Table of contents for May 2022 in PC Pro

I’m about to break a golden rule, for which I can only apologise. A mere two months ago I used this page to explain why I was desperate to buy a new phone but was going to resist temptation. This month, I’m going to explain why I’m desperate to buy a new phone but am going to resist temptation. Please, have some sympathy. One of the truly awful things about this job is that I either test new, exciting products or edit reviews about them – which involves checking how much they cost, which colours they come in, and the marvellous features they offer. It hurts. This month, my object of desire is the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (see p46). I don’t need one; as I mentioned before, my Huawei…

If you’ve spent any time on social media recently, you can’t have failed to have noticed the outbreak of green, yellow and grey squares. Lacking a URL, or any real meaning to outsiders, they are a sign of the aftermath of a battle against Wordle, a clever word game that went viral in January 2022. For the uninitiated, Wordle is a simple game of deduction, written in only a few hundred lines of JavaScript. Players must deduce a five-letter word by making guesses using other five-letter words, with a letter highlighted in green if it’s in the right position, and orange if the letter is in the word but in the wrong place. What has made it such a hit – having gone from around 90 players per day in…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 14in Stunning creative power from £1,899 from apple.com/uk Alongside its 16in sibling, this is simply the world’s best laptop for demanding users. The amount of power on tap via the M1 Pro or M1 Max processor is staggering, and it’s backed up by a terrific screen and stunning battery life. With all the ports you could ask for, the only negatives are its relative bulk (especially compared to the Air) and high price. REVIEW Issue 328, p58 ALTERNATIVES Samsung Galaxy Book Pro (15.6in) A powerful laptop with a 15.6in AMOLED screen that weighs a mere 1.05kg? And with stonking battery life too? The Galaxy Book Pro is a winner. Core i7, £1,449 from johnlewis.com REVIEW Issue 323, p50 Apple MacBook Air If you don’t need…

Barry Collins is co-editor of bigtechquestion.com. He’s worn out his anger management DVD. @bazzacollins It’s not often a podcast makes me furious, let alone one I’m appearing on at the time. But if you listened to PC Pro podcast no. 580 in early February, you’d have detected more than a trace of irritation when it came to the Hot Hardware of the Week. On that show, you’ll hear Darien Graham-Smith eloquently explaining why the Netgear Orbi WiFi 6E mesh router is the best thing since sliced Hovis. If you can’t be bothered to wade through the podcast archives, turn to p68 and read Darien’s review. Isn’t it brilliant, Darien enthused. There’s this new Wi-Fi standard – Wi-Fi 6E – and it allows you to smash data around the home at…

Two-thirds of homes might be able to receive gigabit broadband already, but is the Wi-Fi equipment in people’s homes – often provided by the ISPs themselves – capable of getting those speeds around the house? That is becoming one of the industry’s biggest challenges, according to Zen Internet’s David Barber. “We’re in a world now where the last mile is faster than home Wi-Fi,” he said. “I can’t remember a time when that’s been the case previously, and I’ve been in telecom since 2000.” “We can deliver an almost endless amount of bandwidth to your house,” added Barber. “But actually what people care about is can I get 25Mbits/sec in my conservatory where I’ve just put my new TV, and that all comes down to Wi-Fi. So it’s definitely the…

For many people, the camera is a big consideration when it comes to choosing a smartphone. Even mid-range models tend to have impressive photographic hardware; the phone in your pocket will almost certainly be able to capture 12-megapixel images (probably larger still). That’s a lot of detail. In fact, it’s enough to capture an entire A4 page of text and images at full print quality. With a little care and the right software, therefore, it’s perfectly viable to use your phone for digitising tasks that once required a dedicated scanner. That’s great because, as the world has increasingly moved away from physical letters and documents, personal scanners are becoming something of a rarity. They’re still incorporated into multifunction printers (see p74), but if you don’t have one of those, your…

PRICE £875 (£1,050 inc VAT) from chillblast.com When you’re spending around a grand on a desktop PC, you should set some expectations. First, your money should be evenly split between the core components, so that one doesn’t become a bottleneck. Second, there’s no excuse for cut corners in terms of build quality. Third, this system should be your bedrock for years to come. In fairness to Chillblast, I don’t think it’s ever sent in a PC for review that isn’t perfectly judged in terms of balance. Here, it opts for such a middle-of-the-road Intel Core processor that its idea of a wild night out is a Rod Stewart concert. While the Intel Core i5-12400F is part of the latest Alder Lake generation, it only includes Performance-cores (P-cores) with zero Efficient-cores…

PRICE Core i9/RTX 3070 Ti, £2,167 (£2,600 inc VAT) from rog.asus.com/uk The critical limiting factor of any gaming laptop is size. In short, how effective a cooling system can manufacturers squeeze into the chassis to keep the CPU and GPU cool enough to run at peak speeds? That’s why Alienware goes to such extremes with the sleek X14 opposite. Asus takes a different approach, sacrificing some slenderness to provide room for a 120W RTX 3070 Ti graphics card. Mind you, the designers have worked hard to keep the footprint of this 16in laptop down to that of a typical 15in machine. There are currently two UK versions of this 2022 update to the Zephyrus M16, one with a Core i7, RTX 3060, 1TB SSD and stingy 8GB of DDR5 RAM for £1,900,…

PRICE £208 (£250 inc VAT) from uk.kobobooks.com The Kobo Sage is a more refined version of the three-year-old Kobo Forma, two-upping Amazon’s 7in Kindle Oasis by offering an 8in display that also boasts stylus support. It’s the first mainstream Kobo e-reader to offer the latter, but you’ll need to buy the Kobo Stylus separately for £40. The Sage has a noticeably improved chassis compared to the Forma. It’s still made of plastic, unlike the metal body of the Kindle Oasis, but with a cleaner and more elegant look; it’s effectively only one front piece and one back piece sandwiched together. Even the page-turn buttons are a step up from the Forma. They’re sleeker and more distinct, reminiscent of the Kindle Oasis, and provide a cleaner and more satisfying click action.…

You don’t need to spend a grand on a portable projector, with Acer offering a compelling alternative in the form of its similarly sized C250i, which costs £400 from currys.co.uk. Setup is by no means as slick, relying on the EZCast app to wirelessly connect an Android, iOS or Windows device. You also need to first insert the supplied USB wireless dongle – which takes a surprising amount of muscle – rather than having Wi-Fi built into the unit. What stops us from giving the C250i a full review is that I couldn’t persuade the dongle to work; maybe I pushed too hard. Once set up via a wired connection, the C250i produced a clear image that rivals The Freestyle in a smaller room, but with a lower 300 lumens…

PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from netgear.co.uk Netgear’s Orbi Wi-Fi mesh systems have taken home numerous PC Pro awards thanks to their ease of use, wide coverage and excellent performance. They tend to be pricey, though, and this new model pushes the boat out further than ever with a shocking price of £1,500 for three stations. Then again, the RBKE963 is no ordinary mesh. It’s the first wireless system we’ve seen to support Wi-Fi 6E – a rapidly encroaching standard that opens up a whole new set of radio frequencies in the 6GHz band for home and office use. This is a big deal, because the 5GHz band has always been cramped. Its standard frequency range is only broad enough to accommodate two adjacent networks using the wide 80MHz channel…

PRICE £275 (£330 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Epson’s EcoTank ET-3850 is an inkjet multifunction printer (MFP) aimed at the home office. It’s a three-in-one machine, offering print, scan and copy functionality, but not faxing. It’s quite well specified, featuring a 30-sheet automatic document feeder, wireless networking and a small colour screen. In the base there’s an enclosed 250-sheet paper cassette, and the printer will print on both sides of a sheet of paper without you having to lift a finger. All these are typical features for an MFP costing about a third of the price of the ET-3850, so why pay more? The answer, as we suspect you know by now, lies in Epson’s EcoTank system, which does away with cartridges in favour of large refillable tanks built into the…

SCORE PRICE £37 (£45 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk Inkjet MFPs don’t come much cheaper than HP’s DeskJet 2710e. It’s a basic printer, scanner and copier with rudimentary controls, a small mono display, support for wireless networking, and not a whole lot else. While it comes with cartridges rated for only 120 black and 75 colour pages, it also qualifies for six months’ free Instant Ink, which could amount to considerably more. Despite its “keep it simple” tagline, this MFP was unusually hard to set up. HP doesn’t include drivers in the box, pointing you at the HP Smart app on a mobile or PC. This couldn’t detect any of our three HP printers from an Android phone until we pressed the Wi-Fi button on them – a step not mentioned…

SCORE PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk The FS-1061DN is almost the entry-level model in Kyocera’s Ecosys range of laser printers. It’s reasonably well specified, with a claimed 25ppm print speed, duplex printing and a network interface. While its paper tray juts out the front, it comes with a substantial lid that keeps dust off, and doubles as part of the multi-purpose feed. In common with other Kyocera printers, the FS-1061DN has a ceramic drum that’s expected to last for the printer’s life in normal use. This means you only need buy toner, which helps cut down on plastic waste, but it’s disappointing that the printer arrives with a modest 1,500-page consumable, and replacements last for only 2,100 pages. Ongoing print costs work out at 2.4p per page –…

At least 14 million tonnes of plastic end up in the ocean every year, while microplastic particles have been found in almost every ecosystem on the planet – most recently in the Arctic. If you’ve ever owned a printer, there’s a chance you’ve had a hand in it. Printers are made mostly of plastic. They use plastic toners, cartridges and other consumables. And in the case of lasers, most even print by melting tiny bits of plastic onto the page. I’m sure that most PC Pro readers are responsible about their actual technology waste, but something else struck me about the 12 new printers I received for this group test. After unpacking them all, I’d filled a bulging carrier bag with plastic bags, tapes, wraps, caps and various other disposable…

SCORE PRICE Starter, 5 users, 1TB monthly usage, £2,200 exc VAT billed yearly from files.com Files.com doesn’t want to replace your existing cloud file-sharing and collaboration solutions: it wants to work with them. Its powerful remote server mount feature integrates with all key cloud providers, including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Box, OneDrive and Backblaze, allowing Files.com to connect to any folder located almost anywhere. There’s more, as this feature supports the FTP, SFTP and WebDAV protocols, allowing businesses to save on cloud costs by bringing their own on-premises storage into play. Whichever method you choose, Files.com manages and presents remote storage as shares, and actions performed on files by your users such as creation, deletion or editing will be transmitted in real-time. That’s not to say Files.com doesn’t…

SCORE PRICE Appliance with 1yr Total Security Suite, £1,363 exc VAT from guardsite.co.uk Designed for small offices and remote sites, the Firebox T40-W offers enterprise-class gateway security measures at an affordable price. It’s big on performance, too, as its 1GHz quad-core CPU and 4GB of DDR4 RAM provide – WatchGuard claims – a high raw firewall throughput of 3.4Gbits/sec and 300Mbits/sec with the AV, IPS and application control services enabled. Management choices are extensive, as the T40-W offers a local web console and can be monitored using WatchGuard’s free Dimension logging software. More importantly, it can be integrated with WatchGuard’s cloud portal, which now provides remote configuration services along with monitoring. The T40-W offers a solid hardware package, with five Gigabit ports for WAN, LAN and DMZ duties. The fourth…

VIRTUALBOX Oracle VirtualBox is an open-source Type-2 hypervisor that runs on all recent versions of Windows, plus various flavours of Linux and macOS (although if you have an Apple Silicon processor, you’ll only be able to run ARM code). There’s a wide range of supported guest operating systems, including Windows NT or later, Linux, MS-DOS, OS/2, BeOS and Novell Netware, making this a great choice for hosting legacy software. And the price is hard to beat: VirtualBox is freely available under the GNU General Public Licence. virtualbox.org VMWARE WORKSTATION PLAYER VMware Workstation Player is also free for non-commercial, personal and home use – and it’s well supported because it’s closely related to the enterprise-grade VMware Workstation Pro package. It runs on Windows 8 or later, plus numerous versions of Linux,…

I feel like having a rant; an educated and observed rant, but a rant nonetheless. The good news is that I’m fully aware of how futile ranting is without also offering solutions. I can’t imagine anyone reading this will not have come across the phrase “diversity and inclusion” over the past 18 months. The extent to which the business world has identified the need for greater diversity has accelerated exponentially, and every organisation that wants to remain relevant is now (or at least should be) on a journey to become more inclusive. Saying that, how much has really changed? What impact have all these good intentions and great conversations had on the working experience of marginalised groups? Diversity in tech is a well-trodden path; both the needs and the challenges…

Steve Cassidy Read Steve’s column this month for a file-copying app that’s perfect for power users, plus his warning about the perils of live streaming. Discover why you should be scared from p120 James O’Malley What’s the point of NFTs? That’s the question James sets out to answer by speaking to those involved, including one academic who accidentally earned £1 million. See if you can do the same on p32 Simon Handby If you’re looking to buy a printer, Simon is your man. As you can tell from his eyes, he dreams printers, and tested 12 in this month’s Labs. Find out which is perfect for you from p74 Gary Rayneau Gary, cofounder of a company that helps businesses build diverse and inclusive cultures, explains why IT leaders have a…

If you’ve bought any new computing equipment over the past couple of years, then congratulations – it can’t have been easy. From smartphones and games consoles to graphics cards and networking gear, the entire industry has been throttled by the ongoing shortage of semiconductors. Even the biggest companies have been hit – last year, Apple was forced to scale back manufacturing plans for the iPhone, and more than a year after launch it’s still virtually impossible for consumers to buy a PlayStation 5. So are there any signs of things returning to business as normal any time soon or should we expect shortages for the foreseeable future? We’ve been talking to the experts to find out. A big problem for small companies “If you can’t build PlayStations or iPhones, we…

When Dick Pountain isn’t spending his time being editorial fellow of PC Pro, he’s working on a horror comic called Tales From The Crypto. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk It’s become a centrepiece of IT-biz wisdom that one should always wait for v2 of any technology. Those of us who write about IT must suffer at the bleeding edge, however, and once you get beyond version 2 all bets are off; as an ex-Windows user I refuse to participate in 10 versus 11 chatter. I have long since lost interest. Yet in recent weeks two other small integers have been brought to my attention – namely Web3 and 6G – and these seem to portend a forking of the IT evolutionary tree in two very different directions. Web3 came to my attention thanks…

New-look TV Your PC Probe, “Could the internet cope if all TV is IP?” (see issue 329, p12), made me wonder if we need to re-conceive how video is transmitted. If you were designing the internet from scratch, you’d want to minimise the number of times each video is transmitted. If, say, ten people were watching the Euro 2020 final, you’d want the video transmitted once and people authorised to watch it would grab the single stream. Whether you could do that with existing network protocols is a separate question; maybe we need some new protocols. If you have permission to watch a popular programme, it might also be useful for a smart box like Sky Q to record it even if you hadn’t indicated you want it recorded. This…

Is there any point in paying a premium for the fastest speeds your broadband provider can offer? Adecade ago, the average modem sync speed being measured by Ofcom was a mere 12.9Mbits/sec. Now, around two-thirds of British homes are within reach of – if not connected to – gigabit speeds. The question is: what to do with all that bandwidth? David Barber, Zen Internet’s portfolio management director, says we’re now “living in a time of bandwidth abundance”, with broadband providers can “deliver an almost endless amount of bandwidth to your house”. While that finally feels like a nice problem to have, some of those who are paying for gigabit broadband are finding they simply can’t take advantage of all that bandwidth. Even in an era of 4K streaming, cloud gaming…

Buy a Windows computer today and it’s all but certain to contain a TPM. That’s a Trusted Platform Module – an unassuming component that performs a standard set of security functions. Those are defined by the Trusted Computing Group, an industry body with more than 100 members, including AMD, Dell, Google, Intel, Lenovo and Microsoft, working together to improve security across computing devices and applications. The group has been around in various forms since 1999, but it was in 2009 that it published the first TPM standard (curiously presented as version 1.2). This was quickly adopted across the industry, thanks partly to support built into Windows Vista. In 2015, the TPM 2.0 standard brought extra features, and remains the state of the art for trusted computing. Despite its ubiquity, the…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we 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 receive…

PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk There are two ways of looking at this machine. One, an open goal missed. Two, a cleverly balanced use of budget that places all the focus on the thing you look at all day: the screen. Having spent three weeks in the Vivobook’s company, I lean towards the latter. Its biggest selling point is AMOLED technology, with its 13.3in panel offering 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. It isn’t a wide-gamut panel, only covering 70% of the DCI-P3 colour space, but it’s sharp and accurate, with an average Delta E of 0.45. And it covers almost all of the sRGB gamut, 97.6% to quote precisely from our tests, with a respectable peak brightness of 395cd/m2. It would have been nice to go even brighter than…

PRICE £708 (£850 inc VAT) from hihonor.com If there’s one question that Honor laptops ask, it’s this: why pay more? So it is once again with this 2022 update to the 16in MagicBook, available from early April, which packs a cracking amount of power into its 16in metal-bodied frame. I defy you to find a laptop that offers so much for £850. Let’s start with the power, which stems from AMD’s six-core Ryzen 5 5600H processor. This is last year’s technology, but few people are going to complain at the speed this brilliant chip tears through tasks. A score of 266 in PC Pro’s benchmarks is sensational for a sub-£1,000 laptop, as is a 8,699 result in Cinebench R23’s multicore test. The 512GB SSD isn’t a bottleneck either, with sustained…

PRICE £375 (£450 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk It may use the same E Ink technology made famous by the Kindle, but the Note Air 2 is all about productivity. Sure, you can read books on it, and even download the Kindle app, but this 10.3in screen is there for editing. It can’t quite display A4 documents in their native size, but it shows them big enough both to read and edit comfortably; more so than the 8in Kobo Sage opposite. There’s plenty more to love about the Note Air 2 other than its big screen. Slim at only 5.8mm, a large spine on the left-hand side makes the unit easy to hold in one hand. It also includes a Wacom stylus, complete with a choice of nibs, which magnetically attaches…

Boxshots for illustration purposes only Are you in the market for a new copy of Windows 11? Perhaps you’re building a new PC from scratch or looking to move up from Windows 7? Maybe you’re planning to run Windows alongside macOS or Linux? Whatever your reasons, a Windows 11 OEM licence is a great choice. The first reason is simple: price. Microsoft charges £120 for a retail licence of Windows 11 Home, and a staggering £220 for Windows 11 Pro. By choosing an OEM licence – and avoiding the many dubious sources of licences you may find online – you cut that price in half. OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer, but that doesn’t mean this licence is only an option for new system builders. Far from it, in fact.…

PRICE 256GB, £291 (£349 inc VAT) from buy.realme.com/uk With a superlative-heavy name such as the Realme 9 Pro+, you’re duty bound to deliver something extra. Here, there are two: the first, a heart-rate monitor built into the fingerprint scanner, is odd, but the second is even more bizarre. Buy the Sunrise Blue edition of this phone and the rear changes from a sparkly blue to bright red in direct sunlight. This isn’t just one of those subtle effects seen on many phones: it truly turns from blue to bright red. It’s only a shame that us Brits will only get to show off this feature about three times a year. While you might check out the phone for this eye-catching novelty, you’ll stay for its range of features. Let’s start…

PRICE £200 (£240 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk Let’s be honest, it’s hard to love a mono laser printer. Big, noisy and only good for one thing, nobody spares a thought for them until they’re out of toner or tangled in a paper jam. But if the best thing they can hope for is being good enough to forget about, Oki’s B432dn is in with a shout. It’s a compact workgroup printer, equipped with a Gigabit Ethernet port and capable of a claimed 40ppm. Usually, we end up writing the longest notes for the printers that give us the most trouble. It’s telling, then, that our notes for setting up and using the B432dn ran to just 82 words. It’s child’s play to unpack this printer, remove a few bits of…

SCORE PRICE £113 (£136 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk If you’ve seen one Brother inkjet multifunction printer, you’ve seen them all. The DCP-J1140DW is the latest in a longstanding series of squat, blockish MFPs without much in the way of design flair. On top there’s a scanner, but no automatic document feeder; this device is for general-purpose printing, scanning and copying by people who don’t need to fax. Physically, the DCP-J1140DW is easy to set up – you just need to remove some tape and insert four cartridges – but the software presented more of a challenge. There’s no disc in the box, and at the time of our review the driver package wasn’t available on Brother’s UK website; we found it on brother.be. Once installed, you’re prompted to align the…

SCORE PRICE £53 (£64 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk HP’s DeskJet 4120e is essentially an enhanced version of the DeskJet 2710e. While many of its headline specifications are the same, it gets a 35-sheet ADF and a slight lift in mono print speeds, to a claimed 8.5ppm, rather than 7.5ppm. Sadly, being like the DeskJet 2710e isn’t a good thing. For a start, it was just as difficult to join to a wireless network. After a troubleshooting process that literally took hours, we discovered that it wasn’t happy with our network’s support of WPA3 – only once we disabled this could we successfully get it onto Wi-Fi. This is hardly a quick MFP, managing black text at 8.1ppm and complex colour graphics at only 1.8ppm in our tests. It seemed particularly…

SCORE PRICE £263 (£315 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk Unless we’re very much mistaken, Lexmark’s CS431dw is a Xerox printer in disguise. Other than some colour and detail differences, it’s almost identical to the bottom half of the Xerox C235 MFP – and that’s no bad thing. For less than £300, the CS431dw offers four-colour printing, Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet, all controlled with the help of a full-colour touchscreen. To top it off, there’s a 250-sheet cassette, duplex printing as standard, and claimed speeds of 24.7ppm in black or colour. This printer contains only a small amount of packing material, but it’s easy to miss the red plastic ring pulls on its toner cartridges – fortunately the printer detected that we had, nudging us to pull them out and try again.…

Restrictions have lifted and the end of the pandemic may be in sight, but it’s unlikely to signal a return to the same working practices of the past. Remote working has proved to be a boon for many businesses, with some already implementing more flexible working arrangements for their staff. Businesses with an increasingly distributed workforce are finding cloud file sharing is ideal as it offers a secure and convenient way for remote workers to collaborate with colleagues and clients regardless of their location. Email is a poor substitute as it’s unsuited to sending large files, and projects can easily stall when important attachments go missing in transmission or end up languishing in the recipient’s spam or junk folders. Cloud file sharing offers so much more, as its syncing services…

SCORE PRICE 2TB/10 users, £20 per month exc VAT billed monthly from ionos.com Aimed at SMBs that want simple, easily managed cloud file sharing, the HiDrive service from hosting company Ionos has a few tricks that could add extra appeal. We reviewed the top-level HiDrive Pro service, which brings data-backup services for cloud storage, desktops, laptops, mobiles and NAS appliances into play. It’s comparatively good value: a Pro subscription starts at £20 per month and includes 2TB of cloud storage space plus support for ten users. One feature that will appeal to those who want to send large files is that the only limiting factor is the amount of available cloud storage. One thing to bear in mind, however, is that cloud storage is not per user, but shared among…

SCORE PRICE £79 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com Prices for business Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs) have been falling steadily, and Zyxel takes this to the next level as its NWA90AX costs just £79. As you’d expect at this low price, it’s only an AX1775-rated AP, but Zyxel improves value as the NWA90AX can be managed in standalone mode or remotely using its Nebula Control Center (NCC) cloud platform. It’s also the smallest Wi-Fi 6 AP we’ve yet seen, as this palm-sized plastic slab measures a mere 140 x 140 x 38mm (WDH) and weighs only 290g. Its Gigabit port supports PoE+, but worry not if you don’t have a suitable source as the price does include a power adapter. The NWA90AX is simple to deploy in standalone mode, with its…

Composable business? I’m guessing this isn’t about music? It’s not, but the jargon overlap does make a certain sense: it’s hard to be both intelligent and composable if you don’t have an orchestration layer, or a conductor in charge of the big decisions. But that’s enough cheesy metaphors. All right – but what does it actually mean? Intelligent composable business (ICB) is a modern name for an age-old idea – basically, adapting your operations to suit changing circumstances. One long-established business in my client list rents out bikes in the summer and skis in the winter, and that’s 100% an ICB. It’s not a state that’s achieved without a degree of planning, as each role involves a few modules that never get used in the other. For example, there’s a…

I’ve had my new MacBook Pro for a couple of months now, so I’m at the point where I feel that I can start to give you some proper “Real World” feedback. I never like to write about kit that’s only a few days old because so often the niggles (and indeed the good things) only start to show once you’ve been using it in anger for an extended period. Let’s start with the spec of my machine. I maxed this out apart from the SSD. It’s the 16in version, with the M1 Max processor. I went for 64GB of RAM, which was the most on offer, but I stopped at 2TB of storage. Why? Because although the laptop itself wasn’t especially cheap, Apple’s SSD pricing really takes the proverbial.…

Do you use Google products and services? Given that there are just shy of 2 billion Google accounts, chances are that you do. Everyone knows that what drives the Google machine is data: your data. I’ve written a lot over the years about ways to strengthen your Google security posture and how to lock down your privacy as far as you can while reaping the benefits of big G services. I’m not here to repeat myself, you’ll be relieved to know. Nope, I’m here to let you know how to find out what Google knows about you. More precisely, to download data Google holds from your use of services such as Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Pay and so on. Google Takeout is the data-visibility tool in question, developed by in-house engineers…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor and she wrote this column while waiting for a Sainsbury’s delivery to arrive, with her feet propped up on an empty Amazon box. @njkobie There’s no question that Amazon is convenient. For shoppers, the ability to make nigh-on anything arrive at your door tomorrow – if not sooner – is unquestionably appealing. But as useful as the service is for customers, it’s not good for everyone. Amazon is accused of (and generally denies): overworking warehouse staff, with some delivery drivers urinating in bottles rather than taking a break (pcpro.link/331bottles); chucking returned and unsold items in landfill (pcpro.link/331destroy); nabbing sellers’ ideas to rebrand as its own products (pcpro.link/331data); failing to prevent the sale of dangerous or contraband items (pcpro. link/331contraband); and using tax-avoidance measures…

Looking at the Readers’ poll in the April 2022 edition (see issue 330, p25), I am bereft at the apparent short-sightedness of some people in response to “What would you do with your savings?” Imagine the scene. It’s January 2026. Elsie Butterworth, my 96-year-old aunt, along with the rest of the country, has started to heed the severe weather warnings about approaching storm Boris, the second category 7 storm of the winter. With wind speeds of over 270mph and predicted rainfall of 18in in 12 hours, she has filled her freezer with food and several pans with water and taken residence in her Dorothy-esque cellar (no wine as she’s teetotal). She had been sending me hourly email questions about what to do next. The last one, three hours ago, ended…

PRICE £3,667 (£4,400 inc VAT) from corsair.com/uk The Corsair One i300 mini PC was one of the most eye-catching launches at CES 2022, with the component company cramming some of the best tech around into a stylish, compact case. I’m talking top-of-the-line components such as the Intel Core i9-12900K, a liquid-cooled Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, not to mention a 2TB SSD and up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM. It’s also by far the most expensive Corsair One launched to date, with a starting price of £3,500: that’s with a non-Ti GeForce RTX 3080 and 32GB of memory. If you want the i300 with an RTX 3080 Ti, you’ll part with £4,200. And if 64GB of DDR5 memory tickles your fancy, not only will you pay £4,400 but the RTX…

PRICE As reviewed, £,916 (£2,299 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Alienware X14 is one of the thinnest and lightest gaming laptops we’ve ever seen. It’s only 14.5mm thick and 1.8kg, yet still features cutting-edge hardware: our test model features an Intel Core i7-12700H, 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD and a GeForce RTX 3060. That configuration costs a hefty £2,299, but you can buy the X14 for £1,649 if you can cope with a Core i5 and RTX 3050. Whichever specs you choose, you’re buying one striking laptop: pull the Alienware X14 out of its box and the first thing you notice is how skinny it is. It’s a similar profile to a MacBook Pro, albeit one with a protrusion on the back. Much of the hot air is channelled…

PRICE £542 (£650 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Google’s Chromebook initiative began way back in 2011, and with a decade of progress behind it Chrome OS has graduated from its education niche into the business world. This slim convertible – dressed in sober grey livery – is an excellent example of Chromebooks’ maturity. Cast aside any thoughts of cut-down specs, as the Spin 713 Convertible offers a similar amount of power to a mid-range Windows laptop. It’s built around 11th generation Core chips, as opposed to the tenth generation processors you may see in last year’s models. The clue, as always, is in the prefix of the model name; here, the Core i5-1135G7 as opposed to the Core i5-10210U of 2021’s mid-range Spin 713. The G7 suffix also denotes the Iris…

PRICE £833 (£999incVAT) from samsung.com The Freestyle launched in a cascade of publicity, being arguably the flagship product of Samsung’s CES 2022 campaign. Aimed at a young audience that may never have considered buying a projector before, it’s loaded with numerous features to lend it extra appeal. Think built-in streaming services and funky effects to add atmosphere to a room. It’s hugely flexible, with a sturdy aluminium stand that allows the projector to swivel through well over 180° of tilt. That means you can easily project an image onto practically any surface. While Samsung won’t thank me for this comparison, it’s roughly the size and weight of a large tin of dog food, meaning you can toss it in your backpack at a moment’s notice. You don’t need to remember…

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…

PRICE $700 from amazon.com (exc tax) The PU15-Pre is a portable monitor designed to service a demanding niche: creative professionals who work remotely and digital nomads who want true-to-life colour with low latency, a six-digit contrast ratio and the deepest blacks. As such, it costs about five times as much as a standard Full HD portable display. But this is the Tesla X of portable monitors, where money is no object. Eight million pixels spread over a 15.6in panel is a joy to behold, especially when placed in a stylish slab of metal and glass. The aluminium frame blends seamlessly with the glass panel, even if the latter is glossy and prone to fingerprints and reflections. The display comes with a protective sleeve that doubles as a stand, but I…

You can buy a printer for £45, but should you? Bearing in mind our two-star rating for that particular printer, the answer is probably no. You’ll almost certainly be falling into a costly trap of spending little up front and then being hooked into a long-term contract (written or unwritten) that involves costly consumables. The worst-case scenario – for the environment, at least – is that people buy a cheap printer, sign up to the free trial of an ink subscription, and then throw that printer into landfill when the trial ends. As we highlight in View from the Labs on p91, that’s a lot of plastic going to waste. Instead, we owe it to ourselves and the world to make a well thought-out buying decision that will keep delivering…

PRICE £158 (£190 inc VAT) from epson.co.uk If you want to fax, copy or scan, look away now: Epson’s EcoTank ET-1810 didn’t get the multifunction memo. Instead, this single-function inkjet combines a relatively basic printer with the convenience of Wi-Fi, and Epson’s fantastic EcoTank system. For the money, this may seem a simple device. There’s no display or memory card reader, no Ethernet port, and its minimal control panel is limited to four buttons and some elementary status lights. The ET-1810 doesn’t offer duplex printing, and there’s no enclosed paper cassette – just a simple rear tray that doesn’t do anything to protect the paper stack from dust. That’s not much for almost £190, until you consider running costs. Instead of cartridges, Epson’s EcoTank printers use fixed ink tanks, filled…

PRICE £280 (£335 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk If you’re setting up a home or small office, you’ll need a printer or MFP that handles everything you can throw at it. Provided that doesn’t include faxing, Xerox’s C235dw fits the bill. It’s a compact colour laser multifunction capable of 22ppm printing in black or colour. This is a well-specified MFP. In its base there’s a 250-sheet cassette, supplemented by a single-page bypass slot. On top you’ll find a 50-sheet ADF, although this doesn’t support duplex scans. At the back you’ll find a Gigabit Ethernet port. There’s Wi-Fi connectivity, too, so it’s easy to share among users. A large 7.1cm colour touchscreen makes it simple to configure and control, and there’s a USB host port supporting both printing and scanning. This is…

SCORE PRICE £104 (£125 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk Brother’s impenetrable model numbers seem appropriate for its unexciting but capable home office MFPs. The grey MFC-J1010DW might sound dull as dishwasher parts, but it can print, scan, copy and fax, to which end it’s topped with a 20-sheet ADF. There’s automatic two-sided printing, along with manual support for two-sided copying; the ADF itself isn’t duplex. Add in Wi-Fi and a colour screen, and that’s not a bad spec for a little over £100. This MFP is reasonably quick when printing black only, delivering 15.3ppm in our test, and spitting out an A4 copy in 13 seconds, or ten mono copies in a minute and a half. It’s much slower in colour, though, managing only 3.7ppm in our graphical test. It needed…

SCORE PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from hp.co.uk At first glance, HP’s Envy 6432e looks promising. While it’s quite ambitiously priced – particularly when you consider that it has no fax modem or display – it looks great, managing somehow to include a 35-sheet ADF without appearing cluttered or business-like. Part of the reason for its slick appearance is the lack of any obvious controls; a mix of power, status and copy buttons are all concealed to the right of the paper tray, lighting up only when relevant. At this price we’d usually expect more than this printer’s 120-page black and 75-page colour in-box cartridges, but the Envy 6432e does qualify for nine months’ free Instant Ink – worth up to 6,300 pages if you use the maximum 700 each…

SCORE PRICE £116 (£140 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk If you’re looking for a compact home office/small workgroup mono laser, Xerox’s B230 should be on your list. A 34ppm device, it’s well equipped: it includes wired and wireless networking as standard, plus a useful two-line mono display. This printer’s 250-sheet cassette is supplemented by a single-sheet slot. Once loaded with A4 paper, the tray pokes slightly out of its rear panel, but fortunately there’s a flap to keep dust off. Xerox’s setup program failed if we chose the recommended Type 4 Print System. Although we couldn’t divine why, the alternative Type 3 Print System worked fine. It’s clear from the minute or so it takes to boot that this printer has reasonable brains behind it – it’s loading an operating system,…

SCORE PRICE £20 exc VAT per user per month billed yearly from box.com Box is the place to go if you want a lot more than simple cloud file-sharing services, as it also offers an excellent range of business-class collaboration tools and app integrations. This makes it perfect for those working remotely, as it makes it quite feasible for people to do a lot of their work using just a web browser. Box Preview is a key feature, as it allows users to open, view and annotate personal and shared documents without ever having to download them to their PC. Furthermore, if users have the relevant app installed locally or can access cloud services such as Microsoft 365, they can open files directly from their personal Box web portal, work…

SCORE PRICE £13 exc VAT per user per month billed yearly from tresorit.com Businesses worried about storing and sharing confidential information in the cloud will love Tresorit, as this Swiss company has security as its top priority. Tresorit employs a zero-knowledge policy to encryption keys so nobody else but you can access your data. This latest version adds a raft of new features, including enhanced access controls, document usage analytics and stricter security policies for sharing data with external clients. Ease of use is another winning attribute of this product, as Tresorit is exceptionally simple to deploy and manage. We reviewed the Business Plus plan and swiftly added new users simply by sending email invitations to them from its administrative web portal. The message contains a download link for the…

There’s nothing new about virtualisation. Virtual machines were originally conceived of back in the 1960s, as a way of achieving clean, secure multitasking on mainframe hardware. Subsequently, in the personal computer age, desktop virtualisation became popular as a way to run software across different operating system, with Mac-based hosts such as Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion allowing users to run Windows applications in a virtual environment on their Intel-based hardware. Today’s virtualisation tools can still fulfil those roles, and there are plenty of other benefits, too – which is why businesses of all sizes are increasingly making use of virtualisation throughout their operations. How does virtualisation work? Virtualisation is handled by a piece of software called a hypervisor, which can create and host one or more virtual environments inside a…

I’m sorry to mention the ‘C’ word at this time of year, but the first quarter of a technician’s year is traditionally occupied with rectifying seasonal distress, and 2022 has not disappointed. It takes many forms, the most common relating to the selling, arguably mis-selling, of gaming PCs. William’s desktop arrived on Santa’s sleigh, but the family couldn’t agree who decided it was the gaming thoroughbred that would have shot William to e-gaming superstardom. The reported issues related to speed and performance, which shouldn’t be a cause for concern with a new PC. Speaking over the phone, I suggested they contact the vendor as there would be a warranty procedure and possibly a free repair. Eventually, I agreed to take a look and find the fault, so they could report…

Like Davey, I have my hobbyhorse subjects. Every so often he writes about the term “hacking”, and how he dislikes the slow evolution of that term from industry insider’s compliment to mass-media bogeyman label. For me, 2021 was the year “streaming” took a turn for the worse. At the outset, it was something of a fake jargon term, loosely covering any delivery of media (sound as well as video) without an initial download to local storage. Mostly, the term would be thrown around when a sporting event, Royal wedding/birth/defenestration or record-breaking volcanic eruption made people extra-interested in seeing things unfold. Streaming was a sign that you were absolutely on the leading edge of the home multimedia revolution. Then things started to get a lot more complicated. Both Facebook and YouTube…

Robots. Drones. AI. Whenever a new technology creeps into the public consciousness, we can’t resist considering its potential in extremes: smart city tech will either be a clean, convenient utopia or a centrally controlled dystopia. The positive vision is often pushed by venture-capital investors, startup marketing teams and over-eager journalists, while the nightmare view is heralded by activists, regulators, overly cynical journalists – as well as in science fiction shows such as Black Mirror, created by one-time PC Pro writer Charlie Brooker. The reality for most technologies is somewhere in between those extremes, and largely dependent less on the innovation itself than how we humans choose to make use of it. Self-driving cars should reduce accidents, but could require pedestrians to be sequestered away from roads. AI may help cure…

I don’t normally take much notice of the memes that clutter up Facebook and Twitter, but this one made me pause: 2022 and 1970 are as far apart as 1970 and 1918. Perhaps it’s because I so vividly remember 1970. I was six at the time, and can clearly picture the house my family lived in on Beehive Lane in Chelmsford. Yes, the amusement of a Honeyball living in Beehive Lane was not lost on my then schoolmates. Anyway, 1970 was just before the computing world burst out from the industrial confines of the mainframe and minicomputer and into the home. Apple unveiled its first computer in 1976, while the sub-£100 Sinclair ZX80 arrived in 1980. IBM was famously late to the game with its epoch-defining Personal Computer in 1981,…