Tabla de contenidos para April 2021 en PC Pro

OF COURSE, the main thing 2021 will be remembered for is the invention of the time machine. I realise that you don’t know this yet, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: 13 August 2021, a cry of “Eureka!” from a lab in Cambridge, a small explosion and, when the dust settled, the world had access to a time machine. Now it’s finally my turn to use it, so I’m sending back this letter to explain what life is like in the year 2051. First of all, and it pains me to say it, what a bunch of panic-mongers you guys were! High streets closed? Ha, if only you could see them now. What actually happened after the Covid-19 pandemic (the Time Travel Laws forbid me from…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS AppleMac Book Air Affordable Apple M1 ultraportable from £999 from apple.com/uk Apple’s ARM-based M1 chip is blasting away its AMD and Intel x86 opposition with truly extraordinary speeds. Even the low-end model with 8GB of RAM is ludicrously fast. Apple makes no changes to the Air’s design, but it still looks fabulous and now supports both USB 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Add battery life into the teens and its biggest threat comes from the updated M1 MacBook Pro 13in. REVIEW Issue 316, p40 ALTERNATIVES Dell XPS 17 (2020) An excellent alternative to the 16in MacBook Pro thanks to a 17in IPS screen, bags of power, all-round quality and a great range of specs. From £1,799 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 315, p48 Apple MacBook Pro 13in (M1) Apple replaces…

@bazzacollins Around a year ago, I bought a Mac, and its clean lines and immaculate styling prompted me to implement a tidy-desk policy in my home office. Not only did I clear all of the clutter from the desk itself, but every night before logging off I’d make sure there were no downloads or other files littering the desktop. For the first time in my 20-odd years of journalism, you could walk near my desk without fear of triggering an avalanche. A hat-trick of lockdowns, however, has seen a slight relaxation of my tidy-desk regime. Nowadays, there are two indispensable items that I permit myself to keep to the right of my Mac at all times: a pen and sheet of paper. The well-chewed Biro and notepad had fallen by…

It’s a warm Friday night in late June 2020 and Katie Shadwell is wondering what to make her kids for tea. Her benefits payment from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) should have landed in her account by now so she can buy enough food to get her and two children through the weekend at least. She avoids the queues in the local supermarket and uses the automatic tills instead. She runs through about £20 worth of groceries, including a couple of ice creams that she promised the kids if they were good – a rare treat – and pays with her card. Payment declined. Pesky auto tills. Katie gathers up her shopping, queues for ten minutes with the melting ice creams to reach the only till being manned…

SCORE PRICE From £583 (£699 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The Mac mini is the third of the first wave of M1-based Apple products we’ve reviewed since they were announced last year, joining the M1 MacBook Air (see issue 316, p40) and the M1 MacBook Pro (see issue 316, p44) at the vanguard of Apple’s move away from Intel. It follows a similar template. Aside from the radical architecture revamp, Apple has made few changes to its much-loved compact PC. From the outside, the M1 Mac mini looks exactly the same as the Intel-based model I reviewed over two years ago (see issue 292, p56); it’s inside where all the fireworks are happening. Compatibility caveats As we’ll see, just like the Apple Silicon MacBooks, the M1 Mac mini delivers a huge…

THANKS TO BITDEFENDER, keeping all the computers and mobiles in your home secure justbecamealot easier. The aptly titled Bitdefender Family Pack 2021 includes 15 licences, providing protection for you and your loved ones’ devices – and we’ve got a great deal that will give you two years of protection for just £29.99, saving £120 on the current RRP! This deal – available for a limited period only – isn’t made at the expense of security, either. Bitdefender is a renowned security product that won the 2019 AV Comparatives “Product of the Year Award” and a PC Pro Labs (see issue 306, p76). What sets Bitdefender Family Pack 2021apart is its flexibility in allocating slots to different users. You set yourself up as the master account holder, then add family members…

SCORE PRICE £606 (£727 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com Philips is no stranger to big 4K monitors. Two of its screens won awards in our most recent monitor Labs: the Philips Brilliance 328P6 (see issue 313, p85) and the 346P1 (see issue 313, p88). Where the 329P1H differs from its siblings is that it uses an IPS panel rather than MVA, with the biggest positive effect being that whites appear a fraction whiter. VA panels are also more amenable to curvature, and, while IPS can bear a certain amount of bending, Philips opts for the straight-backed approach here. If you’re used to a 27in monitor then it may be an initial shock to be staring at a flat 32in 4K screen – while a 5in difference doesn’t sound much, remember that…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £208 (£249 inc VAT) from mi.com/uk As Harold Macmillan almost said, you’ve never had it so cheap. He was, of course, referring to 5G handsets, with the 64GB version of the Redmi Note 9T costing a mere £229 and its 128GB sibling £249. That undercuts the Moto G 5G Plus (see issue 312, p68) by £50 and the 5G variant of the Realme 7 (pcpro.link/318real) by £30. It’s no coincidence that this is the first phone we’ve reviewed to include one of MediaTek’s 5G-integrated “Dimensity” chipsets, the 800U, which supports all 5G frequency bands in the UK. MediaTek may have built its reputation for value rather than speed or innovation, but this eight-core system on a chip (S0C) is built using a 7nm fabrication process and includes…

SCORE PRICE £233 (£280 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318net1 WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS You can pay an awful lot for a Wi-Fi 6 router. Premium models nudge close to £400 and mesh systems can cost even more. So while the £280 Nighthawk RAX80 is expensive, it’s not outlandishly so for a high-end Wi-Fi 6 solution. And for the money you get something that’s visibly a cut above the mainstream. The silver-grey casing with its upturned wings makes a definite statement, and round the back sit not four but five LAN ports, of which the leftmost pair can be aggregated for a 2GbE connection. The rear panel also hosts a pair of 5Gbits/sec USB 3 ports, while WPS and Wi-Fi buttons sit on the top, next to a string of…

SCORE PRICE £248 (£297 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318ax88 WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS The RT-AX88U sits at the top of Asus’ standalone router range, and as Wi-Fi 6 hardware goes it’s impeccably equipped. Inside the commanding black case lurk dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, rated at 1,148Mbits/sec and 4,800Mbits/sec respectively, once you enable 160MHz channels. Both support 4x4 MU-MIMO too, pretty much guaranteeing top-tier performance. In the event, the RT-AX88U didn’t quite manage to ace this month’s Wi-Fi 6 tests. Although close-range performance was strong, it rapidly dropped off as we moved away. The average download rate in the bedroom was only 70% of the same-room peak, and at the back of the house that fell to a mere 40%. Of course, every wireless connection is affected by distance,…

SCORE PRICE £131 (£157 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318link1 WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS Squat, angular and solidly built, the MR7350 looks and feels unapologetically functional. We can get along with that – and the no-nonsense ethos carries across to every aspect of this router. At the front, that translates to a single strip LED that shows blue when everything’s hunky dory, switching to purple, red or yellow to indicate any issues. Behind, four LAN ports and a single USB 3 socket provide a usable set of connectivity options. We’re not sure it’s smart to put the WPS button right next to the factory reset button, but it’s a different colour and sticks out further. What’s really interesting about the MR7350 is its internal hardware. Going by the numbers, it…

SCORE PRICE £325 (£390 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS You’d be forgiven for mistaking Netgear’s top-of-the-line Nighthawk RAX120 for the Labs-winning RAX80. Externally, the major difference is the replacement of the fifth LAN connector with a multi-gig socket. Since the first and second ports can also be aggregated into a single 2GbE link, this gives the RAX120 the rare talent of connecting two devices together at higher than gigabit speeds, without needing an external multi-gig switch. Head to the management portal and you can route all internet traffic over a PureVPN connection – a big plus, although it would have been nicer to have a choice of providers. The QoS module also lets you specify priority levels for different services, games or devices. Parental controls,…

SCORE PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS The Archer AX50 cuts an unpretentious figure, with a long, low case that stands just 39mm tall – leaving aside the four sticky-up aerials at the back, of course. It’s also one of the cheapest Wi-Fi 6 routers around, undercut only by sub-£100 offerings from D-Link and Honor. It’s pleasing, therefore, to spot a USB 3 connector at the back, alongside a quartet of Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports. The software is better than you might expect for the price too: the web portal is clearly laid out and feels snappy, as well as including upmarket features such as a VPN server for inbound connections, twin guest networks and flexible QoS settings. Install the Tether smartphone app…

The past few years have seen a concerted shift to the cloud – and the pandemic has only accelerated that. But as the glamour of a new working model wears off, some businesses are finding that hosted services can be inflexible – and more expensive than they’d bargained for. While the initial investment in on-premises hardware can be high, day-to-day running costs are negligible compared to cloud services, and you get total control over your own data and processes. Many companies are, therefore, looking to reinvest in local server hardware or even to splash out on their first server. Whichever boat you’re in, rack-mount models are an appealing choice: they pack in all the power and storage a small business is likely to need, while taking up a minimum of…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,799 exc VAT from fujitsu.com Fujitsu’s Server Primergy RX1330 M4 is a strong choice for roles where storage density is a priority. While the LFF variant only has a conventional four-drive capacity, the model we tested has eight SFF drive bays – and there’s another design with room for ten drives, which is excellent for such a compact server. As if that weren’t enough, the ten-bay model can be additionally fitted with up to four PCIe SSDs – although you’ll need to add a PRAID EP540i or EP580i controller card to drive them. Entry-level systems rely on the motherboard’s C246 chipset to provide striped and mirrored arrays for SATA drives, while our system includes a PRAID CP400i PCIe card that brings SAS3 support plus RAID5 and…

SCORE PRICE £269 exc VAT from bmisolutions.co.uk While Wi-Fi 6 may be the latest and greatest thing, it’s overkill for many businesses. SMBs with a modest mobile workforce will find Wi-Fi 5 access points (APs) offer perfectly good performance at more affordable prices. The DBA-2820P is one such contender, offering strong speeds over 802.11ac and an extensive feature set, including cloud management. To be clear, that latter part isn’t free forever. A one-year subscription to D-Link’s Nuclias cloud platform is included in the price, after which you’ll have to pay for an ongoing licence. Costs are quite reasonable, however, at £50 per device per year, or £125 for three years. It’s not a bad platform to be on, either: Nuclias supports any number of APs and can remotely manage D-Link’s…

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

It began with a phone call. The gasping voice on the other end was attempting to reinforce how disastrous the issue was for her business and that her broken laptop required immediate attention. I tapped at our shop system until Jasmin’s records appeared and then emitted a small groan. The last time I’d had my hands on the laptop was at the end of January 2020, when I’d released it from the unsafe shackles of Windows 7 and bestowed it with the greatness of Windows 10. The machine belonged to the Intel i3 generation, so we’d added an SSD for a bit of pep. Regular readers may recall that the demise of Windows 7 was a busy time in the PC retail and repair sector; we put together a nice…

Barry Collins Challenger “banks” have shaken up the world of finance in many different ways, but you might be taking a financial risk without realising it. Barry reveals all on p26 Gary Rayneau It’s time for IT to tackle a longstanding problem: a lack of diversity. Guest Real World Computing columnist Gary explains the mistakes we make and steps to fix them on p116 Dick Pountain Has lockdown finally got to Dick? He explains why a picture of a loo roll isn’t actually a loo roll, and why that really does matter in the world of technology. Turn to p20 Paul Ockenden Paul goes several steps beyond our Wi-Fi 6 group test (see p74) by introducing a wireless technology that works across valleys. Head to p111 to find out more…

Pictures mean as much to me as music does. I love paintings and used to regularly visit galleries in London before Covid-19 closed them. Before that, I was spoilt by living for some years in a region of Italy that was within 40 miles of half the world’s greatest paintings and the birthplaces of Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca and Luca Signorelli. While I don’t paint myself, having failed to bond with watercolours or oils, I love to play with digital images. I could never consider writing a novel with pen or manual typewriter, and similarly I can’t imagine painting in any medium that doesn’t have an undo option. For many years I’ve been creating fractal art using two main tools: Sumo Paint and Zen Brush. The latter emulates a Chinese/Japanese-style…

The Computer Electronics Show has taken place every January in Las Vegas since the late 1990s, attracting almost 200,000 eager technologists to see and launch the latest hot technology. Covid-19 inevitably put paid to the physical show in 2021, but the organisers made a valiant attempt to replicate it online – and with some success. It was certainly a bumper year for laptop releases, with AMD, Intel and Nvidia spending much of their time attempting to one-up each other with new announcements. We put those in a “safe space” on p38, but you can see the results of their labours on the opening four pages of this report. The rest is dedicated to some weird and wonderful products – including one that turns your iPhone into a hearing aid –…

01 TARGUS UV-C LED DISINFECTION LIGHT PRICE $299 • AVAILABLE Spring 2021 What better time to release a virus-killing desk lamp than during a pandemic? Even better, one that promises to put your mouse and keyboard through five-minute cleaning cycle every hour? There’s just one catch: the UV-C LED Disinfection Light can’t guarantee that it will kill the Covid-19 virus, which rather dampens its appeal. Likewise, the US Food and Drug Administration and our very own Which? have cast doubts over the virus-killing efficacy of UV-C lamps. Buyer beware. 02 HEXHOME PRICE $180 • AVAILABLE Spring 2021 Are you sitting comfortably? Well, don’t move or the Hex Home will detect that someone is in your home and set off a siren (and/or a warning message to your phone). Naturally, it’s…

01 BIOHEART PRICE $199 AVAILABLE June 2021 The Bioheart’s design may allow you to channel your inner Iron Man, but rather than the Tony Starks of this world it’s actually designed for people with heart conditions. It’s meant to be worn all day to monitor your heart via ECG data and then provide useful information for medical professionals, but it will also track your day-to-day activity such as steps and calories consumed. The Bioheart won’t be released in the UK this year, but the company tells us it hopes to launch in the UK once it passes regulatory hurdles. 02 BINATONE MASKFONE PRICE $50 AVAILABLE Now There were many Covid-related products announced at CES (search for Razer’s “Project Hazel” concept if you want to see the weirdest take), but Binatone’s…

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 p14. 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…

SCORE PRICE £691 (£829 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Inspiron 15 7000 is an upper-mid-range 2-in-1 foldable 15.6in laptop that sits between Dell’s workaday Inspiron 5000 series and the desirable but pricey XPS range. That’s not the most exciting introduction to a laptop review you’ll ever read, but it underscores what Dell is punting here: frill-free value. One sign that this is an Inspiron rather than an XPS laptop is its weight. At 1.73kg, it isn’t outrageously heavy for a 15.6in convertible (nor, at 354 x 238 x 17mm, is it unduly large) but if you’re used to sleek 13in ultraportables such as the XPS 13 then you’ll notice its bulk. Still, on removing the Inspiron 15 7000 from its box, your first impressions will be of a stylish and…

SCORE PRICE £959 (£1,151 inc VAT) from boston.co.uk As the price above indicates, the PrimeMini 5 isn’t trying to be just another compact business PC. This is a computer with environmental considerations at its heart, and if your business has similar ethical goals then you may be able to stomach the price. Besides, there are TCO advantages of switching from a gas-guzzling desktop PC. With over-powered innards and multiple fans, it isn’t unusual for a PC to consume 80W at idle; the PrimeMini sips 13W in general use and even at its peak draws only 30W. Over the course of five years, that’s a saving of roughly £150 based on typical usage and electricity rates. If you need a computer to stay on all the time – and this is…

SCORE PRICE £449 (£539 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk There should be a special word for the feeling of utter panic that follows when you drop a tablet or phone. Especially when it lands display side-down, so you can’t see the extent of the damage until you turn it over. To allay this horror, it’s common to wrap a device in a case. The problem, of course, is that you don’t know whether this will be effective until the drop happens. Hence the rise of more rugged devices aimed at people who need to use a tablet in a less friendly, less carpeted setting. And it’s not just the drop capability – working outside means you need a bright screen, as well as protection against rain or water immersion. And working…

SCORE PRICE 2TB, £429 (£515 inc VAT) from istorage-uk.com We’re all aware that enhanced security comes at the cost of convenience, and an external SSD such as the iStorage DiskAshur M2 hammers home the point. This is one secure drive, protected by AES-XTS 256-bit hardware encryption, FIPS 140-3 Level 3 compliance and a dedicated secure processor that fends off physical “tamper” attacks. Nor should this drive fall victim to accidental data loss, with IP68 protection coupled with a crush-proof design that iStorage claims will withstand the force of a 2.7-ton vehicle. That means it should withstand anything up to a large SUV, and even then you’d fancy its chances. Despite this, it’s remarkably compact and light. Slipped inside its metal protective case (which is what provides the seal against water…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £641 (£769 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Samsung clearly wanted to start 2021 with a bang. It released its Galaxy S21 family of phones a month earlier than previous years, giving it a hefty head start over rivals who choose to use Mobile World Congress (MWC) in late February to launch this year’s models. Of the three Galaxy S21 phones, this is the “entry-level” model. In truth, the plain S21 is nothing of the sort as it shares many of the same high-end features as the other two phones in the range. There are cutbacks, of course, but I’m not convinced of their importance. For example, the back is made of plastic rather than metal, but this isn’t immediately noticeable in the flesh. It also lacks the 108MP…

SCORE PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com As its name suggests, the Moto G9 Power offers something different to the endless stream of phones appearing on our shelves (and that’s just from Motorola). It has the biggest battery of any Motorola phone to date, with the alluring promise of an enormous 60 hours of life from a single charge. And you’re getting this for a knockdown price. At £180, the G9 Power undercuts its most obvious big-battery rival – the Samsung Galaxy M31 (see issue 312, p70) – by £65. As if that wasn’t enough, the G9 Power also offers a 6.8in display, 128GB of storage (expandable via microSD up to 512GB) and a 64MP main camera. What pacts with the devil has Motorola struck to achieve this feat?…

SCORE PRICE £126 (£151 inc VAT) from box.co.uk WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS While Asus’ flagship RTAX88U is designed for maximum performance (see p86), the RT-AX82U is more of a balancing act, promising next-gen wireless for a much lower price. That being the case, it’s remarkable how closely the core hardware matches up to its big brother’s. The 5GHz radio has the same maximum connection rate of 4,800Mbits/sec and there’s 4x4 MU-MIMO, with full support for 160MHz channels. It wasn’t too surprising, therefore, to see the RT-AX82U put in a very respectable showing in our tests. It couldn’t quite equal the RT-AX88U’s download speeds over Wi-Fi 6, but it gave us a strong, fast signal in almost every part of the house. Only in the difficult-to-reach bathroom did the…

SCORE PRICE £371 (£445 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318net2 WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS One look and there’s no doubt that this is Orbi kit. Like most of Netgear’s mesh systems, the RBK752 comes in the form of two white monoliths, and while we stop short of calling them beautiful, the design is organic and won’t look too out of place on a bedroom shelf or kitchen worktop. It follows that the Orbi isn’t exactly festooned with distracting LEDs. A recessed light at the front glows various colours during startup, and shines an angry purple if the nodes can’t talk to one another, but most of the time there’s no visible indication that they’re even switched on. Connectors and controls are in similarly short supply. Netgear has seen fit to…

If you want to connect a device to your 2.4GHz network, your first question might be: where is it? By default, many routers use the same name and passphrase on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, causing them to appear as a single network. This has the benefit of simplicity. The list of networks isn’t cluttered by two different ways of connecting to the same router and, by default, your client should simply latch onto whichever band is stronger. Devices that only work on the 2.4GHz band will, of course, ignore the 5GHz signal. This doesn’t give you a way to tell a 5GHz-capable device to use the 2.4GHz band, though. The solution is to hop into the wireless settings on your router and enable band splitting. With this active,…

SCORE PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318zen WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS Some companies like to create clear distinctions between their router and mesh products. With Asus, what’s striking is how little separation there is between the ZenWiFi AX mesh kit and its regular router equivalent, the RT-AX88U. Granted, there’s not much of a visual similarity. The ZenWiFi nodes are plain, boxy-looking things with a single multicoloured status LED, rather than a row of blinking lights. The units we tested were finished in white, although Asus also offers charcoal-coloured variants that look as if they fell out of the 1980s. Once you start setting up your network, however, the experience is immediately familiar. The interface is identical across the two devices, offering the same huge range of features…

SCORE PRICE £231 (£277 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318link2 WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS It seems redundant to say that the MR9600 is the big brother of the MR7350 – the family resemblance is obvious. This model is distinctly more present, however, thanks to a case that’s 69mm wider and 14mm deeper, not to mention two additional aerials. While you still get four LAN Ethernet ports at the rear, the upsized design allows for a second USB port, while the WPS button is moved to a more sensible location on the right-hand side of the router. The firmware, meanwhile, is precisely the same – and we’re not delighted about that. The Linksys Smart Wi-Fi interface felt slow and short of features even on the £157 MR7350, so it’s galling that…

SCORE PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318net3 WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS We’ve already sung the praises of the Orbi RBK752 mesh kit (see p83); the RBK852 is all of that and more. If you go by the datasheet alone, the only difference appears to be that the radios are upgraded from 2x2 MU-MIMO to 4x4, but we suspect that Netgear has also made some tweaks to the transmission power or the antenna design. We say that because, while the RBK752 is a very capable mesh system, the Orbi RBK852 is conspicuously faster. Across our Wi-Fi 6 tests it bested the RBK752 in every location, by a sizeable margin of 6.8MB/sec on average. Even in the worst-served parts of the house, data rates never fell below 43.5MB/sec –…

SCORE PRICE £310 (£372 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318tplink WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS From the name, you might expect the Archer AX11000 to be 220 times as powerful as TP-Link’s cheaper offering above. Sadly it’s not, but it does deliver an abundance of wireless throughput, courtesy of a 2.4GHz transmitter with a claimed top speed of 1,148Mbits/sec, plus dual 5GHz radios rated at 4,804Mbits/sec. Arguably, tri-band routers are something of a luxury in the age of Wi-Fi 6, but for gamers it makes sense to keeping game traffic on its own network, to minimise interference and maximise bandwidth. Indeed, TP-Link markets this as a gaming router, although there’s very about it that’s truly game-specific – the “Game Center” functions in the web portal are mostly just about performance monitoring…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £983 exc VAT from broadberry.co.uk If you need a powerful server that will fit into the smallest of spaces, the CyberServe Xeon E-RS100-E10 fits the bill perfectly. It delivers a quality hardware specification, with a good set of storage options, in a 1U chassis that’s just 384mm deep. Broadberry uses an Asus RS100-E10-PI2 barebones system as its base, kitting it out with a speedy 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E-2224 CPU. The price includes 16GB of DDR4 memory, but the board will accept 32GB DIMMs, so you can boost the RAM to a maximum 128GB. Storage capacity is impressive too, considering the modest size of the server. The drive cages on either side each support either one large form factor (LFF) hard disk or two small form…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,345 exc VAT from hpe.com Most servers can be upgraded and expanded as your needs grow, but HPE’s ProLiant DL180 Gen10 has more scope than most thanks to a second CPU socket that allows you to move up to multiprocessor computing as and when you’re ready. The entry price, meanwhile, is low, with lightweight specifications starting at just £986. This modest sum gets you out of the starting blocks with a six-core Xeon Scalable Bronze 3204 CPU, 16GB of DDR4 Smart Memory and eight LFF drive bays, cabled to the embedded HPE S100i software-based RAID controller. Move up to the £1,345 model on test and you get an eight-core Silver 4208 CPU, a full house of 12 LFF drive bays and HPE’s Smart Array P408i SATA/SAS3…

When you buy into a new technology, there’s often an initial frisson of excitement. I call it the “new shiny toy syndrome” and it’s akin to unwrapping presents to see what’s inside. Is this thing going to be as good as I hoped? Will it deliver what I wanted? All too often, the initial euphoria is replaced by a sense of disappointment. The timescale for this depends on how significant the issues are, while the depth is defined by the magnitude of the problem or limitations. It’s very rare for a product not to have the “trough of despair” after the initial rush of excitement. I’m pleased to report that the M1 Apple MacBook Air falls into the rarefied group where there has been no post-purchase regret. It’s a storming…

The year 2020 will live in infamy for many reasons. The business world continues to feel the shockwaves from a devastating pandemic but also from the murder of George Floyd and global protests in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The business that I co-founded a few years ago that helps organisations create inclusive and diverse cultures was suddenly in demand like never before. “Surely this is a job for the HR department and leadership?” is a question you may well be asking, and it’s a question and sentiment I’ve heard from many of those we’ve worked with in tech departments. My question in response is usually along the lines of “do you want the HR department to decide what systems and software and hardware an increasingly diverse…

I’ve always been a bit of a language nut. So much so that I don’t see the sharp distinctions drawn between human languages and computer languages: I’ve always thought that the similarities outweighed the differences, since it’s the same tool – the human brain – that goes to work on C++ or Ruby on Rails as works on Swiss German, Aleut or Geordie. I realise that humans don’t compile their speeches into binary objects, but that’s not the kind of distinction I think is worth pausing over. Instead, we should pay attention to the way that a new language can redefine the limits of computing or of a problem. Thinking back to the 1980s, I recall that nasty uncomfortable feeling I had around anything to do with C or C++,…

The Commodore 64 (C64) wasn’t the prettiest. Some would say it was downright ugly. But the 8-bit computer so famously compared to a bread bin turned out to be the best-selling single computer model of all time, racking up 17 million sales over 12 years. It could, however, have been improved. In 1989, Commodore looked to create a successor amid falling sales and a shifting interest towards consoles and 16-bit home computers. Over the course of two years it developed a prototype code-named “C64-DX”, with a set of advanced specs that pushed it close to the Commodore Amiga. “I loved the proposed machine with its built-in 3.5in floppy, faster CPU and crisp digital display,” said Paul Gardner-Stephen who, as a freelance software developer around that time, managed to get his…

Thursday 11 March 2021 LABS Laptops from £299 to £999 If you’re on a tight budget, one of these 15 laptops–including from Acer, Dell, HP, Huawei and Microsoft–will surely hold the answer. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a 26-piece PC repair kit. You can read PC Pro in print, on an iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p106 for details. FEATURES Fight for the right to repair Manufacturers are making it harder than ever to fix equipment. Lee Grant explains why we need a legal “right to repair”. Build your own video doorbell While we can’t create a true home made rival to Ring, our guide to creating your own motion-detection system comes close. What’s eating your storage? If you’re running out of space–or want to squeeze…

Millions of users have fled Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp due to a perfect storm of privacy concerns. However, there are fears that people are joining rivals that have poorer privacy features. The messaging upheaval was sparked by two issues at WhatsApp – Apple highlighting the amount of data the app collects, combined with a change in WhatsApp terms that many people wrongly construed as plans to share the content of messages with Facebook. WhatsApp built its reputation on end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which meant only the recipient and sender could access the content of messages. Although WhatsApp won’t be sharing message content with Facebook, it was still a PR disaster for the company, with rival messaging services suddenly shooting up the App Store charts as WhatsApp users sought alternatives. “This is…

Home-learning hardware is largely useless without broadband, but DfE officials face further criticism after missing out on free broadband from BT because it didn’t take up a voucher offer in spring 2020. BT revealed the snub while defending itself from criticism it was profiting from home learning, telling Labour MP Sarah Owen of its surprise. “BT was the first telecoms operator to have an offer for vulnerable families,” BT CEO, Marc Allera, wrote in a letter to Owen. “Unfortunately, the DfE struggled to distribute these vouchers effectively and handed them back to us.” The DfE claims BT’s service offer didn’t provide “reliable and consistent internet connections” and finally, in January 2021, announced data deals with some service providers offering unpaid access to education sites and waiving data limits. EE, O2,…

@njkobie The nationwide working-from-home project has sparked some odd ideas: Zoom parties for socialising with colleagues, fake “commutes” to help separate work from home when both happen in the same place, and oodles of wellness gadgets and widgets that allow bosses to track how their workers are feeling. The latest one to raise eyebrows is the Moodbeam, a wearable silicone wristband that connects to an app on the employee’s phone. When they feel happy, they tap a yellow button on the wristband; when they aren’t happy, they tap the blue one. That data is tabulated up and spat out into a dashboard for managers to watch over their staff’s mental wellness from afar. This gadget raises a few questions. To start, why does it need to be a wristband when…

I found the article on “2021’s most dangerous scams” (see issue 317, p24) very interesting. I have had attempted scams in the past, mostly via phone calls offering to fix a compromised modem. On one occasion, I asked the caller if he could fix my very “slow” computer. Of course he could! After making him wait for my “slow” PC to boot, I unplugged my modem and engaged him and their man with an engineer’s voice for about half an hour. When I’d had enough fun, I told them that I had no internet connection, whereupon they abruptly ended the call. At least my actions prevented them from troubling someone else for half an hour. More seriously, in addition to common sense, virus and malware protection software, I have another powerful…

01 ASUS ZENBOOK PRO DUO 15 OLED PRICE £3,000 AVAILABLE Q2 2021 We review the Asus ZenBook Duo 14 on p44, but, like all big brothers, the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 demands attention too. Its headline feature is a 4K, 15in OLED screen. With guaranteed colour accuracy courtesy of Pantone Validated certification and VESA DisplayHDR 500 True Black, this looks set to be the best screen we’ve ever seen on a laptop. As with the ZenBook Duo 14, a tilting second screen is there for workflows that take advantage. This has a truncated 4K resolution, but you must make do with mere IPS tech rather than OLED. Naturally, Asus backs all this up with the finest trimmings: a Core i9 processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD and a GeForce RTX 3070…

SCORE PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com Read through our report on this year’s CES (see p32) and you’ll see that roughly nine billion new laptops were released during this year’s virtual show. Of these, only three offered anything different: the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 i we preview on p36, which builds an E Ink screen into its lid, and two “Duo” laptops from Asus. You don’t need Sherlock’s observational skills to spot the linking factor between all three laptops: a second screen. But where Lenovo thinks entirely outside the box, Asus is thinking about making the box bigger. Look at either ZenBook Duo and what immediately strikes you is that almost 75% of the surface area is screen. This review focuses on the ZenBook Duo UX482EG, but the…

SCORE PRICE £1,283 (£1,540 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk When ThinkPads are mentioned, what words spring to mind? I’m willing to bet that “dependable”, “solid” and “reliable” all make an appearance. Like an old pair of jeans, you know exactly what you’re getting. So it is with the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s. Its matte-black livery and ThinkPad logo, not to mention those deep-travel keys, recall a time when men wore moustaches and laptops weighed as much as a breeze block. Don’t be fooled by this laptop’s banal veneer, though. Beneath the T14s’ corporate exterior lies a machine that’s as usable, powerful and lovable as the shiniest of its rivals. Reassuringly familiar What’s more, there’s a unique appeal to the ThinkPad T14s’ no-nonsense, matte-black chassis. It might look like it’s made of plastic,…

SCORE PRICE £859 (£1,031 inc VAT) from store.hp.com/uk Although Chromebooks have long been regarded as cheap and simple alternatives to Windows laptops, Google has sought to carve a space in enterprises for its Chrome OS-powered machines. HP has been at the forefront of this move, building Chromebooks for those who seek more than a laptop that does the basics. Its latest device is cast from this mould, combining a top-of-the-range Intel Core i7 processor with 16GB of RAM and a 1080p touchscreen, as well as useful security features and an encouraging collection of connectivity options. What you don’t get is excitement: the Chromebook’s straight-laced, silver-coated aluminium exterior isn’t exactly unattractive, but jaws won’t drop when you lift it out of a case. An expansive keyboard sits between two speaker grilles,…

SCORE PRICE £487 (£584 inc VAT) from store.hp.com/uk If you want to reduce your PC’s power and physical footprint, and the PrimeMini 5 (see p56) is too punch on price, HP hopes to lure you with its EliteDesk 705 G5. This is the fifth generation of HP’s compact PC and it comes equipped with your choice of Intel or AMD processors. The Intel version is called the EliteDesk 800, while the AMD is the 705. I suspect this year will see the appearance of an EliteDesk 805 with AMD’s 4000 series of Ryzen chips, which we covered as part of our review of the StonePC Lite Ryzen PCs (see issue 316, p56). These are twice as fast at certain tasks, but the 3000 series on offer with the EliteDesk 705…

Here’s an offer you won’t find in the shops: you can buy a one-PC, unlimited-lifetime licence of Windows 10 Pro for just £39.99 direct from the PC Pro store. The normal price is £219.99, making this a truly staggering saving. This is a full version, but it’s also easy to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Pro “in place”. Simply enter the provided code and let Windows 10 do the rest. To buy Windows 10 Pro, visit pcpro.link/windows10 and click the red Buy Now button. We will then provide you with the Windows 10 media creation tool, which you can use to upgrade from 7 or create a fresh install using a DVD or USB stick. Or we can send you an official DVD for an extra £6.95. Buy from…

SCORE PRICE £96 (£115 inc VAT) from shure.com The MV5C is surely a product of its time. Designed to work in home offices where there might be distracting background noises, it offers a way for you to speak clearly to fellow video conferencees. Only the prospect of the pandemic finally being crushed counts against it. If and when that does happen, you may decide to bring this excellent and compact microphone back to the office with you. Even at its full height it only stretches to 14cm tall, and with its retro styling and black/metal finish it looks attractive on the desk. If anything it’s too light, being easy to accidentally knock over. What photos never show, though, is the trailing USB cable that’s required to power it and connect…

The S21 does a better job of capturing street lights at night, but we still prefer the subtlety of the iPhone 12 Pro’s portrait mode Here’s a view of one of the most distinctive buildings in London’s Docklands, taken from across the road. Note how well the S21 captures the challenging sky Here you can see the downside of the iPhone 12 Pro’s results at night, with an artificially warm hue spoiling the glistening white of the O2 Arena And here you can see the result with the Samsung’s digital zoom, with no obvious detail lost. It’s only at 20x and 30x that hand shake gets in the way In good light, there’s very little difference in quality between these two high-end phones; we think you’d struggle to tell them…

SCORE PRICE £42 (£50 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318honor WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS Chinese manufacturer Honor is known for its low-cost phones, but its most astonishing value proposition is surely the item that sits before us – a bona fide Wi-Fi 6 router for just £50. While the price is low, the construction doesn’t feel cheap at all. The Router 3’s small white case is as solid as any other chassis this month, and when you flip up the four aerials at the back they snap firmly into place. The way the four Ethernet ports are distributed between them looks a little odd, but it’s a space-efficient arrangement that keeps the thickness of the body down to a slim 41mm. Note that one of these ports is needed for…

SCORE PRICE £192 (£230 inc VAT) from box.co.uk WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOAD The idea of a Wi-Fi 6 mesh system for just £230 sounds too good to be true – but it isn’t. TP-Link’s Deco X20 package comprises three little cylindrical nodes that provide 802.11ax coverage throughout your home for a price that’s lower than some individual routers. How has this been achieved? For a start, each node contains only a single 5GHz radio, as distinct from the tri-band approach favoured by Asus and Netgear. That’s not necessarily a disaster, though, as Wi-Fi 6’s OFDMA technology is specifically designed to share out the available bandwidth across multiple connections. The radios themselves are quite modest models too, with claimed data rates of 1,201Mbits/sec, no 160MHz support and 2x2 MIMO.…

SCORE PRICE £317 (£380 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS Gaming hardware is a specialist genre, but the Rapture attracted mainstream attention on its 2019 debut as one of the first widely available Wi-Fi 6 routers of any sort. It’s an eye-catching beast, with eight chunky aerials and a sinister glowing eye in the middle that can change colour to reflect network status, or just pulse decoratively. Inside, there’s a pair of 5GHz radios, which means you can connect a large number of Wi-Fi 5 clients with minimal contention issues – or form multiple Asus routers into an AiMesh network and then use the second radio for backhaul. Alternatively, gamers can choose to devote the second radio exclusively to gaming traffic, while other home devices go…

SCORE PRICE £74 (£89 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318dlink WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS D-Link submitted only a single router for this month’s Labs, but the DIR-X1860 makes a definite impression: at £89, it’s very nearly the cheapest Wi-Fi 6 router here, undercut only by Honor’s absurdly affordable Router 3. It’s also one of the dinkiest models on test, with a footprint measuring just 224 x 142mm without its four antennae. Though small, the physical design is perfectly practical: the four LEDs at the front are more informative than the Honor’s single multipurpose light, and at the rear you get four Ethernet sockets and a discreet WPS button. USB doesn’t make the cut, but that’s no surprise at this price. The DIR-X1860 also has a few tricks that the Honor…

SCORE PRICE £116 (£139 inc VAT) from box.co.uk WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS Having been mightily impressed by the Nighthawk RAX80, we had high hopes for its mid-priced cousin, the RAX40. Naturally, we weren’t expecting the same stellar performance from a router costing half as much, but, as the Linksys MR7350 has shown, it’s perfectly possible to put together a fast, solid router in this price range. Alas, disappointment sets in as soon as you open the box. The RAX40 is a sizeable thing, yet its construction feels plasticky and lightweight. In place of the upturned wings of other Nighthawk models, it sports a pair of very ordinary aerials. The feature list is a step down too. Netgear’s Circle and Armor services aren’t available on the RAX40, meaning that…

SCORE PRICE £644 (£773 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318net4 WI-FI 5 DOWNLOADS WI-FI 6 DOWNLOADS There are plenty of wireless systems that focus on gaming and video streaming – but if you’re kitting out a home office (or any kind of workplace), you might prefer a more professional approach. That what the Orbi Pro promises, with a distinctive feature set that focuses on work rather than play. The difference in attitude is clear as soon as you lay eyes on the Orbi Pro units. The warm curves of Netgear’s domestic meshes are replaced by a more angular design, with a bold vertical strip-light to alert you to any error states. There’s also a wall-mounting kit in the box – although you may have to work around the fact that the power…

It’s funny, really, how domestic Wi-Fi has become a universal, unquestioned part of our lives, while the technology that underpins it is so complicated and obscure. On pages 76 and 77, we set out the key points to consider when choosing a router, but if you genuinely want to understand how it all works, I hear that Imperial College London offers a decent MSc on the subject. At the same time, if you simply want to watch MasterChef in the bath, you don’t even need to read the manual. Most modern routers present ruthlessly streamlined setup procedures that entirely skip over technical matters such as wireless channels, security schemas and so forth. You can breeze through the configuration wizard in three or four clicks, and at the end of it…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed (Smart Value Standard), £1,425 exc VAT from dell.co.uk Rack servers can play a number of different roles in a business – but Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R340 is versatile enough to suit almost any of them. Its short-depth 1U chassis delivers Xeon E-2200 processing power, along with flexible storage arrangements and good expansion potential. The system we tested includes a quad-core 3.4GHz Intel Xeon E-2224 CPU, just like the Broadberry server opposite. It also comes with twice as much RAM, meaning you get 32GB of ECC DDR4 to play with out of the box – but note that the maximum memory provision is limited to 64GB, as Dell EMC’s firmware doesn’t currently support the full 128GB addressable by Xeon E-2200 CPUs. One of our favourite things about…

SCORE PRICE £356 exc VAT from uk.insight.com Canon offers a whole family of desktop scanners, but the imageFormula DR-S130 is compact and affordable enoughto suit homeworkers as well as small offices. It supports both USB and wireless connections, promises a good 30ppm scan speed and is very easy to use, thanks to a4.3in colour touch screen. That’s not to say it can only handle basic tasks. Canon’s Capture On Touch V4 Pro utility lets you define all sorts of advanced scanning jobs: to get the best from the 60-page document feeder you can scan a whole batch of documents in one go, and have them automatically separated by page counts, bar codes, zonal OCR, patch codes or blank pages. Getting set up is a breeze. A single installation utility loaded…

Kieran Jones, founder of hosting company Freethought, has some pertinent advice when it comes to choosing the right hosting provider. “When selecting a hosting provider, don’t go to the cheapest. They might be cheap, and promise unlimited everything, but you get what you pay for. Select a hosting company that has strong customer reviews, is based in your country, and is contactable readily by phone. Don’t be afraid to give them a call before placing an order just to see what they’re like. If you get lost in a maze of menus then consider looking elsewhere. A smaller independent provider is likely to provide much better, more personable, friendly, and comprehensive service than a large multinational with rock-bottom prices and overseas contact centres. Your whole business relies on your website,…

Over the next few issues I want to talk about LoRa communication. Short for “long range”, it’s a type of low-cost, low-power, extreme-range radio. I’ll go through some use cases later, but for now just imagine that you’re a farmer and your land stretches across a valley. Your farmhouse is on one side and you have a flock/herd/whatever of animals and a shelter on the other side, about 1km away. You want to know the temperature in the shelter (if it’s too cold, you’ll need to bring the animals back to the farm). The first thing you might think of is some kind of Wi-Fi-based temperature sensor, relaying back to the farm. Perhaps something like one of the Cricket boards I wrote about in 2020 (see issue 312, p113); there’s…

Long before I wrote about security, I was a hacker. I first got involved with online communities, bulletin boards, conferencing systems and networks out of a combination of necessity and curiosity. The necessity part is easy to explain: I lost a year of my life, and a whole load of rather important brain cells, in hospital courtesy of a nasty encounter with viral encephalitis in the 1980s. Before becoming a patient at world-renowned Atkinson Morley neurology hospital (which was involved in the development of the CT scanner) I had set out on a career in sports management. Upon my discharge, some 12 months later, I couldn’t read or write, had severe cognitive difficulties and had lost the use of three limbs. Long story short, as my brain started to recover…

Facial recognition is problematic for humans. When it works, it invades privacy and eases us into a surveillance state. When it doesn’t work, people have been falsely arrested by police. But that’s people. For bears, it’s all good – and facial recognition is now being used to help research, monitor and protect the animals using a neural network-based system called BearID. Melanie Clapham tracks grizzlies. Normally, that requires methodically examining photographs or physically tagging the animal, as the University of Victoria researcher’s work on grizzly behaviour requires being able to pinpoint a specific individual. But that’s not easy because bears have few distinctive markings – they’re all brown and fluffy – and can dramatically change appearance from one season to the next. “They moult their coats in the summertime,” said…

BearID isn’t the first conservation project to track wildlife using facial recognition – and, given its success, it won’t be the last. Here are three other projects that are turning the controversial tech into a tool to protect nature. Chimpanzees Researchers at the University of Oxford and Kyoto University trained facial-recognition AI to identify chimpanzees in Guinea, West Africa, using 50 hours of footage of 23 primates. The system was accurate 92% of the time, but to further test the system, the team used it on 100 still images that were also given to human researchers. In that trial, the facial recognition took 30 seconds to accurately identify the chimpanzees 84% of the time versus the humans who only managed a 42% success rate – and took 55 minutes to…

All of this talk about the rise of ARM processors in laptops and desktops, and the spectacular capabilities of the Apple M1 platform, has got me thinking. There has been a significant period, some might say well over a decade, during which stagnation has been the norm. That’s not quite fair – performance has improved, battery life is better, screens are much better, Wi-Fi is vastly superior – but the fundamentals haven’t changed. The handle has been cranked and each year has brought more of the same, with small but useful increments. In contrast, the smartphone platform, with its tablet cousin, has gone from nothing to total dominance in the same period. It remains to be seen whether the PC market can move to ultra-low-power operation in a way that…