Table of contents for May 2016 in PC Pro

EVERYONE WHO READS PC Pro will be familiar with Moore’s law; less known is how hard the semiconductor industry, with Intel at its high-frequency heart, has worked to ensure it remained true. And now, like a grumpy toddler who can’t fit the triangle through the square hole, it’s scrunching Moore’s law into a ball and throwing it away. I’ll admit my toddler analogy is flawed. Our infant would be over 50 years old and rival South Africa’s GDP for income – global semiconductor sales topped $335 billion in 2015. That’s even more than Kim Kardashian’s worth. Something the semiconductor industry shares with toddlers, though, is one heck of an appetite. If we look at Intel in its early 1970s years, it grew at a phenomenal rate. First, it feasted on memory…

Although ISPs aren’t yet being asked to block sites that don’t show age verification, there is a line in the government’s consultation paper that will give cause for concern for Britain’s smaller providers. So far, only the big six providers have been required to implement content filters, but the paper states that the government “will continue to discuss with ISPs (including smaller providers) the potential for driving up the provision, effectiveness and usability” of the filters. Adrian Kennard, owner of AAISP, told PC Pro it would be a “very short conversation” if the government did come asking for filters to be switched on at his company. “Our job is to shift packets of data impartially in accordance with net-neutrality principles,” he said. “We do not look at, or censor, what…

Back in the early days of online piracy, faced with Napster on every computer, rights holders decided to teach us a lesson. In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) started suing individuals – their member record labels’ customers – for hundreds of thousands of dollars for every song they shared. Society may not have sucked up the “piracy is bad” message the labels were ham-fistedly trying to convey, but many people appear to have learned a different lesson: how to abuse copyright to their own ends. The RIAA failed to teach us to respect intellectual property, but it did set a grand example in how to be a copyright jerk. Take the recent case of the Fine Brothers. The pair of YouTube “stars” are famous for their “reaction…

Nicole Kobie is correct that the government’s satellite broadband subsidy – as a way of meeting its shifting Universal Service Commitment (USC) – is cynical (see issue 258, p23) and financially blinkered. Not all homes “stuck on a line slower than 2Mbits/sec” are difficult to reach: many are unable to benefit from an upgrade in which only part of the antiquated distribution infrastructure is replaced. I live in a small village that’s less than three miles from a market town. The exchange serving the village has been upgraded under the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme, and most subscribers are able to enjoy a “superfast” broadband service. Our problem is that the green cabinet serving the village is located almost next door to the exchange, which is more than two miles…

If you download only one product from PC Pro’s bonus software service this year, you won’t regret making it Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9. It provides everything you need to both edit images and create original graphic artworks, and has enough power to have earned a loyal following from professionals. This three-page walkthrough demonstrates some of its most compelling features, so you can get started right away. The interface will be immediately familiar if you’ve ever used a rival editing application, such as PaintShop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. The tools sit on the left-hand side, menus to the top and layers to the right. It’s well worth getting to grips with the idea of working on layers, as it means that you can separate out your image elements and…

PRICE £233 (£279 inc VAT) from fossil.com/uk From geek chic to fully fledged fashion accessory, it’s been a rapid rise for the smartwatch. It’s now as acceptable to have a mobile computer strapped to your wrist as it is to tote a 5.5in phone, which is why fashion brands and traditional watchmakers are eyeing the market. The Fossil Q Founder is among the first, and it won’t be the last. There’s certainly no reason why a watch manufacturer such as Fossil can’t make a smartwatch to match techie rivals. You either opt for a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor or one of the new Intel ones; pick an IPS, transflective or OLED screen; install Android Wear; pick and choose the features it requires; and then it all boils down to design.…

PRICE £2,083 (£2,500 inc VAT) from chillblast.com Chillblast built its reputation on powerful gaming PCs, but has been transferring its expertise to workstations for a little while now. As it well knows, there’s far more to this than sticking a Quadro graphics card into an otherwise standard PC: a workstation user will be much more concerned that their system has staying power. Fortunately, Chillblast is so sure of the Fusion Render’s durability that it comes with a five-year warranty, with the first two years collect and return. That’s especially reassuring, because this system is one of several that ships with a “frequency enhanced” CPU. Its six-core Intel Core i7-5820K has been permanently set to 4.2GHz from its standard 3.3GHz, with a Corsair watercooling system in place to cope with the…

PRICE WS-X141, £2,447 (£2,936 inc VAT); RS-D2180, £4,425 (£5,310 inc VAT) from workstationspecialist.com Workstation Specialists has a novel solution to an ongoing problem: that 3D rendering and 3D modelling require almost the opposite types of specification. It offers two discrete systems designed to work together. The WS-X141 is a standalone modelling workstation, supplied with a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700K. This runs at a nominal 4GHz, but Workstation Specialists has set it permanently to 4.5GHz. For good measure, there’s 64GB of 2,133MHz DDR4 SDRAM onboard. Graphics acceleration comes from Nvidia’s familiar Quadro M4000, but Workstation Specialists diverts from the storage script by supplying two SSDs. There’s the now-standard PCI Express-based unit for OS and apps, in the form of a 512GB Samsung SM951, and it notably topped the charts for write…

PRICE £1,688 (£2,026 inc VAT) from lenovo.com/uk Lenovo inherited IBM’s workstation division along with its ThinkPads, so the ThinkStation P310 Tower sits in a rather illustrious line of computing. The P310 looks tiny compared to the towers elsewhere, but don’t imagine it lacks potency. With an Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia Quadro M4000 graphics and 32GB of DDR4 memory, there’s plenty of firepower in this diminutive package – decidedly more than the HP Z240 sFF. It lacks the design flair of the HP, though. Opening up the P310 requires undoing a pair of crosshead screws rather than being tool-free, and there are only a few tool-free or hot-swap components inside (unlike Lenovo’s full tower P500, P700 and P900 series). For example, the hard drive cages are tool-free, as are the…

Oh for a little variety. While we’re used to seeing Intel take a clean sweep for processors, this month we’ve also seen a complete Nvidia whitewash: Quadro is in every system, with the M4000 inveigling its way into six of the eight dedicated workstations. It’s sad when there’s very little competition in a particular area, with Nvidia having more than 80% of the professional market since late 2014, and probably even more by now. But it’s also understandable. AMD tried to gain greater share by dropping prices at the end of 2014. The FirePro W8100 was a particularly good deal for a professional card sporting 8GB of frame buffer, much better value than Nvidia’s K5000 and K5200. Unfortunately for AMD, the Nvidia Quadro M4000 is now cheaper still and also…

PRICE Appliance and TotalSecure/1yr, £648 exc VAT from sonicwall-sales.com Dell SonicWALL’s latest TZ appliances promise a muchneeded performance boost over their predecessors without a commensurate price hike. Targeting small offices of 25 users or fewer, the TZ300 on review here is good value and supports the new SonicPoint 802.11ac access points (APs) for integral wireless network provisioning and management. Prices start at £400 excluding VAT for the appliance alone, rising to only £648 with a one-year TotalSecure subscription. This enables round-theclock support, IPS, gateway antivirus, anti-spyware and a content-filtering service (CFS). Unlike many of its rivals, antispam is a bolt-on option. A year’s subscription costs £172, and a further £78 will buy you a licence for the Analyzer reporting tool. Wireless management is enabled as standard, allowing the TZ300 to…

PRICE £309 exc VAT from dell.co.uk Dell’s H825cdw colour multifunction printer (MFP) is designed to take the pain out of network printing, scanning and copying, meaning it should appeal to small offices with limited IT expertise. Moreover, its integration with Dell’s Document Hub makes it cloud-friendly and it supports wired or wireless operation, plus AirPrint, Wi-Fi Direct and NFC connections. It gives the Document Hub service a needed shot in the arm as, for more than a year, the only Dell printer that had this embedded was the ageing C2665dnf. The new H-Series of MFPs increases the count to four, which allows you to access the service directly from their touchscreens and scan to, or print, from authorised cloud accounts. We logged in to the Document Hub administrative web portal…

To make your email effective, it’s important to consider the journey your users need to make from receiving your email to reaching whatever your end goal is – for instance, getting them to request a quote on your website. Start with a compelling subject line of 50 characters or fewer that can be digested at a glance. On mobile devices, you can also see the “preheader” in inboxes, which is the first bit of text that appears in an email template. This can support your subject line and further tempt people to open. If you’re serious about email you should use a specialist email marketing tool. These allow you to split-test subject lines so, say, two variations are sent to a 10% sample of your list, and the remaining 80%…

In the words of Winnie-the-Pooh, “the more I looked, the more it wasn’t there”. My 50TB LTO-6 HP tape library had disappeared. I knew this because Retrospect was whinging that its backups hadn’t completed correctly. I tried restarting the Retrospect management app. Retrospect consists of a server engine and a management console, but you don’t have to be running the management console to keep the server engine running, and indeed they don’t even need to be running on the same machine. There are also client agents that you install onto all the computers you want to back up, meaning in a comprehensive solution you might have multiple Retrospect servers, multiple desktop/server agents and control all of these from one or more desktop machines. But rebooting the computer that hosts the…

@happygeek “Opportunists and determined brute-forcers alike will find this hardwareencoded restriction very tough to deal with” If you’re serious about encryption, there’s a lot to be said for doing it in hardware, especially on portable devices such as USB sticks. A dedicated processor, physically located on the encrypted drive, offers several advantages over softwarebased alternatives. The onboard processor runs a random number generator to create the encryption key, meaning your password unlocks access to this key but isn’t used to generate it – a vital advantage. It also requires no driver installation and doesn’t depend on software being installed on the host computer. I’m mentioning this because of a small thing I’ve got my hands on recently: one of Kingston’s new DataTraveler 2000 range of hardware-encrypted USB sticks. The 32GB…

Imagine if the brain could tell a machine what to do without having to type, speak or use other standard interfaces. That’s the aim of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has committed $60 million to a Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) project to do just that. “Today’s best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem,” said Phillip Alvelda, the NESD program manager. “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics.” The aim is to create a tiny chip – no larger than a cubic centimetre – that can translate the brain’s electrochemical “language” into the “ones and zeros that constitute the…

5 issues for £5 On sale 14 April Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and we'll send you a FREE 26-piece tookit as a thank you. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Kindle Fire. See p56 for details. LABS Big screens for pros This Labs is all about quality: we line up a range of big-screen TFTs for people and companies who demand the best. FEATURES Is your boss spying on you? Or do you want to spy on your workforce? We look at both sides in next month's controversial feature. Can the iPad Pro replace a laptop? Apple claims the iPad Pro is a laptop killer; we find out by putting it to the test in a series of day-to-day tasks.…

Mark Newton Intrigued by a version of Windows 10 for IoT devices, Mark decided to put it to the test. Find out what he discovered on p116 David Nield Virtual reality is poised to revolutionise gaming, but what about film? David interviewed a selection of cinematic visionaries. See inside their minds on p46 Jon Honeyball Never mind Error 53: Jon had a problem of a different scale when Apple changed a setting and his tape library disappeared. For his solution, see p110 Dave Stevenson Dave’s mission: to discover why real-life simulators are popular. Crashing a few virtual trucks along the way, he spoke to an expert to find out. See p42…

Tech companies have long been accused of paying little corporation tax in the UK – often using legal but circuitous systems to move or reduce taxable profits. Even when tech giants do agree to pay tax, it’s often well below the going rate for smaller businesses. Google’s recent deal with HM Revenue and Customs is a case in point - the company agreed to pay £130 million in back taxes covering more than a decade, which has been estimated as an effective rate of 2.5%. Google is by no means alone. The figures below highlight just how little companies such as Facebook, Apple and Netflix pay on their UK earnings. The tax authorities are apparently trying to close the loopholes – the “double Irish” system used by many tech companies…

PC Pro readers and experts give their views on the world of If you’ve been following the news, you’ll be familiar with Error 53 – the infamous code that’s been bricking iPhones after the upgrade to iOS 9. As we detail on p13, it’s triggered when the OS detects that the home button (along with its integrated fingerprint reader) isn’t the original one installed at the factory. iPhone owners who have taken advantage of third-party repair services have been suffering since last September, but it’s only in the past month that Apple has issued a fix that brings afflicted devices back to life. It has been a shameful episode for Apple, and considering how concerned the company usually is about the “user experience”, you might wonder how such a situation…

I would never describe myself as a gamer, but that’s not to say that I don’t play computer games. On the contrary, I was once so hooked on Microsoft’s FreeCell that I would download lists of solutions and complexity analyses by maths nerds. I was almost relieved when those miserable sods at Redmond removed it from Windows 7, and have resisted buying any other version. Long before that, I played text adventures such as Zork (under CP/M) and Wizardry (crude graphics on my Apple II ,but highly addictive), plus graphic shooters such as Doom. I even finished the hilariously grisly Duke Nukem. I still play a single game – the gorgeous French “stretchy” platform game Contre Jour - on my Android tablet. So, with this rap sheet, how can I…

Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Steam, £20 It’s hard to decide what’s more impressive about FSX – that it’s older than Windows by three full years, or the fact that, nine years after the release of the latest version, it still has one of the most ardent communities of fans, creating add-ons, providing a community of like-minded aviators and, yes, entire virtual airlines. Train Simulator 2016, Steam, £30 Like trains? Train Simulator 2016 will make or break your hobby. Drive engines across the Cornish Riviera, through the German countryside, and across Wyoming and Philadelphia. TS2016’s four routes include diesel, electric and steam engines, as well as an insane amount of paid-for downloadable content: add it all to your cart in Steam and you’ll inflict £3,342 of damage. I am Bread, Steam,…

PRICE SIM-free, £133 (£160 inc VAT) from microsoftstore.com Microsoft took its time over Windows 10 Mobile, but now, only a few weeks after it first appeared on the screens of the Lumias 950 and 950 XL, we already have the next instalment in the series: the Microsoft Lumia 650. It’s a very different phone, though, to the first pair. While those two targeted consumers looking to spend high-end handset money, the Microsoft Lumia 650 is a budget device for the masses. Not that you’d know this by looking at it, because Microsoft has done a stand-up job on the design. In fact, you could argue the Lumia 650 is a better-looking device than both the 950 and the 950 XL, although perhaps that says as much about the cheap design…

PRICE £233 (£280 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk Corel Painter specialises in digital painting, with emulations of natural media such as pastels, oil and watercolours, plus brushes that have no real-world equivalent. It’s a bitmap editor, with brushstrokes saved as pixels on the virtual page rather than vector co-ordinates. The only time you’re likely to import photos is to use them as a basis for a painting – applying colours to a photo produces quick digital paintings. There are superb, cheap painting apps for iOS and Android, such as Procreate, ArtRage and Brushes, so why pay £280 for Corel Painter? The answer lies in the sophistication and customisation of its brush technology. The property bar at the top handles the basics, including size, opacity and others, depending on the brush. Delving…

PRICE £1,999 (£2,399 inc VAT) from ipworkstations.com The IPW-SL has the honour of being the fastest workstation – at least in terms of processor speed – this month. This turn of pace is built on Intel’s latest Skylake generation rather than its predecessor Haswell, with InterPro taking advantage of the extra headroom afforded by the K version of the Intel Core i7-6700. It was already fast at 4GHz, but InterPro boosted the clock to 4.6GHz with the help of Corsair H80i watercooling. The Core i7-6700K’s disadvantage is that it’s quad-core, albeit with support for Hyper-Threading, as Skylake isn’t yet available with more cores; it probably won’t be for another year (see Core i7 or Xeon?, p84). So a Skylake system will be better suited to 3D modelling and image editing…

PRICE £2,273 (£2,727 inc VAT) from yoyotech.co.uk Yoyotech is a manufacturer that we normally associate with consumer systems, but the company has been producing specific workstation ranges for some years now. The Renatus Pro M3 is its latest foray, and a brand-new line that we’re the first to see. In most respects, it’s similar to a number of other systems this month, but with one or two extra features that might appeal to enterprise-grade users. The processor is the most powerful this month, the six-core Intel Core i7-5930K, which has a nominal 3.5GHz clock frequency, 200MHz more than the i7-5820K CPUs used in a number of other systems. We expected similar results in tests, though, as Yoyotech overclocked its CPU to the same 4.2GHz as rivals (notably, you don’t need…

PRICE £1,666 (£1,999 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk PC Specialist may be better known for its consumer systems, but the Hex shows it knows how to build a workstation. Despite sporting the same processor as two other systems this month, PC Specialist has made tweaks to put its system ahead in some areas. The key to its success is Intel’s Core i7-5820K processor. This runs natively at 3.3GHz, but PC Specialist has raised the cores to 4.4GHz permanently. Usually, this kind of clock increase is accompanied by watercooling, but instead PC Specialist uses a truly gigantic Noctua NH-D15S, which sports two heat-pipe fan arrays and a 120mm fan to keep noise down. It partners the Core i7 with 32GB of 2,133MHz Kingston Fury HyperX DDR4 SDRAM, and they only occupy four…

PRICE Appliance and TotalProtect/1yr, £1,607 exc VAT from sophos.com The union of Sophos and Cyberoam is bearing fruit as the new XG security appliances amalgamate all the best features offered by both vendors. Sophos has done a superb job of integrating everything, and goes even further as the appliances talk to its cloud service and provide instant readouts on endpoint security status. Cyberoam provides the majority of security services, which means that along with anti-malware, anti-spam, web filtering, application controls, IPS and a web-application firewall, you get its patented identity-based security. This adds extra versatility, allowing policies to be applied to users and groups as well as systems. The XG 135w on review looks fit for duty in mid-sized businesses, with the manufacturer claiming a remarkably high UTM throughput of…

PRICE £644 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com Aver claims the VC520 was designed to be equally at home in a small conference room as it is in the middle of a sales floor, but take careful note of its dimensions. This is a big piece of kit. In return, you get professional videoconferencing features at an affordable price. Tipping the scales at 1.5kg, the solid pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera offers full high-definition 1080p resolution and, thanks to the large lens, has both a 12x optical zoom and a maximum aperture of f/1.8, which allows it to work in low light. The 210mm discus-shaped speakerphone is equally impressive, with three directional mics providing 360-degree coverage over a ninemetre diameter. Along with noise suppression and echo cancellation, it has a 10W internal speaker that…

@PaulOckenden “Samsung’s SmartThings Starter Kit will allow you to get a feel of what kit like this can actually do” Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of what’s probably best described as “ingenious solutions”. That is, using technology in a completely different way from what it was originally intended to do. A great example is a note I received from reader Matt Collinge, who wanted to automatically switch his subwoofer on and off at the same time as his TV. There are several ways to achieve this: for example, OneClick’s “Intelliplug” device, which is essentially a plug-in, multi-way device with three outlets – one is always on while the other two are master and slave. The way the latter two work is that the slave outlet gets switched…

@stardotpro You can’t have missed the signs – I’ve laid out part of my logic in the Cheat Sheet of this issue (see p104) – but the picture has now grown big enough that I think a wider viewpoint must be sought, one that includes the factor of crap software writers. It’s a long time since I wrote any software worthy of the name, and what I used to produce wasn’t like modern PC applications. Minicomputers were luxurious places for a programmer: fast, roomy and with the best brains on the planet dedicated to the hard work of writing the compilers and linkers. Issues such as lifecycle, commercial payment, support and updates were years in the future (and keeping up with vendors’ misadventures over online security farther still). What I’m…

MOST STUDENTS USE their time out of class for extracurricular activities such as sport, clubs and drinking, but a group of 30 engineering, design and informatics students at the University of Edinburgh are instead building the future of transport. The students have put together a design for Hyperloop, the pneumatic trains dreamt up by SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk. Hyperloop trains run on a cushion of air through a near-vacuum tube at top speeds of 1,200km/hr (745mph) – enough to slash the time from Edinburgh to London to 40 minutes. Musk is sponsoring a competition to spur research into the area. The University of Edinburgh Hyped team was one of two British projects to present at the Hyperloop Design Weekend competition in Texas, showing off its design to Musk…

You’ve heard the meme that everyone is connected to everyone else in the world by, on average, no more than six people. It works because a small number of people know a lot of people, who act as hubs. Just think of Kevin Bacon, which is why the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game – in which you must connect any actor with Mr Bacon as quickly as possible – caught on so successfully. It’s more interesting to see the result of a recent analysis by Facebook, where it crunched its entire dataset of users looking for links. “Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three-and-a-half other people,” the report read. “The…

1 Apple fights the feds on iPhone encryption Appleissuedanextraordinarypublicrebuke totheFBIaftertheagencydemandedthat AppleprovideaspecialversionofiOSthat couldcircumventencryptiononthedeviceof aterrorist.TheFBIissuedcourtdocuments requiringAppletocreateanewsystem informationfilethatwouldallowthefeds toforcetheirwaypastApple’sencryption andnotriskautomaticdeletionofdatafrom failedpasscodeattempts.Inapublicletter postedonitswebsite,CEOTimCooksaidthe companywouldfightthecourtorder,saying suchsoftwarewouldcompromiseevery iPhoneuser’ssecurity. “Inthephysicalworld, itwouldbethe equivalentofa masterkey, capableof opening hundreds ofmillions oflocks,” wroteCook. “Noreasonable personwouldfind thatacceptable.” 2 Microsoft finally reveals what’s going into Windows 10 updates Havingsteadfastlyrefusedtodivulgewhat’s goingintothenowmandatoryupdatesto Windows10,Microsofthaspublisheda newwebpagecoveringwhat’sactuallybeen fixedoraddedtotheoperatingsystem. “Afterlisteningtofeedbackregardingthe levelofdisclosureforWindows10updates, wedecidedtoimplementanewsystem forcommunicatingupdatestotheoperating system,”aMicrosoftspokespersontold TheRegister. “Todaywearerollingout theWindows10updatehistorysite,ahub forthereleasenotesthatwillaccompany eachupdateandserveasahistorical recordofpriorreleasenotes.”Toview thefulllistofhistoricalupgradesand changestoWindows10,visitthefollowing link:pcpro.link/259updatehistory. 3 Error 53 bricks repaired iPhones It’snotonlylawenforcementApplehas beenshuttingoutthismonth,butitsown customers.AniOSupdateeffectively brickedthehandsetsofcustomers whohadtheirhomebuttons replacedbyindependentrepair shops,withthescreensimply displayingError53.WithApple chargingmorethan£250to replacethehomebutton, manycustomersoptedfor third-partyreplacements. Anexpensiveoptionif Applehadstucktoitsguns. Havingfirstclaimedthat disablinghandsetswas necessarytoprotect theintegrityofTouch ID,however,Apple laterapologisedand rolledoutanupdatetoiOS thatfixedError53.(see DarienGraham-Smith’s columnonp22formore). 4 Torvalds: “I’m not a people person” Thefamouslyprickly creatoroftheLinux kernel,Linus Torvalds,gavea brutallyfrankTED talkinwhichhe openlyconfessed todislikingmanyof hisfellowopensourcecollaborators. “WhatIloveaboutopen sourceisthatitreallyallows differentpeopletoworktogether,”hesaid. “Wedon’thavetolikeeachother.And sometimes,wereallydon’tlikeeachother.” Torvaldsadmittedhewasn’t“apeople person”andwasbaffledbytherowsthat eruptoversoftware.“Codeeitherworks oritdoesn’t,”hesaid.“There’slessroom forargument,andyetwehavearguments despitethis.” Torvaldsalsorevealedhehastoworkin completesilence.“Ifthecatcomesupandit sitsinmylap,Iwanttohearthesoundofthe catpurring,notthefansofthecomputer.” 5 Nextbit Robin: the cloud…

LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 Late 2015, from £959 dell.co.uk We already loved the Dell XPS 13, but this update makes it irresistible. Skylake processors, superfast SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 all help it fly through tasks, and the design is as amazing as ever. It’s the ultraportable we’ve been waiting for. REVIEW: pcpro.link/alxps13 ALTERNATIVES Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 260 NEW ENTRY Blending the best of its esteemed ThinkPad range with the flexibility of the Yoga, Lenovo has created something close to a perfect business hybrid. £1,165; lenovo.com/uk REVIEW: see p62 Asus C201 Chromebook It has weak points – the screen is okay rather than great – but the C201 is ideal for life on the move thanks to its outstanding 12-hour battery life. £200; currys. co.uk REVIEW: pcpro.link/alasusc201 Dell XPS 15 Dell…

Which way round does a USB cable go? The other way*. While I’m sure most of us have wasted a leisurely read of War and Peace trying to jam a USB cable in the “wrong way”, I doubt many of us have wasted much time dithering over which USB cable to use in the first place. A USB cable’s a USB cable. Aside from making sure you’ve got the right connector at either end, the choice of cable itself is immaterial, right? It seems not. Before you tear up your magazine in disgust or skip straight to Nicole’s column, this isn’t about the “quality” of data that gets passed down cables. If you’re one of the cable homeopaths who believes you can only hear John Lennon fart in the background…

1 Minimise blue light emissions Blue light isn’t the enemy: it helps to regulate the body-clock mechanism known as the circadian rhythm, which tells us when to wake up and when to sleep. The real problem is that a uniform level of blue light is emitted by the screens we gaze at all day. The solution? Use a display that regulates the light it produces based on the time. At midday, you’d benefit from a 6,500K colour temperature; by 6pm, you want something closer to 5,500K. At midnight, either stop using your PC and go to bed – or drop down to 4,500K. Choose an EIZO FlexScan EV Series monitor equipped with “circadian dimming” and you’ll not only be able to take total control, it will reduce the blue light…

PRICE £166 (£199 inc VAT) from dell.com/uk We’ve already seen a few sub-£200 Windows PCs, but they’ve generally been compromised. Some have Atom processors, which are barely capable of running Windows properly, and others, such as the Intel Compute Stick and Hannspree Micro PC, are hamstrung by slow Wi-Fi and having only a single USB port. Dell’s Inspiron Micro Desktop is a different proposition. It may be bigger than the Hannspree and Intel stick computers, but it has the advantage of being a properly usable PC. The Micro Desktop is roughly the same size as an Intel NUC, which means it’s slightly smaller than a stack of four CDs. It has a useful selection of ports: on the rear are two USB 2 ports for your keyboard and mouse, HDMI…

PRICE £192 (£230 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk Acer has made serious headway with Chromebooks in recent years, greedily snaffling more than a third of the global market. Now the company is looking to cement its position by taking inspiration from Lenovo’s Yoga line-up. Behold, the company’s first Chrome OS-powered convertible: the Chromebook R11. There’s a hint of déjà vu to the R11. The white plastics and curved edges are reminiscent of the HP Chromebook 11 – but the star of the show is the hinge. The R11’s “patented dual-torque hinge” allows the screen to bend back through 360 degrees, so it can work in laptop, tablet, tent and stand modes with a mere flick of the wrist. This is a brilliant idea, and one that makes the Chromebook R11 far…

PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from serif.com Considering it’s been kicking around for 25 years, Serif’s PagePlus X9 is looking very fresh-faced indeed. Software with a long pedigree often feels swamped with features, but its various panels are sensibly laid out and labelled, its menus are straightforward, and key features are quick to locate. Serif hasn’t taken the easy route of upping the requirements in return for a pretty interface. It still supports Windows XP and modest hardware, and I found it extremely sprightly on my modern PC. This reflects the fact Serif is targeting a less demanding audience than, say, Adobe, and it places a lot of emphasis on ease of use. The Startup Assistant offers links to video tutorials and high-quality templates – perfect for people without the…

PRICE £1,160 (£1,392 inc VAT) from hp.com/uk One of the smallest workstations we’ve ever seen, this diminutive pizza box of a workstation is designed to either sit underneath your monitor or orientated sideways as a rather slim tower (if you buy the optional stand). But the small size doesn’t mean there’s a puny system inside. In fact, the Z240 SFF sports an Intel Xeon processor from Intel’s latest Skylake generation. It’s “only” an E3, the 3.6GHz 1270 v5 to be precise, but it’s a quad-core CPU with Hyper-Threading and a 4GHz Turbo Boost, so it’s well optimised for single-threaded tasks and modest multithreaded activities. HP partners the CPU with 32GB of 2,133MHz DDR4 memory, sensibly supplied on two DIMMs, leaving another two slots free for upgrade to the 64GB maximum.…

PRICE £1,625 (£1,950 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk/3xs The Scan 3XS GW-HT15 has a modest price compared to its rivals, but that doesn’t mean it’s limited in terms of power. In particular, it still packs a six-core Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia Quadro M4000 graphics. The CPU in question is a Core i7-5820K, which runs at a nominal 3.3GHz and offers Hyper-Threading. Scan has permanently set the clock speed to 4.2GHz, matching Chillblast, and they use identical Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 motherboards too. However, Scan employs the sizeable (and quiet) Noctua NH-U14S air cooler rather than a water-based system, and has chosen to partner its processor with only 16GB of 2,666MHz DDR4 SDRAM. This is now the bare minimum for a selfrespecting workstation, although the fact there are four DIMM slots…

PRICE Appliance with all services/1yr, £1,364 exc VAT from barracuda.com Barracuda’s latest NextGen F-Series firewalls look like the perfect choice for small and medium-sized businesses that require the toughest network security, while sophisticated traffic shaping and quality-of-service (QoS) features put the focus firmly on optimising access to cloud-based apps. The NextGen Firewall F80 on review has a claimed 500Mbits/sec IPS throughput that should be sufficient for the recommended 50-user limit. Moreover, the price includes one-year subscriptions to Barracuda’s full web security, advanced threat protection, Energize Updates and instant replacement services. The integral wireless access point (AP) is of the single-band 2.4GHz 802.11n variety, capable of presenting multiple virtual SSIDs. Anti-spam protection isn’t available on this model – if you need this, look instead at the F180 and models above that.…

PRICE Appliance and UTM subscription/1yr, £754 exc VAT from watchguard.com WatchGuard’s Firebox T30 should appeal to budgetconscious SMBs because it offers tough security measures at a very reasonable price. It’s also aimed squarely at remote offices lacking on-site IT expertise, as WatchGuard’s innovative RapidDeploy delivers fast plug-and-play installation services. This fiery red desktop box isn’t lacking in the hardware department either. It sports five Gigabit ports for LAN, WAN and DMZ duties, and it’s big on performance, with a fast UTM throughput of 135Mbits/sec. The standard UTM subscription enables anti-spam, gateway antivirus, IPS, web-content filtering, application controls, HTTPS inspection and WatchGuard’s reputation-enabled defence. WatchGuard also offers optional data-leak prevention (DLP) and advanced persistent threat (APT) blocker services, which only increase a one-year subscription to £1,001 exc VAT. Standalone deployment isn’t…

When was the last time you really worried about storage? It’s one of the truisms of computing that price per megabyte of whichever media you choose will only ever head one way – down. And yet, the value of what we store goes in precisely the opposite direction. Increased regulation means we need to be ever more careful of how we preserve our business records, and fines can – and will – be levied on those who don’t take sufficient care to preserve their accounts and comply with data-protection requirements. It’s not inconceivable that these fines will exceed the cost and inconvenience of taking the matter in hand earlier and setting up a robust and secure storage system, which you review at regular intervals. The fact remains, though, that the…

@mnew “It’s a way of gaining inspiration and, ultimately, showcasing your own projects” If, like me, you’ve been observing the growth of microcomputer boards such as the Arduino, Pi and Galileo, I suspect you’ll have bought a couple and dabbled with them and their various development tools. The web is full of projects using these devices, ranging from the total overkill of creating a dimmable LED to much more complex projects limited mainly by one’s imagination. It’s an exciting arena: the possibilities offered by these little parcels of computing power and hardware control are immense. The overall terminology for this family of devices, defined by their ability to be easily interfaced with the real world, is the “Internet of Things”, or IoT, and most recently I’ve been drawn in by…