PC Pro May 2015

COMPATIBLE PHONES Nokia Lumia 630, 635, 636, 638, 730 and 830 At the end of last year, Microsoft unveiled its vision for the future of Windows: not only the desktop, but also on smart phones, tablets and other connected devices. Until now we’ve only been able to get a feel for Windows 10 on the desktop – what’s changed is that the next piece of the puzzle has been made available: Windows 10 for phones. Just like the desktop OS, the smart phone version is a Technical Preview, available to anyone with a compatible Windows Phone 8.1 handset who registers with the Windows Insider Programme (see p12 for how to sign up). We’ve installed it on a Nokia Lumia 630, but you can also try it out on the compatible phones listed…

PRICE £1,799 (£2,159 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk (pcpro.link/247scan3xs) Of all the workstations on test this month, the Scan 3XSHT15 is the closest to a regular high-performance desktop PC. It uses an enthusiast-grade Core i7-5820K processor, and comes housed in a Corsair Carbide 330R chassis; this has some great features, but it can’t match this month’s HP and Lenovo offerings for tool-free access. Nevertheless, the internals have been chosen to provide strong performance for a keen price. The CPU is from the high-end Haswell-E series, and while it doesn’t have the eight cores of the top Extreme Edition, it delivers six cores and a native 3.3GHz clock speed for half the price. Hyper-Threading means the cores are presented as 12 virtual cores, and Scan has clocked the CPU to 4.2GHz, with temperatures kept…

PRICE £5,700 (£6,840 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk (pcpro.link/247hpz640) HP’s Z640 is the second most expensive workstation on test this month, and in many areas the most highly specified. Sporting a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2667 v3 processors, it offers 32 virtual cores with Hyper-Threading enabled, second only to the Dell Precision T7810 and the Workstation Specialists RS-D render node. HP’s processors are faster, though, with a nominal frequency of 3.2GHz, boosting to 3.6GHz in Turbo Boost. Since the Xeon is from the latest Haswell generation, it supports DDR4 memory, and HP has installed 64GB of 2,133MHz DIMMs. Surprisingly, the manufacturer hasn’t opted for a top-of-the-range graphics card: the PNY Quadro K4200 is no slouch, but a K5200 would have been a better match for the rest of the specification. Although PCI Express solid-state…

ARE SCHOOLS SPENDING too much money on tech, as opposed to investing in teachers? It’s hard to imagine anyone being distracted by such thoughts as they walked the halls of Bett, the massive educational technology show held in London each year, with everything on show from smart whiteboards to in-class robots. But the question has been raised. Russell Hobby, the leader of the National Association of Head Teachers, wrote in a blog post before January’s show that the £716 million predicted to be spent on IT this year could fund 20,000 new teachers. “Can this spend possibly be justified at a time of austerity?” he asked. The tech firms believe this is a false argument, pointing out that British students need up-to-date technology to develop modern workplace skills. “The number of PCs in…

James Morris Former PC Pro editor James is now a professional videographer, so he was our obvious choice to torture-test workstation PCs. See p78 for his verdict. Roger Carey How do you inform customers how much data they’ve used if the measuring tools disagree? Roger from Village Networks shares his findings on p116. Joel Snape As acting editor of Men’s Fitness, Joel knows about staying fit. Turn to p58 for his tips on doing so while still sitting at your desk eight hours a day. Davey Winder A warning: the wireless keyboard you’re using opens up a new avenue of attack. Davey explains how to stay safe, and pays homage to David Gold, on p118.…

What does your job involve? I’m a senior support engineer at an IT support consultancy called Microbyte (microbyte.co.uk). We’re based in Peterborough, with a second office in Basingstoke, and we work with a variety of smalland medium-sized businesses. I handle daily support requests from these companies; my jobs might range from sorting out printing issues to setting up Wi-Fiand internet access, as well as more complicated tasks such as configuring guest networks, provisioning broadband lines and VoIP services, and even building new servers and migrating data across from older systems. What does a typical day look like? The first thing I do when I get into the office is look at my tasks for the day: we use a bespoke call-management system to assign tasks to specific engineers. We have a chap…