Table of contents for May 2015 in PC Pro

BEFORE I’D EVEN completed my sentence, explaining I was going into town and would she like to join me, my seven-year-old daughter fixed me with a stare: “I’ll be down by the front door in my coat in less than a minute.” In short, she was keen. This was partly because it was an unfamiliar town - we were visiting her grandparents in Congleton, Cheshire - but also because she had a purse weighed down by four pound coins and was on a mission to spend. Baroness Thatcher would have been proud. By the time we’d completed the short walk from house to town centre, my daughter’s eyes were acclimatised to her hunt for toys. She’d taken it in her stride that the toy shop we’d previously visited here was…

Teaching tech at school is hard. Schools have limited budgets and long refresh cycles, meaning kit is often out of date. Teachers have to invest much of their own time into staying on top of areas as disparate as programming and Microsoft Office in order to keep up with students, let alone lead them. And even with such efforts, most of the skills students acquire will quickly be out of date. Despite such challenges, many children are fairly well advanced at tech, being exposed to a multitude of devices in the home: my four-year-old niece hasn’t even hit school yet, and she’s already familiar with a smartphone, tablet and laptop. The disconnect described above was the cornerstone of much discussion at the Bett education technology show in London in January…

I wonder what excuse Apple-haters will find to explain the company’s record profits (announced last month). I guess they can always claim that the rate of stupidity is a constant percentage of the population – so, as the world population grows, Apple will always find more fans to buy its products! What makes me happy is that it was thanks to Bill Gates, who still believed in Apple back when it was almost bankrupt, that the company survived and grew beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Will Apple become more like Microsoft, as it continues to grow? In spite of its huge profits, its market share is tiny. Windows still overwhelmingly dominates the PC world, so, unlike the Microsoft of the 1990s, Apple can’t afford to take a break: it must constantly…

1 Flexible & scalable 4D’s new cloud platform runs a number of operating systems on a wide range of virtual server configurations. The new Infortrend SAN and architecture makes it even easier to scale your cloud infrastructure on demand. Whether you need to spin up multiple environments in seconds or store critical data for a number of years, the new cloud platform can meet your demands and grow to suit your needs. 2 Private & secure There are many layers of security for the platform itself, between users on the cloud, the VMs and the network traffic. These include four layers of firewalls, private vLANs for network traffic, enhanced security templates and customisable user permissions. Additional security features enable users to meet more stringent requirements such as PCI DSS. 3…

■ What does your job involve? I’m a senior support engineer at an IT support consultancy called Microbyte (microbyte.co.uk). We’re based in Peterborough, with a second office in Basingstoke, and we work with a variety of smalland medium-sized businesses. I handle daily support requests from these companies; my jobs might range from sorting out printing issues to setting up Wi-Fiand internet access, as well as more complicated tasks such as configuring guest networks, provisioning broadband lines and VoIP services, and even building new servers and migrating data across from older systems. ■ What does a typical day look like? The first thing I do when I get into the office is look at my tasks for the day: we use a bespoke call-management system to assign tasks to specific engineers.…

DEMAND THE DIFFERENCE IF THE PRICE DROPS Retailers such as Amazon might fiddle with the price of a product several times a day to ensure they’re never undercut by rivals. This means you can miss out on a discount in the time it takes for the product to be shipped, especially on expensive electronics. Remember that the Distance Selling Regulations generally give you a 14-day cooling-off period to return goods bought from any online store, and Amazon in particular gives you 30 days to return unused items. Use this to your advantage: contact customer services and threaten to return the goods unless they refund the difference between what you paid and the new price. There’s a good chance the retailer will acquiesce, because they don’t want the hassle and expense…

PRICE £25 (£30 inc VAT) from element14.com (pcpro.link/247rasppi) The Raspberry Pi has been a tremendous success story, ever since the low-cost development board first appeared in 2012. Among enthusiasts and educators it’s sparked an interest in “real” computing unseen since the halcyon days of the 1980s, and it’s also inspired an army of copycat devices. Now the Raspberry Pi Foundation is building on that success with the long-awaited successor – the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. This isn’t the first time the Raspberry Pi Foundation has updated the Pi. The Model B doubled the RAM from 256MB to 512MB and added a second USB port, and last year the foundation released the B+, which added a further pair of USB ports, plus extra GPIO pins and an improved board layout.…

PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from dabs.com (pcpro.link/247micropc) Monitor manufacturer Hannspree may not be the first name that sprung to mind when you think of dramatic innovation in desktop PCs, but its latest product could change all that. The Hannspree Micro PC (also known as a “PC on a Stick” by some retailers) is a full-blown Windows 8.1 (with Bing) PC, squeezed into a package that’s only a touch bigger than a Chrome cast. It weighs a mere 38g, measuring 38 x 110 x 10mm (WDH) and, just like a Chrome cast, it plugs directly into a TV or monitor via HDMI. Since HDMI doesn’t carry any power, you need to plug it into the supplied mains adapter as well, or a spare USB socket in the back of your…

In order to give the broadest possible workstation advice, we’ve used a wide variety of software for testing. Our Real World Benchmarks suite assesses the general speed at which the system runs Windows, how good it is at running more than one application simultaneously, and how it runs a selection of common media tasks including video and 3D rendering. In addition to this, we run tests specifically aimed at higher-end workstation activities. To test 3D modelling, we use SPEC viewperf 12, which runs a number of tests representing graphics content and real-world behaviour from a number of popular 3D, engineering and medical applications. Maxon Cinebench R15 contains another OpenGL modelling test, alongside a highly multithreaded 3D-rendering test, which benefits greatly from multiple processor cores. We also test GPU-accelerated 3D rendering…

PRICE WS-X140, £1,990 (£2,388 inc VAT); RS-D, £3,915 (£4,698 inc VAT) from workstationspecialist.com (pcpro.link/247wsx140 and pcpro.link/247wsrsd) Workstation Specialists has taken a rather different approach for its entry this month. This is a 3D-animationfocused system, but rather than targeting either the modelling or rendering part of the workflow, or attempting to be a jack-of-all-trades, the company has chosen to adopt a dual-pronged approach to the two tasks. The main WS-X140 workstation is aimed at modelling, and a smaller secondary unit – the RS-D – is supplied specifically for rendering, and is designed to sit on top. Many hands make light work The idea is that rendering jobs can be farmed off over the network to the RS-D, so modelling work can continue uninterrupted. In fact, a single RS-D unit could be…

PRICE £5,700 (£6,840 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk (pcpro.link/247hpz640) HP’s Z640 is the second most expensive workstation on test this month, and in many areas the most highly specified. Sporting a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2667 v3 processors, it offers 32 virtual cores with Hyper-Threading enabled, second only to the Dell Precision T7810 and the Workstation Specialists RS-D render node. HP’s processors are faster, though, with a nominal frequency of 3.2GHz, boosting to 3.6GHz in Turbo Boost. Since the Xeon is from the latest Haswell generation, it supports DDR4 memory, and HP has installed 64GB of 2,133MHz DIMMs. Surprisingly, the manufacturer hasn’t opted for a top-of-the-range graphics card: the PNY Quadro K4200 is no slouch, but a K5200 would have been a better match for the rest of the specification. Although…

In some areas of the computing world, PCs have become capable enough for most things we want to do with them. But the professional user remains hungry for powerful new technology that will enable more complex work, quicker production times, and the opportunity to realise ever more sophisticated creative ideas in the shortest time possible. The broad selection of machines in this month’s Labs is ample evidence that this sector of the PC market is in rude health. At one end of the spectrum we have the Apple Mac Pro, which packs a huge amount of power into an unfeasibly small and delectably shaped package. At the other, we have the overbuilt chassis of the HP Z640 and the dual-box approach of the Workstation Specialists system. And where the market…

Fixed forms Bits of paper that let humans feed data directly into the document-management system via OMR (see below). Less structured forms may rely on complex and less reliable handwriting recognition. Optical mark recognition (OMR) Simply put, the ability to read and interpret content on paper. This can be used, for example, to convert ticks on paper forms into searchable digital metadata. Portable Document Format (PDF) The daddy of static, searchable, generally read-only file formats. Now deeply embedded as an archival standard, although Adobe occasionally moves the goalposts with new versions of the format. Version control In this context, the process of relating documents that may be scanned at different times but which are connected by a single business reference.…

“How much? I can’t possibly have used that much!” These are words we often hear at the end of a month, when we reveal to our rural wireless-broadband subscribers the amount of bandwidth they’ve used. Here at Village Networks, we encourage our subscribers to conserve bandwidth. We explain that it’s a limited resource, and that our ability to provide equal access to all our subscribers relies on everyone’s adherence to the agreed allowances. A truth of ISP management is that the faster the connection, the more users will download. With 2Mbits/sec, it isn’t worth trying to watch anything from Netflix. With a 24Mbits/sec connection, you can watch two Netflix movies, over the same connection – and if you can, you will. So, as we’ve followed market forces and upped our…

THE SIMPLEST WAY to determine whether milk has gone off is to give it a sniff. Unfortunately, this isn’t yet something computers have learned to do, which means smart fridges aren’t clever enough to tell us that we need to visit the dairy aisle at the supermarket. However, this may one day be possible. Professor Krishna Persaud of the University of Manchester is one of the scientists currently looking for ways to teach machines to smell –and he’s just published a breakthrough piece of research about smart sensors. ■ Your research has found a way to recreate proteins normally found in the nose. So have you effectively replicated our sense of smell? They’re not actually sensors or receptors; they’re proteins that are carriers for smells. We’ve found a way to…

James Morris Former PC Pro editor James is now a professional videographer, so he was our obvious choice to torture-test workstation PCs. See p78 for his verdict. Roger Carey How do you inform customers how much data they’ve used if the measuring tools disagree? Roger from Village Networks shares his findings on p116. Joel Snape As acting editor of Men’s Fitness, Joel knows about staying fit. Turn to p58 for his tips on doing so while still sitting at your desk eight hours a day. Davey Winder A warning: the wireless keyboard you’re using opens up a new avenue of attack. Davey explains how to stay safe, and pays homage to David Gold, on p118.…

1 Fishy software on Lenovo laptops Kaspersky revealed thata hacking group has beenusing advanced malware that can’tberemoved from hard drives–and suggested the threatmight have ties to the NSA. Lenovo subsequently admitted that the Super fish software preinstalled on some ofits laptops leftusers open toonline attacks. 2 Sony unveils its own smart glasses Forget Google Glass: Sony has launched its own smart glasses, just weeks after Google discontinued the first version of its device. Sony’s SmartEyeglass will show notifications directly in front of your eyes, and connects to a power and control unit via a cable. The headset arrives in the UK in March for £520. 3 Free Wi-Fion British trains David Cameron promised that rail commuters in England and Wales willget free Wi-Fi on trains from 2017. The government will…

As part of the existing legal arsenal against encryption, Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 requires a suspect to hand over a decryption key or put the relevant information into an intelligible form. Failure to comply with a demand to decrypt data can lead to a sentence of up to five years for requests related to terror or child abuse (up to two years for other suspected offences), which require data to be unlocked in order to prove the case. The legislation has already been used to imprison suspected hackers and child-abuse-image downloaders. For example, in 2010, Oliver Drage was questioned “on suspicion of possessing indecent child images” on a hard drive that the police couldn’t decrypt. The then teenager was sentenced to 16 weeks for…

Election fever isn’t far off, and I’m starting to ask myself how the current government has performed. On the technology front, it’s a mixed report card: David Cameron’s positions on surveillance and internet censorship have been hard to swallow, but his government has also supported some laudably open-minded initiatives, such as trials of driverless cars and innovative rural broadband schemes. There’s been a new emphasis on cultivating start-ups, too, with various loans, tax breaks and support services available online in recent years. It’s easy to mock the Tech City project, but it does tap into a certain patriotic pride: the internet can feel like a very American place, so there’s something seductive about the notion that the next big thing could be British. In truth, it’s quite a stretch to…

With TV news full of crashing airliners, beheadings and artillery bombardments, it’s hardly surprising that people wish to escape into a virtual reality under their control – a virtual reality becoming ever more possible. The miniaturised components required for smartphones are precisely those whose lack has been holding back VR for the past few decades: displays, graphics processors, high-bandwidth comms and batteries. The embarrassing withdrawal of Google’s Glass project suggests that gaming remains the principal application for this tech, and Microsoft’s HoloLens goggles confirm that Redmond is thinking the same. The HoloLens employs huge mobile GPU power to mix 3D holographic images into your normal field of view, creating an augmented, rather than virtual, reality effect: you see what’s really there, combined with whatever someone wants to insert. “Could AR…

How do online stores convince you to buy products that you really don’t need? Barry Collinsex poses the secrets of the online retail industry We’re all wise to the tricks that bricksand-mortar stores use to tempt us to buy. Wafting the smell of freshly baked bread through the supermarket, knocking a penny off prices to make them appear a pound cheaper than they really are, and using bright lighting to make goods seem fresh and inviting. Less familiar, however, are the subtle – and sometimes not-so-subtle – techniques that are now used online to make us part with our credit card details. Online stores deploy all manner of psychological triggers to ensure that you don’t leave the site without putting a couple of items in your basket – the items…

PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk (pcpro.link/247asus303) Asus’ Ultrabooks have been treading the same, rather formulaic, path for some time now, with its metal-skinned Zenbook range of laptops a familiar sight in the PC Pro labs. The 13in Zenbook UX303LA doesn’t break that mould, but the price is attractive, and it forges ahead in one important area: it’s the first laptop we’ve seen to sport one of Intel’s new Broadwell 14nm Core i7 CPUs. In this case, it’s the Core i7-5500U, which runs at a nominal clock speed of 2.4GHz and Turbo Boosts up to a maximum of 3GHz. It’s backed up by 6GB of RAM, and since it’s the same basic core design as before, it doesn’t show a great performance boost over the previous generation of Haswell…

COMPATIBLE PHONES Nokia Lumia 630, 635, 636, 638, 730 and 830 At the end of last year, Microsoft unveiled its vision for the future of Windows: not only the desktop, but also on smart phones, tablets and other connected devices. Until now we’ve only been able to get a feel for Windows 10 on the desktop – what’s changed is that the next piece of the puzzle has been made available: Windows 10 for phones. Just like the desktop OS, the smart phone version is a Technical Preview, available to anyone with a compatible Windows Phone 8.1 handset who registers with the Windows Insider Programme (see p12 for how to sign up). We’ve installed it on a Nokia Lumia 630, but you can also try it out on the compatible…

Not all of this month’s workstations incorporate Intel’s professionally orientated Xeon processors, and those that don’t gain considerably from the Core i7’s more flexible clock speed. But every single system in this Labs has opted for professional-grade graphics. If you follow the 3D graphics business, you’ll be aware that, while professional and consumer CPUs are quite different these days, most professional graphics cards have a fairly close equivalent in the consumer range. With professional graphics usually costing at least twice as much as the consumer-grade alternative, it would seem an obvious economy to opt for consumer-grade graphics as well as a consumer-grade CPU. But few manufacturers do this, and certainly none of the manufacturers featured in this month’s Labs. Why is this? Warranty and certification Manufacturers often quote “workstation optimisation”…

PRICE £4,616 (£5,539 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk (pcpro.link/247macpro) It’s easy to fall in love with the Apple Mac Pro’s dinky cylindrical chassis, which will sit happily next to your monitor without spoiling your working environment. Yet its attractive exterior hides a surprisingly powerful set of components: it can be specified up to a 12-core Intel Xeon processor, 64GB of RAM, 1TB of flash storage and dual graphics cards. Our sample was the mid-range eight-core model, using an Intel Xeon E5-1680 v2, offering 16 virtual cores. The native clock speed is 3GHz, and with a top Turbo Boost frequency of 3.9GHz, it’s good for raw speed as well as parallel processing. It’s from the Ivy Bridge era, so it supports only DDR3 rather than the latest DDR4 memory, but Apple has…

PRICE £1,443 (£1,732 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk (pcpro.link/247lenp500) IBM farmed off its server brands to Lenovo last year, but thankfully it’s been business as usual in terms of quality. The Think Station P500 is evidence of this, rivalled only by the HP Z640 for tool-free access. The inside is littered with red flashes showing where to pull to release components, which slide out in a matter of seconds. Our review sample didn’t have the most impressive specifications, however. Its Xeon E5-1620 v3 is the bottom of the new Haswell Xeon E5 range, with a nominal clock speed of 3.5GHz, rising to only 3.6GHz in Turbo Boost. It’s a quad-core CPU, so Hyper-Threading provides only eight virtual cores, where the top systems offer 40. There is support for DDR4 memory, though,…

Whether you’re looking for your small business’ first dedicated server or just wanting to refresh existing, underpowered systems, the rack server is king. Over the years, such systems have become hugely more capable, and are a great choice for companies wanting to make the most of limited space. When it comes to both processing power and storage, the latest rack servers offer the best densities on the market. They’re also versatile enough to deal with a wide range of duties. Rack servers are more flexible than bulky towers, as they’re designed to fit in vertical cabinets that make more efficient use of floor space. Cable, power and server management can be centralised and, as demand increases, you can add more servers to spread the workload. Which U for you? Rack…

It’s all well and good applying a mixture of full-disk and file-level encryption on your devices, where you have control over the encryption process and the keys to unlock it. But what about encryption in the cloud, where an increasing number of SMBs are depositing their data these days? The average small business may well assume its cloud service provider is taking care of everything, but there are important questions to ask regarding the point at which the encryption is applied. It’s a given these days that data will be encrypted while in transit – a secure connection using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a security default after all. But is that enough for you to feel safe about your data in the cloud? Not…

@jonhoneyball Here are some words I wasn’t expecting to type any time soon: I’m genuinely excited by the Windows 10 announcements. There, I’ve said it. I’d been excited by Windows before - excited enough by Windows 3 to jack in my full-time job and launch my own firm specialising in supporting it. Windows NT was a joyous thing too, and NT4 was a positive delight. In the business arena, Windows XP was strong and became well understood, controlled and deployed. I didn’t particularly like Windows 7, but its 64-bit version was certainly a solid update to XP. I didn’t enthuse about it simply because it didn’t move anything forward in a meaningful way. The rest have been disappointing, verging on garbage (let’s not talk about versions 8 and 8.1, whose…

@happygeek The Internet of Things (IoT) has opened up a new can of insecure worms, a subject I’ve commented on before (see pcpro. link/247iot). The usual response is that the threat of devices such as smart power meters becoming vulnerable to back-door attacks – or clever heating thermostats being ramped up to create National Grid havoc – is merely alarmism, a kind of science fiction. However, the fact is that there have already been real cases of baby monitors being hacked into for spying purposes, and connected cars becoming liable to interference by remote hackers. Tim Rains, Microsoft’s director of cybersecurity and cloud strategy, has stated that, “some of these devices lack basic security capabilities, while others have security capabilities but they’re inappropriate for all the scenarios that the device…

Smartphones with scratched glass could go the way of physical keyboards and flip phones, if Corning has its way. Corning has long claimed that its own toughened glass, Gorilla Glass, survives better if dropped than glass made with synthetic sapphire – but the latter is far more scratch-resistant. This is one of the reasons behind Apple’s plans to use sapphire glass for its Watch; the company has already switched to using sapphire for the iPhone 6’s fingerprint scanner. Apple’s sapphire supplier, GT Advanced Technologies, filed for bankruptcy last year, giving Corning the opportunity to get ahead in this market. And the signs are that the company has succeeded. James Clappin, president of Corning Glass Technologies, told us that his firm has created a new version of Gorilla Glass, dubbed Project…

TODAY WE CAN access blogs, tweets, photos and other flies from anywhere, thanks to the cloud - but will we still be able to access them in the future? Vint Cerf, Google vice president and co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol, warned in The Guardian that as the programs needed to view certain file types fall out of use, data will become inaccessible to future generations. “When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that’s captured in digital form -such as our interactions via email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web - it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” he told the newspaper. “If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects…

Despite Microsoft’s promise of a single operating system for all devices, the first Windows 10 preview builds have been for desktops and laptops only. However, the company has moved one step closer to its vision of a unified OS by releasing a version of Windows 10 that will work on a limited number of Lumia handsets. HOW TO GET IT Want to try Windows 10 on your handset? First, you’ll need to join the Windows Insider Programme (insider.windows.com) and register your device. This will install the Windows Insider app on your phone, after which you can follow the prompts to install the new OS. If it all goes terribly wrong, you can always roll back your device to Windows Phone 8.1. Microsoft said most Lumia handsets will be upgradeable to…

LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 13in with Retina display Laptop, from £999 apple.com/uk Gram for gram, the MacBook Pro 13in is a powerhouse of a laptop. An Intel Haswell CPU delivers strong performance and great battery life, the PCI Express SSD is lightningquick, and the sumptuous Retina display is a pixel-perfect delight. REVIEW: pcpro.link/almb13rd ALTERNATIVES Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 2 A versatile hybrid laptop with the best IPS screen in its price range – now available at an irresistible price. £400; johnlewis.com REVIEW: pcpro.link/alyoga2 Asus Zenbook UX303LA NEW ENTRY Sporting the latest Broadwell Core i7, and a quality screen, this Ultrabook is both desirable and excellent value. £700; scan.co.uk REVIEW: see p64 Asus X552CL A capable 15.6in desktop replacement. Battery life is merely okay, but there’s enough power here to get the…

From politicians to laptop makers, it seems everyone is looking for a way to earn some pocket money. In the week that saw Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind caught in Channel 4’s “cash for access” sting, Lenovo found itself implicated in the Superfish debacle; the revelation that, unbeknown to its customers, the company had been secreting security-busting adware in its laptops. Despite Superfish Visual Discovery sounding more like a drunken late-night encounter at the local chippy than a piece of software, the reality is rather more malign. The company responsible for Superfish’s talents, Komodia, was doing something very dangerous indeed. Users had been complaining about the software since September 2014, but it took until February this year for security experts to reveal the full implications of Superfish’s payload. It wasn’t…

Restoring from the cloud I’m writing in response to M Jones’ email “Backing up isn’t enough” (see issue 245, p28). Having been both a Windows and OS X user for more than 20 years, I’ve come across a number of backup processes that claim to restore your PC to its original state – the most impressive of which has to be Apple’s Time Capsule. Recently, I needed to restore my own Windows system from a backup, after experiencing a Blue Screen of Death and wisps of smoke from my motherboard. A new desktop was purchased, but with a smaller SSD, so my backup wouldn’t fit. Since this was Windows 8, however, that wasn’t an issue. I provided my Microsoft Account details and 15 minutes later I had my desktop, apps,…

4D isn’t the kind of provider that sits back and keeps its portfolio ticking along. Nor does it just pay lip service to the idea of listening to its customers: it genuinely engages with the businesses it works with, and then uses that feedback – combined with its own insight and expertise – to build platforms and solutions that support customers’ business needs. 4D has recently launched a new cloud services platform, redesigned from the ground up to match the changing requirements of its clients. We spoke to its founder and technical director, David Barker, about the new cloud platform, and the thinking and work that went behind it. ■ You’ve had a successful cloud platform in place for the past few years. Why did you feel it was time…

As well as revealing the inner details of your hardware, Speccy Professional can deliver insight into the state of your operating system too. Click to open the Operating System pane and you’ll be presented with a huge report, detailing your Windows Update settings, antivirus status, power profile and much more. Two entries are particularly revealing. Under Scheduler, you’ll find details of all the processes that have been set to run automatically at periodic intervals on your computer – these may include automatic updaters for installed applications, and nag screens that ask you to upgrade bundled software to the full edition. You can remove these items within the Windows Task Scheduler – indeed, you can audit them here too, but normally it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind.…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from pcworld.co.uk (pcpro.link/247linx8) Not long ago, we’d have been deeply distrustful of a dirt-cheap Windows tablet – but recent arrivals such as the Bush My Tablet and Linux 10 have proven that the formula can work. Now comes the Linux 8, an 8in Atompowered Windows tablet that retails for only £90. When you look at what you’re getting for that money, it’s baffling how Linux or its rivals are making any money on these devices at all. You get a fully capable tablet running Windows 8.1 with Bing, including a year’s subscription to Office 365 Personal and 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage thrown in for free. That Office 365 subscription is worth £60 on its own, and also lets you use the software on a…

PRICE £5,495 (£6,594 inc VAT) from armari.co.uk (pcpro.link/247armari) Armari is a homegrown workstation company with a few decades of experience of producing cuttingedge workstations. But unlike many other UK brands, Armari designs its own chassis, one of which is employed here. The Magnetar M18H-AW1200 uses a custom Armari M75-S4HS case, with a number of features normally associated only with blue-chip vendors, such as the option for dual-redundant power supplies and hot-swap hard disks. The chassis is also exceedingly well-constructed, and has a clever pop-up carry-handle on top to help with transportation. High-power specifications Armari has unapologetically targeted the high end with the M18H-AW1200’s specification, but in a non-traditional way. Instead of going for the usual dual-socket approach favoured by machines at the top end of the workstation market, Armari has…

PRICE £4,130 (£4,957 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk (pcpro.link/247dellt7810) The Dell Precision T7810 on test this month is configured primarily for use with engineering software, rather than for content creation. As such, it uses a pair of ten-core Xeon E5-2650 v3 processors, which major on core count rather than frequency: they run at a nominal 2.3GHz, hitting 3GHz in Turbo Boost, but Hyper-Threading yields an enormous 40 virtual cores for parallel-processing tasks. Dell compensates for the low clock speed by including an Nvidia Quadro K5200. With 8GB of 6GHz GDDR5 memory and 2,304 CUDA cores – 960 more than the K4200 – this is a hugely powerful GPU. The Xeon processor also supports DDR4 memory, and Dell has equipped the T7810 with 32GB of the 2,133MHz variety. The four 8GB DIMMs…

PRICE £1,799 (£2,159 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk (pcpro.link/247scan3xs) Of all the workstations on test this month, the Scan 3XSHT15 is the closest to a regular high-performance desktop PC. It uses an enthusiast-grade Core i7-5820K processor, and comes housed in a Corsair Carbide 330R chassis; this has some great features, but it can’t match this month’s HP and Lenovo offerings for tool-free access. Nevertheless, the internals have been chosen to provide strong performance for a keen price. The CPU is from the high-end Haswell-E series, and while it doesn’t have the eight cores of the top Extreme Edition, it delivers six cores and a native 3.3GHz clock speed for half the price. Hyper-Threading means the cores are presented as 12 virtual cores, and Scan has clocked the CPU to 4.2GHz, with…

@PaulOckenden I’m going to start this month’s column with a plea from reader Andy Young, who writes: “I’ll soon be upgrading my laptop, but one of the things I always dread when I get a new PC is moving across all of my data and software from the old machine to the new one. Are there any products available that actually work?” Well, there are a few bits of software on the market that claim to migrate both your data and software from one machine to another, and I’ve tried a fair few of them over the years with varying degrees of success, often experiencing niggling doubts about how (or, indeed, whether) they actually work. Copying documents, music, photo and video files isn’t problematic, but it’s usually email archives and…

@stardotpro And so to Cambridge, the hoar frost fresh upon the withies beside the track from Liverpool Street station. There’s something about visiting an 800-year-old institution by train that makes me think of powdered wigs, clay pipes and quill pens, and while I realise that’s a heap of anachronisms bundled into a foggy overview, that’s actually my point. Eight-hundred years of deep thinking is the hallmark of a federated mass of colleges, and their approach to information technology can’t remain immune to this effect. So how was it that a single professor’s presentation led me from highperformance computing (HPC), InfiniBand and gamers’ graphics cards, right through to the pathos and high drama of sick children, family breakup and ruined lives? This trip to Cambridge was all about supercomputers. Back in…

Poor Samsung. In mid-February, its name was at the front and centre of news reports across TV, the internet and papers, with screaming headlines such as the BBC’s “Not in front of the telly: Warning over ‘listening’ TV”. The news that smart TVs might be monitoring what you say should come as no surprise. After all, if a device offers the capability for voice recognition and voice control, what do you expect? I guess most people would assume that the technology for this was embedded within the TV itself. But voice recognition works best when it has huge datasets to work with, and that means comparing your words with those of other people, which means running a cloud service where all the data can be compared. The real disaster, of…