PC Pro的October 2025目录

When the bin lorry comes trundling down the road, few people would expect it to be doing anything more than collecting the rubbish. However, it might well be helping to identify one of the many holes in the UK’s mobile coverage. Inakalum measures the actual throughput delivered by the country’s major mobile networks in a variety of ways. CEO Philip Maguire told us why the company’s equipment is being installed on bin lorries and reveals the dire state of our mobile networks’ performance. PC Pro: How did your company get started? We started in 1995 and we’ve been writing telecoms software ever since. In around 2017, we started developing a new platform for geospatial mapping. We started with public places, places of interest, and then moved into street asset mapping.…

@njkobie Technology developers live and breathe in blocks world. This isn’t an insult – though they often behave like block heads – nor is it a weird reference to Minecraft. Blocks world refers to the simplified environments created by technology developers to test their ideas. Back in 1991, Rodney Brooks went viral – or whatever it was called back then – for his paper “Intelligence Without Representation” that criticised the way robotics et al were stuck in blocks worlds rather than being developed to work in the real world. AI and related technologies required “experiments with real creatures in real worlds” he said, to see if they really worked. (He went on to co-found iRobot, which made Roombas a common household item, so he was certainly correct about a lot…

Administration isn’t just for corporate IT departments. If you’re responsible for the stability and security of any sort of computer network – even a few computers at home – you’re an administrator, whether you like it or not. So why not borrow some ideas from the world of professional IT management? Don’t think of it as taking on extra work. Putting a little effort into administration lets you focus the rest of your time and energy on being productive, rather than being distracted by unplanned troubleshooting and housekeeping tasks. Windows comes with a decent set of built-in, user-friendly management features, including account security, built-in virus protection and automatic updates. But there’s plenty more that you can accomplish by digging beneath the surface, and by downloading a few judiciously chosen third-party…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,833 (£2,199 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Like the Dell 16 Premium overleaf, the Dell 14 Premium carries on the XPS formula with little changed beyond the branding; regular readers will know that Dell has simplified most of its product ranges into plain Dell, Dell Plus and Dell Premium, using the good, better, best principle. Professional products then see the word “Pro” squeezed in. But all this means that the Dell 14 Premium is really the 2025 update to last year’s Dell XPS 14 (see issue 356, p48), with its most obvious rival being the 14in MacBook Pro (see issue 364, p50). Where the XPS 14 used Intel’s Lunar Lake chip, geared towards efficiency, the 14 Premium packs an Arrow Lake H chip. This can be paired…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,360 (£1,632 inc VAT) from hp.com There’s little doubt who HP has in its sights with the EliteBook Ultra G1i. This 1.2kg laptop is for the executive on the go, someone who needs a lightweight travel companion that looks as good in the boardroom as it does in sales meetings. The advert almost writes itself. HP achieves this thanks to a compact and slender magnesium chassis finished in dark, matte blue. It’s different without being ostentatious, making the Dell 14 Premium (see p50) look almost drab by comparison. This is despite the fact that Dell sacrifices practicality for style with its light-up row of function keys and invisible touchpad while HP stays on the right side of practical by sticking to a physical row of keys…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk We’re fans of anything that reduces waste, and that’s the promise of the Acer’s Vero range. Acer’s marketing focuses on its use of post-consumer recycled plastics, but I would instead focus on its longevity, as I think this laptop could last for ten years. For instance, it will be many years before Intel’s Core Ultra 7 255H processor seems slow. This includes 16 cores, six of which are fast P-cores that will devour any task: you can see this in its 15,282 result in Geekbench 6’s multicore section. Intel’s integrated Arc 140T graphics are no slouch either, and thanks to a highly effective fan cooling system – not that you will often hear it called into action outside of games – the…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,917 (£2,300 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Right now, there are only two AIOs on the market that could give the Apple iMac a run for its money: this one and HP’s announced but not yet tested OmniStudio X. Both meet Microsoft’s criteria for Copilot+ PCs, with this Gen 10 version of the Yoga AIO 9i an update to the striking Gen 8 from 2023 (see issue 353, p50). Lenovo has updated the CPU and GPU, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V and Nvidia RTX 4050 now in place. In day-to-day use, it’s extremely powerful: if you need an all-in-one for office tasks, this won’t break a sweat. I never heard the built-in fan come on in these workflows, unlike the Gen 8 with its Core…

SCORE PRICE £528 (£634 inc VAT) from canon.co.uk We love a refillable inkjet. Farewell stingy cartridges, high running costs and wasted plastic; hello simple, cheap bottles of ink and extended service intervals. Canon’s Maxify range is geared towards home power users and busy small offices, and the GX7150 its new range-topping refillable multifunction peripheral (MFP). This is a four-in-one, combining print, scan, copy and fax. On top, an automatic document feeder (ADF) juggles up to 50 sheets of paper; behind it sits a 100-sheet multipurpose paper tray; and the base holds dual 250-sheet paper cassettes. Both the printer and ADF support duplex operation, making double-sided prints, scans, copies and faxes a reality. You can connect this printer via USB, wired Ethernet or Wi-Fi. Everything is controlled by the 2.7in tiltable…

SCORE PRICE $499 (plus $25 delivery and duty costs) from viture.com When it comes to choosing a pair of AR glasses, wearability, picture quality and versatility all come into play – and Viture’s latest specs excel in all three regards. It’s true that Xreal has a technical advantage with the X1 chip built directly into its One Pro glasses (see opposite), but if you’re looking for a comfortable viewing experience with great picture quality, the Luma Pro is absolutely worth considering. In the US, the Luma Pro costs $499, the same as the standard Xreal One glasses. However, Viture doesn’t have a UK distributor, so while you can order these glasses online, you’ll need to pay for international shipping plus VAT and import fees, which together push the price close…

Reviewing PC workstations is always a revelation: like gaming rigs, these are computers that benefit greatly from the latest and greatest performance components. Even though AMD now dominates the CPU side, we’re still enjoying a wide range of specifications, because the technology never stops improving. This year, our test was just late enough to see the latest generation of AMD Ryzen Threadrippers arrive, the 9000 series. The desktop Ryzen equivalent has been around since this time last year, with our first taste in the 2024 workstation labs test. But this time we’re also seeing the desktop version with 3D V-Cache. The result of AMD’s fast-paced development is that only one system this month, from Lenovo, includes an Intel processor. AMD is still failing to oust Nvidia in the professional graphics…

SCORE PRICE £3,447 (£4,136 inc VAT) from lenovo.com The Lenovo ThinkStation P5 is a fine workstation in many ways, but also showcases the current gulf between Intel and AMD when it comes to workstation processors. This system accommodates Xeons from W3 to W7, including the W7-2595X we tested last year (see issue 363, p52). Even that CPU couldn’t beat AMD’s 7000-Series Threadripper, and this system was supplied with a more modest W5-2445. This is a 10-core CPU with a base clock of 3.1GHz and a maximum Turbo Boost frequency of 4.6GHz. AMD’s desktop Ryzen systems this month offer 16 cores with a base 4.3GHz speed, so the Xeon is immediately at a disadvantage. The only storage device is a 1TB SSD. This is Lenovo’s own LUMIS NVMe M.2 drive, which…

SCORE PRICE £2,978 (£3,574 inc VAT) from workstationspecialist.com Workstation Specialists is a regular in our labs test, with a solid focus on professional content creation systems. The WS AR-X8700 is another PC that delivers sensible components for the price. Rather than the more expensive 3D V-cache version of the AMD Ryzen 9, Workstation Specialists has chosen the basic 9950X. This offers 16 cores (32 threads), along with a 4.3GHz base clock with 5.7GHz boost frequency, but it comes with 64MB of L3 cache rather than 128MB. The CPU is partnered with a decent 64GB of 6,000MHz DDR5 memory, supplied as two 32GB modules. Two DIMM slots remain free if you want to upgrade in the future. Instead of the Blackwell-based consumer-grade Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, Nvidia’s professional RTX 4000 Ada…

SCORE PRICE £10,829 (£12,995 inc VAT) from lenovo.com When we’ve reviewed Lenovo workstations in the past we’ve always been impressed by the design. This “Aston Martin-inspired” ThinkStation P8 Tower is no exception. What is exceptional is how well Lenovo has matched up the specifications to the brief we provided for this group test – previous systems have been more off-the-shelf – with this P8 sitting close to our £11,000 exc VAT ceiling. Our sample system does suffer from having the now previous-generation AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7975WX CPU rather than the just-released 9975WX, but we’re sure the latter will be made available once validated on this platform as BIOS compatibility should be all that is required. The 7975WX is a 32-core (64-thread) CPU with a 4GHz base clock and 5.3GHz…

SCORE PRICE £8,333 (£10,000 inc VAT) from wired2fire.co.uk Wired2Fire is a new name in our workstation Labs test, but from this first foray we expect to be seeing the Surrey-based company more often. The TRX50 Extreme 5090 is a potent combination of components that offers many strengths for content creation tasks. Central to the TRX50 is its Ryzen Threadripper 7980X processor, a 64-core (128-thread) CPU with a base 3.2GHz clock and 5.1GHz boost mode. Wired2Fire has confirmed that this system will be supplied with the Threadripper 9980X for the same price (see p85 for a side-by-side comparison in select benchmarks). Wired2Fire supplies 256GB of 5,600MHz DDR5 memory as four 64GB modules, taking advantage of the CPU’s quad-channel bandwidth. These take up all four DIMM slots on the Asus Pro WS…

SCORE PRICE From £180 exc VAT per operator per year from 247connect.cloud It’s for good reason that NetSupport’s Manager has spent so long on the PC Pro A-List as it’s simply the best on-premises remote support solution. The company has now decided it’s time to move into the cloud-hosted support market, and in this review we take an early look at its new 247connect product. It offers a flexible pricing structure split into two tiers. Costs for on-demand access are based on the number of operators, or technicians, starts at £180 per year and enables support for five concurrent connections. Unattended access is priced per agent and starts at £4 each for up to 99, dropping to £2.50 for over 500. You can purchase either or both components, and a…

SCORE PRICE £12 per technician/month exc VAT (billed yearly) from zoho.com/assist Zoho Corporation offers a huge range of business software tools covering everything from sales and marketing to security and IT management. The Assist cloud-hosted remote support solution has always been a key player in its portfolio and will appeal to companies of all sizes. The free version supports one technician, one concurrent session and five unattended desktops. If you like what you see, Zoho offers three pay-as-you-go plans that can be upgraded, downgraded or cancelled at any time. The Professional plan on test provides all essential remote support features, supports four concurrent connections and has a monthly cost of £12 per technician when billed yearly. Unattended access is a separate module with two pricing tiers. The Standard plan costs…

Websites get stale. What once made them fresh and interesting becomes old and familiar – and they can also become insecure if you don’t keep them fully patched. For a business, that can have reputational and financial implications. It’s no wonder many small- and medium-sized companies farm out the job of looking after their online presence entirely. But this doesn’t mean you can forget about the problem. Any issues with your website ultimately reflect on your business, not your provider. The difficult part is knowing what you should be looking for, what matters and what can be left alone. Here’s our checklist of vital checks and updates you should be carrying out – perhaps with the help of your developer, whether they’re in-house or remote – to ensure that your…

At the risk of causing PC Pro’s advertising executives some headaches, I feel I should confess that when a HP Omen gaming PC arrives in the shop for troubleshooting, a rough ride is likely. Why? Well, Omen is HP’s premium gaming brand and allegedly named after a curious incident when the prototype machine was fired up during the branding brainstorm, which immediately caused two executives to clamp their hands over their ears screaming, “Omen God! why have we made it so noisy!” If the tech landscape is dominated by near-silent and fanless devices, then HP Omen sticks out like Brian Blessed stubbing his toe in a nunnery. There is a reason many gamers wear headphones, but HP Omen users would probably benefit from industrial ear defenders. These machines are packed…

How can you get your people – employees, family, relatives – used to the idea that Google might not be available one day? Not just in a regional crash, but offline for days, weeks, months due to a deliberate act of sabotage? That might have seemed a low risk just five years ago, but these days the world is very different. The need to be at least aware of what fault-tolerant options you can exercise has never been greater, and the emphasis on continuous access as a prerequisite for using cloud services never stronger. Then there are the human factors. The uncomfortable need some people have for a sense of permanence – without any idea, naturally, as to how that permanence might be achieved, or what it depends on. Quite…

We saw the first sign of the UK government’s AI strategy with the recent unveiling of the world’s 11th most powerful supercomputer at the University of Bristol. Isambard-AI is formed of 12 cabinets, each packed with 440 Nvidia Grace Hopper superchips, and is now the cornerstone of AI research in Britain, being free of charge to academic researchers but also open to commercial use – for a price. “Today we put the most powerful computer system in the country into the hands of British researchers and entrepreneurs,” said the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Peter Kyle at the supercomputer’s launch. “Isambard-AI doesn’t just close the gap with our international competitors – it propels the UK to the forefront of AI discovery.” He then added: “With our AI…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro M4 M4 beast from £1,599 from apple.com/uk This M4 update to the already brilliant MacBook Pro line is an easy recommendation, so the big question becomes do you choose the 14in version from £1,599 or 16in from £2,499? And then how much do you upgrade, as Apple isn’t afraid of high prices. But whatever you choose should last for years, and look great while it’s doing it.  REVIEW Issue 364, p50 NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Air M4 If you don’t need the all-out power of the Pro, this is a brilliant, cheaper alternative despite the unchanged chassis and screen. 13in from £999, 15in from £1,199 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 368, p54 Honor MagicBook Art 14 (2025) This slim 1kg laptop packs Intel’s powerful Core Ultra…

@bazzacollins One of the many things I don’t miss about working in an office is the meetings. When I edited PC Pro, at least half my day was spent in meeting rooms. Meetings with my publisher, my team, the ads team, marketing, subscriptions, press briefings. I once had a meeting where the athlete Roger Black brought doughnuts to my desk. This was the point I decided to give up drinking. That was getting on for 15 years ago. Nowadays, you’re probably not shuttling from one glass cubicle to another, but sat in front of your screen, jockeying between Teams, Zoom and Google Meet. Maybe a Slack Huddle or two in between. You don’t have to make polite conversation by the watercooler or loom like Reggie Kray at the door to…

Whether you want to buy a new PC or build one yourself, squeezing the most out of your budget is a challenge akin to four-dimensional chess. Every decision you make has repercussions, some of which may not show themselves until three years down the line. This article is here to help. Based on my own 25 years’ experience reviewing desktop PCs, responses from PC vendors and an interview with our very own Lee Grant, I aim to cover the big questions, the pitfalls and squeeze in a few handy tips. While you can visit sites such as PCPartPicker (pcpartpicker.com), which is a great starting point as it does an excellent job of ensuring your parts are compatible, this – like all “configure it yourself” systems – assumes you know roughly…

Every business needs a cyber-incident response plan to ensure that any attacks are handled effectively and consistently. If you’re looking after a home network, or providing informal remote support for friends and family members, you too can benefit from drawing up some simple instructions ahead of time. You might find it helpful to follow the same four-phase structure as recommended by the UK government for corporate response plans: 1 EVALUATE What should your friends and family be looking out for? How can they identify an incident? You don’t want to alarm them, but you don’t want them to overlook suspicious behaviour either. 2 INFORM Tell them the best way to reach you in a cyber-emergency and spell out exactly what you need to know – so hopefully when the call…

SCORE PRICE RTX 5060, from £2,083 (£2,499 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Thanks to its larger body, the Dell 16 Premium – the model formerly known as the Dell XPS 16 (see issue 357, p50) – can pack up to an RTX 5060 GPU compared to the RTX 4050 found in its 14in sibling. In fact, the chassis can cope with an RTX 5070, which is what Dell sent us for testing – but that’s not on offer in the UK. Like the Dell 14 Premium, the 16 uses Intel’s Core Ultra H series chips and that means cores aplenty, going right up to a Core 9 Ultra 9 285H. If you’re paying this much for high-end silicon it makes sense to use Dell’s Ultra Performance settings, which add fan noise…

SCORE PRICE £1,167 (£1,400 inc VAT) from lg.com You have to admire LG’s consistency: from its first “gram” laptop a decade ago to the one sitting in front of me today, it has delivered the slenderest, lightest device it can using current technology. Throughout that time, it has judiciously chosen the best silicon for the job: never cutting-edge, but enough to deliver a smooth user experience and solid battery life. This year, in the gram Pro’s 16in iteration at least, that means Intel’s Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V chips, with my sample packing a Core Ultra 7 258V with 32GB of embedded DDR5 RAM. These eight-core processors are a match for the Ultra 255H in the Dell 16 Premium (see p52) in single-core tasks but fall some distance behind in…

SCORE PRICE £400 (£480 inc VAT) from argon40.com Argon 40 is a well-known name in the world of Raspberry Pi upgrades and cases, but the One Up is more creative and ambitious than any accessory we’ve seen: it’s a fully functional, bona fide Raspberry Pi laptop. It’s based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, and offers an M.2 slot for PCIe storage. It’s being funded via Kickstarter, with the price set at around £450 for the Core unit with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD, plus a GPIO breakout box, which we’ll talk about below. I tried a pre-production unit, so the final version may have a slightly different finish and hopefully a few software tweaks, but there’s more than enough here to get the idea. Despite…

SCORE PRICE £2,749 (£3,299 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk This is the fourth PC I’ve tested with a GeForce RTX 5080 inside, but the first from a non-British PC manufacturer. It’s also the first to choose a Core Ultra 7 265K processor as its partner, with others opting for either the Core Ultra 9 285K (CyberPowerPC Infinity Z890 Elite, issue 367, p53) or Ryzen 7 9800X3D (Scan 3XS Edge iCue, issue 367, p50; Wired2Fire R7X3D RTX 5080 Beast, issue 367, p52). The Core Ultra 7 265K isn’t a terrible choice: as the “K” indicates it’s unlocked, so with the liquid cooler and a “CycloneX 360” triple-fan cooling system I suspect Acer has eked as much out of the chip as is possible. But so do Acer’s rivals with their superior gaming…

SCORE PRICE £337 (£404 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Once you understand Dell’s way of thinking, it’s easy to navigate its monitor range. The “Pro” indicates this is a business-targeted product, the “Plus” that quality will be good but not great. Within its Dell Pro Plus monitor range, you can easily jump between sizes (14in up to 55in), and if you select the 32in version as here then you have the choice of a QHD (2,560 x 1,440) or UHD (3,840 x 2,160) panel. Choosing the latter increases the price to £550 inc VAT, and you’ll definitely notice the sharper image if you do. It increases the dpi from 93 to 140, and in daily use I noticed a lack of sharpness around text. In terms of productivity, I found it…

SCORE PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from uk.anycubic.com The Anycubic Kobra 3 Max Combo is one of the biggest multicolour personal 3D printers on the market. It can turn out huge models using up to eight different filaments, and the user experience and overall print quality are both excellent. The package comes with everything you need to get started, including a USB flash drive containing the documentation and a small sample of PLA. It also comes with a guide to assembling the printer, along with the necessary tools. This isn’t a difficult job – you mostly just need to slot the pieces together and screw them into place. You also need to install the supplied four-colour filament hub, although if you’re happy with mono printing you can get the single-colour…

Workstations are the most powerful desktop PCs around. But there are always budgetary constraints, which means you will need to choose your components wisely based around your workloads and budget. It’s no longer necessary to compromise too much between systems that are biased towards real-time graphics display and those aimed at final output. However, you should still spend the most on the components that will benefit your workload the most. 1 PROCESSOR Processors continue to develop apace. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series arrived last year, but this time we see a few X3D versions with 3D V-Cache, which significantly improves performance with certain workloads. Intel CPUs have moved onto the Core Ultra generation, the first to use a tile configuration like AMD’s Zen architecture. However, no manufacturers sent us a…

SCORE PRICE £3,997 (£4,796 inc VAT) from armari.com Armari has opted for the desktop Ryzen 9 rather than workstation-oriented Ryzen Threadripper for its lower-cost entry this month. It’s the latest version with 3D V-Cache, which can boost performance with certain software. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D has the same 16 cores (32 threads) as the standard 9950X, running at a base 4.3GHz with a 5.7GHz boost, but the L3 cache is doubled to 128MB. Armari partners this with an extremely generous 128GB of 5,600MHz DDR5 memory, supplied as two 64GB modules. Even better, the Asus ProArt X870E-Creator WiFi motherboard has four DIMM slots, so you can add more easily. Like many other systems in this category, Armari opted for consumergrade GeForce RTX 5090 graphics, in this case from Zotac. This is…

SCORE PRICE £5,400 (£6,480 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk PCSpecialist always puts together credible specs, with the Fortis Pro R combining a capable desktop processor with professional graphics. It includes AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D, which is the variant with 3D V-cache. Although this CPU’s 16 cores (32 threads), base clock speed of 4.3GHz and boost frequency of 5.7GHz are all the same as the non-3D 9950X, it has 128MB instead of 64MB of L3 cache. It’s backed by 128GB of 4,800MHz DDR5 memory. This should be enough for the lifetime of the system, which is lucky because the RAM is supplied as a quartet of 32GB modules, filling all four DIMM slots on the Asus ProArt X870E-Creator WiFi motherboard. Most manufacturers have opted for the power (with a few drawbacks) of…

SCORE PRICE £10,800 (£12,960 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk British manufacturer PCSpecialist has gone fully professional with its high-end system this month. Not only does the Fortis Goliath R incorporate pro-grade graphics acceleration, it also uses the Pro version of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper. This is a system that means business as a content creation workhorse. The Fortis Goliath R doesn’t go for the very top of the Threadripper Pro range, instead opting for the 32-core (64-thread) 7975WX. This runs at a base 4GHz with a 5.3GHz boost clock. This will soon be replaced by the 9975WX in AMD’s range, but we expect that to be more expensive than the outgoing 7975WX. PCSpecialist has chosen the Threadripper Pro because it supports eight-channel memory, where the non-Pro version is quad-channel only. Taking advantage…

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) has been even more rapid than the internet’s, but up until this point the biggest GenAI buzz has surrounded online services. Whether you use ChatGPT or video GenAI such as Sora, you enter a prompt via a web interface and download the results from there, too. Your local hardware has been irrelevant. You might think that recent Adobe innovations such as Firefly, Generative Fill in Photoshop and Generative Extend in Premiere Pro do some of their processing on your workstation, because they’re integrated into software that runs locally. However, they need online connectivity to work, and most of the heavy processing is still running remotely. The sole exception is AI audio enhancement in Premiere Pro, which does run locally and doesn’t require an internet…

SCORE PRICE Enterprise, first year, 100 PCs, £329 exc VAT from remotepc.com I Drive’s cloud backup service has always been one of our top choices thanks to its features and value. RemotePC is equally rich in features and offers simplified licensing schemes based only on the number of endpoints you want to support. Some products are licensed by concurrent technician sessions, but the three RemotePC business plans unleash support for unlimited users and include attended and unattended access. The Enterprise version has a first year cost of £329 for 100 PCs and enhances the Team plan with user roles, access permissions and computer grouping plus Microsoft Windows Group Policy Object and InTune support for mass deployments. The Enterprise plan introduces scheduled remote access where sessions can be booked in advance.…

SCORE PRICE IronWolf Pro, £449 exc VAT; Exos M, £424 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Rapidly growing storage needs across the SMB and enterprise markets are driving intense competition between hard disk manufacturers as they strive to meet this demand. Seagate has stepped up to the plate with two monstrous 30TB hard disks and, in this review, we test both its IronWolf Pro and Exos M models. A key feature of both SATA drives is that they’re based on the well-established conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology. This makes them fully compatible with just about any server, storage array or NAS appliance in which you care to install them. Both models have ten platters, and Seagate has achieved an impressive 3TB per platter areal density in an industry-standard 3.5in form factor by…

Synthetic data? What’s that? At the simplest level, synthetic data is the 21st-century equivalent of the “lorem ipsum” placeholder text used in the print industry – a lot of nonsense words with the appearance of real language, which are used to show how the final page will look. Synthetic data brings this idea into the modern world of computing: it’s any set of made-up words, numbers or bits that’s designed to be fed into a spreadsheet, an algorithm or some other process in place of real data. Why is that useful? Isn’t it better to work with real-world data? Real-world data can be a poisoned chalice. For example, testing a new online ordering system with actual customer data raises the risk that you’ll accidentally charge a real person’s debit card…

I’ve never had as much engagement with my social media posts as I did when the Data Use and Access Act 2025 (DUA Act) received Royal Assent on 19 June. After waiting since Brexit and the government’s 2021 consultation paper (Data: A New Direction) to find out which changes were coming, this was top news. I was delivering data protection training during the day so shared the excitement with delegates, but it wasn’t until that evening that I posted on LinkedIn about the new law. I don’t use LinkedIn a lot, and I’m usually happy if I get a handful of likes. Last time I posted about the DUA Bill (as it then was), it had eight reactions and six comments. But when I awoke the next morning, my post…

Features Wipe your devices Whether you want to sell, recycle or gift your existing laptops, desktop PCs, tablets, phones or other gadgets, we explain how to make sure your data doesn’t ship with it. Features Best of IFA 2025 Europe’s biggest consumer tech show takes place in Berlin in early September, and both Tim Danton and Jon Honeyball will be there to pick out the hits from the misses. Features Build a home camera system for £30 Our in-house tinkerer Nik Rawlinson sets out to undercut systems costing hundreds with a £30 budget. Can he do it? Find out next month! Labs Mini PCs There’s a reason why mini PCs are growing in popularity even as they become more compact: they’re a brilliant, efficient way to enjoy high performance for…

I don’t really have the collector’s instinct. When I was a kid my father was a serious stamp collector, and I briefly made a feeble effort to become one too. I was slightly more interested in my album of labels from exotic canned goods, but that soon petered out. In adulthood I’ve accumulated nine guitars but each of those was bought to play, then superseded but not sold, so it doesn’t really count as a collection. I have owned ten motorcycles over 60 or so years, but only ever one at a time. Books don’t count: I started accumulating those as a student and continued as a book reviewer, but all were obtained to read and never sold (there are around a thousand of them, none rare). When I’m not…

Extending laptop life I enjoyed Lee’s article “Windows 11: All Your Questions Answered” (see issue 372, p26). Here’s another suggestion for extending the life of a laptop. Many that cannot move to Windows 11 have a DVD drive. For no more than about £30 you can buy an HDD caddy and SSD that can easily replace the DVD drive. You can then install another OS such as Linux or even an unsupported copy of Windows 11, leaving your original Windows 10 undisturbed. With two SSDs in the laptop you can make ultra-quick backups and you can always pop the DVD drive back in if needed. Peter P-p-p-pick up a part I enjoyed your article “Windows 11: All Your Questions Answered”. I have been upgrading my desktop PC for many years…

If you find you simply can’t build the right PC for your budget, how do you make sure you trim in the right places? “Performance first, aesthetics later,” said CyberPowerPC’s Dave Gornall when we asked him this question. “There are many different ARGB, LCD and OLED options out there, from cases to fans to coolers and even motherboards, but these usually come with a premium price. Make sure the core components of the PC meet expectations first, before spending a ton of money on cosmetic upgrades. These can usually be upgraded down the line, but having a strong, well-performing PC is the most important thing.” Wired2Fire’s Ben Miles points out that some customers decide to save money on the monitor and peripherals, which in his view is the most foolish…

On 1 September 1939, Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers found himself in Berlin to take part in a European conference about telephone systems. Germany invaded Poland the same day. Flowers and a fellow British delegate went to the British embassy to let them know where they were staying. “The young man at the embassy… looked at us and said, ‘You people must be mad, there’s going to be a war in a few days’,” Flowers said in 1998. “Which surprised us a bit.” The British duo spent the next day with their German counterparts on the committee, trying to play it cool, but the next morning the embassy called to say they had to catch the next train out or else. A tense eight-hour journey through Germany followed, but the…

The Windows PowerToys date all the way back to the days of Windows 95. Those who were lucky enough to have internet access in those days could download a set of 15 little utilities that enabled them to tweak the Windows interface, customise their context menus, enhance CD-ROM features and personalise the operating system in various other ways. Since then, the PowerToys suite has been through several iterations, with features appearing and disappearing over time; with Windows 10 it was relaunched as a set of open-source tools, distributed via GitHub and the Microsoft Store. It’s also evolved from a collection of standalone utilities into a single download with a unified front end, from which you can easily activate, deactivate and manage all the various components. You can install the suite…

Laptops and PCs We run a selection of benchmarks on all the PCs and laptops we test. Where possible, we use a cross-platform test so we can compare Windows and macOS machines, which is where both Geekbench and Cinebench come into play. Both push the CPU to its limit, exposing how well cooled a system is. We run extra tests for Windows systems. We use PCMark 10 to benchmark systems in office tasks, content creation and basic tasks such as web browsing and video calls. We also run 3DMark Time Spy and Shadow of the Tomb Raider as a minimum. We test laptops and PCs that include discrete graphics with a range of games, such as Metro Exodus Enhanced and Dirt 5. For laptops, we test battery life with Wi-Fi…

SCORE PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from honor.com When I reviewed the Qualcomm version of the Honor MagicBook Art last year (see issue 366, p52), I mourned the fact it wasn’t due to go on sale in the UK. With this 2025 update, Honor switches to Intel inside and brings it to the UK for £1,500 – a high price, but Honor tends to sweeten the deal with money-off vouchers and freebies. Everything I loved about last year’s model is still here, including an immaculate design. I tested the Emerald Green version, with its soft, matte finish giving it a real lift over the sober Dell 14 Premium (see p50). It’s incredibly compact, barely larger than this A4 magazine, and weighs a mere 1kg. Using magnesium alloy achieves this, and…

NORTON 360 PREMIUM for £19.99 SAVE 89% 10 DEVICES 2YR LICENCE 75GB CLOUD BACKUP ◼ pcpro.link/norton360 We’ve negotiated this exclusive deal for PC Pro readers. 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 there’s no danger of being hit with hiked renewal fees. Because it’s the Premium version of Norton 360, you get a host of extra tools. Top of the list is the full version of Norton VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while you’re abroad. There’s also 75GB of cloud storage for secure backup, while Norton’s Dark Web Monitoring service will alert you if private details –…

Total value this month £105 Identity Advisor Plus 2025 With so many aspects of modern life now conducted online, there’s an ever-increasing risk that your personal information could fall into the wrong hands – and when it does, it can easily be misused. Your bank details, phone number or other information could be exposed as part of a leak or a targeted attack, the consequences of which can be disruptive and costly. This is what Norton Identity Advisor Plus helps you avoid. Simply tell Norton what information you want to protect and the service will then continually monitor online forums, the dark web and more to check whether it’s been exposed. If anything concerning is spotted, you’ll be notified right away, so you can take steps to protect yourself, such…

SCORE PRICE £483 (£579 inc VAT) from xreal.com The original Xreal One AR glasses impressed us back at the start of the year (see issue 366, p70), and I’ve been eagerly waiting to try out the enhanced Pro version. Now it’s finally here, I’m delighted to say it’s worth the wait; it might even be worth the steep asking price. If you’re not familiar with AR glasses, the idea is simple: using a standard USB-C cable, you can connect them to almost any smartphone, laptop or computer, and either extend or duplicate the device’s display onto the inside of the lenses. The result is a huge, high-quality virtual screen that’s completely private to you. I love this technology for long trips on trains and planes, as it allows me to…

SCORE PRICE Galaxy Watch8 from £266 (£319 inc VAT); Watch8 Classic from £374 (£449 inc VAT) from samsung.com We’ve tested nearly every Galaxy Watch since the original, and each one has looked and felt a lot like the last. The Galaxy Watch8, however, brings two innovations: it’s the first smartwatch to come with Google’s Gemini AI assistant built in. And there’s now a Classic variant that looks like a high-end mechanical timepiece with a 46mm face, a rotating bezel and a recessed “quick button” that resembles a regular crown – albeit for a premium £449. If that’s too steep, the regular Watch8 starts at £319 with a 40mm face, or £349 for the 44mm version. Both models have a clean, plain design, although the chunky metal surround makes them look…

We always want to give the broadest possible workstation advice, so we use a wide variety of software for testing – and this year we’ve added even more with a huge new test suite from SPEC (the non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation). To start, we ran our standard PC Pro Media Benchmark suite to assess image-processing and video-encoding abilities, and then multitasking (see the results on p95). 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. This month…

SCORE PRICE £5,995 (£7,194 inc VAT) from ipworkstations.com InterPro is a regular entrant to our annual workstation Labs, always providing solid specs for content creators. Its IPW-TW brings together well-balanced components that offer strong performance in visualisation and other media workloads. The CPU is from AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series, and it’s likely that InterPro will upgrade to the 9000 series by the time you read this. The 7970X offers 32 cores (64 threads) running at a base 4GHz with a 5.3GHz boost frequency. This is partnered with 256GB of 5,600MHz DDR5 memory, supplied as four 64GB ECC Registered modules. These take up all the DIMM slots on the Asus motherboard, but you probably won’t need more memory. More to the point, it satisfies the requirement for the Threadripper’s quad-channel…

SCORE PRICE £5,500 (£6,600 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk/3xs Both of Scan’s entries this month take advantage of its early access to the Threadripper 9000 series. At this price it’s the 32-core variant, while graphics come from Nvidia’s consumer range – but this is still an incredibly potent piece of kit. The Threadripper 9970X offers 32 cores (64 threads) with a base 4GHz clock and a 5.4GHz boost. This combines with 64GB of 5,600MHz DDR5 memory supplied as four 16GB DIMMs to take advantage of the processor’s quad-channel bandwidth. This is a little below what we would like for a 32-core processor. To keep costs down, Scan has opted for consumer-grade graphics with the 3XS GWP-G1-TF32, but it’s a powerful example. The Asus Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 TUF Gaming uses the…

SCORE PRICE £10,995 (£13,194 inc VAT) from armari.com Armari was one of three manufacturers that managed to get hold of an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000-series processor in time for this test. It’s also gone in with all guns blazing with its graphics acceleration. The result is a system that beats almost every other system this month and grabs one particularly noteworthy benchmarking record. Unlike Scan’s top-end system, Armari has chosen the 32-core (64-thread) Ryzen 9970X for the Magnetar MC64T9. Although the base clock of 4GHz is the same as the old 7970X, the boost is now 5.4GHz instead of 5.3GHz. With a 4nm manufacturing process instead of 5nm, it should be possible to run more cores at a faster frequency at the same time. To ensure this, Armari supplied its…

SCORE PRICE £11,000 (£13,200 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk/3xs Scan was one of two manufacturers to grab early samples of the new 9000-series AMD Ryzen Threadripper, equipping the 3XS GWP-A1-TR64 with the top-tier 64-core version. In fact, this system has no holds barred in any area. Let’s start with that CPU. The non-Pro Threadripper tops out with the 9980X, which offers 64 cores (128 threads) running at a base 3.2GHz but with a 5.4GHz boost clock. This is one of the differences compared to the previous 7980X, which maxes out at 5.1GHz. However, the new CPU’s 4nm process should mean more cores can run at a higher speed more of the time. Scan backs this with 128GB of 5,600MHz DDR5 memory, supplied as four 32GB DIMMs. This will be enough for…

IT support teams are essential for efficient business operations, and no company would survive long without them. Flexible and hybrid working practises bring new challenges, though, as technicians are expected to provide fast and effective support no matter where staff are working from. Telephone support can be inefficient and frustrating as it’s often impossible to fix a problem without having access to the user’s device. It’s also far too expensive and time-consuming for technicians to personally visit users every time they have a hardware or software issue. Remote support software is the perfect solution as it puts staff in front of the user’s workstation without having to be physically present. Even better, cloud-hosted products allow them to diagnose and fix problems from the comfort of their own desk, even if…

SCORE PRICE From £71 exc VAT per month billed yearly from logmein.com GoTo offers two distinct remote support solutions, and this year has brought them both under the same LogMeIn brand. LogMeIn Resolve targets IT professionals and MSPs, while LogMeIn Rescue on test here is aimed at businesses and enterprises seeking to support large numbers of users with the focus on access security. Previously, Rescue comprised a cloud administration portal and separate technician desktop app, but moves are afoot to go web-first across the entire product. The desktop app is still provided but GoTo is developing a web portal so technicians can now choose between them. The Rescue Administration Center portal is used to create master administrators that have full access to all settings, whereas standard administrators are allowed to…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £604 exc VAT from uk.insight.com The DiskStation DS1522+ has always been one of Synology’s most popular desktop NAS appliances thanks to its combination of capacity, performance and value. It’s given three years of sterling service, but retirement beckons and has now been replaced by the DS1525+. From the front, you’d be hard pushed to spot any differences as they’re both clothed in the same charcoal-black chassis and present their five drive bays with lockable plastic tool-free drive carriers. It’s all change at the rear, though, as the DS1525+ replaces the four gigabit ports of its predecessor with dual 2.5GbE multi-gig ports. The two eSATA expansion ports in the DS1522+ change to dedicated USB Type-C ports for connecting up to two DX525 5-bay expansion units – hence the…

Expert advice from our panel of professional There are new laws that have come into effect in the UK about controlling the access to certain sorts of material on the internet, specifically pornography. But it also applies to any material unsuitable for someone under the age of 18. Age verification has always been a difficult subject. I’m sure we can all agree that there are classes of material that aren’t suitable for minors. And that some social media spaces allow quite unrestrained access by minors to material that is deemed inappropriate – and allow access to those minors by predatory adults. The question that has haunted the internet from the earliest days is how to manage and control this. The nerds, and those of us who were around at the…

Given the mass media coverage of ransomware attacks on first the UK high street and then the US retail sector, you’d be forgiven for thinking that ransomware is public cyber enemy number one. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a massive problem that has enormous potential for harm to business, but it’s far from the only thing you should be focused on. Especially when you realise that rather than being on the rise, ransomware is actually in decline. I’m not talking about the fall of major criminal groups that have dominated the threat sector in the past; they’re always replaced by others or by themselves. The disbanded groups splinter and make new alliances, form new groups or simply change their name, tweak the malware, establish new infrastructure and it’s business…

Cars are full of sensors and automation that allow vehicles to change lanes or brake without the driver doing much at all. Navigation systems reveal exactly what’s on the road ahead, offering global wayfinding. And roads themselves are full of smart systems to manage junctions, change speeds on the fly and so much more. So why are we stuck in traffic all the time? London drivers lost 101 hours trapped in congestion in 2024, while across the UK more widely, traffic cost an average 62 hours annually, according to data from the transport analytics company INRIX. Road safety continues to be a challenge, too, with 1,633 people killed in accidents last year. Another 27,904 suffered serious injuries. “It really is a pivotal, critical issue for the UK,” said Max Sugarman,…

Everyone on the internet appears to be outraged about something. You can’t move for social media postings lambasting some new cause or public issue. And yet many of these postings have little or no reference sources, and if they do, it’s to a site whose information integrity is often, shall we say, somewhat lacking. So I was intrigued by a particular thread on the hellscape that is X showing a photo of a poster from the University of East London (tinyurl.com/373wifitrees). It said: “Wi-Fi doesn’t grow on trees. Your screen time is damaging the climate.” Duly outraged, I went to read more at the University of East London’s website (tinyurl.com/373eastlondon). This makes the claim that the “growing demand for digital services has created a new challenge for the environment. Sending…