Table of contents for May 2021 in PC Pro

I TEST A LOT of products. In this month’s magazine alone, you’ll find my verdict on 24 pieces of equipment; some are fantastic, such as the Dynabook Portégé X30W-J (see p56), while others fall into the grey noise of mediocrity. As a result, much like Jilly Goolden is able to sniff out the delicate tones of blackberries in what to me smells exactly like red wine, my nose is attuned to bad reviews. Reviews where the aroma is fruity, but not in a good way. Some produce such a stench that they’re unmistakably off to any nose. I speak of the paid-for fake reviews that are the scourge of Amazon, although at least you can dampen their whiff by installing browser add-ons such as Fakespot. I almost (but not quite)…

Tesla’s decision to purchase $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin has not only led to a surge in the value of the controversial cryptocurrency – it may just have given it some much needed credibility. Tesla boss Elon Musk revealed the firm had invested in the cryptocurrency to form part of the company’s cash reserves. He also claims that Tesla car buyers will soon be able to pay for their new vehicles with Bitcoin. Following the announcement, the exchange price of the currency climbed from around $39,000 per virtual coin to $46,000. This follows a steady and dramatic rise for the cryptocurrency that began last October when the price was around $10,000. So what does this surge in price and interest mean? Is Musk’s vote of confidence a sign that Bitcoin…

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 AMD and Intel x86 opposition with truly extraordinary speeds. Even the low-end model with 8GB of RAM is ludicrously fast. Apple makes no changes to the Air’s design, but it still looks fabulous and now supports both USB 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Add battery life into the teens and its biggest threat comes from the updated M1 MacBook Pro 13in. REVIEW Issue 316, p40 ALTERNATIVES Dell XPS 17 (2020) 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 replaces Intel’s…

@bazzacollins I’m routinely stunned by the lengths computer manufacturers go to keep us here at PC Pro in (just about) gainful employment. We really shouldn’t be necessary. Fair enough, 30 years ago, when PCs were largely identical beige boxes that many people were buying for the first time, you needed friendly, expert advice on what to look for. Now most people are in double figures of computers owned and yet you’re still coming to us for advice on which one to buy next, albeit in smaller numbers than back in the 1990s. Part of the reason for this is that the manufacturers make it so hard for people to choose. Deliberately hard. Even Apple – the company with the simplest, most streamlined selection of computer models in the entire industry…

Despite the controversy and challenges from services such as Signal and Telegram, WhatsApp still rules supreme with our tech-savvy readers – although that often seems to be due to inertia rather than any love for the app. “I don’t use WhatsApp by choice, but mostly because people want me to use it. I rarely initiate a WhatsApp call,” wrote Mr G. “I miss the days when you could use an app like Trillian as a single interface for many different messaging applications.” Kevin, meanwhile, is on the brink of leaving the Facebook-owned service: “The moment WhatsApp enforces a Facebook account or changes their privacy to affect us in the EU/UK, I’ll revert to text messages.” “ Persuading my contacts to switch is very difficult. I prefer Signal. After WhatsApp announced…

If you right-click on any file or folder in Explorer and open the Properties window, you’ll see two readouts of its size – first, how many bytes of data it contains and then a second number reflecting how much space it’s actually taking up on your hard disk. The figures are different because Windows allocates space in atomic chunks, typically of 4KB in size. Thus, even if a file only contains 2KB bytes of data, it effectively occupies 4,096 bytes of disk space – and if the file grows to 4,097 bytes long, it spills over into another cluster and takes up 8,192 bytes on disk. The only exception is if a file is smaller than around 500 bytes, in which case NTFS stores it entirely in the file allocation…

There may be a shortage of desktop GeForce RTX 3000 graphics cards, but you’re spoilt for choice when it comes to laptops. Nvidia only announced the mobile incarnation of its latest GPUs in January, yet this month’s review pages are home to five powerful laptops with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 inside. While we dedicated the previous three pages to Asus’ flagship gaming laptop, and the Ryzen 5800H inside it, over the next four you’ll find reviews of rivals that offer a different route into blistering frame rates. To make it easier to compare all five machines on review, here’s a handy graphical comparison of their respective speeds and strengths. Note all these results were with Nvidia’s Game Ready drivers.…

PRICE £ 2,249 (£ 2,699 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Until this month, OLED displays have been a rare sight on laptops. This issue we have two: the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XC here and the Asus ZenBook Flip S on p59. The Aero is part of Gigabyte’s professional line of “Creator” laptops and it combines the attractions of OLED with Pantone certification and a fearsome specification. My sample came with the GeForce RTX 3070, but it’s also available with the 3060 and 3080. Like the Asus ROG Strix G15 (see p50), it’s accompanied by an Intel Core i7-10870H, while 32GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD round off its key specs. The 15.6in OLED screen is the star here: a 4K resolution, HDR 400 certification and factory calibration for…

PRICE £1,416 (£ 1,700 inc VAT) from lenovo.com With one sweep of its active stylus, the Dynabook Portégé X30W-J (see p56) has rewritten our expectations of convertible laptops. In part due to the Yoga9i’slarg larger 14in screen, it looks and feels portly by comparison: vital stats of 318 x211 x16.4mm (WDH) and 1.35kg mean it’s not comfortable in one hand for a prolonged time. It’s also plain. This even applies to the special edition “Shadow Black” version here, which includes a leather cover on the lid. This adds visual interest but feels like plastic – not the intended effect. The screen bezels could be slimmer too: 5mm at the side is great, 8mm at the top is okay, but 13mm at the bottom is archaic. One advantage the Yoga 9i holds…

PRICE CT700-71A, £2,610 (£3,133 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/319acer They may be targeted at a similar type of buyer, but the ConceptD 700 couldn’t look more different from the Scan opposite. This system has enough style to sit on a design agency’s front desk; there’s even a dark wood effect on the top, with Acer hoping that you might just stretch for an accompanying ConceptD monitor such as the CP5271UV (see p65). The pair certainly looked well matched on my desk, and if you want to commit to the look then Acer also plans to sell an all-white ConceptD keyboard and mouse. But it would be wrong to focus too much on this machine’s styling, because its real strength lies inside. First, the Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card, which accounts for…

PRICE €750 from mi.com/fr (not yet available in UK) Instead of doubling down at the budget end of the spectrum, Xiaomihas set its sights on plump wallets with the Mi 11. In return, the handset is graced with Qualcomm’s new flagship processor, a gigantic 108MP camera and a 120Hz display. This is the first phone we’ve seen with the Snapdragon 888 chipset inside, Qualcomm’s first to be manufactured on a 5nm fabrication process – just like Apple’s A14 Bionic and Samsung’s Exynos 2100. It delivered on its promise with a big performance increase – up to 28% – compared with the Snapdragon 865 in Geekbench 5’s single and multicore CPU tests. Scores of 1,128 and 3,667 respectively beat Samsung’s equivalent by around 5%, but the A14 Bionic in the iPhone…

Laptops don’t need to be expensive. If anything, this month's Labs shows precisely how low you can go, as we spread our net across true budget machines right the way up to £999 luxury-packed systems. It also emphasises that you need to have an excellent idea of what you want from your laptop. We’ve dedicated more space than usual to the webcams, for instance, as we still don’t know how much of this coming year will actually be spent in offices and schools. There will come a time when we’re all travelling again, though, so the age-old struggle between portability, power and price comes into play. Again, this is a Labs of extremes, with everything from a £205 system (imported from Hong Kong) to a gaming powerhouse provided by MSI.…

Range starts at: £833 (£999 inc VAT) Model tested: £833 (£999 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk This is the first time we’ve included a MacBook in a “budget” laptop Labs, with the company just squeezing under our £999 limit with the base model of its new M1 MacBook Air. Unlike many base models, this is no low-end affair. The only specs downgrade versus the £1,299 MacBook Pro is that you have seven graphics cores rather than eight, with the CPU being the same, all-conquering ARM-based M1 chip. It’s safe to say that, until the M1, ARM-based processors didn’t have a good reputation within laptops. All the Windows on ARM systems we’ve tested have been sluggish affairs where you traded speed for battery life, but Apple has turned that trend on its…

Range starts at: £458 (£550 inc VAT) Model tested: £558 (£680 inc VAT) from hihonor.com Imagine for a moment that Honor and Huawei are brothers (Honor was a sub-brand of Huawei until it was sold to a Chinese consortium in late 2020). The elder brother, Huawei, is lavished with all the top-end kit while the junior sibling makes do with hand-me-downs. Nevertheless, there’s no disputing the fact that they share the same DNA, right down to the size of the bezels and the all-metal construction of their chassis. Honor, though, has its eye on the value prize. While the MateBook 14 enjoys shiny bezelled corners, the MagicBook looks rather plain in its gunmetal livery – which Honor optimistically calls “Space Grey”. The key to these sacrifices is that they don’t…

Range starts at: £458 (£549 inc VAT) Model tested: £935 (£1,122 inc VAT) from businessdirect.bt.com The Surface Laptop Go is a phenomenal little machine. While buying the lowest-spec version would be a mistake – 64GB of eMMC storage and 4GB of RAM is a combination that makes grown IT support teams weep – once you step up to the £699 model with a Core i5, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, it begins to look like a compelling system. Microsoft even believes it has enough about it to work in a business situation too, sending us a £1,122 system that features a Core i5-1035G1, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and Windows 10 Pro. It points out that there’s “enterprise-grade” protection courtesy of the Windows Hello infrared camera and…

Acer’s Aspire range is designed to do one thing: sell in droves. It’s a mass market laptop built on a budget, and if that means chunky bezels and a predominantly plastic chassis then so be it. It’s the supermarket own-brand of jeans – none of that designer label nonsense. To a large extent, this approach works. The Aspire 5 A514 range, which is primarily on sale at Currys, starts at £429 for a Core i3 system with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. This is enough to run Windows 10, although upgrading the RAM by 4GB will make things smoother (it’s possible to add this yourself if you follow online video guides). Sadly, the specification that Acer sent to use for review is no longer available, which reflects just…

Range starts at: £614 (£737 inc VAT) Model tested: £691 (£829 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews If you’ve read the Chillblast review above, you’ll know what to expect of this PC Specialist machine. They use the same Clevo chassis, a 1.7kg beast that measures 357mm across to accommodate the 15.6in IPS screen. Clevo has made it rain ports, with four on the left alone: a Thunderbolt 4, a USB-C 3.2, a USB-A 3.2 and an HDMI output. There’s also a DC input for the charger, but you can recharge this laptop and connect it to a monitor via the Thunderbolt port. And it doesn’t stop there. On the right, you’ll find a Gigabit Ethernet port, a 3.5mm jack, a USB-A 2 port and a microSD card slot. The wide expanse also…

Range starts at: £574 (£689 inc VAT) Model tested: £792 (£950 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com When Huawei designed the MateBook 14, it didn’t break the mould; it simply passed it to Honor and let its sister brand create the MagicBook 14 (see p82). That cut-price alternative steals much of the MateBook 14’s glory, but there is no disputing which is the classier laptop. For a start, the MateBook’s screen stretches all the way from the top to the bottom of the lid, providing you with a glorious extra area to work in: the 3:2 aspect ratio and 2,160 x 1,400 resolution makes it feasible to work side by side on documents without squinting or constantly having to zoom in. This is a far better panel, too, hitting a peak brightness…

PRICE Appliance with 3yr TotalProtect Plus: $2,964 per year from sophos.com This short-depth rack appliance is designed to keep up with busy networks. Along with a feast of copper and fibre network ports, Sophos’ XG 230 Rev.2 claims a mighty 32Gbits/sec raw firewall throughput – even with all of the security services enabled, it still pumps traffic through at a speedy 4.5Gbits/sec. There’s room to grow further too, thanks to an internal expansion bay that supports eight different Flexi modules, with options ranging from PoE provision up to 10GbE and 40GbE connections. For redundancy, the appliance can accept an optional second power supply and a pair of network bypass ports keep the traffic flowing even if UTM functions are temporarily disabled for any reason. The price above is based on…

PRICE Diskless, £2,314 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Nothing succeeds like excess, and Qnap’s TVS-h1288X has it in abundance. This imposing desktop NAS appliance provides eight LFF and four SFF drive bays, along with dual internal M.2 NVMe SSD slots – and it presents all this storage over four embedded 2.5GbE ports, plus a dual-port 10GBase-T PCIe card. It also enjoys all the benefits of Qnap’s 128-bit ZFS-based QuTS hero OS. This has some fantastic dataintegrity features, including near unlimited snapshots, end-to-end checksums for transparent error-correction, and triple-parity and triple mirroring RAID options. To help you make the most of your storage, the OS also offers inline data deduplication and compression, while off-site data replication is turbocharged by the clever means of only sending changed blocks to remote appliances. For archival…

Workers killed by robots. A pedestrian run down by a driverless car. Algorithmically generated animated videos that terrify children. Machine-learning image analysis that means police arrest the wrong person, invariably a Black man. Horror stories abound of artificial intelligence (AI) gone wrong – and Sean McGregor wants to hear them all. McGregor is the project lead at the AI Incident Database (AIID), a repository of missteps and mistakes made by supposedly smart systems that’s part of the wider efforts of industry group, the Partnership on AI. “One of the project ideas was to build a taxonomy of AI failures to really understand how things can go wrong,” McGregor said, referencing a classification system that can help machines better understand language. The problem was that there wasn’t any data – and,…

This is a difficult subject with no easy answers. But we have to decisively solve the problem of safeguarding children when they’re using the internet. Hardly a week goes by without a news report telling us how adults have been targeting children on chat rooms, video sites and all of the other places that have sprung up online. Forty-two years after the birth of the world wide web, it simply isn’t good enough. It’s easy to say “where on earth were the parents? And why wasn’t the device locked down with some sort of parental control?” It’s easy because we’re techie users who know that parental controls exist and aren’t frightened by the tools required to implement them. But that doesn’t describe the average parent, who may not have the…

Dizzy Oh, very well, classic 8-bit character Dizzy didn’t really write this month’s Retro – but David Crookes explains why 2021 may see a final outing for the beloved hero on p123 Nik Rawlinson Read Nik’s comprehensive guide to setting up a video surveillance system based on a Raspberry Pi from p32. It’s kind of like Ring, except you keep control of your data Lee Grant Having spent two decades fixing laptops, computer shop owner Lee is increasingly concerned by their lack of repairability. From p26, he explains why we need the right to repair Nicole Kobie AI is here to stay, and rightly so, but it needs to be held accountable for its mistakes. Nicole introduces the prime weapon in our armoury from p126…

When Britain locked down last spring, one of the many unknowns was whether people would comply with the new social distancing rules. Would we all keep our distance? Or would we grow tired of the restrictions and flout the rules as time wore on? The answer was vital, as compliance could have a big impact on the transmission and spread of Covid-19. To find out what was happening on street corners, Innovate UK, the government’s innovation agency, awarded a grant to tech firm Vivacity Labs. The company was to use AI-powered cameras, which were installed on the streets of 16 British towns and cities. The devices themselves are relatively simple cameras that are bolted on to existing infrastructure, such as lampposts and traffic lights. The cameras aren’t passively recording images…

Having used most of them since they first emerged, I’m far better disposed toward the giant digital corporations, or “Big Tech”, than most people. I started working from home long before the current emergency, 38 years ago in fact; doing that without Google and Wikipedia is unthinkable to me, while entertainment would be very dull without YouTube and Spotify. The last year has made Amazon indispensable, while Facebook has become my place to joke and grumble. This extended acquaintance means I still regard Big Tech’s services as remarkable amplifiers of my abilities, rather than sinister threats to my freedom. I do, of course, acknowledge that their monopolies, lack of care over fake news and flagrant tax avoidance are serious problems, but I believe the perpetrators need to be cured rather…

You’ve got mail Pete Mitchell’s letter (see issue 317, p22) bemoans the withdrawal of mail forwarding from Yahoo Mail. Surely the first alternative is to use a mail fetcher process in another mail service to get the emails from the Yahoo account? The only downside is that emails may take a few minutes longer to arrive. Many email providers have shut down, sometimes with quite short notice. That includes email provided with broadband accounts such as Tiscali, Orange, Freeserve, Wanadoo and Demon Internet. If you choose to change broadband provider, you’ll likely be charged if you want to keep the associated email address. I believe BT charges £7.50 a month if you wish to keep your @btinternet.com email address. My advice is to switch to a provider that’s (probably) here…

Think about your technology and then consider how miserable life becomes when it breaks. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could repair it yourself and extract a few more years out of your investment? We discard more than two million tons of electrical waste each year in the UK and the horrifying reality is that most of it isn’t very old. With access to the right tools and spare parts, much of it could be fixed and reused. The UK has some of the worst electrical recycling rates in the world, despite the irrefutable humanitarian and environmental cost of the gadgets we buy. Our ability to fix products has been slowly eradicated by manufacturers that view repairs as lost sales. And it’s not only you and your screwdrivers who have…

PRICE £ 1,415 (£ 1,699 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Asus ROG Strix G15 wears its gaming credentials proudly on its sleeve. The Republic of Gamers branding is everywhere, from the logo on the lid to the ROG lettering stencilled subtly on the keyboard surround. It’s heavily laden with RGB lighting too: per-key lighting is customisable via the Aura Creator app, while a strip of LEDs wraps around the underside of the front portion of the laptop – the “Aura Sync light bar” – and lights up your desk in cheerful, multicoloured hues. The plastic chassis doesn’t feel as bulletproof as the all-metal Gigabyte Aero 15 (see p52), but it’s of a high quality and doesn’t creak or squeak when twisted. As you might expect, though, you’re not getting an…

PRICE £2,249 (£2,699 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Gigabyte Aero 17 HDR XC has much in common with its brother opposite. Aimed at creative professionals, Gigabyte sticks with the same one-two punch of Core i7-10870 H processor and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 graphics – although a mere £1,500 extra upgrades you to a Core i9-10980HK, GeForce RTX 3080, 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. Before committing £4,199, we’d hold out for an 11th-generation version of the Core i9. Based on the Tiger Lake architecture, these chips should give even more single-core performance than their tenth-gen equivalents: the Aero’s 1,185 in Cinebench R23, 1,278 in Geekbench 5 and 179 in our photo-editing test are all fine results, but Ryzen 5800H machines are roughly 10% faster. To test the GPU, I…

PRICE £1,499 (£1,799 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk OLED screens are common on TVs and phones, but they’re a rarity in laptops. The reasons are understandable: OLED screens are typically more expensive to manufacture than IPS screens, which can bump up the price for consumers. Their higher power draw will also drag battery life down. While the ZenBook’s £1,799 price may make it seem like you’re paying a huge premium for OLED, it’s around the same as you’d pay for a Dell XPS 13 (see issue 317, p50) with the equivalent hardware spec. That’s especially true when you consider that the display is touch-compatible and, thanks to a 360? hinge, it can be folded back into “tent” mode and used as a large tablet if you want to scribble on the…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The word versatile is over-used when it comes to describing IT equipment. With the Acer ConceptD CP5271UV, however, I pick the word with purpose: you will struggle to find a monitor that can slip so easily between modes for print designers, video editors, games developers and indeed games players. As an extra bonus, it even offers support for HDR600. Is there any task this monitor can’t do? I struggle to think of one. It’s even perfectly suited to office use, with a Gigabit Ethernet port and four USB 3.1 ports making it an ideal docking monitor when connected to a laptop over USB-C; it delivers up 65W of power, so more than enough to keep most laptops charged. Alternatively, there are two HDMI…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Motorola’s Moto G line has a well-earned reputation for being among the best phones you can buy on a budget. However, to stand out from Chinese handsets such as the £249 5G-toting Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T (see issue 318, p71) is growing ever more difficult. In the case of the Moto G9 Plus, its first standout feature is the size of its screen. A 6.81in diagonal and 1,080 x 2,400 resolution equates to a sharp 386ppi, and it’s bright at 466cd/m2 with excellent colour reproduction: it covers 94% of the sRGB spectrum from a colour gamut volume of 95%, and accuracy is top-notch too. Speaking of which, Motorola avoids notches by putting the front camera in a pinhole in the top-left corner. This…

Range starts at: £538 (£699 inc VAT) Model tested: £958 (£1,149 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Our ideal “budget” laptop is one that doesn’t feel or look like a budget laptop at all. While we admit that a starting price of £699 might be pushing the definition of this category, the ZenBook 14 UX425 is indeed that rarest of items. We tested the more expensive model, based around a Core i7-1165G7 with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, but as long as you ensure the model you buy includes an 11th-generation Core processor – indicated by the first two digits of the chip’s name – you can be assured of a responsive machine. If anything, a Core i7 is overkill in a laptop such as this: a maximum height of…

Range starts at: £750 (£900 inc VAT) Model tested: £750 (£900 inc VAT) from store.hp.com/uk You know exactly what you’re getting with an HP Envy 13 laptop. This isn’t a luxurious machine, with HP holding back the all-metal finish for its premium Spectre ranges, but with a silver and black trim and compact dimensions it has enough understated style to feel at home in a business class lounge. Plus, HP wisely chooses to protect the screen with a sturdy metal lid. The 13.3in IPS display is technically excellent, hitting a peak brightness of 430cd/m2 with a superb contrast ratio of 1,942:1. Then there’s exemplary sRGB gamut coverage of 98% with an average Delta E of 0.28. Unlike the MacBook Air, it doesn’t have a wide gamut screen, so don’t expect…

Range starts at: £749 (£899 inc VAT) Model tested: £749 (£899 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk There’s something reassuring about a laptop that knows its purpose in life. The MSI GF65 Thin isn’t trying to be all things to all people, merely an affordable laptop to play games on. It’s a mission unlocked with gusto, even if “Thin” lands just the wrong side of optimism. For, in this company at least, the GF65 Thin is a chunky beast. It’s the only laptop on test to break the 20mm thickness bar, measuring 21.7mm, with the vast bulk of that due to the size of the chassis; the screen lid is very thin indeed, and so flexible that we suspect it wouldn’t deal well with a direct blow. Despite the brushed metal effect…

Range starts at: £458 (£549 inc VAT) Model tested: No longer for sale The Asus VivoBook range of laptops has two things in its favour: eye-popping colours and wallet-friendly prices. While the white-topped VivoBook 14 X413 model we tested is no longer on sale, it’s representative of what you can expect from the dozens of VivoBook 14 X413 configurations that are still available to buy. For instance, head to argos.co.uk and you’ll find three variations: a Core i5 model with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (£549 inc VAT), a 512GB model for £599 and a Core i7/8GB/512GB edition for £699. For the specification, those are great prices, so the cynic in all of us should ask: what gives? The prime sacrifice is the screen. It didn’t take our…

Range starts at: £707 (£849 inc VAT) Model tested: £849 (£1,019 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Dell’s Inspiron range of laptops comes in three tiers: the 3000 series at the bottom, the 5000 in the middle and the 7000 at the top. As you climb through the ranks, you’ll enjoy faster components and more expensive construction, but there’s still quite a gap between the 7000 and Dell’s XPS series. For example, the keyboard on this 2-in-1 model – the 7506 – lacks the punch of XPS laptops. The wide expanse of its 15.6in panel is well protected by an aluminium lid, with the rest of the chassis being a mix of metal and plastic. It’s sturdy rather than stylish, with the rather dull finish lent a smidgen of allure by the…

Range starts at: £833 (£999 inc VAT) Model tested: £1,058 (£1,269 inc VAT) from microsoft.co.uk Quality is threaded right the way through the Surface Laptop 3. It starts with the sturdy aluminium chassis, which protects an equally excellent screen. The 3:2 aspect ratio and 13.5in diagonal are just enough to work on two windows side by side – a 2,256 x 1,504 resolution helps. The screen kicks up to a bright 395cd/m2 too, while 95% coverage of the sRGB gamut coupled with an average 0.44 Delta E ensures excellent colour reproduction. The keyboard is among the best here, with a positive action and large keys, plus a bright backlight. Then there’s the massive touchpad with a glass coating to ensure fingertips slide seamlessly. We should also hail the quality of…

SCORE PRICE £344 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com DrayTek’s security routers feature all the key UTM functions, but one thing that distinguishes them is their keen focus on WAN redundancy. The idea is to ensure that your office can carry on working even if the main internet link goes down, and to that end, the Vigor 2927Lac sports two separate Gigabit WAN connectors, an integrated 4G LTE modem with dual SIM slots and a USB 2 port that will take an additional 4G modem as a further fallback. You can even safeguard against the possibility of the hardware itself failing by deploying a pair of units in high-availability mode. In this configuration, the routers share a virtual IP address and can be set to hot-standby mode when sharing an internet connection,…

PRICE Appliance with 1yr UTM subscription: £401 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Not all businesses require a complete UTM solution, and Zyxel’s USG Flex 100 is perfect for those that only want to pay for the security services they need. That makes it a good starting point for small organisations – and it’s also a natural upgrade for users of Zyxel’s older USG40 appliance, as you can transfer your licences across. Performance-wise, it’s a decent step up from the USG40. The USG Flex 100 claims a raw firewall throughput rate of 900Mbits/sec and 360Mbits/sec with all UTM features active, representing speed boosts of 125% and 500% over the USG40. The cost of entry is very low: the hardware on its own costs £309, and no subscription is needed for firewall and…

Personally, I think the hopes of the password maniacs were dashed long before the year 2000. There was no architecture or communications protocol that stood in the way back then; even the slowest PC could keep up with the rules about changing every month, not repeating, not reusing and not having normal words. The humans were the problem. In one business network I used to manage, we had a great password policy; even the CEO was prepared to kowtow to the change rules. Then, one day, I decided to make a broad sweep, after a particularly smart and obstreperous colleague suddenly became an ex-colleague: we could tell after his rather shouty, door-banging departure that he was not only using his login to access files but those of several colleagues. So…

On December 8 2020, Apple introduced a major change to its App Store. From that point on, every single new or updated app was obliged to make a privacy declaration to users, explaining what data is collected and how it is used. In what could be a strange coincidence, tech observers have noticed that Google has mysteriously stopped updating the vast majority of its dozens of iOS apps since that very date. This is despite the company having previously maintained a regular schedule of almost weekly updates to its most popular apps, such as Gmail and the Chrome browser. This has led to speculation that Google is worried about revealing how much information its apps are collecting on the people using them. The theory is that the company may be…

This graph shows the number of actual pedestrian interactions where people passed within two metres, and the seven-day rolling average. No data was collected from the Nottingham cameras for a few days in September, which explains that sudden dip. The graph shows how social-distancing compliance was strong in the early days of lockdown, before suddenly shooting up as lockdown was lifted in the summer. It’s worth stating that increased footfall would have made social distancing more difficult (people may not have been able to avoid close encounters in some instances). The number of near passes detected by Nottingham’s cameras…

@njkobie Whenever my local council posts anything about Covid-19 or vaccines to its Facebook page, one guy comments with lies and stupidity about the jab not being tested and other anti-vaxxer nonsense about 5G and Bill Gates. The comments always stay up. The council is either too lacking in tech nous to delete them or just can’t be bothered. Even when I report them, Facebook does nothing. We’re in a pandemic with mass vaccination the only route for escape, and we’re still letting this bogus propaganda stand. But not for long. Facebook has finally caught up with the daily news headlines from 2020 and declared it will remove dangerous vaccine misinformation. At the end of last year, Facebook started to remove Covid-related lies, telling users they’d been shown incorrect information.…

Our six-year-old granddaughter has been homeschooling using Microsoft Teams. We provided her with an oldish but serviceable 24in iMac running macOS 10.10 (Yosemite), which was working perfectly until a couple of days ago when there was an update of Teams and a message appeared that it now required macOS 10.11 or newer. I happened to have a MacBook running 10.11 so I downloaded a new copy from the Apple App Store only to find exactly the same message as on 10.10. I checked the Teams support site, which stated that it would only run on the latest macOS and the two previous versions – 10.14 to 10.16. That rules out large numbers of perfectly good Mac computers. With trepidation, and knowing that 10.11 was the latest macOS that the iMac…

PRICE £ 1,333 (£ 1,600 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com The phrase “go big or go home” definitely has its place when it’s time to be bold, but it isn’t always true for gaming laptops. Admittedly “go more compact and it will be easier to carry” is never going to catch on, but there’s one key reason why a 15.6in Full HD screen makes more sense than a 17.3in display with the same resolution: sharpness. Put simply, text is easier on the eye on the TUF Gaming A15 than on the Strix G17 (see p46). Aside from the A15’s lower refresh rate – still great at 240Hz – these IPS screens share many of the same characteristics, with a 3ms response time and almost 100% coverage of the sRGB gamut. Colour…

PRICE X30W-J-10F, £1,233 (£1,480 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk I’ve reviewed numerous Dynabook laptops over the past two years, but this is easily the best product that the company formerly known as Toshiba Laptops has produced. The X30W-J is a 2-in-1 that’s been thought through, from the springs in its keyboard to the touch of the pen against the screen. If you’ve never considered a convertible before, this Portégé might change your mind. The key factor underpinning this convertible’s success is its weight. At 950g on our calibrated scales, it’s phenomenally light for a 13.3in laptop, never mind one that includes hinges that allow the lid to swing round 360?. This means that it’s actually usable as a tablet. All of our usual caveats about Windows 10 as a tablet OS…

PRICE £7,500 (£9,000 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/319scan Over the space of only three years, AMD has virtually taken over the performance high ground for workstation CPUs – but Nvidia still rules the roost for workstation 3D acceleration for content creation. So, to deliver the best of both worlds, Scan picks AMD for the CPU and Nvidia for the GPU. That Nvidia graphics card is monstrous: the latest flagship Quadro RTX A6000. 6000-series Quadros have always been uncompromising, but the A6000 takes things to another level, with 48GB of error-correcting GDDR6 memory. This is ideal for workloads where predictable precision is paramount, and bandwidth is a whopping 768GB/sec. The A6000 uses Nvidia’s Ampere architecture, boasting an unbelievable 10,752 CUDA cores. The previous Turing-based RTX 6000 only had 24GB of memory and…

PRICE £50 (£60 inc VAT) from family-historian.co.uk If you’ve ever researched your family tree, you’ll know it’s much harder than the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? makes it appear. When I started my research five years ago, I thought all I had to do was find a genealogy site, type in my parents’ names and I’d be instantly rewarded with a long list of my ancestors, along with when they were born and died, what they did for a living, the names of their children, their inside leg measurements and the rest. Sadly, this wasn’t the case. First, I had to subscribe to a genealogy service and there are dozens to choose from. Each offers access to billions of records from a plethora of record keepers. I experimented…

Range starts at: £441 (£529 inc VAT) Model tested: £666 (£729 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Acer’s Swift range of affordable lightweight laptops haven’t always lived up to their name, but their latest iteration welcomes AMD’s Ryzen 4000 Series processors into the fold – and the result is nothing short of a revelation. Of course, we already knew that this family of chips was fast. During 2020, the Ryzen 4000 Series broke all sorts of records for mobile processor speed, with their potent combination of single-core power matched with AMD’s ability to pack many cores onto a single die. Intel’s 11th-generation Core chips offer more power per core, but you’ll have to go far up Intel’s range to find an eight-core competitor to the Ryzen 4700H in this Swift 3. You…

Range starts at: $279 (approx £205) Model tested: $279 (approx £205) from store.chuwi.com If you’re on the hunt for a bargain and willing to stray from big-name laptop makers, there are a number of vendors who sell direct from the Far East. Hong Kong-based Chuwi is one of the most prominent and, couriers willing, this laptop should arrive with you within a week rather than the next day delivery of Amazon. Thisisn’t alaptop for anyone who is short on patience anyway. Powered by an Intel Celeron J3455processor that was launched in late 2016, its results in our tests were simply awful. Ascore of 20 in our benchmarks is roughly equivalent to anAtom processor of yore, while amulticore result of 971 in Geekbench 5won’t set even the driest tinder wood on…

Range starts at: €833 (€999 inc VAT) Model tested: €833 (€999 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/fr The stylish MateBook X is an exercise in how much you can squeeze into a compact space. Two stats in particular stand out: its 1kg weight and 13.6mm height. This makes it not only travel-friendly but house-friendly, as it’s so little effort to grab it and move from kitchen to lounge. Nor has Huawei sacrificed build quality to achieve this, with solid construction throughout; even the super-slim lid feels well protected. We tested the “Silver Frost” version of the MateBook, but if you’re feeling more autumnal a“Forest Green” version, as pictured here, is also available. Except, itisn’t. Huawei has made the odd choice to put the MateBook X on sale in European countries, suchas France,…

Range starts at: £791 (£949 inc VAT) Model tested: £833 (£999 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com This is a laptop like no other. Wafer-thin at 11.8mm, it contains a hybrid Intel Core i5-L16G7 processor based on one “big” core and four “small” cores. The big one is the same kind of core as found in a normal Core processor – and yes, Intel’s naming convention gets confusing at this point – while the four small cores are based on Atom architecture. The idea being that the more power-hungry Core core is only called into action when it’s required for intensive tasks. Just to add to the confusion, this is actually the second version of the Galaxy Book S. You may remember our review of this laptop basedona Qualcomm ARM processor in…

Range starts at: £775 (£930 inc VAT) Model tested: £833 (£999 inc VAT) from chillblast.com There’s a good reason we’ve spoiled our alphabetical order and reviewed the Chillblast Prestige Iris 15in on the same page as the PC Specialist 15.6in Lafité Pro: they’re identical (we changed the camera angle for variety). The only difference is their logo treatment, with Chillblast choosing to affix a substrate that stands 1.5mm proud of the lid. We prefer the PC Specialist approach: a more subtle decal. With almost identical specs, we expected them to score identically in our benchmarks, but the Chillblast proved to be slower in its default settings – despite having 32GB of RAM. The mystery was easily solved, however, with the Prestige’s fans set to a quiet mode. If you want…

Range starts at: £777 (£932 inc VAT) Model tested: £777 (£932 inc VAT) from techinn.com There’s a certain retro charm to the Tecra A30’s design. Its forehead bezel is so thick that it reminds us of laptops from the early 2000s, which is why its chassis is as wide and deep as most 14in laptops despite the presence of a 13.3in panel. The Tecra is relatively light at 1.2kg, however, and that’s partially due to the lack of metal casing: think textured black plastic instead. This doesn’t mean it’s fragile, with the A30-G-116 passing the MIL-STD tests for durability. The subdued black styling reflects its business ambitions, with Windows 10 Pro in place and extra layers of data protection: note the smart card reader slot, fingerprint reader and Windows Hello…

As I cast my eye across the 18 laptops sitting on my desk, two things spring to mind. The first and most important is that I need a bigger desk, but the second is the sheer beauty that comes through variety; I’m robbed of the saying that no two laptops are the same due to Chillblast and PC Specialist using identical chassis, but you get the idea. For instance, I grew to love the featherweight Samsung Galaxy Book S Intel after a grumpy start – it took me a while to get used to its shallow keyboard – but I have an equal level of admiration for the MSI GF65 Thin. I’m by no means the target market for the latter, but what an achievement to squeeze all that gaming…

PRICE Appliance with 3yr UTP bundle: £1,753 exc VAT from avfirewalls.co.uk The FortiGate 60F sits in the middle of Fortinet’s entry-level range of UTM appliances and it hits a tempting sweet spot, offering a great specification at a price that SMBs will find very palatable. That starts with connectivity. While there’s no built-in Wi-Fi, the 60F is flush with wired connections: along with five Gigabit LAN ports, it has two ports for WAN and failover services, as well as a dedicated DMZ connector. Two additional sockets can be used to manage locally attached FortiSwitch units, or as extra LAN ports. There’s enough performance to cope with a good number of clients too: thanks to Fortinet’s proprietary security processing unit (SPU), the appliance claims a hefty raw firewall throughput of 10Gbits/sec.…

PRICE £130 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Netgear’s business-class Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs) may have come a little late to the next-gen wireless party, but what an entrance: for only £130 exc VAT, the WAX610 combines 802.11ax technology with full cloud management and support for wireless mesh networks. Like most APs, it’s a dual-band design, claiming connection speeds of up to 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 600Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz. A single 2.5GbE LAN port is set into the rear alongside a power socket – although there’s no power supply included because the expectation is that you’ll use PoE. For basic Wi-Fi services you can deploy the WAX610 in standalone mode and use its local web console to manage it. For larger offices, Netgear’s Insight cloud portal is more appealing,…

STEP 1 Sell the value of your product Your messaging needs to be clear: who are your target customers? What does your product do? How does your product or service solve customers’ problems? How does it beat the competition? Keep your messaging short and concise. STEP 2 Live Chat Let’s be clear, your website needs live chat – even if you don’t plan on using it as a direct sales tool. Not only can you use it to engage website visitors, but it also boosts customer satisfaction by giving them a direct line to customer services. Studies show that customers gain the most satisfaction through live chat compared with phone calls and email. STEP 3 Call to actions Add call to actions to all of your pages, make them specific…

Windows 10X is emerging from the shadows. This new version of Windows has been a long time in the making, and it hasn’t been helped by Microsoft’s twisting and turning about what it was going to be. Let’s first look at the original design intention. The underlying problem that Microsoft has with Windows 10 is both its greatest strength and its biggest problem: the Win32 history. This allows you to run a mind-boggling collection of Windows apps on a Windows 10 machine. Drivers from devices long gone, apps that you bought 20 years ago. Usually it all works. Part of this is the programming APIs that have been common across the decades, but there is also considerable work under the bonnet in Windows 10 to allow it to bend over…

Philip and Andrew Oliver have made many games – so many, in fact, that Guinness World Records states they’re the most prolific 8-bit video game developers of all time. Between 1984 and 1992, they developed 26 games for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC while designing a further nine for others to make. You may fondly remember Super Robin Hood and Grand Prix Simulator, for example. But around a third involved an adventurous egg-shaped character called Dizzy, who players would somersault around fantasy environments to pick up objects before using them to solve puzzles. Venture into the loft of Philip’s home in Leamington Spa and the twins’ history is laid bare. There are bulging cardboard boxes packed with paperwork and floppy disks, various video games spilling onto the floor,…

LABS Printers and MFPs Big or small, laser or inkjet, refillable or replaceable inks – look out for next month’s PCProfor the UK’s most comprehensive grouptestof single-use and multifunction printers. Subscribe today Start your subscription today and claim a 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 Write your own digital will Are you sure your family will follow your digital wishes when you’re gone? Do they even know what they are? We provide a full guide to this most tricky of areas. How to shrink your online footprint Chances are that you’re leaking information. We explain how to find out what others can discover about you,…