Windows Help and Advice 155 (Sampler) by Future PLC

pages of windows step-by-step guides do more with your PC

REINSTALL WINDOWS make your pC Work like new – in-depth guide

EXPLORE THE NEW

WINDOWS 10

ate safely The latest update in full – Discover new features & upd

ALSO INSIDE... Fix OneDrive problems Improve your monitor Master PC notifications Personalise the Taskbar Make a pop-art portrait Send texts from any PC

KEEP YOUR

PC HEALTHY • Claim back space • IMPROVE LOAD times • Stay secure online

Build your own website Get started with Kodi

what next for the PC?

the future of computing revealed!

NEW TECH TESTED & RATED

• surface laptop 2 • best free video players • sound blasterX G6 • Stylish laptop bags

The source for tech buying advice techradar.com 2

| March 2017

Welcome The Windows October 2018 Update is here – and with it, a whole slew of new features that can help you make the most of your PC: from a supercharged Clipboard with history and sync capabilities; to Your Phone, a new app that makes it easy to link your Android phone to your PC. You can read about these and all the other amazing new features included in the Update in our lead feature starting on page 11. Whether you’re ready up to upgrade yet or not, turn to page

48 and you’ll discover how to keep your PC lean, mean and malware-free, while on page 58 you can find out about Moore’s Law and the future of computing. After you’ve enjoyed all that, our Explore section (page 23) will show you how to perform all kinds of practical – and fun – tasks on your PC. And on page 78 we test the Surface Laptop 2. Don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter at www.windowsmag.co.uk. Enjoy the issue,

Rob Mead-Green Editor

www.facebook.com/windowsmag

SUBSCRIBE TO THE MAG TODAY AND SAVE – TURN TO PAGE 20! We pride ourselves in being the only magazine on the shelves to show you exactly how to get the very best from the Windows operating system, whether you’re using Windows 10 or Windows 8.1. Also, don’t forget to take a look at how you can read the magazine on your laptop, smartphone or tablet.

Next issue On sale 7

Don’t miss our Next issue, when we will show you how to… Get a better PC for Christmas Build your own PC on a budget Protect yourself with a VPN Get started with Microsoft Outlook

December 2018

Features

11 Explore the new Windows 10 The October 2018 Update has landed – here’s how to make the most of it

48 Keep your PC healthy

Banish niggles, nuisances and other annoyances with our in-depth guide

58 What’s next for the PC?

Moore’s Law is dead – find out what that means for the future of computing here

Regulars

6 Discover How to watch the weather from your PC; HP’s amazing Spectre Folio tablet; and the welcome return of Winamp 20 Subscriptions Save up to 46% on print and digital issues

37 Back issues Missed an issue? Don’t miss out – order now while stocks last!

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 Christmas 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 Get started in desktop publishing with Affinity Publisher 27 Easily fix OneDrive sync issues 30 Calibrate your PC’s display 32 Text family and friends from your PC with the Your Phone app

Support

64 Get answers to your technical questions with help from our PC experts 4

| December 2018

34 Create a fantastic pop-art effect on your portrait photos

41 Get started with Kodi 44 Take control of notifications

38 Build your own website – fast! 46 Personalise the Taskbar

subscription bundle offer

Digital and print together with free stylish headphones! Find out more on page 20

Discover every new feature of the October 2018 Update – and upgrade safely

77 Our expert reviews 78 Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 80 GoPro Hero7 Black 82 Synology DS418play 84 Creative Sound BlasterX G6 88 Best free video players

Fix those annoying issues and glitches – in-depth guide

The future of computing, beyond Moore’s Law – and why it matters to you today

December 2018 |

NEW things to do

amazing websites

fascinating facts

winter is coming Get up-to-the-minute forecasts for your exactÂ location, with a little help from your PC.

Photo by Nathan Anderson on unsplash

| December 2018

Discover Watch the weather

Eyes on the ski es

The Knowledge…

Watch the weather your desktop from We’re all amateur meteorologists – but with the right

resources, you can do a much better job at predicting rain

ow local is your weather forecast? Head to something like the BBC website, and you’ll be able to drill down to your city, or perhaps a specific region of your city. But what if you could triangulate your upcoming conditions based on your precise location? While you could set up your own weather station and make your own mind up, there are services out there which offer hyper-local forecasts for free. We’d absolutely recommend making Dark Sky (www. darksky.net) your first port of call. It features a host of maps, from precipitation radar (with handy arrows to show which way those storms are travelling) and temperature all the way to a rather odd emoji map which shows how you’ll probably feel if you venture outside. There’s also hour-byhour forecasting, and Dark Sky’s cute ‘Time Machine’ feature, which lets you research historical data or explore its predictions for the future.

For a better weather radar, with live updates and a zoomable map, you could head to www.metcheck.com or the excellent www.accuweather.com, both of which also help you track thunderstorms and lightning strikes. The most accurate local weather information, though, is found at www.weatherunderground. com. It’s a service which is essentially fed by personal weather stations the world over. People with their own gauges send that information back to WU – enter your location, and it’ll link you to the absolute closest weather station to you. Be sure to try the ‘Wundermap’ feature, which enables you to layer all the information you need on a single map. And now winter’s here, how will you know where it’s snowing? You ask Twitter, of course. Or head to www.uksnowmap. com, which catalogues every tweet that uses the #uksnow tag, giving you instant feedback from people gawping out of their windows the country over.

And now winter’s here, how will you know where it’s snowing?

Leather laptop HP reinvents the PC. Again Plastic, magnesium alloy, aluminium – these are the things we expect our PCs to be clad in. Leather hasn’t traditionally been on the list, but HP’s new Spectre Folio employs the unusual material to great effect. That’s one thing, but toting an eighth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage – along with some speciallyshrunken circuitry, giving it an extra-large battery that lasts for up to 18 hours – it’s quite the 2-in-1 PC in its own right…

Stitch up Thick, strong stitching ensures the leather layers of the Spectre won’t come unglued.

Multi-mode It’s a laptop, a tablet, or both, depending on where you position the screen.

Hot hinge The Spectre Folio isn’t short of ports, and it’s built for toughness under the leather.

Winamp What is this, 1997? Quiet, you. Anyone who lived through the crunchy old days of the Internet will remember Winamp, at one time the de facto music player of choice for personal music collections. It did indeed first emerge in 1997 – alongside the rise of services like Napster – and eventually landed in the hands of AOL, who last released a version in 2013. Great. So what’s the story? AOL, in one of its many rounds of divestment and management shake-ups, sold off Winamp (and Internet radio streaming service Shoutcast) to Radionomy in 2014, and now that company is set to release not only the first update to Winamp in five years, but a whole new version of the software. What’ll it do different? Winamp has always been about collections; it played your illicit MP3 collection back in the day, and the new version, due in 2019, will play your whole music collection. Since your playlists and tunes are likely now attached to one or a number of streaming services, that’s what it’ll target: integration with the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and more. Why do I need it? Theoretically, the new Winamp will make things seamless. If there are tracks that are only available on one platform, it’ll bring them in line with your whole collection – you won’t need to run a whole bunch of different apps just to listen to your favourite music. Anything else? Naturally, we don’t all listen to music all the time. The new Winamp is set to stream podcasts, Internet radio, and just about anything else you might want to pipe in to your ears, and there are versions both for the Windows desktop and for mobile platforms in the works. That’s if it all functions properly – tying together a host of music services sounds like a technical and bureaucratic headache to us.

December 2018 |

Ev eryon e’s tal king about...

The companion phone

Phone too big for your pocket or bag? Apparently you need another, smaller phone to go with it

efore the smartphone came the PDA. A small, smartphone-sized device with very limited connectivity, a PDA – or personal digital assistant – held your notes, your appointments, and some atrocious handwriting recognition capabilities that made them at best interesting and at worse obtuse when it came to actually inputting information. The most prominent of these was the Palm Pilot; now, Palm is back. But it’s not producing PDAs, it’s producing phones. Sort of. First, we should be clear: it’s not really Palm. It’s a San Francisco startup, who’ve licensed the Palm name from current owner TCL. And the product, the Palm Phone, isn’t really a phone in its own right. Currently planned to be sold only as an add-on for existing phone plans, the credit card-sized Palm Phone (priced in the US at $350) is a second handset – it shares the same number as your existing phone, and it’s designed to be something you take with you when your existing phone is too big to carry. That sounds barmy, and it is, although there are some practical benefits. You

could take the tiny one-button phone out running or on a workout. You could tuck it into a clutch bag or your pocket to avoid carrying that £1,200 iPhone with you on an evening out. While it runs Android, and has access to the full suite of Android apps – albeit on a tiny screen – you could install an absolutely minimal number of things on it; if you don’t want to be bothered by email or Twitter, if all you want is a phone, you can leave the big boy at home. Switch on the phone’s Life Mode, which disables all radios while the screen is switched off, and you’ll be able to make it last much longer than its listed eight-hour lifespan and absolutely ensure you won’t be bothered. We don’t know when, or if, the Palm Phone will hit UK shelves, or if its initially limited US release – tied to Verizon subscriptions – will be the only way to get hold of it. For some, we’d imagine the Palm Phone would make a perfect everyday mobile. For some, that second phone idea is something that’ll change their lives. For others, it’ll be a beacon of modern waste and excess.

Download this… Unlocker www.emptyloop.com/unlocker/ Have you ever tried to delete a file only to be presented with a cryptic message about the file being locked? Ever seen a mysterious ‘access denied’ prompt that really shouldn’t be there? Install Unlocker, and you’ll be able to take control. It adds a new option when you right-click a file; select Unlocker and you’ll be given the option to remove those locks and delete, rename, or otherwise alter those files without having to track down the program that has its hooks into them. Note: Be careful with the installer for Unlocker, since it will (by default) install some random software that you neither need or want on your PC. Make sure you uncheck the appropriate boxes. Secondly, be careful how you use it. Deleting random system files is a particularly bad idea, so reserve your use of Unlocker for those documents you can stand to lose.

take control Unlocker is a free app that enables you to easily open locked files.

uiz The 60-SecondmQ e sta rts no w! 1

Which of these sites is used for streaming footage of games? A twitch.tv B watch.gameplay C buttonmash.tv

What can you see at sat24.com?

A Weather satellite information B Satellite TV guide C Twenty-four Satya Nadellas

Which service does geoguessr.com turn into a game? A The UN Global Environment Outlook B Google Street View C GEO 600 gravitational wave detector

Where does ‘slime. clown.wiped’ point to on what3words.com? A Times Square B Buckingham Palace C The Louvre

| December 2018

What was the URL of the first ever website? A google.com B acme.com C info.cern.ch

From which country does the .tv domain name originate? A Toras Ruvas B Turkmenistan C Tuvalu

Answers 1A. 2A. 3B. 4B. 5C. 6C

Pe ns at th e rea d y, yo u r ti

www.facebook.com/windowsmag

NEXT ISSUE ON SALE Friday

07 December

Discover Facts & figures

Rob Mead-Green reveals a host of fascinating digital facts

$234 million

Amount of money Apple won’t now be paying in fines after a federal appeals court in the US ruled that Apple hadn’t infringed patents held by University of Wisconsin-Madison after all. The University’s licensing arm originally filed a lawsuit in 2014 saying processors used in the iPhone and iPad used several technologies that the University had created. The case has now been dismissed.

2 seconds 1 “bazillion”

0-60mph time of the PB18 E-tron electric car concept unveiled by Audi at the Paris Motor Show. The car also has a moveable console that enables it to turn from a two-seat roadster into a single-seat racer at the touch of a button, with the driver’s monocoque seating position shifting to the middle of the vehicle in seconds.

Number of phone calls allegedly made by a tiny gecko using a touchscreen desk phone in an animal hospital in Hawaii. The calls were inadvertently made by the gecko, thanks to the sticky pads on its feet, after he’d snuck into the Ke Kai Ola Marine Mammal Centre on the US island.

220GB

Number of files apparently lost by one Windows 10 user after upgrading to the October 2018 Update (version 1809), with numerous other reports of similar issues from users who’d signed up to Windows Insider. Microsoft temporarily halted the rollout of the feature update in October until it was able to resolve the issue.

The new name for the next version of Wi-Fi, otherwise known as 802.11ax. The Wi-Fi Alliance is adopting the new number nomenclature to help clear up confusion over the various flavours of Wi-Fi and so make it easier for you to tell whether you have the latest, fastest, whizziest Wi-Fi version… or not. 802.11ac becomes Wi-Fi 5; 802.11n becomes Wi-Fi 4; and so on…

3.20-3.28pm

Time data taken from a Fitbit watch, which was used as evidence in a murder trial in the US. Detectives showed that victim Kim Navarra’s heart rate peaked at 3.20pm before stopping completely at 3.28pm. This information, along with CCTV footage and the discovery of bloodstained clothing, was used to convict Anthony Aiello, the girl’s stepfather, of the crime. December 2018 |

Incoming

The hottest new Windows hardware on the horizon

Microsoft Surface family From £350 www.microsoft.com/surface Looking to treat yourself this Christmas? Pop along to your local Microsoft Store and feast your eyes (and starve your wallet) on the company’s updated Surface line, which includes the Surface Desktop 2; the Surface Laptop 2 (reviewed on page 78); the Surface Pro 6; and the all-new, on-ear Surface Headphones. Our pick is the delicious Surface Laptop 2, which now boasts a choice of eighth-generation Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processors; up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of ultra-fast SSD storage, depending on configuration, plus true all-day battery life of up to 14.5 hours. Other goodies include a 13.5-inch PixelSense display and a new colour, Black, which joins the existing Platinum, Cobalt Blue and Burgundy versions. Team it with the wireless Surface Headphones – which offer hands-free calling, adjustable noise-cancelling and Cortana integration – for a premium-quality Windows 10 experience on the go.

| December 2018

Windows 10 October 2018 Update revealed

Windows 10:

October 2018 Update Revealed The latest feature update has landed. Nick Peers takes you on a tour of its best features

e’re almost getting the hang of this now. October is the time when Microsoft ships its second major feature update of the year for Windows 10. The October 2018 Update – or version 1809 – is the sixth major update since Windows 10 arrived back in 2015. In this feature we’ll reveal all the exciting new features and improvements that are waiting for you to find them, from a new Clipboard History tool to new ways of integrating Windows 10 with your Android or iOS phone. But the 1809 update path has not been an easy one, with the update temporarily pulled after issues

surrounding the first rollout of the update. It’s exposed major issues with a twice-yearly update cycle that’s forced on the majority of users with no option to opt out or delay the update. That’s why we start this feature by revealing how to protect yourself from future botched updates to ensure the disruption is kept to a minimum. We’ll reveal how to delay updates if you’re running Windows 10 Pro, plus how to recover data that may have been wiped if you were unlucky enough to be one of the early adopters of the October 2018 Update. Without further ado, let’s see what’s new in the October 2018 Update, and how to stop the Spring 2019 Update wrecking your system.

December 2018 |

9000

Update essentials Before exploring the new features found in the October 2018 Update, prepare yourself for this – and future feature updates

icrosoft first attempted to release the October 2018 Update on 4th October. Within a day there were reports that the update was deleting key personal files from user folders – Microsoft promptly pulled the update. Many people – ourselves included – had successfully installed the update on one machine without problems, and if you’re one of those people you can breathe a sigh of relief. If you updated and found files missing, then the advice involved running data recovery software to try and get those files back. Of course, if you’ve followed our previous advice and keep regular backups of your system drive, then your files will have been safely stashed away in your backup, enabling you to restore them using your backup tool’s restoration feature. If not, the three-step walkthrough on the facing page reveals how to attempt data recovery using the free Recuva tool.

Lessons learned

At the time of writing, Microsoft has killed off the bugs, and the October 2018 Update had started rolling out again. Sadly, this episode demonstrates how, especially if you’re a Windows 10 Home user, you should really treat Windows updates with some suspicion and always make a backup of your whole system first.

You’ll receive the latest feature update through Windows Update – unless you get an error message.

What can you do about this? If you’re a Windows 10 Professional user, now is the time to take advantage of that fact: open Settings > ‘Update & security’ and click Advanced Options. Scroll down to the ‘Choose when updates are installed’ section. You can select the Semi-Annual Channel to ensure that feature updates are only installed when it’s considered stable enough for organisations or, if you don’t want to wait that long, use the feature update deferral drop-down to choose how many days to wait – we suggest you choose a minimum of either 30 days or even 60 days) until the

feature update is installed after its general release. And if you’re a Windows 10 Home user? You could attempt disabling

The Update Assistant is a great way to get hold of the October 2018 Update.

Restore from backup If, in future, you run into the problem of missing folders after installing a feature update, you’ll be able to restore them from your backup tool – if you’re using File History, navigate to C:\Users\{Username} in File Explorer, then open each folder in turn (such as Documents) and click the History button to see what’s recoverable. In most cases, the latest version of the files displayed are the ones you want – simply click the green button at the bottom to restore them. In the case of a drive image, If you use Macrium, simply double-click the backup file in File Explorer to mount it as a virtual drive, then copy the missing files back from the Users\{Username} folder on that mounted drive to your PC’s drive; If you’re using Paragon, select the backup in the main program, roll the mouse over the first dash symbol to the left of the Backup timeline clock and click Explore on the pop-up menu. You can then browse your backup for the missing files (again, look under C:\Users\{Your username}) and restore them directly from there.

| December 2018

If you have a recent backup, restoring files deleted by the October 2018 Update is a relatively straightforward task.