Check your home broadband and Wi-Fi

Is your internet too slow? Nicole Kobie invites us into her home to reveal the best tests to find out where the problem lies

It’s an all too common problem: your broadband just isn’t as fast as you think it should be. Perhaps your Internet Service Provider (ISP) promised you 20Mbps, but you are barely managing half of that? Or maybe your speed lluctuates throughout the day, and stutters if you move to a different room.

Thankfully, there are several excellent tests and apps that will tell you what speeds you’re getting, and why these might be slower than you’d hoped. These are even worth trying even if you’re happy with your broadband speed and Wi-Fi - you never know when you might need this kind of information.

Uninstall Windows 10 Apps Now!

Microsoft clutters your PC with many apps and features you don't need. Jonathan Parkyn explains which you should remove - and shows you how to do so safely

Windows has always come with a selection of pre-installed programs and tools, but some are more welcome than others. It can be useful to have built-in media players and so on, but there are often better alternatives available - sometimes for free. Many of Windows 7 and 8’s built-in offerings are limited in their capabilities; others are completely unnecessary - they just get in the way, hogging resources and consuming valuable hard-drive space.

A Look Into Facebook Statistics

The social network provides extensive statistics for some pages. You can use the same to analyse the behaviour of your visitors to your page

Who has liked which post? Where do my visitors come from and when are they online? Answers to all such questions are given by statistics under “Facebook Insights”. With the help of registered clicks and user specifications, this service determines which posts do visitors of a page like and share - for example, the Facebook page of your club, your company or a nonprofit community. You will receive data in an anonymised form; it is not possible to determine who has interacted how. Using the Insight information, you can orient your posts stronger to the target audience and ensure that they are shared more often and thereby, win more fans. Note that only pages but not profiles, are statistically recorded.

Honor Band Z1: Small And Steady

A good looking fitness tracker that doesn’t break the bank

The smart wearables boom is finally here, and many smartphone manufacturers have already jumped onto the bandwagon, with many of their own iterations of a smart wearable. honor has graciously sent us their Band Z1 smart wearable for us to play around with. It’s a minimalist smartwatch with fitness tracking capabilities.

The Blocked Web

Online advertisements are very irritating – But they finance a large part of the internet. The war that has now broken out over them could change the web for ever

Online advertising is the economic engine of the internet, but a curse for many users: Without advertising, there would be no free products or free news reports. Facebook, Twitter and Google services (including Gmail and YouTube) would have been out of the picture, too. On the other hand, online advertising has enormous disadvantages: It slows down websites, because several advertising servers are addressed and loaded in the background when the website is called up. It causes additional traffic, which often eats up the bandwidth, with mobile devices being hit hard in particular. Online advertising also represents a security risk: At the beginning of November 2015, unknown persons hijacked the advertising network of the company PageFair, and infected up to 3,000 websites with drive-by-downloads containing Windows malware.