PC Pro的February 2026目录

We know PC Pro readers like to stay ahead of emerging tech, so we’ve rounded up the big tech launches, trends and potential management changes that you can expect to see in the coming year. We’ve also curated a list of the big tech conferences and exhibitions for 2026, if you want to start booking your flights and hotel rooms… 1 Steam Machines Does a gaming PC have to run Windows? Not if Valve has anything to do with it. Buoyed by the success of the handheld Steam Deck, Valve now has its eyes on the desktop market with the launch of the Steam Machine in early 2026. The attractive-looking cube is designed to sit either beneath a TV like a games console (pay attention Microsoft and Sony) or on…

The UK’s data watchdog isn’t doing its job – that’s according to a recent letter demanding an inquiry into failures of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to act after data breaches. Not that any of this is new. The ICO set the tone as a watchdog without teeth when it failed to fine Google for slurping up Wi-Fi credentials in 2013, giving it a slap on the wrist and a demand to delete the data. Google learned from that and never collected data accidentally ever again – oh wait, remember DeepMind, the Royal Free Hospital and the kidney app debacle? To be fair to the ICO, at that time it could only fine up to £500,000, hardly an amount to make Google or any other multinational sit up and take…

NORTON 360 PREMIUM for £19.99 10 DEVICES 2YR LICENCE 75GB CLOUD STORAGE tinyurl.com/norton360premium 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, 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 backups, while Norton’s Dark Web Monitoring service will alert you if private details – such as your email address…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £11,659 (£13,990 inc VAT) from dell.com Last month we praised the Dell Tower Plus Desktop (see issue 376, p62) for its versatility, with an upgrade here or there taking it from office workhorse to gaming juggernaut. The Dell Pro Max Tower T2 Desktop is a very different beast. You could still use it as an office workhorse, but as the “Pro Max” in its name indicates its power lies when you specify it to the extreme, at which point it becomes a ludicrously powerful creative workstation. Not that this is obvious from Dell’s homepage for the Tower T2. The first system you’ll see costs £776 inc VAT and packs a measly Core Ultra 5 235, integrated Intel Graphics, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. I’ve…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from tinyurl.com/377cyber Genesis, Crowded House, Simon & Garfunkel: some bands are so middle of the road that a white line should be painted straight down the middle of their album covers. But that doesn’t make their music any less enjoyable, which is exactly how I feel about the CyberPowerPC Ultra R5RX. This is a MOR gaming PC designed to deliver the maximum number of frames for your pennies, and it succeeds. It just isn’t very exciting. Perhaps that’s unfair. I do like the chassis, with its white finish, grille cover and striking diagonal centrepiece. There’s even RGB lighting to give it extra zing, and with a hinged tempered glass side it couldn’t be easier to access the innards. Everything is centred around a mid-range…

SCORE PRICE £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from hp.com Whether you buy this 14in model or the OmniBook X Flip 16 opposite, the idea is much the same: a businesslike 2-in-1 convertible that’s differentiated from rivals thanks to an OLED panel and aggressive price. This spec, which includes a 2,880 x 1,800 panel, is generally on sale for £1,099 inc VAT, even dropping to £899 on Black Friday – and that’s a terrific deal bearing in mind the quality on offer. You even get a stylus thrown in. The quality stems from the aluminium chassis, which HP proudly claims uses “20% post-consumer recycled plastics and recycled metals”. That’s backed up with EPEAT Gold with Climate+ certification, but what will matter to most users is that it feels solid and every aspect…

SCORE PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk BenQ targets the PV3200U at video editors and content creators, and as you can spend a small fortune on high-end monitors for content production it’s tempting: a colour-accurate 32in 4K IPS panel with built-in 2.1 speakers for £700 sounds like a bargain. That temptation is reinforced by the specs, with BenQ promising 95% DCI-P3 coverage, Calman Verified accreditation plus a wireless puck to jump between settings and sources. Every inch is finished in a dark charcoal grey, and the result is a smart, unassuming monitor. The plastic construction feels lightweight, but I have no complaints about the stand. Ample adjustability comes via the tubular design and wide base, which provide stable support for the screen, and you get 115mm of smooth height…

SCORE PRICE £583 (£700 inc VAT) from motorola.com Following on from the £1,100 Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge (see issue 371, p75) and £999 iPhone Air (see issue 375, p68), it seems that super-thin phones are the latest bandwagon for manufacturers to leap onto. Motorola has form with its £600 Edge 60 Pro (see issue 371, p74), not to mention the Edge 60, which has dropped to £299. Safe to say I had high expectations for this late 2025 update. It started well. At 5.9mm thick, the Edge 70 is so thin that I felt duty-bound to protect it with the rigid plastic in-box case, thereby mitigating the benefits of a slender mobile in the first place. Mind you, at 159g it still feels notably lighter than the average phone. Pantone…

SCORE PRICE 4TB (tested), £400 (£480 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Corsair MP700 Pro SE is Corsair’s second-generation PCIe 5.0 SSD – evidently the company has decided that the original MP700 Pro, released back in 2023, no longer cuts the mustard. Although this drive has the same base hardware as its previously released sibling, both the controller and flash are upgraded, and it now comes with an optional heatsink or liquid cooling. The drive is offered in 2TB and 4TB capacities only, both of which claim read speeds of up to 14,000MB/sec, thanks to controller manufacturer Phison’s latest “Max14um” platform (get it?). The five-year warranty covers up to 1,400 TBW (TB written) on the 2TB model and 3,000 TBW for the 4TB drive – both more than enough for desktop…

SCORE PRICE 2TB (as tested), £125 (£150 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Kioxia’s SSDs have a solid reputation for reliability, but here we’re focusing on value. The Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 is quite a bit cheaper than any rival whether in its 1TB or 2TB capacity. There are no 4TB or 8TB options, however, which rules the Exceria out if you’re looking for a capacious drive. The Exceria Plus G4 comes with a five-year warranty covering up to 600TB of data written per terabyte of capacity – a fine provision but unremarkable in this month’s company. Kioxia’s SSD Utility software lets you monitor the drive’s state and health in real-time, and handles firmware updates, password protection and secure erase. Kioxia’s design is single-sided, so the back has no components (perhaps a…

SCORE PRICE 8TB (tested), £600 (£720 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Samsung’s 9100 Pro SSD is one of only three SSDs this month to come in a huge 8TB capacity – and it’s far cheaper than the others. It’s also reasonably priced in the 4TB size, although the 2TB and 1TB models are less competitive. While most SSDs use bought-in controller chips and flash memory, Samsung designs and manufactures its own, meaning the 9100 Pro has a distinctive performance profile. That starts with claimed sequential read speeds of 14,700MB/sec for the 2TB model – a little faster than most – and a small boost to 14,800MB/sec for the 8TB version. You also benefit from Samsung’s Magician software, which offers a quick, friendly way to check drive health and S.M.A.R.T. readings, with…

Printers have become significantly cheaper over the years, but there’s still plenty of scope to make an expensive mistake. Go for the wrong balance of features or performance and you might find yourself needing a replacement before too long. Meanwhile, forgetting to factor in running costs could come back to haunt you every time you buy a toner. Fear not; we’re here to guide you. Start by having a clear idea of why you’re buying. If it’s just to print off the odd email, you might get away with a single-function device, but otherwise we’d usually recommend a multifunction peripheral (MFP). These combine print, scan and copy functions, and sometimes also offer fax. There are nine MFPs in this group of 12, two of which offer all four of those…

SCORE PRICE £284 (£341 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk If you need a colour laser MFP for a home office or small business, Canon’s i-Sensys MF660 range should be on your radar. We tested the MF664Cdw, which offers print, scan and copying; for about another £40 the MF667Cdw adds fax. Both come with a 250-sheet paper cassette and single-page bypass slot, together with duplex printing as standard. On top of both models you’ll find an ADF with a generous 50-page capacity. It’s a shame, then, that it can’t scan both sides of originals, ruling out automatic double-sided copies. The MF664Cdw has a decent spec elsewhere. Around the back you’ll find both USB and gigabit Ethernet connectivity, and there’s dual-band wireless, too. At the front a USB host port supports walk-up prints…

SCORE PRICE £119 (£143 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk Brother’s DCP-L1660W is a mono laser multifunction peripheral (MFP) aimed at home office users. It’s a compact device, but it’s also surprisingly affordable. For around £120 exc VAT you get a 20 pages per minute (ppm) laser printer, topped off by a scanner with an automatic document feeder (ADF). Not only that, Brother throws in USB, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity. There almost has to be a catch; delve into the specifications and you’ll find it. Neither the ADF nor printer support automatic duplexing, which is a shame, and the DCP-L1660W arrives with a paltry 350-page “inbox” toner – not enough to cover a single ream. The 1,000-page replacement works out at 3.2p exc VAT per page if you don’t factor in the…

SCORE PRICE £71 (£85 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk The TS7550i is the top model of the three new Canon Pixma inkjet multifunction peripherals featured in this test. In previous Pixma lineups, models beginning with a “7” have tended to be relatively premium, but we found the TS7550i online for £71 exc VAT. That’s quite aggressive pricing, undercutting similar rivals from several competitors. The TS7550i is identical to the Pixma TS6550i (see p88) aside from having a 35-sheet automatic document feeder plonked on top. That means you get a relatively basic 100-sheet paper input, along with duplex printing as standard. There’s also a control panel with a small mono screen – we wouldn’t necessarily expect a colour touchscreen at this price. You can connect to this MFP via USB or over…

SCORE PRICE £149 (£179 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk This colour laser printer from Kyocera doesn’t offer the world, but at least a couple of continents are up for grabs. It’s keenly priced, and that’s reflected to a degree in its specifications. While it supports automatic duplex printing, it’s rated at a modest 21 pages per minute. This version also doesn’t support wireless networks – for that you’ll need to spend another £30 on the PA2101cwx. The PA2101cx is an upright, sensible-looking device. In its base you’ll find a 250-sheet paper cassette, and there’s a 50-sheet multipurpose feed at the front. You can control this printer from a 6.9cm colour touchscreen that’s coupled to a USB host port – perfect for visitors to make walk-up prints, or for regulars to be…

Wi-Fi 7 is now a mature technology and small to medium businesses (SMBs) that want to take advantage of its speed, reliability, lower latency and capacity benefits should be considering upgrading their legacy wireless networks. Staff now expect to access data anytime, anywhere and on any type of device so SMBs should take a “wireless first” approach to future network design if they want their workforce to be more flexible, competitive – and mobile. The numbers tell a compelling story. The Wi-Fi Alliance forecasted 98.7 million Wi-Fi 7 access point (AP) shipments in 2025 and estimates there will be 2.1 billion Wi-Fi 7 devices in use globally by 2028. Adoption is clearly gathering pace rapidly, and the good news for SMBs is that this intense competition is forcing prices down,…

SCORE PRICE £158 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Ubiquiti has been busy expanding its Wi-Fi 7 access point portfolio and now offers businesses a wireless solution for every type of environment. The UniFi U7 Pro XG on review sits near the top of its flagship series and delivers a remarkable range of features that belies its modest price tag. This BE10800-rated AP sports a high-speed 10GbE uplink port and presents six spatial streams equally divided across its three radios. It requires an 802.3at PoE+ power source, which you’ll need as the AP doesn’t have a socket for an optional external power adapter. However, Ubiquiti does offer a 10GbE PoE++ injector for around £33. We’ve always praised UniFi APs for their build quality and styling. The U7 Pro XG again impresses with…

SCORE PRICE Teams Rooms model, £1,550 exc VAT from best4systems.co.uk Jabra claims the PanaCast 40 VBS is the only Android-powered video bar with a 180-degree view that’s designed for small meeting rooms. It can function in appliance mode as its Android 13 OS is certified for Microsoft Teams Rooms plus Zoom Rooms, and can be easily swapped over to BYOD mode. We tested the full Microsoft Teams Rooms version, which includes Jabra’s touchscreen controller panel. Measuring just 530mm wide, the main unit sports a central turret with dual 8MP 4K cameras that deliver a panoramic 180-degree horizontal field of view (FoV), while speaker tracking is handled by an array of six beam-forming microphones The bar’s AI-powered video offers four viewing modes. Dynamic composition simultaneously shows the active speaker and room…

I haven’t written an article focused on AI since issue 353, when naturally I talked mostly about the television series Quantum Leap and its AI Ziggy. Sadly, Quantum Leap is now no more – the reboot leapt away after season 2, taking with it my hopes of seeing Sam Beckett again. AI, on the other hand, continues to leap into all our lives. In fact, there’s so much to update you on that I’m writing not just one, but two successive articles on legal AI developments. Since issue 353, the EU AI Act has come into force, and its provisions have started to apply in phases – a topic for the second article next month. In the UK, there isn’t much AI-specific legislation as yet, but there is a lot…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro M5 Class act from £1,599 from apple.com/uk No radical updates to the design, but this M5 update delivers yet more power to accompany the already excellent battery life. If you can pay the price, Apple’s professional laptop stands apart. The only question is whether the M5 Pro and M5 Max upgrades will be worth the extra cost when they come to the 16in version. REVIEW Issue 376, p52 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 7 255H and a gorgeous…

There’s a line in our interview with Cory Doctorow this month (see p44) that’s been bugging me since I read it. “I think that, as a consumer, there’s not much you can do,” he said of the notion of voting with your feet, of leaving the services that hook you in, hike prices and make the service worse. The implication being you do more harm to yourself by ditching Amazon or Facebook than the company you’re leaving. It’s been bugging me, because he’s got a point – and one I’ve felt myself. A couple of years ago, I got sick of the constant price rises for the Amazon Ring doorbell subscription. I voted with my feet by dumping Ring for the subscription-free Tapo doorbell, but I stopped short of cancelling…

When people think of AI they largely think of text-based chatbots such as ChatGPT. But chatbots are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with the tsunami of AI tools that are flooding onto the market, trying to capitalise on the AI boom we’re living through. In this article, we highlight a range of AI tools (yes, including ChatGPT) that are already delivering amazing capabilities for both professionals and consumers. Some of these are built into well-known pieces of software such as Photoshop, others are standalone apps. All of them are examples that AI is capable of much more than summarising a Word document or turning your selfie into a Pixar character. From isolating the different parts of audio tracks, to creating virtual photo shoots, to triaging the hundreds of…

All internet users will recognise that things are getting worse online. Google searches now require scrolling through AI word soup and sponsored adverts at the top of results, while Facebook has become a morass of promotions and ads. Streaming services that were founded on the principle of no advertising now make users pay to stop them, and your TV is reporting back on what you’re viewing. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate policies in a system that the internet activist and author Cory Doctorow has dubbed “enshittification”. The phenomenon is affecting swathes of platforms – technological or otherwise. The practice is now so common that in 2025 the venerable American dictionary titan Merriam-Webster added enshittification to its lexicon as “a digital platform is made worse for users…

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 £625 (£750 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk When it comes to mini PCs, MSI isn’t here to pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap, but to target professionals who want to know their systems have UK-based support if something goes wrong; small businesses are a key target. That’s one reason why MSI will never offer the cut-price deals of Beelink, Geekom or Minisforum. I couldn’t exactly match the spec on offer in my review unit – a Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, 16GB of DDR-5600 RAM and a 1TB Gen4 SSD – because MSI’s rivals are more generous with RAM, but you can expect to pay around £600 for this amount of power from each of those companies. Why pay the premium for MSI? Primarily for an easy life. It’s…

SCORE PRICE £958 (£1,149 inc VAT) from hp.com Let’s cut to the chase: the HP OmniBook X Flip 16 is a brilliant laptop. This 16in 2-in-1 daintily pirouettes between laptop and tablet modes, the OLED touchscreen is stupendous, and the performance from the mid-pack Intel Lunar Lake processor – both in games and productivity – is spot on. The big surprise is the price. For £1,149 inc VAT, a bright, colour-accurate OLED touchscreen in such a well-built chassis is something of a coup. Clad in a pale, matte silver with a subtle sparkle, HP has crafted a good-looking laptop, and that visual flair goes hand in hand with build quality. This feels like a premium laptop, despite a little flex in the base. Sensibly, the lid housing the OLED panel…

SCORE PRICE £124 (£149 inc VAT) from benq.com Here’s the theory: many PC users, especially programmers and designers, prefer to work in dark environments as it helps them concentrate. They don’t want to fiddle with desk lamps or switch on overhead lighting, they just want to focus. This has given birth to a product category of monitor light bars that perch on top of screens, lighting up your desk area while all around you grows dim. BenQ’s ScreenBar Halo 2’s sits at the premium end of the market. It’s BMW versus Fiat when compared to the Soamco below, and this extends to its sheer size: BenQ’s offering stretches the full width of a 27in monitor, while Soamco’s will only stretch across the top of a 24in screen. That makes the…

As ever with a new generation of technology, it’s taken time for the next generation of PCI Express to arrive en masse. But now, at last, we think it’s safe to say that PCIe Gen5 SSDs are the right choice for upgraders and enthusiasts, and here we put eight of the best to the test. The feature table opposite and the performance graphs on p79 will immediately make clear that not all these SSDs are born equal. We would say there are two rough classes on offer: those offering all-out speed and those leaning towards the budget end. But the biggest determinant of price is capacity. The most common choices are 2TB and 4TB, and we would generally recommend you choose one of these two: you won’t see as much…

SCORE PRICE 2TB (tested), £142 (£170 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Crucial T705 SSD uses the same controller and flash chips as the Corsair MP700 Pro SE, so you won’t be surprised to hear that its performance is very similar. For most people it will be a better buy simply because it’s significantly cheaper. That’s especially true at the entry level. The Crucial T705 starts with a 1TB model that’s cheaper than anything else in its class, aside from the cost-cutting Kioxia. The 2TB model, meanwhile, undercuts the Corsair by almost 30%, while the 4TB model is terrific value at only £281, including the heatsink. Nothing appears to have been compromised to hit these prices. The drive comes with a standard five-year warranty, based on 600TB of writes per TB…

SCORE PRICE 4TB (tested), £280 (£336 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Lexar has produced good-value SSDs in the past, but with this one it depends on the size you go for: while the 4TB model is a compelling deal, the 1TB and 2TB versions are slightly more expensive than the equivalent Acer Predator GM9000 models, which use the same controller and flash chips. There are a few technical differences between this and the Acer SSD. The Lexar’s five-year warranty covers up to 700TB written per terabyte – 100TB less than the Acer – but the Lexar is a little more power-efficient, thanks to the use of ultra-low-voltage LPDDR4x rather than regular LPDDR4. Perhaps more significantly, the Lexar NM1090 Pro is double-sided, with a chunky 3.8mm thickness that limits its ability to…

SCORE PRICE 2TB (tested), £192 (£230 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Though last alphabetically, WD takes an unquestioned first place in this month’s SSD stakes. The WD Black SN8100 outshines all rivals with chart-topping performance and excellent efficiency, and it’s available in a full stack of sizes from 1TB up to an enormous 8TB (although we could only find the 8TB drive at shop.sandisk.com). The SN8100 uses the same core components as the Kingston Fury Renegade G5, but raises the performance ante to 14,900MB/sec for sequential reads – faster than any other SSD on test. Software support, courtesy of parent company Sandisk, is top notch; the WD Dashboard is a close rival to Samsung’s Magician in terms of features and ease of use, and you also get a full OEM edition…

SCORE PRICE £64 (£77 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk Canon’s TS6550i sits in the middle of the three new Pixma models released just ahead of this test. As with many product lineups, that’s typically the sweet spot where you’d expect to find the best combination of features and value. The TS6550i certainly scores well for the latter; while it’s not a particularly highly specified device, it is very affordable, undercutting similar models from rivals. The Pixma TS6550i offers a control panel with a mono screen, which immediately distinguishes it from the screen-less Pixma TS4150i reviewed on p91. There’s also a more subtle improvement over its cheaper sibling: the scanner bed is supported by a damped strut, a bit like an expensive car bonnet. Other than that, you’d be hard pressed to…

SCORE PRICE £123 (£148 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk You’d be hard-pressed to get too excited about Brother’s MFC-J4550DW. It’s a boxy inkjet multifunction peripheral, all hard black plastics and jutting out surfaces. Only the neat and uncluttered control panel with its 6.8cm colour touchscreen adds a touch of class. However, it’s a well specified device, offering print, scan, copy and fax functions, together with dual paper trays and a 20-sheet automatic document feeder. It also supports both wired and wireless networks. That’s a good set of features for a busy home office, and its appeal is helped by reasonable running costs. You can buy replacement cartridges rated at a handy 3,000 black pages, or 2,000 for the separate cyan, magenta and yellow consumables. This gives competitive costs of 5p exc…

SCORE PRICE £233 (£280 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Epson’s EcoTank ET-2950 is a relatively basic multifunction peripheral, offering print, scan and copy functionality. While automatic duplex printing is standard, it comes with a simple 100-sheet rear paper tray – a little bit galling given that the closely related EcoTank ET-4956 (see p89) has a larger enclosed cassette. This MFP also does without an automatic document feeder, so if you want multi-page copies or scans you’ll need to shuffle the paper around yourself. The ET-2950 is among the cheapest refillable MFPs we’ve reviewed, but it doesn’t offer the best bang for your buck. Brother’s DCP-T780DW (see p86) costs about £20 less, yet it comes with a 20-page ADF. As our tests reveal, it’s also substantially quicker when it comes to plain…

SCORE PRICE £183 (£220 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk The Xerox C320 is a slightly odd-looking printer, with a grey bump on the right-hand panel that looks faintly like modern architecture. It’s actually there to house the consumables, which in typical Xerox fashion are small and boxy. They’re already fitted in the printer, although you’ll need to remove a variety of packing material – look out for the elasticated nunchucks behind the front panel that will gleefully ping into your knuckles. In a nod to a previous century, this printer arrives in comfy but near-unrecyclable foam, and proudly clutches a driver CD. But its specs are bang up to date: there’s a 7.1cm colour touchscreen with a USB host port, and it supports both gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Xerox packs a…

SCORE PRICE £251 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk As an early entrant into the Wi-Fi 7 market, EnGenius boasts an impressive portfolio of access points, and its latest ECW520 claims to offer SMBs a high-performing solution at an affordable price point. It certainly has the hardware to handle high demand: it’s powered by the same Qualcomm Networking Pro 1220 platform and quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 CPU as EnGenius’ flagship ECW536 (see issue 365, p98). This tri-band BE10800-rated AP presents six spatial streams spread equally across its 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz radios, and claims maximum speeds of 700Mbits/sec, 4,300Mbits/sec and 5,800Mbits/sec respectively. Its single 2.5GbE multi-gig port only requires a PoE+ source and, although there’s a power jack alongside, an adapter is an optional purchase. All ECW models are managed directly from the…

SCORE PRICE £62 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Prices for business Wi-Fi 7 access points have been falling steadily, and Zyxel takes this to the next level with its NWA50BE costing a pocket-friendly £62. As you’d expect at this price, there are compromises: it lacks a 6GHz radio and has a modest BE5100 rating, but it’s powered by a quad-core Qualcomm CPU and can be managed in standalone mode or remotely using Zyxel’s Nebula Control Center (NCC) cloud platform. It isn’t mandatory for Wi-Fi 7 APs to have a 6GHz radio, and the NWA50BE is endowed with all the other key Wi-Fi 7 features, including 4K-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation), multi-RUs (resource units) and support for multi-link operations (MLO). If you want future-proofed wireless networks, consider Zyxel’s NWA50BE Pro model, as its…

Do you have a hybrid workforce? These days almost every business can answer in the affirmative. Unfortunately, the same goes for the follow-up question: do remote workers pose a risk to the security of your organisation? It doesn’t have to be that way. You may be so small that you think you don’t have the resources to properly secure your data and devices with expensive tools and complex processes, but the truth is that some relatively simple changes can make a huge difference. Let’s start by acknowledging the elephant in the small-business cybersecurity room: no, you are not invisible to attackers, nor are they only interested in bigger fish. According to penetration testing experts Qualysec (qualysec.com), more than 40% of cyberattacks target small businesses. Sure, some of those will be…

It was one of those discussions on the PC Pro Discord channel (pcpro.link/discord) that spilled into the pub with the requisite beer. Given that Microsoft has announced, to a not entirely enthusiastic response, that it is going to move Windows to being an agentic OS, what would that mean to you and me? Well, the idea is that AI can be used to automate a lot of common functions and to slowly take over the way we work with our devices. Critics pointed out that this will inevitably mean some of your data will be sent to the Microsoft cloud for processing, and what will be the privacy issues with that? Also, such a service is going to consume a lot of CPU power, and that will inevitably come at…

Stop telling me that ransomware is no longer business enemy number one. Or better still, start telling that nonsense to the likes of Logitech, which recently endured the data breach consequences of a zero-day by Clop on a third-party software platform. Or maybe the Unites States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which continues to release ransomware attack advisories covering everything from Linux vulnerabilities being exploited to specific guidance for dealing with named groups. I blame the government, the UK lot most recently, for much of this “ransomware is in decline” messaging. People read the headlines, see that there are moves to make the paying of (some) ransoms illegal and think it’s a done deal. It isn’t, of course, and the action is only aimed at public sector and critical infrastructure…

As those who will have tried know, guiding a digital football team to glory is no mean feat. It takes tactical nous, smart planning and a solid understanding of the beautiful game to send a club up through the divisions. Winning a cup involves more than a bit of luck, too. Playing football management sims also consumes a heap of time, which is one reason why Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series has reportedly been cited in 35 divorce cases. But there is a way to get a football management fix without having to dedicate so much effort. It’s called Kevin Toms Football Star* Manager and it has a very different football manager game at its core. To explain, we have to go back to 1982 when Kevin Toms released the…

Geekom, the Taiwanese PC firm that’s made it name with series of mini PCs, is launching its first laptop. The Geekbook X14 Pro borrows the MacBook’s magnesium casing and black keyboard look, and it’s pitched as an ultraportable, weighing a sliver under 1kg and tapering to 13.5mm thick. The X14 Pro will have a choice of two CPUs, either the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H or the more powerful Core Ultra 9 185H. Both will rely on integrated Intel Arc graphics. The laptop will have 1TB of M.2 SSD storage and a generous 32GB of DDR5 RAM. It will contain a 72Wh battery that Geekom claims will deliver up to 16 hours of video playback, and the 65W PD GaN fast-charger will restore “hours” of power in only 30 minutes.…

Mankind has always hankered after immortality… sorry about that, but I’ve been overdosing on social media for several weeks and had begun to worry that my column isn’t bombastic enough. It’s not just social media, either: last week The Guardian ran a piece about a US investment boom in “transhumanist” technologies such as Musk’s Neuralink that claim they’ll enable us to upload our brains and download them again into new bodies. Concerned scientists say this is diverting funding away from sensible medical research. I’ve written plenty here about the delusions most software engineers (even billionaire ones) harbour about brain function and so am not going there again, except to say that it isn’t static data, it’s an evanescent flux, geddit? What interests me more is the replacement body aspect, prompted…

A Grove error How on earth did David Crookes manage to write the otherwise excellent article about Andy Grove (see issue 375, p123) without mentioning the IBM PC with Intel’s 8088 (and optional 8087) inside, which launched the PC revolution? To be fair he’s right that Compaq pioneered the use of the 386, but omitting the 8088 is a bit like writing the history of nuclear power without mentioning the atomic bomb. That said, thanks for an article about one of the all-time greats of our industry! Nigel Burton David Crookes replies: It’s a fair point! This is a glaring omission, so much so that I had to read the article back, convinced I had actually mentioned it. There is, of course, mention of the 8086 (the 8088 being a…

For the past decade we’ve been recommending Affinity Photo as an affordable, buy-once alternative to Adobe Photoshop, with companion apps Affinity Publisher and Affinity Designer making persuasive rivals to InDesign and Illustrator. Last year, though, Serif – the original developer and publisher of Affinity apps – was bought out by online design giant Canva, raising concerns about Affinity’s future. Happily, Canva hasn’t killed off Affinity. In fact, it’s just unveiled the best version of Affinity ever – a brand-new integrated app that brings together all the powerful features of its three predecessors, and adds in a whole lot more. What’s more, where the complete Affinity suite used to cost around £90, the new app is completely free for both personal and commercial use (aside from a few AI add-ons, which…

Technology keeps getting smarter, more reliable and more cloud-based, and old-school backup regimes have fallen by the wayside. Many of us remember the days of copying key files onto floppy disks at the end of the working day, or periodically burning DVDs and sending them off to remote storage – in accordance with the “3-2-1” rule, which advised us to keep three copies of all data, across two different disks (or other media) and one offsite copy. Nowadays that rule seems archaic. While external storage media are increasingly rare, remote data centres are an everyday fact of life. And if a file goes missing or gets accidentally corrupted, it’s easy to assume that there will be a copy sitting safely out there on a server somewhere. With such a volume…

SCORE PRICE £1,458 (£1,749 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk German manufacturer Medion loves to build top-value PCs, and that emphasis on value extends to its high-end offerings. A £1,749 price may seem high, but I wish you luck finding the same specification at a cheaper price. As ever, it’s the graphics card that greedily gulps most of the budget: roughly half of it in this case. You’d better be sure you’ll use its power or you’re wasting your cash. You can see how it compares in our main tests in the graphs below, but here I’ll flag its 4K gaming performance: 182fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Highest (preset), 132fps in Dirt 5 (Ultra High), 99fps in Far Cry 6 (Ultra), 92fps in Borderlands 3 (Badass) and 72fps in Cyberpunk…

SCORE PRICE $599 from tinyurl.com/377beelink Chinese manufacturer Beelink is best known for its mini PCs, available direct from bee-link.com or through a UK retailer such as Amazon. While it’s usually best to go through the latter – if something goes wrong within the one-year warranty you can return the unit easily, rather than needing to send it back to China – this version of the mini PC is only currently available direct from Beelink. The TinyURL address we print above takes you to the PC’s page. The good news is that this well-built system looks and feels great. Its metal chassis is cold to the touch, with an Apple-esque silver finish reminiscent of the Mac mini, but it’s substantially smaller at 135 x 135 x 45mm. That’s roughly 0.82 litres.…

Ashampoo WinOptimizer 27 Ashampoo WinOptimizer 27 is a comprehensive PC cleaning, maintenance and optimisation suite. It can help you achieve peak Windows performance with a series of new automation tools that can accelerate, clean and tweak your applications. For a start, if you’re short of hard drive space then WinOptimizer 27 can help by removing leftover Windows and application files, browser traces (from Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari), unnecessary duplicate files and broken shortcuts. Once it’s done that, the Disk Space Explorer helps you find space-hogging folders, and the program can even defrag the drive once you’ve removed everything you no longer need, to make sure you’re enjoying the best possible performance. An array of other speed-up modules helps to manage your Windows startup programs, highlight and disable unnecessary…

SCORE PRICE £34 (£40 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk As Amazon’s Choice for a low-cost light bar, the Soamco was an obvious choice to test the ScreenBar Halo 2 against. Like the BenQ, it offers a variety of light settings that can be controlled by a wireless puck, but this coin-sized device simply clicks through different brightness settings from full to off. For finer control, you must reach for the buttons on top of the bar, from where you can flick between five colour temperature presets and brightness settings. This is also where you activate the ambient light sensor, although its effect wasn’t as obvious as the BenQ’s. With a 5W peak draw the Soamco can be powered via a laptop USB port, which could be useful if you take it…

SCORE PRICE 2TB (tested), £156 (£187 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Acer has produced some great SSDs in the past, and the GM9000 combines a modern SMI SM2508 controller with last-generation 232-Layer TLC flash memory from Micron. That holds it back from top-tier performance: Acer claims sequential read and write speeds of 14,000MB/sec and 13,000MB/sec respectively, which are strong even when compared to this month’s competition. The drive comes in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, with the five-year warranty covering 800TB of writes per terabyte of capacity. That’s a good deal – we’re more used to seeing 600TB per terabyte, giving this drive an edge for intensive workloads. For most people, though, it’s academic, as most people won’t get close to the maximum write endurance within the drive’s lifespan. The Predator…

SCORE PRICE 2TB (tested), £216 (£259 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Kingston’s latest PCIe Gen5 SSD is one of the most expensive drives here. The 1TB model isn’t too steep, but it’s still £25 more than the recommended Crucial T705. The 2TB and 4TB models command a significant premium, and the 8TB model costs a massive £990 inc VAT. That’s the price you pay for top performance, though. The Fury Renegade G5 claims sequential read speeds of up to 14,700MB/sec – second only to the WD Black SN8100, which edges ahead at a stated 14,900MB/sec. You’re also buying a very reliable drive. The five-year warranty period is nothing special, but this SSD’s promised write endurance is unmatched in the market, with a massive petabyte of writes per terabyte of capacity. Normally…

We always like to look to the future at PC Pro, but sometimes it simply doesn’t make sense to buy cutting-edge components. That’s especially true if your equipment can’t take advantage of them. This is particularly relevant for M.2 SSDs as even the latest high-end motherboards often only support one Gen5 SSD, so if you’re fitting multiple sticks it makes more sense to buy a Gen4 SSD to fill the second slot. Likewise if you’re upgrading a laptop that doesn’t support the latest standard. Here, then, we focus on four of the best PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSDs for speed and value. Note that you can see how their speeds compare to the Gen5 disks we’ve reviewed in the graphs on p79. BEST GEN4 SSD OVERALL Samsung 990 Pro PRICE 2TB, £160…

Call us biased, but we love printouts. Not only do they give us a welcome break from starting at screens, but a high-quality print allows you to present information in a way that’s somehow easier to digest. It also says that this is valuable: we actually bothered to print something out rather than it be throwaway on-screen information. All of which means that we need high-quality printouts now more than ever: that feeling of value is quickly washed away by fuzzy text and odd-looking colours. The good news is that almost all the printers on test here deliver on this front, with more differentiation coming from running costs. Here at PC Pro, we’re big believers in paying up front for a printer and then a fair price for ink –…

SCORE PRICE £208 (£249 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk Until recently, if UK buyers wanted a refillable ink tank printer, they could get one from HP, Epson or Canon, but not Brother. That’s changed with the launch of the DCP-T780DW, and its cheaper sibling the DCP-T580DW. Both are inkjet MFPs, aimed at home and small office users. While the DCP-T580DW is relatively basic, the DCP-T780DW we’re reviewing here has a decent specification, including a 20-sheet ADF on top. If your first reaction is to ask why a relatively humble home inkjet commands a £200 price tag, welcome to the world of refillable printers. Here you’ll find reasonably priced ink in generous bottles, delivering unrivalled low running costs. The flip side is that you need to pay more up front for the…

SCORE PRICE £305 (£366 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Epson EcoTank ET-4956 is the most expensive of the three refillable inkjet MFPs in this group test. It’s comfortably the best specified, however, offering everything you need for the home, home office or a micro business. In its base you’ll find a fully enclosed 250-sheet input cassette, while on top there’s a 30-sheet ADF, ideal for multi-page scans, copies and faxes. Both the printer and ADF support duplex operation – this is the only device on test to offer automatic double-sided photocopies of a double-sided original. As you probably expected, you can connect to the ET-4956 via USB or dual-band Wi-Fi, although it doesn’t support a wired Ethernet connection. You can control everything via its 6.1cm colour touchscreen, integrated into a…

SCORE PRICE £52 (£63 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk The TS4150i sits near the bottom of Canon’s Pixma range of inkjets. It’s a fairly basic MFP, offering prints, scans and copies, but no fax. You can fit about 100 sheets of plain paper in its input tray, and the output tray is similarly basic. Aimed at home users, the TS4150i foregoes useful office features such as an automatic document feeder or wired Ethernet connection. You can connect it to Wi-Fi, but the MFP has no screen, so you’ll need the help of a smartphone to do so. Some previous Pixma models have been quite stylish, so the TS4150i is a bit of a disappointment. It’s not bad looking, but its beige design offers up little in the way of surprise or…

SCORE PRICE £106 (£127 inc VAT) from printerbase.co.uk You expect speed from a laser printer, and the HP LaserJet Pro 4002dn delivers it in spades. It’s rated at 40ppm, and it hit exactly that in our tests. Other than that, however, it’s a rather ordinary single-function mono laser. The “dn” variant we’re testing here has both duplex printing and gigabit wired Ethernet. Need Wi-Fi? That comes on the 4002dw, which costs about £35 more. The LaserJet Pro 4002dn is proof that laser printers don’t need to be ugly, even if they are inherently dull. It’s a squat, white device, livened up with subtle styling touches and – be still our beating heart – a glint of chrome. On top you’ll find a backlit mono LCD screen with a few navigation…

Put someone in a room with 12 printers for long enough, and they’ll start running out of things to talk about. That was certainly the case with this group test, which resulted in something like 80 scanned pictures, 120 photocopies and 1,500 pages of printing, all conducted over the course of a week. As always, I made copious notes, and re-tested anything that didn’t look right. I had plenty of material to write up in my reviews, and yet, after it all, curiously little to say about the bigger picture. It’s not that this was a bad group of printers. On the contrary, Brother’s DCP-T780DW and Epson’s EcoTank ET-4956 are excellent, and several others are comfortably good enough for me to recommend. There were no turkeys, although I did feel…

SCORE PRICE £179 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com TP-Link’s EAP783 (see issue 360, p103) set high standards, with this mighty BE19000-rated Wi-Fi 7 AP delivering impressive performance. A steep asking price of over £500 puts it way beyond the budgets of most SMBs, however, with the EAP787 on review a far more affordable alternative. The EAP787 presents eight spatial streams, with two each for the 2.4GHz and 6GHz radios and four handed to the 5GHz radio. Its BE12000 rating claims speeds of up to 688Mbits/sec for 2.4GHz and 5,765Mbits/sec on both 5GHz and 6GHz. The US version has a higher BE15000 rating as it supports the 5GHz 240MHz channels, which aren’t cleared for use in the UK and EU. All this performance potential is unleashed by a fast 10GbE multi-gig uplink…

SCORE PRICE £562 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com DrayTek has garnered a fine reputation for delivering affordable network solutions to SMBs, and the VigorSwitch P2542x continues this tradition. Aimed at businesses with big Power over Ethernet (PoE) plans, this 48-port gigabit switch delivers PoE+ services on all copper ports, provides six 10GbE SFP+ fibre uplink ports and delivers it all at an appealing price. The P2542x is a full Layer 2 switch with basic Layer 3 routing capabilities that supports static IPv4 and IPv6 routing and inter-VLAN local routing, but not the dynamic routing found in more expensive full L3 switches. For the price it offers a generous 400W PoE budget, but if you want more, DrayTek’s P2542xh model has a 680W budget, with both supporting switch stacking and DrayTek’s optional…

Privacy by design – sounds like a lot of expensive re-engineering? In the context of legacy systems and processes it probably would be very costly to implement. “PbD”, as it’s familiarly known, isn’t a feature you can quickly tack on to an existing system. As the name implies, it’s a principle that’s baked in, not even at the point of development but at the whiteboard phase, before anyone has written a line of code. Originally developed by Dr Ann Cavoukian back in 1995, it’s become a global gold standard for systems design. So it’s not something we can meaningfully act on right now? If you’re not currently architecting new systems then you’re not going to be in a position to implement true, bottom-up PbD. However, you can build its principles…

As we barrel into the second half of this decade, you find me in a reflective mood. Happy New Year, by the way. For reasons which will become relevant in a moment, I’ve delved into Inspiration Computers’ dusty archive and pulled out invoice #00001 dated 6 December 2003 addressed to a Mr H of Huddersfield. This invoice details a 128MB SDRAM module (£39.49) and a 40GB IDE hard drive (£54.99). What isn’t recorded is the sheer terror that this job generated for Alison and me. We’d only opened the shop a day or so earlier and I recall we were still trying to work out how to set it up. The paint on the walls wasn’t yet fully dry, and we’d just had a discussion over whether we had the…

I like to think of us – readers, writers, suppliers – as all being jolly serious folk. No room for RGB bling, don’t even whisper the word “gaming”. We all want to look like we’re making impactful decisions that improve the bottom line in our businesses, and sober utilitarianism is what makes that happen. We like our high-quality brands, and walking the tightrope between build quality, longevity and price is what we think we are paid to do. Just one small problem. History shows that progress lies not with the heavily trusted brands but through smaller innovators in the gaming sector. No gamers, no everlasting performance wars. No gamers, no CUDA, so no modern AI supercomputers either. While I don’t think the switch to UTP networking is solely a gamer…

The next five years could see dramatic change on the web, as AI disrupts Google’s dominance in search, sparks a new browser war and exacerbates privacy invasions and digital surveillance. Or we could take the opportunity to build a better web. That’s what Mozilla is hoping to do – and has been for some time. After all, the Firefox maker has been toiling away at the goal since 1998, offering a browser that promises to prioritise privacy more than rivals whilst supporting open-source projects – though it’s also worth noting that the non-profit is largely funded by its leading rival, Google. Why is now such a key moment? AI chatbots offer an alternative to traditional search, while AI-generated summaries are shaking up search, changing how we interact with the web…

Features CES 2026: live from Las Vegas Tim Danton and Jon Honeyball resume their annual Vegas residencies as they report on the world’s biggest tech show. Features Extend your storage Add fast, high-capacity storage to any device: we show you how to pick the perfect drive, be it internal, external or network attached. Features Real-life war games The past year has seen a military-only Rocket League tournament and a new e-gaming room in a Royal Navy warship. We find out the reason for real-life war games. Labs ChatGPT vs the rest If you’ve ever wondered which AI service would serve you best, next month’s issue brings the answer. No hallucinations, only which of ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude and all the chatbots that don’t begin with C best matches your needs. Retro…

Sometimes technology brings us the perfect solution to a real-world need. A solution that fits so well you wonder how we ever did without it. Allow me to explain. In the run-up to Christmas, my partner and I attend a lot of food fairs at various locations, including a recent one at the wonderful Burghley House near Peterborough. As a specialist condiment, sauce and pickle maker from nearby Huntingdon, we love to give people a chance to taste our wares for themselves. The mantra is simple: spoons in mouths. If someone can taste your product, they are highly likely to buy, if the product is good enough. Fortunately, ours is (jandafood.com, thanks for asking). In the past, it was simple: go to the bank and get enough notes and change…