Table of contents for November 2019 in PC Pro

THERE’S BEEN ONLY one point in my life when I was scared of AI. That’s when I read that Stephen Hawking feared for our future, sending chills down my spine with this paragraph: “One can imagine [AI] outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” Hawking was building an argument that we need regulation and oversight of AI developments, and when it comes to military, financial and healthcare applications I couldn’t agree more. Fortunately, in the mundane areas of helping us use our time more wisely, the free market is pretty good at keeping everyone on the right course.…

1 Apple issues warning over self-inflictedbug Red faces all round at Apple as the company managed to reintroduce a security flaw – which was initially fixed in April – with its iOS 12.4 update. The public vulnerability meant attackers could take control of phones or tablets, forcing Apple to warn users to take caution until the issue was resolved. 2 Facebook under fire over deletion tool Facebook faced criticism over a long-awaited tool for deleting data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. While the company tagged the feature as a “clear history” tool aimed at limiting off-Facebook data use, critics attacked the fact that it merely disconnected data for user accounts and deleted nothing from Facebook’s data trove. 3 KNOB attack on Bluetooth University of Oxford researchers have…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS NEW ENTRY Lenovo ThinkPad T490s Travel business class from £1,140 from lenovo.com Lenovo updates its popular T series laptops with this thin yet powerful laptop. With battery life of over 11 hours in our tests, a 14in screen, 1.35kg weight and all the power most people need – if you want discrete graphics, check out the T490 – this is a truly business class machine. REVIEW Issue 301, p46 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY 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 £2,399 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 Razer Blade 15 Mercury White A beautifully made gaming laptop with a Max-Q RTX 2070 and powerful Core i7 chip inside,…

@bazzacollins Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m losing my grip on reality. I’m directed towards a video on Twitter and for the next couple of minutes I sit there with my jaw practically banging on the space bar, struggling to work out what my eyes are relaying. The video appears innocuous enough. It’s a clip of US comedian Bill Hader appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman. Hader’s being interviewed, and whilst giving his answers he lapses into impressions of film stars Tom Cruise and Seth Rogen. Except it’s not only Hader’s voice that changes when he shifts into Tom Cruise mode, but his face too. It’s subtle, horribly subtle. So much so that I sit there wondering if my mind is playing tricks on me,…

Computers are supposed to be labour-saving devices. So if there’s a particular job you find yourself doing over and over again, why not automate it? The Windows Task Scheduler is the only tool you need to launch programs and run scripts at set times, or in response to specific events. Unfortunately, while the Task Scheduler is easy to use, it’s saddled with a daunting front-end that’s likely to put off all but the most technical users. Here’s our guide to getting started with the Task Scheduler – and making use of its advanced features. 1 The management console The Task Scheduler isn’t strictly a program, but a background service. You can take full advantage of all of its features either via PowerShell (pcpro.link/301powershell) or from the old-fashioned Command Prompt, using…

PRICE £158 (£190 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/301ax4 This is the first 802.11ax router to cost less than £200, but while the AX4 shares its stealth bomber styling with the AX8 (see p62 it doesn’t have its premium feel: the casing is flimsy while the twin antennae are rather loose. The Wi-Fi toggle and WPS buttons at the front are also unwisely embedded in a high-gloss plastic surround, so pressing either results in a smudgy fingerprint. At the back of the router, you’ll find four Gigabit LAN ports, two of which support 802.3ad link aggregation, plus an Ethernet WAN connector and a single USB 3 socket – an acceptable minimum of connectivity. Sign up for Netgear’s Ready CLOUD service and you can access USB-hosted files and folders wherever you are via…

1 Visit the PC Pro download site at pcprodownload.co.uk. You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the card, along with your email address. We’ll send you an email to confirm that your code has been registered. On subsequent visits, you’ll be able to access the download area by entering only your email address. 2 Once you’re into the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions on the left of the product page (again, please…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk We include the Vankyo MatrixPad Z4 as a warning against blindly trusting Amazon star ratings: as I write this, it has 28 reviews, 24 of which give a gushing five stars. Only two give it a one-star verdict – and, I can assure you, that’s far closer to my experience. It’s a miserable product that struggled to complete our standard benchmarks and astonishingly manages to feel cheaper than its price. This is despite it sounding great on paper. You’re looking at a 10.1in tablet with a 1,280 x 800 IPS screen that runs Android 9. With the promise of a quad-core 1.5GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of built-in storage – expandable by another 128GB via the microSD slot – it’s a…

PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com How do you describe this high-end streaming audio system? “Internet radio” doesn’t do it justice because it also covers DAB, streaming services and Bluetooth, all while cramming in a CD player. It’s certainly no shrinking violet. The wooden unit is almost half a metre wide and 16cm high, while a 30cm depth and hefty 7kg might require something sturdier than a standard book shelf. It looks most at home on a low table or a sideboard where you can appreciate its retro looks. With its light wooden cabinet, dark speaker cloth and metal accents, it feels like the descendent of an old-school tabletop radio, but the central 3.5in square OLED display drags it into the present. A peek around the back reveals bass…

We subjected every monitor to a huge suite of tests using our X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter, in conjunction with the open-source display calibration and profiling software, dispcalGUI. X-Rite and dispcalGUI allow us to measure a display’s minimum and maximum brightness in cd/m2, contrast ratio, colour temperature and gamma, plus each panel’s colour gamut as a percentage of the sRGB and, where applicable, Adobe RGB colour spaces. Backlight uniformity is tested by measuring brightness, greyscale tracking and colour temperature across 15 points on the panel. Our video-playback tests, meanwhile, allow us to check each monitor for ghosting or response-time issues. We also test each monitor’s colour accuracy from a central point on the screen. This process measures how close the displayed colours are to their intended shade. The difference between the…

PRICE £378 (£454 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk This Dell occupies an interesting position: a price nudging £500 means it can’t square up to the Eizo or Philips screens in terms of quality or specification, but it’s hardly cheap. As such, it still comes with a sizeable weight of expectation. It’s a 27in IPS panel with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution and, unlike pricier rivals, it uses 8-bit colour rather than 10-bit. We have no problem with this for mainstream work, including photo and video editing, but note that it only uses the sRGB colour gamut. If your laptop has a USB-C port, the Dell could get rid of one power cable thanks to its high-powered USB-C connector. Two more USB 3 ports sit on the side, with another pair at…

PRICE £158 (£190 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com To the casual eye, the BenQ BL2780T seems like a nothing monitor. The design is unfussy, there are no special gimmicks to mark it out, while its price lands it smack in the middle of our Labs’ everyday section – in fact, it’s a few pounds more expensive than its key rivals. Fortunately, BenQ has spent that extra money wisely because it gives room in the budget for a true 8-bit display. That’s a step up from the 6-bit + FRC displays used by the Dell and Iiyama products, and it means that colours will have better gradients on the BenQ. BenQ BL2780T’s panel also has more colour modes than its rivals, while its 60Hz refresh rate and 5ms response time are fine…

PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk The AOC Agon AG322QC4 is similar to the Iiyama in this month’s gaming section – they both aim to be all things to all players. However, the AOC’s higher price allows this panel to tick lots of boxes without as many flaws. The AOC is larger, for starters, with a 31.5in diagonal that dwarfs the 27in Iiyama and 24.5in Acer Predator. The AOC also improves on rivals by offering an 1800R curve. Both factors go a significant way towards making gaming more immersive. This screen has a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, which matches the Iiyama. The AOC’s increased size means it has a lesser density level – 93ppi rather than 109ppi – so games aren’t quite as sharp. But, aside from seeing pixels…

PRICE £262 (£315 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com The Iiyama is the cheapest option in the Labs’ gaming section, but that hasn’t stopped the company from trying to deliver a specification to sate every gamer’s appetite. For esports, the key attraction is 144Hz AMD FreeSync. This works with both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, and only top-level players will notice that 144Hz lags behind the Acer’s 240Hz. Its 1ms response time is great, matching the Acer and beating the 4ms AOC. But AOC’s screen includes FreeSync 2, which means HDR support and better performance at low frame rates. A 27in diagonal and 2,560 x 1,440 resolution translates into a 109ppi density level, so images are crisper on this panel than its key rivals. More pluses: we like its responsive (if plain) onscreen…

PRICE £759 exc VAT from tradescanners.com There are a fair few scanners out there with built-in wireless networking, but the fi-7300NX is one of the few to support 802.11ac Wi-Fi. That lets it deliver scans over the network at the fastest possible speeds – a smart feature for a scanner that’s capable of 60ppm. And for wired connections there’s Gigabit Ethernet and high speed USB 3, too. The fi-7300NX’s other standout feature is its software support: Fujitsu’s extensive app bundle lets you choose between host-based, network or hostless operation. For host-based scanning, you simply connect the scanner via USB to a PC and install Fujitsu’s PaperStream Capture software. This provides scan workflow management and batch processing functions, and comes partnered with the basic ScanSnap Manager, ScanSnap for fi, ScandAll Pro…

PRICE Two pack, £368 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel’s Multy X wireless mesh system has long been one of our favourite home networking upgrades. Now the business version aims to deliver the same blistering speeds and coverage, while adding a number of extra features designed specifically for SMBs. It comes in packs of two and your mesh network can comprise up to six stations. Physically, the Multy Plus stations look identical to the domestic units, and inside the chunky casing lurk the same nine aerials, which include a dedicated 4x4 array for the 1,733Mbits/sec 5GHz backhaul connection. Disappointingly, Zyxel hasn’t added support for PoE, but the design gives you plenty of options for mounting the Multy units on a wall or ceiling and there’s a new plastic desktop stand as…

If data democratisation is such a great idea, why isn’t everyone doing it? One obvious answer is fear of change – and it may well be that the finance department hasn’t yet been persuaded it’s worth the investment. After all, as with all fundamental changes to the way a business works, there are technical and process barriers that need knocking down before the bright new future can be seen. The good news is that many of these barriers are already starting to crumble due to changes elsewhere in the industry. For example, software development teams are increasingly adopting a DevSecOps approach that involves the dismantling of data silos, paving the way for wider access. In many organisations, the democratisation of data won’t be a big one-off project, but an ongoing…

“He’d been booting the machine using a technique developed in the 1970s by Dr Arthur Fonzarelli” @userfriendlypc A recent discussion with a GP revealed similarities in the way we approach our work. When I visit him, he listens to my ramblings before working out what’s wrong and, when he visits me, it’s my turn to decode the symptoms into a diagnosis. The good doctor and I discussed the unseen twist to these conversations, which is best explained by a quote from the brilliant writer Neil Gaiman: “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Mr Gaiman is referring to literature, but…

UNDERSTANDING TURBULENCE ISN’T easy. Whenever anything flows, be it water or air or any other material, tiny whirlpools and swirls called vortices cause chaos, and that means building a model is difficult — a problem for engineers and designers working to build better jet engines, wind turbines or even Formula 1 cars. One particular question that has been considered for decades is how to measure turbulence in a channel, to unpick how forces dissipate in air or water. To find out the answer, Professor Sergei Chernyshenko and Dr Peter Vincent, both of Imperial College London, turned to a supercomputer built from GPUs, taking advantage of the gaming technology to run thousands of channel flow simulations. Each and every simulation was made up of billions of calculations, finally offering the data…

I find the ongoing news stories about Huawei fascinating. Although I’m no expert in matters of international law, the US position evidently boils down to this: Huawei can’t be trusted because of its claimed close relationship with the Chinese government. The company represents a potential risk to US national security, and must therefore be kept out of the marketplace. Yet even a cursory consideration of this notion shows that the response isn’t proportionate to the reality. First, if there’s an issue with the 5G and core networking technology from Huawei, then by all means ban those (as the US government essentially did way back in 2012). Banning consumer handsets is sheer paranoia. Yes, of course there could be some sort of back door in a phone handset, but surely the…

Barry Collins Barry is a troubled man and, in this case, deepfake videos have him worried. If we can’t trust what we see and hear, only paranoia can save us. See p24 Nicole Kobie If Barry has made you paranoid, turn to p124 where Nicole delves deep into the world of deepfakes and explains why the next battlefield could be spam Steve Cassidy Backups truly get Steve’s back up this month, as he tries to resolve the conflict between Office 365 and his client’s Exchange 2007 server. See p120 Mike Jennings Not content with putting five NVMe SSDs through their paces on p60, Mike also stared down the barrel of 12 monitors to decide a Labs Winner from p76…

I used to write a lot about interesting hardware back in the 1980s. I won a prize for my explanation of HP’s PA-RISC pipeline, and a bottle of fine Scotch from Sir Robin Saxby for a piece on ARM’s object-oriented memory manager. Then along came x486, the CPU world settled into a rut/groove and the legendary magazine Byte closed. I never could summon the enthusiasm to follow Intel’s cache and multicore shenanigans. This month, inspired by the CogX AI festival I wrote about last month (see issue 300, p24), I return to the topic of hardware: at last, it feels as exciting as in that 80s RISC revolution. Hardware vendors nowadays need to explain the AI problems their new designs are intended to solve, which are often about “edge computing”.…

AI assistants such as Alexa are all fine and dandy, but they’re pretty limited when it comes to serious work. They can add items to your to-do list, remind you what’s coming up on your calendar and tell you how to spell bureaucracy (that one always gets me), but not a great deal more. However, Alexa is by no means the extent of AI’s software capabilities. There are all manner of online services, apps and software packages with baked-in AI that can help you do the drudge work. Whether it’s divining important messages from the swamp that is your inbox, arranging meetings without eight rounds of email tennis, turning your voice notes or meeting recordings into searchable text or dredging useful data out of spreadsheets without learning complex formulae, AI…

PRICE £2,108 (£2,530 inc VAT) from razer.com You don’t need a long memory to recall when we last reviewed a Razer Blade 15: simply to turn to p52 of last month’s issue and you’ll see two pages devoted to the top-end model costing £2,880 inc VAT. But there are three crucial differences between this machine and its sibling that make it well worth revisiting: it’s better value, both the specs and finish are different, and it has much superior battery life. The cost saving comes via a lesser graphics card, with a Max-Q Design version of the GeForce RTX 2070 in place of last month’s RTX 2080. As with all the Max-Q editions, Nvidia works out the best balance between frequency and heat output, in this case trimming the RTX…

Aorus RGB AIC NVMe SSD 1TB PRICE £188 (£226incVAT) from scan.co.uk The Aorus brand is Gigabyte’s gaming offshoot, so it’s no surprise that this drive is the most outlandish-looking product here. Made from chunky metal, it uses slots from PCIe x4 upwards. The metal looks great, with a brushed finish, and the Aorus’ gaming DNA is represented by an inevitable row of RGB LEDs. Under the metal hood, the Aorus uses a high-end Phison quad-core controller and 64-layer 3D triple-level cell (TLC) flash. That matches the two WD products but falls short of the Samsung’s 96-layer technology. The Aorus has 1GB of memory and supports TRIM and SMART. You get AES 256-bit encryption, but no other security options – unlike the Samsung drive. Where the Aorus trumps every drive here…

PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from logitech.com For the past year, Logitech’s MX Master 2S mouse has ruled supreme. Head to any “best mice” article of 2018 and it was the mouse sitting at the top. So Logitech needed to do something special to usurp it, especially as you can now buy the 2S for a fraction over £50. Safe to say, the MX Master 3 is very special indeed. It shares many traits with the 2S, but they’re all excellent. (Well, all bar one: if you’re left-handed, this isn’t the mouse for you.) First, the sheer quality of the finish: the moment you remove the hefty MX Master 3 from its box you realise you’re holding a high-quality device, and this is only reinforced by buttons and wheels that…

PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from hihonor.com Honor is in a tricky place. As a sub-brand of Huawei, it suffers from all the same trade war/privacy threats that affect its parent company, and so potential buyers may well be put off the Honor 20 Pro. Before you strike it off your list, however, take note: it has the world’s first 48-megapixel with an f/1.4 aperture, 256GB of storage and excellent performance, yet undercuts rivals such as Apple and Samsung on price. The phone is available in two colours – “Phantom Blue”, which counter-intuitively looks green, and “Phantom Black”, which looks purple – and both have a fancy, all-glass, chrome-like finish. It looks amazing when you first take it out of the box but, as ever, attracts fingerprints too easily and…

PRICE £292 (£350 inc VAT) from harmankardon.co.uk Harman Kardon is one of the biggest names in audio and it’s gazing at the smart speaker world with hunger in its eyes. The Citation is its smart speaker brand, based around Google Assistant, and there are already eight products in its range – from the Citation One at £180 to the Citation Tower pair for a cheeky £2,200. The Citation 300 on test here may seem cheap by comparison with that top-end model, but there’s no hiding from the fact that £350 is a lot for a single speaker. If you want to pair two for a traditional stereo setup, it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to realise that’s £700. What’s more, Harman Kardon really wants you to buy several Citations to…

PRICE £3,324 (£3,989 inc VAT) from wexphotovideo.com It’s the understatement of the year to say that the Eizo is the most expensive monitor in this Labs; it makes the £799 Philips Brilliance 329P9H (see opposite) look cheap. But that huge price is justified by a spectacular specification that should sate professional users who work with high-end photo and video material. This 31.1in screen uses the 4,096 x 2,160 DCI 4K resolution necessary for numerous media and film tasks. That means it has more horizontal pixels when compared to conventional 4K, and it helps this screen deliver a density level of 149ppi. That’s higher than any other professional screen here, but more importantly it means that the Eizo is incredibly crisp. That helps when handling detailed photo, video and design work.…

PRICE £270 (£325 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk The MultiSync is the cheapest option in this Labs’ professional section, and it stands apart from the rest of the panels here as it doesn’t place image quality at the heart of its appeal. Instead, NEC concentrates on solid ergonomics and design. The first sign of this is the stand, with its 150mm of height adjustment, 40° of tilt and 340° of swivel. It’s also the only screen here to include HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI and D-SUB inputs, and there are three USB 3.1 ports – with one on the side bezel. Happily, the bezels are slim, so multi-monitor setups are easy. This screen has speakers, too – but they’re dreadful. The OSD is basic, but it’s crammed with options and is easy to…

PRICE £132 (£158 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Dell’s 27in panel is one of the most affordable here – and it makes a solid first impression. It looks more expensive than its price suggests, with a compact base and attractive design, while the panel has tiny bezels. The whole unit is slimmer than the BenQ and looks smarter. Even the rear is attractive, thanks to a glossy finish. However, a closer look reveals that the Dell’s beauty is only skin deep. Connectivity is poor: this is the only screen here without a DisplayPort connection, instead relying on HDMI and D-SUB. There are no USB ports, no audio jacks, no speakers and you don’t even get an HDMI cable. Don’t expect much movement, either. Dell’s screen can tilt back and forward, but…

PRICE £790 (£949 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Asus ROG Strix XG49VQ is one of the most exciting gaming monitors around – a vast widescreen with a 49in diagonal, 32:9 aspect ratio and 1800R curve. That’s a particularly attractive combination for racing games, where the width easily outstrips conventional aspect ratios and the curve adds to that in-car feeling. The design also helps in FPS, RPG and action games – any title where extra width is beneficial. It looks the part, too, with a dramatic, angled stand. There’s substance to back up the style, with a strong set of speakers and height, tilt and swivel adjustment. Asus even wins the OSD wars, with an attractive, responsive design that’s easy to navigate courtesy of the joystick. Elsewhere, 144Hz AMD FreeSync 2…

PRICE £317 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com The ADS-2800W sits near the top of Brother’s extensive family of desktop scanners, and delivers all the document digitising features an SMB could ask for. That includes both wired Ethernet and 802.11n wireless connections (plus plain old USB), along with a 40ppm scan speed and a user-friendly touchscreen interface – all for a very reasonable price. Brother hasn’t skimped on the software side of things, either. Along with the company’s iPrint&Scan and ControlCenter4 scan management apps, the package includes Nuance’s PaperPort 14 SE digital file cabinet and the ABBYY FineReader 12 Sprint and PDF Transformer+ OCR tools. A standalone remote network setup utility is included as well, with a system tray monitor that doubles up as a firmware upgrade advisor – and for low-level…

PRICE £241excVAT from tradescanners.com Xerox’s Duplex Combo Scanner (DCS) is ideal for businesses that want the best of both worlds. It combines a 25ppm automatic document feeder with an A4 colour flatbed, enabling it to scan almost any type of document or image. The two different scanning methods are neatly incorporated into a single low-profile unit, with the flatbed lid sitting on telescopic supports to accommodate large items such as books. The DCS offers only a USB 2 connection, so you’ll need a PC to host it. Getting set up on a Windows 10 desktop took around ten minutes, with the routine loading the drivers, installing the complete software bundle and checking online for updates. Along with the Visioneer OneTouch scan management utility, you get ABBYY’s FineReader 12 Sprint document…

The phrase “market conditions” sounds like something simple and manageable. And that’s the underlying promise when you sign up for a lease: it gives you reassurance that your financial situation – or at least this part of it – will remain stable, steady and predictable. But if we think of market conditions as analogous to weather reports, they’re really stable only at the sort of scale that notes that the sun rises in the morning and winter is colder than summer. What happens when waves swallow ships, tsunamis move at 1,000mph and jellyfish turn up in their billions where last year there were fish? Financially, that could be the sort of environment we’re entering. For a start, it’s almost impossible to predict the impact of Brexit on leasing. Generally, the…

“This is a display that can work outside under direct sunlight, even when there is the sunshine of a 38°C day falling on it” @jonhoneyball It was time to buy another laptop. Except this time, the usual criteria didn’t apply. In terms of vendor and platform, I tend to buy either from Apple, running macOS, or from Dell, running Windows 10. Of course, there is a wide range of other vendors out there making Windows laptops, but I tend to find something from Dell that fits the need, if only because it has such a large selection of laptops and significant configuration options. Our go-to laptop in the lab for a while has been the XPS range, both the XPS 13 and XPS 15 versions. And I would have bought…

“The biggest thing Firefox has going for it, if we are being brutally honest, is simply that it isn’t Google” @happygeek Last month, I briefly mentioned that I had taken the plunge and made the switch from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox Quantum when it comes to my web browser of choice. Although I do still have a fondness for the DuckDuckGo browser app for Android. I have already mentioned that my favourite tracking and blocking extensions, uBlock Origin and the EFF Privacy Badger, work just as I would expect. And how the use of “containers” enables privacy within Firefox to be taken to another level by separating online activities into distinct tab specific sessions that don’t share cookies or other data footprints between them. This month, I thought I…

THE THEFT OF fingerprint and face-recognition details of more than a million people could leave victims facing insurmountable security problems for the rest of their lives. The warning comes after researchers from monitoring company vpnMentor found holes in the security platform BioStar 2, which uses biometrics for access control systems on doors in 5,700 organisations around the world, including the Metropolitan Police and banks. “Our team was able to access over a million fingerprint records, as well as facial recognition information,” the report said. “Combined with the personal details, usernames, and passwords, the potential for criminal activity and fraud is massive.” The researchers found that 23GB of data – including actual photos of users, unencrypted usernames and passwords, and personal details of staff and their position within the company –…

Dropping out of a computer science course doesn’t only take a personal toll on students, it can also leave them facing crippling costs. As advice from Complete University Guide points out: “If you leave after the first term, you may be liable for fees for the whole year and you also have to pay for the remainder of your accommodation costs that you signed a contract for.” Losing that much money with nothing to show for it is one reason many students reluctantly stick out courses they are not enjoying, but the longer term impact is on career prospects. “The big issue for dropouts in this environment is that unless you have a compelling case for why you dropped out, then it looks like you can’t take the pace,” said…

@njkobie It’s a tech cliché that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That probably sounded clever when Arthur C Clarke first wrote it, but after being repeatedly abused in articles by the likes of me, it’s started to sound a bit tired despite its inherent truth. However, it’s not only jumps in technology that have the potential for magic: it can also occur when existing bits and pieces are combined into something truly life-changing. Yes, I know I sound like Apple’s marketing material right now, but I’m not talking about iPhones. Ten years ago, slim and shiny smartphones felt futuristic, but now they’re about as interesting as my toaster. But on my way to the kitchen – which I frequently am, because I like toast – there is a…

I was very pleased to see a sprinkling of vintage reviews in your 25th anniversary issue (see issue 300, p55, p59 and p123). I can’t be the only reader to feel nostalgic for the era when a PC sounded like a jet engine starting up, was very nearly as loud and required constant TLC to keep it running smoothly. I still have an issue from 1997, when half the page count (and considerable weight) was formed by adverts from dozens of independent PC assemblers and component suppliers, few of which survive. A PC is now considered a disposable, mass-market commodity to be delivered with your groceries. Perhaps a page or two in every issue can be devoted to reprinting historical content? Not just the products and services that changed the industry,…

Try as we might, we couldn’t get Intel to comment for this article. This is a shame because there are many factors still in its favour. In particular, while AMD is putting all its focus onto x86 silicon, Intel has its eyes on bigger things. “I think that one thing noticeable coming from Intel about its overall market message is looking for bigger TAM [total addressable market],” said IDC’s Shane Rau. “They quote many hundreds of billions of dollars of TAM across traditional markets for them like PC and server processors, but also IoT.” So while Intel harvests revenue for everything from memory to networking cards and storage devices, AMD can only do so from the silicon inside. In short, Intel has a play in almost every part of the…

PRICE £523 (£628 inc VAT) from lenovo.com The Lenovo 300e couldn’t be much different from the ThinkPad 490s we review on p46. This is a pared-down laptop designed for schools, with the emphasis on a rugged finish, pen input, convertible 2-in-1 design and a low price – think netbook with a rotating screen and you won’t be far wrong. To confuse matters, there is more than one “Lenovo 300e”. Type those two words into Google and you’ll almost certainly be directed to the cheaper Chromebook incarnation, but Lenovo sent us the Windows version to test. You’ll also need to make sure you choose the second-generation version, with plenty of the first-gen models still floating around. This updated model has several things in its favour. The first is a stylus that’s…

PRICE £236 (£283 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/301ax8 Netgear’s bat-like Nighthawk AX8 promises superfast wireless performance over the new 802.11ax standard (also known as Wi-Fi 6), while still supporting devices using 802.11ac and older Wi-Fi technologies. Unlike the pared-down Nighthawk AX4 (see p64), it’s an uncompromising design with impressive technical specs, including a total throughput of 6Gbits/sec. It’s also quite a bit more expensive than the AX4. Is it worth paying the extra? There’s no shortage of boxes ticked. This is a 4x4 MU-MIMO router with a dual-band design, with one 2.4GHz radio rated at 1.2Gbits/sec and one 5GHz radio with a claimed maximum speed of 4.8Gbits/sec. At the rear, there are five Gigabit Ethernet ports and two USB 3 ports, for connecting wired clients, storage devices and peripherals. Spread your…

PRICE £183 (£220 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/301moto With the prices of top-end phones spiralling into four figures, the Motorola One range is a welcome change: these souped-up budget phones provide fancy features more associated with their flagship brethren. The freshly squeezed Motorola One Action is the cheapest of the bunch and it costs exactly the same as the Moto G7 (see issue 295, p48). Its USP is that it brings a triple camera setup to Motorola’s budget range for the first time, with the third camera acting as an “action cam”. This uses an ultra-wide, 117° lens to squeeze four times more of the scene into one frame than a normal phone. Motorola even rotates it by 90°, allowing you to film landscape video while holding your phone in portrait…

PRICE £192 (£230 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com espite its pedigree in internet and DAB radios, the DiscovR is DPure’s first voice-controlled smart speaker. It’s opted for Amazon Alexa over the Google Assistant, but this isn’t trying to rival the Echo: with a 2,500mAh battery, it’s a portable speaker with 15 hours of battery life. It’s also stylish, with a matte aluminium enclosure softened by heavily rounded edges. Encased within is the speaker housing itself, which rises smoothly from its aluminium shell when you push down hard on the top panel. This isn’t just for show: pushing the housing back into the device disconnects the microphone, preventing Alexa from listening, as well as switching the speaker itself off. My only complaint is that it would be better if it were motorised…

PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk When you can head to Amazon and pick up a 31.5in 4K monitor for under £300, Philips needs to work hard to justify the Brilliance 329P9H’s relatively high price. And while this monitor isn’t perfect – especially when compared to the king of screens opposite – it delivers excellent image quality alongside a broad range of features. The excellent image quality comes courtesy of an IPS panel and 10-bit colour, with some outstanding results in our tests. For instance, its average sRGB Delta E of 0.92 is fantastic: low enough that people just won’t be able to tell the difference and not far off the Dell and Eizo panels. Unlike the Eizo, this panel isn’t optimised for Adobe RGB or DCI-P3 colour spaces,…

PRICE £242 (£290 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk The Acer RT280K is the most expensive monitor in our everyday section, and with room to spare – this panel’s price is nearly £100 beyond its nearest rival. The price disparity means that this panel exists in isolation: its three everyday rivals are all 1080p screens, but the Acer lines up with a 4K resolution. The inclusion of 4K at this price makes this panel tempting, especially if you need plenty of screen real estate or want to watch 4K films – and the 28in diagonal delivers a crisp 157ppi density level. There’s only one problem. By packing in 4K for such a low price, there are inevitable compromises elsewhere. That said, it starts well with a 10-bit colour panel, which means gradients…

PRICE £128 (£153 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com The Iiyama is the cheapest monitor in the Labs, albeit by a slim margin – the Dell SE2719H only costs a few pounds more and the BenQ BL2780T isn’t far off. It’s also the smallest, with a diagonal of 24in. The Iiyama’s budget price means a limited specification. This 24in screen has a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution and a density of 92ppi – fine for day-to-day computing and better than 1080p 27in rivals, but not eye-catching. The underlying tech is IPS, which is good, but the Iiyama’s 8-bit colour consists of 6-bit colour that’s been beefed up with FRC. That’s standard at this price, but it means that colours may experience banding on this panel. The Iiyama has a 75Hz refresh rate, which…

PRICE £322 (£387 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The Acer is exceptionally quick, thanks to a 1ms response time and 240Hz Nvidia G-Sync. That’s nearly 100Hz higher than anything else here but comes with the caveat that such a refresh rate will only benefit keen esports players – for those people, though, the Acer will provide smoother gaming than rivals. This focus on speed, and reliance on TN (twisted nematic) tech rather than IPS, means the panel can’t match the quality of its rivals. A contrast ratio of 893:1 leaves the screen looking bright, but lacking depth and punch. I suggest you avoid the Action mode in the onscreen menu (easily controlled via a joystick), as this destroys the contrast and Delta E measurements. These were the Acer’s best results in…

The screens in this Labs are divided into three camps, but they’re similar in some respects. Several of them show off trends that are dominating the monitor market – but the winners are always the products that concentrate on good quality ahead of fashionable features. Take our overall victor, the Eizo ColorEdge CG319X. This monitor doesn’t have fashionably slim bezels or the promise of HDR support at 1,000cd/m2. Instead, this pricey panel delivers near-perfect colour accuracy, fantastic gamut coverage, a huge resolution and built-in hardware calibration. In short, it ignores gimmicks and concentrates on quality and practical features. That’s precisely what’s needed when you’re handling photo, video and design work. The Philips Brilliance 329P9H functions similarly. It’s more stylish than the Eizo, sure, but it doesn’t succeed due to its…

PRICE £806 exc VAT from ebuyer.com We’ve seen dozens of Epson scanners in the lab over the years, but the DS-970 is something special: it’s the company’s fastest ever A4 desktop scanner, with a remarkable top speed of 85ppm. Thanks to duplex scanning capabilities, you can achieve a phenomenal 170ipm with double sided originals, and a 9,000-page daily duty cycle means this scanner is ready for some serious action. Such speeds call for a sizeable ADF, and the DS-970’s 100-sheet feeder can handle a huge range of paper weights, from 27gsm to 413gsm – so even embossed cards won’t be a problem. It also offers a long-paper mode, which can scan documents over 6m in length in a single pass – and the optional flatbed conversion kit allows it to…

PRICE £155 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Netgear’s WAC540 access point (AP) is perfect for high-density 802.11ac wireless networks. It sports three radios and is designed to service up to 600 clients with full cloud management. Its AC3000 wireless rating breaks down as 400Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio, plus 867Mbits/sec on the first 5GHz radio – and a second 5GHz radio supporting speeds of up to 1,733Mbits/sec for 4x4 MU-MIMO client devices. The unit connects to your network via either PoE+ or regular Gigabit Ethernet (although if you want to use the latter you’ll need to source an external power supply, as one isn’t included). If you’re just starting to build your network infrastructure, it can be deployed in standalone mode and managed from its own web console. Netgear’s Insight cloud…

Danger! Thin ice ahead! Skills are in demand and no matter which way Brexit goes, that slope is only going to get steeper. Introducing new technology into your business is only going to heighten that risk, with potentially catastrophic effects on your staff retention. Why does this matter? Because there are two immense categories of knowledge hiding in plain sight within your business. There’s the explicit stuff: how to find things, what not to use. Then there are the hidden rules, the secret stuff that doesn’t get written down or even alluded to. To understand just how important that stuff is, consider my total failure to check in to an automated hotel at 1.30am. I rang the night service staff member, who told me to feel around under the card…

“The lack of awareness of this in the UK is strange because naked DSL is quite common in other countries” @PaulOckenden Do you make or receive calls using a landline phone at home or your small business? Some people still do, but a lot of people now conduct their entire life and their business solely on their mobile phone. The daft thing is, though, if you have a broadband internet connection you’ll also probably be paying for a fixed line phone, even if you’re not actually using it for phone calls. For ADSL and VDSL connections (including the new G.fast rollout), the data service is delivered to your home or office via a BT Openreach copper pair phone line, so you’d normally end up paying a rental charge for the…

“Most people may have a plan B, but cyber-resilience is about reaching at least the letter G with your plans” @stardotpro I hate backups. Not because they occupy some place in company culture that’s undeserved: quite the opposite. The best way to get the IT manager or MD to sit up in bed in a cold sweat is to send them some fake “status: failed” messages from their backup software alerter. That’s both how important backups have become, and how disappointing the whole technical development of the relevant systems has become of late. Take the case of one client (and reader) who has an Exchange server, and two options for getting a safe set of backed up data. First, old-school corporate backup from Arcserve and, second, dear old Windows Backup.…