Innehållsförteckning för March 2022 från TechLife

The school year is looming ahead for students all over Australia, so it’s a great time to lay in the right sort of kit. Back in my day, that meant pencil cases and schoolbooks, but the 80s were a long time ago, and laptops are now a far more common learning tool. A laptop is practically essential for uni students, and even high-schoolers can benefit from a portable computing device in their backpacks. But where to start? And what form factor, or operating system? Do you want something with a bit of gaming grunt, or something that won’t break the bank? Perhaps a two-in-one device that can double as a tablet? We’ve got all the answers, this issue, and have gathered nine great – but very different! – portables for…

Some Windows 10 and 11 users have been suffering at the hands of a strange Outlook bug which affects the search facility in the desktop email client, but a resolution has now been applied by Microsoft. The bug affected those who installed the November 2021 preview cumulative update (KB5007253) or later (so that includes the December update, of course), and means that when searching in the Outlook app, recent emails may not be returned in a search when they should be. Microsoft explains: “This issue is related to emails which have been stored locally in PST or OST files. It might affect POP and IMAP accounts, as well as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365 hosted accounts. If the default search in the Outlook app is set to server search, the…

The Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook is here, and we’re not kidding when we say that we’ve been excited to try this device out – and it does not disappoint. The Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook was hands down one of our favorite Chromebooks ever, and the Duet 5 Chromebook improves on last year’s offering in nearly every way – as long as you’re looking for a laptop more than a tablet. Design Let’s start with the obvious: it’s bigger. Last year’s Duet Chromebook featured a 10.1-inch display, which meant that its detachable keyboard was also 10.1-inches diagonally. This made for a very cramped keyboard, which pretty much ruled it out for a lot of people who don’t have a whole lot of dexterity in their hands. At 13.3-inches diagonally, the…

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first drug to treat the most common form of dwarfism, achondroplasia. This is caused by mutations in the FGFR3 gene, which encodes instructions to build a protein involved in bone growth and development. These mutations push the gene into overdrive, impeding the process by which cartilage tissue gets replaced by bone; this leads to the development of short and abnormally shaped bones and causes people with achondroplasia to be of short stature. BioMarin Pharmaceutical has been developing and testing a treatment for years. Now that drug has officially been approved for use in children ages five and up. Clinical trials suggest that the drug, Voxzogo, is safe and effective at restoring bone growth in children with achondroplasia – thus boosting…

Smart displays that feature built-in cameras can prove useful at home since they can be used to make video calls to help stay in touch with friends and family. However, the screens are often smaller than many tablets, which means the experience isn’t what you hoped for. The new Facebook Portal Plus hopes to change all of this. The 14-inch screen is the largest in the social media giant’s range of smart displays. Even better, it can be manually tilted up or down to ensure it’s at the perfect viewing angle. Design Unlike the Facebook Portal Go, which has a wedge-shaped design, the Facebook Portal Plus boasts a design similar to the Amazon Echo Show 10, with a tiltable display attached to a base. However, in the case of the…

The seismic Microsoft Activision purchase will likely face a long and intense review process for which government approval is “not guaranteed,” says analyst David Cole, founder of DFC Intelligence. “There will be a great deal to work out here and getting it past government regulators will be a major hurdle,” Cole told GamesRadar+. “This includes not just the US, but around the globe where Activision Blizzard products are sold including the European Union, China etc. You also have the issue of market share in the console space, PC space and mobile space to be addressed. The approval process is likely to be long and not guaranteed.” The biggest purchase in the history of the games industry was announced just hours before the US government revealed a sweeping review of merger…

$59.95. PC, PlayStation na.finalfantasyxiv.com Endwalker is a bit like a dam. Behind it sits a decade worth of narrative and characters, each with their own backstories and baggage, while standing at its base on the other side is the player, desperately hoping for a small trickle of story and character details to be let through at a time, rather than being crushed by an overwhelming amount of information at once. Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker thankfully nails the former role. Standing at the precipice of the unknown for Square Enix’s long-running MMO, Endwalker has the unenviable task of rounding out a story arc that began all the way back in 2010, pulling together threads that were established years ago for a satisfying and cohesive conclusion. To accomplish this, Endwalker actually starts…

$349, www.lenovo.com The gaming monitor genre traces its origins back to 2013 and one of the first 144Hz screens to hit the market – Asus’ VG248Q. At the time it cost about US$400 and set a new bar for responsiveness and speed. And remember that Adaptive-Sync wasn’t yet in the mix, not to mention things like HDR or extended colour. In 2021, that same money can buy a QHD screen running at 165Hz, but if your monitor budget starts lower, a 25-inch 144Hz display is the best bet. Lenovo hits that target neatly with its G25-10. It checks the 144Hz and Adaptive-Sync boxes and offers HDR with a caveat we’ll explain in a moment. It doesn’t have extended colour, but it delivers everything else needed for smooth, responsive gameplay and…

$229, www.cherry-world.com The Cherry MX Board 3.0 S is a full-size keyboard made with both gamers and office workers in mind. Complete with per-key RGB, N-key rollover and key remapping and macro programming, it meets the demands for high-intensity shooters and even manages to one-up many similarly priced gaming keyboards with its wrap-around metal case. The Cherry MX Board 3.0 S is an ever-so-slightly compact full-size keyboard. It features a total of 108 buttons (four more than usual thanks to dedicated track controls and a Calculator button above the Numpad) but manages to save a full inch in width compared to a normal office keyboard. It accomplishes this by incorporating extra-thin bezels across all four ideas and shrinking the gaps between the typing keys, arrows and Numpad. It’s a small…

The act of reinstalling Windows 10 can feel daunting. Never fear: we’re going to step you through the entire process from booting from your Windows installation media to running carefully through the post-install setup options. If you’ve not yet done so, visit www.microsoft.com/en-gb/ software-download/windows10 and click Download tool now to download and run the Media Creation Tool. Insert a blank DVD, or plug in an unused USB flash drive (8GB or larger). After launching the tool, accept the licence terms, then choose Create installation media… and follow the prompts (use recommended options when asked) to create your flash drive or generate an ISO file. If you choose the ISO file option, click Open DVD burner at the end to write it to your blank DVD. Once your installation media has been…

If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating new installation media for any version of Windows 10 past the Creators Update, you’ll probably feel a bit silly when you discover that Microsoft tucked a ‘fresh start’ option into its later Win 10 editions. Using it takes any Windows 10 installation back to the basics of a Windows install, even removing any preinstalled software your manufacturer might have included, and stripping away all your drivers – and it doesn’t require any special media. It’s basically a clean install without you having to directly perform the actions of reinstallation. You’ll find it in a corner of Windows Defender Security Centre, aka Windows Security – select Device performance and & health, then Additional info, before clicking Get started to begin. Again, make sure…

We’re at the point in the PC’s evolution where the overheads of virtualisation are proportionately so small, and the technology enabling it so plentiful, that running an everyday OS in a virtual machine is entirely reasonable. You obviously won’t get 100 percent of bare metal performance from a virtualised instance of Windows 10, but it has a host of advantages. When you’ve got a system running just as you like it, you can take a snapshot, then quickly return to it at any point in the future. You can whip up a fresh copy of Windows in minutes, without any risk to your existing install. You can fire up other operating systems, and run them simultaneously on the same machine. If you’re the kind of person who loves to settle…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it REQUIRES Windows 10 For those times you want to quickly check the content of a file without waiting for an app to load, there are a few options. If it’s an image file, you can, of course, use Windows 10’s built-in thumbnails and preview pane. The preview pane also works if you want to look at a PDF. However, it comes up short when you want to preview text files. To get a large, fast preview of a file, there’s a little gizmo available for free on the Microsoft Store that will bring it up in seconds. It’s called QuickLook, and it mirrors functionality that macOS users have had for a few years now – select a file with the mouse and tap the…

FLYOVER GIVES YOU A NEW PERSPECTIVE Flyover puts you on an aerial tour of a city in Maps. First, check which cities work with Flyover on Apple’s website: bit.ly/MLflyover (this link is case sensitive). Search for a location that is compatible with Flyover, then click it in the sidebar. Its information card will appear. On the card, click Flyover Tour. The Flyover tour will now begin. This converts the map to a satellite view (if it wasn’t already) and cycles through major attractions from a drone’s perspective. Details of each location are at the bottom of the window.…

When it comes to PC security crises, there are few potentially more damaging than ransomware. This is where the attacker encrypts your valuable files and demands a ransom be paid in order to get them back. Of all the things that can happen to you, this is the one most likely and one of the more potentially devastating. The ultimate defence against ransomware is having a proper backup of your files. We walked through one possible solution in last month’s Home Networking column, when we talked through setting up Resilio Sync as a possible networked backup tool. But what if you want something simpler: a traditional backup system that automatically keeps up-to-date copies of files in a ‘safe’ location – a USB drive or NAS drive, for example – and…

Enforcement agencies seized bear teeth, rugs, bile and embryos suspended in honey from passengers arriving in Australia and New Zealand from 2007 to 2018. Most of the bear parts and derivatives, such as gallbladder bile, were ingredients in traditional medicines. The goods were most often seized from people travelling into Australia and New Zealand from China, but they also came from other countries such as the US and Canada. “We knew we would find some records, but we never expected them to be in the hundreds or the diversity of products and number of countries from which they were being sourced and transported,” said Phill Cassey, head of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Trade in wildlife threatens many species around the world. Bears are…

With TVs growing ever bigger, it’s increasingly important that our television sets blend into their surroundings. Samsung has been leading the charge with its The Frame TV sets for several years now, but its 2021 edition finally sees the range measuring up to the best that Samsung has to offer. Displaying works of art in standby mode and with a customizable frame that makes it ideal for wall hanging, The Frame TV for 2021 is functionally as good to watch at as it is fashionable to have around your home. Starting at 32 inches (in a 1080p configuration) and going up to 75 inches in size, we’ve been testing the 4K 43-inch QLED model for this review. Design We normally separate our discussions around design and TV software interface in…

How can I make my whole house smart? Kerry Ericsson Guru has long bounced off the whole smart home thing, despite acting as smart home correspondent for a number of reputable publications in the past, but a light has turned itself on within him: that stuff you’re doing with Alexa and Wi-Fi? It’s not smart home. It’s smart Barbie Dreamhouse. It’s dumb home. It is simply the cloying cream on top of a delicious bottle of smart milk. To do smart home right, you need to roll up your sleeves. This means, unfortunately for you, a period of learning, during which you will need to absorb the icky jargon and hideous interface of Home Assistant, ideally installed on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. Home Assistant is, despite everything it…

A new studio built by XCOM studio veterans aims to “blur the line between strategy and action” games. Bit Reactor founder Greg Foertsch’s most recent credits include working as art director on XCOM 2, though his history with Firaxis stretches all the way back to its beginnings in 1996. The studio recently unveiled its official website and social media channels, and while it isn’t ready to share what its first project will be, Foertsch outlined some of the studio’s ambitions in a GamesIndustry.biz interview. The short version is that those ambitions are very, very big. Foertsch expects Bit Reactor to “go head to head with Halo or whoever is out there, just like we did in 2012” with XCOM. He believes strategy games still have a massive amount of untapped…

$59.95, PC, Xbox, PlayStation, www.ubisoft.com Rainbow Six Extraction is as much a trigger-happy horror game as it is a PvE tactical shooter. It’s a spin-off of its older cousin, Rainbow Six Siege, and a fully-formed realisation of the squad-based shooter’s limited-time alien invasion ‘Outbreak’ mode from 2018. Best played in multiplayer, Extraction is about hunting hostile and horrifying creatures in contained environments. It’s about gathering intel and extricating fallen comrades who’ve succumbed to the new threat in battle. With the inclusion of familiar operators, such as Vigil and Sledge and Doc, it’s a competent extension of the Siege universe. With a host of insidious parasitic and ability-wielding baddies, such as grunts and spikers and bloaters, it’s a fine evolution of its source material. Set on New York City’s Liberty Island,…

Albion Online: Awakened Lands SHRUNK DOWN SANDBOX. Free (optional subscription), iOS/Android With the largely abject failure of native MMORPG titles on mobile – the vast majority designed around microtransactions, multiple currencies, and auto-play – much of the innovation of bringing these experiences to phones and tablets revolves around adapting a predominantly PC experience to a touchscreen. This was first completed successfully with Eve Echoes; largely the vast majority of long time PC darling Eve Online replicated onto a touch interface. Albion Online takes a slightly different tact and instead replicates the PC client in its entirety on phones and iPad. This is possible thanks to the top down, moderately graphically light, point and click interface on PC, which translates exceptionally well to a screen. On top of this, the game…

$2,199, www.benq.com We’ve seen some massive PC monitors launch in the last few years, but the BenQ EW3880R, with its 21:9 aspect ratio, is one of the widest and most interesting currently on offer. Its 38-inch (37.5-inch viewable) screen has great presence (before you even turn it on) with its subtle brown speaker grille and stand. It looks like something that would almost fit into a living room. Design The EW3880R’s panel is just about something that would fit in a modern, compact living room, thanks to the brown tinge on the speaker grille below the screen and on the stand. However, the stand does tend to scream that it’s still a computer monitor at heart, meaning it’s not quite suited to being the centerpiece of a family living room.…

$279, www.razer.com Razer’s new Pro Type Ultra is the latest in the company’s more productivity-focused gear lineup, which includes the original Pro Type, the Razer Pro Click and Pro Click Mini and even the Razer Book 13. To that end, it sheds most gamer-centric design trappings, like per-key RGB, while keeping enough to emphasise Razer’s history with mechanical keyboards. Even using this keyboard at home instead of at an office, I really like this less edgy design aesthetic. The finish on the Pro Type Ultra is gorgeous; the aluminum plate combined with the white ABS keycaps, which are prone to shine as they age but tend to have nicer looking legends than PBT, makes it one of the best-looking mechanical keyboards I have reviewed. The keycaps on the Pro Type…

$265, finisaustralia.com The Finis Smart Goggles can be connected to a small module that fits into the corner of one lens, and tracks swimming metrics like laps, stroke type, splits and rests. It also packs in a digital display that you can use to keep a close eye on performance and receive feedback during your swim. Out of the box, these smart goggles look like pretty regular goggles. You can pick them up in white/smoke or with blue or mirror lenses, but the design and the way the smarts are applied remain the same across all models. You also have the tiny tracking module with the built-in display, which fits inside the left goggle lens. Once it’s in, there’s a raised button on the top of the goggle gasket you…

With the current cohort of best and brightest heading back to school and university now, for 2022 many will have a laptop that can hang in there till next year, but there’s a heap of affordable and powerful offerings for those that can’t. Take the stress and strain out of choosing a great system for your schooling and university needs with TechLife’s guide to the best laptops for students, which has a 2022 pick for just about every need and budget. The good news is that retailers are keen to shift laptops to students, and will usually offer a host of tempting deals and discounts to get you to part with your cash, so keep your eyes peeled for the best student discounts on laptops while you shop – you…

Reinstalling Windows is a fairly trivial task. Put in the right media, boot from it, grind away the old OS, and replace it with the pristine bits of a shiny new install. This can be a painless, if time-consuming, procedure that leaves you with a like-new PC, or perhaps an even better one if you were unlucky enough to buy a PC burdened with preinstalled trashware. Before you do this, make sure you’ve checked off a few prerequisites, all of which are good practice even if you’re not planning to wipe everything and start again. First, keep a record of your product key (if you have one – most likely if you’ve upgraded from a previous version of Windows), or make sure your digital licence is well looked after. If…

Reinstalling is, or should be, a last resort – and if you ever come to the point where you absolutely have to reinstall Windows and don’t have copies of your files, it might be too late. A hardware failure, a cryptographic malware attack, whatever the case may be, you don’t want to be left stranded. We’ve talked about using Windows’ File History tools elsewhere, which is a good way to keep regular copies of your personal files, but Windows also includes a more thorough backup procedure in the form of Backup and Restore (Windows 7). Now, we can’t be entirely sure how long this is going to last, given its archaic name, but for now, it works. If you have a backup on an external drive, you can reinstall Windows…

Cannibalising old components I have some components lying around I’d like to reuse. I would like to consider utilising some or all of the following components: a Rocketfish RF-FULLTWR Aluminum Full-Tower Case (huge, great reviews and mod-able), a barely used 700-watt OCZGXS700 PSU, and a new A8-7670k CPU I bought as an impulse buy four years ago (along with a motherboard I can no longer find). Alternatively, I have a new Asrock 775Dual-Vista 775 MB mobo I could build a system around, but my first thought is to use the A8 CPU, case, and PSU for a server build. I also have an ASUS U3S6 PCIe4 x4 card that offers USB 3.0 ports. I found a review from 2016 where the processor was purchased for a small home virtualisation server…

REQUIRES HotKey, OS X 10.10 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to create your own keyboard shortcuts IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes One of our favourite kinds of app is the one that’s clearly a labor of love, and it often comes into being when a developer spots a feature Apple hasn’t provided and steps up to offer it. HotKey is a brilliant example of that. Peter Vorwieger has created a simple, free, and really useful utility for macOS that enables you to quickly and easily create all kinds of keyboard shortcuts – not just for apps but for folders and the clipboard too. So if there’s a particular folder you’re always opening or an app you often need to call up, you can create a keyboard combination for it…

For centuries, making music had relied on the simple principle of objects vibrating when they’re plucked or hit, or columns of air vibrating as that air is blown through a pipe. This changed with the popularity of early electric organs – most notably the Hammond Organ – in the 30s, 40s and 50s, but widespread change didn’t come about until the 60s and 70s. This was the dawn of rock music, and marked a real growth in electronic music. One important element of 70s electronic music was the synthesiser. Synthesisers generated musical notes purely synthetically, but a different approach was also a part of the sound of the 70s. This alternative form of electronic music involved generating the notes using the time-honoured tradition of plucking or hitting something – most…

REQUIRES How to save and organize phrases in your books using the Highlighted app YOU WILL LEARN Highlighted (free), iOS 14 or later IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes If you enjoy reading, you’ve probably got shelves of books with folded pages, scribbled notes, and highlighted phrases running through them. It’s a good bet that the more of these you have in a book, the more loved it is. The problem with this, is that all this loving defacement can, well, deface your collection. And with notes and highlighted passages in the books themselves, there’s no central repository for the interesting things you have saved. But there is, if you use an app called Highlighted. Get this on your phone and you can add books to your collection, scan pages, highlight…

The Summit E16 Flip from MSI is a business laptop geared towards content creators that packs an Intel Core i7 CPU, a Nvidia RTX 3050 laptop GPU, WiFi 6E, a PCIe Gen 4 SSD and a 16-inch QHD+ display into a 2-in-1 form factor. The device’s 360 degree hinge allows you to use it in tent mode or to flip the screen all the way around and use it in tablet mode. Thanks to the inclusion of MPP 2.0 technology and the award-winning MSI pen, with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, digital artists can draw and take notes on its touch display without having to lug around a separate graphics tablet. Design Unlike other business laptops that feature similar designs and try to outdo one another on specs alone, the…

Google is reportedly making a new AR headset – and this tech junkie is having flashbacks. Picture me in 2013, an idiot greeting the world while wearing a monocular AR device that made me look like a 21st Century Mad-Eye Moody. I could blame Google. It was their Google Glass AR headset, after all... but the fault really lies with me for not recognising that I looked like a Glasshole. In truth, Google Glass was incredible wearable technology, way ahead of its time. I mean way ahead. So far ahead that no one understood that you can’t just have innovation for the sake of innovation. There’s an aesthetic aspect. Anything you put on your body must be attractive or at least look like it belongs there. Google Glass failed that…

Within a diamond hauled from deep beneath Earth’s surface, scientists have discovered the first example of a never-before-seen mineral. Named davemaoite after prominent geophysicist Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, the mineral is the first example of a high-pressure calcium silicate perovskite (CaSiO3) found on Earth. Another form of CaSiO3, known as wollastonite, is commonly found across the globe, but davemaoite has a crystalline structure that forms only under high pressures and temperatures in Earth’s mantle, the mainly solid layer of Earth trapped between the outer core and the crust. Davemaoite has long been expected to be an abundant and geochemically important mineral in Earth’s mantle. But scientists have never found any direct evidence of it because it breaks down into other minerals when it moves towards the surface and pressure decreases. Analysis…

The world of flatscreen displays is dense with terminology that can seem deliberately created to mislead. From endless acronyms that look and sound deceptively similar but have totally different meanings to old technologies that get rebranded with new, more jargony monikers. Developed by Samsung, QD-OLED is one of the newest and most exciting kids on the flat panel block. For once, its name represents exactly what it is: a combination of Quantum Dot (QD) displays – endorsed by market leader Samsung as well as the likes of Hisense, Vizio and Roku – and OLED technology, of which Samsung’s arch-rival LG is the dominant player, as the sole supplier of large OLED panels to other manufacturers. The two screen types have different strengths and weaknesses, and combining them could potentially yield…

$37.45, PC, Xbox, www.xbox.com I’ve visited plenty of unknown planets in games. Often as a sole explorer, quietly picking through ruins or jungles, alone with my thoughts as I figure out the path forward. The Gunk is a bit like that too, except you’re never quite alone. It’s like investigating a remote alien landscape with your mum looking over your shoulder, telling you to be careful or that it’s time to come home and eat. Indeed, the game’s two main characters, partners Rani and Becks, have an almost parent and child-like relationship at times. They’ve landed their rickety ‘Bunny’ spaceship on this uncharted world to seek out an energy source they detected from space, in the hope it might be valuable enough to pay off their mountain of debt. Rani…

$839, www.asus.com A PC and OLED TV in one. Those are Asus’s words, not ours. And quite a claim for the Asus Vivobook 13 Slate OLED to live up to. Heck, it’s quite a claim for any device to deliver on, let alone a 13-inch tablet-convertible PC. However, the Vivobook 13 Slate OLED certainly has plenty going for it, the most obvious of which is a 13.3-inch OLED panel with a punchy 550 nits of peak brightness. The competition in the PC-based slate market generally still goes with LCD screen tech. It’s also very slick and slim, with fairly narrow bezels, a skinny chassis and nice build quality. You also get plenty of input options beyond the touchscreen. Both the Asus Pen 2.0 and a detachable keyboard are part of…

$139, au.roccat.com The Roccat Torch puts all of its controls at your fingertips with its mixer-style audio base, and with its intelligent and functional use of RGB lighting, it also ensures that your settings are always discernible at a glance. There is also no need to install Roccat’s unfortunately unfinished NEON software to get the full experience. It’s a shame that this software is incomplete, but it’s great to use the mic right out of the box, and the features that work do so very well. The Roccat Torch is a slim and tall mic that mounts to its own included mixer style stand and can also be easily mounted to a boom arm using standard threads. The front of the mic features an RGB-lit Roccat logo and the back…

$229, www.logitechg.com I typically use a Logitech G602 mouse for gaming, and I’ve been using it as my go-to mouse for many years. The G602 has a thumb rest along the side, multiple programmable buttons, and it’s a heavier mouse that allows for a palm grip. If you can imagine the G602 as the mouse that perfectly fits my hand, the G303 Shroud feels like pretty much the exact opposite. At first glance, the G303 Shroud mouse is attractive, sleek and mature looking. It’s not particularly flashy - no RGB lighting or anything like that (although there’s a battery LED indicator just above the scroll wheel). However, it’s a nice-looking mouse with a Logitech G logo on the lower portion, right and left click buttons, a scroll wheel, a button…

$99, www.roku.com Despite the potential to cause some confusion, it makes sense why Roku named this the Roku Express 4K+ – it looks exactly like the normal Roku Express. It’s nearly the same size as the original Roku Streaming Stick and, funny enough, it’s even smaller than the remote that comes inside the box. But, the benefit to its small form factor is that you can throw it in a bag or store it on your media shelf without it taking up too much real estate. Roku also includes a two-foot-long HDMI cable in every box, a remote, and double-sided adhesive tape that will allow you to stick the Express 4K+ onto your TV or on any surface. The inclusion of all these accessories is actually somewhat surprising – while…

One of the factors that contributes to our pessimism surrounding reinstalling Windows is that we desperately don’t want you to lose anything. We’re kind like that. But there is another, slightly frivolous way to do a reinstallation if you’ve got working hardware to play with: you can turn one Windows installation into two. If you have a second drive that is able to support a Windows 10 installation, or enough access to your current Windows 10 installation (and enough free space) to be able to trim down its drive using Disk Management then create a new clean partition, you can install a second copy of the operating system alongside the first. Simply select a custom install, and then point Windows 10 at that spare disk space – it should do…

Many people look at a Windows reinstallation as a way to fix any and all ills. However, we consider it as being more of a last resort. It’s a little like dealing with unruly children. Before taking drastic action and shipping your PC off to military school, you should really do everything you possibly can to fix the problems you’ve got, and find out the cause of its misbehaviour, because you might just find that a simple solution works better. Heavy-handed metaphor aside, keeping a keen eye on your PC’s actions isn’t particularly difficult, because Windows 10 includes all the tools you might need at your disposal: There’s the Task Manager (which you can pull up at any time with a quick Ctrl-Shift-Escape); there’s Resource Monitor (type “resmon” into the…

After over a decade of service, Windows 7 has been well and truly retired. The venerable operating system is no longer receiving updates. Microsoft is keen for everyone who has been using Windows 7 to move on, but not everyone is happy to do this. So, what happens if you have decided that you really just want to stick with Windows 7? It’s important to remember that Windows 7 will not stop working. However, the fact that Microsoft will no longer issues updates and patches means that there are security implications associated with continuing to use it. Sticking with Windows 7 is not really recommended, but it may be that your computer is simply not up to the task of running Windows 10. We’ve compiled a series of tips to…

REQUIRES Apple Maps, macOS 11 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to use Apple Maps’ extra features to get more out of the app IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes Every year, Apple makes Maps more and more capable. While it can get you from point A to point B, there is much more under the hood when it comes to navigational goodies. For instance, Maps has its own Street View rival, named Look Around, that lets you take a stroll around the neighbourhood, while Flyover gives you a bird’s-eye view of a huge number of cities and locations, highlighting their prominent attractions in three dimensions. And you no longer need to feel like a stranger in a new place – just use one of Maps’ built-in guides to quickly learn…

The Texture control is one of the best tools in Camera Raw and Lightroom for controlling details in your images. On the face of it, the slider is very simple – drag one way to increase detail, drag the other way to decrease it. But used in combination with other excellent Camera Raw or Lightroom tools like the Adjustment Brush and Range Masking, the Texture command becomes even more powerful. While the name may imply that this tool is best at enhancing textures, in fact it’s often at its best when doing precisely the opposite. While the name may imply that this tool is best at enhancing textures, in fact it’s often at its best when doing precisely the opposite. A negative texture value can result in a wonderful softening…

We live in bad-tempered times, and I was sent into a rage by two things this month. One was my energy company sending me a threatening letter over a $6 outstanding bill. Yes: six quid. I know energy sellers are hard up these days, but come on. I’d barely finished swearing and composing sarcastic emails about this travesty, before something happened that made the red mist descend again. This time it was the fateful news that Hue has brought out some new bulbs that are brighter than the existing ones. In the name of God, why? Why?! Upgrades are a controversial topic in the world of tech. On the one hand, everyone hates built-in obsolescence and having to pay to replace things we bought just a few years ago in…