Avast Fast Fixes

Fix broken updates, stop false positives and discover the hidden Repair mode

Programs, websites or email run slowly

Avast has a real-time scanning mode called Active Protection that checks program launches, sent and received emails and visited websites. If you’ve updated the program this could have enabled new options or ones that you’d previously disabled. You can tweak these options to speed up specific activities, or reduce the program’s optimisation to speed everything up – potentially reducing levels of protection.

Secret Tips For… NirLauncher

Speed up navigation, force apps to launch the way you want and add hundreds of extra tools

Turn on text descriptions

NirLauncher, which has just been updated to work in Windows 10, puts hundreds of free, portable NirSoft tools in one launcher. Download it free from http://launcher.nirsoft.net. In the program window, the collection of tools is categorised for easy navigation, but it’s still not always clear what each tool does. So open the Options menu and tick Show Description Text – and now you’ll see a more comprehensive description of each tool’s functions.

Canon CanoScan LiDE 220

A standalone scanner that still standing

Remember when things didn’t do everything? Your phone made phone calls, your camera took pictures and your pocket calculator did sums. Back then, you had a printer to get stuff out of your PC and a scanner to get stuff in. They were separate machines for a reason: a printer is nothing like a scanner. They don’t share any parts.

Desktop vs Mobile: computers in competition

Despite the last few years’ repeated claims of an impending “post-PC” age, when mobile devices would replace personal computers as the most commonly-used medium for computing, more recently, evidence has emerged that PCs are far from dead. In fact, for many of us, the question isn’t whether we should continue using a computer; instead, it’s what type of computer we should opt to use.

The fact remains that, for many purposes, especially business work and academic study, a PC remains the most useful computing device. And, whereas recent years have seen smartphones greatly diversify in their sizes, designs, features and software, computers reached the same stage many years earlier. PCs aren’t dying; rather, as The Verge’s Tom Warren has recently remarked, they have simply “matured enough that you don’t need to replace the one you bought years ago if it’s still working”.

Devialet Silver Phantom

A futuristic speaker, with an exceptional price

With more than 41 audio awards under its belt, the French company Devialet has finally released its much anticipated Phantom range of speakers.

The Silver Phantom, however, isn’t your everyday speaker. Within its glass fibre-filled polycarbonate shell lies an 800MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor, with 512MB of DDR3 memory and a single Cyclone-V system-on-chip sound processing engine.