Table of contents for September 2022 in PC Pro

Twitter has been playing too fast and loose with the phone numbers and email addresses it uses for two-factor authentication, according to the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. As a result, the company is on the hook for a $150 million fine. According to the two agencies, between May 2013 and September 2019, if you handed over your phone number to Twitter to add an extra layer of protection to your account, the company wasn’t just using it to keep you safe – without disclosing it, it was also using your number to target its advertising. “The $150 million penalty reflects the seriousness of the allegations against Twitter, and the substantial new compliance measures to be imposed as a result of today’s proposed settlement will help prevent…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS 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 Apple MacBook Air If you don’t need the power of an M1 Pro or M1 Max, “make do” with the M1 in the MacBook Air and enjoy its super-slim design and relatively light weight at a much lower price. From £999 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue…

Barry Collins is the co-editor of the BigTechQuestion.com. He runs in low-energy mode all the time. @bazzacollins I may have mentioned this once or twice before, but I used to work at a non-League football club. And every Saturday, without fail, one of the players would knock on the office door and ask: “Have you got an iPhone charger?” To which I’d invariably reply: “Which one?” This was a few years ago, when Apple was making the transition from its own proprietary charger to another proprietary charger – back in the days when an iPhone battery ran out of puff faster than a non-League footballer. Although, given that my kids’ iPhones are attached to the wall more often than our landline, I’m not sure those days have yet passed. So…

For more than a decade now, we’ve been waiting for our homes to become truly smart. “Smart home” as a concept is not new, but the problem is that the major platforms vying to run our homes, such as Apple’s HomeKit, Amazon Alexa and Google Home, are just a bit, well, rubbish. With limited functionality, unpredictable compatibility and the overwhelming stench of corporate control, it’s understandable why we might not want to entrust control of our homes to a single corporation. This is why, with the zeal of a new convert, I bring good news: there is a better way. It’s time to break up with Alexa and draw a line in the sand with Siri. Instead, embrace an alternative smart home system that’s powerful, open source and compatible with…

Though Home Assistant is brilliant if you’re a little bit techie and you’re willing to put the time into it, it clearly isn’t for everyone. The reality is that for most people, smart home tech is simply too complicated. With a myriad of technologies, standards and brands, it can be tricky to know if your Hue bulbs work with Alexa, for example, or if your LG ThinQ dishwasher can interface with Google. That’s why in 2019, an enormous alliance of virtually every smart home company announced they had found a solution: yet another new standard. Though this might sound like a recipe for more confusion, “Matter”, as it will be known, could finally be a mainstream breakthrough due to the sheer range of companies that have already signed up for…

Personal information has never been more accessible. Your social profile and posts can give away all sorts of details to people you know, and people you don’t – from potential dates to employers and identity thieves. There are all sorts of steps you can take to reduce your exposure, but policies and privacy settings change over time, and breaches can’t be ruled out. The surest way to protect yourself is to shut down your social media accounts completely. It may also be good for your mental wellbeing to cut ties with any platforms that you feel are no longer enriching your life. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single, straightforward way to close every account. The process is different for each service, it isn’t always instant, and it doesn’t necessarily mean your…

The old UNERASE and UNDELETE commands are long gone – they were designed for disks using the old FAT file system and the obsolete 8.3 filename format. However, if you’ve erased a file by mistake, there are tools out there that can bring it back. One of the most popular is Recuva, and you can download the free version from ccleaner.com/recuva. Once installed, the Recuva wizard will ask a few questions about the sort of file you’re looking for, and give you the option of enabling the “Deep Scan” mode. If you leave this box unticked and hit Next, the program will cogitate for a few seconds; if it’s ticked then Recuva will scan your whole disk, which could easily take upwards of an hour, but may recover fragments of…

SCORE PRICE £1,417 (£1,700 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Every esports fan will be familiar with the Fnatic brand, with its teams competing across CS:GO, FIFA and Rainbow Six: Siege. It also sells its own-brand keyboards, mice and headsets, and in partnership with Chillblast its name now adorns gaming PCs, too. Head to chillblast.com and you’ll find anything from an £800 Core i3 system with a GeForce GTX 1650 to a £2,700 machine with a Core i7-12700K and RTX 3070 Ti inside. We opted for the mid-range Fnatic Victor, which seemed a sensible compromise as it still includes a Core i5-12600K and GeForce 3060 Ti graphics. It also allows us to compare the Fnatic to a Labs-winning system that Chillblast is still selling, the Vanguard Gaming PC (see issue 332, p83),…

SCORE PRICE £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk While I compared the Galaxy Book2 360 on the previous pages to the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, the Galaxy Book2 Pro 5G elevates itself above Dell’s bulky XPS 15 (see issue 328, p62) due to its skinniness. Instead, the 15.6in Book2 Pro’s closest rival is the LG Gram 16 (see issue 320, p50), but while that laptop shares the Samsung’s featherlike 1.2kg weight, it’s made to look positively chubby at 16.8mm thick. The Book2 Pro 5G is a simply ludicrous 11.7mm thin. It’s worth pausing, then, to appreciate what we have here. A super-skinny laptop with a 15.6in AMOLED screen that can keep going on a single charge for more than 12 hours, and still feels well built thanks to an aluminium…

SCORE PRICE £1,002 (£1,202 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The U3223QZ is a thoroughly modern monitor. The first sign of this is its classy platinum finish, and that’s reinforced by a 4K resolution stretched across the panel’s 31.5in diagonal. Switch it on and you’ll be immediately impressed by a gorgeous colour palette, but the pièce de résistance is a webcam that comes with its own long list of features. Top of that list is the Sony Starvis CMOS sensor, offering 4K at 30fps or 1080p at 60fps. AI auto-tracking keeps you centred when you’re moving around inside the frame, digital overlap HDR recovers details in shadowy parts of the frame, and presence detection allows you to log in automatically (well, in theory). Then there’s its adjustable field of view, zoom and…

SCORE PRICE £325 (£390 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Samsung’s Galaxy A-series phones generally emulate the style and features of its high-end models at a lower price. The A53 is a case in point: it might as well be called the S22 Light. It’s certainly cheaper. You can pick it up for £399 with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, versus £769 for the regular S22. It looks good, in a choice of tasteful white, black, blue and peach finishes (Samsung prefixes each colour name with the word “Awesome”, but we’d feel embarrassed to write that more than once). The phone is large but not ungainly, measuring 160 x 75 x 8.1mm and weighing 189g. The rear camera bump isn’t too obtrusive, partly thanks to a curved surround that rises to meet…

SCORE PRICE £92 (£110 inc VAT) from cyberlink.com CyberLink’s PowerDirector is a multiplatform app that can grow with you as you become more proficient and want to take on more challenging projects. Its under-the-hood power makes it a genuine contender for best Adobe Premiere Pro alternative, and there’s even a subscription option, PowerDirector 365, mirroring Adobe’s Creative Cloud. If you’re using PowerDirector 18 or earlier, there are two pieces of good news. First is belated support for 4K video – even if rivals can cater for 8K – and second is compatibility with HEVC. This is the codec of choice for iPhones, for instance. In addition to new templates, themes and effects packs, CyberLink has added a multitude of impressive new features to PowerDirector’s arsenal. I particularly appreciate flipping layers.…

SCORE PRICE Free from moviemakeronline.com Who needs apps or expensive software when you can quickly edit movies in your browser? That’s the promise of Movie Maker Online, a bare-bones website featuring a handful of options. Upload your files, choose stock images, select some free music, change the background colour, insert some text. This is video editing at its most basic. Using your own media is as simple as selecting the files you need from your drive, although you’ll have to wait a while as they are uploaded to the service’s servers. You also have a warning that your media will only remain there for around 24 hours (maybe less), so you’d better work fast. The stock photos are from Pixabay. Search for specific keywords, then click on the thumbnails of…

Processors are far more complicated than they used to be. You can’t just pick a type and look at the clock speed to find the best one for you; instead, you need to closely examine each processor’s capabilities and features so you can find the right one for you. Core drill One of the most important things about a processor is the number of cores that it has, and that’s for two reasons. First, demanding applications can use multiple cores to speed up tasks; the more cores you have, the better. Second, as each core is a CPU in its own right, having multiple cores means that there’s more processing power to share around. That’s very important, as you can have some cores dealing with background tasks while the spare…

SCORE PRICE £149 (£179 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Just like Intel, AMD feels like it’s packing the entry-level market with lots of options at different price points, just because it can. Take the Ryzen 5 5600 as a case in point. Although it costs just over £40 more than the Ryzen 5 5500, you don’t get a lot more for your cash. The six-core processor (12 threads) offers a base clock that’s 100MHz slower than on the 5500, while the all-important boost clock runs at just 200MHz more. This turns into a minor advantage in our benchmarks: the PC Pro, Cinebench and Geekbench results are all marginally better on the 5600 compared to the 5500, as are the single-core and gaming tests. The improvement doesn’t feel like it’s £40 better,…

SCORE PRICE £171 (£205 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The first of the unlocked processors in AMD’s Ryzen lineup, the Ryzen 5 5600X is more of an entry-level chip. That said, there are still six cores (12 threads) on a single chiplet. That puts this chip head-to-head with the Core i5-12500, another six-core processor at a similar price. Both chips run at comparable clock speeds: the Ryzen 5 5600X has a base clock of 3.7GHz and boosts to 4.6GHz, which is the same boost speed as the i5. In single-core tests, the 5600X holds its own against its rival. When it comes to the harder multithreaded tests, such as Cinebench and Geekbench, Intel’s new architecture proves itself and the i5-12600 slightly outperformed the 5600X. Admittedly, it’s a close-run thing; the reason…

SCORE PRICE £442 (£530 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk AMD’s top-end Ryzen, the 5950X has a staggering 16 cores delivering a total of 32 threads. That’s a higher thread count than even the Intel Core i9-12900K. The layout of the chip is two eight-core chips on a single package, so there’s potential for latency if cores have to communicate from one package to another, but you wouldn’t necessarily notice. This processor runs at a base clock of 3.4GHz, boosting to 4.9GHz. Running at full pelt, in benchmarks that can use the full thread count, the 5950X is mighty impressive: its score of 530 in the PC Pro benchmarks is only just behind the Core i9 models, and it’s pretty much level with the i9 in Geekbench 5’s multicore test while pulling…

SCORE PRICE £106 (£127 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The Core i3-12100 is the cheapest “i” CPU in the 12th generation range (there are stripped-down Celeron chips based on the Alder Lake architecture). It has the same four-core and eight-thread P-core layout as the more expensive i3-12300, with no E-cores. The i3-12100 processor has a base speed of 3.3GHz, boosting to 4.3GHz, so 100MHz less than the i3-2300. That made little difference in our benchmarks: single-threaded performance in the likes of the Geekbench and Cinebench tests punches above AMD rivals. On tougher multithreaded benchmarks, the i3-12100 sits at the bottom of the league tables, but it’s only a fraction behind the i3-12300. What it comes down to is price. This is a cheap processor to start with, but opt for the…

SCORE PRICE £158 (£190 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Core i5-12400, just as with the i5-12500, feels like a gap filler. With six P-cores and no E-cores, the only difference between this chip and the other non-K Core i5 models is clock speed. Here, the P-cores run at 2.5GHz (500MHz down on the i5-12500) with a 4.4GHz boost clock (down 200MHz on the i5-12500). Given that CPUs will boost to their higher clock speed when busy, the slower base rate makes little difference. It’s a similar story across the benchmarks. Single-core performance largely impresses thanks to the new architecture; without E-cores, tougher benchmarks such as Cinebench and the PC Pro tests are less impressive, and this chip struggles to keep up with the main competition. In fact, price is the…

SCORE PRICE £179 (£215 inc VAT) from box.co.uk At first glance, the i5-12600 seems to be something of bargain, being £80 cheaper than the i5-12600K. Before you get too excited, though, know that the i5-12600 drops one of the main benefits of Intel’s 12th generation architecture: E-cores. Instead, there are only six P-cores, running at a base speed of 3.3GHz and boosting to 4.8GHz. The lack of E-cores doesn’t make much difference in gaming and single-threaded applications, compared to other Intel chips; indeed, a Geekbench 5 single-core result of 1,732 is faster than any AMD Ryzen chip here. But the difference became obvious in the PC Pro benchmarks, where the CPU plummeted down the league tables, far below the i5-12600K and just under the Ryzen 7 range, which all have…

SCORE PRICE £464 (£557 inc VAT) from box.co.uk An absolute beast of a processor, the Intel Core i9-12900K is the company’s top-of-the-line unlocked CPU. It has the most cores of any Intel processor, with eight P-cores and eight E-cores. With Hyper-Threading, that’s a total of 24 threads. Despite this, the processor ran relatively cool in our benchmarks, topping out at 72°C but dropping down to a cool 20°C when sitting idle; that’s those E-cores at work for you. The P-cores run at 3.4GHz, boosting to 5.2GHz, while the E-cores run at 2.5GHz and boost to 4GHz. In tasks that can use all the cores, the end result is that the i9-12900K is stunningly powerful. An overall score of 592 in the PC Pro benchmarks is among the fastest that we’ve…

SCORE PRICE With 3yr Total Security, £1,508 exc VAT from watchguardonline.co.uk The T20-W is the entry point of WatchGuard’s Firebox table-top security appliances, and is aimed primarily at small and home office deployments. It could also be a sound choice for larger businesses wanting to protect remote sites, as it offers cloud management and zero-touch deployment. The latter is handled via WatchGuard’s RapidDeploy service: once you’ve register a new appliance with your support account, you can assign it a configuration file created from a local Firebox appliance. When the appliance is plugged in at the remote site, it grabs the file from your account and instantly starts providing protection. For management, you can either use the local web console or enable full cloud management, which disables the local interface and…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £411 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com NAS specialist Qnap has lately been expanding into new areas such as network switching; now it turns its attention to the SMB videoconferencing market. And the KoiBox-100W is a clever concept: a portable appliance that can operate as both an all-in-one conferencing solution and a wireless screen-sharing station for in-person presentations. If you’re fed up with monthly subscriptions, there’s one feature you’ll like right away. Instead of charging a recurrent fee, the KoiBox is a one-off purchase with all licences included. That gets you support for the most popular conferencing platforms, including Skype, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. The KoiBox will appeal equally to businesses that want to go off-grid, as it can provide private conferencing services too, with Qnap taking care of…

I’ve been Googling for hours and I can’t find a single product that says it’s DARQ-compatible. Is this a real thing? Part of the problem is that DARQ shares its name with a fairly recent and quite popular video game, which gets in the way of any attempt at research. Moreover, the DARQ that we’re interested in isn’t itself a product or a company: it’s shorthand for a collection of four technologies, namely distributed ledger, artificial intelligence, extended reality and quantum computing (see the boxout “Don’t be left in the dark” below for a more detailed explanation of these terms). It’s not a coherent toolkit, or a necessary foundation of your projects. But if you can’t at least say something about DARQ then this might be an indication that your…

I hate passwords with a vengeance. In the main because they are so badly abused, from a security perspective, by so many people. I’m not just talking about the person on the Clapham omnibus who keeps their passwords simple and shared between multiple accounts and services, but service providers as well. In 2022, I would have liked to think that the days of stupidly short character limits, along with rules forbidding special characters, would be long gone, but that’s not the case. Yes, Virgin Media, I’m looking firmly in your “email passwords can be no longer than ten digits and contain no special characters” direction. Of course, Virgin Media isn’t the only outfit that’s in strong password denial. It’s still possible to find those who see password creation as some…

A question keeps creeping into my mind, one that has been haunting me for years. Perhaps the only way to rid myself of it is to use this page as a confessional. So here goes: has technology made the world better? Taking a macro view, the answer seems a simple yes. Here in the 21st century we are surely much better off than our hunter-gatherer predecessors. Technology, using the word in its broadest sense, has extended our lives, made those lives more comfortable, and freed up our time to spend it on knowledge, art, music, literature. Even if we narrow our focus to the past hundred years, the answer seems a pretty firm yes. The quality of life of someone in 2022, certainly in the West but also in most…

Exclusive investigations into technology practices. Email probe@pcpro.co.uk if you have a story We already have computers in our pockets and on our wrists, and in the not-too-distant future we’ll be strapping them to our faces, too. All of the major players in Silicon Valley are hard at work developing augmented reality (AR) glasses that will blend the physical and digital worlds, literally in front of our eyes, which are expected to hit the market over the next few years. We have, of course, been here before, with devices including the Google Glass (see “Out now and coming soon”, below). What makes the device manufacturers believe that consumers will find their AR kit any less weird and disturbing than the failed devices of before? ■ A warning from history “The idea…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He can confirm the spaghetti sort works well with linguine and bucatini, but not penne or fusilli. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk The most enthusiastic proponents of AI claim we’re on the brink of achieving “artificial general intelligence” on a par with our own organic variety. I’m not against the attempt itself because I’m as fascinated by technology as any AI researcher. But I’m against an oversimplified view of the complexity of the human brain, and the belief that it’s comparable in any useful sense to a digital computer. There’s no denying the remarkable results that deep neural networks based on layers of silicon “neurons” are achieving when trained on vast data sets: the most impressive is DeepMind’s cracking of the protein folding problem. However,…

Software regulator? Reading about the latest zero-day security hole in Microsoft Word and that Microsoft is being slow to act to remedy the problem makes me think that it’s time to have a software regulator that sets rules on how major software products are produced and supported by their manufacturers. They should also be able to issue significant fines for non-compliance. Given the enormous potential impact of software failure on users, there is a need to make software manufacturers provide responsible and timely responses to issues with their software. As users, we are implicitly dependent on these companies responding to issues in a responsible way. There are obviously problems with creating a world regulator, but maybe a start could be made with country-specific ones first. John Falk Trust in Lee…

When all of your devices talk the same language, and they’re connected to a powerful automation engine such as Home Assistant, the possibilities are endless. Here are some ideas to get you thinking. Holiday security trickery If you’re going away for a few days, you could instruct Home Assistant to switch on your lights at certain times, creating the illusion you’re still home. So far, so HomeKit, but using HA you could inject a dose of randomness so that lights switch on and off over the course of the evening, to really create a sense of movement. On-air light We’re all spending a lot more time making video calls, and this means the ever-present risk of a partner or child barging in and causing chaos. But if you’re a Mac…

Most technology isn’t built to last. Take your average laptop out in the rain and you’ll come back with a 1.5kg block of plastic, metal and glass. Expose your smartphone to searing heat and watch it shut down harder than a branch of Debenhams. And let’s not even talk about most kits’ inability to keep running all day without being leashed to the mains. If you need robust, rugged, reliable kit for your work, your adventures or even a summer camping trip, then you need to spot the difference between the truly durable and the marketing hype. We’ve spoken to industry experts so you know exactly what to look for when it comes to picking all-weather laptops, tablets and smartphones, as well as keeping all these devices powered for the…

Once upon a time, back in the earliest days of personal computing, deleting a file meant it was gone for good. That was the assumption, anyway; then, in 1982, Peter Norton released the UNERASE tool, which could be used to magically restore files that had been wiped using the ERASE command in MS-DOS. Subsequently, Microsoft added its own official UNDELETE command to MS-DOS 5. For careless computer users these tools were a godsend, but for businesses that had made the early investment in storing sensitive information on computer disks, the idea of undeleting files was an alarming threat to data security. Since then, the threat has only grown: almost all of us have our own personal information stored somewhere in digital form that we wouldn’t want to fall into the…

If you’ve purchased the bonus software edition of this magazine then you can use your unique code to download and register a complete copy of O&O SafeErase 15 (see p66). This tool can scan your hard disk for files that have been insecurely deleted, along with other items such as browser caches and temporary OS files, and overwrite them to ensure they can’t be recovered. It can also overwrite all the free space on a drive, to remove any remnants of long-deleted files, and wipe entire hard disks. Six security levels are offered: the lowest levels overwrite the relevant disk areas with zeros or random bits, while higher settings enable three, six, seven or 35 passes. You’ll see an estimate of how long the process will take at each setting,…

SCORE PRICE £749 (£899 inc VAT) from cyberpowersystem.co.uk With component prices bouncing around more than Lewis Hamilton on a Sunday drive, there’s something extraordinary about finding an RTX 3060 system for less than £900. That’s almost £200 less than the Box Cube Mythic (see issue 334, p50), which paired its RTX 3060 with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500. Cyberpower achieves this feat by basing the Infinity X123 Pro around Intel’s Core i3-12100F processor. As this month’s group test (see p74) indicates, this sits at the bottom of the Core family, with four performance P-cores alone. Don’t think for a moment that this is a slow PC, however, as it scored an excellent 7,159 in PCMark 10 and returned 234 in the PC Pro benchmarks. That compares to 6,760 and 289…

SCORE PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/gb Lenovo claims the Legion Slim 7, S7 for short, is “the world’s lightest RTX laptop”, undercutting the Razer Blade 15 (see issue 334, p61) by 100g at 1.9kg. And just like its rival, the Legion S7 is dressed to kill, from the metal chassis to the gently pulsing LED embedded in the Legion logo on the lid. Both laptops live up to their monikers, with the Blade 17mm thick and the Legion S7 ranging from 15.9mm at the front to 18.9mm at the rear. The Legion’s hinge is set forward about 1.5cm from this point, which allows Lenovo to include small LED indicators for the power port and two USB-A ports situated on the back edge. You’ll find two USB-C ports on…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £308 (£369 inc VAT) from oneplus.com Last year’s OnePlus Nord 2 (see issue 325, p68) was a superb mid-range smartphone, providing strong performance and camera hardware for only £399. Now it’s followed by the Nord 2T, which brings hardware improvements while squeezing the price down to £369 for the entry-level model with 8GB of RAM 128GB of storage. There’s also a step-up model with 12GB of RAM and twice the storage for £469. The 2T feels solid, with Gorilla Glass on the front and rear surfaces and a metal-effect plastic frame. It’s a comfortable size, with dimensions of 159 x 73 x 8.2mm and a weight of 190g, and the curved rear sits well in the hand – although the model we tested, in the sombre Jade…

SCORE PRICE £392 (£470 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Not quite a tablet, not quite an e-reader. The Onyx Boox Note Air2 Plus is the first time I’ve tested a member of this new breed of devices, which all promise a world of incredible battery life, paper-like note taking and seamless integration with cloud services. At the heart of everything is an E Ink Carta screen. This stretches 10.3in across the diagonal with a density of 227 pixels per inch, which falls behind the 300ppi of the Kindle Oasis and recent Paperwhites. I noticed a slight fuzziness to the edges of characters in ebooks, but this wasn’t an issue once I focused on what I was reading. It’s the same screen as found in the Onyx Book Note Air2 (see issue…

SCORE PRICE £46 (£55 inc VAT) from store.pcpro.co.uk Adobe Premiere Elements is designed for less demanding video editors, with a particular focus on social media output. Start a project and you’re graced with options such as Landscape, Portrait, Square and Social. Each has a drop-down menu for you to select the exact aspect ratio and frame rate you’re after. In the past, your timeline would take on the dimensions of the first clip you drag onto it. To make sure your project retains the dimension you manually set, tick the “Force selected project preset to this project” box. As you add clips with different formats, you’ll see that Elements will shrink them so you can see all of them within the specific frame, which will inevitably lead to black bars…

SCORE PRICE Free from lwks.com Lightworks is a powerful, non-linear video editor available for Windows, Mac and Linux – and it’s free. Nor have the developers rested on their considerable laurels, for this 2022 update brings significant improvements. The first time you launch Lightworks 2022 a new “Startup Wizard” appears. Here, you set up your preferred language and keyboard shortcuts, and choose from one of two layouts. Creating new projects has also been simplified. Previously, you were asked to set the number of frames per second for your timeline; not a problem for experienced editors, less so for more casual users. Now you just give your project a name and you’re done, with the project taking on the dimensions and frame rate of the first clip you add to the…

SCORE PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from pinnaclesys.com Pinnacle Studio 25 Ultimate is well named, being the pinnacle of Corel’s extensive video-editing offerings. It’s a fine alternative to Adobe Premiere Pro, but with no subscriptions to lock you in: simply a one-time purchase. The downside is that it’s only available for Windows. Pinnacle’s traditional strength is in complex projects, with impressive modern tools that do much of the grunt work for you, so that you can focus on the creative side. One big addition is support for 8K video; it’s not mainstream yet, but the trend is moving in that direction. Another addition will be familiar to photographers: blend mode. This allows you to manipulate the dark and light parts of images and blend them with another beneath it. You…

While Intel has opted for a complicated architecture, mixing performance cores with efficiency ones, AMD has stuck with a more traditional architecture for its CPUs. The current generation of chips on review uses the Zen 3 architecture, with the Ryzen 5 5800X3D the last chip of that generation before AMD introduces new processors that will use the brand-new AM5 socket. With this range of processors, AMD largely decided to go for many cores per chip, boosting performance in multithreaded applications in particular. Thanks to its efficient 7nm manufacturing process (Intel is still on 10nm), a large number of cores can be used without the chips getting too hot. As a result, while some of these processors are more than a year old, they still hold up well to Intel’s latest…

SCORE PRICE £358 (£430 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a revamped 5800X. It still has eight cores (16 threads), but AMD has used its 3D memory technology to add a huge 96MB of cache to the chip – that’s 64MB more than the 5800X. This processor runs at a slightly lower voltage than its predecessor, which means lower clock speeds too: the base clock of 3.4GHz is 400MHz slower, while the boost clock of 4.5GHz is 200MHz slower. There’s also no overclocking on this chip, and the multiplier has been locked. This doesn’t make much difference on thermals: an idle temp of 31°C and benchmarking temp of 75°C is the same as for the 5800X. How the two chips stack up in benchmarks varies between the…

SCORE PRICE £305 (£366 inc VAT) from box.co.uk One step down from AMD’s top-end Ryzen, the 5900X drops down to “just” 12 cores compared to the 5950X’s 16, providing 24 threads. The only Intel processor to offer as many threads is the i9 series, and they’re a lot more expensive. Similar to the 5950X’s architecture, this CPU is actually two six-core chiplets located on a single chip. There’s a chance that cross-communication can face some latency, but our benchmarks don’t suggest that this is an issue. Nor did we see any thermal challenges, with 31.5°C when idle jumping to 76°C when running our benchmarking tests. There’s no doubt that the Ryzen 9 5900X is excellent value: it costs about the same as the Core i7-12700K, but offers double the number…

SCORE PRICE £246 (£295 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The Ryzen 7 5800X feels like a slightly strange processor. This eight-core chip is similar to the newer 5800X3D, only without the fancy new 3D cache; it’s also incredibly similar to the far cheaper 5700X. All of the cores on this processor are on a single chiplet: effectively, what you’re getting here is half of a 5900X, which has two chiplets in order to double up the thread count. This processor runs at 3.8GHz and boosts to 4.7GHz. It has similar thermals to the faster chips, and we measured it at 31°C when idle and 75°C when benchmarking. Performance is strong, at least until you look at the price. Hitting 383 in the PC Pro benchmarks, the 5800X is about mid-table, as…

SCORE PRICE £232 (£278 inc VAT) from box.co.uk For years, the Core i5 has been the top mid-range choice for Intel chips. Arguably for the 12th generation chips, the i5-12600K is even better value, as you get all of the benefits of the new architecture. That includes six P-cores and four E-cores, so the same as on the i7 range. Clock speeds are similar to the i7 range, too: the P-cores have a base speed of 3.7GHz and a 4.9GHz boost speed; the E-cores, meanwhile, have a base speed of 2.8GHz and a boost speed of 3.6GHz. As the “K” suffix indicates, you can overclock this chip as it’s unlocked. It runs cooler than its more powerful siblings too, hitting 69°C in benchmarks and 20°C when idle. In some cases,…

SCORE PRICE £321 (£385 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The i9-range may grab headlines for the most threads in an Intel CPU, but the i7-12700K isn’t far behind. This model has the same number of P-cores (eight, delivering 16 threads) but has half the number of E-cores at four. Clock speeds are also a little behind the i9’s, with the P-cores running at 3.6GHz and boosting to 4.9GHz; the E-cores run at 2.7GHz and boost to 3.8GHz. The result is that the i7 was a little cooler when idle at 19°C, although we measured it at 72°C running benchmarks, the same as the i9. When it comes to benchmarks, the i7-12700K is still impressive. In the PC Pro benchmarks, a score of 526 is fourth overall, behind the i9 chips and…

SCORE PRICE £279 (£335 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The Core i7-12700 is similar to its big brother, the 12700K, only without the option of overclocking. Here, you get the same core count, with eight P-cores and four E-cores. That’s a total of 20 threads. Intel has reduced the base clock rate compared to the 12700K, with the P-cores running at 2.1GHz, but the boost clock is just 100MHz slower at 4.8GHz. It’s similar for the E-cores, running at 1.6GHz base and boosting to 3.6GHz. Given that when a CPU is busy it will boost, the difference between the 12700 and 12700K is less pronounced than you might think. A total score of 496 in the PC Pro benchmarks is still massively fast, although the AMD Ryzen 5900X just pushes in…

Efficiency over pure raw power has driven processors forward. First, we saw it with laptops, when Intel developed its efficient Core architecture for notebooks, later transitioning the architecture into its desktop products. Now, the inspiration is coming from mobile chips designed by ARM, which until recently were predominantly used in mobile phones and embedded devices. Apple has taken the lead, with its ARM-based M1 chips powering everything from its entry-level laptops to the high-end Mac Studio. Key to the design is using power-efficient cores, but using a lot of them. The MacBook Air, for example, has eight cores as a starting point (four powerful cores for high-end tasks and four low-power ones for background tasks and efficiency), while the Mac Studio uses the M1 Ultra with up to 20 cores…

SCORE PRICE £286 exc VAT from ballicom.co.uk DrayTek’s Vigor 2866ax looks like an ordinary wireless router – and for a small office it can fulfil that role perfectly well. It offers a solid set of Wi-Fi 6 services, with speeds of up to 574Mbits/sec on its 2.4GHz radio and 2.4Gbits/sec on the 5GHz band. It’s also one of the very few SMB routers we’ve seen that supports wide 160MHz channels for maximum bandwidth. Round the back, six Gigabit Ethernet ports allow for the direct connection of wired clients, or the sixth can alternatively be configured as a WAN socket, as we’ll discuss below. Installation is a cinch. The router’s web console provides quick-start wizards for configuring internet access, presenting secure wireless services and setting up VPNs. The price includes support…

SCORE PRICE With 1yr Gold Security licence, £875 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel’s ZyWALL ATP appliances are designed to stay one step ahead of hackers. They have a sharp focus on zero-day threats, making use of advanced services such as cloud threat intelligence, machine learning and automated sandboxing of suspect files. The ATP200 on test is affordable, too. The price shown includes a one-year Gold licence, after which yearly renewals cost £276. That gets you a heap of security features – not just the technologies menti0ned above, but also hybrid anti-malware, anti-spam, web content filtering, application controls, IPS and Zyxel’s cloud-hosted SecuReporter Premium reporting service. This desktop unit isn’t overloaded with ports, but it presents two Gigabit WAN and four copper LAN ports, plus a handy SFP fibre socket for…

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I suppose there is an expectation that a computer shop should know its onions. Certainly, many of my clients would testify that I have an encyclopaedic store of data that provides instant recall to a multitude of solutions for whatever smouldering pile of broken tech comes through our door. In reality, I can barely remember my own… er, I’m sorry, have we met? What I possess is a passion for manuals and technical documentation that fuels my omniscient façade and fills the brain gaps where once-known knowledge has vanished. 2012 doesn’t seem that long ago, but the technology of that era was different, and that’s where Nathan’s machine starts. He’s one of those kids who loves tech and will spend hours on YouTube watching influencers demonstrating their latest “purchases”. Nathan…

At first, the range of topics on offer for this particular interview seemed downbeat. A leading engineer in a Chinese telecoms firm, itself suffering through some challenging PR issues, would talk about life in the infrastructure sector since the 1950s, and about some possible futures in infrastructure. I was only too pleased to set up this call, because Michael’s CV showed that he had started work in the telecoms sector, but not for a Chinese firm: Michael joined the Post Office, that being the main player in telephones in those far-off days. In this respect, Michael was similar to my late uncle, without whose early influence I would almost certainly not have had a chance of penetrating the technology business at all. So I was in a well-behaved frame of…

The past few years have seen record wildfires in California, Europe and Australia, with conflagrations worsened by hot, dry conditions caused by climate change. That makes fighting such fires all the more costly – financially and in terms of firefighters’ lives. Even the UK faces more frequent and more intense wildfires. The best solution is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to rein in temperatures, but technologies such as drones, AI and sensors are also lending a helping hand to predict, track and fight fires. There’s a host of ways firefighters already use such technology. UK company FireAngel uses AI to predict incidents (pcpro.link/335angel) for at-risk people, such as dementia sufferers, while US government agency NIST developed AI to predict flashovers (pcpro.link/335NIST). This is the phenomenon when items in a room…

We are living in strange times. The pandemic may appear to the general public to have finished, but a recent tech conference in the US was a super-spreader event, with many falling ill afterwards. And the cost-of-living crisis, accelerated by Russia invading Ukraine, means all the accepted norms of household and business budgeting have been thrown up in the air; I didn’t expect a year ago to be paying over £100 to put diesel in my little Audi. Some sages claim that these price squeezes will propel us to a greener future, with houses warmed by heat pumps and electric cars filled by roof-top solar panels. Which is a fine prediction, but inappropriate for city dwellers or the vast majority that simply can’t afford to make that sort of capital…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s futures editor. She can’t believe she pays so much for streaming services when she barely watches TV, but Is It Cake? is worth every penny. @njkobie It is 2022 and I’ve just pirated a television show. That statement shouldn’t be true for a middle-aged woman who goes out of her way to pay for content, but here we are. Back when I started writing for PC Pro more than a decade ago, digital piracy was a frequent topic on our newsdesk. Remember the Pirate Party? The US SOPA legislation? Takedown notices? ISPs sending threatening letters to customers accusing them of piracy? This used to be my bread and butter, and I wasn’t going hungry. I wasn’t keen on pirating, believing content creators should get paid,…

I greatly enjoyed Jon Honeyball’s column on disability aids (see issue 334, p130). If there are any of your “younger” readers who doubt that this is ever going to be relevant to them, I have some sad news: age and infirmity catch up with all of us, and we should encourage all the assistive tech that we can get! In my case, I’ve had severe conductive deafness for decades, alleviated hugely by a marvellous device called a bone-anchored hearing aid (BAHA), which basically vibrates sound into my skull so that my inner ear can pick it up. I was thrilled when Apple introduced its system for connecting an iPhone directly to my MFi hearing aids so that when someone calls me, I know I’m going to be able to hear them.…

Home Assistant can be installed on an enormous range of devices, with varying degrees of difficulty. The easiest way to get up and running is with a Raspberry Pi, as it’s simply a case of burning a disc image to an SD card and powering up. But there are other options, too: it can be installed on an existing Linux installation (and can work within a Docker container), or even be installed simply as a program on Mac or Windows. Though be warned that in order for Home Assistant to be actually useful, you need to leave the computer it’s on running 24/7. So best practice is to install it on a dedicated machine that you’re not planning to tinker with too much, and to connect it via Ethernet to…

The tech industry is (how can we put this without waking the libel lawyers?) a little loose with its terminology when it comes to hardware designed for the great outdoors. Here are the terms to watch for. RUGGED/RUGGEDISED A catch-all term used to describe anything from a smartphone with thin rubber bumpers to £4,000 laptops that could withstand a nuclear holocaust. Pay careful attention to the precise specs. WATER-RESISTANT There is a big difference between “water-resistant” and “waterproof”. Look for the IP ratings to confirm how well a device will repel liquids, or at the very least claims that a device will survive for so long at a certain depth. Don’t rely on generic labels. MILITARY SPEC Another phrase that’s bandied about, often without any justification. There are many military specs,…

If you’re concerned about sensitive data on your computer, you should be using not only secure deletion, but also full-disk encryption. In the Home editions of Windows 10 and 11 you can enable this using the “Device encryption” feature, located in the Update & Security page of the Settings app. Those using Professional or Enterprise OS editions can use the BitLocker drive encryption tool instead: for our purposes the two systems do exactly the same job. When drive encryption is enabled, a thief or spy won’t be able to access any files at all, or even get to the Windows desktop, without providing a valid password (or authenticating in some other way). If they remove the drive and attempt to read the raw data – either by hooking it up…

SCORE PRICE Core i5, £791 (£949 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk For almost a decade, Dell has been the clear leader when it comes to stylish, slim Windows laptops. Challengers to the Dell XPS series have come and gone, but none has dislodged a crown that appeared cemented to Dell’s head. With this second iteration of the Galaxy Book series, Samsung not only grabs the headwear but does so at a bargain price. Samsung’s range needs careful explanation, though. Here, we have the 13.3in Galaxy Book2 360. That is, a convertible that directly targets the XPS 13 2-in-1 (see issue 330, p82). We tested the £949 version, but £200 upgrades that to a Core i7. There is a plain, non-convertible version of the Book2, but this features a 15.6in screen (it…

SCORE PRICE £1,058 (£1,270 inc VAT) from laptopoutlet.co.uk MSI may not be the first name you think of when it comes to laptops, but the Taiwanese company was quick to back Nvidia’s Studio scheme with a range of creative machines. Search online for the MSI Summit E16 Flip and that’s exactly what you’ll find, but this Evo variant is an all-Intel affair based around the 12th generation Core i7-1260P. This means that Intel’s integrated Iris Xe graphics are in charge of 3D acceleration, so if you’re frequently pumping out 3D models in Blender then the Flip Evo is not for you. The Irix Xe is a solid chip that’s capable of 60fps in older games such as Dirt: Showdown and Metro: Last Light, at Full HD and High settings, but…

STORE.PCPRO.CO.UK SAVE £50 As its name implies, Norton 360 is a comprehensive “do it all” suite. Not just for PCs and Macs, its protection stretches across iOS and Android, too. We’ve negotiated a one-year pre-paid licence (so you don’t need to enter credit card details) that covers ten devices, offering family-level protection for a mere £20. Compare that to the £70 you would pay direct from Norton, which would then automatically renew at £95 per year. So what do you get for £20? Top of the list is real-time threat protection. Norton has an enviable record in independent third-party tests here, so you can be assured that you’ll have excellent security against existing and emerging online threats. Web safety components check the links you click to make sure they’re safe…

SCORE PRICE £142 (£170 inc VAT) from logitech.com Logitech’s MX Keys (see issue 303, p75) and MX Keys Mini (see issue 327, p72) are terrific keyboards, so when Logitech announced it was making mechanical versions of both, I was intrigued. The most obvious change is the swapping of chiclet keys to mechanical ones, but these aren’t as big or clacky as you may expect. In the UK, Logitech is selling the keyboard with Tactile Quiet (Brown) key switches. It claims these deliver the company’s “quietest mechanical keyboard ever”. The noise from the MX Mechanical is pretty muted, but at the expense of the deep travel and reassuring clack that many people want from a mechanical keyboard. The switches or keycaps aren’t replaceable so, even if a switch fails, you’re looking…

SCORE PRICE £17 (£20 inc VAT) per month from adobe.com The latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro features a redesigned import window that showcases your clips above all else. Locate them, select the ones you wish to work with, and click Import. A new project will be created for you with those clips added to your sequence. No need to fiddle with settings. Nothing stops you from altering your Sequence Settings after the fact, which is crucial if you need to create a project for a specific social media format. But more often than not, just getting down to working with the clips in their native format will be what people choose to do. Aside from this streamlined approach, one stellar new feature is Speech to Text. The simple name…

SCORE PRICE Free with Windows 11 The last time I reviewed Microsoft Video Editor back in 2020, I praised it for offering “a good selection of tools for the budding video editor whose aim is to create a fun little movie quickly”. Built into the Photos app that comes bundled with Windows, it covered all the basics and received a four-star rating as a reward. But what new features, effects and tools has Microsoft added since then? Except that’s the wrong question. Instead, you should ask what Microsoft has taken away. There’s no more “automatic video” option when you create a new project; you must first import clips to work with. You can get them from Photos’ own library or grab them from your cloud storage, so long as that…

SCORE PRICE £106 (£127 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The lowest processor in AMD’s lineup, the Ryzen 5 5500 costs exactly the same as the Core i3-2100. But there’s a big difference between the chips: where the Ryzen 5 5500 has six cores and 12 threads, the i3 has just four cores and eight threads. AMD has also included more cache on this model than Intel: 32MB versus 12MB. In some applications, that makes a big difference. Overall, AMD’s core and cache advantage turn in better benchmark results. In the PC Pro tests, the Ryzen 5 5500 sits higher up the performance tables than the i3-2100. It’s a feat repeated across all of the more demanding benchmarks, with the i3 only doing better in some of the single-core tests, such as…

SCORE PRICE £225 (£270 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk We spend a lot of our 5800X review explaining why it comes up short against the Ryzen 7 5700X, and for a good reason: this is the superior processor in every metric that counts. This processor has a lower TDP (65W vs 105W), thanks in part to its lower base clock speed of 3.4GHz, which is a full 400MHz lower than that of the 5800X. However, when CPUs are pushed hard, they all clock upwards and jump to their boost speeds: here, that’s 4.6GHz. In the vast majority of cases, then, the 5700X will run at just 100MHz less than its more expensive relative. In terms of benchmarks, the 5700X is similar to the 5800X across PC Pro (seven points slower) and…

SCORE PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Intel Core i3-12300, like the i3-12100, is a budget processor, cheaper than even AMD’s entry-level Ryzen processors. That means limitations. There are no E-cores, although given that these drop out at the i5 level, that’s to be expected. There are also only four cores; even AMD’s budget processors offer six. What you do get is well-balanced performance for the price. The E-cores run at a base speed of 3.5GHz and have the same Turbo speed as the i5-12400 at 4.4GHz. As you might expect, single-core performance is rather good, and the i3-12300 does as well in these benchmarks as its more expensive i5 stablemate. Multicore performance isn’t as good. While the i3-12300 will cope with all tasks, its overall PC Pro…

SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Intel Core i5-12500 is essentially the same processor as the i5-12600, with six P-cores but no E-cores. The difference comes down to clock speeds. Here, the P-cores run at 3GHz base (down 300MHz) with a boost speed of 4.7GHz (200MHz less). The end result is marginal differences in the benchmarks. Single-core tests continue to impress. In fact, the Geekbench 5 single-core speeds are very similar to those achieved by the higher-end processors, and faster than AMD’s offerings. As we get into multicore tests, such as PC Pro’s, the i5-12500 suffers due to the lack of E-cores, falling behind its more expensive siblings, but it still manages to outperform AMD’s similarly priced processors in most tests. Even so, the i5-12500 feels like…

SCORE PRICE £417 (£500 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Coming in at £70 less than its big brother, the Core i9-12900 has the same eight P-cores and eight E-cores, with a total of 24 threads. It differs from the K version in two important ways. First, it can’t be overclocked, as its CPU ratio is locked. Second, it runs at a slightly slower clock speed. This makes practically no difference in recorded temperatures: we measured the i9-12900 at 19°C when idle and only 72°C when running benchmarks. The base P-cores run 200MHz slower at 3.2GHz, but the more important boost clock is a mere 100MHz slower at 5.1GHz. It’s a similar story for the E-cores, with a 100MHz slower base clock at 2.4GHz, and 100MHz slower boost speeds at 3.9GHz. Does…

After years of churning out iterative updates to its architecture, the threat from both AMD and Apple has proven too much for Intel, and it has radically redesigned its new chips. Opting for a combination of big and little cores (Pand E-cores), Intel’s 12th generation processors are fast and efficient. The disappointing news is that Intel doesn’t use E-cores on all models: drop down to the Core i5-12600 and below, and there aren’t any. Sure, there’s a performance increase over the last generation, but the difference is far less pronounced. Where a 12th gen chip has E-cores and P-cores, the performance is hard to ignore. That can be seen in the main benchmark results, where the Core i9-12900K largely outdoes everything AMD has with fewer cores and threads; even the…

SCORE PRICE With 3yr Xstream Protection: £1,439 exc VAT (List) from enterpriseav.co.uk Don’t be deceived by its modest dimensions: the Sophos XGS 116 is a security powerhouse. Aimed at busy SMBs and branch offices, this desktop appliance boasts a raw firewall throughput of 7,700Mbits/sec, and even with full threat protection enabled it keeps up a creditable 685Mbits/sec. That’s largely thanks to Sophos’ dual-processor architecture. The Xstream Flow Processor provides a hardware acceleration layer that’s optimised for specific network tasks, ensuring the main AMD CPU doesn’t get bogged down. Connection options abound. The rear panel presents eight Gigabit Ethernet ports – with PoE+ on the last one – plus one fibre port. While there’s no built-in modem, an expansion bay lets you add VDSL2 or 3G/4G modules, although Sophos’ Flexi network…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £2,382 exc VAT from dell.co.uk When designing the new PowerEdge T350 tower server, Dell EMC originally considered using the same chassis as the mighty T550. But SMBs said no – they wanted something much more space-efficient. And so it came to pass: the T350 introduces a brand-new mini-tower format that’s 37% smaller than its predecessor, the T340. The size reduction doesn’t come at the cost of power. This single-socket server supports Intel’s Xeon E-2300 CPUs and up to 128GB of DDR4 memory, while eight internal LFF hot-swap drive bays offer plenty of storage potential. There isn’t an SFF drive cage option, but smaller SFF hard disks and SSDs can also be mounted in hybrid drive carriers. While the PowerEdge T350 is a more lightweight server than…

HubSpot CRM Free CRM Free is split into multiple “hubs” for managing marketing, sales, operations, customer service and content management – and, as the name suggests, there’s a free tier for anyone who wants to try before they buy. In fact, the free plan may be all that small companies need, as it allows you to store up to a million contacts and companies, integrate live chat and bots, schedule emails, manage advertising and more. As you would expect of a fully featured CRM, HubSpot’s free offering supports tailored views and functions for different users with an organisation, so salespeople, marketers and business owners can all work with the same data for different purposes. Add a contact to the database, and HubSpot can automatically fill out the record with data…

In case law there are a few times when a single landmark decision reshapes or reframes the legal landscape. At the tail end of last year, that’s exactly what happened – and anyone involved in software development should take note. The event was a memorandum decision from the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, which framed its response to a matter relating to software vulnerability. I believe this decision, which caused the defendant firm to settle for an eye-watering quarter of a billion dollars, will change the commercial landscape for good. Up to this point, there have been numerous instances where vulnerabilities (vulns) in IT systems have been left unaddressed, yet directors have managed a lucky escape. But times are changing. There are two key learnings for anyone…