Tabla de contenidos para February 2022 en PC Pro

John Finnemore is radio’s greatest comedy writer. He’s best known for the Radio 4 series Cabin Pressure, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, but the show that has burned his name into the minds of radio comedy “geeks” is John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme. I put the word “geeks” in quotation marks as a tribute to one of John’s inimitable tirades, denouncing someone who describes himself as a geek: “It’s not just about having an interest. It’s not going to an observatory once and then being pleasantly surprised you’re not bored. It’s not being able to tell a Harley Davidson motorbike from a not-a-Harley-Davidson motorbike. [Being a geek is] knowing as much as you can possibly know about a thing and being at least a bit weird about it.” This is why, despite the…

What do you do when your company is feeling the pressure? It appears that Mark Zuckerberg’s response was to strap on a VR headset and tune out. The Facebook CEO has announced that he’s changing the name of the company and giving it a new mission. Facebook, the corporation, is dead; Meta, with its mission to build the so-called “metaverse”, is alive. From a corporate perspective, it appears that the company will be structured similarly to Google and its parent company, Alphabet. Facebook’s existing products, such as Instagram, WhatsApp and, of course, Facebook, will be managed by one half of the company, while Zuck will be taking $10 billion and investing it in the half of the company he’s called “Reality Labs”. The plan for the new arm is to…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 14in Stunning creative power from £1,899 from apple.com/uk Alongside its 16in sibling, this is simply the world’s best laptop for demanding users. The amount of power on tap via the M1 Pro or M1 Max processor is staggering, and it’s backed up by a terrific screen and stunning battery life. With all the ports you could ask for, the only negatives are its relative bulk (especially compared to the Air) and high price. REVIEW Issue 328, p58 ALTERNATIVES Samsung Galaxy Book Pro (15.6in) A powerful laptop with a 15.6in AMOLED screen that weighs a mere 1.05kg? And with stonking battery life too? The Galaxy Book Pro is a winner. Core i7, £1,449 from johnlewis.com REVIEW Issue 323, p50 Apple MacBook Air If you don’t need…

@bazzacollins String me up on charges of shooting fish in a barrel if you will, but I’m 99% sure we’re all sick of paying subscriptions for software. There’s a feature showing you how to avoid subscriptions on p42, and I wouldn’t mind betting you bypassed this column to read it first. I hope you can live with yourself. Two companies having no trouble living with themselves are those who arguably swung the pendulum toward subscriptions in the first place: Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe first launched Creative Cloud in 2013, moving from the big one-off cost of Creative Suite to a subscription model, since when the company’s income charts have looked like a Tour de France mountain stage. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s latest set of financials reveal that Microsoft 365 Consumer subscriptions have…

Steve Gold and Robert Schifreen have more reason to be wary of computer-related legislation than most. In 1984, the pair managed to hack BT Prestel’s online viewdata service and accessed a mailbox belonging to Prince Philip. When the pair – both IT journalists at the time – shared how someone had left system manager credentials on the developer mainframe login page with BT, they were arrested. Alistair Kelman, co-founder of SafeCast Ltd, is an ex-barrister who defended Gold and ultimately represented Schifreen. However, he also had a hand in the formation of the Computer Misuse Act. He was the co-author of a British Computer Society report to the Home Office regarding the viability of computer-related evidence, and was fundamental to the addition of a new clause in the Police and…

SCORE PRICE £2,917 (£3,500 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/328scan As the logo to the right indicates, the Scan 3XS Vengeance Ti has earned its place on the A List. That’s the first in some time for an Intel-powered PC, but the decision made itself as soon as this beast of a machine’s benchmark results started to flood in. Instead, the quandary was whether to place the 3XS Vengeance Ti as a top choice in the workstations category or as an enthusiast PC, such are its all-round strengths. Ultimately I opted for the enthusiast PC category due to the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, which is the Intel Core i9-12900K’s key partner. And I use the word “partner” deliberately, for these two components must be partnered together if you want maximum…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,749 (£2,099 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Dell XPS 15’s design and OLED screen is a match made in heaven: its beautiful thin aluminium chassis is the ideal vessel for a vibrant 3,456 x 2,160 display. With the release of the equally luxurious new MacBook Pros (see p58), this month arguably marks the point in time where OLED in high-end laptops becomes a must have rather than a nice-to-have. It helps that Dell’s OLED screen is an absolute stunner. It hit over 400cd/m2 in our tests and covered 100% of the DCI-P3 colour space, making it a fantastic choice for photographers and video editors. This being an OLED screen, you’re not just getting vibrant colours but also deeper blacks, and it shows. Support for Dolby Vision…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £499 (£599 inc VAT) from store.google.com The Pixel 6 Pro (see p70) is Google’s headline act, but if you can live without its 4x optical zoom and larger screen then there are many good reasons to choose the more modest Pixel 6 – 250 of them, in fact, because the 128GB version undercuts its bigger brother by £250. Both phones look striking, with a two-tone rear split by a horizontal camera block spanning the width of the phone. It’s a bold design, with comparisons to Star Trek’s Geordi La Forge inevitable, but it means the Pixel 6 won’t lie flat on a desk; the sizable camera bump causes a ramp-like inclination. This is true with or without the silicon case that Google provides, so you may want…

SCORE PRICE 32GB Fire HD 8, £75 (£90 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Amazon’s low-cost 8in tablet comes in two forms: the regular HD 8 and the soupedup HD 8 Plus. There’s not much difference between them. The HD 8 Plus adds wireless charging and ups the internal RAM from 2GB to 3GB, but aside from that they’re physically and technically identical. Whichever one you choose, you get a decent budget tablet. The 2GHz quad-core processor isn’t exactly fast, but apps and websites are perfectly usable, with only a little lag when you start switching back and forth between processes. And while gaming performance is predictably limited, there’s enough graphical juice here for casual 3D games, as long as you don’t expect ultra-high detail. It helps that there aren’t too many…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £500 (£600 inc VAT) from lenovo.com It may seem odd to give a full-page review to a tablet that doesn’t earn a Recommended award – especially when we give its sibling the P11 Pro both an award and a half-page review – but there’s much more to say about the fascinating Tab 13 than the worthy but predictable P11 Pro. For a start, the Yoga Tab 13 is the largest tablet we’ve tested. Strictly speaking, its 16:10 aspect ratio means its 13in screen area is very slightly smaller than that of the 12.9in iPad Pro. It’s far chunkier, though, thanks to the cylindrical side-grip that’s a standard fixture on Yoga Tab devices. At 803g it’s appreciably heavier, too. That isn’t necessarily a problem. If you carry the…

SCORE PRICE 16GB, £42 (£50 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk They say you get what you pay for, but with technology that’s not always true. Sometimes innovative designs, coupled with the economies of mass production, allow great products to be sold at knock-down prices. Sadly, that hasn’t happened here. The Fire 7 is every bit as pokey as its price tag would suggest. In theory, a 7in screen ought to be fine for Android, but the low 1,024 x 600 resolution here makes everything feel cramped and boxy. The system is also horribly slow. It came dead last in every benchmark we tried, sometimes by huge margins. Other Android tablets – albeit much more expensive ones – were as much as 15 times faster in the Geekbench 5 multicore benchmarks, and…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £399 (£479 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The best way to understand the iPad mini’s size is to think about books: most tablets in this Labs have the footprint of a typical hardback, but the mini shrinks that down to paperback size. A super-skinny paperback, at that: the mini measures a quarter of an inch thick when “nude”, but add on a couple of millimetres for the optional £59 Smart Folio; you’ll need something to protect the 8.3in screen. It’s not the most interesting screen, in truth. There’s no eyepopping AMOLED technology here, merely IPS, and while Apple specifies that the panel can hit 500cd/m2, that’s just a typical value – our sample for this group test (which we purchased from John Lewis) only reached 412cd/m2, while the…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £150 (£180 inc VAT) from nokia.com The Nokia T20 rubs up against Amazon’s Fire HD 10 tablets, with a similar screen size and a price that’s barely any higher. But while Amazon’s devices are locked into the retailer’s own Fire OS platform, the Nokia runs a fairly clean installation of Android 11, with a full set of Google components and the promise of two years 0f OS updates. It also feels more upmarket than Amazon’s devices. The back is made of sandblasted aluminium in sober ocean blue, and the thin bezels and rounded screen edges add to a sense of sophistication. The 5MP front-facing camera even supports face unlock, which is an unexpected touch of class at this price. Needless to say, the T20 doesn’t use the…

It would be a stretch to say that the pandemic lockdowns of the past 18 months have been good for business, but they have showcased the potential of remote working and videoconferencing. Many companies have taken note of the benefits, and are looking at hybrid working as a new standard practice, even when it’s no longer a public health requirement. The way we use the technology has evolved in this time, too. Huddle rooms have become popular with smaller workgroups that don’t have full boardroom-sized telepresence facilities for catching up with remote colleagues and clients. Homeworkers, meanwhile, want their virtual meetings to be as professional as in-person ones – which means cheap webcams, tinny earbuds and unflattering lighting will no longer do. For these types of scenario, an all-in -one…

SCORE PRICE £600 exc VAT from onedirect.co.uk The UC S10 is one of the most flexible VC bars around. It can be connected to a host computer over USB, or function as a fully independent Android-based conferencing system. It also offers wireless screen-sharing services for up to four simultaneous users, and can even serve as a meeting-room wireless hotspot. Its lightweight design brings together a 4K camera, a single internal speaker, a six-microphone beamforming array and an HDMI port for connecting a display. Automatic framing and audio tracking are used to zero in on the current speaker using digital PTZ functions. In appliance mode the UC S10 is powered by an Android 8-based embedded OS, with a selection of built-in system apps and 16GB of storage for additional packages and…

SCORE PRICE £82 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com For meeting rooms, flexible workspaces or even hotel suites, TP-Link’s EAP615-Wall offers a great space-saving networking solution. This little wall-mounted access point (AP) is very affordable, and offers dual-band Wi-Fi 6 along with three downlink Gigabit Ethernet network ports, one of which supports pass-through Power over Ethernet for devices such as IP phones. It’s tidy, too, measuring only 20mm thick and made of sturdy high-impact plastic. The main Ethernet connector is at the rear, and the kit includes a metal baseplate so it can be fitted over a wall port and pushed down until it locks in place. Technically speaking, the EAP615-Wall is an AX1800 dual-band wireless AP, with claimed speeds of up to 1,201Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the…

Ihave always been fascinated by photography. The feel of the camera, the satisfaction of the physical action of winding the film forward by one frame, the reassurance of the clunk as the photo is taken. And, if you get into the realms of large format photography, using 5 x 4in film, then you open up a whole new world of adjusting the lens position and orientation away from being parallel to the film. This allows all sorts of “movements” to alter the plane of focus, to correct for perspective. Best of all, given the high cost of each shot, you enter a zen state where you’re happy to wait half an hour for that cloud to move into exactly the right place relative to the tree. Then you enter the…

This doesn’t happen often, but it may be that I owe some people an apology. Back in the summer, I wrote a piece on doing the wrong thing with a great big spinning hard disk. Storage can be a puzzling business and, given a surfeit of time at home courtesy of the lockdown, I tried to do some bad things with the drives I’d been sent. Much to my amazement, the 18TB Seagate Ironwolf drive sat happily in a regular PC drive cage, seen by Windows 10, and threw around files at some nicely elevated speeds. It wasn’t even terribly wasteful in terms of cluster sizes and mixtures of large and small files. This led me to take a somewhat foolish step with the next pair of disks to arrive.…

While onstage at Tesla’s AI day in August, Elon Musk surprised attendees with the announcement that his car company was working on a humanoid robot, designed to walk around and help out people using Tesla’s engineering and artificial intelligence skills. “We think we’ll probably have a prototype some time next year,” Musk said, standing next to a non-functioning model of the “Tesla Bot” and later joined by a dancer wearing a robot costume. “It’s intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate through a world built for humans, and eliminate dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks.” Codenamed Optimus, the current plan for the Tesla Bot is a 5ft 8in white-and-black machine with a screen for a face. It will be capable of walking at five miles per hour and carrying 45…

Dick Pountain Predicting the end of Moore’s Law is a fool’s game, and Dick isn’t playing – although he does dig out some toy soldiers in his search for a molten metaphor. See p20 Jon Honeyball Long fascinated by computational photography, Jon explores the latest magical tricks introduced by the Google Pixel 6 Pro – including making his partner disappear. Discover how on p108 Paul Ockenden You can check the air quality in your home or office the easy way, but where’s the fun in that? Paul recommends a cheap device and provides the code to make it work from p111 Athina England Although we still live in a disposable society, there are flickering signs of change. This month’s guest columnist explains how we can become more environmentally conscious on…

The little-known corollary to Moore’s Law is that computer columnists have to mention it in a column at least once a decade, and I am no exception. The miracle of digital search tells me I’ve covered it here in 1996, 2004, 2005, 2009 and 2019 (the numerate among you will deduce that it’s a pretty rough sort of law). That first date is significant because it was in PC Pro issue 18, a year before the most popular piece I ever wrote for Byte, “The Limits Of Computing”, about how and when Moore’s Law would end. In that 1997 piece I talked about the difficulty of getting down to 0.1-micron feature sizes in silicon CPUs: I noted that it would require short-wavelength UV light from exotic krypton/fluorine lasers to illuminate…

Windows 11 woes What a disappointment Windows 11 has turned out to be! On all new installations of Windows for as long as I can remember, one of my first actions is to drag the taskbar from the bottom to the left-hand side of the screen and change the settings to show “Small buttons” and “Never combine buttons”. I find this a much more productive arrangement because, especially on a wide screen, I appreciate the extra height. More importantly, the taskbar now shows individual buttons and names for each of the documents I’m working on. No need to hover over the taskbar button, wait for the pop-ups to appear and then try to work out which one I need to click on. On my HD screen in Windows 10 I…

SAMSUNG GALAXY WATCH 4 £249 FROM SAMSUNG.COM The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4’s headline feature is a revamp of its software, which combines the look and feel of Samsung’s existing Tizen platform and the functionality of Google’s Wear OS. Fitness features are better than ever before, with a new three-in-one BioActive Sensor that measures heart rate, blood oxygen levels and body composition. Stats include a body fat percentage score, skeletal muscle, fat mass, body water and BMI. Just be wary that only Samsung Galaxy phone owners get the full range of health measurements, which seems needlessly picky. With better battery life than ever (up to three days in our tests) and a slim design, the Watch 4 is the best Android alternative to Apple’s smartwatch range this Christmas. MICROSOFT XBOX SERIES…

HYBRID WORK BECOMES DEFAULT CCS Insight Until the pandemic struck, office workers were very much the norm. Not next year, predicts CCS Insight, which claims that “with the increase in remote work and large swathes of the workforce shifting to hybrid working, the office-based employee is no longer common enough to be the default profile”. This shift has “huge implications for organisations’ IT strategies, driving a wave of investment and process optimisation in several sectors”. EMPLOYEE MONITORING BACKLASH CCS Insight With staff literally out of sight at home, “there is a growing appetite for monitoring technologies that use data from applications and devices to determine the way employees are working and behaving”, CCS Insight stated. “However, this has explosive consequences, with employees concerned that monitoring fails to respect their privacy…

How much do you pay for your software subscriptions? It might be more than you think. Consider some of the most common desktop applications: Microsoft 365 Family is £7.99 a month, Dropbox Plus is another £7.90 and QuickBooks adds £24. If you need the Adobe Creative Suite then add almost £50 on top of all that, coming to a total of nearly £90 just on software, or more than £1,000 a year. That’s before you consider things like VoIP services, web hosting, domain registration, VPNs… the list goes on. There are ways to make savings: you might be eligible for an education licence, for example. And it can be helpful to spread the cost of an expensive software suite over several months rather than paying an upfront cost. However, the…

SCORE PRICE £1,666 (£1,999 inc VAT) from cyberpowersystem.co.uk This Cyberpower system provides us with our first look at the Core i7-12700KF, but we strongly suspect it won’t be our last. As with the Scan 3XS Vengeance Ti (see p53), it comes wrapped up in a liquid cooler to keep it running as fast as possible for as long as possible, with an imposing black chassis for company. Thank goodness for all the RGB lighting to soften its impact. No surprise, then, that the GBC Next Day is fundamentally a gaming PC. Cyberpower chooses a GeForce RTX 3070 rather than the 3080 Ti of the Scan or the 3060 of the Chillblast, and as a consequence it sits slap bang in between the two in our gaming tests. At 1080p, it…

We can’t fault Apple’s naming policy: the M1 Max lives up to its moniker. Choose this over the M1 Pro and you have the option of up to 64GB of memory, twice that of the M1 Pro, plus a hugely powerful GPU with twice the number of cores offered by the M1 Pro. Let’s talk numbers. The M1 Pro has 33.7 billion transistors and a 10-core CPU with eight performance cores and two efficiency cores. It supports up to 32GB of memory, and has a memory bandwidth of up to 200GB/sec. However, the cheapest 14in MacBook Pro 2021 includes an M1 Pro chip with an 8-core CPU. The M1 Max also has a 10-core CPU but supports up to 64GB of RAM, with up to 400GB/sec of memory bandwidth. e…

SCORE PRICE Core i3, £474 (£569 VA) from microsoft.com/uk Anyone hopimg for a radical departure with this update to the surface Go will need to sit down with a hot cup of tea and a Bourbon biscuit, such will be their level of disappointment. It’s a steady-as-shegoes upgrade over the Go 2 (see issue 311, p52), with Microsoft believing that the OS upgrade from 10 to 11 will do most of the heavy lifting. There have been modest upgrades to all the CPU options. The bottom-of-the-range version – costing £369 inc VAT – now includes a Pentium 6100Y rather than a 4425Y, with the most notable improvement being a Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz. It should be enough to run Windows 11 smoothly, but we strongly recommend the £499 version…

1 Visit pcprodownload.co.uk. You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the spine of the cover (or directly on the cover if you’re a digital subscriber). If there’s no code on the spine, you have bought the £4.99 version of PC Pro, which doesn’t include a code. Also enter your email address. We’ll then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. 2 Once you’re in 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 make sure to read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register…

SCORE PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from shop.fairphone.com If you want the most eco-friendly phone, the Fairphone 4 is far and away your best option. Fairphone specialises in technology made from eco-friendly materials sourced in sustainable ways and built in factories that treat employees well. It’s a phone with a conscience. Loyal customers have had to wait for this update, though. The Fairphone 4 is the first “new” device from the company since the Fairphone 3 in 2019 (see issue 306, p70), because 2020’s Fairphone 3 Plus was simply an upgraded version of the 3 – and I mean that literally as you could swap out the improved components yourself. Repair and replace This modularity has two immediate benefits: one, you don’t have to pay someone to repair your device;…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £266 (£319 inc VAT) from apple.com Broadly speaking, everyone knows about the iPad, but since Apple regularly tweaks and refreshes the specification, it’s worth taking a close look at what you get if you buy one today. Happily, the ninth-generation iPad (released in September 2021) turns out to be the most attractive model yet. One immediate reason for this is the price. Compared to the 2020 edition, Apple has knocked a tenner off the price, while simultaneously doubling the storage. Thus, a 64GB iPad, which ought to be roomy enough for most of us, can now be had for a very reasonable £319. As always, however, there’s no way to expand the storage after purchase, so if you think you might need more you’ll have to hop…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £516 (£619 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com The Galaxy Tab S7 isn’t cheap. In fact, aside from Apple’s iPad Pro, it’s the most expensive model here – which might seem odd considering its fairly ordinary 11in screen size and 128GB of storage. As soon as you open the box, though, it’s clear where the money has gone. For one thing, next to the tablet itself you’ll find Samsung’s latest S Pen stylus – not an optional extra, but an integral part of the package. It’s colour toned to match the tablet, in your choice of black, silver, navy blue or a distinctly pinkish bronze finish. Power up the S7 and you’ll detect that Samsung has also made a big investment in the screen. While most tablets use IPS…

SCORE PRICE 32GB Fire HD 10, £92 (£110 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Like Amazon’s Fire HD 8 tablets (see p82), the HD 10 and HD 10 Plus are variations on the same design. They use the same processor, screen and battery; the difference is that for £30 extra the Plus comes with 4GB of RAM instead of 3GB, and adds support for wireless charging. As you’d expect, the HD 10 models are physically bigger than their HD 8 counterparts. The display is a more spacious 10.1in, and a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 means that these models can display Full HD content. Colour coverage is better too, representing 95% of the sRGB gamut with an acceptable average Delta E of 1.31. The internals include upgraded eight-core processors with more powerful…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £183 (£220 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Lenovo’s Tab P11 offers a simple, classic tablet proposition – in fact, it’s almost pointedly unfancy, coming in a choice of slate grey or platinum grey. As the name suggests, it has an 11in IPS screen, with an HD+ 2,000 x 1,200 resolution, a maximum brightness of 413cd/m2 and 89.5% sRGB coverage, which is all fine and satisfactory for the price. In our benchmarks it proved a little faster than Amazon’s Fire HD 10 tablets, so it’s hardly a powerhouse, but it should happily run any mainstream apps and games. The only black spot in our tests was a very low Geekbench 5 GPU computing score, but that looks like a compatibility glitch, as the P11 did much better in the…

SCORE PRICE SQ2/256GB, £1,108 (£1,329 inc VAT) from microsoft.com The Surface Pro X isn’t the only tablet that Microsoft produces. You can buy the streamlined 10.5in Surface Go 3 from £369 or the Surface Pro 8 (see issue 327, p63) from £999, both of which run the full version of Windows. But the Surface Pro X is arguably its only “true” tablet, based as it is on an ARM processor. You have a choice of two: the SQ1 or SQ2. The doubling in number isn’t matched by a doubling in power, however. In Geekbench 5, the SQ2-based system we tested this month scored 800 and 3,102 in the single-core and multicore tests respectively; the original SQ1 which ba There bo Adren Adreno 685. system, we tested way back in January…

SCORE PRICE £975 exc VAT from business.currys.co.uk The Bose brand is best known for its hi-fi products, but its Bose Work family of products is designed to provide fully rounded communications solutions, and the Videobar VB1 is its first all-in-one video-conferencing solution. The design is classy: the VB1 takes the form of a sleek brushed-graphite bar that can be mounted under a meeting room monitor or placed on a desk using the sturdy metal stand included in the kit. Wherever you choose to put it, its 48mm height means it won’t get in the way. The low profile doesn’t come at the cost of features. The VB1 sports a central 4K camera and a powerful 20W speaker at each end. Six microphones along its length pick up audio and take…

SCORE PRICE £455 exc VAT from best4systems.co.uk Every laptop these days comes with a built-in webcam that can be used for online meetings, but Poly’s Studio P15 is aimed at those that wanting to project a more professional image. It takes many of the features found in Poly’s meeting-room solutions and presents them in a compact bar that clips neatly to the top of your monitor. Those include a 4K UHD camera with a mechanical privacy shutter, an 8W internal speaker and a beamforming triple-microphone array. The latter is used to provide the same type of speaker-tracking as found in conference-room setups, taking advantage of the camera’s decent 90° field of view and 4x digital zoom, which means the Studio P15 could also work for a small huddle room. With…

Customers often ask what happens to the components that we take out of their computer, or what happens to their old computer if we’ve set up a new one for them. We pride ourselves on being responsible and making sure that everything is disposed of in the correct way. Where possible, we’ll try and reuse parts; if this isn’t possible, then we arrange collection of them from our waste disposal partner. Upon collection, we check the partner’s waste licence to make sure it’s still valid, as fly tipping is prevalent in the area, and then we hand over our box of tricks. The components then go off to be recycled where possible or even turned into green energy. All the hard drives that we remove are wiped and shredded or,…

LABS VPNs Protect your data, protect your privacy and spoof your location as we put all the leading VPNs to the test for speed, ease of use and features. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a free 32GB memory stick emblazoned with the logo of your favourite magazine. You can read PC Pro in print, or on an iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p106 for more details. FEATURES 10 biggest threats to your PC in 2022 As the old lottery campaign used to say, it could be you. But there are nine other looming threats that could just spoil your year. We reveal all next month. The curious science behind keyboards Is it worth spending hundreds on a mechanical keyboard? And what are you paying for? We…

@njkobie When I was a child, my sisters would mock my inability to navigate video games. I’d try to make my little Mario character walk around not only by pressing the little joystick with my thumb, but by physically moving the controller in the air, as though that had an impact. On one hand, as a wee girl I clearly saw the merit in hand-tracking tech, eventually found in controllers such as the Nintendo Wii’s, well before they were invented. On the other hand, not only did my sisters laugh at me, their children now do the same when we play Mario Kart over Zoom. Personal shame aside, the point is this: I am bad at virtual worlds. And now Mark Zuckerberg thinks this is how I should work? In…

Paul Ockenden’s article on early pocket computers (see issue 327, p114) brought back a few memories. When I worked for Rolls-Royce in Derby in the 1980s, I bought a Tandy TRS-80 pocket computer: a rebadged Sharp PC1211 that was sold for twice the price, as I discovered afterwards. I also bought a 16-column dot matrix printer and tape recorder interface cradle that enabled me to download and save BASIC programs on cassettes and print out program listings and outputs. It was an impressive piece of equipment at the time: I’m sure it helped me gain a promotion or two, so the £600 I ended up spending was eventually recouped many times over, as is all investment in personal IT kit in my experience. My colleagues at Rolls-Royce were inspired by…

XBOX GAME PASS ULTIMATE £11 PER MONTH There are two very good reasons why the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is smashing value. First, you get to play a huge library of Xbox console and PC games, including recently released titles such as Football Manager 2022 and Age of Empires IV. Microsoft Flight Simulator also appears in a catalogue of great titles that includes both EA and Bethesda games. However, even if you don’t have an Xbox console, the Game Pass Ultimate is an excellent option (as opposed to the cheaper PC-only Game Pass) because it unlocks streaming, allowing you to stream a good chunk of the available console titles to your PC. The resolution and frame rates aren’t quite up there with an Xbox Series X, but if you’ve got…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index All prices include VAT and are from scan.co.uk. They are correct at time of going to press. All prices of Ryzen chips mentioned in the article also come from scan.co.uk. SCORE PRICE Corei5-12600K, £242 (£290 inc VAT); Core i9-12900K, £492 (£590 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Intel had some catching up to do with Alder Lake, the codename for its 12th generation Core processors. For the past five years, AMD’s Ryzen family has battered it for core counts, value for money and all-round performance when it comes to desktop processors. Meanwhile, Apple has upended the whole power versus performance debate with its ARM-based M1 architecture. Intel needed to produce something special. Fortunately, it has succeeded. With 16 cores and 24…

SCORE PRICE £1,833 (£2,200 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Chillblast chooses a different path for this 12th generation Core PC, with its target being photographers and video editors rather than gamers. To this end, it partners a top-of-the-line Core i9-12900K processor with a GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. This means it can still afford a super-fast SSD and numerous other top-end components while keeping the price down to a modest £2,200. Modest, that is, compared to the £3,500 Scan 3XS Vengeance Ti (see p53). It’s also a surprisingly modest system in terms of noise, which isn’t what you might expect when you peer inside to find an enormous Noctua air cooler taking centre stage. This does make sense – the larger the fins, the slower they need to spin to shift…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, (£2,799 inc VAT) £2,333 from apple.com/uk The 2021 16in MacBook Pro has more in common with its 14in sibling than it does with 2019’s 16in MacBook Pro (see issue 305, p52). It shares the same overhauled design as its brother, hugely impressive levels of performance thanks to the M1 Pro and Max chips, and crowns the whole package with a gorgeous 16in AMOLED panel. You can read all about the M1 Pro and M1 Max in the 14in MacBook Pro review that starts on p58. This 16in version is essentially identical in terms of internal hardware, but its starter model is more expensive: £2,399 for the version with an M1 Pro chip with a 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory and a 512GB SSD.…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £375 (£450 inc VAT) from hihonor.com It’s no coincidence that we haven’t reviewed an Honor phone for almost two years. Nor that the phone in question, the 9X Pro (see issue 308, p71), received a lukewarm verdict that concluded, “without Google apps, the Honor 9X Pro is impossible to recommend”. At that time, Honor was a Huawei sub-brand and subject to the US ban that still prevents Huawei products from using the Android ecosystem. All that changed when Huawei sold Honor to a conglomerate of Chinese companies in early 2021. Unfortunately, Honor hasn’t burst back onto the global stage with gusto. While the Honor 50 is a capable phone, it’s no showstopper. You might even call it generic. You can buy the phone in black, silver and…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com You might think tablets are all much of a muchness, but Huawei’s MatePad Pro has a character of its own. This unassuming 10.8in tablet has some unexpected plus points that earn it a full-page review – and one significant shortcoming that drops its star rating to three. Let’s start with the good stuff. As soon as you wake up the MatePad Pro, you’ll be struck by the screen. At 10.8in it’s one of the largest displays here, and it feels huge thanks to Huawei’s ultra-thin bezels. It’s also one of the sharpest displays we’ve seen, with a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution that works out to 280ppi. Granted, the iPad mini uses even smaller pixels, but at an ordinary viewing distance you…

If any tablet can claim to fully replace a laptop, it must be Apple’s flagship iPad Pro. For a start, the latest 2021 models use the exact same M1 processors that are found in several of the company’s laptop and desktop computers. There’s no compromise on the screen size, either. Apple offers a conventionally sized 11in iPad Pro that looks an awful lot like the iPad Air (see p89), but there’s a 12.9in version too, with a screen that’s as big as a laptop panel. Indeed, it offers more detail than Apple’s own 13in MacBook Pro with a resolution of 2,732 x 2,048; that works out to 36% more pixels. This isn’t the only thing that’s exceptional about the iPad Pro’s display. Both models have full coverage of the DCI-P3…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £483 (£579 inc VAT) from apple.com The branding clearly aims to emphasise how thin and light this tablet is, but the current fourth-generation iPad Air isn’t noticeably thinner than the regular iPad. At 458g, it’s only 6% lighter, too. It has other advantages, though. The squared-off design stylishly echoes the latest iPhone models, and the lack of a physical Home button helps accommodate a larger 10.9in screen, versus the 10.2in panel of the regular iPad. The fingerprint reader now resides in the power button at the top right, while at the bottom it’s great to see a standard USB-C socket for charging and data transfer. The Air also boasts some extra processing power. The A14 Bionic is a generation ahead of the A13 in the standard iPad,…

SCORE PRICE 128GB plus keyboard, £400 (£480 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Although Lenovo doesn’t spell it out, the Tab P11 Pro is clearly intended as an Android powered rival to the 11in iPad Pro, and it makes an impressive fist of the role. That said, the Snapdragon 730G chip can’t compete with the Apple M1 for speed. As our graphs on p92 show, the Tab P11 Pro isn’t even among the fastest Android tablets here, though it’s distinctly quicker than the regular P11. But in reality there are few Android apps that would benefit from more power anyway. Perhaps a bigger deal is the inclusion of 6GB of RAM, which helps keep the OS zipping along even under heavy load. On the display front, the Tab P11 Pro acquits itself…

Confession time: I’ve always been a little lukewarm on tablets. When the original iPad came out, it looked to me like a gadget for the sake of gadgetry. I wrote it off as a fad that would die out in a few years. Clearly, I was wrong. iPad sales have only grown stronger, while friends and family have embraced the tablet revolution. So while putting this Labs together I thought I’d better talk to a tablet devotee and find out what I’ve been missing. Conveniently, I’m married to one, and she was happy to explain why her iPad goes with her everywhere. “It’s very portable,” she began. “I can just grab it and stick it in my handbag as I’m heading out, rather than having to pack up my laptop.”…

SCORE PRICE £2,527 exc VAT from meetingstore.co.uk Setting up a videoconferencing system for a medium-sized or large meeting room can be a messy business: often you have to deal with multiple components, connected by a mess of wires draped across the floor. Logitech’s Rally Bar is a far tidier proposition, combining everything into a single unit that can be mounted on a desk or wall. While the design is appealingly simple, it’s not exactly discreet. The bar measures nearly a whole metre across and weighs a hefty 7kg. The centrepiece of the unit is a big 4K camera offering motorised pan, tilt and zoom (PTZ) functions, and a six-microphone beamforming array extending to either side allows the software to auto-frame active meeting participants. You’ll also notice a smaller lens beside…

SCORE PRICE £233 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk As businesses increasingly transition to remote working, Brother’s A4 Mini Business series of inkjet MFPs aims to provide home workers with all the print, scan, copy and fax features they’d expect in the workplace in a compact, home-office-friendly format. We tested the MFC-J4540DWXL All-In-Box model; despite the low price of just £233 exc VAT this is the flagship of the range, and it comes with a set of high-capacity ink cartridges that Brother claims should last the average user up to three years. We’re prepared to believe it: the black cartridge is rated for 6,000 pages, while the colour ones are good for 5,000 pages each, so it should certainly take an individual worker a while to exhaust them. And when that the…

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Regular readers will know that I’m used to unravelling scams and have helped many people unpick their lives from fraudsters. We’ve dodged a few ourselves, but until recently, I’d never been nose to nose with someone trying to steal from our shop using technical trickery. I’d just finished lunch while enjoying the PC Pro podcast (live every Thursday at mixlr.com/pcpro). I was in the shop when two guys buzzed the door, looking for a new laptop. They didn’t know how lucky they were. Not only do we stock a modest selection of machines at popular prices, but I’ve recently passed the Microsoft Expertzone’s “Windows Accreditation 2021”, a toolkit on how to sell stuff, Redmond style. I am now drilled in the six goals for every customer interaction, the first being…

Given all the editorial space devoted to ransomware over the past couple of years, you might be forgiven for thinking that other cybersecurity threats have gone away. While it’s true that organised criminals have focused resources on ransomware attacks, as these have proven to be the most profitable, it’s far from the whole picture. Viewed through the lens of extortion, and that’s what ransomware is, it’s easy to see the looming presence of other threats. Take DDoS. Denial of service attacks have become part and parcel of many ransomware attacks, courtesy of the more advanced ransomware groups providing their affiliates with the ability to execute them directly from the “dashboard” software they have access to. In a ransomware attack, DDoS is used as just another twist of the leverage knife…

Contrast the wireframes of Elite with the lifelike realism of 2020’s Flight Simulator and you might wonder if the old world of computing is worth a second glance. But that’s not to say we can’t reflect on the past and reminisce on some of the things that have been and gone. In fact, there are plenty of things we – and developers in particular – can learn from the nascent days of computing. Here are 12 things worth celebrating, and remembering, including thoughts from people who helped to make it all happen. 1 So many models to choose from The dawn of the home computer in the late 1970s felt rather adventurous. Companies new and old looked to introduce millions of people to their magical machines and, in doing so,…

Around 40,000 delegates turned up at the recent COP26 summit, supposedly to implement the necessary changes to limit the world’s temperature rise to 1.5°C. We will only know in hindsight if they succeeded, but right now things aren’t looking good for the many small islands around the world that are seeing sea levels rising at a worrying rate. At the same time, we have been experiencing a huge disruption to our energy supplies, be they gas, electricity or petrol. This has had the inevitable effect on wholesale pricing, with multiple energy suppliers going out of business. The wisdom of setting up a business model predicated on absorbing any changes in the price of gas and electricity looks somewhat naïve now, but it has happened and we are all paying the…