Table of contents for March 2015 in PC & Tech Authority

Evolution, as it is want to do, continues in PC & Tech Authority. The pace of change has slowed, and the dust is settling quite nicely. Thanks to reader Calum’s suggestion we are now including Mac software on our DVD. Mac’s are PCs too, at least in terms of being a desktop or laptop computer – and that’s as far into that religious argument I’m getting :) All together, now, I say, as we computing people use whatever tools we like best, without fear or favour. Incidentally, I occasionally receive letters pointing out that our DVD is a redundant thing, and that everyone just downloads what they need online. But that’s not why we have a DVD. No, the DVD is a container for the free full versions of software…

The latest trends and products in the world of technology The recent Sony Pictures hack that leaked emails about upcoming movies – and gossip about actors – could cause “severe” damage to the firm. Security experts have warned that it’s impossible to protect perfectly against such targeted attacks. The hack came to light in November when anonymous hackers contacted Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton, threatening “great damage” if Sony didn’t meet their demands. The following month, the hackers started to leak unreleased films, as well as salaries, passwords, gossip and executives’ emails. Fingers were pointed at North Korea, since the information-stealing malware had previously been used by criminals there – and the country was the subject of the Sony film, The Interview, which was pulled from cinemas amid escalating threats.…

The president of the youth wing of the Swedish Pirate Party has duped attendees of a major security conference into connecting to an unencrypted Wi-Fi network in protest of internet surveillance. Gustav Nipe set-up a Wi-Fi network labelled ‘Open Guest’ and tracked the internet searches, emails, and text messages of around 100 conference attendees including politicians, journalists, and security experts – amongst them strong proponents of internet surveillance. Nipe said he used NSA-style techniques on a smaller scale to narrow down and plausibly identify those responsible for individual searches, emails and messages. “That we can identify government officials, journalists and politicians with the help of a wireless network and their less thoughtful use of online services demonstrates the tremendous power available in controlling the Internet,” he said. “On several occasions,…

Quitbit lighter The Quitbit lighter is designed for tech-minded smokers looking to cut down or quit. This smart-lighter automatically tracks every cigarette, then syncs with an iOS or Android device to let you know how naughty you’ve been. Users can track trends on the app, and can set when Quitbit will be operational if you’re looking to cut down on peak smoking time. When Quitbit is synced with your smartphone, you can track the smartlighter’s location. Quitbit has an inbuilt display for referencing essential predetermined information, while a full recharge is rated for a week of firing up. There’s no need for refills or replacements, either, as it ignites ciggies via a heating coil. www.quitbitlighter.com Tao chair Science tells us that office jobs can adversely affect health, as evolution dictates…

According to women in the industry – and many bodies trying to address the gender gap – one of the root causes of gender imbalance is the low number of girls choosing to study computing and science subjects at school and university. Stereotyping still sees girls pushed towards subjects relevant to the nurturing and creative industries, and away from science and maths. Female students make up a minority of computer-science intakes in universities. Keeping more girls interested in computing at schools and colleges could lead to more balanced working environments – but achieving that will require overturning the idea that coding and technical tasks are intended for boys only. “It’s common in the media,” said programmer Pam-Marie Guzzo. “When we were growing up and films had computer scientists or nerds…

There’s big, really big, and Only-in-Texas big. The Thermaltake Core X9 falls into the latter category. This ridiculously large case is larger than many Sydney apartments, providing a wealth of space for all of your components and then some. Yet how has Thermaltake kept the price so low on such a large case? The answer is an unfortunate one. Before we delve into the problems with this case, let’s get a grip on just how large it is. Measuring a ridiculous 502mm x 380mm x 640mm, it’s easily one of the largest cases to ever bend the desks in the PC and Tech Authority labs. Yet it only tips the scales at a relatively light 17kg – we say relatively, as it’s still quite the behemoth. It’s definitely not the…

The Passport is the first phone to run BlackBerry OS 10.3, the highlight of which is an updated messaging hub and PC companion software, BlackBerry Blend. The hub places all notifications in one place for at-a-glance updates, and now allows you to transfer conversations from one type of communication to another – say, from SMS to email. Via BlackBerry Blend, you can now access your phone’s hub on other devices: Windows laptops, desktops and tablets are supported, as are Android tablets and iPads, but not Android smartphones or iPhones. Install the appropriate app to get your notifications, and you can tuck your phone away for the rest of the day. If you feel you’re drowning in notifications, Blend is a life-saver. Unlike other mobile OSes, BlackBerry’s doesn’t have an editable…

$459 (64GB); $399 (32GB) • www.toshiba.com.au At 560g (quite light) and 8.98mm thickness (not thick at all), the 10.1in Windows 8.1 Toshiba Encore 2 passes the front gate test for a tablet. The tricky folding magnetic stand (creates a half-pyramid shape) is very nice indeed. The bezel is large by today’s standards, and the screen annoyingly glossy if it’s used with bright ceiling lights in an office. Not so good, but still, it’s more than an average tablet and certainly one worth looking closely at. There’s a full version of Office 365 Personal (1 year subscription), and that’s almost the trump card. It’s not often you see this. Two months of Norton Internet Security comes with it too, less cool, but still more than many, and there’s no annoying bloatware…

$329 • www.kogan.com.au On spec, this remarkably cheap machine seems like great value. A large 15.6in 1366 x 768 screen with a Pentium N3540 2.16GHz quad-core CPU, 500GB 5400 rpm HDD and 4GB of 1333MHz RAM is enough to power any student through the year. It’s about the same price as the cheapest Chromebook, and about $100 cheaper than the cheapest Windows 8.1 laptop of similar spec via the major retailers. But to use it is a fairly dismal experience. The screen is the worst LCD we’ve ever seen, muddying fonts and bleeding at the edges of images. It’s blurry with lacklustre colours. The case feels shockingly cheap, rattling and sounding hollow and weak as you tap it. The track pad gives jerky imprecise movement. It’s completely vanilla with no…

$155 • www.seagate.com.au While high capacity and high speed USB stick drives are quickly becoming an option for carrying around large volumes of data, the good old spinning hard drive still has some fight left. Lately we’ve been using the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB. It’s a particularly compact (113.5mm x 76mm, 150g) unit and is certainly jeans-pocketable (front pocket included!). The case is aluminium, and that definitely adds to its ruggedness. A short USB 3 cable rounds out the package. Backup software is included on the drive, although there’s no app or function to provide secure encryption or password protection. While we also have the RAID 0 Seagate Backup Fast here in the office, and there’s no reason at all to consider that a data risk, the Backup Plus…

Crucial’s $145 drive works out at 56c per GB and, using that measure, it’s the cheapest SSD here. That low price hasn’t precluded innovation. It’s the first mainstream consumer SSD to use 16nm NAND – no surprise given the drive is manufactured by Crucial’s parent company, Micron. This is a double-edged sword, however, since the smaller process can improve performance in some areas, but hamper it in others. The MX100 is adept when reading fi les, but it falters when writing them. For instance, in AS SSD’s read test its top 519MB/sec pace was the group’s second best, but its 332MB/sec writes let it down. This pattern was repeated in ATTO, where the MX100 almost caught Samsung when reading, but fell behind when writing larger fi les. In Iometer, its…

This roundup sees PC and Tech Authority switch to our new suite of motherboard benchmarks. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we’re now using the formidable PCMark 8 suite, developed by the benchmark professionals at Futuremark. For this roundup we used the “Home” mode of the benchmark, which runs fi ve different tests that aim to replicate normal household use. These include Web browsing, Word processing, Casual gaming, Photo Editing and Video Chat. Our test components were comprised of an Intel Devil’s Canyon i7-4790K processor, cooled by CoolerMaster’s new Nepton 120XL water cooler. An NVIDIA GTX 760 provided the graphics processing power, while 2 x 4GB sticks of Kingston’s HyperX memory was run at the Z97 standard speed of DDR3 1600, despite most of these boards being able to run much…

Priced at just $139, the ASRock Z97M Pro4 is roughly half the cost of the more expensive boards in this roundup. As such, it’d be unfair to expect the wealth of features found on the premium boards, but ASRock has a reputation for delivering surprising value in its a. ordable products. Can the Z97M Pro4 live up to this tradition? Opening the box reveals a distinct lack of extras – there’s a manual, backplate and a couple of SATA cables. Compared to the overflowing boxes of goodies delivered with higher price tags, it’s a rather stark presentation. The same can’t be said of the front of the motherboard though, as ASRock appears to have put every square centimetre to use. Most obvious are the expansion slots, with a single PCIe…

It may look like a standard portable USB 3 drive, but the Buffalo MiniStation DDR HD-PGDU3 promises to combine the high speeds of an SSD with the affordability and capacity of an HDD through the addition of a dedicated 1GB DDR3 RAM cache. The drive itself is fairly understated, measuring a jacket-pocket-sized 81 x 132 x 18mm (WDH) and weighing only 199g. It draws both power and data through its single USB 3 connection, so there’s no power supply to lug around, and, while the matte-black plastics don’t lend it the high-end feel of some other drives, the casing feels robust. Ease of use is a strong point. The drive comes preformatted for Windows, but it’s easy to reformat for Mac use; once you plug in the cable, it springs…

As the mighty Upgrade Australia project continues, excitement is building for the upcoming event. Each month in PC & Tech Authority we have a new Upgrade Australia feature, covering a new aspect of system building. If you’re a university student, this issue’s guide is geared to help you choose a good value system that can be as effective in your work and study, as it is with gaming in your spare time. THE MISSION Upgrade Australia is six months of hardware advice and recommendations from our most trusted partners, in our print publications and online, and it all culminates in a very special technology event taking place later this year, where it will all come together, and where you get to interact directly with the best PC technology brands and…

There’s a lot of new in this month’s Kitlog. We’ve updated the CPUs for both builds to newer models of the same family, partly because availability of the previous CPUs was falling, but mostly to factor in the improved performance. Storage sees a switch from the Samsung 840 Evo which was used in both builds (but of different capacity) to Samsung’s new 850 PRO, which won our Labs test in this issue. We’ve also ditched the WD Black hybrid drive, swapping in a bargain basement Seagate Barracuda drive for the Perfect PC, and we’ll leave it up to you to decide what you need for expanded storage beyond the SSD in the Game Box. The Perfect PC’s mouse (previously the Razer Ouroborus) has been swapped for the CM Storm Reaper.…

ACCESS Access is one of the granddaddies of desktop databases. It’s easy to use – and easy to abuse. You can design tables, screens and reports from scratch, or start from a template. Some of the templates are overtly American and don’t always teach good practice, but they get you started quickly. Screens and programming features can be quite sophisticated, and you can deploy your finished application to your intranet rather than relying on file shares to get the application to the users. SHAREPOINT SharePoint is a database as well as a document-storage mechanism. You can use it to compile simple lists and link them together. The Form Designer isn’t terribly sophisticated, but customisation is possible. SharePoint’s ability to suck a list of data amassed in Excel into a custom…

WHAT DOES YOUR JOB INVOLVE? At the moment I work for a highereducation establishment, and we have a big customer-relationship-management (CRM) system full of details about alumni and donors. Part of my job is to delve into that data, to analyse where gifts are coming from and work out who’s most likely to make gifts in the future. I run a lot of other queries, too: I might need to find people that meet a particular criteria, for a mailing or perhaps a telethon, or I might need to create a report on something we’ve done lately. So I pull the data out and ask: what did the picture look like before? What is it now? What’s changed as a result of our actions? There’s an element of predictive modelling…

Players of minecraft are used to building their own works of art, but now they can explore André Derain’s The Pool of London and Christopher Nevinson’s futurist look at New York, Soul of the Soulless City, while immersed in the popular game. And there’s plenty more to come. We blocked out some of creator Adam Clarke’s time to ask him a few key questions. You first came up with the idea of art in Minecraft for a competition run by Tate, but you didn’t win. How did the project still happen? After I didn’t win, Tate got in touch with me and proposed a collaboration. They commissioned me to design eight Minecraft maps that explore different paintings – to create Minecraft maps so we could literally walk into those paintings…

By now, many Android users will have upgraded to Android 5, or Lollipop. If you have, you’ll have discovered that it’s a bit of a mixed bag. There’s much to like, but there are also a few annoying changes. My main bugbear is the fact that Google has ditched the standard Email app, and forced everything through Gmail. Thankfully, the Gmail app does now support Exchange Server, but there are some huge annoyances, particularly when used in a multiple-mailbox scenario. For starters, everything is red. Yes, I know red is the “official” colour of Gmail, but surely it should be possible to colour-code mailboxes so you can determine at a glance which one you’re viewing? An even bigger hole – one that has received many complaints – is that there’s…

Google recently went “on message” regarding security by announcing that it will start giving a higher ranking to sites that use encrypted HTTPS connections, rather than unencrypted, plain-vanilla HTTP ones that are open to far more abuse. Given that, while content remains king, SEO has become queen of the online commercial landscape, anything that encourages site owners to tighten security has to be a good thing. Indeed, there’s now a move towards “encryption by default” within Google, as can be seen by the way it treats its own services. Unfortunately – and especially lower down the business-size-versus-profitability graph – many people find the cost and complexity of migrating their sites to HTTPS a huge stumbling block. Unless you have sufficient cash to pay your web developer (assuming you had the…

● Our tests are performed by experienced reviewers in our Labs in accordance with strict benchtesting procedures ● Our brand new benchmarks have been tailor-made to reflect real-world computing needs ● We put tech through its paces – seriously. From processing power to battery life, from usability to screen brightness, our tests are exhaustive ● We will always offer an honest and unbiased opinion for every review THE TEAM... Digital Editor David Hollingworth E dhollingworth@nextmedia.com.au T @atomicmpc Senior Labs Editor Bennett Ring Advertising Manager Jo Ross E jross@nextmedia.com.au Account Manager Kimberly Bloom E kbloom@nextmedia.com.au Art Director Tim Frawley E tfrawley@nextmedia.com.au CONTACT US... Call us (02) 9901 6100 E-mail us inbox@pcandtechauthority.com.au Facebook www.facebook.com/pcandtechauthority Twitter @pctechauthority…

Frontier Developments has confirmed that the Mac version of its successful space exploration and combat simulation game Elite: Dangerous will be going into Beta in about 3 month’s time. This announcement was made in the Elite: Dangerous online newsletter amidst a slew of information regarding the new content, tweaks and fixes that will be coming in updates to the popular game over 2015. To date the Windows version of the game has sold over 300,000 units, exceeding Frontier’s base estimations for units sold at this stage of release. CITIES XXL Focus Home Interactive will be bringing Cities XXL to PC on the 12th of February. Cities XXL will be building on all the promising elements of its 2009 predecessor with the intention of releasing the most realistic city builder ever…

Anthony Caruana has worked for almost every major masthead in the Australian IT press. As an experienced IT professional – having worked as the lead IT executive in several businesses, he brings a unique insight to his reporting of IT for both businesses and consumers. A few years ago, we had a billing dispute with a telco we were using. Essentially, they had overbilled us for mobile data services resulting in an excess usage charge that quadrupled the usual monthly bill. We called the telco, taking note of the time we called and the name of the operator. After over 45 minutes, it was clear that the dispute was not going to be resolved. At that point, after escalating the matter to a “manager” in the call centre, we decided enough…

It’s now time to overhaul the PC & Tech Authority benchmarks. We’ve got over 20 years of benchmarking experience under our belt, so know exactly which pieces of software are best for putting each component of a PC under stress. We’ve relied on a mixture of real world software tests and synthetic benchmarks created by companies that solely exist to build relevant and reliable benchmarking software, for our testing. Over on the facing page we have detailed what we are using, and many of those can be downloaded free online, or for a reasonable sum grab the full pro versions. That way you can run your own tests on the systems or devices you use yourself, if you are so inclined, so you can see how your gear compares to…

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 onehanded on the Nexus 6. At this point, as long as you have a…

$59 • www.cougar-world.com In terms of visual design, the new 600M mouse from Cougar looks more than a little quirky. It’s deeply asymmetrical, with a comfortable extension to rest your thumb on one side, and dramatic, seemingly over-exaggerated cut into the body on the other. It looks like it would feel uncomfortable, and probably is for those with large hands, but in practice it’s surprisingly useable. It’s very responsive, too, with great click feedback, and a very stiff mousewheel. The side-buttons are well-placed, and even the ‘sniper’ button doesn’t get in the way, but is still very useable. It’s smooth on just about any surface, and the multi-coloured lighting system makes it easy to match with any other coloured peripherals. With 512kb of memory on board, it can also store…

$79 • Gaming.coolermaster.com This was released mostlyglobally about a year ago, sans Australian and New Zealand. Now you can buy this particularly good notebook cooler. We wouldn’t say it’s solely for gaming, as any laptop up to 19in can sit atop its grippy rubber chucks and benefit from the huge 180mm fan. The fan blades have an unusual shape, with a varying width across their length and a twisting contour – exactly like you see on a jet engine. A rotary speed dial is included, allowing speed to be tuned between 700 – 1200rpm. There are 4 levels of angle as the laptop support area is elevated up from the base. A metal mesh sits between the fan and your laptop. Four USB 2 ports are on one side and…

$69 • www.worx.com We got this thing in for a review after receiving a press release, unusually for us, because something like this should be a mostly unnecessary but lustfully desirable part of every PC owner’s kit. Also because it looks very neat, and it seemed to tick all the PC-fiddling boxes. Here’s what we found. It’s nicely sized and can reach deep into a fiddly PC easily. There is a LED headlight – this we found to be especially fantastic. Being cordless is nice, though a necessity, of course for this sort of thing, we imagine, being as unfamiliar as we are with power tools. It has a 6-shooter magazine, holding, obviously, six heads. They are selected by pulling back the top back bit exactly like you would with…

Samsung’s newest drive – the 850 Evo – is cheaper than the 850 Pro, but still uses 3D V-NAND fl ash chips. The 850 Evo is produced with TLC rather than MLC memory, so cells store three bits of data rather than two – a move that increases storage density and reduces cost at the expense of performance. That’s not to say the Evo is sluggish. It impressed in AS SSD, occasionally besting even the 850 Pro. Its Iometer result of 5,270 is third best, and in PCMark8 it scored 4,984 – second to the Fujifilm and equal to the 850 Pro. The Evo only faltered in ATTO. Its larger-file read speeds proved slow, and most of its write speeds were average. The $179 Evo is the best mid-range drive…

This drive bears the AMD logo, but it’s made by Toshiba-owned OCZ. It uses a Barefoot 3 M00 controller similar to the chips inside OCZ’s SSDs, and Toshiba’s 19nm MLC NAND fl ash. Its AS SSD sequential read pace is the worst here, and that poor form continues in ATTO – its read tests are among this group’s slowest. The R7 picks up in write tests, but even here it’s hampered by inconsistency. Worst of all is the price: at $189, it’s poor value for money based on the performance on offer. $189 • www.amd.com.au…

A sus’s “The Ultimate Force”, aka TUF, series of motherboards have been around for several years now, and they all share one very unique feature. As you can see from the images, a special “armour” covering is available for the board that covers most of the front of the PCB. This is an optional extra that adds around $45 to the price of the board – the price we’ve used here includes the special covering. The aim of this is to deliver better airflow over the steamier components of the motherboard, but to be honest we’re a little sceptical. An absolutely tiny fan is responsible for pushing air throw the very confined armouring, and we just can’t see how this would be more effective at cooling than leaving the covering…

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 QuickBench 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…

You’re a student and you well know that good tools mean a better job done and less stress while you’re at it. Student life also means a good mix of work and play, so in this month’s Upgrade Australia we’ll show you how you can sort yourself with a powerful PC that does double-duty as a machine that is as much fun to play on as it is to get the work done. After all, with limited breathing space in an intensive study schedule, your play time is just as important as your time spent hitting the books. BUILDING YOUR OWN RIG Intel’s newest range of core components can match your specific needs, and your budget. If you like the idea of optimal performance and future-proof computing, go with a…

The Infinity Engine has a special place in the hearts of many gamers. The venerable engine formed the core and aesthetic of some of the most revered isometric RPGs of all time, including Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment. The lush painted backgrounds and combination of voice acting and scrolling text became the benchmark for how RPGs looked and operated in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since that time things have progressed in leaps and bounds, with new and improved graphics engines allowing for more detail, full 3D environments, full voice acting and a fully controllable camera, but even to this day, where games such as Skyrim and Dragon Age: Origin dominate the RPG market, the yearning for more traditional RPG systems remains strong in a portion of…

CPU INTEL CORE I5 4690K PRICE $289 Ripping along at a stock speed of 3.5GHz, this ‘K’ model allows easy overclocking for even more performance. MOTHERBOARD ASUS ROG RANGER PRICE $219 Fully featured, extremely well engineered. Alternatively, the MSI Gaming 7 or Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H are equally as good at the same price. MEMORY KINGSTON HYPERX BEAST 16GB PRICE $240 Our roundup award winner, it’s wellpriced, fast and overclocks very well. VIDEOCARD NVIDIA GTX 970 PRICE $500 Quiet, sips power, but when the performance is needed this blazer eats up the frames. THE PERFECT PC CPU INTEL CORE I7 4790K PRICE $419 Out of the box at 4GHz and with a 4.4GHz Turbo speed, this CPU will eat anything thrown at it. MOTHERBOARD ASUS Z97 DELUXE PRICE $339 Plenty of cutting-edge…

Some people are earning millions from YouTube clips. What’s their secret, and how can you jump aboard the gravy train? Ian Betteridge shares his expertise With more than a billion visitors every month, YouTube is the third most-used website on the planet after Google search and Facebook. And it’s home to hundreds of YouTube “stars” making six-figure sums from their channels, including plenty of amateurs who started out creating videos for themselves. We don’t have space here to tell you how to turn an idea you may have into a storming success on YouTube – I’ve created a dedicated book for that, called How to be a hit on YouTube (http://tinyurl.com/nb4sjsl) – but we can explain exactly how YouTube channels make their money. RIGHTS AND WRONG In order to understand…

Smartphones are like toast: drop them and they always seem to land on the unfortunate side. But rather than smearing jam on your floor and ruining your breakfast, you’re left with a shattered display. Corning, the creator of the toughened glass that’s used to cover displays on more than three billion (and growing) devices around the world, has decided enough is enough. Gorilla Glass? Is that for monkey exhibits at zoos? Don’t be silly – gorillas aren’t monkeys. Gorilla Glass is a specially strengthened glass – technically, it’s an alkali-aluminosilicate glass – used on top of LCD or OLED panels. Corning strengthens its glass by dipping it into molten potassium salt at 400°C, which leads to an ion switcheroo: smaller sodium ions are drawn out and replaced by larger potassium…

FEATURES + ESET SMART SECURITY + ASHAMPOO SNAP 7 + OBIT DRIVER BOOSTER 2 PRO + KEYDEPOT 2015 + WEBSITE X5 HOME 11 DRIVERS + ATI CATALYST + NVIDIA FORCEWARE EDITORIAL + BURNING AN ISO IMAGE + PC&TA EDITORIALS TROUBLESHOOTING + SERIAL CODES + BLANK REGISTRATION WEBSITE + CAN’T FIND A FILE? + INSTALLATION ERROR WINDOWS APPS + 7ZIP + CCLEANER + CLASSIC SHELL + CUTEPDF + DEFRAGGLER + FOXIT READER + GREENSHOT + SANDBOXIE + VLC MEDIA PLAYER MAC APPS + ALFRED + BETTERTOUCHTOOLS + APPLE ITUNES + DROPBOX + FLUX + GOOGLE CHROME + MOZILLA FIREFOX + PLEX + SKYPE + TEAMVIEWER + VLCKEYDEPOT 2015 + WEBSITE X5 HOME 11 INTERNET APPS + VUZE + DROPBOX + GOOGLE CHROME + MOZILLA FIREFOX + MOZILLA THUNDERBIRD + SKYPE +…

What horizon of digital healthcare have you been sold? Genetic profiling and an app for every ailment? If so, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s a long way to go from the current experience of booking an appointment with your GP. Here, from my vantage point as director of the Health e-Research Centre, I’ll explore how information technology could transform the way we interact with health services. Before I look at what’s wrong, let’s not lose sight of what’s right: the English NHS is the envy of policymakers the world over, and in this article we will see that the lessons it has learned, and those which remain to be learned, apply to Australian services, too. Since the first NHS patient was registered in 1948, there’s been a commitment to…

I think I may have just made someone walk out of his job in a fit of pique. It’s difficult to tell, because once they’ve gone, there’s no well-developed business etiquette for ringing them up to ask, “I say old chap, was that me?” However, since the departure followed soon after a meeting with me on the subject of “collaboration”, there are grounds for suspecting that I was the reason. Collaboration is something of a dirty word at the moment: it’s perfectly clear that a lot of market-making dealers in the big banks have been “collaborating” all right, in ways they weren’t meant to, and using tools they shouldn’t have been using. The most incriminating evidence in the latest market-rigging scandal was, after all, a series of log files that…

“High-definition audio is a curious beast. The CD standard, known as Red Book, uses 44.1kHz sampling at a 16-bit data depth. That gives up to around 20/21kHz of audio, and about a 96dB signal-to-noise ratio. At the time when Sony and Philips released this format in 1980, it was thought to be more than enough, and it has served us well over the years. Studios needing extra headroom for mixing purposes, however, quite quickly moved on to 24 bits and a 192kHz sampling rate. In the meantime, the quality of our music libraries has decreased as we have moved into the era of the computer-based audio player. The need to save space has resulted in some quite unpleasant compression systems such as MP3. Based on a model of what the…

LETTER OF THE MONTH HONEYBALL, CONT. I feel compelled to respond to Super Mick’s letter attacking Jon Honeyball’s “fair & balanced” reviews of Microsoft. I have been a subscriber to this magazine from Day 1 and have always appreciated Jon’s columns. In fact his articles are one of the reasons I still subscribe. Like Super Mick, I am in the IT industry, also like Mick I do not work for Microsoft (MS), Apple or any OS vendor. Having said that I do believe, from a business perspective, that MS products are the better solution. If your reader had taken the time to read Jon’s reviews of MS Server products over the last few years he might have been surprised to see how favourable they were. Personally, I have tried alternatives…

HOT 4K It’s time. Time for razor-sharp fonts, pixels you can’t see anymore and screens that fit more in! We have tested enough 4k screens, now, to be sold on the standard. Sure, they’re expensive, and yes, you need a pair (or more) of the fastest graphics cards for gaming, but one look and there’s no going back. NOT BLUETOOTH SPEAKERS We don’t have anything actually against these little wireless audio bricks. No, we wish for a day when our email inbox isn’t polluted by a press release announcing yet another. Truly. Every day. Well, it feels that way. Certainly if you include the Chinese factory-mails we get offering them in lots of 10,000.…

While all manner of products come through our labs, as much as possible we run standardised tests for specific product categories. This allows you to compare products we may have reviewed in an earlier issue with something newer. However, at times we’ll deviate if we feel a certain test is more appropriate to a certain type of product or group test. GRAPHICS CARDS To put today’s GPUs under the most pressure, we use two real-world games with excellent built-in benchmark routines, in the form of Grid Autosport and Thief. These were selected as they don’t favour Nvidia or AMD, instead taxing both equally, and their scores are in frames per second, where higher is better. Finally we run the synthetic 3DMark benchmark to get a holistic view of each GPU’s…

BlackBerry has tried everything to get out of its sales slump: sticking with what it knows (the classic Q10), ditching the keyboard for a touchscreen (Z10), and even targeting emerging markets (Z3). With the BlackBerry Passport, it has returned to the physical keyboard that first made it famous – and also ditched the touchscreen rectangle common to pretty much every other smartphone, and gone square instead. That odd shape is the Passport’s main selling point – although the OS has had a welcome update too – but it’s also the reason many will find it hard to hold and use: this isn’t a smartphone for the masses, but for a specific selection of users. If you’re one of them, you may find the Passport a revelation that makes working on…

$249 • www.anyware.com.au When high capacity and high speed storage is needed, an emerging product category designed to fit that need is what we’ll call the ‘portable SSD’. In actuality it’s a ‘mini portable external mSSD drive’. Last year we reviewed the Corsair Flash Voyager GTX, and now we have a one from BlueEye, a company we’re not familiar with, but it comes into Australia via Anyware, long time disty’s of PC gear. It connects via USB 3.0, and its internal interface is M-SATA at SATA III standard. You should see speeds of up to 400MB/s, depending on the PC port you’re using, which will yield best results if it’s one of the USB 3 ports that connect directly to the motherboard. Besides data storage and transfer, its support of…

$189 • www.audio-technica.com.au These cans are a revelation. After all my bitching and moaning in the last issue about how not one set of decent gaming headphones have come my way for a year, or more, these wonders arrive, and do it all. Comfort - check! You can wear them for hours and not for a second experience anything less than warm soft ear hugging bliss. Sound quality - big yes! Music is delicate and superbly balanced and defined, with tight bass doing what it should do and never making a mess of things. Everything from gentle classical to rocking guitar noise sounds delectable. Gaming is sublime. They create a precise soundscape with any gaming genre. The tricky cable runs from a single detachable connection on the cans, has the…

Solid-state storage used to be prohibitively expensive and hampered by tight capacities, but the market has recently matured. SSDs are now viable alternatives to hard disks, thanks to lower prices, higher capacities and faster speeds. It’s a fast-moving part of the tech world, which means rapid innovation is the norm. The number of new techniques and technologies present in SSDs means there’s a lot to look out for when buying a drive – it’s certainly a trickier task than picking a hard disk. MAKING MEMORIES Flash memory chips form the bulk of an SSD, and advances in this space have the biggest influence on the performance and longevity of the drives you buy. The most recent technological development was introduced by Samsung in May, in the shape of 3D V-NAND.…

Photography firm Fujifilm’s first foray into SSDs isn’t a homegrown part. It’s a rebadged Toshiba drive that employs 19nm MLC NAND. The HQ-PC was mid-table in most of the AS SSD tests, and its good performance in individual ATTO tests was undermined by mid-table speeds elsewhere. The HQ-PC’s best performances came in the longer-term tests: its Iometer result of 5,475 IOPS was second only to the Samsung 850 Pro. Its $220 price (via Amazon) is a lot to pay, though, for such inconsistent performance. A better mid-range bet is the Samsung 850 Evo. $220 • www.fujifi lm.com.au…

It might seem hard to believe, but the microATX motherboard standard has been around for almost twenty years. Originally launched way back in 1997, these petite motherboards must officially measure just 244mm x 244mm, but they can be even smaller if the manufacturer so desires. Despite existing for almost two decades, it’s only in recent years that the microATX format has become popular amongst the general computing community. Earlier models were as costly as they were limited in features, limiting their use to very specific industrial or commercial uses. How times have changed. Today’s microATX boards now feature most of their full-sized ATX cousin’s characteristics, while prices have plummeted. WHY USE MICRO ATX? The obvious benefit to using a microATX motherboard is its tiny dimensions. With the PC now a…

If this Labs proves anything, it’s that there’s never been so much choice when it comes to high-performance storage. Whether you have $200 or $1500 to spend, whether you’re looking for a portable or a desktop solution, whether you want the raw performance of RAID0, the resilience of RAID1 or a simple, single-drive solution, there’s something for you. And while highend applications grow more demanding, particularly in the realm of 4K video, the technology is keeping up. We’ve tested drives here that can transfer data at speeds of 500MB/sec, 700MB/sec and even 1GB/sec, albeit in specific circumstances. Mechanical hard drives are still getting larger and cheaper, while even high-capacity SSDs are slowly becoming more affordable. Should 4K video hit the mainstream, the technology will be available, at the right price,…

Adesktop storage roundup this issue see the replacement of the long-standing Seagate Backup Plus, with the Labs winner from our roundup. The CalDigit T3 with Thunderbolt 2’s story is on page 64 . WHAT WE SAID: The T3 is an expensive RAID device, but when you factor in the drives and the capacity included, it’s good value. The 12TB of storage should be enough for the most demanding professional applications, and we found the T3 easier to use and work with than the other units here, particularly under Windows. Given this, a generous fi ve-year RTB warranty, storming performance and excellent design, we’re happy to crown the T3 with Thunderbolt 2 as our new Labs winner. It’s a little unusual in that – currently, at least – it’s only available…

If you need to make a list of anything, it’s tempting to see Excel as the default repository: after all, it’s only a small list of items for yourself or a few of your closest colleagues. Perhaps you need something more sophisticated – formulae for some calculations, or macro programming to automate the collection and processing of data. No problem: just type “=” to start writing a formula and from there Excel will be your guide. Unfortunately, the ease with which you can start work in Excel or a rival spreadsheet program is also one of its problems. What starts as a small project in Excel grows and grows, until you’re left with a behemoth – at which point you could also be facing speed and stability issues, or even…

1USE PLAYLISTS This is a great way to keep someone watching beyond the end of a single video, but make sure you put some thought into your playlists – it’s not enough to simply shovel lots of very different content into a playlist and hope people will keep watching: they won’t. Instead, imagine you’re curating a set of videos. When you put one video in the playlist, imagine yourself in the place of the viewer and ask what they would be interested in next. 2KEEP VIEWERS IN SUSPENSE This isn’t only about creating compelling content: you need to borrow a few tricks from TV too. Think about the last time you watched TV with ads. Did anyone say something such as “find out what happens after the break” or “later…

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 occuring with people. On the other hand, robots may improve…

I t was a plaintive message on Facebook: “My computer has gone very slow, is there anything you can do about it?” I couldn’t refuse to help a friend, so I agreed to take her laptop in for investigation. It was clear from the start that something was slowing down her machine harder than a bottle of sleeping tablets. Everything took a long time, it was turgid and lethargic in operation and even logging on took an age. Clearly something was amiss. A quick check of the system with a few downloadable antivirus tools showed nothing of significance, so this wasn’t a pure malware issue, nor were there any of those nasty ransomware screens popping up asking for $100-plus to fix it. After a quick dig around Chrome (actually it…