StevenLayton

Oops, shouldn’t have let the work experience kid plan this!

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

I noticed that there are some pretty good deals on Xbox One X on the Microsoft website. I looked at the Xbox One X Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order bundle, reduced from £449.99 to £259.99. Because I am late to the game, the Microsoft Store had all sold out. However, they were linked to third party sites with the same deal. In the UK they were Amazon, Argos, Game and Currys PR World. I followed the Amazon link, and it went to an Xbox One S console and game. I tried each of the others, and they all did the same. Not sure whose fault it is, but that's really frustrating.

If you haven't seen Pauls Hero image for the recent Short Takes, take a look, its a cracker. Paul, I salute your Photoshop skills!

After moving from Android to an iPhone 11, I find myself with 12 months of free Apple TV+.

Are there any standout series to watch?

Hi guys, a question to those of you who already have access to Disney+. Does the subscription give you access to all of the classic Disney films (Cinderella, Fantasia etc) as well as all of the newer Pixar films (Wally, Finding Nemo etc)?

While I've pre-orderd it for my own selfish reasons (Star Wars, Marvel etc), I also want my 5 and 13 year old to be able to get loads from it.

After a few years of WP and Android, I fancy a change. My current phone is a Huawei P20 lite, which I think takes great photos, which is important to me. I fancy switching to an iPhone. My budget isn’t going to stretch to a Pro or Pro Max, but am interested in people’s thoughts on how good the camera on the iPhone 11 is.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had several Phishing attempts get through to my Hotmail address. They’re really obvious “your account has been suspended click here to unlock it”, type attempts for Amazon etc. Anyone else seen a spike in these getting through?

I bought the Halo Master Chief game pack on disc (not digital download) for the Xbox One ages ago. Am I right in thinking that, because I did that, I can now download the new PCs versions for free, as and when they are released? If so, how?

My five year old managed to order a small skin pack for Minecraft, when I let him play on the Xbox, logged in as me. Its only £5, so no great cost, but is there a method of cancelling the order and getting the money back when placed?

Should I get the new Call of Duty Modern Warfare, and if so, which version (Digital or the Operator version)?

My preference is playing through the single player campaign, and I'm not really into playing online multiplayer (I'm just not good enough!). I'm currently still addicted to playing MW2, and love working my way through the Spec Ops missions, with one or two of them, Estate and the Sniper, my favs that I have spend too much of my life replaying. Does the new Call of Duty have anything akin to the Spec Ops? Is the single player campaign as good as I hear it is? Will it have re-play value?

Will the more expensive Operator version give me any extra value, given that I'm not a big multiplayer fan?

Thanks guys

So, I've just subscribed to Express VPN and am busy installing to all my devices (its a shame my rubbish ISP router doesn't support it). I've noticed that with Express VPN turned on, Windows Updates don't download, nor do the Windows Store Apps download. Any ideas? I'm sure it'll be a setting/option in E-VPN somewhere.

Hey guys, so our 5 year old finally smashed the screen on his hand me down iPad 2 mini.  

I don’t want to buy a him a piece of junk, but he ain’t getting a new iPad either. He’s only 5!

I’m thinking of getting him a £150 8” Amazon Fire Kids tablet.  

Does anyone have any experience of them? All he’ll need is Amazon Prime video, Netflix and access to kids friendly games, which I think the tablet ticks all of.

After making a bad life choice, and having over 50 films bought through Microsoft, I know also see the coming writing on the wall for this service. About half of these films are films I bought for my kids, and some are their favorites. Apart form re-buying them on Amazon or Google, is there a way to get them off the PC in an encrypted format, so I can put them on a hard drive and play through the Xbox One?

Hi all - I've not needed / wanted to do this for ages, but can anyone recommend a good and safe YouTube video downloader? I remember Paul talking about one ages ago, that you pasted the URL into it, and it grabbed the video at the highest res that it could.

Thanks.

When creating or editing a thread post, I keep getting the message ‘www.thurrott.com here’ in a dialogue box.

Happened on both my iPad and Windows 10 PC.

After breaking her cheapish Android phone, I gave our daughter my old Nexus 6p phone as a temporary solution, until we could get her a new one. The battery on the Nexus had deteriorated, which is why I’d given it up, but when I was setting the phone up for her, I fell in love with this phone all over again!

There is something about the phone, right size, great camera, pure Google, finger sensor in the ‘right’ place, which made it such a great phone. Heck, I’ve missed it!

We use Google home, with a couple of the normal and mini assistants, as well as a Chromecast. For Christmas we bought our daughter one of the Smart Hubs, as she loves cooking and baking, and we through she'd like the hands free recipes, etc. She does.

She already had Google account from her phone, so we have added that email address to the home group, alongside my own. She has trained her voice on her phone, and all of the hubs respond her her voice for basic questions (time/weather/timer/web searches etc)

Should she be able to speak to any of the devices, and it recognise HER voice (instead of mine) now? Should she be able to speak to the Smart Hub, and ask it to show HER photos on the screen? It doesn't seem to be doing so at the moment, it only seems to do that for my voice. Also, I tend to take photos of all kinds of work rubbish on my phone, so when the Home Hub is flicking through the photos when not in use, it has all kinds of rubbish, mixed in with family photos. How do I best get it to show collections of specific things? Not sure it matters for features, etc. but we're in the UK.

Any help or pointers would be great.

We have a number of Google smart assistant devices at home, and I’m thinking of adding a smart doorbell. Given that I am Google Assistant based, is there any advantage with going for the Nest Doorbell? The Ring doorbell is cheaper, for what look like basically the same thing, I will pay the extra if there if a good reason to do so, but is there?

Thoughts?

This is a short video, on the BBC website, about how they're using Hololens to train midwives to deal with rare child birth emergencies. What a great use of technology.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-46223467/could-hololens-tech-help-save-babies-lives

Given their difficultly in hitting dates and recent poor reliability, why doesn’t Microsoft simply ship individual Windows feature updates when they’re ready? Why the big bang release of lots of updates in an annual or bi-annual time frame, which is more prone to break things? One at a time, without an artificial 'must be complete by this date' attached to them. This way, several new features might get released a year. Maybe, even, without breaking things.

I’ve just added a 1Tb HDD to my Windows 10 PC, with the intention of freeing up space on my existing SSD.

I’ve changed the location of all my local Documents, Pictures folders, etc to point to this new drive.

I’d like to pull down all of the OneDrive files, photos etc onto the new HHD drive, but the OneDrive path is still pointing to my C:\Users\Name\OneDrive location. How do I get my OneDrive folder structure onto my new E: drive? So it becomes E:\OneDrive.

Thanks

After just watching Star Trek 4 again I’m reminded that for a long time, because of the different pronunciation, I thought that “Aluminum” (transparent or otherwise!) was a futuristic Star Trek metal just made up for the film.

In fact, it was only when I started listening to US based podcasts I even knew that Aluminium and Aluminum were the same thing!

Anyone else using Windows 10 Education, and having the problem with the Films & TV app not allowing you to access puchased content (the tab to do so just isn't there).

Found this thread open on the MS site, so its not just me.

Wonder if Paul and Co would be able to nudge Microsoft to see if they're planning on fixing this.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/apps_windows_10-movies/movies-tv-app-no-explorepurchased-tabs-pc/04d8701c-7344-4c60-8a78-95dceec7e347

I've just sat my Chromebooks Asus C302C) on top of my iPad Pro and the Chromebook screen shut off. I picked up the Chromebook and the screen came back on, sit it down and its off again.

Any ideas what is causing this odd behaviour?

If I access the site, while not logged on, and click on a Premium post, I’m then asked to logon. However, when I do logon, I’m taken to my profile page, rather than the article I clicked on.

Its Thursday, and I'm just listening to Wednesdays Windows Weekly. About half an hour in, and talking about the World Cup, Mary Jo announces that England are 1-0 up.

As an Englishman, ouch, that one hurt! But hey, we still get to play for 3rd place. I think we'd have all taken that before the tournament began!

When you load a webpage on your mobile, go to click on a link, but the page hasn’t finished loading and jumps down, meaning you click on the wrong link. You hit back to try again, and the same thing happens again.

Really interesting

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44368813

Of course, if this takes off in a huge way, we'll end up increasing sea temperatures and still destroying the planet ;)

A few months ago I purchased two Google Home Assistants at the same time as two Google Wi-Fi APs when we moved into a larger house. I chose the Google Assistants over Amazon Alexa because at the time my thinking was that Google (with all of their AI clout) would be the better long term solution and would connect to more 'stuff' in a more intelligent way.

The problem is that I'm also a heavy Amazon user, I buy from them, I listen to Audible, I'm a Amazon Prime member so use their TV and music services. All of which would work 'better' if I was also using Amazon Alexa, rather than Google Home.

I've no real interest in home automation, beyond maybe buying a Ring Doorbell (Now Amazon), and its the Entertainment side of Assistants that I'm more interested in.

Unless something changes, I think I did back the wrong horse.

I bought myself a Fitbit Charge 2 in the New Year sales, but am having problems with it. I've set it all up, and have been wearing it for a few days, but so far I've not lost any weight, or got any healthier. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong?!?!

Hi Paul/Brad and co

A few weeks before the recent change to Thurrott.com, I dropped down from a Premium user, to a Standard. The reasons were nothing to do with any concerns on quality, but was purely budgetary for me. Since the recent change to the site, with Paul writing mostly Premium articles, I worry that the number of articles I can read on the site is now minimal.

Currently on the Homepage (28/11/17) I can see 18 article, and 10 of those are Premium, with 8 of the most recent 9 being Premium. None of which I can access. I can’t help feel the balance towards Premium has shifted too much towards a paywall.

Now, you (or others) could justifiably suggest I just pay up to get access, and it would be hard to counter that as I genuinely understand you guys need to earn your living, and you don’t owe me (or anyone) free content.

However, I wonder if there is a middle ground somewhere?

Just a thought and am interested in your thoughts.

Cheers

As a Brit, I learned everything I know about Thanksgiving from watching Friends on TV.

So to Paul, Brad and the gang, enjoy 24 hours of falling out will family, eating too much, and managing to get a turkey stuck on your head!

Having moved to Google at home with both an assistant, and also their Wi-fi, and using a Nexus 6p, I've found myself in need of a new laptop and my current one has died, and I'm seriously considering a Chromebook.

I work in IT, in Education, so becoming more familiar with Chromebooks is (for me) a good move.

What are the options for for Chromebooks, in the £500 price range? It must be able to run the Google Play Store apps, and I want to have a reasonable experience, so nothing too slow.

Having being one of the few who bought movies through the Microsoft store (about 20, or so), for ease of playback on my Xbox One, I now see the error of my ways.

Parallel to this, I’ve decided to buy into the Google Home eco-system, have and just ordered a Google Home, Google Home Mini and two Google Wi-Fis, as I’ve been tempted by this for some time. This seemed to make most sense, as I moved to a Nexus 6p a year or so ago and have already bought some music through the Google Store.

Because of the above, I’ve decided that I’m going to buy/rent any future movies through Google. My question is what is the best way to get the content on my TV? I have the Xbox One, my Android phone and a Chromecast. Will a combination of these provide an ideal solution, or is there a reasonably priced other option I’m not considering?

Thanks

Does anyone know if it will be possible to update existing computers to Windows 10 S? I work in a school and we have a bank of unmanaged Windows 8 laptops. Upgrading them to Windows 10 S, and managing them through the educational version of inTune is of interest to me.

Whats the easiest way of backing out of the Windows 10 insider builds, and go back to a clean 1607 build?  Is it just a case of turing off insider builds from Settings > Windows Update > Windows Insider Program?  What then?  If I do a restore, will it be a 1607 restore I go back to, or do I need to do a clean install of W10?

A few months ago my Nexus 6P was updated to Android 7.0 and my battery life suddenly plummeted.  

I’m a big Audible user and use it daily on my drive to and from work.  After the 7.0 update my battery would drain by about 20% on my 35 minute drive to work.  It didn’t do this before the update.  At work the phone would often get really hot in my pocket, the MS Next lock screen would always be active, and once or twice Audible would spring to life in my pocket.  

I tried resetting it and many other things, nothing seemed to work.

Just before Christmas, on a hunch, I removed the Next lock screen and I think that this has cured the issue. I’d been using the Next lock screen before the 7.0 update without issue.

Has anyone had this issue?  I can only think that the Next lock screen was at fault here, though the Audible app springing to life was also odd.  I'd still like to be able to use Next again, but don't want the battery issues or hit pocket.  Thoughts?