Table of contents for March 2016 in Computer Shopper

PCs. BIG, HEAVY, humming, power-hungry things, aren’t they? Not necessarily. The mini computers we’ve looked at this month can be small, stylish, quiet, powerful and in some cases very cheap indeed. They’re perfect for anything from web browsing and media streaming to playing the latest games, and are just right if space is limited on your desk or if you want to slip them under your TV. We’ve reviewed a wide range, from £200 budget marvels to superpowered mini monsters, and even the first UK PCs running Valve’s SteamOS. Turn to page 86 for some space-saving bargains. Your flatscreen TV may look great, but if you’re relying on its built-in speakers you’re definitely not getting the most out of your films. You could go the whole hog and wire a…

With more than 30 years of experience in law enforcement, our retired cop gives a police officer’s perspective on the sticky subject of cybercrime letters@computershopper.co.uk THE SUBJECT OF this month’s column came about as a result of a conversation with a friend who works in cyber intelligence for a large global corporate. We often discuss the latest methods used by the bad guys as they attempt to breach his networks, but when he mentioned “bitcoin-mining malware” I will admit to being a little taken aback. This method of conning you out of your cash was certainly new to me. We’ve long seen compromised networks turned into botnets to run spam email campaigns, but using the computing power you’ve stolen to generate cash directly seems a logical step, and so the…

COMPUTER SHOPPER BEST BUY £440 inc VAT (SIM-free) • From www.carphonewarehouse.com VERDICT Google finally gets the phablet right with the Nexus 6P, delivering the best big-screen Android experience under £450 LAST YEAR’S NEXUS 6 was just an overgrown 2nd Gen Moto X without all the great Motorola touches that made that phone truly brilliant. Huawei has stepped up to the plate for 2015, bringing top-class design and build quality for the unique Nexus 6P. This gorgeous all-metal beauty is made from aeronautical-grade aluminium and is only 7.3mm thick. Its sculpted rear feels great in the hand, and its chamfered edges and textured power button give it that premium look and feel. The Nexus 6P is a world away from the soft-touch plastic of the Nexus 5X and has clearly been…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £700 inc VAT • From www.richersounds.com VERDICT With nearly all the wired and wireless connections you’d need and a gorgeous design, the CXN is a brilliant hi-fi streamer SOME MIGHT FEEL that hi-fi separates are a rather 20th-century way to listen to music, but Cambridge Audio’s CXN is about as modern as it gets. It’s a gorgeously designed hi-fi audio streamer with all the wired and wireless connections you need to play digital music from any device, including high-resolution FLAC files. With a sleek brushed-metal silver finish (it’s also available in black) and a 4.3in colour screen, the CXN looks far simpler than the preamps, CD players and DACs it’s likely to sit on. The screen demands attention, displaying album art in full colour, and while its…

£222 inc VAT • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT A fast and spacious SSD at a very fair price IT MUST BE tempting for Crucial to sell nothing but its line of premium MX SSDs, but not everyone needs the lifespan guarantees of these expensive disks. While the 960GB BX200 SSD has 72TB of written data total lifespan, compared to 320TB for the 1TB MX200, this is still more than enough for most people. There are no mSATA or M.2 variants; the BX200 is only available as a SATA3 drive. It does, however, include a few useful extras. There’s a spacer for fitting the 7.5mm-thick disk in a 9mm drive bay, and a free licence for Acronis True Image, for cloning the contents of your existing boot disk to the BX200. It’s…

COMPUTER SHOPPER BEST BUY £272 inc VAT • From www.hitfilm.com VERDICT Not perfect, but great for ambitious video producers on a shoestring budget EVERYONE LIKES A plucky underdog, and it’s easy to warm to FXHome, a small software developer based in Norwich that takes the fight to Adobe After Effects. HitFilm specialises in particle effects such as smoke, bullets and explosions, basic 3D animation (of models created elsewhere), plus compositing tools to combine these elements with live footage to create a photorealistic whole. It comes with a generous selection of high-quality effects. It’s technical in places, but that’s because it gives the user full control over some very advanced features. How else can amateur filmmakers create 3D-modelled particles that respond to gravity and wind, release sparks as they bounce off…

£45 inc VAT • From www.game.co.uk VERDICT Series fans will love Battlefront’s epic battles, but the simplified mechanics aren’t for everyone AFTER THE RECENT release of The Force Awakens, EA has perfectly timed its DICEdeveloped revival of the Battlefront franchise. With Lucasfilm providing access to props, audio libraries and locations, it’s incredibly faithful to the source material and looks absolutely stunning on the Frostbite engine. The lush forests of Endor, icy moons of Hoth and the rocky deserts of Tatooine are all brilliantly replicated, and the attention to detail is staggering; Endor’s ferns and foliage look almost life-like up close, as do the rocks and sands of Tatooine. The particle effects that spray outwards when you land a blaster shot are eye-searingly bright, as they should be. The audio is…

GETTING STARTED The download instructions on the card insert (after page 74) show you how to connect to the download site. Make sure you type in the web address exactly as shown. You’ll need your coupon code the first time you log on to the site. ANY PROBLEMS If you need help with any of the software this month, please send an email to letters@computershopper.co.uk. We check this inbox regularly. Please include the issue number of the magazine and your coupon code. WHY DOWNLOADS In order to provide us with free software, publishers now require us to offer the applications as a download and to require online registration. You need to use the unique code printed in the box on the card insert to register and download the software in…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £203 inc VAT • From www.uk.insight.com VERDICT A charming little Chrome OS PC with surprisingly sprightly performance CHROME OS IS normally associated with budget laptops, as the lightweight operating system and browser-based applications are well suited to those with modest computing needs. We’ve seen fewer desktop Chrome machines, but there’s really little reason why a Chrome desktop PC shouldn’t be a great buy. The Asus Chromebox is a well-designed mini PC, with a footprint a little smaller than a CD case. The dark metallic blue top and sides look classy and don’t give away the PC’s cheap origins. The PC’s tiny size means it can fit practically anywhere: on a desk, on the back of a monitor (with a mount) or even in your media cabinet if…

£226 inc VAT • From www.lambda-tek.com VERDICT Impressive performance from this compact and good-value micro barebones PC MSI’S CUBI IS a ‘build-your-own’ piece of kit, which comes with just a motherboard and processor, leaving you to sort out the storage and RAM. In terms of size, the Cubi goes further than most mini PCs we’ve seen, with a case the size of four slices of bread. The Cubi is available with Broadwell Celeron, Pentium, Core i3 and Core i5 processors, with prices starting from £99 for a barebones Celeron model, which will need RAM, storage and an OS to turn it into a usable PC. Our review unit was fitted with a Core i3-5005U processor, and we plugged in 4GB of 1,600MHz Crucial SODIMM RAM and a 128GB SSD for…

COMPUTER SHOPPER BEST BUY £700 inc VAT • From www.palicomp.co.uk VERDICT The quiet and compact Intel i5 Raven is a complete living-room PC THE SMALLER YOU make a PC, the harder it is to keep it cool. That’s why conventional ATX desktop chassis typically have a huge amount of unused space inside, maximising airflow, keeping temperatures down and so making the PC quieter. When you slot a gaming PC specification into a tiny media PC-style case, there must surely be compromises either to noise or performance. At just 105mm tall, you’d expect the Palicomp Intel i5 Raven to struggle, but this media centre-sized PC manages to run quieter than most mini PCs. The SilverStone Raven RVZ01 case isn’t the most attractive, thanks to its uninspiring matt black plastic front and…

£999 inc VAT • From www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk VERDICT Big and brash, the Steam Machine K isn’t the most subtle of living-room PCs CYBERPOWER’S SYBER BRAND has been producing Windows-based Vapor PCs for a year, while it waited for SteamOS to hit the market. Now Valve finally feels SteamOS is ready for public consumption, Syber has started selling similarly specified machines with SteamOS on board instead of Windows, shipping them with a Steam Controller instead of a sub-par Logitech unit and mini keyboard. We reviewed the Vapor K Windows machine in March 2015 (Reviews, Shopper 328) and awarded it four stars on the basis of its impressive performance, but it didn’t quite manage an award thanks to being fairly loud, with a poor controller and chunky styling. The Steam Machine K’s styling…

£650 inc VAT • From www.currys.co.uk VERDICT A great-sounding soundbar that integrates nicely into LG’s multiroom audio setup, but it’s massive and might obstruct your TV THE FIRST THING you notice about the LG MusicFlow HS9 is what an imposing figure it cuts. This is one of the biggest soundbars we’ve seen, and the gargantuan size even extends to the wireless subwoofer. LG is obviously aware that the size might prove a hindrance as it includes an IR blaster in the box. As the HS9 soundbar measures a substantial 106x1,100x135mm, its height will likely obstruct the infrared receiver on your television, as was the case when paired with our reference 42in television. Adhesive feet are also included to raise the height even further in case you need to make the…

£329 inc VAT • From www.qacoustics.co.uk VERDICT The Q Acoustics Media 4 is great value when it comes to sound quality, even if it’s not the most stylish soundbar Q ACOUSTICS MAY not be a household name, but the 10-year-old British audio company already has a strong reputation in the hi-fi community. It’s these audiophile credentials that Q Acoustics claims it has applied to its Media 4 soundbar. The large soundbar certainly cuts an imposing figure, measuring 90x1,000x142mm. Its height is also significant and if you choose to use the anti-vibration feet, which Q Acoustics recommends you do to provide clearance for the down-firing subwoofer, this adds another 20mm. With the feet attached, the top of the Media 4 was level with the bottom of our TV screen, so depending…

CONTACT LETTERS letters@computershopper.co.uk SELF-DISABLING WINDOWS I have a two-year-old laptop with Windows 8 (rubbish), I upgraded to 8.1 (better), when I heard about 10 I thought ‘great’, then I was offered an early way to get it by becoming a ‘Pro Insider’, so I signed up and downloaded it. Now I had the best of both worlds: upgrade to full 10 or go back to 8/8.1. Just before Windows 10 was launched I was upgraded to Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview Evaluation, build 10074. A short while later, it flashed up a message stating that because I hadn’t allowed it to upgrade it would shut down every two hours, until one day it stopped. To make it worse I am a lecturer and I had a PowerPoint to give the…

Chris Finnamore RANTS Not everybody wants Windows 10, but if you’re not careful you could find it taking up a huge chunk of your hard disk space I LIKE WINDOWS 10. I think it’s a strong operating system that is improving all the time. However, I fully support those who, for whatever reason, don’t want to make the jump. For example, I have one AMD-based system that, with Windows 10, is incredibly slow in games. Nothing I do with graphics drivers will fix the problem, so I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that Windows 10 hates my motherboard and, on that machine at least, I’ll stick with Windows 8.1. Despite all the bad press, Windows 8 is a decent operating system, and can be vastly improved by installing an…

FITBIT Flex (Around £45 inc VAT) The best of the basic fitness trackers, the Flex only tracks steps but it’s unobtrusive and easy to sync with your smartphone or PC (using the bundled Bluetooth adaptor). You can also change the band. FITBIT Charge HR (Around £93 inc VAT) Another Fitbit, but this one includes that all-important heart-rate tracker and tells you the time, too. Don’t confuse it with the standard Charge, which lacks the heart-rate sensor. GARMIN Vivofit 2 (Around £68 inc VAT) It’s not our top pick, but with waterproofing and a year-long battery life – as well as the ability to tell the time – this otherwise basic fitness tracker will appeal to some. GARMIN Vivosmart HR (Around £108 inc VAT) If you want a smarter fitness tracker,…

VERDICT Continuum is fantastic and the interface is much cleaner, but the Settings menu needs a lot of work ALMOST SIX MONTHS after Microsoft launched Windows 10 for PCs and laptops, we finally have the last piece of the puzzle: Windows 10 for mobiles, which launches first on the Lumia 950 and its big brother, the Lumia 950 XL. Nearly all Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 smartphones released over the past year will be eligible for a free upgrade, from the ultra-cheap Lumia 435 up to the Nokia Lumia 930, but some elements of Windows 10 Mobile are only supported by the new handsets. Chief among them is Continuum. Microsoft’s £80 official Display Dock is required to use it, but once docked, Continuum in effect turns your smartphone into a…

COMPUTER SHOPPER BEST BUY £480 inc VAT (SIM-free) • From www.mobilefun.co.uk VERDICT With its top-end specs, beautiful build quality and outstanding shatterproof display, the Moto X Force is officially king of all smartphones SMASHING THE SCREEN is something every smartphone user dreads. Cases can protect against dents and scratches, but if your phone slips out of your hand and falls face down on the floor, shattering seems inevitable. Motorola wants to change that with the Moto X Force, which it’s calling the ‘world’s first shatterproof smartphone’. The company is so confident, in fact, that it’s guaranteeing the screen for four years of typical use. Most smartphone screens are composed of three layers: the LCD or AMOLED panel, a touchscreen digitiser and a top layer of glass. The Moto X Force…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £274 inc VAT • From www.morecomputers.com VERDICT Dell’s H825cdw is a good compromise between speed, quality and cost AS INKJETS BECOME ever faster and cheaper to run, it gets harder to find laser printers we’d recommend. Dell’s new H825cdw is in with a shot, though: it’s a colour laser multifunction peripheral (MFP) with a great set of features, including all the interfaces you could need, automatic duplex (double-sided) printing and scanning, NFC and integration with various cloud services. It’s fast at 28 pages per minute (ppm), and if the need arises you can buy a 550-sheet paper tray to supplement its standard 250-sheet cassette and 50-page multipurpose tray. That all sounds great, but it won’t be love at first sight. The H825cdw is black and monolithic, although…

£140 inc VAT • From www.pcworld.co.uk VERDICT A slickly designed security camera, but it comes with some hidden costs NETWORK SECURITY CAMERAS have been around for years, typically recording footage to local or network storage and being a bit of a nightmare to set up, unless you happen to be a port forwarding expert. Modern models aren’t necessarily any easier to configure and use, but can upload footage to the cloud so you can access it from anywhere – as long as you’re happy to pay a subscription fee. The cloud-only Canary is a cylindrical camera that tries to be as easy to configure and use as possible, by leaning on your smartphone and a selection of built-in sensors. It’s actually so dependent on your phone there’s no web interface,…

£198 inc VAT • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT Great for 2,560x1,440 gaming, but not quick enough to justify the price premium over the Radeon R9 380 and GeForce GTX 960 AMD HAS FOLLOWED a strategy of tweaking its previous mid-range graphics card chips and rebadging them for some time now. The Radeon R9 380 card we reviewed in Shopper 332 was based on 2014’s Radeon R9 285 GPU; both cards had the same 1,792 stream processors, so the only real difference between them was the newer card’s higher 970MHz clock speed and the fact that it was available with 4GB rather than 2GB of graphics memory. The Radeon R9 285 R9 380X is a significant step up over the R9 380, however, thanks to its 2,048 stream processors. It also occupies…

£40 inc VAT • From store.steampowered.com VERDICT Unparalleled customisability, but the Steam Controller is for enthusiasts only VALVE’S ATTEMPT TO bridge the gap between the traditional mouse and keyboard combination and a conventional games controller looks completely alien, even among the fattest aftermarket console controllers. Despite the chunky looks, it’s actually incredibly comfortable to hold. A conventional left analogue stick sits where you’d expect it, with a smooth action and a grippy coating. The shoulder buttons and bumpers have a short, clicky action to them, and the left and right triggers have only around 3mm of play to them, which hardly encourages precision. Pull the triggers all the way back and you get another button press in addition to the trigger pull. Two Grip buttons sit at the back of…

Choosing a... PC system 01 A basic PC costing around £350 will be able to run everyday office, multimedia and education software and will easily cope with surfing the internet. It might even be able to run some modern games. Many PCs can be sold either with or without a monitor. If you don’t like the display that the manufacturer is offering, you can always use your current one, or buy another one separately. 02 If you want to play games, you’ll have to upgrade the graphics card. Budget cards such as the AMD Radeon R7 260X will cope well with many 3D games, but to play the latest 3D games smoothly (and enjoy the best-quality graphics) it’s worth upgrading to a more powerful card such as an AMD Radeon…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £199 inc VAT • From www.dell.co.uk VERDICT An inexpensive PC that’s powerful enough for everyday tasks WE’VE SEEN A few sub-£200 Windows PCs, but they’re generally pretty compromised. Some have Atom processors, which can barely run Windows, and some are barely usable stick PCs with single USB ports. Dell’s Inspiron 3050 Micro Desktop is a different proposition altogether. It’s still small and inexpensive, but it’s also a proper Windows computer. The Micro Desktop is slightly smaller than a stack of four CD cases. The PC has a useful selection of ports: on the rear are two USB2 ports for a keyboard and mouse, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The PC is well served for networking, too, with Gigabit Ethernet and fast 802.11ac…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £999 inc VAT • From www.chillblast.com VERDICT The Fusion Nano 970 manages unbeatable compact PC performance in a tiny package LIKE THE WIRED2FIRE HaL Skylake (see page 99), Chillblast’s Fusion Nano 970 comes with a sizeable water-cooling kit to cope with a hefty processor overclock. Unlike the Wired2Fire PC, this model comes in one of the smallest cases (by volume) of any of the compact PCs we’ve tested, making for a seriously impressive-looking build. We’ve seen the windowed Raijintek Metis case before, but this time it has a blue paint job. The brushed metallic finish looks fantastic in blue, but there are also red, green, grey, black and gold variations available. The case’s Perspex window provides constant reminders of the challenges faced when building a PC this…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £799 inc VAT • From www.pcspecialist.co.uk VERDICT Not the most attractive PC, but the Elite S130’s decent specs and great controller make it fine value SMALL DOESN’T ALWAYS mean elegant, as is demonstrated by the PC Specialist Elite S130’s Cooler Master Elite 130 chassis. It’s not ugly, but its awkward size means it’s slightly too big to fit in a TV cabinet. Still, buyers with little room will appreciate the PC’s small 240x399mm footprint and squat 207mm height. The untidy honeycomb mesh on the front doesn’t look great and the visible dust filter behind it isn’t particularly pleasing either. The chassis has holes at the top to allow the PSU to vent upwards. The build takes up more than the advertised 240x399mm as the PSU mounting point…

£973 inc VAT • From www.wired2fire.co.uk VERDICT A super-fast compact gaming PC that stays cool and quiet under load WIRED2FIRE’S HAL SKYLAKE PC (it stands for Home and LAN) is one of only two mini PCs on test that are liquid-cooled, but this PC has by far the most ambitious overclock, giving it some seriously juicy performance. As is the trend for modern PCs, Intel’s Skylake architecture is once again in effect. The quad-core 3.5GHz Core i5-6600K would normally have a Turbo Boost clock speed of 3.9GHz. Wired2Fire has increased this to a huge 4.7GHz. There’s a large Corsair H100 CPU cooler inside the chassis to combat the extra heat output. The other advantage of liquid cooling over air is that larger fans can be used to dissipate the heat…

£180 inc VAT • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT A simple budget soundbar with a useful remote, but sound quality is a little disappointing THE BOSE SOLO 5 is one of the smallest soundbars we’ve seen, especially compared to Bose’s more premium Solo 15 (page 106). It looks more like a dedicated 5.1 centre channel speaker than a soundbar. Its small size, however, does mean it won’t look out of place if you’re using it with a smaller television. As such, it makes for a good choice if you want to pair it with a bedroom TV. The Solo 5 measures 70x548x86mm and weighs 6.35kg, making wall-mounting relatively straightforward. Mounting brackets aren’t included, however, and Bose’s WB-120 wall-mounting kit costs an additional £25. Considering the already low cost of the Solo 5…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £643 inc VAT • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The Philips Fidelio B5’s virtual Surround On Demand tech is more than just a party trick; this is an incredibly versatile soundbar THE FACT THAT a soundbar is placed under or near your TV makes it difficult to create a surround-sound experience. That hasn’t stopped manufacturers attempting to emulate the 5.1 or 7.1 experience, however. The physical location of the speakers means that trying to re-create a rear speaker requires all manner of technical trickery to reflect sound around the room, often with poor results compared to a true multi-speaker setup. With the Fidelio B5, Philips has attempted to get around this with genuine rear speakers in what it calls ‘Surround On Demand’. In a clever piece of design, two…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £565 inc VAT • From www.johnlewis.com VERDICT The Sonos Playbar is pricy, but it sounds great and integrates into a Sonos multiroom system SONOS HAS BUILT its reputation on its high-quality multiroom audio systems, but the Playbar sees the company trying its hand at home cinema. This being Sonos, the Playbar integrates with the company’s other speakers, similar to how LG and Raumfeld have soundbar options that can be incorporated into their respective multiroom systems. The Playbar is a 3.0 system, with left, right and centre channels, but you can extend its capabilities by using other Sonos speakers to turn it into a 3.1 or even 5.1 system. The Playbar alone is already at the premium end of the soundbar price range, and the cost can become…

These micromechanical gears have been created on the surface of a silicon chip and are about the width of a strand of human hair Miniaturisation has been the key trend in the development of the processors and memory chips that form the heart of our desktop, laptop and handheld gear. Take, for example, Intel’s latest 14nm process, where the parts are so unimaginably small that we ran out of ways to sensibly describe them a long time ago; the thickness of a human hair is 75,000nm across, if you can picture that in comparison (no, we can’t either). Although we can’t visualise such minute dimensions, we accept that making things tiny is essential in the electronics industry and is the key to giving us year-on-year gains in performance. Simply put,…

Automatically moving Outlook messages Q I’m trying to work out how to create a rule in Outlook that finds a set of emails and sends them to a folder. The problem is that I can only say what they don’t match. Emails come in to my inbox and, in many cases, I’ve only been included on the recipient list for completeness, so I’m a recipient along with my boss, or one of my colleagues. The only emails I actually want in my inbox are those that are sent to me and only to me. I could set up a rule to move emails sent only to me, but not to ‘only not move’ emails sent only to me. Is there a way to do this? I’m using Outlook 2007. Pradeesh…

FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT, and a logo is often the first thing people see about a business, publication or community group. The best exude professionalism and give people a flavour of how the organisation should be perceived. The worst are ugly, confusing and, in some cases, illegible. If a logo looks amateurish, people will expect the same of the organisation it represents. But where do you start? We can’t all be hotshot graphic designers. If you can find someone who is, you’ll still need to brief them carefully to ensure the design is not only high quality but also relevant to your organisation. WORDS AND PICTURES The first thing to think about is where the logo will appear. Will it be on business cards and headed paper, on a physical product,…

THE BRITISH PREFERENCE for brick or stone houses causes headaches that many of our North American, timber-housed cousins rarely understand. While a single router can cover a typical US house, we struggle to get a strong Wi-Fi signal once we move upstairs, or possibly even into the next room. Thankfully your Wi-Fi woes can be remedied with a quick trawl through your router’s settings, or with a little networking nous. And while you’re there you can upgrade your security, too. In this month’s Advanced Projects we’ll explain all the relevant settings, what they do and how to use them, and also debunk those security myths that not only make your Wi-Fi more of a hassle to use, but could even draw the attention of data thieves and hackers. SPEED AND…

Software and systems developer letters@computershopper.co.uk IT’S JUST THREE months since I wished my Lenovo IdeaPad a happy birthday. In laptop years, the trusty IdeaPad is probably already over the hill. This observation is based on some simple maths. I change my laptop about every three years, provided Microsoft’s updates don’t kill it first. Humans in the UK live on average 81.5 years; extrapolating that to the laptop’s average lifespan puts it in its mid-thirties. That doesn’t sound so bad, were it not for the fact that on a recent Match of the Day, Messrs Lineker and Shearer were discussing the performance of one well-regarded footballer and saying that, at the age of 34, he wouldn’t last much longer. That would explain why Lenny the Lenovo has been on a go-slow:…

£679 inc VAT • From www.apple.com/uk VERDICT The iPad Pro is powerful, flexible and has an amazing screen, but it won’t suit everyone THE DEBATE HAS raged since the iPad first launched: is it a device for consuming or for creating? While there are plenty of creative things you can do with an iPad, in truth it was often an accessory to a PC or laptop for many jobs. Apple wants to change that with the iPad Pro, a tablet that does everything the regular iPad can do, plus a whole lot more. The iPad Pro looks massive at first. It looks like an oversized iPad Air 2, but once you pick it up and see how light it is (713g for the Wi-Fi model), it doesn’t feel unwieldy. It…

£420 inc VAT (SIM-free) • From www.carphonewarehouse.com VERDICT A superb camera, but crippled by sluggish performance and a mediocre battery AS THE FIRST smartphone to run the final version of Windows 10, the Lumia 950 introduces a host of new features that Microsoft hopes will revolutionise the way our smartphones connect to our PCs. We discuss this in detail on the opposite page, leaving this review to concentrate on the hardware. At 150g and 8.2mm thick, the Lumia 950 is reasonably chunky, but its smooth plastic rear sits well in your hand. It’s a shame Microsoft isn’t releasing it in a choice of colours, as this was easily one of the Lumia range’s most attractive features. The Lumia 950 doesn’t catch the eye as Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge does, but…

£150 inc VAT • From www.currys.co.uk VERDICT Wi-Fi and Bluetooth multiroom audio, but the sound quality is disappointing MULTIROOM AUDIO IS big business, but the ability to broadcast from a Bluetoothconnected device to every speaker in your house has only recently become commonplace. Now Bose has joined the Bluetooth fun with the SoundTouch 10. Most multiroom speakers connect to your home network and pull music directly from streaming services such as Spotify and Google Play Music. The market for streaming services is as hotly contested as that of multiroom speakers, which is why Sonos, with its exhaustive list of supported services, leads the pack. Bose’s support for Spotify, Deezer and internet radio pales in comparison, but with Bluetooth you can essentially broadcast any audio source, whether it’s a streaming service,…

£125 inc VAT • From www.dabs.com VERDICT A good buy for fibre customers with 802.11ac kit, but watch out if you have older 802.11n-only gear THE ARCHER VR900 is the ADSL modemequipped version of TP-Link’s Archer C9, one of the best cable-only 802.11ac routers we’ve seen (see Shopper 331). It’s not just suitable for ADSL connections, though – it’s also VDSL compatible, so will work with Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) and cable connections too, although not with Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) lines. That should still include most BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Plusnet subscribers, though, as well as other smaller VDSL ISPs. It looks almost identical to the C9, with a glossy white plastic case, finished with metal trim. You can switch off the LED lights if you find…

£100 inc VAT • From www.pinnaclesys.com VERDICT Lots of strong features, but the new ones in Pinnacle Studio 19 are relatively modest and the controls could be more responsive PINNACLE STUDIO HAS had its ups and downs in its 19-year history, but recently it has settled down to be capable, reliable and with enough high-quality features to make it a worthy rival to Adobe Premiere Elements (see Shopper 335) and Sony Movie Studio Platinum. New in this version is multi-camera editing, which provides a streamlined interface to cut between footage shot simultaneously with multiple cameras. It’s not often home video producers have a team of camera operators at their disposal, but it might be handy for events such as speeches and first dances at a wedding where multiple guests capture…

Free • From store.steampowered.com/steamos VERDICT It’s free, but poor performance, UI problems and a lack of games mean it’s a false economy VALVE’S GRAB FOR the living room centres around Linux. The free, open-source operating system got its first Steam client in 2012, and since then a few games have been reworked for it. SteamOS is the company’s big push to distance both Steam and PC gaming in general from Windows, and control both its software and hardware (with Steam Machines such as those in our group test on page 86). SteamOS runs on a modified version of Linux, although you can experience it from inside Windows by activating Big Picture Mode within the Steam client. The Big Picture overlay pops up over games when you hit a predefined combination…

COMPUTER SHOPPER BEST BUY £200 inc VAT • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT A clever design means the brilliant Revo One can double up as a three-disk server THE REVO ONE is one of the most unusuallooking PCs we’ve seen. It’s designed for the living room, which goes some way to explaining its unconventional design. The cuboid shape and rounded corners are unobtrusive, making the Revo One the kind of object you wouldn’t mind leaving on display in your AV cabinet, but it’s still small enough to hide out of the way if you prefer. It looks equally attractive in either glossy white or black, and Acer has kept branding to a minimum. The white activity LEDs on the top aren’t too distracting, either. The fact that Acer has managed to make…

£330 inc VAT • From www.laptopsdirect.co.uk VERDICT The Pavilion Mini is a classy mini PC with room for expansion, but it’s up against some very strong competition THE TINY HP Pavilion Mini wouldn’t look out of place on even the tidiest of desks thanks to its miniscule footprint, curved corners, tapering edges and grey/silver metallic colour scheme. Among little PCs only the Mac Mini looks as classy, but it’s £70 more expensive. Inside, you get a 1TB 2½in hard disk, 4GB of RAM and a dual-core Intel Core i3-4025U processor running at 1.9GHz. A laptop-level specification, then, so you should expect laptop levels of performance. Indeed, in our benchmarks the Pavilion Mini managed an overall score of 19, with scores of 44, 28 and 5 in the image editing, video…

COMPUTER SHOPPER RECOMMENDED £999 inc VAT • From www.meshcomputers.com VERDICT It’s expensive for a compact PC, but there’s no doubting this PC’s performance WE FIRST SAW a version of Mesh’s Elite Voyager in Shopper 327. We weren’t bowled over by its dual-core performance or lack of dedicated graphics, but its £500 price without a monitor made it reasonable value. This time around, Mesh has pulled out all the stops to supply one of the most powerful mini PCs we’ve ever seen. It’s also doubled the price. The Fractal Design Node 304 case is striking in white, although its glossy front does give it an unfortunate similarity to a mini fridge. We’d probably go with the black version of this case if we were given the choice. Kitchen appliance styling aside,…

£849 inc VAT • From www.scan.co.uk/3xs VERDICT A brand-new Steam Machine with fantastic hardware, slightly let down by SteamOS software SCAN IS ONE of only two UK-based PC firms licensed to sell Steam Machines, along with Syber (see page 98). It’s a strictly controlled process, with Valve constantly in the loop about how its brand is represented in the real world. The chief advantage SteamOS has over Windows is that it’s free, whereas you’ll pay around £80 extra for a Windows 10 licence. Steam Machines and SteamOS are in their infancy, and while the concept of a Steamonly PC has been floating about for years, it’s taken a long time for Valve to refine both the operating system and the all-important Steam Controller. Steam Machine builders are at the mercy…

£800 inc VAT • From www.yoyotech.co.uk VERDICT A small and attractive gaming PC, but the Warbird RS901 runs too hot and too loud IT’S NOT OFTEN you find a PC made of glass, but in its quest to make a truly impressive small form-factor desktop PC, Yoyotech has chosen the Inwin 901 glass chassis. It’s spectacular. The bulk of its exterior is made from a single piece of aluminium alloy that stretches nearly completely around the chassis, with a gap at the rear for the ports and power supply. Both sides are made from thick sheets of tempered glass that weigh nearly a kilogram each. Each sheet is tinted so the guts of the PC aren’t completely visible; when the PC is switched on you’ll see only some faint LEDs…

£245 inc VAT • From www.prcdirect.co.uk VERDICT The Solo 15 is a decent audio upgrade, but there are better soundbases out there with more sound modes for films and TV THE BOSE SOLO 15 is now available in two different models, the standard Solo 15 reviewed here and a Series II model. The main differences between the two – aside from the price – are the inclusion of Bluetooth and an improved universal remote control. The Solo 15 is available for around £250, while the Solo 15 Series II is priced at around £400. Bluetooth is undoubtedly convenient, especially if you want to play music through the Solo 15, but that’s a significant price increase for quite basic upgrades. Unlike Bose’s Solo 5, the Solo 15 is a soundbase, rather…

COMPUTER SHOPPER BEST BUY £450 inc VAT • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT One of the best-looking soundbars available, with sound quality to match FROM HEADPHONES TO speakers, Philips’ Fidelio range has always been home to classy-looking audio equipment. The Fidelio XS1 SoundStage certainly lives up to the marque’s rich heritage and is one of the best-looking soundbars we’ve seen. Your TV sits on top of the XS1, making it more of a soundbase than a soundbar. The SoundStage name is apt, however, as it delivers room-filling sound with aplomb. A traditional soundbar might be a welcome upgrade over the speakers built into a flatscreen TV, but they too can be limited by thin designs that result in lifeless sound. This isn’t an issue with the XS1, with the larger speaker cabinets…

COMPUTER SHOPPER BEST BUY £359 inc VAT • From ao.com VERDICT The Sony HT-XT3 is a great soundbase with an integrated subwoofer and plenty of connections THE HT-XT3 IS a slightly chunky soundbase, almost twice as thick as the Philips Fidelio XS1 SoundStage. This is primarily because Sony has packed in a pair of subwoofers, as well as a multitude of connection methods, so the added heft can be excused. Protruding feet give the downward-firing subwoofers some clearance, but also add to the overall height. With a TV on top, it’s not the most elegant setup. Up to 65in (or 50kg) TVs are supported, but you’re also restricted by your TV’s stand design; larger sets with feet at either end, rather than a central pedestal, may not have enough clearance…

Yet more Windows 10 woes Q I have a desktop PC based on a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H motherboard, with a 2GB MSI Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 graphics card and 16GB of RAM. I bought it factory overclocked, and it’s generally been very stable. I started out with Windows 7, upgraded to Windows 8, then Windows 8.1 and finally Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Since the most recent update I have a problem whereby my motherboard’s splash screen is obscured by a black rectangle, and I seem unable to get into the BIOS to change any settings. I’d try to enter the settings via the UEFI tile in the Advanced options, but it isn’t there. How can I change my BIOS settings? I also can’t play Grand Theft Auto V without it crashing.…