Table of contents for March 2020 in PC Pro

MICROSOFT’S TRADE-IN programme for Surface buyers is leaving customers waiting months for payment or even failing to pay them altogether, a PC Pro investigation has uncovered. Microsoft introduced the scheme in October 2019, promising customers up to £500 towards a Surface Pro X, Surface Pro 7 or Surface Laptop 3 if they trade in their old laptops. But the process has left customers out of pocket for several weeks, seen them spend hours chasing payments, and saw one customer report Microsoft to Trading Standards after it refused to pay him for a laptop that went missing in transit. “I traded in my Surface 6 for a Surface Laptop 3 and was promised £510,” said author David Hewson, who had waited five weeks for his trade-in payment, before PC Pro intervened.…

MOZILLA HAS RUFFLED feathers in the internet industry by creating its own virtual private network (VPN) service and by booting data-hungry browser extensions off its Firefox browser. Mozilla has often framed itself as more privacy-conscious than rivals and the launch of its own VPN further underlines those credentials. The Firefox Private Network was launched in a select beta back in September 2019, but the company says that it will make the service available to registered users on a wider scale in the near future. These users would be able to use a secure connection via a browser extension for free for 12 hours a month. However, rivals in the security market have been quick to point out the limitations of the Firefox VPN. “A lot of people say browser VPNs…

Friday 2 February 2018 10.24pm: Dido Massivi (partner of Williams’ sister, Jennifer Hodge) sent the video to Hodge, as well as two unidentified recipients. Saturday 3 February 2018 10.55am: Hodge opens message. 10.58am: Hodge shares message with 17 people, including Williams. 11.00am: Sends follow-up message “Sorry had to send this it’s so sad that this person would put this out please post this and let’s hope he gets life”. 11.45am-1.36pm: Exchange of missed calls. Message from Hodge to Williams: “It’s so bad, Dido sent this to me last night, could you find out if it’s been reported?” 7.00pm: The sisters talk for 3mins 22secs. Undisclosed time: Recipient Wendy Mason calls 101 and is told to report to a police station. Sunday 4 February 2018 Undisclosed time: Mason reports to police…

@njkobie Thanks to crime television shows, we’re all aware of the value of our fingerprints: alongside our DNA, they’re one of the most obvious identifiers we have. So why would I scan my precious fingerprint just to open my phone? I’m not suggesting Samsung is going to frame me for murder using the fingerprint scanner on the back of my Galaxy S8, but it seems remarkable to me that biometrics are becoming low-level security tokens. After all, these aren’t eye scanners protecting top secret government facilities, as seen in the sillier sort of spy film. Instead, we’re talking about unlocking our phones a wee bit quicker than tapping four numbers. The security experts at Kaspersky appear to agree, and have come up with a solution: a ring with a fake…

When the reason you’re clinging to Windows 7 like a limpet to a rock is because you’re wedded to a particular application, or a game that just won’t run smoothly on Windows 10, there are potential ways out. The first of these is an oft-forgotten feature of Windows 10 called Compatibility mode. Basically, you install the software as normal (the big assumption here being you can still download or have the discs for the application). Now find the installed software in the Start menu, right-click on it, select “Open file location”. Right-click on the program file and choose Properties, then click the Compatibility tab. Here you’ll find a tickbox option to “Run this program in compatibility mode for:”, which opens a dropdown menu for a wide range of Windows OSes,…

THE HITCH-FREE UPGRADE It’s a minor miracle that migration from Window 7 is as seamless as it is. Most 7 machines are now really quite old, based on hardware that works perfectly adequately. A typical example would be a customer I worked with a few weeks ago. The initial Windows 10 upgrade hadn’t enticed him in the slightest as his setup was punchy and easy to use, but concerns about security forced him to come and see us for a chat. His machine was a 17in laptop with a fourth-generation Core i7 and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. At the time, this was an expensive purchase; by the thick end of 2019, it was beginning to show its age. Interestingly, he’d deliberately chosen Windows 7 rather than 8 as… well, we…

When you’re using Windows, you’re probably only interacting with one or two apps, while a few more quietly chunter along in the background. Behind the scenes, though, there’s a whirlwind of activity going on among the numerous components and subsystems that make up the OS. The Task Manager gives you an overview of the processes that are occupying your CPU and accessing your hard disk at any one time – but if you want to dig more deeply and find out exactly what each one’s doing, the Event Viewer is the place to be. Think of the Event Viewer as a centralised log of almost everything that happens in Windows. I say “almost everything” because actions and events that happen in third-party apps aren’t always included – it’s up to…

Laptops and PCs We run our own benchmarks on every Windows and macOS system we test. These are based around image editing, video editing and multitasking (where we run the video-editing benchmark while simultaneously playing back a 4K video). At the bottom of each laptop and PC review, you’ll find the system’s score in each of these tests, plus an overall score. If a laptop scores 70, say, then it’s 30% slower than our reference system – a PC with a Core i7-4670K and 8GB of RAM. If it scores 160, then it’s 60% faster. We test laptop battery life by playing back a full-screen video until the battery runs out. We set the screen brightness to 170cd/m2, or as close as we can get using its settings, and switch…

PRICE £4,995 (£5,994 inc VAT) from armari.com The benefits of AMD’s 7nm process technology keep coming thick and fast. It’s now filtering through to the Threadripper CPU line, which is entering its third generation. With each new iteration, the maximum Threadripper core count doubles, with 64-core and 48-core variants planned for release later this year. For now, however, the top model is still 32-core. It’s called the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, and our first look comes in the shape of the Armari Magnetar S64T-RW1300G3 workstation. The 3970X is essentially the successor to the 2990WX, and it’s a big leap forward. Thanks to the modular design of AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, which allies 7nm 8-core “chiplets” with a 14nm I/O die in one package, the base clock speed has leapt from…

O&O Disk Image 14 Professional Full product worth £30 oo-software.com HAVING A FALLBACK copy of Windows, along with your apps and files, is a no-brainer. O&O DiskImage Professional includes all the tools you need to back up data and create images of partitions and drives. Simply select a source volume and click “Start drive imaging” to run a standard backup with the default options – or you can image all drives with a single click. You can also use an Explorer-type interface to select individual files and folders to back up, and take advantage of options to run complete, incremental or differential backups, compress or encrypt your archives, and more. When you need to restore a backed-up image or folder, DiskImage has all the flexibility you need. Naturally, you can…

PRICE £322 (£386 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk This Gigabyte board is pricier than the Asus, but that results in a bundle of extra features for enthusiasts and gamers. For instance, the top-right corner holds a POST display, power and reset buttons, and switches to jump between BIOS files. It also includes two eight-pin CPU power connectors for overclocking. At the rear I/O, the Aorus has buttons to clear the CMOS and flash the BIOS, and every PCIe x16 and memory slot is bolstered with steel. The rear is similarly strengthened by a huge slab of metal. It uses Realtek’s ALC1220 audio chip with an ESS SABRE9118 DAC – a higher spec than the Asus. Naturally, there’s full dual-graphics support for Nvidia and AMD cards. It also has more fan and…

Let’s give a bit cheer for the NAS server – the unsung hero of so many homes and offices. The unassuming box in the corner never gets much credit; it just quietly plugs away providing backup, storage and a range of other useful services. If it’s working properly, you’ll spend 99% of your time not even knowing that it’s there. But, when you need it, a good NAS has your back, holding your crucial files when your laptop goes down, as well as giving you a safe space to swap files between users and PCs. It might be the place where you store and stream your photos, or where you keep your favourite movies and TV shows, ready to stream. In a business, today’s NAS can do the work of…

PRICE £386 (£482 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com While certain NAS devices try to straddle the business and enthusiast markets, Buffalo’s TeraStation line is focused wholly on the enterprise. The TS-3220 we’re looking at here is a case in point. Not only does it look more at home in a server room than the average living room, but its pared-back feature set is almost entirely focused on core business storage and backup tasks. That’s also reflected in the design and construction. Standing 17cm tall with a 170 x 230mm desktop footprint, the TS-3220 is as big as some four-bay NAS devices, even though it’s a two-bay model. The two drives sit securely inside the rugged-looking chassis in slide-out caddies, where they’re firmly secured behind a lockable door. The unit has its…

PRICE £242 (£290 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/305syn1 The Synology DS218+ is an evolution of the DS218 that came close to scooping an award in our last NAS Labs. In fact, the physical design is virtually identical, and the differences come down to the interior spec. While the DS218 is based on a Realtek quad-core CPU, backed up by 2GB of RAM, the plus model features a dual-core Intel Celeron J3355, giving it some extra grunt. Given that performance was roughly the only thing that let the DS218 down, this is definitely a step in the right direction. The design, as is so often the case with Synology, is smart, functional and understated. The two drive bays are concealed underneath a magnetic flap, while the drives slide out smoothly in tool-less…

PRICE £319 (£400 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The F5-221 is the five-bay sibling of TerraMaster’s budget F2-210 above, and the extra cash goes further than buying you an extra three drive bays. The spec sees the biggest improvements, with the F2-210’s slow Realtek Arm-based CPU replaced by a speedier Intel Celeron J1800 dual-core, while the RAM is doubled to 2GB, with the option to upgrade to 4GB should you need to down the line. Otherwise the construction is similar, with an aluminium chassis, silver-painted caps on the screw-in drive bays and a bulge around the fans at the back – although this time there are two 82mm fans rather than one. You still get two USB 3 ports at the rear along with a Gigabit Ethernet port. The only other…

NAS is one of the last bastions of old-school mechanical magnetic storage. On the one hand, performance isn’t all important, because most of us are limited by the data transfer speeds of Gigabit Ethernet. On the other, the cost and capacity balance works in hard disks’ favour as SSDs still get prohibitively expensive once you go above 1TB – particularly if you need to pack two to five inside a RAID. Yet NAS manufacturers are finding ways to make the most of SSD. One approach is to add a PCIe or M.2 expansion port where you can fit an NVMe drive as a cache, accelerating read times or read/write times according to your drives and RAID configuration. Another is to fill one or more drive bays with SSDs and then…

PRICE 2,500 sensors, 1yr maintenance £3,832 exc VAT from paessler.com If you have a diverse range of hardware and systems to keep an eye on, Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor could be the perfect solution. It supports no fewer than 257 sensor types – all of which are included in the standard package – so there’s a good chance it will work with everything on your network. When we say everything, we mean it. PRTG can keep tabs on servers, switches, routers, Hyper-V, VMware and Citrix XenServer hosts, and plenty of cloud services, business apps and storage providers. And since the software updates itself automatically, you’ll get access to new capabilities as soon as they become available: the latest release brings a new health sensor for Fujitsu’s iRMC server management controller,…

PRICE Appliance with 1yr Total Security, £2,395 exc VAT from guardsite.co.uk As industrial control systems evolve and become internet-connected, they’re inevitably becoming a target for cybercriminals looking to wreak havoc on a grand scale. Protection is clearly a must, but traditional security appliances aren’t designed to cope with the extreme environments in which industrial systems are often deployed. Enter WatchGuard’s Firebox T35-Rugged, which can withstand the harshest of conditions. Clothed in an aluminium casing that acts as a heatsink, it’s designed to work at temperature extremes between-40°C and +60°C, while its IP64 rating means it’s fully protected against dust and water splashes from all directions. This go-anywhere philosophy makes the T35-Rugged extremely versatile. It’s being considered for deployment inside fire engines to provide secure wireless services to responders, as well…

The zettabyte era? Isn’t that when the dinosaurs lived? Most droll. A zettabyte means a very, very large amount of data indeed – a thousand exabytes, a million petabytes or a billion terabytes. It’s estimated that, ten years ago, the entire World Wide Web constituted 500 exabytes of information: today the amount of digital data stored on earth has ballooned to well over 30 zettabytes, and is on course to reach 175 zettabytes in five years. So you want to know what the zettabyte era means? We’re living in it. That’s a fun bit of trivia, but why should my business care? The transition from the age of the exabyte into the zettabyte era isn’t a small progressive step – it’s more like moving up the Richter scale. My relatives…

Lee questions Microsoft’s motives for hiding away the Windows 7 to 10 free upgrade path, before wrestling Windows 98 into upgrade submission I feel that I need to mark the passing of our old friend, Windows 7. Treat my words with a touch of elasticity as I realise that you may be reading this just before or after Windows 7’s execution date, 14 January 2020. Happy New Year, by the way. Currently, I’m up to my neck in migration work. The message that 7’s end is nigh has galvanised home users, which I see as a positive and a bit of a success story for Microsoft. Some believe that their computers will be “cut off” like a gas supply, while others are concerned it’s going to cost a fortune to…

The Apple Card was meant to be a modern way of managing money, but it’s offered a lesson in machine learning and algorithms instead. The Apple Card launched in the US in summer 2019, backed by bank Goldman Sachs. In November, a thread went viral on Twitter, with a customer claiming he’d been offered 20 times more credit by Apple than his wife, despite their finances being identical. The couple were told by customer service that the difference was the fault of the algorithm, but as the customer in question was David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and founder of Basecamp, he didn’t buy it. Instead, he took to Twitter. “Apple Card is a sexist program,” he posted. “It does not matter what the intent of individual…

You’d think supposedly innovative companies could show a little innovation. We’re supposed to believe that tech companies have the answer to everything, but it’s increasingly clear they don’t. Take Amazon. A report in The Atlantic revealed what it’s like to work in an Amazon warehouse, and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. Robots whizz about the warehouse, but automation isn’t yet good enough to entirely replace human workers. Instead, the report reveals that Amazon treats its employees like fleshy robots with repetitive tasks to deliver at breakneck speed – one staffer said she had to scan a new item every 11 seconds. Why innovate with robots when you can treat people like them? Amazon has used algorithmic recommendations to sell more products, mastered the web to stock nigh on everything,…

I’m one of those weird people who actually likes flying long haul. It’s time away from the normal pressures of day-to-day work. It’s quite comfortable, the food is good and it’s an opportunity to catch up on movies that I didn’t catch in the cinema. It helps that I usually turn left when getting onto a plane these days. When I reached the heady age of 40, I decided that long-haul flights in economy were too much like hard work. And, with increasing age, I noticed that it took longer for me to recover from a flight involving multiple time zone changes. Another reason I love flying is that it gives me a chance to explore airport lounges. These are fascinating things with a real social hierarchy at work. Scrape…

THERE WAS A palpable sense of frustration in Raymond’s email. “NordVPN was your Labs Winner in the comparison of VPNs in issue 303. You state that the price for a three-year licence is £82 including VAT at the top of the review on p84… I decided yesterday to purchase a three-year licence for NordVPN and was charged £122.12 in spite of this price being promoted on the NordVPN site as an 83% limited-time discounted deal. “By my calculation, the ‘deal’ being offered by NordVPN is 49% more expensive than the price that you stated in the review. I am aware that market prices do fluctuate but there can be no excuse for this sort of discrepancy.” Don’t worry if you have a sense of déjà vu. We printed a correction…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Pro 16in Powerhouse laptop with a price to match, from £2,399 from apple.com/uk Most people don’t need this much power but you know that you’ll take advantage of what the MacBook Pro offers then you won’t regret buying it. The only question is where you draw the line, with options right up to 8TB SSDs and 64GB of RAM. Whichever version you choose, you’ll benefit from an improved keyboard, spectacular screen and the best audio setup on a laptop. REVIEW Issue 305, p52 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad T490s Lenovo updates its T series with this thin yet powerful laptop. With battery life over 11 hours in our tests, it’s truly business class. From £1,104 from lenovo.com REVIEW Issue 301, p46 Razer Blade 15 Mercury White A beautifully…

@bazzacollins Do you know what your personal data footprint is? At the time of writing, I’ve got 16GB of data stored in my main Google account, 7GB in a secondary account and 12GB in my Dropbox. My external hard drive, largely occupied by my digital photo collection, has 1.6TB of data backed up to a Livedrive account. That’s not to mention all the photos I’ve uploaded to sharing sites such as Flickr, 500px and Amazon Photos over the years. I’ve largely abandoned Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and other accounts with who knows how much data sitting in them. In short, I don’t know what my data footprint is, but it’s well into the terabytes. How much of that data do I actually need? How many of those files have I even…

OPTION1 STICK WITH WINDOWS 7 You’ve got a Windows 7 PC, it still does everything you need it to, you don’t want to retire it just because Microsoft is cutting the support cord. It’s an entirely understandable stance and one that’s gaining traction in our increasingly environmentally conscious times: why relegate another piece of equipment to landfill when it’s still doing a job? If you’re planning to stick with your Windows 7 system, there are sensible precautions to take that may keep the PC running for a good few years yet. The first thing we have to deal with is, inevitably, security. Just because Microsoft is ending support for Windows 7, it doesn’t mean other companies are. As we saw after the demise of Windows XP, security firms continue to offer…

WE AREN’T SURROUNDED BY 40 AND 50-YEAR-OLDS, WHO HAVE ALWAYS WORKED IN AN OFFICE, WITH HUNCHBACKS Red eyes, hunched back, pale skin, Emma looks tired – worse than tired, she looks like a zombie in need of a square meal. Her sorry state isn’t down to a horrific virus, but sitting at a desk, day in, day out, staring at a bright monitor and typing at an unforgiving keyboard. Thankfully, Emma isn’t alive – she hasn’t died after hours hunched at her desk either, despite overwrought headlines proclaiming that “sitting will kill you”. Instead, she’s a work of fiction created by office furniture firm Fellowes to convince us to shell out on ergonomic equipment or face a similar fate. Fellowes isn’t the only one stretching academic research into dire warnings…

To do, doing and done: that’s Trello in a nutshell. The tool is based on Kanban, a project-management and development method named after the Japanese word for “billboard”. That’s a fair description of what Trello looks like: just as a community noticeboard will be covered in notices of events, jobs and announcements, so a Trello board holds lots of small “cards”. Each one usually details a single task, with your various cards grouped into lists to help keep everything organised. Here’s a practical example of how Kanban works. When editors on our sister site Expert Reviews want to cover a product or news story, they create a Trello card and place it in a list entitled “Ideas”. Once the feature has been commissioned, the card is dragged onto the “Writing”…

PRICE £1,224 (£1,469 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/store Since it appeared in 2017, the Surface Laptop has been one of our favourite laptops. While it may not have the convertible kudos of other Surface systems, it’s a slick and portable machine with a fantastic screen and keyboard. Microsoft has always offered a decent range of configurations, but it’s never been available as a large-screen variant – until now. The third-generation lineup includes a whole spread of 15in configurations to go along with the regular 13.5in Surface Laptop 3 (see issue 304. p54). All 13.5in Surface Laptops are powered by Intel processors, but the 15in range takes in two different architectures. Regular consumer-grade models come with AMD Ryzen CPUs but there’s also a Surface Laptop for Business series that uses Intel Core…

PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com If the PC Specialist Inferno L2 opposite is too rich for your tastes, I can think of a thousand reasons to choose the Chillblast Fusion Onyx. It lacks what our American friends might call the “kick-ass” components of its rival – there’s no watercooling, while the graphics card and processor are more modest offerings – but it’s a great value system with quality in all the right places. Let’s start on the outside. Whether you’re constantly tinkering or just like to sit back and admire your PC, you’ll appreciate the Corsair iCUE 465X RGB case; it looks much better than the name suggests. Two sheets of tempered glass and three large front-mounted RGB fans are the stars of the show, and as soon…

PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk In a way, your choice of whether to buy the Inspiron 14 7000 or not is simple. If, like certain of our political leaders, you crave power on a tight budget, this may be the machine for you. With a tenth-generation Intel Core processor married to GeForce MX250 graphics, it tore through most of our benchmarks. But you will make sacrifices along the way. Let’s start with what you’re losing. First, style. This is no Dell XPS range, despite the fact that the bulk of the chassis is made with a magnesium alloy. You also sacrifice convenience. The Inspiron 14 7000 supports Modern Standby, but with no Windows Hello-compatible webcam you’ll either need to enter your PIN or use the optional fingerprint reader.…

PRICE £625 (£750 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk AMD’s Ryzen chips have a reputation for stellar multithreaded performance, and the latest addition to the roster only strengthens that position. The Ryzen 9 3950X is a monster, with 16 cores that support 32 threads, alongside base and boost speeds of 3.5GHz and 4.7GHz respectively. Increasing the core count usually reduces speeds, but that boost figure is the highest in AMD’s consumer range and only behind a handful of Intel parts. The new chip also deploys 64MB of L3 cache and the excellent Zen 2 architecture, complete with its 7nm manufacturing process. The 3950X doubles the core count of the Ryzen 7 3700X and has four more cores than the Ryzen 9 3900X. No other mainstream consumer processor has this many cores, and…

PRICE £176 (£211 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk Portable monitors aren’t a new idea, but it’s taken Lenovo to produce one that’s worth buying. It weighs 570g, can be carried quite comfortably with a two-finger pinch, and takes little room in your bag (Lenovo includes a felt carry case). Build quality is excellent. Applying pressure to the corners of the screen, for instance, barely flexes it at all, and both the main stand hinge and the mini height-adjusting hinge are satisfyingly firm. Narrow bezels keep the dimensions down, but its key characteristic is that it’s incredibly thin – 4.4mm at its narrowest point, and still only 12mm when the integrated stand is folded in. And don’t think that this means it’s vulnerable during your travels: the M14 is much sturdier than…

On one level, a NAS is nothing more than a cheap, commodity Linux server with a custom operating system – but that doesn’t mean all NAS servers are the same, or even serve the same purpose. In this Labs alone you’ll find quiet, compact devices designed to work into a home entertainment system, along with devices designed to sit in the corner of an office, or even integrate with a small company’s existing IT infrastructure. Some use cheap, power-efficient ARM-based CPUs, while others have a similar specification to a low-end business desktop or server. That’s why buying a NAS isn’t so much about buying the best NAS, but about buying the NAS that best fits your requirements. Define your requirements As with most IT purchases, the key is to balance…

One of the worst things about NAS is the name. True, network attached storage describes roughly what NAS is, but it barely gives an inkling of what a NAS device can do. It’s not just about file storage, but about applications and services – and the way NAS brings what used to be server-level tasks to a much smaller, cheaper and more efficient device. A decent NAS is ideal for backup or file-sharing in the home or office, but why stop there? 1 Stream media Do you have a bunch of old videos that you don’t know what to do with? Copy them to your NAS. Rip your DVDs to H.264 video files, and you can put them on there too. Configure your NAS’s video server application – or install…

PRICE £514 (£642 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/305syn2 You might think that four bays would be enough for all but the most ambitious enthusiasts and businesses, but a new breed of five-bay NAS has arrived to prove you wrong. Synology is early into the fray with its new DS1019+, giving all the storage goodness we would have previously seen in the award-winning DS-918+, but with capacity for an extra drive. So why is a five-bay appliance better than a four-bay one? Capacity is the obvious answer, particularly if you use the more space-efficient RAID5 and RAID6 configurations or the company’s own Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR). What’s more, using five drives in a RAID6 or SHR setup gives you redundancy across two drives with the minimum of lost capacity; lose two drives…

PRICE £467 (£560 inc VAT) from novatech.co.uk Part of Western Digital’s My Cloud Business NAS lineup, the DL4100 is getting long in the tooth, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready for retirement. You can buy it as a barebones, driveless enclosure or in 8TB and 12TB prepopulated versions, with our unit shipping with a pair of WD Red 4TB drives and the other two bays left free. Drives are fitted in well-engineered slide-out caddies, making it easy to remove any problem drives and fit new ones. There’s nothing too exciting about the DL4100’s design, but it’s sturdy and well-executed – not to mention the only NAS on test with a two-line LED display, which is always useful for quick alerts and messages. Connectivity is strong, with two USB 3 ports…

Can you only use a NAS hard disk in your NAS, or could you save some cash by filling it with conventional hard disks? Up to a point, any hard disk will do: you could even see improved read/write speeds with a high-performance 7,200rpm drive, although these generally cost more than the equivalent NAS drive. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea. Desktop hard drives are designed for systems that spend significant periods idle, in standby or turned off. NAS drives are designed for systems that are up and running 24/7, and to protect data over a longer lifespan. For example, while the mainstream WD Blue 6TB is rated for 300,000 load/unload cycles, the WD Red 6TB is rated for 600,000. And where the WD Red has a specified…

PRICE Monitoring Suite, 250 nodes, from £5,970 exc VAT from adremsoft.com AdRem’s NetCrunch gets you up and running in a flash. We installed the Server and Console components on a Windows Server 2019 host system, followed the quick start discovery wizard – and, just 15 minutes later, found ourselves looking at a comprehensive read-out of our entire labs network. It was easy to navigate too, thanks to NetCrunch’s informative and intuitive console. The Atlas page provides a colour-coded overview of all network devices, with the Smart Pages feature automatically applying filters based on the device categories selected in the left pane. If you want to create your own custom views, that’s possible as well. The Top 10 chart reveals the systems on your network with the highest CPU, memory and…

PRICE 100 elements, from£2,275excVAT from solarwinds.com SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a well-featured monitoring solution – and it will particularly appeal if you’re already using other SolarWinds products, as it integrates into SolarWind’s central Orion web console. New features in the latest release include a graphical view of usage and status details for Cisco Catalyst 2960 and Juniper EX-series switches. You can also now view real-time graphs of CPU, memory and interface usage for any node, while the addition of widgets to the page settings screen makes it easier to customise views for individual devices. The Orion web server has been updated to improve performance. Having experienced issues ourselves with the speed of previous versions, we’re happy to say that pages now load noticeably more quickly. Setting up NPM…

Why do staff resign? Some find more interesting propositions elsewhere. Others are tempted by better pay. Everyone retires, eventually. But Zoe Morris, president at Frank Recruitment Group, points out one more factor: “One of the most common reasons for professionals wanting to move on is that their current employer isn’t supporting their development.” It shouldn’t be hard. Few people are better placed to decide where a team member’s skills are lacking than that member themselves. Listen to what they say and give them the time they need to pursue those areas; yet so many managers still get it wrong. “Your most valuable workers are ingrained in their own ecosystems and know the niches and skill sets they want to investigate and delve deeper into,” Morris told PC Pro. That’s why…

JONHONEYBALL “Open banking is supposed to fix this, presumably with an API that isn’t made out of holy water and chewing gum” Jon shares his continued joy of using QuickBooks Online, explains how to find out what’s leaking from your network and reveals how to have fun with fonts One of the things we do in the lab is security analysis of software and hardware. This is not a full-blown reverse-engineering hackathon, where you’re trying to find new and unknown vulnerabilities in products, attempting to identify zero-day exploits. This is more of a straightforward security analysis of what’s going on. For example, we record all the traffic to and from a product over a period of time using Wireshark, and then dive into the details to see what communications are…

Davey hears about stealing cement mixers at a fast-paced infosec event in Liverpool, and explains why Apple and Google users are at risk I love being an adopted member of the global infosecurity industry community, not least as I get to meet with such great people who help spread the safer computing message. A good example of this was a cold winter’s night in Liverpool, where a group of the aforementioned took part in the 40th Ignite Liverpool event (igniteliverpool.com). For anyone in the area who hasn’t heard of Ignite, it’s designed to get people thinking and has a fast-paced format that pushes speakers into doing their best to inspire within a strict five-minute slot. Each speaker must have 20 slides, and each is displayed for just 15 seconds in…

Researchers at Cornell University examined hiring algorithms and the companies that make and use them, finding the industry tends towards obscurity rather than transparency. This is a problem given the issues spotted in some automated HR systems, including one that Amazon stopped using after it was revealed that its AI recruitment tool didn’t think women were up to the job. The academics studied 19 different algorithmic employment screening products, digging around for whatever public information they could find – including marketing websites and webinars – to understand how the systems work, how they avoid bias, and how much the developers were openly sharing. Their research revealed that some companies make no mention of bias or fairness in their marketing material, and those that claim to have a fair algorithm often…

Barry Collins Is there a way to keep Windows 7 running safely? Barry sets out three options in our “Windows 7 rescue kit” feature, starting on p30 Mike Jennings Our resident hardware enthusiast puts the new Ryzen 9 3950X to the test, along with two high-end motherboards. Read his verdicts from p72 James Morris If you’re looking to invest in a 3D-rendering machine, James believes Armari has something perfect, all thanks to a 32-core AMD Threadripper. See p62 Jon Honeyball It wouldn’t be PC Pro unless Jon was trying to improve the world. This month, he’s urging us all to use VPNs (not necessarily NordVPN). Turn to p130…

Qualcomm Snapdragon Compute processors Phone chip giant Qualcomm laid out plans to expand into more computing devices with its Snapdragon Compute platform, promising processors to power laptops in the shape of its 7c and 8c chips. The portfolio of processors, designed to run Windows on Arm hardware, leans on Qualcomm’s experience in the smartphone market, with a focus on battery life and mobile connectivity. However, Qualcomm claims devices built on the chips will also deliver performance. The Snapdragon 7c and 8c join the previously announced Snapdragon 8cx, which is designed for enterprises, and should start to appear in devices this year. Intended for sub-$400 laptops, the Snapdragon 7c is built on Qualcomm’s octa-core Kryo 468 CPU and Adreno 618 GPU, with connectivity via the Snapdragon X15 LTE. Qualcomm claims that…

In a previous column, I’ve confessed my addiction to exotic food videos on YouTube, and one I watched recently sparked off thoughts that went way beyond the culinary. Set in Mongolia, it showed a charming but innocent Canadian couple travel to witness an ancient, now rare, cooking event called Boodog – although it doesn’t contain dog and is probably a poor transliteration. The Mongolian chef invited the young man to catch a goat, by hand, on foot, which he dispatched quickly (to the visible discomfort of the young woman) and skinned. He then sewed up all of the goat’s orifices, including (to the amusement of the same woman) the “butthole”, and finally inflated it like a balloon. Next, a fire of twigs and brushwood was lit in which to heat…

Technology with staying power I read your article about bringing a laptop back from the dead with interest (see issue 304, p30). It’s great when you can repair modern tech, as the fix is usually something simple (although laptops, due to their very small form factor, can be hard to work on with big hands; PCs and servers are much easier). However, I would like to pull you up on one important part that you missed from your mobile phones Labs test (see issue 304, p74), which is how easy is it to make an actual phone call and use them to communicate, as you seem to have forgotten that with all the fancy features smartphones sport these days, people do use them to talk to other phones. My daily…

There’s still a way for businesses to keep their Windows 7 PCs running, but from 14 January 2020 you’ll need to pay. On 1 October 2019, Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 announced (pcpro.link/305smb): “Starting on December 1, 2019, businesses of any size can purchase ESU [extended security updates] through the cloud solution provider (CSP) program. This means that customers can work with their partners to get the security they need while they make their way to Windows 10.” So, Microsoft will provide updates, but it won’t be doing so itself. You need to sign up to its cloud solution provider scheme (pcpro.link/305CSP) and find a partner who will sell you an ESU. This isn’t the only hurdle: it will only work if you’re running Windows 7 Professional…

Virtualisation is great, but it means buying a new PC and depends on you having access to the downloads/discs of the software you want to keep using. If both options aren’t possible, there’s another way to keep using that Windows 7 PC safely – and even get the benefit of a performance boost without paying for any upgrades. Installing a Linux distro alongside your Windows 7 installation is a great way to breathe new life into an old PC and retain access to everything you need. Many Linux distros are much more lightweight than Windows (see below) and are far less likely to fall victim to malware. It means that you can still use your old PC for online banking, email and all the other day-to-day stuff without the constant…

Get ergonomic Your workplace is required to set up your desk safely and provide necessary equipment, be it an adjustable chair or a footstool. Have an assessment and ensure you’re working in the best conditions possible. If you have concerns such as a weak wrist or eyes prone to dryness, ask your employer to supply a wrist guard or tinted glasses. Limit mobile work You can set up your desktop perfectly, but your laptop isn’t so easy. Limit your mobile working to what must be done, rather than hunch over a laptop for your entire commute. Take a break There are different formulas for how often you should step away from your laptop, but there’s no need to make it complex. Simply get up and walk away from your desk…

PRICE £3,158 (£3,789 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk When news first dropped that Apple was launching a 16in MacBook Pro, my heart skipped a beat. After years of reviewing pretty much exclusively 13in, 14in and 15in machines, here was something different. Something with a bigger screen but without the bulk traditionally associated with a big laptop. A laptop with plenty of power and storage, but with good enough battery life to be carted around. My excitement fell a little when I discovered the screen measures 16in exactly across the diagonal, however. To put this in context, the “15-inch” MacBook Pro launched last year featured a display that measured 15.4in across the diagonal, so the new one is only 0.6in bigger. But even small improvements such as this should be embraced, especially…

PRICE £1,266 (£1,519 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Dell XPS 13 (see issue 296, p54) has long been one of our favourite laptops. The 2-in-1 version takes that winning formula and adds a fold-around screen, giving you the option of working in tablet, “stand” or “tent” modes, as well as the regular clamshell format. As with all Dell’s XPS 13 systems, the 2-in-1 features an eye-catching “InfinityEdge” display, which in layman’s terms means thin bezels. It looks great, and allows Dell to squeeze a 13.4in screen into a chassis that measures 296 x 207mm, with a 13mm depth at the rear that tapers to 7mm at the front. It’s wonderfully portable, although at 1.33kg it’s weightier than most 13in laptops. Dell offers the CNC-machined aluminium machine in two colours: “Platinum…

PRICE £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews When PC Pro invites companies to submit PCs for review, we usually suggest a likely price to aim for and see which configurations they come up with. How revealing, then, that both Chillblast (opposite) and PC Specialist have opted for an AMD Ryzen system with Nvidia graphics. With an extra £500 to spend compared to Chillblast, PC Specialist went to town with some delicious components. The most important part is, as ever, the processor. PC Specialist supplied the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, a 12-core part based on Zen 2 architecture, and thanks to the cooling effects of the PCS FrostFlow 240 water cooler, this powered to a phenomenal 447 in our benchmarks. I must acknowledge the elephant in the room, though, as a…

PRICE Model X50-F-16K, £1,433 (£1,720 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com This is the fourth Dynabook laptop we’ve seen since Sharp bought and rebranded Toshiba’s laptop division, and it’s safe to say that everything is business as usual. If your company has been buying Toshiba laptops for years, the only obvious change is the logo shifting from one to the other. Security and manageability still come high up the company’s priority list, with a solid magnesium chassis, webcam cover and trusted platform module in place. Dynabook has also embraced newer technologies such as Windows Hello, with an infrared webcam and fingerprint reader both supplied with this configuration, along with a card reader that’s integrated into the right-hand side. If you haven’t seen a Tecra for a while, you may be surprised by…

PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Don’t be fooled by the “Gaming” in this board’s name: in reality, it takes a step back from that are and concentrates on providing a well-rounded spec. There are no on-board buttons or overclocking features, but the Asus has eight SATA ports, three PCIe x16 slots and two M.2 PCIe 4.0 connectors. Memory support extends to a hefty to 128GB, and it has a magnificent seven USB3.2 Gen 2 ports and a USB-C connection at the rear. It also includes a future-proofed 2.5G bits/sec Ether net connection along with a conventional Gigabit port, and there’s dual-band 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 along side Bluetooth 5. Audio is delivered by a Supreme FXS1220A chip, which is a step above the audio circuitry that’s installed on most…

PRICE £358 (£429 inc VAT) from wexphotovideo.com New Eizo ColorEdge CS monitors are always welcome. Designed to be affordable yet provide the quality you’d expect from Eizo, they offer a tempting entry into the world of colour-accurate monitors for people who have previously been priced out of the market. They also mean that a creative business can start thinking about kitting out the whole office, rather than a handful of desks. What don’t you get? For a start, there’s no hood in the box. This will set you back a further £150. And you’ll need to supply your own calibrator; unlike the more expensive CG series, there’s no clever automation here, meaning you’ll need to keep Eizo’s ColorNavigator software running in the background to remind you that, for instance, 200…

PRICE £360 (£450 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk NAS servers aren’t generally known for in-your-face style, but that’s the approach Asustor has taken with its AS-53 series devices. If anything, the AS5304T takes its design cues from gaming hardware, with its gloss-black, angled surfaces, red touches and glowing indicator LEDs. This is entirely intentional; one of the applications Asustor trumpets with this NAS is storing 4K gaming live streams to your NAS, while one of the bundled third-party apps, StreamsGood, is designed to play live streams from a range of popular gaming services directly from your NAS. Remove the angular face plate from its magnetic moorings, and the AS5304T works like a conventional NAS. There are four bays with slide-out caddies, with the drives affixing without tools for easy population and…

PRICE £314 (£377 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/305qnap If the Qnap TS-251B looks a little like a miniature PC, there’s a reason: it practically is. Not only does it have a dual-core Intel Celeron J3355 processor and 4GB of RAM, but an HDMI video input, a set of three audio outputs and three USB 2 ports for plugging in a keyboard and a mouse. It even has a PCIe expansion port where you can install a 10GbE network card, a Qnap dual-port M.2 card for NVMe SSDs, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 card or a wireless network card. These features come into play when you explore the software. On the one hand, Qnap’s HybridDesk Station software gives you a pared-back desktop UI for browsing the internet or playing music, video and…

PRICE £95 (£119 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The TerraMaster F2-210 is the cheapest NAS on test this month, but you wouldn’t guess that from first impressions. The aluminium chassis feels robust and looks expensive, and it’s only the metallic-painted plastic caps on the two sliding drive trays that give the price away. It’s a shame that the drives are held in the old-fashioned way, using four small screws, but if this makes installation a pain, at least TerraMaster bundles the screwdriver in the box. It’s also worth mentioning that there’s no way to lock the drives in place. Elsewhere, the features are unsurprisingly bare bones, with just a Gigabit Ethernet port and two USB 3 ports at the rear, which is dominated by a bulge housing the 80mm fan. Setup…

PRICE £231 (£288 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk There’s no doubt that the My Cloud Duo is a very different kind of NAS. For a start, it’s actually good-looking, thanks to a living-room friendly, white design that hides all the drives and connectivity away. You can get in and replace the drives should you need to, sliding them in and out of a panel at the top, but you suspect that when WD prepopulated the My Cloud Duo in the factory it really intended it to stay that way. It’s difficult to imagine a NAS that needs less work before it’s up and running. This isn’t just a question of the hardware, but also of the software. The My Cloud Duo will set itself up with RAID1 by default and then…

Just when you thought the NAS might be going the way of the iPod, floppy and optical drive, it keeps showing that there’s more it can do – that it still has a role to play in your work or home life. In particular, you might have expected the shift to cloud for storage and streaming to have made network attached storage less appealing. Instead, the devices have adapted, either working hand in hand with cloud services or providing a viable alternative to them – even delivering features and applications that you might not have expected from a NAS. Not for nothing have we called our test NAS servers this month rather than NAS drives. NAS also seems to fit into a wider trend, which feels like a reaction to…

PRICE 50-pack, perpetual £2,920 exc VAT from manageengine.com If you want to keep your licensing simple, OpManager is sure to appeal: pricing is based solely on the number of monitored devices, regardless of how many interfaces or elements each one has, and it starts at just £188 for a perpetual ten-device licence. There’s also an annually licensed option, which includes the NetFlow, IP service-level agreement and deep packet inspection add-ons (which must otherwise be purchased separately). Whichever licensing model you pick, VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer and Nutanix host monitoring come as standard. This latest version of OpManager also supports Windows Server 2019 systems and improves integration with enterprise storage systems from the likes of Dell EMC and NetApp. Deployment is simpler than ever, thanks to over 8,000 predefined device templates, while…

PRICE As reviewed, £5,775 exc VAT from broadberry.co.uk If you’re looking for fast, versatile network storage at a reasonable price, Broadberry’s CyberStore 212WSS-NVME will be right up your street. This all-Supermicro 2U rack server will take up to four PCIe NVMe SSDs, along with eight hot-swap SAS or SATA drives – and to keep things running smoothly, it’s powered by dual ten-core Xeon Scalable Silver 4210 CPUs, along with a generous 96GB of 2,933MHz DDR4 memory. Notably, the server also comes with Windows Storage Server 2019 preinstalled. This OEM-only edition of the OS is functionally identical to the standard Windows Server 2019, but is licensed to function only as a storage server and not as an application server. This doesn’t mean you can’t host apps such as Microsoft Exchange, but…

Paul finds that being a bit techie and a bit managerial was the key to a successful web application redeployment As it says underneath my photo to the right, my day job involves running a web agency. Actually, web agency is the wrong term. We used to be called a “new media” agency, but it’s no longer the 1990s and so new media isn’t new anymore. “Digital agency” is too woolly – everything is digital these days. So “web agency” it remains, even though actually building websites is just a small part of what we do. I’ve been doing this stuff for decades now and, over the years, I’ve discovered that there are two main kinds of bosses when it comes to small-to-medium tech companies. Firstly, there’s the group of…

LABS Security suites Do you still need a full security suite in 2020? We put the best offerings to the test and see if they deliver better protection than Windows Defender. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim an exclusive 16GB PC ProUSB drive. You can read PC Pro in print, as well as on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES Guide to Google Photos Google Photos sells itself on simplicity and storage, but it has a number of secret skills too. We shed light on them in this practical guide. Best of CES 2020 We report from the mean streets of Las Vegas, where we get our hands on early samples of the cutting-edge hardware that will shape the year to come. Making…