QUICK TIPS
We fix readers’ computing problems
NETWORKING NON-HOMEGROUP FOLDER SHARING
After a recent Windows update, my laptop can no longer see my desktop, although its Wi-Fi connection is fine. Help!
Colin Travis
There are reports of Homegroup connections breaking after Windows updates — either delete and recreate the Homegroup, or switch it off completely in favour of the traditional approach by following these steps on both PCs.
1. Right-click the network icon in the Taskbar’s Notification area and choose ‘Open Network and Sharing Centre’. Click ‘Change advanced sharing settings’ and check network discovery and file and printer sharing are switched on.
2. Switch off Home-groups by selecting ‘Use user accounts and passwords to connect to other computers’, then scroll down to the ‘All Networks’ section and click the down arrow next to it in order to reveal additional options you need to tweak.
3. Switch on Public folder sharing if you’d like to share files through your computer’s Public folders. Then verify 128-bit encryption is selected and set password-protected sharing depending on who has access to your network. Click ‘Save Changes’.
4. You’ll need at least one shared folder on the desktop — browse to it, right-click and choose ‘Share with’. If ‘Stop sharing’ is listed, the folder is already shared; otherwise choose ‘Specific people’ to set it up. Click ‘Share’ to complete the job.
Nick Odantzis
HARDWARE IT’S NOT NAS GETTING OLD
I own a Seagate NAS 220, and received an email telling me that there’s an impending certificate upgrade, which will result in me losing remote access to the unit. I don’t understand — I bought the NAS 220 specifically for this feature. It’s out of warranty now (it’s about six years old), so I expect the cold shoulder from Seagate.
Besides buying a different NAS, going through the cloud (Dropbox, Google and so on), or enabling FTP on my 220, what can I do to remotely access files on my NAS?
Liviu Oncioiu
It sounds like your best bet for remote access is enabling FTP and taking advantage of the NAS 220’s support for Dynamic DNS, which would let you get to the server through an easy-to-remember domain name.
Curious as to why Seagate’s Global Access feature no longer works on your NAS 220, though, we approached a company representative for more details. The response reads as follows: “The Black-Armor family of storage solutions was originally introduced in 2009. While we strive to support our products for the entirety of their useful lives, it is an unfortunate inevitability that some technology updates will outpace the hardware on which they are being deployed — especially for older devices.
“In this case, the Seagate Global Access Service, powered by Tapp-In, underwent a major update on October 7th that can no longer be supported by the code base on our older BlackArmor NAS storage devices. Subsequently, some BlackArmor customers will not be able to use the remote access feature.
“We regret any interruption in service for our users and have reached out to those with products still under warranty to advise on how they can deal with the change in service.”
APC team
IPHONE IOS 10 UNLOCK ANNOYANCE
I recently updated my iPhone SE to iOS 10 and, to my dismay, I now need to click my home button to unlock my phone! So before when I could just rest my finger on the button, get my fingerprint scanned and the
phone would unlock, I now need to click the home button (or the power button) to first turn on the screen, then rest my finger on it, then click the home button again if my finger scan was successful! This seems counterintuitive. Is there a way to revert back to the old system? Allison Bachelor Good news — yes, there is. The function is called ‘Rest Finger to Open’ and it’s turned off by default in iOS 10. To return to the iOS 9 way of unlocking your iPhone, head to ‘Settings > General’, then navigate to the Accessibility menu. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see ‘Home Button’. In here, you’ll see ‘Rest Finger to Open’ is turned off. Turn this on and you should find your phone unlocks the way it used to. If ‘Raise to Wake’ is enabled and also ‘Rest Finger to Open’, this means you can unlock your phone without a single button press. Carmel Sealey
HARDWARE AHCI, IDE AND RAID
What’s up, APC team? I’m absolutely lost. I just learned from the December issue that solid-state boot upgrades should be set to AHCI in the BIOS settings. Besides the fact that I need to use regedit in Windows 10 (already installed) to boot with the AHCI driver, I run into another problem: I already have a RAID setup across my SATA 0/1/2/3 ports. If I change them, I no longer have my RAID setup. I believe my SATA ports can only be set to IDE or Mirror SATA 0/1/2/3. Please help! My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA990FXA-UD3. Vincent King The issue of switching between AHCI and IDE in Windows 10 has come up in several emails we’ve received. Some folks are saying the Registry Editor approach isn’t working. We’ll set up a couple of systems to do some testing, and then report back.
It sounds like your situation is more specific, though. AMD’s SB950 south bridge supports six SATA 6Gb/s ports, so SATA3_0 through SATA3_5 are attached to the same controller. With your ‘OnChip SATA Type’ set to ‘RAID’ and ‘OnChipSATA Port4/5 Type’ set to ‘As SATA Type’, everything is using AMD’s AHCI-compatible RAID driver, which is what you want. To be sure, head over to Device Manager and check under ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers’. APC team
WINDOWS ERROR WHEN STARTING PC
My Windows PC didn’t shut down properly the last time I used it, and now refuses to load. It throws up the error: ‘ Unknown Hard Error: \systemRoot\system32\ntdll.dll’. I’m worried as there’s a lots on the drive that I need access to. Steve Hodges
The error can be caused by all kinds of things — first we asked Steve to check the cable connecting his hard drive to his PC motherboard. He swapped cables with his DVD drive and ensured both were seated correctly. The good news now was the PC would boot again, but then demanded a restart, after which Windows proved unresponsive at the desktop. Steve could, thankfully, reboot into Safe mode, allowing him to transfer key files to an external drive. He could also access the internet using ‘Safe mode with networking’, so our next step was to instruct him to try a clean boot following the procedure at support. microsoft.com/kb/929135 — sadly, we didn’t hear back, so it’s possible Steve decided to perform a full reinstall of Windows, which should finally resolve the problem. Matt Hanson
HARDWARE WE ALL SCREAM FOR WIDE SCREEN
Who chooses which resolutions make it to the standard list of screen sizes that Windows and monitors accept? Why is it 1,280 x 1,024 for instance, and not 1,200 x 1,000, or 1,500 x 1,100? Why is 1,366 x 768 still common in Windows 10 laptops? It’s not a multiple of anything in either direction and 683:384 is hardly a standard aspect ratio! Glyn Janner
Oh, come come! I think you are being disingenuous. Okay, 1,366 x 768 is actually 16.008:9, which is actually only off from the standard 16:9 widescreen resolution by less than
0.05%. In other words, it’s the closest even-numbered horizontal resolution that converts a 1,024 x 768 resolution into widescreen. Why 768 vertical pixels, you ask?
Ah, well, it’s all perfectly logical. In the beginning, there was CGA resolution, which was 320 x 200. This was horrible and didn’t fit properly on 4:3 aspect ratio TVs, so they doubled it horizontally and slightly-more-than-doubled it vertically to produce VGA, which was less horrible. If you double that in both directions again, you’d get 1,280 x 960 but this requires more than 1MB of screen buffer. By the time graphics cards got good enough to do that, we were watching TV on widescreen. It’s much easier to downscale 1080p HD to 1,366 x 768 because they are both 16:9 aspect ratios. And if you need 4:3 resolution, you can stick some black bars on the side and call it 1024 x 768. In fact, the odd one out here is really 1,280 x 1,024, not 1,366 x 768, as 1,280 x 1,024 (or SXGA, as it’s referred to by virtually no one) is the only 5:4 aspect ratio screen resolution, which means it doesn’t display well on just about any modern screen. I think the only reason it lasted so long is that 1,024 is a round number in binary and is, therefore, easy for chip designers to address. Luis Villazon
WINDOWS BACK UP PROGRAM SETTINGS IN WINDOWS?
I need to reinstall Windows, but I’d like to save as much time as possible afterwards by not having to reapply program settings. Can you recommend a good tool that gives me an option to easily back up (and restore) my app settings please? Louis Parker
Download the free CloneApp tool from www.mirinsoft.com — go to the Downloads section to download the program, which is a portable app. After unzipping the program, rightclick CloneApp.exe and choose ‘Run as Administrator’, then browse the list to see what programs are supported — over 100 are covered, including major apps such as Office (2010 onwards), Photoshop and so on. Tick the boxes of those programs you wish to back up, then click ‘Start CloneApp’. After reinstalling Windows and your programs, launch the app again, but this time click ‘Restore’ to bring back your previous settings. Graham Barlow
HARDWARE TO SLI OR NOT TO SLI
I have a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 motherboard with an AMD FX-8320 processer, 32GB of Corsair DDR3-1600 memory, and two MSI GTX 960 OC graphics cards. My question is whether the two 960s (with 2GB of GDDR5 each) are better or worse than a single GeForce GTX 970 or 980 (or newer 1070 or 1080)? I use my PC for programs like Excel, and I like to make greeting cards. I do play hidden object games from Big Fish, but they’re not very demanding. I run a DisplayPort cable to my 27-inch Asus VX279 monitor. Let me know what you think. Ron V
With all due respect, Ron, you should probably take one of those GeForce GTX 960 cards out of your PC to save power. It sounds like the tasks you run mostly include productivity and casual gaming, neither of which requires a $200 graphics card (much less two). But let’s think about the question as if you were playing fast-paced shooters on a monitor with a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 or 2,560 x 1,440.
Combining the power of multiple GPUs through Nvidia’s SLI technology (AMD’s equivalent is called CrossFire) improves performance when bottlenecked by a fully-utilised GPU. But you need a demanding 3D application for that to be the case. What’s more, the on-board memory of each card isn’t additive — information stored on one exists on the other as well — so two 2GB cards yield an
effective 2GB. With that said, you can get away with 2GB of memory at 1,920 x 1,080. That’s the native resolution of your ASUS VX279. Two GTX 1060s with 1024 CUDA per GPU might be a good match for the 2048-core GTX 980’s performance, especially since the pair costs about $100 less. But for someone who already owns modern mainstream cards in SLI, no way we’d would recommend a single GTX 1080 as an upgrade.
Moving to 2,560 x 1,440 really calls for a card with 4GB of memory, though. You’d definitely see a speed-up going from one 2GB board to two at QHD. Ultimately, though, they would run out of memory and limit your frame rates. APC team
HARDWARE BEST GPU FOR 4K VIDEO PLAYBACK
I’m working on a PC for a friend. It’ll be a combination 24/7 file server and Kodi streaming box, which he’ll connect to a 4K TV for display output. If I’m building something to last, I want it to be completely modern and take advantage of the hardware he owns. The TV supports HDMI 2.0, so it is capable of 4K at 60Hz.
The lowest-end graphics card I can find with a matching interface is Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 950. My gut tells me that it should have no problem playing back video at the same resolution and refresh rate, but I would like confirmation before telling my friend to buy it. My online searches turned up people asking similar questions. However, the responses they received were that the 950 can’t game at 4K. This machine will never be used for gaming; it just needs to stream video.
I am not really set on specs for the rest of the system, but as a general guide, it will be a Core i5 with 8 to 16GB of RAM, a 256 or 512GB SSD for the OS and apps, and four 2TB disks in RAID 10 for media files. Tim Plett
Just to clarify, you’re talking about local playback from a PC out to a television through HDMI 2.0, right? Streaming — whereby content is presented as it’s being delivered — suggests that there’s a network in between, adding complexity to the equation (particularly when you’re talking about 4K content at 60 frames per second).
If so, then yes, a GeForce GTX 950 would suit your purpose nicely — although this will soon be superceded by the upcoming GTX 1050. That said, the GTX950 is still a good card for your needs — its GM206 GPU actually boasts more advanced decoding hardware than Nvidia’s GM200 GPU, adding full acceleration for HEVC/H.265. This relatively new compression standard can be used to improve video quality at a given bit rate, or cram an existing quality level into smaller files. It’s a lot more processing-intensive, though, so by offloading the task to the graphics card, your Core i5 won’t have to work as hard (or use as much power).
You’re right that the 950 is the cheapest discrete card with HDMI 2.0 support though. APC team