Table of contents for April 2023 in PC Pro

I missed CES. For the first time in 15 years, I couldn’t attend, thanks to a thin red line that appeared on my Covid test strip the day before I was due to fly out. I felt fine, but after a quick consultation with the show organisers it was agreed that I shouldn’t put other showgoers (or fellow passengers) at risk. What followed was one of the most annoying weeks of my life. While Jon and Barry were scampering hither and thither to meetings, getting their hands on the latest kit and mixing with all the brainiacs that are normally tucked safely away in their Californian labs, I was stuck in my office shed. My first task? Send emails to AMD, HTC, Lenovo, LG, Nvidia and Razer to apologetically cancel…

When you buy an Apple product, it can often feel like a deal with the devil. On the one hand, you can be confident that your new device will be slick, intuitive and powerful. But on the other hand, you’re acquiescing to Apple’s locked down ecosystem of apps and services. Want to run an unapproved app on your new iPhone? Forget it. This is how it’s been since 2008, when the App Store first launched – since when apps have turned into an almost unfathomably lucrative business for Apple. In the year prior to Apple’s most recent financial statement, the store raked in a staggering $78 billion of services revenue, most of which is derived from the App Store. But if rumours are true, the gold rush could soon be…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She looks forward to AI replacing crappy writers, she just hopes she isn’t one of them. It’s not looking good, is it? @njkobie Text generators have been around for years now, but something has changed: they’ve finally become good. Where previous iterations required heavy editing, the latest version of ChatGPT from OpenAI uses better grammar than I. Sorry, me. But it has little creative spark. That’s due to how ChatGPT works. Its machine learning was trained on 570GB of text from Wikipedia, the internet and books. Churning through 300 billion words taught the system how sentences are structured, but not the creative process that led to them. While AI models can be trained on vast amounts of data and can recognise patterns and…

It was only my dear wife’s prompt action with the Heimlich manoeuvre that saved me at breakfast recently after I opened the March 2023 issue of PC Pro and read the Top Ten Programming Languages article (see issue 341, p42). Was this 2008 calling? The list had Visual Basic at the number 6 and JavaScript at the number 7 positions, and those two just strain the list’s credibility. Software analyst TIOBE’s methodology seems at odds with surveys from the likes of Red Monk, GitHub Octoverse, Reddit Language Subreddits and StackOverflow; all of those have JavaScript in first place and put C at around tenth place. Based on these four, a reasonable top ten list of programming languages might be closer to this (in order from one to ten): JavaScript, Python,…

Acer Swift 14 From £1,300, due Feb 2023 At a pre-show briefing, Acer described the 14 as its “flagship Swift product”, and that becomes obvious when you pick up its slender, 1.2kg, CNC-machined frame. It looks gorgeous in the flesh. As the name suggests, it includes a 14in panel, with the IPS version costing £1,300 and the OLED edition £1,500. Both specs include a Core i7-13700H, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, but the extra £200 also buys an upgrade from Nvidia’s RTX 3050 to RTX 3060 graphics. AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX Price not applicable, laptops shipping now AMD used CES to announce nine Ryzen 7000 chips for laptops, but it was the top-end Ryzen 9 7945HX that caught our attention. And talking of attention, you’ll need to pay…

MOS 6502 Founded in 1974 by former Motorola employees, MOS Technology set out to create a new processor architecture that would out-compete Motorola’s chips for a much lower price. With its focus on value, the 6502 became one of the most popular processors of the early home computing revolution. Used in: Apple II (1977), Atari 2600 (1977), BBC Micro (1981), Commodore 64 (1982), Nintendo Entertainment System (1983) Zilog Z80 Similar to the MOS 6502, the Z80 was created in the mid-1970s by a breakaway group of chip designers – in this case, former Intel engineers. Although it could run programs written for the Intel 8080, the Z80 added many enhancements that made it more powerful and easier to program, making it attractive for personal computers and video games. Used in:…

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

SCORE PRICE £1,167 (£1,400 inc VAT) from store.acer.com The Swift Edge is no iterative update: it’s Acer’s attempt to set a new bar for its premium laptops. And it’s worked. The chassis is 14mm thin and weighs 1.2kg thanks to reinforced aluminium alloy that allows the case to be lighter than previous Swift laptops without sacrificing durability. Then there’s the 16in AMOLED screen. It packs a 4K resolution (technically just above 4K, thanks to the 16:10 aspect ratio), covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut and supports HDR. Colours pop while blacks are deep, and the brightness is excellent in any environment. Beyond the screen, Acer offers a solid selection of ports for such a thin laptop: two USB-Cs and two USB-As cater for a miscellany of devices and drives, while…

SCORE PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from netgear.com/uk Netgear’s Orbi meshes aren’t cheap, but they typically offer excellent performance and a decent set of features. The latest model stretches the formula, though. It’s an update to the Orbi RBK852, Netgear’s first flagship Wi-Fi 6 mesh, but while it’s still very much priced as a flagship product, it brings only modest enhancements to the original design. Most notably, the Wi-Fi hardware hasn’t been upgraded at all. Most high-end meshes have moved to Wi-Fi 6E, but the RBK863S uses the same Wi-Fi 6 configuration as the RBK852. In fairness, it’s a beefy tri-band system, with 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections for clients, plus an additional 5GHz network that the mesh stations use to communicate with one another. The 5GHz networks both support 4x4…

SCORE PRICE £33 (£40 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk If the Logitech Brio 505 below is the deluxe BMW of 1080p webcams, the Kensington W1050 is a mainstream Ford. It even has the hint of a Model T to its square design, and it’s only available in black. The W1050’s default field of view is a wide 95°, and I recommend downloading Kensington’s Konnect software and experimenting with its basic zoom tool. As this simply crops into the image, however, what you gain in framing you lose in pixel density, so you may prefer the low-tech method of simply moving closer to the camera. That works fine if you’re using a laptop, but if you intend to attach this webcam to the top of your 32in monitor then you’ll find yourself…

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

Remember when choosing a laptop was simple? If you needed something for a business rollout, it could be any colour you like so long as it was black. And, for the vast majority of users, it would be big, boxy and pack all the sex appeal of a wet kipper. Then there was the distinctly different range of consumer laptops. If you were lucky these might come in different colours, but the only security feature of note would be the AV suite bundled along with so much c**pware you’d spend your first hour uninstalling it. Now, the divide between business laptops and consumer laptops is all but indistinguishable. A handful include Intel’s vPro processors, or AMD’s Ryzen Pro equivalent, which will both help IT departments when it comes to remote…

SCORE PRICE £892 (£1,070 inc VAT) from business.currys.co.uk There is much to love about this compact laptop. Weighing a shade over 1kg it’s one of the most portable machines here, and it backs this up with superb battery life: over 14 hours in our light-use test, and almost 13 hours of video playback. And it’s well-built, too, with a metal body. Its all-black finish, coupled with a slender 16.8mm height, only add to its attractions. Acer finds room for a 14in panel, with a modest but more than adequate 1,920 x 1,200 resolution. We would have liked whites to be purer – we found ourselves pumping it up to its maximum 366cd/m2 brightness to counteract a faint yellow bias – but its colour accuracy is among the best here. It…

SCORE PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from chillblast.com British manufacturers such as Chillblast and PCSpecialist don’t have the R&D resources to create their own laptop designs, so they must focus on specs and value to stand out. That’s immediately obvious here, with a stunning spec for £800: a Core i7-12700H processor, GeForce GTX 1650 graphics and a 1TB SSD wipe the floor when compared to rival sub-£1,000 laptops. This doesn’t mean the Apollo whipped its rivals in all our speed tests, however. As the graphs on p84 show, it topped the PCMark charts but was a more middling performer in the multicore tests, where we expected the i7-12700H’s six P-cores to excel. Perhaps it would have helped if the 16GB of DDR4 memory was split across both SODIMMs, but that…

SCORE PRICE £1,517 (£1,820 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Just as the ThinkPad range has proved to be in safe hands with Lenovo, so has the Portégé brand since Toshiba transitioned into Dynabook in 2019. The company’s laptops have consistently won awards in PC Pro since the change, and the X40L-K-101 is no exception. That’s because Dynabook squeezes a full-power, 28W Core i7-1260P into this slim laptop without any obvious sign of throttling: it’s a match for all the other 1260P-powered systems here, with a noteworthy assist from 32GB of LPDDR5 memory. That’s all the more incredible when you consider that it weighs a mere 1kg and its sizeable 65Wh battery kept it going for between 15 and 17 hours in our rundown tests. It even manages to look both sober…

SCORE PRICE £1,658 (£1,990 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com The HP Elite Dragonfly G3 has much in common with the Dynabook Portégé X40L-K-101. Not only is it extremely light and slim, it’s also stylish enough to earn a second glance of admiration. That will reveal details that might otherwise be missed, whether that’s the diamond-bevelled edges around the huge glass-coated touchpad or the subtle etching of “Dragonfly” beneath the keyboard and into the hinge. Where the laptops differ is their screens. The boring old 16:10 ratio has been replaced by a 3:2 13.5in panel, and even though in practice that only means 80 more vertical pixels, you’ll notice the extra space. HP also opts for a lesser processor, with the Core i7-1255U featuring two P-cores to the four inside the Core…

SCORE PRICE £1,431 (£1,717 inc VAT) from box.co.uk At a glance you might struggle to differentiate the T14s from its P14s sibling, but there’s an air of sophistication here that the P14s lacks. For instance, there’s a rubberised feel to the magnesium alloy shell, and while it’s only 1mm thinner it’s enough to make it look more stylish – all helped by weighing 100g less too. This machine includes Intel’s Evo badge of approval to go along with EPEAT Gold and TCO certification for above-average sustainability, with 100% recycled packaging and some post-consumer recycled plastics in evidence, too. Arguably what matters most, though, is longevity, and with a 12-core Intel Core i7-1260P chip inside it should keep going for many years. The 16GB of LPDDR5 memory is embedded, unfortunately, but…

SCORE PRICE £500 (£600 inc VAT) from laptopoutlet.co.uk The MSI Modern 15 is an unapologetically budget laptop, the cheapest here by some distance, but it still falls within MSI’s “business and productivity” range. It’s certainly built for getting things done rather than looking glamorous, with a number pad to the right and no shortage of ports: three USB-A, one USB-C (you can use this to power the laptop, but there’s a DC input too), a microSD card slot and an HDMI output. Surprisingly for the price, the Modern 15 B12M on test – one of two that MSI sells in the UK, identified by the part code B12M-026UK–includes a Core i7 processor. As ever, though, the devil is in the detail: the Core i7-1255U has two P-cores compared to four…

SCORE PRICE £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Is this is a “pro” laptop? The name suggests so, but like several others here, the Galaxy Book2 includes Windows 11 Home rather than Pro, so if you want to join a domain, encrypt disks using BitLocker or set up Hyper-V VMs then you’ll need to upgrade (£120 via the Windows Store, £80 if you use the PC Pro store at store.pcpro.co.uk). It won’t look out of place in a boardroom, with a silver metal chassis that measures a mere 11.9mm thick. We were pleased to see a Core i7-1260P in place too, and a pair of fans minimised throttling; in fact, the Galaxy topped the demanding PC Pro benchmark and wasn’t far behind rivals in Cinebench R23’s multicore test. Samsung provides a…

SCORE PRICE 100 nodes/interfaces, from £860 exc VAT per year from adremsoft.com SMBs that want a network monitoring solution that does all the hard work for them will love AdRem’s NetCrunch. We found it can be deployed in as little as 15 minutes, and once we’d added all our device credentials to the discovery wizard, it scanned our lab network and presented its findings in a very informative central console. The amount of detail gathered by network monitoring software can be overwhelming, but NetCrunch is able to organise this into easily digestible console views. It succeeds admirably, with the Atlas overview page using colour-coded icons for all monitored devices and services so you can see at a glance which ones have problems. The Top Charts tab presents graphical views of…

SCORE PRICE SL250 yearly licence, £2,915 exc VAT from solarwinds.com SolarWinds offers one of the most extensive ranges of network management products and its Network Performance Monitor (NPM) has always taken pride of place. This is no surprise: it offers a wealth of network troubleshooting and monitoring features all easily accessed from the same Orion web console that’s used by all its stablemates. You need to be careful with licensing, though, as it’s based on monitored elements, which can be nodes, interfaces and volumes. We’ve shown the price for an SL250 yearly subscription licence, which allows you to monitor up to 250 of each type, but if any one goes over this limit, you’ll need to upgrade to an SL500 licence, which pushes yearly costs to £4,594. New features in…

It’s nearly 50 years since the UK last suffered from sustained power blackouts; back then, very few businesses had computer equipment of any kind to worry about. Now, for a variety of reasons, the nation faces a potential energy shortage, and it’s been suggested that planned outages – perhaps from 4pm to 7pm on the coldest winter weekdays – could be necessary to manage the limited supply. Of course, it’s far from certain that things will come to that. Even so, the mere possibility of wide-ranging power cuts should make IT managers take notice. For decades we’ve been paying lip service to ideas of power management and resilience. Now it’s time to get serious about the prospect of spending at least a few hours with no electricity. Down together, up…

We need to talk about data. Specifically, your data and my data. The stuff we use on a day-to-day basis, from where we store it to what our expectations are for its safe handling. Now let me get one thing clear from the beginning: I am going to suggest some ways to approach this thorny issue, but this is not a complete or comprehensive set of solutions. It can’t be – every person and every business has different requirements, needs and pressures. I hope simply to cover the fundamentals about “our stuff” and how we look after it. Take responsibility It’s very easy to sit on the sidelines and throw stones at those who get it wrong, the people and businesses who suffer a catastrophic data failure. Some are the…

Last month I dedicated the entire column to the Mastodon federated social network, which is seeing a massive influx of new users looking for an alternative to Twitter. As part of all that, I looked at how you could verify your identity without paying either £8 (Android) or £11 (for iPhone users) for the privilege, using the <a rel="me" href="Mastodon address">text</a> web or blog code insertion method. But what if you wanted to verify that the Mastodon account is actually being operated by the same person as a Twitter account? The simple solution is to point to your Twitter profile in the Mastodon account profile meta section and include a clear link to your Mastodon account in your Twitter profile. While this works, and I do it myself, it does…

ON SALE Thursday 9 March 2023 Features Make AI work for you AI tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney and DALL-E are fun to play with, but they can do serious work, too. We explore how businesses are putting AI to work in industries as diverse as landscaping and product design. The chip wars The western tech companies are decoupling from China, but what’s really happening – and why? Whether it’s the UK government blocking sales of assets or TSMC opening a fab in Arizona, James O’Malley goes behind the headlines. Bluetooth: everything you will ever need to know What exactly is the difference between Bluetooth 5.1 and 5.2? Should it affect your buying decision? And what’s coming up in the future? Darien dives deep to find out. Labs Security suites…

Running a small business isn’t easy – I know, I have two of them. The testing lab is fortunate in having a close set of clients of many years, so advertising isn’t something we need to do. It’s all word of mouth and recommendations. The food company that I run with my husband Andre is different. This is public-facing, and it’s a lot of work to do marketing, trade and public shows, and operate an e-shop for direct sales to customers. This latter part has been a topic of considerable discussion recently. We have two brands with two websites: Manfood at welovemanfood.com and Janda at jandafood.com. We set up Janda to be a vegan-focused product range, with the name Janda stemming from “Jon And Andre”. But the initial branding was…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in NEW ENTRY 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 Dell XPS 15 (2022) NEW ENTRY Surely the best Windows all-rounder money can buy, with a slim design, gaming potential and plenty of power courtesy of Intel’s 12th gen Core processors. And the AMOLED panel is gorgeous. From £1,950 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 337, p54 Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 (15.6in) Don’t be fooled by its price: this is a true premium laptop, with a metal chassis, Core…

BarryCollins is the co-editor of Bigtechquestion.com and now an enormous fan of nitrous oxide (for medicinal use only). @bazzacollins Far be it for me to start dispensing lifestyle advice, but if I can offer one tip, it’s this: don’t put the bins out in the snow while wearing your slippers. For it was this kamikaze scenario that resulted in me slipping, dislocating my shoulder and spending the next few weeks either in a sling or with very limited use of my right arm. I know. This kind of advice is worth the magazine cover price alone, right? Of course, for a freelance journalist working for Tyrant Danton, taking more than a couple of days off to recuperate wasn’t an option. Our boss makes Jeff Bezos look like Gandhi. And so,…

Podcasts have come a long way in the 16 years since PC Pro broadcast its first, with our survey suggesting that two out of three PC Pro readers now regularly listen to the medium. Peter Jones is a convert, listening to “several martial arts podcasts, the The onefourseven Podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish, The Rest is Politics, some nursing podcasts… My favourite is the PC Pro podcast, which may seem like sycophancy but it’s because that’s the podcast with which I have the most interaction. It feels like myself, Michael Dear, Dartiss and others are part of the broader team. Recurring characters if you will.” Thanks Peter – and it’s true that the PC Pro podcast is a welcoming tribe, so if you haven’t joined us live, then…

You might not think you need another firewall. The one built into Windows is working all the time in the background to protect individual computers, and many routers have their own firewalls to protect the whole network. But running your own custom firewall has several benefits: it gives you more flexibility, and better oversight of what’s going on in the background. It’s also easier to set up than you might think. You don’t need specialist hardware, and you don’t need to pay for firewall software. The open-source pfSense firewall is free for personal use, with a graphical interface for administration and all the same features as the enterprise version (the difference is that you don’t get commercial support). You can run it in a virtual machine on any PC on…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index SCORE PRICE Matte, £483 (£579 inc VAT) from uk.redmagic.gg Why is PC Pro devoting three pages to a gaming phone? The answer lies within: this is the debut for Qualcomm’s most powerful silicon yet, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Qualcomm claims a trio of benefits: a 25% boost in performance in daily tasks, 30% for games and a 45% improvement in power efficiency. It even supports Wi-Fi 7. It remains an eight-core chip, but where before the prime core (now the Cortex-X3) was accompanied by three performance cores and four efficiency cores, this year there are four performance cores and three geared for efficiency. They’re all clocked faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chips but share the same…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £3,083 (£3,699 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk 2023’s Apple MacBook Pro 16in update is both surprising and expected. Apple caught all of us cold by announcing it, along with an updated 14in MacBook Pro and Mac mini (reviews of those next month), via a couple of press releases at the tail end of January. A glamorous launch at the company’s Cupertino headquarters this was not. While the timing and manner of the launch was surprising, the fact that Apple was updating 2021’s critically acclaimed MacBook Pro 16in (see issue 321, p61) wasn’t. With the launch of the M2 chip last year, it was only a matter of time before we saw the more powerful M2 Pro and M2 Max. What’s changed The new 16in MacBook Pro is…

SCORE PRICE From £666 (£799 inc VAT) from store.nvidia.com The RTX 4070 Ti is a card that shouldn’t have been. Not yet, at least. Nvidia originally launched this as a 12GB version of the RTX 4080 (see issue 340, p62), but the negative media and public reaction to its specs and proposed£949pricemeantitwas rapidly “unlaunched”. So, the core specs and hardware haven’t changed; only the RTX 4070 Ti name and reduced price are new. But, compared to previous GeForce cards with a 70 suffix, its price sets an unwelcome precedent. The GTX 970 cost around £259, rising to £399 for the GTX 1070, then £469 for the RTX 2070 and 3070. The launch price of the 3070 Ti was £529. Or you can look at it another way. RTX 4090 cards…

SCORE PRICE Celeron, £125 (£150 inc VAT); Pentium, £180 (£216 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk While it’s easy to be swept away by Intel’s Core i9 chips and high-power computers such as the new MacBook Pro (see p48), there are some tasks that simply don’t need that much firepower. Especially if the PCs are going to be left on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, chugging through undemanding tasks. That’s the central idea behind Intel’s NUC 11 Essential mini PCs. They’re designed for scenarios where you switch the device on and then forget about it, perhaps for years. Think digital signage, media streaming, shared storage. Start totting up the numbers and power consumption becomes far more important than how many highperformance cores are on hand. Intel sent us two…

SCORE PRICE £91 (£109 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com This webcam’s formal name is the Brio 505 Business, with Logitech envisaging its use alongside VC siblings such as the Rally Bar Mini (see issue 340, p97). Your IT team can then manage devices using Logitech Sync – including personal ones, such as the Brio, if used at a worker’s home. If users prefer to handle updates themselves then Logi Tune is at the ready. Alongside firmware update options, this allows people to take manual control of settings such as brightness, contrast and sharpness. Of these, the only setting I played with was sharpness, with Logitech leaning towards a softer, blurrier image – flattering but not 100% realistic. By default, the Brio sticks with the maximum 90° field of view, but you…

SCORE PRICE Part of Adobe Creative Cloud subscription or £17 (£20 inc VAT) per month from adobe.com Adobe Animate can trace its origins back to 1996, when it was known as FutureSplash Animator. This was before Macromedia acquired it and rebranded it as Flash. Before you go running for the hills, this isn’t a sneaky way to bring Flash back. Instead, Adobe took the best elements of that long dead platform and turned it into an excellent 2D animation tool, updating it and improving it along the way. You can subscribe to Animate as a single, standalone app, but that doesn’t make sense at £20 per month. We cover it here because you may well already subscribe to one of Adobe’s Creative Cloud packages, some of which bundle this animation…

SCORE PRICE £1,333 (£1,600 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk This ExpertBook is one of two laptops on test with an OLED screen, and in many ways it’s spectacular. Its colour coverage is literally off the charts, going well beyond the sRGB standard gamut and covering 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut. Colour accuracy is superb, and if you’ll be using this laptop to watch films or edit photos you’ll be blown away. Its resolution even goes beyond 4K, with 3,840 x 2,400 pixels, and we always appreciate a touchscreen, too. If you’ll be working in Excel and Word for long periods, however, you might prefer an IPS screen. There’s a slight “fuzz” to white backgrounds at the pixel level, and despite colour temperature control in the MyAsus app we couldn’t tweak it…

SCORE PRICE £983 (£1,179 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The obvious question to ask before buying the Inspiron 16 7620 is whether you’ll use its 2-in-1 facility. That means the screen can twist round for you to use it as a huge tablet, or simply stick it into tent mode; the size of the screen comes into its own for presentations, for instance. If you want to add extra punch to colours then play around with the CinemaColor options in the excellent My Dell software, which also gives access to SupportAssist (to keep drivers up to date, for instance). However, this app is geared towards home users, as is the Inspiron range as a whole. For example, while Dell supplied our test unit with Windows 11 Pro, if you’re buying direct…

SCORE PRICE £553 (£664 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com We’ll be frank: if you’re given this laptop as part of a business rollout, then you're not sitting in the executive tier of your company. Where the Tecra below, with its metal lid and pleasant keyboard, exudes the air of a Tesco Finest machine, the Satellite Pro sits squarely in the Tesco Value aisle. This will become obvious the moment you lay eyes on its 14in screen. On paper, and even in many of our technical tests, it isn’t too different to that of the Tecra, but in real-world use there’s a chasm of quality between them. And, as you will see from the review below, we weren’t overly taken by the Tecra’s screen. For example, although we measure the contrast of…

SCORE PRICE £1,305 (£1,566 inc VAT) from rapteq.com HP offers a staggeringly large array of business laptops, with the 800 series sitting in the mid-range. If you want lower prices, choose the 600 series; for the lightest designs, head to the 1040 or Dragonfly series. Even within the 800 series there’s a huge choice, so if you prefer a 2-in-1 design or AMD chips there will be something for you. The 840 G9 is based on Intel’s 12th generation Core chips, in this case the i7-1255U. With only two performance cores, it’s no match for the i7-1260P in tasks that exploit multiple threads (see our Geekbench and Cinebench results on p84), but it will blast through everyday jobs with ease. Its low power demands also helped the 840 G9 last…

SCORE PRICE £1,483 (£1,779 inc VAT) from microsoft.co.uk Microsoft takes an unusual approach to its business laptop line-up. Where Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo all offer dedicated business ranges, the Surface Laptop 5 for Business is exactly the same piece of hardware as the consumer Surface Laptop 5. The only difference is that you’re charged an extra £80, get Windows 11 Pro rather than Home, and there are rollout options for larger businesses. The Sage and Sandstone finishes are also off the table: you’re restricted to the Platinum finish with an Alcantara keyboard or the all-black metal version. Both look suitably professional, and as you’ll know from our in-depth review last month the black version is a particularly striking piece of hardware. The screen literally shines versus much of…

SCORE PRICE £625 (£750 inc VAT) from laptopoutlet.co.uk If you’re looking for a game-playing laptop for £750, then type “MSI Prestige 14-A12UC” into your browser right now: you won’t find a better deal, assuming that others haven’t beaten you to it. That money buys you a tasty combo of Core i5-1240P processor and GeForce RTX 3050 graphics, which were enough to easily push this laptop to the top of our gaming charts. It even averaged 59fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the 14in screen’s native 1080p resolution. Whether it’s truly a laptop for professionals is more questionable, but there are arguments in its favour. For one, that graphics chip gives it a big advantage in any apps optimised as part of Nvidia’s Studio initiative (think 3ds Max, Autodesk…

How we test We measure speed using a range of tests. PC Pro’s own benchmarks assess how quickly each system can process a set of image and video files, and handle multiple workloads while simultaneously playing high-definition video. We also test using the industry-standard PCMark 10benchmark, and employ the synthetic Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 5 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 also test 3D performance, again using both real-world and synthetic software. In this case we run Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p with High detail settings (and DLSS at Quality if offered), Civilization VI: Gathering Storm at 1080p with its default (medium) settings, plus the DirectX 12 benchmark 3DMark…

SCORE PRICE 1,000 sensors, 1yr maintenance, €2,499 exc VAT from paessler.com Paessler’s PRTG is probably one of the most versatile network monitoring products on the market thanks to its simple sensorbased licensing. Just choose the sensor pack you require and it can be assigned to anything on the network you want PRTG to keep a close eye on. And when we say anything, we mean it. The PRTG 22.4 on review currently offers 284 different types of sensor covering almost every type of network device, server, workstation, hardware component, service and business application. Value looks even better, since the price includes sensors for monitoring VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Nutanix virtualisation hosts – features some competing vendors charge extra for. Even better, higher level functions such as NetFlow, sFlow and…

SCORE PRICE £625 exc VAT from openreality.co.uk EnGenius offers businesses a fine choice of wireless access points (APs) and the ECW336 is its most powerful yet. This tri-band AP supports the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and Wi-Fi 6E 6GHz bands, as well as the 6GHz high-speed 160MHz channels, and boasts a maximum throughput of 8.4Gbits/sec, giving it an impressive AX8400 rating. The ECW336 presents 12 spatial streams spread equally across the three radios, claiming top speeds of 1,184Mbits/sec, 2,400Mbits/sec and 4,800Mbits/sec respectively. EnGenius ensures there are no bottlenecks to worry about, as the ECW336 is the first SMB-class AP we’ve seen to sport a 5GbE multigigabit network port. The network port supports PoE+ and that’s how you’re expected to power it; although there’s a power jack alongside, an adapter isn’t included. For…

We’re only just buying into the internet of things – do we have to invest in a load of additional gadgets for another new internet? Fear not – the internet of behaviours isn’t a network in its own right. Rather, it’s a targeted business tool, which piggy-backs on the existing internet of things. The idea is to use smart sensors and appliances to collect data, then combine that with behavioural science and edge analytics to illuminate the ways in which your customers reach buying decisions. Is this about “nudging” customers towards profitable behaviours? Because that raises some ethical questions. I fully agree that data-driven behavioural science needs to be handled with care. But this particular mash-up of economics, psychology, statistics and technology is actually quite respectful of the customer. Rather…

Apple learned the hard way in 2012 that taking on Google Maps is not an easy task. After launch, Apple Maps quickly earned a reputation for dodgy data and pointing travellers in the wrong direction. Instead of taking the mapping crown, it consigned itself to the pack of also-rans, alongside rivals such as Bing Maps and Nokia’s Here Maps. A decade on, Google’s rivals are trying again. And this time they’ve decided to work together. The Overture Maps Foundation has been established by the Linux Foundation, and counts Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and TomTom among its founding Avengers. “The real reason maps are hard to build is the data,” said Marc Prioleau, the digital maps veteran who has worked at Uber, Mapbox and now Meta, who is one of the people…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. Although he refutes Samuel Johnson’s refuting argument, he likes the good doctor really. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk My column last month was a semi-temperate rant, triggered by sensationalist reporting of advances in cosmology and particle physics by the mainstream press (the “wormhole in a quantum computer” effect). I attributed this to the coming of age of generations reared on Star Wars and the Marvel Universe, which induces deep longings to flout the laws of physics. Readers of a philosophical bent may have concluded from this column that I’m a red-faced, harrumphing old British empiricist who lumbers around the world kicking things and shouting “I refute it thus!” but nothing could be further from the truth. By “further from the truth” I mean my philosophical…

Importance of being Ethernet Following your recent review of printers (see issue 341, p74), I bought a Brother MFC-J4340DW. I am very pleased with the printing ability and general facilities. However, it relies on Wi-Fi for network connections and has no wired Ethernet port. This is a problem as Wi-Fi will drop a connection due to inactivity. It appears that Brother has solved the problem with the Windows driver, but my access from Linux and Android was seriously curtailed. I have hopefully got a successful workaround in which I periodically ping the printer (on a static IP) via a cron job in order to stop the network connection sleeping. The printer itself still goes into sleep mode. The moral of this story is that if the printer is to be…

After two years of being wiped out or severely hampered by the pandemic, the world’s biggest tech show bounced back with a vengeance in January. The Las Vegas halls were once again flooded with more than 100,000 visitors, all eager to find out what the future holds for the industry in the year to come. PC Pro’s correspondents were among them, jostling for elbow space on the showfloor and shuttling between hotel suites for behind-the-scenes briefings. In the week we spent in Las Vegas, we saw hundreds of new products and had time to take in the wider tech trends that were emerging. Here, then, we bring you the nine things we learned from CES 2023. Consider them our guide to what CES revealed about the direction of the tech…

If you’re buying a new computer, there are two main processor architectures to choose between. Windows PCs are normally built on the x86 platform, used by Intel and AMD, while Apple’s computers use the company’s M1 and M2 processors, based on the ARM architecture. In this article, we explore the differences between their approaches, and what that means in practice. Instruction sets The x86 and ARM processor platforms do the same basic job, but they do it in different ways. Their internal logic is wired up in different arrangements, with different configurations of internal data registers and different sets of hard-coded instructions. At a fundamental level, they run programs in different ways and use different code. On the x86 platform, the internal structure and instruction set of the processor is…

SCORE PRICE 512GB, £1,250 exc VAT (£1,500 inc VAT) from lenovo.com The one previous time we’ve seen Intel’s Core i7-1280P processor was in Dell’s XPS 13 Plus (see issue 337, p52), where it disappointed. This is a far more convincing outing for the chip, which has big numbers in all the right places: six high-performance cores, 14 in total, plus peaks of 4.8GHz. Multicore scores of 9,620 in Cinebench R23 and 11,424 in Geekbench 5 are tribute to its power. This is due not only to a fast Gen4 M.2 SSD and 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, but also to Lenovo prioritising cooling over sleekness; you will occasionally hear the low whirr of its two meaty fans. Yet the Slim still lives up to its name at 14.9mm thick, leaving Lenovo…

SCORE PRICE £248 (£297 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk While most major networking brands embraced the Wi-Fi 6E standard last year, Linksys has been notably absent from the party. Now at last the company’s first 6GHz-capable router has landed in the PC Pro offices. We’re not celebrating too much, though: the Hydra Pro 6E was released in the US back in late 2021, so it’s hard not to feel a little snubbed that it’s taken so long to make its way across the Pond. Still, the Hydra Pro 6E makes a strong entrance. The design is shiny and stylish, with four rectangular antennas and a moody blue LED at the front. And the Wi-Fi 6E specification is impeccable: the Hydra Pro 6E supports 4x4 MIMO and a 160MHz channel width on…

SCORE PRICE £22 (£26 inc VAT) from thepihut.com Up to this point, standard Raspberry Pi camera modules have been fine rather than great. Now the Camera Module 3 introduces a 12MP Sony IMX708 sensor, which matches the resolution of the £57 High Quality Camera Module, while keeping the smaller sensor-on-a-board form factor. It also features autofocus for the first time, along with a new HDR mode that captures multiple images of a scene with different exposure settings, then combines them into a single image with greater tonal detail. There are four flavours of Camera Module 3 to choose from: standard, wide angle, NoIR and NoIR wide angle. The NoIR designation doesn’t refer to moody cinema, but rather that the camera doesn’t have an infrared filter; counter-intuitively, this means it’s sensitive…

SCORE PRICE 2TB, £413 (£496 inc VAT) from westerndigital.com The SanDisk Professional brand is aimed at customers with specialist needs, and here that means resilience on the move. As you might expect, it’s not cheap. The build quality certainly goes above and beyond. The metal housing provides up to 1.8 tonnes of crush resistance, while a tough rubberised coating on the sides and bottom helps the drive survive drops of up to three metres. It’s also IP68 dust/water resistant. SanDisk’s confidence in its engineering is evidenced by a five-year warranty. SanDisk doesn’t include a pouch for the drive, nor a USB Type-C to Type-A cable or adapter. All you get is a short double-ended Type-C cable; for the price, it’s a disappointingly minimal package. The Pro-G40 isn’t just rugged –…

SCORE PRICE £640 (£768 inc VAT) from laptopoutlet.co.uk The TravelMate P2 has no false airs and graces: it’s a basic business laptop and doesn’t pretend to be anything different. You’re buying an expansive 15.6in, 16:9 ratio screen, a well-made but plastic chassis, and in the case of the particular model on test a middle-ofthe-road specification. Thanks to the excellence of Intel’s 12th generation Core chips, that doesn’t translate into slow performance, however. The two P-cores and eight E-cores in the Core i5-1235U are enough to blitz through Windows 11 Pro (or the supplied Windows 10 Pro), and we would expect it to stay snappy for many years. It helps that you can add to the supplied 8GB of RAM via an empty slot, but you’ll need to replace the 256GB…

SCORE PRICE £1,292 (£1,550 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk There is much to like about the ExpertBook B7 Flip. Top of the list is its 14in screen, which impresses both with clear whites and colour accuracy. Then there’s a sharp 2,560 x 1,600 resolution and support for touch. While it can’t match the B5 OLED for colour coverage, with 97% of the sRGB gamut and 71% of DCI-P3, we’d be delighted to stare at the B7 Flip’s screen every day. The screen can fold around to turn the B7 into a gigantic tablet – or, more likely, to put it in tent mode. Asus includes its Pen stylus with the Flip, and it can magnetically attach to the side of the screen. It’s a nice feature, but a 1.5kg machine feels…

SCORE PRICE £2,261 (£2,713 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Back in the day, a Dell Latitude was built like a tank and looked like one. Pick up the Latitude 9330 and you can feel that heritage in the rigidity of its magnesium chassis, but a 14.1mm thickness and 1.2kg weight put most of its corporate rivals to shame. Only the sober grey finish serves as a visible reminder of the 9330’s boardroom ambitions. Perhaps surprisingly, it includes a glossy screen rather than matte. Dell does a great job with its anti-glare coating, however, so while overhead lighting is visible it’s rarely annoying. And the quality of the 13.3in panel is beyond dispute, with peak brightness of over 500cd/m2, superb accuracy and excellent colour coverage: 85% of the DCI-P3 gamut. By cramming…

SCORE PRICE £949 (£1,139 inc VAT) from uk.dynabook.com While the Portégé (see p77) sits at the top of Dynabook’s range, the Tecra nestles one rung below. That means you enjoy more luxuries than with a Satellite Pro, but adjectives such as “featherlight” and “svelte” can rest easy. Not that the Tecra is unattractive or hefty: at 1.5kg and 15.9mm thick it will slip into a rucksack without making you feel like you’ve entered the World’s Strongest Man trials. It held its own in our battery-life tests, with all indications being that it will last a day (just!) away from the mains. Dynabook supplies a compact 65W DC power supply, but it will charge equally happily through either of the USB-C ports that sit on the left-hand side. These both support…

SCORE PRICE £1,297 (£1,549 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk Lenovo’s P series of laptops is designed for speed, with more expensive configurations than this offering discrete work-stationclass Nvidia processors to tie in with its ISV certification. The P14s is a slimline version, which means less powerful chips and – in this case at least – integrated graphics. But don’t imagine it’s slow: turn to the graphs and you will see the ThinkPad P14s vying for top position in many tests. That’s despite the fact it includes a Ryzen 5 processor with six cores compared to the 12 found in the Core i7-1260P, with AMD’s strength due to them all being fast performance cores. Lenovo supports the AMD Ryzen Pro chip with 16GB of high-bandwidth LPDDR5 memory, although this is soldered to…

SCORE PRICE £1,399 (£1,679 inc VAT) from microsoft.co.uk The Surface Pro 9 stands alone this month for one obvious reason: it’s a tablet rather than a laptop. The price above doesn’t even include a stylus or keyboard, but merely the supplied specification of a Core i7-1265U processor, 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. For £1,679 inc VAT, that’s on a par with Scrooge for generosity. If you’re willing to put up with a 256GB SSD then you might as well stick with the entry-level Core i5 and 8GB of RAM for around £500 less. Not that we’re complaining about our test unit’s turn of speed, with the Surface Pro 9 rubbing shoulders with similarly specified laptops despite the slenderness of its 9.3mm chassis. It’s ludicrously light, too, weighing 850g; even…

SCORE PRICE £749 (£899 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews The Acer TravelMate P2, Dynabook Satellite Pro and PCSpecialist Lafité Pro are all attempting to answer the same question: how to deliver a great-value 15.6in business laptop for under £1,000. Each has their own strengths, with the Lafité Pro’s stemming from the screen. While it looks identical to those rivals on paper, with a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, this good-quality panel covers 80% of the sRGB gamut. It’s also more accurate, while a native colour temperature of 6999K means whites look suitably white. The Lafité Pro sits above the Acer and Dynabook machines in terms of specification, with Intel’s ever-popular Core i7-1260P in place alongside Iris Xe graphics. Add 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory and you can expect a nippy machine for…

An essential IT support role is monitoring network health and providing a rapid response service to ensure problems or faults don’t impact on business productivity. This can be a big ask for IT managers in small businesses, as shrinking budgets in these challenging times may mean they could be a department of one. It doesn’t need to be difficult, however: network monitoring software can keep support staff at the top of their game. The best products will tell you precisely what’s on the network, how well it’s performing, and alert you to any issues as soon as they happen. The good news for small IT departments is that there are plenty of affordable products available today, all capable of providing a wealth of information about network, device and application health.…

SCORE PRICE 50 devices, Premium, yearly licence, £1,309 exc VAT from whatsupgold.com Progress Software neatly avoids any confusion over licensing, with prices for its WhatsUp Gold (WUG) 2022 Premium edition being based only on the number of monitored devices. Unlike sensor- or element-based products, you won’t need to worry about the number of CPUs in a host or how many ports your switches have, and you can choose between yearly subscriptions or a perpetual licence. WUG 2022 brings in plenty of new features. It now can send alert notifications to Microsoft Teams groups and users, access security is even tighter, the WUG dashboards offer new customisation features for greater visibility, the log management service provides regulatory compliant archiving and new reports are provided for checking device state changes over selected…

SCORE PRICE £1,399 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel’s XMG1930-30HP could be the perfect partner for SMBs seeking a multi-gigabit Power over Ethernet (PoE) switch that has every angle covered. This 1U rack mount switch offers a total of 30 ports with a wide range of speeds and PoE feeds, a generous 700W power budget and a choice of two management modes. The first 20 copper ports support 100Mbits/sec, 1GbE and 2.5GbE connections all with 30W PoE+; the next four have the same speeds but increase delivery to 60W PoE++; while the next four add 5GbE and 10GbE support and also present PoE++ services. The final two are standard 10GbE SFP+ ports for high-speed fibre uplinks over longer distances. That big power budget means there’s plenty of headroom for a lot…

ORDER TODAY:\ magazinesdirect.com/PDV/B23R 0330 3331113 QUOTE CODE: B23R Other great reasons to subscribe … • Every issue of PC Pro delivered direct to your door. Save up to 27% with each monthly issue• The UK’s most in-depth and trusted reviews• Exclusive and in-depth analysis from IT experts Our simple 3 Month Best Offer breaks up the annual subscription into four easily manageable payments over the course of the year. PRINT EDITION £10.24 every 3 months Get 12 issues of PC Pro in print over 12 months and save35% ANNUAL PRINT + DIGITAL EDITION £13.99 every 3 months Get 12 issues of PC Pro over 12 months in print and digital, and save 41% DIGITAL EDITION £5.49 every 3 months Get 12 issues of PC Pro in digital over the course of…

PC Pro readers who have ventured into our shop will testify that it’s not a capacious space. To stop the clutter, we impose a 90-day limit on machines to be collected after works are complete as we haven’t got the room to keep it all. The same is true for the special cases that I save for the pages of PC Pro. At this time of year, I like to clean out the prospects folder and present a smörgåsbord of mini workshop tales that didn’t make it to the newsstands. Probably the worst laptop… in the world! Let’s begin with a laptop manufacturer that you may not be familiar with, Quilltec. This one had been bought second-hand, but when the vendor vanished from the face of the earth, it was…

Acure for paralysis and blindness that could one day allow humans to level up their own cognition – and all you have to do is trust the tech’s most tempestuous CEO to plonk an implant into your brain. Elon Musk’s Neuralink has ambitions as lofty as SpaceX’s dream of a mission to Mars and Tesla’s fantasy of driverless cars. Founded in 2016, Neuralink is building an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) that would allow computers to read neural signals. That could, in theory, help anyone suffering paralysis, blindness, dementia or other brain diseases, but Musk also sees the technology as valuable to boost human capabilities. “It’s like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch, for lack of a better analogy,” he said at a recruitment demonstration known as “Show…