PC Pro的Summer 2023目录

Part of me is in 1943, another part in 2023. Perhaps I should explain. I’m writing a book about the computers that laid the foundations of the modern world, so for much of the time (although not as much as I’d like) you’ll find me in the British Library poring over old books, journals and newspapers. It’s time travel, without a glamorous assistant or robot dog. One of my chapters is dedicated to the ABC, which many consider to be the first electronic digital computer. In researching it, I’ve been reading all about the amazing physicist John Vincent Atanasoff and how he came up with the idea for “jogging” to make memory work. “Jogging is reminiscent of the little boy going to the grocery store and reciting, ‘a dozen eggs,…

It’s stressful to think about it, but so much of our digital lives exist precariously. With a few taps of the keyboard, Microsoft could stop us from accessing our documents, Google could deny us access to our emails, and Facebook could disconnect us from our friends. If you’re thinking “they’d never do that”, recent events suggests it’s far from a remote possibility – just ask power users of Twitter and the social news site Reddit. In January, just weeks after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was finalised, users of a number of third-party Twitter clients including Tweetbot, Echofon, Birdie and Twitterific, suddenly found themselves unable to log in. And it wasn’t a bug in the system. After several days of uncertainty, it emerged that the new proprietor had decided to…

Dick Pountain is the editorial fellow of PC Pro. He would rather waive the rules than rule the waves. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk There appears to be a widespread opinion that biology and maths don’t mix. Perhaps it’s behind the current panic over AI, and the depiction of robots as villains in superhero movies. It was already prevalent in the 1960s when I was choosing which A-levels to take: to do chemistry I was told firmly I must take maths and physics rather than biology or art, both of which I loved. In those days, the only connection between maths and biology was via statistics, which were necessary for experiments and stuff like population studies. My interest in biology didn’t go away (I ended up in biochemistry), but it combined with interests…

Hold on! Before you spend hundreds if not thousands of pounds on a gaming PC, it’s important to think about what you really need. Gamers have never had more options, be that traditional games consoles, Nintendo’s Switch (and rivals) or cloud-gaming services. This article isn’t here to dissuade you from buying a £4,000 gaming PC if that’s what you want. But we would encourage you to think carefully, to read about all your options before you jump in. That’s why, over the next six pages, we analyse what each sector has to offer. Whether it’s Chromebooks or Windows laptops, mini PCs or towering desktop monsters, consoles or the cloud, by the end you should know exactly where to invest your money.…

Paper records are remarkably durable. You can read a bill from 50 years ago just as easily as one that arrived this morning. The same can’t be said of computer files, even if they’re just a few years old: many are stored in obsolete file formats, designed to be readable by software that has long since been discontinued. When converting paper to pixel, it’s important to think about keeping your files accessible in the future. One option is to store everything as plain text; if you want to preserve the layout of a document, PDF is the industry go-to, as it’s an open standard that’s widely supported. To give digital documents the best chance of long-term survival, consider using PDF/A – a version of the PDF standard that’s maintained by…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we 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 p14. It’s 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…

SCORE PRICE 64GB with ads, £208 (£250 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Fire Max 11 is Amazon’s biggest, most expensive tablet yet – but it’s still much cheaper than the Pixel Tablet (see p48). The entry-level model costs £250 inc VAT with 64GB of storage, or you can go up to 128GB for £40 extra. Unlike most premium tablets, the Fire Max 11 can also be expanded via a microSD slot. Physically, the Fire Max 11 has much in common with the Fire HD 10 Plus (see issue 328, p88). The brushed aluminium rear looks great, aside from its penchant for fingerprints. The power button and volume rocker are on the short side, which can be disorientating unless you’re used to Fire tablets, but it doesn’t take long to get used…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £2,125 (£2,550 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Latitude 7230 is built for places that would kill other tablets. It’s been drop-tested to four feet, at temperatures up to 63°C, and is IP65 rated against ingress from dust and water. Designed to be operated either as a tablet or a laptop via an attachable keyboard, the screen hits 1,425cd/m2 to ensure its 12in display can be seen in direct sunlight. And what a screen it is. While the Panasonic’s and Getac’s panels cover between 50% and 60% of the sRGB gamut, the Dell’s panel covers 95%. With superb colour accuracy, too, coupling an average Delta E of 0.36 with a contrast ratio of 1,770:1. That’s remarkable for a rugged device. Less remarkable is its weight. Dell quotes…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £5,333 (£6,399 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The original Mac Studio (see issue 332, p60) launched last year as a showcase for Apple’s M1 Ultra chip. Physically the Mac Studio M2 is identical to its predecessor, but the silicon has been updated for 2023. At the top of Apple’s latest processor tree we have the M2 Ultra, which in effect is two M2 Max chips stuck together. Or you can configure it with an M2 Max. Apple sent in a unit with the top-end M2 Ultra chip inside, and once again I’m amazed by how much power Apple crams inside these tiny cubes. It’s pointless to even talk about how well this squat powerhouse handled my daily diet of 30+ Chrome tabs and spreadsheets. Even when I…

SCORE PRICE 16GB/512GB, £625 (£750 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com Asus’ Zenfone handsets have always delivered plenty of power at a convenient size, and the new Zenfone 10 doesn’t mess with the formula. At £749 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB storage (or £819 with 16GB/512GB) it makes a compact alternative to the Samsung Galaxy S23 (see issue 343, p70). Unarguably, though, this is a phone with a character of its own. The 5.9in format is smaller than most Android phones these days, and the handset weighs only 172g. That’s partly down to a bio-polycarbonate back, available in a choice of finishes as shown below. Despite the plastic build the Zenfone doesn’t feel cheap; indeed, its grippy texture is ideal for one-handed operation. It’s also good to see a 3.5mm headphone…

We use the industry-standard Geekbench 6 benchmark to measure a phone’s CPU performance. This is split between single-core and multicore speed. We then put the phones through two tests to represent web-browsing performance: JetStream 2 and Basemark Web 3. To check how well the phones will run 3D games, we first use 3DMark’s demanding Sling Shot Extreme test before switching to the standard version of Wild Life. (Unfortunately, our Xiaomi sample refused to run 3DMark.) We then run the challenging Basemark GPU test using its Vulkan API and medium settings. We print the results below at the phones’ native resolutions, which are broadly the same. This month, we elected for simplicity when testing the phones’ battery life. We downloaded a Full HD trailer of Gran Turismo and then played it…

SCORE PRICE £191 (£230 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Is the Motorola Moto G73 5G a glamorous phone? One that’s packed with the latest features, that will turn heads, that will send a pulse of excited energy through you every time you pick it up? No, absolutely not. But this is a solid four-out-of five phone in almost every category, and one that offers terrific value for money. As with all of the phones here, it has a plastic frame and back, but unlike the Edge 30 Neo with its stylish finish, Motorola makes no attempt to glam up the rear of the Moto G73. Only the Motorola logo and camera setup – which juts out from the frame by over a millimetre – break the monotony of the back. Even…

SCORE PRICE £3,748 (£4,497 inc VAT) from armari.com Armari’s lower-cost system is something of a technology showcase, exhibiting the latest options in processor, graphics and storage. The combination is one of the most powerful workstations you could buy for £4,500 inc VAT. At the centre of the Magnetar MC16R7 is AMD’s range-topping Ryzen 9 7950X. This potent 16-core processor uses AMD’s latest Zen 4 architecture and is manufactured on the 5nm process. This enables an incredible base clock of 4.5GHz, which is the boost clock for AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors. The 7950X’s boost clock of 5.7GHz is only a few hundred megahertz behind the best Intel has to offer, and only with the latter’s P-cores, so it’s good to see that Armari makes the most out of the Ryzen…

SCORE PRICE £8,333 (£10,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Scan is another manufacturer that opts for balance rather than brute CPU power with its £10,000 system. While the resulting component choices aren’t surprising, the quality of the implementation is what singles this workstation out. Rather than choosing the top 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX, Scan plumps for the 32-core 5975WX. With a higher 3.6GHz base clock than the 5995WX but the same 4.5GHz maximum boost, the 5975WX promises better general application performance allied with still capable multithreaded abilities. While the current AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro only supports DDR4 memory, not the latest DDR5, it offers eight parallel channels. Scan takes advantage of this with eight 16GB modules of 3,200MHz RAM. This is ECC Registered memory as well, guarding against system…

SCORE PRICE £3,030 (£3,636 inc VAT) from lenovo.com We haven’t seen many blue-chip brands in our workstation Labs for some years. This has largely been because these manufacturers stuck with Intel Xeons, even when AMD was in the ascendancy, so wouldn’t have fared well. But Lenovo has been offering the AMD alternative for some years and was the initial partner for the Ryzen Threadripper Pro when it arrived last year. Now we get our first look at what Lenovo can do with this potent CPU. The system is based on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5945WX, which has the lowest number of cores of any CPU this month – just 12. These run at a base 4.1GHz and boost 4.5GHz, with multithreading and support for eight-channel memory. But Lenovo only…

SCORE PRICE £3,662 (£4,394 inc VAT) from workstationspecialists.com The WS AR-X6700 makes good use of its £4,500 budget, with a solid balance of components. Workstation Specialists has chosen the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, which offers 16 cores and 32 threads, with a base 4.5GHz clock and boost up to 5.7GHz. This is backed by 64GB of RAM, provided as two DIMMs, so there’s room to upgrade. It’s 5,200MHz DDR5, which the Ryzen 7000 series now supports. Graphics acceleration comes from the Nvidia RTX A5000. With a hefty 8,192 CUDA cores and 24GB of GDDR6 frame buffer on a 384-bit bus offering 768GB/sec of bandwidth, it’s a potent workstation accelerator. Its quartet of DisplayPort 1.4a connections support up to four 4K screens at 120Hz, or two 8K screens at 60Hz. Apart…

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) still relying on separate anti-malware, web security and firewall products need to dump them and get a next-generation UTM (unified threat management) appliance. These are the perfect defenders for SMBs as they amalgamate every security service into a single, easily managed unit. There’s no place for separates, or point solutions, in today’s fearsome threat landscape: they’re complex to manage, prohibitively expensive and require IT staff trained in many disciplines. Malicious online activity is increasing exponentially and using multiple security solutions that, in many cases, don’t even talk to each other is adding unnecessary risk. The latest UTM appliances are chock-full of security features. Along with a business-class firewall, they offer virus and malware protection, threat detection, intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and web, email and application…

SCORE PRICE Appliance with 3yr Total Security Suite, £3,148 exc VAT from guardsite.co.uk WatchGuard’s Firebox T45-W-PoE is an eye-catcher not just for its tomato red chassis but also for its excellent range of security measures. Aimed at small businesses and branch offices, it combines wired and wireless protection and is one of the first desktop appliances to bring integral Wi-Fi 6 services to the table. Sporting a new NXP quad-core 1.6GHz CPU, it claims a high raw firewall throughput of 3.94Gbits/sec and 557Mbits/sec with all UTM services enabled – respective speed boosts of 16% and 86% over the older T40-W. Its internal aerials don’t give the wireless game away, and for those who want WAN redundancy, the T45-CW model has an integral 5G NR SIM slot at the rear. The…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £1,860 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Qnap’s TS-855eU-RP aims to show that good things come in small packages as it squeezes eight 3.5in SATA drive bays into a chassis that’s only 297mm deep. This makes it one of the shortest 2U rack NAS devices on the market and makes it ideal for slotting into a small wall box or a two-post rack cabinet. The appliance is powered by a reasonably modern 2.8GHz 8-core Intel Atom C5125 processor, and the base 8GB of DDR4 RAM can be upgraded to 64GB. Dual 2.5GbE ports are provided along with a pair of PCI-E expansion slots and, even though the motherboard is barely 12cm deep, Qnap has found room to add a couple of M.2 NVMe slots. The lack of an “H”…

Do you feel you have done the right thing, when it comes to setting up a working from home (WFH) architecture? Incredibly, most of us are now thinking about the second generation of devices and network layout to support a workforce who could be at home, at work, on the road, or indeed in the middle of a war zone. That first-try lash-up from the early days of lockdown in 2020 was just about the worst nightmare for a well-disciplined, business-aligned IT department: a bodge that had to be put together out of the stuff you could see or touch on the day the news broke. No sooner had Boris’s chilling “This is not a request. This is an instruction” hit home, nerds’ phones all across the world rang. Even…

Microsoft’s announcement that it’s rolling out its Copilot AI and large language model (LLM) technology into Office 365 is both thrilling and terrifying. It doesn’t come cheap, of course. At $30 per user per month, this is a significant uplift on the cost of a regular Office licence. Many have taken the view that the price is simply outrageous. Well, Microsoft has to find money to pay for its multi-billion-dollar investment into the technology – both into the software platform and the necessary hardware on which to run it. This is going to be CPU-intensive work, a level of processing that’s an order of magnitude higher than sending an email or dropping a document into a SharePoint server. From a business point of view, the price is almost irrelevant. I…

Relations between Reddit and third-party developers were not always so frosty, and until recently Selig was regularly talking to the company about Apollo. “I’ve been building it for nine years, I think it’s been on the App Store for about seven, and Reddit’s been great throughout the whole process,” he said. “They kind of offered me a job at the beginning of it. They’ve always had a really great line of communication with me.” And he was even optimistic when the API changes were first announced in April. “At that stage it was still very warm,” said Selig. “They called me the day of [the announcement] and they said, look, we’re looking to make changes to the API.” He describes how Reddit staffers explained that, historically, the company had supported…

Nicole is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She admits she missed Bluey as much as her daughter did. @njkobie Our broadband speeds had been noticeably slower. We were supposed to be getting around 80Mbits/sec, but every now and then it slowed to crawl or cut out. So when our contract came up for renewal, we switched providers. Not because we thought that would fix the problem, but to get better customer service. The only reason we signed up for the first ISP was its price. When it worked, it was one heck of a deal. But when things go wrong, you want the helpline to be answered by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. So we flipped our contract to Zen, frequent winners of PC Pro’s annual awards –…

Check your bank statements! Thank you for your article on online payment fraud (see issue 347, p34). I recently discovered several fraudulent charges to my credit card, all for Amazon. On investigation with my bank we discovered periodic and sporadic charges going back to 2021; almost £700 had been stolen in total. I’m assuming my card details came from a data breach as we were in lockdown when the details were stolen, meaning anybody can suffer from this fraud no matter how careful they are. It transpired that the criminals had been using my card with their own Amazon accounts to buy non-existent goods from their own fake seller accounts, effectively using Amazon to launder the money. The weak point is that Amazon only authorises a card in your banking…

PLUSES ● Superb, fast screens● Slim, stylish options● Can be surprisingly cheap NEGATIVES ● Limited power vs desktops● Usually beefy machines● Expensive at cutting edge Gaming laptops come in many sizes, but there is one simple rule: the bigger they are, the more powerful a card can be squeezed into the chassis and the faster your laptop will be. And they can be chunky, often weighing over 2kg. Unlike gaming PCs, there will be a hard limit on the amount of power the tight confines of a chassis can contain: the current generation of mobile GeForce RTX cards peak at 175W compared to the 450W of the desktop RTX 4090. That has an inevitable impact on performance. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 (see issue 344, p54) is one of…

Once you’ve scanned in all those pesky papers, you can securely dispose of them and rejoice in your newly reclaimed space. But you still need to store your digital copies in a way that makes it easy to access them when you need them. Windows and macOS can use metadata to make searching for documents more intuitive, but a dedicated document management system can give you more powerful options at little or no cost. OpenKM (openkm.com) is available as both an enterprise (paid-for) and community (free) product, and allows for full document management through a web interface. The core product runs on Java, making it largely platform-neutral, with common database technologies such as PostgreSQL and MySQL for indexing. OpenKM can also integrate with open-source and commercial OCR engines to centralise…

Looking for a particular past review? Visit our index at pcpro.link/index SCORE PRICE 256GB, £1,458 (£1,749 inc VAT) from store.google.com It’s about flippin’ time. At last, another mainstream foldable phone is here to compete with Samsung’s Galaxy Fold handsets. And this is no me-too device: the Pixel Fold makes its own mark with a wide front display that’s easy to use, the thinnest design we’ve seen on a foldable, and top-grade cameras. One thing Google hasn’t managed to achieve is undercutting Samsung on price. The just-announced Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 can be bought from the Samsung Store with 256GB for £1,749. And Google lists the 256GB Pixel Fold at… £1,749. Samsung’s offering is a whole £20 cheaper if you choose the 512GB version – £1,849 versus £1,869. However, Google is…

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £499 (£599 inc VAT) from store.google.com When Apple so thoroughly dominates the tablet market, how can other manufacturers make their devices stand out? In the case of the Pixel Tablet, it’s by literally including a stand. Google’s charging dock boosts the tablet’s audio capabilities and turns the display into a smart home hub of sorts. This sets the Pixel Tablet apart not only from the iPad, but also from its closest Android-based rivals: the OnePlus Pad (see issue 346, p46) and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 (see issue 334, p71). Inevitably, this drags up the price. At £599 the Pixel Tablet is much more expensive than the £369 you’ll pay for the basic ninth-generation iPad (see issue 328, p83), and higher even than the £499 of the…

SCORE PRICE £1,333 (£1,600 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com There’s no shortage of choice when it comes to premium 13in laptops. You have the Dell XPS 13 in both its standard (see issue 339, p65) and Plus (see issue 337, p52) forms. The MacBook Air m2 (see issue 336, p50). And, most recently, the deliciously svelte LG gram SuperSlim (see issue 347, p58). Asus knows it must work hard, then, to make the Zenbook S 13 OLED stand out. The first sign of Asus’s industry is in the lid. The striking ceramic finish not only looks and feels special but also adds – so Asus claims – durability and sustainability. For this lid is 100% recyclable (unlike lids with sprayed-on coatings), while also featuring post-industrial recycled magnesium-alloy. Together with post-consumer-recycled plastics…

SCORE PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 drops the entry price for RTX 40-series cards to around £300. There’s no official card from Nvidia, but it has been embraced by manufacturers – including Asus, and here we test its OC Edition. It occupies 2.5 slots of width, which effectively means you can’t use the two adjacent slots. Its single 8-pin connector can provide 150W of power on its own, never mind the 75W from the PCI-E x16 slot. Even with a modest factory overclock, the Asus 4060 won’t come anywhere near hitting those potential power limits. The aesthetics are subdued, with no RGB lighting, so it would be a perfect fit if you’re trying to put together a “stealth-build” PC. There’s a white version,…

SCORE PRICE 12GB/512GB, £417 (£500 inc VAT) from hihonor.com/uk As our roundup of affordable phones from p70 shows, you don’t need to spend a fortune to buy a high-quality phone. Honor, however, hopes that an impressive display, fast battery charging and an attention-grabbing 200-megapixel camera might just persuade you to splash out. At £500, the Honor 90 lands in the same price range as the Google Pixel 7a (see issue 346, p68) and the Samsung Galaxy A54. When you first pick it up, it feels more expensive: the quad-curved display gives it a premium feel, and the matte-textured back panel exudes style whether you opt for the diamond silver, emerald green, peacock blue or midnight black colour scheme. You also get a bigger screen than you’d expect for the money.…

SCORE PRICE £183 (£219 inc VAT) from samsung.com Samsung prefers attention to be focused on its high-end Galaxy phones, but it has offerings for almost every price range. The A14 is one off the bottom – we reviewed the £120 Galaxy A04s two months ago – and costs £179 for the 4G version and £219 for 5G. But we’ll save you some time: if you want 5G, it makes more sense to buy the Moto G73 we review on the opposite page for £11 more. For a start, this is a chunky phone. It’s wider, taller and thicker than not only its rivals here but almost any phone we’ve seen this year. And that girth is obvious as soon as you hold the Galaxy A14 in your hand. You don’t…

If any computing activities will take every processing cycle you can throw at them, they’re 3D animation, video production, CAD and engineering. That means workstations aimed at these tasks are just about the fastest desktops around. For a few years now, though, even a lower-priced system could perform both design and output rendering extremely well. So, why worry about the exact specification? Because you must still ensure you have the best balance of components for your budget and the kinds of tasks you generally perform. Over these two pages, we explain what to look out for in every key area. 1 Processor A high-end CPU is essential for a creative workstation. Since our last Labs test, AMD has improved the supply of the Ryzen Threadripper Pro, now that the non-Pro…

SCORE PRICE £8,333 (£10,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Unlike Armari, Chillblast opted for a balanced approach with its £10,000 system. While still supplying a Ryzen Threadripper Pro, the Chillblast Apex doesn’t use the top-end model, and instead leaves more in the budget for graphics. The chosen CPU is the Threadripper Pro 5975WX, which offers 32 cores to the 64 inside the 5995WX. However, the base clock is considerably higher at 3.6GHz, even if the boost frequency remains the same 4.5GHz. There’s still only DDR4 memory support with the 5000 series CPUs, but this will get a considerable increase from the eight parallel channels available. Chillblast provides 128GB of 3,200MHz RAM, divided into eight modules to take advantage of the extra bandwidth. By saving on the CPU, Chillblast is able to…

SCORE PRICE £8,331 (£9,997 inc VAT) from armari.com Armari never likes to do things by halves, and the company has gone all in with the most powerful workstation processor for its £10,000 entry. However, this has led to compromises elsewhere. AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX has 64 cores and 128 threads. If you run heavily parallelised software, there’s no better option. The 5995WX has a 2.7GHz base clock, but still offers a boost up to 4.5GHz. Although the CPU only supports DDR4 memory, it offers an eight-channel configuration – and Armari takes advantage of this by supplying 128GB as eight 3,600MHz modules. This leaves no room for upgrade but optimises bandwidth. The main compromise with the MC64TP is that Armari has had to opt for the cheaper, previous-generation AMD Radeon…

SCORE PRICE £8,333 (£10,000 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews PCSpecialist has thrown everything at its £10,000 workstation. Not only does it incorporate AMD’s range-topping 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX, but it also includes AMD’s latest professional graphics. The CPU supports multithreading so offers 128 threads. The base clock is 2.7GHz with a boost to 4.5GHz. While there’s no DDR5 support yet for the Threadripper Pro, the eight-channel memory configuration improves bandwidth. PCSpecialist includes a whopping 256GB of 3,200MHz RAM in the form of eight 32GB modules, taking advantage of the extra throughput. PCSpecialist opts for the brand new AMD Radeon Pro W7800 for graphics acceleration. This combines 4,480 RDNA 3 unified shaders with 32GB of GDDR6 frame buffer operating with 576GB/sec bandwidth. Two storage devices are supplied with the Ultra. The 2TB…

SCORE PRICE $485 (approx £380) from firewalla.com Firewalla claims its Gold security appliance is the world’s most affordable multi-gigabit firewall, and the sub-£400 price certainly lends credence to this. In fact, value looks even better as this is a one-off fee that includes the appliance, all security services, lifetime updates and online support. This palm-sized package uses its aluminium shell as a heatsink and sports a reasonable hardware package with a 1.6GHz quad-core Intel Celeron N3160 CPU and 4GB of DDR3 memory in the driving seat. You get four gigabit ports for WAN and LAN duties, but if you want more speed, the Gold Plus model ups these to 2.5GbE at a cost of around £486. It’s a cinch to deploy as you insert it between your internet router and…

SCORE PRICE Appliance with 1yr Gold Security licence, £1,191 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Zyxel’s ZyWALL ATP (advanced threat protection) appliances are aimed at SMBs that want much more than a firewall can offer. The ATP500 takes the standard UTM features from Zyxel’s USG Flex family and adds advanced security measures such as cloud-based threat intelligence using machine learning, sandboxing to protect against unknown threats and deep analytics. The ATP500 sits in the middle of this family of six appliances and claims a decent 2.5Gbits/sec raw firewall throughput and 0.9Gbits/sec with all UTM services enabled. This desktop unit presents seven copper gigabit ports that can each be configured for WAN, LAN or DMZ duties, plus an SFP fibre gigabit port for longer connections. The price we’ve shown will appeal to smaller…

The phrase “technical debt” was coined in 1992 by a developer named Ward Cunningham. Among other things, Cunningham was one of the pioneers of agile software development – a project model in which evolving goals are par for the course. This being the case, Cunningham didn’t argue that technical debt is necessarily a bad thing. As with all borrowing, there are scenarios in which it’s smart and beneficial to accrue debt. A business may be able reap advantages by getting an incomplete software solution to market quickly, which will more than offset the cost of refactoring and updating the code at a later date. Technical debt may also be an inevitable consequence of user-centric design, in which the final project goals are determined and refined through an iterative process of…

This summer’s big job is to get a patio laid. I needed to replace what was left of the lawn following the activity of two overactive rescue greyhounds, accompanied by a committed but much slower terrier whose daily pilgrimage to a single zoomie spot was ripping it up. Literally. The activities of the dogs spinning like vintage jazz records at 78rpm have made it unrecognisable as a lawn. This is less an aesthetic project than it is a practical undertaking to address a problem that I created for myself during Covid when I overcommitted to increasing my pack. A mistake that I don’t regret, but more of that on another day. This project, as with any project we humans have undertaken since early caveman fashioned the first hammerstone, is an…

Computers cannot survive and thrive in isolation. They need software and lots of it to make them practical and useful. History is littered with machines that appeared to be promising on the face of it yet were let down by a lack of support from software developers. With too few apps, consumers would shy away from making a purchase and, with too few consumers, developers would decide their efforts would be better rewarded elsewhere. When three former Texas Instrument (TI) workers decided to set up their own business and manufacture a computer, they were acutely aware of the problems that such a vicious circle posed. It was the early 1980s and there was no computing standard. Developers needed to tweak their software to work on various machines and they would…

It won’t be until next year when early adopters will get their hands and faces on Apple’s Vision Pro (see issue 347, p46), but more details about what we can expect the headset to do have emerged following the release of its software development kit (SDK). The SDK is essentially all of the tools that developers will need to build apps for VisionOS, the operating system at the heart of the device. Intriguingly, it includes a full OS simulator, enabling coders to pretend they’re using the Vision Pro on their Mac, by awkwardly clicking and dragging with a mouse. This unveils several new features that Apple didn’t mention at its launch event. For example, we now know that the Vision Pro will offer similar “visual search” functionality to the iPhone,…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in M2 Pro power from £2,699 from apple.com/uk All the upgrades to this 2023 model are within, as Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max processors take charge. Combine this power with the 16.2in mini-LED screen, superb sound system and phenomenal battery life, and you have the world’s premier workstation laptop. REVIEW Issue 342, p48 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED (UX5304) The perfect 13in laptop? At 1kg, it packs power along with 1TB of storage, a top-quality OLED panel and superb battery life. £1,600 from uk.store.asus.com REVIEW Issue 348, p58 Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra Samsung packs everything into this 16in laptop, from a superb AMOLED panel and a slim 1.8kg chassis to a Core i9 CPU and RTX 4070 graphics. Expensive but top…

Barry Collins is a former PC Pro editor. He’s never forgotten his phone’s passcode. What idiot could forget their own date of birth? @bazzacollins It seems that for the three years that Boris Johnson was ensconced in Number 10, he wasn’t only Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service, he was also Chief Security Officer. That can be the only rational explanation for the truly insane case of what happened with his iPhone. For those who’ve missed this extraordinary saga, a quick recap. Back in May, the Covid-19 public inquiry demanded to see Johnson’s WhatsApp and other messages that were sent from his phone during the pandemic. But there was a problem: due to a security breach in 2021, Johnson had been told to…

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 generates and stores…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £8,279 (£9,935 inc VAT) from Getac resellers To the untrained eye, the X600 might look identical to the Panasonic Toughbook 40 on the previous pages. They’re both fully rugged, so you get an IP66 rating against rain and dust, and you can drop the X600 from four feet with impunity. But where the Toughbook is built as an all-rounder, the Getac X600 has demanding applications in mind. The first sign of this is the powerful Core i7-11850H vPro inside. It’s an 11th generation Core chip, but with 16 threads and more wattage on tap, the X600 was 67% faster in the multicore section of Geekbench 6 than the Toughbook (8,533 versus 5,118) and 77% quicker in Cinebench R23 (9,354 versus 5,273). If you need a rugged…

SCORE PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from hihonor.com Honor has a straightforward and effective technique when it comes to laptops: pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap. But where this approach used to mean laptops that also felt cheap, that isn’t true here. Instead, Honor acts like any astute trader, finding the components that deliver the best value and blending them into an attractive deal. For example, you’ll find a 12th generation Intel processor rather than the latest chips. The mid-range Core i5-12450H won’t blow anyone away with its power, but it remains a fine all-round performer: its 5,329 PCMark 10 score hides a strong 10,755 score in the benchmark’s Essentials section, while a result of 9,254 in Cinebench R23 reflects the presence of 12 threads to tackle intensive tasks. Honor…

SCORE PRICE £38 (£45 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk How do you shave £10 from the price of the Echo Dot (see issue 341, p64)? Apparently, by taking a knife and slicing off the Dot’s spherical front to create a flat surface. Then remove the Alexa button, but leave three at the Pop’s top: two to adjust the volume, one to turn off the microphone. And finally, rather than use a circular ring of LEDs around the bottom, switch to a small light bar at the top. This activates to indicate when Alexa is listening to you. The hidden sacrifice is to its smart home features. While the Pop supports the Matter smart home protocol, the Echo Dot includes temperature and motion sensors that you can use as part of your…

1 Visit pcprodownload.co.uk. First, enter the issue number (348 this month). Next, enter your email address and the coupon code printed on the cover’s spine (or directly on the front cover of digital issues of the magazine). We’ll then send an email to confirm that your code has been registered. Follow the instructions in the email to access the download area. 2 Once you’re in 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 make sure to read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions on…

SCORE PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk There are areas where the Motorola Edge 30 Neo falls behind its rivals this month. It includes only 128GB of storage, with no 256GB model available and no microSD card slot for expansion. It’s also the most expensive phone here, costing a full £70 more than the Moto G73 (see p74). And let’s not ignore that it performed the worst of all the phones in our video-rundown test, which is no surprise considering its battery has a 4,020mAh capacity compared to 5,000mAh for its rivals. Yet, after using these phones during the course of our tests, the Motorola Edge 30 Neo was the obvious winner. The reason boils down to the “q” word: quality. It may be formed from the same raw…

SCORE PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from mi.com/uk Xiaomi has tough competition this month, thanks to the sheer quality of the £300 Motorola Edge 30 Neo (see p73). But there are reasons to choose the Poco X5 5G, starting with its larger 6.7in OLED screen. Both phones share identical resolutions of 1,080 x 2,400, and while that means the Poco’s pixel density is a fraction lower – 395ppi versus 419ppi – people who struggle to read text at close range may find they prefer having the extra space. The screens are both excellent quality, covering 99% of the DCI-P3 gamut with strong colour accuracy, but the Poco’s goes a shade brighter. People who like to watch films on their phones will appreciate the sheer volume of the X5, but we…

To start, we ran our standard PC Pro benchmark suite to assess image-processing and video-encoding abilities, and then multitasking (you can see the results on p93). Each of these categories has an individual score, which indicates relative speed compared to a Core i7-4760K desktop PC with 8GB of RAM. If a machine scores 150 in a test, it’s 50% faster than the reference PC. All these results are combined into an overall score, giving an indication of ability in these content-creation tasks as well as general activities. We added tests specifically aimed at a range of higher-end workstation tasks. To test 3D modelling in all the main content creation workloads, we used SPECviewperf 2020 v3.1, which runs OpenGL viewsets (and in some cases Direct3D) based on popular 3D content creation,…

SCORE PRICE £3,750 (£4,500 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews PCSpecialist takes a unique approach in this month’s Labs by supplying its system with consumer-grade graphics. It’s also the only company to provide secondary storage along with a main drive. So this workstation has a lot in common with a high-end gaming rig; if you design games for a living, this could be exactly what you want. The CPU is unquestionably potent. This is a 13th generation Intel Core i9-13900K with 24 cores. Eight of these are P-cores with a 3GHz base clock rising to 5.8GHz on maximum boost with Hyper-Threading, while the other 16 are E-cores that operate at 2.2GHz or boost to 4.3GHz, but without Hyper-Threading. So you still get 32 threads like the 16-core AMD CPUs, but 24 of…

SCORE PRICE £3,417 (£4,100 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Chillblast has opted for Intel with its lower-cost Apex system this month. This is a valid choice, as the Core i9 became very competitive again for workstations with last year’s 12th generation. Here, Chillblast deploys the 13th generation i9-13900K, which isn’t quite the flagship of the range. It offers eight P-cores running at a base 3GHz and boost 5.8GHz, plus 16 E-cores with a base 2.2GHz frequency and 4.3GHz boost, with 32 threads in total. But the 13900KS version goes ever so slightly faster. At this price we can’t criticise 64GB of RAM, and as Intel processors have supported DDR5 since the previous generation Chillblast takes advantage with two DIMMs running at 5,600MHz. This leaves two slots free for upgrade. Graphics acceleration…

SCORE PRICE £3,750 (£4,500 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Scan opts for the Intel route with its lower-priced system, as the 3XS GWP-ME A132C packs the best Intel CPU available in this class. Where other manufacturers chose the Core i9-13900K, Scan steps things up with the i9-13900KS. This incorporates eight P-cores with Hyper-Threading and 16 E-cores without, but the P-cores have a base frequency of 3.2GHz and 6GHz maximum boost, while the E-cores start at 2.4GHz and go up to 4.3GHz (although the latter is the same as the K variant). Scan also takes advantage of the processor’s support for DDR5 memory by supplying 64GB of 5,600MHz RAM in the form of two 32GB DIMMs. This leaves two slots free for upgrade. The graphics choice is dependable, too: you can’t go…

This month’s Labs test has shown that the workstation market is in rude health. Even if Intel still doesn’t have a high-end Xeon Scalable processor to compete with AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro, its mainstream Core i9 is a match for the Ryzen 7000 series. Monopolies aren’t good for innovation, and this competition will benefit end users with increasingly excellent processors for some time to come as Intel and AMD slug it out. In the past, the same could not have been said for professional graphics acceleration. Whatever AMD did, Nvidia soon dominated again; thankfully the consumer market was more competitive. But the superb performance of the new AMD Radeon Pro W7800 could be a sign that this is going to change, too. There’s an even faster W7900 version, although that’s…

SCORE PRICE Appliance with 3yr Xstream Protection, £3,585 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com SMBs and branch offices looking for a powerful security appliance will find Sophos’ XGS 126w a worthy candidate. Inside this compact desktop model lurk two processors, allowing Sophos to claim an impressively high firewall IMIX (internet mix) throughput of 10.3Gbits/sec and 0.9Gbits/sec with all threat protection services enabled. This super power is achieved by teaming up a 2.6GHz dual-core AMD Ryzen Embedded R1600 CPU with Sophos’ Xstream flow processor. The latter provides a dedicated FastPath hardware layer that handles TLS 1.3 encrypted traffic plus deep packet inspection (DPI) and application acceleration, with the latest SFOS v19 firmware adding IPsec VPNs to FastPath. Network ports are plentiful, with the appliance offering 12 copper gigabit ports with 30W PoE+ on…

SCORE PRICE £1,600 exc VAT from best4systems.co.uk Epos offers a wide range of business videoconferencing (VC) solutions, and the Expand Vision 5 is its most versatile product yet. Designed for small and medium-sized meeting rooms, the Vision 5 is the company’s first all-in-one VC bar and combines built-in support for Microsoft Teams Rooms with a BYOD mode so you can use your own preferred VC app. It takes many of the features from the Vision 3T – a dedicated Teams Rooms bar – but adds two internal speakers, doubles the number of digital MEMS microphones and provides dual HDMI ports (one for for connecting a PC or Mac, one for a meeting room monitor). It also uses a classy Sony 4K UHD camera, which offers a wide 110° horizontal field…

In this feature we’ve focused mostly on protecting your assets from the hosting business that handles your bit of the cloud. But if you get into real trouble here, then there’s a reasonable chance that the provider will be able to help you out, especially for the right amount of money. Another very serious question is how to protect your assets from those who are expressly not on your side – hackers, crackers and all the rest of it. One thing you can’t rely on is security through obscurity. That was always an illusion anyway, but in the cloud it’s all but impossible, as the cloud’s universality and flexibility is guaranteed by some very widely understood protocols and standards. For example, if you’re not connecting via HTTPS or RDP then…

The great calamity of Twitter continues to roll forward but, much to my surprise, it hasn’t actually collapsed into a hole in the ground. I still use it as an information feed, despite the fact it is becoming increasingly difficult to weed out the quality from the noise. I particularly miss the previous blue-tick service, which highlighted those that had gone through an auditing process to establish their credentials. It wasn’t perfect, working best for big companies, celebrities and publishers who could register a bunch of accounts in one go. By the time I tried to get a blue tick, I discovered that the whole process had essentially been shut down to single applicants. With the arrival of Mr Musk, the blue tick process has been turned on its head.…

My inevitable “criminals like to move it, move it” joke aside, there’s nothing funny about the MOVEit cybersecurity attacks that started at the end of May. Certainly not if you’re one of the organisations that has been caught up in this tale of zero-day exploits, multiple vulnerabilities and Russian ransomware groups. It’s not much fun if you happen to be an employee of one of said victims, either. One of my sons works for the BBC and has been informed his personally identifiable information was accessed, and is being held to ransom, by the criminal group known informally as C10p. I shall be referring to them as Clop, because I’m not ten years old. What, or who, is Clop? This ransomware group was one of the first to use the…

Someone to make a cup of tea for you, fix dinner while you’re at work and then do the dishes while you catch up on your favourite shows. This is no backwards dream of a stereotypical 1950s housewife, but the much-promised future of robot butlers. Such robobutlers don’t yet exist. But plenty of startups, researchers and billionaires are trying to make the dream a reality – for those with large bank accounts, at least. British-based Prosper Robotics, founded by former OpenAI staffer Shariq Hashme, has built Alfie to do chores while you’re out. Tesla is working on the humanoid Optimus to help around the house (and in Tesla factories). And humanoid robots are in the works for a variety of use cases, including warehouses and retail, from companies such as…

Features Upgrade to a power browser If you’re using Chrome, Edge or Safari, then we humbly suggest you take a look at a new breed of browser. Ones that enhance your workflow and boost security. Discover all next month. Create your own Spotify If you don’t want to pay Spotify that monthly subscription, why not set up your own personal music server? We show you how it’s done, and reveal how to make it work with Alexa and other smart devices. How to code like a pro Learn to code like the professionals do, with the free edition of Microsoft Visual Studio. Our guide explains how to start creating your own programs and apps using industry-standard libraries and tools. Labs Virtual private networks VPNs are now a crucial weapon in…