Innehållsförteckning för June 2018 från PC Pro

DON’T GET JEALOUS, but I just spent two days on the Spanish coast. It was a work trip, but nothing like the ones I normally go on (think factory tours, conference centres and overcast German skies). We were still subjected to far too many presentations, but I spent about half of my time in my running kit as Fitbit encouraged us to put its latest product, the £200 Fitbit Versa (see p72), through its paces. Despite the constant threat of cardiac arrest, it’s something that was said during one of those elongated presentations that stuck with me. I’m paraphrasing here, but it was along the lines of “the world is getting fatter and we’re here to do something about it”. And it’s true. As I type these words – on…

1 Firefox silences nuisance notifications Firefox 59 has been released with a new feature that prevents websites asking users to allow notifications. The latest version of the browser also includes performance enhancements, and a revamped version of Firefox for the Amazon Fire TV. 2 Age verification plans delayed The controversial age-verification system for adult sites has been pushed back amid fears over privacy, standards and implementation. The system that was due to start in April was delayed until “later in the year”, two weeks before it was supposed to go into effect. 3 Intel issues Meltdown fixfor future chips Intel has outlined further plans to mitigate against the Meltdown and Spectre weaknesses that impacted nearly all x86 chips due to a system design flaw. Intel says its next generation of Xeon Scalable Processors…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS NEW ENTRY Dell XPS 13 9370 Ultraportable from £1,249 from dell.co.uk This 2018 update to the all-dominant Dell XPS 13 keeps tweaks to the minimum: slimmer bezels, eighth-generation Intel Core processors and the promise of even longer battery life are the key benefits. Just note that Dell has embraced USB-C ports at the expense of the old-fashioned Type-A. REVIEW Issue 284, p54 ALTERNATIVES Microsoft Surface Book 2 A unique and versatile laptop with a screen that detaches to become a tablet – the £1,999 version is our pick of the bunch. From £1,499 from microsoft.com/store REVIEW Issue 281, p48 Lenovo Yoga 920 An ultra-thin convertible from Lenovo that not only looks great, and has supreme power, but lasted for an impressive 12 hours in our battery tests. £1,350…

Barry Collins is the co-editor of bigtechquestion.com. He fears he’s just invented a way to close his favourite kebab shop. @bazzacollins I bought myself a new smartwatch recently, ahead of my old Pebble turning to stone when Fitbit finally decides to switch the servers off. I didn’t want a fitness tracker, but it seems I have little choice – the market for bog-standard smartwatches has evaporated faster than my first Friday evening pint. And so I finally plumped for the Huawei Watch 2 Sport, convinced mainly by a whopping great discount that reduced its price to £200. It’s got a battery of sensors measuring my heartbeat, cadence and whether I’m pointing north or not. I pay little or no attention to them, but they beaver away in the background, collecting…

PRICE £27 (£32 inc VAT) from thepihut.com The Raspberry Pi is a quirky thing. When first released in 2012, it was positioned as alightweight, almost disposable computer for kids to learn to program on and for hobbyists to build their electronics and robotics projects around. Aside from the green PCB, it felt less like a piece of tech and more like a toy, and it was priced like one too. That was part of its charm. Since then, though, the Raspberry Pi has evolved into a capable little machine. Now, the latest generation is here: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. The name is becoming a mouthful, but perhaps that’s appropriate for a platform that’s progressively gaining more features. Juicy upgrades The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ brings two major upgrades…

PRICE 64GB with 4G, €499 inc sales tax from huawei.com There’s no doubt what Huawei had in mind when it started work on the MediaPad M5 Pro. If Apple could win over creative professionals with the iPad Pro for £719, it could surely do the same with a slick Android tablet that undercut its rival by £200. Its key weapons are the bundled M-Pen stylus and a number of tweaks to Android that make it almost feel like a Windows laptop. When dropped into the optional keyboard case, it gives you the option of switching to a desktop-style UI running on top of Android Oreo. Just to add to that Microsoft feel, it lets you run windowed Android apps rather than full screen. Don’t dump your Windows laptop just yet,…

PRICE £421 (£505 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk If the DS218 and DS418 reflect the value side of Synology’s latest lineup, the DS918+ sits at the performance end. While those two are powered by quad-core, ARM-based Realtek processors with just 2GB of RAM, this high-end model has the quad-core Celeron J3455 and 4GB ready to go. Synology doesn’t go in for LCD displays or gleaming LED status bars, and instead simple indicators tell you what’s going on with the NAS and the hard disks. Nor does it go overboard on connectivity, with a single USB 3 port at the front and another one at the rear, along with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Yet there’s something elegant and functional about the design of the DS918+. The four caddies slide out easily and…

PRICE £258 (£309 inc VAT) from cclonline.com It’s tempting to see two-bay NAS appliances as entry-level devices, but the AS6302T proves that this doesn’t have to be the case. As well as an Apollo Lake Celeron processor and 2GB of RAM, expandable to 8GB, it packs an impressive number of inputs and outputs: one USB-C and three USB 3 Type-A ports, a 4K-capable HDMI 2 output and S/PDIF. This enables the Asustor to double as both media server and player through the Asus Portal and ever-popular Kodi app. It’s well designed, with a robust steel chassis and slide-out caddies, although the two drives have to be screwed into these. The flashing blue and green status LED bars on the front are a little exuberant, but can be toned down. It’s…

PRICE £273 (£327 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/284net It’s not often you find a NAS that’s eye-catching – the best you can usually hope for is discrete – but the ReadyNAS 422 makes a bigger first impression. It’s larger and heftier than your usual two-bay NAS with a bright two-line LED display, but it’s the cross-shaped layout of cursor controls that dominate the flap that sits front and centre of the NAS. The display provides useful info and comes in handy if you need to reset the NAS, and underneath the flap you’ll find the drive bays, featuring ingenious tool-less caddies that make fitting disks easy (although 2.5in drives will need to be screwed in). The overall build is well thought out and reassuringly robust. Sadly, you can’t use the onboard…

PRICE £229 (£275 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Effectively a two-bay version of the N4810, the Thecus N2810Pro gives you the same features and performance inside a smaller chassis. Like its larger sibling, it’s a hugely versatile NAS, particularly if you’re looking for a unit that can also work as a media streamer sitting under a monitor or TV. Hook up the NAS using the HDMI 2 or DisplayPort 1.4 video outputs, and you’re equipped for downloading, storing and sharing 1080p and 4K video files. It has the spec to play them, too, with a Celeron N3160 quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM, which is upgradable to 8GB if you’re happy to disassemble the NAS and chuck away the existing SODIMM. We’re not 100% convinced by the physical design: the N2810…

When we looked at NAS back in 2014, the big news was the development of cloud-style sync capabilities. Synology, Qnap and Netgear had imbued their high-end NAS appliances with remote access share and sync features, then backed those up with desktop apps that synced specific folders between the NAS and multiple PCs – plus mobile apps for access on the move. Effectively, you could run your own Google Drive or Dropbox from within your home or office, only with terabytes of free capacity and none of the third-party privacy implications. Since then, things have moved on. Some firms, notably Synology and Qnap, have developed Notes apps that sync text and images between your NAS and a desktop client, or allow you to edit notes stored online within your browser. WD’s…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,995 exc VAT from broadberry.co.uk Servers based on Intel’s Xeon Scalable CPUs can be pricey – but Broadberry’s CyberServe Xeon SP1-208S is great value. Powered by an eight-core 2.1GHz Xeon Silver 4110, this innovative 2U rack server offers heaps of expansion and storage potential, yet comes with a price tag that’s just the right side of two grand. There’s just one compromise to note: the Supermicro X11SPL-F motherboard is of the single socket variety, so if you want to add a second CPU down the line, you’re out of luck. However, the spacious interior allows plenty of airflow, and supports TDPs up to 165W – so you could upgrade the supplied CPU for a beefier model, perhaps even from the Gold range. It comes with a healthy…

PRICE As reviewed, £1,858 exc VAT from lenovo.com Last year Lenovo introduced no fewer than 12 new ThinkSystem servers, ranging from lightweight little 1U file servers to mighty four-and eight-way powerhouses. For cost-conscious SMEs, the dual-socket SR550 is likely to be of particular interest. Along with a completely revamped hardware design, a big part of the appeal is Lenovo’s latest XClarity server management system. As soon as we powered it on, the SR550 presented us with the new XClarity Controller (XCC) interface on its dedicated management port. The XClarity Provisioning Manager handles OS deployment with aplomb. We selected its assisted installation mode during boot up and it duly guided us through the process of setting up a RAID array and installing Windows Server 2016; in under 30 minutes we were…

PRICE Diskless, £2,308 exc VAT from span.com The RS2818RP+is the first 3U rack NAS appliance in Synology’s “Plus” series, offering cost-conscious SMEs a more affordable alternative to the meaty RS4017xs+. With 16 hot-swap SATA drive bays, it has the same enormous storage capacity as its big brother – but a few features have been trimmed to keep the cost down. For one, the dual embedded 10GBase-T ports have been ditched – but you can install your own 10GbE card in the RS2818RP+’s single PCI-Express expansion slot. We used an Emulex dual-port 10GBase-T card with no difficulties at all. You also get only one Infiniband disk shelf expansion port, and in place of the eight-core Xeon processor found in the RS4017xs+, there’s a lightweight quad-core Atom C3538. This is certainly less…

@jonhoneyball I bought a new hoover. In fact, a new Hoover, given that this was actually from the company of that name. It wasn’t expensive, at just over a hundred notes, but being the irrepressible geek that I am, I went for the one that’s Wi-Fi-attached. I wasn’t quite sure what adding my Hoover to the Wi-Fi would achieve, but I was fairly sure it wouldn’t magically turn it into a Roomba-esque device that would drive itself around the house on my behalf. Indeed, the IoT Hoover is just that – a normal upright Hoover that has some Wi-Fi bits. Now I’ll confess that I’m not the world’s greatest housekeeper, and I rely on the patience and kindness of my husband for such domestic matters. But I was intrigued to…

@happygeek Anyone who’s ever gone through the rigmarole of installing, or renewing, a SSL/TLS certificate will appreciate what a ball-ache it can be. From generating a certificate signing request (CSR) code to configuring it via cPanel or Plesk, not to mention navigating the vagaries of whether you have a text-based certificate or a CRT file to deal with, it’s all stupidly bothersome. Once up and running, though, your site is secured and visitors get the now required browser client confirmation. This all used to be optional, but a better understanding of security hygiene has led to SEO penalties for sites that aren’t properly secured. From July, the Chrome browser client will flag all unencrypted sites as insecure and display the dreaded “site not safe” message that decimates traffic. According to…

I can see my nearest bus stop from my home office window, the red Transport for London roundel peeking over the top of a fence, half obscured by a lovely tall tree. Buses trundle by every five minutes or so during peak times, so when I need a ride all I need do is shrug on my jacket and go. But that’s not good enough for tech companies: they think such buses could be “smarter”. Silicon Valley giant Uber is eyeing public transport while Citymapper has been trialling its own bus route through London – and it’s now expanding that to a ride-hail minivan service called Smart Bus. Want a ride? Open the Citymapper journey planning app and, if you’re in the catchment area, you’ll be told where to go…

Steve Cassidy In a month that saw a client’s CD drive explode, Steve ties in moon-based data, moo-based data and business networks. Find out how from p120 Stuart Andrews Not content with asking if people should dump Office 365 (see p30), Stuart also puts a dozen NAS drives to the test. Discover which suits your needs from p74 Barry Collins What is it about Reddit that makes it one of the top ten most visited sites in the world? Barry explores its potential for both good and evil on p38 Jon Honeyball A Wi-Fi Hoover sets Jon on the warpath against manufacturers releasing hardware without thinking about the supporting software. See p110…

Sony MP-CD1 Mobile Projector Pocket-sized projectors have been on the market for several years, but Sony has remained surprisingly reluctant to enter the fray – until now. The MP-CD1 Mobile Projector is truly a palm-sized gadget, around the same size as portable hard disk drive. Despite its size, it’s still capable of producing an image that’s 120in across from 3.5m away. With a brightness rating of ANSI 105 lumens and a 854 x 480 resolution, the projector is clearly no match for a serious home theatre or conference room display. Sony is instead pitching the device as an on-the-go all-rounder, capable of showing business presentations or entertainment when away from home. The 280g device has a 5,000mAh built-in battery, which Sony claims can function for two hours, although the device…

BACKGROUND INFO ON INNOVATIVE BRITISH COMPANIES KEY FACTS Smartbox is a family-owned business that makes assistive devices and software for people with disabilities. LOCATION Great Malvern, Worcestershire FOUNDED 2006 EMPLOYEES 70 WEBSITE thinksmartbox.com What are you looking for from your next tablet? A high-resolution screen? Decent battery life? A set of speakers that don’t make Netflix sound like it’s being broadcast from inside a biscuit tin? The list of requirements from Smartbox’s customers is very different. They need truly all-day battery life – not the ten hours or so that many manufacturers deem long enough to market as a “day” – because their tablet is their primary means of communication. Regular tablet battery life would mean losing their voice at 4pm every afternoon. And they don’t just need speakers that can…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. She heard her husband screaming at Alexa while writing this column, so that present was clearly a winner. @njkobie Tech loves early adopters. They shell out hundreds of pounds for anything new without pause, paying to act as beta testers. Having something before anyone else naturally has appeal, but being stingy and cynical, I would rather wait for the price to fall and the technology to prove itself. Yet I was tempted by the new Amazon Echo Dot: not only did this tiny circular puck start cheap at just £50, it was frequently discounted to under £40 — and I was desperate for a birthday present to give my husband. What a mistake. There’s no question the technology behind Alexa and its hardware…

Who would have thought that an online bookshop would end up winning the AI game? Google and Apple are playing catch-up, but Amazon’s Alexa is way out in front. The company’s almighty retail presence, and its ability to sustain deep price cuts, has helped make Alexa unstoppable. Once the Echo is settled in your home, though, what exactly do you use it for? For many of us, Alexa is little more than an interactive replacement for the radio. Yet there’s a lot more that your always-listening, ever-ready assistant can do. Here’s a guide to some of the clever ways you can customise the Echo and make the most of its extensive capabilities. 1 The name game Out of the box, your virtual assistant is called Alexa – but opening vowels…

PRICE £616 (£739 inc VAT) from samsung.com For the Galaxy S9 to stand out in an ocean of equally competent Android smartphones in 2018, Samsung knew that its camera had to be the best. To make that happen, it’s pulled out all the stops. First, by fitting it with an f/1.5 aperture camera – the brightest aperture ever seen on a smartphone – and second, by implementing dual aperture, so the camera can adapt to different light conditions. By combining this with a new 12-shot multi-frame noise reduction, Samsung hoped to maintain its position as the manufacturer of the world’s best smartphone for yet another year. On paper, it’s a winner. That aperture is a huge 28% brighter than the primary camera on last year’s already impressive Galaxy S8. At the…

PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from fitbit.com Is this the smartwatch that breaks into the mainstream? Fitbit hopes so. It’s stripped away the nonessentials from its first smartwatch, the Fitbit Ionic, to provide a cut-down price and a cut-down size. In doing so, it also hopes to attract more ladies to the smartwatch party, which until now has been dominated by men. Albeit the kind of men who glance nervously at their smartwatches and and refuse to dance. The obvious benefit is the size of the watch on the wrist. I’m used to wearing a bulky Garmin Fenix 5X, so the Versa feels ridiculously compact and lightweight in comparison. Women who are used to wearing delicate and featherlight watches may not feel quite the same, of course. Admitedly, it loses…

What do you need a NAS for? If you’re buying a NAS for business backup and file-server duties, you don’t have the same requirements in terms of processing power and connectivity as someone wanting a 4K video-streaming media server. If your needs are simple, spend less on the NAS and more on the hard disks it will use for storage. If you know you want to do more – or just plan to see what a NAS can do – then invest in the best NAS you can afford, even if that means a two-bay device. Talking of which… Two-bay or not two-bay? Don’t dismiss two-bay NAS devices. You can buy one with between 2TB and 12TB of storage built-in or choose a barebones NAS or enclosure and fit your…

PRICE £238 (£286 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Thecus pitches the N4810 as a “high value NAS” and it’s hard to disagree. This four-bay appliance includes dual Gigabit Ethernet connections, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, a quad-core Celeron N3160 processor and 4GB of RAM, yet you can still find it for under £300. For this reason alone, we are willing to cut the N4810 a certain amount of slack. General build quality is perfectly good, but the design isn’t as stylish or as effective at noise dampening as Synology’s, and the lockable slide-in caddies feel rougher sliding in and out. Also, the pins on the clips that hold the drives in place are tricky to fit into the relevant holes. On the plus side, remove the casing and you can easily…

PRICE £450 (£540 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk Asustor’s four-bay NAS won our previous NAS Labs test and is still a contender nearly one year on, combining a powerful spec with some extremely versatile software. The move up from the two-bay AS6302T takes you from the dual-core Celeron J3355 to a quad-core J3455, while RAM leaps from 2GB to 8GB. This gives you scope to run a more demanding set of apps, including virtual servers through VirtualBox and a full Linux desktop with Asus’s Linux Center app. Connect a display to the HDMI port, and a mouse and keyboard via USB, and your NAS can moonlight as a working PC. Moving up the Asustor lineup also nets you a two-line LCD status display along with four navigation buttons, enabling you to…

PRICE £202 (£242 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/284ds2 Where there used to be a gulf in capabilities between your basic, budget two-bay NAS and the all-singing, all-dancing appliances, it’s one that’s being bridged by models such as the Synology DS218. £250 buys you a speedy two-bay NAS with all the features of Synology’s DSM operating system plus enough performance to take advantage. The design is classic Synology, with the two tool-less bays protected by a nicely bevelled matte black plastic chassis and the drive bays covered by a curved magnetic flap. With the drives removed you can access an additional SODIMM slot, enabling you to add a further 4GB to the 2GB of installed RAM. It’s a shame that you can’t connect this quiet NAS to a TV and use it…

If you opt for a barebones NAS enclosure, you still have to fill the appliance with drives. This doesn’t necessarily mean filling a four-bay unit – you can start with two drives in a RAID1 configuration and add more – but you are looking at an investment of between £100 and £1,600, with the latter price assuming your NAS can accommodate four 12TB drives. While you can fill a NAS with standard desktop drives, we recommend resisting this approach. Desktop drives are built for the needs of desktop applications and a single user over an average working day; they aren’t designed for 24/7 activity with multiple users and workloads involving many simultaneous read/write operations. Specialist NAS drives are optimised for these conditions and workloads, prioritise resilience over raw throughput and…

Like a fine cheese, the NAS market has matured nicely over the past few years. Historically, NAS drives were the preserve of techies and IT managers alone, but they are now commodities: open to all and, if you buy the right one, straightforward to use. At the same time, they have become more powerful. With their quad-core Celeron processors and 4GB to 8GB of RAM, there’s not much to differentiate a mid-range NAS from an entry-level server. And all these appliances now run the same kind of software: a multi-window GUI with a built-in app store, offering a broadly similar range of apps. How, then, do you differentiate between them? Not in terms of pure performance. When it comes to large, sequential transfers you’re more likely to hit the limits…

PRICE As reviewed (Smart Value Flexi), £5,489 exc VAT from dell.co.uk Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R540 aims to strike the right balance of value and performance for growing businesses. To that end, this dual-CPU server targets a wide range of apps, including messaging, video surveillance, software-defined storage and data backup. To ensure it can handle those last two tasks with ease, it also comes with support for the latest 12TB hard disks. The price listed above may not seem like much of a value proposition, but then the specification we tested includes a tasty pair of 16-core Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs. For many businesses that’s overkill, and you can save a lot of money by choosing a more modest processor specification. Be warned though: if you want to move upwards, your…

Administrative tasks are an inescapable fact of business life, but they’re also the cause of a lot of wasted time and potential. It makes no sense to hire a talented, experienced employee and then have them spend half their days doing menial tasks. The element of distraction can be destructive too. If workers need to instantly respond to incoming messages and work requests, their work will suffer. Researchers at George Mason University found that even brief distractions can significantly affect the quality of a person’s work. In an experiment, they gave students a fixed amount of time to write an essay, and interrupted half of them for just one minute. In every case, the uninterrupted students turned in a better, longer essay than those who had been distracted. Similarly, Gloria…

@PaulOckenden Following on from my GDPR-themed column two months ago, readers got in touch to ask about the various “rights” they’ve read about in the press – “the right to be forgotten”, for example – and how these relate to the new data-processing principles. It’s actually the same thing. Whether you look at the new regulation from the point of view of the data processor, as I did last time, or the individual, as I’m about to do here, the underlying rules are identical. We’re simply coming at things from a different angle. This alternative view of GDPR is worthwhile, however, because it exposes nuances that aren’t obvious when simply looking at the data-processing principles. Much like those principles, the individual’s rights can be broken down into a number of…

@stardotpro For only the second time in my entire career, I’ve seen what looks remarkably like a case of spontaneous computer combustion. As with the previous incident, this was a desktop PC displaying a narrow swath of extreme heat damage starting from the central connectors on a standard SATA power plug. Unlike my last experience, the owner of this machine was convinced his device wasn’t driving something with a heavy power draw. Its only external connection was to a CD drive, which looked clean and tidy to me. He’d followed the wisps of black smoke to the offending PC – that being the first sign of trouble. In common with most office PCs these days, the machine wasn’t busy at the time. It should have been in a sleep state,…

BUILDING BETTER BATTERIES will take years – but our smartphones will run out in hours. In the meantime, Dr Tazdin Amietszajew has your back. Rather than invent a completely new battery – with the materials science, chemical compounds and threat of explosion that involves – the researcher at the University of Warwick and his colleagues have instead created sensors to embed in existing battery designs. These let manufacturers know exactly how far we can push those technologies for faster charge times and more capacity. Right now, the threat of overheating means that we don’t push batteries very hard, but better data means we can expand their capabilities without dangerous consequences. For us, that means a smartphone or laptop that lasts longer and charges faster – without pesky explosions. PC Pro…

LABS 16 smart speakers We put all the available smart speakers through their paces in the UK’s most in-depth tests. FREE GIFT Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and claim a free Hama flashlight while stocks last. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Kindle Fire. See p108 for details. Subscribe today FEATURES Digital? Over my dead body! You might think the digital takeover is complete, but we meet the refuseniks who still cling to analogue cameras, board games and more. Antivirus: Do you still need it? We explore the intelligent new security features in Windows 10 and Android – and discover how threats can still slip through the net. RIP-OFF Tech’s killer cons From uninvited mobile games to ridiculous support line costs, we…

Leaving the DSM isn’t the only knock-on effect that the tech industry will feel from Brexit. One subject sits right at the top of the list of concerns for British tech companies: how freely will the skilled workers needed by industry be able to move between the UK and our EU neighbours? “People are still a huge issue, because we still don’t know what the migration landscape will be like or where there are opportunities,” said Jeremy Lilley of TechUK. “Easy access to people and the ability to move people around Europe if you’re operating from the UK as your European hub – that’s going to be an important thing.” Another big factor for cross-border trade is the reclaiming of VAT, an issue that is yet to be sorted. It’s…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology Darien Graham-Smith is PC Pro’s associate editor. He used to dream of being a hacker – now he’s just a hack. @dariengs I’ve been on the security beat at PC Pro for a good few years now. Indeed, when I first came to the wonderful world of antivirus, Windows didn’t have any sort of built-in protection, and a great many people simply went without. “As long as you’re careful and don’t visit dodgy sites, there’s nothing to worry about,” ran the received wisdom – but it was entirely untrue. As I’ve argued in features over the years, antivirus software was necessary then, and it’s necessary now. The thing is, you have to trust your chosen security suite.…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He won’t be enabling automatic updates once CRISPR patches become available. When I was eight or nine, one of my Christmas presents was an illustrated book called How And Why It Works, which explained everything from airliners to oil-wells and telescopes. It immediately became my favourite. My course in life was set there and then. I wanted to know how everything works – including you and me – so I became a biochemist and then, through a series of flukes, a computer nerd. Books can still have that sort of effect on me, though rarely nowadays, and when one does I occasionally write about it here. The last time it happened was in August 2016 when Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean…

June 7 2017 was a watershed date for the UK. It was the day the National Grid reported that renewable sources provided 50.7% of the UK’s energy needs, the first time renewables had provided more than half of our power. If this trajectory continues, what does it mean for the wider energy infrastructure? With so much power potentially available, how can we store it until we need it? The day that renewables delivered half of our energy needs was particularly sunny and windy – something that we can’t always rely upon. As we race to develop more electric vehicles, alongside low-cost renewable-energy sources, the question is if we have the energy-storage infrastructure to collect and deliver this resource when we need it. The US Energy Department is already funding 75…

PRICE As reviewed, £2,481 (£2,977 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk The Precision 5820 is Dell’s latest single-socket workstation for content creators. It supports Xeon processors up to 18 cores, dual Nvidia or AMD professional graphics, up to six hard drives, and various flavours of Linux as well as Windows. That doesn’t mean you have to pay a fortune. Our review unit features the basic 4GHz Xeon W-2125, a quad-core chip that supports Hyper-Threading for improved rendering abilities. Even though it’s near the bottom of Intel’s Xeon-W range, it offers high single-core frequencies - it Turbo Boosts up to 4.5GHz - so it can cope with modelling too. Dell’s choice of 16GB 2,666MHz DDR4 ECC memory is a reasonable starter amount, but I was surprised to see it supplied as two 8GB DIMMs.…

PRICE £429 (£515 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/284qnap The Qnap TS-453Be is a new variant of the TS-453B we reviewed in last year’s NAS group test, where we praised it for its versatility and expandability but were put off by the price. This year’s model ditches a few consumer-oriented features of the old one, including the bundled remote control, USB-C port, SD card slot and the titchy two-line OLED display. Luckily, it still has the same Celeron J3455 processor, along with 4GB of RAM, and retains one big advantage over rivals: expansion potential through an internal PCI-Express slot. Using the latter, you can install a QM2 expansion card with a 10GbE (10 Gigabit Ethernet) port and an M.2 SSD slot to boost performance with a high-speed cache. Alternatively, you could fit…

PRICE £254 (£305 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/284wd1 Take note of that business-like demeanour. While other NAS units promote themselves as the Swiss Army knife of storage or the ultimate media machine, the My Cloud EX4100 is focused on SME-friendly backup and storage, plus cloud-like remote access features. Once you’ve signed up to the My Cloud service you can access your shared folders from anywhere through a browser, or use the WDSync applet to sync files and folders between your computer and the NAS. The EX4100 will work with a small team of users and provide a Dropbox-like service. Meanwhile, its WD SmartWare Pro software can handle backup across the team’s PCs. Be aware of what you’re missing out on: this isn’t the NAS for enthusiasts. It works as a simple…

PRICE 4TB, £523 (£627 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/284buff Make no mistake: this NAS means business. Relatively compact but impressively heavy, the 5210DN looks purpose-built for the corporate data centre, with the two drive bays concealed beneath a locking panel complete with tough hexagonal grille. There’s an enormous 8cm fan at the back of the unit, and this kicks in when the appliance is turned on with a ferocious roar. It’s much quieter in general operation, but still far from the most unobtrusive unit in this test. It’s also the sole unit that you can only buy with drives pre-installed, but you can still replace the drives yourself. It’s not the easiest NAS to set up and configure. Forget automatic discovery – you have to browse to a device-specific URL and…

PRICE £313 (£376 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/284ds4 The four-bay version of the DS218, the DS418, sees Synology bring high-end features to an affordable four-bay NAS. This involves a few compromises here and there, with fairly basic connectivity, a simple design and a Realtek quad-core processor instead of the more powerful Intel Celeron sported by costlier rivals – but if you’re more interested in server features than media playback, the DS418 makes a compelling proposition. Synology is still a leader when it comes to physical design, and the DS418 has the elegant, tough plastic chassis and simple slide-out caddies you’d expect from the brand, with a neat, tool-less clip system that makes it easy to fill all four bays with drives in minutes. Simple LED indicators cover power, network and drive…

PRICE £117 (£140 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/284ex2 With the My Cloud EX2 Ultra, Western Digital isn’t targeting those who want to run virtual servers or a website, but those needing fast, centralised storage for files and media. Bear this in mind, and the EX2 Ultra has a lot going for it, particularly when it comes to ease-of-setup and everyday use. Even installing the drives is a simple job – just push the catch to open the flap, unscrew the lid and slide your 3.5in drives into place. Once that’s done, the browser-based configuration takes you through setting up your RAID and connecting the NAS drive to a My Cloud account. Cleverly, it encourages using part of the hard disks in a RAID1 configuration to cover resilience and the rest spanned,…

PRICE As reviewed, £4,390 exc VAT from fujitsu.com Fujitsu’s Server Primergy RX2540 M4 is ideal for companies with big plans for expansion. Our test system came with a sensible, SMB-friendly specification – but when the time comes to upgrade, it will support any Xeon Scalable processor with a TDP up to 205W – which takes you to the very top of the Platinum range. It can also be loaded up with a huge 3TB of DDR4 memory, and offers up to eight PCI Express slots, with support for a maximum of 28 SFF drives. For now, though, let’s focus on what you get for your £4,390 – because that’s still a formidable specification, including a ten-core 2.2GHz Xeon Silver 4114 with room for a second CPU, 16GB of DDR4 memory…

PRICE £189 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Brother recently launched a large-scale assault on the SoHo and small-business printing markets, with a new range of ten affordable mono laser and multifunction printers. The MFC-L2750DW sits at the top of the MFP family, with 4-in-1 print, scan, copy and fax functions, double-sided printing, 34ppm print speeds and connection options galore – yet it costs just £189. Those connection options include USB 2 and both Ethernet and 802.111n wireless (as usual you can’t use both at once). For direct printing from mobile devices there’s also AirPrint and WiFi Direct, plus NFC for tap-to-print connections. There’s even support for scanning to and printing from cloud services including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. Getting set up was a breeze: the installer automatically discovered the printer…

Add photos directly to Trello pcpro.link/284ifttt1 If you manage team projects with Trello, this applet makes it easy to share captured whiteboards and documents with your colleagues. You’ll need to give it access to your Trello account, then select the board you want to add the photos to. By default, it adds them to a list called “DO Camera”, but we’ve created a dedicated list called “Photos”. To choose which list to send your images to, click the cog at the top of the IFTTT card and enter it into the List Name box. You can also decide whether to tag other board users, specify where the photo should appear in the list, and add useful metadata such as where the image was shot. Now to get our photos into…

It was Steve Jobs who once estimated that major advances in computing happen about once every ten years. This was prescient, because when he said it the whole business was only three decades old – and he was right. Initially, everybody leased their computers, not just because the price tags were high, but because everyone was at the bleeding edge, and neither manufacturers nor users had any way of costing simple repairs. Better to share the ownership a bit and, therefore, the repair responsibility. Yet, here we are in the ninth decade of computing, and the underlying reasons for leasing are under attack. Some devices that might seem ideal for leasing turn out to have product lifecycles shorter than the accepted minimum lifetime of a lease. This can produce distorted…

Lee and his wife run Inspiration Computers, which has been supporting home users for 15 years in Kirkheaton, just outside Huddersfield @userfriendlypc “Demand for super-sleek machines means solid backplates, no handy hatches and an obstacle course of traps” If you’re the “techno-hero” for your friends and family, I salute you. Our business has been providing techno-hero services to home users since 2003 and we’re needed now more than ever. I’m not using the term as a self-aggrandising label, but it’s the kind of compliment given after rescuing customers from tech snares, scams and other nonsense. Obviously, customers do ridiculous things – such as sawing the end off a stick of DDR RAM to fit it into a laptop. However, most make rational assumptions with the vague information given by tech…

So the whole problem of Facebook and data, specifically Cambridge Analytica, has exploded onto the news. Commentators are “shocked”, “appalled” and “deeply worried”. MPs demand to have Mr Zuckerberg himself come to grovel in front of them. Mrs Williams of 55 Acacia Gardens, Wimbledon, is now scared to do her weekly online shopping at John Lewis and Ocado, in case her proclivity for the occasional bottle of gin “just as a pre-dinner drinkie, dear” marks her out as a raving alcoholic. It’s hard to know where to start. Was this predictable? Absolutely, yes – and we have been predicting such an incident for years. Was it avoidable? Absolutely, yes. Is Facebook complicit in this? Without a doubt. Will it happen again? Of course. Is Facebook in trouble over this? Hopefully,…