Table of contents for March 2017 in PC Pro

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO WE SCREECHED TO A HALT. “Excuse me?” The man looked up, surprised to hear the beseeching voice of a 12-year-old boy disturb his early evening walk. “We’re trying to find the Hollywood Bowl. We’re lost.” Our potential saviour sucked his teeth, making me wonder if he was a plumber on his way home from work. “You’re going the wrong way. Got to turn round, then left at the big lights.” One minute later, having annoyed a bus driver by hovering in the wrong lane for too long, we were facing the right direction and zooming towards the Bowl. We got there a mere 20 minutes late, my Dad Taxi reputation in tatters. It had been an odd collection of events to bring us to such a terrible situation.…

1 Miraimalware downs ISP customers Avariant of Io T malware,Mirai,has been blamed for attacks on serversat UKISP Talk Talk and the PostOffice,knocking a combined 500,000users offline.Following a similar attack that left near-1million German users without web access,the UKISPs said no personal data was atrisk,but the botnet had targeted users’ routers. 2 Fitbit picksup beached Pebble Parts of smartwatch firm Pebble have been sold to Fitbit for around $40m. The company has stopped shipping hardware, cancelled warranties and may end support for existing hardware, angering its Kickstarter backers. 3 Google takes wraps off Io TOS GooglehasannouncedAndroidThings, aversionoftheOSdesignedforlowendhardware– upgradingaproject previouslycalledBrillo.Itshouldenable developerstobuildsmartdevicesusing AndroidAPIsandGoogleServices,with supportforIntel’sEdison,theRaspberry Pi3andNXPPico.Italso aimstoresolvesome oftheglaringIoT securityissues. 4 Facebook eyes China with censoring software Facebook has developed a tool that could be used to pre-filter content in China. Facebook, which said it…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO GOVERNMENT PLANS to block porn sites that don’t use age verification or include “non-conventional” sex acts have been branded unworkable and potentially dangerous. As part of the Digital Economy Act, the government has announced amendments that would see its regulator, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), able to demand that ISPs block sites. Tech industry experts and rights activists claim the amendments would be expensive and unlikely to achieve their goals. “It looks like they are letting the BBFC dictate to ISPs that they’ve got to block access to material if the BBFC wants, but with very little practical thought as to how the hell you’d actually do that – or how pointless it would be,” said Adrian Kennard, who runs the ISP Andrews & Arnold. “The…

@PCPRO FAC E B O O K .C O M / P C P R O PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 13in ultraportable from £899 dell.co.uk We already loved the Dell XPS 13, but this update makes it irresistible. Skylake CPUs, fly design is as amazing as ever. It’s the ultraportable we’ve been waiting for. super-fast SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 all help it fl y through tasks, and the REVIEW Issue 257, p64 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga A dream laptop that turns into a 14in tablet with the swivel of a keyboard – yet it still weighs under 1.3kg. Simply beautiful design from Lenovo. From £1,230; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW Issue 263, p56 Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2016) The high price stops it from taking Dell’s top spot, but a nine-hour battery…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO @bazzacollins “What’s he coming on, the slow boat to China?” That was my nan’s flippant remark, every time grandad failed to get off the sofa promptly enough to run her latest errand. It’s a shame my nan never ordered a Lenovo laptop, because her put-down wouldn’t have been too far from the truth. “Ships in seven business days,” boasted the Lenovo website when I ordered a new X1 Yoga recently. What I failed to notice in Lenovo’s small print was that “ships” means “leaves the factory”; not “arrives at your door”. And when that factory’s in Kunshan, China, the distinction isn’t trivial. Thanks to the wonder of UPS tracking, I could follow my laptop as it embarked upon its world tour. After leaving Kunshan before lunch on 13…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Windows 10 is racing towards its fourth major update in less than two years, but the forthcoming release is the first to be themed. The Creators Update – officially denied a possessive apostrophe to irritate grammar pedants everywhere – isn’t a meaningless label. It’s indicative of a well-planned coming together of operating system and new hardware with features specifically designed for “creatives”. The new features are as impressive as they are unexpected. A complete revamp of the Paint app that genuinely makes 3D art accessible to all and a mysterious new music creation app are amongst the highlights. These, allied with a set of new hardware announcements (see boxout on p45), perhaps signal that Microsoft’s hardware and software divisions are finally starting to work in harmony. Aside from…

Paragon Partition Manager 15 Home, included with the software download version of this issue (see p66), simplifies many drive management tasks. Its primary role is to create, merge and resize existing partitions, but it also includes powerful hard disk backup features in case of emergency. It’s much easier than wrestling with the command line, and since there’s less chance of mistakes, there’s less risk to your data too. On these pages, we’ll show how to perform two of the most important and common drive management tasks: creating a complete backup and repartitioning a new drive. Partition Manager 15 supports all versions of Windows from XP SP3 onwards, including Windows 10. And it will work with a huge range of disk formats, including FAT16 and FAT32 and all recent versions of…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £458 (£549 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Laptop makers are lining up to shoot down Microsoft’s Surface tablets, with the Asus Transformer Mini locking the Surface 1.44GHz quad-core Atom processor. 3 in its targets, right down to its It’s littered with ports. You’ll find micro-USB for charging the device, mini-HDMI, USB 3, microSD ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack – all you need for everyday usage. Around the back, a Surface-style kickstand converts the tablet into a laptop. I would have liked to see rubber edges around the kickstand, to prevent it from sliding around, but had no problems using it either on my lap or on a wooden desk. Where it suffers compared to the Surface is build quality: it feels flimsy. Then again, and unlike the…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £209 (£251 inc VAT) from cclonline.com Last month (see issue 268, p77) we reviewed Samsung’s new 960 Pro drives and concluded they were amazingly fast, but overkill for most people, especially for the price. Well, Samsung’s 960 Evo has now arrived to provide a similar level of performance for a far more sensible price – and I can forestall any speculation by saying it’s a winning combination. With a few caveats. Like the 960 Pro family, the 960 Evo drives use the M.2 NVMe specification. They’re once again small, black and covered by two smart-looking stickers (the latter aren’t just there for show; they help with thermal performance too). You also benefit from the same 256-bit AES encryption – you can portion off a section of the…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 64GB, £333 (£399 inc VAT) from oneplus.net The OnePlus 3 set a new standard for reasonably priced smartphones when it was launched in June 2016. Offering an incredible combination of premium specifications and a £329 price, it carved out a whole new category; it was so good it had no close rivals. Now, however, the OnePlus is ending the honeymoon with the OnePlus 3T, a replacement flagship bigger battery and, on paper, a vastly improved front camera – but also a much higher price. smartphone with a faster processor, a So what’s new? From a physical perspective, hardly anything. Like the “S” versions of Apple’s iPhones, all the important improvements have taken place beneath the surface. That’s fine by me: I liked the design of the OnePlus…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO FreeAgentLimitedCompany PRICE £29 (£35 inc VAT) per month, from freeagent.com FreeAgent is a cloud-based bookkeeping package designed to make accounting simple for small businesses. We reviewed the Limited Company edition at £35 a month, which covers your whole company with no limit on the number of users. Setup was as easy as promised. With the help of a wizard-based routine to input all the necessary company details, we were up and running within about 30 minutes. We uploaded our historical transactions and our contacts as CSV files with no problem at all. The only snag was uploading a bank statement as a CSV, with the initial file rejected due to formatting. In the end, we opened it up in Notepad and formatted it manually. Once uploaded, though, reconciliation…

It’s long been possible to physically connect multiple graphics cards together to help with rendering. AMD’s proprietary technology that enables this is called CrossFire, while Nvidia’s approach is called Scalable Link Interface (SLI). Historically, however, multi-GPU computing has been a bit of a pain: only certain cards have supported it, and to keep everything in sync you’ve needed to use identical GPUs. Nvidia has also required you to clip on a physical connector to join your cards together. This technology is still supported – see our feature table for details of which cards support it. With DirectX 12, however, a better way has arrived. A feature called “explicit multi-GPU” puts control in the hands of the programmer, allowing the game itself to divide up work across all available GPUs as…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Stretch your budget to the £100 mark and you’re entering the realm of “proper” graphics cards, capable of delivering impressive visual experiences. The AMD Radeon RX 460 (?????, £99) is a big step up from the company’s budget R7 models. Compared to the R7 250, the stream processor count has more than doubled, to 896 individual cores. The memory allocation is up too, to 2GB of GDDR5 as standard. We tested a PowerColor “Red Dragon” card, but other brands will offer identical specifications. The RX range also supports Direct3D feature level 12, rather than the 11_1 level of the R7 series. That bespeaks a GPU that’s designed to keep up with the latest technologies, and so it proved in our tests, where the RX 460 made current DirectX…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO When choosing a new graphics card, you may have given little thought to the idea of virtual-reality gaming. After all, we’ve yet to see an essential VR game: it’s easy to imagine that you’ll be onto your next graphics card before virtual gaming becomes relevant. But the tipping point may come sooner than you think. The PSVR accessory for the PlayStation 4 was a big hit at Christmas, bringing the idea of VR into the mainstream. For PC gamers, the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets offer a mature and effective VR experience. And while A-list games are still the missing link, the catalogue is growing. Right now on Steam you’ll find dozens of fun VR games and experiences. It may take only one or two major releases…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO If your IT department supports more than a handful of users, it quickly becomes very inefficient to have staff personally visiting users every time they have a problem with their PC. But trying to troubleshoot issues over the telephone is also a non-starter; anyone who’s attempted this knows how frustrating and time-consuming it can be. What’s needed is a troubleshooting solution that can instantly put your staff in front of the user’s workstation. Remote support software allows technicians to remotely connect to a recalcitrant system, view its screen, see precisely what the problem is and fix it in double-quick time. Moreover, these solutions aren’t restricted to local networks. With the appropriate software in place, you can extend your support umbrella to cover remote offices and even customer sites…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE Five technicians, £1,130 exc VAT from solarwinds.com DameWare Remote Support is part of SolarWinds’ portfolio of network management products, and for a medium-sized organisation it could be excellent value. The price covers unlimited client systems, being based instead on the number of technicians accessing the management console. It took us barely five minutes to get the Remote Support console set up on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host. The console presents a simple Windows Explorer-style interface, with the left-hand pane showing Active Directory domains and workgroups discovered on the local network As for client-side installation, there is none: DameWare doesn’t need to deploy its own agents, instead relying on native technologies. You might imagine that this would limit its capabilities, but selecting a client brings up a…

“Unified communications has been the talk of computing for years, but what does it actually mean for the average business?” asks Julien St John-Dennis, chief marketing officer of Gradwell – an established provider of IP telephony in the UK, having started in 1998. “Businesses must consider the wider context of the shift to the cloud to ensure unified comms are implemented in a way that matches the functionality they actually need.” In addition, Dennis highlights the necessity of assessing the impact of bandwidth requirements. “You must ensure that bandwidth is both symmetrical and scalable,” he said. “Otherwise, you won’t realise the full benefits of cloud-based unified communications, particularly the integration of voice into CRM and other vertical applications; these are major growth areas not only for Gradwell, but for businesses…

EXPERT ADVICE FROM OUR PANEL OF PROFESSIONALS It’s been a very bitty month – a strong feeling of running hard to stand still. Too many things broke, or were found to be in alpha when they claimed to be late beta. A truly extraordinary amount of time spent trying to hunt down weird and unstable changes in user interfaces. It really doesn’t help when the development team is so close to its project that they’re blind to the issues. I see this myself. When generating large sheets of Excel tables containing thousands of results in the lab, it’s all too easy to succumb to “Excel blindness”, where way too many errors are missed simply because you don’t see them. The defaults in Excel don’t help, either. If you have cells…

Bitcoin is the best-known digital currency, but it isn’t the only option. Startup Colu is set to launch its own version in the UK: a digital local currency for Liverpool and Camden in London. Local currencies are a secondary form of cash that can only be used in a specific area, often offering a discount. They run alongside a national currency, and are frequently created to encourage shopping at smaller retailers or with local companies – examples include the Brixton and Bristol Pound. “Colu has created an app-based platform that provides digital, local currencies,” explained Amos Meiri, CEO of the Israeli startup. “The mobile app, downloaded by consumers, acts as a conduit between users and merchants which can quickly and securely receive and send direct payments, based on secure blockchain…

Graphene is going to change the world, but making it work was a sticky problem; it was too difficult to separate the wonder material into individual, atom-thin pieces. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both working at the University of Manchester, famously picked up a Nobel prize for finding a solution – isolating graphene with a standard piece of sticky tape. Now you, too, can find out about the world’s first two-dimensional material at the Museum of Science and Industry, in an exhibition dedicated to the “wonder material”. Scientists and engineers alike believe that the incredibly strong, atom-thick carbon could be used for anything from transparent touchscreens to super-light vehicles and tiny electronics. Of course, being an atom thick means it’s hard to actually see graphene, so while the museum has…

Still making software the old-fashioned way? Carl explains why he’s so confident in Agile he founded a new company. See p116 Politicians have been lying since the Trojan War, says Dick on p26, but recent events show the power of social media is spiralling out of control Fed up of pop-up windows and unwanted software downloads? Stuart provides practical advice on fighting the PC invaders from p32 While the “make your own computer” kit from Kano that Gareth reviews on p65 isn’t quite as DIY as he’d like, it still has much to offer curious children…

When Windows RT was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2011, then-CEO Steve Ballmer promised that the operating system would “be everywhere, on every kind of device, without compromise”. Alas, it turned out to be on virtually no devices and with plenty of compromises. Soon after RT devices went on sale in late 2012, reports emerged of high return rates at retailers, as customers not only struggled to get to grips with the new Modern interface, but failed to realise that their new “Windows” tablet couldn’t run traditional Windows software. Microsoft promised its own training prior to the launch of Windows 8 and RT to ensure that they could help customers understand the difference between the two. If it took that long to explain it to staff, little store…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO BACKGROUND INFO ON INNOVATIVE BRITISH COMPANIES KEYFACTS Darktrace is a British IT security firm that sells businesses its Enterprise Immune System, software that detects threats purely by learning to observe unusual behaviour on the network. LOCATION Cambridge, UK, and many offices around the world FOUNDED 2013 EMPLOYEES 330 WEBSITE darktrace.com If Darktrace had been around when Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous speech about the threats to America, he might have been able to cross one category of risk off his list: the unknown unknowns. Darktrace was set up to answer a simple question: how do you know if your company is secure? The firm’s director of technology, Dave Palmer, remembers sitting in meetings with previous employers such as MI5 and GCHQ, and being asked to answer…

@njkobie The kids are alright, but they’re not all that when it comes to technology. This isn’t the story you’ll hear from tech leaders, however, who are inexplicably enamoured by younger generations. For a decade, I’ve been hearing CEOs gush about what they’ve learned from young staff members or children, lamenting their own inability to master social tools – first it was Facebook, then Snapchat, and who knows what app kids will be into next. At a conference a few weeks back, a keynote speaker told the gathered luminaries of the telco world that if they wanted to know about the next big thing in IT, they should bypass even so-called millennials, who are apparently too old, and ask the advice of newer models – preferably eight-year-old children, if they…

I have come across what could be a big problem for less technically-minded users getting started with connected devices and the IoT (Internet of Things). Having recently switched ISP, I installed a new Wi-Fi router, waited for it to auto-install and got my tablet online. Happy that all was okay, I then did the same with my wife’s tablet, my phone and the first PC. It was only after repeating the process again and again – with two further laptops – that I realised I should instead have logged into the router and configured it like the old one. Two Chromecasts, two CCTV cameras, a Kindle, a Wi-Fi-enabled digital camera, Slingbox, central heating controller, the final PC and two cups of coffee later (thank goodness the kettle wasn’t Wi-Fi-enabled), I…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Auto-playing adverts, intrusive feedback requests, messages that prompt you to update unwanted software – it can often feel like your PC is under siege. In theory, we’re supposed to have more control of our systems and privacy than ever before, but in practice all those control panels and opt-out options count for nothing when software developers and web advertisers keep finding new ways to circumvent them. In fact, some of the biggest names in PC manufacturing, security and software – even Microsoft itself – seem hell-bent on running roughshod over our preferences and invading our PC screens. It’s time to take our PCs back. On the following pages, you’ll find not only details of the most intrusive PC invaders but also simple, practical advice on how to stop…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Internet hotspots, delivery drop-off points, mini-libraries: people have tried to find all manner of alternative uses for the thousands of rusting, graffiti-stained phone boxes on Britain’s street corners. Yet, few people have ever looked at the 3ft x 3ft boxes and thought: that will make a terrific office. That’s exactly what’s happened to the box outside the The Mitre pub on Greenwich High Road in London, where you’ll find the second high-street store of mobile repair business, Lovefone, owned by Rob Kerr. “The pub’s really nice, and they let our repair guy use the toilet,” Kerr tells me, neglecting to mention the second more obvious benefit of a mobile repair shop just outside a pub: plenty of business from customers who’ve had their grip loosened by an afternoon…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO The biggest, best, most exciting products in tech – tested, evaluated and reviewed PRICE £1,065 from ebuyer.com The Asus ZenBook range has always been – let’s put it politely – a homage to Apple’s MacBook Air. Nowadays, though, that brand is no longer a byword for thin-and-light portability, so the new ZenBook 3 takes its inspiration instead from the 12in MacBook. If the MacBook is the target, the ZenBook 3 certainly hits the mark. Look past the brushed swirl on its aluminium-alloy lid and you could almost get the two laptops mixed up. Even the colour options are eerily familiar. Alongside the distinctive Royal Blue trim, as pictured above, the ZenBook 3 can be ordered in a pale Quartz Grey or the ever more popular Rose Gold. The…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Lenovo Yoga Book is unlike any laptop we’ve seen before. frame comes clad in elegant black magnesium alloy, with a tasteful industrial-styled hinge. It weighs only 690g, yet it’s a fully featured Windows 10 laptop, with a bright 10.1in 1,920 x 1,200 IPS touchscreen. The impossibly slim 9.6mm Except, when I say it’s unlike any laptop we’ve seen before, that isn’t strictly accurate. Lenovo also makes an Android version of the Yoga Book, which impressed us last month (see issue 268, p58). It also shares the Android edition’s most distinctive feature: the futuristic “Halo” keyboard, which shines out of a flat touch-sensitive surface. It’s this that allows the Yoga Book to be so seductively thin, and it comes with a…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from kano.me Kano, an education-focused company, had a huge hit on Kickstarter with its original Computer Kit, promising to provide everything you could need to “build your computer bit-by-bit”. The truth is somewhat different. Inside this, Kano’s second Computer Kit Bundle, you’ll find that the computer you’re “building” is actually a fully assembled Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computer, needing only power and its microSD card to get up and running. The bundled full-colour manual - which Kano dubs a “story book” in keeping with its desire to engage children - walks you through the “building” process in simple terms and clear illustrations. Insert the microSD card, snap together the two halves of the included case, and then the most daunting step: connect the…

PRICE £829 (£995 inc VAT) from selfridges.com Mention the name Bang & Olufsen and the first thing that springs to mind are those achingly expensive lifestyle systems from the 1980s – vertically wall-mounted CD players, all finished in piano black and brushed aluminium, with smoothly motordriven tempered glass doors. This was the high-end audio system of choice, and a long way out of reach for the cash-strapped teenager I then was. Step forward 30-odd years and Bang & Olufsen is still ploughing the same esoteric furrow. The days of the vertical CD player are long gone, however, and the company’s trademark product is now the exotic, cone-shaped 360-degree speaker; the BeoSound 1 brings that technology to the realm of portable wireless speakers. So, what do you get for your thousand…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Graphics cards are as relevant today as they’ve ever been. To be sure, a discrete GPU is no longer a technical necessity. Most modern CPUs have enough builtin graphical power to handle desktop applications, and even a bit of casual gaming. However, today’s graphics cards are a world apart from those integrated GPUs. They have to be: modern games are typically set in vastly complex 3D worlds, with cinematic lighting and immersive effects. It’s no exaggeration to say that computer game design is one of the major creative industries of the 21st century. If your hardware isn’t powerful enough to render the visuals as they were meant to be seen, you simply aren’t getting the full experience. This month, we’ve picked out 17 of the latest graphics cards…

We’ve awarded each graphics card on test a score out of five. Principally, this reflects its performance, but it also takes into account how reasonable or otherwise its price is. How do we measure performance? Dirt: (2012), Tomb Raider (2013) Metro: Last Light Redux (2014) Hitman Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016) to test DirectX 12 performance. There’s only one way to test a graphics card: run games on it. For this Labs, we benchmarked all 17 of our cards using titles both old and new – namely Showdown and from the DirectX 11 era, plus (2016) and We tested in 1080p with high detail, and at 4K resolution (3,840 x 2,160) with maximum detail; for low-end cards we tested at 720p as well. You’ll find details of additional tests for…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO When you’re spending more than £200 on a graphics card, you expect certain things. Every game should be smooth and playable at 1080p, and 4K gaming becomes a reasonable expectation, if not something you can take for granted. As prices creep up toward the enthusiast end of the market, manufacturers start expending more effort customising their offerings: it’s worthwhile shopping around to see if one manufacturer’s card is faster or quieter than another’s, or if it has a more attractive set of coloured LEDs. Such aesthetic fripperies aren’t universal considerations, however. PowerColor’s AMD Radeon R9 380X (?????, £200) is an unremarkablelooking thing, powered by two six-pin plugs. Beneath the twin fans lurks a specification that’s very similar to the cheaper Radeon RX 47ome out with pretty similar benchmark…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Confession time: I’ve never really been one to get excited about computer graphics. Over my years at PC Pro, I’ve frequently overheard the Custom PC desks swooning over some new graphics architecture, and each time I’ve allowed myself a superior chuckle. Sure, HDR lighting and ultra-realistic particle physics are technically impressive – but at the end of the day, it’s all superficial stuff. What’s important is the gameplay, right? Perhaps that instinct is to do with my age. My formative gaming experiences were on the ZX80, a platform whose graphical capabilities extended only to large monochrome squares. The emphasis was naturally on gameplay, because heaven knows you weren’t going to be drawn in by the visuals. But things have changed. Some years ago, I remember hearing Nvidia CEO…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE 1 guest/10 hosts, £625 exc VAT from netop.com Security is a big concern with remote access, but Netop Remote Control impressed us with its extensive range of anti-intrusion measures. We could password-protect clients, require Windows login credentials to authenticate, integrate with Active Directory (AD), restrict support staff capabilities – and, as if that weren’t enough, use the optional Security Server module to log and manage all authentication. Netop also offers a wide range of connection options, making it a great choice for businesses that want to extend support beyond the LAN. Each client system simply requires the host component to be installed, which must be password-protected. The host took two minutes to set up on each of our Windows 10 and OS X El Capitan clients (Sierra…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE Free (1 technician/1 unattended PC) from zoho.com If you’re looking for a cloud-hosted support solution on a budget, Zoho Assist could be just the ticket. Its cloud portal is a cinch to use, and the basic service is free. That allows for one support technician, unlimited sessions and a single unattended PC, where a Windows plugin permits access without the user being present. Along with the requisite remote control, the package includes chat facilities, clipboard sharing and multi-monitor navigation. It even includes access to the iOS and Android technician apps. Of course, many offices will have greater needs: here, the paid-for Professional version delivers more versatility for an attractive price. Yearly subscriptions start at £181, with prices determined by the number of technicians and unattended PCs you…

PRICE Diskless, £939 exc VAT from ebuyer.com It’s nearly two years since Netgear last updated its business storage portfolio; now, the ReadyNAS 526X is here to deliver a serious storage upgrade. Performance is the name of the game,since this chunky six-bay box sports a pair of 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) copper ports. It’s also powered by a speedy dual-core 2.2GHz Pentium D-1508 CPU, supported by 4GB of fast DDR4 memory. The only disappointment is that, as a peek under the lid revealed, there’s no provision for adding additional RAM. While we had the lid removed, we also noted that despite the expansion bay blanking plate at the rear, there isn’t a corresponding PCI-E slot on the motherboard. The 526X’s dual embedded 10GBase-T ports are obviously the main story, but it’s worth…

If there’s a single term that creates greater cause of confusion in IT than “virtual server”, I haven’t come across it. To a web-facing person, a virtual server is a slightly posher product than having your own directory on a shared server, which may help somewhat if asking for more resources when traffic levels are high. To an infrastructure person, a virtual server is a more portable, more recoverable version of the old physical servers we used to suffer in the distant days of hardware capital budgets. Almost all of the unhappy projects I’ve seen stem from a category error: the sales process says you can’t have container-based VMs because, say, you have an HP server with a floppy drive in it. In fact, the whole point about Docker (see…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO The world seems to have gone streaming mad. This time last year, the number of people watching Netflix and Amazon Prime Video was relatively small. A few techie people were watching video over the internet, but to the average person in the street it remained an alien concept. Something they wouldn’t contemplate, and certainly not a facility they’d pay for. A year later, however, and streamed content seems to have exploded. Even the (some would say “crusty old”) Radio Times featured a Netflix show as its main front cover image recently. The streaming services don’t publish their viewer numbers, but the recent viewing boost is obvious to anyone who uses social media. You’ll also overhear people in coffee shop queues talking about The Crown, The Grand Tour, and…

The best way to attract visitors to a stand in a crowded convention hall, it seems, is by equipping it with an obvious exhibit. In the case of Rolls-Royce at the recent Microsoft Future Decoded event, it decided to showcase a 20ft-tall jet engine. Not easy to relate that to the Microsoft product portfolio – and to make matters worse, I must confess that I bunked off the interview I was due to have with the chap from Rolls-Royce. My defence is that the event itself was so different from past years that I was left flabbergasted. For one thing, it was very noisy. Not the pumping music of game consoles or fit people in Lycra hopping about in front of a Kinect – but the show itself. I figured…

Background and analysis on all the important news stories MICROSOFT WILL REKINDLE its attempts to use ARM-based chips for Windows devices following a deal with Qualcomm that it says will enable “cellular PCs” to run a full range of Windows software. Microsoft’s previous attempts to engage with ARM have proved little more than disastrous. Windows RT was widely shunned by manufacturers, after consumers were left bewildered by early devices’ inability to run x86 software. ARM-based phones also power Windows Mobile, but its market share has dwindled to the brink of non-existence. Seemingly learning from past failures, Microsoft is pushing the fact that its latest ARM venture will embrace legacy Windows software. “For the first time, customers will be able to experience the Windows they know with the apps, peripherals and…

Time is money, never more so than in high-frequency trading, where automated trades take place in milliseconds. According to a Colombia University research paper, The Cost of Latency in High-Frequency Trading, a one-millisecond advantage in latency can be worth upwards of $100 million per year to a trader. Figures for latency across networks are often carefully guarded, as traders running fast networks try to protect their advantages. This leads to rumours and theories that trading firms are investing in secret, ultra-low latency microwave networks. For example, financial data watchers in the US were shocked to see a sudden latency drop of 2.5ms between Chicago and New York in 2012 – a huge reduction given that the previous fastest latency among traders was 7.5ms. It was credited to a new microwave…

They’ve been banished from phones, tablets and MacBooks, and they cause consumers no end of confusion with myriad formats. Yet, the SD card continues to shrug off the repeated threats to its existence, with manufacturers such as Samsung having to eat humble pie and reintroduce SD card slots in their flagship phones. Now, yet another new format is set to make SD cards even more pivotal in smartphone storage (see boxout). Why can nobody kill off these tiny chunks of storage? ▪Chaotic evolution Understandably for a 16-year-old technology, SD cards have changed significantly since they first arrived at the turn of the millennium. Capacity has obviously increased significantly as storage density has improved, while card sizes have shrunk to the size of a toddler’s fingernail. The initial SD card standard…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of technology @dariengs This month, I’ve been trying to overcome my smartphone addiction. Or, to be specific, I’ve been trying to overcome my addiction to checking Twitter on my phone. It started harmlessly. Back when Twitter was fairly new, I got into the habit of pulling out my phone in periods of boredom – such as bus journeys, or while waiting to meet friends – and scrolling back through recent tweets to keep myself entertained. And there was nothing wrong with that. However, somewhere along the line, I became a bit hooked. Those Twitter breaks started to crop up increasingly frequently. Eventually, the briefest moment of inactivity would prompt me to instantly, instinctively, reach for my phone. For instance,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO I got my first inkling of the political power of social media back in 2007, on receiving a Facebook friend request from Barack Obama. I was surprised since I’d never met the man, and at that time barely knew who he was. I quickly realised that it wasn’t from Barack himself but a bunch of young IT smart-asses at his campaign headquarters who’d scraped the content of Facebook posts to compile a list of people who might be sympathetic to his cause (but clearly didn’t tell them whether they had a vote in the USA). It seemed to me predictable that it would be Democrats, young and “progressive”, who first learned how to play social media, rather than old, rigid, luddite, perhaps religious Republicans. Oh boy, how things…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO We asked you how long you thought it would be before you were buying most of your software on a rolling subscription. You said: So, it’s bad news for Adobe and Microsoft, who have been aggressively pushing the subscription model with Creative Cloud and Office 365 respectively. But it’s heartening for smaller firms that are taking the opportunity to launch attractive alternatives. Serif’s Affinity Photo, its £29 Photoshop rival, is a case in point. We also asked how much you would be willing to pay if all of the software you regularly use could be bought on a single monthly subscription. Answers ranged from nothing to £50. The most common answers were £2 and £5, although one respondent did suggest that 1p a month would be a fair…

Windows Update has a reputation for choosing the worst possible time to interrupt your work. And in Windows 10 it’s become far less flexible than it used to be. In a world where threats are both more serious and common than they once were, it’s arguably become necessary to take a hard-line approach to security patches. All the same, you may have good reason to treat updates with caution. Some users, for example, found that autumn 2016’s Anniversary Update disabled their computers’ webcams. It may make sense to wait and see what effect a patch has on other users’ machines before you roll it out onto your own. If you like to control exactly what’s downloaded – and when – it’s time to take control of Windows Update. Before we…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £1,667 (£2,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Chillblast’s Fusion Strix Gaming PC introduces Intel’s seventh-generation 14nm Kaby Lake architecture. I’ve been awaiting this with interest, as it’s something of an oddity – a processor that wasn’t supposed to exist. According to Intel’s old “tick-tock” roadmap, we should by now have been test-driving the 10nm Cannonlake core. But Intel needs more time to downsize its transistors, so it’s released a new generation of chips that refines the existing 14nm Skylake design to tide us over. That’s Kaby Lake, and the Core i7-7700K that powers Chillblast’s latest desktop is the flagship of the range. In essence, Intel has optimised the design for greater electrical efficiency. This gives Kaby Lake chips reduced heat dissipation and power consumption compared to their Skylake…

PRICE £1,125 (£1,350 inc VAT) from razerzone.com The Razer Blade Stealth is everything you could possibly morning commute. want from an ultraportable laptop. It’s lightweight, powerful and so gorgeous you probably won’t be able to stop yourself from showing it off to less fortunate travellers on your This isn’t something I’d have said about the firm’s previous laptops, but this is a huge departure from the chunky Razer machines of old: it’s a laptop just as happy in the boardroom as it is in the living room (although you might want to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro). It feels rugged too, with its all-metal aluminium chassis barely flexing a millimetre when I attempted to twist and bend it. That’s impressive given that it’s a mere 13.1mm thick and weighs 1.29kg,…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Total value this month £154 ParagonPartitionManager15Home ▪ Full version worth £15 ▪ paragon-software.com WITH STORAGE PRICES tumbling, there’s never been a better time to upgrade your hard disk. New drives are often faster than the ones they replace – and they’re less likely to fail. The trouble is, new hard drives often ship with multiple partitions already configured, or with no partitions set up at all. Your first job, then, is to configure it to suit your needs. Formatting a drive is easy, but partitioning can be a complicated task. Here’s where Partition Manager can help. It’s designed specifically for home users who need to create, delete or resize existing partitions, and perform a range of other drive-management tasks. Partition Manager 15 Home includes basic disk management tools…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £375 (£450 inc VAT) from htc.com Let me save you some time: unless you love listening to music on your phone, there’s little to commend the HTC 10 evo over the otherwise far superior HTC 10. Even then, you might resent retiring your regular headphones, because there’s no 3.5mm jack here: instead, HTC relies on the single USB Type-C connector, declaring the bundled earbuds are the world’s first “dual adaptive earphones that tailor sound to your ears’ unique structure”. When you configure the earbuds, they send small sound waves into the ear canal, and then measure how these noises are reflected through the in-built microphone. This allows music and sound effects to be tailored to your ears’ shape via a profile stored on the phone. Clever. Once…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO 1 Don’t be blinded by brands Browse online for graphics cards and you’ll find a panoply of brands, from Asus to Zotac. But the choice isn’t as complicated as it may first appear. Every mainstream graphics card is built around a standard graphics chip – a GPU – from either AMD or Nvidia. There are around 20 different models widely on sale, and we’ve tested all of the major variants, with prices stretching from £23 to £605. That doesn’t mean that brands are irrelevant. One maker may equip a given GPU with a tiny cooler, so it will fit inside a compact case and make minimum noise. Another manufacturer’s take on the same GPU might have a powerful fan that lets it run at top speed for long…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO The Nvidia GeForce GT 710 (?????, £23) may well be the cheapest graphics card we’ve tested, but it’s fully DirectX 12 certified, with the same OpenGL and OpenCL support as you’ll find on Nvidia’s premium cards. Still, we doubt you’ll run anything more demanding than Minesweeper on this card. You might imagine you could run demanding games by switching to low-res graphics and minimal detail – but this isn’t the case. Across all of our gaming tests, the best we could coax out of the GT 710 was an average 20fps in Dirt: Showdown – achieved by stepping down the resolution to 1,280 x 720 and switching all settings to Low. The reason isn’t a mystery: the GT 710 is equipped with just 192 stream processors and a…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO You read that price correctly – with the exception of a few souped-up, special edition cards, there’s nothing to buy right now between £300 and £400. The size of the price gap makes it clear that, with these final four cards, we’ve aspired our way into a market where price is a secondary consideration. Within this echelon your cheapest option is the AMD Radeon R9 Nano (? ????, £429). If you thought the R9 Fury was too darn big, this card could be just what you’re looking for. The Gigabyte card we tested measured a mere 154mm in length – around half the size of the Fury, taking up barely more space than the humble Radeon R7 240. It also requires only a single eight-pin power connector, and…

PRICE 1-500 systems, £25 each exc VAT from netsupportmanager.com NetSupport Manager (NSM) must be doing something right: it’s now into its third decade. And since we first reviewed it way back in 1995, we’ve watched it mature into one of the finest remote support tools on the market. NSM offers a wealth of features, including top-notch remote control, file transfer, text or two-way audio chat and recording facilities, as well as detailed hardware and software inventory capabilities. The NSM Control console provides easy access to all systems, with a nifty active thumbnail view that makes it easy to monitor multiple systems at once and see what users are doing in real-time. This version brings enhancements over the last major release, including macOS Sierra support and an option to apply bandwidth…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO ▪ Unified communications? What is that, another buzzphrase? In a sense, yes, but perhaps in this case that’s apt. Often, the significance of a buzzphrase is conveyed less by the words themselves than by all the activity that surrounds them. Similarly, Unified Communications - UC for short – is about extending communication functions beyond the traditional telephone network and into the rest of your technology suite. In practical terms, we’re talking things like a CRM product being able to pop up a customer’s contact history on your screen before you’ve even answered their call. ▪ Clever – but do we need it? Our supplier is singing the praises of UC, when we were just planning to buy new phones. A UC approach can open up possibilities that…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO PRICE £284 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Brother’s MFC-L5750DW is a one-stop monochrome MFP offering print, copy and scan operations. It offers a big, 123mm colour LCD touchscreen, and it has a connection for everyone, with support for USB, wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint, not to mention numerous cloud services. It’s no slouch, either. Brother’s 1,200dpi mono laser engine is rated at 40ppm, and our 40-page test Word document was delivered in 59 seconds at both 600dpi and 1,200dpi resolutions. The printer employs the same 800MHz Cortex-A9 processor as Brother’s workgroup printers, so graphics and photos don’t slow it down. Our challenging 24-page DTP document rushed out in 35 seconds at both resolutions for 41ppm. Impatient users will also love how quickly the MFC-L5750DW springs to life.…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Is Office 365 right for your business? It’s a big question, and I’m very tempted to hold back the answer until the end of this feature, to keep you hanging on to see whether or not moving to Office 365 is a good idea. But I can’t do that – not all the way through this piece. Because the answer is a glaringly simple yes. Now, before anyone from the Google camp becomes too hormonal at the thought of a war between Office 365 and Google’s G Suite (formerly known as Google Apps for Work), I should add that I’m not actually bothered if you make a different choice. There are pros and cons to both, and PC Pro will look at G Suite in more detail next…

At my previous company, I’d been involved in several successful Agile deliveries: software released in less than six months that delivered exactly what the customer wanted in a truly collaborative, cost-effective manner. Customers often eulogised about how “refreshing” they found the Agile experience. This convinced me there was mileage in Agile delivery. Initially, I was almost comically evangelical. So in 2011, I broke away from a permanent role as a head of information services to become an independent Agile coach. Day to day, it’s my job to navigate teams and individuals into a balanced Agile practice that fits their situation. It’s also important to spend time with senior management to help them digest and adjust to Agile ways of working. I’m juggling a mix of salesmanship, mentoring and role-modelling, as…

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO The flood of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has made me pause and ask a key question: what, now, is a product? In the past, it was easy. I had hardware with an operating system, or at least firmware. Then I had software. The common connector was the “platform” – the apps ran on the OS, which sat on the hardware. I could buy hardware from one place (Acer, Asus, Dell, HP), my OS from another (usually Microsoft, but more often now Android or iOS), and developers wrote code for that platform. If the hardware died, or the vendor went out of business, it wasn’t a huge disaster. Next time I could choose a different vendor, and the connecting “glue” of the OS meant that my apps would…