Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2021 in PC Pro

YOU’RE NO FOOL. How could you be? You’re holding a copy of PC Pro in your hands. Wherever you turn, though, I guarantee people are trying to part you from your money. For some prime examples, look no further than Davey Winder’s eye-opening feature about scams on p24. You’ll notice that this isn’t a list of tricks such as the old ruse of “Microsoft” calling about a problem with Windows. The new breed of scammers are smarter than that. Among many other devious tactics, they tailor their message for topicality, whether that’s mysterious delivery firms calling to expedite your parcel – a popular scam call in the lead-up to Christmas when this was a big concern – or the promise of a January sale deal. The biggest danger may be…

Everyone at PC Pro was saddened and shocked to hear of the death of Adam Banks. Adam, who had written for PC Pro many times over the years, was best known as the editor of our sister title MacUser, taking the helm twice during the magazine’s lifespan. The world “editior” doesn't even come close to describing the scale of Adam’s input, however: he was a writer, columnist, art director and editor all wrapped into one supremely talented human being. It was one of Adam’s many moments of inspiration that won MacUser national acclaim, when a 2012 magazine cover was chosen as one of the PPA’s Covers of the Century. In truth, the PPA could have chosen from a dozen or more equally strong contenders. Adam would probably have squirmed at…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS AppleMacBookAir Affordable Apple M1 ultraportable from £999 from apple.com/uk Apple’s ARM-based M1 chip is blasting away its AMD and Intel x86 opposition with truly extraordinary speeds. Even the low-end model with 8GB of RAM is ludicrously fast. Apple makes few changes to the Air’s design, but it looks fabulous and now supports both USB 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Add battery life into the teens and its only real threat comes from the updated MacBook Pro 13in. REVIEW Issue 316, p40 ALTERNATIVES Dell XPS 17 (2020) An excellent alternative to the 16in MacBook Pro thanks to a 17in IPS screen, bags of power, all round quality and a great range of specs. From £1,799 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 315, p48 Apple MacBook Pro 13in (M1) Apple replaces Intel’s Core processors…

@bazzacollins One of the reasons I’m here today, bashing out words that good people like yourselves pay to read, is because of a computer game called Front Page. You probably won’t remember Front Page, the most niche of titles for the Commodore 64. I bought it for 20p in Oxfam, mainly because it came in such a big box that eight-year-old me decided it must be good. You played a newspaper baron in a right-wing dictatorship and had to select the stories that went into the paper each week, balancing the need to run rag-selling sensationalist scoops with not upsetting the government so badly that it stormed in and took over your title. It was like editing the Daily Express, but with less Diana. By today’s standards, Front Page was…

SCORE PRICE Core i5/16GB/256GB, £1,389 (£1,667 inc VAT) from store.hp.com If you can look past the branding, the HP EliteBook x360 has a surprising amount in common with the Porsche Design Acer Book on p44. They have an almost identical set of compact physical dimensions – right down to their 1.2kg weight – and feel similarly well built in the hand, thanks to an all-metal construction that should prove durable. While the HP doesn’t aim for style in the same way as the Porsche Design, it has an understated chic. An aggressive bezelled edge at the front makes it look slimmer than even a 16.1mm measurement would suggest, while the grilles on either side of the keyboard break up the monotony of silver. The “sacrifice” compared to the Porsche Design…

SCORE PRICE £882 (£1,058 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com (part code: 7AB90ET) As anyone who has struggled with a laptop while working from home will agree, there are obvious advantages to an all-in-one PC. The screen is much larger and easier on the eye; a separate keyboard and mouse mean typing and navigation are both more accurate and less tiring; and you’re also far more likely to have a superior webcam and speakers due to space no longer being at a premium. HP delivers on this latter feature with a pop-up webcam that is indeed far better than that of an average laptop. Don’t expect extraordinary detail, but video captured at its default 1080p setting looks crisp while offering natural colours. My only criticism is that you’ll need to move closer…

SCORE PRICE £109 (£131 inc VAT) from store.hp.com To be as clear as Dominic Cummings’ diary, this is not a portable hub. It’s designed to sit permanently on your desk, with a chunky power supply that you should ideally keep hidden from view. After all, one of the benefits of a dock such as this is to keep your workspace clear of cable clutter. One cable the Dock G5 should immediately replace is your laptop’s power supply, providing a charge of up to 100W – although the company’s specifications say that its maximum is 75W on non-HP machines. Either way, that’s enough for all but the most powerful laptops, and note that HP emphasises the hub’s suitability for a “mixed PC environment” (including most MacBooks). With a compact footprint, all…

SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/317sony Sony made a problem for itself by naming its main flagship the Xperia 1and its mid-range model theXperia 5. So, to differentiate this second generation of releases, the company has decided to add Roman numerals – confusingly, you’re meant to pronounce them as “Mark 2”. The Xperia 5II, then, is the cut-down version of the Xperia 1II, which was launched in early 2020. What separates the pair is size and price, with the 5II considerably reduced in both. It also doesn’t have wireless charging or the 4K screen, but that’s all you miss out on while saving £300. The 5II has an aluminium chassis pleasingly wrapped in Gorilla Glass 6. Sony continues its insistence on a 21:9 aspect ratio: it’s 158mm tall…

PRICE £88 (£105 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Imposing, hefty, ostentatious… the D-Link DIR-X1860is none of these things. This Wi-Fi 6 router occupies a modest 224 x166mm footprint whilst weighing an insubstantial 525g. The case design isn’t exactly boring, but with its simple curved shape and matte black finish it’s no conversation piece. it’s no At the front, the only visual decoration is four LEDs that glow white to indicate the power is on, the internet connected and your 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios are up and running. Simplicity also rules the day at the rear: four Gigabit Ethernet sockets are joined by a yellow WAN port that connects to your modem. (Note that, as reflected by its price, no modem is supplied.) Beside that WAN port lurks a WPS button, and…

PRICE £83 (£99 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Just like its rivals, the HomePod mini is a low-cost smart speaker that can be controlled by voice, but here you’re being served by Siri instead of Alexa or Google Assistant. While those rivals can be used on whichever phone you fancy, the HomePod mini is only designed for users of Apple devices. It’s absolutely tiny, measuring 84mm tall and 98mm in diameter. That’s around half the height of the Nest Audio and significantly smaller than the fourth-generation Echo. It’s also fractionally smaller than the new Echo Dot. It’s wrapped in smart looking textured fabric, available in white or grey. A rubber base stops the speaker sliding around surfaces while a captive, braided power cable emerges from the rear of the speaker. This…

PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews PC Specialist takes an intriguing approach for this sub-£500 PC. Based around the Asus PN50 barebones chassis we reviewed two months ago (see issue 315, p47), it packs a surprising amount of power into a tiny box – and in doing so makes both the Acer Aspire and Chillblast Versato seem bulky, loud and simply overkill for their intended purposes. Let’s tackle its obvious weakness first: this isn’t a computer designed for gamers. It relies on integrated Radeon RX Vega 6 graphics, with the “6” in its title referring to the number of graphics cores it has to play with. Compare that to the Chillblast with its RX Vega 11 graphics and the difference in games is predictable, with the far bigger Versato…

PRICE £832 (£999 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews One component takes centre stage in this PC: the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X. As with all the Ryzen 5000 series processors we’ve tested, based as they are on AMD’s superb Zen 3 architecture, it’s blisteringly quick. This is one of the fastest computers you can buy for under £1,000, offering workstation levels of power for a relative pittance. It underlines this point by breaking the 300-point barrier in the PC Pro benchmarks, a clear 53 points ahead of its nearest sub-£1,000 rival, which is a remarkable score for a six-core processor. It showed a similar turn of pace in Geekbench and Cinebench, rivalling the £1,500 PCs for single-core speed. And it does all this without raising much more than a murmur from the…

PRICE £832 (£999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk If you had preconceptions about HP’s PCs, perhaps considering Hewlett-Packard’s biggest talent being to churn out printers and boring corporate computers, set them aside. The HP Omen is a high-class affair with a degree of industrial chic that other manufacturers could – and should – learn from. The first sign of this is when you switch the Omen on. Rather than be hit with an array of multicoloured LED lights, the inside of the case lights up like a display case in a jewellers, except rather than glistening gold your eyes are treated to a combination of understated black and white. HP doesn’t attempt to hide away the cables, placing them front and centre as they snake around the inside of the case.…

PRICE £1,333 (£1,599 inc VAT) from cyberpowersystem.co.uk We’ve been consistently impressed with the speed and quality of Cyberpower’s PCs, but we confess that we have criticised its systems in the past for fan noise. Well, we have no such worries with the Ultra 7 RTX Elite. This isn’t to suggest it’s silent, which is too much to expect of a system packed with this much power, but Cyberpower’s judicious use of large fans and a liquid cooler ensure that it’s never irritating. The only sound that interrupted our thoughts when using this PC was the occasional cute gurgle from the Cooler Master MasterLiquid Lite 240. By contrast, the light display that appears when you switch on the Ultra 7 RTX Elite for the first time can be described as many…

There were times when I lost track of the day, the month, even the year. When you’re buried in testing, things blend into one. Your life is a constant battle against benchmarks that misbehave, computers that run out of storage space and reams of identical sheets of paper with something scrawled on them that’s probably, definitely, maybe a three. Or an eight. Not sure? Time to rerun the benchmark. In a fog of results such as this, it’s easy to be distracted by the siren call of numbers rather than the factors that will genuinely make a difference if someone buys the computer on test. And trust me, I take this responsibility seriously: 99 times out of a 100 the people who write into PC Pro after buying something we…

PRICE Business plan, £15 exc VAT per user per month (billed yearly) from egnyte.com Egnyte might not be a familiar name, but it deserves to be. It offers a comprehensive cloud syncing and sharing solution, with its Team subscription tier offering a decent terabyte of cloud storage for a monthly cost of £7.43 per user. The £15 Business plan on test adds 10GB of private storage for each user, plus multi-factor authentication and the company’s innovative hybrid storage option – which we’ll get into below. The service creates a good impression from the off, with a free 15-day trial that doesn’t demand payment details. And as part of the setup process you’re invited to create a custom subdomain name for your account URL, adding an extra touch of professionalism when…

PRICE As reviewed, £15,995 exc VAT from broadberry.co.uk The blue chips have been slow to embrace AMD’s EPYC server processors, but for Taiwanese server specialist Tyan it’s been full steam ahead: the company now has a portfolio of over 30 motherboard designs supporting the latest core-heavy Gen2 EPYC 7002 CPUs. From this lineup, Broadberry has chosen the Transport HX TS75-B8252 barebones system as the basis for its CyberServe AM2-B8252 server – and the end product really shows off the potential of the platform. The price above includes not one but a pair of mighty 32-core 2.4GHz AMD EPYC 7532 CPUs, and a whopping terabyte of 3,200MHz DDR4 memory. There’s 80TB of storage too, in the form of eight 10TB SATA hard disks – and to hammer the point home, Broadberry…

Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves is both a cliché and a truism. Capping costs at every level within a business – however small – allows resources to be reinvested elsewhere. When businesses worldwide are struggling to survive, never mind thrive, in a tough economic climate, looking again at costs such as ink, toner and paper consumption can pay dividends. Whatever the size of your business, you’re almost certainly spending more than you need to on printing. Using third-party compatible consumables is one way to address that, but these come with their own risks that could ultimately cost you more. What are your other options? Buy consumables on subscription Buying consumables on subscription is a more predictable way to manage your organisation-wide printing costs, and…

Okay, I confess: just this morning, I moved my final Windows 7 installation to Windows 10. Yes, I know, this section should be called Jon is a Bad Boy, and I should have done this years ago. My only excuse, if there is one, is that this is Windows 7 in a virtual machine, it’s only fired up once a month for about five minutes and it runs a specific piece of software. I guess you need some back story. In the lab, we have a full door control access system. This means that there’s a door tag reader on both sides of every door. You need to use an RFID token to open the door and the doors close automatically. While this is somewhat overkill in our small company,…

You may not have realised it as you were doom-scrolling through news about pandemics and politics, but 2020 was the year of the quantum internet – all thanks to a pair of experiments that suggests this futuristic networking technology could indeed be possible. It’s not a new idea, with the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) setting up the first quantum key distribution network in 2003 and experiments in quantum teleportation going back to 1997 at the University of Vienna. So what was so special about 2020? In February, scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China published a paper detailing a 1,200km quantum link with the Micius satellite, the longest yet. A few months later, in September, researchers at the University of Bristol revealed a…

Jon Honeyball On top of his usual contributions – including the tale of his final Windows 7 migration on p110 – Jon delivers his verdict on the £549 Apple AirPods Max on p59 Dave Mitchell Sharing files in the cloud doesn’t only mean using Dropbox, Google and Microsoft. Dave explains what to look for and puts four alternatives through their paces from p94 Lee Grant As someone who has to deal with grieving families trying to unlock a loved one’s technology, Lee provides a unique insight on the steps we can all take. See p116 Nicole Kobie What does the quantum internet actually do? And when will it appear? In this month’s Futures section on p126, Nicole reveals two big recent breakthroughs that change everything…

World-changing innovations are like London buses: you wait for years and then three come along at once. The recent wait has been particularly irksome, as virology and epidemiology felt like the only relevant sciences in lockdown – apart from rocket science, with our tech leaders evidently desperate to get off this pestilential planet and to Mars. Then, blam, three breakthroughs arrive in the same month. By far the most heralded were the three coronavirus vaccines, all produced in record-breaking time. While their speed of development, testing and approval is remarkable, that’s not the best part: the real innovation is that two of those vaccines are totally synthetic. Until now, most vaccines have required the target virus to be cultured in animal cells, then deactivated or broken apart and bits injected…

Let’s face it, the economy is looking pretty grim. The worst decline in GDP since dinosaurs were lolling about in swamps, public sector pay freezes and double-digit unemployment levels: these are our “new normal”. In treacherous times such as these, it makes more sense than ever to look for extra ways to earn money, which is why we’ve sought inspiration from three people who have used tech to convert their interests and hobbies into a regular income. Be warned: there are no get-richquick schemes here. All three of our case studies put in years of hard work before they saw any return on their time and passion. And I’m sure all three wouldn’t mind me saying that none of them will have Bill Gates looking over their shoulders on the…

Looking or a particular past review? Visit ourindex at pcpro.link/index SCORE PRICE £1,583 (£1,900 inc VAT) from store.acer.com This is a laptop of firsts. It’s the first Porsche Design laptop we’ve reviewed, and the first machine that Porsche’s design wing has produced in partnership with Acer. It’s the first laptop we’ve seen with an 11th-generation Core i7 processor. And it’s also the first outing for Nvidia’s GeForce MX350 graphics. However, what’s most unusual about this laptop is its look. A carbon fibre finish on the lid is striking enough to gain stolen glances from across the train aisle and across the boardroom, with a honeycomb effect that looks far better in the flesh than words can describe or photos show. The rest of the design is more practical, with a…

SCORE PRICE Ryzen 5, £417 (£500 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Avita evidently believes that you don’t need to sacrifice design and build quality just because you don’thave thousands of pounds to spend on a laptop, with this budget machine making a great first impression. It isn’t another cookie-cutter version of the MacBook, either, with a jet-black finish that gives it a style all of its own (it also comes in red or grey). Avita describes the 1.3kg chassis as “mainly metallic” due to its plastic base, but there’s more flex in the lid than is ideal. If you intend to take the Liber V on your travels, we’d advise buying a protective cover; Avita does include a lightweight pouch in the box, but it’s there to protect against scratches rather…

SCORE PRICE £624 (£749 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk In a world where Nvidia charges £1,500 for a consumer graphics card, LG’s £749 asking price for a 27in gaming screen doesn’t seem so crazy. Especially when that monitor offers a 4K resolution, refresh rates up to 144Hz and compatibility with AMD FreeSync Premium Pro and Nvidia G-Sync. For the occasions when you want to watch films rather than play games, there’s VESA DisplayHDR 600 certification. But it’s gaming where this screen excels, with a vividness that’s a world apart from everyday IPS monitors. There’s a richness to colours that will make futuristic, neon-lit worlds look exactly like their creators intended. Naturally, LG adds some RGB bling for good measure, but unlike MSI’s curved 34in Optix MPG341CQR (see issue 313, p87), which…

SCORE PRICE £38 (£45 inc VAT) from store.hp.com Let’s hope that users of wireless trackball mice are patient sorts, as they’ve had a ten-year wait for this successor to the M570. This isn’t to say Logitech has left people who desire ergonomic mice in the lurch for a decade, as it’s released the MX Vertical mouse and the MX Ergo Wireless in the meantime, but both of those cost north of £90. This, then, is a more affordable option, and it’s true that it doesn’t have the “deluxe” feel of an MX mouse; it’s robust but plasticky. Logitech even boasts about its use of recycled plastic in the M575, with 50% of the graphite coloured option and 21% for the white version. It’s also unashamedly designed for use with the…

SCORE PRICE £274 (£329 inc VAT) from oneplus.com/uk The first OnePlus Nord (see issue 313, p62) was OnePlus’ attempt to recapture the mid-range ground it lost by focusing on more expensive flagship phones. The Nord N10 is its follow-up, costing £50 less with, it hopes, minimal sacrifices. Externally, it’s a struggle to find a difference between the two, although this new model is a millimetre or two larger than its sibling in width and height. However, below the surface, OnePlus has shaved its specification in several places. Most notably, the N10 uses a Snapdragon 690 processor where the original had a Snapdragon 765. It also reduces the RAM to 6GB. Despite this, there’s nothing between the two phones for day-to-day speed: the N10 scored 605 in Geekbench 5’s single core…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk This is the most dramatic change in design since Amazon first started making smart speakers. The first Echo was a tall, industrial-looking cylinder with a twistable top for adjusting the volume. This became a shorter, stubbier fabric-covered cylinder for the second and third generations. Now, cylindrical is out and the spherical is in. The fabric remains, although it now only covers two-thirds of the device, with matte plastic on the rest The ring of light that activates when you say the “Alexa” wake word has relocated to the bottom, and we’re fans of the warm glow it casts onto the surface it’s sitting on. It could look even more fetching if wall-mounted via the screw hole in the bottom. All that said, it…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from store.google.com It’s happened: Google has finally released the Google Nest Audio, an update to its very first smart speaker, the Google Home. And, after a four-year wait, plenty has changed. The design has been revamped, inside and out, the price is lower and there’s a renewed focus on audio quality. The best news, though? The Nest Audio is a crackerjack of a smart speaker. It’s a very different beast to the speaker it replaces, both in terms of the way it looks and the way it’s constructed. It’s covered head-to-toe in tough-feeling recycled fabric. It no longer has multicoloured LEDs on top; instead, there are four LEDs across the front. It now has a physical mute switch on the rear for those times when…

PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk There are two obvious types of buyer for the Acer Aspire XC-895: first, someone with a tight budget; second, someone who’s tight on space. The Aspire still consumes 100 x 330mm on your desk and it isn’t designed for a monitor to sit on top of it, but its faux brushed aluminium front gives it Habitat catalogue flair. There’s practicality here too, with a full-size SD card on the front along with USB-C, USB-A and two 3.5mm jacks. You could add a slimline optical drive – there’s a cut out on the front and the bay behind sits free – but you’ll need to be both patient and handy with a screwdriver. This is one of the drawbacks of such a small chassis,…

PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk When we first set eyes on the Acer Nitro 50-610 four months ago (see issue 313, p47), it cost £899. That outing earned the Nitro a three-star review, but with a £200 price drop we’re minded to be more charitable about its shortcomings. The biggest one is a 256GB SSD primary drive. While it’s great that this uses PCIe technology rather than SATA, it will quickly fill up if you install games. You will soon have to resort to the 1TB hard disk instead, which is both a pain and means slower load times. Acer also applies a minor handbrake to the Intel Core i5-10400F processor by only supplying 8GB of RAM, but this is easy to remedy via the two spare DIMM…

It was the email we never want to receive: “Transportation and component costs have increased – in the case of logistics the costs are now ridiculous and increasing all the time.” The end result was that the manufacturer in question could no longer honour the price they had originally quoted for the PC they had sent into the Labs, and it would have to rise by £100. Another manufacturer only had a limited number of slots with its preferred courier and decided to personally drive its system to us rather than deny a customer their delivery. Through a combination of Brexit and Covid-19, we live in uncertain times – and with uncertain times come uncertain prices, uncertain logistics and uncertain stock levels. Considering the turmoil that 2020 brought, we’ve been…

PRICE £1,549 (£1,859 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk It’s been some time since Dell entered one of our desktop PCs Labs so we were delighted when it agreed to send in its new Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition, even if it inadvertently broke our maximum guide price of £1,500 inc VAT and forced us to raise the bar to £2,000. Still, one of the best things about buying from Dell is that you can tweak the components to fit your budget, and there really is nothing else like the Aurora in terms of design. If you decide you want to buy this exact specification then enter “d00awr1006” into the search box at dell.co.uk, select the £1,749 option and upgrade the Ryzen 3900 to the 3900X we tested. Now you can start upgrading…

PRICE £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews We suspect that PC Specialist’s engineers referred to this one as “The Beast” in the privacy of their labs. Not just due to the size of the Lian Li Lancool II case, a giant at 229 x 478 x 494mm, but because of the roar it makes when it’s switched on: there’s no hiding from the sound of the six 120mm fans that collectively aim to keep the Fusion X cool. It’s the kind of unapologetic noise we expect from workstations, and in terms of horsepower that’s what you can expect to enjoy. The Ryzen 7 5800X’s eight cores and 16 threads sliced their way through Cinebench R23’s multicore test scene in no time, finishing with a result of 15,457. Only the 12-core…

You may have spotted a theme to our buyer’s guides over the past nine months or so. The pandemic has required businesses to find new ways to work, collaborate and communicate – and while an end to the crisis may finally be in sight, many companies will opt to continue some of those new practices even after restrictions have been lifted. Cloud file sharing is a natural fit for this new working normal. It gives remote staff a secure, seamless way to share documents and collaborate with colleagues, no matter where they are. There’s no need to set up a complicated VPN to provide homeworkers with full LAN access: the cloud lets them get at the resources they need at any time, from anywhere, on their choice of device. You’re…

PRICE 250GB, £56 exc VAT for first year from idrive.com The cloud isn’t just for sharing data with others – it’s also ideal for off-site backup. IDrive has traditionally focused on the latter, but its IDrive for Business service combines regular online backup with file-syncing and sharing, making it an intriguing all-in-one proposition. There are a few quirks you need to be aware of from the beginning. When setting up IDrive accounts, you’ll be given the option of using a private encryption key, but if you want users to be able to share files with one another then you’ll need to use the default AES-256 key instead. You’ll also need to align your backup and synchronisation schedules, as files can only be shared once they’ve been backed up to IDrive’s…

SCORE PRICE £144 exc VAT from uk.insight.com Next-generation Wi-Fi 6 devices have been on the market for more than 18 months, but we’ve only recently started to see access points (APs) at prices that make sense for small businesses. Aruba’s entry into the low-cost fray is the AP22, which delivers a complete suite of 802.11ax services for just £144. Despite the price, you get the full complement of management and connections options. The AP22 is part of Aruba’s Instant On family, which means it supports Aruba’s Smart Mesh technology, and can be cloudmanaged from either a web portal or the free mobile app. We tried the app, which quickly discovered the AP and provided a wizard to help us add it to our account and create our first secure wireless…

Apple knows a thing or two about running successful stores. By letting people play around with the goods, congregate for a natter and ask experts for advice and support, its shops attract large crowds and even encourage some to whip out their credit cards to make a purchase. When Apple opened its first branch in Tysons, Virginia almost 20 years ago, this approach felt invigorating. Where rivals would keep a beady eye on customers and discourage attempts to touch the products, Apple’s growing number of stores began to feel like welcoming social hubs. In many ways, they invoked memories of the earlier days of computing. If you rewind to the late 1970s and early 1980s, computer shops were similarly more than just places to buy software and hardware. They were…

LABS Wi-Fi 6 routers Whether your budgetis£50or£799, and whether you’re looking for the home or the office, next month will reveal a router that’s right for you. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a 26-piece PC repair kit. You can read PC Pro in print, on an iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES Why you can’t always bank on online banks Tempted by the new breed of challenger banks? While they’re slickand convenient, they come with unadvertisedrisks. Create your own Alexa skill Amazon’s handy blueprints make creating Alexa skills far easier. We explain why rolling your own skill can be useful–and how to do it. The rise, fall and rise of the keyboard phone Remember when the Psion Series 5 was king? A new…

@njkobie Social media isn’t very nice. Twitter is full of people taking offence where none was meant, whilst others seek to offend as many as possible. Facebook is no better, not least because the trolls are often your own family and friends. There’s an easy solution, of course: don’t use such sites. That’s easier said than done, but I’m certainly spending less and less time on social media, despite the lockdown-induced need for conversation sources external to my own living room/office. And I have it better than many. Study after study shows that women get the worst abuse online, with the most intense and foul harassment saved for black women. I have been lucky enough to avoid death threats and doxxing, probably because I’m not particularly controversial with what I…

SCORE PRICE £458 (£549 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk When it comes to making great headphones, you have two basic design routes: straightforward analogue engineering, where you build miracles of precision construction with only the best materials, or you take the the digital route and rely on the power of digital-signal processing (DSP) to work miracles. Apple does both, combining a precision analogue build with a computational DSP for each headphone. They also tap into an array of mics (both inside and outside the cups) that use adaptive frequency response shaping of the in-ear soundfield to best match the incoming signal. It’s a technological tour de force unlike any I’ve seen in my decades of testing headphones. Each ear has ten cores of CPU power for all the processing work required,…

PRICE £43 (£50 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk It’s not only the full-sized Amazon Echo (see opposite) that enjoys a fresh look. While most would accept a year with a full-blown pandemic as a valid excuse for an iterative update, Amazon has found time to revamp the Echo Dot too. Gone is the plastic hockey puck of the first two generations and the slightly fatter fabric look of the third: in its place, a sphere slightly larger than a cricket ball. Like the full-sized Echo, it’s about two-thirds covered in fabric, with the remaining third a hard matte plastic. It is, of course, flat on one side, to prevent it rolling around. As with the full-size Echo, we’re keen on the trademark ring of blue light that appears when the wake…

One of the great joys of producing a Labs is that you see the whole market in a cross-section. Especially in a Labs such as this one, where prices start from a humble £399 and steadily rise to almost £2,000 In the space of 18 pages, you can see a clear picture of what your money buys you – and thanks to our comprehensive graphs starting on p92, you can also see exactly what difference that makes in terms of speed. If you weren’t sure what your budget should be for that new PC before this test, you should be after. It may well be that one of the dozen computers on test here perfectly matches your needs, but the continuing beauty of desktop PCs is their customisability. For the…

PRICE £417 (£500 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Compared to PC Specialist, Chillblast takes the traditional route to PC building here. The Versato Family PC has a capacious case that offers one huge advantage: expandability. Based around a high-quality Asus TUF B450M-Plus motherboard, an x16 PCIe slot lies temptingly empty – so if you discover the integrated Radeon RX Vega 11 graphics aren’t enough to play games, it’s easy to add a dedicated card. For now, you’ll be limited to undemanding titles at 1080p, so think Fornite and Minecraft rather than Hitman 2. Note that Chillblast saves money by opting for an older Ryzen 5 3400G processor, a quad-core CPU that supports multithreading but uses Zen 2 rather than Zen 3 architecture. Even with a generous 16GB of RAM, it came…

PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The Acer Nitro and HP Pavilion have more in common than their £699 price, with both machines in lockstep in much of our testing due to their shared processor: the six-core, 12-thread Intel Core i5-10400F. Ignore the colouring and even their chassis have much in column, with a much more compact design than the likes of Chillblast and PC Specialist. At first sight, there’s little room for upgrades, but hunt out HP’s maintenance guide for this machine and you’ll find that by removing two screws you reach a 3.5in drive bay and get easy access to the single spare DIMM socket. That’s because HP only fills one, which is an odd choice when two would have taken advantage of the Intel chipset’s support…

PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com From the moment we removed the Chillblast Fusion Marine from its box, one word sprang to mind: class. This PC not only looks gorgeous through the tempered glass, but it’s whisper quiet and lit with a degree of taste that would have even Jean Paul Gaultier muttering an appreciative “bien”. If you want a PC that lights up like a Christmas tree, look elsewhere. Naturally, good looks will only get you so far, but Chillblast provides a set of high-class components in support. Does the Intel Core i5-10600K really need watercooling? Probably not, but the “K” indicates there’s potential for overclocking and Chillblast backs this up with the capable Asus TUF B460M-Plus motherboard. What’s more, there’s a whopping 32GB of memory supplied across…

PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from chillblast.com One of the advantages of a single manufacturer supplying a £500, £1,000 and £1,500 PC is that you can see the evolution of a great PC. The Fusion Commando started from humble beginnings in the Versato (see p82), with its handful of basic components rattling around a case. It grew into a proper mid-range gaming system in the Fusion Marine (see p86), before blossoming into this: a well-rounded, high-quality PC that can turn its hand to anything. It helps that Chillblast effectively uses the same case design for all three systems, with the dimensions staying the same but the quality of the materials increasing at every step. Here, we reach the top of the line with tempered glass not only on the left-hand…

Sub-£500 PCs Sub-£1,000 PCs Sub-£2,000 PCs PC Pro benchmarks (overall) Cinebench R23 (single-core) 1080p gaming (weighted average, fps) Geekbench 5 (single-core) Cinebench R23 (multicore) 1440p gaming (weighted average, fps) Geekbench 5 (multicore) 3DMark Time Spy (overall) 4K gaming (weighted average, fps) Sequential read (AS SSD, MB/sec) Sequential write (AS SSD, MB/sec) Estimated running costs per year…

PRICE Business plan, £12 exc VAT per user per month (billed yearly) from box.com Box has always been one of the top business file-sharing and collaboration solutions, and it’s recently added a raft of features aimed at improving the lives of remote workers. One notable arrival is Box Collections, which lets users organise their files, folders and web links into custom groupings, without having to actually move the items around between shared folders. Then there’s the new Box Preview screen, which lets you browse and annotate cloud documents without needing to download them or open the parent application. The Box web portal meanwhile gets a fresh coat of paint, and there’s integration with the Zoom videoconferencing platform for extra convenience. Box offers four plans. The basic Starter tier costs £4…

PRICE Business Plus, £13 exc VAT per user per month (billed yearly) from tresorit.com If you’re concerned about the security and privacy issues associated with cloud file-sharing, Tresorit should put your mind at rest. It uses full end-to-end encryption, with a zero-knowledge policy that means the company never sees or stores your encryption keys. It offers a range of plans for individuals and businesses; we tried out the Business Plus subscription, which costs £13 per user per month. This gets you a roomy 2TB of storage per user, along with an unlimited file-version history, which should be ample for almost any purpose. The individual file-size limit is generous too, at 15GB, and business customers can even choose where in the world their data will be stored, from a selection of…

Subscribe today and save on the single issue price. Each issue of PC Pro will be delivered driectly to your device each month. SEE NEXT PAGE FOR SET-UP INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO SUBSCRIBE… … on an iPad or iPhone STEP 1 Return to the PC Pro library STEP 2 Choose your subscription term and tap twice on the 'price' box STEP 3 Choose whether to create an optional PixelMags account STEP 4 Enter your Apple ID password to confirm … Windows 8 STEP 1 Return to the PC Pro library STEP 2 Choose a subscription term from the bottom left menu and click/tap the corresponding 'Purchase' button STEP 3 Click buy on the popup bar STEP 4 Enter your Microsoft account details to confirm … on an Android device STEP 1…

We need a proper, open discussion about the future of working from home. This has significant impacts for office provision and transportation, let alone the existential changes it will bring to the myriad services that support a working conurbation. But that’s not where I’m looking today. Like many, my business has been in “work from home” mode as much as possible these past months. Some clients have essentially moved to the shires. Others are balancing in-office with out-of-office working. The shift from face-toface meetings to Zoom or Teams has bedded in and we are unlikely to return to normal by late 2021, if ever. Yet this has brought with it significant issues for a company’s IT provision and infrastructure: historical ideas about network boundaries are being blown away. Of course,…