Innehållsförteckning för June 2021 från PC Pro

IMAGINE THAT YOU’RE the editor of a technology magazine wanting to write a column about how astonishingly rapid the growth of computing has been. Imagine you’re looking for an opening line for said column. Imagine that you want to confirm when the first computer was built, and think that asking your smart speaker might be the perfect illustration of technology’s rapid rise… Me: “Alexa, when did computers begin?” Echo: “Here’s something I found on the web. According to lsuagcenter.com: The LSU AgCenter expert says most researchers recommend that children begin using the computer at age four.” Maybe I phrased that badly. Let’s try again… Me: “Alexa, when did computing begin?” Echo: “I know about 837 film noirs, including Sunset Boulevard, which was released on 10 August 1950.” A bit bizarre,…

For five days in February, people in Australia experienced a version of Facebook that many may wish they could keep: all of the news had disappeared. Following a dispute with the Australian government over a proposed new law that would see tech giants paying a fee to link to news stories, Facebook pulled the plug on news. The blockade was expansive, hiding posts from Australian news outlets, and preventing Australians from linking to stories – even those from international outlets. It was one heck of a way to make a point. It was, however, a fight that the Australian government appears to have won. By mid-March, both Facebook and Google, the two companies targeted by the “News Media Bargaining Code”, had signed licensing deals with the major news publishers in…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Air Affordable Apple M1 ultraportable from £999 from apple.com/uk Apple's ARM-based M1 chip is blasting away its AM D 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 4and Wi-Fi 6. Add battery life into the teens and its biggest threat comes from the updated M1 MacBook Pro 13in. REVIEW Issue316, p40 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY Dell XPS 17 (2020) An excellent alternative to the 16in MacBook Pro thanks to a 17in IPS screen, bags of power, all-round quality and a great range of specs. From £1,799 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 315, p48 Apple MacBook Pro 13in (M1) Apple…

@bazzacollins Occasionally, just occasionally, you lot come in quite handy. A year ago, when I was off on one of my hourly Twitter rants – this time about password managers – a reader called Brian suggested I should take a look at Bitwarden (see p61 for our verdict on its latest iteration). All the password managers I’d tried previously had been a bit pants, but Brian was right: Bitwarden is brilliant. It works near-flawlessly across phones, tablets and computers – in Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, as well as any web browser you can think of – and it doesn’t pelt you with pop-ups or smash your inbox with upgrade offers. The premium account is subtly offered in the settings menu and you can upgrade if you want. Which I…

There’s nothing like a pandemic to make us confront our mortality. Most of us of a certain age will likely have documented what we’d like to happen to our house, savings and other tangible assets when we expire, but far fewer have given any serious thought to what happens to their digital estate. Your next of kin might inherit the laptop left on your desk, but would they be able to get any further than the login screen? What happens to the decades of family photos and videos you’ve got stored on that computer and online services? What about your digital music collection, the money in your PayPal account, the shares you bought, the £400 in your online gambling account? Does anyone but you know how to access this stuff?…

Everyone knows you need protection against hacker attacks, malware and numerous other threats. What you might not realise is Windows 10 includes a broad set of built-in tools that Provide just that. They’re all bundled together within the Windows Security app – but if the name is unfamiliar, that’s understandable. Prior to the September 2018 update, Windows’ various security settings were collectively accessed via the “Windows Defender Security Center”. That in turn was an evolution of the Windows Defender tool that had been built into Windows 8, which took over the antivirus duties previously performed by the standalone Security Essentials tool. You can probably see why Microsoft eventually decided to go with a simple, all-encompassing name. In the latest version of Windows 10, Windows Security looks and works like part…

SCORE PRICE £1,675 (£2,010 inc VAT) from lenovo.com We all know that technologies follow trends, especially when it comes to size Right now the mantra is more about going big, with homeworkers in particular appreciating large screens afforded by machines such as the LG Gram 17 (see p51). With the aptly named Nano, Lenovo is bucking the trend. Jump from the LG Gram 17 to this and you feel much like Alice when she ill-advisedly consumed the “Drink Me” potion. Both machines share one thing in common, and that’s a low weight. At 952g on the PC Pro scales, the Nano feels almost weightless in the hand and in the bag. Ideally, you want to leave the 65W USB-C charger at home as it weighs 329g and uses the rat-and-tail design; Lenovo…

SCORE PRICE £1,208 (£1,449 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/320gram This year, LG hasn’t only refreshed the 17in Gram (see opposite), but has also introduced a new model: the Gram 16. It does a similar job to its larger sibling but in an ever-so-slightly more compact package. The idea, however, remains the same: to maximise screen space without packing on the pounds. And it’s worked. Thanks to its lightweight magnesium alloy chassis, the Gram 16 weighs a mere 1.16kg. That’s more than three-quarters of a kilo lighter than the Apple MacBook Pro 16in (see issue 316, p44) and 540g lighter than the 16in Honor MagicBook Pro (see p57). LG sells a slew of different models, all of which feature Intel’s 11th-generation Core processors with integrated Iris Xe graphics. In our test unit,…

SCORE PRICE £691 (£829 inc VAT) fromcurrys.co.uk As I wrote in last month’s laptops group test (see issue 319, P74), models go out of stock quickly due to the unprecedented demand for mobile machines this past year. To prove my point, the exact model of the Yoga Slim 7 that Lenovo sent in for review - identified by 82A20016UK - is no longer on sale, but variants are. For instance, you can buy this exact same specification but in purple from currys.co.uk. This might not be such a bad move because my grey model offers all the visual excitement of a radio play. I also question Lenovo’s naming strategy on two counts. First, Yoga suggests this laptop’s screen can push back all the way to 360', turning this into a…

Bitwarden If you don’t want a pricey password manager, this cheap, functional offering is the best choice SCORE PRICE Free or $10 per year (Premium subscription) from bitwarden.com Bitwarden is the only mainstream password manager that offers a truly unlimited service for free: you can store as many passwords as you like and access them across all of your devices. You can also share credentials with one nominated recipient, making it the number-one option for anyone who wants to protect their logins without breaking out the credit card. Don’t overlook its subscription services, though. At $10 per year for the Premium plan, Bitwarden is much cheaper than either Dashlane (see p62) or LastPass (see p63), and subscribing unlocks warnings about weak or reused passwords, plus a trusted contact feature for…

SCORE PRICE £26 (£31 inc VAT) per year (Premium, one user) from lastpass.com LastPass has been one of the most popular password mangers for years, and it was all thanks to a free edition that matched many of its paid-for rivals for features – most notably the ability to use it across mobile and desktop accounts without charge. On 16 March, that all changed, with the free edition now only working on one platform. One thing hasn’t changed, which is that this versatile manager plugs into all major browsers. It’s designed to work in Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, but you don’t need to install standalone apps as you can manage your account from a desktop browser. Getting started is effortless. Once you’ve installed the browser plugin or mobile app,…

SCORE PRICE £70 (£84 inc VAT) from eposaudio.com This is the second outing for EPOS Sennheiser Adapt headsets in PC Pro, with the wireless 660 pair (see issue 311, p71) gaining a Recommended award for near-audiophile sound quality. The Adapt 165T II sets its sights lower down the food chain, but again provides detailed reproduction; what it lacks in bass, it makes up for in rich detail and clear vocal delivery. You also lose the immersive nature of over-the-ear headphones, and note that the only active noise cancellation is for the microphone, but that makes sense for a professional headset such as this. Its competition comes from the likes of the Logitech Zone Wired (see issue 311, p71), or indeed the older Sennheiser SC 165 set that the 165T essentially…

SCORE PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from oppostore.co.uk The Oppo name is still little-known in the UK, but this Chinese colossus is now the fourth-biggest phone maker in the world. While it produces phones of all shapes, sizes and prices, the Find X3 Pro is its flagship: and this handset is just as well-formed as anything Apple or Samsung can muster. It’s definitely one of the most striking phones I’ve reviewed, with a mirrored glass back and rounded sides that encase the Find X3 Pro’s iPhone-like camera cluster. With soft curves around the edge of the slim camera bump, it’s really quite lovely to behold. This styling continues to the front, where the screen curves slightly around the left and right edges of the handset, with a generous screen-to-body ratio…

SCORE PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com The Moto G10 is, even by the Moto G range’s budget standards, worryingly cheap. Has Motorola really managed to produce a decent handset for £30 less than the price of the entry-level Moto G9 Play (see issue 314, p76)? At a glance, the G10 shares a lot of DNA with the G9 series – and its more expensive sibling opposite. It’s a fine-looking phone, with the only giveaways that you’re not holding a flagship being the bezel on the “chin” and the plastic back. Motorola has tried something a little different with the shell here, introducing 29 textured waves to give it a distinctive look and make it marginally more grippy. The fingerprint reader is embedded into the circular Motorola logo on…

Printers are in short supply at the moment, thanks to Brexit and Covid-19, and that’s as true for magazine group tests as it is for businesses and consumers. Even the cupboards of the manufacturers’ departments are bare, with staff working from home and the necessity for safe working environments taking its toll on our ability to summon printers from the usual channels. As a result, we had to rely on friendly suppliers to help us out. We’d like to thank printerbase.co.uk and cartridgepeople.com for their help in loaning us printers for review, despite suffering their own supply problems. If you’re struggling to find the printer you want, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend either of these companies, who have knowledgeable staff ready and waiting to help you find your perfect printer.…

SCORE PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk Canon’s Pixma TS8350 has been a stalwart of the mid-range multifunction scene for a while, but the simple truth is that it hasn’t been bettered. There are some niggles, but the TL;DR summary is that this printer produces fantastic-looking prints, whether you’re churning out a report for work or a photo for pleasure. We love the simplicity of Canon’s setup process. Head to ij.start.canon, enter the printer’s series name (the Pixma TS series in this example) and then choose the exact model from the list. You’re guided through every step of the process in as much or as little detail as you want, from removing the packing tape that stops the components rattling around in transit, to connecting the device via USB…

SCORE PRICE £199 (£239 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk Canon has a bewildering array of printers in its Pixma G series, which it also calls MegaTanks. There are mono and colour printers, with and without various networking options, and with or without the usual MFP add-ons such as a scanner, document feeder and fax machine. The G3501 is at the cheaper end of the colour scale. It looks expensive at £239 but remember that cost is frontloaded: it comes with enough ink to print 12,000 mono pages (from two bottles of black ink) and 7,000 colour pages. By the time you come to need to replace it, the cost of refuelling drops to 0.2p per mono page and 0.4p per colour page – which is the standard ongoing cost across all…

SCORE PRICE £235 (£282 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com If your expectation is that a printer capable of printing on A3 paper must be huge, Epson’s Photo HD XP-15000 will be a pleasant surprise. It barely takes up any more room than a standard A4 multifunctional device – not until you fold out the support arm for the rear paper feed, which necessarily extends some distance above the printer to stop A3 sheets in portrait orientation from bending. Even with all its trays and supports extended, however, it’s a lot smaller than the Canon Pixma Pro-200. While it may be the size of a multifunctional device, there’s no scanner to be found here. However, unlike Canon’s A3 printer, the XP-15000 is much better suited to being the only printer in your…

SCORE PRICE £217 (£260 inc VAT) from store.hp.com/uk While ink tank printers now have a significant presence in the inkjet market, “refillables” have yet to make much of a splash amongst lasers. This is one of the few, with toner that’s refilled from a bottle, much like the Epson and Canon ink tank printers on test. The main downside is that, for the moment at least, this bottle-based approach is only available on a mono printer. Its prints work out to around 0.7p each, meaning it doesn’t match the phenomenally cheap printing of the inkjet models, but at less than a penny per page it significantly undercuts its laser rivals. It’s a good thing it does because the Neverstop Laser 1202nw seems expensive for what you’re getting. To be fair,…

Data is the lifeblood of business, and if you don’t keep yours backed up, you’re taking an awful risk. Unfortunately, many companies are relying on ad hoc, untested backup strategies, which leaves plenty of opportunities for things to fall through the cracks. Without a proper backup system in place, you’re putting your very survival on the line. As always, the best strategy is to keep both on-site and cloud backups: generally referred to as “hybrid” backup, this approach gives you the best chance of being able to recover the information you need in the event of a disaster. Backing up to multiple different destinations may sound complicated, but many backup packages now come with built-in support for hybrid backup, making it easy to set up and manage. This month, we…

SCORE PRICE From £146 per year exc VAT from idrive.com If you’re concerned about the ongoing costs of cloud backup, IDrive could be the answer. Its plans start at just £146 per year for 500GB of cloud capacity, which can be shared across unlimited Windows, macOS and Linux systems. It’s not just for desktops, either. The package includes backup services for Hyper-V and VMware hosts, and supports popular business apps such as Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle and Microsoft 365 Exchange mailboxes. If you’re securing multiple servers, the 500GB storage allowance could get used up quickly, but if you need to step up to the 1.25TB tier the price remains reasonable, working out at around £274 per year. Deployment can be a chore, as the IDrive client app has to…

SCORE PRICE £222 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Wi-Fi 6 is gaining momentum in business networks, and if you’re ready to upgrade then TP-Link’s Omada EAP660 HD access point (AP) is a classy way to do it. It’s a dual-band AP that can be fully cloud-managed and promises excellent speeds of up to 2,402Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 1,148Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band. Its 2.5GbE LAN port supports either PoE or PoE+, but for those who don’t have an available power source, there’s an external PSU in the box. If you’re deploying the EAP660 HD in standalone mode, the web console has you covered: the quick-start wizard walks you through setting up admin access and configuring your first two SSIDs, out of a maximum of eight per radio. For cloud…

The recent arrival of Facebook Shops has been great news for many small businesses, allowing them to host an ecommerce outlet on Facebook with minimal investment and administration. However, Tim Mackey, principal security strategist at the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center, warns that it could throw up unforeseen legal issues. “While most businesses operating a Facebook Shop are not targeting an international market, it is important to recognise that data processing for Facebook may occur in a different jurisdiction than the business is based in – perhaps one where the data privacy laws are quite different,” Mackey said. “When an organisation like Facebook is providing the core platform, it’s critical for business owners to understand the ecosystem of providers their customer data is being processed by, so they can be proactive…

Subscribe to today and save on the single issue price. Each issue of PC Pro will be delivered directly to your device each month. SEE NEXT PACiE FOR SET-UP INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO SUBSCRIBE… … on an iPad or iPhone STEP 1 Return to the PC Pro library STEP 2 Choose your subscription term and tap twice on the 'price' box STEP 3 Choose whether to create an optional PixelMags account STEP 4 Enter your Apple ID password to confirm … Windows8 STEP 1 Return to the PC Pro library STEP 2 Choose a subscription term from the bottom left menu and click/tap the corresponding 'Purchase' button STEP 3 Click buy on the popup bar STEP 4 Enter your Microsoft account details to confirm … on an Android device STEP 1…

@userfriendlypc At the end of 2020, Nvidia and AMD unleashed some exquisite hardware. Nvidia’s RTX 3000 range of GPUs brought unthinkable levels of performance into the home, while AMD launched the third iteration of Ryzen in under 18 months. For system builders and upgraders, this is the moment we live for. The prospect of balancing budgets and technology to create machines that deliver the latest wizardry into people’s homes. Well, that is what’s meant to happen: instead, last December, a chronic shortage of components scuppered Christmas retail for me and other system builders. The shelves had been cleared of certain CPUs and you had more chance of receiving a written apology from Donald Trump than getting your hands on these products. Once the low volumes of new GPUs vanished, the…

@happygeek I’m always banging the password manager drum. There’s a good reason for this, in fact there are millions of good reasons for this: the crappy passwords that are still used, and reused, by way too many people who really should know better. I’m confident that PC Pro readers aren’t among this number, but I bet they have family, friends and work colleagues who are. It’s not just the quality, in terms of entropy (more of that will follow shortly), that’s problematic, but the quantity as well. Everyone appreciates that there are far too many websites and services that require a login for anyone who isn’t Akira Haraguchi to remember unique password for each. Haraguchi holds an unofficial world record for memorising more than 111,701 digits of pi. That said,…

A simple little incident, on the surface at least. We put together a couple of PCs because we wanted to test the customer’s working from home capacity. The VDI host machine was a beast: an HP Z820 workstation, with some heavy wow-factor liquid CPU cooling – the second time I’ve seen what we think of as a gamer mod present in a stiff and upright corporate hardcore workstation. It didn’t leak or gurgle, and it kept the machine amazingly quiet. The user workstation was my old Opteron eight-core machine, manufacturer unknown because a) I found it in a skip and b) I don’t speak Korean. It was nearly one of those project days where I start breaking things out of sheer frustration. The two machines could hardly be more different,…

Thursday 13 May 2021 LABS Chromebooks Whether you’re looking for yourself, your children or even your business, we provide a comprehensive round up of the best current Chrome books in next month’s issue. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a free 32GB memory stick emblazoned with the logo of your favourite magazine. You can read PC Pro in print, on an iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p106 for more details. FEATURES Linux on Mars! The Perseverance Marsrover is carrying an important payload: a Linux machine being used in the “Helicopter”, an experimental drone that’s going to be flow non Mars. We speak to the man in charge. Upgrade your home office It seems that many British workers will be splitting their time between home, office and coffee…

My position as honorary grump on the PC Pro podcast is now enshrined. Part of that stems from cynicism that’s been forcefully baked into me over the years – years that stretch even beyond the first issue of PC Pro and to its predecessor Windows Magazine. Over the past three decades, I’ve been spun more marketing lines, more sales nonsense and more fluff than I care to think about. I had hoped that things would be better today. The reality is that we just have bigger and better piles of mediocrity. “Helpful” wizards abound and can occasionally can save time. On most occasions, they just get in the way. Whilst it might be time-consuming to work out what you actually need to do, it’s less frustrating than having to undo…

James O’Malley In this month’s PC Probe, James investigates whether Google might just be losing its grip on the mobile web as rivals to AMP emerge. Turn to p12 to find out more Barry Collins Whether it’s photos or Facebook accounts, we all have digital belongings that we’d like to pass on to loved ones when we die. Barry explains how to create a digital will on p26 Abadesi Osunsade Language matters, explains Abadesi, and that includes terms such as blacklist and master/slave that we use so naturally in IT. So what can we all do about it? Find out on p32 Athina England Athina, this month’s guest RWC columnist, explains why she found being an IT apprentice so useful and what apprenticeships have to offer employers today. See p116…

The mobile web can be frustrating. Click a link to that article you’d like to read and you might find the page takes ages to load because of all of the junk. There are cookie consent boxes, auto-playing videos, obnoxious banner adverts and images that resize at random when they finish loading, sending the text you’ve started reading flying off the screen. In 2015, Facebook and Apple both hit upon similar solutions to this problem. They turned news articles into app-like experiences. Apple launched the Apple News app and Facebook had “Instant Articles” built inside of its main app. Both led to something similar: news articles with all of the gunk stripped away. They loaded up instantly, scrolling was smooth and they made reading more pleasurable. But not everyone was…

Last month, I confessed to feeling less hostile toward the giant digital corporations than is fashionable nowadays, and this month I’m heading further still into the wilderness by admitting that I’m not particularly paranoid about online security, either. That’s not to say I deny the importance of my dear colleague Davey Winder’s advice; I do follow it and, as a result, have only experienced two successful virus attacks in 40 years. In the mid-1980s I used to visit CeBIT with Byte magazine every year, where on one drunken evening with members of the Chaos Computer Club I accepted a floppy disk of source code that blew up the laptop I was using. Luckily, it wasn’t mine but borrowed from a friendly London dealer. Oops. I caught the second one around…

We’re the oversharing generation. You might think that your Facebook posts, Twitter missives and LinkedIn musings are all suitably considered and circumspect, but over time your accumulated posts will inevitably build up a picture of who you are – perhaps including where you live, what you do for a living, your childhood, your family composition, birthday and more. All of which would be valuable information to a potential identity thief. As an example, let’s say you post a picture of your child blowing out candles on a cake. Unless the metadata has been stripped first, you’ve probably also shared the date on which the picture was taken. If your child is young, it’s unlikely they waited until the weekend to celebrate, so there’s a good chance the date it was…

At the bottom of the “App & browser control” page, you’ll find a link to “Exploit protection settings”. Click and you’ll see a list of technical features in Windows that make it hard for malware to get into places it shouldn’t – they’re switched on by default and you should leave them all on. If you’re curious about to what they do, though, here’s an overview: Control flow guard: Some malware works by tricking a legitimate program into storing a carefully crafted set of binary data in memory, then executing that data as code. “Control flow guard” blocks this by only allowing programs to run functions that were identified at the time of compilation as containing valid code. Data execution prevention: Similar to the above, this blocks any attempt to…

SCORE PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) fromcostco.co.uk The wonderful thing about the LG Gram r7 is that you know exactly what you’re getting. Everything is centred around that glorious 77m screen, with a 2,560 x 7,600 resolution to give workers all the space they need. Coupled with a lightness that defies all logic and LG is offering a laptop like no other. Well, aside from the LG Gram 76 we review opposite. I’ll cover the screen first because it’s undoubtedly the star of the show. Not only does it hit a bright 388cd/m2, but LG ensures that whites blaze forth with a purity that would make Mother Teresa blush. It’s tuned for the DCI-P3 colour space, covering 97% out of a 101% volume, and that means rich colours that make…

SCORE PRICE £792 (£950 inc VAT) from hihonor.com It’s no coincidence that Honor’s laptops take such a dominant position in the “Everyday laptops” category of our A-List (see p14). No other company delivers such consistently excellent value, and its three key ingredients are as simple as they are successful: generous specifications, metal chassis, low price. Six months ago, we saw this in the AMD Ryzen 5 4600H version of the MagicBook Pro (see issue 314, p72), but Honor has now added an Intel variant using a Core i5-10210U processor. In both cases, the chips are supported by 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. Honor’s list price of the Intel version is £950, but at the time of going to press it was offering a ridiculous deal: you could buy…

SCORE PRICE $36 per year(individual subscription) from 1password.com Almost every platform is covered by 1Password: it has desktop apps for Windows and macOS, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and plugins for Chrome, Firefox and Edge and Brave. As the Chrome plugin replicates more or less the full feature set of the desktop app, you can use it to run and manage 1Password from Chrome OS or Linux too. It securely stores login details, credit cards, private notes and other bits of personal information, and can insert them into web forms with a click or tap. But that’s not all: the Watchtower component warns you about any passwords that are weak or vulnerable, as well as sites that might not be secure. This is useful, although 1Password does nothing to…

SCORE PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk We’ve all seen examples of bad lighting when dialling into conference calls over the past year. Whether it’s a lack of natural light, someone sitting in front of a window or the poor quality of a laptop’s webcam, there are many reasons to boost your visuals. You probably weren’t thinking of spending £180 for the privilege, however, and the Razer Kiyo Pro’s 1080p resolution is hardly inspiring. So why consider it? The answer is its ability to produce strong images even in poor light, with support for HDR and a top-quality sensor. And it works: HDR boosted darker parts of the image, such as my poorly lit face in the image below, without blowing out highlights like my LED lights in the…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £1,124 (£1,349 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/uk This isn’t déjà vu. We have indeed already reviewed the Surface Duo (see issue 315, p42), with Jon Honeyball buying a US version on launch. It’s finally arrived in the UK, so with five months of software updates it’s time to see if Microsoft has ironed out the creases to justify a £1,349 launch price that made all of us at PC Pro wince in unison. What hasn’t changed is the hardware, which remains gorgeous: two slim servings of glass and screen connected by a beautifully engineered hinge. This is one of those rare times when I wish PC Pro had sound effects, as when you close the Duo there’s a life-affirming thunk that’s reminiscent of a luxury car door. It’s…

Our tests push printers to their limits, checking for quality of prints and the time it takes to complete them. We time how quickly a printer can print using a 25-page mono document and a 24-page colour document, also taking note of how quickly it produces the first mono page. We measure all our speed tests from the moment we click the Print button until the final page has dropped into the output tray. If a printer has draft or duplex modes, we test those too. We also print two 10 x 8in photos and six 6 x 4in photos at the printer’s highest quality setting. On inkjets, they’re printed on appropriately sized photo paper; on lasers, they’re printed onto A4. On the MFPs, we time a single photocopy and,…

SCORE PRICE £217 (£260 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk The ET-2750 is far more down to earth than its extra-terrestrial name suggests. It’s one of the most eco-friendly printers on test, as it uses refillable ink tanks instead of cartridges. These tanks take up more space than the traditional approach but the printer is no larger than a regular MFP multifunction printer). You need to pour ink into the tanks before you switch it on. This sounds scary but is almost impossible to get wrong: break open the bottle’s seal, open the printer lid and upend the bottle onto the correct tank. You can’t even accidentally pour it in the wrong one because Epson has moulded a key shape into the neck of the bottle. Once it’s slotted into place, a…

SCORE PRICE £325 (£390 inc VAT) from store.canon.co.uk The Pixma G7050 sits at the other end of the scale from the Pixma G3501. It uses the same base ink tank concept but adds in every feature you could ever need from an MFP, right up to fax functions. Consequently, the printer is massive and looks busy – the control panel needs an entire number keypad built into it so you can dial out to send those faxes. At least this tilts up nicely, meaning you can operate it from seated or standing. Every function on the printer is controlled using a two-line text-only LCD screen, which sounds woefully inadequate but is actually okay in use. A snazzy touchscreen would certainly make life easier than scrolling through one text option at…

SCORE PRICE £83 (£100 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The HP Envy Pro 6432 is one part multifunction printer, two parts light show. When switched on, the output tray is lit up by an LED strip that glows different colours depending on what state the printer is in. There’s no screen, but the control panel, which is invisible when not in use, lights up like the deck of the Starship Enterprise when its called upon. There are even coloured lights to guide you through problems: a light near the case’s release handle lights up when a cartridge runs out, along with a light on the inside to indicate which ink needs replacing. The rest of the design is cool white and grey, and it’s compact considering it incorporates a scanner and…

SCORE PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk Brother is a multiple winner of PC Pro’s Excellence Awards based on user satisfaction, and the HL-L3210CW provides a glimpse into the brand’s popularity. It’s the lowest-priced colour laser on test yet it can churn out a lot of prints each month at decent speed. What you don’t get is any frills: there’s no scanner, you only get a single-line mono LCD screen, and it’s unable to automatically print on both sides of a piece of paper. Your first task is to install the four colour toner cartridges. They’re already sitting in the correct place – you just need to pull out the tray, remove the cartridge, take off the protective seal and pop them back into place again. It’s more fiddly…

Packed with features and exceptionally fast, but this printer is both expensive to buy and expensive to run SCORE PRICE £317 (£380 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk If you’re looking for a printer to churn out colour pages at speed, this is the one. It was the fastest machine among the 14 we tested, exceeding 19ppm in our standard 25-page mono print test and accelerating to 21ppm in our demanding, laser-only 50-page test. It was joint first in the colour tests, too, inching past the 15ppm mark. It’s also the fastest at duplex printing. You get the idea. It’s fast. If only the printer’s consumables weren’t so costly. Even if you opt to use Lexmark’s recycling programme, which works out cheaper if you commit to sending used cartridges back, at 5.3p…

SCORE PRICE From £458 per year exc VAT from acronis.com Acronis takes a broad view to data protection: Cyber Protect doesn’t just take care of backup, but adds a heap of AI-driven cybersecurity measures, including malware protection, vulnerability assessments, patch management, hard disk health monitoring and remote desktop services. Both local and cloud management options are provided; we went for the latter, as it gives you the ability to extend protection to homeworkers. There are also Essentials, Standard and Advanced editions, with the top-tier package including shared protection plans, deduplication, backup fingerprinting and backup malware scans. For a full breakdown of the differences between versions, see pcpro.link/320acronis. Whichever permutation you opt for, all versions are subscription only. The Advanced licence includes protection for one physical or virtual server and 250GB…

SCORE PRICE From £678 exc VAT from storagecraft.com StorageCraft’s ShadowXafe is an all-round backup solution with a particular focus on VMware and Hyper-V environments. Hybrid backup comes as standard, with SMB shares and iSCSI targets supported as destinations alongside StorageCraft’s own cloud services. The software can be bought either on a subscription basis or as a one-off purchase; the price above is for a perpetual two-socket host licence covering unlimited VMs, although note that backing up physical systems costs extra. Cloud storage starts at around £120 per VM per year, with the premium service providing full disaster recovery. ShadowXafe’s various functions are all managed from StorageCraft’s OneSystem portal. If you want to manage backups for remote workers, you can access this in the cloud or run it privately on a…

@jonhoneyball The news that Fry’s Electronics has closed all of its stores across the US has left me rather upset. Yes, it was a bricks-and-mortar chain that sold computers and related peripherals. So does Currys PC World. But the difference couldn’t have been starker, at least in the distant past. When I first visited San Francisco in 1991, I made visiting the Silicon Valley branches a “must do”. I was absolutely stunned by what I found. This place didn’t just stock computers – it had CPUs. All of them. In all speeds. Motherboards by the stack. RAM? Yes, all of that, in every flavour. There was enough stuff here for you to build any computer you might wish for. Then there were the shelves of tools and test equipment. And…

Athinaengland It all started when I was three years old, and my grandad bought me my first computer. Those were the days before we had internet and the floppy disk was the only way of loading my favourite programs. I was fascinated by anything computer-related and could often be found dismantling and rebuilding them on his dining room table. Miraculously, we always managed to find the right parts to put back together again. In secondary school I studied ICT, but was told I wasn’t allowed to do computing at A Level because it wasn’t a subject for girls. This made me move away from my love of computers towards the sciences, as I felt it was more of a girly subject. I stopped fixing computers myself and relied on others…

Before I head off back into the cybers for another month, I had to ask you this: can you tell the difference between rappers and malware? It turns out I can – at least more often than most. App security bods Promon devised the quiz, which you can try yourself at rapperormalware.com. See if you can beat my 17/20 score. Interestingly, rappers did better than cybersecurity pros at this. Maybe it’s time that researchers stopped giving malware stupid names, or rappers stopped using stupid names – either would work for me. I mean, Tizi, JPEGMAFIA, CozyDuke, CupcakKe could be either, neither or both.…

You can see from the two screengrabs, taken from our sister site itpro.co.uk, the difference AMP makes to the mobile web-browsing experience. On the full desktop web page, a large banner ad appears at the top of the page, a second prominent advertisement runs in the right-hand column and a pop-up video appears over page content. The reader has to scroll down before they can read any of the story, even on a full-size desktop screen. On the AMP page, the ads are gone (although limited AMP ads are permitted), the overlays are not permitted and the content is readable without scrolling. Further differences are evident as you scroll further through the story too (not shown here). For example, tweets that are embedded in the desktop version of the story…

@njkobie My buzzing phone was the first sign that something was up. Whenever a contact in my phone joined Signal, the app would let me know; it’s a quirk of the privacy-focused messaging app that it broadcasts when you join. Those first pings turned into a mass migration in January, with a flood of new Signal users — all because of Facebook’s ongoing disdain for privacy. When I first installed Signal many years ago, the contacts who popped up were fellow journalists, interview subjects for features on privacy and a small handful of forward-thinking friends who had long ago uninstalled Facebook. That meant Signal wasn’t very helpful as a default messaging tool, as it lacked any network effect: if everyone’s on WhatsApp, that’s the app I’m going to use. Anyway,…

It’s 5am and I’m sitting in my lounge re-reading Jon Honeyball’s review of the Microsoft Surface Duo (see issue 315, p42). I’m typing this email on my Nokia Android phone, while my Surface Duo is back in its box, waiting for me to return it via my local Covid-compliant courier. I was the last to leave the Windows Phone world for Android. I hated Android. However, four years and a fairly steep learning curve for a 50-year-old IT pro later, I’m now a convert. Why? In short, because I can group a load of apps by purpose into a single folder – “Office”, “Shopping”, “Media” and so forth – on my homescreen or apps screen. How is that relevant to the Surface Duo? Well, Microsoft has decided this feature isn’t…

If you’re concerned about what your voice assistant might be recording, you can take charge of this just like any other sort of personal data. The Google Assistant doesn’t save your audio by default, but you can optionally enable the capability at pcpro.link/320activity. While there, you might want to click the “Auto-delete” option and set your data to be wiped after three, 18 or 36 months. If you want to see if your Assistant devices have captured any recordings, go to myaccount.google.com/yourdata/assistant and check the settings under Google-wide controls. Under “Audio recordings”, select “Listen to and delete activity”. If you have an Amazon Echo device, you can use your voice to instruct it to “delete all of my voice recordings”. You’ll be warned that this might make it harder for…

Looking for a particular pastreview? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index SCORE PRICE £1,666 (£1,999 inc VAT) from store.acer.com It was perhaps unwise for Intel to take aim at Apple with a series of “attack ads” in March, where it mocked its long-time partner for its staid approach to laptop design. But it had a point. Apple’s resistance to touchscreens in laptops means that creative professionals must still use a graphics tablet – or an iPad – if they want to draw digitally. In contrast, creative pros who aren’t averse to Windows have a multitude of choices. They can buy a tablet-first Surface Pro with its detachable keyboard, a laptop-first Surface Book 3 (see issue 311, p48) with its detachable screen, or choose a convertible 2-in-1 with a lid that rotates…

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 £2,916 (£3,499 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk If you bought the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550LXS we reviewed a few months ago (see issue 312, p52), it’s best if you look away now. Not only is this update faster in every way, it’s also £500 cheaper. Still, this is the literal price we all pay for living at the cutting edge of technology, and the GX551QS skates so close you can hear the ice crack. Asus pairs AMD’s most powerful and most recent Ryzen 9 5900HX processor with the fastest mobile graphics chip in existence: Nvidia’s all-new RTX 3080. With all the power inside, the ice should be melting and it’s true that this laptop isn’t going to last long when gaming on the move. We squeezed 5hrs…

SCORE PRICE £200 (£240 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/320echo It’s no coincidence that Honor’s laptops take such a dominant position in the “Everyday laptops” category of our A-List (see p14). No other company delivers such consistently excellent value, and its three key ingredients are as simple as they are successful: generous specifications, metal chassis, low price. The principal use case is video calls. Amazon launched group calling for Echo devices at the end of 2020, in the hope that it would supplant Zoom and Skype for remote family get-togethers. Indeed, with support for Skype in place and Zoom coming soon, the Show 10 could be viewed as the ultimate standalone webcam. Before you can get started, though, there’s setup to plough through. This sees you tweaking the default resting position of…

SCORE PRICE $40 per year(Premium subscription) from dashlane.com Dashlane is a beginner-friendly password manager that works with Google Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. It will also plug into Chromium-based browsers such as Opera and Brave, and apps let you manage and configure the service on Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. When you install the desktop app, it picks up any passwords saved in your browser and lets you choose which ones to import. A click takes you to the installation page for the appropriate browser extension. The main interface has a clean, clear layout from which you can review your stored items, check the strength of your passwords and configure sharing and emergency access. Most of the time, though, the software is almost invisible. When a web page wants you…

SCORE PRICE £92 (£110 inc VAT) from logitech.com The Ergo K860 is a “science-driven ergonomic keyboard to help office workers improve their posture, increase comfort and lower muscle strain”. It splits the traditionally flat keyboard in two, angling each half toward your elbows and introduces a hump in the middle – Logitech calls this the “curved keyframe” – so your hands tilt slightly to the side as you type. The Ergo K860 also includes a luxurious padded wristrest that raises your palms up slightly above the level of the keyboard. And I love it. It feels supportive, cushioned and pleasant to touch all at the same time – it’s like a memory foam mattress for your wrists. Flip-out legs underneath the wristrest mean you can tilt the angle up at…

SCORE PRICE £133 (£160 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/320g30 Despite its name, the Moto G30 isn’t three times as good as the Moto G10 opposite, but it also isn’t three times the price. At a mere £30 more, though, is the Moto G30 worth the extra? Despite the numerical jump, the G30 is still very much a budget device. Powered by Qualcomm’s eight-core Snapdragon 662 processor and backed by 4GB of RAM, it’s actually a side-step from the Moto G9 Power (see issue 318, p72) and G9 Play (see issue 314, p76) handsets, which have identical internals. Like its G10 doppelganger, the G30 is a chunky handset, with a 6.5in screen bordered by bezels a couple of millimetres thick. As usual, this bezel doubles in thickness around the “chin” of the…

SCORE PRICE £379 (£455 inc VAT) from store.canon.co.uk While some of the laser printers on test this month are chunky beasts, the Pro-200 is a true giant. It actually isn’t all that heavy, considering its size, but it has an enormous footprint, particularly when its rear input and front output trays are fully extended. It’s 837mm wide so, before you buy, make sure you factor in the price of a second desk to put it on. The reason for its enormity is its ability to print on A3 paper. Actually, this isn’t strictly true, since the Epson Photo HD XP-15000 can also print on A3 and is significantly more compact. However, we can’t bring ourselves to be too critical of the Pixma Pro-200’s proportions because it prints photos like an…

SCORE PRICE £127 (£153 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk With its subdued colours and boxy design, the OfficeJet Pro 8022 is a more business-like printer than the voluptuous OfficeJet 6950. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a boring beige box; if anything it has more trimmings than its brother, including a slightly larger 2.6in colour touchscreen. The only physical button on the device is the one you press to switch it on. There are numerous connection options too, with an Ethernet port alongside the more standard USB and Wi-Fi, giving more choices for sharing if you’re thinking of installing it in a small office. It uses the same setup and software as the OfficeJet 6950, so is reasonably smooth to get running and is well integrated into Windows 10. However,…

SCORE PRICE £60 (£72 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk This affordable little MFP is frill-free, but we’re still flabbergasted that Epson has crammed so much into such a small box: its footprint is barely larger than the A4 scanner that sits on the top. Its features are hidden under flaps that unfold to reveal its functions, such as the paper tray at the back, the tilt-out control panel and the (slightly flimsy) paper output tray that slides out from the front. It can even do some fancy tricks that pricier printers can’t, such as print on both sides of a sheet. The printer uses four cartridges, which is a better option than the HP Envy Pro 6432 and its inefficient method of combining three colours in a single cartridge. However, cost…

SCORE PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from cartridgepeople.com This big dark grey box will dominate any table you place it on, but its size is somewhat tempered by its quirky, slanted styling. It gives the impression of a printer that’s been manufactured in italics, and is strangely pleasing to the eye. Its lines carry down through the printer to the paper tray at the bottom, which can hold 225 sheets of plain paper. The top of the box is dominated by the 35-sheet automatic document feeder. Below that, there’s a simple control panel with a small, monochrome touchscreen. At 2.2in across the diagonal, it’s small enough to make some operations fiddly – you’ll find yourself scrolling to get through menus of options – but it’s perfectly usable. Cartridges are split…

SCORE PRICE £207 (£249 inc VAT) from cartridgepeople.com Laser printers are the backbone of offices around the land, and this HP LaserJet is a prime example of its type: this affordable laser will churn out reasonably priced, sharply printed documents with speed and accuracy. It doesn’t have a scanner built in, but if you’re looking for a straightforward device to churn out page after page, month after month, the Color LaserJet Pro M255dw is well up to the task. Physically, there isn’t much to look at: it’s a white box with a generous 250-sheet plain paper tray at the bottom. Prints appear at the top, descending into an output tray that can hold 100 sheets at a time. There’s a single power button on the front with everything else on…

As I write this, it seems like a terrible time to need a new printer. The two horsemen of the apocalypse – Brexit and Covid-19 – have cast their long shadows over the world, blocking the smooth movement of both inkjet and laser printers. But I have high hopes that they’re only temporary hurdles. Once we’ve beaten back the pandemic with vaccines, and people become more familiar with the extra complications required to move goods across our borders, I fully expect the situation to pick up. In the meantime, if printer supplies are still looking low by the time you read this, don’t panic. Over the course of writing this Labs I’ve also been monitoring supplies of printers (I’m great company at dinner parties) and there are promising signs. If…

SCORE PRICE From £461 per year exc VAT from barracuda.com It’s great to have a single solution that manages both local and cloud backup – and Barracuda’s Backup platform adds site-to-site replication too, making it ideal for multi-office businesses. It runs on a range of standalone backup appliances, but you can also get it as a virtual server for both VMware and Hyper-V. We tried out the latter and found that installing the VM took just ten minutes. We were then easily able to register the virtual appliance to our account by logging into the cloud portal and entering its unique code. Pricing for virtual host backup is based on sockets: our dual-socket Hyper-V hosts required a total of four licences, while physical Windows servers required a single licence each,…

SCORE PRICE £259 exc VAT from ebuyer.com With a footprint of just 292 x 161mm, the ScanSnap iX1400 is a supremely compact desktop scanner. Yet there’s nothing cut-down about its capabilities: it churns through 300dpi colour scans at 40ppm, supports double-sided scanning and includes a decently sized 50-page automatic document feeder. What you don’t get is network support – this scanner only works over a USB 3 connection. There’s no screen, either, nor anything much in the way of controls, but the blue button at the front links up with Fujitsu’s ScanSnap Home software for one-touch scan operations. Installation on a Windows 10 desktop was swift. All we had to do was visit the website as directed by the manual, download the latest version of ScanSnap Home and plug in…

Facebook pixels take their name from an old tracking technology used in emails and web pages, which contained HTML code that downloaded a tiny single-pixel image from a remote site. By recording the IP address and other details of the requesting computer, the pixel server could keep track of who had opened the email or visited the target page. Today, a Facebook “pixel” is actually a few lines of code that you insert into your own web pages; these capture contact information for visitors to your site, and link them together with interactions on your Facebook page (“events”). CyberSmart’s CEO Jamie Akhtar and social specialist Frankie Baesa explained that, armed with this information, “Facebook can prepare reports on the impact of your advertising campaigns and other online content, and generate…

In the midst of a global lockdown, social learning feels like a very 21st-century idea; after all, the communication technologies we have today make it far more viable than it would have been a few decades ago. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen in the past, though. Just ask leader of the opposition Sir Keir Starmer, who has described how, as a schoolboy, he used to participate in prolonged and vehement political debates with his classmate Andrew Sullivan, who is now a US-based political commentator. I happened to be in the same class as them both, and can confirm that, without a doubt, their war of words raised not just their own game, but everybody else’s too. As the ideas bounced back and forth, we were all challenged and enlightened…

@PaulOckenden Thanks for the feedback so far on this short series of columns covering LoRa and LoRaWAN. It’s nice to hear that the idea of low-powered long-range radio is grabbing your interest. I briefly mentioned antennas last month, but let’s take a look in a bit more detail now. Actually, I say “detail”, but antenna theory gets very complex and you’d need a thick book to cover it all, not just a few paragraphs in a magazine column, so as usual I’ll try my best to simplify things. Apologies in advance if you’re a radio nerd and my simplification goes a step too far! There are many different types of antenna, but perhaps one of the first things to look at is whether they’re directional or not. Actually, to a…

There are a number of important things to consider when taking an apprentice on, both from an employer’s point of view and also from that of an apprentice: ■ If you’re employing an apprentice yourself and avoiding a training body, a good training structure is vital. Normally, apprentices come straight out of school or sixth form and want qualifications. It doesn’t have to be in the same way that I earned my qualifications, but it became clear from the young people that I spoke to that they would like the option to gain some formal training. ■ Make sure apprentices are paired up with someone who is willing to teach them and has the time to mentor them. I’ve seen a bored person on too many occasions and that doesn’t…

@stardotpro As sudden as a light bulb, the reader mailbox burst into life in mid-February. One particular question stood out: what’s the best add-on disk controller for a domestic, small NAS project? Seems simple on first pass, right? So I dearly wish, but getting the right bits to run in the right way and actually work as protectors of your data is not the walk through a daisy-lined park that you might imagine. Contrary to the impression I may have given in previous columns, the entire storage business is a nightmarish labyrinth of not-really-compatible, but apparently perfectly standard, components and software. Take a look at the storage market in devices for hosting centres, where replacement or expansion drives for heavyweight rack-mount storage expansion cages are very machine-specific. Many a support…

Solving the problems faced by driverless cars requires rethinking how vehicles work, and research from Bani Anvari, research leader of the Intelligent Mobility Group at University College London, reveals even seating may have to be reconsidered. Plenty of driverless designs suggest seats that swivel, so drivers can turn around to speak to passengers after they let the machine take the wheel. That’s not what Anvari is considering. Instead, she’s examining the use of haptic feedback to let the car communicate to the human sitting in the driver’s seat that it’s time to retake the wheel, rather than a flashing light or beeping sound. “Normally in autonomous cars, we see audio and video feedback for different levels of autonomy and the handover task between these levels of autonomy,” Anvari explained. “What…