Computer Shopperの December 2016 の目次

THE AMOUNT OF online data we’re now producing, searching, analysing and storing is terrifying. We send billions of emails, like billions of Facebook posts, spend millions on websites every day. While this data revolution has made everything so much more convenient, and allowed us to be much more connected with people, places and things, it has also come with a heavy price on our privacy. The fact is, for us to really benefit from all these services, or in some cases to be able to carry out basic tasks now unavailable offline, we need to share a lot of our personal data with dozens of organisations. And once that data is shared, we need to trust that all those businesses are taking as much care over the security of our…

HOW MANY MORE massive security breaches can we tolerate? It seems a month can’t go by without reports of another large hack attack. This time, it’s Yahoo! in the spotlight, with news of a breach that has seen 500 million accounts compromised. According to the firm’s chief information security officer, Bob Lord, “the account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt), and encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers”. As well as the scale of the theft, there are two shocking details about this hack. First, Yahoo! reported that the hack took place more than 18 months ago, at the end of 2014. Second, the internet firm said it attributes the attack to a “state-sponsored actor”. In other…

Cambridge sets sights on Quantum 2.0 THE UNIVERSITY OF Cambridge is putting money and minds behind Quantum 2.0, which it says has the potential to create a step change in the field. Plans were announced at the Cambridge Wireless Technology and Engineering Conference 2016 by Professor Neil Stansfield of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. Stansfield said that the efforts will be supported by £350m in government funding for innovative products and research. Stansfield said that quantum computing could allow great leaps in ultra high-speed image processing and underground geology, not to mention the ability to see around corners and build new products that we don’t yet even know that we need. He called for an “open innovation paradigm” with the government and industry participants, saying “the best way to…

£999 • From www.yoyotech.co.uk VERDICT Packed with power and features, the Warbird RS10v2 is the new king of sub-£1,000 systems STOP US IF you’ve heard this one before: an overclocked Intel Core i5-6600K walks into an NZXT S340 case and orders 8GB of RAM with a 250GB SK Hynix SSD on the side. Yes, Yoyotech’s Warbird RS10v2 has more than a few parts in common with the Best Buy-winning Chillblast Fusion Everest (Shopper 344). Now that the latter has jumped to £1,000, they even cost pretty much the same, and while the RS10v2 has a few things to differentiate it – mainly the GTX 1060 GPU, the closed-loop CPU watercooler and the all-black case – they do also serve to make it look a little like the Fusion Everest’s evil…

£900 • From www.currys.co.uk VERDICT It’s wonderfully flexible, but the new HP Envy x360 falls short in portability and display quality LARGER-SCREENED CONVERTIBLES have always had a tougher time than their smaller counterparts, due to higher costs and portability sacrifices. This was the case with last year’s HP Envy x360: its performance was great but everything else was lacklustre. Now there’s a new model, but at first glance it doesn’t seem as if much has changed. The aluminium chassis is matt rather than brushed, and the power button and volume rocker have moved, but at 2.2kg it’s still a pretty monstrous convertible. It is, however, reassuringly rugged, and barely flexes at all when put under pressure. The shiny metal hinge also feels reasonably sturdy, which is crucial when the laptop…

£150 • From www.argos.co.uk VERDICT Perfect for Netflix, the Acer Iconia Tab 10 is a decent budget tablet buy WITH FEWER CONVENTIONAL tablets hitting our shelves this year (the focus seemingly shifting to 2-in-1 hybrids), there’s less choice than ever for consumers who only want a slate and nothing else. Acer hasn’t yet forgotten that Android tablets are still a thing, however, and despite the doldrums the market finds itself in, the company keeps releasing new products. Its latest is the Iconia Tab 10, first introduced last year, which gets a significant upgrade for 2016. The tablet’s design has been completely overhauled. It’s no longer the basic featureless tablet of 2015, now coming with eye-catching bronze detailing and a textured back for extra grip. It really looks the part and,…

£350 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT One of the most versatile multiroom speakers ever made, the SC-All7CD is a must-buy for anyone who still prefers CDs over MP3s WITH MORE AND more people digitising their music collections, the number of options for those still hanging on to their CD racks is dwindling. Fortunately, Panasonic still has its eye on the optical media crowd: its SC-All7CD speaker not only lets you play discs, it can also stream them to other compatible Panasonic multiroom speakers (or any speaker that supports Qualcomm’s AllPlay standard). That’s not its only party trick, either. The SC-All7CD can rip CDs to its 4GB internal storage in Wav or 320Kbit/s MP3 formats, allowing you to store up to five album presets to play or stream whenever you like. It’s…

£250 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT You need a 4K HDR TV to get the best out of it, but the Xbox One S and its 4K Blu-ray player signal the start of great things for Xbox fans AS THE SUFFIX implies, the Xbox One S is a slimline version of the current Xbox One. An astonishing 40% smaller overall, the Xbox One S is positively tiny compared to its hulking forebear, and it’s a gorgeous bit of modern console design too, rectifying many of the issues we had with the original console. The physical power button, for instance, is no longer touch-sensitive, and there’s now a USB port on the front of the console rather than the side, making it easier to plug in your controller when you want to…

£88 • From www.cclonline.com VERDICT It will keep your CPU suitably chilly, but the MasterLiquid Pro 240 has more than a couple of rough edges COOLER MASTER RECENTLY launched a couple of new closed-loop, all-in-one (AIO) liquid CPU coolers: the dual-fan MasterLiquid Pro 240 and the single-fan MasterLiquid Pro 120. We were sent the larger model to try out, so set to work installing it in our test PC. First impressions were good: with the two 120mm fans attached to the radiator, it’s only 52mm thick, which meant we had no issue slipping the assembled unit into the top of our PC case, even with high-profile RAM sticks in the way. The box includes almost everything you need, including a tube of thermal paste and a universal mount that permits…

Backing up Windows 10 Q I have about 100GB of data on my Windows 10 PC, which needs regular backup, but I’m confused about the options available to me. I have a 1TB USB3 external drive and a Synology NAS. I’m ruling out cloud backups as I suspect they’d be too slow and expensive. My options appear to be Windows Backup, Windows File History or Synology’s Cloud Station Backup. I don’t understand the difference between the two Windows options – I wonder about the ‘Windows 7’ label applied to Windows Backup – but they have the attraction of being native to Windows, and fast if writing to the external drive. Backing up to the NAS will be slower whichever app I’m using, but given that anything I back up to…

Clive Webster has been tinkering with computers ever since Windows 98 forced him to manually install his drivers clive@computershopper.co.uk THE LATEST BIG update for Windows 10 is out, and while the Anniversary Update might bring a slew of new features (see Shopper 345), there are also a few glitches and gremlins that might need sorting out. The update also doesn’t solve some of Microsoft’s more questionable and irritating design decisions. Thankfully Shopper is here to show you how to fix the bugs, minimise future disruptions and tweak Windows 10 to behave as you want it to. Thanks for the update, Microsoft, but we’ll still do things our way! WHILE THE ANNIVERSARY Update has been available since 2nd August, some of us still haven’t received it. To check, search for winver…

letters@computershopper.co.uk Star letter Hub of the problem @ I read your article regarding the new BT Smart Hub (Reviews, Shopper 344) with interest, especially the part stating, “If you renew or take out a new Infinity contract, you get the router for free”. While I have always been happy with my existing BT Home Hub 5 router, my signal does drop out on several occasions as it isn’t wired. I was considering moving from BT as my quarterly bill is becoming expensive, but your article prompted me to renew my Infinity 2 contract after first checking with BT customer services that the offer for a ‘free’ BT Smart Hub was correct. Reassured, I renewed my contract online and was shown various offers and discounts on my phone line and Infinity…

Mel Croucher RAVES What are friends for? If they’re on Facebook, they’re for selling you stuff and scamming you. That’s if they haven’t already popped their clogs I CONFESS TO a couple of thousand friends in my Facebook social network. Many of these friends are other writers, musicians, artists and video-game creators, whose mission in life is to flog me a copy of their latest title, even though they’ve never met me. That seems fair, seeing as my mission in life is to flog them a copy of my latest title, even though I’ve never met them. Then there are those poor souls who have asked to become my Facebook friend for reasons of self-aggrandisement by association, or because they are strangely attracted to me. But nowhere near as many…

US Edward Snowden is in the bad books again An official US government report has unsurprisingly found that the whistleblowing done by ex-NSA man Edward Snowden did more harm than good. “Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs affecting individual privacy interests. They instead pertain to military, defence and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries,” said the US House Intelligence Committee report. Europe EU stamps on plans to limit data-roaming caps EU president Jean-Claude Juncker has ordered that proposals to limit free data roaming in the EU to 90 days a year and a maximum 30 consecutive days be withdrawn immediately. Juncker found that the proposals included a number of points that did…

DISCONTINUED NOW, BUT not forgotten, some people are still using the Nokia 6310, and we are willing to bet that there are a few executive saloon cars that were new at around the turn of the millennium that still have a dashboard hands-free holder for one. The 6310 was the businessman’s phone. All gold flashes and graphite colouring, it looked the business and performed like a winner. The myriad thrilling features included, but were not limited to: voice dialling and recording; date and time support; four – that’s right, count them, four! – games; a whopping two pre-downloaded applications, World Clock and Converter; Bluetooth; and up to six hours of talktime. Then again, you did get all this in a tiny package weighing just 111g. Looking back on its specifications…

£2,300 • From www.eclipsecomputers.com VERDICT Powerful but outpaced by cheaper systems, the Nebula OC’s outstanding external hardware saves the day YOU WOULD EXPECT that paying £2,300 for a single-GPU PC would at least mean that you’re receiving top-of-the-line hardware; luckily, with Eclipse’s Nebula OC series, that’s exactly what you get. Our high-spec review model came equipped with a watercooled Intel Core i7-6700K processor, overclocked to 4GHz, as well as Asus’s superb ROG Strix GTX 1080 OC graphics card (Shopper 344). While that does mean that it’s pushing the upper limits of performance, at least using mainstream parts, the Nebula OC isn’t quite the fastest PC we’ve seen recently. In our application benchmarks, for instance, it scored 151 for image editing, 171 for video editing and encoding, 188 for multitasking and…

£170 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Its second screen is more useful than Samsung’s efforts, but the rest of the LG X Screen just doesn’t measure up INSTEAD OF SIMPLY creating a cheaper version of its flagship G5, LG is taking that phone’s key features and sharing them out across different handsets. One such device is the LG X Screen, which takes the G5’s always-on display and crams it into a second screen that sits above the X Screen’s main display. It’s a similar idea to Samsung’s S7 Edge forerunner, the Galaxy Note Edge, but LG’s take on the second screen is arguably a lot more practical than Samsung’s sloping edge display. On the X Screen, the second display measures only 1.7in and it has a tiny resolution of 80x250 pixels,…

£60 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The new Kindle for 2016 is a great entry-level eReader and comes packed with extra features IF YOU THOUGHT £110 was a lot to spend on a Kindle Paperwhite, then the prospect of forking out £170 for a Kindle Voyage or £270 for a Kindle Oasis probably isn’t very appealing. After all, why would anyone spend so much when the basic £60 Kindle does essentially the same thing? Since 2014 the answer has been simple: Amazon’s old Kindle was made of cheap, nasty plastic that really made it feel like a cut-price budget device. Now, Amazon is looking to change that with a new entry-level eReader for 2016. It’s still made out of rather cheap plastic, but its thinner, lighter chassis does at least go…

£197 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT It has lots of ports and comes with a dedicated subwoofer, but the HW-K450’s sound quality may not suit all music tastes AS ONE OF Samsung’s lower-end soundbar and subwoofer combos for 2016, the HW-K450 keeps things simple. Its plain wire mesh exterior doesn’t have any fancy embellishments or distinguishing features, but at least its small, compact design means it won’t distract from your TV. Measuring 908mm long, this soundbar is best suited to TVs that are at least 42in in size – any smaller and the soundbar will begin to dwarf the length of your set. Still, when it stands only 53mm high, it’s pretty low profile, so it should fit quite happily underneath most TVs, and it certainly shouldn’t obscure the IR receiver…

£215 • From www.ballicom.co.uk VERDICT If you’ve ever had separation anxiety for an inkjet MFP, HP’s pint-sized OfficeJet 250 is for you WE’RE ALL USED to computing on the move, but if we want to print, scan or copy a document it’s usually time to head home. Where that’s really not an option, HP’s OfficeJet 250 provides a solution: it’s a tiny, portable, colour inkjet MFP. It’s perfectly specified for mobile work: there’s a colour touchscreen, support for wireless and Bluetooth networking, and a Lithium-ion battery as standard. HP has done a fine job with this MFP’s design. It’s fashioned from the usual matt black plastic, but it’s thick stuff that ought to withstand a few knocks. A lid keeps dust out of the paper feeds and, when open, creates…

£60 • From www.paintshoppro.com VERDICT PaintShop Pro X9 is an unambitious update that fails to address the software’s disjointed, underpowered Raw support HOW DO YOU keep an image editor fresh, relevant and appealing after 26 years of development? If you know the answer, perhaps you could let Corel know. PaintShop Pro X9 arrives exactly a year after the release of X8, and very little has changed. The New From Template feature provides various templates for collages, greetings and business cards, brochures and social media profile pictures. This content is downloaded as required, but only a small proportion of these templates are free, with others priced at £1.49 to £4.99 each. These templates are then populated with your own photos, but the process of dropping them below specific layer masks in…

When people describe the internet as a great place for sharing, they usually mean things they have chosen to divulge. Sadly, we’re all sharing far too much personal information, some of it without our say so. The problem is that you’re just too valuable for companies to let go. Knowing what you like, which shops you visit and where you live is massively attractive to advertisers, who want to show you lots of targeted ads. Even if you don’t log into a service, ad networks can build up a profile of you based on your IP address and by dropping cookies. It doesn’t have to be this way. Here we show you how your data is leaked, where all of the big companies store that information and what you can…

CERTIFICATION The use of deep learning algorithms means autonomous car software is continually evolving, making it hard to certify as safe for road use. It also raises question as to whether safety certifications should come from automotive or technology bodies. The whole situation is basically a certification conundrum. Serkan Arslan, director of Nvidia’s automotive division, suggests that driverless car software could take a driving test like us humans, only with a few adjustments to take into account that it’s a computer rather than a hormone-driven teenager behind the wheel. LEGISLATION The problem with self-driving cars is that some people really like to drive, while others would be happy to cede control to a computer. Car makers are likely to serve both sets of people, but that means roads with a…

Photographer, musician, sound engineer, designer and video producer Ben Pitt guides you through a multimedia project ben@computershopper.co.uk ANY VIDEO-EDITING software will let you overlay one clip across another, but it’s a much bigger challenge to combine them so they appear as a single clip. Superimposing two photos in an image editor is hard enough, and doing it for moving images adds another layer of complexity. The results justify the effort, though. You can use green-screen effects to superimpose a caped crusader over some aerial footage shot with a drone camera, create a split screen to show someone arguing with himself, or draw masks to drop any actor or prop into any location. With careful planning and execution – and the right software – you can achieve spectacular results. JUMP CUTS…

Having your PC’s behaviour change with no warning isn’t Microsoft’s most prudent design choice, especially when that behaviour goes from ‘all’s fine’ to ‘something’s broken’. If you use Windows 10 Professional, you can take full control over how updates are delivered and installed. Search for Group Policy Editor, and open this tool’s Computer Configuration section. Then navigate to Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Update. Set your update policy via the ‘Configure automatic updating’ drop-down menu; option 3 (Auto download and notify for install) is probably the most useful. Windows 10 Professional costs £100 to upgrade to via the Store, but perhaps that isn’t too steep given that Microsoft intends for us to use Windows 10 for evermore. There are hacks to prevent automatic updates on Windows 10 Home, but they…

AS I WRITE this, the lovely long summer nights are fading away. By the time you read it, we’ll be back with darkness at 5pm or earlier. Time for the focus to move away from outdoor evening pursuits and shift towards playing with electronics and messing with music software. I’m just back from the South of France, where the weather has been sublime. It’s also been pretty good at home while we’ve been away and, judging by the state of the garden, there’s been very little rain. In fact, were it not for my ‘home brew’ irrigation system, many of my favourite plants would be toast. Over a long period I’ve used a series of devices from DIY and gardening stores, and they’ve all been pretty poor. They’re batterypowered boxes…

UK security chief proposes a Great British Firewall SAY WHAT? CIARAN MARTIN, CHIEF executive of the recently established UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is coming in like a new broom, promising to try to create a security blanket under which we can all feel safe and sound. Martin (right) took the opportunity to lay out his plans at a cybersecurity session called the Billington Summit in Washington dc: One suggestion includes a national internet filter to prevent malicious content from entering our shores. Martin is also looking for more cooperation between the government, industry and law enforcement agencies around cyberattacks and cyberdefence, both locally and internationally. “This really matters for the UK. The government I work for is charged with helping to protect a highly digitalised economy, which by…

£599 • From www.apple.com/uk VERDICT Only a marginal improvement over the iPhone 6s, but the iPhone 7 is still the best iPhone you can buy today YES, IT’S TRUE: the iPhone 7 has killed the 3.5mm headphone jack. Sort of. Apple has certainly made a lot of fuss about its wireless AirPods and Lightning-powered EarPods headphones, but the truth of the matter is that you can still use your old 3.5mm headphones as long as you don’t mind using the bundled 3.5mm-to-Lightning adaptor. It’s not exactly the most elegant solution for a company that’s often prided itself on simplicity and ease of use, but at least it means you don’t have to fork out even more money just to carry on listening to your favourite tunes. For the iPhone 7…

£170 • From www.pcworld.co.uk VERDICT Acer’s MacBook Air-inspired Chromebook is an exquisitely made Chrome OS laptop CHROMEBOOKS ARE TYPICALLY small and rather basic laptops that sacrifice looks for affordability, but Acer’s new Chromebook 14 looks to shake up that trend. In particular, its wedged shape, gold or silver aluminium chassis, black plastic hinge at the rear and sunken keyboard are all reminiscent of Apple’s MacBook Air; only the brushed finish on the lid and the Acer logo give the game away. Still, the whole thing feels reassuringly expensive and barely flexes if you try to twist and bend it. It’s as chunky as a MacBook at 17mm deep, yet isn’t quite as light, weighing 1.7kg. For £170 you get a 14in, 1,366x768-resolution display, an Intel Celeron processor and 2GB of…

£550 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT This super-sized version of the Huawei P9 has its charms, but the higher price leaves it floundering THE HUAWEI P9 (Shopper 342) impressed us with its Leica-endorsed cameras and relatively affordable price point; now, Huawei has super-sized it to create the 5.5in P9 Plus. It shares the same cameras and Kirin 955 hardware as its smaller 5.2in stablemate, but the AMOLED screen resolution hasn’t changed from 1,920x1,080. It also comes with 64GB of storage, rather than 32GB, and has a larger 3,400mAh battery. Otherwise, you’re more or less looking at the same handset. Nonetheless, these few additions have sent the price soaring. At £550 SIM-free or around £35 per month on contract, the P9 Plus is substantially more expensive than the regular P9, as well…

£905 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT It’s technically advanced, but the Sony a6300’s controls aren’t in line with the high price THE A6300 IS Sony’s latest compact system camera (CSC), and an update to the a6000 (Shopper 319). That was one of 2014’s best cameras, so the a6300 has big boots to fill. There are quite a few similarities. They both use a 24-megapixel APS-C sensor – the same size that’s found in consumer SLRs – and they’re virtually identical to look at, with a slim, rangefinder-style design. There’s just enough room for an electronic viewfinder, flash hotshoe, integrated flash, mode dial and command dial along the top plate. Power, shutter-release and a custom button are mounted on top of the handgrip, which is big enough for a secure fit in…

£40 • From www.nowtv.com VERDICT Sky is on to a winner with the upgraded Smart Box – and the content bundles aren’t bad, either SKY’S NOW TV streaming service has been undergoing some big changes of late. Service-wise, there’s a new Now TV Combo package, which encompasses TV, phone and broadband in one, while the Now TV box itself has been replaced by a new model equipped with a Freeview HD tuner, named the Now TV Smart Box. This small, slender device is a bit larger than the previous Now TV Box, but it’s still very understated, measuring 165mm deep and wide and 21mm in height. Around the back, it’s pretty sparse in terms of ports, but you still get the essentials: an aerial socket, Ethernet (as an alternative to…

£70 • From www.lambda-tek.com VERDICT Mechanical disks rule for capacity, but this well-priced external SSD is a great performer WHILE AN INTERNAL SSD is a necessary upgrade for most PCs, external models have felt extravagant. With the SV620, ADATA is challenging that theory with a low-cost portable external SSD sporting a USB3 connection. For £70 you get the 240GB model on test here (the 480GB model costs £120), bringing the price per gigabyte down to just 29p. ADATA has saved a little on build quality, opting for a simple plastic case. It looks neat, although there’s a little flex in the plastic if you squeeze it. The SSD inside feels tough, so should survive being carried around every day. It’s also small, at 115x78x11.5mm – that’s little bigger than an…

Not all comments welcome Q I’m working on a Word document with several colleagues, all of whom have included a number of different comments. I want to be able to show the comments from the people who are officially on my team, but not those of my colleagues who have just looked it over as a favour. Is there a way to turn off comments from some reviewers? I’m using Word 2010. Graham Parker A Yes, you can do this from the Review tab of the Office Ribbon. In the Tracking region of the Review tab, click Show Markup. In the options that appear, choose Reviewers, then untick All Reviewers. You can now select only the reviewers you want to have visible. Note that anyone editing the document will still…