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PAGES OF windows step-by-step guides MAKE YOUR PC PERFECT
IMPROVE Windows 10 GET ready for the next WindowS update
SPEED UP YOUR PC
! Sure-fire tips from the experts for making your PC as good as new
TOP 10
ALSO INSIDE... Make photo art Create movies Fix your Wi-Fi Improve audio Dictate emails Start blogging
ESSENTIAL windows timesavers
BACK UP
NOW! Discover The foolproof way of protecting YOUR FILES
NEW TECH TESTED & RATED • NEST CAM IQ • LENOVO YOGA 720 • PC Specialist Lafite III • ASUS MB16A
The source for tech buying advice techradar.com 2
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| March 2017
Welcome The Autumn Creators Update may well be winging its way to your PC by the time you read this – and to make sure you’re ready for the inevitable changes it will bring, we’ve assembled some brilliant tips, tricks and tweaks to help you make the most of it. Starting on page 11, our ‘Speed Up Your PC’ feature explains how you can breathe new life into any computer by reducing clutter, optimising system processes and adding hardware tweaks to make sure your PC is the best it can be.
And on page 60 we’ll also explain the secret to creating flawless backups, so all of your most important files are kept safe when it comes to upgrade time. On page 52, you’ll also discover some super-shortcuts and other secrets that can save you time and make using Windows easier, faster and more productive. And starting on page 23, you’ll find 27 pages of step-by-step guides to help you do even more. Enjoy the issue,
Rob Mead-Green Editor
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Features
11 Speed up your PC
Give your computer a new lease of life with these top tricks, tips and tweaks
52 Windows timesavers
Super-shortcuts and other tricks that can make using any PC easier and faster
60 Make flawless backups
The Autumn Creators Update is coming! Here’s how to backup your essential files
Regulars
6 Discover How to create strong passwords for use online; the hidden hinterland of the internet and Acer takes the fight to Microsoft’s Surface 20 Subscriptions Save up to 46% on print and digital issues
70 Digital issues Get the world’s best Windows mag on your phone or tablet 78 Back issues Missed an issue? Don’t miss out – order now while stocks last!
90 Next month Find out what’s
coming up in the November 2017 issue
Explore The best PC tutorials Your guide Rob Mead-Green says…
“If you’re looking for better ways to use your home computer, then this is the place to start. We’ll show you all the tips and tricks the experts use and more!” 24 Create artistic image effects using Windows’ Photos app 27 Make movie magic with green screen effects in Shotcut
Support
66 Get answers to your technical questions with help from our PC experts 4
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| October 2017
42 How to make your PC safer 44 How to sync documents and notes across your devices
30 How to declutter your PC
46 How to write documents and emails using only your voice
32 Personalise your PC easily
48 Make your PC child-proof
36 Fix common Wi-Fi problems
50 How to create and publish content on your first blog
39 Fast fixes for PC audio issues
Subscription bundle offer Print and digital bundle – only £14 every 3 months Find out more on page 20
SPEED UP YOUR PC
11 Give your PC a new lease of life with our guide to boosting its power and performance
52 Super-shortcuts to help make using your PC easier, simpler and faster
Upgrade 79 Our expert reviews 80 Lenovo Yoga 720 82 PC Specialist Lafite III 84 Nest Cam IQ 86 Asus ZenScreen MB16A 88 Best free portable apps
Follow us on… 60 Discover the secret to keeping safe, secure and easily accessible copies of your most important files
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October 2017 |
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NEW things to do
amazing websites
Lock it down Browse in confidence – and keep your passwords secure – by using a password manager.
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| October 2017
fascinating facts
Discover Stay protected
Sta y pro tec ted an d safe
Power up passwords quickly and easily
The Knowledge…
If you want to keep your online accounts safe, it’s time to change the locks for something much more secure We all have to use passwords every day, the websites you are using it on gets and it’s very tempting to use passwords compromised – and your password gets which are easy to remember. Perhaps released into the wild – hackers may they’re based on dictionary words, attempt to use that password on other maybe with a number replacing a letter websites for which you have accounts. In or a little bit of punctuation peppered in. one moment, your entire online life But the easier your passwords are to could be opened up. So it’s important to remember, the easier they are to crack. use a unique password for each account Actually perhaps this isn’t true. One of when you register it online. You could the most secure ways of setting a apply the four-word method, of course, password is to select more than one although this will quickly become a dictionary word. For serious memory test. instance, look Instead, password Using the same around you right managers can help password on multiple you keep track of now and select four objects, then stitch sites can be a big risk your credentials for them together into a each website you password: KeyboardCoffeeWalletScreen, use or even, if you wish, generate secure perhaps. Those four words will be easy to passwords for those sites that even you remember, particularly if you can set a don’t know. All you will need is a single story around them. And while a single master password. Probably the best word can be cracked in a few hours, it password manager – one we’ve covered may take ages to pass through four. before in these pages – is LastPass (www.lastpass.com). It’s very simple to set up and, as long as you don’t reveal password management your master password to anyone, you’ll Using the same password on multiple never get locked out. sites can be a big risk, because if one of
Surface dressed down Acer aims high Microsoft’s Surface Pro might be the top dog in Windows tablets right now, but it’s far from being the only pup in the race. Acer’s brand new Switch 3 and 5 tablets are remarkable tablets that pull off most of the Surface’s tricks for a fraction of the price. The Switch 3, based on a Pentium processor, costs around £450 – half that of the Surface – while the more powerful Switch 5, using an Intel Core i5 or i7 chip, still manages to undercut its rival by a good £200.
Write right The Switch range includes an active pressure-sensitive stylus for drawing on screen.
Quiet time The Switch 3 runs completely silently thanks to a clever passive cooling design.
Type on A keyboard cover is included in the price – on the Surface Pro, that’s a £100 add-on.
Massdrop What is it? Massdrop (www.massdrop.com) is a website which harnesses people power to work out deals. Potential buyers register their interest in a product and, if a certain threshold is reached, manufacturers agree to produce that product for a reduced price – a ‘drop’ – or, perhaps, to produce the product in the first place. So it’s like Kickstarter? Not really. Kickstarter, Indiegogo and the like are usually focused on funding products which are in the development stage. Massdrop, on the other hand, is designed for stuff that’s completely ready to go – its products typically just need funding and interest to justify a smallscale manufacturing run. What kinds of things, then? As you might expect, Massdrop excels at niche items. It divides its drops into a number of different communities, including categories such as audiophile tech, watches, mechanical keyboards and DIY, but a recent expansion has seen it hitting other hobby markets including knitting, stitching and beauty. What’s the catch? The Massdrop site is a little hard to fathom at first glance, and you’ll need to be quick to get on board with drops as they usually run for a limited time. Shop around, too; certain things pushed as bargains may already be available elsewhere for a good price, and while a successful drop means you’ll get your items, there’s often a long wait attached for more obscure products. How do I get involved? Sign up at www.massdrop.com to set up your own account and give Massdrop your taste profile. The next time you visit the site, you’ll see community discussion and drops that will be of potential interest to you. Keep tabs on your credit card spending, though; being on the cutting edge can be a very tempting thing…
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Ev eryon e’s tal king about
The hidden internet
Should you be worried by the so-called ‘dark web’? It turns out there’s not as much to fear as you might think
T
here’s a divide on the internet between the web we know and love and the so-called ‘dark web’, a collection of sites that aren’t indexed by search engines. You may already have heard of it; the dark web was the home of the notorious Silk Road, a site which sold various illicit goods before a high-profile FBI investigation shut it down in 2013. More recent activities have seen two further criminal marketplaces shuttered, but they’re unlikely to be the last. So should you be concerned about the dark web? It’s important to understand what the dark web actually is. The term can refer to any online content that can’t be found by conventional means, which can mean private databases or hidden folders, but it’s often applied to sites only available when running your internet traffic through The Onion Router, or Tor. Tor is usually used for privacy, since it anonymises your internet traffic and conceals your location online. The concept of Tor isn’t illegal, and the service itself is not responsible for criminal
activity, but it’s not hard to see why it could be attractive to those skirting the law. Individual machines on the Tor network can be set up as secret sites. Those who want in need the address – generally a jumble of letters and numbers – and this can change frequently. Transactions also usually take place using currencies such as Bitcoin, which are themselves built on protecting privacy. However, the dark web isn’t – as some corners of the media may suggest – a hive of scum and villainy and nothing else. And correlation is not causation; the use of privacy tools does not make you a criminal. It’s next to impossible to stumble onto something you shouldn’t on the Tor network. The vast majority of its users simply use it to anonymise their web traffic – and as more and more governments decide to snoop on their citizens (including in the US and the UK), the importance of privacy tools is only going to rise. The web had criminal marketplaces before Tor, and it’ll have them after. It is not the tools that are the problem – it is the users.
Download this… Dication IO dictation.io Don’t fancy typing? Fancy speaking to your PC instead? Google Chrome includes a complete speech recognition engine, and you can make the most of it with dictation.io, a simple site that uses your PC’s built-in microphone to turn your speech into words on a page. It really is easy. Just jump to the site using Chrome, click ‘start dictation’, and speak naturally. The dictation.io site is built to recognise not just single words, but sentences as well, and you can add punctuation as you go. It’s not absolutely perfect, of course, but the resulting output is easy to clean up once you’re done. Just click copy, and paste it into your favourite word processor. If you are a hunt-and-peck typist, this will save tons of time; even if you do not finish your prose in one go, you can come back to your dictation at a later time as it’s saved in-browser.
Speak to type Save your typing fingers with the brilliant dictation.io website.
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uiz The 60-Secondm Q e sta rts no w! Pe ns at th e rea d y, yo u r ti
1
What was the name of Microsoft Office’s annoying assistant? A Clippy B Clippit C Clappy
2
Which purple desktop assistant sneakily collected personal information? A Bonzi Buddy B Barney Buddy C Boots Buddy
3
What was the name of the short-lived replacement desktop for Windows from 1995? A Steve B Bill C Bob
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Which key would you normally press to access Windows help? A F1 B Tilde C Question mark
5
From which popular PC game does Cortana get her name? A Banjo-Kazooie B Halo C Super Mario World
6
Which assistive technology is activated by pressing [Shift] five times? A Sticky keys B Yucky keys C Slimy keys
Answers 1A, 2B, 3C, 4A, 5B, 6A
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13 OCTOBER
Discover Facts & figures
Rob Mead-Green reveals a host of fascinating digital facts
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Number of terabytes of uncompressed data that can be stored on a palm-sized data cartridge jointly developed by IBM and Sony. The cartridge uses prototype sputtered magnetic tape and is said to be ideal for use in cloud backup situations. There’s no news yet on a launch date.
Number of completely electric vehicles that British company Arrival claims it will produce each year at its factory in Banbury, Oxfordshire. The company has recently joined up with Royal Mail to produce nine all-electric trucks that will be used in London and the surrounding areas.
1,069 Number of robots – all called Dobi – which recently broke a Guinness World Record for the ‘most robots dancing simultaneously’. The Dobi robots beat the previous record by 62.
FIFTY FIFTY FIFTY
Size in micrometres of the world’s smallest self-driving car. Developed by the University of California San Diego and China’s Harbin Institute of Technology, the vehicle is properly described as a ‘spherical micromotor’ The aim is to use the vehicle – Fantastic Voyage-style – to diagnose disorders, deliver drugs and perform surgery within the human body.
Maximum number of transactions delivered each second by Microsoft’s Coco, a framework for dealing with superfast payments in Blockchain – the technology used by digital currencies, such as Bitcoin. October 2017 |
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Incoming
The hottest new Windows hardware on the horizon
Elgato Stream Deck Price £191.81, www.elgato.com If you’ve ever fancied joining the legions of gamers and YouTubers who live broadcast their every waking moment to the world, then the Elgato Stream Deck is just for you. It enables you to take multiple streams of content from all kinds of sources (audio, video, GIFs, social media) and then seamlessly switch between them as you livestream, without your viewers ever seeing the join. It’s the kind of thing broadcasters have been using for years, professionally. Only the Elgato Stream Deck puts that power into everyone’s hands. Designed to work with PCs running Windows 10 64-bit, it comes with 15 colour, customisable LCD keys that can trigger up to 150 separate actions. It even offers direct integration with popular streaming services such as Twitch. The next television revolution is here. We’re all programme makers now.
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Windows Speed up your PC
SPEED UP YOUR PC
Discover all the tips, techniques and hardware upgrades you need to boost your PC’s performance and lengthen its life
D
oes your PC struggle to keep up with the demands you place upon it? Do you think that it might be time to bite the bullet and buy a new one? If your PC is under ten years old, there’s a good chance you can extend its life without having to incur the cost of a total replacement. In this guide, we’ll show you all the tips and tricks you need to speed up your PC – and many of the techniques we reveal won’t cost you a penny. There’s the inevitable clean-up of course – most speed problems can be traced to increasing the load on your computer over time, so we’ll start by stripping things back. Then
we’ll help you examine the time it takes your PC to start up – not only will our tips and tricks eliminate boot-time bottlenecks, but you’ll also free up more system resources and give your PC a new lease of life. We’ll then look into some clever system tweaks that can free up your machine even further, helping to improve its responsiveness and performance when heavier demands are placed on it. And we’ll finish by revealing which hardware components you might want to swap out for faster, newer ones to give it a real lift. Follow our guide to its end, and you’ll wonder why you ever thought about replacing your PC as it frees itself from its shackles and really starts to fly.
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Perform a quick clean-up Before you start targeting specific areas of your computer, begin with a much-needed clearout of key areas of your system. Here’s how…
S
tep one to speeding up your PC means giving it a clearout – if you’ve followed our previous features on the subject, you might be tempted to skip this step, but you’ll be surprised by how quickly detritus can accumulate, so these tips are worth following even if your last spring clean wasn’t long ago. First, we need to make sure there’s a sufficient free space on your system drive – aim to leave at least 5GB (and preferably much more) spare. Open File Explorer, right-click your drive and choose Properties. Click the Disk Clean-up button, wait for the scan and then click ‘Clean up system files’ to find more files to clear out. You may need to scroll through the list and tick further items to clean up; be sure to select them first to read more about them since some – such as ESD files – are best left in place if possible. If you want to push things further – or you’re still lacking free space – follow the ‘Clear out using CCleaner’ boxout on the facing page. You can download and install CCleaner from www.piriform.com
Clear out unused apps
It doesn’t matter how diligent you are, at some point you’ll start to accumulate redundant programs on your PC, each one demanding its own share of space and system resources. You can manage these from the Programs and Features
Streamline your fonts and you might reclaim valuable system resources on low-end systems.
Control Panel (Windows 7 or 8.1), Settings > ‘Search and apps’ > App sizes’ (Windows 8.1 – Store apps only) and Settings > Apps (Windows 10 – both desktop and Windows Store apps). That’s all well and good, but programs leave bits of themselves behind – leftover files and Registry entries. If you don’t plan to reinstall the app again, these can be safely deleted with the help of a third-party program, such as Revo Uninstaller Portable (www. revouninstaller.com – click Downloads followed by ‘Free Portable’). Note Revo Uninstaller only works with desktop
programs. You can clear out both desktop programs and Windows Store apps (including those pre-installed with Windows) using IObit Uninstaller 6 Free
Revo Uninstaller is fast and unobstrusive, if a little basic.
Registry cleaning Third-party clean-up tools – including CCleaner – include Registry cleaning tools, with the promise of streamlining and speeding up Windows. These tools scan areas of the Registry for supposedly redundant Registry entries, offering to delete them with one click. Hundreds or even thousands of entries get removed at a time, but even if your cleaning tool doesn’t accidentally delete an important Registry entry (and it will sooner or later), Registry cleaning offers no benefit to performance whatsoever. You can potentially improve performance – but not by
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much – by defragging the Registry files (known as ‘hives’) using a dedicated tool, such as Registry Defrag Free (www. registry-clean.net/freeregistry-defrag.htm). It’ll analyse the Registry and tell you if significant ‘bloating’ has taken place; if it has (more than 10%), you can take a Restore Point then let the program compress and defrag the files. If you’re running Windows on an SSD, however, there’s little benefit in defragging the files. In most cases, you’ll also find that Windows has done a reasonable job of keeping the hives in good order, making the process redundant. | October 2017
On rare occasions, you’ll see that the Registry needs defragging – in most cases, however, Free Registry Defrag will tell you it’s not required.
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