Table of contents for October 2020 in PC Pro

ANOTHER MONTH, ANOTHER ransomware attack. Another month, another cloud-based service that doesn’t work for days. Another month, another reason for me to be convinced that we’re sleepwalking into a “computer says no” future if we insist on dumbing down our devices in return for the so-called convenience of the cloud. Consider the recent ransomware attack on Garmin. As I write this, my Garmin Connect app still won’t allow me to upload activities, with one message telling me that it’s due to “maintenance” and a second reporting “an outage”. It’s been like that for five days. Now, I don’t care a jot in the short term because I do the exercise for myself, not for Garmin’s gratification, but I like to have long-term records of where I’ve run and in what…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in Powerhouse laptop with price to match, from £2,3 a 2,399 from apple.com/uk If you know you’ll take advantage of what the 16in MacBook Pro offers, you won’t regret buying it. The only question is where you draw the line, with options right up to 8TB SSDs and 64GB of RAM. Whichever version you choose, you’ll benefit from an improved keyboard, spectacular screen and the very best audio setup on a laptop. REVIEW Issue 305, p52 ALTERNATIVES HP Spectre x360 (2020) HP keeps producing exceptional laptops and the new 13in Spectre x360 is one of its best. A striking convertible with all the mod cons. £1,399 from store.hp.com REVIEW Issue 307, p60 LG Gram 17 A 1.3kg 17in laptop with battery life of over 11…

@bazzacollins The Apple App Store is “the gift that keeps on giving,” CCS Insight’s chief of research, Ben Wood, told me recently. He’s not wrong. According to Apple’s own figures, the combined App Stores (mobile, desktop and TV) generated more than half a trillion dollars of revenue in 2019 alone, with around $20 billion of that going straight into Apple’s coffers as a result of its now infamous 30% cut on digital sales. Apple didn’t break down the sales into different device categories, but I’d bet $20 billion that the vast majority of that revenue came from the iPhone App Store, with the Mac App Store contributing a single-digit percentage to those figures. Microsoft gets a lot of stick for the lacklustre performance of the Windows Store, but Apple’s Mac…

A theme emerged in your longer responses: that the US said “jump” and the UK government replied “how high?”. “I’m pretty sure this is purely political,” wrote reader Keith Radcliffe. “Why not ban all Huawei handsets too? We’ll all pay for this due to higher tariffs but it seems the UK is just following Trump with this.” Borstuk agreed: “It feels like we’ve just jumped on this one because the US have a thing about Huawei.” Ed Clarke, meanwhile, argued that “Huawei has not been acting responsibly on security and deserves to be dropped”, while Errol Goldsmith urged caution: “Our opinion can only be formed from the drip-fed information we as the public have been given, which, so far, is just a headline!” “It’s a case of biting off our…

PRICE £2,416 (£2,900 inc VAT) from photospecialist.co.uk Cast aside any notions you have about what a monitor is; the Eizo Foris Nova defies them all. It certainly defies any idea of value for money, with a price that reaches for the sky and then keeps going. But then, if you buy the Foris Nova you’re also buying exclusivity: only 500 units of this monitor have been made worldwide and you even receive a certificate of authenticity, along with your number, in the box. Fortunately, exclusivity isn’t the only thing that makes it special. It also includes a stunning 4K OLED panel – and that has allowed Eizo to ignore the usual rules of monitor design to create something unique. ▪ Executive orders The first thing that strikes you about the…

PRICE £849 (£999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Gaming laptops and heavyweight prices go together like nitro and glycerine, but Acer’s Nitro 5 range aims to buck this trend. There are many models of Nitro 5 to choose from, including 15in variants, but here I’m testing a 17in Core i7-9750H machine that’s identified by the part number NH.Q9BEK.004. Note that it’s only available from currys.co.uk. In terms of style, think plastic and chunky: weighing 2.6kg even before you take the power brick into account, which measures 403 x 280 x 27mm (WDH), so you’ll struggle to slot it into the average backpack. The rear edge is dominated by a row of exhaust ports, and if you flip the laptop over you can watch the dual cooling fans at work. These are…

PRICE Three nodes, £63 (£75 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Thanks to its solid performance and very reasonable price, BT’s Whole Home Wi-Fi system (see issue 309, p79) has been on our list of recommended mesh extenders since its debut back in 2017. Now, the telecoms giant has come out with an even cheaper option, shrinking down its distinctive discs and scaling back the internals. Although this means performance is slower, it still makes a great way to extend the reach of your home network on the cheap. The Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi kit is an 802.11ac mesh system, just like the regular Whole Home kit. As with the original model – but unlike most other mesh platforms – it works as an extender for your existing router, rather than seeking…

PRICE £204 (£245 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/312m31 If there’s one area of smartphone technology that hasn’t improved much in recent years, it’s battery life. Readers with long memories will recall the Lenovo P2 (see issue 271, p60) from 2016, which kept going for 29 hours in our video-rundown test – only to be mysteriously pulled from UK shop shelves a few months after release. We haven’t seen anything that comes close since. Those who value battery life over glitz finally have hope, though. Samsung’s Galaxy M31 packs a gigantic 6,000mAh battery, which is 900mAh bigger than the Lenovo P2’s. And I won’t keep you in suspense: this larger battery meant the Galaxy lasted for 30hrs 20mins in our video rundown test, beating the P2 by 90 minutes. Translated into real-world…

PRICE £142 (£170 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk On the face of it, there’s nothing exceptional about the Xperia L4. It uses the weak MediaTek Helio P22 chipset, has 3GB of RAM and only its 64GB of storage deserves praise in this company. The 6.2in IPS screen is unusual, though: it’s only 720 pixels wide, but an aspect ratio of 21:9 mimics high-end Sony phones such as the Xperia 1 II (see p62). The screen itself isn’t great, as reflected in its technical results: 80.8% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut with a total volume of 89.2% and average Delta E score of 3.16 illustrate that the Xperia L4’s display is neither accurate nor vibrant. Nor is it overly bright, peaking at 355cd/m². Its one saving grace is a contrast ratio…

PRICE £224 (£269 inc VAT) from moto360.com With Google seemingly content to leave Wear OS bubbling on a back burner, smartwatch manufacturers have been left to try and drag the sector forwards by themselves. Consequently, there’s nothing earth-shattering about this third generation of the Moto 360, but it remains an accomplished time piece an accomplished time piece. Let’s start with its versatility. The Moto 360 comes in three different colours and each of those has two different bands in the box, one for leisurewear and one for sport. The classic steel version I was sent for review comes with an elegant tan leather strap for casual wear and a black silicone strap for when you’re working up a sweat. The device itself is rated 3atm water resistant, which Motorola says…

PRICE 1,362 (£1,634 inc VAT) from lambda-tek.com BENCHMARKS Corporate types will need no introduction to the Portégé brand, debuted by Toshiba all the way back in 1994. Today it’s been spun off to the Sharp-backed Dynabook, but the formula remains the same: high-end specifications in an ultra-light, ultraportable chassis. When we say ultra-light, that’s not mere marketing fluff. Pick up the X30L and you’ll think you’re holding an empty shell, rather than a functioning PC. On the scale it registers just 870g; in practice, it’s a system you can take everywhere and never even notice the weight. Though light, the Portégé X30L isn’t the smallest laptop on the block. The casing isn’t as compact as the Dell XPS 13, nor as slim as the HP Elite Dragonfly, but at a…

PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com BENCHMARKS Acer’s TravelMate X3 will come as a breath of fresh air for cost-conscious businesses. It comes in various configurations, but the one we tested costs just £583 exc VAT – and it holds up remarkably well against much pricier rivals. Let’s start with performance. Our X3 came with a relatively modest Core i5-8265U, and it was one of only two Windows system this month to make do with 8GB of RAM. For general desktop productivity, however, that’s perfectly ample, and while the X3 didn’t particularly distinguish itself in our multitasking test, it flew through our single-threaded image-editing benchmark, coming out with a perfectly fine overall score of 80. That’s partly thanks to the TravelMate X3’s relatively spacious 328 x 237mm chassis, which…

PRICE £767 (£920 inc VAT) from lenovo.com BENCHMARKS The ThinkPad L14 costs about half as much as the X1 Carbon, yet it looks remarkably similar. Open it up and you’ll find the same lovely keyboard, along with, once more, the signature combination of a touchpad and a TrackPoint nub in the middle of the keyboard. Significant differences quickly emerge, however. For a start, the plastic-encased L14 is nearly 40% heavier than the X1 Carbon, not to mention bigger in every dimension. The display is also different: while this 14in panel has the same resolution as the X1’s, it’s nowhere near as vivid, hitting a maximum of 243cd/m2, with an uninspiring contrast ratio of 1,220:1. Colour performance is poor too, as indicated by this month’s worst average Delta E of 4.8.…

Practical buying and strategic advice for IT managers and decision makers The Business Question How do I keep distributed IT patched and secure? p102 Hardware upgrades When it does – and doesn’t – make sense to invest in new kit p104 Cheat Sheet: Data fabric We untangle the latest fashion in data organisation p107 When the novel coronavirus pandemic first struck, businesses were forced to quickly adapt to new methods of working. Now, lockdown restrictions are beginning to ease, but it’s not a case of back to business as usual. Homeworking will be the norm for some time to come, and many organisations are making permanent changes to the way they operate. Last month, we looked at endpoint security software that can protect homeworkers from online dangers – but even…

PRICE One to 500 systems, perpetual licence, £10 each exc VAT from netsupportmanager.com NetSupport Manager is a complete support system that you host on your own network. That doesn’t mean it’s limited to local connections, however: it’s fully capable of supporting remote workers over the internet, and on private wide-area connections. The remote access features are included in the price, and let you link remote offices and homeworkers to the main site with a choice of encryption options, including 256-bit AES. Deployment is inevitably a little more complex than with a cloud hosted support solution, but it’s still straightforward. To handle off-site connections, the gateway server component needs to be installed on a Windows PC that’s accessible over the internet, which you can achieve by port forwarding or by placing…

PRICE Diskless, £6,205 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com The SA3600 heads up Synology’s family of high-end NAS appliances, targeting businesses that want powerful features and plenty of expansion potential. It’s a 2U 12-bay rack mounter that supports SAS 3 as well as SATA drives, and it comes with a meaty 12-core 2.1GHz Xeon D-1567 CPU in the engine room. It’s designed to grow with your workload. The base 16GB of DDR4 memory can be boosted to 128GB using standard DIMM modules, and an external SAS 3 expansion port supports up to seven RX1217sas or RX2417sas expansion shelves, taking the drive count to a maximum of 180. You won’t run short of network bandwidth either, thanks to four embedded Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus two 10GBase-T ports. A pair of spare PCIe slots…

Over 90% of my work is repair and it’s certainly become more challenging in recent years as manufacturers eschew repairability for planned obsolescence and limited-life products. Some blame this on Sir Jony Ive, the British designer who helped create Apple’s iconic look that normalised glued-in batteries and the screwless chassis. Apple’s AirPods, for instance, are a shameful product to be made in 2020 as they’re 100% disposable. A battery is glued into a tube, which is glued to a speaker and then glued to sensors that are glued to the casing, rendering it utterly unrepairable. Don’t take my word for it: have a look at this teardown video by iFixit (pcpro.link/312airpods). There’s no denying that the sound they create is stunning, especially when they’re chucked into a bin because something…

Lee Grant Much to his wife’s disappointment, Lee doesn’t really look like the character on the front cover, but he does share 67 tricks of his trade on p26 Nicole Kobie Is facial-recognition tech a valuable aid for the police or a flawed tool that should be suspended from active duty? Nicole speaks to the experts from p126 Darien Graham-Smith It’s been a testing month for Darien, who puts 11 business laptops through their paces from p76 and measures up BT’s Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi on p60 Steve Cassidy While Barry explains how to bulletproof your broadband on p32, Steve explains what’s been eating all our lockdown bandwidth from p122…

It’s 11 years since I last wrote a column about the end of Moore’s law (see issue 180!), in which time the number of transistors on a chip must have grown at least 100-fold. As I said in that column, just as in one four years prior, declaring the end of Moore’s law is a mug’s game. It’s a bit like predicting the Second Coming or the arrival of a Covid-19 vaccine. As far back as a 1997 article for Byte, I’d predicted that lithographic limits and quantum effects would flatten the curve below 100nm feature size, and I was only off by one order of magnitude. That counts as a win in this futile race. Intel’s latest fabrication plant, built to produce chips with minimum 10nm feature size, was…

The cusp of the biggest recession the world has ever seen might not strike you as the perfect time to splash out on a new PC. The good news is repairing or revamping the one you’ve already got isn’t as difficult as you may fear. If you want to boost the performance of a beloved PC, this guide will help navigate you around the infinite permutations. We’ll show how to extend the life of existing kit without stressing the credit card, alongside tips and tricks to ensure you make the right decisions. If you’ve always fancied taking a screwdriver to your machine, or it’s been a while since you last tinkered, upgrades are the perfect starting place. Most are simple and, if you follow our advice on research and purchasing,…

Lockdown has been described as a three-month live experiment in homeworking. Given that millions of people were plunged into said experiment with almost zero preparation, it’s no surprise that many have found their “broadband” isn’t quite up to the task. Zen Internet alone reports that it’s seen three times as many customers enquiring about broadband upgrades than it would expect normally. The reason I put broadband in speech marks above is that people often blame the “broadband connection” for a multitude of sins that are nothing to do with the raw connection in the first place. “Usually, when people say ‘my internet is slow and unreliable’, they haven’t assessed whether it is the wireless or the broadband connection itself,” said Alex Bloor, general manager at broadband provider Andrews & Arnold…

If your Echo device isn’t responding promptly, or just seems to be out of sorts, you can usually fix it by turning it off and on again. Some users even report that the devices are more responsive and better at recognising commands after a restart. There’s no official word on whether that’s true or not, but you can always give it a try. There’s no voice command to reboot Alexa, nor does the hardware come with a reset button or power switch – so you’ll need to switch the power off at the wall, or unplug the power cable, wait a few seconds and reconnect. If this doesn’t fix your issue, the next step is to try restoring your device to its factory settings – although note that this is a…

PRICE £2,249 (£2,699 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The gap between gaming and creative laptops is rapidly dwindling. After all, both benefit from a high-end multicore processor and supercharged graphics acceleration, and in either situation users will be willing to sacrifice slim dimensions for the sake of speed. With the latest version of its Aero 17 series, Gigabyte has created what may well be the perfect example of a crossover device. For this is a gaming laptop. Just look at the RTX 2070 Super graphics and the customisable RGB keyboard. Or take a gander at its sides and rear: these scream boy racer, with a mix of grey mesh fuselage, striking geometry and even a metal “number plate” that boldly states AERO. Heck, press the top-left button on the keyboard and…

PRICE £916(£1,099incVAT) from sony.co.uk Over the years, Sony has struggled to keep pace with the smart phone juggernauts Apple and Samsung. It wants to turn those fortunes around with the Xper 1II, a flagship release that it hopes will thrust its smartphones back into the lime light and, ultimately, back into your pocket. Before we go any further, though, we need to address the odd name. Sony has boxed itself into a corner by releasing two mid-range phones called the Xperia 10 and Xperia 5 in the past year, leaving it limited room for manoeuvre for the successor to its top of the range Xperia I (see issue 304, P84). For the record, this one is officially called “Xperia 1, mark 2”. ▪ Vive la difference There's a lot to…

Voucher code now printed on the spine of the cover and directly on the cover for digital subscribers 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 does not include acode. Also enter your email address. We will then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. 2 Once you’re into the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the…

PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from nokia.com Just when you think that budget smartphones can’t get any better, another well-rounded handset comes along to prove you wrong. The Nokia 5.3 includes four cameras, a 6.55in IPS display protected by Gorilla Glass, 64GB of storage and is even speedy – what devilry is at work? Admittedly, it doesn’t look like a luxury phone. Nokia sent me the model with a charcoal finish rather than the cyan or “sand” variant, and, from the back, it looks like a black slab of plastic with only a fingerprint reader and raised camera module for relief. There’s no sheen to the casing and it picks up fingerprints easily. Still, it feels well made. There’s a Google Assistant shortcut button on the left, which I deactivated…

PRICE £158 (£189 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk There’s no getting away from the fact that this isn’t an eyecatching phone: the greyish-blue colour of its plastic chassis is dull, and I’m not a fan of the way Xiaomi has placed the fingerprint reader and quad camera into one big rectangular box on the rear. The camera module isn’t flush with the back either, so it doesn’t rest flush against a flat surface when placed face up. The body itself feels cheap to the touch, and it’s quick to collect greasy fingerprints. That’s less of an issue on the front, where the display is protected by a smooth layer of Gorilla Glass 5. Plus, the selfie camera is neatly embedded inside the upper left corner of the display. That 6.53in screen…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/312eufy Stand aside Nest and Ring: there’s a new video doorbell in town. The Eufy Wireless is easy to set up, too, with the first step being to plug the supplied Eufy HomeBase into your router via an Ethernet cable. This box also acts as your doorbell chime and has 16GB of internal storage where it stores motion triggered video clips, which means no need to pay a subscription fee for an online service. The doorbell unit itself is battery powered, with Eufy claiming the battery will last up to six months (you charge it via a micro-USB port). You can hook it up to mains power if you prefer, but the battery option means you only need attach the mounting plate to your…

PRICE £997 (£1,196 inc VAT) from box.co.uk BENCHMARKS The TravelMate P6 is one of the biggest laptops in this month’s Labs – which isn’t surprising, since it features an unusually large 14in screen. Even so, the casing is a little bigger than it strictly needs to be to accommodate a display of this size, with medium-sized bezels either side of the screen and 3cm of plastic below. Nor, we have to say, is the display itself a stunner. Although big, it has only a bog-standard 1080p resolution, which means you don’t get any more desktop space than you would on the much smaller Dynabook Portégé X30L (see p84) or the HP Elite Dragonfly (see p85). The P6’s bigger screen merely makes things look larger by lowering the pixel density to…

PRICE £1,509 (£1,811 inc VAT) from store.hp.com BENCHMARKS HP’s Elite Dragonfly isn’t the smallest or lightest laptop here, but it’s definitely toward that end of the scale. At less than 20cm deep it will nestle into any satchel, and its 1.01kg weight feels almost flyaway compared to the some of the chunkers in this month’s Labs. Impressively, HP has managed at the same time to engineer in a 360° hinge, permitting you to flip the screen around into stand, tent or tablet formats; there’s even a stylus included, so you can make the most of tablet mode right away. And we’re pleased to see that nothing about the design is compromised to enable that flexibility. The 2-in-1 and inking options are a bonus for when you want them, but for…

PRICE £1,583 (£1,900 inc VAT) from lenovo.com BENCHMARKS The ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been a tent pole of the executive laptop market since the London Olympics – and although we’re now on the eighth hardware generation, the latest version sticks pretty closely to the original formula. That’s not a bad thing at all. The namesake carbon-fibre chassis keeps things light – this model weighs a spry 1.08kg – and it’s slim at just 15mm thick. A footprint of 323 x 218mm means the X1 isn’t the tiniest laptop around, but that allows Lenovo to fit in a good-sized 14in display. And while the matte black exterior tends to expose greasy fingerprints, it also makes a bold retro style statement that will appeal to old-timers. It’s a similar story with the…

PRICE £691 (£829 inc VAT) from store.google.com IT managers love the security and manageability of Chrome OS, while CFOs love the fact that a perfectly serviceable Chromebook can be had for as little as £200. If you want the full Google-branded experience, however, you’ll have to pay a bit more – £691 exc VAT, to be precise, for the Pixelbook Go. As the name suggests, the focus is on portability. The Go is just 13mm thick, and weighs a fairly airy 1.08kg. There’s no need to carry a separate charger around, either: in our video-rundown test, the Go ran for a magnificent 13hrs 19mins before finally shutting down. As is usual with Chromebooks, however, these plus points come at the expense of computing power. The Pixelbook Go is built on…

Surveying the range of systems in this month’s Labs, I’m put in mind of the old engineering adage: “Good, fast or cheap: pick any two.” If anything, the challenge facing laptop designers is even trickier. Here we’re dealing not with a mere triangle of tensions, but with all the complex interdependencies of performance, resolution, battery life, portability and price, each one pulling against several others. As mentioned in our guide on p78, this is one of those situations where there’s no single right answer – and that there isn’t really a wholly wrong answer either. As you may have noticed, none of the systems on test this month scores fewer than three stars out of five – isn’t that nice? Let’s be clear, though: this certainly doesn’t mean these laptops…

PRICE Team, first year, 50 computers, £145 exc VAT from remotepc.com The firm IDrive is best known for its affordable cloud backup solutions, but it also offers a smart cloud-hosted remote support solution. It’s designed to be easy to deploy, use and manage, and is priced attractively for smaller organisations. There are three versions to choose from. The Consumer/SOHO package offers a basic set of features, while the RemotePC Team edition here adds a central management web portal and allows you to create unlimited users and organise them into groups. Move up to the Enterprise version and you can manage remote deployments of the client app, define user access permissions and link up with Windows group policies. All the core support tools you’re likely to need are available in the…

PRICE One technician, 500 endpoints, £355 exc VAT per year from solarwinds.com Solarwinds’ Dameware Remote Everywhere lives up to its name, with a hosted design that allows technicians to reach out to users no matter where they are. Its pricing model is simple too: a £355 annual licence lets one technician support up to 500 endpoints, with additional licences enabling more concurrent sessions. That makes it great value for companies of a certain size, although those with smaller headcounts will very likely find other options more cost-effective. Deployment starts at the web portal, where you create accounts for your technicians and set privileges for each one, determining which tools they’re allowed to use. Technicians can also be assigned to particular departments, which allows support requests to be automatically routed to…

Place a note in your diary: 22 June 2020 was the day when the PC industry changed course, and nothing will be the same again. As Bob Dylan grumbled, “the times they are a-changin’”. What has brought on this change? The announcement of the move of the Mac line from Intel chips to custom designed ARM processors. “But wait,” I hear the naysayers cry, “no one buys Mac laptops and desktops Jon! They’re toys for those who prefer to inhabit the Club and First lounges at airports, the sort of person for whom the badge is more important than the inner capabilities. They have a small percentage of the marketplace. Who cares what processor they use? No one uses them for real work?” They don’t stop there. “Windows laptops are…

The world was very different in 1960, even more so in the small Yorkshire village I called home. Most people had never heard of computers and thought electronics was something to do with “valves” in radios and televisions. Books on computing didn’t exist in our village until the library placed a special order for me, aged 11. When my two books appeared, they detailed the workings of ENIAC and EDSAC, with photos showing boffins in white coats tinkering with electronic racks of equipment. I read with interest about such things as mercury delay lines used for memory, thermionic valves in logic gates and other magical components. Right then, it dawned on me that I may not be clever enough to live in this never-never land. But I wasn’t going to…

It has been a month of unexpected invitations. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait another four weeks to discover what probing questions I eventually manage to lay in front of Tony Blair, but like most events these days this will be over a remote video platform. I’ve even decided to create a dedicated “two-way chat over video” device, as this is going to be the way things will be for the rest of 2020. While videoconferencing does have its positives – not least all those interesting invitations – there’s a conflict between the type of control required in a corporate conversation versus the needs of the journalist. In corporates, especially outside the English-speaking world, it’s a case of don’t speak until you’re spoken to. This supports the function of the…

LABS Monitors monster test We put over 30 screens through their paces so you can buy the right one for your home or office. FEATURES Spotify vs the world Whether it’s Apple or Amazon, Deezer or YouTube, there are now several reasons to stop giving your monthly sub to Spotify. Supercharge Windows We reveal ten practical ways to make your Windows system run as fast as possible, including freebies and paid-for upgrades. Encrypt your disks Windows 10 Pro makes full-device encryption simple, but what are your options if you’re on the Home version? Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim our popular 15-piece PC screwdriver set. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for full details.…

It was one of those panicky phone calls, the sort that happens when something has gone sideways. Bob couldn’t get his stuff to work. He was incoherent with anger and frustration, which didn’t help get to the bottom of the issue, but once he stopped sobbing, it became very clear that Something Was Not Right. He was trying to get to the photographs held in his Adobe account in Lightroom, and “nothing worked”. This was during the recent outage from Adobe’s authentication servers, which brought customers to their knees. No amount of saying “it will be back soon” seemed to help, and he had to wait it out until Adobe put some pound coins in the meter to start up the relevant services once again. All I could do was…

The UK’s decision to ban Huawei equipment from 5G infrastructure – and potentially other networks – could lead to British consumers picking up the tab for £2 billion of additional costs. Under political pressure from the US in its trade war with the Chinese government, which many believe holds too much sway over Huawei, the UK government confirmed that networks will be barred from buying and installing 5G equipment from January next year. Existing Huawei equipment will have to be removed by 2027, but the uncertainty faced in sourcing new suppliers, at a higher cost, will hamper the 5G rollout and could increase prices for consumers. “This will be a major headache for most, if not all, of the telcos,” said Paulo Pescatore, founder of research firm PP Foresight. “While…

Given their scale, it’s no urprise that tech giants ave serious internal security teams draw from security forces. The seriousness with which big tech companies pursue their internal security goals is highlighted by the track records of recruits to the positions that oversee internal investigations. Joseph Vincent, to pick one such professional at random, is Electronic Arts’ head of global intelligence, investigation and incident management. He began his career as a police sergeant with the US Department of Defense, moving to a position as a special agent with the Department of Justice, before spending 11 years with the Department of Homeland Security. On leaving public office, he moved to Google to lead up internal investigations, before joining EA. Clearly this type of employee takes their role seriously, and while it…

@njkobie The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a life-changing technology revolution. It isn’t robots or automation or virtual GP appointments, despite what the many press releases sitting unread in my inbox probably say. Instead, I’m talking about ordering drinks at the pub using my phone. Before you all shout “but Wetherspoons!” at me, know two things: first, I can’t hear you, and second, I’m perfectly aware that the pub chain has long offered an ordering app. That, alongside the chain’s wide-ranging vegetarian menu and low-priced craft beer selection, had made it a firm favourite in my household. I could tap a few buttons in the app, enter the table number, and get food and beer delivered — it was a marvel of modern life. But after seeing the way the company…

I was a victim of the recent Claire’s hack. Malware was loaded onto the Claire’s payment processing server and intercepted everything entered on the checkout page so, rather than steal saved details, it quietly harvested details of everyone at the point they made a purchase online. This malware was apparently active for several weeks. To be fair to Claire’s, they notified me of this a couple of weeks ago. Today, I noticed several fraudulent transactions on the card. I was able to block most of them before they cleared my account. Thankfully, I used a credit card, meaning it was less inconvenient than losing access to my current account. I regularly read PC Pro and, like probably all your readers, use a password manager, 2FA via an app where possible…

PRICE Core i7/16GB/512GB, £1,125 (£1,350 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/312lg Over the past two years, LG has sent us numerous laptops from its lightweight Gram range – including the PC Pro Recommended LG Gram 17 last month (see issue 311, p56). While they’ve all been excellent in their own ways, none has lived up to the Gram name as much as this latest entry. Weighing in a dab of paint under 1kg, it’s one of the most portable Windows 10 laptops you can buy. ▪ Model selection It’s also the smallest laptop in the LG Gram lineup. Whereas the standard Gram employs a 15.6in display and the Gram 17 uses a 17in panel, the Gram 14’s display measures – as you might have guessed – 14in from one corner to the…

PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from huawei.com How much? Yes, Huawei really is charging £1,300 for this update to the P40 Pro (see issue 309, p62), and no you still can’t load the Google Play store – unless you’re willing to follow tortuous online guides that may or may not work. While Huawei is throwing in tempting extras to make the package more alluring, with a 40W wireless charger and its Watch GT 2 bundled at the time of writing, it’s a lot of money for an Android phone that doesn’t support Google Play store or Google Play services. In Huawei’s defence, the lack of Google’s official app store is less important than it was. That’s largely due to Huawei’s Phone Clone app, which makes it easy to copy apps…

PRICE 64GB, £250 (£300 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk Until now, even if you were lucky enough to live in one of the few 5G-enabled areas dotted around the UK, the entry fee into this brave, new world was off-putting. Only a handful of phones could access these faster data speeds and they tended to be flagship devices that cost the best part of £1,000. It’s true that a few phones have tried to bring down the 5G network’s high barrier for entry since the tech was switched on last May. Samsung’s Galaxy A90 5G cost a more considerate £669 on release earlier this year, for instance. But it’s taken Motorola’s popular Moto G series to provide the real breakthrough: a 5G phone for £300. What’s the catch? ▪ No 5G…

PRICE £149 (£179 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com The Galaxy A21s is made of plastic, but this is still a striking phone: our black review sample included an iridescent oil-slick finish that’s shared by its white and blue siblings. A slightly curved rear and sleek dimensions only add to its appeal, while the fingerprint sensor is well placed for quickly unlocking the phone and authorising contactless payments. The 13-megapixel selfie camera, hidden in a hole-punch notch in the top-left corner of the screen, also allows for face unlocks. More practicality comes from a 3.5mm audio jack on the bottom edge, with a shared nano-SIM and microSD tray on the left; this takes cards up to 512GB to boost its 32GB of storage. Samsung’s Exynos 980 chipset, backed by 3GB of RAM,…

PRICE £42 (£50 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/312auto The Amazon Echo Auto is an intriguing product that begs one question: why does it exist? Yes, it provides a cheap and handy way for owners of older cars to integrate voice-driven smart tech, but what does it add that your phone doesn’t? Especially if that phone has a 3.5mm output, which means you can plug it directly into your car’s stereo. The good news is that this is a neat device, squeezing all the smarts of an Echo – including a speaker for setup prompts – into a package the size of a small external hard disk. An LED light bar runs along the front of the Echo Auto, which provides similar visual cues to its house-bound brethren. On the right is…

PRICE £1,458 (£1,749 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk BENCHMARKS Probably the first thing that strikes you about the XPS 13 is how little it is. At just 296 x 199mm and a mere 15mm thick, it’s the smallest laptop here. The next is Dell’s “InfinityEdge” display: this may not be quite as gobsmacking today as when it was introduced in 2015, but the bezels still look impressively tiny – and they make it possible for Dell to cram a 13.4in touchscreen into that very compact case. And what a screen it is. The 16:10 shape is a tad taller than the usual letterbox aspect ratio, giving you some welcome extra workspace, and the model we tested boasts an extreme native resolution of 3,840 x 1,200. That equates to an astronomical 338ppi,…

PRICE £1,417 (£1,700 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com BENCHMARKS Looks aren’t everything, but it certainly doesn’t hurt if your laptop happens to be a thing of aesthetic and ergonomic beauty. That’s something Huawei clearly gets: we’d say its exquisite Matebook X Pro vies with the Dell XPS 13 for the title of this month’s most attractive laptop. As soon as you pick it up, the Matebook X Pro feels desirable. With a footprint of just 304 x 217mm it’s deliciously compact, and the warm grey metallic shell is impressively sturdy. It sits quite heavily in the hand, packing a substantial 1.32kg into that small chassis, but the USB-C “wall wart” power supply weighs just 198g, meaning the system as a whole is highly portable. Inside, the 13.9 in screen is far…

PRICE £2,041 (£2,449 inc VAT) from microsoft.com BENCHMARKS The Surface Book 3 is a unique proposition in today’s market: it looks like a regular laptop, but its 13.5 in screen can be detached and used as a standalone tablet. As the name indicates, it’s Microsoft’s third system of this type, and while some aspects of the design have barely changed from the original 2015 model, other parts are wholly up to date. Those include the processor – in this case, a tenth-generation Intel Core i7-1065G7 – and the graphics hardware, which comes in the form of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU. Our test system came with 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, all of which drives the price up to the rather alarming figure quoted above –…

PRICE £1,609 (£1,931 inc VAT) from store.hp.com BENCHMARKS The Elite x2 is HP’s answer to the Microsoft Surface Pro – a Windows 10 tablet with a thin snap-on keyboard cover. It’s a fine concept, but HP’s execution is both expensive and bulky. The 13in model we tested weighs 838g in tablet mode, going up to 1.44kg once you attach the supplied keyboard. HP also offers a 12.3in version that’s slightly more mobile (not to mention cheaper), but if you want the full 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD, you will need to buy a big-screen model. In fairness, the 13in Elite x2 is almost as powerful as a regular laptop for everyday desktop workloads, with its Core i7-8565U CPU delivering a solid set of benchmark scores. It has some good…

Laptops aren’t cheap. They’re expensive to buy, and – since they’re often designed as single, sealed units – they can be shockingly expensive to repair when something goes wrong. I’ve more than once had a service technician tell me that it would be more cost-effective to buy a brand-new laptop than to fix a fault with my old one. It’s tempting to set such concerns aside when you buy a new laptop with a manufacturer’s warranty – but the truth is that the protection could be almost worthless. For a start, a new computer should have a useful life of several years, yet most models are protected only for the first 12 months. If your laptop is destined to give up the ghost, the odds are it will happen after…

PRICE Perpetual, one guest/ten hosts, £625 exc VAT; subscription, 100 hosts, £1,075 exc VAT per year from netop.com Torn between cloud-hosted and on-premises support? With Netop’s Remote Control you don’t need to choose one or the other. An annual subscription enables cloud-based support, which can be easily combined with on-premises services by adding a perpetual licence. If you’ve encountered the software before, you’ll note some new features in this latest version, including email notifications for connection attempts, 64-bit macOS and Linux agents plus improved screen scaling for the browser-based client. There’s also a new optional add-on called Netop OnDemand, which supports ondemand connections and makes it possible to access iOS devices. What hasn’t changed is Netop’s tough security measures. All sessions are 256-bit AES encrypted, and host installation packages can…

PRICE As reviewed, £7,295 exc VAT from broadberry.co.uk AMD’s latest core-dense server CPUs are a huge challenge to Intel, with its three new 7Fx2 chips promising speeds, cache capacities and prices that their Xeon equivalents can’t match. Broadberry’s CyberServe R272-Z31 showcases their potential. It’s built around the EPYC 7F72 model, which features 24 cores, a 3.2GHz base clock speed that’s higher than the Xeon Scalable Platinum 8268 and a 192MB L3 cache that’s more than five times the size of its rival’s. It also supports up to 2TB of 3,200MHz RDIMM DDR4 memory, and a huge 128 PCIe 4 lanes. While this is undeniably a highend server, the R272-Z31 is good value for virtualisation, as it doesn’t attract VMware’s extra licensing charge for CPUs with more than 32 physical cores.…

So much IoT and other data gathering kit is powered by batteries these days, particularly the sensors. It makes sense too, with a weather station being the perfect example. It’s fine for an indoor unit with a display to be plugged into a power supply, but temperature, wind and humidity sensors must be sited outdoors, and the last thing anyone wants to do is run power and signal cables to the bottom of their garden. Wireless comms and battery power are perfect for this. Indoors, too, it makes sense for IoT kit to use batteries. I have a sensor on my patio doors and if the door is open for more than a minute then my system automatically turns the heating down in that room; I don’t want to pay…

Anyone who has followed my written ramblings over the decades will know that I’m a cybersecurity nerd. My idea of a relaxing evening read is a research paper covering an ingenious method of either implementing or breaking something security or privacy related. So it was that I found myself mesmerised by the idea of using a light bulb to eavesdrop on private conversations with little chance of getting caught. As you do. What grabbed my attention most about this paper from a bunch of rather clever researchers based at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel was that this privacy hacking didn’t involve a smart bulb. Well, it could do, but old-fashioned light bulbs work just as well. We’ve become so used…

In January, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was handcuffed and arrested in front of his family for shoplifting after being identified by facial recognition used by the Detroit Police Department. The system was wrong and he wasn’t a criminal but, because a machine said so, Williams spent 30 hours in jail. Williams has the distinction of being the first person arrested and jailed after being falsely identified by facial recognition – or, at least, the first person that we the public have been told about. The Detroit police chief said at a meeting following the reports of Williams’ arrest that the system misidentified suspects 96% of the time. Given the wider discussion around reforming policing in the US following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis officers, it’s no wonder calls for…