Table of contents for April 2020 in PC Pro

THE WAY THAT the Department for Education (DfE) handles sensitive data on children and students needs a thorough independent investigation, experts argue, following revelations that one of its datasets had been used to help betting companies target new customers. The data scare was flagged in an investigation by The Sunday Times, but PC Pro can reveal it may be the tip of the iceberg amid accusations that the DfE’s systems aren’t fit for purpose. The Sunday Times reported how one of the DfE’s datasets – the 28-million-file strong Learning Records Service (LRS) – had been used by a company called GBG to help betting firms verify ages. In fact, betting companies did not have access to the data, but GBG allegedly worked with another company, called Trustopia, to check the age…

Companies might claim that keeping devices running in their twilight years is too expensive, but vigilante self-support groups show it’s possible. Pebble is a good example – a smartwatch firm that was bought by Fitbit, which eventually shut down the servers providing the platform for two million Pebble devices. That could have been the end of the story, but Pebble had a community willing to fight, or at least code, for their watches. Between the acquisition and the servers being turned off 18 months later, the “Rebble Alliance” worked frantically to document critical APIs and development tools. “Pebble didn’t make sense as a Fitbit product, so they did not keep making it, but we’ve had support from Pebblers inside Fitbit, and Fitbit itself,” said Joshua Ward, a coder on the…

@njkobie There’s been a tech backlash growing for years. We see the money and power US firms amass in the name of innovation by abusing our data and overworking staff, and some ofus, the performatively woke like myself, decide to opt out. But that’s not easy. I don’t use Uber because of the way it treats both its drivers and its customers. But it turns out that what I mean by that is I’ve deleted the app from my phone only to reinstall it when needed. Stranded by public transport because of a shooting and stabbing on our bus route, my husband and I tried one of the Uber alternatives, Kapten. However, the driver couldn’t figure out how to get to us and cancelled, leaving us to either walk the…

Of the many arguments for and against Windows 10, and there have been many good ones in PC Pro, the one that concerns me most is the gradual erosion of software and hardware that hospitals use. A Windows 7 computer runs the programs and peripherals in use without needing to upgrade until sufficient analysis of the upgrade has taken place. However, Windows 10 forces its updates on users, which on some occasions have, in my case, rendered graphics cards unusable (one of them in a desktop only a year old). To cap this, some computers “suddenly” changed over from Windows 7 to Windows 10 after clicking the X to close the nagging “Do you want to upgrade?” message. Microsoft’s answer to this debacle was a knowing wink and a half-hearted…

LENOVO LEGION Y740S PRICE $1,100 ON SALE May 2020 This is a clever concept. Love to play games but don’t want to carry a full-on gaming laptop wherever you go? How do you square that circle? With a15.6in laptop that weighs 1.9kg, supports up to 32GB of RAM and – here’s the crucial bit – supports external GPUs. So you use integrated graphics on the move and buy Lenovo’s accompanying Legion BoostStation ($250) to stay on the desk – this supports cards all the way up to the RTX 2080 Super. DELL LATITUDE 9510 PRICE From $1,799 ON SALE 26 March 2020 Available as both a clamshell laptop and a 2-in-1, the handsome Latitude 9510 looks even better in the flesh than it does in photos. With a “target” battery…

RAZER TOMAHAWK PRICE To be confirmed ON SALE Late 2020 The only bright spot in a dull CES from Intel was its “Ghost Canyon” modular computing platform, or NUC 9 (Next Unit of Computing). Razer is an early backer with a stylish prototype called Tomahawk, complete with Core i9 “Extreme Computer Element” and a discrete RTX 2080 graphics card. With all the power of a top-end desktop in a ten-litre chassis, and the promise of easy upgrades, the Tomahawk looks set to be a hit with gamers who don’t want to buy a hulking machine. KINGSTON PCIE GEN3 X4 DC1000B NVME SSD PRICE To be confirmed ON SALE Q2 2020 M.2 SSDs may not seem like a natural fit for data centres, but that’s precisely what Kingston is targeting with…

Google Photos might look like a simple smartphone app – but there’s more to it than you might think. Its flexibility, generous storage and ease of use make it a useful tool for photographers of all abilities, from beginners to advanced hobbyists and even professionals. Photos has evolved over the years. It started out as part of the defunct Google+ social network before being spun out into its own app in 2015, and has now developed a distinct personality of its own. It’s less closely integrated with Google Drive than it once was too. Although your photo library is directly accessible through Google apps and Gmail, you can’t actually get to it from the Drive interface. And your upgrade options are different depending on whether you use G Suite or…

I get where Tim’s coming from in his fulsome praise for the new Edge – in isolation it is a perfectly good browser. But heaping praise on Microsoft for Edge is a bit like lauding the person who puts together a Beatles Greatest Hits album instead of Lennon and McCartney. There’s nothing here – literally nothing – that hasn’t been done by other browser makers before. The new privacy modes are almost a direct lift from Firefox, except not quite as detailed. And if Microsoft is suddenly going to take the high ground on privacy and block trackers from sites you haven’t visited by default, perhaps it should get its own house in order first. When I visit Microsoft.com in Firefox, for instance, I can click on the shield in…

PRICE SF514-54T, £750 (£900 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/uk Acer’s Swift series has always prioritised portability over power and its 2019 iteration of the Swift 5 is no exception. At 990g, it’s among the lightest 14in laptops around, but it still finds room for Intel’s tenth-generation Core processors: either the Intel Core i5-1035G1 or the i7-1065G7. Acer sent us the Core i5 version, backed by 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. As the G1 suffix in the processor’s name reveals, it includes Intel’s mediocre UHD Graphics; these only produced 32.1fps in the undemanding GFXBench Car Chase test at 1080p. If you want Intel’s more powerful Iris Plus graphics, which push 50fps in the same test, opt for the Core i7 chip. The Swift didn’t live up to its name in…

PRICE £1,015 (£1,269 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/uk When Microsoft first announced the Surface Pro X, my mind zoomed immediately back to 2012. This was the year that Microsoft decided to take a leap into the unknown and unleash the Surface RT. Much like the Pro X, this ran a hobbled version of Windows but didn’t support legacy Windows apps. Ultimately, while the hardware itself was decent, the RT failed. Microsoft quickly reverted to regular Windows machines. Now, Microsoft has decided it’s time for another try. ■ Build quality The Surface Pro X is beautifully made. It’s ludicrously slim and the screen takes up most of the front of the chassis, with barely any bezels. And, despite measuring 1.2mm thinner, 5mm narrower and a mere 6mm taller than the Surface Pro…

PRICE 1yr 3 devices, £17 (£20 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/306bit Bitdefender is one of the most effective security suites around. In AV-Test’s tests, it achieved a perfect 100% score for malware protection, and dropped only a few marks for AV-Comparatives. While this doesn’t quite match Norton 360’s flawless record, Bitdefender did better than Norton in the false-positive test, making only a single mistake across all tests – and the suite is nimble too, with a creditable 94% rating for system performance. Bitdefender will appeal if you’re the sort who likes lots of features and options to play with. The customisable dashboard gives access to a selection of core features, and the Protection and Privacy panes offer plenty more to explore. The sheer number of things to click on might seem…

PRICE Free, built into Windows A decade ago, Microsoft launched a free-standing, ultra-lightweight virus scanner called “Security Essentials”. Since then it’s been not only renamed but progressively absorbed into Windows, to the extent that Defender no longer exists at all as a program in its own right: type its name into the Windows 10 Start menu and you’ll simply be directed to the main Security page in the Settings app. Still, if you’re looking for the functions that used to comprise Defender, they’ve been shunted onto the “Virus & threat protection” page and have picked up a few new tricks along the way. Signatures are regularly downloaded via Windows Update, while a cloud protection feature can identify the latest threats even if they’re not in your database. Another addition is…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £33 (£39 inc VAT) from avira.com We’re not saying Avira is pushy, but after installing Antivirus Pro you’re given a dashboard that invites you to install no less than eight other products. To be fair, they’re all free to download, but the Software Updater, Password Manager and VPN are feature-limited, and cost extra to fully enable. The antivirus module itself is disappointingly bare. You can browse pages dedicated to Ransomware Protection, Web Protection and Mail Protection, but each one offers only a single on/off switch, and you have to open the Settings window to discover and adjust what gets scanned by each module. It’s a similar story with the Firewall: the main interface lets you turn it on and off, but only on peering into the Settings…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £16 (£19 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/306fsecure The F-Secure SAFE interface is clean and clear – and the suite itself certainly isn’t cluttered with features. Naturally, it’ll watch for viruses, and carry out on-demand scans, but there’s little in the way of secondary functions to discover. To some extent, this is because the important stuff is taking place behind the scenes. F-Secure doesn’t transfer your sensitive transactions into a separate browser, but it does install extensions for Chrome and Firefox aimed at doing a similar job. It even detects when you’re connected to a payment or banking site and locks down all other network traffic, so snoopers can’t capture your details. Similarly, while SAFE doesn’t make a song and dance about its anti-ransomware feature, it’s there in the…

PRICE Free from pandasecurity.com Panda Free Antivirus doesn’t bundle in a custom browser, parental controls or anything fancy like that. The focus is squarely on the important job of malware detection – and, as you would hope, it does it rather well, achieving a 99.6% protection rate in AV-Comparatives’ most recent report. That lab did find that the software also flagged up 12 false positives, which might confound less experienced users, but that’s way ahead of Windows Defender, and even beats some paid-for contenders. A few secondary tools are included as well. The Rescue Kit lets you create a bootable flash drive for disinfecting compromised systems, while the Process Monitor works like a simple manual firewall: you can view all running processes, or only those accessing the internet, inspect their…

They say you never forget your first antivirus scanner. Mine was a simple program called VirusX on the Commodore Amiga. It was free – or “public domain” as we used to say – and it saved my bacon once or twice when friends came to visit with dodgy disks full of pirated software. I was lucky, because with no domestic internet service to speak of, there was no easy way to ensure that your copy of VirusX was au fait with the latest threats. If you wanted to update your protection, you had to send off a cheque or postal order to your chosen software library, and wait for a 3.5in floppy to arrive in the post a few days later containing a complete new version of the software. How…

PRICE With 1yr TotalProtect Plus, £1,849 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Sophos’ newest SMB security appliance comes straight in at the top of the range. Taking performance to new heights, the XG 135w Rev. 3 quotes a huge raw firewall throughput of 8Gbits/sec, and a decent 1.2Gbits/sec with all security services enabled. It’s not just fast, but versatile. In addition to eight copper Gigabit Ethernet ports and one SFP fibre port, it presents dual-band 802.11ac wireless services, while an expansion slot allows you to add optional DSL, 3G/4G or Gigabit SFP cards – or a second Wi-Fi module. Another strength is the price. The figure we’ve shown above includes a one-year TotalProtect Plus subscription, which covers the network, web, email and web server protection modules, along with Sophos’ Sandstorm cloud sandbox…

PRICE Diskless, £956 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Synology’s four-bay RackStation RS820+ NAS is a significant upgrade on its predecessor, the RS818+. That model, introduced two years ago, was held back by an ageing Atom C2538 CPU and relatively slow DDR3L memory; the RS820+ sports a more powerful quad-core 2.1GHz Atom C3538 and faster DDR4 RAM. The RS820RP+ model we tested also adds power redundancy courtesy of dual 150W hotplug power supplies. Interestingly, the new appliance has also gained 2GB of base memory embedded onto the motherboard. That means its single SODIMM slot can be used to boost capacity to a total of 18GB, a modest step up from the 16GB on the older model. Upgrades are easy: you simply need to undo the four screws holding the lid down to…

It’s certainly true that the latest high-speed inkjet printers are a huge leap forward compared to the cheap desktop devices of old. They really have been engineered to be office grade, with print speeds that can be quite eye-popping. Cast aside any ideas that all inkjets are slow, with this modern breed rivalling and sometimes beating their laser rivals for speed. They don’t necessarily provide quite the same crispness as a laser printer because an ink-based system is always going to be more susceptible to ink-creep on the paper stock you choose. But this itself opens up an interesting question: what quality do you actually need? I don’t have data to back this up, but I suspect that over 95% of printouts remain within the walls of the business. So…

Lee begins to be won over by Microsoft’s insistence on online accounts and helps a customer who lost thousands of pounds to a copycat HP website You’ll be aware of the adage that warns against meeting one’s heroes. Years of working in television taught me that the danger isn’t that your idol could shatter illusions, but to prevent oneself from asking a daft question and feeling like a complete berk. Jonathan Bray is a technical genius, testing legend and thoroughly decent chap. Even when a goon like me asks if he’s set up a laptop lately. I have form in this area, having once asked Geoff Capes if he needed help carrying some heavy shopping. Jonathan and I discussed Windows 10’s latest attempt to trick users into creating online accounts.…

There’s something to be said for working together — and although Elon Musk creates more real innovation than most in Silicon Valley, he’s not always a team player. That causes problems. Musk’s SpaceX is launching 42,000 of its Starlink satellites into the sky to build a sky-high network for broadband to reach unserved areas; a noble goal. So far, only 120 have been hurled into space, but they’re already angering astronomers. Clarae Martínez-Vázquez, from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, said a train of 19 Starlink satellites ruined exposures on the dark energy camera she was working with for five minutes. “Rather depressing,” she tweeted. “This is not cool!” Another astronomer, Simon Porter at the Southwest Research Institute, said that despite Musk’s green credentials for pushing forward electric…

On sale Thursday 12 March LABS Workstations If you need heavyweight computing, this year’s collection of workstations looks more enticing than ever. Whatever your budget, whatever your task, one of our supremely powerful systems will deliver exactly what you need. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim an exclusive 16GB PC Pro USB drive. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES The changing shape of computing Flexible screens, 5G and new low-power yet high-performance processors mean that computing devices in 2030 could look very different from today… Deep Dive: Windows startup One of the reasons why Windows PCs run so slowly after a year or two is the cluster of services and software that start up. We…

TO SAY THERE’S a bumper crop of laptops from this year’s CES (see p26) would be an insult to the word bumper. I’m genuinely excited about what’s to come, and that’s in no small part down to magnificent work done by engineers at AMD and Intel. What a shame, then, that both firms make it so difficult for people to understand what they’re buying. For example, make a trip to currys.co.uk. It currently offers 13 filters for laptop processors, with the Intel options ranging from a Celeron to a Core i9. Within that, you could buy a laptop toting a Pentium Silver or a Pentium Gold. While we can expect anybody to understand that Gold is superior to Silver, and a Core i9 definitely sounds better than a Core i3,…

1 EU fixes sights on facial recognition Facial recognition faces scrutiny in the EU, with officials mulling over a five-year ban on it in public spaces while potential threats are investigated. Face-recognition systems have been tested in UK train stations, shopping centres and football stadia with little oversight, but continental watchdogs are proposing a three-to-five-year moratorium to assess the risks to privacy from abuse by private and public operators. 2 Number’s up for unlucky lottery hacker A UK hacker felt the full force of computer misuse laws when he was jailed for nine months for his role in an attack on the National Lottery system. Anwar Batson made a life-changing £5 out of the attack, which used readily downloadable tools, but lottery organiser Camelot justified the case saying its response…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS 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 if you know that you’ll take advantage of what the MacBook Pro offers, 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 £1,080 from lenovo.com REVIEW Issue 301, p46 Razer Blade 15 Mercury White A beautifully…

@bazzacollins Six days. Six sodding days of grinding, thumping, scraping, banging, clanging, swearing and engines revving is what it took Virgin Media to dig up 100 yards of our road to install fibre. If Virgin Media had been digging trenches during the war, I’d be getting my broadband from Deutsche Telekom by now. However, the Saturday morning pneumatic-drill wake-up call might just have been worth it, as I’m now one of the mere 10% to have the option of a full-fibre connection. The rest of you saps? Join the queue, because a nightmarish combination of Boris, Ofcom, Openreach and a handful of other major players are trying to work out how we might get the remaining 90% of the UK sorted. Holding your breath is definitely not recommended. Let’s start…

ACER CONCEPTD 7 EZEL PRICE From €2,499 ON SALE April 2020 Part of Acer’s high-end range aimed at creative types, the ConceptD7 Ezel Pro’s party trick is a screen that folds back on itself. Why? Acer wants “designers to collaborate, share and bring ideas to life” and feels that being able to whip out the built-in Wacom pen and choose the right screen orientation for your needs – “sharing mode, floating mode, stand mode, pad mode or display mode” – could be a killer blow. While we remain to be convinced that’s what creatives really want, they’ll definitely appreciate the bright 4K IPS screen complete with Pantone colour matching. There’s bags of power too, with Xeons and professional graphics accelerators available if you opt for the more expensive “Pro” range…

CASTAWAY PRICE £183 ON SALE May 2020 This magnetically attached second screen acts as both a cover for your phone and its second screen. So you could watch videos on it while browsing the web on your phone, or even use it as a virtual keyboard. As it’s connected by a magnet, it’s also easy to separate – you could pass it over to friends to flip through photos stored on your phone, for instance. We’re just worried we’d buy it and, after a week’s use, it would live in a drawer… ROYOLE MIRAGE SMART SPEAKER PRICE $899 ON SALE Q2 2020 There’s a reason this speaker is in our “Weird & wonderful” section, although we think it’s more the former than the latter. Royole wowed us last year with…

The Google Photos app automatically uploads images taken on your phone, but you can also add images that were shot on a different camera. If you’re an Adobe Lightroom user, an easy way to do this is using Jeffrey Friedl’s Export to Google Photos add-on, available from pcpro.link/306lr. To install it, open Lightroom and click File followed by “Plugin Manager…”, then click Add and select the downloaded file. The plugin needs to be authenticated with Google Photos before first use, so open a browser window and log in to Google Photos. Now return to Lightroom and select an image to upload. Click File followed by Export, then select “jf Google Photos” from the dropdown menu beside Export To. Click “Authenticate to Google Photos”, click to grant the requested permissions and…

PRICE £1,113 (£1,335 inc VAT) from lenovo.co.uk While the essential idea behind the Lenovo C940 is the same as the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (see issue 305, p60), this convertible laptop has two immediate advantages: it comes with an active stylus, which stows away neatly in a slot in the spine of the machine and it includes a larger display. The Yoga’s measures 14in across the diagonal with an aspect ratio of 16:9, while the Dell’s is 13.4in and a squarer 16:10. You can configure the Yoga C940 with a 1080p or 4K panel, with Lenovo sending me the former for testing. It’s a fine display but if you’re going to use it for photo editing or colour-critical design work, seek out the Intel Graphics Control Panel by searching for…

PRICE £1,309 (£1,636 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk HP might not be the first company you think of when it comes to colour-accurate monitors, but don’t forget that it has been at the forefront of print technologies for decades: HP has a vested interest in making sure that what you see is what you get. Its high-end DreamColor range of monitors is nothing new, dating back to 2008; what makes the Z27 G2 so interesting is HP’s focus on the DCI-P3 gamut (see our Deep Dive on colour management, p44). In particular, it promises 98% coverage of that colour space, which is the preferred choice for digital video production; this is no coincidence, as DCI stands for Digital Camera Initiatives, a joint venture formed by firms such as Warner Bros, 20th…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £17 (£20 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/306kas If you buy Kaspersky Internet Security from the company’s website, you’ll pay £45 for a one-year, three-device licence – but the publisher allows retailers to apply deep discounts, and if you skip over to the PC Pro store you’ll find the same package for just £20. That’s a tempting price for a security suite that goes far beyond real-time malware protection. Some of the extra features are familiar. The Safe Money browser does the same job as any other secure browser, although the green border helps ensure that you don’t get your windows mixed up, and we also like the way it can be set to spring up only when you arrive at a site that processes financial transactions. More innovative…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £14 (£17 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/306bull BullGuard is one of the cheapest internet security suites around, and for the money it delivers a good degree of malware protection. It’s not the leader, but it’s on par with Kaspersky, and it only slipped up once in AV-Test’s false-positives test – although it’s important to note that AV-Comparatives didn’t test it. The package also brings together a fair set of features, including both a safe browser and an integrated backup client. BullGuard doesn’t provide online storage for your files, but it works with Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, which may suffice to protect your precious files against ransomware. That’s just as well, since BullGuard doesn’t offer any sort of ransomware-specific protection. There’s a set of bespoke parental controls, which…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £36 (£43 inc VAT) from gdatasoftware.co.uk G Data’s dark red trim gives it the air of an emergency service, and the interface provides a sober, functional overview of your protection. The first two pages in particular are a hit: it only takes two clicks to check your system status, carry out various types of scan or create a bootable rescue disk. The third page is for G Data’s proprietary, fully customisable firewall. Would-be sysadmins will appreciate the freedom this gives you to create your own security rules, but it’s fiddly to work with because the necessary controls are spread across three tabs in the main interface and then four more panes in the Settings window. Next up is what’s advertised as a “cloud backup” feature – but…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £17 (£20 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/306trend If you’re looking for uncompromising virus protection, you can’t do better than Trend Micro Internet Security. Along with Norton 360, it’s one of only two security suites this month to achieve a faultless 100% protection score. We like its compact, no-nonsense front-end, which divides functions neatly across four pages. On the Device page, you’ll find scan settings, and an optimisation wizard that checks for security vulnerabilities, wasted disk space and personal history files that could compromise your privacy. You can also set up the versatile Mute Mode, which not only silences interruptions when you’re running in full-screen mode, but can also temporarily disable Windows Update and automatically kill nominated processes to ensure they don’t interfere with your experience. The Privacy page…

PRICE With 1yr Total Security Suite, £2,366 exc VAT from guardsite.co.uk Gateway security often involves a performance trade-off, but WatchGuard’s Firebox T70 is designed for SMBs who aren’t willing to compromise. It’s the vendor’s first appliance built on an Intel CPU, which enables it to deliver high-speed deep packet inspection of HTTPS traffic – something many rival appliances struggle with. Indeed, the T70’s numbers are impressive across the board. It claims a raw firewall throughput of 4Gbits/sec, and a remarkable 1.1Gbits/sec with all UTM services enabled. You don’t have to pay a steep premium for this performance either: the appliance costs a competitive £2,366 exc VAT, including a one-year subscription to WatchGuard’s Total Security Suite. That subscription unleashes a wealth of security measures. Along with the aforementioned DPI, you get…

PRICE £248 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com The name smacks of hyperbole, but for small businesses seeking a painless way to update their networks, the UniFi Dream Machine (UDM) might seem like a dream come true: it delivers a complete, secure, fully managed networking solution in one compact and easy to install cylinder. This is no cut-down appliance, either: it runs a full-fat edition of Ubiquiti’s UniFi Network Controller (UNC) software, while the integrated Advanced Security Gateway (ASG) provides a business-class firewall with IDS or IPS threat protection and deep packet inspection. It’s all powered by a 1.7GHz quad-core ARM Cortex CPU and 2GB of RAM, ensuring performance remains up to par even during periods of heavy load. Build quality is also excellent: the UDM weighs just over a kilo, with…

“When I heard the noise, the diagnosis was instant and brutal: the hard disks were on their way out” Jon switches off Marillion to discover why his PC is running so dog slow, finally drops Dropbox and has a bit of fun with the Mac Pro configurator Ker-chunk. Ker-chunk. Ker-chunk. The sound of doom from a desktop computer. But before we dive into what happened, let’s consider the back story. In the lab, there’s a work area for testing audio products. It houses some expensive and specialist equipment, including oscilloscopes, arbitrary function generators and two audio analysers: one from Audiomatica in Italy called Clio and a vastly more expensive item from Prism in Cambridge called dScope Series III. Clio does a sterling job for day-to-day measurements (generator, FFT analysis, third…

Davey dedicates his column to password security, starting with easy tips for you to share with friends before upping the ante with Authy As you might imagine, I get an awful lot of press releases, research papers and statistical surveys coming my way. I haven’t counted them as I’m not that sad, but the majority cover three topics: data breaches, vulnerabilities and passwords. I focused on password reuse in the final paragraph of my last column, and I’m going to fully focus on passwords in this, my last column of 2019. “What do you mean? It’s February 2020 you fool!” It’s actually a few days before Christmas in my office (and the rest of the country to be fair), courtesy of the peculiarities of preparing a print publication. Which means…

When you think of drones, you may imagine annoying whirring machines filling the air or shutting down Gatwick. But some projects have found ways to put drones to better use, saving endangered animals, watching for floods and starting fires – but in a good way. BATHAWK ON ELEPHANT PATROL Poachers kill an elephant every 14 minutes across the African continent, while a rhino is killed twice a day. That’s according to Air Shepherd, an organisation that uses drones to watch for threats to wildlife in reserves across South Africa, Malawi and Zimbabwe. It then alerts anti-poaching teams and park rangers. In particular, the drones monitor water holes, which poachers poison with cyanide before returning to remove tusks from the dead elephants that drink from it. Made by UAV Drone Solutions…

If you listened to our CES podcast, recorded by editor Tim and myself in my room at The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, you’ll know there was much to be inspired, annoyed and concerned about at the brain-scramblingly big show. Looking back with a week’s hindsight, two thoughts stick in my mind as significant concerns, and both rotate around product updates and marketplace churn. I write this on the last day of support for Windows 7, a product that has been around for half a lifetime for many of its younger users. It takes someone with seriously greying hair like myself to hark back to XP, and then NT 4 and all the way to Windows 3.0. But Microsoft is finally pulling the plug on Windows 7. At the same…

Alan Martin Are the Fairphone 3’s ethical credentials worth paying for? Alan grapples with his own conscience in search for an answer on p70 Barry Collins How does a lifelong Windows user switch to a Mac? Newbie Barry taps into the wisdom of Apple old-timer Jon Honeyball from p36 Paul Ockenden In a column that all Barclays customers should read, Paul explains a way to bypass the awful payment apps provided by banks on p113 Jon Bray Microsoft believes its Surface Pro X is the best combination yet of tablet and laptop, but Jon has different ideas. Discover why on p68…

My Christmas present to myself this year was a guitar, an Ibanez AS73 Artcore. This isn’t meant to replace my vintage MIJ Strat but rather to complement it in a jazzier direction. 50-odd years ago, I fell in love with blues, ragtime and country finger-picking, then slowly gravitated toward jazz via Jim Hall and Joe Pass, then to current Americana-fusionists like Bill Frisell, Charlie Hunter and Julian Lage (none of whom I’m anywhere near skill-wise). It’s a long time since I was in a band and I play mostly for amusement, but I can’t escape the fact that those idols all work best in a trio format, with drums and bass. My rig includes a Hofner violin bass, drum machine and looper pedal to record and replay accompaniments, and I…

You may not know Brian Leonard’s name, but you’ve almost certainly used one of his products. He was design director at Dell during the genesis of its XPS range, before returning to Lenovo four years ago. Even at that point, he was sketching ideas of what a foldable computer could look like; he just had to wait a further two years for LG to catch up and produce the required AMOLED panels. “The ideas around folding screens have been around for a long time,” he told PC Pro in an exclusive interview on Lenovo’s bustling stand, “and we’ve all been dreaming about ’em. So fake models, screens and stuff, we’ve been doing for years. It was maybe two years ago we saw the first working panel and that’s really when…

SUUNTO 7 PRICE £429 ON SALE Now We have excellent news for anyone who wants a Google Android Wear watch but fancies battery life of more than a day: as the Suunto 7 is based on Qualcomm’s Wear 3100 chip, it can keep going for two days as a smartwatch or 12 hours if you use GPS tracking. As Jon Bray wrote in his first-look review on Expert Reviews, “it’s styled to appeal to adventuresome types with a chunky, rugged case and a couple of big buttons on the right side, designed to be operable while wearing gloves”. With a bright 1.39in OLED screen, water resistance to 50m and support for offline topographic mapping (it has 8GB of storage), along with 70 preset tracking modes, this is a watch built…

I took me 20 years, but I’ve finally bought a Mac. My much-loved ThinkPad was nearing the end of its three-year warranty and starting to show signs that it was running out of puff – and then Apple launched the 16in MacBook Pro. The terrible Butterfly keyboard had gone, the onboard graphics looked decent and the speakers were reportedly phenomenal. I specced up the model I wanted online, tried desperately hard to talk the Apple sales line into a discount, then swallowed something hard and jagged and gave them my credit card details. After its extraordinary 10,000-mile journey from Shanghai to Anchorage, via Cologne in Germany, and finally to my door after a side-trip to Stanford-Le-Hope, I’m typing this very feature on my new MacBook. Even at this early stage,…

PRICE Free from microsoft.com A web browser is no longer a web browser. It’s the gravitational force that companies use to tie you to their services, whether that’s email, shopping or file storage. If Microsoft can convince you to switch from Chrome to Edge then it’s taken the first step towards making you a paid-up member of its clan. You don’t need to pay a penny upfront: Microsoft is making money from you through advertising and, it hopes, upgrades to subscription services. That’s why Microsoft took the drastic decision to use Chromium, the rendering engine that powers Google Chrome, for this latest version of Edge rather than stick to its own EdgeHTML. It’s a pragmatic move that we’ve come to expect from Satya Nadella’s Microsoft, based on the understanding that…

PRICE £2,750 (£3,300 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk As the saying goes, a gamer and his money are soon parted. If you’ve managed to resist the allure of an upgrade for the past couple of years, though, this system may just be enough to push you over the edge. Of course, it has cutting-edge technology. Of course, it’s stupidly fast. Of course, you should probably stop reading this review if you don’t have £3,300 kicking around your bank account. Let’s address its size first. For readers who aren’t familiar with the NZXT H710 chassis, this mid-tower ATX case puts airflow and expandability as top priorities over compactness; it’s more akin to a workstation chassis than a standard system. With a retail price of £140 from Scan, it’s packed with quality from…

PRICE £1,016 (£1,220 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Make no mistake: the Core i9-10980XE is a monster 18-core CPU with staggering levels of performance by almost any measure. But it’s more evidence that Intel is falling further behind AMD at the top end, both in terms of speed and value. For instance, a price of £1,220 inc VAT is almost £500 more expensive than the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X (see issue 305, p72). And, while Intel proudly describes the i9-10980XE as a 10th Gen part using a design called Cascade Lake-X, this is a cosmetic upgrade: the new chip uses a refined version of 2017’s Skylake-X architecture. It relies on the same core architecture and the same 14nm manufacturing process, only making minor improvements when compared to the i9-9980XE. For example,…

PRICE £392 (£470 inc VAT) from uk.gearbest.com Xiaomi might not be a household name in the UK yet, but surely that will change if it continues to offer handsets with flagship features at palatable prices. While the Mi Note 10 is more expensive than most of the company’s products, it also includes one unique feature: a 108-megapixel camera. ■ Into focus This is a tad surprising when you consider that Samsung makes the Isocell Plus sensor inside; until now, this sensor could only be found on high-priced digital cameras. By default, the camera captures a 27-megapixel image, merging four neighbouring pixels of the same colour into one big pixel, in a process called “pixel-binning”. Xiaomi says this method increases the resolution of images, with brighter nighttime shots and reduced visual…

PRICE Freefrom avast.com A vast’s headline price of zero quid can’t be beaten – but the trade-off is some quite aggressive in-application marketing. The tone is set right from the word go, with an installation process that pops up warnings such as “you only have a basic firewall” and “your PC may be suffering from slowdown and clutter”. Click through and suddenly you’re asked to pay £20 a year for Avast’s Premium Security package; you can continue with free protection by closing the window, but this isn’t explained. Advertising is one thing, but this feels positively deceptive. There’s more sneaky design at play once the program’s installed. Click around the Protection, Privacy and Performance panes and you’ll find icons for 18 features – but only a minority of these are…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £13 (£15 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/306nor Symantec keeps on tinkering with the name of its flagship security suite: last year it was Norton Security, but now it’s been rebranded as Norton 360. The water is further muddied by the fact that it’s offered in Standard, Deluxe and Premium editions, which cover one, three (or five) and ten devices. The feature sets are the same, though, except that the single-device licence doesn’t include the parental control module – which is fair enough, as kids will presumably be using a separate device anyway. Uniquely, Norton includes a cloud backup module. You’ll need to be selective about what you back up, as the Standard and Deluxe licences come with a fairly tight 10GB and 25GB of storage (50GB if you…

PRICE Free from avg.com AVG Antivirus Free looks and feels a lot like Avast’s free offering – which isn’t very surprising as it’s published by the same company. You get the same safe browser, and the same silent-running mode, which can be either manually activated or set to kick in when specific apps are running. Click on the Settings icon and you get a largely identical range of controls for things such as detection strictness and selective website blocking. Predictably, AVG also shares Avast’s enthusiasm for the upsell. As with Avast, the installation process immediately tried to guide us into adding on a premium feature (in this case the VPN), and regaled us with some very familiar warnings about how this free software doesn’t include either ransomware protection or a…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £42 (£50 inc VAT) from eset.com A perennial concern with security software is whether it will slow down your PC. With Eset you don’t need to worry: in AV-Comparatives’ most recent test this suite garnered top marks for performance. Testers found that the software slightly slowed down the first launch of newly installed applications, but rated it “very fast” in all other scenarios. Another thing you might like about Eset is that the developer provides its own firewall, with fully customisable rules and any number of configurable network zones. It defaults to Automatic mode, which won’t bother you, but you can switch to Interactive mode if you prefer to personally approve connection requests – or choose the much stricter Policy mode, which blocks all connections that aren’t…

PRICE 1yr 3devices, £8 (£10 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/306mcafee Five years ago, McAfee had an unfortunate reputation for sub-standard protection. But since parting ways with former owner Intel, the company has been turning things around, with aggressive pricing that’s presumably aimed at persuading doubters to give it another chance. Thus we find the company’s Total Protection suite available online for one penny under a tenner. Despite its name, Total Protection isn’t all that fully featured. It includes cross-platform parental control features, but neither backup nor VPN capabilities are included. Moreover, not all of the stuff you do get seems necessary. For example, the Web Boost feature merely prevents videos from automatically playing in your browser, while App Boost dynamically tweaks task priorities and resource usage to help certain programs run…

If you receive a suspicious-looking file as an email attachment – or perhaps download one from a website you don’t wholly trust – you might want to check it out in a safe, isolated environment. One option is to set up a virtual Windows installation using a hypervisor tool like VirtualBox (virtualbox.org). However, if you’re running an up-to-date version of Windows 10, there’s an easier way: just fire up the Windows Sandbox, a new feature added in the Windows 10 May 2019 Update. To use it, all you need is a processor that supports hardware virtualisation (a given on most modern computers) and a suitable version of Windows 10. Officially, only the Professional and Enterprise editions are supported, but you can enable it on the Home edition using a cunning…

PRICE £150 exc VAT from ebuyer.com It may look like a regular router, but DrayTek’s Vigor 2862 is a bona fide security gateway, with optional remote management via the cloud-hosted VigorACS2 service. To be sure, it’s not as feature-packed as some chunkier, more expensive options. Notably, the Vigor 2862 doesn’t offer antivirus services, nor any sort of spam filtering. You do, however, get a 400Mbits/sec SPI firewall, plus a good range of web-filtering and app-control options. The Vigor 2862 will also make your day if you’re looking to provide secure connections for remote staff, as it supports up to 32 concurrent IPsec VPN tunnels and 16 simultaneous SSL connections, via DrayTek’s free Smart VPN client for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. And while the appliance doesn’t have built-in wireless services,…

PRICE With1rNebula Security Pack licence, £515 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk Zyxel’s security appliances divide into two families: the USG models are designed for local administration, while the NSG range can be managed from anywhere in the world using Zyxel’s Nebula Control Center (NCC) cloud platform. The model we tested this month is the NSG200, which is aimed at small offices, and the price shown includes your first year’s subscription to Zyxel’s Nebula Security Pack. This enables IDP, application control, content filtering and antivirus security services on the appliance, and also upgrades your access to the NCC console. The basic free service has limited features, including a logging limit of just seven days, but your Security Pack licence enables Nebula Professional, which gives you a full year’s worth of logging and…

“We are very much down the inkjet route these days,” Peter Silcock, manager of Epson’s business management division told PC Pro. “Our focus is 100% on business inkjet, because we see it as being the future.” It comes down to two things, Silcock explains: sustainability and productivity. Inkjet printer tech, he said, “cuts energy by 96% because it doesn’t have to use a fuser. There’s none of that heating up and cooling down business that you get with a laser printer.” Silcock believes we’ve become used to making compromises for the mechanics of laser printing, but we’ve reached the point where we need to break the habit. “Laser devices are kind of unsustainable. We need to look at more [business] efficient and energy-efficient devices. So, we have a whole range…

Are VPNs on their way out? Here’s what NetFoundry CEO Galeal Zino told us: “The demand for high-performance, secure connectivity is at an all-time high as businesses embrace and deploy modern cloud applications. However, the perimeter-based security provided by VPNs is lacking. VPNs aren’t built to protect corporate assets from insider threats, including employees who have already been logged into the network. The performance and security challenges of traditional VPNs are well documented. “The bottom line is that VPNs don’t meet today’s infrastructure and application requirements. They had their heyday in 1998 as the only secure way to do transactions across the widening internet and spiralling extranets. But they fail at modern needs like connectivity performance, cloud networking, IoT network awareness and application availability. There’s no VPN that can offer…

Steve buys lovely refurbished German PCs before helping to cleanse the rubbish from another friend’s not-at-all lovely refurbished machine My client was in a very common situation. It had become completely reliant on a software vendor that defines all its computing requirements because it produces a tightly defined line of business software suite that does everything said business needs. A couple of minor omissions aside, a single executable did everything, including presenting at point-of-sale, printing receipts, and spitting out stock and trading volume reports. Quite a lot of the IT business works this way now. I was quite surprised to find that the software company hadn’t gone one step further and done some branded hardware, like those ruggedised touchscreen terminals you see in some pubs and restaurants. But no… standard…