Innehållsförteckning för November 2017 från Computer Shopper

NOT A WEEK goes by without reports of yet another major hacking attack, exposing the personal data of thousands or millions of unwitting users, and shaming the company whose systems were breached. One of the most nefarious hacking groups currently on the hunt for the weak and unprotected is OurMine. Portraying themselves as a mischievous band of rogues akin to Robin Hood and his Merry Men, OurMine claims to be simply trying to get those nasty big corporates to take security more seriously and do more to protect the data of the little people (see page 14). The trouble is, it’s often us little people caught in the crossfire, when OurMine gets bored and decides to leak some of the sensitive data it’s accessed across the web. In light of…

Stuck in the middle I’ve been a Shopper subscriber for many years, and pretty much every bit of technology I own has come from one of your recommendations. In January 2012, I lost the video output on my desktop PC, and although I was sure this was fixable, I had a lot of work to do and a strict deadline, so I needed an emergency computer. As usual, I went straight to the latest issue of Shopper, and found a strong review for the Acer Aspire 5749, and it was only £400. That was my first laptop, and my first experience of Windows 7, and I loved them both. Now, after more than five years, I think it’s time for an upgrade, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but…

Madeline Bennett RANTS THIS YEAR’S CROP of GCSE and A-level results saw a slight decline in overall pass rates, as students faced tougher exams. But one area that stayed pretty much static was the overall number of pupils taking computing exams. Considering technology is now the lynchpin of pretty much everything we do, you’d think more kids would be keen to take a computing course. This is especially true in light of the younger generation’s obsession with technology. Ask most kids what they’d like for a birthday or Christmas, and a mobile phone or tablet will likely top the list – assuming they haven’t got one already, that is. However, this passion for technology isn’t reflected at school. Computing and ICT GCSEs accounted for just 2.5% of all exams sat,…

1 Singapore web users The country tops the league for broadband speeds, according to M-Lab. The UK is in 31st place, behind 17 other EU nations. 2 Canine technophiles DJI has launched one of its Phantom drones especially for dogs, so you can sit back and watch your beloved pooch being walked by a flying object. 3 Bitcoin Companies are helping to support Bitcoin by hoarding the digital currency in case of ransomware attacks. 4 Quality control Samsung has unveiled its Galaxy Note 8, which apparently has nonexploding batteries after some rigorous pre-launch testing. CRASHING 1 Note 4 batteries Unfortunately for Samsung, the same can’t be said of the Galaxy Note 4. Refurbished, or counterfeit, batteries for the handset are a fire hazard and have been recalled. 2 Piracy streaming…

MICRO COMPUTER ASUS Tinker Board £52 • From www.currys.co.uk VERDICT A brilliant smart computer for projects, with almost double the Raspberry Pi 3’s performance THE RASPBERRY PI rekindled people’s love of low-level computing and projects, thanks to its combination of performance, low price and active community. Asus now wants in on the act with its competitor to the Raspberry Pi 3 (Shopper 340), the more powerful – and expensive – Tinker Board. Put the Tinker Board next to the Raspberry Pi 3, and you can’t help but notice the similarity. For compatibility reasons, Asus has used the same layout as on the Raspberry Pi 3, complete with the same headers. You get the 40-pin header with 28 GPIO pins, for external peripherals such as LEDs or motors; there’s a CSI…

£850 • From www.lenovo.com VERDICT The Miix 510 is attractively priced, but battery life is mediocre, and the screen could be sharper THE LENOVO MIIX 510 is a 2-in-1 hybrid to rival the Microsoft Surface Pro (Shopper 355). On paper, the Miix 510 appears to be a much better deal – unlike the Surface Pro, Lenovo provides a keyboard attachment and stylus in the very same box, and most importantly, the Miix 510 is an awful lot cheaper. An Intel Core i3-6100U model with 4GB of RAM will set you back £650, while an upgraded Core i5-6200U version with 8GB of RAM is £850 (we tested the latter). While these are previous-generation Skylake chips, not newer Kaby Lake processors, the roughly equivalent Surface Pro models cost £799 and an enormous…

£90 • From www.shop.bt.com VERDICT Ideal for the well-funded gap year, HP’s Sprocket is a fun little photo printer HP’S SPROCKET PHOTO printer is so tiny that when it turned up at Shopper Towers, we thought the pack only contained some paper. Roughly the same size as two smartphones stacked on top of each other, it’s the smallest printer we’ve ever reviewed: designed to pair with a phone to make a fun, highly portable photo booth for travellers, revellers and anyone else who can’t bear to be away from a printer. It comes with a short Micro USB cable, so you can charge its integral battery from an Apple or generic USB charger. The Sprocket confounds your expectations in several ways. First, it uses smaller paper – tiny 2x3in rectangles…

£188 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT Another substandard overclocker overcomes this handicap with efficiency and sheer value WITH THE RYZEN 5 1500X and 1400 both dropping down to four cores and eight threads, it’s up to the Ryzen 5 1600 to act as AMD’s most affordable hexa-core, 12-threaded Zen CPU. To the chip’s credit, there’s an awful lot in common here with the headlining 1600X (page 38): the core count, cache sizes and DDR4 memory support are all the same as on the Ryzen 5 family’s leading part. The main differences, besides the jettisoned suffix and £30 of cost, are lower clock speeds (a 3.2GHz base speed with a 3.6GHz boost), a lower 65W TDP and a diminished XFR boost of 50MHz to the 1600X’s 100MHz. CLOSE CALL Happily, these reductions…

£799 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Classy and compact, the Canon EOS M6 is a solid choice – but it’s not cheap CANON’S EOS M range of compact system cameras (CSCs) had a shaky start in life, but the Canon EOS M5 proved these little cameras were ready for the big league. The M5 is a bit of an extravagance, though, costing £1,000 body only or £1,300 with its 18-150mm kit lens. With the two-year-old Canon EOS M3 (Shopper 332) still available for around £440, that leaves a mid-price gap in the line-up, which the Canon EOS M6 is here to plug. However, £799 is still a big expense, and this camera needs to work hard to compete with the Panasonic G80 (Shopper 353) or Sony a6300 (Shopper 352). The key…

£200 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT A water-resistant speaker with top-quality Bluetooth audio, but you pay through the nose for it THE SOUNDLINK REVOLVE, Bose’s latest wireless speaker, is very much a follower, not a trendsetter. It doesn’t do anything particularly clever. It isn’t a digital voice assistant and can’t do the shopping for you. It’s a Bluetooth speaker, no more, no less. That’s not such a bad thing, though, especially when it’s a speaker this good. The SoundLink Revolve has been built with the same care and attention to detail that made the Bose SoundLink Mini II (Shopper 343) one of our favourite Bluetooth speakers at the time, and it sounds wonderful, too. First, the key facts: the Bose SoundLink Revolve is a battery-powered, rechargeable Bluetooth speaker. It doesn’t have…

COMPUTER SHOPPER’S REVIEWS use some of the most exhaustive testing procedures you’ll find in any PC magazine. Every product is subjected to qualitative and quantitative tests that show how it performs in practical use. Graphs for performance, battery-life scores and costs are used in the Reviews section, as shown on the right. Look in the ‘Summary of tests’ table (below) for details of each test we run. For PCs and laptops, we evaluate performance using our own custom benchmarking suite. See below for a brief description of our benchmarking software and game tests. SUMMARY OF TESTS BENCHMARKS SHOPPER BENCHMARKS Our benchmark suite uses open-source software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems. This lets us use objective results to compare PCs and laptops, no matter which operating…

£255 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Asus has successfully overclocked its RX 570 model to be almost as powerful as an RX 580 THE RADEON RX 570 sits between the budget RX 560 and the mid-range RX 580; you can think of it as the gateway between high-quality 1080p gaming and affordable 1440p performance. This could have positioned RX 570-based cards, such as this Asus ROG Strix RX 570 OC, on an awkward middle ground, but thankfully the GPU is closer to the more expensive RX 580 in terms of specs and performance, all while costing less. It combines 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM with 2,048 stream processors (AMD’s term for cores), and Asus has made some relatively bold overclocks to boot. The reference design (which you can’t actually buy, due to…

£261 • From www.novatech.co.uk VERDICT Mild GPU improvements aren’t enough to dethrone the GTX 1060, especially with fans as loud as these THE RX 580 sits atop AMD’s 500-series of mid-range GPUs, replacing the fantastic RX 480 (Shopper 345). This time, there are 4GB and more expensive 8GB VRAM variants, the former of which is the basis of Gigabyte’s Radeon RX 580 Gaming 4G. The reference design for this GPU includes 2,304 cores at a base speed of 1,257MHz and a boost speed of 1,340MHz, and Gigabyte has added a couple of options for tweaking these speeds. This is managed by the Aorus Graphics Engine utility, which, like Asus’s GPU Tweak II software, can be used to toggle between Silent, Gaming and OC modes. Silent and Gaming modes both force…

£330 • From www.overclockers.co.uk VERDICT It’s extremely competitive on pure performance, but this 8GB version of the RX 580 is just too expensive at the moment IF THE 4GB version of AMD’s Radeon RX 580 can’t quite stand up to the 6GB GTX 1060, perhaps this 8GB model will have better luck. The Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 has the same 2,304 stream processors as Gigabyte’s Radeon RX 580 Gaming 4G, but besides the doubling of its VRAM, Sapphire’s card also pushes its clock speeds even further, up to a 1,366MHz boost clock. That’s 11MHz higher than Gigabyte’s card running in OC mode. Unfortunately, the 8GB RX 580 has been hit as hard as any GPU on the market by mining-induced inflation. After originally launching earlier this year for around…

Passwords are still used to protect the vast majority of online accounts, so choosing secure ones is absolutely critical. If you use just a simple word, then it’s easy for the hackers to guess your login details or run a brute-force attack, cycling through a dictionary until they gain entry. Likewise, you should ensure that your password reset security questions are tough to guess, or a hacker may be able to gain entry to your accounts. CREATE SECURE PASSWORDS Your first job is to create a secure password that’s easy for you to remember. If you end up creating a secure password, but have to write it down on a Post-it note that you’ve stuck to your PC, something is clearly not working. Original password security guides suggested that passwords…

clive@computershopper.co.uk The Free PC Transform a pile of junk and hand-me-down parts into a fully functional, modern computer. Clive Webster shows you how IF YOU’RE ANYTHING like us – and you must be if you’re reading this – you’ve got a stash of spare parts, husks of old computers and various ‘gifts’ of PCs past that friends and relatives were sure you’d find a use for. It’s time to put all that spare hardware to use. A FRANKENSTEIN PC needn’t be less than the sum of its parts. With Linux you can get a quick, slick and modern-looking PC for no outlay at all. Just hide the box, because we’re sure it won’t look pretty. Depending on how ‘generous’ your friends and relatives have been with the hand-me-downs, and how…

Madeline Bennett "4G on the Tube. A depressing prospect for those of us not wanting to hear loud phone chats in an enclosed space" David Ludlow "Apple’s original headphones: the world would be a quieter place without them" Nathan Spendelow "Kaby Lake. Greater power efficiency my arse" James Archer "Whatever software drives those dreadful ‘Around the web’ ads" Dave Neal "Drones – a flying menace" Roland Moore-Colyer "Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game that promised so much but ultimately failed to deliver. Utter disappointment" Simon Handby "Amazon Dash buttons. Why, why, why, why, why?"…

ONE-EYE BOB is a Watchman. I don’t mean he’s a watchman in the DC comic-book sense. I mean One-Eye Bob runs our Neighbourhood Watch to help protect our community from Them. And I don’t mean he’s only got one eye, either. We call him One-Eye Bob because he never stops saying, “I always keep one eye out for Them!” I wouldn’t be at all surprised if One-Eye Bob is the kind of guy who sticks a blob of Blu Tack over his computer camera to stop Them spying on us. I know I am. It was One-Eye Bob who got us to join the campaign against Them. So, let me tell you what we in the Neighbourhood Watch think about the con trick that involves Them spying on us. It’s…

Intel unveils first 8th-gen processors SAY WHAT? INTEL HAS REVEALED the first of its 8th-generation processors, as well as taking the unusual step of including three different platforms into this generation: Kaby Lake Refresh, Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake. Coffee Lake, which employs a new 14nm++ manufacturing process, and Cannon Lake, set to be Intel’s first 10nm chips, won’t arrive until either later this year or early in 2018, but the first batch of Kaby Lake Refresh parts are already making their way into laptops and devices. The Core i7-8650U, Core i7-8550U, Core i5-8350U and Core i5-8250U are so far the only 8th-gen CPUs to be detailed in full, though the H-series, Y-series, S-series and the rest of the U-series will also be part of the 14nm+ Kaby Lake Refresh…

Spain Game of Thrones leaked Broadcaster HBO’s Spanish division accidentally released an episode of Game of Thrones to pirates early, compounding the media firm’s problems with hackers leaking episodes and scripts of the new series. Copies of the episode, called Death is the Enemy, were removed from the official channels, but the same cannot be confirmed for unofficial ones. Netherlands No smileys, please Researchers from three universities, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Haifa and the Ben-Gurion University in Israel, have carried out research into how people perceive the smiley face emoji in official communications. They found that the emoji reflects badly on the sender. “Our findings provide first-time evidence that, contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence. Perceptions…

"If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea” Elon Musk is worried about AI "My dream as a crypto anarchist is to have an identification tool for encrypting an electronic signature, and of course for medical application” "Russian obstetrician Alexander Volchek explains why he now has a total of six chips under his skin "This is starting to look worrying, and shows signs we are going to be very far short of the numbers needed for our nation to remain a leader of digital technology” "The British Computing Society’s Bill Mitchell laments the low numbers of pupils taking technology GCSEs "The impact of misinformation on our society is one of the most divisive, fraught, and important topics of our day. Misinformation depletes…

£1,090 • From www.cclonline.com VERDICT It’s a little noisy, but the CCL Reaper is the best all-rounder we’ve seen at this price IT’S TAKEN A few months, but the trickle of fully AMD-based PCs on the market has turned into a steady stream. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the reliable combination of Intel and Nvidia, AMD’s Ryzen chips certainly offer something a bit different to Intel’s Core i range, and the RX 500 series of Radeon graphics cards comprises the newest consumer GPUs on the market. The extra choice alone is good for potential PC buyers, though it would all be for naught if these new components didn’t make for quality systems. Fortunately, it’s been good news so far, judging by the Overclockers Titan Merlin (Shopper 356) and, now,…

£634 • From www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk VERDICT A great professional-level monitor for jobs that demand high colour accuracy IF YOU’RE SERIOUSLY into photo or video editing, a traditional monitor probably won’t cut it, as it’s not capable of producing accurate enough colours. Instead, you need a professional model, such as the 27in BenQ SW2700PT that we have on review here. The first clue that this monitor is something a little different is that it ships with a shading hood. This three-sided box sits on the top and sides of the display, reducing glare on the screen so that you get a clearer and more accurate picture. Assembling this hood is straightforward, with the separate pieces neatly clipping together and then sliding over the mounting brackets on the display’s sides. A second standout…

£93 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Epson’s latest all-in-one is a great all-rounder for the home office, but ink costs make it expensive to run EPSON’S WORKFORCE PRO WF-3720DWF is a mid-range inkjet MFP for the home office. It’s the latest update to a range that we’ve showered with praise – we awarded its predecessor, the WF-3620DWF (Shopper 355) a Best Buy – and it looks like Epson’s reeled out yet another superb inkjet workhorse. The WF-3720DWF appears to be slightly more than the usual light refresh of the outgoing WF-3620DWF: it has a less cluttered, more upright new design, and the crisp new colour touchscreen offers direct control over the various functions. It can print, scan, fax and copy, has a 35-page automatic document feeder (ADF) and connects to a…

£59 • From www.lambda-tek.com VERDICT A cheap security camera, but the app is fiddly and you don’t get much control MANY OF THE security cameras we’ve reviewed recently have been packed full of smart features, but they’ve had high prices to match. Creative’s Live! Cam IP SmartHD is a simpler camera that’s available for under £60, making it seem a more attractive choice if you just need basic monitoring. The Live! Cam IP SmartHD has a 720p resolution, rather than Full HD, but that’s not necessarily a problem. At this resolution, there’s still enough detail to work out what’s going on and distinguish the people you recognise from those you don’t. It also has a choice of microSD card recording (up to 32GB cards are supported, which gives around 100…

£379 • From www.motorola.co.uk VERDICT This well-priced modular smartphone builds on (almost) everything we loved about the original IT’S NO SURPRISE that last year’s Moto Z Play (Shopper 349) remains a top-tier smartphone. It cooked up almost everything to perfection, coupling top-notch looks with a long-lasting battery, a great camera and the ability to add capabilities via Moto Mods – modular attachments, such as speakers, battery packs and even projectors, that affix to the phone’s rear. Crucially, though, cost was kept to a minimum, and its successor, the Motorola Moto Z2 Play, seeks to bolster the original’s successes. When it comes to looks, the Moto Z2 Play doesn’t deviate too far from the rest of the Moto Z lineup, but there are a few subtle (and welcome) changes. The new…

£649 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Despite its extensive features, the UDP-203 is simply too expensive to recommend IF YOU’RE LOOKING for a device to play an Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray film, there’s only a handful of players to choose from. Now Oppo, a Chinese electronics manufacturer highly respected in the industry for its high-end disc spinners, is ready to join the party. The Oppo UDP-203 is a UHD 4K Blu-ray player that has support for RGB and YCbCr colour spaces, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, PCM and Bitstream audio formats, plus HDR10, and Dolby Vision HDR coming soon through a firmware update. That’s a long list of features, though we’d expect nothing less considering the high price of £649. With a brushed aluminium front panel, a full metal chassis and metal feet,…

AMD RX Vega 64 Sadly, we were unable to source any review samples of AMD’s Vega series in time for this issue, although the RX Vega 64 is available to pre-order at the time of writing. Both this and the RX Vega 56 (see below) are plugging a gap in AMD’s high-end GPU output that’s been empty since the 2015 R9 Fury X, employing a completely different upgraded architecture to the Polaris-based 500-series The RX Vega 64 is the best of the best, with 4,096 cores running at 1,546MHz, 8GB of VRAM and an enormous memory bandwidth of 484GB/s. Starting at £550, it’s priced to compete with Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and, according to early benchmark reports, keeps up with the Nvidia GPU in performance as well. AMD RX Vega 56…

£429 • From www.cclonline.com VERDICT It’s not quite top of the range, but this card will serve up smooth performances at all resolutions AS FAR AS partner cards go, those made by EVGA tend to be slightly cheaper than those from Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac and the like. Indeed, the GeForce GTX 1070 FTW Gaming isn’t the flashiest of 4K-ready graphics cards, but that doesn’t mean EVGA has skimped on improvements and customisations. The stock GTX 1070’s blower cooler, for instance, has been replaced with two open-air fans, while Nvidia’s standard base clock speed of 1,506MHz and boost clock speed of 1,683MHz have both been given sizable overclocks, to 1,607MHz and 1,797MHz respectively. There’s even some visual flair in the form of multiple RGB LED panels around the side and…

£279 • From www.geforce.co.uk VERDICT Even with AMD upping its game, the GTX 1060 remains an excellent choice of GPU at all resolutions IN TERMS OF competition, few graphics cards have been accosted from so many angles as Nvidia’s mid-range GTX 1060. When it launched, it was up against the Radeon RX 480, an impressive AMD effort that was cheaper yet almost as powerful; the GTX 1060 just about saw it off, only for two new rivals to pop up this year in the RX 580 and RX 570. On top of that, it also arrived weighted down by expectations; Nvidia claimed that the GTX 1060 could stand up to the old GTX 980, which cost well over £400 when it was new. Like its AMD peers, the GTX 1060…

£132 • From www.novatech.co.uk VERDICT Beating the competition in almost every way, the GTX 1050 Ti Mini is a minuscule card with massive appeal ONE OF THE secondary advantages of cheap graphics cards is how compact they can be, and you’d struggle to find anything much smaller than the Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mini. At a mere 145mm long, it’s tiny enough to fit in almost any Mini-ITX or microATX system where case space is limited. The GPU it’s been built around, Nvidia’s GTX 1050 Ti, sits between the entry-level GTX 1050 and the mid-range GTX 1060, but leans towards the former by sharing an emphasis on 1080p gaming and low power consumption. Indeed, like the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 D5 2G, Zotac’s dinky card doesn’t even need to…

The selfie-snapping Lily drone, long-awaited games such as Half-Life 3, and Google’s Project Ara modular phone: all are much-hyped and desired products that never actually existed, nothing more than vapourware. The technology industry comes up with plenty of ideas, and it seems it just can’t make them all. Sometimes companies open their mouths too soon, promoting products that they’re not sure they can actually make – hello, Kickstarter – while in other cases prototypes are pushed as near-finished products to give brands a marketing boost. We’re looking at you, Asus and your adorable Zenbo robot that’s still not up for a sale a year after launch. While broken promises from technology manufacturers certainly disappoint, however, vapourware isn’t all harmful, and may even help drive innovation. WHAT IS VAPOURWARE? So what…

Send your problems to businesshelp@computershopper.co.uk Colour coordinated Excel cells Is there a way in Excel to have a cell change colour depending on a value being entered in another cell? So if a cell in column A has a value less than 0, the cell on the same row but column C should be coloured red; if it’s 0, there should be no colour, and if it’s greater than 100, it’s coloured green. I’ve found details of how to do some of this on the cell with the value itself, but can’t work out how to do it based on the value of other cells. Alex Anderson You can do what you want, though I’d suggest you also investigate Excel’s Color Scales option, as it would do what you want, except…

ben@computershopper.co.uk Working with layers Get to grips with your image editor’s selection tools, layers and adjustment layers to isolate subjects, perform surgical colour correction, simulate depth-of-field effects and much more WE USE LIGHTROOM for the majority of our photo-editing tasks, but there are a few jobs that demand a different sort of editor. Lightroom can apply effects to limited areas of the frame, but these are achieved using brush strokes or graduated filters. When you need to apply an effect to a specific object or person in a photo, you need a layer-based editor. Here, various parts of the image are kept on separate layers that can be manipulated independently. Photoshop CC is the best known, and because it’s bundled with Lightroom in the Creative Cloud Photography Plan, this is…

letters@computershopper.co.uk Printer of discontent With regard to the issue of waste (Letters, Shopper 355), the planned obsolescence of the printer itself – designing a component such as the ink absorption pad to fail after a given time – is not the only way in which printer manufacturers act in a manner detrimental to the environment. Some years ago I had an Epson Photo Stylus R200, a six-cartridge printer that produced beautiful quality prints. However, it was quite hungry on the ink front. I noticed a few months later that the printer was being sold for £70, which was a decent price for the quality of output. All printer manufacturers give dire warnings about the alleged hazards of using third-party cartridges, which became immediately relevant when I noticed that to purchase a…

FOR TOO LONG, companies have had too much freedom to do what they want with our personal data. Fortunately, that will change when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on 25th May 2018. A huge overhaul in privacy, implemented across the EU, GDPR makes things better for consumers and gives the government more freedom to tackle companies with weak security or those that misuse personal data. Take TalkTalk, which was fined £400,000 for security failings. That sounds a lot of money, but it was the maximum fine that could be applied. Under GDPR the maximum fines increase, and a company can be fined up to €20m or 4% of worldwide turnover, whichever is greater. For TalkTalk, this could have meant a fine of £70m. Companies will have…

For the wallet There are plenty of great Windows-based 2-in-1s, but nearly all of them are mightily expensive, especially if you need to buy a keyboard attachment or stylus separately. Not so with the 10.6in Samsung Galaxy Book, a smart little hybrid with keyboard and S-Pen all for £650. Its Intel Core m3-7y30 processor, while a far cry from the Core i7s of premium hybrids like the Surface Pro, is powerful enough for everyday office tasks, and the display is bright and colour-accurate. Even the keyboard, unavoidably small in order to match the tablet’s size, is surprisingly comfortable in extended typing sessions. For the den Not just for the den, in fact, but the garden and the bathroom as well: the Bose SoundLink Revolve is a portable, batterypowered and water-resistant…

£650 • From www.johnlewis.com VERDICT Samsung’s Galaxy Book is affordable, compact and refined – at this price, it’s the Windows hybrid to beat JOINING THE LENOVO Miix 510 (page 28) in an attempt on the Surface Pro’s supremacy is the Samsung Galaxy Book. Like its spiritual predecessor, the Galaxy TabPro S, it’s a Windows-powered 2-in-1, and this time comes in both 10.6in and 12in varieties. We reviewed the smaller model. If you’ve seen the TabPro S, the Galaxy Book will look very familiar; put the two side by side and you’d struggle to tell them apart, aside from the Galaxy Book’s more powerful hardware making it a little chunkier. It’s 8.9mm thick, which is noticeably fatter than Apple’s 10.5in iPad Pro (Shopper 356) and a hair thicker than the 2017…

£480 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT LG’s gently curved 34UC79G is great for gaming and comes at an extremely competitive price ULTRA-WIDE GAMING monitors usually come with a high price, making them inaccessible to those on a tight budget. The LG 34UC79G is more expensive than a standard office monitor, but by gaming monitor standards, this 34in, 144Hz 2,560x1,080 screen is pretty reasonable, especially considering its specifications. This does mean that some corners have been cut, specifically with regards to manufacturing. The build quality is low for a £400-plus display; when we extracted it from the box, we immediately noticed how flimsy and plasticky the stand was, which is less than ideal considering how large the monitor is. It isn’t that flexible, either. The stand allows you to tilt the screen…

£218 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT Another excellent multitasker from AMD, though it’s not much good for overclocking WHEN THE RYZEN 7 series launched earlier this year, it single-handedly brought AMD back as a premier producer of desktop CPUs. The Ryzen 7 1800X (Shopper 352) and Ryzen 7 1700 (Shopper 353) particularly impressed, undercutting their Intel Core i7 rivals while massively outperforming them in multitasking and individual multithreaded applications. The Ryzen 5 range – which includes the hexa-core 1600X and 1600, and the quad-core 1500X and 1400 – aims to do something similar to Intel’s Core i5 line-up. This time, it’s not so much about beating Intel on price (the Ryzen 7 1800X was about one-third of the price of the Core i7-6950X when it launched, whereas the Ryzen 5 1600X…

£217 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT A high-quality HDD that makes for fast NAS drives, but the price could be more competitive SSDs ARE BECOMING the default choice for PCs, thanks to their incredible performance, decent capacities and falling prices, yet the mechanical hard disk is far from dead and still has its place. This applies in particular if you’re building a NAS, where the total amount of storage you have is likely to be the most important factor. Performance isn’t quite the same issue in a NAS as it is in a PC, either, as network speed is the limiting factor. While any old hard disk can be used in a NAS, for the best reliability it makes sense to choose a drive specifically designed to run in such an…

£130 • From www.carphonewarehouse.com VERDICT Nokia’s first budget Android phone is a decent first effort, but a handful of niggles hold it back IN 2014, NOKIA left the smartphone arena. After years of producing great phones, the once-dominant mobile firm had let it all slip through its fingers, selling up to Microsoft after a disastrous few years as the only big firm making Window Phone handsets. Now, however, Nokia is back. Not only is there the Nokia 3310 remake (Shopper 355) on the feature phone side, but there’s also a new range of true smartphones, powered by Android. The simply named Nokia 3 is the cheapest of these devices, coming below the only slightly pricier Nokia 5 and Nokia 6. Aimed at those less able to justify spending top dollar…

£130 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT An excellent low-price addition to Nintendo’s handheld gaming family IT’S NOT ENTIRELY new and revolutionary like the Nintendo Switch (Shopper 352), but the New Nintendo 2DS XL is a both a thoughtful addition to Nintendo’s handheld console range and a refinement of what the Japanese firm does best. It’s colourful and chunky in a way that shouts for you to play it and, just like the original 2DS, it loses very little by not having a stereoscopic 3D display. With its clamshell design and crisp colour combinations, plus the same C-stick nub, Amiibo support and 4.88in screen as the New 3DS XL, the 2DS XL is a thing of quiet beauty. It may not have the customisable interchangeable covers of its siblings, but it feels…

Chat and Communication UPDATED Evernote 6.6.4.5512 Store your notes, ideas and plans in the cloud, and synchronise them between computers. UPDATED Mailbird 2.4.10.0 A free desktop email client for Windows. UPDATED Miranda IM 0.10.72 Chat with friends across multiple messaging platforms, including AIM, Facebook, IRC and MSN, all from one simple interface. UPDATED Skype for Windows 7.39.0.102 Make internet voice and video calls for free, and buy credit to make calls to mobiles and landlines. NEW VERSION Trillian 6.0.0.61 Use all your instant-messaging accounts with one application. Supports Windows Live!, AIM, Yahoo! and Google Talk. UPDATED WhatsApp Desktop 0.2.5371 A free PC and Mac version of the popular messaging app, letting you chat from your desktop. Customisation NEW VERSION iolo System Mechanic Free 17.0.1 Speed up your system with Iolo’s…

£607 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT Asus’s overclocked take on the GTX 1080 manages to improve on excellence THE ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1080 OC is a partner variant of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. It’s an ambitious prospect – the GTX 1080 was the most powerful enthusiast GPU around when it launched, and even now is only outranked by the GTX 1080 Ti. Even so, Asus has pushed it even further, upping the stock GPU’s 1,607MHz base clock and 1,733MHz boost clock speeds to a mighty 1,759MHz and 1,898MHz respectively. That’s just in the default Gaming mode, too; switch to OC mode in the GPU Tweak II software utility, and they rise even further to 1,784MHz and 1,936MHz respectively. That’s on top of the GTX 1080’s whopping 8GB of…

£115 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT With Gigabyte’s effective hardware upgrades, the budget GTX 1050 has withstood the test of time THE GEFORCE GTX 1050 is Nvidia’s most basic, entry-level GPU, though it’s based on the same Pascal architecture as the rest of the GTX 10- series. We’ve tested a customised, single-fan, slightly overclocked version from Gigabyte; there are no stock cards or Founders Edition GTX 1050s for sale, so partner cards are your first and last resort. Still, Gigabyte’s tweaks put it in good stead to go up against its key rival, the AMD Radeon RX 560. The 1050 may only have 640 CUDA cores to the RX 460’s 1,024 processor streams (or cores) but the Gigabyte card has each one running at faster speeds, with a base clock of…

£125 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT There’s very little wrong with this overclocked budget GPU, but there are better alternatives AT LAST, AN AMD-based graphics card that hasn’t ballooned in price. The Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 OC is as keenly inexpensive as it’s ever been, and this is just the overclocked version with a boost clock speed of 1,300MHz; Sapphire also makes a standard model, with a 1,216MHz boost clock, for £5 less. The RX 560 is AMD’s answer to the Nvidia GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti: a cheap, hyper-efficient GPU that will accommodate most games at 1080p. To this end, it’s bumped up the number of stream processors – 1,024 to the old RX 460’s 896 – and comes with 4GB of VRAM, all at a low TDP of…

The PC is dead – allegedly. For the past few years, the dominant reign of the personal computer in the tech world has been touted as being at death’s door. The rise of ever-more sophisticated smartphones and subsequently the debut of the tablet, spearheaded by the Apple iPad, has seen people without the need for tasks other than internet browsing and the odd email opt for mobile devices over laptops or desktops. In the working world, more reliable and powerful laptops, combined with often limited company budgets, have seen offices make do with machines three or more years old, rather than refreshing their PCs every two years or so. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that forecast figures from market watchers and technology analyst houses such as IDC and…

Send your problems to help@computershopper.co.uk Cherry filling I’m after a bit of buying advice for my home office setup. I’m a solicitor and I quite regularly work from home using my work-provided laptop. For when I don’t have that with me, I would like a second system that can run Citrix Receiver for remote access to my work applications. I’ve been considering one of the fanless Cherry Trail Windows 10 mini PCs you can buy at Amazon for £100 or so. They would need to drive my ultra-wide 29in monitor, which runs at a 2,560x1,080 resolution; are they up to the task? Second, I regularly work on long manuscripts containing 100 pages or more. I’d like to be able to scan them in and send them back to the office…