Windows Help and Advice 157 (Sampler) by Future PLC

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

REINSTALL WINDOWS Get the perfect Windows install RIGHT NOW!

WINDOWS 10 en settings •Master the desktop • manage your files •access hidd

ALSO INSIDE... Customise Windows 10 Secure your passwords Boost your battery life Free up storage space Master the Notes app Mirror your PC desktop

BEST APPS FOR

WINDOWS 10 EverythinG you need from backup to productiviTY tools

Get creative with HDR Improve video quality

Get the best PC monitor

Your unmissable guide to the latest screens

NEW TECH TESTED & RATED

• google home hub • synology DS1618+ NAS • nikon z6 camera • super smart speakers

The source for tech buying advice techradar.com 2

| March 2017

Welcome Whether you’re new to Windows 10 or an experienced user, our lead feature (page 11) has plenty of surprises in store – you’ll learn tons of new tips, tricks and techniques to help you make the most of your PC, and discover lots of super-secrets along the way. Turn to page 46 and you’ll find a treasure trove of low-cost or free apps that can help you kit out your machine, while on page 52 we’ll show you how to choose the right display for your budget, as well as recommended buys.

That’s not the half of it. On page 66 we’ll show you how to get the most cinema-like experience when watching movies or playing games; while our Explore section (page 25 onwards) delivers step-by-step guides on everything from customising Windows’ look to creating stunning HDR images. Finally, don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter at windowsmag.co.uk for even more goodies. Enjoy the issue!

Rob Mead-Green Editor

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SUBSCRIBE TO THE MAG TODAY AND SAVE – TURN TO PAGE 22! 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 1

Don’t miss our Next issue, when we will show you how to…

February 2019

Power up Google Chrome Pick and choose your default apps Create a perfect copy of a PC drive Play music on your PC with Wvnl

Features

11 Windows 10 crash course

Discover the tips, tricks and techniques you need to completely master your PC

46 25 best Windows apps

Kit out your PC at low cost – or for free!

52 Best PC monitors 2019

Top-quality displays for every budget

58 Perfect video playback

How to get cinema quality on your PC

Regulars 6 Discover Tick off your to-dos – the best task management apps; beat the tech scammers; the rise and rise of TikTok 22 Subscriptions 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 February 2019 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!” 26 Personalise Windows 10 29 Create strong passwords and store them safely with BitWarden 32 Copy and paste across all your devices with the Clipboard app

Support

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

| January 2019

34 Create a stunning HDR photo from a single image capture 38 Free up space on your PC with Windows’ Storage Sense

40 Mirror your desktop 42 Pair Bluetooth headphones 44 How to make your laptop’s battery last much longer

subscription bundle offer Digital and print together – and a free laptop bag!

Find out more on page 22

• Master your desktop • Find hidden settings • Manage your files

77 Our expert reviews

Kit out your new PC at low cost – or for free!

78 Synology DiskStation DS1618+ 80 Nikon Z6 82 Googe Home Hub 86 Smart speakers group test 88 The best free video converters

How to get more monitor for your money

January 2019 |

NEW things to do

amazing websites

Forget-me-not Tackle tough tasks (or the weekly shop) without missing a single thing.

| January 2019

fascinating facts

Discover Get better organised

Lis t up on lists up on lists

Get better organised with a task manager

The Knowledge…

Tick off those tasks with ease – and share the load with your family, too

here’s always something new to do. It never stops. Adult life is essentially a combination of being presented with problems and then solving those problems as effectively as you can – but if you really want to be effective, you need to know what’s coming, and every step you need to do to solve it. This can be as simple as keeping an up-to-date shopping list or keeping up with your weekly housework tasks, all the way to planning a brand new extension or sorting out a retirement portfolio.

You could generate your own system, using online tools like Google Docs – share access to a single document with a list of all your upcoming tasks, and you can collaborate on solving those problems with a partner. But we’re most fond of Wunderlist (www.wunderlist. com/), a task manager with an online component, apps for just about every phone and desktop platform, and the right stuff to get your lists moving. Creating a new list is a case of a couple of clicks, and you can share access to that list with a couple more. Checking off tasks is quick and easy, and if you’re doing something complex you can nest those tasks or items to ensure every little thing is covered – a new kitchen, for instance, could be broken down by job type (plumbing, electricals, cabinets and the like), then split into the individual tasks required, all of which can contain more detail. Keep it organised, keep it in one place, and keep on top of it all.

The Microsoft Store is overflowing with task management apps

sort it out

You could rely on your brain, but a good task manager – and we’re not talking about Windows’ Task Manager app, that’s completely different – is a low-effort way to remember those critical tasks. You’re not short of choices. The Microsoft Store is absolutely overflowing with task management applications, and some of them are even reasonably good.

Listen to this Microsoft invades your ears Continuing the company’s assault on the hardware market, the latest in Microsoft’s ever-expanding Surface line is here – and this time it’s a set of wallet-worrying headphones. At an intimidating price of £329.99, they’re certainly not the kind of cans you’ll be buying for casual wear, but if you’re serious about your audio, and you really want your earwear to match your other Surface devices, the Surface Headphones could be just the thing.

Broken audio The Surface Headphones are constructed from a complex list of components.

Sweet sounds Integrated noise cancelling and closed backs block out most outside distractions.

Touching tunes Need to mute, pause, or tweak the volume? Tap the ear to take Bluetooth control.

TikTok What is it? TikTok is, in essence, a service for sharing short-form videos with friends. It’s a lot more than that, as we’ll get to, but it’s also the key service which has helped make Chinese parent company Bytedance into the world’s most valuable tech startup, trumping even the mighty Uber with a value of over $75 billion. How is that possible? That’s a very good question, and one we can only really answer with some big statistics. TikTok (a merger of Bytedance’s original Chinese social network, Douyin, and musical.ly, purchased by the company in 2017) is immensely popular with young people the world over, netting more downloads than Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram in the US. It has been downloaded some 80 million times in the US alone. That’s pretty big. Should I download it? No. Really. The fact that you’re reading this magazine tells us TikTok isn’t for you, unless you’re interested in watching teenagers singing along to their favourite songs. TikTok is a wild west social network for those craving attention – and while we don’t think it’s going away soon, one of Bytedance’s other social projects has been banned in China because its users were creating some rather vulgar content. Can I trust my kids with it? We’d put TikTok on the same level as Snapchat, in as much as it’s very possible to encounter less-than-savoury content if you go looking for it. It’s hard to control a teenager, but try to establish some trust. So what’s the big takeaway? Essentially, the Chinese are coming. TikTok is one thing, but Asia’s largest company, Tencent, is picking up stakes in products like eSports game League of Legends and Fortnite creator Epic Games. As Chinese tech money grows, it’s coming to the West – and we don’t think it’s going to stop.

January 2019 |

Ev eryon e’s tal king about

Tech support scammers

They don’t want to help – they just want your money. Keep your wits about you, and don’t be fooled

ave you ever had a call claiming to be from Microsoft? Perhaps from someone with a thick accent, and a slight delay on the line? The chances are you have, because they’re basically inescapable, and we’d also wager that you’ve not fallen for the obvious scam. If you’re not familiar, these calls amount to little more than fraud: call centres, usually located in India, cold-call folks to claim there’s a critical problem with their PC. If the victim bites, the caller negotiates remote access to the user’s PC, shows off some worrying-looking (but actually completely benign) messages in Windows’ Event Viewer, and then demands money to fix it – or worse. Some scanners might lock up their target machines and hold them to ransom.

rogue callers

These rogues won’t always claim they’re calling from Microsoft – anti-virus companies are another popular false identity – and they don’t always cold-call, sometimes buying up Google Ads for technical support buzzwords, and

offering up a spurious number for people to call when they’re having problems. With a little thought, they’re relatively easy to avoid. For a start, Microsoft won’t call you randomly about some nebulous problem, and it won’t ask for remote access to your PC. Often, modern phones will highlight these calls as potential spam, and asking for a number to call back on is usually enough to stop the scammer in their tracks. If they do give a number, search for it online. If you do end up on a technical support website, look in your web browser’s address bar. Check for the lock symbol, and examine the web address to see if you’re really on the site you think you’re on. If not, back away – and if you’re really looking for technical support, scrutinise those Google results to make sure you’re not being duped. Big tech companies are upset about this. And they’re stepping up the fight against it, with Microsoft recently working to get over 20 Indian call centres shut down. Whether the effort will stick is as yet unclear. Keep your wits about you, and don’t get sucked in.

Download this… Wiztree antibody-software.com What’s on your PC? Far too much, we’d wager. And it may well be very poorly organised, so when that storage starts to brim over you’ll be scraping and clawing to find those files which are filling it up the most. Unless, that is, you use Wiztree. Run it, let it loose on your PC’s storage drive, and it’ll hunt out every single file that’s there. Once it’s made its map, it shows it to you as a visual representation of your storage; bigger files are shown as bigger blocks, and folders (even if they’re full of tiny files) are distinctly indicated. Hovering your mouse over the coloured map shows the individual file names and their location on your drive – you can delete (or even copy or unzip) them with a right click, or select the ‘Explore Folder’ option if you want to take a closer look at the folder they’re in. It’s an absolutely essential tool.

What’s where? The contents of your PC’s storage drive laid completely bare.

uiz The 60-SecondmQ e sta rts no w! Pe ns at th e rea d y, yo u r ti

A Japan B Brazil C Nepal

Which country hosted the preInternet Minitel online service? A Germany B France C Vatican City

Which music streaming company is based in Sweden?

SAP, Europe’s largest tech company, hails from which country?

A Pandora B Deezer C Spotify

A Finland B Germany C Latvia

A Skype B Microsoft Office C Google Chrome

A Microsoft B Alphabet C Apple

Which other tech product also originated in Sweden?

What is the most valuable tech company in the world?

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

NTT Data is the biggest tech company in which country?

| January 2019

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01 February

Discover Facts & figures

Rob Mead-Green reveals a host of fascinating digital facts

200 million

7 % $812.93 Number of people who have now registered to play online gaming phenomenon Fortnite, a jump from 125 million in June 2018. Creator Epic says the game now has 8.3 million concurrent players – a new record.

Chance that SpaceX founder and Tesla boss, Elon Musk, will move to Mars. He’s made the claim several times before, but never attached a figure of probability to it. He’d better hurry up – SpaceX’s first Mars mission is currently scheduled for 2022.

billion 100,000 Number of HoloLens headsets that the US Army is expected to buy from Microsoft in a $480 million deal. The headsets will be used for training and live combat purposes. “Augmented reality technology will provide troops with more and better information to make decisions,” Microsoft says.

£4.5 million Amount of money Facebook has pledged to help train local journalists in the UK – and so help combat the spread of “fake news”. The Community News Project money will be distributed by the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ).

Market cap reached by Microsoft on 27 November, making it – briefly – the world’s most valuable company after a hiatus of eight years. The company snatched the slot from Apple, whose own market cap had slipped from a peak of $1 trillion in August 2018 to $812.60 billion on that same day in November, largely as a result of investor concerns over iPhone sales.

$3,900

Real-money value of a single Bitcoin in November 2018, a fall of 80.29 percent from the $19,783 peak it reached in December 2017. The cryptocurrency’s dramatic fall has been attributed to nervousness among Bitcoin traders, plus the arrival of several forks of Bitcoin, including Bitcoin Cash. January 2019 |

Incoming

The hottest new Windows hardware on the horizon

Nvidia Titan RTX $2,499 www.nvidia.com Do you believe in love at first sight? We didn’t. Well, until now. The object of our affection is the stunning gold-coloured Titan RTX from Nvidia. Just look at it. While you’re taking in its sensuous form, its three DisplayPort connectors and those gorgeous twin fans, let’s explain what’s so special about it. For one, it’s the most powerful prosumer graphics card you can buy today, packing in almost all the power of its Quadro RTX 6000 workstation cousin for less than half the price – stick it in your PC and watch it fly. Second, it’s kitted out with Nvidia’s Turing architecture, a 1,350MHz processor (boostable to 1,770MHz) and 24GB of ulra-fast GDDR6 memory, delivering 130 teraflops of performance. That makes it ideal for everything from high-end gaming (up to 8K) to dataset crunching, plus AI/machine learning duties and real-time 3D. Who says you can’t have beauty and brains? Hands off, it’s ours.

| January 2019

Windows 10 Windows crash course

WINDOWS 10 New to Windows 10? Looking to brush up your existing skills? Nick Peers reveals how to get around on your PC

t doesn’t matter if you’ve been using Windows 10 for years, have just upgraded from a previous version of Windows or are starting out on the PC for the most time, this feature has you covered. It’s designed to acquaint you with the fundamentals of the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, giving you a leg up to (or welcome boost in) the world of Windows. Even if you think you know all there is to know, chances are you’ll discover a more efficient way of using your PC and, of course, if you’re new to the whole experience then we’re here to settle your nerves and demonstrate just how user-friendly Windows can be. Over the course of the next 10 pages we’ll step you through all the fundamental parts of Windows, from navigating the desktop and accessing your folders and files

to learning how to find information with various search tools in Windows. You’ll also discover how to receive notifications through the new Action Centre and explore the Settings tool to configure all aspects of Windows and your computer to your tastes. All you need to do is unpack your new laptop or boot up your trusty PC, wait for the desktop to appear and then turn the page to start your crash course into mastering Windows. Walk this way…

January 2019 |

9000

Master the Windows desktop

Reacquaint yourself with the desktop, Start menu and Taskbar

he bulk of your computing life is spent within the confines of the Windows desktop. Even when you have applications open, you’re using the Taskbar to switch between them, while the Start menu sits ready to pop up when you need it. The desktop continues to reside underneath it all too, just a click away and revealing either a bare

backdrop or a pile of shortcuts, files and folders that you’ve found no other home for. It’s easy to develop bad habits over time, so in this opening section we’re going to step you through bestpractice advice for making better use of the desktop – even if that means making less use of it thanks to the presence of other, improved tools – the Start menu and the Taskbar.

Customise the desktop

Any program shortcut can be dragged to the desktop, plus you can store folders and files here for easy access. You can also place certain system shortcuts here: right-click the desktop and choose Personalise > Themes. Scroll down and click ‘Desktop icon settings’ to open a dialog box from where you can add shortcuts to This PC, your user folder, the network, the Recycle Bin and Control Panel.

| January 2019

Manage desktop windows

As you open multiple program windows, switching between them can be awkward, even when using Aero Peek (see the annotation above). Thanks to a feature called Aero Snap, it’s possible to drag windows to the sides and corners of the screen to quickly resize them: drag left or right to resize the window to half the available screen width, drag it to the corners to make it take up a quarter of the space.