Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2016 i PC Pro

WHEN I WAS nine years old, with dimples that everyone told me were cute – this doesn’t happen any more – I lived in America for a few months. It was 1982, two years before Michael Dell created the company that bears his name, and we’d moved because my dad had landed a job in the US office of Micro Focus. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because the British firm recently made a rare foray into the newspaper headlines with its $8.8 billion purchase of HP Enterprise’s software wing. Many memories still shine brightly from my brief time in the US, from being the best in my year at “soccer”, to rollercoasters that made their UK cousins look like toys. Perhaps appropriately, I saw those in a theme park…

1 Yahoo loses half a billion user details Yahooadmittedithadbeentargetedby hackers,whohadstolenhalfabillionnames, emailaddresses,phonenumbersand securityquestions– waybackin2014. Blaming“state-sponsoredhackers”,the companywarneduserstochangetheir passwords,butdidn’timmediatelyexplain whytheadvicecametwomonthsafter hackersfirstdumpeduserdataonline–and twoyearsafterthebreach. 2 Samsung counts cost of Galaxy recall SamsungwasforcedtorecallitsGalaxyNote 7smartphoneafterfaultybatteriessawa numberofhandsetscatchfire,causinginjury anddamagetoproperty.Thecompany startedwithavoluntaryreturnprogramme, butinmanyjurisdictions,this becameanofficialrecall.The costtothecompanyis estimatedtobeinthe regionof£1bn. 3 Adblock looks to cash in on ads Adblock–thecompany thatmadeitsname protectingconsumers fromonlineadvertising –saiditwouldlauncha platformshowing “acceptableads”.Underthe scheme,publishersandbloggerswillbeable tosellandshowpre-whitelistedads,withthe platformtakinga20%sliceoftherevenue. 4 HP switches On cartridge busting DRM HPangeredusersof third-partyprinter inkbyswitchingon DRMsoftwarethathad beenincludedinapreviousfirmwareupdate. OwnersofOfficeJet,OfficeJetProand OfficeJetProXprintersbegantoseeerror messageswhentryingtousethird-party cartridges.Theupdateappearstoprevent thecartridgesworkingatall,insteadof merelywarningusersaboutinkquality. 5 Facebook inflates video Viewing figures Facebookcameunderfirefromadvertising agenciesoveritsroleas“refereeandplayer” incalculatingvideometricsonitssite.The companyadmittedanaccounting“glitch” thatmeantithadbeeninflatingreported viewingtimebyasmuchas80%fortwo years.Advertiserscomplainedthatthey hadbeenmakingpurchasingdecisions basedonfalsedata.…

 With most of the country now able to connect to fibre, it would be understandable if a little complacency has set in. After all, if your connection is capable of 40, 50, 100 or even 200Mbits/sec, is there any need to sweat over which provider offers the best service? Surely they’ll all be fast enough to cope with even the most demanding of tasks? Not so. In this feature, we’re going to take a deep dive into the fibre broadband business, explaining why not all fibre connections are born equal and disclosing some surprising differences in the performance of Britain’s broadband providers. We’ll reveal why you might be wasting your money by paying for a premium connection, how some ISPs hide the appalling low upload speeds on their fibre tariffs,…

 PRICE 32GB iPhone 7, £499 (£599 inc VAT); 32GB iPhone 7 Plus, £599 (£719 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Have we all got over our collective shock at the iPhone 7’s lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack? Good, because we can begin assessing the phone’s true worth – and the iPhone 7 has several other important features. There’s still a little residual shock at Apple’s big decision. Removing a socket that has been around since the days of the Sony Walkman is a big step - and not completely necessary, either. Apple called the decision “courageous”, a move that would save space in the chassis and bring other advantages. I’m not convinced. How much space is really saved by not including the headphone socket? Then balance that against the…

PRICE £316 (£379 inc VAT) from estore.sonymobile.com/gb Sony’s Compact range has followed a simple rule: shrink the body of the company’s premium phone while cramming in the same top-quality components. But instead of shrinking the Xperia XZ, the X Compact is a 4.6in frankenphone, combining some of the features of the XZ with others from the older Xperia X. Instead of the barnstorming Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor from the XZ, the X Compact has the hexa-core Snapdragon 650 from the Xperia X. Plus, it inherits the new camera from the XZ. I’m also disappointed by the slightly cheaper design of the X Compact. Next to its predecessor – the Z5 Compact – it looks positively frumpy, with its plastic, wraparound frame and glossy plastic rear comparing poorly with the sharp…

PRICE £229 (£275 inc VAT) from pcworldbusiness.co.uk It’s amazing how much more pleasant your monitor is to use when it has narrow bezels. The screen feel larger than it is, and when the bezels sit flush against the panel, it almost feels like you’re computing in the future. The 27in AOC Q2781PQ is a particularly gorgeous example, since its skinny bezels measure only 8mm across, allowing your PC’s desktop to take up 93% of the monitor front. The screen’s silver edges, unobtrusive logo and metal stand add yet more class. And not only does it have a sculpted, machined look, it also takes up less space on your desk. There’s even room within the stand’s U-shaped foot for your phone, while a keyboard will slide over the top of it…

PRICE £100 (£120 inc VAT) from ebuyer.com The Samsung Evo 750 doesn’t look anything special, either on the inside or out. Physically, it uses Samsung’s signature colour scheme of a blackpainted metal casing with a coloured square indicating the drive’s class: grey for Evo; red for Pro. Inside, it relies on “old-fashioned” planar TLC NAND technology. However, in partnership with Samsung’s own controller these chips can still hold their own for speed, with one proviso: that you don’t fox them with intensive workloads. In CrystalDiskMark, the 750 Evo was never far behind the Samsung 850 Pro – even beating it in a couple of benchmarks – and it also performed well in generalised benchmarks such as PCMark 8. It was the fastest drive to boot from cold too, taking 17.8…

PRICE £132 (£158 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk This isn’t a new drive – it’s been around for a couple of years – but whether you choose the 240GB, 480GB or 960GB version, it’s priced aggressively. Here we test the 480GB version, with a usable capacity of 446GB, which is a great buy at £158. It uses a 1GB SLC cache to keep initial transfer speeds high, and battled gamely with the Samsung drives in our benchmarks. For example, it hit sequential read speeds of 516MB/sec in CrystalDiskMark to the 850 Pro’s 519MB/sec. And it managed to boot Windows 10 from cold in 18.4 seconds, beating that Samsung drive by 1.5 seconds. SanDisk backs up these figures with reassuring cover. You get a ten-year warranty and endurance is rated at 80TB;…

Each PC in this month’s Labs is awarded an overall star rating, ranging from one star to five stars. To calculate this score, we weigh up each PC’s performance across several key areas. The first is performance: to test this, we begin by running our desktop benchmark suite, which includes image-editing and video-processing tasks, as well as a gruelling multitasking test that involves transcoding an MPEG-4 movie file while playing a 4K video in the foreground. These tests provide a numeric score for each system, representing its performance relative to a Core i5-4670K reference PC. You’ll find each system’s scores for this and our other tests on p93, along with its measured power consumption. There’s more to performance than processor speed, however. We also test the performance of each system’s…

PRICE £816 (£979 inc VAT) from dinopc.com You won’t mistake DinoPC’s Primal GT4 system for any of its Labs competitors. The Aerocool Dead Silence “gaming cube” has a wide and curved low-rise design that’s quite unlike any PC we’ve seen before. We’re not certain we love the way the optical drive sits in the middle of the otherwise blank frontage, but if you’re bored of anonymous boxes, this squat little chassis has a character of its own. As with the Chillblast, the DinoPC’s case demands a micro-ATX motherboard, and the company has opted for a Gigabyte board based on the H170 chipset. It’s a good choice, offering four USB 3 ports at the rear alongside two USB 2 connectors. You also get a further two USB 2 and two USB…

PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews Cast an eye down our feature table and the PC Specialist Apollo S might give you a sense of déjà vu. Although the overall recipe is unique, the individual ingredients are all familiar. That starts with the Core i7-6700 CPU, as seen in the Chillblast and StormForce systems. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course: it’s a powerful processor that’s great at multitasking. An overall benchmark score of 143 puts the Apollo S near the upper end of the performance table. Spookily, the same trio have also all landed on the AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card, rather than the more popular Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. As our tests show, however, there’s little to choose between the two in terms of performance. For…

In the Labs, we don’t tell PC vendors which specific components we’re hoping to see. If we went down that route, we’d end up reviewing ten identical systems, and what would be the point of that? Instead, we describe our needs in general terms, and leave it to the system builders to come up with a specification to suit our needs. This month, I told participants simply that we were looking for a powerful all-rounder, within a budget of £999. I didn’t say anything about attractive cases, or overclocked processors. The only explicit bit of guidance I gave was that gaming performance wasn’t a top priority. Some enthusiasts, I know, would be happy to see half the budget go on 3D hardware; personally, I’m more interested in desktop performance, and…

PRICE Diskless, £493 exc VAT from transparent-uk.com The Thecus W5810 is designed to slot seamlessly into your Windows network. Not only does it come preinstalled with Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials, it can also function as a full Active Directory domain controller. The “Essentials” OS may sound minimal, but it supports up to 50 users or devices out of the box, and includes most of the key storage goodness from Microsoft’s Standard version. You get deduplication, thin provisioning and Storage Spaces, plus NAS and IP SAN operations. The only notable feature missing is the Hyper-V role. Cleverly, the operating system comes installed on an internal 60GB SSD, so the W5810’s five 3.5in drive bays are all up for grabs. The Thecus W5810 is powered by a 1.9GHz Celeron J1900…

When it comes to the security of the SaaS model, Zoho’s Raj Sabhlok personifies the standard cloud industry response when he says companies such as his have “far deeper knowledge of security” than most of their customers. I absolutely agree with him, but this doesn’t mean your data is automatically more secure than if you were using boxed software and storing data offline. Security blogger Graham Cluley hits the nail on the head when he suggests you replace “the cloud” with “somebody else’s computer” in order to properly understand the security implications. Do that and you must start asking yourself, does the SaaS provider take security as seriously as I do? Ultimately, data security is your responsibility, even if you’re using “somebody else’s computer” to store it. It’s up to…

One of my most favoured touchstones is a sentiment first expressed by H • Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” I reach for it frequently in client meetings, discussions with my highly skilled operations team, and anyone else who presents a requirement, specification or solution as a fait accompli. It has saved projects more times than I care to remember. But it’s incomplete. The corollary is that complex, sophisticated solutions often obscure simple needs. I lack a proper IT background – the last time I wrote a line of code was in Visual Basic 1 – so I’ve always tended to come at problems differently. In particular, I look for the true business need and whether existing technology can be configured,…

I’m not proud of my linguistic skills. Mumbling in French and German kind of works out, swearing in Rumantsch finds smaller audiences – and there’s something about the southern European languages that defeats me. This isn’t normally a problem in multinational deployments, because I know a few chaps whose language blindness is the other way around: they whistle along in Portuguese and Italian, and stagger helplessly through German or Swedish. This doesn’t just matter when it comes to finding a hotel in Zurich at 3am, or a restaurant in Helsinki: when it comes to languages, there’s real trouble lurking in IT. I’m thinking here of the way that different nations handle the idea of “enable the setting”, or “this is the default”. It’s a notion that falls right over the…

Lenovo Yoga Book Lenovo has done something different with the Yoga Book. Rather than attach a physical keyboard, it uses a virtual one, meaning the “keyboard” can be used for drawing and writing with a stylus. Even more clever: clip a paper pad onto the tablet and any notes will be automatically digitised. It’s the future of note-taking. It’s available to buy now at £430 for the Android edition and £510 for Windows 10. Hasselblad True Zoom Slap the Hasselblad onto a Motorola phone and you’ll get 10x optical zoom, Xenon flash, and a range of shooting options. That includes a choice of ISO settings, manual focus and the ability to shoot in RAW. Pre-orders are now open for the £199 camera, but it only works with certain Motorola phones.…

Why is the banking system so dreadful? It’s a thought that crosses my mind every time I have to log into my online bank account to pay some bills, or check whether invoices have been paid. On the surface, all seems well. Compare your “customer experience” now to what it would have been 40 years ago, and you’ll see a clear example of how powerful a force the internet and digital technology have been. I’m old enough – just – to remember the very first “hole in the wall” machine that my parents used with Barclays. It used punched cards, and dispensed a single £5 note, if my distant memory is correct. Today, the Chip and PIN card has become a cornerstone of our digital lives, and really should be…

Steve Cassidy The question is no longer whether you need a cloud provider, explains Steve – it’s which of the many options to choose. It’s not just Azure vs AWS… p104 Adam Banks Now that you need a TV licence to watch iPlayer, the BBC is rolling out some familiar threats about detector vans. Adam isn’t convinced: see p46 Simon Hudson As co-founder of a tech company that solved a real NHS problem – and potentially saved it billions of pounds – Simon shares lessons learned on p116 Nicole Kobie What does the office of the future really look like? Find out on p124, where Nicole speaks to the experts – and the companies – making the products…

There’s no need to rush onto Amazon to order a pair of Lightning buds just yet, however. Apple has previously “killed off” all manner of technologies by moving to newer, and often more profitable, proprietary standards – but that doesn’t always spell the end. Years after their apparent demise, many techs continue to limp on, either in niche environments or in the world of Windows or consumer electronics. Floppy disk drive Launch date: 1971 Apple kill-off: 1998 The end: 2010 Still available: Yes Perhaps Apple’s most audacious assassination was the surprise omission of floppy disk drives from its iMac G3 in 1998. At the time, it was seen as madness, but the 1.44MB capacity is a reminder of how far storage has moved on. It wasn’t until 2010 that the…

Although the maximum prison sentence for the new law is two years, so far the courts have been lenient on offenders. A CPS report that boasted of 206 prosecutions included the following sentences: ● Defendant sent intimate photos of a woman to members of her family via Facebook, and threatened to post further pictures. Sentenced to 12 weeks’ imprisonment, suspended for 18 months. ● Defendant posted intimate pictures of a woman, which had been taken without her consent or knowledge. Sentenced to a 12-month community order, fined £110, ordered to pay court costs of £295, and given an indefinite restraining order. ● Defendant sent sexual images of a woman to her brother. Sentenced to 12 weeks’ imprisonment, with a restraining order granted for three years.…

Darien Graham-Smith is PCPro’s associate editor. If you want to know anything more about him, just ask Google. @dariengs Google knows me so well I’m wondering if I’m a robot Predictive technologies are getting scarily good – and that raises some difficult questions It was Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich who made me start to seriously question whether I have free will. To explain, let me add a little bit of context. I was recently watching The Sound of the Sixties on BBC Four, – because that’s how I like to party – when a song came on by the aforementioned quintet. I didn’t recognise it, and the presenter seemed to garble the name slightly – was it called “Sabadat” or something?. So after listening for a…

By now, surely, everyone knows about the iPhone 7 Plus’ dual rear cameras. One is exactly the same as you’ll find in the iPhone 7, with a 28mm lens and f/1.8 aperture. Its results, not surprisingly, are precisely the same as those of the iPhone 7. The second camera has a 56mm focal length and adds a 2x optical zoom function to the Plus, which you can flick in and out of by simply tapping the 2x icon at the bottom of the camera app screen. This may not sound much in a world where bridge cameras routinely hit 24x optical zoom and beyond, but to fit those optics into a phone as slim as the iPhone 7 Plus is remarkable. It not only allows you to get closer to…

PRICE 38mm, £308 (£369 inc VAT); 42mm, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Okay, I’ll admit it: the Apple Watch I’ve been using for the past year has a patchy record on my wrist. I absolutely love it, but when I’ve had to remove it – because I’ve been testing an Android phone or smartwatch – I haven’t always put it back on afterwards. This is nothing to do with its quality. Apple did a great job in producing a wearable that was intuitive to use and looked great. It also established a workable platform for wrist-based software, and thus encouraged developers to produce great apps. But I wanted more. I wanted a smartwatch that could track my running, swimming, cycling and sleep as proficiently as my favourite fitness trackers.…

PRICE £111 (£133 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The 850 Evo has been the go-to mid-range drive since its launch nearly two years ago. Its debut combined Samsung’s own 3D TLC (triple-level cell) NAND with the company’s excellent controller, providing such a great balance of price and performance that its dominance hasn’t let up since. As with other TLC SSDs, Samsung dedicates a portion of the NAND for use in SLC (single-level cell) mode, for faster write operations. In the 500GB drive’s case, that’s 6GB, leaving you with 465GB capacity under Windows 10. As a result, it should be no surprise that the 850 Evo performed extremely well in our tests. Right across the board, it beats other families of budget or mid-range drives – and even exchanged first places with…

Feeling limited by your laptop? Looking to replace a trusty tower that’s no longer keeping up with your demands? The traditional desktop PC format has fallen a little out of fashion in recent years, but it’s still very much alive and kicking. Indeed, because the tower design gives you the freedom to pick and choose the parts that represent the best bang-per-buck, it is possible to get a system that will tear through your workload for a very reasonable price. In this month’s Labs, you’ll find PCs with top-of-the range processors, huge hard disks, super-fast SSDs, more memory than most of us will ever need – and powerful graphics cards capable of smooth gaming even at quad-HD resolutions, should you choose to invest in a 4K monitor. You’ll also find…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from meshcomputers.com In our last group test of desktop PCs, we took Mesh to task for supplying a PC in a tacky, plasticky case (see issue 263). Evidently, the company has heeded our criticism: its offering this month comes in a gorgeous InWin 303 enclosure with a smoked-glass side. Standing slightly taller than its rivals at 500mm, it barely looks like a conventional PC at all – perhaps think of it as an imposing yet elegant display unit, designed to showcase the motherboard instead. And what a motherboard it is. We’re not normally won over by fripperies such as flashing lights, but for a design such as this a bit of pizzazz seems only appropriate. So we can’t fault Mesh’s choice of the Asus Z170…

The Yoga Home 900 makes one heck of a first impression with its huge 27in IPS display. Disappointingly, though, the resolution is only Full HD – and with a lowpower 2GB Nvidia GeForce 940A GPU inside, you won’t be able to enjoy high-detail gaming. The processor inside is a bit of a letdown too. The Core i7-5500U scored 79 in our single-threaded image-editing benchmark. But it’s only a dual-core chip, and a disastrous multitasking score of 12 dragged down its overall benchmark result to 33. There’s no SSD, either – only a 1TB 5,400rpm hard disk with an 8GB solid-state cache. The Yoga Home 900’s party trick is its swivelling base, which lets you lie the screen flat to play touch-friendly tabletop games. When you’re using it upright, however, the…

No matter what your business does, there’s almost certainly some function that can be handled faster, more cheaply, or more effectively by a cloud service (see p102). But correctly working out what to offload, and where to send it, is a question full of potential pitfalls. Part of the problem is that, when it comes to the cloud, everybody has their own experiences and opinions. Many of these are based on very limited engagement, or on the pernicious idea that business cloud services are, broadly speaking, the same sort of thing as consumer services. Services such as Gmail do, in a sense, live in the cloud, but they certainly don’t represent what you should be seeking for your business. You can’t ask Google to bump you up to a faster…

I’ve either been writing about, consulting upon, or actively engaged in the business of IT security for more than 25 years. I started as a “game cracker” at the tail end of 1989, and by the following year I’d become a “network explorer”, for want of a better term. That better term would be “hacker”, of course. The Computer Misuse Act didn’t become law until 1990, so technically, I wasn’t doing anything illegal. 1990 was also the only year that I was caught out by a virus. The Swiss Cracking Association (SCA) bootsector virus infection wasn’t too surprising considering that, at the time, I – like many Amiga fanatics – was heavily involved in games piracy on floppies. It messed up a few games, and while rebooting displayed, “Something wonderful…

Sensors and AI could help doctors diagnose illness and also give patients greater knowledge about their health. Startup Neura aims to be a smart “friend” that helps people manage their own health data, explains co-founder Ori Shaashua. What is Neura? Neura is a personal AI service, which… goes with the user from app, to device, to service, acting as a “friend” that can tell technology the things it needs to know to become uniquely personalised and contextual, but leaves the user in full control. Nothing is shared without permission. We analyse the sensors, keep raw data secure in the Neura user profile, and let users exchange insights based on that data for tangible value. Consumers get better technology without surrendering all of their data. What makes this technology possible now?…

Brain-computer interfaces race Here, competitors control a character in a game, using electroencephalography (EEG) or infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to tell their avatar when to run and jump. Functional electrical stimulation bike race Electrodes on the skin apply electrical current to muscles to make them pedal. All cyclists in the competition have a spinal-cord injury. Powered arm prosthesis race This challenge tests competitors through a gauntlet of daily tasks, from solving a puzzle to setting up a breakfast table. Powered leg prosthetic race Those with above-knee amputations race to complete a set of tasks including climbing stairs and traversing a beam. Powered exoskeleton race Using an exoskeleton suit, competitors with spinal cord injuries face tests such as sitting down in a chair and traversing a ramp. Wheelchair race Pilots who have…

GOVERNMENT PLANS to create a “Great British Firewall”, to reduce malware and inbound hacks, have attracted fierce criticism from technology privacy watchdogs. The idea was mooted by security bosses from the UK’s communications intelligence service GCHQ, who claim it would protect British businesses and infrastructure from an increasing number of online attacks. “We’re exploring a flagship project on scaling up DNS filtering,” Ciaran Martin, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, said at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington, dc: “What better way of providing automated defences at scale than by the major private providers effectively blocking their customers from coming into contact with known malware and bad addresses?” The onus is expected to be placed on ISPs to block access to domains known to be malicious. While details…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 13in ultraportable from £899 dell.co.uk We already loved the Dell XPS 13, but this update makes it irresistible. Skylake CPUs, super-fast SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 all help it fly through tasks, and the design is as amazing as ever. It’s the ultraportable we’ve been waiting for. REVIEW Issue 257, p64 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga A dream laptop that turns into a 14in tablet with the swivel of a keyboard – yet it still weighs under 1.3kg. Simply beautiful design from Lenovo. From £1,290; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 263, p56 Apple MacBook Pro 13in (Retina) If you need to do serious work on a laptop, and want a MacBook, the Pro 13in remains our top choice – although we suspect a new model is imminent. From…

PRICE £283 (£340 inc VAT) from huawei.com/uk Huawei may be a relative newcomer to the smartphone top table, but it’s making its presence known. The company’s phones are visibly improving with each iteration, but remain competitively priced. The Huawei Nova continues that trend. With a 5in screen (Huawei is also launching the 5.5in Nova Plus), it’s a cross between an iPhone 5 and the HTC One series – and neither of those are ugly. The front is dominated by the screen, bookended by two black strips, all coated in Gorilla Glass. Turn the device over, and it’s charmingly minimalist. The back is smooth and metallic, with a black band at the top surrounding the rear-facing camera, and a small, circular indent for the fingerprint reader that sits just below it.…

PRICE 16GB, £75 (£90 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk, with special offers Last year’s Amazon Fire HD 8 was a decent cut-price tablet, but it struggled to stand out against its cheaper Fire 7 sibling, or the larger Fire HD 10. This year, Amazon has revamped the 8in Fire tablet with more storage, more colour and more powerful internals. And what a difference it makes. Where last year’s model was hamstrung by 8GB of storage, the new Fire HD 8 comes in 16GB and 32GB models that can be expanded by up to 200GB via microSD. Plus, there’s a new quad-core 1.3GHz chip inside and a more generous 1.5GB of RAM. It’s chunky, weighing 341g, but Amazon distracts from the thick bezel by offering a choice of four colours: black, blue,…

PRICE £179 (£215 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Just as Samsung’s 850 Evo line has been the top choice for mainstream users for two years, the 850 Pro series has been among the best choices for supreme performance. It now stretches all the way up to 2TB for a whopping £800, but the 512GB version costs a rather more reasonable £215. That’s still expensive for a 512GB SSD, but the use of MLC (multi-level cell) contributes to a high endurance rating of 150TB and a ten-year warranty. A little extra has gone into the looks too, with the same metal casing as the other Samsung drives and some stylish bevelling. And you get boasting rights due to the little red square that denotes this is a “Pro” model. In the box,…

While the single biggest advantage of an all-in-one over a conventional desktop PC is obvious – everything you need is in one convenient box – there are some extra bonuses that only hit home when you place them side by side. As I did, physically, in our Labs. Number one is the cable count. A desktop PC can be a sprawling mess of cables, with one each to provide power to the tower unit and monitor, plus a cable to connect them, plus power and yet more cables to connect speakers. Of course, you can use a wireless keyboard and mouse with a desktop PC, but it’s notable that pretty much every all-in-one PC we see in PC Pro comes with a wireless set by default. As such, the only…

Apple’s flagship all-in-one has been a permanent fixture on our A-List since it came out in late 2014. That’s partly thanks to its huge, sumptuous 5,120 x 2,880 screen: it doesn’t support touch, but visually it knocks spots off other all-in-one displays. Performance is strong too: the current £1,599 model, with its desktop-class Core i5-6500 processor, achieved an overall score of 100 in our benchmarks – not far behind this month’s towers. It’s backed up by 8GB of RAM and a 1TB “Fusion Drive”, combining mechanical and solid-state storage. Gaming performance is only so-so – the 2GB Radeon R9 M390 will struggle to deliver high detail at Full HD, let alone the native 5K resolution. And the price may well be a sticking point: if you want to save money…

PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from yoyotech.co.uk As our review of the PC Specialist Apollo S makes clear (see p90), we’re big fans of the matte black NZXT S340 case with blue trim. For the Warbird RS15, Yoyotech has used the same chassis, but here it’s in gloss black with no trim. Frankly, it’s nowhere near as appealing: it looks like something that fell out of the 1980s, and the shiny exterior is a magnet for fingerprints. Superficialities aside, the Warbird RS15 is a respectable performer. It’s the fourth PC this month to use an overclocked Core i5-6600K, in this case turned up to a maximum of 4.4GHz. An overall benchmark score of 130 places it just a half-step short of Core i7 territory, but if you’re feeling bold you…

PRICE Diskless, £379 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com If you’re looking for a slimline rackmount NAS appliance, rather than the conventional standalone box, then Synology’s RS816 is well worth a look. Measuring a mere 12in deep, the RS816 will fit neatly into a small cabinet – and as befits a member of Synology’s “Value” line, it’s very affordable. Indeed, it’s the cheapest NAS device on test this month by a distance. With four hot-swap bays, the RS816 isn’t as expandable as the other units on test this month. You can upgrade it to eight drives via the RX415 1U disk shelf, but this is an expensive option, costing almost as much as the main appliance. Along with an eSATA expansion port, the appliance also offers dual Gigabit and USB 3 ports.…

1 I understand where I want the border to be, between internal and external resources, and my reason is... 2 The number of different firms or services I want to engage with is (X) and this is because... 3 When an external service fails to perform, my plan to recover from that is... 4 I am just moving my servers as they are/I am starting an entirely new product or platform. 5 I believe that the commercial objectives of the cloud service I use, and of my company, are aligned and compatible. 6 I have made some rough estimates of how much data we will be moving and storing per month, for both the best- and worst-case scenarios. 7 If my estimates turn out to be a bit off the…

Reader Josh Evans got in touch recently. He explained how he’s a bit of a “neatness freak” (his words, not mine), and how this obsession has caused him issues with home and office automation experiments to date. He went on to explain: “I’m one of those people who likes things to look neat and tidy. I can’t stand seeing wires everywhere, and that’s one of the reasons why, despite having been interested in the technology for some time, I’ve only recently started playing with automation products in any serious way. And that’s because it’s only in the past year or two that wire-free sensors, switches and other devices have become widely available.” For a long time he’d wanted to replace the lock on his studio door (he’s an art restorer)…

People may have noticed that I’m a Windows fan. This is a strange position for me, because my career in IT spans back to devices that you couldn’t fit in your car (and I tried!), never mind slip in your pocket. My first move outside the computer suite and away from the howling fans cooling the mini-computers was to the then-new Apple Macintosh. These days, the boot is on the other foot, with the esteemed Mr Honeyball firmly in the Apple camp. I have, I suspect unintentionally, aligned myself with Windows guru Mark Minasi. I was reminded of his rather show-stopping asides regarding Windows Vista during a session at Microsoft TechEd a few years ago (but not so long ago that Vista was still current): he let everybody in the…