PC Pro的April 2025目录

I’m not having much luck with computers at the moment. Within the space of a month, two died on me: one long-serving laptop that I still have hopes of resuscitating through a reset, the other an emergency machine that, without warning, obstinately refused to switch on. So, in my desperation, I hauled the Nvidia RTX 5080-powered Scan 3XS Edge iCue (see p50) onto my desk to provide daily service until today – the day we send PC Pro to the printers. So what astonishing lessons have I learned from this series of events? What words of wisdom can I impart that will shake to the foundations all that you hold true? This: the new version of Outlook is rubbish. Until a week ago, I hadn’t realised how much I relied…

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 Mac Book Air 13in (M3) Both the 13in and 15in MacBook Airs impress for speed, styling and battery life, but the 1.2kg 13in Air wins out of the two for its sheer portability. From £1,299 from apple.com REVIEW Issue 356, p54 Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED Asus pairs a Core Ultra 9 288V…

Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro. He doesn’t get out of bed for less than a gigabit. Email him at barry@pcpro.co.uk. @bazzacollins There’s no doubt that an awful lot of whoosh has been added to British broadband connections over the past few years. Ofcom reports that more than 83% of British homes now have access to gigabit broadband, which is phenomenal given that, a decade ago, the fastest anyone could get was 200Mbits/sec and the average download speed in the UK was a piddling 3.7Mbits/sec. Don’t adjust your sets. This isn’t one of my twice-in-a-lifetime uplifting columns; there’s an almighty caveat coming. Because for all the progress we’ve made at the network end of broadband connectivity, the final bit – the router that beams all those lovely…

AI has arrived for all Microsoft 365 subscribers – whether you wanted it or not. Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint users can now call on AI assistance without paying an additional fee, although those fees are going up if you subscribe directly with Microsoft. Now even Personal and Family subscribers can call on Copilot to summarise long emails, write complex formulae for their spreadsheets, turn Word bullet points into tables, or add slides to a PowerPoint presentation. There’s lots more that Copilot can do to make your home and work life easier, and in this feature we’ll explore the full capabilities of the embedded Microsoft 365 AI – as well as setting your expectations by explaining what it can’t do. Yet. We’ll take each of the major apps in turn,…

WHAT CAN IT DO? Generate slides (or even whole presentations) While the capability of generating an entire presentation from a single prompt sounds impressive, we can’t think of any scenario – bar pure desperation – where you would. There are endless YouTube videos of people gleefully typing in “generate a presentation about global warming” or some such, and while the results generally look nice, the content is as bland and beige as a Marks & Spencer cardigan. What purpose does it serve? There are situations, however, where relying on Copilot to generate a slide or two makes sense. Let’s say, for example, you’re putting together a presentation about a company conference in Barcelona. You might ask the AI to generate a slide highlighting some of the city’s key attractions for…

If you’re looking for something even cheaper than Affinity Photo, Photopea is a great free online image-editing suite – find it at photopea.com, and see issue 364 for our guide. Alternatively, there’s always the open-source GIMP (gimp.org); as well as supporting Windows and macOS, GIMP runs on Linux and includes full support for layers and adjustments. However, the GIMP’s user interface takes some getting used to, and it lacks a dedicated raw image-editing module like the Develop Persona found in Affinity Photo. Corel’s PaintShop Pro (paintshoppro.com) is another paid-for tool that works similarly to Affinity Photo. It’s also sold as a perpetual licence, with features including raw image editing and focus stacking to increase depth of field. It has AI tools for removing artefacts, upscaling, replacing backgrounds and more, and…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index RTX 5080 SCORE PRICE Founders Edition, £816 (£979 inc VAT) from nvidia.com RTX 5090 SCORE PRICE Founders Edition, £1,616 (£1,939 inc VAT) from nvidia.com With a trio of major architectural changes, you can see why Nvidia kept us waiting almost two years for an update to its RTX 40-series. First up is its move to a 4nm process from 5nm, while it has also made the jump from PCIe 4 to PCIe 5 (see “Why PCI Express rules the world”, p40). But the biggest hardware change the new Blackwell architecture brings is GDDR7 video memory – and it’s far faster than GDDR6 and GDDR6X. For example, the RTX 5090 has a roughly 33% increase in Gbits/sec over the RTX…

SCORE PRICE £2,333 (£2,800 inc VAT) from wired2fire.co.uk In some ways, the Wired2Fire Beast (we don’t have space to spell out its full name) is the polar opposite of the Scan 3XS Edge iCue (see p50), despite the two sharing the same GPU, CPU and price. Where the Scan is an ice queen, silent and aloof, the Beast lives up to its name with a domineering design, lashings of RGB colour and an ever-present low hum. The Beast also earns bragging rights by topping our performance table – if we limit ourselves to the trio of RTX 5080 systems on test this month – more times than either of its rivals. With the help of 64GB of top-quality XPG RAM, it squeezed the very most out of the Ryzen 7…

SCORE PRICE £917 (£1,100 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com Companies often exaggerate in their marketing: we’re rewriting the rules, revolutionising the world, solving all of humanity’s problems. But this laptop is worthy of hyperbole, because it has reset my expectations of what you can buy for £1,100. For a start, the Zenbook A14 is unusually light. 980g, to be exact. I can’t think of a laptop that’s weighed so little that could be bought for under £1,500 before. Then there’s the fact that it includes a top-quality OLED panel, which again used to be a premium feature. And finally there’s its sheer style. Asus calls the material “Ceraluminium”, and this is no spray-on coating. According to Asus, it’s a “ceramic oxidised material that grows directly from the aluminium itself”, and the…

SCORE PRICE Estimated, from £625 (£750 inc VAT) from store.acer.com Ihope you’re the patient type, because Acer doesn’t expect the Aspire 14 AI to go on sale in the UK until June. Nor has it confirmed a price, so for now I’m using the “from $699” quoted at its CES launch (tinyurl.com/367aspire). Normally, these convert dollar for pound, raising the possibility of a laptop with a Core Ultra 5 226V processor and 16GB of RAM for £699. I suspect it will be more, but even at £750, say, that would be a steal. My test sample included a Core Ultra 7 258V with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, which is probably the top specification. Despite having a single and sometimes noisy fan, the Aspire 14 AI extracted almost…

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 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 Password…

SCORE PRICE Tablet only, £416 (£499 inc VAT) from oppostore.co.uk The Oppo Pad 3 Pro joins the growing ranks of premium Android tablets, with its obvious competitor being the £449 OnePlus Pad 2 (see issue 364, p86). The two are essentially identical other than their colour – here, your eyes are treated to Starlit Blue rather than the Pad 2’s grey. At £499 with 256GB of storage, it’s also a rival to the 256GB iPad, which costs £479 – although, unlike Apple, Oppo doesn’t offer any other storage or cellular options. You’ll soon be able to partner the tablet with the Oppo Pencil 2 Pro stylus and a full Qwerty keyboard with kickstand, but neither is currently available to order. The slim, unibody design is well constructed and looks smart,…

SCORE PRICE £917 (£1,100 inc VAT) from honor.com The Magic7 Pro is a big phone with a big price, though it’s cheaper than the iPhone 16 Pro Max (see issue 363, p72) or the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (see p70), especially once you factor in the generous 512GB of storage that comes as standard. Perhaps it also makes a more individualist statement than those mass-market handsets. Then again, the design isn’t exactly a bold departure. The lateral curves of the Magic6 Pro (see issue 356, p70) have been ditched in favour of a boxier design with flat sides – a look very much in keeping with Apple’s and Samsung’s latest releases. However, the front and rear faces are more rounded, with symmetrical “micro curves” around the edges. The feel is…

We kicked off our last Linux Labs (see issue 354, p78) with an admission: that despite its success in the server space, Linux ran just 3% of all desktops. Windows machines outnumbered Linux by 20 devices to one. But, we said, “its future looks bright” – and we were right. CONTENTS Its user base has grown by 50% since, and it’s on course to touch 5% of all desktops in the first quarter of 2025. This isn’t surprising. The increasing popularity of single-board computers like Raspberry Pi is putting Linux into the hands of a whole new generation of users while computers are lasting longer than ever before, Combine hardware longevity with Microsoft’s desire to end support for Windows 10 – it goes end of life on 14 October unless…

Linux can run from a USB drive as well as it does from an SSD. You can test most distributions this way before you commit them to internal storage. But why stop there? Running an operating system entirely from a USB thumb drive makes it uniquely portable. You can carry it with you if you travel and, so long as you aren’t blocked by the host machine’s Secure Boot settings, use it to start any device meeting the distribution’s minimum spec. Whether that’s a friend’s old Intel Mac or your Airbnb’s ageing PC, you won’t risk damaging their setup, nor leaving behind any of your personal data. Many distributions make a virtue of this. Head for Tails The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) is a Debian-based distribution that’s designed to…

SCORE WEBSITE linuxmint.com Linux Mint is one of the most talked-about distributions, for reasons we’ll come to later. Ubuntu-based, it’s been around for 18 years and has earned itself a loyal following. It’s updated roughly one month after the Ubuntu LTS build on which each version is based, so you should see a major release every other year, along with point releases every six months. Major builds are supported for five years, with support for this release, codenamed Xia and based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running through to 2029. The installation process is the same as for Ubuntu: as it handles creating your user account, all you need to do once it’s finished is log in. At this point you’ll encounter the well-designed onboarding process, presenting a series of one-click…

SCORE WEBSITE mxlinux.org This is the only distribution on test running the Xfce desktop environment by default. Designed to run well on less powerful hardware, this makes MX Linux a natural choice for anyone who wants to squeeze a few more years of life out of an ageing machine. If you don’t get on with Xfce, it’s also available with KDE and Fluxbox, but there’s no harm in giving it a go: you can install alternatives later, including Mate, Gnome Base and Budgie, from the Package Installer. In its default state, this particular implementation of Xfce looks more basic (and to our eyes less appealing) than KDE or Gnome, but it’s highly customisable and you can add themes, so there’s no reason for it to stay like that. For example,…

SCORE WEBSITE ubuntu.com Ubuntu is possibly the best-known desktop distribution among consumers – and with good reason. Not only is it fully featured and frequently updated, it’s also the basis of many other distros, including Zorin OS, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS and Linux Mint. That might surprise you when you consider how different they each look, but it’s like Android phone manufacturers putting their own skin and refinements on Google’s stock OS. As a result, Ubuntu is well supported and has a large user base, which can help when searching for answers. You can choose between minimal and full installations, with the former featuring just a narrow selection of software, including Firefox but no email client or office suite. The full build rolls in LibreOffice, Rhythmbox media player, Shotwell photo organiser,…

SCORE PRICE £18 exc VAT per user/month billed yearly from dropbox.com With a track record reaching back nearly 18 years, Dropbox is undeniably one of the most popular cloud file-sharing platforms. The reasons are manifold: it has always offered an impressive range of features and will appeal to SMBs that want an affordable and secure cloud collaboration platform. Available in a wide range of plans, the top-dog Business Plus on review costs £18 per user per month when billed yearly, starts with three users and presents 15TB of shared storage, which increases by 5TB for every extra user and can also be upgraded in 1TB increments as required. A closer look at the features shows this plan to be very good value as it enables the security add-on for ransomware…

SCORE PRICE £12.83 exc VAT per user per month billed yearly from tresorit.com SMBs looking for the most secure cloud collaboration platform will love Tresorit Business. Its zero-knowledge policy delivers total end-to-end AES-256 encryption, meaning all data is encrypted client-side, in transit and on Tresorit’s cloud servers – no keys or passwords are stored anywhere in unencrypted form so only you have access. Tresorit offers a choice of plans for individuals and businesses. We reviewed the Business plan, which starts with a minimum of three users. Costing only £12.83 per user per month, this price hasn’t changed for a number of years and dishes out 2TB of encrypted cloud storage to each user, supports a 15GB maximum file upload size and offers a choice of 12 global data centres. E-signatures…

Modern software development methods might seem a world away from the early days of punch-card programming, but it turns out that some things are timeless. Winston Royce was a computer scientist for Lockheed Martin and TRW in the 1960s, working on space mission planning, orbit selection and developing the software on which America’s rapidly expanding space sector relied. As part of this work, he wrote an influential report advocating a standard approach to producing code – particularly for large projects – which split the overall development cycle into seven steps. Each stage fed into the next, like a cascade of waterfalls where each drop lands in a pool that goes on to feed the next fall. Today, Royce is widely credited with inventing the “waterfall model”, as used in software…

Continuing his flirtation with Ubiquiti devices, Jon welcomes its NAS solution into the lab – but is less impressed by Microsoft bundling Copilot into Office 365 Family with a bump in price What sort of storage do you need, both in your home and in your business? Larger organisations have many choices, with multiple enterprise solutions available. These have a whole range of capability requirements that are well outside the scope of the home and SME marketplace: it is, quite simply, a different world. But choices in the SME space are interesting. The standard play here is a network attached storage (NAS) device to which all the clients connect, usually via SMB protocol. This covers all the day-to-day operation of laptops, desktops and servers. However, in the server space, you…

Davey ponders the problems that occur when a secure sign-in for third-party services turns out to be not so secure after all Imagine you used to work for a startup that went bust. You were always 100% mindful of your security when logging into third-party accounts at work, but you now find your sensitive data has been compromised. There are lots of reasons that this could happen – adversary-in-the-middle attacks and malware, to name a couple – although why they would strike now when the startup is no more, and you have moved on to pastures new, is a mystery. Now imagine that a security vulnerability in the very process you were using to authorise yourself, supposedly securely, to those accounts was to blame. Welcome to the Sign-in with Google…

There’s little doubt that shareware revolutionised the way software was distributed in the early days of computing. It steamed in with a blend of innovation and accessibility, offering users a “try before you buy” model that went a long way towards democratising software development. Suddenly, pioneering independent coders could reach a global audience without needing a big budget or corporate backing. They could create games and serious applications while breaking free from retail shelves, all the while shaping the digital landscape by offering consumers greater choice. Key to this movement were a small number of individuals who took a great gamble with their work by pleading to the good side of human nature. Chief among them was former attorney, writer and publisher Andrew Fluegelman, who developed and released an excellent…

The news that Sony is finally shutting down production of its optical disc manufacturing facilities comes as little surprise. In the Big Book of World History, there will be an entire chapter on the rise and fall of optical media. I still remember the thrill of CD audio’s launch in the 1980s. “Pure, perfect sound forever” was the claim, and it failed on almost every front. The early discs sounded horrible, caused by a combination of the recording industry’s ignorance of how to make the most of the format and early players of somewhat dodgy quality. However, things improved rapidly as we wrapped our heads around new technologies such as oversampling, eight-to-fourteen modulation and Reed-Solomon encoding. These three items almost certainly mean nothing to you, so there’s enjoyable reading to…

Barry Collins Always willing to delegate dull tasks to others, Barry investigates exactly how good Copilot is in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Tim’s best friend Outlook from p26. Nik Rawlinson With Windows 10 going end of life this year, and many PCs incompatible with Windows 11, we asked Nik to test and rate the best Linux distros. Read his verdict from p78. Lee Grant It’s all very well having replaceable parts for PCs and printers, explains Lee, but the system fails if you can’t buy them – or, worse, if they’re incompatible when they arrive. See p113. Olivia Whitcroft Aside from sampling many excellent red wines, Olivia learned much from an ill-fated trip to Paris when it comes to governing law. Join her for a tipple on p116.…

The UK is now well acquainted with gigabit broadband – 83% of UK homes are capable of receiving gigabit speeds, according to Ofcom research published at the end of last year. But how much faster can we push our fibre networks? Turns out a whole lot faster, as proven by a recent Openreach trial. The networking arm of BT conducted a trial in Ipswich with Nokia that saw a home achieve download speeds in excess of 40Gbits/sec and upload speeds of just over 20Gbits/sec. How long will it be before we can all enjoy such speeds, and what on earth will we do with all the bandwidth anyway? Openreach’s director of network technology, Trevor Linney, plots the roadmap for us. PC Pro: Tell us about the trial you conducted and…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro and hopes that Elon doesn’t read his column. He doesn’t want to be DOGEd. @dick-pountain I used to think a monthly column was a relaxed schedule compared to, say, a daily newspaper. No longer. I had decided to do this one about how China upset the USA by doing AI on the cheap, but now I feel a need to check online every ten minutes for whatever new geopolitical atrocity has just overshadowed that. Besides, Nicole got there first. Nevertheless, I’ll start with a nod to the original plan, of how China pulled down the knickers of the US AI bubbleheads. I won’t dive deep into the details of how DeepSeek succeeded in doing what ChatGPT does for a fraction of the…

The internet is rubbish Jon Honeyball’s comments at the end of One Last Thing (see issue 366, p130) definitely resonated with me. I have always assumed that 90% of internet information is rubbish (and the resultant training data LOL) and that most people on forums usually post the first thing that comes into their heads without checking anything. One thing that has changed with Transformer-based AIs is that up to a few years back I could tell fake videos and game screenshots easily – but now I think I may as well hang up my boots as the deluge of AI content drowns everything else out. It has at least made me log out of some of these sites and stay away. The human condition means that despite telling myself…

WHAT CAN IT DO? Compose business letters Even though the sophistication of AI writing continues to improve, it’s still gobsmackingly obvious when AI has written an entire report or anything of substantial length. However, for jobs such as writing short business letters, the Copilot AI is perfect. Without wishing to sound condescending, it’s ideal for people who struggle with the written word or have a condition such as dyslexia. You can tell the AI what you want the letter to say in telegramese – it doesn’t even have to be spelt correctly – and it will compose the letter in a professional tone with no spelling or grammatical errors (any smart arses writing in to tell us we should use it to compose PC Pro features will be given the…

WHAT CAN IT DO? Summarising emails In many ways, it feels like Outlook should be the app that benefits most from Copilot’s presence. Wouldn’t it be great to have an AI assistant that can skim through 150 unread emails, give you the skinny on the important stuff or a heads-up on what needs dealing with urgently? Yeah, don’t hold your breath. Copilot in Outlook can summarise emails, but only one at a time. You can’t tell it to summarise all your unread messages or do anything with your inbox as a whole. Neither will it deal with attachments, even if they’re in text-friendly formats such as PDF or even Word format, which it is of course perfectly capable of reading. Things such as school newsletters will have to be dragged…

Whether you’re shooting with a smartphone or a powerful DSLR, your photos can often benefit from a little light editing. You can tweak them with Windows’ integrated Photos app, but for more advanced, professional-grade edits you’ll need a more capable tool, such as Affinity Photo. Developed in the UK by Serif (now part of Canva), Affinity Photo is part of the three-app Affinity suite, along with Designer and Publisher. It’s a dedicated image-editing program, much like Adobe Photoshop, with support for a wide range of image formats, including raw files straight off the camera. It’s available for Windows and macOS, and there’s also an iPad edition for editing on the move. One thing that makes Affinity Photo particularly appealing is its price. By contrast with Adobe’s subscription-only licensing for Photoshop,…

In a world filled with laptops, smartphones and tablets, the very idea of PCI Express (now commonly shortened to PCIe) might seem outdated. After all, the standard was originally laid down way back in 2003, four years before iPhones – a world where big-box desktop PCs ran Windows XP, and jumbo-sized expansion slots could be used to install anything from a sound card to a modem. Today, only a minority of us are still using those classic full-sized tower PCs. And even if your motherboard does have PCIe expansion slots, you may never have to use them: most mainstream CPUs include their own built-in graphics processors, so you can get by quite happily without even needing a graphics card, and everything else you need for daily computing is nowadays built…

SCORE PRICE £2,499 (£2,999 inc VAT) from tinyurl.com/367cyberpower CyberPowerPC takes a different approach to Scan and Wired2Fire, partnering its GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor. While Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs haven’t set the world alight, there is much to like about this flagship of the range. Not least its eight P-cores and 16 E-cores, which thrive on multicore tasks. This showed itself in Geekbench, where its result of 20,374 was around 10% faster than the Scan and a few hundred points in front of the Wired2Fire. And that lead became much clearer in Cinebench 2024, with a 2,290 result around 30% ahead of its rivals. Not that it was a winner-takes-all situation: I also benchmarked all three systems using PCMark 10, and…

SCORE PRICE £1,121 (£1,345 inc VAT) from lenovo.com (including web discount) This AMD spin on the sixth generation ThinkPad T14s is a laptop for the business masses. There are several signs that it’s been built with budget in mind, but none of the sacrifices prevent it from being a classy machine for workers who schlep their laptop from home to office to clients. As with all ThinkPads, it will make a sober, business-like impression on all those who see it. The trademark black finish and red TrackPoint are in evidence, including a glowing red dot that forms part of the logo on the lid, and its tank-like build quality is only softened by its compact dimensions. Battery life, however, is not a strength. Two years ago I would have been…

SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk When I first heard about the Nighthawk RS200 router, I was genuinely excited. Wi-Fi 7 has so far tended to be an expensive luxury: Netgear’s flagship Nighthawk RS700S router cost a whopping £800 when introduced (see issue 353, p76), and even the cutdown Nighthawk RS300 still came in at a fairly hefty £300 (see issue 361, p72). But with the RS200 shaving another £100 off that, Wi-Fi 7 is finally getting down to sensible prices. Unfortunately, my excitement was quickly overtaken by concerns about how the cost saving has been achieved. If there’s one big innovation that defines Wi-Fi 7, it’s MLO – the multi-link operation mode that can increase bandwidth and improve reliability by letting devices connect across the 2.4GHz, 5GHz…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Samsung’s newest top-grade smartphone has been accused of copying Apple, but it outshines the latest iPhone with a brighter display, smarter AI features and a lighter frame. It’s the best Android phone I’ve tested, and the best phone you can buy right now. It’s not cheap. Pricing starts at £1,249 for 256GB of storage, with upgrades to 512GB for £1,349 or 1TB for £1,549. Colour options are Titanium Black, Grey, Silverblue and Whitesilver; the Samsung website also offers online-exclusive Jadegreen and Pinkgold finishes, as well as a sombre Jetblack. There’s an online trade-in deal, too. Measuring 163mm tall and 78mm wide, it’s almost identically sized to the iPhone 16 Pro Max (see issue 363, p72). The titanium frame is sturdy, and…

SCORE PRICE 16GB/1TB, £500 (£600 inc VAT) from lenovo.com The Legion Go S is a more compact sibling to Lenovo’s original Legion Go handheld gaming PC (see issue 352, p56) – although with its 8in display it’s still larger than rival handhelds such as the Asus ROG Ally and Steam Deck OLED. It also features an updated chassis and introduces AMD’s new Ryzen Z2 Go processor. I’m a big fan of the new design. I found the original Legion Go too bulky to hold comfortably for more than ten minutes, but that’s not at all the case with the Legion Go S – it’s both smaller and more ergonomically styled, with rounded grippy corners. While it’s no longer possible to detach the controllers, as you could on the Legion Go,…

If you’re coming from Windows or macOS, where the operating system name is all you need to know, you might be wondering what exactly a Linux distribution is, how a display server differs from a desktop environment, and where apps and packages fit into the mix. A distribution – often shortened to distro – is the overarching operating system, including the kernel, the graphical interface, the code that interfaces between different hardware elements and so on. As such, while we might consider Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint and the like to be “distros”, your Ubuntu distro might be significantly different to ours. Desktop environment Unless you spend a lot of time working at the Terminal, most of your interaction will be through the desktop environment. In Windows, that would be the Windows…

SCORE WEBSITE elementary.io Elementary pitches itself as a thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows and macOS. Currently at version 8, it’s based on Ubuntu LTS 24.04.1 and offered on a pay-what-you-can basis (if that’s nothing, enter zero in the box on the download page). LTS 24.04 is the most recent long-term Ubuntu release. It shipped in April 2024, which makes it two years younger than the Ubuntu LTS 22.04 on which Pop!_OS is based. It will continue to receive support until August 2029. Elementary OS looks nothing like Ubuntu, and even if you’re familiar with the OS on which it’s based, you might need a little time to find your bearings. Installation is quick and easy, with account creation and language selection handled after first boot. At that point,…

SCORE WEBSITE get.opensuse.org Now 30 years old, openSUSE is one of the longest-standing distributions still in widespread use. Despite this, it will almost certainly be the most up-to-date option whenever you choose to install it. That’s because Tumbleweed is in continuous development, with a new release shipped every day. Indeed, look at the official title of this review and you can work out when we downloaded it (naturally, there were no patches available for installation upon first boot). If you don’t like the idea of an ever-changing distribution, opt instead for openSUSE Leap. This is a more traditional model with major updates appearing annually and an emphasis on stability rather than including the most cutting-edge components. You’ll need to invoke it manually to upgrade a Leap installation, but with Tumbleweed…

So long, Windows 10. As mentioned at the outset, Microsoft will end support from its decade-old operating system later this year. So, if you haven’t already upgraded to Windows 11, now would be a good time to consider your next step. Sticking with Windows is one option but, as our reviews hopefully show, switching to Linux is a viable alternative. The last time I wrote a Linux Labs, I said the platform had come of age: nothing that’s happened since then has changed my mind. Together, the various distributions cater for just about any requirement, whether that’s photo editing on a high-end workstation or breathing new life into a decades-old machine that would otherwise head for recycling. In devising this Labs, I took the centre ground. My test machine was…

SCORE PRICE From £32 exc VAT per user per month billed yearly from egnyte.com Egnyte is a great choice for businesses that want a cloud collaboration service that snaps into their existing workflows. It supports nearly 200 apps and integrations, and has a keen focus on data security and governance with integral malware scanning, ransomware protection and automated AI-powered classification of documents with sensitive content. Egnyte’s entry-level Team option offers basic file-sharing features and a monthly cost of only £8 per user. At £32 per user per month the Enterprise Lite version on review is substantially more expensive, but it takes everything in the Business edition and adds governance tools such as content lifecycle management and archiving, plus suspicious login and artefact-based ransomware detection. Sensitive data management and compliance monitoring…

SCORE PRICE £192 exc VAT from amazon.co.uk Amazon is a big name in the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market, and its WorkSpaces offers a great set of features for businesses that want to provision easily managed, secure cloud-based desktops to remote and hybrid workers. It’s easy to use, too, as WorkSpaces supports simple web access and offers clients for virtually any device and OS. The WorkSpaces Thin Client is designed for businesses that want to dispense with their laptops and workstations. You can ship it directly to a remote worker, and they simply plug it in and connect it to a WorkSpaces account. You’d be forgiven for thinking the Thin Client is an Amazon Fire TV Cube as that’s exactly what it is. The only differences are it runs custom…

Is this just another label for the same old AI hype? Well, yes and no. If you ask a passerby in the street what AI means to them, their answer might in fact be a definition of AGI – short for artificial general intelligence. The term refers to an AI that’s so broad and versatile that it can mimic the intelligence and functions of a human. To be clear, though, a genuine AGI wouldn’t be just a dumb copycat – it would be a free-thinking entity in its own right. How does this differ from the various types of AI we have today? The idea of emulating organic intelligences is a fundamental step beyond the workings of ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Natural systems learn by gaining and losing connections in…

This week’s Any Questions asks: is half a service better than no service? Can a printer use a potty? And what was wrong with that mouse? To set the scene, this month’s column comes to you from platform 2 of Derby railway station. I am surrounded by grumpy travellers who, like me, weren’t planning on being in Derby. Those well-remunerated executives at CrossCountry railways have seen fit to add a frisson of excitement to our journey from Yorkshire to Cornwall by cancelling most of it. Despite the millions that have been splurged on the travel apps being bombarded by myself and Derby’s other surprise visitors, the consensus is that the information appearing on our devices is incorrect and not to be trusted. Here and now, on this platform, technology has…

A misty-eyed Steve asks why, in this era of supposed personalisation, the services we all use make us feel depersonalised? Ireally miss Winamp. No, seriously: I realise it just played audio, and agree with those who consider the visualisation plugin as “software for potheads”, but what I mourn are the skins. You could make Winamp look like anything at all. There were steampunk skins, Star Trek skins, skins for Star Wars, Barbie and The Matrix (of course!), even a Forrest Gump skin. But simply reading that list will quicken the pulse of a copyright and trademark lawyer faster than a direct injection of four double espressos. The more popular the cultural event, be it a movie or a pop group, a child’s toy or a soap opera, the more lawyers…

As the hillsides surrounding LA burned, reports emerged of firefighters running out of water to douse the flames. In response, California lawmakers introduced bills designed to force data centres to publish how much water they use and work towards using less – but two weeks later, President Trump was promising to go big on data centres to power the AI boom, with $500 billion pledged to make it happen. The Labour government has promised something similar here in the UK, in the hope AI will boost the economy. Can we build the next generation of data centres without dooming ourselves to water shortages, or even water wars? It’s possible – and may even be technically necessary. Data centres already use as much as 2% of global electricity, on a par…

If you’ve ever lost your broadband connection because a local construction project sliced through the cables, you’ll know the disruption it can cause. Well, magnify that from a local to a national scale and you can understand why the government is prepared to send out navy submarines to ensure the subsea cables connecting the UK to the rest of the world aren’t sabotaged. That’s precisely what happened in November last year, when a Royal Navy submarine was ordered to surface close to a Russian spy ship called the Yantar, which was believed to be mapping the UK’s critical undersea infrastructure. Two months later in late January, it was spotted again, and this time HMS Somerset and HMS Tyne were deployed to see off the Russian vessel. The Yantar’s second appearance…

GPON Gigabit Passive Optical Network The broadband technology being used by Openreach and others now. It uses time-division multiplexing (TDM) and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) to share a single fibre among multiple users, up to 32 in Openreach’s case. The technology is capable of 2.49Gbits/sec down and 1.24Gbits/sec up, shared between all users of that single fibre. XGS-PON 10-Gigabit Symmetrical Passive Optical Network Already starting to be deployed by Openreach when it lights up new areas, XGS-PON bumps the top speed up to 10Gbits/sec in both directions. It can co-exist with GPON on the same infrastructure thanks to WDM, meaning the broadband providers can offer a greater range of speeds to customers. 50G PON 50-Gigabit Passive Optical Network This is the technology used by Openreach in its Ipswich trial. As the…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Future’s editor. Her favourite AI misconception is that you can spot generated text because it uses a lot of em-dashes – you should see how many my editors have to take out. @njkobie Big Tech was hit by a DeepSeeking missile in January, with the Chinese AI sending shares into a spiral and sparking an existential crisis among (most) tech-bro CEOs. But we should have seen it coming – we were warned repeatedly, after all. First, a step back for those who have tapped out of listening to every scrap of AI news. In January, DeepSeek released an LLM that could compete with the top US AI players yet requires much less processing power, chews through less energy and water (see p126) and is much…

WHAT CAN I DO? Collate survey feedback Excel is, of course, right at home when it comes to the analysis of quantitative data. Qualitative data? Not so much. At least, not until Copilot reared its head and made the job easier. Let’s say you’ve published an online survey or a customer feedback form that contains a field allowing respondents to write comments – something we do in the annual PC Pro Excellence Awards survey, where we invite you to share your experiences of the companies you’ve bought kit and services from. You may end up with hundreds or thousands of free-form comments in an Excel spreadsheet column that, until now, you would basically have to wade through manually, trying to detect themes. Now the AI can do that laborious job…

tinyurl.com/ms365offer 6 DEVICES 1YR LICENCE To help pay for Copilot in everyone’s favourite Office apps, Microsoft has quietly bumped up the annual price from £79.99 to £104.99. But there’s an easy way to avoid this, and that’s to buy a licence from the PC Pro store instead. Here’s what you get for your money. Along with full desktop versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, you also receive a copy of Microsoft’s note-taking application OneNote. The suite can be installed on Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS and Android devices, making it simple to pick up documents on every platform you use. What’s more, the Family edition includes six licences, and while it’s aimed at families there’s nothing to stop you sharing with your friends, too. Our one-off fee buys you a…

Because PCIe is so gloriously cross-compatible, you very rarely need to worry about which precise version of the interface your hardware supports. However, if you’re shopping for a new PC, you might be concerned about future-proofing. While mid-price systems often still use PCIe 4, PCIe 5 has become standard on high-end motherboards – and it may not be long before PCIe 6 boards start to appear. How much this matters depends on exactly you want to connect. Surprisingly, a high-end graphics card won’t necessarily benefit from a top-speed PCIe interface. Once a game’s assets and code have been loaded onto the card, the GPU mostly works locally, using its own dedicated graphics memory and display outputs; adding a faster connection to the CPU and system RAM makes little difference to…

SCORE PRICE £2,333 (£2,800 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The line between gaming PCs and creative workstations has never been slimmer, and the Scan 3XS Edge iCue sits bang on it. Switch the fans to white using the Corsair iCue software that gives this PC its name and you have a stylish, understated workstation; choose the Interstellar profile instead and you’ll be bombarded with distracting flashing colours to set a gamer’s heart pulsing. But Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5080 GPU defines this PC. As we cover on the previous pages, this is the second release in Nvidia’s long-awaited RTX 50-series, and while the RTX 5080 is significantly less powerful than the RTX 5090, it represents far better value for money – and has the advantage that you can buy one. RTX 5090…

SCORE PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from geekom.co.uk When I spoke to Geekom at CES, the A6 proved to be the hot topic. While the A8 (see issue 363, p85) is popular thanks to its incredibly small footprint and 0.47-litre volume, not to mention its stylish aluminium alloy frame, many potential Geekom customers wanted a cheaper option. Something closer in price to the £535 Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro (see issue 363, p91), which won our recent mini PCs Labs. The A6, then, is Geekom’s answer. With a selling price of £499 (I’ll ignore the £599 list price), it’s £220 cheaper than the A8 despite using the exact same chassis. That means two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports on the front alongside the 3.5mm combo jack and power switch, a full-size…

SCORE PRICE £1,000 (£1,200 inc VAT) from store.acer.com You could be forgiven for thinking we have reviewed the Acer Swift 14 AI before, because we have: last month, in fact. But that was its Intel incarnation (see issue 366, p48), and this month it’s the turn of Qualcomm. Acer only sells one Qualcomm model, powered by the mid-range Snapdragon X Plus chip. But don’t confuse mid-range with slow, as there are ten powerful cores tucked inside; that’s why the Swift 14 AI thundered to 13,295 in Geekbench 6’s multicore benchmark, over 2,000 more than the Core Ultra 7 258V in the Intel version we tested last month. Another benefit of choosing Qualcomm is that it will be almost as fast on battery power as it is on the mains, while…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews The quality of Clevo chassis keeps on improving, which is great news for PCSpecialist. It, like every other British PC maker, relies on Chinese and Taiwanese companies for their laptop designs, and this is one of the best. You’ll notice the all-metal build the moment you pick it up, along with the MIL-STD 810 sticker to indicate resistance to drops, shakes and extreme heat or cold. This is also the first British Copilot+ PC we’ve seen, thanks to the Intel Core Ultra 5 226V’s 40 TOPS NPU. It’s by no means the quickest chip in Intel’s range, but the solid Geekbench scores below reflect how nippy Windows 11 Home feels. There’s even gaming potential, with 35fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider…

Total value this month £176 DiskImage 19 Professional If you’ve ever been through the shock of data loss, or spent half a working week rebuilding a broken system, you’ll know the importance of creating and maintaining regular, full backups of your computer and its drives. Having a fallback copy of both Windows – including all your favourite apps and painstakingly crafted settings – and your irreplaceable documents, media and other files is a no-brainer. The only question is: what’s the best way to go about managing it? As part of this month’s software download bundle, we’re offering O&O DiskImage 19 Professional, which could well be the answer. It provides all the tools you need for backing up individual documents – such as selected files and folders – and for creating comprehensive…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk While the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (see p70) is a superlative smartphone, the regular Galaxy S25 provides a more affordable alternative – and may well be the smarter purchase. The cost of admission to Samsung’s ecosystem is much lower than the Ultra, starting at £799 for the 128GB edition or £859 with 256GB of storage, putting the S25 head to head with the Google Pixel 9 (see issue 362, p58) and the basic Apple iPhone 16 (see issue 363, p68). For those seeking something more substantial there’s also the Galaxy S25+ variant, which has a larger 6.7in display and a bigger battery for an extra £140. Both models come in Icyblue, Navy, Silver Shadow and Mint finishes; if you buy directly…

SCORE PRICE £64 (£73 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk It’s no surprise that Dell knows how to make excellent backpacks: it ships around 40 million laptops each year, and they need protection. It’s been making backpacks for years, and this shows in the attention to detail here. Crucially, your laptop will stay protected. There’s heavy cushioning at the rear and the bottom, with a dedicated sleeve to prevent scratches from neighbouring items. Dell states that the largest laptop dimensions are 360 x 260 x 20mm, and the fractionally larger PCSpecialist Fusion 16 (see p63) slipped in easily. The 23-litre backpack’s capacity is spread across two main sections and two smaller pockets. The rear is for laptops or a tablet (it can be locked thanks to loops built into the zip sliders),…

SCORE WEBSITE fedoraproject.org Fedora celebrated its 20th birthday in 2023, which makes it one of the longest-established distros on test. It has an impressive heritage, with roots in the Red Hat Linux project. The association continues to the present day, with Red Hat employees contributing to Fedora’s development, Red Hat itself sponsoring Fedora, and – in a virtuous circle – innovations rolled out in Fedora feeding back into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you use Red Hat in a business environment, it therefore makes a lot of sense to opt for Fedora at home. A new build is released roughly every six months and supported for 13 months, so this is a distro that refreshes regularly but doesn’t require an update (patches aside) more than once a year if you’re…

SCORE WEBSITE manjaro.org Manjaro is the only Arch-based distro on test. Along with the Arm variant, for phones, there’s the x86 variant – and naturally that’s the one we tested. The distro is available with a choice of desktops: KDE Plasma, Xfce and Gnome as official images, supplemented by community images featuring Cinnamon (as seen in Linux Mint), i3 and Sway WM. We opted for KDE Plasma as it was presented first in the list of official images. Our build, available in Minimal and Full flavours, was released on 16 December last year. Manjaro uses a rolling release model in which the core is continually upgraded as replacement builds become available. That means you shouldn’t need to do a large manual update at any point. As such, there’s not really…

SCORE WEBSITE pop.system76.com Developer System76 describes Pop!_OS as an operating system for STEM and creative professionals who use their computer as a tool to discover and create. In part, this is made possible by some clever UI tweaks that help you navigate the interface more quickly. Enable the Auto-Tiling feature, for instance, and it will generate a mosaic of application windows, which dynamically rearranges as your windows multiply. You can use keyboard shortcuts or trackpad gestures to navigate from one window to another, or drag and drop the windows themselves – in which case a semi-opaque overlay demonstrates the space they’ll occupy when you release them. When you do this, other windows rearrange to fit. The way you find and launch apps has been rethought, too. Press the Windows/symbol key…

As workforces become more mobile, businesses may find traditional file-sharing using on-premises servers holding them back. Cloud file-sharing is the ideal alternative as these services offer secure and convenient ways for remote workers to collaborate with colleagues and clients regardless of their location. Cloud services require no upfront investment in hardware or maintenance contracts and all reputable providers implement best security practices to ensure your data is safe. There’s no need to connect remote workers to the main office over complex virtual private networks (VPNs) either, as cloud services are designed to allow users to seamlessly access work documents in the cloud anytime, from anywhere and from their choice of device. An unprecedented demand has presented SMBs with a huge choice of affordable cloud file-sharing services. This month, we review…

SCORE PRICE £19.90 exc VAT per user per month billed yearly from sharefile.com Progress Software offers an impressive portfolio of data and infrastructure management solutions, and its recent acquisition of ShareFile adds sophisticated cloud file-sharing and collaboration to the mix. ShareFile is available in a range of plans starting at 1TB of cloud storage per user, with options to upgrade capacity as demand increases. ShareFile Premium costs less than £20 per user per month when billed yearly, and all plans support a generous 100GB maximum file size. It offers a wealth of features including file-syncing and versioning, custom portal branding, automated workflows, email encryption and malware protection, plus projects and templates for streamlining repetitive tasks. Unlike most of its rivals, ShareFile supports two different types of user. Only those defined…

SCORE PRICE £270 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Netgear moved into the business Wi-Fi 7 space last year with its WBE750 access point (AP), which offers a mighty BE18400 rating. Its £563 price tag won’t endear it to SMBs, though, with the WBE710 offering a more affordable option. As you’d expect, compromises have been made: the 10GbE port in the WBE750 is downgraded to a 2.5GbE multi-gigabit port and it has a much lower BE9400 rating. On the plus side, the WBE710 supports the ultrawide Wi-Fi 7 320MHz channels and MLO, which allows compliant end-user devices to simultaneously connect to multiple bands on the AP for increased throughput and reduced latency. The WBE710 can function as a standalone device or be cloud-managed from Netgear’s Insight web portal. Measuring only 157mm square…

SAVE 30%* ORDER SECURELY ONLINE magazinesdirect.com/pdv/DH44C 0330 333 1113 QUOTE OFFER CODE: DH44C Please allow 28 days for delivery, UK only. Future Publishing Limited reserves the right to limit offers of this kind to one per household. Other great reasons to subscribe… • Save on newsstand price. • Every issue of PC Pro delivered direct to your door. • Get all the tips, product reviews and security updates early. PRINT EDITION £25.99 for 6 months DIGITAL EDITION £21.80 for 6 months Offer closes 1st September 2025. Offer open to new UK subscribers only. Pricing is guaranteed every 6 months and we will notify you in advance of any price changes. Please allow up to six weeks for delivery of your first subscription issue (up to eight weeks overseas). The full subscription rate…

If you aren’t au fait with governing law, you may be giving carte blanche to the foreign company you’re working with – and that would be a faux pas About 15 years ago I went on a business trip to Paris. While it sounds glamorous, the purpose was to attend a data room. It wasn’t a modern-day data room, which requires just a laptop, internet connection and multi-factor authentication to visit, and you can come and go as you please. This was more like a less fun version of an escape room, where you’re trapped in an underground chamber and not allowed to leave until you’ve decoded all the paper documents within. We’d been sent there in connection with the purchase of a French firm. We were acting for the…

If there’s a more confused market than that for videoconferencing devices, I haven’t seen or heard of it. A year ago Kensington showered me with little boxes containing USB-connected cameras, for plug-and-play, work-from-home activities – all on what I think of as businesslike, working-day applications. By that I mean the hardware emphasises all-day high-resolution video. Most of these little boxes have stereo microphones, too, though they can be delivered by an innocuous aperture somewhere on the casing. These desktop cameras are only a couple of hundred quid at the most. The strange thing is that they are comprehensively out-performed by an average smartphone camera. My video setup is a ruinous mess of tangled-up fossil devices I should have recycled years ago. I find a perverse appeal in the bizarre Logitech…

ON SALE Thursday 3 April 2025 Features Tweak Windows to meet your needs We’re stuck with Windows 11 for a while, so make it work exactly like you want it to. We show you how using the best free and paid-for add-ons. Features Understanding reasoning LLMs If you want to know how GPT-4 and other LLMs work, read next month’s magazine. Not only will we pierce the hype, but we’ll help you make sense of it all without using ChatGPT. Features What you need to know about CPUs Whether AMD, Intel or Qualcomm, it’s becoming increasingly hard to navigate the mess of chips, code names and capabilities. We’re here to help. Labs Creative AI services How well does Midjourney really compare to the best of its rivals, whether that’s Adobe…