PC Proの April 2026 の目次

Look, it’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not even Elon Musk’s fault. But something has gone wrong with technology branding, to the point where it now obfuscates rather than helps. This month Intel is the focus of my ire, but only because its products have dominated my life this past month. Without wanting to sound like Dennis Waterman (although I’m told he was excellent company in the pub), I wrote the main Intel Core Ultra Series 3 review from p50, edited three more laptop reviews containing its chips, and then wrote my own review of the rather lovely Asus ExpertBook Ultra (see p58). My first conclusion is simple: that Intel has created a great mobile chip. My second: its branding team has taken that fine work, diced…

The internal unrest at Microsoft following the disastrous release of Windows 8 has been inadvertently exposed in the Epstein files. Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft executive in charge of Windows 8, was an associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s, even after the latter’s conviction for procuring a girl below the age of 18 for prostitution. Email exchanges reveal that Epstein was helping Sinofsky negotiate his “retirement” package from Microsoft after Windows 8 sales fell flat. Sinofsky eventually settled for a $14 million payout, which was reported at the time to include non-compete and non-disparagement clauses. A copy of Sinofsky’s resignation agreement with Microsoft in the Epstein files lays bare the terms of the deal, with Sinofsky barred from accepting “direct or indirect employment” with Amazon, Apple, EMC, Facebook, Google, Oracle or VMware. The…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro M5 Class act from £1,599 from apple.com/uk No radical updates to the design, but this M5 update delivers yet more power to accompany the already excellent battery life. If you can pay the price, Apple’s professional laptop stands apart. The only question is whether the M5 Pro and M5 Max upgrades will be worth the extra cost when they come to the 16in version. REVIEW Issue 376, p52 Apple MacBook Air M4 If you don’t need the all-out power of the Pro, this is a brilliant, cheaper alternative despite the unchanged chassis and screen. 13in from £999, 15in from £1,199 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 368, p54 NEW ENTRY Dell XPS 14 Dell brings back the XPS name and mojo thanks in part to Intel’s Core…

At university, part of my (much maligned) media degree involved going out on to the streets and interviewing people using tape recorders. Once we’d stuffed the tape with enough soundbites, it was back to the studio where we spent the next couple of hours splicing tape, cutting it with a knife at what you hoped was the exact moment between words, but frequently butchering them mid-syllable. I learnt a few new swear words on that job. It was a tedious, fiddly, labourintensive process that required enormous levels of patience and craft. The tutor could splice and stick these tapes back together to form a coherent piece of audio in minutes; it would take me hours. And by the time I’d completed my course, those skills were redundant. The world had…

Twelve seconds. That’s how long it took from the final dart hitting the board in the PDC World Championships in January to Wikipedia updating Luke Littler’s entry as the confirmed 2026 world champion. Of course, it wasn’t Wikipedia per se updating Littler’s entry. It was one of more than 260,000 active editors on the site, who was primed to update the online encyclopaedia the moment he hit that crucial double. A volunteer system that many thought would lead to chaos when it was first unveiled 25 years ago, but has turned out to be one of the most inspired ideas to emerge from any tech company. That idea was Jimmy Wales’, and 25 years later he’s talking to me on a video call, describing how Wikipedia remains true to its…

It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that the prices of RAM and SSDs have rocketed over the past nine months. Affordability and availability have taken a hammering, leaving system builders, repairers and resellers all struggling to find parts in a market with barely any stock. Vintage readers will have witnessed this phenomenon several times over the years, with pricing spikes blamed on random natural disasters – a wildfire torching a manufacturing plant or a tsunami washing away a warehouse or two. The usual remedy is to sit tight and wait a few months for normality to resume, but that strategy won’t work this time. The current memory crisis isn’t a freak of nature, and multiple industry insiders have told PC Pro that prices are expected to rise for at least…

eSIMs have particular benefits for businesses operating fleets of mobile devices. In the past, IT departments or office administrators had to keep track of dozens of physical SIMs, potentially distributed all around the country in different people’s phones and laptops. Reassigning a line meant physically couriering a SIM from one place to another, and careful internal management was required to track who was using a particular identity at a particular time – especially since it was common practice to keep a small bank of spare SIMs on hand in case of need. Ordering new services, auditing usage and cancelling lost or stolen SIMs usually required a phone call to the network provider. With eSIMs, businesses have far more hands-on control. Online portals let corporate customers instantly provision, activate and suspend…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,916 (£2,299 inc VAT) from dell.com The Dell XPS 14 (2026) is a true return to form. Like many others, I wasn’t exactly enthused when the US giant decided to rebrand its iconic laptop line as “Dell Premium”. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for the company to rethink its strategy. As we covered in our CES feature last month (see issue 378, p26), the XPS is back – and arguably better than ever. It’s surely no coincidence that the new XPS looks much like a MacBook. The CNC-machined aluminium chassis has softer, rounded corners and weighs less than 1.4kg – around 300g lighter than the Dell 14 Premium (see issue 373, p50). It looks amazing and feels fantastic to hold. Best of all, Dell has fixed its…

PRICE From £2,499 (£2,999 inc VAT) from samsung.com Samsung announced a trio of Galaxy Book6 laptops at CES in January: the base-level Book6, the Book6 Pro and the Book6 Ultra. Both its siblings are available in 14in and 16in models, but the Book6 Ultra comes in a 16in size alone. It weighs a hefty 1.8kg, but Samsung has done a great job of keeping this laptop thin, being slimmer than the 14in MacBook Pro (see issue 376, p52) at 15.4mm and with only a slightly larger footprint of 357 x 248mm. Despite the thin design, Samsung crams in two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB-A port, HDMI 2.1, a 3.5mm combo jack and an SD card reader, so a bigger selection than the Dell XPS 14 (see p56). With Wi-Fi 7…

PRICE Core 9/2TB SSD, €1,134 (€1,349 inc VAT) from geekom.de Geekom is primarily known for making mini PCs, and has now entered the altogether more challenging laptop market with a brace of slim and light machines called the X14 Pro and the X16 Pro. For now, they’re only available through Geekom’s US (from $1,049) and German (from €1,149) sites, with a UK release still under consideration. To keep the weight under 1kg, the X14 Pro is mainly made from magnesium alloy. It’s 200g lighter than the 13.3in MacBook Air and similarly thin, but the x14 Pro isn’t fragile: the lid and the body showed little flex when I tried to twist it out of shape. The only fault I can pick with the design is that the matte finish is…

PRICE £1,499 (£1,799 inc VAT) from wired2fire.co.uk I suspect that British PC maker Wired2Fire had fun in the development of the Haven Ember Pro. Its greatest feat is to squeeze a tower PC’s worth of gaming rig into a micro-ATX case, namely the striking Jonsbo V12 White chassis (tinyurl.com/379jonsbo). Its most striking feature of all is the 8mm-thick walnut panel, apparently made from North American walnut trees, which Wired2Fire decided was better described as “ember” to capture the warmth of the colouring. Press the equally stylish white-LED-framed power button – which sits above a rather less stylish trio of USB-A, USB-C and 3.5mm headphone jack – and the aRGB case fans spin into action. Two 120mm fans at the front, one at the rear, with airflow moving from front to…

PRICE £330 (£396 inc VAT) from hp.com With its 33ppm print speeds and a recommended load of up to 4,000 pages a month, the HP Color LaserJet Pro 4202dw is well suited to a busy workgroup, and its relatively compact design will also appeal to home workers. Crisp corners, strict symmetry and refreshing blue panels ensure this colour laser stands out from rivals, and there’s even expandability thanks to an optional 550-sheet paper tray. The drawer at the bottom holds up to 250 sheets of A4 paper, while the blue panel above reveals a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray – far more useful than the usual single sheet feeder. The output tray on top is also deeper than most, holding up to 150 sheets. There’s no touchscreen, only a four-line LCD with…

Although we normally like to stay reasonably unbiased, let us categorically say one thing: we love network-attached storage (NAS) drives. We’d go so far as to say that if you’re a PC Pro reader and you don’t have a NAS drive, we would send a “tsk, tsk” in your direction. And we’re sorry to be so firm. Why the adoration? Because they do everything that we, as enthusiasts, need. Choose wisely and you can cover video surveillance, media playback and local backups – including ransomware-resistant storage – in one elegant device. Not only that, but they’re the perfect repository for a small business’s data, and with several models on test this month you can expand your storage in line with your business. We also like the fact that they can cut…

PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Anyone familiar with NAS naming conventions might find the Synology DS725+ confusing. It’s a 2025 model, but clearly only a two-bay device – the “7” comes from the fact you can upgrade it with the DX525 five-bay expansion unit, giving you up to seven disks. In its standard form it supports the usual RAID0, RAID1 or JBOD configurations possible with two disks. Add disks in an expansion unit and you can configure larger arrays. With the expansion unit it supports RAID6 and RAID10, offering greater data redundancy, and you can allocate a drive as a hot spare if needed. This enclosure looks similar to the more affordable DiskStation DS225+, but in truth it’s a significant upgrade. Look closely and you’ll notice a less…

PRICE £452 (£542 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk QNAP’s HS-264 looks more like a set-top box than a NAS enclosure, and with some reason: it’s pitched as a home media server, and comes with features such as dual 4K HDMI ports and a fanless design. This is a two-bay NAS, offering the usual two-disk RAID options, but it has no NVMe slots. You do get dual 2.5GbE ports, though, and two USB-A ports capable of 10Gbits/sec. This is a slightly fiddly device to set up. Access to the disk slots comes via a detachable front panel – not through removing the screws on the base – after which you pull out two alloy disk caddies. Whether you’re installing 3.5in or 2.5in drives, you’ll need to screw them in, as the metal…

PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk QNAP’s TS-432X is primarily designed for storage in small businesses. While reasonably affordable, it offers multiple upgrade paths, allowing it to work faster and harder – and store more data – if your needs develop over time. The TS-432X has a curious specification. While it’s missing the M.2 slots you might expect on a four-bay enclosure at this price, it’s almost overspecified when it comes to networking. Alongside dual 2.5GbE ports, there’s support for a 10GbE SFP+ module, which could come in handy if you have a fibre network and multiple demanding users. You can trunk all three interfaces together for a huge overall bandwidth, or use the PCIe slot to add a wired 10GbE interface, or NVMe SSDs. There are lots of…

PRICE £398 (£478 inc VAT) from broadbandbuyer.com If you regularly listen to the PC Pro podcast, you’ll know that Jon Honeyball is a big fan of Ubiquiti’s growing range of NAS drives. We hoped to get one of the new UNAS 4 or UNAS 2 devices in for this test, but with no samples available we settled for this sevendisk, business-focused system. That’s shown by its 2U rack mount design, which arrives with the necessary mounting kit, but it also arrives with simple rubber feet in case you want to use it in a standalone configuration. You need a serious network setup to get the best from the UNAS Pro’s fibre 10GbE SFP+ network port. Ideally you’d want to connect it to workstations and other devices via a switch with…

PRICE £408 (£490 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk The DXP4800 Plus is Ugreen’s flagship four-bay NAS enclosure, and it makes a brilliant first impression. Heavy, metal, and with some neat design, it’s certainly confidence-inspiring. This NAS is aimed at power users and small businesses, and it has the specifications to prove it. Unfortunately, it also comes with a price tag that pits it against some excellent products from more established competitors. This enclosure’s headline act is probably its 10GbE network port, theoretically supporting transfers of over 1GB/sec. Unfortunately we didn’t have a 10GbE switch or PC, but could still give it a workout over a 5GbE connection. Other spec highlights include a Pentium Gold processor, 8GB of RAM (upgradable to 64GB) and a plethora of USB ports, including two supporting the…

The shift to distributed workforces and hybrid working is gathering pace and driving a global boom in file sharing. Cloud-based platforms are perfectly poised to take advantage of this demand as they allow teams and clients to work together and collaborate on important projects regardless of their location. The argument? That the days of on-premises file sharing are numbered: cloud services can be far more cost-effective than physical on-site servers, and you’ll never have to worry about ongoing maintenance costs or server operating systems reaching end of support. Cloud services are designed to scale much more easily with demand and there’s no need for complex virtual private networks (VPNs), since they allow workers to use their choice of device and remotely access, share and edit documents at any time and…

PRICE £19 exc VAT per user per month billed yearly from sharefile.com Progress ShareFile is a great choice for SMBs that want secure cloud collaboration services, and this latest version adds a wealth of new features with a sharp focus on centralising and streamlining client management. It’s an affordable option, too, with the Premium plan on review costing £19 per user per month and entitling each one to 1TB of pooled cloud storage, which can be easily upgraded as required. Another compelling feature is ShareFile’s support for two user types. Those defined as employees require a licence and have access to all features such as a personal web portal or creating and sharing personal folders and may be assigned any of nearly 30 management privileges. External collaborators such as customers…

PRICE £192 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Intended for small offices that want secure, always-on internet access, DrayTek’s Vigor 2767ax offers a great range of security and WAN redundancy features at an appealing price. It addresses the exponential bandwidth increases in fibre broadband with its high-speed VDSL and 2.5GbE WAN ports, and there are USB ports for adding 4G/5G modems, any of which can be joined together for failover links. The 2.5GbE port is switchable so you can use it for WAN or LAN purposes, and it’s teamed up with three 1GbE LAN ports. The router also presents Wi-Fi 6 services with its AX3000-rated access point (AP) supporting the Wi-Fi 6 highperformance 160MHz channels. Installation is a breeze. After a mandatory admin password change, you’ll find the slick DrayOS 5 web…

Carbon emissions are a handy proxy for an activity’s impact on the global climate. But with the rise of compute-intensive cloud AI services, we’ve also seen concerns over data centres’ water usage. It’s important to understand that servers don’t consume water in the same way they consume electricity. Water is used to cool hot processor casings, then dispersed back into the environment, often in the form of vapour. The trouble is that at times of high compute demand – or high local temperatures – a server farm can suck up very large quantities of water in a short period. This affects availability for other important purposes, such as watering crops, and can lead to usage restrictions or environmental damage. Water impact is harder to measure than carbon: demand is highly…

For more than a decade, cyber security regulation has been treated as a technical problem: mandate controls, require incident reporting and resilience will follow. That approach is now being quietly abandoned. Repeated, high-impact incidents have shown that failure rarely stems from a lack of tools, but from failures of decision-making, oversight and accountability at senior levels. Cyber resilience, it turns out, is less about whether an organisation owns the right tools, and more about whether the people in charge know what they’re doing with them. In response, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have shifted course. Cyber resilience is now treated as a matter of governance rather than pure technical compliance, anchored in leadership accountability rather than post-incident reporting. Against that backdrop, the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (CSRB)…

ON SALE Thursday 2 April Features Do you need Windows? From low-end hardware to gaming rigs, the OS isn’t the default choice any more. We explore whether you need Windows in 2026. Features Firefox vs the world Nik Rawlinson explains why there are still three different browser engines – and why it matters to the development of the web. Features Charge your devices like a pro Keeping your laptop, phone, tablet and other devices charged may seem simple, but Darien reveals why devices don’t charge as quickly as you’d expect and what you can do about it. Labs Best Linux distros We put a selection of Linux distributions to the test to see which are the best choices, whether you’re looking to switch from Windows or not. Retro Going back…

Barry Collins Barry used all his wily charm – by which we mean he sent an email – to set up an exclusive interview with Jimmy Wales. Read what the Wikipedia founder has to say from p28 Simon Handby Whether you already own a NAS appliance or think it might be time to upgrade to something new, make the most of Simon’s indepth testing of 13 leading contenders from p78 Rois Ni Thuama While the UK government may be very pleased with its shiny new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, Rois takes a different view as she can see its impact on British businesses. See p116 Davey Winder When it comes to passwords, everyone needs a system that causes them the least friction while giving them the least grief –…

It’s excruciatingly annoying when you can’t get a mobile signal but others around you can. That shouldn’t be a problem for customers of Honest Mobile’s Smart SIM, however, which can connect to all four of the UK’s mobile networks, providing a backup signal when your primary network is showing no bars (read how Barry Collins got on with it on the opposite page). It doesn’t only work in the UK, either, but in more than 180 countries. And it costs from £3.75 per month. We spoke to Honest Mobile’s co-founder, Andy Aitken, to find out how it works. PC Pro: Tell us how your business started… Andy Aitken: We launched back in 2019 as a challenger MVNO [mobile virtual network operator]. We were the first MVNO to be net-zero, we were…

Is it just me, or does it feel as though we’re currently living in a peculiar sort of limbo? Deep down we all know that AI is bound to end in tears, with the only questions that remain concerning from whose eyes, whether they’re caused by economics, politics or ecology, and whether they’re of rage or hilarity. (On that point, I’m guiltily amused by the cruel wag on Substack who suggested we should start calling Sam Altman “Sloppenheimer”.) I’m acutely aware of the amount of space I’ve devoted in this column, over many years, to expressing scepticism about the strongest claims made by the AI crowd, and I don’t wish to bang on about those same arguments. Fortunately, I’ve found a new one to bang on about. Of course, living…

Missing battery I’m a subscriber to PC Pro and have done lots of voluntary user support, which naturally includes lots of fixing hardware. I’ve been at it for over 30 years, so I’m confident, if not expert. As an inveterate tweaker, I always enjoy Lee Grant’s struggles with repairability. In August 2024 I thought I’d dip my toe into Windows on ARM and bought a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Snapdragon laptop. This has performed well until the last week or two when the 16+ hours of battery life diminished, seemingly overnight, to about 2.5 hours. Given that I’ve got ancient portables, going back to a Surface Pro 4 from 2015, which still manage quite close to their original battery life, I wasn’t impressed. According to Lenovo, the battery is an…

Famously, anyone can edit a Wikipedia page without logging in. Go to a page, click the Edit link at the top, make your changes and press Submit. Assuming you’re not on one of the few highly protected pages that don’t allow anonymous edits, your changes will appear for all to see. But it’s not the ideal way to edit. It’s far more rewarding to sign up for an account and make edits while logged in. You don’t have to hand over any personal details: a username, password and email address is all you need to register, and that email account doesn’t have to be your primary account with an identifiable moniker. Only your username will appear in any edit logs. Signing up for an account has several benefits. First, you’ll…

As well as containing a hard-coded IMSI and cryptographic key, SIMs have a certain amount of writable space. This stores the mobile settings that tell your phone how to get onto your provider’s network, including information about preferred roaming partners – so if you take your Vodafone SIM to France, your handset will default to connecting to the operator’s local partner, which happens to be SFR. This isn’t the same as a network lock, however; your phone and SIM will automatically connect to other foreign networks if SFR isn’t available, or if you go into the settings and manually switch. The amount of writable space on a SIM can range from 8KB to 256KB, and any spare capacity is available for the user to store contacts and text messages. In…

The Core Ultra Series 3 is a big deal for Intel. If it can deliver this family of chips in volume it will mark the start of a comeback for the once dominant chipmaker. For let’s place this in context: if Intel was a boxer, the past two decades have seen it slump from world heavyweight champion to a bruised and sometimes confused challenger. Punches have come from two sides. In the manufacturing corner, it’s lost its crown to the pure-play foundry TSMC. Intel took seven painful years to transition from its 14nm node to 10nm while TSMC clicked its way steadily downwards, to the point where it is now scaling its 2nm node while Intel is only just releasing chips based on its equivalent, 18A. I visited one of…

PRICE From £1,583 (£1,900 inc VAT) from asus.com For an instant understanding of how effective Intel’s latest Core Ultra chips (see p50) can be, take a look at the Asus ExpertBook Ultra. Here, it features the Core Ultra X7 358H, which despite its 16 cores is an excellent choice even for an ultraportable such as this. That’s because it offers a winning combination of uncompromising performance when plugged in and excellent battery life when on the move. The Ultra X7 358H also packs a brilliant integrated GPU, the Arc B390, which is often a match for discrete graphics chips such as the mobile RTX 4050. What’s particularly compelling about the 358H in this laptop is that you’re getting so much power in such a tiny form. The ExpertBook Ultra weighs…

PRICE £1,417 (£1,700 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com AMD announced its Ryzen AI 400 series chips at CES, but don’t get excited: I can’t spot any difference between the ten-core Ryzen AI 9 465 processor that debuts in this Zenbook S16 compared to last year’s Ryzen AI 9 365. Asus also offers the S16 with the six-core Ryzen AI 7 445, but beware: only two are high-performance Zen 5 cores, with the four Zen 5c cores built for efficiency. Plus you only get a 1TB SSD for your £1,500, while the Ryzen AI 9 465 edition of the S16 comes with a 2TB SSD for £1,700. The Ryzen AI 9 465’s 12-core Radeon 880M is also a far superior GPU to the 4-core 840M in the Ryzen AI 7 445, but…

O&O DiskImage 21 Premium Anyone who’s ever experienced the shock of data loss or had to spend hours recovering their system will know how important it is to maintain an ongoing backup of everything on your PC. Having a fallback copy of both Windows – including all your favourite apps and painstakingly crafted settings – and your irreplaceable documents, media and other files is a no-brainer, but with so many options you may be left wondering about the best way to do it. And, if you’re going to opt for ultimate protection – a complete image of your drive – which software should you use? This month, we have the answer: we’re giving every reader the chance to download O&O DiskImage Premium to keep their PC safely backed up. This…

PRICE £2,143 (£2,572 inc VAT) from dell.com During February I visited a company that builds custom display setups. The kind you see in films, where a guard sits in front of an array of monitors showing streams from security cameras. One of the setups on show featured a pair of 21:9 monitors, one atop the other, while a 27in monitor in portrait mode sat on either side. Surely no-one actually has a setup like that, I asked? Oh yes, came the answer, especially in finance. It’s this kind of power user Dell had in mind when designing the UltraSharp 52. Rather than put up with four different monitors with four different power supplies and ancillary clutter, they can simplify down to one screen with five different video inputs: one Thunderbolt…

PRICE £750 (£900 inc VAT) from motorola.com I’m not the most stylish of men. More Berghaus than Burberry, more Casio than Cartier. So arguably Motorola made a tactical mistake when sending me its Motorola signature for review, as this ultra-slim phone is all about making a fashion statement. You can buy it in timeless black – or Pantone Carbon to use Motorola’s branding – but I prefer the Martini Olive version. With its leather-like rear finish and bronzed edges, it catches the eye in a way that black never will. Whichever colour you choose, though, you’re missing the point if you slap a case on this phone. As is the modern way, the Motorola signature is also incredibly slim. For the most part it measures 7mm, rising to around 10mm…

If you mostly want a destination for computer backups, or a large storage space to share files across a network, almost any NAS drive will do the job – but we can do better than that. The best NAS devices offer more speed, more features, or an upgrade path to support your growing needs. Here’s how to find your ideal NAS. ◼ How many bays do I need? We don’t recommend single-bay enclosures as they offer no redundancy for your data – if their single disk fails, everything on it is likely to be gone for good. At a minimum, get a two-bay device, and create a RAID1 array. This mirrors your data between both drives, so if one fails, you’ll still have a copy on the other one. Don’t…

PRICE £259 (£311 inc VAT) from lambda-tek.com The NASync DH4300 Plus is one of the cheapest four-bay NAS enclosures we’ve seen. It’s something of an oddball, eschewing the standard front-entry drive slots for concealed top-mounted caddies. It’s also not especially well specified but, as we’ll see, it still manages to deliver where it counts. With its upright stance giving a smaller-than typical footprint, this is a smart-looking NAS that wouldn’t look out of place on a desktop. We wouldn’t especially recommend that, though, because (as with all enclosures) there’s notable disk noise, particularly if multiple users are accessing it at once. The NAS is cooled by a single large fan in the bottom, with fresh air entering through a grille at the top rear – the enclosure itself is usually…

PRICE £514 (£617 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk The QNAP TBS-464 is an all-flash NAS enclosure aimed primarily at mobile workers and content creators. It’s highly portable – about half the size of the QNAP HS-264 reviewed above – and with subtle gold details it looks particularly smart. This NAS supports up to four 4TB NVMe SSDs, meaning it will give you a maximum 12TB RAID5 array. It also supports RAID6 or 10 for greater redundancy, along with hardware encryption – essential if you plan to take your data on the road. It’s easy to install storage in this enclosure, but as with other QNAP devices the QTS operating system is fussy to set up, particularly when it comes to disk provisioning. This is one of two devices on test that…

PRICE £272 (£326 inc VAT) from broadbandbuyer.com The DiskStation DS225+ sits towards the bottom of Synology’s wide range of NAS and storage devices. It’s marketed at business users, but it’s also well suited to general home use, with a strong operating system and a range of powerful apps. This is a two-bay device, without support for NVMe disks. Although there are cheaper two-bay enclosures, the DS225+ is still competitively priced. In our previous Labs (see issue 369, p78) we criticised Synology’s more affordable enclosures for sticking with 1GbE long after many rivals offered 2.5GbE or more, so it’s good to see a 2.5GbE and 1GbE pairing on the back of this device. While its 2GB of base memory is a little stingy, we can’t complain about its Celeron J4125 CPU,…

NAS devices usually run all the time and have multiple drives in close proximity. That generates more heat and vibration than you’d get in a PC. Hard disk manufacturers offer NASspecific drives designed to last in these conditions. If you’re buying new disks to use in your NAS, it makes sense to pay the premium for these. You’ll find there’s a choice between disks that spin at 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm, with the latter usually costing more. In theory, 7,200rpm disks allow for faster data transfer and lower random access times, giving them the edge in overall performance. This comes at the cost of higher power use, greater heat and a little more noise. We compared both in several enclosures for this test and saw little practical difference – in some…

This group test looked at home and small office NAS enclosures. With network interfaces getting faster, we wanted to strike a balance between a realistic setup and one that could reveal the potential of quicker devices. We chose a highly specced Windows 11 Pro mini PC with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. We upgraded it with a USB-C to 5GbE adapter, and used a QSW-2104-2T-R2 switch supporting up to 5GbE, kindly provided by QNAP.We tested each NAS with the maximum number of disks. For two-bay devices, we used two 6TB WD Red Pro drives. On four-bay devices we used four 4TB Synology HAT3300 disks, while we filled the Ubiquiti UniFi UNAS Pro with both sets, plus a single 6TB WD…

PRICE £12 exc VAT per user per month billed yearly from box.com Box is a long-term player in the cloud collaboration space, and its entry-level Business plan will appeal mightily to smaller organisations. Starting at a mere £12 per user per month when billed yearly, Box gets our thumbs up for value as the price hasn’t changed for at least seven years. It may have a comparatively modest maximum 5GB file upload size, but Box sweetens the deal with unlimited cloud storage for each user plus facilities to retain up to 50 file versions. Along with support for unlimited e-signatures, Box offers its AI feature with support for the Document and Notes tools included in the Business plan, but an additional purchase of “AI Units” is required to access the…

PRICE Engage Business plan, from £144 exc VAT per month billed yearly from tresorit.com Tresorit has traditionally offered one of the most secure cloud file-sharing services, and its new Engage platform signals a move into the client collaboration space. Available in three plans, it takes Tresorit’s SecureCloud file-sharing service and its zero-knowledge, end-to-end AES-256 encryption and augments it with encrypted data rooms and advanced collaboration functions. Data rooms allow businesses to construct digital spaces where they can work on projects and securely share them with external clients. Each room can be customised and used to provide unified workflows that include file sharing, task sets and Tresorit’s e-signature service. The Engage Business plan starts with unlimited data rooms, three room managers, 15 contributors and any number of viewers. The Professional plan…

In a recent survey of business leaders, MIT Technology Review Insights found that 94% of firms were using generative AI as part of their software development process. Some were running nothing more than a small pilot, but for a fifth it was a “well-integrated part” of the process. A further third said it was “widely used”. We’re not just talking about resource-poor startups and nimble little disruptors. Between 20% and 30% of Microsoft’s code is written by software, according to CEO Satya Nadella. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at last year’s LlamaCon, said he couldn’t put an exact figure on how much of Meta’s code was generated by AI, but revealed that the firm was “focused on building an AI and a machine-learning engineer to advance the Llama development itself”. Meta’s…

Ihave been investigating two alternative internet access points this month. One for resilience, the other for ease of access. I confess they both come from my favoured networking company, Ubiquiti, and I know I’ve covered its equipment before. The reason I like Ubiquiti’s stuff is because it works, it’s well engineered and there are no subscriptions for the main operating products. You can add paid-for items but they’re very much the exception, covering advanced capabilities such as deep traffic inspection on firewalls and routers. So the main lab feed is the core of the business. It’s a 1GbE fibre line from a local provider, and it has been extremely reliable, no doubt helped by the difficulty any road contractors would find when digging up the private car park that separates…

Yes, you can write your passwords down. There, I’ve said it. Not everyone should, of course, and there are better ways of managing your account logins. However, the notion that keeping a paper record of your passwords is somehow insecure and a sure-fire way to get hacked is so far from the truth that I’ve decided to devote the entire column this month to explaining why. Well, almost the entire thing; some of it will, inevitably, cover why there are better methods and how passwords shouldn’t be front and centre of your login authentication strategy any more anyway. Buckle up, here we go. Someone who has read PC Pro and this column for years got in touch to flag that a “password book with alphabetical tabs” was being sold online,…

Before the AI boom, there were 450 or so data centres across the UK, depending on what you consider a data centre. A few years on, and another 100 are in the works. They’re the type of building project figures that many would like to see for houses or public transport, rather than an unproven technology. Does that statement annoy you? Well, these data centres are annoying plenty of their new neighbours: complaints have hit plans for a data centre at a former brewery in trendy Brick Lane, London; at a facility next to a retirement village in Wiltshire; and on green belt land along the M25 near Abbots Langley – there’s no welcome place to build these AI-powering data centres, it seems. The government says this is necessary. PM…

My day started badly. Still bleary-eyed at 6am, with a bucket of coffee sitting untouched beside me, I dropped the SIM-removal tool into my keyboard. Fortunately, the excellent Das Keyboard with superclicky action is designed for such abuse, and it was the work of 15 minutes with a screwdriver to take it apart and rebuild it, along with the obligatory foam clean and wipe. Cleaning things is the perfect zen moment for some thinking. And strands of thought came together in my head relating to Mr Musk. Let me quote from my friend Scott’s online financial report (tinyurl.com/379ssoreport): “In 2025, VW overtook Tesla to become the new leader in EV sales across Europe. Tesla has also lost its #1 position in global EV sales to BYD. In China, which accounts…

I think that what Ed Zitron called the dog shit economics of it are so off the charts that this really isn’t the kind of thing you fix by price gouging.” So said Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification, talking about AI in a recent interview with PC Pro (see issue 377, p44). Instead, OpenAI is trying to stem the fiscal bleeding by introducing ads into ChatGPT. American users of the free version of ChatGPT will be the first to see ads encroaching on their conversations with the chatbot, as the company seeks new revenue streams to pay the astronomical bills for its AI infrastructure. Will the market leader’s move prompt rivals such as Google, Anthropic and Grok to follow suit? Has the golden age of AI already passed? ■ Following…

I’ve had Honest Mobile’s Smart SIM in my phone for a fortnight, and it’s genuinely difficult to tell whether I’ve benefitted or not. The key thing to remember is this is a backup SIM, a failover for when you can’t get a connection on your primary network. The other key piece of information is that it only provides data for selected apps. WhatsApp, Google Maps, all the main banks, email apps and delivery services are among the 500 or so different apps that can still send and receive data with the Smart SIM, but there are many that can’t. No streaming services, no web browsers, and crucially no phone or text messages. To test its effectiveness, I drove out to some local Sussex villages that have iffy reception on my…

Alongside the manufactured debate over the Bad Bunny half-time show, the Super Bowl made headlines for another reason: a stream of AI-related ads at roughly $8 million per 30-second slot. Anthropic used its half-minute to brag that it doesn’t use ads in its chatbot like rival OpenAI. Chris Hemsworth worried that Alexa was trying to kill him, but got over it when offered a massage. Another company showed how to use an AI assistant to get out of work the next day. But one ad stood out amid a wave of companies begging you to use their AI, and it wasn’t for good reasons. Smart doorbell company Ring – owned by Amazon – used its 30 seconds to let everyone know about a new feature: Search Party. The ad pulls…

In a fast-moving world, SIMs have been a remarkably consistent part of our digital lives. Today’s high-end phones still support the exact same SIM technology and interfaces as the very first GSM mobiles, launched 35 years ago. Short for “subscriber identity module”, the SIM is basically a token that identifies you to your mobile service provider, using a fixed code called an IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) plus a secret key that can be used to cryptographically authenticate the card itself. Here’s how it works: whenever your phone, tablet or mobile router tries to connect to a mobile network, it sends the SIM card’s IMSI to the operator. The operator checks that the IMSI is assigned to a valid subscriber, and issues a cryptographic challenge-and-response request to confirm that your…

There are plenty of cloud-based AI chat services, but they all have downsides: you have no direct control over your privacy, the experience can abruptly change from day to day, and to get the best results you must often pay a subscription fee. If you’d rather avoid all that, why not run your own AI chatbot? Doing so can be a lot cheaper and easier than you might think. General-purpose AI platforms are known for consuming vast quantities of energy and computing power, but it’s quite possible to run your own large language model (LLM) on a humble Raspberry Pi. And to help you do so, Raspberry Pi has just released the AI HAT+ 2 for a very reasonable £125 inc VAT. The board adds a Hailo-10H AI accelerator…

PRICE £2,083 (£2,500 inc VAT) from uk.asus.com The idea behind the Zenbook Duo range is simple: unite OLED touchscreens with a hinge, then allow a physical keyboard to either rest on the surface of the lower screen to make it into a standard clamshell or lift it off, unfurl the built-in stand and effectively turn it into an all-in-one PC. This year, the design sees tangible improvements, including Asus’ “Ceraluminium” materials that combine a tough aluminium construction with a durable and attractive ceramic-style finish. Even in dark grey, it looks great. Most of the body of the hinge has been cleverly recessed inside the unit, reducing the gap from 25.3mm last year to 7.6mm. It’s still visible if you’re watching a video or working in one window spanning both screens,…

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

PRICE £1,999 (£2,399 inc VAT) from tinyurl.com/cyberpowerpc379 Hyte – a sister brand of California-based iBuyPower – is known for its attention-grabbing cases, but the X50 Air on show here is a more subtle affair. With a matte, honeycomb metal design that curves around the chassis from top to bottom it’s reminiscent of a giant speaker. Or at least, it is if you choose black: this chassis is also available in white, cherry red, lime green, “strawberry milk” pink and a crayon-like purple. From a PC builder’s perspective, the X50 Air is a joy to work inside. It’s extremely well built, with an anodised finish and no rough edges. The sides lift off to reveal either the main area, as shown in the picture above, or the rear of the motherboard…

PRICE £1,500 (£1,800 inc VAT) from lg.com If you think more pixels makes for a better PC monitor, you’re going to love the LG UltraFine 6K Evo 32U990A. This 6K monster has more than 21 million of them. For context, a 4K display has only eight million. Those 21 million pixels are crammed into the same 32in diagonal as a regular widescreen monitor, resulting in much higher pixel density: 4K on a 32in display comes in around 140 pixels per inch (ppi), while the LG UltraFine 6K Evo clocks in at 224ppi. This makes for incredibly sharp visuals and clear, crisp text. It also allows for a huge amount of space for professional workflows: for instance, you can view 4K content in a window at full resolution and still have…

NORTON 360 PREMIUM for £19.99 10 DEVICES 2YR LICENCE 75GB CLOUD STORAGE ◼ tinyurl.com/norton360premium We’ve negotiated this exclusive deal for PC Pro readers. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Security suite across ten devices, and there’s no danger of being hit with hiked renewal fees. Because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. Top of the list is the full version of Norton VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while you’re abroad. There’s also 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, while Norton’s Dark Web Monitoring service will alert you if private details – such as your email…

PRICE £382 (£458 inc VAT) from broadbandbuyer.com If you’re looking for a well-balanced four-bay NAS enclosure with a reasonable set of features, Synology’s DiskStation DS425+ should be on your shortlist. While not highly specified when compared to the fastest here, it still has a decent configuration and can certainly tick most of the boxes for advanced home or light business use. We’ve previously criticised Synology’s more affordable enclosures for sticking with 1GbE interfaces, but this new model has both 2.5GbE and 1GbE, giving it a significant speed advantage over earlier models. That said, several competitors now have dual 2.5GbE, dual 5GbE or even 10GbE. The DS425+ enclosure shares the same Celeron J4125 processor found in the two-bay DS225+, again paired with 2GB of memory. Although you can upgrade to 6GB,…

PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk TerraMaster is perhaps a niche choice when it comes to NAS enclosures, but its products are usually well specified, with the F2-425 Plus being a case in point. This two-bay enclosure inhabits something of a sweet spot at around £330 exc VAT, where it competes with other high-end home and entry-level business devices. It’s certainly well equipped for the job, with spec highlights including an Intel N150 processor and 8GB of RAM. Look closer and you’ll soon notice other substantial upgrades over the entry-level F2-425. This NAS has dual 5GbE network ports, offering a theoretical throughput of almost 1,200MB/sec in a multi-user environment. Even a single user could expect to reach nearly 600MB/sec when transferring large files, but only if their computer and…

PRICE £148 (£222 inc VAT) from broadbandbuyer.com If you’re looking for a cheap device to securely store data, QNAP’s TS-216G is a strong choice. It’s an entry-level two-bay NAS, without such fripperies as M.2 slots, and with a toned down set of apps compared to higher-end QNAP enclosures. At this price, inevitably, there are compromises. Chief among these is the humble Arm Cortex-A55 processor, which is about as slow as you’ll find in a NAS. Still, the TS-216G is by no means a cheapskate device: you get tool-less, lockable, hot-swappable drive caddies, and highlights including a 2.5GbE network port and two 10Gbits/sec USB ports. It supports up to 22TB disks, meaning you can have a formatted RAID1 array of up to 19.3TB. Like all QNAP enclosures, it supports the Btrfs…

PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk TerraMaster’s F4 SSD is one of a growing number of all-flash NAS enclosures for demanding users. It’s a dinky device, little bigger than two 3.5in hard disks, yet with four M.2 slots onboard for SSDs. Its small stature means not much room for connectivity, but TerraMaster has crammed in three USB ports, an HDMI port and a 5GbE network connection. The four NVMe slots are arranged in pairs. The first two are PCIe Gen3 x2, offering a theoretical maximum speed just under 2GB/sec, while the remainder are x1, with a speed of up to 1GB/sec. Given the whole NAS is limited by its 5GbE network connection, with a theoretical maximum of 625MB/sec, we wouldn’t expect this to be much of an issue. We…

PRICE £213 (£256 inc VAT) from ballicom.co.uk This two-bay NAS is pretty affordable, so on opening it you might be pleasantly surprised. It feels well made, with some neat touches such as a magnetic, washable dust filter. Its specification is also excellent. The NASync DX2800 has an Intel N100 processor, and comes with 8GB of RAM, upgradable to 16GB. It has a couple of fast USB 3.2 Gen2 ports and two M.2 slots for SSDs, but only a single 2.5GbE network port. Compare that to Synology’s more expensive DS225+ and you’ll realise just how competitively priced this NAS is. The good impression continues when it comes to setting it up. The two lockable disk caddies are tool-less for 3.5in disks, although there’s a bit of a knack to inserting them…

Things don’t change quickly in the world of network-attached storage, or at least so I thought. It’s only a couple of years since my last NAS group test (see issue 358), and as I tracked down suitable models for this Labs it seemed it would be more of the same – the odd hardware upgrade here, perhaps, the odd software update there. Most NAS drives still rely on mechanical SATA disks and in many cases run the same major release of software. However, in my last test it became obvious that gigabit Ethernet was dying. Not dead, perhaps, but comfortably outclassed and outstretched by the 2.5GbE ports finding their way onto mid-range devices. Today, network interfaces remain a battleground: every NAS in this group has at least 2.5GbE, most new…

PRICE 2TB/10 users, £20 exc VAT per month billed monthly from ionos.com SMBs are spoilt for choice with cloud file-sharing and collaboration products, but smaller organisations with modest requirements may find the sheer range of features on offer overwhelming. For those that want simple file sharing and short contracts there’s HiDrive from web-hosting giant Ionos. HiDrive is available in four plans, with the entry-level Basic option costing £1.50 per month and providing 100GB of cloud storage with an option to cancel at any time. We wanted to look at the top-of-the-range Pro plan but came across a catch for existing Ionos users. We use Ionos to host websites and provide email services, and our account includes the Team HiDrive service for one user. We considered upgrading this service but were…

PRICE £1,360 exc VAT from blueskysystems.co.uk D-Link’s network switch portfolio has a solution for every business, and its latest DGS-1530 series is aimed at those with big expansion plans. The family comprises eight models offering a wide choice of gigabit port densities, and a key feature is their stacking capabilities as up to nine switches can be connected over 10GbE uplinks and managed using a single, virtual IP address. The flagship DGS-1530-52P presents 48 gigabit copper and four 10GbE SFP+ fibre ports. Along with the DGS-1530-28P, it offers 802.3at PoE+ services across all gigabit ports, making it well suited to high-density deployments of IP cameras, VoIP phones and wireless access points. It also offers uninterrupted power services, with its Perpetual PoE feature ensuring a continuous power supply to powered devices…

Go on then – what exactly is a “green cloud”? Good question – it’s not a defined standard, or a packaged product, but more of an ideal. A truly “green cloud” would be one that could process all your workloads with no carbon emissions and no impact on the climate. Needless to say, you won’t find a service like that in the real world, but some get closer than others. Quantifying how green a particular service is can be tricky, however; by its nature, the cloud constitutes multiple clusters of services spread across different locations, all with their own environmental characteristics. Is this our problem? We’re more focused on cost and reliability. Cost control and green computing sometimes go hand in hand, as data centres that get their electricity from…

At this time of year, most people are keeping a close eye on their finances. Prices are particularly frightening in the tech industry. Hardware sales at the end of 2025 were tough due to vast wholesale price increases of RAM and storage, so I don’t blame anyone for trying to shave a few quid off their bills. At the start of the year, Gary slid into our shop. It was raining outside, and his worn and mud-spattered Oxfords were aquaplaning across the pavement. A quick glance at soggy Gary, the prestige car that he’d “parked” (or abandoned) outside the shop and the deluxe-embroidered Dell laptop bag he waved reinforced his bearing of “I am an important business executive”. In Gary’s world, Dell means business and business means money… although one…

Every month, without fail, the editor of this magazine sends me a preview of my column. It’s a stunningly accurate preview, because it’s the pixel-perfect final imaging of the pages. If I don’t spot any bloopers, the next thing that happens is that the file gets fed into a gargantuan printing press and turned into many thousands of physical paper pages. We’ve been doing this whole check’n’send routine since for almost two decades, so none of this is newsworthy in itself. What interested me last month was that the size of the PDF had jumped up massively. Years of 3MB files, handled without further comment, suddenly replaced by a 13MB PDF. Not to point any fingers here; I seriously doubt the fault lies with our esteemed editor, possibly the most…

Up in space Rocket launchers are cheaper than they once were, there’s no fight for land, plenty of solar power – why not build in space? This idea gets mooted every few years, and in 2025 Google researchers unveiled Project Suncatcher, the company’s plans for an AI data centre in space with works beginning as early as 2027. “This approach would have tremendous potential for scale, and also minimises impact on terrestrial resources,” the company said at the time. No surprise, but SpaceX owner Elon Musk is also keen on the idea, as is Starcloud, a startup working with Nvidia. There could be downsides: perhaps we’d like to be able to still see the stars, after all. And Google has wisely warned that “significant engineering challenges remain”. In the middle…