Readers’ comments
Your views and feedback from email and the web
Not the Android you’re looking for
The relationship between the Android stakeholders – app developers, phone manufacturers and Google – is a confusing mess. As consumers, it’s not always clear where to go for help and the quality of support is very variable. It can’t be all blamed on lockdown.
For example, if notifications stop working for an app, it could be due to a firmware upgrade/hardware incompatibility (phone), the app itself (app developer), an issue specific to the OS (Google) or a conflict that, in the worst possible scenario, involves all three!
We have a multitude of support forums of varying quality: app ones tend to be better, phone ones vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and Google support is just perverse – “This question is locked and replying has been disabled”. Er, anyone?
I realise we pay a price for the Android paradigm, but things could be so much better for those of us who like our Android phones when they work properly. Brett Laniosh
RAMping up
I was interested to read your article “How much RAM do you really need?” ( see issue 317, p40).
The recommendation that 4GB is adequate doesn’t match my everyday experience of servicing PCs. I often come across PCs running very slowly with a mechanical hard drive and 4GB
of RAM. Using the Performance tab of the Task Manager shows that the RAM is working at maximum capacity and the hard drive is working flat out at 100%, even when apparently idle. These computers still struggle when startup programs and background tasks have been reduced to a minimum, and other factors have been ruled out.
Upgrading to 8GB of RAM and a solid-state hard drive transforms the computer from limping along to working quickly. Otherwise, even for basic tasks, 4GB of RAM is soon used up and a Windows 10 PC struggles with this amount. The combination of a mechanical drive and 4GB of RAM doesn’t seem to provide an adequate hardware platform for Windows 10 in the PCs I’ve encountered, particularly with a Core i3 processor or equivalent.
Geoffrey Cox
Associate editor Darien Graham-Smith replies:
Fair point – our feature focused on SSD-based systems. With a mechanical hard disk, virtual memory access can really bog down performance, and moving from 4GB to 8GB of physical RAM yields a palpable speed boost. Where possible, though, we’d prioritise ditching the old-school drive and installing an SSD, for a smoother all-round Windows experience.
Mesh together
Last issue’s article on the cost of Wi-Fi upgrades ( see issue 317, p10) was something of a let-down. Whilst explaining the costs of “whole home” Wi-Fi offerings from providers, it failed to discuss alternatives.
Recently, I had to tackle this issue when Covid-19 led to mandatory homeworking for my daughter. She lives alone in a small, three-bedroom house that was built in 2018, so modern without thick walls. Her broadband comes from Sky (not Sky Q) and still uses the router that she had in her previous house. This worked fine in the main room where the router and master socket are located. She also has a TV in the master bedroom, but this wouldn’t reliably stream Netflix via the Sky Wi-Fi.
When homeworking began, she decided to use her small third “bedroom” as a study but found problems with dropouts during conference calls. Even accessing files on the corporate servers seemed slow. Having previously used powerline adapters in our old, granite-walled home, I suggested that she get a couple of these to connect the router to the study over the house wiring. This would completely bypass the router’s Wi-Fi module and leave Wi-Fi bandwidth free for her other devices (phone, music streaming and so on) so giving the maximum benefit.
A TP-Link Gigabit Powerline Starter Kit (TL-PA7017 KIT) was purchased for £30. To improve her Wi-Fi, I looked for a cheap mesh kit to try to improve coverage for the bedroom TV and some other devices around the house. The Tenda Nova MW5 two-pack seemed to get decent reviews at a good price (£52 for a base unit with one satellite) so we bought this at the same time. Since this plugs into one of the LAN ports on the router, it also bypasses the router’s Wi-Fi module. She can now stream HD films from Netflix without any problems. This setup has also fixed all her homeworking issues and has now been working perfectly for several months at a budget cost. Ian Thow
Associate editor Darien Graham-Smith
replies: It’s true, spotty internet coverage can be surprisingly cheap and easy to remedy. For the very best performance, there’s also the option of investing in a new router – see our Labs on p74 for a roundup of almost all the Wi-Fi 6 models on the market.
Homeworking on the range
Jon Honeyball is right that massive corporate offices will shrink to meet the new demand in working from home ( see issue 317, p130). But Openreach has confirmed that they can only provide 80% of homes with internet speeds that would support a minimum level of a Zoom call for the foreseeable future, so if you’re surrounded by fields, you’re not going to work from home.
Expecting a company to install a second internet service to remote employees would be fine in an urban or even a semi-rural environment, depending on the infrastructure, with the costs being no more than a typical business mobile phone cost.
But what about those a bit further out? A friend of a friend said that she has no internet and even 4G phones are patchy on her farm. She’s asked how much it would be to install a line and it came in at over £100,000, so farm homeworking is far from ideal for her. The solution that we found was for the local vicar to let her use a room in the church hall.
Michael Ashworth
A £30,000 saving
Just a small observation in support of Barry Collins’ article on children educating themselves while gaming ( see issue 317, p20). My son got heavily into a game a few years ago ( Age of Mythology, I think). I later found he had quite an extensive knowledge of Roman and Greek mythology and history, and even a rudimentary grasp of the respective languages, saving me £30,000 a year for a public school classical education. Rob Hindle