Table of contents for August 2019 in PC Pro

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO FOR ONE WEEK in May, the world went a little bit crazy. Here in the UK, our politics were turned upside down as a newly formed party swept aside established names in the European elections. Milkshake sales went through the roof, and Theresa May set a date for her departure. Elsewhere, Huawei’s global business was being shaken to the core. Thanks to pressure from a US administration, against the backdrop of an ongoing trade feud between China and America, a number of major companies decided they could no longer do business with Huawei. First came Google, then Arm and then Microsoft. By the time you read this, that list could well be longer – or it could all have been reversed, such is the volatile nature of global…

Asus may not be the first name you think of for bleeding-edge designs, but the company is on-trend with its ZenFone 6, an Android smartphone that sports a pop-up camera that enables a 6.4in notchless screen. Phone designers have of late been pondering how to include front-facing cameras without blocking a wedge of screen and, just like the OnePlus 7 Pro (see p70), Asus manages this with a pop-up camera. Instead of separate front and back-facing cameras, the ZenFone 6 sports a motorised module that pops up from the camera’s main body and features two cameras that can be swivelled to face forward or towards the user, giving snappers a choice of using the 48-megapixel Sony IMX586 main camera or the 13-megapixel 125? wide-angle option. The ZenFone 6 is powered…

Advertising companies and sites understand that the user interface can be a significant factor in shaping user response to questions, and one emerging permission box design highlights the point. In this example from guitaretab.com (although the same template is used widely by other sites), the permission buttons to share data are actually switched off when you land on the page for the first time, and visitors are given relatively simple options to Save and Exit. However, the toggle buttons for the permissions seem deliberately confusing. We have grown accustomed to brightly filled toggle switches meaning the selection is active, but in this example the opposite is true, so an attempt to switch the tab off slides it to “Active”, while greying out the switch. GuitareTab has not responded to questions…

Darien Graham-Smith would love to have £1,800 to spend on a phone; unfortunately, he is associate editor of PCPro. @dariengs If you’ve listened to the PC Pro podcast, you’ll be familiar with our regular Hot Hardware segment. Each fortnight, one member of the team talks us through some brand-new gadget that they’ve been trying out, while the others pose questions and voice doubts. At the end, a virtual show of hands is held to decide, in unforgivingly binary terms, whether the item in question is hot or not. In this simple format, Hot Hardware has been a regular fixture on the show for more than ten years. And I don’t see it going anywhere for the next ten because, let’s face it, we all love whizzy new toys, and happily…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. If he had a penny for every penny he’d made from online content, he wouldn’t have a penny. Visit dickpountain.co.uk To say that the shine has worn off social media would be an understatement: in fact, we appear to be on the verge of what sociologist Stan Cohen memorably labelled a “moral panic” that might end up severely curtailing the freedom of web communication in some countries. I’ve mentioned before that I review books for another, rather dustier, journal than PC Pro, and I’ve just completed a blockbuster on three that describe the darker side of the internet: Martin Moore’s Democracy Hacked, Susan Landau’s Listening In and Matthew Hindman’s The Internet Trap. I still feel slightly sick and keep looking over my…

So, you fancy building a PC? Our computer business has been building and selling PCs for more than 15 years – countless machines in countless configurations. Each of them is built by myself or my wife, by hand, using the methods and workarounds you’re going to read about here. This isn’t a simple list or discussion about the merits of certain components. It’s our method of how to spec, build and test a machine to a professional standard. As you’re reading this magazine, I’m assuming a little knowledge, but don’t worry if you would struggle to tell a Threadripper from a Pentium. Although we’ll focus on a Windows build, the methodology works fine for other platforms, too. It’s not all about top-of-the-range components, either. It may surprise you to learn…

Not all apps make the same demands of your wireless network. An issue with restricted bandwidth may not be noticeable at all when you’re browsing the web or chatting with friends – but it could ruin the experience when you want to play online games and watch TV. So it makes sense to prioritise these applications to ensure that you get performance where it counts. This is something that your router can take care of automatically. As usual, the precise instructions will vary between brands and models, but look for quality of service (QoS) settings, which allow you to select specific applications and order them by preference. This won’t improve your Wi-Fi speed, but by prioritising the most demanding services it can eradicate glitches, making your network feel both faster and…

You can’t outfox physics, which is why the 35Whr battery was always going to be this laptop’s biggest problem. VAIO’s representatives claim that it learns ways to improve battery life the longer you use it, and that it can last up to 7hrs 45mins, but that applies to the Full HD version – not the battery-sucking Ultra HD version reviewed here. Fortunately, we could run our battery test on the same specification machine except with a Full HD screen rather than 4K. The good news? It lasted 7hrs 45mins, so exactly what was promised. In practice, we think you’ll struggle to get a full day’s use, but that’s a much more reassuring result. This model is also cheaper, but don’t get too excited: you’ll still have to pay £2,149.…

PRICE £324 (£389 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk When a company claims that a screen is designed for “creative professionals” – as Iiyama does with this 27in 4K display – you expect some supporting evidence. A definitive promise about colour accuracy would be good; all Iiyama states on its website is that 100% of the sRGB gamut is covered. You also expect the screen to be calibrated before it leaves the factory, with a report supplied in the box. There are no such reassurances here. But then, there’s another thing you’d expect from such a monitor, and that’s a price nudging £700, £800, even £1,000. That’s certainly what we’re accustomed to seeing with professional 4K screens. With the XUB2792UHSU, Iiyama has slashed the price by taking a different approach. It’s shipping…

TESTRIG Core i7-9700K, Ge Force RTX 2060, 16 GB3, 000MHzDDR 4RAM, 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD ASRock Z390 Extreme4 PRICE £133 (£160 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298asrock The ASRock Extreme4 squares up to the Gigabyte Aorus with a strong set of features and a slightly lower price. And it starts off well, thanks to its PCI configuration. Two of the three PCIe x16 slots run at 8x speed and the board supports AMD CrossFire and Nvidia SLI – so multi-GPU rigs are possible. There’s good connectivity throughout. More details are in the “Key specs” below, but note the two M.2 slots for NVMe storage and a third for wireless cards. You also get eight SATA ports – two more than any other board here. The Realtek ALC1220 audio chipset is…

PRICE £120 (£144 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The MSI costs £144, which is £4 more than the Asus – but it’s still substantially cheaper than the Gigabyte. Happily, it doesn’t look like a budget board. Military imagery and fonts are used throughout, with metal heatsinks decorated to resemble weapon crates. The military motif even extends to the rear I/O cover. The feature set is fine, if unspectacular. There’s the usual 64GB of DDR4 support and two M.2 slots, and you get a third M.2 connector for wireless cards. While the MSI has three PCIe x16 slots, only the first one runs at its full bandwidth. The next two slots run at 4x and 1x speeds, so they’re useful for expansion cards rather than graphics cards. Note the lack of Nvidia…

PRICE 12GB/256GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from oneplus.com In truth, we’re stretching our definition of “mid-range” to its maximum by including the OnePlus 7 Pro in this roundup. For while OnePlus phones have become synonymous with great performance for a great price, this year’s OnePlus 7 Pro is different: it’s gunning for the Huawei P30 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S10 Pro, with a design to match. And it looks stunning, especially the “indigo blue” model, which is finished with a silky, matte-finish glass at the rear and a shimmering “nebula blue” colour. In the hand, the OnePlus 7 Pro doesn’t feel as beefy as you might expect given the huge 6.67in display. That’s mainly due to the dramatic curves that run down the edges of the phone. The Gorilla Glass…

PRICE 8GB/256GB, £458 (£549 inc VAT) from oneplus.com The OnePlus 7 Pro (see p70) might be stealing all the headlines this year, but for those on a stricter budget, the regular OnePlus 7 is well worth considering. OnePlus has chosen not to bump up the price – it’s still £499 for the base 6GB/128GB model – and yet it’s managed to squeeze in some significant upgrades to ensure that the phone stays relevant in 2019. The first thing to note is that, physically, there’s no difference between the OnePlus 7 and its predecessor, the OnePlus 6T. The screen is the same size and resolution (6.4in and 1,080 x 2,340) and it has the same size and shape of notch housing the front-facing camera. The chassis is identical, too, as is…

PRICE £24 (£29 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com For less than £30, Canon’s Pixma TS205 is just about the cheapest printer you can buy. It connects only to a single PC via a USB cable, so there’s no Wi-Fi, cloud or mobile support. There’s also no scanner, meaning copies and faxes are out. Clearly it won’t suit everyone, but if you’re looking to buy the cheapest printer possible, is it any good? Our first impressions were mixed. The TS205 is tiny, making it easy to find a home for. It also looks smart, particularly with the paper trays closed, but it doesn’t feel like a high-quality item. Its black and tricolour ink cartridges don’t so much slot into place as wobble through a big compartment at the front, and its input…

PRICE £244 (£293 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298xer Xerox’s VersaLink C400DN is at the top end of what any sane person would consider a home printer, being too big, too clever and possibly too expensive for most home offices. Essentially, it’s the bottom three-quarters of the C405DN multifunction that has taken up residence in PC Pro Business Printer A-List (see p18) slot. That means the C400DN sits on a 550-sheet paper tray supplemented with a 150-sheet multipurpose feed, and that printed pages collect in a 250-sheet output. Duplex is standard and the printer is rated at 35ppm in either black or colour. Gigabit Ethernet is also included, but wireless networking is a £50 upgrade. Behind the headline specifications there’s a raft of security features, and Xerox’s typically comprehensive OS support, spanning…

PRICE £38 (£46 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Judge Epson’s Expression Home XP-452 by its looks and you would be forgiven for thinking it belongs a class or two above its true level. Squeaking in under £50, it’s one of the cheapest MFPs you can buy, and yet its smart plastics are decorated with a colour screen. Get closer and you’ll spot that its menu is controlled by buttons, rather than touch, but considering that there’s also an SD card slot and wireless interface, it’s good value. Start printing and the XP-452 is less likely to confound your expectations. It’s slow, producing just 2.4 pages of colour graphics in a minute, and delivering letter-quality text at 10.1ppm. Switch to draft and this rises to 16ppm, but the extra speed accentuates a…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk For all the talk of colour printers replacing mono ones, and inkjets replacing lasers, you can still buy mono lasers like Lexmark’s B2236dw. Strictly speaking, it’s a small workgroup device, rated at a heady 34ppm and equipped with a full set of network, security and management features, but at this price it’s as likely to end up in home offices and micro businesses. The B2236dw is very compact, with room only for a 250-sheet paper tray and a single-sheet bypass slot for special media. On arrival you need to remove some protective card from the surface of its drum – use caution, lest the tape holding it on sticks to the drum itself. It’s a chore to enter a wireless password via the…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,487 exc VAT from broadberry.co.uk Broadberry’s CyberServe Xeon E-108S is the most powerful server on test this month. Not only is it powered by a speedy six-core 3.3GHz Intel Xeon E-2136 CPU, it also comes with a generous 32GB of DDR4 memory and a pair of fast-booting 240GB Intel S4510 SATA SSDs, mirrored for safety and ready for you to install an OS. That leaves six of the eight SFF hot-swap drive bays free for data storage – and one great thing about Broadberry is that, unlike certain providers, it lets you install your own drives, without affecting the warranty. That alone could save you a ton of cash. All drive bays are handled by the Intel C246 chipset, which includes Intel’s RSTe RAID controller. Stripes, mirrors…

PRICE Asreviewed,£1,155excVAT fromuk.insight.com If you’re an IT manager for a small, cash-strapped business, the first thing that will strike you about Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SR250 is the price. Even though it comes from a big name, it’s conspicuously cheaper than any other server this month. After that, you might notice its size: with a depth of only 555mm, it’s distinctly shorter than the average 1U rack server. Happily, this doesn’t come at the cost of features. Indeed, the SR250 is a very flexible creature, which you can specify and expand to suit your needs. For a start, it’s available with up to ten SFF hot-swap drive bays – two of which can take high-speed PCIe NVMe SSDs, thanks to Lenovo’s clever AnyBay backplane. The only catch is that these drives will…

What connects the Royal Albert Hall with Paralympic cycling? This month, the link was your humble correspondent, who was foolish enough to agree to meetings on both subjects within the same day. Not a show-stopping issue at first glance, but it definitely gained some tension when I figured out the Paralympic event was in Eindhoven. Eindhoven represents a travel lacuna if you’re starting from the western end of London. Yes, you can hop on a plane, but it won’t be landing especially nearby. So it was that the day saw a somewhat deranged Cassidy in a Volvo, swiftly moving from one to t’other. Actually, that wasn’t as hard as it sounds, because the Royal Albert Hall was taking invited visitors at the ungodly hour of 7.30am to show off its…

On sale Thursday 11 July 2019 Chromebooks Why spend several hundred pounds on a Windows laptop when a Chromebook can do the job just as well – if not better? We put the latest models to the test. Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and claim a free 16GB USB stick while stocks last. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES ThePCProguide to buying second hand You can save plenty of cash by buying secondhand kit, but is it safe? We dig into the detail so you can buy with confidence. Deepdive: Windows TaskManager Darien Graham-Smith explores the inner workings of Task Manager. Find out what it does and how to bend it to your will.…

TELECOMS REGULATOR OF COM has finally outlined rules that will force broadband and mobile service providers to inform customers about the best available deals when their contract runs out. The move looks to close a loophole where consumers that stayed loyal to ISPs ended up paying more at the end of their contract. Under Ofcom’s plans, telecoms operators would be obliged to contact customers between ten and 40 days before their contract ended with information, including the finish date, how much the customer is currently paying, how much they will be charged after the contract rolls over and details of any notice period. Providers will also be expected to show the best current deals available, including what prices are available to new customers. The rules come into effect on 15…

Tumblr – owned by Verizon Networks – is another site that exhibits some of privacy watchdogs’ pet hates. It starts by presenting the delivery of cookies as a fait accompli, with a landing page explaining users need to “Scroll down and select ‘Accept’ to proceed, otherwise you will not be able to access our sites and apps”, despite the fact it also has a link to cookie controls. Clicking through to the options to restrict cookies, Tumblr suggests consumers head to the sites of Google, Amazon and other platforms to manage Tumblr’s interaction with those sites instead of taking responsibility itself. Tumblr then explains that for advertising partners that participate in the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework, “the framework requires these partners to adhere to certain IAB standards around user…

Barry Collins is the co-editor of bigtechquestion.com. He runs on tea and similes. @bazzacollins When this magazine was born nearly 25 years ago, it didn’t start life as PC Pro, it entered the world as Windows Magazine. Magazines gathered in little tribes. There was us, PC Magazine, Computer Shopper and several others all vying for the Windows users, and then there were MacUser and MacFormat trying to tempt the Macolytes. Later on, the Linux mags came along, once the writers had managed to unjam their beards from the printer. There wasn’t – with the possible exception of the ultra-snobby Wired – one magazine that served all those audiences, because why would they? What would a Mac owner want to know about the new advances in Windows 98? It just didn’t…

If you like the idea of building your own machine, but you don’t fancy getting your hands dirty, don’t be put off. We’re regularly approached by people with a shedload of components that they don’t have the time or the confidence to put together. Overclocked machines with water coolers and RGB can be a daunting project and, if components are faulty, it’s easy to become trapped with expensive kit that just won’t work. Most independent computer shops will help you and this can be a very sensible way to get the machine running. So how do you choose the best place? Back to stage two again – research. Choose a professional, not that friend of a friend who last built a PC in 1993. What are you going to do…

If you have tried all our free tips and your Wi-Fi still isn’t satisfactory, it’s time to spend some money – but that needn’t mean a big investment. A low-cost Wi-Fi range extender such as the Tenda A15 Dual Band AC750 Wi-Fi Repeater could make a huge difference to your coverage, and it’s currently available on Amazon for just £24 (pcpro.link/294a15). As with all repeaters, it works by connecting to your existing network and creating a second network to extend the signal. You can use the same name for both networks, for a completely transparent extension, or give it a different SSID so you can choose which network to connect to. This model has a quoted maximum speed of 433Mbits/sec, and, when we tested it back in issue 294, we were…

There’s nothing quite like the Yoga Book C930. With its dual 10.8in displays and unique “keyboard”, it has no direct competition. But you can achieve similar results with different machines. For instance, £1,330 buys you a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 with an Intel Core i7 CPU. It’s clunky by comparison, but it’s also far faster. Or you can purchase the mid-tier Microsoft Surface Pro 6 for £1,375 with the Signature Type Cover and Surface Pen. It doesn’t have the versatility of the Yoga Book, but it’s still sleek and powerful. For £1,300 you could also buy the Lenovo Yoga C930 (similar name, different device), an exceptional 2-in-1 that was unveiled alongside the Yoga Book C930 at IFA 2018. And I shouldn’t leave out the 12.9in Apple iPad Pro, available from…

As ever, there are three suggested base configurations for the 27in iMac, with differing upgrade options for each. All have new processors: at the bottom end, a choice of three eighth-gen or ninth-gen six-core Core i5 CPUs; and, at the top end, Intel’s latest ninth-gen, eight-core 3.6GHz Core i9-9900K. All are available with discrete graphics – either the AMD Radeon Pro 580X with 8GB of GDDR5 RAM or the Radeon Pro Vega 48 with 8GB of superfast HBM2 memory. Prices start at £1,749 inc VAT and rise to £4,904 for the Core i9 with 2TB of storage. I was sent the Core i9 model with the Radeon Pro Vega 48 GPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, a model that will set you back £3,284. Note that the Pro…

PRICE Core i5, £583 (£700 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298s15 We’ve reviewed a lot of high-end laptops in PC Pro over the past few months, but few that cost £700 or less. The VivoBook, then, makes a welcome change. And while there are signs of compromise compared to laptops costing north of £1,000, Asus is canny enough to keep the quality in almost all the right places. Wide-awake readers will note the word “almost” there. And I’ll get this laptop’s biggest weakness out of the way first: the screen. It’s a whopper at 15.6in, with a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, and it’s also bright enough for most situations at 260cd/m2. A contrast ratio of 1,252:1 is solid, too. But its colour coverage and accuracy are woeful, with an average Delta E…

PRICE £259 (£311 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298hp1 When HP describes a monitor as a docking monitor, it isn’t joking. It has packed this display with everything you would normally associate with a docking station, with the idea being that all you need to do is plug in your laptop using the supplied USB-C cable and start working. Perfect for hotdesking environments and incredibly convenient for users. It works, too. While HP has its own EliteBook range in mind to partner its EliteDisplay monitors – there’s even a power adapter in the box that lets you directly power older HP laptops that can’t charge via USB-C – I chose to hook up my Surface Book 2 and use it as my day-to-day setup. So I plugged my wired mouse and wired…

PRICE £117 (£140 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Asus TUF boards promise enhanced durability with features that will appeal to inexperienced system builders. Reliability is improved by beefed-up capacitors and voltage regulator modules (VRMs) alongside chips that guard against electrostatic discharge. And Asus is confident too: note the five-year warranty. They’re welcome features, but not extraordinary. The Asus’s main PCIe x16 slot is bolstered with steel, for instance, but every other board here offers that. And while the Z390-Plus Gaming has plenty of temperature sensors and five fan connectors, that’s not unusual. The Asus has solid entry-level features: that top PCIe x16 slot is joined by four PCIe x1 slots, which are handy for numerous expansion cards. However, it only has three audio jacks, and there’s no room for USB-C 3.1…

PRICE £391 (£469 inc VAT) from store.google.com At first glance, the Pixel 3a XL looks astonishingly similar to the Pixel 3 XL (see issue 292, p72). It even looks the same when switched on: as with all Pixel phones, it runs the latest version of Android with Google’s enhanced Pixel launcher software plastered on top. Only the small print reveals the differences. The Pixel 3a XL has a smaller screen than the 3 XL – 6in across the diagonal instead of 6.3in – it runs a less-powerful processor and it isn’t water-resistant. One bonus feature, though, is that the Google Pixel 3a XL has a 3.5mm headphone jack, where the pricier phone doesn’t. As with the Pixel 3a (see p68), the most significant physical difference between the 3a XL and…

PRICE £479 (£575 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298sam The Galaxy S10 and S10+ (see issue 296, p68) represented Samsung’s biggest leap forward in recent years, but both share a major drawback: they’re absurdly expensive. Thankfully, the smallest of the three is also the cheapest. The S10e’s screen shrinks to 5.8in across the diagonal, compared to 6.1in for the Galaxy S10, but the phone still incorporates the same silver-tinted edging and wide range of colours. In fact, the Galaxy S10e has an exclusive paint job, although “canary yellow” won’t be to everybody’s taste. Assuming you don’t choose this colour, the elegant Galaxy S10e is achingly attractive, its small size fits nicely in the hand, and layers of Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and rear ensure that its lavish looks are well…

ADF (automatic document feeder) A paper feeder that sits atop many all-in-one printers that allows you to place, for instance, ten sheets to be scanned or copied with just a press of a button. They are then automatically fed through the printer, with the best printers supporting two-sided (duplex) printing. dpi (dots per inch) A measure of resolution for scans and prints. Duplex A posh way of saying two-sided printing. Note that duplex printing is much slower; when we quote pages per minute for duplex, we’re referring to the printed page rather than the number of pieces of paper that get printed per minute. ppm (pages per minute) Simple to understand, but note that the manufacturers’ official figures can’t always be trusted. While laser printers tend to live up to…

PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298can Canon’s Pixma TS6250 is a three-in-one inkjet multifunction aimed at general and more creative use in the home. While it doesn’t have business features such as a fax or automatic document feeder, it can duplex print, which is handy for saving paper or producing more professional-looking multipage documents. The TS6250’s wireless connection makes it easy to share throughout the home, and it enables a wide range of mobile and cloud-based applications. Control comes via a useful 7.5cm colour touchscreen, although there’s no front-facing USB or SD card slot for direct photo prints. Made from classy-looking black plastic, the TS6250 is smart enough to install in the lounge near to more expensive home audio equipment. It’s fairly compact, although pushing it back against a…

PRICE £223 (£267 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk Brother’s DCP-L3550CDW is a relatively affordable colour laser MFP, but it’s full of useful features for a home or small office: wired and wireless networking, fax, duplex printing and a 50-sheet ADF. Sadly, this model can’t make duplex scans, faxes or copies, but the range-topping MFC-L3770CDW can. You could hardly accuse this MFP of being good looking, but it’s a practical design, with control coming from a 9.3cm colour touchscreen. Brother has clearly invested in usability: the DCP-L3550CDW can multitask, scanning to a PC, for example, while servicing a print job, and even releases the automatic document feeder for use after copying while the printer is still churning out the copied pages. This MFP isn’t particularly quick for a laser. Rated at a…

PRICE £266 (£319 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk If your home office has room for an A3-capable device, Brother’s MFC-J5945DW offers plenty of features. In its base are two, 250-sheet paper trays and at the back there’s a 100-sheet input – all accept A3 paper, although not A3+. On top there’s an A4-only scanner, a 50-sheet ADF capable of scanning both sides of a document in a single pass, and a big, user-friendly touchscreen. You can connect it to a wired or wireless network, but the one-off, ten-minute ink-priming process comes before the Wi-Fi setup screen, so you can’t crack on with installing PC software while you wait. This is a seriously quick inkjet, churning out black text at 20ppm and complex colour graphics at 10.2ppm. Although it can’t duplex print…

PRICE £107 (£128 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com The Expression Premium XP-7100 sits towards the top of Epson’s range of home inkjet MFPs. It combines a 1,200 x 4,800dpi scanner with a five-ink printer, fed by dedicated A4 and photo paper trays in the main body. The specification is high throughout, with support for both wired and wireless networks, an SD card slot and control via a large 10.9cm colour touchscreen. Although there’s no fax modem, the 30-sheet, duplexing ADF lets you make unattended multipage copies or scans. The XP-7100 stands surprisingly upright in the flesh, but it’s almost stylish. Turn it on, start printing and its control panel and output tray both motor automatically into place. It’s a neat party trick, but we wish Epson had concentrated more on the…

We don’t cut corners with testing at PC Pro, and in this Labs I’ve burned my way through about three reams of paper. I’ve reused as much as possible and I’ll recycle it all, but as I look at the piles of prints and copies, I’m struck by the thought that it’s just a microcosm of all the offices and homes around the world: together we buy a lot of printers and they use a lot of paper. Why are we still so hooked on the stuff? In the age of cheap screens, Retina displays and information everywhere, what is it about the white page that makes black text so much easier to absorb? In the past, flickery CRT monitors could make screen reading tiring, but these days even my…

PRICE As reviewed (Smart Value Flexi), £1,579 exc VAT from dell.co.uk Dell EMC offers two 1U servers based on Intel’s current Xeon E processor family. The entrylevel PowerEdge R240 targets small businesses looking for their first server, while the R340 on review is intended as a more scalable option. One notable difference is the storage choices: the R240 is only available with four LFF drive bays, while with the R340 you get a choice of four LFF or eight SFF hot-swap bays. We tested the four-bay model, which came supplied with two 1TB SATA LFF drives. These are handled by the embedded PERC S140 SATA RAID controller, and that’s fine to start with, but the system also includes a PERC H330 PCIe RAID card, so you can move up to…

PRICE £114 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk You might find it hard to get excited about a new wireless access point (AP), but DrayTek’s VigorAP 903 is set to turn some heads. That’s because this isn’t just another Wave 2 802.11ac AP: it brings self-healing mesh technology persuasively down into the SMB price bracket, with a price of just £114. If you want to start small, there’s no need to spend any more. The VigorAP 903 will happily function as a standalone AP, with 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios concurrently presenting up to four SSIDs each. At the side, you’ll also spot five Gigabit Ethernet ports; the first accepts a PoE source (although there’s a power supply in the box), the next three can be used to connect PCs or other network…

Is there an intrinsic problem with letting someone choose a different browser? No, but that’s not the whole story. It boils down to how you manage your infrastructure and what rules and processes you put in place. Traffic that goes in and out of the organisation should be appropriately monitored, whether that be light touch URL filtering or URL filtering backed by cloud-based blacklists and packet filtering. The risk comes from allowing a highly modifiable platform into your users’ working space. The web browser has access to all the traffic that flows through it, so the acceptance of user-chosen third-party plugins should be viewed with concern. That plugin has access to everything and, whether it’s an internal line of business app or a cloud-based solution, this is an exposure that…

Within the world of pen testing, a colour-coding system is often used to describe different types of test. White (or crystal) testing is where the testers have full access to your systems, and focuses on what might happen if an attacker manages to break in. Black-box testing is the opposite, with testers getting more or less no information about your systems. This is a better simulation of a real-world attack, but it tends to take longer and cost more. The in-between option is a “grey” test, in which testers receive the sort of information that a determined attacker would be able to discover. You might also hear about “red-teaming”. This is a type of test where consultants have permission to launch a simulated attack, but the business doesn’t know when…

You might recall that Barry Collins recently wrote about his frustratingly unrepairable freezer (see issue 292, p25). His predicament is common as we’re pushed down the slope of disposable technology, but Barry brings hope. His proposal to modify the VAT laws to hold manufacturers to book is the kind of talk I enjoy. Barry’s joining a movement that is starting to change the world. First, a little history. Let’s go back about ten years to when Hewlett-Packard released a shiny new set of laptops. They were a fantastic option for resellers like us because HP had created a sizable range in specification and chassis sizes. We sold a lot of these laptops and many of them were faulty. These were the legendary HP DVs – machines that ran at such…

The news has emerged that the 1p and 2p coins will remain in circulation after all. I can feel the collective sigh of relief amongst the twinset-and-tweeds brigade all across the nation. Those of a wholly patriotic bent can be reassured that this Great British Institution will continue “for years to come”. That our country’s children can continue to collect grubby little coins, in the sure knowledge that “if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves”. However, this is all a huge mistake. First, there are an enormous number of these damnable things around. In 2017 alone, 241 million 1p coins were minted, along with 16.6 million 2p coins. Just for completeness, they were joined by 220 million 5p coins, 33 million 10p coins, zero 20p…

1 Facebook sues over app-makers’ data profits Facebook has sued a South Korean developer it accuses of misusing personal data. After a discovery that echoed the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook sued Rankwave, claiming the company “used the Facebook data associated with its apps to create and sell advertising and marketing analytics and models.” 2 Spy chiefs dust down UK’s espionage bill Home Office officials are putting together a new espionage bill that gives the security services stronger powers to hunt down online spies – but could also criminalise whistleblowers who expose classified information. Officials claim the bill will “update our Official Secrets Acts for the 21st century”; plans lean on a 2015 Law Commission consultation, which will be published this autumn. 3 Sony leaps onto Microsoft’s cloud Console rivals Microsoft…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Huawei MateBook 14 Ultraportable from £1,000 from huawei.com Huawei gets everything right with this 14in ultraportable. It boasts a ten-hour batt ery life, plenty of power – enough for some gaming, even – and excellent connectivity, including a handy USB-A port. Both models are great value: the £1,300 variant adds a touchscreen and upgrades the processor to a Core i7, the RAM to 16GB and the SSD to 512GB. REVIEW Issue 296, p56 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 15in (2018) A machine for true power users with amazing specifications, including that infamous Core i9 CPU and up to 4TB of SSD storage. From £2,349 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 Dell XPS 15 We all know what to expect from Dell’s XPS 15 range, yet it continues to reign…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She now has a very full, very disorganised Dropbox with nonsensical file names because of broken keyboards. @njkobie I have a stack of old laptops cluttering up a corner of my office the way other people have long-read books or old magazines. And that means every time I move home – which is often, because London – I must carefully pack all this useless old hardware into a box, lug it to a moving van, and do the reverse at the new flat. This is clearly stupid, but as we’re about to learn, I am stupid. (Stop nodding in agreement, it’s rude.) With yet another move on the horizon, I finally smartened up this month and set aside time to sort through my…

I read the review of the Huawei P30 Pro (see issue 297, p68) and, on Saturday afternoon, ventured forth to various mobile shops to consider my options. I compared the P30 Pro, Samsung S10+, Apple Xs and even the P20 Pro. The P30 Pro won. So, the following Monday morning’s news that Google will be cutting Huawei out of the Android club was a very nasty surprise. Some say I should take the phone back, and I’ve got 11 days left in which to do so. But don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring, because the Chinese are very resilient – and it seems they’ve already planned for this. I like the P30 Pro and its fab camera, and I’m going to keep it. Can it stay top of the A-List though? You’d…

Wi-Fi is part of the fabric of our homes. We use it for staying in touch, streaming TV, playing games, controlling smart devices and more. It’s such a vital part of modern life that, in 2016, the UN formally recognised internet access as a human right. When your connection slows to a crawl, or keeps inexplicably dropping out, that’s a problem. Fortunately, fixing it needn’t be expensive. If the problem is range, there are plenty of low-cost solutions, such as wireless repeaters and powerline extenders, that can help you get a faster or stronger signal in remote locations around your home. And you may be able to dramatically improve your Wi-Fi performance without spending any money at all, by following the simple steps below. We can’t promise that you’ll enjoy…

With v16 of 3CX, the company didn’t just introduce a bunch of new features (see issue 296, p62) - it also introduced a pricing structure that cut the costs by up to 66%. In fact, many smaller businesses can run a 3CX PBX without spending a penny on licence fees. ▪ New, lower prices Here’s how 3CX’s charging structure works. Unlike rivals, who may charge you a fixed fee per user or f0r call centre features, it charges based on how many simultaneous calls (SC) you need. Typically, that translates into three to four end users per SC, meaning a 25-seat company should get along fine with an 8SC licence. And that’s free. In fact, for the first year, the standard licence is completely free no matter how many simultaneous…

PRICE 128GB, £416 (£499 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298quest While the Oculus Go (see issue 286, p64) was a great introduction to wireless VR, its limited power and single controller meant it was never going to be as immersive as traditional VR headsets. With the Oculus Quest, Facebook promises the same wireless, put-on-and-play experience as the Go, but with beefed-up power to help make virtual reality experiences even more entertaining. The Quest is a handsome machine: the all-black finish and textured fabric exterior contribute to the feeling that you’re wearing the tech equivalent of a new car. There’s something particularly striking about the front panel, which is a matte black affair with four external cameras inlaid into each corner. The two motion controllers that come with the Quest are equally stylish,…

PRICE £699 (£839 inc VAT) from toshiba.co.uk Toshiba, you say? That company is no more, at least when it comes to manufacturing laptops. On 1 October 2018, Toshiba’s notebook division undertook its own version of Brexit and “deconsolidated” from the Toshiba Group. The business is now 80% owned by Sharp and calls itself Dynabook, in honour of what it describes as the world’s first notebook, 1989’s Toshiba Dynabook J-3100 SS001 (no relation to the Dynabook concept cooked up by Alan Kay in 1968). So why isn’t this new laptop called the Dynabook Satellite Pro A50-EC? In the main, no doubt, because the Dynabook brand isn’t yet established in IT managers’ minds, whilst they will instantly recognise the words “Satellite Pro”. Indeed, the approach is cautious all round; design-wise it is…

PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298net Netgear’s Orbi platform is one of the best mesh Wi-Fi systems out there, but this update adds something novel. Alexa transforms the secondary node from a dull piece of networking infrastructure into an interactive hub for music, information and home automation. The Orbi Voice pack contains two units: a regular RBR50 router and an RBS40V satellite, which serves as both a Wi-Fi extender and an Alexa smart speaker. The latter comes wrapped in a tasteful grey fabric, behind which there’s a 35W Harman Kardonbranded speaker. If you want to extend the mesh network, you can buy more Orbi nodes and pair them with the router. Can’t get enough of Alexa? Then buy additional voice satellites. ▪ Fuss-free setup? The Orbi units are chunky.…

PRICE £140 (£168 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298gig The Gigabyte is the most expensive board in this shootout, and it serves up impressive aesthetics to justify the cost. The heatsinks and rear I/O cover are designed using eyecatching angles, and RGB LEDs are installed in the heatsinks, along the audio circuitry and even between the memory slots. The design is backed up by practicality. You get three PCIe x16 slots, with two capable of handling dual-graphics from AMD and Nvidia. It’s the only board here with steel around its PCI and memory slots, and it has support for 128GB of memory. Both M.2 connectors have heatsinks – an unusual extravagance at this price. The Gigabyte serves up six fan connectors and four lighting headers, which is more than any other board here.…

PRICE £274 (£329 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com While Huawei always makes big headlines with its flagship phone launches, it’s also fond of Lite variants. If you don’t have mortgage-inducing sums of cash to splurge, but you love taking photos on your phone, the P30 Lite offers a similar design and experience to the P30 at half the price. There are a few cutbacks in key areas, though. Let’s start with the processor. There’s no top-end Kirin 980 here, with the P30 Lite instead fitted with a comparatively low-powered Kirin 710 chipset. While the P30 Lite can’t keep up with its siblings or most other phones here (see p71), a Geekbench 4 single and multicore benchmark result of 1,534 and 5,469 respectively show that it’s no slouch. That’s a much better…

PRICE £145 (£174 inc VAT) from lambda-tek.com Epson’s EcoTank ET-2710 is the least expensive MFP with refillable ink tanks that we’ve reviewed. Typically of such devices, it’s basic: while it has wireless networking, its lack of a screen rules out more advanced functions. Instead, there’s a smattering of icons and indicator LEDs to control simple tasks such as single-page photocopying – there’s no counter to dial up multiple copies. Paper handling is limited to a simple 100-sheet input and a 30-sheet output and, if you want to print double-sided, you will need to do it manually. The EcoTank ET-2710’s lack of screen rules out advanced cloud functions such as scanning to or printing from an online file service, but the ET-2710 does support Google Cloud Print. This allows you to…

PRICE £74 (£89 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Brother’s MFC-J491DW looks like it has everything you need from a home office multifunction device. This compact inkjet combines printer, scanner, fax and copier functions, and connects to a wireless network. It can print double-sided, and its 20-sheet ADF helps with multipage copies and faxes. In the flesh, it’s less convincing. The clattery and flexible 100-sheet paper tray is the most obvious culprit, but there’s a lack of polish when compared to rival MFPs. For example, the ink tanks aren’t physically keyed, so it’s possible to insert the wrong colour if you’re not paying attention. There are neat touches: the ADF folds away into the top panel when you’re not using it and you can take direct control via a compact colour screen…

PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Not all the best ideas fit on the back of an envelope – or a sheet of A4 paper – hence the rise in A3-capable MFPs. Canon’s Pixma TS9550 combines an A4 scanner and 20-sheet ADF with an A3 inkjet printer. There’s a rear feed capable of storing up to 50 pages of plain A3 or 20 sheets of photo paper, and a tray in the base for up to 100 sheets of plain A4. By limiting A3 paper support to one input and the output tray, Canon has made this MFP more compact than you might expect. While it’s still biggish, it’s barely larger than HP’s A4-only OfficeJet Pro 6970 (see p90), making it easier to fit into a home office. It…

PRICE £76 (£92 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com HP’s OfficeJet Pro 6970 is an inkjet MFP that prints, scans, copies and faxes. Its home office bias is reflected in sensible features, such as a 225-sheet paper tray in the base, a 35-sheet duplexing ADF on top, and ink supplies rated for up to 1,500 black pages or 825 in colour. At the front there’s a USB port, but you can only print photos from an inserted USB drive – not PDFs or other documents. The OfficeJet Pro 6970 seems much wider than necessary and it’s not the most user-friendly MFP. Its large paper tray is tricky to load unless you release the two blue catches near the rear and pull it free. Its lid doubles as the output tray and latches…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,476 exc VAT from kikatek.com Fujitsu’s Primergy servers have always prioritised energy efficiency and, of the four servers on test this month, the RX1330 M4 boasted by far the lowest power consumption. Sitting idle it sipped just 18W from the mains, and even with its 3.3GHz quad-core Xeon E-2124 processor under maximum load, its power demands never topped 70W. This is largely thanks to the Cool-safe chassis; its air grilles and channels are tailor-made to maximise airflow. This lets the fans run more slowly, meaning they consume less power – and it keeps the noise down, with the SPLnFFT iOS app measuring only 37.2dB at one metre away. That’s perfect for small offices that don’t want to shell out for a soundproof cabinet. Knowing this, it’s no…

PRICE £1,085 exc VAT with 1yr TotalSecure Advanced from sonicwallonline.com Targeting SMBs and remote offices, the TZ300P is one of SonicWall’s most versatile desktop appliances yet. Alongside a stiff set of unified threat management (UTM) security measures, it delivers software defined WAN (SD-WAN) services and wireless AP management – and, for good measure, it even supports PoE. Recommended for up to 25 users, the TZ300P boasts a raw firewall throughput of 750Mbits/sec, dropping to 235Mbits/sec with UTM services enabled. The compact box offers five Gigabit Ethernet ports, one of which is set aside for WAN duties, while the rest are available for LAN usage. Two of these are PoE-enabled, which is handy – just note that the small 35W power threshold means that it will only drive a single PoE+…

Last month, I explained why I thought the current set of social media, chat and email services were essentially doomed in their current form. In short, the lack of authentication and provable identity is a huge stumbling block. We have come to expect that the internet is an essentially anonymous place. This wasn’t the case in the earliest days when people knew other users or they were obviously attached to an organisation such as a university college. As the userbase of the internet spread into the general population, the new influx revelled in their new-found lack of identity. And we’ve seen the rise of obnoxious, ill-tempered, immoral and illegal behaviour. The largest social media companies have had little interest in making users traceable and responsible for their behaviour, preferring to…

The backpack I lug around on a day-to-day basis has a Surface Go inside and a “zombie outbreak response team” badge on the outside. I mention this because zombies and data cybersecurity go together like two things that are often seen going together. Joking aside, there’s nothing particularly funny about the kind of zombies I’m referring to: zombie phishing attacks. These are nothing new, but as is appropriate with zombies, they never seem to die. Which is worrying as they’re making a comeback. “We know these are not new attacks, nor a new methodology for conducting them,” Darian Lewis, staff threat intelligence analyst at data discovery specialists Relativity told me, “but they are being resurrected and are still highly effective.” That they remain so effective is the reason for the…

Potholes. Construction lorries parking illegally. Congestion from closed streets. Each of these perpetual annoyances is being addressed by Transport for London (TfL) as part of its new RoadLab roadworks programme, which also introduces the Internet of Things (IoT) to London roads. The programme brings together nine startups and established businesses with TfL’s experts at the Plexal innovation centre and co-working space at the Olympic Park in London. Over a period of ten weeks, the companies have access to TfL and its data – as well as utilities, councils and Plexal’s consultants – with the aim of building solutions to help roadworks run more smoothly. “The context behind this is that barriers to entry have reduced because of emerging technology – whether it’s data or sensors,” said Rikesh Shah, head of…

Waterfront Toronto may sound like any other regeneration project, but the Canadian city’s former industrial district’s warehouses and quays aren’t only giving way to high-end housing, but to an experiment in building a connected, data-driven neigh-bourhood. It’s run by Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. Experiments are good. Not all of the ideas laid out in Sidewalk’s 2017 vision document will necessarily work, but they’re worth attempting, be it self-driving public transport, modular housing for low-cost homes or climate-positive energy grids. The problem is those promises come with downsides, with people concerned about data collection, privacy and surveillance. No surprise considering it’s Google in charge. At the time of writing, Sidewalk was long expected to file a detailed document laying out specifically how the Waterfront project…