PC Pro March 2020

highlights this month

REVIEW OF THE MONTH Apple MacBook Pro 16in p52 The best laptop ever made? It’s certainly one of the most powerful, and most expensive, with the top option costing almost £6,000 and packing an 8TB SSD along with high-end AMD Radeon graphics, 64GB of memory and an eight-core Core i9 processor. But anyone can do power: the Apple difference is to support it with industrial chic design, a glorious 16in screen, the best audio setup we’ve ever heard on a laptop and what can only be described as a “magical” keyboard. Even if you’re a Windows traditionalist, we won’t blame you at all if you’re tempted. p30 ADVICE OF THE MONTH Chances are that you know someone who’s still running a Windows 7 PC or laptop. We lay out the three options you have available, and…

when the real rate isn’t real, do discounts matter?

THERE WAS A palpable sense of frustration in Raymond’s email. “NordVPN was your Labs Winner in the comparison of VPNs in issue 303. You state that the price for a three-year licence is £82 including VAT at the top of the review on p84… I decided yesterday to purchase a three-year licence for NordVPN and was charged £122.12 in spite of this price being promoted on the NordVPN site as an 83% limited-time discounted deal. “By my calculation, the ‘deal’ being offered by NordVPN is 49% more expensive than the price that you stated in the review. I am aware that market prices do fluctuate but there can be no excuse for this sort of discrepancy.” Don’t worry if you have a sense of déjà vu. We printed a correction in last…

contributors

Barry Collins Is there a way to keep Windows 7 running safely? Barry sets out three options in our “Windows 7 rescue kit” feature, starting on p30 Mike Jennings Our resident hardware enthusiast puts the new Ryzen 9 3950X to the test, along with two high-end motherboards. Read his verdicts from p72 James Morris If you’re looking to invest in a 3D-rendering machine, James believes Armari has something perfect, all thanks to a 32-core AMD Threadripper. See p62 Jon Honeyball It wouldn’t be PC Pro unless Jon was trying to improve the world. This month, he’s urging us all to use VPNs (not necessarily NordVPN). Turn to p130…

microsoft trade-in payments fail to surface

MICROSOFT’S TRADE-IN programme for Surface buyers is leaving customers waiting months for payment or even failing to pay them altogether, a PC Pro investigation has uncovered. Microsoft introduced the scheme in October 2019, promising customers up to £500 towards a Surface Pro X, Surface Pro 7 or Surface Laptop 3 if they trade in their old laptops. But the process has left customers out of pocket for several weeks, seen them spend hours chasing payments, and saw one customer report Microsoft to Trading Standards after it refused to pay him for a laptop that went missing in transit. “I traded in my Surface 6 for a Surface Laptop 3 and was promised £510,” said author David Hewson, who had waited five weeks for his trade-in payment, before PC Pro intervened. “I have a…

five stories not to miss

1 China hits back with ban on foreign tech kit China has reacted to trade tariffs and security blocks on companies such as Huawei and ZTE with plans to pull foreign software and hardware from official networks and offices. According to reports, the ban on non-Chinese technology will start with a 30% reduction of overseas products in 2020 and should be completed in 2022. 2 Verizon under fire over Yahoo Groups closure Yahoo owner, Verizon, was accused of preventing campaigners from archiving a trove of early internet content ahead of the closure of Yahoo Groups and the deletion of 20 years’ worth of data. Verizon said it was permanently deleting the publicly created data – seen by archivists as an important slice of early internet culture – because keeping the archive available was…

unveiled

Qualcomm Snapdragon Compute processors Phone chip giant Qualcomm laid out plans to expand into more computing devices with its Snapdragon Compute platform, promising processors to power laptops in the shape of its 7c and 8c chips. The portfolio of processors, designed to run Windows on Arm hardware, leans on Qualcomm’s experience in the smartphone market, with a focus on battery life and mobile connectivity. However, Qualcomm claims devices built on the chips will also deliver performance. The Snapdragon 7c and 8c join the previously announced Snapdragon 8cx, which is designed for enterprises, and should start to appear in devices this year. Intended for sub-$400 laptops, the Snapdragon 7c is built on Qualcomm’s octa-core Kryo 468 CPU and Adreno 618 GPU, with connectivity via the Snapdragon X15 LTE. Qualcomm claims that devices will be capable of…