Table of contents for July 2017 in PC Pro

THE LAST TIME I checked my calendar, it was 2017. Before we know it, we’ll have reached the end of the second decade of the 21st century, a century that will be defined by technology. Our industry will have generated countless jobs, contributed zillions to the UK economy, and created the backbone for business. Yet, what role will technology have in the election of our next parliament? Zero. As an industry we’re bystanders, and that’s ridiculous. We still live in a world where our political leaders can declare themselves ignorant when it comes to technology , with a self-deprecating laugh , and get away with it . They don ’ t say , “ Oh , the economy . I don ’ t really get it , but my grandson…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology You might not have noticed it, but we’ve just passed a pretty big tech milestone. In March, according to web analytics firm StatCounter, Android became the world’s most widely used internet platform, overtaking Windows for the first time. To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean that more people are using Android than Windows. All it tells us is that more websites were accessed from Android devices than Windows. It could even be an anomaly: perhaps a single person spent the month sitting on his smartphone, hitting Refresh thousands of times a second. Look back through the historical figures, though, and it’s clear which way the wind’s blowing. Android’s share of internet traffic for the same period in…

Taking on a new computing platform was furthest from my mind, but it just happened anyway. I’m still basically wedded to Windows (albeit 8.1) which I’ve wrestled to a stalemate that works well enough, only needing a reboot around once a quarter. For mobile, I’m equally wedded to Android, via my 7in Asus tablet and HTC smartphone, with Google providing the interface between the three devices via Gmail, Contacts, Calendar and the beloved Keep, plus a little help from Dropbox. But now there are four... PC Pro’s publisher, Dennis Publishing, is on the last lap of preparing to move office, after over 20 years, from one 1930s block in London’s Fitzrovia to a smaller one nearby. The new offices are extensively refurbished, very much in Silicon Valley style, with lots…

Microsoft’s IFTTT rival may be the new kid on the block, but it has much to offer As the name suggests, Microsoft Flow aims to smooth the automation of tasks, streamline communication between apps and, most importantly, make power users’ lives easier – without the need for time-consuming scripting. Released to take on established services such as IFTTT and Zapier, Microsoft Flow is designed to be implemented in businesses of all sizes. It can, therefore, automate jobs involving a wide range of services (110 to be precise), including big names such as SharePoint, Office 365, OneDrive, Dropbox, Gmail, Google Drive, MailChimp, Slack, Todoist, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, as well as comparatively obscure choices such as Toodledo, Typeform, SendGrid and Redmine. As with IFTTT, you can create your own applets,…

AdwCleaner malwarebytes.com AdwCleaner was a popular tool long before it was swallowed up by Malwarebytes, and for good reason: similar to the Junkware Removal Tool, it’s a speedy way to check if adware has hooked its claws into your system. Its particular specialism is the sort of junk that’s installed when you download a piece of freeware: think browser toolbars and unwanted extra programs. It’s easy to use but, as with RogueKiller, you may be left wondering what to do with the information it provides – bleepingcomputer.com is your friend here. Avast Free Antivirus avast.com It may be free but, in AV-Test.org’s most recent round of tests, Avast achieved a perfect 100% protection rating against never-before-seen “zero-day” attacks, and a 99.8% rating against widespread threats. That puts it several points…

Reader’s pick Freemake Video Converter freemake.com “The whole line of software from Freemake is brilliant,” Jake Harris told us, “but for me, the most useful of their applications is Freemake Video Converter. I’ve been using it for around five years now and it has become my go-to way of managing all the different video file types on my PC. “Freemake’s software can deal with almost any file format, as well as download and convert videos from places such as YouTube. There are very basic video-editing capabilities, such as being able to cut, join and rotate videos. The software is consistently updated to support new devices, meaning you can select the device you intend to play your video on and it will automatically know which format works best. “For me, Freemake…

Reviews The biggest, best, most exciting products in tech - tested, evaluated and reviewed PRICE £108 (£129 inc VAT) from store.google.com There’s one reason for the Google Home’s existence: to help you out in the home. (Well, three reasons if you count Google reaching its tendrils into every corner of our lives and then making lots of money in the process.) It’s designed to be the hub of your family’s life, so you can stay on top of what’s going on while also answering those burning IMDB queries about that bit-part actor in Total Recall. It won’t mop your floors or clean your car, but it will let you know if your eldest has football practice after school tomorrow. The cylinder in the room is the Amazon Echo. It’s a…

PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from yoyotech.co.uk Yoyotech’s newest Ryzen PC comes in a striking white Game Max Vega chassis. It’s a large case, but stylish, with smoked glass sides that show off the glowing AMD Wraith cooler. The effect is rather undermined by the large amount of empty space around it: this isn’t an underspecified PC by any means, but the windowed sides make it obvious that the internals would fit happily into a case half the size. Still, the Vega housing definitely has its plus points. There’s space inside to add a whole stack of extra drives, and even a water-cooling system should you wish to install one. That’s not as fanciful as it might sound: we’ve seen with previous systems that high-end cooling helps Ryzen CPUs achieve…

PRICE 32GB, £283 (£339 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The new iPad surprised us when it was announced in March. We were all expecting the iPad Air 3; instead came a weird hybrid of the original iPad Air and the iPad Air 2. That sounds like it should be bad news, and in some ways it is. This new iPad is both fatter and heavier than the iPad Air 2 (which it replaces) and the screen isn’t quite as nice. On paper, the new iPad has a less capable processor as well. The huge caveat is that the new iPad is considerably cheaper than the iPad Air 2. At £339, it knocks a full £60 off the price, and you also get double the storage at 32GB. If you need more,…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,208 (£1,449 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 is the answer to a question that, I’d argue, not many people are asking – but that doesn’t make it a bad laptop. In fact, it has many great qualities, from the excellent design to the build quality that has made the XPS series so popular among discerning Windows laptop buyers. Yes, it’s that most interesting of beasts, the 2-in-1 convertible, with all the benefits and difficulties that entails. The good news comes with the design, which matches the most recent Dell XPS 13 for looks and arguably steps beyond it regarding build quality. The exterior is clad in stiff, sturdy-feeling silver aluminium, and it’s finished with soft-touch carbon-fibre-effect plastic inside. Even more impressively, this model…

Buying printers is a baffling business. On the one hand, printers have never offered so much for so little. Pop to all-in-one for less than £30. Even highperformance colour lasers are available at prices a small business can afford. Yet in no other tech product category are the hidden costs so monumental or so aggravating.your local supermarket and you can pick up an all-singing, all-dancing, wireless Buy in haste and you’ll repent at leisure, as that bargain printer costs you an arm and a leg year after year. To make things worse, it’s a confusing market. The old lines between inkjets and lasers have eroded to the point where form factor and features matter more than the underlying technology. Even manufacturers are struggling to explain how their different laser and inkjet…

PRICE £149 (£179 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk With its WorkForce Pro range, Epson was arguably the first major printer manufacturer to pitch inkjets directly into laser territory, and the WF-6590DWF shows no signs of a retreat. With claimed speeds of 34ppm mono and 30ppm colour, it’s competing directly on speed, and while Epson doesn’t specify a recommended monthly duty cycle, the stated 35,000 page maximum monthly cycle shows a level of confidence in the engine and paper-feed mechanism. This looks and feels like a robust office MFP, with a 250-sheet main paper tray at the bottom and an 80-sheet multipurpose tray for heavier or glossy media at the rear. The output tray at the front extends to hold 250 sheets at a time. The downside is that this printer is…

PRICE £204 (£245 inc VAT) from printernet.co.uk Stripped-back and kept deliberately simple, the Brother HL-L8260CDW is a compact, business-ready colour laser with wireless capabilities built in. It’s a chunky cube and, after the full-colour touchscreens used elsewhere, its two-line LCD screen and button controls leave it feeling a little old-school. Luckily, it’s easy to set up, with Brother’s software finding the printer and configuring Wi-Fi connectivity automatically, then going on to install the necessary drivers. The menus on the device are clear, while the driver does a good job of surfacing all the features and options. The 250-sheet input tray and 50-sheet multipurpose tray should help you avoid the need for regular reloading – there’s even a gauge on the front of the main tray to show how close you…

PRICE £203 (£244 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk If you’ve no compelling need for colour, HP’s LaserJet Pro MFP M227fdw is a mono laser with plenty going for it. With a desktop footprint of just 403 x 407mm it’s a surprisingly compact design, with the 250-sheet main paper tray integrated in the body and the 150-sheet output tray stashed neatly beneath the flatbed scanner and ADF assembly. It’s noticeably lighter and less bulky than most other lasers, and there are some nice touches, such as the window into the paper tray that shows you how much paper you have left. We struggled to get the printer connected to our 802.11n wireless network using WPS, but selecting the network and entering the password isn’t a struggle: the 6.8cm capacitive touchscreen might be…

PRICE 25 seats, 1 yr subscription, £1,214 exc VAT from pandasecurity.com “AD360 had no problem with our malware – the clients blocked, deleted or disinfected it with no enduser interaction required” Panda’s Adaptive Defense 360 (AD360) cloud security takes endpoint protection to the next level. Instead of reactively relying on signatures to identify malicious software, it analyses every application running on a client and flags up the ones it doesn’t know about. That’s not necessarily to say it stops them from running. Rather, Panda’s cloud service checks the app’s security posture in the background; if it’s deemed to be safe, the endpoint client allows it through. To ensure you don’t run into any avoidable teething problems on first deployment, you can start by running AD360 in audit mode, to gather…

PRICE £396 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Kyocera’s Ecosys M2640idw is great for SMBs that want more from a mono MFP. As well as the expected functions, it supports Kyocera’s HyPAS – “hybrid platform for advanced solutions” – which adds a host of onboard apps to the regular print, copy, scan and fax capabilities. It’s an impressive technology that’s usually reserved for Kyocera’s TASKalfa enterprise printers. You can’t use it out of the box, mind. To enable HyPAS, you’ll need to install an SD card of at least 4GB into the slot behind the printer’s Gigabit Ethernet port. The base 512MB of memory needs upgrading too, with a 1GB module costing around £170. With this done, you can dip into a wide range of apps; Kyocera offers a decent library of…

Don’t think that a password is enough, it isn’t. It’s far better to add a secondary layer of authentication. While biometric identifiers would be a great choice in an ideal world, I know of very few organisations that inhabit this mythical place. Once you move on from anything but a handful of employees to equip, enrol and administer, it just becomes way more trouble (expensive trouble at that) than it’s worth. Think of tokenisation as the way forward, offering similar security benefits for most businesses but with far less faffing around and at a far cheaper cost. That is, I would suggest, if you avoid hardware tokens. In my experience these are just as problematical in the cost and deployment department as a biometric factor. The use of "soft" tokens,…

Every day nearly 180,000 people move to cities, resulting in more than 60 million new urban dwellers each year. London’s population is expected to reach over ten million by 2025. Such rapid growth puts pressure on a city’s infrastructure (transport, energy, water, housing), and scarce infrastructure aggravates civil issues such as law and order and the delivery of basic services. For instance, studies suggest a typical driver spends 106 days of his/her life looking for parking spaces, while every year over 467,000 people die prematurely in Europe because of air pollution. In response to pressure from organisations and citizens, “smartening up” cities has become a priority for policy makers. The “smart city” label has been applied to a range of technology developments powered by city data and digital technologies. It’s…

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future What is fog computing? Forget the cloud: if you want true security, you need fog p127 Sooner or Later Good news for Tesla’s solar panels; bad news for self-driving cars p127 Geek Day Out Relive the 20th century with a visit to IBM’s museum p128 Data is important in healthcare. How a chart is read, if a doctor has time to take a second look at that scan of your chest, and whether there’s enough evidence to make you book an appointment with your GP could mean the difference between life and death for you — and of lower-cost preventative measures and expensive treatments for the NHS and insurance companies. Currently, we rely on doctors and nurses…

Twenty years ago, IBM staffer Len Peach started a collection of historical equipment for an open day — since then, the pile of ancient tech has grown at Hursley House in IBM’s offices in Hampshire, offering an in-person view of the evolution of computing from the beginning of the 20th century to now. “Hopefully, people can see that the technology has moved on at a blistering pace over the past 100 years, from manual punch machines all the way through to the phone in your pocket that enables you to connect to any computer, anywhere in the world,” said Mark Perry, volunteer curator. The evidence of that evolution is on show with IBM hardware from the early part of the 20th century, all the way to the present day, Perry…

Stuart Andrews Stuart has been testing printers for over 20 years , so who bett er to put the best high-end inkjets and lasers through their paces • See p78 for his verdict Sasha Muller If Stuart has spent much of his working life in front of printers , so Sasha has with monitors . He explains why a 34in NEC curved monitor is worth the cash on p70 Ian Betteridge Can the new 2-in-1 Dell XPS 13 convert Macolyte Ian Betteridge • Discover the reasons why he isn ’ t reaching for his wallet quite yet on p72 Dick Pountain The loan of a Google Chromebook tempts Dick to the Other Side for the first time , but there ’ s still one problem to be fixed . See…

IN AN INTERVIEW with Apple blog Daring Fireball, executives admitted the company had made mistakes with its previous configuration, which meant it couldn’t refresh the machines to meet the changing requirements of pro customers. The slim, quiet design meant it couldn’t be upgraded to more powerful processors without causing the cylindrical system to overheat. “I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner,” said Apple’s senior vice president, Craig Federighi. “We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that… we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two-GPU architecture. “That was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialise to fit that as broadly as we hoped. Being able to put larger single…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 (New) 13in ultraportable from £1,149 dell.co.uk Dell only needed to refine its brilliant XPS 13 design to keep top spot , and that t ’ s what it does : it ’ s slightly quicker and adds more options , but it ’ s the edgee -to-edge 13.3in display and compactct chassis that lift it above the opposition . Oh , and it ’ s now available in Rose Gold.REVIEW Issue 270, p54 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga A dream laptop that turns into a 14in tablet with the swivel of a keyboard – yet it still weighs under 1.3kg. Simply beautiful design from Lenovo. From £1,699; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 263, p56 Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2016) The high price stops it from taking Dell’s top…

Anyone remember the halcyon days of terrorism? “It used to be that people used to steam open envelopes or just listen into phones when they wanted to find out what people were doing,” claimed the Home Secretary recently. Now, your modern-day terrorist has a “secret place” to plot attacks, on WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging services. Your average counter-terrorism Bobby doesn’t stand a chance. Except it’s not true. Not even close. Firstly, let’s deal with the notion that “the threat of terrorism is greater than it ever has been”. That’s statistically, emphatically false. There have been fewer than a hundred terrorism-related deaths in the UK since the turn of the century, including the recent attacks. This compares to 1,094 deaths in the 15-year period before that, and 2,211 between 1970…

IFTTT page 31 MICROSOFT FLOW page 37 ZAPIER page 40 We’re all plugged into dozens of different web services and devices – but all of them work in their own little silos. You might have an Android smartphone, Philips Hue lights, an Apple iPad, accounts with Dropbox, Gmail and Wunderlist, but making this diverse set of digital accoutrements work with one another is tough. Services such as If This Then That (IFTTT) are the glue that bind these services together. Using a simple web interface or app, you’ll find it’s possible to get your iPhone talking to your smart plug, your Spotify playlists backed up in a Google spreadsheet, your eBay listings automatically tweeted to potential buyers. Better still, it can make smart home devices even smarter. Alexa can be…

Simplicity is the name of the game with Zapier. Released in 2012, the automation service has become the go-to alternative to IFTTT, being rightly lauded for its clarity, ease of use and huge selection of apps. While Microsoft Flow can often feel unwieldy, Zapier – according to its website – wants to “empower businesses everywhere to create processes and systems that let computers do what they are best at doing and let humans do what they are best at doing”. It’s an admirable ambition that’s reflected in the speed with which its applet templates – satisfyingly called “Zaps” – can be modified: providing you’re signed up with the necessary web apps, the process can take under a minute. It’s really that simple. As with both IFTTT and Flow, you can…

Google Chrome google.com/chrome Browser choices are as personal as fashion, but there are many reasons why Chrome remains our – and indeed, the world’s – default browser. Cross-platform sync is perhaps its chief attraction, with seamless password sharing between both Android and Windows browsers, and the ability to pick up tabs left open on other devices. Didn’t get a chance to finish reading that important report in the office? With Chrome, you can easily read it on the train on the way home using your smartphone. Chrome’s omnipotence hands it arguably the best library of extensions of any browser (Edge, for the record, has a mere 21). Pushbullet, Wikiwand and Social Fixer are among those we’d urge you to install. While Chrome certainly isn’t the sleek gazelle it lauded itself…

The world is on the verge of a mental health crisis. According to the World Health Organisation, the number of people diagnosed with a neurological condition is accelerating. There were around 416 million people reported to be suffering from depression or anxiety in 1990 – by 2013, that number had grown to 615 million. With so many people being diagnosed with mental health conditions, there’s an increasing strain on health institutions to take action. Treatment is expensive, and as we’ve seen here in the UK, funding for mental health is often given lower priority than conditions such as cancer and heart disease. Even if care is available, many people are afraid to seek help because of the stereotypes associated with mental health. The Counselling Directory claims that only 230 of…

PRICE £133 (£159 inc VAT) from invoxia.com/en-gb Invoxia’s Triby Family wants to become a fixture in your kitchen, with two fiercely strong magnets on its rear to clamp the device securely to your fridge. And that’s far from the only quirky thing about this Alexaenabled device. The Triby is designed to be at the fulcrum of family life, not only playing music and answering inane voice queries, but also acting as a messaging hub. To the left of the monochrome 2.9in E Ink screen sit two telephone-shaped buttons. These are effectively speed dial buttons for different members of the household, using Invoxia’s own VoIP service to place calls to the person’s smartphone via the Triby app. The VoIP service was largely fine if the call recipient was connected to Wi-Fi,…

PRICE £850 (£1,020 inc VAT) from nec-display-solutions.com “The curvature of the screen reduces how much refocusing your eyes need to do, helping to keep eye strain at bay” Business monitors rarely set the pulse racing – or at least they didn’t until the NEC MultiSync EX341R landed in PC Pro’s labs. Granted, display geeks will moan that it lacks the 4K resolution or HDR technology that’s often packed into £1,000 living room TVs, but the NEC’s curved 34in display is designed for an entirely different purpose – to both rival and replace existing multimonitor setups, and provide pixelperfect image quality in the process. If you’re one of those people who scoff at the idea of a curved TV, then it’s fair to say that curved monitors make a lot more…

PRICE £574 (£689 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk The battle to be the world’s best Android phone has never been so fierce. For a few years Samsung appeared to be king with barely any effort: a minor update was all it took. Now, it must wage war with brilliant handsets such as the Google Pixel and rescue a reputation tarnished by the burnt-out corpse of the Galaxy Note 7. Add a SIM-free price of £689 and the S8 must not only be good – it must be brilliant. Its design certainly lives up to this description. By removing the physical home button, adding height and making curved edges ubiquitous, Samsung has created a thing of beauty. And, just as important, it’s extremely comfortable in the hand. I use a Galaxy S7…

PRICE £115 (£138 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk The HP Envy 7640 delivers the kind of print, scan and copy functions we’re used to seeing from HP’s consumer line of printers, but with the addition of duplex printing and an ADF. While the latter looks a little odd when combined with the sleek curved lines and glossy surfaces of the printer, it makes the Envy a more versatile machine, and it still looks more fashion-conscious than your average OfficeJet. This isn’t a business printer, even if it does have fax and copy capabilities. The recommended monthly workload is between 300 to 1,000 pages, while the use of one mono print cartridge and one combined colour cartridge, each with a modest 600- or 415-page capacity, indicate that print costs will be high.…

PRICE £188 (£226 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk Like the HP LaserJet Pro MFP M227fdw, the i-Sensys MF249DW is a compact, mono laser all-in-one aimed squarely at small businesses. Even though it comes in cheaper than the HP, it poses pretty much the same question: when you can buy an excellent colour office printer for less than £250, why opt for one that can only print in black-and-white? As with the HP, convenience and size are part of the answer. At 390 x 378mm, the Canon has a small desktop footprint. The 250-sheet cassette sits neatly inside the printer, and while a support for the 100-sheet output tray slides outwards during operation, both it and the control panel can fold inside when not in use. But the Canon’s real advantage is…

PRICE £183 (£220 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com If nothing else, Canon’s premium home printer wins plaudits for its ingenious design. When not in use, it’s a low-profile square unit with a 372 x 324mm desktop footprint measuring only 140mm tall; when it’s ready to print the output tray extends outwards above the 120-sheet input cassette, and if you’re planning to print photos then you’ll need to pull out the 20-sheet tray at the back. Fail to remember and the printer will send a grumpy message before it even considers printing out a page. It’s easy to use, partly thanks to its large 12.6cm capacitive touchscreen, which is far more responsive than the resistive efforts found on many other models. Canon’s configuration utility makes easy work of finding and setting up…

PRICE £272 (£326 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk The Oki’s big selling point is its advanced smart features, beginning with a huge 17.5cm colour touchscreen and going on to cover a range of management and security features – including its Private Print pull-print option - and firmware you can extend with a range of first and third-party apps. Certain features will mean more to larger enterprises than small businesses, but with document management and printer administration tools thrown in, they might be tempting to firms looking to install a small fleet. Such companies might have full-time IT staff, in which case configuring the C542dn won’t be an issue. If not, the manual configuration process needed to get the printer connected to the Ethernet network could be a barrier, as could simply…

PRICE 25 users, 1yr subscription, £616 exc VAT from kaspersky.co.uk Kaspersky’s Endpoint Security for Business (ESB) runs on an on-premises host – so it’s ideal for businesses that want their security solution right where they can see it. We tested the entry-point ESB Select package, which offers anti-malware services for Windows servers and workstations, macOS and Linux, along with web, device and application controls – and there’s mobile security as well. Installation starts with the ESB Security Center, which is the central point of contact for all functions. We had this up and running inside 40 minutes; while the main console hasn’t changed much over the years, it’s easy to get to grips with, and very informative. Next, the Network Agent and Endpoint Security components must be installed on each…

PRICE Appliance with 1yr Security Suite, £942 exc VAT from watchguardonline. co.uk If you need an on-site network security solution that does it all, WatchGuard’s Firebox T30-W is a great choice. This tomato-red desktop box delivers every gateway security service you could possibly need – and the icing on the cake is its integral wireless 802.11ac dual-band AP and wireless gateway controller for WatchGuard’s own APs. Prices start at a reasonable £942 for the appliance and a one-year Security Suite subscription. Your licence activates the Firebox’s antivirus, anti-spam, web content filtering, IPS, HTTPS inspection, application controls and WatchGuard Reputation Enabled Defence. If that’s not enough, you can step up to the premium Total Security Suite licence, for a total cost of £1,323: this adds WatchGuard’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and…

PRICE Diskless, £3,922 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com "DiskStation Manager 6.1 brings in a heap of features, including self-healing snapshots and options to encrypt existing shares" Synology has a fine reputation for its consumer and SME NAS appliances, but its latest rack models show a sharper focus on mid-sized businesses. The 12-bay RS18017xs+ aims to deliver unbeatable performance, as it’s one of Synology’s first appliances to support 12Gbits/sec SAS3 LFF and SFF drives. Processing power gets a boost too: the Xeon E3 v2 CPU found in the old RS18016xs+ is replaced by a faster six-core 2.2GHz Xeon D-1531. Base systems start with 16GB of ECC DDR4 RAM, expandable to 128GB. The drive backplane is connected via three cables to a Synology SAS12G PCI-Express card sporting an Avago SAS 3216 SAS3 controller…

Real world computing EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS The launch of a new file system is a rare event. There are good reasons for this: moving over an entire community of users from one file system format to another is a big deal. No, scratch that – it’s a huge deal. And it’s the sort of hugeness that means you can do this only once a decade. Even that would be considered almost rashly hasty. If you think about it, the PC/ Windows world has seen remarkably few file systems over the history of the PC. We started with MS-DOS, and then subdirectories were added – oh, the naughty radicalism of that move! MS-DOS evolved from FAT to FAT32, and then stopped. NTFS came with Windows NT in…

Way back at the start of the 1990s, Phil Zimmerman wrote an essay displaying remarkable perception of what was to come as the internet matured. “Email messages are just too easy to intercept and scan for interesting keywords,” Zimmerman wrote. “This can be done easily, routinely, automatically and undetectably on a grand scale.” Remember that this was almost 20 years before Edward Snowden blew his snooping whistle loudly – and with such reverberations within the world of cryptology. Zimmerman then stated: “The government will protect our email with government-designed encryption protocols. Probably most people will acquiesce to that. But perhaps some people will prefer their own protective measures.” Phil Zimmerman was, in case you need reminding, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). His journey towards fame – or infamy,…

Ada Ada is a smartphone app that “talks to you like a really good doctor would,” taking into account your history and symptoms. It’s now being ported to Amazon’s Echo, so you can ask such questions to the Alexa voice assistant, too. Rather than act like a symptom checker online, each aspect of a question is actually computed for results, offering advice and next steps – including whether you should go and see your human doctor. Naturally, there are disclaimers: Ada is not a medical diagnosis, so see a doctor if you’re worried. DeepMind and Moorfields DeepMind’s kidney app was its first project; the second is a partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital, which aims to help optometrists detect common eye disorders by letting deep-learning systems look at scans. It takes…

LABS UpgradeyourWi-Fi Want a better wireless signal? We put the best new routers to the test, and compare them to what ISPs are offering FREE GIFT On sale 15 June 2017 Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and we’ll send you a FREE 26-piece screwdriver set as a thank you. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Kindle Fire. See p108 for details. FEATURES Isantivirusbad forsecurity? Why developers argue that buggy antivirus software is a bigger danger than the attacks it’s meant to prevent Windows10Cloud MicrosofthasGoogle’sChrome OSinitssightswiththisnew editionofWindows,butwillit temptyouawayfromafull-fat operatingsystem? Office365: Jon'sexperttips Forget Word, Excel and co: Jon Honeyball reveals how to get more from Microsoft’s subscription package InstallLinux… onWindows A practical guide to adding Linux to your Windows desktop – without fiddling…

Background and analysis on all the important news stories Infographic: Media consumption The way we listen to music and read books is ever-shifting p12 Who wants to kill IoT devices? The “things” are being hunted down and killed, but why? p13 PC Probe: Windows 10 What data is Microsoft collecting and what can you do about it? p14 INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS are to face £185m in additional, automatic compensation payouts if they don’t improve repair and installation times. The threat comes from telecoms regulator Ofcom after a flurry of high-profile billing, data breach and infrastructure irregularities involving broadband and network providers. Under the new compensation proposals, first aired more than a decade ago, ISPs would be obliged to make automatic compensation payments for customers left without broadband or fixed line…

Talking about security isn’t easy. It’s a complicated subject, understood fully by few, that’s worth a lot of money and affects everyone. Not a week goes by without a major hack, dangeroussounding flaw, or security headlines that need deciphering by millions of people who lack technical skills. In the past few weeks, normal people — those who don’t read PC Pro for fun — have had to grapple with the benefits and limitations of VPNs (to protect against ISP and government snooping), ponder the implications of a zero-day vulnerability uncovered in Word, and decide whether to change passwords after a leak at Wonga. The advice given by the mainstream media varies in quality and content. Consider the recent uproar in the US after ISPs were given the legal ability to…

I read with interest Tim Danton’s editorial in issue 272 (see p7) about how the internet was nagging you, and you wished for it to stop. I’d argue that the problem doesn’t end there, but only begins: the internet is becoming extremely difficult to use, especially when it comes to providing quality information to others. I gave up blogging some time ago, because there’s no way to compete with the constant barrage of clickbait sites. More recently, I gave up on Twitter and Facebook as I felt they were slowly rotting my soul. It was increasingly impossible to reach people through those sites with articles, videos and support, because of changes the companies made to their ad revenue models. Additionally, the hijacking of social media by major advertisers, the increasing…

IFTTT is powered by applets (previously called recipes), which are essentially user-defined scripts for particular services. Each applet needs a trigger (the “if” this happens) and an outcome (“then do that”). Applets can deal with a single service (for example, if I leave the office, unmute my Android phone), or bring together multiple services/devices (if I add a song to a Spotify playlist, tweet a link to the track). The IFTTT.com website contains many pre-prepared applets for the dozens of different services and devices that IFTTT is compatible with. If you can’t find an applet to do what you want, you can create your own by clicking on My Applets | New Applets and follow the on-screen prompts. However, in our experience, IFTTT applets can be flaky. Some work flawlessly,…

Can you imagine how much a large software company would charge you for a code development system that supported programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic, F#, C++, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript and Python, and allowed you to deploy your code onto Windows, Android, iOS or web servers? Such a tool sounds really expensive, doesn’t it? Well, as you’ve probably guessed it’s free, and the software I’m talking about is Visual Studio Community from Microsoft (visualstudio.com/vs/community). It’s a great mature platform, and for many programmers it provides everything they need without stumping up for the paid-for version of Visual Studio. Sharing a similar name, look and feel – but not much else – is Visual Studio Code (code.visualstudio.com), also from Microsoft. It’s a lean tool compared to the other Visual Studio…

WARNING Take extra care when cleaning components: electricity and wetness rarely combine well. All cleaning is done at your own risk! You wash your hands after using the toilet, but how often do you wash them after typing? Researchers for CBT Nuggets, who swabbed a range of items in a typical office, found that the typical keyboard is around 20,000 times dirtier than a toilet seat. On the keyboards they tested, scientists found over 3.5 million colony-forming units of bacteria, yeast or mould per square inch, compared to just 172 on a toilet seat. It’s a similar situation when you compare computer mice to toilet handles (1.37 million colony-forming units per square inch versus just 30). If that sounds surprising, remember that we regularly clean our bathrooms. When did you…

PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from zoostorm.com The StormForce Ventus comes in a white, glass-sided chassis that’s similar to the Yoyotech Redback N5 (see opposite). Power it on, however, and it immediately expresses its own personality: a bank of multicoloured internal LEDs springs to life, cycling rapidly through seven colours and evoking the spirit of a 1970s discotheque. Happily, you don’t have to live with this all the time. Tap the LED control button at the top of the case and the lights step through a series of programmes, including more restful pulsing transitions and static single-colour options. It’s showy, but it does add some visual interest to what would otherwise be a rather uninteresting view – there’s no glowing signature heatsink to ogle here, just a regular set of…

PRICE £500 (£600 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com The Windows-powered Galaxy Book stole plenty of headlines at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but Samsung also unveiled the Galaxy Tab S3. It received rather less fanfare, and little wonder: at a glance, it doesn’t look any different to Samsung’s previous premium tablet, the Galaxy Tab S2. But that’s fine. It means the gorgeous 9.7in AMOLED display is still in place, and the tablet remains ridiculously thin and light. The big difference is that this time Samsung includes its enhanced S Pen in the box. However, we need to talk about the price. With the new iPad (opposite) starting at £339, the S3 looks crazily expensive. Samsung will argue that its closer competition is the 9.7in iPad Pro, which costs from £549 and…

PRICE £166 (£199 inc VAT) from logitech.com “If you’re trying to convey something complex to a colleague then being able to relay such detail might save you a journey” When Logitech first announced the Brio, its first 4K webcam, I suspect the same thought flashed through my mind as is flashing through yours right now: who in the world needs such high resolution videos? But then I made my first Skype call using it. My guinea pig caller, this magazine’s own Darien Graham-Smith, casually remarked how clear the image was. I held an issue of PC Pro about two feet away from the camera and asked him to read the text – while he couldn’t make out smaller words, such as those you’re reading right now, he could read text…

HuaweiP10 PRICE £421 (£505 inc VAT) from alza.co.uk With minimalist looks and gentle curves, the P10’s design has more than a hint of the iPhone 7. As with Apple’s device, the fingerprint reader is integrated into the home button, but Huawei differs with USB Type-C charging, a microSD tray and a headphone jack. Our review model was an understated black, but you can take your pick from eight colours. The P10 has a 5.1in, 1,080 x 1,920 IPS display, bordered by thin bezels on either side. That may sound disappointing when the Galaxy S8 (see p74) offers a 1,440 x 2,560 resolution, but text and images look perfectly crisp. Closer inspection with our colour calibrator shows the screen covers 99.9% of the sRGB gamut, with a high contrast ratio of…

PRICE £99 (£119 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk For all its mild-mannered, boring office printer looks, the Brother MFC-J5330DW conceals a few surprises. Not only does it punch above its weight when it comes to speed, but it comes with a handy hidden talent. Pack it with A4 paper and it prints using a strange, sideways paper path – okay, not particularly exciting in itself. If, however, you pull out the paper tray, press a plastic button and extend it, you can pack in A3 sheets as well, giving you the option of A3 printing without the size penalty of the real deal. Nevertheless, this isn’t what you would call a compact printer. The desktop footprint of 530 x 398mm leaves it looking larger than some colour lasers, and that’s before…

PRICE £210 (£252 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk While the Ecosys P5206cdn isn’t quite as compact as HP’s mono LaserJet Pro MFP M227fdw, it’s attractive for an office laser printer. The white cube design and 410 x 410mm footprint makes it surprisingly unobtrusive, yet it’s still a full-colour laser with a 250-sheet paper cassette, a 50-sheet multipurpose tray and capacity for 150 sheets in the output tray at the top of the printer. Kyocera doesn’t specify a duty cycle beyond a maximum 50,000 pages per month, but if you need a printer to service a small office or workgroup, this one will definitely do the job. In some respects, though, it’s rather old-fashioned. There’s no wireless connectivity and no fancy colour touchscreen, just a simple two-line, backlit LCD panel and a…

The upfront purchase price of a printer is only a small part of the true cost of printing. The figures that will hit your wallet hard repeatedly over the full length of your ownership have more to do with the costs of ink. It’s impossible to model these accurately before you buy. Not only will your estimates of future printing be guesswork, but the claimed capacity of an ink or toner cartridge will be stated in terms of ISO-standard pages, which might not reflect the kind of print jobs that you run. Then there’s the fact that some printers, particularly inkjets, waste a certain amount of ink in cleaning and declogging the print heads. All the same, we’ve given it our best shot to offer some idea of how much…

PRICE £187 (£224 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk Epson has taken a stand against the exorbitant running costs of inkjet printers, switching cartridges for a system of internal ink tanks refilled using cheaper bottles with enough ink to print up to 6,500 pages. The results are impressive, with mono prints coming in at just 0.24p per page and colour prints costing around half-a-penny. Note there’s potential for mess when refilling and the printer needs to charge the ink before use – a process that takes roughly 20 minutes. A rubber cap keeps the ink securely in the printer, however, and Epson has made the tanks semi-opaque in places so you can literally see the current ink levels. You might expect there to be compromises elsewhere, and indeed there are. The ET-2600…

“I’ve been impressed by the stridessomemanufacturers are making in driving down both costs and environmental impact” Halfway through this Labs, I hit the frightening realisation that I’ve been testing and reviewing printers for a little over 20 years. I know all technologies have undergone huge transformation in that time, but with printers the development has been remarkable. I used to be amazed when an inkjet pulled off smooth colour graduations in a very basic illustration of a train. Even some lasers couldn’t produce decent-quality black text. I clearly remember the whole Labs team watching, gobsmacked, as photo prints from one of the first true photo-quality printers inched, line-by-line, into the out tray. Now we take all that for granted. The print quality of every printer I tested here – even…

PRICE Appliance with 1yr, 25-user licence, £1,093 exc VAT from kerio.com Kerio’s range of UTM appliances has recently been expanded with two new wireless models – the lightweight NG100W and the more capable NG300W. This follows the same basic design as the standard NG300 UTM appliance, but adds dual-band 802.11ac wireless services, with support for up to eight SSIDs. It’s built on a firm foundation: Kerio’s embedded Control software teams up a standard SPI firewall with deep packet inspection, IPsec VPNs, IPS, bandwidth management and quality of service (QoS). That’s supplemented here by Kerio’s own web filtering service and Sophos’ gateway antivirus, to keep your users well away from dangerous content. The appliance is silent, as its chunky aluminium chassis functions as a heatsink. Inside beats a quad-core 2.4GHz Intel…

Ithought I’d follow on from last month’s column by starting to show you how to build a genuinely useful Internet of Things (IoT) “thing”. And to prove there’s plenty of choice in the marketplace when it comes to ultra-cheap wireless platforms, I’m going to change boards. Last month was mostly about the ESP8266-based NodeMCU development kit; this month I’ll focus on the Raspberry Pi Zero W. Why? Well, because it’s fairly new (the “W” wireless variant first went on sale at the end of February), and because it’s British, and PC Pro loves to promote home-grown talent! I’m sure many of you already know this, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity, founded in Cambridge, and its stated aim is to “promote the study of computer science and related…

If there’s a single measure to apply to modern businesses then this year is all about agility. Despite the fact that nobody has standardised the unit of agility, everybody thinks they can measure it and demonstrate what it means. When trying to make sense of this type of problem, I fall back on a simple technique known as derailing someone’s smooth sales presentation with a silly question. You see, silly questions are much more powerful than sensible ones. Especially when someone agile has been through and whipped up a show, a market, an economy, or the whole world into a turbulent mess in their passing wake. When things get extra turbulent, the silly question moves the conversation forward, by reminding us that there really are no sensible anchors in R&D,…

"There will be a flood of script kiddies trying them out and targeting everyone from NASA to the takeaway down the street" Colour me shocked. It appears the NSA has been collecting a treasure trove of hacks for Windows, both desktop and servers, covering all versions of the OS bar Windows 10. And this toolbox of capabilities, which also included ways to get into banking and other related systems, has leaked to the public. I suspect your jaw isn’t gaping in surprise. What’s followed has been just as predictable. First, there’s shock that the NSA might have built such a collection of exploits. Sorry, what do you expect the NSA to be doing? Creating toolkits that can be used against undesirables is what it exists for. Injecting custom spyware onto…