Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i PC Pro

I’m a big believer in the wisdom of the crowd. Not only in its traditional meaning, of a crowd of people somehow having greater collective intelligence than one individual, but in the individual intelligence of each member within that collective. One of the huge benefits of social media is that individuals now have a voice. We can’t all be Prime Minister, although it did appear for a while as if every Conservative MP was going to give it a go, but we can now share our wisdom on the platform of our choice. Whether people choose to listen is a quite different matter. Go back 25 years and our lead feature this month, the unapologetically named “25 apps for geeks” (see p28), would have been drawn from the limited experience…

It appears that Alexa has been developing a God complex. Not only can Amazon’s voice assistant declare “let there be light” and switch on the lights; soon she may also be able to bring back the dead. In a startling tech demo at Amazon’s annual MARS conference, the company’s head scientist Rohit Prasad described how “human attributes of empathy and affect are key for building trust,” and that “while AI can’t eliminate the pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last”. And then he played a short video, in which a child says: “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me The Wizard of Oz?”, to which Alexa responds by playing the story in the simulated voice of his departed grandmother. It’s undoubtedly an impressive technical achievement, but unsurprisingly, some…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 14in Stunning creative power from £1,899 from apple.com/uk Alongside its 16in sibling, this is simply the world’s best laptop for demanding users. The amount of power on tap via the M1 Pro or M1 Max processor is staggering, and it’s backed up by a terrific screen and stunning battery life. With all the ports you could ask for, the only negatives are its relative bulk (especially compared to the Air) and high price. REVIEW Issue 328, p58 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Air (M1) The M2 MacBook Air is brilliant but expensive. Most people can happily save £250 and buy the M1 model for £999, as it’s still fast, light and top quality. From £999 from apple.com/uk. REVIEW Issue 318, p40 Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro…

Barry Collins is the co-editor of BigTechQuestion.com. He only mentions this so he can get some non-Google traffic. @bazzacollins When you run your own business it can be difficult to work out who you really work for (clue: it’s not yourself). When you run a website, the answer is clear: you’re working for Google. I’d estimate about 90% of the time I spend working on BigTechQuestion.com is devoted to trying to please Google. Writing articles that will get noticed by the search engine, tweaking the site to make sure it meets Google’s ever-changing criteria, trying to improve site performance so that we don’t get punished in the search rankings. Writing content that ticks Google’s boxes is perhaps the most demeaning task of all. After 25 years as a journalist, I…

With thanks to everyone who contributed thoughts on our Facebook page: Martin Bailey, Jonathan Bowman, Conrad Braam, Geoff Campbell, Hazel Collins, Sean Dodd, Craig Greenall, John Gwatkin-Williams, Nick Houghton, John Johnson, Andy B J Low, Si Mellor, Geoff Miles, Robert Neuschul, Mark Newton, Michael Oglesby, Nick Ross, Mark Scott and Ryan Thomas. The app stores are full of apps that look pretty and do little. This list is the exact opposite. The apps here might not be plastered on the walls of the Design Museum (some are so ugly we can’t even bring ourselves to screenshot them), but they are either unbelievably useful or tug at our geeky heartstrings in some way. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to all the PC Pro readers who sent in suggestions for…

The computer desktop has become a noisy place. For every hour we spend working productively, we spend another fighting spam, blocking pop-ups, silencing notifications and puzzling through overcomplicated cookie alerts. It shouldn’t be like that – and it doesn’t need to be. The devices and programs you use every day, including your browser, your phone and even Windows itself, provide the tools you need to fight back. All you need to do is configure them. Here are some simple measures you can take to reduce the interruptions and regain your focus. Email spam Email spam is a fact of online life, and while you can reduce the volume you receive by being cautious about where you share your email address, it’s impossible to stay spam-free. Web services such as Gmail…

SCORE PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from lg.com/uk How do you turn the LG Gram 16’s 16:10 aspect ratio into a 32:10 ratio? Simple: buy a second 16:10 screen, in this case the Gram +view. But what’s particularly clever about the +view is that it uses the same specification of panel as the Gram 16, with the two performing near identically in our tests: 98% coverage of the DCI-P3 colour space, average Delta E of 0.37 and a similar peak brightness of 356cd/m2. The only notable difference I measured was their colour temperature, with the Gram 16 at 6682K and the +view at 6234K. That’s enough of a gap to be visible to the naked eye when working on white backgrounds, such as Excel or Word. There may be a…

SCORE PRICE £2,833 (£3,399 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk This is the kitchen sink of gaming laptops. Not in a bad way; in a throw-every-last-thing-at-it kind of way. The result is a gaming machine with a quite ludicrous amount of power. The lynchpin is its Core i9-12950HX processor. That’s Intel’s fastest and most expensive Core chip, with eight powerful P-cores that can run at 5GHz for prolonged periods with sufficient cooling. Which is exactly what Asus supplies: activating Turbo mode in its Armoury Crate software unleashes the full fury of its 84-blade fans while pushing the CPU to 55W and the GPU to 175W. Switch to Manual mode and you can bump up the CPU to 65W. Such firepower, together with 32GB of DDR5 memory and the eight efficient E-cores that…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £624 (£749 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk As Dell’s budget brand, Inspiron laptops have often sacrificed finesse in pursuit of bang-perbuck, so this 2022 iteration of the Inspiron 14 2-in-1 is a surprise. It’s sleek, includes an aluminium chassis with a stylish silver lid, and signs of luxury abound. What’s going on? There is one immediate gotcha, which is weight. Turn to our review of the LG Gram 16 (see p46) and you’ll see that the 14in 2-in-1 version of that machine weighs 1.2kg, so you pay a 400g penalty with the 1.6kg Dell. Nor should you expect exceptional battery life, with the Inspiron lasting between seven and eight hours in our tests. However, this laptop recharges extremely quickly – from empty to full in around an…

SCORE PRICE £58 (£70 inc VAT) from logitech.co.uk Logitech’s MX series shows that it knows how to build high-end keyboards and mice, but the mid-range MK650 Combo has different ambitions. Here, Logitech targets IT managers equipping offices and hybrid workers with a simple and modern keyboard and mouse set. It isn’t cheap. There are hundreds of rivals on Amazon alone that cost far less than £70 (a guide price that you should be able to negotiate down if you buy in bulk). Logitech’s promise is that this set will last for years and shouldn’t bring in any support calls. Plug in the USB Bolt receiver, or connect through Bluetooth, and it just works. That’s true whether on a Windows PC, Mac, iPad or even Linux and ChromeOS systems. More adventurous…

SCORE PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from store.google.com Another Google phone? Well, sort of. Arriving nine months after the rest of the Pixel 6 family, Google is positioning the Pixel 6a as an affordable alternative to the original handset, rather than a real update. It’s not much cheaper, however. The £399 that Google demands is certainly less than the £599 launch price of the original Pixel 6 (see issue 328, p70), but today that phone can be bought for as little as £440, so there’s very little saving to be made. Still, the 6a has attractions besides price. The original Pixel 6 was a sizeable thing, measuring 75mm wide and 159mm tall; with a smaller 72 x 152mm frame and weighing only 178g, the 6a is more comfortable to use…

SCORE PRICE £7,495 (£8,994 inc VAT) from armari.com Just when it looked like AMD was out, it’s pulled the workstation market right back in. The end to the dominance of the AMD Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper thanks to the 12th generation Intel Core i9 (among other things – see “What on earth happened to AMD?” on p87) has been halted by the arrival of the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 series. Armari just managed to obtain a processor in time for this test, and thank goodness it did: the Magnetar M64TP-RW2000G3 shows how much potential this work-stationclass Zen 3 processor has. The exact CPU in question is the Threadripper Pro 5975WX. It might seem a little odd that this is a 32-core processor in a system costing nearly £9,000 when last…

SCORE PRICE £8,333 (£10,000 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews It’s a sign of the times that we are again seeing a workstation with dual Intel Xeon processors. AMD has dominated with its Threadrippers above 16 cores, but now these have been discontinued and the new generation of the Pro version is in scarce supply. The Goliath heralds the return of a classic: dual-socket Xeon. The PCSpecialist system sports a pair of Xeon Gold 5220R CPUs, which offer 24 cores and 48 threads each, with a base 2.2GHz clock speed and 4GHz Turbo mode. That’s 16 fewer cores than a 64-core Threadripper, but there’s still plenty of power here. The downside is double the cooling, which means this workstation is a fraction noisier than its rivals. There’s 128GB of 2,666MHz DDR4 RAM…

SCORE PRICE £3,749 (£4,498 inc VAT) from armari.com Armari’s Magnetar CXI-AD1000 shows what the 12th gen Intel Core i9 can deliver when optimised. The range-topping 12900KS variant here offers a 3.4GHz base clock for the eight P-cores with a 5.5GHz Thermal Velocity Boost frequency, while the eight E-cores can jump from 2.5GHz to 4GHz in the Max Turbo mode. Armari gives the chip two speed-oriented partners in both the Asus ROG Strix Z690-F Gaming motherboard and 64GB of DDR5 5,200MHz memory. These come as two 32GB DIMMs, leaving two slots free for expansion up to the motherboard’s 128GB maximum. Graphics acceleration comes in the form of the PNY Nvidia Quadro RTX A4500. This combines a considerable 7,168 CUDA cores with 20GB of GDDR6 memory offering 640GB/sec bandwidth. This will be…

SCORE PRICE £3,748 (£4,498 inc VAT) from workstationspecialists.com Like most manufacturers this month, Workstation Specialists has switched from AMD to Intel. The WS IC-Z6901 takes the route of most other contenders by opting for the Core i9-12900KS, at the top of Intel’s high performance range. Its eight P-cores and eight E-cores deliver 24 threads. The KS version supports Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost, so the P-cores can run at up to 5.5GHz, with a base frequency of 3.4GHz. The E-cores operate at 2.5GHz with a boost up to 4GHz, and don’t support Hyper-Threading. Workstation Specialists has taken advantage of this Intel CPU generation’s support for DDR5 memory and supplied 64GB of 5,200MHz memory, which should be ample for the lifetime of the machine. Graphics acceleration comes in the shape of Nvidia’s…

Backup is probably one of the least exciting functions of network administration, but businesses that fail to implement it properly are playing a very risky game. It’s easy to get side-tracked by the latest shiny business application or performance enhancing technology, but without a solid foundation built on backup, they will be worthless in the event of data loss or disaster. It doesn’t have to be difficult, however, as there are plenty of backup solutions available to suit businesses and budgets of all sizes. In fact, the biggest hurdle facing SMBs is the sheer range of options, so it’s important to pick the one that fits your data protection requirements to avoid inadequate recovery procedures. The best data-protection strategies use a combination of on-premises and cloud backup. Generally referred to…

SCORE PRICE Microsoft 365, £2.77 per user/per month exc VAT from metallic.io Commvault Metallic is perfect for businesses that only want to pay for the backup services they need as it offers eight distinct modules. These provide protection for VMware, Hyper-V, Azure VM and Kubernetes virtualisation hosts, databases, file and object storage, Windows, macOS and Linux endpoints, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Sales-force and Active Directory (AD). This hybrid solution combines on-premises with cloud backup and you can use Metallic’s cloud storage or your own Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure accounts as off-site backup destinations. There are no hidden costs either, as Metallic provides a price calculator on its website for each module. Managed from one cloud portal, it presents a dashboard overview of each module along with links…

SCORE PRICE £139 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com SMBs that want an affordable and compact Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP) with an emphasis on speed will appreciate TP-Link’s Omada EAP650. Costing only £139, this slimline ceiling-mount AP isn’t much larger than a smoke detector and yet combines a fast AX3000 rating with support for the Wi-Fi 6 high-performance 160MHz channels. The EAP650 delivers speeds of up to 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz one. Its single LAN port supports PoE+, but if you don’t have an available power source the box includes an external PSU. The only catch is that the port is the Gigabit variety so you won’t see the full potential of the 160MHz channels. On the plus side, the EAP650 teams up plenty of…

Aside from consuming less energy, another way to cut power bills is by reducing your reliance on the national grid by installing your own solar panels. Needless to say, solar energy has its limits, especially in the UK. If you’re dealing with a cupboard full of dusty towers that look like they fell out of the 1980s then even the odd record heat-wave is unlikely to provide enough energy to keep everything up and running. But a decent solar array can generate a persistent feed of 2kW – enough to drive a good few NAS or gateway appliances. Or you can feed the energy you collect back into the grid to offset your bills. This isn’t futurology. Solar panelling for industrial buildings and offices is a mature technology, and already…

Most cyber-scare stories have more in common with horror fiction than practical reality, and I’m not talking purely about the hyped-up cyber-warfare stuff that appears online. Me being me, I’m focused on the hacking threat stuff. Regular readers of my body of work, here at PC Pro and beyond, will know that I have a thirst for oddball security research papers. But here’s the thing: there’s a secret to digesting these papers in a way so as not to confuse the theoretical risk with the practical one. There’s a huge difference between fascinating research work, conducted by hugely talented folk, and the practical risk that you’re likely to be exposed to as a result of it. This isn’t to say that such research is pointless; far from it, in fact.…

Augmented reality has had a rough take off – perhaps not a surprise for a technology launched into the public consciousness by Google with skydivers. Almost a decade ago, Google Glass was unveiled at the company’s I/O conference by people leaping out of a plane wearing the smart glasses and landing at the Moscone conference hall. Despite the flashy entrance, Google Glass stalled, held back by privacy concerns and a failure to meet user expectations; rather than letting us view the world with a snazzy sci-fi overlay of information, Glass was like trying to read Twitter from a TV on the other side of the room. Other AR headsets followed, from Microsoft’s HoloLens to Magic Leap. And none found real success in the consumer market, though Glass and HoloLens are…

Although their contact lenses certainly look smart, Mojo Vision and InWith aren’t the first AR vision systems that people have lost their heads(-up displays) over. Here’s a short history of recent devices; some are failures, some have found their niche, and some remain to be fully realised. Google Glass (2012) Google first unveiled its smart glasses at an I/O conference using skydivers, though they weren’t available to developers until the following year or the public until the year after that. Though the camera sparked privacy concerns and the glasses never really took off as a consumer product – those who did wear them were dubbed “Glassholes” – the enterprise version has had more success and been used in surgery and even to coach breastfeeding. Microsoft HoloLens (2015) Developed off the…

Features Windows 11’s big update: what’s in, what’s missing We now have an excellent idea of what will be in Windows 11 version 22 H2,its first feature update since release. To find out what’s in and what’s not, read our analysis next month. Take advantage of education discounts Whether you have children at schoolor university, or perhaps you’re enrolled in an adult learning course, it pays to know where savings can be found. What difference RAM actually makes There are few things less understood in modern computers than memory, with a be wil dering array of specs to choose between. Darien explains all. Labs Chromebooks We put all the latest Chrome books through a tranche of demanding tests. Whether you’re buying for home or business, find out which is right…

Sarah Kidner Perks work both ways: Sarah explains what perks employees should be asking for, and how employers should be using them to lure the best talent to their business. See p34 James Morris If it’s time to get down to some serious work – from data processing to video editing, from CAD design to 3D animation – our workstation expert James Morris has the answer in this month’s Labs from p74. Olivia Whitcroft Don’t simply copy the Ts and Cs from a contract, explains Olivia. As a lawyer who specialises in IT and commercial contracts, she explains the right way to do things from p116. Paul Ockenden Anyone considering a switch to their ISP’s “digital voice” product should turn to p111 straight away. As Paul explains, it won’t always…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He can recite the “fair use” rules in his sleep (and sometimes does so). Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk A “commonplace book” is, according to my dictionary, “a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use”. My late friend and long-term associate Felix Dennis used to keep one, a largish leather-bound album that went with him on all his travels, filled with clippings, photos and handwritten notes of whatever captured his attention (often poems). I wasn’t inclined to note-taking in the era of paper: I never kept a diary and only started to collect common (and not so common) places after the arrival of the personal computer. When I did start, it was back in the clunky, pre-Windows days, thanks…

If you’ve read our recent feature on virtual private networking (see issue 334, p41), you’ll know all the benefits of routing your internet connection through a trusted VPN provider. Your online anonymity is protected, and using a server located in another country can also defeat geographic restrictions, allowing you to unlock extra content on Netflix, or sign up to US-only streaming services such as Hulu or HBO Max. However, many VPN services support only a limited number of connections, and they don’t always work smoothly with devices such as Chromebooks, games consoles, smart TVs or set-top boxes. One way around this is to set up your router to forward all traffic from your entire home network through a secure server. Not all routers support this, though, and even if yours…

SCORE PRICE 16GB/1TB, £1,624 (£1,949 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The new 13in MacBook Pro is a laptop of contradictions. It’s revolutionary, but plays it safe. Exciting, but a bit boring. It’s a strange choice by Apple, and yet it also makes complete sense – at least to Apple’s accounting team. These contradictions all stem from Apple’s decision to stick with the same design as 2020’s 13in MacBook Pro (see issue 316, p44). Where that introduced the M1, this time we see the M2. As can be seen from the graphs on the previous page, the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips in the larger MacBook Pros still hold the performance advantage owing to their additional cores, but the M2 represents a hefty upgrade over the standard M1. Benchmarks only tell…

SCORE PRICE £1,999 (£2,399 inc VAT) from laptopoutlet.co.uk If you’re a content creator who loves to play games, then the Creator Z16P might just be your dream laptop. Switch off the per-key RGB backlighting and this sturdy metal-bodied laptop could even pass for a 16in MacBook Pro. One giveaway of its non-Apple provenance is the removable GeForce RTX Studio sticker next to the trackpad, and this discrete chip is the key differentiator between the Z16P and a MacBook. It provides phenomenal acceleration in apps that have been tuned for Nvidia’s Studio drivers, including much of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, plus the ability to play the latest games at slick frame rates. I tested the £2,399 model that includes RTX 3070 Ti graphics, and this powered it to 71fps in Dirt…

SCORE PRICE Core i7, £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk Our previous reviews of Huawei’s value-packed MateBook D range could be summed up as “great if you don’t mind mid-range components and a second tier screen”. The D 16 veers away from this script by including both a cutting-edge processor and a high-quality display, yet the price is still aggressively low. Huawei is selling two variants of the D 16 in the UK: one for £750, one for £1,000. Both include a 512GB SSD, and the cheaper version has 8GB of RAM rather than 16GB, but the crucial difference is the CPU. Pay £750 and a Core i5-12450H is inside. This has eight cores – four P-cores, four E-cores – to the 14 of the i7-12700H in its sibling. Screen…

SCORE PRICE £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from sony.co.uk Costing £1,299 with 256GB of storage, the Xperia 1 IV is more expensive than any comparable iPhone or Samsung Galaxy handset. But then this is a special device, with a range of high-end photography and videography features aimed at mobile content creators. Considering its creative ambitions, the phone itself is surprisingly plain. It’s long, thin and angular, with flat edges that aren’t all that comfortable. Colour options of violet, white or black are conservative too. Still, its 71mm width won’t stretch your hand, and it’s light at 185g. As with most premium phones, there’s sturdy Gorilla Glass Victus on the front and back, and IP68 certification means it’s protected against dust and brief submersions in water. Around the edges you’ll find a…

SCORE PRICE £3,750 (£4,500 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Chillblast’s entry in the sub-£4,500 category shows just how much has changed in a year. Based around AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, it would almost certainly have been an award winner in our previous workstation test. It still fares well but, in many areas at least, it has been eclipsed by systems using Intel’s 12th generation Core i9 processors. Still, the 5950X offers an impressive specification thanks to 16 cores that all support multithreading; so you get 32 threads compared to the Core i9-12900’s 24 threads. However, these run at a base 3.4GHz up to 4.9GHz in Boost mode, so a few hundred megahertz behind what the 12900KS can offer when its cores hit Turbo mode. As we shall see, this gives…

SCORE PRICE £3,500 (£4,200 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Scan has taken a more balanced approach than some other manufacturers this month, coming in £300 under our £4,500 budget but choosing to spend more on graphics acceleration relative to CPU and memory. The processor is still a 12th generation Intel Core i9 with 16 cores, but instead of opting for the top-end 12900KS, Scan has supplied its GWP-ME A124C with the 12900K version, one rung below. This has a 3.2GHz base clock for its eight P-cores with a 5.2GHz Turbo Max 3 frequency, but no 5.5GHz Thermal Velocity Boost above that. The eight E-cores are a notch slower, too, with a 2.4GHz base frequency and 3.9GHz Turbo Boost. But you still get a total of 24 threads. Scan has also chosen…

SCORE PRICE £7,500 (£9,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com The absence of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper meant that Chillblast decided to increase the specification of a system based on a Core i9 processor for its more expensive entry this month. The CPU is a Core i9-12900KS. This 16-core chip sits atop Intel’s 12th gen Alder Lake range, with the unique ability to run its eight P-cores at up to 5.5GHz using Thermal Velocity Boost, although the nominal clock is 3.4GHz. The eight E-cores have a base 2.5GHz frequency but can boost up to 4GHz. Chillblast has partnered this processor with 128GB of 4,800MHz DDR5 memory. This will be more than ample for years to come, which is handy because it’s also the maximum quantity supported by the Asus ProArt Z690-Creator motherboard. Another…

SCORE PRICE One virtual host from £729 per year exc VAT from acronis.com Acronis’ Cyber Protect puts a different spin on data protection, as it combines hybrid backup with AI-driven cyber-security measures and endpoint management. This will appeal to SMBs that want to avoid the expense of separates since it means they can pay a single subscription fee for all their data backup and workstation protection services. Platform support is impressive and includes Windows, macOS and Linux systems, all popular business apps and almost any virtualisation host you care to name. You can choose from on-premises or cloud-managed versions. We reviewed the latter as this extends protection to home workers and mobile devices. Acronis offers Essentials, Standard, Advanced and Backup Advanced editions. We tested the Advanced version, which activates features…

SCORE PRICE 1.25TB, £299 per year exc VAT from idrive.com SMBs with a keen eye on backup costs will love IDrive Business as its prices are based purely on cloud backup capacity. Yearly subscriptions start at only £60 for 250GB of cloud storage, with the package on review upping this to 1.25TB for a very affordable £299. The best part is that all price tiers include unlimited platform, client and app support. The list is impressive and includes Windows, macOS and Linux desktops, iOS and Android mobiles, Windows Server, Hyper-V and VMware hosts, as well as popular business apps such as Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 Exchange mailboxes. Procedures for creating backup jobs vary depending on the platform and app being protected, but in most cases you’ll need…

• A wireless phone charger, with handy suction cups to hold the charger to your device while charging• A clever kickstand props the device in either landscape or portrait mode, keeping you hands-free, all while charging• Indicator lights provide status of device charging as well as current battery charge. Other great reasons to subscribe… • Every issue of PC Pro delivered direct to your door. Save up to 41% with each monthly issue• The UK’s most in-depth and trusted reviews• Exclusive and in-depth analysis from IT experts Choose your package! PRINT EDITION £31.50 every 6 months Get 12 Issues of PC Pro over 12 months in print, straight to your door and save 12% ANNUAL PRINT + DIGITAL EDITION £35.50 every 6 months 12 issues of PC Pro over 12…

A mechanical engineer once explained to me that repair is a simplistic, binary process of broken in, fixed out. Maybe this was once true of hardware-based issues, but I’m assuming my pal worked in a software-free environment. We all marvel at the invisible layers of different codebases, harmoniously creating platforms for work and entertainment, until one minuscule update shatters our tranquillity. Beth writes specialist textbooks with stunning illustrations and photos, but her Dell tower was feeling the strain despite being no slouch. An Intel Core i7-4790 with 16GB of DDR3 RAM, a 500GB SSD and a stack of hard disks had been perfectly adequate until her photographer updated their camera, ballooning the file sizes of the images. Crashes and stalls increased in frequency and the near miss of an important…

I’ve written a fair amount about browser privacy over the past few months, and readers have emailed to ask what I think of various “niche” browser performances in this area. While I’m working on covering some of these in future columns, rather than leave you hanging if you’re among those wondering how well your browser of choice performs when it comes to privacy across a bunch of metrics, I can heartily recommend a quick visit to PrivacyTests.org, whose URL is just that. Here you can find tables setting out multiple browser privacy performances, including in the often overlooked private mode, and the results may just make you think about switching.…

It seems that every day we read about pollution around the world. From whales caught up in nets to particulates in the air we breathe, and water infested with everything from toxic chemicals to raw sewage. Then there is the growing horror of micro-plastics: tiny chunks of plastic defined as being smaller than five millimetres in diameter, which are increasingly being found inside living creatures. The pollution problem is also getting worse in the online world, except here it’s mostly related to a tidal wave of advertising material. Some of it is obvious, with websites that are often more advert than content a particular bête noire of mine. Other ads are more insidious, such as those injected into video streams on YouTube. I understand the need for advertising revenue, and…

Videos aren’t the only example of Amazon creating different refund rules for different products. Even the next closest thing to an ebook – the audiobook – has an entirely different refund policy on Amazon. Audible, the audiobook service that was acquired by Amazon in 2008, allows customers to request a refund for up to a year after purchase. But behind the scenes, the author only loses their royalties if the return is within seven days, with Amazon itself taking the hit if the refund is requested after. “This isn’t a competition issue,” said Nicola Solomon of the Society of Authors. “It’s not a question of us authors being worried about what [Amazon] do to the end user. It’s what [they] do to us as your supplier.” Solomon puts the difference…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s futures editor and she’s had a lot of retro internet experiences lately. What’s next? MySpace? Napster? LulzSec? @njkobie My sister and her family visited me recently. As her children are approaching their teenage years and are travelling from Canada, which has terrible and expensive roaming mobile plans, the first words out of my niece and nephew wherever we went was: “what’s the Wi-Fi?” This isn’t a dig at younger generations. They were asking because they knew their parents had already sussed it and were diligently tapping the login details into their iPhones. This was no problem when we were in London. Here, and in other major cities, the UK has solid mobile coverage and decent speeds. But head to rural locales and it’s like going…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit ourindex at pcpro.link/index SCORE PRICE £1,292 (£1,550 inc VAT) from lg.com/uk The name gives the game away: LG’s Gram series of laptops are ultra-light machines designed for life on the move, so whether you’re buying the 14in, 16in or 17in iteration, you know that you’ll never be dragged down by excess weight. This 2022 update features an upgrade to a trio of crucial of components, with the processor sitting right at the top of the list. Where last year’s models featured 11th generation Intel Core processors, this year buyers will be treated – and it is a treat – to 12th generation silicon that ensures the laptops are notably quicker than before. It doesn’t take long to see that LG has remote and…

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

Windows 11 Pro for £79.99 pcpro.link/win11pro Want to upgrade from Windows 11 Home to Windows 11 Pro? Or perhaps you’re building a new PC from scratch, or looking to move up from Windows 7? Or you may want to run Windows on your Mac. Whatever your motives, a Windows 11 Professional OEM licence is a great choice. The first reason is simple: price. Microsoft charges £119.99 for a retail licence of Windows 11 Home, and a staggering £219.99 for Windows 11 Professional. By choosing an OEM licence – and avoiding the many dubious sources of licences you may find online – you cut that price in half. ALSO CONSIDER Windows 11 Home for £59.99 SAVE 50% Norton 360 Deluxe for £16 (5 devices, 15 months) pcpro.link/deluxe360 Norton 360 Deluxe goes…

SCORE PRICE 8GB/256GB, £608 (£729 inc VAT) from microsoft.co.uk If you’re spending around £700 on a laptop, you have no right to expect the quality that runs through the Surface Laptop Go 2. From the aluminium lid to the rigid polycarbonate shell, from the 720p webcam to the twin far-field mics, from the keyboard to the touchpad, it exudes class like a Savile Row suit. Here, though, there’s no tailoring of choices. If you can live with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, it’s a bargain at £529. A stiff £100 will double the RAM to 8GB. And if you want 256GB you must spend £729. Those prices are with Windows 11 Home; if you need Pro you’ll need to pay an extra £80 for a “Surface Laptop Go…

SCORE PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Whisper it, but I think we’ve turned a corner. The IT industry has suffered through horrific levels of inflation this past year as demand for core components outstripped supply, but the tide is turning. Six months ago you could spend £1,500 on a PC with a fast CPU and GeForce 3060 Ti, but Acer is now selling precisely that for £1,199. It’s doing so in this newly updated version of the Predator Orion 3000, which features a totally different chassis to the one we reviewed a year ago (see issue 323, p90). Be careful when you buy, as the older Orion 3000 is still on sale, but three clues will guide you to the right machine. The first is simple: P03-640 in…

SCORE PRICE 8GB/128GB, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from nothing.tech The Phone 1 (let’s abandon the awkward brackets early doors) certainly isn’t nothing: this is the first smartphone from the London-based startup, with a unique design that aims to be both fun and practical. The handset comes in a simple choice of black and white finishes, and, from the front at least, bears an immediate resemblance to the iPhone 13 Pro Max (see issue 327, p49). While its 6.6in screen is a fraction smaller, the straight-sided metal frame, rounded corners, flat front and back, and dual rear camera placement are almost identical to Apple’s flagship. One difference, of course, is the software platform: rather than iOS, the Nothing Phone 1 runs a custom version of Android 12. And the price is…

We wanted to give the broadest possible workstation advice, so we used a wide variety of software for testing – as the huge number of graphs on these pages shows! To start with, we ran our standard PC Pro benchmark suite to assess image-processing and video-encoding abilities, and then multitasking (see results on p91). Each of these categories has an individual score, which indicates relative speed compared to a Core i7-4760K desktop PC with 8GB of RAM. If a machine scores 150 in a test, it’s 50% faster than the reference PC. All these results are combined into an overall score, giving an indication of ability in these content-creation tasks as well as general activities. On top of our regular benchmark suite, we added tests specifically aimed at a range…

SCORE PRICE £3,663 (£4,395 inc VAT) from ipworkstations.com InterPro chose not to use the range-topping Intel Core i9 processor for its summarily named IPW-AL, but it has still managed to put together a workstation that competes strongly in almost every area – and it’s £105 under our £4,500 budget, too. However, you will need to fork out £25 for delivery. Instead of the KS version of the 16-core Intel Core i9-12900, InterPro opted for the 12900K variant one rung down. This misses out on the top 5.5GHz Turbo mode, instead offering a maximum clock of 5.2GHz for its eight P-cores, with a base frequency of 3.2GHz. The eight E-cores max out at 3.9GHz, with a base 2.4GHz frequency. While the 12900K saves money, InterPro hasn’t skimped on RAM, taking full…

SCORE PRICE £3,750 (£4,500 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews The £4,500 system from PCSpecialist mostly follows the same script as other systems in this class, based as it is on Intel’s range-topping Core i9-12900KS processor. However, there are some variations in the specification that differentiate it from the crowd. Where PCSpecialist diverges is by opting for DDR4 memory rather than DDR5, a fact that betrayed by the D4 suffix in the Asus ROG Strix Z690-A Gaming WiFi D4 motherboard. All four of the board’s memory sockets are occupied, with four 16GB 3,200MHz DIMMs, so there’s no room for upgrade. This approach frees up room in the budget for PCSpecialist to go one step further than most systems in this class by opting for Nvidia Quadro RTX A5000 graphics, rather than the…

This labs test feels like a watershed moment. As the systems came in, the plethora of systems containing Intel processors could have indicated that AMD’s few years in the workstation sun were over. But the single Ryzen 9 system isn’t far behind, and then the Thread-ripper Pro 5975WX reasserted AMD’s dominance at the high end. As I argue on p87 (“What on earth happened to AMD?”), this is not AMD receding into the background again, as it did after the Opteron and Athlon 64. I didn’t mention there that this time AMD continues to pile on pressure in the server space with the EPYC, where its core count advantage is winning the company many customers, even with the main cloud service providers. In reality, it’s great for the market that…

SCORE PRICE Appliance and 1yr Energize Updates, £2,453 exc VAT from barracuda.com Small businesses that want a complete hybrid backup solution will find Barracuda’s Backup 295 appliance appealing as it looks to have every angle covered. Easily managed from a central cloud portal, Barracuda provides on-site and off-site cloud backup, full data restoration and disaster recovery services, as well as optional site-to-site replication. Aimed at SMBs and remote offices, this fan-less desktop appliance has a single 2TB hard disk and a recommended backup capacity of 1TB. This may seem stingy considering the price, but Barracuda’s efficient variable block-level deduplication increases available capacity significantly as it scrunched our initial backups totalling 1.4TB down to only 365GB. You won’t need to worry about extra costs for platform support and clients, either, as…

SCORE PRICE £565 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk Stepping up to the pinnacle of Brother’s new family of business desktop scanners, the ADS-4900W takes everything that impressed us with its predecessor, the ADS-3600W (see issue 310, p98), and makes it bigger and faster. Colour and mono scan speeds receive a 20% boost to 60ppm, its automatic document feeder (ADF) doubles in capacity to 100 pages, and it can take even more punishment with the recommended daily duty cycle increasing from 5,000 to 9,000 pages. Connection options abound: it teams up USB 3 with wired or wireless connection options, and the latter now supports 802.11a/n 5GHz networks. The colour touchscreen has been widened from 9.3cm to a more finger-friendly 10.9cm, and a small switch above it allows you to manually select single-sheet…

This doesn’t seem like a topic that needs explaining–unless you know how to get our bills back to 2021 levels? Well, that’s what everyone wants to know. A business generation raised on the mantra of “disruption” is now finding out just what that term means when applied to their own energy costs. It seems likely that the present price squeeze will ease off at some point, but I wouldn’t sit around and wait for that if I were you. The long-term solution is to power down those energy-hungry systems for good, in favour of cloud services and remote working. Sure, but those are big projects. For now, how do I find out where all our electricity is going? You could use a little plug-socket wattmeter, but that’s not ideal for…

We really need to talk about passwords. The reality is that they are horrible and not fit for purpose. Let’s just look at the issues. The typical login consists of a user token, which is often a username or email address and a password. Back in the day, a password could be relatively simple and used on multiple sites, because the whole phishing industry hadn’t arrived. Today, phishing has been refined to the point where even sensible and appropriately cynical users can get caught. We have to handle such a large volume of website logins that it’s impossible to remember a unique password for each site, so it’s no surprise that people reuse passwords. Which is fine, until either someone works out what your password is, or they extract it…

“Does anyone have some template Ts and Cs?” This is a question I often see in (oxymoronic) business social media forums. If furnished with one or more sets of terms by kind fellow members, the amateur contract-drafter can then create a sparkling new contract using one of the following techniques: 1. Using the document as is. One shouldn’t fiddle with the wording, and it worked for @EsméBiz, so it will work for me too. This often results in terms for the manufacture of goods vehicles being used for the provision of a software service. 2. Combining several sets of terms into a new contract. If you have five clauses dealing with each issue, that gives you five times the protection, right? This creates a lovely long-form agreement, with so many…

It would be foolish and premature to label Cisco as one of the overall “losers” in the volatile post-pandemic marketplace. For one thing, it’s still an enormous business in the old-school, heavily configured, special purpose networking device market. On the other hand, it remains a steep hill to climb for even its most ardent customers: in a market where most people don’t realise switches even have configurations, selling switches with hugely complicated configuration options seems a little perverse. However, the amazing variety of Cisco devices supporting IP telephony ought to provide a clue to the hopes and intentions of the company that more or less invented modern Ethernet all on its own. As such, I didn’t want to miss what it had to say about the brave new world of…

Mojo Vision has been working on augmented reality smart contact lenses since 2015, but earlier this year announced it had reached a final technical design for its Mojo Lens. The aim is to let people read key information – messages, directions, fitness tracking, gaming cues – in a heads-up display without having to look down at a screen. Mojo calls this an “eyes up experience” and “invisible computing”. The microLED display is less than half a milli-metre wide, with a pixel density of 200 micro pixels per inch, and uses an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer – all sensors common to smartphones – to track eye movements to make overlaid images look still. That’s managed using a custom application-specific integrated circuit powered by an ARM Core M0 chip and 5GHz radio…