Inhoudsopgave van February 2022 - Tech Advisor

Microsoft didn’t completely kill off Windows 10 on Arm in a recent announcement, but it dealt a serious blow to Windows on Arm users who don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11. The company has decided that that ‘x64’ application support for Arm CPUs – which would let Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered laptops run software made for traditional 64-bit x86 PC processors – will not be allowed on Windows 10, according to an update Microsoft published to a 2020 Windows blog post where the company first announced the feature (see fave.co/3G2W0HE). “For those interested in experiencing this, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required,” Microsoft said, even though x64 app emulation has been tested by Windows Insider preview testers on Windows 10 for roughly 11 months. Arm-based Windows 10 laptops…

Qualcomm processors for PCs enhanced by the company’s Nuvia design team will sample in 2022 for devices shipping in 2023, Qualcomm executives recently revealed. The company also boldly pledged to offer Adreno graphics that could compete with desktop PCs. At the company’s 2021 investor day in New York, Dr James Thompson, chief technology officer at Qualcomm, offered an overview of the company’s technology road map in several areas. A key focus, naturally, will be how and when Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors will integrate the Nuvia design team, an Arm CPU developer that Qualcomm acquired in January 2021. Processor development takes time, however, and that integration won’t happen immediately. “They’re pretty far along at this point,” Thompson said, presumably talking about the first Snapdragon processors featuring Nuvia technology. “We’ll be sampling a…

Price: £1,499 from fave.co/3E3qJn8 Razer updated its Razer Book productivity laptop for the end of 2021 and the launch of Windows 11, and we were eager to see if anything had materially changed. To some extent, performance was slightly affected. But the strengths – and flaws – of the Razer Book remain largely identical to our review of a similar model a few months ago. The Razer Book that we tested represents a slight upgrade over the older Razer Book that Razer launched in March 2021. For one thing, all of these new Razer Books ship with Windows 11 preinstalled, while the earlier versions offered Windows 10 and the promise of a later upgrade to Windows 11. Our review model, with a Full HD (1,920x1200) display, 16GB of RAM and…

Mobile carriers have spent millions touting the benefits of 5G over the past few years. Their bragging makes it easy to forget that most devices spend a significant amount of their time connected to Wi-Fi. This is true even of smartphones and, of course, absolutely true of your PC. Yet people pay relatively little attention to their Wi-Fi network. Most tuck the router provided by the ISP in a corner and call it a day. That’s a mistake. Upgrading your home Wi-Fi can make every Internet-connected device in your home more enjoyable to use. WI-FI 6 IS A BIG UPGRADE Wi-Fi 6, less frequently referred to as 802.11ax, is the latest Wi-Fi standard. Wi-Fi 6 routers have technically been available since 2019 but, as usual, the technology did not immediately…

Back when Microsoft announced Windows 11, it proclaimed the new operating system to be the most secure version of Windows yet. The company’s requirements certainly imply that Windows 11 outdoes its predecessor, given the need for a trusted platform module (TPM) 2.0 and Secure Boot in order to achieve full compatibility – as well as a guarantee of future security updates. But Microsoft touting Windows 11 as more secure is having an unintended effect. Some people now believe they don’t need to do anything beyond meeting those hardware and security requirements. And that’s not true. TPM and Secure Boot only protect against two types of threats. A TPM stores information related to encryption or authentication (like Windows Hello biometric data). To keep it safe, it monitors your hardware configuration –…

Microsoft will begin phasing out the Groove Music app in favour of a new version of the venerable Windows Media Player, the company has announced. Long-time users of Windows have probably used the Media Player app to play video and audio files from yesteryear. While the classic Windows Media Player will live on inside the Windows Tools folder inside of Windows 11, the new app will begin rolling out to those testing new Windows 11 builds as part of the Windows Insider Dev Channel. The new Media Player will be used to play back both audio and video files, Microsoft said in a blog post (see fave.co/3D6qJlc). As a consequence, the Groove Music app will be finally retired. (Microsoft killed the Groove Music Pass service in 2017, but left the…

Price: £569 from fave.co/3o3Jkdi Microsoft touts its 10.5in Surface Go 3 tablet as its most mobile Surface. While that’s definitely true, what else does the new Surface Go 3 have to offer? A small processor bump, Windows 11, and, well, that’s about it. The Surface Go 3 is essentially the same device as the Surface Go 2. We don’t consider Windows 11 to be necessarily worth the upgrade, which robs the Surface Go 3 of its appeal. As for the processor upgrade – yes, there’s now a 10th-gen Core i3 option, but it doesn’t really move the needle performance-wise. BASIC FEATURES AND AVAILABLE CONFIGURATIONS Microsoft’s Surface Go 3 is available in three configurations, ranging from £369 on up to £569, which is the price of our review unit. We wouldn’t…

Price: £899 from fave.co/3GW2tW0 Sony increasingly makes its phones for a small – but vocal – niche, and the Xperia 5 III is no different. For those who are drawn to the unusual aspect ratio, complex camera features, and powerful display this is an excellent package – arguably even more appealing than the flagship Xperia 1 III – but like that phone it comes with serious drawbacks too. The camera in particular is only powerful if you know how to use it well, and makes for a fairly poor point‑and-shoot option at the price. The oddities mean this is a phone best suited for those willing to work at the camera or anyone who needs a small, but flagship, Android phone and is willing to pay for it. If that…

Searching for a new graphics card used to be much more straightforward. You could simply select the resolution you wanted to play at and see how the competition stacked up. But that’s not quite the case any longer. Native resolution remains the golden standard for performance and image quality, but image upscaling and upsampling is all the rage these days. Nvidia ignited the modern trend with its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, but now AMD, Intel and even the Unreal Engine are getting into the action, rendering games at lower resolution (and thus at higher frame rates) before using software tricks to upscale the final image to your screen’s resolution. But how do you measure the subjective quality of each competing option? Upscaling an image from a lower resolution…

Most of us have some rather sensitive files on our PCs. Whether it’s our tax returns, financial records, password lists (seriously, just use a password manager already), or just files you don’t want anyone to see under any circumstances, we all have our reasons for wanting a bit more security. This means that it’s time to get into encryption, which is where a drive, file, or folder is encoded (encrypted) so as to make it unreadable to anyone except the person with the right key to decrypt it. The upside is that anyone attempting to access it without the password will fail, and the downside is that if you lose the encryption key (usually a password), whatever you had encrypted will be gone forever, unless there’s a way to recover…

The infamous Blue Screen of Death is a rite of passage among PC users, the tell-tale sign that something bad is happening. But the BSOD in Windows 11 is all-black instead of using the historically standard blue. Apparently someone at Microsoft was feeling nostalgic: a forthcoming update will change it back to the blue hue. The all-blue error message after an operating system crash has been a part of Windows since pre-release versions of 1.0 in the 1980s, though it’s become more useful with error codes and QR codes that (at least sometimes) lead to online help. Some late cosmetic changes to Windows 11 shifted the BSOD to a black background last summer, though the background of the QR codes oddly remained blue. Ars Technica spotted the change back to…

Price: £1,466 from fave.co/3I5IiW7 The LG Gram 17’s purpose is obvious: to deliver lightweight productivity chops in a 17in laptop that’s lighter than some 13in laptops. It performs that task exceptionally well. LG’s notebook also has a stunning display, and while it won’t break any performance records, its 11th-generation Tiger Lake CPU runs multiple applications and office-bound tasks with ease. The LG Gram 17 also offers Thunderbolt 4 functionality and a better than all-day battery life, further adding to its versatility as a portable productivity workhorse. Combined, these features make it a standout in the category. DESIGN The LG Gram 17 sports a nanocarbon and magnesium chassis with silver ‘Gram’ logos on the top cover and lower bezel. At 380.2x260.1x17.8mm, its chassis is more compact than 17in laptops like the…

Price: £450 from fave.co/3CTG8px It’s all change for Honor at the moment. Once part of Huawei, the brand was spun off into its own company last year to escape the worst impact of a restrictive US trade ban. It’s taken a while, but the Honor 50 is the first phone the company has released globally since striking out on its own. That means that the Honor 50 is the first Honor phone in some time to ship with full support for Google Mobile Services – but it’s also one of the first Honor phones to use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset and to run on software developed at least partly without Huawei’s support. The good news is that Honor has hit the ground running with a phone that fits right in…

What a long, strange trip it’s been. From its inaugural release to today, Android has transformed visually, conceptually and functionally – time and time again. Google’s mobile operating system may have started out scrappy, but it’s certainly evolved. Here’s a fast-paced tour of Android version highlights from the platform’s birth to present. ANDROID VERSIONS 1.0 TO 1.1: THE EARLY DAYS Android made its official public debut in 2008 with Android 1.0 – a release so ancient it didn’t even have a codename. Things were pretty basic back then, but the software did include a suite of early Google apps like Gmail, Maps, Calendar and YouTube, all of which were integrated into the operating system – a stark contrast to the more easily updatable standalone-app model employed today. ANDROID VERSION 1.5:…