Table of contents for June 2023 in PC Pro

A confession that will shock nobody: I love technology. I love how it changes the world, how it improves people’s lives, how it enables us to either do interesting new things or do old things more quickly. But here’s my second admission: sometimes, the pace of change is so agonisingly slow that I only realise how much things have moved on when I stop and reflect on the previous decade. Like a timelapse photo of a sunrise. Not the past six months. ChatGPT’s arrival on the scene has been a revelation, like Eric Cantona’s arrival at Manchester United, and nothing will ever be the same again. Readers of this magazine will know full well that ChatGPT was based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model, and that GPT-4 is now inveigling…

We all know that the Earth takes 24 hours to complete one rotation. The only problem is that it doesn’t. A host of irregularities, caused by everything from the laws of angular momentum, to the tides, to even natural events such as earthquakes, means that in any given year our clocks could find themselves slipping ever so slightly out of sync with the observed reality. That’s why since 1972 scientists have occasionally voted to add a “leap second” to the calendar, either at the end of June or on New Year’s Eve, to keep clocks reflective of our actual position in space. But all of this could be about to change. Following a vote at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures, the leap second could be abandoned as…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in M2 Pro power from £2,699 from apple.com/uk All the upgrades to this 2023 model are within, as Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max processors take charge. Combine this power with the 16.2in mini-LED screen, superb sound system and phenomenal battery life, and you have the world’s premier workstation laptop. REVIEW Issue 342, p48 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Pro 14in If you prefer your power in a more compact package than the Pro 16in, then the 14in is an excellent alternative – and it weighs 1.6kg rather than 2.2kg. From £2,149 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 343, p44 Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra Samsung packs everything into this 16in laptop, from a superb AMOLED panel and a slim 1.8kg chassis to a Core i9 CPU and…

Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro and a longstanding dweller on Ofcom’s naughty step. @bazzacollins Have you got fibre broadband? It turns out you might not have, even if the word “fibre” appears in the name of your tariff. Regulator Ofcom has finally cottoned on to the fact that most “fibre broadband” lines – the ones within reach of 96% of the UK population – aren’t really fibre at all. They’re fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) lines, and as pedants such as me have been pointing out for over a decade, the final leg of those connections runs over speed-sapping copper cable. Nevertheless, broadband providers have sold FTTC lines as fibre since the technology first emerged. And though we knew it wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but…

SCORE PRICE £70 (£84 inc VAT) from theedustore.co.uk It was two weeks after the GeoBook arrived that I realised I had overpaid for this laptop. Head to theedustore.co.uk and you can buy the Tactus-branded GeoBook 2e for £84 inc VAT with free delivery, rather than the £100 plus £8 I paid on eBay. Lesson learned, and education is very much the theme here: this 12.5in laptop has been designed for schools, with the bundled OS being Windows 10 Pro Education. I suspect that Microsoft’s licensing team aren’t overly happy that it’s so readily available. That money buys you a Celeron N3450, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage. The N3450 wasn’t exactly fast when it launched in 2016, but with four cores and a burst rate of 2.2GHz it’s…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com There’s something about the Venturer that reminds me of the HP Jornada and Psion Series 5 from years past. Perhaps it stems from the reduced-size keys, which take some adjustment before you hit normal typing speeds. The keys themselves have just enough cushioning to lift the Venturer above the even more clackety Coda and Iota laptops, but I soon found myself reaching for the Esc key: pressing this together with the Fn key disables the palmrest, which is generously wide but is also placed where the base of your thumbs will naturally brush against it when typing. And palm rejection doesn’t work well here. Another reason for my retro thoughts is that Venturer tucks all the ports at the rear of the…

We’ve already highlighted several examples of how tech can help provide better care for patients. The bigger question is whether the NHS will have enough staff to provide the tech. The NHS in England has 3,500 vacant tech roles, according to a Parliamentary report published in February, which was evaluating the government’s commitments to digitise the NHS. “What is particularly disappointing is that the government recognises that the digitisation of the NHS is essential to bring about real benefits to patients, for example by helping them to monitor and manage long-term health conditions independently,” said professor Dame Jane Dacre, chair of the report’s expert panel. “Yet time and again, promises have been made but not delivered, hampering wider progress. “Evidence also highlights challenges in recruiting, retaining and building the specialised…

If you want the full Microsoft 365 service, including the desktop applications and 1TB of cloud storage, there’s sadly no way to get that for free – but you don’t need to pay the full RRP of £60 for the Personal edition or £80 for the Family pack. If you work for a company that already uses Microsoft 365, you may be able to claim a 30% discount on your own installation through the Microsoft Workplace programme. This cuts the price to £42 a year for a Personal subscription, or £56 for the Family pack. Once you’ve enrolled, you can keep the discount for as long as you maintain your subscription, even if you leave the company. To find out whether you qualify, enter your company email address at pcpro.link/344workplace.…

Many high-end smartphones allow you to save your photos as raw files with no processing applied – so you can develop each image in your own way, using software such as Adobe Lightroom or Affinity Photo. This isn’t normally necessary. The companion software is already designed to bring out all the tone and detail it can from the captured image, so even an expertly processed raw image isn’t going to look much more natural than the JPEG produced by your camera app. If you want to get more artistic, though, then by all means dive into the raw files. The raw image data may contain grain and artefacts that would normally be cleaned away by the in-camera processing, but which add character and interest to the scene. What’s more, raw…

Laptops and PCs We run a selection of benchmarks on all the PCs and laptops we test. Where possible, we use a cross-platform test so we can compare Windows and macOS machines, which is where both Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23 come into play. Both push the CPU to its limit, exposing how well cooled a system is. We run extra tests for Windows systems. We use our own benchmarks to test photo-editing, video-encoding and multitasking speeds. We then switch to PCMark 10 to benchmark systems in office tasks, content creation and basic tasks such as web browsing and video calls. We also run 3DMark Time Spy and a selection of benchmarks in games such as Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. For laptops, we test battery life…

SCORE PRICE £509 (£610 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk In some ways the 7900X3D makes a lot of sense. Compare it to the 5800X3D, which was a great gaming chip but held back in thread-intensive tasks due to its eight cores. The 7900X3D solves that by having 12 cores, plus it can boost to 5.6GHz rather than 5GHz. The Ryzen 97900X3D is also power efficient, drawing far less power than either the standard 7900X or the competing Intel chips, thus delivering superb power efficiency that ranks among the best we’ve tested. Your choice, then, is to either overclock it or benefit from a cooler, quieter system. The chip also drops into AM5 motherboards that support the latest connectivity tech, such as PCI-E 5 and DDR5. The graphs tell most of the…

SCORE PRICE £708 (£849 inc VAT) from oppostore.co.uk The Oppo Find N2 Flip is the firm’s first folding phone to hit the UK. Unusually, it uses the clamshell format, which we’ve previously seen on only a handful of phones, most notably Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip. Indeed, the N2 Flip feels as if it was designed to go head to head with the Z Flip4 (see issue 337, p72). For a start, Oppo comes out swinging with a considerably lower price: a Flip4 with the same 256GB of storage will cost you £1,059, and the 128GB Samsung model comes in at £999. Slick engineering Oppo also outdoes Samsung when it comes to the key design feature of a folding phone: the hinge. The Find N2 Flip introduces Oppo’s “Flexion Hinge” mechanism,…

1 Visit pcprodownload.co.uk. First, enter the issue number (344 this month). Next, enter your email address and the coupon code printed on the cover’s spine (or directly on the front cover of digital issues of the magazine). We’ll then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. Follow the instructions in the email to access the download area. 2 Once you’re in the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please make sure to read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions…

Even in the era of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, homes and offices have wireless dead spots. That’s where these Wi-Fi 6 extenders step in, essentially stretching your router’s coverage over a larger area. It can be a much more cost effective way to solve the problem than buying a mesh Wi-Fi system for several hundred pounds. From inexpensive wall plugs that can be easily hidden behind a sofa to desktop units that prioritise power over aesthetics, we’ve whittled the plethora of available Wi-Fi extenders down to four. One uses powerline technology, another a desktop unit, while the other two are plug-based range extenders. All are simple to set up, with some offering step-by-step instructions via an app, so you’ll see results almost instantly. Which Wi-Fi extender is right for you?…

SCORE PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The TP-Link RE605X is a cheaper alternative to the RE700X, and that’s reflected in a slightly less elegant design. While the premium model is a compact all-in-one format, this has two large external antennas that thrust almost six inches up into the air. The internal hardware isn’t as powerful, either: it still supports Wi-Fi 6, but with a top speed of 1.2Gbits/sec on the 5GHz band, which is only half of what its pricier sibling offers. The upside is that TP-Link has squeezed the price to a reasonable £80. And you still get the benefit of the user-friendly Tether app for iOS and Android, which automatically detects the extender on setup and guides you through the process of linking the RE605X to…

1 WHAT SHARPNESS IS SHARP ENOUGH? This is a pivotal question. The Acer Vero RL272 is the cheapest monitor here and its quality is solid. But there’s no hiding from the fact that text becomes jagged when you’re stretching 1,920 x 1,080 pixels across a panel with a 27in diagonal. That’s a density of 82 pixels per inch (ppi), but anything under 100ppi will result in the same visual effect. In truth, it’s not going to make anyone less productive – and you do get used to it – but if you can stretch your budget to a higher-resolution screen then we recommend you do so. Talking of resolution brings us to the related question of what you need to get your work done. There’s a reason that 3,440 x…

SCORE PRICE £133 (£159 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk You may be familiar with Acer’s eco-friendly Vero range from our reviews of its Chromebook Vero 514 (see issue 340, p54) and TravelMate Vero (see issue 334, p52). Now Acer has introduced Vero monitors, with the promise of reduced environmental impact thanks to using 85% post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastics and 5% ocean-bound plastics. It’s only a shame that Acer hasn’t backed this up with an EPEAT rating. Usually an environmentally friendly approach comes with a higher price, but the Vero is actually the cheapest monitor here. That’s reflected in its 1,920 x 1,080 panel, which shares the same 6-bit specification as the ViewSonic VG2755. Both use interpolating FRC technology to “fill in” the colour gaps, but neither will blow you away with…

SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from shop.benq.eu Whether or not you buy the BenQ GW2785TC boils down to one thing: how much you value USB-C. And note we aren’t talking about a docking monitor, because BenQ jettisons the likes of RJ-45 connectors and a USB-A hub in the interests of keeping the price down. You get a DisplayPort, HDMI input, USB-C and a headphone jack – and that’s it. Compared to some monitors in this Labs the GW2785TC’s colours also look a touch drab, as this panel covers 94% of the sRGB colour space but a conservative 71% of DCI-P3. That’s fine for office use, though, and we were pleased to see it scored well for accuracy with an average Delta E of 0.94 in sRGB mode. Its peak…

SCORE PRICE £ 183 (£220 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Dell C2423H is the odd one out this month, being the only 24in monitor we allowed into the Labs. Our minimum bar was meant to be 27in, but we were just too intrigued by the videoconferencing skills that donate so many extra words to this screen’s name. Ideally we would have reviewed its big brother, the 27in C2723H, which has the same 1,920 x 1,080 resolution stretched over 27in and costs £286 from dell.co.uk. We couldn’t find the C2423H on sale from Dell (it’s widely available online), with that site still pushing the older C2422HE for £347. The big difference between the two is that the plain C2423H doesn’t include USB-C, relying instead on USB-B. Connecting that extra cable brings…

SCORE PRICE £439 (£527 inc VAT) from hp.co.uk When it comes to the full names of its products, HP takes a leaf from M&S: this isn’t just the HP E34m G4, this is the HP E34m G4 WQHD Curved USB-C Conferencing Monitor. That’s worth spelling out because it really is excellent at video calls and conferencing. Its 5MP webcam (which streams at Full HD) produces detailed and well-balanced images, and HP backs it up with noise-cancelling mics along with an excellent pair of 5W speakers. HP’s Display Center app includes an Enhanced Lighting widget, which lets you use the monitor as a light source in dim conditions. It’s a subtle effect that adds colour to your cheeks in dim conditions. You should also play with HP Presence, as this brings…

SCORE PRICE £391 (£470 inc VAT) from lenovo.com We need to start this review with a caveat. Lenovo’s official price for the P27u-20 is £700 inc VAT, and as you’ll see it’s worth that price. But for a limited time, it should be available from lenovo.com for £470 – at which price it’s an unbelievable bargain. Even at £600 it would be walking away with an award. So, why are we so impressed? To start with, the inclusion of a 4K 27in panel is always a big positive. It’s true that Acer provides a 4K 28in screen for £329, but it can’t match the colour performance or flexibility of the Lenovo: sRGB mode covers 93% of that space, DCI-P3 mode 92% and Adobe RGB mode 93%. All with minimal overspill,…

SCORE PRICE £554 (£665 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com It’s less the elephant in the room and more the gigantic screen in the room: the one thing you have to say about the Philips 40B1U5601H is that it’s so huge. Its 40in panel is flat, and with a 3,440 x 1,440 resolution it really is like having two 27 in screens side by side in front of you. We prefer some curvature when screens get this large, but the flat approach allows Philips to keep costs down whilst sticking to an IPS panel. There is some drop-off in brightness in the corners (up to 13%), but whack up the brightness to its full 537cd/m2 and we doubt you’ll notice. This monitor put in a strong performance in the rest of our…

As regular readers will be well aware, PC Pro is a “real-world” magazine so we like to keep our tests as practical as possible. In this case, that means using each monitor as our daily screen and seeing how it performs; for instance, you will often see notes in the reviews that talk about the quality of the on-screen display (OSD), as that can make a big difference in daily use. We also put each panel through a selection of technical tests. We use an X-Rite i1 Display Pro colorimeter in conjunction with the display calibration and profiling software, DisplayCal. X-Rite and DisplayCal allow us to measure a display’s minimum and maximum brightness in cd/m2, its contrast ratio and colour temperature, plus each panel’s colour gamut as a percentage of…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £3,293 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Wait till you see what’s inside Qnap’s TS-h987XU-RP before judging it on price, as this 1U rack NAS is bursting with features. First up is its nifty hybrid storage arrangement: along with four standard LFF hot-swap front drive bays, it presents five SFF trays underneath the lid, with dual support for U.2 NVMe and SATA SSDs. It’s a powerful package, too, with the resident 3.4GHz Intel Xeon E-2334 CPU supported by a base 16GB of DDR4 ECC memory expandable to 128GB. Networking is equally well endowed, with dual embedded 2.5GbE and RJ-45 10GbE multi-gig ports, while the spare PCI-E Gen4 slot can be used to add other adapters such as Qnap’s 25/40GbE Ethernet and 16/32Gbits/sec Fibre Channel cards. For our tests, we…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £499 exc VAT from terra-master.com/uk Joining TerraMaster’s burgeoning family of small business NAS appliances, the U4-423 offers an affordable storage solution that will slip easily into the smallest of spaces. Measuring only 360mm deep, this competitively priced 1U rack NAS presents four hot-swap LFF/SFF SATA drive bays and partners them with dual 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports. There’s plenty of power on tap, with the appliance sporting a 2GHz quad-core Celeron N5095 CPU, while the base 4GB of DDR4 memory can be upgraded to a very usable 32GB. It also has an internal M.2 NVMe SSD slot, which can be used for caching or as a small high-performance storage pool. Build quality is great. The U4-423 is clothed in a solid steel chassis and employs equally sturdy metal drive…

Sourcing hardware means balancing priorities. For individuals there’s an obvious appeal to stylish, powerful systems; growing businesses may need to consider their budget first; while for enterprises the focus is often on a standard platform with long-term support. No matter what size your organisation is, it’s easy to overlook the ecological credentials of a purchase. But technology choices have a huge aggregate impact, and reversing the damage may be difficult or impossible. That’s why it’s imperative to consider the environmental impact of your procurement at the outset. Buy low-power hardware One way to cut your carbon footprint – and energy bills – is to avoid overspecifying hardware. If you’re buying machines for business use, for example, you probably don’t need a feature-rich, energy-hungry graphics card. For tasks that do make…

Smart industry technologies have such potential that it’s easy to get carried away with ideas of what might be possible. For example, in these days of all-pervasive AI, it’s tempting to imagine that all your smart data sources and action-taking systems might somehow coalesce into (say) a fast-track last-minute ordering system, with machine intelligence taking care of everything from automatically ordering the raw materials through to firing off ChatGPT-generated emails asking workers to pull night-shifts to get the order out of the door. Yet the notion isn’t as fanciful as you might think. Not long ago I was working with a client in the fashion industry who found that smartening up their systems did indeed allow them to start offering next-day services – at a healthy surcharge. The project relied…

I must admit, coffee was coughed across p115 of issue 341 of PC Pro as I read David Crookes’ inflammatory headline “Floppy disks: the tech that won’t die”. How many times does an IT repair business reach for the 3.5s these days? On the week I sprayed David’s article, three. One of our regular customers is Dan, who’s a tech enthusiast confident enough to break out the screwdrivers. Dan’s superpower is knowing when to stop. Normally when he’s hit that point, he arrives in our shop with boxes of boards, RAM and cables, along with a lengthy hit list of other tweaks. This job was Dan’s Sleeper PC, which is a concept I’d never heard of, at least not by that name. According to world-beating AI, GPT-3.5 defines a Sleeper…

Last month I was exploring the security risks that AI-powered systems such as ChatGPT might present in the future. I also looked at the very present dangers of credential-stuffing attacks. This month, I feel a sense of déjà vu as I’ve been exploring another AI-powered system. In truth, I’m far more enamoured with this new AI-powered system than I am with ChatGPT. ChatGPT shows a lot of promise for sure, but if you truly know a subject inside out, it doesn’t take long to find the holes in the output you’re presented with. The same argument can be levelled at Perplexity AI (perplexity.ai) to a degree. However, it’s a different proposition, as you can use it as an excellent initial search tool. My reasoning here is that it cites its…

As I get older, my patience for dealing with idiots is getting shorter. Perhaps that’s because I’m aware I have considerably less time remaining on this planet than I’ve enjoyed so far. Whatever the reason, I’ve noticed I am becoming hypercritical of the vacuous nonsense that politicians spout on an almost daily basis. It doesn’t matter which hue they are; the low quality of the content is beyond worrying. So imagine my annoyance when I read this: “Large language models like ChatGPT offer huge potential. In the future they could help us live longer, healthier, wealthier lives. I want us to invest now to reap the benefits of this innovation; in healthcare, manufacturing and public service delivery.” Who spouted this drivel? None other than Michelle Donelan MP, secretary of state…

Darien Graham-Smith How can you take the best possible photos with your smartphone? Darien details the camera features found on the latest Apple and Android devices from p42. Writesonic Writesonic is an AI-powered writing assistant that crafts exceptional content, including blog posts, articles, essays and more. Even if it does say so itself. Read our verdict on p70. Dr Rois Ni Thuama If you think class actions are a US-only thing, think again. Our new regular columnist Rois explains why tech companies should prepare for a new EU law right now on p114. Jon Spinage How do you take an idea for an app from concept to profitable product in the space of six years? Jon, CTO of Vitaccess, shares his company’s ups and downs on p116.…

Britain needs a “New National Purpose”, argued former Prime Minister Tony Blair in a new report published by his Institute for Global Change. Co-authored with his erstwhile rival from across the despatch box, former Conservative Party leader William Hague, the report called for Britain to implement a wide range of science and technology proposals in order to create a “strategic state”. One idea sticks out above all: a renewed call for the government to create a “digital identity” system to better manage the relationship between citizens and the state. The report recommends that Britain take inspiration from countries such as Estonia and develop a system of legally recognised digital IDs. It further suggests a law be passed to codify the “only once” principle in how the government handles our data…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro and definitely lives in a “house” in Norf Landan. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk I was born and schooled among the coalfields of northeast Derbyshire, but I no longer have much of a regional accent. I came to London as a student and have been here ever since, three-quarters of my life. I haven’t acquired a Norf Landan accent, but you could still detect my vestigial Derbyshire one were I to say, for example, “there’s a duck in my bath”. I’ve written here before about my fascination with human speech, especially using computers to recognise and simulate it, but my interest runs deeper than that. As a writer, both spelling and pronunciation matter to me: not because I do a lot of public speaking, which…

Locked-in battery syndrome In the past, when a desktop PC was turned on and the BIOS date and time defaulted to the reset date, the problem was usually a failing real-time clock battery. The repair was simple. Replace the lithium cell on the motherboard. I have this fault on a powerful desktop PC that is fitted with a modern graphics card “module”. The module is a tight fit. The length and depth of the module are so large that they just fit within the available motherboard space. The width covers over two of the PCI-E sockets. The edge of the lithium cell, located near the centre of the motherboard, can just be seen under the graphics module. The graphics module must be removed to reach the battery. Getting the graphics…

It all started with an email from a reader. “Have you seen these Coda 1.1 laptops being advertised on TikTok and Facebook?” asked Michael Albin. “These are Windows 10 laptops with a Celeron processor and 11in screen. I found them on eBay, brand new for £64 including delivery.” The gist of Michael’s email was simple: how would such cheap laptops fare when put through the PC Pro tests? He had taken the bait and been suitably impressed. “It isn’t the fastest in the world, but it is a very functional little laptop that runs everything I then tried on it.” Nor was the Coda 1.1 alone. There were plenty of TikTok videos showing off sub-£100 laptops that appeared to do everyday jobs without any issue. Why pay more? REAL-WORLD TROUBLES…

SCORE PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from ebay.co.uk The Iota Flo is aptly named, as its price seems to fluctuate with the ebb and tide of passing weeks. I bought it for £120 plus £5.32 for next-day delivery, but during the time of writing its price jumped to £180. Then fell to £120 again. Allow me to safely say that it isn’t worth £180, unless you’re absolutely desperate for its killer feature among this group: it ships with Windows 11. Its Celeron N4020 processor came out in 2019 and proved to be the fastest of the new laptops by some distance, despite the fact that it only includes two cores. I still wouldn’t describe the Iota Flo as nippy, but even in Google Docs you can tell it has that…

Microsoft Office has been through a lot of changes since its original release in 1990. One notable milestone was the introduction of the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, but perhaps the most significant moment of evolution came in 2010, with the launch of docs.com – a collaboration with Facebook that allowed users to share documents with friends, discover documents that their friends had uploaded and even edit them collaboratively. It was shortly followed by the full Office Live Workspace service, alongside simple web-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Those early online services may not have had a huge immediate impact, but they laid the groundwork for Office 365, which came along in 2013 offering extensive cloud-based sharing and collaboration features. Fast-forward to the present day and the whole idea…

You wouldn’t expect the slim little smartphone in your pocket to take pictures that can rival a “proper” camera. But after two decades of fierce competition and year-on-year refinements to both the hardware and software, mobile camera technology has reached a point where it’s often impossible to tell whether a photo was taken on a DSLR or a high-end smartphone – at least, not without deliberate and careful inspection. As with a DSLR, though, if you want to shoot great pictures from your phone camera it helps to understand its capabilities, and how to operate its settings. Here’s our guide to getting the best from your smartphone camera. How many lenses does a camera need? Just as a professional photographer might carry around a selection of different lenses, smartphones almost…

SCORE PRICE £2,541 (£3,049 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Samsung is never shy when it comes to launching batches of products at the same time, and the Ultra is one of three when it comes to new Book3 laptops. You can also buy the convertible Pro 360 and a plain Book3 Pro, but the Ultra at the top of the range is a totally new design. There are suitably heavyweight components to match its name. Samsung sent us the top-end model, with a Core i9 processor and GeForce RTX 4070 graphics that push it into gaming laptop territory, most notably the 2023 Razer Blade 16 (look out for our review next month). It also packs enough multi-threaded performance to make it a worthy alternative to the 16in MacBook Pro (see issue…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p14. It’s updated each month. Labs Winner Each month we run a group test, or Labs. This product has managed to beat all others to top position. The pcpro.link Throughout the magazine you’ll see pcpro.link shortcuts. Enter these into the address bar of your browser and it will take you to a particular page, which will either be too long or awkward for us to publish or will take you to the precise shop from which to buy. If it’s Amazon, note that we have an affiliate deal in place so we will receive…

SCORE PRICE £3,333 (£3,999 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Laptops with 18in screens had seemingly fallen out of favour, but 2023 has seen a resurgence in the form factor. We reviewed the Razer Blade 18 last month (see issue 343, p52), Dell has released the Alienware m18, and now Asus brings us the ROG Strix Scar 18. With the Strix Scar at the top of Asus’s performance tree, it sets the bar for this burgeoning size category. So far, Asus has released only one model of the Strix Scar 18 in the UK (you can buy ROG Strix 18 laptops with a lesser specification). This features Intel’s Core i9-13980HX processor, 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM, 2TB of storage (via two 1TB drives in a RAID0 array) and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics.…

Norton 360 Premium for £19.99 (10 devices for two years) ■ pcpro.link/norton360 We’ve negotiated a killer deal with Norton. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Security suite across ten devices. And because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. There’s 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, plus the full version of Norton Secure VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while abroad. Norton Parental Control provides tools to see exactly what your kids are up to on their various devices, and you also get GPS location monitoring for Android and iOS. To round things off, Norton Password Manager generates and…

SCORE PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from mi.com/uk The Xiaomi 13 Pro is an impressive phone. It has the sort of hardware and software you expect from a high-end smartphone in 2023 – so the question isn’t “is this phone good?”, but rather “why should I buy it instead of a Google Pixel or a Samsung Galaxy?” There are several possible answers: the Xiaomi offers not one but three 50MP main cameras, fast 120W charging and lengthy battery life. However, performance isn’t as balanced as its rivals, and while the £1,099 price is cheaper than the £1,249 Galaxy S23 Ultra (see issue 343, p54), it’s a lot more expensive than the £849 Google Pixel 7 Pro (see issue 339, p72). Design difference Xiaomi has settled on a particular style for…

SCORE PRICE £442 (£530 inc VAT) from direct.playstation.com Sony’s new headset is the most powerful virtual reality system around. It brings together an impressive set of immersive tech, and is driven by the mighty PlayStation 5 console. The catch is that the PS5 and headset together come to just over £1,000. That’s a big ask when the Meta Quest 2 can be had for £399 all in. The design is an evolution of the first-gen PSVR headset. It retains the plastic headband, but now integrates the headband release button and the tightening wheel into one on the back of the band. At the rear is a socket for plugging in the bundled wired earbuds, and a thin captive cable that connects the PSVR2 to the PS5. I didn’t find this…

SCORE PRICE £183 (£219 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk If you want to extend your wireless coverage over long distances or through thick walls, a regular repeater may not cut the mustard. Devolo’s Magic adapters combine Wi-Fi with powerline technology, enabling them to communicate over your mains electricity circuit, and provide a connection in areas that would otherwise be unreachable. The Magic 2 WiFi 6 kit is the company’s top-of-the-range system, offering not only wireless and powerline networking but mesh support too. That means you can start with the two-unit starter kit, which includes one base unit and one Wi-Fi transmitter, and add extra transmitter nodes as needed. Devolo claims speeds of up to 1.2Gbits/sec are attainable on the 5GHz band, with powerline connections up to 2.4Gbits/sec – although the speed…

SCORE PRICE £80 (£96 inc VAT) from box.co.uk This Wi-Fi 6 repeater offers 2x2 MIMO with 160MHz channel support, enabling connections of up to 2.4Gbits/sec on the 5GHz band. The simple boxy design plugs directly into a mains power socket. There’s no mains passthrough socket, but you do get a gigabit Ethernet port, which you can use for wired devices. Alternatively you can connect it to your router and use the RE700X as a Wi-Fi 6 access point – useful if your router is stuck on Wi-Fi 5. Setup couldn’t be easier. You can simply scan a QR code to download TP-Link’s Tether app for Android and iOS; this automatically detected the TP-Link RE700X as soon as I plugged it in, and guided me through the setup process with no…

SCORE PRICE £323 (£388 inc VAT) from box.co.uk AOC can claim the prize of being the least expensive 34in display here, which is quite a feat when you consider how aggressively priced rivals such as the Iiyama ProLite XCB3494WQSN are. AOC still finds room in its budget for a 1080p webcam that supports Windows Hello, but the cheap-looking surround it sits in reflects the quality of the camera itself: it’s usable at a pinch, but there’s a lot of “noise” in the video and the dual mics aren’t the most sensitive. You’ll also soon discover that not all 5W speakers are born equal, with AOC’s pair sounding distinctly weedy next to those of the HP E34m G4. But then again there’s a £149 difference between the two, so the maxim…

SCORE PRICE £266 (£319 inc VAT) from dell.com/en-uk You may not be able to guess it from the price, but this 27in monitor falls into the back-to-basics category. Stripped-back packaging, stripped-back name, stripped-back features. There isn’t even USB-C on offer, with Dell relying on the old and trusted DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. And we mean old, as they’re stuck at versions 1.2 and 1.4 respectively (see the jargon buster on p91 for the difference this makes). It’s perhaps surprising, then, to see a generous helping of four USB-A ports, with two hiding away at the rear but two more accessible under the bottom bezel. You’ll need to connect your computer with the supplied USB-A to USB-B cable, with a DisplayPort cable also in the box (but no HDMI). Heading into…

SCORE PRICE £364 (£437 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk For years, Iiyama has consistently produced high-quality monitors for competitive prices, often choosing to omit features to keep costs down. In previous group tests, those features included a USB-C port – but not this time. And while this noncurved 32in 4K monitor doesn’t pack as many luxuries as some of its rivals, it does include an RJ-45 connector – so the XUB3293UHSN is effectively a docking station as well as a monitor. Iiyama could have been more generous with its USB-A ports, with two tucked away on the left. Unless you’re using a wireless keyboard and mouse that use the same receiver, that means both will be filled if you want to take advantage of the KVM. There’s no webcam, but the…

SCORE PRICE £208 (£250 inc VAT) from lenovo.com If the Lenovo ThinkVision P27u-20 is the star of the show, the E29w-20 is one of the reliable backing singers. There’s nothing glamorous happening here, but if you need a productivity-focused screen for an aggressive price then keep reading. Its biggest selling point is a 29in diagonal that contains 2,560 x 1,080 pixels, which translates to a wide 21:9 aspect ratio. That’s not only great for spreadsheets but also for working on two documents (even three documents) side by side. The E29w-20 could feasibly replace two Full HD 27in monitors, but for the running costs of one. Unlike its sibling, there’s no option to switch between colour spaces. We tested this screen in three different modes, and each time it came out…

SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from box.co.uk If you’re an IT manager looking to roll out monitors to hotdesking staff, there are many excellent reasons to choose the ViewSonic VG2755. Top of that list is its USB-C port, which also delivers 60W of power. There’s no RJ-45 here to turn the VG2755 into a “full” docking station, but you can share three USB-A ports with a second connected computer. This must connect over either the HDMI or DisplayPort, and then access the USB hub using the USB-B input, and there’s also a D-SUB port for backwards compatibility. ViewSonic includes a pair of speakers, too, but these tinny 2W units fall some way behind the 5W speakers in the ViewSonic VG2756V-2K. There’s no drop in quality when it comes to…

Dear makers of monitors, a plea: rethink your power buttons. Please. The number of times I accidentally switched off a screen as I was fiddling with its OSD reached ludicrous levels this month; after the tenth occasion it stopped being funny. Is it so very difficult to move the power button a few inches away from the other controls? Or go wild and put it on the front, paint it a different colour, give it a funky texture – anything, I beg you. It doesn’t help that so many manufacturers opt for style over usability. All 17 screens here may look lovely with their thin bezels unencumbered by buttons, but that means shoving those buttons to the underside or rear. Sometimes that’s fine, because the on-screen display is so well…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £4,139 exc VAT (MSRP) from qsan.com It’s been a few years since Qsan updated its NAS appliances, but the XCubeNAS XN8112R signifies the wait is over. Coming in at the pinnacle of a range of six new models, the XN8112R is designed to offer SMBs an expandable hybrid storage solution with a sharp focus on performance. Along with 12 front SATA LFF/SFF bays, the appliance has four SFF bays at the rear that support U.2 NVMe SSDs. These can be used as a high-performance storage pool or teamed up with Qsan’s new hybrid SSD cache service, and there are two internal M.2 NVMe slots that also support both options. The CPU gets a welcome update, with the elderly Xeon E3-1225 v6 in the XN8012R replaced with a…

SCORE PRICE £394 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Cloud-managed wireless networks may be all the rage, but their yearly per-device costs mean these services can get expensive for large access point (AP) deployments. The DAP-X2850 offers SMBs an appealing alternative, as it’s designed to be managed using D-Link’s free on-premises Nuclias Connect software, with a single instance supporting up to 1,500 APs and smart-managed switches. This Wi-Fi 6 AP is well built with a solid metal backplate and has good credentials, with its AX3600 rating comprising claimed speeds of up to 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 1,147Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. Its primary 2.5GbE port requires a PoE+ source, while the second gigabit port can be used to connect other wired devices and provide them with network access. The AP…

1 Setup administrative policies Setting fleet-wide policies to enforce power management settings makes it easy to ensure PCs are shut down outside of working hours – unless they’re being used. Configuration Manager’s power management editor lets you apply power plans across your enrolled machines, and can also identify computers with power conflicts via the “Computers with Multiple Power Plans” report. Other reports let you monitor computer activity over time, which can pinpoint devices that are wasting energy. See the help pages at pcpro.link/344configman for details of the additional reports. 2 Replace servers with cloud services Delegate responsibility for managing your network infrastructure to experts, by switching from on-premises hardware to cloud. This not only reduces your administrative burden, but reduces overall power consumption, since you’ll be leasing only the resources you…

At the beginning of this year, Bloomberg reported that a “Class-Action Wave Is Coming” (pcpro.link/344bloom). The article called out the rise in environment, social and governance-related cases, citing the hardening of corporate disclosure requirements as a catalyst for this type of litigation. From a tech perspective, the most interesting aspect in that article was a quote from Norton Rose Fulbright, a leading law firm, which said that cybersecurity is a “class-action area of future concern”. This article makes the case that the future is now. But it also makes the case that it’s not all bad news. Management can, without incurring a huge amount of expense, simultaneously augment their business’s cyber-resilience posture and go some way to managing the new risk of class actions. I make no attempt to plot…

This column comes to you from the Pickwick Hotel in San Francisco. I was expecting to stay with relatives this weekend, but the best-laid plans of mice, men and IT consultants have a habit of changing. Here I am, in the kind of hotel I enjoy – old, slightly tatty, but dripping with atmosphere. Even if I have cracked my head on the towel rail in the sub-miniature bathroom five times. What’s not quite so atmospheric is how my 5G devices are working here. I’m used to the idea that I have to make a sizeable top-up to my PAYG account when roaming in some countries. The phone I use for apps, navigation and overseas messaging is on a different network to my main phone, because I’ve seen the problems…

The backlash didn’t take long. OpenAI released the latest version of its ChatGPT in the autumn of 2022, and within weeks startups were taking advantage of the generative AI tool and the large language model that powers it. In 2022 alone, $1.4 billion was reportedly invested in generative AI companies in 78 deals (pcpro.link/344futurism). But warnings about the technology arose just as quickly. First, people didn’t understand the text was grammatically correct but not necessarily factual; that’s not a flaw but how these systems inherently work, although that was apparently news to many. (Indeed, ChatGPT itself warns that it “may occasionally generate incorrect information”, can be biased and has limited knowledge after 2021.) Critics also raised concerns about the ownership and quality of the data on which the models were…

What could the government do to build the trust necessary for a digital ID to work? “We try to be very transparent, I think this is the ultimate cornerstone,” said Siim Sikkut. “I can log into our equivalent of GOV.UK and see who has access to my data. Even some of my most sensitive data, like my health records.” He explains how this even goes down to the level of identifying individual doctors who can access his records – and if he is suspicious, Estonia has established a reporting mechanism that will launch a data protection investigation. “There have been some people who have been fined for peeking into things they shouldn’t have. And we’ve been very public about those incidents because that stops the next ones.” In 2017, a…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor and she’s more than a little annoyed to have invested in blackout blinds and curtains only to find the irritant coming from inside the house. @njkobie It was probably about 3am when I lost my mind. As the parent of a one-year-old, my sleep is often interrupted, but what’s worse than being woken in the dark hours is the inability to fall back asleep. This time around, my temporary insomnia wasn’t due to an odd pain in my body or too much post-lunch caffeine, nor even the dramatic disruption to my sleep patterns leaving my brain confused. No, it was a series of bright flashing lights right next to my face. Like many in London, I don’t have a spare room to use…

SCORE PRICE £63 (£75 inc VAT) from box.co.uk This was the laptop that inspired this article, with reader Michael Albin buying it for £64 from eBay. I wasn’t so fortunate, as the price had jumped to £105 when I purchased it from the same site, but as I write it’s back down to £75 from box.co.uk. But in truth, I still wouldn’t buy it. The reason why is that the Geo is a notably superior laptop for £9 more. Take the Coda’s keyboard, which has an annoying habit of dropping keystrokes. I suspect this may have more to do with the processor than the board, as it appears to be the exact same keyboard as that of the Iota, right down to the lack of cushioning and loud clacks as…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from ebay.co.uk The saying “they don’t make them like that any more” normally harks back to solid machinery from olden and better times, but here I utter the phrase with gratitude. The Satellite Pro C850-1HD, which dates back to 2013, is a typical chunky business laptop of a bygone era that I’m delighted has passed. Mostly. I bought it for £99 to give a direct second-hand comparison to all the new laptops, and I can summarise the difference in one sentence: far more powerful, far less portable, far more battered. Let’s take power first. My machine included a Core i5-3230M, which was a solid chip for its time with two cores, four threads and a peak frequency of 3.2GHz. With 8GB of memory in…

That the NHS is in an unprecedented crisis will come as news to nobody. Leaving aside any political debate over what got us here, the raw data paints an unquestionably bleak picture. More than 7 million people are now on waiting lists for treatment, up from 4.5 million at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and from 2.5 million in 2010. The percentage of potential cancer patients seeing a consultant within a fortnight of GP referral has fallen to 80%, well below the 93% target. More than 50,000 people had a wait in excess of 12 hours in A&E departments in December, a figure that was in the hundreds only four years ago. Despite the phenomenal efforts of the medical professionals, NHS performance has nose-dived. Can technology help pull it…

If you want to get artistic, almost every phone will let you adjust the camera controls manually to achieve a particular look. One setting to try is exposure compensation: this lets you make the scene darker or brighter, to deliberately create pictures where some parts are murky or blown out. You can also set the shutter speed manually, so you can take ultra-fast shots even in low light, or use a camera stand to capture long dreamy exposures in brighter conditions. You might need to apply exposure compensation to dial down the brightness so the scene isn’t overexposed. Tweaking the white balance can correct for a colour cast, perhaps from nearby lighting. It can also be well worth taking manual control of your “flash”. If you’re shooting in dark conditions,…

SCORE PRICE Core i7, £2,417 (£2,900 inc VAT) from lenovo.com For every gaming PC with a spaceship-inspired design, there’s something more subtle. In some ways the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 follows the lead of office mid-towers with a grey, boxy design, but it also emulates the best gaming PCs with plenty of options for upgradability. Lenovo sent in a model with an Intel Core i9-13900KF and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080, but at the time of writing the only available spec in the UK has a Core i7-13700KF. Gaming results won’t be much affected, but the Core i9 has 24 cores (eight P-cores, 16 E-cores) to the 16 of the i7 (eight P-cores, eight E-cores), so its multicore score of 22,275 in Geekbench is more likely to be…

SCORE PRICE £616 (£739 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X3D is geared for blasting through CPU-limited games while still having the heft to handle the heaviest of productivity workloads. It packs 16 Zen 4 cores and the company’s second-gen 3D V-Cache tech, which unlocks 128MB of L3 cache, a combination that delivers the fastest gaming performance available on the market. Like AMD’s inaugural X3D chip, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D (see issue 335, p82), the extra L3 cache comes courtesy of a 3D-stacked SRAM chiplet fused atop the processor. AMD also has a new thread-targeting technique that applies gains more evenly across a broad range of games. The first-gen 3D V-Cache chip suffered in some productivity apps due to a limit of eight cores and its relatively low boost…

SCORE PRICE £217 (£260 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk A keyboard for £260? And not even a full-sized unit but a compact version! Even when you appreciate that Asus is aiming the ROG Azoth at gaming enthusiasts, it’s obvious that this wireless keyboard has to be something special. How fortunate, then, that it is. As a 75% keyboard, the size is kept down by jettisoning certain keys. You don’t get the numpad, and the keys that remain are cleverly moved to minimise space. You still get the full range of F keys at the top, while the Insert, Delete, Page Up and Page Down keys run down the right-hand side, with function doubling for Home and End, for example. Most importantly (for me at least), the four arrow keys are maintained…

SCORE PRICE £112 (£134 inc VAT) from iiyama-monitors.co.uk Head to our group test of monitors from p76 and you’ll see that many manufacturers are integrating webcams into the top bezel. Not Iiyama. Its mantra is flexibility, pointing out that if you’re looking for a neat “all-in-one” solution then you can simply plug a webcam of your own choosing into one of the USB-A ports tucked away at the rear of its USB-C monitors. I can see that argument. All the integrated webcams on test were usable, but few offer any tilting so you end up pulling the screen down to its lowest level simply to keep yourself in the frame. And the quality is variable. In addition, this way you can choose whether you want a personal webcam, with a…

Total value this month £144 Norton Utilities Ultimate 2023 Is your PC running slow? Norton Utilities Ultimate can probably help. It’s a whole suite of tools that work together to get your PC running like new, optimising your CPU usage, memory and hard drive. One-click operations can be used to tune up a less-than-perfect system – ideal for less technically minded users, who know what they want to achieve. And if you’re more comfortable signing off changes yourself, you can preview every recommendation before it’s implemented. The Dashboard gives a handy overview of the state of your system, with a breakdown of any issues that it’s detected. These can range from problems in the Registry or junk files wasting space to unnecessary startup programs slowing down your computer. If you…

Jasper SCORE Writesonic SCORE PRICE Jasper, from $29 per month from jasper.ai; Writesonic, from $19 per month from writesonic.com What if you could write better-quality words more quickly? That’s the promise of AI writers, with GPT-3 giving birth to a plethora of offerings based on the generative AI technology. Here, we pitch two such writers in battle. Jasper, formerly known as Jarvis, was born in 2021 and claims to have 60,000 customers around the world. Writesonic sprung into life in late 2020 and has already earned numerous awards. Could either of them work for you? Free or paid? Jasper offers three plans. The cheapest is Starter, which is designed for “short-form content such as product descriptions, single paragraphs and much more”. $29 per month buys you 20,000 words, but you…

SCORE PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from netgear.com Netgear offers a wide selection of Wi-Fi range extenders, but the Nighthawk AX8 (also sold as the EAX80) is the cream of the crop. As soon as you lay eyes on it, you can see it’s no ordinary extender: while most Wi-Fi repeaters are little boxes that plug into a mains socket, the AX8 is an imposing angular desktop unit that’s as big as a router. Indeed, like many routers it offers four gigabit Ethernet ports, plus a USB-A 3 port that can be used to share an external hard disk or USB printer over the network. Inside there’s a full-spec Wi-Fi 6 radio array with 4x4 MIMO on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, enabling massive top speeds of 1.2Gbits/sec and…

We’re pretty sure that if Plato had been alive today, he wouldn’t have chosen a chair as his ideal form but a monitor instead. For everyone has an image of what a monitor is in their minds. They’re ubiquitous in our modern world – and if you don’t have one, but are still struggling with a laptop screen instead, then this is the group test for you. The reason we mention Plato is that none of these monitors is “ideal”, in the same way that no chair met Plato’s ideal form for a perfect chair. However, we’re convinced they will come close to your perfect monitor, stretching as they do from 24in to 40in, from flat to curved, from inexpensive to wallet-emptying. Some, admittedly, veer away from what we might…

SCORE PRICE £274 (£329 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Attentive readers of our feature table on p78 will have already noticed that the CB282K isn’t a 27in monitor, with an unusually sized 28in panel present instead. Acer has made the most of that extra inch by packing in 3,840 x 2,160 pixels, and the result is a super-sharp density of 157ppi. That compares to around 140ppi for a 4K display on a 31.5in panel (such as the Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN), but ultimately means that you’re getting all the detail of a 4K panel for a smidgen over £300. That’s a superb deal. What you don’t get is USB-C, with Acer instead offering a DisplayPort and two HDMI inputs. There’s no USB hub, with a 3.5mm headphone jack the only other connector,…

SCORE PRICE £258 (£310 inc VAT) from box.co.uk AOC is a past master at building high-quality products for aggressive prices, and the Q27P3CW is yet another example. It undercuts the similarly specified ViewSonic VG2756V-2K by over £150, yet still offers the same rich set of features: 65W USB-C docking, wired networking and a 1080p webcam. There is admittedly a gap in quality between the two. The ViewSonic has an X factor to its whites and colours the AOC can’t match, despite them covering an almost identical gamut: with 98% of the sRGB space and 80% of DCI-P3, the Q27P3CW’s figures are only a whisker behind its rival’s. Likewise its colour accuracy, with an excellent average Delta E of 0.44. But we’re being picky: most people will be happy to stare…

See the entire range online at www.magazinesdirect.com/spring23 or phone 0330 333 1113 and quote code SP42 OVERSEAS OFFERS ALSO AVAILABLE Offer closes 30th April 2023. Offer open to new UK subscribers only. Savings are based on cover price. After your trial period ends, your subscription will continue at the price shown at the point of purchase. We will notify you in advance of any price changes. Please allow up to six weeks for delivery of your first subscription issue (up to eight weeks overseas). Payment is non-refundable after the 14-day cancellation period unless exceptional circumstances apply. Exclusions apply. For enquiries, please call: +44 (0) 330 3331113. Lines are open Monday-Friday 8:30am-7pm, Saturday 10am-3pm UK Time (excluding Bank Holidays) or email: help@magazinesdirect.com. Calls to 0330 numbers will be charged at no…

SCORE PRICE £343 (£412 inc VAT) from box.co.uk We’re reminded of a 1980s TV ad when it comes to 34in curved monitors, for we’re surely spoiling you this month. This is the second 34in curved monitor from HP alone, but unlike the luxurious E34m G4 the P34hc G4 is aimed at mainstream workers rather than the ambassadors of this world. Its rivals instead are the AOC CU34V5CW and Iiyama ProLite XCB3494WQSN, which are almost identically priced. While the AOC can point to its webcam and the Iiyama to its gaming potential, the P34hc G4’s distinguishing feature is the corporate reassurance of the HP brand and the extra credentials that brings with it – in particular, it has EPEAT Gold certification while its rivals do not. This is a monitor destined…

SCORE PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from box.co.uk There was a time when VA panels were visibly poorer than IPS, with a faint yellow hue that made whites look less pure in Word and Excel. That’s no longer true. Until you attack these panels with a colorimeter, few laypeople would be able to distinguish the technologies. There are three obvious benefits to VA panels, too. One is that they’re bendier than IPS, which is why Iiyama can grace this screen with a 1500R curvature. The second is contrast, with Iiyama claiming a typical 3,000:1 ratio (IPS tends to be around 1,000:1), and our tests showing it to be over 4,000:1. The third is response times: Iiyama claims an excellent 0.4ms moving picture response time (MPRT); coupled with a 120Hz refresh…

SCORE PRICE £367 (£440 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Last month our eyes were treated to the Philips 27B1U7903 (see issue 343, p63), a 27in 4K IPS panel with mini LED backlighting. The 27B1U5601H is part of Philips’ more practical B5000 series, and must live in the comparatively mundane world of W-LED backlights and 1440p resolutions. But it’s still a fine screen, and has the clear advantage of costing £600 less than its glamorous sibling. Philips ships the screen at its 6500K setting, which is the ideal for whites to look white. We measured it at 6488K, one of the best results here, and it does so while covering 80% of the DCI-P3 gamut and 99% of the sRGB space. A solid set of figures matched by its results in our…

SCORE PRICE £393 (£472 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Only a number here and a letter there appears to differentiate the VG2756V-2K from the VG2755, but use one next to the other and you will soon see that a gulf exists between them in terms of quality. It’s not merely that this is a 2K panel, with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution rather than 1,920 x 1,080, but also that it is much, much better. Take something as simple as working in Word or Excel. The whites of the VG2756V-2K zing out at you, while the greater pixel density means that text and numbers don’t have jagged edges. The quality difference extends to colour coverage, too, with this panel covering 100% of the sRGB space and 81% of the DCI-P3 gamut.…

SMBs struggling with unrelenting data growth will find network attached storage (NAS) appliances can solve most of their problems. There’s no denying cloud storage has many benefits, but these services incur regular monthly fees and can become progressively more expensive for storing and accessing large quantities of data. It’s no surprise that NAS appliances are very popular with small businesses: they allow multiple users to store and share files in a centralised location and are capable of providing a huge storage repository for a fraction of the cost. Yes, your initial investment will be higher, but ongoing running costs will be insignificant when compared to cloud storage subscriptions. NAS appliances have many other benefits, too. Keeping data on-site means you aren’t leaving data security to be managed by a third…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £613 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Synology’s five-bay desktop NAS appliances have always been a popular choice for small businesses as they combine plenty of capacity with heaps of valuable data-protection services at a fair price. Costing a shade over £600, the DiskStation DS1522+ continues this tradition and adds plenty of new and welcome features. The appliance is powered by a speedy dual-core 2.6GHz AMD Ryzen R1600 CPU, and its base 8GB of DDR4 ECC memory can be boosted to 32GB. The dual eSATA ports at the rear support two of Synology’s five-bay DX517 expansion units – hence the ‘15’ in the model name. Networking sees notable improvements. Along with a quartet of gigabit ports, the small bay alongside accepts Synology’s E10G22-T1-Mini card. At £119, it’s a tad…

SCORE PRICE £664 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Businesses planning office-wide deployments of IP phones, wireless APs and IP cameras need a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) device that can keep up with them, and TP-Link’s JetStream TL-SG3452XP looks the perfect candidate. For an affordable £664, it presents 48 PoE-enabled gigabit ports and teams them up with four 10-gigabit fibre SFP+ ports for high-speed uplinks. More importantly, the switch offers a generous 500W power budget – one of the highest available at this price point. It can deliver 15.4W PoE or 30W PoE+ on each Ethernet port so is clearly capable of supporting a large number of powered devices (PDs). At its foundation, the TL-SG3452XP is a Layer 2 switch with basic Layer 3 routing capabilities. Often referred to as “Layer 3 Lite” or…

I think our business is pretty smart already, so what’s this about? We’re not talking about the smartness of an organisation as a whole, but rather about the tools and processes that make the business tick. For many established companies (especially traditional brick-and-mortar ones) there are limited opportunities to expand: you can’t double the output of an aluminium smelter on a whim. Smarter technology can help you to do what you’re already doing more effectively and economically. So what makes an industry smart? Here’s a simple example: how much has your energy bill risen in the last year? Probably a lot. By applying the kind of basic metering and power management controls commonly found in home automation products, you can make significant savings. Now imagine what you could achieve if…

The ongoing rollercoaster that is Twitter’s communications has consistently gained headlines since Mr Musk took over. However, this month Twitter managed to outdo itself. In fairness, what it said was correct, but as we know many people don’t tend to read notifications correctly. The background is the use of 2FA, or two factor authentication. This is super important stuff, because it adds a significant additional layer of authentication protection. Let’s take a good example of how this works, and how it relates to Twitter. It’s usual to set up an account on a service using an email address and a password. Companies are getting somewhat better at enforcing strong and complex passwords, and this helps if a bad actor is trying to break into your account by guessing likely passwords.…

There are many things to do when starting a company. Find desk space, register the company, get a bank account, set up the website and all the other tasks that require different hats to be worn. If the idiom were reality, hatters and milliners would be present at every startup accelerator. You’ll need a product or service to offer your customers. Without this you won’t be in business for long, unless you have other revenue streams or your investors or lenders are patient (they never seem to be). Happily, you’ve probably thought of an idea for this already; you think it’s going to change the world for the better, solve someone’s problem or mitigate someone’s risk – possibly all three. So how are you going to get from A to…

Features 31 ways to work faster Whether it’s the integration of AI into existing software or completely new apps, there’s a good chance you’ve missed out ways to speed up your working life. We reveal all. We’re all going on a busman’s holiday How good are simulation games? We find out by asking a football manager to play Football Manager, a pilot to rate Flight Simulator and Lee Grant to build an empire of PC repair shops. How to run Linux apps on Windows You may have heard how much easier it is to run Linux apps on Windows 11, and next month we put the theory into practice with Linux fan Nik Rawlinson. Labs NAS and external storage The easiest way to expand your laptop’s storage is to connect…