Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i PC Pro

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO I WAS READING our Business Focus (see p96) on end point protection – tools for IT admins to keep smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs protected, in non-business speak – when it struck me what Windows really needed. It’s so obvious that I wonder why I didn’t think of it before, and that Microsoft hasn’t already done precisely this already. What we need is the ability for more knowledgeable folk to have control of our household’s laptops. Not only which security suite is running on devices, but similar levels of management that IT managers have over their employees’ systems. Think of it as Group Policy for the masses. I realise this may cause difficulties. My teenage children barely let me step into their bedroom, and I suspect that me…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Smart homes, smartphones and digital assistants are supposed to make life better, but they’ve also had the uneasy side effect of increasing domestic abuse. Increasingly, charities and academics are classing “tech abuse” as a strain of domestic abuse, where the abuser takes control of internet and email accounts, installs listening and video equipment that isolates their victims, and deploys tracking software on mobile phones. Experts we spoke to were reluctant to discuss details of tactics they have come across, for fear of giving abusers ideas, but they did share outlines of what victims face. “The thing to remember is that abusers, stalkers and other bad actors are going to use any tool they can to control and abuse their victim,” said Chris Cox, executive director of Operation Safe…

Have you spent time during lockdown worrying about what life will be like after this pandemic ends? For me, lockdown itself hasn’t been a huge deal as I’ve been working from home for the best part of 30 years, but I’m noticing other changes already. One example: this time last year, I devoted two of these columns to an AI conference, CogX, which was held a short stroll down the canal from my home in King’s Cross. Well, I’m there again this year, but virtually via live streaming. It works well enough – in fact, it’s easier to hear the speakers and read their slides than it was sitting in a tent in the rain – but I notice that there are fewer big hitters from US labs on the…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO At a BT Premium I have a couple of comments about your mesh extenders Labs (see issue 309, p72). Firstly, the BT offering tested was the standard version of Whole Home Wi-Fi, which is a dual-band setup and can’t compete on speed with the tri-band systems that you reviewed. However, BT does offer a tri-band system in the shape of Premium Whole Home Wi-Fi. The backhaul uses 802.11ax (or Wi-Fi 6), meaning it should be fast. I’d love to see a test of this system using the same methodology you used to test the other extenders. Also, each of the Premium units has two Ethernet sockets and I think the stands are removable, which immediately addresses two specific criticisms you had about the standard version. Secondly, you devoted…

The licensing situation around using Windows in virtual machines is opaque, to say the least. Good luck trying to find any guidance information from Microsoft on the topic. Meanwhile, Parallels’ support staff claim on its support forums that Microsoft’s Windows licence agreement “usually” states “one licence on one device”. That’s a full Windows licence, by the way, not an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) version. There are two things to note here. First, you can install and run a Windows virtual machine or Boot Camp installation without entering a licence key. That said, there are restrictions on what you can do (syncing settings, for example) and you will be nagged until you enter a key. In my experience, Windows has accepted the same licence key for the Windows 10 instance installed…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Are you continually running out of space on Dropbox, Google Drive or whatever your chosen cloud platform may be? If so, it’s time to take matters into your own hands. Storing files on your own hardware lets you consolidate and synchronise your data without having to worry about storage limitations – and your privacy can also be better protected. Here’s how to set up either a Raspberry Pi or a spare Windows PC as a personal cloud server, using the free ownCloud platform. STEP 1 Getting started with the Raspberry Pi You can install and run ownCloud on a regular Raspberry Pi running Raspbian, but getting it working can be a little complicated, as you also need to install and configure web and database services. To simplify things,…

Businesses invest heavily in IT security, while most home networks are protected by nothing more than an optimistic trust in default settings. Yet, arguably, the stakes are higher for personal devices than corporate ones: the cost of an attack on a company can be absorbed over time, whereas if your computer gets hit by malware, you could lose personal photos or private documents forever. If you only want to do the bare minimum of network management, therefore, you should focus on security. The basic measures are still worth repeating: use a secure passphrase for your wireless router, and don’t rely on outdated encryption standards – use WPA2 as a bare minimum, or the stronger WPA3 if your devices support it. In truth, it’s unlikely that strangers will be trying to…

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…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE Core i7/16GB/512GB, £1,292 (£1,550 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk If you’re looking a work-fromhome laptop, LG it has the answer the LG Gram 17. This laptop has of the power that phenomenal battery life a screen that stretches from to infinity when compared to ultraportables But what makes it very clever is that LG packs this into a chassis It’s a truly remarkable the Gra into a category all on its own. In fact, the LG Gram 17’s competition is itself: we gave this product a five-star review last year (see issue 295, p60), when it was powered by eighth-generation Intel Core processors, and you may still find it online for a lower price. Expanding range While last year’s Gram 17 was only available with one specification (Core i7, 16GB of…

The Samsung Galaxy Book Ion has plenty of competition, whether it’s the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, the Dell XPS 13, the Apple MacBook Air or numerous other lightweight machines. Samsung clearly isn’t aiming to win for all-out value. The MacBook Air, for instance, costs £1,099 with a Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, although it uses an older variant of the Core i5. Then there’s HP Envy 13 range, which usually costs around £900 for that specification – but we await its 2020 update. The Galaxy Book Ion is better value than the Surface Laptop 3, however. While Microsoft’s offering starts cheaper at £999, that model only comes with a 128GB SSD. Microsoft sells a Core i5 version with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD for…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Total value this month £146 Ability Office Single PC licence worth £20 ability.com ABILITY OFFICE IS a powerful Microsoft Officecompatible productivity suite, which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and photo manager. Ability Write looks and feels a lot like Microsoft Word. It reads and writes the same DOC and DOCX files, and supports the formatting options you need. Ability Spreadsheet has more than 250 built-in functions, 25 chart types, pivot tables, autoshapes and more, while Ability Presentation lets you open and edit PowerPoint presentations or create new documents of your own. The suite also includes Ability Launcher, a tiny application that adds an icon to your system tray, and Photoalbum, a thumbnail browser for locating, viewing and organising the images on your PC. NEW INSTRUCTIONS Voucher…

PRICE £29 (£35 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/311blink The Blink Mini is a new addition to Amazon-owned Blink’s security camera range. It’s cheap, cheerful and basic; a camera for those who want something simple to monitor a single room. Don’t expect much in the box, though, with just the camera, a 2m micro-USB cable and a power adapter to be found. While the Blink Mini feels lightweight, it looks neat decked out in white and black plastic and crams in all of the necessary core features, including 1080p footage recorded at a frame rate of 30fps. There’s motion detection, day and night video recording, and even two-way audio, meaning you can talk through your smartphone to the person on the other side of the camera. As with most smart home security…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Mike Jennings tests five memory kits to discover which deserves a place in your PC TEST RIG: Intel Core 9900K, Nvidia RTX 2080 Super, MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard, 500GB WD SN750 M.2 SSD PRICE £63 (£76 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Vengeance LPX kit is one of the most popular RAM sets, which is no wonder considering its low £76 price. Its budget leanings deliver a more modest design than others here, with black heatspreaders and little ornamentation. When it comes to its spec, though, the Corsair kit impresses with a 3,000MHz clock speed and the best timing figures in the group. Those translate to great performance. In our real-world benchmarks, the Corsair returned scores of 186 and 325 in the image and video-editing tests…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Regular readers of PC Pro will have noticed a clear trend: where desktop PCs on review used to be dominated by Intel, British system makers now prefer to send in machines based on AMD Ryzen processors. This is no coincidence. Through their own extensive testing, the likes of Chillblast, CyberPower, PC Specialist and Scan know exactly which chips form the best basis for a modern-day system To see why, turn to the graphs starting on p92. There are some areas where Intel still beats its nemesis – namely singlethreaded tasks and gaming – but the margins are slim. Compare that to the areas where AMD dominates, which is pretty much any task that can take advantage of multiple cores and threads This isn’t to say that choosing the…

PRICE £366 (£440 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is one of the cheapest high end processors in the entire Labs, which is all the more impressive when you consider the amount of power that AMD has loaded inside this CPU The 3900X has a whopping 12 multithreaded cores, meaning it can handle 24 concurrent threads. That’s two more cores than the Intel Core i9-10900K (see p86), which offers ten cores for a higher price of £530. AMD’s chip has 64MB of L3 cache, which is miles more than the 20MB included with Intel’s chip. It has 24 dedicated PCI lanes, which is four more than Intel offers. The only area where AMD doesn’t take a clear lead is in clock speed. The 3900X’s stock speed of…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £358 (£430 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk The i7-10700K is one of three new chips on test that Intel has released with its new Comet design, and its 430 price means this processor is nearly £100 more expensive than its keenest rival, AMD’s Ryzen 7 3800X. In truth, anything suggesting a “new design” may be pushing it. Under the literal hood, these chips still rely on the Skylake architecture. That means an archaic 14nm manufacturing process and no significant changes in basic functionality. Instead, Intel has developed these new chips by improving multithreaded abilities and clock speeds. The i7-10700K has eight cores that are multithreaded, for instance. That’s a big improvement over the i7-9700K, which wasn’t multithreaded, and it brings Intel’s new chip into line with AMD’s Ryzen…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £282 (£338 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk The 3800X is AMD’s beefiest Ryzen 7 chip, which means a meaty spec and price. Yet, at £338 it undercuts Intel’s i7-10700K (see p83) by almost £100. That’s hard to argue with, especially when you factor in the rest of its strengths. AMD’s part uses the familiar Zen 2 architecture, which results in a clean, modular design with slick internal I/O and a 7nm manufacturing process. That means it’s more efficient than the older Skylake hardware in Intel’s chips, not to mention AMD chips based on its Zen+ architecture. The 3800X has eight multithreaded cores, which matches the Intel part, and it runs at 3.9GHz and 4.5GHz. This gives Intel a ray of hope, as the 10700K beats that latter speed…

PRICE £442 (£530 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Intel’s latest Core i9 is a curious chip. This flagship processor relies on a relatively old architecture, but Intel has loaded new tech on top to try and keep this CPU competitive. And, in many ways, it succeeds. As the “10” at the start of its name indicates, this is one of Intel’s new Comet Lake chips (tenth-generation Core) and these still rely on the Skylake architecture, which debuted back in 2015. That means no wholesale architectural changes, and a 14nm manufacturing process that looks dated alongside AMD’s 7nm Zen 2. Intel attempts to bridge that gap by making improvements to core counts and clock speeds. The i9-10900K has ten multithreaded cores – two more than the i9-9900K chip – along with a…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Your staff may be keeping their distance during the Covid-19 pandemic, but cybercriminals aren’t. On the contrary, the year so far has seen a huge increase in attacks, as workers have moved outside of the company firewall – often on laptops that lack proper protection against intrusions and malware It’s no mystery how this situation came about. When the pandemic was declared, many smaller businesses found themselves suddenly forced to embrace remote working, with no time to formulate proper security policies and implement a managed transition. By now, though, your workers’ laptops, workstations and mobiles really ought to be properly locked down: if they’re not, it’s high time you took action. The good news for SMBs is there’s a wealth of affordable solutions on the market that can…

PRICE 10 users, £405 per year exc VAT from kaspersky.co.uk Kaspersky offers an end point protection answer for every business. Large firms that want total control can choose its on-site Endpoint Security for Business products, while smaller companies that don’t want to run their own host server have two cloud-managed solutions to choose from. We tested Kaspersky’s Endpoint Security Cloud, which is managed entirely from a cloud portal and protects ten to 150 Windows systems and Macs. Licensing is flexible, with each user licence supporting one workstation, laptop or server, plus two iOS or Android mobile devices. The standard service includes protection against all types of malware and ransomware, a client firewall, a network attack blocker and vulnerability scanning. There’s also a new cloud discovery feature that lets you keep…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £514 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com There’s no doubt that Wi-Fi 6 is the future, but so far we’ve seen only one really SMB-friendly Wi-Fi 6 access point, the EnGenius EWS357AP (see issue 300, p101). Now, at last, Zyxel has joined the fray, with three new APs designed to give a boost to networks of all sizes. On review is the flagship Unified Pro WAX650S, an AC3550 unit supporting speeds of 2,400Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 1,150Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. At £514, it’s more expensive than the Engenius EWS357AP, but it offers double the throughput and is still a lot cheaper than the blue-chip alternatives. It also offers a veritable feast of management options. The WAX650S can be operated in standalone mode, teamed up with Zyxel’s…

As I needed to edit some video, I thought I would give Adobe Premiere Pro 2020 a whirl. After all, I have a full Creative Cloud licence, and the install was but a click away. A few minutes later, the app was installed and ready to go. There was but one problem: it wouldn’t start. I kept getting error messages about my account. When Lightroom refused to work as well, I looked at status.adobe.com and found a sea of red warnings. I headed to the always useful website Downdetector (downdetector.com) and found an even bigger mess there: Adobe was having an outage, and it was a big one. Because I couldn’t get access to the licensing server, my apps were dead in the water. Looking over the smoking crater this…

Iwas installing a new network printer on a client’s computer when the conversation turned to car mechanics. This gentleman, I should explain, was one of the staff in the office where I was working. He seemed interested in my job as a roving IT engineer, solving problems for small businesses and individuals, and asked me what part of the work I found the most difficult. After some reflection, I came up with three words: “weird software problems”. Sometimes, I explained, a computer could misbehave for no apparent reason; the hardware tests okay and my usual diagnostic tools suggest no faults. Yet the machine does not work as it should. I looked away from the monitor and to his face. He still seemed interested. Either that or he was good at…

If there’s one thing that focuses the mind on the plight of the homeworker, it’s the sound of a drill failing to disturb a chunk of granite embedded in concrete. Yes, next door has the builders in. I can’t just put my headphones on and keep working: when dealing with the concrete, granite and rebar mix from which my house is made, the sound propagation capabilities of this method of construction defeat even the best of headphones. The noise comes in through the soles of your feet. It comes from the opposite wall, from the bed if you’re foolish enough to essay a midday nap. Headphones the doesn’t cut it and aren’t we supposed to be staying indoors if we can? It was an enquiry on quora.com that came to…

One consequence of the ongoing lockdown is that I’ve been spending a lot less time at my desk in the lab. This hasn’t been a big problem: having a fibre connection from home has been a huge help (see p110), with everything logically local even if it’s physically ten miles away. Even so, I have continued to drop in from time to time, usually on a Saturday or Sunday when the place is empty, to get the necessary on-site jobs completed, swap the LTO tapes in the archive library and ensure that everything is running as it should I’ve even managed to tidy my desk. I’ve always subscribed to the view that a tidy desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, or something equally nonsensical. But my most recent…

Euleen Hope managed to tech abuse tuation, but e knows how especially forms of domestic bullying are taking place. Hope eventually sought help from the charity Refuge (refuge.org.uk), but it was an uphill battle. “My ex-partner set up my email and social media accounts for me,” said Hope. “He also replaced my phone with an iPhone, which he mirrored onto his iPad to monitor calls and messages. “He set up a location tracker, saying it would help me. You wouldn’t think he was doing anything bad, but I didn’t realise it was going to be part of my entrapment.” In the end, it was his use of tech that alerted Hope to his overbearing control when she caught him spying on her at home. “He installed cameras around the house,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO @njkobie As a journalist, I always find it nerve-wracking when a company switches to AI for any aspect of my work. How fortunate, then, that AI is so bad at the role that it’s laughable. I may not have job security, but fear of being replaced by machines isn’t keeping me up at night. Recessions are a different matter. Economic downturns are bad news for online publishing, as the advertising that funds our work is often the first line of budget to be cut. So it was no surprise when Microsoft announced it was slashing hundreds of journalism jobs on its MSN.com portal, handing the work to its own AI system. To be clear, MSN.com never actually employed journalists to report or write, but to make editorial decisions…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO While there are many reasons to love Microsoft, it’s impossible not to laugh when you visit its Windows 10 Pro homepage. For a start, it’s trying to sell Windows 10 Pro for £220 – and that’s for the digital download. There isn’t even the option to order a DVD. Once you stop sniggering at that price, it’s time to get serious: Microsoft, tell us, why should we choose Pro rather than Home? At this point, Microsoft goes into shoot-thyself-in-the-foot mode, as it seems almost desperate not to explain why Windows 10 Pro might be a better choice for people than Windows 10 Home. “Easily manage your business, the way you want” is the closest it gets until you take the trouble to scroll halfway down the page. So,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE Core i7/32GB/512GB, £2,041 (£2,449 inc VAT) from microsoft.com When, in 2017, I bought the Surface Book 2, I made a mistake: I chose the version with 256GB of storage rather than 512GB. As I use this machine as my main device for all things PC Pro – and that includes an awful lot of highresolution photos – I’ve been fighting an ongoing battle against storage space ever since. Needless to say, my credit card started twitching as soon as I heard news of the Surface Book 3. Not that Microsoft has changed much with the Surface Book formula. Its key attraction remains a screen that detaches from the keyboard to become a tablet, and while this sounds similar to the Surface Pro series, in reality that’s a…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE Core m3, £516 (£619 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/store The Microsoft Surface Go 2 represents all the best and worst things about 2-in-1 laptops. It’s tiny, lightweight and spans the laptop and tablet genres with effortless ease. You can use it to watch Netflix in bed in the morning before attaching the keyboard and slinging it in your bag to do some work on the move – and it’s so compact and light you’ll barely notice its presence. Yet, it’s a compromise device. It isn’t as powerful as laptops at the same price, nor as cheap as an equally powerful tablet. And, despite the fact that its main appeal is a split tablet/laptop personality, Microsoft still insists on selling the keyboard separately. That immediately adds at least £100…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE Core i7/16GB/512GB, £1,333 (£1,599 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk For many years, the Dell XPS 13 has set the gold standard for ultraportable laptops – and it remains so in 2020. It still has that classic wedge-shaped profile, with aluminium plates on the lid and base, and there’s still carbon fibre softtouch plastic on the interior. But don’t be fooled: this year’s laptop brings subtle yet important upgrades. First, the internals have also been given a boost, to the best tenthgeneration Intel CPUs. Physically, there’s a new Windows Hello webcam and a thinner bezel at the bottom of the screen. Perhaps most notably, that display shifts from a 16:9 aspect ratio to a taller 16:10, and it’s available in FHD+ and UHD+ resolutions. Small change Otherwise, though, it’s…

PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk If there’s one thing the Asus Chromebook Flip C436F proves, it’s that Chromebooks are growing up. It’s been a slow process, but there is finally a good choice of premium laptops running Google’s OS. None more so than this convertible, which measures a skinny 13.7mm when closed. Slim bezels surround the 14in display and, at 1.2kg, it’s surprisingly light too. Despite this lack of girth, the C436F is solidly made. There’s no play in the smooth hinge, which twists round the full 360°, nor much give in the chassis. And it looks fantastic with a white finish to the lid, set off beautifully by chrome effect hinges and a finely perforated grille at the rear of the machine for venting heat. Asus finds…

PRICE 32GB, with Special Offers, £75 (£90 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/311fire No other tablet maker could come close to the previous Amazon Fire HD 8 (see issue 290, p87) for value, but with 512MB more RAM, double the base storage (now starting at 32GB) and USB-C charging, this 8in tablet stretches yet further away from rivals. It’s also the fastest tablet we’ve seen under £100, packing a quad-core 2GHz MediaTek CPU that proved 30% more powerful than the 2018 version in Geekbench Sadly, this doesn’t mean Amazon has eliminated the visible judder when quickly swiping between applications, but I wasn’t tearing my hair out in frustration as I have done with previous Fire tablets. Gaming performance is equally improved, tripling its predecessor’s frame rate in the GFXBench Manhattan 3 onscreen…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £349 (£419 inc VAT) from eposaudio.com Everyone loves a rebrand, so little wonder that Sennheiser has decided to spin off its headset arm into the all-new Epos Sennheiser. Or at least, that’s what it’s called for now, with future products to drop the Sennheiser branding. Here, I’m testing its top-end model from the Adapt 600 series, the 660. Epos lists its price as £349 exc VAT, but a hunt around online will find it available for closer to £200. As with Logitech’s Zone Wireless set (see issue 299, p69), the Adapt 660 is designed to work with multiple devices so you can pick up a call on your phone or from a VoIP service running on your laptop. If you use the supplied USB dongle, there’s even…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) fromoverclockers.co.uk The Vengeance RGB Pro kit is the boldest-looking memory in this group. Its heatspreaders are the tallest here and they’re topped with a thick band of RGB LED lighting. A Windows app can program complex effects and synchronise the RGB LEDs with other Corsair products. This 16GB Vengeance kit runs at 3,000MHz, but its timings are a step or two behind the cheaper Corsair Vengeance LPX kit and the HyperX Fury gaming RAM. That didn’t affect it in our gaming tests: minimum and average frame rates of 114fps and 150fps in Tomb Raider are the best in the group, and its 3DMark Fire Strike score of 24,741 isn’t far behind the leaders. However, this kit struggled in application tests. Its overall real-world result of…

PRICE £29 (£35 inc VAT) from cclonline.com This ValueRAM memory lives up to its name – buy two of these 8GB sticks and you’ll only pay £70, making this set the cheapest “kit” here. (Note that our results are for two 8GB DIMMs.) The lower price necessitates compromise. This memory runs at 2,666MHz, which puts it a couple of steps behind everything else. The DIMM itself is plain, with no heatspreaders or LEDs Unsurprisingly, the Kingston’s performance is underwhelming too. In our image-editing test, its score of 186 is reasonable, but it fell behind all of its rivals in the tougher video-editing and multitasking benchmarks. It offered a surprising turn of speed in Cinebench’s multicore test, but lagged behind most other kits in the other Cinebench run and in both…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Cores, clock speeds, architectures, ecosystems… there’s a lot to think about when choosing a new processor, so it pays to delve into what exactly makes a CPU tick, and to evaluate what’s worth your attention when picking a new chip. The Core issue Much of the current discussion around CPUs concerns core count, which is no surprise: cores are effectively smaller processors within the chip, and having more of these enables a CPU to handle more tasks concurrently. Most mainstream and high-end processors also employ multithreading, which allows each core to address two threads rather than one. However, just because you can buy a processor with 16 cores doesn’t mean you should. It’s only when you’re using the computer for tasks that are well suited to multiple threads…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £575 (£690 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk There’s a reason the Ryzen 9 3950X costs £690: this monster chip is the most powerful part that’s currently available on AMD’s AM4 platform. Its specifications are enough to make Intel weep. The 16 multithreaded cores compare to the ten for Intel’s i9-10900X processor and 12 for its i9-10920X chip, and this relative weakness is no doubt why Intel is (for once) undercutting AMD on price with costs of £530 and £600. The 3950X has an impressive specification elsewhere. It has a hefty 64MB of L3 cache, with base and boost clock speeds of 3.9GHz and 4.5GHz. Clock speed is the only area where Intel’s chips can hope to compete on performance – the new i9-10900K has a turbo peak of…

PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Ryzen 3 3300X is one of the most exciting chips AMD has released for some time. It’s the first Ryzen 3 to be based on the Zen 2 architecture, and also the first with multithreading. AMD is clearly keen to make an impact at the lower end. The move to the superb Zen 2 architecture means that this part has loads of underlying improvements, including a more efficient chiplet design that boosts performance and lowers manufacturing costs. The move to a 7nm manufacturing process also delivers a big boost to performance. The 3300X has four cores that support eight threads, and they run with base and boost speeds of 3.8GHz and 4.3GHz, alongside 16MB That compares well to Intel’s competition – this…

PRICE £1,050 (£1,260 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The 3950X is the most expensive CPU here by some distance – at £1,260, it costs almost twice as much as its nearest rival. There’s a reason for the lofty price, though: this Threadripper chip offers a monster 24 cores that support 48 concurrent threads, and this CPU adds support for quad-channel memory – alongside a mighty 128MB of L3 cache and 64 dedicated PCI lanes. That formidable specification sits alongside base and boost clock speeds of 3.8GHz and 4.5GHz. Unsurprisingly, the 280W TDP is higher than anything else, too. The Threadripper’s monster spec means the chip is physically larger than anything else in the Labs, which means a new socket. It’s called sTRX4, works with the X399 chipset and includes PCIe 4…

DAYS BEFORE WE went to press, AMD announced three new AMD Ryzen processors: the Ryzen 5 3600XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 9 3900XT feature a mix of higher bass and boost frequencies than their “X” equivalents, with the aim of wiping out Intel’s advantage in games. AMD didn’t have chips available for early testing so for now we must speculate on their performance. For example, compared to the 3900X, the 3900XT increases boost frequency from 4.7GHz to 4.8GHz and adds 6MB to the L3 cache. Let’s assume that the 2.1% lift in boost clock translates directly into a 2.1% increase in CPU-limited games. In Ghost Recon Wildlands, that equates to an 83.8fps average at 1080p, so still behind the top-end Core chips. In Warhammer II at 1080p, the lift…

PRICE 10 devices, £395 per year exc VAT from avast.com If you’re after a cloud-managed end point protection solution that’s simple to deploy and administer, Avast’s business offering could be perfect. It comes in three flavours: we tested the top-dog Business Antivirus Pro Plus version, which supplements Avast’s core set of security features with a heap of extras such as Exchange and SharePoint protection, a data shredder, identity protection and even a webcam shield. There are plenty of installation options. As usual, the Windows and macOS agents can be downloaded from the web portal and installed from a central distribution point, or you can email the installation link to your staff. Automated deployment is also possible by creating a master agent, scanning your Active Directory server and automatically pushing the…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 10-24 users, £46 per user per year exc VAT from sophos.com Sophos was one of the first security specialists to embrace cloud-managed end point protection, and over the years its Central solution has evolved into something impressively sophisticated. The cloud portal works with more or less every security component Sophos has to offer, providing one-stop management for all workstations, servers and mobile devices. It opens with a handy dashboard view showing the most recent alerts, a summary of devices and users, plus details of how your access controls are performing. A menu at the side provides swift access to individual protection components, and if you have a Sophos firewall it can also be managed from here. The deployment process is clever too. You can download the agent…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Traditional telephony is on its way out. It’s expensive and inflexible, is liable to tie you to a contract that runs for longer than you want, and getting set up means waiting around for days on end for an engineer to come and plumb you in. The logical alternative is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). It’s far more versatile, and you can get up and running almost instantly. If you haven’t yet made the jump, you will also be pleased to hear that VoIP is something that even the smallest business can easily afford. The VoIP advantage The first thing you need for VoIP is a decent internet connection – but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need a dedicated, superfast line. According to leading VoIP provider Vonage, a…

I’ve received a number of cries for help from readers over the past few months of people working at home, so for this column I’ve picked out a few because they have a common theme of trying to use a Mac productively as part of a home office setup. Let’s run through them in no particular order. The first is from Jo: “I’ve bought a lovely monitor that plugs into my MacBook Pro. It works well, and I like how macOS supports multiple monitors – I prefer it to my employer-provided Windows setup back at the office. However, I have the new monitor sitting above the laptop screen and I’ve used the desktop arrangement tools to position things as best I can, but I can’t get the scaling to match.…

Qualcomm chipset heralds budget 5G handsets Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon 690 chipset, a low-end system that includes support for 5G through its onboard X51 modem. The new addition to the company’s 6-series chips also promises other top-drawer features, such as support for 120Hz displays and 4K HDR video capture. “This is a big step in enabling more products with 5G, more competition and lower prices,” said Geoff Blaber, mobile analyst for CCS Insight. “We expect devices to initially fall as low as $300 with this platform and significantly lower as we move into 2021. Price is being removed as an obstacle to 5G adoption.” One potential weakness is that the chip only supports the sub-6GHz flavour of 5G, not the faster mmWave standard, but as network operators are still gearing…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in Powerhouse laptop with a price to match, from £2,399 from apple.com/uk If you know you’ll take advantage of what the 16in MacBook Pro offers, you won’t regret buying it. The only question is where you draw the line, with options right up to 8TB SSDs and 64GB of RAM. Whichever version you choose, you’ll benefit from an improved keyboard, spectacular screen and the very best audio setup on a laptop. REVIEW Issue 305, p52 ALTERNATIVES HP Spectre x360 (2020) HP keeps producing exceptional laptops and the new 13in Spectre x360 is one of its best. A striking convertible with all the mod cons. £1,399 from store.hp.com REVIEW Issue 307, p60 NEW ENTRY LG Gram 17 A 1.3kg 17in laptop with battery life…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO @bazzacollins Writing for a magazine is a strange business. I sit here, bashing out these columns, throwing in the odd one-liners and not really knowing if any of them are landing. Occasionally, someone will tweet or email something nice when they’ve read a column, sometimes it’s less complimentary, but direct feedback is rare and on an enormous satellite delay. I’ve no idea whether you’re still reading or have already binned this self-regarding claptrap. Now, I think live performers are getting a sense of what it’s like to be me. Live audience shows have been replaced by Zoom or an equivalent. Performers accustomed to bouncing off a crowd are suddenly starved of feedback, with no idea whether that cutting jibe about Boris is about to go viral or has…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO There are three operating system instances running on my Mac – two of them are Windows 10. That noise you can hear is Steve Jobs spinning in his grave at 7,200rpm. Why have I got two lots of Windows 10 on the MacBook? Because a Boot Camp installation and a virtual Windows 10 running in Parallels Desktop have different strengths and weaknesses, which make it worth the extra storage space sacrifice. And just to confuse matters further, you can get the best(ish) of both worlds and run your Boot Camp Windows installation using Parallels, without having to reboot the entire system. Here, then, for anyone considering running Windows 10 on a Mac, is an explanation of the three different ways to run Windows and why you might, or…

While many of the other benefits here apply to businesses, we would flag these three in particular for IT admins or small business owners. Note that you can buy multiple licences from the PC Pro store and claim back VAT. SUPPORT FOR DOMAINS AND ACTIVE DIRECTORY “Join domain” is arguably the most important reason for businesses to dictate that all employees’ laptops use Windows 10 Pro: it enables them to join the company domain wherever they are. Thanks to Active Directory (which can now be deployed in the cloud using Azure), your IT team can give access to shared resources such as office printers, approved software and networked storage. GROUP POLICY MANAGEMENT While Group Policy has been around since Windows NT and was designed to allow IT admins to control…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Douglas Adams coined the memorable phrase, “looking as if it had been not so much designed as congealed”. He was referring to Vogon spaceships, but the image applies equally to many home networks. After all, very few of us have ever sat down and planned out our connections: in most cases, the topology simply accretes as you acquire new gadgets and services. That sort of ad hoc arrangement might be functional, but a little hands-on management can reap improved security, performance, stability and ease of use. The good news is that you don’t have to be an experienced IT pro to learn from the practices of enterprise network management, and bring the benefits into your own home. Here’s how. 1 Perk up your network performance As a rule,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Laptops and PCs We run our own benchmarks on every Windows and macOS system we test. These are based around image editing, video editing and multitasking (where we run the video-editing benchmark while simultaneously playing back a 4K video). At the bottom of each laptop and PC review, you’ll find the system’s score in each of these tests, plus an overall score. If a laptop scores 70, say, then it’s 30% slower than our reference system – a PC with a Core i7-4670K and 8GB of RAM. If it scores 160, then it’s 60% faster. We test laptop battery life by playing back a full-screen video until the battery runs out. We set the screen brightness to 170cd/m2, or as close as we can get using its settings,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £2,667 (£3,200 inc VAT) from razer.com Razer has built brand around its powerful laptops, but the Pro is biggest and baddest the Its 2020 refresh of this monster is more powerful ever: with latest Intel CPUs and Nvidia GeForce Super silicon inside, Razer’s machine poses a serious threat to Apple’s finest: the 16in MacBook Pro (see issue 305, p52). It looks the part too, with a slab-like chassis carved from a single block of blackened aluminium. I wouldn’t want to drop it on my toe. Decorative adornments are kept to a minimum, with only the three-armed Razer logo backlit in green on the lid while the Razer Chroma RGB keyboard glows with multicoloured menace on the inside. Weighing 2.4kg, it looks decidedly chunky next to the 1.38kg…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 13in Ion, £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com You know the Samsung Galaxy Book Ion is special as soon as you prise it from its box. This is no MacBook Air clone, clad in dull grey aluminium, but a laptop with its own identity that hits all the right notes for a 13in ultraportable: it’s light at 970g, robust and packs a stunner of a screen. The company couldn’t have chosen a better machine to announce its return to the British laptop market. Or, to be absolutely correct, a better pair of machines. The Ion is also available with a 15.6in screen, but with precisely the same core specs: 8GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and a Core i5-10210U processor. It’s also a supremely light 1.19kg. Novel…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from hihonor.com Four months ago, we printed a glowing review of the Huawei MateBook D 15 (see issue 307, p64), and now it’s time for the company’s sister brand to shine: the Honor MagicBook 14 is a remarkable budget laptop that’s packed with quality. The first thing you notice is its all-metal chassis, immediately lifting it above the budget laptop pack, but it has still been built with portability in mind. A 1.38kg weight is roughly the same as the most recent 13in MacBook Pro and makes it light enough to carry around all day without worrying about shoulder ache. Meanwhile, a battery life of 8hrs 15mins means you can leave the USB-C charger behind on day trips – and if you do…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £142 (£170 inc VAT) from uk-store.acer.com Back in January, I was fortunate enough to take the 14in Lenovo ThinkVision M14 (see issue 305, p74) with me to CES in Las Vegas, and found it a godsend: when travelling, a second screen to complement your laptop’s can lift your productivity. For a start, you can work on two programs side by side without squinting. That’s why I asked Acer to send in the PM161Q. After all, its 15.6in portable monitor is around £50 cheaper than the 14in M14. Could the twin advantage of price and screen size be enough to propel it into the business traveller’s luggage, or even help out those currently being forced to work at home? It didn’t make the greatest first impression when I…

PRICE £99 (£119 inc VAT) from logitech.com One year ago, I reviewed the Logitech Zone Wireless headset (see issue 299, p69), which justified its £199 price in part due to the focus it would give employees. No more distractions from office colleagues as its active noise cancelling (ANC) and high-quality audio would let your staff keep working while always being ready to pick up a call. Evidently Logitech has realised that not everyone needs or even wants wireless headphones, or perhaps that not everyone is willing to pay almost £200 for them, and so released this wired follow-up. You lose the ANC, and the Zone Wireless’ key attraction of being able to simultaneously pair with your phone (just as the Adapt 660 set, above, can), but in return comes hassle-free…

When buying memory, there are important rules of thumb to follow: make sure you’ve got the right capacity and channel arrangement, and buy the fastest kit you can afford. If you’re buying an AMD Ryzen processor, though, the company’s design process means memory speed is vital. AMD builds Ryzen chips using modules with several CPU cores, with these modules packaged alongside each other to create multicore CPUs. This approach is beneficial: it brings AMD’s costs down, and it also means AMD can build high-end chips with more cores at a lower cost than Intel. These blocks need to communicate, though, which requires an interconnect architecture called the Infinity Fabric (IF). This architecture doesn’t only connect CPU cores – it also handles PCIe traffic, south bridge data and SATA information. Your…

Every processor has been subjected to a broad range of benchmarks that evaluate its performance in a wide variety of workloads (see graphs from p92). First, we look at real-world tests. PC Pro’s suite of application tests evaluate a CPU’s performance in image-editing, video-encoding and multitasked environments. We use Cinebench and Blender to benchmark video production and rendering capability, while workstation manufacturer Puget Systems makes it possible to test each processor’s performance in both Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro tests. We use Geekbench 5 to test each CPU for its performance in encryption, HTML5, navigation, physics and machine learning workloads, and Y-Cruncher provides pure computational tests. We use SiSoftware Sandra to run tests on cryptography and neural network workloads. Where possible, every test has been conducted with both single and…

PRICE £229 (£275 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The i5-10600K isn’t Intel’s 10th Gen flagship, but it’s certain to become one of the new range’s most popular parts – it’s far more affordable than the i9-10900K, and i balances its mid-range price with a much-improved specification. This new chip has the same six ha activated multithreading on its new Comet Lake chips, which means the i5-10600K can address 12 threads. That’s twice as many as the i5-9600K. The new Core i5 has base and boost clocks of 4.1GHz and 4.8GHz, which also improve on Intel’s older chip. Yet, disappointingly, the Core i5-10600K doesn’t get Turbo Boost 3 Max or Thermal Velocity Boost – those are exclusive to the Core i9 part. On this chip, turbo functions rely on the same Turbo…

PRICE £159 (£191 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Ryzen 5 3600X only costs £191, but it’s one of the stars of AMD’s entire range. It’s the most powerful chip from the mid-market Ryzen 5 brand, coming with six multithreaded cores and clock speeds of 3.8GHz and 4.4GHz. The Zen 2 architecture and its 7nm manufacturing mean a huge boost to efficiency and performance. There’s an impressive 32MB of cache, but no integrated graphics – just like AMD’s other pure Ryzen 3 chips. The “X” suffix means the 3600X has more aggressive turbo compared to parts such as the Ryzen 5 3600, but that also means that the Ryzen 5 3600X has a TDP of 95W. More modest chips like the 3600 sit down at 65W. The Ryzen 5 3600X competes…

PRICE £407 (£488 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The i9-9900K is one of Intel’s older chips, but its Core i9 designation means that it still has plenty of power – at least on paper. This £488 chip has eight cores and, unlike most other Intel chips that use the Coffee Lake architecture, it’s multithreaded – so it matches its rivals by supporting 16 threads. Mix in clock speeds of 3.6GHz (base) and 5GHz (turbo), alongside 16MB of cache, and we can see why many people might still be tempted by its charms. However, it faces plenty of competition. It’s just been superseded by the Core i9-10900K below, which includes two more cores and better clock speeds alongside a higher – but not that much higher – £530 price. The i9-9900K also…

PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com The Ryzen 3 3100 is the cheaper of AMD’s two new low-end CPUs, and this £100 part is the cheapest desktop chip to use the Zen 2 architecture. Despite the price, it has four multithreaded cores, 16MB of cache and the 7nm manufacturing process – a formidable spec compared to AMD’s Zen+ APUs and the Core i3-9100. The only thing missing here is the “X” suffix, which means that this part has more modest turbo abilities than the Ryzen 3 3300X. The 3100’s base and boost speeds of 3.1GHz and 3.9GHz are significantly slower than AMD’s other Ryzen 3 CPU – and they’re beaten on paper by Intel too. Yet, in benchmarks, there’s a surprising amount of punch here. The 3100’s overall benchmark…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £133 (£160 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The Ryzen 5 3600 is one of the most affordable ways to get your hands on the Zen 2 architecture in a six-core format, and this part is multithreaded – which instantly lifts it above the Intel Core i5-9400F (see p90), which has six cores, no multithreading and a slightly lower price. The Ryzen 5 3600 motors along with clock speeds of 3.6GHz and 4.2GHz, and it’s got 32MB of cache, meaning it’s ahead of Intel in both of those departments. Because it’s a Zen 2 part, it supports PCIe 4 and has 24 PCI lanes. On paper, the 3600 easily outstrips the Intel chip, but tougher competition comes from within AMD’s ranks. The Ryzen 5 3600X (see p84) only costs…

PRICE £97 (£117 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The i3-9100 is the cheapest Intel CPU here, which means a modest spec. It’s a quad-core Coffee Lake chip with no multithreading, and it has base and boost speeds of 3.6GHz and 4.2GHz. There’s not enough cash for much cache, with 6MB of L3, but note that it includes graphics via Intel’s UHD Graphics 630 integrated core. It has plenty of rivals. If you want integrated graphics, the Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G sit either side; if that isn’t important, the Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X offer competitive prices. There’s another CPU to consider, though: the Core i3-9100F. That part drops the integrated graphics core, and the price drops dramatically to £72 – undercutting every other chip here. The i3-9100’s processing…

PRICE £270 (£324 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Intel’s older Coffee Lake chips are still on sale, with price cuts to help keep them competitive. This means that the Core i7-9700 is Intel’s most affordable eight-core CPU, with its £324 price neatly ducking under the i7-9700K. Ominously for Intel, though, that price means it sits between AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X and 3800X. Unlike those AMD chips, the Intel part has no multithreading, and it’s clocked to 3GHz and 4.7GHz. That modest base speed is a lot lower than either AMD part, but its turbo pace is a few hundred megahertz quicker. The good news is short-lived, though, with a lesser amount of cache than all of its rivals and fewer PCI lanes than AMD’s chips. Plus no PCIe 4…

There’s rarely been a better time to buy a processor – and, if you’re AMD, there haven’t been many better times to be making them. That would have sounded outlandish a few years ago, when AMD was derided as the poor relation to Intel. This month’s Labs has demonstrated how times have changed. AMD debuted its Zen architecture back in 2017. Zen+ followed, then the current Zen 2 architecture. The latter design has been a revelation, with an improved 7nm manufacturing process, a simpler and more efficient internal layout and impressive boosts to multithreaded performance. The impact of these improvements is clear across the Labs. At the high end, chips such as the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X both deliver Intel-beating speed in multicore tasks. Video editing and rendering,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 1-24 devices, £27 per device per year exc VAT from f-secure.com F-Secure has every threat angle covered: its Protection Service for Business can look after Windows and macOS workstations, and Windows, Linux and Citrix servers – as well as Exchange and SharePoint hosts. It’s good value and SMBs will appreciate that it can all be managed from a single cloud portal. Along with malware protection, it includes web content security, removable device controls and patch management for Windows and third-party applications. F-Secure’s DeepGuard tech, meanwhile, analyses files, system change attempts and program behaviour to defend against hackers and zero-day attacks. Deployment is straightforward. You can use the portal to email links to users or download the installer directly for manual setup. Either way, the agent takes around…

PRICE Multi-Server, 1yr support, £2,015 exc VAT from retrospect.com Backup specialist Retrospect is one of the industry’s old hands, now in its 31st year. Don’t think its software is old-fashioned, though: Backup 17 introduces a range of brand-new features, mostly aimed at simplifying deployment. One notable addition is automatic onboarding, which can dramatically speed up installation. It works by providing a custom client that users can download and install themselves; this then immediately starts backing up files according to your policy, with zero user configuration required. Elsewhere, the ProactiveAI feature helps keep your protection up to date by dynamically adjusting backup windows, and it can now process more hosts for faster responses. Other improvements include reduced restore times for larger sites and an option to export preflight summaries of all…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO AI as a service? What exactly does that mean? Well, you’re doubtless familiar with software as a service (SaaS); AIaaS (as it’s familiarly called) is a similar idea, but instead of leasing programs and web-based services, you’re paying to run AI-based workloads on someone else’s server. It’s a smart way to reap the benefits of machine-learning technologies, without having to invest in all the expertise and infrastructure associated with this highly complex branch of computing. What sort of workloads are we talking about? One widely reported application of AIaaS has been The New York Times using Google’s AI platform to intelligently digitise an archive of some five million physical photos – not merely turning prints into digital representations, but generating all sorts of insights about the content and…

When we unlocked our door in 2003, one of the first customers to open it was Arthur. He’s an amateur filmmaker specialising in social and community history and has been great for business as he’s brought most of his filmmakers’ club to us. In previous lives, Alison and I made TV for ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC, so Arthur’s club had found a computer shop that understood their nomenclature. We successfully kept Arthur’s plates spinning until last summer, when his XP machine finally died (fear not, security fans, it was offline and purely used for editing). The obvious answer was to supply a modern computer that can cut 4K, share films online with one click – and countless other magnificent features that don’t apply to a man who is…

Iam a man of a certain age, unfortunately quite an old one these days. Which is why I can not only remember online life before the internet became accessible to the masses and the World Wide Web had yet to be invented, but also when trolling wasn’t a hateful activity. Indeed, back in the early days of online communities I used to be quite well known on one of them, CIX, for being a pain in the arse – but one without a nasty bone in his body. I was trolling before trolling had been given a name. Yet my particular brand of trolling, often fuelled by a little too much whisky, reflected my personality: Winder by name, wind-up merchant by nature. I liked to make people laugh, although not…

Windows’ power management reporting isn’t perfect, but it does exist and it might save you money. First introduced in Windows 7, the powercfg command line utility has an-energy parameter. This watches your machine for a minute before spitting out an HTML-formatted report into C:/windows/system32. You might be amazed by the level of data (on my Think Station C20, it thought I might have missed a BIOS update to take advantage of the higher levels of sleep modes and CPU Core Parking, for example), but I was more disappointed by what it didn’t say. There’s no blanket statement of N watts of power being consumed over X count of seconds. A small glint of hope is visible from deeper Googling, in the form of Microsoft Research’s Joulemeter, only to be withdrawn…

Crowdless Designed by social enterprise developers Lanterne, Crowdless was born from work developing an app to help people navigate safely in conflict areas. “We were keen to see what we could do to help in the current circumstances, and we came up with Crowdless,” co-founder Alex Barnes told PC Pro in late May, “a way to help people avoid queues and crowds while socially distancing.” The app allows users to check if a location, such as a grocery shop, is crowded or requires queuing, so they can choose to wait at home or go elsewhere. “We came up with the idea in mid-March, created the app in under four weeks, and we’ve now been live for five weeks with more than 60,000 downloads,” Barnes said. Flatfair Finding a new flat…

The crisis will lead to some startups foundering, but it could also spark a wave of innovation. That’s according to Russ Shaw, founder of startup advocacy group Tech London Advocates. “It’s a bit of a mixed bag,” he said. “There are going to be some startups that just don’t make it through this pandemic and the uncertainty of the months ahead.” That’s mainly down to cash flow; while government support has helped, it may not prove enough if investors don’t also step up. On the other hand, it’s clear that technology has proven its importance during lockdown, and Shaw notes that financial, health and educational tech sectors remain strong. “There’s going to be a lot of winners, but a lot of losers as well,” he said, adding that some companies…