Death of Mozilla

David Briddock asks if open-source stalwart Mozilla is about to self-destruct

Mozilla has been around since the dawn of the web. Over the years, it's made an invaluable contribution to the open-source movement in terms of projects, products and funding support.

However, as it celebrates its 18th birthday Mozilla's future looks uncertain. It has decided to forgo its primary funding stream, terminated its high-profile smartphone initiative and now appears to be veering off in a brand new direction.

What's really going on at Mozilla?

Top 10 Calendar Tips

The Windows 10 Calendar has steadily improved since it was first seen and is now a useful tool. Roland Waddilove list his top 10 tips

1 Enable The Live Tile

This is the simplest tip of all, but it is one of the most useful. The Windows 10 Start menu contains tiles for starting apps, but they can also show live content. Right click the Calendar tile on the Start menu and select More, Turn live tile on. Then right click it and select Resize, Large so there is room to display events from your Calendar. It shows today's appointments and it means you can see what it coming up without even opening the Calendar app.

Has Amazon Cleaned Up Its Act?

Avoiding tax, mistreating workers, pricing competitors out of the market... Amazon's been criticised for a lot over the last few years. Sarah Dobbs checks in to see if things are getting better

Remember when Amazon was just a site for buying books more cheaply than you could in 'real world' bookshops? Now it seems to have taken over almost every aspect of commerce - it sells everything you could ever want, with next day delivery and a super slick checkout that almost completely removes the pain of handing over your money. It's got its fingers in plenty of other pies too, from its own publishing platform, electronics, film studio, and so, so much more.

Mod Your Old Computer

David Crookes looks at how you can give a retro machine a brand new lease of life

We are constantly discarding the old in the pursuit of the new. A new phone comes out and suddenly the last one is old news, even though it's worked perfectly well for the past year and probably will into the next decade. A new update appears on the computer, and scores of us decide to upgrade for no reason other than the  fact that it's there and we're curious. Developers of numerous websites from Facebook to Twitter make tweaks just to refresh things, usually leading to an outcry about an icon or something, but then we carry on as normal again.

DONTNOD

Life really is strange for this unpredictable Parisian outfit

The words ‘Final Boss’ are written on oskar Guilbert’s office door. Inside, rather than an intimidating showdown with a challenging figure covered in glowing red bits, we find Dontnod’s friendly CEO. His spacious workplace features a slanted glass wall offering a grand view of Paris’ Sacré-Coeur Basilica sitting on Montmartre, which is bathed in an orange early-evening glow.

Return Of The Obra Dinn

Lucas Pope’s obsession with antiaspirational vocations continues with Return Of The Obra Dinn, a game in which you play as a 19th-century insurance loss adjuster. Unlike the designer’s previous game, Papers, Please, which placed you in the musty environs of a fictional yet grimly recognisable Eastern European border checkpoint in the 1980s, here the location is somewhat more exotic, even if the work itself is just as monotonously gruelling. The Obra Dinn is an East Indian merchant ship which was lost at sea, somewhere around the Cape of Good Hope, while en route to the Orient. One October morning in 1808, the forsaken vessel drifts into port. The return is marked, not with rejoicing, but with red tape. As a trusty red-blooded insurance adjuster for the East India Company’s London Office, you embark on the ship and, against a soundtrack of creak and slop, you begin to figure out what happened to the 60-odd crew members (a number scaled back from Pope’s original, ambitious crew of 86), many of whose bodies litter its decks and nooks.

SteelSeries Nimbus

As far as mobile gaming controllers go, there’s really only a few names that are worth taking a look at. SteelSeries is one such brand with a solid reputation behind it. We recently reviewed the Stratus XL and gave it a glowing four-star review; now we have an Apple version to complement it.

The Nimbus is SteelSeries’ answer to a quality Apple controller, be it for Apple TV or even the iPad. Available at the Apple Store, it has already got certification from the big shots themselves. The geniuses will probably even tell you to buy one.

Pebble Time Round

A change of strategy sees Pebble design its best-looking smartwatch yet. But is it style over substance?

Rewind back a few years ago and smartwatches were the stuff of James Bond movies and pipe dreams. Then along came a recordbreaking Kickstarter project by a little known US start-up called Pebble. A few years later, almost every manufacturer, from Apple and Samsung right through to Alcatel, has launched a smartwatch, but the design and functionalities of wearables has come on leaps and bounds. No longer are they big, lumpy square behemoths that feel like you’ve strapped anchor to your wrist – now smartwatches are beginning to actually look like watches. It is this idea, a watch that does smart things, that serves as a starting point for the Pebble Time Round.

Samsung Gear VR

The most accessible VR headset available, with the best balance between quality and price

Our first sort of experience with virtual reality (VR) dated back to the ill-fated Virtual Boy. Legendary Gameboy creator Gunpei Yokoi left Nintendo in 1996 in the wake of Virtual Boy’s commercial failure. That ended interest in VR in the 1990s, with many stung by it and not wanting to hear about it ever again. Exactly 20 years later, 2016 sees the rebirth of VR, rising from the ashes of the Virtual Boy.

Ricoh SP C250DN

The cheapest colour laser printer

Colour laser printers, on the whole, don’t really float our boat. They’re fine for plonking in the middle of an open-plan office so people can print their PowerPoint presentations over the network while shouting ‘Giles, bring that to me in the boardroom in four minutes with an obscenely overpriced coffee!’ At least, that’s what we imagine people do with them. For the rest of us, they’re just bigger, more expensive inkjet printers that emit a funny smell and make your photos look like GIFs off the internet.

PlayZX

David Hayward finds another excuse to play on his Spectrum (not that he needs one)

It's no secret that I'm somewhat fond of the ZX Spectrum, as I'm sure many of you reading this are. It was, after all, a huge part of my childhood and the beginning of my obsession with all things technological.

Remembering... Fighting Fantasy

Turn to page 25 to fight David Hayward, or continue reading for great treasure

At the same time that gaming on a computer was beginning to form, at least in the shape or the ZX81 and Atari console, another genre of gaming was experiencing something of a renaissance: roleplay gamebooks. It's a form of entertainment that can be traced back as far as 1941, with Jorge Luis Borges' Examen de la о bra de Herbert Qua in, a three part story that contained several different endings, prompting the reader to determine their path.

AC Worldwide Star Wars Bluetooth Speaker

The Force is definitely strong with this one

With the release of the most recent Star Wars film, the Disney driven merchandising engine has gone into overdrive. Even now, several months after the film was launched, it's difficult to escape Star Wars related stuff.

One of the better examples of the movie merchandising we've seen recently is from AC Worldwide, in the form of a set of Bluetooth speakers shaped as either a Stromtrooper or C-3PO. In this instance we have a near-bust plastic representation of a Stormtrooper to test, but is this just a gimmick for fans only or is this speaker worth looking more into?

Dell Venue 10 Pro 5056

A business-class Windows 10 tablet, with a very good display

The Venue 10 Pro 5056 series is the updated generation of Dell's business line of Windows 10 tablets. As the name suggests this is a 10" tablet built around the classic Dell Venue chassis, but with a slight improvement when it comes to what's going on inside.

Western Digital My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS Box 8TB

Western Digital enhances its small NAS box design for small business users

When Western Digital launched its 'EX' Expert Series NAS boxes, many wondered why most of the best features went exclusively to the four drive units. The answer, it would seem, is relatively simple: Western Digital's most important products are hard drives. Therefore, each NAS box sale is an indirect means to potentially selling more drives, either bundled with it or post-sale.

ScanJet 2500F1

Requiring a workspace reorganisation, Michael checks out a stand-alone scanner

Rather than forming part of a multifunction device, the HP ScanJet 2500F1 is that rarest of things these days: a stand-alone A4 flatbed scanner. You might expect a stand-alone device to require less space on your worktop but this is not the case with this HP product. This flatbed's dimensions of 450 x 150 x 120mm mean it has a larger footprint than many of the multifunction devices I have seen recently. With a colour scheme that combines light and dark grey, the ScanJet 2500F1 is not going to be mistaken for anything else, however. It has a top-mounted ADF (automatic document feeder) with a capacity for 50 sheets fed through the unit for either single or double sided scanning that's conducted in a single pass.

Asus VivoBook Pro N552VM

Who says you have to spend £1500 on a high-performance laptop?

The new Asus VivoBook Pro N552VW is a mid-range laptop with some pretty impressive high-end components going in its favour. Although it's not specifically seen as a top of the range gaming model, it could quite easily stand toe to toe with some of the heavy-weight examples currently available.

Inside you'll find an Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor running at 2.6GHz with a turbo frequency of 3.5GHz. There's an impressive 16GB of DDR4 memory installed, along with a 128GB SSD with Windows 10 Home 64-bit preinstalled and a further 2TB mass storage hard drive.

Master Lock 4400D Wide Bluetooth Smart Padlock

A smarter way to keep things safe

This padlock uses Bluetooth to ensure it only opens for you. You set it up by installing Master Lock’s app on your Apple or Android phone or tablet and pairing it with the lock. From then on, pressing the illuminated button on the 4400D will release its shackle – but only when your phone or tablet is close to it. You can pair more than one device, which is handy if you have kids who lose keys but are never separated from their phones. The app records who’s used the lock and notifies you if anyone else tampers with it.

Iiyama ProLite B2783QSU-B1

Same price, more pixels

Most monitors have a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, matching a Full HD TV set. If your living-room TV is, say, 48 inches, and your monitor is 24 inches, the monitor will be twice as sharp. And it needs to be, because Windows shows you a lot of fine text and icons that Coronation Street doesn’t.

As monitors and TVs get bigger, Full HD is beginning to feel less crisp, and manufacturers would like to sell us all 4K or ‘Ultra HD’ displays, with 3840x2160 pixels. Not surprisingly, they cost more, starting at around £300 for basic models that give you the increased resolution but compromise in other areas.

Apple iPad Pro 9.7in

Another impressive iPad for those with deep pockets

Bringing the features of the 12.9in iPad Pro down to a standard 9.7in size, this slim, light iPad is hard to fault. Not only does the screen have extremely high resolution and the widest colour range of any tablet or laptop, but True Tone light sensors adjust its balance according to the time of day, so colours always look as they are intended.

The LCD panel is laminated so tightly to the front glass that you really feel like you’re touching what’s on the screen, and thanks to Apple’s iOS software – which is not as good as Windows 10 for advanced business apps, but superior on tablets to Android – everything responds instantly and smoothly.

Why does Apple hate Windows users?

The company ended support for a Windows program without telling anyone

Although it’s annoying when technology companies end support for products and services, at least they normally give you plenty of notice. When Google stops updating Picasa on 1 May, almost three months will have passed since the company announced the news. Microsoft meanwhile tells you years in advance when support for different versions of Windows will end (see the lifecycle page at www.snipca.com/20301).

Apple iPhone SE

The best-value iPhone yet

Finally, a cheaper iPhone. We’ve been waiting for this since Apple announced its first phone in 2007, but there’s an obvious reason why it hasn’t happened before. By only selling top-of-the-range phones, Apple has brought in fewer customers but more money. Today, it accounts for about 20 per cent of all smartphones sold, and about 90 per cent of the profit made in this market. It would be easy to conclude that iPhones are overpriced, but it’s a strong argument against going downmarket.

OnePlus X

A luxury budget phone

OnePlus is the mobile-phone company that skips everything else that other mobile-phone companies do, like sponsoring football teams and opening shops. Instead it just sells phones, initially only to customers who apply and wait for an invitation. Once a new model is in full production, however, it gets a ‘Buy’ button on the company’s website, and the OnePlus X is now available that way.

The End of Support: Is your tech about to be abandoned?

Companies can remove support for any device or service at any time, effectively leaving them unusable and unsafe. Mike Plant reveals whether time is running out for your favourite tech

There’s always a thrill about buying a new device like a laptop, tablet or TV. You’ve done your research, read all the reviews and are happy the device does everything you want. You hand over your money and take it home, eager to unpack it and power it up for the first time.

It works perfectly, with every feature and function working as you hoped. Soon you wonder how you ever lived without it. And then, without warning, the rug is pulled from under your feet. Your TV no longer supports your favourite streaming service, your ebook reader can no longer access its book store or your broadband provider drops its bonus offers.

Here, we uncover some of the most high-profile recent examples of disappearing support for devices and services, as companies abandon their devices, services, apps… and customers.

Dell Inspiron 24 5000

A desktop PC built into a touchscreen

With no boxy system case and a single mains cable, all-in-one PCs are an appealing alternative to desktop PC tower units, even if they lack the scope for expansion. Dell’s new Inspiron 24 5000 is a great advert for the concept. Its black plastic case has a pleasingly simple design, even if the bezel around the screen could be slimmer. A sturdy articulated stand lets you position that screen exactly how you want it – even lying almost flat.

Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14

A bigger little laptop for less

It may sound like a South American football result, but ‘Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14’ is actually the name of a nippy little laptop. It’s got a good brain on paper, even if it’s a bit off the pace for the big leagues. So should you snap it up while the transfer window is open, or would buying it be an own goal?

HiFiMAN HE400S Planar Magnetic Headphones

HiFiMAN has been at the forefront of planar magnetic headphone technology for many years. Several of its headphones have been featured prominently here in Hi-Fi+ by our own Chris Martens. Recently HiFiMAN and its creative leader, Dr. Fang Bian, have been competing tooth and nail with a handful of other top-rated manufacturers in the high end arena and to say they can hold their own is an understatement. The company’s current flagship HE1000’s are without question one of the top headphones at any price in the market today. While it is exciting to see how far up the sonic mountain these top of the line products can reach, for most headphone aficionado’s these prices are prohibitive. Enter the HE400S. Priced at an affordable £249/$299, these comfortable and easy to drive new headphones are just the ticket to get a taste of champagne on a sparkling water budget.

REL T/9i subwoofer

On the one hand, this is a review of the REL T/9i subwoofer. On the other hand, this is a review of the REL T/9i subwoofer. Because this is a review of two REL T/9i subwoofers. More specifically, this is a survey of how most people get deep bass very wrong, and how a pair of well-integrated RELs are the exception.

Let’s start with the T/9i itself. The top dog in REL’s new core T/i series, the T/9i is a solid square piano gloss cube with a new front firing 254mm long-throw drive unit with a steel chassis and a large inverted dust cap. This is joined by a matching 254mm downward firing passive radiator. Adding depth to the cabinet makes the cabinets act like a concert hall, designed to properly dissipate rather than propagate the back wave.

KEF EGG

The latest member of KEF’s EGG family updates the iconic speaker design. Ed Selley enjoys some over-easy beats

As the revival in the fortunes of two-channel audio looks set to continue, we’re seeing companies adapt products that were originally intended for multi-channel use to more traditional stereo-orientated designs. In the case of KEF, the company has taken its long standing ‘egg’ satellite speaker – a benchmark in the compact home cinema multi-channel loudspeaker market – and given it a thorough overhaul to turn the design into the active stereo setup you see before you here.

Gears 4: The Wind of Change

We speak exclusively with The Coalition’s Rod Fergusson and Chuck Osleja as the Gears Of War 4 beta rolls out on Xbox One

“When we first came in, we talked about the Tim Burton Batman and the Christopher Nolan Batman,” Rod Fergusson tells us as we talk ahead of the launch of the Gears Of War 4 beta. “When I first came in that was one of our things: ‘We’re going to be Christopher Nolan’s Batman’. But as we started doing it we realised ‘This just isn’t Gears. This is something else’. So we’re trying to find this middle ground when you hear the banter, even in our tease at E3, with Kait and JD talking to each other. I don’t want to make a humourless game.”

10 ways to guide people with design

Jenn Tang explains how designers can pull emotional and cognitive strings to guide users through their products and drive engagement

Have you ever wondered how sites like Facebook or apps like Snapchat get users to come back again and again? It’s not magic; whether they know it or not, they are using psychological tools that play on our emotions and biological instincts.

Liquid Dreams

When you look at where we’ve come from, the modern LCD panel is a wondrous achievement. Not too long ago we had CRT monitors that literally took up half your desktop real estate but thankfully now we have larger, clearer and higher fidelity screens that take up hardly any room at all.

Convoy

When a friend described Convoy to me as “Mad Max meets FTL” it was, obviously, a must play. Somehow, the 2015 release, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, had passed me by unnoticed. Generally, despite the recommendation, I wouldn’t hold a game to another game (or film’s) standards, but Convoy’s Steam page does cite these two greats as influences and I got over-excited. I wish I’d played it with no expectations.

Shardlight

I didn’t want Shardlight to end. I played it over three nights and I missed it profusely when it was over. Why? I wanted more of just being there, which is an odd thing to say about most post-apocalyptic settings. Twenty years after Blast Day, people are lean and ravaged by Green Lung. As well as accepting dangerous work for tickets in the vaccine lottery, however, they make pottery, restore cars and genuinely band together as a community of friends.

The Slaughter: Act One

It wasn’t until I was the guy reluctantly in a dress, ready to break a barstool over another guy who had made a racist slur about a third guy, that I truly had a sense of all the narrative threads converging in The Slaughter: Act One. It’s a Jack the Ripper story, but one told in a way that is completely unexpected. I came to care immensely about everyone and their imperfect contexts. The humiliation I felt as my character vomited, publicly, was real.

Oculus Rift Consumer Version 1

The future’s so bright I gotta wear these… shades?

I have waited 25 long years for this day to arrive. From the first clumsy attempt at Virtual Reality (VR) I experienced when playing the terrible Dactyl Nightmare back in 1991, I’ve known that VR had the potential to revolutionise the way we game, educate, interact and imagine. Sure, I may have needed to vomit immediately afterwards thanks to the chug-tastic framerates and huge delay between head movement and screen update, but it was a tiny, tentative taste of what was to come. Little did I realise that it would take so long for the world’s first consumer VR headset that didn’t suck to arrive. But arrive it has, in the form of the Oculus Rift Consumer Version 1 (CV1). We finally have VR that is affordable and that works… though it’s not without issues.

Acer Predator G3 710 Gaming Tower

So close, and yet so far

Buying a pre-built gaming PC from a mass-manufacturer like Acer brings a few key benefits with it. For starters, you won’t need to shed any blood inside the case when you’re trying to bung your graphics card under the drive cages. Secondly, if anything goes wrong you can rest assured that your machine will be collected, repaired and returned in a minimal amount of time. Finally, it’s pretty safe to say that all of the components within have been stress-tested with each other, avoiding the rare bugs that sometimes crop up between components. On the flipside, you’re going to have to pay a rather higher price tag than doing it yourself, and you also won’t learn anything about building or troubleshooting your PC. With Acer’s new Predator series hitting Aussie shores, I was keen to see just how this fabled maker of  laptops and office machines would manage the distinct requirements of a gaming box. Not too well it would appear.

ASUS PG348Q

The king of all gaming displays

The era of the premium of gaming display has finally come of age. We’ve always had a small niche of PC screens targeted at gamers, but nothing like the huge range available today. Leading the charge for screens aimed squarely at gamer’s retinas is Asus, and the new PG348Q looks set to topple all pretenders.

Technology That Can Help You Sleep

We all know modern gadgets can keep you awake at night, but they can also be used for the exact opposite reason

If you’ve ever found yourself engrossed in a good book at 2am on a work night, then you’ll know how reading can keep you awake instead of helping you nod off. But these days, thanks to e-readers, even the most dull or badly written of prose can prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep.

How To Recover Lost Files And Data

Everyone loses files at some point. Roland Waddilove shows how to prevent this and how to recover them when disaster strikes

Disk drives are supposed to keep our files safe and sound, and mostly they do. Sometimes they keep them safe for five or more years, and in some cases there have been disk drives that have lasted ten years or more without developing a fault. It is unwise to rely on them, though. Indeed, there’s an old saying that goes, ‘Hope for the best, but plan for the worst’. That’s true with disk drives: although you can hope that they’ll provide many years of reliable operation, you should treat them like they’ll fail tomorrow. Could you cope?

The Best Free Alternatives To Commercial Apps

Even if your budget is limited, there’s no reason to go without essential apps with free alternatives so readily available

There’s a very popular saying that says, ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. This rather cynical expression is a shorthand way of saying nothing comes for free and that you should expect to pay something, even if you don’t expect to. There’s always a catch, basically.

Making an emergency Linux installation

Having a Linux disto you can turn to in a pinch could be a lifesaver

When you’re putting together a PC, things aren’t always straightforward. If something goes wrong – a hardware compatibility issue, a corrupted drive, a misconfiguration – then you might suddenly find yourself without any way to research the very problem you want to fix.

If that happens, it’s always worth having a bootable USB drive to help you bypass whatever the problem might be and get back online so you can figure out what’s going on. If you want to do that, you’ll have to make one in advance, though. If you don’t have a Windows USB stick available (and especially if your PC doesn’t have an optical drive) then there’s no better time than the present to get that sorted out.

What components can you re-use?

Don’t cripple a system upgrade with false economies

Buying a new PC off-the-shelf might be simple, but it can be annoying to pay for components you don’t use. If someone else builds your PC for you, you also risk voiding your warranty by opening it up to install your existing gear. What’s more, if you want to transfer that expensive SSD or Blu-ray drive into a new computer you’ll have to build it from scratch yourself.

If you’re doing that anyway, there’s no reason not to re-use as much as you can, and recycling hardware has lots of benefits. It saves money, it reduces waste, and it means you’re familiar with your PC’s components if you encounter a problem you’ve solved before.

Not every piece of hardware should be recycled, however. So here’s our rough guide to what you should and shouldn’t keep.

Guide to choosing an Intel CPU & MotherBoard

If you’re after a market-leading chip and board, this is this is the way to go…

Picking a CPU and motherboard combination is one of the most frustrating parts of building a new system, but it has to be done early on so you can build the rest of your system around it. If you’re starting with an Intel system, this is the guide for you.

Top 10 OneNote Tips

The Windows 10 OneNote app is great for taking notes for work or personal projects. Get more from it with Roland Waddilove’s top tips

1 Access Your Notes Online

The OneNote app in Windows 10 stores your notes in a file on OneDrive and places it in the Documents folder. If you need to access your notes on a different computer, such as a Windows 7 PC or a work computer, go to the OneDrive.com website in a browser, click the menu button in the top-left corner and click OneNote. It lists the notebooks, and after selecting the one you want, it opens in the browser.

Notebook sections are listed down the left-hand side online but across the top in the Windows 10 app. Otherwise, most of the menus and features are the same. There are differences, though. For example, the Windows 10 app has drawing functions, while the online version of OneNote can record and insert voice notes.

Remembering… 3D Monster Maze

David Hayward recalls a time when dinosaurs were really scary

A few weeks ago, I fondly recalled the ZX81, a tiny computer that set many of us off on this weird and wonderful journey into hobbyist technology. This week, I’m taking a quick look at one of the most influential titles ever published on that machine: 3D Monster Maze.

Since we’re about to see the release of a new Doom title, it seems fitting to feature the granddaddy of all first-person games. 3D Monster Maze took my breath away when I saw it for the first time. I had a ZX81 with a 16KB RAM pack, but all I had to play were things I created myself (getting the pound sign to move across the screen before it crashed) or one of the many educational titles that my parents bought.

Micro Drone 3.0

Take to the skies with this tiny flier

2016 is certainly shaping up as the year of the drone. The market has expanded considerably in recent months, with each newly released model offering more and more functionality.

Extreme Fliers, a UK-based company, has recently launched its newest palm-sized model, the Micro Drone 3.0, designed for both novices and more experienced pilots.

Huawei Watch

Want to know the time. Ask Michael Fereday with his Huawei Watch

The Huawei Watch brings together the functionality of a watch, fitness tracker and a two-way link to a smartphone, whether of the Android or iOS persuasion. Befitting its title of 'Watch', this device’s appearance could easily be mistaken for a traditional wrist-watch with its matte-black casing and leather strap. There's even a small, protruding knob whose sole purpose is to revert to timekeeping mode from other views supported by this product. The watch element has a diameter of 9.42mm and a thickness of 11.3mm, which makes it slightly larger than my usual Casio timepiece.

Linksys Max-Stream EA7500 AC1900 MU-MIMO Router

Linksys unleashes all the abbreviations with its latest router

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen some pretty extreme router designs hitting the market.

But from the outside, the Linksys Max-Stream EA7500 doesn’t pay homage to a stealth bomber or the weekend-wear of a Sith Lord. It’s large, but stylish without being outlandish, and our homes could stand more restrained gear of this variety.

How to Run Windows software without Microsoft spying

If you like Windows but hate Microsoft’s increasing interference, why not try an alternative? Wayne Williams explains how to use ReactOS

Windows 10 is undoubtedly a good operating system, but there are elements of it that you might not be so keen on. The fact that it spies on you and makes updates mandatory, for example, may leave you feeling less comfortable than you did with previous versions. If you don’t want to upgrade to Windows 10, and Microsoft’s constant nagging to do so is beginning to grate, perhaps it’s time to consider switching to a brand new operating system.

Although Linux, Mac OS X and Chrome OS are great alternatives to Windows, they all have downsides – not least of which is that you might need to shell out for new hardware to use some of them. ReactOS (www.reactos.org) is potentially a better solution – it’s fully compatible with Windows, which means it will run all your favourite programs, but at the same time it isn’t Windows, and Microsoft has nothing to do with it.