Table of contents for March 2025 in PC Pro

One of the reasons I love going to CES each year is that I get to interview people I otherwise simply wouldn’t meet. Some are high-flying execs at international companies, and that’s great. After speaking to a trio of Intel VPs in one particularly intense half-hour session, I feel I have a far better insight into what’s happening at the company and how that will affect what it’s doing this year. In short, pedal to the metal for the core skills of making, well, cores, but a shedding of distractions such as its RealSense camera division. But I also enjoy speaking to the up-and-comers. We highlight a couple in our big CES feature, starting on p26, such as a Japanese PhD student who has created a hardware platform for third…

Microsoft has bundled its Copilot AI into Personal and Family editions of its Microsoft 365 apps – but it’s bumping up subscription prices as a result. Microsoft was previously charging a hefty £19 a month to add the AI extras to the former Office suite, but it’s now decided to roll them in, albeit with limits. Personal and Family subscribers get 60 AI credits per month, with each prompt in apps such as Word, PowerPoint or Outlook consuming a single credit. Customers who want unlimited access to the AI can still pay £19 per month for Microsoft Copilot Pro. Microsoft has used the bundling of the AI features and the inclusion of Designer (think Canva or Adobe Express) to justify the increase. In the UK, the monthly price of Microsoft…

@njkobie Mikey Shulman needs to bake some cupcakes or sit down with some crayons and paper and doodle. He’s the CEO of Suno AI, a tool for making music using AI. On a recent podcast, he said writing and recording songs takes too much time – you need to learn an instrument, practise it until you’re good and maybe even learn production software. “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music,” he suggested. It’s hard to think anyone would do a job like writing songs if they hated it. So this is clearly a man who himself gleans no joy from the act of creation. Getting caught up in writing, building, cooking or whatever is one of the great pleasures of…

ASUS ZENBOOK A14 PRICE From £999 • AVAILABLE To be confirmed Asus pitches the Zenbook A14 as the world’s lightest Copilot+ PC, somewhat ambitiously describing it as “light as air” in one claim. That’s for the 48Wh version, which weighs 899g, but I’d opt for the 70Wh model as that promises 32 hours of video playback per charge (thankfully, this is the model that will be sold in the UK). Powered by Snapdragon X chips, it packs a 14in OLED panel and Wi-Fi 7, while Asus’ “Ceraluminum” material combines the feel of ceramic with the lightness of aluminium. In the flesh, it looks genuinely lovely, too. Three final plus points: the keyboard is nice and crisp, the trackpad is large, and you still benefit from USB-A and HDMI, along with…

AMD RYZEN 200 AND AI 300 PRICE Not applicable AVAILABLE Q1-Q2 2025 Alongside its powerful Ryzen AI Max and 9000H/HX CPUs, AMD launched two mainstream mobile CPUs at CES: the Ryzen 200 and AI 300 Series. The budget 200 series is an update to the Ryzen 8040 series. It lacks the AI moniker as – at best – it includes an NPU rated at 16 TOPS. These chips are based on AMD’s Zen 4 architecture, using a mix of Zen 4 and Zen 4c (so more efficient) cores. The Ryzen 3 210 sits at the bottom with four cores, eight threads and no NPU, while the Ryzen 9 270 tops the list with eight cores, 16 threads and the NPU. The Ryzen AI 300 series is more interesting, based on…

This year, the world was clearly, if slowly, moving from the “AI with everything” we saw last year. Then, AI felt like a slap-on marketing tag, but many firms are making real progress in justifying the moniker. The one big winner, of course, is Nvidia. A new range of graphics cards promises multiplier levels of speed increases. Although some accuse the company of “cheating” by using inferred frames to bump up the frame rate, it’s hard to argue when you see the demos. For me, though, Nvidia’s Project DIGITS was the high point of CES 2025. Although it isn’t yet a shipping item, it promises to bring true supercomputer levels of AI performance at a petaflop of speed to the desktop of any researcher or AI fiddler, for a cost…

PRICE Core Ultra 7 258V, £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from store.acer.com The Acer Swift 14 AI Intel is a Copilot+ laptop with several top features. It’s speedy, with graphics that can actually handle games; its battery lasts two regular workdays; its OLED display pops with colour; and it’s superbly portable. As the name suggests, there’s also a generous helping of AI horsepower under the bonnet. The model I tried features a Core Ultra 7 258V processor, a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM; there’s also a cheaper variant with a Core Ultra 7 256V CPU and 16GB of RAM, along with 16in variants of both (one of which I review overleaf). Note that while 16GB of RAM is enough for most purposes, the memory is soldered to the motherboard so…

PRICE €1,417 (€1,700 inc VAT) from honor.com/fr Fancy a trip to France? Right now that’s the easiest way to buy the Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon, as the laptop is only on sale there, China, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Honor is monitoring sales in France before it decides whether to sell it in the UK, so a 4.9-star rating on Honor’s French site is a promising sign. Start using the MagicBook and it’s easy to see why it’s so loved. The screen is a 14.6in expanse of OLED beauty with a super-sharp 3,120 x 2,080 resolution. It’s almost perfectly tuned to the DCI-P3 gamut, too, with 97% coverage out of a 98% volume. Add a peak brightness of 486cd/m2 and crisp whites, plus solid colour accuracy (an average Delta…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,167 (£1,400 inc VAT) from lenovo.com After the excitement of seeing a Lenovo laptop with a rolling display (see p29) at CES, the Yoga Slim 7i seems rather ordinary. The display is boringly fixed in place, it uses Intel’s well-established Core Ultra 7 258V processor, and the light grey finish is frankly dull. But despite my initial yawns on picking up the Slim 7i on my return from Las Vegas, there’s a solid laptop here that deserves your consideration. The first thing to mention is what makes it an Aura Edition laptop. This is the outcome of a partnership between Intel and Lenovo that aims to address the pain points revealed by a survey of tens of thousands of users. Pain points such as poor battery life,…

B570 PRICE £175 (£205 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk B580 PRICE £200 (£240 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Nvidia may have set the world of high-end graphics cards alight at CES 2025, but weeks earlier Intel had jumped its rivals by releasing two cards based on its Battlemage architecture. With much-improved drivers compared to the first round of Intel Arc GPUs, it’s now a genuine alternative to Nvidia and AMD if you have between £200 and £250 to spend. On paper, the B580 looks far less powerful than the existing A750, never mind the full-fat A770 16GB card. The B580 has “only” 20 Xe-cores, compared to 28 on the A750 and 32 on the A770; even the lowly A580 has 24 Xe-cores. The real story is that Battlemage has major architectural design…

Total value this month £230 Norton 360 Standard 2025 Norton’s comprehensive security suite includes everything you need to protect your device and data – from a VPN to cloud backup, password management and more. The Norton Security module is a headline feature, bringing you strong protection against all types of malware. It monitors files and programs not just for known threats but also suspicious behaviour, so it can block malware before it gains a foothold on your system. There’s a firewall, too, to automatically block attacks from both outside and inside your PC, while web safety components check the links you click to make sure they’re safe to visit. Downloaded files are screened for both security and reliability, and you’ll benefit from comprehensive cleanup, disk optimisation and startup manager tools to…

PRICE 12GB/256GB, £749 (£899 inc VAT) from oneplus.com/uk The number 13 may be unlucky for some, but the OnePlus 13 has plenty of blessings, including a great screen, powerful processor, long battery life and fast recharging. You could even say it sets the standard for 2025 smartphones, having been launched in the first week of the year. The price is higher than last year’s OnePlus 12 (see issue 354, p60): you’ll now pay £899 for the phone with 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage, or £999 for the 16GB/512GB version. That’s still less than other high-end, big-screen phones such as Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra (see issue 354, p58) or the Pixel 9 Pro XL (see issue 362, p58) – especially if you’re looking for maxed-out memory and storage. New look…

When it comes to virus protection, you’ve never had it so good. All of the products on test here provide strong defences against real-world attacks, and that includes the built-in protection from Windows Defender (although it was the weakest on test). So why pay for a security suite? You certainly don’t need to if you’re only worried about malware, but the clue comes in the name: if you want a suite of tools to protect your security, and your privacy, then there are strong arguments to buy an all-in-one package rather than going separately. We’re particularly thinking about VPN software. While we will always tell you to buy a specialist tool if you have advanced needs, a security suite is a cost-effective way to add this privacy tool to your…

1st YEAR PRICE 5 devices, £43 (£52 inc VAT) from bitdefender.co.uk RENEWAL PRICE 5 devices, £63 (£75 inc VAT) from bitdefender.co.uk RETAIL PRICE 5 devices, 1yr, £17 (£20 inc VAT) from store.pcpro.co.uk Already a very effective security suite, Bitdefender has improved its malware detection performance from last year, and offers plenty of features without becoming too costly or bundling in irrelevant options. It’s available for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. We don’t have data from SE Labs, but Bitdefender was a top performer in AV-Test’s regular assessments involving both real-world exposure to live malware and scanning of a passive set of malicious files. It detected and protected against all malware, with zero false positives of benign software. AV-Comparatives’ latest real-world malware exposure test was more challenging to all the software…

1st YEAR PRICE 10 devices, £31 (£37 inc VAT) from home.sophos.com RENEWAL PRICE 10 devices, £42 (£50 inc VAT) from home.sophos.com RETAIL PRICE Not available Based in the UK, Sophos produces antivirus for home and business use, with its home offering notable for its unusually useful web-based dashboard. Sign into your account management interface on the My Sophos website and you can not only see a list of every device that the software has been deployed on, but also enable and disable protection modules on a per-device basis. You can also set up scheduled scans and run a quick scan on any computer that you’ve added to your fleet, assuming it’s switched on at the time. This is the kind of functionality we more often see from enterprise antivirus, but…

1st YEAR PRICE 5 devices, £64 (£77 inc VAT) from eset.com RENEWAL PRICE 5 devices, £96 (£115 inc VAT) from eset.com RETAIL PRICE 5 devices, 1yr, £67 (£80 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk RETAIL PRICE Not available Based in Slovakia, Eset is a proven player in the internet security world. Here, we review Eset Ultimate, and the first thing to note is that – unusually – the best deals are available direct from the company. Still, compared to rivals, it’s expensive, so it needs to excel. It did well in AV-Test’s trials, where it detected all malware with no false positives, and AV-Comparatives, where it blocked 99.2% of threats and misidentified only three harmless applications as potential malware. SE Labs doesn’t currently test Eset. Components include a firewall, a browser protection…

1st YEAR PRICE 5 devices, £31 (£37 inc VAT) from k7computing.com RENEWAL PRICE 5 devices, £53 (£63 inc VAT) from k7computing.com RETAIL PRICE Not available With so many internet security companies taking a similar approach, this year we wanted to give Indian contender K7 a try, even though only AV-Test regularly puts K7’s malware detection engine through its paces. While it failed to detect some malware in a flat-file scan of AV-Test’s huge reference cache of infected files, it scored well in real-world exposure tests and its overall performance has been going from strength to strength. The bad news is that AV-Test’s data shows that K7 notably slows down the launch of both apps and websites. It’s pretty cheap, starting at £17 inc VAT for your first year’s subscription for…

Phishing is still one of the biggest threats to users’ security and privacy. We all know the basic methodology: create a bait of an urgent-looking message, hook them with a link and then capture on a website where they enter their details. And that’s it: you’ve been caught. One effective counter-measure is to flag these “bad” websites, and such filtering is a reasonably common feature in high-end VPN services. Apart from noting that it exists, however, we reviewers have generally had few options to properly assess its effectiveness. In November 2024, that changed when NordSec commissioned AV-Test to carry out a comparison (tinyurl.com/366phishing) of the malicious URL blocking and anti-phishing features built into VPN clients. Naturally, this included NordVPN, but also IPVanish, ExpressVPN, Mullvad and ProtonVPN, all of which offer…

PRICE From $150 per node/year from parkplacetechnologies.com Entuity from Park Place Technologies will appeal to SMBs worried about hidden costs as its licensing is based only on nodes. The yearly starting price of $150 per node may seem high but this includes many features other vendors charge extra for such as IP address management, Flow analysis, device configuration management and cloud monitoring. Entuity can be run on Linux or Windows Server 2019/2022 platforms and minimum system requirements are modest, with smaller environments requiring only a 6-core Xeon E3 CPU, 6GB of memory and 60GB of storage space. Entuity can be virtualised so we opted to install it on a Windows Server 2022 VM on the lab’s VMware ESXi host, which took 30 minutes. Some vendors expect you to supply your…

PRICE £225 exc VAT from solwise.co.uk When we reviewed EnGenius’ mighty BE19000-rated ECW536 Wi-Fi 7 access point (see issue 365, p98), we were bowled over by its great combination of features and performance. Its £406 tag may be a bit steep for smaller businesses though, and for them there’s the ECW526, which offers a scaled-down set of Wi-Fi 7 features at a more appealing price. Behind the scenes is the same powerful Qualcomm Networking Pro 1220 hardware platform featuring a 2.2GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 CPU. The ECW526 presents six spatial streams – half as many as the ECW536 – but this still delivers an impressive BE9500 rating comprising 5,800Mbits/sec on the 6GHz radio, 2,900Mbits/sec for 5GHz and 720Mbits/sec for 2.4GHz. The AP ensures there are no bottlenecks as it boasts…

Until recently I would probably have tended towards the unsophisticated view that most storage problems can be staved off, if not solved entirely, by the infinite adding of more and bigger disks. But then two very different clients ran out of space at the same time, for totally different reasons. The first set of clients will not mind me calling them the Brazilian Drag Queens, because that’s what they are. With a textile studio in Camden, a shop in Covent Garden and little specialism in technology, they carried blithely on as their boss made a semi-arbitrary decision that their clothing catalogue would no longer use Photoshop to simulate pictures of clothes in varying colours: if a material were available in 30 shades, they would shoot and publish 30 real pictures…

The year 2025 has begun with the traditional bedlam and financial ruination of repair based retail. By striving to fix the unfixable, I think of myself as the Artful Bodger, a grubby-faced urchin that picks the pockets of wealthy OEMs by denying them a sale. This year, my job should get easier. More Right to Repair legislation went live on 1 January and, if the EU can finally agree what day it is, by the end of the year there should be clarity on user-replaceable batteries for devices larger than mobiles and tablets. I’m excited about the potential of these changes and look forward to reading PC Pro reviews where the availability and pricing of spare parts will affect the final score. Despite the new laws, change won’t be instant.…

The most important book in my modest collection of tech literature is pictured opposite. How the World Was One is a dreadful pun of a title, by scientist, wartime boffin and sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke. It’s his account of how several generations of communications engineers connected together the world’s political classes, by way of telegraph Morse code, telephony voice signals and eventually the internet. What has this to do with 2025? Because the Russians seem to have rediscovered the fine art of dragging the seabed for submarine cables and cutting them. A sufficient number of those cables carry regular, public internet traffic to make this wholly relevant to 2025. And, more pointedly, to make your cloud resources and your backup/restore technology truly location independent. I will, now and then,…

KG Orphanides When it comes to rating security suites – from AV effectiveness to the quality of bundled VPNs – nobody does it better than KG Orphanides. Read their verdict from p78. Rois Ni Thuama What does climbing Mount Everest have in common with business leaders understanding the fundamentals of information security? Rois explains all on p116. Davey Winder Is someone spying on you? Our security guru explains why your iPhone might not be quite as secure as you think, and how to find out if your paranoia is justified, from p118. Nicole Kobie Want to live in the future today? You can indeed travel in a driverless car, work in the metaverse and enjoy robot service in your home. Just don’t expect miracles. See p126.…

Ofcom’s decision to ban broadband providers from imposing inflation-linked price rises could lead to customers on cheaper tariffs facing the steepest price rises. The telecoms regulator decided to ban mid-contract price hikes that are linked to inflation following the spike in 2022, which saw the UK’s inflation rate rise to almost 10%. That left millions of customers facing huge price rises without any option to cancel their contract. Ofcom’s new rules ban inflationlinked price rises, stating that “telecoms providers must now set out up front, in pounds and pence, any price rises that will apply to customer contracts”. However, this has already led to some customers paying more than they would have under the previous system. BT, for example, has announced that broadband customers signing new contracts will face a…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro M4 M4 beast from £1,599 from apple.com/uk This M4 update to the already brilliant MacBook Pro line is an easy recommendation, so the big question becomes do you choose the 14in version from £1,599 or 16in from £2,499? And then how much do you upgrade, as Apple isn’t afraid of high prices. But whatever you choose should last for years, and look great while it’s doing it. REVIEW Issue 364, p50 Apple Mac Book Air 13in (M3) Both the 13in and 15in MacBook Airs impress for speed, styling and battery life, but the 1.2kg 13in Air wins out of the two for its sheer portability. From £1,299 from apple.com REVIEW Issue 356, p54 Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED Asus pairs a Core Ultra 9 288V…

@bazzacollins The notion that big tech firms have a set of values has always triggered my BS filter. Companies will do what’s best for the bottom line. If that happens to coincide with what’s best for the planet, society or its customers, great. But the buck comes first. Never has that been more transparent than in the rush to throw money at Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Uber are among the companies that have all made $1 million donations to the fund, either directly or through their senior executives. That pays for one hell of a party. It shouldn’t matter if the top brass at these firms drank a little too much Dom Perignon on the big day, because several of them already seem…

PLUS 44 OTHER RELEASES We pick the 56 standout products and new technologies from this year’s CES Best of CES 2025! Every year, CES acts as a calling card for all the great new technology due to be released in the coming year. It’s the only place to be if you want to see what companies will be pinning their hopes on. You’ll bump into everyone from PhD students with ideas fresh from research labs to directors of global tech firms. And CEOs, too, with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang stealing much of the limelight, as we describe opposite. CES takes place in Las Vegas, consuming two huge convention centres and speckling its way across many of Sin City’s hotels. With the first briefings taking place on a Sunday and the show…

NVIDIA GEFORCE NOW ON STEAM DECK PRICE Free • AVAILABLE Soon If you own a Steam Deck, you probably already know you can apply a workaround to get GeForce Now on the handheld. Soon there will be no need for this fiddly hack, as official support is on its way. Perhaps the biggest benefit won’t be felt by those who primarily use the device for handheld gaming, but by those docking their Steam Deck with a full-blown display: you’ll now be able to stream 4K at up to 60 frames per second using the Deck, provided you’ve got one of the punchily priced Ultimate tier accounts. The benefits will presumably extend to the SteamOS version of the Lenovo Legion Go (see right) and future SteamOS devices, too. BARRY COLLINS RAZER…

ADAM PRICE Price varies • AVAILABLE Available to rent in the US now The robotic bartender ADAM uses AI to mix the perfect drink, say scientists at Richtech Robotics (richtechrobotics.com). It can be configured to make hot drinks like coffee and bubble tea, too, with an extensive library of drinks stored in its software. It also interacts with customers – according to company representatives – and provides recommendations. You can even rent ADAM… but right now, it’s only available in the USA. KEUMARS AFIFI-SABET REALBOTIX ARIA PRICE $175,000 • AVAILABLE Now “Let’s get down to brass tacks,” I say to Realbotix’s CEO, on the company’s tiny CES stand. “Is this a sex doll?” “No,” Andrew Kiguel replied, “but it can have, what I would say, conversations of a more intimate…

It’s been said that the obstacles in our path aren’t what stop us achieving great things; rather, it’s the easier paths we choose to follow instead. Nowhere is this truer than when sitting at a computer. You could be getting on with writing your novel, but half an hour clicking around the web is easier and more beguiling. You could have finished filing your taxes – if you’d not been distracted by your email. You might even have got ahead on an academic assignment, if you hadn’t spent the time compiling the perfect playlist. Each of these paths is a distraction, and while we’re sympathetic to anyone who finds themselves continually distracted by an ever-connected PC, there really is no excuse for such behaviour today – not if you’re using…

PRICE Core Ultra 5 226V, £1,000 (£1,200 inc VAT) from store.acer.com The 16in model of Acer’s Swift AI laptop is, on paper, all but identical to the 14in model (see p48) – only bigger. It’s still sharp-looking and deliciously thin, tapering from 15.9mm at the back down to 9.9mm at the front. There are differences, though. Naturally, it’s a little heavier, at 1.5kg – enough to make the squared-off edges feel a little uncomfortable when you hold the laptop in your hands. On the plus side, the extra space allows Acer to squeeze in a numeric keypad alongside the main keyboard, and while the number keys are distinctly narrow, they’re usable. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the keyboard response is crisper than that of the Swift 14…

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…

NORTON 360 PREMIUM for £19.99 10 DEVICES 2YR LICENCE 75GB CLOUD STORAGE ■ tinyurl.com/norton360premium We’ve negotiated a killer deal with Norton. 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 because it’s the Premium version, you get a host of extra tools. There’s 75GB of cloud storage for secure backups, plus the full version of Norton Secure VPN, both to protect your identity and provide a way of watching British TV while abroad. Norton Parental Control provides tools to see exactly what your kids are up to on their various devices, and you also get GPS location monitoring for Android and iOS. To round things off, Norton…

PRICE RC-N3, £308 (£369 inc VAT) from store.dji.com The DJI Flip is the drone giant’s latest offering, and it might well be its most appealing one yet. For a very reasonable price it captures stunning stills with a high-quality 48MP camera, and can also film smooth and sumptuous 4K video that looks as good as anything you’ll get from far more expensive models. The headline price of £369 includes the drone and basic RC-N3 controller, which connects to your smartphone to show the live view from the drone’s camera. In my view it’s worth stepping up to the £549 bundle with the RC-2 controller, which has its own integrated 5.5in touchscreen for a neater, more engaging flying experience. The Fly More combo adds two spare batteries, a charging hub and…

PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from vive.com Ireally wanted to love the HTC Vive Focus Vision, especially after my first few tests with Half-Life: Alyx and VR sim racing worked out so well. But after a few weeks with the headset, the relationship grew complicated. Let me explain. After the first handful of sessions, I felt that what I’d heard about this headset from my friends in the industry may have been overly harsh. The build quality is great, with a lovely even weight distribution that feels fine on your head for hours and hours, which makes the hotswappable batteries even more critical and impressive here. Pair that with 5K display tech, stellar eye tracking with minimal latency, great all-round tracking and an ergonomic set of controllers, and you’ve got…

PRICE 12GB/256GB, £566 (£679 inc VAT) from oneplus.com The OnePlus 13R offers much of the same character as the OnePlus 13 (see p72), but for £220 less. You still get a 6.8in screen, the same 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and they even look similar: its aluminium frame comes in silver “Astral Trail” or black “Nebula Noir”, with Corning’s Gorilla Glass 7i for protection against scratches. An IP64 rating means it can handle splashes, too, though you can’t dunk the phone in water or blast it with high-pressure water jets like you can the OnePlus 13. While the OnePlus 13R’s display is just as big as the 13’s, it has a lower 1,264 x 2,780 resolution. That’s still sharp (it works out to 449ppi), and the adaptive refresh…

When it comes to choosing security software, there’s one thing that can’t be ignored: security. That may sound obvious, but with so many packages drowning in other features, it’s easy to become sidetracked. However, avoiding infection by malicious software should be your top priority. That means that real-time malware protection is the critical feature of a security suite. This is a service that continuously monitors your PC for threats, primarily by scanning files and websites your computer encounters. It’s our minimum bar for inclusion in this group test. For example, the free edition of Malwarebytes is effective and justifiably popular but, unlike its paid-for version, only provides on-demand scanning. Every product here can protect your computer against the majority of malicious software. You can take their mere presence in our…

1st YEAR PRICE Individual, unlimited devices, £142 (£170 inc VAT) from mcafee.com RENEWAL PRICE Individual, unlimited devices, £191 (£230 inc VAT) from mcafee.com RETAIL PRICE Not available As antivirus brands merge and reform, McAfee has retained its name but hasn’t been immune to changing corporate winds. In the past decade, the company has been sold by Intel, floated on the New York stock exchange and taken private again by an investment group. Once synonymous with hard-to-uninstall OEM laptop cruft, McAfee has become both easier to live with and better at protecting against malware, but its top tiers remain expensive, and renewal costs can be extremely steep. We’re reviewing McAfee’s most expensive, feature-packed McAfee+ range. This includes four products: Essential, Premium, Advanced and Ultimate. The top two tiers are significantly more…

1st YEAR PRICE 5 devices, £83 (£100 inc VAT) from f-secure.com RENEWAL PRICE 5 devices, £83 (£100 inc VAT) from f-secure.com RETAIL PRICE Not available F-Secure Total is F-Secure Internet Security plus a bunch of additional features. The Finnish company’s antivirus suites all use a pair of malware detection engines – Bitdefender’s Aquaris in conjunction with its own. They’re great at keeping you safe, but in AV-Comparatives’ real-world live malware exposure test run by from July to October 2024, it threw up 45 false positives. That’s no one-off, being in line with previous performances in this set of tests. The counterpoint to this is that it’s consistently strongly protective, in this case blocking 99.8% of malware. This indicates that F-Secure’s combined engines might be on the twitchy side, blocking more…

PRICE Free The integrated version of Microsoft Defender is the benchmark by which all other Windows antivirus is measured. When we review antivirus software, we’re really trying to answer the following question: “Is it good enough to replace Microsoft Defender?” For many users, that answer will be no. Defender protects your Windows PC from the moment you install the OS and its system impact is low, although it does slow down the installation of software compared to some commercial antivirus. It also isn’t available for end-of-life Windows versions like Windows 7. Windows Defender’s performance in independent tests plays a critical role in how likely we are to recommend other antivirus software. Recently, it has wobbled in terms of malware protection from all three labs whose data we source for these…

In today’s digital world network downtime is bad news for businesses, and a prolonged outage could be catastrophic. The immediate effect is loss of productivity and revenue, but it can have far-reaching consequences if dissatisfied customers take their business elsewhere. An essential IT support role is monitoring network, system and application health and providing a rapid response to ensure problems or faults don’t impact on productivity. Network-monitoring software is the ideal solution as it can tell you precisely what’s on your network, how it’s performing and alert you to issues the moment they happen. Monitoring software can help predict system failures and network issues by providing an early warning system that highlights poor service response times, an overloaded application server or one that’s running out of storage capacity. This gives…

PRICE Enterprise, 50 devices, £1,177 exc VAT per year from whatsupgold.com Few can match WhatsUp Gold (WUG) for longevity: it has been a major player in network monitoring for nearly 30 years, and Progress Software continues to enhance it with new features. WUG 2024 has a sharp focus on customisation and improved reporting. Performance monitors can now be modified with filters to exclude irrelevant data such as the Windows system reserved partitions, and Alert Center email notifications can be improved with options to fully customise the message body. Devices that breach their assigned thresholds trigger an alert and WUG can now inform you when a device automatically recovers and goes back within its thresholds. Changes to active monitor policies can be applied in bulk to multiple devices, and the monitor…

PRICE Diskless, £528 exc VAT from ukstore.qnap.com Qnap’s TS-433eU will appeal to small offices with limited space as it’s probably the smallest rack-mount NAS appliance on the market. Presented in a chassis that’s a mere 292mm deep, it can be easily fitted in a small wall box, a standard two-post rack cabinet or even placed unobtrusively on a desk. The appliance offers four hot-swap LFF/SFF drive bays at the front and is powered by a 2GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU. It comes with 4GB of DDR4 RAM, but this is soldered on the motherboard and cannot be upgraded. Networking comes courtesy of dual 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports, and two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports can be used to expand storage outside the box with Qnap’s equally short four-bay TR-004U disk shelves.…

So, is it that time again when we need to upgrade our network to keep up with Wi-Fi standards? You don’t need to upgrade to Wi-Fi 7 yet – nor ever. Doing so could bring benefits for performance and reliability, but Wi-Fi 6 is plenty fast enough for most desktop roles, and as long as you’re already using WPA3 authentication, there’s nothing new in Wi-Fi 7 on the security front. Well, that’s good to hear. But if we do choose to upgrade, are we looking at a major project? It doesn’t have to be an all-hands-to-the-pumps undertaking. A Wi-Fi 7 base station will happily work with slower, old-tech devices – although they won’t get the fastest connections – so existing laptops can serve out their lifespan, and you can replace…

On an icy night in November 2018, I picked my way slowly around the snaking roads of north Wales through a flurry of snow. I was heading to the Moel Siabod café to meet friends – and listen to two of the greatest mountaineers describe the first ascent of the southwest face of Mount Everest. Fifty years ago, as part of a British expedition led by Chris Bonington, Doug Scott and his climbing partner Dougal Haston became the first climbers to reach the summit via this new route. It was a remarkable achievement; it was an ambitious and challenging climb largely due to its technical difficulty and exposure to severe weather conditions. That evening, Doug Scott and Paul “Tut” Braithwaite, Britain’s most prolific alpinist, shared with the audience what it…

An intriguing photograph recently appeared in my Facebook feed, featuring an employee at a US doughnut shop using one of two Commodore 64s to process orders. The post featured the ageing computers positioned side by side in Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg, Indiana, and it garnered more than 1,300 comments, many of which echoed the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, doughnut fix it!” Upon closer examination, it became evident that the computers were running a program written in BASIC, a relatively primitive programming language by today’s standards. But, as one poster asked, “how much computing power do you really need to sell doughnuts?” The vast comments thread also highlighted the continued use of Commodore 64s in various other contemporary settings. There are reportedly instances of Commodore 64s being used in…

Features Use your phone like a computer Can you really ditch your laptop in favour of a phone that offers a desktop-like OS? Yes, says Darien Graham-Smith, who explains how. Features Affinity Photo: Instant Expert Affinity Photo is one of the most loved photo-editing apps around, whether on phone or PC, but if you want to get the most out of it then read our guide next month. Features A modern guide to dev models Agile, waterfall, iterative – different development models have all had their days, but which produce the best results? Nik Rawlinson investigates. Labs Which Linux is right for you? We put a combination of new and old favourites to the test as we uncover which Linux distro is the best choice for different needs – or…

The world could save 99% of the energy spent on transferring data over the web if it moved to a system of device-to-device communication, according to a startup firm. Hopcast, a company formed in 2022, claims to be the first mobile-specific content delivery network (CDN). Instead of constantly fetching data from remote servers all over the world, Hopcast’s technology allows for device-to-device transfer of data – similar to systems such as Apple’s AirDrop but without any user intervention. This would both slash the amount of data users require from their mobile network and save a vast amount of energy, according to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Farid Benbadis. “On all Android phones, on all iOS phones, we have the capability to do device-to-device communication, but these resources are not used…

Allow me to be contrarian and suggest that 2024 was not the year of AI. Instead, for me at least, it was the year of the podcast. That’s partly because I was exposed to AI rather early via Stable Diffusion in 2022, and was bored stiff of it by the end of 2023. But it’s also because online services that had kept me amused for years, including Facebook and YouTube, started sliding down a sloppily slippery slope into irrelevance during 2024. Feeds filled up with unwanted sponsored guff and AI-generated fluff, while real friends abandoned platforms to be replaced by reels and clickbait that spread like digital cockroaches. In response, I began to consume more podcasts. Just as reels were shrinking down to 30 seconds of inane pointlessness, podcasts started…

Is that a fact? I listened to episode 725 of the PC Pro podcast with great interest, specifically the conversation on the removal of Facebook’s factcheckers. In that discussion Rois outlined her views that the removal of Facebook’s fact-checkers was a good step change and correction from Facebook to enable further free speech on the platform. I felt she made a very valid point that those with certain views not considered in keeping with what the fact-checkers deemed acceptable are shut down and accounts are blocked, where the fact-checkers were moving far too much towards censorship. I also have great sympathy with those who are making points as part of a debate (even when I do not agree with them) who then experience abuse; this simply should not be allowed…

Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs were arguably the biggest news of CES 2025, encompassing four desktop cards – the RTX 5090 ($1,999), RTX 5080 ($999), RTX 5070 Ti ($749) and RTX 5070 $549) – plus equivalent chips for laptops. But to get a true taste for what the cards could do, I went behind the scenes at a private Nvidia event. DLSS 4 IS THE KEY “Can it run Cyberpunk 2077?” has become the 2020s equivalent of “can it run Crysis?”, and boy, can the RTX 5090 run Cyberpunk 2077. At maxed-out settings, I saw a peak of around 265fps and a low of 245fps. Every detail is crisp, the fidelity incredible and smoothness fantastic – and much is thanks to Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 4. This uses a machine…

GEEKOM QS1 PRO PRICE & AVAILABILITY To be confirmed It should be no surprise that a mini PC specialist is among the first to sell a system based around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform, in this case the 12-core X1E-80-100. All the usual caveats apply about performance – blistering in multitasking, not so great at 3D acceleration – but with a 45 TOPS NPU for local AI tasks I’d be happy with this as my main system. It resembles the Geekom A6, but note the four microphone slots and that there’s space for two M.2 SSDs. It also comes with Windows 11 Pro, a three-year warranty and dual 2.5GbE ports. All we need now is a price and on-sale date. TIM DANTON HP Z2 MINI G1A PRICE To be confirmed • AVAILABLE…

LG ULTRAGEAR OLED 45GX990A PRICE & AVAILABILITY To be confirmed The display industry can’t make its mind up whether curved or flat screens are in fashion, so why should you? The LG UltraGear OLED 45GX990A offers both: at the press of a button on its remote control it goes from flat to a 900R curved screen. It isn’t short of resolution, with 5,120 x 2,160 pixels spread across the 45in OLED panel. The LG Dual-Mode technology means it can switch between native 21:9 and 16:9 aspect ratios, with picture sizes of 27in, 34in or 39in. It supports DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1 and USB-C with 90W power delivery, and is certified for Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync to keep everything looking smooth. A non-bendy version is launching at $1,999, so expect…

HDMI 2.2 PRICE Not applicable • AVAILABLE Late 2025 The HDMI specification body used CES to announce HDMI 2.2, an upgrade on the current 2.1 version. As you would expect, it has lots of shiny new features – specifically around faster data rates and hence higher resolutions and frame rates. You can share the 96Gbits/sec of data bandwidth between resolution and frame rate, so although HDMI 2.2 supports panels at 16K resolution, it can also do 4K at a 480Hz frame rate. There are new features in the specification for latency management, too, which will be handy. All of which sounds great, but sales of 8K TVs are weak due to lack of content and high power consumption. It’s hard to see a broader need for these new 2.2 capabilities,…

While capturing and editing video is easier than ever, the fighting file formats are a pit of complexity. We’re asked to choose between AVI, MP4, H.264 and so forth, but what’s the difference between them? Here’s everything you need to know to produce the best videos for your needs, whether you’re looking for smaller files, fast transcodes or the best possible quality. The big picture The fundamental reason why all these different formats exist is that each frame of video – in the form that we see on our screens – is huge. A single frame of Full HD video consists of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, which is to say just over two megapixels. If each pixel were represented by a single bit, the full frame would represent over two…

PRICE £741 (£890 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com Acer’s Swift Go series sits a rung or two below the Acer Swift range, so don’t expect the same build quality or aesthetics. It features a grey aluminium lid that looks like a standard film prop laptop; it’s blank outside of the Acer logo in the top right and Acer’s AI branding in the top left. Still, basic looks aside, it has that premium metal feel thanks to a sandblasted lid. At 1.4kg it’s roughly the same weight as most modern 14in laptops, but at 16.6mm thick it’s a fraction chunkier than rivals. But Acer rewards you with plenty of ports: two USB-A ports (albeit 5Gbits/sec) to accompany the pair of USB-C 4 ports, plus an HDMI 2.1 connector and the expected 3.5mm…

Recommended This, quite simply, is a product we recommend you buy – if it meets your needs. A-List The best buy in its category right now. The product will also feature on our A-List, starting on p14. It’s updated each month. Labs Winner Each month we run a group test, or Labs. This product has managed to beat all others to top position. Tinyurl.com links Throughout the magazine you’ll see tinyurl.com shortcuts. Enter these into the address bar of your browser and it will take you to a particular page, which will either be too long or awkward for us to publish or will take you to the precise shop from which to buy. If it’s Amazon, note that we may have an affiliate deal in place so we will…

PRICE £96 (£115 inc VAT) from thepihut.com We’ve previously sung the praises of the Raspberry Pi 5 in our Pi buyer’s guide (see issue 363, p41), and discussed the versatile range of 2GB, 4GB and 8GB models. Now there’s a fourth option with a whopping 16GB – more than any previous Pi model. It’s also the most expensive Pi ever, costing around £40 more than the 8GB version. The 16GB Pi has the same capabilities and connectors as the 8GB model. The only differences are the RAM and the fact that this board uses the updated Broadcom BCM2712D0 CPU, as found on the 2GB version. This removes a few on-chip functions that the Pi doesn’t need, making it slightly more cost-effective to manufacture, but to all intents and purposes it’s…

PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from store.acer.com @PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Forget bendable screens: sometimes simplicity is best, and that’s exactly what Acer opts for with this dual portable monitor. It’s slapped a pair of 15.6in IPS panels into a plain but effective plastic casing, added a sturdy stand, and in doing so provided a surprisingly versatile way to expand your laptop’s display. You can position the PD3 Series (model number PD193Q) in several ways. I tried it in portrait mode with a bend in the middle, as shown to the right, portrait without the bend, in landscape mode (where it’s like a 22in panel but with a big bezel in the middle), and in tent mode so that someone else could view the content of the other display while I was…

PRICE £374 (£449 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Xreal’s long-running family of augmented reality (AR) glasses has recently been joined by two new models, the Xreal One and the One Pro. They’re quite similar, so we’ll focus–if you’ll pardon the expression – on the Xreal One, which costs £100 less than the Pro model. The price is still £159 more than the mixed-reality Meta Quest 3S (see issue 363, p64), but this is a different type of headset. Unlike Meta’s offering, the Xreal One isn’t a standalone unit, but rather an add-on display for any device that supports HDMI or DisplayPort over USB Type-C. Like most AR spectacles, the One looks like a pair of oversized sunglasses, with thick frames and side arms. The frame holds dual Sony micro-LED displays with…

1st YEAR PRICE 5 devices, £43 (£52 inc VAT) from avira.com RENEWAL PRICE 5 devices, £76 (£91 inc VAT) from avira.com RETAIL PRICE Not available German brand Avira kept going as its own company until 2021, at which point it was sold to an investment company and then the internet security firm Gen Digital, which was formed when Avast and NortonLifeLock merged. Unlike AVG, Avira continues to use its own malware detection engine and is an independent, distinct product. In fact, it did slightly better than Avast in the latest tests from both AV-Test and AV-Comparatives, though the margins are very fine. Sadly, SE Labs didn’t include Avira in its latest round-up, but two data sets are sufficient to make a fair assessment of the service. Avira’s performance was the…

1st YEAR PRICE 5 devices, £25 (£30 inc VAT) from uk.norton.com  RENEWAL PRICE 5 devices, £75 (£90 inc VAT) from uk.norton.com RETAIL PRICE Not available Norton 360 Deluxe covers up to five computers and mobile devices. We’ll touch on the entire Norton 360 range, though, because the number of licences, in addition to which features you get, changes depending on which tier you buy. For example, a Plus subscription (£20) covers one device but doesn’t include a VPN while Standard (odd naming) adds a VPN for £5 more. Deluxe covers five devices and adds parental controls for £30. We’ve previously reviewed the top £35 Advanced tier, which doubles the number of devices to ten, includes identity restoration and credit score checking tools, and promises dark web breach monitoring. Advanced is…

1st YEAR PRICE 10 devices, £58 (£70 inc VAT) from avast.com RENEWAL PRICE 10 devices, £117 (£140 inc VAT) from avast.com RETAIL PRICE 10 devices, 2yrs, £25 (£30 inc VAT) from store.pcpro.co.uk Since we reviewed Avast Ultimate last year, both its RRP and its reduced-cost first-year offer have increased in price. Buy direct from avast.com and you’ll pay £110 for a one-PC subscription, up from an already ludicrous £90, while a ten-device sub has leapt from £110 to £140. Avast’s heavily discounted first-year offers have also gone up, from £42 to £50 for a single PC and from £65 to £70 for ten devices. If you leave auto-renews active, your Avast sub will always renew at whatever the current RRP is, so this price inflation is important to keep an…

1st YEAR PRICE 5 devices, $68 ($82 inc VAT) from gdatasoftware.co.uk RENEWAL PRICE 5 devices, $68 ($82 inc VAT) from gdatasoftware.co.uk RETAIL PRICE 5 devices, 1yr, £60 (£72 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk GData might not be the first name that comes to mind when you’re asked to name an antivirus provider, but it consistently puts in an excellent performance in malware protection tests, year in, year out. Its interface hasn’t visibly changed in years, but it does the job. It still refers to Internet Explorer, not Edge, and long-defunct services such as Google Picasa. At least its system tuner doesn’t automatically try to defrag your SSDs (a very bad idea for their longevity). Its password manager, only usable via some creaky browser plug-ins, is to be avoided. And if you…

1st YEAR PRICE 5 devices, £24 (£29 inc VAT) from totalav.com RENEWAL PRICE 5 devices, £83 (£99 inc VAT) from totalav.com RETAIL PRICE Not available UK-based TotalAV’s detection engine regularly appears in AV-Test and AV-Comparatives’ tests, so we have plenty of data on how well it performs. In the latest tests by both labs, it barely outperforms Microsoft Defender, but still did well enough to effectively protect a PC. AV-Test found it protected against 100% of real-time exposure and flat file reference scan malware samples, with no false positives. It struggled more with AV-Comparatives’ tests, which saw it block 98.7% of malware with five false positives. That’s pretty good. SE Labs doesn’t test TotalAV. The basic antivirus costs as little as £29 a year with a first-year discount (you’ll see…

PRICE From £2,350 exc VAT per year from adremsoft.com SMBs are spoilt for choice with network-monitoring products, but AdRem’s NetCrunch stands out from the crowd for a number of reasons. One feature we’ve always liked is its lightning-quick deployment, and version 15 is no exception: we loaded its Server and Console components on a Windows Server 2022 host, followed the discovery wizard and were presented with a complete readout of our lab network in only 20 minutes. The NetCrunch console has been redesigned to make it even easier to use and opens with an informative Atlas overview page that uses colour-coded icons of all monitored devices so you can see at a glance which ones have issues or are offline. Custom views take this further, automatically presenting details based on…

PRICE From £4.25 exc VAT per node from solarwinds.com SolarWinds offers lots of network-monitoring and systems management solutions, but the different licensing models can make buying separates a complicated process. The Observability suite comes to the rescue as it amalgamates all key products into one solution and uses simple node-based licensing. Deployment options are extensive, with the Observability SaaS version hosted in the cloud for you while the Observability Self-Hosted (OSH) on review can be run on-premises and in your own cloud. OSH Essentials starts at £4.25 per node and includes the Network Performance Monitor (NPM), Log Analyzer, Server & Application Monitor (SAM), IP Address Manager, VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM) and User Device Tracker (UDT). OSH Advanced ups the price to £7.43 per node and adds the Network…

Almost everything a business does generates data. So it’s entirely possible – even quite likely – that at some point you may abruptly and painfully run out of storage space. This isn’t a concern that’s always taken seriously, because avoiding it seems like almost the simplest job in IT: just stack up some more disks, job done. However, if you take a closer look around, you may find that storage doesn’t scale up in the way you think it should. Older enterprises may still be relying on expensive boxes, with dedicated, special-purpose drives inside and six Ethernet ports on the back. These drives do the same job as cheap, generic SATA disks, but they’re coded to work with the supplier’s own NAS hardware – so while they’re technically hots wappable,…

After years of very solid service, I have moved away from pfSense running on a dedicated Netgate gateway appliance at the lab. Why move away from such an illustrious and well-regarded platform for the core lab network? Well, let me first say that pfSense is a superb piece of work – I have no qualms about using it again. It’s supremely flexible and has a wide range of add-on packages that you can install and tweak to get it working just how you want. The problem is that I am not, and never have been, a pfSense nerd. I have relied on the default configurations to work well, and they have. And that isn’t just a matter of trust: I have poked and probed it on both the LAN and…

At this point in time, I’m really not sure if it counts as a flex or the precise opposite, but Elon Musk recently reposted a tweet (twix, tweet, Xeet – I give up) about an article of mine discussing iPhone spyware attacks that had been published at Forbes. Needless to say, that got me a lot of attention, both positive and negative, from the Elon followers as well as the looney tunes conspiracy brigade. There’s some overlap between the two, but that’s beside the point. The point, dear reader, is that the overwhelming majority of those emails and direct messages on X were asking about the best way to detect spyware on your iPhone and how such detection works. Oh, and with a nod in the direction of the looney…

The future is unevenly distributed. That famous axiom, courtesy of sci-fi author William Gibson, has become a tech cliché, but when it comes to the arrival of futuristic technologies it holds true. Yes, many sci-fi innovations are already here if you’re willing to put in some effort and turn on your imagination, but you must also lower your expectations. Consider driverless cars, AI personal assistants and robot butlers. These technologies loom over the horizon. They may never come to be, perhaps tripped up by technical limitations or regulatory demands. But you can try out the early versions of these ideas now for a small taste of what the future could bring. Here’s how to capture a glimpse of the future by renting a swish car, automating your work with AI,…

It was a watershed moment. I’m not too sure what brought it on – maybe the rather nice gin and tonic I was enjoying in Virgin Upper Class on my flight to Los Angeles en route to CES? But I’ve drunk many gin and tonics and they’ve never had this effect before. Yet there, undeniably, it was. As real as the bubbles surrounding the slice of lemon, the realisation that I couldn’t trust most anything on the internet any more. This might seem like a trivial matter. A “doh!” moment that’s obvious to many. But having been around in the online world since well before the internet existed in its current form, I have always felt an underlying bedrock of trust. That trust has gone. It’s not just the rise…