Table of contents for September 2016 in PC Pro

We need your help to decide the Technology Excellence Awards winners! Turn to p59 for prize details and vote now at pcpro.link/techies16 I WRITE THIS FOUR days after the referendum result, one day before the magazine is due to hit the presses. I write this having just seen England outplayed by Iceland. I write this on an iMac, but I’ll be editing it on a Dell XPS 13 and taking a quick final check on a 4K display connected to a GeForce 1080 GTX graphics card. And those three things are connected by the “r” word. Religion. Not going-t0-church-on-a-Sunday religion, but the sectarian divides we place between ourselves, the divisions that blind us to rational argument due to the levels of passion they ignite. I found myself in the rare…

Skills shortage The UK continues to suffer from a tech skills shortage – a sentence that could have been written at any point over the past 20 years. That’s bad news for employers, but can be an opportunity for workers to target their skills to meet the needs of employers – and, as we’ll discover, push for higher salaries. Year-on-year, tech salaries and day rates for contractors have increased by 4.7% and 3.3% respectively, according to Experis research, as employers compete to attract skilled IT workers. This is notably higher than the 2% annual increase in earnings seen in the Office of National Statistics’ UK Labour Market report. KEY GROWTH SECTORS AND THEIR MISSING SKILLS As technologies wax and wane, so do the areas in which there are skills shortages.…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 13in ultraportable from £959 dell.co.uk We already loved the Dell XPS 13, but this update makes it irresistible. Skylake CPUs, super-fast SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 all help it fly through tasks, and the design is as amazing as ever. It’s the ultraportable we’ve been waiting for. REVIEW Issue 257, p64 NEWENTRY ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga A dream laptop that turns into a 14in tablet with the swivel of a keyboard – yet it still weighs under 1.3kg. Simply beautiful design from Lenovo. From £1,320; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 263, p56 Apple MacBook Pro 13in (Retina) If you need to do serious work on a laptop, and want a MacBook, the Pro 13in remains our top choice – although we suspect a new model is imminent. From…

“UK legislation dealing with what we should and shouldn't be able to access on the internet is worryingly thin” Who decides what you can and can’t see on the internet? Assuming you’re older than about 13, you may assume you do. You’d be wrong. As a comprehensive report from the Council of Europe revealed recently, more often it’s unaccountable bods at your ISP. Compiled by the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, the report examined the “law and practice in respect of filtering, blocking and takedown of illegal content on the internet in the 47 Council of Europe member states”. The UK-specific part – some 32 pages – ends up focusing more on practices than the law, because as the report reveals: most of the people who censor internet content aren’t…

Clogged inkjet printers Your recent review of printers failed to mention one of the main problems with inkjets: head clogging when the printer isn’t used for a while. I require a small, colour multifunction printer to keep in a holiday cottage. There are often periods of several months when the printer is kept in a cupboard, and usually one or other of the cartridges is completely useless when I next try to use it. I’ve looked for a small colour laser MFD, since lasers don’t tend to suffer from this problem, but such a thing doesn’t seem to exist. This problem is something that reviews of printers tend to ignore – along with advice on how to prevent and fix blocked inkjets. I recently managed to fix my Epson R3000…

When Microsoft released Windows 10, it promised we were dancing to a new tune; upgrades would be released as and when new features were ready. Over the past year we’ve seen a steady stream of new features added to Windows 10, while this summer’s Anniversary Update is the biggest yet. So how much has Windows 10 changed since its launch and has Microsoft pulled off any great birthday surprises? Here, we look back on what’s been added and herald the new features set to arrive this summer. 1 Start menu Microsoft can’t stop fiddling with the Start menu. It went through numerous revisions in the various test phases of Windows 10 and the Redmond engineers have continued to tweak the design ever since – including a revised version for the…

The Digitising Scotland project has the potential to be are search data set to facilitate social science and health research in the future As I embark on the building of the Stevenson family tree, Sarah Williams, editor of Who Do You Think You Are, issues a warning. “It’s quite addictive,” she said. “It’s like a serious eBay habit, but you know, instead of buying yet more pots… [you’re] buying ancestors, collecting them.” This proves to be true. Over the following weeks, my family tree at Ancestry.co.uk (see Descendents Reunited, p44) takes ever more elaborate shape as I pluck great aunts and uncles from obscurity, and pore over birth indices and military records. It replaces Twitter; faced with five spare minutes, I find myself shoring up the particulars of my great-great…

MANY PEOPLE ARE DISADVANTAGED BY EXCLUSION FROM SERVICES AND WORLD MARKETS – WE NEED EVERYONE TO BE CONNECTED TO EACH OTHER” With Britain still in the midst of a “fibre rollout” – most of which isn’t fibre anyway – I’ve been looking for examples of countries that are getting it right. In fact, I’ve had to travel to the other side of the world, to New Zealand, where I’ve discovered a visionary policy of putting fibre first so that the country is ready for the future and breaking down the digital divide. Fibre in New Zealand is providing first-class broadband and mobile coverage all around the country via the Ultra-Fast Broadband and Rural Broadband Initiative programmes. I discovered a simple, consistent policy of replacing fibre-to-thenode (FTTN), the equivalent of the…

PRICE £1,057 (£1,269 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk “Lenovo is keen to promote the durability of the X1, claiming it has been tested to withstand ten years of office dust” The all-in-one desktop PC scene has been dominated by Apple so comprehensively, and for so long, that the rest of the industry must wonder if it’s worth bothering to produce their own. There remain a steady trickle of other manufacturers producing machines, though, and Lenovo’s 24in ThinkCentre X1 is the most interesting to have rolled into the PC Pro Labs in quite some time. Approached from the front, you’d think there wasn’t much in the way to worry Apple. In typical Lenovo fashion, the ThinkCentre X1 is finished in black, and the wireless keyboard and mouse supplied with the machine are…

PRICE£238(£309incVAT)fromoneplus.net “Putting the phone into silent mode at the flick of a switch is so useful you have to wonder why more haven’t done it before” The OnePlus 3 has much to live up to. The OnePlus 2 was one of the hits of 2015, and is still on sale at £249. At £60 more, is the OnePlus 3 worth the price hike? Immediate impressions are positive. Although the phone has the same 5.5in-sized screen as the OnePlus 2, upgrades abound elsewhere: there’s a faster, more efficient Snapdragon 820 processor, RAM doubles to 6GB, and there’s NFC in addition to a front-mounted fingerprint reader, allowing it to be used for contactless payments via Android Pay. Even the camera sees an upgrade. While it looks bland from a distance, that all…

“With Eizo’s usual fiveyear warranty to round off the package, the FlexScan EV2450 is a formidable choice” “The NEC’s panel has a spacious 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, and you can feel the difference in everyday use ” PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk AOCI2781FH The AOC I2781FH is a stylish, slimline giant. The slender body is mounted on top of a nifty-looking one-piece stand, and the narrow bezels surrounding the LCD panel mean that the 27in I2781FH doesn’t take up dramatically more room than many 24in monitors. However, the pared-down design leaves the I2781FH with an external laptop-style power supply, and while the stand looks great, it provides only a small amount of front-to-back tilt. It’s a little too wobbly for our liking, as well. Some will scoff at…

PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk Despite the company name, the Overclockers Kinetic H1 comes equipped with a stock-speed Core i5-6500 CPU. For sure, it’s a formidable processor, with all the power you need to make modern applications whizz along. But compared to the rest of this month’s group, it’s the most lightweight option. With the exception of CCL’s Nova Pro 250, Overclockers’ rivals have all opted for faster Core i5 or Core i7 models. The difference in performance was exposed by our benchmark tests. With an overall score of 103, the Overclockers system took nearly 50% longer to complete our tests than Wired2Fire’s outrageous Workstation Ultima, and around 20% longer than the group average. To reiterate, this is still a very fast PC; but if you run up…

PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from vibox.co.uk Like many system builders these days, Vibox specialises in high-end gaming hardware – after all, that’s where the money is. And while its Hive system is designed for general-purpose computing, the enthusiast pedigree is immediately betrayed by the distinctive BitFenix Phenom enclosure. That’s not a bad thing. Although the case has an unusually large 250 x 374mm footprint, we found its low-profile design very appealing. Power controls, audio jacks and two USB 3 ports are built directly into the left-hand side of the case, which is elegant – as long as you weren’t hoping to have that side facing the wall. Interestingly, the motherboard mounts “upside-down” relative to the norm, so the PCI Express slots are at the top of the case. This…

PRICE £582 (£699 inc VAT) from dinopc.com The Evolve D-Pro is a serious PC. It comes in a professionallooking Corsair case, and inside there’s a high-end Core i7-6700 CPU that helped the system achieve one of this month’s highest overall benchmark scores. For more leisurely pursuits, DinoPC has invested in an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti. This isn’t a particularly powerful GPU, but it’s a step up from Intel’s integrated graphics. When we fired up Dirt Showdown at 1080p, it kept up a perfectly decent average of 49fps. The Asus H110-Plus motherboard is unusually accommodating for those with older hardware, offering three conventional PCI slots on the inside and – to our surprise – a parallel port at the rear. We suppose this could be handy if you need to…

“With an all-in-one, my upgrade options are nil: all I can do is flog the thing on eBay and buy a whole new computer” When I told my friends and family I planned to spend a month testing and reviewing desktop PC systems, some expressed surprise. “Does anybody buy those anymore?” was a common response. It’s true that the regular tower PC is an old-fashioned idea. It’s a throwback to a different time, when computing resources were scarce and expensive. If you were around in the days of Windows 95, you’ll recall the yearning for a faster processor, the unending hunger for extra RAM to make applications run more smoothly, and for a bigger hard disk to save you from the regular agony of the clear-out. In that context, a…

“The price looks like good value, but remember to factor in the additional costs of network support if you need it” PRICE £381 exc VAT from ebuyer.com Canon’s compact imageFormula DR-C240 measures less than 30cm across but packs in fast scan speeds – 30ppm in colour at 200dpi, 45ppm in mono – and a generous 60-page capacity ADF. If you’re short on desk space, it’s a tempting option. As it comes, the device connects only via USB and hence requires a host PC. It can, however, be networked with an optional £85 Silex SX-DS-4000U2 USB device server. You can also broaden its versatility by adding Canon’s A4 FB-101 (£331 exc VAT) or A3 FB-201 (£557 exc VAT) flatbed scanners, which connect directly to the DR-C240 via USB. Setting up the…

PRICE £2,618 exc VAT from uk.insight.com “An increasing number of businesses are seeing the value of tape as a low-cost, reliable medium for longterm data archiving ” Linear tape open, or LTO, has become the dominant tape format for low-cost data archiving, and the seventh generation brings some significant upgrades. Native transfer rates and cartridge capacities are boosted to 300MB/sec and 6TB, while maximum hardware compression remains as LTO-6, at 2.5:1. That translates to theoretical backup speeds of 750MB/sec, and cartridge capacities that are up to a whopping 15TB in size. LTO-7 media also sees a move from Metal Particle (MP) to Barium Ferrite (BaFe), which has superior magnetic properties – essential for delivering the increased areal density for future LTO generations. The drives maintain backward compatibility with earlier media;…

I wonder how many readers will empathise with reader Daniel Franks. He’s invested a lot of money in various bits of IoT (Internet of Things) hardware, but has been struggling to find a way to graph his data, and wondered what advice I could offer via this column. Whether you have just a couple of temperature and humidity sensors, or a complex home-automation setup, I can’t over-emphasise how important it is to graph your data. You’ll start to notice patterns that you simply didn’t realise were there. For example, a couple of months ago, I explained here how graphs had shown the extent to which my house heats up all by itself on sunny days. Using this, combined with weather forecasts, I’ve been able to adjust the heating schedule of…

“LinkedIn should have prioritised the 6.5 million included in the list, following up with a mandatory reset for everyone” It seems an age now since LinkedIn suffered a breach and a whopping 6.5 million users found their logins had been stolen. It seems like an age because it was; 2012 to be precise. At the time, we were advised to change our passwords, as usual, and things went on, as usual. Until now, that is, with news that the true extent of that breach had more reach than we were led to believe – in the region of 117 million user logins. Why has it taken so long to be disclosed? The answer would appear to be a hacker called Peace. We know the extent of the original compromise because…

IN 1928, BRITAIN’S first robot opened an exhibition, giving a speech in place of the Duke of York, before touring the world and suddenly disappearing. The Science Museum is celebrating Eric, as he was called, by rebuilding the metallic celebrity in time for a new exhibition on robots that opens next February. It was never going to be easy. First, the museum needed to crowdfund £35,000 for the project (it’s already smashed through this target, raising more than £50,000), but curator Ben Russell and his team still have only a few photos and one snippet of video from which to work. We spoke to Russell to find out why Eric is being resurrected and how he’ll manage such a feat. Why are you rebuilding Eric? We have an exhibition that’s…

FREE GIFT LABS Tabletsthatwork There’s a new breed of powerful, professional tablet – complete with keyboard and pen. We put ten to the test. Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and we’ll send you a FREE 16GB USB 3 drive as a thank you. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Kindle Fire. See p108 for details. FEATURES Takeour digitaldiet Practical steps to a slimmer, more stress-free you: take control of your digital life, once and for all. Novelwaysto reinventbooks Four different approaches that publishers are trying in order to bring a little character to digital books. Must-have Chromeapps We pick out the apps that transform Google Chrome from a browser into an indispensable tool. The tech of Shrek It takes half a billion digital…

Jon Honeyball As Windows 10 celebrates its first birthday, Jon turns his ice-cold gaze onto what Microsoft must do next. Read his verdict on p38 Darien Graham-Smith Want a new PC that’s packed with power but that doesn’t cost a fortune? Darien has spent a month testing the best. See p76 Dr Peter Cochrane OBE The former CTO of British Telecom explains why the UK must take fibre broadband inspiration from New Zealand on p48 Zenbo Okay, Asus’ robot butler didn’t actually write the article explaining what he can do, but it could just be a matter of time. See p126…

“Tesco Mobile is to offer customers a £3 discount on monthly bills if they agree to watch adverts” ADVERTISING IS SET to become an even more central part of technology companies’ income as they look to combat the falling price of hardware. The trend is exemplified by Tesco Mobile, which is to offer customers a £3 discount – up to 40% – on their monthly bills if they agree to watch adverts on their smartphones for 21 days per month. The news comes after Microsoft acknowledged that it was accepting adverts in the form of promoted apps in the Start menu of Windows 10, and follows similar tactics by companies such as Amazon. “Consumers want rock-bottom prices, but if you’re in industry you want to maintain margins – how do…

Elon Musk believes our world is more likely than not a simulation, and that he’ll be the King of Mars. He’s wrong on both counts (and joking on the second, probably), but at least he isn’t boring – like everyone else in tech – and yes, Tim Cook, phenomenal success can be boring. I’ve spent nigh on a decade covering the technology sector – that’s every single iPhone launch – and I’m bored. Fingerprint readers on phones? Bah. VR? It’s about time. Butler robots (see p126)? Cute, yes, but less useful than a seven-year-old Roomba. Tech has become more about sensible business plans than building the future. Generally, that’s good: it lowers prices and makes the benefits of technology available to everyone. But it’s dull. What happened to all the…

Windows 10 has hit its first birthday. The balloons are up, the cake ordered, and I’m sure there will be many bleary eyes the morning after. So what is the current status? Is it all cheer and fun, or are there clouds on the horizon? (And I’m not talking about Azure.) Well, let’s start with what Microsoft has achieved. It has delivered a version of Windows that has managed to combine the benefits of conventional desktop operation with the capabilities of touch and pen operation. No small feat, even it was quite clear where it had gone horribly wrong with Windows 8/8.1. History will write many pages about the failures of Microsoft’s management during the 2005-2015 era. With Windows 10, Microsoft tried to pull back from the precipice and make…

PRICE £1,483 (£1,780 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk/3xs “The end result is phenomenal speed in games, even at 4K. In Dirt Showdown, it averaged 103fps on Ultra settings” If you’re building a top-end gaming rig then there’s only one item to spend your money on right now: the all-new Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card. Of the Z170 Vengeance’s £1,780 asking price, a third is swallowed by this one component. It certainly has specs to make a grown gamer cry, with 2,560 CUDA cores (compared to 2,048 for the GTX 980) at a base clock speed of 1,607MHz. Just for fun, Scan overclocks this by 200MHz as well. The end result is phenomenal performance in games, even at 4K. In Dirt Showdown, it averaged 103fps on the game’s highest Ultra settings (a…

PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from chillblast.com It’s a good job we don’t believe in love at first sight, because Chillblast’s Fusion Insight system isn’t what we call an attractive PC. It’s housed in a boxy Game Max Silent chassis with tall 468mm sides and a wide 230mm footprint. Yet closer inspection reveals plenty to like. The Asus B150M-A motherboard offers a decent range of external connectivity options, with two USB 3 ports at the front and another pair at the rear. There are four USB 2 ports as well, plus a USB Type-C connector. Right now, that might seem pointless; once the new standard becomes widespread it could prove very useful, since Type-C can deliver up to six times the juice of a standard USB 2 socket. (In theory,…

PRICE £582 (£699 inc VAT) from wired2fire.co.uk Wired2Fire is a company with an affinity for super-fast PCs, so it was perhaps predictable that, even within our tight budget, the Dorking-based system builder would shoot for outstanding performance. That it’s certainly achieved. The Workstation Ultima is built around a Core i7-6700K processor, overclocked to 4.3GHz. On paper, that isn’t quite as ambitious as Palicomp’s 4.6GHz Core i5-6600K, but factor in the Core i7’s Hyper-Threading capabilities and larger on-board cache, and you’re looking at an unbeatable performer. With an overall benchmark score of 151, this is easily the fastest PC here. It even beats the 148 scored by HP’s Xeon-based Z240 in our recent workstation group test (see issue 259, p90) – while costing half as much. After accounting for such a…

PRICE £582 (£699 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk The Vulcan E1 follows the same basic formula as the Chillblast Fusion Insight, combining a Core i5-6600 CPU with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. No surprise, then, that its benchmark performance proved almost identical. An overall score of 109 in our application tests is highly respectable, if unexceptional in this group, and an average frame rate of 82fps in our high-resolution Dirt Showdown test indicates plenty of power for gamers. With that graphics card filling the PCI Express x16 slot, however, you don’t have much scope for internal expansion. The Asus H110M-D D3 motherboard comes with just two empty PCI Express x1 slots – there’s no PCI Express x4 and no conventional PCI for legacy hardware. You also get just two…

PRICE £426 exc VAT from misco.co.uk “For the price, we’d have expected a better Windows software bundle – but the i1190 can’t be faulted for speed and output quality” Kodak’s i1190 is built for substantial scanning jobs: along with a big 5,000-page daily duty cycle, it promises a scan speed of 40ppm in both colour and mono scans – and not only at 200dpi, but at 300dpi as well. Our lab tests confirm the truth of Kodak’s claims. Our mono and colour duplex scans of 50 bank statements averaged a perfect 40ppm at both resolutions. Like all scanners, the i1190 slowed down considerably at 600dpi, with mono and colour scans both dropping to 10ppm – but this remains better than many rivals. Scan quality and accuracy at 200pdi is perfectly…

PRICE Starts from £14.95 per month (exc VAT) from sipgate.co.uk “Sipgate Team offers good value and plenty of features, with no minimum contract period and no need for an on-site server” Every business can benefit from VoIP, but not everyone wants to set up and manage their own dedicated PBX. The Sipgate Team service could be the solution. It offers good value and plenty of features, with no minimum contract period and no need for an on-site server. Your main interface with the service is the web portal. This is nicely designed, displaying details of all inbound and outbound calls, account billing status and options to order more phone services and numbers. We settled for the numbers already assigned to our account, but you can request local, 0845, 0870 or…

Is there a reason we can’t just dump our old computers in a skip? There are several. The obvious one is the legal restrictions on disposal of electronic items: the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2013, or WEEE, which are intended to protect the environment from the toxic chemicals found inside old kit. See Understanding WEEE, below, for more on this. There’s also the danger that if you just leave your old computers sitting out on the street, anyone who comes along could pick them up and mine the hard disks for sensitive data. Unless you happen to have a car crusher on the premises, or some other means of physically destroying your old drives, you should think about disposing of your old computers in a more managed way.…

“Hand over the hard disks and let the geeks go play with the data. Let them mine and see what they find” My sides are aching from the laughter! No, really, it doesn’t matter how you tell the joke, it’s still side-splittingly funny. Go on, tell it again! Microsoft has bought LinkedIn? For $26 billion, you say? That Nadella, he really knows how to rock and roll! Now for the sober reality. At first glance, it looks like $1 billion of value and $25 billion of sheer desperation. Given how utterly dreadful Microsoft’s record of large-scale acquisitions has played out, from aQuantive to the even bigger disaster called Nokia, it’s hard to immediately see how this will go any differently. Surely this will amount to a huge write-off on the…

“Done right, a state-supported social network could be a big step forward – and could even treat its users like human beings” Computers were supposed to save us from pointless, repetitive tasks. Lately, they’ve inflicted a new one on me – that is, regularly going through the settings on my apps and services and turning off all the changes and new features I never wanted in the first place. That’s assuming they can be disabled, of course. No doubt you’ve had similar experiences. A trusted app or website gets an unexpected update, and suddenly things no longer work the way they should. Twitter starts to mess with the order of your timeline; YouTube becomes impossible to navigate; games start pestering you to buy in-game bonuses with real money. The Germans…

“I’m sure it isn’t only me who suffers a frisson of anxiety when I feel how hot my almost-discharged tablet sometimes becomes” Batteries, dontcha just hate them? For the ten-thousandth time, I forgot to plug in my phone last night, so when I grabbed it to go out it was dead and I had to leave it behind on charge. My HTC phone’s battery will last over two days if I turn off various transceivers, but life’s too short. And phones are only the worst example, to the extent that I now find myself trying to avoid buying gadgets that require batteries. I have self-winding wristwatches, but I’m too sedentary to keep them wound and they sometimes stop at midnight on Sunday. I don’t care for smartwatches, but I did…

So, Windows 10 is one. Is it really time for Microsoft’s developers to be popping champagne corks and reaching for their party hats? We set Jon Honeyball the challenge of deciding, and you can read his verdict on p38. We’re not sure it will be happy reading for the company. It would be overstating matters to say that Microsoft gambled its future on Windows 10 – but not by much. Designed to be the OS that runs on everything from phones to games consoles, tablets to full-blown desktop workstations, a huge amount was – and is – riding on its success. Not only was Windows 10 designed to be all-encompassing, it was intended to be ever-evolving. No more staging-post updates, but regular releases of new features, as and when they…

David Stevenson has a complicated family tree. In December 1960, only a few hours old, he was discovered in the hallway of a block of flats in Golders Green. Wrapped in two multicoloured blankets, the Daily Mail, dubbed him “The Rainbow Baby”. Almost 50 years on, he wrote in the same newspaper, “for me, the past is a blank page”. Stevenson was adopted by a family from Edgware, who were upfront about the circumstances surrounding his discovery, but the question of his biological beginnings has resulted in exhaustive efforts. Stevenson’s partner, Julie Howell, has taken up the search. “David was left to be found,” she says. “We know there was a deliberate attempt to make him safe, as well as a deliberate attempt to cover up whatever had happened.” Howell’s…

PRICE £1,617 (£1,940 inc VAT) from shop.lenovo.com/uk Lenovo knows a thing or two about building great business laptops, and the ThinkPad X1 Yoga is no exception. Fusing Intel’s Skylake processors with a 14in WQHD display, this hybrid is designed to flit between laptop and tablet modes with ease – and with a dash of style to boot. Not that the ThinkPad X1 Yoga draws attention to itself. Encased in sheets of matte-black carbon fiber, bar the small pinprick of red afloat in the centre of the keyboard – yes, there’s still a TrackPoint, this is a ThinkPad after all – the X1 Yoga is relentlessly monochromatic. There’s still something reassuringly utilitarian in its simplicity. And crucially for a 14in laptop, it’s thin and light. Weighing 1.27kg and measuring a slender…

PRICE £1,667 (£2,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com “Chillblast thoughtfully provides two 3TB hard disks set up in a RAID1 array, so you can be sure your data is safe” The clue is in the name. While Scan goes for all-out gaming with its GeForce GTX 1080-powered system (opposite), Chillblast has its eyes on the photographer who wants the last word in image-editing speed. To that end, it overclocks an Intel i7-6800K Broadwell-E processor from 3.4GHz to 4.18GHz, and marries it with one of the fastest M.2 SSDs around – and a gluttonous 32GB of RAM. The OC VII tore through our benchmarks, beating the photoediting time of the record-breaking Armari Magnetar workstation by a whisker (see A List, p17). It carried that explosive form into our videoediting and multitasking tests…

PRICE £141 (£169 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk “I like how easy it is to drag the focus and exposure point around the screen and adjust the exposure compensation to suit” The Motorola Moto G4 follows a long line of successful budget smartphones that stretches all the way back to 2013, but it has its work cut out in 2016. With Samsung and others joining the budget fray, the Moto G4 must do something special to maintain its position at the top. Lenovo (the new owner of the Motorola brand) hasn’t made life any easier for the Moto G4 by bumping up the base price. The cost of 2016’s model is £169 inc VAT, up £20 on last year’s Moto G (3rd gen). What does that extra cash get you? For…

PRICE £582 (£699 inc VAT) from meshcomputers.com We’re not ones to be swayed by flattery, but we felt a certain pride on learning that Mesh had put together a £699 PC specification just for us. This quickly evaporated, however, once we saw what it looked like. No two ways about it: the Thermaltake Versa N21 case is an ugly thing, finished in fingerprintattracting glossy plastic and standing an entirely unnecessary 513mm tall. Happily, the internals are much more agreeable. Mesh has opted for a Core i7-6700 processor, running at 3.4GHz with a maximum Turbo Boost frequency of 4GHz. This lifts application performance: not only do Core i7 chips have larger onboard caches than their Core i5 cousins (8MB versus 6MB), they also feature Hyper-Threading, allowing them to multitask more efficiently.…

PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from palicomp.co.uk The Palicomp i5 Tremor looks unassuming, but inside it ticks a Core i5-6600K that’s been aggressively overclocked to 4.6GHz. That’s a big boost compared to the standard i5-6600, which tops out at 3.9GHz; the i5 Tremor’s overall benchmark scores matched those of this month’s Core i7-6700 systems. If you want to be technically precise, the Tremor’s single-threaded score was a few per cent higher, owing to the Core i5’s higher clock speed, while its multitasking score was a few per cent lower, owing to its lack of Hyper-Threading. Overall, however, it’s fair to say that Palicomp has achieved Core i7 performance for the price of a Core i5. With the money saved, the system builder has chosen to invest in a Samsung SM951…

PRICE £578 (£693 inc VAT) from cclonline.com Like the Overclockers Kinetic H1, the CCL Nova Pro 250 uses a Core i5-6500 CPU that ranks at the bottom of this month’s table when it comes to application performance. Unlike the Kinetic H1, it also relies on the processor for graphics, using Intel’s integrated GPU rather than a discrete graphics card. Inescapably, therefore, we’re looking at this month’s slowest PC overall. But it would be a mistake to write off the Nova Pro 250 just for that. It bears repeating that an overall benchmark score of 103 still represents a beefy desktop PC. And while Full HD gaming is out of the question, Intel’s integrated graphics allowed us to switch to 720p and enjoy Dirt Showdown at a perfectly playable average of…

PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from yoyotech.co.uk Yoyotech’s Virtue RS2, like the Chillblast Fusion Insight, arrives in a Game Max Silent case. Its oversized design will put off some, but it lives up to its name: we found the system entirely inaudible in operation. This is partly down to the fact that there’s no graphics card. But that doesn’t mean you can’t play games on the Virtue RS2 – as we’ve noted elsewhere, the built-in Intel HD Graphics 530 GPU is more powerful than you might expect. At 720p and high detail, Dirt Showdown ran at an average of 34fps. When it comes to desktop performance, the Virtue RS2 motors along at an impressive pace thanks to a Core i7-6700 CPU. With an overall benchmark score of 136, it’s only…

PRICE £461 exc VAT from ebuyer.com “The ADS-3600W’s speed and output quality are impressive, as is cloud support – and the price is very tempting indeed” Brother’s ADS-3600W has every document-digitising feature a small or medium-sized business could possibly need. It offers a fast 50ppm scan speed and a generous 50-page ADF –and it will take some stick, with a 5,000-sheet daily duty cycle. Hooking it up is easy: there’s support for direct PC connection via USB 3, or your choice of Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n wireless connections. There’s also NFC support, so you can connect a compatible mobile device with a tap. At the front, the ADS-3600W’s onboard controls are accessed via a 9.3cm LCD colour touchscreen. We found it effortless to get connected to our wireless network via…

PRICE £414 exc VAT from morecomputers.com “The lack of network and cloud capabilities might discourage some, but the PS456U’s scan speeds are persuasive” At first glance, Plustek’s little SmartOffice PS456U looks unremarkable. But underneath its glossy, white plastic exterior lurks an astonishingly fast 80ppm scan engine. Thanks to its duplex capability, that equates to a filecabinet-busting 160ipm. The big 100-sheet ADF and 8,000-page daily duty cycle confirm this is a scanner that’s up for heavy-duty digitising. The key thing that’s missing is network support. Still, the PS456U is a cinch to install on a dedicated host PC; we connected its USB 2 port to our Windows 10 workstation and had all the software apps loaded in less than ten minutes. It’s an impressive software bundle. Along with TWAIN, ISIS and…

EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS “Back in the old days, you had to rely upon your knowledge to stitch together what was necessary to make a platform complete” How much do you care about an operating system? It’s an intriguing question, and I’ll admit it’s one that’s best discussed over a pint of your favourite tipple. Or glass of Chardonnay, or whatever your favoured drink. The stark reality is that most people don’t care a jot. They’re only concerned with what it can do for them. This is a clear shift in the commoditisation of the computer and the services it offers. This has profound effects on the decision-making process in terms of what to buy next. It’s a tough question to answer, but it has to be…

“I wouldn’t have spent the time and effort putting the course together if there wasn’t a prospect of making a profit” To make legitimate money online, you have three main options: to sell what you have, what you can do, or what you know. Assuming you know something that others will pay to learn, the last of these can look particularly compelling, and a number of video-based platforms have sprung up to service the demand from both experts and learners. Udemy is the world’s largest such service, recently welcoming its 10-millionth registered student, but competition is fierce: with more than 20,000 instructors and 40,000 courses, I was curious to find out if it was still a viable platform for selling the expertise I had to offer. If you build it,…

Last month’s column was left well and truly dangling, describing the process of diagnosis with a client but not yet having fully dived in to the process of a fix. There were good and bad reasons for that: the good was that I thought I could see a relatively easy way out of the disaster; the bad was that some of those ways would require waiting for telecom broadband supply orders to actually come through. In my experience, that’s about the worst nail-biter, progressive-reveal, can’t-motivate-them jobsworth disaster in modern business. Most of my experience has been in central London, but this client is based in the more civilised environs of the home counties. As a result, rather than the “three months, maybe never” type of service that I’ve been used…

Zenbo, open the door! Zenbo, how do I make paella? Zenbo, read junior a story! “Zenbo” isn’t a magical command to control your spouse, it’s Asus’ newly announced robot butler, featuring facial recognition, cloudbased AI and a cheerful animated face – all for $599 (£415). Unveiled at Computex in Taipei, the 2ft-tall robot rolled on to the stage with Asus chair Jonney Shih, snapping his photo on verbal command. Technical details on how the robot operates weren’t revealed, but similar ideas have been attempted in the past (sit, Sony Aibo, sit!). Indeed, the real technological leap is the price, which is about the same as an iPhone. Of course, the price is moot if Zenbo can’t deliver on its many promises. Aside from an ability to “emote” via its cartoon…