PC Proの December 2019 の目次

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He takes 20mg of Lisinopril per diem to control his osmotic pressure. Regular readers might have been surprised when I devoted my previous two columns to AI, a topic about which I’ve often expressed scepticism. There’s no reason to be, as it’s quite possible to be impressed by the latest advances in AI hardware and software while remaining a sceptic about the field’s more hubristic claims. And a book that reinforces my scepticism has arrived at precisely the right time: The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio. He’s a Portuguese-American professor of neuroscience who made his name researching the neurology of the emotions and the critical role they play in high-level cognition (contrary to current orthodoxy). Damasio also has a interest…

TECHNOLOGY EXCELLENCE AWARDS BEST PC BRAND PC Specialist BEST LAPTOP BRAND Apple BEST TABLET BRAND Apple, Microsoft BEST NAS BRAND Synology BEST ROUTER BRAND AVM Fritz!Box, DrayTek, Ubiquiti BEST MONITOR BRAND Asus, Iiyama BEST PRINTER BRAND Brother BEST ONLINE RETAILER Scan BEST WEB HOST Zen Internet BEST CLOUD STORAGE Amazon Drive, Google Drive BEST MOBILE DATA PROVIDER Giffgaff BEST PHONE BRAND OnePlus BEST BROADBAND ISP Zen Internet PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR DESKTOP PC OF THE YEAR Chillblast Fusion Akula RTX 2060 Super Gaming PC TABLET OF THE YEAR Microsoft Surface Go PHONE OF THE YEAR Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ SOFTWARE OF THE YEAR Serif Affinity Publisher LAPTOP OF THE YEAR Razer Blade 15 Mercury White BUSINESS LAPTOP OF THE YEAR Lenovo ThinkPad T490s WORKSTATION OF THE YEAR Scan 3XS WA4000…

Barry Collins exposes the misleading information pumped out by some of the biggest broadband comparison sites Fed up with your broadband provider? Like millions of others, you might well decide enough is enough, punch your postcode into a broadband comparison site and see what the others have to offer. After all, Ofcom-approved sites such as broadbandcompared.co.uk “compare the UK’s best broadband”, or broadbandchoices.co.uk lets you “find the best deal possible”. Except, as our investigation will show, that’s often not the case. For starters, many of these sites fail to list the very best broadband providers out there, including the one you’ve voted as the best broadband provider for the past 15 years. The information they provide is often woefully inaccurate and misleading. And can you really trust such sites to…

NAS appliances tend to store a lot of irreplaceable personal data–and I have a sneaky suspicion that your NAS itself isn’t backed up, because there’s no really straightforward and affordable way for a consumer to back up terabytes of data. So what happens if your NAS goes poof? Your data should still be safely on the drives; the problem is getting at it. If you move the hard disks to a different NAS, it will probably just say “unrecognised RAID array” and insist on reformatting the drives before using them. Your safest recourse is to get your NAS professionally repaired–take the drives out first to make sure they’re not wiped by an overenthusiastic technician–or buy another appliance of the exact same make and model and slot them in. If you…

PRICE £1,570 (£1,884 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Lenovo is in new laptop mode at the moment, refreshing its X1 Carbon along with the X1 Yoga (opposite) and the ThinkPad T390S (see issue 301, p46). ThinkPad purists will surely be most excited by this, its flagship laptop. Quite aside from being a flag of pride among ThinkPad aficionados – right down to the black-on-black “X1 Carbon” imprint beneath the screen – this is surely the best ThinkPad you can buy. I should qualify the word “best”, however. It isn’t the fastest: despite having the same quad-core Intel Core i7-8565U processor as the ThinkPad T390S, its tighter chassis creates cooling challenges that mean the X1 Carbon can’t sustain the super-high boost speeds of its brother. Also note it uses slower LPDDR3 memory,…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com To grossly simplify the story of the past two years, AMD has been hugely successful in high-end desktop systems and low-end laptops. What it’s failed to do is wrench away Intel’s dominance of the sleek ultraportable market, with all the top-tier manufacturers – from Apple to Dell to Lenovo – playing it safe with Intel inside. While the Envy is HP’s mid-range offering, this laptop is premium in everything but price. Intel should be worried. The first sign of the Envy’s premium nature is the anodised aluminium chassis; it’s no exaggeration to say this would be a great choice for a £2,000 laptop, never mind one costing £800. It’s a solid design with no indication of weakness, right down to the smooth hinges…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we would recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p18. 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…

PRICE £183 (£219 inc VAT) from store.google.com How do you improve on the charming 7in Google Home Hub (see issue 292, p75)? Google’s answer is threefold: welcome it into the Nest family with a rebrand, give it a camera and upgrade the screen to 10in with a 1,280 x 800 resolution. Oh, and add £80 to the price. The Nest Hub Max is just as attractive as its sibling. The screen looks like 2015’s idea of a tablet, with half-inch bezels all the way around, but I like its chunky charms. The tablet rests on a fabric-covered speaker with a larger footprint than its predecessor, available in “chalk” or “charcoal” colours. The benefits of a larger screen are obvious: everything is easier to see or touch. Don’t expect super-sharp images, but…

We award each PC an overall rating from one to five, calculated by weighing up its performance, features, upgradeability, power draw and value for money. We also consider the warranty, service, and support. To test performance, we run our own benchmark suite, which features demanding image-editing and video-processing tasks followed by a multitasking benchmark that involves transcoding MPEG-4 video while playing a 4K video file. These tests provide a score for each system, presenting performance relative to a Core i5-4670K reference system. A score of 150 is, therefore, 50% faster than that baseline PC. We also test each system’s general productivity performance using UL’s PCMark 10 benchmark suite, gaming performance using Unigine’s Superposition benchmark at the 720p Low preset, and how long it takes to boot from cold to the…

PRICE £374 (£449 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk While Dell has an undeniable presence in the gaming, workstation and even server markets, its bread and butter is exactly the kind of no-frills desktop machine that makes up the bulk of this month’s Labs. The company’s Inspiron family is designed to offer everything a home or small office user could need – at an affordable price. Case in point: the Inspiron 3670 on test includes an Intel Coffee Lake Core i3-9100 processor, released only in April 2019 and boasting a 3.6GHz base clock that boosts to 4.2GHz when required. Although it’s part of Intel’s entry-level i3 CPU family, it’s a powerful chip – the only real loss is Hyper-Threading, which would allow it to run eight simultaneous threads on its four physical cores.…

PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from palicomp.co.uk As a non-Core Intel CPU, you’d expect the Palicomp Graphite’s Pentium Gold processor to be missing a little something – and you would be right. The chip has no Turbo Boost functionality, meaning that its 3.7GHz base frequency is also its maximum. The processor is also a dual-core design, although Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology allows it to run four simultaneous threads. The CPU isn’t the only cost-reduction choice Palicomp has made here. As with the considerably more expensive Dell Inspiron, there’s only a mechanical hard drive for storage, and while the power supply claims to be a 500W model it lacks any PCI Express connectors for a future add-in graphics card. The case is functional; we welcome the inclusion of thumbscrews to remove the…

PRICE £549 (£659 inc VAT) from quietpc.com If you’re going to break the budget, you’re going to need a reason. In the case of the PC Specialist Vortex (see p91), that reason is impressive gaming performance; for the Quiet PC Nofan, it’s the promise of wholly passive cooling. The Nofan A830a hasn’t a single moving part in operation. The processor is cooled using the Nofan heatsink from which the system takes its name; the power supply, meanwhile, has its own passive heatsink inside. Coupled with solid-state storage, it’s a system that makes absolutely no noise whether it’s switched on or switched off. Sadly, silence doesn’t come cheap. At £659, the Nofan is the most expensive system in the group – and that expense has gone wholly into the passive cooling…

Gareth Halfacree is the author of The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide It’s easy to get distracted by the shiny, high-end machines you find between the covers of PC Pro. From ultra-powerful workstations to high-end gaming rigs with glass windows and glowing RGB LED lighting, they are eye-catching – but they’re not the bulk of the PC market by any means. That honour goes to the humble entry-level desktop. Not the most powerful, rarely the prettiest, entry-level and mid-range desktops make up the bulk of the non-portable PC market. You’ll see them everywhere, from schools and offices to hospitals and homes. When Little Jimmy tells his parents that he desperately needs a glowing monstrosity with Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics to do his homework, a basic black box is…

PRICE Perpetual: 1-500 systems, £10 each exc VAT from netsupportmanger.com Businesses looking for the best on-premises remote support solution money can buy will love NetSupport Manager (NSM). Now entering its third decade, NSM has long been a favourite thanks to its remarkable range of support features and its convenient control software, which can be hosted on a Windows or Mac desktop of your choice. It’s also great for supporting remote offices: NetSupport’s free Gateway component easily links sites together, with four encryption options to choose from including 256-bit AES. And within the local network, NetSupport’s PIN connect system makes it effortless to get connected: the technician and user simply enter the same unique PIN to create an instant connection. If you’re concerned about security, you can rest easy. NSM offers…

PRICE £387 exc VAT from netxl.com If your business is ready to make the jump to high-performance 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), DrayTek’s latest switches could be the perfect choice. The VigorSwitch P2280x and G2280x are the company’s first 10GbE-enabled models, and they deliver an impressive range of features at a price so low it will have the competition scratching their heads. The focus isn’t just on speed, mind you, but also on power. Alongside their four 10GbE SFP+ fibre ports, both models offer two dozen regular Gigabit ports, and the P2280x supports Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) on all 24 of them. Its huge 400W total power budget is more than you’ll get from many more expensive switches, making it a great choice for powering the latest PoE+ IP phones, IP cameras and high-performance…

When determining whether multi-cloud is right for your particular needs, it’s important to look beyond the immediate budgetary benefits. Moving to multi-cloud can be pitched to the finance director as a cost-saving measure, but at the same time it’s crucial to factor in the integration challenges it brings. The fact is that building the necessary (and necessarily complex) integrations between multiple clouds takes time and costs money – and if done badly it will likely come back to bite your reputation firmly where it hurts. While you can get the most competitive pricing by playing vendor against vendor, that may be a false economy if it makes your integration harder; it could even make you less secure, if deployment takes you outside of your comfort zone. Our advice then is…

It’s not good for a small business to frustrate a customer. Our shop is a place to get help and advice, but one question that we’re always asked is tricky to answer: “When will it be fixed?”. We’re always honest, but sometimes must point out that until we know what the problem is, any estimate will be as accurate as Donald Trump’s autobiography. What experience consistently proves is the destructive nature of making snap promises. Saying that it’ll take about 15 minutes to install new security software is a guarantee that a technical car smash is about to occur. Usually it’s Windows updates on startup or discovering the viral infections are approaching triple figures, but the gold standard is the BSOD after AV removal that renders the machine unbootable. This…

WHETHER YOU LOVE or despise Apple, you have to admit this: its products just work. As Tim Cook said prior to the launch of the iPhone 11 Pro (see p52): “At Apple, we put the customer at the centre of everything that we do… Through the deep integration of hardware, software and services, these products empower people to do incredible things every day.” And bingo, there’s the key phrase: “deep integration of hardware, software and services”. It’s a closed system. It works because no one else can pollute the water. And while I’ve always been a PC guy rather than an Apple guy, there are times when I wish I’d never heard the name Microsoft. In particular, I wouldn’t have to cross my fingers every time I pressed Print. We…

1 Facebook suspends thousands of apps Facebook has been forced to suspend “tens of thousands” of apps amid data sharing issues uncovered in the investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Facebook said the apps came from 400 developers and that it had outright banned apps that shared data inappropriately. Thousands more face further investigation. 2 Windows update wrecks Wi-Fi Windows users faced yet more update misery when version 1903 disrupted Wi-Fi access for customers using Intel and Broadcom Wi-Fi adapters. “If these devices are updated to Windows 10, version 1903, they will no longer be able to use any Wi-Fi connections,” Microsoft said, adding that disabling and re-enabling the adapters may fix the issue. 3 LastPass bug leaves security codes exposed Password management firm LastPass was forced to patch its system after a…

What3words What3words breaks the planet down into 57 trillion 3 x 3m squares, assigning each square its own three-word identifier. It offers a much more precise location than postcodes and works at sea and in the wilderness, which have no address other than longitude and latitude references. The system makes locating people more user-friendly with words rather than coordinates, has clear uses in the geolocation space and has attracted significant venture capital funding. From an end user point of view, it’s just as accurate as AML or other GPS-based services as it relies on the same location data, which it puts into its grid system. “The what3words app makes use of operating system functions to obtain the device’s location in GPS coordinates and its algorithm turns this into the three…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She’s currently searching for cheap flights to Japan and Korea. Ooh, and maybe Singapore. @njkobie Speeding around Berlin’s Tiergarten on a Lime e-scooter, I had a realisation: this was my own version of the Segway, those embarrassing city transport devices that only ever seem to be used by inexperienced travellers, boredlooking security guards in airports and–I kid you not, this really happened–Auschwitz tours. My husband and I are on a three-week Interrailing tour around Europe and the experience has been revelatory. Not only have I learned the limits of my feet, thanks to the stairs and cobbled streets that make up every single European Old Town, but my idea that the future is unequally distributed has been reconfirmed. Admittedly, that’s not very insightful,…

The selection of old computer articles celebrating PC Pro’s 25th anniversary (see issue 300) showed how far we have come. While the old computers got the job done, just not as fast as our newer ones, your predictions of future technology suggest linear development coupled with new technologies. My own computing history dates back to 1983, when I was programming COBOL at college using mainframes and punched cards. It seems ancient these days but, back then, we did have Computer Electronic Mail (email). The following year we were shown the original Apple Macintosh and its amazing graphical user interface. It was demonstrated by an Apple employee, over from America, who spoke about Steve Jobs like he knew him personally. When I was recently given a MacBook for work, the IT guy…

1 DON’T PAY THE STICKER PRICE In the same way you should never pay the “sticker price” for a car, neither should you do so for a broadband connection. Treat the prices they publish–especially on the premium tariffs–as mere guides. Ring the company and talk to a salesperson. Point them towards cheaper prices from rival providers. Most will knock at least 10% off that sticker price. 2 DON’T GET DRAGGED UPWARDS Providers will do everything they can to persuade you onto their more expensive tariffs, even if they will make little or no difference to your broadband experience. Would anyone notice the real-world difference between Virgin’s 200Mbits/sec and 350Mbits/sec tariffs, for example? It’s highly unlikely, but one is £60 a year more expensive than the other. Pay for what you…

If you don’t like the idea of files disappearing into quarantine without your knowledge, you can disable Windows Defender’s “routine remediation” feature: this doesn’t stop it from detecting potentially dodgy files, but obliges it to ask you what to do with them, rather than taking the decision itself. You can make the change by editing a single Group Policy setting, as detailed at pcpro.link/302defender. If you’re running Windows 10 Home (which doesn’t include the Group Policy editor), you can alternatively disable routine remediation by opening the Registry Editor, navigating to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\ Microsoft\Windows Defender, creating a new DWORD value called DisableRoutinely TakingAction and then setting it to 1. However, whichever approach you take, be warned that major Windows 10 updates often reset security options to their defaults, so you may need…

Apple is keen to push the iPhone 11 Pro – it’s no coincidence that this is the model it sent in for review – but it’s not the only new iPhone you can buy. As the table below shows, there are now six models to choose between, ranging from the £479 iPhone 8 to the £1,499 iPhone 11 Pro Max. Note that Apple is also now offering a trade-in deal. While this is convenient, you may well get a better price elsewhere. For instance, a 256GB iPhone 7 in “good condition” will give you £100 towards a new iPhone, which is hardly the deal of the century. To find out how much your old iPhone is worth, choose the iPhone you would like to buy and then select “yes” when…

PRICE £1,688(£2,026incVAT) from lenovo.com Anyone hoping for a big change between last year’s ThinkPad X1 Yoga and this will be disappointed. The grey, opinions-plitting aluminium and magnesium alloy chassis remains in place, though its weight has been cut from 1.4kg to 1.34kg. According to Lenovo, it’s also “17% smaller” than its predecessor, measuring 323 x 218 x 15mm (WDH). Lenovo also finds space for an infrared camera on the top bezel, alongside the 720p webcam and ThinkShutter sliding webcam cover. Both the Windows Hello face recognition and fingerprint scanner work quickly – you can unlock the machine in a split-second – but note that the “4K 500-nit” screen on test here lacks Lenovo’s PrivacyGuard software. This darkens the screen, obscuring it to nosy onlookers, and then, using the IR depth…

PRICE £1,025 (£1,230 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Always quick to spot an opportunity, Chillblast is the first PC maker to supply us with a system based around Nvidia’s RTX 2060 Super graphics card. And that’s an excellent move: as is plain from our review of the new Super cards (see p64), the RTX 2060 Super is a match for the RTX 2070 in all the key areas, but it means that Chillblast can undercut our previous A-List champ – the Cyberpower Ultra 7 RTX Gaming PC (see issue 296, p50) – by £100. This PC benefits from the Ryzen 7 3700X compared to the 2700X inside the Cyberpower. Together with two sticks of 8GB of DDR-3200 memory and a gloriously fast Samsung 970 Evo Plus PCIe SSD, this pushed the…

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super PRICE £316 (£379 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk It’s already been a busy year for Nvidia, with several graphics card releases based on its superb Turing architecture, but with AMD unleashing powerful and cheaper alternatives, Nvidia felt it was time to step up its game once more. So it’s farewell to the RTX 2060, RTX 2070 and RTX 2080, and welcome to their “Super”-suffixed replacements. The three new cards retain the Turing architecture, which means support for ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). To deliver a performance boost, the existing hardware has been turbocharged throughout (see table below). The new…

PRICE Twin pack, £118 (£142 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/302zyxel Released back in 2017, the Zyxel Multy X wireless mesh system won our wireless extender Labs (see issue 282, p76) thanks to its speed and coverage. It remains a strong contender even today, but at £250 for a two-node kit it’s pricey. Enter the Multy U, a cut-down version that promises whole-home Wi-Fi coverage in a much more compact package – for barely more than half the cost. It’s a tri-band 802.11ac wireless extender, but both 5GHz radios are rated at an unremarkable 866Mbits/sec, with the 2.4GHz transceiver claiming a maximum data rate of 300Mbits/sec. However, there’s 2x2 MU-MIMO support, and one of the 5GHz radios serves as a dedicated backhaul channel, which should keep traffic moving more smoothly than rival…

Despite the doom and gloom surrounding the PC market over the past few years, the humble desktop has yet to disappear. The launch of the Apple iPad, and the shot in the arm it gave to the previously niche tablet computing market, was predicted to spell the end of the desktop in favour of portable computing. But, while tablets, convertibles, two-in-ones and smartphones are admittedly ubiquitous today, the desktop remains. This month’s Labs shows why. It gathers together nine desktops from a range of suppliers, the bulk of which sit below a target price of £500. Despite this low budget, it’s entirely possible to buy a system capable of surprising performance in general productivity, multitasking and even light gaming. For those who have a little flexibility in their budgets, two…

PRICE £417 (£500 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Offering AMD’s latest Ryzen processors for less than £500 is impressive, but Chillblast – along with the other Labs participants using the same family of parts – has a trick up its sleeve courtesy of AMD’s confusing part naming convention. While the 3000-series Ryzen CPU parts are based on the firm’s newest Zen 2 microarchitecture on a 7nm process node, AMD’s latest Ryzen APU range (see p92) uses the older Zen+ architecture on a 12nm process node. It’s still a capable family of chips. The Ryzen 3 3200G offers four cores, albeit without the ability to run multiple threads per core, running at a base 3.6GHz frequency and boosting to 4GHz. Chillblast has paired it with two sticks of 8GB DDR4-2666 memory, allowing the…

PRICE £417 (£500 inc VAT) from palicomp.co.uk The majority of machines in this month’s Labs are built to a definite budget and that’s resulted in a clear theme: quad-core processors with or without the ability to run multiple threads on a single core, 8GB of RAM and a reliance on integrated graphics processing power. It’s enough for general-purpose computing, but lacks grunt when it comes to multitasking or playing newer games. The Palicomp Impulse, however, stands out. Despite squeaking under the £500 mark (by one penny; its official price is £499.99), the build includes both a full-fat Ryzen 5 processor and a discrete graphics card: the AMD Radeon RX 560 2GB. Even more impressively, they’re all housed in a case with a full-window side panel to show them off. Just…

PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk There’s a lot of overlap in the design thinking between PC Specialist’s Inferno and Chillblast’s rival Billet: both systems include solid-state storage as standard, both feature an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G accelerated processing unit (APU) and both rely on the chip’s Radeon Vega R8 integrated graphics. The PC Specialist, though, comes in at a full £100 cheaper – and the reasons why quickly become apparent. Not only does the PC Specialist come with half the RAM of the Chillblast, it’s installed as a single 8GB DIMM, which forces the system to run in single-channel mode. There are other differences between the systems, too: the PC Specialist comes with a 240GB SATA SSD and a 1TB mechanical hard drive; Chillblast opts instead for a…

Accelerated processing units are nothing new. AMD released them way back in 2011, with the idea that buyers on a budget could benefit from the company’s processing and graphics technology without spending extra on a discrete graphics card. While many of Intel’s processors also include 3D acceleration courtesy of integrated chips such as the UHD 630 Graphics, you only need to take a quick glance at the Superposition graph on p94 to realise that its offering is much inferior. What’s more, if you find that your games won’t run at a respectable frame rate on the APU inside your machine, you always have the option of adding a discrete graphics card. Essentially, your APU becomes a CPU, with the built-in graphics chip automatically switched off. So is the decision simple?…

PRICE Subscription: 1technician/unlimitedclients,£290/yrexcVATfrom solarwinds.com DameWare Remote Support (DRS) is all about choice. If you’re supporting a modest number of users on your LAN then you can run it in standalone mode, while those with a larger workforce can opt for the centralised server version. Either way, it’s great value, as licensing is based on the number of technicians and covers an unlimited number of clients. The server-based version comprises three core modules, namely the Central Server, Proxy Server and Mobile Gateway Server. All three are accessed via the main administrative console, and can be installed on a single Windows host or on different ones to spread the load. One slight drawback of this version of DRS is that it doesn’t offer agentless client access: every computer you want to support…

PRICE Model T1324SC120IN, £847 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com Don’t judge Fujitsu’s little tower server on size alone. It’s certainly small, standing just 405mm tall – but it’s a powerful package that’s more versatile than many much larger servers. That’s partly thanks to its highly configurable design. The model we tested had a quad-core Xeon E-2134 and 16GB of DDR4 RAM – expandable to a maximum of 64GB – but Fujitsu offers a choice of ten Xeon E-2100 CPUs, with prices starting at just £827 for a base system with 8GB of memory. There’s a wide range of storage choices, too. The entry models support two LFF SATA drives, but for storage-hungry roles, you can specify up to eight hotplug SFF drive bays. If you don’t want to go the whole…

Poking about in other people’s network traffic is your right as a system administrator – arguably even your duty. And early efforts to declare computer use “private” from bosses foundered, not least thanks to the difficulty of establishing whether sending copies of every password typed into a server in Guangzhou was actually a private matter at all. Even so, the whole topic is still one that needs careful handling. What’s the best way to tell staff that everything they do on their computer is going to be at least findable by the analyser, if not comprehensible by the network operator? A clue may be found in research into how people ask for state aid. It has been observed that when someone fills in a questionnaire on a computer, they tend…

My love affair lasted about three weeks. You might think that this is a long time before reality sets in, but I had real hope this time. Maybe we were compatible. Maybe we had enough in common that it could be made to work. I’m not referring to my husband, of course, but my new rugged Dell Latitude 5420 laptop. Bought for working in tough and unpleasant environments, where its water resistance and drop-proofing would be essential – boardrooms of larger PLCs, for example, and in the machine room of a bank, where “percussive maintenance” is always useful. The problem? Windows 10 Update 1903. Now, I had actually lined myself up to say some really nice things about 1903. That Windows 10 had reached a tipping point, where the capabilities…

I’ve been riding the two-factor authentication (2FA), or multifactor authentication (MFA) or even two-factor verification (2FV) depending on whether you suffer from abbreviation compulsive disorder (ACD) or not, hobbyhorse for more years than I care to recall. Whatever you want to call it, and personally I’m happy with 2FA as people actually understand what that means, the point is you should be using it wherever it is available. Or should you? Here’s the thing: you may have noticed that there has been a backlash against 2FA by SMS text message within the infosecurity community. Quite rightly so, because 2FA over SMS is insecure. Here’s the other thing, though: it’s still more secure than no 2FA at all. At least it is for most services, used by most people, most of…

Criticising early pioneers for poor code or eccentric configuration behaviour makes it sound like nobody has had a go at fixing these problems. Of course you can throw money at the problem and run routers from Cisco, or subsume the routing job into the firewall and thereby step up to a much more expensive and intricate configuration process. The problem is that it indicates a limited understanding of the impact of fiddling on the modern business. Lots of IT sector businesses restrict firewall changes to one reboot a week because people want to actually use the thing all day every day. The existence of the Cupboard of Shame, however, shows that other devices that are equally important to connections can be just too unpredictable and annoying and peculiar to be…

Wilted leaves, black discolouration, weak roots and tiny bugs – all subtle yet important signs that signal apocalypse for bananas. If diseases spread, we risk losing one of our favourite fruits. There are many potential solutions, but one tool could see smartphones using AI to analyse photos of banana plants – all snapped by farmers in their groves, helping spot infestations and infections earlier and more easily. It’s one way AI is slipping into our diets. And there’s plenty more, from boosting the flavour of basil to machine-generated recipes. Potential improvements aren’t only about tastier meals, but also addressing challenges such as sustainability and distribution, says Max Elder, research director for the Food Futures Lab at the Institute for the Future. “Technologists, food companies, farmers and more are embedding artificial…

DENNISMAGS.CO.UK/PCPRO On sale Thursday 7 November LABS VPNs With dozens of VPN services to choose from, which should you use? Darien Graham-Smith puts the best to the test. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim one of these compact LED flashlights. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for more details. FEATURES Green myths exposed Want to reduce your energy consumption? There’s a lot of advice but much of it is hogwash. Barry Collins reveals what’s genuine and what’s nonsense. The PC Pro Christmas gift guide If you’re as hard to buy for as we are, here’s some good news: we’ve assembled a gift guide that’s perfect for techies. Never lose a file again Do you sometimes struggle to find…

Last week I went to a breakfast meeting. You might not think this is odd, but this was an event put on by Barclays, my business bankers, for local businesses. And it was titled “Fraud Prevention Event for Businesses”. I wasn’t expecting to learn anything new from this. After all, security of networks and business processes is what we do. However, I was intrigued to see just how good the advice was going to be. How relevant, how up to date, and how appropriately pitched. So I trundled along to the golf club at Pidley, along with 60 or so other small business owners. After the obligatory bacon buns and coffee, the presentations started. The morning’s agenda immediately revealed that this wasn’t a wobbly pitch from the local bank branch’s…

Jon Bray At first, Jon wasn’t a fan of the Apple iPhone 11 Pro’s looks, but time spent in its company won him around. To find out why, read his full review on p52 Nathan Spendelow Sticking to the phone theme, Nathan attended the launch of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro in Munich. Is this the best phone you shouldn’t buy? See p74 Darien Graham-Smith Darien explains how to recover from a data disaster (including rescuing lost files) and preventing loss in the first place. See p44 Paul Ockenden Dig out your Physics revision guide as Paul goes back to basics with an in-depth explanation of how SSDs work, right down to subatomic level. See p113…

Asus ProArt StudioBook One PRICE To be confirmed AVAILABILITY Late 2019/early 2020 The StudioBook One looks set to be the world’s most powerful workstation laptop and its key component is Quadro RTX 6000 graphics. So how do you keep such a powerful component cool? Asus has worked with Nvidia to ensure there’s enough airflow, with the innovative solution being that all the components are crammed into the lid–which then opens up to give breathing space. With a Core i9 processor and 15in Pantone-certified screen, complete with 4K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, this was the most impressive laptop to be unveiled at IFA. Dell Inspiron 14 5000 PRICE From £619 AVAILABILITY Now The Inspiron 5000 is the unsung hero of Dell’s laptop range, selling by the bucketful as it attempts…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Lenovo ThinkPad T490s Travel business class from £926 from lenovo.com Lenovo updates its popular T series laptops with this thin yet powerful laptop. With battery life of over 11 hours in our tests, a 14in screen, 1.35kg weight and all the power most people need–if you want discrete graphics, check out the T490–this is a truly business class machine. REVIEW Issue 301, p46 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 15in (2018) A machine for true power users with amazing specifications, including that infamous Core i9 CPU and up to 4TB of SSD storage. From £2,399 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 Razer Blade 15 Mercury White A beautifully made gaming laptop with a Max-Q RTX 2070 and powerful Core i7 chip inside, along with 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD.…

Barry Collins is a former editor of PCPro. He would still be willing to pay a tenner a month for a WestWing subscription. @bazzacollins Never has the question “what shall we watch on TV tonight?” been so complicated. It makes you yearn for when every channel had its own button on the telly. Viewers are now presented with a huge choice of live TV, catch-up services and streaming–all of which are getting more expensive, despite commanding an ever-slimmer share of the viewing audience. Netflix has just imposed its third price rise in as many years on Standard account holders, with tariffs that are 30% higher than they would be if they were merely tracking inflation. And that’s not the half of it. The BBC is ripping some of its back…

in association with Expert Reviews and IT Pro Workstation of the Year Scan 3XS WA4000 VR We turn to former PC Pro editor James Morris for workstation expertise, and over the past year he’s looked at almost 20 different systems. So what makes this Scan machine so supreme? “The Scan 3XS WA4000 VR showcases just how much the latest AMD Zen 2 architecture has to offer,” he says, “providing similar performance with 12 cores as you got from 16 cores just last year. It’s a sign of even greater things to come from AMD in the workstation market.” When you factor in the support Scan offers professional customers, and its proven attention to detail when it comes to producing reliable systems, it’s no coincidence that Scan is a repeat winner…

An unexpected outage or data loss can be hugely costly to a business–but when disaster strikes at home the stakes are arguably even higher. Over time, a healthy company will (hopefully) recover from a one-off incident, whereas if your half-finished novel and that folder full of videos from your last family holiday are lost then you may never get them back. It might be overkill to draw up a formal set of recovery procedures for your personal devices, but it’s important to have some idea of your exposure, and your remediation options if the worst comes to pass. Here’s our guide to recovering from the most common disaster scenarios, and how to protect yourself before they happen. Recovering lost files There are lost files, and then there are lost files.…

Apple’s improvements to the iPhone’s camera don’t stop at the hardware. As part of the upgrade to iOS 13, it has also given the user interface a fresh lick of paint with a new zoom graphic and some of the photo options – aspect ratio and live photo, for instance – have moved from the top left of the screen to a new position, revealed by a simple swipe up from the bottom of the screen in the camera app. Another nice addition here is the ability to have the camera capture images from the ultra-wide and primary cameras simultaneously. Then, if you go in and edit the photo, you can recompose and re-crop using the wider angle shot. This is typical of the whole iOS 13 upgrade, in fact.…

PRICE £750 (£900 inc VAT) from uk-store.acer.com It’s been a while since we saw a TravelMate laptop in PC Pro. Actually, that’s a huge understatement: you would have to read through 70 issues, stretching back almost six years, since we gave the TravelMate X313-M a three-star review (see issue 232, p141). We can guarantee that this is a trend that will end as Acer has upped its game since then: the TravelMate X5 is a super-light business ultraportable at an exceptional price. I should apply an important caveat here. The price quoted above is after a £200 discount, which is currently available on Acer’s web store. Its list price is a far less attractive £1,100. However, Acer assures us that this model (identified by the part code NX.VJ7EK.007) will have…

1 You can run the full 3CX PBX on a Raspberry Pi. 2 After a year, you have to pay for 3CX. 3 3CX WebMeeting only works on Google Chrome. 4 3CX WebMeeting servers never fail. 5 The digital receptionist feature costs just £1 per month. 6 In his recent PC Pro review of the 3CX Phone System, Dave Mitchell wrote that 3CX is “the perfect choice for SMEs that want to host their own PBX”. 7 If you have a network connection, you can make free calls to anyone else on your 3CX system via your phone. ANSWERS 1. It’s true! As long as it’s a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ or later, you can run the full 3CX PBX on a Pi. 2. No. 3CX is free for…

PRICE £45 (£54 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/301band Not so very long ago, fitness trackers were glorified pedometers, diligently counting steps and allowing you to check your progress in an app. While that’s arguably still the core function, most have grown to borrow features from serious running watches – and the Huawei Band 3 Pro does this in spades. That means it will track steps and sleep as every fitness tracker since the original Fitbit has, but it also has an optical heart rate tracker and GPS built-in for the purpose of outdoor cycling, runs and swims (it’s water resistant to 50m in depth and up to ten minutes). As with other trackers, indoor activities are supported, but more as an estimate of exertion. It displays all this pertinent information on a…

PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from cyberpowersystem.co.uk Even before we opened the shipping box, it was obvious that the Cyberpower Ultra 5 Vega would stand out from the crowd: at 10.4kg, this PC is around twice the average weight of its rival machines. Where this weight comes from quickly becomes clear. Not only does the Ultra 3 use tempered glass for its side-panel window, the only machine on test to do so instead of cheaper and lighter acrylic, it uses it for the front panel as well. The window reveals a spacious case with more than enough room for future upgrades: as well as seven expansion slots (not all of which are usable given the motherboard has only one 16-lane and two 1-lane PCI Express slots, with one taken up by…

PRICE £400 (£480 inc VAT) from cclonline.com DeskMini by name, DeskMini by nature: this prebuilt system from CCL, based on the ASRock DeskMini A300 barebones ultra-small form factor (USFF), is tiny compared to even the smallest of the other machines this month. Despite this, there’s some reasonably impressive hardware crammed into the tiny box: a Ryzen 5 2400G accelerated processing unit (APU) provides both general and graphics compute, offering four cores and eight threads running at 3.6GHz base and 3.9GHz boost, and connects to 8GB of DDR4-2666 running in dual-channel mode. The inevitable downside is that these consume both of the RAM slots on the board. Storage is provided by a 512GB M.2 PCIe solid-state drive, which helps keep performance up and the boot time down to a Labs-leading 23.2…

PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk While a few of the systems in the Labs this month make a passable attempt at handling a gaming workload, the PC Specialist Vortex is the only one to specifically target it – and in doing so breaks the budget, coming in around £100 more than competing machines like the Palicomp Impulse. That extra cash gets you a discrete graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 4GB. Based on the company’s latest Turing architecture, although without the ray tracing and artificial intelligence capabilities of the RTX cards, it has twice the video RAM of the Radeon in the Impulse and considerably better performance: an average of 132fps in the Unigine Superposition benchmark shows that there’s potential for gaming above a 720p resolution here,…

PRICE Perpetual: 1 guest/10 hosts, £625 exc VAT; Subscription: 100 hosts, £1,075/yr exc VAT from netop.com Access security is a serious issue when it comes to remote support – and Netop’s Remote Control has it by the bucketful. It uses 256-bit AES session encryption by default, and you can enforce multifactor authentication for web portal access, integrate it with Active Directory, assign roles to individual technicians to control what they can do and even use your own custom security certificates. Plenty of thought has gone into client-side security, too. The host software installer can be tailored in various ways, with enrolment packages allowing you to specify an expiry date for the agent and limit the number of times it can be accessed. Additionally, you can assign each system to a…

PRICE Subscription: 1 technician, £7/month exc VAT from zoho.com/assist Cloud-hosted remote support doesn’t get much easier than Zoho Assist – nor indeed more affordable. Small businesses may well find that the free basic service does everything they need, with support for one technician, unlimited sessions and unattended access to up to five computers. There’s also built-in chat, clipboard sharing and support for Windows and Mac clients. If your needs are greater, you can step up to the Standard, Professional or Enterprise plans – and there’s no need to worry about locking yourself into the wrong one. Zoho’s pay-as-you go policy lets you choose whether to be billed monthly or yearly, and you can upgrade, downgrade or cancel your contract whenever you want. Regardless of which tier you’re on, Zoho is…

If you have a business, it’s almost certain that you have a network. Connected to it will be any number of boxes of tricks – and not all of them will be perfectly known to you. These days, anything from a server to a doorbell, from an air-conditioning controller to a million-dollar MRI machine, could be going online and doing heaven knows what. We’ve become accustomed to this. Much like “the cloud”, the network has become an unremarkable part of the fabric of your building. At least, it ought to be unremarkable – but as regulators and insurers have realised, risks and limitations abound, and it’s crucial to ensure that your network is safe, reliable and properly monitored. Unfortunately, this is very much a case of easier said than done.…

“Picking the right service provider can be a huge help: they know about this stuff and can make solid recommendations” How can you have multiple clouds? Surely the cloud is the cloud? It might be convenient to think of “the cloud” as a monolithic, all-encompassing shorthand for any sort of virtual location – but the reality isn’t that simple, nor has it ever been. Even way back in the early days of cloud computing, you may recall there was plenty of debate about the “public” and “private” cloud. Organisations would rent the former from companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, then use that resource to set up the latter for the exclusive use of their own organisations. Is that still the major division today? Yes and no. It quickly became…

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how fragile solid state storage can be, especially in the form of tiny devices such as microSD cards. I don’t mean physically fragile – I’m talking more in terms of the robustness of the data storage mechanism. A few people asked me to expand on how this fragility affects SSDs rather than memory cards. I’m going to try one of my “Paul simplifies physics a bit too much” explanations to look at how flash storage works. I’m sure it’s going to annoy experts in the field – and anyone who hates abbreviations and initialisms. Nearly all modern electronics is based around various types of transistors. You can think of these a bit like an electronic tap: you apply a small electric charge…

If there is one thing I see most often in visiting PC Pro readers’ offices, it’s the “Cupboard of Shame”. This will be populated by apparently hot devices that were doomed from the outset by poor software design. NAS boxes, “security” switches, overambitious CCTV cameras: it’s a dishonourable list. And while the short-lived inkjet pile might be the biggest, the router pile is always the most populous. While a good router could sit blinking away on top of your filing cabinet for 15 years, bad routers make for happy consultants. Bad routers hit the back of the Cupboard of Shame with some force, and can be replaced in only an hour or two after sometimes months or years of agony. This is not the way we are used to thinking…

IF YOU WANT the famously high level of protection that Norton 360 offers plus 75GB of cloud storage – and you want to protect up to ten devices – then take note of this phenomenal deal. In addition to protection against all the latest threats when you bank, browse or shop online, Norton 360 Premium offers many additional features, including: NEW! Cloud Backup 75GB of cloud storage to safeguard your most important files and data NEW! Password Manager Generate, store and access your passwords across your devices NEW! Secure VPN Create a secure tunnel between your device and the internet NEW! Virus Protection Promise A Norton expert is on hand 24/7 to help keep your devices secure and virus-free or get your full subscription refunded Norton 360 Premium 10-Device 1-Year:…

Faced with a dinner that refuses to cook itself or a whinging family who aren’t sure what they want to eat, but definitely want it now? While smart appliances that team up with AI to produce MasterChef-level meals remain a long way in the future, there are already tools to help. Hey Alexa, what’s for dinner? Voice assistants are handy in the kitchen, letting cooks set timers with a few words or converting imperial measurements to metric hands-free. But Amazon has more tricks. Alongside creating a shopping list, you can install skills from Allrecipes to read out instructions as you cook or from Food Network for dinner inspiration. Find the full list of Alexa cooking skills here: pcpro.link/302skills. Beyoncé planning your meals The diva’s empire includes a nutrition site, which…