Table of contents for April 2016 in PC & Tech Authority

Predicting the future may be a challenge for economists, election pundits and Sportsbet addicts, but for followers of computer tech it’s all fairly straightforward. We’re privy to roadmaps, we meet and talk with everyone in all corners of the industry and there’s always a fairly solid view of the next few months in place. Thusly, Mark Williams set out to crystal-ball-gaze what’s going to be hot for the rest of 2016. Mark’s a hardcore tech addict and he consumes products and tech detail like no other – which is why he’s also perfect to write Chip News as well as our recently launched System News sections. In the process it again became clear just how much some segments of the market rely on a new Intel motherboard chipset to pin…

MICROSOFT CALLS TIME ON AGEING INTERNET EXPLORERS Microsoft has ended support for several versions of Internet Explorer and Windows 8 as it continues to push users towards the latest versions to make support easier. In accordance with its lifecycle roadmap, January marked the final update for outdated versions of Explorer, although which options remain available to end users depends on the installed version of Windows. Only the latest compatible MS browser version for each OS will be supported – so people using Windows Vista will be able to patch Explorer 9; Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users will only have IE11 as a supported Microsoft browser. The company is also ending support for Windows 8 and security updates will only be available for users that have upgraded to 8.1. CHROME…

“Aeroplane hacks through media systems that allow you to monitor the traffic of customers of the flight. Getting access to the root system, and therefore control of the aircraft, would require physical access.” STEPHEN COTY, CHIEF SECURITY EVANGELIST AT ALERT LOGIC “Crimeware toolkits are designed to steal information, but there’s a limit to how much damage these threats can achieve. Given their goals and focus, they don’t really have the capacity to qualify as a catastrophe.” ELAD SHARF, SECURITY RESEARCH MANAGER AT PERFORMANTA “I’m really not worried about fitness trackers and smartwatches, or hackers stealing my biometric data. I’m more worried about transportation, utilities and the big stuffmore likely to draw the attention of attackers with both the skills and motivation to carry out our biggest fears.” ADRIAN SANABRIA, SENIOR…

G-Sync versus FreeSync, Nvidia versus AMD, proprietary versus open standard. The adaptive sync format war is going to continue this year with currently no end in sight. If you want a dynamic refresh monitor you will also have to also choose a specific brand of graphics card to drive your screen of choice and vice versa. However, there are two big wheels being set in motion this year that Nvidia won’t be able to fight against with its proprietary but technologically superior G-Sync. AMD has made moves to make FreeSync available over the ever-popular HDMI standard, which natively doesn’t actually have adaptive refresh in the specification. So AMD are making use of HDMI extensions, a feature effectively allowing AMD to shoehorn adaptive sync into the specification which will only help…

The most disruptive technology coming to storage this year (heck, this decade!) will be Intel’s Optane products, based on its new non-volatile memory dubbed 3D Xpoint (pronounced ‘cross point’) and is a true paradigm shift in storage. NAND flash, which is found in current SSDs, is laid down in a 2D fashion onto a wafer of silicon that uses transistors to store each bit of data in a cell in the case of SLC, or 2-3 bits per cell for MLC. And because of the way NAND works, strings of multiple cells must be activated to be read from or written to, introducing latency – ultimately limiting peak achievable read/write speeds. On top of that it’s getting very hard to squeeze those transistors any closer together to create denser, more…

Where gear meets slab There happens to be more than the usual amount of product reviewed in the pages ahead that I personally find interesting, and love to read about, but that I’d just never ever use – even if it was presented to me entirely free. The Microsoft Display Dock is probably some presenter or road warrior’s dream. Not mine. An Android media player? I wish them luck, but I still have memories of the last Aussie player to launch the latest ‘entertainment revolution’, with the Seebo. I can think of a small handful of things I’d do with a Computestick or Chromebit, none of which I don’t have already covered. On the other hand, a relatively mundane pair of laptops – the Dell XPS 15 and Venom Blackbook…

When the first Ricoh Theta appeared back in 2013, it broke the rules of photography – and I find the concept as appealing now as I did then. This is photography unhindered by all the usual conventions, photography without the frame, and it’s amazing how different that feels. Since launch, it’s been updated with the Theta m15 version, which added much-needed video support, while the Theta S boosts the quality of stills and video. The core appeal of the Theta remains the same. Hold it up, press the big button and move on. So much simpler than fiddling with exposures and ordering friends into a space that fits the frame. While you may not want the faff, you will still want good-looking photos and the Theta S is far better…

Plantronics new BackBeat Pro+ headphones are not only aptXcompatible Bluetooth headphones, they also incorporate active noisecancelling, plus they have Plantronics’ usual high-quality comms tech – microphones for call-taking and Siri access. There’s good range too (a claimed 100 metres) if you use them with the supplied USB dongle in your computer, or if your smart device shares the BackBeat’s Class 1 v4.0 Bluetooth spec. The ergonomics are effective – a slide switch for power on the right cup, one for noise-cancellation on the left. Press the right headshell to receive calls, press a little button to ‘hear through’ the headphones (the external microphone is piped through). Press the left headshell to play/pause. Twist it for next/last track or rewind/FF. Twist the right headshell for volume. There’s a lot going on,…

$99 • www.rapoo.com At a sniffunder a hundred bucks, this is the cheapest mechanical keyboard on the market that includes RGB lighting, as far as we’re aware. That’s RRP, too, so on the street it could be much less. You get Kail switches, not Cherry, but they’re colour coded roughly along the same lines. I used the Brown version as my main typing and gaming keyboard for almost a month and was very pleasantly surprised. The action has a quality feel that belies its price, with a solid movement and almost no wobble, rebound was very good indeed – they spring back into action very positively. Due to the keys being raised above the flat base, Corsair-style, there’s quite a lot of light bleed around the base of the keys…

$239 (16GB); $294 (32GB); 64GB TBC • www.kingston.com One look at this thing and you can see what it’s all about, and thus determine if you or your company should use this, or something like it. What’s not obvious is that the drive uses AES 256-bit hardware encryption in XTS mode to secure your data, so it’s more than a simple combination lock to keep things safe. The hardware encryption kicks in automatically when the drive is removed from a device, and can’t be accessed again without the correct keycode. To prevent brute force hacks it resets the encryption key and reformats the drive after ten unsuccessful attempts. So don’t let your kids play with it! The case is aluminium, has a sliding cover and a wire cable for the…

$679 • www.panasonic.com.au Panasonic excels at making fixed-lens cameras that feel like full DSLRs, and the FZ300 is the perfect bridge camera. With a very versatile f/2.8 Leica lens it’s just as at home taking landscapes, portraits, or macro shots, and those shots come out looking crisp and colourful thanks to an impressive 12mp sensor. The camera’s controls are easy to get to grips with, with focus and zoom controls both accessible either via your thumb, as in traditional compact cameras, or via controls on the barrel of the lens, just like the real thing. It also feels very comfortable in the hand, thanks to a chunky right-hand grip. Functionality is similarly superb – all of Panasonic’s usual enhanced shooting modes are present, and the FZ300 can shoot continuous 4K…

All the routers reviewed in this Labs were tested in a tightly controlled, real-world environment, letting us compare each one objectively with the minimum of interference from other wireless devices. We first connected each router to a desktop PC via Gigabit Ethernet. The PC was fitted with an SSD to ensure it wouldn’t create a performance bottleneck. With the router and PC in one room, we set up a second PC with a 3x3-stream, 802.11ac Wi-Fiadapter 2.5m away within the same room to test close-range speeds. We used the command-line utility iperf3 to measure transfer speeds over 2.4GHz 802.11n and 5GHz 802.11ac connections, before repeating the tests at a distance of 15m with a brick wall in the path of the wireless signal. Because you’ll only approach the fastest speeds…

QUANTUM COMPUTING AGAIN? Haven’t we been hearing about this for years? The idea of trading bits for qubits – which can be a one, zero or both simultaneously – isn’t new. But for the first time, someone’s making the concept work on real-world computing problems. Google and NASA have been studying how quantum systems can advance artificial intelligence and machine learning, and solve difficult optimisation problems, using hardware from quantum firm D-Wave. It’s the latter challenge, called quantum annealing, that’s generating fresh excitement, with the researchers solving a major problem using the D-Wave 2X, which could help bring quantum computing into the mainstream. SO GOOGLE DIDN’T MAKE THE HARDWARE? No, NASA and Google simply have a standing order with the Canadian company to receive its top-end machines. That’s now the…

FEATURES + ASHAMPOO CLIPFINDER HD 2 + AUSLOGICS DISK DEFRAG 4 PRO + GOOGLE CLEAN 2016 + XARA PHOTO & GRAPHIC DESIGNER 9 DRIVERS + ATI CATALYST + NVIDIA FORCEWARE HELP + DISCLAIMER + DAMAGED OR FAULTY DVDS + USING THIS DVD + INSTALLING SOFTWARE EDITORIAL + BURNING AN ISO IMAGE + PC&TA EDITORIALS TROUBLESHOOTING + SERIAL CODES + BLANK REGISTRATION WEBSITE + CAN’T FIND A FILE? + INSTALLATION ERROR WINDOWS CCLEANER + CLASSIC SHELL + CUTEPDF + DEFRAGGLER + FOXIT READER + GREENSHOT + APPLE ITUNES + LIBRE OFFICE + OPEN OFFICE + MALWAREBYTES’ A/M + SANDBOXIE + VLC MEDIA PLAYER + FLUX + 7ZIP MAC + ALFRED + BETTERTOUCHTOOLS + APPLE ITUNES + DROPBOX + FLUX + GOOGLE CHROME + MOZILLA FIREFOX + PLEX + SKYPE + TEAMVIEWER…

is a consultant specialising in the business end of intranets and the digital workplace “Left to their own devices, everyone would come up with their own solution” Office 365 may be a success story for Microsoft in terms of sales but, when you look at how people work, not much has changed since Office 2003. Take a team I recently helped, who wanted to improve how they managed projects in their organisation. They saw it as a knowledge management issue: every time somebody set up a new project, they did it in a slightly different way and spent time reinventing things that already existed. So, they asked for a “knowledgemanagement system”. However, it soon became clear that they didn’t need a specialist system at all – they needed to work…

PCS BEYOND OUR NEEDS? Technology is changing at a pretty fast pace where the latest parts for your PC are improved upon within six months. When it comes to CPUs, the brains of our systems, the amount of cores and threads have not really changed a lot, only the speed. Laptops are still being sold as ‘Dual Core’ where some desktop CPU’s are boasting 12 cores. Well what do we actually need? The same goes with overclocking. Can you really tell the difference between 4.0GHz and 4.4GHz when playing Dirt 3, Gotham, or World of Warships? The same goes for full HD monitors, can you really tell the difference between 144Hz refresh rate and 60 Hz? Can the naked eye really tell the difference? So many times I have had…

Chris Pirina has gaming in his sights Amazon has made a bold and unexpected move to release an engine that it hopes will rival Unreal and Unity. Unsually the service has no subscription fee, and developers are not required to pay royalties. Instead, the service is funded through profits from Amazon Web Services, which has some integrated features such as cloud storage. The service is not open source however, meaning you can’t use it as a blueprint to make your own version of the engine. The angle Amazon has pushed so far is spending “less time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting” and more on “creating great gameplay and building communities of fans”. While the engines’ use for great gameplay is yet to be thoroughly tested with this beta, creating a…

PASCAL, THE GPGPU COMPUTE MONSTER A slide from a researcher who is also a CUDA fellow posted some slides that just so happen to show the projected compute performance of Pascal. I say projected because the slides appear to be dated in 2014, however don’t let the age of the slides fool you. GPU design, planning and implementation have very long lead times where a year or two is quite the norm, so these could be the calculated targets Nvidia was aiming for when it started on the Pascal journey. The slide reveals that Pascal will supposedly have 12 Teraflops of single precision (FP16) compute performance and 4 Teraflops of double precision (FP32) performance. Interestingly AMD’s upcoming R9 Fury X2’s theoretical peak single precision performance is also said to be…

Bee, MSY: Obviously, there’s always going to be new technology coming out. If you need a PC now, build now. Intel 6th Gen Core i5-6600k can handle most demanding PC games while the current Nvidia GTX900 series graphic card such as GTX 970, 980 and 980Ti have proven gaming records. Combine these two, you will have a killer gaming machine. Joseph, Umart: New ultra-wide monitors are on the horizon, with rumours pointing to 2160p 21:9 aspect ratio ultra-wides, as well as two new, even wider standards of 2.4:1 and even up to 32:9 for dual screen use on a single screen. These new monitors will be great for gaming and production alike, and will also likely drive the price down even further for existing UHD and ultrawide displays. The two…

When Las Vegas hosts a technology show, it doesn't scrimp. There is no bigger tech event than the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), with its product releases, keynote speeches and monstrous stands. Here, we highlight the key products so that you get all the flavour of CES without having to tramp the halls. Every year we see several new trends being pushed at CES, but we're old and wise enough to keep a weary eye out for hype over substance. We still have the scars from two consecutive CES shows when Sony, Samsung and the rest were pushing 3D TVs as if they were the saviour of home entertainment. This year? Nary a mention. Instead, the talk was of self-driving cars, connected homes, fitness, sleep and health trackers, and OLED screens.…

With the holiday season frivolities out of the way, the school holidays over and everyone back at work, we can now afford ourselves some time to take stock and look forward at what exciting new technologies and products are expected to come in the year ahead for the PC technology industry. 2015 was in eventful year, with Intel championing 14nm CPUs, Nvidia and AMD squeezing all they can out of aging 28nm for graphics cards as they had a gap year waiting for 16/14nm processes to come online. We saw the first product using HBM memory, NVMe SSDs arrived, offering ludicrous speeds and various Adaptive Sync displays started coming to market in force. 2016 is set to be just as eventful with two main events. Mid-year, when a once-in-a-generation leap…

CES saw the paper launch of the first Wi-Fi802.11ad capable router. But before we go further, let’s cover some radio signal basics. Radio signals are a bit of a push and pull affair. As you turn the frequency of a signal up it allows you more bandwidth to push more data, however as the frequency rises so too does the chance that the signal will collide with materials between the transmitter and the receiver. This is why AM radio stations (with lower, KHz range station frequencies) can be tuned into long after you’ve travelled out of a capital city and why FM stations (with higher, MHz range stations) can sometimes be finicky with reception even in the city, but at the same time it’s why FM can do stereo with…

2D TESTS Desktop PCs and laptops are tested using our own custom bench testing suite, which has been carefully designed to test all aspects of a system and rate them in a way that’s useful to you. Our benchtesting cover three main tests: a typical video editing test, a demanding 4K video editing test and a multitasking test that stresses all aspects of the system. We look at the time it takes for each test to run, which is then compared to our reference PC to produce a normalised result. This score is shown on a graph, and to help you understand just where the PC we’re reviewing sits in the grand scheme of things, we will often include other system’s scores. The median score of 100 is based on…

Wireless range extenders are pretty common place now, making sure all the devices we have these days can get on to the Internet. The Linksys RE6700 is the bigger brother of the RE6300 reviewed in this issue. Whilst it may look similar and does the same thing, there’s a few bonuses that could make the extra cost worth it. For starters, the RE6700 comes with AC1200 802.11ac Wi-Fi. If you’ve got an existing AC1200 access point, this may get a little extra speed out of the wireless link. The RE6700 performed identically to the RE6300 when located in the same spot in my house. Perhaps with an 802.11ac device connected, the speed difference may be more prominent. From my experience with other 802.11ac devices, getting the full benefits of AC1200…

$849 • www.draytek.com.au TThe latest model in Draytek’s 2860 range eschews 802.11ac, and is instead just 802.11n – but it adds a slot for a 4G LTE mobile broadband SIM card. This makes it appealing for use in remote locations where there’s limited or unreliable DSL or NBN coverage, or as a backup internet connectivity option if the regular connection fails. Temporary installations would be another selling point, like events or exhibitions, or anywhere a net connection is needed without bothering your ISP, including when you’re on the move. SIM cards from all major Australian and NZ ISPs are supported. Quad-WAN is also possible, using the V/A/DSL2+ modem, Gigabit WAN, the USB port and the 4G LTE slot. DrayTek routers are intended for SMBs primarily, so the features focus on…

$59 • www.cougargaming.com There is a lot to like about the Cougar 450M. The left and right buttons have a wonderful click to them thanks to the increasingly popular Omron switches which provide a crisp and decisive click feel. Rather than being sunk into the body of the mouse the wheel is instead recessed in a gap between the left and right buttons making it easy to clean. The 5000 DPI optical sensor that features a polling rate of up to 1000Hz is extremely smooth and accurate. The ambidextrous design is comfortable in the hands. Well, at least it would be if not for the fact that Cougar have opted for a glossy finish that makes the mouse not only a magnet for fingerprints but also constantly feels unpleasantly wet…

$399 • www.kef.com/au In March 2014 we reviewed British Hi-Fioutfit KEF’s XM500 headphones, and we loved them for their nearly perfect, unadulterated sound along with supreme comfort and tasteful good looks. The new M400 cans arrived on my desk at the start of this year, I’ve been using them daily and they’re also very good indeed. The sound allows every element of your music through without being too generous in bass, mid-range or treble, though can handle a fair whack of cranking with the heavy stuffwithout distorting out. But they’re positioned lower in KEF’s range than the slightly better XM500s, yet are more expensive, at least comparing the launch price of $379 vs $399 for the new M400s. I can’t find any XM500s onsale online, so that, by default, makes…

What do the at-risk ancient monuments of Syria and the world’s oldest ham have in common? They’re both being preserved in 3D for future generations to enjoy (if not taste). The technology isn’t new, but smarter and smaller hardware is helping push its use by academics and archivists alike. Variations of the technology are being used to preserve monuments before they’re lost, resurrect those that have already fallen, and let academics, students and museum visitors get their hands on perfect 3D-printed replicas of objects that would be damaged by their touch – including the world’s oldest preserved ham from 1902 and a peanut from 1890. HOW IT WORKS 3D scanning is accomplished either with lasers that take measurements when they bounce offan object, room or monument, a technique called Lidar,…

President Obama called for gun-control measures with tears in his eyes, but his words will put smiles on the faces of smart-gun makers. He asked why the “most technologically advanced nation on Earth” doesn’t use biometrics to secure weapons. “If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?” he asked. Smart guns already exist. Armatix’s iP1 pistol will only fire if the user wears a watch with a matching RFID chip, whereas Mossberg’s handgun unlocks via an RFID ring. Identilock and Kodiak have also developed fingerprint scanners. The appeal of smart guns is clear, said independent security analyst Joseph Steinberg: they reduce the likelihood of people accidentally shooting themselves or others;…

DOES THE INTERNET MAKE OUR BRAINS LAZY? Forgotten something? Google it. Lost your way? Open satnav. Does this reliance on technology make our brains lazy? Research suggests we make less of an effort to remember a fact when we know it’s available at the touch of a button, a phenomenon dubbed “digital amnesia”. However, separate studies suggest this doesn’t mean our minds are becoming weaker, but more efficient at choosing what information is worth remembering – why waste brain space on trivia when you can remember something more important? That said, more research is required – it’s clear that the internet is changing our brains, but whether it’s bad news or not remains to be seen. HOW REAL LIFE IMITATES THE GAMES WE PLAY Do you see Frogger whenever you…

My iPad Pro is still used on a daily basis and I am writing this very column on it, in between sessions and meetings at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). I’m getting on fine with its clip-on keyboard and finding the key action to be good. Much of that is down to the firm base click and the slight roughness to the key tops. The biggest problem is juggling the multi-bending sections of the keyboard when you try to put it into the working position, which can feel like wrestling with an octopus. I just wish there were a better set of applications ready for it today, ones that really took advantage of both its performance and flexibility. Hopefully they will come soon. However, the iPad Pro is not…

Davey is an award-winning journalist and consultant specialising in privacy and security issues @happygeek Social engineering, in the form of email phishing, remains the most common type of online attack, and the harsh truth is that everyone should know that by now. A safe way to learn is by exposing people to sandboxed versions of the threat, and PhishMe is one organisation that employs simulations to train employees to identify and mitigate such threats. At the end of 2015, PhishMe published its “Enterprise Phishing Susceptibility Report” (tinyurl.com/hb4gbrv), which analysed the year’s data from 400 customers. Admittedly, the majority of its 4,000 or so simulations were done in American companies with 1,000+ staff, but the technique scales well to smaller enterprises in different countries. The important statistic in the report is…

Starry Station Eschewing the traditional alien-spaceshipesque look of most high-end routers in favour of a sleek white pyramid design, Starry Station is a gorgeous feature filled and idiot-proof router. MOST WANTED: Featuring a 3.8-inch touchscreen on the front of the device, Starry Station provides simple easy to understand summaries of your network, with a ‘health score’ indicating the strength of your overall connection, and an activity map of your connected devices and their data use. What’s more it will provide tips to troubleshoot issues should they arise; meaning your family or housemates won’t need to bother you, the resident tech-head, every time something goes wrong… in theory, at least. NOT WANTED:Comfort and ease for the technophobic comes at a high price, of course-US$349.99. Hubsan Nano Quadcopter While the drone enthusiasts…

A STEALTHY POWERHOUSE Scorptec Battlebox 980 Ti SLI Gaming PC $4,999 • tinyurl.com/howkhbs With case fans aimed towards silent operation, a power supply whose fan doesn’t even turn on most of the time, 280mm CPU AIO liquid cooler and two graphics cards sporting triple fan aftermarket coolers, this is one quiet system. And that’s not all, behind the F-117 stealth bomber look of the case with all its angled lines and black paint lies some serious firepower. SLI’d GTX 980 Ti’s, a top of the range overclockable Skylake CPU and a massive 32GB of RAM round out the highlights of this system. Considering it also has dual M.2 slots and USB 3.1 support this system will last you for quite some time. The only thing missing is an operating system.…

INTEL TO CONTINUE ITS REIGN Intel will be busy with five consumer grade CPU releases this year. The first is Broadwell-E, expected in early April. Designed for workstations, professionals and high demand enthusiasts who require more threads than simply raw gigahertz. It will be a drop-in replacement for current 5000-series CPUs into existing LGA 2011-V3 socket motherboards after a BIOS upgrade. Much has leaked about these already. Broadwell-E (14nm) is just a node shrink of Haswell-E (22nm) with three of the four (i7-6900K, i7-6850K, i7-6800K) being basically the same specs-wise to current Haswell-E’s, but uprated by 100-200MHz on base and turbo clocks. The most interesting of the four will be the i7-6950X which will be the first consumer deca-core CPU from Intel. It’ll run 200MHz slower than its octa-core sister…

“The laptop feels brutally fast in pretty much every scenario: press the power button and Windows 10 is up and running in seconds” Dell has scaled up the elegant carbon-fibre and metal design of the XPS 13 to create the company’s most stylish 15in laptop yet. Throw in the latest quad-core Skylake processors, Nvidia graphics and the option of blazingly quick NVMe SSDs, and the Dell XPS 15 is ready to do serious damage to your credit card. Squared-offslabs of cool-to-the-touch metal sandwich a thin wedge of carbon fibre; long rubber feet poke through the underside; and the clean, crisp design is all straight-line geometry and subtle curves. The XPS 15 is one handsome devil alright. Tilt back the lid, and there are only a few millimetres of bezel framing…

The Xmedex Xtreme Plus is a new entrant in the crowded media player market, that’ll literally do it all when it comes to watching stufffrom the Internet on your TV. The guts of the Xmedex Xtreme Plus feature a rather speedy RockChip RK3288 ARM based CPU and Mali-T7 GPU. Combined with 4GB of RAM, the UI and associated apps run with no lag at all. The included IR-based remote works fine, but there’s also Bluetooth 4.0 to hook up any input device you like. 802.11ac Wi-Fiand Gigabit Ethernet are on-board too. Being an Android 4.4 based device is what makes the Xmedex Xtreme Plus such a versatile little unit. Whilst it comes with decent pre-installed apps and a rather ugly looking home screen, you can grab whatever you need offGoogle…

The Asus Chromebit is a new twist on the stick PC. Intel started the trend with the Compute Stick, and plenty of other manufacturers have joined in since, including Hannspree with its Micro PC – a device we really wanted to love, but couldn’t quite recommend. The Asus Chromebit is different. Unlike the Intel and Hannspree devices, it runs Google’s lightweight Chrome OS, which seems to make more sense for the form factor here. So, who is this tiny machine for? It is here we strike our first problem. Even Asus doesn’t seem to know, mentioning in the same marketing breath families, businesses, schools and buyers in the market for digital signage. Can it really have something for all of these target markets? And is it any different from the…

Talk about turning case design on its head. The latest entry in Corsair’s successful range of Carbide cases takes the regular ATX design and flips it upside down. This places the PSU at the top of the box, within its own enclosure, helping to stop the heat generated by your power brick from rising to the top of the case. It also helps make your PC’s innards look that much better if you go for the optional transparent Perspex side window. If you’d rather a stealth PC that emits barely any noise, the 600Q is the better option, as it removes the Perspex window of the 600C and every external panel is layered with sound-muffling material, ensuring your twin GPUs remain whisper quiet. And yes, there is plenty of room…

Only the nerdiest of nerds run Ethernet cables all throughout their homes. Most sane people in the 21st century use Wi-Fito make sure all their gizmos and gadgets can communicate to each other and the Internet. Making sure all those devices can reach a strong Wi-Fisignal is important and a single wireless access point often isn’t enough for most homes or businesses. That’s where a wireless range extender like the Linksys RE6300 comes in to help. A wireless extender does what it says on the tin-extends your wireless signal! You place the extender in a location that has a strong signal and wirelessly connect it to the existing access point and using a second radio, it will create a new wireless network that your far away devices can connect to…

Pinnacle Studio may not have the name recognition of Adobe or Sony, but it has enough high-quality features to make it a worthy opponent to the leaders Premiere Elements and Movie Studio Platinum. New to this version is multi-camera editing, with a streamlined interface to cut between footage shot simultaneously with multiple cameras. This might be handy for events such as speeches and first dances at a wedding, where multiple guests capture the action with their cameras and phones. Or cut between multiple camera angles shot during a theatrical performance. Studio 19 supports up to six simultaneous streams in the Ultimate edition, four in Studio Plus and two in the entry-level version. The manual explains how to use it, but not where to find it – I eventually tracked it…

$79 • www.cougargaming.com In the echelons of keyboard mechanisms sits the scissor; above membrane, below mechanical and priced accordingly. The Cougar 300K’s action is very springy indeed. Coming from almost any other keyboard, at first at least, you’re very conscious of the extra push needed. The actuation point is muddied a little by a spongy ‘click-point’. It’s as if you’re pushing, pushing, further, the pressure builds up... then suddenly lets go and away she clicks. Odd, but certainly an interesting possibility for gaming because with a mechanism like this it’s hard to make an accidental keypress. Like a membrane, but unlike a mechanical, the keys are set quote low into the chassis. It looks quite nice with the yellow trim, though the backlighting was a little subdued in daylight, though…

$49 • www.rapoo.com This convenient battery is a little bit genius. Not only does it have a whopping 10,400mAh, which was enough to fully charge my iPhone, Xperia tablet and Nintendo 3DS two times each while still having 40% charge remaining, it also has a handy pop-out lamp with four very bright LED. It is incredibly bright, but the best part is that the battery has a flat bottom which allows you to stand it up and point the flip-out light at whatever it is you need illuminated, without the need to hold it. This is a great feature if you’re working on something that requires two hands. The only downside is that if you use it standing up it blocks the two USB out ports (1A and 2.1A) that…

CyArk’s Project Anqa aims to collect and archive more than 500 sites around the world over the next five years – and that means gathering and storing an incredible amount of data. That’s why CyArk has teamed up with Seagate. “On average, each individual site is three terabytes in size – equivalent to 1.3 billion typewritten pages,” said Ulrich Plechschmidt, managing director for cloud systems at Seagate Technology in Europe. “By the end of the project, when all 500 sites have been completed, Seagate will have stored two petabytes of data – the equivalent of 500,000 high-definition movies.” He added: “When the project first began it was a relatively small but ambitious initiative. However, the CyArk team didn’t necessarily anticipate the enormous amount of storage they’d need so quickly.” The…

A year and a half ago, we started this column to highlight what we considered to be the most interesting, technologyrelated crowdfunding projects. Here, we take a look back at how those projects have fared and ask if crowdfunding is an effective way to get tech products to market. Does crowdfunding work? For every Pebble – which raised a huge US$20 million on Kickstarter – there are plenty of failures. Of the 16 projects we’ve picked so far, only four were funded, a hit rate of 25%. That’s better than average: Kickstarter states only 20% of tech projects hit their target. Some were easy wins. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega games machine was 150% funded and the Sense ICON smart bike light quadrupled its goal. Others failed terribly. That includes…

The LP is enjoying a Lazarus-like comeback, with a 64% jump in sales in 2015. There’s even new hardware hitting the market, including a relaunch of the $8,000 Technics SL-1200 turntable. It seems audiophiles like to physically own media in quality formats, although the debate over which formats offer higher quality or richer sound rumbles ever onwards. The 2.1m vinyl albums sold last year marked the LP’s best figures in 21 years, during which the CD has prospered and started to wane, while downloads and streaming have exploded. However, while audiophiles are leading a boom for vinyl, the LP remains niche and makes up a tiny slice of overall music sales. At the other end of the perceived quality spectrum, streaming music via services such as Spotify leapt 81% year…

Paul owns an agency that helps businesses exploit the web, from sales to marketing and everything in between @PaulOckenden Wearables and automotive technology are everyone’s predictions for the “next big thing” this year, and they’re the same things that were going to be huge last year. And the year before that. My prediction is that home automation (and its trickle down to small and medium businesses) will be the sector to see massive growth. I accept that we’ve all been predicting a home automation boom since Tomorrow’s World was broadcast in black and white but, half a century later, I believe the prediction will finally come true. The reason for this confidence isn’t the ever-expanding range of hardware and software available, although that obviously helps, but more the fact that…

Steve is a consultant who specialises in networks, cloud, HR and upsetting the corporate apple cart @stardotpro Christmas 2014 was a bit of a washout, as I was drawn into the classic nightmare of trying, against the clock, to recover a poorly built Exchange installation. It had finally fallen apart due to poorly built hardware selected under even worse time pressure. And then, as we arrived at the dog days of December 2015, my phone rang with exactly the same type of creeping horror looming over my Christmas. Initially the symptoms seemed harmless enough: a user couldn’t get Exchange ActiveSync or the web interface to let him into his mailbox. Then the first-try repair and move tools didn’t seem to finish in quite the usual ways, and finally more mailboxes…

“I’ve returned from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas complete with the usual annual flu. It seems you can’t pack nigh-on 200,000 people into a few enormous convention halls without bugs spreading like wildfire. It really does belie the claim that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. The mass illness sweeping the tech world at the moment is a predictable and unwelcome side effect of the world’s biggest, craziest consumer electronics show. Flu makes you grumpy and maybe that’s why there is so much press this year about how CES has apparently lost its mojo. Microsoft wasn’t there, although it’s hard to see what it had to show – Windows Mobile, anyone? Apple wasn’t there, but it hasn’t been for years, much preferring to orchestrate its own media…