Table of contents for March 2022 in PC Pro

Ever since the arrival of the iPhone 13 and Pixel 6, my two-year-old Huawei P30 Pro has been looking increasingly tired. An ill-advised dip in the bath turned its USB-C charging port into a USB-C non-charging port, and if it weren’t for wireless chargers it would have been sent to the great recycling bin in the sky long ago. This aside, the phone works perfectly. It’s still receiving security updates and the camera setup is so good I rarely take my “proper” camera with me to product launches. Still, I had the two-year itch. After all, I told myself, I could always pass on my phone to one of my ragged-trousered children and buy something new and shiny instead. So, I started looking. Anyone who’s read this magazine for a…

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

Barry Collins is the co-editor of bigtechquestion.com, and no, you can’t borrow any of his spare bandwidth. @bazzacollins Iam never knowingly undersold. When I first signed a mobile phone contract back in the late 1990s, I made sure I went for one with something like 20,000 call minutes, even though every month I’d still have 19,935 of them left in the bank. Hello, Mum. Yet here I am, with Virgin Media begging me to take a gigabit broadband line, dangling the prospect that it will be boosted to 2.2Gbits/sec before 2022 is out, and suddenly I’m not for turning. I’m all bandwidthed out. Granted, Collins Towers has two broadband connections: a 65Mbits/sec FTTC Zen Internet one for the main house and a dedicated 200Mbits/sec Virgin Media connection for my home…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £3,539 4,246 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk This is the latest in Dell’s established line of portable workstations, which have particular appeal for their flexibility: if you’re an architect whose workflow will benefit from an Nvidia RTX A4000 graphics chip, you can head to Dell’s “build your own” service and specify it. If not, save £800 by sticking to the integrated graphics built into Intel’s processor. Still, no-one’s going to describe this laptop as cheap. The base version – with a Core i5-11500H, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD – costs £2,112 inc VAT. Or you can go the other way and specify a Xeon W-11955M processor, RTX A5000 graphics, 128GB of ECC RAM, a trio of 4TB SSDs and the top-end screen for around £8,600.…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £139 (£167 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The Kingston XS2000 has been billed as the world’s fastest native USB SSD, but the keyword here is “native”. This will only hold true over a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface, which provides a theoretical bandwidth of 20Gbits/sec (twice that of USB 3.2 Gen 2). The spectre hanging over it is USB 4: this is on the verge of going mainstream and provides 40Gbits/sec bandwidth. An industry insider candidly told us that he thinks that portable Gen 2x2 drives are “a rather niche market that’s better suited for players who are already heavily invested in storage or flash technologies. It also makes more sense for desktop PCs rather than notebooks.” That might explain why Samsung and Crucial have yet to launch…

SCORE PRICE £133 (£160 inc VAT) from uk.kobobooks.com Kobo is selling the Libra 2 for a mere £10 more than the original Libra, but don’t be fooled: this is a huge upgrade. It brings a better E Ink Carta screen, 32GB of storage and Bluetooth connectivity for listening to audiobooks via wireless headphones. That puts the Libra 2 in direct competition with the Kindle Oasis while costing £70 less. Of all those updates, the addition of audiobook support is the headline feature. You can purchase books individually or subscribe to Kobo’s Audible-like service, where £6.99 per month buys you one credit to spend on any audiobook. Sadly, the tempting Kobo Plus “all you can read” ebook/audiobook subscription service isn’t yet available in the UK. However, you can only listen to…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from ryman.co.uk As a general rule, the cheaper the printer, the more expensive it is to run. However, this entry level business all-in-one is compatible with Brother’s high-capacity cartridges, which achieve the lowest per-page print costs of any cartridge-based inkjet. Brother refuses to join the refillable ink tank revolution, insisting that larger cartridges are more convenient than bottled ink, and its awkwardly named INKvestment Tank system offers a cartridge-based alternative. This is Brother’s smallest INKvestment model, and I must immediately point out that it isn’t compatible with the super-high-yield INKvestment cartridges that give up to 5,000 pages per cartridge. There’s no LCD, automatic document feeder or auto duplex mode, but it does promise high-quality colour printing and scanning, and comes with enough ink in…

2yr/10 licences £19.99 Norton is one of the most trusted security brands around, and rightly so: it consistently earns 100% protection ratings from both AV-Comparatives and AV-Test. Norton 360 Premium goes several steps beyond virus protection, however, with a comprehensive selection of tools designed to give you security and peace of mind. First up is a whopping 75GB of cloud storage space for backups. Whether you already back up to a local disk or not, this provides an easy way to protect your most important files from ransomware or simple data loss. Then there’s the full version of Norton Secure VPN - something that Norton normally charges £40 per year for all on its own. This means that you can browse anonymously wherever you are, block ad trackers and get…

SCORE PRICE £50 (£60 inc VAT) per year for Personal subscription from planner5d.com If there’s one advantage online services have over native apps, it’s that you can use them anywhere, from any device. Native apps, on the other hand, can better take advantage of a computer’s resources, and are usually more responsive as a result. But why not combine the two and get the best of both worlds? This is what the people at Planner 5D have done: you can use the service from any web browser or use native apps in iOS (13 and above), Android (4.1 and above), Windows (10 and above) and macOS (10.15 and above). Best of all, you can try it out for free. You’ll encounter limits of course, such a restricted catalogue and no…

SCORE PRICE £9 per month or £44 per year, from nordvpn.com NordVPN is consistently among the fastest and most effective consumer VPN services around. It was our Labs Winner last time around (see issue 303, p84) and has held its crown thanks to blazing speeds, great-value subscriptions and excellent streaming capabilities. It’s versatile, too. NordVPN provides clients for all the usual suspects – common web browsers, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and the Linux command line – plus instructions for setting it up on VPN routers and other appliances. You can connect up to six devices simultaneously, and the service supports the OpenVPN, IKEv2/IPSec, SSTP and WireGuard VPN protocols. Its desktop clients default to using WireGuard, however. Other features include a kill switch, Onion Over VPN (in which you use both…

SCORE PRICE Free; £6.71 per month, £36.54 per year from windscribe.com Windscribe has long provided one of the best free VPN subscriptions, alongside a very respectable paid subscription. Recently it hasn’t matched the blazing speeds we’ve seen from its endpoints in the past, with disappointing speed test results this month despite repeat testing from our test account, but it’s speedy enough for day-today browsing and streaming. It gave us well below average speeds of 71Mbits/sec via the UK, 35Mbits/sec via the Netherlands, and 33Mbits/sec via New York. The inherent variability of VPN testing is illustrated by the better performance of its free endpoints, which managed 174Mbits/sec, 96Mbits/sec and 49Mbits/sec respectively. Testing via our paid-for account, we were able to watch region-exclusive content on BBC iPlayer when connected to a UK…

SCORE PRICE Free; Premium, £11 per month or £84 per year, from hotspotshield.com Hotspot Shield, formerly part of AnchorFree, has been owned since 2019 by US firm Aura, another VPN and security company that’s actively adding services to its portfolio. It’s probably one of the most widely white-labelled services around; for example, we know it’s the service behind Kaspersky’s Secure Connection VPN. Under previous ownership, the service was found to have leaked users’ real locations, a bug that was rapidly patched. Hotspot Shield has a limited but useful free tier. It’s ad-supported, gives you 500MB of data per day, and doesn’t require you to log into a Hotspot Shield account. You get access to just one endpoint, in the USA, but connection speeds, though slowed by contention, are often surprisingly…

SCORE PRICE £8 per month or £32 per year, from privateinternetaccess.com One of the best-known privacy-oriented VPN services, US-based Private Internet Access had, under previous ownership, the dubious privilege of being one of the few VPN providers whose policy of keeping no identifying logs was demonstrated by court orders. It was subsequently bought by Kape Technologies, but its no-logging policy may soon be reproven in a court case surrounding the piracy of the movie Angel Has Fallen. Until that point, it’s a good idea to regard its no-logging policy as you would that of any other reputable VPN that hasn’t had the misfortune of having to prove it: likely true, but not certain. A more troubling aspect of the takeover by Kape is that one company now owns a not-insignificant…

Why buy a VPN? Most people just want an extra layer of security on unfamiliar networks or to watch US Netflix exclusives in peace. If so, check our speed and region-shifting test results and carry on about your business. If privacy in a broader sense is a specific concern, whether for practical, political or ethical reasons, then it’s worth paying attention to the landscape surrounding privacy-focused online services such as VPNs and encrypted communications tools, including some of the drama. On the commercial side of things, we’re seeing a rise in service-gobbling holding companies, such as Kape Technologies, owner of CyberGhost, PIA and ExpressVPN, as well as review sites VPNMentor and Wizcase. Similarly, J2 Global owns services including IP Vanish, StrongVPN and its associated white-label provider WLVPN, as well as…

SCORE PRICE £229 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com If you need an AP that’s capable of providing Wi-Fi 6 services to a big, busy office, Netgear’s sizeable WAX630 is just the thing: it’s designed to handle up to 600 clients and 100 concurrent connections. It’s helped along by a massive AX6000 throughput rating, achieved by combining three 4 x 4 radios – that is, a 2.4GHz transceiver capable of up to 1,200Mbits/sec, plus high and low 5GHz radios each supporting connections at up to 2,400Mbits/sec. What’s great about this setup is that you can choose how the radios are used. You can employ all three as front-haul connections for client devices, or set up a mesh network using compatible Netgear APs and use one of the 5GHz radios for a dedicated…

SCORE PRICE £157 exc VAT from ebuyer.com Canon’s ImageFormula R10 is a compact, portable document scanner that’s ideal for mobile workers and home-based staff seeking a fuss-free scanner that doesn’t require acres of desk space. It has a footprint of just 285 x 95mm, and at 900g it’s light enough to carry around with you – although it would have been nice if Canon had included a protective pouch. There are no accessories to worry about, either. The R10 doesn’t need a battery or an external power supply – it gets all the juice it needs over the supplied 1.7m USB 2 cable. Nor, for that matter, are there any drivers or applications to install: when you plug the R10 into a host computer running Windows or macOS, a USB-connected…

Well, my 16in MacBook Pro finally arrived. It was with trepidation that I unpacked it and got it ready to boot. Then I opened the lid and fell in love. The only word to use is “wow”. I accept that I ticked most of the boxes when it came to this purchase, going for the M1 Max processor, 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. That came in at around four grand, only for me to realise that I hadn’t paid for AppleCare (which I have on all my daily-use devices), so that upped the price even further. But one look at the screen was enough to wipe away all thoughts of that cost. It has blacks that are blacker than black. The peak white brightness on HDR content is…

Dr Rois Ni Thuama There’s a good chance you or your company could be hit by a cyberattack in 2022, so how do you mitigate the risk? Our guest columnist shares her expertise on p116 Stuart Andrews If you think that choosing a keyboard is a simple matter of membrane or mechanical, prepare yourself for a deep dive into a world of multicoloured switches from p36 KG Orphanides For this month’s group test of VPNs, we recruited one of the UK’s biggest experts in the field. Discover why just three of the 12 VPNs on test walk away with an award from p78 Paul Ockenden We cover some of the principles behind website building in 2022 on p44, but don’t miss Paul’s column this month where he covers how to…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He wanted an Anarakite Amulet for Christmas, but all he got was a cloak of invisibility. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk One year ago I wrote about three technical breakthroughs that were announced in late 2020: an mRNA vaccine against Covid-19, Alphafold 2 solving the “protein-folding problem” and Apple’s M1 chip. My picks for 2021’s trio of late breakthroughs are equally profound – one in neuroscience, one in space exploration and one in quantum computing – but they’re perhaps a little more difficult to explain. The neuroscience discovery is at least simple to state: the human neuron appears to be several orders of magnitude more computationally complex than silicon ones used to emulate it. Given each neuron’s number of axon connections, this means the whole…

If connecting multiple cloud providers together doesn’t solve your organisational headaches–or if you simply don’t want to rely on third-party cloud services–it’s easy to setup and host your own cloud with effectively unlimited storage. The key is a free software plat form called (appropriately enough) own Cloud, which provides desktop clients for Windows, mac OS and Linux, plus apps for Android and iOS. If there’s a catch, it’s that the own Cloud backend runs on Linux; there isn’t a native installer for Windows. For most of us, therefore, the easiest way to runitison a RaspberryPi. Own Cloud is conveniently built into the Diet Pi distribution (dietpi.com), and if your micro SD card isn’t big enough for the files you want to store, you can attach an external USB hard disk…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index SCORE PRICE Core i5, £583 (£700 inc VAT) from store.acer.com Is that the wind of change we can hear? Three years ago, right to repair felt like a fringe movement. Now we have a huge global corporation not only embracing right to repair but inviting it in for a slap-up meal. The question we must ask, though, is whether products such as the Acer Aspire Vero are an exercise in PR greenwashing. Are the changes skin deep, is supply limited, is the price so high that few people can afford it? We can address that last point straight away: at £700, the Aspire Vero costs around £50 more than a “non-green” Aspire of this spec might cost, so it’s…

SCORE PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk Microsoft should brace itself for revolt, because Google is targeting businesses with its Chromebooks – and the CX9 (often called the CX9400 online) fully deserves to lead the charge. Its key component is Intel’s Core i7-1165G7 CPU. With the help of 16GB of RAM, the CX9 scorched through benchmarks: 160 in JetStream, 737 in MotionMark and 3,714 in Geekbench 5. Overall, that’s around 20% quicker than the next fastest Chromebook we’ve tested, the Core i7 10610U HP Pro C640 Enterprise (see issue 321, p91) It’s arguably the most attractive Chromebook to cross our path, too. Its slimline chassis is made from aluminium alloy finished in a brooding dark grey. There’s attention to detail, too. As you lift up the screen, the rear…

Thanks to Iiyama, we have five high-quality monitors to giveaway What’s even better than a new monitor? One that’s been tested by PC Pro and featured in our Labs, of course! All five screens are as-new, having only left the box for testing purposes, and are still covered by Iiyama’s three-year warranty. Entries will be open until Tuesday 15 February 2022. Please note that this offer is only open to residents of the United Kingdom. No purchase is necessary, but for full details check the website before entering your details. Iiyama ProLite XUB2792QSN-B1 Worth £300 27in IPS monitor 2,560x1,440 resolution USB-Coutput up to 65W Iiyama ProLite XUB2492HSU-B1 Worth £165 24in general purpose monitor 1,920x1,080 resolution USB huband stereo speakers Iiyama Prolite XUB2792QSU-W1 Worth £260 27in IPS monitor 2,560x1,440 resolution AMD…

SCORE PRICE Two nodes, £217 (£260 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Netgear Orbi line has become the name to beat when it comes to mesh systems, but the various Wi-Fi 6 models are all expensive. The Mini is here to change that, promising reliable, business-grade Wi-Fi at a much lower price than the company’s previous Pro mesh kits. You can buy it as either a single router or as a multi-part package, with the two-node SXK30 kit costing £260, and additional satellites (SXS30) available for around £150. To put that in perspective, the full-sized Netgear Orbi Pro WiFi 6 SXK80 (see issue 318, p90) dual pack costs £709, making the Mini something of a bargain by comparison. Measuring just 19cm tall, the Mini router and satellite are much smaller than…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £145 (£174 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/329drive A home NAS can function as both a private network storage space and a media centre for sharing and streaming music, videos and photos. Whichever role you’re most interested in, the Asustor Drivestor 2 ticks all the important boxes. The budget-friendly price still delivers upmarket features, including 2.5GbE and access to a curated store of apps, with plenty of media tools as well as backup and connectivity solutions. It looks simple but stylish. The all-black design has a patterned cover and a small footprint, with LEDs for power and drive activity and a single front-facing USB-A 3 port for easily transferring or sharing files on external media. At the back there’s the power connector, plus Ethernet and another USB-A 3 port.…

SCORE PRICE Free; Basic, €5 per month or €48 per year; Plus, €10 per month or €96 per year, from protonvpn.com Run by Proton Technologies, the firm behind the ProtonMail secure email service, ProtonVPN is the most expensive service we recommend. Specifically, we recommend the ProtonVPN Plus tier, along with its Free tier. The Basic tier is cheaper than Plus and includes P2P filesharing support and optional ad blocking, but lacks key features such as streaming and higher-speed servers. The expensive Visionary tier bundles a ProtonMail account with support for multiple domains for those who wish to support Proton Technologies’ overall project. A discounted rate is available to anyone who uses paid tiers of both ProtonMail and ProtonVPN. The huge range of pricing options seems unnecessary, but you can safely…

SCORE PRICE £10 per month or £74 per year, from expressvpn.com ExpressVPN is an old favourite that’s recently undergone some major upheavals. Many are to its benefit, with easy-to-use desktop apps on macOS and Windows, while Linux users get a similarly pleasant command-line utility. The company also provides instructions to help you manually set up your VPN connection on routers and other devices. Features include automatic obfuscation on some servers, notably the Hong Kong endpoint, though we’d prefer better marked obfuscation modes. 94 endpoint countries are on offer, entirely using RAMdisk servers. You also get a kill switch, split tunnelling and some proxy plugins for your web browser of choice. The clients default to ExpressVPN’s own open-source Lightway protocol, which performs comparably to OpenVPN, edging towards being a little faster…

SCORE PRICE €5 per month from mullvad.net Mullvad costs €5 (around £4.20) a month. It always costs that. Regardless of whether you need to subscribe for one month or 36 months, exactly one tier is available, and you can cancel and recommence your subscription whenever you like. You can pay anonymously, too, not just via the quasi-anonymity of cryptocurrency transactions, but also by sending the VPN provider a handful of cash in an envelope. The service, which provides the backend infrastructure for Mozilla’s VPN at twice the price, is based in Sweden. Although that’s not a country particularly well known for privacy-friendly regulations, Mullvad is explicitly clear about its obligations when it comes to the law, its own status – it’s not classed as an electronic communications service so has…

SCORE PRICE Free; Unlimited, $10 per month or $60 per year, from tunnelbear.com TunnelBear is an effective if somewhat middle-of-the-road consumer VPN service, which also caters to business users with a managed Teams tier. It’s been owned by US-based McAfee since 2018, but continues to operate independently and retains its Canadian HQ. This means it falls under Canadian law, which is ambiguous when it comes to the duties of VPN providers to log any torrenting to ensure that no copyrighted material was illegally downloaded or uploaded. TunnelBear used to forbid users from torrenting, but all mention of this has been removed from its website. Now, the only information you get about torrents is a vague page saying that you should be able to “share files” when TunnelBear is connected and…

It’s taken a few years for Wi-Fi 6 – also known as 802.11ax – to gain a foothold, but it’s now a standard feature on laptops, smartphones and networking hardware. Any business still relying on a legacy wireless infrastructure should be building the new standard into its 2022 plans. It’s not just about headline speeds. New working norms have brought an influx of mobile devices into the workplace, which means wireless networks are having to handle higher client densities than ever. Wi-Fi 6 allows large numbers of devices to access the network at once without degrading performance. Don’t be put off by apprehensions about the price. When the first Wi-Fi 6 routers and access points (APs) started to appear in 2019 they were expensive, but intense competition has driven prices…

SCORE PRICE £136 exc VAT from ebuyer.com SMBs wanting to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 on a tight budget will find plenty to like about TP-Link’s Omada EAP620 HD. For a modest out lay of outlay of £ 136, this dual-band access point delivers a full set of business features, including the same cloud management services as found on much pricier models. As you’d expect at this price, it’s not the fastest performer. It carries an AX1800 rating, made up of 1,201Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 574Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. These are theoretical maximums, but there’s still a definite performance gap between this and an AX3600-rated AP. When copying large files between a Windows 10 Pro workstation sporting a TP-Link Archer TX3000E Wi-Fi 6 PCI-E adapter and a server…

SCORE PRICE Diskless/8GB, £782 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Qnap’s TVS-675 is an intriguing NAS appliance. While almost every other storage solution on the market runs on either Intel or AMD silicon, this desktop box gives Chinese x86 CPU manufacturer Zhaoxin its debut on the global stage, courtesy of an eight-core 2.5GHz KaiXian KX-U6580 SoC. It’s the centrepiece of a very versatile specification. The TVS-675 comes with 8GB of base DDR4 non-ECC memory, which can be upgraded all the way up to 64GB using two 32GB SODIMM modules. The six front-facing SATA bays can support either LFF drives or SFF SSDs, while two internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots can be used to create a fast system pool or a performance-boosting cache. Connectivity is strong, too. Storage is served up over dual…

Biometrics aren’t a magic bullet. In some ways they’re worse than a passwords: if an attacker gets hold of your fingerprint data or your retinal scan, you can’t conveniently ditch the compromised body part and generate another one. Happily, there’s no need to share your vital statistics with the world. Real purists might stick to app-based approaches, and only use their biometrics to unlock a phone or workstation, which in turn generates a one-time login code. However, it’s perfectly possible to use biometrics securely online, thanks to a set of standards dubbed FIDO2 (“Fast Identity Online”). One key principle of FIDO2 is that your biometric credentials themselves are never transmitted: rather, they’re used on your device to generate a cryptographic key that securely confirms your identity. What’s more, each website…

When using a calculator, many aschool pupil has tapped in a few numbers, turned the device upside down and proudly shown off words such as “shell”. Maybe even something a little more risqué. For some students, however, that hasn’t been satisfying enough, prompting them to go further by hacking away at the technology and pushing it to its limits. Although it may seem that calculators are rather constrained, for some models that couldn’t be further from the truth. In the 1990sand 2000s, many students took Texas Instruments ’ graphing calculators and created all kinds of wonderful software, ranging from a whole new operating system and a synthesiser to an emulator capable of playing Ninten do Game Boy titles. Such endeavours got them into trouble – not with the teachers, you…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. Children aside, Amazon actually had the nerve to ask the breed of my dog. She’s a perfectly fluffy rescue; adopt, don’t shop. @njkobie There’s nothing more valuable to online marketers than a pregnant woman, since she’s about to plonk a wodge of cash decorating a nursery, buying several thousand nappies and investing in entirely unnecessary products in the misguided hope of easing the early days of parenthood. As I write this, I’m a handful of days from labour – and, thanks to my impossibly massive belly, sat several inches further from my desk than is strictly speaking comfortable – so I’m very much the target of such aggressive behavioural advertising. Friends of mine have attempted to keep their pregnancies from the internet advertising…

With the predictability of Lee getting irate about something totally unrepairable, I’m in a strop about sodding software updates again. Just this morning, I arrived on a site ready to conduct about 25 hearing tests. Got myself set up, tested to verify everything was working nicely, and with ten minutes until the first appointment I made a coffee. When I came back Windows had decided to install an update, which then took an absolute age and ran into the first appointment time, meaning the patient was standing waiting while I drummed my fingers on the desk. That’s annoying enough, but when it came back to life, magically what had all been working ten minutes ago was now utterly dead – no printer, no audiometer. An hour of trying fixes later,…

Boxshots for illustration purposes only Are you in the market for a new copy of Windows 11? Perhaps you’re building a new PC from scratch or looking to move up from Windows 7? Maybe you’re planning to run Windows alongside macOS or Linux? Whatever your reasons, a Windows 11 OEM licence is a great choice. The first reason is simple: price. Microsoft charges £120 for a retail licence of Windows 11 Home, and a staggering £220 for Windows 11 Pro. By choosing an OEM licence – and avoiding the many dubious sources of licences you may find online – you cut that price in half. OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer, but that doesn’t mean this licence is only an option for new system builders. Far from it, in fact.…

One of the oddest aspects of the keyboard is that most of us still use a layout that bears no logical relation to the alphabet or how we type. It’s something of a myth that the Qwerty layout was developed to slow typists down, but it was built to address a mechanical issue of the early manual typewriters. When two keys on the same side were pressed in quick succession, there was a risk that the levers that stamped each letter on the page would meet and intertwine. By placing letters that were commonly struck in succession on each side of the keyboard, Qwerty reduced the risk. However, it also left us with a layout that’s hardly intuitive, or even particularly efficient. In 1936, Dr August Dvorak patented an alternative,…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £ 1,698 (£2,038 inc VAT) from frame.work When tech startup Framework debuted its Laptop DIY Edition, it promised tinkerers and enthusiasts something unique: a modular laptop And it has delivered. The simply styled DIY Edition is fun and easy to assemble – so easy that, with the help of my son, we were ready to load Windows within minutes. Initially, it was only available in North America, but in mid-December Framework announced that it was shipping to the UK with immediate effect. Simply click on the US flag at the top-right of the website and select the UK as your location. Now all you need to do is check out which of its many options are right for you, place your £100 deposit to secure your build, and wait…

SCORE PRICE £291 (£349 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk When Samsung announced the Chromebook Go, the image that sprang to mind was of an ultra portable machine with built-in mobile broadband and epic battery life. It turns out my imagination was racing away from me, with this first iteration of the Go delivering a far more modest package. The mobile broadband component of my dream machine was justified, but that hardly deserves membership of the Sherlock Holmes society: all Samsung laptops with the “Go” moniker include 4G. The nano SIM slot is tucked into the right of the chassis, next to a USB-C and a USB-A port, with a microSD card slot, 3.5mm jack and second USB-C port on the other side. You can use either USB-C port for charging, and…

SCORE PRICE 2TB, £258 (£310 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The LaCie Portable SSD begs one question from the off: are you paying a premium for the brand name and the design? After all, the Kingston XS2000 (see below) offers faster speeds for less money across a range of capacaties. Both are offered in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB options, and Kingston has the advantage in two out of three sizes: £88 versus £110 for 500GB, both cost £167 for 1TB, and £277 versus £310 for 2TB (all prices from box.co.uk). To my eyes, the LaCie is the more attractive device. It’s a minimalist block of aluminium with a Type-C connector at one end, and only a status light and a LaCie logo to break the sleek lines. It’s also small enough…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £358 (£430 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com The Motorola Edge 20 is what most other Motorola phones are not: slim. In fact, it’s positively skinny at 7mm. Even with its supplied silicone jacket on, it feels the same depth as a normal “naked” phone, and Motorola evidently wants you to use this case as the Edge 20 is already wearing it in the box. This makes sense, as without it the stick-out camera housing means the phone doesn’t sit flat on a table – risking damage to the lenses and the little rings of metal sitting around them. Chipping off their thin layer of black paint is a sure-fire way to make your Motorola Edge 20 look tatty. A case also hides this phone’s plastic back. Motorola says…

1 Visit pcprodownload.co.uk. You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the spine of the cover (or directly on the cover if you’re a digital subscriber). If there’s no code on the spine, you have bought the £4.99 version of PC Pro, which doesn’t include a code. Also enter your email address. We’ll then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. 2 Once you’re in the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please make sure to read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register…

SCORE PRICE £12 (£14 inc VAT) from thepihut.com I remember falling for the first Raspberry Pi Zero back in 2015. It was the smallest and cheapest Raspberry Pi ever, with a single-core 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM that were ample for basic projects. Subsequently came the Zero W model, adding Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; and now, after six long years, the Zero 2 W finally brings a CPU update. It’s a significant one, too, moving from a single-core processor to a quad-core one. In fact, it uses the same ARM Cortex A53 processor as the Raspberry Pi 3, although the speed remains at 1GHz. Other than that, almost nothing has changed. The form factor is identical to all previous Zero models, which means you can drop the Raspberry Pi Zero…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, $300 from megamac.com The problem with M.2 NVMe SSDs is simple: size. The form factor’s minimal surface area limits the number of NAND modules that can be mounted on it, currently topping out at 8TB. U.2 is a relatively new specification that provides more space for modules and, therefore, much greater capacities. Always at the pointy end of storage developments, OWC has sent us a product designed to exploit U.2 technology for rapid external storage. This Thunderbolt 3 drive enclosure can accept two U.2 drives and use them in a RAID configuration. Or, via an adapter, up to eight M.2 SSDs. As we went to press, OWC only had US prices, but its UK release is set for mid-January so you won’t have long to wait to…

SCORE PRICE £9 per month, £30 per six months or £44 per two years, from surfshark.com Surfshark is conspicuously cheap at £44 for two years, working out at just under £2 per month. A one-year subscription isn’t available, but you’ll pay the same or more for a single-year subscription from most of its directly comparable rivals. If two years is too much of a commitment, you can pay £8.99 for a month or £30 for six months; although good value, neither of those is a particularly outstanding offer on paper. In reality you’re actually getting a far better deal than you might expect. Unlike most rivals, Surfshark allows you to simultaneously connect from an unlimited number of devices, allowing you to equip your entire family with a VPN. In this…

SCORE PRICE 5-connection personal plan, £39 per year or £86 per three years, from hidemyass.com Also known as Hide My Ass!, HMA VPN is a UK-based subsidiary of Czech antimalware firm Avast. Its unique selling point is that it has endpoints in 210 geographical regions, including some countries whose existence isn’t officially agreed upon by other states. It bolsters access and connection performance to some of these regions with virtual servers, which are physically located in other countries but assign you an IP address within your target location. If you’re looking for a service that will allow you to test access to specific websites in far-flung regions of the world, HMA is the one to go for. Otherwise, HMA is a generally unremarkable VPN provider, with consistently adequate but below-average…

SCORE PRICE €13 per month or €120 per year, from perfect-privacy.com any VPN services keep no logs, commission audits and publish transparency reports. Perfect Privacy has had its no-logging credentials backed up by a real-life police raid. When two of the Swiss company’s servers were seized by Dutch police in 2016, no identifying information was on them to be compromised. Rivals ExpressVPN and Private Internet Access once held similar status, but as these have subsequently been bought by holding company Kape Technologies, we’ve no choice but to reset the clock on that front. To add to Perfect Privacy’s rock-solid security credentials, it has used RAMdisk servers for years. Its features include a multi-hop option to connect a chain of four VPN tunnels to help obfuscate your endpoint location, a “stealth”…

SCORE PRICE £7 per month or £44 per year, from vyprvpn.com Although VyprVPN’s speed test results were comparatively poor throughout much of 2020 and 2021, this month’s blistering performance represents a return to past form. It defaults to using the WireGuard protocol, of which the service was a relatively early adopter. We obtained download speeds of 337Mbits/sec from UK endpoints, 425Mbits/sec from Netherlands endpoints and 187Mbits/sec from the US, all significantly above the group average. The fast speeds are impressive, particularly the US result, as the long stretch from London to New York is often the most challenging part of this test sequence. It’s not bad for streaming, either. Region-shifting has always been one of Vypr’s strong suits, but we were pleased to find that we could easily watch iPlayer…

SCORE PRICE £270 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com DrayTek impressed us last summer with its first Wi-Fi 6 AP, the eminently affordable VigorAP 960C (see issue 322, p100). Now the VigorAP 1060C dials up the performance: its AX3600 rating represents double the bandwidth of the 960C, with its 5GHz radio rated for up to 2,400Mbits/sec along with 1,200Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. A third radio is included too, though this isn’t for client or mesh connections: rather, it’s used for rogue AP detection and 5GHz channel scanning, allowing the main network to dynamically detect and switch to the best available channel. At the rear, a 2.5GbE uplink port ensures wireless connections aren’t bottlenecked, and it supports PoE+ for single-cable deployment. If you prefer you can use a separate power supply, but…

SCORE PRICE £159 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com If you’re into software-defined networking, then Ubiquiti Networks has plenty to offer, including two very affordable Wi-Fi 6 access points. The entry-level model is the AX1800-rated UniFiU6-Lite, priced at just £ 81, but here we’ve tested the top-dog U6-LR. At £ 159 it’s almost twice the price, but it’s still well with in reach of an SMB budget, and the extra money gets you a speedy AX3000 rating. Unusually, the U6-LR also supports the high performance 160MHz channel width, which improves band width and penetration for compatible clients. That’s all part of the promise: the “LR” stands for “long range”, and though you can’t see them, the U6-LR features downward-tilting internal aerials that aim to offer improved coverage. As for speeds, the 2.4GHz…

A slow network hampers your productivity, and it’s also frankly embarrassing – it sends a message to your staff, and to any external parties who may access it. Yet it’s an area where major improvements can frequently be made with some tweaks to your settings that don’t cost apenny, a side from the engineer time and expertise required to implement them. There are plenty more upgrades that aren’t free but whose price is, by the standards of corporate networking budgets, barely worth worrying about. Getting the required results isn’t necessarily straightforward, because there are a lot of different ways in which a network can be slow. One business I shall not name used a cheap Wi-Fi base station and a corporate Dropbox account for storage and collaboration. The network was…

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It’s time for Britain to go galactic – that’s according to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, talking up the UK space industry’s economic potential and promising the first ever launches from British soil as early as 2022. “The days of the industry idling on the launch pad are over,” he boasted in the foreword to the government’s National Space Strategy, which was released in September 2021. The wider British space industry can hardly be accused of idling, even without its own launches: the space sector is worth £16.4 billion a year, according to that government report, and employs more than 45,000 people – and it’s growing at a rate of 4.7%, which is faster than the wider UK economy. So the government’s plans have a solid ground from which to launch.…

▪ Newquay, Cornwall Based at Cornwall Airport Newquay, this spaceport will be used for horizontal launches, which means adapted airplanes will take off with a rocket onboard, launching it from 35,000 feet. Spaceport Cornwall is being built by Cornwall Council, the Local Enterprise Partnership, Goonhilly Earth Station and Virgin Orbit, which will supply the first launch planes and rockets. The first launch is expected in the summer of 2022. Because Spaceport Cornwall is operating from an existing airport using standard planes, the only thing holding up the process is licensing. ▪ Sutherland, Scotland Space Hub Sutherland has overcome the legal hurdles and has planning permission in place. A vertical launch site, it will work with Orbex in the hope of launching environmentally sustainable rockets to put satellites into space at…

LABS Windows 11 laptops Why wait for an update when you can buy a laptop that’s been tuned for Windows 11 out of the box? We test a variety of systems at a wide range of prices. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a free 32GB memory stick emblazoned with the logo of your favourite magazine. You can read PC Pro in print, or on an iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p106 for more details. FEATURES CES 2022: the hits and the misses Whether CES turns out to be virtual, in-person or a mix of both, we’ll get as close to the products as we can to see what hardware delights 2022 has in store. How to run a VoIP system yourself Whether in your home or…

It’s hard to see how Amazon makes any money from Alexa. Of course, it sells all the Echo hardware with Alexa enabled on it, but these come at a set of keen price points. I’m sure there’s also some sort of developer integration licence fee, whereby third parties can embed Alexa within their products. But is this going to generate a large amount of money? I think not. Then there are Alexa apps, or “skills”, which allow you to connect devices to your Alexa system. These could enable relatively simple commands such as turning on and off lights or adjusting the heating, or more complicated solutions such as turning on the TV, closing the blinds, choosing a channel and so forth. All these are freebies, including the skills that mean…