Table of contents for September 2024 in PC Pro

It’s the morning on which we send the magazine to press, the 360th such morning this monthly magazine has enjoyed. You would think it gets easier. Smooth, even. But I can tell you with so much honesty it would make a judge weep, that every issue I’ve ever been involved with stumbles over the line, leaving me a mumbling wreck in its wake. I like to think that it’s because this is a cutting-edge technology magazine, one that includes the latest releases, so we must do it this way. And there’s an element of truth in this: we do our very utmost to review the latest products in the magazine, even if that means making our production editor Steve pore over stats and words minutes before we’re due to send…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro and quite satisfied with his slice of the π. He has indeed been writing for the magazine since its beginning in 1994. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk Astute readers <aside class= “smarm”> which of course to me means all of you </aside> will have noticed that this is the 30th anniversary issue of PC Pro, and since this is a monthly magazine, and since there are 12 months in a year, and since this is my 360th opinion column, the corollary is that I’ve been writing here since the beginning. I use the word “corollary” there because it suggests a mathematical proof, and that is a ham-fisted way of introducing my theme for this month, which is mathematics. 360 is a special number not simply…

CrowdStrike crisis I get that CrowdStrike should test its releases better. What few people seem to be asking is how companies such as airline services and Sky News, where Windows machines working is mission-critical, managed to update all their machines without doing their own testing first. How much did this cost in operational and reputational damage? How much would it cost to install the patch on a couple of machines and test it for a couple of hours? It’s as interesting to see the companies that weren’t caught out as the ones that were. I work for banks. The ones I’ve been at always test operating system patches. It should not be routine to install any external software on business-critical systems. One of the industries affected were the airports. These…

The Human Rights Act 1988 stipulates that “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”. That means the government and state agencies can’t spy on your personal communications – at least, not without a court order. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop hackers and cybercriminals (or some governments). And the truth is that many of our communications are transmitted and stored insecurely. A malicious actor could intercept your messages in transit, or access them while they’re sitting on a provider’s servers – and then leak your personal information, forge messages using your identity or even blackmail you. You can reduce the risk by using a secure messaging platform. The problem is that there are several options to choose from. To an extent your…

When you first install ChromeOS Flex you’ll see the option of signing into a managed Workspace account; alternatively, you can switch later by selecting “Add person” from the login screen. This makes ChromeOS Flex a great option for small businesses on tight budgets, giving them a free and easy way to recycle old laptops into perfectly usable employee computers, with low overheads for support and security. However, it’s important to know that devices running a standard ChromeOS Flex installation can’t be remotely managed from the Google Workspace Admin console. To add this capability you’ll need the Chrome Enterprise Upgrade; Google offers a 30-day free trial for up to 50 devices, after which it costs £40 per device per year. That’s not quite as price-competitive as free, but it’s still a…

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £1,416 (£1,699 inc VAT) from samsung.com The Book4 Edge is unique among Copilot+ PCs for one reason: its 16in screen. It’s odd that others concentrate on 14in and 15in designs, because if you need to get serious work done then every inch counts. And who doesn’t enjoy a big screen when watching films? I would say gaming as well, but as with all other laptops based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips the Book4 Edge isn’t a good choice for gamers. That’s reflected in its 29fps average in Dirt 5 and 33fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. And that was at 1200p with low settings. Those results are higher than rival Copilot+ PCs I’ve tested, however, thanks to Samsung choosing the top-end Snapdragon X1E-84-100 chip. Together with…

Framework sent me the DIY Edition of the Laptop 13, but anyone who regularly reads PC Pro will have no trouble putting it together. Framework even supplies its own versatile Framework Screwdriver – a combo crosshead/Torx T5 screwdriver and spludger – in the box. Don’t throw it away, as you’ll need it when the time comes to upgrade or remove items. STEP 1 Unpack everything! You get a lot of boxes in the box (two boxes in my case). The “barebones” chassis, a bezel cover, keyboard unit, the tool and your choice of expansion cards. You must select four cards, one of which will need to be USB-C to charge the device. Optionally, you can buy DDR5-5600 SODIMMs from Framework or use your own; likewise the M.2 2280 NVMe SSD.…

SCORE PRICE £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Most all-in-one PCs include 24in or 27in panels, but Acer is thinking big with the Aspire S32. This includes a 31.5in display, and the company doesn’t stop there: via a set of pogo pins at the rear, it bundles a veritable feast of add-ons. The first is a plain 1080p webcam, which is more than good enough to use for video calls. Second comes a 720p camera with a ring light: tap the top and it cycles from off to full-blast white. And the third is a strip light that switches between white, yellow or a mix of the two. All of the add-ons work via USB-C, too, so you can mix and match. Acer also bundles an enormous detachable touchpad. This…

Total value this month £ 132 SafeErase 17 Professional It’s tempting to think that deleting a file means it’s gone forever. But in reality, “deleted” data can hang around on your hard disk long after it’s supposedly been wiped. This happens because when you erase a file Windows simply marks it as deleted, rather than actually removing it from your disk. The assumption is that the disk space will be overwritten sooner or later – but until that happens, anyone with rudimentary data recovery tools can dive in and resurrect your deleted data. O&O SafeErase Professional ensures that the items you want to delete really do get wiped. After marking files as deleted, it immediately overwrites their disk space with zeros – or you can use more thorough (and time-consuming)…

Norton 360 Premium for £19.99 (10 devices for two years) ■ pcpro.link/norton360 We’ve negotiated a killer deal with Norton. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Security suite across ten devices. And because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. There’s 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, plus the full version of Norton Secure VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while abroad. Norton Parental Control provides tools to see exactly what your kids are up to on their various devices, and you also get GPS location monitoring for Android and iOS. To round things off, Norton Password Manager…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £399 (£479 inc VAT) from oneplus.com Low-cost smartphones are often pared-down versions of the manufacturer’s headline offering, but the OnePlus Nord 4 has its own distinctive character away from the OnePlus flagships. Its notable features include a big display and great battery life, but what really sets it apart from the crowd is a metal unibody design. It’s made of aluminium alloy, with the only glass – aside from the screen – to be found around the horizontally arranged rear camera lenses. It’s a bold look, although an IP65 rating means it’s not as waterproof as the IP67 protection offered by the Google Pixel 8a (see issue 358, p74). The phone comes in three colours and textures, or “Nordtones” as OnePlus brands them – the brushed Obsidian…

SCORE PRICE £136 (£163 inc VAT) from westerndigital.com After years of capacity stagnation at 5TB, Western Digital recently upped its top-capacity portable hard drives to 6TB. Here, I’m testing the 6TB My Passport, but the gaming-focused WD Black and more basic Essential line benefit from the same capacity bump. It comes with an increase in height, too, with the 6TB model measuring 20.6mm thick to the 5TB drive’s 19.2mm, suggesting a platter has been added to the drive inside. The drives come with a plastic shell that’s grey on the bottom, but with a top lid that’s available in white, red, blue or black if you choose the “normal” model. This ships with an 18-inch cable that’s USB-A on one end but USB Micro-B on the other. Yes, the 5Gbits/sec…

One of the most difficult tasks in a VPN Labs is to work out how good value each product is. You could spend hours comparing costs, as variables include not only the number of devices but also whether you buy monthly, annually or even on a three-year deal. And in most cases, you’ll then be hit by the dreaded renewal fee, often significantly higher than the first year’s charge that lured you in. We’ve done our very best to make it easier for you by splitting the costs in various ways in our feature table overleaf and in the graphs on p94. In particular, you can see at a glance which service offers the lowest cost per month – but note that this involves a substantial up-front investment. For those…

SCORE BEST DEAL 1yr $100 (£79) from expressvpn.com RENEWAL PRICE 1yr $100 (£79) ExpressVPN always performs astonishingly well in tests, but when choosing a VPN there are other factors you may wish to consider. And the challenge for ExpressVPN is that it has recently been dogged by dubious corporate decisions and, earlier this year, the revelation of a long-standing bug that exposed the split-tunnelled DNS requests of some Windows users. One controversy came from the company’s support of now-departed board member Daniel Gericke, found to have worked as a mercenary spy exposing journalists and activists who criticised the government of the UAE. This all happened ahead of a conveniently timed acquisition by Kape Technologies, so it’s up to you to decide if the corporate changes make any difference to your…

SCORE BEST DEAL £46 (£55 inc VAT) for 27 months from surfshark.com RENEWAL PRICE £39 (£47 inc VAT) Surfshark is reliably among the fastest VPN services we test, and it goes out of its way to ensure that international streaming services work. It has a credible track record for privacy, with regular third-party audits of its no-logging policy and RAMdisk servers so there’s no chance of stray data being left on a disk. However, Surfshark’s pricing is more convoluted than we’d like. Don’t subscribe monthly, because it costs £15 inc VAT per month, but its first-time subscriber one- and two-year offers are worth your time. You’ll pay £37 for your initial one-year sub, and get a bonus three months added to your subscription. A two-year sub is even better value…

As Google Chrome rolls out measures to prevent ad and tracker blockers such as uBlock Origin from working – Google is an advertising company, after all – more privacy-conscious internet users are turning to more secure browser choices. But how do they work and which should you choose? That’s what we aim to cover here. VPN in your browser As we cover in the reviews, many VPN providers also provide browser extensions, which may or may not require that you have the main app running in order to use them. While some VPN extensions simply provide a browser-based control system for your desktop VPN, most will only send traffic from the browser itself via the VPN network. Technically, a “VPN” that only reroutes traffic from your browser is, in fact,…

SCORE BEST DEAL First year, 10 devices, £58 (£70 inc VAT) from uk.norton.com RENEWAL PRICE 10 devices, £67 (£80 inc VAT) Most often bundled in security suites, Norton Secure VPN uses the VPN infrastructure of Norton subsidiary SurfEasy. This is a Canadian VPN firm, and it’s actually significantly cheaper to subscribe to it directly than Norton’s VPN tiers. Like most of Norton’s services, Secure VPN is priced competitively for the first year, but then the renewal price goes up. In some scenarios, by a lot. Also, don’t be lured in by its headline low cost of £1.67 per month, as that is for a single-device service at £20 including VAT for the first year. Five devices will cost you £30 and ten devices will set you back £70. Also be…

■ APK stands for Android Package Kit and allows users to install Android apps independently of the Google Play Store. ■ Kill switches protect you when a VPN connection disconnects. Essentially, if the VPN connection drops, the kill switch activates and blocks your device’s internet access. This prevents you from accidentally sending data outside of the secure VPN tunnel. ■ Port forwarding allows inbound access to a PC through the VPN’s IP address. It can be used to host networked games or access a home media service while you’re at work, and is also commonly used for torrent trackers. ■ RAMdisk servers store data (and the code necessary for the VPN to run) in RAM rather than SSDs or hard disks, so that if power is removed then all information…

SCORE PRICE £667 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com DrayTek’s Vigor 2927Lax-5G is an ideal appliance for small businesses that can’t tolerate any internet downtime as it offers an incredible range of WAN redundancy features. Along with an integral 5G LTE modem sporting dual SIM slots for primary and backup mobile network connections, it can use two of its seven gigabit ports for WAN connections, the USB-A 2 port accepts a 4G modem and all can be linked together for load-balancing or failover purposes. Redundancy features include the ability to deploy two routers in high availability mode. Sharing a virtual IP address, they can be set to hot-standby mode when sharing one internet connection or active-standby if each has its own link. The router also delivers integrated Wi-Fi 6 services. Its AX3000-rated…

SCORE PRICE £142 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com SMBs and home offices seeking an affordable all-in-one security router will find Zyxel’s USG Lite 60AX a worthy contender. This diminutive desktop unit teams up a Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP) with an integral multi-gigabit switch, and the price includes a lifetime subscription to Zyxel’s Security Cloud. This service includes a firewall, ransomware and malware prevention, VPN proxy, intrusion, dark web and ad blockers, application identification, GeoIP country restrictions, and mail fraud and phishing protection. The optional Elite Pack licence enables the Trellix-powered real-time threat intelligence and web category filtering services as well as a Nebula Pro Pack and costs £33 per year. The router is designed to be desk-mounted, with the small and flimsy base stand rotated round to keep it upright.…

Promoting your product or service is a serious business. Large organisations have whole departments dedicated to the task, staffed with marketing experts and following the latest trends on every social and advertising network. Many work with external creative agencies, and have the kind of budget that justifies a dedicated account manager at each outlet. For smaller businesses it’s a different story. In this sector you usually need to manage your own advertising spend, decide for yourself how to allocate it across diverse networks and different markets, and even design your own ads. Knowing where to direct your efforts can be confusing to begin with, and a little bit of trial and error when you’re starting out is inevitable. However, understanding how the various options compare and what they might cost…

Cybersecurity training is broken. Is it? Is it really, though? In line with the current trend to offer trigger warnings for almost everything, here’s yours. A highly uncontroversial difference of opinion will follow. If that doesn’t appal you, you’re one of my people, let’s get into this. So here goes: cybersecurity training is not, in fact, broken. It’s worse than that. For the statement “cybersecurity training is broken” to be true, it would mean that at some point in its short history that cybersecurity training had worked. I maintain throughout this article that the old-school traditional security training that we all know and loathe never worked. It was not then and is not now fit for purpose. I believe that businesses are wasting time and money. I think that the…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She would be very happy if ChatGPT could help reduce her energy bill. And her mortgage, while y’all are at it. @njkobie Generative AI is energy hungry. Training the ever-growing models requires more data centres – and more powerful ones at that. That means the AI arms race could have serious repercussions. Google has admitted that its emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years, pinning the blame on electricity consumption from data centres as well as its wider supply chain. As a result, its AI investments made it difficult to predict when it would reach net zero. Microsoft president Brad Smith now says the company’s own carbon-negative “moonshot” is unlikely to be reached any time soon, as “the moon has moved”…

Most of us have old computers knocking about that still work perfectly well, but which struggle with the latest versions of Windows and desktop applications. Google’s lightweight ChromeOS could give such systems a new lease of life: it’s designed to run snappily on low-power hardware, and it can’t be beaten for simplicity and security – which means it’s also an ideal choice if you’re setting up a computer for your kids, or donating one to your parents. And let’s be clear, this is no hack. When ChromeOS was first released it was exclusively available on Chromebook and Chromebox systems (remember them?), but 2022 saw the introduction of the ChromeOS Flex edition, which you can download for free and run on any Intel-based PC or Mac with Google’s blessing. The installation…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,791 (£2,149 inc VAT) from microsoft.com Microsoft has toyed with Arm-based laptops for years, starting with the Surface RT back in 2012 and more recently the Surface Pro X (see issue 328, p91). But those were toes in the water. With the launch of Copilot+ PCs, which need at least 40 TOPS of AI processing power, it’s jumped right in and declared that the water is divine, switching both its headline laptops to the Arm platform. We start with the Surface Laptop – fans of the Surface Pro should turn to p52 – as both its 13.8in and 15in models include Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips. The bigger version, which I tested, only ships with the 12-core Elite X1E-80-100, but the cheapest 13.8in Surface Laptop includes the…

SCORE PRICE £1,500 (£1,800 inc VAT) from lenovo.com While we’re still waiting for business-focused Copilot+ PCs from Dell, HP and Microsoft, Lenovo has rushed to the corporate buyer’s aid by producing a ThinkPad version. Not that it’s jumped in too aggressively, as for the moment you can only buy the precise specification on review here. Fortunately, it’s a very tempting mix. For £1,500 exc VAT, you get the 12-core Snapdragon X1E-80-100 chip, which sits second in Qualcomm’s pecking order behind the X1E-84-100 in the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge (see p53). A little surprisingly, Lenovo has chosen 32GB rather than 16GB to support it, with a 1TB SSD for storage. It’s a fast disk, too, hitting 6,191MB/sec sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark and 4,809MB/sec writes. Anyone who fears that this laptop won’t…

SCORE PRICE £1,042 (£1,250 inc VAT) from palicomp.co.uk/destiny-mag1 One of the most aggravating things about buying technology is that you can always go one further. Spend a little more, get a little more. And that’s exactly the case if you increase your budget from £1,000 to £1,250, with the Palicomp AMD Destiny offering a significant speed hike over the CyberPowerPC opposite. The vast majority of this is due to the presence of an RTX 4070 Super card rather than an RTX 4060. At retail, the 4070 Super costs around £600 compared to £300 for its lesser sibling, and it’s roughly twice as fast, too. 3DMark Time Spy is a great measure of this, with the Destiny scoring 18,932 versus 10,518 for the Infinity X145 Elite. In practice, I can simplify…

SCORE PRICE £1,417 (£1,700 inc VAT) from lenovo.com While HP’s Elite x360 2-in-1 opposite would wear a bowler hat if it could, the Yoga 9i is a free spirit. It wants you to make art not presentations, to view films not spreadsheets, to sit in cafés not end-of-quarter sales meetings. That’s not to say it can’t look serious – if anything, the slim, dark blue metal chassis could be a funkier colour – but it essentially screams entertainment. Let’s start with the 14in OLED panel. While it peaked at a modest 402cd/m2 in our SDR tests, its VESA TrueBlack 500 certification shows in punchy colours when watching films or playing games. It covers 119% of the DCI-P3 gamut and you can trust its colours, too, with an average Delta E…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk Motorola’s latest high-end flip-phone is competitively priced. At £1,000 inc VAT it costs the same as an iPhone 15 Pro, and more importantly £50 less than its direct rival, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip6 (see p73). So the question is: has anything been sacrificed? It’s certainly not style. In fact, I’d argue that the Razr 50 Ultra is the coolest phone you can buy. It comes in four colours that are as striking as the names Motorola gives them, namely Spring Green, Midnight Blue, Peach Fuzz and a Hot Pink that’s a throwback to 2005’s pink Razr V3. Everything about the design is thoughtful and slick, from the soft, suede-effect “vegan leather” (ie, plastic) back that shows off the paint job nicely, to…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £1,499 (£1,799 inc VAT) from samsung.com While flip phones are hardly cheap at around £1,000, fold-out handsets still command a premium. In the case of the Galaxy Z Fold6, that’s £1,799 for the base specification with 256GB and 12GB of RAM. This is a phone with plenty to justify. It certainly looks like a high-end device. The Silver Shadow, Pink and Navy finishes are all stylish, with purist black and white options also available direct from the Samsung website. I also like how it feels in the hand: Samsung has cut some of the heft from previous models, so the Z Fold6 now weighs about the same as an iPhone 14 Pro Max. The thickness has been shaved down, too, so when closed the Z Fold6 is…

SCORE PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Amazon’s original Echo Spot was discontinued in 2019, but it has been resurrected, with a new look and an updated feature set that expands on the first-generation design in some ways and streamlines it in others. The slanted design of the new Spot is clearly inspired by the Echo Pop (see issue 348, p63). However, while the front of the Pop is one big speaker, the top half of the Spot houses a colourful 2.8in LCD touchscreen, with a resolution of 240 x 230 pixels. That may not sound like a lot, but on a display this small it’s enough to ensure that text and icons look sharp. Below the screen sits a forward-facing 1.7in speaker; flip the Spot around and you’ll…

SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Monitors can have the fanciest features in the world, but ultimately there are four things that matter: image quality, resolution, connectivity and price. So while I’ll tell you up front that the AOC Q27B3CF2’s onscreen display is hard to navigate and its features are stripped back to a bare minimum, the key is that its 27in IPS panel delivers strong colours with accuracy, packs 2,560 x 1,440 pixels and includes a USB-C connector – all for £200. I say strong colours, but I don’t say a wide colour gamut: by modern standards 82% of the DCI-P3 colour space isn’t wide. However, I’d be very happy to use this as my everyday monitor because photos and videos still look great, and its colour…

First, let’s define what we mean by a VPN. A virtual private network is an encrypted connection from your device to a remote server. You may have encountered one in the workplace, allowing those working remotely to access an on-premises or cloud-based office network. But we’re looking at consumer VPN providers. These subscription-based services provide an encrypted tunnel for all your internet traffic and typically provide endpoint servers in scores of different locations, allowing you to virtually locate yourself in any of those places. Privacy is a major selling point for VPN services. Data going to and from your device through an encrypted link to a remote server can’t be inspected by your ISP or, typically, monitoring tools on a local network. Region shifting However, the most popular reason for…

SCORE BEST DEAL £78 (£94 inc VAT) for 27 months from nordvpn.com RENEWAL PRICE £66 (£79 inc VAT) Although it has been pipped to the Labs Winner award this month by its stablemate, Surfshark, NordVPN is one of the best all-purpose consumer VPN services around. Clients are available for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, with a command-line Linux client and direct downloads of Android APKs for use on de-Googled smartphones. And it doesn’t stop there, with browser plugins for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, plus instructions for connecting numerous other devices. NordVPN has really gone for it when it comes to adding extra features to its service, as reflected by the main interface of the Windows client. This shows the status of your VPN, Threat Protection and File Sharing modules, as…

SCORE BEST DEAL Free or $120 (£94) for 3yrs from tunnelbear.com RENEWAL PRICE $60 (£47) Based in Canada but owned by US consumer security firm McAfee, Tunnelbear is a stalwart of the VPN industry. It has a solid reputation, a long-standing no-logging policy and submits itself to regular third-party audits. It doesn’t, however, maintain a warrant canary or transparency report, which will be a deal-breaker for some, particularly as Canada is hardly a privacy safe haven. But for most consumer VPN users, Tunnelbear’s privacy measures will surely be sufficient. Graphical clients are available for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, with OpenVPN setup instructions for Ubuntu Linux, but no manual configuration instructions for other devices, including routers. That’s unusual for a VPN of this calibre. Browser extensions are available for Chrome,…

SCORE BEST DEAL £93 (£112 inc VAT) for 3yrs from avast.com RENEWAL PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) Unlike many antivirus-branded VPN services, Avast’s SecureLine VPN has its own network of endpoints, rather than being a white-label service with a famous brand pasted onto it. Avast’s Windows client isn’t much to look at. Its large window is dominated by an on/off switch, with other options hidden away in its settings menu. There’s a kill switch, enabled by default to ensure that you don’t leak data if your connection to SecureLine’s VPN network accidentally drops. Avast automatically selects the most effective protocol, but you can manually choose between WireGuard, OpenVPN and Avast’s obfuscated Mimic protocol. Only the Android app supports split tunnelling. The app is rather better looking than the Windows client,…

SCORE BEST DEAL £54 (£65 inc VAT) for 39 months from privateinternetaccess.com RENEWAL PRICE £27 (£32 inc VAT) Private Internet Access is one of the longest-established VPN services, with a track record for privacy that appears to be holding even after its 2019 acquisition by Kape Technologies. However, although its pricing remains attractive, its performance is among the worst in this group, continuing a years-long trend. PIA’s performance from its fastest UK endpoint – reliably the one dedicated to video streaming – was 65Mbits/sec. To the Netherlands, we got 51Mbits/sec and, always challenging, we saw just 18Mbits/sec from the US. That last transfer rate is a problem, as it isn’t really sufficient for modern video-heavy websites to respond snappily. PIA is pretty good at video streaming for a budget service,…

The consumer VPN industry is young compared to the rest of the online security world, and lacks the relatively staid reputation of many of its counterparts. So we get bombastic advertising claims, wildly irrelevant YouTube influencer and gaming sponsorships, and officially endorsed subreddits where users are allowed to speculate about which of a company’s rivals are secretly fronts for government agencies. This isn’t helped by some genuine controversies, from run-of-the-mill corporate acquisitions that have seen a single company own both multiple VPN firms and several publications that review them (Kape and J2 Global), to companies handing over logs they promised that they didn’t keep in the first place (PureVPN, IPVanish under previous ownership). This has led to a blame culture within the industry, with companies and their surprisingly partisan fans…

SCORE PRICE £461 exc VAT from firewalla.com Targeting small businesses and home workers, the Firewalla Gold Plus is a multi-gigabit smart firewall with a price tag that will make them sit up and take notice. For a mere £461, it presents four 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports for WAN and LAN connections and delivers an equally impressive range of network security measures. Using its pocket-sized aluminium case as a heatsink, the Gold Plus is powered by an elderly but capable 2GHz quad-core Intel Celeron J4125 CPU, which is partnered with 4GB of DDR4 memory and a 32GB SSD for internal storage. Its primary function is to sit between your internet router and network, but it also supports a bridged mode if you have a separate modem and ISP router. Installation is a…

SCORE PRICE £1,665 exc VAT from owllabs.co.uk The Meeting Owl products from Owl Labs have consistently been among the most innovative hybrid videoconferencing (VC) solutions on the market, and the Meeting Owl 4+ comes with even more appeal. Previously, the Owl Pro and Owl 3 (see issue 340, p98) offered a comparatively low 1080p resolution, but the Owl 4+ sports a new 64MP fish-eye camera that boosts video output to 4K Ultra HD. There’s more going on inside, as it gets a faster Snapdragon 8250 SoC – the same as used by the 4K Owl Bar. The extra power has been put to good use by the Owl Intelligence System (OIS) software as businesses can pair multiple Owl devices together to provide total in-room coverage. The Owl 4+ sports the…

The US government has decided to take terminal action against Kaspersky, that well-known supplier of antivirus and other related security software. The writing has been on the wall for a while: a few years ago, it banned use of Kaspersky software on government computers. But now it has issued a ruling that it can’t be sold at all to new customers after 20 July, and that it won’t be allowed to issue updates and antivirus signatures after midnight on 29 September 2024. Which means, of course, that its effectiveness as protection will quickly fade away because much of the risk comes from new and emerging malware. Existing customers won’t be banned from continuing to use the software after that date, but it would probably be unwise. Why has the USA…

I know it seems like I’m a one-trick pony right now, with that truck being authentication technology, but it’s such an important part of any security posturing that I’m in no mood to apologise for it. So, following on from last month when I covered recent moves to require email authentication in the form of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) by Google and others to crack down on spam and the malicious content it often leads to, I’m back on the authentication soapbox again. It would appear that some of the biggest names in tech are finally taking your security seriously without having to release a disclosure about how it was breached and your personal information compromised. The deprecation of the username and password login Google and Microsoft…

The allure of working for the big tech companies appears to be fading, with research showing growing disgruntlement with conditions inside the top firms. Big tech firms were once lauded for their huge salaries and tasty perks, such as in-house gourmet dining and pristine gyms. Staff were seemingly willing to accept the trade-offs of long working hours and high-stress environments. However, the pandemic driving everyone out of those well-equipped offices and back to their homes for extended periods seems to have prompted a widescale re-evaluation of what tech employees regard as important, with in-office perks dropping right down their list of desirables. Media analytics firm Commetric analysed the employee reviews of ten tech giants – including Google, Microsoft and Apple – sampling 500 reviews from each firm. The research found…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in (2023) M3 power from £1,699 from apple.com The M3 chips give the already brilliant MacBook Pro series a boost in games with no sacrifices elsewhere, so power users who are happy with Apple must grapple with the big decisions: which M3 chip, which size of screen, and how much RAM and storage? REVIEW Issue 352, p46 ALTERNATIVES Apple Mac Book Air13in (M3) Both the 13in and 15in MacBook Airs impress for speed, styling and battery life, but the 1.2kg 13in Air wins out of the two for its sheer portability. From £1,299 from apple.com REVIEW Issue 356, p54 Huawei MateBook X Pro (2024) Despite weighing just 980g, this laptop packs a 14.2in OLED panel, 2TB of storage and an 11-hour battery life, as well…

Barry Collins is sorry he didn’t look out for Colin as much as Colin looked out for him. Email barry@mediabc.co.uk @bazzacollins “Can you get Baz to have a look at mum’s broadband connection? She seems to be paying £70 a month for it.” So comes the request from my brother-in-law, who’s been going through his mum’s finances after the death of my father-in-law. Seventy quid a month? She can’t be. That bog-standard 30Mbits/sec connection that the kids complain about every time we visit? Even BT wouldn’t have the brass neck to charge £70 for that. A recent press release from Broadband Deals claims the UK’s average monthly broadband package costs £26.90, and their connection is very average. There must be some mistake. It turns out the only mistake was mine,…

They say a week is a long time in politics, but it is as nothing compared to three decades of technology. As we painstakingly compiled this list – whittling it down from a long list of over 150 notable events and product launches – it quickly became clear that everything has changed. When PC Pro launched, computers were boring blocks of beige; Apple was more of a laughing stock than an investment stock; and going online involved a stern warning to your family that they couldn’t make any calls for the next ten minutes. And phones, believe it or not, were indeed entirely used to make calls. Now, we appreciate that none of this will be news to you. But what we hope you find as fascinating as we did…

ChromeOS Flex is a capable operating system, but its lack of support for Android apps does hold it back. That applies particularly if you want to use Microsoft Office; since the native editions of Word, Excel and so forth can’t be installed on Flex, you’re limited to the more basic web equivalents. There is, however, a way to get a fully featured office suite onto your ChromeOS Flex computer. Although Flex doesn’t support Windows virtualisation, it can host a Debian-based Linux environment, into which you can install the free LibreOffice suite. You can also connect your OneDrive account to ChromeOS, to easily share files with other computers running Office – you’ll find the option in the Settings app, under System preferences. The Linux environment is disabled by default. To enable…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, without keyboard, £1,291 (£1,549 inc VAT) from microsoft.com Microsoft is making a decisive statement with its new 2-in-1. The 2024 Surface Pro (aka the 11th Edition) isn’t the first Surface to use an ARM processor, but with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips and more compatible apps than ever, it’s a mainstream rival to laptops with Intel and AMD’s x86 chips inside. It comes in two configurations. The first includes the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus processor and a regular LCD panel; that starts at £1,049 inc VAT, and includes 256GB of storage and 16GB of RAM. The second costs from £1,549, but you get a 512GB SSD, a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite chip and, for the first time in a Surface Pro, an OLED screen. It’s a 2,880…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,078 (£1,294 inc VAT) from frame.work Framework takes a different approach from most laptop makers, with an emphasis on repairability. It even adopts a modular approach to ports, so you can swap a USB-A port for an HDMI connector on the fly. As my guide to building a Framework opposite shows, however, this isn’t a DIY system in the same way that you might build a desktop PC. Framework supplies the chassis with the motherboard and display built in, so all you’re doing is adding the SSD, memory, keyboard, ports and bezel of your choosing. Install Windows or Linux, and the relevant drivers, and you’re done. Or you can buy a laptop preassembled and pre-loaded with Windows. There isn’t a huge difference in the price, but…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from tinyurl.com/360cyber Timing is everything when buying a gaming PC. You want to squeeze every last morsel out of your budget at the moment of purchase, and right now, CyberPowerPC is backing Intel’s mid-range Core i5-14400F processor due to its bang-per-penny: you have ten cores and 16 threads when you need them, but a single core can push up to 4.7GHz using Intel’s Max Turbo mode. A generous 32GB of DDR5 RAM means that memory will never be a bottleneck. The Intel chip’s main partner in crime is Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 graphics, which inevitably don’t have the numbers of the RTX 4070 Super in the Palicomp system opposite – their respective scores of 10,518 and 18,932 in 3DMark Time Spy underline the difference…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,400 (£1,680 inc VAT) from hp.com While Copilot+ PCs with Qualcomm Arm chips are gaining plenty of attention, there are compelling reasons to stick with the traditional approach. We await the killer app for AI on laptops, and Intel’s Core Ultra chips remain better all-rounders: the x86 architecture is still king on Windows and Intel’s Arc graphics are far more accomplished than anything Qualcomm can offer. Despite my words of praise for Lenovo’s ThinkPad T14s (see p56), there are good reasons for business buyers to remain cautious and stick with a traditional approach. Chief among them is compatibility, as the last thing a business wants to do is a mass roll-out of laptops that are incompatible with key software or the office printer. For the 11th…

SCORE PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk If the Razr 50 Ultra is too pricey, Motorola also offers a regular version of its latest flip phone. At only £800 inc VAT it’s the cheapest of the current generation of foldables, yet it manages to match much of the style and appeal of the Ultra. It too comes in a cool choice of colours, ranging from sober Koala Grey through tasteful Beach Sand to Spritz Orange. The vegan leather casing remains, with its contoured edges and lightweight feel, and the updated folding mechanism opens and closes with a satisfying snap. The Razr 50 also has a generously sized cover screen, with the same two punched-out holes for the camera lenses. It doesn’t quite cover the entire front of the phone…

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £874 (£1,049 inc VAT) from samsung.com Samsung is on its sixth generation of Galaxy Z Flip devices, and the newest version brings some decent updates, including a 50MP main camera and an upgraded front display. It also comes with a price hike, however, making it £50 more expensive than Motorola’s excellent Razr 50 Ultra (see p68). The basic design has a similar aesthetic to last year’s Galaxy Z Flip5 (see issue 349, p70). The phone is still incredibly compact when closed, and its aluminium frame feels solid in the hand. The only visible difference this time around is that the outlines of the camera lenses are tastefully accented in the same colour as the phone. Four standard trims are on offer, namely Silver Shadow, Yellow, Blue and…

SCORE PRICE 8TB, £553 (£664 inc VAT) from westerndigital.com In our recent roundup of portable SSDs (see issue 357), only one went up to 8TB: the Samsung T5 Evo. Now SanDisk has released the Desk Drive in 4TB and 8TB capacities, and while the T5 Evo and SanDisk Desk Drive match each other for capacity and price, they’re very different. For a start, the T5 Evo is designed to travel with you, while the Desk Drive is meant to be tethered to your main computer. And to a power supply, as it only works when plugged in. This drive is substantially bigger too, with the footprint of a drinks coaster but roughly 4cm tall. It also comes with a key piece of software: Acronis True Image WD. This is a…

SCORE PRICE £38 (£45 inc VAT) from logitech.com One of the biggest challenges for Logitech is that its webcams are expensive compared to no-name rivals on Amazon that have similar specifications. As a recent example, consider the £219 MX Brio 705 for Business (see issue 356, p68) I reviewed four months ago. Admittedly, that was a top-end device packed with features and capable of 4K streaming at 30fps. The Brio 105 is a more modest offering that’s limited to 1080p and a 58° field of view (the Brio 705 offers a choice of three FoVs). But in practice, how much resolution and flexibility do most people need? If it’s only you, sitting at your desk, attending a meeting, 1080p is absolutely fine, and a 58° FoV will place you large…

Tests are carried out on a Windows 10 desktop virtual machine hosted on a server with a 10Gbits/sec symmetric fibre link. We connect to endpoints in the UK, Netherlands and USA. These download content from reference servers located in London, Amsterdam and New York. We do this via HTTP using curl at the Windows command line. All paid-for VPN services, which are unlimited, download around 600MB of data, to allow us to observe variations in download speeds over time. We also used this test for the free VPN services, as all of them provide sufficiently large bandwidth allowances to permit it. At the time of testing, our virtual machine’s reference connection speeds were a little slower than usual at 98Mbits/sec to our UK target, 122Mbits/sec to the Netherlands and 51Mbits/sec…

SCORE BEST DEAL Free or $108 (£86) for 2yrs from protonvpn.com RENEWAL PRICE 1yr $72 (£57); 2yrs $120 (£96) Proton VPN is famously privacy-conscious, with fantastic speeds and streaming performance, as well as well-designed desktop and mobile apps. Proton Technologies has recently announced that it’s transitioning to become a non-profit foundation under Swiss law (tinyurl.com/360proton), free of shareholders and in line with its long-term goals of existing to promote privacy technologies for the public good. However, the customer-facing business will continue to be the responsibility of Proton AG, the commercial side, so in practice next to nothing will change for its users. Proton takes privacy seriously, whether applied to its customers or as a global right. For example, the company provides free VPN access to users in areas where access…

SCORE BEST DEAL Free or $69 (£54) for 1yr from windscribe.com RENEWAL PRICE $69 (£54) Windscribe takes privacy seriously, both when it comes to features and to campaigning. It publishes a live transparency report that tallies up a list of every DMCA and government or law enforcement data request the company has ever received. It also works to provide free VPN access, in cooperation with NGOs, to journalists and entire regions where governments are attempting to suppress free communication. Windscribe is, like rival NordVPN, prone to brash advertising – it even used a post in which it announced a security issue with one of its own endpoints to try to knock its rivals. Some of its sniping is genuinely useful, such as the company’s effort to highlight a tendency towards…

SCORE BEST DEAL €5 (£4.22) per month from mullvad.net RENEWAL PRICE €5 (£4.22) per month Mullvad is an outstanding VPN, with a strong focus on privacy and transparency and an incredibly clear approach to pricing. However, as this is a specifically privacy-focused VPN, don’t expect the same level of region-shifting reliability that you might see from services that are more focused on media and streaming. Although we were able to stream UK iPlayer and US Netflix content while connected to the service, Amazon detected that we were on a VPN and Mullvad itself makes no promises that you’ll be able to evade geo-locked streaming restrictions. Mullvad is intensely protective of its users’ privacy, as illustrated when police came knocking on the Swedish company’s door – only to go away with…

Three of the VPNs on test include free tiers, and they’re all fine choices if you need a free VPN in a hurry. You’ll have to sign up for an account in each case, but you don’t have to provide any payment information or identifying data. You’ll find the performance data for each of these services’ free servers in our graphs overleaf. The clients are exactly the same as the paid-for tiers of the same services, although platform-agnostic manual configuration options, for example using OpenVPN profiles, aren’t available for any of the free services we’ve looked at. Best three free VPNs Proton VPN This is clearly the best free VPN service because you get unlimited data. Instead, Proton restricts which endpoints you can access to only three countries: the USA,…

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) can’t let their guard down when it comes to data security. The financial fallout from a data breach will be many times higher than the price of protection and, in the case of ransomware demands, could even drive them to extinction. The 2023 Cyber Threat Analysis report by ISP Beaming identified an 8% increase in cyberattacks over 2022. It isn’t looking any better in 2024 either, with Beaming saying it recorded a 5% increase in malicious online activity in the first three months of this year. SMBs need to get serious about network security. Fortunately, it couldn’t be easier: the latest unified threat management (UTM) security appliances are the perfect defenders. Along with a business-class firewall, many offer features such as malware protection, threat detection…

SCORE PRICE Appliance with 1yr TSS subscription £4,273 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com WatchGuard’s Firebox M390 shows that high-end security appliances don’t always command a high price. Targeting busy SMBs with up to 250 users, this affordable 1U rack model boasts a top raw firewall throughput of 18Gbits/sec, dropping to a respectable 2.4Gbits/sec with all UTM security services enabled. A simplified licensing scheme makes it easy to manage costs. We’ve shown the price of a Total Security Suite (TSS) subscription, which enables everything WatchGuard has to offer. This includes gateway antivirus, anti-spam, web content filtering, application controls, intrusion prevention services (IPS) and an advanced persistent threat (APT) blocker with cloud sandboxing. You also get WatchGuard’s reputation enabled defence (RED) cloud-based URL filtering, ThreatSync XDR for collection, correlation and automated responses to…

SCORE PRICE £520 exc VAT from senetic.co.uk TP-Link’s first Wi-Fi 7 business access point (AP) sets a high standard for the rest to follow, as this slimline discus has a mighty BE19000 rating. The EAP783 achieves this with a claimed 1,376Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio, 5,760Mbits/sec on 5GHz and a speedy 11,520Mbits/sec on 6GHz, with the latter enabling the ultrawide Wi-Fi 7 320MHz channels. It’s also one of the first APs to support the multi-link operation (MLO) feature, which allows devices to connect to the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands simultaneously for increased throughput and reduced latency. The only downside is that very few end-user devices currently support MLO, and Windows users will have to wait until Windows 11 24H2 is fully released. The EAP783 has other appealing credentials. It…

An email from a regular customer arrived. “How much to fit this to my machine?” I clicked the Amazon link, made a note to thank said customer for shopping locally then gazed in wonder at the Kraken Elite RGB 360 (tinyurl.com/360kraken). What? You’ve never heard of the Kraken Elite RGB 360? Look out of your cave – all the cool kids are wearing Kraken Elite RGB 360 T-shirts and drinking from Kraken Elite RGB 360 soda cups, and you don’t even know what it is. You’re not alone. Like many streams of technology, the Kraken Elite RGB 360’s ridiculous product name is neither descriptive nor patronymic. The aforementioned product is an all-in-one (AIO) liquid CPU cooler made by NZXT priced at around £260. It’s a beast: a water block, featuring…

I’m shocked to report that for the first time ever, I’ve been accused of overkill. As regular readers will know, I have a distinct preference for older, ex-corporate grade servers over the expensive servers that are presented as being “just right for the job”. Mostly this comes from casting a jaundiced eye over the warranties you can expect from the server companies, plus a trail of projects in which I was parachuted in when either the small print, or the man-ina-van, didn’t quite meet the customer’s expectations. The commonly held view is that a small business server has a much lower priority for repairs than a big-company machine. Large companies pay real money for 24-hour service, although even here the small print can bite back: some 24-hour contracts say you…

The average speed for a car travelling across London is 10mph; for buses, it’s closer to 9mph. That’s the same as a horse-drawn carriage in 1908. Why? Traffic. Too many of us drive, and that causes problems for everyone else driving a car — as well as those who suffer the downsides of cars, be it clogged roads holding up bikes and buses, or emissions causing dangerously poor air quality while exacerbating climate change. Policies to reduce car use have become fodder for the tabloids’ culture war — ideas such as modal filtering or LTNs (low-traffic neighbourhoods), road pricing such as London’s congestion zone, and air quality rules like the ULEZ are all deemed battles in the so-called “war against cars”. Setting aside the politics, all of these traffic-control techniques…

ON SALE Thursday 5 September Features Windows & macOS: what’s new Every autumn brings a fresh batch of features to Windows and macOS. We gain early access to see what’s great and what’s instantly forgettable. Cyberspace oddity Lee Grant delves into the story behind BowieNet, an extraordinary internet service provider created by the star man himself. Features Turn an old router into a Wi-Fi extender Darien Graham-Smith shows how it’s done, with guides for every major brand. Labs Workstations Look out for our appetite-whetting test of eight cutting-edge graphics workstations next month, as we put the very latest and most powerful hardware to the test. Retro Steve Jobs & NeXT After leaving Apple, Jobs hoped to make a big impact making computers for education. But NeXT ended up teaching the…

When I first saw the seminal film Blade Runner, there was a moment when I felt a shiver run down my spine: when Roy Batty said, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” In those few words, Batty opened up a galaxy of the unknown. The only appropriate response to something this new is to stop. To take stock of what you have just seen, and then attempt to both put it into context and see where it will take us. Even now, I can remember the philosophical effect Blade Runner had on me and my thinking. Exactly…