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pages of windows step-by-step guides make your PC perfect
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The quick and easy guide to making your PC run like new!
ALSO INSIDE... Back up your system Manage user accounts Easily edit your videos
50
ways to speed up your PC top timesavers revealed
Stop sites tracking you Take control of Cortana Do more with PDFs
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| March 2017
Welcome Remember those halcyon days when your PC positively screamed with speed? Well in this issue we’re going to show you how to bring that wonderful feeling back – not only by showing you how to perform a complete Windows reinstall (starting on page 50) but also by sharing 50 tips that make using your PC easier, faster and more fun – head to page 11 now to find out more. Turn to our Explore section on page 23 and you’ll discover even more ways to do more with your
PC. We’ll explain how you can manage user accounts; take charge of the Windows update process; and how you can beef up your PC’s security by using one of the best anti-virus programs around. We’ll even show you how to make the most of Cortana, putting key phrases at your command so you can do more, more quickly. One more thing? Turn to page 88 for our pick of the best free PC optimisation apps. Enjoy the issue,
Rob Mead-Green Editor
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Clean up your PC for a slicker, quicker system Make Windows easier to use Edit any audio file with Audacity Get creative with your favourite photos
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Features
11 50 ways to speed up your PC Make Windows easier, faster and more fun to use with these tips and tricks
50 Reinstall Windows
Give your PC a brand new start with this complete guide to reinstalling Windows
58 Games for 2018
What are the hot titles you’ll be playing this year? You can find out right here
Regulars
6 Discover Teach yourself how to code; the trouble with Facebook; and an incredible camera with 16 different lenses 20 Subscriptions Save up to 46% on print and digital issues
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68 Digital issues Get the world’s best Windows mag on your phone or tablet
90 Next month Find out what’s coming up in the June 2018 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 How to create and manage user accounts on your PC 27 Take control of Windows updates – we show you how 30 Boost your PC’s anti-virus protection with AVG AntiVirus
Support
64 Get answers to your technical questions with help from our PC experts 4
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| May 2018
32 Create an amazing ‘bokeh’ effect in your favourite photos 36 Master Cortana commands
38 View, edit and annotate PDFs using Microsoft Edge 39 Stop websites from tracking you with the Ghostery extension
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Find out more on page 20
11 Make Windows easier, faster and more fun to use with this essential selection of tips and tricks
REINSTALL WIND WS 50 The quick and easy guide to making your PC run like new!
75 Our expert reviews 76 Dell Latitude 5290 2-in-1 78 TerraMaster F4-420 NAS 80 Teclast F6 Pro laptop 82 Gigabyte Aero 15 laptop 84 Yi Technology 360 VR camera 86 All-in-one wireless speakers 88 Best free PC optimisation apps
Follow us on… 58 The ones to watch from this year’s bumper PC gaming crop
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5
NEW things to do
amazing websites
Write right Give programming a go – it’s seriously not nearly as scary as it looks!
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fascinating facts
Discover Write your own code
Write you r ow n cod e
Learn PC programming from the ground up
The Knowledge…
Ever fancied yourself as a coder? It’s easy to get started, and you don’t even need to install anything on your
C
oding isn’t an easy thing but, as with any learned skill, the Internet is a fantastic resource. The first trick is learning where to start – and there are no good answers. There are a host of programming languages that are suited to beginners, but no one ‘start here’ language. The good news is that many languages work in a very similar way, so transitioning between them later on won’t be too difficult if you have the basics down.
GET CODING
way that help you understand the way code works. If you’d prefer to be taught more directly, check out Daniel Shiffman’s Coding Train videos on YouTube via youtube.com/user/shiffman. There’s a vast catalogue on offer, from the very basic, right up to follow-along coding challenges, and Shiffman’s effervescent, easy presenting style takes the fear out of programming – and proves it’s OK to make a mistake or two along the way. Perhaps even looking at code makes your eyes wobble and your head hurt? No problem: MIT’s Scratch programming language (scratch.mit.edu) does everything absolutely visually. Rather than writing code, you slot together what amounts to a virtual jigsaw, dropping in what you want to happen and when. While you won’t be creating anything world-changing in Scratch, it’s a great illustration of the principles behind coding. Good luck!
There are a host of languages that are suited to beginners
We’d recommend, though, that you start your journey by pointing your web browser at www. codeacademy.com. It’s free to sign up – the company makes its money from more professional level tutorials – and you can start coding immediately, with clear examples that run right in your browser. Your first steps will involve lightly tweaking code; as you move on, Code Academy gradually ups the difficulty, setting you simple challenges along the
The eyes have it More lenses, more camera It might look a little absurd, but Light’s L16 camera has some solid thinking behind it. Tap the shutter on this compact device and it takes a picture with ten or more of its lenses, each of which has a unique focal depth, perspective, and zoom level. Those individual frames are then stitched together into a huge resulting image, perfect for impressive landscape shots. It doesn’t come cheap – the L16 comes in at a painful £1,850 – but it’s definitely an exciting concept.
Lots of lenses The Light L16 features – you guessed it – 16 individual eyes on the world.
Standalone VR So I don’t need a PC? That’s sort of the point. By standalone VR we mean a VR experience entirely contained within a headset. No wires, no slotting your phone in, no nonsense – everything you need in one single device. It’s a growing market, and the major players – and some less major ones – are all on board with headsets leveraging smartphone technology and existing libraries of VR-compatible mobile games. For example? The clever cookies at Facebook-owned Oculus have a low-end headset on the way, the Oculus Go, which ups the lens technology from its PC-connected headset and sneaks in at around £200, but it’s relatively simple in terms of technology, tracking only your head movements. Its main competitors, which cost a little more, have opted for a more advanced six degrees of freedom tracking. What’s that? Before we answer that, let’s explain Oculus’ three degrees: it tracks your head tilting forwards and back, left and right, and rotating. Although hopefully your head doesn’t entirely rotate. With six degrees of freedom, a headset can also pick up your height above the ground, and your relative position within a defined floor space – precisely what standalone VR is made for. What else is out there, then? If Oculus is doing it, then HTC is doing it too – thus it’s developed the Vive Focus, currently China-only. Lenovo has a finger in the pie with the Daydream Mirage – compatible, as its name suggests, with anything that supports Google’s Daydream phone add-on. And there’s more: plucky upstart Pico has revealed the super-high resolution Neo, too. Any disadvantages? This isn’t the same Virtual Reality (VR) as you’ll get on a PC. Each of these products uses what is essentially a bunch of mobile phone tech, and plays mobile games and experiences – but if they’re popular, they’ll help mobile VR to improve.
Compact design It’s as big as a phone, and it’s powered by a custom version of Android within.
Perfect pictures Light’s photo techniques make for some uniquely detailed and bright images.
May 2018 |
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Ev eryon e’s tal king about
Facebook’s data scandal
Can you trust the world’s biggest social site – and why aren’t more people closing their accounts?
F
acebook is in the news again for all the wrong reasons, following a Channel 4 story which revealed that Cambridge Analytica – a London-based data mining firm – misused information from as many as 50 million Facebook users, apparently using that data to influence the result of the most recent US election. When discovered, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica’s accounts – but by the time it shut the door, the horse had already bolted.
Data mining The most worrying aspect of this scandal is the way the data was obtained in the first place. To give one known example: in 2015, University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan created a Facebook app, which promised to predict aspects of users’ personalities. Over 270,000 people signed up to the app, giving Kogan not just information about their personal and political preferences and leanings, but also a mass of information about their accounts – including their location, other content on Facebook they’d liked, and even information about their Facebook friends.
Kogan passed the data on to Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm, SCL, and the rest is troubling and now notorious history. While the damage has been done in this case – and Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, reeling after a massive drop in share prices, has made pains to assure media that steps will be taken to prevent future breaches – it’s apt that a psychology professor was the one to obtain the data in the first place. Facebook is ripe for psychological trickery; who hasn’t seen the ‘vaguebooking’ messages of a friend looking for attention, or the adverts that somehow know an incredible amount about that thing you thought about five minutes ago? There’s unlikely to be a mass exodus from the social media platform, since it’s such a valuable communication tool for so many, and a powerful way to connect with brands and organisations. But be careful what you click, and be wary what you share. Every time you sign up for a Facebook app, you’ll be told what data Facebook shares with it – if there’s anything even slightly unrelated to the app, turn away.
Download this… TobiFOX www.freem.ne.jp/win/game/12060 A disclaimer, first of all: this obscure little freeware game is Japanese, and as such you’ll need to fumble your way through a little Japanese text to get started. Once you do, though, you’re in for a treat. As the eponymous TobiFOX (a nimble anthropomorphic fox soldier, naturally) you’ll platform and shoot your way through a host of ingeniously designed single-screen levels, each one requiring as much puzzle solving as they do skill, on your way to rescuing your captured comrades. It won’t be easy, and if you’re squeamish about a little pixelated blood this might not be for you, but it’s challenging and fair enough to drag you back for more even after countless failures – be sure to take advantage of Easy mode’s infinite lives while you’re learning your way around, because you’re definitely going to need them.
Vulpine violence TobiFOX is certainly an action-packed pile of pixels.
Follow us on… www.twitter.com/windowsmag
uiz The 60-Secondm Q e sta rts no w! Pe ns at th e rea d y, yo u r ti
1
Which of the following is not a programming language? AC B C# C C flat Major
2
Which of these acronyms does not apply to a music format? A MIDI B MAXI C MP3
3
Which of these is not a Windows version?
A Windows 95 B Windows 2000 C Windows 2084
4
Which of the following is not a major international search engine? A Baidu B Searchor C DuckDuckGo
5
Which of these shortcuts is not a way to switch apps? A [Alt] + [F4] B [Alt] + [Tab] C [Win] + [Tab]
6
Which of these people is not a member of the Microsoft board? A Bill Gates B Mark Zuckerberg C Steve Ballmer
Answers 1C 2B 3C 4B 5A 6B
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NEXT ISSUE ON SALE Friday
25 May
Discover Facts & figures
25 Million
Number of ‘fans’ affected by Playboy’s decision to deactivate its Facebook account, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Tesla and SpaceX have also removed their pages from the social media platform following an order from tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Rob Mead-Green reveals a host of fascinating digital facts
$1.2 billion Amount of money stolen from 100 banks in more than 40 countries by a crime syndicate using a combination of malware and phishing scams. Europe arrested the alleged leader of the syndicate in April following a four-year investigation.
51%
Number of US citizens who now say they don’t trust Facebook, according to a survey conducted by news agency Reuters. 2,237 adults were polled in the survey.
2,000,000 Number of smartphones sold worldwide in the final quarter of 2017, a fall of 5.6 percent over the previous quarter. Research firm Gartner said the fall was likely due to a lack of quality ‘ultra-low cost’ smartphones, and the fact that we’re hanging on to our existing phones for longer.
20,000
Number of employees aged 40+ laid off by IBM in favour of younger workers in the last five years, according to a report by ProPublica and Mother Jones. The report was based on questionnaires from over 1,000 former IBM employees. The actual number of age-related layoffs is believed to be much higher.
May 2018 |
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Incoming
The hottest new Windows hardware on the horizon
Asus ROG G703 Price $3,499, www.asus.com Intel announced its next generation of Core processors in April, bringing its top-end Core i9 CPU to laptops for the first time. One of the first recipients will be Asus’ seriously hardcore ROG 703 gaming notebook – a 17.3-inch monster, which will not only sport a six-core i9 capable of 4.8GHz of power using Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost technology, but is also equipped with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics, up to 64GB of RAM and up to three M.2 solid state drives. Why does this matter? While the ASUS ROG G703 is an extreme example, it hints at a future for laptops where 5GHz speeds will become increasingly the norm, especially since Intel is selling the Core i9 ‘unlocked’, enabling laptop makers to boost performance further. Intel says its eighth-generation CPUs are 29 percent faster than their predecessors, with gaming and 4K video editing performance boosted by 41 percent and 59 percent respectively.
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Windows 10 50 ways to speed up your PC
50 ways to
SPEED UP YOUR PC
Discover how to save time and perform key tasks more quickly when using your PC with this collection of tips (and bonus keyboard shortcuts)
T
here’s only so much you can do to speed up your PC by tinkering under the hood. What about another bottleneck in the way it performs: you? Yes, we’re looking directly at you – it’s all very well Windows loading in under a minute and opening apps in a flash if you’re not streamlining the way you use it. In this feature we’re going to focus on revealing 50 time-saving tips and techniques that could revolutionise the way you interact with your PC. We’ll open by looking at Windows itself, revealing its own collection of efficiency-boosting (and often hidden) tools and shortcuts. Then – given how much of our
collective time is spent on the Internet – we’ll reveal tips and tricks to help speed up your web browsing and email too. There’s also time to take a look at Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, before finishing off our gargantuan tips collection with a list of handy time-saving apps that contain a host of different ways in which your computing life can be made easier and quicker. And if those 50 tips aren’t enough for you, we’re also including a collection of 30 keyboard shortcuts for Windows, the Internet and Office, providing you with even more ways to save time while sat at your computer. Enough preamble – we’re here to save you time, so turn the page to get started.
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Windows apps
Create one-click Start menu shortcuts
Programs can be pinned to the Start menu as tiles from just about anywhere – right-click a program’s shortcut in the main Start menu list, on the Taskbar or the desktop and look for a ‘Pin to Start’ option. Once in place, take the time to rearrange items by clicking and dragging them into related groups (which you can rename by clicking the ‘=’ button next to the current group title). Right-click a Start menu tile to further customise it. Also make use of the shortcuts on the left-hand side of the panel – click the cog icon to open the Settings panel, for instance. And while you’re in Settings, navigate to Personalisation > Start and click ‘Choose which folders appear on Start’ to place shortcuts to favourite user folders as well as Network.
Customise the Quick Access menu
Right-click the Start button to reveal a handy menu to various system tools and settings like Command Prompt, Device Manager and ‘Apps and Features’. Download Win+X Menu Editor from http://winaero.com/comment. php?comment.news.30 to edit the list, plus add your own. Once you’ve saved WinXMenuEditorRelease.zip to your Downloads folder, right-click the file and choose Extract All > Extract. Open the WinXMenuEditorRelease folder and double-click WinXEditor.exe to run it. Click ‘Add a program’ to add your choice of programs, Control Panel items or Administrative Tools. Select ‘Add preset’ and you’ll find some handy
shortcuts to hidden tools and power options as well. You can also organise your items into groups to keep related items together and make things easier to find. Be sure to click Restart Explorer when you’re done to apply all the customisations you have made.
Make use of the Taskbar
The best place to keep program and app shortcuts is on the Taskbar because they’re always visible. Launch a program and you’ll see its icon appear here – just right-click this and choose ‘Pin to taskbar’ to make it available at all times. Right-click a Taskbar shortcut and you’ll also see its Jump List, which is a handy list of files you recently opened in that app – clicking one opens it directly. You can ‘pin’ favourite items permanently to this list – just roll your mouse over a file and click the pin icon that appears. You’ll also see the program’s own shortcut appear again in this list – rightclick it to run it with administrator privileges or to choose Properties to assign it a keyboard shortcut that will enable you to open it even quicker.
One-click access to any file or folder
Why open File Explorer each time you want to open a file or folder? Right-click the Taskbar and choose Toolbars > Desktop, then click the ‘>>’ button next to Desktop that appears on the Taskbar and you’ll be able to browse your entire drive. If you’d rather just pin a selected drive or folder, choose Toolbars > ‘New toolbar…’ instead. Choose Toolbars > Address and you’ll be able to open web
10 time-saving keyboard shortcuts [Win] + [1] through to [Win] + [0] – open the first ten application shortcuts on the Taskbar – [Win] + [1] for the left-most shortcut through to [Win] + [0] on the right. [Win] + [A] – open Action Centre. [Win] + [D] – show/hide desktop. [Win] + [E] – open File Explorer. [Win] + [I] – open Settings. Win + L – lock PC or switch users. [Win] + [Home] – minimise all other windows except the current one (press again to restore). [Win] + [X] – open the Quick Access Menu. [Win] + [Tab] – open Task View, then press [Ctrl] + [Win] + [D] to create a new virtual desktop, and [Ctrl] + [Win] + [left/ right cursor keys] to move between them. Prefer the old-style task switcher? Press [Alt] + [Tab], then keep [Alt] held down and press [Tab] to cycle right, or [Shift] + [Tab] to cycle left. [Shift] + [Delete] – bypass Recycle bin and delete selection.
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pages in your default web browser direct from the Taskbar too.
Customise the right-click menu
A load of handy time-saving shortcuts can be found in the context menus that pop up whenever you right-click a drive, folder or file in File Explorer. You’ll find its contents changing over time as third-party applications add potentially time-saving options of their own, although sometimes they can add far more than you’d like, and the size of the menu grows to the point where it becomes difficult to navigate, nullifying the point of using it in the first place. Prune the list using a general-purpose tool such as CCleaner (Tools > Startup > Context Menu) or run the portable Context Menu tool (www.sordum. org/7615/easy-context-menu-v1-6/). Choose File > ContextMenuCleaner to review and scrub unwanted entries, then examine the program’s other options that enable you to add all kinds of useful shortcuts to the various menus available.
Make better use of ‘Send to’
The ‘Send to’ menu is a particularly good place to place shortcuts – anything in here is opened along with the selected file. You can trim this list manually, but an easier option is to use the SendToToys tool from www. gabrieleponti.com/software – this makes it easy to remove existing options, but it also enables you to add others such as copying filename or file contents to the clipboard, opening the
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