Table of contents for March 2022 in Tech Advisor

PCs flew off the shelves during 2021 – and without the ongoing constraints in the supply chain, people would have bought even more. According to reports released by Gartner and IDC, 2021 continued the unexpected surge in demand for PCs and Chromebooks. According to Gartner, PC shipments surged 9.9 per cent in 2021 to 339.8 million units. IDC reported even sharper growth: 14.8 per cent, up to 348.8 million units. (IDC is a division of IDG, the company that owns Tech Advisor, but has no editorial affiliation with us.) The two analyst groups typically differ slightly in how they collect their data. Gartner tracks desktops, notebooks, ultra-mobiles like the Microsoft Surface and Chromebooks; IDC tracks desktops, notebooks and workstations, but not tablets in its yearend reports. Nevertheless, both firms had…

CES 2022 is typically the single most important media event for the PC laptop industry. This year proved no different despite the sudden and unexpected shift from to a largely virtually show (The major chip makers all stayed remote, as did most laptop manufacturers). In fact, 2022 is shaping up to be an excellent year for Windows laptops. New CPUs and GPUs from AMD, Nvidia and Intel promise to send laptop performance to the moon – and that’s just the start. Here’s five top laptop trends from CES 2022 that simply can’t be ignored. 1. LAPTOPS GROW IN POWER (AND POWER CONSUMPTION) The PC laptop world was focused on large, heavy, and expensive laptops at CES 2022. While AMD, Intel and Nvidia continue to make silicon focused on thin-and-light systems,…

Price: £529 from fave.co/3qF4boG HP’s Pavilion range has long been a popular option for consumers, offering a combination of performance and style at affordable prices, but how does the latest 14in HP Pavilion fare amidst a sea of competition? Read on to find out. DESIGN The HP Pavilion 14 is a good-looking laptop. The aluminium chassis in frosted silver gives it elegance, despite the midrange price. It’s polished for office use, without the awful chunkiness you get on some business laptops, such as the (otherwise excellent) Acer Aspire 3. If you’re interested in a machine that will double up for personal and professional use, the Pavilion 14 definitely looks the part. But more crucially: it’s portable. While there are lighter laptops out there, the Pavilion 14 is very light at…

Price: £499 from fave.co/3wlwsSr The Xiaomi 11T is one of the first phones to land in the west without the classic ‘Mi’ branding. It was released alongside its slightly pricier and fancier sister handset, the Xiaomi 11T Pro. The phone is remarkably similar to the Xiaomi Mi 11, albeit with a few tweaks including faster-charging speeds, a refreshed design and a slightly different camera set-up. I’ve been testing out the Xiaomi 11T over the last few weeks to see how it holds up under day-to-day use. DESIGN The Xiaomi 11T comes in a choice of three colours: Moonlight White, Celestial Blue and Meteorite Gray. Sadly, the design is uninspiring and generic – it’s hard to tell this phone apart from the ever-growing market. Make no mistake, this is a big…

Stardock Software’s Start11 utility is available, and if you hate the reductionist design of the Windows 11 Start menu and taskbar, you’ll want to check it out. Start11, among other tricks, lets you move the taskbar around your desktop and configure the Start menu to emulate Windows 10’s look and feel. Start11, priced at £5.99 (fave. co/3HiQamS) as a standalone utility, doesn’t offer everything: it can’t create any dynamic Windows 10 Live Tiles, for example, and your ability to move and resize the Windows 11’s taskbar icons is still somewhat limited. But if you’d like a more gentle transition between Windows 10 and Windows 11, Start11 certainly helps. Start11 is the latest iteration of the ‘StartX’ utilities from Stardock, which shipped similar Start8 and Start10 utilities as throwback UIs to…

Some low-cost Windows PCs and tablets ship with Windows 11 Home in S Mode (also known as ‘Windows 11 S’) as a way to secure the PC and prevent the use of unauthorized applications by restricting access to Windows Store software alone. There is a quick, easy, and free way to upgrade to a full-fledged Windows 11 Home experience, however, which can be completed in a matter of minutes. Like Windows 10 Home in S Mode (or Windows 10 S), the chief advantage of preserving Windows 11 S is to limit the number of apps available to the user. Microsoft bans all apps that aren’t available from the Windows Store, preventing users from downloading and installing dodgy apps from any number of sources. Microsoft has also argued that Windows 10…

Intel has named Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the current executive vice president of its Sales, Marketing and Communications Group, as the new head of its Client Computing Group (CCG), which includes Intel’s Core processor line. Gregory ‘GB’ Bryant, who at the time of writing headed Intel’s CCG, was due to leave at the end of January for another opportunity, Intel said. Holthaus had been the head of Intel’s sales and marketing group since 2017 and previously led all of Intel’s CCG sales. In her new role, she will be responsible for all aspects of running and growing the client business, including “strategy, financial performance and product development for the full portfolio of client technologies and platforms designed to enable exceptional personal computing experiences,” Intel said in a statement. “Michelle’s track record…

CES is an important show for PC monitors. The presence of display giants like LG and Samsung sets the tone for the coming year while smaller monitor makers tease announcements for upcoming flagships. Many monitors shown at CES 2022 won’t arrive until the latter half of the year and pricing remains in short supply. Still, the show can help you decide between upgrading a monitor now or waiting for the next holiday shopping season. Here’s a rundown of the most important monitor trends from CES 2022. 1. NVIDIA WANTS TO MAKE GAMING MONITORS BIGGER AND FASTER Nvidia came to CES 2022 touting the benefits of 27in, 1440p monitors with a 360Hz refresh rate as an alternative to traditional 25in, 1080p esports monitors. 1440p at 360Hz is new, but 27in monitors…

Price: £649 from fave.co/3FIeSee The Acer Aspire Vero takes a markedly different approach to most other laptops on the market – because it focuses on its environmental credentials ahead of other factors, like price or performance. Acer makes a big deal about the Vero’s (the AV15-51) recycled materials, for instance, and the firm claims that the box works as a laptop stand after you’ve removed the machine. Sustainability is a big subject that’ll inevitably become bigger, so we won’t be surprised if more laptops make more noise in this area – but Acer is one of the first to take the initiative. The model we’ve reviewed is the more affordable Core i5 specification, and it costs £649, so it’s not particularly expensive. Is the Vero a good laptop and good…

There’s a reason that unboxing videos and the phrase ‘new car smell’ are firmly ensconced in the public group mind. New stuff is exciting. New stuff is (theoretically) better. New stuff is just plain cool. But new stuff also costs an arm and a leg – at least if you’re talking about a new PC. And you might not even truly need a new PC to accomplish what you’re looking to do, because most everyday tasks don’t require much processing power, especially now that so many services have moved onto the web. Fortunately, there are a slew of ways to breathe new life into an older PC that’s starting to feel a little pokey. Even better: Most are outright free, a couple of (still relatively low-cost) hardware upgrades aside. Sure,…

If you’re one of those Windows enthusiasts who finds Windows’ hardware volume controls absolutely infuriating, there’s good news: the latest Windows 11 Insider Build restores sanity to the universe. Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22533 is currently rolling out for the Dev Channel, which means the code isn’t guaranteed to roll out to the stable channel of existing Windows 11 PCs. But given the level of distaste for the current structure, there’s a good chance it will. What do we mean? If you use your laptop’s hardware controls to adjust the brightness or volume, the control typically appears way up in the top lefthand corner of your screen, with some odd vertical slide bar controlling the experience. It doesn’t look anything like Windows, really. With the updated fly-out experience, you’ll…

There’s a ritual among dedicated PC users. We watch new Apple events closely (whether we admit it or not), just to see what weird stuff the other side of the computer aisle is up to. We previously scoffed as Apple moved its ‘iconic’ screen notch over to its MacBook Pro laptops, apparently for no reason other than to slim down the bezels. The face-scanning tech present in iPhones didn’t make the journey, despite the fact that Windows has had it for years. Oh how we scoffed. Between this baffling choice, dropping the half-measures Touch Bar, and adding back ports that Apple laptops abandoned years ago, the latest MacBook Pros seem like a humbling mix of grudging steps backwards and steps forward no one asked for. But let’s save a slice…

CES returned to Las Vegas in 2022, but most of the major PC players decided to stick to the safety of remote events. The parade of PC hardware went on regardless. Big names AMD, Intel and Nvidia all made splashy announcements, and PC manufacturers followed in their wake with new products, many coming soon. Peripherals and displays proved just as exciting. No time to sift through all our CES coverage? No problem. Read on for our Best of CES picks – the most intriguing and innovative products we saw. (If you’re looking for higherlevel impressions from the show, be sure to check out our round-ups of 5 laptops trends, see page 21, and 5 monitor trends that PC enthusiasts can’t ignore, see page 27.) 1. CYBERPOWERPC KINETIC CASE We’ve seen…

AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm: CES always ushers in a flood of chip news that sets the stage for the year to come, and CES 2022 has been no different. Two broad themes stand out: a concerted effort by AMD and Nvidia to develop low-end GPUs that (hopefully) will be widely available, and the introduction of next-gen CPU platforms by both AMD and Intel. Here’s all of our coverage. AMD’S RX 6000S, RX6850M GPUS In my mind, one of the most impressive announcements of CES was the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, precisely because of what it hoped to accomplish: a platform for both work and play. I couldn’t help but view AMD’s new mobile GPUs through the same lens: GPUs designed for ultraportable laptops that could be carried to work…

Price: £519 from fave.co/3xqd8ns Even by Nubia’s standards, 2021 was a busy year for the Red Magic line. The Red Magic 6 series saw the introduction of a new Pro model, even if remains exclusive to China. It then launched a more affordable option – the Red Magic 6R – combining premium specs with a more muted design. Now, there’s the Red Magic 6S series. However, this time only the Pro model is getting a global launch. It’s the most expensive Red Magic phone we’ve seen launch outside China, but it’s still considerably more affordable than flagship phones from Samsung. As a gaming phone, though, can the Red Magic 6S Pro challenge the Asus ROG Phone 5 despite being significantly cheaper? Let’s find out. DESIGN There are no real surprises…

You probably have a ‘tool drawer’ in your house or apartment with a wrench, a few screwdrivers, and other tools for home projects. That’s what PowerToys is – just for Windows. Microsoft’s PowerToys debuted more than two years ago, evolving from a single utility to an even dozen Windows tools that perform specialized tasks to improve your life. Some can be extremely powerful! I will show you a number of ways I use Microsoft’s PowerToys within Windows 10 and 11, as examples for you to accomplish more, too. For those who want to dive into the code, you can visit PowerToys’ GitHub page (fave.co/3KjsyzT). But if you simply want to download and use PowerToys, there are two simple ways: • Download PowerToys from the Windows Store (fave.co/3GI7d0N).• Use WinGet: Open…

Microsoft loves Microsoft Teams… and thinks you should, too. Yes, it’s useful, especially if someone you know schedules you for a meeting over Teams. But if booting up your PC and seeing a Teams window immediately pop up irritates you, you can remove Teams without actually uninstalling it. In fact, you’ll probably kick yourself that you didn’t think of this sooner. Teams typically opens itself during the start-up or boot process of your Windows machine, and that’s the key to removing it. Within the Settings app on both Windows 10 and Windows 11, scroll down to the Apps > Start-up menu. You’ll see a list of applications that launch during your PC’s start-up process. Simply switch the toggle switch assigned to ‘Microsoft Teams’ off, and Teams won’t show up during…