Table of contents for July 2016 in PC Pro

EACH MONTH, WE try to tie our readers’ poll (see p27) to one of the issue’s big subjects. So when our letters editor came up with the idea of “Is email dead?”, I jumped at it. I knew what my answer was without hesitation; email has been the bane of my working life, and I figured this would be true of PC Pro readers. Well, I sit here humbled, with only one person agreeing with me out of 122 (and counting). I tried to work out why, which meant going through the comments. “My business, IT support, just couldn’t operate without this simple yet brutally reliable tool,” wrote Terry Montague. He added that “it just works”, an argument that cropped up again and again. Email’s universal nature proved another key…

1 Microsoft joins privacy fight Microsoft has joined the battle-already begun by Apple and Google-for privacy against US authorities. It's taking legal action againstthe US Department of Justice over its use of court orders to make the company turn over customerfiles without notifying the end-user. Microsoft's chief legal officer,BradSmith(below),isarguing thaf'non-disclosure"orders-whichprohibitthefirmfrom telling customers when theirdata is being probed-violate itsconstitutional righttofree speech and customers' protection against unreasonable searches. 2 Google drops support for ageing operating systems Google hasdropped support for older Microsoft and Macoperatingsystemsin version 50 of itsChrome web browser, meaning userson older systems will need toupgrade or switch browser. Thecompanyannounced that PCs running Microsoftversionsolder than Windows 7 - primarily Vista and XP -would no longer be supported by Chrome, while Macs on versions of OS X earlier than 10.9 willalsodrop off…

KEYFACTS IN A NUTSHELL Launched in February 2016, Yubl is a social network that’s targeting 18-24-year-olds who are disenfranchised with Facebook, Twitter et al. LOCATION London FOUNDED 2012 EMPLOYEES 55 WEBSITE yubl.me If we had £5 for every social network startup we’d come across over the past decade, well… we’d have enough to eat heartily in one of London’s finest diners. Social networks disappear as fast they appear, with even the near-limitless resources of Google proving unable to prick the bubbles of Facebook and Twitter. Yet, nobody could accuse the founders of Yubl of rushing to market with half-baked notions of stealing Facebook’s thunder. Yubl has taken seven years from concept to launch, and even then it’s starting slowly in the UK before embarking on the wider world. But what…

@njkobie If you were one of the few who bought a Revolv home hub, congrats! You now own a $300 device that’s been turned into a brick by Google. If you want to chuck it through Google’s office window, I’d totally understand. Back in 2014, Google bought Nest, the maker of smart thermostats that have since evolved into the centre of Google’s smart home system. Later that year, Nest bought Revolv, pulling its home hub hardware from sale, but continuing to support the service. A year and a half on, Revolv and Nest announced they’ll be ending that service in mid-May. They’re not only halting updates, and leaving users without support; Revolv hubs will actually stop working as of 15 May – a kick in the face for buyers who…

The social-engineering risk is something that a traditional pen test, especially one using automated tools to check for system vulnerabilities, won’t adequately check. There are specialist pen testing offshoots known as “red teams” which take the notion of attack simulation to the extreme by actually sending the boys (and girls) round to attack you as if they were the real deal. However, the small business on a budget might consider implementing a social media honeypot. Ken Munro and his team at Pen Test Partners believe that there’s a real place for DIY pen testing in that it helps promote a proactive security stance, and a social media honeypot is a simple way to gather threat intelligence to help the business defend itself. A honeypot is simply something created to look…

PRICE £689 (£827 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk It seems like 2-in-1 hybrids are more like two-a-penny hybrids at the moment – we reviewed both the Dell XPS 12 and HP Spectre x2 last month – but the Galaxy TabPro S offers something different. First, this 12in 2-in-1 includes a 2,160 x 1,440 Super AMOLED display with colours so vibrant they don’t just jump off the screen, they punch you in the nose. Then there’s its 4:3 aspect ratio, a break from the 16:9 orthodoxy of most Windows laptops. While this leads to thicker black bars on the top edge when watching films, I found the 4:3 ratio made both browsing and editing documents more pleasurable thanks to the extra splash of vertical screen space. As expected for a Samsung screen,…

PRICE £574 (£689 inc VAT) from htcvive.com Removing yourself from the Vive’s virtual worlds is an odd, disorientating experience. Despite the fantastic worlds into which you’re submerged – see the images below – it’s so realistic it’s unnerving. While the Vive may not be the product that brings VR into living rooms around the land, it heralds the beginning of something beautiful. That’s despite the Vive being something of an ugly duckling among the major VR headsets. Sony’s PlayStation VR looks futuristic, and the Oculus Rift has slimmed down and ditched the plastic for a fabricwrapped shell, but HTC’s device maintains a pock-marked exterior and looks pudgy in comparison. As soon as you hold the Vive in your hands, though, it’s clear you’re dealing with a premium product. The plastic…

PRICE Free from £36 per month from uswitch.com The Galaxy S6 Edge was a misstep by Samsung, adding £100 to the S6’s price but keeping the spec precisely the same. This year, there’s a much sharper distinction: the S7 Edge has a 5.5in display that’s 0.4in larger than both the S6 Edge and the standard S7, moving this phone towards “Plus” territory. It does share features with the S7, but that’s no bad thing. I warmly welcome the return of microSD expansion, with support for cards up to 200GB, and weatherproofing – an IP68 rating means the S7 can be immersed in water up to 1.5m deep for up to 30 minutes. Style-wise, the phone looks very close to the S6 Edge. A glossy glass finish sandwiches a gleaming, coloured…

Speed, access, privacy, protection, control. With the rise of the cloud, it looked for a while like the days of local network storage were numbered, but these are the crucial factors that mean NAS drives will always appeal to those in the technical know. For others, the arguments can sound compelling. Cloud storage services have risen in capacity and dropped in price, while media streaming services have taken over from physical formats and even downloads. The growth of fibre broadband has made online backup and HD video streaming practical, while the proliferation of mobile devices has transformed the cloud into the essential infrastructure that ties all your devices together. Why store your own stuff, when you can pay someone else to store it for you? Does it make sense to…

PRICE £200 (£240 inc VAT) from broadbandbuyer.co.uk If the DS216+ looks familiar, it’s because the chassis is all but identical to Synology’s previous two-bay units. Still, with both being PC Pro award winners, why fix what isn’t broken? The matt-black plastic chassis looks good, while the curved panel on the front pulls off neatly to reveal the two drive bays with their simple slide-out caddies. Drives are held in by pinned clamps and rubber grommets, which do an effective job of dampening drive noise. With this and a carefully controlled 92mm fan, the DS216+ is noticeably quieter than the other powerhouse NAS units on test. There’s real attention to detail here as well, with any tabs you’re meant to pull labelled to match, while labels on the caddies show which…

PRICE £147 (£176 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Buffalo supplies its compact two-bay consumer NAS populated, with a choice of dual 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB drives. Despite this, it’s kept the price surprisingly low, meaning you can grab the 2TB version for the same price as some unpopulated two-bay rivals. If you want to buy the entry-level version now and upgrade later, it’s no problem – open the front-facing door and the two Western Digital Green hard disks emerge neatly in their slide-out bays. It’s a shame that the software setup process isn’t so easy, requiring you to visit Buffalo’s website, download its NAS Navigator software, install it and then find your NAS before you can even get going. If the tool seems dated, the firmware isn’t much better, seemingly…

PRICE 6GB, £230 (£275 inc VAT) from seagate.com NAS drives are rarely accused of stylish design, but Seagate’s Personal Cloud is an exception. The size and shape of a modern Blu-ray player, it could fit in the average home entertainment setup without looking out of place. The downside is flexibility. It comes in single- or two-bay variants with drives pre-installed and no easy way to replace them. The software, meanwhile, focuses on ease-of-use over advanced features. If you plan to use a NAS as a low-cost, low-power server, it’s not for you. That doesn’t make it a bad choice for everyone. Its web-based setup routine is close to fool-proof, taking you through the selection of RAID0 or RAID1 configurations before asking what you want to do with your NAS –…

PRICE From £585 exc VAT from kerio.com If you’re looking for a one-stop on-premises IP PBX system, Kerio’s Operator Box v300 deserves an immediate place on your shortlist. This palm-sized steel slab is compact enough to suit the smallest office, yet powerful enough to handle up to 180 concurrent calls. The one-off fee of £585 includes support for five users, plus a year of software maintenance and hardware warranty. Additional licence packs cost £90 per five users, while ongoing software maintenance is around £195 per year. The warranty can be extended to three years for an extra £94. Getting the v300 working on our network was easy. The user manual detailed all the port-forwarding information we needed to set it up behind our lab’s firewall – or, if you prefer,…

PRICE File Server Module, from £899 exc VAT from arcserve.com Arcserve’s primary backup offering is now its Unified Data Protection solution, but the Backup package has much to offer small businesses. It includes cloud archival and remains the only backup product with data deduplication in the base price. It also works with just about any storage device – indeed, it comes bundled with Arcserve UDP Advanced, to help businesses offload disk-based UDP backups to tape for long-term archiving. The latest release brings support for Windows 10 and Exchange 2016, plus improved VMware vSphere 6 features and full compatibility with LTO-7 tape drives. Installation on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host took 30 minutes, via an intuitive process even for new users. Since the Manager software is unchanged from previous releases,…

Agood portion of my time is taken up repairing systems infected by viruses, or trying to recover data that’s been damaged by an infection – although I should be clear: when I say “virus” here, I’m using it in the same way I do for clients, as a catch-all term. Otherwise, I tend to get a blank look and a polite nod. For the rest of this column, as I explain how I get rid of viruses, you can assume I mean any form of malware, worm or rootkit. There are a multitude of ways to remove viruses, from manual removal right through to fully automated systems. Manual removal involves a painstaking search through the system Registry and files to delete the infected entries, which is fine if, first, you…

This isn’t the first use of VR in healthcare. For decades, it’s been used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological training (such as helping people with autism train for job interviews), pain management and rehabilitation. Dr Skip Rizzo, director for medical virtual reality at the Institute for Creative Technologies, has helped patients with third-degree burns manage their extreme pain: “Put them in a headset and give them a game environment to play in, and the perception of pain drops by at least half. It’s a pure distraction approach.” Dr Rizzo specialises in the use of VR to treat PTSD, drawing on an existing technique called prolonged exposure, where patients recount the incident that caused the trauma in order to help them process it. The headset can amplify that, “setting…

YOUR ROUTER PROBABLY uses MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output), a system of multiple antennas to improve signal efficiency. But your hub’s two or four antennas have nothing on the behemoth built at the University of Bristol, with 128 antennas crammed into a base station. Dubbed Massive MIMO, the test setup supports simultaneous connectivity for up to 12 laptops, hitting an “unprecedented” bandwidth efficiency of 79.4b/s/Hz, or 1.59Gbits/sec in the 20MHz channel. That’s 12 times better than 4G now, and a world record in spectrum efficiency – something that operators will be keen to see as we devour more and more mobile data (it will only get worse with 5G speeds). We spoke to Professor Mark Beach, one of the project’s leads, to find out how Massive MIMO works and when it will…

Charles Arthur What lurks on the dark web? We dispatched Charles, the Guardian’s former technology editor, to find out. The answer, on p46, may just surprise you Anthony Dowling Who better to advise on how to get rid of viruses and ransomware than a man who rescues infected PCs for a living? See his trade secrets on p116 Stuart Andrews There’s only one way to unearth the best NAS drives on the market, and that’s to put them to the test. Discover the results of Stuart’s efforts on p76 Professor Mark Beach The University of Bristol is leading research into 5G. We speak to the professor who has helped build and test a “Massive MIMO” antenna – see p128…

Web publishers are increasingly turning the screws on surfers that use ad-blocking technologies such as AdBlock Plus, effectively depriving content providers of essential income. Restricting access to content and asking for a subscription are two of the tactics being used to persuade visitors to disable the blockers. Yet consumers are reluctant to do so, often because they see browser performance suffer, and because ads are becoming ever more intrusive and audible. Not to mention the privacy fears of advertisers tracking you from one website to the next. The battle is only set to intensify, as smartphone users look to block content on their handsets. Even more worrying for publishers is the fact that younger people are the most likely to block adverts. Sources: PageFair and Adobe 2015 Adblocking report/PubNation/Global Web…

Even though it may be difficult – if not impossible – to lock down every last piece of sensitive information within an organisation, experts agree there are steps you can take to reduce the impact of a leak. Counter-intuitively, one of the first steps to reduce leaks is to set up an in-house whistleblowing system, where staff can report corruption or discrimination without fear of retribution. Staff are less likely to go to the media if there’s an effective way to report malpractice internally. “There’s the person who starts the process – say, bribery in an organisation – and the receiver who gets the material, and they’re anonymous to each other, although they can communicate and interact via chat so the two parties can build trust,” said Marco Calamari. Other…

@dariengs They may have a stuffy image, but our high-street banks are rocking some pretty modern technology these days. Contactless payment has become more or less ubiquitous, while the frustrating three-day wait for money transfers to arrive is a thing of the past. And do you want to talk about convenience? The banking app on my smartphone lets me shunt six-figure sums around without even needing to speak to an agent. Not that such sums are normally to be found in my account, you understand, but while moving house last year I was blown away by how quick and easy it all was. Yet while very large payments are much easier to handle than they were 20 years ago, we seem to have made no progress at all with the…

It’s a cliché, but true; many IT problems are caused by the unholy rapidity of change in our industry. But I’ve just had an irritating lesson in the opposite case, where things that remain the same for too long can land you in trouble. It started last week, when a friend emailed to say that mail to my main dick@dickpountain.co.uk address was bouncing, and it soon turned into a tragicomedy. A test mail showed it was indeed broken, and that my website at dickpountain.co.uk had become inaccessible too. Something nasty had happened to my domain. This wasn’t without precedent: I wrote here exactly a year ago, in issue 249, about the way Google’s tightened security had busted my site. The first step is to log into the website of my…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from very.co.uk At first glance, you could almost mistake HP’s new Chromebook 14 for its identically named 2014 predecessor. Both have a neat, white lid and flashes of sky blue along their sides. Open them up, however, and differences quickly become apparent. Whereas the previous model limited its sky-blue finish to the edges of the lid, the new Chromebook 14’s interior is blue throughout. When open, the eye can’t help but be drawn to it. Despite the copious amounts of plastic, it feels well built. It’s a little lighter than its predecessor (1.69kg versus 1.9kg) and marginally thinner (17.8mm vs 20.6mm), but otherwise the two models have much in common. The keyboard retains the same bouncy spring, but in this case that’s no bad thing:…

PRICE £8 (£10 inc VAT) upfront and then £31.50 per month from uswitch.com The HTC 10 is an excellent phone, but it really has to be. £570 SIM-free is the same price as the Samsung Galaxy S7, £30 more than the entry-level iPhone 6s, and over £200 more than the iPhone SE (see p74). Say what you like about HTC, that’s a bold statement of intent. It certainly looks the part. By ditching the logo and speaker beneath the screen, HTC has found room to swell the screen size – it’s now 5.2in to the M9’s 5in – and add a touchsensitive home button that doubles as a fingerprint scanner. There are other changes, too, the most obvious being a USB Type-C port rather than micro-USB. The power button has…

PRICE 6GB, £292 (£350 inc VAT) from store.wdc.com Much as we love the Qnap TS-451+ , not everyone wants a chunky NAS with hotswappable bays, a vast range of features and the kind of design that makes network admins swoon. Some simply want fast networked storage, Dropbox-like sync capabilities and solid media-handling features, preferably in a box that’s easy on the eye and with an interface that justifies the adjective “intuitive”. If that’s your wishlist, the second-generation My Cloud Mirror is hard to beat. For a start, the design owes more to Western Digital’s external hard disks than enterprise storage, and it comes populated with dual 2TB, 3TB or 4TB Western Digital Red drives for a total of 4TB, 6TB or 8TB of capacity. If you do need to replace…

PRICE £185 (£220 inc VAT) from lambda-tek.com On first impressions, the Asustor AS3102T seems like your average barebones NAS. Once you remove the side and top panels, which are joined as one single unit, the two drives screw directly into the chassis. This construction doesn’t do much to dampen the noise; it makes a surprising racket. Asustor doesn’t help its case for user-friendliness by providing its quick-start guide on CD, while advising those without an optical drive to visit the website to download it, along with the Control Centre utility required for initial setup. On the plus side, it’s a friendly tool that makes it easy to find and then initialise your NAS and drives, complete with a download of the latest firmware update. Once up and running it’s more…

PRICE £267 (£321 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Achunky, business-like four-bay NAS, the Netgear RN214 earns points straight away for ease of installation – with drives fitting neatly into pull-out rails on the screw-less caddies, the process takes just a couple of minutes. The rest of the setup is no more challenging, with a web-based routine that signs you up to Netgear’s ReadyCloud web portal for configuration. Netgear’s well-designed user interface encourages you to use the NAS much like a cloud storage service, partnered with a ReadyCloud app running on your PC or Mac. It’s effective, with a Dropbox-like look and feel and rapid synchronisation of documents and media files. The accompanying iOS and Android apps even allow for auto-uploads of photos and videos, just like OneDrive or Dropbox. However, if…

PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from span.com This two-bay NAS is definitely speedy. With a 1.6GHz Broadwell Celeron N2050 processor and a healthy 2GB of DDR3 RAM, the Thecus N2810 is one of the fastest units on test, beating the Qnap TS-451+ with an average write speed of 106.8MB/sec in our large video file transfer test and coming a close second for read speeds. Only a slightly-less-than-stellar effort in our small files transfer tests prevented it from topping the performance table. Connectivity is another strength, with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports supporting link bonding, three USB 3 ports, with one handy at the front, and an HDMI output that enables the N2810 to double as a media player as well as server. With built-in transcoding abilities it’s certainly equipped for the…

PRICE 4-channel licence, £270 exc VAT from 3cx.com The Phone System from 3CX has been around for a decade – a long time in VoIP. It has become the preferred PBX software choice for many service providers, thanks to a remarkable range of features that scale easily from SMBs to enterprises. It’s also one of few software products designed to run on a Windows host. You can try out 3CX without any financial commitment, since the two-channel version supports two simultaneous internal or external calls for free. Commercial licences are flexibly priced; a four-channel licence costs £270, including one year’s software maintenance, while a 16-channel licence costs £964. We installed 3CX in the lab on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host and had it running inside 30 minutes. A slick…

PRICE From £4/month per SIP channel (exc VAT) from t4com.co.uk Those who don’t have the time or expertise to set up their own PBX will love T4Com. This UK-based SIP trunking specialist can look after it all for you. Just give the company your requirements and it will supply a complete VoIP system tailored to your needs. T4Com’s SIP-trunking services operate from its London data centre; you can connect using your existing broadband connection, or have T4Com install a VoIP-optimised circuit. Whichever option you choose, you receive free calls between all offices connected via T4Com SIP trunks, and if an office is relocated, all its VoIP services will be transferred seamlessly to the new location. When it comes to phone numbers, the choice is yours. T4Com can port your existing…

Whether IT is your core business or a means to an end, every office needs computers. Traditionally, acquiring the right hardware, and upgrading as needed, would entail a programme of irregular purchases that could be difficult to budget for. By turning to a leasing model, so the argument goes, businesses can ensure they have the hardware they need at a stable monthly cost. “Traditionally, there have been two leasing options that a customer would have,” Cormac Costelloe, general manager of Dell Financial Services in Europe, told PC Pro. “A ‘full payout’ scheme is basically a traditional hire-purchase lease. It’s a structure that simply divides the cost of your tech expenditure across a number of payments – it could be 24 months, 36 or whatever.” The alternative is what Costelloe calls…

So Twitter is ten years old this year; it was founded on 21 March 2006 to be precise. My first tweet was 11 months later, on 7 February 2007, and said: “Right now I am mostly spilling Won Ton soup down my shirt.” I kind of wish I’d typed something more profound, which is apt as “tweet regret” is indicative of much Twitter business usage. Of course, back in 2007 few people were considering Twitter – or any social media for that matter – to be of much interest or use to the business community. How things have changed… and stayed the same. While only a fool would dismiss the benefits that social media can bring to the average business, far too many are still posting the equivalent of my…

LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 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 pcpro.link/alxps13 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 260 Blending its esteemed ThinkPad range with the flexibility of the Yoga, Lenovo has created something close to a perfect business hybrid. From £875; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 259, p62 Acer Chromebook R11 Spices up the Chromebook formula with a Yoga-like hinge and vibrant 11in touchscreen. With a battery life of nearly nine hours, it’s a budget do-it-all hybrid. £230; currys.co.uk REVIEW Issue 259, p70 Dell XPS 15 Dell takes the XPS 13’s beautiful design and applies…

@bazzacollins Forget Manchester United’s famous night in Barcelona; forget Churchill returning for a second term as prime minister; forget, even, Noel Edmond’s triumphant return to the screens with Deal or No Deal. The single greatest comeback of the modern era belongs to a tiny piece of tech: Bluetooth. Once the sick man of technology, Bluetooth was as reliable as Russell Grant’s horoscopes – you had more chance of a successful pairing on Cilla’s Blind Date and, even if you did manage to get device A to talk to device B, connections would be dropped if a sparrow flew past in the wrong direction. And that’s not to mention Bluetooth’s catastrophic effect on battery life. Even back when mobile battery life was measured in days and not hours, switching on Bluetooth…

Starletter I’m writing this on my desktop PC, which, against my express wishes, recently updated itself from Windows 7 to 10 while I was out of the room. To my left I can see my laptop, which I purposefully updated from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 – but which I find no easier to use and now has a troublesome trackpad. My Acer notebook lies unused in a cupboard, since the update from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 10 rendered it unusably slow. My Linx tablet updated from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, but now the cameras don’t work; if I install working drivers then Windows 10 updates them to newer, broken versions. My partner’s HP Stream keeps asking to update, but is incapable of doing so due to lack…

PRICE From £416 (£499 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk without Pencil or Smart Keyboard What makes an iPad “Pro”? Not long ago, you might have included a larger screen in the list of characteristics that turns an ordinary iPad into a Pro device, but the iPad Pro 9.7 turns that idea on its head. Visually, it’s almost identical to the iPad Air. It’s the same size and weight, and the main clues that it isn’t an Air are on the back, where the camera protrudes, iPhone 6-style. There are also three tell-tale black dots on the side that indicate the presence of Apple’s Smart Connector, for hooking up compatible keyboards. The main changes are all internal, where you’ll find an Apple A9X processor and up to 256GB of storage. The screen,…

PRICE £149 (£179 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Dell Inspiron 11 3000 has two eye-catching features. First is the price: £179 inc VAT is phenomenally low for a Windows 10 laptop. Second is its colour scheme: you wonder if there’s any “Tango Red” left in Dell’s paint factory, such is the punch of its plastic lid. If it screams too much for your taste, fear not; blue and white finishes are also available. Considering that price, it’s surprisingly well put together. The edges are nicely rounded, and it feels as though it would survive a few knocks in a backpack. At 18.5mm thick and around 1.2kg, you could also carry it around without undue strain. It’s less brilliant when it comes to long periods of working, however. The keyboard’s chiclet…

PRICE Free from £26 (£31 inc VAT) per month from uswitch.com In a world of me-too smartphones, the LG G5 is a breath of fresh air. Where every other manufacturer seems content to tiptoe forward with incremental improvements, LG has reinvented its flagship phone with a modular design that can be upgraded and tweaked with camera add-ons, high-end audio and replaceable batteries. Note, too, that LG hasn’t reverted to a shonky plastic rear to achieve this. Instead, the LG G5 has an attractive anodised aluminium unibody that’s smoothly contoured and unblemished by dust-gathering grooves or nail catches. It’s elegant and unfussy, with only the bulging camera housing spoiling its look. I also like the position of the fingerprint reader in the centre at the rear, which doubles as the phone’s…

PRICE Free from £24 per month from uswitch.com If you’ve been doggedly clinging to a battered iPhone 5 or iPhone 5s, then the iPhone SE is your dream made real: a 4in phone with all the power of Apple’s latest handsets. If, on the other hand, you’ve become used to a larger-screened phone then the iPhone SE looks and feels disconcertingly tiny. It’s exactly the same size and weight as the iPhone 5s, giving it an almost retro charm. Inside, though, beats the heart of an iPhone 6s. No matter how you might feel about Apple, kudos to its engineers: taking the powerful A9 processor from its top-end phones and cramming it into the tiny iPhone SE is a remarkable feat. If you suspected it would be a cut-down, half-pint…

PRICE £292 (£350 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk It says something when NAS drives pack processors more commonly associated with laptops. While the Qnap TS-451+ doesn’t have one of Intel’s latest Braswell Celeron processors inside, there’s nothing slow about its Celeron J1900 Bay Trail processor – running at 2GHz with a 2.4GHz burst speed, and partnered with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, it’s primed for speed. And so it proved in our test. The Qnap hit average speeds of 107MB/sec when transferring meaty 4K video files, dropping down to 105MB/sec when writing. Even the small file tests that leave other NAS struggling didn’t faze it, with its 46.6MB/sec write and 42.9MB/sec read speeds comfortably the fastest on test. There’s more to this hefty four-bay NAS than performance, too. For a start, it’s…

PRICE £278 (£333 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk If we judged NAS units solely by the number of lights and ports, this would be a winner. It’s festooned with blue and green LED indicators on the front panel and drive bays, and three USB 3, two USB 2 and two eSATA ports offer great expansion choices. The hot-swappable drives screw into two slide-out caddies, which click back into place with ease. Sound isolation could be better, though, with some clicking from the drives carrying through the chassis. Software setup and configuration involves visiting the Asustor website and downloading the Control Centre utility, but once installed finding and initialising the drive won’t take long, with the option to choose between RAID0 and RAID1. Those looking for a NAS for home entertainment will…

PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from cclonline.com The Qnap TS-228 looks surprisingly stylish for a budget NAS, with two bays positioned vertically in the chassis, concealed by a sleek slide-off shell. Supplied barebones, the drives slide into place and are held in without screws by a pair of clips, but this thoughtful design is spoilt by one fact – the shell is an absolute nightmare to get back on. Once you do, this NAS is relatively quiet aside from the noise from the hard disks themselves, which tends to come through. Things go much more smoothly with the software setup, where the combination of a web-based process and special codes attached to each individual NAS make it easy to get the Qnap running and configured as a RAID0 or RAID1…

Is there a place for NAS in 2016? When we started these tests, I wasn’t sure. Five years ago, the idea of centralised backup and file storage for my home and small business was incredibly appealing. Now I use OneDrive and Dropbox as my go-to save locations, while Google Drive and iCloud Drive play a role in supporting my iOS and Android hardware. Similarly, I once had big plans to centralise all the music, movies and recorded TV in the home and make it accessible through our Android tablets and Roku media streamers. Now, with the likes of Netflix, NowTV, Amazon Prime and Spotify, that idea seems redundant. Unexpectedly, however, I’m beginning to change my mind. For one thing, NAS drives are becoming easier to set up and work with,…

PRICE £925 exc VAT from beronet.com If you’ll excuse the cliché, Beronet’s Appliance 2 is truly a system of two halves. One side comprises standard PC hardware for hosting your choice of PBX software, while the other adds an integrated media gateway that lets you continue using your existing landline or ISDN systems in parallel with your new VoIP PBX. It’s versatile, too: the chassis can sit on a desk or be mounted in a rack, and the aluminium casing serves as a heatsink so it’s completely silent. The PC portion of the appliance is built around a 2GHz Intel Celeron J1900 processor, with 4GB of DDR3 memory and a 60GB SSD. If you’re planning on running multiple VMs, you can opt for 8GB or 16GB of memory, and larger…

PRICE 250-499 devices, £14 each exc VAT from netsupportdna.com NetSupport DNA has always been a fine asset-management package, but it’s nearly seven years since it last saw a significant update. DNA 4.1 rewards patient IT managers with a raft of new features, including automated deployment, SNMP device monitoring, Windows 10 support and more. Two versions are available: we tested the Corporate edition, which includes the A-Listed NetSupport Manager remote-control software. The Educational edition comes with NetSupport School, which includes the new eSafety feature to monitor and restrict the use of specified phrases and keywords. Installation on a Windows Server 2012 R2 server took only 15 minutes: then we used the deployment tool to scan the network and push the DNA agent to selected Windows 7, 8, 10 and Server 2012…

Our time is precious, and whether we’re at home, at work or online, we’re rarely inclined to sit and wait for something to happen. If one supplier can’t provide what we need right now, be it a breakdown service, plumber or shop, we’ll go elsewhere. The same is true online. Despite websites becoming weightier as designers increasingly integrate rich media content, we expect them to load in the blink of an eye. No matter the kind of site you’re running, this puts you in a difficult position. Gone are the days of getting away with plain text and static graphics. Your rivals – in any market – are almost certainly embedding video, large photos, infographics, HTML5 effects, long stylesheets and design frameworks. In order to compete, you’ll need to go…

I last wrote about “China phones” just over a year ago (see issue 247), but it’s a subject that’s been cropping up regularly since then. Folk often ask me whether it’s worth paying a premium for the latest Samsung or Sony handset, compared with one of the cheap-and-cheerful China phones available. China phones usually run Android – sometimes Windows Mobile – with specifications that aren’t quite on the leading-edge, but often not that far behind. The biggest differences you’ll spot are the unknown branding and the pricing. The higher-end China phones are typically around half the price of the equivalent handsets from the big-name manufacturers. The well-known brands are fighting back, with some offering lower-spec handsets at bargainbasement prices. However, for a given spec, you’ll always end up getting more…

Hashtag: 21stCenturyProblems. There can be no better example of this category of technical whinge, than finding that your Gigabit internet (and no, I don’t mean Ethernet!) connection won’t allow traffic coming inwards. It’s a connection so fast that it’s actively embarrassing to talk about it – but configured only so I can connect to those wonderful “cloud” resources faster than anyone else on the planet. What a great feeling, right? Wrong. I realise that a lot of people – even fairly technical people – think that web hosts are all going to deliver data every bit as fast as we can consume it, but the truth is they simply don’t, because hosting companies aren’t set up this way. It’s a field in which there are a lot of commercial deep…

A BLADE MAKES an incision into the patient, but looking down from the surgeon’s perspective, you realise it’s someone else’s hands making the cut. No, this isn’t the description of a horrifically realistic virtualreality (VR) game, but the future of medical training. It’s a concept that’s already been trialled: in mid-April, British surgeon Dr Shafi Ahmed allowed anyone with a VR headset to watch colon tumour surgery in near-real-time at the Royal London Hospital. Speaking ahead of the surgery, he told PC Pro: “There will be sound and vision, so you’ll be immersed in the operating theatre. You’ll be able to see how the team works, observe the operation itself, or watch the anaesthetist specifically, for example.” The idea, he said, is to improve the quality of medical training. VR…

The game making us look each other in the eye Sitting on a bus or train, all eyes are on the small screens of phones. Even in the supermarket, you can pick up your groceries without interacting with a human. Mara Balestrini is hoping to change that. The director of research at Ideas for Change has been working with researchers on Jokebox, an “icebreaker” that tells a joke and punchline – but only if two separate people push the buttons. She describes it as “a technology prototype that can help us understand how to design novel interfaces, to foster social connectedness in urban settings by encouraging eye contact and co-operation between strangers”. That the world has come to this… pcpro.link/261alphr1 How the Internet of Things could change healthcare The IoT…

On sale 16 June FREE GIFT LABS Printers: lasers vs inkjets Upgrade to a high-quality, low-running-cost printer for home or office. We put five lasers and five inkjets 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 How to fix the unfixable Think you can’t repair a broken iPhone yourself or replace components in a sealed laptop? We explain how to fix the unfixable. Take the world’s best tech course Harvard’s CS50 is the world’s most in-demand computing course. Find out what makes it so special and how to sign up for free. Use Google’s free photo…

One thing is without question – the leak of the financial documents from Panama is going to have a profound effect on the discussion about international finance, taxation and the legality and morality of corporate and high-net-worth money handling. And this discussion will run for years, probably decades. There’s no simple black-and-white test here. Offshore funds aren’t illegal; not paying tax as due is the issue. I have no problem with a fund running in Panama that pays no tax to Panama, but whose beneficiaries pay tax in their own countries. That’s how it works. It’s the conflation of legal tax minimising (avoidance) with illegal tax evasion that’s worrying. And then there’s the whole morality issue. The tax evasion being described at present goes well beyond claiming for an extra…