Tabla de contenidos para September 2019 en PC Pro

I’VE REACHED THE second point in my life where I find myself traipsing across university campuses hunting out oddly named buildings. “They said it was up the hill and left,” I moan to anyone who will listen, “so where the [muffled] is it?” There! My son and I hurry through the doors, follow the signs and find ourselves in a modern lecture theatre – all bendy tables and weirdly shaped seating, as if Escher and Dalí decided to get out of art and into sadistic furniture design. We throw ourselves into two of the few empty seats and wait for the start. By the time it does, there’s standing room only. The head of faculty enters, wearing his academic-cool mix of jeans and shirt, and begins the sell. “If you’re…

If you enjoy programming as much as I do, you’re likely to have encountered the scenario I’m about to describe. You’re tackling a really knotty problem that involves novel data types and frequent forays into the manuals. You eventually crack it, then glance at the clock and realise that hours have passed in total concentration, with you oblivious to all other influences. You suddenly feel thirsty, rise to make a cup of tea and feel weak at the knees, as if you had just run a mile. That’s because using your brain so intensively is, energetically, every bit as demanding as running: it uses up your blood glucose at a ferocious rate. Our brains burn glucose faster than any of our other organs, up to 20% of our total consumption…

Thoughts on Huawei WeChat, the absolute must-have app for every Chinese citizen, is the product of a commercial enterprise (Tencent). If, as we are repeatedly assured, such enterprises are wholly separate from the state, then why, when people share photos deemed unacceptable to the state, must they submit both a photo of themselves and use their voice to request reactivation of the app? Does the Western equivalent (WhatsApp) monitor your activity to ensure it complies with government requirements, and disallow sharing pictures of crowds in Times Square if President Trump deems such images unacceptable (rather than Hong Kong residents remembering Tiananmen Square)? Huawei may be trying the charm offensive at present, but its suggestion that it is a wholly independent private company is just as offensive to our sensibility. Chinese…

While Computex may have a reputation of being about components – and heaven knows there were some crazy cases, motherboards and gadgets on show – this is a show that’s also about business. First, there are a lot of deals signed behind the closed doors. And second, you’ll see a lot of technology squarely aimed at businesses rather than suppliers. The inevitable negative is that it’s a long way to travel to Taipei from the UK (think 13-hour long haul to Hong Kong before the short hop to Taiwan’s capital), but you’re rewarded with one of the world’s most vibrant and interesting capitals. Cheap taxis and an excellent public transport system make it easy to hop around, too.…

Most Windows users know about the Task Manager – the handy little tool that shows you which applications are running, and what resources they’re using. It also lets you easily shut down misbehaving apps with a click, which is jolly helpful when something’s slowing down your PC or appears to have crashed. The Task Manager does a lot more than this, though, and even advanced users don’t fully explore all the features and information it offers. Here’s our guide to making the most of the Task Manager – including its hidden capabilities. Opening the Task Manager Everyone knows the Ctrl+Alt+Delete keyboard shortcut – but this isn’t the fastest way of accessing the Task Manager. Instead, the experts press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, which brings up the Task Manager right away. Not only does…

PRICE Asreviewed,£3,310(£3,973incVAT) from pcpro.link/298dell Do you need a laptop that can survive 6ft drops, pressurised water jets, dust storms, thermal shocks and explosive atmospheres? For the average consumer the answer is, obviously, no. But then the Dell Rugged Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme isn’t designed for the average consumer. Rather, according to Dell, it’s a machine for those who are engaged in the “world’s toughest jobs” – primarily heavy industry, military personnel and others working in hazardous environments. People, in other words, who need a laptop that’s both rugged and capable. Naturally, those people have varying needs when it comes to power, which is where Dell’s extensive configuration options come in. There are four processor models to choose from, starting with a Core i3-7130U, with memory and storage options ranging up…

PRICE 16GB with ads, £43 (£50 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/299fire The Amazon Fire 7 tablet is the perfect example of why Amazon is such a difficult company to compete with. As a product, it’s nothing special, but it’s so keenly priced that no other manufacturer can come close to matching its combination of features for the money. Despite its price, the matte-plastic Fire 7 is a well-made, robust product that will take abuse. I know this because one of my kids has been chucking an Amazon Fire 7 around (quite literally) for a couple of years and it’s still going strong. The three new colours – plum, sage and twilight blue – are an odd choice, though. They’re more muted than the usual bright hues Amazon favours and won’t appeal…

PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk Kolink is the least well-known name in this shootout, but the £80 Phalanx looks right at home alongside its more renowned rivals. Its front panel is made from strips of brushed aluminium with a stripe of mesh down the middle, and the price includes a tempered glass side panel. It’s hinged, so it’s easy to open, and build quality is almost a match for the Corsair. You can alter the colour of the four RGB LED fans with a roof button, which is kept company by one USB 3 port, two USB 2 ports and a pair of audio connections. Note the magnetic dust filter, too. There’s lots of room to work inside with large cable-routing holes, while the front supports trios of…

1 Visit the PC Pro download site at pcprodownload.co.uk. You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the card, along with your email address. We’ll send you an email to confirm that your code has been registered. On subsequent visits, you’ll be able to access the download area by entering only your email address. 2 Once you’re into the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions on the left of the product page (again, please…

PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from asus.com The quest for a 100% full-screen smartphone has turned into a troublesome journey. That pesky selfie camera and earpiece speaker keep getting in the way of the austere, minimalist frontage we so desperately crave. There’s no shortage of attempts to solve the problem. Screen notches, vibrating displays and pop-up cameras have all been put forward, but often these introduce their own set of problems. Asus, however, has a new approach. The ZenFone 6 tackles the problem by ditching the selfie camera altogether, with the rear-mounted camera unit rotating towards the front of the phone instead. Back to normal Let’s start with the “normal” stuff first. The ZenFone 6 is Asus’ flagship phone for 2019 and, aside from that curious camera, everything else is…

PRICE £41 (£49 inc VAT) from affinity.serif.com This is not the first app to compete with Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress in a lower price bracket. But there’s a big gap between basic layout and producing a commercial-quality magazine or brochure ready for offset printing, and ten minutes with a consumer app generally exposes it. Not so here. Colour management and PDF export, master pages, grids and guides, asset management, anchored graphics and typography are all properly handled, never falling too short of the market leaders’ functionality and sometimes exceeding it. Like InDesign, for example, Publisher offers effectively unlimited Undo steps – often a life-saver – but it goes one better by saving history with the document, so you can even undo after re-opening it. Display efficiency is fundamental to Affinity,…

PRICE £424 (£509 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Up until recently, Acer’s approach to high-end Chromebooks was to combine premium looks and materials with budget Celeron and Pentium components, then ship at a mid-range price. Recently, though, that strategy changed with the introduction of the 2-in-1 Chromebook Spin 13 – and this, its non-convertible sibling, the Chromebook 13 CB713. Both Chromebooks combine the designs and materials we’ve seen in Acer’s high-end Windows slim and light laptops with a heavyweight specification; while this model ships with an eighth-generation Core i3-8130U and 4GB of RAM, the Chromebook Spin 13 goes all the way up to a Core i7-8550U and 8GB. The design is businesslike rather than chic, with the aluminium casing finished in a gunmetal grey, and at 18mm thick and 1.4kg in…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,416 (£1,699 inc VAT) from store.google.com Google created the premium Chromebook with the original Pixel, and it has continued to redefine it with the Pixelbook and Pixel Slate. The former is arguably the best convertible running any OS from any laptop maker, with a 2-in-1 design that’s both thin enough and light enough to make a convincing 12in tablet, particularly as it has a 3:2 aspect ratio display and is just 10.3mm thick. At 1.1kg, it’s heavier than a 12.9in iPad Pro or a Surface Pro with no keyboard attached, but no other hinged 2-in-1 convertible does as effective a job of delivering tablet and laptop functionality. The square style and two-tone finish haven’t dated at all in the time since launch, and the build quality remains…

PRICE £209 (£251 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Confusingly, Acer makes several different Chromebook 11 models, not to mention the convertible Chromebook Spin 11 and Chromebook R11. This particular one is a ruggedised device built for the education and business markets. It certainly feels solid, with the matte black chassis surrounded by a tough, rubberised grey strip for added shock proofing, and should withstand a few years of life in the classroom or out on the road. It’s fairly light, too, weighing in at just 1.35kg. Build quality aside, this is clearly a Chromebook built to budget. It’s based on a Celeron N3350 processor, which made its debut back in late 2016, and the twisted nematic (TN) screen is an obvious weakness. While it can reach respectable levels of brightness –…

PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from store.hp.com/uk HP’s Chromebooks tend to fall into two camps. In one, you get smart, innovative, class-leading laptops like the muchloved Chromebook 13 G1 and hybrid Chromebook X2. In the other, HP offers cost-conscious models that don’t score so well on design or performance but deliver on value. HP’s latest model, the Chromebook 15, falls between the two. It’s nicely designed: our model came in a fetching two-tone ink-blue and white finish, with a tough anodised aluminium chassis and what HP calls a ceramic-feel plastic lid. It’s just 18mm thick when closed and weighs only 1.8kg. Its standout feature, though, is the (non-touch) 15.6in IPS screen. Thanks to the tiny side bezels, it looks huge, and while you’ll find higher-end Chromebooks with more pixels per…

Data backup may be one of the most boring parts of network management – but it’s one that needs proper attention. A data disaster could seriously disrupt your operations; even an accidentally deleted report or project can cost heavily in terms of lost productivity. Unfortunately, many businesses are at risk. A report last year by IT services provider Beaming found that only 35% of UK companies stored their backup data outside of the office (see pcpro.link/299beam). More worrying, 17% of respondents said they didn’t back up their data at all. This cavalier attitude can’t be down to lack of choice – there are plenty of backup products on the market to suit businesses of all sizes. In this month’s Business Focus, we test four products, from Arcserve, Iperius, Retrospect and…

PRICE Multi-Server with 1yr support, £2,099 exc VAT from retrospect.com Retrospect Backup comes with a flexible licensing scheme: you can start with the base Single Server package – which costs £599 and backs up one Windows server, plus five desktops – and scale right up to the Multi-Server version on review, which supports unlimited Windows, Mac and Linux servers and desktops. Optional add-ons bring support for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and IMAP email accounts, plus features included in the Multi-Server Premium version such as open-file backup and restoration of Windows system images to dissimilar hardware. If you have used Retrospect Backup before, the main console will be very familiar as it hasn’t seen any design changes for over a decade, but it still works perfectly well. Your first task is…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,084 exc VAT from uk.insight.com Fujitsu is known for its affordable single-socket servers, and the Server Primergy TX1330 M4 is its most powerful yet. Designed for growing businesses and branch offices, this modestly sized tower crams in a Xeon E-2100 CPU and offers plenty of room to expand as needed. That starts with the RAM: our test system came with a six-core 3.3GHz Xeon E-2136 CPU and 16GB of DDR4 memory, but you can expand this to 64GB – and a future BIOS upgrade will increase the limit to 128GB. If storage capacity is a priority, the TX1330 M4 has you well covered here. Our starter system came with an eight-bay SFF drive cage, and you can add two further eight-bay cages with a field-installable kit that…

Microsoft has a new browser. This is a big deal, and not only because it’s the third go by the firm over the past 30 years. Internet Explorer is still trundling along, but has become a historical artefact. That doesn’t stop it being useful, and it is clear that Microsoft has expended a lot of effort on this browser in recent years, especially with regards to security capabilities, which are comparable to the best. But everything started to go a bit Pete Tong when Windows 7 arrived. Suddenly we had a new browser, one that claimed to be optimised for the touch experience. (As an aside, I still can’t get on with the onscreen touch keyboard for Windows 10, but I guess it’s just one of my many failings.) Microsoft…

As I sit here writing this column, it’s just a few days before the biggest infosecurity event in Europe takes place in that there London. Infosecurity Europe – not the most imaginative name, I grant you – is where security vendors and researchers, law enforcement, regulators and government all come together with the media for a week of cybersecurity information sharing. Unfortunately, some of the information that gets shared isn’t done so intentionally. Attendees at DEF CON in Las Vegas have long since got used to the “Wall of Sheep” display that advances security awareness by watching network traffic for evidence of people logging into email and so on unencrypted. It then shows the login username and first few characters of the password on a huge screen. And those are…

Want to avoid facial recognition systems? It’s not as straightforward as pulling a mask over your face, as one Londoner found. In May, the Met Police ran a trial of its facial recognition software in Romford, capturing digital images of everyone who walked past their cameras and running them through the system. One man protested by covering his face when he walked by, which attracted the attention of police, prompting a disagreement that was captured by a BBC camera crew. Police eventually fined him £90 for disorderly behaviour. Asked by local activists Big Brother Watch why he was stopped, one officer said: “The fact that he’s walked past clearly masking his face from recognition.” There are more subtle ways to confound facial recognition systems, although researchers have found that wearing…

Vertical Aerospace The first test flight was in September last year, and plenty have followed since, with the quadcopter-style eVTOL wobbling into the air over the tarmac at Cotswold Airport. This is Vertical Aerospace, and it’s perhaps the UK’s best shot at a flying car. While the UK has solid heritage in the aerospace industry, this is a startup few will have heard of. However, the CEO and founder Stephen Fitzpatrick will be familiar to Formula 1 fans – he was the owner of Manor Racing and has brought his experience with superfast cars to aircraft. Vertical Aerospace’s eVTOL is entirely electric. It lifts out of the air using thrust created by four rotors, before tilting slightly for forward travel. The aim isn’t to use it for intra-city transport, such…

On sale Thursday 14 August 2019 Bargain laptops Not convinced by Chromebooks? We review a bunch of big-value Windows laptops to show why you don’t need to pay a fortune for a high-quality machine. Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and claim a free 16GB USB stick while stocks last. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES 25 most influential people in tech To mark our 25th anniversary issue, we reveal our exclusive list of technologists who will shape the next 25 years. Run Linux commands and programs in Windows Fancy a walk on the open-source side? We provide a practical guide to the Windows Subsystem for Linux. 25 stupid predictions for 2044 When PC Pro…

Relying on any single platform for business is a dangerous game, according to computer repair companies that have recently been knee-capped by changes to Google’s Ads policies. Google has frequently upset website owners by changing search algorithms to thwart underhand SEO practices, but a recent change to advertising rules has left its paying customers angry and facing a huge drop in business. “In May, Google decided to switch off all advertising for ‘third-party repair’ companies in a heavy-handed attempt to stop the scam adverts for companies selling fake Microsoft support services and the like,” said Mike Whitehouse, owner of Sunderland Computer Repairs, a servicing and system-building operation. “It has had the unfortunate side effect of stopping all adverts for computer repair shops. My business has paid Google £300 to £400…

Facebook wants to pay for your private data. No, not the information it already has on you – it took that for free and the social network certainly isn’t offering back pay. The pay-for-data scheme is via a new app called Study. So far, it’s invite-only and limited to Google Android devices. Install the app and it will hoover up data about the other apps installed on your phone, including how much time you spend using them and what you’re doing with each app. It will also nab details such as the country you live in, what type of device you use and what network you’re on; it doesn’t look for passwords or read messages. In short, Facebook wants to know what you’re up to, digitally speaking, when you’re not…

It’s strange that Jon Honeyball should trot out the tired old line “those that have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear”. After all, as Edward Snowden once put it: “Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like arguing that you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” In a liberal Western democracy, there may be some validity to Jon’s assertion, but most of the world doesn’t live in a liberal democracy. Moreover, our own is under attack. Liberal democracies are a recent and possibly transient phenomenon, and for the majority of history, people’s beliefs, preferences and identity exposed them to discrimination or actual harm. Jon is smart enough to think of all the potential ways in which information…

1 Never spend all your budget on the machine Have a float left over for semi-consumable parts, especially hard drives in all kinds of machines and batteries in laptops. Putting in a new drive (especially an SSD) often revolutionises even the most ancient or humble machine with a decent corporate architecture and storage chipset. 2 High-end kit is risky Top-end machines – gamer’s laptops, liquid-cooled deskside PCs, servers with four CPU sockets – are a much bigger risk secondhand. Those exotic parts may only be supported by one OS release, or they may cost the Earth to replace, or be very short-lived when pushed to run at full tilt. Mid-range machines are easier to live with than either the superstar topenders or the bargain basement stuff. 3 Find out how…

By default, the Task Manager opens in “always on top” mode – so you can easily keep it in view while carrying out different tasks. You can change this by unticking the Options | Always on top menu item. The two options below it aren’t quite so self-explanatory. “Hide when minimised” means that when you hit the minimise icon to hide the Task Manager window, its icon also disappears from the taskbar. It’s not lost, though: what you may not have noticed is that whenever the Task Manager is running, a small greyish square appears in the system tray (you might need to click the “Show hidden icons” arrow to see it). This tiny square gives an at-a-glance indication of total CPU usage, and if you hover your mouse pointer…

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 p16. 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 £38 (£45 inc VAT) from cclonline.com The MB520 is the cheapest enclosure in this group, a fact reflected in its finish. The glossy plastic front panel with red accents on its air intakes looks dated, and if you want a tempered glass side window, rather than flimsy plastic, you’ll need to pay £20 more. That also includes three RGB LED fans, which still leaves it as the cheapest case in this group. It’s also sold in black, white or blue trim options. Get hands-on and the MasterBox’s practical advantages become obvious. The front air intakes include dust filters – unlike those on the Kolink – and there’s a large magnetic dust filter on the top, too. It also has the roomiest interior here. That’s an advantage when it comes…

PRICE £63 (£75 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk The NZXT H500 is the smallest enclosure in the group – albeit by only a couple of millimetres compared to the Corsair. A tempered glass side panel complements the smart if plain façade while, impressively, the panel only attaches with one hidden thumbscrew, with its bottom edge sliding neatly into the chassis – so the view remains unspoiled. Build quality is top-notch, too NZXT makes it simple to put a system together. A white band of steel courses through the middle of the case and obscures most of the power cables. The rest of the motherboard tray has plenty of cable-routing holes – although they don’t have grommets – and the PSU shroud includes a hole to handle vertically mounting GPUs. This is…

PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from uk.creative.com Creative’s latest wireless headphones introduce a new technology, dubbed “Super X-Fi”, which aims to change the way you enjoy music and other media. The idea is both straightforward and compelling: instead of settling for a regular two-channel stereo signal, the tech uses acoustic modelling to simulate multi-speaker surround-sound, using only two 50mm neodymium drivers. It’s quite a claim, but thanks to a piece of technical wizardry that Creative dubs Super X-Fi, it works astonishingly well. You can also buy this in the form of a thumb-sized amplifier that works with Android phones and tablets. Indeed, if you read the PC Pro feature from this year’s CES (see issue 294, p28), you may recall Jon Honeyball’s largely positive take on the technology. Integrating Super…

PRICE £708 (£849 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/299sony If there’s one thing to take away from this year’s phone launches, it’s that smartphone displays are always changing. With flexible screened phones cresting the horizon and Samsung paying particular attention to HDR 10+ panels, manufacturers are focusing on innovative display technologies to stand out from the crowd. Sony’s Xperia 1 continues this trend but its USP is a 21:9 aspect ratio display. That results in a very tall phone that will peep out from the top of most pockets, and it can make the phone awkward to use at first. For example, accessing the phone’s notification tray by dragging your thumb from the top of the screen is usually easy, but it’s a stretch with the Xperia 1. It’s only a one-handed…

Think Chromebooks are for children and students? Think again. While they’re still selling fast into schools and colleges, they’re also gaining favour with businesses and everyday users. Whether you’re looking for a cheap and cheerful budget laptop or a slick, slimline ultraportable, it’s time to take Chromebooks seriously. That’s partly because the Chromebook itself has changed. Google led the way with sophisticated, high-end models such as the Chromebook Pixel, Pixelbook and Pixel Slate, and the other big laptop manufacturers have followed suit. These days Chromebooks come in every type, every size and at every price. You can have a cool convertible, a budget netbook, a desktop replacement or a sleek business laptop, and while some Chromebooks still ship with the most basic specification, others are built to perform at the…

PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Asus is the force behind some of the most popular recent Chromebooks, including the dinky, tablet-sized C101 convertibles and the 12.5in C302CA two-in-one. The Chromebook Flip C434TA is the successor to that last model, promising you a compact 14in Chromebook in the body of a 13in device. Open it up and you’ll see how the trick is done: using a narrow bezel screen that keeps the display-to-body ratio at an impressive 87%. You can still flip that screen around and use it in a tablet mode, or in the usual tent or stand configurations instead. At 15.6mm thick, it’s noticeably slimmer than its convertible competitors – with the exception of the Google Pixelbook – and while that 1.45kg weight means it’s not ideal…

PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk Ruggedised convertible Chromebooks are nothing new, particularly in the education market, but the 11.6in Chromebook 500e takes things a little further. For one thing, Lenovo’s design has hit a near-perfect balance between versatility, durability and all-round practicality. With a desktop footprint of 290 x 240mm and thickness of just over 20mm it’s an easy fit for crowded classrooms and won’t stick out amongst the textbooks in the school bag – yet it will effortlessly shift between clamshell, tablet and tent configurations. What’s more, it’s about as rugged as they come. From the rubber bumpers and spill-proof keyboard to the Gorilla Glass 3 screen, this thing feels built for the battlefield – and it’s passed the MIL-STD-810G tests to prove it. Don’t be put…

PRICE £292 (£350 inc VAT) from uk-store.acer.com The latest version of the Acer Chromebook 14 makes a big first impression for a £350 laptop. With its aluminium keyboard surround and matching lid, it looks a whole lot more expensive than that asking price, while the slim bezels make it noticeably smaller and neater than many other 14in Chromebooks (including Acer’s own previous generation models). Take a closer look, though, and things aren’t quite so promising. The aluminium feels thin in places, while there are some rough edges where the keyboard surround meets the rest of the body. It’s not bad for a budget laptop, but please don’t expect a MacBook Air at netbook prices. This mix of pleasant surprise and sudden disappointment continues. On the upside, the screen is a…

PRICE 1TB, £1,599 per year exc VAT from uk.insight.com Arcserve’s UDP Cloud Direct is simple to deploy and easy to use – qualities that will immediately endear it to overworked IT departments. Two versions are available: we tested the backup as a service (BaaS) edition, which promises pain-free cloud backup and recovery, but you can step up to the disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) package, which adds in-the-cloud virtualised recovery of key systems. Pricing for BaaS is based on your cloud storage requirements. The 1TB package costs £1,599 per year, or if you go for a 5TB subscription, you save over £300 per terabyte. DRaaS comes as a separate service, where you’ll pay around £350 a year for a VM with one CPU and 4GB of RAM. After signing…

PRICE 1yr Bronze subscription, £370 exc VAT per terabyte from span.com Veritas Backup Exec has quite a track record as a backup solution for small businesses, and it just keeps getting better. This latest release adds the ability to write-protect your data stores, to ensure that ransomware can’t meddle with them, while the new GDPR Guard feature allows only System Logon Account (SLA) users to view and restore sensitive items. Platform support is extensive: you can install the software on Windows Server 2019 as both host and client, and Hyper-V VMs hosted on Server 2016 are protected using resilient change tracking (RCT). Microsoft Azure Site Recovery is supported too, and your backups and licences can be managed from a central cloud portal. Installation is quick: we had Backup Exec deployed…

The word “bias” can mean a lot of different things. In one context, it describes a particular way of weaving a strip of material, so that its threads are at a 45° angle to the structural strain. From there, it’s grown to refer to a consistent skew in a source of data: for example, if a sensor consistently under-reported the water pressure in a hydraulic system, that would be a bias in the results. Once we bring the idea into the human realm, however, things get murky. Whenever any sort of distribution isn’t perfectly even and equal, suspicions of intent come into play. Take the example of the Amazon Prime trial mentioned opposite: if a human had made the same zoning decisions as Amazon’s algorithm, they would certainly have been…

Currently available only in the US, Amazon’s “Alexa for Business” service sounds seductive. It lets employees use Echo devices at work to book meeting rooms, set up conference calls and so forth. You can even develop internal “skills” to interface with existing systems. It’s important to realise, though, that this isn’t what the Echo was really designed for. One can’t blame Amazon for spotting an opportunity to expand the Echo’s reach, but it was originally created to infiltrate homes, not offices – and to help us spend money, rather than make it. As a result, Echo hardware comes with some very consumercentric assumptions, including automatic updates to both the devices themselves and the back-end – which should make your IT staff uneasy. What’s more, while Amazon does offer service-level guarantees,…

1 Facebook to pay for data Facebook is launching an Android app that will pay users for data on how they use other apps and platforms. The Study app – similar to previous data harvesting tools banned by Apple – will pay participants an as-yet undisclosed fee for monitoring what apps they have on board, how long they spend on each app, the device type and where it’s being used. Read what Nicole Kobie thinks of the idea on p23. 2 Google headsback into painful text territory Google was revealed to be planning another crack at a messaging service – following the failures of Google Talk, Hangouts and many others – with the company hoping to oust the phone companies’ ageing SMS system. Rich Communication Services (RCS Chat) has been…

THE UK SECURITY service MI5 unlawfully acquired and stored data for years, according to the body responsible for overseeing the service’s work. In evidence revealed during a court case challenging the validity of the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which allows security services to monitor hardware and communications, MI5 was forced to reveal practices that shocked the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO). According to rights group Liberty, which brought the case, court documents show that MI5 had kept data to which it had no right, stored it in insecure places and misled officials to try and cover up its breaches. “These shocking revelations expose how MI5 has been illegally mishandling our data for years, storing it when they have no legal basis to do so,” said Megan Goulding, a lawyer with…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Huawei MateBook 14 Ultraportable from £1,000 from huawei.com Huawei gets everything right with this 14in ultraportable. It boasts a ten-hour battery life, plenty of power – enough for some gaming, even – and excellent connectivity, including a handy USB-A port. Both models are great value: the £1,300 variantant adds a touchscreen and upgrades the processor to a Core i7, the RAM to 16GB and the SSD to 512GB. REVIEW Issue 296, p56 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 £2,349 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 Dell XPS 15 We all know what to expect from Dell’s XPS 15 range, yet it continues to reign supreme…

I’m a sucker for true crime on Netflix: The Staircase, Making a Murderer and, most recently, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann. However, the latter obviously wasn’t on the watchlists of the staff or parents at the Cancún resort I’ve just visited. Unbelievably, the possibility of child abduction didn’t even seem to occur to them. Madeleine, if anyone needs reminding, was seemingly abducted from her family’s holiday villa in Portugal in 2007. The documentary retraces the case in minute detail that I’m not going to dive into, save for the fact that the most credible working theory is that Madeleine was snatched from her apartment while her parents dined about 50m away. I can’t believe any parent has gone on holiday since and not had the case at the back of…

If you’ve bought a laptop from an online retailer and it turns out to be faulty, you have got 14 days from the moment the goods arrive to cancel the order and seek a full refund under the Consumer Contracts Regulations. The Consumer Rights Act also puts a responsibility on traders to accurately describe the condition of any products, including faults. That’s not the case if you buy from a private seller, though. Here, they are under no obligation to highlight faults – the old phrase “sold as seen” comes into play, even if you can’t see the goods before you buy. So, if you’re sold an “Apple laptop” and it turns out to be an Apple laptop that doesn’t work, that’s the buyer’s lookout. Only if it was described…

Microsoft flew many of its top executives to Taipei, and I took the opportunity to interview Stephanie Hallford, vice president and general manager of Intel’s business client platforms. Top of the agenda was vPro, which, I admitted, had come to mean a badge in my mind rather than anything more significant. Was there a danger that this initiative, launched back in the Windows XP heyday of 2006, had lost its way? “When vPro launched, OSes were not stable. So the simple message of ‘when the OS is down, I can still get to the system’ worked. Fast forward ten years, that’s not the case anymore,” said Hallford. Then there’s the sea change in how people use computers. “We recognise that the business end user has more influence, period. Whether in…

PRICE 2GB, £37 (£44 inc VAT) from thepihut.com I won’t lie. When I heard that the long-heralded Raspberry Pi 4 Model B would – according to its creators – deliver “desktop performance comparable to entry level x86 PC systems”, I experienced a frisson of nerdy excitement. The Raspberry Pi’s lightweight design has tended to restrict it to hobbyist projects and IoT roles, rather than primary desktop or home server duties, but the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is arguably the most significant upgrade in the platform’s history. Could the humble Pi really be about to conquer the desktop? What’s new? The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is, physically, almost identical to last year’s Pi 3 Model B+ (see issue 292, p59): it comes as a bare board, retaining the familiar…

PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk Lenovo’s Smart Clock is a tiny smart display designed to sit atop your bedside table. In many ways, it’s the perfect introduction to Google’s Home ecosystem; it can do practically anything its larger stablemates can, but at £80 it’s firmly within impulse purchase territory. Dominated by its 4in screen when viewed from the front, Lenovo’s Smart Clock is a small, cute and boxy thing. Unlike Google’s Nest Hub, which resembles a tablet stuck to a pumice stone, the Lenovo speaker is a single, cohesive unit covered entirely in fabric – and it looks all the better for it. Two buttons on the top let you control the speaker’s volume, while the Smart Clock’s rectangular rear houses a USB-A port alongside a power input…

PRICE £79 (£95 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk The Corsair is the oldest case in this group, but it’s still hugely popular. Visually, it’s not showing its age. The front is made from clean, dark steel, it sits proudly on a quartet of smart feet, while the hinged side panel opens easily with a handle. The window is made from Perspex, not tempered glass, but feels sturdy. Two relatively wide air intakes ensure a steady flow into the system, especially when compared to the competing NZXT. The front has a bigger dust filter than any other case in this shootout, and there’s a magnetic dust filter on the roof, too. Build quality, at least on the outside, is the best in the group. The front and rear fan mounts all have…

PRICE £166 (£199 inc VAT) from logitech.com The curse of modern offices is the hubbub. Phones ringing, neighbours chatting, doors banging shut. Little wonder that many people plug themselves into a pair of headphones all day. Rather than seeing this as a hindrance, Logitech has decided it’s an opportunity. What if you could supply workers with high-quality, noise-cancelling headphones that stayed connected to their phone and their computer at the same time? So they would be umbilically connected to the office, while still able to shut out the world when they need to concentrate. The key to the Logitech Zone Wireless, then, is that it connects to a laptop and phone simultaneously. You first pair and connect over Bluetooth to your phone, and then plug the bundled USB dongle into…

PRICE £188 (£225 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/299watch Say what you like about Samsung: the company knows how to design stylish electronics. And this is a fine-looking timepiece. Its 1.1in watch face is circular, with a thick black bezel around the side. This manages to look like an intentional throwback to traditional watches, rather than a tacit acceptance thatt the race to end the bezel is less advanced on wearables than it is on phones. If that design sounds familiar, you’ll be thinking of the Samsung Gear Sport, which the Galaxy Watch Active updates. It has the same 360 x 360 OLED screen, GPS and heart-rate tracking built in, plus that round face. But there are changes. Firstly, the rotating bezel has gone, meaning it’s only controlled by the touchscreen and…

PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Asus, Acer and HP long ago worked out that there was a market for Chromebooks that were as sleek and stylish as their macOS and Windows equivalents, but it’s taken a while for Dell and Lenovo to join the party. The Inspiron Chromebook 14 makes the wait feel worth it. With a premium, all-metal chassis and a narrow-bezel 14in screen, it’s the kind of Chromebook that can sell to both executives and the high-end home market in competition with the best Windows devices. Photos can’t do full justice to its beautiful design, with this 2-in-1 convertible dressed in a cool grey gunmetal finish and matching lid. At a glance, it looks like a unibody design, but there is a seam at the bottom…

PRICE £541 (£649 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk We used to see Chromebooks as lightweight, secondary computers or as cheap and cheerful classroom devices, but with web-based apps evolving, more companies adopting software-as-as ervice and ubiquitous support for Android apps, a Chrome OS laptop can be a workhorse, too. The Yoga Chromebook C630 is every inch that workhorse, albeit a more flexible and versatile nag than we’re used to. It brings a 15.6in screen and a full-sized keyboard into a 2-in-1 form factor that’s surprisingly slim and light. Less than 18mm thick and 1.9kg in weight, the Chromebook C630 is a laptop you can happily lug around all day, and you can use it in the full range of clamshell, tent, tablet and stand modes. True, it’s too big and heavy…

PRICE £442 (£530 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Dell’s 2-in-1 Chromebook was built with schools in mind, but don’t let that put you off if you simply want a durable, compact laptop for your business. Like other convertibles, it can morph between clamshell, tent and tablet positions, and while at 21mm deep and 1.41kg it’s a little chunky to pass off as a tablet, it still works well as one thanks to a sensitive touchscreen and an ergonomic design. What’s more, with its Gorilla Glass screen, spill-resistant keyboard and rubberised edges it’s incredibly tough. Dell claims it has been tested beyond normal MIL-STD standards, and we can believe it. While it’s a small-screen Chromebook, with an 11.6in display, we can’t complain about its usability. The chiclet keyboard has a small left…

It’s confessions of an early adopter time. I was right in there with the early Chromebooks, buying Samsung’s second-generation model when it first came out. Like many others, I bought my first Chromebook because I wanted a cheap, ultramobile computer, so I was prepared to deal with a few sticking points and hurdles on the way. Well, safe to say I got them. Most apps only worked with a live internet connection, while those that did work offline didn’t always sync when you came back online. Image editing was a nightmare over slow hotel connections, and every workflow seemed to involve some kind of kludge. I loved that little Chromebook but actually using it could be painful. How things have changed. Chrome OS is now a sleek, usable, modern OS…

PRICE Full lifetime licence, £222 exc VAT from iperiusbackup.com If you’re looking for business-class backup on the smallest possible budget, you won’t do much better than Iperius Backup. The completely free version supports all Windows desktop and Server operating systems, while for a very reasonable £222, excluding VAT, the Full version (on test here) delivers a heap of extra protection features, including support for VMware, Hyper-V, Exchange and SQL Server, along with just about any storage destination you can think of. But there are some other costs you’ll need to factor in. The package doesn’t include cloud storage, so you’ll need to sort that out separately – although there are plenty of options, with Dropbox, Google Drive and Cloud Storage, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Iperius’ own cloud storage…

PRICE £583 exc VAT from netxl.com DrayTek is a name that’s well known to SMBs, but its latest Ethernet switches are aimed squarely at the enterprise space. The VigorSwitch G2500 and P2500 both offer a generous 50 ports, while keeping a keen eye on value. Outwardly, the two switches look identical, but while the VigorSwitch G2500 focuses on regular Ethernet, the top-dog P2500 adds Power-over- Ethernet (PoE) support into the equation. And, make no mistake, this switch is a proper powerhouse, capable of delivering up to 30W of PoE/PoE+ to each of the 44 copper Gigabit Ethernet ports, within a total power budget of 405W. That leaves just four copper ports that don’t supply power, along with six SFP fibre ports at the far right of the casing. The first…

In the real-world scenario of ensuring the best security posture for your organisation, I’m less worried about the distinction between a vulnerability and a threat than I am about how the relationship between vulnerabilities, exploits, threats and risk work together to undermine a business’ best data security efforts. That I sometimes see these terms being used in a transposable fashion by those responsible for securing data assets as well as, all too often for my liking, those who write about breaches is, frankly, disappointing in 2019. Infosec is no longer a dark art but a comprehensively documented business process: getting these things right really does go beyond semantic willy-waving. Keeping up with changes to the threat landscape, where all manner of threats exist, is key. Not all threats are created…

F’xa pcpro.link/299fxa This feminist chatbot immediately expresses a bias of its own by excluding desktop users – it only works on smartphones. The forced interactive design somewhat conceals the overall message too, and it certainly won’t help with the actual coding. Still, it presents some thought-provoking ideas about equality online. IBM pcpro.link/299ibm A much more committed and focused statement than the video-based page mentioned above. Broadly speaking, it’s an advert for IBM’s own AI projects, but it sets out some useful concepts, along with mathematical examples, links and references that can help you to smarten up your own AI projects, no matter how humble. Open Global Rights pcpro.link/299ogr This online forum and think tank makes an insightful attempt to distinguish “unfair” bias from other types. Not far beneath the surface…

San Francisco is often seen as the epicentre of the future, thanks in no small part to the proximity of Silicon Valley. Given that, it may be a surprise to find out that the city has banned the use of facial recognition systems by police and other government authorities. “I think part of San Francisco being the real and perceived headquarters for all things tech also comes with a responsibility for its local legislators,” said city supervisor Aaron Peskin, according to local media reports. “We have an outsize responsibility to regulate the excesses of technology precisely because they are headquartered here.” They’re not the only ones rethinking how such technology is used. The London Policing Ethics Panel studied Met Police trials of the technology at Notting Hill Carnival and elsewhere,…

Multicopter Picture a helicopter-style chassis, lifted from the ground by dozens of tiny rotors. This design is better for shorter flights, making it a possible contender for an air taxi. One example is the German-built Volocopter; the latest model carries two passengers at a speed of 70km/h for up to 27km. Quadcopter This time, picture a drone – but make it bigger. These are also ideal for shorter flights, with the leading example, the Chinesemade Ehang 184 AAV, capable of 100km/h speeds over 15km. And, unlike the other VTOLs, quadcopters are autonomous. Hybrids These are a mix between a quadcopter or multicopter design and a plane – imagine a helicopter with drone rotors that change position from spinning flat overhead to vertical, like a plane’s propeller. One example is the…

The news that there’s a major lawsuit between industry titans Adobe and Dolby is raising eyebrows around the world. Now before I go any further, let me be crystal clear. I am not an IP lawyer. I am simply a customer of both companies. I have, over the years, been fortunate enough to know a number of senior people in both firms, including the honour of meeting Ray Dolby a half-lifetime ago. I think both companies do great work in their various areas. And both of them have frustrated and annoyed me in almost equal measures. So I have absolutely no axe to grind with either of them and I certainly am not taking sides. The court papers, which you can digest at pcpro.link/299jon, make fascinating reading. “Dolby’s licence agreements…