Table of contents for December 2020 in PC Pro

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO “TO IGNORE ONE informed PC Pro reader may be regarded as misfortune; to ignore two looks like carelessness.” With huge apologies to Oscar Wilde, that is the best way I can conceive to explain the importance of being earnest about customer support. The PC Pro Technology Excellence Awards (see p24) are the greatest distillation of technical nous in this country, and we ignore that wisdom at our peril. After all, we all have stories to tell of buying an item on impulse – or even after months of research – only to be disappointed soon after we removed it from its box. Nor are all flaws immediately obvious: often it’s a year down the line when you realise the solid metal is in fact brittle plastic,…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in Powerhouse laptop with a price to match, from £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 specification 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 LG Gram 17 A 1.3kg 17in laptop with battery life of over 11 hours might seem unbelievable, but here it is. It’s not the most powerful system, but it’s more than fast enough for most workers. £1,550 from argos.co.uk REVIEW Issue 311, p57 NEW ENTRY…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro. He’s spent a good half hour arguing over whether it should be ARM or Arm with the current editor. Turns out it’s both… @bazzacollins Gone are the days when companies slapped “British” at the front of their name as a badge of honour. British Airways, British Leyland, British Telecom: even though two of those three companies still survive, their names feel like relics from a Pathé newsreel. If the “British” brand had still been in vogue in the 1990s, Arm Holdings might have been known as British Semiconductor. Born in Cambridge as a brilliant byproduct of the Acorn Archimedes, Arm has been that rarest of things: a British tech success story. Hence the period of national mourning…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO In association with Expert Reviews and IT Pro Business Hardware of the Year Broadberry CyberServe R272-Z31 “Businesses fretting about the rising cost of core-based virtualisation and software licensing can rest easy with Broadberry on their side,” explains Dave Mitchell, whose reviews of high-end business hardware have kept PC Pro’s The Network section powering through 2020. “Powered by AMD’s mighty 24-core, high-performance EPYC 7F72 CPU, the R272-Z31 keeps licence costs down and presents a high storage capacity and great expansion potential.” Business Laptop of the Year HP Elite Dragonfly “The Dragonfly is that rare gem,” writes Expert Reviews’ heaf reviews Jonathan Bray. “It’s a business laptop that not only includes all the necessary corporate features – full serviceability, easy fleet deployment and smart BIOS features yet is…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO The Raspberry Pi Sense Hat is a versatile addon, with sensors for temperature, humidity, pressure, orientation and direction, and there are numerous examples of how it can be used online. The European Space Agency has even sent two of them to the International Space Station for conducting experiments in weightless environments (pcpro.link/314astro). Here at PC Pro, we’re a little more down to earth. To showcase the Sense Hat’s capabilities, we’ll focus on three of those sensors – temperature, humidity and pressure – to build a greenhouse-monitoring system. With winter on the way and gardeners moving vulnerable plants under cover, it makes sense to have a way of keeping an eye on conditions without having to go out and check a thermometer. We’ll therefore take a reading every 15…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 64GB, £250 (£300 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Released last year, the Oculus Quest (see issue 298, p51) was remarkable. It squashed VR into a portable package, side-stepping the need for a gaming PC or compatible smartphone and freeing you from cables in the process. It was an easy way for a consumer to try VR for the first time at a console-like cost of £400. Slimmer, lighter and better than its predecessor in almost every way, the Oculus Quest 2 takes this a step further. If it had launched at the same price as the original Quest, I’d still have loved it; given that the base model is £100 cheaper, however, the Quest 2 has fast become my favourite VR headset of all time. In the box…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk It’s mean to review the Acer Aspire C24 in the same month as the new 27in Apple iMac (see p58) because, while the two are both all-in-ones, they couldn’t be further apart in terms of aesthetics or aspirations. The C24 is big on value and light on style, while the iMac is big on style and heavy on the wallet. To hammer home this point, if you want to upgrade the iMac’s SSD from 512GB to the 1TB SSD inside this Acer it costs £200, so almost a third of the Aspire C24. Instead, this all-in-one should be considered in the context of buying a 24in monitor and a mini PC. Albeit one with mobile rather than desktop components:…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk Chromebooks are a fantastic alternative to Windows machines for children, students and businesses, or anyone who will appreciate a fuss-free approach to OS updates and security. As the Acer Chromebook 714 proves, they’re not all stubby bargain-bin machines, either. In fact, I’d go so far as to call the Chromebook 714 stylish. Its allaluminium chassis is finished in attractive matte dark grey, it’s reasonably slim at 18mm and weighs 1.6kg: not bad considering that it includes a 14in Full HD display. There is an immediate “but”: while the chassis looks great, the bottom plate doesn’t fit flush with the edges, leaving an ugly overhang, and the touchpad feels loose and rattly when you click it. That’s a shame because the surface…

PRICE £133 (£160 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Covid-19 hasn’t interrupted Motorola’s usual barrage of phone launches. Landing just six months after the Moto G8, the G9 Play improves on its predecessor with an upgraded Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor, the addition of NFC and a £20 drop in price. It’s also tweaked the design, with the rear cameras now neatly situated in a square in the top-centre of the phone, with a circular fingerprint reader sitting underneath. I also like the two new colour choices on offer. I was sent the “Sapphire Blue” model for review, which has a subtle gradient finish that changes from a dark blue to a lighter hue from the edges of the handset towards the middle. There’s also a “Forest Green” variant, which is just as…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Serious creative work requires a different kind of laptop. Whether you’re processing and correcting high-resolution stills, editing 4K video or producing 3D graphics, you need processing power, RAM and high-speed storage beyond what you’ll typically get from the average office workhorse. Similarly, running financial simulations, CAD software or complex data analytics necessitates more grunt than a mainstream laptop can muster. This is where this month’s Labs contenders come in. Some are massive and über-powerful, some ultraportable and agile, but all of them are designed to give you the capabilities you need for more demanding tasks. We asked the UK’s biggest and best laptop manufacturers to send in devices that could go the extra mile. We asked for high-end processors, discrete graphics, great designs and beautiful, colour-accurate screens that…

PRICE £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from acer.co.uk Compared to Acer’s ConceptD 7, the ConceptD 3 looks prosaic. Boring, even. This is a more traditional, sensible workhorse of a laptop, leaving out the ConceptD 7’s stunning 4K screen and high-end GPU for a more accessible price. Yet if it lacks the flair of its stablemate opposite, the ConceptD 3 is certainly well balanced. You still get the six-core, 12-thread Core i7-9750H processor, albeit with 16GB rather than 32GB of RAM, and while the GeForce GTX 1650 GPU is no match for our ConceptD 7’s RTX 2080, it’s a sensible compromise: this graphics chip comes with enough power to accelerate lightweight 3D workloads and rendering tasks, while the powerful processor can handle number crunching in video and image editing, plus scientific, financial…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £1,666 (£1,999 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Let’s call this one a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Beneath the bland and anonymous grey aluminium chassis, the Phantom packs in some mighty specifications, including an eight-core, 16-thread Core i7-10785H processor and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super GPU. What’s more, it crams in enough cooling to keep these processors running at full pelt. The result is a laptop that might not look like much, but that machineguns the competition when it comes to performance. If speed matters and you’re not worried about high-end professional features or certifications, you’ll struggle to find a machine that gives you so much for so relatively little. The construction isn’t actually all aluminium. The lid is, as is most of the screen surround and the plate…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £1,833 (£2,199 inc VAT) from microsoft.com Nearly five years on from the launch of the first Surface Book, the Surface Book 3 remains a unique laptop. With all of the core components in what would normally be the laptop’s lid, the screen can detach and function as a high-end Windows tablet, yet the GPU and secondary battery in the base give it capabilities that no rival 2-in-1 device can offer – not to mention enhanced connectivity and sound. It’s a design that still makes a lot of sense for many design professionals, particularly illustrators and retouchers who might prefer working with a pen. You can hold the screen in tablet mode and draw or make edits directly to the surface. Microsoft’s PixelSense technology is as…

PRICE £322 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk The HL-J6100DW is larger than your average desktop inkjet, but that’s because it can turn out A3 prints just as happily as A4. That’s a handy trick, and while the £322 price tag is this month’s highest, it’s a lot cheaper than most A3 lasers. Running costs are low too: the printer ships with standard high-yield ink cartridges, which print a mono page for a penny and a colour one for 5p. When these are exhausted, the super-high-yield replacements cut costs further to just 0.9p for mono and 4p for colour – and, to keep wastage to a minimum, the printer’s Secure Function Lock can restrict colour printing to specific users. This makes the HL-J6100DW well suited to busy offices, and it comes with…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £310 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk Lexmark’s GO Line series of lasers is aimed at businesses with relatively light printing needs, and within that family the C3426dw is the top-end colour model. It delivers good speeds and excellent output quality for a low starting price: the trade-off is running costs, which are a little steeper than you’ll find with other lasers. The starter cartridges supplied with the C3426dw are only rated for 1,500 pages, after which Lexmark’s 4,500-page high-yield replacements work out to 1.9p per mono page and 10.4p for colour. As long as you can live with that, the C3426dw is a very respectable A4 colour laser, claiming a swift 26ppm print speed in both colour and mono, and integrated duplex printing. Paper capacity is ample for…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO On-the-job training remains one of the best ways to bring recruits up to speed. It’s inexpensive, effective and extends the company ethos to the next generation of employees as they learn from old hands. It’s also far more difficult now that large swathes of the workforce are working from home. Even traditional training, delivered on-site or at third-party premises, has taken a hit. Aside from the fact that many will have to travel using public transport, which they still may not be comfortable doing, you’ll need to run more sessions so you can split staff into smaller groups, or hire a larger venue. Each solution increases costs. Yet training isn’t something you can put on hold until the crisis is over. Poorly trained staff are more…

Last week, I hosted a big online meeting with the digital marketing and development teams from several of my company’s clients, as well as a few other interested parties. The purpose of this session was to show them some of the things we’ve been working on recently, and to try to get them to think about how their online strategy needs to adapt and change in the post-coronavirus world. I can’t tell you much about the meeting because of a shedload of client confidentiality clauses. What I found interesting, though, was how these clients – all unrelated – were willing to share experiences and best practices with each other. None were direct competitors, but despite that I’m sure that if I’d got them all into a big conference room and…

I’ve been a part of, and as a journalist apart from, the cybersecurity community for the best part of 30 years now. That’s before most people would have said such a thing existed, but I can assure you it did. Back then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, hacker communities existed across FidoNet (look it up, post-millennials) and other bulletin board systems, as well as the emerging internet by way of certain Usenet newsgroups (ditto). Since the very beginning of my adventures in cyber, which started on what you might call the wrong side of the fence as a hacker, there’s been one thread that strings it all together: the password. Back in the day, “cracking” a password was something of an overstatement as often that password would be…

Nik Rawlinson In search of the perfect project to showcase the Pi Sense Hat, Nik turned one of his many Pis into a sentient thermometer for his greenhouse. See p42 Stuart Andrews If you’re after a laptop that can handle any task, Stuart’s testing of nine contenders yields some surprising results. Find out which excel from p78 Stewart Mitchell While CV19 has shown the infosec industry at its best (see above), serious issues surround its treatment of women, Stewart finds from p12 Jo Best With life expectancies creeping up, Jo explores the nascent technologies that could help us live healthier and more productive lives. See p36…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO If infosecurity conferences have been cancelled during the coronavirus crisis, there’s one group of attendees who probably let out a quiet sigh of relief: women. A staggering one in four women have reported being sexually harassed at infosec events, according to an international survey. The question is why – given this level of abuse and several high-profile cases of sexual assault – has the infosec industry done nothing about it? For Chloé Messdaghi, co-founder of support group Women of Security (WoSEC), her introduction to the perils of working in what she describes as a toxic environment was at a 2017 conference. “I was leaving a drinks event and when I was walking out this guy grabbed me by my neck and put me up against a…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He often wonders whether placebo pills are made in different strengths, and if they are then are they called Placebo Plus? It feels as though the Covid-19 pandemic has made virologists and epidemiologists of all of us. People are suddenly following vaccine development with sport-like devotion and discussing the difference between cytokine and bradykinin storms at the bus stop. Or perhaps that’s just my circle of hypervigilant friends. This interest has a practical focus, since returning to any semblance of normal life depends to a great extent on success in a vaccination program. But I sense there’s another dimension to it: it makes us feel better when we understand what’s happening to us and gives us a sense (perhaps illusory) of control.…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Moore’s outlaw I’ve read that we’re rapidly reaching the end of the line in terms of shrinking semiconductors. We hit the clock speed limit around 15 years ago so manufacturers are running out of options to deliver further gains in performance or efficiency. Yes, you can keep adding cores to processors but a lot of tasks cannot simply be divided into dozens of smaller jobs performed in parallel. It’s said the only way forward is moving from largely generic CPUs to processors optimised for specific tasks. Apple’s move to designing its own silicon, coupling hardware and software, looks like a very shrewd move at this point. Google is following suit, designing its own chips, so I wonder what the “Wintel” platform can do to avoid stagnation…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO If you were born in 1920, you could expect to live for just over 55 years if you were a man, and almost 60 if you were a woman. The average boy born today, however, will reach almost their 90th birthday, while girls will hit their 92nd. Lifespans have been extended by decades, but does our quality of life suffer as a result? Getting older isn’t only a matter of adding a few more candles to the cake and accepting that music was “better in my day”, it also brings a vast range of physical changes. The functions of our liver, kidneys and other organs gradually decline; muscles and joints wear out; our immune system starts to put its feet up. Even the brain can reduce…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO If you’ve ever used Windows, it’s a fair bet that you’ve installed the odd software package – be that Chrome, Word or Fortnite. And, no doubt, you did it in the usual way, by opening up the File Explorer, launching setup.exe, clicking through a series of confirmations, waiting for the necessary files, libraries and settings to be installed, then finally clicking “Close” to finish up. While this process is easy for beginners to get along with, all that clicking and waiting around is hardly efficient. If you have several apps to set up it can be a real pain, as you can’t start a second installation until the first is complete. Fear not, though. A better way is at hand, as long as you’re not afraid of a…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £1,667 (£2,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk While AMD has enjoyed a phenomenal 2020, there’s one nut it hasn’t yet cracked: desktop graphics. Nvidia remains the connoisseur’s choice thanks to its support for ray tracing and the sheer monitor-cracking performance of top-end cards such as the RTX 2080 Ti. All of which would make most companies sit back and relax. Nvidia, it turns out, isn’t prepared to go gently into that good night. With its RTX 30 series cards, it has torn up people’s expectations of an affordable graphics card. The RTX 3070 will cost £469 and promises speeds to match the £800-plus RTX 2080 Ti, while the RTX 3090 has gone on sale for £1,399 and makes the 2080 Ti look like a Tonka Toy.…

PRICE £1,319 (£1,583 inc VAT) from uk.dynabook.com Not all Dynabook Portégé X30 laptops are born the same. Two months ago, we reviewed the 870g X30L (see issue 312, p84), but the plain X30 employs a larger chassis so it can take advantage of a nominally faster processor. (If you’re confused by Dynabook’s naming strategy, you aren’t alone; the key difference here is that the suffix “L” indicates an even lighter design.) I say “nominally faster” because there proved to be little difference in these laptops’ PC Pro benchmark scores, with the X30-G one point slower at 95 overall. That’s despite the Core i7-10510 in the X30-G having a higher base frequency of 1.9GHz to the 1.1GHz of the Core i7-10710 – but the latter chip has six cores compared to…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE4K, £1,750 (£2,100 inc VAT) from razer.com Razer has made its name by producing slim and sleek gaming laptops, and the Razer Blade Stealth 13 is slimmest and sleekest of them all. At 15.3mm thin from front to back, and weighing 1.48kg, this is a laptop you can throw into the bag without a second thought. While that’s true of all ultraportables, here you can knock up a sales report on the way to work and enjoy a spot of Doom Eternal on the way back. That’s because Razer finds room inside for a GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics chip, and a glance at the Metro: Last Light graph opposite show its benefits compared to integrated graphics (it’s also a chunk faster than the GeForce GTX 1650 in…

PRICE £291 (£349 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk It wasn’t so long ago that a pre-calibrated monitor with guaranteed colour accuracy sent accountants’ blood pressure soaring. Last month, in our group test of 35 monitors, the BenQ PD2705Q (see issue 313, p82) changed that: this £379 monitor came with Calman and Pantone certification, along with the promise of an average Delta E of under three. Considering that price bought you a high-quality 27in IPS panel with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, we came away impressed. This month, the ProArt Display PA278QV arrives on the scene with a similar sales patter. The PA278QV’s price is lower, yet it again includes Calman certification and this time a guarantee of a Delta E less than two. Delta E is a measure of colour accuracy,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from logitech.com Logitech has already created the king of mice in the MX Master 3 (see issue 301, p65), and its dynastic legacy is obvious the moment you pick up the MX Anywhere 3. The most obvious sign of its DNA is the central stainless steel wheel. Using electromagnets, this allows you to slip seamlessly between a ratchet scroll (line by line) to freewheeling at a speed that will make long documents fly by. You can even use it to scroll sideways by pressing the shortcut buttons on the side at the same time. It addresses one of people’s big criticisms of the Anywhere 2S: if you press down on the old mouse’s scroll wheel it selects between inputs (the MX series can…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £2,333 (£2,799 inc VAT) from acer.co.uk Even with laptops aimed at creative users, it’s surprising how little creativity seems to go into their design. Happily, that’s not the case with the ConceptD 7; from its elegant white aluminium chassis to the understated amber backlighting under the keyboard, it looks great. Even the grilles between the hinges at the rear of the machine look like they’ve not just been designed, but styled. It’s not the most compact laptop on test this month, but with a 359 x 255mm footprint and 18mm thickness, you could hardly call it chunky. And the design works on a practical level. For one thing, the size allows for a cooling solution that can balance performance with noise. Even running at full tilt in…

PRICE £1,874 (£2,249 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Gigabyte pitches the Aero 15 OLED as the ultimate work hard, play hard machine, with all the power and speed you might require for creative projects, alongside outstanding performance for 3D games. With a Core i7-10875H and GeForce RTX 2070 Super in place, neither claim seems out of order, and the Aero 15 also has the advantage of a fantastic 15.6in OLED screen. When we say fantastic, we mean it. It’s not tuned as bright as the Razer’s OLED display – its peak brightness stops at 334cd/m2 – but it’s a close match in every other respect, with 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour gamuts, and 95.5% of Adobe RGB. Colour accuracy isn’t perfect – we measured an average Delta E of 3.32…

PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews in a Labs dominated by high-end laptops with high-end specs and matching price tags, it’s almost a relief to find something more reasonably priced. True, PC Specialist has cut down the specification and made compromises on the chassis and the screen, but you can see it’s tried to meet the needs of creative users without driving the price out of reach. While the Fusion Pro R isn’t perfect, it hits the target more than you might expect. There are signs of cost-cutting in the aluminium chassis, which feels like a thin shell and lacks the premium feel of more expensive devices. The lid also has more flex than we’d like, although the base feels perfectly robust. The hinge is slightly stiff, but we’d rather a…

Before we start a Labs group test, we contact all the relevant manufacturers detailing the kind of machines we’re looking for. In this case, I explained to them, we were on the hunt for serious creative laptops, so please could the various manufacturers either provide the kind of high-end, high-cost mobile workstations that they sell into the professional 3D graphics market or machines that focused on photography and digital design? Yet something unexpected happened: a number of manufacturers asked if they could send in laptops that I’d normally think of as high-end games machines. There were various reasons behind this, but one message kept on coming through: these laptops had the specs, the features and the performance required for the most demanding creative applications. Why not try them and see…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £253 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk Canon’s i-Sensys LBP664Cx is a tempting option for busy offices. This desktop A4 laser costs a reasonable £253, yet delivers a speedy 27ppm in both colour and mono. A 12.7cm colour touchscreen makes it easy to use, and you can even take some advantage of Canon’s library of downloadable apps. All the key connections are here: alongside a USB 2 port, the printer offers Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n wireless services, which are easily configured via a touch-driven wizard (although, as usual, both interfaces can’t be active simultaneously). There’s an integrated NFC sensor too, ready for tap-to-print operations. The printer is supplied with a set of 1,200-page starter cartridges, and the only consumables are replacement toner packs, which come in standard and high-yield…

PRICE As reviewed, £2,033 exc VAT from dell.co.uk With prices starting at just £538, the PowerEdge T140 is a tempting proposition for growing SMBs looking for their first purpose-built server. This sturdy little tower comes with support for Intel’s powerful Xeon E-2200 CPUs, flexible storage options and room to expand with demand. There’s a good range of core configurations on offer too, to suit almost any workload. The Basic entry-level system sports a 3.6GHz Core i3-9100 CPU and 8GB of DDR4, while the Standard model starts at £832 and offers a larger CPU choice, with all Xeon E-2100 and E-2200 models available. Coming in at £2,033, our review system is clearly a lot more expensive, but it’s powerful enough for the most demanding of roles. We selected a 3.4GHz quad-core…

The elephant in the room when it comes to training is the difference between prebuilt, standard courses and custom jobs. A prebuilt course steers a narrow semantic route between rapids and whirlpools, because knowing what Photoshop can do is very different from knowing how your company happens to make use of it. Prebuilt scripts can be packed with plenty of information, but only a fraction may be relevant to the hard-pressed student. I used to try to convey this idea with three small diagrams: a circle filled with dots, dashes and question marks, to represent the entire feature set of a product; then the same circle, blotched with fat marker pen to represent the features you’re never going to use and don’t need to be trained in; and, finally, an…

Four months ago, I explained (see issue 310, p118) that Boris had declared our shop must close its doors to the public. Overnight we metamorphosed into a collect and deliver repair service implementing a socially distanced technical process worthy of a Whitehall test’n’trace app. We’d arrive at the customer’s house, place a large plastic container on the doorstep then sprint to safety behind a rhododendron bush. The customer would place whatever into the container then retreat back inside. Most of the containers were taken back to the shop, but I also repaired laptops in beautiful gardens, wireless printers on driveways and a pig of an iPhone from a cramped, damp garage. Thankfully, we’ve had to repeat our process hundreds of times and Google Maps made the operation less stressful. I…

I’m intolerant of the usual approach to router and connection faultfinding. No, really. Even someone with my sweet and reasonable outlook can become sarcastic and spiteful after long enough on hold. But don’t settle back for a merry tale of quips to call centre operatives because the world has changed. What used to be a game of phone tag and discountnegotiation now has some real teeth: you need to work from home, leave enough bandwidth for streamed movies, pick the cheapest deal and get tech support out of departments almost totally denuded of staff. That’s a proper and worthy challenge. So I’m asking you, please, to be careful before you follow advice on the internet connection support forums. As a case in point, let’s start with one from Virgin Media…

Democracy faces a host of challenges, and that includes voting itself. Voter turnout is falling – in the UK, it fell to 67% of eligible people in the 2019 general election, down by 1.5% from 2017. And that was before the pandemic hit. With the looming US election, casting an in-person ballot has some worried about the potential risk of queuing at a polling station and others more worried about the impact of the most vulnerable voters deciding to stay at home. Mail-in ballots are one answer, but the chaos surrounding the US Postal Service (USPS) has many concerned. E-voting is often suggested as a solution, and has been trialled in Estonia with some success, but digital polls are haunted by security concerns. Could blockchain be the answer? The digital…

I’m mad as hell. I’m tired of companies flogging third-rate firmware on second-rate hardware whilst charging a first-rate price. I’m tired of IT stuff that just doesn’t work, of systems that are thrown together with chewing gum and sticking plaster, and barely work when new, let alone several years down the line when some poor sucker has to take over the management and support. I’m tired of companies for whom “customer support” has turned into a joke. I’ve just tried to track an incoming package from the US with FedEx and the phone enquiries line timed out after 15 minutes of waiting, telling me that there were no customer representatives available. The online chat representative seemed unable to answer my question (after another 20-minute wait) and then, after I had…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Nvidia faces an uphill battle to convince regulators and partners that its purchase of Arm Holdings won’t radically reshape the mobile and computing industries. UK-based Arm was bought by Japanese investment giant SoftBank in 2016, but was recently snapped up by graphics chip specialist Nvidia in a deal worth $40 billion. However, that deal faces a tortuous route through regulators, who will be worried by the fact that a chip design company driving the mobile industry has been bought by another chip maker, potentially jeopardising Arm’s cherished independence. “The future of Arm is the future of the mobile industry, because every smartphone includes ARM* technology at its core, and increasingly so do mobile networks and data centres, too,” explained Ian Fogg, vice president of analysis at…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She really does love and miss Pret and the lovely staff who make her flat whites, and thinks you should know it now delivers. @njkobie The government wants so-called “knowledge workers” to go back to the office. After all, if you don’t leave your house, it’ll ruin all those shops you used to buy unsatisfying sandwiches from to devour hunched over your keyboard. Now, I love Pret as much as anyone else, but there’s only one reason you should return to the office: because you want to. Forget what the prime minister wants, what your boss demands or the pressure from your colleagues – if you want to work from home, you’ve spent the past several months proving you…

When did something so simple become so hard? To deliver and manage a more considered Wi-Fi system at home, I decided to flatten my TP-Link Archer C5400 and RE450 devices and start again with a cunning plan. The reason for the nuclear option was to finally move my kids’ internet access onto a guest network, keeping all core internet devices on a primary network. This fundamental redesign had been prompted by a two-year Cold War between myself and my son (now 12), where my efforts to implement a viable parental control strategy were constantly undermined by his ingenuity, including… 1 A spoofed MAC address on the Xbox (thanks very much, Microsoft!) 2 Borrowing the powerline network adapter from my Marantz AV unit 3 Connecting to the internet via the RE450…

For most older adults, the closest they come to getting support from a robot is using a Roomba to pick dog hairs off the carpet. Yet that could be about to change. Japan has one of the oldest populations, with almost a third of citizens now aged over 65, making it a hotbed of innovation for older adults. For example, robots are already undertaking a number of roles for the elderly, including cleaning, acting as companions and exercise coaches, and even nurses (albeit sometimes shaped like bears), with one nursing home using 20 separate models of robot. In Japan, such robots tend to be viewed positively – research found the majority of people would be fine with nursing care from a robot – but attitudes vary around the world, and…

While the big news is Hosted by 3CX, behind the scenes it’s all about improving the lives of remote workers and the IT team that has to deliver the services. Microsoft 365 integration We have re-engineered the Microsoft 365 sync mechanism, with smoother synchronisation between users, contacts and calendar status. For instance, 3CX can now sync with Microsoft 365 emails and usernames. Upgraded iOS and Android apps You’ll see a number of tweaks to these apps, focused around both performance and usability. For instance, the new Android app uses the latest Chat API to better support live chat features such as transferring from chat to calls. Improved WebMeeting interface 2020 has become the battle for band width in many homes, so we’ve introduced enhancement to minimise this. Organi can now…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE As reviewed, £2,333 (£2,799 inc VAT) from apple.com If you were hoping for a radical overhaul to this year’s iMac, I have bad news. In fact, Apple hasn’t significantly altered the design of the iMac for years – it’s still the slender, silver all-in-one we purred over back in 2012. Perhaps the chassis will change next time, to accompany Apple’s switch from Intel’s chips to its own Silicon, but, for now, the iMac is the same as it ever was. How fortunate for Apple that it remains one of the most attractive and powerful all-in-ones you can buy. What’s new? There are subtle changes. A new “nano-texture” anti-reflective glass option reduces glare in bright rooms and it’s the first iMac with Apple’s “True Tone” display tech (covered…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £1,299 (£1,559 inc VAT) from uk.dynabook.com While it seems shallow to admit it, names count. What aspiring executive wouldn’t prefer a sleek and sexy Portégé as opposed to a boxy sounding Tecra? Not that there was anything too boxy about the Tecra X40-F (see issue 304, p59) that the Portégé X40-G replaces. They share all the same vital stats, from how much they weigh to the size of the chassis; all that’s changed is the name and the internal components. Both are improvements, especially as this laptop shares so much of the same design DNA as its 13.3in brother opposite. Considering that the X40-G includes a 14in screen, it’s also slim and light at 16.9mm and 1.25kg. If I could make one request of Dynabook’s designers, it…

PRICE £708 (£850 inc VAT) from hihonor.com Hot on the heels of the bargain MagicBook 14 – our A-List choice of budget laptop for three months now (see issue 311, p65) – comes the MagicBook Pro. While the price is still low, Honor has clearly lifted its sights to more premium buyers here, with many of the same elements as the Huawei MateBook X Pro (see issue 312, p86). As Honor is a Huawei spinoff, the similarities come as little surprise. A 16.1in non-touchscreen means it’s larger than any of Huawei’s offerings to date, but its grey, “frosted” matte finish, pop-up keyboard webcam and circular fingerprint power button give the game away. That’s great news: Huawei’s laptops have proved consistently excellent in terms of build quality, and it’s the same…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £374 (£449 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Just as gaming laptops are muscling their way into professional workspaces – take a look at our Labs this month (see p78) to discover how viciously the lines are becoming blurred – so gaming monitors are starting to look and sound similar to their professional stablemates. This 31.5in screen has much in common with the curved Philips Brilliance P series monitors that shone so brightly in last month’s group test of 35 monitors (see issue 313, p68), right down to the built-in USB hub, USB-C connection and generous height adjustment. Most crucial of all, though, they all use a VA panel. Standing for vertical alignment, VA is the obvious choice for curved panels due to the way light shines through vertically…

PRICE £283 (£340 inc VAT) from lenovo.com If ever there was a product for our times, it’s the ThinkSmart View. The idea is that this device sits on your desk to handle videoconferencing duties, display your calendar and show the stream of messages from colleagues. That leaves your main computer uncluttered with notifications and admin duties, so you can focus on the things that matter. While it’s true that the ThinkSmart View can do all this, I should emphasise that it’s 100% tied to Microsoft Teams, meaning Zoom and Slack users need not apply. When you switch it on, having connected it to your wireless network, you’re prompted to enter your Teams login and it won’t be long before you can see your calendar and use the touchscreen to check…

We wanted to push this month’s group of laptops to their limits using benchmarks that would test their capabilities across a range of creative applications, along with the kind of workloads we’d expect workstation-class computers to be able to run. We still ran the laptops through our standard PC Pro benchmarks, which represent common image-editing, 4K video transcoding and multitasking workloads, but also an additional suite of tests, including: Cinebench R20: Maxon’s 3D rendering benchmark tests PC performance in CPUintensive ray tracing workloads. It incorporates the newest rendering technologies in Maxon Cinema 4D, and is built to make the most of multithreaded processors and the latest features of Intel and AMD architectures. V-Ray Next: The V-Ray Next benchmark tests both CPU and GPU-accelerated 3D rendering using V-Ray’s advanced rendering engine,…

PRICE £2,533 (£3,064 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Alienware was one of the first companies to push high-end designer gaming laptops, but Dell (which bought the brand way back in 2006) believes these models could also double for creative duties. Looking at the Alienware it’s not hard to see why While there are signs of its gaming heritage in the angular design and honeycomb grille above the keyboard, these are relatively restrained. What’s more, there’s no arguing with the spec. With a tenth-generation Core i9-10980HK CPU 32GB of 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM and a mobile RTX 2080 Max-Q, our review sample easily out-specs most workstations you could buy for the same money. The design is nothing if not practical, bringing the hinge forwards of the rear edge of the laptop, which shuffles…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £1,119 (£1,343 inc VAT) from store.hp.com If you think of mobile workstations as huge desktop replacement laptops with bulky chassis and arrays of noisy fans, HP’s ZBook 14u G6 might come as a shock. It looks like a 14in ultraportable. Yes, it’s thicker than your average MacBook clone at 17mm, yet it still contains a Core i7 processor and one of AMD’s professional workstation GPUs. It’s all encased in a rock-solid aluminium chassis, which HP claims has been tested against military standards for drop and shock-proofing along with harsh environments, and the whole thing weighs in at under 1.5kg. Despite its diminutive size, it still has a full complement of connections, with a single USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port on the left-hand side, plus Gigabit Ethernet, a…

PRICE £1,875 (£2,250 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com Razer’s Blade laptops were instrumental in transforming the gaming laptop from a hulking desktop replacement into today’s more desirable slim and light machines. So desirable and practical, in fact, that they’ve started crossing over into the professional and creative markets too. These days, the range covers everything from 13in ultraportables to the workstation-class Studio Edition models with Core i7 processors and Nvidia Quadro graphics. And sitting somewhere in the middle we have this Razer Blade 15 model, which is based around the eight-core Core i7-10875H, a GeForce RTX 2070 Super GPU and a fantastic 4K OLED screen. It’s an impressive piece of hardware, and while there are traces of its gaming heritage in the RGB-backlit keyboard, the design still looks elegant, streamlined and restrained. The aluminium…

Dell EMC PowerEdge T140 A perfect – and affordable – first server for your business p104 Kodak Scan Station 730EX Plus A nifty little scanner that makes digitising less stressful p105 The Business Question What’s the best way to manage your remote team’s training? p106 How do you choose the perfect printer for your office? Dave Mitchell provides a guide for what to look for and reviews four top contenders @ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO In previous issues of PC Pro, we’ve written at length about the benefits of digital document management – but no business can do away with paper entirely. Companies still need to produce hard copies of invoices and reports, contracts for signing or proofing, sales receipts and more. For the foreseeable future, the office printer is here…

PRICE Print 365 service, from £37 per month exc VAT from epson.co.uk If your business is a moderate user of printers and you’re worried about the costs of consumables and maintenance, a managed print service could be just the ticket. Epson’s Print 365 scheme charges a flat monthly fee to cover the cost of all hardware, consumables, service and delivery – so all you need to buy is the paper. There’s a fair spread of printers to choose from, but the WF-C529RDTW is one of our favourites. It doesn’t have an NFC sensor and its LCD panel isn’t touch-enabled – but it’s rated for a serious 4,500-page monthly duty cycle, and comes with 750-sheet and 500-sheet paper trays, plus an 80-page multipurpose tray at the rear. It can also pump…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £1,380 exc VAT from thescannershop.com Sure, you can buy a cheap USB scanner and hook it up to a host PC – but that’s a waste of space and resources. Kodak’s Scan Station 730EX Plus is a far more elegant way to go, delivering speedy walk-up scanning in a compact, self-contained unit. It’s a breeze to use too, thanks to a huge 24.6cm touchscreen that’s as big and colourful as an iPad. This offers soft buttons for preconfigured scan jobs, allowing users to get scanning with no training required: they simply need to load their documents into the large 75-page ADF, tap the right button and let Kodak do the rest. Configuration is handled by Kodak’s Scanner Administration Windows utility. This automatically discovered the 730EX Plus on…

I know I’m becoming a grumpy old man (grumpier – Ed). My tolerance for manufacturers that deliver poor products is getting smaller by the year. I haven’t yet got to the point of going nuclear with a company over the shoddy products that they ship, but I came close recently. Much of this upset comes down to the way that companies are handling security issues, especially fixes in firmware. The inescapable reality is that new security exploits are found all the time – one of this summer’s treats has been the Ripple20 set of exploits, which was found by JSOF (jsof-tech.com/ripple20). In essence, JSOF found 19 vulnerabilities, including multiple remote code executions. What was special about Ripple20 was the way in which it got out into the wild. The back…

As a roaming IT engineer, I’m used to working on-site. When coronavirus hit, like many others, I had to change the way I did things. Lockdown meant I suddenly had to give support from a distance via phone, email or remote access apps – with collections on the doorstep when my customers needed more hands-on help. At the start of lockdown, however, some of my customers also had to arrange for their staff to work from home. One company I look after supplies farm equipment and, as an essential business, has stayed open throughout the pandemic. There are usually around 12 people in the office and, to help minimise risk, the firm decided to have staff in on different days. When not at work, some could enjoy the time off,…

Come close. This is a private chat between firewall administrators, while the rest of this month is a private chat to home internet workers. I know, I’ve argued that communications on this topic are better when they are open – but that’s a perfect world aspiration, and I’ve not met an equally beleaguered group in 2020 than the small tribe of firewall administrators. Besides, this was my proudest hack of the lockdown. You may remember the start of this tale from four months ago, at the start of the lockdown, when I shared the story of a client that had an ancient SonicWall firewall that was maxed out in terms of home user VPN connections (see issue 310, p122). It was also a royal pain to live with, having strange…

LABS Backup suites Backup suites Take total control of your data with software designed for the task. We test all the main contenders to reveal which is best for your needs. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a free 4,000mAh power bank. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for more details. FEATURES Humanity’s future on ice We’re all doomed, but hopefull your accumulated wisdomisn’t. We reveal the cold, hard truths about the data stores designed for disaster. Tailor Windows 10 to your precise needs Want to change the way Windows looks? We show how to tweakit so that it’s perfectly suited for work, gaming or family PC duties. Turn your Raspberry Pi intoa1 980s computer Sure you can…