Fake your online identity

Sharing your real personal info over the web leaves you open to spam and scams. Hayden Parkes (aka Robert Irvine) explains how to be someone else online

Secret New Tools For Google

Think you know Google inside out? Well, think again. David Ludlow lifts the lid on 30 of the search giant’s newest and most useful hidden features in the services you use every day

Google tools such as Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Drive and of course search have become so integral to our lives - both online and off - that it’s hard to imagine how we’d survive without them. And although there are valid concerns about what Google does with our data, no other company can claim to offer so many sites and so much software of such good quality and ease of use.

Much of Google’s success is down to the fact that it never stops improving its existing tools and developing new ones, so there’s always something new and useful for us to try. Over the following six pages, we round up our favourite new and lesser-known features from the search giant, spanning all its most popular products and a few that have launched more recently.

Battle Of The Virtual Assistants — Microsoft vs Apple vs Google

As predicted by Star Trek, it looks like we‘ll be talking to our computers soon. Or, more specifically, an AI personal assistant. Roland Waddilove compares the current crop

The digital personal assistant would appear to be one of the next big battlegrounds in tech, and many companies are pouring a lot of money, time, and talent into developing them. These are apps and services that are intelligent, interactive, can perform tasks that make life easier, and keep you updated with the latest information on things that interest you. The names are now pretty well-known: Microsoft has Cortana, a key component of the Windows 10 operating system; Google has Now on Android and iOS, and also Assistant in the latest Pixel phone; Apple has Siri, which is on iOS and also in macOS Sierra, the latest Mac operating system. Other companies are getting into digital personal assistants, too, such as Amazon with Alexa.

Bagging A Bargain

It’s time to whip out the credit card: Black Friday and Cyber Monday are back

If you have snapped up this copy of Micro Mart on the day it made it to the shops – that is, 24th November 2016 – then let us be the first to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. It may seem odd for us to do that given we don’t actually celebrate this particular American festival here in the UK. But it’s getting to the point where it’s just about the only US event that we don’t mark. Not yet, in any case.

Fantastic new uses for your old laptop

You may struggle to teach old dogs new tricks, but that’s not true of old laptops. Mike Plant explains how to get more out of a laptop you thought you’d never use again

Many of us have an old, long-forgotten laptop squirreled away in a cupboard or the loft gathering dust. It probably became too sluggish for everyday use, prompting you to replace it with a swankier, speedier model. Perhaps you put your laptop through our recent ‘When will your PC die?’ benchmark tests and realised it was on its last legs.

Before you send it off to your nearest landfill site, why not try giving it a new lease of life? Read on as we explain how to convert it into anything from a second PC screen to an amplifier.