Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i PC Pro

“THAT’S AN INTERESTING pattern,” I said, my attention half on a tennis match on the TV. My son rolled his eyes. “It’s not a pattern, dad. Something’s wrong with the screen.” “Have you tried switching it on and off ag–?” “Yes, dad. I think it’s broken.” Those portentous words finally transported me from the rust-coloured courts of Roland Garros back to my own front room. I took a closer look at my son’s laptop and saw the telltale lines criss-crossing the screen. “That’s cracked,” I told him, genius that I am. He paused for a beat. “I need a new laptop.” It’s a scenario regularly played out in homes, schools and businesses. One bash against a door is all it takes to crack a screen; one drop can destroy a…

BACKGROUND INFO ON INNOVATIVE BRITISH COMPANIES KEYFACTS Compare Your Footprint is an online carbon calculator that allows companies to enter their own data and find out how they rank against their industry peers. LOCATION Wimbledon FOUNDED 2017 EMPLOYEES Five (for parent company Green Element) WEBSITE compareyour footprint.com I t’s a provocative question to ask a man who’s just set up a carbon footprint measuring service – and it gets the friendly contempt it deserves. “Hasn’t all this fuss about carbon footprinting died off?” I ask William Richardson, who’s been advising businesses on how to become more environmentally friendly for more than a decade. “It’s fallen away in your eyes – as in someone who’s not in the industry – because it’s just happening,” he said. Us journalists have lost interest…

@njkobie We’ve all stood in front of a mirror, shirt held aloft in each hand, trying to decide which to wear. In the low-tech past, we were forced to seek the advice of family or friends, but no longer must our fashion suffer, thanks to Amazon. The retail and tech giant has a new gadget that adds eyes to the ears and mouth of the Echo: the camera-toting Echo Look. With Echo Look, you can ask voice assistant Alexa to take a picture or video, then view the image on your smartphone or run it through the company’s Style Check app, which uses machine learning to rate your fashion sense. Upload two images, and it will tell you which is best, based both on current trends and how the clothes…

Well, if this was a referendum there would be no doubt about the result! That said, our voters were much more balanced in their views than a typical electoral debate. “An online system is the way forward,” wrote Patrick Smith, “but safeguards must be built in to ensure the identity of the person voting and that it is not someone purporting to be them. Safeguards exist with postal voting. An online system if properly organised would result in a potentially higher turnout and reduce costs.” For those who said “no”, the main fear revolved around fraud. “What assurance could voters have that what the screen shows the voter is the same as the result that the machine reports of votes cast? I need a paper ballot on which I have…

The biggest, best, most exciting products in tech – tested, evaluated and reviewed PRICE £416 (£499 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/274bb1 In a world of bland, lookalike phones, the BlackBerry KEYone offers something different. With a 35-key Qwerty keyboard and several security features lying beneath the surface, it plays to both of BlackBerry’s traditional strengths. A couple of things have changed. For one, this machine isn’t actually made by BlackBerry but by TCL Communications – BlackBerry pulled out of the device-making game last year, instead licensing its name to manufacturers. The second is that the KEYone uses Android 7.1, rather than a proprietary OS. The security keys Naturally, this isn’t raw Android but a heavily modified version. For once, though, that isn’t a bad thing. BlackBerry still makes the software and…

PRICE £1,000 (£1,200 inc VAT) from chillblast.com The Chillblast Apollo is a tempting proposition. The price is roughly on par with a Dell XPS 13, but buys you a 15.6in beast with an uncompromising set of internals capable of gamer-grade performance. For a start, the processor is a quad-core Core i7-7700HQ with a Turbo frequency of 3.8GHz and Hyper-Threading technology that allows its four cores to process eight tasks at once. It powered the Apollo to a score of 109 in our benchmarks – faster than many desktops. But the Apollo isn’t just about the processor: it also comes with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics. That’s not a top-of-the-range chip, but it provides enough 3D power for modern games, even when you dial up the visual settings. At Full…

PRICE £191 (£229 inc VAT) for two nodes from play.google.com Google Wifi has been a long time in the making. First conceived in 2013, it has taken Google’s networking experts four years to bring the system to market and its appearance in 2017 is significant. Back when the Google’s engineers first dreamed it up, the market was dominated by single routers; today mesh networking is the vogue. The basic kit includes two compact cylindrical router devices, each with a coloured status LED wrapped around its middle and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports built into a cavity in the base. In terms of specifications, Google Wifi doesn’t look as impressive as its key rivals. Where the BT Whole Home Wi-Fi units are each tri-band, 4x4 stream routers offering connection speeds…

PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from asus.com/uk When it comes to wireless routers, small businesses are usually faced with a choice between two types of product: one that offers the features they need but the wireless performance they don’t want; or a fast, powerful consumer router that’s entirely unsuited to a business setting. Asus’ BRT-AC828 seems to offer the best of both worlds. It has no fewer than eight Gigabit Ethernet ports. There’s a hardware VPN server, a host of user and group access permissions features and a pair of Gigabit WAN ports – so if you have a backup internet connection, you can set the router to automatically switch over to it if your main line goes down. The BRT-AC828 can even set up and host a branded customer…

PRICE Three nodes, £333 (£400 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Linksys Velop has the same appeal on paper as the BT Whole Home Wi-Fi. It’s easy to set up and spreading a strong signal across your home is as easy as plugging extra nodes in where you need coverage. Once you’ve done that, you shouldn’t need to touch it. As you move around the house, your devices connect to the node with the strongest Wi-Fi signal and requests are passed around the mesh until they reach the base unit, which is attached to your main router or modem. Setup is super simple. Each Velop node has built-in Bluetooth, so there’s no need to faff around entering usernames and passwords first, and once you’ve chosen the type of router or modem you’re…

PRICE £291 exc VAT from pcpro.link/274eps Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF- 8010DW could be just the thing for demanding workgroups. This A3+ inkjet has an enormous 65,000-page maximum monthly duty cycle, impressively low running costs and a brisk claimed top speed of 34ppm for A4 mono and colour prints. It’s also ideal for businesses that want plenty of paper choices. The single 250-sheet A3+ base cassette can be supplemented with up to three additional 500-sheet trays, while the large tray at the rear can handle 80 sheets at sizes up to A3+ and weights up to 256gsm. Internally, the WF-8010DW uses the same PrecisionCore print head technology as Epson’s commercial printers, with high-capacity DuraBrite Pro ink tanks that deliver laser-matching print costs. Go for the high-yield XL cartridges and you’ll pay…

EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS T he news that an antivirus package has managed to go rogue, and decide that key Windows system files were malware, caused quite a flurry of tut-tutting. But it isn’t the first time this has happened. Every year or so, it seems that one of the major AV packages gets an updated set of definitions, only to cause huge disruption. It grabs core Windows system files and moves them into quarantine, or deletes them, or performs some other, quite unhelpful action. If you’re unlucky, you won’t notice this until the machine is rebooted, and the subsequent reboot attempt fails with the end result a thoroughly scrambled OS. If you’re really unlucky, then the machine just dies before you’ve had an opportunity to save…

Would you like to put the most secure portable hard drive ever made to the test? That was the question asked of me, along with a promise that I’d be the first journalist on the planet to get properly hands-on with the diskAshur Pro2. I could hardly say no, could I? So at the time of writing, I’ve been using the device in a very real-world setting for a few weeks now. In my other job as managing analyst at IT Security Thing, I get to play with all sorts of interesting security-related devices. I also get to challenge an awful lot of outrageous claims. In this case, the whole “most secure hard drive ever” claim is pretty much impossible for iStorage to prove – or for me to dismantle.…

Jon Honeyball Want to get more from Office 365? Seasoned subscriber Jon Honeyball reveals seven ways to make the most of your subscription from p46 Dick Pountain If some curves are “just sexier than others”, Dick ponders on p26, can humans’ appreciation of beauty be reduced to a set of algorithms? Nicole Kobie Uber is the poster child of the gig economy; Nicole reveals how its disruptive and wide-ranging influence could affect how you work in the future. See p124 Jon Bray The old days of buying a single router could soon be over, discovers Jon, with mesh wireless systems stealing two awards in our router Labs. See p74…

2017 SEXUAL HARASSMENT CLAIMS Uber was forced – again – to quell sexism claims after former employee Susan Fowler claimed she was propositioned for sex. Fowler said internal complaints had been dismissed while Uber promised to investigate, with CEO Travis Kalanick tweeting that “anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired”. SELF-DRIVING ALLEGATIONS Getting rid of drivers would definitely help boost Uber’s profits. However, the company faces legal action from Alphabet’s self-driving Waymo unit, which claims that Uber’s Otto self-driving technology benefited from a former Google employee downloading 14,000 files before jumping ship with several colleagues. 2016 WORKER OR CONTRACTOR? Uber claims its drivers are self-employed, which means it has little responsibility for workers’ rights, and has fought the issue in courts internationally. However, a…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology @dariengs It feels like a very long time since the big tech companies paid much attention to what their customers really wanted Every time a new smartphone comes along, I immediately inquire about the battery. Then, almost inevitably, I start tearing my hair out. As the picture to the left illustrates, this is becoming a problem. The source of my exasperation is this: phone manufacturers seem to think that a battery only needs to get you through a single day’s moderate use – a judgement that most certainly does not square with my own. That’s partly because the idea of “moderate use” is somewhat alien to me, but also because I resent having to put my phone…

You’re probably familiar with the expression “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, but what do you think it means? The obvious interpretation is relativist: what I find beautiful need not be what you find beautiful. But we could also take it literally, namely that beauty is property of, or a process within, the human eye (or visual cortex, or brain) rather than a property of external objects. My two main “hobbies”, regularly chronicled in this column, are fiddling with photographs in Photoshop Elements 5 and composing algorithmic music using my own software recently rewritten in Python. What these activities have in common is firstly that they are both pursued on a computer, and secondly that they are both iterative in nature: I make a change, look at it…

Manufacturers have unveiled a range of Windows 10 S-compatible devices, including the marquee Surface Laptop, durable 2-in-1 convertibles for students and cheaper versions of existing laptops. Details, particularly regarding UK prices and release dates, are still thin on the ground, but here’s what we know about them so far. 1 Microsoft Surface Laptop Microsoft has made a great fuss of its Surface Laptop – a notebook designed to showcase the best of the new OS and, according to the firm’s website, “empower people to bring their ideas to life”. Built with MacBook-toting university students in mind, the Surface Laptop packs a 7th generation Intel Core processor and has a claimed battery life of 14.5 hours, which Microsoft suggests you use to “watch 14 episodes of your favourite TV show in…

PRICE £1,333 (£1,600 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk Most 2-in-1 convertibles make compromises. For instance, the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (see issue 273, p72) used an ultra-lowpower processor to keep its weight and dimensions down. The Portégé X20W, on the other hand, packs serious specs, stonking battery life and enterprise-grade biometric security. All in a chassis that weighs 1.1kg, which is 140g lighter than the XPS 13 2-in-1. Admittedly, its magnesium alloy chassis feels flimsy next to the rigid, aluminium-framed Dell, but this remains a premium piece of design. For instance, the hinge is sturdy with a smooth action, and once in position I had no concerns about it shifting or falling down. Visually, it looks sleek and professional, with a brushedmetal effect on the black lid and keyboard surround. At…

PRICE £649 (£779 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk You might think the Samsung Galaxy S8+ doesn’t really deserve its own review. It’s much the same as the Samsung Galaxy S8, which we covered last month (see issue 273, p74), with the same internals, camera, storage options and screen resolution. What makes it different is the sheer size of the thing. The screen measures 6.2in across the diagonal, which would make a regular phone practically unusable – but then the Samsung Galaxy S8+ is no regular phone. That’s mainly because the 18.5:9 aspect ratio allows Samsung to add extra screen space without expanding the width of the phone too much. Surprisingly, it’s comfortable to hold and use in one hand. A look at the numbers reveals why. The Samsung Galaxy S8+ is…

PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from kobo.com Kobo faces a tough battle. How on earth does it distinguish its e-reader from the nigh-on ubiquitous Kindle? As the original H2O proved, though, the battle isn’t impossible. That e-reader drew much acclaim for its waterproofing, a feature that no Kindle can yet match, and this updated version improves things still further: the new Aura H2O is IPX8-rated, meaning it can survive up to an hour in 2m of water. That’s a significant improvement on the IP67 certification of its predecessor (30 minutes, 1m of water), and Kobo also doubles the capacity from 4GB to 8GB – or 6,000 books rather than 3,000. What you don’t get is access to the Amazon Kindle store. Instead, you must use Kobo’s alternative, which stocks around…

PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Netgear Nighthawk X10 is hands down the most expensive router we’ve ever tested. At £400, it costs more than a games console, many a 4K TV and – perhaps a little more relevantly – any of the award-winning mesh Wi-Fi systems on test this month. But perhaps this is a sign of the times. In 2017, it seems, spending £200 to £400 to sort your Wi-Fi appears is the going rate. So what do you get for your money? The first thing to note is that the X10 doesn’t come with an ADSL/ VDSL modem built in, which is disappointing for the price, but you can attach it to your existing modem or router using the WAN port to extend your network…

PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com When BT introduced the Smart Hub back in 2016, we were mightily impressed. Here was an ISP-supplied wireless router that, for once, wasn’t short on specifications. And one you didn’t need to immediately worry about how to upgrade when you received it in the post. The reason is support for Wave 2 802.11ac Wi-Fi and, thanks to seven internal antennae, the ability to deliver theoretical throughput of up to 1,733Mbits/sec over 5GHz via 4x4 MIMO and 200Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz via 3x3 MIMO. In both our long- and short-range tests, the BT Smart Hub put in an imperious performance with figures of 85.5MB/sec in the same room and 13.8MB/sec in our kitchen, both speeds achieved over 5GHz. The Sky Q Hub, which is the…

PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk All clad in blue and black, the Linksys WRT3200ACM is a striking router that looks like it means business. It’s sturdily built, as if it’s been designed to take some abuse and, handily, it’s stackable with Linksys’ 8-port Gigabit SE4008 switch, allowing you to extend your network’s wired capabilities for around £40. That isn’t the only industrialstrength aspect of this router, though, with the manufacturer proudly boasting of its ability to top out at 2.6Gbits/sec over 5GHz through the use of 802.11ac Wave 2’s 160MHz channels and 3x3 stream MIMO. Add that to its ability to connect at up to 600Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz and you have the headline 3.2Gbits/sec total. There’s also a USB 3 port and, unusually, an eSATA port for sharing…

PRICE £49 (£59 inc VAT) for existing Sky subscribers from sky.com For a long time, Sky broadband customers suffered under the yoke of poor Wi-Fi, largely inflicted by the terrible standardissue Sky Hub. In fact, the Sky Hub is still offered to Sky broadband customers who don’t take Sky TV. That’s shocking considering it’s a router that looks like it came out of the Stone Age, both in terms of features (single-band 802.11n, 4 x 10/100 Ethernet) and performance. We tested it again this month and its speed and range are poor. Still, Sky Broadband customers can at least now get relief, with the Sky Q Hub available to existing customers for £59 and £20 as an upgrade for new subscribers. Sky Q customers get it as part of their…

Prices for A3 colour printers are at an all-time low – so now’s the perfect time to move your marketing, brochure and poster production in-house. That’s not to say that commercial print shops no longer have a role. They can still be the right answer for high-volume, one-off runs of specialist prints. But outsourcing means dealing with lead times, shipping costs and the temptation to pay for copies you don’t need to get volume discounts. In-house printing gives you more control over your processes, and reduces costs in the medium term. You can cut wastage by printing only what you need, when you want it – and have it ready for distribution immediately. That being the case, it’s no surprise that A3 printers are fast becoming commodity items. Intense competition…

PRICE Starts from £9,715 exc VAT from kyoceradocumentsolutions.co.uk Kyocera’s TASKalfa MFPs are real workhorses – typically they’re suited to businesses looking to consolidate the roles of several old printers into one. The 2552ci is the entry point of the new TASKalfa A3 family, combining print, copy and scan features with a 1,200dpi engine, a ton of feature options and professional-grade print quality. True, print speeds aren’t earthshattering: Kyocera quotes 25ppm for A4 and 12ppm for A3. Rather, the appeal of this printer lies in its versatility. One feature that designers will love is SRA3 support – the 2552ci can take 450 x 320mm paper, which can be trimmed down to A3 for borderless prints and posters. The free-standing printer comes with two 500-sheet drawers, one for A4 and one for…

PRICE As reviewed, £5,445 exc VAT from broadberry.co.uk With its new storage server, Broadberry Data Systems has beaten the blue chips: the CyberStore 224S-WSS is the first commercially available appliance running Microsoft’s latest Windows Storage Server 2016 (WSS2016). And it delivers a powerful hardware package at a very reasonable price. It comes in the form of a 2U all-Supermicro rack system, equipped with dual 2.1GHz Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 processors and 64GB of DDR4 RAM. Network connections are plentiful: as well as the four embedded Gigabit Ethernet ports, Broadberry has fitted a dual-port Intel 10GBase-T card. Storage options are flexible too. The CyberStore offers 24 hot-swap SFF drive bays, which will accept either mechanical drives or SSDs, and supports both SATA and SAS interfaces. The Supermicro X10DRHCLN4 motherboard’s C612 chipset…

Last month I looked at the new Raspberry Pi Zero W, and how you can set it up in a headless configuration. This month, I’m going to turn it into a IoT “thing”. Smallscale IoT devices tend to be either some kind of sensor (temperature, movement, doors opening) or an output – perhaps a display or a buzzer. I’ve gone for the latter, and decided to make a coat-bot! I’ll make the Pi Zero W grab the day’s weather forecast and then guide me on whether I’ll need a waterproof, a warm coat or just a thin jacket when I leave the house. First, we’ll need a weather forecast, and the go-to place for such data is Weather Underground (wunderground.com). Along with the main website, Weather Underground provides an API…

Being a network person, I thrive on the numbers. Folk like me continue to worry about performance, because we’re unlikely to see a slow network that someone is entirely happy with; it’s far more likely that we see a huge volume of traffic being squeezed into a tiny network lead, or over a slow circuit. So when I was invited to attend an award ceremony at software giant SAP’s global headquarters, I jumped at the chance. What’s that got to do with esoteric numbers? Quite a bit, actually. For one thing, the awards were being given to entire teams of people in SAP’s world-spanning customer base. Getting a person through a qualification, or scoring 100% in a test, is hard enough when it comes to vocational qualifications. Getting ten people…

B12 Co-founder Nitesh Banta believes AI and humans should work together, with the B12 platform helping to pair machine efforts with people. The initial work is building websites. A software algorithm will build a first draft of a new site, freeing up human designers and writers to fill in the details. The human workers are offered the work via an automated system, which pings a message about the project to potential contractors, from designers to copywriters or photographers. If they agree at a set rate, they get to work via a Slack channel to communicate with other remote staff. Moonlighting The trouble with contracting via the gig economy is finding work and getting paid. Moonlighting is an app that aims to manage both aspects, helping SMBs advertise for roles, freelancers…

ELON MUSK WANTS to make a wizard hat for the brain. That’s how one site — Wait But Why, which had an exclusive interview with the Iron Man wannabe — described the latest project from the founder of SpaceX and Tesla. The billionaire has launched another company, making him the CEO of three futuristic startups. The latest is Neuralink, which aims to develop tech called “neural lace” that implants electrodes in your brain to let it interface with machines as well as boost memory and fight neurological diseases. Musk aims to have a version ready in just four years. What is neural lace? It isn’t a specific technology, but a term to describe intertwining computing with our brains using connected electrodes. Tiny implants embedded in the brain read neural activity,…

We all have to confront the reality that encryption is a necessary thing that will not go away Dear Prime Minister – I apologise for not saying “Dear Mrs May”, but I’m writing this some weeks before the election and, in light of recent events, anything might happen – I would like to comment on your seemingly endless ignorance of the internet. Some might think that unfair. But I have yet to see evidence that any incumbent of No 10, past, present or potential future, has anything remotely resembling a clue. So I’ll stick with “Dear Prime Minister” as it applies to all of you. A few weeks ago, many organisations, including the NHS, were hit with a nasty virus outbreak, which took advantage of a hole in the security…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 (New) Ultraportable from £1,149 from dell.co.uk Dell only needed to refine its brilliant XPS 13 design to keep top spot, and that’s chassis that lift it above the opposition. Oh, and it’s now refi ne what it does: it’s slightly quicker and adds more options, but it’s the edge -to-edge 13.3in display and compact chassis that lift it above the opposition. Oh, and it’s now available in Rose Gold. REVIEW Issue 270, p54 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. £1,699 from lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 263, p56 Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2016) The high price stops it from taking Dell’s top…

@bazzacollins Not for the first time in my <low mumble> 20-year career </low mumble> I find myself wondering what the Charlie Dickens Microsoft is up to. After years of insisting it’s not really a hardware manufacturer – more a reluctant pawn that is sometimes forced to make the devices other manufacturers don’t want to – Microsoft is now nakedly in the laptop business. Its latest device, the Surface Laptop, does (editor’s banned phrase coming up) exactly what it says on the tin. It’s not a convertible, it’s not a two-in-one, it’s a straightforward clamshell laptop, of the type that have been on the market longer than I’ve been writing about them. It’s about as innovative as cheese on toast. This, officially at least, wasn’t why Microsoft got into the PC…

You probably think of the Windows Command Prompt as a historical hangover from the MS-DOS days. To be fair, that’s pretty much what it is. But it’s still a powerful and efficient way of getting things done, some of which would be complicated or impossible with the mouse. Here’s our pick of commands worth knowing – all of which still work in Windows 10. 1 attrib View and change file properties Example: attrib -h -r c:\example.dat Every file in Windows has a set of basic attributes: some are “system” files, and Windows will complain if you try to delete or move them. Others might be hidden, so by default they won’t be shown in Explorer. The “attrib” command lets you view or change these attributes. The example above removes the…

Business or frequent travellers will be familiar with the scenario. You land in a new country and want to connect. If you’re lucky, you can get online with your phone, but even then it may not support the local 4G or LTE bands – so you’ll be restricted to 2.5G or 3G speeds – and you probably can’t tether your laptop. There are pocket Wi-Fi devices that solve some of the problems in some of the countries, but often they’re tied to specific mobile operators with fearsome charges if you download too much data from the wrong carrier. These are just some of the reasons why Nuu Mobile created the Konnect i1. Just released, here are the key reasons businesses and frequent travellers will be interested – and two exclusive…

PRICE £1,583 (£1,900 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk High-performance gaming Gigabyte’s Aero 15 laptop is an laptops are getting smaller. Skinnier and more powerefficient chips are the catalyst, and excellent example of the new breed. A 2.8GHz Core i7-7700HQ processor runs the show, backed by 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB PCIe M.2 SSD. Naturally, there’s a 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card buried within. This meant the Aero 15 topped the charts across almost all our tests, beating the latest Razer Blade by a single point in our benchmarks (unsurprising, as they have all but identical specs). Gaming performance proved similarly stellar. Metro: Last Light – a notoriously demanding game – ran at a silky smooth 86fps on the Ultra preset at Full HD resolution with SSAO turned…

PRICE £1,249 (£1,499 inc VAT) from store.hp.com The HP Spectre x360 isn’t a single laptop: that would be too simple. Instead, the range covers both 13.3in and 15.6in chassis sizes, with seven different specifications to choose from on HP’s website. What both chassis share is the same design aesthetic, so while I focus on the larger Spectre X360 here it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to apply much of my criticisms – and compliments – to its 13.3in sibling. To be precise, HP sent us the Spectre x360 15-bl000na for testing: a 15.6in laptop with a 4K display, Intel Core i7-7500U processor, 512GB SSD, Nvidia GeForce 940MX graphics and a price of £1,499 inc VAT. I hunted around for laptops with a similar specification, but nothing quite matches…

SeagateBarraCuda4TB PRICE £97 (£116 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/274sbc There are a number of odd things about Seagate’s entry-level drive. That its maximum capacity is 4GB rather than the 6GB norm; that this more expensive model is slower than the 3GB version, with claimed sustained read/write speeds of 190MB/sec to its sibling’s 210MB/sec; that its spindle speed is 5,900rpm against the usual of 5,400rpm for budget drives. Where it meets expectations is a two-year warranty and a data throughput rating of 55TB/year, while the drives are designed to be powered on for 2,400 hours per year. So this isn’t a good choice for systems that are powered on all the time or hammered regularly. It’s comparatively powerefficient, with standby usage of 0.25W, idle usage of 2.5W and operating usage of 5W,…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com Replacing your router with a better one can certainly improve the speed and range of your wireless signal, but this only works up to a point. Signal quality and strength degrade rapidly over distance, especially inside a home where walls, furniture and people get in the way. That’s where mesh Wi-Fi systems such as BT’s Whole Home Wi-Fi come in (note that it will work with any broadband service, not just BT). By using many boxes or “nodes” to spread the signal around, mesh systems can cover a much broader area than a single router can, and provide stronger speed across your home as a result (see p89). BT’s system comprises three of these nodes, each disc with a BT logo discreetly adorning…

PRICE £142 (£170 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Buying a router with an integrated ADSL modem can often mean making sacrifices elsewhere, so it’s great to see a top-of-the-range model such as the TP-Link Archer VR2800 setting the standard this month. Not only is this router replete with features and stacked with the very latest the Wi-Fi world has to offer, it backs this up with solid, reliable performance and great ease of use. Admittedly, it’s not much to look at – the Archer is a nondescript black slab with four antennae sticking up at the back, along with four Gigabit LAN ports and a VDSL2/ADSL2+ compatible socket, plus a couple of USB 3 ports on the left-hand edge. There’s plenty going on inside, though, and when it comes to Wi-Fi…

PRICE £207 (£248 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk DrayTek has plied its trade for years producing wireless routers for small to mediumsized enterprises – and consumers who like to tinker. With the Vigor 2860AC, that’s not about to change any time soon. This router is all about function before form and it’s stuffed with practical features. At the front there are six Gigabit LAN ports, plus one Gigabit WAN port and a VDSL2/ADSL port for connection to Openreachbased broadband connections. Alongside these is a pair of USB 2 ports that can be used for connecting USB storage, printers or 3G/4G adapters for backup connection to the internet if your main connection goes down. There are plenty of options for connectivity, then, but the real magic is hidden away in the 2860AC’s…

PRICE £305 (£366 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Mesh Wi-Fi systems are a fantastic way to spread your broadband across your home, but they can be a little basic when it comes to features. Netgear’s Orbi, however, is different. The basic system comprises two rather large, vase-shaped devices: a base unit, which you connect to an existing router or modem via its WAN port (there’s no DSL modem here), and a satellite node to extend the range of the wireless signal. The appeal of the Orbi system is that you don’t sacrifice features over a more traditional single router. In addition to that WAN port, the base unit also has three Gigabit Ethernet ports, the satellite unit has four, plus there’s a decent spread of features accessible via the base unit’s…

PRICE Free to all subscribers from virginmedia.com Virgin Media introduced the Hub 3 in 2016. It’s included free with all of Virgin Media’s broadband packages and it’s the only internal router that supports Virgin’s fastest 300Mbits/sec package. Aside from that, there’s nothing particularly special about it. Indeed, it offers little over and above the previous model, the Super Hub 2ac. As with previous Virgin Media routers, the Hub 3 stands vertical: it’s a little more angular, but otherwise the format is familiar, with a WPS button on the front, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, a pair of telephone ports (currently inactive) and a threaded attachment where you attach it to Virgin Media’s cable network. There’s no USB port for storage or printer sharing, which is a disappointment, but the router can…

PRICE £161 exc VAT from pcpro.link/274pro Brother’s MFC-J6930DW is a well-connected device. This A3 inkjet MFP comes with USB, Ethernet, 802.11n wireless and NFC – plus it supports WiFi Direct and AirPrint, and works with a good range of cloud and mobile services. It’s also notable for the low cost of consumables. Brother’s high-yield cartridges deliver a typical A4 mono page for only 0.8p and a colour one for 4.2p – prices that easily compete with a laser. Just remember that A3 poster prints can eat up much more ink than the average document. With a footprint of 57x48cm, the MFC-J6930DW is a sizeable thing, but it features not one but two 250-sheet input trays, both accepting either A4 or A3 paper. There’s also a 100-sheet multipurpose tray at the…

PRICE £704 exc VAT from pcpro.link/274oki If you’re short on office space then Oki’s C843dn could be the perfect printer for you. It’s probably the smallest A3 unit on the market – and one of the cheapest too, so it should fit comfortably into your budget. Though compact, the C843dn is surprisingly heavy: it weighs in at 40kg, so it’ll need to sit on a very sturdy desk. Paper choices start with a single 300-sheet A3 lower tray and 100-sheet A3 MPT (multi-purpose tray), to which you can add three extra 530-sheet trays and a wheeled base. The output tray at the top of the printer holds up to 250 pages; opening the rear output provides a straight path through the printer, allowing you to use heavy 256gsm paper and…

PRICE As reviewed (estimated), £1,294 exc VAT from lenovo.co.uk The ThinkServer TS150 is perfect for a small business seeking its first server. It offers an impressive range of features at an affordable price, and it’s also the first production tower available using Intel’s new Kaby Lake Xeon E3-1200 v6 processors. The price we’ve shown is Lenovo’s estimated street price for the 70UB001MEA model, which proudly sports a 3.3GHz Xeon E3-1225 v6 CPU, but all eight members of the new E3 family are on offer, with speeds ranging from 3GHz up to 3.9GHz. Whichever you choose, you get four cores, 8MB of L3 cache and support for 2,400MHz ECC DDR4 memory. Chips ending with a 5 also include integrated HD P630 graphics. The T150 is solidly put together, and its side…

I had reason to be grateful that asset management and remote wipe aren't as reliable as one might wish: I lost my phone on a remote alpine trail, dashing back to dodge an imminent thunderstorm. Thunderstorms in high mountains are no fun, because you’re soaking wet and inside the clouds where the lightning starts – something that happened to my Nokia 930, lying by the trail in a leather case for an unknown period. Once I realised it was lost, I logged in to the Microsoft page, which presents the remote kill option. After a bit of gnashing of teeth, I pressed the kill-switch and got a message saying my request was being processed. Resigned to losing the photos and texts, I bought a stop-gap phone and resolved to buy…

Iwas quick to board the “cloud bus” back when it was all new and exciting. Early on, I tasked my team with moving from an increasingly painful on-premise infrastructure into a private cloud service offered by our WAN provider. All the arguments made sense. Using its data centre, and its “N+1 for everything”, I’d save money versus constantly resourcing capacity – which was, at best, a finger-in-theair endeavour. I’d worked as global infrastructure director for a shipping company prior to joining my current employer (bigger head count, much bigger budget, more salesmen to deal with) and I’d always found capacity planning to be a mess. Investing hope, faith and money with someone who’s tasked with selling you terabytes of storage is never going to end well – and the tools,…

Roles are being broken down into easily automated work, and algorithms are set to become your boss It’s been a rough year so far for Uber, but while many shake their heads at the startup’s corporate culture, the rest of the gig economy must be quietly applauding the firm for testing the regulation around transport, employment and more. Because if there’s one thing the wide-ranging companies that make up the gig economy have in common – across accommodation apps, food delivery startups and laundry on demand — it’s their impact on work. Indeed, the catch-all term for companies such as Uber, Airbnb and the like has shifted from “sharing economy” to the perhaps more realistic “gig economy”, with workers treated as private contractors. This gives companies more flexibility to meet…