Windows sound fast fixes

Get PC sound on your HDMI TV, equalise unpredictable volume levels and fix choppy audio

No sound when playing media from your laptop through TV

Connected your laptop to your TV via an HDMI cable and getting pictures but no sound? It’s a common problem that's easily fixed. Press Windows key+R to open the Run box, type mmsys.cpl and press Enter. Select the Playback tab to view a list of available devices, which should include an entry for your TV. Right-click this entry and choose ‘Set as Default Device’. Click OK to close the box and then, if necessary, close and restart whatever media application you’re using to output audio/video to your TV.

Google Brotli

Browsing the web using Chrome is about to get much faster

What is it?

Google’s latest algorithm for compressing data in its Chrome browser. The company says this “whole new data format" will make browsing the internet in Chrome much faster because web pages will load more quickly. Google announced its development last September, saying it was exciting news “because fast is better than slow". Can't argue with that.

Bose Solo 5

Boost your TV's audio quality

Soundbars have become a popular TV accessory, sitting below the front edge of your screen and blurting out more better-quality audio than the built in speakers. This one is particularly compact, and doesn’t come with a separate subwoofer or any other complications. That makes it convenient for a PC as well as a TV. It can be wall mounted, if you prefer, using Bose's £25 WB-120 kit.

What’s unusual about the Solo 5 is that it isn’t really designed for the kind of thumping bass and screaming stereo that put you in the middle of the movies. Instead, it’s accent is on clarity. Film directors these days seem to positively encourage actors to mumble, presumably because it feels more natural. In the same quest for realism, they also tend to let their sound designers emphasise every conceivable background noise.

AOC Q2778VQE

A decent PC monitor, plain and simple

If you look up ‘monitor' in the dictionary, and skip past the bits about medical recording devices, giant lizards and school prefects, you’ll discover it means ‘a screen that displays an image generated by a computer’. But that doesn’t really do justice to today’s PC screens.

At the very least, any self-respecting LCD panel will tend to lay on a multi-port USB 3.0 hub; built-in stereo speakers are de rigueur, and how about an SD card slot to view photos from your camera? And finally. Mill, support, so you can connect your Android device to charge up and mirror videos to the screen.

HP Officejet 7510

An A4 printer that's A3 on the inside

Like Brother, HP has worked out that if you design an A4 printer so that the print head travels along the long side of the paper, you can also feed A3 into it. This is because the short side of A3 matches the long side of A4. It’s not a great set up for printing A3 all the time, but handy for producing the occasional poster, say.

Medion Lifetab

Could this be the next Tesco Hudl?

You may come across this Android tablet in Aldi, which is selling them as a ‘Special Buy’. It’s certainly special all right - especially bad. It has a 1920x1200-pixel screen, giving you Full HD plus a bit extra for a more iPad like shape. Costing just £139, it was shaping up to be a potential successor to Tesco’s Hudl 2, which was an excellent bargain at a tenner less (until it was discontinued last autumn).

You wouldn’t immediately guess that this was a budget product. It doesn’t have the solid metal construction of an iPad, but then nor do many other devices. The back has a sparkly silver finish that Medion presumably hopes people might mistake for aluminium, and the white plastic edges are crisply styled, with a bit of a Star Wars feel to their diagonal grooves and insets. The 2-megapixel webcam and 5-megapixel rear camera won’t win any awards, but that’s tablet cameras for you.

Lenovo Yoga 700 (11 inch)

A small laptop that's also a big tablet

We’ve mentioned before that Lenovo makes rather a lot of different laptop tablet hybrids with becomingly similar names. This year it seems to have called them all the 700. This particular one is the Yoga 700 - not to be confused with the Yoga 700. That’s the one with a 14.1in screen. This one is 11.6in. Still following?

As befits a convertible, the Lenovo Yoga 700 (11 inch) has a special hinge that bends all the way round so you can fold the keyboard back and ignore it. Well, you can’t literally ignore it, unless you undergo some sort of hypnosis, because you’re still carrying it around. But the whole thing weighs a modest 1.1kg, so you can just about pretend. At 15.8mm, though, the folded-up Yoga 700 (11 inch) is a pretty chunky kind of iPad.

Chillblast Fusion Orion i3

A cheap and cheerful PC that's so quiet you'll forget it's there

Desktop computers used to be plain black boxes. Now they come with UFO landing lights, rocket exhaust vents and Formula 1 spoilers. But what if you just want something that gets on with the job, neither seen nor heard? PC builder Chillblast - which isn’t usually averse to an LED-backlit grille or dual-radiator water cooler - has pushed all the stops back in for this exercise in understatement. The Fusion Orion i3 takes a selection of the latest affordable components and hides them inside a box so black, it'll attract nobody's attention but Stephen Hawking.