Innehållsförteckning för June 2015 från PC Pro

It might make sense for Microsoft to offer Windows on a subscription basis (see p16), but the model certainly has its opponents – more than half of you said you’d insist on a perpetual licence, or switch to a different platform. On average, those who were willing to pay considered around £3.50 a month a fair price for personal use. When asked about the sum businesses should pay, you considered that £5 a month per workstation, on average, would be reasonable. Join the debate Join the growing PC Pro community on Facebook at facebook.com/pcpro Get the latest news and updates by following us @pcpro Email us at letters@pcpro.co.uk Add your comments to news, reviews and features at pcpro.co.uk “£60 is fair for an OS with a five-year lifespan – so…

Twitter seems like a simple way for businesses to connect with their customers: just type in a message and send. But it’s easy to get it wrong. Tweet at the wrong time of the day and your message will be missed. Use the service as a one-way advertising channel and your audience will drift away. And those are the relatively benign pitfalls. Allowing employees to tweet on behalf of your organisation can lead to trouble, as retailer HMV found in 2013, when a group of former employees took to the company’s feed to complain about mass firings. Used in the correct way, however, Twitter can be a positive tool for your business. Here, we look at what you should tweet and when, plus power-user tricks such as scheduling tweets to…

The makers are coming. If you haven’t yet heard of the maker movement, or got involved, now is the time to sit up and take notice: opportunities abound to join an existing maker community, or create your own around your interests. Even Intel is joining in, with a new Maker section on its website offering support and resources for those wanting to get involved. You don’t need any special skills. What appears to unite makers is a curiosity about how things work, a desire to improve upon what already exists and – in some cases – an urge to create something entirely new. The defining feature of the maker movement is its adherence to the theory of constructivism: the argument put forward by psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget that social…

These days, any update to Office must inevitably seem quite minor – after all, the major features have been fully formed for years. So it is with Office 2016, now available as an “IT Pro and Developer Preview” for Office 365 subscribers. But incremental improvements are no bad thing: if Microsoft had rested on its laurels after Office 97, we’d have no ribbon interface, no Backstage view or OneDrive integration – and we’d still have Clippy greeting us at startup. One key addition to Office 2016 could change the way you use the suite: desktop applications have now inherited the “Tell me what you want to do…” search box from the Office online applications. Once you start using this simple feature, you’ll be wondering why Microsoft didn’t build it in…

PRICE £148 (£178 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk (pcpro.link/248aceraspire) There’s something appealingly stripped back about the design of the Aspire ES1-111M. Where some of Acer’s previous budget laptops and Chromebooks look and feel like My First Ultrabook, this one is all about the bare essentials. The base still feels lightweight, and there’s too much flex in the lid, but overall the construction is solid, and the matte textures and rubber feet mean it sits well on both a desk and your lap. At just over 21mm thick and 1.29kg in weight, the ES1-111M is light and portable. The screen is among the best we’ve seen on a budget laptop. Viewing angles could be wider – colours fade once you move off-centre – but the brightness level of 273cd/m2 is impressive, even…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from argos. co.uk (pcpro.link/248toshsat) The Toshiba Satellite CL10-B was the first Windows 8.1 with Bing device we looked at, and we were impressed by its smart design, reasonable performance and decent screen. Now that it’s been joined by a new breed of low-cost laptop, can it still stand up as one of the best? It’s certainly one of the most attractive. Toshiba has used its Chromebook experience as the basis for the CL10-B, and while it still looks a little like an imitation Ultrabook, its plastics feel thicker and its construction more solid than similarly priced rivals. It’s a thoughtful design, too, with the weight concentrated in the base to provide balance, a textured underside that doesn’t slip around much on the lap, and a…

PRICE 50 devices, £1,298 exc VAT from manageengine.com ManageEngine’s OpManager 11.5 is in the process of migrating to a swish APIdriven user interface, but if it’s not to your liking you can easily switch back to the older web console. And we did, because we found the discovery process in the API client awkward to set up – and when we did get it going, it missed a few of our lab systems. Neither console would allow us to include the root credentials for our VMware host in a standard sweep, so it had to be added manually as a separate device. Even so, after a couple of attempts we had all our systems correctly discovered and proceeded to be amazed by the sheer range of features on offer. Both…

PRICE 250GB, £65/year exc VAT from idrive.com In our recent cloud-backup buyers’ guide (see issue 243, p98), we described MozyPro as affordable, offering as it does 50GB of storage for £209 exc VAT. Well, IDrive Online Backup for Business blows it clean out of the water for value. A starting price of £65 per year buys you 250GB of cloud storage, unlimited servers and workstations and support for business apps including Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint. IDrive also provides Dropbox-like sync services, and the fee includes an equal amount of sync space. Plus, both continuous data protection (CDP) and disk image backup are included, while IDrive matches MozyPro’s 2xProtect feature by securing data to a local drive or network share for fast recovery. To load the IDrive client, we logged…

Forget plastic models, faux-wood chess pieces or almost-ceramic vases – if you want to print your own electronics, these companies’ 3D printers will let you do just that. Voxel8 Voxel8 makes 3D printers that can create objects from plastic and silver ink. For example, the developers like to show off a 3D-printed drone, with only the motor added after the shell is built. The idea is a result of years of research by Jennifer Lewis and colleagues at Harvard. The Voxel8 printers will start shipping at the end of 2015 and cost $8,499 (around £5,746). Argentum This machine won’t print a fully working electronics device, but it will print the circuitry. Funded on Kickstarter, the Argentum lets you print silver particles onto paper, plastic, glass or other surfaces to build…

Five locations have made the shortlist for the UK’s first spaceport, which the government hopes to have up and running by 2018. Under consideration are Campbeltown, Glasgow, Prestwick and Stornoway in Scotland; Newquay in England; and Llanbedr in Wales. One key characteristic of all five locations is that they’re situated on the coast, enabling take-off and landings over the water, to help cut risk. Other requirements include being away from areas of high population and having room for a 3km runway. The spaceport will become the home of commercial spaceflight in Britain, and will be used to launch satellites and for tourist space flights. “Launching satellites and operating commercial space flights from our shores was once confined to the depths of science fiction, but with the results of this consultation…

Real-world problem Recursion is an important programming principle, which can be illustrated with a real-world problem – dividing a pizza so that a certain number of friends each get at least one slice. A simple recursive solution is to start by cutting the entire pizza in two, and then – if you don’t yet have enough slices – halving the resulting pieces again and again until you do. Here’s how we might express that in pseudocode: The recursive part is the way in which the number of slices is repeatedly fed back through the doubling function, until the “escape condition” is met – that is, until we have enough slices. (If you’re worried about wastage, you can run the function again on any leftover slices, or just eat them yourself.)…

Goodbye IE, hello Spartan Windows 10 will replace the much-maligned Internet Explorer 10 with a new browser, dubbed Spartan. Microsoft has built it from the ground up to be lighter-weight and cleaner than its predecessor; new features include the ability to handwrite annotations directly onto web pages. But IE isn’t entirely dead – it will be made available for enterprises and anyone else who needs the legacy browser for apps. Windows for free Microsoft has also revealed that most Windows users will receive the new OS as a free upgrade. If you’re on Windows 7 or 8.1, it will be free; if you’re on Windows 8, you’ll need to update to version 8.1 first. Windows 10 won’t be available for devices running Windows RT – the ARM version of the…

Every election, one issue always comes up: is it time to switch to online voting? Katherine Peacock from ComRes told attendees at the PICTFOR meeting that young people in particular want the ability to vote online. “I do my banking online, which is the most sensitive thing I could do, so why can’t I vote?” she asked. A poll conducted by her firm found that 63% of people surveyed said they’d vote online if they could – a figure that’s well above actual turnout rates. On the flip side, most MPs when polled said they didn’t think it would widen participation and don’t think it can be trusted. A recent report from WebRoots Democracy echoed Peacock’s stance, pointing to the success that Estonia has had in previous elections. Others disagree.…

Fed up with spam My email address has recently become known to spammers, despite the care I take in disclosing it selectively. I receive emails from loan sharks, gambling sites, PPI-recovery firms, debt-collection businesses – all of which appear to be at the leech end of the spectrum, an impression only reinforced by their failure to include unsubscribe links. They won’t say how they get their information either; to suggest that disclosure isn’t possible is clearly dishonest. Our politicians, showing as much spine as is customary, have done nothing about it, failing to even initiate a service such as the Telephone Preference Service, ineffectual though that is. Anyone might be moved to suspect collusion! Peter B Thomas Hard driving Driverless cars won’t happen in my lifetime. Have you seen the…

Whether you’re running a personal homepage or a corporate website, Google Analytics is a powerful tool for monitoring the number of visitors to your site. It doesn’t matter if your site gets one hundred or one million impressions per month – Google will record what every single visitor gets up to, helping you to understand and improve their experience. Indeed, we use Google Analytics on the PC Pro website, to gain a real-time overview of how the site is performing, and to examine how individual pages and sections of the site are doing. If you’re new to online analytics then the Google Analytics interface can seem daunting at first. But as we reveal below, you need to learn only a few simple techniques to start working out what is or…

PRICE £500 (£600 inc VAT); from free on a £35/mth, 24mth contract from omio.com For many years now, Samsung’s smartphones have been among the best, packing in the latest technology. One thing has held them back from true greatness, however, and that’s design. With the Galaxy S6, the company has finally broken free of those shackles; the Samsung Galaxy S6 is, unequivocally, the best smartphone you can buy. It’s a stunner, framed in cool-tothe-touch aluminium; the Galaxy S6 is a beautiful phone to behold. It’s clad in Gorilla Glass 4 front and back, and the way it gleams and glistens in the light is quite entrancing. The S6 is available in White Pearl, Gold Platinum and Blue Topaz, but we think it looks best in Black Sapphire, which is effectively…

PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from dell.com (pcpro.link/248delllat) As consumer laptops have become ever more exotic, business laptops have remained defiantly monochrome, fashion-free zones. That’s no bad thing, but the trend for hybrid devices such as the Surface Pro 3 – half-tablet, half-laptop – is blurring the lines between work and play. Now, Dell has stepped into the fray with the Latitude 13 7000 Series. Combining a Core M-powered 13.3in tablet with a docking keyboard, this is a cuttingedge hybrid in sensible shoes. From the outside, the Latitude 13 7000 looks every inch the business portable. The body is cast in a dark charcoal grey, and there’s only the tiniest hint of glamour: the sombre exterior is shot through with a subtle silver sparkle, and a delicate chrome trim skirts…

AVAILABILITY Now, from the Windows 10 Store (beta) Having already furnished iPad and Android users with touch-friendly versions of its Office apps, Microsoft has finally thrown a bone to Windows tablet users. Well, sort of. Although polished versions of the Office apps are now in the iTunes App Store and Google Play, the touch versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel are only available on the Windows 10 Technical Preview and are still in beta. Still, they’re good enough to provide a feel for what Windows 10 users will have access to when the OS launches this autumn, and how they compare to the Office apps on rival platforms. Has Microsoft saved any special treats for the loyalists? Word On first inspection, there’s little difference between the Word apps for iOS…

Intel’s Atom processors were always intended to expand the potential of compact, low-cost PCs, but it was only with 2012’s Clover Trail platform that the processor really began to deliver on its promise. Today, Clover Trail’s successor, Bay Trail, brings us fully capable laptops at remarkably low prices. That’s thanks to the underlying Silvermont architecture, launched in 2013, which represents a few firsts for the Atom line-up. For a start, it’s the first Atom processor to embrace the 22nm 3D Tri-Gate technology introduced in Intel’s mainstream Core line with 2012’s Ivy Bridge processors. What’s more, it’s Intel’s first lowpower SoC (system on a chip) to have out-of-order execution (OoOE). Previously, Atom processors executed instructions in sequence from one long list, which meant that, say, execution resources could be left sitting…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from pcworld.co.uk (pcpro.link/248x200ma) While the Asus X200MA is more expensive than its stablemate, the EeeBook X205TA (see p92), the extra £25 nets you a better specification and more local storage, albeit at the expense of portability and battery life. Our review sample arrived in a business-like black, but the X200MA is also available in snazzy red, blue and white finishes. There’s some flair in the dimpled texture on the keyboard surround and the lid, and the curvy, wedge-like profile provides a good typing position. You can see signs of the X200MA’s price in the lightweight plastics, but it still feels noticeably tougher than the EeeBook. On the downside, it’s larger: 16mm wider, 7mm deeper and more than 25mm thick at the rear of the machine.…

SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £146 (£175 inc VAT) from laptops direct.co.uk (pcpro.link/248eeebook) There’s definitely something of the netbook in the new breed of Windows 8.1 with Bing devices, so it’s fitting that Asus has revived the EeeBook brand with its example. It looks surprisingly glamorous, with a matte champagne finish applied to all the plastics bar the keyboard and the frame around the screen. The feel isn’t quite so luxurious, though. While the base seems solid, the screen is flexible and flimsy. Still, at 18mm thick and weighing 950g, the EeeBook is the thinnest and lightest laptop on test. The 11.6in, 1,366 x 768 display is a big step up from what we used to see on netbooks. It’s bright, hitting a maximum of 288cd/m2, and the 414:1 contrast level is…

Downtime is a dirty word for today’s busy networks. To forestall howls of complaint from end users, support staff need to be able to spot faults and rectify them in double-quick time – and to do this they need network-monitoring software. In the past only affordable for enterprises with deep pockets, many monitoring products are now priced right for smaller businesses as well. In this month’s buyer’s guide, we look at four of the best software solutions on the market, reveal their key features and explain how to make your choice. Voyage of discovery You don’t need to tell networkmonitoring software what’s on your network – it will do this for you. Just provide the IP address ranges you want the software to peer into, along with the relevant credentials,…

PRICE 500 sensors, 1yr maintenance, £885 exc VAT from paessler.com There’s one excellent reason to go with Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor 15: it has no hidden costs. Switches, routers, Windows servers, workstations, critical apps, VMware, Hyper-V – they’re all included in the price. In addition, licensing is based purely on sensor count, so you only pay for what you want to monitor. That said, we found that sensors can get used up quickly. After running our first discovery on the lab network, PRTG swallowed up more than 300, with our 48-port HP ProCurve Gigabit switch alone using 66. Clearly, these needed culling, but that’s easy enough to do: from the main dashboard, we simply deleted those we didn’t want and returned them to our sensor pool for use elsewhere. The…

■ Connection Vouchers – what are they? Connection Vouchers are a government scheme that can contribute up to £3,000 towards the cost of getting your business a better connection to the internet. ■ Are these vouchers available to everyone? Connection Vouchers are for businesses only. Your business has to be in the right area too, according to a postcode check, and vouchers must be spent with one of the 650+ accredited partners. That may sound like it gives you a lot of choice, but it could be a sticking point if your current provider isn’t on the list. ■ Didn’t I hear that the scheme was a flop? When the scheme was introduced at the end of 2013, take-up was low – but then, at the time, the upgrades on…

KEYFACTS SCOUT7 IN A NUTSHELL Scout7 helps some of Europe’s biggest football clubs recruit players by providing a huge database of footballers from across the world, as well as allowing clubs to manage data generated by their own scouting departments. LOCATION Birmingham FOUNDED 2001 EMPLOYEES 24 WEBSITE info.scout7.com According to TV pundits, there are many factors that go into winning a football match: flair, guts, tactics, set-pieces, luck. There’s another one that probably isn’t on Robbie Savage’s list of clichés, but most definitely should be: data. In today’s football industry, decisions about which player to spend £35 million on aren’t based purely on the manager’s gut reaction or the notes jotted down in the chief scout’s little black book – they’re made after months of detailed analysis tracking thousands of…

What does the job involve? I work at Fasthosts Internet, where I’m head of operations essentially. I’m responsible for keeping the data centres powered and cooled, as well as installing and removing hardware. It sounds simple, but it’s a big job: we have two data centres, one in our main premises that has 60 racks, and another dedicated data centre with more than 170 racks spread over two floors. It’s also a constantly evolving job, as the equipment is upgraded frequently. It’s my responsibility to plan and ensure there’s enough space and power for everything. There’s a lot of maintenance involved too – I test devices such as air conditioners, uninterruptible power supplies, emergency generators and so forth. What skills do you need? There’s a lot of planning involved –…

PRICE £1,602 (£1,922 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk (pcpro.link/248Alien17) Alienware has come a long way since it first landed back in 1996. Gone are the luminous-green laptops and giant alien skulls: the new Alienware 17 R2 oozes class. With its soft-touch matte-black and gunmetal-grey case, sharp contours and chopped-off corners, it’s a beast, but a handsome one. Certainly it looks more sophisticated than rivals such as the MSI GT72 Dominator Pro. It’s slimmer too, at 37mm thick versus the MSI’s 58mm, although it’s no lighter: weighing a considerable 3.7kg, it feels rock-solid across every millimetre of the chassis. For those who still crave a bit of bling, multicoloured LEDs shine along the front edge and lid, and beneath the keyboard and touchpad. Each area can be lit in different colours –…

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PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from store.hp.com/ukstore (pcpro.link/248hpstream) Even were there nothing else to recommend the Stream 11, its eye-catching design would win it many fans. HP’s 11.6in, Windows 8.1 with Bing budget laptop comes in a choice of vibrant blue or magenta, with a chassis measuring just under 20mm thick and weighing 1.29kg. It isn’t as slim and light as the Asus EeeBook X205TA, but the plastics have been treated with a powdered matte finish that give it an expensive look. The Stream 11 feels solid and robust, and is well balanced, both on the desk and on the lap. While we’re not wholly sure about the graduated colours on the keyboard surround, there’s a sense of fun to the styling. The good news continues when you power it…

PRICE £225 (£270 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com (pcpro.link/248toshch) It’s no secret that the new Windows 8.1 with Bing laptops are a reaction to Google’s cut-price, cloud-based Chromebooks, and devices such as the Toshiba Satellite CL10-B and HP Stream 11 make a compelling case for Microsoft’s initiative. Does this mean curtains for the Chromebook, or has Google got an equally strong reply? It has, in the shape of the Toshiba Chromebook 2 CB30-B-104. It’s more expensive than the Windows 8.1 with Bing laptops, at £270 for the premium 13.3in model, but it’s easily the best Chromebook yet. The big news is the display. It’s an IPS panel with a Full HD 1080p resolution – practically unheard of in Windows laptops costing less than £500. It’s bright, at 357cd/m2, and has an…

PRICE £146 (£175 inc VAT) from laptops direct.co.uk (pcpro.link/248eeebook) Whereas most sub-£200 budget laptops provide 11.6in screens, Lenovo has decided to go big with the B50-30, delivering a slightly old-school laptop with a 15.6in screen and a built-in DVD writer. At 2.32kg, it’s substantially heavier than the other models here; while the manufacturer has done its best to slim down the laptop’s bulk, the B50-30 is still a beast to lug around. Build quality is disappointing by Lenovo’s standards. The plastics feel thin, the lid flexes alarmingly when twisted, and there’s too much give near the DVD-writer tray. The B50-30 is noisy, too, thanks to a 500GB, 5,400rpm hard disk that clatters away at the slightest provocation. On the plus side, this means more local storage than you get from…

PRICE 100 devices, £2,470 exc VAT from whatsupgold.com Ipswitch has worked hard to make WhatsUp Gold easy to use, and this can be seen in its slick dashboard. We found it simple to customise views in order to keep an eye on all our critical systems and find out the moment any went AWOL. A ribbon menu across the top of the web console provides swift access to all features, while in-context navigation means a monitored device stays selected regardless of the view or menu option selected. Views are modified easily from the built-in designer tool and its lightbox, which is useful for previewing different views and graph styles. The Standard edition (starting at £1,198) provides device discovery, mapping, SNMP monitoring, alerting and reporting. You can add a number of…

PRICE 250 elements, £3,880 exc VAT from solarwinds.com One reason we love the latest version of SolarWinds’ Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is the sheer number of features it packs in as standard. They include support for 802.11 wireless acess points (APs), VMware and Hyper-V hosts, and a handy QoE (quality of experience) tool for monitoring app traffic. Even better, NPM’s LUCID (“logical, usable, customisable, interactive and drill-down”) UI lives up to its name. Its homepage presents a summary of network activity, device status and alerts, which allowed us to quickly identify problems. You can customise each view to your own requirements: we swiftly added new columns, resized them to fit and moved monitored resources within columns. What’s more, the NPM discovery took only ten minutes to scan the lab’s…

Almost every business today relies on computer systems. That means that even a brief power outage can result in disaster, as servers go abruptly offline and data is lost. The basic advice is to invest in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) – but ensuring you’re protected isn’t as simple as plugging in an appliance. What’s the danger? According to UK Power Networks – the agency that maintains power lines in south-eastern England – Britain’s electricity network is “99.99% reliable”. If you’ve any experience of hosted services, you’ll know that this is actually a poor level of availability, representing nearly an hour’s downtime per year, or one minute each week. Of course, power outages don’t run to a predictable schedule. And as Steve Spicer, UK sales manager at Eaton Power, told…

There’s a collection of plastic skulls in the PC Pro office – they’ve become our go-to shape for testing 3D printers, and that highlights one of the main issues with the machines: unless you plan to stage a unique twist on Hamlet, there aren’t many genuinely useful things you can print with cheap plastic. That could be set to change. At CES in January 2015, 3D printer giant MakerBot revealed it was working on new composite filaments – the materials its printers splurt out to build users’ designs. In addition to brightly coloured plastics, by the end of this year MakerBot’s line-up of materials will include simulated limestone, maple wood, bronze and iron. Not only do these look better, they mimic the properties of those materials too; the metals, for…

Phone manufacturers may upgrade their handsets every year, but others are more patient: the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is receiving its first update since June 1999. HTTP/2 brings a host of new features, but the most significant will lead to faster page-load times for us all. Here’s how it works. What is HTTP/2? Another sequel in the spirit of Fast & Furious 2? In a way, yes. It’s like HTTP, but better, faster – and more secure. Okay, that’s not a great cinematic tagline, but this is a follow-up that’s worth a look. HTTP is the protocol by which links work and data is transmitted online, making it the foundation of the web as we know it. As the working group that creates these protocols noted when referring to the…

The Royal Institution (shortened to Ri by the institute in a geeky nod to Pi) has been a base of research for some of the most famous scientists and inventors in the world. Illustrious names include electron discoverer JJ Thomson and photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot – and you can see their genius in action at the Michael Faraday Museum in London. Over three floors you’ll find items from the first thermos flask to the miner’s safety lamp, plus work from the museum’s namesake: Faraday’s magnetic laboratory is displayed as it was in the 1950s. “From the odds and ends that became the first electrical transformer to the tube that told us why the sky is blue, visitors can view the actual objects Ri scientists built and used in…