Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i PC Pro

Along with receding hairlines and exercise-resistant paunches, nothing gives away the passage of time more than the words that escape our mouths. That moment in the pub when you realise you’ve been talking about mortgage rates for the past five minutes, or shared with a glassy-eyed acquaintance exactly how much pension pot money you need to afford your lavish retirement. Although over time I’ve downgraded my idea of “lavish” from two annual foreign holidays to an occasional takeaway. Now I have another giveaway to add to the list: how you attend technology trade shows. Back in the days when I could fit into jeans that didn’t include “stretch” cotton, I spent my days chasing the latest gadgets and my nights chasing bartenders. To serve me drinks, you understand, nothing sinister.…

Openreach has announced that it is to begin selling symmetric gigabit connections for consumers and businesses. But customers will be paying well over three figures a month for the privilege, and it’s not available in many areas. The new speeds – only available to properties in a BDUK Type C area, which are mainly hard-to-reach rural locations – will arrive at a wholesale cost to broadband providers of £1,200 per year, plus a connection fee of £123. That boils down to £100 per month, before VAT and the broadband provider’s margin are taken into consideration, which means lines are likely to cost at least £150 per month for consumers. For comparison, Community Fibre charges as little as £25 per month to consumers for symmetric gigabit connections, while Zen Internet sells…

I’m literally a one-man-band, by which I mean that I make music using an assembly of electro-acoustic gadgets that let me create without the collaboration of other human musicians. Before you get any ideas, I hasten to add that those gadgets do not include drums or cymbals strapped to my legs, like the blokes who used to entertain cinema and theatre queues. I love music from a wide range of genres, and I’m picky about quality reproduction. This doesn’t mean I’m a hi-fi nut – if anything I’m sceptical of the excesses they indulge in – but I do run a nice-sounding system based around a Fosi Class D amplifier connected to vintage British speakers. This sucks in music via wire from a vinyl turntable or CD player, and via…

50Gbit dreaming I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read the article about BT’s 50Gbits/sec broadband connection (see issue 367, p12). I live in a town in the middle of Hampshire, so not out in the sticks, and it’s the third most expensive market town in the country when buying a house. Despite this affluence, my FTTC broadband gives about 10Mbits/sec down and less than that on up. This is the same for most of the town. No word from BT as to when we will get fibre. So while it is nice to read about BT doing super-fast things, it would be even nicer if they did something more for those of us who live in normal, well-populated parts of the country. Dave Wright News &…

Life as a Windows user can sometimes feel like being a passenger in the back of a cab. You don’t have any real control, you have to go in whichever direction Microsoft decides to take you. If Microsoft tweaks the Start menu (again), or changes the way Explorer behaves, or deprecates a feature that you’ve relied upon for years it’s, well, tough. However, you needn’t surrender complete control of your computer. The ten apps covered in this feature let you wrest power back from Microsoft, allowing you to tweak the behaviour of your Windows machine in all manner of ways. It could be entirely overhauling the appearance of the Windows desktop, opening apps via custom launchers, or adding mods that bring new features to the OS, such as scrolling on…

Affinity Designer is a standalone tool for designing and editing vector images, similar to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. It’s part of the Serif suite of creative tools, which also includes Affinity Photo (see issue 367, p36). It’s a one-off purchase at a reasonable £68 for Windows or macOS, making it a competitive option for those who don’t need Adobe’s heavyweight toolkit. It can import AI files created by Illustrator, and export in the industry-standard SVG and EPS format, which can be opened and edited in Illustrator or any other vector-editing application. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, you can download a free trial from serif.com. How do I get it? Designer has quite light system requirements and is available for Windows, macOS and iPadOS – see tinyurl.com/368designer…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index PRICE As reviewed, £1,925 (£2,310 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Say what you like about Dell’s new branding strategy (see opposite), but you can’t accuse it of false advertising. The Dell Pro 13 Premium reeks of professionalism from every dark grey pore, while the recycled magnesium finish could not look any classier. If you want a laptop to whip out of a bag and make a great first impression, this is it. Dell also promises “commercial-grade durability” and claims it’s passed MIL-STD 810 H testing. While it’s light on detail here, I’m willing to cut it slack due to the obvious build quality on show. This laptop feels so sturdy, so dense, that I would fear for my life if…

PRICE 13in, from £833 (£999 inc VAT); 15in, from £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk How do you make one of the best laptops in the world better? You could redesign it, but you risk disenfranchising passionate fans. In that case, making small changes, especially under-the-hood ones, is the smart move, and it’s clearly Apple’s strategy here. The M4 MacBook Air is virtually indistinguishable from the M3 model. Apple has left the keyboard and trackpad almost untouched, and the same goes for the display. The weight of both 13in and 15in variants remains unchanged, so all that’s new is a Sky Blue colour option. The significant changes are all inside. First up, the 12MP Center Stage camera replaces the 1080p FaceTime camera. It’s an ultrawide lens in a screen notch…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D (see p60) may be the headline news, but there’s much to be said for AMD’s older processors. The Ryzen 5 7500F is a great-value six-core chip that continues to hold up well in benchmarks two years after its release, with the Zen 4 architecture delivering the goods for gamers. Six cores and 12 threads means it’s more than capable in media-creation tasks, too, with 816 in Cinebench 2024’s multicore section a fine score even today. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s RTX 40-series cards have retained their lustre despite the release of the RTX 50-series (see p68). You lose out on DLSS Multi Frame Generation and memory bandwidth, but in terms of horsepower there isn’t as big a divide between the RTX 40…

AMD had one job to do with the launch of its RDNA 4 graphics cards – spearheaded by the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT – and that was to not get run over by Nvidia’s Blackwell too badly this generation. With the RX 9070 XT in particular, not only does AMD hold its own against the GeForce RTX monolith, it perfectly positions Team Red to take advantage of the discontent among gamers upset over the price and availability of Nvidia’s latest GPUs. Not just the RTX 5080 and 5090 we reviewed last month (see issue 367, p46), but also the newly released RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. We expect Nvidia to launch the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti in the coming weeks, but for now we must…

PRICE From £499 (£599 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Nvidia made the classic mistake of overpromising and underdelivering with the RTX 5070. The gulf between what was expected from Jensen Heung’s speech at CES 2025 and what the RTX 5070 actually delivers is simply too wide a gap to bridge for gamers and enthusiasts. In short, not enough speed, not enough supply and the price is too high. The “broken promise” was RTX 4090 levels of speed. It wasn’t exactly a lie: the RTX 5070 does reach native RTX 4090 performance in some games thanks to Blackwell’s Multi Frame Generation (MFG) technology. And, to be fair, the RTX 5070 is a substantial improvement over the RTX 4070, with a roughly 20-25% performance gain. The challenge for Nvidia is that the RTX…

PRICE 128GB, £499 (£599 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Originally released in 2016, the iPhone SE was an attractive alternative to Apple’s shiniest handsets – a low-cost option whose design and update schedule were decoupled from the main iPhone line. Now, though, it’s been discontinued, in favour of a new approach: as the name implies, the iPhone 16e is a close relative of the regular iPhone 16, and I suspect it will be updated annually along with the rest of the family. The pricing strategy has changed, too. The last iPhone SE, released in 2022 (see issue 332, p70), cost a deliciously affordable £419 inc VAT, but the 16e starts at £599 inc VAT with 128GB of storage – only £200 less than the standard iPhone 16. There are also 256GB…

PRICE 128GB, £274 (£329 inc VAT) from nothing.tech We were impressed by the £449 Nothing Phone 3a Pro, as you can see opposite, but the standard Phone 3a squishes the price even further. You’ll pay £329 for the base model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, which includes a telephoto camera and a spacious screen. Or for £50 more enjoy an extra 4GB of RAM and double the storage. The design is classic Nothing, with its lit-up LEDs and stylish swooping lines. “What’s with the Blade Runner phone?”, my daughter asked when she spied it on my desk, and she meant it as a compliment. Personally, I’m not such a fan: to my eye, the phone looks like it hasn’t been fully assembled. It feels sturdy, though, with…

PROS Character generation tools • splicer for mixing images and styles • addictive generation tools • good text CONS More photorealistic images seen elsewhere • private image generation only available on paid plans PRICE From free to $39 per month from artbreeder.com Artbreeder offers a range of prompt-based tools, supplemented by alternative image generators that could help visualise graphics for unrelated projects – for example, characters for a novel or background actors in video games. The Tuner tool is a case in point: input a regular prompt, such as “25-year-old woman in medieval England”, then drag sliders to change her hair colour, neatness, age, whether she’s happy or sad… the list goes on. If that doesn’t deliver what you need, try the Splicer, which combines objects and styles from two…

PROS Good logo generation • very strong on cartoon-like artwork • flexible in-browser editing • prompts well understood CONS Text can sometimes be nonsensical • what you get for your money should be clearer PRICE From free to £19 per month as part of Copilot Pro from designer.microsoft.com You may have come across Designer’s tools inside Microsoft 365 apps, where you can add images directly to your documents and presentations. For this Labs, we used it through the browser. Designer operates on a freemium basis. You’re awarded a certain number of free credits every month, which you can spend on generating images. If you’re using a free Microsoft account, you’ll start the month with 15 credits, of which one will be deducted for every interaction. You can’t top up your…

PROS Free to use • option to install on your own hardware • good human image generation CONS Proved difficult to force some changes in a few models • challenging to use previous output within subsequent prompts PRICE Free from stablediffusion.com You can download and run Stable Diffusion on your own machine. A decent GPU will help it run more quickly, but it will work with onboard graphics if you’re prepared to wait. Or you can use the hosted service, as we did in our tests. There are several models to choose from, with more complex options generally taking longer to output an image. The wait is worth it. The quick web UI accurately produced a picture of a cat beside a Venetian canal, but the colours were oversaturated, and…

PROMPT “Make an advertisement for a 1980s-themed disco at the local village hall. Include cartoon people dressed up in clothing from that time, and use films like Back to the Future, ET and The Goonies as your inspiration.” ARTBREEDER STABLE DIFFUSION MICROSOFT DESIGNER GOOGLE IMAGEFX ADOBE FIREFLY OPENAI DALL-E LEONARDO MIDJOURNEY…

PROMPT “Create a two-colour logo on a white background inspired by the French word ‘chaton’. That word must appear in the logo.” GOOGLE IMAGEFX STABLE DIFFUSION ARTBREEDER LEONARDO MICROSOFT DESIGNER ADOBE FIREFLY OPENAI DALL-E MIDJOURNEY @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO…

PRICE As reviewed, £3,072 exc VAT (MSRP) from servercase.com Qsan’s XCubeNAS XN2204-4C is a hybrid appliance that aims to deliver affordable all-flash storage to SMBs. Don’t be deceived by its modest dimensions; this 1U rack appliance is bursting with features. Up front there are four universal LFF/SFF drive bays that support standard SATA HDDs or SSDs and NVMe SSDs. Qsan offers a tempting proposition when it comes to value, with the price we’ve shown including four 1.92TB U.3 NVMe SSDs. The appliance also has two internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots, which can be used as a mirrored cache or standard storage pool. Networking options look good, too: it sports four 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports and teams them up with quad 10GbE SFP+ fibre ports, and the spare PCIe expansion slot accepts…

PRICE Diskless, £980 exc VAT from sotel.de The SMB NAS market is about to get a lot more interesting as Ugreen steps up for a piece of the action. Many businesses will be familiar with Ugreen’s high-quality PC accessories and power chargers and it makes its play for its share of the NAS market with a family of six desktop appliances. The attention to detail is clearly evident, as the 6-bay NASync DXP6800 Pro on review is extremely well built. What lies beneath the sleek aluminium shell is even more interesting as it offers an incredible specification for the price. It’s powered by a 10-core Intel Core i5-1235U mobile CPU and comes with 8GB of DDR5 memory, upgradable to 64GB. Port choices are remarkable: it has pairs of 10GbE multi-gigabit…

Apps are everywhere. Many businesses, especially smaller ones, are taking advantage of convenient, turnkey mobile apps to run their day-to-day operations – but they’re risking potential disaster if one day a critical app stops working. It’s vital to think ahead, consider how to prepare for the eventuality, and know what to do if it comes to pass. First, some definitions. The word “app” has come to mean any executable program, but I’m talking here specifically about mobile apps designed for a phone or tablet, which typically serve as your front end to a hosted service and are downloaded from a third-party app store, rather than directly from the publisher. That last part may provide a certain sense of security. When you know some huge intermediary like Apple or Google is…

I have a few things on my mind this month. Let’s start with something that happened back in January when I was at CES in Las Vegas, along with Tim and Barry of this parish. I usually buy an eSIM for trips to the States from one of the online vendors. This not only provides a second number – always useful – but means I don’t get into any arguments over what is “acceptable use” on my “unlimited data” SIMs from UK providers. This time, I decided I wanted to have a USA phone number, just in case I needed to get in contact with colleagues. My usual go-to provider, Holafly, wouldn’t be appropriate because its eSIM offerings are purely data. With hindsight, I should have remembered that the lab…

My advice when it comes to the Google Chrome web browser isn’t as brutal as many in the security space. In short, I don’t shout, “Do. Not. Use.” Rather, use it if you like it, but be aware that it’s the primary browser targeted by threat actors because of its reach. That means being particularly cautious, employing the best of best security practices, and doing so without fail. That same advice applies to all browser usage, and when it comes to the security of your networks and data, every browser is an avenue of attack on the threat map. (I’m tempted to say threat satnav as increasingly victims are targeted to that degree of specificity, but I digress.) Again, it’s that important word: reach. You’re at greater risk of getting…

There was a time when you could walk into a newsagent and see multiple shelves groaning under the weight of videogame and computer magazines. They were often hefty tomes almost as thick as phone books (the Royal Mail once refused to deliver Computer Shopper, it was so thick). They were the first point of call in the pre-internet era for anyone wanting to discover the latest news about games, serious software and hardware. While there are still a good number of magnificent gaming and technology magazines in print, many have sadly folded. But memories still linger and there’s an important recognition that past publications hold vital historical information worth preserving. Enthusiasts have been digitising old magazines for years, making them available for anyone to enjoy online. Trouble is, finding them…

When I were a lad, things were simple. Back in the mid-1970s, TV meant a box in the living room. Big-screen tellies stretched all of 20in, while colour was a high-end option. Remote controls were large brick-sized devices tethered to the set, and marked out your TV as being special. We had three channels: BBC1, BBC2 and the regional ITV station, Anglia in our household. They all shut down at a decent hour, which was well after my bedtime but no later than midnight. Getting to choose a programme as a 10-year-old was a major coup. And my mum had no compunction about saying “we don’t want to be watching this” if anything came on screen she deemed inappropriate. After all, she was watching the TV too, even if she…

HMD Fusion X1 Smartphone brands have previously tried to protect children by bolting controls and digital health features on top of their existing interfaces, but the HMD X1, a partnership between HMD and kid-friendly tech brand Xplora, is designed from the ground up to help young people grow into the smart device world. It give parents granular control over app permissions and approved contacts, direct access to the phone from a parent device, plus options for tracking and concentration modes. Meanwhile, a 108MP camera, 5,000mAh battery and a variety of case options may yet win over teenagers. Expected to launch this year, but the price and monthly subscription cost for services are yet to be confirmed. RICHARD PRIDAY Lenovo Yoga Solar PC A laptop that can charge from sunlight? Why…

@njkobie Every now and then, I open up OpenAI’s ChatGPT in my browser and give it a task. Usually, this is spurred by sitting in front of a blank document, the cursor taunting me, needing a way into a story. ChatGPT often proves useful for this very first step, but with many caveats. For example, I asked ChatGPT to draw up a list of key milestones in quantum computing as part of my Futures article this month (see p126). Quantum computing always makes my head hurt, so I thought a basic search task like this could be helpful. As always, I asked for links to ensure facts were verifiable. Although the AI did come back with a list of events, key details were entirely incorrect – including, oddly, dates. I…

Not everything needs an add-on. Windows is packed with options for changing the way it looks and behaves – and many are easily rolled back as they’re nothing more than a switch or a tickbox. For others, you’ll need to edit the Registry. That could cause problems if you make a mistake, so make a full Registry backup before you go any further. To do this, launch the Registry Editor by pressing Windows key+R. Then type “regedit” and press return. Now click File, followed by “Export…” and put the backup somewhere safe. While you’re at it, check that your system backup is also current. In the worst-case scenario, a Registry error could prevent Windows from starting up. Switch on logical scrolling Microsoft implemented an important but easily missed setting in…

When you’re buying or building a new computer, you’ll invariably be encouraged to choose the latest generation of processor. That applies whether you’re looking for an AMD-powered gaming system, an Intel workstation or an ultra-efficient Apple laptop. But does it really make a difference? Is this year’s silicon really so much better than what’s gone before? The truth is, there’s no simple answer. A lot can change between different processor generations – or the difference from one year to the next may be minimal. Here we’ll look at why the big chip brands keep on rolling out generation after generation of processors, and what might change from one iteration to the next. Next month we’ll take a closer look at what specifically differentiates the most recent generations of Intel, AMD…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,416 (£1,700 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Do not adjust your sets: this is a ThinkPad. It’s not black, there’s no TrackPoint and everything is going to be okay. That’s partially because you, if you’re already a ThinkPad fan, are not who Lenovo is targeting here: it’s trying to reach a new market of young buyers who naturally lean to MacBooks. Some things stay the same. The build quality is excellent throughout, and all the usual support tools for SMBs and enterprises remain intact. It comes with an excellent three-year warranty, and it’s simple to extend this using Lenovo’s Commercial Vantage software. Lenovo also keeps its commitment to sustainability by using recycled materials where it can: 50% recycled aluminium in the chassis, recycled plastics in the keycaps and…

PRICE 128GB, £499 (£599 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Apple’s new iPad Air M3 looks identical to last year’s M2 model. That’s because it is identical. The only difference is the newer M3 chip, which gives it iPad Pro-level performance. It also comes with a host of useful Apple Intelligence features out of the box, although these AI capabilities can also be added to the M2-powered Air by simply upgrading to iPadOS 18. If you’re like me and have previously admired the iPad Air’s thin, minimalist aluminium design, you won’t mind that Apple hasn’t changed it: it’s as elegant and sturdy as ever. Measuring a mere 6.1mm deep and weighing only 460g, this tablet still lives up to its “Air” moniker. It can easily slip into your backpack, and indeed is…

PRICE £1,583 (£1,900 inc VAT) from tinyurl.com/368cyberpower Until this month, my generic if boring advice to anyone specifying a desktop PC was to buy the fastest Nvidia card you could afford. But if you turn to p68 you’ll see that AMD has well and truly spoiled the party with its RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT GPUs, all of which means this RTX 5070-powered system must work hard to justify its price. CyberPowerPC UK, the British arm of the American PC manufacturer, has carefully chosen the supporting components and opted for quality throughout. That starts with the Lian Li Lancool 207 chassis, which is entirely toolless – the tempered glass windows and right-hand side panel even clip in without screws, meaning you simply slip your finger into a groove to…

PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D is something special. It’s the company’s latest “flagship” chip, and I’m comfortable saying that it’s the best processor ever made for the consumer market. For sure, that comes at a price. As well as being the greatest mainstream CPU, it’s also the most expensive at £700 inc VAT. By comparison, Intel’s current top-ranking chip, the Core Ultra 9 285K, seems positively affordable at only £572. Then again, the new AMD processor will work in any AM5 motherboard, while Intel’s offering requires a whole new chipset. The best way to understand what’s so special about the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is to compare it to its predecessor. This means stepping back not one but two generations: the Ryzen 8000 series didn’t…

PRICE From £496 (£595 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk If AMD’s MSRPs were to be believed, there would be little point considering the RX 9070. This card doesn’t have enough firepower to deliver consistent rates over 60fps at 4K, whereas its XT variant does. Eith the latter only costing an extra £50, it would be the very definition of a no-brainer decision. In reality, you can buy variants of this card (there is no reference version to match Nvidia’s Founders Edition) for a little under £600, while the RX 9070 XT cards now start at around £670, often pushing over £700. That means you should engage your brain, as there is an argument for this as a 4K card. It very much depends on which games you’re going to be playing:…

PRICE From £716 (£860 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Forget the RTX 5080: if you’re a gaming enthusiast or graphics/video creator and don’t fancy spending over a grand on a GPU, the 5070 Ti is the card to buy. It stands out due to its significant uplift compared to the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super, even rivalling the RTX 4080 Super in certain tasks. Look at the graphs on the previous page and you’ll see that it’s also consistently ahead of the RX 9070 XT in games, while demolishing it in creative tasks. Starting with 1440p gaming, the gen-on-gen improvement of the RTX 5070 Ti over the RTX 4070 Ti is a solid 20%, even without factoring in DLSS 4 with MFG. And it’s excels at ray tracing:…

PRICE 512GB, £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from mi.com Xiaomi’s Ultra smartphones are always eye-catching, but this update takes things to a new level: the Silver Chrome edition of the 15 Ultra is designed to look like a classic Leica camera, complete with faux leather coating, and looks spectacular. I’m not normally a fan of Xiaomi’s large circular camera units, but for this inventive design it works perfectly. If you prefer something less showy, there are also plain black and white versions. The other side of the phone has its own visual charms. The 15 Ultra packs a 6.73in AMOLED display with an adaptive 1-120Hz refresh rate, a huge 3,200cd/m2 peak brightness, support for HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, and a fingerprint sensor under the display. The screen quality is immediately apparent…

Not a day goes by without an AI developer claiming that their product is the answer to one of life’s bugbears. Whether it’s cutting hospital waiting times, assessing claims or making us safer drivers, there’s seemingly no end to AI’s talents. And nowhere is this more true than its capacity to generate wholly imaginary images. This month, we compare eight leading contenders on their ability to produce realistic, useful graphics in response to six diverse prompts. The prompts themselves, which you can read in full from p88 to p93, were designed to generate a series of images that we could compare directly. Which makes this sound easy, when it wasn’t: weighing the benefits of one service against another is a huge challenge, given their diversity. Microsoft Designer, for example, works…

PROS Excellent photorealistic image generation • price • generally good text rendering CONS Difficulty generating UK landmarks outside London • not a collaborative workflow PRICE Free from tinyurl.com/368imagefx As a Google Labs product, ImageFX sits beside other “experiments” such as GenType for producing AI-generated alphabets, TextFX for playing with language components, and MusicFX, which uses prompts to generate music. The quality of the output is difficult to criticise, so the fact that it’s free to anyone with a Google Account is particularly impressive. It’s also fun. After running through our test prompts, we started to explore more esoteric options. “A badly framed holiday photo taken in the Algarve that just misses a woman proposing to her boyfriend because it was slightly out of the frame” delivered what could well have…

PROS Flexible generation prompting with direct access to parameters • basic in-browser editing • impressive external editor if you qualify to use it • mood boards and profiles CONS Private image generation only available on Pro and Mega plans • some issues with text • external editor not available to all users PRICE From $10 to $120 per month from midjourney.com Midjourney bills itself as an “open community”, by which it means that other users can see your output and remix it for their own purposes. To generate private images, you’ll need to subscribe to at least the Pro or Mega plans, at $60 and $120 per month respectively. Like all other plans, these rates are cut by 20% if you sign on for a year; whichever plan you’re on,…

PROMPT “Make a photorealistic image of a ginger cat sitting on the side of a canal in Venice. The cat is cleaning itself while a gondola passes by in the background. On the other side of the canal is a church with steps leading up to double doors, and a dome on top. The weather is sunny.” ARTBREEDER OPENAI DALL-E MICROSOFT DESIGNER GOOGLE IMAGEFX ADOBE FIREFLY STABLE DIFFUSION LEONARDO MIDJOURNEY…

PROMPT “A pencil sketch of a woman waiting for a bus. It is raining and the bus is running late.” ARTBREEDER GOOGLE IMAGEFX MICROSOFT DESIGNER ADOBE FIREFLY OPENAI DALL-E MIDJOURNEY LEONARDO STABLE DIFFUSION @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO…

“I remember when the Telegraph opened its photo library,” JAG Gillan, a pioneering digital artist who uses AI in his practice, told PC Pro. “I would go to their office and look through hundreds of negatives and slides, and even that was seen as doing a photographer out of a job because we were using something that already existed.” We’d met to discuss his approach to Midjourney, which he uses in creating what he calls Organic Electronic Art: digital pieces that appear untouched by a computer. His work (jagart.co.uk) is defined by thick, expressive oil strokes, fluid watercolours and the subtle imperfections that give art a human touch. On countless layers, each created by hand in Rebelle, a digital painting studio, they surround and overlay the AI element that inspires each…

PRICE Diskless, £1,397 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com The DiskStation DS1823xs+ may have been launched a couple of years ago but it still stands tall as one of Synology’s flagship high-performance desktop models. Reasons are manifold: this 8-bay model is driven by a powerful quad-core 3.35GHz AMD Ryzen V1780B CPU, and its base 8GB of DDR4 ECC memory can be boosted to 32GB. The main drive bays support SATA HDDs and SSDs, while the two internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots can be used as a performance-enhancing cache or a standard storage pool. Bear in mind that all storage devices are restricted to Synology’s own models; it will work with drives from other manufacturers but Synology won’t provide support if you use them. Networking options are plentiful, with the appliance offering a…

PRICE £159 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk EnGenius has a fine reputation for delivering high-performing Wi-Fi 7 access points (APs), and it now turns its attention to small businesses with a family of three “Lite” models. The ECW210L and ECW212L are Wi-Fi 6 APs, while the flagship ECW516L on review brings Wi-Fi 7 into play. With a price a shade under £160, the ECW516L offers a lot for your money. Its big BE14000 rating presents eight spatial streams: two for its 2.4GHz radio and three each for the 5GHz and 6GHz bands, with theoretical maximum speeds of 700Mbits/sec, 4,300Mbits/sec and 8,700Mbits/sec respectively. To keep costs down EnGenius has replaced the powerful Qualcomm Networking Pro 1220 platform in its higher-end APs with a 2GHz MediaTek MT7986A A53 CPU. The ECW516L has a…

A rare beast has been dragged into our repair shop: a Surface 3 laptop. I’m unsure whether it’s the historic lack of sales density or the sheer systemic unrepairability within the range, but Microsoft’s finest non-Xbox hardware hasn’t troubled the consumer space. Certainly not in Yorkshire. This Surface model didn’t require a fault-fix, just an SSD upgrade as the owner had finally outgrown the miserly 128GB drive fitted in the factory. This type of work has become very common over recent years as the prices of SSDs have fallen, and it’s usually a painless process. The Surface 3 laptop has great features that grease the wheels of frictionless repair. For a start, Microsoft has published its Surface Service Guides (tinyurl.com/368guides). The manual for the Surface 3 is a 54-page PDF…

My normal remit here is to present small to medium business owners with what they need to know to make their IT run better. I’ve been inclined to think about this as a matter of mainly performance – a rapid IT platform is a virtuous IT platform, after all. This month’s topic isn’t about that kind of advice. It’s about just how twisted up things have become when it comes to our data. We’re constantly told that the protection of our data is principally our responsibility. Increasingly, however, our right to access loans, the level of service we receive from businesses and even our right to sign up to such services is determined not by our liquidity but a loose and shadowy collection of “scores”. Many of which we cannot…

Oxford’s teleporting DQS Building a quantum computer is a rather difficult undertaking. Beyond the fact that frankly everything about these systems is bewildering – entanglement, teleporting, superposition! – actually assembling a quantum computer of any real use would require millions of qubits, and that would mean building a massive machine. Like, utterly massive. So why not connect a bunch of smaller machines instead? It’s still challenging, like everything in quantum computing, but researchers have created an algorithm that links together smaller quantum machines using teleportation – as you do – to help them scale. Using this method, the team at the University of Oxford may have found a solution to the scalability problem. And the best bit is that they actually built it. This could herald the early steps for…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro M4 M4 beast from £1,599 from apple.com/uk This M4 update to the already brilliant MacBook Pro line is an easy recommendation, so the big question becomes do you choose the 14in version from £1,599 or 16in from £2,499? And then how much do you upgrade, as Apple isn’t afraid of high prices. But whatever you choose should last for years, and look great while it’s doing it. REVIEW Issue 364, p50 NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Air M4 If you don’t need the all-out power of the Pro, this is a brilliant, cheaper alternative despite the unchanged chassis and screen.  13in from £999, 15in from £1,199 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 368, p54 Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED Asus pairs a Core Ultra 9 288V with a…

@bazzacollins There’s a tendency to regard every move a Big Tech firm makes as sinister, yet another example of The Man taking the Richard Bliss. Perhaps none more so than Amazon’s recent decision to prevent people downloading copies of Kindle books to their computers. Tech sites have been pressing the overly worn panic button, imploring Amazon customers to download copies of their books to their computers BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!! (Sorry, it is too late: the deadline passed in late February.) YouTubers issued 20-minute soliloquies, lamenting the end of another fundamental right. Online petitions were, of course, created. And ignored, as all online petitions rightfully are. Why were the bookerati so upset? Because Amazon was withdrawing the last practical means of downloading ebooks, stripping them of their DRM, converting them…

If you work in artificial intelligence or machine learning, you’re probably familiar with vague and hotly debated definitions. The term “reasoning models” is no exception. Eventually, someone will define it formally in a paper, only for it to be redefined in the next, and so on. I define “reasoning” as the process of answering questions that require complex, multi-step generation with intermediate steps. For example, factual question-answering such as “What is the capital of France?” doesn’t involve reasoning. In contrast, a question like “If a train is moving at 60mph and travels for three hours, how far does it go?” requires simple reasoning. After all, it requires recognising the relationship between distance, speed and time before arriving at the answer. A regular large language model (LLM) may only provide a…

Between 2007 and 2016, Intel proudly maintained what it called a “tick-tock cadence”. This meant putting out a new generation of chips every year, alternating between new core designs in even-numbered generations and process shrinks in the odd years. The tick-tock strategy made things nicely predictable, but it relied on Intel being able to reliably reduce the process size by around 40% every two years – an ambitious goal. In the event, the manufacturer successfully pulled off three complete runs around the cycle, before discovering that its silicon fabrication plants simply weren’t able to reliably shrink the sixth-generation Skylake core down from 14nm to 10nm. Did this prompt Intel to put a pause on new releases, and to keep selling sixth-generation chips until the next iteration was finally ready? Of…

PRICE £1,750 (£2,100 inc VAT) from uk.asus.com Turn to our coverage from MWC Barcelona 2025 (see p12) and you’ll discover that Lenovo continues to hunt for a solution to a perennial laptop problem: how to increase screen area. It provided two solutions, one involving magnetic clip-on displays (which work surprisingly well) and one where the OLED panel folds backwards over the lid. It’s a design I’m sure Salvador Dali would have appreciated. This is all on top of Lenovo’s forthcoming ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, where a motor unrolls an extra 4.7in of AMOLED screen that’s otherwise hidden beneath the keyboard. All ingenious solutions, but expensive: the ThinkBook is likely to cost £3,500 on its June release. Asus takes a different approach, with its third iteration on the Zenbook Duo elegant…

PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from honor.com The Honor Pad V9 makes an appealing Android-based alternative to the standard iPad. It offers comparable hardware specs along with clever built-in software features – and while it’s more expensive than the cheapest model of Apple’s tablet, it comes with twice as much storage. Even better, the £400 price includes a flip cover and stylus, both pricey extras for its rival. It’s worth mentioning, though, that there’s only one model available, with no option for additional storage or cellular connectivity. The V9’s design doesn’t shake up the tablet world, nor the colour options of grey and white, but the tablet looks smart with classy rounded edges. A USB-C port sits on the right-hand side with a front camera along the long edge, suitable…

PRICE As reviewed, £923 (£1,107 inc VAT) from lenovo.com There’s no messing around here: the fifth generation of the ThinkCentre M70q will only be of interest to business buyers. While you can buy it in single units, it feels destined for large-scale rollouts – perhaps to individual homes, as IT teams can manage these PCs remotely if you choose the versions with vPro chips. For this is the Intel version of the M70q Gen 5, with CPU choices ranging from the non-vPro Core i5-14400T to the Core i7-14700T vPro, with a price difference of £300 between those two extremes. The “T” suffix indicates this range’s leaning towards power efficiency, but my test unit with a Core i7-14700T and 16GB of RAM showed rapid pace in Geekbench 6 (2,686 single core,…

Total value this month £151 Norton Mobile Security 2025 Smartphones and tablets are treasure troves of personal information. From lists of contacts to credit and debit card details, your email inbox, personal notes and the data in your favourite apps, your mobile devices are loaded with private information about you, your contacts and your family. And malicious actors would love to get their hands on it – which is why it’s not just desktop PCs and laptops that need protection from malware and other types of cyber-attack. The breadth of protection is important, because many of today’s threats exploit human nature, and try to trick us into responding to risky text messages, opening malware-laden emails, visiting fake websites, and more. It can only take a moment of distraction on your part…

PRICE From £558 (£670 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk dear Nvidia, is how to launch a new generation of graphics cards. No wild promises, just power: AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT delivers RTX 4080-levels of gaming performance at half the price. Its strengths lie in raw gaming performance. At 1440p, it holds its own against Nvidia’s heavy hitters: about 8% faster than the RTX 4070 Ti, 4% slower than the RTX 4080 and 7% slower than the RTX 5070 Ti. This carries over into 4K gaming, thanks to the RX 9070 XT’s 16GB VRAM. Here, it’s about 15% faster than the 4070 Ti, 2.5% quicker than the RX 7900 XTX and a mere 3.5% slower than the RTX 4080. It also comes within 8% of the RTX 5070 Ti’s 4K performance.…

NORTON 360 PREMIUM for £19.99 10 DEVICES 2YR LICENCE 75GB CLOUD STORAGE ■ tinyurl.com/norton360premium We’ve negotiated a killer deal with Norton. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Security suite across ten devices. And because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. There’s 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, plus the full version of Norton Secure VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while you’re abroad. Norton Parental Control provides tools to see exactly what your kids are up to on their various devices, and you also get GPS location monitoring for Android and iOS. To round things off,…

PRICE £374 (£449 inc VAT) from nothing.tech Despite the “Pro” tag, the Nothing Phone 3a Pro is very much a value proposition. For £449 it comes with a generous 256GB of storage – twice as much as the Pixel 8a (see issue 358, p74) and iPhone 16e (see p72) – a big screen and a powerful camera setup. The regular Phone 3a opposite is even cheaper, for reasons that will become clear. The design sticks with the see-through style of previous models. This combines a sleek feel with a helping of hi-tech futurism, providing a peek into the inside: micro-screws and cable ribbons are clearly visible through the sturdy glass casing. The distinctive “Glyph” rear LED display is here, too. This not only adds to the conversation-starting aesthetic, but has…

PROS Conversational workflow • great logo response • expressive oil paintings • diversity in human depiction CONS Difficulty steering UK landmarks away from London • Venice pictures could have been better PRICE From free to £29 per month from firefly.adobe.com (credits also included with Creative Cloud subscriptions) If you’re already a Creative Cloud subscriber, what are you waiting for? On the All Apps plan, you get 1,000 Firefly generative credits a month, and 500 if you’re on a single app plan or have a paid subscription to Adobe Stock. Lightroom and Photography 20GB plan subscribers receive 100 credits apiece, and if you have multiple subscriptions, your credits are aggregated. Non-CC users needn’t feel left out. If you sign up for a free account then, per Adobe, you “may be provided…

PROS Extremely fast • free tier quota resets daily • workflow balances prompts with traditional controls CONS No private image generation on free plan • inconsistent quality PRICE From free to $60 per month from leonardo.ai When using Leonardo’s free plan, all of your creations are public, as they are with the lower-tier Midjourney plans. You’re also limited to 150 fast tokens daily. Although that sounds a lot, our prompt for a photorealistic cat ate up 40. You can’t generate anything larger than “medium”-sized images with a free plan, can’t generate images privately, and don’t get access to the most advanced features, so there are plenty of reasons to upgrade if you find it’s a platform you like. Some functions incur lower charges, such as unzooming – currently in beta…

PROS Collaborative workflow • text handling • smart when interpreting feedback good CONS Limited free allowance • reluctance to take inspiration from pop culture references PRICE From free to $200 per month from chatgpt.com DALL-E is accessed through the same interface as ChatGPT. The exact number of images you can generate is ambiguous, with ChatGPT explaining that free account users “typically get a limited number” of generations per month according to OpenAI’s policies. The number isn’t always fixed, and “may reset monthly or be subject to tiers. Paid users… often get more generation”. We managed to generate three free images before we had to pay for an upgrade, which isn’t exactly generous. Moreover, it generated only a single image in response to each prompt, where Midjourney, Google ImageFX and Microsoft…

PROMPT “Generate an oil painting. The subject is a bowl of fruit in front of a half-drunk glass of wine. It is in a kitchen some time in the 16th century. On the same table as the bowl of fruit there is a plate with a little cheese on it. Use Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring as your inspiration. Make the picture portrait shaped in 3:2 ratio.” ADOBE FIREFLY MICROSOFT DESIGNER ARTBREEDER GOOGLE IMAGEFX MIDJOURNEY OPENAI DALL-E LEONARDO STABLE DIFFUSION @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO…

PROMPT “Create some artwork for a podcast about classic cars. The audience will be entirely in the UK, so make sure the result includes a British landmark. The image should be exciting and glamorous, and give the impression of speed without encouraging dangerous driving. Include the podcast title, which is Bonnet Banter.” MIDJOURNEY ADOBE FIREFLY ARTBREEDER GOOGLE IMAGEFX MICROSOFT DESIGNER OPENAI DALL-E LEONARDO STABLE DIFFUSION…

Many SMBs facing a storage crisis have turned to the cloud, but as the monthly bills keep rolling in some are finding these services are an increasingly expensive solution. Network-attached storage (NAS) appliances can be a far more cost-effective option as although their initial outlay will be much higher, ongoing costs are negligible. NAS appliances can also be a much better choice than a purpose-built server. There’s no need to worry about the additional costs of an operating system and client access licences as NAS systems are supplied with a business-class OS, can serve as many users as you want without paying extra – and come with free business apps including backup, replication and much more. The benefits of NAS are manifold: they’re easy to deploy, simple to manage and…

PRICE Diskless, £608 exc VAT from amazon.co.uk TerraMaster has a fine reputation for delivering ultra-compact NAS appliances and it goes one step beyond with the F8 SSD Plus. Measuring a mere 61 x 140 x 178mm (WDH), this little plastic box is the first NAS we’ve seen to present eight internal M.2 NVMe slots. There’s plenty of power on tap, as the appliance employs an 8-core 1.8GHz Intel Core i3 N305 mobile CPU partnered by 16GB of fast DDR5 RAM, upgradable to 32GB. The F8 SSD Plus isn’t cheap, but TerraMaster also offers an F8 SSD model with a 4-core 1.7GHz Intel N95 CPU with 8GB of DDR5 memory for around £70 less. Network performance won’t be held back as the F8 SSD Plus is equipped with a 10GBase-T port.…

PRICE £208 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com TP-Link has consistently offered an impressive range of business networking products, so it comes as some surprise that the DR3650v is its first DSL gateway appliance. It makes a grand entrance, though, as along with multi-WAN backup and load-balancing services, it’s designed to provide SMBs with an affordable all-in-one communications solution. Along with five gigabit ports, you get a dual-band AX3000 Wi-Fi 6 access point, with the USB-A port supporting 4G dongles for further WAN backup. Security comes via an SPI firewall with deep packet inspection (DPI) and web content filtering, it supports IPsec and SSL VPNs and has a built-in VoIP IP PBX. The appliance’s RJ11 WAN port supports VDSL2/VDSL2 35b and ADSL2+ services and the two RJ11 FXS ports are for connecting…

Surely all “as a service” offerings are IT, in one form or another? They are – but most of them focus on one specific aspect of the IT workload. “IT as a service” takes in the broader management and support of the computing estate. That includes things such as making sure the right servers are available and accessible, along with internal services such as desktop support and mobile-device management. So we’re talking about a flexible, outsourced IT department? We are, and that’s a tempting idea for would-be entrepreneurs hoping to start the next megacorporation in their back bedroom, or under the eaves of a WeWork. As with all “as a service” offerings, there’s no upfront expenditure required, and once you’re running you need pay only for the resources and services…

There can be little doubt that our society needs to protect young people from inappropriate content. If you’re not convinced by this then you need only familiarise yourself with a handful of facts. By the time this issue goes to press, it may well be that the FBI (working with the British police) has successfully recovered files deleted by the Southport killer. These files may shed light on the ideological impulses that helped to drive a man to commit those atrocities. They may not. For all we know the deleted files may be similar to the 166,000 documents preferred and downloaded by the killer. We’ll have to wait and see. But let’s think about those numbers for a second: 166,000 documents downloaded by a 17-year-old, still a minor in the…

Features Windows 95: the inside story We speak to the people behind the OS to discover what went so right, and yet what nearly went so wrong, with Microsoft’s biggest ever upgrade. Features Pick the best home VoIP package As Skype shuts down, we compare alternative IP telephony services, including options that let you keep a geographical number. Features CPUs: the next generation We take a deep dive into the latest chips from AMD, Apple and Intel, comparing the models, specifications and features – and explore what’s coming next. Labs NAS drives We pit the world’s best NAS drives against one another to find out which is best for different types of needs, whether that’s a small office file server or storing and distributing media. Or something else entirely… Retro…