Table of contents for March 2016 in PC & Tech Authority

Despite having a nice laptop of my own (A Toshiba Kira Ultrabook), I chose to take the Microsoft Surface 4 Pro away with me for the Christmas holiday break (which for me was a nice couple of weeks in QLD and some equally high quality couch and gaming time back in Sydney). Microsoft extended the loan period for the device (which I reviewed in PC&TA 218), so despite my hypocritical urgings here and to friends and family that holidays should be tech-free, I was all set. The Surface 4 Pro is a beautiful looking device, and is exquisitely built, but dear oh dear does this machine crash a lot. In the few days I had with the Surface 4 Pro to do the initial review it crashed a couple of…

This home-monitoring camera instantly wins points because it doesn’t reek of tech. The soft styling and bamboo sheath help it blend into the household’s decor in the way that a traditional IP camera wouldn’t. It also won me over with high-quality video. For years we’ve had IP cameras that either tote 640 x 480 sensors, or have higher-res sensors that only use a fraction of that resolution at a time, reserving the rest for semi-fake zooming and panning. This punts impressive, high-frame-rate and high-definition video to your iPhone (a beta version is available for Android 4.4 or later) – not just when you’re connected to your home network, but when you’re out and about too. The low-distortion 135-degree view means you don’t always have to pan, but it’s a 5-megapixel…

This multicoloured LED lamp can be powered using its internal rechargeable battery for around three hours, as well as letting you control both its colour and brightness from an app on your phone. It can connect to the same bridge as the other Philips Hue lights (which I already have in my home), and you can also build it into Hue “recipes”. For example, I have one called Night, which switches offthe lightbulbs in my living room and turns the Go down to a dim warm glow to act as a nightlight for my baby daughter. The reason I love this so much is that you don’t have to be invested in the Hue ecosystem. The Go can operate completely independently. You switch between preset scenes – dim, bright, a…

You won’t find better reviews anywhere in Australia! I find it particularly annoying when I talk to people who have firmly cemented their idea that a particular company, or its products, are bad because of how things were many years ago. There are always two that come up, Dell, for being boring, and Norton, for being slow. While, yes, Dell still features good amounts of boring in its range – and that’s by design of course, serving the corporate market as it does – the company has a stellar range of truly exciting products, and has for many years. The Dell XPS 13 is a perfect example. This thin, light and powerful Ultrabook is just plain sexy. Classy-sexy, too, unlike some brands I shan’t name that think high-end means garish…

If Microsoft is going to succeed with Windows 10 Mobile, it needs to win over those on Android or iOS. I fall decisively into this camp, so PC & Tech Authority’s reviews editor asked: could it woo me? It made a great first impression. Although the fashion has moved away from plastic-backed handsets such as this one towards metal, it feels reassuringly solid and the gently rounded edges add finesse. Besides, that plastic back can be removed to reveal the replaceable battery and microSD slot. I’m also pleased to see a USB Type-C connector to replace micro-USB, especially as Microsoft helpfully provides both a USB lead and a plug charger. It also supports wireless charging. It took me a little longer to get used to the phone’s sheer size. The…

Motorola has a habit of coming up with a product everyone’s gagging for, yet no other manufacturer has thought to produce. Last time it was the Motorola Razr Maxx with its enormous battery. This time, it’s sheer toughness. The Motorola Moto X Force is so rugged, so resistant to drops and screen breakage, that Motorola was perfectly happy for me to throw the phone at the floor, stamp on it and smash it as hard as I liked on the corner of a table during a demo. It’s so confident in its ShatterShield display that it’s guaranteed for an unprecedented four years against accidental breakage. Whether you bash the display by dropping it on the pavement, or throw it in the path of a rampaging elephant, Motorola is confident it…

Exposure to screens late at night can disrupt your sleep, leaving you weaker the next day. The simple solution is to stop using phones and tablets before going to bed, but that’s easier said than done, and that’s where Twilight comes in. Functioning in a similar way to Flux for desktops, Twilight adapts the colouring of the screen to fade out the blue lights as the sun sets, tinting everything in a soft red glow when it really matters. It takes a little getting used to at first, but if it helps you get better-quality sleep, then it’s well worth taking the time to adapt. OVERALL…

$249 • www.samsung.com.au Wireless speakers are pretty much a dime a dozen, but Samsung’s decided to enter the market anyway, and made a pretty good fist of it. The Wireless Audio 360 is a very versatile piece of kit, designed to operate in a number of ways – you can set it up as a single speaker, set up multiple speakers in multiple rooms for streaming a single track, or even create an ad-hoc HiFiset-up by linking them together. Basic set-up of a single unit is simple – you just download the Samsung Multiroom app, pair it with your speaker, and away you go. This only works with music on your phone, and most streaming services (via the app), though Google Play Music is not one of them. That’s via…

$350 • www.thehouseofmarley.com.au The Legend ANC cans are real lookers, alright, with aluminium and wood (Sapele) inlays, but sound is what’s important here. Sound and, as always, comfort. The latter isn’t so great. They’re heavy and they feel it, clamping your head uncomfortably and weighing it down. They are neither onor over-ear, with the speaker grills touching your ear surface and the cushion cups doing little more than compressing the edge of your ears. On the plus side, even at extreme volume nobody around you will be disturbed by leaks. The sound is thick and rich, pretty good for the price although not in Sennheiser league for similar bucks. Audio is clear with good absence of hiss. I would totally rock out to these. The louder and bassier the music,…

$549 • www.advanceaudio.com.au Bluetooth speakers are thruppence a sheaf these days, and every HiFibrand worth its salt has one (even B&W). Now KEF joins the crowd with an ultra-compact, ultrapremium little speaker designed to take on the likes of the Bose Soundlink Mini II, albeit at almost twice the price. British HiFiwizards KEF are well-respected at the ultrahigh-end, and this little speaker takes design cues from the floorstanding KEF Muons... which cost $225,000. No really. The Muo drops the N and nearly a quarter of a million dollars to give you two unique 50mm drivers and a bass “radiator” (essentially a speaker cone without a voice coil and magnet) wrapped in a stout aluminium wedge-shaped case. The Muo pumps table-rattling bass like many other speakers in this segment, but the…

We test each package’s core anti-malware features. Rather than artificially infecting target systems, we set them up in an environment that mimics how PCs become infected in the wild. This gives an accurate picture of how each security package fends offmalware in realworld situations. We not only look at whether the package provides protection against the threat, but how it handles the malware. For instance, is it blocked before it can install itself on the PC (our preferred result)? Does it run, but then the antivirus software detects and neutralises it? In the worst-case scenario, does the software allow the malware to run unimpeded? We test against 100 such threats, giving a weighted score on how well it copes with each threat. The protection score you see at the foot…

AVG beat Avast in our protection tests this time around, blocking 72 of the 100 attacks and neutralising a further 22 after they had started running. Six more attacks were able to run uninterrupted. It’s an unusual score: none of the other suites on test allowed so many viruses to run before eliminating them. It only stopped us installing a legitimate piece of software on one occasion, but we were irritated that it halted the installation without telling us. You can’t call AVG svelte, either. It took up a full 973MB of space on our test PC, and slowed system startup from 17 seconds to 28 seconds. Even worse, our 1.8GB file-copy benchmark took 40 seconds, more than three times longer than a PC with no antivirus installed, and eight…

Internet Security sits in the middle of McAfee’s range, and offers all the basic features you’d expect from a Windows-based suite. Except, that is, for a well-designed interface. For example, the General Settings menu is a mess of buttons, with individual categories hiding on/offswitches that make tweaking settings a real pain. Even worse, with no built-in help system, McAfee directs you to its support website to explain features and terminology. At least the parental controls are well implemented, with age-based presets automatically assigning what’s blocked for each age group. If your child is under five, say, McAfee blocks everything apart from websites it deems “kid-safe”. If you choose 9-12, you’ll unlock categories such as streaming websites, games and social networks. You can also add and remove categories manually, block specific…

We’ve been hearing about graphene changing the world of technology for years, although we’re yet to actually see a breakthrough. Now, the carbon-based wonder material is already at risk of being overtaken. Two months ago, we wrote about carbon nanotubes – an incredibly strong, rolled form of graphene – but this month’s clever material is potentially just as strong and light: diamond nanothread. What is diamond nanothread? It’s not the same as the rock on your finger, but there are similarities. The gems are the result of carbon atoms being pressed together, while the “diamond” in this material is made by stacking benzene molecules and compressing them to create strings of carbon. The molecules form a structure similar to diamond, with the benzene atoms linking in an unexpected and strong…

FEATURES + PASSWORD BOSS + ASHAMPOO BURNINGSTUDIO 2016 + WATCHDOG ANTI-MALWARE+ CYBERLINK POWERDIRECTOR 12 LE DRIVERS + ATI CATALYST + NVIDIA FORCEWARE HELP + DISCLAIMER + DAMAGED OR FAULTY DVDS + USING THIS DVD + INSTALLING SOFTWARE EDITORIAL + BURNING AN ISO IMAGE + PC&TA EDITORIALS TROUBLESHOOTING + SERIAL CODES + BLANK REGISTRATION WEBSITE + CAN’T FIND A FILE? + INSTALLATION ERROR WINDOWS CCLEANER + CLASSIC SHELL + CUTEPDF + DEFRAGGLER + FOXIT READER + GREENSHOT + APPLE ITUNES + LIBRE OFFICE + OPEN OFFICE + MALWAREBYTES’ A/M + SANDBOXIE + VLC MEDIA PLAYER + FLUX + 7ZIP MAC + ALFRED + BETTERTOUCHTOOLS + APPLE ITUNES + DROPBOX + FLUX + GOOGLE CHROME + MOZILLA FIREFOX + PLEX + SKYPE + TEAMVIEWER + VLC INTERNET + VUZE + DROPBOX +…

MACGYVER SURVEILLANCE In your February Edition you showed how to set up a $100 webcam as a security camera. An old tablet, Android phone or Windows Phone that’s no longer used can be turned into a IP Security Camera using free apps. There are dozen of IP camera apps in the app stores. The free apps only provide a video feed. Apps that cost a few dollars will provide extra functions such as audio, motion detection, video recording, email alerts and uploading of video to ftp servers. For Android I use IP Webcam and for Windows Phones and Tablets I use Win IP Camera. These apps require virtually no setup and tell you the IP address to use in the remote viewing device. Port forwarding on the router and a…

POLARIS SHINES BRIGHTLY At CES AMD was proudly showing offa demo of its next generation of graphics card. While they don’t have an official product name yet, AMD did reveal that they will be moving on from the island code names (like Tahiti and Tonga) for their GPUs, and moving to the stars for their 14nm node products. Polaris (named after a star in the constellation Ursa Minor) is the codename AMD has chosen for this first 14nm product. They actually have two Polaris products in the works, Polaris 10 and Polaris 11. Polarise 10 being a “console class” product in terms of performance and will be aimed at thin and light notebooks. While Polaris 11 is an enthusiast product for desktops. Polaris 10 was at the show running a…

John, TI Computers: “Yes, absolutely. Quality mouse pads such as the ROG Whetstone still remains popular among my high performance system customers, especially customers buying for gaming and design purposes. A good mouse pad can easily deliver smoother and more accurate movements, allowing my users to maximize the performance of a quality high DPI mouse, which in effect will result in better work efficiency. Though many mouse pads may look similar, a quality mouse pad will generally focuses on maximizing either the smoothness or accuracy of mouse scrolls using various materials and patterns. Superior non-slip base will also help to prevent discomfort due to slipping mouse pads often found on cheaper ones. At the end of the day, we will always advise customers to try out a mouse pad with…

This is, in principle, one of the most basic things you could add to your home to give it some brains: a binary sensor that reports whether the two small units – one about the size of a slightly flattened sugar cube, one about the size of two stacked disposable lighters – are in close proximity or not. You attach one to a door or window and the other to the frame by peeling the backing offa strip of adhesive. The point is that you can then load up the Elgato Eve app and check if the door or window to which you’ve attached the sensor is open. That’s great when you’re lying awake at night fretting that you forgot to close the kitchen window before you came to bed.…

2D TESTS Desktop PCs and laptops are tested using our own custom bench testing suite, which has been carefully designed to test all aspects of a system and rate them in a way that’s useful to you. Our benchtesting cover three main tests: a typical video editing test, a demanding 4K video editing test and a multitasking test that stresses all aspects of the system. We look at the time it takes for each test to run, which is then compared to our reference PC to produce a normalised result. This score is shown on a graph, and to help you understand just where the PC we’re reviewing sits in the grand scheme of things, we will often include other system’s scores. The median score of 100 is based on…

You might be thinking, “gee, $700 for a two bay NAS? I can build a rather nice PC and chuck in my own drives for that sort of coin!”, which would be a totally valid and reasonable response when looking at the price and specs of the DS716+. Let’s look at what makes up the DS716+ and see if $700 for a dual bay NAS is justified. The DS716+ packs an Intel Celeron N3150 CPU and 2GB of RAM. This is a large factor as to why the DS716+ is pricier than most traditional NAS units, which use relatively underpowered ARM CPUs. Having such a powerful CPU means you’re able to run things like Plex Media Server with no fuss – a task cheaper NAS units struggle with and something…

When we’re all fondly reminiscing about OSes in a decade or so, there’s every chance it will be Windows 10 Mobile, rather than its big brother, that’s seen as the pivotal release of 2015. The introduction of Universal apps, which run the same code on phone and desktop, is something that’s never been attempted before in the mobile space, and it could eventually turn the phone world on its head. At first glance, however, you’d be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. The lockscreen and homescreen look largely as they did in Windows Phone 8.1, with vertically scrolling, data-rich Live Tiles still the dominant feature. But it doesn’t take much digging before the changes begin to emerge. The most obvious are to be found in the Action…

G-Sync, Nvidia’s proprietary framesmoothing technology, is possibly one of the most exciting game developments in the last five years. Being a hardware solution – as opposed to AMD’s similar, but software-based, FreeSync – it does add a bit to the price of a monitor, but when you combine that with everything else that Acer’s new Predatorbranded monitor is offering, you end up with one compelling piece of hardware. The XB1 is a 27in model, with a crisp IPS panel boasting Ultra Low Motion Blur, a 144Hz refresh rate (and this can be ‘overclocked’ to 165Hz), 100 per cent sRGB coverage. Basically, it’s a sexy piece of kit, and we suspect it’s the same panel as used in Asus’ similarly specced Asus PG279Q, though we couldn’t confirm that for certain. In…

This is the handset BlackBerry should have produced years ago. Not only does it run Android, so it can combine the platform’s apps and mature OS with BlackBerry’s own strengths, it also includes a hardware keyboard and messaging software. The screen is a sharp 5.4in, 2,560 x 1,440 AMOLED display with curved edges. Its contrast is incredible, and the colours are intense, vibrant and saturated. The Priv looks great: the curved edges lend the phone an unusual look, and the rear is clad in rubberised plastic with a carbonweave finish. And then there’s the physical keyboard, which slides out from beneath the screen with a satisfying thwack. It’s classic BlackBerry: sculpted keys help you locate each one with the tip of your thumb, ridges embedded between each horizontal row keep…

FREE • Android Watching video on a phone has one key problem: you can’t multitask and you have to keep the video on screen, otherwise the playback stops. If you need to reply to a text or tweet, then you’ll just have to put your video playback on hold – aside from on a couple of phablets that have multitasking built in. This app solves that, letting you keep a windowed video player over the top of your Android screen. Put a playlist on and go about your business – although if you want to watch videos longer than five minutes, you’ll have to pay $2.71. OVERALL…

$35 • www.rapoo.com The Rapoo V20 is not the greatest mouse in the world. It feels a bit light, is very plasticky and the optical sensor, whilst accurate, isn’t anything that will set the gaming world on fire, but the combination of features and the unbeatable price make it one of the best budget gaming mice we’ve ever seen. The right handed mouse is nicely designed and fits comfortably in the hand with all five buttons in easy reach and the scroll wheel is one of the better ones we’ve used in a while. Under the plastic shell is a new Rapoo ARM core, some built in memory for profiles and macros and one of the brightest RPG lights we’ve seen. It makes for quite the eye-catching spectacle as the…

$38 • www.rapoo.com A small avalanche of new Rapoo gear hit the Labs just before Christmas. Funky stufflike the drone on page 53, and the cheap but impressive mouse on this page. And this. Normally we’d gratefully receive yet another battery pack, think about it for five seconds then chuck it on the pile with all the others. But this one I’m keeping. It’s so fetch. Why? It’s metal, and shaped to fit the hand better than your regular brick. Which is good because the torch is actually a real torch, with a Philips LED and lens. I’d take it camping. It can light up a dark family room, but for me will serve solid duty instead shining into broken PCs. With aplomb. And at 10,400mAh she’s a right munter.…

We’re not going to scare you with stories of rising virus attacks, ransomware and zero-day exploits. If there’s one thing this Labs shows, it’s that the average person is now safer from attack than ever – if they’re using Windows 8 or Windows 10 at least. That’s because the past three months have seen a huge improvement from Microsoft’s built-in security tools. Satya Nadella shouldn’t uncork the bubbly quite yet, though, as the top, paid-for security suites still offer better protection, not to mention a raft of genuinely useful features. Things such as anti-theft protection, where you can track your laptop if it goes missing. Powerful parental tools to control when your kids go online, and what they get up to are also very important, along with management features that…

We haven’t always been fans of Microsoft Security Essentials. Historically, it has combined minimal system impact (great) with very poor threat protection compared to its rivals (not so great). So its results this time around are something of a revelation, not quite banishing the ghosts of the past but still delivering low impact and great protection. Well, great protection compared to what we’ve seen previously. It was the sixth-best out of the nine products on test, successfully defending against 88 of our attacks and neutralising a further six before they could inflict damage. That left six undetected viruses on our test PC, putting it on a par with AVG AntiVirus Free. It remains an incredibly lightweight piece of software. It takes up only 279MB of disk space and barely affected…

Trend Micro can claim one thing: its top-end security product has the best name going. It successfully defended 96 out of our 100 attacks, neutralising two more before they were able to wreak havoc. It did, however, allow two threats to run unabated, dragging its overall protection rating down to 93%. It wolfed down almost 1GB of disk space, but only slowed our system boot time by one second. It made our PC significantly slower during scans, though with 1.8GB of files copied in 32 seconds compared to Norton’s 21. Sadly, the extra features are buried in annoying, animated menus. The interface is divided into four sections: Device, Privacy, Data and Family. Device lets you configure the anti-malware elements of the software, with options for both its realtime and scheduled…

NEW CATEGORY: GAMING LAPTOP There’s so much activity in this segment, with dozens of dedicated gaming machines onsale in Australia, and more released all the time, that we absolutely need to add it to A-List. In key parts of the Asia Pacific territory it’s the single fastest growing laptop category of them all, and in some areas more of these are sold than any other type of laptop. At the same time, we feel that the existing Performance category is largely redundant, because the machines we recommend for the other categories largely overlap the broad Performance umbrella – and the most powerful machines you’ll find anywhere are indeed the gaming beasts. The inaugural entry is the mighty Metabox Prime P870DM-G, which we reviewed in the last issue (#219, page 41).…

HOW TECH HELPS OLYMPIC ROWERS WIN GOLD You’d think that, having been a sport since the days of Ancient Egypt, there would be little more to learn about rowing. However, the tech team at British Rowing is fitting sensors to measure a boat’s force, angle to the water and acceleration to shave tenths of a second from each stroke. “There’s a lot of talk of marginal gains in sport at the moment, but if you’re taking 200 strokes per race, it suddenly becomes quite a significant margin,” Jamie Thomas, a biochemist and performance analyst told us. However, the telemetry sensors aren’t allowed to be used in races, so we’ll have to judge their success with medal counts. THE CANINE HEROES OF SOVIET SPACE When Soviet scientists needed to test the…

Idecided I needed a new pair of test laptops for the office – something that would be well built and last a good three years in the daily grind. It was, of course, tempting to go for one of the plastic-fantastic, super-cheap devices on offer, but their build quality leaves everything to be desired. Instead, I decided it was time to buy some new Dell XPS laptops. I’ve bought Dells in the past and have been very happy with them. After the Dell era, we went through a phase of only buying Samsung, notably its Series 9 devices, which were quite tasty. However, Samsung appears to have disappeared from the laptop market, so that option was no longer available. On scanning Dell’s website, my eyes fell on the Dell XPS…

Last summer was a busy one for me. Contrary to popular thought, for many school teachers the summer holidays aren’t an eight-week jolly but a time for refilling knowledge banks and looking at new ideas. My new ideas revolved around the Raspberry Pi, and I found myself in the privileged position of taking part in two major training opportunities. The first was to become a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator, a feat I achieved mid-July, and one I thoroughly recommend to any teacher thinking about doing any work with this brilliant little powerhouse of a computer. A day or so after the course had finished I was in the doldrums. The days had been so full-on, so exciting and so enriching that I was at a real low. I retreated to…

There were a number of seismic shifts in the IT business in 2015, though most of them felt remote to everyday PC buyers – until they went out into the market and tried to purchase something. The kinds of “something” I have in mind are the absolute opposites of our own PC & Tech Authority recommendations: they’re definitely “not A-List”. Understand that I’m not denigrating our A-List, whose place and purpose is to highlight the winners in an ever-shifting war of technological innovations. The minute Samsung outflanks Apple, we’ll be updating our league table and shifting our advice, and one has only to go to our annual awards dinner to see how important this is for the guys in the front line of selling, delivering and developing new stuff. But…

“There is real value in delivering high-quality audio to the part of the public who cares about these things” “I shouldn’t have got involved. It was in my local pub, a few sherbets consumed, and the discussion was, shall we say, lively. The news that Tesco will start restocking vinyl LPs made us reminisce about Dansette record players, that wonderfully nostalgic “music centre” of the 1970s and 80s. Then came the bit where I should have kept my mouth shut: that CD was so much better because it didn’t have pops and crackles, and was, of course, digital. Instead, I waded in, pontificating grandiosely how analogue vinyl turntables could sound really extraordinarily good, but they required care, attention and the choice of a good vendor. You don’t have to spend…

Microsoft is making an official move into education thanks to its 2015 purchase of Mojang and its blockbuster hit Minecraft, with the new endeavour being dubbed Minecraft: Education Edition. While the title may not exude creativity, many of the plans presented make up for it, with new features geared towards a more real world experience, albeit in Minecraft’s signature blocky style. This allows teachers to guide students through foreign and ancient landscapes, such as the Pyramids of Giza and Pompeii. There are also quality of life changes to help ease teachers into the use of Minecraft, like a new mapping tool for easier navigation, and a camera for scrapbooking. The changes will not be immense as Microsoft has stated a desire to keep Minecraft a game at its core, so…

RED Scarlet-W RED Digital Cinema made a name for itself by undercutting its competitors on price, and the company’s new entry-level professional grade cinema quality camera takes things to new levels of relative affordability, making it the enviable weapon of choice for those looking to graduate from prosumer to budget-conscious fully-fledged professional. MOST WANTED: Capable of capturing 5K footage at 60fps, 4K at 150fps and 2K at 300fps, and with integrated mounting points and interchangeable lens mounts, the Scarlet-W is a 1.5kg camera built to be as adaptable as possible. If you want it but it’s a struggle to purchase it outright unless you have a heap of film work lined up – the base package will set you back US$14,500 – but at that price day and week rate…

THE SLASHENING PC Case Gear Bloodclaw 960 $1099 • http://tinyurl.com/h64vzav Do you have a little dinosaur in your household that needs to be let loose in Ark: Survival Evolved so they can go terrorise their prehistoric friends? This is a system that can achieve that with ease. Very well priced for a gaming system it offers some reasonable specs for a first gaming system or those on a budget. The CPU is great for budget gaming systems however it really does need to be overclocked to achieve that, so be prepared to play around a little in the BIOS if you want the full potential from it. The hard drive is a negative. It’s small by today’s standards and not particularly fast. An SSD should be the first thing on…

Wireless charging is one of those ideas that’s terrific in theory, but frequently disappointing in real life. Its name suggests blissful charging of your devices wherever you sit them down. In reality, you’re stuck with a single place to charge, just like a plug or cable. Ikea’s genius here is not so much that it makes standalone Qi-compatible wireless charging pads – though it does, and that’s perfectly fine – but that it has built them into furniture. This not only means that you can be encouraged to add more charging points throughout your house, but that they’re built into electrical devices that do other things. If, like me, you find you never have enough plug sockets in your house, this is a great way of adding multiple charging points…

I’ve been living with the Nest Thermostat for 18 months. While you can order the hardware alone, unless you happen to be a trained electrician then I suggest you pay an electrician for installation. Within 30 minutes the Heat Link box was mounted next to my boiler and a stylish round thermostat attached to my wall. The Nest Thermostat only controls the heating, so we kept our existing timer for the hot water. Other than that, though, it works beautifully. Each thermostat connects to mobile devices via your home Wi-Fibut, sensibly, the thermostat talks to the Heat Link box via mains wiring or a proprietary wireless connection so isn’t dependent on your network. Controlling the temperature via the thermostat is easy: twist the outer ring clockwise for hotter, anti-clockwise for…

Mobile OSes are only as good as the phone they’re paired with, so I expected Microsoft to pull out all the stops with the Lumia 950. Certainly, the specs list is like a who’s who of flagship phone internals, from the hexa-core Snapdragon 808 chip to the 5.2in Quad HD display. It’s practical too: Gorilla Glass 3 protects that display, while a removable battery and wireless charging are always welcome. There’s no fingerprint reader, but the iris recognition is an interesting alternative – and it works. However, the specs are also a little misleading. I expected animations to be as smooth as melting butter on a Teflon frying pan, but not so: shifting from the homescreen to the alphabetised list, for example, was often met by a judder. Nor does…

The Acer XB281HK is very much a gamer’s monitor, but it takes a different path to delivering the experience than the XB271HU which David reviewed above. While the 27in XB271HU offers a relatively standard 2560x1440 resolution but at up to a screaming 165Hz, the ever so slightly larger 28in XB281HK displays in 4k (3840 x 2160), but only tops out at 60Hz. Both feature G-Sync to butter up the frames, but it’s the ultrararity of G-Sync at 4K that makes the Acer XB281HK so interesting. Whether the Acer XB281HK appeals to you depends entirely on the GPU powering it. I tested it at home over the Christmas break where I run an Nvidia 980Ti, and I was able to play Fallout 4, Assetto Corsa and War Thunder at the highest…

So, congratulations to Sony for a true world first: a phone with a 4K screen. That’s 8,294,400 pixels spread over a screen measuring 5.5in from corner to corner, giving a pixel density of around 806ppi. Why? Excellent question, especially since the Z5 Premium mostly stays in 1080p mode to save battery life. But we’ll come to that. First, how is it to hold? That depends on how you get on with big phones. At 5.5in, the Xperia Z5 Premium is a monster. Ours arrived bedecked in gaudy gold, which wouldn’t be my first, second or even third choice, but it can also be bought in stylish black or chrome. The finish feels slippery in the hand, but Sony has given the front and back a small lip, meaning it doesn’t…

Taskmator $7.99 • iOS Something strange is afoot. After a few decades of increasingly complicated file formats, people are moving back to using the oldest one of the lot: plain text. And that’s not just for writing documents, using text-only formats such as Markdown. It’s also for that most controversial and complex of things, managing your tasks and time. At the forefront of plain-text task management is the syntax invented by Hog Bay Software for its TaskPaper Mac (and originally iOS) applications. With TaskPaper, documents are only plain text. “Projects” are created by writing the title and adding a colon: everything below that is part of the project. Actions are created by simply starting a line with a hyphen. Tagging and due dates are done by adding “@tag” or “@due(2008-05-31)”.…

Logitech G502 $120 • www.logitech.com.au No box is left unchecked with this rodent. It’s perfectly ergonomic for most hand sizes, with buttons you won’t ever miss or accidentally hit. Rubber inlays on both sides work with any hand position and you won’t be fudging up a move through sweat-slip (new word!). The DPI is adjustable in increments of 50DPI via the excellent software, all the way up to 12,000DPI and you get polling rate options too, covering 125, 250, 500 and 1000Hz. Profiles for unique settings can be saved to Windows, or the device’s onboard memory, and they can switch automatically when a game is fired up, allowing a Windows desktop profile to be kept separate. It’s light, if you like it that way, or heavy thanks to the five…

$99.95 • gaming.logitech.com There’s an irony in that actual pro gamers mostly don’t use massive, button-encrusted mice. They like compact, minimalist models with an emphasis on the sensor and overall ergonomics. So of all Logitech’s top-tier mice, the G303 is probably the most likely to appear at tournament level. It’s small in the hand but suits a range of different grip styles, with slight bias toward “claw grip”. The short, symmetrical design favours function over form, and serious gamers only need six programmable buttons, apparently. Metal spring button tensioning sounds like marketing bumf but means precise, satisfying clicks, and the scroll wheel is one of the best on the market right now. Logitech’s PWM3366 optical sensor can be tuned for different surfaces and supports DPI from 200 to 12,000! The…

$159 • www.corsair.com For many years, a pure black high-quality but minimalist quiet ATX case was something you could only get at the top end of the market. You had to pay more, for less. Now, the Carbide 400Q gives you the minimalism you want at a price that makes sense. The all-steel construction isn’t exactly light, but it is solid, and lack of an optical drive bay means nothing to break that Monolith-like fascia. Sound dampening material on the side panels further cuts unpleasant audio from the two included 120mm fans, and your PSU can be hidden away underneath a plastic cover. Plenty of cable-routing slots keep the build tidy, and a magnetically-secured top cover flips offso you can mount a water-cooler radiator. A couple of USB 3.0 ports…

There’s no way around it: BullGuard Internet Security’s results were well below par. A protection rating of 74% meant it battled with Avast for last position. It successfully defended against 83 attacks, managing to neutralise a further nine before they could do any damage. That left eight pieces of malware on the loose. To make matters worse, its system impact was the worst on test at 13%. It took up 1.2GB of disk space and added 15 seconds to our system’s boot time. It also doubled the time it took to copy 1.8GB of test files, taking the operation from 13 seconds to 27 seconds. It’s a shame performance isn’t up to scratch, because BullGuard is a highly configurable piece of software. The main screen is split into seven clearly…

“Hassle is a big factor in the buying decision: if you’re going to be annoyed by a product then it isn’t worth installing” It’s curious just how laissez-faire an attitude some people have towards antivirus software. I’ll always remember one member of the PC & Tech Authority staff– I’ll protect his identity, even though he’d shrug his shoulders and say he didn’t care – who actively resented installing it. “I don’t go to dodgy websites or click on dodgy links,” he’d say, “and I’m technically literate. I don’t need it.” Just like the 80-year-old smoker who waves away the suggestion that smoking causes cancer, he existed in a one-person statistical group and that was enough for him. See no evidence directly affecting me, hear no evidence directly affecting me, as…

WordPress powers almost a quarter of all the live sites on the web. That’s not surprising, as it’s well supported, easy to use and extremely flexible. It’s no longer just a blogging tool either, since the fully fledged content management system sitting behind the friendly interface is more than capable of running hugely popular sites. Unfortunately, the more popular a system becomes – be it Windows, Android or a publishing tool such as WordPress – the more it attracts the attention of less scrupulous users. Put simply, it’s never been more likely to be attacked than it is right now. But there’s some good news. There is a huge range of tools and extensions designed to fix this problem, so you can quickly and easily make your WordPress site more…

Top athletes function like machines, but as of next year we’ll get to see if the machines can keep up. During the 2016-2017 season, Formula E – the electric version of Formula 1 – will run a race with automated drivers for the first time. The Roborace will cover the same circuit as Formula E races, taking place before normal cars roll onto the track. Ten teams will compete over the one-hour races, each using the same model of driverless car, with every team developing its own real-time algorithms and AI systems. One of the teams will be a crowdsourced community team that’s open to “enthusiastic software and technology experts all over the world,” Formula E said in a statement. Denis Sverdlov, founder of Roborace and automotive startup Kinetik, said…

Some readers may be aware that my day job is building websites and web-enabled business tools, mostly for large companies. It’s great work because it’s impossible to get into a rut – things constantly change, meaning our skillset and working practices must keep evolving at an incredibly rapid pace. We run just to keep up, and I sometimes joke that if I were to go away on holiday for a couple of weeks, I’d be completely out of the loop. Every week it seems there’s a new technology, technique or trend. Design seems to be the most fickle: one minute all sites have to have round corners, then, before you know it, they’re square again. People used to pack lots of content into any available space, then sites became very…

If Jonghwa Kim, CEO of Vonvon – publisher of the Most Used Words Facebook app – played his own game, “privacy” may be large in the word cloud, but “transparency” and “clarity” would be missing. Most Used was just another of those clickbait surveys, quizzes and “dumbotainment” apps that do the rounds on Facebook. They combine a similar level of pointlessness and fleeting entertainment value with a tendency to go viral, while logging your information. This last bit is the most important to me, but seemingly the least to those who participate. Does anyone read the privacy policies of the companies who provide these apps before agreeing to the string of access permissions they request? For Most Used Words, which had close to 20 million players at the time of…