Inhoudsopgave van December 2021 - PC Pro

Although I love this country of ours, there are times when you wonder how it ever ruled the waves. We’re like the grown man who can’t take a compliment, flapping it away with a self-deprecating comment. When Brits do amazing things, we briefly acknowledge their achievements before rushing to talk about their flaws. I see this in the column inches dedicated to Sir Clive Sinclair after he died, even the photos used to illustrate the stories: both the BBC and The Guardian showed him sitting in a C5. I never met Sir Clive, but I’ve interviewed people who worked with him - and those who competed against him. Every single person has been full of admiration for his genius and his impact: all told, his computers sold over six million…

Apple’s M1 silicon may have smashed performance benchmarks, but until now a significant computing constituency has missed out on the gains: Linux users. Enter developer Hector Martin, who since last November has been working hard to reverse-engineer Apple’s custom silicon. Over the past few months, we’ve started to see the fruits of his labour, with a colleague tweeting screenshots of a custom distribution, dubbed Asahi, running a Gnome desktop. So how did the team manage to break open Apple’s hardware? The first step was to find a way to talk to the M1 Mac mini. “It turns out these machines do have a serial port, it’s hidden in the [USB] Type C-ports,” explained Martin. “You need to send some magic voodoo commands through a special vendor-defined message… and suddenly the…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Apple MacBook Air Affordable Apple M1 ultraportable from £999 from apple.com/uk Apple’s ARM-based M1 chip is blasting away its AMD and INTEL x86 opposition with truly extraordinary speeds. Even the low-end model with 8GB of RAM is ludicrously fast. Apple makes no changes to the Air’s design, but it still looks fabulous and now supports both USB 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Add battery life into the teens and its biggest threat comes from the updated M1 MacBook Pro 13in. REVIEW Issue 316, p40 ALTERNATIVES Samsung Galaxy Book Pro (15.6in) A powerful laptop with a 15.6in AMOLED screen that weighs a mere 1.05kg? And with stonking battery life too? The Galaxy Book Pro is a winner. Core i7, £1,449 from johnlewis.com REVIEW Issue 323, p50 MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo This…

@bazzacollins Here at the global media empire that is Media BC Ltd, we have a hard-and-fast hardware lifecycle policy. The main work laptop gets replaced every three years, once the warranty/care package expires and you enter that dicey period where you’re basically crossing fingers and hoping nothing goes wrong. The current day-to-day system, a 2019 MacBook Pro, is nearing its final year, before it’s put out to pasture in the “cupboard for testing software that I’m worried might nuke my work laptop”. Naturally, the old hardware trigger finger is getting itchy, the business credit card is quivering in a corner. A significant purchase is within touching distance, but, unusually for me, self-doubt has crept in. Do I actually need a new laptop or would a desktop be a better idea?…

“My wife’s old Time Computers speakers are still doing sterling service and they were bought in 1997,” said Ryan Thomas. But it was PCs themselves that just kept on chugging. “My PC is more than 11 years old now, or at least the bare bones of it is: there have been a few upgrades in terms of hard drives, memory, graphics card, etc, during that time,” said one reader. “An old Dell tower PC ex-work from 2005,” said Paul Cheetham. “Originally XP, upgraded to W10 Pro. It was slow, but a great backup for older software. Only just retired to computer heaven!” “The oldest piece of technology I still have in active use is a Cambridge Computers Z88 from 1987.”Gareth Halfacree “I’m still using my iPad Air 2. Purchased not…

You probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how files and data are organised on your hard disk. You don’t need to: when you buy a new PC, its system drive will invariably come formatted as NTFS. This is Windows’ native file system, and using it ensures that you get the full performance and storage features supported by the platform. NTFS isn’t your only option, however. For example, if you buy a second hard disk for your desktop PC, or an external SSD to connect to a laptop, you have several options for formatting it. That also applies when you divide a hard disk into separate partitions, perhaps so you can dual-boot a PC into Linux. NTFS may be the default choice, but it could be that a…

1 Create your document Launch Scrivener and click Blank in the sidebar. With the Blank document selected, click Create, then give your new project a name. You can change this later; it’s just the filename under which it’s saved. When the file opens, you’ll see two distinct areas: the sidebar on the left, in which you organise scenes and chapters, and the main writing pane. There are text formatting controls across the top, as in a regular word processor, but don’t worry too much about them, as you want to keep your text fairly simple. 2 Structure your content If you already know how your book is going to flow, create a new chapter by clicking the three dots at the bottom of the sidebar. Hover over Add in the…

SCORE PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from box.co.uk If you have between £1,000 and £1,500 to spend on a gaming laptop, your options are, well, legion. Only recently I’ve reviewed both the Asus TUF Dash F15 (see pcpro.link/326TUF) and the Acer Nitro 5 (see issue 323, p58), two machines that reset the level of performance you can expect from a sub-£1,500 gaming laptop. Now Lenovo has weighed in with its new Legion 5, but can it outdo the rest? It’s available in 15.6in and 17in flavours, with prices starting at £800 for a Ryzen 54600H CPU, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and a GeForce GTX 1650. Lenovo sent us the £1,299 machine with its Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3070 graphics (130W), 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.…

SCORE PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from cyberpowersystem.co.uk It’s a sign of the times that when Cyberpower sent the Infinity X105 GT in for testing, the price was set at £999. Then, for the umpteenth time this year, we were hit with supply issues, and the RTX 3060 graphics card this machine is built around jumped massively in price. As a result, it’s now £1,099 instead. Still, if there’s one thing we can be sure of it’s that the RTX 3060 is worth the extra £100. Three months ago, in our desktop PCs group test (see issue 323, p76), the only way manufacturers could hit a £999 price was to choose GeForce GTX cards; a 1660 Super in the case of the PCSpecialist Fusion R (see issue 323, p86). That…

SCORE PRICE £149 (£179 inc VAT) from ikea.com This is the third collaboration between Ikea and Sonos, following the Symfonisk bookshelf speaker and table lamp in 2019. As with both those products, the Symfonisk picture frame speaker provides easy access to the world of wireless streaming audio while blending in with your living space. However, this isn’t a true picture frame: it’s a plastic structure into which you clip Ikea-sold artwork panels. It comes with one panel pre-installed with a selection of alternative panels sold separately for £17 apiece. The supplied artwork, by artist Jennifer Idrizi, has a certain minimalist appeal, but lacks the kind of impact I look for in a piece of art. There’s much to admire about the Symfonisk’s sound quality, however, all delivered via a 102mm…

Colour spaces are a way to make sense of the colours captured by devices (such as cameras in all their forms) and those that display them. Such spaces also need to work on printouts, so that there isn’t a huge disparity between what’s shown on your screen and what emerges from a printer. In the beginning, the industry got together to define the sRGB gamut. For example, the triangle within the graphic on the right shows the sRGB colour space within all the colours our eyes can see. If we were to show DCI-P3 in the same image, it would extend further. DCI-P3 is the colour space used by digital projectors in cinemas, and thus creators of films. A monitor that covers almost 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut will give…

SCORE PRICE £177 (£221 inc VAT) from wexphotovideo.com This isn’t one of Eizo’s newest screens, but don’t be put off: at £221 inc VAT it’s the fourth cheapest in this Labs, and we don’t often use the word “cheap” to describe Eizo displays. It’s the smallest monitor here, with a 22.5in diagonal, but packs in the pixels: a 16:10 aspect ratio allows for a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution at 101 pixels per inch. A smaller panel also leads to the smallest footprint of any monitor this month, with a simple yet flexible stand on offer. For example, where other Eizos use a sophisticated telescopic stand to allow for height adjustment (140mm here), the EV2360 is a straightforward up-and-down mechanism. Unusually, to allow for the generous 35° tilt, you push back…

SCORE PRICE £500(£600 incVAT)from huawei.com There are many things we love about the Huawei MateView. Top of the list is its aspect ratio, which is wonderfully different at 3:2. This worked well whether we were focusing on a single window or working on two side by side; it helps that a second thing to love about this screen is its 3,840 x 2,560 resolution, which translates into a super-sharp 164ppi across the 28.2in diagonal. We also love the minimalist, floating design. We haven’t yet seen a bezel-less monitor, but with 7mm on the top, left and right edges, this comes close. The bottom bezel spoils the symmetry by being 10mm thick, but in recompense it holds a secret: slide your finger underneath from left to right, for instance, and you…

SCORE PRICE £198 (£238 inc VAT) from novatech.co.uk To put the AOC Q34E2A’s price into perspective, it would be the fourth cheapest 24in panel on test – if you happened to shave 10in off its diagonal. In terms of inches, the return per pound spent is sensational. The downside is resolution and pixel density, with 2,560 x 1,080 translating into 81 pixels per inch. This isn’t a disaster: after all, that’s the same density as a 27in monitor with a Full HD resolution, and using this panel is like having two such monitors bolted together. The disadvantage is that it’s a flat screen, and switching from the left edge to the right is reminiscent of watching a rally at Wimbledon. To an onlooker, it will seem like you’re shaking your…

SCORE PRICE £324 (£389 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/326sam Samsung likes to add the word “smart” to its products, and with the M7 Smart Monitor it has excellent cause: if you connect it to your wireless network (it supports Wi-Fi 5), the Tizen OS gives you direct access to apps such as Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+ and even basic web browsing. If that sounds a lot like a smart TV then you’d be right, except there isn’t a digital tuner built into the monitor. Unlike the other screens here, though, you access the monitor’s settings via a remote control – just note that your choice of colour and other picture controls are much more limited than we’ve come to expect. Even in the “expert settings” you can only fiddle…

SCORE PRICE Bare unit, £445 (£534 inc VAT) from tecadec.com “Work from anywhere” has become a worn-out phrase these past 18 months, but what about when you really do need to work from anywhere? Tecadec has the answer: a workstation in a box. Like a self-assembly IT transformer, it turns from suitcase on wheels to desk without any need for tools: all you need to do is open the case, remove the screen (in its holder), slot things into place and ensure everything fits firmly together. The process takes less than five minutes. The Tecadec works best with a 27in screen. Any monitor that has a VESA 100 mount will fit, or you can buy it with a screen pre-fitted. There’s a holder for your laptop to act as a…

Even before the pandemic, SMBs had a spotty track recordfor data backup. A 2019 report by IT services provider Beaming found that nearly three million small and medium-sized businesses in the UK were either failing to protect their data properly, or not backing it up at all (see pcpro. link/326beaming). In 2020, things got even worse. As the world scrambled to adapt to working from home, many companies who had relied on office-based backup regimes found that their systems didn’t cover remote workers. Now, at last, staff are starting to return to the office – but many will continue hybrid working. It’s never been more important, therefore, to ensure you have a backup solution that will protect you from disaster, no matter where your employees are logging on from. That…

SCORE PRICE Multi-Server with 1 year support, £2,167 exc VAT from retrospect.com With a release history going back to 1989, Retrospect has plenty of experience with SMB data protection, and its Backup product continues to evolve. One significant update in this latest release is support for immutable cloud storage, with user-definable retention periods to ensure that offsite backups can’t be tampered with by hackers or ransomware. Reporting has been improved, too, with more detail on protected clients and storage usage and the option to regularly email the information to multiple addresses. A clever addition is a readout of the percentage of files changed in the latest backup – a high value could indicate suspicious activity. The web console has also had an upgrade, to accommodate these enhanced details, with a…

SCORE PRICE Diskless/32GB, £2,756 exc VAT from ballicom.com Qnap’s TS-h1886XU-RP is a highly versatile business NAS. This 2U rack system can house up to 18 drives, via 12 front-facing hotswap bays and six rear SFF bays, and has plenty of connectivity options, in the form of quad Gigabit Ethernet ports plus dual 10GbE connectors. The appliance even offers two operating systems: on initial setup, the quick-start wizard prompts you to choose between Qnap’s nimble QTS OS and the advanced QuTS hero OS. While the latter is more demanding, the TS-h1886XU-RP has the resources to match it: the price above includes 32GB of DDR4 RAM, which is enough to fully enable inline deduplication and get top performance from the 10GbE ports. The only catch is that you’re limited to a 1TB…

As I wrote last month, the starting point for my green home energy journey was an array of solar panels strapped to the roof of my house. I mentioned that my setup uses microinverters rather than a more conventional “string” inverter that takes a single input from all the solar panels wired together. Microinverters sit on the back of a single solar panel (or are sometimes shared between two; dual microinverters can be used to reduce costs, but they also reduce the benefits). They live on the roof, attached to the panel array, whereas a string inverter would be indoors, somewhere close to your electricity meter. Microinverters send 240V AC down off the roof, whereas a string-based setup will have a nice fat cable carrying a few hundred volts of…

This month I’m going to so do something that I’m sure won’t shock regular readers: pick an argument with the powers that be. The government organisation in question is the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which, by and large, does a splendid job in both public and private sectors in matters of security advice and support. By and large, but not on one occasion recently when it decided the time was right to remind us of some password construction advice it first offered five years ago. It was wrong then and remains so to this day. Using the perfectly reasonable hashtag of #thinkrandom, that advice was to use three random words as your password. That’s three words, not four, so you can forget about the XKCD comic suggestion (xkcd.com/936) of…

Nathan Spendelow Having put both of Samsung’s new foldable phones through the wringer, Nathan explains why he’s such a big fan of the Z Flip3. See p70 Nik Rawlinson With a string of self-published novels to his name, Nik reveals the tools he uses to turn ideas into books that people want to buy on p40 Darien Graham-Smith Darien has a knack of turning technical topics into something you want to read about; he turns his attention to NTFS on p36 Jon Honeyball Together with Barry Collins, Jon shares his thoughts on Windows 11 from p46 – and reveals that ripping up his network isn’t quite going to plan on p110…

After almost two lost summers, international travel is slowly getting back to something approaching normal, but travelling abroad is still not easy. There are complex demands for tests, long queues at the airport and mountains of paperwork. Surely, there must be an app for that? This is why, since the early days of the pandemic, governments, the travel industry and airlines have all talked about digital Covid health passes. So why aren’t we there yet? And how long until proving our vaccination status at the airport is as easy as scanning a passport? “The airport is too late” “By the time we get to the airport, that’s far too late,” said Dr Edgar Whitley, who specialises in digital identity at the London School of Economics. “Airports don’t want to have…

If there’s an underlying theme to this column, which may be doubted, then it’s the difference between the physical and the digital worlds. I can sum it up in an aphorism I’ve employed far too many times: “You can order a pizza online, but you can’t eat it online”. I’ve been living in this gap between worlds for 40 years now: my first toe in the digital water was via a Commodore PET in 1981 at the start of the personal computer revolution, though it wasn’t until the coming of WWW that we all got properly connected together. Of course, I was born into the physical world, and inhabited it with increasing curiosity throughout a childhood filled with Meccano (I built the travelling gantry!) and model aeroplanes with glow-plug engines…

Damaged goods I decided it was time to replace my 2013 iMac with its M1 grandchild. We are all aware of global warming and I am a fully paid-up advocate of recycling, so I offered the computer for sale at one of the well-known resellers of used equipment. The price offered for my good-condition iMac wasn’t generous, but enough for me to say yes to the deal. I didn’t see the red flag, but I should have done. I’ve read the book, seen the film and its sequels, and I have the T-shirt in many shades. The reseller simply instructed me to click on a link to book its chosen courier. The next instruction was to “Pack your items into ANY box”. This is such a simple but dangerously loaded…

CONTRIBUTORS: 5,325 READERS (PLUS BARRY COLLINS AND TIM DANTON) TECHNOLOGY EXCELLENCE AWARDS 2021 TECHNOLOGY EXCELLENCE AWARDS BEST PC MANUFACTURER PCSpecialist BEST LAPTOP MANUFACTURER Apple BEST TABLET MANUFACTURER Apple BEST NAS MANUFACTURER Synology BEST ROUTER MANUFACTURER DrayTek BEST ONLINE RETAILER Amazon, John Lewis, Scan BEST WEB HOST Zen Internet BEST CLOUD STORAGE SUPPLIER Backblaze BEST BROADBAND ISP Zen Internet BEST MOBILE DATA PROVIDER Giffgaff BEST PHONE MANUFACTURER OnePlus BEST MONITOR MANUFACTURER AOC, Iiyama BEST SMARTWATCH MANUFACTURER Apple BEST PRINTER MANUFACTURER Brother PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR DESKTOP PC OF THE YEAR Chillblast Fusion Commando 3060Ti Gaming PC BUSINESS LAPTOP OF THE YEAR Dynabook Portégé X30W-J-10F WORKSTATION OF THE YEAR Scan 3XS GWP-ME N1-32T SOFTWARE OF THE YEAR Vivaldi LAPTOP OF THE YEAR Apple MacBook Air BUSINESS SOFTWARE OF THE YEAR 3CX Phone…

Although NTFS works fine for most people’s needs, it hasn’t been updated in more than 20 years. Surely someone’s had some fresh ideas about data storage since then? Someone has. In 2003, Microsoft unveiled the first beta of a whole new file system called WinFS. Strictly speaking, this was an extension that sat on top of NTFS, but it brought a radical new approach to storage, treating the disk not as a simple repository for binary data but as a database. Under WinFS, applications would save information using standardised schemas for images, documents, sound files and so forth, with extensive metadata to describe and expose the contents. This provided a powerful way for users to search for and access the information within their files, and for programs to extract and…

SCORE PRICE Free upgrade for Windows 10 users via Windows Update Windows 11 is the operating system that should never have been. Although Microsoft is busily burying the quotes down the Memory Hole, it once promised Windows 10 would be the last desktop release, with that OS being regularly upgraded into infinity. The question, therefore, is does Windows 11 bring enough to the table to make it worthy of a new version number? Or is it just an exercise in marketing? Needy requirements The biggest controversy surrounding Windows 11 is whether you’ll even be able to install it on systems currently running Windows 10. After rumours of about-turns, Microsoft stayed true to its declaration that PCs would need a TPM 2 module to run Windows 11. You’ll also need a…

SCORE PRICE £826 (£991 inc VAT) from box.co.uk This latest Dynabook Tecra asks a straightforward question of anyone deciding whether or not to buy it: how much do you care about screen quality? About colour coverage and accuracy, about whether whites actually look white? If the answer is “a lot” to any of those, then you should save three minutes of your life and turn the page, because none of this panel’s results make for pleasant reading – whether that’s 61% coverage of the sRGB gamut, an average Delta E of 4.16 or a 5800K colour temperature that gives whites a yellowish hue. If you can look past the screen, however, this is one belter of a business laptop that offers terrific value for money. I want to emphasise the…

SCORE PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Nvidia’s lineup of RTX 30-series graphics cards continues to grow. At the top, we have the fire-breathing RTX 3090, while at the bottom are the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti. These low-price GPUs aim to bring the joys of ray tracing to more affordable machines, which makes sense as time passes and a ray-tracing-capable GPU becomes de rigueur. The GA107 Ampere chip in the 3050 Ti GPU uses 2,560 CUDA, 20 Ray Tracing (RT) and 80 Tensor cores. For comparison, the RTX 3060 uses 3,584 CUDA, 28 RT and 112 Tensor cores. To put it another way, the 3050 Ti is roughly 75% of a 3060. The other big limitation is a maximum of 4GB of video RAM, while potential buyers…

SCORE PRICE £218 (£261 inc VAT) from techinn.com Acer may not be the first brand you think of when it comes to business monitors, but this compact offering can match the likes of Dell, HP and NEC punch for punch. For a start, consider its connectivity. Most docking monitors are content to supply a USB-C connector, but Acer backs that up with an RJ-45 Ethernet port. You can daisy chain a second monitor via the DisplayPort out port, while there are four USB-A 3 ports (two handily located on the left). Acer follows the current trend of integrating a webcam, which sits at the top. It’s fixed in place, but a rotating design means you can point it towards you or even hide it away completely for privacy. There’s support…

SCORE PRICE £258 (£309 inc VAT) from wexphotovideo.com When we reviewed the Eizo FlexScan EV2460 last year, it felt expensive at £274 when most other 24in monitors cost around £150. In the context of this Labs, especially when compared to the EV2495 (see p84), the EV2480 feels good value despite the £35 increase. While the EV2480 would definitely lose heavily to the EV2495 in a features war – no RJ-45 port, no daisy chaining, no KVM switch – it offers buyers the reassurance of Eizo quality for a much more reasonable price. Stick in the sRGB gamut and you’ll be assured of delicious whites, and its excellent viewing angles, coupled with 1,070:1 contrast and minimal brightness drop-off at the edges, mean it’s a pleasure to use. Not that this is…

SCORE PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from box.co.uk In last year’s Labs, we commented on the fact that none of the Iiyama screens included USB-C ports for easy docking. Vive la change, for this is a true docking monitor, and one so cheap it begs the question of why you’d spend more on a 27in monitor. There are no obvious omissions. Other USB-C connections go higher than the 65W offered here, but that’s enough for most laptops, and once connected you have access to RJ-45 wired Ethernet and two USB-A ports. You can daisy chain a second monitor via the DisplayPort output, with one HDMI and one DisplayPort input available as well, but no USB-B input. The stand is functional rather than elegant, with a hard-wearing black plastic finish. You…

SCORE PRICE £358 (£430 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk The most striking thing about this 34in screen – other than its full name of 34in UltraWide QHD IPS HDR Monitor Ergo – is not its flat IPS panel but its stand. Or rather, lack thereof. Instead, LG supplies an arm mount that you attach to the rear of your desk. The obvious advantage is that you can push it away when you finish working, and pull it close when you need to focus. It’s a high-quality piece of engineering and also offers a handy 130mm of height adjustment. The panel delivers the same level of quality, with 98% coverage of the sRGB gamut out of a 104% volume and an average Delta E of 0.4. With a maximum value of 1.25,…

Get a FREE upgrade to Windows 11 There are many reasons to buy a separate copy of Windows 10. Perhaps you’re building a new PC from scratch or looking to move up from an older version of Windows. Maybe you want to run a version of Windows alongside macOS or Linux. Whatever your reason, a Windows 10 OEM licence is a great choice. OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer (think Acer and Dell), and that means it’s tied to one PC (so you can’t reuse the licence on a new build). But that’s reflected in a far lower price: we’re offering Windows 10 Pro for just £69.99, a £150 saving on Microsoft’s £219.99 price for the retail version, or you can buy Windows 10 Home for £39.99 versus the retail…

SCORE PRICE £29 (£35 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com We’re sitting in front of a 49in screen. Or to be more accurate, two 27in 16:9 monitors sitting side by side on Iiyama’s DS1002C desk mounting arm, for we are indeed living our best Wall Street trader dream. For £35 inc VAT, though, this is hardly the stuff of millionaires. In fact, all you need is a primary monitor that supports daisy chaining and then any secondary display. Try to use panels with the same pixel density, though, or moving windows between them will feel awkward as they shift in size. This is also where colour standards such as sRGB come in useful, as it isn’t natural to swap your attention between panels with different palettes. Assembly is straightforward, and Iiyama makes…

SCORE PRICE Appliance and 1yr updates, £6,119 exc VAT from barracuda.com Managing a total business backup strategy can seem a daunting responsibility. Barracuda’s Backup appliances could be the perfect answer: they provide an all-in-one solution, with on-site backup, cloud backup, site-to-site replication and full data restoration services all managed from a single browser-based portal. The Backup 490 appliance we tested comes with four hot-swap 4TB WD Enterprise SATA drives, which had been preconfigured in a RAID10 array. Barracuda recommends a maximum backup capacity of 6TB; this might seem small, especially for the price, but the appliance performs block-level deduplication, so this translates to a much greater amount of backed-up data. Aside from capacity, there are few limitations to think about. The price gets you unlimited protection, with no need to…

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@njkobie Back in 2018, a trio of mobile operators made a public promise: roaming charges wouldn’t be reintroduced, despite the Brexit-induced death of the rules prohibiting them. Vodafone, EE and now Three have all broken that pledge, meaning travellers to the EU will have to pay extra. This sparked an angry backlash on social media and in headlines. But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Mobile operators demand loyalty from customers in the form of long contracts, but never offer it in return. Brand loyalty is a fool’s game. You may have bought into Three’s “we love our customers!” schtick, but it only loves your business. And that’s not a shot against Three in particular. Google’s entrepreneurial spirit may inspire you, but it’s in this for the quarterly revenue.…

I was looking for an inkjet printer for one of my clients. In the past couple of years I’ve often recommended HP printers with their Instant Ink subscription service (where the user pays a small monthly fee to print a set number of pages; any unused pages are rolled over and can be used the following month). What really makes it great value is that pages can be black and white, colour, or full photo prints for the same price per page. Anyone who’s printed photos on their inkjet knows just how much ink these can use up. So it was interesting to see that many new HP inkjet printers now come with something called HP+, which includes Instant Ink. However, in the terms and conditions it states that “HP+…

The network-attached storage market is a relatively narrow field, but it’s always a competitive one. Qnap has been nipping at Synology’s heels in this category for the past few years, but once again it’s not quite managed to overthrow its rival. Speed, reliability and features set Synology apart, with a score of over 90% in each of these three categories. Synology’s gear isn’t particularly cheap, which perhaps explains why value for money is the company’s weakest score, but our survey results are a clear indication that, as with most things in the technology world, you get what you pay for. It’s not only the quality of Synology’s support, but the longevity of it that is valued by PC Pro readers. “I now own three Synology NAS boxes,” wrote Tim Stewart.…

Three companies came joint top of the charts this year, with Amazon, John Lewis and Scan managing to keep their customers happy despite the huge logistical and supply challenges they have faced. For Amazon, it’s price, speed of delivery and easy refunding process that keep it front of mind. “Returning an incomplete item to Amazon was straightforward,” wrote Stephen Chance. “Returning an item that did not meet its specification to Ebuyer was cumbersome, requiring emails and a phone call before an RMA was issued.” James Young neatly sums up what helps John Lewis in its battle for the online pound. “John Lewis customer service is the gold standard, never any quibbles. They are surprisingly competitive on most of their electronics so if they sell it, I tend to buy from…

In association with Expert Reviews and IT Pro Desktop PC of the Year Chillblast Fusion Commando 3060Ti Gaming PC HIGHLY COMMENDED HP Omen 25L Chillblast approached our most recent desktop PCs group test in a clever way: it sent in systems costing £500, £1,000 and £1,500, each building on the foundations of what came before to show what you can get for your money. By the time we reached the top PC, the Commando 3060Ti that claims this award, you were getting an all-round powerhouse with no compromises. In that same Labs, we were impressed by HP’s Omen gaming computers. These manage to look classy as well as pack in surprisingly powerful components, including a GeForce RTX 3060 in the £1,100 Omen 25L. Tablet of the Year Apple iPad Pro…

If you fancy yourself as the next Leo Tolstoy, November is the month to prove it. NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – is back, and in the coming weeks more than half a million people will be putting fingers to keyboard. Despite the name, participants join in from all round the world, and you don’t necessarily have to write an actual novel: the goal is to simply tap out 50,000 words or more of fiction. Those could be a complete story, or a chunk of a longer novel – what matters is the word count. While 50,000 words may sound a big number, over a 30-day month it breaks down to just 1,666 a day. If you put your mind to it, you can knock those out in an…

The arrival of a new version of Windows is always a significant event. Having started with Windows 2.x, I have lived through the ups and downs of 3.x, NT, 9x, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10. And now 11. Some have been good, some horrible (Windows ME, anyone?) and some outright failed: the Windows mobile platform, the attempts to do embedded and IoT Windows, the billion-dollar Windows RT mistake. Still, you can’t say that Microsoft hasn’t tried. The lessons learnt from RT doubtless fed into the ARM versions of Windows that followed, and Microsoft keeps chipping away at that market with its Surface designs, and a few devices from third parties. As part of this effort, Microsoft worked on a new version of Windows called 10X. This was aimed at…

SCORE PRICE £1,666 (£1,999 inc VAT) from very.co.uk Turn to page 60 and you'll see me describe Lenovo's Legion 5 as a "masterclass in mid-price gaming". On paper, the Legion 7 is the Khan to the Legion 5's Kirk, in that it's better at absolutely everything. No surprise, then, that the Legion 7 redefines what you can expect from a urn to page £2,000 gaming laptop. Let’s take the specs for starters: £1,999 buys you the potent combination of an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics (the 165W version). Other versions of the Legion 7 are available, including one that includes a Ryzen 9 5900H, 2TB of storage and 32GB of RAM for an extra £900, but, as…

SCORE PRICE £957 (£1,149 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Sitting below the Omen series in the HP hierarchy, the Victus still packs all the important attributes of a gaming laptop: quick-refresh display, powerful GPU and the option to add more RAM and storage. What you don’t get is fripperies, whether that’s a modified keyboard with bolder WASD keys or an RGB light show. It’s priced to match, with two models currently on sale in the UK: one for £999 with a Core i5 and RTX 3050 Ti graphics, another with a Ryzen 7 and RTX 3060 for £1,049. Wisely, HP sent in the more expensive machine for testing, because - as discussed in the review of the MSI GL66 Pulse (see p61) - only having 4GB of VRAM means you will…

SCORE PRICE 46mm, £308 (£369 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com This is no iteration of what came before. With the Galaxy Watch 4 series, Samsung is shaking things up with a new processor, a new operating system and more choice than ever: the plain Watch 4 comes in 40mm (£249) and 44mm (£269) sizes, while the Watch 4 Classic is larger at 42mm (£349) or 46mm (£369), and features a rotating bezel. All come with optional 4G for an extra £40. The headline here is Google’s Wear OS software in place of Samsung’s own Tizen OS, but this isn’t Wear OS as you might know it. In fact, this “powered by Samsung” version feels quite different to Wear OS on other Google-based smartwatches. Rotating the bezel clockwise opens a series of…

PRICE From £21 (£25 inc VAT) per instance from microsoft.co.uk Pitched exclusively at businesses, Windows 365 is designed to let employees stream a full Windows desktop from whatever hardware they have to hand – an old desktop PC, a MacBook, even an iPad. In theory, it means people can run a company-supplied Windows desktop on whatever hardware they own, without the inherent security risk of doing business on personal hardware. Microsoft has made Windows 365 licensing typically complex. There’s a vast matrix of plans available, starting from £21 per month for a 1 virtual CPU (vCPU) package with only 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, right through to the 8 vCPU, 32GB of RAM and 512GB storage tier that costs an accountant-wobbling £138 per month. Discounts are available for…

Along with using the screens to test for “real-world performance”, we run a selection of technical tests that check each panel’s colour performance across the sRGB, Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces. Other checks include brightness uniformity across 25 areas on the panel, gamma tracking and how close each panel gets to the target 6500K colour space. To perform these tests, we use an x-rite i1 Display Plus colorimeter in conjunction with the open-source display calibration and profiling software, DisplayCal. We also test each monitor's colour accuracy from a central point on the screen. The difference between the intended and actual colour is measured in the unit of colour difference, Delta E; the higher the figure, the poorer the match. A Delta E of less than 1 is considered perfect.…

SCORE PRICE £288 (£346 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Dell UltraSharp 25 makes a superb first impression. With slim bezels on every side and a smart black-and-grey colour scheme, it’s a fine choice for a front desk. It continues that impression when you switch it on, with clean whites thanks to its finely tuned electronics. Unusually for a business monitor, each unit comes with its own colour calibration factory report that details its Delta E across 32 tests. Our sample showed a figure of less than one in each test, and we saw almost identical results in our own tests: an average of 0.51 and maximum of 1.19 is superb. Both Dell’s test and ours were in the sRGB colour space, but switching to DCI-P3 produced equally accurate results. The…

SCORE PRICE £329 (£395 inc VAT) from hp.co.uk The joy of HP’s product naming system is that it’s both short and littered with clues. Here, the G3 tells us it’s the third generation of product; the “Z” that it’s part of the company’s high-end workstation family; the 27 obvious; and the “u” that it includes a USB-C port. That last is a little confusing, because other manufacturers use “u” to indicate an Ultra HD (4K) resolution, but the Z27u includes a 1440p panel instead. We had hoped a screen to partner workstations would have a high-end panel to match, but it’s only a 6-bit unit with frame rate control (FRC), so while it can display 16.7 million colours it isn’t as smooth as a true 8-bit panel. And it’s tuned…

SCORE PRICE £385 (£463 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com As you’ll see from the AOC U27P2 on the following page, there’s no need to spend almost £500 to buy a 4K 27in monitor, so the question the latest Moda 27 asks is simple: why choose me instead? The primary reason is the quality of the panel, which sailed through our technical tests. Put into sRGB mode, where our sample locked to 279cd/m2, it covered 93.6% of the gamut out of 93.9% volume (so no overspill) with an average Delta E of 0.54 and a maximum of 1.03. Stellar results. Combine that with a 1,304:1 contrast ratio and spot-on 6522K colour temperature and you have a screen that’s exceptionally easy on the eye. An intuitive OSD, controlled via a joystick, allows you…

SCORE PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com One of the drawbacks of VA technology compared to IPS is the clarity of the whites. Normally, that is. Philips bucks the trend, with a white that’s almost as good as the best IPS screens; were it not for the pronounced 1800R curvature of this screen, a hallmark of VA, we’d query the 346P1C’s specs. To enjoy the panel at its best, pump it up close to full brightness (a searing 463cd/m2), or switch to sRGB mode. This locks it to 452cd/m2, which sounds as if it would scorch your eyes but is actually quite pleasant. It covers 92% of the sRGB gamut with a 95% volume, with a fine average Delta E of 0.92. The one quirk is that its colour…

As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I have two main loves: tennis and technology. I missed most of the US Open championship due to being surrounded by monitors and crying at the volume of testing that still needed to be done, but even in the depths of my despair it became clear that this was a breakthrough tournament. Probably the most dramatic one for two decades. On the men’s side, we had the first clear sign that Novak Djokovic – arguably the greatest male tennis player in history – was no longer at the crest of his career hill but slightly over it. But the women’s tournament was even more drama-packed. If you’re British, then it’s illegal for you not to know that 18-year-old Emma Raducanu crushed…

SCORE PRICE Enterprise, 5 servers, perpetual from £479 exc VAT from nakivo.com Nakivo’s Backup & Replication (NBR) software will fit into almost any backup role. It can be run on either Windows or Linux, and Nakivo also offers downloadable VMs for VMware hosts or Nutanix AHV clusters, plus a cloud machine image for AWS EC2. Alternatively, you can run the server on a NAS: packages are offered for Asustor, Netgear, Qnap, Synology, Western Digital and FreeNAS appliances, as well as generic ARM-based devices and even the Raspberry Pi. On the client side, meanwhile, it provides full backup services for Windows and Linux workstations and servers, along with VMware vSphere and Cloud Director, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2, Oracle databases and Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint data stores. Make no mistake, it’s the most…

SCORE PRICE £157 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Netgear is making a name for itself in the world of affordable Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs). Back in issue 319 it impressed us with the WAX610, which offered mesh networking plus cloud management support for just £131; now, the WAX620 offers even more wireless goodness for only a few pounds more. To wit, for £157 this AX3600 dual-band AP offers a speed doubling over the WAX610, promising up to 2,400Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 1,200Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. To get the best performance, we recommend you use a PoE+ power source; the 2.5GbE LAN port also supports regular PoE, but using this incurs a performance penalty of around 40%. Alternatively, you can pay £13 for the official Netgear power adapter…

Changing core infrastructure is always hard, always fraught with complications and always littered with unexpected roadblocks. That’s why we do it so infrequently, and usually after an appropriate period of consideration, testing and verification. Transitioning a large network is something that must be done over a period of time, so coexistence is always a critical factor because there is never one homogenous solution in place. After about six years of hard use, it was necessary to look again at our core network switching, firewalls and Wi-Fi access points. The solution I put in place back then was from Cisco Meraki, a cloud-based user-friendly platform that can scale to global enterprises. One benefit is that it doesn’t drag you into the deep dark hole that is the Cisco command line. It’s…

Last May, Right To Repair Europe (righttorepair.eu), a sustainability campaign group formed of activists and Green MEPs, staged a demonstration outside the European Commission (EC) in Brussels. It was a reminder to policy makers about a pledge they’d made about printers. Twelve months earlier, the EC had promised to address the life cycle and premature obsolescence of electrical products by promoting initiatives such as right to repair. It had singled out printers as particularly wasteful products, so the EC threatened specific regulation “unless the sector reaches an ambitious voluntary agreement”. The deadline for this was September 2020. SPOILER WARNING! Angry protesters next to a stack of knackered printers may have given the game away. Those protesters are right to be furious. If you’re searching for the prize exhibit to shove…

It doesn’t seem possible that it was nine years ago that I wrote a feature for PC Pro detailing my fight with wet macular degeneration that had seriously impaired my vision. The story is still out there on Alphr (pcpro.link/326alphr) if you want to refresh your memory. The good news is that I no longer have to wear a pirate eyepatch and, even better, my vision has stabilised after many injections into my eyeballs (I kid ye not) so that I now easily pass the legal requirement, with spectacles, for driving. I mention this because those days of struggling with an online world largely not accommodating of people with impaired vision were brought back into focus recently. Like many others, I regularly post animated GIFs on Twitter when responding to…