Tabla de contenidos para December 2022 en PC Pro

p50 REVIEW OF THE MONTH Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED Bendy phones are just so passé. If you truly want to live on the cutting edge then bendy laptops are the next big thing, and the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED is very big indeed. Unfolded, it’s a 17in tablet. Or kick out its built-in stand, whip out the Bluetooth keyboard and turn it into an all-in-one. Need to work on the move? No problem. Pop that keyboard onto the bottom half of the screen and you have a mini laptop. That, at least, is the theory. It’s true to an extent but, as we discover, this first-generation device suffers from some jack-0f-all-trades drawbacks. For the moment, you may decide to look but not touch.…

If you’re a PC user with an Android device, we get it. You don’t need to be like those snooty Apple people – you rightly value the flexibility and customisation that Apple zealots can only dream of. But it would be nice if your devices played nicely together, right? Whether it’s sharing the screen with AirPlay, transferring a file via AirDrop or finishing the email you started on your phone on your computer using Continuity, Apple devices are just that little bit slicker. It’s good news, then, that Google has announced plans to do something similar for Android, with the launch of a new cross-device SDK that should help Android apps communicate better locally, enabling some clever new functionality in the process. “There’s just a bit of a minefield,” said…

In last month’s column I explained how I came to terms with, and eventually even to love, taking photographs with my smartphone rather than a proper camera. I take even more pictures now because the phone is always ready in my pocket. What hasn’t changed is that I select a very few of the pictures I take to post online, on Facebook more than Flickr nowadays (since the latter was taken over by SmugMug), and recently more on Instagram, too. Before posting them I examine these pictures in a photo editor and often lightly tweak them, with cropping and maybe a touch of exposure correction and/or sharpening. Fewer still get selected for heavier mangling, with special effects making them into graphic art to look like a painting or a poster.…

Don’t delete that! I have an Asus Zenbook with a 250GB SSD. After several years, I am again getting warnings about running low on storage space. I have previously drastically cut my music and photo files, so I’m looking for other ideas. My laptop has an Intel Core i5 processor, but there’s 5GB of AMD64 files on the hard drive, in the WinSxS folder. Can I delete these, as I assume they are not used by the Intel system? Stephen Eastman Darien Graham-Smith replies: I’m afraid you can’t safely delete these files. AMD64 is the standard 64-bit architecture that’s used by both AMD and Intel processors – the name merely reflects the fact that it was originally designed by AMD as an extension to the 32-bit x86 platform, and adopted…

In association with TechRadar, Tom’s Guide and IT Pro Desktop PC of the Year PCSpecialist Fusion Elite HIGHLY COMMENDED Acer Predator Orion 3000 (2022) PCSpecialist earned many nominations to be a Lockdown Hero (see p32), as it kept on delivering high-quality systems during those tough times. We were particularly thankful for the Fusion Elite. While many rival manufacturers thrust up the prices of their systems due to fluctuating component costs earlier this year, PCSpecialist kept its rises to a minimum. That meant people could benefit from an affordable five-star system based around a Ryzen 5 5600X and RTX 3060 Ti graphics card while others suffered price increases, cancelled orders or long lead times. Thankfully prices are now dropping again, which is where the £1,199 Acer Predator Orion 3000 steps in.…

Part of what’s great about Google Docs is its familiarity. It looks and feels so similar to Microsoft Office, LibreOffice and other offline word processors that you can jump in and start working with very little culture shock. Similarly, Google Sheets looks enough like Excel that you can skip over any sort of training and start being productive right away. However, if you think of Google’s apps merely as free alternatives to the traditional desktop office suite, you’ll miss out on some unique features, many of which take advantage of the online model. Here are some of our favourite features and tricks that will help you get the best from Google Docs and Sheets. PAGELESS VIEW When word processors first became mainstream in the 1980s, it was a fair assumption…

Laptops and PCs We run a selection of benchmarks on all the PCs and laptops we test. Where possible, we use a cross-platform test so we can compare Windows and macOS machines, which is where both Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23 come into play. Both push the CPU to its limit, exposing how well cooled a system is. We run extra tests for Windows systems. We use our own benchmarks to test photo-editing, video-encoding and multitasking speeds. We then switch to PCMark 10 to benchmark systems in office tasks, content creation and basic tasks such as web browsing and video calls. We also run 3DMark Time Spy and a selection of benchmarks in games such as Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. For laptops, we test battery life…

SCORE PRICE £793 (£951 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com Lenovo’s ThinkPad range needs no introduction, but this may be the first review of a ThinkBook you’ve read. That’s despite the first ThinkBooks being launched in 2019. The conceit behind the range is to allow Lenovo to extend the “Think” brand to small businesses with more competitive prices, shorter product lifespans and lower prices. The latter may not be obvious from the £793 excluding VAT price of the system on review, but at the time of writing the entry-level model – with a Core i3-1215U processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD and Windows 11 Pro – cost £467 excluding VAT from lenovo.com. Let me place my cards on the table now: I don’t think the ThinkBook 15 makes sense once you go…

SCORE PRICE 128GB iPhone 14 Pro, £916 (£1,099 inc VAT); 128GB iPhone 14 Pro Max, £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk While the regular iPhone 14 doesn’t stray too far from last year’s formula, the iPhone 14 Pro is a more ambitious release. It comes with a bunch of fresh features that make the £1,099 price seem almost reasonable – until you realise that’s a £150 jump from last year and only buys you 128GB of storage. Those with big pockets and even bigger storage needs can pay £1,640 for the 1TB model. There’s also a larger Pro Max variant for £100 more. Both are available in Deep Purple, Gold, Silver or Space Black. Admittedly, when you first take the phone out of the box there’s not much innovation on…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £524 (£629 inc VAT) from oneplus.com/uk The high-end OnePlus 10 Pro was released back in April, but it wasn’t accompanied by a regular, non-Pro version. Now at last it has a mid-price partner. The basic model costs £629 for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or £729 with twice as much memory and storage. That means it competes with the £599 Google Pixel 6 (see issue 328, p70), but offers a bigger screen, more powerful chipset and faster charging. The 10T comes in black and pale green finishes; both are beautifully shiny, though they quickly pick up fingerprints. The display is flat, which makes the phone feel even larger than its sizeable 6.7in frame. It runs at a smooth (but fixed) 120Hz, and with wide colour…

SCORE PRICE From £224 (£269 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Samsung’s new smartwatch looks and feels a lot like last year’s Galaxy Watch 4 (see issue 326, p68). It does bring some changes that set it apart from its predecessor, starting with a small price hike: the basic Bluetooth-only 40mm model now costs £269, up from £239, while the model with cellular connectivity is £319. Larger 44mm models cost £289 and £339 respectively. There are new colour choices, too. The 40mm watch comes in graphite (black), silver or “pink gold”, while the larger version replaces the latter with a muted sapphire. Additional colours are available at Samsung’s “Bespoke Studio” website, with a wide range of strap styles at various prices. In all variations, the watch is IP68-certified against dust and water,…

SCORE PRICE £65 (£78 inc VAT) per year from winzip.com WinZip has been a popular tool for compressing and decompressing files since long before Windows came with Zip support. Now from the same stable comes a fully featured PDF editor. It doesn’t make the finest first impression as the app opens with a conspicuous “Make WinZip PDF Pro your default app” banner along the upper part of the screen. I dismissed this, as I find it more convenient to open PDFs in my browser, but it kept popping up each time I opened the application, and I couldn’t find a way to disable it. By default, PDFs open with the Read tab active. As the name suggests, this isn’t designed for major manipulations, but it includes tools to rotate individual…

SCORE PRICE £749 (£899 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Acer takes a very different approach to HP and Huawei with their all-in-ones. With the C24, it focuses on compactness and value for money, delivering on both. The bezels at the top and bottom are chunky by modern standards, while the plastic feet and unconvincing silver effect around the edges make it obvious that this isn’t a luxurious machine. But it also takes up barely any space on a desk, while the surprisingly decent wireless keyboard and mouse mean you’re wire-free other than the external PSU. It’s only a shame that Acer didn’t spend more on the 23.8in panel. We can cope with the 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, even if it lacks sharpness compared to the HP and Huawei with its 93dpi…

SCORE PRICE £383 (£460 inc VAT) from chillblast.com The Chillblast WAP Ultimate is, in some ways, a product built for our times. Not only is it the smallest computer here by some distance, with roughly the same footprint as two iPhone minis placed side by side, but it also survives on a tiny 11W trickle of power when idling along. Even at 54p per kWh, and assuming you push it to the max for 90 minutes per eight-hour day, that works out at £29 per year. A pittance compared to all the other computers in this Labs. Its one drawback is that when it does require more processing power (which is often when Windows 11 decides to embark on some mysterious errand of its own) the fans kick in, and…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/338hellfire Palicomp only missed one trick when submitting this PC: if you’re going to call your system “Hellfire” surely you need to set the fan colour to angry red? Instead, it comes with the standard preset that cycles through different colours, so you’ll have to press the LED button at the top until the appropriate hue blazes through the two huge frontmounted RGB fans and the single 120mm fan at the rear. Whether or not you notice the fan noise depends on two things. First, if you choose to place this system – and it’s a big fella – beside you on the desk or tuck it away underneath. Second, whether you like to work in silence or have music blaring away. We’re…

SCORE PRICE £583 (£699 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews The Aurora Pro R is one of three systems based around Intel’s Core i5-12400F processor, and the least expensive by some distance. That’s primarily down to the choice of accompanying graphics card: where Chillblast and Palicomp opt for powerful RTX units in their systems, PCSpecialist chooses the much more modest GeForce GT 1030. So modest it doesn’t even have an X in its name. This means the Aurora Pro R is better suited to office tasks than gaming: it came bottom in all of our gaming tests, refusing even to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But to criticise it for this would be to miss the point, as like its sibling the Aurora Spark R this back-to-basics PC will gorge its…

SCORE PRICE Premium, 1 socket, £1,311 exc VAT from arcserve.com Arcserve UDP offers total data and ransomware protection for a wide range of business sizes and is available pre-installed on high-end turnkey appliances or as a software-only option. The latter is the best choice for SMBs with smaller backup demands as they can choose their own host system. A range of licensing options are available. We’ve shown the price for a UDP 8.1 single socket licence, with the Premium edition enabling every feature. Socket licences apply only to the systems being protected, support unlimited virtual machines (VMs) and have no restrictions on the amount of back-end storage used. For testing, we used a low-cost Dell PowerEdge 1U rack server equipped with a 3GHz Xeon E3 CPU, 32GB of memory, a…

SCORE PRICE Simple Core Pack, 5 instances, £616 per year exc VAT ($745) from veritas.com Backup Exec is a great on-premises data protection solution for SMBs, combining extreme ease of use with a wealth of backup and restore services. Backup Exec 22 (BE22) adds even more appeal as it introduces a raft of new features and Veritas’ BE Simple pricing structure. Microsoft 365 (MS365) support allows BE22 to protect Exchange Online and OneDrive user data (SharePoint and Teams will be added soon), and Windows Server 2022 is supported as a host and client. BE22 uses a 64-bit SQL Express database for improved host performance, while ransomware protection gets a boost as it can now back up data to Amazon S3 buckets with Object Lock enabled. The Bronze, Silver and Gold…

When Microsoft Teams was introduced in 2017, no-one could have guessed how it would take over our lives. The pandemic gave Microsoft’s unified communications (UC) platform the perfect opportunity to grow into an indispensable business tool. That hasn’t just meant between departments, but for cooperation and collaboration between customer and supplier. But the basic setup is just that – basic. A little configuration, coupled perhaps with some hardware and software add-ons, can help you make the best of Teams. ◼ How big is Teams anyway? Most metrics place Teams as one of the top four UC platforms, alongside Zoom, Cisco WebEx and Google Workspace. In mid-2021 it was estimated to have 145 million users. Although Teams is part of Microsoft 365, it’s not always the best choice of communications platform;…

Regulars here will know that sometimes I include code in these columns. Feedback suggests that readers like that, even if the tight confines of a magazine page mean it’s not always easy to convey. I mention it because last week someone asked me for a good programming language for their child to learn, and at first my mind turned to code, but then it took a step back. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no single “best” language to learn. I think that the real key is to learn how to write code. With one notable exception that I’ll come on to shortly, the programming language is mostly immaterial, and learning languages should come later. Four of the key elements are as follows. 1. Learn to plan Before you get…

Even though this is one of those topics best handled (to quote Microsoft) with a decent glass of strong Tuscan red, I was still intrigued by a friend’s account of his ongoing reputation management project. He has been working for a member of parliament who, at first sight, is in pretty dire straits. His last Facebook update – a basic, sober social announcement about exam results – had six likes. A total of 3,100 people follow his account, so not a huge number, but still within reasonable boundaries. Six, though: that’s pretty appalling, right? It turns out that the online and social media habits of our political representatives are easy to trace. I typed “list of UK MPs by Facebook likes” into Bing and the top link was to Statista…

Features Gifts for grown-ups If you’re anything like us, you’re a nightmare to buy for. We put a selection of tempting but affordable techie treats through their paces to draw up a handy shortlist. Windows on ARM: will it ever work? We would love to believe that Windows will run as quickly on ARM as MacBooks do on Apple’s M1 and M2 chips, but is there really any chance of such a thing? Barry Collins finds out. Ethernet explained In one of his regular deep dives into the technology that everyone takes for granted, Darien Graham-Smith explains how this foundation of networking actually works. Labs M.2 SSDs They’re the simplest way to give your laptop or PC a speed boost, but how do you find the right M.2 SSD for…

If you’re a regular PC Pro podcast listener, you’ll know that I should never change occupation to become a futurologist. My record is something like one hit to every ten misses, starting way back in the 1990s when I resisted buying a mobile phone. “Why would I want people to be able to contact me wherever I am?” I almost certainly grumbled to anyone who would listen. “Besides, there are lots of phone boxes if I ever need to call someone.” A few years later, in 2004, you would have found me at the launch of the Compaq iPAQ 3800 series with bulging pockets, lugging around my Psion Series 5mx in one and a Nokia 6310 in the other. I distinctly remember speaking to Compaq’s head of product development at…

Exclusive investigations into technology practices. Email probe@pcpro.co.uk if you have a story Back in August, users of password management app 1Password saw a familiar prompt inside their desktop apps: a new update was available. But the launch of 1Password 8.0 wasn’t a routine update. Under the hood, something significant changed: the underlying architecture of the app was switched to Electron. Electron, or “ElectronJS” to use its full title, is on paper a rather clever idea. It allows developers to write an app only once, so instead of writing an app for Windows, an app for macOS and an app for Linux, the same code powers the app on multiple platforms. It’s both popular and open source, and the framework is used today for a range of popular desktop apps, from…

@njkobie Go to a new website, or merely one you haven’t visited in a while. You likely won’t be able to see it, especially if you’re on one of these new-fangled mobile phones. That’s because the page you’ve tried to load is probably obscured by the bane of the internet: a cookie banner. In my early days at PC Pro, I spent a lot of time writing about the thenincoming cookie consent law. This was born from an EU directive that web users should know if a website wants to track them, and have an opportunity to withhold consent; here in the UK it fell to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to recommend ways for website owners to implement the warning and ask for permission when the law came into…

Rarely does a month pass without PC Pro reporting on a new AI system, billed as forward-looking, autonomous and poised to improve our futures. What we don’t often hear about is the increasing utilisation of AI to examine our pasts. Historians, archaeologists, musicians and data scientists are deploying AI technologies to re-imagine and re-create historical moments. We’ll explore the immense human challenges in getting the best results from AI machines, and, as you’ll discover, there’s no magic-bullet computing at work. Like so many tales from the evolution of modern computing, success with AI is grounded in the values of collaboration, opportunity and experimentation. The challenges our experts face require distinct technical solutions, while sharing striking amounts of commonality. We’ll also look at the bias and ethics of restorative-AI and consider…

Modern laptops are amazing things, with ultra-slim designs, bright screens and powerful processors. Storage, however, tends to be a sticking point. To keep the price down, entry-level computers often have a small SSD with a capacity of only 256GB or even 128GB, much of which is instantly eaten up by the operating system and core applications. That’s fine if you just want to browse the web and edit the odd Word document, but when it comes to playing games, editing movies or otherwise taking advantage of your PC’s potential, space can quickly become tight. Here’s our advice on stretching your storage to get the best from your computer. Use the built-in clean-up tool Let’s start with a simple tool that’s been built into every release of Microsoft’s OS since Windows…

SCORE  PRICE £1,500 (£1,800 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk Some laptops look great in photos, but when you see them in the flesh you realise you’ve been fooled by low angles and clever lighting. The new MateBook X Pro isn’t like that. If you think the photos here make it look good – and trust me when I say that its sleek lines and dark powder blue finish will bring coos of admiration from onlookers – just wait until you hold its all-metal frame. Huawei’s first trick is to include a 14.2in screen in the MateBook’s ridiculously slender dimensions. It’s simply gorgeous, pushing up to a peak of almost 600cd/m2 while covering 93% of the DCI-P3 gamut. Films pack a proper punch, and it’s all delivered with accuracy: an average Delta…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £902 (£1,082 inc VAT) from lenovo.com In stark contrast to the ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 (see p56), there’s nothing glamorous or exciting about the ThinkPad E15 Gen 4. Instead, it’s a workhorse. It will give you or your staff the tools they need to get work done, and it will do so reliably and at a price that won’t destroy your budget. Direct from Lenovo, prices start at £772 inc VAT. That buys you a basic Core i3-1215U processor with 8GB of memory, a 256GB SSD, 45Wh battery and Windows 11 Home. But Lenovo also offers custom options: to upgrade to our tested configuration with a Core i5-1235U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 57Wh battery and Windows 11 Pro will cost £1,082 inc VAT. The downside is…

Total value this month £145 O&O AutoBackup 6 Automate the job of backing up your data to removable media with this simple tool. It’s easy to use, which can’t be said about all backup software, and this version has a new tabbed interface, which makes it even easier to get started. Simply choose which drive or folder you’d like to back up, then pick an external drive to use as the backup destination. Once this has been done, the program will sit quietly in the background and automatically update the backup whenever the chosen drive is connected. You can use wildcards to specify which types of files should be backed up – useful if your drive has limited capacity and you need to focus on only the most important files.…

SCORE PRICE £4,995 (£5,994 inc VAT) from matterport.com When you pull the Matterport Pro3 from its box, there’s a disconnect: how can something so expensive be so simple? The package is essentially a case with a camera inside, a charger and an adapter to mount the camera to a tripod or stand. How fortunate, then, that when you pick up the camera it has a reassuring heft, a reflection of the premium build quality behind it. The reason it costs so much is that the 3D images the Matterport Pro3 shoots are a world away from the fuzzy results seen with consumerlevel equipment. You invest £5K in this because you want every image in the 3D render to have 4K quality. Little wonder that estate agents and architects are two…

SCORE PRICE £358 (£429 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com While the regular Galaxy Watch5 (see opposite) is largely an incremental update to last year’s model, the new Watch5 Pro takes things further. It’s a bigger, more rugged device with a few high-end enhancements. The most obvious is the casing. This is made of titanium, rather than the aluminium of the standard Watch5, and it includes a solid raised surround for the display. This makes it quite a bit heavier at 47g, and it feels more chunky and substantial on the wrist. An IP68 rating provides reassurance that the watch can be submerged for over 30 minutes at depths greater than one metre. The silicone strap gets an upgrade too, with a hinged D-buckle that’s exclusive to the Pro. It looks sleek…

EVERY SIZE. VERY SHAPE. EVERY BUDGET. Not all desktop PCs are born the same, with variations in size, budget and design obvious from this month’s wide selection When we first sent out invites for this Labs, we focused on two things: price and size. With cost being a bigger focus than ever, it made sense to go low and to consider mini PCs with their inherently lower running costs. All was going well. Then Acer hit us with a wild card. Do we want to review its latest all-in-one PC rather than a conventional desktop? We like to think ourselves as open-minded folk here at PC Pro, so said yes – and then expanded our invitation to others with an all-in-one PC they were willing to submit to our unique…

SCORE PRICE £1,917 (£2,300 inc VAT) from hp.com The HP Envy 34 is awesome in the truest sense of the word. It dominates a desk, in part due to its angular industrial grey chic but primarily due to that magnificent expanse of glass. A 34in widescreen is quite something to behold, even more so when it can hit a blazing 533cd/m2 at peak. It’s a superb panel, too, with lovely, clean whites. At its Default setting, it covers 97% of the DCI-P3 gamut with a triumphant average Delta E of 0.4, and the only reason we can see to switch gamuts – it’s precalibrated for sRGB, Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 – is if you’re a print designer wanting the accuracy of Adobe RGB. Our only possible criticism is that it’s…

SCORE PRICE £1,262 (£1,514 inc VAT) from box.co.uk The HP Z2 Mini workstation may not be quite as miniature as the Chillblast WAP opposite – in fact, it’s twice its size – but this is still a beautifully small machine. It’s versatile, too. You can stand it vertically where it will consume the same footprint as a hardback book, sit it horizontally – a solid metal chassis means it will easily support a 27in screen – or attach it to the rear of a compatible monitor using a VESA 100 mounting kit. HP’s designers have been clever enough to ensure that all the ports will remain usable in such a situation, with one USB-A port, two super-fast USB-C ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top (or the side…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Chillblast is the official PC maker of Fnatic – who the BBC described as an esport “equivalent of football super-team Real Madrid” – and offers six PCs in its lineup. We reviewed the £1,700 Victor three months ago (see issue 335, p48), which paired a Core i5-12600K with a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, but for £1,000 you can buy the same customised chassis with a Core i5-12400F and GeForce RTX 3050. That’s instantly more attractive, but we can’t ignore the elephant in the Labs: Palicomp’s Intel Hellfire costs the same but offers an RTX 3070. The difference in firepower between the two is made clear in our gaming tests, with the Fnatic averaging 86fps in Metro Exodus at 1080p High settings, compared…

SCORE PRICE £449 (£539 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews The moment you switch on the Aurora Spark R, one thing becomes obvious: this is a speedy machine. Much nippier than you might expect for its modest price. That’s all down to the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G processor, which is a fabulous choice for a system such as this thanks to its six cores, 12 threads and seven Radeon graphics cores. Integrated graphics means that PCSpecialist need not waste any money on a discrete card, but if the Spark R’s performance in your games of choice isn’t enough – take heed of its 22fps average in the aged Metro: Last Light benchmark at 1080p – then it’s simplicity itself to add your own card. A lovely full-size Gigabyte board sits ready and…

SCORE PRICE Enterprise, 5 servers, perpetual from £525 exc VAT from nakivo.com There’s a huge choice of backup products suited to SMBs, but Nakivo’s Backup & Replication (NBR) stands out as it supports more host platforms than any other solution. As well as versions for Windows, Linux, VMware, Nutanix and AWS EC2, there are packages for all the big NAS vendors and even one for Raspberry Pi. Client support is good. Although macOS support is missing, NBR can protect Windows and Linux servers and workstations, VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix hosts and business apps including Exchange and SQL Server, with NBR 10.6 adding Microsoft 365 (MS365) Exchange Online, OneDrive and SharePoint Online (Teams support will be in version 10.7). Choices for backup destinations are equally impressive: NBR supports any local storage…

SCORE PRICE £36 per user/year exc VAT from barracuda.com Microsoft 365 (MS365) is an incredibly popular cloud collaboration platform but, as with any other business asset, it needs protecting with regular backups. Microsoft won’t do this for you, however, as its service availability agreement expressly recommends that you regularly back up your content and data using a third-party application. There’s certainly no lack of choice in this department, but most cloud and on-premises backup products only support MS365 as an additional component, so if you only want this service then you could end up paying for more features than you need. Barracuda’s Cloud-to-Cloud Backup (CCB) stands out, however, as it has been designed specifically to protect Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Teams in a single, easily managed…

▪ Seems like the backlash against big data has begun? Not a backlash as such, but a response to the limitations of big data, and its accompanying analytical apparatus. The point of the “big data” approach is to not get bogged down in details: you don’t need to know exactly which numbers are feeding into the output, or how many petabytes they take up – it’s just big data. That’s great as far as it goes, but you can’t run a business entirely on not knowing things. ▪ So now we’re turning back to small data? Big data is as powerful as it ever was: the problem is that anything that qualifies for the term is, by definition, too large and complex for a human to comprehend. It’s great to…

The man at our counter was the artist I had spoken to a few days earlier. It was the ink-stained fingers and normcore, paint-splattered attire that gave him away. When I’d chatted with Sam on the phone, he’d declared: “I have a small printer problem.” I’m happy to report that almost everything in his statement was incorrect. My suspicions were first raised when he asked me to help him get the printer out of his truck. Two-person peripheral lifts are unusual in consumer IT, but Sam’s printer wasn’t designed for the home, or indeed two people. Page 15 of Epson’s manual specifically states, “Make sure you have four people lift the printer,” so, happy to be doing the work of four people, we lifted the 43kg device, an Epson Stylus…

Anne Bras is a king. The PC King. Or at least that’s what he calls himself, and for good reason. His huge collection of boxed PC games is officially the largest of its kind on Earth, earning him an entry in the Guinness World Records. When he was bestowed with the honour in 2017, he had amassed 1,832 items. Today, he owns more than 2,000. As with many vast collections, it started with a solitary purchase. “Day of the Tentacle,” he said. “It was the art of the box that grabbed my attention.” He’d played the game many times but had never seen it on the shelves of a game store until that point. “I had no idea what the original box looked like,” he explained. “Seeing it for the…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 14in Stunning creative power from £1,899 from apple.com/uk Alongside its 16in sibling, this is simply the world’s best laptop for demanding users. The amount of power on tap via the M1 Pro or M1 Max processor is staggering, and it’s backed up by a terrific screen and stunning battery life. With all the ports you could ask for, the only negatives are its relative bulk (especially compared to the Air) and high price. REVIEW Issue 328, p58 ALTERNATIVES Dell XPS 15 (2022) Surely the best Windows all-rounder money can buy, with a slim design, gaming potential and plenty of power courtesy of Intel’s 12th gen Core processors. And the AMOLED panel is gorgeous. From £1,950 from dell.co.uk REVIEW Issue 337, p54 NEW ENTRY Huawei MateBook…

@bazzacollins I’ve moved home a lot recently. Not my actual home – I last did that 15 years ago and I understand they’ve still not introduced solicitors to the concept of email. I’m not moving again until they do. No, I’m talking about moving my virtual home, the computers and phones I use for my day-to-day existence. And unlike hoiking the family from one plot of bricks and mortar to another, this process has become a lot easier over the years. Switching computers used to be an eight-cheese-sandwiches-before-bedtime, wake-up-dripping-insweat nightmare. Just getting your files from one PC to another was a chore when I first started banging out words for this magazine in the late 1990s, what with removable storage having all the capacity of a Pimlico bedsit. Not to…

Almost 7,000 people took part in our unique survey about technology buyers’ satisfaction. Whether you want to buy a new phone or invest in a NAS server, cut out and keep this unique guide to keep you company for the rest of 2022 and the whole of 2023. Plus we reveal your lockdown heroes and the products of the year! CONTRIBUTORS: 6,676 READERS (AND BARRY COLLINS AND TIM DANTON) Technology Excellence Awards BEST PC MANUFACTURER Chillblast, Scan BEST LAPTOP MANUFACTURER Apple BEST TABLET MANUFACTURER Apple BEST NAS MANUFACTURER Qnap BEST ROUTER MANUFACTURER DrayTek BEST ONLINE RETAILER Printerland, Scan BEST WEB HOST Zen Internet BEST CLOUD STORAGE Backblaze BEST BROADBAND ISP Zen Internet BEST MOBILE DATA PROVIDER Giffgaff BEST PHONE MANUFACTURER Google, OnePlus BEST MONITOR MANUFACTURER BenQ BEST SMARTWATCH MANUFACTURER Amazfit…

Mobile networks can be a bit like banks – people are reluctant to switch. That’s partly because mobile data increasingly comes as part of a wider broadband/TV bundle, and partly because of inertia. But switching is a lot less painful than it used to be, and as our mobile data award has consistently shown over the past few years, it’s the household names of this sector that offer least satisfaction and value for money. Each of the top five providers in our table are MVNOs – virtual networks that don’t have their own masts, but piggyback on another network. It’s not until you reach EE in fifth place that you find one of the traditional big four networks (the others being O2, now merged with Virgin Media, Three and Vodafone).…

Norton 360 Premium for £19.99 (10 devices for two years) ▪ pcpro.link/norton360 We’ve negotiated a killer deal with Norton. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Security suite across ten devices. And because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. There’s 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, plus the full version of Norton Secure VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while abroad. Norton Parental Control provides tools to see exactly what your kids are up to on their various devices, and you also get GPS location monitoring for Android and iOS. To round things off, Norton Password Manager…

SCORE PRICE £2,750 (£3,300 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk (available in Q4 2002) Before I go any deeper into this review, I must make it absolutely clear that I applaud Asus for releasing the Zenbook 17 Fold. Asus isn’t alone in believing there to be a future in folding laptops, with Lenovo also showcasing the X1 Fold (see overleaf), but the Zenbook has one major factor in its favour: that we know it will actually go on sale in the UK by December at the latest, albeit for a startling £3,300. Lenovo has so far only provided a price and availability for the X1 Fold in the USA. So, what exactly is the Zenbook 17 Fold? You could say it’s a 17in tablet that folds in the middle, which is true.…

SCORE PRICE From £1,592 (£1,910 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Unlike any other laptop brand, ThinkPads have always had a distinctive look. You can trace their lineage back to the first IBM ThinkPad in 1992, and Lenovo has carried on its fine tradition since it bought IBM’s PC business way back in 2005. So it’s quite something to see such a strikingly different design in the Z13 (and its big brother the Z16). I tested the most striking version of all, with a vegan leather top rather than the standard black aluminium. Personally, I like my laptops to look like laptops, not Filofaxes, but the effect is professional rather than kitsch. The point is moot, however, as this option isn’t currently on sale in the UK, with a modest black aluminium…

SCORE PRICE 128GB iPhone 14, £708 (£849 inc VAT); 128GB iPhone 14 Plus, £791 (£949 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk If you want a new iPhone then, goodness knows, you have plenty of choice. Apple has blessed us with four new models this year, namely the iPhone 14 and Plus, along with the iPhone 14 Pro and Max (see overleaf). The plain iPhone starts at a £849 for the 128GB model, a £70 increase from last year, and comes in a new range of tasteful colours: pastel blue and purple options, a dark navy blue called Midnight, the pearl-like Starlight and bold Product(Red). Aside from the palette, the iPhone 14 looks very much like the iPhone 13, with the same-sized 6.1in screen and identical placement of buttons and ports. The aluminium…

SCORE PRICE 18GB/512GB Supernova, £674 (£809 inc VAT) from uk.redmagic.gg Unless you’re an aficionado of mobile gaming the name RedMagic might not ring any bells, but the bold design of the 7s Pro is hard to forget. At 10mm thick and 235g it’s a substantial phone, and it’s loaded with memory and storage. The standard £669 model comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB storage, in a moody Obsidian colour scheme; I tested the 18GB model with 512GB of storage, which is available in shiny Mercury or the darkly translucent Supernova. Whichever you choose, the entire front face is covered by the screen. There’s no notch or hole: the front camera is wholly invisible underneath the display. This will probably be the norm in a few years, but right now…

SCORE PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk Huawei is slowly adding to its roster of screens, with the 23.8in MateView SE the baby brother to the glorious MateView (see issue 326, p86). The SE also impresses with an above-average IPS panel that covers 100% of the sRGB gamut and 85% of the more vibrant DCI-P3 space. That’s if you slip it into “P3 color” mode using the simple but responsive OSD, with options including “sRGB color” – this successfully locks it down to that gamut, with 96% coverage out of 99% volume. Add an average Delta E of 0.6 and a peak of 1.39 and you have a colour-accurate screen. Whites look great and there’s no sign of the horrible contrast drop-off you sometimes see in lesser monitors, where…

SCORE PRICE Free from fxhome.com You may already be familiar with HitFilm Express, but this 2022 update heralds a rebrand: it’s now simply called HitFilm. It’s still free, but you’ll find yourself constantly pushed to upgrade to FXHome’s two subscription tiers. Creator costs £10 on a month-bymonth subscription or £75 if you pay annually, and includes the HitFilm Creator and Imerge Creator apps; Imerge is FXHome’s photo-editing software. HitFilm Creator allows you to export footage at up to 4K (the free edition limits that to HD), includes 100 songs, 100 sound effects and 25 templates from the Artlist library, and offers “premium support”. The Pro subscription costs £16 a month or £120 a year, and comes with HitFilm Pro, Imerge Pro, Mocha HitFilm, BorisFX 3D Objects and Foundry 3D Camera…

How quickly things change. Two years ago we barely mentioned PCs’ running costs; now they’re an important factor in a buying decision. Even with price caps, a power-guzzling PC could cost you well over £100 a year to run. We print the idle and peak power consumption in the graphs on p93, along with an estimated annual running cost based on the October price cap of 52p per kWh. SIZE VERSUS SPACE We review two “mini PCs” this month: the Chillblast WAP Ultimate and HP’s Z2 Mini G9 workstation. And most PC makers offer similar machines. While they tend not to come with the most powerful components, which need plenty of cooling, both are fast enough to be used as daily systems. If you currently use a laptop, a new…

SCORE PRICE £1,500 (£1,800 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk Drop. Dead. Gorgeous. Those are the three words that struck us after switching on the MateStation X, with pure whites and rich colours streaming out at a sunglasses-inducing 504cd/m2. But it’s not merely the quality of the touch-friendly screen that strikes you (it covers 95% of the DCI-P3 gamut with a superbly accurate average Delta E of 0.56), but the size and shape of it. Displays with a 3:2 aspect ratio are hardly a new idea, but to see it writ large across a 28.2in diagonal is something to behold. Its design surely takes inspiration from Apple’s displays, with the slender black bezel, rounded edges and slick chrome finish exuding class. Even the power lead plugs in perfectly, with no gap, while…

SCORE PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/338cobra Cobra is an apt name for this system. It’s poised, ready to strike in an instant and with lethal speed, but there’s a sting in the tail: if you want gaming power you’ll need to add a separate graphics card yourself. That’s because Palicomp wisely builds the system around an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G processor, which is effectively a Ryzen 5 5600 (see issue 335, p82) with built-in graphics. A score of 1,375 in 3DMark Time Spy indicates that its seven-core Radeon chip offers respectable 3D acceleration, roughly on a par with Intel’s Iris Xe graphics: if you want to play older titles such as Metro: Last Light (where it averaged 45fps at 1080p High settings) or less demanding games such as…

SCORE PRICE £466 (£559 inc VAT) from cyberpowersystem.co.uk If you want a new PC right now, then the Cyberpower Ultra 45 Radeon Next Day PC makes an excellent choice. It’s fast, it’s affordable and it includes highquality components that should keep you productive for years. And because it’s a “Next Day PC”, if you order it by 2pm on a weekday then it should be delivered to you the following day. As ever with Cyberpower systems, it’s extremely well put together, with neat cabling throughout. Three 120mm RGB fans add a splash of colour through the front of the mesh grille or when you gaze adoringly through the tempered glass, and it comes with a compact remote control that allows you to set the colours. We settled on a solid…

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) need all the help they can get to bounce back from the impact of the pandemic, and having a sound data protection strategy in place will avoid being tripped up by an unforeseen disaster. Data backup is a fundamental part of this plan, and SMBs that don’t do this could be putting their very survival on the line. Disasters don’t occur on a schedule and can seriously disrupt businesses on the road to recovery. There are many other threats that can have a major impact on productivity as well, such as an accidentally deleted report or, even worse, a ransomware attack. Data protection doesn’t have to be challenging, however. There are plenty of top quality on-premises backup products on the market that are suitable for…

SCORE PRICE Multi-Server with 1yr support, £2,167 exc VAT from retrospect.com Retrospect Backup is exceptionally good value. A range of licence packs covers the needs of single users right up to large businesses, with the Multi-Server edition on review costing £2,167 for a perpetual licence that supports an unlimited number of server and workstation clients. The software can be hosted on Windows or macOS systems and client support extends to Windows servers and workstations plus macOS and Linux endpoints. Optional agents for SQL Server and Exchange are available for £829 each, and the Multi-Server Premium version adds open file backup and Windows bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware. Backup 18.5 supports Windows 11 and Server 2022 as hosts or clients and has a focus on ransomware protection. Retrospect already supports…

SCORE PRICE £435 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel’s NR5101 has a connection for every occasion as this desktop mobile router combines 5G NR (new radio), Wi-Fi 6 and Gigabit networking services. This makes it incredibly versatile: it will suit businesses and home workers in remote or rural locations that can’t get decent fixed-line broadband speeds, those that need a high-speed wireless router with 5G WAN failover, or mobile workers that demand anywhere internet access. The NR5101 is solidly built and its 600g weight makes it reasonably portable, but if you want a 5G mobile router you can slip in your pocket then Zyxel’s smaller NR2101 is worth considering. The NR5101 offers more features, though, and the latest firmware upgrade supports Zyxel’s Nebula Control Center (NCC) for cloud-based remote management. Two…

I am currently enjoying a brief escape from work, visiting friends across the UK as part of a motorbike trip. I do this each year over the Bank Holiday August weekend as it’s when many of us meet at Carmarthen in south-west Wales, “us” being friends that go back to the earliest days of the internet, who were there on the CIX system as it moved from a hosted CoSy conference engine to an internet-connected platform. My route, from my Cambridgeshire base to Telford, Malvern, Cirencester, Ross on Wye, Carmarthen, through Wales to Chester, over to Scarborough and back home again takes six days and allows for an enjoyable trundle, and you might imagine a lot of thinking time. However, motorbiking requires top concentration so any pondering must be done…

You might almost believe that Dickens had a Gmail account when he wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I jest, of course – he was a Hotmail kind of guy – but email security is a serious matter. There’s a reason that criminal and state-sponsored threat enterprises invest so much time in exploiting vulnerabilities in email clients. Gain access to the average email account’s data vault (financial details, personal information, business communications and password reset links), and you have the keys to the hacking kingdom. So, with a heavy heart, I read reports from two security research teams, one being Google’s own Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which revealed a couple of very nasty Gmail threats that can read all the target’s email messages.…

Technology won’t save us from climate change, but it could help – and if quantum computing would hurry up, the leap forward in processing power could help expand our understanding of our changing world, reveal how to reduce the impact of carbon emissions and spark innovations that make a real-world difference. Rather than have bits that are either on or off, as in standard binary systems, quantum computing uses physics that allows particles to be in multiple states (see box, p128). That means quantum bits (qubits) give this type of computer an exponential jump in processing power. Vital milestones have been reached – Google laid claim to reaching quantum supremacy in 2020, which means its system managed an equation that a standard computer couldn’t do. It’s well worth the effort,…

The profound sense of loss felt by so many, myself included, came as a shock. As did the words “this is the BBC from London”. Trying to rationalise that grief against the reality that this was a lady I had never met, someone I only saw on TV, caused great upset to me and, I’m sure, to us all. The death of the Queen has also been an object lesson in the internet’s place in the transmission of news. We were watching, live, a statement by the newly appointed Prime Minister about the ongoing horror of the UK energy market when it quickly became clear that notes were being passed among the top teams. Live, before our eyes. With a mastery that only the Palace could manage, brief messages from…