the day went. If you often find yourself falling behind schedule, you need RescueTime – software that can help you optimise every hour of the day. RescueTime uses a Desktop program to track exactly what you’re doing with your time. It lets you set goals and then classify tasks based on how productive they were. If, for example, you find that replying to emails or attending certain meetings take up more time than they should, then you can mark those tasks as unproductive. When you first sign up to RescueTime, a ‘getting started’ guide introduces you to the main dashboard and prompts you to set goals. Here, you can block distracting websites, access a full record of your productivity over time and log any time spent away from your computer. To test RescueTime, we set some basic goals: to spend less than two and a half hours being unproductive between 6am and 8pm; and more than two and a half hours hours being productive in both the morning and afternoon, including our lunch break. Over the course of a day, RescueTime monitors your

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activity and calculates what it calls your ‘productivity pulse’, which displays how efficient you’re being in a handy at-a-glance percentage score. Carrying out activities you’ve classified as productive will raise the productivity pulse, while spending time on wasteful activities lowers it. Over the first few days, you’ll probably need to refine your initial settings and goals. Based on our definition of what constituted productive time, we almost never met our morning goal, but exceeded our afternoon goal. We used this data to gauge how realistic our goals were and in which periods of the day we were most efficient. We found that Friday afternoons were our least efficient period when working in the office, but our most productive time when working from home. Those who tend to overwork – whether at home or in the office – can take advantage of the feature that lets you configure alerts notifying you via email or a pop-up message that you’ve hit a certain goal for the day. You can also use the alert system to give you a nudge if it looks like you’re falling behind. Moreover, RescueTime’s Advanced Filters

BUY IT!

★★★★★

settings let you monitor different periods for different days, handy if you work different hours at the weekend, for example. A free Android app lets you log and track activities when you’re away from your PC (www.snipca.com/11207). If, like us, you work on multiple computers in different locations over the course of a day, you can install RescueTime on each of your PCs. Following five minutes of inactivity, the software starts wondering what you’ve been up to and asks via a dialogue box to explain your absence. There’s a risk of accidentally logging activities for the same time period twice

if you’re using multiple PCs, but you can edit RescueTime’s logs later to rectify this. Although we like RescueTime, the interface could be refined further. We’d prefer all time-related settings to be on one screen, for example, rather than spread out across different screens. Even so, RescueTime is one of the best time-management tools we’ve used to increase personal productivity and analyse working patterns to highlight where improvements can be made. People who work from home and freelancers, in particular, would benefit from RescueTime, which is easily worth its modest price.

VERDICT: The best method we’ve found to show how we’re wasting time

★★★★★ INFO: www.snipca.com/11354

New Products tested by our experts

MONITOR

Asus PB278Q

BUY IT!

Large-screen monitor with high resolution We’ve reviewed quite a few Asus monitors in the past but the one we’re reviewing today, takes the cake. It’s the PB278Q we’re taking a look at and it sits in the top tier of the range offered by Asus. As per Asus the PB278Q is ergonomically designed, enabling users to tilt (up to 20 degrees), swivel, pivot (up to 90 degrees) and even adjust the height for a better viewing experience. We found all these claims to be true. The monitor is also equipped with a streamlined cabling system that takes away the normal cable clutter. On the I/O side, the PB278Q supports HDMI 1.4, D-Sub, Display Port, Dual-Link DVI-D, a 3.5mm headphone jack and an audio in port along with two 3W stereo speakers. The onscreen display (OSD) menu buttons are placed on the bottom of the monitor with the

text painted on the front side. The PB278Q features a 27-inch PLS (Plane-to-Line Switching) display panel and though there’s a good amount of debate if an IPS panel is better or a PLS one, we would say this PLS-equipped monitor from Asus is at par. The monitor offers a 178° viewing angle along with a fast refresh rate of 5ms for smooth visuals. The monitor’s selling point is the huge display size complemented with the high resolution. The PB278Q supports WQHD resolution (2560x1440 pixels), which is about 109 pixels per inch (PPI) or about four times the resolution of a 720p display! In short, working on this monitor is a treat. The colour accuracy and image accuracy is very good since it supports 100% sRGB and results in a crisper text and sharper images, thanks to the high resolution. The monitor also features 80,000,000:1 ASUS

★★★★★ Smart Contrast Ratio (ASCR), Splendid Video Intelligence Technology and six preset modes like scenery, theater, sRGB, standard and two user-customizable modes for an improved viewing experience. The PB278Q also has something called as QuickFit Virtual Scale that allows to preview photos and documents on-screen in their actual size prior to printing via a dedicated key. The Asus PB278Q is priced at Rs. 44,250 and is a good buy for designers and other professionals with all the features it packs in. VERDICT: A performance driven monitor with good colour accuracy

★★★★★ INFO: www. asus.com/in

SMARTPHONE

Nokia Lumia 1320 A big screen experience at a mid-range price There’s no denying of the fact that large screen phones are in demand these days. Even Nokia knows this, which is why they introduced new devices like the Lumia 1320 and Lumia 1520. While Lumia 1520 is a high-end device in every sense, we take a look at the Lumia 1320 that tries to bring all the goodness of a large screen on Windows Phone platform at an affordable price. The first thing you’ll notice about the Lumia 1320 is its size. The device is big and maybe unwieldy to hold for some. Design of the Lumia 1320 is very much on the lines Nokia have adopted for its Lumia range. It comes in a variety of colours, features rounded edges that gives a better grip and sports the usual key and port placement that are typical of a Lumia device. The Lumia 1320 has a 6-inch ClearBlack IPS display that supports a 1280x720 pixel resolution and achieves a pixel density of 245 ppi (pixels per inch). Admittedly, not as sharp as you’d find in

some of the high-end devices these days but the resolution on the 6-inch display does its job well. Viewing angle is pretty good with saturated colours, the display is quite legible outdoors. Lumia 1320 is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon dual-core 1.7GHz processor and 1GB RAM. Given how optimized Windows Phone 8 is, the hardware is enough to deliver a smooth performance, unlike Android devices with similar specifications. The phone runs Windows Phone 8 OS with the Lumia Black update that brings in additional functionality over the regular Windows Phone 8. The Lumia Black update includes software enhancements like improved Glance Screen, better multitasking of apps, ability to customize ringtones, display rotation lock, Nokia Beamer and Nokia Camera app.

Speaking of camera, the Lumia 1320 houses a 5MP at the back and a VGA one on the front. The camera UI is pretty much the same and even supports lenses to spruce up the images. As for the quality, the 5MP camera fares up well under good light and is fairly competent compared to other devices in the same price range. The camera also supports Full HD video recording. The Lumia 1320 features a 3400mAh non-removable battery that gives more than a day of mixed use consisting of calls, videos, games and some music. Lumia 1320 is a good first attempt by Nokia to offer a large screen experience at an affordable price. It retails in India for Rs. 24,000 VERDICT: A big phone packed with the latest Windows Phone 8

★★★★☆ INFO: www. nokia.co.in March 2014 Computer active

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Reviews SMARTPHONE

Galaxy Grand 2

VERDICT: Good performance but pricey compared to the competition

Galaxy Grand successor gets more premium

★★★

☆

INFO: www.samsung.com/in Galaxy Grand was a grand success in the Indian market, it successfully tapped consumers who desired a big screen at an affordable price. Building on the success of the original Galaxy Grand, Samsung announced the Galaxy Grand 2 in December last year. Let’s check out if it is a worthy successor. The design is more or less in line with rest of the devices in the Galaxy line, but there’s one distinguishing factor that sets it apart: the faux leather back. Just like the Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Grand 2’s rear is covered with a soft touch cross stitch design, giving the device a premium look. Samsung has upgraded the Galaxy Grand 2 in the hardware department. Compared to the original, the second iteration comes with a faster processor and more RAM. The Galaxy Grand 2 is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 400 1.2GHz quad-core processor and 1.5GB RAM ensuring a smooth

performance without any lag in the interface. Speaking of the interface, the Galaxy Grand 2 runs the TouchWiz user interface atop Android 4.3 OS. We’re not certain when, but rest assured that Galaxy Grand 2 will get the Android 4.4 KitKat update. Samsung’s customisation also extends to some of software features like My Magazine app that displays news, personal content and social media feeds in an aesthetically pleasing tile-based interface. There’s also the new and improved Multi Window from carried over from Galaxy Note 3, and the Club Samsung app exclusive to India. This gives consumers a large variety of content like music and movies.

Access to Club Samsung will be free for first three months. Galaxy Grand 2 features two cameras – an 8MP at the back and 1.9MP on the front. Camera quality is good with both cameras supporting HD video recording (main camera supports 1080p and front camera supports 720p) and variety of camera modes and filters to spruce up images. As for the battery life, the Galaxy Grand 2 features a 2600mAh battery and with two SIMs with Always On connectivity, you can easily get about a days work on a full charge. The battery lasts longer than a day if you use a single SIM. Galaxy Grand 2 is a good device and delivers on every front that a successor should deliver but it faces stiff competition from devices like Moto G that offer a similar feature set at a more affordable price. Galaxy Grand 2 retails for Rs. 23,000.

DEVICE

Transcend JetFlash 380G (32GB) USB flash drive and expandable storage for your phone USB OTG (On-the-go) has evolved over the last few years. What started as a data cable that plugged one end in to the smartphone and the other to a USB flash drive, has now been fused together into a compact and pocket able shape. This month we take a look at Transcend’s JetFlash 380G OTG flash drive, for the uninitiated, OTG basically allows you to use your regular USB flash drive with your smartphones and tablets. Design-wise the JetFlash

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380G is really sleek and compact and comes in a gold finish that gives it a premium feel. Making the drive work is a piece of cake. If the drive is compatible with your device (http://bit.ly/1hf0Ynk check compatibility here), just plug the drive in the mobile device and it should detect it right away. Transcend even has an Android app, downloadable for free from the Play Store that enables users to setup one-touch backup of pictures, music, movies or even

manually copy or move the content from the device to the drive and vice versa. The 32GB Transcend JetFlash 380G is priced at Rs. 1,570 and offers a good bang for the buck. Just check out for the compatibility before investing in one! VERDICT: Simple, compact and affordable expandable storage for your phone

★★★

☆

INFO: www.in.transcend-info.com/

New Products tested by our experts SOFTWARE

Ashampoo Burning Studio 14 Ashampoo’s disc-writing program isn’t a runaway success

Depending on which version of Windows you use, your operating system’s built-in disc-writing capabilities will vary from virtually non-existent to surprisingly difficult to use. One alternative is Ashampoo Burning Studio 14, which provides a range of disc-writing options for CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, video discs and backups. But, unlike other disc-writing software suites – such as Nero or Roxio Creator – Burning Studio doesn’t include extra media editing and conversion programs. This limits the range of video-file formats you can write to a video disc for playback in a DVD or Blu-ray player. Burning Studio lets you put your favourite videos and images onto a DVD – with slideshows and a slick video menu – using basic video-, photo- and menu-editing tools. Unfortunately, the lack of a video- conversion program means you can’t use any of your MKV videos, because the format isn’t supported. It does support H.264 and MPEG4 videos, but we found this to be plagued by problems. The program failed to recognise several of our high-definition H.264 test files, which worked fine in other disc-writing programs we tested. Nor could it recognise the MPEG4 videos produced by our Google Nexus 5 phone and Creative Vado HD video camera. Given how few video formats are supported, you’ll certainly need separate

video-conversion software, such as the free Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr). All the standard disc-writing capabilities we’d expect are present and work fine: creating ISO images, writing an audio CD, writing ISO images to a disc, adding and removing files from discs as if they were a USB

There are a few unusual features in the program’s advanced options, such as the ability to create a modified copy of an existing disc. That’s handy if, for example, you want to add an extra bit of documentation or a licence key reminder to a disc, but most people won’t need

stick, and creating a data disc that can be read by almost any device. You’ll also find a very basic backup feature, but this is also limited because you can’t schedule backups, nor can you set it to back up only those files which have changed since the last backup. More useful are the options to create encrypted discs, which is new in version 14, and automatically spread large amounts of data across multiple discs. But you can’t use Burning Studio to create backups of copy-protected discs.

this feature. More advanced users will be disappointed to find that it’s not possible to modify existing ISOs in the same way. The program’s updated interface is fairly slick, although

some elements still feel dated. For example, its file browser is cramped and doesn’t let you drag and drop files and folders unless you first minimise the program into Compact mode. Folders on a NAS that are mapped to a drive letter won’t show up in the file browser. Instead you have to manually navigate to them. Once you’ve begun the disc-writing process, you won’t be able to do anything else with the program, such as putting together another disc, until the disc you’re burning has finished. Ashampoo Burning Studio 14 isn’t bad, it’s just rather average and, for existing users, little has changed since Burning Studio 2013. It has some useful features such as disc encryption and is fine for basic disc-writing tasks, but the interface is a little old fashioned, it has poor video-file support and most of its features can be found in other betterdesigned programs.

VERDICT: Although it’s not bad and does have some worthwhile features, this program isn’t polished enough to justify its £35 price

★★★☆☆ INFO: www.snipca.com/11135

March 2014 Computer active

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Reviews SMARTPEN

Livescribe 3 Transcribe handwritten notes quickly and easily, but only on iOS devices

The Livescribe 3 is a smartpen that lets you take notes anywhere – in meetings and lectures, for example – and transfer them to your iPad or iPhone. You can then turn the notes into text to be edited and distributed to other people using the free Livescribe+ iOS app. The Livescribe 3 uses the same technology as its predecessors to capture every detail of what you write or draw. A tiny built-in camera tracks the location of the pen’s nib when used on special paper that has a unique pattern, just visible to the naked eye, printed on it. You can either buy this paper in the form of notebooks www.snipca.com/11345) or you can print the pattern using a laser printer. The pen comes with a 50-page starter notebook. Like previous Livescribe pens, the 3’s internal storage keeps digital copies of everything you scrawl on the paper. But unlike its predecessors, which connect to a PC using USB or Wi-Fi, Livescribe 3 only works with iOS 7 devices equipped with a version of Bluetooth called Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE. Compatible models include the iPad 3 or later, the iPhone 4S or later and the fifth generation iPod Touch. This is why the Livescribe 3 doesn’t currently work with Android – comparatively few Android devices have BLE built in. The Livescribe 3 transmits

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whatever you write on the paper pad to your Livescribe+ app, virtually in real time. Because BLE doesn’t consume much power and the pen has a battery life of around 14 hours, it’s feasible to keep the device and pen paired and active for long periods. The Livescribe 3 is much lighter than previous versions, so it looks and feels more like a normal pen. It lacks the built-in screen and voice recorder that previous versions had, but you can record audio using the Livescribe+ app instead. The paper has special controls printed onto it, and if you tap these with the pen you can control the app. For example, there are controls to record, pause and stop audio recordings in the app. The notes you take appear in

the Livescribe+ app’s Feeds screen in the order they were created. When you highlight a note using your finger or the end of the pen, the app will try to transcribe your handwritten notes into digital text. In our tests it struggled to transcribe hurriedly scribbled notes, but coped well with numbers, block capitals and neat joined-up handwriting. Any transcribed text can then be copied and pasted into other apps. Transcribed numbers can be turned into a phone contact or

appointment in your calendar. However, only dates written in the format ‘29th October 2013’ were successfully sent to our calendar. Dates using slashes were mistakenly identified as phone numbers. You can also create Pencasts (a combination of audio recording and notes) but, oddly, only on an iPhone. This lets you jot down notes as you make the recording and review both the notes and audio in sync at a later time. You can export and share pencasts with other iOS 7 users via Apple’s AirDrop wireless sharing feature, or by uploading them to Evernote or Livescribe’s own online pencast-sharing service. Despite its imperfect transcription technology and its current incompatibility with Android, the Livescribe 3 is a very useful tool. The ability to convert handwritten notes into legible, editable digital text quickly and easily is invaluable, especially if you’re not a particularly fast typist.

VERDICT: Great for turning handwritten notes into text without the need for a PC, but it’s currently only available for iOS

★★★★☆ INFO: www.snipca.com/11348

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Best ever registry tweaks

Hack Your

Own PC

Don’t be scared by the complexity of the Registry and Command Prompt. Our easy-to-follow tweaks show you how to make Windows work better for you

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ention the Windows Registry or Command Prompt to most PC users and you’ll either get a blank stare or a sucking of teeth followed by a warning not to touch it. However, as we reveal in this article, Registry and Command Prompt tools are nothing to be scared of. In fact, they’re incredibly useful for tweaking and customising Windows. If you want to take charge of how Windows behaves, it’s certainly worth becoming acquainted with these tools. The Registry is Windows’ repository of settings. This vital part of Windows was never really intended for the average user, but many of its options can be adjusted via the Control Panel – a friendlierlooking version of the Registry. However, only a limited selection of Windows settings and features are shown in the Control Panel. If you want to change

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anything else, you need to learn how to safely tinker with the Registry. Command Prompt, meanwhile, is a tool that lets you change many Windows features by typing commands rather than selecting menu options. With these tools and our help, you’ll be able to make some worthwhile transformations to any version of Windows, making it easier to use, faster, better-looking and more reliable.

BEFORE YOU START HACKING

System Restore You should always back up before making changes to Windows settings. A full system backup is ideal, but it’s time-consuming. However, you can make a full backup of the Registry in a few moments by creating a System Restore point. In XP, click Start, Programs,

Accessories, System Tools. Click System Restore, then click ‘Create a new restore point’. Give the restore point a memorable name so you can find it easily when restoring. In Vista, 7 or 8, press Windows key+R, type sysdm.cpl in the box and click OK. Now click System Protection, Create, type a name for the restore point and click OK. To restore settings from a restore point, click Start, Programs, Accessories, then System Tools. In XP, click System Restore, then click ‘Restore my computer to an earlier time’. Click Next, choose the restore point from the list, click Next then Next again. In Vista, 7 or 8, click System Restore in the System Protection tab. Click Next, select a restore point and follow the instructions. In Vista, 7 or 8, System Restore can be run even if Windows won’t start. To do so, you need to start your PC with the

Best ever registry tweaks

It’s vital you back up and export Registry keys before editing them

original Windows installation disc inserted. With the CD inserted, restart your computer and press any key on your keyboard when you see the ‘Press a key to boot from CD’ message. Click English in the language settings, then click Next, ‘Repair your computer’. Finally, choose System Restore from the menu options and follow the instructions.

Edit and back up the Registry Most of the hacks in this feature involve editing or creating new Registry keys using Regedit. To use Regedit type regedit. exe in the Start, Run box and click Yes in User Account Control to confirm you want Regedit to be able to edit the Registry. The left pane in Regedit presents folders of Registry keys. Each key’s value is shown in the right pane. For each Registry hack in this feature you need to launch Regedit then expand each of the KEY_CLASSES folders and subfolders

in succession until you get to the key you want to edit. Do this by clicking the tiny arrow to the left of each folder’s name. For example, to get to the Registry key for Internet Explorer launch Regedit then expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main It’s very important that you back up the current setting before making any changes. This is because the Registry is live in memory and any changes you make will take effect immediately. To back up a key, select it in the left Registry pane, click File, Export, ‘Selected branch’. (Don’t click ‘All’ as this won’t create a backup.) Now type a name for the file and browse to where you want to save the backup. We recommend you create a folder named ‘Backed up Registry keys’ and store it on an external drive or an online archive. Click Save. The key will have a .reg file extension. To edit a Registry key value, right-click it and click Modify. To create a new key or value, right-click a blank area of the Registry’s right pane and click New. Type the key name exactly as we write it with gaps closed up if that’s what we show. The new key will automatically be assigned a value of 0. Click Modify and type the value we state, then click OK.

To access Command Prompt in Windows 8, type command prompt in the search box on the Start screen. For some hacks you need to be an administrator to run Command Prompt (this isn’t the case for XP). To run Command Prompt as an administrator in Vista or Windows 7 or 8, right-click its icon and choose ‘Run as administrator’. We recommend you pin Command Prompt to the Taskbar in Windows 7 or 8. (Right-click the icon and choose ‘Pin to Taskbar’.) You’ll then be able to run as administrator by pressing Ctrl+Shift while clicking the icon to launch it.

How to enable Command Prompt The other main type of hack involves using instructions via Command Prompt. In XP, Vista or 7 Command Prompt is in the Programs, Accessories folder.

Jump to Command Prompt from the Taskbar

ACCESS EVERYTHING FASTER

Permanently add Command vPrompt to right-click menus Windows Vista, 7 and 8 In Vista, 7 and 8, if you right-click a folder in Explorer while pressing the Shift key you get an extra ‘Open Command window here’ option. If you click this Command Prompt will open in the selected folder. To enable this without pressing Shift, launch Regedit and navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\ shell\cmd Delete the Extended value in the right pane. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\ cmd and delete the Extended value. To

Add an option to launch a frequently used program from the right-click menu

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Best ever registry tweaks Add an Encrypt option to Explorer’s right-click menu

enable the extra ‘Open command window’ option on your Desktop right-click menu, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\ Background\shell\cmd and delete the Extended key. To reverse the process, in each of the above locations create a New String Value named Extended.

Add items to the right-click menu All Windows versions When you install a new program, there’s invariably the option to add a Desktop icon so you can find and launch it. The result can be a cluttered Desktop. A slicker option is to add a frequently used program to the Desktop right-click menu. To do this, launch Regedit and navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\ Background\shell Now right-click this key and click New, then Key. Type the name of the program you want to appear in the menu – in our example on page 49 it’s Wordpad. Select this new key, right-click it, choose New and Key again to create a sub-key. Name this ‘command’ (it’s important you use lowercase letters). Select this sub-key and double-click Default in the right pane. Type “write.exe” (include the double quote marks) and click OK. You can put any program on the menu in this way. If the tweak doesn’t work you may need to use the exact location of the program file – for example, “C:\Windows\ System32\write.exe”.

All Windows versions except Home Windows can encrypt files or folders so they can’t be viewed or copied by other users. By adding a command to the file or folder menu you can make encryption a right-click option. Launch Regedit and navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_ Add the option to instantly encrypt any file to the right-click menu USER\Software\ Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ pop out. To reduce the delay and make Explorer\Advanced Now right-click menu navigation snappier, launch in the right pane, then click New, Regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_ DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name this value USER\Control Panel\Desktop Look for ‘EncryptionContextMenu’, double-click the MenuShowDelay entry. If it doesn’t it and change its value to 1, then click exist create a new DWORD (32-bit) OK. Now you can encrypt or decrypt a Value. Right-click this, choose Modify file by simply right-clicking it. and type 100 in the Value Data box then click OK. The number sets the delay in Speed up the Start menu milliseconds. Choose a different value Windows XP, Vista and 7 if you prefer. However, a setting of less When you hover your mouse over than 50 can make navigation difficult. sub-folders on the Start menu, there’s an annoying built-in delay before they

MAKE WINDOWS WORK YOUR WAY

See a reminder message when you log into Windows All Windows versions To make a message box appear every time you log on, launch Regedit, then navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/ SOFTWARE/Microsoft/ WindowsNT/CurrentVersion/ Winlogon key In the right-hand pane, look for two entries named legalnoticecaption and legalnoticetext. Right-click legalnoticecaption and type Welcome in the Value Data box, then click OK. Repeat this for the legalnotice but this time type your

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message such as Don’t forget to back up the PC today. Click OK, exit the Regedit and restart your PC. The message box will appear before the logon screen. Click OK to dismiss it. To stop the box appearing, repeat the process above and delete the text in both Value Data boxes.

Shut down Windows without installing updates

Prevent Windows installing updates when you turn it off

Windows Vista and 7 We can’t be the only ones who find it annoying that when you press the Shut Down button in Windows Vista or 7 it changes to ‘Install updates and shut down’. To make Windows shut down

Best ever registry tweaks

Use a hack to set time restrictions for when your computer cannot be used

without installing updates first, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Policies\Microsoft\Windows\ WindowsUpdate\AU key Right-click in the right pane, click New, DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it ‘NoAUAsDefaultShutdownOption’. Double-click the default value the new key is assigned and change it to 1. You can still install updates by clicking the power button and manually choosing ‘Install updates and shut down’.

Strip back the right-click menu All Windows versions Many programs add an entry to the right-click menu in Explorer. To remove unwanted right-click menu items, launch Regedit and navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellexe\ ContextMenuHandlers Find the item you want to remove, right-click its key and click Delete.

Remove items from the Open With menu All Windows versions If you right-click a file in Explorer the ‘Open with’ sub-menu appears and presents a list of programs. To prune programs from this list, launch Regedit and find the key HKEY_ CLASSES_ ROOT\Applications and expand it. To remove an item, click its entry, then create a new blank DWORD (32-bit) Value in the right pane called NoOpenWith.

Prevent users logging on at certain times All Windows versions

Open the SendTo list to add new entries or delete unwanted ones

This hack uses the powerful ‘net’ command in Command Prompt to set the days and times a particular user is allowed to log into Windows. Open Command Prompt as an administrator (see ‘How to enable Command Prompt’ page 49). For example, to allow user David to log on at any time, type net user David / times:all. To allow Janet to use the PC only between 9am and 6pm during the week and 10am and 9pm at weekends, type net user Janet /times:M-F,0918;Sa-Su,10-21. You can spell out the days or use M/T/W/Th/F/Sa/Su. Now, when Janet tries to use the computer outside the specified hours, she’ll see a message stating that she can’t use it at the moment as time restrictions are in place. Windows Family Safety in Windows 8 and Parental Controls in Windows 7 offer additional usage restrictions. However, our hack works for all Windows versions.

Customise the SendTo menu All Windows versions The ‘Send to’ option that appears when you right-click a file is handy for copying files to drives or other programs. To customise the SendTo menu, open Explorer, type %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\ SendTo in the top bar and press Enter. You’ll now be able to delete items from the SendTo menu by right-clicking them and clicking Delete. To add a new program to the list, right-click a blank area, choose New,

Shortcut and follow the wizard to choose the program file. You can also add shortcuts to a drive or folder by dragging and dropping it into the rightclick menu folder.

Stop Windows restarting automatically Windows XP, Vista and 7 To stop Windows automatically restarting your PC after installing updates, you need to delete the Registry key that tells Windows to automatically reboot. Launch Regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ Policies\Microsoft\Windows Create a key called WindowsUpdate\ AU, then create a new value called NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers and give it a value of 1. Now the PC won’t restart after an update as long as you are logged on to your computer.

Make Windows show numbered files in the right order All Windows versions When you’ve numbered files, it’s annoying when Windows sorts them in the wrong order, so 10.doc appears before 1.doc. You can solve this manually by adding a 0 before singledigit numbers in file names, but a better trick is to change the sort method in the Registry. Click the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Explorer. Then create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value called NoStrCompLogical. Change its value to 1.

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Best ever registry tweaks GIVE WINDOWS A WHOLE NEW LOOK You probably know how to change the general appearance of Windows by changing the Desktop wallpaper, screensavers, themes and so on. But there are some hidden tweaks that can only be accessed via the Registry or Command Prompt, or by using third-

can create for the Mystify screensaver. To create Blur set the Mystify DWORD/ Blur key value to 1. Lines will now fade away. Set the Blur value to 0 to disable the effect. To change the line width create a new DWORD key called LineWidth.

Change this key’s value to anything between 1000000000 and 1080000000. Finally, the NumLines value can be set between 1 to 100 to adjust the number of lines onscreen.

Personalise Windows with a theme pack Most Windows 7 and 8 versions Most versions of Windows 7 and 8 can save or load personalisation settings as Theme packs containing wallpapers, sounds, screensavers, colours, icons and mouse pointers. To save such items to a theme pack, right-click the Desktop then click Personalise. Rightclick the theme you want to save in the My Themes section, then click ‘Save theme for sharing’. Type a name for the theme pack. Its file extension will be .themepack. This file can be shared via email or online with other users. To load a theme pack, doubleclick the file. Windows 7

Tweak your screensavers’s appearance using hidden Registry options

party programs such as Microsoft’s own TweakUI for XP (download it from www.snipca.com/9813). This free, easy-to-use program has lots of options for changing the way the Windows interface works.

Change the Bubbles and Mystify screensavers Windows Vista, 7 and 8 Most of the built-in screensavers in Vista, 7 and 8 have no options, but Bubbles and Mystify can be changed via Registry hacks. Launch Regedit, open HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Microsoft\Windows\ Current Version\Screensavers and expand it. Click Bubbles, then create a new DWORD (32bit) Value called ShowShadows. Change its default value to 1 to show shadows under the bubbles. Now create another DWORD key called MaterialGlass. This time change the value to 0 for opaque bubbles or 1 for transparent ones. There are three DWORD values you

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Save all your personalised settings as a Theme pack

Best ever registry tweaks Starter and Home Basic editions don’t support themes.

Change the colour of the Command Prompt window All Windows versions Command Prompt usually displays white text on a black background. You can change this combination from within Command Prompt. Type help color and click Enter. Windows will now list all the available colours for the background and text. Each colour is represented by a letter. Type the letter of a colour to change to it. The first letter after ‘color’ is for the background. The second letter is for the text. To change to red text on a white background, for example, type color fc and click Enter. Windows won’t let you change the background and text to the same colour. To revert to the standard colours, just type color and click Enter. To change the default colours, in the Registry find the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\Command Processor Open the Defaultcolor value and enter You can change the colours of the Command Prompt window

Brand new hacks for Windows 7 and 8 Some new hacks only work for features in Windows 7 and 8, such as Aero Peek. This tool shows thumbnail previews of each item when you hover your mouse over a program on the Taskbar and have multiple programs open. You can then click one to select and open that window. To instead open the most recently used window launch Regedit and go to HKEY_ CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\Windows\ Current Version\Explorer\ Advanced

Change the behaviour of Aero Peek previews with a Registry hack

Add a new DWORD (32-bit) Value called LastActiveClick and change its value to 1. Clicking the Taskbar icon repeatedly now cycles between open windows, so you don’t have to navigate the tiny previews.

Invoke God Mode A hidden feature called God Mode in Windows 7 and 8 shows you almost every Windows setting in a single view. To find it, right-click on the Desktop, click New, Folder and call it ‘GodMode.

{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C99712043E01C}’. You must spell this correctly and include the full stop after ‘GodMode’. Open this new folder to view more than 250 settings grouped by category. Many of these settings are accessible from Control Panel, but it’s much more convenient to have them in one place.

Reinstate the Start button The removal of the Start button from the Taskbar in Windows

God Mode shows all Windows settings in one folder so you don’t have to spend ages searching for them

8 annoyed many users, but it’s due to return in a cutdown form in Windows 8.1 in October. The easiest way to get it back and working just like older Windows versions is to use the free program Classic Shell (www.classicshell.net). This adds a Start button to the Taskbar, shows a Vista-style Start menu, bypasses the Start screen and can apply lots of other clever customisations. The latest beta version (3.9.0) can create a Windows 7-style Start menu.

Get the Start button and menu back in Windows 8 using Classic Shell

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Best ever registry tweaks

Be careful when making changes using the Ultimate Windows Tweaker

the two character codes you want as the default. To restore the white-on-black defaults, change the value to 0.

Tweak XP’s Control Panel Windows XP only You can change or hide items in XP’s Control Panel using TweakUI (www.snipca.com/9813). Run TweakUI and click Control Panel. On the right TweakUI displays all Control Panel items along with a description. Untick the box next to any items you don’t want to appear in Control Panel. Any of these entries can still be run by typing its name (for example, desk.cpol for the Display Properties) into a Run box. The free Ultimate Windows Tweaker (www.snipca.com/9813) provides similar features to TweakUI and works in Vista, 7 and 8. As soon as it’s installed you’ll see a window listing options to access settings for Personalization, System Performance, Security Settings, Network Tweaks and more. You can change many Windows settings using Ultimate Windows Tweaker but be careful as it has some advanced hacks that could compromise the security of your PC.

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Disable Windows Snap and Shake Windows Vista, 7 and 8 The Aero Snap feature in Windows 7 and 8 resizes windows if they’re dragged to the edges of the screen.

The Shake tool minimises all windows except the one being ‘shaken’ with the mouse. To disable these features, in Windows 7 type mouse in the Start search box, click Enter then ‘Change how your mouse works’. In Windows 8, click Start, type mouse, click Settings then ‘Change how your mouse works’. Next, in either version of Windows, tick ‘Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen’. In the same menu you can also change the size and colour of the mouse pointer. Select a new option then click Apply. Another useful tweak in this menu is ‘Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse’. This brings a background window to the front when you move the mouse over it. You can enable this mouse feature in XP using TweakUI. Go to the Mouse section, click X-Mouse and tick both options. To make a window active in Vista, go to Control Panel, ‘Ease of Access Center’, click ‘Change how your mouse works’ and tick ‘Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse’.

Tweak ‘Ease of Access Center’ settings to change how your mouse behaves

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Please complete the order form and mail it to us at Next Gen Publishing Ltd., 2nd Floor, C Wing, Trade World, Kamala Mills Compound, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai 400013 India. You can also fax the order for credit card purchases to +91 22 24955394, For clarifications, email: [email protected] or call +91 22 4352 5252 TERMS AND CONDITIONS: Please allow 4-5 weeks for processing of your subscription. Copies will be sent by ordinary post only. Next Gen Publishing will not be responsible for postal delay, transit loses or mutilation of copies. No cancellation of subscriptions will be entertained after commencement of subscription. Please mention your name and address on the reverse of your DD/Cheque. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of courts in Mumbai only.

How you can run XP forever

How you can run XP FOREVER

ORE BEST BEF 014 8 APRIL 2

Two months from now Microsoft will withdraw all support for Windows XP. We explain how to keep XP running safely beyond that point

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indows XP is a fast, dependable operating system (os) that runs on a third of the world’s PCs and is the most popular operating system after Windows 7. We know many readers still love using it, but Microsoft is keen to end the XP era and push us toward the radically different Windows 8 age. In fact, it’s just over two months until Microsoft withdraws support for XP completely. But many people feel pushed into buying a new computer or replacing an OS that’s familiar and does everything they need. Resistance, therefore, runs deep and many XP users insist they will continue to use it long after the 8 April cut-off. It’s a brave stand, but if you’re willing to ramp up your computer’s defences and look after its security yourself, you shouldn’t need to wave goodbye to XP any time soon.

What happens when Microsoft ends XP support? Search for anything XP-related on a Microsoft website and you’ll see a stark message warning that support for XP is coming to an end and that it’s time to choose a new PC or upgrade your current one to Windows 8. Microsoft won’t actively prevent you using XP, but

newer programs may not run on it. If you’re determined to keep using XP, the most important consideration is how you’ll manage to keep it safe. Security experts warn that hackers are likely to start concerted attacks on XP computers as soon as Microsoft’s support for it ends. Crucially, Microsoft won’t issue any more monthly patches to fix the security flaws hackers uncover. Only businesses with support contracts will receive emergency updates if a serious security flaw is found.

What should you do? If you’re still willing to persevere with XP, the most secure option is to take it offline, perhaps using it solely as a media server. This means you’ll need a different PC for web access. For now at least, antivirus companies are continuing to cover XP. All the big-name security brands, including Norton, AVG, Avira and Kaspersky, include XP support in the 2014 versions of their software. But it’s more important than ever to make sure your antivirus software is kept up to date. If you aren’t already using XP SP3 (Service Pack 3) you should install it as soon as possible from www.snipca.com/9981. If you don’t install SP3, you won’t get

If you use XP, you’ll get warnings that support is ending soon. Install XP Service Pack 3 to get important security updates

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important security updates for your computer as support for previous versions of XP has already ended. SP3 is also useful because it lets you run programs that might not run on earlier versions. If you have a 64bit computer, you can only upgrade up to XP SP2. This will also only be supported until April 2014. To check which version of XP you’re running, go to Start, My Computer and right-click Properties. The Service Pack version is shown beneath the Windows version. If you use Internet Explorer, download this along with the security patches you’re offered. You should also burn a copy of the Service Pack to CD. This way, if you need to reinstall Windows XP you won’t have to depend on the download still being available from the Microsoft website. Label the SP3 disc and store it somewhere safe. Another useful precaution is to make a complete backup of your PC and create a disk image. Use the free software DriveImage XML (www.snipca.com/9989) to create a backup of your system and burn it to DVD. You’ll be able to use this like a recovery disc to restore everything on your Windows XP PC.

Bring your XP PC’s hardware up to date

If you use Internet Explorer, make sure you’re using IE8, the most recent version to support XP

How you can run XP forever

available updates. Windows XP Mode support will also end in April, but because it runs as a virtual computer it won’t be exposed to the same security risks as it would be if you were running XP as your main operating system. In Windows 7 and 8 you can also use Compatibility Mode to run XP programs and games. If a program fails to run, right-click it, then click Properties, Compatibility. Tick ‘Run this program in compatibility mode for’, then click Windows XP, Apply. If the program still won’t run, choose a lower resolution in the Compatibility settings menu. Make a backup of your system with DriveImage XML and burn it to a disc

Dual-boot Windows XP

If you dual-boot Windows XP using Windows XP programs in Windows the free program VirtualBox (www. XP Mode. This is particularly useful virtualbox.org), you’ll be able to run if you eventually switch operating system it alongside Windows 7 or 8. but still want to use programs you couldn’t Once you’ve installed a copy of otherwise run in Windows 7 or 8. VirtualBox, install XP on the virtual To do this, you’ll need to create a virtual computer using your Windows XP operating system on your PC. installation disc, then install Service And in Windows 7, you’ll need to use Pack 3 from the Microsoft website the Hardware Virtualisation Tool in IE (www.snipca.com/9981). (www.snipca.com/9986) to check If you don’t have an XP installation your computer supports hardware disc you can instead download XP virtualisation. If it does, download from www.modern.ie. Click Test Windows XP Mode for Windows Across Browsers, then ‘Get free VMs’. 7 or 8 from www.snipca.com/9983. Click Windows, ‘VirtualBox on Tick ‘WindowsXPMode_en-us.exe’ to install Windows’ then double-click the the full version of XP. The exe file without ‘WindowsVirtualBox.exe’ link in the the N in its name doesn’t include Windows ‘IE8 – XP’ section. In VirtualBox, click File, Media Player. You’ll need to use Internet Import Appliance, Open Appliance. Explorer for the download as your copy of Double-click the file that’s extracted Windows first needs to be validated, and How to run Windows XP within and the virtual machine will be created you can only do this in IE. You must create another operating system and ready to use. and validate a password for the XP Mode If you use Windows 7 Professional or installation and allow drive sharing (so you Ultimate, or Windows 8, you can run can access your documents and programs). Once XP is installed you’ll see a message that Windows can’t find any security software. This shouldn’t be a problem as you’re running XP from within another, protected version of Windows. However, we recommend letting Use Windows XP Mode in a newer version of Windows so Windows search for Download a free version of Windows XP from www.modern. you can continue to use XP safely after support for it ends and install any ie to use use as a virtual computer You can easily and cheaply add several useful technologies that have launched since Microsoft releasedWindows XP. As long as your PC has a PCI Express card slot you can add USB 3.0 ports via an add-in card. such as this model: www. snipca.com/9987. USB 3.0 will make it much faster to copy items to and from your PC. Watch this video tutorial on how to install the card (www.snipca.com/10071). We also recommend buying a USB SD card reader (such as this Kingston model: www.snipca.com/ 10047) to import photos from your camera dongle, and a USB Bluetooth adaptor (such as these Maplin models: www.snipca.com/10044) so you can use a wireless keyboard and mouse.

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Keep your

mind active Fatigue and advancing years take their toll on our mental agility, but apps and games can help.

M

any of us are guilty of being too inactive, filling our hours watching TV or surfing the web for no real reason. But there are thousands of great free games and challenges you could be enjoying that will do you some good. Mentally stimulating games are good fun and a great way of enjoying your computer, tablet or phone. Here are some of our favourites.

compete against the clock and come up against various in-game distractions. The tasks follow a familiar pattern (shape comparisons; yes/no statements about items matching certain criteria). You’ll need to keep your wits about you as the

Brain-testing apps

Daily mental workouts Lumosity (www.lumosity.com and free for Android and iOS) provides a very slicklooking set of mental exercises. It offers a customised daily workout based on your stated goals, such as increasing personal focus and concentration, improving your problem-solving skills and speeding up your analysis of complex ideas. You

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criteria you measure letters and colours against changes without warning within an exercise and catches you out. The daily workout element and personal scoreboard make it more likely you’ll use Lumosity frequently.

Lumosity creates customised brain-training challenges and a daily brain workout schedule

Most brain-training apps involve logic, reasoning and memory-test games. The free Coach Memory (for Android www. snipca.com/10228) offers some ‘classic’ training exercises such as Color Match which asks whether a word is in the same colour as an adjacent word suggests. There’s also an against-the-clock challenge where you must state whether successive blocks of four images are the same as the previous set that appeared. The free Brain Trainer Special for Android (www.snipca.com/10229) asks

Keep your mind active

(www.snipca.com/10230) for Android. The instructions are a little unclear, but you must memorise a series of bubbles then, when the number inside each one disappears, tap each bubble in turn to indicate the ascending order. The music is quite distracting and there’s not much variety in the game, but you can compare your ‘brain age’ to other peoples’ on the world leaderboard. Coach Memory asks if the colour of the text on the right matches what’s written on the left

you to calculate the sum of two numbers and state whether they’re greater than another combination. Another exercise asks you to add up the total of figures shown on rotating blocks.

Which parts of your brain work best? Fit Brains Trainer (www.fitbrains.com/ brain-games) offers an assortment of exercises to try online (you need to create a free account) or as a free iOS (www. snipca.com/10264) app. You can also try its Uber Brain analyser without signing up. Exercises are sorted into Concentration, Language, Organization, Memory and Problem Solving. You start with a ‘cross trainer’ that assesses your abilities based on your age and education level. After a five-minute examination by ‘Dr N’ you get a summary of strengths and weaknesses. Based on the results you can choose games to improve those areas – however, you need to pay a substantial subscription to unlock many of the games, so stick to the free ones such as Paradise Island 2, which boosts language skills.

Get brain-fit At Brain Metrix (www.brainmetrix. com) there are lots of free games to test your IQ, memory, creativity and reflexes, plus several challenging games such as the Tower of Hanoi. In this game you must rebuild the tower on another prong without ever putting a larger disc on top of a smaller one. Make sure you ignore the brightly coloured embedded ads for PacMan and other games on the site. Click the X in the corner of each one to ‘mute’ (hide) them.

Find out how old your brain is If you want to find out how mentally agile you are, try the light-hearted but very unscientific free Brain Age Test

Build towers of Goo If you like logistics and construction, World of Goo (2dboy.com/games.php) is a great choice. You can download a free demo and buy £1.99 versions for Windows, Kindle and Android and then play it with friends online.

Recognise what’s changed If you want more effective and varied memory exercises try the selection at www.gamesforthebrain.com. This site offers a good balance of fun games and tests of your IQ. Mastermind (below) shows you fragments of nine paintings. You must memorise the selection, then state which fragment has been replaced on the next screen. The Variations game, meanwhile, requires you to assemble a picture from a jumble of tiles or memorise the order of certain images.

Choose the right materials to use in changing climates in construction game World of Goo

Within the game you must work out what construction materials to use, depending on the terrain and climate, and how to bridge chasms using combinations of Goo balls. Changing seasons and other environmental factors make the game all the more interesting.

Learn to touch type You may prefer to learn something new rather than simply play games. For example, if you find yourself using your PC more and more, you could teach yourself to touch type. Sites such as TypingWeb (www.snipca.com/10251) provide formal typing training – with a leaderboard for competitive students.

Master another language Memorise the paintings then click the image that’s substituted on the next screen

Get stuck into Sudoku The advantage of online Sudoku is you can choose your own level of difficulty and get hints for those really tough puzzles. There are dozens of great free Sudoku puzzles sites and many of them are specifically designed so you can print out the puzzles. We particularly like www.dailysudoku. co.uk/sudoku with its monster puzzle grids and KrazyDad’s booklets of free puzzles (krazydad.com/sudoku). To play on your Android tablet try the free Cool Mango Sudoku Fun (www. snipca.com/10217). For iPad and iPhone, we like FingerArts’ Sudoko (www.snipca. com/10265).

The BBC Learning website (www.bbc. co.uk/learning/adults) has flash cards and other memory joggers to help you build vocabulary and memorise phrases when learning foreign languages (www. bbc.co.uk/languages). You can also use the impressive free Duolingo (www. duolingo.com) website to start learning French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. There are also free Duolingo apps for Android, Kindle Fire and iOS.

Further your learning There are lots of websites that offer free courses. Try the free course modules at the Open University (www.open. edu/openlearn) or sign up to the new FutureLearn (www.futurelearn.com) site, which offers courses provided by British universities. March 2014 Computer active

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Download huge files faster

Download

huge files faster It can be a trial getting large files to download. we look at ways to speed up the process

W

aiting for downloads to finish is no fun. After all, if you’ve decided you want to save or install something you find online, you probably want to use or play it straight away. Thankfully, there are lots of ways to speed up downloads – but also several pitfalls you should avoid in your quest to achieve it. Here, we look at how to download large files faster no matter how slow your bandwidth is.

Speed up downloads on very slow broadband connections There’s no easy cure for a limited web connection – and we know many readers are stuck on speeds of less than 2Mbps. Your first priority is to ensure nothing else is interfering with your bandwidth. This means switching off your email, closing instant messaging programs and making sure no other webpages are active. If you’ve got a fairly fast broadband connection, you don’t need to be quite so strict about switching off services. Other web-based activities will make a difference to how long the download takes, but simple web surfing will have a negligible effect. However, we don’t recommend trying to watch a YouTube clip while you wait for iPlayer to download a programme you want to watch as this will devote lots of your bandwidth buffering the video.

Check what other devices are using your web connection If you find your downloads take much longer than expected, other devices and software are probably using the web connection too. If you’ve got an iOS or

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‘Device list’ to see what’s it’s connected to. If you’ve used Fing before, click Refresh to make it re-scan for connected devices. If you discover computers logged on that shouldn’t be, change the password for your Wi-Fi network and only give the new one to family members.

Stop programs going online Stopping other programs periodically accessing the internet to check for updates or retrieve information will also help speed up your downloads because you won’t be competing with other items on your computer for the web connection. To check which programs and Check for unauthorised devices using your bandwidth using Fing services are set up to connect to the internet, press Android device, you can use the free Ctrl+Alt+Delete, click Task Manager, Fing app (www.snipca.com/10068) to Services and look through the entries identify anything that’s on your that have network access. Items such as network. To use it, just start Fing and it Adobe Acrobat Updates can be stopped. will automatically search for all connected devices. Click an entry in the

Download huge files faster

bandwidthheavy tasks down the list and promote downloads.

Check how long a download should take On a broadband connection of at least 5Mbps, even large items should Tell iPlayer to download programmes when the computer isn’t being used for other tasks download in less than five minutes. To find out how long a Limit when other people can download should take if your web use your web connection connection is working at its optimum, If all the devices connected to your consult the table at www. network are ones that should be thinkbroadband.com/download.html allowed web access, either change the showing download times for differing traffic priority for your broadband file sizes. As well as estimating connection on your router so your download times, hinkbroadband downloads take precedence or you can provides files you can download to test schedule your downloads for later and whether your web connection is prevent other people using the web at particularly slow. that time. If you don’t want the kids watching YouTube videos at all or only at certain Compress files first times of the day, give their laptops a If you compress the items you want to password-protected, Standard or download into a smaller file size they Limited user account and use the will take less time to download. settings menu to restrict what they can Although you can do this yourself, it’s do and when. This way, if you’re trying to download an HD film, you can make sure their computers are set to allow web access only until, say, 10pm and start your download after that. To change your broadband connections bandwidth priority, go to the settings menu for your router and locate QoS. Move Skype calls, instant messaging, online At the Thinkbroadband website you can find out how long a download should take gaming and other

best to install a download tool that will compress and convert YouTube and other bulky downloads for you. There are lots of YouTube-conversion and download tools available, but if you specifically want HD video and 3D content, try Tubebox (http://en.tubebox. org).

Download at the quietest time Downloading early in the morning should be faster than late afternoon and evening because most web traffic is in the US and there’s a big surge in use. Downloading when you’re not using your PC is faster too, so schedule \ downloads rather than wait for them to take place. This will also avoid busting your monthly download limit as your ISP probably won’t meter these off-peak downloads.

Make a stalled download reconnect Many of the tools we’ve described here will attempt to reconnect to the source of a download if you lose your Wi-Fi or web connection. You can also use Download Accelerator Pro 10 (www. speedbit.com/dap), but this takes ages to install and is only free for a trial period.

Use torrents to schedule off-peak downloads Torrent sites work by temporarily connecting the computers of people who want to download a file and making them each download a different piece that they then share with each other. This lessens the load on the original download site, but also potentially exposes each computer to malware. Nonetheless, torrenting is incredibly useful for large downloads. Make sure you have your antivirus switched on and use www.mywot.com’s link checker before starting a download. You can use torrents on your tablet or phone as well as your computer. Make sure you install the free version of the BitTorrent tool uTorrent from the official website www.utorrent.com. There’s a free Android version at www. snipca.com/10110. Untick all the extras you’re offered when it installs. Decline the simultaneous streaming option to make your downloads as fast as possible. Now search for the video or file you want to download and select March 2014 Computer active

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Download huge files faster

them faster, tick the ‘Always check for available downloads’ option in the iTunes, Preferences menu. Tick to enable automatic downloads of music, apps and books. To make sure you get to listen to the new album by your favourite artist as soon as possible, tick ‘Download pre-orders when available’ on the same Preferences page. If you have lots of items due to download from iTunes, it makes sense for each item to download in succession rather than have them all trying to download simultaneously since you can’t listen to or watch more than one item at once. Oddly, the default setting is for simultaneous downloads. To change this click the arrow next to the ‘Search Library’ box in iTunes and untick ‘Allow simultaneous downloads’.

Speed up phone and tablet downloads Use uTorrent to schedule downloads and make them faster

where to save it on your computer. Next, click the cog in the top right of uTorrent and click Scheduler. The dark green squares indicate when uTorrent will work at full speed. Successively click squares relating to peak periods to make them white and make uTorrent inactive.

Click Apply then OK.

Make iTunes downloads faster These days you can buy buy full-length films and TV shows on iTunes as well as music, so you could be downloading some hefty files. To make

To change the iTunes default setting, untick ‘Allow simultaneous downloads’

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The fastest option is to connect your phone or tablet directly to your router. When downloading files locally, a strong Wi-Fi connection (three or four bars) will provide the best wireless download speed. If you’ve got a 4G connection on your phone, your downloads will be almost as fast as when downloading over a fast broadband connection, but the more data you use up at once, the quicker you’ll run out of data allocation. It’s usually better to wait until you’re able to connect to your home broadband so you don’t go over your phone’s download limits. Unlimited data tariffs are usually subject to a fair-use policy, so read the fine print of your contract. You can boost your connection speed by changing which server your phone or tablet uses to connect to the internet. Google’s own DNS (domain name server) is faster than the server your ISP uses, so switch to this instead. You’ll need a DNS-changing app such as Set DNS (www.snipca.com/10085). Once installed, you can use Set DNS to override the connection on Wi-Fi and choose the faster Google DNS or OpenDNS instead. To use the free version of Set DNS (£2.28) you need to root the phone. However, there’s also a paid-for version of Set DNS that lets you override the DNS settings for your Android phone or tablet without needing to root it.

?

What’s All The Fuss About… …

Smartwatches Forget phones – watches are now getting the ‘smart’ treatment. Here’s what you need to know about these new devices What are they? Touchscreen watches that use Bluetooth to connect to the smartphone in your pocket. They show information from the web, and let you know about notifications on your phone, such as a new email or text message. Nissan is even working on a smartwatch to wear when you drive. It will measure your car’s performance by taking average speed and fuel-consumption readings, and use biometric technology to warn you when you’re too tired to drive. The wave of new smartwatches is part of a trend towards ‘wearable technology’. You’re going to hear a lot more about this, whether you like it or not.

Do you mean laptops built into cardigans?

it to answer calls. It also runs apps for eBay and Evernote, and has a music player, pedometer and a 1.9-megapixel camera.

Sounds clever, but how much is it? Rather pricey - £299. And early reports suggest it’s not worth the money. You have to recharge it every day – which will quickly become annoying – and it only connects with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and new Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets. That’s very restrictive. Sony’s SmartWatch 2 is cheaper – you can buy it for £159.99 from Amazon (www.snipca.com/10091). It works with any Android phone and tablet that runs 4.0 (or newer), so connects to more devices than the Galaxy Gear does.

Not quite. At least, not yet. It means clothing and accessories that have computing technology built in. Remember those calculator watches from the 1980s? If not, Wikipedia will jog your memory: www. snipca.com/10093. Google Glass (www.google. com/glass) is the most famous example of wearable technology, but the term also includes fitness monitors that track your health, such as the Fitbit Flex (www.fitbit. The Sony SmartWatch 2 – which you can buy for £159.99 from Amazon – is compatible with any Android 4.0 device com).

OK, but do I really need another ‘smart’ device?

Won’t smartwatch screens be too small to operate?

Companies such as Sony and Samsung will try very hard to convince you that you do. Samsung released the most hyped smartwatch yet in September. Called the Samsung Galaxy Gear (www.snipca. com/10084), it runs Android 4.3 and shows the weather and displays notifications and previews of new emails and text messages. It has a microphone, letting you speak into

You might think so, but the icons are large and you won’t be typing emails or text messages, just tapping the screen. However, if you find phones tricky to use, smartwatches won’t be any easier.

Will everybody have one this time next year? We hope not. It’s already a pain dodging

The Samsung Galaxy Gear only works with the Galaxy Note 3 and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet

people in the street as they walk and stare at their phone. If people start gazing at their wrist too, we might have to launch a campaign to ban them. But seriously, we think that smartwatches will take longer to catch on than smartphones. That might change when Apple releases the iWatch.

When’s that due? Nobody knows, but Apple has trademarked ‘iWatch’, so it plans to launch something, possibly later this year. Here’s an artist’s impression of what it may look like, from our sister title Mac User: www. snipca.com/10083. It could be as revolutionary as the iPod, iPhone and iPad. But it’ll almost certainly be very expensive. March 2014 Computer active

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Workshops

Strap on page 3 xxxxxxxxxx

25 pages of easy-to-follow workshops 61 Use a webcam with your Raspberry Pi 64 Create your own free online comics 67 Make Excel charts look more exciting

69 Keep emails private for free with Thunderbird and Enigmail 72 Organise notes and webpages with Evernote 75 Get the most Firefox for Android

77 Read Kindle books on any device 79 Track fundraising progress with a free Excel template

80 Readers’ Tips 81 Tablet & Phone Tips 83 Make Windows Better 84 Make Office Better 85 Defraggler

Use a webcam with your Raspberry Pi T

he small size and low-power requirements of the Raspberry Pi make it ideal for time-lapse photography, where a device needs to be left alone for long periods of time and where there might not be space for a normal computer. The Pi will work with most webcams, while the stills will be shot and saved

by the free program Motion, which also works on other Linux computers. Both your Pi’s USB sockets will be taken up by the webcam and wireless adapter because this Workshop involves accessing the Pi remotely from another PC. Download and install PuTTY Portable (www.snipca.com/9770) before you start.

STEP You can make your Raspberry Pi easier to find on your

1

network by installing a program called Avahi. Start your Raspberry Pi as normal and make sure it’s connected to the internet. Open LXTerminal and type sudo apt-get update, press Enter then type sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon. Press Enter then Y when asked to confirm. Now start PuTTY on your Windows PC. It should find the Pi on your network, listing it as either rasberrypi.local or raspberry.pi. If not, you may need to install the free Apple tool Bonjour (www.snipca.com/9335) on your PC

STEP Remotely controlling your pi via PuTTY on your PC, type

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sudo mkdir /public at the command line and press Enter to create a public folder. To share the folder over your network type sudo apt-get install samba and press Enter. Next, type sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf, press Enter and scroll to the bottom and enter the text from [public] onwards as it appears in this screenshot. Press Ctrl + X, then Y, and then Enter to save the changes and quit. Type sudo chown -R root:users /public, press Enter, then type sudo chmod -R ug+rwx /public/ and press Enter. Restart the Samba server by typing sudo service samba restart. Finally, type mkdir /public/ motion and press Enter. March 2014 Computer active

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Workshops STEP You must create a new user in order to access this new

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shared folder. Type sudo pdbedit --create --user pi. Enter the password – raspberry – for the Pi user and press Enter. Test that the shared folder is working properly by returning to your Windows computer. Start Windows Explorer, click the Address Bar at the top, type \\raspberrypi, then press Enter. Type raspberrypi\pi in the username box at the top and the password raspberry in the bottom box. Select the option ‘Remember my credentials’ to avoid having to repeat this process. You should now see all the folders and files in the Pi user’s home folder.

STEP To Install motion on your Raspberry

4

Pi return to PuTTY, type sudo apt-get install motion and press Enter. Press Y to confirm the installation. When it’s finished installing, set Motion to run at startup. To do this, type crontab -e in LXTerminal, then press Enter. Scroll down to the bottom of this file and type @reboot sudo motion. Press Ctrl + X, then Y when asked to ‘Save modified buffer’. Press Enter to confirm.

STEP You can set exactly how Motion will work by editing

5

a single text file. Type sudo nano /etc/motion/ motion.conf then press Enter. The text document is rather long so to find the setting you need, press Ctrl + W, type target_dir in the Search section at the bottom of the screen, then press Enter. The cursor will jump to this setting. Replace the text after target_dir with /public/motion. Press Ctrl + W again, type snapshot_interval and press Enter. Delete 0 and replace with the number of seconds you want between each shot.

STEP You can improve the quality of your video by

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increasing the resolution of the captured images. Press Ctrl + W, type 320 and press Enter to find the relevant settings. Change the image width and height settings to your webcam’s upper limit. Our Microsoft LifeCam HD-5000 can manage 1280x720. Press Ctrl + X, then Y when prompted to save, and then Enter. Shut down the Pi by typing sudo shutdown -h now. When all the LEDs apart from the red PWR have gone off, it’s safe to unplug the Pi. Position it where you want it and then power it up again to start taking time-lapse photos.

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Take time-lapse pictures STEP When you’ve finished capturing the time-lapse

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videos you need to stop Motion from taking any more images. To do this, launch LXTerminal, type pidof motion then press Enter. Next, type sudo kill followed by the number that appeared after you typed the last command. To stop Motion running every time your Pi starts up, type crontab -e and press Enter. Scroll down to the setting shown in Step 4 and add a # (hashtag symbol) at the beginning of the line to make Raspbian ignore it. Press Ctrl + X, then Y and then Enter to save your changes and quit.

STEP To make a video from your time-lapse images, return to

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your Windows PC and launch Windows Movie Maker. Click the ‘Add videos and photos’ button in the Ribbon. Navigate to your Pi’s folder, press Ctrl + A to select all the photos, then click Open. By default, Movie Maker gives each picture seven seconds on screen, which is far too long. So, press Ctrl + A to select all the pictures, click the Edit tab in the Ribbon, then type a smaller number in the Duration text box. To see what duration works best with your captured images, click the play button underneath the video preview.

STEP Add a title to the video by clicking the Home tab, then

9

the Title button. Use captions to describe moments of interest during the video. When you’re happy with the video, click the ‘Save movie’ button in the Home tab of the Ribbon and then create a customised time-lapse setting. Name the setting ‘Webcam Time-lapse’ and set the resolution to that of your webcam. Click Save twice, then Close. Click the ‘Save movie’ button again and select the time-lapse setting you just created. Give the video a name and then click Save.

STEP You can also use Motion to capture video when

10

movement is detected on the webcam. Open the Motion.conf file for editing (see Step 5), press Ctrl + W, type snapshot_interval and press Enter. Change the number to 0 to disable snapshots. Next, press Ctrl + W, type threshold, then press Enter. Change the number for the threshold setting to 1500. Motion-capture is more complicated than time-lapse, so follow the detailed instructions at www.snipca.com/9800. This describes how to ignore portions of the view if cars passing by start the motion-capture, and how long to keep recording after no more movement is detected. O March 2014 Computer active

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Workshops Create your own free online comics C

omix I/O (http://cmx.io) is an online cartoon generator that takes the grind out of learning HTML – the markup language used to build websites. The cartoons appear in the style of humorous stick-figure site xkcd.com. The website describes itself as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm,

math, and language”, and we urge you to take a moment to check it out. The artwork is simple but you’ll find much that will make you laugh. We will explain how to edit the text and move your cartoon characters around. We ecommend using Chrome (www.google.co.uk/ chrome) for this workshop.

STEP Click Launch Editor on the Comix homepage to show the

1

editing page. The page is split in half, with the comic strip at the top and the HTML code below it. Click the title at the top of the first panel (known as a cell) and a number of small coloured icons will appear. Click and drag the green cross to move the title around the cell. Use the purple icons to adjust how the title is angled. Click and drag the bent arrow icon to adjust the rotation of the title. Click and drag the purple cross to change the centre of rotation.

STEP Change the title text by editing the HTML code in the bottom half of the

2

browser window. The code is well arranged and colour-coded so it’s easy to read. If you’re looking for a particular phrase, use the Chrome Find tool. Press Ctrl + F, type a word or phrase from the title and press Enter. The cursor will jump to that text and select it. Replace the phrase ‘One lazy morning’ with your own title – we used At Computeractive Towers. Press Ctrl + S to make the changes appear in the comic preview at the top of the web page. The title has to fit in a single line so you may need to experiment to make it fit.

STEP You can make the title stand out by using colour text. The title

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text is surrounded by text in square brackets, known as tags. Tags tells the browser how to display different elements on the page. To change the title’s text colour, type the description fill=’’blue’’ at the end of the tspan tag immediately before the title text. You should end up with the tag .

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make cartoons using HTML STEP You can use a wide range of colours for the text by

4

using a colour code. This is formed by three hexadecimal codes – preceded by a # symbol – that represent the combination of red, green and blue that makes up the colour. The easiest way to find the colour’s hexadecimal code is to use an image editor such as Paint.NET (www. getpaint.net). Start Paint.NET and press F8 to show the colour tool. Pick a colour by clicking in the circle, then copy the code in the Hex text box and paste into the comic editor.

STEP You can change character poses by clicking a character and

5

moving the points of control. Click the character on the right in the first cell to show the control points. Click and drag the blue dots to adjust the position of the hands and feet. The red dots adjust the elbow and knee joints, and the orange dot lets you adjust the angle of the character’s head. The light-blue dots control the position of the spine. Finally, click and drag the purple line with an arrow at each end to adjust the angle of the entire character.

STEP Position the characters’ speech text by clicking it to

6

make the control dots appear. The dark-blue and light-blue dots adjust the line that runs behind the text indicating which character is speaking. The green dot adjusts the position of the text. In the HTML code, you can edit the text in the bubble sections using a separate tspan tag for each line of text, while the vertical position is set with the attribute y=’’2em’’. This means that the lines will never overlap each other.

STEP You can add more characters to a cell by simply copying and pasting an

7

entire character tag in the HTML section. To add a second character, copy the second character’s tag (this should be lines 29 to 35 inclusive) and paste it just below the original character’s tag. Press Ctrl + S to update the preview. Click the second character and reposition it so that both are visible. You can now edit this character. It’s not just characters that can be added – you can also copy entire scenes. If you do, remember to update the number in the ‘scene id’ section at the beginning, so that no two scenes have the same number.

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Workshops STEP You can use a wide range of colours for the text by using a

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colour code. This is formed by three hexadecimal codes – preceded by a # symbol – that represent the combination of red, green and blue that makes up the colour. The easiest way to find the colour’s hexadecimal code is to use an image editor such as Paint.NET (www.getpaint.net). Start Paint.NET and press F8 to show the colour tool. Pick a colour by clicking in the circle, then copy the code in the Hex text box and paste into the comic editor.

STEP You can change character poses by clicking a

9

character and moving the points of control. Click the character on the right in the first cell to show the control points. Click and drag the blue dots to adjust the position of the hands and feet. The red dots adjust the elbow and knee joints, and the orange dot lets you adjust the angle of the character’s head. The light-blue dots control the position of the spine. Finally, click and drag the purple line with an arrow at each end to adjust the angle of the entire character.

STEP Position the characters’ speech text by it to make the control dots 10 clicking appear. The dark-blue and light-blue

dots adjust the line that runs behind the text indicating which character is speaking. The green dot adjusts the position of the text. In the HTML code, you can edit the text in the bubble sections using a separate tspan tag for each line of text, while the vertical position is set with the attribute y=’’2em’’. This means that the lines will never overlap each other. O

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Create compelling charts

Make Excel charts look more exciting E

xcel charts are an excellent way of summarising large chunks of data, but they can become monotonous viewing over time. However, you don’t have to rely on Excel’s default graph. There are plenty of other options for adding more information and pictures to your charts. Tools such as Trendlines

aren’t just for show – they can really help make sense of information contained in your spreadsheet. In this Workshop, unless we mention Excel 2013 specifically, these tips will work in Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013. You can download our demo workbook from snipca.com/9735.

STEP Converting a graph to 3D can make it stand out

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from the crowd. Click the chart, then the Design tab in the Chart Tools section that appears in the Ribbon bar. Click the far-left icon called Change Chart Type, then choose a new Chart Type from the options. If you don’t like a chart, you can easily return to the original or, if you can’t remember what it was, press Ctrl and Z to undo the change.

STEP You may need to change the rotation of 3D charts

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to make sure all the points are visible. The rotation will depend on the nature of the graph and the data it shows. Click the graph, then select the Layout tab in the Chart Tools section of the Ribbon, and click the 3-D Rotation button. Use the up and down buttons in the Rotation section to adjust the graph. The arrow buttons adjust the settings in increments of 10, so click in the boxes and type a number if you want to fine-tune your adjustments. Fine-tuning is helped by the fact that any changes made to the graph’s rotation appear instantly.

STEP Trendlines are useful for showing long-term trends

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in graphs, but can only be added to 2D charts. Right-click one of the coloured bars on your graph, then click Add Trendline. There are numerous types of Trendlines available – the most useful for our example graph is the Polynominal. Adjust the Order setting to make the line follow the graph more closely or loosely. Click Close when you’re happy with the settings. Find out more about the different types of trendlines and when to use them on Microsoft’s Office.com website: snipca.com/9731.

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Workshops STEP Showing the exact figure of a particular point in a

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graph is useful when you want to draw attention to something of note. The highest temperature on our graph is July 2013. To highlight this, right-click the relevant point in the graph, then select Add Data Labels. To remove a label, click it twice. This isn’t a double-click: the first click selects all labels and the second click specifies the one you want to remove. Press the Delete key to remove the data label.

STEP You can edit the text inside the Data Label to

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include more information. Click the Data Label once to select it, once more to switch to editing mode (the cursor will change to the ‘insert text’ cursor) and then one more time to start editing text. Editing the Data Label detaches it from the data in the graph, meaning it won’t adjust should you change any data in the graph. Click anywhere outside the Data Label when you’ve finished editing. To move the Data Label around the graph, click it once to select it and then click and drag it into a new position. One new feature of Excel 2013 is a line that connects the Data Label to the relevant part of the graph when it’s moved a certain distance.

STEP Make the Data Label stand out

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even more by adding a picture or texture. Right-click the Data Label, then click Format Data Label. Click Fill on the left and choose ‘Picture or texture fill’. You can choose a texture from the Texture dropdown menu and then adjust the Scale X and Scale Y % figures until the texture is the correct size. Click the File button and then select a picture to use. Unless the Data Label is perfectly square you’ll need to adjust the ‘Stretch options’ to stop it looking distorted. Move the transparency slider to the right to make the image paler so it doesn’t obscure the text. O

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Exchange private emails

Keep emails private for free with Thunderbird and Enigmail S

ending an email is like writing a postcard because everyone who handles it can read the contents. But if you want to send sensitive content, such as medical information, the Enigmail add-on for Thunderbird and the Gpg4win software offers added layers

of protection. They scramble messages by creating two passwords (called keys). You need to swap your public keys with anyone you want to exchange sensitive information with. Using the key, you can scramble and descramble emails between you.

STEP Install the software in the correct order. First

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download the full installer from gpg4win.org/ download. When installing you can leave all options as they are – there’s no bundled software to avoid. Now install Thunderbird and set up your email accounts. This Workshop also works with the portable version of Thunderbird (snipca.com/9724). Start Thunderbird, then click the top-right button (with three vertical lines) then Add-ons. Search for ‘enigmail’, then click the Install button in the Enigmail row. Click ‘Restart now’ when the link appears to complete the installation.

STEP In thunderbird click the menu button (on the right with

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three horizontal lines), then the arrow next to OpenPGP and then Setup Wizard. Leave the top option selected and click Next. Leave ‘Yes, I want to sign all of my email’ selected, and click Next. Leave the bottom option ‘No, I will create perrecipient rules for those that sent me their public key’ selected if you want to avoid sending out scrambled emails to other contacts. Click Next. Leave the option to change the default settings selected. Click Details to see what default settings will be changed. The most significant change is that you will work with plain-text emails by default rather than HTML-formatted ones. Click Next.

STEP Create an OpenPGP key by selecting the top option ‘I want to

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create a new key pair for signing and encrypting my email’, then click Next. Enter a strong, but memorable, passphrase for your key pair and keep it safe. A summary of the changes you’ve made will appear. Click Next and allow access to the internet if your firewall asks. Click the Generate Certificate button when asked to create a revocation certificate. Find a safe location for the file, then click Save. Enter your passphrase to unlock the secret key and click OK. The revocation certificate lets you cancel your key if it’s compromised. Click OK, then Finish.

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Workshops STEP you can Save your key and upload it to a public

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keyserver, so that other people can download your key for themselves and confirm your identity. This way you don’t have to email the key to them. To do this, click the Menu button, then the arrow next to OpenPGP, and then Key Management. Select ‘Display All Keys by Default’. Click your key, then File and ‘Export Keys to File’. Select Export Public Keys Only and save the file to your Desktop. The file format should be ASCII Armored Files (*.asc).

STEP Go to snipca.com/9725, click Choose File, open the

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file you just saved, then click Upload. A summary of your key will appear and an email will be sent to confirm your identity. Click Done. Go to your email inbox and click the link in the verification email. Click Accept, then click the Download Verification key and save it to your Desktop. Return to the OpenPGP Key Management window in Thunderbird, click File and then ‘Import Keys from File’. Click the file, Open, and then OK in the confirmation window. Click the PHP Global Directory Verification Key entry, then Edit and Set Owner Trust. Select ‘I trust fully’ and click OK. Click Done.

STEP Next, send your public key to the person that you

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want to exchange private emails with. Write a message explaining that you want to share encrypted emails with them. Click the OpenPGP menu and then select Attach My Public Key. Click Send and select the top option ‘Just encrypt/sign the message text, but not the attachments’ in the window that appears, then click OK. Alternatively, people can visit keyserver.pgp.com and search for your email address. They can then download the file that you just sent as an attachment. At this point they should also send you their public key.

STEP Import the key that you have been sent. Save or download

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it to your Desktop, and open the Key Management window in Thunderbird (see Step 4). Click File, then ‘Import Key from File’ and open the file you just downloaded. You’ll see that the preview of their email has a message at the top that reads: ‘UNTRUSTED Good signature from Your Name ’. If you trust this person, click Details, then ‘Set Owner Trust of Sender’s Key’. Choose a level of trust for that person, then click OK. If you choose the bottom option ‘I trust ultimately’, the message at the top of any email from that person will be green to confirm that their email is trusted.

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Exchange private emails

STEP sign all emails sent to this person, so they can

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be sure they’ve come from you. To do this, click the Thunderbird menu icon, the arrow next to OpenPGP, and then Edit Per-Recipient Rules. Click Add and enter the recipient’s email address in the top text box. Click the Select Key(s) button, then select both your key and the public key from that person. Click OK. Select Always in the Signing dropdown menu. Click OK twice to save the changes.

STEP To send an encrypted message, click Write

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in the Thunderbird toolbar. Compose your message and attach any files you want to send. Click the OpenPGP icon in the toolbar and select Encrypt. Alternatively, use the two small icons at the bottom right of the message window. Click the left pen icon to sign the message and the key icon to encrypt it. Click Send and then select the ‘encrypt your attachments’ option. Click OK, enter your passphrase and press Enter.

STEP To read the email when it arrives the recipient will

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need to enter their private key passphrase when prompted. The message will then be descrambled. The message at the top of the email preview will say that your signature is untrusted if the Owner Trust level has not been set as Ultimate, but the message will still be decrypted. To decrypt the attachment, right-click the file name at the bottom of the email window, click Decrypt then Save As. Enter your passphrase and click OK. Choose where to save the file and enter your passphrase again. Your file is now saved unencrypted O

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Workshops Organise and search notes and webpages with Evernote E

vernote (www.evernote.com) is designed to help you easily make notes, organise them into Notebooks, format them with bullet points or numbered lists, and attach audio, webpages and other files. This Workshop mainly uses the new version for Windows, which has 100 new features including reminders and improved search. There are

versions for Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows mobile devices, and Mac OS X. All notes are automatically updated across your various devices. Standard Evernote accounts are free, but a paid-for account adds offline access to Notebooks, passcode protection and priority for text recognition in PDFs and images.

STEP Creating a new Note is still

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easy, but slightly different from earlier versions you may have used. Click the New Note icon in the toolbar 1 or press Ctrl + N. Click the ‘Click to set title’ text and type the Note’s title. Type your Note in the area below, using the formatting icons to change the font style and size, or arrange your notes into numbered or bullet-point lists 2 . To add a file to the Note, click the paperclip icon 3 , click the file and then Open.

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STEP Adding reminders to Notes

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is a very useful new tool. Click the Reminder icon 1 to add a reminder in your Notebook. These appear at the top of the All Notes column. Click Add Date and then choose Tomorrow, ‘In a Week’ 2 or pick a date from the calendar. Once completed, mark the task as done by moving the mouse over the entry and clicking the tick that appears.

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1 2

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Organise and search notes and webpages with Evernote

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STEP Click the new Atlas link

1 on the left-hand column to view your Notes by location. Click a flag to zoom into that location and see flag pins for each Note. Click a pin to open its Note. If your device doesn’t have location information – likely with laptops – you can add it yourself. Click the Info button in a Note, then ‘Click to set location’ and then click ‘Enter manually’. Paste in the coordinates (easier to find in Bing Maps than Google Maps) and click OK.

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STEP You don’t need a scanner to add images to Evernote; a webcam will

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do the job. To add a picture using your webcam, click the New Note down arrow and select New Webcam Note 1 . Click New Webcam Note and hold up the page you want to photograph. Click Take Snapshot, then press ‘Save to Evernote’. Evernote will recognise text automatically once the Note has been synchronised. There’s no set time limit for when this will be done, although Premium Evernote users get priority. It can also recognise neat handwriting. The mobile apps can capture photos with the built-in cameras on your device.

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STEP Finding individual Notes is easy,

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even if you have a large collection. Type a keyword or phrase in the search box 1 that appears above the Notes preview. As you type, a list of Related Notes will appear in the All Notes column. Evernote also highlights the text you are searching for in the right-hand window, so you can quickly find the word/phrase in the Note 2 . Text in the images added in Step 4 will also be included in the search.

STEP Evernote can also record audio. Start a new

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Note and then click the microphone icon 1 . Click the Blue record button to start recording. Use the slider beneath the level indicator 2 to adjust the recording volume. Click Save to stop recording. Unlike Microsoft OneNote, typed comments are not linked to the time in the recording when they were made, so you may want to include the recording time 3 when typing a comment.

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Workshops STEP You can save webpages with Evernote using the

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browser plugins for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera from the Evernote website (evernote.com/ webclipper). The Internet Explorer add-on is installed automatically when you install Evernote. In Internet Explorer right-click anywhere on the page, then click ‘Clip this page’. The webpage will then appear in an Evernote window. Add tags 1 to the Clip to help you find it again. The links 2 on the webpage are preserved so you can still click to open them in your browser.

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STEP You can draw attention to important information in

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clipped webpages using the new highlighter tool, which is very useful if they contain a lot of extra text that you don’t need. You can do this from the main Evernote window or the small window that pops up when you clip a page. Select the desired text and click the Highlight icon 1 in the formatting toolbar. You can also press Ctrl, Shift + H.

STEP You can keep and

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share a record of what you eat on your Android or iOS device using the free Evernote Food app. Download it for Android from www.snipca. com/10023 or iOS from www.snipca.com/10024. Once installed, open the app. To share a meal, tap the plus next to My Meals. Tap the camera icon to take a photo of the food and then fill in more information below. Tap the map and enter an address if you want to share your location. Your meal will appear in your Windows Evernote program once both have synchronised.

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STEP The Evernote Windows 8 app (www.snipca.

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com/10025) is great for taking notes when you use other apps for research. Tap the topleft green button 1 to create a new note. You’ll find formatting options at the bottom of the screen with a coloured wheel on the left which lets you set the text colour. Evernote also works well when pinned to one side of the screen. This makes it easier for you to work in other apps, although you can’t add formatting in this smaller view. O

Get the most from Firefox for Android What you need: Android 2.2 or higher Time Required: 30 minutes

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he latest version of Firefox for Android (www.snipca.com/ 9963) not only brings one of the best browsers to your phone or tablet, but adds extra tools to share bookmarks and open tabs from your desktop PC. Unlike many app updates, the system

requirements for Firefox for Android have been lowered, so if you’ve found previous versions too slow, it might be time to give it another go. You can visit sites on your mobile device that are currently open on your PC, install add-ons and save pages as PDFs.

STEP Open Firefox and you’ll

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see what Mozilla calls the Awesome Screen. You’ll see the sites you visit most shown first, followed by tabs from previous browsing sessions, add-on suggestions and finally tabs on your desktop computer (see Step 2). Enter a search term or address in the ‘Enter Search or Address’ box 1 , and suggestions will appear as you type. To return to the Awesome Screen, type about:home in this box and tap Go. Tap the second icon from the right to view your open tabs 2 . Tap a particular tab to open it.

STEP You can share

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bookmarks, passwords and open tabs between your mobile device and desktop computer using Firefox Sync. Launch Firefox on your PC. Click the top-left orange Firefox button, then Set Up Sync. Click ‘Create a New Account’. Fill out the requested details using the default server. After accepting the terms and conditions click Next and then Close. On your mobile device, tap the menu icon at the top right and then Settings. Tap Sync and three code numbers will appear. Leave them onscreen or make a note of them.

STEP Return to your desktop computer. Click the

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Firefox button, then Options. Click the Sync tab, then ‘Pair a Device’. Enter the three code numbers from your mobile device in the three boxes and click Next. Firefox on your Android device will automatically exit the Sync wizard as the PC connects to it. Scroll to the bottom of the Awesome Screen to find your desktop computer’s open tabs. Click the Firefox button, then Sync Now on your desktop computer to copy your settings to the Firefox servers and then your device.

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Workshops STEP To fine tune what exactly is shared with your mobile device,

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click the Firefox button, then Options and the Sync tab. You may wish to untick Password if you don’t want to risk anyone getting access to your online accounts if your phone is lost or stolen. You can use the Manage Account menu to recover your password should you forget it and to check how much of your Firefox Sync quota you have used. Every user gets 25MB. That may not sound like very much, but the information you store uses very little space, so it should be plenty.

STEP You can improve Firefox for Android by installing add-ons. Some of the most

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useful block adverts. To use Adblock Plus, our favourite ad-blocking service, scroll down the Awesome Screen and tap ‘Browse all Firefox add-ons’. Tap the search box 1 and type adblock plus. Tap the result and then the green ‘Add to Firefox’ button. Tap Install to complete the process. You can find a complete list of Firefox for Android add-ons at www.snipca.com/9985.

STEP Protect your privacy when using Firefox for Android with private tabs

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and the Do Not Track message. This message is sent to websites to tell them not to record details about your visit. Tap the top-right menu, then Settings. Scroll down and tap Tracking, then ‘Tell sites that I do not want to be tracked’. If you’re worried about your browsing history being left on the device, tap the menu icon, then New Private Tab. This latest version lets you have a mixture of private and ordinary tabs open at the same time.

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STEP You can save web pages as PDF files, which is great if

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you want to read them offline or share them with friends. Tap the top-right menu icon, Tools, then ‘Save as PDF’ 1 . To open the PDF file, tap the menu icon again, Tools, then Downloads. To read a PDF, tap it, then choose which app to open it with. If you don’t have one, download Adobe Reader from www.snipca.com/9982. The PDFs are saved to the download folder on your phone’s SD card. O

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Read ebooks on any device What you need: XP,Vista,7 or 8; Android or iOS Time required: 20 minutes

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hen you buy a Kindle ebook, there’s no limit to where you can read it because the Kindle software can be installed on just about every device you can think of for free, including Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone

devices as well as Windows and Mac OS X. Go to www.snipca. com/10064 for a full list of links. The recently updated Android app makes it easier to find books downloaded to other devices and get book samples.

STEP Adding ebooks to your Kindle account is best

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done on a Desktop computer because you can search for titles and authors more easily. Log on to www.amazon.co.uk, move the mouse over ‘Shop by Department’ on the left, then Kindle and click Kindle Books. When you have found your book, choose the device that you want the book to appear on first in the ‘Deliver to’ menu on the right 1 . Click the ‘Buy now with 1-Click’ button 2 . The confirmation page has a similar dropdown menu if you want to send the ebook to another device.

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STEP A new tool in the latest version of the Kindle App for

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Android shows all the books on your Amazon account – if they’re not on the device, they’ll be stored online. Start the Kindle app, tap the top-left icon with three vertical lines 1 and tap the All Items option. Books on your device have a tick icon. Tap a book without a tick 2 to download it to your device (this hardly takes any time at all). Tap it to start reading from where you left off on other devices.

STEP Return to

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your desktop computer. Click the Firefox button, then Options. Click the Sync tab, then ‘Pair a Device’. Enter the three code numbers from your mobile device in the three boxes and click Next. Firefox on your Android device will automatically exit the Sync wizard as the PC connects to it. Scroll to the bottom of the Awesome Screen to find your desktop computer’s open tabs. Click the Firefox button, then Sync Now on your desktop computer to copy your settings to the Firefox servers and then your device.

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Workshops 1

1

2

STEP You can read your books on a computer without

STEP Add books and other documents to your Kindle devices

installing extra software through the Kindle Cloud Reader website for Chrome, Safari and Firefox (but not IE). Go to https://read.amazon.com and sign in with your Amazon account. Click Allow when asked to store information for offline use if you want to read your books offline. In Chrome, right-click a book and click Download & Pin Book 1 . Use the arrow keys to turn pages and move the mouse to the top or bottom of the page to see more options, including font selection.

and apps with the special email addresses that Amazon creates for you. These can be used to add books from manybooks.net, for example, which has hundreds of free books. To discover the email address, log in to Amazon, move the mouse over Your Account and click Manage Your Kindle. Click Personal Document Settings 1 to see the email addresses for your different devices 2 . You can email books and documents in the official Kindle format (.mobi or .azw), and as Word files, webpages and PDFs.

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STEP You can

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1

STEP If you read ebooks on Windows or iOS, you can

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use the new shared highlights tool in the Kindle for PC software (snipca.com/10112) to discover passages that other people have found interesting. These are underlined with a dashed grey line. A number shows how many people have highlighted the section 1 .

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save web pages as PDF files, which is great if you want to read them offline or share them with friends. Tap the topright menu icon, Tools, then ‘Save as PDF’ 1 . To open the PDF file, tap the menu icon again, Tools, then Downloads. To read a PDF, tap it, then choose which app to open it with. If you don’t have one, download Adobe Reader from www. snipca.com/9982. The PDFs are saved to the download folder on your phone’s SD card. O

Track fundraising progress with a free Excel template What you need: Excel 2010/2013 Time Required: 30 minutes

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he bottom line of any fundraising event is to raise more money than you spend. And you’ll want to praise your star fundraiser. The free Fundraiser template (www.snipca.com/9967) from Microsoft does all this for you and demonstrates some of the features that

were introduced in Excel 2010, including range markers and the Slicers tool that quickly filters information. To use the Pounds symbol in the workbook, select cells with currency information and click the Currency icon in the Numbers section of the Ribbon Home tab.

STEP Enter the information about your event using the two

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sheets Lists and ‘Revenue and Expenses’. Use Lists to record the different activities, expenses and then people involved. Notice the small right-angled marker that appears at the bottom of each list 1 . It will move automatically as you enter new items to the list. Add money going out and coming into the ‘Revenue and Expenses’ sheet. Use Tab to move to the next cell (even at the end of a line) and a dropdown menu icon will appear. Click this icon and choose from the items entered in the Lists sheet 2 .

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STEP Click the Event Overview tab and change the Event Goal

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figure to your goal. The light-green section of the pie chart shows how close you are to your goal. After you reach the target, the Amount To Goal section will show how much money has been raised exceeding your goal. Make a profit more obvious by adding some conditional formatting to the ‘Amount to goal’ figure. Click Cell C11 1 and then the Home tab in the Ribbon. Click Conditional Formatting 2 and then Less Than. Type 0 in the left-hand box and select ‘Green File with Dark Green Text’ in the menu on the right. Click OK. To highlight a shortfall, repeat this but select Greater Than and a red colour scheme instead.

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STEP Use the two coloured boxes below the Pie chart to

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3 2 1

summarise the income and expenditure tables by person and/or category. To show the amount of money raised by raffle tickets, click Raffle Tickets in the Source list 1 . Refine the list even further by clicking a name to the left 2 . Click the icon above the scroll bar to clear your selection and expand the list below 3 . The Income and Expenditure sections are independent of each other so you can filter each separately. This is helpful when checking if a person or activity has raised more money than they spent. O

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Handy hints and tips from your fellow readers

Readers’ Tips

Email us your tips: [email protected]

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT T

Fix shutdown problems in Windows 8

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indows 8 starts up very quickly because the normal shutdown option works more like hibernating a laptop – previous versions of Windows spent a lot of time checking for new hardware. This certainly saves time, but did cause problems with my network card. I had to restart every time I switched my computer on after every shutdown, which wasted a lot of time. The solution is to disable the new startup process. Go to the Start Screen and type power options. Click Settings, Power Options, ‘Choose what the power buttons do’ and then ‘Change settings that are currently unavailable’. Deselect the ‘Turn on fast startup (recommended)’ option and then click ‘Save changes’. William Ball

The winner of every Tip of the Fortnight wins this exclusive Computeractive mug! DNS services Get the most reliable DNS service possible

libreoffice More words, less typing

An alternative DNS service from the likes of Google and OpenDNS can improve performance and security. For the most reliable service, you can use both at the same time so it doesn’t matter if one stops working. Click the Start button, type network and sharing and press Enter. Click the link for your network connection. This will be Local Area Connection or Wireless Network Connect depending on whether you use a wired or wireless connection. Click Properties in the window that appears, scroll down and double-click Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4). Select ‘Use the following DNS server addresses’. Type 8.8.8.8 in the top box for Google and 208.67.222.222 for OpenDNS in the second box. Click OK twice, then Close to save the settings. Barry Deacon

LibreOffice has a word-completion tool that reduces the amount of typing you have to do. Click the Tools menu, then AutoCorrect. Click the Word Completion tab and select ‘Enable word completion’ and ‘Append space’. Choose the Accept key. Enter is the default choice but you can also choose the Right arrow, Tab or Space key. Click OK. LibreOffice makes suggestions in a small hint box that appears as you type. It learns and stores the words you type, so it might not work immediately, but can save you time once it’s stored enough words. Peter Beard windows 8 store Reinstall default Windows 8 apps

Raspberry Pi Use a better browser If you’re frustrated by the rather basic web browser that comes with Rasbpian on the Raspberry Pi, there are alternative versions of Chrome (called Chromium) and Firefox (called

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Ice Weasel) which work better with the latest web technologies. Start Raspbian and double-click the LXTerminal icon on the Desktop. Update your Raspberry Pi by typing sudo apt-get update then press enter. Type sudo apt-get upgrade and press Enter. Press Y, then Enter to confirm the updates. Install the Microsoft Core fonts by typing sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefontsinstaller and press Enter. Press Y, then Enter to confirm installation. When the fonts have installed, type sudo apt-get install chromiumbrowser, press Enter, then Y and then Enter. To install Ice Weasel, type sudo apt-get install iceweasel, press Y, then Enter. To start the browser, click the Raspbian button, Internet and then the browser you want. Dan Percival

I removed the Windows 8 Start Screen tile for the Mail app and then changed my mind. The quickest way to find uninstalled apps is to right-click a blank bit of the Windows Store screen, then click ‘Your apps’ in the top green bar. A list of uninstalled apps appears that also includes apps installed on other PCs linked to your Microsoft account. Select an app then click Install. Heather Castell

Phone and Tablet Tips IOS

Copy media without syncing Sometimes you want to copy videos to an iOS device without having to go through a complete iTunes sync, because this can delete content from your device. Click the iPad (or iPhone) button at the top right of the iTunes window. Scroll down the Summary page and select the ‘Manually manage music and videos’ option at the bottom. Click the On This iPad button in the top bar, then Films in the left-hand column. Drag and drop the video file from a Windows Explorer window onto the main part of the iTunes window. The video will now be copied to the iPad. You can see the transfer progress at the top of the iTunes window. Make sure that this progress bar has finished before unplugging your iPad. ANDROID

Get smartphone updates on your Chrome browser Krome (krome.mobi), which is an Android app and Chrome add-on, displays notifications from your smartphone on your computer and lets you type text-message responses faster for only

Best New Apps AVG Privacy Fix Free Android www.snipca.com/9990 iOS www.snipca.com/9992 This app scans your Facebook and Google accounts, and your browser to flag up any privacy problems. If Facebook tracks you when you visit other websites, for example, then you can quickly change the relevant setting. There’s a Desktop version at www.privacyfix.com.

Brilliant things to do on your device

50p. It’s even better than the AirDroid app (see Workshop, Issue 398) because it works over the internet, so your PC and phone don’t have to be on the same network. Once you’ve installed the app (which costs 50p) and add-on, click the Chrome Launcher, then Krome on your PC (you’ll need Chrome 28 or higher installed). Then open the Krome app on your phone. You’ll need to grant a number of permissions at this point. Tap Open Accessibility Settings and enable the Krome service. Return to the Krome app. Tap Next twice and type the code shown in the Krome window on your computer. Once the code has been entered the screen on the Android device will update automatically. The first time the Krome app starts on your phone, it may suggest blocking ‘spamming’ apps. Check the apps it’s offering to block carefully. These are usually based on how many updates an app makes, so it may accidentally suggest blocking Messages or Google Play updates. Tap Cancel on this screen. Tap Installed Apps to adjust which app notifications are shown by Krome. Krome sends information over the internet, so it’s a good idea to encrypt the

information. Tap Open Krome Settings, then tap ‘Encrypt Data (beta)’. Enter a password – this will be used to scramble your information. Click the cog icon in the Krome window on the Desktop, type the password, and click Save. Remove this password if the text in SMS messages doesn’t look right. Whenever a message arrives a pop-up notification will appear on your Desktop. Click Reply to type a return message on your computer. If you don’t manage to read the message before it disappears, the Krome icon in the Notification Area will turn blue to show there are unread messages waiting. Right-click this icon to disable notifications for an hour or a day if you don’t want to be disturbed.

What you should install this fortnight Digg Free Android www. snipca.com/9996 iOS www.snipca. com/9997 Interesting articles and websites can often get hidden among the general white noise of the internet, but Digg makes finding them easy. Recently relaunched, Digg curates a list of articles from across the web, which are then voted on by readers to show their popularity. The app is a simple way to read loads of great articles.

Google Keep Free Android www.snipca.com/9998 This updated app’s new streamlined interface makes it easier to add notes and set reminders. You can also now add time and location reminders for tasks. Cleverly, Keep can use the GPS in your phone or tablet to remind you of something when you reach a specific location.

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IOS

Stop unwanted screen rotation Normally the automatic screen rotation in iOS is very useful, but there are times when you want to fix the screen in place. It’s possible to assign the mute slider on the side of your phone or tablet to this function. To do this, tap Settings, then General. Scroll down to the section ‘Use Side Switch to’, then select Lock Rotation. You’ll see a different icon when you slide the switch and a small icon will appear next to the battery.

and within reach of your thumbs. Tap and hold the keyboard button again, then tap ‘Dock and Merge’ to return the keyboard to its original position. If you want to keep the keyboards at the bottom of the screen, touch it with two fingers and then swipe them away from each other horizontally. Reverse the motion to join the keyboards together. ANDROID

Get a better calculator The calculator that comes with Android devices is useful for quick sums but rather limited for anything else. The free CyanogenMod Calculator (www.snipca. com/10099) keeps the simple interface of the default calculator but adds a lot of useful extra functions, including graphing

tools and support for array calculations with matrices. You can find the extra pages of tools by swiping left or right. Once you’ve installed the calculator, which is only 848KB, tap the top-left menu icon to disable the pages you don’t need. The Advanced panel includes buttons for trigonometry functions and parentheses that ensure different parts of calculations are done in the correct order. If you like the app and want to give something to the developers, buy the version that costs £1.

Games With Kids What to play together on your phone and tablet AGES 05 IPAD

Make typing easier when holding your iPad Typing on an iPad while you’re holding it can be very awkward. The Split Keyboard tool makes it much less frustrating because you can type with just your thumbs. Once the keyboard appears, tap and hold the bottom-left keyboard icon until a menu appears. Tap the Split option and two half-keyboards will appear, one on each side of the screen

Pet Spa & Salon Free www.snipca.com/10098 There’s nothing quite like looking after pets when it doesn’t involve mess. Pet Spa & Salon lets children care for four cute animals: a cat, a dog, a bear and a lion cub. Once you clean the animals, dress them in different outfits. The results can be saved to your SD card or emailed. AGES 610

Wild Time Free www.projectwildthing.com This app for Android and iOS provides lots of outdoor activities suitable for children. They’re organised by the time required, from short 10-minute activities to projects requiring half a day. The instructions are clear and offer useful guidance without being too rigid. AGES 1116

Chess Time Free www.hapticappsllc.com/site Chess Time lets you play against real people, by specific invitation or against anyone who happens to be looking for a match. The graphics are simple but look good on all screen sizes and it shows allowable moves. There is real-time chat, hence the minimum age of 13.

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Make Windows Better

Clever tips for every version

XP

XP, VISTA, 7 AND 8

Search for programs and

Make your PC faster and quieter

documents If you’re envious of the search box in the Start Menus of Windows Vista and 7, there’s an excellent alternative called Launchy that you can download from www.launchy.net. Once you’ve installed it, press Ctrl+Space to bring up the Launchy window. Start typing and it will display possible matches from programs and documents. You can also use it as a replacement for the Windows calculator to provide solutions to sums. To adjust the Launchy settings, press Ctrl+Space, then click the cog icon. The Launchy options window lets you change how many suggestions are shown as you type, as well as how transparent the Launchy window is. Click the Skins tab to choose a different look. In the Catalog tab you can add further folders in the search for your documents. You can add extra features to Launchy by installing plugins from www.launchy.net/plugins.php.

The various power plans that you can enable in Windows aren’t just there for the sake of laptop-owners wanting to squeeze a little more life from their battery. If you use them correctly they can make your computer faster or quieter, but not both at the same time. Enabling ‘High performance’ mode stops Windows from slowing down your processor when it thinks it isn’t needed. Slowing your processor by selecting ‘Power saver’ is fine if you’re typing an email, but editing photos or videos requires sudden bursts of activity that

WINDOWS 8.1

Pin programs to your Start Screen After upgrading to Windows 8.1 from Windows 8, you’ll realise that none of your Desktop programs appear on the Start Screen anymore, only your apps. You can find your programs by clicking the small down arrow at the bottom left of the Start Screen where they are arranged in alphabetical order and by sections, like the old Start Menu. You can add these shortcuts to the main Start Screen, making them quicker to find. Right-click as

many shortcuts in the second Start Screen page as you want to add, then click the ‘Pin to Start’ icon that appears in the taskbar at the bottom.

will otherwise be delayed. The ‘Power saver’ setting will reduce the noise from your PC’s fans as less heat will be generated. Click the Start button (or press the Windows keys in Windows 8), type power options, then press Enter. Choose one of the power plans on offer and close the window. If you’re using a laptop, bear in mind that the setting will only apply to whatever the laptop’s power status is when you set it. This means that you can set ‘High performance’ when the power cable is connected and ‘Power saver’ when it isn’t, and Windows will switch between them automatically. Using ‘High performance’ mode will mean that the battery will take longer to recharge. You can find these options in Windows XP in the Control Panel. Double-click Power Options, then choose the Power Schemes tab. Choose Always On for the best possible performance or Max Battery to keep your PC quiet.

XP, VISTA, 7 AND 8

VISTA AND 7

Get weather updates on your

Improve your dual-screen

Desktop

wallpapers p p

The free YoWindow software for Windows (yowindow.com) is a great way to keep an eye on the weather. You can leave it running in the background behind other programs and it’ll also work as your screensaver. Make sure you select the Custom installation option, even though it’ll be greyed out, to avoid installing unwanted software at the same time. When it’s finished installing, you’ll see an icon that shows the current temperature where you are in the notification Window. Click this icon to open the full YoWindow view, which includes a three-day forecast and more information. Click the Location menu to change the locality of the weather you’re monitoring. Click Program, then ‘Set YoWindows as ScreenSaver’ to view updates when your computer is idle.

It’s quite common to have two monitors connected to a PC that are different sizes. If the smaller monitor is selected as the main display, the larger monitor will have black bars around some or all of the edges of the wallpaper. To fix this problem, set the larger monitor as your PC’s main display. Right-click the Desktop, then click ‘Screen resolution’. Click your larger monitor and select the option ‘Make this my main display’. This may move your Taskbar and Start button to the larger monitor. If you want to return these items to their original positions, click an empty part of the Taskbar and drag it to the correct position. If it doesn’t move, it may mean it’s locked. Right-click an empty area, then click ‘Lock the taskbar’ to remove the tick and try again.

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Make Office Better

Expert tips for every program

OUTLOOK

Transfer contact details There’s an easy way to back up your contacts from Outlook and import them into a new version or the same version on a different computer. Click Contacts (or People in Office 2013), then the File menu (or the Office Orb in Office 2007) and then ‘Import and Export’. Select ‘Export to a file’, click Next, then select Comma Separated Values (Windows) and click Next. Select Contacts if you’re asked where to export from and click Next again. Type a name for the file, click Browse, choose a location and click OK. Click Next, then Finish. To import these contacts, open your new

WORD

Customise list numbering There’s no reason why you have to start a numbered list at 1. It’s simple to tell Word to start from a different number. Start your list and select the items. Click the down arrow on the numbered list icon in the Paragraph section of the Home tab in the Ribbon. Click Set Numbering Value, then enter the number you want to start from in the ‘Set value to’ box. Click OK and your list will be updated to start from the new number.

version of Outlook, select People or Contacts, click File and then Import and Export (you’ll find it in the ‘Open & Export’ section in Outlook 2013). Leave ‘Import from another program or file’ selected and click Next. Click Next to leave Comma Separated Values selected. Click Browse to find and open your contacts file. Choose what action to take with any duplicate entries (you can replace existing contacts, create as duplicates or ignore), then click Next. Leave Contacts selected as the destination, click Next, then Finish to import your contacts.

the shape you want your slides to be. Click the Design Ribbon tab in PowerPoint and then the left Page Setup icon in PowerPoint 2007 and 2010. Select the correct presentation shape in the dropdown menu. There are options for 4:3 monitors as well as both 16:9 and 16:10 widescreen monitors. There are also options for printed slides. The Page Setup icon is on the right in PowerPoint 2013 and offers a choice between Standard and Widescreen. Click Custom Slide Size to choose from one of the other options. EXCEL

Search entire workbooks

POWERPOINT

Optimise the shape of slides If you’ve created a PowerPoint presentation on a computer with a widescreen monitor to show on a 4:3 aspect ratio projector, you might find that the slides either have black bars or appear distorted. The solution is to specify

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Find cells in Excel workbook with multiple sheets more quickly by selecting all the sheets so they are included in the search at the same time. Right-click one of the sheets (it doesn’t matter which) and then click Select All Sheets. All the sheet tabs should now change colour. Press Ctrl+F to show the ‘Find and Replace’ window. Type what you are looking but don’t press Enter or click Find – click Find All instead. A list of all the matches will appear below. This list will show the sheet containing the reference you were looking for, the cell address and the exact contents of this cell. Click an entry to jump to its position in the workbook without closing the ‘Find and Replace’ window. Click the Close button when you have found the cell you want. The Find window can also be used to

search for text inside comments included in the Workbook. Click the Options button and select Comments in the ‘Look in’ dropdown menu. OFFICE

Make fonts less blurry Many Office 2013 users have reported their fonts look ‘blurry’ or indistinct. This only seems to be the case in Windows 8 with Office and Internet Explorer on the Desktop – other programs appear to be unaffected. This happens because Microsoft has disabled Clear Type – a technology that improves fonts on LCD monitors, but doesn’t work so well on tablets. It’s possible to improve the look of fonts by disabling hardware acceleration. Click the File button, then Open. Click Advanced on the left and scroll down the right-hand side of the window to the Display section. Select the option ‘Disable hardware graphics acceleration’, then click OK. Increasing the zoom level can also make a dramatic improvement, although you won’t be able to fit as much onscreen.

Secret Tips For…

Defraggler Schedule a defrag You don’t need to remember to defrag your PC because Defraggler (www.piriform.com/ defraggler) can do it automatically. Click Settings, Schedule, select the Drive to defrag and tick the box next to ‘Schedule defragmentation for the chosen volume’. Under Period select how often you want the drive to be defragged – weekly and monthly are ideal – then enter a time and day when your PC would ordinarily be on. For ‘Defrag type’ select Full, then click OK. Repeat for any other drives that need regular defragging.

Prevent needless defragging You can tweak the Defraggler Schedule tool so it doesn’t inconvenience you. Select ‘Apply additional conditions’ in the Schedule window and then click Define. These settings let you put a time limit on the defrag task, prevent it from running if your laptop is on battery power or ignore the task if the drive doesn’t require defragmentation. Click OK to finish.

Defrag files before Windows starts For the best possible performance boost, use Defraggler’s Boot Time Defrag tool.

Monitor your hard drive’s health and performance Exclude, Add, select Drive or Folder, click Browse, select the backup disk or SSD, click OK and OK again, then OK for a third time to make the changes.

Defrag a specific file or folder

Exclude SSDs and backup drives to speed up defragging and prevent damage

This can defrag system and security files that are locked once Windows has loaded. Click Boot Time Defrag and select Run Once. Click Yes to reboot the computer and start the task.

Don’t scan certain drives There’s no need to defragment solid-state drives (SSD). Fragmented files don’t affect their performance and defragging SSDs will actually shorten their lifespan. Drives used for backups can also be ignored because their infrequent use means performance isn’t critical. To exclude certain drives, click Settings, Options,

Check the health of your drive Click the Health tab to get useful information about the condition of your hard drive. The information comes from a technology called SMART (Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology). Don’t worry if the numbers on the right are technobabble so long as Defraggler displays the health as good. You should also check the temperature - anything over 50 degrees suggests that your PC needs better cooling. To check for errors with the actual contents of the drive, click Action, Advanced and ‘Check Drive for Give your PC a medical using Defraggler’s Errors’. health tab

You can right-click any file or folder in Windows Explorer, select Defraggler then Check Fragmentation or Defrag (the former is good for finding out if certain files and folders need defragging). If you didn’t enable the Windows Explorer option during installation, you can defrag files and folders in Defraggler instead. To do this, click Action, then Defrag Folder or Defrag File. Choose the file or folder and click OK. You can also select files by ticking the left-hand box in the File List after a drive has been analysed.

Decipher the drive map The drive map that appears after the disk is analysed shows fragmented files as red. Lots of red may not mean the drive is badly fragmented – it might just be one very large file in a couple of fragments. Click the ‘File list’ tab at the bottom, then the Fragments heading to view a list of files sorted by the degree of fragmentation. The latest version of Defraggler lets you sort by file type and date modified, making it easy to find huge video files. Alternatively, click one of the coloured squares in the drive map to find out more information about the file it represents.

The File List reveals if you have lots of fragmented files

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Problems Solved PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT

Why can’t I launch Group Policy Editor? I was pleased to see the workshop earlier about using the Local Group Policy Editor tool to disable the Windows 8 lock screen. It sounded a bit too technical for me so I let sleeping dogs lie and put up with the inconvenience. However, recently I decided that I’ve had enough and had a go, being very careful to follow the instructions to the letter. Unfortunately, it seems my version of Windows 8 does not have Local Group Policy Editor that will run on my laptop. I searched for ‘gpedit.msc’ – the file name mentioned in Issue 393 – and I found it in four locations on my computer, but none would launch. My version of Windows 8 is not the Professional edition. Is there anything I can do? Tony Ingle

Q

that you back up your PC. If you wish to proceed, from the Start screen, type regedit, then press Enter. If the User Account Control (UAC) dialogue box appears, click Yes to proceed – the Registry Editor window will appear. In the Registry Editor window, click the arrows in the left-hand navigation pane to move down to this key: HKEY_ LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\ Microsoft\Windows. Now look for the Personalization key within this. If it’s there, click to select it. If not, right-click the Windows key, from the pop-up menu, choose New, then Key. Type Personalization and press Enter. Now click to select the Personalization key and, in the right-hand pane, right-click and choose New, then ‘DWORD (32-bit) Value’. Name this new value ‘NoLockScreen’ and press Enter. Finally, double-click the NoLockScreen value, type ‘1’ into the ‘Value data’ field and click OK.

Local Group Policy Editor is supplied only with Professional (or better) editions of Windows. However, as you managed to find the program file on your laptop, our guess is that it’s been upgraded from a version of Windows that included the tool. Regardless, there’s no way to launch Local Group Policy Editor on a non-Professional edition of Windows – it simply won’t work, as you’ve discovered. So, if you want to follow the method published in Issue 393 then you’ll need to Disable the Windows 8 lock screen by editing the Registry, upgrade your version of if you don’t have Local Group Policy Editor Windows 8. However, there’s still a way to achieve That’s the job done. To test your work, what you want without help from Local close the Registry Editor and restart Group Policy Editor. Be warned, though, Windows. If you wish later to re-enable that it involves manually editing the the lock screen then repeat these steps, Windows Registry. As such, it’s both setting the NoLockScreen value to ‘0’ by more complicated and riskier – so deleting the value entirely. To do this, tap before beginning we’d advise strongly the Delete key, then click Yes to confirm.

A

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Why does my iPhone fail to back up? I have an iPhone 5 that, up until recently, used to back up just fine to iTunes on my Windows 7 PC. Now, for whatever reason, whenever I try to back up in this way, a message is displayed that says: ‘iTunes could not backup iPhone because the iPhone is disconnected’. I can assure you that it hasn’t been disconnected. Suspecting that my cable might be faulty, I borrowed another from a friend but the problem persisted. I’m confident that nothing has changed on the PC (I haven’t installed anything new in months, other than Windows Updates). I regularly try new apps on my iPhone, but everything on that seems to work just fine. Any ideas? Ajit Raje

Q

By chance, a couple of people on Computeractive have also encountered this problem. The culprit is an app called iZip, but we’re not exactly sure why. With iZip installed, certain combinations of iOS versions and iTunes versions cause this particular problem. We’re guessing that when you downloaded a new app on your iPhone you’ve also installed iZip. Until this bug is fixed by Apple or iZip’s developer, the answer is to remove iZip (and then, if you still want it, reinstall it after backing up). To do this, simply press and hold any app icon until they all start to wobble, and then tap the cross at the iZip icon’s top left. Tap Delete to confirm.

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Remove the iZip app from your iPhone if you’re having problems backing up to iTunes

Our experts solve all your tech problems Email us your problem and we’ll try to help: [email protected]

Has my old website been hacked? I run a local-history website. I started it on free web space provided by my internet service provider. But when it grew too large I transferred it to a commercial paid-for service. I left the old website up and running, as it was still attracting visitors, and used it to redirect visitors to the new site. Recently, I visited my old site to find a number of hyperlinks which lead to adverts. Does this mean my site was accessed illegally? And surely it can’t be used for advertising without my consent? Gordon Adams

Q

There are various possible causes here. Of course, it’s possible for a web designer to build a website with built-in hyperlinks to adverts but as you’re the designer of this particular website – and have no knowledge of doing this – we can discount this. It’s also possible that your website has been hacked to include these links but frankly

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Get rid of unwanted add-ons by disabling any related extensions in your browser settings

we think this is unlikely, not least because there are easier and more effective ways for ne’er-do-wells to achieve much the same thing – as we’ll explain. Another possibility is that the provider of the web service automatically scans published websites for certain keywords and turns them into advert-laden hyperlinks before the content is displayed to visitors. This kind of behaviour tends to

be the preserve of providers of free web space – it’s a way of generating revenue from the websites they host for free. If your website has been dormant for a while, it’s possible the provider has changed its terms and conditions in the meantime. Finally, you may have inadvertently installed an unwanted browser add-on along with a program. Text Enhance, for example, is just one among many browser hijackers that produces exactly the symptoms you describe. It can be disabled via the ‘Uninstall a program’ command in Control Panel, though you’ll also need to disable any related browser add-ons. In Internet Explorer, for example, click the cog icon at the top right then choose ‘Manage add-ons’. Now choose the ‘Toolbars and Extensions’ link on the left, right-click the Text Enhance entry and choose Disable.

Why can’t I edit a .docx file in Google Docs? Someone sent me a .docx file, which they said was from Microsoft Word 2010. I don’t have Microsoft Office installed, but they said I should be able to open it in Google Docs. I successfully uploaded the file to my Google Drive and I was then able to open and read the document in Google Docs. However, when I tried to edit it I couldn’t. Whatever I did or wherever I clicked, there seemed to be no way to change the document. The person who sent me the file assured me that it wasn’t locked down in any way. I can normally create and edit new documents with Google Docs without any problem, so what am I doing wrong here? Linda Hall

Q

Edit Word documents in Google Drive by opening the documents with Google Docs

The default option for Microsoft Office files uploaded to Google Drive is for them to be opened for viewing only, in the Google Drive Viewer tool – that explains why you can’t edit the document. However, the default option for files created with Google Docs is for them to open in Google Docs – and that explains

A

why you can edit Google Docs files. Fortunately, the solution is very simple. Once you’ve uploaded the document, right-click it then go to ‘Open with’, then Google Docs. Note that if you make changes after this, the document will be automatically saved as a Google Docs document. March 2014 Computer active

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Problems Solved Why won’t Freemake install on my Android tablet? I downloaded Freemake Video Downloader and copied it to my Android (Jelly Bean) tablet. However, for whatever reason it won’t install. Do you know why this is? And how can I get rid of the download? Trevor Tolson

Q

The answer to the first question is straightforward – Freemake Video Downloader is a program for PCs running the Windows operating system, not Android tablets. So, while your Android tablet gamely let you download the executable file, it has no idea what to do with it. There are various ways to delete unwanted stuff from an Android template. You can hook it up to a PC and browse the folders using Windows Explorer or, if the tablet’s manufacturer has included one, you can use a file-management app to remove it. Otherwise, visit the Google Play store and install a free Android app such as File Manager HD (www.snipca. com/9884) and use this to do the job. Launch the app then navigate to the Downloads folder, or SD\Downloads if your tablet saves to a memory card. Now tap and hold on the ‘FreemakeVideoDownloadSetup.exe’ file. Tap Delete, then OK.

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What is this funny icon in some websites? I use Chrome as my preferred web browser and Gmail as my preferred email tool. Recently when visiting Gmail I noticed a funny little icon appear in the Chrome search bar, on the Gmail home page: it looked like two interwoven diamonds. I’ve not noticed this before. What is it? And should I be worried about it? Alison Cornwell

Q

The icon indicates that Chrome wants to install ‘service handler’ for the current website. That sounds pretty complicated but all it means is that, if you agree, the website in question will be registered as the default ‘handler’ for certain links. Gmail, for example, can be registered as the default service handler for links that are email addresses – so when you click an email address link on a website, Gmail will launch in a new tab (rather than Microsoft Outlook, for example). Use Chrome’s settings to set your email provider as

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the default handler of email links on webpages

Is it safe to clear out my DNS cache automatically? You have earlier recommended clearing out the DNS cache and explained how to do this. I’ve noticed that in CCleaner there’s an option to do this by merely ticking a box. Is this a safe way to clear out the cache? If so, would it be a good idea to leave the box ticked so that the DNS cache is cleared out each time CCleaner is used? In my case that would be once a week. Bryan Hewitt

Q

There are various good reasons for clearing your computer’s DNS cache. These include to beef up your privacy and refreshing the cache so that its information is bang up

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Use Android’s free app File Manager HD to remove unwanted downloads

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If you want Gmail to be registered as the default service handler for email links all you need to do is click the icon, select the Use Gmail radio button and then click Done. If you later change your mind, click Chrome’s Menu button (three horizontal lines, top right), then choose Settings followed by ‘Show advanced settings’. Next, click ‘Content settings’ under the Privacy heading followed by ‘Manage handlers’ under Handlers. Now you can use the ‘Protocol handlers’ dialogue box to manage the various service handlers.

Tick the DNS Cache box in CCleaner to clear out the cache every time you use the program

to date. However, performance isn’t the strongest argument: while clearing the cache will remove out-of-date web links and boost performance for these specific websites, it isn’t something that needs to be done regularly – once every few months is more than sufficient. So yes, the CCleaner option is safe to use, but once a week is overkill.

How do I disable tabs in Gmail? It seems every time I log into Gmail these days something else has changed, mostly for the worse in my opinion. The latest update has resulted in a number of tabs appearing in my inbox labelled ‘Primary’, ‘Social’ and ‘Promotions’. I’m not sure what these are all about but my Facebook notifications are now directed to the Social tab. I find this deeply annoying – I’m capable of organising my own inbox and I fear that I’m now losing emails that would previously be shown in my inbox. I’ve had a look in Gmail’s Settings screen but I can’t find any way to disable or manage these tabs. What’s the purpose of these tabs? And is it possible to disable them? Louise Nelson

Q

Google has been busy reinventing or redesigning many of its most popular products and these Gmail tabs are the latest example. Their purpose, as you’ve already guessed, is to sort email automatically – social updates (Facebook, Twitter and so on) are automatically placed under the Social tab, while messages that Gmail considers adverts are directed to the Promotions tab. It’s possible to disable these tabs, but not in Settings. Instead, click the top-right cog icon and Manage your Gmail inbox tabs via the cog icon choose ‘Configure inbox’. In the ‘Select tabs to enable’ dialogue box, use the tick boxes to disable (or enable) the tabs as you see fit. If you want to go back to the old inbox, simply untick all the boxes. Click Save.

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How do I suspend Microsoft Security Essentials? Some Windows programs demand that I disable my antivirus software in order to install them. I use Microsoft Security Essentials but can find no way to disable it. Can you help? I also have Windows Defender installed. Is this surplus to requirements? Gene Wilroz

Q

Disabling Microsoft Essentials should only be done as a last resort, and it isn’t an easy procedure – though it is possible. In fact, for what you want to do, you just need to disable Essentials’ ‘Real-time protection’ feature. This is the part of Security Essentials that monitors for programs trying to do unwelcome things during installations. To do this, launch Security Essentials, click the Settings tab, then the ‘Real-time protection’ link in the left-hand navigation pane. Now untick the ‘Turn on real-time protection (recommended)’ box, then click the ‘Save changes’ button at the bottom. Install your program, then repeat these actions to re-enable ‘Real-time

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Turn off real-time protection in Microsoft Security Essentials to install Windows programs

protection’. As for Windows Defender, this tool is included with all recent consumer editions of Windows. Since Windows Vista, Defender has effectively been an integral part of the operating system. And as such, it cannot be uninstalled from Vista, 7 or 8. However, Windows Defender is automatically disabled when Security

Essentials is installed, so there’s nothing else for you to do. Windows XP users can uninstall Windows Defender via the usual method: go to Control Panel, then click ‘Add or Remove Programs’, find Windows Defender in the list, click to select, then click the adjacent Remove button and follow the prompts. March 2014 Computer active

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Problems Solved Where are my missing gigabytes? How do I set Details view as the default? Under My Computer there is a menu called View. It has a choice of several settings with a default setting (on my PC at least) of Tiles. This view takes up a lot of space, as do the Thumbnails and Icons options. I find Details the most useful, as it gives a clear listing of my files, with the bonus of being able to sort/rearrange. Instead of having to choose this view for each new folder I open, is there a method of applying this to all the folders on my drive in one go? Eric Davies

Q

Yes there is a way to do this. Launch Windows Explorer (hold down the Windows key + E) and navigate to any folder. Set this folder to Details view in the usual way (open the View menu and click Details). Next go to the Tools menu and select ‘Folder options’. In the Folder Options dialogue box, select the View tab and then click the ‘Apply to Folders’ button. Note that if the ‘Apply to Folders’ button is greyed out and therefore you can’t click it, you have probably navigated to a Windows 7 Library rather than to a folder. If this is the case, repeat the procedure and this time navigate to a folder, rather than a Library.

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Set the viewing options for all folders on your PC via the Tools menu

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I have an Acer Aspire 8920G which states within the specs that it has a 320GB hard disk drive. However, when I look at the drive in Windows Explorer, it informs me that I have 24.7GB remaining from a total hard disk capacity on the C drive of 144GB. Where is the missing 176GB? Mat Jansen

Q

of the C drive – this should be the missing 134GB. Right-click this and choose New Simple Volume. Work through the New Simple Volume wizard, leaving the ‘Simple volume size in MB’ figure as it is (it should be the same as the ‘Maximum disk space in MB’ figure above). Assign a drive letter (such as D) and click Next, select the option to format the drive and click Next, then Finish. Once the disk is formatted, it will appear as a new drive in Windows Explorer.

According to the 8902G’s manual, 10GB of the hard-disk space is reserved as a hidden recovery partition, but the rest should be available for you to use. We suspect that, for some reason, the remaining space is hidden in an ‘unallocated’ (unused) partition. To check whether this is the case, right-click Computer in the Start menu and select Manage. In the Computer Management window that appears, click to expand Storage and select Disk Management. In the lower section of the middle panel, look for a box labelled ‘unallocated’ to the right Locate and free up hidden disk-drive space with Windows

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Computer Management tool

What webcam should I buy for Skype? I would like to use a webcam on my computer to have Skype conversations with my relatives in Australia. I am running Windows 7 I’m aware that some people have problems with sound and audio when using Skype,

Q

HD webcams like Microsoft’s LifeCam HD-3000 are ideal for Skyping

so what should I bear in mind when buying one? Mike Humphreys The key issues when using Skype are image and sound quality, as well as internet-connection speed. Assuming you can get at least 2Mbps from your broadband connection then you should be fine – a fibre-optic connection is really not essential. As for the webcam, you should go for something with a high-definition (HD) camera and a built-in noise-cancelling microphone. This will ensure you’re sending high-quality video and sound to your relatives. Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000, for example, has both (www.snipca.com/9936). But remember, the person at the other end will also need good equipment.

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Why don’t your Snipca links work? In an earlier you recommended some Wi-Fi-finding tools that I found of interest. I typed the published links (www.snipca. com//9517 and www.snipca.com//9518) into the browser address bar and also via Google, but neither method worked and I couldn’t view the pages. Any suggestions? I use both a third-generation iPad and a Toshiba C660 laptop. Hugh Pritchard

Q

The problems readers sometimes have with snipca links (shortened URLs) is not with how they appear in the magazine, but with the way that they’re entered. For example, many people are in the habit of typing website addresses into a Google (or other) search bar. While this is not the foolproof method of visiting web addresses, it generally works because a Google search will usually find the page in question – and then a

A

single click takes the visitor to the desired page. In other words, people get used to this method working for most sites and then wonder why Snipca links Type our Snipca URLs into the website address bar in the correct format to don’t work. avoid problems However, Google searches for newly published Snipca links contained two forward slash (‘//’) symbols, will generally rather than the single forward slash (‘/’) fail, because the search engine generally required. If this is indeed how you typed won’t have indexed the links yet. The trick them, then the snipca (or any other URLs) is to ensure that you’re typing our links won’t work in the URL bar and nor would into the website address (URL) bar – not they be found by a Google search, for the the search bar. reasons explained. You say that you’ve tried both, but there In summary, the answer is to type was an additional clue contained within Snipca URLs, carefully, into the URL/ your email. We notice that the ‘nonwebsite address bar – not the Google working’ links that you sent to us (or other) search bar.

READERS TO THE RESCUE

Answer readers’ problems at forums.computeractive.co.uk

Does Windows 8 affect my broadband cap? I have a capped monthly broadband package but have been advised that Windows 8 is very dependent on the internet. For example, if I want to go on my PC to use Word or Excel, will I be online immediately (and therefore using up my broadband allowance)? I was under the impression that if I fired up my

Q

PC it was not connected to the internet until I actively clicked on the internet. However, I have not found a way to click off the internet in Windows 8. Is there a way? Jack100, Computeractive Forum If you’re using broadband, your internet connection is always on, regardless of the operating system you have installed. Windows 8, like its predecessors, has automatic access to the

A

Manage automatic downloads via Windows Control Panel

internet so that it can download and install security updates and so on. Automatic downloads can be turned off in the Control Panel (go to Windows Update under ‘System and Security’), but then you would miss the security updates – and this is not a good idea. You can set them to be offered but not installed, but you still need to download the data, so in that respect you haven’t saved on your broadband allowance. Many other programs also require automatic access for updates, especially antivirus software. However, most of the time the programs will not be downloading data, so your allowance will not be affected. Calimanco, Computeractive Forum

CORRIGENDUM In the February 2014 issue, on page no. 18, we have published a wrong image of Zebronics Tower Speakers, we regret the mistake. March 2014 Computer active

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Fast Fixes Sort out problems uploading, tagging and protecting your photos

Flickr Fix Flickr login problems Because Flickr is owned by Yahoo you usually need a Yahoo ID and email address to log in. Some people find their Yahoo email account login details won’t work with Flickr. If you’ve received a message in the past about merging your Flickr and Yahoo accounts, you may find Yahoo requires a different ID from the one you thought it wanted. To find out which ID Flickr requires, go to www.flickr.com/help/with/ login and click the ‘Help by Email’ link halfway down the page. Yahoo’s technical support should be able to resolve this problem for you.

Upload your photos in intervals Since May, when Yahoo announced 1TB of free storage for anyone with a Flickr account, the site’s servers have been somewhat inundated and you may have had problems uploading batches of photos to the site. Yahoo has set a 4GB- per-upload limit, so check you aren’t trying to upload batches that are larger. If you find you can only upload a few photos and the rest of the transfer process fails, try using an upload scheduler, such as the free program Loadlater (www.loadlater.com). This lets you schedule photo uploads in 10-minute intervals, so there’s less chance of them being rejected because the server is too busy. To use Loadlater, first sign into Flickr, then go to www.loadlater.com and click ‘sign in’ to connect it to your Flickr account. Click Choose File under Upload A

Single Photo and select your photo. Add a description and tag to the photo then click in the Date box next to ‘When to Upload’. Choose a time and day, then click Upload. You may need to change the timezone to at the top of the screen.

editing pane. Now click ‘Edit dates’ and choose a new one from the list, then click Save.

Fix Flickr app download errors Flickr is available as an app for iOS and Android, but some people have not been able to download photos from their Flickr account to their phone or tablet to view offline – or to get downloading to stop. On an iPhone or iPad you need to tap Settings in Flickr then ‘Save to Camera Roll’ to make your photos appear. In Android, you just need to type your account details. If permission to access your Flickr account is already activated, try uninstalling and reinstalling the Flickr app. The same advice applies if you’re using thirdparty tools such as Glimmr (www.snipca. If your photos don’t appear on your iOS device open the Flickr app, tap Settings then turn on ‘Save to Camera Roll’

com/10095) to view your Flickr photos on your device. There’s currently no built-in way to stop Flickr automatically fetching photos (and using up all your data allowance).

Make Flickr display photos in the right order by changing their date stamps

Stop other people using the photos in your account You can opt out of having your photos visible in galleries and in public searches at www.snipca.com/10102. You can also exclude your photos from Yahoo Image Search and from inclusion on Flickr-based apps that use its API. Click ‘Hide your photos from site-wide searches on flickr. com’ or ‘Hide your photos from searches on 3rd party sites that use the API, including Yahoo Image Search’. Usually, Flickr lets other people add photos to their Galleries as long as the original photographer is acknowledged or the photo has been made available for use under a Creative Commons licence (see options at www.flickr.com/ creativecommons). Click Remove to exclude your photos appearing in a Gallery, which is a set of Flickr photos that other people have in their top 18.

Make photos appear in the order you want them to

Use Loadlater to upload your photos in tenminute intervals

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Flickr shows photos on your Photostream in date order, starting with the most recent. If the photo doesn’t have a date stamp, Flickr will simply assign the date on which the photo was uploaded to the site. To make your photos appear in a different order you need to change their date stamps. To do this, click Organize and drag all the photos whose details you want to change on to the

Stop people using your photos in their apps by hiding them from the third-party searches

Jargon Buster 1080p Of the common types of highdefinition video, this is the best quality: 1920x1080 pixels. AAC Advanced Audio Coding. A type of music file. AIFF Audio Interchange File Format. A digital audio format often associated with Apple Mac computers. API Application Programming Interface. A system built into a program so that other programs can work with it. BMP Bitmap. An image file. Burst shooting A camera mode for taking pictures quickly. Common interface A technology used to access pay-per-view TV content. Component video A type of highquality video connection that uses three cables, plus two more for sound. Can carry high-definition video. Composite video A low-quality type of video connection that uses one cable for video. Normally colourcoded yellow. Defragmentation To reorganise data stored on a hard drive. Digital audio output A connection that allows a computer to output surround sound digitally so it can be processed by a decoder. DivX A popular type of compressed video file. DNS Domain Name System. A technology that associates PCs with their IP addresses. Dual core Two processors combined into a single chip. Exposure Compensation A feature that automatically tries to pick the correct exposure. EXE A program file designed to run in Windows. Named after the file

extension .exe. Fibre optic A technology that sends data as pulses of light via glass cables. FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec. A type of digital audio file that can be created from CD. Fps Frames per second. The speed at which the graphics of a game are refreshed. The higher the fps, the smoother the graphics will be. A low fps score can make gameplay frustrating. GIF Graphics Interchange Format. A type of image file often used on the web. Graphics card A component in a computer that produces the image shown on the monitor. H.264 A type of MPEG4 video that is used on Blu-ray discs. Hardware acceleration Using a graphics card to radically improve video and games performance. Hardware virtualisation Technologies for improving performance when running virtual computers. HDMI High definition media interface. Transmits HD video and audio signals. Integrated graphics chip A device that has a chip for processing graphics data built on to its motherboard, rather than having a separate graphics card. ISO The light sensitivity of a camera. Higher ISO numbers allow you to shoot without flash in darker situations. Keylogging Recording everything someone types, normally used to steal passwords.

of detail that can be recorded by a digital image. A one-megapixel image is made up of a million dots (pixels).

computer’s working area, used for data storage while the PC is switched on.

Micro SD card A small type of memory card. Can be converted to SD size using an adapter.

Registry A file integrated into Windows that stores information on all hardware and software installed on your PC.

Mirror A setting for showing the same picture on two monitors connected to the same PC. MKV Matroska. An open-source type of video file. MP4 A type of digital movie file often used for portable players. Nas Network-attached storage. A hard disk attached to a network that can be shared by other PCs.

Remote Code Execution When a hacker is able to start a program running on a remote computer. Resolution The amount of detail shown in an image, whether on screen or printed. Scart A standard connector for video and audio signals.

Network adapter A socket for connecting a PC to a network.

Sensor The part of the camera that captures each image. Equivalent to a piece of film on a film camera.

Noise Visible dust-like speckles that appear in some camera and TV images. In photos, they are caused by the camera’s own sensor.

Solid state drive Describes a device, such as an MP3 player or memory card, which has no internal moving parts.

Ogg Vorbis A free alternative to the MP3 standard for compressing digital audio.

TIFF Tagged Image File Format. A standard file format used to store graphics images.

Optical character recognition Software that converts a picture of text into editable text.

UPnP Universal Plug and Play. A standard for sharing media between computers and network devices.

Overclocking Making a CPU work faster to improve performance.

USB3 A faster version of the USB standard used to connect devices to a computer.

PCI-Express A faster version of PCI, used by graphics cards. PNG Portable Network Graphics. A format for images that shrinks file sizes. QoS A faster version of PCI, used by modern graphics cards.

M4A An audio format often used on mobile devices.

Quad core A computer that has four processors on a single chip, which allows it to operate faster than standard (single-core) computers.

Megapixel A measure of the amount

Ram Random-access memory. The

WAV file Also known as a Wave file and saved with a .wav extension. An audio file, used for recording music and other sounds to disk. White balance Adjusts the balance of colours in the image to produce more natural-looking images. Wizard A step-by-step process that helps you choose settings. WMV Windows Media Video. A Microsoft file format for video.

March 2014 Computer active

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The Final Straw This issue Stuart Andrews considers the chaos of. . .

Troublesome updates S

o, who’s regretting that iOS 7 update? Well, if you expected Apple to give you a new kind of iPad or iPhone experience, then you certainly got one. If you were lucky you just got apps that didn’t work as you remembered, messages that never reached their intended target and less reliable wireless connections than before. If you were unlucky, the new zooming and scrolling animations made you nauseous. I’ve seen plenty of software that has made me sick to my stomach, but only Apple could manage it so literally. Don’t get me wrong – I like iOS 7. It looks nice, clean and modern and works quite intuitively, like Windows 8 re-designed by Dyson. However, those who don’t like it have my sympathy. After all, you expect a software update to improve what you had before, not alter it radically, make the core functions unfamiliar and leave your stomach churning. If I took my car to the dealer for a service and got it back with the interior redone in pastel plastics and the handbrake concealed beneath the passenger seat I might feel a little peeved too. Still, at least iOS 7 left most of the devices it was installed on up and running. Last

November an update to Apple TV stopped it connecting to a number of wireless networks – a concern when you’re a wireless media-streaming device. In April, Microsoft had to fix an update for Windows 7 after it started crashing systems, while an August update heralded the return of the good old Blue Screen of Death. That same month Google’s Nexus 4 smartphone update left some devices overheating, failing to boot or struggling with reception. In June, Sony put out a PlayStation 3 update that turned some consoles into high-tech doorstops. Call me old-fashioned, but shouldn’t an update improve a product, not hinder or wreck it? I’m sure I’m not the only one to have installed an update on my PC, tablet or phone, only to find it feeling slower, or apps and features that no longer worked, or that battery life was now much worse. Remember that famous first principle of the doctor’s Hypocratic Oath: first, do no harm? Perhaps software developers could swear to something similar. It’s not just the problems that software updates cause that needle me, but also their timing. This week alone I’ve had one tablet, one games console and two PCs

STUART ANDREWS is Computeractive’s Mr Angry @SATAndrews

decide to install updates, and each time I was in the middle of – or about to start – something urgent. In each case there was no option to delay the update and no sign it was doing anything remotely useful, just a miserable half-hour wait before I could crack on with work for a deadline, bid on an auction, check for an urgent email or watch the film I’d been waiting all weekend to watch. Only in the wonderful world of technology does this stuff go on. If my oven made me wait 30 minutes while it

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have installed a new update on my PC, tablet or phone, only to find it feeling slower

downloaded and configured updates then burnt my dinner it wouldn’t last a week. If my car paused to update as I pulled out onto an A road, I wouldn’t last a week. So why do we tolerate this from our PCs and gadgets? It’s because, annoyingly, we have to, if we want our devices to stay safe and fast. Still, there’s no excuse for updates making things worse. If the makers want us to keep installing them, they need to work better and install at a time that’s convenient to us. Is that too much to ask? Do you agree with Stuart? Let us know at [email protected]

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& Quiz # 33 Now, the fun at Computer Interactive gets even more rewarding! Take a crack at this IMS-Computeractive Quiz and win! Find the answers and shoot before 30th December 2013 to win a Digitek Instant Power DIP 5200A or Envie Speedster. Mail to [email protected].

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