Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2021 in PC Pro

@njkobie Waiting to pay for a few tasty snacks at a furniture retailer’s food hall, I spotted a sign fixed to the plastic sheets protecting the cashier from the airborne particles that have kept us locked down so much over the past 18 months. The sign didn’t ask people to stay 2m back, wear a mask or wash their hands. Instead, it declared: card payments only, no cash. That was a problem for the customer ahead of me. She had the coins to cover her bill of £2.20, but the retailer wouldn’t accept physical money. The cashier had no way to accept coins, the customer had nothing else to pay with. Turning to me, she asked if I would pay for her, and happily I did. The coins she handed…

I’m normally someone who likes the very latest version of Windows installed, so when the opportunity arose to try out Windows 11, I was happy to be a guinea pig. I have to say that the experience was, on the whole, a smooth one. The new font is lovely to look at and very clear to read. The new sound effects are subtle. The wallpapers are beautiful. There have been a large number of improvements in many areas, most notably the Settings screen. Everything I tried just worked with no issues whatsoever – in spite of the fact that my PC is running a seventh-generation Intel Core i5 and, therefore, technically, not within the spec for Windows 11. There was just one fly in the ointment: the Start screen. I…

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

SCORE PRICE £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Think of premium laptops and it’s American brands that spring to mind: the Apple MacBook, Dell XPS and HP Spectre series for instance. With the Summit E13 Flip Evo, Taiwanese manufacturer MSI aims to break up that all-American dominance with a laptop that could have come right out of a Californian design lab. This is a gorgeous laptop to hold and be hold, finished in an all-metal chassis and measuring only 15mm thick. Nor is just a laptop, as the Flip in its name indicates. The hinge not only lifts the rear of the chassis by a couple of millimetres to aid typing, but swivels 360° to turn the Summit E13 into a tablet. MSI includes a stylus in the box, but…

SCORE PRICE £352 (£422 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com If you’re looking for a light weight alternative to Windows or macOS machines, this might be the Chromebox that ticks all the boxes. There’s a version for every budget: this Corei3-based machine here costs £352 excVAT, but Celeron based versions start at £209 exc VAT. If you need more power there are Core i5 and Core i7 versions available too. Its design is focused on function rather than form. It weighs only 648g and its square body is just 149mm wide and 40mm deep. That means it will take up minimal space on a desk, and you can even sling it into a bag and carry it around without issue – perfect for hotdesking or jumping between home and office. The Chromebox…

SCORE PRICE £1,541 (£1,849 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 is a monster. Measuring 49in from corner to corner, it arrives in a box big enough to sleep in. With a sweeping 1000R curvature, 1.15m width and 418mm depth, you’ll need a huge desk to accommodate it. It also has one key industry-first feature hidden beneath its space-age white plastic exterior: Mini LED backlighting. This means its LEDs are up to five times smaller than normal (0.008in compared to 0.04in), which reduces the amount of backlight bleed and improves overall accuracy. Mini LED TVs are becoming more common, but this is the first time we’ve seen the technology in a monitor. There are 2,048 individual local dimming zones beneath the Neo G9’s panel, a vast improvement over…

SCORE PRICE 8GB/128GB, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from oneplus.com/uk The OnePlus Nord 2 isn’t actually the second Nord phone in the OnePlus range, nor is it even the third or fourth. Following the success of the original, OnePlus went to town, releasing the cheaper N100 and N10 models and then the CE “Core Edition” variant (see overleaf), making this the fifth Nord phone to be released since the beginning of 2020. However, to dismiss it as just another mid-range OnePlus would be doing the Nord 2 a disservice, since it’s a superb phone in its own right. The price is attractive, the specs solid and it’s a far more interesting phone than you might expect. Striking design The most noticeable thing about the design of the Nord 2 is its…

SCORE PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk 4K webcams such as the Dell UltraSharp aren’t common, and there’s a good reason why. For most people, a 1080p webcam is good enough; although it sounds attractive on paper, the vast majority of us don’t need 4K. Still, the extra pixels give you flexibility to crop more closely into the frame without losing quality and, if you harbour ambitions to become a YouTube celebrity, the more pixels you have at your disposal, the better. The other reason you might want to pause before investing in a 4K webcam such as the UltraSharp is the price, because cameras like these tend to be much more expensive than their 1080p counterparts. The UltraSharp will set you back £180, and its main rival, the…

SCORE PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from ipworkstations.com InterPro is one of a small group of UK PC manufacturers that focus on computers for professional applications. In every PC Pro workstation Labs test, it shows its ability in this area, and the IPW-R9 is a particularly good example. This is one of three systems this month to be based on AMD’s punchy Ryzen 9 5950X, which sports 16 cores with a base 3.4GHz clock and 4.9GHz turbo mode. For the £3,000 inc VAT price, it hits the sweet spot, costing a little over half the 24-core Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, for example, yet delivering much more than half the performance. The downside is that the memory configuration is merely dual-channel rather than quad channel, so you lose on bandwidth. InterPro has…

SCORE PRICE £2,499 (£2,998 inc VAT) from armari.com Although Armari designs its own cases, for more budget conscious models it sticks with generic chassis. But this is no run-of-the-mill workstation. The system is based around AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X, which is the best processor currently on the market for a workstation at this price. Combining 16 cores with a 3.4GHz base clock and 4.9GHz boost, this CPU will be great with both single and multithreaded workloads. Armari also partners the Ryzen 9 with 64GB of DDR4 memory. This is supplied as two 32GB modules, taking advantage of the processor’s dual-channel memory architecture but leaving two DIMM slots on the Asus ROG Strix B550-XE Gaming free for upgrade. Graphics acceleration is as expected at this price: Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A4000. This…

SCORE PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com This Chillblast system is one of three that hit the apparent sweet spot for a £3,000 inc VAT workstation. All three have the same combination of processor, memory quantity and graphics acceleration. Even the chassis is a popular choice. The processor is the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. This 16-core CPU has a base 3.4GHz clock but a boost all the way up to 4.9GHz, giving it strong ability whether your workload is single or multithreaded. Chillblast has partnered this potent CPU with 64GB of DDR4 memory, supplied as a pair of 32GB modules so there are still two DIMM slots free in the Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming WiFi. This enables dual-channel memory bandwidth. The graphics acceleration is the third common element:…

Last year, when the pandemic struck and working from home suddenly became a necessity, it was understandable if support for remote workers was ad-hoc and patchy. Now, as the era of lockdowns hopefully draws to an end, many businesses are ready to permanently embrace flexible working models – and that means they need to find a reliable and manageable way of delivering technical support to staff across diverse locations. Luckily, the solution is already out there. Remote-support software is a mature technology that’s been around for many years. It means there’s no need to waste time on unproductive and frustrating phone calls: support technicians can put themselves in front of a user’s computer without leaving the comfort of their own desk – or, as it might be, their own home.…

SCORE PRICE Yearly plan, per agent/month, £32 exc VAT from gotoassist.com LogMeIn’s GoToAssist Remote Support is a well established cloud-hosted support service, and this latest update adds flexibility by allowing technicians to launch remote-access sessions from their personal web portal or a dedicated desktop application. Whichever method you choose, it’s easy to set up an on-demand connection. With a few clicks you can generate a nine-digit access code and a web link, which can be sent directly to the client via email or SMS. The end user can then either click on the link or manually open the website and enter the code to initiate the session. A few security measures help prevent unauthorised access. Before remote control is granted, the user is shown a web page displaying details of…

SCORE PRICE £263 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com When it’s time to move your office network onto Wi-Fi 6, you don’t want to be held back by a last-generation gigabit switch. To reap the full bandwidth of 802.11ax you need a multi-gigabit back-end. Thankfully, that doesn’t have to mean a jacked-up price: for a shockingly reasonable £263, TP-Link’s TL-SG3210XHP-M2 desktop/rack switch offers eight 2.5GbE ports and two high-speed 10GbE SFP+ fibre uplink ports. That’s not all. Each of the switch’s eight copper ports presents 802.3af/at PoE+, with a generous total power budget of 240W. This means that the switch can deliver 30W on every multi-gig port at once, making it a great choice for anyone wanting to upgrade or install an office full of APs with a minimum of cabling. The…

Windows 11 has crashed into view and it’s a critical moment in the history of computing. Will it be inducted into the “Windows Hall of Fame” to join 3.1, XP and 7 or exposed in the tabloid “Hall of Shame” with ME, 8 and RT? As a retailer, a new OS can be a delight. It drives sales as the public use the release as a justification to thrash the plastic and treat themselves to something shiny with a warranty. As a system builder, a new OS can drive me insane. When customers take delivery of a machine loaded with the latest OS, there’s an unspoken expectation that it should be faster than their old PC. If I delve back into the archives of our business, this hasn’t always been…

My heartfelt thanks go out to Mission, the British tech and hi-fi business, which held the first in-person event I’ve been to for the past 18 months. I picked out my most fetching face mask and pedalled over to just behind John Lewis on Oxford Street, where Zuma – also known as Mission and found at zuma.ai – had a little pop-up shop. It was demoing a smart light fitting. Imagine a shotgun cartridge embedded in your false ceiling. The vents around the actinically bright LED element double as sound wave exits for the rear-mounted speaker drivers. This tube fits into the form factor of the old, hot, incandescent element downlighters we identify as “stylish and modern” in the strange terminology of home decorations. But the visible parts and the…

It was all going well. Too well. I opened the door to my office with a jaunty air on Sunday evening, just as a final check to make sure everything was prepped for Monday morning before the final push of sending this issue of PC Pro to the printers. I may even have whistled a sunny refrain as I logged into my computer and navigated my way to the main folder. Then it hit me. Empty. Where there should have been all of this month’s InDesign files and PDFs was a yawning expanse of white. The whistle froze on my lips as I leapt from folder to folder, looking for anything that was the sum of this month’s combined hard work from the 20-odd people (emphasis on odd) that contribute…

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

@bazzacollins I hate paying for something and not knowing what it is, like one of those cryptically named transactions on a bank statement. Yet, UK taxpayers, we’re all paying for a secretive consortium of IT security companies called Vivace – and the Home Office is not keen to tell us what’s going on there. Vivace first came to my attention when it was named as one of the “industry experts” consulted for the NSPCC’s highly dubious report into end-to-end encryption, which I wrote about here a few months ago (see issue 322, p22). I’d never heard of Vivace, and its website (vivace.tech) left me none the wiser, offering little more than a full house in buzzword bingo (“providing innovative, agile and flexible solutions to problems in the communications data space”)…

It’s easy to misplace your phone. Or your wireless earbuds. Or your laptop. Sometimes they will be in the house or the office, which isn’t too problematic. Other times they’ll be in the back of a taxi, on the train or in a burglar’s swag bag. That’s when things start getting tricky. Luckily, so many of the devices we use every day have wireless features that they’re becoming much easier to track. Even if they don’t have the chops to maintain a network connection themselves, stickers and dongles from the likes of Tile make adding such features trivial. In this feature, we’ll walk through your options for tracking not only computers and phones, but everyday items such as your car, bike, family member – or even your pet. In many…

PRICE £1,332 (£1,599 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index The original Galaxy Fold didn’t have the best start in life. Plagued with design flaws, it was far from the shiny folding future Samsung hoped for. But the South Korean firm didn’t give up, producing a much-improved sequel just before the pandemic hit. With this year’s Galaxy Z Fold3, it’s clear that Samsung has renewed confidence in its high-priced foldable flagship. And what makes it clear is that this is the first time Samsung has been brave enough to send units out for review in the UK. What’s new This year’s Fold benefits from a full-service upgrade. Not only is it waterproof, but it’s far more durable. Incorporating some must-have improvements, such…

SCORE PRICE £1,435 (£1,723 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Lenovo is never afraid to experiment with new form factors, and this Yoga all-in-one is one of its most lavish creations. Imagine a longlist of desirable features, including a 4K screen, and few will go unticked. What about gaming? Most all-in-ones make do with the integrated graphics built into their processor, but Lenovo adds ad discrete, mobile Nvidia RTX 2060 chip. At 1080p and the toughest Mein Leben settings, the Yoga ran Wolfenstein with RTX and DLSS enabled at 96fps. Sticking to 1080p, Shadow of the Tomb Raider returned 73fps and Metro Exodus 58fps. Lenovo sensibly complements the speedy 512GB NVMe SSD with a 1TB hard disk for all the extra storage you’ll need for these games. If you want to play…

SCORE PRICE 4GB, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk The pitch for the Galaxy Book Go is straightforward: this is a cheap, 4G, 14in laptop built around a Snapdragon chip that runs Windows 10 on ARM. It has superb battery life, lasting for 14hrs 17mins in our video-rundown test – a feat only matched by the latest MacBooks with their own ARM processors. And it really is cheap, with the 4GB version costing £399. Its 8GB sibling costs £499, which is a mysterious hike when they both have 128GB of storage. No wonder it’s the cheaper model that Samsung sent us to test. Windows 10 on ARM can run 32-bit x86 apps under emulation, but not 64-bit apps (although this is possible in developer preview builds). As such, I couldn’t…

SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/325tplink We don’t see many tri-band Wi-Fi 6 routers. Thanks to the technological improvements introduced in the 802.11ax wireless standard, a single 5GHz radio can service dozens of clients at once without clogging up the airwaves, so there’s not much need to pay a premium for a router with two. Yet there are still benefits to a tri-band design. The extra bandwidth can be useful for large households or small offices with lots of computers all wanting to exchange data concurrently. Or, you can dedicate one radio to a gaming rig or server, so it can enjoy a full-speed connection with no need to share bandwidth. With the Archer AX90, TP-Link has come up with a clever way to keep the cost down.…

SCORE PRICE 8GB/128GB, £249 (£299 inc VAT) from oneplus.com/uk Nord is OnePlus’ budget brand, and whilst the Nord 2 (see p68) sits at the top end of the range, the CE “Core Edition” targets those with less to spend. That doesn’t mean it lacks appealing features. Top of the list is its 90Hz 6.43in AMOLED screen, which delivers vibrant images that are a match for any phone in its price bracket. Brightness peaks at a solid 400cd/m², and colour accuracy in Natural (sRGB) mode is excellent. You can’t expect such accuracy in its most lurid mode, AMOLED Wide Gamut, where the panel covers 114% of the DCI-P3 colour space. It’s an excellent display. The Nord CE looks pretty good with the screen off, too. You have a choice of “void…

SCORE PRICE £58 (£70 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/325trust The Taxon QHD sits at the top of Trust’s range of basic webcams and offers 2K streaming for £70. Whilst Trust doesn’t match the bundled tripod stand of the Dell opposite, I’m not complaining about the captive 1.8m USB cable or the versatile hinged stand. This can be mounted to the top of your monitor or laptop screen, placed flat on a desk or screwed directly onto a tripod. The camera captures video at 2,560 x 1,440 at 30fps, so it’s more advanced than the cheapest 720p and 1080p cameras. Add a pair of stereo microphones and a built-in privacy shield and you have a strong selection of physical features for the price. Image quality is pretty good. The Taxon delivers an…

SCORE PRICE £6,667 (£8,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1-48T is based around one class-leading feature: its graphics card. This is the only workstation this month with the monster Nvidia Quadro RTX A6000, which alone costs over £4,500 inc VAT. Inevitably, this has meant that Scan has had to make a reduction in another important part of the specification. The primary area where Scan has compensated for the price of the graphics is in the CPU. Where other manufacturers submitting a workstation in the £8,000 inc VAT category have opted for 32 or 64-core processors, Scan has chosen the 24-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X – which PCSpecialist managed to fit into a machine costing £3,000 inc VAT. This is a capable processor, with a 3.8GHz base clock…

SCORE PRICE £6,667 (£8,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Chillblast’s abilities to put together a capable workstation are in full evidence with the Fusion Ripper Render RTX A5000. With barely any weaknesses, this is a system that will cope with everything your content-creation workflow might throw at it. Central to the Chillblast system is its 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor. Despite its huge number of cores, this still operates with a base frequency of 2.9GHz and a 4.3GHz boost. Sensibly, Chillblast has partnered this omnipotent CPU with a whopping 128GB of DDR4 memory, supplied as four modules and thereby leaving four DIMM slots free on the Asus ROG Strix TRX40-XE Gaming motherboard for upgrade. The Nvidia Quadro RTX A5000 is the perfect partner for this processor. With 8,192 CUDA processors…

SCORE PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews PCSpecialist shows exactly what you can now get for your money with its £3,000 inc VAT system – namely, a whopping 24 cores. But to afford this princely number, the company has been forced to make compromises in other areas. First, though, that processor – an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X. This 24-core CPU offers a 3.8GHz base clock and 4.5GHz turbo, so it will cope superbly whether you’re performing single-threaded or multithreaded tasks. The memory PCSpecialist has chosen to accompany this is only 32GB, however, which is a bit meagre for 24 cores. This has at least been supplied as four DIMMs, taking advantage of the quad-channel memory architecture of the Ryzen Threadripper, leaving four more slots free for upgrade on the…

SCORE PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Scan has a reputation to uphold, as the winner of our last workstation Labs and a regular recipient of awards for showcasing the latest tech. The 3XS GWP-ME A1-24R is another amazing mixture of cutting-edge components. At the centre is a 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, which has a 3.7GHz base clock and 4.8GHz turbo. Scan has partnered the 5900X with a healthy 64GB of DDR4 memory, supplied as two 32GB modules to take advantage of the processor’s dual-channel memory ability but leaving two DIMM slots free on the Asus ProArt B550 Creator motherboard for upgrade. Graphics acceleration is as expected at the lower price – Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A4000. This is a big step up from the Quadro RTX 4000, providing…

SCORE PRICE Starts from £17 per month exc VAT from connectwise.com If you’re looking for remote support with a personal touch then ConnectWise Control is a great choice, as its portal and client apps can be easily branded with your company details. Personalisation is built into the system from the start: as soon as you sign up, you’re prompted to pick a unique name to append to the standard Control URL. A focus on security quickly becomes apparent too, as you can tighten technician access by enforcing two-factor authentication, and set up user roles to determine what support functions are available to each individual. The technician portal is easy to navigate, and offers two different types of remote-support session. To create an on-demand connection you can visit the Support tab…

SCORE PRICE 1-500 systems, perpetual, £10 each exc VAT from netsupportmanager.com Cloud-friendly SMBs have a plethora of remote-support products to choose from; those who prefer to keep it all in house have fewer options. Luckily, one of those options is the exceptional NetSupport Manager (NSM), a product that IT departments have been relying on for more than 30 years. Despite its affordable pricing, NSM offers all the features you’d want from a fully-fledged support product. Those include full remote control, file transfer, text and audio chat, remote application launch and Registry editing tools – plus highly detailed hardware and software inventory. Getting set up is swift and easy. After installing the NSM Control component on a Windows 10 host, we were able to use the Deploy tool to scan the…

iPerf3 is one of those industry-standard tools for measuring network performance. You run it at each end of a connection and then fire it up to determine how quickly the data gets sent over the wire (or Wi-Fi). It’s been around a while and is very much a known quantity. The app is usually controlled from a command line, which gives a good indication of how hair-shirt it really is, but the core technology is available on just about every computing platform out there. Some developers have wrapped a graphical user interface around the core code to make it more friendly, but being a keyboard warrior, the command line with its endless switches and options is The One True Way. Well, most of the time. I use Magic iPerf on…

The saying “there’s nowt so queer as folk” has been rattling around my head these past weeks. In my job, this often means customers not fully understanding how their devices work, and it makes for some fascinating conversations. A great example of this comes from Steve. A regular customer, he rang to say he couldn’t get the internet on his iPad. Whenever possible, I always try to offer help over the phone before I book a visit, and my first piece of advice to Steve was to turn his router off and on. That in itself can be an interesting experience, as people rarely know what a router is. “It’s the box near your phone with some lights on it” usually does the trick, but Steve remained confused. He couldn’t…

The future of AI in medicine is in Cambridge – and it’s superfast. Nvidia has unveiled Cambridge-1, a practical name for the most powerful supercomputer in the UK and among the top 50 globally, installed during the pandemic at a cost of $100 million (£73 million) to the GPU giant. The aim isn’t just to cozy up to the UK government at a time when Nvidia is hoping its acquisition of British chipmaker ARM will be approved, but to show off its DGX SuperPOD scalable computing setup for AI – and help power the future of medicine. Cambridge-1’s first projects will be with pharmaceutical giants GSK and AstraZeneca, medical startup Oxford Nanopore, and researchers at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London. “Cambridge-1 will empower world-leading…

LABS Monitors We put over 30 monitors to the test, from stripped-down bargains to luxury-laden delights. And with sizes ranging from 24 into 34in, this Labs is suitable for all sizes of desk. FEATURES PC Pro Excellence Awards 2021 Discover the most reliable brands in our unique roundup of customer service and reliability–as decided by you–plus our list of the best products of the year. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a free 32GB memory stick emblazoned with the logo of your favourite magazine. You can read PC Pro in print, on an iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p106 for more details.…

Mark Parvin Regular guest columnist Mark tries to explain to customers why errors still occur even after he’s fixed their machines from p116 David Crookes Rather than celebrate old technology in this month’s Retro, David celebrates the people who gave it a chance to succeed: early adopters like you. See p123 Nathan Spendelow Did our resident phone reviewer Nathan fall for the charms of the Galaxy Z Fold3? Find out in his in-depth review, starting on p46 Paul Ockenden Sit back and admire as Paul explains how he uses clever automation tech and sunlight to save energy in his home. Turn to p111…

While casually watching a Hawaiian volcano erupt on YouTube, as you do, I detected something creepy about the narrator that I couldn’t quite identify. It sounded like an adult American male, but with something subtly wrong about his rhythm. I started noticing the same in other videos, and posted on Facebook to ask whether anyone else thought synthetic digital voices were being used: the consensus was “probably not”. Then last month the MIT Technology Review published an article about AI voice actors (pcpro.link/325mit) that said “deepfake voices had something of a lousy reputation for their use in scam calls and internet trickery. But their improving quality has since piqued the interest of a growing number of companies. Recent breakthroughs in deep learning have made it possible to replicate many of…

Central cryptoheating The negative consensus assessment of cryptocurrencies in last month’s issue (see issue 324, p26) isn’t strong enough in my opinion. They are nearly useless as currencies because they do not have sufficient transaction capacity and the value is too volatile. As assets, they are a pure Ponzi scheme. Unlike gold, the energy consumption used to limit the supply of cryptocoin is not recoverable. By contrast, the so-called “fiat currencies” are backed by the tax-raising powers of the governments that issue them. The farmer who uses biomethane to generate electricity for cryptomining isn’t being green. He is releasing just as much stored carbon into the atmosphere. Instead, he could sell the electricity to the grid, thereby substituting fossil carbon. On the other hand, it’s increasingly green to switch from…

New versions of Windows don’t come along all that often these days. Indeed, if you’d taken Microsoft at its word a few years ago, Windows 11 should never have arrived at all. But here we are, with a new version of Windows on the near horizon, with Windows 10 users set to qualify for a free upgrade to the new operating system. Before you hit that Upgrade button in Windows Update, however, you should take this once-in-a-computing-generation opportunity to get your PCs in order and ready to take full advantage of the new OS. First, however, it’s worth considering if you should – or can – upgrade to Windows 11. We’ll explore the pros and cons of upgrading a Windows 10 PC and dive into the detailed system requirements to…

1 PCI EXPRESS IS OLD ENOUGH TO BUY AROUND OF DRINKS We may think of PCI Express as a modern standard, but it was first introduced way back in 2002. To put into context just how long ago that was, the cross-industry group that developed it included Compaq and a company that still went by the full name of Hewlett-Packard, as well as Dell, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. The tech was originally called 3GIO, short for “third-generation I/O”. That reflects its role as a successor to the venerable PCI bus and its short-lived follow-up PCI-X. But while the name emphasises its heritage, PCI Express works in a fundamentally different way to its predecessors. Those older interfaces used parallel data transfer, while PCI Express switched to a serial approach. The reason…

PRICE Core i7, £875 (£1,050 inc VAT) from box.co.uk We’re used to seeing all-in-one PCs from the major manufacturers, but Taiwan’s Micro-Star International, better known by the initials MSI, is a new name in town. The AM241 comes in two flavours: an Intel Core i7-based machine with 16GB of RAM at £875 exc VAT and a Core i5 model with 8GB of RAM at a lower £666 exc VAT. We tested the former, marked by a “P” at the end of its model name. Pull the AM241P out of its box and you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve bought a monitor rather than a PC. At 541 x 175 x 407mm and weighing just shy of 4.5kg with the stand, it’s the same size and weight as a typical…

SCORE PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from store.hp.com Surprise and delight” is a phrase used by marketing types to describe the feeling a customer gets when they discover something unexpected in their purchase. It’s a phrase I loathe with a passion, so I was disturbed to experience a degree of S&D when I fired up the new HP Pavilion 14. First, it uses the same sandblasted, anodised finish on the cover and keyboard frame as more expensive HP machines such as the Envy 13 (see issue 319, p83). The “Serene Pink” lid is lovely, too, and since it’s a largely metal construct it feels solid (there’s a silver model too). There’s more flex to the lid than in the Envy 13, but it’s nothing to worry about. This laptop defies…

SCORE PRICE £637 (£764 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com It isn’t often that anyone gets excited by a 0.1 jump in a spec, but it’s worth marking the increase from HDMI 2.0 to HDMI 2.1 with a shiny gold star. The new spec means that consoles such as the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 can stream at 120 frames per second at 4K, adding welcome flexibility to “PC” gaming monitors. To take advantage, you will need to use the HDMI 2.1 cable that Asus includes in the box; this cable is described as Ultra High Speed, a reflection of the almost tripling of bandwidth from 16Gbits/sec to 48Gbits/sec. And, of course, you will need one of the new consoles, because all their predecessors are limited to 4K at 60Hz at…

SCORE PRICE £1,060 (£1,272 inc VAT) from vive.com/uk Virtual reality is a PeterPan technology: it never seems to grow up. While the first few generations of VR headsets were initially impressive, the “wow” factor quickly faded and wider adoption has been hampered by several key by factors. These include awkward setup, a limited number of apps, and the need to be tethered to a bulky PC – unless you’re willing to accept a significant drop in performance and quality. HTC has been doing its level best to change that, however. Unlike Facebook’s Oculus Quest headsets, which have taken a more consumer friendly approach, HTC’s Vive family has its sights set on the high-end “prosumer” and business market. We gave the Vive Pro 2 (see issue 324, p46) a cautious welcome…

SCORE PRICE £6,650 (£7,980 inc VAT) from armari.com Armari always likes to experiment with bleeding-edge technology, and this month’s system reveals a number of components we haven’t seen before at PC Pro. The headline act is that this is our first look at the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro processor, but it also features the latest AMD graphics. The Ryzen Threadripper Pro in question is the 32-core 3975WX, which is the Pro equivalent of the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. Aside from the Pro offering eight-channel memory with support for up to 2TB of RAM rather than 256GB, as well as additional hardware security features, the clock speeds are subtly different between the two CPUs. The non-Pro has a 3.7GHz base clock and 4.5GHz turbo mode, but the Pro has a base…

SCORE PRICE £6,667 (£8,000 inc VAT) from workstationspecialists.com Workstation Specialists has spared almost no expense with the WS-1640A-G4. Powerful processor, powerful graphics, plenty of storage, loads of memory – there isn’t a weak spot with this system. It’s been configured to deliver the best possible content creation experience in every area. The centrepiece of the WS-1640A-G4 is its 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X. This runs at a nominal 2.9GHz with a 4.3GHz turbo mode, so will deliver excellent performance with single-threaded applications alongside its all encompassing multithreaded abilities. Sensibly, Workstation Specialists has partnered this processor with 128GB of DDR4 memory supplied as four modules to take advantage of the quad-channel Ryzen Threadripper memory architecture. This leaves four DIMM slots free on the ASRock TRX40 Creator motherboard, should you ever feel…

Throughout this month’s Labs, we’ve focused primarily on the complete takeover by AMD processors. However, there was another visible trend: only three of this month’s systems contained conventional, mechanical hard disks. For many years, the traditional configuration for workstations has been a smaller, fast SSD for the OS and applications with much larger, slower hard disks for general media storage. Only three systems this month deliver this configuration, though. At last, the benefits of SSDs over conventional hard disks are pulling ahead, with sizes growing and costs falling. When SSDs first arrived, they were soon hitting the ceiling provided by the SATA 600 interface. While conventional hard drives were delivering 160 to 210MB/sec sustained throughput in our 2015 workstation Labs, SATA-connected SSDs were already achieving a 560MB/sec read rate. The…

SCORE PRICE Cloud/1 licence, £259 per year exc VAT from islonline.com With ISL Online, simplicity is the name of the game. It’s a web-based service that’s geared up for helping technicians quickly and easily establish on-demand support sessions with remote workers, or set client computers up for secure unattended access. The online portal is a tidy affair. To start a new session, just select the remote support tab, then click to download the ISL Light app. You can now choose whether you want to view the remote desktop, share your own screen or just have a text chat; whichever you pick, the app provides a unique eight-digit code, and offers multiple convenient options for conveying it to a remote user. The quickest is to email a web link directly from…

SCORE PRICE £363 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk There are plenty of 802.11ax access points to choose from, but most of them are designed for indoor installation. EnGenius’ ECW260 bringsthe performance of Wi-Fi6 into the great outdoors. Its innards are protected by an IP67-rated metal housing, so it should be more than up to the to the challenges of the British weather – it’s totally totally tight and can even handle full dust-immersion in a metre of water for 30 minutes. As for technical capabilities, we’re looking at a dual-band AP claiming speeds of up to 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. It connects back to your network through a 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit LAN port located behind the weatherproof grommet in its base; note that there’s no…

I often write about how I use automation to switch things on and off automatically to reduce fuel costs and save energy. I’ve had quite a few requests asking to provide more detail of the setup that I use, so that’s what I’m going to do over the next couple of months. Not just what works well, but also the mistakes I’ve made along the way. Oh, and before I start I should probably admit that I’ve spent far more on the kit to save energy than I’m likely to actually save in the short to medium term. For me it’s partly fun, and also an attempt at doing my bit to save the planet. Let’s start with a descriptive picture of my setup. My house has mains gas and…

This month I’m concentrating on one of the many pieces of reader feedback that reach me across multiple platforms. One of those platforms, ironically, being Gmail. I say ironically as the reader in question wanted to know my opinion on just how secure the service was for personal use. Addressing that security question is easy: it’s as secure as the steps you take to secure your Google account, and your awareness of incoming risk, allow. The secondary question, which was how private it is, is somewhat more complicated and I’ll come to that momentarily. For most people, Google account security comes down to two things. First, ensure you have a unique and strong password. As I always say at this point, a password manager is your friend here, both in…

We’ve all encountered laggards. “One of those fancy new smartphones, is it?,” they will have said a decade ago, nodding towards the black slab you just pulled out of your pocket. “My old Nokia 3210 does everything I need. Fancy a game of Snake?” In truth, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this attitude. They swore by their device’s long battery life and robust nature, just as you swore when your phone fell to the floor with a sickening thud. The term “laggards” for people who prefer to stand still was coined back in 1962, when Professor Everett Rogers published Diffusion of Innovations. He didn’t intend the word in a rude way, but no company in its right mind will ever target them. I thought of the laggards when I heard,…

The most recent Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is led by the Fugaku supercomputer at the RIKEN Centre for Computational Science in Japan, with its Linpack performance rating of 442,010Tflop/sec. The Nvidia Cambridge-1 isn’t yet on the list, but it will rank as the fastest in the UK and in the mid-50s globally with its claimed performance rating of about 8,000TFlop/sec. Here are the UK’s fastest official machines with their global ranking. #1 in the UK (#58 globally) United Kingdom Meteorological Office, made by Cray and HPE ⭍ 241,920 cores using Intel Xeon E5 processors⭍ 116,032GB memory⭍ Linpack performance 7,039TFlop/sec⭍ Theoretical peak performance 8,129TFlop/sec #2 in the UK (#100 globally) University of Cambridge’s Wilkes-3, made by Dell EMC ⭍ 44,800 cores using AMD EPYC and Nvidia…

One of the advantages of doing this job for over 30 years is that you have a somewhat different perspective to the whippersnappers. I’m acutely aware that people in their 20s have grown up with the internet as an integral part of their lives. That Google has always been there. And why wouldn’t you use online services to order everything from today’s lunch to your underwear? To them, it’s natural that all of this can be done from their phone, which they carry with them at all times. There is no point trying to describe what it was like Before Internet, because they simply cannot comprehend it. It was an entirely different world, as alien to them as suggesting that Channel 4 was a big deal when it first appeared…