Table of contents for June 2025 in PC Pro

Flmmff. That, I need hardly tell you, is the sound of a wormhole appearing in the space-time continuum, through which I’ve just sent three gentlemen a copy of this magazine. In their world, it’s 1950. One falls into the lap of Maurice Wilkes; another lands next to FC Williams; and the third flies into Alan Turing’s pigeonhole at King’s College, Cambridge, which I know he’ll be checking in a couple of minutes. Of those three names, you’ll surely be most familiar with Turing. You may also have a passing knowledge of Maurice Wilkes, but you probably won’t have heard of FC Williams. I only know about these latter two because I’ve spent the past year researching and writing a book called The Computers that Made the World (on sale this…

Britain’s full-fibre networks have become a patchwork quilt of more than 100 different providers. Zen Internet boss Richard Tang wants to do something about that. As an ISP, striking wholesale deals with different fibre providers is a pain. Different contracts, different pricing, different APIs. So Tang wants Zen to become an “altnet aggregator”, connecting to several different altnets and then allowing channel partners or even rival ISPs access to all those different networks via Zen. One contract, one API, much less hassle. The curious thing is that even Tang believes that the vast majority of these altnets won’t be around in as little as five years’ time. A predicted wave of consolidation will see the full-fibre market dwindle down to only a handful of different networks, Tang predicts. So why…

Some 26 years ago, back in May 1999, I opened this column thus: “It’s said there’s an ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times!’ Actually it’s been said by me at least twice before.” Well, it looks time to trot it out for a fourth outing, though nowadays I can check its truth using my old friend ChatGPT: “No record of this phrase (or anything close to it) exists in classical Chinese literature: the earliest known attribution is from British sources in the 20th century, a 1936 speech by Sir Austen Chamberlain (brother of Neville) who claimed to have heard it as a Chinese curse, but it seems more like a Western invention made to sound exotic or wise.” So, I’ve been peddling fake news for a quarter…

Dumb and dumber Jon Honeyball’s account of being tired of dumb items (see issue 368, p110) certainly resonates with me as the race to get something to market and “sort out the bugs later” increasingly becomes the norm. My own “smart” Sony TV will only grudgingly talk to my LG sound bar after a lot of messing with setup procedures (and clearing the cache, for some reason). Apparently this is due to Sony and LG jointly throwing their toys out of their respective prams. My two printers often work flawlessly until they suddenly either decide to sulk or try to pick paper from a non-existent paper tray or (very often with the Epson) to print everything across several sheets. Add to this, a managerial necessity by Microsoft for constant unwanted…

The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” blared across Microsoft’s Redmond campus on the day Windows 95 was unveiled to the world. This was the big one. A landmark release on Microsoft’s journey away from its DOS roots and into the 32-bit era. “Start me up and I’ll never stop,” shouted Mick Jagger, and so far that promise has held. Well, apart from the occasional blue screen of death. It had been a long road to launch, twisting and turning away from its original vision with such vigour that even Mick must have looked on with admiration. But now it was here, bringing us the roots of the Windows user experience we still use 30 years later. Millions of copies were sold over the next few days, many to people who…

Back in the 1990s, testing operating systems when they were in beta release was fun. The fun wasn’t the crashes, the reinstalls or the piles of 3.5in floppy disks you had to pump into your computer. It was seeing the rapid rate of change on every new build. We were watching evolution in action. In the mid-1990s, Windows NT was carving out its high-end powerhouse niche. But the requirements were still too high for many mainstream customers, who wanted to move on from the relatively lightweight Windows 3.x. Hence Windows 95 was born, as a stepping stone that would eventually lead to the merging into Windows XP of both the NT and 9X worlds. Beta testing for Windows 95 was on a CompuServe group, and even the most senior members…

Sixty hours a week “is the sweet spot of productivity”, according to a recent leaked memo written by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Sixty hours? Man up, Sergey. The Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy called for young staff to work 70-hour weeks, claiming “I don’t believe in work-life balance”. Seventy hours a week is dialling it in, according to Alibaba founder Jack Ma, a big fan of China’s “996” work culture, which entails working from 9am to 9pm six days a week. “If you find something you like, there is no such thing as 996; if you don’t like it or don’t love it, going to work is torture every minute,” he stated in a 2019 blog post, translated from Chinese. (See “What’s it like to work 996?” on p37.) Even if…

If you’re a long-term VoIP user you could have been using your Skype phone number for as long as 20 years – in which case you probably don’t want to lose it. It is possible to move an active Skype number to another VoIP provider, using the regular porting option that most platforms offer when you sign up. The catch is that little word “active”: it may not be possible to keep your number after your Skype subscription has ended. In other words, if your number is still working and you want to keep it, act quickly.…

AMD AMD’s Ryzen processors have always been popular with cost-conscious shoppers seeking performance on a budget. One reason for this is that AMD generally manages to cram more cores into its chips than competing Intel models. AMD long ago outsourced its chip production to Taiwan-based specialist TSMC, so it’s been able to take advantage of industry-leading manufacturing processes; as a result, very complex chips with a dozen cores or more can be reliably manufactured with smaller and smaller process sizes. Meanwhile, as we noted last month, Intel has struggled to shrink its own in-house manufacturing processes, meaning it’s been playing catch-up almost since the very first AMD Ryzen processor was released in 2017. The latest AMD processors are based on the fifth major generation of its Zen core, officially dubbed…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p14. It’s updated each month. Labs Winner Each month we run a group test, or Labs. This product has managed to beat all others to top position. Tinyurl.com links Throughout the magazine you’ll see tinyurl.com shortcuts. Enter these into the address bar of your browser and it will take you to a particular page, which will either be too long or awkward for us to publish or will take you to the precise shop from which to buy. If it’s Amazon, note that we may have an affiliate deal in place so we will…

SCORE PRICE £1,958 (£2,349 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk Wakefield-based PCSpecialist has earned its reputation for bespoke PCs, but it also offers a wide range of next-day PCs. If it’s in stock, and you order in time for PCSpecialist to book a delivery slot with DPD, it will be with you the next day. Here, it sent us the latest addition to its next-day range based on its own PCS Lumin ARGB Mid-Tower chassis. By a complete coincidence, I can unmask this chassis as a custom version of the Gamdias Neso P1 Pro – because that’s what the Wired2Fire opposite uses and the two are identical. Except for branding, that is, because the PCSpecialist logo sits discreetly at the bottom right of this chassis, while the tag you pull to open…

SCORE PRICE 128GB with stylus, £317 (£380 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Lenovo’s latest tablet costs roughly as much as a basic iPad (see issue 364, p91), but it offers a bigger screen and stylus at no extra cost. Expansion is cheaper, too: while the 128GB model costs £380 inc VAT, you can find the 256GB variant on the high street for only £20 more. The design isn’t the most thrilling, but the smooth metal casing is pleasant to the touch and gives an impression of durability. At 620g it’s on the weighty side, but that’s down to the large 12.7in display. While the 8mm bezels are chunky, they help you easily hold the tablet by its edges without accidentally triggering the touchscreen. Another nice design touch is the strong magnetic…

SCORE PRICE £219 (£263 inc VAT) from dell.com This is the second product we’ve seen after Dell’s big rebrand, announced at CES. From now on, all its new professional products will include the name “Pro”, whether it’s a monitor, a desktop PC or a laptop. We saw a top-of-the-range Premium model last month in the Dell Pro Premium 13 laptop (see issue 368, p46), and this month is the debut of a Plus product. That is, one that sits in the middle of the range in terms of quality. If the Dell Pro 14 Plus is anything to go by, they’re all going to be good-looking devices. This is a sleek device with a thin, lightweight aluminium chassis that weighs only 570g. Close examination reveals the plastic framing around the…

SCORE PRICE $269 plus import duty from rayneo.com Established in 2021, RayNeo has made its mark producing simple, affordable smartglasses. It doesn’t try to match the rich feature sets of competitor Xreal, instead focusing on price – something the Air 3s, its latest model, sticks to while offering improved performance and vastly superior audio over prior generations. To be clear, this isn’t a self-contained VR headset such as the Meta Quest 3. It’s a virtual display that plugs into a host device and simulates a huge 201in screen, floating six metres in front of your face. It will work with almost any device that supports video over USB, which means you can use most smartphones, tablets, PCs and Macs. When I opened up the RayNeo Air 3s glasses I initially…

SCORE PRICE £383 (£459 inc VAT) from samsung.com When it comes to phones, the letter “a” has been hijacked as a shortcut for affordable. So it is for Google’s Pixel 9a (see p74), and so too for Samsung’s long line of A-series phones. These have now all been refreshed for 2025, from the bottom-of-the-pack A16 for £139 to this top-of-the-range A56. I’m testing the Enterprise Edition, which costs £40 less than the non-Enterprise model but includes 128GB of storage rather than 256GB. There are two other differences between this and the consumer version. First, you’ll enjoy three years of support rather than two, plus the promise of next-day business exchange with a “gold stock” phone. I assume that means either new or refurbished, but Samsung is unclear despite my pestering.…

SCORE PRICE £192 (£230 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Although an entry-level two-bay NAS enclosure, the Asustor Drivestor 2 Pro AS3302T punches above its weight, delivering a level of performance that puts it above its budget rivals. The slight lack of upgradability will put off those who want more from their NAS device, but if you have more basic needs, this is an excellent device. The two SATA hard disk bays are hidden behind a magnetic panel on the front. There are no locks on the drive caddies, but the panel will at least stop the casual fiddler from messing with running hard disks. Both drive bays use a screwless design, so you can quickly pop the disks in and have the NAS ready to go in a matter of minutes.…

Technically, you can install any hard disk in a NAS. Although it’s generally best to use the same type of disk in each slot – the same manufacturer, model and size – if you have spare hard disks lying around then there’s no harm in using them. If buying storage from scratch, you’ll have a choice between standard desktop hard disks and models specially designed to be used in a NAS, such as the WD Red hard disks we used for this test. So, what’s the difference, and do you really need NAS hard disks? NAS hard disks have been explicitly designed to work in the confined spaces of a NAS enclosure and are intended to be operated 24 hours per day. As such, they’re built to last longer and…

SCORE PRICE £491 (£589 inc VAT) from ukstore.qnap.com Although it has a mid-range price, the Qnap TS-464 has the flexibility and performance of a more expensive device. It’s also available in a two-bay version, the TS-264, which we review on p86. While many NAS devices at this price offer only gigabit Ethernet, this device has two 2.5GbE ports, plus an expansion port if you ever need dual 10GbE ports. Inside, Qnap pairs an Intel Celeron N5095 processor with 8GB of RAM. That leaves a spare SODIMM slot that can take another 8GB stick of DDR4 RAM for a maximum of 16GB – handy if you want to run lots of apps on the NAS. The four hard drive bays are located at the front of the NAS. They’re covered by…

SCORE PRICE £490 (£588 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Although it looks like the F4-424 we reviewed last year (see issue 358, p88), the TerraMaster F4-424 Pro has all-new internals. And a higher price. However, that nets you an eight-core Intel Core i3-N305 CPU (3.8GHz boost speed) and memory slots pre-populated with 32GB of DDR5 RAM, so you’re getting a lot for your money. The F4-424 Pro should be ready for anything you can throw at it. Build quality and usability are mixed. It’s great to see four hot-swap hard disk caddies that slide out of the front, but they’re not covered and don’t have a lock. So, unlike Synology’s NAS devices, anyone can pop out a disk whenever they want. While the hard disks bays are tool-free, the two M.2…

Hard disk tests SSD storage tests When buying a NAS device, it’s vital to think about flexibility. Starting with the basics, that means buying the right number of bays for your needs. However, it’s also about your ability to use SSD storage in the way that you want. It’s becoming increasingly common to see NAS enclosures that let you use SSDs in a storage pool, for fast, quiet storage, not caching alone. That becomes even more important if you can use four NVMe drives instead of two. Layered on top that is the NAS enclosure’s operating system and range of apps. Sure, a NAS must provide network-connected storage, but modern devices are fully fledged servers that can provide everything from media streaming and security camera surveillance to Dropbox-style file synchronisation.…

SCORE PRICE From £21 exc VAT per user per month from goto.com It’s easy to see why GoTo is a popular choice for cloud-hosted VoIP services as it delivers an incredible range of unified communications features. The Connect Phone System on review offers a wealth of call-handling services, teams them up with messaging, meetings, chat and videoconferencing, adds new AI-powered calls and presents them all in one administration portal. GoTo has simplified its plans, with Phone System offering all the VoIP services most businesses will likely need. Price transparency is lacking so you’ll need to request a quote, but we were advised that prices start at £21 per user per month for up to ten seats, dropping to £16 for larger volumes. All your GoTo products are accessed from the…

SCORE PRICE £244 exc VAT from cablemonkey.co.uk D-Link has traditionally offered two types of wireless access point, allowing businesses to choose between cloud or on-premises management. The DAP-X3060OU on review joins the latter family and, along with support for standalone mode, includes D-Link’s free Nuclias Connect software, with a single instance supporting up to 1,000 APs and smart-managed switches. The DAP-X3060OU can handle the great British weather, too. Its IP68 rating is one the highest achievable and means it’s completely dust-tight and can withstand continuous immersion in water. The kit includes wall-mount and pole brackets so it can be easily positioned to achieve the best wireless coverage. This big AP is well built and its AX3000 rating claims speeds of up to 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on…

My first dip into remote access came almost by accident. I’d been trying out the then-new Windows 2000 Terminal Server Edition for another project when a fresh client popped up, asking lots of complicated questions about how to detect all sorts of intrusions, forgeries and unauthorised transmissions inside a Lotus email deployment. While footling around with LotusScript, I made a couple of comments about how I’d been trying out Terminal Services as a remote-access service. My reports were met with a mixture of strong interest and equally strong disbelief: this particular client was a bit too young to remember mainframe teletype terminals, and too old to have started exploring the internet in any depth. I had a few weeks before I needed the Terminal Server for anything else, so I…

Expert advice from our panel of professionals Let me tell you about an utter outrage. Few things boil my blood quite as much as this. You see, I had an email from Home Connect about its app. The message started off by saying: “With our latest Home Connect app release, we have decided to streamline our digital features within the Home Connect environment, ensuring a more focused and beneficial experience for consumers.” Well, that sounds good. Who wouldn’t want a more focused and beneficial experience? It went on: “Due to technical reasons, the following Home Connect functionality will be discontinued on April 30th, 2025.” Oh! Technical reasons, you say? And functionality will be discontinued? “While the dedicated Smartwatch app will no longer be available, the notification functionality will remain unaffected.”…

Here’s something you’ve heard said a lot on these pages: “You must employ multi-factor authentication!” Or maybe I’ve said 2FA as I’m old and have difficulty using such new-fangled and more accurate terms as MFA. But is that advice still valid? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Consider the sheer volume of threat campaigns employing infostealer malware to firstly grab as many login credentials as possible and then use those already collated in brute force and password-spraying attacks. Also consider how readily available those logs of stolen passwords are. So, I must be out of my mind even suggesting that 2FA could be past its sell-by date, right? But, as usual, it’s complicated, and the cybersecurity devil is very much in the detail. It isn’t 2FA that’s the problem per se;…

Inspirational stories from computing’s long-distant past Although Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press around 1440, producing professional publications long remained a laborious and time-sapping endeavour. If you wanted to create a newspaper or a magazine for much of the first half of the 20th century, you needed skilled workers to use machines to manually assemble letters into lines – a process known as hot metal typesetting. Even though production methods gradually became more refined thanks to cold type and offset printing, the process of putting words and images on a page remained cumbersome. As an example, in issue 14 of Amstrad Action printed in 1986, there was an article explaining how the magazine was made. Text would be written on Amstrad CPC 464 and CPC 664 computers using a…

With climate change in mind, we need to know what’s happening to polar regions. Is the ice receding? What’s the weather like, beyond freezing beyond all comprehension? How are marine environments changing? As we’ve seen with weather forecasting, AI can sift through data to make the necessary predictions to track the damage we’ve done to polar ice. But first we need to get the data. James Byrne, research software engineer lead at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said the trick is getting data out of a very hostile environment. “It’s a lot of fun working down there, but you don’t have mobile networks, it’s done by satellite or going to get an SD card out of an instrument that just overwintered in minus 50 conditions in blowing snow all year…

We are in the centre of a trade war storm the likes of which we have never seen before. President Trump has decided that he knows best, and that international trade can be reduced to a few simple sums in a spreadsheet. I’d suggest using a slide rule, but I suspect log tables are a little beyond him. Part of this enormous upheaval is the imposition of large tariffs on goods exported from China to the USA. Well, that might change by this afternoon, as it has twice already in the past few days. But let’s just run with the concept of tariffs on imported goods. The logic, thin as it might seem, is that forcing tariffs on the likes of Acer, Apple, Audi and almost all other vendors, will…

I have watched cars flying, taken a ride in a driverless taxi and crossed the Firth of Forth on an automated bus – but the innovation I’m most impressed with is app-connected delivery lockers. If you’re not familiar with these genius inventions, they’re huge metal boxes from a company called InPost. You’ll find them tucked away near shops and in car parks, covered in little doors with a scanner and screen on the front. Need to pick something up? Scan a QR code, a door pops open and there, as if by magic, is your parcel. Sending a parcel is even better – you don’t even need to print a label. Amazon has similar lockers that connect to your phone via Bluetooth, the door swinging open as if the machine…

Apple vs Google apps Steve Cassidy is obviously not an app developer or he would know that there is a world of difference between the testing carried out by Apple and the testing (not) carried out by Google (see issue 368, p104). When you seek to have an app listed on the App Store, you have to supply credentials on the Apple Connect website for Apple to actually run your app. I know for a fact that they do this because I once changed the test login for one of my apps without updating the developer info on Connect and very shortly got a message back from Apple stating that they couldn’t log into my app. Generally for a new app, there’s a wait of around two days from submitting…

Few people realise just how many problems were caused by making the border around windows in Windows 95 one pixel bigger on each side to create a bevel effect. We had system metrics, a way for apps to get and use the values of things such as colours, border sizes and so on at runtime. We had functions that would compute how big your window should be given a certain display area, if you wanted a title bar and menu bar and so on. We had functions to convert screen coordinates to window frame and window client coordinates. But did developers use them properly? Of course not! Every which way developers could get it wrong they did. We’re talking developers at big famous software companies. They hard-coded “1” values for…

Although not built specifically for Windows 95, the 3D pipes screensaver will be fondly remembered by users of the operating system. Well, not so fondly by some, it seems. “A customer complained that they were losing productivity because employees were spending too much time running the 3D Pipes screensaver and waiting for teapots to appear,” wrote Chen. “They requested an option to increase the likelihood of a teapot, so the employees would be placated more quickly and get back to their work.” Teapots were an Easter Egg in the screensaver, appearing in the join of pipes in tribute to the Utah teapot, a standard reference object in the computer graphics industry. “I can’t find any evidence that this feature request was accepted,” wrote Chen. And, “despite rumours to the contrary,…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index The biggest, best, most exciting products in technology – reviewed and rated SCORE PRICE £4,167 (£5,000 inc VAT) from tinyurl.com/369scan Regular desktop processors are now so good that you don’t necessarily need a workstation-focused CPU for professional creative work. This is particularly true if you want to game on the same system. For those who fit this category, AMD reckons it has a processor that will meet your needs perfectly: the Ryzen 9 with 3D V-Cache. We put the latest version through its paces in a system from British manufacturer Scan. AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology stacks additional layers of L3 cache on top of the CPU. This significantly increases capacity, without making the chip package bigger. The 3D versions…

SCORE PRICE M4 Max from £1,749 (£2,099 inc VAT); M3 Ultra from £3,499 (£4,199 inc VAT) from apple.com Apple’s latest Mac Studio models look just like previous versions, but they’re built on newer and even more powerful chips. Depending on your needs you can opt for either the M4 Max or the mightiest processor Apple has ever made, the M3 Ultra. As usual, the target market is creative professionals such as photographers and video editors, while the extra power of the M3 Ultra makes it suited to more demanding tasks such as AI, engineering and scientific research. Pick and choose The M4 Max and M3 Ultra systems have the same boxy design as previous models. They also offer all the same physical connectors, including four rear-facing Thunderbolt 5 ports, twin…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £3,250 (£3,900 inc VAT) from razer.com The moment I saw the new Blade 16 at CES in January, I had concerns. Such a slim design, far thinner than the 2024 model (see issue 359, p60), surely came with a trade-off in performance? Another question mark was over Razer’s choice of a non-gaming CPU in the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series; last year’s model used Intel’s non-AI but gaming-friendly Core i9-14900HX. Fast-forward to this laptop arriving in our labs configured with the top-of-the-range RTX 5090, which is reflected in its £3,900 price. The base model of the new Blade 16 costs £2,700, which buys you an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor, 12GB GeForce RTX 5070 Ti graphics, a 1TB SSD, 32GB of RAM and a 16in,…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £416 (£449 inc VAT) from mi.com Chinese brand Xiaomi has a knack for offering top-end specs at competitive prices, and that’s exactly what you get with the Pad 7 Pro. For two-thirds of the price of an iPad Air (see issue 368, p56), it combines one of the most powerful Android chipsets with a bright, sharp screen and ultra-fast charging. The £449 model comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, but moving up to 12GB RAM and 512GB of storage only costs an extra £50 – a great-value upgrade. A further £50 buys a version with matte glass, for a tasteful, professional look with minimal reflections. The standard models come in blue, green and grey, while the matte version is only available in grey. The…

Total value this month £160 WebSite X5 Go 2025 WebSite X5 Go 2025 is a powerful web-design tool that makes it easy to create top-quality, responsive websites – even if you have no design or coding experience. That’s because it includes more than 25 eye-catching, professional templates covering just about every site type and topic area, from e-commerce to blogs, sports sites, animals, food, movies, web portals and more. The results don’t only work well in a regular browser, either: they’ve been carefully coded to look great on any device, from a desktop PC right down to a smartphone. Your first job is to choose a design that appeals to you, after which you can start to plan out your site’s structure using a map. This is a great way to…

NORTON 360 PREMIUM for £19.99 10 DEVICES 2YR LICENCE 75GB CLOUD STORAGE tinyurl.com/norton360premium We’ve negotiated a killer deal with Norton. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Security suite across ten devices. And because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. There’s 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, plus the full version of Norton Secure VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while you’re abroad. Norton Parental Control provides tools to see exactly what your kids are up to on their various devices, and you also get GPS location monitoring for Android and iOS. To round things off, Norton…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £416 (£499 inc VAT) from store.google.com For a long time Google was untouchable when it came to mid-price phones, but recent newcomers such as the £449 Nothing Phone 3a Pro (see issue 368, p76) and Apple’s £599 iPhone 16e (see issue 368, p72) have put it under pressure. But not for long. Google reclaims the crown thanks to powerful AI features and competitive pricing. The Pixel 9a comes in four chic colours – Iris, Obsidian, Peony and Porcelain – although it lacks the character of previous models. That’s because Google has replaced the distinctive camera bar with a smaller, more conventional bump. You may appreciate the simpler look, but I miss such a key part of the Pixel’s identity. Other changes are subjective, too, such as the…

Despite cloud storage’s prevalence and ubiquity, the humble network-attached storage (NAS) device is still an attractive proposition. Two obvious reasons are space and money. While 1TB of cloud storage may seem like a lot and can be picked up relatively cheaply (or even bundled with a Microsoft 365 plan), it’s an ongoing cost, and that storage space isn’t as much as you might think. Fill it up with your music collection, every file you’ve owned and a load of videos, and 1TB disappears quickly. With your own NAS, you’re master of your storage needs and can start with a lot more storage than you get online, even with an entry-level device. A NAS is about more than just physical storage, though. It’s a way of controlling what you own without…

SCORE PRICE £168 (£202 inc VAT) from ukstore.qnap.com The first sign of this NAS drive’s low price comes when you want to open it. While most NAS enclosures here are screw-free, Qnap’s TS-233 isn’t. Before you can install the hard disks, the bottom screw has to be removed, and then the case side removed. That’s easier said than done, and we had to consult the manual as the side didn’t want to budge at first. Once open, you’ll find two hard disk caddies that unclip and slide out. SATA hard disks can then be clipped in (fortunately, no screws are needed here) and then you simply slide the caddies back into place. With the side open, it’s clear that there are no further expansion opportunities: the Qnap TS-233 can’t have…

SCORE PRICE £389 (£467 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Synology’s top-of-the-range two-bay NAS device, the DS723+, is highly expandable, has lots of power and is easy to set up and install. It includes two Ethernet ports, but these are 1GbE rather than 2.5GbE, which feels outdated on such an expensive product. But there’s so much else here that is great. The DS723+ is a breeze to set up, as it’s entirely tool-free. The two SATA hard disk bays on the front have simple keylocks to prevent anyone accidentally pulling a live drive out. Once unlocked, the caddies slide out, and hard disks can be quickly inserted. If you want SSD caching, two NVMe slots are available underneath. Just remove the screw-free covers and insert the drives into the slots. It’s brilliantly…

SCORE PRICE £558 (£670 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Afive-bay NAS, the Synology DiskStation DS1522+ opens up more options and gives more flexibility than a four-bay enclosure. It also has much in common with the other Synology enclosures here, benefitting from a powerful operating system and brilliant apps. The enclosure has a tool-free design throughout. Hard disk caddies are available from the front of the device, and can be locked into place using the provided plastic key. This simple latching system won’t stop a determined thief, but it will stop someone accidentally removing a hard disk while the NAS is running. Having five bays, rather than four, gives extra flexibility. You can use the extra drive for additional storage space, opting for a single-disk-failure fault tolerance. You can also opt for…

Practical buying and strategic advice for IT managers and decision makers Businesses that still haven’t made the switch to voice over internet protocol (VoIP) have just been given a lifeline. Openreach had originally planned to close down the entire public switched telephone network (PSTN) and integrated services digital network (ISDN) by December 2025 but has now extended this final switch-off date to the end of January 2027. The main reasons for this extension are to provide support for the near 2 million people in the UK that rely on in-home telecare services such as personal alarms, to allow manufacturers to implement digital life line alarms and to give residents in rural areas more time to switch. This doesn’t mean businesses can ignore the great switch-off, however, as it will happen…

SCORE PRICE From £11 exc VAT per user per month from telephonesystems.cloud Businesses worried about hidden costs and lengthy VoIP service contracts will find a lot to like about TelephoneSystems. Cloud. This UK-based provider charges a flat £11 per user per month and doesn’t tie you in with fixed-term contracts so you can cancel at any time. You don’t have to negotiate with a sales representative, either, as the company offers a slick online quote system. This guides you through the entire ordering process and presents a clear breakdown of charges before asking you to commit. To test the quote process, we requested five users, chose our own internet provider and opted for softphones and our existing desk phones. If your desk phones are the same make and model, you…

SCORE PRICE £201 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Ruijie Networks’ Reyee sub-brand offers SMBs a range of affordable networking products and it moves firmly into the Wi-Fi 7 space with a choice selection of access points (APs). The RG-RAP73Pro on review stands out for a number of reasons, as along with a standard 2.5GbE multi-gig network port it’s the first we’ve seen with a 10GbE SFP+ fibre port. With a price that’s a smidgeon over £200, the RG-RAP73Pro looks remarkably good value. Its big BE14000 rating presents eight spatial streams – two for its 2.4GHz radio and three each for the 5GHz and 6GHz bands, with theoretical maximum speeds of 688Mbits/sec, 4,323Mbits/sec and 8,646Mbits/sec respectively. A key feature of the Reyee portfolio is all products can be remotely managed from Ruijie’s…

I’m certainly aware of ISO 27001, but what exactly is it? Simply put, ISO 27001 is an agreed international standard for information security. If you’re 27001-certified, there’s a reasonable chance that your data is more secure than that of someone who isn’t – and that’s something potential partners and customers may find reassuring. How does a company go about getting certified? It’s mostly a paperwork exercise, whereby someone reasonably senior fills in a lot of forms on behalf of the business. To do so, however, they not only need a thorough understanding of how information flows around the company, they must also be able to show that suitable management structures and systems are in place. Getting all of this in order can take anything from a few months (for a…

It may not be a surprise for you to hear that the shop has been busy with Window 10 migrations. Broadly, these fall into four main categories: “BIOS upgrade”, “BIOS & CPU upgrade”, “Have you considered Linux?” and “Please take that antique home and close the door behind you”. Microsoft’s PC Health Check app (tinyurl.com/369health) has been judge and jury over whether a Windows 10 machine is worthy of a free upgrade, giving a simple yes or no verdict. If you’re on a modern Windows platform then you may have seen it. If the decision has gone against you, then I advise doing your homework because PC Health Check isn’t always correct. It can only report the status of a machine’s current hardware and isn’t sophisticated enough to work out…

Better late than never, Microsoft is implementing a new Windows feature that should prevent a repeat of incidents such as last year’s CrowdStrike calamity. Called Quick Machine Recovery, the new system should allow both IT professionals and Microsoft to recover machines that are trapped in failed boot loops. CrowdStrike caused widespread chaos in July 2024 when a flawed kernel-level update of the company’s Falcon software caused millions of Windows PCs to crash and fail to reboot. Initially, machines were only recoverable locally, meaning it took several days for some businesses to recover. The incident affected airlines, banks, hospitals and many other businesses across the world. Quick Machine Recovery was first announced last year, as part of Microsoft’s Windows Resiliency Initiative. Now the feature is being tested with Windows Insiders. The…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro M4 M4 beast from £1,599 from apple.com/uk This M4 update to the already brilliant MacBook Pro line is an easy recommendation, so the big question becomes do you choose the 14in version from £1,599 or 16in from £2,499? And then how much do you upgrade, as Apple isn’t afraid of high prices. But whatever you choose should last for years, and look great while it’s doing it. REVIEW Issue 364, p50 Apple MacBook Air M4 If you don’t need the all-out power of the Pro, this is a brilliant, cheaper alternative despite the unchanged chassis and screen. 13in from £999, 15in from £1,199 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 368, p54 Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED Asus pairs a Core Ultra 9 288V with a 72Wh battery…

The sadistic part of me almost looks forward to my 18-monthly wrangle with Virgin Media’s retention department. It normally follows a familiar pattern. Virgin sends me a contractending reminder, saying it will be charging me the price of a Range Rover from next month. I tell Virgin I’m not prepared to pay any extra, we spend a couple of hours arguing the toss, I threaten to leave about six times, and it eventually caves and renews at roughly what I was paying in the first place. It’s like rows with my other half, except she’s the one threatening to leave and I always end up paying (I’m available for weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc). This year’s haggle started off following the familiar script. How about we give you more speed for…

21% WINDOWS 3/3.1 34% WINDOWS 95 35% WINDOWS XP 10% WINDOWS There was a curious split across our poll on X and Facebook, with XP the clear winner on the former but Windows 95 earning win after win on the latter. Backers included one of our much-missed writers, now retired, Paul Ockenden: “95, because I was part of the beta prog and used to enjoy having a UPS(*) dude bringing me new CDs a couple of times a week! (*) Brown van man, not uninterruptible power supply.” A view rapidly backed up by Dick Pountain. “Windows 95 [was the] most important commercially (finally worked well enough to kill DOS) but Windows 3.0 was more important historically – it worked just well enough to convince early adopters (inc. me) to try…

Windows 95 introduced the time zone map. Instead of selecting your time zone from a drop-down menu or some such, you clicked on a map to identify your current location. “Everybody thought that was a lot of fun,” said Chen. “Until geopolitics entered the picture.” Microsoft used official UN-recognised maps to determine boundaries, Chen said, but not every country recognises those maps and there were all sorts of border disputes around the world. “A small European country would contact us and say ‘our country’s kinda small, can you give us one of our neighbour’s pixels to make it easier to click on, because our citizens are having difficulty clicking on that thing because we have to hit a really tiny target,” Chen recalled. Of course, that would prompt the shrunken…

Windows 95 was peak “beige box” era in PC land. Our repair shop floor was stacked with a myriad of bland towers which, because of their thick steel chassis, weighed the same as a small family hatchback. One frequent visitor to our shop had casters and required two people to lift it. Laptops weren’t much better but were rarely seen. Building Windows 95 desktops presented physical complexities: 40-pin IDE drives used 40mm wide cables and, although they could be rolled, they remained unwieldy. If a customer wanted twin opticals, dual hard disks, a ZIP and floppy, it wasn’t the work of a moment to connect everything together. Plus, that rat’s nest of data and power lines provided airflow problems in an era before case manufacturers considered cable management. And that…

There’s nothing new about VoIP – or, to give it its full name, voice-over IP telephony. Even before the Covid-19 lockdown, millions of people were using services such as Zoom, Teams and Google Meet for live audio and video conversations over the internet. And when half the nation was obliged to work from home, they quickly became household names. Yet the service that was once the biggest of all is on its way out. Microsoft bought the enormous Skype platform in 2011, but six years later it started to phase it out in favour of its home-grown Teams product. And in February of this year, Microsoft announced that Skype would be shutting down on 5 May, replaced for both business and home users by the Teams service that’s now been…

Laptops and PCs We run a selection of benchmarks on all the PCs and laptops we test. Where possible, we use a cross-platform test so we can compare Windows and macOS machines, which is where both Geekbench and Cinebench come into play. Both push the CPU to its limit, exposing how well cooled a system is. We run extra tests for Windows systems. We use PCMark 10 to benchmark systems in office tasks, content creation and basic tasks such as web browsing and video calls. We also run 3DMark Time Spy and Shadow of the Tomb Raider as a minimum. We test laptops and PCs that include discrete graphics with a range of games, such as Metro Exodus Enhanced and Dirt 5. For laptops, we test battery life with Wi-Fi…

SCORE PRICE £1,917 (£2,300 inc VAT) from wired2fire.co.uk If you read our review of AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card (see issue 368, p70) then you’ll know that Nvidia finally has serious competition at the high end. But it needs the right processing partner, which is where AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D comes in. While the Ryzen 7 7800X3D was great for gaming, it couldn’t be easily overclocked; the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, on the other hand, is effectively AMD’s unlocked Ryzen 7 9800X with extra cache. Such a powerful pairing needs a suitable base, and British PC manufacturer Wired2Fire doesn’t hold back. As its name gives away, the Gigabyte X870 Eagle WiFi 7 uses AMD’s top-end chipset – and that means all the mod cons. PCIe Gen 5 support for…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Our first job is surely to decode this laptop’s prodigiously long name. Prestige indicates that it’s part of Taiwanese manufacturer MSI’s business and productivity range; 13 the size of its screen (13.3in to be precise); AI+ that it meets Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC criteria; Evo that it passes Intel’s Evo checklist; and A2VM… well, life has to have some secrets. I can reveal that this is an incredibly light laptop. MSI states 990g but it tipped my scales at 967g, and the usual cliché applies: I genuinely didn’t notice this in my rucksack. MSI achieves this feat via a magnesium-aluminium chassis, and while there’s flex in the lid (not a bad thing as this helps to absorb impacts), the Prestige 13 will surely…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com It’s the economy, stupid. So said James Carville during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, and it didn’t take long for “it’s the software, stupid” to enter the vernacular. And that truth remains: you can build the best hardware in the world, but if it doesn’t run software you want to use then it’s nothing more than a fancy web-surfing machine. At a grand, the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 is far too expensive to be a mere web-surfing machine. But it’s definitely fancy. The first sign of this is its slim, stylish frame, which feels as well made as any iPad. That’s despite packing a 13.2in panel into a 580g frame, which means it’s 35g lighter than the 13in iPad Air (see issue…

SCORE PRICE £396 (£475 inc VAT) from eizo.com Do you know how much power your monitor consumes? A safe bet is 20W to 30W at a comfortable brightness – around 200cd/m2 in an office – yet the 24in Full HD Eizo FlexScan FLT can work happily on 6W. Switch to Eco mode and that cuts in half to 3W, but the screen brightness also drops to a dim 99cd/m2 so I wouldn’t recommend it. So watt, you ask? The answer is that when rolled out across an office, where you’re replacing hundreds of monitors, there will be a measurable drop in power consumption without any loss of functionality. Almost as important, it plummets to 0.27W in power save mode. All this means the FLT is the first monitor to qualify…

SCORE PRICE Standard kit, £250 (£300 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Potensic made a splash in 2023 with its cheap yet capable Atom drone. The Atom 2 brings big improvements while keeping the same low price: £300 includes the battery and controller, while £400 for the “Fly More Combo” adds two spare batteries, a charging hub and a carrying bag. The drone is as tiny as its name suggests, weighing just under 250g. This means you can legally fly it in residential, recreational and commercial areas that are usually out of bounds to heavier drones. There are still regulations you’ll need to comply with, though, so do your research before you take to the skies. Despite its low weight, the Atom 2 is solidly built; I accidentally crashed it twice into…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £749 (£899 inc VAT) from mi.com Last month we were impressed by Xiaomi’s new flagship phone, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra (see issue 368, p74). Now comes the regular Xiaomi 15, offering a similar feel and features for a lower price. It starts at £899 for 256GB of storage, while the larger 512GB option comes in at £999. That’s more expensive than the Samsung Galaxy S25 (see issue 367, p70), which costs £859 for 256GB and £959 for 512GB, but it’s telling that the iPhone 16 (see issue 363, p68) costs £799 for 128GB, £899 for 256GB and an intake-of-breath-worthy £1,099 for 512GB. Xiaomi’s display is a fraction larger at 6.4in, and this AMOLED panel packs a 1,200 x 2,670 resolution and dynamic 120Hz refresh rate. Xiaomi claims…

Q How many bays do I need? Avoid single-bay NAS devices. These are effectively external hard disks with a network port. While they offer the same features as other NAS devices, they have one big problem: if the hard disk dies, all your data goes. At the minimum, you should opt for a two-bay system. That way, you can install two hard disks and use RAID1 (mirroring), where data is written to both disks simultaneously. Should one hard disk fail, your data is safe, and you can swap the broken disk for a new one. It’s worth swapping quickly to prevent the risk of complete data loss. The downside of a two-bay NAS system is that with a RAID1 configuration you only get half the total capacity of both disks.…

SCORE PRICE £391 (£469 inc VAT) from ukstore.qnap.com The Qnap TS-264 is aimed at those who want a bit more from a traditional two-bay NAS. It’s effectively the two-bay version of the excellent four-bay TS-464 that we review on p89; the latter is worth buying if you know you need more storage from the off. Aside from having half the bays of its big brother, the TS-264 has many of the same benefits, including the dual 2.5GbE ports at the rear, which open the NAS up to faster transfer rates. If you want more, a PCIe Gen 3 x2 slot lies empty, ready and waiting for a dual-port 10GbE card. There’s a powerful 4-core Intel Celeron N5095 processor inside, which is paired with 8GB of DDR4 RAM. If you want…

SCORE PRICE £441 (£529 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Built for those who demand the best performance, the Asustor Nimbustor 4 Gen2 AS5404T is a four-bay NAS that offers much more than most, with some nice surprises under its standard-looking exterior. Like other Asustor NAS enclosures, the AS5404T hides its tool-free drive bays behind a magnetically connected fascia. That not only makes the outside look nicer but means that the drives can’t be tampered with. The drive caddies aren’t locked and lift out with a simple lever action, making a disconcerting snapping sound as they come free. We struggled to get the caddy clips out and had to use a screwdriver to tease them out; they needed a hard push to put them back into place, too. The AS5404T takes up…

SCORE PRICE £450 (£540 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Synology DS923+ has been around for a few years now and remains a high-quality, upgradable four-bay NAS that’s a great fit for small businesses. This model shares a lot with the two-bay DS723+ on p87, but you only pay a little more for the extra two storage bays. And, while both devices have a dual-core 2.6GHz AMD Ryzen 1600 processor, the DS923+ has double the base memory at 4GB. It’s possible to upgrade the RAM to a maximum of 32GB if you use both SODIMM slots and don’t mind discarding the existing stick of DDR4 memory. If you’re going to run lots of apps, it could well be worth it. The DS923+ uses Synology’s brilliant screw-free design. The four drive bays…

SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from ukstore.qnap.com Qnap’s TS-h973AX is a nine-bay NAS, but don’t imagine that this enclosure can take nine 3.5in hard disks. Instead, those nine bays can take a mixed collection of storage, all accessible from the front via pull-out drive caddies. The caddies can be locked into place with a simple key lock. This is enough to stop someone from accidentally pulling out a hard disk while the system is running. Five 3.5in caddies for traditional hard disks sit at the top of the device. This gives good flexibility, as you can either increase the size of a storage pool compared to a four-bay NAS or use the extra slot with RAID6 for two-disk redundancy. Underneath sit four 2.5in bays. The bottom two are for…

SCORE PRICE Enterprise, 8SC, £385 exc VAT per year from 3cx.com 3 CX’s Phone System is probably the best self-hosted IP PBX on the planet, and its new pricing structure makes it even more affordable. Instead of per-user pricing you pay one annual licence fee, and the various plans have been simplified, making it even easier to choose the right one. Small businesses with up to ten users will love the 3CX Free edition. It’s hosted in the cloud for you and offers a solid set of PBX, call centre and videoconferencing features. The Professional and Enterprise editions support unlimited extensions, and licences are based purely on the number of simultaneous calls (SCs). We reviewed Phone System Enterprise, which starts at £385 for an 8SC licence and enables everything 3CX has…

SCORE PRICE Starts from £12 exc VAT per user per month from voip-unlimited.net Voip Unlimited’s cloud-hosted Voxone is squarely aimed at businesses seeking a unified communications (UC) solution that amalgamates IP PBX, messaging, meeting and contact centre services into a single platform. Key features are its ability to easily scale with demand and the fact that it’s hosted on Voip Unlimited’s dedicated network, which is optimised for voice traffic and spread over three UK data centres for resiliency. Prices start at £12 per user per month, which includes 2,000 call minutes to UK landlines and 2,000 minutes to UK mobile numbers, with separate charges applied for international calls based on each country’s call rates. Call statistics and a wallboard display for support staff are available with a CC (call centre)…

The idea of remote access throws up all sorts of security and confidentiality concerns, especially since it’s now not just a special dispensation for techies and jet-setting CEOs, but standard operating procedure for staff at all levels. Everybody has been obliged to at least try it out, whether they’re working from home or administering remote infrastructure and hardware. The market in remote-access services, products and architectures is absolutely heaving with offerings. With so many options and scenarios to think about, businesses naturally want to follow best practice, but what does that mean? Of course it’s “best practice” to find the right balance between security, cost and complexity, but what that looks like in reality will depend on the size of the company. The fact is, there’s no award or prize…

ITU The International Telecommunication Union takes care of standards that go well beyond phone calls and the like: these guys are responsible for the definition and upkeep of the media formats we use every day. JPEG is one of theirs, as are a grab-bag of video codecs, including the ubiquitous H.264 and H.265 standards. IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force created and maintains the underpinnings of networks both public and private, by effectively owning the definition of TCP/IP. That’s enough to keep a decent workforce of very clever people in work for an extremely long time indeed. IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has the widest remit of any body listed here, presenting a massive portfolio of standards for all kinds of industries and utilities. SNIA The Storage…

Changes to the law can be annoying. You’ve just got your head round the rules, built them into your systems and are sitting back watching everything run smoothly. Then a new law comes along that pulls you back to square one. A key driver for legal change is technology. Technological advances change the way in which we do stuff, and the roles and perspectives of the different players. Existing laws are not always equipped to address the challenges and uncertainties that arise. Right now, I’m trying to keep track of several legal developments. Proposed new data protection laws aim to clarify provisions that are impeding the use of new technologies. Applying existing intellectual property law to the use and creation of content by AI is just messy, and the UK…

It turns out that having seven whirring boxes dotted around my basement wasn’t necessarily the best answer to my storage requirements. In particular, every so often I need a nice big uninterrupted space for complete images of misbehaving boot drives from servers; laying that out from a mix of 1TB and 2TB bricks using the Windows Disk Manager control suite is theoretically possible, but it’s practically impossible once your NAS device count goes much over three. Time to investigate the latest cool advancements in the NAS sector. What I found completely derailed my search, because things had totally moved on since my previous forage. The first and key enabling factor was the collapsing price of Intel hardware: I found a Dell box with 16GB of memory and a staggering 24TB…

The trends and technologies that are the shape of things to come Look at your weather app and it says rain soon – and then you end up carrying an umbrella in the sunshine. Or, more likely in this country, the app predicts sun and you end up drenched. What if weather forecasts were more accurate? Now imagine you live in a country that doesn’t have access to its own weather models and relies on systems designed for other parts of the world. Local storms can’t be predicted and seasonal forecasts required for agriculture aren’t accurate enough. There’s a solution and, predictably, it’s based on AI. Less predictably, it’s called Aardvark – an AI-based system that ditches supercomputers and allows local models to be run on a desktop by a…

Features Code your own app in AI Whether you’re curious about how AI can bring your ideas to life or you’ve always wanted to create your own software – including games – we show you how. Features Create your own calendar Fed up of AI but still want to code? This partner piece to our main feature shows how one programmer created her own self-hosted calendar. Features Instant Expert: Microsoft Designer Copilot describes Microsoft Designer as a graphic design app powered by AI that helps you create professional-quality visuals. More usefully, we explain how to use it. Labs VPNs Whether you want to watch and listen to BBC content abroad, enjoy Netflix USA in Britain or simply keep your connections safe from prying eyes, our test of all the main…