Innehållsförteckning för December 2021 från Tech Advisor

Microsoft is warning of a new Office vulnerability that can be avoided by continuing to use smart Internet practices. Namely, don’t open untrusted documents. Researcher EXPMON recently reported a new vulnerability to Microsoft (see fave.co/3tHStct), the company said, and it confirmed the vulnerability in a security update – fave.co/3C9iKnc. The tech giant has yet to issue a patch, though it said it will “take the appropriate action to help protect our customers”. The vulnerability takes advantage of the MSHTML rendering engine used by Internet Explorer, a browser that Microsoft has deprecated. (IE will still run within Edge, but within the browser’s sandbox, protecting your PC.) So instead, the attackers are targeting the IE engine running within Microsoft 365 or Office documents. If a malicious Office document is sent you via…

If there was a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, just to reverse slam dunk victory back into the jaws of utter failure, Microsoft found it with the way it’s handled the Windows 11 hardware compatibility fiasco. In August, the company revealed it would indeed let PCs built before 2018 install Windows 11, ending what had been building into a modern day Cuban Missile Crisis among PC enthusiasts. The problems began in June when Microsoft released a Windows 11 compatibility checker that essentially threw computers running still-powerful CPUs like the Intel Core i7-7700K and AMD Ryzen 7 1800X overboard – including its own Microsoft Surface laptops – in the name of security. As you can imagine, the PC community wasn’t happy to have to be forced into…

If you’re wondering how to increase the performance of your Windows 11 PC, you may already know one way: use the Windows power-performance slider. But in Windows 11, Microsoft has hidden it. We’ll show you where. Microsoft offers you an easy way to boost performance in Windows 10. On the Windows taskbar, clicking the battery icon opens what we know as the power slider, where you can trade lower performance for extended battery life. Naturally, this feature is common on laptops, less so on desktops. But it does make a difference. Microsoft, for example, dials down the performance slider on its devices to their most minimal settings, preserving battery life at the cost of performance. On Surface devices like the Surface Laptop 4 and the Surface Pro 7+, simply sliding…

Are you still typing in all-caps BECAUSE WINDOWS 11 HOME WILL FORCE USERS TO HAVE A MICROSOFT ACCOUNT? Lighten up. I, like you, detest being forced to have an account just to use every new Microsoft product. It feels like a craven attempt to spam my inbox with marketing offers. It’s equally hard to read about how many Windows PCs won’t qualify for Windows 11, even if we understand better now why Microsoft requires a TPM for the new operating system. But taking all these big changes as signs about the direction Windows 11 is going, the account requirement starts to make more sense. Clearly Microsoft wants to increase the baseline security of every Windows 11 PC, far beyond what’s ever been required before. One of the features where the…

Price: £1,199 from fave.co/2WgLI5j When Sony unveiled its Xperia Mark III line-up earlier this year, the company showcased what looked like an unmistakably familiar face. While the new flagship Xperia 1 III may resemble its predecessor, however, it promises a handful of notable upgrades and additions that stand out from the status quo. Sony has occupied a relatively tiny corner of the smartphone market in recent years, further tailoring its Xperia smartphones to brand loyalists who value the company’s technical expertise and distinct style of hardware and software above all else. The Xperia 1 line serves as the pinnacle of its smartphone portfolio; each new revision offers a tighter and more refined experience than the last, leaning heavily on the company’s expertise and technologies within other product categories; like its…

Price: Free from fave.co/3kaDJQr Password managers relieve users of the burden of remembering all their passwords except one – the master password. As the key that unlocks access to all your other passwords, it is a single point of failure. Forget it and you’re up the proverbial creek. LogMeOnce solves this problem by not requiring a master password (though it’s still an option if you want to use it) and using biometric, numeric PIN, and photo logins to provide access to your password vault. Other than this unique passwordless access, LogMeOnce operates similarly to other password managers. It allows you to store and synchronize passwords, credit cards, secure notes and sensitive files across your devices and secures it all with end-to-end encryption. It includes a strong-password generator that creates passwords…

The desktop PC has two major nemeses: dust and heat. Heat can be tough to diagnose since you can’t see it the way you can with dust. The key to avoiding any heat-related issues (besides regularly cleaning your PC) is sticking with some tried and true principles of cooling. If you follow the basics, then adapt them to your local environment and the demands of your PC, you should be just fine. HOW TO MEASURE TEMPERATURES The best way to easily measure if your PC is getting too hot is to monitor the temperatures reported by the CPU and GPU. If these two components are staying within their recommended temperature ranges, then everything else should be just fine. For CPUs, this means keeping your processor under 80 degrees Celsius when…

As we’ve seen, there’s a scary new attack targeting Microsoft Office – and worse, it’s not patched yet. But you can keep your computer safe if you don’t click on files from untrusted sources. And even if you do, Office’s Protected View feature can help. Unfortunately, we all still click on Office documents emailed from ‘trusted’ contacts, so the next line of defence is to make sure Protected View – the prompt that warns you a file originated from someone potentially insecure, requiring you to click a button to start editing it – is switched on in Office 365. It’s normally on by default, but some users may errantly switch it off. If you’re wondering if you have Protected View on, here’s the easy five-step process to check. HOW TO…

Windows 11 certainly looks different, but under-the-hood performance improvements may make it feel different, too – specifically in how the operating system handles multiple apps, as well as how your PC resumes from sleep. Microsoft detailed the new changes in a company video (see fave.co/3lqfX2d), where Steve Dispensa, vice president of enterprise management at Microsoft, explained how Windows 11 will deliver more performance in three different scenarios. 1. RUNNING MULTIPLE APPS ON AN OVERLOADED PC Take a PC with multiple applications running: email in the background, instant messaging, browsers with multiple tabs, and so on. A PC without much memory or CPU cycles available will run slowly, probably causing you to close an app or two to improve performance. In Windows 11, Microsoft promises that the way in which those…

Within Windows 11, the Widgets drawer is huge. But what if you don’t want Widgets? You might not be able to banish it entirely, but you can get rid of the Widgets button from your Taskbar in just a few easy steps. In fact, if you don’t even have to use the Search icon or even Task View, you can remove those icons from your Taskbar as well. Here’s how. Widgets is the Windows 11 reboot of News & Interests, the Windows 10 feature that pre-selects news, weather, sports scores and stock prices and collects them in a small widget that lives at the bottom of your screen. (On Windows 10, News & Interests displays the temperature and weather within your Taskbar, while within Windows 11 it does not.) In…

Price: £1,599 (inc VAT) from fave.co/3C5OFVE The Acer Swift X packs impressive power inside an ultraportable case and is a great pick if you want a high-performance, highly portable laptop. Where most ultraportables prize efficiency and rely on integrated graphics, the Swift X serves up Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU for an added punch. With the RTX graphics and a powerful AMD CPU, the Swift X is able to handle content-creation tasks and some gaming in addition to the basic office chores for which most ultraportables are built. The Swift X doesn’t toss efficiency out the window and provides ample battery life despite its power-hungry parts. You’ll need to put up with a frequently loud fan and warm keyboard, however, and the system’s fit and finish is not on…

Price: £599 from fave.co/3kjYgki The Asus ZenFone 8 was released alongside the ZenFone 8 Flip and went on sale globally just a few months ago. This handset boasts flagship features, but is a fraction of the price of phones from leading manufacturers such as Samsung and Apple – and it’s smaller too. But does the lower cost mean that there’s some big compromises? I’ve spent some time with the ZenFone 8 to see if this is a phone worth investing in. DESIGN As Goldilocks would say, this phone is not too big, nor too small – it’s just right. It can be used one-handed easily and will slip inside most pockets comfortably, but the screen is still large enough to enjoy videos on and you can play games without feeling…

The Command Prompt app has been around since December 1987, providing Windows users with a command-line interface from which to execute operating systems tasks, many of which are very useful. Due to its popularity, Microsoft has made the app easily accessible on Windows 10, in more ways than one. Here are 10 ways to open Command Prompt. 1. OPEN COMMAND PROMPT FROM THE SEARCH BAR You can search for any app using the Windows search bar, and the Command Prompt is no exception. First, type Command Prompt in the Windows search bar in the bottom-left corner of your screen, and then click the Command Prompt app in the search results, or click ‘Open’ in the list of options to the right of the search results. 2. OPEN COMMAND PROMPT FROM…

It’s official: Windows 11 is out. Writing at the end of August, a Microsoft spokesperson said, “On this day, the free upgrade to Windows 11 will begin rolling out to eligible Windows 10 PCs and PCs that come pre-loaded with Windows 11 will start to become available for purchase.” That’s an interesting twist, as it had previously said that Windows 11 upgrades for Windows 10 PCs wouldn’t happen until 2022. At the time of writing it wasn’t clear whether eligible PCs would start seeing the Windows 11 upgrade prompt immediately, or if most people would need to wait until later for the offer? Microsoft has said that new devices will get offered it first, with Windows 11 spreading to all eligible PCs by mid-2022. Don’t let those technical details take…

Windows 11 won’t just change the Windows operating system, it will change the way some Windows apps look and feel, too. Before the new operating system’s launch, Microsoft showed off several Windows apps that it’s reworked for Windows 11, including what you might consider to be core Windows apps: Mail and Calendar, Paint, and even the lowly Clock app. Below, we’ll show you what to expect of these new apps within Windows 11. Note: at the time of writing Windows 11 was officially in beta. Things may have changed between then and the final release. CLOCK (FOCUS SESSIONS) Perhaps the most unexpectedly interesting update to Windows 11’s suite of Windows apps is the lowly Clock app. Now, in addition to the usual suite of Timers, Alarms, a Stopwatch and a…

Windows 11 introduces a new, centred Taskbar, complete with icons that are grouped in the centre of your screen, rather than the familiar left-hand corner. If this feels weird, here’s how to move your Taskbar icons back to where they were in the days of Windows 10. Why do this? Muscle memory. By now, you’re probably used to the familiar way of dragging your mouse cursor down to the left-hand corner and clicking the Start menu icon to launch an application. With the Windows 11 layout, you can’t unconsciously do this. In fact, as more icons add themselves to your Windows 11 Taskbar, the Start menu slides farther and farther to the left. What this means is that you’ll consciously have to hunt down the Start icon, rather than simply…

Price: £2,999 (inc VAT) from fave.co/3CiWCab Warning: Dell’s XPS 17 9710 is no gaming laptop. If you just wrinkled your nose up in disapproval, it’s fine – from Dell’s point of view anyway. That’s because the XPS 17 9710 is seemingly designed to appeal to content creators, not those focused only on gaming. You might have difficulty wrapping your head around the concept since gaming laptops with a higher-resolution screen typically pass as content creation laptops. We admit we thought that too, but over time, we’ve come to finally understand what Dell is doing here – very successfully too. Adobe users in particular will love this notebook. FEATURES CPU: Intel 8-core 11th gen Core i7-11800H processor GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 RAM: 32GB DDR4 Storage: 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD…

Price: Free from fave.co/3EksME4 While free PDF editors are easy to find, free PDF editors with advanced features are virtually unheard of. PDF Candy is a rarity, offering top-shelf scanning, multiple file-conversion options, OCR capability and other features you’d otherwise expect to pay for. The web-based editor isn’t presented as a unified interface but rather as a slate of individual app icons accessible from a single landing page. Altogether there are 44 tools for creating, editing and converting PDFs. You just choose one, upload the file, and wait for PDF Candy to complete the task. The tool selection is impressive. Naturally, you get a modest editor that lets you edit, mark up and annotate text. But you’ll also find tools for watermarking documents; adding, rearranging and splitting pages; extracting images;…

Does your laptop feel sluggish? Do you have to wait five minutes after rebooting the laptop before it responds? Does it struggle to switch between browser tabs even when you have less than half a dozen open? A slow laptop may have you shopping for a new model, but you should try these tips before you give up. Improving the performance of your ageing laptop can extend its life by several years and keep it out of landfill. 1. RESTART YOUR PC Have you tried turning it off and on again? It’s a cliché for a reason. If anything, this trick is even more relevant today. A modern laptop is reliable and can be placed in an efficient sleep mode to save power. There’s no reason to turn it off…