Table of contents for March 2024 in PC Pro

Imagine for a moment that people spoke in real life as they do in the hyped-up tech-industry announcements we’ve grown used to. That the barista told you the latte you’re about to drink is unique, transformative, revolutionary. We’d stare at them oddly, wish them a lovely day, and move slowly away. Yet in the bizarre world of tech marketing, that’s exactly what we all put up with every day. At the risk of triggering your flight-or-fight instincts, allow me to share some giveaway words. Top of my list: leverage, and, in particular, leveraging. I’m not a language snob, angry at the verbifying of a noun; heck, I just used the word verbifying, so I have no pride. I’m angry because it’s so hackneyed, so over-used, that its sole remaining meaning…

Since 2021 it has been possible to get high-speed broadband almost anywhere on Earth, thanks to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. With upwards of 5,300 satellites currently in low-Earth orbit, the network has already accrued more than 2.3 million customers in rural and far-flung locations around the world, where terrestrial broadband doesn’t reach at speed. However, to make use of Starlink’s capabilities you need a bulky satellite receiver, making it impractical for mobile use – at least, until now. In January, the company launched the first six of a new iteration of its satellites with “Direct to Cell” capabilities, which it’s hoped will enable an ordinary mobile phone to connect directly to the space-based network using 4G. A few days later, the company proved it possible by exchanging its first SMS text…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in (2023) M3 power from £1,699 from apple.com/uk The M3 chips give the already brilliant MacBook Pro series a boost in games with no sacrifices elsewhere, so power users who are happy with Apple must grapple with the big decisions: which M3 chip, which size of screen, and how much RAM and storage? REVIEW Issue 352, p46 ALTERNATIVES Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED (UX5304) The perfect 13in laptop? At 1kg, it packs power along with 1TB of storage, a top-quality OLED panel and superb battery life. £1,600 from uk.store.asus.com REVIEW Issue 348, p58 Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra Samsung packs everything into this 16in laptop, from a superb AMOLED panel and a slim 1.8kg chassis to a Core i9 CPU and RTX 4070 graphics. Expensive but…

Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro and has just completed his 13th CES. You would think he’d have got the hang of roaming by now. @bazzacollins Preparing for a trip to Las Vegas is always fraught with dilemmas. Do I need a raincoat, just in case? Which of my 18 international plug adapters should I pack? One feather boa or two? However, one problem I thought I’d managed to quash for this year’s CES jaunt (see p26 for the tech highlights) was roaming data. “Thought” being the operative word. I use the blisteringly cheap Lebara as my mobile network here in the UK: the 15GB of data I get for £6.95 per month is cracking value, not least because Lebara throws in free EU roaming. In the…

When it comes to future technology, no show does it quite like CES. It’s the A-Z of everything electrical, with companies from Acer to Zyxel displaying their new products for 2024. But it’s not just about big companies: over 1,400 startups were at Eureka Park in the hope of coverage or a distribution deal. As you can imagine, CES is enormous. It not only consumes the halls of the gigantic Las Vegas Convention Center, it spreads out to a second convention centre – called the Venetian Expo – with three more huge halls to fill. As if that weren’t enough, the show’s tendrils spread into hotels across the city. There’s no hope for one person to cover this event, and even with three of us from PC Pro we still…

AMD Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G PRICE 8600G, £220; 8700G, £310 AVAILABLE Now AMD rolled out its Ryzen 8000G lineup of APUs at CES 2024, beating Intel to the punch as the first company to bring purpose-built AI accelerators to the desktop PC. As we’ve seen in the past, AMD builds its APUs for the desktop using the same silicon as its laptop chips. In this case, AMD uses the “Phoenix” architecture that employs the Zen 4 CPU architecture and RDNA 3 graphics engine. However, the lack of battery life concerns in desktop PCs allows the chip to run at higher power limits, thus unleashing the full power of the silicon. AMD’s two flagship models, the Ryzen 7 8700G and the Ryzen 5 8600G, boast eight and six…

Xebec Snap PRICE $999 for two screens • AVAILABLE Now Portable screens for laptops have become something of a CES staple in recent years, but the Xebec Snap adds a touch of refinement to juggling multiple displays. With this system, you can “snap” a screen to either side of the laptop’s main display, which is held in place by strong magnets. If you want to switch the orientation of either screen, you just pull it off and rotate it, giving you a range of orientation choices. The Snap is available in one or two-screen configurations, with each display a 13.3in Full HD model with a claimed 400cd/m2 of brightness. The company plans to extend the system further with more snap-on accessories, including a wireless smartphone charger and a bright light to…

Ximira PHINIX PRICE TBC • AVAILABLE TBC Some of the most exciting uses of AI and machine vision is in the area of support for people living with disabilities such as blindness. Ximira is working on a platform called PHINIX (Perceptive Helper with Intelligent Navigation and Intuitive eXperience), which currently looks like an enhanced backpack. A Framework laptop motherboard and storage sit inside, wrapped in a plastic case, with cameras mounted on the backpack’s straps plus headphones for the wearer. PHINIX uses AI to recognise the scene around the user and to describe it clearly – alerting you to pedestrians and street furniture, for example – and it can also use facial recognition to identify nearby friends. It’s early days for this project, but the potential is significant. Jon Honeyball…

Home surveillance and alarm systems are increasingly affordable, but there’s no need to buy dedicated hardware: a single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi can do the job perfectly well. With low-cost peripherals such as microphones, proximity detectors and motion sensors, you can build your own security system to rival high-end commercial offerings. Any model of Pi will work, but here’s how we did it using a cheap, compact Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. STEP 1 Install the operating system You can buy a microSD card with Raspberry Pi OS pre-installed from shop.pimoroni.com; the 32GB version costs £9.90, the 64GB option is £19.90. But you probably own a microSD card already, and they cost from £6.19 on amazon.co.uk at the time of writing. Start by flashing a microSD card with the…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from hp.co.uk The Acer Swift Go 14 (see p48) and this HP Pavilion Plus 14 are resetting our expectations of a laptop costing around £1,000. Top of the list is a high-resolution 14in OLED panel, and with a Ryzen 7 7840 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, the rest of the headlines specs aren’t too shabby either. Neither is the aluminium chassis. It might not break stylistic ground and it’s a fraction thicker than the Acer, but it looks the part. But we might as well tackle this laptop’s biggest problem at the outset: despite having a 68Wh battery, it lasted only 5hrs 48mins in our web-surfing test. That aside, this laptop shines. The 2,880 x 1,800 OLED panel covers all of…

SCORE PRICE $279 from acemagic.com Acemagic positions the S1 as an entry-level mini PC for home and office users. With its compact design, 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD of storage, it’s well tailored for low-impact day-to-day tasks. But it could serve you even better as a router/firewall in a small office or home network, or as a file storage server if you upgrade to the 1TB version for an extra $20. You may not even need to hook it up to a monitor, as its standout feature is a 1.9in LCD screen. By default, this displays the CPU’s power consumption, temperature and load, along with the memory load and fan speed. (It tells you the time and date, too.) I’ve tested numerous mini PCs and while this can be…

SCORE PRICE 16GB/512GB, £917 (£1,100 inc VAT) from rog.asus.com The ROG Phone 7 Ultimate (see issue 350, p64) was arguably the best gaming phone of 2023, but at £1,200 for the 512GB version Asus was asking a considerable price. Even though the ROG Phone 8 Pro is £100 cheaper, the same criticism applies – more so if you opt for the 24GB RAM/1TB variant for £1,300. But one thing has changed. With the release of the ROG Phone 8 Pro, Asus has accepted that even gaming phones should look and feel relatively normal. The “Dare to win” decals are still present, albeit now subtly rendered in dark writing, while Asus’ AniMe system on the back of the phone lets you program LED effects or display information such as the phone’s…

Total value this month £133 AVG TuneUp 2024 ■ 10-device, one-year licence worth £45 ■ avg.com REQUIRES Windows 8 or later; 200MB hard drive space; online registration AVG TuneUp can handle all your PC maintenance needs – and we don’t just mean the usual “empty temporary folders and clear your browser history” routines. The suite cleans up after major applications, locates duplicate files, removes bulky startup programs, warns about software that could slow down your PC, deactivates unnecessary processes, optimises battery life, suggests speed-up opportunities and much more. If you’re the hands-on type then you can take full control; if not, the program can do most of its work automatically. The Disk Doctor module will scan your drives for errors and report not only what should be fixed but how it should…

SCORE PRICE £158 (£189 inc VAT) from store.creality.com The Creality Ender-3 V3 SE is the perfect 3D printer for beginners. With an easy-to-use interface, direct drive extruder and on-screen guide, it helps you through every step of the process. Combined with a low price, there’s little more a beginner could ask for: with a fair wind, you can go from unboxing to printing in less than 30 minutes. As far as features go, the Ender-3 V3 SE is relatively barebones. It has the same bed-slinger design as other budget 3D printers, and some premium models, allowing a clear view of the internal print workings. This has two benefits: it gives novices the hands-on experience they need, and makes it easier to identify issues such as loose belts. Assembly of the…

SCORE PRICE £61 (£73 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk AI seems to be everywhere lately, and that includes the world of home networking: D-Link’s latest “smart router” proudly wears its AI credentials on its sleeve. As we’ll see, this is definitely a case where the buzzword oversells the reality, but if the R32 is short on smarts it makes up for that in value. As we went to press, it cost only £73 inc VAT on Amazon, making it one of the cheapest Wi-Fi 6 routers around. The Eagle Pro AI R32 is the successor to last year’s Eagle Pro AI R15, which was similarly cheap and looked almost identical. The main difference between the two is what you might guess from the name: the new model is just over twice…

There’s nothing stopping you trying Linux today. Most distributions are free to download, and although we installed each on bare metal for our tests, they generally run as well in a virtualised environment or from a thumb drive as they do from an SSD. So, if you want to try before you buy, there’s no need to sacrifice your boot drive until you’re sure that Linux does what you need. Distributions can be separated into families. Of these, the Debian family, which includes Ubuntu, Zorin and Raspberry Pi OS, is the largest – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it should be your go-to. Fedora emerged from the code behind Red Hat Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux in turn draws code from the Fedora project. Does the family matter? Unless…

SCORE WEBSITE nxos.org On first encounter, Nitrux 3.2 is a moody beast. The default UI is dark, file management windows have black backgrounds and apps are dimmed when they lose focus. Yet somehow, even if you’re not a fan of dark modes (as this writer isn’t), it works. You can switch between windows for some real showmanship: apps swoop around each other to make space, and where two windows sit side by side, they part to let hidden windows through. The default font is skinny but easy on the eye, and while the launcher is too angular for our tastes, that’s a matter of personal preference. Where we think it’s less successful is in detaching the windows buttons – close, maximise and minimise – and putting them up in the…

SCORE WEBSITE ubuntu.com Debian-based Ubuntu is the jumping-off point for many other distributions, including Linux Mint and Zorin OS. The Desktop edition is available in at least two builds: the so-called LTS (Long Term Support) build, which receives support for a minimum of five years from release, and the bleeding-edge release, which comes with nine months of security and maintenance updates. In each case, the build number – 23.10 in the case of this review – denotes the year and month of release, so 23.10 will enjoy support until July 2024, and 22.04 LTS until April 2027. New releases appear every six months for the cutting-edge build, and every other year for the LTS edition. Both 23.10 and 22.04.3 LTS require 4GB of memory, 25GB of drive space and a…

Healthy business networks are productive ones, and it’s imperative that IT departments keep them that way. Downtime is a dirty word: it can cause a loss of productivity, while prolonged service outages may lead to irreparable damage to a company’s reputation and customer perception. As networks become interconnected and ever more complex, support staff need all the help they can get if they want to avoid a daily firefight. Network-monitoring software is ideal as it can tell them precisely what’s on their networks, how it’s performing and alert them to any issues as soon as they happen. The good news for IT departments is that there are plenty of products available all capable of providing a wealth of information about network, device and application health. This month, we review four…

SCORE PRICE 1,000 sensors, 1yr maintenance, €2,649 exc VAT from paessler.com Businesses concerned about the cost of add-on components and upgrades can rest easy with Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor as everything is included in the price. Its sensor-based licensing means you just select the number you want and apply them to any device, individual hardware component, service or business application you choose. Paessler offers a range of sensor packs. We’ve shown the price for a PRTG 1000 perpetual licence, which includes one year of maintenance and should be sufficient to monitor up to 100 devices. You can easily upgrade to larger packs when required, and Paessler also offers a free version with 100 sensors. Businesses with distributed offices may prefer the cloud-hosted version where they remotely monitor each network by…

SCORE PRICE Appliance with 3yr TSS, £4,015 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.co.uk WatchGuard’s family of Firebox security appliances offers an unbeatable range of desktop solutions, and the T45-CW brings 5G failover to the table. Ideal for businesses that need always-on internet access for remote sites, its multi-WAN features combine wired and 5G mobile connections in a single policy so if one goes down, the other seamlessly steps in and takes over. The T45-CW’s quad-core 1.6GHz NXP CPU claims a high raw firewall throughput of 3.94Gbits/sec and 557Mbits/sec with all UTM services enabled. It has five gigabit ports for WAN, LAN plus DMZ duties and, unlike many table-top security appliances, it offers secure Wi-Fi 6 services. The appliance delivers a wealth of security features, and it’s easy to choose the right subscription…

FinOps isn’t a single product you can roll out. It’s an ongoing philosophy that drives upgrades and refinements to your finance functions. To make it a bit more manageable, the FinOps Foundation breaks the idea into three phases, dubbed “Inform, Optimise and Operate”. The first phase involves analysis of potential gains; then comes tuning processes and resources to get the best results. Finally, the Operate phase entails continuous monitoring and validation, to check that your FinOps model is still serving the business. Any financial task can proceed individually through these phases at its own pace. If that sounds like a lot to manage, you might find it helpful to divide up your activities into the classic three computer-science categories – that is, what’s computable now, what will be computable eventually,…

Last December, our computer repair shop almost celebrated 20 years of business. We don’t get excited about anniversaries, but two decades seemed cake-worthy – until fate served a helping of humble pie instead. I’ve previously written about the shadowy spectre of Hubris that hides within each repair, ready to slap down techies who believe (if only for a second) that they’re mastering the art of fixing. During the week of our anniversary, Hubris arrived three times to run amok. I’ll save two of the tales for a rainy day and leave you with this. If you want me, I’ll be the one in the corner, crying. Mark’s PC was a desktop built by an online retailer a few years ago. They moulded it around a ninth-generation Core i5 (Christopher Ecclestone)…

To upgrade a broadband connection in Wales, Openreach had to get a line through a wooded valley and across a river. In short, it wasn’t going to happen. Either an engineer would have to risk their life wading through the water or the broadband infrastructure company would need to spend months on expensive works along the side of the road, requiring permission it might not get. So the 20 houses were left unconnected – until one engineer at BT Group’s infrastructure arm had the clever idea to use drones, dragging the cable through the air to the tiny village, where an engineer waited to catch it. “We got the drone up, flew the cables over the trees and river, and up the other side,” said engineer and drone pilot Gary…

I have been pondering on the nature of the relationship between us, the users, and the software that comes with new products. In the dim and distant past, we were expected to invest time into learning basic tasks. Hence the rise of courses covering “Microsoft Office Skills” and even – yes, it’s true – keyboard and mouse operation. Today, everyone has these skills. Age is no longer a barrier, to the point that most everyone can pick up a computing device and understand how it works. And nowhere is this more true than phones. When we load a new app, we don’t want to study the basics of its operation: we expect instant results. For the trip to CES in Las Vegas, I decided to fly to Los Angeles, pick…

Since the 17th century, the British Library and its predecessor institutions have been home to one of the most important collections of documents, books and periodicals in the world. Today, it’s our national deposit library, and publishers have a legal obligation to file a copy of every new book published with the library. As such, it’s a hugely important research institution, and the corridors and research rooms on any given day are usually packed with academics and scholars. At least, that’s what should be happening. On the last weekend of October last year, disaster struck the library as a ransomware attack quietly spread across its systems, locking out researchers, staff and management alike. The hackers demanded payment to unlock the system, simultaneously threatening to release the personal data of many…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He fancies himself as a blacksmith as well as a luthier. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk For the past 30 years I’ve been dabbling in the digital arts. In music, in graphics and indeed in programming itself. Digital offers huge advantages over the physical world, in speed of production, editability and economy of experiment. You don’t waste paint and canvas when creating an image in Photoshop, and there’s no twanging of strings or blowing on hard reeds in Ableton. But for a while I’ve felt an increasing pull back toward the physical, and to judge by the content on YouTube I’m not alone. If forced to change professions I’d probably become a luthier, repairing and fettling fine guitars (I’m not good enough at woodwork to…

Evernote alternative I had to write – first, to agree with the “Artful Dodger” Dick Pountain (see issue 353, p20). His excellent article rang bells with me after my recent travails with Evernote, who peremptorily announced an effective shutting down of its “free” offering at the beginning of December. After much research I settled on Upnote. It does everything I want, quickly, and its price of 89p per month is modest. Its “lifetime” upgrade at £23 is little more than Evernote wanted for a month. The Upnote website is excellent in design and content, answering every query I had, including a link to discussions about the team and business viability on Reddit. I was using Evernote for “projects and files” and WorkFlowy for the here-and-now, but with Upnote I could…

Alienware m18 R2 PRICE From $1,899 • AVAILABLE Now We didn’t get our hands on the Alienware m18 R2 at CES, making do with a pre-show video demonstration instead. But one thing we know for sure is that this second iteration of the Alienware m18 brings enough power to suit any gamer’s needs. From Intel’s 14th generation Core i7 and i9 options to Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics, ranging from the RTX 4060 to the top-of-the-line RTX 4090, the m18 has you covered. Need a bright colourful and speedy display? The m18 arrives with either a 165Hz QHD (2,560 x 1,600) panel or a Full HD display that whacks refresh rates up to 480Hz. With RAM choices up to 64GB, the Alienware m18 has everything a gamer could want in a…

DeepX DX-V1 PRICE Not applicable • AVAILABLE Now At the DeepX stand, I chatted to Ha Joon Yu, an IP specialist at the South Korean AI chip-maker. It was displaying three of its NPUs, which are built into M.2 format devices so they can be easily added to, for example, single-board computers. The DX-V1 (pictured) detects people and objects in tandem with a camera. Was he worried about the rise of NPUs in chips from AMD and Intel? “Intel, AMD and Qualcomm… have to have an AI function built into their microprocessor, because this market is very big, but this market is also very fragmented. “There are very huge markets, like AI PCs, AI smartphones, and that’s what Qualcomm, Intel and AMD will do. But we want every data to…

Auracast Bluetooth PRICE N/A • AVAILABLE Now You’re sitting in the pub, trying to watch the rugby, while all around you are engrossed in the football and its commentary belting through the speakers. It’s hardly Twickenham, is it? But Auracast could soon make that experience more bearable. Pleasant, even. With this new Bluetooth technology, venues will be able to broadcast multi-channel audio to as many customers as they can hold. You could hook your Bluetooth headphones to the rugby commentary, while others listen to the football. Conference centres could provide live translations of speeches being given on stage, with audience members able to select their language. The technology will even work at a local level, with you able to share your laptop’s audio with other headphone wearers in the vicinity,…

Swarovski AX Visio PRICE £3,820 • AVAILABLE February 2024 It seems like AI is trying to sneak into everything these days, wanted or not, but in this case I think it may actually belong. You can use these high-end binoculars not only to take digital photos with, but also identify what you’re looking at using AI recognition software. The neural processing unit in these binoculars is similar to what you get in the latest phones, and has been trained to identify 9,000 species of birds, making bird-watching more accessible to the layman than ever. Simply look through the AX Visio like any other pair of binoculars, and when you see a mystery bird, press a button on the side that will show a red circle in your vision. Get your…

Intel has finally released its much-trailed Core Ultra chips – codenamed Meteor Lake – in its bid to power “AI PCs”. That is, laptops and desktops with silicon that incorporates not merely a CPU and GPU, but a neural processing unit (NPU) as well. While question marks still hang over the usefulness of AI PCs (read Barry Collins’ take on p29), there’s a good chance a laptop you buy in 2024 will include one. The Core Ultra is now Intel’s mainstream notebook chip, ranging from the Ultra 5 125U to the Ultra 9 185H. ■ New era, new node The processors are the first consumer chips built on the company’s Intel 4 process node, using its Foveros 3D hybrid architecture. This allows Intel to stack chiplets (it calls them “tiles”)…

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 R23 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 our own benchmarks to test photo-editing, video-encoding and multitasking speeds. We then switch to 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 a selection of benchmarks in games such as Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. For laptops, we test battery life with…

SCORE PRICE 12GB/256GB, £1,041 (£1,249 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk Samsung is marketing the Galaxy S24 Ultra as the AI phone to beat in 2024. From the Circle to Search feature to discovering what plant is growing in your garden to Chat Assist translating messages in other languages, the Galaxy AI features all aim to simplify your life. But: the Galaxy S24 Ultra costs £100 more than the S23 Ultra (see issue 343, p68), while replacing that phone’s 10x optical camera with a less powerful but sharper 50MP 5x telephoto lens. So is this a mis-step or AI-assisted brilliance? ■ Galaxy of AI features First, let’s consider Circle to Search. This is a Google initiative that will be rolled out to other phones, and it aims to make search easier if…

SCORE PRICE 12GB/256GB, £483 (£579 inc VAT) from uk.redmagic.gg Ssay what you like about the RedMagic 9 Pro gaming phone, but you can’t question its value. While the equivalent Asus ROG Phone costs north of £1,000, RedMagic is asking £579 for the 9 Pro with 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage, or £709 for the 16GB/512GB editions. So what do you lose out on? At first glance, very little. It has a headphone jack on its top edge, while the aluminium sides house a red Game Space slider for accessing the phone’s gaming tools alongside the usual power and volume controls. The back of the RedMagic is flat aside from the flash module, meaning that while it’s thicker than a “normal” phone, it stays stable when laid flat. Colour choices…

SCORE PRICE £483 (£579 inc VAT) from store.nvidia.com The RTX 4070 Super is the first “refresh” of Nvidia’s 40-series to land, with the 4070 Ti Super and 4080 Super due to arrive shortly. The newcomer provides higher specs and better performance than the plain RTX 4070, and also pushes the price of that card down to £529. In our tests, it’s about 15% faster than the RTX 4070. That means you’re getting equivalent performance to the previous generation RTX 3090 for less than half the cost. And, with a 192-bit interface and 12GB of VRAM, it’s a memory match for the 4070 Ti. In terms of key specs, you get the same 2,475MHz boost clock as the RTX 4070, but with 22% more cores and a 10% higher total graphics…

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2024 for just £59.99 (2 devices, perpetual licence) tinyurl.com/elements2024 Photoshop Elements 2024 is the latest edition of Adobe’s popular consumer version of Photoshop, and we have a deal that will save you £27 from its normal £86.99 price and give you two licences. And don’t worry if you’re a Mac user: simply select the Mac version of the software for the same price. The program is built around Sensei AI technology, which takes the hassle out of editing by providing a series of “guided edits” to simplify popular tasks. That could be automatically colourising old black and white photos, replacing backgrounds to add more vibrancy, or making one-click selections of awkwardly shaped objects. Throw in tools for removing unwanted objects and combining two shots into a single…

SCORE PRICE €233 (€280 inc VAT) from euroshop.boox.com With a thick right-hand edge, the Onyx Boox Page looks much like the Kindle Oasis (see issue 281, p58) and the Kobo Libra 2 (see issue 329, p65). It shares the same superb 7in E Ink Carta 1200 screen as both models, but the Onyx Page is faster thanks to a better processor – and, despite being made of plastic, its body looks far more premium than the Libra, too. It also has a weight advantage at 310g rather than 390g, but the Oasis wins here at 188g. Like its rivals, the physical page-turn buttons double up as volume controls. There’s a speaker built-in for audiobook playback, but tinny sound quality means you’ll soon be reaching for Bluetooth headphones. Onyx provides a…

Most Linux distributions are free to download and install. All you need to get started is an ISO and a thumb drive to host the installer. While we prefer to run Linux on a dedicated hard drive or SSD, we’ve yet to come across an installer that won’t offer to repartition an existing internal drive. Do that and you can run Linux alongside an existing Windows installation. STEP 1 DOWNLOAD BALENAETCHER BalenaEtcher extracts ISOs onto USB drives and sets them up for booting. All of the distributions on test, unless they had a media creator, were installed in this manner, either from the live OS or a specific installation routine that appears at boot. BalenaEtcher is a free download from etcher.balena.io. When it’s finished downloading, install and launch it. STEP…

SCORE WEBSITE fedoraproject.org Fedora Linux is refreshed every six months, with version 39 shipping in November 2023, 20 years (and one day) since the first iteration’s debut. It was originally a spin-off of Red Hat Linux, but the tables have been turned and it now forms the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Stream. Of the five versions on offer, we reviewed the desktop build, which sits alongside server, cloud, containerised and IoT editions. Each release receives support for 13 months, with version 40 scheduled to appear in April 2024, and build 39 reaching end of life in November 2024. Fedora has a free-to-download media creation tool, much like Microsoft’s equivalent for Windows, and the Raspberry Pi imager for the single-board computers. This writes the latest build to…

SCORE WEBSITE get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed It’s not unusual for Linux distributions to be available in several builds. Ubuntu has long-term support and cutting-edge editions, Zorin has Core and Pro builds, and openSUSE has Tumbleweed and Leap. Tumbleweed, which we’re reviewing here, is a continuously evolving build comprising the latest stable version of each component, which is updated as and when new code appears. Leap, which is based on SUSE Enterprise Linux, is a stable release that receives periodic updates. The version that we installed was running the 6.6.3-1 kernel (the very latest build was 6.6.4 at the time of writing), and is available with a choice of desktop managers, including Gnome, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate and KDE Plasma 5, the latter of which tops the installer’s list of options. That’s therefore what we…

SCORE WEBSITE zorin.com Want a pretty OS? Look no further. Zorin comes as close as any operating system to rivalling Windows 11’s featherweight fluid design. We’re testing the free Zorin OS Core, but there are alternatives for older computers (Zorin OS Lite) and professional users (Zorin OS Pro). Lite switches the highly customised Gnome 43 desktop environment for Xfce, while Pro, which costs £39 exc VAT, bundles installation support and additional software for image editing, 3D graphics, video editing, note taking and more. Pro can be installed on multiple computers with a single licence, unless you’re a business or education user, in which case you’ll need a licence for each machine. Whichever version you choose, Zorin is based on Ubuntu, with the latest build running on the 6.2 kernel. Support…

SCORE PRICE 50-pack, $645 per year from manageengine.com A key player in the Zoho software and services empire, ManageEngine offers a wide range of IT management solutions. The OpManager product family delivers network, server and application performance monitoring, and ManageEngine version 12.7 delivers plenty of new features. There’s a focus on compliance and security, with support for single sign-on using security assertion markup language (SAML) and SNMP 3 with tougher SHA-2 authentication. Root cause analysis (RCA) profiles compare data collected from multiple devices to help with problem remediation, Cisco ACI, IPMI and VPN monitors are present and OpManager integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams for alert notifications. ManageEngine’s flexible licensing schemes are good value for SMBs as they’re based on devices, not elements or sensors. The OpManager Standard edition costs…

SCORE PRICE Enterprise, 50 devices, £1,192 exc VAT per year from whatsupgold.com Progress Software has been busy developing its flagship network-monitoring software, and WhatsUp Gold (WUG) 2023.1 introduces a raft of new features with ease of use given a high priority. Previously, you had to manually enable monitoring for every device, but you can now set a network discovery scan job to do this for you. What’s more, the discovery process automatically collects SNMP and WMI device attributes and updates them in real-time, while WUG’s dynamic SNMP table monitor populates every instance, making it easier to monitor specific devices. The device properties page clearly shows which credentials are being used, access security has been tightened up with TLS 1.3 support, and SQL Server Express 2022 is now the default database.…

Ray Tomlinson sent the world’s first email in 1971 – and more than 50 years later, the medium is as popular as ever, with 4.5 billion users worldwide in 2024. According to ONS figures, it’s the one thing Brits do online more than anything else. One reason why email remains such a success is its universality. Email works equally well on smartphones, tablets and desktop computers, and it doesn’t rely on proprietary apps. For businesses, email is also one of the most direct ways to reach an audience. You have full control of your message and the means of its delivery; there’s no need to game an algorithm or jump through arbitrary hoops to make sure your content is seen. The only barrier to entry is that you’ll probably want…

Last year an app tried to kill me. Twice. That isn’t hyperbole. The unnerving anecdotes that follow take on new relevance as the EU looks set to introduce the world’s first comprehensive AI law. Some commentators have implied that regulating AI is the slow strangulation of innovation, stifling creativity, smothering efficiency and suffocating entrepreneurs. Now that is hyperbole. Whatever firms do, whatever sector they’re in, they must meet their legal obligations. No matter what tool they created, whether it’s powered by AI, ML or fairy dust, that business can’t escape or evade liabilities. The two instances that I set out are instructive as they provide colour and clarity to the “new” rules. In the first scenario, this travel app sent me to a town five miles west of Davos. Sounds…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s futures editor. If OpenAI could automate rights permissions requests, she might be more sympathetic. @njkobie Sam Altman wants to work less than I do. Look, I don’t blame him — but I also don’t think it should happen. What am I on about? OpenAI and its generative AI rivals need to be fed data, in particular written words. Existing models have been trained on datasets hoovered up from the web, and some of those datasets contain material under copyright, sparking lawsuits ranging from authors to the New York Times. Other publishers have opted to cut a deal, presumably meaning they’ll get paid and perhaps some help using AI in their newsrooms. As a journalist, this is frustrating: any media company selling my words to AI…

With chip and PC makers desperately searching for something to rouse the industry from its post-pandemic slump, the AI PC is their big hope. Essentially a regular PC with a neural processing unit (NPU) inside to handle AI workloads locally, companies including HP, Lenovo and Dell are bullishly predicting a surge in sales. Should you jump in? No, not yet. It’s early days for NPUs and nobody seems quite sure what to do with them yet. There are a lot of prototype demos, much talk about running AI services locally instead of the cloud, but little in the way of concrete benefits to leaping in at this stage. Not unless you’re particularly desperate to have a Windows Copilot key on your keyboard (narrator: nobody was desperate for a Windows Copilot…

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super PRICE £579 • AVAILABLE Now With the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super, you’re essentially getting about 93% of the RTX 4070 Ti for 75% of the price. Alternatively, you’re getting 22% more GPU than the RTX 4070 for the same price. More importantly, you’re getting 12GB of high-speed GDDR6X memory, along with access to Nvidia’s RTX technologies: DLSS 3, superior ray tracing and AI tensor cores. Given the RTX 4070 already trades blows with the RX 7800 XT – slightly slower rasterisation performance, much faster ray tracing and AI performance, and the RTX 4070 Ti does the same with the RX 7900 XT – Nvidia now effectively delivers a higher performance option at the same price. Read our full review on p68. Jarred Walton MSI Project…

Canon Free Viewpoint PRICE N/A • AVAILABLE N/A Trailed at last year’s CES, we finally got a chance to test Canon’s Free Viewpoint VR system at this year’s show. In a nutshell, Canon has teamed up with the NBA to capture basketball games and replay the action in VR. With a surface the size of a dining table in front of you, the VR headset allows you to watch the slam dunks and other action as if it were taking place right in front of you, in pseudo 3D. The resolution and frame rates need improvement, but could this be the future of watching sport? Hell, yes. It even made basketball look interesting for ten minutes. There are all manner of challenges to overcome before this translates to watching games…

It runs on almost every Windows PC, but what exactly does Windows Defender do – and what settings should you be tweaking for the best protection? Here, we reveal seven tips that not only explain the philosophy (and history) behind Windows Defender, but also how to get the most out of it. 1 What is Windows Defender? It’s a funny thing: everyone’s heard of Windows Defender, but if you search your system, you won’t find any program of that name. At least, not if you’re running a recent version of Windows 10 or 11. For more than a decade, though, the OS did include a built-in tool called Defender. In Windows Vista and 7, Defender was a system component that detected and removed spyware from your system; in Windows 8…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Acer’s Swift Go 14 lived up to its name, being the first laptop to arrive in our labs with Intel’s Core Ultra inside (see p46). In the case of our review system, that means a Core Ultra 7 155H, giving us our first glimpse at both Intel’s eight-core integrated Arc graphics and the all-new neural processing unit (NPU). This trinity of CPU, GPU and NPU combines to great effect in this update to the Acer Swift Go 14, even comparing favourably with the 13in MacBook Air M2 (see issue 336, p50). It does so without throwing away what makes Acer Swift laptops so attractive: their blend of portability and performance for a competitive price. The Acer Swift Go 14 I…

SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £3,333 (£4,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is one of the largest gaming laptops you can buy, and it’s just been refreshed for 2024 with a 14th-generation Core i9 processor and a stunning mini-LED screen. Physically the design hasn’t changed from the 2023 version (see issue 344, p54). That means it remains a massive slab of a laptop, with a footprint of 399 x 294mm. It isn’t too heavy, though, weighing in at 3kg. The construction is certainly striking. The aluminium lid has an RGB-backlit logo, with additional colour bars along the front and rear of the chassis, controllable via either Asus’ Armoury Crate app or the standard Windows Settings. The rest of the chassis is part-translucent plastic; I don’t love…

SCORE PRICE 12GB/256GB, £708 (£849 inc VAT) from oneplus.com OnePlus is on the up. First it surprised us late last year by nabbing the folding phone crown from Samsung with the OnePlus Open (see issue 351, p60); now the OnePlus 12 is resetting expectations for premium phones. It starts with aggressive pricing. At £849 inc VAT with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, this phone is a little pricier than the OnePlus 11 (see issue 343, p72), but it’s a whole lot cheaper than the Google Pixel 8 Pro (see issue 351, p70) and, of course, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (see p58). There’s also a maxed-out version with 16GB of memory and twice the storage, and for an introductory period it’s only £50 more than the base model…

SCORE PRICE Argon, £167 (£200 inc VAT) from solosglasses.com We’ve seen a rush of smart glasses in recent months, with the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses (see issue 352, p71) the most high profile. While US firm Solos might not be as famous, its range of AirGo 3 frames are arguably the pick of the bunch. Not only do you get ChatGPT access through a single touch of the temple, and impressive media playback through surprisingly decent speakers, but there’s real-time language translation, too. You can choose from three frame designs: Xeon sunglasses (from £160), Argon eyeglasses (from £200) and Helium sports glasses (from £160). The modular construction means you can disconnect the temples and fit new frames to them if bought separately from the Solos Glasses website, allowing you to…

SCORE PRICE £318 (£381 inc VAT) from broadbandbuyer.com Until SSDs match the capacities and price-per-gigabyte of hard disks, there will always be a place for our mechanical friends. That’s especially true for NAS appliances, which is precisely what Western Digital’s Red Pro series is designed for. This means the focus isn’t on the fastest possible performance, but on maximum endurance and low power consumption. There’s a wide range of capacities on offer, from 2TB up to 22TB, but the 14TB model hits a sweet spot between low cost and capacity. It uses eight high-density platters, which spin in a sealed helium enclosure to minimise resistance, heat build-up and vibrations. If you don’t live in an earthquake zone that last feature might seem superfluous, but it can provide protection against accidental…

SCORE PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from reskube.com As remote working continues to boom, there’s no shortage of solutions aiming to improve the resilience of your power or networking provision. However, Reskube’s Home Pro is the first device we’ve come across that promises to do both: it’s an uninterruptible power supply, offering up to 500W of backup power, and also provides fallback data connectivity through an integrated 4G LTE router. If the mains goes down, the Home Pro keeps its two forward sockets powered from the internal battery; if your internet connection is lost, it switches to the mobile data connection. The design is basic but robust, with no controls aside from the power button. The front features two simple LED strips indicating battery life and current power output. At…

Let’s address the penguin in the room before we go any further. In the 30-plus years since it first appeared, Linux has captured a fraction over 3% of the desktop. For every Linux machine in home or office use, there are 20-plus running Windows and six running macOS. So it’s a failure, right? Absolutely not. There’s a reason why Linux supports a growing number of companies whose existence is based on the open-source model. Together, they employ a workforce of millions. Pick away at the internet and Linux is almost everywhere. Reverse-engineer the OS of most smartphones and you’ll uncover the Linux kernel – eventually. And with single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi increasingly evident in STEM environments, a higher proportion of tomorrow’s workforce will be comfortable with Linux than…

SCORE WEBSITE raspberrypi.com/software Many distributions are available in full-fat and light editions. Zorin and Linux Mint are good examples, each giving a choice of Gnome- or Xfce-based ISOs. Debian with Raspberry Desktop, which closely resembles Raspberry Pi OS, is different. Available for PCs after a decade as the default OS for the eponymous single-board computer, it uses neither Gnome nor Xfce, but PIXEL, the Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight, which itself is based on the lightweight LDXE desktop manager. Don’t let the “lightweight” moniker put you off. PIXEL sports many features familiar from rival environments, including a menu bar, application menu, desktop icons and context menus. It does lack some frills, though. There are no widgets, as there are in Mint, you can’t snap windows to the edges of the…

SCORE WEBSITE linuxmint.com Many Debian-based distros, Linux Mint included, use Ubuntu as their jumping-off point. The latest release – 21.2 Victoria – is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and will continue to be supported until 2027. That means it currently uses the 5.15 LTS kernel, but there’s a bleeding-edge edition, aptly called 21.2 Cinnamon Edge, that uses 6.2 should you prefer. Where many Ubuntu spin-offs stick with Gnome display manager, as used by Ubuntu itself, Mint’s default is Cinnamon. This started as an offshoot from Gnome 2 when version 3 was released. Version 3 was the first to drop support for the panel (taskbar in Windows parlance) in favour of a purer shell, which likewise demoted widgets and jettisoned desktop icons. Cinnamon puts all of these front and centre, which…

SCORE WEBSITE rockylinux.org Rocky Linux is one of the youngest distributions around, first appearing in mid-2021. It’s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so in some ways is a natural home for anyone previously running CentOS, a community-supported version of Red Hat terminated in December 2020. Rocky’s first release was version 8.3, reflecting the fact that it was based on the same version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The version-8 line remains current, despite 8.9 appearing two days after 9.3, which itself is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3. That’s the version we’re testing here. Planned end of life for the Rocky 9 line is May 2032. For Rocky 8, it’s May 2029. Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses Fedora source code in its development, so Fedora and Rocky naturally…

It’s been four years since PC Pro last ran a Linux Labs (see issue 308, p78). Much has changed since then – and all for the better. On that occasion, I performed the tests on a Core i3-based Dell Inspiron laptop, and some distributions had trouble connecting to Wi-Fi. The laptop had no Ethernet port, and the only fix was to connect to a mobile hotspot once the OS had been installed so I could download some hefty updates. Support for the trackpad was likewise patchy, and it was occasionally unresponsive upon waking up. That laptop is still in daily use, and still running Linux – flawlessly now – but wasn’t called up for duty this year. This time around, I used a mini PC with an AMD Ryzen 5…

SCORE PRICE 300 nodes, £2,833 exc VAT per year from mutiny.com If extreme longevity is a mark of success then Mutiny Ltd is a clear winner, as this UK-based company has now been in the network-monitoring business for 22 years. And for good reason, too: its Monitoring System is designed to hit the ground running with a simple installation and a fast network discovery process. It’s also excellent value for money. Licensing is based only on monitored nodes, regardless of the number of ports or elements each one has. Mutiny is totally transparent about costs, with the starting subscription price of £2,833 per year enabling 300 nodes, and you can scale right up to unlimited nodes for only £6,612 per year. The Mutiny service offers plenty of deployment options: it…

SCORE PRICE £867 exc VAT from uk.insight.com Jabra’s PanaCast 50 video bar ensures that no-one feels left out, with its triple 13MP 4K camera turret presenting a full 180° horizontal field of view (FoV). What’s more, lurking inside this 650mm wide cylinder is an 8-microphone beamforming array teamed up with pairs of 50mm woofers and 20mm tweeters. Speaker tracking is a cut above the rest, too, as the PanaCast 50 incorporates no fewer than nine Edge processors, including two Edge AI chips. These allow it to provide integral video analytics, apply always-on people counting and use Jabra’s Virtual Director technology to focus on the active speaker and zero in on them with its automatic 6x digital zoom. The camera provides a USB-C port for BYOD meetings or connection to a…

VLANs allow you to logically split up your physical network by attaching VLAN tags to traffic. So you could have all traffic from one SSID called “HomeIOT” going down a VLAN called “HomeIOT” and it will be on its own IP address range. At your router, this is then shovelled out to the outside world, and it’s entirely up to you whether this IOT traffic can have any visibility to the core network or not. The big advantage here is that if you have a suitably well-designed network fabric, then managing all of this should be extremely straightforward. How much of this you want to implement is entirely up to you, but it’s worth knowing it’s there. And remember, all VLAN traffic goes over the same physical network, even though…

Once upon a time, there was a huge company that, a couple of weeks after a patch for a critical vulnerability had been patched by the vendor, discovered threat actors had been poking around its networks. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? However, this is a story with a twist in the tale: it’s not about timely vulnerability patching. It’s about passwords. The firm in question is Comcast Cable Communications, trading as Xfinity, one of the US telecoms giants. The critical zero-day vulnerability labelled CVE-2023-4966, also known as Citrix Bleed, impacted Citrix NetScaler application delivery and gateway devices and has been exploited from August 2023 to steal authentication sessions. CVE-2023-4966 earned a 9.4 CVSS criticality rating as it didn’t require user interaction nor privilege escalation and was exploitable remotely. Citrix published a…