Indice dei contenuti per No.293 - March 2019 in PC Pro

WE HUMANS HAVE one fundamental problem: the inability to think long term. I’ll steer clear of a rant about Trump and global warming because this isn’t the place – although we do cover how to be an ethical techie on p36 – but just for a moment let’s load up the timeline of computing, pinch our fingers and zoom out to get a 30-year view. The problem is that our instinctive timescale is, at best, two or three years. We look at where we are now, glance at the latest shiny and new things, and then extrapolate to the near future. But that’s not how things really work. For example, right now, our wireless telecoms infrastructure is rubbish. A significant chunk of the UK’s population doesn’t have any mobile phone…

@bazzacollins In December 2013, I wrote a piece for the PC Pro site, profiling the contenders for the then-vacant Microsoft CEO position. Of the eventual winner, Satya Nadella, I wrote that “if (and it’s a pretty stonking if) Microsoft sees its future primarily as an enterprise company, then Sat Nadella undoubtedly has the CV for the job. “Nadella is a confident and calm public speaker – the antithesis of Ballmer’s highly strung, hyperactive stage act – but lacks the sparkle and charisma that the figurehead of a consumer-facing company arguably needs, making him more a Tim Cook character than a Steve Jobs. A strong candidate, certainly, but perhaps not a sufficiently rounded one.” Five years on, I would say that analysis has stood the test of time – bar that…

BATTERY MYTHS This article is dedicated to genuine ways you can improve the battery life of your phone and laptop. But first, we thought we would tackle the myths. A mixture of misinformation and common “sense” that doesn’t make sense means that many of the things people “know” kills your battery life are wrong – with several from previous eras of battery tech. Here are a few things you don’t really need to worry about anymore. You must charge the battery to full and run it all the way down on first use This is a throwback to the days of nickel-cadmium batteries, where if you didn’t fully charge the battery and deplete it all the way on first use, you might end up with restricted capacity or false charge…

Grappling with the “ethics of technology” isn’t easy. The term encompasses myriad concerns about conflict-ridden supply chains in developing countries, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the environmental impact of manufacture and, of course, workers’ rights in the Far East and elsewhere. To take a recent example, Amnesty International created a campaign that led Google employees to sign an open letter urging the firm to drop its “Dragonfly” project in China. According to the letter, the prototype search engine would “enable censorship and government-directed disinformation, and destabilise the ground truth on which popular deliberation and dissent rely” by obeying the Chinese government’s stringent rules. While China may seem a long way from Chiswick, such issues affect everyone who consumes technology – who doesn’t use Google, after all? But does that…

PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from store.hp.com/ukstore The HP Tango X isn’t a normal printer. While the phrase “designed from the ground up” has been overused to the point of redundancy, the Tango genuinely has been. HP’s engineers have cast aside all thoughts of what a typical home printer is and created something that will fit into our (and it hurts me to write these words) modern lifestyle. In practical terms, that means this printer is 100% wireless. Indeed, its setup routine is based around your phone rather than your PC via the HP Smart app. It’s also both quiet and compact, with the Tango X including a textured wraparound cover/output tray that means you can camouflage your printer when it’s not in use. While that may seem like a…

PRICE £243 (£291 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/293hanns Quantum dot technology has been getting people excited for years, especially in TVs. The promise? Vivid images, longevity and competitive prices. Kind of like OLED but without the price premium. Here, Hannspree (technically, its parent firm Hanns.G, but let’s keep things simple) is among the first to deliver an affordable desktop monitor that incorporates quantum dots. While it’s one of Hannspree’s more expensive 27in monitors, it isn’t exactly flash. You’ll need to screw in the stand yourself, and once in place don’t expect height adjustability, pivot or even swivel. This is a “put it on the desk and stay there” kind of stand. There’s a-5°/15° tilt and that’s your lot. The 2cm-thick bezel rules out side by side installation, too. Instead, this monitor…

PRICE £265 (£318 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/293gal Mark the date, because dual cameras are now officially old hat. Previously reserved for Huawei’s flagship phones, the Samsung Galaxy A7 brings a versatile triple-camera configuration down to a phone costing around £300. It implements them neatly too, with the three lenses stacked vertically down the left-hand side of the handset’s rear, with the flash sitting just below. The primary camera has a 24-megapixel sensor with an f/1.7 lens, accompanied by an 8-megapixel sensor with an ultra-wide f/2.4 lens, and a 5-megapixel, f/2.2 depth-sensing unit for bokeh-style effects. Working together, these are capable of capturing truly stunning pictures. The Galaxy A7’s shots of London’s skyline on a gloomy winter morning looked superb, with crisp, well-defined details and accurate colours. Performance in low light…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293cruc PRICEMATRIX As the commercial brand for Micron’s memory products, you’d expect Crucial to have some of the strongest tech, and the MX500 combines Micron’s 3D NAND with a Dynamic Write Accelerator cache using a pool of high-speed SLC flash. Crucial claims read speeds of up to 560MB/sec and write speeds of up to 10MB/sec, putting the MX500 up against the Adata SU800, with the same speeds, a similar architecture and the same SMI controller. We tested the larger 1TB version, while Adata provided a 500GB drive, which helps to explain why the two drives perform nigh-identically in some aspects but not in others. In both the AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark tests, the MX500 delivered similar or better sequential read speeds but dropped below the SU800 in write speeds,…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293san PRICEMATRIX The SanDisk Ultra II first emerged back in 2014, where it was one of the first TLC NAND drives to deliver good performance and high capacities at affordable prices. Several years on, the drive is getting long-in-the-tooth and nearing end of life, but can it still compete on performance or value with the newer 3D NAND SSDs? In a word, no. This isn’t necessarily a slow drive. SanDisk quotes read speeds of up to 550MB/sec and write speeds of up to 500MB/sec, and in CrystalDiskMark it hit 555MB/sec and 507MB/sec respectively. Yet that still puts it near the bottom of the leaderboard, behind the WD Green on read according to CrystalDiskMark and on a par according to AS SSD, though half-decent write speeds help mitigate the damage.…

SUPPLIER lambda-tek.com/shop PRICEMATRIX Western Digital has stuck to its old three-line policy with its transition to SSDs, and where Black means high performance and Blue is for mainstream PCs, Green is the cost-conscious choice. That means living with slower TLC NAND than its Blue stablemate, albeit combined with an SLC cache, but the price helps compensate. The 240GB version comes in at £31, giving you a bargain basement cost per GB of just 13p. There is a 480GB version available but it seems to be going end-of-life; it was only available at lambdatek.com/shop at time of going to press. Heavy PC users might have some concerns about reliability. The MBTF is just one million hours where most comparable SSDs claim over 1.5 million, there’s no suggested lifespan stated and the…

SUPPLIER scan.co.uk PRICEMATRIX On specification alone, Corsair’s latest M.2 SSD looks like a serious contender. A PCIe Gen 3 x4 drive, it uses Toshiba’s 3D BiCS NAND and a Phison PS5012-E12 controller to deliver write speeds of up to 3,480MB/sec and write speeds of up to 3,000MB/sec, beating the 1TB models of the WD Black and the Samsung 970 Pro. Of course, write speeds drop with the lower capacity models, to 2,000MB/sec on the 480GB drive and 1,050MB/sec on the 240GB version, but if you want a ludicrously speedy SSD and have the money, the MP510 deserves a good look. In fact, the money isn’t as much of a problem as it is with its Samsung rival. You can pick up the 480GB version for under £120 and the 960GB…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293evo PRICEMATRIX The Samsung 970 Evo is a regular sight in the PC Pro Labs – it’s the choice of many a system builder looking to get the most performance from their desktop PC. It’s not hard to see why, with the 970 Evo based on the same 64-layer Samsung V-NAND MLC flash memory as the class-leading 970 Pro, but at a more approachable, mainstream cost. There are differences between the two drives in terms of the architecture and the use of 2-bit versus 3-bit V-NAND, but the 970 Evo uses the same Phoenix controller and doesn’t perform like a second-class drive. Admittedly, you’re not quite seeing it at its best if you plump for the entry-level 256GB model. All bar the 2TB version have the same 3,400MB/sec max…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293black PRICEMATRIX When the hard disk was king, there was only one question for high-performance PC builders: do you go for the Seagate Barracuda or WD Black? That question has changed now that Samsung dominates this area of the market, but it’s great to see the WD Black still in the frame. With Toshiba’s 3D BiCS NAND memory behind it, it’s ready to go up against the Samsung 970 Evo. Certainly good things are being promised in the spec. The 1TB model we tested claims sequential read speeds of up to 3,400MB/sec and write speeds of up to 2,800MB/sec, putting the WD Black ahead of the 970 Evo and – on write speeds – the 970 Pro. Random read/write operation specs are just as bold, though the Samsung claims…

PRICE 2,500sensors,1yrmaintenance, £3,939excVATfrompaessler.com Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor uses a sensor-based licensing scheme that might seem rather fussy at first. Rather than covering individual servers or appliances, you pay for the right to monitor a certain number of individual elements – which might be anything from a CPU core or a network switch port to a web URL or an Exchange mail queue. It’s easier to get along with than you might fear, though. Sensors are automatically assigned to the most useful metrics, and it’s terrifically easy to decommission the ones you don’t need, so they can be reused for some other purpose. You don’t need to worry about whether or not the sort of sensor you need is available, either: more than 250 sensor types, including virtual host, cloud and…

PRICE AP with 1yr Total Wi-Fi subscription, £468 exc VAT from watchguardonline.co.uk WatchGuard’s AP325 is ideal for SMBs seeking Wave 2 Wi-Fi performance, strong security and remote management on a modest budget. In terms of design, there’s not much to it: its only connectors are two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The first is for your LAN connection and management access, while the second can be used to extend the wired network or for link aggregation. The primary port also conveniently supports PoE+ – but we don’t recommend you run it from a low-power 802.3af PoE source, as this will disable the second LAN port and reduce the transmission power. It’s worth noting that the AP325 doesn’t function as a standalone AP. It can be managed either via one of WatchGuard’s Firebox…

The heart of the Chromebook experience for most businesses will likely be the licensed-peruser G-Suite. A Basic G-Suite subscription costs £3.30 per seat, which includes 30GB of cloud storage, email via Gmail, video and voice conferencing services, secure team messaging, shared calendars and the familiar range of office apps, comprising Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. In my experience, though, the most popular option is the £6.60-a-seat Business subscription. This lets you add a “low code” app development environment (with a drag-and-drop user interface and declarative data modelling), unlimited storage (or 1TB per user if there are fewer than five users in total), a smart search function that reaches across the entire G-Suite, the ability to enable retention policies for email and chat, data regions, and e-discovery auditing for emails, chats…

Max Figgett Most of us rush to buy the latest and greatest gadget, without considering the impact of our choices. Discover how to be more ethical on p36 Stuart Andrews We know that SSDs make your laptop and desktop PC faster, but there’s a bewildering amount of choice. Stuart tests 15 different units from p74 Simon Hudson Find out how Simon went from Microsoft Search cynic to one of its biggest advocates in his introduction to the new technology on p116 Barry Collins Is your phone struggling to last from dawn to dusk? Does your laptop give up on a working day before you? Barry shows how to boost your battery from p30…

Security professionals working with the risk of prosecution have built better ways of reporting that minimise the risk of researchers being labelled criminals. Zero Disclo (zerodisclo.com), for example, provides an encrypted online form that a whistleblower can fill out anonymously and goes through a trusted middleman to explain the vulnerability without exposing the source or method of discovery. “If you find a vulnerability, you go to zerodisclo.com and you can report, in a simple form, the type of vulnerability,” said Nicolas Diaz of white hat group YesWeHack, which created the tool. “You can attach screenshots to help the entity understand it and you have the option of putting your email address or not.” Instead of going direct to the organisation, the report is encrypted and sent to the Computer Emergency…

@njkobie Perhaps I’m just getting old, but didn’t tech used to be fun? (Both can be true.) If news broke about Facebook, it was because it had an intriguing new feature, not that it had leaked millions of users’ data to propagandists. Google was once celebrated as a useful tool, not criticised as a surveillance machine. As a journalist, covering hardware launches required building charts to compare specs, and we all waited to find out if a new handset would have a removable battery or SD card – now, I’ve got to have privacy experts on call for comment about new biometric hack vectors. Ten years ago, the tech industry was shiny and new; we were still too excited about it to see the damage it could cause. The Chrome…

I write as one of the apparently 5% of the UK population that has no mobile phone signal to their home. It appears that, in 2019, some online transactions will have to be verified through the receipt of a text message with a code that has to be entered to complete the transaction. For my wife and I, living in a rural village in the Brecon Beacons, this means we would no longer have the ability to shop online from our house and we would have to drive or walk to a place where we could get a phone signal fast enough to use for online shopping, and strong enough to receive text messages promptly. Some of our text messages can take a day to come through, finally popping up…

Most laptops will come with a one-year warranty, but what about the battery inside the laptop? Does that get the same degree of cover, even though it’s arguably a consumable? The short answer: it’s complicated, differing from manufacturer to manufacturer. HP’s standard warranty conditions, for example, lists the battery in the “Product Specific Exclusions”, although if you plough through the legalese, it’s not as bad as you might fear. The battery is covered for a year, but only for defects “in materials or workmanship”. A decrease in the battery’s maximum capacity is, understandably, not covered by the warranty, although it’s hard to discern whether it would qualify as a fault if the battery lost 75% of its capacity in the first year, for example. “To determine whether your battery has…

SMARTPHONE Fairphone Chances are that you have already heard of Fairphone. The Amsterdam-based company has become the standard bearer for ethical smartphones, producing two in the past five years. Its Fairphone 2 (below) is manufactured with as little environmental impact as possible. The modular design makes replacing parts faff-free and extends the lifespan of the device. There is also an emphasis on transparent supply chains, with Fairphone sourcing raw materials from conflict-free and Fairtrade mines in Africa. Finally, the company is a member of the Clean Electronics Production Network (CEPN), a body dedicated to improving worker safety, and aims to improve representation and lower working hours within the manufacturing industry. If you’re thinking that this ethical peace of mind comes at a stratospheric price, relax. The Fairphone 2 costs €529…

Audioboom audioboom.com Starting at $10 a month, Audioboom lets you publish up to five episodes during each billing cycle, with an aggregate limit of 10,000 plays. It distributes via Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Stitcher, it has an embeddable player and gathers analytics. Upper tiers for pros and podcast networks offer sponsorship features, live events tools and access to Audioboom’s advertising network. Buzzsprout buzzsprout.com Buzzsprout’s free service lets you upload two hours of new content a month, and retains your uploads for 90 days. This should be sufficient for proof-of-concept uploads and niche interest streams. Should your production gain a following, you can easily upgrade without switching hosts: $12 a month gives you an additional 50% of monthly upload capacity and retains your episodes indefinitely. Other options allow…

PRICE £712 (£854 inc VAT) from bechtle.co.uk Comparing the Hannspree (see p64) to this NEC monitor is a touch unfair – it’s double the price, after all – but also shows what you get for your money. They’re also aimed at two completely different markets: while the Hannspree is all about walloping your eyes with vivid colours, the MultiSync is aimed at demanding office workers. The idea is that you can stare at this monitor for a day without feeling fatigue, all while delivering a top-quality image. While combating eye fatigue is difficult to judge objectively, the EA271U ticks all the right boxes. An ambient light sensor means it can optimise the brightness for conditions, while a combination of low blue light and flicker-free technology means that your eyes should…

PRICE £417 (£500 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk Quite aside from being one heck of a tongue twister – it’s pronounced "shaow-me-me-eight-pro” – the Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro’s launch represents a historic moment. It’s the biggest event the UK’s smartphone scene has witnessed, in fact, since OnePlus went invite-free back in 2016. That’s because, as the fourth-biggest smartphone maker in the world, Xiaomi has what it takes to violently shake up the smartphone market. This is a company with the muscle to produce high-spec phones at previously unheard-of prices – exactly the sort of approach that has made OnePlus so successful in recent years. The Xiaomi Mi 8 Pro encapsulates everything you need to know about Xiaomi as a company. It’s a phone with a flagship-class specification – a 6.2in, tall-thin…

PRICE From £17 (£20 inc VAT) per month from adobe.com We all instinctively know that non-professional video production is shifting from camcorders to phones, but it’s even happening in the professional space. Consider the 2018 Turner Prize winner, a half-hour single-screen video shot on a phone, a perfect example. In recognition of this trend, Adobe launched a special cut-down version of Premiere Pro in October 2018 called Premiere Rush. Initially, this arrived on iOS, but the desktop version soon followed. Why mention it now? Because while Rush has specialised tools for creating video that’s been shot on smartphones, or destined to be viewed on smartphones, all your edited files and media are stored in the cloud via your Adobe account. It’s fine if all you want to do is edit…

We sourced 2.5in SATA and M.2 drives from the biggest brands in the storage business, then ran them through a series of benchmarks, starting with the AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark synthetic benchmarks to check raw sequential and random read/write speeds, then moving to our standard PC Pro benchmarks to see how SSD performance impacted performance in real-world applications. We also measured the time taken for the drive to transfer 20GB of files, including several large media files and many smaller files to evaluate real-world, mixed load transfer speeds.…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293king PRICEMATRIX With stated read/write speeds of up to 520MB/sec and 500MB/sec respectively, it’s clear that Kingston isn’t pushing the SUV500 as a high-performance SATA 3 drive. Instead, the focus is on reliability and business-grade features, with a five-year warranty, optional 256-bit AES self-encryption and support for TCG Opal 2 security management. If you’re looking for drives for your gaming rig, then look elsewhere, but if you’re upgrading a fleet of business desktops, then this could be the drive for you. The hardware itself feels robust and looks surprisingly stylish, though it matters little with something that will be slotted inside your PC. Kingston also bundles in a coupon for the OEM edition of Acronis True Image, making it easier and faster to migrate old hard disks. Performance is…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293sea PRICEMATRIX Seagate has held on longer than most as a hard disk-focused manufacturer, and you’ll still find it pushing hard behind its spinning disk and hybrid Firecuda drives. Yet the Barracuda brand has long been associated with high-end performance, so it’s great to see it slapped on an SSD. The SSD in question is based on 3D TLC NAND technology along with a Seagate-branded controller, and Seagate makes some ambitious claims about performance. The stated sequential read speed is 560MB/sec, just as on the Samsung 860 Pro, with a sequential write speed of 540MB/sec – 10MB/sec faster. Random speeds are 90,000 IOPs, which should make this a competitive drive in everyday use. Make no mistake: this is an impressively fast drive. CrystalDiskMark puts it at the top of…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293adata2 PRICEMATRIX The Adata XPG-SX8200 is a costconscious rival to the NVMe big guns, promising similar read/write performance to the all-conquering Samsung 970 Evo, but at a slightly lower price. Admittedly, this doesn’t quite work out at the entry-level, where the 256GB Evo is available for less than the 240GB SX8200, but venture beyond to the 480GB and the SX8200 makes a stronger case, coming in cheaper than the Evo and the WD Black. It’s worth moving up the scale. Adata sent us the 240GB drive, and with a 3,200MB/sec sequential read speed and a 1,700MB/sec sequential write speed this is a good match for the 256GB 970 Evo, at 3,400MB/sec and 1,500MB/sec respectively. Yet Adata’s own published test results put the 240GB model at between 2,500 and 3,200MB/sec…

3D NAND: A form of NAND where the memory cells aren’t organised on a plane but sit stacked in a three-dimensional structure, increasing density and speeding up access. BiCS flash: A form of 3D NAND flash designed and manufactured by Toshiba, with higher storage density for higher capacities and faster speeds. Cache: A small amount of DDR RAM or SLC NAND designed to hold and process incoming and outgoing data on its way to and from the SSD. Different drives will have different architectures and different levels of cache, working around the characteristics of the NAND flash to deliver optimal performance. Controller: The processor in an SSD that controls its storage functions and routes data through the cache to the NAND flash. Newer, faster controllers can have a major impact…

SUPPLIER ebuyer.com PRICEMATRIX For a while, Samsung’s 970 Pro was the undisputed speed champ of SSDs, with Samsung’s V-NAND 20-bit MLC technology stomping all over the competition. Now, though, it faces stiffer competition from new and improved 3D NAND technologies from Micron and Toshiba. Is the 970 Pro still the silverback gorilla of the SSD jungle? Well, it’s certainly not looking tired. The 512GB model Samsung sent us for testing promises read speeds of up to 3,500MB/sec and write speeds of up to 2,300MB/sec, meaning it comes close to saturating the PCIe Gen 3 x4 bus in one direction, at least. Move to the more expensive 1TB version and the write speeds climb to 2,700MB/sec, making that a good, albeit pricey move where write performance really matters. As is, the…

SUPPLIER ebuyer.com PRICEMATRIX While buyers of the WD Black can bask in the high-bandwidth NVMe sunshine, purchasing the WD Blue M.2 means stepping down to the SATA 3 interface, albeit through a modern M.2 slot. This means that, whatever the performance of the NAND memory, speeds will always be limited by the constraints of 6Gbits/sec SATA. Hence the stated maximum sequential read/write speeds of 560MB/sec and 530MB/sec. In other words, this is pretty much the same drive as the WD Blue 3D NAND SSD we review elsewhere, albeit with – in our review sample – double the capacity. This has fairly little impact on performance, with both drives achieving very similar results. CrystalDiskMark records sequential read speeds of 564MB/sec for both drives and write speeds of 538MB/sec and 539MB/sec. The…

PRICE Premium: 25 devices, from £2,030 exc VAT from ipswitch.com If you’re befuddled by licensing schemes, WhatsUp Gold (WUG) 2018 will appeal right away. Its points-based system could hardly be simpler: each device – no matter how many network ports, CPUs and so on it has – costs one point, while monitored applications and NetFlow data sources cost ten points apiece. You also get the choice between a yearly subscription or a Premium licence, which includes a year of support. Both versions provide core features such as discovery, alerting, reporting and wireless, cloud and storage monitoring; upgrade to a Total Plus licence and you also get monitoring for flows, virtualised environments and applications. If you don’t need the full whack, you can purchase these features separately as add-on packs. WUG…

PRICE 100 elements, from £2,245 exc VAT from solarwinds.com If you’re already using SolarWinds’ network management tools, Network Performance Monitor (NPM) will fit seamlessly into your workflow. Rather than presenting a standalone interface, it snaps into the company’s Orion unified web console. You don’t need to be an existing customer to get on board with NPM, however. The only hurdle is the slightly confusing licensing system, which divides elements into nodes, interfaces and logical disk volumes. The price shown above is for an SL100 licence, which enables 100 of each element type. Installing the software on a Windows Server 2016 host took 90 minutes, thanks to the new online installer downloading all the latest components. With those in place, the discovery wizard asked us for address ranges, subnets and credentials…

Conway’s law is named after computer scientist Melvin Conway, who observed in 1967 that software design tends to mimic established procedures or social structures. You only have to give a school rugby team a Frisbee to see a similar effect in action – although things naturally get a bit more complex when you’re dealing with logical objects rather then physical ones. In the current context, Conway’s law can represent a challenge. Moving to microservices gives you a great opportunity to escape from the rigid structures of your old processes and applications, and find new, more efficient and flexible ways of doing things. But, the range of possibilities is so vast that imposing some sort of order becomes an urgent priority – which tends to strengthen the effect of Conway’s law.…

Paul owns an agency that helps businesses exploit the web, from sales to marketing and everything in between @PaulOckenden I was contacted by a reader who’d bought a Samsung Galaxy S9+ smartphone after I wrote nice things about it a few months back. He was confused about two things: Knox and the Secure Folder facility. “What are they, and how do they work?” was the gist of the question. That’s a great choice of phone, by the way. It’s obviously no longer the latest and greatest Android handset out there, but it’s still up there among the best. And the one inclusion you’ll struggle to find elsewhere is the built-in security system, which is where Knox and the Secure Folder come in. Knox is Samsung’s mobile security layer, named after…

Davey is an award-winning journalist and consultant specialising in privacy and security issues @happygeek When I bought my latest car, through a main dealer “approved used vehicle” scheme, I was surprised to discover that when I explored the phone connectivity options via the infotainment system, the previous owner’s data was still there. Contacts, numbers, text messages – the whole caboodle. Being the conscientious type, I deleted it all immediately. However, it did make me wonder about the number of used vehicles out there sold with personal information still present. The GDPR implications for a main dealership that sells such vehicles could, I imagine, be quite painful. And it seems that I’m not alone in wondering about such things. Researchers from an outfit called Privacy4Cars, which makes an app to erase…

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future “Do I smell bad?” It’s a question many of us have wondered, sniffing at our armpits or begging a loved one to be honest about our odour. (If you have to ask…) There may soon be a tech solution, and it’s not half as silly as it sounds. Chipmaker ARM, global conglomerate Unilever and electronics firm PragmatIC have teamed up with researchers at the University of Manchester to make a cheap, plastic sensor that uses machine learning to report if you smell. The whiffy widget will likely end up as marketing gubbins attached to a can of Lynx body spray or the like, but there are serious use cases from food safety to healthcare – if the…

Bruno Zamborlin is the CEO and founder of HyperSurfaces and can be seen, right, with one of the car-based prototypes FORGET VOICE ASSISTANTS and touchscreens everywhere: the future of interacting with smart homes and connected cars is any old surface at all. That’s the idea behind HyperSurfaces, a London-based startup that’s using vibration sensors and AI to interpret taps on your car door or kitchen table as controls for apps and other computing systems. Want to pause music in your car? Tap the steering wheel – there’s no button, but the system still knows what you want. Run your fingers across your kitchen table to dim the lights, or install the system in flooring to analyse footsteps for a high-tech security system. Retailers can use the technology to analyse footfall…

Background and analysis on all the important news stories GCHQ HAS MOOTED a plan to circumvent encryption “without breaking it”, an assertion dubbed laughable by cryptography experts. Governments – particularly the UK’s “Five Eyes” allies – have been wrestling with ways to read encrypted messages to prevent terrorist and criminal communications. With widespread criticism from tech and other sectors over the idea of creating backdoors to weaken encryption, GCHQ has outlined another method to access messages. In a document published by the national security-focused Lawfare blog, a senior GCHQ official suggested that the method mirrored early phone intercepts where crocodile clips were used to patch security services into a call without the targets knowing. “We’re not talking about weakening encryption or defeating the end-to-end nature of the service,” said Ian…

Nvidia unveiled what it claims to be the fastest PC graphics card yet in the shape of Titan RTX – but gamers should curb their enthusiasm. The release of graphics hardware is usually monitored most closely by gamers wanting the best performance at highest quality settings, but this card will actually offer relatively little in terms of performanceversus-price for gamers. Instead, the Titan RTX – which, at $2,499, will prove too expensive for all but the keenest hobbyist – targets those customers working on data manipulation, artificial intelligence and videography. According to Nvidia, the release marks its biggest incremental increase in performance for more than a decade and is driven by the new Turing architecture, which has allowed Nvidia to build a card capable of 130 teraflops of deep learning…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 9370 Ultraportable from £1,279 from dell.co.uk This 2018 update to the all-dominant Dell XPS 13 keeps tweaks to the minimum: slimmer bezels, eighth-generation Intel Core processors and the promise of even longer battery life are the most important benefits. Just keep in mind that Dell has embraced USB-C ports at the expense of the old-fashioned Type-A variety. REVIEW Issue 284, p54 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 15in (2018) A machine for true power users with amazing specifications, including that infamous Core i9 – and up to 4TB of SSD storage. From £2,349 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 Dell XPS 15 We all know what to expect from Dell’s XPS 15 range, yet it continues to reign supreme – this time thanks to sheer speed, courtesy…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology @dariengs When we say that personal computing has changed the world, it’s true in the most literal sense. It’s not just about how we communicate, or about the games we play. Our towns are metamorphosing before our eyes, as commerce moves online and the retail centres that once served as community hubs and geographic landmarks are forced to shrink, close or reinvent themselves. I’ll admit, technology isn’t the only reason I no longer haunt the West End in the way I used to in my twenties. As I’ve become older and more jaded, the bright lights and bustle don’t excite me like they once did. Now I mostly work from home, it’s a bit harder to justify…

For all that I grouse about it, Facebook can sometimes be fun. Last week I posted about a small tech victory. My dear old HTC Desire phone had been playing up – go-slows, total freezes – and no amount of purging apps would fix it. I started eyeing up various Motos on Amazon, but before committing decided to try one last fix: a full factory reset. All my data and most apps came back automatically from Google within 15 minutes and the phone is now rock-solid and faster than ever. But the response on Facebook should have been predictable: an avalanche of advice from friends suggesting replacements costing up to £1,000. I protested that I don’t care about phones. I use mine mostly as a Citymapper and Spotify platform, and…

The app stores are cluttered with “battery-saver” apps, ranging from obscure developers you’ve never heard of to well-known names such as Avast and Kaspersky. But are these apps worth installing? It’s hard to make blanket statements, but we’ve tested several battery-saving apps and most don’t appear to offer much – if anything – above and beyond what is preinstalled on most smartphones nowadays. Many attempt to save battery life by aggressively closing apps, preventing them from background battery drain. It’s debatable whether the trade-off in performance is worth the battery savings. Most modern phones will warn you if a background app is spanking the battery, and the drop-off in performance of having to cold-start apps such as Twitter and Instagram will irritate smartphone addicts. Then there’s the overhead of installing…

There’s a major change underway in the evolution of Windows – and it’s not just about apps and flashy graphics. Microsoft’s constantly evolving platform is actively expanding into new areas and onto new platforms. Admittedly, things didn’t get off to a good start, with the demise of Windows Phone and the ditching of Windows 10 Mobile. But that’s allowed Microsoft to focus on its core Windows product, evolving the desktop edition and embracing new hardware in innovative and unexpected ways. Which brings us to the Raspberry Pi. This certainly isn’t a conventional Windows workstation: even the range-topping Pi 3 Model B+ has just 1GB of RAM and a 1.4GHz ARM-based processor. There’s no way you could run the full version of Windows 10 on a system like this. What you…

If £886 sounds like too much, there are cheaper variants of this NUC that use the same chassis. For £705, you could opt for a slightly downgraded Core i7-8705G processor, which has the same RX Vega M GL chip found in the top-spec HP Spectre x360 laptop. You can also buy the £486 “Skull Canyon” model with a Core i7-6770HQ and integrated Iris Pro Graphics 580. If you’re looking for mini-PCs with a comparable focus on both CPU and GPU performance, your options are limited. Zotac’s Magnus ER51060 and Magnus ER51070 barebones systems are arguably its closest rivals, but they’re a lot deeper and taller. These employ AMD Ryzen 5 1400 CPUs and, respectively, GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 graphics cards, so are better for gaming even if they’re…

PRICE £1,597 (£1,916 inc VAT) from eizo.co.uk To say the Eizo ColorEdge CG279X is a niche monitor is one of the world’s great understatements. While you can argue the mainstream case for NEC’s EA71U opposite, the CG279X has a narrow band of people who should buy it: professionals who work in video post-production, image processing and pre-printing. If you must be 100% confident that the colours you see on-screen are the same that will appear on calibrated movie screens and final prints, you need a monitor like this. Put in that perspective, the CG279X suddenly looks affordable. If you’re spending thousands on a print job then you want whites, say, to jump out of your carefully crafted blue background; get it wrong and it will look lacklustre. That could be…

1 Visit the PC Pro download site at pcprodownload.co.uk. You’ll need to enter the coupon code printed on the card, along with your email address. We’ll send you an email to confirm that your code has been registered. On subsequent visits, you’ll be able to access the download area by entering only your email address. 2 Once you’re into the download area, you can access this month’s bonus software by navigating to the relevant product page and clicking the red Install button. For trial software, freeware and other downloads, click the Install button below the product description, or follow the onscreen instructions (please read these carefully). 3 If the software needs registering, click the purple Register button, or follow the instructions on the left of the product page (again, please…

PRICE £291 (£349 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/293poco We review Xiamo’s flashy flagship, the Mi 8 Pro, on p68, but the Pocophone F1 is an even cheaper alternative. Xiaomi hasn’t scrimped on specs, though: the Pocophone is a mid-range phone in price alone. It’s still fitted with Qualcomm’s fastest current mobile processor, the Snapdragon 845, and even pairs it with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for £349. That’s incredible value for money. Indeed, it’s £150 cheaper than the 128GB OnePlus 6T, which is equipped with similar components. There are chinks in the Pocophone’s armour, with the most obvious being its design: the F1’s all-plastic chassis feels old hat compared to the gorgeous sandwiches of metal and glass that are commonplace elsewhere. Thankfully, the F1’s silver-tinted chamfered edges add a…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293adata PRICEMATRIX Adata is pushing the definition of “ultimate” by describing the SU800 as the “Ultimate Solid State Drive”, but its 3D NAND technology and dynamic SLC Cache make it a serious contender if you’re looking for a 2.5in SATA unit. The aggressive pricing helps as well, with the SU800 going neck-and-neck with the Seagate Barracuda and WD Blue at both the 512GB and 1TB levels, although the Barracuda’s 256GB model is a little bit cheaper. Adata claims read speeds of up to 560MB/sec and write speeds only 540MB/sec slower, and in some tests it actually exceeds these. CrystalDiskMark recorded sequential read and write speeds of 565MB/sec and 529MB/sec respectively, but this dropped to 521MB/sec and 485MB/sec in AS SSD. The drive is even more impressive when it comes…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293sam PRICEMATRIX Moving out of the hard disk business to focus on solid stage storage might have been one of Samsung’s smartest moves. Its M.2 drives offer cutting-edge performance and much the same goes for this 2.5in SATA SSD. The 860 Pro is designed for use in high-end PCs and workstations, pairing its MJX controller with 64-layer MLC flash, promising sequential read speeds of up to 560MB/sec and write speeds of up to 530MB/sec. The stated random read and write operation speeds are also the highest of any drive on test. Does this theoretical performance translate to real-world performance? You bet it does. While the 860 Pro doesn’t pull ahead of the Seagate Barracuda, WD Blue and Adata SU800 in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, AS SSD puts it ahead in…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293blue PRICEMATRIX WD’s Blue line is its mainstream storage option, giving you faster performance than on the entry-level Green line without the costs and cutting-edge performance of the Black. Yet it’s hard to see where the WD Blue 3D NAND could go much further on specification. It uses WD’s 3D BiCS NAND technology, as developed by WD and Toshiba, along with a Marvell controller and a Micron cache module. Plus it promises read speeds of up to 560MB/sec and write speeds of up to 530MB/sec, matching Samsung’s mighty 860 Pro. It’s a little slower on the random read/write side, with 95,000 and 84,000 IOPS to the Samsung’s 100,000 and 90,000, but not to any worrying extent. In fact, the biggest difference between the two is reliability and lifespan. While…

Is there any point in SSDs becoming faster? The latest M.2 NVMe drives are close to saturating the PCIe 3 x4 bus and deliver speed in excess of what most applications need. Yet, if there’s one thing we can guarantee, it’s that future applications will demand even more performance. We explore the next-gen SSD tech. PCIe 4 For faster drives to be useful, the PC needs a faster I/O bus. Enter the PCIe 4 specification, announced in 2011 but only just reaching mass availability. Doubling the maximum transfer rate per PCIe lane from 8Gbits/sec to 16Gbits/sec, this should support PCIe 4 x4 drives running at up to 8Gbits/sec. But there’s just one thing in its way: PCIe 4 has been so long making it to market that PCIe 5 is…

SUPPLIER pcpro.link/293cruc2 PRICEMATRIX For most people M.2 is synonymous with NVMe and PCIe 3 x4, but you don’t have to go the high-performance route. Some manufacturers are, like Crucial, producing SATA drives that fit into the M.2 slot but support the older SATA 3 protocols instead. Not every M.2 slot on your motherboard will support one of these drives, but you are effectively getting a SATA drive in the smaller, more convenient form factor. Why should you bother when performance won’t be anywhere near NVMe levels? After all, where other M.2 drives on test are capable of 3,600MB/sec and 3,000MB/sec transfer speeds, the MX500 maxes out at a stated 560MB/sec and 510MB/sec. The answer is price per GB. You can pick up a 500GB MX500 for less than some 256GB…

Let’s get the Toshiba’s biggest issue out of the way: you can’t buy it. It’s being sold to OEMs to make desktops and laptops, but Toshiba has no plans to launch it into retail. This might be an effort not to upset partners such as Western Digital and Corsair, but it’s still disappointing. The XG6 is a ferociously competitive high-performance SSD. It’s base on Toshiba’s 3D BiCS NAND technology and on its most advanced 96-layer process, combined with Toshiba’s own eight-channel TC58NCP090GSB controller. Toshiba’s quite conservative about its stated speeds, with a maximum sequential read speed of 3,180MB/sec and a write speed of 2,960MB/sec – both WD and Corsair promise more with variants of the older 64-layer tech. It’s a similar story with IOPS for random read/write operations. Synthetic benchmarks…

When I first set foot in the PC Pro Labs over 20 years ago, the drive was the Quantum Fireball. If you got a PC in for testing and it had a Quantum Fireball in it, there was a good chance that the PC was going to win awards (and a Matrox Millennium graphics card never hurt). In the past few years, you have really had two choices: the Samsung 970 Pro and its cheaper sibling the 970 Evo. Speeds were through the roof, the performance profile boosted performance in real-world applications, while Samsung’s NAND technology always seemed a step ahead of the rest. Now Samsung’s rivals have finally caught up. The drives packing Toshiba’s latest BiCS 3D NAND technology are matching Samsung’s champs in some scenarios and even besting…

PRICE 50 devices, from £1,850 exc VAT from manageengine.co.uk ManageEngine’s OpManager has been around for many years, but recent updates have given it a distinctly modern feel, and make problem detection and troubleshooting easier than ever. Licensing is handled on a flat, per-device basis, regardless of the number of interfaces or elements each device has. A 50-device pack should, therefore, easily cover a small or growing business – and it’s great value, starting at just £1,850 for an “Essential” licence. Despite the name, that includes not only all the core functions, but also support for virtualisation hosts and VMs, which many other vendors offer only as an optional, paid-for feature. You don’t need a beefy server to run OpManager, either. Having downloaded the 135MB installer, we had it set up…

PRICE £387 exc VAT from ebuyer.com Fujitsu’s new ScanSnap iX1500 sits at the top of the company’s desktop scanner family. Aimed at home offices and small businesses, it offers a quoted speed of 30ppm in colour at 300dpi, a decent 50-page document feeder, double-sided operation and simultaneous USB 3 and 802.11n Wi-Fi connections. It also has a 4.3in colour touchscreen, through which you access a slick and friendly menu system. Aside from anything else, this makes installation a breeze. After connecting the iX1500 over USB 3 to a Windows 10 desktop, we simply followed the instructions on the touchscreen to get fully set up. This included choosing whether to connect to an existing wireless AP or to have the iX1500 act as an AP itself for direct mobile connections. You…

Penetration testing should be part of any serious security strategy, for the reasons already stated. However, just how effective the results of that testing will be relies entirely upon what the business decides to do with it. In my experience, and that of the pen testers I have known over the years, the act of penetration testing is often seen as some kind of compliance auditing check-box exercise. All too often this means that, as low-level vulnerabilities tend to fall under the “things I give a monkey’s about” bar, some vulnerabilities will simply get ignored. Sure, the risk/reward balance is always key, but it depends how much the knobs get turned in favour of the reward side of the equation to save money and effort. This can be dangerous territory…

EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS Jon is the MD of an IT consultancy that specialises in testing and deploying hardware @jonhoneyball Afew months ago, I proposed that I might move away from Dropbox for Business. Early testing suggested that the Synology Drive capability supplied with Synology NAS boxes would actually deliver everything we needed in the lab, and then some. I’d become increasingly tired of the “mutton dressed as lamb” approach that Dropbox takes with its Business product, adding functionality that isn’t meaningful in a business context whilst ignoring big issues. I discovered, for example, that the really useful capability in Dropbox to create a link to a file had different levels of capability, depending on whether you used the desktop client or the web browser. In the…

Simon Hudson is an entrepreneur, health sector specialist, and founder of Cloud2 Ltd and Kinata Ltd @simonjhudson My first reaction to Microsoft announcing Microsoft Search at Ignite 2018 was: “Humph. So what?” Since then, I’ve been reflecting on it, as well as showing Microsoft Search to various folk. I’ve now shifted from “Humph” to “Gosh! That could really work”. Everyone I’ve shown it to has said it’s good – even my techno-sceptical wife. Microsoft Search, like so many fine ideas, is a simple concept. Ordinary users rarely go to their intranet to look for things; they jump straight to a search engine, almost always Google. As a result, they spend company time hoping to find an ungoverned version of a “knowledge object” that their company will have already provided within…

Steve is a consultant who specialises in networks, cloud, HR and upsetting the corporate apple cart @stardotpro Taking bold steps in design is no longer a thing in computing, if you go by what we’re given as software. We’re told everything is standard: that’s what allows it to work across the broadest possible range of hardware. Nothing can be changed, because customisation leads to a hardware/software feeding frenzy, where change follows change in a circular wave of delays, revisions and goof-ups. It takes farsighted design – with a large development budget and a large scope of responsibility among widely differing disciplines – to take a grand perspective and push it through so it works properly. Enter Huawei. The Chinese giant can assemble software developers and hardware designers and, indeed, mount…

On sale Thursday 14 February 2019 LABS Wi-Fiextenders Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and claim a free three-in-one USB charging cable, while stocks last. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details. FEATURES Smartphone cameras: mythbuster We ask a professional photographer if and when it’s possible to replace a DSLR with a top-end phone. Automate everything Stop wasting your time with menial chores that could be replaced by code. We explore how you can use IFTTT to automate it all. Best of CES 2019 Jon Honeyball, Tim Danton and Barry Collins pick out the most exciting tech announced at the world’s biggest consumer technology show.…

The news that Microsoft is dropping the internal engine used in Edge and moving to Chromium certainly made me sit down and think. This isn’t the Microsoft of old, where Linux was spat upon and iOS viewed as a toy. And macOS supported simply to help keep the regulators out of the building. As Barry discusses on p25, the Ballmer-led Microsoft of old would have just kept going, barking loudly that its browser was the One True Way, and that everything else would be steamrollered out of its path. The old Microsoft would have done everything in its power to force users to keep using its technology. A lot of commentators have been saying that the removal of this engine, and its rendering platform, is a bad thing because it…