Tabla de contenidos para June 2020 en PC Pro

OF THE MANY lessons Covid-19 has already delivered, the one that strikes home for me is just how much I’ve taken for granted my entire life. The effect of the virus echoes throughout this magazine. We had the idea for the “Can tech survive without China?” investigation (see p36) soon after the first cases of coronavirus emerged from Wuhan, the heartland of China’s electrical production. Having gone through weeks and months of denial, the Chinese government shut everything down. The result: a sudden halt in production of the technology we love to buy. As you’ll discover when you read the feature, China now effectively owns the production cycle from start to end and we’re almost totally dependent on one nation. And then, almost while we weren’t looking, Europe became the epicentre…

1 Microsoft goes on offensive to take out botnet Microsoft led a strategic international takedown of what was described as the world’s most prolific botnet: the nine million-machine Necurs network blamed for multiple malware and spam attacks. Although supported by industry partners and authorities, the targeted action raised eyebrows as it was led by Microsoft rather than law enforcement and involved the firm pre-emptively blocking six million domains that could be used to spread malware. 2 A Brave battle with Google Google is facing fresh legal action in Europe after the browser firm Brave accused the company of breaching the fundamentals of Europe’s GDPR by sharing data collected across its various platforms between services. According to a complaint from Brave, Google doesn’t ring-fence data collected within different strands of its…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro16in Powerhouse laptop with a price to match, from £2,399 from apple.com/uk Most people don’t need this much power, but if you know that you’ll take advantage of what the MacBook Pro offers, you won’t regret buying it. The only question is where you draw the line, with options right up to 8TB SSDs and 64GB of RAM. Whichever version you choose, you’ll benefit from an improved keyboard, spectacular screen and the best audio setup on a laptop. REVIEW Issue 305, p52 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad T490s Lenovo updates its T series with this thin yet powerful laptop. With battery life over 11 hours in our tests, it’s truly business class. From £1,214 from lenovo.com REVIEW Issue 301, p46 Razer Blade 15 Mercury White A beautifully made…

Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro. Heyearns for the days of software arriving on 12 different floppy disks. @bazzacollins It used to be the porn industry that led the way in technical innovation – or so I’m told. Nowadays, the games industry is a better barometer. Right now, it’s starting to go through the licensing pains that will soon be felt across the computing spectrum, and you’ll doubtless be shocked to hear that it’s us consumers who will feel that pain most acutely. Last month, I wrote a feature about the burgeoning games streaming services (see issue 307, p40), one of which was Nvidia GeForce Now. This arguably launched with the most enticing business model – a bring-your-own games service that allows you to play titles you’ve…

6% be wholly paid for by employers 20% be subsidised by employers 14% be subsidised by the state 6% be provided by the state, for free 54% not change from the way it’s already provided and paid for As well as the poll above, we also asked what people thought of working from home as a whole (see our feature on p28). John Winstanley commented that he’s “done it for years. Far more productive. Tech goes a long way to bridging the ‘gossip gap’ [but] it can be difficult to not ‘just do an extra 30mins’ when really you should be closing down and getting on with your own stuff.” “I’ve been working from home one day a week for years,” explained Ian Orford. “I find it a good way to avoid distractions, avoid…

RELAX. It’s hard, but if you’re constantly interrupting people or nosing around to find out what they’re up to, all your underlings will think is that you don’t trust them. And perhaps you don’t. But, ultimately, it’s better to judge people by results rather than whether you can see they’re sitting at their desk from 9am to 5pm. THINK TASKS, NOT TIME. This is a variant on “relax”, but will hopefully make it easier. Because what really matters to your business: what your employees achieve or how long they sit at a desk? In 90% of cases, it’s the former, so monitor what your employees do rather than forcing them to be constantly available on Skype or Slack. CHECK IN. This may seem like a contradiction of the previous advice,…

FIND A DEDICATED WORKSPACE Don’t work on the sofa, at the kitchen table or in any other communal space if you can avoid it. Having a dedicated workspace is important for your mindset, if nothing else. Of course, most people won’t go to the expense of creating a home office for what we all hope will be a handful of weeks of homeworking. However, setting up a table and chair in a spare bedroom – or even your own bedroom – helps isolate you from the rest of the family when you need to concentrate. Family members also need to be politely reminded to respect your workspace. Just because mum or dad are working from home doesn’t mean that they can be interrupted every five minutes. GET A KEYBOARD AND…

The cancellations began with Mobile World Congress (MWC), the annual mobile show held annually in Barcelona. Only two weeks before the massive show was set to open, MWC was cancelled by the GSMA after a string of high-profile attendees dropped out, citing health concerns for their employees. It’s not the only tech event to be hit by the coronavirus outbreak. Facebook’s F8, Google’s I/O and many more have been cancelled to avoid spreading the virus, while companies such as Amazon temporarily banned corporate travel. “MWC is typically the largest, most important show for the mobile industry,” said Marina Koytcheva, an analyst at CSS Insight. “Much happens there: products are launched, it’s a stage for companies to share their success stories, and of course the most important thing is that a…

Laptops and PCs We run our own benchmarks on every Windows and macOS system we test. These are based around image editing, video editing and multitasking (where we run the video-editing benchmark while simultaneously playing back a 4K video). At the bottom of each laptop and PC review, you’ll find the system’s score in each of these tests, plus an overall score. If a laptop scores 70, say, then it’s 30% slower than our reference system – a PC with a Core i7-4670K and 8GB of RAM. If it scores 160, then it’s 60% faster. We test laptop battery life by playing back a full-screen video until the battery runs out. We set the screen brightness to 170cd/m2, or as close as we can get using its settings, and switch…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/308cyber Just as “nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM” in the 1980s, it seems that no PC manufacturer will ever be blamed for combining AMD Ryzen processors with Nvidia graphics cards today. It’s become the de facto computing engine of almost every desktop PC we’ve reviewed in the past two years, from budget systems right up to monster £10,000 workstations. So the question then becomes: which CPU should go with which GPU? With only £999 to play with, Cyberpower opts for the mid-range six-core AMD Ryzen 5 3600, which won a PC Pro Recommended award four months ago (see issue 304, p62), but dedicates the majority of its budget to the RTX 2060 – an excellent choice for 1080p gaming. For proof,…

PRICE $133 from gearbest.com There are times when bringing your big, heavy and expensive flagship phone doesn’t make sense. Whether you’re heading off on a hiking trip or down to the beach, sometimes a “burner” phone fits the bill: something small, cheap, rugged and fully functional. Something like the Cubot Kingkong Mini. Being smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and barely heavier at 100g, it’s easy to forget you’ve got the Cubot Kingkong Mini in your pocket. I almost put my review handset in the washing machine after forgetting I’d left it in my trousers. Mind you, it might have survived. The top, bottom and four corners of the phone are protected by thick rubber bumpers while the sides boast screwed-on alloy protection bars. The two halves of the device…

3 CX picked up PC Pro’s A-List award last month, with Dave Mitchell concluding: “With easy deployment, plenty of call features and pricing to suit organisations of all sizes, 3CX Phone System is very hard to fault.”And those features just keep on growing in number. As anyone who already uses 3CX will know, the company is constantly listening to its users: whether that’s implementing customer requests or tweaking existing functionality. Often, though, the biggest changes come as it spots a new opportunity. Here, we explore just a few of the new features rolled out in the past few months, and find out how web chat can enhance your business. New 3CX Android app The 3CX Android app always allowed you to bring your office communications with you wherever you go,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO A lot has changed in the past 20 years. At the turn of the millennium, KDE was less than two years old, work had begun on GNOME just a few months before and Microsoft clearly saw Linux as a threat, rather than something to embrace. Today, Linux underpins macOS, Android and iOS, it’s been integrated into Windows and pure Linux environments are as attractive, easy to use and fully featured as a “mainstream”, charged-for OS. Moreover, the client applications, including LibreOffice and GIMP, are accomplished enough that switching to Linux should no longer be seen as a compromise. It’s different, but that doesn’t make it less suited to business use. It’s been core to IBM’s systems strategy for the past two decades, with Big Blue investing $1 billion…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO WEBSITE getfedora.org Fedora is the freely distributable offshoot of Red Hat, offering versions for standalone computers, servers, cloud computing, containers and IoT devices. We opted for the first, Workstation release 31, and installed it from a live image. We’d expect this build to be supported until around November this year, by which point Fedora 33 should be ready for download. (Fedora’s typical release cycle lasts six months, with only the two latest releases supported, so each installation is “current” for around 13 months, giving one month’s grace for slow upgraders to get themselves up to date.) It was extremely easy to install. The live system picked up our Wi-Fi hardware, allowing us to connect to our wireless network pre-installation, and the settings carried through to the version set…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO WEBSITE manjaro.org The Manjaro live USB detected our wireless card right away. We didn’t need to install any drivers or write any scripts to configure it, allowing us to get online even before we’d clicked install. Once the distro was running from our hard drive, entering the Wi-Fi password for a second time made the connection permanent, and it downloaded and installed over 700MB of updates. We were fully patched and ready for business within 15 minutes of downloading the Manjaro ISO. Our touchpad, which has been a pain point throughout these tests, didn’t stop working when we slept and woke our laptop, as happened to varying degrees with the majority of distributions on test, but it did forget how to scroll with two fingers. Bizarrely, Manjaro’s developers…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO WEBSITE ubuntu.com Ubuntu is celebrating its 15th anniversary, during which time it’s built itself a loyal following. It isn’t difficult to see why. It’s well supported, easy on the eye and simple to install. It’s based on Debian and available in both client and server editions. We used Rufus to burn Ubuntu 19.10 (“Eoan Ermine”) to a USB stick and installed directly from the boot menu, without first entering live mode. Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu every six months, with long-term support (LTS) releases every other year. Although 19.10 is the latest release, the most recent revision with LTS is 18.04 (“Bionic Beaver”) for which mainstream support is guaranteed until at least 2023. Non-LTS versions are supported for nine months, giving a three-month grace period to…

PRICE £703 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Brother’s MFC-L9570CDW is the company’s flagship A4 colour laser MFP. It’s designed for workgroups of up to ten users and includes an old-school fax modem, as well as the expected print, scan and copy functions. That inclusive personality extends to connections too. You can hook it up via USB, Ethernet or 802.11n, and there’s also built-in support for NFC, Wi-Fi Direct, AirPrint and more cloud services than you can shake a stick at. Print-wise, it’s a nippy performer. We found its quoted speed of 31ppm perfectly achievable in the real world: our 31-page Word document was delivered at 600dpi in precisely 60 seconds, with a wait of less than ten seconds for the first page. The printer had no problems with our 24-page colour…

It’s expensive to run, but this desk-friendly colour laser delivers good output quality, security and print features PRICE £176 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Lexmark’s MC3224adwe is one of the smallest MFPs around, with a footprint of just 411 x 394mm. That will appeal to businesses that are short on office space – as will its feature set, which includes duplex printing plus scan, copy and fax services, support for either wired or wireless connections and a 7.2cm colour touchscreen. The other thing that’s eye-catching about this particular model is its very low price, but be warned: cheap printers tend to be expensive to run, and the MC3224adwe is no exception. Its toner cartridges are only good for 1,500 pages each, which at current prices means you’ll be paying…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO The myth of the paperless office died long ago. Sometimes it seems that computers exist only to promote the continuation of the paper business. It’s not even as if we need all of these hard copies – a 2010 survey suggested that two-thirds of all office printouts were immediately discarded – yet printing remains a core capability for most businesses. That’s partly because business records are primarily kept on paper. The UK requires certain types of document to be stored for seven years, and anecdotes abound of some inspector wanting to see original printouts, where the laser toner is starting to crack off the page, accompanied by fading highlighter marks and the ballpoint signatures of long-departed staff. The physical document, for them, is the expression of authenticity. The…

Some companies run their own bug bounty programmes, paying a range of rewards to hackers who discover flaws and vulnerabilities. The odds are, however, that your organisation isn’t really geared up to deal with that sort of thing – so your easiest course of action is to sign up with a bug bounty platform. As the name suggests, a bug bounty platform is a centralised service where you can promote bounties for finding certain types of bug in specific products. The platform acts as a middleman, handling the crowdsourcing of ethical hackers and the initial validation of reported vulnerabilities – which makes the whole process almost effortless from your end. Using such a platform also helps ensure that your product receives wide and diverse scrutiny, as bounty hunters naturally frequent…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO “There’s no point receiving an alert saying that your granny fell over an hour ago” Paul looks at a camera setup that eschews Wi-Fi to eke out the battery, and solves a data problem by abusing SQL functions Someone on Twitter recently asked me to cover more battery-powered cloud cameras in this column. Anyone considering a truly wireless camera setup used to have a choice of just Arlo from Netgear (now spun off into a separate company) and Blink (now owned by Amazon). All of the other small cameras either needed a power supply or only had local storage. But now there are loads of them, all competing on a combination of price, battery longevity, picture quality and the cost of the associated cloud storage facilities. Let’s start…

“The vendor had turned the file-sharing device into a combination of ticking time bomb and brick” @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Steve takes a trip down memory lane to discover that FreeNAS is glitzier than ever, but finds himself trapped in an unsolvable storage conundrum Nobody could have been more surprised than me to find, on re-downloading my favourite file server freeware, that it now supports virtual machines. It has to be the biggest case of the tail wagging the dog: I started using NAS devices and their freeware stablemates because I wanted to make better use of VMware on Windows Server, which meant not disturbing the running setup of a live customer machine, while at the same time getting a massive boost in usable storage. The right answer in what was ordinarily…

From Cranfield to Sunderland, the car navigated 230 miles of lanes, roundabouts and junctions – all without a driver. This was HumanDrive’s “Grand Drive”, a£13.5 million project run by a consortium led by the government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles and Innovate UK, alongside Nissan engineers. It was the longest autonomous car journey yet attempted in the UK. The project used a combination of GPS, radar, Lidar and cameras embedded on a Nissan Leaf to see the road ahead, letting it change lanes, merge, stop and start as required – beginning ona winding country lane, transitioning ontoa roundabout and exiting ontoa motorway. “You don’t find that in the US, we don’t find that in China,” said David Moss, senior vice president of research and development at Nissan, explaining why…

Next month’s issue On sale Thursday 14 May LABS Mesh Wi-Fi extenders If you want rock solid Wi-Fi throughout your home or business, mesh Wi-Fi is often the best choice. We put 19 contenders to the test. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim your very own 26-piece PC repair kit. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES How to video conference like a pro Now so many of us are working from home, we need to learn new remote communication skills. We explain how to avoid the gaffes… Run Windows 7 on Windows 10 As part of our “life after Windows 7” series, we provide a 12-step guide to turning your Windows 7 installation into a…

Nik Rawlinson If you have a Windows 7 machine that you want to keep running, Nik has the answer courtesy of eight Linux distros. See p78 Dick Pountain As we move from face-to-face services to their digital twins, Dick explains why learning in particular needs to be treated differently. Turn to p22 Dave Mitchell Buying an office printer is a long-term investment, but luckily Dave is here to help through a mixture of reviews and purchasing advice. See p96 Nicole Kobie Nicole set out to discover how much control China has over the worldwide technology supply chain. The answer is frightening, as you’ll find from p36…

Vecnos 360 camera You may not have heard of Vecnos, but the firm’s fledgling foray into the camera market after flying the nest from parent company Ricoh sees the launch of a 360˚ camera pitched at the consumer market. Leaning on technology first explored at professional-focussed Ricoh with its Theta 360 camera, Vecnos says the new hardware features a four-lens optical system, with three lenses circling the tip of the shaft and another sitting on the device’s head. The main point of difference from competitors, such as the Insta360, lies in its slender pen-like shape, which the company argues makes the device less bulky than rivals. There are only two buttons on the side of the camera. Stitched-together images captured by the quartet of lenses can be edited and manipulated…

Imagine moving into a newly built house, firm of foundation and paintwork fresh, only to discover that the broadband in the building isn’t what was promised – or isn’t switched on for months after you’ve moved in. That’s too often the case in new-build homes as developers appear to see broadband provision as either a cash cow or an afterthought, with no ducting in the designs and no cabling within walls for internet access points around the home. Despite upcoming changes to building regulations that will push more responsibility onto developers (see boxout below) several issues can leave customers with services that don’t match expectations. Take Carl Thomas, a network specialist who paid almost £400,000 for his property in a new-build development, at least partly because it was sold as…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He always notices the “Remember me” box three milliseconds after he’s hit Return. Online booking is one of the more noticeable ways in which computer technology has changed our lives for the better. See an advert for a concert, play or movie – perhaps on paper or on Facebook – and in a few keystrokes you have your e-tickets, removing the chore of collecting them from the box office. But online booking has also shown me some of the limitations of the virtual world. For example, EasyJet’s website was once so laggy that I thought I was clicking 6 August, but the dropdown hadn’t updated so the tickets were for 5 August. Ouch. Admittedly, that was ten years ago. More recently, I…

Call that liberation? I’ve just read Jon Honeyball’s column (see issue 307, p111), in which he claims to feel liberated by a battery case for an iPhone 11 Pro Max. I have some suggestions that would liberate him further, all of which start with buying something like my Redmi Note 7, which cost less than his case alone. Its battery lasts me through the busiest of days without dropping below 50%. Maybe the camera isn’t quite as good, but I can’t think of a single other thing my phone lacks over an iPhone (although I can think of a few plus points). With the gobsmacking saving of about £1,150, he could fly to Brisbane and swim the Great Barrier Reef, learn to fly a glider or maybe liberate his spirit…

The kit The tools The hacks Have our lives changed forever? As we struggle through the first few weeks of enforced isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it certainly feels like it. Empty trains, no football matches, closed pubs – it’s the precise opposite of Britain as we know it. For over a century, we’ve become used to working in an office as the de facto choice. If you work in cities, that means the daily grind of public transport, where your nose would often be forced unpleasantly close to someone else’s armpit. If you work in less congested areas, perhaps your commute was a more sedate drive – albeit with annoying rush-hour traffic. Now we live in a world where we’re actively told to work from home. It’s a…

SLACK Slack is now the default form of internal communication inside many companies, nudging email to one side. It’s organised by channels, and these can range in size from two people discussing a sub-project to entire company-wide announcements. All messages are published in chronological order, which can make it difficult to keep up – although Slack does support threaded conversations, these are poorly implemented, which means keeping channels tightly focused is essential. Direct messaging and voice/video calls to individuals or small groups is also possible. One of Slack’s great strengths is its integrations. Drop a link to a Google Doc in a channel, for example, and you’ll get a notification when someone comments on the doc; you can add new cards to a project’s Trello board without leaving Slack; previews…

The Foxconn campus in Zhengzhou employs 200,000 workers, which is about the same population of Peterborough. It covers a staggering 1.4 million square metres, so is four times the size of the cathedral city. The factories are normally bustling, busy assembling phones for Apple, Huawei and Samsung. But as news of the novel coronavirus spread at the beginning of February, work at such plants was abruptly halted on Chinese government orders. Many workers had returned to their hometowns for Lunar New Year celebrations and were told not to return until the epidemic waned; when they did come back, those from affected areas were forced into quarantine for up to two weeks, leaving production lines understaffed and employees from Hubei province and others with coronavirus locked down in company apartments. For…

Google Chrome was launched back in 2008, and since 2012 it’s been the web’s number one browser, currently accounting for around two-thirds of all website visits. That means there’s a good chance you’re using it – but it’s also a fair bet that you haven’t discovered all of the tricks and features available in recent versions. Here’s our guide to getting the best from the desktop browser, along with some tips for the Android edition. Of course, there’s a galaxy of plugins available at the Chrome Web Store that can extend your experience in all sorts of ways, but we’ll focus on the many powerful features that are built into the standard installation. 001 Expert search tricks One of the things we do most frequently in our browsers is search.…

PRICE £3,333 (£4,000 inc VAT) from razer.com For regular readers, the Razer Blade 15 range will need no introduction. If you were looking for a slim, stylish laptop that could also play cutting-edge games, it’s been the clear winner for over a year. Now, Razer has upped the stakes by introducing Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 5000 graphics to create a stonkingly powerful mobile workstation. For slimness and style, only the Radeon Pro-equipped 16in Apple MacBook Pro (see issue 305, p52) comes close. Rendering speed You can buy the Razer Blaze 15 in a variety of configurations, but if you want Quadro RTX levels of power, there’s only one choice. Nor is it a cheap one at £4,000 once you factor in VAT. That investment will buy you a satisfyingly powerful collection…

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra As exciting as it is expensive, this is the best Android phone on the market – but we have quibbles PRICE 128GB, £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from samsung.com Galaxy Fold and Z Flip (see p50) notwithstanding, the S20 Ultra is Samsung’s most expensive smartphone to date. It’s packed with Samsung firsts: a 108-megapixel camera, 8K video recording and an outrageous 100x zoom. And while we’ve seen 120Hz screens on gaming phones, this is its first appearance on a “mainstream” device. Along with the rest of the S20 lineup, the S20 Ultra is also the first Galaxy phone to be powered by Samsung’s latest flagship Exynos 990 mobile chipset. With built-in support for 5G, 12GB of RAM and a minimum of 128GB of storage – the 512GB…

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…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £208(£250 inc VAT) from hihonor.com This is the follow-up to the rather good Honor 9X. As you might expect, the word Pro means it comes with more processing grunt, with the Kirin 710 processor subbed out for a 2.27GHz octa-core Kirin 810. The 6GB of RAM remains the same but there’s also a generous 256GB of internal storage, which can be expanded via microSD cards. All of these are positive enhancements over the “non-Pro” version, but this is the first Honor phone to be hit by the US’ brouhaha with Huawei, which means no Google Play store and no Google apps. From a design point of view, the Honor 9X Pro is a thing of beauty for the price. For a 6.6in handset, it’s surprisingly sleek with…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Adata SC680 480GB PRICE £65 (£78 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The SC680 is the lightest SSD here, and its dimensions make it one of the smallest. Its £78 price is very cheap – at 17.4p per gigabyte, it’s barely more expensive than the WD My Passport Go and costs less than the Seagate. This hasn’t stopped Adata throwing in both USB Type-A to Type-C and Type-C to Type-C cables, though. The low price means two compromises: there’s no encryption, and the exterior is flimsy compared to its rivals. In our real-world tests, the SC680’s took less than 15secs to read 500MB of files, among the best here, and its write speeds were competitive. The same could be said for the SC680’s write speeds in Atto, but its read…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO 1 Download Rufus Rufus is a small, free utility that extracts ISOs onto USB drives and sets them up for booting. All of the distributions on test this month were installed in this manner, either from the live OS or a specific install menu that appears at boot. You don’t need to install Rufus, so download it from rufus.ie and launch it from Windows’ Downloads folder. 2 Download Linux Once you’ve chosen a version of Linux, download an ISO of its desktop, workstation or client version. Frequently, each will be available for a variety of processor architectures, so make sure you choose the appropriate distribution for your PC, which will almost certainly be marked as either x86_64 or AMD64. 3 Select the distro and drive Plug in a…

WEBSITE linuxmint.com The version of Mint you’ll most likely encounter is based on Ubuntu, but there’s another branch that cuts out the middleman; this uses Debian (on which Ubuntu is based) as its starting point. Either way, Mint doesn’t look much like its parents, thanks to its distinctive desktop language, Cinnamon. It’s getting a lot of favourable attention, with many hailing it as the next “big thing”. The same is true of MX Linux. We installed version 19.3 Tricia. As with Ubuntu, the process was fuss-free, although our Wi-Fi card wasn’t operative on first booting. This was only fixed once we’d shared a 3G connection from our iPhone and updated the OS. Mint also suffered from an unresponsive touchpad upon wake, as did several others. The fix, as it had…

WEBSITE mxlinux.org We had some trouble installing MX Linux, but it was well worth persevering. The main hurdle was that it froze halfway through booting the live USB; only by switching to the text view did we realise that it was waiting for us to log in at the command prompt. We did so, using the default root password, but then it couldn’t start the window server. An online search turned up plenty of advice (it wasn’t an unknown issue), with several forum posts suggesting that we update the kernel. This is easy enough so long as you have a second PC to hand that can boot from your USB stick. From there, opening MX Tools lets you update the kernel on the live USB, write it back to the…

WEBSITE zorinos.com Zorin OS is another of the many flavours of Linux based on Ubuntu. However, one of its key marketing points is its resemblance to Windows – in looks if nothing else – and the comparison is valid; you’ll quickly feel at home if you’re switching from Windows 7. Particularly neat is the way it handles the windows of apps that stay resident when closed (Slack, for example), dropping active menus to the right of the taskbar for quickly reopening them or skipping straight to specific windows or features. Mount a share, or several, and they will appear here, too, where clicking the eject button lets you skip to the one you need. Installation was a cinch, but again we encountered problems with Wi-Fi (initially, there wasn’t any), and…

PRICE £243 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk The old wisdom would have you believe that only laser printers are suitable for business use. That hasn’t been true for many years, though – and Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF-C5710DWF makes a compelling argument for inkjets in the workplace. Along with a low acquisition cost, this small-footprint MFP offers a speedy 24ppm print rate, every imaginable connection option and laser-busting running costs. That’s down to Epson’s replaceable ink pack system, which delivers mono pages for just 1.1p and colour for 4.8p. Notably, that works out the same whether you opt for the 3,000-page or 5,000-page capacity refills, so you can choose whichever you find more convenient. While the WF-C5710DWF is a great-value MFP, it doesn’t skimp on features. It serves up print, copy, scan…

PRICE £115 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk The first thing that strikes you about the SkyKey is its size. Weighing a mere 79g, it 100 EnGenius EWS accesss points (APs) and network switches via the free ezMaster software. Indeed, it’s so tiny that you may not need to make use of the included mounting brackets: EnGenius has cleverly given the box a magnetic back, allowing it to clamp securely to the side of a rack cabinet. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports sit on the left-hand side, while on the other end there’s a microSD card slot for configuration backups, plus a socket for the optional power adapter. You may not need that, though, as the first Ethernet socket also supports PoE. Deploying the SkyKey took just a few minutes. After connecting the…

In researching this piece, one of my most valuable resources has been an electronics recycling facility, familiarly known as the “pink dumpster”. I don’t know the relevance of the paint job, but I can tell you that it’s located in the middle of a 3,000-dwelling estate, and since it arrived I’ve seen it filled with around £25,000 of printers of all makes, sizes and technologies. Clearly, throwing away perfectly working hardware is about as un-green as you can get, and as it happens I’ve also had the opportunity to rescue and test numerous items, to see just how many were really defunct. I’d say as many as one in seven was fully functional, while a further two were fixable with the use of tools. Notably, a lot of the throwaways…

“I can exclusively reveal to you that Intel’s thirteenth generation of CPU will come from Huddersfield” @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO As Windows XP, Vista and 7 machines arrive in their droves, Lee tackles the problem of transferring old photos – and then creates Intel Doctor Whos Wexit continues to dominate our working lives as people arrive in the shop clutching Windows 7 machines. Microsoft should receive a smattering of applause for the way it’s conducted the execution of Windows 7’s demise as much older systems have also been smoked out. Since Christmas, I’ve seen more PCs on Vista and XP than in the previous three years. This is easily explained, as many home users don’t know what OS they’re running. They don’t know because there isn’t a requirement to care: providing Outlook…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO People want self-driving cars, but they’re going to have to wait years, if not decades, for them – and also walk to a legal pickup point. That’s one of the lessons from one of the largest trials of driverless cars, run by Lyft, a ride-hailing rival to Uber. “The first self-driving trip will be on a ride-sharing network for most people,” said Raj Kapoor, chief strategy officer and head of self-driving at Lyft. That’s because such vehicles are and will remain too expensive for most people, but also because the technology will have limited abilities for many years to come. “For now until at least a decade if not longer, these vehicles are limited in capability. They can do certain streets and certain conditions.” The company is running…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Writing this in mid-March, it’s hard to know how far the coronavirus outbreak will spread, and what outcomes will result. All of us at PC Pro hope that you and your loved ones are well, and that we all get to the other side of this in one piece. I’ll skip over the obvious madness of panic-buying toilet rolls, if you don’t mind. But it’s clear to me that this will be a tipping point. The world will not be the same afterwards: such a jolting shock to the system, to the normal daily routine, will have irrevocable consequences, many of which are not obvious at this time. The news that the airlines are in trouble is no surprise, of course, because many countries are closing their borders.…

GOVERNMENT PLANS TO levy a Digital Services Tax (DST) on US technology giants are likely to falter in trade negotiations, experts have told PC Pro. In a Spring Budget containing measures designed to boost digital businesses, the chancellor made several pledges, from a previously peddled £5 billion on fibre broadband to further billions on research and development. However, plans to impose taxes on tech giants could be dropped under pressure from foreign governments and UK businesses, raising questions about how the new initiatives will be funded – even before the coronavirus crisis. Following the lead of several other European countries, the UK laid out plans for a 2% Digital Services Tax to harvest some of the wealth generated in the UK by largely American tech firms. But with the UK…

NEWLY DISCOVERED WEAKNESSES in multiple Intel and AMD processors could enable industrial espionage and state hacking, according to security experts. The warning is the latest in a series of “side-channel” weaknesses that emerged in 2017 with the Spectre and Meltdown attacks that target the way processors deal with data passing through memory. While the latest threats are unlikely to impact home users, businesses and cloud computing platforms may be vulnerable, and in the case of Intel’s processors the only surefire solution is to replace them with newer chips. “For side-channel attacks to work, you need to be running software on the same computer so they are more likely in a cloud environment,” said Jethro Beekman, of cloud security specialist Fortanix. According to Beekman, the difficulty of attacks would deter casual hackers,…

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has moved to improve broadband provision in new-builds, with plans to make gigabit broadband provision a legal requirement, but some will still be left in the slow lane. “Government will require developers in England to install gigabit-capable infrastructure and, subject to a cost cap, a gigabit-capable connection,” the DCMS explained in a policy consultation response on new-build regulations. The plans would see infrastructure providers such as Virgin and Openreach obliged to make a contribution to supply new-build sites, but developers would be expected to make up any shortfall – up to a point. In many cases, Openreach and Virgin are happy to provide fibre connections for free because it gives them access to new customers, but their willingness to invest in…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. Her only boss while working from home is the dog, who today stole the fancy work chair because it was the sunniest spot in the house. Fair enough. @njkobie The coronavirus has sent the nation home to work, for those who can, and that’s sparked an outbreak of earnestness from freelancers across the nation, armed with tips and advice on how to survive working from home. Twitter is flooded with advice such as “get dressed” and “go for a walk”, while newspapers and tech sites alike share tips like “maintain normal hours” and “use collaboration tools”. PC Pro itself dedicates eight pages of this issue to this very topic (see p28) in which Barry suggests you should avoid distractions, and not leave the…

My cyber resilience is reasonably proficient. I have a DrayTek router with a 4G dongle in my home server rack, which had been useful when the BT Openreach filter plate on my telephone socket made my connection fall over. However, a few weeks ago, I was working into the small hours – using the internet to prepare for a meeting later that day – when my connection suddenly went down. I thought my 4G dongle would kick in, but my mobile phone had no signal, even when I went outside. I tried the house phone but that was dead too. As I needed to get some fuel, I headed to a 24-hour petrol station and passed a load of BT Openreach engineers updating the main fibre-optic cable out of the…

MOUSE BUDGET £9 TO£100 You really don’t want to spend the next three months using your trackpad, so the sooner you invest in a proper mouse, the better. We’ve tested the £9 Tecknet Wireless Mouse (pcpro.link/308teck) and found it shockingly good for the money. Or you could treat yourself to the £35 Logitech M590 Silent Mouse (pcpro. link/308log1) if you want a blissfully quiet environment. But the king of mice? That has to be the Logitech MX Master 3, which costs an admittedly meaty £100 from logitech.com. KEYBOARD BUDGET £19 TO £100 Just as the Logitech MX Master 3 is the king of mice, so the Logitech MX Keys (see issue 303, p75) is the king of domestic keyboards. This stylish wireless keyboard can pair with three computers (including Macs…

You’ve got a supply of hand sanitiser, have sent staff to work from home and have upgraded your plan with your videoconferencing supplier. There’s little else you can do to prepare for disruption such as coronavirus, says Tim Jennings, research director for enterprise IT at analyst firm Omdia. “The more immediate impact on IT departments will be the need to support a greater number of employees working from home, and more remote collaboration between office locations and with customers,” Jennings said. “A good business continuity plan should already cater for such a scenario, but some organisations will not have stress-tested this at scale, and could encounter problems.” If staff aren’t already using collaboration tools, now is a good time to learn – Microsoft and Google are both offering temporary free…

PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from samsung.com There have been many pivotal moments in the history of the smartphone. The early success of Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry, the emergence of capacitive screens. The move away from keyboards to a full-screen touch interface with the original iPhone, which directly led to the shift from “it’s a clever phone” to “a do-anything mobile computing super-platform”. As such, the move to a phone that you can fold in half might not seem such a big deal. But it is. Take the Z Flip to the pub, as I did before the virus hit, place it on the bar counter and open the screen. Conversation ceases. Eyes pop. “No way” is heard, along with “show me that again”. You show it folding and grown…

PRICE £624 (£749 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk If there’s one thing the Huawei MateBook D 15 (see issue 307, p64) showed us last month, it’s that you don’t need to sacrifice quality even if you’re on a budget. That £600 machine featured a full-metal body Stanley Kubrick would have been proud of, while racing through our benchmarks with a total score of 112. At £149 more, the Aspire 5 only features a metal lid and scored 87. What gives? The biggest difference is that Acer supplies a tenth-gen Intel Core CPU where Huawei used a third-gen Ryzen 5 chip. While faster, th the AMD processor simply isn’t as power-efficient, a fact that’s hammered home by the Acer Aspire’s 9hrs 45mins of battery life in our video-rundown test, in contrast to 5hrs…

The iPhone 11 Pro Max’s camera is far more adept in low light, capturing colours much more vividly than the Galaxy S20+ This pair of photos clearly demonstrates the amazing power of the 100x zoom in the Galaxy S20 Ultra Here’s a 100% crop of two shots taken by the S20, one at 3x optical zoom and one with the 30x “Space Zoom” – the difference is clear The S20+ has a 30x hybrid zoom, but its optical zoom alone makes its presence felt against the iPhone 11 Pro Max Both the S20 and iPhone 11 take great photos in most conditions, but we marginally prefer the iPhone for its more natural colours @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO…

PRICE £183 (£220 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/308moto The Moto G8 Power is more than a simple annual upgrade of the Moto G7 Power (see issue 295, p51). While last year’s model cost £180 and sat near the bottom of the G7 range, the G8 Power costs £220 and sits near the top. Not only has the processor been upgraded from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 to the 665, but Motorola has doubled the RAM from 2GB to 4GB, while boosting the screen’s resolution to 1080p. And there are now four cameras at your disposal, encompassing everything from telephoto photography to closeup macro shots. The “Power” part of the name is still the same, though, referring to electricity rather than processing grunt. The battery is a 5,000mAh whopper, which is the same…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £495 (£594 inc VAT) from eizo.co.uk While Eizo may have earned its reputation on the basis of sheer colour accuracy, the EV2760 isn’t aimed at the niche industries of creative design. This 27in 1440p monitor is perfectly suited to any office, and Eizo is hoping that you’ll buy more than one per desk: note the slim bezels at the top, left and right to make multi-monitor setups easier. Those bezels help to make the EV2760 one of the most attractive monitors Eizo has made – it’s certainly the most attractive one that I’ve tested over the past 20 years – and if you fancy a change from black, it’s also available in white. I would genuinely describe this Eizo monitor as stylish. If you are tempted to…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Windows 7 has just turned ten and, to celebrate, Microsoft ended support for  its most popular operating system to date. Around a third of all computers still run it, and if yours is among them we have some bad news: there’s no such thing as safety in numbers. It’s time to consider your moving options. In many cases, this will be an upgrade to Windows 10 but, if you’re running older hardware or are in the mood for a change, perhaps it’s time for another look at Linux. Our very own Jon Honeyball has fallen for the charms of Linux Mint – and we can understand why – but Mint is far from the only flavour on offer. In this month’s Labs, we put eight distributions through their paces,…

WEBSITE elementary.io In the unlikely instance you didn’t want to reveal you were using Linux, this is the distribution you’d choose. Even without any tweaks, the Pantheon desktop is bright and welcoming, with an air of macOS. In large part this is thanks to its choice of fonts and the centralised dock (or “Plank”) that gives quick access to favourite apps and slides off the screen when you maximise a window. Elementary OS founder and CEO Daniel Foré addressed this in a myth buster posted on the Elementary blog (pcpro.link/308ele), stating that “we have less in common with OS X than others would have you believe”. If you’re coming from Windows (or a Mac), it does have a few quirks, but you’ll likely be over them within the first hour.…

A Linux operating system isn’t a single entity, but a collection of files, scripts and executables that work together to present an interface and manage the underlying environment. Together, those assets are known as a distribution, or “distro”. Whichever flavour of Linux you choose to install, it will have several recognisable components in common with its rivals. ■ Kernel This is what it all comes down to. Without the kernel, there would be no Linux. It sits directly above your hardware to provide an interface between the software layer and your processor, memory, storage and so on. It can be added to on the fly as and when the system needs to access a device driver, and its similarity to Unix is what defines Linux as a Unix-like operating system,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO WEBSITE opensuse.org OpenSUSE has one of the best thought-out installers on test. There are plenty of manual options for tweaking the defaults, most of which are self-explanatory. Our Wi-Fi was up and running in advance of the install, allowing it to trawl for updates prior to our first full boot. We were also pleased that the touchpad didn’t clam up entirely after putting the laptop through a sleep/wake cycle, although it did lose its two-finger scroll features until a full reboot. Mouse scroll wheels continued to work fine. The other anomaly was non-functioning sound, both in and out. Plugging in a USB sound source unblocked this in both directions, so the problem was confined to our internal hardware. openSUSE scored highly for “look and feel”. It has a…

Practical buying and strategic advice for IT managers and decision makers Investing in a multifunction printer (MFP) can help small businesses make big savings. By bringing print, copy and scan functions together into a single device, a MFP cuts your hardware costs while improving workflow efficiencies. The latest models can also help you cut down on consumables by sending documents directly to specified network locations, recipients and cloud services, rather than having to distribute multiple hard copies. It’s not just about money, either. Printers, copiers and scanners are bulky things. Bringing those functions into one central location lets you make the most of your office space, as well as making it easy for managers to keep an eye on usage. The popularity of MFPs means there’s a huge range to…

PRICE £769 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Sitting at the top of Kyocera’s Ecosys family of A4 colour MFPs, the M6635cidn combines a wealth of features with exceptionally low printing costs. Its high-capacity toner cartridges deliver mono and colour pages for only 1p and 5.1p, so while the initial purchase price may seem high, it’s an investment that will pay off handsomely over time. The M6635cidn also supports Kyocera’s HyPAS app platform, opening up a wide library of apps providing features such as colour control and cloud printing. To use it you simply need to install a standard SD card into the slot at the rear of the printer: a 4GB card supports up to five apps, while the 32GB card we used for testing upped this to 16. The catch…

PRICE 50-99 users per year, £23.80 each (exc VAT) from safesendsoftware.com @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO We’ve all experienced that sinking feeling after accidentally sending an email to the wrong recipient. If it’s an internal message, you may still be able to recall it – but if it’s gone to someone outside of your company there may be nothing you can do. At best, it’s an embarrassment; at worst, if your message contained confidential or personal information, you could be looking at a hefty fine. SafeSend Email Security is a small add-in for Outlook that’s designed to eliminate that risk. It achieves this partly by requiring users to review all external email recipients and confirm that they’re correct before the message can be released. There’s a lot more than this to the software,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO ▪Bug bounties? Presumably we’re not talking about outlaw insects? Well, there’s an insect link: the use of the word “bug” for a computer error has been attributed to Grace Hopper who, back in 1947, supposedly traced the cause of a computing problem to a dead moth caught in a relay. Whether that really happened or not, bug hunting in the metaphorical sense remains something that every computer programmer needs to be au fait with. The problem is that, with the best will in the world, no individual (or team) can ever be truly certain that any moderately complex application or service is 100% bug-free. Hence, the idea of a “bug bounty” – a monetary reward offered by a company to any outsider who discovers and reports a security…

“Having trusted DNS is a big deal, but you need to consider who you are trusting and why” Jon explains why you should think about how your browser handles DNS, falls for the Samsung Z Flip and finds the (almost) perfect keyboard It’s a fascinating time to be looking at web browsers and their power. Back in the early days, we went through a series of rapid expansion of capabilities and the “browser wars” kicked in with a vengeance. Numerous browsers came and went but Internet Explorer, after a slow start, ruled the desktop. And then Chrome arrived. Today, Chrome has somewhere around 50% of the market share, depending on the stats you believe. Internet Explorer and the Microsoft-powered Edge have now bowed out, with their main use within Windows…

“The vulnerability even got its own logo, and you know things are bad when a vulnerability gets a logo” @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Why Gmail users have machine “deep learning” to thank for a security boost while iPhone users should rest easy over the Krook vulnerability As a small business user, what’s your email solution? For the longest time, and I mean decades, the answer I heard was almost always Microsoft Outlook in some form or other. At the very small end of the small business market it may well have been Outlook as part of a standard Office install, moving to Exchange as the businesses, and their demands, got larger. Then, in recent years, two things happened: the larger small business increasingly started saying “Microsoft Office 365” with Exchange Online, while…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Futures We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future HumanDrive’s “Grand Drive” The project that pulled off a driverless trip to Sunderland p126 Lyft’s self-driving trials What the Uber rival gleaned from its 100,000 test rides p127 What’s next for Britain’s roads? How 5G, scooters and flying taxis might transform our travel p128 Electric scooters. Hyperloops. Driverless cars – or even flying ones. These are the technologies most of us think of when picturing transport of the future, but there’s a revolution happening in roads too. Forget controversial “smart motorways”, with their changing directional signs. Instead, Highways England is looking to combine connectivity and data analytics to cut congestion, thanks to two-way communication between cars and the road network, as well as better…