Table of contents for May 2016 in PC & Tech Authority

The NBN will be an election issue this year, and rightly so. It will be an interesting war of words and promises, too. Malcolm Turnbull understands technology better than any Prime Minister Australia has had – though Kevin Rudd had a good grand overview, and was ably advised by then Minister of Communications Stephen Conroy. Now Turnbull faces Jason Clare, the Shadow Minister of Communications and Clare is well versed on technology and the NBN’s low-level functionality. So it probably won’t be a heated debate based on solely on marketable ‘big picture benefits’ rhetoric – it should delve fairly deeply into detailed technical nuances, and for techy-types like you and I it should make for a compelling spectacle. I fear it will devolve, though, into large parts political blame gaming-let’s…

James, Scorptech: “All-In-One Liquid Cooling solutions are extremely popular in the systems we pre-build, and in customer systems. They have proven themselves to be on par or better than the top end air coolers, and can give a much cleaner look to the build. In my opinion, the extra cost and space requirements are certainly outweighed by the benefits, especially due to the fact almost all cases nowadays will support a radiator in some capacity. Failures were quite common on first release of AIO, most of them due to pump failure (no longer working or noisy), very rarely saw returns from leaks. These days the pumps are of a much better quality and we are not seeing the returns we used to see.” John, TI Computers: “Our customers do recognize…

We all know that Windows 10 is pretty good. With some smart interface tweaks, solid behind-thescenes plumbing and more of a “have it your way” approach than Windows 8, it’s arguably the best version of Windows ever. However, that doesn’t make it perfect – at least not as it arrives fresh after installation. Many users will always prefer the more traditional look and feel of Windows 7, or will find that Windows 10 isn’t tuned to the way they work. Power users often find that the simplicity of the UI works against it, making it harder to get to the more sophisticated control panels that they’re used to or the applications, files and folders they use the most. And, for some of us, Windows never looks or feels right until…

You won’t find better reviews anywhere in Australia! Computer magazines are a bit like car magazines in that we read them to keep up with the latest because we love this stuff. We like to know what’s on the horizon for a minor upgrade, and when planning a full build or purchase we want to be sure the equipment we’re buying is up to the task, makes economic sense and is stuffwe’ll be proud to own. But of course you would never build a car. That’s crazy talk. Over here in PCland, though, many of us do build from scratch and that’s a mighty satisfying accomplishment. Now, let’s be honest, not everyone builds full PCs. Even readers and PC lovers I’ve known for 20 years, who are desperately attached to…

When we think about SSDs here at PCTA’s testing lab, we inevitably think about Samsung’s worlddominating models. But it seems its lead is slowly but surely being eroded by other companies that have plenty of their own experience when it comes to flash-memory, and one such organisation is Kingston. It turns out that these guys are the largest independent maker of DRAM memory modules in the world, yet we haven’t been blown away by their SSD efforts over the last year or so. The new KC400 aims to change all that, targeting business users with its unique data protection abilities, not to mention a relatively attractive price point. Let’s see if it can deliver on Kingston’s promises. This is a standard 2.5-inch SATA 3 SSD, foregoing the latest PCIe/NVMe connection…

After overclocking a Haswell-E rig sporting an R9 295X2 and simultaneously running OCCT and Furmark, as you do, and having its 850W PSU cut out thanks to the overcurrent protection, we took out Thermaltake’s latest PSU to see if it could do better. The first thing we noticed was that all the high amperage cabling, such as the ATX 24-pin, all the PCI-E and ATX12V/EPS cables had individual fabric-sheathed wiring (plastic wiring looms are included to keep them neat and tidy) with a red, black and beigey yellow colour scheme. Which looks great, so long as it matches your colour scheme. The rest of the cables, for Molex and SATA connectors, are your typical plastic flat black cabling fair. The second thing we noticed was that it came with proper…

$69 • www.rapoo.com This mouse is a bit of a hit and a bit of a miss. I quite enjoyed the smooth matte texture on the top of the mouse which made scrolling and swiping gestures much nicer to use than the gloss textures many other touch devices opt for. The tiny 5GHz dongle fits nicely in the USB port and barely protrudes making it hardly noticeable. There is a number of different gestures which are assignable. Inputs like forward and backward on a web page are as simple as two fingered swipe in a certain direction. The only downside is that the click seems to be a bit on the sensitive side. It’s a little too easy to click the mouse while using the touch gestures and unfortunately there’s…

$89 • www.au.ttesports.com The keyboard in this combo pack is very decent. While just a standard membrane keyboard, it’s festooned with more macro keys than the $320 Ryos on this page, three game profile mode keys, media keys lighting and effects keys to handle the full RGB lighting. While the stylised looks aren’t going to be to everyone’s taste, it is comfortable to use and the keys have a sweet and soft feel, which, funnily enough, is a nice change from all the mechanical clacking we’ve become accustomed to. The mouse is a cheapy, though, with hard plastic all over and no soft bits, and worse – it’s scratchy on the mouse pad as it slides. Just not nice at all. We can’t recommend it even at a bargain price…

Smartphones may seem like an extension of ourselves, but a true computer-human meld is a goal yet to be reached – despite work by military researchers such as DARPA. While robotic limbs are increasingly commonplace, they remain difficult to attach and expensive. DARPA is hoping third-party efforts can help create the ultimate interface between humans and machines. Just as the Kinect sensor found uses in remote surgery and controlling robots, gesture-recognition hardware could be the next big opportunity for bionics. In part, that’s thanks to developer Thalmic Labs offering an API and software development kit (SDK) for its armband, Myo. Myo reads electromyography (EMG) signals – tiny twitches in your muscles – and translates them into data to communicate movement in a game or control a drone. Researchers at Johns…

Jon is the MD of an IT consultancy that specialises in testing and deploying hardware @jonhoneyball “But I like living dangerously and you’re all bold power users, so it’s time to roll up our sleeves” In the words of Winnie-the-Pooh, “the more I looked, the more it wasn’t there”. My 50TB LTO-6 HP tape library had disappeared. I knew this because Retrospect was whinging that its backups hadn’t completed correctly. I tried restarting the Retrospect management app. Retrospect consists of a server engine and a management console, but you don’t have to be running the management console to keep the server engine running, and indeed they don’t even need to be running on the same machine. There are also client agents that you install onto all the computers you want…

THE NBN DISASTER I cannot begin to tell you what an absolute catastrophe the rollout of FTTN to my house has been. Three months in total from application to activation. Three solid weeks without ADSL and phone service, which decimated our home business where we had to survive by tethering our PCs to an iPhone and divert all calls from the exchange to the same phone. This cost us money and loss of client goodwill. Now, with it finally operating we are left with a substandard product that is completely unreliable in the speed it delivers. 70Mbps in the morning, it drops to a pitiful and infuriating 2Mbps during the evenings, every night. Worse than my ADSL, that gave me 15Mbps consistently, any time of day. Dropped packets, schizophrenic pings,…

APPLE FIGHTS THE FEDS ON IPHONE ENCRYPTION Apple issued an extraordinary public rebuke to the FBI after the agency demanded that Apple provide a special version of iOS that could circumvent encryption on the device of a terrorist. The FBI issued court documents requiring Apple to create a new system information file that would allow the feds to force their way past Apple’s encryption and not risk automatic deletion of data from failed passcode attempts. In a public letter posted on its website, CEO Tim Cook said the company would fight the court order, saying such software would compromise every iPhone user’s security. “In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks,” wrote Cook. “No reasonable person would…

UNBEATABLE MONSTER Mwave Infinite Battlebox $3,274 • http://tinyurl.com/j8co554 As the saying goes, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, and while the price hit to your wallet is a big one, if you can afford it you’ll have an almost unbeatable monster of a machine. This system is housed in a rather roomy case with a dual zone cooling design where the PSU and drives are housed behind the motherboard in their own chamber. The six-core CPU has water-cooling pre-installed and with the graphics card able to be upgraded to a water cooled version as well (for $200 extra) this would be one silent and cool machine. Being X99 this system will also be compatible with the upcoming Broadwell-E CPUs coming in a month or two. KEY SPECS CPU:…

2D TESTS Desktop PCs and laptops are tested using our own custom bench testing suite, which has been carefully designed to test all aspects of a system and rate them in a way that’s useful to you. Our benchtesting cover three main tests: a typical video editing test, a demanding 4K video editing test and a multitasking test that stresses all aspects of the system. We look at the time it takes for each test to run, which is then compared to our reference PC to produce a normalised result. This score is shown on a graph, and to help you understand just where the PC we’re reviewing sits in the grand scheme of things, we will often include other system’s scores. The median score of 100 is based on…

If you’re running a couple of PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones at home, now is the time for a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. Once the sole domain of network engineers who had the know-how to configure their confusing interfaces, these boxes of data storage are now easy enough for the average Joe to setup. And with their ability to stream music, movies and images to multiple devices simultaneously, not to mention back up that valuable data in one central repository, makes them a must-have device in today’s connected home. Synology is one of the best brands when it comes to easy-to-use home NAS devices, so let’s see what its new SOHO box can do. This is a twin-bay device, which means it’ll handle two drives, neither of which is…

$209-$279 • www.runtastic.com Here’s a fresh and welcome take on the fitness tracking watch scene. It’s a standard analogue BATTERY POWERED watch, so it will run for about A YEAR, but it has fitness tracking, albeit very basic. It simply measures steps taken and then translates that into active minutes, calories (no kJ...) and distance. That data can be used to create personal goals, and the watch has a small dial that shows you how far through that you’ve managed to go during the day. It all hooks up via an app for more granular info, though it’s not particularly sophisticated. If all you want is a basic activity tracker and blessed battery life, all in a decent looking watch then the Runtastic is a winner. I’ve been using it…

www.coolermaster.com $159 (tenkeyless S); $199 (standard with numpad) This elegant slab of keys looks great, has Cherry switches and thus is a joy to type and game on. It’s well made, the materials are high quality and I have no hesitation recommending it to anyone – with one critical caveat. This is RGB gone mad, perhaps beautifully so, depending on your inclination. I’m not talking about the multitude of various effects you can set, including ripple, wave, star and raindrop effects plus a whole lot more disco dazzle via the software, and of course as-good-as infinite colour choices. No, it’s the deliberate light spill that fills the void between keys creating a sea of glow that can outshine the actual key illumination. I personally found it too distracting in a…

AMD’s AM1 processors are designed for low-cost computers capable of simple tasks. Prices are low: the top-end Athlon 5350 costs less than $75, making it an enticing choice for those looking to build an everyday desktop PC. All the chips are incredibly frugal, rated at just 25W TDP – a fraction of the power required by the high-end AM3+ chip. AMD has abandoned its usual cooler mount, creating a new one specifically for AM1. This is largely because the tiny chips don’t need as much cooling, and the new design means it’s possible to make smaller motherboards for smaller computers. ARCHITECTURE AND PERFORMANCE Currently only four processors use the AM1 socket. All four are part of AMD’s Kabini family and use its Jaguar 28nm microarchitecture, and all have four cores…

Aliasing is the unavoidable effect that comes from using square pixels to draw diagonal lines. As screen resolutions increase, the effect becomes less prominent, but on today’s 1,920x1,080 and 2,560x1,440 monitors aliasing (jagged edges) is still a major issue. A range of different anti-aliasing techniques reduce the effect, but these vary by game and by graphics card manufacturer. We use three different methods when testing graphics cards: Fast Approximate AA (FXAA), Multi Sampling AA (MSAA) and Super Sampling AA (SSAA). FXAA is the least intensive form of anti-aliasing, as it doesn’t actually analyse the 3D models onscreen; instead, it applies a smoothing effect to the entire scene as a post-processing filter. However, this means it blurs objects and textures that should be left alone, reducing the sharpness of the image.…

if you invested in 2012, each bitcoin you bought would be worth ten times as much now – but what will it be worth if the digital currency fails? With a price above $540 it doesn’t look like Bitcoin is circling the drain, but developer Mike Hearn raised the question in an online post: “Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail.” He claims it’s fading because the currency was intended to be a decentralised answer to financial institutions, but is now controlled by “a handful of people”. Part of that comes down to the blockchain, the digital ledger system that manages transactions. According to Hearn, because of an artificial capacity cap that those in control of Bitcoin won’t change, the network is “now almost completely exhausted”.…

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the language the internet speaks – but it’s time for a new vocabulary. TCP is the communications protocol that splits your data up into tiny packets, sends them over the internet, and then reassembles them (addressing them via Internet Protocol, hence the acronyms usually appearing together as TCP/IP). While TCP has served us well through the growth of the internet and invention of the web, it was designed back in 1974 and a more modern replacement has now been developed by networking firm Akamai. In January, the company revealed Giga, a new protocol that can move data 30% faster than TCP. Here’s how Giga works and why it’s so quick. WHAT IS GIGA? Like TCP, Giga is a protocol for splitting up data and sending…

Paul owns an agency that helps businesses exploit the web, from sales to marketing and everything in between @PaulOckenden “Samsung’s SmartThings Starter Kit will allow you to get a feel of what kit like this can actually do” Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of what’s probably best described as “ingenious solutions”. That is, using technology in a completely different way from what it was originally intended to do. A great example is a note I received from reader Matt Collinge, who wanted to automatically switch his subwoofer on and offat the same time as his TV. There are several ways to achieve this: for example, OneClick’s “Intelliplug” device, which is essentially a plug-in, multi-way device with three outlets – one is always on while the other two…

Davey is an award-winning journalist and consultant specialising in privacy and security issues @happygeek If you’re serious about encryption, there’s a lot to be said for doing it in hardware, especially on portable devices such as USB sticks. A dedicated processor, physically located on the encrypted drive, offers several advantages over software-based alternatives. The onboard processor runs a random number generator to create the encryption key, meaning your password unlocks access to this key but isn’t used to generate it – a vital advantage. It also requires no driver installation and doesn’t depend on software being installed on the host computer. I’m mentioning this because of a small thing I’ve got my hands on recently: one of Kingston’s new DataTraveler 2000 range of hardwareencrypted USB sticks. The 32GB Kingston DT2000…

“Twitter is simply too stupid a platform to be useful, and the signal-to-noise ratio continues to plummet” “You’ve heard the meme that everyone is connected to everyone else in the world by, on average, no more than six people. It works because a small number of people know a lot of people, who act as hubs. Just think of Kevin Bacon, which is why the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game – in which you must connect any actor with Mr Bacon as quickly as possible – caught on so successfully. It’s more interesting to see the result of a recent analysis by Facebook, where it crunched its entire dataset of users looking for links. “Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook)…

The latest trends and products in the world of technology Virtual reality is the buzzword of the moment, with analysts predicting soaring sales and consumer units such as the Oculus Rift and Microsoft’s HoloLens set to launch this year. According to figures from Gartner Research, global sales for headsets are set to leap from 140,000 units in 2015 to 1.4 million in 2016 and 6.3 million in 2017. The trend could also hold potential for PC makers that have been driven towards making cheap, low-powered machines, rather than high-end PCs with more sustainable profit margins. The theory is that headsets such as the Oculus Rift will put too great a demand on current hardware, forcing buyers to upgrade. The Rift, for example, requires a minimum specification of an Nvidia GeForce…

Nathan Lawrence is deep in space I ’ve had my eye on this game since it blipped on my radar last year. While there is the option to play 1v1 (a 2v2 option is greyed out at the moment) against human or AI opponents, there’s also the first few levels of the campaign on offer, too. This is where I spent the majority of my time, after initially fumbling around in an ill-fated skirmish against an AI foe (set on normal difficulty, which is apparently quite tough). While generic RTS skills certainly aid in wrapping one’s head around the basics of Armada, there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface of what’s shaping up to be a deep, tactical experience. As was expected (and welcomed), the opening campaign mission…

At first glance, the TS-251+ looks a heck of a lot like the Synology DS-216+ reviewed on the opposite page. They’re both dual-bay NAS devices, both specialise in video transcoding, and both are aimed at the SOHO market. Setting up the two devices is almost identical – simply slot a drive into each of the two bays, power it up and away you go. However, the QNAP isn’t tool-less, as each drive must first be screwed into its tray – it’s no biggie, but worth mentioning. Once that’s done, power up the TS-251+ and then point your browser to start.qnap.com, and from here you’ll be prompted to download the QNAP Qfinder Pro software, which is basically identical to Synology’s Assistant. It’s basically a small app that will search your network…

If you live in anything larger than a shoebox, firstly you probably don’t live in inner-city Sydney. Secondly, you’ll probably find that a single router struggles to deliver a decent signal strength throughout your entire property. This is where Wi-Firepeaters come in handy, and the new RPAC68U is one of the first to offer a 3x4 transmitter/receiver configuration. Setting this thing up is relatively simple. Place it around the midrange point between your router and the end of the house, and hit the power button. From there you can log-in via any Wi-Fienabled device by heading to repeater.asus.com to access the setup wizard – we used a HTC M9 to do so. However, once it had identified our networks, and supposedly set them up, they disappeared from our detectable network…

$79 • www.au.msi.com Sanity prevails with this design, which is sturdy, seemingly solid and reliable, and very comfortable. MSI has checked all the important boxes and left over the top out of the equation. The laser sensor feels great, with no undue acceleration and it ranges from 800 to 6400 DPI and polling rates from 125 to 1000Hz. Omron switches are used, but that’s no longer a big deal, suffice that the clicks are clear and decisive. The buttons are large and easy to hit, the roller big and chunky with a nice rubber coating and the surface of the mouse is a grippy matte plastic, so it’s nice to look at and great to hold. I liked it better with the three removable weights taken out as they made…

$319 • www.roccat.org Roccat Ryos keyboards aren’t what we’d call minimalist. These extremely chunky boards are large, tough (no flex, quite heavy) and come with an abundance of extra controls including five macro keys plus three overall mode keys which results in a massive 94 programmable keys on the board. Mic and headphone inputs are there which feed via a cable to your PC. So they’ve very popular with MMO players. Now it gets the dreaded RGB treatment, and a bump up to a whopping $320 pricetag. But it’s big, and we think, ugly. No-one in the office thought it was attractive... keyboard design and style has moved on since this look was cool, but it certainly is a hefty brute, if that’s what you like. Part of this is…

$129 • www.thehouseofmarley.com.au These classy little numbers have been hewn from wee blocks of wood, which dangle from a rasta-style red, green and yellow woven cord. It’s saple wood, if that means anything to wood-fanciers, but it looks alright to me. Designed for iPod and Android there’s an in-line control plus microphone. We don’t usually review regular earbuds here, but it’s been a long time since I was this impressed with such a product – and it’s not because of how terrific they look – though props right now for the also fabulous packaging where things are hand-tied together by thick bits of string. No, it’s because for $129 the sound quality is through the roof. Far better than ultra premium ear buds costing more. Unadulterated, clear and powerful, these…

One issue with Intel’s Haswell processors was that they weren’t that much faster than the previous generation. Intel looked to fix that with its Devil’s Canyon line of CPUs. ARCHITECTURE AND PERFORMANCE Although the internal architecture of Devil’s Canyon CPUs is the same as Haswell processors, Intel used a new thermal interface material. This reduces the heat of the CPU, increasing how far the clock speed can be pushed. This is particularly important for the ‘K’ variety of the chips: when we tested the 4GHz Core i7-4790K, we managed to push it to 4.7GHz using the stock Intel cooler. Turbo Boost technology lets the processor overclock itself when there’s enough thermal headroom; with Devil’s Canyon, the chips can boost higher for much longer. Using Devil’s Canyon requires a motherboard with…

Virtual reality looks set to become a big deal in 2016, with the likes of the Oculus Rift making a splash. The idea is simple: you strap on a set of goggles, giving you one screen per eye, for true 3D. Even better, as you move your head, the world updates, letting you look around as naturally as you do in real life. In this way, games will become fully immersive. While the idea is simple, powering this kind of technology is a little harder: you need a graphics card that can produce double the number of frames, so each eye gets its own view. You also need a PC that can handle realtime head movements and tracking. Nvidia has released its minimum VR specs for a new PC. These…

Imagine if the brain could tell a machine what to do without having to type, speak or use other standard interfaces. That’s the aim of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has committed US$60 million to a Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) project to do just that. “Today’s best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem,” said Phillip Alvelda, the NESD program manager. “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics.” The aim is to create a tiny chip – no larger than a cubic centimetre – that can translate the brain’s electrochemical “language” into the “ones and zeros that constitute the…

FEATURES + F-SECURE KEY+ CRAZYTALK 7 STANDARD+ ABELSSOFT UNDELETER 2016+ SUPEREASY AUDIO CONVERTER 3+ ASHAMPOO HOME DESIGNER 2 DRIVERS + ATI CATALYST + NVIDIA FORCEWARE HELP + DISCLAIMER + DAMAGED OR FAULTY DVDS + USING THIS DVD + INSTALLING SOFTWARE EDITORIAL + CREATE AN ANDROID APP + BENCHMARK YOUR PC + UNDERSTANDING MALWARE TROUBLESHOOTING + SERIAL CODES + BLANK REGISTRATION WEBSITE + CAN’T FIND A FILE? + INSTALLATION ERROR WINDOWS CCLEANER + CLASSIC SHELL + CUTEPDF + DEFRAGGLER + FOXIT READER + GREENSHOT + APPLE ITUNES + LIBRE OFFICE + OPEN OFFICE + MALWAREBYTES’ A/M + SANDBOXIE + VLC MEDIA PLAYER + FLUX + 7ZIP MAC + ALFRED + BETTERTOUCHTOOLS + APPLE ITUNES + DROPBOX + FLUX + GOOGLE CHROME + MOZILLA FIREFOX + PLEX + SKYPE + TEAMVIEWER +…

is based in Orkney and is an internet solutions developer and MD of ECats Ltd If, like me, you’ve been observing the growth of microcomputer boards such as the Arduino, Pi and Galileo, I suspect you’ll have bought a couple and dabbled with them and their various development tools. The web is full of projects using these devices, ranging from the total overkill of creating a dimmable LED to much more complex projects limited mainly by one’s imagination. It’s an exciting arena: the possibilities offered by these little parcels of computing power and hardware control are immense. The overall terminology for this family of devices, defined by their ability to be easily interfaced with the real world, is the “Internet of Things”, or IoT, and most recently I’ve been drawn…

Steve is a consultant who specialises in networks, cloud, HR and upsetting the corporate apple cart @stardotpro “Very small businesses may be emotionally devastated by legal action, but the larger ones treat it as part of the rich tapestry of life” You can’t have missed the signs – poorly coded software is an abundant annoyance – but the picture has now grown big enough that I think a wider viewpoint must be sought, one that includes the factor of crap software writers. It’s a long time since I wrote any software worthy of the name, and what I used to produce wasn’t like modern PC applications. Minicomputers were luxurious places for a programmer: fast, roomy and with the best brains on the planet dedicated to the hard work of writing…