Table of contents for April 2018 in PC & Tech Authority

M ohawk Games’ first game was the excellent Offworld Trading Company, a kind of strategic resource management sim with plenty of sci-fishinies to distract you from all the number crunching. But the people at Mohawk are best known for their work on the Civilization series, including company founder Soren Johnson, who was the lead designer on Civ IV, and Dorian Newcomb, who was the art director on Civ V and thus chiefly responsible for that game’s stately optimism. Mohawk has just announced its next game and it definitely looks like it’s building on that Civ pedigree, while possibly adding in a dash of Crusader Kings - or rather that’s how we interpret the scant details in the press release. 10 Crowns is “an epic-scale turn-based strategy game that lets players…

DESKSPACE You have a dilemma. You want one of those awesome oldschool box-of-minerals collections (you know, with the quartz and the iron pyrite you told your friend was gold), but you also want a model of the solar system. And you’re a busy executive. How are you going to solve this dilemma? With Deskspace! MOST WANTED: It’s a set of the planets, with each planet made out of some kind of interesting mineral. Mercury is Labradorite (which displays a beautiful inner labradorescense this is not a joke); Venus is nephrite; Earth is sodalite; Mars is mahogany obsidian obviously; Jupiter is Tiger’s Eye; Saturn is calcite (“Used in World War II for gun sights!” cries an odd footnote); Uranus is amazonite; Neptune is a synthetic cat’s eye silicate; and there are…

If you’re planning to roll out Firefox across a business, read Mozilla’s guide to deploying the browser in an enterprise environment (tinyurl.com/l457uwb). There’s also a dedicated Enterprise Working Group mailing list you can sign up to (tinyurl.com/cty84rw) and, as well as receiving updates, you can mine the enterprise archives for advice and information (tinyurl.com/y9awvglx). For those who need to schedule updates, Mozilla maintains a public release timetable, which at the time of writing runs to late November 2018 (tinyurl.com/5uzucu4). For a business, you’ll probably want to focus on the Extended Support Release (ESR) versions, rather than Rapid Release (RR) builds. ESR editions of Firefox generally remain stable for a full year, allowing organisations to minimise any disruption associated with upgrades and compatibility tests – you just need to make sure…

A MD had a very successful 2017 beginning with the release its Ryzen series of CPUs, firmly bringing the company back to a welcome competitive position not seen for the last decade. Not stopping there, AMD continued to execute its plans with Threadripper, Epyc, Ryzen Pro and finally Ryzen Mobile all being well received. As we moved well into 2018 there was always the glaring omission of the company’s shining light; its APU range. For many years AMD’s processor division saw most of its success come from the sales of its range of so called APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) which merge the functionality of a CPU and GPU onto a single die. It’s the one area where AMD have consistently outclassed Intel. This last piece of the first generation Ryzen…

The QNAP TS-677 is so much more than a mundane NAS to store files on. It’s an extremely capable server thanks to its full-blown AMD Ryzen CPU and PCIe ports. The best way to think about the TS-677 is that it’s a desktop computer, squished into a little cube, that only runs QNAP’s QTS operating system so there’s minimal configuration required. If you’ve ever used a QNAP NAS, the TS-677 works pretty much the same way as they all do with QTS installed, but this one has an incredibly powerful CPU to handle the most demanding tasks. The TS-677 comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU that has 6-cores and 12-threads, running at 3.2GHz and can boost to 3.6GHz. By default, the TS-677 comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM…

N ot too long ago, only Razer was mass producing thin and light gaming laptops, but thanks, at least in part, to the Nvidia Max-Q design philosophy, every month we’re seeing more and more machines that combine portability and power into a very appealing package. The design philosophy throttles down the GPU reducing the heat output so the laptop doesn’t require bulkier and heavier cooling to offset the extra heat. It’s a clever philosophy but one of compromise – it’s unlikely a Max-Q laptop will ever be as fast or powerful as a desktop replacement style gaming laptop, but the more powerful machines will never be as portable. The 15.6in Triton 700 comes in two versions; one sporting a 1060 and one sporting an 8Gb 1080. We’ve reviewed the more…

Monitors don’t get any bigger than Samsung’s behemoth 49in CHG90 QLED curved gaming monitor. It’s so big that it didn’t even fit on my desk when I unboxed its gigantic frame from the surfboard sized box it arrived in. As a result, Samsung’s LC49HG90DMEXXY (aka CHG90 for short) ended up on the kitchen table for this review, much to my partner’s chagrin. If you have any interest at all in this big boy, you really need to get the measuring tape out before splashing the cash, otherwise you’ll end up in my embarrassing situation. The dimensions of the CHG90 and its stand, if you’re wondering, are 1203mm wide, 525mm high and 381mm deep. Despite the size of the screen, unboxing it simple and attaching the stand is a piece of…

As the National Broadband Network spreads around Australia, people are finding themselves in the market for a new device that lets them connect to it. Those in a Fibre to the Node (FTTN) area need to throw their ADSL 2 modems in the bin and upgrade to a VDSL 2 modem, like the DrayTek Vigor2862Vac. The Vigor2862Vac not only supports VDSL 2 so it’ll work on the FTTN portion of the NBN, but has a gigabit Ethernet WAN port, four gigabit Ethernet LAN ports and 802.11ac Wave 2 dual-band Wi-Fiwith support for MU-MIMO, beamforming and four spatial streams. Standard stuff for 2018. Where things get interesting with the Vigor2862Vac is VoIP support and two USB ports. The USB ports can be used for sharing a printer or an external hard…

The naming of the Advanced and Pro keyboards from Alienware sounds a little topsy-turvy to us, but the Pro is a more appealing prospect, even though it costs $80 more. One of the problems we had with the Advanced keyboard remains with the Pro – the wrist rest is an optional extra that costs more – but it does feature backlighting. It also features the same Kailh Brown switches. Rather disappointingly, although the top plate of the keyboard has a metallic sheen, it’s just different coloured plastic. The build quality is still good, but for the price of a premium keyboard some aluminium for added rigidity isn’t much to ask. The only real change to the overall design of the Pro is that the three volume buttons of the Advanced…

If it weren’t for the existence of a Tt Esports mousepad, the X1 RGB would be more aptly titled the XL RGB. It’s a big keyboard – full sized with a large bezel on each side, a fairly large magnetic wrist rest and dedicated AV keys and controls for game mode, a windows lock and lighting. The thing has a footprint that takes up a large part of a desk – 465 x 170 x 40mm (approximately). Despite the fact that the keyboard is much bigger than we usually prefer our keyboards to be, we can’t but help sing the praises of this well-built board, Rather than offering the full range of Cherry MX switches (or Kailh switches that have appeared in previous Thermaltake keyboards), the X1 RGB instead focusses…

Most whole-home networking systems operate two 5GHz wireless networks in parallel. There’s the public Wi-Fisystem, which is the one your personal devices can see and connect to – and then there’s a second invisible, private network called the backhaul, which the router and nodes use to forward traffic to and from one another. Splitting traffic up helps minimise contention, and it can also have a significant impact on performance. While backhaul bandwidth certainly isn’t the only factor affecting wireless speeds, a fast, dedicated backhaul tends to correlate with a fast overall connection. And, if you really want to get the very best out of your mesh system, it’s possible to give it an extra boost by replacing the wireless backhaul with a wired connection. Clearly, this isn’t always an elegant…

Uniquely, Netgear’s Orbi system comes in two sizes: the smaller RBK40 kits promise 370m2 of dual-band coverage over a 867Mbits/sec backhaul, while the larger RBK50 units – the ones we’ve tested here – increase coverage to 460m2 with double the backhaul bandwidth. They’re imposing things, standing a full 8in tall. They’re not exactly ugly, though, and the upright design means their footprint isn’t difficult to accommodate. Bigger also tends to mean better when it comes to radio performance, and I got a good signal between the two nodes even when placed at opposite ends of the house. While overall the Orbi’s wireless connection wasn’t quite this month’s fastest, performance was very strong almost everywhere. Download speeds dropped off a little in the bathroom, but even there I got a great…

The Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, not only featured the best skiers and skaters, but top-end tech, too. Here are the highlights of the robots, networking and more on show at what is surely the highest-tech Olympic games yet – helped along by a partnership with Intel. ROBOTS EVERYWHERE The Olympic torch relay signals the beginning of each round of the games, but day 41 of the march to Pyeongchang wasn’t quite the norm: a robot dubbed HUBO made by the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology punched through a wall, picked up the torch, and carried it a few steps before passing it off to its own designer, professor Dennis Hong. The robot has voice recognition, a vision system, and can roll around or climb stairs, helping…

When you nominate “realism”, “authenticity” and “historical accuracy” as core pillars of the design philosophy upon which your open world RPG is built, you inevitably invite scrutiny. The real world can be a cruel yardstick against which digital simulations almost always fail to measure up. Yet at the same, as players, we tend to be easy to impress. When it comes to realism, close enough can be good enough. Kingdom Come: Deliverance cuts it fine a lot of the time, and misses the mark by a wide margin in some areas, but when it really hits it’s a triumph. Developer Warhorse Studios is based on the Czech Republic and they’ve chosen to explore a part of their own history here, recreating the rolling green hills, thick forests and mud-soaked villages…

“Whenever somebody tells me the information I need is on SharePoint, my heart sinks” began one focus group participant: “I know I’ll never find it”. There were nods of agreement around the room, with comments that SharePoint was making teamwork harder rather than easier. This was part of a workshop I was running for a client to see how its teams could work more effectively. The client had introduced Microsoft Office 365 18 months ago, driven by expectations that it would streamline work. Now disillusionment had set in, with low levels of adoption and a fear that the organisation was creating a sprawling mess of information without a clear plan or governance. My consulting company had been asked to help get things back on track. When employees say they can’t…

$ 4,000. That’s about the price of a top of the line gaming PC these days. Crazy right? It wasn’t all that long ago (less than a year actually) that a little over $3,000 would get you the best of the best. It seems we’re in something of a perfect storm in the PC market with multiple pressures influencing the price of various components all at once. The biggest and most obvious culprit is the crypto mining craze that is creating a high degree of demand for all high-performance graphics cards for use in multi-GPU mining rigs. To the point where retailers are limiting sales to one or two per customer, if they even have stock in the first place. The demand is so high that a graphics card I…

In the old days, you’d visit the local store, buy a box with a CD (or floppy disks for me – I’m glad the days of installing Corel Draw from 5.25in floppies are behind me) and install your software. Unless there was a compelling reason, you didn’t repeat that ritual for another three or four years. But the software business has undergone a revolution. Instead if paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for software every two or three years, we now pay a few dollars each month for “access” to software and services. Similarly, we’ve become conditioned to paying for other things each month as well. Perhaps the most popular subscription service in the country, at least until recently, is Foxtel. Each month, families shelled out around $100 each month…

Ladies and gentlement what we have before us here is a dinosaur. The IBM 5150, the sort of stone-age piece of hardware that makes young people pick up sticks and start poking at it It was born in 1981, which is eight years after this author, and has been loved ever since. The big grey box was embraced in classrooms and by early tech aficionados. Big Blue saw it as a replacement for the multimillion-dallar lwge-array cnmpuling machines that industry was using, butonethatwas built and priced for the home. IBM remembers the thing fondly; in fact, you'd have to go some distance to find anyone who doesn’t “When the IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150) was introduced to the world 25 yeaiS ago, it was dramatically clear to most observers that…

DELL’S JEWELLERY COLLECTION Yes, you read that correctly. The purveyor of some of the world’s most ordinary laptops has dived into fashion, although it’s really only providing the raw materials. Dell is supplying gold recovered from its motherboards for a new collection of jewellery designed by actress Nikki Reed, which is available from bayouwithlove.com. Rings start from $78, although Reed is refusing to comment on rumours that you need to flash the BIOS of your trinkets. SELF-MOVING CHESS BOARD If you’re lacking a mate to put into check mate, the Square Off chessboard might be the answer. This delightful piece of science fiction moves its own pieces, saving you the (admittedly gentle) effort of having to shuffle the rook to wherever the LEDs of traditional computerised chess boards tell you…

With the release of Intel’s new 8thgeneration CPUs, there’s never been a better time to be in the market for a thin and light laptop, that also has four cores. HP have realised this and updated their popular Spectre 13 ultrabook with the latest chip from Intel, the i5-8250. This CPU makes what was a great laptop in 2017, into a spectacular laptop in 2018. From the moment you unbox the Spectre 13, you can feel the premium material and attention to detail. HP’s marketing material claims that the Spectre 13’s “seamless design is carefully chiselled from machined aluminium and carbon fiber”, that the hidden coaxial hinge “draws from inspiration from high-end cabinetry”, the speakers are “tuned” by Bang & Olufsen and the exterior comes in either a minimalist white…

When it comes to multiroom audio, Sonos stands head and shoulders above the competition. The reason for its success is simple: Sonos’ family of speakers blend superb sound quality, an easyto- use mobile app and mesh Wi-Finetworking to create a truly smart, whole-home sound system. The Sonos One takes that one step further: it combines Sonos’ multiroom talents with the latest in voice control from Amazon Alexa and, coming later this year, Google Assistant. STYLISH DESIGN A single power cable trails neatly out of the rear, four rubber feet give the One a firm grip onto the surfaces beneath, and a single Ethernet socket allows for wired operation where Wi-Fiisn’t a viable option. The only fundamental difference between the Play One and the Play:1 is that Sonos has removed the…

We’ve seen our fair share of gaming laptops over the years. Some are better than others but with a few exceptions, one of the traditional weaknesses of gaming laptops are the screens they come with. If you’re dropping a few grand on a laptop, a generic 1080p screen just makes the whole experience poorer. Asus know this and has introduced something every serious laptop gamer must have: A genuine IPS 1080p 120Hz screen with G-Sync, powered by a GTX 1070. Hoorah! The Asus GL503 Scar is a serious laptop. Its design is somewhat understated in an era where RGB lighting and brash styling is the norm. The lid is metallic, but the shell is plastic which lacks the premium feel of the likes of the MSI GS series. It still…

It’s rare to find an all-in-one computer designed for gaming that is actually up to the task thanks to the size, power and cooling requirements of desktop graphics cards forcing manufacturers to compromise on performance in order to keep the machine cool and not unreasonably bulky. Well, Resistance, the gaming arm of Leader Computers hasn’t compromised on power to deliver a sleeper all-in-one computer. The Beast AiO is very aptly named. It’s huge and bulky, allowing for both a massive screen as well as some powerful innards. Built around a Samsung 21:9, 34in curved 3440x1440, 60Hz panel, the Beast measures 863.6mm wide, 127mm deep and 431.8 mm high and weighs in at 13.6Kg. As such, it needs a fairly deep desk, but if you have one, there’s a lot to…

All PC gamers share a common dream. At least, when they see someone playing on a Nintendo Switch. They imagine a handheld, pocketable device, with gaming control, but which can run full-fat Windows 10 and thus any PC game. The GPD Win cannot run any PC game. But it can run any PC game released before, say, 2010, and more than a few that have come after. It ships with a full install of Windows 10 Home. When you push the power button, it boots up like a tiny laptop. Because it is a tiny laptop. Pleasingly, the GPD Win fails to disappoint. It has a sturdy, all metal (as of a 2017 revision) case, an excellent 5.5-inch 1280x720 capacitive 10-touchpoint display, thumbsticks, a D-pad, Xbox face buttons with alternate…

Epson’s EcoTank system has always been a promising concept. Instead of costly and wasteful ink cartridges, EcoTank devices have enormous tanks, come with generous bottles of ink and slash print costs to a fraction of conventional levels. It’s a great idea, but none of the previous EcoTank printers I’ve tested have been good enough t o recommend. The new EcoTank ET-4750 finally delivers on the promise. It’s immediately clear that Epson has improved the EcoTank system itself. This MFP’s ink tanks are neatly integrated into the front, where you can view their levels at a glance; just like a car’s petrol tank, it’s important not to let them run dry. More significantly, Epson has overhauled the filling system, introducing keying to eliminate the risk of misfuelling. The new system appears…

To keep things simple I’ll start by saying that I love this keyboard. It is the best we’ve seen from Razer to date, combining the excellent performance and feel if the standard Chroma V2 but fitting it into a tenkeyless package. The model we reviewed featured Razer Yellow switches, the silent, linear switches with a shorter throw and actuation distance than the more common Orange and Green switches. They feel similar to the excellent Cherry Speed switches if slightly firmer – an odd fact given that both switches feature a 45g actuation force. At any rate, the Yellow switches feel great and fast, for both gaming and typing. Making the keyboard feel even faster is a technology Razer calls I.T.T. Instant Trigger Technology sends the key activation to the PC…

We’ve been really keen to check out our first dedicated optical switch keyboard for quite a while now, and our first experience has turned out to be quite the surprise. We don’t know about you, but when we think optical, we think quiet. Light isn’t known for making too much noise. Imagine our surprise then when we discover that the Hermes P2 RGB is just about the loudest, clickiest keyboard we’ve ever heard. The keyboard features optical switches, yes, but they are Blue optical switches. Noise aside, the Hermes P2 RGB is an excellent keyboard. The keys have a nice resistance and tactile feedback and feel extremely quick under the fingers thanks to the relatively short actuation distance. The build quality of the keyboard is excellent, with a big slab…

Asus’ Lyra mesh networking system is one of the most expensive kits on the market – partly because it comes only as a set of three nodes. Like most mesh extenders, Lyra can be used as a simple wireless bridge, but it’s really intended to replace your existing router. Once you’ve hooked up the power, and connected one of the discs (it doesn’t matter which) to your modem, setup is very easy, thanks to an app for Android and iOS that walks you through the process. Some of the instructions are in slightly broken English, but it’s all pleasingly clear and unambiguous. Then it’s just a case of positioning the other two discs around your home. The app includes a helpful signal strength meter, so you can quickly sniff out…

The Deco branding suggests artistry – but, if you ask me, TP-Link’s bland little discs look like cheap smoke detectors. Nor did they dazzle with their performance: the Deco M5 system did succeed in banishing wireless dead spots in my home, but other kits gave far better performance, including several two-node arrangements. The issue, it seems, is to do with the architecture of the Deco M5 network. A single 867Mbits/sec 5GHz connection is used for both clients and backhaul, meaning there’s a limited amount of bandwidth to go around. This also has an impact on Ethernet performance: the node in the kitchen gave me wired download speeds of a mediocre 36.6MB/sec, and the disc at the back of the house could manage only half that data rate. The Android app…

It’s little more than a year since I put together our last round up of Wi-Fi extenders – but a lot has changed in that time. Back then, your choice was between a wallmounted repeater and a powerline system; there was no such thing as a domestic mesh networking kit. Now there are enough mesh systems on sale to warrant an entire Labs of their own. The appeal of the mesh approach is obvious. The multi-node topology ensures you’ll get a good Wi-Fisignal in the locations that matter most, while a dedicated backhaul channel makes for unbeatable performance. Mesh gear has a downside, though, and that’s the price. Our Labs Winner back in 2016 was the TP-Link RE450 repeater, which can nowadays be had for just $110. It’s not quite…

Rise & Fall isn’t an overhaul of Civ VI. Instead its core new features are additions to the mix that are not intended to fundamentally reconfigure your strategies, but rather encourage players into considering different approaches. Overall, I think, the design goal is to introduce a little more push and pull between the competing systems, a little more flexibility and even unpredictability to the arc of a single play session. The new feature that best reflects the expansion’s title is the Golden Age, in which players rack up points for their empire’s achievements - e.g. eliminating a barbarian camp, circumnavigating the world, building a unique unit, and so on. Qualify for a Golden Age and you’re rewarded with bonuses and a lovely yellow hue to your empire. Fail and you…

Chip makers, system builders and software companies are still trying to come to terms with the wide-ranging consequences of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities – with the industry’s response to the major threat described as both “a mess” and “garbage”. First discovered in June 2017, the two critical weaknesses could allow attackers to sniff data as it’s processed and they affect almost every mobile and desktop processor. But, to date, fixes have been randomly applied, glitch-ridden and confusing. Patches for the problems – which affect Intel, AMD and ARM processors to varying extents – started being rolled out days after they were publicised in early January, but many of these had a significant impact on performance. One Windows patch effectively bricked PCs running on AMD processors. The response has been…

Google Glass was before its time. The iconic wearable promised a new way of interacting with our digital lives -- one that was seamless, overlaid on our vision as we moved around the world. I wanted one. Badly. But alas, before it could even trickle down to consumer land it was beaten under the oppressive heel of public opinion – the ability to record video surreptitiously, not to mention the unintended pretentiousness of its look, led to Google Glass users being coined ‘glassholes’. Wholly undeserving, one would think. It reflected not a problem with the technology, but its timing – society just wasn’t ready to add this level of integration to the mix just yet. GLASS STILL LIVES Google Glass in its original form quietly died, and was later resurrected…

Switching to Firefox might feel like a step backwards. Back in 2010, Mozilla’s lightweight browser commanded a solid third of the browser market, but today its share has fallen to just under 14%. Then again, it’s still bigger than Internet Explorer (13.13%) and miles ahead of Microsoft Edge (3.64%) – so it’s no stranger a choice of browser than either of Windows’ defaults. And if you’re one of those who have switched away, there are plenty of good reasons to give its new browser a try. We’ll discuss some of the most practical ones later, but let’s start with something more fundamental: Mozilla’s ethics. Firefox is built and maintained by a non-profit organisation, whose stated purpose is to “ensure the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to…

A lcatel’s area of expertise is cheap and cheerful products that get the job done for a reasonable price. Their smartphones are a great example of this mindset. The Plus 12 tablet however, is an awful example of Alcatel’s commitment to value for money. Frankly, the Plus 12 is one of the poorest performing computers to come across our testing lab. The Plus 12 is a rather standard 12-inch tablet, with a 1080p touch screen, running Windows 10 and is based around the 1.1 GHz, dual-core Intel N3350 Celeron CPU, 4GB of RAM and 32GB eMMC for storage. There’s plenty of devices on the market like this and they all suffer the same problems as Alcatel’s implementation of it. For starters, the N3350 is a weak CPU. Surfing the web…

Asus’s routers are some of the best in the industry for home users wanting a little extra than simply getting online. Known for their performance and wide feature set, the DSL-AC3100 is the latest in that tradition and does not disappoint. Denoted by the DSL in its product name, the DSL-AC3100 is a Wi-Firouter with a built-in ADSL, ADSL 2/2+ and VDSL2 modem. Perfect for NBN FTTN users. Interestingly, Asus has added support for G.Fast, which doesn’t exist in Australia yet, but could one-day be used on the copper portions of the NBN. Wi-Fion the DSL-AC3100 is one of its unique selling points thanks to the inclusion of 1024-QAM technology. Asus calls it NitroQAM, and claim it can provide over 2.1 Gbit/sec over 5GHz to devices that also support 1024-…

The Spot is the fifth speaker in Amazon’s Echo range - and arguably the cutest. Finished in a soft-touch plastic, available in either white or black, it’s so adorable it makes you want to reach out and tickle it under the chin. Even the 2.5in circular touchscreen is beautifully integrated. It’s set back at a slight angle, making it comfortable to read whether the Spot is nestled on the desk next to you or on the kitchen table a few metres away. A resolution of 480 x 480 works well on that size of screen, too. So what does the Spot do, other than sit in the corner making eyes at you? Essentially, all the same stuff as the larger Echo Show. That means, in addition to the usual Alexa…

It seems like it’s been forever since the legendary Samsung 850 Pro and Evo SSDs launched. Almost unbelievably, we have to go all the way back to 2014 since we saw the first iterations of the 850 series. The competition never really managed to catch up and when you’re the top dog in the market, there’s little commercial reason to shake things up. The 850 Evo in particular is probably the best consumer SATA SSD ever made due to its unrivalled combination of value, performance, reliability and brand recognition. The 850 Pro has been the long time performance leader which makes it equally important. Now we’re well into 2018 though; the competition has finally caught up and a behemoth like Samsung is not known for allowing any challenge to its…

Water cooling a high performance PC used to be a fairly terrifying experience, but advent of the allin- one or AIO cooler has made modern water systems simple to install. The H115i is Corsair’s dual-fan, 280mm radiator kit. It’s a big and bold system for running a sustained overclock (i.e. for months, set and forget), but the real benefit here is acoustic. The H115i uses Corsair’s magnetic levitation fans. Impressively, they are silent up to 900rpm, and on a big radiator like this, 900rpm is plenty fast enough. The pump in the water block is audible at default settings. But this cooler comes with a USB interface. Hook it up to the motherboard, and Corsair’s LINK software allows the user to put the pump in “silent mode” (and mess with…

It takes a little while to get used to the keyboard commands for changing the lighting on the MK 750. F1-F8 all have different functions for the lighting when combined with the Fn key, from changing the intensity of a hue to changing an actual effect, making it all too easy to turn your keyboard into a strobe light. With that out of the way, however, we can definitely say that Cooler Master has delivered a great looking, feeling and performing keyboard with the MK 750. Our review model came with Cherry Brown switches but the MK750 also comes with Cherry Red and Blue skus. Construction of the keyboard is nice and solid, using a combination of an aluminium top plate and plastic for the base. The comfortable if somewhat…

Fed up with flaky Wi-Fi? Treat yourself to a whole-home mesh networking system and enjoy a superfast connection in all corners of your home. These clever extensible kits cover a huge area, and since you can locate the nodes wherever you want – and even add extras as needed – you can be certain of getting a strong signal where it’s needed. Performance is top notch too, leaving traditional wireless repeaters and powerline extenders in the dust. This month, we’ve rounded up every major whole-home Wi-Fikit on the market, and subjected them all to extensive testing to find out which provides the best range and the fastest coverage. Most of these systems can replace your home router, so we’ve also checked out their advanced networking features to help you make…

Google’s own-brand Wi-Fisystem scores points right away for its elegant design. The nodes look like chunky little layer cakes, with a coloured LED strip sandwiched tastefully between two white plastic pucks. The power and Ethernet sockets are discreetly hidden away on the underside, and each unit measures just 104mm in diameter, so they’re easy to squeeze onto busy work surfaces or shelves. Setup is a breeze too. Having unboxed ten different mesh systems this month, I can confidently say that Google’s process was the slickest. The Android app found my nodes almost instantly, and connected by simply scanning a QR code on the base of the one connected to my fibre modem. Once up and running, you can browse connected devices with a tap, monitor their bandwidth usage and even…

The Velop was one of the first home mesh kits to arrive on the scene, and it feels like a mature bit of networking hardware. Although you can’t customise the IP range, it defaults to 192.168.1.x, so your existing assignments should continue to work. Advanced features like port forwarding are supported too, plus port range triggering, so applications can communicate on custom ports without manual configuration. Internally, the Velop has a similar arrangement of radios to the Asus Lyra – that is, a dedicated 867Mbits/ sec wireless backhaul, serving up a 400Mbits/sec 2.4GHz network plus 867Mbits/sec 802.11ac wireless over a claimed area of 560m2. Unlike the Lyra, though, the Velop lets you split up the two bands into separate SSIDs, rather than trusting the unit’s built-in band-steering technology. The Velop…

We know technology has flaws: security experts have been hacking connected cars for years. But that requires uncommon skills, knowledge and nerve; why not just paint a circle of road markings around it, trapping it? That’s an idea from artist James Bridle, whose Autonomous Trap 001 is simply a circle in salt, with broken lines on the outside and a continuous line on the inside – which a driverless car would interpret to mean it can enter the circle, but not leave. Watching elite athletes run, leap and score, it’s hard to imagine there’s much room for improvement, but the Internet of Things, Big Data and virtual reality are shaving milliseconds from sprinters, extending the jump of Olympians – and helping your favourite striker put the ball in the net.…

Do you know what GDPR is? I doubt that many readers of my Australian readers of this column will be familiar with it as it is a European initiative, but it’s an interesting topic that could well influence the way we ecommerce is conducted in further reaches around the world. That said, I’m also sure that if I asked a hundred of my European friends exactly what GDPR – or General Data Protection Regulation – entails, I’d end up with a hundred different responses. Examples would include: “firms will have to ensure data is held securely”, “firms can’t automatically opt you in to receiving marketing emails, or use pre-ticked boxes on contact forms”, “there will be bigger fines for companies when data breaches happen”. All are true, but there’s more…

I ’m surprised there hasn’t yet been a round in a TV quiz show based on ransomware. The field of knowledge required to understand the threat is varied and quirky, while it’s popular enough that weird, twisted myths circulate about what you should do when an infection becomes apparent. This is a clear marker that we should help people understand how to combat malware when it reaches them – and the traditional forms of mass communication aren’t working. Having a newspaper quote a public sector manager saying that the infected PC “shook, and smoke came out” when the infection took hold isn’t going to help anyone understand anything – except possibly the number of public sector managers who would, under pressure, kneel before their PC and beg its forgiveness. My…