Tech Advisor Christmas 2021

Price: Review unit $2,699 (around £1,980) Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio feels like a glimpse of the future. Microsoft’s new pull-forward design arguably improves upon the Surface Book 3, its spiritual predecessor, offering you a light menu of gaming, content creation, and everyday computing capabilities to choose from. Tell us if you’ve heard this before, though: the Surface Laptop Studio doesn’t come cheap, and its excellent new inking capabilities require the separate purchase of a £120 Slim Pen 2. You can opt for Windows 11 to power this new 2-in-1 PC, though the new hardware, software, and drivers may make this a bit of a bumpy road to begin with. You’ll also have to decide whether this arguably niche device is worth the investment, versus general-purpose notebooks that may offer more value. Nevertheless,…

Price: £999 from fave.co/3awqGDd Microsoft’s Surface Pro 8 tablet arrives as Windows 11 goes out the door. Microsoft has already shipped one tablet this year, the Surface Pro 7+, which rose to the top of our round-up of the best Windows tablets of 2021. Can the Surface Pro 8 improve upon it? Yes and no. The Surface Pro 8 boldly strides forward with a larger, higher resolution, faster screen, a revamped inking experience spearheaded by the optional Surface Slim Pen 2, and a pair of Thunderbolt ports that supplement the legacy Surface Connect charger. It’s a dramatic reworking of the iconic Surface Pro tablet line, and that’s enough to grab your attention. If only we could leave it here. Put simply, we can’t be entirely certain how well the Surface Pro 8 performs…

Microsoft’s original Surface Duo folding phone designed in some serious flaws. The Surface Duo 2, to its credit, appears to have at least addressed them. When Microsoft launched the Surface Duo folding phone a year ago, Microsoft executives preceded it with a gauzy veil of hype that concealed the many flaws reviewers noted: a poor camera, a lack of NFC and 5G, a subsequently poor track record of patches and updates, and an interface whose bugs made the dualscreen interface painful to use. Microsoft’s Surface Duo 2 is available for preorder for £1,349 on up, with shipments starting 30 November. That’s about the same price as Microsoft’s earlier Surface Duo. Can the new phone fix the flaws of the first? On paper, it takes a good first step. For one, Microsoft now offers…

Price: Free upgrade from Windows 10 Windows 11 doesn’t convincingly answer the question every PC user should ask: why do I need this upgrade? The new operating system repurposes some of Microsoft’s cancelled Windows 10X code, but lacks the unified vision that 10X promised. In some ways, Windows 11 feels very much like a product of 2020. Last year, we often felt we had to do something, and for some very good reasons, but without a real sense of the way ahead. And so goes Windows 11. Aesthetically, Microsoft’s OS sacrifices productivity for personality, but without cohesion. A new Start menu seems designed for enterprises. A hyperactive Widgets app pushes celebrity gossip. Teams Chat asks you to reorganize your social circles around Microsoft. Yes, you’ll find things within Windows 11 worth applauding: the…

Windows 11 has finally been released to the public, and you can download it right away. Here’s how. Downloading the official final version of Windows 11 is very much like downloading the original Windows 11 beta, but there’s an additional tool that Microsoft has added to facilitate the process. In fact, there are four ways to download Windows 11, each with their own unique advantages. We’ll show you all four, after explaining what you should know before upgrading first. WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO DOWNLOAD WINDOWS 11 Before you begin downloading Windows 11, make sure you have the right PC hardware. While we don’t think there’s much risk to downloading and installing Windows 11, there’s always the risk that something will go wrong. Take a moment and back up critical files to an external…

Windows 11 is here, and while we recommend most people stick to Windows 10 for now, the allure of hot new Windows 11 features like AutoHDR in games and enhanced Snap functionality might be too tempting to pass up. If you want to upgrade your PC to Windows 11, this checklist can help ensure success. This checklist applies to both in-place upgrades and clean installs of Windows 11. An in-place upgrade lets you move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 without wiping your applications and files, while a clean install starts you with a fresh copy of Windows that needs to have applications installed. For clean installs, you have to restore your files from a backup to have access to them again. 1. CONFIRM YOUR HARDWARE MEETS THE REQUIREMENTS You can run Windows…