Table of contents for April 2022 in PC Pro

Me of a month ago would be very disappointed with me of today. “You’ve fallen for the hype,” old me would say. “You’ve drunk so much Kool-Aid it’s pickled what’s left of your pathetic brain cells.” But that cynical and rather rude yester-me hadn’t been to this year’s CES (see p26), hadn’t wandered the halls of Eureka Park and seen the scattering of seeds that will become the metaverse. For yes, I’m a believer. Now, before you check to see if this month’s magazine has been sponsored by the corporate entity formerly known as Facebook, let me explain First of all, I don’t think we’re all going to be spending our lives living in a Ready Player One-like virtual reality. The metaverse – I wish I could think of a…

What do the two mobile giants have to say for themselves in response? Here are two short excerpts from their submission to the CMA. Apple: “Apple is aware that it has some vociferous (and well-resourced) detractors campaigning against it in the UK and elsewhere. These detractors appear to be given significant weight in the SoS [statement of scope] and in relation to the preliminary description of Apple’s business model and practices. Apple is confident that the CMA’s in-depth investigation will reveal how many of the statements from third parties repeated in the SoS are self-serving, misrepresent Apple’s business model and are not grounded in competition law.” Google: “We think the Market Study will show that Android has been a success for us and for competition. It has enabled a substantial…

The blockchain, the core technology at the heart of the Web3 noise, is most famous as the backbone of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. It’s the name given to the ledger where transactions are recorded, so when you send or receive money, it is recorded on the blockchain, which acts like a database. Crucially, unlike a traditional database, the blockchain is not stored in any one place or is the property of any one institution. Instead, it is “distributed”, with anonymised transaction logs stored by other blockchain users. It’s a clever idea because, thanks to complex maths and a lot of computing power, it essentially creates a database you can trust is accurate out of thin air. If you want to verify money really was transferred, you don’t need…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Future’s editor. She’s yet to miss a word on Wordle, but has deleted Scrabble from her phone – and not just because she got tired of losing so brutally to editor Tim Danton. @njkobie My awareness of Wordle began how it likely did for many: friends sharing odd little blocky charts with scores out of six on Twitter and Instagram. As a fan of word games – readers may recall my rant about the terrible reboot of the bewilderingly flashy Scrabble app – I was naturally intrigued. So I headed to Google, and searched for Wordle. The first result was an obscure-sounding website, powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle, the boring URL that hosts Josh Wardle’s viral game, in which players have six chances to guess a five–letter word. Visiting…

Barry Collins takes aim at chips in printers in his Viewpoints column this month (see p22), and mentions Canon by name. We felt it was only fair to give Canon the right to reply. It declined to comment on the active lawsuit that Barry mentions for legal reasons, but had this response about the chips in its toner cartridges: “Whilst the global shortage of semiconductor components continues to affect many industries, it's our priority to prevent any disruption to our customers. As with all manufacturers, we continually monitor our supply chain to anticipate and prepare for any potential disruption and we are taking steps to deal with the situation, such as adjusting product designs. “One example of this is in toner bottles for our MFP range as we are currently…

Acer Swift X 14 Compared to the other laptops we’ve highlighted here, the Swift X 14 is rather, well, boring. Just a plain old 14in laptop with a choice of red or green lids. Move on, nothing to see. But we think it’s a sign of Acer shifting its sights towards more demanding buyers without the cost creep that can afflict the likes of Dell and HP. It’s an all-metal chassis, but still weighs a reasonable 1.4kg, and copper heat pipes mean Acer can include GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics to accompany the 12th gen Core U series (see p30). It’s reassuring to see a screen that covers 100% of the sRGB gamut too, and a 2,240 x 1,400 resolution is tough to criticise. Acer even promises high-quality images in…

I love Wi-Fi 6, and I’ll probably love Wi-Fi 6E even more once I have a phone and laptop that support it. But that’s the problem with the latest wireless standards; you have to update all your client devices to get the benefit. So I’m excited about TP-Link’s Archer AXE200 Omni router. Not only is it one of the first Wi-Fi 6E routers out there, it’s the first we’ve ever seen to sport mechanised aerials, which automatically rotate to optimise the radio signal to connected devices, no matter where they’re located. It may sound like a gimmick, but the positioning and orientation of your antenna can make a real difference to wireless performance. Naturally we'll have to test TP-Link's implementation to see how effective it is, and how it handles…

Air-Clenz We were cynical about this before we spoke toAir-Clenz at its stand, but we've been won over by the idea. Its inventor's conceit is that when you breathe in an office environment, most particles bounce back from the screen in front of you and then into general circulation. How about using suction to draw them into a filter and remove virus-infected aerosols? And then why not repeat the trick in planes, with a filter effectively built into the back of the seat infront of you? It's clunky, with the prototypes on show at CES adding quite some bulk to regular monitors, but Air-Clenz claims that independent tests prove it works. It told us that it's already talking to monitor makers, and we can well imagine call centres ordering them…

SCORE PRICE £1,125 (£1,350 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews The Titan Spark is a handy reality check this month. Amid all the great innovation on show at CES (see p26) and stunning laptop designs such as the Asus ProArt Studiobook OLED 16 (see p56), the dependable desktop PC continues to deliver in three key areas: speed, value and simple upgradability. It’s only right to start with speed, as the Titan Spark flies. The Core i5-12600KF is proof once more that Intel has delivered with the 12th generation Alder Lake family. It raced through the PC Pro benchmarks with a score of 457, then punched its way to a 8,023 tally in PCMark 10. Cinebench R23 proved no challenge, with a 16,957 result in the multicore test. Compare that triumvirate of scores…

SCORE PRICE With sound bar, £416 (£500 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk As we saw with its first MateView (see issue 326, p86), a gorgeous 28.2in monitor with a 3:2 aspect ratio, Huawei isn’t afraid to think differently when it comes to screen design. The MateView GT 34in doesn’t tear up quite so many rule books as its sibling, but this well-built curved screen includes a handful of nifty features that mean it’s equally as happy when the night draws in as it is during office hours. Some of that versatility is due to a 21:9 panel based on MVA technology. MVA stands for multi-domain vertical alignment, and its historic disadvantage compared to in-plane switching (IPS) panels was that it struggled to display pure whites. A top-quality IPS panel would still…

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.…

SCORE PRICE 64GB, £142 (£170 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk The cheaper end of the smartphone market is increasingly cluttered, but Motorola hopes to cut through the sludge with its Moto G31. By ignoring 5G, its tactic is to concentrate on more visible aspects of the device – think design and screen – while stuffing in a whopping great battery to keep it going for two days. It’s the build of the phone that will likely delight you most. Offering curved edges and a textured rear, it felt good to hold and secure in my hands (which are smaller than most people’s, so normally aren’t fond of big phones). Motorola sent us the “mineral grey” model to review – it’s also available in “baby blue” – and it looks classy despite…

SCORE PRICE £72 (£86 inc VAT) from adobe.com Adobe Premiere Elements 2022 does its best to simplify the often complicated process of editing videos. While professionals can spend years mastering the nuances and intricacies of powerful software such as Adobe Premiere Pro, many of us just want to create and share fun and meaningful snippets of our life and loved ones. Premiere Elements excels in this regard, thanks to an accessible interface, easy-to-use tools and cool creative styling. The three tabs on the interface — Quick, Guided and Expert — offer novices an opportunity to fix their videos quickly and learn more complex workflows, while providing more experienced users with plenty of sophisticated and powerful tools. This 2022 update adds a handful of improved features, and a couple of them…

Reviewing laptops is fraught with difficulty, particularly ones made by the likes of Acer and HP. The biggest challenge is that particular configurations we review often sell out quickly, and they’re replaced with very slightly updated models, with a different size of SSD or a faster processor, for example. This is why we try to review a “line” rather than an individual configuration. For example, there are several varieties of the Acer Aspire 5 A514-54, and they all use the same mix of chassis, screen, battery and keyboard. You can then choose the processor and storage capacity that best meet your needs.…

SCORE PRICE £1,066 (£1,279 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk As its name makes clear, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill laptop: it’s a 2-in-1 convertible, capable of transforming from laptop to tablet with one smooth swing of the hinge. As with every aspect of the XPS 13’s engineering, it does so with grace and finesse; you can only compare Dell’s 2-in-1 to the GeoFlex 340 in the same way that you can describe both Liverpool FC and Accrington Stanley as football teams. The bigger question is whether a convertible design makes sense for you over the non-convertible XPS 13 or a rival such as the HP Pavilion 14. It certainly opens up your options. For instance, flip this laptop into tent mode and it becomes a superb mini TV. Or perhaps you need…

SCORE PRICE £567 (£680 inc VAT) from hp.com In the HP hierarchy of consumer laptops, the Pavilion range sits one step up from the bottom rung: it goes Essentials, Pavilion, Envy and then Spectre at the top. This means you miss out on some luxuries found on the Envy 14 opposite, but it looks and feels like a much more expensive laptop than its price suggests. Finished in attractive silver, an aluminium alloy lid and keyboard deck both add to the premium aroma. Put it side by side with Acer’s budget offerings and there’s only one winner for style. It’s a compact system as well. Measuring 17mm high and with a 1.4kg weight, it takes up little room in a travel bag. More expensive laptops beat it comfortably for screen-to-body…

SCORE PRICE £887 (£1,064 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews One of the advantages of choosing a British laptop manufacturer – such as PCSpecialist – is that they have the means to customise the specification to your choice. Of the big international companies, only Dell offers the same flexibility, but similar Dell XPS 13 configurations (there’s no exact match) cost £1,199 at a minimum. Where PCSpecialist can’t match the big companies is for R&D, so it relies on third-party chassis makers. In the past, the choice has been limited to chassis that feel a generation or two behind the likes of Dell and HP, but the Fusion Studio is a match for style and finish. For a start, it’s made from a full-body magnesium alloy chassis, and aside from the lid –…

SCORE PRICE £1,000 (£1,200 inc VAT) from box.co.uk If the MSI Pulse wins for value – and it most definitely does between the two gaming laptops on test – then the Asus TUF Dash F15 wins for fit and finish. By comparison it screams luxury, whether that’s through a delightful soft-touch keyboard (complete with highlighted WASD keys) or the top-quality trackpad with its super-smooth finish. We suspect you’ll enjoy using the TUF Dash if you buy it. While the screen didn’t excel in our technical tests, there’s much to like from a gamer’s point of view: support for adaptive sync and a 144Hz refresh rate make it a fine choice for the powerful gaming components inside. Chief among these is Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile chip, which includes 8GB of…

SCORE PRICE £722 (£866 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews There is much to like about this desktop replacement, and we’ll start with the 17.3in screen. We’re used to lacklustre displays in sub-£1,000 laptops, but this IPS panel covers 94% of the sRGB gamut with an average Delta E of 0.79. Then consider its exemplary 6471K colour temperature, and it’s no surprise that whites look gloriously white. It’s bright too, hitting 414cd/m2 in our tests. We would have been happy with 350cd/m2, so that’s a fantastic result. There’s enough power here to keep Windows 11 feeling sprightly for years to come, with a modest but effective trio of core components: a Core i5-11300H processor, 8GB of DDR4 memory and 512GB SSD. You’re stuck with the processor for the lifetime of this machine,…

SCORE PRICE 25 devices, Premium licence, $2,740 from whatsupgold.com WhatsUp Gold (WUG) has been a popular network-monitoring solution since the 1990s, thanks to its excellent ease of use and extensive troubleshooting features. And publisher Progress Software isn’t resting on its laurels: this latest edition gains the ability to collect Windows Event Log and Syslog events, with extensive log search, filtering and export facilities courtesy of the Elasticsearch analytics engine. Licensing is fairly straightforward. The Premium edition can be had as either a yearly subscriptions or a perpetual licence, and is priced according to the number of monitored devices, regardless of how many ports or CPU cores they have. All the key features we’d want to see are here, including network discovery, device, cloud, wireless network and storage monitoring, plus alerting…

SCORE PRICE £620 exc VAT from best4systems.co.uk Working from home will be with us for a while yet – indeed, many workers aren’t ever planning to return to the office, which means personal videoconferencing is now a regular fact of life. It’s time to replace those clip-on cameras and tinny speakers with a proper solution, and Poly has an ideal alternative in the Studio P21, a conveniently sized desktop monitor that integrates everything you need for top-quality video calls. At first glance the P21 looks like a fairly ordinary 21.5in LCD monitor. It has a standard 1080p resolution and fabric grille across the bottom, which hides a 10W speaker on each side. The first visible clue that it’s more than a regular display is the camera set discreetly into the…

There’s a lot to think about after a breach, but never lose focus on getting your business back online. “A major breach can quickly become an existential threat to your business,” said Paul Baird, chief technical security officer UK, Qualys. “If you can get basic services back online, while safeguarding your customers and staff, then do so.” This could take the shape of quickly standing up a temporary cloud-based service and establishing emergency communications to set customer service expectations. “Ask yourself, what is the minimum infrastructure you need to get up and running?” he advised. “It could be as simple as SaaS-based telephony, email, payments processing and ticketing.” In some cases it may be difficult to restore or recover legacy systems; in this event, don’t rule out the option of…

Regular readers will know I’m somewhat obsessed with threat intelligence reports; I suck them up faster than a deranged Dyson in a dust factory. One ransomware attack analysis, however, caught my attention recently because of passwords. I skipped over the bit about local admin passwords that hadn’t been changed for a year (not least as regularly changing passwords isn’t something I advise), and even the fact that they were all the same didn’t surprise me much, sadly. No, what grabbed me was the password of `1qazxcv itself. Kudos to anyone who immediately spots the problem. Unfortunately, far too many people would think it relatively secure. Well, if you ignore the fact it’s a meagre eight characters long. Putting the length problem to one side for a moment, adding numerical and…

Even so, few would have predicted how big a success it would be. Having sold 100,000 units on the first day, it surpassed 8 million sales just four years later. At that point it had beaten the Amstrad PCW as the best-selling British computer. Today, more than 40 million boards have been sold. Far from being a flash in the pan, the Raspberry Pi is on to its fourth main model. There are two smaller versions - Zero and Pico-and a unit called the Raspberry Pi 400 that harks backto the days when computers were placed in the same case as the keyboard. In some respects, that has brought the Pi full circle. A lot of the incentive for creating the low-cost machine lay in the legendary BBC Micro, the…

LABS Printers Inkjet or laser? Refil lable or cartridge? Subscription or adhoc? Choosing a printer has never begged so many questions, but next month’s Labs holds the answers. 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 Are you paying too much for your broadband? Big numbers tempt us all, whether it’s 200 Mbits/sec downloads or countless“ free” TV channels. But buy smart and you can save money without feeling the speed pinch. Turn your phone into a high-end scanner We’ve all used our phone to snap documents, but that’s merely skimming the surface of what it…

Nik Rawlinson Still paying for a landline? Nik explains how much you could save by moving to VoIP, unearths the hidden benefits of switching and reveals the practical steps you need to take. See p42 Davey Winder Alongside his regular Real World Computing column on p118, Davey explains exactly what to do if an online attacker gets its hands on your business’s data. Discover your best response on p103 Dick Pountain A broken amplifier for his hi-fi, with no easy replacement to be found, prompts Dick to tread the line between digital and analogue with spectacular effect. Head to p20 to discover why Olivia Whitcroft If you aren’t baking data protection into the design of your new products, your customers may turn their noses up. Lawyer Olivia Whitcroft reveals the…

It wasn’t so long ago that BlackBerry was on top of the world. With famous adherents including Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian, for a time the company’s devices were not only an important part of doing business, but a status symbol too. Fast-forward to 2022, however, and the world is very different. It has now been seven years since the release of the last true BlackBerry OS device, and in early January the company announced that it was finally pulling the plug on supporting its devices. If you fire up your old phone, you should expect it to “no longer reliably function”. “I think it’s a little bit sad,” said Anton Boman, who worked on BlackBerry 10 (BB10), the final version of the company’s home-grown operating system. “There are very…

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 NEW ENTRY 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…

Barry Collins is the co-editor of BigTechQuestion.com. Ironically, he’ll be printing the letters from Canon’s lawyers when they read this. @bazzacollins Few phrases cause my blood to run colder than the beer in the fridge than when one of the kids yelps: “Dad, can I print my homework?” Let me tell you something about kids. If they manage to leave a single square centimetre of white paper peeping through a sheet of A4, they consider it a personal failure. If the page doesn’t emerge from the printer so sopping wet with ink that it needs 20 minutes on Gas Mark 4 to dry, they go back and try again. Even if the homework is nothing more than a six-syllable haiku, they’ll print it in a 256-point font with a full-bleed…

I hesitate to even put the ZenBook17 Fold OLED into a category, as this is a “laptop” that transcends the usual computing norms. It's a 17in all-in-one PC. A gigantic 1.6kg tablet. A two-screen ebook reader. But also, by bending the screen in half and placing the bundled Bluetooth keyboard across the lower portion, a12.5in laptop. The world needs a super-word that goes beyond “versatile” to describe this extraordinary piece of technology. But let's snap back to reality for a moment. Asus hasn't yet announced a price or a release date, nor have I managed to lay my hands on the product. That's crucial, because the success of the ZenBook 17 Fold will live or die by the quality of its engineering. For a start, if it's a great PC…

12th Gen Intel Core mobile processors If you’re already familiar with Intel’s 12th generation Core processors for the desktop, then you won’t be surprised by the mobile lineup’s key feature: a combination of performance cores (“P cores”) and efficiency cores (“E cores”) that echoes the Big. Little architecture found in ARM designs. Together with support for DDR5 memory and the fifth generation of PCI-Express, this new family of chips is being given the best chance to thrive. Intel is also integrating Wi-Fi 6E and support for Thunderbolt 4 into the package. Bottlenecks, what bottlenecks? As ever, Intel complicates matters by splitting this generation of chips into three series. At the top, the H Series, where power efficiency takes a back seat to performance, so expect to see these processors in…

Boogie Board VersaNotes The great thing about talking to Boogie Board about its VersaNotes was its avoidance of phrases like “electronic Post-it notes”. For that’s what these are, but the company can’t say that publicly. Instead, they told us, it’s “a quick sort of sticky note, which you can write on and then stick on a magnetic surface”. You can write using anything - your finger, a stylus - but to erase it you need to use the supplied “pencil” by tapping on the corner of the note with the pencil’s top. There’s no clever syncing with apps here: it’s a straightforward note. It’s admirably simple and, as we saw on the stand, it works. They’re due out in the spring with a starter pack that contains three notes in…

Aceleron Essential Battery Aceleron was one of a handful of British startups at CES this year, and wethink it's onto a winner. Its big idea is modular, easy-to-reuse and easy-to recycle lithium-ion battery packs for use in anything that requires what co-founder Carlton Cummins describes as “stationary energy storage applications”. So that could include everything from renewable energy power stations to specialist vehicles, with Carlton listing coffee trucks, canal boats and ambulances as successful areas. “The technician can easily rockup and install six of these [the battery pictured, left] and the capacity of the new ones is15% more in three years' time. He takes the old ones back to do any maintenance and repair he needs to redeploy to a new customer.” Sold. SmartMute technology London-based Smart Audio Technologies was…

DeepMind’s AlphaZero has already overcome rival AI engines and inspired grandmasters to change their style of play. So what else is left for AlphaZero to achieve? After all, it’s not as if any human grandmasters will be stupid enough to take it on. As Nigel Short remarks, even “your mobile phone will just thrash the world champion” these days. DeepMind’s staff research engineer, Nenad Tomasev, says the project is now focused on giving something back to the chess community. “We are no longer actively improving AlphaZero on chess, to make it stronger,” he said. “Instead, we see this as an opportunity to do research on identifying ways in which AIs can best complement and enrich human skill, as this is likely to be important in various domains of future AI…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £458 (£550 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk The Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook is finally here, a device I’ve been excited to try ever since it was announced in September 2021. That’s because the IdeaPad Duet (see issue 321, p86) was arguably the stand-out laptop in our most recent Chromebooks group test, and the Duet 5 Chromebook improves on last year’s offering in several important ways. Let’s start with the obvious change: it’s bigger. The original Duet Chromebook featured a 10.1in display, which inevitably meant that its detachable keyboard also measured around 10in diagonally. This rules it out for people who don’t have much dexterity in their hands or don’t want to type with hunched-up claws. With a 13.3in screen to press up against, the Duet 5 Chromebook’s…

SCORE PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from logitech.com The Logitech Zone Wired Earbuds may well be the product you’ve been waiting for these past two years. Rather than wear a clunky headset for video calls, you can switch to wired earbuds with a built-in noise-cancelling microphone that you can use in busy environments. That gives it two clear selling points: it’s great for Zoom calls with a virtual background, as the earbuds merge into your face; and of particular use to business travellers. Logitech even includes a handy pouch. While I mention Zoom above, these earbuds are actually at their best for Teams users. Pressing the middle button on the in-line remote control launches Teams if you already have it installed, and the button’s backlight will pulse if someone calls…

SCORE PRICE 42mm, £175 (£210 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com Several companies make stylish smartwatches; several make functional fitness focused smartwatches. With the Watch GT 3, Huawei manages to hit the Venn diagram bangin the centre. To look at, you wouldn’t think this watch was geared towards fitness at all. Its bright AMOLED touchscreen displayisset set in a light weight stainless steel and plastic case, and topped with toughened glass that has acurved edge to creates the illusion of extra screenspace. It comes with a variety of strap options, including silicone, metal and leather (shown here). The watch comes in two sizes: 42mm and 46mm. The larger version has a 1.43in display with a case that’s 11mm thick, and weighs 43g without the strap. The smaller model has a 1.3in display…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £583 (£699 inc VAT) from samsung.com The Samsung Galaxy S21 FE really challenges the idiom “better late than never”: arriving almost a year after the other phones in theS21 family, the FE lands as we await news of the Galaxy S22 range. This Fan Edition is purportedly the budget member of the Galaxy S21 range, but, right off the bat, price is a problem. At £699, it’s almost identical to thestreet price of the S21 (see issue318, p68). You’d be forgiven for confusing the Galaxy Sar FE with its non-FE sibling: other than its larger size, it’s a dead ringer. Until you touch it, that is, for this is a plastic rather than metal phone. The positive to this is that it’s less prone to scratches and…

SCORE PRICE £619 (£743 inc VAT) from box.co.uk If we were forced to summarise the Acer TravelMate P4 P414-51 in one word, it would be “solid”. This isn’t a laptop that will bring an admiring glance from passers-by, nor one that will ever sit at the top of the performance charts, but if you’re after a business laptop for an aggressive price then it deserves to be at the top of your shortlist. In part that’s due to the solidity of the laptop. Other machines at this price often feel thrown together, but the TravelMate P4 exudes reassuring sturdiness. That’s despite the fact only the lid is made from metal, with the rest of the chassis fashioned from rigid plastic, and its dark blue livery gives it a professional look.…

SCORE PRICE £291 (£349 inc VAT) from very.co.uk The GeoFlex is arguably the most interesting laptop in this Labs. Its most obvious standout feature in this company is its price, yet it still packs the handy ability to twist the screen round 360° to create a quasi tablet. So it’s matching the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 for features at a quarter of the price. You might expect every other aspect of this machine to be sacrificed in the quest for low cost, but even here the GeoFlex 340 includes some surprises. Top of the list is its screen. Unlike the drab displays of some low-cost laptops, it includes a 14.1in panel capable of covering 91% of the sRGB gamut and 67% of the DCI-P3 space. Whites even look white. That…

SCORE PRICE £1,086 (£1,300 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk The Huawei MateBook 14s is so nearly the perfect laptop. For a start, it’s fast: a Core i7-11370H matched with 16GB of RAM is always a powerful combination, and so it proved here with results of 164 in the PC Pro benchmarks and 5,327 in PCMark 10. This isn’t merely due to the core components but also the highly effective cooling mechanism. Huawei also squeezes more out of Intel’s Iris Xe graphics chip than any of its rivals, with a whopping 112fps in Dirt: Showdown at 1o8op. That’s not too far behind the HP Envy 14 with its GTX1650 Ti graphics. When you switch to more graphically intensive games - even Metro: Last Light, where the MateBook’s s6fps was far behind the…

SCORE PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The Acer Aspire 5 chassis – the A514-54 on test is one variation of many that Acer sells – has been largely unchanged for years, and it’s showing its age. The metal effect finish of the plastic chassis fools no-one, while the high-contrast black bezels around the screen simply look large. And while Acer quotes an 18mm height, it’s closer to 20mm in many places. At 1.7kg, this is a chunky machine by modern standards. First impressions aren’t improved by a lacklustre screen. Whites aren’t true, and even when we pushed the brightness up to its 264cd/m2 maximum – and tweaked its colour balance in software – this wasn’t a panel that brought joy to our eyes. If you plan to watch…

SCORE PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from chillblast.com There is only one reason to choose the Fusion Iris, and that’s if your top priority is bang-per-buck. With a Core i7-1165G7 processor and 16GB of RAM, it rivalled far more expensive machines in our non-gaming benchmarks. Our only caveat is that Acer’s Swift 3 more than lived up to its name thanks to a six-core Ryzen chip inside, and that machine costs £101 less than the Fusion Iris. Those looking for a gaming system would be far better served by the £899 MSI Pulse GL66, which offers a major upgrade in the form of the discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti chip versus Intel’s integrated Xe graphics. For example, the MSI scored 170fps in Metro: Last Light compared to the Chillblast’s…

We measure a laptop’s performance using a range of tests. The PC Pro benchmark measures how quickly each system can process a standard set of image and video files, and handle multiple workloads while simultaneously playing a video. We also test using PCMark 10, Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23. We test the internal SSD using the AS SSD tool, which determines sequential read and write speeds. This month, we also timed how long it took to transfer 11GB of mixed files via a USB-C port. Next we test gaming performance using 3DMark, Dirt: Showdown and Metro: Last Light. If a laptop has discrete graphics, we test it in Metro: Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. All benchmarks shown here are at 1080p at High presets. We then move on…

PRICE Essentials, 25 devices, £375 per month exc VAT from auvik.com There are plenty of cloud-hosted network-monitoring options to choose from, but Auvik can claim to be one of the fastest to deploy. Two versions are available: the Essentials edition provides network mapping, monitoring, alerting and device configuration management, while the Performance edition adds features such as Syslog collection and flow data analysis for detailed application visibility. To use it you simply need to install a collector agent in each site – and this is painless as it’s a lightweight service that will run on any version of Windows. The back-end, meanwhile, is hosted in AWS data centres, and protected by both single sign-on and 2FA procedures. All collector data is encrypted, and outbound communications are only permitted with its…

SCORE PRICE 1 server/VM, €99 per year exc VAT from virtualmetric.com VirtualMetric may not be so well known in the network monitoring world as old-timers such as PRTG and WhatsUp Gold, but it makes its mark with an impressive range of features. It offers real-time agentless monitoring of both physical and virtual servers, works with numerous popular business apps and additionally provides log monitoring, change tracking and inventory functions. Subscription terms are flexible, with monthly and annual options. Each monitored SNMP endpoint costs €2.90 or €29 respectively, while one physical server or virtual machine will cost €9.90 or €99. Installing the software takes just two minutes, but be aware that VirtualMetric requires a minimum of Windows Server 2016, plus SQL Server 2014 or higher. We used a Windows Server 2019…

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Working through the pandemic has convinced many of my clients that remote support is a great option. Repairers have also adapted their methods, especially a skill that is seldom discussed: the art of ignoring things that the client definitely didn’t want anyone to see. The most common example would be a client demonstrating a browser quirk, where one innocent keystroke displays their recent history. Via the magic of remote, I can quickly redirect with chat about fascinating icons in the taskbar while triggering incognito mode so we can both move on. Last November, I didn’t have the barrier of remote software when I was unblocking a customer’s email client. My solution to his problem is no technical marvel – all that was needed to get things running was a decent…

Whenever the first snowfall of the year blankets Calgary, the Canadian city I grew up in, the roads swiftly become lined with cars that have spun out of their lanes. There’s a distinctly Canadian remark that comes along with spotting a car caught up in the annual mass fender-bender – “must be new” – based on the assumption that all the roadside wipe-outs are clearly recent arrivals to town. After all, anyone who’s lived locally for a year is forced the hard way to learn how to drive in snow, so anyone slip-sliding across the motorway must be a newbie. There are many tricks to driving in snowy conditions, but here are a few: drive slowly, even slower than you think you should; if snow obscures the lane markings, follow…

We are moving into the post-smartphone era. That might come as a shock to you, but the smartphone has had a decent run – depending of course on what you call a “smartphone”. For most of us, the category was kicked off by the iPhone well over a decade ago: its full-face touchscreen and rich software ecosystem have simply transformed the world. Those with long memories might hark back to devices such as the Nokia Communicator or the Palm Treo, while others might pin their flags to the Android pole, but it’s indisputable that Apple has done more with the smartphone platform than anyone else. In particular, it’s almost single-handedly ushered in the successor phase of personal technology: the age of wearables. For me, the Apple Watch has been as…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He thought DAC was a brand of trousers until he discovered Smirnoff. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk Grandpa’s Axe is a figment of American folk mythology: “had it nigh on 60 years, never give me no trouble except in’ fer two new heads and three new handles”. My hi-fi system is very much like that. I’m far from being a hi-fi buff, but I listen to a lot of music and enjoy good sound. I bought an ex-review Sansui system back in the days when Hi-Fi Choice was one of PC Pro’s sister publications, but the only component remaining from that is a pair of wood-cased Castle speakers. I still love those speakers. Nowadays all my audio feeds – smart TV, Spotify and YouTube on…

Halls heaving with so many bodies you could barely walk a foot without jostling someone. LG’s stunning waterfall of screens. Taxi horns blaring in frustration as they attempted to transport attendees from one venue to another, only to be met by the ever-lasting traffic jam from hell. That was CES 2020. Roll forward two years and things couldn’t have been more different. Halls with yawning gaps where exhibitors were meant to be. LG’s stand a hollow echo of what came before, with makeshift signs that encouraged you to download an AR app to admire highlights from previous years. A taxi journey that previously took an hour now took eight minutes. But there was life if you knew where to find it. Eureka Park, CES’s home for startups and niche ideas,…

Dell U3223QZ video conferencing monitor Dell proves that it’s not only laptop screens that can have a webcam built in with the catchily named U3223QZ videoconferencing monitor. It’s a 4K display with a 4K webcam attached, which uses the Sony HDR STARVIS CMOS to make you look your best on those tiresome Teams calls. (There’s a dedicated Teams button on the front of the display if you get really tired of them and want to hang up.) If you’re worried that the camera won’t put you bang in the middle of the frame, the camera tilts by 20°, and you can switch between three different fields of view to ensure you get as much or as little of your bookshelves in the background as you desire. The screen itself is…

Acer Predator Orion 5000 Acer is pushing the Orion 5000 under the banner of “raw power”, and we can see why. Intel’s 12th gen Core i7 processors, up to 64GB of DDR5 memory and GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards are the core ingredients, with the exact mix depending upon your choice of model. As the photo on the left shows, the obligatory RGB options are in place, but we’d draw your attention to the brooding design of the chassis and its tool-less design. It launches in Europe from March, starting at €1,999. Alienware m17 R5 Ryzen Edition Alienware should surely have gone the whole hog and called this the “AMD Showcase Of Alllts Mobile Gaming Technology Edition”, for that is what it is. A portfolio of technologies dubbed AMD…

AI will ruin chess. It will turn players into robots, encourage the “endless dry manoeuvring” that normally leads to drawn games, as former world champion Garry Kasparov warned in a 2018 article for Science magazine. That was the conventional wisdom, and it certainly looked like it was coming true. Take that year’s World Chess Championship between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, where all 12 games ended in a draw. The match had to be decided on the chess equivalent of a penalty shoot-out – three games of rapid chess – to find a winner. “You’re starting to have a real problem when you have 12 classical games drawn,” said Nigel Short, the former World Chess Championship finalist, speaking exclusively to PC Pro. It looked like being a similar scenario in…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p14. It’s updated each month. Labs Winner Each month we run a group test, or Labs. This product has managed to beat all others to top position. The pcpro.link Throughout the magazine you’ll see pcpro.link shortcuts. Enter these into the address bar of your browser and it will take you to a particular page, which will either be too long or awkward for us to publish or will take you to the precise shop from which to buy. If it’s Amazon, note that we have an affiliate deal in place so we will receive a commission…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from logitech.com Do not adjust your sets: this is a Logitech keyboard, just not as you know it. Rather than the staid grey designs of its ever-brilliant MX series, the Pop Keys is available in a trio of eye-popping colours. And, as the photo shows, it includes a column of five emoji keys down the righthand side. If Logitech’s chosen set of emojis makes you? then mix and match with the four others in the box until you’re ?. Simply rip the old ones off and slot the new ones on. Logitech would earn itself an even bigger smile if its Options software was clever enough to automatically detect which buttons were in place, but instead this is a manual job. More positively, if…

Total value this month £142 O&O DiskImage 16 Professional We all know how important it is to maintain a fallback copy of Windows – with all your carefully configfured apps and settings – as well as your personal documents, media and other files. O&O DiskImage Professional provides all the tools you need to make regular backups of your files and folders, along with entire drives and disk partitions. Once the software is installed, you can choose a backup mode, or select a source drive or volume and run a backup using the default settings. You can also browse individual files and folders, and tick the ones you want to protect as you go. There are options to run incremental or differential backups, compress or encrypt your archives, and more. When…

SCORE PRICE £200 (£240 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk What a brilliant idea the Echo Show 15 is. Where the previous Echo Show devices have been tabletop affairs, the Show 15 is at its best hanging on a wall – next to the fridge, perhaps, as Amazon hopes it will become the fulcrum of family life. You can buy the optional stand (£35) and sit it on your desk like a traditional Echo Show, but that feels like a waste of its talents. So, where to put it? Amazon’s advice is to keep the Show 15 at eye level. It comes with a “mounting template” (a posh word for a piece of paper with the Show’s outline on it) and, once you work out your preferred area, you drill holes and…

When will I get Windows 11? One of our criteria for this group test is self-evident: the laptop must be capable of running Windows 11. Ideally, we wanted the laptops to ship with Windows 11, but those models sold at retailers will ship with Windows 10 for a while. Luckily, they should soon update themselves (with your consent) to Windows 11 via Windows Update. Check out the bottom row of our feature table on p76 to see each model’s status at a glance; where we were offered an update during the test, we say “Upgrade offered”. Where we were still waiting at the end of the test, we put “Waiting for update”. We also indicate if a laptop was supplied with Windows 11. How good is the webcam? Two years…

SCORE PRICE £524 (£628 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com As the saying used to go, an IT manager was never going to be fired for buying IBM. Today, in the world of laptops at least, that might equally be said of Dell, Dynabook (formerly Toshiba), HP and Lenovo, but as this Labs demonstrates both Acer and Asus now have compelling business offerings that deserve your attention. In the case of the ExpertBook B1 series, its big appeal is value for money. At a fraction over £600, Asus is offering a well-balanced specification in a well-built chassis with a well-rounded supporting cast of security, screen and expansion offerings. At the risk of over-egging our point, it’s great for the money. The same could be said of the Acer TravelMate P4 opposite, but…

SCORE PRICE £1,167 (£1,400 inc VAT) from hp.com The HP Envy range has been a regular on the PC Pro A List, often offering amazing quality for the money. With a starting price of £1,100, the latest iteration of the Envy 14 range falls short of that description, but if you’re after a powerful machine with luxury trimmings, then read on. Let’s start with the power on offer. Our test system included a Core i7-1165G7, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and discrete GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics. As such, it’s no surprise to see it near the top of every speed-test graph (see p92). If you’re after firepower, this is a superb choice. It even qualifies as a gaming laptop of sorts thanks to that GeForce chip, which is…

SCORE PRICE £749 (£899 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The MSI Pulse GL66 is one of two gaming laptops submitted to this Labs, and it edges ahead of the Asus TUF Dash F15 not merely due to price but also because it’s faster overall. Indeed, the gaming test graphs onp93 suggest that the MSI laptop includes a faster graphics card, but in truth its chart-topping results in Dirt: Showdown and Metro: Last Light reflect that these games are limited by the CPU at1080p. It would be fairer to compare the two in more demanding games, where the positions were reversed. For instance, in Metro: Exodus the Pulse averaged 52fps while the Asus returned 73fps (at 1080p, High settings). The gap was narrower in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. with scores of…

SCORE PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk If you’re on a tight budget and need multicore power, then nothing ticks the boxes quite like this AMD-powered Swift 3. The Ryzen 5 5500U is the key to its success, with six cores and 12 threads ensuring it whips through multicore tasks in no time. That’s despite the limiting 8GB of RAM, which is soldered onto the motherboard (there’s no SODIMM socket so no upgrade route). AMD’s Radeon Vega 7 graphics can’t match the CPU for potency, but a 77fps average in Dirt: Showdown shows that it has some gaming prowess. Anyone who thinks you need to choose Intel for battery life should also take note of this laptop’s fine performance in our video-rundown test, where it kept going for 11hrs…

SCORE PRICE £1,563 (£1,876 inc VAT) from bechtle.com/gb This is a business laptop that screams quality from every pore. Its slim chassis is built using magnesium, which is why it’s so solid yet so light: at 1.2kg you can slip the EliteBook 840 Aero into a briefcase or rucksack without feeling weighed down. (The “Aero” indicates that this is the lighter variant of the standard 840.) You probably won’t even need to bring the power supply with you as it lasted for a dozen or so hours in both of our light-use tests. Don’t think it lacks power, either. Our test unit included a Core i5-1135G7, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB SSD, which pushed it to a nippy 143 in the PC Pro benchmarks and 4,846 in PCMark…

I know it’s trendy to blame the media, but I also wonder if it’s our fault. The woeful state of webcams in laptops, that is. As my mini biography kindly points out at the foot of this column, I’ve been reviewing laptops for over 20 years – my first in summer 1999, if I recall correctly – but it’s only in the past 18 months that I’ve paid much attention to the quality of their webcams. Now, obviously people used webcams before the first lockdown, but it was a side issue. They were for family get-togethers over Skype, a very occasional conflab with colleagues who worked on different continents (but wasn’t that what boardroom videoconferencing solutions were for?) and those occasional Webex calls where we had to download some weird…

SCORE PRICE 2,500 sensors, 1yr maintenance, €4,950 exc VAT from paessler.com If you’re feeling bamboozled by complicated licensing models, PRTG Network Monitor is the answer. Pricing is based purely on the number of sensors you want to use – and you don’t have to worry about add-ons and extras, as the entire range of 285 different sensor types is included as standard. These cover virtually every type of network device, hardware component, business app and service, so you’d be hard pushed to find something on your network that PRTG couldn’t monitor. It’s reasonably priced, too, with the Small Business package starting at €1,500 a year for 500 sensors – enough to monitor around 50 devices. Installation is simple. After we’d loaded PRTG’s on-site server software onto a Windows Server 2019…

SCORE PRICE £183 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com With fierce competition in the SMB Wi-Fi market, vendors need to offer something special to stand out. Enter D-Link’s Nuclias access points (APs), which offer full cloud management, plenty of business-class features and a choice of models at different speeds. We tried out the entry-level DBA-X1230P, which claims an AX1800 performance rating. That’s arrived at by totting up theoretical speeds of 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 600Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. It isn’t the cheapest AX1800 AP we’ve seen – Netgear’s WAX610 (see issue 319, p100) only costs £130 – but it’s better value than it appears, as the price includes your first year’s subscription to D-Link’s Nuclias cloud-management platform. You’ll need it, as the DBA-X1230P doesn’t support standalone operations. But keeping…

Ransomware incidents can be particularly difficult to deal with because you have to tackle all the challenges of a security or privacy breach in circumstances where your operations are probably paralysed. “This puts pressure on the organisation to quickly pay the ransom to avoid loss of revenue and the reputational damage of leaked data,” Oscar Arean, head of operations at Databarracks, said. “Small businesses in particular can be quickly overwhelmed,” he continued. “Make sure you have resources available to help. Your insurance company may provide security and forensic specialists, but if not, it’s a good idea to develop a relationship with specialists that you can call upon if you need them.”…

Let me tell you a story: you’re having a new friend round for lunch. You’ve designed a recipe for “Meaty Platter”, which combines a range of meats. You’ve bought the finest ingredients for the platter. That morning you blended it together and made it look amazing. Your friend arrives. She takes one look at your beautiful platter and declines to eat it; she doesn’t understand what it’s made from, and doesn’t want to eat meat. Meaty Platter goes in the bin, and your friend doesn’t return. Or maybe she takes a taste, and then suffers a severe stomach ache later that day, and your friendship is lost. So how do you host a lunch without alienating or damaging your friends? Before designing your recipe, you consider whether aspects of your…

Back in the good old 20-teens, my go-to device for car satnav was my Microsoft/Nokia Lumia 950XL. No matter how you feel about Windows for Mobile phones, the 950 is an interesting machine, and the free lifetime updates to worldwide maps are hard to ignore. The only problem in everyday use was that after a couple of hours of map display, GPS and route-planning duty, the device would be too hot to hold. Hanging it in front of the dash vents was the only fix. If, that is, you intend to carry on using what you were pre-pandemic. Quite by accident, I left the house for a trip to Europe with the wrong phone. Setting up Waze on the Nokia X20 was simple, and the ferry Wi-Fi didn’t actually melt…