Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2020 in PC Pro

THANK YOU, EVERYONE, for gathering here today. I know that Virtual Reality, or VR as he liked to be called, lives on in all our hearts. I would like to celebrate what might have been. You soared too close to the stars, young VR, but my how you soared. Some of you will know that I was a friend of VR’s almost since the beginning. When others pointed, even laughed, I jumped to his defence. “Too heavy,” you taunted, “too sweaty, too demanding”. And while I would never have said this to his face – VR had feelings too – there were elements of what you said that were impossible to deny. Let us tackle those criticisms one by one. Too heavy. Yes, it’s true. He demanded we cover our…

1 Google reveals updated Pixels Google took the lid off its latest box of hardware toys, with the company announcing the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL phones (see p62), Pixel Buds 2 earphones, the Pixel Go Chromebook as well as smart home devices. At its Made by Google event in New York City, the company also announced that its Stadia gaming platform would launch on 19 November and be supported by the Pixel 4 handsets. 2 Bogus adware plaguing Google’s Play store Adware is thriving in Google’s Play store, with research from security firm ESET spotting 172 malicious apps in the shopfront and 335m installations in September, despite Google’s efforts to reduce harmful software. According to the research, revenue-generating code hidden in apps meant ads were served even when…

We live in paranoid times, and at least part of that paranoia is being provoked by advances in technology. New techniques of surveillance and prediction cut two ways: they can be used to prevent crime and to predict illness, but they can also be abused for social control and political repression. Which of these one sees as more important is becoming a matter of high controversy. Recent protests in Hong Kong highlight the way that sophisticated facial recognition tech, when combined with CCTV built into special lampposts, can enable a state to track and arrest individuals at will. But the potential problems go way further than this, which is merely an extension of current law-enforcement technology. Huge advances in AI and deep learning are making it possible to refine the…

PRICE £567 (£680 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk If you’ve always longed for a ThinkPad but been put off by the high asking price, Lenovo is dangling this tempting carrot: a 13in business-focused laptop with much of the ruggedness found on ThinkPads, yet at a remarkably low price. The switch from black to industrial grey is no coincidence, as Lenovo is hoping to woo a younger audience of buyers who consider the traditional Think Pad as too unfashionable to go with their topknot and almond-milk latte. What’s most impressive about the Think Book, though, is that Lenovo retains so much of the ThinkPad heritage while keeping the price down. For instance, it still feels rugged, with an aluminium chassis that’s reassuringly cool to the touch. There’s no military-standard testing to back…

PRICE £658 (£790 inc VAT) from uk-store.acer.com I was mightily impressed by the sleek Acer TravelMate X5 last month (see issue 302, p60), with Acer offering a high-quality 13in business ultraportable for £900. The X3 may sound like it’s smaller still, but in fact this is a 14in and comparatively chunky machine. But that’s fine. If power is more important to you than portability then there are advantages to going up in girth. The most obvious is that a larger chassis gives more room for cooling, and that in turn means that you can expect the processor inside your machine to keep going at its maximum speed for longer. And so it proved here. While the X5 I tested last month included a Core i7-8565U processor that promised boost speeds…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) frompcpro.link/303echo For those who have been following the smart speaker revolution, the third-generation Echo looks remarkably familiar. But it’s not because Amazon has retained the shell from the second-generation Echo. Instead, it takes its design cues and innards from the second generation Echo Plus (see issue 291, p64), only without the advanced smart-home connectivity that comes courtesy of its built-in hub. In terms of audio credentials, they’re identical, with the Echo 3 inheriting the 3in neodymium woofer and 0.8in tweeter from the Amazon Echo Plus 2. That’s an excellent upgrade over the 2.5in woofer and 0.6in tweeter in the second generation Echo. This third-generation Echo (let’s call it the Echo 3 for short) and the Echo Plus are also impossible to tell apart in real…

PRICE 46mm, £200 (£240 inc VAT) from huawei.com Don’t tell Donald Trump, but the Huawei Watch GT 2 is listening. It comes with a microphone and speaker, so you can answer phone calls on the Watch GT 2 when you’re in range of your phone. The good news for Mr President? There’s no cellular version of the watch, so probably no need to ban it. This doesn’t mean you have a shortage of options. Not only does the Watch GT 2 come in two sizes – 42mm and 46mm – but you can buy straps in an array of colours. The Watch GT 2’s stainless steel and plastic casing looks great with sporty silicone straps and leather wristbands alike, and it’s comfortable: it’s 22g lighter than the equivalent-sized Samsung Galaxy…

PRICE £10/month, £55/yr, £74/2yr, £76/3yr (7 devices, all prices inc VAT)from cyberghostvpn.com CyberGhost makes a low low-key first impression, appearing as a simple black pop-up above your system tray. “Best server location” is preselected – a default option default that automatically finds a fast, secure server in a near by location – so all you need do to get connected is click the large yellow switch icon. There’s a lot more to CyberGhost than this, though. Clicking the dropdown gives you instant access to popular servers in France, Germany and the US, plus one-click options to unblock Netflix US or BBC iPlayer. Select “More servers…” (or click the tasteful yellow tab) and the interface expands into its full-sized, windowed form. From here you can browse servers across 61 countries, or…

PRICE £9.49/month, £57/yr, £38/2yr (unlimited devices, all prices inc VAT) from surfshark.com Most VPNs let you connect three, five or even ten even at once; Surf shark lifts the bar completely and allows unlimited simultaneous connections. That makes it perfect for a busy household packed with computers, phones and smart appliances: you’ll never need to worry about disconnecting device so that device B can get onto the VPN. You’d expect that freedom to come at a cost, but Surfshark’s rates are very competitive. An annual subscription works out to £4.79 a month, but you would be daft to take that deal, because a two-year licence is actually cheaper, working out to just £1.59 a month – the lowest price you’ll pay for any of the 16 VPNs on test this…

If you want the protection of a VPN with an absolute minimum of extra software and subscriptions to think about, how about one that's completely free and built right into your web browser? Mozilla is currently trialling an official VPN extension for Firefox-dubbed Firefox Private Network-as part of its "Test Pilot" beta programme. Before you get too excited, there are a few points to be aware of. First, although the free VPN is supported by a huge global network of servers operated by Cloudflare, it doesn't allow you to choose your own exit node: when you turn the VPN on, you'll be automatically connected to a server that's as close as possible to your actual location. This means that, while the VPN can get you into sites that are normally…

PRICE £60/yr,£96/2yr,£129/3yr (5 devices, all prices inc VA T)from hidemyass.com If you've a long memory you might recognise HMA as the VPN that, back in 2012, landed LulzSec hacker Cody Andrew Kretsinger in prison by sharing details of his online activity with the UK authorities. Since then, though, the company has been bought out by Avast and now boasts that it records no information about the websites you've been visiting, nor the data you’ve transferred. The service is completely separate from A vast 's own-brand Secure Line VPN, however, and differs from it in several ways. One is the sheer global reach of the service, while SecureLine offers servers in 34 regions, HMA Pro can route you into a whopping 190 countries - more than any other VPN on test.…

PRICE £20/yr (1 device),£30/yr (5 devices), £70/yr (10 devices) (all prices inc VA 1) from uk.norton.com Norton isn't the only security specialist that's branched out into private networking: on previous pages you'll have seen offerings from Avast and F-Secure. Nor ton Secure VPN undershoots both, though, to take the dubious title of this month 's worst VPN. To be fair, the software does what it promises to. You can browse via servers in 29 countries, and picking a US server gave us fuss-free access to Netflix US. Performance wasn't atrocious either: our Swiss connection was lightning-fast at 105 Mbits/sec, and we got strong download speeds of around 68Mbits/sec from both New York and Japan. Norton doesn't let you pick a specific exit node in your chosen country, however, so we…

PRICE Free(5OOMB/month), $900/month,$00/yr(5 devices) from tunnelbear.com Tunnel Bear endears itself right away with its playful ursine theme - and it's one of the few VPNs to offer a free service, which will be music to your ears if you only need a secure connection every now and then. It's not exactly generous though, with a transfer cap ofjust500MB per month·, you can get an extra gigabyte by tweeting about the service, but that still feels rather mean when Hotspot Shield gives you 500MB for free every single day. The selection of virtual locations is also one of the narrowest here, covering just 22 territories, with no option to pick a specific city within your chosen country. On the plus side, TunnelBear gave us some very good download speeds: we averaged…

We've hammered home the point this month that a VPN can safeguard your online privacy. But at the end of the day, if the police come knocking with a court order, your VPN provider has no choice but to cooperate. You can reduce that risk by choosing a service outside of your local jurisdiction, but you can't wholly eliminate it. For the maximum protection, therefore, you might consider using Tor instead. Similar to a VPN, this technology routes your connection through remote servers to make it harder to trace. The difference is that Tor sends everything through (at least) three randomly selected servers in turn, and applies multiple levels of encryption so that no single server ever knows both the origin of your connection and its content. This multilayered approach…

PRICE £175 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk If you're looking to minimise your environmental impact, an inkjet is the way to go - and you won't do much better than Epson's WorkForce Pro WF-C5290DW. Throughout our tests, this small workgroup printer never consumed more than 27W, which is around 2% of the peak draw of an equivalent business laser. It's cheap to run, too. With XXL black and XL colour ink cartridges, typical mono and colour pages work out to just 1.2p and SP respectively. Be warned, though, that the printer is supplied with small starter ink bags·, Epson doesn't quote a page life, but our testing suggests that they're only good for around 500 pages. Despite all of this, there's very little in the way of technical trade-off. The WF-C5290DW…

PRICE 16TB(4 x 4TB),£1,325exc VAT from span.com Buffalo Technology is upping its game in the SMB NAS market with the newTS6ooo series of TeraStation appliances. Along with an updated hardware package, Buffalo has added support for NAS and iSCSI LUN snapshots, plus a service for securing IP SAN volumes to remote Buffalo appliances. This month, we've tested the four-bay, 1U TS6400RN. There's no diskless option, but you can have the appliance pre populated with 4TB or STBSeagate Iron Wolf drives. A 24-hour exchange service for failed drives is included in the standard three-year warranty, although this may be invalidated if you fit your own drives. One key upgrade from the older TS5010 range is that the Alpine CPU has been replaced with a 2. 1GHz Intel Atom C353S. You also…

I was in my local pub, enjoying a nice pint, when my friend Mike sidled up to me and asked if I could take a look at his laptop. I occasionally do this for friends in the village – it’s a good neighbourly thing. Of course I don’t charge for the favour; if nothing else, the billable rate would be somewhat hilarious. So I’m happy to help in return for the occasional pint. This isn’t the first time I’ve looked at Mike’s computer. He is not a computer wizard, just a normal user. And, like many users, his computer gets into a tangle every few years. A few days later, he dropped around his aged Toshiba laptop, complete with a Pentium of unspecified nature and a whopping 4GB of RAM.…

Davey Winder While it’s easy to blame service providers for playing fast and loose with our data security, Davey sets out the steps we can take ourselves. See p118 Dick Pountain Think you make your own decisions? Dick examines the larger forces that guide our decisions through “nudges”, and why it’s only going to get worse. See p22 Nik Rawlinson Things people never say #77: “Windows is brilliant at finding the files I’m after”. Luckily, Nik provides the tools to make us all search wizards on p42 Jon Honeyball If you have a slow laptop then Jon has some useful advice – but unless you’re a friend from his local pub, he won’t fix it for you. Find out why on p130…

▶Microsoft Surface Duo Microsoft’s record with smartphones is roughly akin to Donald Trump’s record with international diplomacy, but the company is giving it yet another go. The latest Microsoft phone is the surface Duo, a clamshell device that will run on Android. The Surface Duo is a foldable phone, in a similar vein to Samsung’s recent Galaxy Fold. But instead of using a folding screen, the Surface Duo has two distinct 5.6in panels linked by sturdy-looking hinges. Microsoft foresees the two screens displaying separate features or apps, a different take from other foldable handsets that double the screen size of a single app. APIs will allow developers to tailor apps to the dual displays. The company believes it is creating a device that’s better for productivity than a standard phone,…

@njkobie The internet is broken, though that’s hardly news. Facebook doesn’t bring the world closer together, as Mark Zuckerberg once hoped, but drives people with slightly divergent opinions further apart. Twitter was designed to share news and information instantly and across borders, but it’s much better for sharing abuse. As for Google’s goal, to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”? Searching for anything specific is nigh on impossible. Don’t believe that Google is useless? Here’s an example. Try to find out the date and time of your local Bonfire Night fireworks display. The first result I see when I search “Walthamstow Bonfire Night 2019” is a Google-made “Events” box informing me that Bonfire Night is the fifth of November, a fact I very much remember.…

With all the excitement regarding Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), it’s worth considering the support router manufacturers provide for existing kit. Recently, Netgear published an R7000 firmware update, which I quickly installed to keep Davey Winder happy. However, it not only broke my Google Chromecast Ultras, but also removed half a dozen features (such as DLNA). Thus, I can’t update my router to fix security issues if I want the router to keep the features I paid good money for. The strong suspicion is that Netgear dropped these features to make space for new subscription services (antivirus and parental controls) that I just don’t want. Your shiny new Wi-Fi 6 router may have a shorter shelf life than you think. Or am I being too cynical? Darien Graham-Smith replies: We raised this…

HOME & OUTDOORS Asus RT-AX88U AX6000 PRICE £261 from amazon.co.uk There’s only one problem with testing the latest technology: once the tests are complete, you have to send it back to the manufacturer. So have some sympathy for Darien Graham-Smith, who’s reviewed all the latest Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) routers and has thus seen the future. “I want an 802.11ax router and adapters for all my devices,” he said. “Having seen how great the technology is, I’m impatient to switch as soon as possible!” When we pinned Darien down on which exact 802.11ax router he wanted, the Asus was his top pick. “It’s not the fastest for last-gen devices, but 802.11ax performance is simply fantastic.” Now to let him down gently that we’re not actually going to buy it for him…

PRICE £958 (£1,150 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com At any one time, there’s a sweet spot for computers. A big-selling product type where the major manufacturers are simultaneously dropping prices and improving quality in their quest to usurp rivals. That sweet spot, for the moment at least, is the 13in ultraportable. While the Dell XPS 13 has been the 13in laptop to beat for some time, HP undoubtedly produced the bargain of 2018 with its Envy 13 (see issue 288, p61). At £849 for a Core i5/8GB/256GB spec, it was unbeatable value. This year, it’s set its sights higher by boosting quality and dropping prices: the Core i5 version costs £749 direct from HP, while this version (the aq0003na) with a Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD is…

PRICE 64GB, £557 (£669 inc VAT) from store.google.com My immediate reaction to the Google Pixel 4 was disappointment. While it offers a series of firsts for the Pixel range – two rear cameras rather than one, a Snapdragon 855 processor, a 90Hz screen, even radar-sensing gesture controls – there was still no immediate sense that it had jumped ahead of its rivals. That’s despite a new design. Google has ditched the two-tone look of its previous three generations of Pixels, instead opting for a simple single-tone colour scheme available in “Just Black”, “Clearly White” and “Oh So Orange”. Each is surrounded by a curved, textured black trim, with a coloured power button and volume rocker on the right edge. There’s no notch, either; instead, the 8MP selfie camera and earpiece…

PRICE 40mm, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Apple is yet to make big changes to the Apple Watch with its annual iterations, but even by its standards the Series 5 is a small upgrade: the only major new feature is its always-on screen. How annoying for the competition, then, that it’s still the best smart watch you can buy. Small change As with the Watch 4, the Watch 5 can only be paired with an iPhone and comes in two sizes: 40mm and 44mm. With either you can pick between a GPS-only model and one that also has cellular connectivity, the latter of which is supported by EE, O2 and Vodafone in the UK. While the always-on screen is the key new feature on the Apple Watch Series 5,…

PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from logitech.com We all know that mice get lonely when left on their own, which is why Logitech has created the wireless MX Keys to accompany its excellent MX Master 3 mouse (see issue 301, p65). Finished in the same industrial chic grey, the moment you lift the MX Keys from its eco-friendly packaging it’s obvious you’ve bought a top-quality device: its all-metal plate only adds to the feeling. Most crucially, though, the MX Keys is lovely to type on. Concave key tops mean that your fingers sit comfortably in place whether you’re mid-flow or sitting in “home” position, ready to start touch typing. And if you’re used to a mechanical keyboard, it’s pleasantly quiet, too. The keys don’t have the same triumphant feel of…

PRICE $13/month, $60/6 months, $100/yr (5 devices) from expressvpn.com ExpressVPN is based in the British Virgin Islands – a tiny Caribbean nation that is, despite the name, blissfully unburdened by European surveillance agreements and legislation. You can’t do much better when it comes to privacy and the ExpressVPN app itself opens up in a similarly small and unencumbered form. To help you hit the ground running, it immediately suggests a “smart location” and remembers two recent connections so you can easily restore a closed session. If you wish to virtually wander further afield, clicking your currently selected location brings up a list of recommended servers, with a search box allowing you to jump straight to a particular location. Clicking on “All Locations” lets you browse a long list of the…

PRICE £65/yr, £120/2yr, £180/3yr (5 devices, all prices inc VAT) from avast.com If you’ve used Avast’s free internet security software lately then you’ll already have seen in-program ads recommending the company’s SecureLine VPN as an extra layer to your online protection. However, while this fuss-free VPN certainly can protect your privacy, it lags behind the competition in numerous ways. Let’s start with platform support. Client software is available for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, but there’s no support for Linux, Chromebooks or smart TVs. Nor can you configure SecureLine at the router level to protect all your traffic, so while your subscription covers five simultaneous connections, anything that doesn’t run one of the four major plat forms is left out in the cold. There’s an extension for Chrome, and for…

PRICE £25/yr(3 devices),£50/yr(7 devices), £70/2yr (7 devices) (all prices inc VAT) from f-secure.com F-Secure's Freedome VPN offers an attractive, flexible pricing structure. If you only need three connections then you can pay just £2.08 a month on an annual contract, while a seven-device subscription comes out at £4.17 a month on a yearly contract or £2.92 a month biennially. However, not all types of device are covered. F-Secure offers apps for the main desktop and mobile platforms, but rather snippily declares on its website that it doesn't consider a Linux version "feasible". There's no support for using the VPN with a smart TV or router either, nor any browser extensions, making this one of the least versatile VPNs around. It's not overloaded with features, either. The big, blue interface exposes…

PRICE Free (500M B/day,£11/month, £120/yr, £216/2yr (5 devices, all prices inc VAT) from hotspotshield.com If you just need a VPN for light us age - say, transferring the odd document - then Hotspot Shield could be just the thing. It offers a free service tier that lets you transfer 500MB of data a day, via more than 70 countries. Better yet, the free Chrome extension has no data cap and can route your web traffic through more than 25 virtual locations. Sign up for the full service and Hotspot Shield is fairly expensive. Even a two-year deal works out to £9 a month, going up to £10 for the yearly package and £11 for a month-by-month subscription. Still, what you get for that is best-in-class performance. Hotspot Shield wowed us…

PRICE $6.95/month, $36/6 months, $40/yr(10 devices)from privateinternetaccess.com Private Internet Access - let's just call it PIA-opens up as a floating window crammed with buttons and widgets. It's daunting at first, but techies will appreciate all the information on offer, and you can customise the layout to hide the parts that aren't important to you. A certain technical bent is evident elsewhere, too. For example, although the client software doesn't support split tunnelling, you'll find a tutorial on the website showing you how to use PowerShell to configure it at the OS level. In the absence of an official client for Fire TV devices, there's also a step-by-step guide to sideloading the standard Android app. Linux fans meanwhile will be pleased to learn that PIA gives them a proper graphical client,…

PRICE Free (10GBofdata/month), $9/month, $49/yr(unlimited devices) from windscribe.com Windscribe is a generous VPN. It's one of only two services this month to permit unlimited simultaneous connections (the other being Surfshark), and it even lets you transfer 10 GB of secure data per month for free. Subscription terms are admirably flexible too. A standard annual licence comes out to around £3. 30 a month, but if you don't need access to all 66 countries where Windscribe operates you can build your own plan. Each location costs $1 per month for 10G B of data, with unlimited data across all your locations costing an extra dollar. This means you can get unlimited access to Windscribe's dedicated US Netflix server for just $2 a month, with no lock-in. You can also I ease…

PRICE £358 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Kyocera's Eco sys P6235cdn is no lightweight laser: it targets medium-to-large workgroups with serious printing needs. Its long life print drum and developer are each rated for 200,000 pages and they come with a three-year warranty (whichever comes first), so there's a good chance you will only ever need concern yourself with replacing toner. Even that's not something you will have to do very often. The starter mono and colour cartridges supplied in the box are good for 6,ooo pages and 5,ooo pages respectively - and replacements are rated at a massive 13,000 and 11,000 pages. That translates to low ongoing costs of just 1p per mono page and 5.1p for colour. There's no need to be constantly reloading paper either, as the P6235cd's…

PRICE Diskless,£2,100excVAT from span.com If data protection is your priority, you'11 find that Qsan's XCubeNAS appliances have plenty to offer. The XN 5012RE is the latest to join this burgeoning family, and like all its stable mates, it runs Qsan's QSM software, which is based on a robust ZOL (ZFS on Linux) architecture. Snapshot services are excellent, with QSM's copy-on-write feature offering unlimited snapshots as standard. Data deduplication services are included too, along with real-time data tiering and optional WORM (write once read many) policies for long-term data protection. Internally, the XN5012RE is powered by a dual-core 2.9GHz Celeron G3930 CPU and comes with 8GB ofDDR4 memory (which can be expanded to 64GB). It presents 12 hot-swap SATA drive bays; if you need more, consider stepping up to Qsan's XN5012R,…

My real-world computing involves a real-world shop. This means calls from sales reps trying to persuade me to stock new widgets and wonders. That is their job of course: to push the latest and greatest with a chirpy swagger intended to soften me psychologically so I’ll order ten pallets of USB-C fondue sets. I’d love to see one of them chat with Neville. He is an accounts clerk for a small local business and his work machine was the suspect in the boatload of racy emails that was received by the company’s entire address book. We had spoken on the phone and I’d advised him to change his email password immediately. As he didn’t know how to do this, I suggested a call to his ISP would be useful. According…

Sensitive to the accusation of living a bit high off the hog, I begin this month with a story that could not be physically closer to home. We are separated from the outside here by a car park, which has yet to fall victim to the dead, Terminator-like hand of unattended operation. There’s a guard’s room, with a neat little cooker, a loo (mostly these days used by Ubers) and a PC for internet access and email. Following some recent shenanigans, we’ve had a literal changing of the guard, and the new boy has proved to be a fast learner and natural diplomat. Cups of tea in the guard’s booth are now quite a frequent mid-morning thing, and it was during one such that the new boy unburdened himself. “Bloody…

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future Forget walking down the high street to queue at your bank branch to set up an account, make a deposit or do any other basics of business banking. Thanks to the rise of mobile and online banking, such tasks can be done with a few taps on a smartphone between meetings. But the future of business banking isn’t just digital – it’s about integrated services and linking up with third-party software to make your finances as streamlined as possible. That’s the idea behind open banking, which is a set of regulations that lets your financial data be shared, opening up the way for new services and apps. Indeed, it’s helped spark the rise of so-called “challenger” banks,…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS NEW ENTRY HP Envy 13 (2019) Sleek ultraportable for a price that’s right, £1,150 from johnlewis.com Last year’s top bargain buy becomes this year’s top all-round choice thanks to a high-quality Full HD screen, Nvidia MX250 graphics and a stylish design. This price includes a Core i7, 16GB of memory and a 1TB SSD, but you can save £400 by buying the Core i5 model with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD direct from HP’s website. REVIEW Issue 303, p57 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 15in (2018) A machine for true power users with amazing specifications, including that infamous Core i9 CPU and up to 4TB of SSD storage. From £2,399 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 Razer Blade 15 Mercury White A beautifully made gaming laptop with…

@bazzacollins Spoiler alert: editing this month’s PC Probe (see p14) was a depressing job. Not because Stewart Mitchell’s writing was anything less than his brilliant best, but because of the topic. At the age of 42, I am pretty much washed up when it comes to pursuing a career in IT. It’s not that those already in the IT industry should consider themselves pensioned off as soon as they hit their forties – although Stewart does find strong evidence that the industry casts aside experienced staff. It’s that my chances of getting a foot in the door are about as high as my chances of eloping with the Queen. This is particularly true should I wish to join a startup. These fledgling companies aren’t interested in what someone with a…

In issue 302 of PC Pro we published an article that included inaccurate statements about the website MoneySavingExpert, and its comparison tool Broadband Unbundled. On p43 of the article it said: “MoneySavingExpert even admitted to stealing exclusives from other sites!”. Further to additional information provided by MoneySavingExpert, we accept this is untrue and we apologise for this statement. MoneySavingExpert.com has clarified that when it becomes aware of an exclusive offer from another site that may help users save money, its editors get in contact with them and always ask for their permission before featuring it on their tool. See broadband. moneysavingexpert.com for full details. We would also like to clarify that MoneySavingExpert always selects deals based on what is best for users, and not on whether the site receives payment.…

We’re living in something of a post-truth age. Things are stated as fact, with little or no evidence to back them up. Claims about products and technologies are made without being challenged. And few areas are subject to the pulping of the truth more than so-called green technology. Innovations, ideas and schemes arrive that are meant to make the planet greener. But when you start chipping away at the veneer of these claims or truisms, there's often little to back them up. Here, I'm going to investigate five common claims about "green" technology to see if there is any truth behind them and whether you're doing any good for the environment by adhering to them - or whether you're simply being hoodwinked. Dark mode saves battery life Dark mode is…

PRICE 32GB, £290 (£349 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk I have a simple answer when friends ask, “What laptop do you recommend for around £300 to £400?” That answer: “Why don’t you buy an iPad and keyboard instead?” Good battery life, great performance and a top-quality screen go together to make for a product that, in most instances, will be far superior to a Windows 10 laptop at a similar price. All they need to do is add that keyboard and they’re good to go. As if in acknowledgement of the iPad’s rising status as an all-round productivity tool, Apple has made this easier with the addition of its “Smart Connector” keyboard interface. This three-pin magnetic connector means you can add Apple’s Smart Keyboard for a laptop-like experience. It’s the first…

PRICE Approx £1,800 (£2,160 inc VAT) from Dynabook resellers The Toshiba brand is slowly disentangling itself from the all-new Dynabook, and this is the first true Dynabook laptop we’ve seen – complete with a substantial silver logo on the lid. While you’ll still see a Tosh logo at emea.dynabook.com, and it’s embedded into the default wallpaper, this feels like the final goodbye. If you were hoping for a dramatic change to mark the event, though, you’ll be disappointed. To say this is business as usual is a statement with obviousness on a par with “Brexit is tricky, isn’t it?” The Portégé X30F-14U is finished in Toshiba’s trademark onyx blue, and if you’ve used any Portégé of the past five years then you’ll know what to expect: slim dimensions, light weight,…

PRICE £50 (£60 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/303dot The history of Amazon’s own products – misguided attempt at a smartphone aside – is one of small iterations. Whether it’s Kindles, Fire tablets or Echos, each new version brings small improvements that you weren’t aware you needed until they arrived. The Echo Dot with clock is a great example of this. Since I reviewed last year’s third-generation Echo Dot, it’s become a friendly nighttime ally. It can turn off the lights, saving me bumped knees trying to navigate the room in the dark, and play a series of sleep sounds to lull my unsettled mind to rest. But there’s a problem. While it can tell the time, I have to ask it out loud and then it shouts back at me. Not…

1 Visit the PC Pro download site at pcprodownload.co.uk. You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the card, along with your email address. We’ll send you an email to confirm that your code has been registered. On subsequent visits, you’ll be able to access the download area by entering only your email address. 2 Once you’re into the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions on the left of the product page (again, please…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from fitbit.com At the time of its launch, the Fitbit Versa proved to be a big money-spinner for a company that was struggling to keep up with the modern world of wearables. Fitbit was being squeezed from three directions: the expensive Apple Watch (seep70), cheap Chinese fitness bands such as the Xiaomi Mi Band, and by dedicated running watches from Garmin and Polar. The Versa almost single-handedly turned around the company’s fortunes, giving it first quarter of profit in ages. It’s perhaps no wonder that it’s hoping to repeat the trick with a sequel: the Fitbit Versa 2. Don’t break it If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it seems to be Fitbit’s main mantra with the Versa 2, as the company tries hard to make…

PRICE £71 (£85 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/303zoe The Zoemini photo printer is Canon’s answer to the HP Sprocket. About the size of a thick, small smartphone, it’s highly portable yet contains everything you need to print 2 x 3in photos, beamed via Bluetooth. I reviewed the standalone printer, but the range includes the Zoemini C and Zoemini S, each of which combines a printer and digital camera in a single device. Like the Sprocket family, the Zoemini uses Zink’s specialised ink-free paper, available in packs of 20 or 50. Slide open the cover, load a bundle of ten sheets, and the printer spits out the blue information page and is ready to go. You’ll also need Canon’s Mini Print app, available for iOS and Android phones; there are no PC…

Each VPN in this month’s Labs receives a star rating out of five, which takes into account performance, ease of use, features and value for money. To test performance, we install each VPN client on a standard laptop running Windows 10 Professional, connected via Ethernet to a domestic fibre broadband line rated at 110Mbits/sec. We then connect to a selection of VPN servers in different parts of the world and run speed tests using the free Ookla Speed Test tool at speedtest.net. Our reviews focus on the single-connection testing mode, which measures downstream speeds for a single download or video stream; you’ll find the results in our graphs on p94. We also try out all the features of each VPN, and rate each one for its versatility and usability. Value…

PRICE £9.15/month, £64/yr, £73/2yr, £82/3yr (6 devices, all prices inc VAT) from nordvpn.com If you’re looking for a VPN with plenty of servers, Nord VPN takes the crown. Its geographic reach is n’t quite as extensive as some rival VPNs – it has a presence in 60 countries, while HMA Pro boasts 190 – but within those nations it claims more than 5, 500 exit nodes, so you should have no problem finding a fast connection that isn’t overloaded. Indeed, there’s no need to hunt around at all if you don’t want to. You’re free to browse all the servers and compare their load estimates, but double-clicking on a country name instantly connects you to the fastest available server in that region. And we certainly can’t complain about the results.…

PRICE $13/month, $79/yr, $99/2yr (5 devices) from buffered.com Although Buffered operates out of Budapest, its VPN business is legally based in Gibraltar. That's because Gibraltarian law prohibits any data about you from being transferred outside of the territory without your consent: reassuring stuff. The service itself, however, is rudimentary. Buffered operates in just 27 countries and most countries appear to host just a single server - the exception being the US, which offers separate connections for the west coast, Midwest and east coast. One thing we like about Buffered is all the information it provides about your connection, with large-print details of transfer speeds and total bytes sent and received, as well as a readout of your external IP address. There's a speed-tester tool and a rating widget that you…

PRICE $4.95/month, $13/3 months, $23/6 months, $40/yr, $55/2yr(3 devices)from getflix.com.au Most VPNs emphasise privacy and security, but Getflix makes no bones about it: this is a service that's primarily designed for unblocking video streaming sites. And it does so in a clever way, with the standard configuration operating purely at the DNS level. This means you can watch Netflix US, Amazon Prime and a wide selection of other international streaming sites without having to route all your network traffic via the country in question - and without having to deal with the performance implications that entails. Getting set up is less user-friendly than with other VPNs, however. You have to go into the network settings of the device you want to stream to, and manually change its DNS settings to…

PRICE $10/month, $27/3 months, $78/yr (10 devices) from ipvanish.com IPVanish is one of the more liberal VPNs when it comes to device support, allowing up to ten simultaneous connections. You can use it with most types of hardware, too: native apps are offered for Linux and Amazon Fire TV devices, and the website offers setup instructions for a variety of router models. The Windows client can be used in a compact "Simple mode" - similar to Surfshark's "Mini mode" - or as a full-size window. The latter includes a live graph of upload and download speeds, and while this may not be the most useful feature in the world, it's quite pleasing to watch. We saw a creditable data rate of 106.5Mbits/sec from the Netherlands, with 49.9Mbits/sec via Japan and…

PRICE $11/month, $70/yr, $80/2yr (5 devices)from purevpn.com Pure VPN has servers inover140 countries, but you might not discover them all at first. On opening the app you're prompted to select an operating mode (options include "streaming ", "internet freedom" and "file-sharing"), which brings up a shortlist of servers deemed suitable for your purpose. They're sorted by ping time, so you can just click on the top one and get on with whatever it is you want to do. Indeed, if it's video streaming you're interested in, you can forget about virtual locations altogether, and simply scroll through a list of more than So video-on-demand services from all around the world. A click unblocks anyone of them, and there's a Fire TV client too so you can easily hop between regions…

The Labs has been part of PC Pro since day one-yet believe it or not, we've never before carried out a full-scale Labs test of VPN s. To a casual observer that might seem odd, not least since the first mainstream VPN came with Windows NT 4, which means the idea has been around for almost as long as the magazine itself. But it's only in recent years that the true value of virtual private networking has become apparent. Back in the 1990s, the focus was on businesses wanting secure LAN connections over the nascent internet. Today, thanks to the likes of Edward Snowden, we've belatedly come to recognise how important on line privacy is in our personal lives as well as our professional ones. Indeed, right now, we Brits…

PRICE £132 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk From the price tag you would be forgiven for assuming that Brother's HL-L3270CDW was a simple consumer-grade printer. Yet this colour LED desktop unit offers a 24ppm print speed in both mono and colour, a built-in duplexer and both wired and wireless networking-not to mention top-notch mobile device and cloud support as well. It looks the part too, with a flip-up 6.8cm colour touchscreen and an integrated NFC sensor for tap-to-print mobile operations, Capacity is spread across a single sheet multipurpose tray and a 250-sheet lower tray, which is long enough to take 14in legal paper as well as regular A4. As usual. you can't use both wired and wireless networking at the same time, but whichever you choose the HL-L3270CDW is simple to…

PRICE £369excVAT from printerland.co.uk Sitting in the middle of Xerox's VersaLink range, the C500DN is a colour LED printer aimed at workgroups of between five and 15 users. To that end, it offers fast 43ppm print speeds, built-in duplexing and a recommended monthly duty cycle of 10,000-pages. It also features a generous 700-sheet paper tray - which can be expanded hugely by adding up to four 550-sheet lower trays, or combining one with a high-capacity 2,000-sheet feeder. Connection options are flexible, as the C500DN sports both USB 3 and Gigabit Ethernet ports. while simultaneous 802.11n wireless services can be added for £47viaa little box that snaps in at the back. What really makes the VersaLink C500DN special, however, is Xerox's Connect Key platform. This provides a tablet-like user experience via…

EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS My recent experience with upgrading large Synology NAS (network attached storage) boxes to 10Gb Ethernet was sufficiently promising and useful that I decided to upgrade my “waste basket” Mac Pro, too. That’s because, every few months, it’s used for a specific project where I handle a multitude of large Windows virtual machines, hosted within Parallels VMs. I sometimes end up with 30 to 40 system state snapshots within the VM container, and the resultant file can be upwards of 500GB in size. Moving that around for backup purposes over Gigabit Ethernet is an exercise in frustration as the network itself is clearly the bottleneck. How to add 10Gb Ethernet to the Mac Pro? The obvious way was to use a Thunderbolt 2 to…

One of the many professional hats that I wear happens to have senior contributor at Forbes written upon it, and one of the subjects that comes up time and time again in my reports is that of misconfiguration. Sure, you can think of this as subset of the “people problem” if you like, or maybe a result of a lack of true visibility into your networks and data. However, hiding the misconfiguration issue behind the veneer of these common infosecurity tropes is dangerous. Why? Because misconfiguration, be that of a product or service, is increasingly emerging as the root cause of many security incidents I see. And it’s not just me. A recent report from McAfee, looking at risk in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) sector, suggested as many…

LABS Smartphones Yes, it’s time for our annual megatest of phones. Pixel 4 or iPhone 11? OnePlus or Huawei? Moto or Xiaomi? One thing’s for sure: if you’re thinking of buying a new phone, wait until next month to ensure you make the right choice. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim one of these compact LED flash lights (available in four colours). You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for more details. FEATURES How to fix a trouble some laptop PC Pro columnist and computer repair shop owner Lee Grant condenses his years of laptop-fixing experience into a guide. Deep dive:colour management After true blues and rich reds? Darien Graham-Smith shows how colour profiles can help you get the…