Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2021 in PC Pro

WE APPEAR TO be in the midst of a weird outbreak of common sense. I’m as surprised to write that sentence as I suspect you are to read it, but such phenomena do occasionally happen. Just like “corrections” on the stock exchange, every second decade or so technology companies pause their headlong rush for faster, smaller and more expensive, and listen to what punters genuinely want. Crazy things such as phones with longer-lasting batteries and prices that don’t require a once-in-a-lifetime inheritance. This is most obvious in the Google Pixel 5 (see p62), a supposedly flagship phone that’s priced at a not-insane £599. OnePlus pulled a similar move with its 8T (see p63), and even Apple is getting into the act. While the base model iPhone 12 (see p58) is…

Public bodies are having to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds every year to prevent scams from dominating Google’s search results, a PC Pro investigation has found. Companies have previously complained that they feel obliged to buy advertising to avoid their brand being pushed below rivals that use their company’s name in search terms. Now official public bodies are falling into the same trap. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s regulator charged with protecting consumers from financial fraud, says it feels compelled to pay Google to run adverts to counter ads from scammers that appear above “organic” search results. “It’s a massive problem the way the scammers are able to pay Google to get top place on a search for important keywords in a regulated industry, jumping ahead of…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She has a cardboard cutout of her friend Jen, which she hid behind a door during a Zoom call. Later, she opened the door and screamed because “Jen” was hiding there… @njkobie The world of work shifted to remote in March, and that meant videoconferencing. Skype et al existed before, of course, but most of my interviews and meetings in the before times were still conducted via a phone call. That’s convenient for me, because I can check notes while y’all yammer on, I need not brush my hair first and I can phone from anywhere – including but not limited to Prets, train stations, friends’ flats and once even a ski hill. Nowadays, instead of trying to find a quiet place to…

I’ve both heard (on the PC Pro podcast) and read (in the magazine) reminders recently about the importance of keeping software up to date, and it finally shamed me into sitting down and looking at a couple of updates that I’ve put off for a while now. I got as far as the “Confirm purchase” button but couldn’t bring myself to do it. My problem is that my setup as it is now works, and works perfectly, but I have experience time and again of doing updates “for security” and key software or hardware immediately stopping working. From a Windows 10 update that stopped my spirometers working (this meant I lost income until I could find a fix… and then Windows decided to push out another update, which did it…

Let’s lance the boil on Windows 10’s Game Mode right away: some consider it a complete waste of space. Us? We consider it a useful tool that’s simply been overhyped. Head to the Game Mode settings and it will tell you that “When Game Mode is on, Windows optimises your PC for play”. That makes it sound as if you’ll enjoy a huge boost to frame rates, but the reality is more mundane. With Game Mode on, Windows 10 does two things. It prevents Windows Update performing driver updates or pinging you with notifications to restart. And it “helps achieve a more stable frame rate, depending on the specific game and system”, which is a carefully written get-out clause if we’ve ever read one. In short, it should focus system…

SET UP CHILD ACCOUNTS The first thing you need to do on a family PC, if you haven’t already, is to give everyone their own account, especially the youth wing of the household. This means they don’t have the licence to wreak havoc that comes with running on the admin account, allowing them to install whatever they like – and whatever merry hell comes with the stuff they downloaded. It also allows you to impose time limits, content restrictions and so forth. To set up a child account, go to Settings, Accounts and then select “Family & others” from the left-hand menu. Click “Add a family member” and follow the instructions to set up a child account. Microsoft is now pretty insistent that kids must have their own email address…

SCORE PRICE £1,419 (£1,703 inc VAT) from uk.dynabook.com While some might criticise Dynabook for failing to make drastic changes to the Toshiba product line since it took over its laptop business, this Sharp-backed enterprise is slowly and steadily making its mark. The Portégé brand in particular now stands apart from the rest of the Dynabook portfolio, simplifying the purchasing process for business decision makers. If employees want a slim and light Dynabook laptop, they should buy a Portégé: the only job now is to choose a size of screen and the spec. Sharp’s biggest influence is on the screen and, having reviewed many Dynabook laptops over the past two years, I can firmly recommend you opt for an IGZO display. This is Sharp’s own panel and, as a rule of…

SCORE PRICE 32GB WI-FI, £274(£329 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Iterative updates aren’t sexy, but they’re my favourite. Company A (Apple) takes established and market-leading product B (the iPad) and improves it a smidgen. It’s a win-win for everyone. So it is with this eighth-generation iPad. There’s nothing surprising, nothing ground breaking, but that doesn’t matter one jot because it remains the best tablet you can buy for the price. And, if you buy the keyboard as well, it makes a mighty fine budget laptop replacement. Design changes (or lack thereof) I often begin a review with a deep dive on the design, but since the new iPad 10.2in is exactly the same as the 10.2in iPad from 2019 (see issue 303, p50), that feels redundant. Its dimensions are exactly the…

SCORE PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from store.google.com The Pixel 5 is a phone for our times. Instead of a £1,000 handset stuffed with cuttingedge components, this stripped-back affair shuns flourishes such as the sleek glass finish of the Pixel 4 (see issue 304, p83). It’s replaced by a recycled aluminium chassis that’s almost identical in design to the Pixel 4a (see issue 313, p60), with the main differences being a larger camera housing and a lightly speckled finish that adds texture to the shell. I also like this phone’s compact dimensions, which mean it fits nicely in the hand, but despite Google’s best efforts – including a light green colour option dubbed “Sort a Sage” by its naming wags – the Pixel 5 feels like a downgrade on the…

SCORE PRICE 40mm, £224 (£269 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The Apple Watch SE is the cheapest smartwatch the firm has ever launched. At first glance, you could be forgiven for wondering why on earth you’d pay any more for the Apple Watch Series 6 (see p68). After all, the Watch SE has the same display and resolution, the same design and does most of the same things. This begs the obvious question of what the Series 6 has that the Watch SE hasn’t. Top of the list is an always-on display: the Watch SE’s screen turns off when you’re not looking at it and only switches on when you raise your wrist or tap the screen. The Series 6’s display can be set to permanently active. The cheaper watch also…

Labs Backup software get it: you’re sick of being lectured about the importance of backups. Rest assured, there’ll be no preaching in this month’s Labs. Instead, we’re getting practical, and seeking the best way to protect all those irreplaceable files scattered across your various computers and storage devices To that end, we’ve put 22 different backup programs to the test. Eight of them are completely free – because if backup seems like a chore, having to pay for it feels like adding insult to injury. For those who are turned off by the mere idea of having to choose and install backup software, we also check out the backup systems that are built into Windows. Alongside the cheap and cheerful options, however, we also review upmarket commercial solutions, including eight…

SCORE PRICE $52 per year from idrive.com The IDrive client isn’t exactly ugly, but it looks like it was put together by a programmer rather than a professional designer. Still, it’s admirably functional: nearly all of its tools are accessible directly from the main window, via an obvious button with a clear text label. It helps that IDrive isn’t overloaded with features. It’s first and foremost a cloud backup system, and that means the specifics of backup strategies, compression and so forth are handled invisibly by the service. Indeed, once you’ve chosen which files and folders you want to back up, IDrive immediately starts quietly uploading them without asking any further questions at all. Even multi-computer deployments are effortless to set up: simply install a second copy of the software…

SCORE PRICE Free from ubackup.com Most free backup systems have limited features, and that’s certainly the case with Aomei Backupper, an unapologetically cutdown counterpart to the publisher’s $47 Backupper Professional package. Even so, there’s enough in the free package to warrant consideration. It supports multiple backup jobs with configurable compression, and email notifications to let you know if a scheduled job has gone wrong. You can set up incremental backups, although differentials are reserved for paying customers. And, as well as files and folders, you can back up individual partitions, Windows systems and complete hard disks. Those core features are complemented by a folder synchronisation feature, but if you’re looking for a Dropbox alternative you’ll be disappointed. Not only does the free edition of Aomei Backupper not support continuous syncing…

SCORE PRICE $48 from backup4all.com We’ve praised Backblaze above for its simplicity; Backup4all goes the other way, seemingly aiming to provide every file backup feature imaginable. We can see the appeal of that, but it makes for an overwhelming first impression. The window opens with three tabs along the bottom, which switch between the Jobs, History and Scheduler views; each of these in turn has its own set of tabs along the top, exposing multiple ribbons full of buttons. It’s a lot to take in. In practice, though, creating a basic backup task isn’t complicated at all. The wizard prompts you for a destination, then invites you to select your files and folders – note that Backup4all doesn’t handle disk or partition images – and choose whether to create a…

SCORE PRICE Free from easeus.com Like Aomei Backupper Standard on p84, EaseUS ToDo Backup Free is a functional file-backup package that also serves as an advertisement for the paid-for Home edition. The upgrade is expensive, however, at $59 (around £46) with no built-in cloud support, meaning that this free version is arguably the more persuasive proposition. Indeed, it covers the important bases. Full disks can be backed up, as well as specific files and folders, and there’s a friendly system backup option that captures a complete image of your Windows installation. The backup process is straightforward to configure and not too sluggish: EaseUS backed up our test 2GB folder to a USB 3 disk in 29 seconds, stretching to 57 with standard compression applied. ToDo Backup also boasts an unusually…

SCORE PRICE £6 (£7 inc VAT) per month from livedrive.com Livedrive is a cloud backup service similar to IDrive and Carbonite, with a £7 monthly fee that buys you continuous, unlimited cloud backup for a single PC or Mac. There’s a five-device Pro Suite option for £15 too, which adds support for Android and iOS, along with a Dropbox-style sync tool called Briefcase. One thing that sets Livedrive apart right away is that it’s priced in pounds: although ultimately owned by US tech giant J2 Global, Livedrive is a British company with a data centre in the UK, so you don’t have to wonder about your backups residing in a foreign jurisdiction. The interface is simple, but there are a few things to configure. Your standard personal folders are covered…

Practical buying and strategic advice for IT managers and decision makers Dell EMC PowerEdge T340 We’ve sussed out a superb tower server for small firms p100 Epson WorkForce ProWF-C5210W This colour inkjet produces great prints with low running costs p101 Low-code development It’s time to empower your staff to build their own apps p102 The move to wireless connections is inexorable – and it’s not just about staff wanting to work from their phones and tablets. Even before the pandemic, the traditional desktop PC was being supplanted by powerful, portable laptops. Now, with many workers dividing their time between home and the office, mobile working is the norm. This doesn’t have to be a challenge. Most businesses already have some sort of wireless coverage. But as Wi-Fi takes centre stage…

SCORE PRICE AP with one year of Total Wi-Fi, £290 exc VAT from guardsite.co.uk WatchGuard’s diminutive AP225W makes security its top priority. It’s sold as a dual-band Wave 2 AP, but it actually has three radios inside–two providing regular wireless services, plus one dedicated to WatchGuard’s Wireless Intrusion Prevention System, or WIPS for short. If you haven’t come across WIPS before, it’s a clever system that can sniff out rogue APs on your premises – such as unauthorised hardware using the same SSID as your real APs – and disrupt them so that no one can inadvertently connect. That might not be a threat you encounter every day, but consider the potential cost of a breach and you’ll quickly see the wisdom of playing it safe. The AP225W can be…

SCORE PRICE £142 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Cost-conscious SMBs may be wary of inkjets that are constantly running out of ink and demanding expensive refills – but Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF-C5210DW hits all the right notes, promising some of the largest ink yields in the business along with low running costs. Invest in Epson’s capacious XL 5,000-page cartridges and you’re looking at just 1.3p per mono page, and 5.7p for colour. Even the supplied cartridges are good value. Rather than fobbing you off with half-empty starter supplies, Epson throws in a set of standard T902 3,000-page cartridges, which should last you a fair while before you need to start shopping for replacements. There’s a good set of paper options too: the built-in 250-sheet paper cassette can be supplemented with a…

It’s nothing short of blasphemy to confess that my favourite piece of tech will never appear within the hallowed pages of PC Pro. It’s an essential gadget that I’m never far away from. I try to limit my time with it during the week, preferring to wait for the weekend to thrash it through a battery of programmes and extract some serious performance. I’m referring, of course, to my beloved washing machine. When my loyal Bosch died of exhaustion a few months ago, the search for its replacement became rather forensic. The requirement list included specific dimensions, preferences on water input/output and three deal-breaking features: a 10kg drum, sub-60-minute mixed cycle and a timer. Hours of digging through handbooks, websites and reviews ensued, with the Candy Rapido RO16106DWHC7 my final…

I’m banned from taking pictures of my work room at the moment. That’s the effect of delicate, artistic sensibilities being presented with the grim truth of what happens after almost five months of obligatory isolation – and the minor side issue of partners who don’t even want to look in there, not for a second, either in reality or on the pages of a magazine. That’s because there’s nothing like sitting at home for turning your mind to hardware purchases. I know, everything’s in the cloud, right? Nobody ought to be wandering around with anything larger than a smartphone these days. But nobody expected to have to work from home; not in a messy, fragmented way with different rules applied with different levels of severity in different regions of the…

Among the Great Unpleasantness of 2020, there is something we should be grateful for. A thing that will make our lives better and more fulfilled, and help with the daily grind. I am, of course, referring to 5G. I shall now remove my tongue from my cheek. I know 5G is something that I should be super-excited about because Apple told me so during its recent launch of the iPhone 12. Apparently, it features 5G. Not just any old 5G, but real and proper FIVE GEEEEE! This is amazing, transformative, game changing. It’s a brand-new era of mobile communications, and vendors and consultants keep telling me that it’s much more than just something for your phone. It will impact every aspect of our daily lives, and we should be positively…

Domain registrar Nominet is facing calls for a complete overhaul after a series of controversial decisions by its board. Angry members believe it’s been hijacked by directors who are paying themselves over the odds, whilst stripping charity donations and reducing member influence. “It’s looking and sounding like a for-profit enterprise, but without the levers of accountability you would expect,” said Emily Taylor, CEO of online governance consultancy Oxford Information Labs. “It’s a characteristic of some internet governance companies, [of] how incredibly cash rich, how profitable, they are. “When you say ‘not-for-profit’ people think ‘charity shop’, but if you look at turnover and salaries, where else is the money going to go? If you can’t distribute it to shareholders and you close down your charitable foundation, the only thing you can…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16IN Powerhouse laptop with a price to match, from £2,399 from apple.com/uk If you know you’ll take advantage of what the 16in MacBook Pro offers, you won’t regret buying it. The only question is where you draw the line, with options right up to 8TB SSDs and 64GB of RAM. Whichever specification you choose, you’ll benefit from an improved keyboard, spectacular screen and the very best audio setup on a laptop. REVIEW Issue 305, p52 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY Alienware M15 R3 This is a powerhouse thanks to its Core i9-10980HK, 32GB of RAM, RTX 2080 Max-Q graphics and stunning 15in screen. It’s a winning combo. £3,499 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 314, p86 Dell XPS 17 (2020) An excellent alternative to the 16in MacBook Pro thanks…

Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro. His broadband is generously paid for by Media BC Ltd. @bazzacollins Nothing is straightforward in this most troubled of times. With Boris Johnson now shooing office workers back to their back bedrooms, a gnarly tech issue that was brushed under the carpet during the first lockdown is now proving too lumpy to hide. When everyone first deserted their desks for the kitchen table, we just hooked our laptops to the home Wi-Fi and it sort of worked. The broadband network coped remarkably well with the overnight stress test. Now it appears that homeworking is going to become a permanent thing for millions of us, there are bigger questions. First, who should be paying for that broadband connection if you’re spending the…

The Arctic World Archive may be the best place to begin building an authoritative history of humans Longyearbyen, located on the west coast of the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, is cold. It always is: the average temperature there is -5°C. In fact, the average is -13°C for three months from January to March, climbing to a tropical 7°C in July. It has a population of under 3,000 people, a single-screen cinema that plays films on Wednesdays and Sundays, and a school whose 270 students show up for their first day in August in mittens and hats. When school trips head into the mountains, teachers carry rifles to account for the risk of polar bears. It’s also a place that, in a thousand years, might provide archaeologists with the…

SCORE PRICE Ryzen 4800U,£399(£479incVAT) from scan.co.uk Unless your limbs are of giant proportions, it isn’t possible to fit the Asus Mini PC PN50 into the palm of your hand – but this barebones PC comes phenomenally close. Its 11.5cm2 footprint takes up a fraction more space than a drinks coaster, and yet it packs more power than the towering desktop it could easily replace. That power comes thanks to yet another brilliant AMD processor: the Ryzen 7 4800U. This mobile chip doesn’t act like one, with eight cores that can peak at 4.3GHz and run consistently at 3GHz under load. It can’t quite match the Ryzen 4800H inside the Huawei MateBook 14 (see p53), but it chewed through our tough video-editing benchmark at a speed that embarrasses Intel’s equivalent: here,…

SCORE PRICE £792 (£950 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk This is a laptop that should make Intel executives break out in a sweat. its a remarkable demonstration of not only the the power tucked into AMD’s Ryzen 4000 processors, but of the compactness of their design and the price at which AMD can churn them out. That Huawei can produce a laptop costing less than £1,000 to rival hulking beasts for raw speed is hard to believe. The main reason for that speed is eight chunky cores that are clocked at 2.9GHz, but – in this configuration – are capable of jumping up to 4.3GHz when required. Even when pushed by our multitasking benchmark, where every core is maxed out, they were quite happy to run for several minutes at around…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Let’s put the iPhone 12 in context. Back in 2007, the first iPhone had a 3.5in 320 x 480 screen and a two-megapixel camera that, at the time, seemed a novelty more than a practical way of capturing memories. Today, the iPhone 12 is the only consumer device that can capture 10-bit Dolby Vision video footage. This sort of progress is only made possible by continually taking small, steady steps. The iPhone 12 is another incremental advance. The most obvious change is the new look, with the iPhones of 2020 reprising the getup of the ten-year-old iPhone 4, but much else is new too. Apple’s A14 Bionic chipset for starters: this six-core system-on-a–chip (SoC) is notable not only for the fact…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £458 (£549 inc VAT) from oneplus.com/uk What’s the difference between the OnePlus 8 (see issue 309, p61) and the OnePlus 8T? Far more than a “T” suffix might suggest: the 8T has a new design, 65W fast charging and twin batteries that mean it goes from zero to full in 39 minutes. Battery life is phenomenal, too: in our video-rundown test, the 8T’s 4,500mAh double battery lasted 26hrs 30mins, placing it fifth in our all-time list. It inherits the120Hz AMOLED display from the OnePlus 8Pro (see issue 309,p58), which is a nominal improvement on the 90Hz screen of the regular OnePlus 8, butI’m unconvinced it makes a discernible difference. In my experience, 90Hz is as slickan interface as anyone needs. Still, I’m not nit picking as this…

How to claim your bonus software 1Visit pcprodownload.co.uk You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the spine of the cover (or directly on the cover if you’re a digital subscriber). If there’s no code on the spine, you have bought the £4.99 version of PC Pro which does not include a code. Also enter your email address. We will then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. 2 ce 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). 3If the software needs registering, click…

SCORE PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from hihonor.com We’ve been impatiently waiting for a company to produce an affordable Wi-Fi 6 router since the first wave of releases in mid-2019 and, at last, Honor has delivered. To put its price in perspective, the next cheapest Wi-Fi 6 router we’ve seen is the £150 Netgear Nighthawk AX4 (see issue 301, p64), and if you want the very best speeds you need to consider the Asus RT-AX88U (see issue 300, p62) – a snip at £300. Then again, the Honor’s price is reflected in its features. This is a basic dual-band router with no internal modem, while its casing is small and simple: at the front, there’s a single LED that glows various colours to show the router status, and there’s a…

SCORE PRICE £30 (£36 inc VAT) from oo-software.com Despite the name, O&O DiskImage is an all-round backup solution, capable of protecting nominated files and folders as well as entire hard disks. In fact, it’s somewhat agnostic as to what you want to protect: disk and file backup tasks are initially defined through separate dialogs, but after that, you can schedule, edit and update them in exactly the same way. It’s an approach that encourages you to make regular backups of your entire system, which certainly isn’t a bad idea. Doing it this way ensures that nothing gets inadvertently missed out of your backup set, and finding and recovering files is a breeze because your backed-up disk image can be mounted and browsed directly within the Windows Explorer. Plus, of course,…

SCORE PRICE £17 (£20 inc VAT) from ashampoo.com At £20, Ashampoo’s Backup Pro 14 is one of the cheapest professional backup suites around – and it offers a strong set of features. While there’s no native cloud backup, the client makes a great impression right away with integrated support for nine third-party cloud platforms (including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive), as well as WebDAV connections. There’s also support for backing up disk images along with individual files – although the job definition wizard doesn’t make a song and dance about this, only asking which you want to protect after you’ve already chosen a destination and given your backup set a name. Successive dialogs then ask you all of the key questions one by one: do you want compression, do you…

SCORE PRICE $72 per year from carbonite.com Like Backblaze, Carbonite does one job: it quietly and continually uploads your personal files to the cloud, ensuring they’re recoverable no matter what befalls your home computer. Also like Backblaze, it offers unlimited storage for a single PC or Mac, and by some curious coincidence the annual price for the basic service is identical too. There are some differences, however. One is speed: Carbonite uploaded our files around 40% faster than Backblaze, backing up two gigabytes in just 35mins 27secs. Carbonite also distinguishes itself by overlaying a green dot onto each file’s icon as it’s backed up, with yellow dots indicating items whose upload is pending. This provides a great at-a-glance view of your backup status – and any dot-less files can be…

SCORE PRICE Free from google.com/drive/download Google’s Backup & Sync package is the evolution of the old Google Drive app: as well as synchronising files across multiple computers, it lets you mark selected folders for backup. Their contents will then be uploaded to Google’s cloud for safekeeping, but they won’t sync to other devices. Google Backup & Sync’s major selling point is that if you have only a handful of files to protect, it’s completely free. Every Google account comes with 15GB of complimentary storage, and while this also has to accommodate your Gmail archives and Google Drive content, there should be a few gigabytes left over for essential backups. If you need more space, you can step up to 100GB for a modest £16 a year, and there are plenty…

SCORE PRICE Free from minitool.com With its svelte black design, the free ShadowMaker backup client looks like it fell out of the 1980s. At heart, though, it’s an unpretentious little program, whose strength is simplicity rather than glamour. That’s not to say it’s minimal. Disk and partition images can be created as well as regular file backups – and while these are stored in MiniTool’s own MPI format, you can mount them from within the program for easy browsing and drag-and-drop file restoration in Explorer. You can also prepare for the day when you need to restore your entire system by creating a bootable USB flash drive containing the ShadowMaker software or installing the recovery environment directly onto your hard disk, with a boot menu for easy access. ShadowMaker also…

SCORE PRICE £106 exc VAT from ebuyer.com Aruba may be best known for its enterprise wireless gear, but its Instant On range of wireless APs and network switches is aimed at SMBs, with a focus on making setup and management as easy as possible. The Instant On AP12 on test is a Wave 2 dual-band AP, offering speeds of up to 1,300Mbits/sec over its 5GHz radio and 300Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. The kit includes ceiling-mount brackets, but no power supply: this AP requires a PoE source connected to its Gigabit Ethernet uplink port. For this, we turned to Aruba’s 1930 8G PoE switch. This costs £163 and offers eight Gigabit Ethernet ports – each supporting PoE+ with a total power budget of 124W – along with two fibre Gigabit…

SCORE PRICE £215 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel’s WAX510D makes an affordable entry point into next-generation Wi-Fi. Used with compatible clients, it offers speeds well beyond what’s possible with Wi-Fi 5, with a peak throughput of 1,200Mbits/sec on the 5GHz band and 575Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz. Management options go the extra mile too. The WAX510D can work in standalone mode, team up with one of Zyxel’s on-premises NXC controller appliances or take its orders from the cloud via Zyxel’s Nebula Control Center platform (the price above includes a year’s Professional Pack licence). For smaller offices, the cheaper NWA110AX is functionally similar but doesn’t include the Nebula subscription and can’t be managed with an NXC controller. Its internal aerials are also optimised for wall mounting, while the WAX510D is equally at home…

One of my friends pointed me in the direction of a new CVE listing, which is the database containing known exploits. One description immediately caught my eye: “ismartgate Pro 1.5.9 is vulnerable to malicious file uploads via the form for uploading sounds to garage doors.” Remote hack into a web-based controller when doing a firmware upgrade? Maybe. Sending a malformed request causing a buffer overrun? Yes, I could see that too. Sending a sound to a garage door? This had to be worth digging into. You can check out the CVE listing yourself at pcpro.link/315cve, which includes a handy link direct to ismartgate.com. Looking at the site, it’s clear that this is a fully featured IoT-style garage door controller. It has bells, whistles and many more waveforms besides. Digging deeper…

One of the main reasons I enjoy my job is the variety. I get to visit different places, meet people from different walks of life and deal with pretty much anything to do with technology. The work can sometimes be repetitive as I see the same problems again and again: forgotten passwords, wireless printers not connecting and loss of internet, to name but a few. Other issues may have me stumped for a while, such as a slow or non-starting PC. And some issues have a brick wall around every turn ready for me to bash my head against. That latter category certainly fits the assortment of issues I’ve seen in the past few weeks. The first problem I encountered echoed one I mentioned four months ago (see issue 311,…

Microsoft launched DOS on 12 August 1981 – the day IBM debuted its Personal Computer. Known as PC DOS on that machine (and marketed as MS-DOS on compatibles), its series of commands and programs soon became the standard for PCs, paving the way for Windows in November 1985. But that first version of Windows was appalling. How did Microsoft achieve operating system dominance and how did it see off rivals as strong as CP/M, which had been around since the mid-1970s? As always in such battles for supremacy there were key moments – and a lot of luck – that worked in favour of the winner. A fractious meeting Microsoft wasn’t interested in creating an OS. At least, it wasn’t at first. When IBM called founder Bill Gates and asked…

Businesses that have rolled out Chromebooks but occasionally need Windows apps can now get the best of both worlds with the launch of Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise. In a similar vein to the company’s well-known Mac software, the new virtualisation app allows business users to run full-blown Windows 10 desktops on selected Chromebooks. It’s pitched at power users who need features that you don’t find in mobile/web versions of apps, such as macros or sparklines in Excel. The software shares many of the same features as the Mac equivalent, including the ability to cut and paste between Chrome OS and Windows, the option to set Windows apps as the default for certain file types, and the option to share custom folders from services such as OneDrive or Google Drive.…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He’d be delighted if you coughed up £7.95 for his book at pcpro.link/315reality. One of my lockdown activities has been extending my reading of the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, including his If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, a serio-comic, postmodern novel about books. The narrator begins a novel that ends abruptly because it’s been wrongly bound with duplicated sections; returning it to the shop, he meets a girl with a similarly defective copy and together they set out to finish the story, which becomes ever more complicated. The bewildering sequence of partial novels by different (or not) authors about sex, war and spies is gripping, with none ever proceeding to an ending. It’s not another book about the dreaded abstraction…

Got your number(s) I see that the problem of ID cards has raised its head again (see issue 314, p11). There are valid objections from the information security experts, but if we stand back and consider the matter unemotionally we can see that the massive database objection is probably too late. Every UK citizen over 16 has two ID numbers: an NHS number and a National Insurance (NI) number. Many PC Pro readers will also have a driving licence number, a passport number and, if they’re the right age, an older person’s bus pass number. If you pay council tax, your home will also have a council tax number. These forms of ID are, with the possible exception of the passport, all keyed to a simple search parameter: the house…

VIRTUAL DESKTOPS Virtual desktops come into their own when you’re juggling projects and need visual separation between them. You can have different sets of apps, or even different instances of the same app open on each desktop, letting you keep your head where it needs to be. Alternatively, you can use them as a focus tool. You can have, say, all your communications tools (Outlook, Slack and so on) open in one desktop, and work apps in another, so that when you’re 30 paragraphs deep into a report, you’re not distracted by an incoming email or Slack ping. One feature added in the 2004 update was for virtual desktops to be given names, which helps you sort between them. Click on the Task View button in the taskbar, then tap…

If the world today seems depressing, why not revisit the fun and excitement of computing in the 1980s? The operating system you’re probably using now has its roots all the way back in 1981, when MS-DOS first hit the scene (see more on this story in Retro, p123). Their established competitor, CP/M, had been shipping since the middle of the previous decade, but it never caught on in the same way – although it would later make its way into many British homes as the OS that underpinned the Amstrad PCW range of word-processing computers. Running any of these text-based OSes today feels like a dry and limited experience, but you don’t have to skip ahead very far to get to the birth of Windows. Version 1.0 shipped in 1985,…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, (£2,899 incVAT) from dell.co.uk The Dell XPS 17 slowly growing trend in the world of laptops: the return of the large-screen desktop replacement. Championed by machines such as the LG Gram 17 (see issue 311, p56), Razer Blade Pro 17in (see issue 311, p54) and the Apple MacBook Pro 16in (see issue 305, p52), this rebooted genre loses the chunky stylings of the deskbound monsters of old, delivering big displays while maintaining the sleek chassis of modern laptops. Built to last The XPS 17 certainly matches its rivals in terms of style. Like an XPS 13 on steroids, it has the same black carbon-fibre interior as its sibling, right down to the gleaming edges and wedge-shaped profile. When it’s time to pack up for the day,…

SCORE PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk This is Avita’s third laptop to hit British shelves, and it marks a step up in its its aspirations: the Liber and Puraboth had budget buyers in mind, with sub-£500 prices, but the Admiror enjoys the trappings of a much more expensive laptop. This is obvious the moment you hold it, with a well-built 1.3kg metal chassis and a striking copper finish. A more modest brown version is available if you prefer, but I’d stick with copper as it’s bold without bein gaudy. The other attention-grabbing feature is the touchpad, which stretches from left to right like the Joker’s grin. With a smooth surface and support for Windows’ precision commands, it gives you agenerous amount of room for gestures. The keyboard is…

SCORE PRICE £304 (£365 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com In a world of identikit 27in 1440p panels, you need something special to (ahem) stand out from the crowd, and LG takes the interesting approach of shipping the Ergo 27QN880-Bwith a flexible arm rather than a conventional stand. And it really is flexible. I’m reminded of the 1960s classic song Bend Me, Shape Me, because you can push the Ergo 27QN880 any way you want to (it’s alright). It has all the moves too, whether you want to move it to the left or take a step to the right. You can pivot it, push it all the way to the back of your desk, or adjust it to almost any height. You can tilt it back by 25°, or forwards the…

SCORE PRICE 40mm, £316 (£379 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The Apple Watch has long been the best smartwatch you can buy. Its advantage was hammered home by the Series 5 (see issue 303, p70), and no rivals have appeared over the past 12 months that challenged Apple’s position. With the Series 6, several improvements mean it’s even more firmly ensconced at the top of the wearables sector. Android phone owners still aren’t catered for, despite the new Family Setup feature I describe below, but if you own an iPhone there’s nothing – in terms of capabilities – that even comes close. Same old design From the front, the Series 6 looks no different from the past two generations. The digital crown is still there, with the side button below it,…

GoPro Hero 9 Black PRICE £330 from gopro.com If you’ve been tempted by GoPro’s action cameras before but have never taken the plunge, this might be the one that pushes you over the edge (hopefully not when you’re filming). 5K video, astonishing levels of stabilisation and great image quality all meant Expert Reviews’ decision to award this five stars was a “no-brainer”. Denon Home 150 PRICE £219 from currys.co.uk While the Home 150 is an excellent Bluetooth speaker in its own right – you’ll be amazed at the power and delicacy, given its size – its real power comes when partnered with sister HEOS (Home Entertainment Operating System) speakers that provide a Sonos-like multiroom setup. As such, they’re a great starter into that system. JBL Tune 225TWS PRICE £100 from…

SCORE PRICE £34 (£42 inc VAT) (perpetual licence) or £29 (£35 inc VAT) per year from acronis.com Whenever we round up backup software, Acronis True Image is never far away from the top spot. And there’s a good reason for that: it really does do everything. The standard package handles local backups of files, folders, disks and partitions, while the clear, tasteful front-end makes it both quick and easy to set up any number of backup sets, each with its own schedule and destination. For those who like to take full control of their backup strategy, meanwhile, there’s plenty to configure. Want to alternate between full, differential and incremental backups? No problem: you can use a predefined scheme or create your own, with fully configurable cleanup rules. Backups can be…

SCORE PRICE Free from paragon-software.com The “CE” stands for “Community Edition”, which is a euphemistic way of saying “free” – but that doesn’t mean this backup suite comes with no strings attached. It’s licensed for non-commercial use only, so if you’re looking for a home office solution this particular offering won’t fit the bill. Still, as a personal backup manager it might well hit the spot, allowing you to easily configure any number of local backup jobs, with a much greater degree of control and configuration than you’d expect from a free backup suite. As you’d imagine, the core functions include backing up the contents of one or more folders, and optionally restricting the selection to files of specified types. More than this, however, you can also create jobs that…

SCORE PRICE $6 per month from backblaze.com Backblaze took top honours in this year’s PC Pro Technology Excellence Awards (see issue 314, p28) with a 91% rating for ease of use – and cloud backup doesn’t get much easier. There are only three buttons, and you need not touch any of them: it comes configured to scan your system for personal files, no matter where they are on your system, and automatically upload them to Backblaze’s servers. Continual updates occur whenever you make a change or create a new document. For most people, that’s ample protection with zero configuration. Of course, if you want to get your hands dirty, there are a few things you can customise. Specific file types, locations and drives can be included and excluded – you’re…

SCORE PRICE Free from cobiansoft.com This freeware backup client is no longer under active development – the latest version is dated 2012 – but it’s still widely used and works perfectly well under Windows 10. You don’t have to worry about its archive formats becoming obsolete either because, by default, Cobian Backup simply duplicates your files into a new folder on the destination volume. This makes it unbeatably fast, with our 2GB folder backed up to USB in just 19 seconds. If you prefer, you can enable compression to generate industry-standard ZIP or 7Z files: the latter method is slow but very effective, taking just under nine minutes to process our files, but compressing them down to 1.81GB. Cobian Backup’s enduring popularity is probably down to the balance it strikes…

SCORE PRICE Free from iperiusbackup.co.uk Iperius Backup comes in two domestic editions: the standard Desktop version costing €29 (around £26) and this free edition, which is lighter on features but still perfectly viable for personal use. If you find its restrictions are holding you back, registering the software unlocks a 21-day trial of the paid-for package, so you can see if that better fits your needs. Whichever version you choose, the front-end is the same. Its flat grey and navy design looks businesslike, and as you start creating your first backup job you’ll see buttons for some very corporate features such as Hyper-V and SQL Server backup. Needless to say, these are inactive – it’s irksome that Iperius doesn’t visually indicate which features are included in your current edition, and…

SCORE PRICE £22 (£26 inc VAT) per year from novabackup.com NovaBackup has been protecting files and disk images for more than 20 years, and now the main program has had a cloud component grafted onto it as well, turning it into a complete 3-2-1 backup solution. The downside is that there’s no longer an option to buy the software outright; home users are instead charged £26 a year for the client plus 2GB of cloud storage, an insultingly small allocation that can’t currently be expanded. The software also suffers from a woefully outdated interface design. The layout takes cues from Office 2007, but with clunky visuals and a bitty layout that sprawls across ten different tabs. It’s not exactly hard to find your way around, but it feels like a…

This month’s Labs is our biggest ever roundup of backup solutions – but at the outset, I was dubious as to how much I’d find to say about the 22 different packages on test. After all, they do the same basic job, right? It turns out, that’s true in the same way that my little Renault Clio does the same job as a Lamborghini. Either will get you where you’re going, but the ride is (I assume) quite different. To extend the analogy, you might argue that different backup suites deliver you to different destinations. The best solutions build up a timeline of file activity for easy review, along with a complete image of your system for disaster recovery. Lesser options just clog up your hard disk with redundant duplicates,…

SCORE PRICE £167 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk We’ve praised DrayTek in the past for its knack of turning out high-quality kit at prices that SMBs can afford – and with the VigorAP 1000C it’s done it again. This slim plastic slab can function as a simple range extender, work as a standalone AP or use DrayTek’s VigorMesh technology to create a self-healing, easy-to-extend mesh network – all for just £167. It’s a tri-band design, offering connections on the 2.4GHz band alongside twin 5GHz radios. These can be used together in regular Wi-Fi configurations, while switching to mesh mode turns one into a dedicated high-speed backhaul link. Another premium feature is dual Gigabit Ethernet ports: one of these connects to a PoE+ power source, while the other allows you to connect…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £2,893 ex VAT from dell.co.uk Dell EMC’s PowerEdge T340 is ideal for anyone seeking an expandable tower server without the expense of dual CPU sockets. Don’t call it a compromise candidate, however: with support for Intel’s E-2200 CPUs and plenty of storage capacity, it has all the power most SMBs are likely to need. Pricing starts at a terrifically affordable £1,050, which includes a quad-core 3.4GHz Xeon E-2224 CPU. Our test system came with a top-of-the-range eight-core 3.7GHz Xeon E-2288G, but there are plenty of cheaper alternatives, especially if you don’t need the embedded GPU. Build quality is excellent. The T340 has exactly the same burly chassis construction as the enterprise-class T640, with solid pressed steel panels all round, a lockable side panel and Dell EMC’s…

OutSystems Counting Intel, Vodafone and VW among its customers, OutSystems helps businesses create cloudbased, on-premises and hybrid applications for mobile and web. Its development environment is predominantly drag-and-drop, with views for processes, data and interface, and more than 100 responsive UI templates to get you started. The interface intelligently updates to reflect new data – so, for example, changing an underlying database will automatically update the forms that feed into or draw from it – and advanced users can add custom code if they need a function that doesn’t exist in the library. Apps can integrate with third-party services from PayPal, Google, Oracle, Salesforce and more, and both Android and iOS executables can be generated with a single click, for distribution either via the relevant app store or as progressive…

Someone asked me what’s the best way to set up and interact with a Raspberry Pi the other day. That’s one of those questions where there’s no single correct answer, so I thought I’d talk through some of the options in this month’s column. Although what I’m going to discuss is specific to the Raspberry Pi, much the same applies to many other single-board computers (SBCs), and particularly Raspberry Pi clones such as the Orange Pi, Banana Pi, NanoPi, ZeroPi, and the various Pine models. Incidentally, should you buy one of these clones rather than a real Raspberry Pi? Again, that isn’t an easy question to answer. Proper Raspberry Pis are cheap, work well, have good support, and the cost partly funds a charity that works to promote IT learning…

The problem with two-factor authentication (2FA) isn’t that it’s fundamentally flawed, because it isn’t. The problem is that it’s not yet the de facto login security baseline for every site, service and application. Some of the biggest firms, such as Activision in the gaming sphere, are also the biggest offenders. When talk about a possible data breach involving hundreds of thousands Call of Duty accounts surfaced a couple of months back, Activision was quick to pour cold water on the reports. In the official statement provided to me, Activision said that it recommended “players take precautions to protect their accounts at all times”. The “Keeping your Activision account secure” page the statement pointed to offered some excellent advice to gamers: use a strong password; don’t use passwords that are used…

The drone’s four rotors start spinning, pulling it up into the cool Scottish air, before buzzing into the distance. The drone will arrive at its destination, 16km away on the Isle of Mull, in 15 minutes and drop off PPE, Covid-19 tests and other sorely needed medical equipment to the local hospital. It’s a journey that would normally take over an hour – and that’s if the ferry is running. “You’d be speaking to a nurse or a doctor on the ground, the drone would take off and disappear, and 15 minutes later while you’re still talking, you can tell them it’s landed and they’re taking the cargo out,” said Alex Brown, head of operations of the drone’s supplier, Skyports. Drone delivery is here – and it could be surprisingly…