Table of contents for October 2017 in PC Pro

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Full contents overleaf PRODUCT OF THE MONTH Intel Core i9-7900X When AMD released the Ryzen 7, we were reminded of the Monty Python sketch where Michael Palin slapped John Cleese around the face with a pair of pilchards. “Wake up,” AMD shouted, “time to innovate again!” From a consumer’s point of view, it’s worked. The Core i9 series kicks off with a ten-core monster, the i9-7900X, that costs 50% less than the chip it replaces. We’ve not only put this chip through a fierce set of benchmarks, we’ve also reviewed a workstation that takes advantage. If you know that Monty Python sketch, you’ll understand when we say it’s one heck of a halibut. p50 CONTROVERSY OF THE MONTH How would you feel about paying a subscription fee for…

@PCPRO PCPRO.CO.UK/NEWS Background and analysis on all the important news stories Unveiled The hottest hardware news, including a Linux workstation p12 5G auction could be put on hold A spat between Three and Ofcom looks set to delay the process p13 PC Probe The surveillance that nobody, even ISPs, can talk about p16 EXPERTS ARE WARNING Microsoft faces an uphill battle if it attempts to force consumers into paying a subscription for Windows. Microsoft has already managed to successfully convert Office into a subscription product and recently introduced Microsoft 365, a joint payas- you go model for both Office and Windows targeted at businesses. That’s given rise to predictions that Microsoft is planning to turn Windows into a pay-monthly subscription for consumers, too. “Microsoft is on a trajectory that seems…

THE 5G SPECTRUM auction could be delayed by a row over the bidding rules between Three and telecoms regulator Ofcom. The auction covers 190MHz of radio airwaves for mobile broadband in two separate slices – 40MHz in the currently useable 2.3GHz band and 150MHz of spectrum in the 3.4GHz band. The 2.3GHz band is the disputed territory as it’s already used for 4G services, while the 3.4GHz spectrum is earmarked for future 5G services. Although Ofcom has placed restrictions on Three’s bigger rivals, it’s refusing to meet Three’s demands for a 30% cap of all spectrum per operator. BT/EE holds 255MHz of useable spectrum, Vodafone has 176MHz, while Three and O2 trail on 90MHz and 86MHz respectively. Three claims the new auction rules mean the BT/EE partnership and Vodafone will…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 (New) Ultraportable from £1,149 from dell.co.uk Dell only needed to refine its brilliant XPS 13 design to keep top spot, and and adds more options, but it’s the edge -to-edge 13.3in display and compact chassis that lift it above the opposition. Oh, and it’s now available in Rose Gold. REVIEW refine that’s what it does: it’s slightly quicker Issue 270, p54 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2016) The high price stops it from taking Dell’s top spot, but a nine-hour battery life, sleek design and – for a premium – the Touch Bar make this a stunning machine. From £1,249 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 268, p54 Dell XPS 15 (2017) Not cheap, but a svelte and stylish 15in laptop that packs a punch thanks…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro. He voted to remain in the EU, lest anyone doubt his motives for this column… @bazzacollins Great journalists defend the defenceless. Then there are cheap hacks like me who defend the indefensible. So put the coffee pot on, fire up your indignation, and sit back in disbelief as I make the case that Microsoft and Google are being unfairly picked on by the EU. The EU, as we know, has a massive problem with “bundling” – but only if you’re a monopoly. Apple can bundle what it likes with its operating systems – web browsers, media players, email clients – because its products are so expensive that it will never monopolise a market. The moment you cross the line…

Think Different (please) Why is Jon Honeyball obsessed with Apple? In issue 275, he tells us all about Samsung’s desktop-on-aphone idea, which it pinched from Microsoft. Both seem to have done a good job, but neither is apparently acceptable, and Jon is waiting for Apple to have a go instead. Apple is the company that just spent $5 billion on a donut for its new HQ but can’t seem to innovate even the simplest of commodities, like a new Wi-Fi router to replace its defunct AirPort range. It seems that all 100,000+ of its employees are too busy designing the all-new iPhone to think up anything new, so he may be waiting some time. Alan Ingram Not so hotdesking Your article on hotdesking (see issue 275, p106) overlooked one important…

PRICE £3,667 (£4,400 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Once the power of AMD’s Ryzen 7 chips became clear, Intel ha to hit back fast. Its first salvo architecture up to 18 cores and introduces the new Core i9 brand, signalling even faster desktop and look at the Core i9 for workstations comes via the updated Scan 3XS Classic 3D – the previous iteration of comes in the shape of “Skylake-X”, which extends the familiar Skylake workstation performance. Our first which took the winner’s spot in our workstation Labs (see issue 270, p76). The new 3XS Classic 3D sports the only Core i9 that has officially been made available so far, the i9-7900X. You’ll find our full four-page review of this super-chip on p50, but it boils down to this: the new…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE Around $450 from gearbest.com If you were to visit China, you’d see an awful lot of Xiaomi handsets. “Who,” you might reasonably ask, “is Xiaomi?” Well, in 2014, the company was declared the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Not only in its native China: the world. That’s not too shabby for a company that doesn’t ship to Europe or the US, and the Xiaomi Mi 6 is a good insight into what we’re missing. The handset is every bit as powerful as the latest releases from Samsung, HTC and Sony, yet it comes in at around half the retail price. Even the toughest customs hike won’t put it level with the Samsung Galaxy S8. Naturally, you immediately begin looking for which corners have been cut,…

PRICE 8GB, £43 (£50 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276fire7 We can talk processor speeds, resolutions and battery capacities all day long, but with Amazon’s new-and-improved 7in Fire tablet there’s only one number that matters: £50. While I have plenty of negative things to say about the Fire, bear in mind this is still a tablet with a quad-core processor, two cameras and Amazon’s slick, family-friendly software. What’s more, the 2017 Fire has Alexa, better battery life and four new colours, should you want to get all jazzy. And you might be tempted. In black, this is as generic and featureless a 7in tablet as you can imagine. It’s over 1cm thick, crafted from cheapfeeling plastic, and with only the shiny silver power switch and volume rocker at the top to lend…

PRICE €308 (€369 inc VAT) loupedeck.com from Sometimes a piece of kit comes along that you’re just willing to be as good as it looks in the publicity shots. Loupedeck almost lives up to those expectations. Lightroom, the workflow software used by the vast majority of professional and enthusiast photographers that I know of. Instead of using mouse and traditional keyboard to adjust sliders and tweak settings, the deck allows you to make adjustments to photos by twiddling dedicated knobs and sliders. It’s a control console for Adobe Want to punch up the brightness of a photo? Spin the exposure knob to the right. Quickly convert a photo to black and white? There’s a button for that. Boost the saturation of the grass in your landscape? Tap the Sat button…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO D-LinkDCS-960L PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276dcs This is a security camera with one clear selling point: its 180-degree camera. The idea is that you can install one camera and take in the full view, as opposed to the 130 degrees or so of a regular camera. “Forget about pan and tilt cameras,” promises the D-Link website, “view everything instantly in real-time.” And it works. Unlike a typical fisheye camera, D-Link does a great job of flattening the view so that it looks normal. Walls will still look curved at the edge of the image, but overall it’s surprisingly effective. It records at 720p and the image is a little sharper than the Arlo Pro – you’ll recognise people even at the edge of the frame. Unlike…

PRICE Three cameras, £533 (£640 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276arlo The Arlo Pro takes a different approach than most. While all the other cameras on test connect directly to your router, the Arlo includes a base station in the package. This then connects, via the supplied Ethernet cable, to a port on your router, which means your cameras’ video streams don’t consume your network’s wireless capacity. “Net at moiskeen on adding features. It recently announceda 110dB siren to scare the bejesus out of burglars” And note the plural there, because Netgear thinks of the Arlo Pro as a camera system rather than a camera or two. You can connect up to six cameras to each base station, but don’t start thinking you’ll get economies of scale: each add-on camera costs around…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £515 (£618 inc VAT) from asustor.com The AS6404T is Asustor’s newest four-bay NAS appliance – so new that we’ve yet to see how pricing shakes out on the high street. We’re expecting to see it come in at around £618, making it one of this month’s most expensive contenders. The high price is no surprise, as this is clearly a high-end appliance. Turn it on and a two-line LCD display lights up, showing system status at a glance; four navigation buttons let you step through a series of menus to access information and settings Inside, the AS6404T is powered by a quad-core Intel Celeron J3455. This sits near the top of the latest “Apollo Lake” family of SoCs (system on a chip), and includes hardware video acceleration,…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £71 (£86 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276bls If you’re looking for the cheapest, most frill-free NAS appliance on the market, look no further. The Buffalo LinkStation 520 costs just £86, yet offers all the file-sharing services a small office is likely to need. To be sure, a lot of creature comforts are sacrificed to get to that ultra-low price. The unit itself is a boxy little thing, with just two tiny LEDs visible at the front to indicate status and USB activity. (There are actually two disk status lights as well, but these are hidden behind the flimsy drive door.) There’s no front-facing USB socket, and only a single USB 3 connector at the rear. Adjacent to this sits a sole Gigabit Ethernet port, putting paid to any…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £191 (£230 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276n212 The Netgear ReadyNAS 212 is a mid-market two-bay NAS device. While not as cheap as the Synology DS216j, it’s a cut above in build quality, with a sturdy metal enclosure and a door that swings open to reveal two tool-free drive bays. It also offers a handy front-facing USB 3 port, with a one-click copy button; round the back there are two further USB 3 ports and, slightly unexpectedly, an eSATA port. Netgear doesn’t offer an eSATA expansion enclosure, so we doubt you’ll find a use for this connector. Finally, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports enables link aggregation and load balancing. Pretty much all the expected network services are supported, including FTP, DLNA, Time Machine and iSCSI; all that’s missing…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £589 (£707 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276qn4 Qnap’s TS-453B is an upmarket relative of the TS-251A. Not only does it offer twice as many drive bays, it features a more up-to-date quad-core Celeron J3455 processor – the same one as found in the Labs-winning Asustor AS6404T. The TS-453B’s high-end credentials are obvious: as soon as you turn the power on, a compact two-line LCD display lights up with a helpful overview of the system’s status. Two tiny touch buttons let you navigate through various information pages. It’s a nice feature, although the text is on the small side – you won’t be able to read it from across the room The TS-453B’s drive bays, meanwhile, hide behind a tasteful smoked plastic door, which slides off to reveal four…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £216 (£260 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276t2 If you haven’t spotted TerraMaster’s NAS offerings on the high street, that’s no surprise: this upstart Chinese NAS specialist sells to the UK exclusively through Amazon. If you’re hesitant to entrust your precious data to an unfamiliar provider, be reassured that, like most NAS platforms, it’s built on Linux, so the foundations are solid – from a software point of view, at least. The hardware is pretty sturdy too. The F2-240 feels well put-together, with two drive caddies that slide out and click into place as cleanly as any rival’s. They’re not tool-free, but a screwdriver is thoughtfully included to help you get set up as easily as possible TerraMaster’s TOS software offers easy access to technical settings via a stylish…

SCORE PRICE 12TB, £2,802 exc VAT from misco.co.uk If your in-house expertise is focused on Windows, there’s value in choosing a NAS that runs on the same platform. Buffalo’s TeraStation WSH5610 fits the bill nicely: with Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 (WSS) at the helm, this 6-bay desktop box presents the shallowest of learning curves for those comfortable with Microsoft’s standard server OSes. It runs the Standard Edition of WSS, which supports unlimited users and SMB connections with no capacity restrictions. Other benefits over the Workgroup Edition are global data deduplication and Hyper-V, allowing the TeraStation to host up to two VMs. Buffalo offers 12TB or 24TB versions – there’s no diskless model. We tried out the former, which came populated with six 2TB WD Red NAS hot-swap hard disks.…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £3,638 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com Thecus has a fine reputation for cost-effective NAS solutions, and it’s done it again with the N12910SAS. This 2U rack appliance isn’t cheap, but it delivers a powerful package which includes a 3.5GHz Xeon E3 v5 CPU, DDR4 memory and support for high-performance SAS3 storage. In case its 12 bays aren’t enough, it’s expandable too; the LSI SAS3008 adapter card has an external port ready to connect to one of Thecus’ 16-bay D16000 disk shelves. You’ll need an SFF-8644 to SFF-8088 cable to link the first shelf to the appliance; after that, you can daisy-chain up to three more shelves, for a total of 76 drive bays. We notice that there’s also a small tray inside the main unit for two SFF…

SCORE PRICE £286 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Xerox’s ConnectKey technology lets you customise and extend its printers with a wide range of apps – and the VersaLink C400 brings it firmly within the budgets of SMBs You’ll see this in action the first time you power up, as the 5in colour touchscreen reveals four pre-installed ConnectKey apps. These provide easy access to printer settings, job status and printing from USB devices – but the one that’s of most interest is the App Gallery. Tap on this and you can create a cloud account, browse available apps and install them with a couple of jabs. It’s also possible to access your account from a browser and install apps to the printer over the LAN. Many of the apps on offer are…

Simon Hudson is an entrepreneur, health sector specialist and founder of Cloud2 Ltd and Kinata Ltd @simonjhudson The prevailing view is that Office 365 is rather good. Even Mr Honeyball says so, and he isn’t known for leaping to Microsoft’s defence. The company has created a technology and brand that successfully ranges from individuals through small businesses (O365 Business Essentials) and up to major enterprises with 100,000+ seats. It provides a genuine set of capabilities that’s well matched to the needs of this disparate group and it continues to improve. If you’re used to Microsoft tech, then I’d always favour O365 over the Google platform. But it isn’t perfect. In common with other tech firms, Microsoft often takes some fun internal project and launches it as a new component of…

There’s a reason futuristic policing films such as Blade Runner and RoboCop are set in apocalyptic versions of our world – there’s a lot that can go wrong when technology and police combine. While there’s potential for improved transparency, faster response times and cheaper but better results, there are also concerns around privacy invasion, excessive surveillance and abuse of power. “While technological advances may bring benefits for policing, this must always be balanced with the risks they pose to our privacy and security,” said Pam Cowburn, communications director at the Open Rights Group. “The police have a duty to uphold human rights law and that includes ensuring that their techniques do not violate our fundamental rights.” That’s not always easy, she noted, as tech develops more quickly than the law.…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO MY REVIEW OF the D-Link DCS-960L (see p72) was originally going to open with a line castigating the name, which is as out of place as a cucumber in a strawberry field next to devices such as the Netatmo Welcome, Netgear Arlo and D-Link’s own Omna. It was only as I spent time playing with its other features that I recognised that D-Link’s branding team might be far smarter than I am. They recognise that there are two types of buyers. First come the Tinkerers, who care about features and getting under the skin of a product. There’s a sliding scale of Tinkerer, with Extreme Tinkerers on one side: people who will hack away to make the device comply with their wishes. Then you have Tinkerers Lite, who…

1 False dawn for PC sales After a brief upswing in PC sales sparked hopes of a return to growth, Gartner figures for Q2 show a return to “business as usual”, with declining shipments for desktops and laptops. The company said 61 million units shipped in the quarter, with only HP showing growth, and the market overall was down 4.3% on the previous year – in part due to rising machine prices followinghigher costs for DRAM,SSDs and LCD panels. 2 Facebook pushes ads into Messenger Facebook’s efforts to alienate users continue apace, with the company revealing that it plans to insert adverts into Messenger, the breakaway app that Facebook has forced users to install if they want to chat on the platform. The company is hoping to monetise more of…

BACKGROUND INFO ON INNOVATIVE BRITISH COMPANIES KEYFACTS Mimecast is a global email security provider that protects environments including Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 and Google Apps for Work HEADQUARTERS London FORMED 2003 STAFF 960 WEBSITE mimecast.com @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO When you start to consider the sheer magnitude of email within corporations, it makes your brain hurt. Mimecast, for example, deals with 180 million emails on behalf of its 26,000 clients every day, or 125,000 emails every minute. And that’s just the “good” stuff – those numbers exclude the vast mountains of spam that don’t even pass through the gates in the first place. All that email has to be scanned, processed and often archived in real-time. If a client on the phone in Singapore tells you he’s sent an email confirming the…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She handed in her copy late this month, but she’d like to clarify to her editor it wasn’t because of naps. Promiszzz. @njkobie Working from home has more pleasures than not — nap anytime! No missed Amazon deliveries! But it also means setting aside part of your home for work. As I live in London, my flat is tiny. Not a complaint, just a fact. Of the four rooms I share with another human being, one is for cooking, one for sleeping, one for… well, it’s the bathroom, and the remaining room houses everything else. My “office” is a desk crammed into one corner, my chair bumps up against our dining table, and I can reach out and touch our TV with a…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPROFACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276nok The Nokia 3 heralds the return of the Finnish technology firm as a smartphone brand after an absence of almost three years. It arrives this time with much humbler, more achievable ambitions (although its flagship Nokia 6 phone should land soon). At a price of £130 it’s up against phones such as the Motorola Moto G5 and – if you’re willing to stretch your budget – the £200 Lenovo P2. Despite that price, the Nokia 3 is a nicely designed phone and one that gives a nod towards Nokia smartphones of times gone by. Just like the Lumia 830, this phone has a metal frame and a coloured polycarbonate rear panel, with the Nokia logo elegantly carved in-line with the camera…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £192 (£230 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276deco If you read our Labs on wireless routers two months ago (see issue 274, p74), one thing would have become obvious: if you want the strongest Wi-Fi coverage around your home or office, mesh networking is the future. TP-Link has embraced this truth, with the Deco M5 its first mesh networking system. Just like the award-winning mesh systems in our Labs, the Google Wifi and BT Whole Home Wi-Fi, it aims to improve wireless coverage by using multiple boxes to bounce the wireless signal from one to the other, spreading it into former black spots and reducing load on your router The Deco M5 kit consists of three of these “nodes”, one more than Google Wifi and the same number as…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 16GB, £67 (£80 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276fire8 Amazon followers might feel like they’ve seen this product somewhere before, and they’d be right. In its original incarnation, the Amazon Fire HD 8 was released at the back end of 2015, along with the Amazon Fire HD 10 and the original 6in Fire. This, the 2017 version, looks identical, comes with the same quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT8163 processor and 1.5GB of RAM, but there’s something a little extra up its sleeve. This is the new Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet, now with Alexa. With zero change to its innards, the Amazon Fire HD 8 performs almost identically to the budget tablet it supersedes. In a serious case of “you get what you pay for,” the Fire HD 8 scored…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £417 (£500 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276acer Enjoy gaming? Want a tear-free image even at intense frame rates? Own an AMD graphics card? Then I’ll cut to the chase: this is your ideal monitor. Its 27in 1440p 144Hz panel makes it the perfect choice for competitive and casual gamers alike. And with the inclusion of AMD FreeSync, those with AMD graphics cards get tear-free gaming. Its “ZeroFrame” narrow-bezel design is what you’ll notice immediately, though, with a brushedaluminium finish on the bottom bezel to add a touch of style. The stand is sturdy and allows you to tilt, pivot and fully rotate the screen, or you can replace it with a compatible 100 x 100mm VESA stand. Unlike most gaming monitors I’ve seen of late, there’s no headphone…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from apple.com Let’s get one thing straight from the start: this camera is only worth considering if you’re already a dedicated Apple HomeKit user. There’s no Android app: it’s designed to work within an Apple-based lifestyle, and that’s reflected in its all-silver design. Not everyone will love its looks – for example, the Omna is chubbier than the Netatmo Welcome – but then again it offers two extra features compared to the Welcome that some might find vital. First, 180-degree video. Second, two-way audio. “D-Link has a69-page PDF on its support sitethat document show to adjust every thing from hue to SMTP configuration” Image quality is as clear as you’d expect from a 1080p D-Link camera, but note you can only record clips to microSD…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Network-attached storage isn’t just for big businesses. In most homes and small offices these days you will find a plethora of desktops, laptops and mobile devices – so a central repository for your important files makes sense. It ensures that you can access your data from wherever you happen to be, even if you’re out on the road, thanks to the easy-to-use remote-access services that come as standard. And if one of your hard drives fails, it’s good to know that a multi-disk RAID array is keeping your data safe. More than this, modern NAS appliances can also run all sorts of useful network applications, from media servers to databases, wikis and security-camera management systems. No matter what your needs, a NAS can help – so read on…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £119 (£143 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276sy2 The Synology DS216j is a very cheap two-bay NAS appliance which – it must be said – scores low on glamour. The enclosure isn’t exactly ugly, but the shiny white plastic is a little tacky, and there’s no easy access to the drive bays: to install or replace disks, you’ll have to dig out a screwdriver and slide the side off. Functionally, though, this dinky drive ticks a lot of boxes. Despite its diminutive size, it runs the full version of Synology’s latest DSM 6.1 operating system, which means you get all the same features as the much chunkier – and much pricier – DS916+ (see p87). That starts with a rich, window-based web interface, and an extensive set of companion…

SCORE PRICE 2 x 1TB, £319 (£383 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276bts The TeraStation TS3210DN is an oddity. From its size, you’d assume it was a four-bay unit, but the lockable drive door swings open to reveal just two horizontal bays. It’s not clear why the unit’s so large, although one factor is the internal power supply, which allows the TS3210DN to be powered by a regular kettle lead rather than an external adapter. Those aren’t the only unusual things about the TeraStation. Uniquely this month, it’s sold only in pre-populated form – our review model came with two 1TB WD Red drives, which explains the price. Subtract the cost of those and you can compare the TeraStation to two-bay units costing around £250. Be warned, though – if you want…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £224 (£269 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276qn2 The TS-251A crams a lot of features into its compact twobay frame. That starts at the front panel, where the standard USB 3 connector is joined by a micro- USB 3 port and an SD card reader. These make it tremendously easy to consolidate your media, regardless of where it’s all stored – and if that’s not convenient enough for you, the Qnap TS-251A will also accept USB Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapters, for direct over-the-air transfers More goodies are to be found at the rear: alongside a duo of Ethernet connectors, there are two HDMI sockets and a brace of audio jacks. While the Intel Celeron N3060 CPU isn’t quite as powerful as the newer chip found in the Asus AS6302T,…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £419 (£503 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276sy4 Synology’s nimble DS216j is one of our favourite NAS appliances this month, and the DS916+ is built on the same platform – although it features a much beefier quad-core Intel Pentium N3710 processor. This happens to include a fairly capable GPU, but unlike the Asustor and Qnap systems, the DS916+ doesn’t support local video output. The basic unit comes with 2GB of RAM, which can be upgraded to 8GB, so there’s ample headroom for running demanding apps and services. Like its two-bay counterpart, the DS916+ supports the full complement of networking protocols, including iSCSI and Active Directory. There’s integration with half a dozen popular cloud services, and a good range of backup options; as with the DS216j, you can connect to…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £329 (£395 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276wdc2 There’s a certain logic to getting your NAS appliance from the same company that makes the drives, and alongside the diskless unit, the My Cloud Pro PR2100 is offered in a variety of pre-populated configurations. Some of these are good value, but do the maths before you invest: the 4TB model comes in at £600, whereas you can buy a diskless package and a separate pair of 2TB WD Red disks for a total of £555. Installing those drives is a piece of cake. Each of the bay doors at the front of the My Cloud Pro PR2100 pops open to reveal a gaping slot; simply slide your drive in, then close the door firmly to push the connector into place.…

Darien Graham-Smith is associate editor of PC Pro. Email him at darien@pcpro.co.uk Exactly a decade ago, Microsoft announced Windows Home Server (WHS) – a generalpurpose home hub, providing centralised data storage and backup for the whole household, as well as streaming video and handling remote access. I thought it was a great idea: I even put together a feature for PC Pro guiding you through the process of building and setting up your own Home Server. Those were the days. Sadly, Windows Home Server is no longer with us. Microsoft never gave an official reason for killing it off, but the evidence points to strategic euthanasia. In the last release of WHS, before it was ditched altogether, Microsoft surprised everyone by removing one of its core features – the “Drive…

SCORE PRICE Diskless TS-1685-D1531-64G, £3,521 exc VAT from span.com Qnap’s TS-1685 Super NAS lives up to its name – it’s probably the biggest desktop appliance on the planet. This huge box supports up to 16 hot-swap drives, via 12 LFF and four 2.5in SSD bays As if that weren’t enough, there’s also six internal SATA M.2 SSD slots, supporting all sizes up to the latest 22110 110mm modules. Accessing these is almost as easy as fitting regular drives, as the slots are lined up neatly behind the motherboard’s easily removable dual-fan assembly. Qnap’s QTier feature helps ensure high-speed storage is used efficiently: it monitors activity and shunts data into different storage tiers based on usage. Round the back, the TS-1685’s quad Gigabit Ethernet ports are joined by dual 10GBase-T sockets.…

The cloud is, for most purposes, invisible. On the surface, there’s no difference between a free, ad-supported website and a million-pound custom deployment. So it’s no surprise that plenty of small businesses (and even some larger ones) have decided to save their money and rely on free email accounts, free web storage, free cloud backup and so forth. But there must be good reasons for digging out your credit card – mustn’t there? Well, when you’re dealing with an invisible resource, that’s a good question. What can cloud providers offer that makes paying a good idea? Here’s… well, not exactly an A to Z of the situation, but a list of issues to watch out for. A is for advert It’s the small-child part of the brain that responds to…

Jon is the MD of an IT consultancy that specialises in testing and deploying hardware @jonhoneyball EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS Iwas intrigued by the new Microsoft Surface Laptop. So much so, that I decided I needed to buy one. The prices seem a little robust, starting at £979 inc VAT for the base-level specification of Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. A more Honeyball-esque specification of Core i7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage runs to a somewhat more fruity £2,149, which is quite a lot of money. Nevertheless, it had to be done. First impressions? Microsoft is building on its previous work with the Surface Book and Surface Pro, and has delivered a high-quality product. No-one can argue with the build…

Davey is an award-winning journalist and consultant specialising in privacy and security issues @happygeek As I write this column, the UK parliament was recovering from a cyber-attack. Nothing overly surprising about that, you might think, given that WannaCry impacted so many public sector organisations and the NotPetya attack has gone global after starting off targeting government data stores in the Ukraine. Here’s the thing, though: the attack on parliament, or more accurately on MPs using the parliamentary network, wasn’t sophisticated – but it was both predictable and preventable. In a statement in the House of Lords, Lord Fowler (the Lord Speaker) stated that the “Parliamentary Digital Service discovered unusual activity and evidence of an attempted cyber-attack on our computer network. Closer investigation confirmed that hackers were carrying out a sustained…

When Satya Nadella took over as boss of Microsoft, I heaved a big sigh of relief. The rampaging elephant on the Microsoft board, Steve Ballmer, had finally moved on. It was time for a new era, a time for respect for the customer. I’m not foolish enough to suggest that all Ballmer did was wrong – there is enough material from his reign to fill multiple MBA courses at Harvard – but he brought an oppressive bullishness to the business that was unpleasant and unnecessary, and certainly tainted the memories of his successes. One of these was getting Microsoft to reach out into the retail community with the Microsoft Store. That it is a clear rip-off of the Apple Store is neither here nor there. Apple was first, and the…

Nicole Kobie Robot cars that follow suspects, super-accurate facial recognition and drone eyes in the sky – Nicole reveals our police-state future on p124 Darien Graham-Smith Darien spends a month locked up with 13 NAS drives to discover which devices are best for storage, streaming and speed. See p74 Barry Collins If you take half as many photos as Barry, you might just fall in love with the Loupedeck editing console as much as he did. Discover why he’s smitten on p68 Simon Hudson In our brave new cloud-based world, where should you store your business documents? Office 365 expert Simon has the answer on p116…

Sequent smartwatch A drawback of smartwatches has been insipid battery life, but a startup called Sequent believes it has solved the problem with a wearable device powered by kinetic action. Currently being funded via Kickstarter, the Swiss-made, 42mm watch looks more like a traditional timepiece, but it packs fitness-centric features and communications into a device the makers claim never needs plugging into the mains. The rate of charging – and ability to perform the full range of features - depends on the amount of wrist action the wearer produces. Excess output is stored in the battery for later use and the company says that if there is insufficient activity for certain functions, the unit will turn them off to preserve power. Users can configure which of the features will go…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology Darien Graham-Smith is PCPro’s associate editor. His pet peeves include getting lost and asking for directions. @dariengs For this month’s column, I had intended to argue that the rise of augmented reality is inevitable. In particular, I planned to focus on one specific application that has always excited me. You might call it simply “personalised virtual navigation” – effectively a projection of GPS navigation onto the real world. A possible implementation might take the form of a series of coloured lines, superimposed on the floor or pavement by your augmented-reality headset, leading off to various destinations. The experience would be similar to what you get in large hospitals – follow the green line to obstetrics, the red…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Editorial fellow and essayist Dick Pountain considered changing his name to Pontaigne, but it played havoc with his social media profiles. I’ve decided that I would like you all to refer to me as an essayist rather than a columnist from now on. After attending a stimulating talk by Brian Dillon at the London Review Bookshop the other day, I realised that, in a certain light, the stuff with which I populate this column looks quite a bit like an essay, and that essays are way cooler than columns. So I would like to be added somewhere near the bottom of a list that starts with Montaigne, Hazlitt, Orwell, Sontag and Woolf. Dillon’s definition of an essay was a kind of text that starts by chronicling an everyday…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Cities across the globe are bristling with sensors providing vital data. Citizens have wielded sensors to provide radiation data in Fukushima, air quality information in Amsterdam, and to measure damp levels in housing across Bristol. But most smart city projects aren’t like that. Many have surrendered their data to the companies who installed the equipment. Cities find themselves in the bizarre situation of having to buy back their own privatised smart data, and even then they can’t marry it to other data sets being collected by a different firm in the same area. What’s the point of collecting traffic data if it can’t be cross-referenced with air quality, for example? Now, Barcelona is preparing to make a stand. It’s experimenting with citizen-led Internet of Things and sharing economy…

A lot has changed with the introduction of Intel’s new X299 platform and Skylake-X chips. With more CPUs than ever to choose from, potential owners have even trickier choices to make than with the previous X99 platform. From Core i5 to Core i9 There are nine new CPUs in total, although the Core i7-7740X and Core i5-7640X are actually Kaby Lake quad-core CPUs in LGA2066 packages. The idea is that these will offer better overclocking potential than their mainstream counterparts, thanks to the more advanced CPU power-management capabilities of X299 motherboards. However, they lack quad-channel memory support, only have 16 PCI-E lanes and don’t support Turbo Boost Max The CPUs based on the Skylake-X architecture are much more tempting. These chips start with the Core i7-7800X, which offers six cores…

PRICE £316 (£379 inc VAT) from motorola.co. Remember when modular have lost faith in that vision, but add-ons. phones were supposed to be the future? Google and LG may Motorola’s parent company Lenovo is still plugging away with the Moto Z2 Play. Which is great news. Not only is this the most convincing integration of custom modules I’ve seen, it’s backwards compatible with last year’s from the Moto Z2 Play and the mods wouldn’t fit. Besides, there are couple of changes. First, the phone has gone on a diet. At 6mm thin, it’s roughly 15% skinnier than last year’s Moto Z Play. On top of this, the back switches from a glossy fingerprintmagnet of a design to a stylish matte metal grey finish. At a glance, there’s little different original,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE As reviewed, £1,458 (£1,749 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Any other manufacturer would have been accused of flogging a dead horse by now. Another year has rolled by without a significant change to the design of the ever made. While we will see the iMac Pro debut later this year, this update is iMac and yet it remains, categorically, the best-looking all-in-one computer all about incremental improvements. iMac’s design. The first is that there’s no height adjustability: you can only tilt the iMac back and forth. The second is the 27mm-wide bezels surrounding the screen. In 2017 these are starting to look chubby. That’s fine by me. Even after three years, I only have two gripes with the Display boost The Retina display on the original model was…

PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276dcs The Netatmo looks more like an ornament than a security camera, and all its features revolve around convenience and userfriendliness instead of fine-grained control. Once paired with your phone – an odd process that involves turning the Welcome upside down for the first few minutes – it will start recording and look out for new faces. When it’s comfortable that it’s capturing images of the same person (typically after a couple of hours of them walking past) it will ask you to name the identified face and then confirm that the photos it’s taken are indeed them. The idea is that it builds up a picture of who’s in your family and is then able to flag the appearance of a stranger. You’ll…

1 How many bays do I need? We strongly advise you to steer clear of single-disk NAS systems. It’s a fact of life that hard disks fail from time to time, and if that disk contains the only copy of your irreplaceable data, you’re in trouble. It’s much safer to go for a two-bay system, using two matching hard disks in a mirrored RAID1 configuration. That way, if one drive fails, you’ll still have a copy of all your data. Just be sure to replace the broken disk promptly, so the NAS unit can rebuild your array and restore your protection. Don’t be tempted by JBOD or RAID0: these offer more capacity, but lack fault tolerance. If you’re willing to spend a bit more, a four-bay NAS drive is more…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £350 (£421 inc VAT) from asustor.com The Asustor AS6302T isn’t that different to the Labs-winning 6404T – the most obvious difference being that it has two drive bays rather than four. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it reduces noise and power consumption, and makes for an agreeably compact case. The trade-off, of course, is versatility: a mirrored RAID1 array is your only sensible option. The LCD display and control buttons are also gone. You’re still left with coloured LEDs indicating power, network and drive activity, plus a one-click copy button, with its own activity light, for the front-facing USB 3 port. Even so, the appliance feels more like a generic black box. Inside, the AS6302T is powerful, but slightly less so than its larger sibling.…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £417 (£501 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276d5n2 The Drobo 5N2 offers a generous five drive bays, yet is barely any larger than some four-bay models. That’s thanks to its spaceefficient design: to populate it, you simply pull off the magnetic front cover and slide a bare 3.5in drive into one of the awaiting slots. Below, a row of LEDs shows how much space you’ve used – a thoughtful feature. The Drobo 5N2 embodies a unique design philosophy: it aims to make the world of network-attached storage accessible to non-technical users. All talk of RAID levels is banished: the unit automatically configures your installed media to provide the best balance of capacity and security, asking you only whether you want to be protected against a single disk error, or…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £400 (£480 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/276wdc4 The My Cloud PR4100 is the four-bay version of the PR2100, and the family resemblance is self-evident, right down to the slot-based 3.5in drive bays. On closer inspection, a few differences come to light: where the PR2100 relies on LEDs to keep you informed, the PR4100 has a two-line LCD status display plus a pair of inset navigation buttons that let you cycle through the information on offer. There’s also an additional USB 3 socket around the back, making three in total. Fundamentally, though, we’re looking at a bigger version of the same system, and pretty much everything we’ve said about the PR2100 applies here. That’s no bad thing: all the important network services are supported, from Active Directory to Time…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £4,002 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Stepping up as Synology’s first 3U rackmount NAS appliance, the RS4017xs+ has a lot to offer storage-hungry businesses. Its 16 hot-swap SATA drive bays can handle the latest 10TB hard disks for a huge storage pool – and if you need to expand it further, it’s possible to add two 12-bay RX1217 disk expansion shelves, thanks to a pair of highperformance Infiniband ports at the rear. Quad Gigabit Ethernet and dual 10GBase-T ports are included too, and there’s two PCI-Express slots for expanding the unit’s connectivity. Synology offers its own single- and dual-port 10GbE adapters, or you can choose from a wide range of thirdparty alternatives; speed demons can add a Mellanox dual-port 40GbE card. The appliance is powered by a suitably…

SCORE PRICE £285 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk EnGenius’ EL-EWS1025CAM adds a new dimension to video surveillance, combining a 2-megapixel IP camera with an 802.11ac wireless access point (AP). It’s a clever bit of convergence, and it doesn’t stop there: if you buy multiple units, they can connect to EnGenius’ Neutron WLAN management switches and form a wireless mesh network. As a camera, the EL-EWS1025CAM has strong credentials. The lens has a wide 120-degree field of vision, and is encircled by 24 IR emitters, enabling it to capture detailed footage even at night. An integrated microphone picks up good, clear sound. Behind the rubber cover on the side there’s a microSD card slot and reset button. Mounting is easy, too. It comes with a circular plastic bracket and a set of…

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Sitting in the pub with some friends the other night, we were all chatting… No, of course we weren’t. We were all doing stuff on our phones and ignoring each other. At least for a few minutes, anyway. Has anyone else started to notice a bit of social synchronisation when this happens? A group of people sits there chatting normally, and then once every half hour or so, everyone checks their phones at the same time. This level of coordination seems to be a new thing (previously, phones were checked at random times by different people), but I’ve spotted it across several different and diverse circles of friends. It’s nice – much less annoying for everyone involved. Anyway, during one of the periods when we were actually talking to each…

Steve is a consultant who specialises in networks, cloud, HR and upsetting the corporate apple cart @stardotpro Imagine the biggest thunderstorm you’ve ever been in. Then double it. Picture the relaxing waterfalls you associate with the mountains in summer suddenly turned into muddy, writhing pillars of grit – or leaping, 100m-high jets barely contained by concrete diverter culverts. Then think about putting a data centre into this environment. That’s the Swiss Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, which clings to the steep rocky slopes above the shore of the lake of the same name. I’d received an invite to take a look around, which I’d deferred due to poor health. It’s one of those tantalising targets you want to tick off your list, especially when on the map it looked to be…