Table of contents for April 2024 in PC Pro

“Oh Alice’s Adventures in dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” So said the White Rabbit in Wonderland, and I can only assume that Lewis Carroll had access to both a time machine and mind-reading equipment, because that’s precisely what I feel every month at this point. The magazine has to go to press! There’s too much to do! If only some kind of magical creature could help! Well, that creature has arrived, and it is neither furry, nor white, nor the wearer of a waistcoat. Of course, I’m talking about AI. I currently subscribe to Copilot Pro and Google’s Gemini equivalent, and in theory they could certainly whip up 600 words for this column; all I would need to do, like a certain mouse in Fantasia if I…

Whether you’re a believer or not, it’s hard to deny that since the explosion of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, we’re living through an era of significant financial innovation. From distributed ledgers to smart contracts and NFTs, crypto has pioneered new ways of doing business – for better or for worse. That’s why the traditional banking system is worried. And it’s why central banks are starting to explore what their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) might look like. That includes the Bank of England (BoE), which recently published its thoughts on how to create Britain’s own “digital pound”. It might sound like little more than press-release posturing, but there could be considerable upsides to Britain developing its own digital currency. And big risks if we don’t. ■ On the…

Do you want to know how to stay private online? I can tell you, but don’t ask to see my own settings. I’ve been writing about technology so long that certain how-to pieces can’t help but repeat. Some of that is the cyclical nature of the industry – how many AI boom and bust cycles will we endure before we learn to stop hyping the idea beyond its capabilities? – but it also reflects the nature of the challenges created by the rise of the web, smartphones, social media and so on. After all, Facebook turns 20 this year, and Mark Zuckerberg’s executives still haven’t solved privacy issues on the social media giant. So it’s no surprise that one of the topics I keep coming back to is online privacy.…

If you want an example of what not to use Copilot for in PowerPoint, then I have just the thing. You might think that asking Copilot Pro to “create a presentation about Copilot Pro in PowerPoint” would be an easy win for the AI. You would think wrong: instead, it came up with a presentation about a fictitious piece of software that appears to combine advanced aircraft flight planning with a collision avoidance system – which it illustrated with a picture of a car. Of all the Office applications, PowerPoint probably benefits least from Copilot Pro when it comes to creating documents from scratch. This is down to it not having one of the key features that business users of Copilot get: the ability to take a Word document and…

There are three key features in Copilot for Outlook: summarisation, drafting and coaching. Summarisation is probably the feature you’ll encounter first, as every email you receive has a prominent “Summary by Copilot” bar at the top. Click on this, and it creates a short, easy-to-read summary of the key points in the email. How useful this will be depends on the kind of mail you get. But if you spend a long time reading complex emails and trying to work out what the point is, you’ll love it. The second main feature, drafting, is like the drafting feature in Word, in that you give it a prompt and it writes the email for you. You can vary the tone using pop-up options – direct, neutral, casual, formal or, erm, “make…

The past few years have been boom times for British broadband customers. More than a hundred smaller fibre providers – so-called “altnets” – have sprung up across the country, installing fibre-to-the-premises and offering it to new customers at knock-down rates. Symmetrical gigabit broadband for £25 per month? Where do I sign? The emergence of the altnets, combined with expanding fibre networks from both Openreach and Virgin Media, have rapidly enlarged the UK’s fibre footprint. The majority (57%) of British homes now have access to full-fibre, according to Ofcom figures published in December, covering 17 million homes. That’s up from 42% of homes only a year before. However, the boom may be coming to an end. Having burned through their venture capital funding, many altnets are now focusing on getting customers…

The Heat Map app reports your Wi-Fi signal strength in negative numbers, typically ranging from around -80 to -40. This may seem rather arbitrary, but there is a logic to it. The measurements are in decibel-milliwatts (dBm), where 0dBm means the strength of the received signal is equivalent to one milliwatt of power. The scale is logarithmic, so -10dBm represents 0.1mW of power, -20dBm represents 0.01mW and so forth. The dBm scale itself has no upper or lower limit, but most Wi-Fi gear has a maximum radio transmission power of -30dBm. In practice, any measurement above -50dBm can be considered a good, strong signal, and should get you close to the full performance your hardware is capable of. Weaker signals are still usable, but are more susceptible to transmission errors,…

PRICE From $3,499 from apple.com (US only for now) “What the heck is happening?” That’s what I said to myself as I played virtual DJ, spinning two records in front of me with a crossfade knob and special effects I could control with my hands in mid-air. I just reached out and touched them. I had a similar what-the-heck moment — in a good way — when I just looked at my MacBook to connect and supersize its display on the wall in front of me. Then I pinned the Apple Music app to the left of my desk and Slack to the right. This is what Apple means by spatial computing. And I was left almost speechless when I viewed a 3D spatial video of my three dogs coming…

PRICE As reviewed, £3,608 (£4,329 inc VAT) from lenovo.com (before discounts) Eighteen months. That’s how long ago Lenovo announced the ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 Gen 1 – or the X1 Fold Gen 2 as it was then called – at IFA 2022. That was at roughly the same time that Asus’ Zenbook 17 Fold (see issue 338, p50) went on sale for £3,300. Anyone who appreciates fine engineering, however, won’t care a jot. Close the bendable 16in screen and it snaps shut like an Audi door, and the hinge is so sturdy that it always stayed locked at my chosen angle. As the photos here make clear, the X1 Fold 16 doubles as an all-in-one PC courtesy of a separate stand, can be oriented in portrait or landscape, and works…

PRICE 512GB, £1,416 (£1,699 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Glance at the Galaxy Book4 Pro 16in and you may be fooled into thinking it’s the 16in MacBook Pro (see issue 342, p48). It channels the same industrial chic, with a metal shell barely interrupted by design touches – unless you count a discreet Samsung logo on the lid – while a huge touchpad dominates the space below the keyboard. But it doesn’t take long to spot the differences, starting with price: the Book4 Pro starts at £1,699, compared to £2,599 for its rival. This is also a supremely sleek laptop, measuring 12.5mm from top to bottom. Despite this, Samsung packs in a great selection of ports, with two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C 4 sockets on the left alongside an HDMI 2.1 output that…

PRICE £1,417 (£1,700 inc VAT) from hihonor.com/uk Honor has kept us waiting for the Magic V2, launching it in China way back in July 2023. I suspect it has spent much of that time refining the software that folding phones need to make them worthwhile, and while Honor still falls behind Samsung for slickness, the Magic V2 offers one big compensation: its compactness. Because the Magic V2 is light years ahead of its key rival, the Galaxy Z Fold5 (see issue 349, p68), in terms of slimness and weight. A fact made even more stark for me as I had been using the Fold5 for several weeks before the Honor Magic V2 arrived for testing. ■ It’s a phone, Jim The biggest difference between the two is that the Honor…

PRICE 2TB, £249 (£299 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com LaCie has many similar-looking external drives, but if you’re looking for the new, compact Rugged Mini – announced at CES 2024 – then ensure you buy one with a code that starts with STMF. For instance, the 2TB model reviewed here is the STMF2000400. It’s pocketable, supports 20Mbits/sec USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2 mode and is IP54-rated for water and dust protection. The bold orange rubberised bumper both looks distinctive and gives extra protection: LaCie claims it can survive a 1m drop (on the box and in the brochure; the website states 3m) and one tonne of car-crushing resistance. You can remove the bumper, which makes it both slimmer and easier to see the recessed activity LED, but doing so sacrifices the IP54…

Here’s the basic question this Labs aims to answer: is it worth spending money on a security suite when Windows Defender does the job for free? Our answer: yes, probably. At the very least, you should consider one of the free alternatives. Turn to p89 for more on that topic. However, there isn’t a straightforward answer that’s right for everyone. Some people might find it simpler to stick with Windows as it does the job, even if it can’t match the top antimalware for protection levels. Some may find the upgrade nags in the free alternatives unbearably annoying. It’s also well worth dipping into your pocket for the right product and the right reasons. It can provide an affordable route to VPNs, which could be extremely useful for those times when…

DIRECT PRICE 10 devices, £67 (£80 inc VAT) from avg.com RETAIL PRICE 10 devices, 2yrs, £25 (£30 inc VAT) from store.pcpro.co.uk AVG Ultimate is functionally identical to Avast Ultimate. They use the same engine, have the same tools, and are basically reskinned versions of the same thing. This has been the case since shortly after Avast bought AVG in 2016. Both are now part of Gen Digital, which formed when Avast merged with NortonLifeLock in 2022. AVG’s sibling companies include Avira, VPN provider HMA, and Registry cleaner maker Piriform, among others. Like Avast, AVG got 100% protection scores from both AV-Test and AV-Comparatives, with two false positives in the latter’s latest Real-World Protection Test. AVG isn’t tested by SE Labs, but Avast is, and it got a perfect score, so you…

DIRECT PRICE 5 devices, £43 (£52 inc VAT) from avira.com RETAIL PRICE Avira Prime not available Avira Prime is the top-tier product from a brand that’s best known for its free antivirus package. It includes the same antivirus and firewall modules as the free version, plus a software updater and a password manager that also appear in Avira Internet Security. Neither of these are products you strictly need, as software can and usually should be trusted to check for its own updates, and you ought to be using a dedicated password manager. Avira Prime also adds Avira’s Phantom VPN. This isn’t a white-label product but the company’s own, and it’s a solid choice, if not in the absolute top flight of VPN providers. Prime also includes a clutch of system…

DIRECT PRICE 5 devices, £19 (£23 inc VAT) from kaspersky.co.uk RETAIL PRICE 5 devices, £14 (£17 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Kaspersky is in the awkward position of providing highly effective protection against viruses, alongside numerous ethical and practical problems in the context of the Russian government’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and Kaspersky’s contracts with the Russian state. The UK National Cyber Security Centre doesn’t regard Kaspersky software to be a threat to individual users. However, the software has been banned by many public sector and some private sector workplaces, which you should be aware of if you use your PC for work. Kaspersky Premium includes the company’s Safe Kids parental controls, 24/7 remote IT support for security issues, and identity protection features. The latter aren’t as heavy-duty as those from…

DIRECT PRICE Deluxe, 5 devices, £74 (£89 inc VAT) from uk.norton.com RETAIL PRICE 10 devices, 2yrs, £17 (£20 inc VAT) from store.pcpro.co.uk Norton 360 is, along with McAfee, as close to a household name as you’ll get with antivirus. It’s been part of the security landscape for over 30 years, in the hands of a variety of companies. It’s no longer any relation to the Symantec range of business security services, but instead is a brand-mate of Avast and Avira, among other consumer-focused tools. There are plenty of choices for would-be subscribers. We bought a two-year licence from the PC Pro store for £20 and were informed it would automatically renew at £100, subject to price changes. This is all due to Norton, we should add, as it forces you…

We get hands-on with every single product in the group test, ensuring that its features and interface all work as they’re supposed to and highlighting any friction points. However, long-term testing with live malware samples is required to genuinely evaluate how effective any given antivirus solution is at protecting your system against malicious software. For this, we turn to data produced by a number of well-regarded anti-malware testing houses: specifically, SE Labs in the UK, AV-Test in Germany and AV-Comparatives in Austria. All three publish their test data and methodologies, making them available to the public, as well as the press and industry professionals. Data for this Labs test came from the following tests: ■ AV-Test Home Windows test October 2023 tinyurl.com/355avtest ■ AV-Comparatives Real-World Protection Test July-October 2023 tinyurl.com/355avcomp ■…

PRICE £20 exc VAT per user per month from box.com SMBs that want a cloud file-sharing service that snaps neatly into their existing workflows will love Box, as it offers more app integrations than most of its rivals – over 1,500 in fact. Even better, admins can control which third-party apps are to be made available, and users can browse and install them directly from their personal web portal. There’s a lot more to Box than that, however. It’s packed to the gills with collaboration tools: along with the obligatory cloud file-sharing and syncing services, it provides facilities for issuing file upload requests to external users, strong access controls for shared files, Box Preview for viewing and editing files in a browser without downloading them, Box Relay for automating repetitive…

PRICE £12.83 exc VAT per user per month from tresorit.com SMBs that are worried about file-sharing security and privacy can rest easy with Tresorit. A great feature of this cloud service is its zero-knowledge policy, which delivers end-to-end AES-256 encryption, and the company never stores keys or passwords, so only account holders and users have access to their data. Tresorit is good value, and it’s commendable that its prices haven’t increased for over four years, with the Business Plus plan on review holding steady at £12.83 per user per month when billed yearly. This is a good choice for SMBs: it takes all the features of the Standard plan and doubles cloud storage per user to 2TB, trebles the maximum single file size to 15GB and offers a 100 file-version…

This year is a big transitional one for voice communications – or at least, for anyone who’s been dragging their feet over the switch to shiny new VoIP systems, it should be. In 2025 the UK’s old-school 50V bell-ringing telephone network is officially being shut down. This means no more rotary-dial Bakelite phones; soon it’s going to be IP or nothing. And in an age when workers are increasingly reliant on domestic telephony to stay connected to the office network, this brings up some definite issues. ■ How smart is your phone? Once you start shopping around for home VoIP phones you might be surprised to find there’s a huge market out there – and it’s awash with very similar-looking desktop objects at heavily divergent prices. In fact, a fully…

This month my Real World column will begin with a Real World comment from a Real World customer who dropped into our Real World shop towards the end of 2023. “Why have they made two different apps with the same name?” Before I had a chance to comment on Microsoft’s latest attempt to confuse the masses, he chirped back in, “…and these clowns want us to use AI when they’re clearly as thick as s**t”. Clearly a passionately expressed sentiment, but from his side of the counter, Microsoft had caused mayhem with its rollout of New Outlook. He wasn’t alone. We received many calls from panicked people who couldn’t understand why their email had become unrecognisable. Most times normality was quickly restored, but once the customers were placated, most of…

I don’t want you to think I’m obsessed by batteries; it’s just a busy time in the whole power generation and delivery field, as some futurologists start talking about battery-powered airliners, cargo ships, forklift trucks and so on. We in the IT sector have a head start. Our experience of the behaviour and risks of rechargeables is a premonition of the state of society for years to come. The whole design of a power grid that allows for home generation and EV charging is dependent on good battery design and placement. We’ve already seen the comic videos of laptops on fire morph into not at all amusing videos of scooters being the seed of much more catastrophic incidents. Everybody is on the case of finding better ways to store energy.…

Features AI PCs: what they can actually do AMD, Intel and Microsoft have hyped the AI PC concept to a crescendo, but what difference does having NPUs genuinely make today? Features Has your network been hacked? Today’s cybercriminals have learnt to fly under the radar. We show you how to find hidden threats before they strike. Features Master the Pi VPN Securely access your home network from anywhere, using secure, industry-standard VPN protocols – all you need is a Raspberry Pi! Labs Chromebook Plus laptops Google promises that its Chromebook Plus laptops offer double the speed and capabilities of a typical Chromebook. We put all the best official (and unofficial) models to the test. Retro Rise of the retro handheld consoles Want to play classic games on the move? We…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in (2023) M3 power from £1,699 from apple.com/uk The M3 chips give the already brilliant MacBook Pro series a boost in games with no sacrifices elsewhere, so power users who are happy with Apple must grapple with the big decisions: which M3 chip, which size of screen, and how much RAM and storage? REVIEW Issue 352, p46 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Air 15in It’s no MacBook Pro, but with an 8-core M2 chip the 15in MacBook Air offers solid performance and a spacious, goodlooking display for a great price. From £1,399 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 347, p60 NEW ENTRY HP Spectre x360 14 (2024) An Intel Core Ultra 7 processor means that this is a fast 2-in-1 as well as being beautifully designed, with a sumptuous…

Regular listeners to the PC Pro podcast – those who are back in the community and not judged to be a danger to the wider public – may recall that last year I bought a refurbed ten-year-old iMac. And almost since the moment it touched down here at Collins Towers, I’ve been wondering what to do with it. It’s long been rid of macOS and revitalised with Linux Mint, making it a sprightly system once more, but I’ve struggled to find a day-to-day purpose for it. Apple kiboshed the option to use it as a secondary screen for my MacBook Pro. I’ve dallied with using it as a retro games emulator, loading all sorts of classics by live booting Batocera from a USB drive. But here’s the thing about retro…

Ah, Microsoft. How we love your ability to create world-dominating software with one hand and sow world-beating confusion with the other. In January, finally, it announced that Copilot for Office was available for all. Except, this being Microsoft, calling it Copilot for Office would be too simple. Instead, we now have the free Copilot, Copilot Pro and Copilot for Microsoft 365. (And Windows Copilot, GitHub Copilot and a trio of Sales, Service and Security Copilots, but let’s ignore these distractions.) Now, vanilla Copilot has nothing to do with Office. It’s the successor to Bing Chat and, unless you choose to download the Copilot apps for iOS and Android, you’ll access it via the web. As it’s based on GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo, though, it remains a powerful tool – especially…

Copilot has three main uses in Word: creating a draft for either an entire document or for sections of it, based on a prompt of up to 2,000 characters; rewriting selected text according to a prompt; and answering questions about a document’s content, including summarising it. When you create a new document in Word, you’ll see how much Microsoft wants you to draft using Copilot: it’s the first thing you see. And any time you make a new paragraph, the Copilot icon shows up in the left margin, letting you input a prompt to write a new section. If you select text, the icon shows up with an option to rewrite the selection. There’s also a Copilot icon in the Home toolbar, which opens a sidebar so you can ask…

Long before the arrival of Copilot, Microsoft Teams became my go-to app that was always active on my desktop. It’s the central tool I use to stay updated about my organisation’s activities and it’s where I plan my daily tasks, share content, have meetings and plan long-term goals. Now Microsoft has added Copilot, it has become even more indispensable. This is most obvious in meetings. The responsibility of capturing important meeting details typically rests on a single person, a task that’s rarely enviable and often challenging. Even with transcription features enabled in Teams, sifting through conversations to find pertinent information was daunting. This is an area where Copilot excels, making it easy to summarise the discussion and draw up action points. I also find it useful within meetings, especially long…

PRICE £374 (£449 inc VAT) for hardware, £63 (£75 inc VAT) per month for service from starlink.com If you can’t access high-speed internet via the usual means, Elon Musk’s Starlink is now available across the UK. Having experienced repeated issues with traditional broadband in my rural setting, I recently signed up to the company’s Personal service for £75 inc VAT per month, which offers unlimited data subject to a “fair use” policy. It appears that you don’t need to be concerned about this policy. After one month and downloading nearly 400GB of data, I experienced no issues. However, this may be because I use a VPN on all my devices, encrypting traffic so Starlink can’t distinguish specific content such as streaming video. The Personal service gives expected performance of around…

A strong wireless signal isn’t always a guarantee of fast performance. If your heatmap shows that a computer is sitting pretty in a bright green area but it’s still getting sluggish network speeds, here are some possible causes to investigate. OLD WI-FI STANDARD Wi-Fi devices from different eras are gloriously interoperable – you can connect a Wi-Fi 5 client to a Wi-Fi 7 router, or vice versa, without having to worry about the differing technologies. However, this means you could be running an outdated connection without realising it. If a device is being slowed down by an older Wi-Fi standard, you may be able to give it a boost by changing its settings or fitting a new network card. SLOW RADIO BAND Wi-Fi works across three separate radio bands –…

PRICE £541 (£649 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews The AMD Ryzen 8600G was announced at CES 2024, so it’s great to see vendors already building systems around the budget-friendly chip. British manufacturer PCSpecialist was the quickest out of the blocks to supply us with a test machine, and if the Fusion Elite P is a sign of things to come then it’s fantastic news for people who don’t have a bottomless budget. Particularly if they have gaming aspirations, with capable 1080p performance today while a PCI-E x16 slot sits empty for a graphics card when the budget allows. PCSpecialist chooses an Asus Prime A620M-K micr0ATX motherboard as this PC’s foundation. It isn’t the most expandable of boards, with two SODIMM sockets and one M.2 slot. They’re all occupied, with high-quality 8GB…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,667 (£2,000 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk As the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 (see p58) proves with some vengeance, foldable tablets are expensive and relatively low-powered. So, what if you only have £2,000 to play with, still want to indulge in dual-screen action and fancy one of Intel’s new Core Ultra processors? The answer, as I suspect you’ve guessed, is the latest iteration of Asus’ Zenbook Duo range. Just like the X1 Fold, it can be used as a laptop and quasi-all-in-one PC. You could even, at a push, use it as a giant ebook, while the bundled Asus Pen 2 sits at the ready if you wish to scrawl notes, draw or annotate. The difference is that here Asus provides two flat screens, which comes with…

Total value this month £169 DiskImage 18 Professional If you’ve ever suffered the shock of data loss or had to spend hours recovering your system after a crash or drive corruption, you’ll already know how important it is to make and maintain a regular backup. Ideally encompassing every aspect of your system, not just your work files and photos. Having a fallback copy of Windows – including all your favourite apps and settings, along with your irreplaceable documents, media and other files – is a no-brainer. But with so many options, what’s the best way to set this up? O&O DiskImage Professional features all the tools you need for backing up individual files and folders, and creating images of entire partitions and drives. Hints and tips guide you through the…

S24 S24+ PRICE S24: 8GB/128GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT); S24+: 12GB/256GB, £833 (£999 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk The story of the Samsung Galaxy S24 series – including the S24 Ultra we reviewed last month (see issue 354, p58) – centres around Samsung’s suite of AI-powered features. It’s understandable, as AI is new and buzzy, and the Galaxy AI capabilities at the heart of the Galaxy S24 series are both practical and (with some exceptions) polished. As with the S23 family, there’s little difference between the S24 and S24+ other than their size. In terms of specs and camera setup they’re identical, other than the S24 having less RAM and a smaller battery. They come in identical colours (including Sapphire Blue, Jade Green and the striking Sandstone Orange, which are exclusive…

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

Modern security software packs in loads of features, but make no mistake: not getting infected by malware should be your top priority. That means real-time malware protection is the critical feature of a security suite. This is a service that continuously monitors your PC for malicious software, primarily by scanning new files and websites your computer encounters. It’s also our minimum bar for inclusion in this group test. For example, the free edition of Malwarebytes is effective and justifiably popular but, unlike its paid-for version, it only provides on-demand scanning. Every single product in this group test will protect your computer against the vast majority of malicious software. Performance analysis of malware protection is in the business of assessing edge cases, unfamiliar malware and false positives. These marginal instances can…

DIRECT PRICE 5 devices, £42 (£50 inc VAT) from bitdefender.co.uk RETAIL PRICE 5 devices, 1yr, £25 (£30 inc VAT) from store.pcpro.co.uk Bitdefender makes reliable, easy-to-use antivirus software that doesn’t hog your system resources and doesn’t bother you. This applies to all versions, from its free antivirus to the parental-control equipped Family Pack and its all-in-one Premium Security tier. We tested Bitdefender Total Security, which is the company’s top-tier device security suite, but doesn’t include the parental control modules that comes with a Family Pack subscription. We found the parental controls rather invasive, so better suited to young children, but the main benefit of the Family Pack is that it covers 15 devices rather than Total’s five. To confuse matters, Bitdefender also offers a Premium offering, for ten devices, but it’s expensive…

DIRECT PRICE 5 devices, £96 (£115 inc VAT) from eset.com RETAIL PRICE Not available Since last year’s review, Eset has retired its Internet Security suite branding and revamped its consumer antivirus into its new Eset Home Security range. There are three tiers, starting with Essential. Alongside the usual antivirus and online threat detection, this offers parental controls, webcam protection, a firewall, Android anti-malware and anti-theft for your devices. The Premium tier adds a password manager, iOS protection and encryption tools, plus the cloud-based LiveGuard scanner; this runs potential threats in an isolated sandbox. The Ultimate tier includes all the features of Essential and Premium, plus a VPN for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. The privacy policy states the VPN logs aren’t retained and Eset told us it was using a…

DIRECT PRICE Individual, £63 (£75 inc VAT) from mcafee.com RETAIL PRICE Not available McAfee is one of the most expensive security suites around, but it is trustworthy: ever since Intel spun it off into an independent company, its long-term performance in malware protection tests has significantly improved. Unfortunately, McAfee’s recent performance leaves something to be desired. It achieved 100% protection in AV-Tests’s most recent tests, with just two false positives, but got an unexpectedly poor 96% rating from SE Labs, albeit with no false positives. It returned a decent but not world-beating 99.6% in AV-Comparatives’ latest tests with six false positives. All McAfee+ plans come with some degree of identity protection, but in Premium this is a scan-only feature to encourage you to upgrade. The Advanced and Ultimate tiers include tools…

DIRECT PRICE 5 devices, £33 (£40 inc VAT) from pandasecurity.com RETAIL PRICE Not available Panda Dome antivirus has a prettier client than most, with soothing landscape wallpaper images you can customise. It’s only a shame the icons are so stylised as to be almost meaningless without the small tooltip text that appears next to them. It’s also a shame that AV-Test hasn’t touched a version of Panda since 2018, but we’ve got data from both SE Labs and AV-Comparatives. Historical test data shows that Panda’s malware detection has gone from strength to strength since the Spanish antivirus firm was bought by hardware firewall maker WatchGuard in 2020. In AV-Comparatives’ latest tests, Panda netted a 98.6% protection rating, albeit with 20 false positives. In SE Labs’ tests, its protection rating of…

PRICE 250GB, £55 exc VAT for first year from idrive.com Cloud backup and file-sharing services are normally considered two separate business processes, but IDrive turns this notion on its head by combining the two together in one product. IDrive’s primary focus has always been on data backup and recovery, but all paid-for versions also include file-sharing and syncing services as standard. There are limitations: for starters, users can only share files that have already been backed up to IDrive’s cloud servers. Furthermore, when setting up IDrive accounts, you must select the default AES-256 encryption key as file sharing isn’t supported if you choose a private key. Clearly, this service is only cost-effective if you plan to make full use of its backup services. The good news is that IDrive is…

PRICE £125 exc VAT from amazon.co.uk Asus’ ExpertWiFi product family speaks to small businesses and retail outlets requiring a complete network security solution that’s affordable and simple to deploy. The EBR63 is a prime example: this deceptively small router teams up dual-band Wi-Fi 6 services with a heap of gateway security measures and delivers them all for only £125. On the wireless side, the EBR63 has an AX3000 rating derived from claimed speeds of 574Mbits/sec on its 2.4GHz radio and 2,402Mbits/sec on the 5GHz radio, with the latter supporting high-performance 160MHz Wi-Fi 6 channels. However, the EBR63’s switch is only endowed with gigabit WAN and LAN ports so you won’t see the full performance potential of its Wi-Fi 6 credentials. A positive takeaway is support for Asus’ AiMesh technology so…

Aren’t cloud services mostly aimed at enterprise-sized businesses? It’s true that the cloud has much to offer big companies. However, part of the cloud promise is about handling unexpected bursts of demand – the classic example being when you get mentioned on the news, and suddenly your website traffic jumps by several orders of magnitude. When that happens, it’s the smallest businesses that can benefit most from quickly scalable cloud support. Our internet service is quite slow – isn’t it best for us to rely on it as little as possible? Bad last-mile internet service is an argument for more cloud, not less. When your servers are mostly working and communicating inside the data centre, it’s less necessary to have the fastest possible connection to your own premises. For most…

The most common request for data protection services that I receive is to prepare a privacy notice. Actually, a lot of people ask for a privacy policy, to which I reply that I can assist with their privacy notice. Then they say “policy”, and I say “notice”, and we go back and forth for a bit before I write “privacy notice” in my laminated engagement letter, and then that’s settled. A privacy notice is an important step towards transparency in how you handle personal data. But there’s a popular belief that if you put a hastily typed-out privacy notice on your website, then that’s data protection done and dusted. As I touched on in my article six months ago (see issue 349, p116), this overlooks all the behind-the-scenes assessments that…

My friend had a SAM Coupé. He bought it in the early 1990s from a shop called Micro-Tech somewhere north of Manchester, having been convinced it was the Next Big Thing by a computer salesman wearing a long, brown lab coat like Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours. But my friend seemed happy. “Prince of Persia,” he would say, nodding. “Prince. Of. Persia.” The fact that the game to which he was referring had been released on pretty much every platform under the sun mattered not one jot to him. Nor to any SAM Coupé owner. Prince of Persia, with its lifelike character animation, was trotted out as proof that this 8-bit computer was powerful enough to stand toe-to-toe with 16-bit machines. The game was ported to the machine by…

I have been incredibly lucky in my life with the people I’ve met. The list of names is too long, and I’m sure I impacted their lives infinitely less than they influenced mine. Jobs, Gates, Wolfram, Allchin, Silverberg: the list is long. The same is true for musicians. Having a classical pianist background, I was fortunate to study with Curcio, Boulez, Kondrashin, Dutoit and Groves. And to meet on recording sessions with Ashkenazy, Marriner and many more. They say you should never meet your heroes, but they are wrong. No-one is perfect, but each of these people had a spark, a passion and a genius that showed you why they had succeeded in their chosen field. In the early 1980s, the One True Goddess was Joni Mitchell. The words “voice…

7 9AD was not a great time to be living in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum. It was in that year that the nearby volcano Vesuvius erupted, quickly burying the town in volcanic debris, freezing it in time along with nearby Pompeii. Two thousand years on and Herculaneum today is a popular tourist attraction, with astonishingly wellpreserved architecture and vivid mosaics for visitors to enjoy. But one secret has remained: the contents of hundreds of scrolls that were buried and cooked with the eruption. Despite being some of the few remaining examples of writing from the Roman era, the scrolls are simply too fragile to unravel. So, since they were first rediscovered in 1750, their contents have been a mystery. At least, they were until a bunch of computer…

Internet culture was once expected to join the whole world together, and in some ways – such as email – it still comes closer than any previous technology. However, in other ways it divides us up into radically different camps and silos, especially when it comes to publishing one’s own multimedia content. This thought occurred to me recently when I finally succumbed to curiosity by opening a Substack account. I’d been hearing about this service for several years, as used by many people whose work I read, so I decided to put up some of the material from my existing Blogger blogs and website. My first impression was deep confusion, greater even than that I feel on Instagram. Substack combines a blog for publishing new short material with a website…

Laptop lite I’ve never understood why nobody sold a laptop without a screen or a battery, especially in days gone by when even simple laptops cost a couple of thousand pounds. The battery and screen were two of the most expensive items on a laptop, and if you asked most people they only ever used their machine at either work or at home – and then they plugged them into the mains and attached them to a desktop monitor. With that in mind, manufacturers could have put the mains adapter in the battery space, which could have reduced the price by around £1,000. Even now I think the idea applies: few people seem to use a laptop without being in easy reach of a mains socket, and with screen casting…

Unlike the other Copilot Pro tools, Copilot for Excel is labelled prominently as “beta”. But even in this qualified state, it has the promise of being a game-changer for anyone who needs to work with data but doesn’t want to become an expert in writing formulas, working out the best way to pivot data or spotting trends in large data sets. Copilot for Excel exists in the toolbar, but sometimes it’s greyed out. That’s because it only works on. xlsx or. xlsm files saved in OneDrive or SharePoint. When the button is green, hitting it allows you to write natural language instructions to create formulas, analyse data or highlight cells according to whatever criteria you want. If you’ve ever struggled with creating a complex formula (or even a simple one),…

It could be because I tried Copilot in OneNote after all the other apps. It could be a because I’m not a regular OneNote user. Or it could be that this is indeed a, “oh, I suppose we should add it to OneNote as well” kind of effort. Copilot appears in OneNote the same way as most other apps: as a button in the Home ribbon. You can do all the things you’d expect, such as summarising meeting notes and creating action points. But where in Teams it feels powerful and integrated, here it feels like an add-on. For example, I hoped that it would tie in with the transcription option, perhaps creating a rival to Otter.ai that not only delivered the notes but gave me something extra, such as…

YOU CAN CREATE A SIMPLE HEATMAP USING JUST A PIECE OF PAPER, A PEN AND A SMARTPHONE OR LAPTOP Patchy Wi-Fi is the bane of many households. You can pay considerable sums for a router with the latest technology, only to find that half of your home still gets iffy service. If you want to improve matters, the first step is to identify exactly where your wireless coverage is strong and where it’s lagging. Professional network architects approach this sort of job by creating a heatmap of wireless signal strength across a business’ premises, revealing any areas of uneven coverage and potential locations where additional transmitters may be required. Here’s how to do the same for your own home, entirely for free. YOUR FIRST HEATMAP You can create a simple…

An old adage says you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Today’s equivalent might be to dress up your online profile – and that applies particularly on LinkedIn. While there are occasional career opportunities to be found on social sites such as Facebook and X, the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform remains one of the best and most appropriate forums for shopping your skills to potential employers. As with every online service, though, getting the best from it means understanding how to take advantage of its key features. Let’s take a look at how you can stand out, improve your discoverability and build connections on LinkedIn. This should strengthen any applications you make on the site, and increase the likelihood of an active approach from…

PRICE £736 (£883 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com It’s tempting to ignore the diagrams on the Philips 49B2U6900CH box that say, categorically, “this is a two-person job”. So tempting, in fact, that I did ignore them, and was soon struggling to attach the gigantic 49in panel to the gratifyingly sturdy metal stand. At least I had the good sense to clear my desk beforehand, as I looked like a weightlifter huffing and puffing it into place. But it’s office workers rather than weightlifters that Philips targets here, particularly those who currently have two or three 27in monitors littering their desk. The idea is to replace such anachronisms with a single screen, allowing you to split your windows across the 5,120 x 1,440 pixels (32:9). Windows Snap does a great job of…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,583 (£1,899 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk HP’s latest Spectre convertible is a pricey proposition – you could buy a decent laptop plus a separate tablet for the same cost. But if you’re looking for something that can fulfil both roles, this powerful, premium computer is a delight. The two-in-one design doesn’t compromise the aesthetics at all. Its deep blue chassis stands out tastefully from the swamp of monochrome laptops, while sliced-off corners give a pleasing minimalist aesthetic, as do the thin bezels around the display. In tablet mode, magnets hold the screen secure against the chassis, and despite the 14in screen it’s not too heavy to carry around at 1.4kg. My one reservation about the design is a lack of ports: you get one USB-A port on…

PRICE Performance Pro with graphics, £1,791 (£2,149 inc VAT) from frame.work The Framework Laptop 16 defies categorisation. It’s a gaming laptop, unless you decide not to choose discrete graphics, in which case it’s a productivity workhorse. Even then you have decisions to make. Which keyboard? Should you choose a number pad? Perhaps an RGB macro pad? What about spacers, ports, storage? This is simply the most customisable laptop I’ve seen. There are two drawbacks, starting with the price. But all the various input options, expansion choices and graphics swaps make specifying the Framework Laptop 16 a complicated matter. For PC Pro readers familiar with the inner workings of PCs this won’t be a problem, but Framework is hitting the point where you need a degree of expertise or you could…

PRICE £541 (£649 inc VAT) from oneplus.com Last month we were impressed by the OnePlus 12 (see issue 354, p60), the latest flagship from the Shenzhen-based manufacturer. Now, OnePlus follows up with the 12R, a more affordable variation on the theme. At a glance, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the 12R for the full-fat edition, thanks to its rounded edges and the distinctive circular camera surround. The Iron Grey finish has a matte glass back that repels fingerprints and curves elegantly into the thin metal frame. Along the bottom you’ll find the USB-C port, SIM tray and speaker grille, while the top edge sports additional speakers and an IR transmitter. That last unusual inclusion, also found on the OnePlus 12, means you can use the phone to control a TV…

PRICE 256GB, £150 (£180 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Motorola’s Moto G54 5G continues the company’s mission to offer high-quality phones for as low a price as possible. In this case £180 inc VAT – £10 less than the previous model. And that’s with 256GB of storage, too. While the phone isn’t exactly a fashion statement, it’s still attractive. I tested the Indigo Blue colour, which has a vegan leather back that’s both pleasing on the eye and to hold. You can also choose from Glacier Blue, Midnight Blue and Mint Green finishes, although those have all-plastic bodies. In all cases, the camera bump on the rear barely protrudes at all, so when the phone is set down on a surface it sits flat. The front is dominated by a 6.5in…

DIRECT PRICE 10 devices, £54 (£65 inc VAT) from avast.com RETAIL PRICE 10 devices, 2yrs, £25 (£30 inc VAT) from store.pcpro.co.uk Avast’s offerings need careful explanation. Avast Ultimate includes Avast Premium Security, Avast SecureLine VPN, Avast AntiTrack Premium and Avast Cleanup Premium. It’s the main subject of our review here. However, if you’d rather have everything in a single application, then Avast One is also worth considering. Both use the same malware-detection engine and VPN infrastructure, so the core functionality is the same, although the two products’ feature sets differ on several points. Regardless of which version of Avast you subscribe to, you’ll benefit from the same malware-detection engine. Avast’s sibling AVG also uses the same detection engine, with the same effective results, although the app itself is different. This is…

DIRECT PRICE 5 devices, $82 from gdatasoftware.co.uk RETAIL PRICE Not available If your priority is to stay safe, there are two good reasons to choose G Data Total Protection: its twin malware detection engines. G Data combines its own engine with Bitdefender’s, which is also a reliable performer, helping to keep those detection scores high. It’s better known in its native Germany than in the UK, which is why it isn’t tested so widely; the UK-based SE Labs doesn’t test G Data, and even in AV-Test (based in Austria) we had to go back to February 2023 for results, where it provided 100% protection. AV-Comparatives is based in Germany and unsurprisingly covers G Data much more frequently, and here it provided a strong set of scores, albeit not the best.…

DIRECT PRICE Free with Windows RETAIL PRICE Not applicable Microsoft Defender is Windows’ integrated malware protection, and with detection performance that compares well to both free and paid-for rivals, it’s good enough to rely on for security. As we discussed last month (see issue 354, p36), the “Defender” naming scheme is confusing, but this is a review of free Microsoft Defender Antivirus and related tools that are built into the Windows 10 and 11 Security app. These include real-time protection against malware, various on-demand scans and the creaky-to-configure but effective Windows firewall. Microsoft Family Safety is one of the best parental control suites you can get for Windows, and also covers Android and iOS. There’s even dedicated ransomware protection, which both monitors protected folders for unauthorised changes and can sync…

DIRECT PRICE 3 devices, 1yr, £58 (£70 inc VAT) from trendmicro.com RETAIL PRICE 3 devices, 1yr, £17 (£20 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Trend Micro packs a lot of features into Maximum Security. What’s more, it looks good doing it. Unusually for antivirus software, the desktop client’s neutral interface is customisable with appealing backgrounds and animations, which make it more pleasant to live with. It also shakes off the unremittingly dour, scaremongering vibes you get from some antivirus suites. As you’d expect, there’s real-time, on-demand and scheduled malware scanning, plus POP3 and IMAP email and spam filtering. You also get a botnet-detecting “firewall booster”, plus a browser plugin that blocks threats in social media, webmail and elsewhere on the web. Its ransomware protection module defends selected directories and their contents against changes by…

Cloud file-sharing is the perfect partner for businesses that have embraced hybrid working practices. It provides staff with secure ways of sharing documents and collaborating on projects with colleagues and partners irrespective of where they’re located. There’s no need to invest in complex and expensive VPNs to securely link remote workers to the main office systems. With cloud file sharing, they can easily work on documents anytime, anywhere and from their choice of device. Employers railing against hybrid working need to acquaint themselves with the UK government’s Flexible Working Bill, which came into law in December last year, as this gives employees greater choice over when, where and how they work. Previously, they needed to have worked with an employer for 26 weeks before they could put in a request…

PRICE £19.60 exc VAT per user per month from sharefile.com ShareFile will appeal to SMBs with big cloud collaboration plans as all schemes start at 1TB of storage per user with the option to upgrade capacity as required. Revised pricing makes it even better value, with the top-dog Premium edition on review costing less than £20 per user per month when billed yearly, and ShareFile has lowered the entry price by dropping the minimum number of users from five to three. Maximum supported file sizes have also changed. The entry-level Standard edition – which costs around £8 per user – supports 10GB, while the generous 100GB limit for the Advanced and Premium versions make them good choices for businesses handling large files such as medical images. Another compelling feature is…

PRICE £356 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com D-Link is aiming to take surveillance in new directions with its DSS-200G series of Layer 2 switches, which are designed to power the latest IP cameras and provide automated recovery services. This family of four switches is headed up by the 28-port DSS-200G-28MPP, which has a punchy power budget of 518W and offers support for 90W 802.3bt PoE services. We reviewed the DSS-200G-28MP model, which sits on the rung below and offers a more modest 370W power budget with 30W 803.2at services available across all 24 gigabit ports. Both have four pairs of unpowered copper and fibre dual-personality gigabit ports for uplinks to a network video recorder (NVR) or server. The switch can power any PoE-compliant device, but D-Link has focused primarily on surveillance…

Apple has announced its proposed changes to the App Store, taking into account the requirements of the EU regulation changes that come into effect in March. They have been released into an iOS beta, and developers now have the documentation. First, it should be noted that these are comprehensive proposals and that at the time of writing we don’t know whether the EU will accept them. That’s how this stuff works: the EU makes demands, companies try to build to the requirements, and it’s only once it’s up and running that we know whether the EU is satisfied. The battle to see whether what Apple is offering is considered adequate or acceptable will doubtless be accompanied by many lawyers writing invoices using extra-wide calculators. If you want to read the…

My name is Davey Winder and I’m an Appleholic. There, I’ve said it. For the first time in my 35-plus years as a technology writer, I am now primarily using Apple technology. I do still own a Windows machine, a beast of an Alienware gaming laptop that I now use almost entirely for doing what it was built to do. Apart from that, and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 foldable that I use as my secondary smartphone because it’s so pocketable, my daily drivers are all from the Cupertino fruiterers. I switched from Android to iOS some years back now, having become too frustrated with the fractured Android ecosystem and the delays to security updates that brought with it. Since then, I have upgraded my iPhone every year to the…

Robots make us lazy. Not because Roombas are vacuuming our houses, but because humans have a habit of slacking off when sharing tasks. That’s according to recent research that had humans and robots working side by side – sort of – to inspect circuit boards. The results suggest that working within a team, robot or otherwise, can inspire and motivate, but it can also spark “social loafing” – when a team member knows their own contribution can’t be discerned among the wider effort, they let others pick up the slack. You might be thinking of that one guy at work who never pitches in, but when it comes to robots, we might be that guy. But then again, isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? What’s the point of robotics…