Why Your PC Keeps Crashing

Tired of your computer freezing, rebooting or giving you the dreaded Blue Screen of Death? David Ludlow explains how to make your PC more dependable

We’ve all experienced the frustration of merrily typing away when suddenly - bang! - your trusty computer locks up and won’t respond no matter what you do. You sit there waiting, hoping and eventually praying for Windows to right itself, but deep down you know it’s only a matter of time before you have to press the power button and risk losing anything you haven’t recently saved.

While a frozen PC is annoying, a computer that crashes often is enough to reduce the best of us to tears. To make matters worse, it can be incredibly difficult to pinpoint the cause of these seemingly random crashes. The usual fixes are to update your drivers, install software updates and download the latest versions of your programs. But if you’ve tried all those and you’re still pulling your hair out, what do you do next?

Can The Internet’s Abuse Problem Be Solved?

Sarah Dobbs looks into the ways various platforms are trying to combat trolls

At this point, there's no point trying to deny it: there is a massive problem with abuse on the internet. It's not a new phenomenon, of course. For almost as long as the web has existed, people have been using it to be horrible to one another just as often as they've been using it to share knowledge or make friends. Can you remember the first time you heard the phrase "don't read the comments"? It was probably years ago. More than a decade, even.

Roccat Skeltr

A clever keyboard to unite the PC and the mobile device

Roccat's impressive range of peripherals has expanded recently with the arrival of the Skeltr, a keyboard that wjas originally announced a couple of years ago. It is designed to unite the mobile and PC platforms, with a set of features you won't find from any other manufacturer.

At first glance, it's a large (520 x 250 x 30mm - including detachable wrist rest) membrane keyboard with five programmable macro keys to the far left of the keyboard and a further three programmable profile keys located under the space bar. It is RGB backlit, allowing a combination of 16.8 million colours in a variety of effects and setups. It has a 1000Hz polling rate, 512KB of memory and a 32-bit ARM CPU helping to drive its many functions and features.

Western Digital My Cloud Pro Series PR2100 16TB

Western Digital goes all out for performance with their Pro Series PR2100

Western Digital's NAS solutions have been getting progressively better since it entered this sector and gradually polarised its range into home and business-oriented solutions. The new My Cloud Pro Series builds on previous designs by delivering more compact and refined offerings, in the form of the four-bay PR4100 and dual drive PR2100 reviewed here. The review system came with two of the latest WD RED 8TB drives pre-installed, though you can buy this unit with smaller capacities or as a bare system if you don't need the 16TB of potential drive space on offer.

How To Avoid Buying Fake And Poor-quality Memory Cards

How do you spot unofficial memory cards and avoid the models that'll likely be of lesser quality? We find out

Bootleggers have been around for a very long time and have plied their trade in many different markets. One of the most common places to find counterfeit products has always been media, with bootleg copies of movies, music and even video games. Often these products are very easy to spot, with obvious differences or notable style changes from the official product. However, some bootleggers are far better at duplicating the real McCoy than others and there have been many cases where a fake product has been all but impossible to identify in without some serious investigation.

Recover instantly from PC mistakes

Most PC mistakes are easy to undo if you know how. Edward Munn reveals quick, reliable fixes for six of the most common blunders

Instantly undo your last mistake Ctrl+Z is one of the most useful keyboard shortcuts you can ever learn. In Microsoft Office programs, such as Word and Excel, it can be used not only to quickly undo your last mistake but also to jump back an almost unlimited number of steps to restore anything you’ve recently edited. In fact, when you make a change anywhere in Windows, such as renaming or deleting a file, pressing Ctrl+Z is normally the quickest way of restoring it to its previous state.

Kobo Aura One

Nathan Spendelow looks at one of the strongest Kindle rivals we’ve seen in years

Amazon’s new Kindles might not command the headlines as they once did, but the retailer continues to sell e-readers by the bucketload and is more dominant in the sector than ever.

Kobo, however, is keeping up the fight and its latest offering, the Aura One, is a premium device with a generous 7.8in screen that has its sights set firmly on Amazon’s Kindle Voyage and Kindle Oasis.

With such a large screen, the Kobo is closer in size to a small tablet like the iPad Mini 4 than a standard e-reader. This has the advantage of fitting more words per page, providing a less cramped read. On the other hand, it’s significantly more cumbersome than the smaller 6in Kindles and is heavy for an e-reader at 230g.

Who's Spying Your PC?

Don’t think for a second that you’re ever truly alone when browsing the web. Mike Plant reveals how everything you do online is watched – and what you can do about it

How would you react if the next time you walked into a restaurant you’d never visited before the head waiter not only greeted you by name, but also reeled off your address? Then, before you’d had a chance to sit down, he asked you about your recent holiday to the Costa del Sol, before telling you that your best friend visited the restaurant recently and would definitely recommend the chicken chasseur.

Secret Tips For… Audacity

Record web radio, get rid of crackling noises and remove long silences

Record sounds playing on your PC

Free audio-editing program Audacity (www.audacityteam.org) is great for editing digital files from your music collection as well as voice recordings. But it can also record any audio playing on your computer – for example, an internet radio station, a YouTube video or an iTunes song.

To start recording, open Audacity, select Windows WASAPI in the Audio Host dropdown menu and click the record button. Once you’ve made your recording, click the stop button. If you’d like to listen to your recorded audio on an MP3 player or smartphone you should convert the audio file to MP3 (see next tip).

Test anything from your browser

You can do more with your browser than just visit web pages. Edward Munn looks at six useful functions you can perform from your browser with no additional software

Best free Android VPNs

Mobile VPNs protect your privacy on the web and let you unlock restricted content wherever you go. Edward Munn compares six of the best VPN apps

Best free torrent tools

BitTorrent has plenty of excellent, legal uses, so don’t be put off using it. Rob Beattie compares the top torrent software for downloading videos, music and more

The Problems With Driver Update Programs

They promise to help and optimise your PC, but are driver update programs actually worth it?

Underneath all of the cooling fans, heat sinks, capacitors and within the microchips and storage media of your PC lies the software that you use every day. Powering all of this and telling all of the components of your system how to run together are drivers. These special software packages are the instructions that make your system’s hardware work. From the mouse and keyboard, to the graphics card and motherboard, all of this hardware needs drivers in order to function. Without them, you wouldn’t have a PC capable of doing much.