Table of contents for No.289 - November 2018 in PC Pro

I’VE SPENT THIS MONTH poring over the results from our annual service and reliability survey. This is where we ask PC Pro readers to give us feedback on the products you’ve bought, and thousands of you have done just that – so thank you. Whether it’s your work laptop, your home broadband or the NAS drive you bought to sort out your backups (see p44), you’ve let us know how satisfied or dissatisfied you are, and the results are in the tables you see from p30. My only fear is that those numbers are too easy to flick past in the rush to read about the latest kit. That would be a shame: these results are no random number, but the sum of a vast crowd’s experience. Not only Jerry…

1 Microsoft to put Windows 8 Store out of misery Like calling “last orders” in a drab, empty pub, Microsoft has laid out its timeline for killing off the Windows 8 Store, with no new apps to be accepted after 31 October. In July 2019, it will stop distributing updates for apps on Windows Phone 8.x devices or earlier, while the company will stop distributing app updates to Windows 8 and 8.1 devices in July 2023. 2 Google facing action over location tracking Google is facing fresh concerns and legal action after it emerged the firm was storing users’ location data even when they had disabled Location History. Google updated its terms and conditions to say that “some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 9370 Ultraportable from £1,199 from dell.co.uk This 2018 update to the all-dominant Dell XPS 13 keeps tweaks to the minimum: slimmer bezels, eighth-generation Intel Core processors and the promise of even longer battery life are the most important benefits. Just keep in mind that Dell has embraced USB-C ports at the expense of the old-fashioned Type-A variety. REVIEW Issue 284, p54 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 15in (2018) A machine for true power users with amazing specifications, including that infamous Core i9 – and up to 4TB of SSD storage. From £2,349 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 NEW ENTRY Dell XPS 15 We all know what to expect from Dell’s XPS 15 range, yet it continues to reign supreme – this time thanks to sheer…

@bazzacollins Sometimes it’s hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for Google. Yes, $800 billion, monopoly-in-chief, “don’t be evil” tax-dodging Google. This summer it got handed a $5 billion fine from the EU, partly for forcing phone makers to bundle Google services on their Android handsets. Just weeks later, the biggest game on the entire planet – Fortnite – decided to shun the Google Play Store and make its app available as a direct download because Android is an “open platform”. Talk about getting whacked from both sides. Fortnite is without doubt the most high-profile app to dodge the Play Store. The game generated more than $100 million in revenue in its first 90 days on the Apple App Store (where it has no choice but to comply) and…

Best PC Brand Chillblast RECOMMENDED ACER, PC SPECIALIST We’ve said it many times before, but if you have a good idea of what PC specification you want then it makes sense to buy British. Or to put it another way: “[This is the] second PC I’ve bought from Chillblast, and I’m still using the first one,” wrote Graham Moore. “When I rang for help in ordering the right spec, they put me on to the guy who actually designed the system. You couldn’t do that in PC World!” No surprise, then, that 19 out of 20 Chillblast customers would buy from the company again. Frankly, though, we were a little surprised to see that Acer produced such a strong result. This is nothing against Acer: it’s just that international companies…

PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/289tab Looking for a tablet that can convert into a quasi-laptop for working on the go? The iPad Pro and Microsoft’s various Surface devices have shown how the idea does work, but Android users have been left out in the cold. Enter Samsung, with a plan to revive Android’s professional aspirations. It’s clear that Samsung has the 10.5in iPad Pro in its sights, even opting for the same distinctive screen size – albeit in a slightly taller, thinner shape. It also has some obvious advantages. The package includes a bundled stylus, and the tablet is Samsung’s first to feature DeX mode – a desktop-style interface that’s designed to work with a keyboard and mouse, and can even be displayed on an external monitor. If…

PRICE £681 (£817 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk With 16 cores and 32 threads, the Threadripper 2950X goes head to head with Intel’s i9-7900X – and the price is the same too. Like the original 16-core Threadripper, its TDP remains slightly higher than Intel’s at 180W, but there’s no need for expensive watercooling as it will work with a wide range of air coolers. The Threadripper 2950X is a chip that’s made for overclocking, and we managed to get ours up to 4.2GHz on all cores using a 1.425V vcore, which is our safe limit for an everyday overclock. That’s a big 400MHz higher than we managed with the equivalent first-generation CPU. Indeed, we found that the old Threadripper 1950X often worked best at stock speed, as with default settings the…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,541 (£1,849 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk If you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu, don’t worry: it isn’t you. We reviewed the 2-in-1 version of the XPS 15 two months ago (see issue 287, p54), and now Dell has released an update to its non-convertible brother. This one is all about performance, with Intel’s new six-core Core i7-8750H processor housed inside – giving us a Windows rival to the new 15in Apple MacBook Pro. And it really is powerful. This CPU has six Hyper-Threaded cores running at a base clock of 2.2GHz, and when stressed can boost to a staggering 4.1GHz per core. Our review sample also has 16GB of 2,666MHz DDR4 RAM and a 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD inside. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a…

1 Visit the PC Pro download site at pcprodownload.co.uk. You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the card, along with your email address. We’ll send you an email to confirm that your code has been registered. On subsequent visits, you’ll be able to access the download area by entering only your email address. 2 Once you’re into the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions on the left of the product page (again, please…

PRICE £292 (£350 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk This is not the perfect phone. It has flaws, it’s beaten for speed by many others, it’s missing a couple of nice-to-have features that I’d really like to have. What it is, however, is stunning value. It’s a genuine rival to the OnePlus 6 and should make you seriously question the wisdom of spending more than £400 on any phone. The key to its success is that Asus doesn’t cut corners on any of the things that you use every day. Prime among those is the screen, which rivals those of flagship phones with its high-quality IPS panel and glorious 6.2in diagonal size. Just like the three-times-as-expensive iPhone X, this fills every available square millimetre with pixels and I would challenge anyone to…

Xerox VersaLink C600DN “Busy SMBs that want a fast A4 colour printer with all the trimmings will find the VersaLink C600DN the perfect choice,” we wrote back in issue 283. “Factor in Xerox’s lifetime warranty with an annual toner purchase and it’s an almost irresistible deal.” No wonder it’s been sitting pretty on the A-List ever since. Typical price, £485 Xerox VersaLink B600DN This A4 mono laser is “well-suited to busy workgroups,” stated our review, which declared that “print quality is great for general office use [with] pin-sharp text across a wide range of font sizes.” With 55ppm speeds and a 5in colour touchscreen, plus an integral duplexer, we called it a “speed demon”. Typical price, £665 Xerox VersaLink C505S Designed for busy workgroups of up to 15 users, this…

We run each laptop through our usual PC Pro benchmark tests, looking at how they cope in demanding image-editing and video-processing applications, and how they handle our bruising multitasking test, mixing 4K video playback with other processor intensive tasks. We also assess display quality, using a colorimeter to test brightness and contrast levels, colour accuracy and ability to reproduce the full gamut of colours in the sRGB standard. To test battery life, we set the screen brightness to 170cd/m², prevent the screen from dimming and the laptop from sleeping, then play a video clip on loop until the battery runs out. Finally, to test graphics performance, we run the laptops through the benchmark built into Rise of the Tomb Raider, using 1080p and the medium detail preset, then the low…

PRICE £708 (£849 inc VAT) from store.hp.com The HP Spectre 15 is a stunning premium laptop, but not everyone can afford to spend that kind of money. That’s where the HP Envy 13 enters the scene, giving you a taste of the high-end at a more accessible price. You might not get the fastest processor around or even the latest, greatest screen technology – although a high-end version with a Core i7 processor is available – but you do get a superb and slimline design, consistently good quality, richer audio than usual and more than enough performance for mainstream applications. In some ways, we prefer the Envy’s looks to those of the Spectre. It’s sleek, silver and very slim, just 14.9mm thick and 1.3kg in weight, with a tiny bezel…

PRICE £824 (£989 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk The PC Specialist Recoil II isn’t exactly subtle about its angle or its audience; if the name doesn’t tell you that this is a gaming laptop, the multi-coloured pyrotechnic display of the fully RGB-backlit keyboard will. Admittedly, it also stretches our definition of thin-and-light to breaking point. It’s 19.9mm thick towards the back and hits the scales at nearly 2kg. Throw the chunky power adapter in your bag, and you’re looking at a 2.54kg carrying weight. Still, you can’t help but like its sense of menace. With a design mixing metals, matte-black plastics and whopping grilles, it’s the kind of laptop the new Star Wars trilogy’s Kylo Ren might use to wind down before smashing up his room when he failed to get…

PRICE £750 (£900 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/289chill Chillblast’s laptop can’t compete with the best of the big brand models on mobility or stylish design, but take a good look at what you’re actually getting for £900. While the 13.3in 1,080p IPS screen is what you’d expect for the price, Chillblast goes big on the specification: it includes a Core i7-8550U CPU and 16GB of RAM at a price where you would normally be talking Core i5 and 8GB. Only the 250GB SSD reflects the sub-£1,000 budget. That impressive specification is reflected in the laptop’s benchmark scores as well – while the Helios isn’t quite up there with the PC Specialist Recoil II, it’s not that far behind. The Clevo aluminium chassis not only looks good, it offers much more connectivity…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from microsoft.com When Microsoft released the Surface Laptop last year, it proved that you could build an innovative and portable laptop without taking your design cues from Apple. It’s still hard not to love the matte-finish aluminium chassis, soft colours and deliberately angular style. The design’s not just good looking, but practical, and the 13.5in screen and 1.28kg weight make this a laptop you could easily lug around all day. It’s a slight shame that the hinge isn’t more flexible – using the optional pen or touchscreen never feels quite natural on a laptop, and it’s easy to forget that touch is an option and stick to the silky smooth, beautifully responsive touchpad. The soft-touch Alcantra around the keyboard is a love-it, hate-it kind of…

PRICE With 3yr Total Protect subscription, £1,667 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk If you’re seeking a do-it-all UTM appliance, the Sophos XG 125w could well be the answer. It’s packed to the rafters with security features, and it’s no performance lightweight either: it claims a raw firewall throughput of 6.5Gbits/sec, or a respectable 1.5Gbits/sec with all UTM functions enabled. Connectivity comes courtesy of eight copper Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus a single SFP optical Ethernet port. An expansion bay can be used to add an optional DSL or 3G/4G adapter, or an additional SFP module. The appliance also provides dual-band 802.11ac wireless services, with support for multiple virtual SSIDs and built-in hotspot guest access facilities. Installation is a doddle. The browser-based quick-start wizard guided us through securing administrative access, setting up the…

PRICE £555 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Xerox’ VersaLink B600DN brings together everything an SME could ask for from a mono A4 printer – including a fast 55ppm print speed, a true 1,200dpi resolution and inkjet-trouncing running costs. Thanks to Xerox’s ConnectKey technology, it’s impressively versatile too. A wealth of connection options ensure that the B600DN will fit into your workflow. USB 3 and Gigabit Ethernet ports come built in, as does NFC; simultaneous 802.11n wireless services can be added for £47 via a dongle that snaps in at the back. The printer is a cinch to install, with a graphical wizard that opens up on the 5in colour touchscreen to introduce the four core ConnectKey apps. These provide access to printer settings, job status and USB options, while the App…

It can’t just be me whose social media feeds increasingly have a robotic feel. I have a growing sense that algorithms are deciding which posts I see, and that those algorithms are defining the posts penned in the first place. As a consequence, businesses are increasingly able to target me – but kick the ball wide of the proverbial goal when it comes to what they actually want to say. It’s not a new feature of technology that data tends to supersede the human brain, that it’s easier to point to graphs and in-depth market intelligence when defining a strategy than listen to the instinct of a human being. Social media provides huge opportunities for businesses to talk directly to their customers, yet little emphasis is given to the voice…

MarkTechArc72 You know something has hit the mainstream when you see TV ads for it, and so it is with “cloud”. Adverts from Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and Google all espouse the benefits of always-on, large-scale computing platforms. But what about the economics that sit behind those promises? Over the course of several cloud migration projects, I’ve discovered some amazing benefits for my clients – but I’ve also unearthed areas of concern that could hit you in the pocket. Financial benefits The financial benefits proposed by the cloud vendors is clear, and these resonate with our customers. The most obvious cost reduction comes through retiring an existing data centre, either local or hosted, as companies shift numerous servers, appliances and services to the cloud. Server rooms, power, cooling and racking are…

Have we reached stagnation in computer technology? It’s a question that I ponder all the time these days. I’ve been testing laptops and PCs since 1986, and that’s over 30 years. There’s probably only a handful of PCs since the dawn of the PC era that haven’t gone through my hands. Much the same can be said of tablets, and most of the smartphones out there. I’m particularly interested in the cutting edge – as soon as something comes available, we have it in the lab. So you would expect that I would be at the “staring off into the abyss” of that cutting edge on my personal devices. In the past that was true – in the 1990s, I was one of the first to bring multi-CPU Windows NT…

Darien Graham-Smith Darien summons the wisdom of HG Wells and explains how to build a time machine – one that can restore your data with minimal hassle. See p44 Mark Walsham The sales pitch for cloud computing promises huge cost savings, but is there an economic case for it? IT consultant Mark shares his experience on p116 Davey Winder Using his contacts across the security world, Davey shares the insights of 26 different experts to give an A-Z of security. Educate yourself from p102 5,000 of you Just to hammer home the point, we couldn’t have written this month’s Awards article without your contributions. See what you think on p30…

@njkobie Do you spend too much time staring at your smartphone? Most people would say yes, including me, which is why I was intrigued to learn about so-called “digital wellness”. This awful term is the latest health trend, and Google, Apple and Facebook are leaping onto the bandwagon. You can understand why: it lets them chalk up a few positive headlines amid the doom and gloom about smartphones keeping us awake at night, social media impairing mental health, and the small matter of destroying democracy. All three companies are rolling out digital wellness tools – rather convenient timing, if you consider it. Facebook, and its Instagram sibling, will track how much time you spend in its apps, charting it in your settings. Of course, they always tracked how much time…

I’ve just finished reading Jon Honeyball’s comments on Dropbox and Microsoft (see issue 288, p110), which highlight the vendor view of just doing things regardless of what the customer wants. We’re a small marketing agency, which for ten years has used Skype Business (not Skype for Business in Office 365). Generally, it’s worked fine – or did until Microsoft waded in. The option to record our own outgoing voicemail message disappeared. Then came last month’s update that removed the link to Outlook Contacts, so for every call we had to look up numbers to cut and paste from Outlook. Support was very responsive but concluded, “no, it’s not there but I’m sure it will be coming… Just keep installing the new package to see when it works. Meanwhile revert back…

1 Launch the Recovery Media Creator Open the Start menu and search for “Create a recovery drive”; this will launch the Recovery Media Creator. Accept the option to back up your system files to the recovery drive if you want to restore your existing Windows installation directly after booting from it. 2 Create your recovery media Windows scans your system, and when it’s compiled a list of required files it will ask for a USB flash drive or external hard disk. Note that any existing files on the drive will be wiped, and the process of creating the archive can take several hours, depending on the size of your files and the speed of your drive. 3 Boot into recovery mode When you need to use your recovery media, boot…

The Wi-Fi-only edition of the Galaxy Tab S4 costs £599 in the UK, and comes with 64GB of internal storage, expandable to a maximum of 400GB via the microSD slot. There’s also an LTE version coming for £649. The 10.5in iPad Pro is a superbly capable and versatile alternative, but it’s a touch more expensive, with prices starting at £619 – if you want the Apple Pencil stylus, that will set you back an extra £89. It’s widely rumoured that a new, upgraded version of the iPad Pro will be introduced before the end of 2018, so it might be worth waiting a few months before buying. If you’re looking for something cheaper, the old Galaxy Tab S3 is still available: we’ve found the Wi-Fi version online for £425. However,…

PRICE £1,367 (£1,640 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Cramming 32 cores into a desktop CPU is a stellar achievement for AMD – and it’s fast too, with a peak boost speed of 4.2GHz and all-core frequencies of at least 3GHz. Thanks to AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive and other SenseMI technologies, frequencies can rise even higher if your cooling and power delivery systems are up to it. Since the CPU is compatible with current X399-chipset motherboards, you don’t even need to invest in new hardware. Note the increased TDP, though: at 250W, its cooling needs are beyond most air coolers. If you’re hoping to overclock, you’ll need a decent all-in-one liquid cooler. The 2990WX’s four Zeppelin dies each host eight Zen+ cores. Only 16 of these 32 cores can directly access the…

PRICE From £1,179 (£1,415 inc VAT) from toshiba.co.uk There’s no shortage of candidates if you’re looking for a thin-and-light laptop: just turn to p76 for our roundup of 12 home-oriented machines. But this Portégé is a little different because it has IT managers in its sights. The X30-E is designed to be an easy-to-manage laptop that also happens to be slim and sexy. Well, sexy may be pushing it. Dressed in a sober dark blue finish, it’s more Canary Wharf boardroom than Shoreditch coffee shop, but it has a list of attractive stats: a 15.9mm height, a 1.09kg weight and a promised battery life of over ten hours. That latter stat will be tough to reach in general use, but it lasted a creditable 8hrs 38mins in our video rundown…

PRICE £1,208 (£1,450 inc VAT) from chillblast.com There’s no hiding from the fact that Brexit and Bitcoin mining have provided a perfect storm for PC prices. Two years ago, it was easy to build a brilliantly fast system for this price. Now, manufacturers must use all their nous to build a system that’s fast but doesn’t blow the budget. Fortunately, Chillblast has just such nous. Its key starting point was to focus on quality rather than cut-price components. There’s also more style than you might expect from a British PC manufacturer, with an understated white-and-black theme that starts with the Corsair Carbide 275R chassis and ends with the Asus Prime Z370-A motherboard. In between, it’s picked reputable components that don’t cost the earth. And that leaves room in the budget…

PRICE £17 (£20 inc VAT) from Apple Store Tablets, they used to say, aren’t appropriate for creative professionals. The software just isn’t there and, when it is, it can’t match what’s available for Windows and macOS. That’s something Serif wants to change. Over the past five years, it’s taken a different approach to mobile app development, tearing down its venerable PhotoPlus and DrawPlus applications and rebuilding them from the ground up with cross-platform, tablet-friendly code. The result is a pair of iPad apps that replicate, feature-for-feature, their desktop counterparts. Affinity Designer is the most recent launch on the iPad, but it’s arguably even more impressive than Affinity Photo: this is a powerful piece of creative software. So what can it do? It’s a vector drawing application, principally used to create…

We pondered for a while: what shall we call this month’s laptops? Ultrabooks? That name – still an Intel trademark and specification – has fallen out of favour in recent years. Now people flit between “thin and light” and ultraportable, with a scattering of “2-in-1s” to confuse matters. Either way, it doesn’t matter. These are the slimmest and coolest laptops in town; the laptops you want to be seen using at home, at work and on the move. If that means a high price, so be it. When we challenged manufacturers to bring us their best thin-and-light laptops, we explained we didn’t care how much they cost as long as they kept thickness and weight to a minimum. We wanted to showcase the breadth of laptops you can buy that…

PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Asus’s strength has always been in delivering a similar experience to big name, high-end laptops, but for a whole lot less. With the ZenBook UX331U we have a laptop that’s still cheaper than the Dell and HP equivalents, but that can go toe-to-toe with them on nearly every level. We have some minor reservations about the screen, but this is an exceptional thin-and-light laptop balancing performance with features and design. Let’s start with the latter. The UX331 has a gorgeous, slimline all-metal chassis with a spun-metal finish, a royal blue paint job and a luxurious gloss coating that’s almost pearlescent in the right light. It’s highly portable, too: just under 14mm thick and not much more than 1kg in weight. To achieve this,…

PRICE £1,583 (£1,899 inc VAT) from store.hp.com The HP Spectre x360 has never been an easy laptop to ignore. When the first model landed back in 2015, you couldn’t help but be impressed by the slimline style and shape-shifting design, and subsequent versions have only improved on the successful formula. With the latest 15.6in version, however, HP has managed to make the Spectre more versatile still. And for once, the killer feature isn’t what you see on the outside, but what’s inside the case. That killer feature is the Intel i7-8750G Kaby Lake-G processor, which combines a four-core, eight-thread processor with an AMD Radeon RX Vega M processor; they sit on one module and are connected by an Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge. This is a chip (well, pair of chips)…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from uk-store.acer.com Think you need to spend big to get a stylish slim-and-light laptop? The Acer Spin 5 might make you think again. It’s a beautifully designed 2-in-1 convertible with a flexible hinge that allows it to work in tablet, tent and stand configurations, as well as a more conventional clamshell laptop. At 1.6kg, it’s a little heavy by normal tablet standards, but the responsive touchscreen and excellent bundled stylus make the effort seem worthwhile. The mix of black and a dark grey aluminium also makes this mid-range device look and feel surprisingly expensive. It’s not just desirable, but practical as well. We have some minor quibbles about the keyboard, such as the weird split Enter key and the similarly afflicted left-Shift, but the actual…

PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1 brings a few of the features found in Dell’s premium XPS line down to the mainstream Inspiron. It’s another of Dell’s 2-in-1 convertibles, but with a thin-bezel design that delivers a 13.3in IPS touchscreen in a smaller chassis than you would usually expect: it has a desktop footprint of just 309 x 215mm and a weight of 1.45kg. The brushed aluminium casing, with its gunmetal tone, looks nearly as expensive as the XPS 13, while the flexible hinge means you can use it as a super-sized tablet or in a tent configuration when you don’t need the keyboard to hand. The Inspiron will work with an optional £40 Dell stylus, but oddly it’s not offered when you buy…

PRICE From £111 per year (exc VAT) from kaspersky.co.uk Small businesses with up to 50 computers and no dedicated IT support team will find plenty to like about Kaspersky’s Small Office Security (KSOS) 6. It offers wide-ranging protection for desktops, servers and Android mobile devices, and a cloud-based portal that gives you an easy overview of your protection status. It’s great value too, with prices starting at £111 per year for up to five Windows or Mac desktops, plus five Android mobiles, one Windows Server system and five password managers. If you want to protect two Windows Server hosts, you’ll need to buy a minimum of 15 desktop licences, but this still only comes to £279 per year. Getting started with KSOS 6 means manually installing the client app on…

PRICE Appliance with 1yr UTM, £419 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk Zyxel’s gateway appliances are aimed specifically at small businesses, and the pricing reflects that. The USG60W sits at the top of a family of four models, combining solid UTM capabilities with integrated dual-band wireless services, yet it costs just £419. That includes your first year’s subscription, which gets you gateway antivirus, web content filtering, IDP, antispam and Zyxel’s own Application Patrol; in addition, the base unit also provides firewalling and VPN services. Since smaller offices often don’t have a lot of in-house expertise, Zyxel has made ease of use a priority. That’s obvious from first contact with its web interface: once you’ve set a secure administrative password, you’re immediately transported to the new Easy Mode console, which provides a wizard…

Artificial intelligence David Rogers, security product specialist at King of Servers “We’re increasingly seeing AI-powered cyber-attacks, with the aim of going after high-value data. Like a human attacker, AI will learn about its target, tailor its attack and launch it at the most appropriate time. However, unlike a human hacker, AI doesn’t tire and can undertake multiple attacks at once. The key to defence is AI itself: over 90% of security leaders are concerned with AI attacks, and hackers switching to AI, so many organisations are implementing AI defences to boost their existing protection.” Business email compromise Ramon Vicens, CTO at Blueliv “A business email compromise can be used to steal money directly – or it can be tied to credential theft, account takeovers and phishing attempts. SMBs should be…

If you’re an old-school IT wonk, accustomed to managing a room full of very physical servers, then the transition up into the cloud is likely to be a bit of a culture shock. In theory, many of the same admin tasks apply as before – but part of the point of the cloud is that things no longer have to be done by hand. This is where orchestration products come in, to help automate tasks across arbitrary numbers of remote machines that may not even physically exist. Be warned, though, that this doesn’t necessarily simplify things: Microsoft’s Orchestrator Runbook, ironically, requires a server of its own to run on. There’s a range of orchestration products out there, and the option remains of not using one at all. As with so…

@jonhoneyball A few months ago, I mentioned how one of my long-serving Promise Thunderbolt RAID arrays had died. I’d tried a new disk, tried rebuilding, but it felt terminal to me. As a replacement I ordered the Lacie 6Big 36TB unit, which has the new Thunderbolt 3 connectors. Fortunately, the Apple Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter can be used either way around, and I soon had it up and running on my ageing iMac 5K. Everything was fine, although I’m slightly annoyed by the time taken for it to boot and appear on the Thunderbolt bus. It means I have to wait a few seconds or so before logging in, because I have a large Dropbox installation held on the array. If the array isn’t ready yet, then Dropbox throws…

@happygeek I’m not in the globetrotting conference Premier League along with Jon and Steve, but there are some events that tempt me to abandon my Yorkshire hermit role. One of these is the annual NetEvents global press and analyst summit in Silicon Valley. It’s unique in that it exists to bring innovative startups and established vendors across a broad spectrum of network, AI and security sectors before (so-called) influential journalists and analysts. Not in the usual “here’s a hall full of stands, and you can find the lecture hall over there” kind of way. Rather, with mornings populated by interactive panel sessions, followed by afternoons of speed-dating-style round tables talking with vendors, and evenings chatting over dinner and drinks. It’s all very sociable, and that allows those of us who…

“The countdown to the first orbital rocket launch from UK soil has officially begun,” crowed Patrick Wood, Lockheed Martin’s UK country executive for space. Wood was talking up the company’s plans for the UK’s first spaceport in Scotland – but there’s competition. The government started talking about a British spaceport back in 2014, when it earmarked eight possible locations for conversion by 2018. But in 2016, the competition ended without choosing a location; instead, regulations would be tweaked to allow any suitable spot to be used under a licence. In March, the Space Industry Bill was passed, allowing spaceports in the UK for the first time. Since then, two leaders have emerged in a race to become the UK’s first spaceport – a vertical site in Sutherland, Scotland and a…

We’ve heard time and time again that robots are coming for our jobs. Back in 2013, a University of Oxford study predicted that almost half of American jobs were at risk, and ever since report after report has either claimed a) the automation revolution is coming, run for the hills! Or b) calm down, Luddites, technology makes more jobs than it destroys. Automation is already creeping into working lives, but physical robotics and AI-powered bots will do more than help with filing. They’ll change the very nature of work, for good and bad. Nurses won’t have to lift so many heavy objects. Logistics workers need not pick every item from high shelves. And I won’t have to transcribe notes any more — already automated services such as Descript and Otter…

Face recognition has started to appear in shopping centres and other public spaces run by private firms, but there are yet more developments in the private sector that concern privacy advocates. Take security company Trustwave, which has launched a tool that when fed with a name and image of an individual can link their social media accounts using photographs across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms. The company says its Social Mapper is designed to help penetration testers perform social-media phishing scenarios, but it declined to comment on what safeguards it had in place to stop anyone using and abusing the software. According to Privacy International’s Kaltheuner, the tech has similarities with an app that was misused after launch. “There was a Russian app called Find Face a couple…

@dariengs While browsing the magazines in my local supermarket the other day, I came across a publication entitled iPad for Seniors. Jokingly, my wife suggested that I ought to buy it. I didn’t find this as amusing as she did. You see, I’m acutely aware that I’m not the technical whizz kid I used to be. There was a time when you could plonk me down in front of any sort of computer and I’d quickly intuit my way around it. I used to feel sorry for people who needed big friendly picture-books to guide them through the world of technology. Nowadays, as I find myself struggling to get to grips with the latest apps and websites, I wonder whether I’ve become one of them. The frustrating thing is, it’s…

It’s been 16 months since I abandoned my ThinkPad for a Chromebook, and the adventure has gone well – with a sole exception. Regular readers may know that a pastime of mine is creating computer art, and for the past 12 years this has consisted of taking photographs; some posted to Flickr straight, but others modified to look like paintings using Photoshop Elements. These modifications depend heavily on Photoshop’s layers, which I duplicate, filter and re-merge over and again until the visual result pleases me. My discovery of Silver Efex Pro – part of the Nik filter suite Google that so magnanimously gave away – was a leap forward as its “structure” parameter gives great control over the levels of detail in a picture. However, regular readers may also know…

Desktop PC of the Year Palicomp Intel i7 Nebula “Palicomp went for it on the specs with the i7 Nebula,” said Stuart Andrews, who tested all the PCs in the Labs that the Nebula ended up winning in issue 286. “It combined a Core i7-8700K with a GTX 1080 GPU, 16GB of DDR-3200 RAM and not one, but two Samsung M.2 SSDs. And just when you thought that might be going over the top, it overclocked the CPU and GPU to eke out a little extra welly. This was a system that sneered at high-performance tasks and could run games at 4K resolutions without any compromise – an incredibly powerful machine.” Tablet of the Year Apple iPad (2018) We’ve seen some fine Android tablets this year, including the Huawei MediaPad…

1 Download the installer Ubuntu comes in several flavours, with native, Gnome or KDE desktops. You’ll find them at ubuntu.com/download/flavours. We’ll stick with the regular distribution for now, which you can download from ubuntu.com/download/desktop. Select the appropriate ISO for your processor architecture and save it to your hard disk. 2 Make your USB drive bootable The handy Rufus tool automates the process of making your USB flash drive bootable. Download it from rufus.akeo.ie, then run it. Make sure the correct destination device is selected in the first drop-down menu, then click Select and point Rufus at the Ubuntu ISO you downloaded in step 1. 3 Partition and install Make sure the Partition scheme and Target system drop-downs are set appropriately for your PC; on a modern system, you won’t need…

PRICE £4,000(£4,800 inc VAT) fromscan.co.uk Scan’s 3XS WI6000 Viz has been our A-listed workstation for the past eight months, thanks largely to the phenomenal power of its 18-core Core i9-7980XE processor. Now the company has put together an AMD-based alternative, powered by the new 32-core Threadripper 2990WX CPU reviewed opposite. The WA6000 Viz looks every inch a serious system, encased as it is in a sizeable, sober-looking Fractal Design Define XL R2 case. The guilty secret is that it’s actually built on an Asus RoG Zenith Extreme gaming motherboard; this doesn’t feel too incongruous, but a few features stick out, such as the coloured LEDs illuminating the audio ports at the rear. Still, the board can’t be faulted for connections and features. There’s no fewer than ten USB 3.1 ports…

PRICE 1TB, £525 (£630 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk You only need to look at this month’s group test of laptops (see p76) to appreciate the rise of USB-C. To complicate matters, it comes in two varieties: USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3. Of the two, Thunderbolt is preferable for all sorts of reasons, with one being speed – it can reach 40Mbits/sec while USB 3.1 is capped at 10Mbits/sec. And such speeds, as this Samsung SSD amply demonstrates, are particularly useful for external SSD drives. Samsung has history here, with its SSD T5 reigning supreme as the USB 3.1 speed king. With the SSD X5, it adds a Thunderbolt 3-enabled SSD to the mix, in your choice of 500GB, 1TB or 2TB. Samsung quotes sequential read/write speed of up to 2,800MB/sec…

PRICE £1,333 (£1,599 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Dell’s 13in thin-and-light laptop improves with each generation, and while our test sample’s colour scheme won’t be for everyone, it’s hard to grumble about the overall design. The wedge-shaped chassis has been redesigned to be even thinner, measuring under 8mm at the front-edge and 11.6mm at the rear. The combination of metals and woven glass fibres looks and feels fantastic, with a coating that gives it a luxury car sheen. Even those of us who aren’t too keen on Rose Gold finishes have to admit that it looks superb with the Alpine White of the interior, while Dell’s Infinity Edge display looks as breathtaking as ever. Not to your taste? Then fear not: you can save a little cash by opting for the…

PRICE £1,133 (£1,360 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Like so many of Lenovo’s ThinkPads, the X380 Yoga doesn’t feel like it’s trying to impress. The styling is simple, angular and practical. There’s no rose gold, ivory or champagne tones, just a whole bunch of matte black. This isn’t a criticism. It’s thin and lightweight at just 1.44kg, but it’s not bothered about being the skinniest laptop on the block. Like its stablemate, the X280, it’s a laptop aimed squarely at getting work done wherever and whenever you need it. The only hint of showing off is how smoothly it switches between laptop, tent and tablet forms. Needless to say, it feels bulletproof. Lenovo has tested it against 12 military spec requirements, with the X380 Yoga passing over 200 durability tests. Whether…

PRICE £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from uk-store.acer.com The 14in laptop doesn’t get any slimmer, lighter or lovelier than the Acer Swift 7. Weighing in at just 1.2kg, it’s actually lighter than most of the 13.3in models on test, while the 8.9mm thin chassis is a wonder of engineering; it’s slimmer than some recent tablets. Although it feels like it might blow away in a stiff breeze, the aluminium unibody construction is perfectly robust, while Acer earns extra points for bundling a sleeve. The hinge doesn’t allow you to fold the screen flat against the back and use it like a tablet, but it will sit flat against the desktop, which can be handy if you want to make full use of its touchscreen. The design leaves barely any room for…

PRICE £1,242 (£1,490 inc VAT) from lenovo.com The ThinkPad X280 isn’t here to wow you with its looks or dazzle you with features. Instead, it’s here to be the ultimate lightweight, take-anywhere laptop that you reach for when you need to get stuff done. It weighs just 1.15kg, while a tiny desktop footprint of 308 x 210mm means that it’s not much bigger than an A4 notepad. It’s less than 18mm thick, too. Yet, with its durable, spill-resistant chassis, it feels incredibly robust. This laptop is also crammed with business-grade features, including a superbly quick and accurate fingerprint reader and a webcam cover that simply slides across. You charge it using USB-C with the supplied adapter, and a second USB-C port supports Thunderbolt 3 for even faster data transfers with…

I used to think the whole idea of one PC that does it all was the rainbow-coloured unicorn of the IT landscape. Like many more enthusiastic PC users, I tend to bounce between a desktop and a laptop or, in my case, two: a ThinkPad for serious work and a lightweight Chromebook for surfing and browsing. When the first Ultrabooks arrived I found them very tempting, but were they genuinely practical? Could you really work across multiple apps or documents? Could you sit at a desk and work all day long? Could you see what you were doing when working in Vegas or Lightroom? Could you do all the things that a PC is best at doing? As a games addict, I also wanted to sneak in a little light…

PRICE 25 seats, 1yr subscription, £1,231 exc VAT from pandasecurity.com When we first tested Panda’s cloud-based Adaptive Defense 360 (AD360) last year, we were bowled over by the breadth of security measures on offer. Since then, remarkably, Panda has updated the package with even more features, and some welcome enhancements to the cloud portal. To get started, you simply need to install the endpoint client onto your Windows, Linux, macOS and Android devices. You can do this by hand if you wish, but the new discovery tool makes things much easier, allowing you to simply scan the network and push the agent directly onto discovered devices. At the core of AD360 are all the security services you’d expect, including file, web and email antivirus, a firewall and Exchange antispam. On…

PRICE £567 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com With the rise of VoIP, network cameras, IoT devices and smart lighting, Power over Ethernet (PoE) is becoming a must-have for business networks. Netgear’s ProSafe GS752TPP is the perfect powered switch for SMEs preparing to support the coming influx of single-cable devices. Positioned at the top of Netgear’s Smart Managed Pro switch family, the GS752TPP provides a huge 48 PoE-enabled Gigabit Ethernet ports – and its generous 760W power budget means it can feed the full 15.4W to all of them at once. It can even support a large number of PoE+ devices, such as high-power Wave 2 wireless APs and HD IP cameras. If that’s not enough connectivity for you, there are also four SFP fibre Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be used…

The org chart might tell you that data security is the responsibility of your IT department – but as Matt Middleton-Leal, general manager (EMEA) at Netwrix, points out, security demands the co-operation of people from every part of the business. “If just one person falls short, the result is poor IT hygiene and increased risk of a data breach,” Middleton-Leal told us. “Two examples are running hardware that hasn’t been properly configured, or software that’s out of date. Both fall within the domain of your IT people, but they can’t be held responsible when non-IT staff breach company policy and ignore security best practices. “Tools do exist that allow IT staff to spot the telltale signs of privilege abuse or data tampering, and take early action before a breach can…

@PaulOckenden A short and sweet tweet from a reader asked: “What’s the best car mount for a smartphone? Thnx.” That’s one of those “How long is a piece of string” type questions. There are many different car mounts available, and what works for one person might not suit someone else. I’ve even had online arguments with friends on this very subject! I assume that the reader who asked the question wants to use their phone as a satnav. I’d discourage any other use of a phone in a car, particularly making or taking calls. Strictly speaking, if you have the phone in a mount then phone calls are legal (at least for now), but various studies have shown that concentrating on a call increases the risk of accidents. If you…

@stardotpro If there’s one consistent trend in business networking these days, it’s that everything is bigger. From the vantage point of the long, hot summer of 2018, it’s easy to see the reason. The Internet of Things has come of age in the past couple of years, making all the preceding efforts at computing and storage seem puny, shrunken, introverted little projects. IoT is a monster, no matter what your business or your intended purpose. Take the guy I met who made wire for windings in electric motors: billions of kilometres of the stuff. His IoT project was all about industrial sensors, of which he had an average of 20 on each wire-making machine, of six distinct types. Just for a bit of wire! Since then, my rule of thumb…

COMPOSITION, TECHNICAL ABILITY, artistic merit. The winning painting of an annual art competition, a reinterpretation of Cézanne’s Houses at L’Estaque, has all three. And while the artist behind the work is a human, Pindar Van Arman, the painting was done by a robot he designed and built. Echoing the impressionists who set up their own salon for judging their innovative paintings in the 1800s, Andrew Conru founded RobortArt, a competition to judge the work created by human artists teaming up with robots and algorithms. “I started trying to answer the question of whether or not robots can create something beautiful,” Conru told PC Pro. The answer is yes, but humans remain heavily involved in the process, coming up with the idea, training or programming the algorithm. Only then does a…

LABS Tablets As Android tablets get better and cheaper, are iPads still the obvious choice? We put 12 tablets to the test to find out Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and claim a free three-in-one USB charging cable, while stocks last. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Kindle Fire. See p108 for details. FEATURES Virtual private networks: the expert’s guide From which VPNs to choose to how to set up your own, we reveal how to make the most of a virtual private network Time for ebooks to turn a new leaf? Ebooks have largely failed to exploit the benefits of digital. But that’s all set to change, finds Nicole Kobie The perils of digital divorce You can now complete a…