Table of contents for March 2019 in Tech Advisor

Qualcomm’s efforts to put its Snapdragon chips into PCs have historically run into one major obstacle: the performance simply isn’t competitive with that of chips from Intel and AMD. Now Qualcomm is trying again, with what it’s calling an ‘extreme’ version of the Snapdragon: the 8cx. The firm is promising that the 8cx will offer the equivalent performance of the competition’s 15-watt processor offerings – though it’s not saying which one. (Intel’s U-series Core chips consume 15 watts.) At the same time, Qualcomm is promising more of its traditional strength: an incredible 25 hours of battery life, plus support for niceties such as LPDDR4X memory, NVMe SSDs, USB 3.1, and four PCI Express lanes. There’s Qualcomm QuickCharge, too. Executives said that the company has already designed the Snapdragon 835 and…

The age of the major PC exclusive may be long gone (beyond a few welcome exceptions), but laptop players can still get all the biggest console games, for cheaper, and run them faster and at 4K. With that in mind, we round up the best games you can get. They cover every budget, but they’ve all got one thing in common: they’re absolutely brilliant. Battlefield 5 Price: £49.94 from fave.co/2QK8LRm A prediction: as long as this list exists, there’ll be a DICE game on it. As we start 2019 that game is Battlefield, DICE’s first foray into World War II in almost a decade. From the bombed out ruins of Rotterdam to the snowy mountain peaks of Norway, Battlefield V looks fantastic. Buildings crumble, tanks burn, the Northern Lights twist…

We have access to more fonts today than ever before, and so many are free! Fonts, like graphics, can make or break a presentation (such as a PowerPoint slideshow); sell a book, magazine, newspaper (or leave it on the shelf); and make an advertisement succeed or fail. We’ll go over fonts in detail so you can start downloading and using them for your own projects. What are fonts? Fonts are the complete set of characters – that is, letters, numbers, and symbols/icons – within a typeface, which is the design of the characters. For example, Arial is the typeface; Arial Bold, Italic, Narrow, Extended (Wide), Black, and so on, are the fonts, or font Family. Each typeface or font falls within one of five classifications: • Serif (Times Roman, Bookman…

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx is the chip the company hopes will scale the performance mountain, reaching the heights that competing Intel Core chips have already surmounted. After trying it at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, we can say it seems promising. As we’ve seen, the Snapdragon 8cx was designed as a ground-up, optimized design specifically for laptops. Its mission is to achieve performance comparable to that of an Intel U-series Core i5 chip. Qualcomm supplied a limited number of Snapdragon 8cx reference notebooks at the event, all running Windows 10 Pro. We tried to navigate to one of the web-based benchmarks we’ve used to test previous Snapdragon PCs, but we were told that benchmarking wasn’t allowed. In part, that’s because the clock speeds of the chip haven’t been formally…

In Microsoft Word, templates are pre-designed documents that you or someone else (such as Microsoft) creates to use as a pattern for a project. The template could be for a business card, brochure, resume, presentation...the list goes on. Regardless of the purpose, templates provide the design consistency that any organization (or individual) needs to look professional. (You can also find templates for Excel, PowerPoint, and other applications, but in this article we’re focusing on Microsoft Word.) The template contains a specific layout, style, design and, sometimes, fields and text that are common to every use of that template. Some templates are so complete (such as business cards), you only have to change the individual’s name, phone number, and email address. Others, such as business reports or brochures, could require that…

Power users love to talk about how powerful and awesome Excel is, what with its Pivot Tables, nested formulas, and Boolean logic. But many of us barely know how to find the Autosum feature, let alone use Excel’s functions to create powerful formulas. If you’re part of the Excel 99 per cent, here are 16 handy Excel functions that will get you well on your way to spreadsheet mastery. 1. =SUM() The first function anyone should know tells Excel to carry out basic arithmetic. Let’s say you wanted the numbers in cell A2 and cell B2 to be added together in cell C2. All you’d do is enter =SUM(A2:B2) into C2, then hit Enter. In an instant you’d see sum of the two cells appear. You can use this function,…

Picking a gaming laptop is a lot more fun today than it was five years ago, when a ‘real’ gaming laptop meant 5kg of back-breaking hardware to haul around. With major advances in laptop CPUs and graphics technologies, you can now get great gaming performance in sizes from slender to huge, and prices from budget to sky-high. That’s where this handy-dandy buyer’s guide come in. We’ll name the best gaming laptops currently available, and we’ll highlight what to look for when buying a gaming laptop. The ‘best’ screen for a laptop When you buy a gaming laptop, one of the most important decisions you’ll need to make regards the screen. After all, what you get on day one is what you’re stuck with until you junk the device. You can,…

Working with PDFs has become as common as working with Word documents, but to get the full editing capabilities in Adobe Acrobat you must shell out £15.17 per month (available from fave.co/2QOFswX) for a Pro DC subscription. While there are plenty of alternative PDF editors, the simplest solution might be a tool you already use: Microsoft Word. While previous versions of Word let you save a document as a PDF, Word 2016 allows you to open an Adobe formatted file, modify it and then re-save it back to the PDF format without using Acrobat. Microsoft calls this new feature PDF Reflow, and here we’ll show how it works with a file containing text and an image. Import, export, and edit PDFs in Microsoft Word 1. Open Word 2016. Select File…