PC Pro -julkaisun February 2021 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

DRAW UP YOUR CHAIRS and make yourself comfortable, because we’re in for one heck of a ride. The next ten years will see a total overhaul in computing as ARM usurps the Intel x86 architecture that has dominated for almost 40 years. The reason will be obvious the moment you turn to Jon Honeyball’s review of the new MacBook Air, powered by Apple’s M1 chip, on p40. If you still have any doubts, they’ll be mopped up by Jonathan Bray’s review of the M1 MacBook Pro four pages later. The M1 is a staggering achievement, brilliantly executed not only in hardware but in the level of integration with Apple’s software. This is just the beginning. Apple has started a war and Microsoft and its partners must step up to battle.…

It took just shy of five years for Google Photos to fully ingratiate itself into my life, and as soon as it happened, Google yanked the photo storage out from under me. In a few months, Google will be counting new uploads of photos against the 15GB every account gets for free, meaning many people will need to start paying. I’m livid, despite the fact I already pay Google for storage. Like many PC Pro readers, I provide my family with computing support and advice, and there is no task more important to my parents – grandparents to five children – than organising, finding and displaying digital photos. I have been dealing with this question for years. Back in the 2000s, I enthusiastically recommended to everyone Picasa, a brilliant photo-editing…

SCORE PRICE 16GB/1TB, £1,374 (£1,649 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk How dull. Another year, another MacBook Air. Apple hasn’t even bothered to change the design, so we know exactly what to expect, right? It’s going to be quirky, not particularly fast and of little interest to businesses. It’ll be overpriced for what you’re getting, with that money wasted on a design that rivals already match or exceed. Not only that, this new MacBook Air is the bottom of the range, so anyone with any sense will go for the MacBook Pro (see p44). Oh, MacBook Airs are popular amongst those who frequent the First Class Lounge at Heathrow to sip on champagne and nibble canapés. Nothing here to worry Windows and Intel/AMD. Move along, it’s a frippery for the irrelevant. Except…

SCORE PRICE £938 (£1,126 inc VAT) from store.hp.com Like Switzerland in the md midst of war, HP is equally happy to supply AMDorIntelchip chips in its business laptops. The EliteBook 845 ships with Ryzens and the otherwise identical EliteBook 840 usesIntel Core processors. These EliteBooks are as well built as they are attractive, with a highly respectableweightof1.39kg fora14in laptop with an all-metal chassis. HP also packsinthe ports, as shown in the images below. Both USB-C ports support USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3, and can be used for charging. The only omission of note is an Ethernet port. The keyboard is quiet, backlit and unexceptional: while HP has given the keys plenty of travel, they don’t have the tactile pushback of the best keyboards. The touchpad’s smooth finish makes it pleasant…

Here’s an offer you won’t find in the shops: you can buy a one-PC, unlimited-lifetime licence of Windows 10 Pro for just £39.99 direct from the PC Pro store. The normal price is £219.99, making this a truly staggering saving. This is a full version, but it’s also easy to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Pro “in place”. Simply enter the provided code and let Windows 10 do the rest. To buy Windows 10 Pro, visit pcpro.link/windows10 and click the red Buy Now button. We will then provide you with the Windows 10 media creation tool, which you can use to upgrade from 7 or create a fresh install using a DVD or USB stick. Or we can send you an official DVD for an extra £6.95. WAS £219.99…

SCORE PRICE £654 (£785 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Compared to the Philips 279C9 opposite, all the cards appear to be against this 27in Eizo monitor. After all, it has a mere 1440p resolution to the Philips’ 4K whilst costing almost twice as much. Bearing in mind that the 279C9 produced a commendable set of results in our image-quality tests, is there any reason to spend more? The answer is “yes” for several reasons, but whether they’re worth the difference in price will entirely depend on your needs. The first reason will be if you’re searching for a neat dual-monitor setup, because the Eizo offers daisy-chaining via a USB-C output. So you could power your laptop through the Eizo’s USB-C input, connect a second screen via the USB-C output and only…

The latest Apple Watches rule supreme for all-round excellence, but what are your choices on a tighter budget? We review four contenders SCORE PRICE £174 (£209 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk “Is that an Apple Watch?” It was a question repeatedly asked during my two months of testing the Zepp E Square, with the rounded edges and bright 1.65in 348 x 442 AMOLED screen both reminiscent of Apple’s devices. If my questioners had looked more closely they’d have noticed a single, subtle button on the right-hand side rather than a Digital Crown, but there’s no doubting the inspiration behind this stylish all-metal design. A sleek profile means it’s the most comfortable smartwatch I’ve worn, whether during the day or in bed, and the silicone strap still looks good after numerous runs…

SCORE PRICE £122 146 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk First released in the UK via Kickstarter, the Mobvoi TicWatch E was one of 2017’s best smartwatches: it delivered flagship features, including GPS and heart rate monitoring, for a far more affordable price than the mainstream. The TicWatch E2 was its late-2019 follow-up and, despite its age, this is arguably the best smartwatch you can buy for under £200. Uniquely here, it runs Google’s Wear OS software, giving you access to a welcome selection of third-party apps, along with smooth integration with Android devices. Although it’s powered by the now rather antiquated Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100, Mobvoi has worked hard to optimise the software and, as a result, it delivers a smooth user experience. Physically, the TicWatch E2 is unlikely to win…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk With a 6.7in screen, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is only 0.2in bigger than the 11 Pro Max, but it feelshuge. By contrast, the iPhone12Pro (see opposite)is eminently practical: lighter, easier to slip in and out of a jeans pocket, and I feel less like I’m going to drop it every time Iuse it. So should you ignore the Pro Max this time around? No, because in most other respect this is the best phone Apple has ever made. Much of this is due to the camera setup. Like the rest of therange, the Pro Max shoots 12MP images from all of its cameras, and the main “wide” camera shares the same seven-element lens as the iPhone 12 Pro. But there…

SCORE PRICE From £75 (£90 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8 Plus SCORE PRICE From £100 (£120 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk It’s unfair to compare Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets to “rivals” such as Apple’s iPads because the two ranges operate in different worlds. After all, a stylus for the iPad costs as much as entire Fire HD 8 tablet. Instead, think of the Fire tablets as semi-disposable items designed for consuming media – whether that’s magazines, books, TV or video. We cover Amazon’s 8in tablets here, but head to amazon.co.uk and you’ll find the Fire 7 for £50 and the Fire HD 10 for £150. While the screen sizes vary, the central ingredients are largely the same: low-end MediaTek processors, average screens and thick plastic casings finished…

SCORE PRICE £417 (£500 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com The “Pro” in this tablet’s name could not be more appropriate. Buy it with the keyboard, which will almost certainly be bundled for free along with a stylus if you buy from Huawei’s site, and it instantly turns from entertainment device into a professional tool. There is, of course, a Google-shaped elephant entirely absent from the room, with the ongoing trade dispute between China and the US meaning that newer Huawei devices such as the MatePad Pro don’t have access to the Google Play store. There are online resources that promise ways around this, but they aren’t a simple five-minute fix like the Fire tablets and we don’t recommend you go down that route. Instead, accept that you’ll never be able to…

SCORE PRICE From £192 (£230 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com In some ways, the Huawei MatePad is awkwardly priced. At £230 inc VAT for the 32GB edition, it’s no low-end bargain, while £270 for 64GB starts pushing it into iPad territory. So it sits in the troublesome middle, especially when you consider that – like the MatePad Pro – you don’t have direct access to the Google Play store. While you can buy a stylus (£100) and keyboard (£130), Huawei isn’t promoting them in a bundle in the way it does for the MatePad Pro. Indeed, they don’t even come up as recommended purchases when you add the MatePad to your basket. Still, this 10.4in tablet has obvious strengths. Build quality and design are both on a level you’d expect from…

SCORE PRICE £192 (£230 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk While other companies take the blank slate approach to building tablets, Lenovo likes to think about how they’re going to be used. With the Smart Tab P10, it envisages a scenario where you’re going to be hands-free much of the time. Perhaps in the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room – anywhere you’ll take advantage of the excellent bundled speaker dock. While the main thing that hits you about the dock is its volume and bass, there’s some subtlety here: it can handle the haunting music of Björk equally as well as a thumping track from Nirvana. Fans of speech radio and audiobooks will be delighted by how well it handles the spoken word too, and like the Yoga it includes Lenovo’s…

The sharp-eyed will have noticed one absentee from this Labs: Google. This isn’t because we forgot to ask the world’s fourth most valuable company to send us a tablet, but because it’s stopped making them. “Google’s HARDWARE team will be solely focused on building laptops moving forward,” wrote senior vice president Rick Osterloh on Twitter in June 2019, “but make no mistake, Android and Chrome OS teams are 100% committed for the long-run on working with our partners on tablets for all segments of the market.” This was after the beautiful but flawed Pixel Slate failed to match up to users’ high expectations of what a Google tablet should be, with one of those expectations being that it ran Android. What a shock to switch it on and find Chrome…

SCORE PRICE 2,500 sensors, 1yr maintenance, £4,433 exc VAT from paessler.com If you’re keen to keep costs under control then Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor is well worth a look, as it’s priced solely by sensor count. It’s versatile too: a single sensor can track any of 276 different metrics across your network, enabling the software to keep an eye on servers, desktops, storage devices, cloud services, applications, databases and more. New sensors are continually under development, with this latest edition bringing monitors for SQL Server 2019 databases, cloud web server loads and Dell EMC Unity storage arrays. Despite the sophistication of the software, setup is very simple. We launched the installer on a Windows Server 2019 host and were greeted by a smart setup wizard, which gets the discovery process…

SCORE PRICE £652 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk The EnGenius ECS2512FP is a fairly compact network switch, measuring a modest 330mm across. Don’t judge it on size alone, though, because it packs serious performance into its diminutive chassis. Eight front-facing Ethernet ports all support both regular Gigabit and 2.5Gbits/sec connections, while four 10GbE SFP+ ports allow for highspeed fibre connections. Even better, all eight multi-Gigabit ports support the 802.3bt PoE++ specification, with an overall power budget of 240W. This means the ECS2512FP can deliver 30W on every port at once, or 60W on any four of them – which should be music to the ears of IT managers looking to deploy high-performance Wi-Fi 6 APs over existing Cat5e cabling. Three management methods are on offer: you can use the switch’s own…

A few years ago, the telecoms industry came up with the idea of “presence management”. This was yet another spin on the idea of an online presence, and it basically meant adding chat-style interfaces to telephony systems. People could browse their contact lists and see each person’s status, so you would know who was available before even picking up the headset. Fantasies started to multiply about automatic sensors, cameras and the like, which could save you the hassle of having to manually set your availability. This was partly a response to what traditional phone companies saw as PC-based communications platforms muscling in on their territory. Unfortunately, their suspicion of that market put the mockers on the whole venture. If they’d been willing to integrate their services with a desktop GUI,…

It’s interesting to reflect that within the dynamic maelstrom of technological evolution there are contrasting questions and stories that have a slow burn nature and slip away without an answer. One of Barry Collins’ recent columns (see issue 314, p22) reminded me of this when he questioned the relevance of the desktop PC. As a retailer, and specifically a system builder, I have a great love for desktops. Barry’s ponderings over desktop versus laptop ranks within the top five questions I get asked on a weekly basis. We find that purchasers of a distinctly more mature audience favour the desktop, but the reason is usually socioeconomic than technical or financial, as this band of the public is more likely to own floor space that can accommodate a bulky tower. A…

David Crookes Pining for the DOS games that whiled away your youth? David travels back in time via a vast online archive. Join him in our Retro column on p123 Alan Martin The Covid-19 lockdown has given board games a new lease of life in online realms. Alan unlocks the next level of tabletop gaming from p30 Adam Shepherd In these crazy times, why shouldn’t Raspberry Pi build a computer into a keyboard? Adam reveals if the Pi 400 is ready for the mainstream on p58 Simon Hudson After wondering why he felt so tired after video meetings, Simon set out to investigate the truth behind Zoom fatigue – and how to fight it. See p26…

Google has become the latest company to be accused of effectively bricking smart speaker systems. Sonos angered consumers when it was accused of bricking ageing devices last year, but changes to the way Google handles music over its Home (since rebranded to Nest) speakers mean that users can’t even play their own music over working speakers unless they pay for a YouTube Premium subscription at £10 per month. “Google has been diabolical, I’ve spent hours on the phone, but there’s no way around it,” said Jon Stanton, a PC Proreader and web designer who flagged the issue. The issue relates to the closure of Google Play Music. As suggested by Google ahead of the closure, Stanton transferred his 7,000 tracks from Google Play Music to YouTube Music, where he hoped…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Air 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 NEW ENTRY Dell XPS 17 (2020) An excellent alternative to the 16in MacBook Pro thanks to a 17in IPS screen, bags of power, allround quality and a great range of specs. From £1,799 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 315, p48 Apple MacBook Pro 13in (M1) Apple…

There’s no telling some people. Family warned me, friends warned me, techie colleagues said I’d be mad to even entertain the idea. Heck, even you lot served me fair warning with your dire customer support ratings in the recent PC Pro Awards. Did I listen? Did I Friar Tuck. I signed up with Virgin Media. Let me explain what may appear to be a terminal lapse into insanity. We recently became Virgin territory: the firm spent what felt like six years, but was probably only a couple of months, grinding up our pavements, ruining the grass verges and thoughtlessly blocking driveways to install fibre in the ’hood. Ever since, we’ve been carpet-bombed with letters, leaflets and door-to-door sales staff trying to persuade us to sign up. I had no interest…

“After a week of shelter-in-place, I was just flabbergasted by how intense and exhausting it was,” wrote Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford University professor, in a piece by Microsoft Research (pcpro.link/316fatigue) that examined why people found online meetings so much more tiring than the real thing. On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. In important meetings, we need to be on top form: we need to judge how, when and with whom to interact; think on our feet; and simply be alive to all the messages, verbal and physical, being transmitted. The adrenaline that carries us through such meetings quickly dissipates once they end, leaving us drained. You’d think that online meetings would be more relaxed affairs. You’d be wrong. “It is a lot more tiring,” said Professor Paul Lee, co-director…

If you buy a new computer today, it’s sure to have at least one USB connector – but what sort? And if you’re buying a new laptop, what should you look out for? Manufacturers throw around terms such as USB 3.1, Gen2 and USB-C, but the meanings are far from obvious. First, let’s review our history. The original USB 1 specification was released in 1996, and supported data transfers at up to 12Mbits/sec – which was more than fast enough for an era when dial-up internet connections topped out at 56Kbits/sec. The USB connector could power lightweight devices, supplying 500mA of power at 5V, over a standard cable with a rectangular Type-A plug at one end and a square-ish Type-B connector at the other. USB quickly became popular, but it…

SCORE PRICE 8GB/256GB,£1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The MacBook Air (see p40) was no one-off. Not only is this M1-powered update to the MacBook Pro a great laptop in all the usual ways – the display, keyboard, touchpad, microphone and speakers are all wonderful – but the new processor takes it to another level, boosting battery life and performance to such an extent that both AMD and Intel should be seriously worried. Our MacBook Air review has already covered the most important aspects of the M1 chip, along with the Rosetta 2 runtime environment and the full suite of native M1-compatible Mac software that Apple has released from the get-go. The only change here (and with the new Mac mini) is that Apple adds fan cooling. Aside from this,…

SCORE PRICE £3,416 (£4,100 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/316scan It’s no longer a surprise to see GeForce RTX graphics in a workstation, and that’s in large part due to Nvidia’s Studio initiative. Launched at Computex in May 2019, it’s already a compelling platform: a combination of certified components and drivers that are supported by industry-leading software across 3D rendering, photography, video editing, graphic design and more. All without the premium for AMD and Nvidia’s pro-level cards. Here, the star is Nvidia’s RTX 3090. This costs £1,500 and includes a specification to make apps tremble. First, the 10,496 CUDA cores provide unparalleled levels of parallel processing. Then you have 328 Tensor cores to give a boost in apps that support deep learning – perhaps most notably in games that support deep learning…

SCORE PRICESSTONEBLT-018,£389(£467incVAT); STONEBLT-019, £459 (£551 inc VAT); STONEBLT-020, £579 (£695 inc VAT) from stonepcgroup.co.uk Stone is one of the UK’s biggest suppliers of computers to both education and local government. It tends to avoid the limelight of reviews, but this trio of StonePC Lite systems – called STONEBLT-018 for the Ryzen 3 version, STONEBLT-019 for the Ryzen 5 and STONEBLT-020 with a Ryzen 7 – are exceptional. They’re the first computers we’ve seen with AMD’s Ryzen Pro 4000 chips inside, and while they will never garner the headlines of Ryzen’s 5000 Series (see p52), it’s easy to see their appeal to IT managers. Ryzen 4000 Pro unwrapped First, we need to break down AMD’s mystifying naming conventions, because in essence the 4000 Series of desktop chips is simply the 3000…

SCORE PRICE £371 (£445 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com I nour recent group test of 35 desktop monitors (see issue 313, p76), only one 27in screen cost less than £500 whilst offering a 4K resolution and USB-C connectivity: the BenQ EW2780U (see issue 313, p82). Despite its £465 price, two insurmountable barriers sat between that screen and a Recommended award. First, its stripped-back feature set and, second, the even more impressive Dell Ultra Sharp U2760Q (see issue 313, p81), which costs £60 more. Our conclusion? Pay the extra. The Philips immediately offers advantages over the BenQ, and not just the fact it #8217;s £20 cheaper. It has VESA Display HDR 400 certification, while the BenQ offered an emulated HDR mode; it includes AMD’s FreeSync technology for the promise of tear-free gaming;…

SCORE PRICE 38mm, £166 (£199 inc VAT) from apple.com With the launch of the £269 Apple Watch SE (see issue 315, p68), we thought time was up for the Series 3, but Apple has chosen to keep its cheapest smartwatch on sale. There’s no cellular option, with your two options being the 38mm model for £199 or the 42mm edition for £229. The obvious question is – other than cellular - what do you lose by opting for the Series 3? In terms of looks, only the distinctive red edging around the Digital Crown, with the rounded edges of the AMOLED screen an ever-present for all Apple Watches. Put both watches side by side, though, and you notice how much larger the SE’s screen is, thanks to its slimmer bezels.…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £583 (£699 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Once upon a time, a phone with a 5.4in display such as the Apple iPhone 12 mini was considered enormous – something you might poke fun at rather than stand in awe of. Today, most smartphones tote 6in displays and compact handsets are rare; rarer still are compact phones that are as powerful and capable as their pocket-stretching counterparts. However, the iPhone 12 mini is effectively the iPhone 12 we reviewed last month (see issue 315, p58) in miniature. It still supports 5G while every physical feature is in the same place, including the twin cameras. The difference purely boils down to size: the mini measures 64 x 7.4 x 132mm (WDH) and weighs 133g, which is 10% more compact by…

SCORE PRICE From £483 (£579 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk We thought that Apple might be sending us a secret message when it chose to send in the 10.9in Apple iPad Air for this group test but omitted the 11in version of the iPad Pro. After all, if you opt for the 64GB iPad Air for £579, you’ll save £190 over the cheapest 11in Pro with sacrifices that most people won’t notice: no Lidar scanner, a screen with a 60Hz rather than 120Hz refresh rate and a lesser selection of cameras. Was Apple telling us that the all-new iPad Air was the obvious choice for professionals seeking a more compact tablet? It certainly isn’t if you want big amounts of storage. You can upgrade from the base 64GB to 256GB for…

SCORE PRICE From £291 (£349 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk On paper, the S6 Lite makes a lot of sense. While it costs £20 more than the 32GB iPad, it comes bundled with a stylus and includes a far more sensible 64GB of storage. And you can add extra via the microSD card slot. What’s more, the 4G version of the S6 Lite (available SIM-free from samsung.com/uk) costs an affordable £399. The 32GB iPad with “cellular” costs £459, and adding the Pencil brings the total to £548. Holding both tablets in either hand, it’s not obvious why you’d pay more for Apple’s device, with the Tab S6 Lite scoring a clear design win due to its sleeker 7mm depth and slim bezels. It’s superbly built too, with a solid metal body…

SCORE PRICE From £274 (£329 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk We’ve long said that if your budget is below £500 and you’re looking for a laptop, you should seriously consider buying an iPad. Our view is entirely unchanged in light of this group test, and that’s despite the excellence of the Huawei and Samsung hardware. It’s true that those tablets are sleeker and more stylish than the iPad, which is made to look dated by its huge chin and forehead bezels, but Apple’s “budget” tablet matches them for speed whether you’re looking at processor-based benchmarks such as Geekbench or gaming tests such as 3DMark (see p92). Where the iPad truly wins is the sleek experience provided by iPadOS and the range of accessories you can buy for it. For example, this…

SCORE PRICE From £333 (£399 inc VAT) from microsoft.com The Surface Go 2 sits apart from all the other tablets here. While it may be sold as a slate, in truth it makes little sense without an accompanying £100 Type Cover to turn it into a mini laptop. This is where its strength lies, as within its tiny frame it holds a powerful enough processor to keep Windows 10 running smoothly. That’s even true of the £529 version, which includes a Pentium 4425Y chip compared to the Core m3 of the £619 option. Both these configurations include 8GB of RAM and a speedy SSD, and while the m3 version is faster – scoring 32 in our benchmarks to 21 for the Pentium – you won’t notice much difference in practice.…

SCORE PRICE £208 (£250 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk We’re fond of the Lenovo Yoga Smart Tab. While all the other tablets here are cut from the same design cloth, the Yoga has a style of its own. Most obviously, it has a built-in stand that means we left it in a standing position when not holding it. The stand even includes a cut-out so you can hang it on a wall. That’s not all. A bulge at its base holds a pair of stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos certification. In truth, we didn’t find the audio to be notably better than the Huawei MatePad, say, but there’s a fraction more bass if you listen out for it. Despite Lenovo’s best efforts, the speakers don’t have enough power to fill a…

Downtime isn’t just a pain – it can be a catastrophe for a small business. Aside from the direct loss of productivity, going offline can harm your reputation and frustrate your customers, prompting them to take their business elsewhere. It’s essential, therefore, to keep your network healthy, and not just through reactive firefighting. Network monitoring software can help by quickly alerting you to problems, and even flagging up potential failures before they happen, by spotting issues such as sluggish response times, overloaded application servers or low storage capacity. This month, we look at four of the top monitoring solutions on the market from ManageEngine, Paessler, Progress Software and SolarWinds. All of them offer a wealth of features to help keep your network ticking along smoothly, and we put each of…

SCORE PRICE 25 devices, Premium licence, £2,092 exc VAT from whatsupgold.com Developer Ipswitch was recently acquired by Progress Software, and WhatsUp Gold remains a worthy network monitoring solution, with a fine track record going back to the early 1990s. This 2020 version brings innovations including pulsing device icons for eye-catching alerts, facilities for uploading your own icons and improved reporting. There’s also an optional application performance add-on that can keep an eye on AWS and Azure environments, while the network traffic analysis module now provides a global map showing traffic between distributed devices. The Premium edition we tested includes all the core features such as discovery, interactive mapping, alerting and reporting, plus cloud, network and storage monitoring. The optional modules can be added on individually, or you can move up…

SCORE PRICE £269 exc VAT from bmisolutions.co.uk Fujitsu’s SP series has long been a great choice for USB scanning – and now the SP-1130N ups the ante. It’s one of three new network-enabled models, along with the 1120N and 1125N, that offer the same speeds as their deskbound counterparts but add a Gigabit Ethernet port, giving you the freedom to locate the scanner where you want and drive it from any computer on the network. Software-wise, all three stick with Fujitsu’s PaperStream IP software suite – and we’ve no complaints about that, as it offers a wealth of image-processing and scan-management features. Batch scanning in particular is made easy: you can create jobs that scan and process multi-page documents with a single click, and use barcode recognition or OCR zones…

Licence management: this is about making sure we’re using legitimate copies of Windows and Office, right? Well, that’s part of it. Unfortunately, that only covers what former US defence chief Donald Rumsfeld memorably referred to as the “known knowns”. The sticky part of licence management is getting to grips with the “unknown unknowns”. People do strange things with computers, and even on a well-managed network you can find little fan clubs keeping old applications and variant releases alive, without giving the slightest thought to licensing. Still, as long as our headline apps are activated, we don’t need to worry about those… Unfortunately, activation alone doesn’t prove anything. Software can deactivate itself for all sorts of reasons: some apps have time limits, some won’t start unless they can contact their licence…

Writing good code is hard. As the old joke goes: if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Part of writing good code is defining the use cases, the allowable input data and the expected output ranges. At the lab, we’re heavy users of conditional cell formats in Excel: define an acceptable range for a result and highlight it if it goes out of range. It may not be perfect, but it can make it obvious that something is wrong, either due to a typo or an unexpected but correct input. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that any sort of numerical handling in an app or spreadsheet should be liberally smothered with appropriate handling and highlighting. It should be part of the basic techniques that we…

If there ever was a bigger computing scandal than Public Health England’s handling of the pandemic statistics in late 2020, I’ve not heard of it. If you’ve been held in solitary confinement and missed the story, British health researchers miscounted the number of cases, leading to policymaker confusion and headlines about “extra deaths”. The problem, it turned out, was Excel. To be more precise, the incoming data looked perfectly good when opened in Excel but, in reality, was far from it. This came as quite a shock to me as I followed the story in autumn 2020, because over the past few years I’ve witnessed several exemplary supercomputer projects in the medical arena, all devoted to improving understanding and efficiency in the treatment of diseases and disorders. All these projects…

The pandemic has had unforeseen consequences. Sending office workers home in the first lockdown sparked a 2,000% rise in Zoom use (pcpro.link/316zoom) and a rush on ergonomic chairs. But what’s coming next could be a utopian world where tech eases employment by working for us – or a dystopian horror of monitoring software and RSI. “I’ve heard it said many times over the past few months that lockdown has accelerated discussion about flexible working by 20 years, and there’s a lot of truth in that,” said Jane Parry, director of research for human resources management and organisational behaviour at the University of Southampton. “But the next challenge is going to be harnessing what we’ve learnt so that it can be used effectively to manage work differently. The first lockdown was…

We have all been cheered by the early results of Covid-19 vaccine trials, albeit with accompanying concerns about the distribution and delivery of the candidates to the general public. This will be a huge logistical exercise, and the relevant government departments haven’t covered themselves in glory on logistical matters so far. But there’s a bigger issue that might well be coming down the line, one that we should consider and discuss before it’s too late. Let’s start with a few assumptions. First, that whichever vaccines are deployed have a good result. Secondly, let’s assume that supplies are not going to be like running water, and that there will be logistical issues with purchase, supply, distribution and clinical handling, let alone getting people to turn up on time at the right…

Music and electronics have gone hand in hand for me from the very beginning. The folk songs we were taught in junior school didn’t grab me, and the first tunes that did – when I was 15 – were two guitar instrumentals: Apache by Cliff Richard’s band The Shadows and Riders In The Sky by The Ramrods. Both made gloriously excessive use of echo machines, and I wanted one. Around that time, in 1960, Britain was still peppered with shops and dumps selling ex-Second World War electronic surplus: we had a local one, a corrugated-iron Nissen hut in a field that was full of RAF-surplus radar sets and similar stuff. We used to hang out there, buying bits to make crystal radio sets – or even one-valve sets for the…

Reflected glory As a long-term user of Macrium Reflect, I was rather disappointed to see this highly regarded software relegated to the also-rans at the end of your review, despite a four-star rating (see issue 315, p90). You say your only reservation is the price, but the full Home version only costs £6 more than Acronis True Image (and £12 more than O&O DiskImage Professional) – hardly a deal-breaker when the cost of a perpetual licence is spread over several years. Furthermore, there is an entirely free version (not just a 30-day trial), which lacks little other than “File and Folder backup” and the ability to do incremental backups – visit macrium.com/reflectfree to download it. Martin Bailey Associate editor Darien Graham-Smith replies: Unfortunately, space in the Labs group test is…

When the UK plunged into lockdown in March 2020, all manner of leisure pursuits were put on hold. For the country’s enthusiastic tabletop gaming community, the pain was especially acute. Promising Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaigns would go unfinished, and Games Workshop models meticulously painted for tournaments would have to wait a few months for their tabletop debut. Several months later, and with the country again in varying states of lockdown, tabletop players are about to go through the same process again. However, for many, it will be less painful this time around, because in the intervening months millions of people worldwide have discovered the joys of digital equivalents. “It’s taken off quite a bit, especially in March and April where it was just crazy,” said Doug Davison, co-owner and…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £583 (£699 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/uk The Surface Laptop Go is, probably, the cutest laptop in the world. Imagine a netbook of ten years ago in terms of footprint, but slimmed down, slathered in metal and gifted with one of the nicest screens you’ll find in a laptop under a grand. It’s a thing of beauty. Unlike most netbooks, this Surface also feels incredibly sturdy. That’s despite the bottom of the Laptop Go being finished in polycarbonate resin rather than metal, which makes it cheaper than it feels: there’s still a robustness here. This extends to the wristrest, with none of the creak and bend you often find in less expensive laptops. Microsoft goes to even greater efforts with the screen, with an aluminium alloy lid. Despite…

SCORE PRICE £1,458 (£1,750 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/316scan2 Two months ago, Scan gave us a taste of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080’s power by partnering it with an Intel Core i7-10700 in the identically named 3XS Gamer RTX (see issue 314, p50). This month see sees a double substitution, with the RTX 3070 earning its chance to shine along side AMD’s Ryzen 75800X – part of the new range of Ryzen 5000 desktop chips we cover in the cover in review of the Scan workstation on p52. This has two plus points. First, a price drop from £2,000 to £1,750. Second, far superior multi threaded performance, and that’s despite the i7-10700 and Ryzen 7 5800X both having eight cores and 16 threads. The prime evidence is benchmark scores: the AMD…

SCORE PRICE Personal Computer Kit, £78 (£93 inc VAT) from okdo.com The Raspberry Pi Foundation has never been afraid to try out new form factors, with everything from industrial compute modules to miniature versions of its single-board computer. The Raspberry Pi 400 is another plot twist – and it’s a device the charity hopes will help it break into the business world, as well as serving its core education market. Rather than being supplied as a simple board, the computer is hidden inside the body of the official Raspberry Pi keyboard, with the ports exposed along the back of the casing; simply plug it in, connect it to a monitor and you’re good to go. This makes it incredibly portable. With a footprint of only 286 x 122mm, a 384g weight…

SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from fitbit.com Hallelujah! It’s taken three iterations, but finally we’ve seen the arrival of GPS into Fitbit’s mainstream smartwatch. Aside from this, there’s little to physically differentiate the Versa 3 from the Versa 2 (see issue 303, p72), aside from the removal of the previous model’s button: now there’s simply an indent on the left-hand side that functions as a pressure-sensitive “inductive” button. Or should do; the only way I found to make it consistently respond was to pinch the watch on both sides. Otherwise, in design terms, the Versa 3 is an absolute treat, with its bright 1.58in, 336 x 336 display enclosed in a chamfered aluminium enclosure. Yes, it still has fairly thick bezels around it, but Fitbit cunningly ensures that each…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £833 (£999 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The iPhone 12 Pro slots in as the second-most expensive phone in Apple’s range, ahead of the iPhone 12 (see issue 315, p58) and behind the 12 Pro Max. I cover the differences between the Pro Max and the Pro opposite, but here I’ll focus on the changes versus the iPhone 12. Although the Pro has a fancier stainless steel frame, an extra camera and a Lidar depth sensor, the rest of the package is eerily similar. Both phones use a 6.1in AMOLED display and both have the same capacity battery. Both employ the latest Apple A14 Bionic chip, and you also get 5G and the clever MagSafe system that allows accessories to snap neatly to the rear of the phone.…

STEP 1 Choose your OS There are two main choices here, plus the wild card option of Windows (see p89). For now, we’ll focus on Android and iPadOS. In virtually every way, iPadOS is the superior operating system. It offers multitasking that makes it a breeze to split apps, puts heavy emphasis on privacy, and its level of integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem – phones, computers, services – puts Android to shame. It’s also very slick: widgets, for instance, slide stylishly into view on demand. In addition, the iPad’s dominance and the long-established App Store have made it catnip for developers. While the big companies will make sure their apps are available on both platforms, you’re far more likely to find a niche (but high-quality) app on…

SCORE PRICE From £808 (£969 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk There are 13 tablets in this group test, plus one. Despite the best attempts of Huawei and Samsung, and even the excellent iPad Air, the iPad Pro sits at its own table: this is the world’s finest tablet and Apple knows it. The first and most obvious sign of this is the iPad Pro’s price. While the £969 inc VAT Apple charges for its entry-level 12.9in Pro squeezes under the four-figure mark, you will need to be made of stern stuff not to be lured in by the £349 Magic Keyboard and £119 Pencil (see our separate reviews of the accessories on p86). That original £969 only buys you the “basic” 128GB version, of course, and the 256GB version for another…

SCORE PRICE From £516 (£619 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Samsung likes to give its premium tablets a dash of panache, and that’s obvious the moment you prise the S7 from its box. This tablet comes in a choice of three colours, but Samsung chose to send us the ultrastylish Mystic Bronze. This literally gives it the edge over grey and black rivals, with bronze detailing found on every millimetre of its 6.3mm-thick profile. If bronze sounds too brazen, Mystic Black and Mystic Silver are but a click away. There is only one memory configuration, 128GB, but as with all Samsung tablets you can extend this using the microSD slot. And if you fancy working on the move without relying on Wi-Fi then choose the LTE version of the S7, which…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk Head onto your online retailer of choice and you’ll see any number of cut-price tablets that appear to promise the world. Supreme power through their multicore processors, stunning IPS screens, a sleek design that would make Apple blush. Or so their photos suggest. To see exactly what £100 would buy, we plucked one of those tablets from obscurity and gave it a chance to shine. For better or worse, that device was the Bush 10in 32GB tablet from Argos. If you think that’s not catchy, its “real” name is the Bush10Nou. No prizes for guessing its storage capacity or screen size, nor for deducing where it came in pretty much all our tests. Turning to p92 will only confirm that it flirtedwith…

SCORE PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/316m10 Head to Lenovo’s homepage for Android tablets and one thing becomes clear: it makes a lot of them. It sells seven different models of its Tab Series direct from its site, with yet more available from the likes of Amazon, which is where you will find this first-generation Tab M10 FHD (enter pcpro.link/316m10 into your browser to be taken to the exact page). To confuse matters, Lenovo is also selling a second-generation Tab M10 FHD Plus, but this replaces our review unit’s excellent Echo speaker dock with a much more basic charging dock – and switches allegiance to Google Assistant. Here, we’ll focus on the first-generation tablet Lenovo sent in for testing. It has much in common with the P10 below, including…

SCORE PRICE From £666 (£799 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk If spending your life’s savings on the iPad Pro doesn’t appeal, but you want the fastest and highest quality tablet around, the S7+ is the obvious choice. Much of what we say in the S7 review holds true here, so we’ll instead concentrate on the differences between the devices. Top of the list is the screen, which is 12.4in of radiant, AMOLED beauty. Just like the iPad Pro, it refreshes at 120Hz to provide a smooth glide effect that you’ll never know you wanted until you see it. While a peak brightness of 355cd/m2 may seem low compared to rivals, don’t be fooled: the way AMOLED tech works means you’ll have no trouble viewing this tablet even in the brightest of…

SCORE PRICE 50 devices, perpetual, £2, 875 excVAT from manageengine.com ManageEngine’s OpManager offers an extensive set of features at a reasonable price. The standard OpManager lets you monitor up to ten devices, including virtualisation hosts and VMs, for just £184. We moved up to the OpManager Plus package, though, which covers 50 devices for £2,875, and adds the network configuration management and NetFlow add-ons for up to 15 devices, along with log management for one firewall device. Getting started is as easy as you’d hope. OpManager comes preloaded with 8,000 device templates, so it should have no problem identifying everything on your network. Setup is fast too: it took a mere ten minutes to scan our lab, promptly returning with a detailed list of servers, workstations, switches, virtualisation hosts, storage…

SCORE PRICE SL100 licence, £2,275 exc VAT from solarwinds.com SolarWinds offers a range of monitoring and systems management solutions, but Network Performance Monitor has always been its flagship product. The latest release lives up to its lineage with a wealth of monitoring and troubleshooting features, all neatly collected into one web console. Admittedly, the licensing system can be a little off-putting. Pricing is based on monitored elements, but you’re not buying a flat number of sensors: rather, the SL100 pack on test here gives you a perpetual licence for up to 100 nodes, interfaces or volumes, and if any one of those goes over the limit you’ll need to upgrade to the next tier. The range of elements that can be monitored is impressive, with this latest release – version…

Companies are settling into a new normal, and it’s clear that the role of the internet has shifted. Of course, it was already woven into most business models, but now we’re facing another evolutionary step – one in which the internet develops from one leg of the stool, as it were, into a core capability, arguably even a life or death determinant for businesses as well as people. That may sound like an exaggeration, but as individuals we’re more dependent than ever before on businesses serving us online. For businesses, it’s never been more important to reach customers online. Speaking from a business strategy perspective, this is a good thing. Normally, when we come to address big questions of what your company ought to be doing, the answer involves a…

There are numerous software inventory tools that can reach out across the corporate network and detect rogue apps running on company computers – giving you the opportunity to either pay up or purge them sharpish. When the bulk of your staff is working from home, however, things become a little trickier. Big companies with dedicated IT departments will likely have issued their workers with locked-down laptops, on which software can only be installed and updated by an administrator. Failing that, they may at least have introduced enough friction into the process to greatly discourage the installation of unauthorised software. Unfortunately, some apps require administrative rights or they just won’t work – while smaller companies tend to allow laxer security, or encourage a completely unmonitored BYOD model. In a situation like…

As I sit here at my desk, I can see an electronic radiator valve that’s part of my Evohome setup, an Arlo camera just outside the window and a Wi-Fi controllable aircon unit on the wall. Naturally, me being me, there’s loads more stuff like this all around my home and back at my office. These pieces of tech work just fine in a standalone manner. Some need internet access (such as my Arlo cameras), while some will continue to work without external connectivity (thankfully, my Evohome heating fits into that category; if the internet goes down, my radiators stay toasty). But none of these systems need to be interfaced with anything else to work properly. You can just treat them as individual, unrelated products. I’m sure that many people…

You’ll be well aware that I’m a password manager evangelist. I’ve used them forever, and when I’m asked for the one thing I’d recommend when it comes to improving data security for the average person, that’s my answer right there. Which is all well and good, but password managers require that you still need to remember, or indeed know, one password: the master that unlocks the application and grants access to all the others. All those other passwords, in my case, exceed 25 characters (unless the service or account in question is stupid enough to still restrict such things) and are randomly complex. Or should that be complex in their randomness? Whatever, the point is I couldn’t tell you what my Twitter password is on pain of death because I…

When it comes to nostalgia, there’s a special place in every retro gamer’s heart for that low-res C:\> prompt. It would represent the starting point for an exciting journey into a digital world, and there were certainly many titles to enjoy during the 1980s and 1990s. Most tastes were catered for, from interactive fiction and real-time strategy to point-and-click quests and first person 3D shooters, as genres were formed and techniques refined. Past names trip off the tongue: The Secret of Monkey Island, Prince of Persia, Sid Meier’s Civilization, Doom and Sim City to name but five – all from an era of playing alone in a bedroom, long before online gaming became the standard. Head to the Internet Archive’s library of DOS games (pcpro.link/316dos) and you’ll find more than…

LABS Desktop PCs Find out exactly what your budget will buy in our round up of PCs, ranging from sub-£500 bargains to gaming beasts packed with the latest technology. 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 p106 for details. FEATURES 2021’s most dangerous scams Thanks to home working and lax security, scammers have never had it so good. We show how you can guard against them. How to turn your talents into cash Psst! Fancy earning some money on the side? We share the secrets of success from people turning their talents into cash. What’seatingyourRAM? Windows, web browsers and “helpful” utilities all have aceaseless appetite for your memory, so…