Readers’ comments

Your views and feedback from email and the web

Peter doesn’t need to buy a MacBook

I read with interest Peter White’s letter in issue 278 in which he says he is off to buy a MacBook so he can avoid Microsoft’s frequent updates and patches. I can understand his frustration. It can sometimes take days for Windows 10 to fully update after a download, as several tasks take place in the background. If you keep Windows Task Manager loaded you can see them firing up. I also have several computers running flavours of Linux, macOS, Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise, and even Windows XP for an old application that requires an RS232 interface to update some hardware of mine.

I recently investigated using virtual machines, and was surprised at how good these have become. I now have all sorts of operating systems running on my Core i5 laptop, including Windows, BBC Micro and macOS, and can switch between them as required. Peter doesn’t have to splash out on a MacBook: he can convert his current laptop to a pseudo MacBook. If he’s using Windows 10, I would suggest replacing it with Windows 7 (put Windows 10 into a VM if required) as that doesn’t give the painful update experience, or use Linux as the base operating system on which to run the VMs.

Of course, Peter will need to purchase Mountain Lion (£19.99 from the Apple Store), but this gives him a licence, and it can then be upgraded to later versions of macOS. Monkey Nut

Taxing tax

Much has been printed, even by PC Pro ( see issue 278, p41), about large organisations not paying tax. It’s time people understood what’s really going on. Reports always read “BigCorp paid £VeryLittleTax with revenues of £VeryBig”, but revenues without profit mean nothing. If there’s no profit, where is the money going to come from to pay the tax?

Corporation Tax, which is always mentioned, is only one of the many taxes a company will pay. From National Insurance to business rates, there are plenty of other ways that they contribute to our economy. Multinational companies can move their profit wherever they like, so these companies haven’t avoided paying tax at all; they’ve just paid it in another country. Should Shell pay its tax to the middle of the North Sea because that’s where its product comes from, or where it’s refined, or where it’s sold? These are complicated questions with no simple answer.

In a time of increasing isolation for the UK, we need to woo these organisations into paying the tax here, not put them off with deliberately ignorant headlines and punitive taxes. Alan Ingram

There goes the Neighbourhood

I’m previewing the Windows Fall Creators Update [ see p50 for our verdict] and my machines have become invisible in Network Neighbourhood. It turns out that the computer browser service – on which this relies – has been removed from

build 1709… and from future releases of Windows.

So, the strategy we’ve used for the last 20 years to view and access data on networked computers no longer works. I can use an IP scanner to find the devices on the network, but I can’t then click them to access their files.

Microsoft’s advice is that “home and small business users who use Network Neighborhood to locate Windows computers... should map drives to the computers so that you no longer have to browse for them.” Somewhat frustratingly, the instructions it provides for doing this rely on browsing for the drive in Network Neighbourhood. Which only shows the drives on the local PC. John Errington

Trusted software taken to the cleaners

I have just read the article in issue 278 about CCleaner being compromised by malware. I recently downloaded CCleaner to a new PC. What should I do? Remove it, or is it too late for that? Roger Cookson

Editor-in-chief Tim

Danton replies: Piriform, CCleaner’s developer, advises all users to update to the latest release. Doing so should ensure you’re no longer vulnerable (if you ever were), and also enable the new code to detect any vulnerabilities introduced by the compromised installation. At the time of writing, the latest update is version 5.34. You can download it from

Bloatware apps

When I first succumbed to a smartphone, apps averaged 2MB apiece. Today, however, they are rarely below 50MB, and some are nudging 1GB. How can anyone code software so inefficiently?

I bought some mainframe software in the mid-1980s, only to be told that its core processes had been written early the previous decade, and wrapped in layer upon layer of extra code every time a new OS came along. The developers admitted that it was slow and inefficient, as each process required multiple translations, but they were too scared (or lazy) to rewrite the original code.

Is this what’s happened to apps, or is there no incentive to code efficiently anymore when you can simply cut and paste old libraries and pray for faster processors?

A true software engineer is someone who can code into 1MB what any damn fool can write in 10MB

App stores should incentivise coders who keep their apps small. Star ratings could be reduced by a factor linked to the app size, or revenue shares for paid apps be made inversely proportional to app size. PC Pro’s reviews could rate them for coding efficiency, and engineering institutions could award prizes to encourage better software engineering practices.

The saying goes that a true engineer is “someone who can do for £1 what any damn fool can do for £10”. Perhaps we ought to rephrase it: “a true software engineer is someone who can code into 1MB what any damn fool can write in 10MB”. Quentin Howard

ABOVE Reader Alan Ingram suggests that the UK woos large companies into paying tax – rather than scaring them off