Inhoudsopgave van November 2023 - PC Pro

I have a perverse love of trade shows, so when IFA invited me to attend this year’s feast of technology in Berlin, I said yes faster than an MP fills out their expenses. Like many others, I’m trying to be more eco-conscious these days, so I spent the next couple of days looking for practical ways to reach Berlin by train, but circuitous routes and ridiculous pricing meant I succumbed to the inevitable. Never mind, I told myself. IFA is going big on sustainability this year, so if I mention all the great, green things that are happening then – if you squint and ignore the air miles – my trip is still justifiable. And onto the plane I hopped. One of the first events I went to was the…

Not so long ago it felt like we were on the cusp of a transport revolution, as the promise of autonomous vehicles took hold. “You can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this,” said wildly optimistic Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2014, who after making his billions created the company’s X-Lab, which later spun out Waymo, to research autonomous technology. And, of course, there was Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In 2015 he confidently predicted that within two years “full autonomy” would be achieved, and then a year later during a TED talk predicted that by the end of 2017, one of his company’s cars would be capable of driving across the United States without the driver once having to touch the steering wheel.…

Tech companies love to look to the future rather than deal with the here and now. Open AI warns shrilly about the existential risks of artificial general intelligence while ignoring the current harms caused by less capable AI. Google develops driverless cars and other moonshots while spam still filters through, and search gets less and less helpful in finding unsponsored information. And Facebook-owner Meta heralds the beginning of the metaverse, yet can’t stop basic malware from spreading across the site. I know this because I’ve watched it happen. First, it hit my uncle’s account. He’s not a frequent Facebook user, so the sudden flood of posts was a clear sign of dodgy activity, as were the many friends tagged in each post, ensuring as many people saw it as possible.…

Tiny11 is a stripped-down version of Windows 11. Where the full-fat OS requires 4GB of RAM and 64GB of drive space, Tiny11 can manage with 2GB and 8GB respectively. It looks like the perfect solution for older machines that fall short of Windows 11’s specs as, in the developer’s words, it will run on “basically any computer that also ran Windows 10”. That might leave you wondering why Microsoft, with all of its resources, didn’t manage the same. The answer is most likely that Microsoft didn’t want to: its goal was to ship a feature-rich operating system that was a genuine step up from Windows 10, rather than a minimised working environment. Tiny11 developer NTDev hasn’t stripped out everything. Accessibility features and smaller apps such as the Calculator and Notepad,…

What’s that I hear on the jukebox? “All Good Things (Come to an End)” by Nelly Furtado? How apt. For that saying is as true for a balmy summer as it is for operating system support. Windows 10 has aged well, but the carriage clock is ticking. Windows 10, 22H2 version, will go into retirement on 14 October 2025. That might be around two years away, but it’s somewhat startling as to how quickly that time will pass. But, you ask, what am I to do? The answer to that depends almost entirely on where you are now. Of course, you’re on the current build of Windows 10 aren’t you? You keep it up to date, patch all third-party code including browsers, and have appropriate disaster recovery and archive solutions…

PRICE £541 (£649 inc VAT) from shop.fairphone.com It’s been two years since we reviewed the Fairphone 4 (see issue 328, p72), but this delay is deliberate: the Dutch company wants its phones to last for years. Buy the Fairphone 5 and you’re guaranteed five Android updates and eight years of security updates, and Fairphone hopes to extend the latter to ten years. And where the Fairphone 4 has eight separate parts that could be replaced by an owner, this update includes ten replaceable parts. That’s great, but for the Fairphone 5 to be a success it must still meet expectations for speed and quality. Especially when it costs £649 for the one available spec, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage; you can expand the internal storage via a…

PRICE As reviewed, £3,333 (£3,999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk With its Orion 9000 range stuck on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30 cards, the Predator Orion 7000 is now Acer’s premier gaming PC series. The 2023 update has just landed, packed with Nvidia RTX 40 series GPUs and Intel Raptor Lake 13th generation chips. After spending a week with a top-tier model, I can confidently state that the Orion 7000 range is a power-packed choice for hardcore gamers —as well as being one of the largest PCs you can buy. I’m a big guy, and I still had to take a deep breath and brace myself before hefting the 17kg Orion 7000 around during the setup process. The tall tower case measures roughly half a metre tall and deep, so it…

These days, running Windows on your Mac is straightforward thanks to virtualisation software. You can even do it without paying a penny thanks to VirtualBox. But if you’re serious about running Windows apps on your Mac, then Parallels Desktop is the tool to choose. It’s the only Mac virtualisation software officially backed by Microsoft, which produced an ARM version of Windows 11 Pro specifically for Parallels users. Here, we’ve created a special bundle deal to provide the latest version of Parallels Desktop for Mac 19 Standard (a one-year, one-Mac licence) and the Windows 11 Pro OS. Not only will it save PC Pro readers 58% over the retail fee, it also means you can get Windows 11 on your Mac immediately. ■ Parallel lives Parallels enables you to emulate just…

PRICE £208 (£250 inc VAT) from NEC resellers We hoped to include the MultiSync E274FL in our annual group test of “everyday” monitors (see issue 344, p76), but NEC has kept us waiting for this enterprise-friendly screen. Especially friendly when the E274FL combines three alluring properties: a low price, USB-C docking and integrated wired networking. As immediately became clear when I put it on my desk, it also produces excellent whites. It’s this, rather than a huge colour gamut, that’s most important to office workers after all. The panel’s evident quality was backed up in our tests, where it covered 95% of the sRGB gamut with an average Delta-E of 1.08 and maximum of 3.03. Those are strong figures, even if film lovers won’t be wowed by DCI-P3 coverage of…

PRICE £1,000 (£1,200 inc VAT) from rog.asus.com/uk Mobile gaming is a growing market, and the Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate is aimed at those who demand the best possible gaming performance on their phone. Predictably, that makes it one of the most expensive (non-folding) phones you can buy – but you get superlative hardware in return. As the name implies, it’s a maxed-out version of the Asus ROG Phone 7, with a 6.8in screen, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, a huge 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It’s also one of the first devices we’ve seen that supports Wi-Fi 7, and it offers not one but two USB-C ports, including one that can handle DisplayPort for big-screen video output. The display goes up to an incredible 165Hz –…

The best password managers make it easy to stay secure online. The concept is simple: all of your passwords are stored in an encrypted online vault, which can only be unlocked with your private master password. Once you’ve entered this password, the password manager uses the appropriate credentials to log you into whichever site or service you want to access. While most web browsers have built-in password managers, they’re not as flexible or secure as a dedicated app. The password managers on test this month aren’t just for individual users. Many of these products are also offered in business-friendly versions (albeit for higher prices). With the widespread adoption of hybrid and remote working, users are increasingly storing business-sensitive passwords on their devices, and IT departments should take a hard look…

PRICE Business, from £2 per user per month from keepersecurity.com Security is job one at Keeper. The company undergoes regular auditing to ensure its zero-knowledge security model is strictly observed, and that it complies with US and EU data-protection directives. Its software also offers powerful admin tools, great sharing options and remote access, so it’s a top-notch option for SMBs. The Keeper Business plan costs £4 per user per month and offers user management and extensive policy enforcement. For smaller companies the Business Starter plan costs £2 per user per month for teams of between five and ten, while Enterprise plans add SSO, team management and advanced provisioning. Unusually, you can also add custom modules with extra features: the compliance reporting module costs an extra £10 per user per year,…

PRICE Business, 1-10 users, from $3.49 per user per month from roboform.com Originally devised as a business product, RoboForm now caters to both organisations and individuals. There’s even a free personal service that lets you store any number of passwords and warns you of data breaches, but you can only use it on a single device. To fully unlock the software costs $24 per year, or $48 for up to five users. As well as unlimited devices, that adds web access and password sharing. For businesses, RoboForm costs a flat rate of $40 per person per year, with discounts of 15% and 25% respectively on three-and five-year deals. The business tier includes some advanced administrator controls, such as enforced minimum master password standards and periodic password changes; businesses can also…

PRICE £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from acer.co.uk If you only associate Acer with affordable consumer laptops, the Acer TravelMate P6 should change your mind. This is a premium 14in business laptop, and one that SMBs should take note of. We should emphasise that we’re testing the latest version, with a TMP614-53 suffix rather than last year’s TMP614-52. As we went to press, it wasn’t even available to buy, but Acer assured us that the range will be on sale from its normal suppliers in October. The 53 suffix coincides with a 13th generation Core processor, in this case the i7-1365U. As with all U-series chips, it blends power efficiency with power; most notably, it packs two performance P-cores rather than the four you’ll find in P-series chips such as the…

PRICE £1,446 (£1,736 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk In the absence of an updated Microsoft Surface Pro (see issue 342, p81), it falls to Dell to promote the tablet form factor as a business laptop. For, like the Surface Pro, it only takes the addition of a keyboard to transform it from one to the other. Indeed, to look at, you’d find it hard to tell the difference. But there are differences. Most obviously, the XPS doesn’t have a kickstand. Instead, Dell uses magnets built into the top flap of the folding keyboard to lock the screen into place. It’s highly effective, allowing you to position the screen at just about any angle you like. The keyboard is pleasant to type on, with generously sized flat keys that offer satisfying resistance…

PRICE £1,541 (£1,849 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk There’s something odd about the idea of a 1.7kg laptop that can turn into a tablet, but Samsung is never afraid to lead the way for outlandish ideas. Nor does it overcharge for extras, with a compact S Pen in the box. It’s a great way to write notes on the screen, with a soft nib that reacts well with the glossy surface, although we would have liked it to be chunkier and thus easier to hold. It’s not as if Samsung kept it slim so it could fit within the chassis: this is a pen to carry in your pocket. Samsung also lifts itself above rivals with an ecosystem that, in some ways, rivals Apple. Buy a Galaxy phone, tablet and laptop…

PRICE £524 (£650 inc VAT) from chillblast.com British manufacturers Chillblast and PCSpecialist are united in one aim this month: to persuade businesses to choose their laptops instead of one of the familiar international suppliers. While their rivals have the advantage of millions to spend on R&D to create their own designs, the Brits can lean into local support and bespoke specifications. Certainly, Chillblast isn’t falling behind rivals when it comes to the technology. It offers the Prestige 15.6in with a choice of 13th generation Core chips: either a Core i5-1360P, as found in the Samsung, or the Core i3-1315U we tested. With two P-cores and four E-cores, this was always in the bottom half of our speed tests, but don’t be put off: this is a nippy machine. Our test…

PRICE £816 (£979 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews Just like Chillblast, PCSpecialist must rely on third-party laptop makers for its designs, and we think it’s chosen wisely with the Fusion Studio. This is a compact 14in chassis that weighs 1.3kg, yet there’s still room for a 99Wh battery; that meant the laptop kept going for over 11 hours in the PCMark Modern Office test, which is a great result. Especially so when you consider it has a Core i5-13500H inside. H series chips lean towards power over efficiency, and while this Core i5 version has only four P-cores to the six inside Core i7 editions, the Fusion Studio proved its worth in our toughest speed tests. The downside is a continual low hum of fan noise, even when we chose Silent…

PRICE Premium, one socket, £1,257 exc VAT from arcserve.com Arcserve UDP (unified data protection) provides a one-stop shop for backup and recovery of all your physical and virtual systems. Available as a turnkey appliance or software only, UDP 9.1 introduces a choice of private on-premises or cloud management. There’s a range of licensing plans; the price we’ve shown is for an on-premises UDP 9.1 single socket premium licence. Socket licences are only applied to the systems being protected, have no restrictions on the amount of back-end storage and support unlimited virtual machines. Ransomware protection for the UDP host comes into play as the price includes the Sophos Intercept X Advanced for Servers endpoint protection software. Arcserve supplies it with a personal Sophos Central account so you can manage the software…

PRICE Simple Core Pack, 5 instances, £489 per year exc VAT from uk.insight.com Veritas Backup Exec (BE) has always been one of our top choices for on-premises data protection. It delivers a comprehensive range of backup and recovery services. The BE Simple licensing plans make it very affordable for SMBs, and BE 22.2 on review introduces plenty of new and welcome features. Microsoft 365 (MS365) backups now support SharePoint and Teams as well as Exchange Online and OneDrive. Microsoft Azure Object Lock provides ransomware-protected immutable cloud storage, backups to ReFS volumes can be accelerated, anomaly detection protects backup scripts from tampering, and BE now uses the FIPs-compliant deduplication engine from Veritas’ enterprise NetBackup product. The simple yearly subscription service is based only on compute instances, which can be a physical…

Every business needs a website, and every website needs a presence on Google. Getting onto Google isn’t hard: in fact, once your site is live you can just sit back and Google will discover and index it sooner or later. However, it can take weeks for a new website to be added to Google’s database – weeks in which you’re missing out on business. What’s more, once your site has been indexed you might well find that not all pages are represented in the way you hoped. Your site is doubtless full of enticing content that offers precisely what your would-be customers are looking for – but in order to get the search rankings and traffic you deserve, you need to ensure that Google’s web-crawling engine has properly explored your…

“Your column writes itself,” was the shrewd observation of PC Pro’s features editor, Barry Collins, when I posted a picture of Oscar’s laptop. His machine was rather curious and a reminder that as I extol the virtues of repair and upgradability from a well-stocked workshop, the reality of doing tricky tweaks at the kitchen table, with only YouTube for guidance, is often a breeding ground for unpredictable results. Oscar felt his laptop was lacking in the Wi-Fi department. When you listen to the PC Pro podcast, you’ll hear our frequent mutterings about PCs being factory-fitted with Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, but here in the shop, I have suppliers offering machines with the latest and greatest CPUs backed by Wi-Fi 5. For many users, it’s an unimportant detail of their technological…

Be it a privacy issue or yet another zero-day vulnerability in the Chrome browser, more often than not I’m pulling my (imaginary) hair out while writing about Google. But this month is different. This month, I have nothing but praise for the Big G. Let’s start with quantum cryptography, shall we? Yes, I know it’s something of a Sheldon Cooper subject, but it was delivered with much less comedic intent. No matter the complexity of the underlying concepts or the overarching hyperbole surrounding vendor announcements, quantum cryptography is something you’ll have to get used to sooner or later. Given the rate of technological progress and the billions being spent on it, I’d say sooner is a good guess. I thought I’d check my work archive and discovered the first time…

Step aside Margaret Atwood and Stephen King, here’s a dystopian horror story for you: imagine spending years of your life toiling over a keyboard, carefully crafting sentences, paragraphs and chapters of a book that weaves together a plot, brings characters to life and enthralls readers for hundreds of pages. Now, watch as an AI eats it and spits your garbled works back at you. Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT brought large language models (LLMs) to the wider world’s attention, it’s been suspected that writers’ work has been used to train them. LLMs are deep-learning systems with hundreds of millions of parameters that are taught to assemble sentences by hoovering up massive text datasets. Datasets such as most of the English language internet, including Wikipedia. Writers are speaking up. In June 2023,…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in M2 Pro power from £2,699 from apple.com/uk All the upgrades to this 2023 model are within, as Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max processors take charge. Combine this power with the 16.2in mini-LED screen, superb sound system and phenomenal battery life, and you have the world’s premier workstation laptop. REVIEW Issue 342, p48 ALTERNATIVES Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED (UX5304) The perfect 13in laptop? At 1kg, it packs power along with 1TB of storage, a top-quality OLED panel and superb battery life. £1,600 from uk.store.asus.com REVIEW Issue 348, p58 Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra Samsung packs everything into this 16in laptop, from a superb AMOLED panel and a slim 1.8kg chassis to a Core i9 CPU and RTX 4070 graphics. Expensive but top quality. From…

When friends come to me for tech advice, there’s one question I dread above all others: “Can you recommend a gaming PC?” Can’t you ask me something easier, like “can you sequence the DNA of a Cadbury’s Twirl?” or “why do people keep hiring Piers Morgan?” There’s no such thing as a gaming PC. A gaming PC means different things to different people. To my dad, it means a system capable of playing Solitaire without crashing when the cards bounce and cascade down the screen after a win. To the 15-year-old son of my friends, it means being able to play Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing, at high texture quality and medium volumetric fog resolution. Of course, parents of said 15-year-old don’t know that. They know he plays “that shooting…

Don’t panic! Those were the words so famously written across the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in Douglas Adams’ eponymous book, and they apply equally well here. Windows 10 has already stopped getting new features and security updates will come to a halt in October 2025. The clock is ticking. While you shouldn’t panic, you should think about what happens next before your hand is forced. Follow Microsoft’s advice to the letter and that perfectly functional PC or laptop will be consigned to landfill, as security updates end. Lee, opposite, is not happy about that. Perhaps you want to wait it out. Maybe Microsoft will bow to the pressure and keep releasing security updates? Or you could simply ignore Davey Winder’s advice on p31 and keep running Windows 10 anyway.…

Windows 365 – not to be confused with Microsoft 365, the new name for Office – has been largely hovering under the radar for more than a year now. It allows you to stream a Windows 11 desktop to pretty much any device (or Windows 10, for that matter). Microsoft offers a free month’s trial of Windows 365 before you have to commit to an annual subscription. However, when Barry Collins tried to sign up it was an exercise in pure frustration: the procedure flopped at the payment confirmation screen, at which point he was given an error code and told to call Microsoft. I’ll save you the pain that stemmed from that… So what do you get? A Windows session that you connect to from your PC, Mac or…

Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world, and there are good reasons for that: it’s not only underpinned by one of the biggest names on the net, it’s supported by an active community of extension developers. A huge library of extensions massively increases the range of tasks that Chrome can accomplish, making it as much a productivity platform as it is a window on the web. Here’s our pick of ten essential extensions that can save you time and enhance your web experience, whether you’re a casual browser, a power user or an online professional. You don’t even have to be using Chrome to make use of them – you can also install Chrome extensions in Microsoft Edge to get the exact same benefits (see pcpro.link/350edge).…

PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from geekom.co.uk When Intel announced it was discontinuing its popular line of NUC PCs, many may have wondered if the mini-PC market was collapsing. Fear not, if the Geekom Mini IT 13 is anything to go by. This compact unit packs in a feast of decent components for a near-ridiculous price. Inside you’ll find Intel’s Core i9-13900H mobile processor, partnered with 32GB of DDR4 RAM. It’s not found wanting for storage space, either, with a 2TB M.2 SSD included. There’s an Intel Wi-Fi 6E chip, ports aplenty and Windows 11 Pro. All this for £700! For comparison, if you wanted a Mac mini with 32GB of memory and 2TB of storage, you’d be looking at the thick end of £2,500, almost four times the price…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,333 (£1,599 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk This elegant OLED-equipped ultraportable turned heads when it debuted in 2022 (see issue 337, p52), but I was disappointed by its battery life and fiddly capacitive touch function keys. I wish I could say that things have changed with this update to Intel’s latest chips. Our review sample came with a Core i7-1360P and 16GB of RAM. That’s a potent combination, and it showed its strength in our video-encoding test. Here, the XPS 13 Plus took 6mins 31secs to transcode a 4K video down to 1080p in Handbrake in Ultra Performance mode; that’s 18 seconds faster than last year’s model (which included an i7-1280P) and over a minute quicker than the MacBook Air M2 (see issue 336, p50). Intel’s Iris Xe…

PRICE £104 (£125 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com Asus’ latest router isn’t much to look at, but it’s unassuming in a way that in itself makes a statement. Where previous routers have tended to resemble model spaceships as much as networking components, the sober tower format of the RT-AX59U bespeaks a more sensible, practical approach. It’s also a modest size, standing 204mm tall on its mount, or you can remove the base and attach it to a wall via a pair of convenient mounting sockets on the side. The corrugated casing adds just the right amount of tasteful visual interest, while a single multicoloured status LED wraps around the front, so you can see it from almost any angle. For the price, you won’t be amazed to learn that this router…

PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk With 16in laptops all the rage, it’s hardly shocking to see that size class invade the portable monitor space. Nor is it a surprise to see Asus leading the charge, with its ZenScreen MB16QHG priced at a heavyweight £399. That’s four times the cost of a 15.6in 1080p monitor you’d find on Amazon, but the ZenScreen not only features a 2,560 x 1,600 IPS panel but also offers a 120Hz refresh rate. Throw in strong colour performance, a robust stand and one of the brightest panels we’ve seen in a portable display, and the MB16QHG has a lot going for it. Asus opts for a hinged base rather than a kickstand or detachable/magnetic stand. This makes the unit heavier, but it’s a solid…

PRICE 16GB/512GB Aurora, £590 (£709 inc VAT) from uk.redmagic.gg If you’re not quite ready to drop £1,200 on Asus’ top-tier gaming phone (see opposite), Nubia’s Red Magic 8S Pro could be right up your street. Pricing starts at an affordable £579 inc VAT for the Matte/Midnight model, which comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage; at £689 the Platinum model offers a lighter finish, 16GB of RAM and double the storage, while the Aurora adds a fancy semi-transparent case and RGB lighting for an extra £20. In all cases the design is elegant. In place of the bloated Transformers-like design of previous Red Magic phones, the 8S Pro has a clean, flat-edged look. Gorilla Glass 5 covers the front and back, sandwiching an aluminium frame. It looks great,…

PRICE Individual, £1.89 per month from nordpass.com Last month NordVPN took the top spot in our Labs roundup of VPNs (see issue 349, p78) – and the company’s password manager is just as impressive. It boasts all the important features, including secure sharing, autofill for passwords, credit cards and login details, and single click saving of new credentials. Unusually, you can even start using the service without paying a penny. Free users can store an unlimited number of passwords, and access them from anywhere, but they’re only allowed one signed-in session at a time – so if you alternate between your phone and your computer, you’ll have to log in again each time you change device. The free edition also won’t detect weak or reused passwords, and it won’t scan…

PRICE $2.99 per month from 1password.com 1Password has a top-notch business pedigree, with companies including IBM, GitLab and Slack trusting it to keep their passwords secure. It’s also available for individuals, with subscriptions starting at $36 a year; that includes unlimited password access, with full support for passkeys, plus 1GB of online storage and the ability to restore deleted passwords for up to a year. If you pay $60 a year for the five-user family deal, you also get management features, account recovery and guest accounts. For businesses, the Teams Starter Pack costs $20 per month and covers ten users, each of whom gets 1GB of storage and unlimited shared vaults. Move up to the $8 business plan and you’ll receive VIP support, 5GB of storage per user, custom security…

Laptops designed for work used to be boring. If you worked in sales in the early 2000s, chances are you had to cart around a 3kg grey slab that packed all the visual appeal of a self-storage warehouse. This latest haul of “business laptops” couldn’t be more different. Not only do you have variety, but in one or two cases you actually have beauty. Not that we’re suggesting you choose your next work laptop purely on the basis of aesthetics, merely that it’s one of the buying factors to consider (see our full buyers’ guide on p78). But we do think the decisions to make when choosing a laptop are changing; for instance, we would argue that power is less important than screen quality, battery life and portability for most…

PRICE £1,833 (£2,200 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk Asus might not be the first name you think of when shortlisting laptops for work, but ignore the B9 OLED at your peril. This built-to-order laptop provides a superb balance between portability and power, all wrapped up in an understated yet stylish chassis. Its first trick is to squeeze a 14in panel into a chassis so compact and light. At 1kg, and measuring 15.7mm at its thickest, you can chuck this magnesium-lithium machine into a bag and barely notice its presence. And while we’re always cynical when companies claim “MIL-STD 810H” testing, we can believe this well-built machine will survive life on the road far beyond the single year of its warranty. Keep the OLED screen at a decent level of brightness and…

PRICE £917 (£1,100 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com If this group test was a party, the MateBook 16s 2023 would be standing in the corner having a haltering conversation with the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360. Both these laptops stand out from the corporate crowd, emphasised by the inclusion of Windows 11 Home rather than Pro (although the latter is an £80 upgrade from store.pcpro.co.uk). Both laptops include striking 16in screens, but the MateBook sticks with IPS technology rather than OLED. That means you miss out on perfect contrast and rich blacks, but with 95% coverage of the sRGB gamut the Huawei can still cover a strong range of colours. With good accuracy, too. It also benefits from a 2,520 x 1,680 resolution to ensure that text looks sharp, while a…

PRICE £804 (£965 inc VAT) from business.currys.co.uk Don’t be too put off by the listed price of £965 for this Spin P4, as that’s for the 512GB version we tested. The 256GB alternative costs £827, which is a far better deal. Even at £827, however, we would hope for a better screen than this. It’s a dull affair, peaking at 264cd/m2 in our tests with a lowly 55% coverage of the sRGB colour space. Let’s not even talk about colour accuracy. It has two redeeming factors. One is that good viewing angles and decent whites make it bearable for everyday office tasks. The second is that it’s a touchscreen, which leads into the Spin’s big skill: that the screen can swivel 360° to turn the laptop into a tablet. Unlike…

PRICE £1,030 (£1,236 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk There are several things that distinguish the Firefly from other laptops this month. Chief among them is the presence of a discrete graphics chip, with Nvidia’s T550 (complete with 4GB of GDDR6 memory) giving excellent support to an Intel Core i7-1265U processor. The T550 will make the biggest difference in professional tasks such as CAD, lending this compact 1.5kg laptop creative workstation credentials. It’s still poorly specified compared to other more expensive (not to mention bigger) members of HP’s ZBook family, but the discrete graphics pushed it to the top of this month’s pile in 3DMark’s Time Spy test, with similarly strong results in PCMark. It dropped to mid-table in our CPU-intensive tests, which is to be expected as the i7-1265U is last…

How wetest A cross these two pages, you’ll find graphs summarising the results of our most important tests.We measure each laptop’s productivity and digital creation power using a trio of benchmarks. First, using the industry-standard PCMark 10 benchmark. This gives an overall score, but here we also publish its Productivity scores (across spreadsheets and word processing) and Digital Content Creation (photo editing, rendering and video editing). We also use the Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 6 benchmarks to assess the laptops’ single-core and multicore performance. We determine the maximum sequential read and write speeds of the internal SSD using CrystalDiskMark 8. We test 3D performance using the DirectX 12 benchmark 3DMark Time Spy. This also gives an indication of how well each laptop will perform in creative tasks such as CAD…

PRICE Unlimited Plus, Perpetual, from £536 exc VAT from hornetsecurity.com Hornetsecurity’s VM Backup is designed specifically to protect VMware and Hyper-V environments. It presents a clever management console where most operations can be carried out using nothing more than drag and drop. VM Backup’s perpetual licences are based only on the number of hosts, regardless of the sockets each one has. There’s also a subscription model where licensing is charged on the monthly number of VMs being backed up. A perpetual Standard edition starts at £348 and allows you to back up five VMs per host. You can protect all VMs on each host with the Unlimited edition (£426 per host), while the Unlimited Plus edition on review ups the price to £536 and enables all the features VM Backup…

PRICE £246 exc VAT from amazon.co.uk Best known for its excellent range of NAS appliances, Synology moves deeper into surveillance territory with a choice of two IP cameras. The TC500 targets indoor use while the BC500 on review is geared up for the great outdoors. The British weather won’t worry this little bullet camera, since its IP67 rating means it’s certified as dust-tight and can survive total immersion in water for up to 30 minutes. Its 5MP CMOS sensor and 2.8mm/f1.8 lens team up to deliver a maximum resolution of 2,880 x 1,620 pixels, it supports the H.264 and H.265 codecs and it offers a wide 110° horizontal field of view (FoV). The BC500 has a 10/100 Ethernet port on the end of a 35cm waterproof cable and can be…

I miss the silly season. It used to be the case that summer was the time when the news took a snooze. You could get through a dozen books in a month because the whole world hopped in a hammock. Everyone took a few weeks off. But I will remember this year for a bumper crop of huge headlines. If you blinked and you missed it as the unrelenting news cycle reported endlessly on a range of hot topics, these are two stories that will continue to play out. Their significance should not be underestimated. Both stories centre around technologies that are characterised by novelty, potential for disruption and transformative capabilities. They therefore sit neatly in the realm of emerging technologies. They also raise serious questions about how we as…

These days, minor disagreements are often over-dramatised. Go to the service formerly known as Twitter, lay out your opinion and wait for the backlash, which becomes more important than the original subject ever was. I’m one of those anti-social networking people, because I believe that, as Mr J Lydon of Public Image Ltd once sang, “anger is an energy”. By all means warm people up to their subject, but don’t take the conversation to places from which no return is possible. You should always aim to be able to shake hands after the discussion is over. If there was ever going to be a subject that puts this rule to the test, it’s the ticklish business of borrowing a neighbour’s Wi-Fi when yours isn’t co-operating. It ought not to be…

When TikTok took the world by storm in the late 2010s, its powerful rivals raced into action. Instagram rapidly built its own short-form video product, called Reels. And YouTube turned its business on to its side and into portrait mode, with the launch of YouTube Shorts. But this wasn’t the only big tech company starting to worry, because TikTok wasn’t just coming for video – it was coming for online shopping, too. That’s why in the past couple of years Amazon, which is typically more interested in selling shoes than viral videos, has found itself under threat, as TikTok launched its “TikTok Shop”, enabling users of the platform to buy products from directly inside the app. “TikTok has just exploded when it comes to shopping in general, ever since they…

Despite the fact that I spend much of every day in front of a computer screen – writing, reading, editing, drawing, coding, listening – I’ve never made any real money online. Sure, I’ve made money writing about computers and online enterprise, but I’ve never been paid for an article that appeared only online. As a keen photographer I have 2,000+ photographs on Flickr, but no-one ever buys a print. Those few photos I have been paid for appeared in foreign magazines whose art directors contacted me having seen them online, which barely counts. I also create abstract digital artworks based on fractals and similar stuff, but they don’t sell online either. My friend Catherine successfully sells her oil paintings via the Saatchi Art website, but her buyers get an original…

PowerToys to the rescue The tip regarding PowerToys text extraction (see issue 348, p36) has been a great help. I get a number of French documents that have been scanned into PDF but don’t include text, so I can’t do a copy and paste. PowerToys has proved a time saver feeding the OCR’d text into Google Translate. On a different note, I liked the VPN article in the October 23 edition (see issue 349, p78), but perhaps you could have mentioned a DIY technique using a Raspberry Pi and PiVPN? I use this whenever I’m abroad as it cuts down on the number of times bank sites and suchlike say that I’m using a different location and go through a laborious identification check. Roger Preston Associate editor Darien Graham-Smith replies:…

Linux was once the standard but never entirely helpful answer when asked what to do with an old computer. For many, it was an academic exercise: something you tinkered with when you’d moved to a new machine and could afford to corrupt your old workhorse. There was no guarantee that a Linux machine would play nicely with your existing data, sharing files with friends and family could be difficult, and the overall process could often have often been a lot more user friendly. None of that is true today. A familiar environment Let’s be blunt: there’s no reason why Linux shouldn’t be your primary operating system. Most of your data is platform agnostic, many apps run in the browser, and Linux itself is as friendly and easy to use as…

Windows 10 is not yet an ex-Windows. It is not preaching to the choir eternal, and it has not ceased to be. Yet, it will soon become as dead as the parrot in that famous Monty Python sketch. So, what will this mean in terms of the security of your data? First of all, dates and details are important here. Windows 10 Home and Professional 21H2 won’t get any more security updates, having hit end of support on 13 June 2023. Organisations running Education and Enterprise versions have until 11 June 2024. If you’ve updated to version 22H2 then security updates will continue until 14 October 2025. And note that this applies to all versions, including Education and Enterprise. Running Windows 10 after 14 October 2025 The security implications of…

At the start of September this year, almost 200,000 people descended upon Berlin for the world’s biggest trade show dedicated to consumer electronics and home appliances: IFA. It’s a show with a long and glistening history, too. This is where Philips unveiled the CD, Telefunken the first widely available TV sets and Sony the world’s first video cassette player. Unless we missed it, nothing to match the import of those releases happened at this year’s show, which celebrates its 100th anniversary next year, but it was a bustling event. One that suggests trade shows are on their way back to full health after three extremely difficult years because of Covid. Here, we pick out the key trends from the showfloor and the products that caught our eye. We also give…

PRICE As reviewed, £624 (£749 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk It’s surprisingly difficult to find a budget all-in-one PC that doesn’t make huge sacrifices somewhere. If it’s not the quality of the screen, it’s the low-powered components. If it’s not the specification, it’s woeful design. While the Dell Inspiron 24 All-in-One is hardly the pinnacle of perfection, it’s the best attempt we’ve yet seen at this price. Let’s start with the design. The Inspiron 24 is a simple yet sleek machine that’s easy to move around, thanks to its relatively light weight of 5.2kg. (Perhaps I don’t need to emphasise that it’s made of plastic rather than iMac-style metal.) That’s roughly the same weight as three laptops. Setup was a breeze, as I only needed to remove it from its box,…

PRICE Two units, £317 (£380 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk (B0C86GLJKW) The Linksys Velop Pro 6E is one of the most affordable Wi-Fi 6E meshes on the market – but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap. Support for 6GHz inevitably drives up the cost of a mesh system, as every station has to include an extra radio alongside the 2.4GHz and 5GHz transmitters. So while this Velop system is competitively priced for what it is, you’re still looking at £380 inc VAT for the two-unit system, or £500 for three stations. On the plus side, there’s a good chance you don’t need all three. Linksys advertises a huge coverage area of 280 square metres per station, and while such figures must always be taken with a grain of salt, I found that…

PRICE £392 (£470 inc VAT) from canon.co.uk Here’s a departure from the usual all-in-one (AIO) form factor. How about an automatic document feed (ADF) that loads from the front rather than the top? Or a scanner that specialises in copying passports and ID cards? The advantage is that you can install this AIO under a counter or on a shelf, and copy documents without having to lift the scanner lid more than a few inches. The GX6550 slots into the middle of Canon’s GX line of office-oriented A4 Maxify inkjets, with the Maxify indicating refillable ink tanks. It includes all the essential business features – duplex printing, colour copying, a high duty cycle – while eschewing the fax modem and additional paper tray of premium Maxify printers such as the…

PRICE 1TB, £48 (£58 inc VAT) from kingston.com The XS1000 is a tiny external USB SSD, measuring only 7cm long and weighing less than 30g. It’s perfectly pocketable, and it will work with any computer or mobile device with a USB-C port. The big difference between the XS1000 and Kingston’s XS2000 (see issue 329, p60) is speed: where the XS2000 supported USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 transfer rates of up to 20Gbits/sec, the XS1000 has a maximum connection speed of 10Gbits/sec. To be fair, that’s more than fast enough for everyday use, and it helps keep the price down. As few host devices support 20Gbits/sec over USB, in many cases the faster drive would be a waste of money anyway. And the XS1000 lives up to its performance claims. In our…

Total value this month £168 AOMEI Backupper Professional 7 AOMEI Backupper is a tool for backing up files, partitions, hard drives or your entire system. Its straightforward interface should be immediately familiar if you’ve previously used a backup tool, so you can start securing your precious data right away – and we’re giving every reader a one-year licence worth £43. Getting started is easy. Switch to the Backup tab, then click Disk Backup, choose the drive you want to back up, and set your preferred options. You can choose the level of compression, type of encryption, how archives are split, where email notifications should be sent and more. Once you’ve set the parameters to suit your requirements, it just takes another click or two to secure your data in the destination…

PRICE Individual, free from bitwarden.com Bitwarden is unlike any other password manager on test this month: it’s offered under an open-source licence, which means anyone can review, access and contribute to its code. While most of us may be happy to leave that to developers, it’s a reassuring degree of transparency. What’s more, like most open-source projects, Bitwarden can be used completely free of charge. And this isn’t a strictly limited service like other password managers offer, either: free users can store as many passwords as they like, and sync them across any number of devices. You can even share passwords with other Bitwarden users, and make use of a built-in password generator and email aliases. If you want more, the paid-for Premium plan adds advanced 2FA, emergency access, security…

PRICE Business, £8 per user per month from dashlane.com Dashlane boasts that more than 2.5 billion credentials have been saved on it, by customers including Wayfair and PepsiCo. You can try it yourself with the free plan, which lets you store unlimited passwords and passkeys on one device, and includes a password generator, 2FA and personal alerts. If you want more, £3.49 a month gets you an Advanced subscription, which supports unlimited devices and adds dark web monitoring to make sure your credentials haven’t leaked. The £3.99 Premium plan includes the Hotspot Shield VPN (which normally costs £10.99 on its own), while the Friends & Family plan costs £5.99 a month for up to ten users, with all Premium features plus a dashboard for easy management. There are three business…

1 A CORE CHOICE Raw performance isn’t what it used to be. If you buy a laptop with a 12th or 13th generation Core processor inside then it’s likely to be fast enough to last you for years. (You can tell that it’s one of the more recent Intel chips through its name; for example, a Core i7-1165U is an 11th generation chip, a Core i7-1265U is a 12th gen chip.) Although we didn’t see a single AMD-powered laptop computer in this test, don’t be put off from an AMD laptop that hits all your other key buying points. AMD’s recent Ryzen mobile chips are fast and power-efficient, and you’ll find them in many machines – often for better prices than their Intel equivalents. If you need more power, choose…

PRICE £1,139 (£1,377 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk You can see the lineage between this 13in corporate laptop and its XPS 13 forbears. It’s by no means sexy, but the almost rubberised finish to the aluminium alloy frame, coupled with its compact footprint, ensure it makes a fine first impression. If you carry this laptop into a meeting, you’re to be taken seriously. It makes an even better second impression thanks to the keyboard. We love the quietness of the keys, but also their tactile feel, deep travel and sensible spacing to minimise typos. There’s nothing fancy about the trackpad, but a glass coating ensures it’s smooth to the touch while being both big and responsive. Like Lenovo, Dell opts for IPS panels rather than OLED. They only have a resolution…

PRICE £1,597 (£1,916 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk (before discounts) This is our first look at the 11th generation of X1 Carbon, and Lenovo’s compact 13in ultraportable continues to impress. We’ll start with the signature feature, the ThinkPad keyboard. As ever, Lenovo pays great attention to detail with a gentle concave centre to the keys, complete with a substantial “feel” and a quiet action that adds up to the best keyboard here. We also like the double-height Enter key, large backspace and wide spacebar. Quite an achievement considering the 316mm width of this laptop. The red trackpoint remains, along with physical mouse buttons below it, and while the glass-coated touchpad isn’t the largest it’s still big enough for navigation and gestures. Naturally, a fingerprint reader sits above the keyboard, embedded in…

PRICE £358 (£430 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk In many ways, you know exactly what you’re getting with this laptop. It’s built to a budget and that means compromises on screen quality, aesthetics and bulk, but Asus makes sensible choices throughout – and throws in a surprise or two. The screen obviously can’t compare to the best here, whether that’s for colour coverage (61% of sRGB), accuracy (3.89 average Delta-E) or brightness (260cd/m2). In general use, you’ll find it muted rather than vibrant. And when it comes to text, there’s a fuzziness to letter edges due to stretching 1,920 x 1,080 pixels across a 15.6in diagonal. But it’s by no means a terrible screen; whites still look okay, for instance. At this price the chassis is always going to be predominantly…

PRICE £922 (£1,106 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com Lenovo makes so many business laptops that it’s easy to become confused. The E14 series sits squarely in the budget category, while the Gen 4 reveals its 2022 heritage: Lenovo is currently transitioning the E14 series to Gen 5, which use Intel’s 13th generation Core processors, so you’ll struggle to buy the exact model we tested. At the time of going to press, only a Core i5-1235U version with a 256GB SSD was available direct from Lenovo, while our tested spec was available from Insight for an unenticing £1,106. That buys you an Intel Core i7-1255U, which is made to look its age in this month’s company. To see what we mean, turn to the graphs on p90. The equivalent Gen 5 system,…

The ever-present threats of data breaches, ransomware attacks and natural disasters mean it’s never been more important for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to get their backup house in order. A complete data protection strategy is an essential business process and those businesses that don’t have one in place are foolishly putting their business and their staffs’ livelihoods at extreme risk. This shouldn’t be challenging; there are lots of top-quality backup products on the market that are suitable for a wide range of environments and budgets. The best backup strategies use a hybrid mix of on-premises and cloud backup to provide the requisite number of copies, and the vast majority of products can combine both for simplified management. This month’s buyer’s guide is aimed at SMBs that want to keep…

PRICE Enterprise, 10 servers, perpetual from £1,874 exc VAT from nakivo.com Many business backup solutions require a dedicated Windows Server host, but Nakivo’s Backup & Replication (NBR) is far more amenable as it can be deployed to just about any platform you care to name. It will run happily on a Windows host, but also supports Linux, VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, AWS EC2, Raspberry Pi and all the main NAS appliance vendors, including Qnap and Synology. On review is NBR 10.9, which includes bare metal recovery where you use its new Bootable Media Wizard to restore physical Windows and Linux servers from selected backups. Malware protection is now available, with NBR integrating with a range of third-party antivirus products, and all MS365 components, including Teams, can be protected. Licensing is…

PRICE £146 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel’s SCR 50AXE will appeal to small businesses and home offices that want secure wireless networks without the added expense of separate devices. This desktop router delivers triband Wi-Fi 6/6E services, combines these with an integral firewall and Zyxel’s threat management services, and delivers them all at a tempting price. It looks particularly good value as the price includes a lifetime subscription to Zyxel’s Security Cloud, which enables (deep breath) a firewall, ransomware and malware prevention, VPN proxy, intrusion, dark web and ad blockers, application monitoring, GeoIP country restrictions and protection against mail fraud and phishing. An SCR Pro Pack licence adds the Trellix-powered real-time threat intelligence and web filtering services, with a one-year subscription costing around £40. The router comes with a magnetic…

What sort of cats do you have? I don’t mean the fluffy sort that like to walk across your keyboard at an inopportune moment; I mean the Ethernet cabling that you have in your walls, and between your various pieces of network equipment. What you need will depend on what you’re trying to do, of course. However, the specifications keep moving forward and it’s possible to go very fast over wired Ethernet if both your devices and cabling support it properly. Cat5E is now considered the basic standard cabling. It’s good for gigabit connections, which are used by the majority of client devices. It’s not unusual to have 2.5GbE or 10GbE on devices, but it most certainly is not the norm. You can run Cat5E for a long distance and…

Karen, a local yoga instructor, contacted me with the familiar tale of a slow computer. When I arrived to take a look, she explained she hadn’t turned it on, so I could see just how long it took to start. Many customers do this, and on most occasions, it doesn’t help me one jot. All I do is waste time watching paint dry until it’s booted, and then – and only then – can I dig in and see what needs doing. Having said that, I was glad Karen had kept hers switched off: this laptop was so sluggish that I could have learnt to become a yoga master long before it even hit the login screen. Something was definitely amiss, so while I sat and waited, I looked the…

PRICE Around £120 (if you can find one) Night after night for a few weeks in the late 1980s, I would gaze longingly at a photograph in a copy of Smash Hits magazine. To see this object of my desire, I needed to flick past numerous images of Debbie Gibson, Patsy Kensit, Belinda Carlisle and Kylie, but there was so much to take in and admire. For starters, there was a sleek-looking computer with a built-in 3in disk drive, a sturdy-looking joystick and a collection of 17 games with familiar names such as Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. There was a colour TV monitor and a clock/radio, all sitting upon a smart desk. Lying in a bed in a room bereft of entertainment, it felt like the stuff of dreams. At…

ON SALE Thursday 9 November Labs Smart home special We review the main smart home systems from Apple, Amazon, Google and the rest. Plus, what difference will Matter make, which smart plug should you buy and what about extras such as motion sensors? All this and more next month. Labs Mini £300-£500 Android phones To complete our roundups of affordable Android phones, we see what you can get if you increase your budget to over £300. Features How are you most likely to get hacked? From old-school viruses to sneaky phishing attacks, we explore the biggest online risks – and show how to protect yourself. AWARDS SPECIAL Next month is the big one: our Excellence Awards, where we corral feedback from over 9,000 readers to discover which companies are delivering…

It seemed innocent enough. The air-conditioning system needed its annual service. This was never particularly onerous: check the pressure levels, clean the air filters, give it a good spray of some suitably pungent smelling gloop. Move on. So there was no reason for the MD’s secretary to believe this booking was any different. It had been made with the usual company. The van arrived, the chap got on with his work. Everything was working just fine, he said. All was good, and the director hadn’t been disturbed because he was away at a client meeting. Possibly on a golf course. It was only a few months later that strange things started to happen. Quotations to established clients weren’t turning into orders. A surprise, but perhaps that’s just the economy. But…