Inhoudsopgave van November 2025 - PC Pro

It’s the morning after. I’m battling typical hangover symptoms of headaches, mild nausea and deep-muscle fatigue, but this has nothing to with an epic “night before”. It’s the first day after I left IFA 2025 in Berlin, where my only excesses were gorging on new launches, crawling every inch of IFA’s showfloor and speaking to chipmakers. Within a few hours of each other, I had informal, on-the-record but “please don’t quote me directly” chats with a senior engineer from Intel and three key figures from AMD. Separately, they talked about the power demands of NPUs and how they plan to lower the AI-per-watt figure. This is one of their next big engineering challenges, where huge amounts of investment are going. Is that an “I don’t care about NPUs” at the…

Apple has extended its Air range of slimline products to the iPhone, among its latest batch of annual handset releases. The 6.5in iPhone Air is the thinnest iPhone ever made, measuring only 5.6mm at its thinnest point. The entire body isn’t 5.6mm thick, as there’s still a sizeable bump for the camera housing, which contains only one 48-megapixel camera. The reduced number of cameras may be a consequence of Apple squeezing as much of the phone’s electronics into that camera bump as possible, so as to afford room for the battery inside. Apple hasn’t revealed the precise capacity of the battery at the time of writing, but its own figures state the Air’s battery will last for only 27 hours of video playback, while the standard iPhone 17 offers 30…

It becomes harder and harder to scrabble grains of pleasure, amusement or edification from the internet, but it remains possible (just) on YouTube. I particularly enjoy two grizzled performers, Rick Beato – whose interviews with musicians such as Rick Rubin, Guthrie Trapp and Tom Bukovac are priceless – and Jon Stewart, the satirical commentator whose Daily Show kept many of us in stitches during the George W Bush presidency. Stewart tried to retire in 2015, but he’s now returned, presumably lured by the grim shenanigans in the White House. He presents a YouTube version of the Daily Show on Mondays, and on Thursdays he hosts an in-depth podcast called The Weekly Show, on which a recent guest was the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt’s best-selling book suggests that smartphone overuse…

Podcast love I had to email to tip my hat in the general direction of Mr Grant. After listening to podcasts since the time when podcasts such as TWiT were still in single figures and my knees still worked, Lee’s epic outpouring on the dangers of toilet-based doomscrolling was a unique thing of pure beauty. The first time I’ve ever had to rewind and listen again to part of a podcast not once but twice. Award that man a round of applause and a beer on expenses. Adam Jackson Editor-in-chief Tim Danton replies: I couldn’t agree more, Adam. Except the bit about buying Lee a beer. For those who wish to listen for themselves, head to episode 758 and jump to around 47mins 45secs. Fibre monopoly Further to your correspondent’s comment…

If you’re disposing of a Windows 10/11 PC, you’ll certainly want to clear off all your personal files first. And you might well be tempted by the Reset PC facility, which offers you the option to “remove everything” including “all of your personal files, apps and settings”. However, only when you delve into the Microsoft support pages for the Reset PC feature (tinyurl.com/374resetpc) does a rather ominous warning appear: “The data erasure functionality is targeted at consumers and does not meet government and industry data erasure standards,” it warns. Even more unhelpfully, it doesn’t explain precisely what it does when “removing everything”. Does it just delete the files? Does it write over them? We’re really none the wiser. That is until you click two screens further through the Reset PC…

Memory cards are highly likely to contain photos or videos that you don’t want others to see. They might also contain sensitive data, if you’ve used one to boot a Raspberry Pi, for example. While it’s a doddle to destroy a memory card – hell, we’ve destroyed dozens without even trying – it’s more environmentally friendly to wipe them clean and pass them on. Even if you are intent on destroying the card, wiping it first will make sure nothing is retrievable from the fragments. The good news is utilities such as KillDisk (mentioned in the Windows and Mac sections on the previous pages) will treat SD cards just like any other drive, so you can use that to write over the card’s memory and ensure nothing is retrievable. That…

Modern Android phones and tablets are very similar to iPads/iPhones in that they have encryption turned on by default. If you follow the procedures to factory-reset your device (these vary slightly from handset to handset), there shouldn’t be any practical way for a new owner to retrieve your data. This encryption system has been in place since Android 10, released back in 2019, so very few devices in circulation today won’t be protected. That said, there are a couple of extra considerations for Android handsets. Unlike Apple devices, some Android phones/tablets allow you to pop in memory cards to supplement the built-in storage. You might want to ensure they’re properly wiped by using the utilities mentioned in the memory cards section opposite. If you want to be doubly, triply sure…

ACER CHROMEBOOK ENTERPRISE PLUS SPIN 514 PRICE From €879 inc VAT (€699 for non-Enterprise version) from acer.com AVAILABLE October 2025 Walking into the large hall containing every one of Acer’s 25 products announced at IFA, I had no intention of stopping at the Chromebooks section. But there’s something about the Plus Spin 14 that lifts it apart from the chasing pack, whether it’s the chrome edges on the lid or the shiny metal hinges – paint them gold and Donald Trump would be a very happy customer. Here, though, Acer has everyday consumers in mind for the plain Plus Spin 14 edition, while it hopes to lure businesses and education buyers with the Enterprise version (which comes with extra support and manageability). Both feature local AI thanks to the MediaTek…

PLAUD NOTE PRO PRICE £169 inc VAT from uk.plaud.ai AVAILABLE October 2025 You may remember the Plaud Note: this credit-card-sized device can record conversations happening around you or calls directly on your phone. It then transcribes what it hears, with 300 free minutes per month; if you need more, you’ll need to stump up for the Pro subscription for £8.33 per month. At IFA, Plaud not only launched new hardware – the Note Pro includes a one-inch wide OLED screen that shows information such as battery life – but also improved software. This can create a mind map tracking the ebb and flow of your meetings, and analyse the characteristics of people within it. So if you’re talking too much, or using a hectoring tone, it will tell you and…

From cheap home routers to enterprise data centres, every internet-enabled device runs on IP. Together with TCP – the protocol that allows remote systems to connect and reliably exchange data with one another – IP underpins our connected lives, and has been doing so for years. Whether you’ve wanted to or not, you’ve probably absorbed a certain working familiarity with IP. When it comes to the finer details, though, things get more mysterious. A typical router interface offers any number of advanced settings whose meanings are far from clear, and while you may know that certain aspects of the setup need to be just so, the reason is rarely obvious. Let’s look at some of the more puzzling questions relating to IP – and at last get some understandable answers.…

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…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from asus.com Taiwanese manufacturer Asus is extremely keen to be the supplier of your business laptops, and its latest offering is the ExpertBook P3. Designed for volume purchase deals, this is a Copilot+ PC for the masses with a price to match. I can’t be absolutely certain the ExpertBook P3 is the cheapest Copilot+ PC for business, but it’s certainly not far off. The star in the specification line-up is AMD’s Ryzen 7 AI 370. This is light years behind the power of the Ryzen 9 AI 395+ Max in the HP Z2 Mini G1a (see p60), but with four Zen 5 cores and four efficiency-focused Zen 5c cores it won’t struggle with office tasks. It holds an advantage over Intel’s Lunar Lake Core 7…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,058 £1,270 inc VAT)  from lenovo.com If you’re the kind of person who likes a neat desktop, Lenovo’s latest Yoga AIO 27i is for you. It offers a smart design with solid performance, and comes with everything you need either built in or included in the box. I spent a week using this all-in-one PC as my main desktop for work and creative projects, and while there are a few areas where it could be improved, the experience was almost entirely positive. It’s a sturdy and elegant-looking device, with plenty of practical features. The stand stays rock-solid during adjustments, letting me tilt, raise, lower or rotate the display with ease – although I do wish the screen could sit a bit lower for shorter users. As an…

PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT)  from laptopsdirect.co.uk Is it unfair to compare Medion to Lidl? I’m not sure how happy the German PC manufacturer would be with this comparison, but there’s surely no disputing both companies’ emphasis on delivering high-value products in a pile ’em high style. This is particularly true for Medion’s budget lines, and the Erazer Bandit P20 certainly qualifies for that description when you consider what it packs in for £1,000. The centrepiece is an Nvidia RTX 5060 graphics card, which dominates the inside of the compact chassis. One spare PCIe x1 slot sits below this, but you’ll have to remove the GPU, which almost stretches the width of the case, before you can access it. It’s equally fiddly to reach the empty M.2 slot: this sits…

PRICE £189 (£227 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk If you want a mobile printer that uses normal A4 paper, you’re limited to a portable inkjet. Specifically, the Epson WorkForce WF-110W (see issue 309, p68), HP’s nine-year-old OfficeJet 200 and the Canon Maxify BX110 reviewed here. Despite its tiny size – smaller than a ream of paper – a screen sits on the top with simple control options. The Maxify BX110 even packs a removable lithium-ion battery. Canon claims a 330-page battery life, but as it can recharge over USB-C you can use a mobile power block to keep it going. Back in the office, you can use the DC input to recharge it in about two hours. That USB-C port can also be used as a simple connection to your laptop,…

PRICE £233 (£279 inc VAT) from  cherryxtrfy.com Previously we’ve concentrated on Cherry’s office keyboards, but as the pictures give away the German company’s Xtrfy brand is focused on gamers. That means per-key RGB lighting and absurdly high polling rates – 4,000MHz over wireless, 8,000MHz if you plug in the supplied 1.8m USB-C to USB-A braided cable. That high wireless polling rate is when you use the RF USB receiver, but you can connect it to up to three devices via Bluetooth too. Rather than control the RGB via software on your PC, Cherry provides a rotary wheel above the number pad: don’t order the tenkeyless version by mistake, which has TKL in its name. The wheel lets you scroll through RGB presets such as Breathing, Wave, Rolling and Static. It’s…

PRICE 128GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from store.google.com If the Pixel 10 Pro on the previous pages is too pricey, the regular Pixel 10 offers several of the same signature features for a lower price, including magnetic charging and a 5x zoom camera. It also comes in a more fun selection of colours, namely Indigo, Frost and Lemongrass, as well as the sombre Obsidian. Its design is all but identical to this year’s Pixel 10 Pro, to the extent that you can use the same case for either phone. The biggest difference from last year’s Pixel 9 is that there are now internal magnets at the back, but these don’t have any discernible impact on the phone’s thickness or weight. You can’t see the magnets, but you can feel them.…

You’d be forgiven for assuming that it’s easier to choose a smaller, simpler computer than it is to buy a full-blown desktop or find the right laptop. Yes, but also no. Mini PCs might not have the expandability of their full-size cousins, and you don’t need to worry about screen, trackpad or keyboard quality as you do with a laptop, but there are still plenty of pitfalls. In fact, with limited scope to upgrade and limited space to do it in, it’s more important to get the fundamentals right from the start. Happily, we’re here to assist. All mini PCs are small by definition, but many are less than one litre in volume – that’s about the size of four to six thick slices of supermarket bread. For a comparison…

PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT)  from minisforum.uk Let’s not talk about the price of this mini PC – at least not yet. Minisforum’s UM750L Slim packs 16GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. It’s powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 7545U processor that placed it broadly lower-middle in our benchmarks, and produced playable frame rates in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Now consider that it’s the second-cheapest PC here, costing half the price of its mid-range rivals, and look at those specs and benchmarks again. Surely some mistake? Fortunately not. The UM750L Slim’s processor might be a couple of years old, but it’s still a fine mid-range choice for any general-purpose PC. Here it’s partnered with dual-channel onboard RAM clocked at 6,400MT/sec, giving a slight lift above the 5,600MT/sec you…

PRICE £420 (£504 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk If you want a sensible mini PC for general business use, the Acer Veriton N6 VN6710GT is a fine choice. It’s built in a squat, square metal case, featuring recycled plastics made from post-consumer waste. The ports are colour-coded, it has cable clips, a vertical stand and a monitor mount – which also doubles up for fixing the PC to a wall. Add in a wired keyboard and mouse as standard, and this is a decent package for getting a new staff member up and running – all you need to do is add a monitor. But while the VN6710GT ticks all the right boxes for sustainability and practicality, it’s not so exciting when it comes to the details. We tested a model…

PRICE £551 (£661 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Lenovo’s ThinkCentre M75q Gen 5 is aimed at business use, and it looks like it. It comes in a sensible black metal case with a sensible range of ports, is available with a range of sensible options, and has a three-year on-site warranty. That said, there are some silly omissions: it doesn’t have a fingerprint reader, and the standard model doesn’t come with Wi-Fi. At the time of our test, Lenovo was bundling a free keyboard and mouse, but they were the sort of cheap peripherals you wouldn’t wish on anyone. While the line starts at £509, we’re testing the mid-range, AMD Ryzen 5 8500GE version. This has a single 16GB memory module, leaving space for an easy upgrades. There’s also a 512GB…

PRICE £875 (£1,050 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The MSI Cubi NUC AI+ has all the ingredients for a high-end Copilot+ PC. It’s built around an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor rated at 115 TOPs overall, with the NPU contributing a cool 47 trillion ops per second– that’s good enough for a Copilot button, even if we’re still not sure why you’d want one. In fact, you needn’t use it or the built-in fingerprint reader at all: you can VESA-mount this PC out of sight, and use the supplied stick-on power button extension to turn it on. This mini PC is comparatively tall, giving it a total volume just shy of one litre. That means there’s loads of space for upgrades, so it’s all the more disappointing to find there…

PRICE 1TB front-end licence, £649 exc VAT per year from arcserve.com UDP (unified data protection) has a deployment option for every occasion as along with Arcserve’s 10000-series turnkey appliances, you can install the backup software on your own on-site hardware and choose between local and cloud management. On review is UDP 10.2, which has a sharp focus on ransomware protection as it supports Arcserve’s new cloud-hosted Cyber Resilient Storage. This teams up immutable WORM (write once, read many) storage with advanced encryption to stop ransomware attacks from changing, encrypting or deleting your backup sets. The Cyber Resilient Storage feature provides even more protection by sending immutable snapshots of backup data stores to other on-premises storage. Central to UDP are recovery point servers (RPS), which define backup locations, support any storage…

PRICE Enterprise, 5 servers, perpetual, £937 exc VAT from nakivo.com Many on-premises business backup solutions require a dedicated Windows Server host, but Nakivo Backup & Replication (NBR) is far more versatile as it supports a huge range of host platforms. You can run it on Windows, Linux, VMware or Nutanix and host it in the cloud on AWS EC2, while smaller businesses can cut costs by using a NAS appliance, with Nakivo supporting all the key players including Synology, Qnap and FreeNAS. Raspberry Pi hosts are no longer supported, but the latest NBR 11 introduces a wealth of new features including agentless backup and recovery for the popular Proxmox Virtual Environment. It now provides cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365 (MS365) plus real-time replication of VMware virtual machines, and introduces source-side…

You could say that PC Pro is all about performance monitoring. Every month, we put the latest hardware and software to the test, and award prizes and recommendations for the best devices. But in business, performance monitoring is less about choosing hardware, and more about understanding what your existing systems are doing. While the idea may sound simple, it’s a subject with a lot of intricacy and specificity to it. For example, our famous PC Pro benchmarks produce a single standardised measurement of things such as CPU speed, memory bandwidth and so on. That’s anathema to business-grade performance monitoring, which is all about watching over a long period, observing how and when performance ebbs and flows, and trying to figure out why. You could think of benchmarks as a collection…

I have been using the new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 alongside my daily-driver iPhone 16 Pro Max since it arrived a few weeks ago. If you listened to the PC Pro podcast episode 753, “We’re over 18 and we can prove it”, I had only had it in my hands for a few hours, and it was already making a very strong impression. The first thing that struck me is just how stupidly thin each panel is. The hinge is far better than previous folding phone hinges that I’ve seen, and it’s actually hard either to see or feel the slight crease across the screen. Clearly an enormous amount of engineering has gone into this, and it looks and feels like a very polished product now. The Android build works…

Imagine a threat actor who can not only read a user agent, but who can also tamper with it. Now imagine that again, but this time understanding that a user agent can be your web browser. In this case, your web browser that has been compromised by malware. Don’t dismiss this as someone else’s problem, as doing so could well mean it becomes yours soon enough. Malware capable of reading and modifying browser memory, as well as accessing stored secrets on disk, is both commonplace and increasingly popular in attacks. Google’s senior director of product management, Andy Wen, recently confirmed as much when he published a warning that, across 2024, Google two-factor authentication bypass attacks had risen by an astounding 84% (tinyurl.com/374google). A trend, Wen said, that has intensified during…

It was December 1983, and Belgrade in former Yugoslavia was suffering a typically harsh winter. Temperatures had plummeted to as low as-10°C. Yet something happened that month which would warm the hearts of thousands of technology enthusiasts: a special edition of a popular science magazine hit the shelves. The publication, Računari u vašoj kući (Computers in Your Home), was released as a spin-off of the monthly magazine Galaksija and it was notable for two things. One, it was the first computer magazine to be released in the country. Two, it instructed readers how to build their own computer. What’s more, it became as influential in Eastern Europe as the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 were in the West. What began as a small project became a phenomenon. The concept of…

Features PC Pro Technology Excellence Awards 2025 The results are in! Find out who delivers the most reliable products and the best customer support across the tech industry. Features The office life of Pi What happened when Barry Collins switched from his faithful MacBook Pro to a Raspberry Pi system for a week? We print a blow-by-blow account, and it isn’t always pretty. Features Hey, Alexa, what’s coming next month? “Well, PC Pro reader, you’ll find out all the latest features that I now offer, so if you’re still using me as a glorified alarm clock then make sure you pick up a copy of the magazine.” Labs World’s best security suites vs Windows Defender Find out if the paid-for suites from Avira, Bitdefender, McAfee, Norton and many more can…

Wandering around the show halls of IFA this month (see p32), I was struck by how big some aspects of our industry expect smartglasses to be – and by how blind they are to exactly how bad their current offerings are. I don’t care how much proponents claim otherwise; most offerings fall apart as soon as you look at the reality of their designs. This isn’t a criticism of the designers: the problem is that the technology we need to make this format really work is several generations ahead of us. The components required to produce a truly useful, immersive AR experience do not yet exist. For consumer electronics firms, the sensible thing to be doing right now is working on the fundamentals of the OS and development platforms, so…

What constitutes a “green” PC? Do consumers know what an AI PC is? And just how different are the consumer and business PC markets? These are all issues we discussed with Emmanuel Fromont, president of Acer’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) operations in an exclusive briefing at the IFA trade show in Berlin in September. The Acer executive was refreshingly honest with his answers, too. PC Pro: Acer’s CEO Jason Chen spent the first ten minutes of his IFA presentation talking about environmental matters. Is that how you want Acer to be thought of, environment first? Emmanuel Fromont: This is very deliberate. I think we’ve been very consistent on the [environmental] story. We really are careful not to do greenwashing, but to execute. We often have questions saying “it…

Put your headphones in, pull your headphones out – it’s not the hokey cokey, as you Brits call it, it’s modern life. Getting the etiquette right on headphones is clearly beyond most people, and yes, I am aware how old and crotchety I sound right now. It would seem I’m not alone in my annoyance at music being played out loud in public. To battle the scourge, Transport for London (TfL) is asking people to behave better. I blame this on Apple AirPods, which – again, like I’m 99 years old – I refer to as “EarPods”. In an age of wireless ear-hole fillers, traditional headphone jacks have mostly disappeared from smartphones, and that means if your EarPods run out of charge, or if you can’t figure out how Bluetooth…

Can a message be any clearer? Across X and Facebook, our readers are shouting at Apple, Google, Samsung et al that battery life is the most important feature to them – from our shortlist, at least. “Battery life, battery life and battery life,” as Mike Gannon put it. “Something to get through 5-7 hours of walking using GPS without having to cart the second battery with me,” agreed Ro Barltrop. But perhaps we should have included size in our poll, as that was another theme. Along with Ro wanting a “pocket-sized phone”, John Wright asked: “Is it small enough to fit in my running belt? That’s almost all I care about if the battery lasts until 5pm and it can take a reasonably decent photo. I have the iPhone 13…

Securely wiping a Mac is much easier than it is with Windows provided you own a relatively recent machine. All Apple Siliconbased Macs have the FileVault encryption switched on by default. Even Intel-based Macs with a T2 security chip have FileVault, although it wasn’t switched on by default on these machines. If you do have a FileVault-enabled machine, securely wiping your machine is simply a case of going to Settings | General | Transfer or Reset | Erase All Content and Settings. This wipes out the encryption keys, which means nothing is recoverable. This is because on modern Macs, Apple creates two disk volumes: a System volume that contains the operating system and a Data volume that contains all the user files. The Erase All Content and Settings function basically…

Every September the great and the good of the technological world descend upon Berlin for a riot of technology launches. Some live on in history, such as the first VCR in 1971 and the debut of the compact disc a decade later. Most have their moment in the sun before being cast into the eternal shade of history. And this year – well, we have a mix. Perhaps the biggest news was the arrival of a Panther Lake laptop, as we cover on p35, while ThinkPad purists will likely go as white as the X9 Aura Edition’s finish on seeing Lenovo move away from its purist black roots. Acer also claimed headlines for its sub-1kg Acer Swift 16 Air AI. We provide our first take of all IFA’s new laptops…

MOTOROLA G06 POWER PRICE £90 inc VAT AVAILABILITY To be confirmed While Motorola gained many headlines for its Edge 60 Neo, also announced at IFA, I was more drawn to the ultra-affordable G06 Power. That’s because it includes a whopping 7,000mAh battery, enough to get you through two days at a push. What’s more, in the hand this doesn’t feel like a cheap phone at all. Sure, this becomes clearer when you peer at the 6.9in panel with its 720 x 1,640 pixels, and it’s no speed monster with a five-year-old MediaTek Helio G81 Ultra processor inside, but it runs Android 15 perfectly well and has its place in less demanding pockets. TIM DANTON SAMSUNG GALAXY S25 FE PRICE 128GB, £649 inc VAT from samsung.com AVAILABILITY Now We all know…

REOLINK TRACKFLEX FLOODLIGHT WIFI CAMERA PRICE To be confirmed AVAILABILITY To be confirmed Using AI to recognise people wandering onto your property is nothing new, but this is the first time I’ve seen a device where everything happens on-device, as opposed to in the cloud or on a connected NAS. I spent quite a while on Reolink’s stand watching its AI tag visitors in real-time, identifying them by age group, gender, clothing and even hairstyle. You can then search locally for suspicious characters; perhaps people you’ve already identified on the system. Add a high-quality 360-degree 4K camera, AI tracking, auto zoom and a pair of LED floodlights that push all the way up to 3,000 lumens and you have quite the package. The only detail this device wouldn’t identify is…

PRICE As reviewed, £2,000 (£2,400 inc VAT)  from lenovo.com Compared to the Lenovo ThinkBook Rollable G6 (see p48), the Gen 10 update to the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 is thoroughly boring. Grey aluminium top and bottom; what a yawn-fest. And how predictable that it’s been upgraded to the 200V series of Intel chips from last year’s 100V series, bringing support for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC scheme. In terms of novelty, this laptop is duller than a John Major biopic. In terms of a business rollout, on the other hand, it’s exactly what IT managers and users demand. That assumes the intended user will take advantage of the 2-in-1 form factor. If not, then the X1 Carbon (see issue 370, p52) makes much more sense due to its 1kg weight: I immediately noticed…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk One of the big complaints about Copilot+ PCs at their launch last year was that they were expensive. Microsoft’s promise was that the asking price would soon drop to three figures and approach budget laptop territory, and that’s precisely what has happened with the 2025 update to the Acer Aspire 16 AI. Acer achieves this with a big helping hand from Qualcomm, which has introduced a new entry-level X series chip: the X1-26-100. The “26” in that name indicates roughly where it sits in Qualcomm’s speed hierarchy, compared, say, to the “84” in the top-end X1E-84-100. But I think the company is underselling this chip’s talents, because 2,134 in Geekbench 6’s single-core test is a solid score, while its five-figure return in the…

PRICE As reviewed, £2,280 (£2,736 inc VAT) from hp.com If you ever wanted evidence that the shape of computing is changing, you need only look at our mini PCs Labs from p78 and the HP Z2 Mini G1a workstation on test here. These bijou systems pack the sort of power previously reserved for hunking tower PCs: modern processors are that good. In the HP Z2 Mini’s case, the processor is AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395. AMD calls this Strix Halo, and it’s a chip that Intel currently has no answer to. A total of 16 powerful Zen 5 cores sit at its centre, but it’s the Radeon 8060S graphics and 50 TOPS NPU that earn the Z2 Mini G1a the description of “AI workstation”. Plus the ability to siphon…

PRICE £1,124 (£1,349 inc VAT) from cyberpowersystem.co.uk When buying a PC, there’s always a sweet spot when it comes to value. Right now, that spreads from around £800 to £1,500; the Goldilocks zone where every pound you spend has a notable impact on power, design and features. Here, CyberPowerPC’s biggest investment is in the AMD graphics card, which might be a surprise inclusion to some. For years, Nvidia’s RTX range has dominated the graphics card market, but this year marks a shift. Nvidia’s RTX 50 series still wins at the high end, but by focusing on AI enhancements rather than raw performance it allowed AMD to catch up via its RX 9000 series cards. The RX 9060 XT with its 16GB of VRAM is a fine choice as it provides…

PRICE £500 (£600 inc VAT) from benq.eu Colour me intrigued when BenQ suggested that PC Pro review its monitor designed for programmers. Two obvious questions sprung to mind: “Why?” Quickly followed by: “How?” Answering the first question is relatively simple. Distractions are the absolute enemy of programmers so you need to do everything you can to help them focus: in a monitor’s case that means reducing eye strain and reflections. BenQ’s answer is its Nano Matte technology, adding extra layers to reduce the visibility of overhead lights. This diffused the glare from my spotlights so well that I had to hunt for them against a black background, with the only sign being a weak spread of light. This is also one of the newer breed of IPS panels with a…

PRICE £339 (£399 inc VAT) from remarkable.com The reMarkable Paper Pro Move is an expensive tablet: it costs £399 inc VAT with a standard Marker stylus, or £439 with a Marker Plus, which adds an eraser function to the opposing end. Is it worth the extra £40 just for a dedicated eraser? If you’re asking that question, you’re considering the wrong tablet. This is a luxury lifestyle device for the executive who has everything. To be more precise, the reMarkable Paper Pro Move is a thin and very lightweight writing tablet. Despite its lightness, it feels very solid: I had no trouble holding it in my left palm and writing comfortably across the whole page with my right. Then I just tucked it into the back pocket of my jeans.…

PRICE 8GB/256GB, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from oneplus.com OnePlus’ Nord phones promise a taste of the high end at an affordable price, and the new Nord 5 costs a very reasonable £399 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. That’s £30 less than last year’s Nord 4, a welcome reversal of inflationary trends. Then again, that phone had 12GB of RAM; if you want that this year, you’ll have to move up to the 12GB/512GB model at £499. The Nord family is not known for its beauty, and the Nord 5 is one of the most boring-looking phones I’ve seen – a big, chocolate-bar-style box, offered in grey, white and ice blue. At 211g it’s slightly heavier than your average phone, and with its huge 6.83in screen it feels…

PRICE £1,000 (£1,200 inc VAT) from asus.com Let’s skip the preamble: the NUC 14 Pro AI is a cracking mini PC. While it won’t out-slug truly top-end NUCs, it’s got all the power you need to accelerate enthusiast computing, at a relatively reasonable price. Perhaps that’s no real surprise given Asus’ pedigree in this market, but this diminutive device still has plenty to set it apart. The company originally claimed the NUC 14 Pro AI as the world’s first AI mini PC. It turned out to be the first of many, but still stands out thanks to Intel’s top-end Core Ultra 9 288V processor, which claims 120 trillion operations per second (TOPS) for the whole platform. Some 48 trillion of these come from the NPU, comfortably exceeding the 40 TOPS…

PRICE £783 (£939 inc VAT)  from minisforum.uk While Minisforum’s UM750L Slim courts the lower end of the market, its AI X1 Pro is focused on much more demanding users. It’s a lovely looking thing, too. Though some way bigger than the smallest mini PCs, its alloy case has no vents on the front three sides, and little clutter. It would probably attract admiring glances in an office or living room, shortly followed by questions about the little-known brand, but let’s park that for the moment. Spec spotters will be delighted by what this PC has to offer. The range starts at £659 inc VAT for a barebones system without RAM or disk, but we’re testing the £939 version fitted with a very handy 64GB of memory, alongside a 1TB SSD…

PRICE £1,145 (£1,374 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk At well over £1,000 – even before you factor in VAT – Asus’ business-focused ExpertCenter PN54 is the most expensive mini PC in this group. It’s also one of the smallest, yet it pulls off the impressive trick of being one of the most powerful. For the most part that’s down to the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor at its heart. At the time of testing, this was towards the top end of mobile processors. Based on AMD’s 4nm Zen 5 architecture, it features 8 cores, can boost at up to 5GHz, and with a 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS) NPU, helps qualify the PN54 as a Copilot+ PC. Asus has sensibly given the ExpertCenter PN54 32GB of RAM and fitted…

PRICE £714 (£857 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk We wanted to include one or two slightly larger PCs in this test to see if it was worth trading space for more performance and features. Enter the Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo 50s Gen 5, a midi PC weighing nearly 4kg and taking up nine litres of space. That’s still compact by PC standards, but you get the advantage of an integrated power supply – and more room for useful extras. Not that you get them at this price. We tested a mid-range variant, powered by Intel’s 13th generation Core i5-13400 desktop processor. In its base configuration it comes with 16GB of memory and only 512GB of storage, no Wi-Fi, no optical drive, and a one-year warranty – that really doesn’t look great for…

We had hoped to include a couple of Chromeboxes – mini PCs that run ChromeOS – in this test. Surely their simplified software would be the perfect match for compact, simple hardware? However, it quickly became clear that they were a non-starter. Only Acer was able to send us a current Chromebox, and we quickly realised the rest of the group would eat its breakfast, lunch and dinner before flushing its head down the toilet. For some users, ChromeOS is the perfect antidote to a Windows experience that remains bloated, slow and overkill for lightweight tasks like working in office suites. Chromebook sales peaked during the pandemic, but according to the latest figures from Canalys they’ve dropped back significantly to roughly 17 million units in 2024, against around 200 million…

PRICE Simple Core Pack, 5 instances, £612 exc VAT per year from senetic.co.uk Backup Exec (BE) has always been one of our top choices for on-premises data backup and recovery, and after Cohesity’s acquisition of Veritas at the start of 2025 it begins a new phase in its life as Arctera’s flagship product. Arctera immediately assigned it a dedicated software development team, and we’re already seeing the fruits of its labour as Backup Exec 25 (BE25) delivers plenty of new features. Along with full support for Windows Server 2025, it enhances Microsoft 365 (MS365) protection with options to restore Exchange items to a PST file and secure Teams private channels. There’s a new role for restore administrators, and the integral malware detection service now supports the Symantec Protection Engine (SPE).…

PRICE £232 exc VAT  from lambda-tek.com D-Link’s DBR routers target small businesses with up to 100 users that want a simple security appliance with VPN routing, WAN redundancy and wireless access point (AP) management. The range comprises two models, with the DBR-600-P and DBR-700 both delivering 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports across the board. There are distinct differences between them. The DBR-600-P has nine copper 2.5GbE ports, provides 802.3at PoE+ services and its USB port supports a 4G/5G modem. The DBR-700 we reviewed doesn’t have the USB port or PoE services but its ninth port is the 2.5GbE SFP fibre variety, which supports longer connection distances. The DBR-700 has good WAN redundancy features; the last copper port is a dedicated WAN interface, while the SFP port and the eighth copper port can…

Not another sort of AI – is there no end to them? None in sight yet! And while not all AI-related “innovations” are actually distinct and useful, agentic AI does deserve a label of its own. To define our terms, “agentic” refers to the pre-AI concept of an agent – a piece of software that acts automatically, without requiring a human to click its buttons. Early agents usually took care of simple tasks such as installing updates or blocking viruses, following fixed rules or instructions beamed over the network, but the new generation of AI agents are far more autonomous. They can use multi-step reasoning, act proactively and even update their behaviour based on past experience. So the AI just decides for itself what to do? Not exactly: AI agents…

I’ve thought of an AI enhancement that Microsoft should roll out with indecent haste. It’s a derivation of the ignition interlocks that can be fitted to cars so the driver has to pass a breath test before the engine will start. My Microsoft proposal is to let Copilot use webcam and/or microphone data to detect if a laptop user has just uncorked an agreeable Cab Sav or nosedived into a hot chocolate with marshmallows. At the first hint of “liquid-crime”, Copilot’s AI terminates 95% of the machine’s power, while the remaining 5% is used to play “Crazy Frog” (tinyurl.com/374crazyfrog) on an uninterruptible loop. Only a few months ago (see issue 372, p115) I warned about liquids and laptops, but clearly the message isn’t getting through. When Mr Jones quipped that…

Isuppose I should be pleased that the mainstream media has finally caught up with some of the observations I’ve been making about AI for years. Their stories are both late breaking and panic-stricken, and profoundly lacking in practical advice. Advice I aim to give you in this article. Why the panic? Partly because they conflate several areas of expertise not commonly found in the brain of one person. Technology, yes, that’s fine. Infrastructure? Some of those concepts are easily understood, sure. Then there’s commercial real estate project modelling: not only a trifle esoteric, but also generally performed by bankers, and we all know how evil they are in modern times, right? That’s the physical side. Now consider the human factor. First, let’s add a dollop of international geopolitical meddling, following…

Language is always changing, and nowhere does that happen faster than with teenagers. But forget them and whatever the heck “skibidi” means: there’s a flood of new words in the world of tech, too, thanks to the rise of AI and other future innovations hovering on the horizon. “Technology is bound to be an important driver of ‘lexical innovation’ – linguists’ jargon for new vocabulary – when new concepts, processes and products are not encoded by our existing lexicon,” said linguist Tony Thorne, the author of Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. Clankers, glazing, vibe coding – these aren’t just relevant to IT but to everyone, notes Thorne. “AI has generated a whole raft of new terms, and many of these are escaping the purely specialist environment and are becoming familiar to…

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 Honor MagicBook Art 14 (2025) This slim 1kg laptop packs Intel’s powerful Core Ultra 7 255H…

It was precisely four years ago that I bored you with my company’s hard-and-fast hardware lifecycle policy. Namely, “my work laptop gets replaced every three years, once the warranty/care package expires and you enter that dicey period where you’re basically crossing fingers and hoping nothing goes wrong”. Reader, I lied. Or, as my company’s head of legal affairs (ChatGPT) would describe it: “My statement reflected our general policy intent, though in practice individual replacement cycles have varied based on operational needs and circumstances.” Indeed, three short months after I wrote that column my 2019 MacBook Pro was consigned to the corporate scrapheap – a mere two-and-a-bit years into its lifecycle. Why? Because Apple had released the first MacBook Pro running on Apple Silicon, and the promise of genuine all-day battery…

Given that Windows 10 is nearing the end, many people will be preparing to retire a PC over the next few months. But before you pull the plug on that PC for the last time, you need to ensure you’ve erased any sensitive data – and that requires more effort than simply running through the Reset procedure. Of course, it’s not only Windows 10 PCs that are being decommissioned. So, here we’re going to run you through how to ensure all the devices we use regularly are properly wiped before we send them on to their next destination – whether that be a friend or relative, a buyer or even straight to the recycling centre. You can’t be too careful, even with a device that’s destined for the crusher. @PCPRO…

ACER VERITON GN100 PRICE From €3,999 inc VAT from acer.com AVAILABLE Q1 2026 For now, this is as close as you’re going to get to an AI supercomputer in your pocket. That’s because it’s based on Nvidia’s ever-so-humbly named GB10 Superchip, which promises 1,000 TOPS for AI inference, around 31 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and 1 PFLOP performance at FP4 precision. Can it play Doom? Probably, and at around a million frames per second. But more importantly the Acer Veriton GN100 allows scientists, researchers and well-heeled students the opportunity to develop and run their own inference models on their own hardware. You can even connect two GN100 computers together to run in parallel, bringing AI models with up to 405 billion parameters into play. It runs on Nvidia’s Linux-based OS,…

LENOVO THINKVISION P40WD-40 PRICE €1,4999 inc VAT from lenovo.com AVAILABLE November 2025 If a 32in monitor simply doesn’t give you enough space, then let this 40in widescreen offering fulfil your dreams. With a phenomenally sharp 5,120 ×2,160 resolution it’s very nearly equivalent to having two 27in 4K screens side by side, with a soft 2500R curvature so you don’t need to slide your chair along to see detail on the edges. To help control power consumption Lenovo provides an adaptive refresh rate, from 24Hz to 120Hz, which did make a difference while I watched on, although don’t imagine that will claw back running costs so far to justify the price. Instead, that comes from the IPS panel’s evident image quality and superb connectivity stemming from Thunderbolt 4. This is a…

Home security systems can be complicated things. If you want to, you can invest in proximity and movement sensors, contacts that detect when doors or windows have been opened and multiple cameras all managed from a central hub. Not everyone needs a full-scale surveillance system like that, however. Even a single camera can give you a huge boost in protection; while it may not cover every entry point, if you pick the right location it can watch over your most valuable possessions and alert you to any unexpected movement. The best part is that good cameras can be very cheap, costing – as you might have guessed from our headline – less than £20 apiece. With most models that price even includes easy-to-use surveillance software, but this won’t necessarily let…

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…

PRICE £458 (£549 inc VAT) from lenovo.com By nature, I’m not a Chromebook lover. My take for years has been that you’re better off spending a little more on a Windows laptop or MacBook with more features. So it was with some reluctance that I put away my MacBook and switched to the Lenovo Chromebook Plus as my work system for a week. Turns out that all it took was those seven days to make me a full Chrome OS convert. Part of this is the power on offer. As Chrome OS is a simplistic system to run on, laptop makers typically compromise on the system specs. That means they’re usually zippy enough for daily tasks, but they can quickly crumble under multitasking pressure. This often shows in reduced battery…

NORTON 360 PREMIUM for £19.99 10 DEVICES 2YR LICENCE 75GB CLOUD BACKUP pcpro.link/norton360 We’ve negotiated this exclusive deal for PC Pro readers. 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 there’s no danger of being hit with hiked renewal fees. Because it’s the Premium version of Norton 360, you get a host of extra tools. Top of the list is the full version of Norton VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while you’re abroad. There’s also 75GB of cloud storage for secure backup, while Norton’s Dark Web Monitoring service will alert you if private details – such as…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,599 (£1,919 inc VAT) from frame.work Framework builds its laptops with the ethos of a desktop: repairable, customisable and even upgradable when new parts come out. Now, the company’s offering a desktop too. Surprisingly, though, the Framework Desktop seems to embody an opposite ethos to the laptop, being more of an integrated unit than a regular system. It comes with both the CPU and RAM soldered to the motherboard, meaning the only user-upgradable elements are storage, Wi-Fi, the case fan and a few decorative and connectivity components at the front. You get numerous configuration options at the point of ordering. The base system costs £1,099 inc VAT and comes with an AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 processor, Radeon 8050S graphics and 32GB of RAM. We tested the…

Total value this month £105 SafeErase 18 Professional ■ Full product worth £20 ■ oo-software.com REQUIRES Windows 8 or later; 300MB hard drive space; online registration It’s tempting to think that deleting a file means it’s gone forever – but that’s not really the case. Data can often be recovered from your hard drive for a long time after it’s supposedly been erased. That might reassure anyone who doesn’t keep backups, but for the rest of us, with potentially sensitive information to look after, it’s worrying. The reason data is so easily recovered is that it’s not physically deleted from your drive when you empty the Recycle Bin. In order to prevent performance grinding to a halt (and to save wear and tear on your drive), Windows simply marks the…

PRICE €117 (€140 inc VAT) from  shop.cherry.de Anyone on the hunt for a compact, wireless mechanical keyboard should stop that search right now. The KW 300W MX’s appeal starts with the feel of the keys, which use Cherry’s sound-dampened MX2A switch. These are full height rather than the shallow travel of the Xtrfy MX 10.1 above, and my fingers delighted in the crisp, deep action. PBT key caps mean that they should still look as good in ten years as they do today, and while the grey finish and simple white backlighting won’t turn heads there are numerous nice details. For instance, I like the subtle Cherry logo beneath the space bar, and the flip-up feet at the rear provide the slightest of angles to make typing more comfortable. I…

PRICE 256GB, £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from store.google.com If you’re a PC Pro Podcast listener, you might have heard me proposing the Pixel 10 Pro as Hot Hardware of the Week. You’ll also have heard me being decisively voted down by a sceptical audience. I’m here now to tell you why the listeners were right – but why I still think it’s a great phone. I speak from experience, having bought the Pixel 10 Pro on launch day as an upgrade from my trusty Pixel 7 Pro (see issue 339, p72). The new phone has some definite attractions if you’re coming from a handset released back in the heyday of Liz Truss. For one thing, the physical design is completely different; the new format was introduced last year with the…

You’ve got to love mini PCs. If you’ve spent years hefting massive PC cases around offices, it’s a revelation to switch to the size and simplicity of these little boxes. Connect a power lead and monitor cable, hook up a keyboard and mouse, press “on” – and you’ll discover a surprisingly capable computer. Office work? Covered. Likewise creative apps, whether for music, film or photography. Want to do a bit of coding, even gaming? Certainly, if you don’t expect too much. Mini PCs represent such an easy, tidy ownership experience that it’s hard to make the argument for a full-sized device save for hardcore gamers or the most megalomaniacal of power users. In fact, we suggest you leave most of your assumptions at the door. Some of the smallest mini…

PRICE £224 (£279 inc VAT) from geekom.co.uk In a labs test featuring plenty of highly specified PCs, it’s interesting that many of the standout models were the ones geared towards value. Take the Geekom A5. Not only is it one of the cheapest devices here, it’s also one of the most affordable mini PCs on the market. To Geekom’s credit, this PC’s modest price is only reflected in its specifications to a limited degree. Sure, it packs a relatively aged AMD Ryzen 5 7430U processor, but it’s paired with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD – that’s really not bad for the money. Perhaps more impressively, the A5 benefits from the same three-year warranty that Geekom provides with all its computers. That’s a great reassurance if money’s tight, and…

PRICE £500 (£600 inc VAT) from wired2fire.co.uk British PC manufacturer Wred2Fire was a late entrant to this test, kindly rushing us its AMD R8845 Mini PC at short notice. Like the Geekom and Minisforum systems, it’s aimed at consumers rather than businesses, with no management features and Windows 11 Home. Nor will you find luxuries such as a fingerprint or memory card reader on its sides. As a result there’s something pleasingly uncluttered about the design and at 0.9 litres it’s also very small – but not tiny. For the money, this mini PC has an eyewatering specification. It’s powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor offering eight cores and 16 threads. It’s a potent choice, with a 5.1GHz boost speed and onboard NPU contributing 16 TOPS. While that…

PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from geekom.co.uk At first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s not much remarkable about the Geekom Mini IT12; it certainly doesn’t stand out in our performance tables. It’s quite a cheap mini PC, though, with the range starting at only £379 inc VAT. The example we’re testing costs £120 more, and comes with an impressive 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The processor isn’t quite so exciting: an Intel Core i7-1280P, which launched more than three years ago. Still, you can’t have everything on a budget, and the Mini IT12 follows Geekom’s tradition of offering plenty of ports and good upgradability. Clustered around this dinky, 0.64l device you’ll find two USB-C 4 ports, three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports and a single USB-A…

PRICE £708 (£850 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk MSI’s Cubi NUC AI 1UMG sits at something of a sweet point in the mini PC market. As such, it’s in good company, lining up broadly against the Asus NUC 14 Pro AI and Minisforum AI X1 Pro. However, straight away it’s at a disadvantage: unlike those rivals, the NPU in its Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor offers only 11 TOPS, short of the requirements for a Copilot+ PC. At this price we’d hope for more than 16GB of RAM. Still, the 1TB SSD is welcome – this one performed particularly well in CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read test. It’s also easy to remove the four screws and get at the Cubi’s internals. Here you’ll find a free memory slot, making it simple to…

Companies that don’t have a robust data backup and recovery strategy are playing with fire and recklessly putting their business and their employees’ livelihoods at risk. The increasing frequency of sophisticated ransomware attacks are a clear and present danger, but businesses also need to protect themselves against a raft of other major incidents including data breaches, severe weather events, fire, floods and equipment theft. Data protection doesn’t need to be challenging, however: there are plenty of top-quality on-premises backup products on the market that are suitable for a wide range of IT environments and budgets. Along with all the tools needed to manage a complete strategy, they support all popular client platforms and applications, with the best products allowing you to create a hybrid data protection strategy that combines on-site…

PRICE Unlimited Plus, Perpetual, £445 exc VAT per host from hornetsecurity.com Businesses seeking a dedicated backup solution for protecting virtualised environments will find Hornetsecurity’s VM Backup has lots of appeal. Along with support for VMware, Hyper-V and the increasingly popular Proxmox, its smart management console and drag-and-drop operations make it very easy to create VM protection strategies. It’s good value as pricing is based only on the number of hosts and not sockets or CPUs. The free version protects two VMs, while a Standard perpetual licence costs £289 per host and supports up to five VMs for each. Any number of VMs can be secured with the Unlimited version (£354), but Unlimited Plus offers the best ransomware protection as it can use immutable cloud storage from Microsoft Azure Blob, Amazon…

PRICE Diskless, £858 exc VAT from ballicom.co.uk Synology’s eight-bay desktop NAS appliances have always been a popular choice for SMBs as they offer an impressive storage capacity in a desk-friendly format teamed up with plenty of features. It’s been a long wait but after four years, the dependable DS1821+ has finally been replaced by the DS1825+. Alas, there are no changes in the processor department as the DS1825+ sports the same quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B as its predecessor, along with all of Synology’s other 2025 Plus desktop models. Standard memory is doubled with a single 8GB stick of ECC DDR4 upgradable to 32GB, with the two SO-DIMM slots located behind a small panel in the base. The USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port count drops from four to three but…