Table of contents for July 2019 in PC Pro

J’ACCUSE, APPLE. Take your place on the stand. Promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Let me begin, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, by explaining that there was a time when a new Apple product was something we at PC Pro were genuinely excited by. We cooed whenever a new iProduct arrived in the office, clamoured to be among the first to touch its sleek, shiny, metallic sides. Spoke in awe of its groundbreaking, industrial design and made an idol of Jony Ive. Whether it was the latest iPod, iPhone or iPad, Apple was at the tipping point of innovation: not always the first to market with a new idea, but brilliant at taking inspiration from others and delivering a superior product. For…

1 Farewell for Windows USB drive threat Microsoft has laid to rest the idea that fretful users need to “safely remove” or “eject” USB hardware such as thumb drives in Windows 10. “Beginning in Windows 10 version 1809, the default policy is quick removal – in earlier versions of Windows the default policy was better performance,” the company said, warning that users still shouldn’t remove devices during writing. 2 Final chapter for Microsoft’s ebooks So ends the tale of Microsoft’s ebook store, with the company shuttering the service in a bid to streamline its services. Customers who had bought books were told they would be removed from their accounts and become unreadable in July, with Microsoft offering refunds for those purchases and any pre-ordered books. 3 Apple throwing weight behind…

SMART DEVICE MANUFACTURERS are in danger of losing consumer confidence, according to experts. The concern comes in the wake of revelations that thousands of Amazon staff were listening to recordings of voice conversations recorded by Alexa assistants in a bid to improve AI. At a time when consumers are wary of listening devices, and amid reports that platforms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft perform human intervention, even tech-friendly critics said companies must be clearer. “Transparency – so I can decide whether I want in or not – is critical in this area,” said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst with research firm Creative Strategies. “There is also some misconception as far as what is heard, what is kept, what is anonymous and what is shared,” Milanesi said. “The more…

@bazzacollins There’s a guy on eBay selling back issues of PC Pro for more than they cost when they first went on sale. Well, I say “selling”. He’s listing them. Him and a few others, hoping they can cash in on magazines with such screamingly topical headlines as “Google Glass: The Verdict” and “Netbooks from £115”. I’m not seeking to do down this magazine – I’ve spent the vast majority of my career writing for and editing it. But someone putting a £10 valuation on a 2012 back issue is indicative of the point of this column: people put far too high a value on the content they have bought. This struck me recently when Microsoft closed its ebook store. First, it came as something of a surprise that Microsoft…

The next version of Windows 10 is here, bringing with it a tasty selection of new features and enhancements to the operating system. This time around, those include visual enhancements, improvements to Windows Update and better ways to work across different devices and operating systems. If you haven’t got the update just yet, don’t panic. The new release is called the “May 2019 Update”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be using it before the month’s out. Last year’s October 2018 update was released on time, but then pulled a few days later while Microsoft investigated reports of users losing data when installing the update. In the end, it wasn’t until the middle of November that most people were able to install the new release. Still, this time around…

Last autumn was a watershed for the embedded security community, and by implication everyone else. Bloomberg announced that rogue chips had been found on the motherboards of servers sold by Super Micro Computer to companies such as Amazon and Apple. Whoever added these during the manufacturing process now had the ability to control and access data from the servers. For the first time, a computer had been hacked before it had even left the production line. Until then, hacking was predominantly viewed as getting malicious code into a “clean” device, by exploiting security flaws in the software. That’s what happened with every PC virus: attacks such as the WannaCry ransomware, state-sponsored attacks such as Stuxnet, and the recently discovered attempt by Russian hackers to infiltrate the Organisation for the Prevention…

IT Pro itpro.co.uk The news and analysis website for IT professionals, which spins out its own weekly newsletter if you prefer a digest. Channel Pro channelpro.co.uk For those seeking news of industry movers and shakers, here’s your first port of call. The PC Pro Podcast Tim, Darien, Barry and Jon Honeyball battle it out over the fortnight’s last tech developments, and almost invariably fail to convince one another of the merits of the so-called Hot Hardware of the Week. @pcpro The Twitter handle for this very magazine, which will ensure you never miss a live podcast stream, new issue or reader poll. @timdanton The Twitter account of our editorial overlord dispenses tech tips amongst regular complaints about his tennis-related ailments. @bazzacollins Barry Collins’ Twitter feed is not recommended for young…

The iPad mini has little real competition. If you’re looking for a compact tablet, you can choose the budget Amazon Fire HD 8 for £80 or the 8in version of the Huawei MediaPad M5. This costs around £250 and has better speakers and narrower bezels than the iPad mini – but is far slower. Ironically, the strongest challenger to the new iPad mini is arguably the four-year-old iPad mini 4. You can’t buy this direct from Apple, but there’s limited stock of the 128GB version on sale from the likes of Argos and John Lewis. It also costs £399 but, as the graphs above show, it’s significantly slower. Which leaves just one notable rival: Apple’s cheapest 9.7in iPad. At £319, the regular iPad has a larger screen than the iPad…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews Much as we all love to have the fastest possible system, sometimes you have to cut your cloth. And that’s exactly what PC Specialist has done to hit a £999 price without sacrificing performance in areas that most people will notice. The key component is Nvidia’s new GeForce 1660 graphics, with PC Specialist opting for the more expensive Ti variant: as we cover in our review on p64, this delivers enough extra acceleration to be worth the £60-odd extra it costs over the regular 1660. Perhaps what’s most important is that this card delivers more playable frame rates at 1440p resolutions, where you might find yourself slashing quality settings with the non-Ti variant. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for instance, the Vulcan…

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti PRICE £217 (£260 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Nvidia has been riding high since the release of its RTX 20-series graphics cards last year, but its latest GPUs are a curious diversion. Not quite “true” GTX cards, as they’re based on the new Turing architecture, but also not RTX cards – as they don’t include the crucial ray tracing and deep-learning super-sampling (DLSS) features. These features are enabled on RTX cards by dedicated cores, and those cores simply aren’t included in the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti. Should you worry about their omission? Perhaps not. In theory, ray tracing is amazing thanks to more realistic lighting, shadows and reflections. Likewise DLSS, which uses AI to…

PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Just as Samsung sells the Galaxy S10 and S10+, so Huawei offers the P30 to complement its P30 Pro. The key differences are the P30’s smaller screen (6.1in versus 6.47in), the lack of a 5x optical telephoto lens and a smaller battery (3,450mAh versus 4,200mAh). The P30 also lacks wireless charging. If the P30 Pro didn’t exist, though, we’d be dripping superlatives about the P30’s design. Available in the same eye-catching colour options as the P30 Pro, even the black model looks great with its gunmetal, silverish gleam catching the light and glistening menacingly. And, while the screen at the front doesn’t have the swooping “3.5D” curved edges of the P30 Pro, it still looks gorgeous. On the rear, the camera housing sticks…

PRICE Standard plan, $49 per year from windscribe.com Windscribe’s main appeal is for people who want to access geo-blocked content, with a huge network of servers spread across 60 countries. This opens up all sorts of video-streaming services, including Netflix, HBO Go and Hulu. The only service we couldn’t access was iPlayer from any UK server. We started by testing Windscribe on a Windows PC, although it provides clients for Mac and Linux, browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox and mobile apps for Android and iOS. To activate the software, you simply need to create a username and password. Note that you don’t need to supply an email address, but do so and free monthly bandwidth jumps from 2GB to 10GB. Once the client is set up, you’ll see an…

We award each mini PC an overall five star rating from one to five, calculated by weighing up its performance, features, size, power draw and value for money. We also consider the warranty, service and support. To test performance we run our benchmark suite, which features demanding image-editing and video-processing tasks, followed by a multitasking benchmark that involves transcoding MPEG4 video while playing a 4K video file. These tests provide a score for each system, presenting performance relative to a Core i5-4670K reference system. So, a score of 150 is 50% faster than that baseline PC. The exception for this is the Raspberry Pi, which completed the multitasking benchmark while playing a 1080p video file owing to its limited memory. We test each system’s gaming and 3D rendering performance using…

PRICE £860 (£1,032 inc VAT) from quietpc.com Measuring 240 x 260 x 111mm, and weighing 4.5kg with its surprisingly bulky external PSU, the QuietPC AMD Sentinel Fanless is the second-largest machine in this month’s Labs group. That trade-off in size, though, grants you a number of advantages over its more compact competition. Ignoring the optical drive – a DVD-writing slot loader as reviewed, though it can be left off the build list or replaced with a Blu-ray drive – the biggest feature of the Sentinel is the inclusion of a PCI Express x16 slot on the motherboard. This, sadly, isn’t quite as useful as it first seems: as well as being limited to 8x operation when an APU is fitted, as in our review model, the case restricts add-in cards…

PRICE N005U, £501 (£601 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Google’s attempt to capture the low-cost computing market, Chrome OS – an OS born from the pairing of the Linux kernel with a user interface built inside the Chrome web browser – is a divisive subject. On the one hand, the company’s right in saying it offers a largely maintenancefree computing experience for mainstream use; on the other, it lacks compatibility with legacy software and encourages vendor tie-in. It’s also becoming less and less about low-cost computing. While the first Chrome OS devices were cheap and cheerful laptops, this version of the Asus Chromebox 3 packs an Intel Core i5-8250U and 8GB of RAM in a compact box priced costing over £600. With such power, its results on p92 appear surprisingly poor.…

PRICE £659 (£791 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Part of the Think Centre Tiny range of ultra small form factor systems, Lenovo’s ThinkCentre M910x Tiny is one of only two systems on test to come with a bundled keyboard and mouse – and while these are nothing to write home about, they’re serviceable and will likely be welcomed by the target market of buyers looking to outfit a full office or six with compact computers. The most impressive thing isn’t the machine itself, but the ecosystem: Lenovo has gone to some trouble to turn its collection of mini PCs into something that can be as many things to as many people as possible. As well as more optional mounting systems and accessories than any other system on test – including an…

PRICE £66 (£79 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk (bought separately) The Raspberry Pi needs little introduction. It has become the darling of the education and maker movement and, since its launch, has seen several upgrades to its current specification of a quad-core 1.4GHz 64-bit Arm processor and 1GB of RAM. Those specifications, though impressive for the price, mean that the Raspberry Pi is typically not thought of as a PC – although it is a computer and it is primarily for personal use. That’s not entirely unfair, as our benchmark results attest: the Raspberry Pi is entirely unable to run the Superposition benchmark, and while it slowly worked its way through our image and video editing benchmarks, it would only complete the multitasking benchmark when we switched from playing back a…

PRICE Barebones, £559 (£671 inc VAT) from icubes.co.uk The Shuttle DS77U7 isn’t your everyday PC. Its three display outputs – two HDMI, one DisplayPort – spell a system ideal for digital signage usage, while the two front-facing serial ports (one RS232 only and the other a triple-function RS232/RS422/RS485 port) will be of most interest to industrial and embedded users. The black chassis is easy to open, thanks to two bottom panels secured by a single screw each: the first unveils the user-upgradeable RAM and M.2 storage, the other a mounting point for a 2.5in SATA hard drive or SSD. Assuming a sensible choice of components, the DS77U7 claims to support fairly hostile environments. With suitable RAM and storage, the passively cooled and silent system can operate at load 24/7 in…

PRICE £269 exc VAT from zcomax.co.uk SMBs investing in new APs with an eye to future expansion are likely to find IgniteNet’s proposal very interesting indeed. Cloud management is free for the first two devices, and while adding more units attracts a subscription fee of $99 a year (around £75), that flat rate then covers an unlimited number of sites and APs. There are a few models of AP to choose from; we tested the top-dog SunSpot AC2600 Wave2, which features dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios and full-speed 4x4 MU-MIMO technology. At £269, it’s comparatively expensive, but it has an IP55 rating against particle and water intrusion, which means you can deploy it almost anywhere, either indoors or out. Setup is a breeze. Creating a new wireless network is a…

PRICE £133 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Ubiquiti’s UniFi APs have impressed us in the past with their business-class features; the new nanoHD is also impressively tiny, with a diameter of just 160mm. If even that’s too obtrusive, you can buy skins that fit over the front to help the unit blend in – we rather like the camouflage version, with a box of three costing £41. And despite its size, this is a fully capable Wave 2 4x4 MU-MIMO AC2100 AP. It can be powered by an 802.3af PoE source, and you even get a PoE injector in the box when you buy a single unit. Setup is handled via Ubiquiti’s free UniFi Network Controller (UNC) app for Windows, macOS and Linux. We had this installed on a Windows 10…

The rise of voice AI has profound implications for search-engine optimisation. When users type a search into Google, they get a page full of results - but ask a smart speaker to find you a particular sort of business and it will give you just a single result. If you’re competing in a vibrant market and you don’t occupy that top spot, you may as well not exist at all. One of the most effective ways to boost your voice search performance is to fill out your online presence with relevant information, so that the AI recognises when your business is the best hit for a local customer. Google’s My Business page (google.com/business) helps you add location data, opening hours, phone numbers and more to Google search results and Maps,…

The rapidity of this industry is exciting, but from time to time, the instigators of the tech vanguard make some real howlers. One of which was hiding behind the curtains when I arrived one afternoon to deliver a new PC. The writing wasn’t so much on the wall as screwed to it. CDs in umpteen racks of curated and organised loveliness, enough to keep a radio station repeat-free for several months. This is a DRM story, of course – an idealist technology to protect content but that instead taught the world how to BitTorrent. Peter hadn’t heard of DRM until it blocked his favourite ripped tracks playing on his new machine. To use an exhausted cliché, “computer says no”. Years ago, Microsoft introduced Windows Media Digital Rights Management (WMDRM), which…

Kurt Luther was in a Pennsylvanian history museum when he saw his great-great-great uncle staring back at him. By coincidence, a photo of his distant relative was in a collection on display in an exhibit about the American Civil War, and sparked an idea to make it easier to identify soldiers in the four million photos held by museums and collectors. “I was looking at a photo of my Civil War ancestor from 150 years ago – it was the first time I’d seen a picture of him or anybody from that generation,” Luther told PC Pro. “It was the oldest family picture I’d seen.” That Luther could identify the photo was remarkable: three million soldiers fought in the Civil War, and just one in ten of their portraits have…

Lee Grant Our new Real World Computing columnist rises to challenges from customers at his computer repair shop – including a monster upgrade. See p116 Gareth Halfacree Proving that size really isn’t everything, Gareth has spent the past month putting 14 mini PCs to the test. Find out if any fit your needs from p76 Mike Jennings Want to know which components to buy? Mike is king of all things PCB, and puts the GeForce 1660 and 1660 Ti graphics cards through their paces on p64 Jon Honeyball Jon explains why the age of anonymity as we know it on the internet must come to an end. Whether you agree or not, this is a must-read article. See p110…

GOOGLE HAS TAKEN a major step in making its Docs and G Suite more productive by enabling them to work closely with Microsoft’s various Office products. While it’s been possible to work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in Docs, it’s been a faff, requiring users to download and convert files before being able to edit files or collaborate. Now, both consumers and corporate customers can edit Word files directly in Google’s apps. “Office editing will make it easy for G Suite users to open and edit Microsoft Office files that have been shared,” the company said in a blog.…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Huawei Mate Book 14 Ultraportable from £1,000 from huawei.com Huawei gets everything right with this 14in ultraportable, with a ten-hour battery life, plenty of power – including some gaming ability – and excellent connectivity. Including a handy USB-A port. Both models are great value too, with £1,300 adding a touchscreen while upgrading the processor to a Core i7, the RAM to 16GB and the SSD to 512GB. REVIEW Issue 296, p56 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 15in (2018) A machine for true power users with amazing specifications, including that infamous Core i9 – and up to 4TB of SSD storage. From £2,349 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 Dell XPS 15 We all know what to expect from Dell’s XPS 15 range, yet it continues to reign supreme –…

@njkobie There’s a multitude of reasons to be angry with social media companies. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the rest exacerbate bullying in children (and adults, quite frankly), help spread racism and intolerance, and have potentially undermined democracy. That’s all terrible, and certainly worthy of discussion, but right now what I want to talk about is desks. I never much thought about desks when I worked in an office – I sat where I was told – but as someone who now works from home, my office environment is fully under my control. I can change the temperature, use any desk I can afford, and cover that desk with plants without any complaints from bosses. That assumes space for a desk. In my last tiny flat, as I’ve written previously, I…

I read your February review of smartphones with a view to replacing my mobile, which was slowing down and running short of memory. I settled for a Motorola E5 Play, which, although not reviewed, was about the cheapest I could find with a decent amount of memory. However, on a general point, I wish your reviewers weren’t so obsessed with the camera capabilities. Little or no attention is given to the main purpose, which is surely phoning and texting. I was dismayed to find texting on the Moto not nearly as good as my old Samsung. For instance, the text box doesn’t expand to accommodate what you’re typing, making editing a nightmare. Bluetooth doesn’t seem to work properly, either. No mention is made of the speaker/microphone quality for calls although…

Alongside the major editions of Windows 10, Microsoft has quietly developed a new version of the OS that’s aimed at compact, lightweight devices. To be clear, this isn’t Windows 10 S – last year’s short-lived, locked-down platform which only ran Store apps and blocked regular desktop applications. Nor is it a reboot of the disastrous Windows RT, which combined the same restriction with the world’s clumsiest touch interface. Windows Lite is a more radical redesign of Windows, aimed at a new class of hinged dual-screen devices that open up to reveal left and right digital “pages”. The idea has been bouncing around within Microsoft for long time – the company unveiled its dual-screen Courier concept back in 2008 – but the recent spate of folding smartphones could finally bring the…

PRICE £58 (£70 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/297kin, including special offers For a long time, the main argument against buying the basic Amazon Kindle was that it wasn’t as well made as the Paperwhite and had no built-in reading light. With the arrival of the 2019 model, however, those drawbacks have finally been sorted; you can happily splash £70 on Amazon’s cheapest ebook reader safe in the knowledge that it does almost everything its pricier stablemates can. The front light isn’t the only new feature. Amazon adds Bluetooth and thus the ability to download and listen to Audible audiobooks. This tenth-generation Kindle also benefits from the mildest of mild redesigns: the edges and front bezels are that little bit more rounded than the old model. Otherwise, it’s as you were. The…

PRICE Core i5, £1,208 (£1,449 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” seems to be Apple’s current mantra. The only changes to the 21.5in iMac since 2012 are the ports at its rear, the display and the internals. This year, however, is significant for the smaller of Apple’s all-in-one PCs: this 21.5in model is the first to be available with a six-core Intel processor and discrete graphics power. Even though the design hasn’t been updated for seven years, the iMac wears its age wonderfully well. There are only two things that grate. First, if you want to physically connect anything to the iMac you’ll have to fumble around at the rear on the right-hand side, where you’ll find four USB-A 3 ports, two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C…

PRICE £398 (£478 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk While it may seem odd to describe this 27in screen as expensive when it sits opposite an Eizo display costing almost £4,000, there’s no hiding from the truth. You can buy a myriad of good-quality 27in 1440p screens for less than £300, so Dell must work hard to justify the premium. One major benefit it offers over the cheaper competition is a USB-C connection. This hugely simplifies a desk setup as you can power the monitor via the single power cable (there’s no external power brick) and then use USB-C to both transmit data and charge laptops that need a maximum of 65W. You can even hook up a second 1440p monitor via the DisplayPort, which is neat. And Dell has worked hard…

As ever, buyers have a lot of choice when buying the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti as Nvidia’s board partners have already released cards with numerous designs. If you want an affordable, stock-speed GTX 1660 Ti, go for the Zotac Twin Fan model. It’s £260, which is as cheap as this card gets, and it has a larger heatsink with two fans – so the fans will be slower and quieter than similarly priced single-fan models. Don’t discount those single-fan models. The Palit StormX is 168mm long, which makes it up to 10cm shorter than some of its rivals and easier to fit in smaller systems. And it also costs £260. You’ll have to spend more if you want an overclock. The heftiest improvement so far comes from Gigabyte: its…

PRICE £83 (£99 inc VAT) from vodafone.co.uk (plus £10 top-up) It says an awful lot about how fast smartphone technology has spread that the Vodafone Smart X9 could easily pass for a flagship phone of three years ago. A 5.7in 18:9 display is encased in thin bezels to the left and right of the screen, with a slightly wider forehead and chin bezel above and below. There’s no ungainly notch in sight. Flip the X9 over and it’s pleasingly minimalist. A dual-camera array is neatly contained in the top left-hand corner, and the circular fingerprint reader sits near the top in the middle. Vodafone even plays it tasteful with the logo, which is barely visible near the bottom. The phone’s rear is, however, the first indicator that you’re not dealing…

Size, despite what you may have heard to the contrary, matters. Not everyone can find room for a hulking full tower on or under their desk, and not everyone wants to burn through electricity just to check their emails. The mini PCs in this month’s Labs are considerably more compact than the norm, with some measuring less than the width of this page – where possible, we’ve shown them “actual size”. But their diminutive stature doesn’t necessarily mean they lack power: we’ve gathered together as wide an array of machines as possible, from gaming rigs with aggressive angles and glowing skulls to a palm-size system that sips less power at full load than most of its rivals do at idle. Fancy getting your hands dirty and wielding a screwdriver with…

PRICE £708 (£850 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com The second you open its packaging, you know that Asus is positioning the PB60 as a ready-to-run mini PC that’s just as suitable to techies as it is to the masses. It’s one of just two systems on test this month to include a bundled keyboard and mouse, and you’ll also find a stand for vertical use and a VESA bracket to hide the system behind your monitor. Sadly, Asus’s bundling practice doesn’t stop with physical accessories. As soon as the system is powered up and the Windows configuration dance begins, the company’s interference makes itself known: click carefully, or you’ll find yourself signing up for an entirely pointless Asus Account alongside your Microsoft Account – the secret, with no Cancel button in…

PRICE Barebones, £267 (£320 inc VAT) from shuttle.eu Sat next to the other machines in the group, Shuttle’s XPC SH370R8 looks like Godzilla – but, at 217 x 340 x 197mm, it’s considerably more compact than a traditional tower system and just about squeaks under the wire for classification as a “mini PC”. Losing a chunk of desk space to a far larger chassis than any other mini PC on test gives you considerable flexibility. For storage, it’s possible to fit four 2.5in or 3.5in SSDs or hard drives in the chassis as standard; an optional bracket ups that to an impressive eight 2.5in drives, on top of the SATA/NVMe M.2 slot on the bundled motherboard. The XPC is also the only system on test to accept CPUs with a…

PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from pcworld.co.uk The biggest giveaway that the NUC 7 family isn’t quite at the cutting edge comes not from the presence of a seventh-generation Core i3 or Core i5 processor, but from a card included in the box offering a range of free downloadable software – providing you travel back in time and redeem it before September 2018. This aside, however, there’s a lot to recommend Intel’s compact NUC form factor. The 7 Home Mini PC is both a lot smaller and lighter than most systems on test, and it’s one of the few to include Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 technology – making it compatible with external graphics housings for those who need a serious performance boost. The machine’s surprising performance in the multitasking benchmark, given…

PRICE Barebones, £522 (£626 inc VAT); as tested, £747 (£896 inc VAT) from quietpc.com It’s unusual enough to see one of AMD’s Zen-based Ryzen processors offered from a system builder; it’s doubly unusual when it’s one of the Ryzen Embedded family, soldered chips designed for low-power small form factor use – as found in this signage-focused machine. There’s a reason for picking the Ryzen Embedded V1605B over any of its Intel equivalents: the integrated Radeon Vega 8 graphics processor, which drives an impressive four DisplayPort outputs, all of which can be used simultaneously. It’s also responsible for the machine’s surprising performance in the Superposition gaming benchmark, returning a just-about-playable 36.2fps average at the 720p Low preset. That’s considerably higher than most of its Intel-powered competition. The graphics grunt offered by…

Nowadays, all computers are roughly equivalent in terms of capabilities, if not raw performance. It’s possible to take any program and run it on machines ranging from a room-spanning supercomputer to the smartphone in your pocket – the only difference being the time it takes to complete. As both time and technology march forward, everything moves up a performance tier: for instance, the smartphones of today are orders of magnitude more powerful than the huge supercomputers of just a few decades ago. The same is true of the gap between full-size and ultra small form factor PCs: the majority of machines tested in this month’s Labs can easily outperform a mid-range desktop from five years ago at a fraction of the size and power draw. The fastest mini PCs can…

PRICE £183 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com If the LAPAC2600C looks familiar, there’s a good reason for that. This Wave 2 wireless AP takes everything we liked about Linksys’ old LAPAC2600 model – including the funky rounded hexagonal design – and adds full cloud management capabilities. To show how serious Linksys is about the cloud, the price even includes a five-year Cloud Manager subscription. Getting started is easy: you just need to provide an email address for the designated owner, add a password and choose a domain name, after which you can then set about defining networks for each site. Provisioning the AP itself is just as swift, although before you start, we recommend that you visit the portal’s main settings page and change the default admin password for all managed…

PRICE £366 exc VAT from uk.insight.com We’ve always had a soft spot for Fujitsu’s Esprimo mini PCs. We’ve used them in our lab for a number of years, and have found them great space-saving alternatives to bulky desktops – and much greener, too. Now Fujitsu introduces its smallest system yet, the ultra-compact Esprimo G558, with a footprint of 165 x 36mm and a volume of just 0.8 litres. Despite its tiny size, the G558 has the power to handle most business apps. Our review unit arrived with an eighth-generation quad-core 3.1GHz Core i3-8100T CPU; for more lightweight roles there’s a Pentium Gold G5400T model, which will save you around £50, as well as other CPU choices, including Celeron, Core i5 and Core i7 variants. The price above also includes 4GB…

In the last century, computing tasks almost invariably ended with a printout. No matter how smart your construction software might be, the final plans were still destined for an A0 pen plotter. Legal papers and documents might be sent around as Word files, but recipients would ultimately hit “Print” and file their hard copy safely away. But times change. One friend astonished a customer recently by turning up to a meeting with just his Microsoft Surface, flipping through the 40 or 50 PDFs that made up the project while simultaneously firing off fleets of AWS VMs. The fact is millennial types aren’t particularly attached to paper. For all kinds of document, digital is increasingly the default, and yesterday’s yellow sticky note on a product design is tomorrow’s annotation and tag…

It’s time for a radical change of thinking. I take no joy in saying this, but the cold, hard reality is that we’ve managed to get the public internet, web and daily connectivity stuck into a cul-de-sac from which we desperately need to emerge. And to fix this problem, we must take radical steps. I’ve been coming to this conclusion for a while and, in trying to find a solution, you keep coming back to the same inescapable issue. If we don’t make the changes, they will be imposed upon us by the government. Indeed, we can see the first steps already emerging. First, let’s look at where we are today. The advantage of age is that you, hopefully, have some sense of perspective. I have no interest in harking…

I had yet another interesting email from a reader recently, asking about using the Tor browser and a VPN together for better privacy. Jack wanted to know: “should I be connecting to my VPN first and then Tor or the other way around? I’ve asked a few people, and looked online, and had conflicting answers. I’ve also been told that there is no benefit in using Tor as well as a VPN. Can you clarify as I’m really confused now?” I’ll do my best Jack, and I’ll start with why you might not want to mix these two tools into one. Let’s start with the fact that, while the Tor browser is based on Firefox, the differences are important: Firefox is tweaked for speed, Tor is tweaked for privacy and…

Flying drone deliveries are here. Well, they’re in North Carolina, Switzerland and Rwanda. While Amazon, Google and others are still trialling airborne courier systems, Matternet has rolled out another drone delivery network. The newest system uses large quadcopters to ferry blood samples for WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh. Previously, samples were driven between clinics and labs by couriers, taking three hours. This can be cut to minutes via air. And because there’s no traffic, the drones can do the job not only in a fraction of the time but more predictably. A similar system slashed delivery times in Switzerland to 15 minutes, while in Rwanda the drones allowed coverage into more remote areas. This is the perfect use case for drones – not Amazon orders or pizza deliveries. The rise of…

DENNISMAGS.CO.UK/PCPRO LABS Printers Whether you’re looking for laser-edged quality, brilliant inkjet photos or a mix of the two, we have the answer. Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and claim a free three-in-one USB charging cable, while stocks last. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details FEATURES BuildaPClikea professional Our new RWC columnist, Lee Grant, shares his hard-earned experience from years of building computers for customers. ImproveyourWi-Fi coverageforfree You don’t need to spend hundreds on a new mesh router. We show how to boost speeds and kill dead spots – for free. Making Tax Digital: what it really means to you Whether you’re a small business owner, freelancer or simply need to submit your taxes, we reveal…

I like to think that I’m a fairly reasonable chap. I might get wound up about some things, but I do my best to be fair-minded… although I will admit that ignorant rudeness, and its corollary in poorly designed hardware and software, are often to blame for reducing me to a dribbling incoherent monster. I also accept, within limitations, that “we are the product” when it comes to internet services. Especially those that purport to be free. But I’m starting to get really quite annoyed with services that want to stop me using their product the way I have always used it, and to force me into something different. For example, let’s take Twitter. A pretty simple, nay simplistic, tool that was a good idea on the back of an…

ISPS, REGULATORS AND child-protection groups face a fight to maintain control over web traffic as a new DNS system threatens to neuter tools such as porn-blockers and anti-malware tools. Firefox and Chrome plan to shift from DNS – the “telephone book” that translates user page requests into IP addresses – to a more secure version called DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Until now, DNS requests have been unencrypted, meaning ISPs can see domain requests within traffic and block domains on blacklists, or sites known to host malware. Many experts believe the proposed changes are overdue and represent an improvement in security and privacy. However, the shift threatens services such as the adult content filters operated by all of Britain’s major ISPs, because they would no longer have the ability to filter…

@dariengs If you want to spy on my browsing activity, go nuts. All you’ll learn is that I spend an unhealthy amount of time browsing items I’m never going to buy on Amazon, and that my best posts on Twitter are usually stolen directly from Reddit. Where I draw the line is having my physical location tracked. To be clear, I don’t mean to sound like an anti-GPS Luddite (although I do enjoy the image of getting a mob together to commandeer a spaceship and smash up a few satellites). I rather like looking back through my Google timeline and seeing where I’ve roamed in the past month. Recently I had the opportunity to go skiing in the Portes du Soleil, and it was a joy to be able to…

Visit dickpountain.co.uk Amid all the hoo-hah over Brexit, you might be forgiven for not having noticed that, in addition to taking on the EU, our valiant government has also decided to fight the internet. To be exact, it has decided to regulate the consumption of pornography, which as everyone knows is what keeps that internet going. To be more exact, it has announced a date for announcing a date for the introduction of a porn pass, without which porn sites will be inaccessible to you. This pass, which you’ll buy either online or from your local newsagent for a fiver, proves that you’re over 18 years of age. It also presumably adds you to a database of dirty dogs who in some post-Brexit theocracy may be summoned for chemical castration.…

PRICE £2,575 (£3,090 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com Asus’s tagline is “In search of the incredible”, and with the Asus Mini PC ProArt PA90 it might just have found it. From the moment you power up this workstation and watch in wonder as the top plate moves up and down like a miniature TARDIS engine, you know it’s something different. If that phrase has the ring of Apple to it, I make no apologies; the ProArt PA90 itself has more than echo of the Mac Pro. A cylindrical workstation dressed in dark grey isn’t a wholly novel concept, after all. This machine is taller than the Mac Pro, though, standing just over a foot high. Asus is also less shy than Apple when it comes to showing you what’s inside the…

PRICE £3,325 (£3,990 inc VAT) from jigsaw24.com This is an insane monitor. Not only because of that price, but because of its sheer talent; it’s truly the Lionel Messi of monitors. Want a huge 31.1in screen for editing HDR video? No problem, because the CG319X comes equipped with everything you need. Need perfect colour matching for an outdoors print campaign? At the press of a button, you can move into the Adobe RGB colour space with total confidence. But Eizo primarily pitches the CG319X – its top-of-the-range monitor – at video professionals, and with good reason. The first is a panel that packs all the necessary technology. You’ve got the HLG and PQ gamma curves to ensure HDR video is accurate, plus the promise of 98% gamut coverage of the…

I’ve been using the Huawei P30 Pro since its launch in late March, having switched from its sister phone the Mate 20 Pro. Day to day, there’s little difference between the two: you only notice when you take photos. Even here, the quality gap is minimal when you’re capturing images of friends, family and scenery. They both offer exceptional clarity and wide-angle shots that go far beyond the capabilities of phones from two years ago. The real difference is the zoom. I remember using one of the first digital cameras with a 10x optical zoom, and it was atrocious: there was no way I, with my shaky hands, could capture a usable image. Huawei deserves immense credit, because even in the hands of amateurs such as myself the P30 Pro’s…

PRICE £48 (£57 inc VAT) per year from surfshark.com Surfshark is a relative newcomer to the VPN waters, having launched in spring 2018. From the outset, it has focused on security and privacy: based in the British Virgin Islands, it has no surveillance or data-retention laws to worry about. It has a strict no-logs policy, insisting that it only records your email address and billing information. Reassuringly, its Chrome and Firefox extensions have been independently audited to show they can’t monitor and store information about your activity. We tried out the Windows client, Chrome extension and mobile apps for Android and iPad app; there are also desktop clients for Mac and Linux, a Firefox extension and apps for Amazon Fire TV Stick and Android TV. Your subscription lets you use…

PRICE CPU-only, £558 (£670 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com The chip at the heart of Intel’s Hades Canyon NUC8i7HNK is an odd duck: it combines Intel’s four-core, eight-thread Core i5-8705G processor with rival AMD’s Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics core, creating something more than the sum of its parts. At least, that was the theory behind the companies’ partnership. Designed as an exercise in cramming as much compute performance into as small a space as possible, the Hades Canyon is barely recognisable as a NUC. The original 4in by 4in square of Intel’s Next Unit of Computing motherboard layout is nowhere to be found, replaced instead with a wide angular box adorned with a light-up skull decal that glows blue and pinkish-red when the system is powered on – and…

PRICE Barebones, £118 (£142 inc VAT) from stuff-uk.net Robbed of any sense of scale, you would think the ASRock DeskMini 310 Series was a full-size tower PC; it’s only when you spot the size of the USB ports, or get up close and personal with it in the flesh, that you realise it seems to have shrunk in the wash. Based on the STX form factor, smaller even than ITX, the DeskMini is a true barebones system: as standard it comes with only the case, power supply and motherboard. Everything else must be purchased separately and fitted by hand, making it the only system on test to come without some form of specialised CPU cooler. There’s not a lot of clearance inside, either. The chassis can only take low-profile coolers,…

PRICE Barebones, £195 (£234 inc VAT) from mini-itx.com The specifications tell you all you need to know about the Jetway JBC420: two network ports, a small SSD, 4GB of DDR3 memory and a low-end Celeron processor combine to produce a system that struggles as a general-purpose desktop – a theory borne out by its presence near the bottom of the table for every compute benchmark we ran (see p92). The Jetway JBC420, however, was never intended to be a general-purpose desktop – although if you’re patient and do little more than check your emails and listen to the PC Pro podcast then it’s fully compatible with Windows 10. Instead, it’s designed to be used as a network appliance, boasting dual Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports and a combined RS232/422/485 serial port.…

PRICE £575 (£690 inc VAT) from quietpc.com The UltraNUC Pro 7 Fanless is an interesting beast, because it’s not really its own machine: it’s one of Intel’s seventh-generation Next Unit of Computing (NUC) systems, removed from its original housing and installed in a third-party case, along with any upgrades you fancy specifying at the point of order. The reliance on using an original NUC system as its base means you won’t find the same processor options as other systems in QuietPC’s catalogue: the seventh-gen Core i3-7100U – as reviewed, explaining its poor showing in our multitasking benchmark – and i5-7300U chips are options for the reviewed Akasa Newton S7 case, with the Core i7-8650U limited to the larger Plato X7. This provides improved but still passive cooling at the cost…

PRICE Barebones, £200 (£240 inc VAT) from reichelt.com At first glance, it’s easy to get the Shuttle DH370 mixed up with its industrial cousin, the DS77U7. They’re both extremely compact black boxes, with the DH370 coming in slightly smaller but the DS77U7 weighing a fraction less. Where the DS77U7’s processor is fixed and unchangeable, though, the DH370 is a full barebones system – and one that ditches passive cooling in favour of a dual-fan integrated heatsink. This pulls fresh air in at the top and pushes hot air out of the sides. Once we added, as with the other barebones systems sharing its 65W thermal design profile CPU limit, an Intel Core i5-8400 and 16GB of DDR4 RAM, it was no surprise to see the DH370 doing well in the…

Wireless networking was once seen as a luxury, or even a frippery. That’s no longer the case. Many modern businesses run almost exclusively on mobile devices, including not just laptops but smartphones and tablets. SMBs need to consider a wireless-first approach to ensure employees stay connected and productive. Wireless networking isn’t just about mobility, however. It’s quicker and cheaper to deploy than traditional wired networks, and it can also be easier to manage, with most APs offering powerful administration interfaces. Another advantage of wireless networking is that it’s easy to expand to keep up with your growing business: the latest Wave 2 APs are more than capable of handling the demands of a large userbase. Finally, wireless gives you options such as guest networks, which add a touch of professionalism…

PRICE £80excVATfromebuyer.com For offices that have already embraced Netgear’s Insight cloud portal, the WAC510 is a tempting choice – because it will snap right into your existing management framework. The AP can also be used in standalone mode, but integrating it into the Insight platform gives you visibility into your wireless networks, right alongside data from your Insight-enabled switches, routers and NAS appliances. At £80, the WAC510 is cheap, but free cloud services are limited, and only your first two APs are covered. If you want to take advantage of key features such as the desktop browser portal and Wi-Fi roaming, you’ll need an Insight Premium subscription, which costs around £379 a year for up to 25 devices. Another expense you might need to consider is power. If you already…

PRICE £123 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Lexmark’s new mono A4 MFP is so cheap you might wonder what the catch is. But there’s nothing missing from the spec sheet: it combines print, scan, copy and fax services with a nippy 34ppm print speed, duplex printing and support for both wired and wireless networks (although not at the same time). Its compact chassis won’t require much desktop space, and inside it there’s a dual-core 1GHz CPU, backed up by 512MB of memory – enough power to handle demanding print runs. The only compromise is that the scanner is of the simplex variety, and can’t do double-sided copies. Despite the low purchase price, running costs are similar to other mono MFPs. The imaging unit needs replacing every 12,000 pages, and whether you…

As you can see from the mini biography underneath my photo on the right, I run a web agency. In fact, I own one of the UK’s oldest web agencies – we started going right at the dawn of the commercial internet. I can’t think of any of our competitors from back then that are still going. In those early days, we were mostly producing websites for reluctant clients. Back in 1995, many of the companies we spoke to thought that the World Wide Web would be over in a few months, and so they didn’t want to spend lots of their precious budget on something that they considered to be a flash in the pan. The main reason that we picked up many of those original web projects was…

If you’re in the habit of whipping the lids off rack-mount servers, you might well agree with my observation that they can be pretty hostile environments. The thinner a rackmount server gets, the more extreme its engineering. Heat is the problem: 1U of rack space is just about okay when filled with an Ethernet switch or small web-hosting server, which probably reaches no more than 30cm back into the depths of the rack. Proper servers, though, are a bit deeper – most of the ones I seem to suffer with are getting on for a metre deep or more. Suddenly, little fans that would gently cough out a stream of warmish air are plunged into a labyrinth of components, covers and casings. Air becomes a precious commodity, shepherded by flappy…