Table of contents for May 2017 in PC Pro

IN MY DEFENCE, I was tired, hungry and grumpy as I typed the message. “What on earth have you used that version for?” The keyboard bounced around my desk as I expressed my frustration through forceful fingertips. “That was last month’s document!!” The annoyance expressed by those two exclamation marks was clearly mirrored by Paul’s response. “No,” typed PC Pro’s art director, the “you idiot” he wanted to express being silent. “Look. Here’s the doc.” A screenshot swiftly followed, which did indeed show the old words, despite the document having the right month’s name. I uttered a few words that can’t be expressed in a family-friendly magazine such as this. I opened the Word document on Google Drive and all seemed fine. I was about to point out that he…

Smartwatches aren’t dead – just waiting for smart design If the smartwatch is going to break out of its niche, we need to think outside of the box – literally It’s here! Hang out the bunting and crack open the bubbly: Android Wear 2 has arrived! Or, as it might be, give a shrug and get on with your life. Because the fact is, the latest major update to Google’s smartwatch platform is a cause for great excitement among a particular geeky constituency, and of no interest whatsoever to anyone else. In my view, the world ought to be a lot more excited about smartwatches. But I understand where the apathy comes from. I remember the first smartwatch I ever tried out, a mid-2014 Samsung Gear 2. Frankly, it felt…

Our industry is notorious for its love of buzzwords (think “agile”, or “responsive”, or “passionate”) but currently the most egregious one, the one that makes me reach for my imaginary Luger, is “creative”. It’s one of those words, like “love” or “cool”, that’s so unabusable, so self-evidently good and desirable, that it’s guaranteed it will be continually abused. I consider myself creative, like everyone else in the friggin’ world, but I’ve recently been prompted to examine more closely what that means. This reflection was provoked by a Bill McKibben review in the New York Review of Books of The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax. We’re witnessing more and more islands of analogue refuge among the waves of digital media and communication Sax’s thesis…

There are many ways to be more productive. You could always spend longer at your desk – but the ideal is to work not harder, but more efficiently. A simple but effective way to do this is to stop relying on your mouse (or trackpad, or touchscreen). Every time your fingers leave your keyboard, you’re breaking your flow and taking your concentration away from your work. A few keyboard shortcuts can make you faster and more focused. In this article, we’ll list the most time-saving shortcuts – and explain how to create your own. TheversatileWindowskey Let’s start with the easy ones. As we expect most PC Pro readers will already know, combining the Windows key with a variety of others gives you direct access to a range of useful functions:…

PRICE £250 (£300 inc VAT) from shop.bt.com After years of living in the shadows, suffering the merciless bullying of disgruntled internet users, the beleaguered wireless router is at last fighting back – and BT’s Whole Home Wi-Fi is in the vanguard. It’s part of a new wave of multi-box wireless “mesh” systems that aim to banish dead spots and blanket your home with strong, solid Wi-Fi. The concept is simple. By spreading the wireless signal around the home using not a single router, but many, you get a strong signal everywhere. And because these systems are built with ease of use in mind by one manufacturer, they’re typically simple to set up and maintain. While it’s certainly possible (and much cheaper) to use wireless repeaters to extend the reach of…

PRICE £46 (£55 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The success of the Raspberry Pi came out of nowhere. Nobody, not even the Raspberry Pi Foundation itself, could have predicted it selling in such numbers. Following its success, though, it’s no surprise to find rivals popping up from all quarters. Asus’ entry follows a familiar template: in layout and functionality, the Tinker Board is a near-perfect clone of the Raspberry Pi 3, right down to the 40-pin general-purpose input-output (GPIO) header, four USB ports, and connectors for CSI and DSI peripherals. Having copied the layout of the Raspberry Pi closely enough to fit in any third-party case, Asus’ team turned their eyes to an area where they felt comfortable competing: specifications. The Tinker Board boasts a 1.8GHz processor to the Pi 3’s…

PRICE £198 (£233 inc VAT) from morecomputers.com Until now, soundbars have been associated with TVs. That’s despite modern incarnations offering not only TV inputs but wireless streaming, Bluetooth connectivity and even USB playback. The Creative Katana offers an extra trick: it can be connected to a Windows PC through USB and even provides a line out/mic in for your headphones. Creative even describes the speaker’s primary purpose as an “Under Monitor Audio System” (the not-so-catchy UMAS for short). At £233 inc VAT, it’s pitched up against some tough TV-focused competitors, including the Cambridge Audio TV2 (v2) at around £200. Creative packs in a lot for the price, though, including a subwoofer, a remote and two wall-mount brackets. Its build quality and looks reflect that price, too. The brushedaluminium design couples…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT); free delivery from pcspecialist.co.uk PC Specialist’s £800 PC follows a similar blueprint to the Chillblast, partnering a Kaby Lake Core i5-7400 processor with an Asus H110M-R motherboard. This is basically identical to the H110M-A, so you get the same set of connectors at the back, and the same internal expansion options. One difference worth noting, however, is the lack of an M.2 connector. To be fair, the 240GB Kingston SATA SSD does a fine job of keeping Windows 10 running smoothly, and it’s supplemented by a 1TB WD hard disk. It’s also worth noting that the H110M-R, like its brother, has only two DIMM slots. In this case, however, they come populated with a pair of 8GB modules, adding up to a generous 16GB of…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) plus £24 delivery from wired2fire.co.uk Ifyou’relookingforanewsystembutdon’twanttopayafortune, DarienGraham-Smithhasfourgreatcontendersonreview In its unassuming Corsair 88R case, the Diablo Ultima v2 isn’t the most attractive system here, but it’s what’s inside that counts. And Wired2Fire pushes the boat out with a Core i5-7600 – a significantly faster chip than its rivals, with a core speed of 3.5GHz and a maximum Turbo frequency of 4.1GHz. In our benchmarks, this drove the Ultima v2 to an excellent overall score of 124. If you need hardcore multitasking capabilities then there’s still nothing to match a Core i7, but for everyday workloads this CPU will rarely disappoint. It’s backed up with 16GB of RAM, and Wired2Fire has also managed to stick an Intel 600p SSD in the M.2 socket. From this we measured…

PRICE From $60/yr per PC, unlimited storage from crashplan.com CrashPlan is one of several cloud backup providers offering a simple headline proposition: for a nominal fee (in this case around £4 per month), you get a “set-and-forget” service with unlimited storage, so you don’t need to worry about clearing out old files, nor indeed think about backup at all until disaster strikes. For many of us, that’s a persuasive pitch – when you look at how much the likes of Dropbox and OneDrive charge for storage, it almost sounds too good to be true. But having put CrashPlan comprehensively through its paces, we’re pleased to confirm that there’s no catch. Let’s start with performance. You may expect a cloud backup provider to cut costs by cheaping out on bandwidth, but…

PRICE From £5 per month per PC, unlimited storage from livedrive.com Livedrive is yet another lightweight backup client offering unlimited cloud storage. It’s a bit more expensive than rivals, but you might appreciate not having to commit on a yearly basis. Getting started is easy. You can select folders to be backed up by drilling down a directory tree in the main console; external drives can be added as well as internal ones – although USB flash drives aren’t supported – and up to 30 older versions of updated files are retained. It’s also a decent performer: our 5GB folder of personal data was backed up in 2hrs 18mins, which isn’t bad at all, and when we hit restore, the files came back down the line in 33 minutes. It…

PRICE £40/yr for 5 PCs, 25GB from uk.norton.com Norton Online Backup doesn’t have a local interface to speak of: all that’s installed on your PC is a lightweight agent that runs in the background. Backup parameters and other actions are handled from the web console, which opens when you double-click on the Norton icon. In truth, there’s not much to configure: your options divide into three tabs headed “What”, “When” and “Other”. The first of these lets you specify the types of file to back up – such as music, pictures, contacts and so forth – and add or exclude specific files and folders. Under “When” you can switch from continuous protection to a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. Finally, the “Other” tab lets you throttle backups by dragging a…

PRICE $5/month, unlimited devices, 100GB from spideroak.com SpiderOak might not be the best known name in backup, but it has some interesting plus points. For one, you get unlimited file versioning, so you can roll back through history as far as you like – at least, within your 100GB allowance. The client also uses local encryption as standard: everything is encoded on your PC before it’s uploaded, using your account password as the encryption key. By default, this password isn’t relayed to SpiderOak, so as long as you stick to using the desktop client, the company has no way of decrypting your information. If you log in to the web console, the company’s “zero knowledge” position is lost, but from here you can download files to any PC, and set…

PRICE 1TB Capacity Edition Lite, £1,052 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com “We could delve into ourVM backups and pluck out files, folders, SQL databases, Exchange data stores and mailbox items to restore” Veritas acquired Backup Exec from Symantec in 2015, and it hasn’t dragged its heels when it comes to updates: the software comes with full support for Windows Server 2016’s core server operations. That’s in addition to support for cloud providers including Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3, allowing businesses to easily migrate data off-site and manage it from the same console. The new Instant Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) speeds up data recovery from VMs too, and it’s also ready to go with vSphere 2016. Another welcome change from the Symantec days is a less tangled licensing scheme. Veritas now offers…

PRICE £512 exc VAT from span.com Thecus’s W4810 is a four-bay NAS appliance running Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials (WSSE R2). That means it can do a lot more than a basic enclosure: its capabilities include full Active Directory Primary Domain Controller (AD PDC) services, plus slick workstation backup and recovery features. It runs on a speedy quad-core 1.6GHz Celeron N3160 CPU with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. There’s no option to upgrade the memory, but we found that wasn’t a problem as the OS rarely used more than 2.6GB. There’s also an internal 60GB SATA SSD, on which the OS resides, leaving the four main drive bays free for use. Getting set up is easy: AD newbies will appreciate the wizard-based installation procedure, which walks you through configuring the…

While trying to recover from the inevitable post-CES flu, and catching up on the work backlog, I’ve been going over several items that raised their heads at CES. One that really piqued my interest is the new security router/Wi-Fi unit from Norton, a Symantec-owned brand. Now it’s probably best to put my cards on the table, and this may shock you, but I’m a naturally cynical person. And most of the AV companies make my cynicism-o-meter hit the end stop and bend around a few times. If you want to see examples of just how cynical these firms can be, browse their websites and try to work out which features are included in the various OS versions of their products. If you can do so, you’re a better person than…

Istart this month’s column with a question: which type of user authentication system is the most secure? Is it a hardware token, a code-generating application, a code delivered by text message, or a system using push notifications? I guess that most readers will be in a similar situation to me, being faced with all sorts of additional verification being sought to access one service or another. My business bank makes me input a passkey on my smartphone, which then spits out a time-limited code; my personal bank relies on me recalling a lucky dip of characters from a passkey, having already entered a PIN; and PayPal likes to send me one of those time-restricted codes by way of an SMS text message. Then there are other online services that ask…

rather than improve batteries, why not reduce the need for them? Researchers at the University of Cambridge have designed transistors that scavenge for energy from their own environment, meaning devices could have power for years without a new battery. The ultra-low-power transistor borrows from computers in sleep mode, harnessing leaked electrical current from transistors. The experts compare it to water dripping from a faulty tap, and such leaks are characteristic of all transistors, offering a free energy source – if only it can be captured and used. To do so, the researchers made use of the point of contact between the metal and semiconducting points of a transistor, known as the Schottky barrier. Transistor engineers usually try to avoid such barriers, but the Cambridge researchers instead tapped it for power.…

Faced with thousands of feeds, curation has become impossible due to the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ out there You may just possibly have noticed that there’s a lot of news floating around about news right now, and in particular how accurate it is. Mr Trump’s team frequently claims that all the news outlets aren’t telling the truth, and that this is a bad thing that must be punished. Part of their communication strategy is to bypass the mainstream and go straight to the end user via Twitter, with typical directness. The inevitable result, like a flamethrower in a dry forest, is a firestorm about “what exactly is truth in news?” It’s a fascinating subject, because it goes to the heart of why we have channels through which we consume such…

PREMIUMLAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 (New) 13in ultraportable from £1,149 dell.co.uk Dell only needed to refine its brilliant XPS 13 design to keep top spot, and that’s -to-edge 13.3in display and supercompact in Rose Gold. REVIEW refi ne what it does: it’s slightly quicker and adds more options, but it’s the edge compact chassis that lift it above the opposition. Oh, and it’s now available Issue 270, p54 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 £1,670; 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 life, sleek design and –…

There’s a witch hunt in Silicon Valley, and Travis Kalanick was clearly worried he wouldn’t float. Following an American executive order banning visitors from seven countries, most of the tech industry gasped incredulously, then loudly criticised the policy – although most initially spoke out of concern for their own staff, lamenting how difficult it was to find good people. That Silicon Valley skills gap is hard to fill without international visas, after all. There was genuine concern, of course. Many tech leaders are immigrants, and Sergey Brin showed up at a protest in San Francisco while very publicly donating $2 million to a “crisis fund” supporting the likes of rights campaigners the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In some cases, such donations were the only way to avoid a PR…

Tech and health data As an NHS professional working to develop improved data handling, I read your feature, “Can technology save the NHS?” (see issue 270, p30), with great interest. I know from experience that there’s a great desire to improve data sharing among NHS organisations and beyond, but I feel your article didn’t touch on the biggest hurdle, data protection. For many of us, our medical data is considered among the most private of all information. This presents some significant challenges when it comes to sharing data, as even the slightest risk of identifiability is (rightly, in my opinion) deemed unacceptable, yet completely anonymising such data is a non-trivial endeavour. Furthermore, patients don’t always have an appetite for their information to be shared even within an NHS organisation. While…

PRICE £160 (£200 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk Remember when your phone lasted more than a day on a single charge? Well, the glory days are back and Lenovo’s P2 is the saviour: it lasted a staggering 28hrs 50mins in our continuous video test. That’s a full five hours longer than our previous winner, Motorola’s Moto Z Play (see issue 268, p62). Anecdotally, after a heavy weekend’s sightseeing filled with Google Maps, selfies and the odd game of Mini Metro, the P2 never dipped below 70%. Lenovo achieves this by cramming a 5,100mAh battery – most phones’ batteries sit around the 3,000mAh mark – into the P2’s metal body, but this isn’t a bulky phone. It feels a little fatter than super-svelte flagships such as the A-Listed Galaxy S7 Edge, but…

PRICE From £138 (£165 inc VAT) from misfit.com With wearables, it seems you can either have the feature-packed or goodlooking definition of “smart”. The part of the Venn diagram where the two cross over is vanishingly small, especially when you add a third circle labelled “decent battery life”. The Misfit Phase attempts to square this circle: a hybrid smartwatch that looks great and has six-month battery life. The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no screen, just hour and minute hands that tick around the minimalist circular face of the watch. There aren’t even numbers, just lines and a tiny logo at the top. Two buttons adorn the right-hand side, but there’s no crown to set the time, as this is handled by the accompanying app. Our model came…

PRICE £79 (£95 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk We’re not fans of throwaway printers at PC Pro: rather than be lured in by the false promise of £50 inkjet multifunction printers (MFPs) that plague supermarket shelves, we think it’s better to affordable ink cartridges. invest in a high-quality printer with The Epson WorkForce WF- 3620DWF is exactly such a printer. It’s equally well suited to a home office as it is a demanding household, to support a mixed output of photos, letters and homework. It’s also one of Epson’s best-value inkjet MFPs. It’s already cheap at £95 inc VAT, but until at least the end of March 2017 it comes with a free threeyear warranty and a £20 cashback offer, which transforms it into something of a bargain. That’s perhaps a…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT); free delivery from chillblast.com Chillblast’s Fusion Arrow makes a statement right away with its striking purple trim; turn it on and colour-matched LEDs glow through the front fan and windowed side. If purple isn’t your thing, you can switch it for red, green, blue or a bold white design, but we rather like it as is. This compact case is well appointed, with three USB ports at the top (one of which supports SuperSpeed USB 3), twin audio jacks and an SD card reader. Round the back, the Asus H110M-A motherboard offers an additional pair of USB 3 connectors, plus four USB 2 sockets and twin PS/2 connectors for anyone still wedded to an ancient keyboard. It’s powered by a 3GHz Core i5-7400 processor, built…

PRICE From $60/yr per PC, unlimited storage from carbonite.com Carbonite is the original allyou- can-eat cloud backup service, and the basics work just as you’d expect: once installed it continuously backs up most user files, including documents, spreadsheets, email archives and music. If you prefer a more structured timetable, you can configure a single daily backup at a specified time, or specify quiet hours so Carbonite doesn’t interfere with your working day. One distinctive feature of Carbonite is its Explorer integration. Adding items to your backup is a simple case of selecting them in Windows Explorer, then rightclicking and selecting “Back this up” from the Carbonite contextual menu. A coloured blob should then appear overlaid on the file’s icon: green means safely backed up, orange means awaiting upload. It’s a…

PRICE From $52/yr (£41), unlimited devices, 1TB storage from idrive.com While most cloud backup services restrict you to one PC, IDrive supports unlimited devices. The trade-off is a fixed storage quota, although we doubt many individuals will be seriously constrained by the standard one-terabyte allocation. To help you make the most of your space, IDrive doesn’t automatically select what’s going to be backed up and what’s not. The client opens with a list of personal data folders, which you can customise to your heart’s content. Continuous backup is enabled by default, or if you prefer you can set your backup to run at certain times and on certain days. It involves a little back-and-forth, but you can define multiple backup jobs to run at set times, and back up files…

PRICE From £55/yr per PC, 50GB from mozy.co.uk The MozyHome front-end is tastefully compact, but click on Settings and a rich interface opens up. You can select which files to back up according to type rather than location, then easily add specific items and folders using the directory tree view – or by right-clicking in Windows Explorer and using the MozyHome contextual menu. By default, backups run when your computer is idle, and you can specify what that means in terms of CPU usage and user input. If you prefer your backups to run at a set time, you can set a schedule from every day to once every seven weeks. One nice feature is the “Mozy 2xProtect” option, which lets you mirror your cloud backups to a local volume…

This month’s Labs has been of more than professional interest to me. The truth is, I need to sort out my own backup situation. Yes, I’m one of those terrible people who lectures friends and colleagues about backing up, yet doesn’t have a proper system in place himself. In fact, I’ll admit it: my home setup illustrates some quite serious backup mistakes. It’s not that I’m blasé about the possibility of losing my data. At home I have a 6TB NAS appliance, which hosts File History data for all my Windows machines – plus Time Machine for the increasing number of Mac clients in my household. So I know that if I manage to leave my laptop on the W7 bus, my data at least can be recovered. So far…

PRICE Appliance with 3yr full subscription, £4,446 exc VAT from barracuda.com Barracuda’s Backup 290 is a slick hybrid product, combining local backup with simple one-click cloud replication. It will be of particular interest to growing businesses, as the price includes support for unlimited clients and critical business apps. We tried the entry-level Backup 290 appliance, which has a single 1TB drive for local backup storage. That may not sound like much, but the 290 performs variable block-level deduplication, so you can effectively squeeze much more than a terabyte of data into that space. The cloud storage side of things costs £1,699 exc VAT for a three-year subscription, which is automatically linked to your cloud portal account. The beauty of an integrated approach is that local backup jobs can be set…

As promised last month, I’m going to look at a few more cloud-based cameras in this column. On the desk in front of me I have a Nest Cam, a Ring Stick Up Cam (complete with solar panel accessory), a Y-Cam Evo HD, and finally, the new Arlo Pro I mentioned last month. All apart from the latter were kindly loaned to me by the folks at Vesternet. Let’s begin with the Arlo Pro. I’m using the new camera with my original Arlo base station, so I’m not able to test the siren or the local USB recording that the complete updated system provides; I’m just focusing (excuse the pun) on the updated camera. And I’m sure the fact that it will work in existing installations will please those who…

It’s one thing to talk about preventing disaster; real experience is both rare and valuable. What happens when you’re actually sitting down to work out what’s left of a business’ data, with the owner breathing down your neck and the clock ticking on both your diagnosis and the likely action plan? Like almost everyone I talked to during this month’s crisis, I have a full repertoire of ways of keeping restorable backups; not a full repertoire of tools to try to drag data out of a hard disk that’s just become a bubbling, evil swamp of despair. So, feel free to do what all those colleagues and contacts did, taking up too much of my crisis-management time: ask a series of questions that might, in a different situation, have served…

Most companies are happy to have a product that speaker, potentially saving phone and tablet makers from having to find room for separate speakers in their already sardine-like chassis; it also provides dynamic haptic feedback on the screen, enabling developers to create virtual, tactile buttons on almost any type of surface. serves one need – the paradoxically named Redux has one product that meets two. Not only can its technology turn a display into a If it works as promised, Redux is sitting on a technology that could utterly transform mobile devices as well as industrial machinery – all those flat screen displays used on factory floors could suddenly provide haptic feedback, letting workers know they actually pressed a “button” even above the din of machinery. For the time being,…

In the good old days at PC Pro, we used to have after-work poker tournaments in the office. A crate of beers, enough salted snacks to grit half of London during a cold snap, and a table of very mixed abilities. With all due disrespect to colleagues past and present, I hated those games. Why did I loathe these evening sessions of Texas Hold’em? Because I’m spectacularly fond of winning, and these games were impossible to read. Half the table had no idea how to play the game, no sense of when to call or fold, no concept of strategy. I recall bombing out of a tournament early, when my pair of queens was beaten by someone who had gone all-in on a four and a two – one of…

Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, Brexit over-easy. For months there has been fevered speculation about the implications of last summer’s vote to bid adieu to the EU, but finally we have some certainty over Britain’s plan to parachute out of Europe. We won’t remain members of the single market, although we’re seeking the “freest possible trade” with our chums from across the Channel. We’ll be leaving the customs union, but are hoping to negotiate “a customs union agreement” with the rest of the EU. There will be an end to free movement of labour, although it isn’t yet clear whether we’ll follow an Australianstyle points-based system, work permits or something different altogether. And we won’t be bound by the European Court of Justice, the body that ensures EU legislation is applied…

SCORE ????? PRICE £550 (£660 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk If Batman built himself a laptop, it would look like this. While most modern offerings are finished in shiny silver aluminium or brightly coloured plastic, the Ultranote IV is an ode to monochrome. The only attempt at decoration is a couple of triangular cutouts, which only add to the stealth chic feel. There isn’t even a logo on the lid. LED lights, hi-fi speaker logos and gaudy marketing stickers are conspicuous by their absence. might be more eye-catching, but the Ultranote’s got it where it counts. Despite a few clunky bits of detailing, it’s fashionably slim and light, tipping the scales at 2.18kg despite its 15.6in screen. Build quality feels sturdy enough to carry around without layers of padding, even if…

PRICE £674 (£809 inc VAT) from morecomputers.com There are two main categories for curved monitors: those built for gamers and those built for professionals. But what if you want the best of both worlds? A monitor with a fast refresh rate, low input lag, fast response time, good viewing angles and fantastic colour reproduction? Step forward the CF791, a 100Hz curved monitor that combines Samsung’s quantum dot technology with a gamer-friendly VA panel. The price may seem high, but even at these dizzy heights there’s plenty of curved monitor competition from the likes of Acer (Predator Z35, £800), Dell (U3417W, £930) and Philips (BDM3490UC, £730). Where the CF791 immediately wins is looks, with low-profile silver bezels and a white rear giving it a suitably premium and futuristic look. The stand…

PRICE £41 (£49 inc VAT) from affinity.serif.com There can be few Adobe Photoshop CC subscribers who don’t look at that steep fee leaving their account every month and wonder if there’s a cheaper alternative out there. Until recently, the search for competent alternatives would have drawn a blank. But the arrival of the £49 Affinity Photo on Windows changes everything. If you’re thinking £49 per month still sounds teeth-suckingly steep, relax. This isn’t a monthly subscription but a one-off fee: cheaper than a mere three months’ worth of Photoshop. Can something so inexpensive really compete with Adobe’s industry standard? Yes, yes it can. Pick a persona At first tilt, Affinity Photo appears to be something of a crossbreed of Lightroom and Photoshop, offering different stages of workflow (Develop, Photo, Export…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) plus £15 delivery from yoyotech.co.uk The Warbird RSG1 is taller and shallower than your typical desktop PC, but the mesh-wrapped Aerocool QS-240 case is certainly eye-catching. It also offers three front-facing USB ports, which we’re always happy to see. Internally, the Intel Core i5-7400 makes another appearance, as does the 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. Together, these deliver the performance you’d expect: the Warbird RSG1 achieved a score of 101 in our tests, precisely on par with the Chillblast. In fact, in our gaming test, Yoyotech’s system managed average of 54fps in Metro: Last Light Redux at 1080p and maximum detail settings. Perhaps that’s thanks to its superfast 3,000MHz DDR4 RAM – but it’s not a big enough difference to get excited about. What sets…

PRICE From £30/yr per PC, 50GB from acronis.com We’ve been fans of Acronis True Image since long before “the cloud” came along. While this latest release fully embraces remote backup, it doesn’t ditch the flexibility and features that made it a favourite back in the days of tape drives. Depending on your needs, you can buy it as a standalone backup client, with no cloud component, for a one-off fee of £35. The more modern option, however, is Acronis’ personal subscription service, starting at £30 per year. This gets you the full client – and updates while your subscription remains current – and 50GB of cloud storage. That may look a bit mean next to the unlimited quotas of Carbonite and CrashPlan, but if you have only a small amount…

PRICE From $50/yr per PC, unlimited storage from backblaze.com Backblaze’s headline offering is the same as CrashPlan’s, namely unlimited cloud backup for $5 a month. In fact, if you pay for a year upfront, it’s cheaper than CrashPlan, coming in at just $50. The philosophy is very much “set-and-forget”: simply point Backblaze at a hard drive and it will start continuously backing up almost everything it finds, meaning you don’t need to fiddle about configuring complicated backup parameters or schedules. Generously, external drives are backed up, too. That said, there aren’t many advanced options to configure. You can throttle bandwidth and CPU usage, as well as optionally specifying a private encryption key for unbreakable security. It’s also possible to use the Backblaze web interface to track the geographic location of…

PRICE $7.49/month, unlimited devices, 100GB from sugarsync.com SugarSync is an unusual backup service. At first you might take it for a cloud-syncing tool rather than a true backup solution, and certainly it can be used in that way, keeping files and folders continuously in sync across all PCs with the client installed. You can also share public links to your uploaded files, and share folders with other SugarSync users, offering either read-only or full access. To that extent, SugarSync makes a perfectly good alternative to the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive. Where it differs is that you’re not limited to a specific folder. SugarSync works with any number of folders, located anywhere on your system, so you don’t have to adjust your way of working to suit it. You…

PRICE 250GB, £41 exc VAT first year from idrive.com Small businesses on a tight budget will love IDrive Business, which offers plenty of backup features at pocket-friendly prices. Costs are based purely on how much cloud storage you need, starting at just £41 for 250GB for the first year. That very affordable subscription includes support for unlimited Windows, OS X and Linux systems. And it’s app-friendly, too: along with facilities for backing up Hyper-V and VMware hosts, you get options for securing Exchange, SQL, Oracle and SharePoint servers, along with their system states, as standard. Setup involves a little more work than some other backup services. There’s no push installation, so on each system that’s to be protected you’ll have to log into the IDrive web portal, download the client…

PRICE £490 exc VAT from morecomputers.com Measuring just 30cm tall and weighing under a kilogram, AVer’s go-anywhere videoconferencing solution is perfect for mobile workers. Despite its small size, it has everything you need to quickly set up voice and video conferences at client sites, huddle rooms and your own office. The VC320 feels solidly built, although the glossy piano-black finish on the front is a magnet for grubby finger smudges. The f/2.0 lens at the top of the unit provides a 1080p video stream with a wide 110° field of view. It features a 5x optical zoom with pan and tilt functions, or can be manually angled up and down as required. Below it you’ll find an NFC sensor, omni-directional mic and four status indicators for video conference and HDMI…

Real world comput?ng Despite the rise of social media, email is still king of the internet marketing heap. I ran a promotion recently with a group of other creatives, using a combination of email, Facebook and Twitter promotion, and you won’t believe what happened next. Over the period of the promotion, 87% of transactions could be attributed to an email, 8% to Facebook and the rest to Twitter. This, despite the social media audiences being an order of magnitude bigger than email lists. The continuing effectiveness of email makes it all the more surprising that marketers don’t innovate in their communications with customers. For example, it’s common to use an email sequence to sell a product. The sequence usually begins with educational content and ends with the selling phase. Wouldn’t…

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