Inhaltsverzeichnis für June 2022 in PC Pro

As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. In truth, you don’t even think about it. This time last year, with Covid rightly dominating the headlines, the electricity supply was on few people’s minds. Now phrases such as “energy security” are everyday terms, as we belatedly realise how much of Europe has sleepwalked into dependency on Russia’s cheap oil and gas. The inflationary pressure on electricity was already strong before Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting Ofgem to implement a huge price cap increase from the start of April. To quote another saying (or is it a song?), the only way is up. Even the wealthiest of households must now be looking at ways to cut their consumption, and may I humbly suggest we all tweak our…

With the silicon shortage still leaving warehouses empty, what are you supposed to do if you need a decent computer at short notice? According to Google, the answer is to grab that old, knackered laptop from the back of the cupboard and bring it back to life with Chrome OS. Google has launched Chrome OS Flex, the first official standalone version of the operating system that can be installed on Windows PCs and Macs. It follows in the footsteps of Neverware’s CloudReady, which was a self-installable version of the open-source Chromium OS from which Chrome OS is derived. Google bought Neverware in 2021. To install Flex, all you need is a USB stick formatted with the installer software, and then you can boot into it – running Chrome OS either…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 14in Stunning creative power from £1,899 from apple.com/uk Alongside its 16in sibling, this is simply the world’s best laptop for demanding users. The amount of power on tap via the M1 Pro or M1 Max processor is staggering, and it’s backed up by a terrific screen and stunning battery life. With all the ports you could ask for, the only negatives are its relative bulk (especially compared to the Air) and high price. REVIEW Issue 328, p58 ALTERNATIVES Samsung Galaxy Book Pro (15.6in) A powerful laptop with a 15.6in AMOLED screen that weighs a mere 1.05kg? And with stonking battery life too? The Galaxy Book Pro is a winner. Core i7, £1,449 from johnlewis.com REVIEW Issue 323, p50 Apple MacBook Air If you don’t need…

@bazzacollins Prior to Covid, you had to work hard to earn a place on my Twitter block list. Repeated abuse, spamming my timeline or supporting Tottenham Hotspur were obviously not tolerated, but I used to think that it was generally best to take people warts and all – especially if we’d met in real life and they weren’t just a keyboard jockey from Obnoxiousville. Well, I’ve updated my terms and conditions. Two years of Covid dimwittery (the “dim” could be replaced with something stronger) and now the dreadful events in Ukraine have massively lowered my tolerance levels. My block list has climbed from a half a dozen or so idiots to a provincial theatre’s worth of people who’ve irritated me over the past couple of years. And my timeline is…

There’s always room for improvement where technology is concerned, and I’ll bet almost a fiver that your PC is no exception. I’ve pulled together 30 tech tips to deliver improvements to most desktops and laptops, both state-of-the-art and straight-off-the-Ark. There are simple software solutions that could unlock that performance bottleneck, alongside some hot hardware tweaks if you fancy getting the screwdrivers out. As a PC Pro bonus, there are also three things not to do, as they’re a waste of time and money. 1 DON’T DOUBLE UP ON SECURITY There is such a thing as too much protection, and it’s not uncommon to see machines struggling to juggle multiple security suites. There isn’t one rule for everyone where antivirus is concerned, but here are a few things to think about.…

If you’ve hitherto been using a free email address – such as one at gmail.com, yahoo.com or live.com – this is the perfect time to set up your own domain and start self-hosting. Meaningful domains are becoming scarcer. Even though new top-level domains such as .art, .dance and .ninja are appearing all the time, the most memorable options are often quick to disappear. You can shop around if you like; there’s no obligation to register the domain and buy hosting from the same provider. However, doing so means you have a single point of contact should you run into problems. We’ve bought from a range of providers in the past, including Manchester-based 34sp.com and Ionos (ionos.co.uk). Prices vary widely depending on both your preferred supplier and your chosen domain type.…

SCORE PRICE Scar 15 (G533ZW-LN148W), £1,999 (£2,399 inc VAT) SCORE PRICE Scar 17 (G733ZW-LL093W), £2,166 (£2,599 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Asus loves to give its gaming laptops a fresh injection of blood every year, and 2022 is no different. Last month, we saw the 19.9mm-thick and 2kg Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 (see issue 331, p59), and this month Asus delivered up a double treat with the 15.6in and 17in versions of its ROG Strix Scar. Some scene setting. The Strix Scar sits at the top of Asus’s laptop gaming tree, which means no compromises. If a laptop needs to be a few millimetres thicker to squeeze in the most powerful graphics card, then so be it. That’s one of the reasons why the 15.6in version of the Strix Scar weighs…

SCORE PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from netgear.co.uk Netgear gave us our first taste of Wi-Fi 6E last month with its phenomenally fast – but phenomenally expensive – Orbi 6E mesh system (see issue 331, p68). Now the company has delivered its first standalone Wi-Fi 6E router, bringing the new technology into a single package and reducing the cost to a more manageable level. To recap, Wi-Fi 6E introduces a new set of wireless channels in the 6GHz frequency range. These can be used to evade interference from older networks, allowing for a clearer, faster connection; the catch is that in order to take advantage, both the router and clients need the latest 6GHz-compatible hardware. The Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500 thus integrates separate transceivers for the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz radio…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £641 (£769 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Samsung’s new entry-level smartphone lacks the premium features of the top-end Galaxy S22 Ultra (see issue 331, p46), and the larger screen of the Galaxy S22+ (see opposite). But it has the same CPU as those flashier options, plus a great display and an impressive camera. Pricing starts at £769 for the base model with 128GB of storage, or an extra £50 for the 256GB model. Order directly from Samsung and you can get £200 off when you trade in your old Android phone, plus extra colour options – the standard phantom black, phantom white, green and pink gold finishes are joined on the website by exclusive graphite, cream, sky blue and violet trims. While the price is reasonable, the design…

SCORE PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from oneplus.com/uk The CE in its name stands for “Core Edition”, but this phone has little in common with the regular OnePlus Nord 2 (see issue 325, p68). Rather, it’s a modest evolution of last year’s affordable OnePlus Nord CE (see issue 325, p70). For £299 it comes with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and 5G, in your choice of Grey Mirror or Bahama Blue finish. That’s £100 less than the Nord 2, and more on par with the Realme 9 Pro+ (see issue 331, p73) and Xiaomi Poco F3 (see issue 322, p68). We tested the Grey Mirror model, and found it a little boring but undeniably shiny. At 7.8mm thick the CE 2 is pleasingly slim in the hand, and its…

SCORE PRICE £1,185 (£1,422 inc VAT) from lambda-tek.com ANNUAL RUNNING COSTS £41 The ConceptD 100 is the odd one out in this Labs, being neither a budget system nor a gaming PC. Instead, its target audience is anyone who needs a creative workstation with Quadro graphics – a diminishing niche owing to the rise of Nvidia’s RTX Studio initiative. That card is the Quadro P1000, based on Nvidia’s Pascal architecture. This was released in 2016 and used in GTX 1000 series cards, so you can forget about hardware acceleration for ray tracing and DLSS. Still, it remains a powerful accelerator in applications that take advantage of its 640 CUDA cores, and with four mini-DisplayPort connectors packed on to the rear of this low-profile card it’s even possible to output to…

SCORE PRICE £808 (£969 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk ANNUAL RUNNING COSTS £43 Dell earned its reputation for building its PCs to order with a “just in time” philosophy, but as time goes on it seems to be edging towards a pile-’em-high approach; we ordered this PC ourselves, and were hoping to customise the memory and SSD using its online configurator. But no such luck. We had to lump the preset options or pay another £500 for a Core i7 version with the 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD that we wanted. So, would we lump it and like it? There’s certainly much to admire. The XPS Desktop 8950 (simply called New XPS Desktop on dell.co.uk) is based on Intel’s excellent 12th gen Core processors, in our case the Core i5-12600K,…

SCORE PRICE £624 (£749 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews ANNUAL RUNNING COSTS £37 How you look at the PCSpecialist depends on whether you’re a cup-half-full or cup-half-empty kind of person. We’re more of the former, so rather than criticise this PC for its lack of graphics card, when we see the open expanse of Asus Prime B550-Plus motherboard we imagine all the opportunities open to us at some future stage. At the point of purchase you’re reliant on the Radeon Vega graphics built into AMD’s excellent Ryzen 7 5700G chip with its eight cores and 16 threads. Together with the 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, this pushed the Fusion Master to some superb benchmark results. Take PC Pro’s own, where it raced to 353, or its Geekbench 5 multicore result of…

I am a simple man, so it’s a constant source of pleasure to me that dogs are all so different. Don’t worry, I haven’t taken leave of my senses and decided I write for Crufts magazine. It’s simply that I’ve been struck this month by the variety of approaches manufacturers can take when building a personal computer. And that made me think about dogs. The thing about dogs is that they come in all shapes, sizes and colours, yet your brain can look at one and label it, without hesitation, as “dog”. And it’s the same with PCs. Compare and contrast the Acer ConceptD 100 with the Dell XPS Desktop 8950, which share all the same core traits yet are visually so different. Look at them both, though, and your…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £1,168 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com SMBs that want a desktop NAS with a focus on data protection will find Qsan’s XCubeNAS XN5008T has plenty to offer. It may be one of Qsan’s entry-level models, but it runs exactly the same QSM software as its bigger brothers, which is based on a ZOL (ZFS on Linux) architecture. The upshot is the appliance offers a range of enterprise-class features including unlimited snapshots, data deduplication, block-level replication and intelligent real-time data tiering. Whereas some competitors have only recently introduced support for WORM (write once read many), QSM has always offered this, and lets you apply one of three NAS share policies to protect data from tampering. This 9-bay appliance is solidly built and the ninth bay is secreted behind a…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed (Smart Value Basic), £2,514 exc VAT from dell.co.uk Stepping in at the entry point of Dell EMC’s extensive range of rack servers, the PowerEdge R250 aims to offer SMBs an affordable solution that can handle a wide range of business applications. It packs a lot into its short-depth 1U chassis, bringing Xeon E-2300 processing power to the table along with a big helping of fast memory, plenty of storage options and room to grow. Prices start at £950, which gets you a basic dual-core 3.5GHz Intel Pentium G6405T CPU partnered by 8GB of DDR4 memory. Our review system is a lot more powerful, as the price includes a quad-core 3.1GHz Xeon E-2324G CPU and 32GB of memory which can be boosted to 128GB for memory-hungry workloads.…

I’m going to start this month with a tip. Many of you will already know this, but I’m always amazed at the number of people who don’t. You’ll be aware that when editing or copying text a single click will position the cursor, while a double click will select the whole word. The thing that seems to have escaped many people is that a triple click will select the whole paragraph or, in a web browser, the whole URL. I cringe every time I see someone manually trying to highlight a whole paragraph with a mouse. Everyone seems to know about left clicks, right clicks and double clicks, yet triple clicks seem to have slipped under the radar. It’s an extremely useful thing to know when editing documents or working…

You’re minding your own business, surfing the web idly, when an advert pops up for your local fast-food establishment. The pictured burger certainly looks delectable, but it’s the smell wafting from your laptop that entices you to lick your display for a taste – and when you do, it’s delicious greasy goodness (without the calories). The future of lunch may just be digital. Researchers in Japan are the latest to demonstrate this idea. Homei Miyashita, a professor at Meiji University, Tokyo, demonstrated a prototype of what he calls “Taste the TV”, developed in a lab where students spend their time creating digital taste devices. The TV uses combinations of ten canisters to create flavours that are sprayed onto a removable film on the display, where they can be licked by…

Writing this in the middle of March has proven to be extraordinarily difficult. The horrifying news from Ukraine fills our daily news cycles with stories that are hard to comprehend. I am always loath to resort to the clichés of “the worst atrocity of the century” and such drivel. War is a terrible thing, and there is no league table that seems even vaguely appropriate for the human tragedy that is unfolding. That such a thing could happen in a modern European country, where the towns and cities are similar to Romford or Sheffield, is impossible for me to understand. It’s not that I haven’t tried; it’s that the situation is so far away from my life experience that it makes me stop and freeze up. The closest I think…

Lee Grant If your PC or laptop needs a boost, repair shop owner Lee has the answer. Many tips are free, some are low cost, and others involve doing nothing at all. Discover his secrets from p26 Dave Mitchell Many businesses still need fast local storage to complement the cloud, and there’s no better choice than a NAS. Dave reveals how to pick between appliances and puts four to the test from p92 Nicole Kobie Could Smell-O-Vision be making a comeback? Nicole talks to researchers from Japan, America and London who are all hoping to bring smell and taste to a screen near you. See p126 Dr Rois Ni Thuama If you think DORA is just an explorer then you could be in for a rude awakening, says this month’s…

Regular readers of this column will know that I largely abandoned Windows for a Chromebook back in 2017 and have been extremely happy with my choice ever since (doctors now believe that every Windows upgrade you skip adds five years to your life). However, as a columnist for a magazine that has “PC” in its title I could hardly turn my back on Microsoft completely, so I held onto my last Windows machine, a Lenovo Yoga laptop running Windows 8.1. I didn’t keep this going purely for kicks. It still ran my Canon printer and acted as a backup server via a large external Samsung USB drive, accessible from the Chromebook over Wi-Fi. I once needed it to run a few programs, such as Photoshop Elements, but I’ve steadily replaced…

Nokia C2 2nd Edition From £75. Available May 2022 This sequel to the C2 delivers a solid spec for an extremely low price: it has a 5.7in HD display, a 5MP rear camera and a 2MP selfie shooter. It comes with 1GB or 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, expandable to 256GB. It’s not going to give Honor or Samsung any sleepless nights, but at £75 this looks an incredibly good deal for a quality 4G smartphone. Nokia C21 Plus £100. Available April 2022 With a price of only £100, the Nokia C21 Plus is bound to win some fans. Costing £25 more than the C2 2nd Edition, the spec is significantly better: a 6.5in HD+ display, twin rear cameras (13MP with 2MP depth) and a 5MP front camera,…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index SCORE PRICE 128GB, £833 (£999 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com More like a portable monitor than a tablet, the 14.6in Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra is 326mm wide, 208mm tall and a surprisingly thin 5.5mm. It feels as though it would be easy to snap in half with your bare hands, but I decided not to try. Despite those slender dimensions it’s heavy for a tablet, weighing just shy of 730g, but what do you expect from something this big? The Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra comes in one only colour: what Samsung calls “graphite” and I call dull grey. Perhaps Samsung’s designers secretly agree, as they give the back a lift by coating it in glass. Two interesting things to note…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk For £1,000, you’re buying a whole lot of laptop here. The MateBook 16 is powerful, packs a 16in screen and includes all the features most people will want. It falls short of greatness, but from a value for money point of view it’s hard to criticise. One key to its success is the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor. If you’ve always “played safe” and chosen Intel before then this chip should change your mind, as it fired the MateBook 16 to a remarkable 300 in the PC Pro benchmarks. Some Core i7 Intel chips score around 125. Even the integrated graphics have grunt, averaging 39fps in Metro: Last Light at 1080p. Much of the chip’s power comes from having eight cores and…

SCORE PRICE Standard glass, tilt-adjustable stand, £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The Studio Display has been designed to be the natural companion of the Mac Studio (see p60). Other Mac hardware is welcome, so long as it runs macOS Monterey 12.3/iPad OS 15.4 or later, but Windows users should look away. Even if your PC or laptop includes the required Thunderbolt output, you’ll miss out on a bunch of handy features. Those with smaller budgets are also better served elsewhere. While it’s a lot cheaper than Apple’s Pro Display XDR screen, a snip at £4,599 before you even choose a stand, the Studio Display isn’t cheap. With standard glass and the basic tilt-adjustable stand it costs £1,499, but choosing a height-adjustable stand adds a further £400. It’s this kind…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £791 (£949 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Of the three Galaxy S22 phones, the S22+ is the one most people will forget about. That’s understandable: it has mostly the same specs as the S22 opposite, but with a bigger screen and battery plus Wi-Fi 6E rather than Wi-Fi 6. Still, that means it’s a powerful phone, with a top-end chipset, decent battery life and great main camera. I love the design, too. Even though the phone measures 157 x 76 x 7.6mm, chunkier than the S22, it doesn’t feel awkward or heavy to hold, and the power button and volume rocker are reachable if you’re using the device one-handed. It comes in tasteful variants of white, black, green and pink, and if you buy from Samsung’s website you…

SCORE PRICE £117 (£140 inc VAT) from elgato.com It’s not often that PC Pro delves into the kind of hardware targeted at Twitch streamers. The brilliance of the Stream Deck, however, is that it has many uses beyond playing a police siren sound effect to a watching audience. The Stream Deck is a 15-button panel that can be used to control all manner of things: Windows PC or Mac, Photoshop or PowerPoint, Spotify or Slack. Anything that accepts keyboard shortcuts is basically compatible with the Elgato Stream Deck Mk.2. This second version is a minor upgrade to the model Paul Ockenden waxed lyrical about in his RWC column (see issue 317, p113), and is now only part of a range of Stream Decks that span from the six-button Mini version…

SCORE PRICE £625 (£750 inc VAT) from chillblast.com ANNUAL RUNNING COSTS £45 Chillblast defies the odds in this month’s Labs by including that most rarified of objects, a discrete graphics card, in a system costing £750. The GeForce GTX 1650 sits at the bottom of Nvidia’s line-up, but you only need to look at the graphs on p90 to understand how much more 3D acceleration it delivers than the integrated graphics found elsewhere. The TL; DR version is that the Fusion Reaver will comfortably play games at 1080p, as an average of 64fps across our four gaming benchmarks reveals. It’s worth diving into the numbers, though. It blasted through 2013’s Metro: Last Light with a 106fps average at High settings, but we had to dial down from High to Low…

One aspect of computing that has grown worse over time is the naming of processors. It’s not that we think AMD and Intel are deliberately confusing the market, but we’ve reached the point where even technology enthusiasts would struggle to decipher the model names. But, like an Agatha Christie murder mystery, both companies scatter clues to help those seeking out the truth. Here, we attempt to isolate the clues. Intel: Core blimey Intel releases a new generation of its Core family of processors each year. We’re now on to the 12th generation, codenamed Alder Lake, which means most PCs you can buy include 10th, 11th or 12th generation processors. (There is still the odd exception for specialist machines, such as the Acer ConceptD 100 we test this month.) Until Alder…

SCORE PRICE £1,373 (£1,647 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/332seraph ANNUAL RUNNING COSTS £91 There’s a good reason why both Chillblast and Wired2Fire chose the Corsair 4000D chassis in their most expensive machines: not only is it statement-making big, but it exudes quality from every blackened steel pore. The dark expanse of its tempered glass side is a joy to behold, and rather than lather the insides with a myriad of different lights, Wired2Fire sticks to the pulsing ARGB colours that decorate the RAM’s heatsinks. It’s a classy setup. Things are just as classy once you investigate what powers this PC. First up is the chip of the hour, Intel’s Core i7-12700K. We’ve almost run out of superlatives for this processor, with its eight P-cores and four E-cores making Windows 11 snap…

Network-attached storage (NAS) appliances are perfect for SMBs with rapidly growing data demands as they provide a reliable and cost-effective storage solution. The cloud has its place in this equation, but for many businesses it isn’t practical to use it as their main storage location as costs will increase substantially with data growth and access can easily be stymied by service or internet outages. Keeping your data on site solves many problems, and business NAS appliances offer huge storage capacities that can be easily expanded as demand dictates. Compared to ongoing cloud storage subscriptions, NAS is far more affordable since, after the initial upfront expense, the appliance costs very little to run and maintain. They are simple to manage and extremely versatile, and all good NAS vendors provide free apps…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £2,349 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Synology’s DiskStation DS3622xs+ will appeal to businesses that want lots of storage capacity but don’t have the luxury of a rack cabinet, as it’s one of the biggest desktop appliances on the market. This imposing black cube presents 12 hot-swap drive bays supporting LFF or SFF drives and partners them with dual gigabit and 10GbE data ports. Stepping up as a timely successor to the elderly DS3617xsII, the DS3622xs+ has a speedier 6-core Intel Xeon D-1531 CPU, although the base 16GB of ECC DDR4 memory remains the same, as does the maximum 48GB. A notable change is that the Infiniband expansion ports on its predecessor have been replaced with mini-SAS HD ports that support two DX1222 12-bay desktop units. The DS3622xs+ lacks…

SCORE PRICE £810 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel takes multi-gigabit switching to the next performance level with the deceptively small XS1930-12HP, which is positively bulging with features. Not only are all 12 ports on this desktop-sized unit the 10-gigabit (10GbE) variety, but the first eight provide 802.3bt PoE++ services. The switch is incredibly versatile. All ten copper ports support 100Mbits/sec, 1GbE, 2.5GbE, 5GbE or 10GbE connections and you can easily see their operating speed as each one has a five-colour status LED. The last two are standard 10GbE SFP+ fibre ports for high-speed uplinks over long distances. A generous power budget of 375W means the switch can easily provide 30W on all eight ports with enough headroom to power quite a few high-performance Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs) that need…

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This month, it’s not all about the money, but rather the systems and rules that govern the movement, storage, reporting and even taxation of money. We’ve all seen the headlines about disputes between Visa, Mastercard and Amazon: these veer from “Minor disruption expected” to “Half the UK will have to switch credit cards to use Amazon”, and all seem to result in a non-event that makes everyone less interested the next time the subject emerges. After some of the conversations I’ve had this month, we ought to pay more attention to this subject. This isn’t just an argument about how the credit-card processors manage payments for vendors so big they define their own markets and acceptable procedures: it’s an argument about how payments can be handled at all scales, from…

@njkobie As Storm Eunice – who names these things? – bore down on the UK in February, something went viral beyond Covid: Big Jet TV. You may not have caught this single-day sensation, but at various points throughout the day hundreds of thousands of people were watching the aviation-themed YouTube channel. It certainly made for compelling viewing. Big Jet TV’s host, Jerry Dyer, was standing in a horse field near Heathrow, watching planes trying to touch down amid ridiculous crosswinds, offering commentary that ranged from knowledgeable analysis to joyful shrieks when pilots nailed a landing. (From my time watching, I learned that pilots get three chances to land; it wasn’t clear what happened after that.) Charming and nerdy and exciting, Big Jet TV was much more fun than watching Eunice…

11% Laptops aren’t fast enough for me 13% I’ve always bought desktop PCs 23% Nothing: a laptop is all I need 20% Other 21% For maximum ability to upgrade 10% I don’t need a portable computer 2% To connect multiple monitors It looks like there’s still an appetite out there for desktop PCs, despite the obvious rise of laptops. So what other reasons did people give for choosing one? “Expense,” wrote Glenn Brett. “I can pay 10-20% more for a laptop. Besides, I like the huge screen I have with my desktop.” Other readers, including Mark Walsham, mentioned that they use their desktop PC as a server, so they like to leave it on. And CorinthCom put it like this: “Unless you specifically need the portability of a laptop, they…

All good things come to an end, and that includes Google’s free Workspace accounts for private domains. For more than 15 years, you’ve been able to link your own internet domain to Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite), so you can make use of a personally branded online office suite, and receive emails addressed to your custom email address inside a Gmail inbox. It’s been a very attractive idea for small businesses and sole traders, but also to a large number of individuals who run their own personal domains. So the news that Google is retiring its free service as of 1 May affects an awful lot of us. That’s not to say it will be impossible to keep using your branded email domain with Google Workspace, but you’ll…

UPDATE EVERYTHING If your router is working as it should, you probably have no reason to go rummaging about in its settings – but firmware updates often close off recently discovered vulnerabilities. Many models can check automatically to a set schedule and update themselves when new firmware is found, and if you have this feature we strongly recommend you turn it on. Just don’t set the automatic update for a time when your kids are in the middle of a Fortnite marathon. Naturally, you should also install OS updates for your computers, tablets and smartphones as promptly as you can. Think about software services too, such as media servers, VPN gateways, self-hosted cloud storage or even a personal web server running on a spare PC or a NAS appliance; when…

PRICE From £1,208 (£1,449 inc VAT) from microsoft.com While the accompanying photos to this review show the three main modes of operation for the Surface Laptop Studio, you must watch a video or see it in the flesh to truly appreciate the marvel of the hinge mechanism. At first, the Studio looks like a normal laptop. The only clue is a horizontal line across the middle of the lid. Exert enough pressure to overcome the force of the magnets that keep it locked in place and the screen is suddenly released from its bonds. You can then pull it fully forward (as shown opposite) or rest it halfway along the base (as shown below). It won’t stay in any other position, though, only those two. Then the bundled Surface Slim…

SCORE PRICE £581 (£697 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk Consider this as an appetiser for the business laptops Labs coming next month, where we hope to have a dozen or more machines lined up against one another. But, if you seek a manageable and affordable laptop, you may decide not to wait. It’s the 15.6in matte screen that defines the Satellite Pro C50 range; if you want smaller, consider a laptop from the 14in Satellite Pro C40 family that has also just launched. Both have the same 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. I need to address the screen from the start, though, as it falls some way short of the quality seen in higher-end Dynabook laptops such as Tecras. Its brightness peaks at a lowly 269cd/m2; even inside, I kept pressing the…

SCORE PRICE 64GB Wi-Fi, £474 (£569 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk As is often the way with product launches, Apple gave me, along with a group of fellow hardware reviewers, a live video briefing on the new iPad Air. None of the things it wanted to highlight will surprise you – most were based around how the Apple M1 chip inside would turn the Air into a tool to create content on rather than a tablet to merely enjoy content on – but by the end of the briefing, when the host asked for questions, there was one thing on all of our minds. Why would anyone buy the 11in iPad Pro, which starts at £749, when they could buy the cheaper iPad Air? Apple had plenty of answers, of course.…

1 Visit 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 doesn’t include a code. Also enter your email address. We’ll then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. 2 Once you’re in 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 make sure to read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £349 (£419 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk If you like your smartphones affordable and retro-styled, Apple’s updated iPhone SE could be perfect. The look and feel are unchanged from the 2020 SE, but it’s been upgraded to Apple’s powerful A15 Bionic CPU, the same silicon you’ll find in the latest iPhone 13. The classic iPhone design still has charm. The aluminium enclosure is smooth and clean, with a choice of Midnight, Starlight and (Product)Red finishes. Weighing about as much as an iPhone 13 mini, it sits beautifully in the hand – no sharp edges here – and is water-and dust-resistant, with IP67 certification. Volume buttons and a sleep/silent switch sit on the left, while on the right are the power button and the SIM slot (eSIMs are also…

SCORE PRICE £206 (£247 inc VAT) from store.obsbot.com Shenzhen-based Obsbot describes the Tiny 4K as an “AI-powered PTZ 4K webcam”, and actually delivers on the AI promise. Combined with the pan, tilt and zoom features that PTZ is short for, it removes many annoyances associated with video calls. Take something as simple as your position within the frame. Similarly to Apple’s Center Stage, the Tiny 4K is clever enough to follow you as you move around. It doesn’t do it using digital zoom, but by rotating itself on its gimbal so that you can still enjoy a crisp 4K resolution. The only time you lose that is if you zoom in, as this is a digital effect, not an optical one. You can also set a zoom preset that means…

SCORE PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk ANNUAL RUNNING COSTS £25 It’s tempting to bypass the lowest-priced PCs on the basis that they’re simply too cheap to be any good, especially when they’re sold through big chains such as Currys/PCWorld. But that isn’t always the case. Here, Acer has cooked up a system to hit a price point, and although it cuts a few corners, we suspect few buyers will notice. The first thing to accept is its place in the speed hierarchy. With an 11th generation Core i5-11400 and a single stick of 8GB DDR4 RAM, it was never going to trouble Ryzen-powered systems or even the 12th gen Core i3 Chillblast Fusion Reaver. It’s no surprise to see the XC-1660 at the foot of most of the…

SCORE PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from chillblast.com ANNUAL RUNNING COSTS £85 Is it fair to call this a gaming PC for introverts? Perhaps that’s going too far, but unlike the RGB-laden beasts elsewhere, the Chillblast Fusion Vanguard is positively shoegazing. The only bling to see through the tempered glass is the bright white of the Corsair liquid cooler and an RGB flash on the side of the graphics card. But don’t misunderstand: we’re not complaining. The imposing black Corsair 4000D case (the same chosen by Wired2Fire with its £1,500 PC) makes a strong statement of intent, and we’d far rather have big, quiet black fans, as here, than colourful but noisy ones. Most of the time the Vanguard stays near-silent, emitting the lowest of hums, and even when it’s…

SCORE PRICE £1,166 (£1,399 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews ANNUAL RUNNING COSTS £89 One of our fears when inviting companies to submit PCs that hit a price point is that they follow the exact same route. This month, such fears were thrown out of the window the moment we lifted the Fusion Elite from its box. Even more so when we plugged it in and our eyes were hit with all the colours of the rainbow, from the striking pattern on the front of the case to the ARGB liquid cooler, ARGB fans and Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro memory inside. There’s no need to string LEDs around the inside of this case, as the components do all the work for you. It’s also pleasing to have a different processor inside, with…

SCORE PRICE £625 (£750 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/332ultima It’s been almost four years since we reviewed a Wired2Fire system in PC Pro, but this Dorking-based company has a commendable 4.9/5 rating on Trustpilot. We don’t have enough feedback from PC Pro readers to give it a rating in our reliability and service survey, but hopefully that will change this year. In the meantime, take assurance from that Trustpilot result and a five-year warranty, the first two years of which include parts, labour and courier costs. We’re less convinced by the “Ultima” in this PC’s name, because it isn’t stuffed to the brim with components. Like the PCSpecialist Fusion Master, it’s based around AMD’s Ryzen 7 5700G, with the “G” signifying the presence of integrated graphics. As a result, its gaming…

SCORE PRICE Diskless/4GB, £1,753 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Space-poor SMBs will love Qnap’s TS-873AU-RP, an 8-bay appliance that packs a lot into a comparatively small package. Its 2U rack chassis measures only 425mm deep, so it will slip easily into a small data cabinet or can be placed conveniently on a desk. This shortness doesn’t come at the cost of features. It’s powered by a quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B CPU, and the base 4GB of DDR4 memory can be boosted to 64GB. The network is handled by dual 2.5GbE multi-gig ports, a pair of PCIe slots provide plenty of upgrade options, and the price includes two hot-plug 300W PSUs. You also get a choice of operating systems. It can run Qnap’s QTS or QuTS hero, although to get the…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £749 exc VAT from terra-master.com/uk Chinese company TerraMaster has been in the NAS game for over a decade and offers an impressive range of storage appliances, all with a sharp focus on value. The U8-111 on review is a prime example: this 2U rack appliance teams up eight hot-swap LFF/SFF SATA drive bays with dual gigabit plus a high-speed 10GbE copper port and comes at a competitive price. The appliance is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core Intel Celeron J3455 CPU. The base 4GB of embedded DDR3L memory can be doubled, but it’s far from easy as the motherboard must be removed to access the spare SODIMM slot underneath. Two USB 3 ports are for connecting external storage devices, but further expansion is limited by the lack of…

Many frustrations and failures in business computing come from things that ought to be simple. The problem is, it’s easy to focus on big, showy, chewy problems and neglect the little things that can have a big effect on overall productivity. With a little planning – and sometimes a little user participation – there’s an awful lot you can achieve in a single day, with minimal disruption to the business and no need to book in expensive consultants or advisers. Aside from the direct object of a project, there can be a cultural benefit, too. IT departments are largely reactive, but a one-day project gives them a chance to demonstrate proactivity and forward thinking, without completely rewriting their role. Involving the users encourages self-reliance, too – an increasingly desirable trait…

I just received the news that Cliff Stanford has died. His name will be remembered by those of us in the UK who were around in the 1990s, during the dawn of the public internet, which no doubt includes many readers of this column. A little bit of history is in order. In 1990, I first started writing for the long-defunct fortnightly magazine PC User. From there I helped found Windows Magazine at Dennis Publishing, which morphed into PC Pro after Microsoft took umbrage at its name. Back then, everybody was on a bulletin board system called CIX, short for Compulink Information eXchange. I still fondly remember the chats with dna@cix, the irreplaceable Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s fame. For others, being able to chat to Terry Pratchett offered a unique…