Table of contents for No.291 - January 2019 in PC Pro

WHAT DOES YOUR laptop say about you? If it’s battered at the edges and finished in old-school grey, you may consider every scratch a badge of honour. Perhaps you’re a MacBook advocate, where industrial design and that mirrored Apple logo send a message of success. Or you might have smothered it in stickers, turning it into a no-logo John Doe. Whether we like it or not, our laptops say something about us. I think Microsoft understands this. After all, the only visible difference between the Surface Pro 6 (see p44) and Surface Pro 5 is colouring: dressed in svelte black, the Pro 6 is a fine-looking beast. It’s bizarre, though, that we’ve got to the tail end of 2018 and the company remains incapable of looking outside its own bubbled…

PAUL ALLEN MAY be forever remembered as Bill Gates’ sidekick, having partnered Gates in forming Microsoft at the birth of personal computing, but he was so much more than that. As Gates himself acknowledged in a blog post published shortly after Allen’s death from cancer at the age of 65: “Microsoft would never have happened without Paul”. Allen was arguable the driving force in the early days of Microsoft, coming up with the company name and selling IBM on an operating system (MS-DOS) that at the time was still a glint in his eye. It was Allen who persuaded a young Bill Gates to leave Harvard and join him in creating what would become the world’s dominant software company. Indeed, the world’s largest company, full stop. Allen was first diagnosed…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 9370 Ultraportable from £1,248 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 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 speed, courtesy…

Barry Collins is a former editor of PCPro. He was robbed in at least six of those driving tests. @bazzacollins As a guy who took ten years and seven attempts to pass his driving test, I’m arguably not the best qualified person to lecture on traffic management. But having spent the equivalent of a working day stuck in traffic over the past month alone, I know something needs to be done. Ironically, part of the reason that I’ve sat nose-to-tail on motorways recently is because of the installation of a so-called “smart motorway” at the top of the M23, near where I live. The major part of the work is the conversion of the hard shoulder into a fourth lane of traffic. The rest is the installation of new overhead…

Let books be books I know you love your technology, and no doubt many readers will agree that “clever tech makes ebooks smarter than paper”, as Nicole Kobie seems to believe (see issue 290, p38). But I don’t want them to be smart. I much prefer to read books in print. I can focus on the text without being distracted by emails, Twitter or the urge to look things up. Granted, my Kindle is invaluable when I want to take a lot of books with me but have limited space. It’s the Kindle’s sheer simplicity that makes it ideal. If books start to be whizzy and interactive, I might as well read them on my iPad, and within five minutes I’ll be back on Twitter. Tim Morris Pitfalls of being…

We all know it’s vital to create strong passwords, and to use a different one for each site and application you log into. But if you’ve ever tried to follow these rules, you’ll know how impractical they are. This is entwined with the limitations of the human brain. According to Scientific American, “neurons [in the brain] combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something … around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).” Never mind a few cryptic passwords: we ought to be able to remember around 300 years’ worth of HD video (pcpro.link/291mind). The problem is that passwords are abstract things that don’t helpfully relate to anything else in our brains. According to best practice, knowing one…

PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from rog.asus.com How much power do you need? And what are you willing to sacrifice to get it? Those are the two key questions you need to ask when deciding whether or not to buy the astonishingly quick Asus ROG Strix GL12CX – although the £3,000 asking price may well make such matters academic. Putting aside the cost for a moment, let’s take a moment to understand what it offers. This is the first PC we’ve seen with a Core i9-9900X inside, and kudos to Asus for sending it in so quickly after the processor’s launch – and preover-clocking it to 4.8GHz to o. Partnered with GeForce GTX 2080 graphics and a water-cooling system, it’s darn close to the enthusiast’s dream machine. The only upgrade…

PRICE £625 (£750 inc VAT) from pcworld.co.uk While there’s nothing special in terms of the Yoga 530’s design, there is something new inside: the first AMD Ryzen 7 chip we’ve seen in a mainstream laptop. To be precise, a Ryzen 7 2700U with integrated Radeon Vega 10 graphics. Could this Yoga be a harbinger of things to come? It’s a quad-core chip with a base speed of 2.2GHz that can boost up to 3.8GHz, and with four cores and eight threads, we were hoping for good things in our benchmarks. It started brightly, with a score of 109 in the image-editing tests: this is the best indication of day-to-day speed. A video editing score of 75 is okay, but suggests that the processor is throttled back under sustained pressure. Where…

PRICE £1,889 (£2,267 inc VAT) from store.hp.com There was a time when buying a business laptop meant settling for an ugly brick of a machine that had all the entertainment potential of A Night With Des O’Connor. The EliteBook 1050 G1 is many things, but boring isn’t one of them: with GeForce GTX 1050 Max-Q graphics and Intel’s Coffee Lake H-series processors, it will blast through any task. Perhaps most tellingly, it’s also gorgeous. The silver aluminium chassis offers a MacBook-like contrast to the black bezels around the 15.6in screen, and at 1.9cm thick it justifies being called slim. This is a laptop that any high-level executive would be happy to whip out in a meeting. It’s also very well connected. I’m a signed-up fan of Thunderbolt ports, and HP…

The Huawei P20 Pro’s triple camera array was a revelation when we first tested it (see issue 285, p68) and in the Mate 20, Huawei has refined things even further. The phone still has three cameras on the rear. The primary camera remains an incredibly high-resolution 40-megapixel snapper with a bright aperture of f/1.8. Even the telephoto camera has the same specifications as before: 8 megapixels with an aperture of f/2.2 and an optical zoom of 3x. What’s new is that, instead of the third camera being just for black and white snaps, the Mate 20 Pro has an ultra-wide angle camera. Activated by tapping the zoom control in the camera app until you reach “0.6x”, this shoots at the full-frame camera equivalent focal length of 16mm, which means you…

PRICE 40mm GPS, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk When Apple launched the Watch Series 4, the company boasted it had been “fundamentally redesigned and re-engineered”. Although that’s true – the watch comes in two new sizes and has a 30% larger screen – when you see it in the flesh, it’s less of an overhaul than you might expect. The Watch Series 4 is unmistakably an evolution of its predecessors. Still, it has a series of stand-out new features – such as fall detection and the promised ability to perform an ECG test on your wrist – that make it the best smartwatch the company has ever made. ■ Back to basics As with all Apple smartwatches before it, the Watch Series 4 still needs to be paired with…

1 Do I still need security software? Viruses haven’t been much in the news lately, and the platforms we rely on are a lot more security-conscious than they used to be. The days when you could get infected simply by visiting the wrong website, or when you could pick up a malicious worm by merely connecting to the internet, are thankfully long gone. That doesn’t mean the threat has gone away. It may be harder for attackers to sneak under the radar, but they can still compromise your security through social engineering – that is, tricking you into voluntarily installing dodgy apps and giving away information that you really shouldn’t. A good security suite can save you from yourself when you’re about to make a dangerous mistake. As ever, there’s…

PRICE 1yr 3 devices, £21 (£25 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291kis I’ve been reviewing security software for over a decade, and in all that time Kaspersky has never been far from the winners’ podium. There are four reasons for that. The first is that it’s a supremely effective antivirus tool. The latest figures from both AV-Comparatives and AV-Test saw Kaspersky achieve a flawless clean sheet against all types of malware. What’s more, it did so with a phenomenal false positive rate of just 0.01%; Bitdefender did very slightly better, but really this is as near to perfection as makes no odds. Second, despite its thorough malware-detection technologies, Kaspersky is surprisingly light on resources: AV-Comparatives rated it as “very fast” in every test except archiving and unarchiving files, which isn’t something you’re…

PRICE Free from avast.com For a free antivirus tool, Avast is well decked out with features. Alongside the expected on-demand and real-time virus scan capabilities, it features web and email protection, plus a browser plugin that warns you away from potentially risky links. Dig into the settings and you’ll find an optional “hardened mode” too, which only allows programs on a known whitelist to run. The package also includes a standalone secure browser, but this doesn’t open automatically when you visit a banking site. It does include a handy video downloader, however, which lets you grab copies of videos from YouTube and similar streaming sites (albeit not iPlayer or Netflix). This latest release doesn’t add anything major into the mix, but it does bring a new Do Not Disturb feature,…

PRICE 1yr 3 devices, £33 (£39 inc VAT) from avira.com Avira Antivirus Pro is one of this month’s more streamlined security products: its key functions don’t extend much beyond scanning your system, websites and email for viruses. However, it’s good to see that a dedicated anti-ransomware module has been added since we last reviewed the software. This isn’t as configurable as Bitdefender’s approach – you can’t specify custom folders to protect – but it’s reassuring to know it’s watching for ransomware-type activity. If you’re looking for more features to play with, the Avira front-end offers a selection of add-on tools to download, including a password manager, a VPN, a software updater and a performance tune-up tool. Don’t feel too special, though: these are just freebies that anyone can download from…

PRICE 1yr 5 devices, £13 (£15 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291fsc F-Secure Safe starts strong, with one of this month’s highest protection rates. It’s a gnat’s hair behind the front runners, with an unrounded score of 99.98%, but that’s good enough for us to put our trust in. And while its false-positive rate might seem unremarkable, it’s a huge step forward from last year, when F-Secure Safe wrongly flagged up over four times as many innocuous items as any rival suite. It’s still not the best in the business, but we’re very happy about the direction of travel. On the features front, Safe is quite modestly equipped. It relies on the Windows firewall, rather than its own, and lacks supplementary tools such as software updaters and performance enhancers. There’s also no…

PRICE 1yr 5 devices, £16 (£19 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291nor Norton Security remains almost exactly as it was last year. This means that the Standard and Deluxe editions are still weirdly identical: the only difference is that the Standard package is for a single device, while a Deluxe subscription covers up to five. There’s also a Premium edition for up to ten devices, which adds parental controls and a cloud backup service with 25GB of included storage. That leaves the regular versions with real-time and on-demand scanning, plus a firewall and browserbased protection. On that note, one thing that’s changed in the past 12 months is that the old Norton toolbar has finally been ditched, and replaced by native browser extensions for Norton’s Safe Web and Identity Safe (that is,…

PRICE £192 exc VAT from ebuyer.com You can pay a lot for a high-end desktop scanner – but if your needs are more modest then Epson’s WorkForce DS-1660W could be the perfect fit. It features a 25ppm ADF, an A4 flatbed, and it connects via both USB and Wi-Fi. And it costs very little indeed The thing itself is likeably petite. It won’t take up much desk space, and the lid simply lifts up for scanning books and magazines. It also contains an NFC chip, allowing Android users to get a quick scan with a simple tap. The software bundle is lightweight, extending only to the basic Scan 2 utility and Document Capture Pro app. We found the scanner easy to install, though: the hardware was recognised as soon as…

PRICE Diskless, £863 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Measuring just 12in from front to rear, the RackStation RS1219+ is the first short-depth eight-bay NAS appliance on the market. It’s great for SMBs seeking a lot of storage in a small space, as it will slot neatly into a small wall or two-post rack cabinet – yet its eight LFF hot-swap bays can deliver a huge 112TB of capacity using certified 14TB drives. If that’s somehow not enough, you can even add a four-bay RX418 shelf, which is again only 12.8in deep. Round the back you’ll find four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and an internal PCI-Express slot supports either a standard 10GbE adapter or Synology’s M2D17 dual M.2 SSD cache card. Dual USB 3 sockets allow local connections too. Internally, it’s a bit…

@userfriendlypc I bet you wish your machine was faster. Most of our clients say their machines are no longer perky, complaining startup drags on for minutes, or that several aeons will elapse before their browser renders Facebook into coherence. But the comments that really concern me are from customers who believe that, at three years old, the whole machine is probably ready for the bin. Discarded because it’s slow. Not broken, just slow. People march on Whitehall in protest at paying five pence for a supermarket carrier, but barely blink ditching a sluggish laptop into a skip. My mission is to re-educate, reuse and revitalise, but first I’ll need help from Microsoft, as Windows 10 has developed a weight problem. It’s gone a bit “Vista”, and the real-world effects of…

Background and analysis on all the important news stories PROPOSED CHANGES TO the way Google licenses Android in Europe could actually end up doing the company more good than harm. Following its £3.8 billion EU fine for insisting phone manufacturers included all of its apps, Google has proposed a remedy that would make it possible for handset manufacturers to exclude some apps and even work on forks of the Android OS. However, faced with the potential of losing both the advertising and data revenue from its search and Chrome features, the company plans to start charging a licence fee for several products. A source close to the Google competition case told PC Pro that the proposed settlement was nothing more than Google “thumbing its nose at the EU”. In the…

BACKGROUND INFO ON INNOVATIVE BRITISH COMPANIES The phrase “British television manufacturer” sounds like an anachronism, not heard since the days of Ceefax and Frank Bough. Indeed, when I saw a press release trumpeting Cello as a British television manufacturer, my first instinct was to hunt for the catch. It surely just ships the TVs over from the Far East and puts a British manual in the box? Not so. With somewhere in the region of 100 staff beavering away at the company’s factory in Bishop Auckland, Cello is every bit the manufacturer, the last of its type in this country. It’s not a hardy survivor from the days of cathode tubes, either, but a company set up to capitalise on the flat screen boom and now smart TVs. It might…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She prefers natural stupidity to artificial intelligence. @njkobie Amazon built an AI system to sift through CVs, and it turned out not to like women – a fact that doesn’t so much highlight algorithmic bias as it does reveal the stupidity of much of the AI that’s already in use. In 2014, Amazon started investigating ways to automate its hiring. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those,” a source told Reuters, which uncovered the project. Within a year, it was clear the system was discounting women as candidates for technical jobs, such as software development roles. Unable to fix it, the company scrapped…

“Google+ is a great site and has many followers and it’s not nefarious like Facebook. I don’t think G+ will shut down – I’ve heard from a reliable source that it won’t”Ken Pudsey “People signed up and didn’t engage, so they didn’t get a lot of feedback and thought it was a ghost town. Didn’t occur to them that it might be down to the way they were using G+. Yes, I’m talking about you, journalists”Garry Knight “I was and still am a Google+ user. Its Communities and Collections made it stand out. I’ll be transitioning to Steemit”Patrick Hutton “I had high hopes but it felt as if Google had given up immediately after its launch; it then slowly died”David Ward It seems that many people will miss Google+, including…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we would recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p16, updated each month. Labs Winner Each month we run a group test, or Labs. This product has managed to beat all others to top position. The pcpro.link Throughout the magazine you’ll see pcpro.link shortcuts. Enter these into the address bar of your browser and it will take you to a particular page, which will either be too long or awkward for us to publish or will take you to the precise shop from which to buy. If it’s Amazon, note that we have an affiliate deal in place so we will receive…

PRICE £1,542 (£1,850 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Big. Brassy. Breakneck speed. Those are the words I’d reach for if someone asked me to describe the Chillblast Fusion Hero Gaming PC (and, for some reason, restricted me to words beginning with B). And it really is big. It towers over the Scan opposite, while its angular black and white design is only outshone by the light show Chillblast provides by default: switch this PC on and you’re hurtled back to the disco days, with a strip light up the front, an LED-lit fan at the rear and even the edges of the Corsair RAM pulsating with coloured light. Naturally you can customise these as you wish – turn them all white and the Fusion becomes almost classy – and we shouldn’t…

PRICE £1,000 (£1,200 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Casting my mind back through 20 years of reviewing laptops, I can’t remember a single business laptop with an AMD processor inside. For HP to supply an EliteBook with a Ryzen chip is a landmark worth noting. It’s using the AMD Ryzen Pro platform, which provides all the benefits of a Ryzen 7 processor along with a security co-processor that runs AMD’s GuardMI tech. This promises memory encryption, secure boot processes and support for TPM 2. AMD also guarantees image stability over 18 months and two-year availability for processors, so you can roll out a fleet over a period of many months. The 745 G5 is straight out of HP’s EliteBook playbook, but that’s no bad thing. A sleek magnesium alloy chassis sets…

PRICE £117 (£140 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291plus Like the original Echo Plus, the 2018 remix wants to be the centre of your connected household. As before, its chief weapon is a built-in smart home hub, but this second iteration offers superior sound quality. Amazon has also eschewed the metallic cylindrical looks of last year’s Plus, imitating instead the fabric-covered tin of beans chic of the second-generation Echo. The change comes with one casualty: you can’t twist the top of the speaker to adjust the volume. The big circular status LED is still there, but the physical buttons on top are the only way to alter the volume without raising your voice. Sound familiar? It should: put the Echo Plus side by side with a second-generation Echo and you may struggle…

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 64GB, £616 (£739 inc VAT) from store.google.com Google wants you to think that the Pixel 3 is the Android smartphone. Faster. Prettier. And the best smartphone camera around. Although, as is becoming the norm, the Pixel 3 isn’t one phone but two: the 5.5in Pixel 3 looks positively tiny next to the 6.3in Pixel 3 XL (see p72). There’s one other difference, too: the plain Pixel 3 doesn’t include a notch. Instead, the Pixel 3’s all-screen frontage looks more like the Galaxy S9, with forehead and chin bezels sitting above and below the display, surrounding the pair of front-facing speakers. Flip the phone over, and you’re treated to a similar-looking mash-up of matte and glossy glass. The solitary rear camera has also shifted slightly to the left, and the…

PRICE £72 (£87 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291adobe Just as you can rely on the Christmas decorations arriving in the supermarkets every October, so too can you can count on a new release of Photoshop Elements. Adobe adds a scattering of features every autumn to justify a fresh version, but in an era when tablet and phone apps are becoming more sophisticated, and enthusiast-grade editors are getting cheaper, it becomes harder to justify Photoshop Elements’ existence. That said, it’s easy to forget how much editing power lies beneath the software’s consumer-friendly surface. Plunge the software into Expert mode and you’ll find many of the power features that are in full-fat Photoshop. So what’s new? Most of the fresh features come in the form of Guided Edits, where Elements takes you step…

Each of the 14 security products on test this month gets a star rating out of five. This partly reflects how practical and user-friendly its feature set is, and value for money is taken into account, too. Clearly, though, the most important question is how effective each package is at protecting you from viruses – plus, how susceptible it is to false positives, and how it impacts the responsiveness of your PC. Here we’ve turned to not one but two of the most respected antivirus testing organisations in the business: AV-Comparatives.org in Innsbruck, and Magdeburg-based AV-Test.org. Both labs carry out extensive independent testing of a wide range of security products, and publish protection scores, false-positive rates and performance rankings for a variety of real-world tasks. The figures we cite on…

PRICE 1yr 3 devices, £8 (£10 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291mca Founded way back in 1987, McAfee is one of the best-known names in computer security. Its reputation hasn’t always been enviable, though, with a string of recent last-place performances in our annual security suite reviews. This time around, though, things are different. Around 18 months ago, McAfee was officially spun off into an independent company by former owner Intel – and the change appears to have had a salutary effect on the company. Believe it or not, in just a year, it’s rocketed from the bottom of the malware-detection table to the top. So remarkable is McAfee’s rise that we’d be tempted to put it down to a statistical blip, but the results were confirmed across several months by two…

PRICE 1yr unlimited devices, £19 (£23 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291avg Avast acquired AVG in 2016 and the two suites have been gradually growing together. The latest release of AVG Internet Security looks and feels eerily similar to Avast, and it comes with several of the same features, including the same secure browser – complete with integrated video downloader – and the same Do Not Disturb feature. But it’s not quite a carbon copy. For instance, Avast’s “hardened” whitelist mode isn’t an option here. Also, in place of Avast’s safe browsing plugin, AVG comes with something called SafePrice, which pops up adverts and special offers when you visit shopping sites. It’s not exactly sneaky – the alerts are in your face – but it doesn’t belong in a piece of security…

PRICE 1yr 3 devices, £8 (£10 inc VAT) from pcpro.co.uk/291bull BullGuard’s latest Internet Security package looks a lot like the 2018 release. The only difference is that the interface has been stretched to include new buttons for identity protection options and the home network scanner – but you’ll have to pay an extra £20 for these as they’re only included in BullGuard’s Premium Protection suite. As it stands, BullGuard Internet Security comes with a reasonable set of features. As well as real-time virus detection, the suite includes its own firewall, plus a safe browsing component to steer you away from dodgy links on Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook. The parental control module is sophisticated, letting you block websites by category for specific accounts, set time limits on internet and computer…

PRICE 1yr 3 devices, £38 (£45 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291gda GData’s security software uses two scanning engines – one developed in-house, the other licensed from Bitdefender. That may sound reassuring, but since Bitdefender regularly achieves perfect 100% malware protection scores on its own, it strikes us as unnecessary. That’s especially so when you look at the impact it has on system responsiveness. AV-Comparatives hasn’t tested G Data lately, but AV-Test found that the current version slowed down web browsing by 29% on a standard PC, and delayed application launch by 13%. You can tweak the settings so that only one engine is used for real-time scanning – but there’s no transparency into which one will be left running. The suite does have a few distinctive features. One is a backup…

PRICE 1yr 3 PCs, £25 (£30 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291tre The first thing you see on installing Trend Micro Internet Security is a prompt asking you which folders you want to be monitored and protected from ransomware. It’s a strong, proactive introduction that provides reassurance from the start. Its main interface is divided into four sections. The first is “Device”: here you can configure your scanning and web-filtering options and set up Trend Micro’s silent-running “Mute mode”. This works in an unusual way: you have to activate it manually, but you can then optionally suspend Windows Update, and even nominate specific processes that should be automatically terminated. Next is the Privacy section, which includes some interesting features: the suite can check your settings on various social networks, and warn if…

PRICE £533 exc VAT from ebuyer.com The Fujitsu fi-7160 is a standalone USB scanner with no network capabilities, but it’s still very much a business-class bit of kit. The company’s PaperStream IP software is designed to streamline large scanning jobs, and the scanner itself boasts an 80-page ADF and a generous 4,000-page daily duty cycle. It won’t keep you waiting around either, thanks to a claimed top speed of 60ppm for 300dpi colour scans (it’s actually higher). For peace of mind when important documents are whizzing through the scanner, Fujitsu’s intelligent Sonic Paper Protection (iSOP) hardware promises to make damaging jams a thing of the past. The fi-7160 doesn’t have much in the way of physical controls, but there’s a small LCD panel and control pad on the front panel,…

PRICE £134 exc VAT from amazon.co.uk A wireless network should grow with your needs, and Zyxel’s NWA1123-AC HD makes a great starting point. This 802.11ac wireless AP can operate in standalone mode, link up with a Windows app for local management, or move into the cloud for free via Zyxel’s Nebula platform. The hardware offers all the capabilities an evolving business demands. There’s support for concurrent 2.4GHz and 5GHz operations, with built-in immunity to 3G/4G interference, and MUMIMO technology to increase the number of lanes on your wireless highway, helping the AP to support a large userbase. Inside, there are two 2.4GHz and three 5GHz internal aerials; at the rear, you’ll find a standard Gigabit Ethernet port, plus a PoE+-enabled connector. We recommend you connect this to an 802.3at PoE+…

@jonhoneyball It’s been a very bitty month. Lots of little things going right, and quite a few going wrong with my tech. Let’s start with a tablet theme. In a way that will doubtless get friends rolling their eyes and saying “Oh Jon…”, I managed to lose my 12in iPad Pro. It was somewhere, but I wasn’t quite sure where. The problem with the iPad, as with other tablets, is that its form factor means it’s very easy to lose in a pile of magazines. And there it was, tucked into a pile of Octane and Evo back issues waiting to be read. I fired it up only to discover it was now a long way out of date. Upgrading it to iOS 12 required pushing the update in via…

@happygeek Back in 2016, Twitter decided to phase out the sensible option of seeing your timeline (and there’s a big clue right there) in chronological order. Instead, Twitter decided we’d all rather be presented with an algorithmically curated version of that timeline. A version that shows the stuff Twitter thinks you’d like to see: stuff like “top-ranked” tweets, even if they’re way older than others, and retweets from people you don’t follow, while hiding tweets from those you do. By 2017 the option to opt out of this relevance-model-driven idiocy had, in any real meaning of the phrase, vanished. Nor is this curation obsession limited to Twitter: Facebook has been cursed with the same disease for years now. Here’s the thing, though: while these relevance algorithms like to think they’re…

Whether you’re a Remainer or voted to leave, you can’t ignore the problems Brexit raises for the Irish border. It’s a political predicament with no obvious solution, but that hasn’t stopped Chancellor Philip Hammond from spewing tech buzzwords. “There is technology becoming available” that could help, he told the Conservative Party conference. “I don’t claim to be an expert on it, but the most obvious technology is blockchain.” I had to check there wasn’t a new series of The Thick of It. Hammond isn’t the first to be convinced by the seemingly limitless promise of blockchain. The digital ledger at the heart of Bitcoin has been tossed around as the solution to bullying (yes, really, via US politician Mark Cuban), a way to secure e-voting, and even to track sexual…

On sale 6 December 2018 LABS Beat the smartphone swindle We test over 20 phones so that you can buy with confidence 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 Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES Last-minutegifts fortechies Still searching for ideas, for yourself or the people you love? Then you know where to look. AR glasses that transform theatre The smart glasses that add captions to on-stage action. Coming to a theatre near you? How to quit social media in 2019 It’s not too difficult to quit a social network, but how do you avoid FOMO pulling you back?…

▶ Huawei Mate 20 X Huawei is attacking the high-end phone market with a new phablet-cum-games console. Huawei is pitching the handset as a rival to Nintendo’s Switch, with its own gamepad and controllers. The 7.2in 1080p screen offers plenty of space for gaming, movie watching or ebook reading. There’s also the same three-camera system as found in the Huawei Mate 20 Pro (see p68) and a sizeable 5,000mAh battery to keep all of this powered. Huawei claims it’s the first smartphone to use graphene as a cooling material, which should allow the handset to run at full-throttle for longer periods with fewer overheating or performance issues. The only problem? Initially, the president of Huawei Europe told us in a private briefing, it will only be released in China. KEY…

It’s starting to become a habit. After blue-screen bugs halted the release of the Spring Update to Windows 10 earlier this year, the Fall Update quickly became the Fail Update. Reports of widespread user file deletion forced Microsoft to yank the update and send it back for repairs. But with “tens of millions” of Insiders testing Windows releases and one of the biggest QA departments in the software industry, why does Windows keep breaking? Broken or unstable updates aren’t confined to Windows, of course, with experts warning the latest case highlights a weakness that spans the entire industry. “Nowadays, software development teams typically follow an agile development model in which new software versions are released on a frequent basis,” said Cristian Cadar, who leads the Software Reliability Group at Imperial…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology Darien Graham-Smith is PCPro’s associate editor. His motto is “a penny saved is a penny towards the next electronic gadget”. @dariengs I spent last month’s column bashing Google. Then, having dispensed my 950 words of vitriol, I naturally went straight back to using it. Google Search has its detractors, but it’s the one I know – and the one that knows me. However loose my search terms, it somehow always manages to intuit what I’m looking for. Except in one scenario, that is. You won’t be amazed to learn that I do an increasing amount of shopping online – not just for groceries and such, but for clothes, computer parts, musical instruments and all the other things…

Most people encounter turning points in their lives, and one of the earliest in mine came while deciding to apply for university: I loved both chemistry and maths, and had the A-level results to study either. I could have become a mathematician, but the lure of smells and bangs was too strong. However, I’ve never lost my love of maths, especially number theory, and I still do some for fun from time to time. In the 1960s, I spent months playing at topology, in particular notations for classifying knots. More recently, I wanted to hear what the prime numbers sound like, which led me into a computer music composition project. A subject of fascination for me has always been irrational numbers. These are numbers that can’t be expressed as fractions…

The biggest, best, most exciting products in tech – tested, evaluated and reviewed PRICE As reviewed, £958 (£1,149 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/uk How do you approach the sixth iteration of a hugely popular product? If anyone should know, it’s Microsoft: just look at how successfully it’s brought incremental improvements to Office. But, if you’re expecting a Ribbon-style revolution, prepare to be disappointed. This is more Office 2003 to Office 2007, with incremental improvements the order of the day. On the surface, if you’ll forgive the double meaning, the only real change is an additional colour option. Black is back, and this time it’s a stylish matte finish that will turn heads. Minor internal improvements have been made, too, including an important update to the processor family – but more on…

PRICE £500 (£600 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Intel’s Core i9-9900K is ostensibly aimed at gamers – but its appeal ought to be much wider than that. It’s one of only two mainstream Intel chips to include a full eight physical cores (the other one being the new Core i7-9700K), and it also delivers the highest clock speeds yet, with an insane maximum single-core turbo speed of 5GHz. This is a chip that will tear through productivity tasks just as happily as shoot-em-ups. It’s a lot easier to accommodate than Intel’s enthusiast-class X-series chips, too. It will fit in the same LGA 1151 socket as last year’s Coffee Lake processors, with most Z370 motherboards just needing a BIOS update to support it. And it features the same integrated HD Graphics 630…

PRICE £1,333 (£1,600 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk If there’s one thing you can take from comparing the Scan 3XS Gamer RTX with the Chillblast Fusion Hero Gaming PC opposite, it’s this: right now, AMD is killing Intel for value. Aside from the processor and motherboard, the two systems have so much in common they could be mistaken for twins (although, I admit, not in a visual sense). They both use Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 2070 graphics; they both have 16GB of fast DDR4 RAM; they both use water-cooling to keep the system temperature under control and allow for overclocking; and they both use a combination of PCIe SSD and hard disk to provide the best combination of load speed and capacious storage. When it comes to benchmarks that take advantage of…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com There are two ways of looking at the new ZenBook S series: a thoroughly modern laptop that makes a bold design statement, or a piece of bling that would make Donald Trump recoil and say “very gold, too much gold, not good”. It comes in two colours, with Asus sending me the rich burgundy finish rather than the alternative “deep blue”. The inside is beautiful, with an understated matte finish that excudes class. Don’t be alarmed when I say the keys are backlit in gold rather than plain white: it’s actually a subtle effect that adds to the style, not to the sense of bling. If only I could say the same about the lid. Asus abandons all sense of subtlety here, with…

PRICE £183 (£220 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/291show The Amazon Echo Show was my all-time favourite Echo speaker, so I had high hopes for this second-generation refresh. With a slick new design, sharper 10in screen, better speakers and a fistful of extra smart features, it was surely set to steal my heart. Except it didn’t. The screen dominates, with Amazon sensibly moving the speaker from below the screen to the rear of the unit. The new Echo Show has a slightly bigger footprint than its predecessor, but it’s actually a little shorter than the original. It hasn’t lost its gawkiness, though. The thick bezel above the screen gives it a lopsided look, but it’s there for a reason: it houses not only a five-megapixel camera but also part of the Show’s…

PRICE £749 (£899 inc VAT) from carphonewarehouse.co.uk The Huawei Mate 20 Pro comes agonisingly close to being the best Android phone, bar none. That’s saying something when you look at the competition, with this month alone seeing the release of the Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL (see p70 and p72). So what lifts it from the pack? One, its camera, which is truly magnificent. Two, its combination of power and battery life. It’s the fastest Android phone out there and almost matches the OnePlus 6 for stamina. ■ Built for speed That speed comes courtesy of Huawei’s own silicon. While most smartphone makers use Snapdragon 845 chips in their flagship phones, the giant Chinese company can use its own-designed chipset called the Kirin 980. Huawei made bold claims…

PRICE 64GB, £724 (£869 inc VAT) from store.google.com The Google Pixel 3 XL is the big brother to the Pixel 3 (see p70). It has a larger 6.3in display with a resolution of 1,440 x 2,960, but in most other respects it’s identical: same 12.2-megapixel camera, same Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and it looks almost identical, too. The rear is still divided into matte and glass portions, with the top glossy part surrounding the single camera and flash, while the bottom matte part offers more grip that you would normally get from a glass-backed phone. Look closely, though, and you’ll see that both parts are now seamlessly joined; in fact, the rear panel is all one piece of glass. At the front, the 6.3in display has a rather unsightly notch…

PRICE 1yr 3 devices, £21 (£25 inc VAT) from bitdefender.co.uk The 2019 release of Bitdefender Internet Security ditches the old grey-on-black interface in favour of a smarter, brighter look – and the layout has been rejigged, too. Previously, many of the suite’s options and settings were hidden away behind layers of tabs and links. Now everything is flatter, with many more buttons at the front of the interface. This puts the full potential of the program at your fingertips, but less technical users might find it a bit overwhelming. Still, there’s little need to regularly engage with the interface, because Bitdefender retains its beginnerfriendly “Autopilot” feature. Yet this isn’t quite what it used to be: in older versions, this setting instructed the suite to detect and block threats without any…

PRICE Free from pandasecurity.com Last year we named Panda Free Antivirus our favourite free security suite, but lamented the impenetrable interface, with its controls and links dotted all over the place. So we’re pleased to see that Panda has now refreshed the front end with a much more easily graspable arrangement of buttons. As is usual with free antivirus tools, the feature set isn’t huge, but the core functions are all here, starting with on-demand scans. Be aware, a speedy scanner this is not: select a full scan and you’re warned that it will take several hours to complete. Even a “quick” scan churns through the entire Windows directory, which in my case took just under five minutes. Happily, that’s not something you’ll need to do often, since the package…

PRICE 1yr 3 devices, £42 (£50 inc VAT) from eset.com Fifty quid per annum is, in the grand scheme of things, not a lot of money to pay for online security. But when you can get highly effective alternatives for no money at all, it’s a bit of an ask – and unlike many other security packages, Eset Internet Security isn’t offered more cheaply through online retailers. So the question has to be what this suite does to justify the cost. Unfortunately, Eset hasn’t blown us away with its effectiveness in recent years. In our last Labs, Eset ranked joint fifth in the malware detection stakes, and this time it’s slipped to the bottom of the table, with last-place protection rates of 98.4% and 99.8% in AV-Comparatives’ most recent zero-day…

PRICE Free If you’re running the latest version of Windows 10, you may have noticed that Microsoft’s built-in antivirus agent is no longer an app in its own right. Virus protection is now just one part of the Windows Defender Security Center, along with device and network security, parental controls and system health reports. This makes sense in the larger context of system maintenance, but it’s a bit odd if you’re used to thinking of security suites as standalone applications. That’s not all that’s changed: the Defender component has gained a new anti-ransomware capability. A toggle enables “controlled folder access”, which blocks unrecognised apps from writing to specified folders. It’s a positive step, but it’s switched off by default, and I think I know why: whitelisting apps is a real…

It’s taken about 30 years, but the security software market is starting to feel pretty grown-up. Gone are the days when choosing the wrong suite meant you’d be left with a PC that was achingly slow, infested with incessant pop-ups and riddled with undetected viruses. Today, no matter which software you land on, you can be confident that it won’t slow your system down too much – and even the worst performer can be expected to protect you against 99% of infections. Does this mean that computer security is a solved problem? I doubt it. Yes, it’s encouraging to see such excellent detection rates across the board: it suggests that the bad guys are struggling to find new vulnerabilities to exploit. But whenever antivirus researchers seem to be gaining the…

PRICE £455 exc VAT from ebuyer.com It may look like a converted fax machine, but the Brother ADS-3600W is a thoroughly modern scanner. With a fast 50ppm scan speed in both colour and mono and a 50-page ADF, it will help you clear out your filing cabinets in double-quick time – and, at £455, it’s reasonably priced, too. You can take your pick of connection options: there’s USB 3 for standalone use, but both Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi are also supported, along with NFC tap-to-scan operations for iOS and Android. Its 9.3cm colour touchscreen makes it a breeze to explore its features, and it takes just a few taps to fire off a fast scan directly to a network or cloud location. When we say fast, we mean it.…

PRICE £775 exc VAT from uk.insight.com If you feel the need for scanning speed, the DocuMate 6460 from Xerox could be the answer, as this deceptively compact desktop scanner claims a fast performance of 70ppm. It can do this for colour and mono scans at 200dpi with speed only dropping slightly to 65ppm at 300dpi. The 6460 can also take some punishment, with Xerox quoting a massive duty cycle of 10,000 pages per day. It’s also great for big scan jobs because its ADF can handle up to 120 pages of 80gsm paper. The scanner’s raked paper input tray offers a flatter path than most other upright desktop scanners, making it a better choice for scanning thicker media such as A4 photos. Moreover, the input tray has latches for setting…

@PaulOckenden A throwaway comment at the end of my column in issue 286 seemed to spark interest from several readers. I mentioned that I’d been using an Orange Pi Zero to monitor my boiler. I’d assumed I was the only nerd who likes to plot graphs of flow and return temperatures to optimise their heating system, but it turns out I’m not alone. A few of you asked for more details, so I thought I’d write a bit about my setup and the various forms of monitoring that I use. Don’t glaze over if you have no interest in heating efficiencies, as this has all kinds of other applications. Home automation has many overlaps with industrial control and monitoring – it just operates at a much lower price point! Exactly…

@stardotpro “Hi Steve, it’s Brenda.” It sounded like a perfectly normal voicemail message. “You might not remember me, I work at…”. I hate voicemail. If you travel around and trigger roaming on your phone, it can take days for voicemails to catch up with you - and even longer for deletions of voicemails to be correctly represented. One might be excused from feeling a little frustrated that this is still an issue as we head into 2019, but that wasn’t my concern at this stage. My concern was that everybody I talk to knows not to leave me voicemails, so why was the mysterious Brenda calling me? The last time we had talked was back in 2007. Brenda is the office manager of a small industry association I’d helped to…

RECHARGING DEVICES IS a pain, sending us searching for a charging point to keep our smartwatches, smartphones and other gadgets alive. But scientists at the University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute may have an answer: us. Our own movement could be harvested for power using triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), tiny energy-grabbing devices that use contact between two different materials to produce current. Once the kinks are worked out, TENGs could be built into wearables to capture energy every time you lift your wrist to check the time, or embedded in smart, Internet of Things sensors to nab power from the wind or waves. Not only would that end the hunt for a battery pack or charging point, but it would be free, renewable and sustainable energy. Ishara Dharmasena is a PhD…

Oh dear. Poor old Microsoft released its Windows Update in October and it caused considerable upset. You know there are problems when a company as big as Microsoft pulls an update from its site, and tries to reissue it later on. I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, bugs will get through testing. It doesn’t matter how much testing you do, there will be combinations that unexpectedly cause significant issues. You hope that your testing regime is thorough enough to have caught every conceivable outcome, but you can never be sure. On the other hand, I’m annoyed by this update failure for several reasons. First, it deleted users’ data from their computers. Now I could sit here and waffle on that all machines should be seen as…