We fix readers’ computing problems.
APC and its readers can be one giant helpdesk. If you have a technical problem, chances are one of us can solve it.
WINDOWS QUICK ASSIST ALTERNATIVE
I read with interest your guide to Quick Assist in the February issue (OWV). My parents have Windows 8.1, so Quick Assist isn’t an option. What else can I try instead? Tommy Elphick Try Remote Assistance instead — both you and your parents should press Win-Pause/Break to bring up the System Control Panel, then click ‘Remote settings’ and verify ‘Allow Remote Assistance connections to this computer’. Now type ‘remote assistance’ into the search box or charm — press Win-Q in Windows 8.1 to bring this up — and follow the prompts to either give or receive remote assistance, using the Easy Connect option when prompted. Another option — which would enable you to access their PC without them having to ask for assistance — is TeamViewer ( www.teamviewer.com). TeamViewer can also be installed on other operating systems, and even on mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Doing so will give you access to your own PC and to others remotely, even when you’re on the go. Best of all, TeamViewer is free for personal use. Rob Mead-Green
INTERNET CAN’T DOWNLOAD EMAIL WITH HOTEL WI-FI
I recently holidayed in southern Fuerteventura for a week, and was told I could either pay for Wi-Fi access or use the free version that was limited to the hotel’s reception area. I was unable to download any email to my tablet — it kept telling me there was no connection — but did access some random online newspapers and download a free app to my tablet. Is there a reason for this inexplicable phenomenon? Bryan Little We suspect this will be down to your hotel’s router’s configuration. Any network — including Wi-Fi — communicates with the Internet through a series of ports. For example, email uses ports 110 and 995 for incoming POP3 email; ports 143 and 993 for incoming IMAP email; and ports 25, 465 and 587 for outgoing SMTP email. It’s probable that these ports were blocked as part of the limitations of the free Wi-Fi service. You might have been able to access your email through the web (ports 80 and 443), but it sounds like another form of web-blocking was in play if you were only able to access certain websites, so this may not have been possible either. Alex Cox
OFFICE CHANGE LANGUAGE OF POWERPOINT PRESENTATION
Someone’s sent me a PowerPoint presentation that’s all in US English. I need to convert this to AU English, but it’s 200 slides and I don’t want to wade through each slide manually switching language for each text box. Is there a quicker way in PowerPoint 2016? Friedrich Weber The following trick will work all text boxes on your slides, but won’t extend the
hidden notes slide, sadly. Switch to the View tab on the ribbon and select Outline View. Place the cursor inside one of the text boxes in the left-hand view, then press Ctrl-A, which should select all of the text on all of the slides. Now switch to the Review tab, select Language > Set Proofing Language. Make sure ‘Mark selected text as’ is set to ‘English (Australia)’ and click OK. You’ll still need to manually correct US spellings, but they will be clearly highlighted and right-clicking each word should bring up the Australian spelling for that word. Rob Mead-Green
WINDOWS
CONTROL HOW UPDATES ARE DELIVERED
I’m a little bit confused about Delivery Optimisation in Windows 10. What is it and how should I configure it? Steve Cox This delivers Windows updates to your PC using other computers, both on your local network and via the Internet. If you don’t like some or all of this behaviour, you can control it – the step-by-step guide here reveals how.
To access Delivery Optimisation’s settings, click the Start button and select Settings, then browse to ‘Update & security’ > Windows Update. Click ‘Advanced options’ followed by ‘Delivery Optimisation’ to configure it.
By default your PC may be set to download (and upload) to other PCs on your LAN as well as the wider Internet. Select ‘PCs on my local network’ if you have two or more PCs at home, or flick the switch to Off if you don’t.
If you do want to allow other PCs over the Internet to grab updates from your PC, click ‘Advanced options’ and set arbitrary limits under ‘Upload settings’. Limit bandwidth to 20 percent or less, and set an upload limit of 10GB or less.
Delivery Optimisation won’t work over the Internet if your connection is metered. Go to ‘Settings > Network & Internet > WiFi’ to mark individual Wi-Fi hotspots as metered and disable the feature when you’re using them. Cat Ellis
BROWSING LASTPASS, FIREFOX & 2FA
What is it with Firefox and LastPass? I use two-factor authentication (2FA) to provide additional security on my LastPass account, but for the last six weeks I’m being forced to reauthenticate every time I launch Firefox, even though I’ve flicked the switch that should exempt me from this check for 30 days. Freya Outhwaite LastPass seems to be struggling with its Firefox add-on for some unknown reason. The latest issue appeared when Firefox 57 (Quantum) was released, which changed the way add-ons work.
Click the LastPass icon and choose ‘Open my Vault’. You should see the address bar list an address similar to moz-extension://9420657a-9759-4218b751-eeb93cdbca0d/vault.html. Select all of this address — minus the /vault. html portion — and copy it to the clipboard. Now open Firefox’s Options, go to Privacy & Security and click the Exceptions button next to ‘Accept cookies from websites’. Paste in the moz-extension address into the ‘Address of web site’ box and click Allow followed by Save Changes.
Now quit and restart Firefox – when you’re prompted to enter the code, make sure you type in the six-digit code yourself rather than use Firefox Authenticator’s one-tap option. This should ensure that the LastPass add-on works properly going forward. Matt Hanson
“LastPass seems to be struggling with its Firefox add-on for some unknown reason. The latest issue appeared when Firefox 57 (Quantum) was released, which changed the way add-ons work.”
EMAIL SWITCH EMAIL BACKUP
Do you know of any good Outlook 2010 data backup programs? I used to have a good one whose name I’ve forgotten, but it doesn’t work with Windows 10. Ian McAndrew Our go-to mail backup tool – KLS Mail Backup ( www.kls-soft.com/ klsmailbackup) – doesn’t sadly support Outlook, but does cover most other providers. We’re also fans of MailStore Home Edition ( www.mailstore.com/en/ products/mailstore-home/ for archiving email — this works with Outlook, and is also a good way to back up web-based email such as Google Mail and Hotmail. However, its biggest drawback is the lack of automated features, so you’ll need to set reminders yourself if you want to create email backups on a regular basis. Ian also discovered Safe PST Backup ( www. safepstbackup.com), which is free for home users (in return for your email address at the download screen). Safe PST Backup offers automatic backup and supports an incremental backup model, so subsequent backups don’t take up massive amounts of drive space. It works with all versions of Outlook except the version released for older Surface devices (Outlook 2013 RT). Cat Ellis
WINDOWS REINSTALLING WITHOUT A BOOTABLE DRIVE
I have a Sager laptop with three 500GB drives. After removing and wiping all three drives to perform a clean reinstall of Windows 10, I cannot boot from either a Windows installation DVD or from a USB flash drive. Can you help solve this problem? Gerald Gibson We spent a lot of time trying to fix the underlying problem of having no bootable media, but in the end — helped by Gerald’s ability to hook up his laptop hard drive to another PC using a drive enclosure – we found a workaround. This involves making the hard drive itself bootable, copying the Windows installation files on to that and then installing Windows from the hard drive. It’s a convoluted process that is thankfully outlined in detail at www. instructables.com/id/How-to-CLEANInstall — the procedure is for Windows 8, but is identical for Windows 10 too. Once he’d followed this advice, Gerald was able to reinstall Windows. There’s one final step to perform once Windows is back on your drive – at boot time you’ll be taken to the boot screen where you’re given a choice of running Windows 10 or re-running the setup program. To hide or remove this latter option press Win-R, type msconfig and press Enter, then switch to the Boot tab. You can reduce the timeout to three seconds if you want to keep the option as a backup, or select it and click Delete to remove it completely. Nick Peers
LINUX MATHS ON LINUX
I’ve been reading your magazine since July 2008 and still enjoy receiving each issue ever since. My main interest at present centres on SymPy and matplotlib and so far I haven’t found anything in the archives in the way of PDFs or tutorials on these applications. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places? I also wondered whether there was any other FOSS, similar in intent to SymPy. Any information you can give me would be appreciated. Alan James It’s always nice to know people are doing maths on Linux. As far as symbolic computation goes, Octave is king of the open source crop. It works as a drop-in replacement for Matlab most of the time, and can do pretty much anything it can, including having mexs (C++ snippets) to speed up processor-heavy operations. Moving away from symbolic computation there’s the Numpy library on Python,
which gives proper data types (arrays for matrices and vectors as opposed to lists, complex numbers) and all the math operations you could ever dream of. Its focus is linear algebra, but it can do much more, and obviously can be used in conjunction with SymPy. There is also a rather ambitious project called SAGE ( www.sagemath.org) that aims to bring together a huge number of FOSS maths programs, but it’s quite hard for distros to package all this. It’s been a few years since I played with it though, so maybe the situation has improved. Do let us know if you find anything else! APC Team
SECURITY FOLDER ACCESS ISSUE
After a recent update, Windows Defender now offers a ‘controlled folder access’ option to block Ransomware. After ticking the option, however, I’m unable to make changes to any spreadsheet or document in LibreOffice. Is there some way I can continue to benefit from this protection and use LibreOffice? David Reece The new feature is great in theory, but there are clearly teething problems. It would help if Windows Defender threw up an alert that enabled you to confirm that you’re using a trusted program, but in the absence of this you’ll have to perform a long-winded workaround that you may have to repeat for other programs too.
For now, open Windows Defender and tap the shield icon on the left. Select ‘Virus & threat protection settings’, scroll down to ‘Controlled folder access’ and – if you’ve disabled the feature – toggle the switch to On again. Next, click ‘Allow an app through controlled folder access’ followed by the ‘+’ button. Browse to ‘C:\Program Files’ or ‘C:\ Program Files (x86)’ if you’re running the 32-bit version of LibreOffice under 64-bit Windows. From here browse to LibreOffice\ programs. To filter the list, click the ‘All files’ drop-down menu and change it to ‘*.exe’, then select swriter. exe and click OK to whitelist LibreOffice Writer. You’ll then need to repeat this for any other LibreOffice tools you use, such as scalc.exe for the Calc spreadsheet app, for example. Matt Hanson
INTERNET STOP PDF FILES FROM OPENING IN CHROME
I recently switched to Google Chrome, but one annoying thing it does is automatically download PDF files to my Downloads folder – even though I’ve configured Chrome to let me choose where to save downloaded files, and then open them in my PDF application. Grant Dennis Open Chrome’s settings and click Advanced, then scroll down to ‘Privacy and Security’ and click ‘Content settings’. Scroll down again to the bottom of the list where you’ll find ‘PDF documents’. Simply flick the switch marked ‘Download PDF files instead of automatically opening them in Chrome’. Cat Ellis