Table of contents for March 2016 in PC Pro

Ofcom’s report showed that 75% of the UK has access to superfast broadband, but only 21% of homes and businesses opt for it – although that’s up from 16% in 2013. Thinkbroadband analyst Andrew Ferguson noted that in the areas where full fibre-tothe-premises connections are available “we often see people signing up for the cheaper products,” saying “people buy the products that suits their wallet”. “I think there’s still a lot of confusion around what fibre is, as well as where it is available,” added uSwitch’s Ewan Taylor Gibson. “For a lot of people, they just don’t see the need. They’re quite happy with their 10Mbits/sec broadband and, as fibre is more expensive, they don’t see any real benefit to having a fibre connection at the moment.” The areas with…

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980M finally marks the debut of Nvidia’s second-generation “Maxwell” GPU architecture. While last year’s range-topping GTX 880M used the older Kepler architecture, Nvidia chose to debut Maxwell’s potential with the midrange GTX 860M, which proved its mettle with a judicious blend of performance and efficiency. Now, however, Nvidia has demonstrated what Maxwell can do for high-end mobile gaming. The GM204 GPU in the GTX 980M builds on the changes introduced by the GTX 860M’s GM107 chip. For starters, the new streaming multiprocessor design (SMM) dramatically improves both performance and power efficiency over the Kepler architecture in the GTX 880M. So much so, in fact, that on paper the GTX 980M doesn’t appear to have much going for it. It has the same number of CUDA processing cores…

British PC manufacturers aim to keep prices low, but the realities of sourcing components at competitive prices can be challenging. “Component costs are linked to the dollar,” Ben Miles of PC maker Chillblast told us. “At times such as now, when the pound is taking a hammering from the US dollar, we can see our margin fall from double-digit percentages to practically nothing, with no change in the component US dollar pricing.” All the same, raising prices is out of the question. “A price gets ‘locked down’ whenever a system is reviewed, at least for a period of time,” Miles explained. “And UK customers are generally extremely suspicious of any firm that raises prices on technology items. There’s a perceived downward pressure on the price of technology, meaning margins on…

To put these high-performance drives through their paces, we connected them to an Apple Mac Pro (2013) with OS X 10.9 and a Windows 8.1 Boot Camp partition installed. Drives were connected via USB 3 and Thunderbolt as appropriate. On OS X, we ran a series of file-transfer tests, with one handling 4.4GB of RAW photos and another more than 10.2GB of raw 4K footage from a Red 4K video camera. We also tested the drive’s performance with small files and larger files using the Quick Bench synthetic benchmark. Switching to Windows, we then ran additional tests using the ATTO disk benchmarking utility and CrystalDiskMark to obtain sequential and random read/write results across a range of scenarios.…

The Nexus 6 is big – too big to make one-handed use practical, in our opinion. Much of the time, this isn’t an issue, but on occasion you’ll need to answer calls, reply to texts, search the web or find something nearby with Google Maps when one of your hands is occupied – holding a shopping bag, for instance – and the size makes this almost impossible. However, the handset has an ace up its sleeve: Google Now. Since this is a Nexus device, Google’s voice-control and dictation system can be activated using the key phrase “OK, Google”, which means all you have to do to activate it is unlock the phone – just about achievable one-handed on the Nexus 6. At this point, as long as you have a…

Robots are hardly a new arrival in many workplaces – car factories being one obvious example – but as they make more inroads into industry, and become more advanced, there’s a greater safety risk. So far, there have been few accidents: a New York Times report revealed a total of 33 deaths or injuries in the US due to robots at work in the past three decades. Even then, details of some accidents suggest human error may have been the cause. However, at the moment, most robots are specialised machines doing repetitive work, often inside “cages” to keep human limbs out of the way; as that shifts to smarter machines that move around, there’s more of a risk of accidents with people. On the other hand, robots may improve safety:…