Indice dei contenuti per June 2024 in PC Pro

I haven’t gone through the pain of house-hunting for over a decade, but I still remember the X+1 problem. In my last search for a new home I had a hard price limit, determined by salary and savings, which meant there was zero point looking at properties above a certain budget. So why did I always find myself looking at houses just beyond? The odd thing about those properties was that they were all perfect, while all the ones in my budget were never quite right. The kitchens were too small, the neighbourhoods were unsuitable, the gardens were odd shapes that the kids would hate. If only I could stretch that little bit further and buy the next house up in the listings, I lamented. My life would be complete!…

We’re now over three years into one of Apple’s biggest ever gambles. At the tail end of 2020, the company made a major architectural change, moving from building computers that use Intel-built x86 chips to ARM-based chips of its own design. As soon as the first M1 Macs launched, the reason for the change became clear. The new system on a chip (SOC) was dramatically faster, ran cooler and consumed less energy than anything Intel could offer – and sales quickly soared. However, this wild success has just become a little bit awkward. A new hardware vulnerability has emerged, named GoFetch, which can conceivably compromise the millions of devices around the world that use these chips. And, even worse, the problem is thought to be unpatchable. Side-channel attacks How big…

@njkobie Amazon Go has gone. Seven years ago, Amazon unveiled Go as a “new kind of corner store” that removed the hassle of queuing to pay. Plonk your groceries into a bag and, when you’re done, leave – an AI-powered system dubbed Just Walk Out uses computer vision to identify your selections and charges your Amazon account. Pretty neat. Just Walk Out’s computer vision was aided by hundreds of in-store cameras, but items also had to be kept in specific locations, requiring in-store staff to keep shelves organised, and the whole process was watched over virtually by over 1,000 overseas workers. As it turns out, those people were doing more of the work identifying purchased items than the AI, leading Amazon to ditch the experiment. As a joke I saw…

1 Think long term – Jon Honeyball Short-term thinking is the absolute enemy of effective working. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve completed a firewall audit, only to find an incoming route punched through the firewall because the CEO wanted to run some weird software from home for a weekend. And that was two years ago, and yet nobody has gone back and plugged the hole. Dropping that cheap switch into the network because the cable wasn’t long enough is fine as a short-term fix – until this becomes a major route of traffic through your office. And the cleaner unplugs it to get the vacuum to work. How many times have there been servers collecting dust under the desk that someone has forgotten about? Or…

They’re two of the most dangerous words in the English language: “per user”. See them next to a software licensing price and watch your monthly costs rocket, and it’s as true for communications solutions as it is for every other service you pay for. If not worse, with dangerous hidden T&Cs designed to make it tricky to escape a contract’s clutches. 3CX has the answer in the form of the all-new 3CX V20. As you’ve become used to with 3CX, the service is free forever for up to ten users. And that includes all the features highlighted below. In short, where others are charging $20 per user per month for their communications platforms, 3CX is offering you a full service for free. And where others tie you into long-term contracts…

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 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 photoediting, 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 with…

PRICE As reviewed, £749 (£899 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Dell’s Inspiron brand isn’t usually associated with exciting designs. With the new Inspiron 14 Plus, though, it really is what’s inside that counts: with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, it can easily keep up with professional workloads. It’s good value, too, at £899 inc VAT – or for the most demanding roles there’s a Core Ultra 9 version with 32GB of RAM for £1,199 inc VAT. While the overall look is hardly fresh, the ice blue aluminium exterior adds personality. It’s thin (19mm) if not particularly light for its screen size at 1.6kg, but the chassis is well equipped with ports. You get HDMI 1.4, a Thunderbolt 4/USB-C port, a pair of…

PRICE 2-pack, £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from netgear.com Whenever a new Wi-Fi standard comes along, you can expect Netgear to be one of the first companies out of the traps with high-end hardware that showcases the potential of the new technology. You can expect something else, too: that its products will come at a price guaranteed to scare off all but the most ardent early adopters. Indeed, we’ve already seen the Netgear Nighthawk RS700S (see issue 353, p76) – the first standalone Wi-Fi 7 router to reach these shores, yours for a mere £800 once you factor in VAT. Now Netgear has followed up with the Orbi 970, a premium Wi-Fi 7 mesh that sets a couple of records for the PC Pro labs. Big design, big budget The Netgear…

PRICE £142 (£170 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk When you can buy the third-gen Echo Show 8 (see issue 352, p72) for £100 – a price it’s frequently discounted to from £150 – you may wonder why anyone would buy the Echo Hub. After all, this loses the webcam of its sister product and includes lesser speakers. It is, pure and simple, a smart home controller. In practice this means that, while the Echo Show will bombard you with ads and messages, the Hub is a passive touchscreen. It also brings support for Zigbee, Thread and Matter, so you should have no difficulty adding devices. They’re grouped together, so you can access all your cameras, lights and speakers in one location. Or you can head straight to a room and see…

Before you buy a portable SSD, you should consider several factors. Most obviously, speed. While they all use USB-C ports, there’s a huge difference in transfer rates, with two factors in play: one is the chips and electronics inside the drive, and the other is the standard supported by the connector. The fastest drives all support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, with its 20Gbits/sec bandwidth, but that’s only of use if the device you’re connecting it to also supports that standard (or USB 4, which is backwards-compatible). Most don’t, so you could end up wasting money. Then there’s how much storage you actually need. Generally, we’d play safe. If you think you can “get away” with 500GB, go for 1TB. The same is true if you think 1TB should be just…

PRICE 1TB, £86 (£103 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Rocket Nano V2 is a curious drive. Sabrent obviously spent considerable time and effort constructing a robust enclosure, even bundling a silicon bumper you can wrap around its aluminium shell for added protection. But it makes no claims about fall survival heights or if this keeps water and dust out. The bumper has strategically cut holes that show the Rocket logo and an activity light, and slots that we presume are for heat dissipation. With the bumper in place, the Nano V2 feels like it should withstand plenty of abuse, so it’s a shame it comes with a mediocre three-year warranty. Another curiosity is that this is a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive but its claimed speeds are 1,500MB/sec for both…

PRICE £124 (£149 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk We know that not everyone has hundreds of pounds to spend on a monitor, and that some people prefer to buy a pair for an extended desktop. And you’ll struggle to find a better budget choice than this Full HD 27in panel. Of course, there are drawbacks. A pixel density of 81ppi means a lack of sharpness around text edges, while you lose the sheer definition in images; if you can afford it, we’d always recommend choosing a monitor with over 100ppi. And, unlike the AOC 27B3CA2, there’s no USB-C docking option here, with Acer providing a thoroughly traditional trio of video inputs instead: DisplayPort, HDMI and our old friend VGA. You can use it as a USB hub, though, with four USB-A…

PRICE £225 (£270 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk There’s a lot to like about this 27in, 1440p monitor. Especially for owners of Apple laptops, as BenQ goes out of its way to colourmatch its output with MacBook screens via the M-book mode. And that’s just the start: the brilliant OSD, arguably the best here, makes it simple to switch profiles between Coding, Movie, Game and sepia-tinted ePaper. Those who find their eyes are tired by the end of the day will appreciate the Care mode, which uses an ambient light sensor to keep the screen at sensible brightness and contrast levels. You can also manually adjust low blue light options, with five intensity levels to flick between, while BenQ says its Flicker-Free Technology “eliminates flickering… to reduce eye strain, fatigue and…

PRICE £191 (£229 inc VAT) from senetic.co.uk In some ways, the NEC MultiSync E274FL’s natural rival in this Labs is the AOC 27B3CA2, which on the surface has one obvious advantage: price. Where the NEC costs £191 exc VAT, the AOC costs a mere £125. For the businesses that are likely to buy this monitor, however, that extra £66 should be seen as an investment. Certainly you can expect the NEC’s stand to live up to the abuse of employees, as it feels robust to the point of over-engineered. The monitor lifts smoothly through its 120mm of height adjustment, while the screen rotates easily through 170° in either direction. Another big difference comes in the RJ45 port at the rear, which not only offers users connection to the local network…

PRICE £358 (£429 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Why pay over a grand for a 31.5in 4K monitor – namely the Eizo FlexScan EV3240X (see p91) – when Iiyama is selling this ProLite for a third of the price? There are reasons, particularly in terms of visual impact, but in truth you aren’t making many sacrifices. Let’s start with image quality. In our technical tests, there was little to separate the two: they both cover 100% of the sRGB gamut, and the ProLite even has the edge for DCI-P3 coverage at 95% compared to 87%. Nor are we going to complain about an average Delta E of 0.81, which reflects the panel’s strong colour accuracy. In fact, it’s only side by side that you notice the extra punch provided by the…

PRICE £2,149 (£2,579 inc VAT) from wexphotovideo.com The ColorEdge CG2700X stands out from other monitors in this group test for many reasons. First, this is a monitor absolutely and unapologetically designed for creative professionals. Second, and tied to that, its huge top bezel contains a built-in calibrator (more on that in a moment). Third, its price, which is six times that of the BenQ PD2706U – which is also a 4K 27in monitor with its eye on the creative market. A 10-bit panel sits at this monitor’s foundation. As we mentioned in the buyer’s guide on p82, this means it can cover 1.07 billion colours without the use of FRC, and it’s one of the indicators of professional-level quality here. Years ago, you would have needed a pro-quality graphics card…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk On its website, Samsung lists this monitor as the S90PC ViewFinity 5K Smart Monitor, but it feels more like a smart TV on first “boot”. It asks to be connected to your Wi-Fi network, and once you’ve jumped through various hoops you’ll find yourself in Samsung’s TV Plus section with a huge selection of live channels. Just to hammer home the point, your first interactions are via a remote control rather than an OSD. The remote offers dedicated buttons for Disney Plus, Netflix and Prime Video. We watched the first few minutes of Top Gun: Maverick and the detail was so rich on the 5K panel that we picked up several details we didn’t spot in the cinema. Samsung backs up the visuals…

PRICE Small Business, 10 users, £175 exc VAT per year from 3cx.com 3 CX is the place to go for the best IP PBX services, as its Phone System software offers an unbeatable range of call-handling features. Not content to rest on its laurels, 3CX has been working hard on development and the version 20 on review represents the most significant update we’ve seen for many years. Security takes centre stage here, with 3CX hardening its systems against cyberattacks by using a zero trust model across the board for much stricter access control policies. Only allowing the native 3CX softphone app to be deployed from the Microsoft store adds extra security, and it lets 3CX update it as required without having to tinker with the main Phone System build. One of…

PRICE From £10 exc VAT per extension/month from voip8.uk SMBs fretting about the transition to digital communications can rest easy with VoIP8, as this UK-based cloud provider aims to demystify and simplify the entire process. Whereas many providers expect you to know what you want before signing up, VoIP8 will discuss your needs first, tailor a system to your requirements, guide you through deployment and provide ongoing management and support. VoIP8 is transparent about pricing so there are no hidden costs, and it all looks very affordable. Each extension and external number costs £10 and £5 respectively per month, the price includes all calls to UK numbers and there are no fixed-term contracts. To test VoIP8, we had the obligatory conversation with its support staff and opted to start with…

If your business has any kind of internet connection, it’s at risk. In a recent survey by Deloitte, a full third of executives said their accounting and financial data had been targeted over the past 12 months; in 2022, an incredible three-quarters of organisations polled reported that they’d been the subject of an attempted ransomware attack. And things are unlikely to get any better any time soon. As AI and machine learning go mainstream, the potential for malicious actors to cause harm is only increasing. Your organisation must be ready to defend itself – and you need to be able to prove it to potential customers and partners. If not, they’ll understandably be hesitant to rely on your services and trust you with their data. For small businesses, the Cyber…

I would really quite like to quote you a whole load of security statistics, provided by NordLayer.com, revealing the proportion of your workforce that’s likely to let in your next malware outbreak or ransom attack. I’d like to, but I can’t, because NordLayer’s website doesn’t want to present the report PDF on my positively Jurassic mix of hardware and browser. Regulars may recall that I have been goofing around with a few Mac Pros, of vintages as far back as 2011. These are being re-adopted by lots of people, so it’s not impossible that they’ll crop up in small business infection/ransom situations. A couple of my Mac Pros are out with customers, running as foreign servers, not sharing login data with the rest of the network; the most likely playout…

ON SALE Thursday 6 June 2024 Features Windows 12: what we want to see The next version is expected later this year, so we asked our editorial team what they wanteMicrosoft to include – and rate the chances of each one happening. Features How ChatGPT can change your life AI isn’t just for deepfakes and chatbots. We look at the practical ways public AI platforms can save you time and help out with everyday tasks. Features Leading the charge We explore the fascinating (we promise!) technology behind charging, and find out how to make your batteries charge faster and last longer. Labs NAS drives While we’re fans of streaming services and cloud storage, there are still strong arguments for local NAS drives. Next month, we review the best you can…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in (2023) M3 power from £1,699 from apple.com/uk The M3 chips give the already brilliant MacBook Pro series a boost in games with no sacrifices elsewhere, so power users who are happy with Apple must grapple with the big decisions: which M3 chip, which size of screen, and how much RAM and storage? REVIEW Issue 352, p46 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) An Intel Core Ultra 7 processor means that this is a fast 2-in-1 as well as being beautifully designed, with a sumptuous screen and excellent battery life. £1,899 from hp.com/uk REVIEW Issue 355, p62 Apple Mac Book Air 13in (M3) Both the 13in and 15in MacBook Airs impress for speed, styling and battery life, but the 1.2kg 13in Air wins out…

@bazzacollins Nothing gets on my nipples like an unjustified price rise. So, when Amazon’s Ring emailed in February, cheerfully informing me that it was whacking up the price of the Protect plan required to make its doorbells function from £35 to £50 a year, I fear I may have startled the neighbours with my verbal outburst. It made me so angry I may have startled the residents of Ottawa. The Ring price hike is a classic case of price gouging, where a company reels you in with relatively cheap hardware for years and then turns the screw. Changing a video doorbell system isn’t as easy as changing washing powder: you may have hard-wired it to your door, you may have invested in accessories and other Ring cameras, and then there’s…

The standard electricity tariff in the UK is still an eye-watering 28p per kilowatt hour. In February, by “gaming” the variable price tariff he’s on and making the most efficient use of the solar panels and batteries in his home, PC Pro reader Rob Tweed managed to get his average price down to 9.8p – just over a third of what most people are paying at the most expensive time of year. Rob’s setup is nothing short of ingenious. He uses software he coded himself to perfectly optimise when he draws power from the grid to charge his batteries, assuming the solar panels on his roof haven’t already done the job for him. The software pulls in data from a highly accurate weather forecasting service, so he knows almost exactly…

Home broadband is getting faster and faster. Many ISPs are now offering gigabit home internet connections in urban areas, and some go even faster. Community Fibre has one package that goes all the way up to 3Gbits/sec (communityfibre.co.uk). We’ve come a long way since 56Kbits/sec dial-up. But while the idea of an ultra-fast internet connection is appealing, once you’ve had the service installed you may find you’re not getting the speeds you expect. That’s probably because the infrastructure inside your home isn’t fast enough to let your devices get the full bandwidth of your internet line. On these pages we’ll find out why – and what you can do about it. The woe of Wi-Fi When you order a gigabit-class internet service, you can be fairly confident the line will…

PRICE £2,250 (£2,700 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk (availability TBC) I can’t tell you my exact words when Lenovo’s 3D software first kicked in because this is a family magazine, but suffice to say that they were accompanied by a cackle of delighted laughter. This was all the more surprising as I’ve seen glassesfree 3D in action many times, most recently on Acer’s Predator Helios 3D 15 laptop (see issue 353, p56). Yet still I was taken aback: there, in front of me, on a 27in monitor, sat a 3D object. You can read how the technology works on p92, so all I will say here is that an ingenious combination of lenticular lenses and eye-tracking technology allow the ThinkVision 27 3D to beam one set of images to your left…

The HP Omen Transcend 14 is part of a growing breed of Trojan Horse gaming laptops. On the surface, they look professional; the main giveaway comes when you start playing a game and the keyboard lights up in all its RGB glory. HP sent us the black version of the Transcend 14 for testing, but you can buy it in white. I prefer dark colouring for laptops as they tend to age better, and this classy, anodised aluminium chassis will turn heads for years. The main body is jet black, with the stiff lid in dark, corporate grey. A slender 17.9mm height coupled with a small footprint give it an ultraportable feel, although at 1.6kg you’ll notice it in a bag. As with many modern gaming laptops, the rear juts…

PRICE £1,333 (£1,600 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com This year’s update to Asus’ Vivobook Pro 15 makes one thing obvious: the days when you had to pay over £2,000 for a powerful mobile workstation are gone. Packed inside this 1.8kg monster you’ll find Intel’s top-end Core Ultra 9 185H processor and GeForce RTX 4060 graphics, and with Nvidia’s Studio software it’s ready to go with a bunch of professional apps. Asus certainly has its eye on designers here, even building a dial into the top left of the touchpad. If you’re dextrous enough to keep within its 3cm diameter then you can use it to whizz through timelines in Premiere Pro, adjust brush sizes in Photoshop and switch font sizes in PowerPoint. It’s no replacement for a hardware dial, but could…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Most routers sell themselves on speed or clever configurable features. The diminutive Asus RT-AX57 Go aims instead for portability. It’s a pocket-sized router designed to provide a Wi-Fi 6 network wherever you need it, and then to travel home with you at the end of the day. It could be perfect for teams at trade shows, pop-up venues or in ad hoc workspaces, while larger company departments might find it handy for travelling assignments. Although it’s designed for life on the road, the RT-AX57 Go isn’t a true go-anywhere device. For one thing it doesn’t have an internal battery, so you’ll need to power it from an external source. However, since the power connector uses the USB-C standard, you can run it off…

Norton 360 Premium for £19.99 (10 devices for two years) pcpro.link/norton360 Norton is one of the most trusted security brands around, and rightly so: it consistently earns 100% protection ratings from both AV-Comparatives and AV-Test. Norton 360 Premium is a comprehensive selection of tools designed to give you security and peace of mind. First up is Norton Security, which offers strong anti-malware protection to monitor files and programs – not just for known threats, but for suspicious behaviour, too. This helps block malware before it can gain a foothold on your system. You also get a firewall, silently blocking attacks from both outside and inside your PC. Web Safety components check the links you click to make sure they’re safe to visit, while downloaded files are screened and checked for both…

PRICE 1TB, £58 (£69 inc VAT) from uk.crucial.com The first thing you notice about the Crucial X6 is how small it is; not far off USB thumb drive size (69 x 64 x 11mm). The second thing is its price, which is among the lowest in this test. A fact reflected by its minimalist black plastic case, adorned only by the Crucial logo. But more crucially, if you’ll forgive the terrible pun, the price is reflected by its speed. Crucial promises read speeds of up to 540MB/sec over its USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 connection, but it failed to reach even this modest target. An average of 447MB/sec reads and 412MB/sec writes across our tests means you’ll be left waiting for big files to copy across – a 10GB file took…

PRICE 1TB, £83 (£99 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk It may be only by one gram, but the SlimXpress Pro can claim to be the lightest USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive on test. Integral, a British company, claims read and write speeds of 2,000MB/sec, and it came close to the former in our tests. In real-world use, when we connected it to a PS5, the Pro’s high transfer speeds and large capacity made it easy to store numerous games and data. It also worked well with a Blackmagic 6K camera, directly storing 6K raw files, and with an iPhone 15 Pro for Apple ProRes files. Additionally, its small size and light weight made it an ideal choice when we were looking for a media store to connect to a smart TV.…

PRICE 1TB, $130 (exc local sales tax) from amazon.com Unlike many portable SSDs that shove Pro into their name, the Lexar Professional SL600 is genuinely aimed at professionals – primarily photographers and videographers. This 64g device, complete with handy carabiner loop at the top, has an all-metal casing that’s larger than rivals such as the Kingston XS2000 but should make it difficult to lose. It’s still sleek enough to slip into a pocket, but we wonder if Lexar should have opted for a brighter colour finish to help photographers find it quickly in their kit bags. At the other extreme, for those looking for extra storage for a desk-based computer, the flat design makes it easy to add Velcro and then attach to a monitor. Only a USB-C connector interrupts…

PRICE 2TB, £133 (£160 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk Eight terabytes. Support for that huge capacity is what marks the Samsung T5 Evo Portable SSD out from all the others, even if it’s also outsized physically at 17mm thick, 95mm long and 40mm wide. With a surprising 102g weight, you’ll certainly notice it in a jeans pocket. Still, it’s extremely well built thanks to a unibody aluminium enclosure wrapped in a rubber sleeve. That carry handle at the top could prove useful, too. Despite its rugged looks, Samsung makes no claims about IP ratings or drop resistance. Nor does it add to its basic three-year warranty. At least you benefit from Samsung’s Magician software, which eases data migration from a previous drive, adds hardware encryption and provides health checks and firmware…

PRICE £224 (£269 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk You can usually be confident of aggressive pricing from Acer, and it doesn’t disappoint here. The next cheapest 4K screen, BenQ’s PD2706U, costs £399, while the BenQ BL2790QT costs £270 and includes a mere 1440p panel. No contest, surely? In some ways, no. Photographers or film lovers who love detail will appreciate the level of detail on show here, and if you have good eyesight and devour spreadsheets – or tend to work with two windows side by side – the same is true for business use. Technically, this is a superior panel too, as it’s a true 8-bit display that uses FRC to increase colour coverage to 1.07 billion colours. The BenQ BL2790QT, by contrast, is a 6-bit panel with FRC taking…

PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk If you’re a graphic designer but your budget doesn’t reach Eizo levels, then there are some extremely compelling reasons to choose the BenQ PD2706U. Let’s start with the obvious: this is a 27in 4K screen, so that means you enjoy incredible amounts of detail. Unlike the Eizo ColorEdge CG2700X, it uses an 8-bit panel plus FRC (see p83) to reach 1.07 billion colours, but if you’re happy to stick to the sRGB, Display P3 and DCI-P3 colour spaces then it covers them all with superb accuracy. For example, switch to sRGB and it covers 98% with a 100% volume, while DCI-P3 covers 92% with no overspill. With a maximum (not average) Delta E of 1.81, you can trust what your eyes show you.…

PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com As a rule, we’re fans of 1440p 27in screens. They feel more spacious than 1080p rivals, making it a pleasure to work on two windows side by side, and text looks sharp. This is one reason the £270 BenQ BL2790QT wins a Recommended award. The ViewSonic VG2756V-2K offers similarly high image quality, plus a bunch of extra features to justify its significantly higher price. Chief among these is its USB-C connection. This makes the monitor both more suited to office rollouts and more appealing to laptop users, with up to 90W of power delivery. ViewSonic even sweetens the deal by embedding a pop-up 1080p webcam into the top of the display, complete with LED lights, but those hoping to launch a streaming career…

PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk You can almost consider the Philips 34B1U5600CH as the spoilt older brother to the AOC CU34P3CV. They appear to share similar genes: both are 34in curved VA panels boasting a 3,440 x 1,440 resolution, and they gave near-identical (and strong) performances in our technical tests. Whites look good, DCI-P3 colour coverage is strong at 85%, and an average Delta E of 0.58 means you can trust that colours are accurate. The reason it’s spoilt is that this monitor gets many of the features that are missing on its AOC rival. There’s a respectable, albeit grainy, 1080p webcam that supports Windows Hello, a power sensor that switches the screen off if it detects no-one is there, plus an ambient light sensor. The speakers are…

PRICE £1,206 (£1,448 inc VAT) from photospecialist.co.uk Sometimes, numbers can’t do justice to products. In fact, if you judged this monitor by numbers alone then it wouldn’t even win an award, let alone the Labs Winner gong. No matter how well it might perform in technical tests, there was one number that would always rule them all: the price. It’s more than three times as expensive as the award-winning Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5, despite them sharing the same 4K resolution and 31.5in screen diagonal, and scoring similarly in our tests. We think the Iiyama is great – and stupendous value – but the Eizo will make you go “wow” in a way that no other monitor on test here can. Much of the credit for this must go to the combination…

Quality test results COLOUR TESTING Note that colour space testing was performed in the monitor’s relevant mode (such as sRGB or DCI-P3) if available. If not, we used a 6500K colour temperature. If that wasn’t available, we used the default mode. The ideal is for a monitor to achieve 100% sRGB coverage and 100% volume: a big difference between the two values shows the panel isn’t tuned to that colour space. How we test Details of the exhaustive procedures through which we put each screen As with all our testing, where possible we use a mix of real-world and technical tests to determine the quality of our products. Here, that means using each monitor as our daily work screen to see not just how enjoyable it is to look at…

PRICE Wave 100 from £7.50 exc VAT per user per month from gradwell.com UK-based Gradwell has been in the communications business for over 25 years, and its Wave cloud VoIP service will appeal to SMBs seeking a smooth transition from their legacy analogue systems. Deployment is a breeze. Gradwell manages the process for you, and pricing is easy to understand as you only need to concern yourself with the number of monthly call minutes to landlines and mobiles that you require. Wave comes in three packages, and they all offer the same call-handling features along with the Wave desktop and mobile apps. The Wave 100 package costs £7.50 per user per month and provides 100 monthly call minutes; Wave 1000 starts at £10.50 and allows 1,000 minutes; and Wave 3000…

PRICE 3yr TSS subscription, £2,204 exc VAT from watchguard-online.co.uk WatchGuard’s FireboxV will appeal to businesses that want to virtualise their security services and avoid the extra cost of an on-premises hardware appliance. It’s now available in five versions, after WatchGuard responded to customer requests and added a budget-priced Micro model. Targeting smaller sites with up to five users, FireboxV Micro is restricted to two virtual CPUs (vCPUs), a maximum firewall throughput of 1Gbit/sec and five branch office VPNs. If your needs change in the future you can upgrade to a Small, Medium, Large or XLarge model by applying a new licence key, and there are no compromises on features: all versions offer precisely the same security measures as WatchGuard’s hardware appliances. FireboxV supports Hyper-V, VMware plus KVM on CentOS. For…

I’ve heard of a prism… what on earth is a TRiSM? Your uncertainty is understandable, as it’s a rather forced acronym. Simply put, it refers to the particular human and organisational issues raised by AI adoption projects, namely Trust, Risk, Security and… well, the “M” just stands for Management. Which is fine, because the first three points are quite big enough to require attention and consideration on their own. I can see why trust is an issue – ChatGPT talks a lot of nonsense. Businesses wanting to embrace AI certainly need to think about how to deal with unreliable output – and indeed how to detect it. Old tales from the 1970s come to mind of bosses ordering employees to double-check computer calculations by hand. But the problem runs deeper.…

Today is my 60th birthday. This fact is mostly unremarkable, and I am pleased to announce that it feels quite the same as yesterday. Nevertheless, it is always useful to mark such a day with a large gin and tonic, and ponder what the world is doing both right and wrong. I am increasingly despondent at the state of the wider internet, specifically the spiralling mess that is social media. Clearly the big players have no interest in making things better, despite their hand-wringing and wailing to the contrary. So long as eyeballs equal cash, the algorithms will keep doing their dirty work to keep us scrolling. X, née Twitter, still ping-pongs around on its strategy, seemingly at the whim of its mercurial owner. The latest is that the blue…

You don’t need to be a heavy Twitter user to know that feeling of gnawing anxiety when a software or service you use every day is taken over by another company. In an instant, the future of the tool that you rely on to get work done is thrown into doubt – and though it could mean great things that make the product better… it might not. The latest community to experience this are customers of Affinity, the British-made suite of design tools that have taken on the almighty Adobe. Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher are strong alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and they don’t demand a monthly subscription but a modest one-off fee for the applications. Now Canva, the web-based design platform, has acquired Affinity for an undisclosed…

Unless you live life as an avatar in Second Life – yes, it still exists – it can’t have escaped you that the world we live in has become much more interesting in recent years. And by interesting, I mean dangerous. What with epidemics, wars and deepfakery, the dotcom boom feels as remote as the Middle Ages. A couple of recent incidents pushed me toward these reflections. The first was the news that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) was launching an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, for restraint of trade and monopolising the smartphone market. The DoJ’s complaints arise from the walledgarden attitude that Apple has had ever since its very first days under Steve Jobs, with strict control over software development and peripheral manufacture so as to exclude smaller…

Editor-in-chief Tim Danton writes: A huge thanks to everyone who wrote in about their mini PC experience in response to my request last month. Sadly we don’t have space to include all the responses, but I’m grateful to Jeffrey Barfield, David Forth and John Knight for contacting us, in addition to the published correspondence below. Life with mini PCs #1 I’ve always been a laptop user but, five years ago, after refurbishing my home office, I hankered after something more versatile and with a large display. I don’t game or edit video, so I bought an Intel NUC barebones with a sixth generation Celeron CPU. I fitted it out with a couple of sticks of DDR3 and a SATA SSD. Five years on and the NUC has never faltered –…

Home Assistant is the software of choice for those who are hacking together their own smart home. It works with a vast swathe of smart home kit, as well as more mundane devices such as TVs, printers and laptops, bringing all the internet-connected devices in your home under one umbrella. From there you can start to do smart things, such as automating when devices are switched on, or making best use of the energy stored in home batteries, for example. Installation Smart Assistant is free software that can be installed on all manner of hardware: PCs, Macs, Raspberry Pi units and even NAS drives. Given that you’re going to want Smart Assistant running 24/7, it’s best not to install it on an energy-guzzling gaming PC, though. Something like a low-powered…

Old TVs are cheap to replace, even if you’re buying something larger or smarter. But disposing of a spare display is wasteful. It could be given a second life in a kitchen or bedroom – and, while you can’t make your old TV any bigger, you can make it a lot smarter, quite easily and cheaply. As you’ll have gathered from the title, the secret ingredient is the Raspberry Pi. One option is to attach the Pi directly to your TV, something that’s gloriously easy to do thanks to the Pi’s integrated HDMI. But for an even better experience you can set up your Raspberry Pi as a network server, and use it in combination with a streaming device such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, Chromecast or the…

PRICE As reviewed, £2,749 (£3,299 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Dell XPS 16 is a beautiful laptop. Its machined aluminium chassis is so sleek you can almost forget it weighs 2.2kg, with super-thin bezels that mean the 16.3in display seems to hover in the air. It’s packed with powerful components, too. In our review sample’s case, that was a Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, but even the cheapest model – £1,849 inc VAT – includes the same processor, albeit with Intel’s integrated Arc graphics and 16GB of memory. There are heaps of options: RTX 4050 or RTX 4060 graphics, up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of storage, and the slightly faster Ultra 7 165H or top-end Ultra 9 185H…

PRICE £2,438 (£2,926 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews How do you squeeze every last ounce of performance from silicon? Liquid cooling, of course, and PCSpecialist is offering this option on its latest Recoil gaming laptop. If you buy the version with an RTX 4080 or 4090 inside, you can pay an extra £96 for an external unit that pumps ionised water around the inside of the laptop to complement the standard heatsink and fans. And it works. At this laptop’s native 2,560 x 1,600 resolution, and with the most extreme settings, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla leapt from 115fps to 127fps, Cyberpunk 2077 from 82fps to 87fps and Dirt 5 accelerated from 138fps to 157fps. Those are worthy increases, and were mirrored in the Graphics section of 3DMark Time Spy: 20,745 became 21,172.…

PRICE £1,000 (£1,200 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Two months ago, Samsung won five stars for its Galaxy Book4 Ultra (see issue 355, p64), a stylish Core Ultra 7 laptop with a 16in 120Hz OLED screen and 16GB of DDR5 RAM for £1,699. Now we have Asus’ £1,200 Vivobook S16 OLED, with a 1TB SSD rather than 512GB – and it’s even lighter at 1.5kg versus 1.6kg. How, you might well wonder, has it done that?. On first sight, there are no obvious sacrifices. This is an all-metal chassis that has passed five of the MIL-STD tests, and although I would prefer the screen to have more protection – the lid flexes under duress – there are no other weak points. It isn’t as sleek as its rival, at 15.9mm rather…

Total value this month £177 Norton Utilities Ultimate 2024 The Norton name has been synonymous with PC optimisation tools and security utilities for decades. This month, we’re giving every reader a full copy of Norton Utilities Ultimate 2024, which you can install on up to ten devices and use for the next year. Norton Utilities comprises numerous components, and can be used in several different ways. If you prefer not to get involved with the nitty-gritty of configuring everything yourself, there are one-click options for getting quick results. Or you can let software analyse your PC and work through its recommendations one by one. The Dashboard presents an overview of your system, with a breakdown of any issues detected, such as junk files wasting space or unnecessary startup programs slowing…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from uk.kobobooks.com I’ve admired Kobo’s Libra line of e-readers since the first was launched in 2019, but the new Libra Colour has two big upgrades over the previous Libra 2 model. The most obvious is a colour screen, but it also brings note-taking capabilities from Kobo’s line of digital notebooks, expanding it from a passive reading device into a versatile companion for productivity and reference. At £200 inc VAT, in your choice of black or white casing, it’s cheap by the standards of digital notebooks – Amazon’s monochrome Kindle Scribe is £275, while the Onyx Boox Tab Mini C costs £450. However, the price doesn’t include a stylus, so to take full advantage of its new features you’ll need to spend £70 on the Kobo…

Colour giveaways The days when a bog-standard monitor produced terrible colours are long gone: even entry-level displays will cover a solid range of colours with respectable accuracy. But that doesn’t mean you need to settle for mediocrity. If you want a display with colours that punch you between the eyes, or you prize accuracy over wide gamuts, there are clues. The first clue comes in the type of panel (see IPS vs VA, below). This rule of thumb still holds: IPS produces the whitest whites, OLED the most vivid colours and richest blacks, and VA sits somewhere in the middle. But if you’re willing to dig into the specs you’ll find more hints. As we discuss in “The magic of FRC” opposite, a 10-bit panel will produce more colours than…

PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk We were hoping to review the AOC 27B3CF2 in this Labs, as you can buy it for a similar price to the 27B3CA2 and they’re identical but for one factor: the stand. Where the version with A2 at the end has a lightweight plastic stand that keeps the monitor at a fixed position, with the bottom roughly 110mm above your desk, the F2 offers 110mm of height adjustment. Both monitors offer the tantalising prospect of a 27in USB-C docking monitor for around £150, and to hit that price point AOC has had to make some compromises. Let’s start with the features: you only get two USB-A ports (5Gbits/sec), and nothing in the way of extras, unless you count the 3.5mm headphone socket. Aside…

PRICE £120 (£144 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The ProLite XUB2763HSU-B1 has one obvious rival here: the Acer Vero B277. Give or take a fiver, they cost the same, both include a 1,920 x 1,080 IPS panel and both lean heavily on their green credentials. In the Iiyama’s case, that means the plastic is 85% PCR, the packaging 100% recyclable and made from cardboard pulp, an EPEAT Silver rating and arguably most importantly an incredibly low power rating. Even at its peak 251cd/m2 brightness, it drew 11W dropping to 10W at our standard test brightness of 200cd/m2. That compares to the typical 16W to 18W for 27in panels in this test. Iiyama jettisons frills such as USB-C and RJ45 connectors in its quest to hit such a low price, but let’s…

PRICE £317 (£380 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk If we purely decided star ratings based on value for money, then this curved 34in monitor would be walking away with ten. It’s almost unbelievable that you’re buying this much quality for less than £400 inc VAT: in terms of whites, colour coverage and colour accuracy it was consistently in the top five of a competitive field. It even topped the table for brightness variation, and while its peak of 355cd/m2 can’t match the very best screens, that’s still more than enough to be viewable in bright environments. Nor does the CU34P3CV sacrifice any vital features to hit a price. It ticks all the key points for a USB-C docking monitor, with 65W power delivery plenty for most laptops, an RJ45 port, four…

PRICE £427 (£512 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com Aletter can make a big difference in a monitor name, and none more so than here. The ViewSonic VG3456 (see issue 326, p95) is a highly affordable flat-screen monitor that you can now purchase for around £250, while the VG3456C is curved – exactly like the AOC CU34P3CV and Philips 34B1U5600CH. They also share the same 3,440 x 1,440 resolution, giving you huge amounts of space on which to spread your windows, and VA technology. The ViewSonic is the most stylish of the three, with slim bezels and a fuzzy speaker-like finish to the bottom edge of the monitor. We only wish the pair of 5W speakers could live up to the billing, but like so many others here they’re better suited to…

The Network Practical buying and strategic advice for IT managers and decision makers Buyer’s guide Businesses that still haven’t made the switch to voice over internet protocol (VoIP) are running out of time. Dubbed “the big switch-off”, OpenReach will close down the entire public switched telephone network (PSTN) and integrated services digital network (ISDN) by the end of December 2025. Some companies think that moving to VoIP is optional, but rest assured that by this date all legacy analogue phone systems still in use will stop working – forever. If you didn’t know this, you’re not alone. A recent study commissioned by UK internet service provider Gamma and conducted by the Centre of Economics Business Research found that 29% of the 400 UK businesses surveyed were completely unaware of the…

PRICE From £11 exc VAT per user/month from telephonesystems.cloud TelephoneSystems.Cloud stands out from the crowd of VoIP providers as its automated quote system lets you set your entire business service up without having to speak to any representatives. We tested this by visiting the main website (given away by the company name) and clicking on the “Get Quote” button, after which we were guided through a set of questions asking about our requirements. For our VoIP testbed, we requested four users, chose to use our own internet provider, opted for softphones and our existing desk phones, skipped the optional Webex Teams+ and Presenter, asked for new UK phone numbers and selected the automated installation service. TelephoneSystems.Cloud presented us with an itemised bill showing a £60 setup fee and monthly charges…

PRICE £569 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Consumers have had it all their own way for far too long: this year, at last, the Wi-Fi 7 focus is going to shift significantly towards businesses. Zyxel gets the ball rolling with two business Wi-Fi 7 access points (APs), and we reviewed its flagship tri-band WBE660S. This solidly built BE22000-rated AP has a lot to say as it presents 12 spatial streams – four each for its 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands, with theoretical maximum speeds of 1,376Mbits/sec, 8,646Mbits/sec and 11,530Mbits/sec respectively. It supports the Wi-Fi 7 6GHz high-speed 320MHz channels, its main 10GbE port requires an 802.3bt PoE++ power source and its extra gigabit LAN port can be used to network other wired devices. The AP can be wall- or ceiling-mounted and…

I wanted to change some of the security cameras at home. At the lab, we fitted high-end Axis cameras over a decade ago. They proved an excellent investment and are still doing sterling work every day; I see no reason to change them. This is reassuring, because new, albeit higher-spec Axis cameras are priced in the “robust” corner of the price list. At home, at roughly the same time, I went for no-name Chinese clones at around £100 each. These were adequate for the job, and supported Ethernet connection with power over Ethernet (PoE), which I consider essential for a security camera. These cheap cameras also support a wireless connection. I happily ignored this, right up until the point where I found their failure mode. If the camera decided to…

Odds are that you’re already using AI at work, whether you know it or not – artificial intelligence powers smartphone cameras, online search and plenty of other algorithms, after all. But since OpenAI’s ChatGPT landed in 2022, the generative AI explosion has changed how businesses use and plan to use this nascent technology. It’s no longer just an ingredient in a larger piece of software – though as we’ll see, that’s still the case – but AI is now a tool to address different problems across industries. “The question still remains on the extent to which we can really make use of this technology, and where we can actually put this technology to use safely and responsibly,” said Michael Wooldridge, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. Is…