Indice dei contenuti per October 2021 in PC Pro

Microsoft has launched Windows 365, a cloud service that allows businesses to stream Windows desktops on demand. There are various SKUs available with a range of specs, with the lowest starting with a single CPU, 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, which is designed for frontline workers and call centres. At the other end of the scale, an eight CPU system with 32GB of RAM and 512GB of storage is aimed at developers and content creators. Prices had yet to be confirmed at the time of going to press, although leaked docs suggested one of the more modest specs would cost $31 a month.…

@njkobie As an immigrant and – before the last 18 months – a frequent traveller, I find borders annoying. But we need to build some tougher ones on the internet. I try to avoid relying on Amazon for online retail for the usual reasons: complaints about staff treatment, damage to local businesses, and the company’s efforts to avoid paying taxes, while making enough money to blast founder Jeff Bezos into space. And that means that when I need to buy something, I turn first to the wider, and wilder, internet. Before bashing a search term into Google, there are obvious options such as eBay, Etsy or John Lewis. The latter has the benefit of being a UK brand, while the two former sites at least allow a would-be shopper to…

I write in reference to Barry Collins’ recent article (see issue 322, p36) about the closure of the PSTN system. This is a bad idea driven by greed as the current system is now reaching the end of its life, with BT having failed to invest. My main objection is a security one. At the moment, the PSTN system is isolated from the internet and as such is immune to cyberattack, but routing all communications via the internet will give a single point of cyberattack to devastate internal UK communications. My second objection is on behalf of the 1.5 million people without internet access either by choice, which is being overridden in the interests of BT, or geography, which will mean no phone system if you live in the deep…

Fundamentally, cryptomining is about using a computer’s resources to crunch through equations. Most of those equations will amount to nought, but just occasionally (if you have a powerful enough system) you will hit the jackpot – that is, find a coin. Turn to p33 for our rundown of the main currencies to choose from. The equation-crunching is also used to verify a block of transactions, and this constant need for verification is one of the reasons why cryptocurrency is so controversial: it needs people to keep mining for it to work. And that consumes epic amounts of electricity (see p31). Whoever wins the race for verification is rewarded with currency. Similarly, when a transfer of currency is made, that transaction must be verified and added to the public ledger –…

When Apple’s M1 processor was unveiled last year it caused a sensation, delivering performance far beyond what analysts had expected from an ARM-based chip. In some benchmarks it put high-end Core i7 and even Core i9 desktop systems to shame, while maintaining astounding energy efficiency – we found the M1-powered MacBook Pro ran for more than 17 hours on a single battery charge. How was this achieved? The M1 uses eight ARM cores running at up to 3.2GHz, which Apple partners with a slew of custom on-chip modules, to accelerate tasks like image and video processing, mathematical transformations, encryption and even machine learning, all using Apple’s “neural engine”. The pairing of ARM efficiency with x86-type specialisms and extensions delivers the best of both worlds. The M1 benefits from a unique…

SCORE PRICE £625 (£750inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk By now, we know we’ going to get with the Huawei MateBook D series. Focused on value, these laptops always cram a powerful specification into a metal chassis that rewrote our expectations for budget machines back in 2019. And so it is for this 2021 update of the 15in variant, the MateBook D 15. What’s less predictable is whether Huawei is going to swing towards AMD or Intel, as it’s equally at home with both chip makers. Here, the benefactor is Intel, with its familiar four-core Core i5-1135G7 inside. It’s an 11th-generation chip with Intel’s fastest integrated graphics, Iris Xe, and Huawei wrings every last drop of power from the combination. To see this, compare the MateBook’s scores with the Core i7-powered Dynabook on…

SCORE PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from huawei.com Whatever your views about Huawei as a company, this monitor proves one thing beyond a doubt: it knows how to innovate. With its screen debut, it takes an entirely different approach to the rest of the industry, and in doing so has created a screen that is both unique and brilliant. First up, there’s the most obvious difference: the design. I’m not just talking about the way the screen appears to hang in mid-air in front of you, due in part to the slim bezel, or the super-thin panel or even the stylish silver stand. I’m talking about the aspect ratio, which moves away from the widescreen norm and instead offers a squarer – almost old-school – 3:2 panel. This makes a…

SCORE PRICE £375 (£450 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk This display’s most striking feature is obvious: rather than a stand, it comes with an arm mount that attaches to your desk. This means you can push the screen away when you don’t need it, pull it close when you do. The 130mm of height adjustment helps too. The 34in IPS panel is tuned for the sRGB colour space, and within those confines it’s accurate: 98.3% coverage with an average Delta E of 0.4 are the kind of figures I like to see. Others are more modest. Although this LG supports HDR10, with a peak brightness of 330cd/m2 you shouldn’t expect eye-popping scenes. And while it’s always nice to see support for AMD FreeSync, a 5ms response time and 60Hz refresh won’t…

SCORE PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com The Xperia 10 is that rarest of things: an affordable Sony handset. This is its third iteration, and just as with the Xperia 1 III (see p62) you can deduce that from the silly “III” appendage to its name. It also shares its sibling’s unusual 21:9 design, which, Sony is keen to point out, is the aspect ratio that two thirds of Netflix’s movies are shot in. In practice, the screen’s aspect ratio is a mixed blessing. For films shot in 21:9 then it’s a treat, with no black borders at all. However, TV series are filmed in 16:9 and this means thick black borders on either side of the show you’re watching; far thicker than the ones you experience watching 21:9…

SCORE PRICE 3-pack, £233 (£279 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324Eero If you’re familiar with Amazon’s original Eero mesh kit, the Eero 6 will hold few surprises. It’s almost identical, save for the fact that this latest model supports Wi-Fi 6. The Eero platform emphasises ease of use, with a friendly smartphone app putting all network monitoring and management options quite literally at your fingertips. However, there are already plenty of Wi-Fi 6 meshes to choose from: does the Eero 6 stand out from the crowd, or is it a case of wireless meh? The basics The Eero 6 is a dual-bond 802.11ax mesh system. Each unit contains a 2.4GHz radio rated at up to 600Mbits/sec and a 5GHz one capable of connections at up to 1,200Mbits/sec. Unlike triple-band systems, that single…

SCORE PRICE £79 (£95 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk If hybrid working is going to succeed in the long term, IT teams must equip staff with technology that will work just as well in the office as in their home. That sort of versatility is what EPOS offers with the Adapt 260, a pair of wireless headphones that can simultaneously connect over Bluetooth with a phone and with a PC via the provided dongle. This isn’t a novel approach. We have seen it with many Bluetooth headsets, most notably the Logitech Zone Wireless (see issue 299, p69). However, that headset costs around £135 exc VAT from online retailers whilst you can buy the Adapt 260 for £79 exc VAT. EPOS also offers a greater variety of options. For instance, you can…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £140 (£168 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sn8 READ SPEED 5,746MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 5,085MB/SEC If you’re upgrading or building a PC, the WD Black SN850 makes a superb system drive. It takes advantage of the huge bandwidth of the PCI Express Gen4 bus to offer performance rival SSDs can’t match: in our tests it achieved a sequential read speed of almost 6GB/sec, and topped 5GB/sec when writing. Multi-threaded performance is excellent too. In AS SSD’s 64-thread random-access test, the SN850 kept up a read speed of 2,906MB/sec and a write rate of 2,805MB/sec. In both of the PCMark storage benchmarks it achieved solid first-place rankings, scoring 3,502 in the system disk test and 5,984 as a data disk. Despite these amazing figures, the SN850 is pretty affordable. True, the…

SCORE PRICE 2TB, £343 (£412 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324mp6 READ SPEED 4,869MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 5,418MB/SEC Corsair’s MP600 Pro is a high-end NVMe SSD, with PCI Express Gen4 support promising the highest possible speeds. Unusually, it comes with a heatsink as standard to help it maintain those speeds even under heavy load, without the need for thermal throttling. Our test results confirm that this is a fast drive, and more than a match for any Gen3 model. Yet by Gen4 standards its raw performance isn’t spectacular: in the AS SSD sequential read benchmark it was easily bested by competing drives from Samsung and Western Digital. It did better in the sequential write test, achieving this month’s fastest sustained transfer rate. Even so, the overall balance holds this drive back from greatness.…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £154 (£185 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam2 READ SPEED 5,468MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 3,944MB/SEC Samsung’s 980 Pro is a premium NVMe SSD with support for PCI Express Gen4. In theory, that should allow it to run twice as fast as its mid-range counterpart (see left) – and to our delight and amazement it actually does, achieving a 110% speed boost over the 970 Evo Plus in our sequential read speed test. Write speeds aren’t quite as spectacular, but they’re still 70% faster than you’ll get from the cheaper drive, thanks partly to an onboard 1GB SDRAM cache. These raw speeds translate to first-class real-world performance. The PCMark 10 benchmark gave the 980 Pro an excellent system disk score of 2,977 – a silver-medal showing, beaten only by WD’s Black…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £94 (£113 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324kc6 READ SPEED 530MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 484MB/SEC Kingston’s KC600 is a standard 2.5in SATA drive, and that immediately tells us it’s not going to break any performance records, owing to the limitations of the SATA interface. Indeed, the KC600’s sequential read speed of 530MB/sec proved effectively identical to the three other SATA drives on test in this month’s Labs. Not all SSDs are created equal, however. The KC600 lagged slightly in AS SSD’s sequential write and multithreaded random-access tests, and ended up with worst-in-class scores in the PCMark 10 storage benchmarks. That’s not very encouraging if you’re looking for an SSD to serve as a system drive. The KC600 does have its plus points, though. There’s hardware encryption, which the Adata lacks,…

SCORE PRICE 500GB, £53 (£64 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam6 READ SPEED 912MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 756MB/SEC With its smart metallic finish and rounded edges, the Samsung T7 Touch looks rather like a business-card holder. In fact, it’s roughly the same size, with a footprint of 57 x 85mm, and it weighs a mere 58g without the cable. That makes it one of the most deliciously portable drives this month – only the Seagate One Touch is more compact. It has a neat party trick, too. The little square on the front isn’t just ornamentation – as the name hints, it’s a biometric scanner. With the supplied software you can lock the entire drive using hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption, so it will reveal its contents only once you’ve authenticated with a fingerprint.…

SCORE PRICE 2TB, £47 (£56 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324tosh1 READ SPEED 143MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 140MB/SEC Your eyes do not deceive you: the Canvio Advance offers two full terabytes of personal storage for just £56, equivalent to 3p per gigabyte. If that’s somehow not enough space, the 4TB model can be yours for £90, or 2p/GB. So how have these incredible prices been achieved? While most modern external drives are based on SSD technology, Toshiba has stuck with the traditional spinning disk design, allowing it to offer huge drives at much lower cost. Needless to say, there are trade-offs. The main one is performance. The speeds above are around a sixth of what we would expect to see from a USB-attached SSD; benchmark the Canvio Advance against one of the latest…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £110 (£132 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324lac READ SPEED 508MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 406MB/SEC LaCie’s Portable SSD uses the modern USB-C connector, but it doesn’t take advantage of modern USB standards. Rather, it’s stuck with what used to be called USB 3.0, and a maximum transfer speed of 5Gbits/sec. As the figures above illustrate, that holds it back when it comes to sequential read and write rates. Yet things aren’t as bad as they may seem. The LaCie’s random-access performance is surprisingly competitive, besting many SSDs with faster interfaces. Clever caching even allowed the drive to rack up an effective write speed of 658MB/sec in the AS SSD multithreaded write test, exceeding the nominal bandwidth of the USB connection. The LaCie aced the PCMark 10 storage tests as well,…

SCORE PRICE 4TB, £75 (£90 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324tosh1 READ SPEED 143MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 138MB/SEC Toshiba’s Canvio Flex offers a huge amount of storage for an amazing price – but it achieves that by using slow mechanical disk technology. It’s a similar proposition to the Canvio Advance (see p85), and both drives offer a purported maximum transfer rate of 625MB/sec over a 5Gbits/sec USB connection. In practice, we found neither drive was capable of attaining a quarter of that speed – and they struggled with the punishing random-access tests, thrashing and stuttering to the point that some solid-state rivals were a thousand times faster. Clearly these drives are best suited to lightweight or non-performance-critical duties. There are a few differences between the Flex and the Advance: the Flex comes with…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £117 (£140 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324wd2 READ SPEED 979MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 980MB/SEC While the mechanical WD My Passport is best suited to low-speed applications (see left), this flash-based counterpart focuses much more on performance. To that end it supports USB 3.2 Gen 2, and takes full advantage of the bandwidth available: in our tests, the My Passport SSD read and wrote big files at around 980MB/sec, close to the maximum the connection can handle. It proved a strong performer at random-access tasks too, achieving a PCMark data disk score of 1,694 – the best we’ve seen from any USB SSD, aside from those few using the newest Gen 2x2 technology. Hardware-based encryption is another plus, and the WD Discovery software that manages it can also take care…

SCORE PRICE £262 exc VAT from tradescanners.com Brother’s ADS-2700W desktop scanner is a versatile choice for SMBs on a budget. It supports USB, Ethernet and wireless connections, and is well suited to big batch scans with a speed of 35ppm, a 50-page ADF and a daily duty cycle of up to 3,000 pages. Setup is a bit of a faff: you don’t get any software in the box, so you’ll need to download it all from Brother’s website. Once you have acquired the main utility, though, the rest of the process is straightforward. With the scanner connected to our lab network via Ethernet the installer discovered it promptly, loaded the requisite drivers and invited us to download Brother’s iPrint&Scan app, along with Nuance’s PaperPort 14 SE digital file cabinet. You…

SCORE PRICE £1,520 exc VAT from thescannershop.com Not everyone needs a scanner costing upwards of £1,500, but if you have a daily paper mountain to climb then Kodak’s Alaris S2085f could be the answer. This mighty desktop scanner boasts superfast 85ppm scanning and a giant 300-page motorised elevator tray. It’s rated for up to 20,000 pages per day, and just in case you need to scan the odd awkwardly shaped item, it comes with a secondary A4 flatbed scanner built in too. You can use the S2085f over either USB 3 or Gigabit Ethernet (but not both together), and it doesn’t require a high-powered host as it has its own internal CPU to handle image processing and enhancement. There’s a capacious output tray at the front, while a side lever…

Way back in 1996, when the web was young, Bill Gates published an article about the web entitled “Content is King”. That’s a maxim that remains true to this day – no matter how hard you work at maximising traffic to your website, there’s no substitute for great content that makes people keep coming back. Even so, it takes targeted optimisation to make your website as effective as it can be. You need to know how visitors are interacting with your pages, identify what’s drawing them in – and pinpoint anything that might drive them away. The easiest way to discover all of this is with Google Analytics. In the 16 years since its launch, this freemium tool has become the go-to for online marketers the world over, providing a…

Creating good user interfaces is an immensely skilled task. You need to come up with something that’s functional yet simple. An interface that’s naturally intuitive, where you don’t need to keep referring to the manual – more likely a PDF these days – to work out how to do something. It’s a level of simplicity that Apple largely mastered around the time of the original iPhone, although sadly those skills seem to have faded alongside Steve Jobs. Apple user interfaces are now full of “you need to know how to” where they used to be more “it’s immediately obvious how to”. It’s not just onscreen stuff, either – physical user interfaces can also be intuitive if well engineered. As an example, I have two pocket DAB radios sitting in my…

If you’ve ever attended an infosec or cybersecurity event, you will no doubt have noticed the preponderance of “Hacking is NOT a Crime” stickers. In 2018, some 500 such stickers were handed out at the DEF CON 26 event, the following year 5,000 were distributed. Who knows how many real and virtual stickers will be handed out at this year’s event, which is going hybrid due to Covid. Yes, you did read that right: Hacking is NOT a Crime (hackingisnotacrime.org) isn’t just a sticker or meme, it’s a non-profit organisation on a mission to advocate global policy reform to both recognise and protect hacker rights. And yes, you did read that right as well. If you’re thinking, “why should any organisation be arguing that people behind ransomware, data breaches and…

The IT entrepreneur hall of fame isn’t short of curious characters, but John McAfee was surely one of the most curious of all. Despite parting company with the product that uses his name many years ago, McAfee the man had an unfortunate habit – actually, several unfortunate habits – that kept him in the news. McAfee’s outlook on the security industry he helped start would be remarkable enough on its own, but it forms only a small part of his quotable output. My favourite is “a good example is more irritating than a bad one”, but that doesn’t mean he was always right – his claim that he could live and work without any security software because he stayed away from porn sites is a charming reminder of a much…

To count how many seabirds lived in a colony, David Johnston and his team at Duke University used to walk among the black-browed albatrosses and southern rockhopper penguins with a clicker, like bouncers at a bar. When one small section was finished, that number would be extrapolated across the total area. If the colony on the Falklands Islands was in a spot too difficult for humans to easily access, planes would be sent up for aerial photography that would be painstakingly examined on a computer display – counting the tens of thousands of birds, one by one. “Trying to sit there counting those damn birds on the screen, you just go crazy,” said Johnston, an associate professor of marine conservation at Duke. Nor was it accurate. “If we were both…

It’s not often that I render people speechless, but for a few seconds there was a distinct pause on the other end of the line. I thought for a moment that our Zoom connection had frozen, but no; the thought I put forward seemed too staggering to imagine. Some context. This was a conversation about the history of technology, because it turns out that I’m now a dinosaur. The “4” at the beginning of my age, which I’d just become used to, will next year tick over to a “5”, and that means I grew up in the mysterious era of computers unconnected to the internet. To the young student interviewing me, this was a world beyond her ken. She was a true “digital native”, and our call was part…

It has long been established that Britain is one of the most heavily surveilled countries in the world. London alone has more than 600,000 CCTV cameras, averaging just over 67 cameras for every 1,000 people, according to analysis by Comparitech. It’s the only city outside of China to make the top ten. And, slowly, the cameras are getting smarter. At the moment, only a small proportion of cameras are capable of live facial recognition (LFR), but the numbers are growing. In a bid to get ahead of the technology, the information commissioner Elizabeth Denham has fired a warning shot at the industry, in the form of a new official “opinion” from her office, setting out the rules around use of the technology. “The law requires them to demonstrate that their…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Air Affordable Apple M1 ultraportable from £999 from apple.com/uk Apple’s ARM-based M1 chip is blasting away its AMD and Intel x86 opposition with truly extraordinary speeds. Even the low-end model with 8GB of RAM is ludicrously fast. Apple makes no changes to the Air’s design, but it still looks fabulous and now supports both USB 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Add battery life into the teens and its biggest threat comes from the updated M1 MacBook Pro 13in. REVIEW Issue 316, p40 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 13in (M1) Apple has replaced Intel’s Core processors with its own M1 chip and the results are sensational: the MacBook Pro 13in is fast with an incredible battery life. From £1,299 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 316, p44 Samsung Galaxy Book Pro…

@bazzacollins What is an operating system? Relax, this isn’t some Will Self-style navel gazing that ends up with me concluding that they’re actually a digital reflection of Marx’s Gattungswesen; that’s Dick Pountain’s job. But release the grip on your phone for one second and consider the real role of Windows or macOS or Android. I’ve spent the past few years trying to detach myself from OSes, making myself as platform agnostic as possible. I bought a MacBook Pro because it was the hardware that best suited my needs at the time, but I run both macOS and Windows on the laptop. I don’t use Safari or Apple Mail or iCloud backup or any of the other gubbins that come with macOS, because I don’t want to be locked into the…

SCORE PRICE Headset only, £599 (£719 inc VAT) from vive.com The barrier for entry into the world of cutting-edge VR is still painfully high. While the standalone Oculus Quest 2 (see issue 314, p54) brought virtual reality into console-like territory at £299, if you crave the best that VR gaming has to offer then you’ll need to invest much more money (and time) to get things up and running. Just like the original HTC Vive Pro (see issue 287, p48), the Vive Pro 2 is the most expensive way to access VR at the moment – and that’s before you take into consideration the beefy gaming PC you’ll need to enjoy it to the fullest. Nevertheless, the Vive Pro 2 offers a premium VR experience like no other. Temper, temper…

SCORE PRICE £1,134 (£1,361 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk Dyna book announced this update to its X30L series way back in October 2020, meaning it it’s probably the longest we’ve had to wait from press release to final product. Blame Brexit, blame Covid, blame the actor Christopher Timothy – what matters is that’s it here now, and whether it’s worth the wait. On paper, the answer must be yes. Dynabook packs a 13.3in screen into a magnesium alloy chassis that weighs 906g, and don’t imagine it’s flimsy: it’s even backed by a “Reliability Guarantee” that means Dynabook will provide a repair and full refund if it fails within the one-year warranty. It packs in an 11th-generation Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, along with Windows 10 Pro,…

SCORE PRICE £233 (£279 inc VAT) from motorolarugged.com More than a decade has passed since the Motorola Defy stormed onto a nascent smartphone market. The first of its kind, the Defy was a compact, rugged smartphone with the unusual ability to shrug off the bumps and scrapes of everyday life. Despite many plaudits for its rugged design, phones like the Defy haven’t taken off. Sure, we’ve seen the occasional hardy handset from construction firm Cat, and Motorola itself has attempted to revive the idea of a rugged handset with its Force range; but these faded into history as well. With the relaunch of the long-dormant Defy brand, could Motorola finally persuade customers that rugged smartphones are cool again? Hard as nails The first question to ask is whether the Defy…

SCORE PRICE £63 (£75 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324echo This second-generation Echo Show 5 is the smallest smart screen in the Echo range, sitting below the £120 Echo Show 8 (see issue 323, p70). I’ve had the older model on my desk for some time and use it for listening to the radio, viewing the camera feed from my video doorbell, and as an intercom to the rest of the house. Or you might use it as a smart alarm clock, to make video calls (either via Alexa’s own video call system or Skype, as Zoom isn’t yet supported in the UK), or to view pictures you’ve stored in Amazon Photos. While it can display movies and TV shows, the 5.5in screen isn’t really big enough for this. Still, the Show…

Our computing needs just keep getting bigger and bigger – but our C drives don’t. If you’re feeling the squeeze, this month’s Labs is for you. Whether you want to accommodate an ever-growing media library or just make space for those essential backups, it’s easy and affordable to upsize your storage. On the pages that follow we’ll help you pick a path through the dozens of options available. For those looking to upgrade a modern laptop or desktop PC – or build a new one – we test a full range of M.2 SSDs using NVMe technology to deliver top performance. Some models take advantage of the latest PCIe Gen4 bus to unlock phenomenal speeds, while others focus on value, offering a massive 2TB of fast storage for a very…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £70 (£80 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sn5 READ SPEED 2,221MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 1,905MB/SEC While WD’s Black SN850 drive takes the crown for performance, the Blue SN550 focuses on value. A street price of £80 inc VAT for the 1TB model works out to a mere 9p per gigabyte, making this very nearly the cheapest SSD here – only Samsung’s SATA-based 870 QVO undercuts it. When it comes to performance, the WD Blue leaves the QVO in the dust. Its sequential read and write speeds are around four times as fast as any SATA drive, thanks to the far superior NVMe architecture. Real-world performance benefits as well: in the PCMark system drive benchmark, the Blue SN550 scored a creditable 1,668. WD hasn’t skimped on the trimmings. As with the…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £95 (£114 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324kc2 READ SPEED 2,665MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 2,246MB/SEC Kingston’s KC2500 is one of this month’s most affordable SSDs. It’s not as cheap as the £80 WD Blue SN550, but the £34 difference translates to a performance boost – we found the KC2500’s sequential read speeds around 20% faster than the WD Blue’s, while write speeds were up by nearly 30%. Multithreaded performance is lifted by a similar margin, which means the KC2500 should comfortably cope with any sort of workload. The PCMark 10 benchmark suite gave it a system disk score of 2,473 and a data disk score of 3,260 – indicating that it’s not only a stronger all-rounder than the WD Blue, it’s also a much better system drive than the Corsair…

SCORE PRICE 500GB, £66 (£79 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324fire READ SPEED 3,574MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 1,722MB/SEC The FireCuda 520 is marketed as a gaming drive, but in this case that doesn’t mean pretty lights. Rather, Seagate has focused on reliability: the 500GB model we tested is rated for a whopping 850TBW, with the 1TB variant more than doubling that to 1,800TBW. Even better, if the drive fails before its time, the five-year warranty includes three years of protection from Seagate’s data-recovery labs. Success isn’t guaranteed, but they will try to get your data back from a dead drive. Although the FireCuda is compatible with PCI Express Gen4, we found its performance a little lacklustre. Sequential read speeds fell short of what we’ve seen from other Gen4 SSDs, and write speeds were…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £93 (£112 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324su8 READ SPEED 529MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 485MB/SEC Adata’s Ultimate SU800 is officially a TLC SSD, but it features a fast SDRAM buffer and a limited amount of SLC cache to help boost performance. Don’t get too excited, though: the 6Gbits/sec SATA interface ensures that this drive won’t be challenging faster USB or M.2 models in the speed stakes. The SU800 mostly just keeps pace with the more basic Kingston KC600, and lags slightly behind Samsung’s 870 Evo – another TLC drive with an SDRAM cache. In the AS SSD single-threaded random-access test, the SU800 recorded read and write speeds of 31MB/sec and 103MB/sec respectively, while the Samsung managed 44MB/sec and 107MB/sec. Probably for that reason, the SU800 didn’t quite match up in…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £150 (£180 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324san2 READ SPEED 1,861MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 1,842MB/SEC The SanDisk Extreme Pro is one of the first external drives we’ve seen that uses the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 standard. When it’s connected to a compatible socket, it can sustain speeds of up to 20Gbits/sec. The catch might be the “compatible socket” part – even on the newest laptops and desktops, 2x2 ports are still rare. If you don’t have one, you can plug this drive into a regular USB socket for now, and look forward to a big speed boost when you next upgrade your computer. Alternatively, for a desktop system you can buy a PCI Express card that adds the requisite USB connector for around £30. That’s what we did and we…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £102 (£122 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324se7 READ SPEED 980MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 787MB/SEC From its size and shape, we strongly suspect that the Adata SE760 is a standard M.2 SSD wrapped up in a USB enclosure. There’s nothing wrong with that – using commodity parts evidently helps keep the price down, as this is one of the most economical SSDs around, working out to 13p per gigabyte. It doesn’t win any points for style, however. The plain-looking case comes in a choice of two drab colours – black and grey – and its curved design means it wobbles on your desk as you type. We appreciate the inclusion of an activity LED, a convenience that most manufacturers seem to have abandoned; irritatingly, though, it’s stuck on the end,…

SCORE PRICE 500GB, £49 (£59 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam5 READ SPEED 965MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 773MB/SEC There’s something familiar about Samsung’s T7 external SSD. The name echoes that of the T7 Touch (see p84), and design-wise this petite portable is practically its doppelgänger. The difference is that the T7 lacks the fingerprint reader. It still supports 256-bit AES encryption, but you’ll need to unlock it with a password rather than a prod. Other than that, the two designs are distinguished solely by their colouring. While the T7 Touch comes only in sober black and silver varieties, the vanilla T7 offers vibrant blue and red finishes, along with a business-like grey. With identical internals and the same USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface, the T7 achieves much the same benchmark scores as the…

Buying extra storage can feel like an admission of failure. You have let your files grow out of control until your hard disk can’t take any more, and now, rather than pruning them back, you’re simply buying your way out of the problem. Or, perhaps the issue isn’t your file management. Perhaps the real culprit is your past self, who bought a computer that genuinely didn’t have enough storage for your needs. They cheaped out and now you’re having to pick up their slack. Either way, it’s not a great feeling. Don’t blame yourself. If hard disks had kept pace with other PC components then by now a new laptop ought to come with about 4TB of storage. Instead, many of us are still bumbling along with 256GB, and having…

SCORE PRICE £539 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Canon’s DR-M260 is expensive for a USB-only desktop scanner, but it will appeal to businesses with big document scanning demands. It offers a fast 60ppm scan speed, an 80-page ADF and a heavyweight duty cycle of up to 7,500 pages per day – supported by an extensive range of document management utilities. Since there’s no need to connect to a network, installation could hardly be simpler. Just pick a host PC, run the supplied utility to load Canon’s TWAIN drivers and scanning software, then plug the scanner in. It’s impressively quiet in use, and we found Canon’s speed claims were actually a touch on the conservative side: we scanned in a 30-page sheaf of bank statements at 200dpi and found the job completed…

SCORE PRICE £131 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com DrayTek has a knack for putting together feature-rich network solutions at SMB-friendly prices. The VigorSwitch P2100 is a case in point: this ten-port Gigabit Ethernet switch delivers PoE+ services on all copper ports, with full Layer 2 switching, basic Layer 3 routing capabilities and flexible management options. All for £131. The P2100’s various connectors are clearly accessible across the front panel, with eight copper GbE ports each capable of supplying up to 30W of 802.3at PoE+ power. The total power budget of 140W may sound small, but it’s more than you’ll get from most other manufacturers at this price. It’s also less restrictive than you might fear: we tried hooking up four D-Link IP cameras to the switch, along with a Linksys wireless…

Subscribe to today and save on the single issue price. Each issue of PC Pro will be delivered directlyto your device each month. SEE NEXT PAGE FOR SET-UP INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO SUBSCRIBE… … on an iPad or iPhone STEP 1 Return to the PC Pro library STEP 2 Choose your subscription term and tap twice on the 'price' box STEP 3 Choose whether to create an optional PixelMags account STEP 4 Enter your Apple ID password to confirm … Windows8 STEP 1 Return to the PC Pro library STEP 2 Choose a subscription term from the bottom left menu and click/tap the corresponding 'Purchase' button STEP 3 Click buy on the popup bar STEP 4 Enter your Microsoft account details to confirm … on an Android device STEP 1 Open the…

Felix is a lucky boy. Although he’d never built a PC before, he had done his research. YouTube and Reddit are crammed with resources to help the untrained navigate the basics of most everyday tasks and PC building has a vibrant community ready to offer advice. Felix followed the approved four-step PC Pro guidelines of fix a goal, set a budget, check compatibility and find a bargain so, about a week after delivery, he called me: despite his best efforts, the machine refused to work. I also watch YouTube videos as it’s often the only way of seeing kit before purchase: think of a product and you will find an online unboxing, reaction or review video. The problem is that many of these are forms of advertorial, designed to showcase…

Exclusive investigations into technology practices. Email probe@pcpro.co.uk if you have a story When President Biden met President Putin in Geneva in June, he reminded his Russian counterpart of something important: that the US has “significant cyber capability”. With a nudge and a wink, he was warning Russia that enough was enough. This subtle shift in tone is unsurprising. From Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election, to the attack last year on networking firm SolarWinds, which compromised software used by the US and UK governments, the US has long been a target of foreign hacking capabilities. But what can Biden do? And, more importantly, what is he – or any other world leader – allowed to do if attacked? ■ Pointing fingers “If country A flies its aeroplane into the…

During lockdown I bought three gadgets: a phone, a tablet and a guitar pedal. This wasn’t out of boredom but because the old ones had become unusably slow (phone) or noisy (pedal) or packed up altogether (tablet). I wonder how many VLSI chips that means I bought? I’d guess at least 20, what with phone and tablet SoCs, signal processors in the pedal and heaps of memory. None of these were premium items, all costing under £150, which means they likely contain not the latest chips but rather the cheapest, fabricated using older processes. And there you have one cause of the drastic shortage of chips that the whole world is experiencing. Moore’s law is turning around to bite us on the arse: the cost of building fabs for new…

Attacks from within At the time of writing, Kaseya, the patch management and monitoring company, hasn’t managed to get its cloud or on-premises servers back online after an attack last week. The supply chain attack, where you attack the provider of the software but then use the software running in computer networks of others to do the actual attacking, is similar to the SolarWinds attack earlier in the year. But I think that the Kaseya attack is something different and will require a different mindset to solve. Sophos tells us the Kaseya attack took six minutes from launch to infecting and encrypting the end computers – that’s fast and most people wouldn’t be able to log in and shut down a server in that time. To protect a computer system,…

“Buy them only if you’re prepared to lose all your money,” said Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey in May 2021. He was talking about cryptocurrencies, one problem of which is that they “don’t have intrinsic value”. Does that make them a bad investment? And are traditional currencies any better? Sterling was underpinned by gold until Britain sold off half of its reserves between 1999 and 2002, when gold was at its lowest value in 20 years. When governments can make fundamental decisions like that, whether or not the electorate approves, decentralised cryptocurrencies over which no single party has absolute influence start to look appealing. Particularly if they’re set up to mimic a traditional gold-backed means of exchange. Indeed, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto mimicked gold in two key ways:…

Bitcoin (BTC / XBT) The first name most of us think of when someone says “cryptocurrency”. Invented by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, its market capitalisation (at the time of writing) stands just shy of $700 billion. Bitcoins are divided into millibitcoins and satoshis with, respectively, 1/1000th and 1/100,000,000 of a full-value coin. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever be mined, of which 18.6 million are already in circulation. Two new cryptocurrencies Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Gold (BTG) were spun off from Bitcoin in 2017. Bitcoin Gold can’t be mined using the ASICs conventionally used to mine bitcoins, making it accessible to miners using traditional PC hardware. Ether (ETH) The second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, the global stock of Ether is worth $255 billion. Ether is the…

SCORE PRICE £324 (£389 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk The seed of the Chromebook’s success was planted in the fertile ground of education. From an IT point of view, what’s not to like about a laptop that updates itself, can easily last a day without being plugged in and needs such minimal setup? Log in using your Google account and everything you need is on tap, with the hardware merely the portal into a cloudy swirl of applications and data. As we stumble our way into the unpredictable world of hybrid working, those arguments resonate with businesses’ IT teams too. If you can wean workers off full-fat Microsoft Office and towards web-based apps, which typically work better for collaboration anyway, then why not switch? Those who insist on using Word and…

SCORE PRICE £194 (£233 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324hp With the OfficeJet Pro 9022e, HP isn’t just selling you a printer but trying to change the way you think about printing itself. Although you can certainly buy this printer and use it like any other, HP intends it to be a flag bearer for its HP+ Instant Ink subscription service. In some ways, this is a positive thing: signing up gets you six months of free ink and adds an extra year on the warranty, taking it up to three years in total. The downside is you have to contractually tie your new printer into the service and forgo using non-HP cartridges. The 9022e we’ve reviewed here is essentially the same as the OfficeJet Pro 9020, but with all the elements…

SCORE PRICE £229 (£275 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk There’s no hiding from the fact that the HP E27q G4 is boring. From its plain grey stand to a bezel that measures 9mm thick at the top and the sides, it’s far more likely to increase the pulse of IT managers than it is the staff who end up with it on their desk. Unless you’re upgrading them from 24in Full HD screens, in which case the bump up to 27in and a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution will be very welcome indeed. With no USB-C input, this screen wouldn’t be our top choice for hotdesking. It’s better suited for desktop PCs and older laptops - there’s even a D-SUB input to accompany the DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. Whilst the stand looks…

SCORE PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from sony.co.uk The Sony Xperia 1 II (see issue 312, p62) was one of 2020’s most memorable phones, albeit a rather expensive one at £1,099. The Xperia 1 III is even more costly but, spending couple of weeks with Sony’s new flagship, I can state without fear of contradiction that this is one of 2021’s standout phones. And that’s mainly due to the camera. The rear camera array incorporates a trio of 12MP lenses, all at different focal lengths. Sitting at the top is an ultrawide unit, which has an equivalent focal length of 16mm. The main sensor in the centre is optically stabilised and has a focal length of 24mm and an f/1.7 aperture. The most exciting thing about this phone, however, is…

Total value this month £140 Backup4all9Lite Backup4all is an easy-touse and capable backup tool. The Lite edition is aimed at home users, and offers all the core functionality most people will need. You can specify the files and folders you’d like to back up and save them to local, external or network drives. There are options to compress and password protect your archives, and a simple scheduler can automatically run your backup jobs every day, week or month. Restoration is just as simple because your backups are mirrors of the original files and folders, stored in regular ZIP files. Open a folder in Windows Explorer and you’ll be able to recover what you need in seconds. The latest version brings a revamped, more customisable and easier-to-user interface. You can now…

SCORE PRICE £67 (80 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324anker As with most webcams, you don’t get an awful lot with the Anker PowerConf C300. Included in the small box is the camera itself, which is attached to a 1.5m USB-C to USB-C cable and a monitor clip, a couple of stick-on privacy shutters and a USB-C to USB-A adapter. The clip allows you to quickly and securely mount the camera to the top of a monitor or laptop display and it also has a decent range of pivot and tilt, which make setting the right angle very easy. Rubber pads prevent the camera from slipping out of place and there’s a 3/4in thread set into the stand’s base for mounting it on a either a stand or tripod. The camera is…

1 Am I looking for internal or external storage? If you have the option of expanding your internal storage, that’s normally the neatest solution. It’s likely to give you the best performance too, as your new drive will be connected directly to the motherboard. Most desktop computers have space for you to install a second disk to work alongside your existing Windows drive. Alternatively, you might prefer to move your system wholesale onto a new, bigger drive: this keeps things simple, and if you pick a fast SSD then it can yield a noticeable performance boost. It’s not hard to “clone” your current system drive onto a new model (see our feature on p38). With many modern laptops and all-in-one systems, the main SSD is soldered in place, so your…

SCORE PRICE 2TB, £201 (£241 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324mp4 READ SPEED 2,875MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 2,788MB/SEC If you’re looking for a huge M.2 drive, the MP400 has you covered: as well as 1TB and 2TB models, it’s offered in supersized 4TB and 8TB capacities. The 8TB version will set you back a chunky £1,250, but pricing is more reasonable elsewhere: the 1TB model costs £108, equivalent to 11p per gigabyte, and the 2TB and 4TB models work out to 13p/GB. Corsair keeps the price down by using QLC technology, storing four bits of data in each memory cell rather than the three used by most other SSDs. This has an effect on performance: while headline read and write speeds are on par with other PCI Express Gen3 drives, the drive struggles…

SCORE PRICE 500GB, £61 (£73 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam1 READ SPEED 2,604MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 2,318MB/SEC Samsung’s 970 Evo Plus comes in a broad range of sizes, from 250GB up to 2TB. Whichever you choose, the price works out to about 15p/GB – not awful value, as long as the performance is there. In our tests, however, the 970 Evo Plus struggled to distinguish itself. With its PCI Express Gen3 connection, it was never going to compete with the latest top-speed contenders, but we were disappointed to see sequential read and write speeds merely on par with the 1TB Kingston KC2500 – a drive that’s considerably cheaper on a per-gigabyte basis. Indeed, when we fired up the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, the 970 Evo Plus fell behind the Kingston, with a…

SCORE PRICE 2TB, £232 (£278 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sn7 READ SPEED 3,016MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 2,446MB/SEC The WD Black SN750 is a pensioner by SSD standards: it was launched back in 2019, as the firm’s flagship drive. That title has since been taken by the SN850, but the SN750 remains available. It’s certainly a cheaper option. The 2TB model we tested works out at a very fair 15p per gigabyte, while the 1TB model can be had online for just £100 inc VAT, equivalent to 11p/GB. While the Black SN750 is – like all SSDs of this vintage – limited to PCI Express Gen3 connections, it delivers strong sequential speeds. Its read performance is the fastest we’ve seen from any Gen3 drive, while its write speeds are bested only by the…

SCORE PRICE 2TB, £129 (£154 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sam4 READ SPEED 529MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 494MB/SEC All SATA disks look somewhat alike, but the Samsung 870 QVO is almost a carbon copy of the 870 Evo. That’s because it’s effectively the same drive, with one important difference – it uses four-bit QLC chips, in place of the more mainstream TLC tech. It’s a smart option to offer. Packing additional bits into a memory cell normally slows down performance, but that’s moot with SATA drives as the interface bottlenecks the available bandwidth anyway. The AS SSD benchmarks clearly illustrate the point, reporting precisely the same speeds from the 870 QVO and its TLC counterpart. The QVO even managed to pull ahead in the PCMark 10 storage tests – the 2TB model racked…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £92 (£110 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324sea READ SPEED 910MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 958MB/SEC Looks aren’t the most important thing when you’re shopping for storage, but they certainly don’t hurt. The One Touch SSD is, in our view, this month’s most stylish drive, with a smart white trim, slate-grey finish and fabric side panels that are warm and pleasing to the touch. It’s also tiny, measuring just 50 x 70mm, and it weighs a mere 74g. You could happily carry it around in a shirt pocket. When it comes to performance the One Touch SSD punches above its weight, using a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection to achieve very creditable sequential read and write speeds. As our graphs on p92 show, it’s not quite the fastest contender on the…

SCORE PRICE 500GB, £63 (£75 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324se9 READ SPEED 1,869MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 1,756MB/SEC If Adata’s SE760 is a little on the plain side, the SE900G goes to the opposite extreme. Plug it in and the top is immediately illuminated with a glowing rainbow mesh pattern. The colours pulse continuously while the drive is connected, and can’t be customised or disabled – so here’s hoping you like the effect. Another thing distinctive about this drive is its support for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. Plug it into a compatible PC and you’re looking at double the bandwidth of most competing drives: we saw fantastic sequential read and write speeds approaching 2GB/sec. Better yet, the drive manages to maintain best-in-class speeds under demanding random-access workloads. In the multithreaded AS SSD benchmark,…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £98 (£118 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324san1 READ SPEED 957MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 957MB/SEC The SanDisk Extreme looks a lot like the Extreme Pro (see p84), but the two aren’t identical. This one’s considerably smaller, measuring 50 x 96mm, and the orange trim is confined to the corner, rather than running all the way round the outer edge. At 63g, it’s lighter too; in all it’s a much more low-key drive. Nevertheless, the Extreme matches the build quality of its bigger brother, with the same tough plastic and rubber construction, and again an IP55 rating promising resistance to dust and splashes. On the downside, hardware encryption remains absent, and the warranty on this model is shorter than the Pro at three years instead of five. The biggest difference is…

SCORE PRICE 4TB, £68 (£82 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324wd1 READ SPEED 111MB/SEC WRITE SPEED 105MB/SEC The My Passport is Western Digital’s portable mechanical offering. As usual with this type of drive, it’s designed for a bulk storage role, and the company’s marketing doesn’t make any claims about performance at all. That’s probably wise. For sequential operations the My Passport is this month’s slowest drive, delivering a read rate of just 111MB/sec. It evaded last place in the PCMark data disk test, but the margin was tiny: in terms of the overall user experience, this is as slow as it gets. Still, the My Passport has strengths elsewhere. Unlike Toshiba’s Canvio drives it supports 256-bit hardware encryption, and its footprint is a tad smaller. The 19mm depth is on the chunky…

Document flow has been one of many casualties of the pandemic. With employees abruptly shifting from a central location to their own homes, piles of paperwork will undoubtedly have been left in limbo back at the office. Meanwhile, new documents received or generated in the past year may not have been properly filed or shared – and security issues arise too when workers start handling sensitive documents at home. Against this backdrop, the benefits of digitisation have never been clearer. Documents stored in a central digital repository are impossible to mislay and they’re accessible to everyone – an increasingly decisive benefit as working from home becomes a normal part of life. There are valuable space savings to be made too. With many businesses already looking to downsize their offices as…

SCORE PRICE £317 exc VAT from ebuyer.com Businesses seeking an easy way to share scans in the cloud will love Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX1600. Designed to make scanning a simple, one-tap operation, it offers USB 3 and wireless connections, strong 40ppm scan speeds and an affordable price. Ease of use is exceptional from the off. When you first power on the scanner, instructions appear on the 4.3in colour touchscreen to guide you through downloading Fujitsu’s support software and getting connected over USB. And when you then open the ScanSnap Home application, you’ll find it presents a graphical view that mirrors the scanner’s control panel, for a clear and consistent user experience. The software comes set up with six default scan profiles; these can be easily customised to suit, or used as…

SCORE PRICE From £80 per concurrent user/year exc VAT from parallels.com While the darkest days of lockdown are hopefully behind us, many businesses plan to continue supporting work from home. The ad-hoc approach won’t do as a long-term solution, though; virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) services provide a secure and manageable alternative. It’s a market with plenty of mature products to choose from, but Parallels Remote Application Server 18 (RAS) stands out with a wealth of features aimed at improving life for both workers and administrators. The platform takes care of all VDI and application delivery services, with support for FSLogix Profile Containers for easier user configuration, and the whole thing integrates with Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), so it can be managed from a single console. Even better, users can keep…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” So wrote Charles Dickens of the grand announcement of Windows 11, by the team bosses and The Big Cheese Nadella himself. Let’s cover the worst of times first. What went wrong? A lot. The live stream from Microsoft was an unmitigated disaster of stalling video, disconnections and technical issues. The very thing that a demonstration of your world-leading competence in cloud services should not do. “Scale out! Scale up!” has…

Good help, as the cliché goes, is hard to find. That’s always been so, but by March 2020 I thought I had figured out the challenge of finding new software developers for my team. We had a process: an initial phone call followed by a face-to-face interview. After that, our new hires were in the office with us, where getting them up to speed was a well-trodden path that we were practiced at walking. Then everything changed. We were in the middle of recruiting a new developer as the UK went into the first lockdown, so there wasn’t much time to stop and think. In common with all but the biggest companies, the majority of our new hires are sourced via recruiters. Although several recruiting firms we work with furloughed…

The big problem with this war is that it’s invisible. Cybersecurity has rushed to the centre of the stage in 2021, but you have to look for peripheral signs that obliquely point to it. Take my email inbox. A third of the press releases sent to me are rather unsavoury attempts to gain coverage for some security product or service, by claiming that someone else’s disaster could have been averted or better cleaned up if they had bought in to the latest smart security product. I don’t buy into the premise behind these releases. I’m expected to believe that, by stumbling into a hosting relationship with some marginally competent cloud providers, a global business would be protected by the right security product mix, and that it could then delegate any…

Sitting in a beautiful kitchen, the sun shining bright through a large window, David Darling turns his head away from his screen and, for the first time during our conversation, looks a tad uncomfortable. I’ve just reminded him that Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, recently drew a comparison between his family and the endeavours of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. “I wouldn’t compare myself to Steve Jobs,” he said, wincing slightly. “But he was somebody who inspired me; somebody who carried on fighting. He was such a determined and visionary character.” It’s easy to see where Western was coming from as Darling co-founded the video game company Codemasters 35 years ago along with his brother Richard, and father James. While at the helm, Codemasters published a…

Thursday 9 September LABS Workstations Whatever your budget or task, our roundup of the latest workstations will hold the answer. Expect records to be broken. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a free 32GB memory stick emblazoned with the logo of your favourite magazine. You can read PC Pro in print, on an iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p106 for more details. FEATURES How to track anything you own Apple has breathed new life into the tracking world with its Air Tags, but other tracking technologies may serve your needs better. Windows 11: how to prepare for the upgrade Whether you want to try the beta or prepare for the final version, we explain how to move in as slick and safe a way as possible. PCI…

The phone rang in that way it has. “I’ve got a problem, Jon, maybe you can help?” This call was from a friend in the village. He’s a nice chap, but his follow-up statement of “the Wi-Fi doesn’t appear to be working” inspired an immediate sense of sadness and gloom, not helped by the follow-up of “could you pop round and take a look?” I did my very best to sound joyful whilst agreeing a time through gritted teeth. There was an upside, though – hopefully a beer or two at the pub. I trundled round to his house and fired up my Dell rugged laptop, chosen for this task because the shoulder strap and waterproofing meant I wasn’t bothered if it started to spit with rain on the walk…