Table of contents for August 2024 in PC Pro

You know a company is excited about a launch when it tries to position it among the great tech events of history. So, when Microsoft kicked off a 15-minute presentation with an image of a 1981 IBM PC, my hyperbole antennae started quivering. “In the 80s, we had the IBM PC, which influenced PCs for years to come,” announced Sam Hull, senior category manager for Windows Consumer in the UK. “In the 90s we had Windows 95… and Windows launched features at this point that consumers still expect from our ecosystem today, from our OS today.” The third great event was modestly ascribed to Microsoft’s rival, with Sam giving a nod to the iPhone. Then last year, we were told, Copilot in Windows changed the way that consumers interact with…

MSI brings AI PCs to the desktop MSI unveiled the MEG Vision X AI, promising to bring AI PC features to desktop users via MSI’s proprietary AI Engine – complete with a touchscreen AI human-machine interface (HMI). This touchscreen sits at the front of the PC, supposedly giving users easy access to the PC’s onboard AI. So you can produce high-quality images via MSI Artist x MSI Chat, perform text generation, ask questions and summarise documents without an internet connection or using that fiddly keyboard. A trio of handheld PCs After our feature on handheld PCs last month (see issue 358, p34), we got our hands on the upgraded Asus ROG Ally X with its 80Wh battery and greatly improved joystick and buttons (plus the base storage starts at 1TB).…

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 Mac Book Air13in (M3) Both the 13in and 15in MacBook Airs impress for speed, styling and battery life, but the 1.2kg 13in Air wins out of the two for its sheer portability. From £1,299 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 356, p54 Huawei MateBook X Pro (2024) Despite weighing just 980g, this laptop packs a 14.2in OLED panel, 2TB of storage and an 11-hour battery life, as well…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He thinks it will all end in tiers. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk A few weeks ago I “attended” an interesting webinar organised by IT security firm Sophos, in which one of their researchers, Ben Gelman, demonstrated how someone with no knowledge of programming or web design can construct a convincing e-commerce site complete with product pictures, audio and video for around £4.23 in eight minutes. He did this live on screen using GPT4, Stable Diffusion and a couple of other free tools. Then he dropped the bombshell: by adding just a tiny bit of HTML, he created from this an agent-based framework capable of churning out hundreds or thousands of similar sites from simple text templates. The web will soon be swamped by such…

If you toyed with generative AI a year or so ago, you could be forgiven for dismissing it as a gimmicky toy that would never seep into professional art workflows. You can’t say that any more. In the year or so since its beta release, Adobe’s Firefly AI model has improved to the point where the company is now happy to embed AI tools in flagship products such as Photoshop and Lightroom. Adobe executives claim these AI tools are now used more often than the crop tool. They swear that’s no exaggeration. In this feature, I’m going to show how the Photoshop AI tools can be used for the types of jobs that professionals are asked to do every day: replacing backgrounds for product photography, adding “stock images” to websites,…

Adobe Lightroom is the app many photographers will use to manage their photos and make routine edits, and that too has been given the AI treatment in the most recent version. There are two main AI features in Lightroom (both the Classic and regular versions, as well as the mobile and tablet apps): Lens Blur and Generative Remove. LENS BLUR Lens Blur allows you to adjust the aperture you used to take the photo after the event, artificially adding blur where none exists in the original image. It can work convincingly, but only if you apply this new feature via the correct method. There are two ways to add lens blur. Adobe has added an “Adaptive: Blur Background” section to its growing list of default presets, where with a single…

Windows isn’t free software. You may not have paid for it directly, but when you buy a new PC with Windows preinstalled the price includes a licence to run the operating system. Normally this will be what’s called an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) licence, meaning it’s tied to the specific hardware. In other words, it allows you to run Windows on that specific computer, but not to move it onto another machine. This has both practical and legal implications. If you’ve ever performed a major hardware upgrade on a desktop PC – such as replacing the motherboard – you may have found that Windows thinks it’s no longer running on the same machine, and requires you to reactivate the OS. Similarly, when you move Windows 10 from physical hardware into…

Storing your cloud files on a single microSD card or USB drive isn’t ideal. If the card gets corrupted or the disk dies then the files in your Nextcloud space could be lost, although copies may still be available on any connected machines. If you don’t want to take that risk, consider connecting a pair of matching USB drives and configuring them as a RAID1 (mirrored) array. Space doesn’t permit us to go into the process of configuring two disks as a single volume in Linux, but online guides can take you a long way. And remember to pay attention to the power requirements of your drives; you might need to use a powered USB hub or a high-wattage supply for your Pi to enable them both to operate reliably.…

SCORE PRICE Core 7 Ultra, £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com When it comes to laptops, the truism “you get what you pay for” still holds true. There are great machines in our group test of sub-£1,000 laptops (see p78), but by breaking into four figures you step up in almost every key area: speed, design and build quality. I tested the Core 7 Ultra version of the latest Zenbook 14, but prices start at £1,100 for the Core Ultra 5 machine. That won’t finish core-hungry tasks as quickly – it has four P-cores rather than six and is clocked slightly lower – but it won’t be far off. For example, where the 155H pushed this laptop to 12,386 in Geekbench 6’s multicore test, I’d expect the 125H-powered system to…

SCORE PRICE Ryzen 9, £749 (£899 inc VAT) from geekom.co.uk There has been a growing demand from PC Pro readers – via social media and emails – for us to review more compact PCs, so when Geekom offered its new A8 Mini PC for review I quickly accepted. Especially when I saw the specification: for £719 inc VAT you can buy a Ryzen 7 8845HS with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD; the £899 system I tested doubles the storage to 2TB and packs a Ryzen 9 8945HS. Both of these eight-core, 16-thread CPUs are designed for laptops, but the “HS” in their name denotes their high-performance status. The Ryzen 9 clocks higher, with a 5.2GHz peak to 5.1GHz (and a base frequency of 4GHz versus 3.8GHz), but aside…

Total value this month £ 116 Backup4All 9.9 Lite This feature-rich backup software makes it easy to archive your important data and keep it secured for years to come. The Lite version included with this issue’s downloads is the perfect solution for home users, balancing ease of use with the flexibility to define your own backup routine. An intuitive interface walks you through the process of defining your backup set, allowing you to select the drive you want to secure and define which type of files you want to include in the archive. You can create separate backups for, say, documents, photos, videos and audio files, and restore them in bulk – or retrieve a single file without having to navigate through all of the others. Backup4All’s plugins make it…

SCORE PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from uk.kobobooks.com Kobo’s Clara BW is the first e-reader we’ve seen to use E Ink’s Carta 1300 technology. This keeps the screen resolution at a sharp 300ppi while improving both refresh time and contrast over previous generations. Despite the cutting-edge display, the Clara BW is very affordable: at £120, it’s £40 cheaper than the Kindle Paperwhite. And, in an industry first, Kobo has partnered with iFixit to provide spare parts and repair kits, so if you’re confident with a screwdriver you can replace the battery or fix a smashed case without having to ditch the entire thing. A body that’s made from 85% recycled plastic adds to its sustainability claims, and the packaging is recycled and recyclable, with biodegradable soy ink printing. Design-wise, the…

SCORE PRICE Standard Bundle, £292 (£350 inc VAT) from store.insta360.com The new Go 3S is the latest in a line of tiny action cameras by Insta360, with convenient magnetic mounting and useful accessories for hands-free operation and unique points of view. When your phone won’t do or can’t be risked, the tiny and fully waterproof Go 3S steps up. Both the camera and the Action Pod (which comes as part of the Standard Bundle and essentially turns the Go 3S into a GoPro-style camera) are made from rigid plastic, so I’d be happy to put them in harm’s way. They’ve already taken occasional knocks from fast-moving balls and clumsy drops, and come out unscathed. Insta360 updates the one-year-old Go 3 with key upgrades, chiefly bumping video resolution up from 2.7K…

SCORE PRICE £708 (£850 inc VAT) from acer.com Acer’s all-new Aspire 14 – distinguishable from the other laptops in its Aspire range through the A14-51GM that begins its model name – fits our “everyday” description perfectly. Although not as affordable as the Asus Vivobook or its Aspire Go 14 stablemate, the price is aggressive and it’s based on the latest generation of Intel silicon, so you can expect years of strong performance. We tested an early production unit fitted with a Core i5-1335U, together with 8GB of RAM and Nvidia’s RTX 2050 graphics. The most similar model you can buy is the one with a part code of NX.KSVEK.005, which includes a Core 5 processor 120U, 16GB of RAM and the same graphics card. That will cost £850 from acer.com,…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk This is the most physically flexible laptop in this test; if you need an everyday option that can double up as a tablet, then the HP Envy x360 may be for you. This robust laptop feels mighty despite its size, making it a natural alternative to the MSI Prestige 13 Evo. Let’s start with the similarities. It may not include “Evo” in its name, but the Envy x360 also makes use of Intel’s platform. So, you again benefit from Intel’s promises for excellent battery life, snappy wake-up times from sleep and nippy performance in a compact laptop. The Envy delivers in all areas, but here you must make do with a 12th, not 13th, generation Intel processor: the Core i7-1250U. The Envy’s…

SCORE PRICE £696 (£835 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Buy a ThinkPad and you know you’re buying a trustworthy and reliable machine for day-to-day work – and make no mistake, this is an all-out business laptop. This is the first-generation ThinkPad E16, available with AMD or Intel chips, and is currently something of a bargain as Lenovo is slowly bringing Gen 2 models to the market. Lenovo’s E series of ThinkPads are designed for affordability, but despite this it looks and feels like almost every ThinkPad you can imagine. It comes, as usual, with a completely matt black style that isn’t for everyone but does make an immediate statement of corporate intent. The chassis is aluminium aside from the plastic bottom, and it feels reassuringly solid. It comes with one year…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk MSI’s Prestige 13 Evo is a diminutive and premium laptop, and while it’s among the most expensive here it offers remarkable value compared to other sub-1kg laptops (it’s 990g to be precise). For not only does it offer elite performance and ultraportability, it also scores clear style points. We’re sure Intel will be pleased, for not only does it tick all the right boxes to qualify for its Evo marketing but MSI even puts Evo into the name. The basic promise of “Intel Evo” is that you get fast performance, near-instant wake-ups from sleep and a full working day of battery life. Taking the latter first, the Prestige 13 Evo delivers with superb results of 18hrs 4mins when idling and 12hrs 27mins…

Until testing the 11 laptops in this Labs, my own notebook’s lacklustre battery life often made me wonder if working far from a mains was actually a myth spread by evil technology journalists. In the pocket of AMD, Apple and Intel, they would spread this illusion of devices that kept on going, hoping to lure innocent buyers into buying their shiny new machines. But it turns out that my own laptop is just a terrible example. In exactly 50% of my testing, the laptops kept running for over half a day, despite being asked to carry out automated tasks. Yes, it made those tests last somewhat longer than I expected, but it’s such a positive for users. It shows what can be delivered by some devices when opting for modern,…

SCORE PRICE From £2,000 exc VAT from barraguard.co.uk Businesses worried about managing a hybrid data protection strategy may want to consider Barracuda’s Backup appliances, as they do everything for you. These all-in-one physical and virtual solutions provide on-site backup, cloud replication and full data restoration services, as well as optional site-to-site replication, all managed from one cloud portal. Barracuda offers a wide choice of hardware appliances, with the entry-level Backup 290 on review presented as a low-profile 1U rack appliance fitted with a single 2TB SATA hard disk. This may not sound like very much, but the appliance’s variable block-level deduplication is very efficient; during testing we backed up 1.7TB of data, which Barracuda squashed down to 331GB for an 82% reduction. Prices for the Backup 290 start at £2,000,…

SCORE PRICE £426 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Canon’s imageFormula DR-S250N desktop scanner is designed with accessibility in mind, and can be used without installing any apps, drivers or software. This clever attribute comes courtesy of its CaptureOnTouch (COT) Lite web interface, which means if a networked device can load a browser, it can pull in a scan. The web console opens with a simple home page. Clicking on the Scan button presents a menu for selecting colour or greyscale, a page size, a resolution up to 300dpi, simplex or duplex scans, double feed detection and a passport mode. From the Output page, you choose PDF or JPEG formats and enable OCR with a choice of ten languages. Mobile users walk up to the scanner, select the COT Lite Web option…

I’ve no shortage of pub stories about IT managers coming into work on a Monday morning and finding they’ve no cloud platform to log in to because the cloud provider was hit by a meteorite, or some other disaster, and they didn’t plan ahead. Such cautionary tales can be valuable, not to mention entertaining. But it’s probably more productive to look at how successful “cloud people” manage to sidestep such disasters. Perhaps the most important habit is that of engineering soft landings. When I look back over some of the cloud migration projects I’ve seen, I’m put in mind of a cat climbing an apple tree, with a clear ambition ahead but no idea how it might get down again. When the project reaches the appropriate stage, it is imagined,…

Microsoft’s ExpertZone is a retailer’s resource packed with interactive training elements. It’s all here: Surface, Windows, Xbox, Azure, all tailored to enhance the retail experience in order to sell more product. The last time I mentioned ExpertZone (see issue 328, p114), I used approved Microsoft sales tactics while two people attempted to acquire a laptop (for no cost) from our shop to flog it for vast profit. Who could foresee that stealing things to make vast profits would become the business model that launched AI into the mainstream? Today, Microsoft is keen for its ExpertZone trainees to help claw back some of the $10 billion it sunk into OpenAI. I took the Copilot 2024–25 ExpertClass as I wanted to discover how I should “officially” sell AI to my customers. The…

One of the few statistics that sticks in my head is that the average length of stay in a job in the UK is a shade over two years. Unfortunately, I can’t find a source for this memory, and other research suggests it’s closer to five years, but even so this means that the average worker has between ten and 20 different employers, assuming a 50-year working span. Of course, not the whole workforce is going to be bang on the population average in any company, so one would be unsurprised by places and people that buck the trend. The stick-in-the-mind example for me was the lovely old chap who spent an entire lifespan in a single room, making twiddly parts for bicycles. If I had met him after the…

Forget typing and mousing. We’ve been trying for years to come up with new ways to interface with computers, be it eye-trackers, mind-reading tech or VR-powered immersive systems. And among PC Pro staff (past and present), it’s become a joke. We once even ran this headline: “Control your computer with your face and head!” Yet here I am, typing into a laptop and staring into a monitor, just like a chump from the 1980s. But perhaps not for much longer if Apple and Google have their way, with announcements on eye-tracking plus head and face movement recognition. Such technologies were created for people with accessibility challenges, and that’s also the origin of eye trackers and brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Hopefully, by integrating such accessibility tools into mainstream tech, iPads and other…

ON SALE Thursday 8 August Features 30 greatest tech milestones ever To mark our 30th anniversary, our contributors (and readers) pick out the 30 most significant products and events. Features Keep your private messages private We compare WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram and other popular messaging platforms to find the smartest, safest ways to communicate. Features Chrome OS Flex masterclass Turn any spare PC into a snappy, secure Chromebook with Google’s free web-based OS. Darien Graham-Smith shows you how. Labs VPNs Whether you want to protect your privacy, dial back to the office network securely or switch countries to access streaming media, our in-depth testing and authoritative reviews will reveal what to buy. Retro Netscape Navigator turns 30 David Crookes remembers the rapid rise – and equally rapid fall – of Netscape…

You can buy Barry Collins’ personal details on a dark web near you. Email barry@mediabc.co.uk for a quote. @bazzacollins I received an email the other day from HaveIBeenPwned.com, a site that informs you when your email address has been identified in a data breach. Apparently, I was one of the 361,468,099 pwned in a recent attack on Telegram. This was a breach involving more people than the entire population of the USA, and it barely provoked a tut from me. Just as being one of the 15 million victims of the recent Trello breach or one of the 70 million affected by the Naz.API attack barely registered. Not least because I still don’t even know what Naz.API is. Massive data leaks have become so routine that they simply wash over…

Wishful thinking I get a little puzzled at articles such as your Windows 12 wish list (see issue 358, p26). Some years ago, shortly after Windows 8 had been released and Windows 10 was already being mentioned, I asked the Microsoft representative at a security conference I attended how long it took to develop a version of Windows from inception to release, and at what point they realised they had a good version on their hands or a turkey. I seem to remember the response was that the gestation period was around eight years or so at the time, and that how the version was received by users depended on whether the marketing people or the developers had won the battle for looks, feel and features. Although it makes for…

Until recently, it wasn’t possible to generate images from scratch from within Photoshop. There were workarounds to cheat it, but it wasn’t officially supported. Now, if you start with a blank canvas, you have the option to generatively fill the space. A little expectation setting first. The resolution of generated images is still limited to around 1,500 x 1,500 pixels. It can generate images in other aspect ratios, to be clear, but if you’re hoping that you’re going to use Firefly to generate something that you can use at poster scale, think again, unless you’ve got a decent upscaling tool such as Topaz Gigapixel AI. Adobe says improving the resolution of images is high on its to-do list, but that of course comes at a compute cost. As we’ll see,…

The option to remove backgrounds and replace them with something AI generated could be a brilliant timesaver for those who deal with product photography. We’ve used a couple of examples here: a perfume bottom that was AI generated in the first place (let’s call it Eau de Pro) and an actual product shot of some high-heeled shoes. As soon as you open the photos in Photoshop, the option to remove the background should appear in the floating context menu. This background removal tool has improved enormously in recent versions, and even with the dark shadows underneath the glass bottle, the tool accurately cut out the perfume bottle. With the background removed, the context menu now switches to “generate background”, and you can enter a text prompt with your desired backdrop.…

It’s Victorian London, and cholera is creeping through the streets of Soho. Famously, Dr John Snow deduced that the disease wasn’t spread via bad smells in the air as believed but through water – in particular, a single water pump. He figured that out with data and a map. The good doctor simply plotted the deaths of infected people within the district and had the good sense to notice that they lived near the same water pump on Broad Street. As the story goes, he ended the outbreak by removing the pump’s handle. And so data analytics within cities was born. A few years later, in 1868, the world’s first traffic light was installed, at Bridge Street near Parliament Square in London. This was before cars, but a thousand pedestrians…

In an age when we’re all living and working across multiple devices and locations, cloud storage is indispensable. Unfortunately, it costs money – at least, it does once you go beyond the limited quotas offered by the likes of Box, Google Drive and OneDrive. If you’re feeling squeezed by the storage limit on your current cloud plan and aren’t eager to take on yet another subscription, it’s easier than you might think to set up your own personal cloud, with no fees and no storage caps. There are some downsides to running your own cloud. Obviously you have to provide the hardware yourself. However, this doesn’t have to be expensive – you can use an old PC, an existing NAS or – as we’ll explore on these pages – a…

SCORE PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com Microsoft decided not to deliver Windows 12 this year, but arguably it’s offering something even better: Copilot+ PCs. These still run Windows 11, but as the name alludes to they’re capable of running Microsoft’s Copilot AI directly on the silicon. To be precise, that means neural processing units (NPUs) that are capable of handling 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Otherwise known as one heck of a lot. Right now, Qualcomm is the only manufacturer shipping a processor – technically we should call it a system on chip, or SoC, but there are quite enough TLAs to deal with so let’s not be pedantic – capable of 40 TOPS. In fact, it has four such chips available to manufacturers, all of which…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,716 (£2,059 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk If you’re looking for a big, flexible laptop, the HP Spectre x360 16 will make you very happy indeed. Its 16in screen delivers bags of desktop space; there’s ample power for apps and games; the convertible design provides plenty of usage options; and the included stylus makes it a great tool for artists and graphic designers. The entry-level model costs £1,799 inc VAT and comes with an Intel Core i7-1360P CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a gorgeous 4K OLED touchscreen; the model I tested has a newer Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, GeForce RTX 4050 graphics and a 120Hz screen, but the resolution drops to 2,880 x 1,800. HP hasn’t changed the design of the Spectre x360…

SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk The first sign of any product’s quality comes when you unpack it from its box, especially when it’s honed to hit a budget. Does it feel too light, look too plasticky? Have corners been cut that make it horrible to use? In short, does it feel cheap? So it was with an inward sigh of relief that I started assembling the HP All-in-One 27. Finished in all white, it looks classy, while the stand not only includes 100mm of height adjustment but a felt-covered base. That may sound trivial, but it shows the attention to detail often lacking in budget laptops and PCs. HP has also taken account of this machine’s environmental impact, using 40% post-consumer recycled plastic, 10% recycled metal and…

SCORE PRICE £2,975 (£3,570 inc VAT) from ultima-computers.co.uk Last month I reviewed the Toughbook 55 MK3 (see issue 358, p56), a rugged laptop that offers almost 24 hours of battery life, and now it’s the turn of its little tablet brother: the Toughbook 33 MK3. I use the word little with caution, for as a standalone tablet it’s no lightweight at 1.6kg, and once you attach its keyboard base it weighs the same 2.8kg as the 55 while being significantly bulkier. But if the Toughbook 55’s secret weapon is its portable power, the Toughbook 33 is all about versatility. The 12th gen U series chips don’t pack as much grunt as the 13th gen P series units found in its sibling – primarily due to having two P-cores rather than…

SCORE PRICE £296 (£355 inc VAT) from uk.elegoo.com In the world of 3D printing, resin-based stereolithography (SLA) is less popular than squirty thermoplastics – probably because it involves a manual finishing process and toxic materials. However, Elegoo’s latest resin printer is both easy to use and produces excellent results. The package comes with everything you need to get started. The printer arrives fully assembled, and the box contains a metal scraper for the build plate, a plastic scraper for the release film, paper funnels, disposable gloves, disposable masks and a set of Allen keys. There’s also a printed manual and USB flash drive, preloaded with the Chitubox Basic slicing software, a PDF of the manual and pre-sliced test prints. Gloves and masks aren’t included just for fun: uncured resin is…

This month we look at everyday laptops. And that begs one obvious question: what is an everyday laptop? The answer depends on you. What everyday use looks like differs from person to person, so our brief to manufacturers wasn’t overly stringent, and the laptops on test cover a wide range of needs. Some users may prefer a compact, light laptop with excellent battery life, and we have five varied options here. The Samsung Galaxy Book4 is a great example of this, costing £949 (usually discounted to £899) yet looking like a far more glamorous, expensive machine. Or you could consider the flexible and equally eye-catching HP Envy x360. Others will prioritise power, perhaps looking for gaming potential, and again we have three fine choices on test. Turn to the gaming…

SCORE PRICE £375 (£450 inc VAT) from acer.com Acer’s new Aspire Go 14 has clearly been designed to take the best elements from the Aspire 14 and place them into a more affordable and accessible model. Indeed, the similarities in style and design are so striking that it’s tricky to tell them apart from a first look. The lighter metallic grey finish of the Go is the first clue, but it’s specifications that really divide the two, justifying a clear price gap. While the Aspire 14 range includes Intel’s new range of chips – either the Core 5 processor 120U or the Core 7 processor 150U – the Go 14 will ship with either the Core i3-N305 or AMD’s Ryzen 3 7320U. To confuse matters, Acer sent us an early…

SCORE PRICE £750 (£900 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Gaming laptops can be considered everyday devices in the same way that 4x4 vehicles are everyday cars. They consume far more power to perform any given task, are much larger, and all that extra power is only fully utilised by a subsection of owners. Nonetheless, the HP Victus 15 is one laptop with gaming credentials that doubles up as a handy everyday workhorse – and unlike so many gaming laptops, it’s affordable. How affordable depends on what deals HP is running. In our testing period, from mid-May to early June, it was selling this model of the Victus 15 (identified either by its full name of Victus Gaming Laptop 15-fb0003na or the part code 6P128EA#ABU) for £699. Considering what you’re getting, that’s…

SCORE PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk One of the many things we like about Chromebooks is their worry-free nature. With Windows, you have to mess around with settings to maximise battery life, ensure updates install smoothly and generally fuss about. Google’s Chrome OS offers a simplified approach to everyday computing, with everything connected, clean and synchronised. While you can download files for offline use, it works best for those who are always online –and a laptop such as the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i could also be more cost-effective than a Windows laptop. This IdeaPad is a well-put-together touchscreen Chromebook with 360° hinges and stylus support. As such, it’s a flexible alternative to the traditional laptop Windows format, opening up extra opportunities for use. Especially as you can download…

SCORE PRICE £790 (£949 inc VAT) from samsung.com Samsung’s stylish approach to technology is exemplified by its Galaxy Book range. These premium laptops look and feel exactly as you would expect for their price, with the £949 Book4 the cheapest laptop in the range. We’ve already reviewed the £1,699 Book4 Pro 16in (see issue 355, p64), and that price is made to look modest compared to the top-end Book4 Ultra at £3,549. Nor does the range end there. You can also choose “360” versions and pick between 14in and 16in editions, while Samsung has just added the Copilot+ Book4 Edge (starting at £1,399). Here, though, we focus on the entry-level Book4. This, like all its siblings, is attractive and minimalist to look at, with a slim and all-metal design, but…

Businesses are creating data at unprecedented rates, and those that don’t protect it are taking some appalling risks and putting their very survival on the line. There’s no such thing as “safe data”, so it’s essential that businesses implement a sound backup strategy to protect against unforeseen disasters. The number of threats faced by businesses are increasing just as fast. Data breaches and ransomware attacks are always on the rise, but so are environmental disasters and crimes such as theft and burglary. Backup doesn’t need to be challenging, and the cloud makes it even easier as it provides an ideal location for essential off-site storage. The best data protection strategies use a hybrid combination of on-premises and cloud backup, which ensures that multiple copies of your data are maintained in…

SCORE PRICE Microsoft 365 module, from £1.20 exc VAT per user per month from commvault.com A highly modular approach makes Commvault’s Cloud an attractive choice for businesses that want a hybrid backup solution they can tailor precisely to their needs. Originally launched a few years ago as Metallic and now integrated into Commvault’s cyber resiliency and recovery cloud platform, it comprises 16 distinct components so looks to have every data protection requirement covered. For essential off-site backup, you can use Commvault’s cloud storage as a backup destination or choose from 26 third-party providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google. Commvault gives ransomware attacks a hard time, as its Azure-based cloud storage is air-gapped and immutable, with modules now provided for risk analysis and backup content malware scans.…

SCORE PRICE £160 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Ruijie Networks isn’t very well known in the UK; this network infrastructure provider has traditionally focused on the enterprise and carrier markets. Its Reyee sub-brand aims to radically change this perception as it presents SMBs with a huge range of affordable networking products. The Reyee portfolio comprises modular and fixed-port switches, routers, firewalls and wireless APs, and a key feature is they can all be managed from Ruijie’s free cloud portal. UK supplier Broadbandbuyer takes this a stage further, as it offers a complete cloud provisioning service so you just plug them in and go. On review is the RG-RAP2260(E) AX3200 Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP), which claims top speeds of 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 800Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. It…

The word “convergence” gets bandied about a lot – what are we talking about here? It’s true, when techies use the word “convergent” it can mean almost anything. You might conceivably say that Mozilla and the internet “converged” to produce the World Wide Web. Personally I’m more troubled by “phygital”, a horrible train crash of a term which really just means something we’ve all been doing with computers for decades – connecting a digital model in software to a physical thing. So is this primarily about design and manufacturing? It can relate to any physical resource or emplacement, such as a threshing machine, an oil tanker or a bridge over an angry river. Think of phygital as attaching a digital sidecar to a real thing – to track, store, expose…

Woah! It’s been over a year since I last updated you on international data transfers. Those were the days when compliant transfers of personal data to the US seemed impossible. In 2020, the EU-US Privacy Shield was declared invalid, and there began the requirement to undertake transfer risk assessments (TRAs) when using contractual solutions to send data to the US (and other countries). It got worse from there, as it seemed supervisory authorities were not taking a laissez-faire approach to enforcement of the new requirements; for example, the Austrian and French authorities’ action against websites using Google Analytics, as covered in my article in issue 343 of PC Pro. In 2023, Meta Ireland was fined €1.2 billion by the Irish Data Protection Commission – the largest GDPR fine ever –…

There is a website that I refer to every few days. It typifies government-run sites, because it is an infuriating mix of excellence, highly useful capabilities and annoying features. I’m referring to the Companies House site. Whenever I’m taken to a site for a service I don’t know which is processing information about me, I want to know where the company is based and what’s behind it. This morning, I received an email about a scan I’m having at Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, part of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Nothing of concern there: it’s an NHS appointment made through my GP. To access the letter of instructions, telling me where and when to attend, I had to visit a third-party website. This company provides IT services to the NHS and acts…

New ePaper displays up to an enormous 25in in size are being touted as a low-maintenance replacement for posters and signage in commercial venues. The Sharp NEC ePaper Displays come in two sizes – 25.3in and 13.3in – offering full colour resolutions of 3,200 x 1,800 and 1,600 x 1,200 respectively. The displays share many of the same qualities as paper: a viewing angle of 180°, easily visible in bright environments and always on. In fact, they need power only when refreshing the content of the screen. “These need to be put in well-lit areas and treated like paper,” Jack Wilders, senior solutions architect at Sharp NEC Display Solutions told PC Pro. “Users have to think about which colours are going to pop on it. It’s definitely more similar to…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s futures editor. Yes, she knows she should just delete her Facebook and Instagram accounts. And her Google one. And go live under a rock or something. @njkobie OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o in May with advanced voice systems that sound more natural. To many people, it sounded like actress Scarlett Johansson, in particular her portrayal of an AI in the film Her. That feeling was encouraged by CEO Sam Altman tweeting the word “her” at the time of the launch. Then the actress revealed she was contacted by the company a year ago to voice the AI assistant, but declined. OpenAI says there was no intent for the “Sky” voice, as it’s known, to sound like ScarJo, and posted a blog detailing its timeline of actor auditions…

Another new feature added to Photoshop in the latest update is the option to provide reference images. So instead of struggling to find the right words to describe the style of image you’re looking for, you can upload a photograph that embodies the style you’re hoping to create. Don’t get the wrong impression of this feature: it’s not designed to create an AI photocopy of the image you provide, it’s intended to provide inspiration, to retain characteristics. You can provide reference images whether you’re generating images from scratch or only want to generate part of an image. Here (see right), for example, we’ve downloaded a royalty-free vector-art style image from Vecteezy and used that as a reference image. But we’ve also added extra detail to the prompt, asking for a…

If you’re still using Windows 10, it won’t have escaped your notice that Microsoft is keen for you to upgrade to Windows 11. Notifications have been popping up in Windows Update for some time, and recently users have been seeing full-screen adverts urging them to make the switch. Yet users aren’t exactly rushing to embrace the new OS. According to StatCounter figures from March 2024, Windows 10 is still running on 69% of all desktop computers, with Windows 11 trailing behind at 26.7%. For a free upgrade, that’s a pretty low figure. There’s no single reason why more people aren’t rushing to Windows 11. In some cases the new OS’s hardware requirements are an obstacle – but we’ve heard from many readers that, even though their PCs are capable of…

Most modern NAS platforms include a personal cloud server component. Asustor calls its cloud platform EZ Sync; on Synology it’s Synology Drive, while Qnap has its own offering called Cloud Drive. If you already have a NAS appliance then using one of these services for your cloud storage and synchronisation needs is probably a no-brainer – you don’t need any extra hardware or software, and you can use as much space as is available on your NAS volume. If you’re thinking of buying a new appliance primarily for online storage and syncing, there are a few cloud-focused NAS options to consider. The WD My Cloud Home is offered in a range of capacities from 2TB to 8TB, with prices starting at just £118 (see tinyurl.com/359mycloud), while Synology’s BeeStation comes in…

SCORE PRICE RTX 4090/32GB RAM/2TB SSD, £3,500 (£4,200 inc VAT) from razer.com The Razer Blade 16 has been one of our favourite gaming laptops for years, and with its big screen, high-end CPU and Nvidia RTX graphics it makes a stonking graphical workstation, too. What it’s never been is a machine for people with light wallets. The new entry-level model for 2024 comes with a 24-core Intel Core i9-14900HX processor, an Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU, a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM – and it costs £3,000 inc VAT. The model I tested was upgraded with an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU, plus double the storage and memory, bringing the price up to £4,200 inc VAT. If you want 4TB of storage and 64GB of RAM, you’ll have to pay an…

SCORE PRICE £375 (£450 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk Allow me to be frank. If this tablet came with a standard glossy display, it would be consigned to the already overflowing PC Pro bin of me-too Android tablets. The processor is so middle-of-the-road it attends Billy Joel concerts in a home-knit jumper; the design so bland that it makes tapioca pudding look like a knickerbocker glory. Yet I grew to love it, for one reason only: its paper-like screen. For, despite this tablet’s prosaic name, this isn’t a matte display in the usual sense; when we describe a matte display on a laptop, we essentially mean that it isn’t glossy. Here, it’s truly akin to paper, able to soak up light in a similar way to an E Ink screen. However,…

SCORE PRICE £424 (£509 inc VAT) from samsung.com It turns out that “tablet” isn’t a great word in terms of precise description. The Galaxy Active5 5G tablet has more differences than similarities to either of the two other tablets we review this month – the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro (see p64) and the Panasonic Toughbook 33 MK3 opposite. If anything, this compact 8in device has more in common with a phone, including support for 5G and a slim design. But this is no consumer device. It’s a rugged tablet designed for hard knocks, with the promise of drop protection from 1.8m in the bundled case, an IP68 rating against dust and water ingress, and Samsung even claims that it has been tested to meet MIL-STD-810 standards – including altitude, humidity…

SCORE PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from honor.com/uk The Honor 200 Pro isn’t the first premium phone to pack a great set of cameras, but it is the first to come with a set of bespoke filters developed in partnership with Studio Harcourt, the legendary Parisian portrait studio. Yes, technically these are only software effects, but they’re superb ones that can help you capture striking, characterful shots. The “Harcourt Classic” filter is most recognisable. This aims to recreate the look of the studio’s signature black-and-white headshots, and the results can be stunning. With the right subjects, at least, as the photo of me below sadly shows. “Harcourt Colour” is similar, but uses a lovely warm colour palette. Both modes accentuate lens flares, and while artificial bokeh may be old hat,…

Every user has differing daily needs, not to mention differing budgets, so we’re not going to try to guide you precisely to your perfect laptop. Hopefully, our reviews will help you on that front. Instead, these two pages should help you identify your must-haves versus your nice-to-haves. We’ll start with the literal core component: the processor. Everyday performance There are so many processor options that it’s almost impossible to know where to begin. So we’ll keep it simple to start with: for everyday usage, Intel’s Core i5 and AMD’s Ryzen 5 chips are great mid-range choices. However, Core i7 and Ryzen 7 options will result a more responsive laptop and achieve faster results when tackling tougher tasks, particularly creative work, video and photo editing, and coding. A Core i3 or…

SCORE PRICE £500 (£600 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com The Asus Vivobook is one of the more affordable laptops in this month’s test, aiming to deliver the perfect balance of features, performance and value. Although it photographs nicely, put away any premium expectations. While it looks great at first glance, with a metal finish on its top and keyboard surround, a closer look reveals that Acer has used plastic on the base and underside. That’s to be expected at this price, but other laptops (such as the Aspire 14) don’t pretend that they’re all-metal – which is less tacky. The Vivobook is also a sizeable laptop, at 360 x 233 x 17.9mm. Asus spreads the weight well, though, and even at 1.7kg we found it comfortable to carry. Still, a tiny…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from huawei.com The MateBook D16 is larger than any of its rivals this month, with a 16in display its most dominant feature. And don’t think this laptop is an immovable feast: at 1.7kg, the D16 is a great option for those who like to work and play in different areas of the house rather than sitting at a desk all day. A £1,000 price is similarly sizeable in this month’s company, but that’s because its size comes with power attached. Intel’s 13th generation Core i9-13900H is the most powerful processor in this Labs by a distance, and Huawei pairs it with a 1TB SSD drive and 16GB of memory. There’s little that stands out style-wise, but the D16 looks smart with its all-metal, grey,…

SCORE PRICE £741 (£889 inc VAT) from very.co.uk MSI’s Cyborg 15 has direct competition in this Labs: the HP Victus 15. But for gamers who seek high frame rates beyond anything else, it holds the ace card in the form of Nvidia’s RTX 4060 GPU. Turn to our graphs on p94 and you’ll see the MSI was the clear winner in all of our gaming tests, with its most notable results being 7,635 in 3DMark’s Time Spy DirectX 12 and 103fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p and Highest settings. Like HP, MSI saves money by choosing an older processor. Here, it opts for Intel rather than AMD, with the Core i7-12650H now two generations old, having been launched in 2022. The “H” in the chip’s name denotes…

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 and…

SCORE PRICE From £95 exc VAT per year from acronis.com Acronis’ Cyber Protect teams up hybrid backup services with full-strength cybersecurity and endpoint protection. One subscription takes care of everything, and it’s all managed from a single cloud portal. Cyber Protect 16 Advanced takes the Standard edition and adds features such as Windows patch management, backup malware scans and an endpoint detection and remediation (EDR) service that provides event correlation, threat containment, incident investigation, kill chain analysis and endpoint rollback recovery. Ransomware protection comes with tamper-proof immutable backups and a compliance mode that stops malicious actors from changing account settings and deleting backups. There are a lot of activities to keep track of, but the cloud portal helps by presenting a customisable dashboard. You have lots of widgets to choose…

SCORE PRICE 5TB, £838 exc VAT per year from idrive.com I Drive Business is a great cloud backup solution for SMBs concerned about hidden costs as its subscriptions are based only on cloud capacity. Available in a wide range of flexible plans, you can start small and scale up as and when you need to. Prices start at only £56 per year for 250GB, rising to £838 for 5TB, with options to go up to 50TB and beyond. It has even more appeal as all plans include unlimited workstation and server support so you can secure Windows, macOS and Linux desktops, iOS and Android mobiles, Windows Server, Hyper-V and VMware hosts, and business apps such as Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Oracle. Features keep on coming as IDrive’s hybrid backups…

Cloud computing is everywhere. Everyone’s doing it, and you can bet that a whole lot of people are getting it wrong in some way. Before we look at how, though, let’s start off by making sure we get the definition of “cloud computing” right. It matters, because you can’t hope to have a successful relationship with the cloud if you don’t know what it actually consists of. To be fair, the general conception of the cloud has been fuzzy ever since services such as Amazon’s EC2 started marketing to non-technical users. Prior to this I had been present in technical meetings and conferences where we all understood that “the cloud” meant a particular set of architectures presenting a particular set of services. But once marketeers started trying to sell the…

The arrival of Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite CPUs on Windows laptops intrigues me. Early benchmarks suggest that Qualcomm and Microsoft have really done their homework here, although I’m not at all bothered whether it’s better or worse than an M2 Mac of some flavour. The reality is that it must represent a significant leap from the current Intel and AMD laptop CPU offerings. As PC Pro’s own testing shows (see p52), this seems the case. Windows on ARM has had a somewhat difficult recent history, despite the fact that Windows NT was designed as a cross-platform operating system. The first version, NT 3.1, shipped on Intel, MIPS and Alpha. PowerPC came along soon after, but never went anywhere, while Intel’s i860 build was never released to the public. Subsequently, Intel’s…

Last month, I briefly mentioned DMARC when writing about how and why I switched my primary email client from Gmail to Proton Mail. This month, given the amount of activity surrounding email authentication over the past few months from both sides of the cybersecurity fence, I thought I would dive a little deeper. I suspect – I admit I have no actual statistics to back this up – that most email users have never heard of the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) security protocol. Why would they? So long as emails are reaching their destination, be that their own inboxes or someone else’s, why worry? Indeed, when Google started to implement new rules relating to the authentication of messages arriving in Gmail inboxes from marketers, spammers and anyone…