Table of contents for July 2021 in PC Pro

Here’s an alternative way of looking at the tech industry. Take it as read that firms are there to grab your money. A radical thought, I know, but with so many services provided for “free” and so much spin around companies’ intentions, there comes a time when you have to – and excuse my language here – cut through the crap. Step back to pre-internet days and manufacturers’ business models were easy to grasp. They would create such attractive products or software that you would go out – literally, to shops – and buy them. That model rolled on through the early 2010s, but then someone with a calculator figured out how expensive it was to attract new customers. Wouldn’t it be a lot better if the company could hook…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Apple MacBook Air Affordable Apple M1 ultraportable from £999 from apple.com/uk Apple’s ARM-based M1 chip is blastin away its AMD and Intel x86 opposition with truly extraordinary speeds. Even the low-end model with 8GB of RAM is ludicrously fast. Apple makes no changes to the Air’s design, but it still looks fabulous and now supports both USB 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Add battery life into the teens and its biggest threat comes from the updated M1 MacBook Pro 13in. REVIEW Issue 316, p40 ALTERNATIVES Dell XPS 17 (2020) The XPS 17 is an excellent alternative to the 16in MacBook Pro, thanks to a 17in IPS screen, plenty of power, all-round quality and a great range of specifications. From £1,799 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 315, p48 Apple MacBook Pro 13in…

Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro. He’s due to expire in 2058, based on current UK life expectancy. Strap in. @bazzacollins Killing off tech is hard – even when you’re the company that controls it. Around 1% of desktop users still run Windows XP and a ridiculous 25% are still on Windows 7, despite both being many years retired. Similarly, Adobe gave Flash the lethal injection at the end of last year, but there are companies desperate to keep Flash breathing. In January, PC Pro podcast listeners may remember me yakking on about a piece of software called Surpass Viewer, which the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) was recommending pupils install on their computers so that they could carry on taking the Flash-based assessments the exam board had…

SCORE PRICE £300 (£360 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Orbi LBR20 is a router with a convenient failover mode: if your main connection goes down, it can fall back on a 4G nano-SIM that slots into the base of the modem. Setting up the Orbi to run in failover mode is far from intuitive: it took guidance from Netgear’s support team to find the two different advanced settings you need to tweak before it worked. (Make sure you untick the box that turns the WAN/LAN1 port into WAN-only mode if you don’t want to spend six hours swearing.) Setup hurdles overcome, however, and performance proved to be great. There’s no Wi-Fi 6 here, but the tri-band MU-MIMO router is fast and should easily cover a modest-sized home. Even through two external walls, we…

If your web browser feels sluggish, it could be that the issue isn’t with your Wi-Fi at all. The fastest router in the world won’t speed up the internet if there’s a slow service coming from your internet service provider (ISP). To check you’re getting what you pay for, you can use a free online speed checker such as the Ookla service at speedtest.net to see how real-world performance measures up to your ISP’s claims. It’s a good idea to run this from a laptop located close to the router, or ideally from a computer connected by Ethernet, to ensure your results aren’t skewed by an iffy Wi-Fi connection. You can also set up a shared folder and use a free tool such as LAN Speed Test (Lite) (totusoft.com) to test…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £766 (£920 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk It takes a minute or two to wrap your head around what the OptiPlex 7090 Ultra Desktop actually is. Boiled down, this is a 20cm computer that can squeeze into an accompanying monitor stand. You can then attach the stand to any monitor that includes VESA 100 connectors, which is 99% of them. Think of the OptiPlex 7090 Ultra as the brains of an all-in-one PC, but brains that can be swapped out at will. Clearly, that comes with compromises. There isn’t a desktop component in sight, with the OptiPlex built using laptop parts alone. Another is much reduced space for ports; in situ, the only directly accessible ports – via cut-outs in the shell that clips onto the stand…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we would recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p14. It’s updated each month. Labs Winner Each month we run a group test, or Labs. This product has managed to beat all others to top position. The pcpro.link Throughout the magazine you’ll see pcpro.link shortcuts. Enter these into the address bar of your browser and it will take you to a particular page, which will either be too long or awkward for us to publish or will take you to the precise shop from which to buy. If it’s Amazon, note that we have an affiliate deal in place so we will…

SCORE PRICE £208 (£250 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com AOC is a monitor brand determined to deliver the maximum amount of return from the smallest amount of investment, and you can’t get much more value-packed than this. A 32in (well, technically 31.5in) monitor for £250, and yet AOC still finds room in its budget for a pair of 3W speakers, a four-port USB hub and a highly adjustable screen. Less a cherry on top and more a firm biscuit foundation, it’s all based on IPS technology rather than the inferior twisted nematic (TN) you might expect at this price. There are some inevitable caveats. The first, and most obvious when you start using the Q32P2, are its viewing angles. These tail off notably towards the edges when compared to more expensive…

SCORE PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from store.google.com Once products have matured, improvements typically come in small steps or big lurches in direction. The second-generation Google Nest Hub unusually combines both, making a series of incremental improvements and adding one major new feature that alters the trajectory of Google’s smart screen. The new Nest Hub is designed not only to act as a smart speaker – for listening to music, podcasts and radio, answering questions, viewing photos and controlling smart home kit – but also employs Soli low-energy radar technology to track your sleep. In doing so, Google has turned what was a general-purpose smart screen into the ultimate bedside alarm clock. Core features What the new Nest Hub doesn’t give you is a radical new design. There’s a new…

1 Visit pcprodownload.co.uk. You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the spine of the cover (or directly on the cover if you’re a digital subscriber). If there’s no code on the spine, you have bought the £4.99 version of PC Pro, which doesn’t include a code. Also enter your email address. We’ll then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. 2 Once you’re in the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please make sure to read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register…

SCORE PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from samsung.com Samsung’s mid-tier Galaxy A52 5G intends to plug the ever-widening gap between the top and bottom ends of the phone-buying scale. Often, that means annoying compromises, but I’ll speak plainly from the start: this is a brilliant buy. It looks like a premium phone, even it isn’t as lavishly furnished as the Galaxy S21 (see issue 318, p68) on closer inspection. It has a soft-textured plastic back, with a slim camera housing and an aluminium frame that’s available in four colours; “Awesome Violet”, “Awesome Black”, “Awesome White” and “Awesome Blue”. Thesaurus for Mr Samsung. Still, it isn’t quite as awesomely eye-catching as its predecessor, lacking the pearlescent finish and subtly curved sides of the Galaxy A51 (see issue 310, p75). The front…

SCORE PRICE £91 (£109 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk While AVerMedia offers a more affordable 1080p webcam in the PW310P (£73 from Amazon), the PW315 is designed to attract demanding users. In particular, it’s aimed at people who present to others – teachers, streamers, YouTubers and presenters in business meetings too. Its key skills stem from a combination of hardware, flexible physical design and software. The camera hardware is a 2MP CMOS sensor with a 95° field of view. It streams 1080p at up to 60fps, so higher than the 30fps of almost every other camera out there. One exception is the Razer Kiyo Pro (see issue 320, p64), but that has the notable disadvantage of costing £180. Image quality is solid rather than exceptional, with good detail and vibrant (if…

SCORE PRICE £90 (£108 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/321c9 The moment you start using a high-end Logitech webcam it becomes obvious what you’re paying for. This, as with the C925e, is a notable step up from the Aukey with an unmatched ability to capture details and naturalistic colours. However, it isn’t such a leap to justify a price three times as high, so what else does the C930e have in its favour? Its main advantage is that it handles low light better than the Aukey, likewise if you’re sitting in front of a light source. Another plus is a 90° field of view. This means more of your background can be viewed, which is useful when doing demonstrations, and thanks to a 4x digital zoom you can take control of what…

SCORE PRICE £919 (£1,102 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk It’s clear where Dell is going with this machine. From the design to the specification, from the name to the price, it’s squarely aimed at the corporate market. It comes in clamshell and 2-in-1 variants with a range of specifications, running from a Core i3 model at just under £900 to a Core i7 at over £1,500, with three or four years of Dell ProSupport Plus on-site services bundled in. The design is businesslike but still attractive, with a 14in display crammed into what’s effectively a 13.3in aluminium chassis just 18.5mm thick and 1.35kg in weight. The Latitude 7410 feels rock-solid – it’s been built to withstand 17 MILSTD 810G tests – and there’s barely a hint of give in the lid…

SCORE PRICE £442 (£530 inc VA) from lenovo.com/gb f the three convertible Chromebooks in this month’s Labs, the Lenovo Chromebook Flex 5 has the least elegant name and the least elegant design. At 17mm thick and 1.35kg in weight, it’s actually slimmer and lighter than the Acer Chromebook Spin 713, but there’s something about the balance and 16:9 aspect ratio that makes it less satisfying to use in tablet form. Meanwhile, the Asus Chromebook Flip C436FA feels substantially lighter and goes even further than the Acer in its tablet-like appeal, and has a larger 14in screen to boot. However, the Lenovo has some real points in its favour. It’s cheaper than both its rivals while matching the Asus on screen quality and beating both on performance, and we would argue…

The early years of Chrome OS were often marred by grumbles that the Chromebook was too reliant on internet connectivity to get anything done, and that it couldn’t run “proper” applications, only simple web-based apps. It didn’t take Google long to address these issues, first with extensions that enabled many Chrome apps to run without a live connection and then by allowing users to install Android apps. In 2018, however, Google added the ability to run Linux applications in a Linux container hosted within Chrome OS. At first an experimental option, dubbed Crostini, it has moved out of the Chrome OS beta channel and into the mainstream: it’s now accessible to all Chromebook users and has been enhanced and upgraded. And while it was primarily designed to allow developers to…

SCORE PRICE £955 (£1,146 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk HP pitches the Pro C640 Enterprise as a stylish model for corporate power users, leaning heavily into the management features and baked-in security of Chrome Enterprise and a cloud-based IT model. It’s an expensive unit and HP hasn’t cut any corners on the design. With a 14in form factor and a 1.5kg weight, the C640 Enterprise is as sleek, slim and lightweight as any modern business laptop, with an aluminium chassis that could easily turn heads. It has extras you won’t find on cheaper Chromebooks – such as a fingerprint reader, Wi-Fi 6 and an HDMI output – and comes in specifications ranging from a lowly Pentium Gold 6405U up to a mighty Core i7-10610U. In terms of feel and usability, it’s…

Cloud storage has undoubted benefits for small and medium-sized businesses – but it’s not always the best option. Storing large volumes of data in the cloud gets expensive over the long term, and uploading rarely accessed archives can be a big waste of time as well as money. A network-attached storage appliance is a much more attractive solution, providing a massive capacity for a fraction of the cost. True, your year-one spend will be higher, but over time you’ll come out ahead, compared to the recurrent costs of a cloud storage service. NAS appliances have other benefits too. Keeping your data in-house puts you in charge of security. You have full control over who can access what, and you never need to worry about internet or cloud service outages. It’s…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, 4GB RAM, £1,279 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com The times they are a-changin’: Synology’s RackStation RS1221+ is the company’s first rack NAS appliance to be built around an AMD CPU. Positioned as a replacement for the venerable RS1219+, it swaps the pensionable Atom C2538 CPU and DDR3 memory of its predecessor for a quad-core 2.2GHz Ryzen V1500B, paired with 4GB of faster DDR4 RAM. What hasn’t changed is the design. Just like the older model, the RS1221+ comes in a space-saving short-depth chassis, allowing it to slot neatly into a small wall box or a two-post rack cabinet. The standard single-PSU model measures 307mm deep, while the RS1221RP+ model we tested is 10cm deeper to accommodate dual 350W hotplug PSUs. Both versions offer eight hotswap SATA drive bays,…

SCORE PRICE £1,461 exc VAT (diskless) from broadbandbuyer.com If you need to capture, store and manage large archives of security camera footage, the DVA3221 is for you. While it may look like a regular four-bay desktop NAS, it’s designed and configured as a one-stop surveillance hub, so you can simply plug in your IP cameras and go. In terms of hardware, its key feature is a preinstalled Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. This provides the horsepower for deep video analytics tasks, allowing you to track people, employ live facial recognition and do plenty more across multiple video feeds. The DVA3221 is also laughably easy to deploy. After slotting in four 14TB WD Red Pro NAS hard disks and firing up Synology’s web discovery portal, there was almost nothing left…

@jonhoneyball Getting old means finding things more confusing, but I can’t be the only person who is completely bewildered by USB. It started off simply enough. We had USB. There were a few plug choices, but we knew what it did. Then along came USB 2.o and that was reasonably straightforward too. It was only with the arrival of USB 3.0 that it seems to have gone barking mad. USB 3.0 was released in 2007. One of its main features was a speed increase from the USB 2.o spec of 480Mbits/sec to a much-improved 5Gbits/sec connection speed. This was necessary for a broader range of devices to be connected. For example, a modern hard disk isn’t much fun limited to 480Mbits/sec and let’s not even consider connecting a monitor down…

@mittasmark As technology changes, so does my work. Much of it’s the same, but the issues I see vary or mutate as the years roll by. The one area I seem to deal with more than ever these days is passwords. I often see customers who have the impressive ability to forget their details and lock themselves out of their online accounts. However, it now goes even further than that: password problems are seeping into nearly every part of my job. A classic example of this came from Linda. She got in touch because her laptop was displaying the Black Screen of Death. BSOD – not to be confused with its blue cousin – nearly always happens while Windows is loading. Along with the black screen, it usually comes with…

The UK government is launching an investigation into the sale of Arm to Nvidia. To recap, in September last year the current owner, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, announced that it had agreed a $40 billion sale to Nvidia. The offer consists of $12 billion in cash, $21.5 billion in Nvidia shares, $1.5 billion in equity to Arm employees and $5 billion depending on the financial performance of the Arm arm of the new company. But wait! Oliver Dowden, the UK culture secretary, has written to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), telling them to start a “phase one” investigation. Given the deal was first announced several months ago, we can’t accuse him of rushing. In the words of the wonderfully chewy government statement: “The secretary of state believes that it is…

Darien Graham-Smith Want to solve your Wi-Fi woes? Darien not only explains why things go wrong but provides practical solutions to fix issues from p42 Nicole Kobie We always hear about autonomous cars, but the biggest difference robots and AI could make is to agriculture. Nicole examines the future of farming from p126 James O’Malley In April 2021, NASA’s “helicopter” took off from Mars. James talks to the techie who led the mission, and reveals the integral part Linux had to play. See p34 Stuart Andrews This month, Stuart put 12 Chromebooks through a series of tests for speed, battery life and quality to determine which would win our top awards. Turn to p76…

During the Cold War, one of the biggest problems faced by the west was understanding what was happening in Moscow. The Russian government was so secretive that any information that did emerge was pored over by analysts looking for clues to what the Kremlin was planning next. The people who became experts in deciphering these limited signals were sometimes referred to as “Kremlinologists”. Today, the world is different but some things remain the same. There’s still a hugely powerful, mysterious force in the world that refuses to explain itself. It’s just this one is based in Cupertino, California. Apple is notoriously secretive and, consequently, the company has a band of modern Kremlinologists watching its every move too. Spend enough time reading technology blogs or clicking through YouTube channels and you’ll…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro and doesn’t possess a selfie stick. Or at least, not yet. Although I have two shelves packed with cookery books, digital sloth dictates that nowadays I tend to go online and Google for a recipe rather than trying to find one there. Searching for “pork mushrooms kimchi” yields hundreds of matches. But if a link takes me to a YouTube video, I’ll back out sharply and try the next until I find one that’s just a still photo and a text recipe. I spend an inordinate amount of my free time watching Japanese sushi slicers, guitar neck resetters, jet fighters and restorations of rusty mangles on YouTube, so it strikes me as odd that I have such a powerful aversion to watching…

The only thing we can say about the future of work with any certainty is this: it’s uncertain. Whatever happens, though, it seems likely that working from home is going to become an integral part of many people’s working lives, so it makes sense to invest a few pounds to make it a pleasant – and productive – place to be. Our ethos in this feature is to work out where to invest to make the maximum possible impact. After all, there are numerous ways to spend money, and not all of them are immediately obvious. There may also be a way to extract some fresh usage out of a piece of equipment, including turning a digital SLR into a top-quality webcam (see p33). We’ve split our advice into three…

A faster network connection never hurts – especially if you’re using a household NAS or regularly sharing files between computers inside your home. A top-speed wireless link can make remote folders feel as responsive and convenient as local ones, which means a happier and more productive home life. But if you use Wi-Fi mostly as a gateway to the internet, it’s probably not worth spending large amounts of time and money chasing the ultimate performance. Disney+ and Netflix both recommend that streaming 4K content requires a connection of at least 25Mbits/sec – and even a cheap, old Wi-Fi 5 router should more than meet that requirement. That’s not to say that faster networks don’t have their place. More bandwidth may mean that more people can stream simultaneously without bogging down…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews So far, 2021 has been a difficult year if you’re trying to buy a new PC. Chip shortages for both processors and graphics cards have led to fluctuating prices, while pre-built systems from firms such as Acer and HP have disappeared from the virtual shelves quicker than we can recommend them. With the arrival of the PC Specialist Vortex Elite R, however, there are signs that normal service has resumed. In truth, “Vortex” probably isn’t the right name. That word conjures extreme levels of noise and performance, when this is a more statesmanlike system that will do the job without fuss – and without challenging any speed records. I’m happy with that balance, especially as the chunky PC Specialist-branded air cooler ensures…

SCORE PRICE £1,333 (£1,599 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com With the MateBook X Pro, Huawei faces the exact same problem as Dell with its XPS 13 (see issue 317, p50). Once you’ve created a market-leading product, it doesn’t make sense to rip up the design and do something new, but as each year passes and your design evolves by only a fraction others will catch up – and eventually surpass you. I fear that Huawei is a year too late in its reinvention of the MateBook X Pro. Not that there is anything manifestly wrong with this machine, which remains a thing of compact beauty. Even more so in its new “Emerald Green” finish, although Space Grey remains available for more conservative buyers. Its prize possession is a 13.9in 3,000 x…

SCORE PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/321acer The Acer Nitro 5 series of gaming laptops is available in a wide variety of models with both Intel and AMD chips, starting at £749 inc VAT. I’ve tested the AN515-44 version (NH.Q9HEK.002) with a Ryzen 5 4600H CPU and GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics, which at the time of going to press was £800 from Amazon as part of a bundle with a gaming headset, mouse and mouse mat. The challenge for buyers is that bundles such as this can disappear on Amazon, and you can’t buy this exact model from Acer’s website. You can buy a version (without accessories) with a more powerful Ryzen 7 4800H processor for £999, or with a Ryzen 5 4600H and lesser GTX 1650 GPU…

SCORE PRICE £316 (£379 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com What difference does a letter make? A lot when it comes to AOC monitors, with the “U” here indicating its Ultra HD (4K) resolution. Whilst this screen shares many characteristics with its Q32P2 stablemate, including a 31.5in diagonal, flexible stand and a USB hub, there are even more things that set them apart. The most fundamental is the choice of panel technology, with multidomain vertical alignment (MVA) taking centre stage here. On the plus side, this largely eradicates the viewing angle issues I had with the cheaper screen; less positive is that whites aren’t as white, with a faint yellow present even when you switch colour temperatures. MVA is normally better suited to gaming than IPS, and (like the Q32P2) this monitor…

Is it worth spend in gover£ 100 on a webcam or should you save your money? TimDan tonputs six very different offerings to the test SCORE PRICE £42 (£50 inc VAT) from store.acer.com This is a frustrating webcam. In so many ways, it’s excellent. The colours are pleasantly vibrant, albeit erring on the side of oversaturation, and it’s capable of capturing up to 1944p (a 4:3 aspect ratio of 2,592 x 1,944), which is impressive for a webcam costing £50. Yet it has one major idiosyncrasy: barrel distortion. Whether through software manipulation or superior hardware, barrel distortion simply isn’t noticeable on any other webcam on test. Another contributing factor is Acer’s surprisingly wide field of view (FoV), which Acer states as 78° but in practice feels wider – perhaps because…

SCORE PRICE £20 (£24 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/321jelly Everyone loves a bargain and, at £24 from the link above, this 1080 webcam has a £10 head start on every other unit here. We chose it for this test due to its high Amazon rating, even after doing our usual check for promotional reviews, and in many ways it lives up to expectations. Its colour accuracy is the best we’ve seen in a sub-£50 webcam and it produces detailed images too. Its biggest issue stems from the autofocus, which works in the same way as a camera when adjusting for a shot – a slight zoom in and out as it seeks the right focal point. It’s a tad irritating, but if you keep relatively still and nothing is shifting around…

SCORE PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk If you’re one of those Chromebook devotees lamenting the demise of the classic Google Chromebook Pixel and Pixelbook, the Acer Chromebook Spin 713 feels like a natural successor. Miss the squarer 3:2 aspect ratio, QHD screen? The all-metal, thin-and-light design? The Pixelbook’s convertible form factor? The Spin 713 has you covered, only without the sky-high price tags of Google’s own-brand Chromebooks and with a spec that’s bang up to date. Our test model came with a tenth-generation Intel Core i3-10110U processor with two cores and four threads that boost up to 4.1GHz, and while it wasn’t right at the top of the table in our performance benchmarks, it wasn’t far off the leaders’ pace. With 8GB of RAM, you’ll need a lot…

SCORE PRICE £690 (£829 inc VAT) from store.google.com Having set the standard for high-end Chromebooks with the original Chromebook Pixel, Google did the same for more affordable models with the Pixelbook Go. Out went the high price tags and square format screens in favour of something more accessible with a wider choice of specs. But the Pixelbook Go launched in late 2019. Does it still stand up today? The physical design hasn’t become any less interesting or practical. At just over 1kg in weight and less than 14mm thick, the Pixelbook Go is still one of the most lightweight and portable Chromebooks, giving you a 13.3in screen in a form factor you can happily lug around all day. It’s beautifully finished in what Google calls “finely painted magnesium”, although it…

SCORE PRICE £224(£269 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The Chromebook 311 C733 is significantly more expensive than its 11.6in rivals, but you get what you pay for in terms of ruggedisation. While it’s over 2cm thick and comparatively heavy at 1.25kg, the build is very solid, with a thicker lid and a chunky, rubberised bumper protecting all the edges on the base. With a spill-proof keyboard, it’s clearly aimed at the education market, but you might be glad of its tough construction if you’re carrying it around all day from class to class or job to job. In fact, there’s a lot that’s very practical about this Chromebook. Connectivity is basic, with just a single USB-C 3.1 and a matching USB-A port, along with audio and microSD ports, but they’re all…

SCORE PRICE £166 (£199 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The Asus Chromebook C223 makes a fine first impression for a cut-price Chromebook, especially in the natty red finish of our review model. It’s roughly the size of an A4 pad of paper and very slim at just 17.3mm, while the weight is precisely 1kg. The all-plastic construction feels cheap, while the lid is thin and a little too flexible for comfort, but the actual build feels very solid even if our review unit had developed the odd scuff during its lifetime as a test machine. The screen isn’t too bad, either. Sure, at a maximum 203cd/m2 it’s nowhere near bright enough for use outdoors in strong sunlight, and it can only manage a miserable 57% of the sRGB colour gamut, but…

SCORE PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/gb If there’s one good reason to get excited about the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Chromebook, it’s the price. £180 is an astonishingly tiny amount to pay for a fully featured laptop, even one with a basic specification and an 11.6in screen. So, is it the bargain of the century or a cut-price duffer we should warn you off? Inevitably, the truth lies somewhere in between. In terms of the physical design, Lenovo has made the best of a limited budget. The all-plastic construction feels cheap, but there’s a nice two-tone effect on the lid, which itself isn’t as weak and flexible as on certain other budget Chromebooks. Bar the massive bezel below the screen, it’s not a bad-looking device. Connectivity isn’t a problem,…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, 32GB RAM, £1,047 exc VAT from ballicom.co.uk Qnap’s TS-h973AX might not have the snappiest name in the desktop NAS market, but it makes a big impression in other ways, offering enterprise-class data security and protection on an SMB budget. Much of that is thanks to Qnap’s ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, and its impressive range of native storage features. ZFS copy-on-write provides fast, near unlimited snapshots, while end-to-end checksums offer transparent self-healing of data corruption and inline data deduplication and compression help you make the most efficient use of your storage. QuTS goes above and beyond when it comes to RAID provision, too. Alongside the usual range of parity and mirroring options, it lets you create triple-parity arrays to protect against three drive failures, or use triple…

SCORE PRICE 32TB, 4GB RAM, £1,365 exc VAT from westerndigital.com As the name suggests, Western Digital’s My Cloud appliances are designed for SMBs wanting their own online vault for file sharing, collaboration and workstation backup. The four-bay PR4100 here made its debut back in 2016 but still does a sterling job, powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Pentium N3710 CPU and 4GB of DDR3L memory, which can be upgraded to 16GB. WD also offers the cheaper EX4100, which uses a less powerful ARM-based processor – but we’d recommend it only for lightweight roles as it’s stuck with 2GB of RAM. While the PR4100 doesn’t support 10GbE, you do get a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports that can be teamed together, and a pair of power inputs give you a very easy…

@PaulOckenden Welcome to the next part of my series of articles on LoRa and LoRaWAN. As promised, I’m going to be looking at some of the better LoRaWAN sensors I’ve discovered and I’ll also guide you through connecting a sensor to The Things Network. There’s a huge variety of sensors out there. For example, I’ve recently come across waste bin management sensors for those business-sized “dumpster” bins – they monitor how full the bin is, so that the company emptying them can optimise the lorry routes and avoid sending trucks to bins that are empty. Another good example is a parking sensor that’s available from Bosch. No, not those things that incessantly beep when you’re trying to reverse into a space; these sensors are glued to the road and detect…

@happygeek I’ve written a lot about ensuring every account that can have two-factor authentication (2FA) activated does so. Adding an extra layer of protection means that if your login credentials are compromised, say a reused password turns up in a breach database traded between cybercriminals, the account itself won’t get compromised. Of course, there’s no such thing as 100% secure and 2FA is no exception to this rule. 2FA via SMS is at best a 50% score, for example, as there are many known ways that the process itself can be successfully attacked. That’s still 50% better than zero secure, though. 2FA TOTP code authentication apps – that’s a time-based one-time passcode, rather than anything to do with Top of the Pops, sadly – are much better still and hardware-based…

Since the early 1990s, Intel has been one of computing’s superpowers, but a decision by Apple last year revealed just how fragile that status was. The switch from Intel to Apple Silicon, with the chips manufactured by TSMC, has been hailed as a success. The latest line of M1 Macs marks a step change in terms of speed, thermals and efficiency. That’s great news for consumers, but crystallises a major problem for Intel. “I think that Intel really has to do something because it’s getting attacked from all sides,” said Dr Mark Dickinson, CEO of chip design firm Intrinsic Semiconductor. He warns that “the move with Apple Silicon, in particular, shows the world that the best laptop processor can be built by somebody other than Intel”. Intel’s server business is…

1 Kang (97% success rate) A mysterious leaker who posts to China’s Weibo social network. They correctly called almost every detail of last year’s iPhones, right down to the colours of the new devices. 2 CoinX (95.2%) A not very prolific leaker, but they seem to be particularly prescient about future iPad developments. Their major dud? They predicted in March 2020 that a new iMac would be coming soon. 3 The Information (90.9%) A more traditional news outlet that appears better plugged into Cupertino than the supply chain, correctly calling the iPad Smart Keyboard and the Apple One subscription bundle. 4 Mark Gurman (89.1%) Arguably the most credible person on the list, Gurman began his career covering leaks at 9to5Mac before graduating to the esteemed heights of business news outlet Bloomberg. Gurman…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. Some people are working on quantum and automation and other cutting-edge tech, others are still figuring out apps. @njkobie When I first moved to the UK, about 15 years ago, I was astonished how behind the times British banks were. In Canada, I could email money to people. In the UK, to send money to an overseas account, I had to ditch work early to attend a branch before it closed at 4pm to fill out a paper form that was faxed to a Canadian bank, which typed the details into its own system. Since then, things have improved in leaps and bounds, and so-called “challenger banks” such as Monzo and Starling are to be thanked for pushing along such progress. My Monzo…

This topic of email beacons attracted some negative comments from Jon Honeyball in last month’s PC Pro (see issue 320, p109). The issue is that beacons can be regarded as breaching privacy by silently reporting whether an email has been read. I would argue that beacons are a useful fix for one of the shortcomings of email. I imagine most of us would be disappointed to hear that some of our carefully crafted emails never reach the intended recipient. It’s valuable to know that an email has been delivered and a beacon can provide that service. Some email client software offers a “read receipt” function, but that requires the recipient to acknowledge receipt. Nobody bothers. I use MailChimp to send bulk, opt-in newsletters. Anyone familiar with MailChimp knows that it…

Before you buy a USB-C docking monitor or a USB-C dock, check that it will deliver enough power to keep your laptop charged. A 90W supply will be enough to power everything short of an Apple MacBook Pro, while those that deliver 60W may struggle with more powerful laptops (but will be absolutely fine with less demanding machines). If you own a MacBook, it’s also worth making sure that your chosen dock or monitor supports it. And note that one reader hit issues with an older Dell XPS 13 being powered by a Dell USB-C docking monitor. While we’ve rarely seen problems in our tests, it’s always worth checking the small print – and the returns policy if the product won’t do what you want it to.…

Wi-Fi is all around us and, with the advent of Wi-Fi 6, it’s getting better and better. Yet it’s hard to think of a technology where there’s a bigger gap between the manufacturers’ performance claims and the reality you can expect to see in your own home. That’s partly down to the way wireless gear is marketed. For example, the Netgear Nighthawk RAX80, which is on PC Pro’s A-List (see p14), advertises a connection speed of up to 4.8Gbits/sec on its wireless radio. Since there are eight bits in a byte, that sounds like it will send data screaming down the line at 600 megabytes per second – but, in reality, you’ll never see anything resembling that sort of speed. For one thing, that 4.8Gbits/sec figure refers to the wireless…

To illustrate the impact of location and channel settings, we measured download speeds while using an HP Elite Dragonfly laptop to copy a 400MB data file from a NAS appliance connected to an Asus RT-AX82U Wi-Fi 6 router in the adjacent room ROUTER HEIGHT (MB/sec) With the router sitting on the floor, our test file came flying through the air at a respectable 48.3MB/sec. However, simply moving the router to the top of a high bookshelf in the same room yielded a free, instant boost to 55.5MB/sec – an increase of nearly 15%. The only downsides were the trailing wires. CHOOSING THE RIGHT CHANNEL (MB/sec) With the router returned to its regular desktop location, we tried switching our 5GHz transmitter out of the standard 36-48 channel range and into the…

SCORE PRICE £836 (£1,009 inc VAT) from box.co.uk How do you take a once great laptop brand such as Toshiba and turn it into your own? It’s a tough challenge for Dynabook, which hitherto has made the minutest changes to the designs it inherited. The X40-J series, however, introduces subtle shifts that won’t put off its existing customer base but keep the range looking fresh. Not that you would notice if you viewed this laptop head on. In use, it’s almost identical to every other slimline Portégé, with an attractive if understated dark blue finish – the “almost” is because Dynabook adds millimetre-thick silver outlines to the power key and trackpad. It’s a hint of pizzazz without going full Ratners. Close the lid and you’ll see a far more significant…

SCORE PRICE Two nodes, £163 (£195 inc VAT); three nodes, £225 (£270 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/321orbi The Orbi RBK352 is Netgear’s new, low-cost Wi-Fi 6 mesh system. At least, it’s low cost compared to the company’s previous Wi-Fi 6 mesh offerings. The high-end Orbi RBK852 (see issue 318, p90) system is £645 for a two-node kit, while the mid-range RBK752 (see issue 318, p83) will set you back £450. The RBK352, by contrast, starts at £195, making it a viable competitor to many Wi-Fi 5 mesh systems. Inevitably, though, the price cut comes with a trade-off. The RBK352 hardware isn’t as powerful as its premium brethren, and that has an impact on real-world performance. In particular, it’s a dual-band system. Each unit contains a 2.4GHz radio rated at 600Mbits/sec and…

SCORE PRICE £441 (£529 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Any 34in curved monitor is a superb addition to a desk that can hold one. The 21:9 widescreen ratio is better suited to working on documents side by side than 16:9 displays, and the flatter ratio also means you aren’t faced with the “wall of screen” effect that happens when you sit in front of a 16:9 32in monitor such as the AOCs on test. Here, Dell uses an IPS panel with a gentle 3800R curvature – so gentle that it’s barely noticeable. Compare to the 1500R curvature of the PC Pro Recommended Philips Brilliance 346P1 (see issue 313, p88), which uses more bendable MVA technology. To give some idea of the difference, the numbers relate to the radius of the created…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £524 (£629 inc VAT) from oneplus.com OnePlus’ focus on mid range continues to tighten, with the firm updating its supposed “flagship killers every six months or so with slightly tweaked internals and a handful of added features. This release schedule has continued in 2021 with the OnePlus 9, but with the dust barely having settled on the five-star OnePlus 8T (see issue 315, p63) are all the new additions worth the extra cost? The OnePlus 9 feels less premium than its rivals. Despite what the marketing materials would have you believe, the “fibreglass-reinforced polymer frame” is simply another way of saying “plastic”, and it lacks the sleek aluminium finish of the beefier OnePlus 9 Pro (see p68). In short, it looks and feels quite cheap, and the…

SCORE PRICE £28 (£34 incVAT) from pcpro.link/321auk The Aukey raises a question that Logitech won’t like: is it worth paying almost £100 for a 108op webcam when you can buy something this good for £34? It’s tough to justify, even though the Aukey can’t quite match the Logitech webcams for quality; it’s crisp but detail isn’t captured to the same level, and its colours lean towards the conservative, pastel scale. Even Donald Trump would come out looking pasty. However, in a 100m sprint for quality the Aukey would only be a few steps behind the Logitechs, which is quite an achievement for the price. What you don’t get is Logitech’s software support, with no utilities that let you control the colour intensity or the field of view. That means you’re…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from logitech.com When it comes to 1080p webcams, the C925e sits at the head of the table. Not that you would know it from the list of specs, which are entirely ordinary for the price. Start recording with the C925e, however, and the difference in quality becomes instantly clear. Just like the more expensive C930e, it puts you in the best light – even in the worst light. Nor will you have to fiddle with settings to find the right colour intensity or white balance, with the onboard processing doing such a good job that the fact you can take fine control over both aspects becomes a check in a box rather than a meaningful feature. The C930e is a better choice for presenters…

SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Asus led the way for slimline convertible Chromebooks with its original Chromebook Flip line and it’s still pushing forwards with the latest C436FA model. It’s a lovely laptop, repeating Asus’s trick of squeezing a 14in screen into a 13.3in chassis, with minimal bezels enabling an 85% screen-to-body ratio. What’s more, the new design reduces the weight and heft of the C436 even further over the old Flip C434, from 15.7mm down to 13.7mm and 1.45kg down to 1.1kg. And, thanks to a solid magnesium-alloy chassis, it doesn’t feel any weaker or more vulnerable for it. This comes at the expense of ports – we’re down to just one USB-C 3.1 port on each side, along with an audio jack and microSD card…

SCORE PRICE £249 (£300 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/gb Google might have given up on the Chrome OS tablet with the demise of the Pixel Slate, but that hasn’t stopped Lenovo. The IdeaPad Duet is a 10.1in Chromebook tablet and is supplied with a rear cover with integral fold-out stand, plus a magnetic clip-on keyboard to turn it into a useful productivity device. Look at the price and you’ll expect the result to be a disaster, but here’s the surprise: while far from perfect, the Duet turns out to be the little wonder of this month’s Labs. For a start, it’s a well-built little tablet in a fetching two-tone blue and grey design. The shell is plastic, but it feels reasonably robust, is a fraction over 7mm thick and weighs just…

SCORE PRICE £192 (£230 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk T314 promises a lot of Chromebook for under £250, stepping up from the 11.6in screens of the ultra-budget models to a more expansive 14in display, and all encased in a slim-and-light plastic chassis that, if you squint, you might almost mistake for aluminium. It looks considerably more expensive than it is. Beyond the flexible lid, it doesn’t even feel that cheap. However, switch it on and the illusion starts to dissipate, mainly because of the screen. It’s nice to have the 14in screen size, but a 1,366 x 768 resolution that looks crisp on an 11.6in Chromebook looks pixellated spread across 14in. Worse, it’s really dim, not even getting above 200cd/m2 in our tests. sRGB gamut coverage is poor at just 55%,…

SCORE PRICE £317 (£380 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com While the low-cost Chromebooks get all the sales and the premium models grab all the attention, it’s often the mid-range Chromebooks that deliver the best value for money. Take the Asus Chromebook C423: it looks and feels like a premium laptop, yet costs less than £400. You don’t have to look too hard to see how this is done. The design is impressively slim and light at 16mm thick and 1.34kg, but what looks like an aluminium shell turns out to be a plastic body with an aluminium-finished lid. The processor is the 2017-vintage Pentium N4200, although it’s teamed with 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 64GB of storage. The Full HD “IPS-level” screen on our model isn’t bad at all. Viewing angles…

Ten years of Chromebooks have seen Google’s Chrome OS devices blossom from slightly weird, cheap computers into a credible alternative to the Windows and macOS mainstream. Granted, they don’t form a like-for-like alternative; there are still many tasks that are better tackled with more feature-packed, industry-standard applications on a more powerful Windows laptop or a MacBook. Yet if you’re looking for simple, affordable and secure browsing, entertainment and productivity, a Chromebook can work just as well as a more conventional laptop – and as this Labs demonstrates, you might get a higher-quality machine for less. In a way, the world has caught up with Chromebooks. More of us do more work than ever in the browser, and Chromebooks are purpose-built for these tasks. You can wave goodbye to annoying updates…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, 8GB RAM, £3,565 exc VAT from ballicom.co.uk If capacity is your priority, Qsan’s XCubeNAS XN7016R could be your ideal NAS. This 3U rack appliance offers 16 hot-swap drive bays, any of which can be fitted with SSDs for caching or data tiering. They’re not limited to SATA, either: high-performance SAS3 drives are supported both inside and out, with a pair of external SAS3 ports allowing you to connect up to eight external 24-bay shelves. Qsan’s partnership with Western Digital means you can even connect four massive Ultrastar Data60 or Data102 SAS JBOD arrays for a ludicrous raw capacity of up to eight petabytes. It all runs on a 1.6GHz Intel Pentium D1517 CPU, and comes with a base 8GB of DDR4 memory that can be upgraded to…

SCORE PRICE £345 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk EnGenius was an early entrant into the SMB Wi-Fi 6 market, making a splash with the temptingly affordable EWS357AP. The ECW230 costs nearly £140 more, but the extra cash brings faster wireless performance. Indeed, on paper you’re getting double the speed, as the ECW230’s AX3600 rating combines a top speed of 2,400Mbits/sec on the 5GHz band and 1,148Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz. To allow you to make the most of that performance, it sports a 2.5GbE multi-Gigabit LAN port – and this is also how you’re expected to power it, although if you don’t have a PoE+ source you can buy a separate power supply and plug it into the adjacent power socket. For testing, we used EnGenius’ ECS2512FP model, which provides 802.3bt PoE++ on…

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@userfriendlypc One of the fabulous things about this magazine is the reviews section: many readers tell me how much they value it when considering the next spend. It’s invaluable because a glance along any retailer’s shelves (virtual or real) will bombard the senses with an array of data that can inject uncertainty into a purchasing process. If it’s any consolation, it’s not a lot easier from our side of the counter. Selling products is a retailer’s mission and many are perfectly happy to flog a customer exactly what they have asked for. There’s nothing wrong with this. You wouldn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition from a checkout operator over the suitability of a tin of beans. That’s mainly because supermarkets trust that we’re aware of the consequences of a misguided bean…

@stardotpro Honestly, I really want to like augmented reality (AR). It ought to be an easy thing to implement, now that we’re walking around with devices that have screens, cameras, microphones and motion sensors built-in. It’s one of those fields where even the simplest demo or thought experiment can be very exciting. Google Lens shows this off very nicely: let the camera see a product barcode and the cloud decodes it and gives you back a search engine listing of sellers, locations, information pages… anything you want to know. Of course, such implementations of AR have their limits, being best suited to simple things such as toothbrushes, mysterious vegan meat-substitute pies, untrustworthy power distribution strips and anything else you want to evaluate carefully before buying. It seems a slow start…

The robot trundles between rows of plants, assessing the berries on the stems. Depending on the time of year, it could be spraying or applying UV light against pests, snapping images of fruit to track its growth or – one day soon – choosing which berry to delicately harvest. Farming may be an industry with an old-fashioned vibe, but that couldn’t be further from the truth: it has long used AI to manage crops and the Internet of Things to track growth, and tractors went driverless long before cars. Planting and harvesting crops with robots has been a challenge too far, however, as it’s delicate, highly skilled work. But the pressure is on, especially in Britain. Over the past few years, the UK saw an average of almost 70,000 seasonal…

New Zealand’s apple vacuum Kiwi food producer T&G Global lacked the workforce to pick apples, so US startup Abundant Robotics stepped in with a solution: a robot driven by Lidar – one of the technologies that lets driverless cars “see” – with machine vision to spot ripe fruit and a vacuum arm to pull apples from trees gently, without bruising. Floridian strawberries Harvest CROO Robotics wants to pick the world’s strawberries, with its Berry 7 robot able to pull aside leaves, inspect fruit and pick fresh berries. The robot replaces 30 pickers, the company says, and is able to harvest eight acres a day at a rate of eight seconds per plant. The technology is still in the trial phase, but is in use at Wish Farms in Florida. Kenyan…

Do more with your Fire TV stick Amazon’s cheap device is far more intelligent than it first appears. We explain how to do so much more than watch end less reruns of The Office. 10 things every IT department should be able to answer Steve Cassidy scans the average IT department for vulnerabilities before applying his own set of fixes. Are you ready for the Big Switch Off? When BT switches off copper-based networks in 2025, it will have a massive impact on homes and businesses. We reveal how you can prepare for the change.…