Table of contents for September 2025 in PC Pro

Is there a single person alive who loves Microsoft, shareholders aside? The answer to this rhetorical question is no, and I know why: like so many long-term partners, it takes us for granted. Just now, I was hit by a warning message in Edge because I don’t use Bing as my search engine. Well, no, I use Google. A choice I could only make by navigating its forest of options to find the setting I was looking for, stuck in the same metaphorical toilet cubicle where Arthur Dent found the bypass plans. Strange how easy Microsoft makes it for me to change back to Bing. Then there’s the data honey trap known as OneDrive. We all know someone who has fallen for the “you risk losing your photos, videos and…

If you’re moving into one of the 1.5 million new homes the government has pledged to build over the course of this parliament, you might think the last thing you need worry about is the broadband. Surely a new build will have full fibre running to it as a matter of course? In the vast majority of cases, it will. However, you might have no choice over which broadband provider you’re saddled with. Many property developers strike exclusive deals with ISPs that leave customers paying over the odds for a shoddy service, with no option to seek an alternate provider, and little hope of the situation improving. ■ What the regulations say Developers of new build properties are obligated to provide high-speed broadband, following amendments made to the Building Regulations…

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor. The real magic of ebooks is a non-Amazon e-reader or the Libby app paired with an account for your local library. @njkobie Let me start by saying I prefer physical books to ebooks, but I keep novels on my phone in the hope they’ll distract me from scrolling Instagram – and, when it comes to work, searchable ebooks are handy for research. So now and then I try to buy an ebook on my phone. It goes like this: see an ad or post about a book, search it, click the Amazon listing in the Google results, causing the Amazon app to open. The marvels of living in the future, a book in a matter of clicks! But wait. Under “Kindle Edition”, the…

October will be here before you know it, and Microsoft will pull the plug on Windows 10 support. The great migration to Windows 11 will now have to begin and if you still haven’t decided what to do, then (like a doctor with a concerned look on his face) I’m here to talk you through your options. For the past year, barely a day has passed when I haven’t had this complicated conversation with a customer, so PC Pro has asked me to empty my brain and give you advice on what to do with your Windows 10 machine. We’ll look at your hardware, explain the upgrade options for AMD and Intel, for desktops and laptops, helping you to create a plan of action. Let’s begin by working out exactly…

One of the lesser-known requirements of Windows 11 is for the boot drive to have a GPT (GUID partition table) partition style. Most Windows 10 machines already have this, but not all, so let me show you how to fix it. Warning: before you begin, work out which key combination your machine uses to get into the BIOS/UEFI. You’ll need this during the process and it’s better for your blood pressure to have this information now rather than not have it in about ten minutes. Open Disk Management in Windows 10 and ignore the information in the top half of the box. Right-click on the “Disk 0” (or applicable), then select Properties. Select the Volumes tab and Partition Style should confirm you’re running MBR. Next, open a command window as…

I hard enough getting Wi-Fi to work reliably in a two-bedroom flat, let alone a field containing thousands of smartphone-wielding festival-goers or a train belting through the British countryside. But there are networking professionals who are used to working in these Wi-Fi warzones. We’ve talked to networking experts who have installed Wi-Fi in brutally challenging environments to find out how they do it. Whether it’s preventing visitors dragging down the network at Brighton Pride, installing under-seat access points in football stadiums or making sure overgrown shrubs don’t knock out the Wi-Fi on the 5.15 to Basingstoke, we’ve got the inside story on how some of the most extreme Wi-Fi networks are put together. FESTIVALS AND OUTDOOR EVENTS You might not give much thought to it when you’re standing in the…

We all know that AI has an uncanny ability to generate text, graphics and videos from scratch. But it can also work wonders with your existing photo and video content, applying complicated adjustments and edits that would be tricky and time-consuming to accomplish by hand, and producing professional-quality results – most of the time, at least. Since AI operations demand a lot of computing power, the best services for working with images and videos almost always cost money – but depending on your requirements there are often cheap and free options available. Here’s a rundown of what you can do, along with our favourite tools for such jobs, whether you’re working with stills or moving images. Upscale low-resolution photos and video Low-resolution images are a pain. They look cheap on…

PRICE 256GB, £874 (£1,049 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk While it doesn’t have the high-end internals of the Fold7, the Z Flip7 is a compelling phone in its own way – and far more affordable. The standard model comes with 256GB of storage at £1,049, with the 512GB version costing £1,149, so it’s very much on a par with its arch rival, Motorola’s Razr 60 Ultra (see issue 370, p46). The Flip7 comes in four colours, including vibrant Coralred; you can choose the same elegant Jetblack and Blue Shadow options as the Fold7, or Mint if you buy from Samsung’s website. Like its predecessors, the Flip7 has flat edges that dig into your hand, and it remains tricky to open one-handed, but there are welcome changes. For a start, it’s thinner…

PRICE From £1,658 (£1,990 inc VAT) from lenovo.com Sci-fi filmmakers understand a simple truth: nothing says futuristic tech quite like a keyboard-free design. The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i Gen 10 embraces that vision, greeting users with two stunning 14in OLED displays and not a button in sight — unless you include the bundled, detachable keyboard. For those of us who live in the here and now, the question must surely be: why? Essentially, as with the first such Yoga Book 9i (see issue 347, p64), the more recent Asus Zenbook Duo UX8406CA (see issue 368, p52) and the various “Fold” designs based around a single, foldable OLED screen, the answer is to give you a laptop design when in cramped conditions and a mini desktop when you have the space.…

PRICE £1,833 (£2,200 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com If you’re a gamer on the move, you’ve never had so much choice – this month alone we review the new Razer Blade 14 (see p58) and Lenovo’s Legion Go S with Steam OS (see p72). But what if you could take the best of a gaming laptop and handheld and mosh them together? The answer is the Asus ROG Flow Z13: a high-performance gaming tablet that can play AAA titles at good, as opposed to merely playable, frame rates. The power stems from AMD’s Ryzen AI Max 390 processor. Part of the Strix Halo family announced at CES, this includes a dozen Zen 5 cores, a powerful Ryzen NPU AI rated at 50 TOPS (easily enough to meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirements)…

PRICE Two stations: £150 (£180 inc VAT); three stations: £203 (£244 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk We’ve tested a few Wi-Fi 7 meshes in the past, but never one this cheap. Prior to the arrival of the Asus ZenWiFi BD4, the most affordable Wi-Fi 7 mesh system we’d seen was Amazon’s Eero Max 7 (see issue 352, p68) – yours for a knockdown £1,150 inc VAT. That was back at the end of 2023, however. The market has moved on, and the latest Wi-Fi 7 systems are much more affordable. The ZenWiFi BD4 comes in at a fraction of the price of the Eero: you’re looking at £180 for two stations, or £244 for three. To be fair, this is a more cut-down proposition than Amazon’s chunky mesh. That system supported…

PRICE Free from blackmagicdesign.com When it comes to professional video editing, you might think of Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer or Final Cut Pro. You might also imagine paying a small fortune for them. But there’s another option that offers professional-grade tools for free: Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve. There are no awkward compromises here; no ads, no watermarks. It does have limitations, the biggest being that it restricts exports to 4K and 60fps. DaVinci Resolve Studio raises the ceiling to 32K/120fps and includes a host of other advanced features for £225, and that fee includes all future updates, large or small. Here, we’re focusing on the free version. A program that not only allows you to edit a video project, but integrates a bunch of powerful features that would…

SCORE PRICE £112 (£134 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk This 24in Full HD monitor couldn’t be any more different to AOC’s Graphic Pro U32U3CV sibling on p90 if it came in neon green and spoke Russian. It’s basic, it’s small, it’s cheap – and while it was never going to vie for awards there are plenty of factors in its favour. Most important of all, the AOC 24B3CF2’s image quality is far better than you might expect for the price. Stick to the native colour mode and this 1,920 x 1,080 panel covers a respectable 71% of the DCI-P3 gamut, which compares well to many budget monitors we’ve seen. Colours don’t exactly pop, but nor is it dull. There’s also an sRGB mode, which locks well to that gamut and means…

SCORE PRICE £283 (£339 inc VAT) from dell.com Take care if you choose this monitor: it comes with three different resolution panels (Full HD, QHD or the tested 4K), and you can select each with or without USB-C. The price changes – for example, the non-USB-C version costs £269 inc VAT – but the looks stay the same, with a chic design distinguished by ultra-slim bezels and a matt white stand. It’s definitely one of the most stylish monitors around. Dell takes the unusual step of hiding away the USB hub, which consists of a USB-A and USB-C port in a pop-down unit at the bottom left of the bezel. It’s neat, until you plug cables in and they remain visible. A second USB-A port sits in a cavity at…

SCORE PRICE £198 (£237 inc VAT) from iiyama-monitors.co.uk It shouldn’t surprise us to see a high-quality yet superb-value Iiyama monitor, because that’s what the company has produced for years. Here it delivers a 27in QHD (2,560 x 1,440) display based on a lily-white IPS panel. Although anyone hoping for wide colour gamuts should look elsewhere: it covers 77% of the DCI-P3 space compared to 97% of the ViewSonic VP2788-5K, to take an expensive example, and that means you miss out on lush hues in scenery. The Iiyama display performed excellently in our colour accuracy tests, however, and its peak brightness of 317cd/m 2 is more than enough for office locations. We found it usable at half that brightness. In terms of features, it’s quicker to cover what the XUB2797QSNP-B1 doesn’t…

SCORE PRICE Quotes provided on application with Sharp We’ve finally reached the end of the five-year branding road: NEC Display Solutions became NEC/Sharp in 2020 and has now become Sharp, with this the first monitor under the new name. As with its predecessors, the MultiSync EA272U is squarely aimed at enterprise buyers so you’ll rarely find it in retailers. Although individual units can be bought from some specialists for around £475 exc VAT, it only makes sense when bought as part of a fleet. That’s in part because you can probably negotiate a lower price, but also because it’s designed for remote management. The physical part is connecting to your network via the RJ45 port, with the soft component coming via the NaViSet software. This allows you to manage each…

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk One monitor looms large in the background when reviewing the BenQ DesignVue PD2730S: the Apple Studio Display (see issue 332, p62). They’re both 5K screens, and both designed to complement Apple computers with Thunderbolt 4 outputs, but while the Studio Display costs £1,499 with the standard glass and stand – rising to £2,149 if you select the Nano-texture glass and height-adjustable stand – you can pick up the BenQ for a flat £1,000. That’s also £199 cheaper than the similarly luxurious ViewSonic ColorPro VP2788-5K (see p86). The great thing about this BenQ display is that, when it comes to image quality at least, you’re making no compromises. It’s pre-calibrated to hit the sRGB, Display P3 and DCI-P3 gamuts almost perfectly, along with…

SCORE PRICE £319 (£383 inc VAT) from hp.com When it was released back in 2021, this monitor ticked all the right boxes – by which we primarily mean that it supported USB-C. But here we are in 2025 and its 65W output looks weak, albeit still enough to power typical office laptops, while it loses out on increasingly common wired networking ports. Another sign of its age is that all the ports in its USB hub are USB-A, with no USB-C option, and they’re tucked awkwardly at the rear. This is where you’ll also find DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 connectors, plus a USB-B input so that you can share peripherals (keyboards, mice, external drives) plugged into the USB-A ports between computers. Compared to rivals, the P34hc’s peak brightness of…

SCORE PRICE £427 (£512 inc VAT) from visunext.co.uk The 34in curved ViewSonic VG3457CV is designed to be a one-stop, do-it-all docking monitor. Along with the usual physical network port and USB hub, it provides a Zoom-certified 5MP webcam complete with microphone and fill-in lighting – not needed in good lighting, where this webcam excels, but it provided a helpful lift in darker situations. You can tune the fill-in lighting with settings for brightness and warmth, and unlike the Iiyama ProLite XCB3497WQSNPH there is a limited amount of tilt. It’s a pop-up webcam so hides away for privacy, but it’s nice to see support for Windows Hello. However, it feels plasticky, and on the first sample ViewSonic sent us the camera didn’t work – this makes us worry about durability, although…

If you listen to the PC Pro podcast then you will have heard me wax lyrical about the comedy writer John Finnemore, perhaps most famous for writing the excellent radio show Cabin Pressure (starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Roger Allam and the brilliant Stephanie Cole) and his contribution to the Paddington films. But he also wrote a sketch about choice. “First,” the narrator intones, “there was no choice.” “This is it,” says a car salesman. “It’s big, it’s grey and it sometimes catches fire.” The next step: not enough choice. “All right, there are two kinds,” explains the salesman. “There are the big grey ones that sometimes catch fire, or these small brown ones that don’t work.” “Then, for about five minutes, there was just enough choice,” says the narrator. Cue the…

SCORE PRICE £447 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com If your business cannot accept any internet downtime, you’ve come to the right place: DrayTek’s Vigor C510ax security appliance is bursting with WAN redundancy features. Its internal 5G LTE modem has two SIM slots for primary and backup mobile network connections, two of its five gigabit ports can be assigned to WAN duties, and its integral Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP) can failover to a local wireless hotspot. Internet redundancy is configured by defining multiple WAN connections as an active or a backup link, where the latter is automatically brought online when the primary link fails or its traffic exceeds specific thresholds. Another option is to set all links as active and use load balancing to distribute traffic across them. The Wi-Fi 6…

SCORE PRICE £83 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com DrayTek has a fine reputation for delivering affordable wireless networks, and its VigorAP 905 takes this to the next level. This Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP) supports three operational modes along with no fewer than four management choices, and it does it all for only £83. This slim-line AP can be freestanding or wall-mounted, with its AX3000 rating claiming speeds of up to 2,400Mbits/sec on its 5GHz radio and 600Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio. It supports the 5GHz 160MHz channels and presents up to 16 SSIDs spread equally across each radio. The main LAN port is the 2.5GbE multi-gig variety, which requires an 802.3at PoE+ power source. Alternatively, you can use the external power adapter DrayTek generously includes in the box. It also…

Where to start with the announcements and releases from Apple’s WWDC conference? Rather than get mired in deep detail, there are a couple of important underlying issues. The new look and feel, especially on iPhone and iPad, is gorgeous. The use of glass effects goes further than anything I’ve seen before. It isn’t just a few frosty special effects and fake 3D, as some have suggested. Look closer and this is an entirely new world of graphical rendering and layering. And the iPad’s move to a properly windowed environment is arguably the biggest change in the product since it launched. My 13in iPad Pro M4 on its keyboard stand, along with the Pencil, has gained a new level of usability that moves it from an expensive content consumption device to…

Everyone who regularly reads this column knows that SMS text messages are not the recommended method of delivering two-factor authentication codes. There’s a good reason for that: in terms of security, it’s only one step above someone shouting them to you across the street. There’s the SIM swap threat, but for most people this is a somewhat overplayed hand in the game of risk poker; malware and phishing are far greater threats. As there are so many better options, including authentication apps and passkeys, why play the game at all? Which is a rather long-winded way of saying I’m not addressing that issue today. I’m more concerned with the general risk of SMS threats that revolve around phishing, as that’s the number one method of initial access to compromise devices…

Regular readers may have noticed that we have been having a bit of a rocky period with Outlook. Not only me; not only Jon, whose patience with misbehaving software is legendarily short. Customers, too, were gradually admitting they didn’t understand the recent changes in behaviour following the most recent software update. The incident that started me thinking about the role of sync software in these circumstances was the boss-man in my high mountain client. He lives in Outlook and, as reports of misbehaving email installations started mounting up, I was more concerned by his silence than by the problems I knew his desktop PC setup was already facing. Sure enough, his machine – a reasonably recent ex-corporate box, made a lot faster and quieter with a nice SSD upgrade –…

Lithium-ion batteries have plenty of benefits – good energy density, fast charging and light weight among others – but there are enough downsides that researchers have long been seeking alternatives. Lithium is costly to extract, requiring huge amounts of water, and the batteries remain difficult to recycle. Plus, if damaged they have a tendency to catch fire and even explode. Here are a few potential replacements that are already in the works. Lithium-air/lithium-oxygen Like lithium-carbon dioxide, these batteries have a higher theoretical energy density than lithium-ion batteries. But they also face issues with degradation when recharging, complicated engineering, and the possibility of fires, especially if pure oxygen is used. Lithium-sulphur Proponents of a lithium-sulphur design claim it could deliver twice the energy density of lithium-ion designs while being much lighter.…

There’s a potentially fun and funky new Wi-Fi protocol coming soon for your mobile devices. Called Wi-Fi Aware, it’s a similar idea to the existing Wi-Fi Direct protocol – but while that technology has been largely ignored, this one has me genuinely excited. Currently supported by both Android and Apple, Wi-Fi Aware is a peer-to-peer protocol that lets wireles devices find one another and communicate directly, without having to go through a base station or router. Any compatible device can broadcast a list of interfaces that it supports, and any other one can discover it and initiate a high-speed connection with very low latency. Best of all, the technology allows multiple connections between multiple devices at the same time, so your phone can be connected to a number of different…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro M4 M4 beast from £1,599 from apple.com/uk This M4 update to the already brilliant MacBook Pro line is an easy recommendation, so the big question becomes do you choose the 14in version from £1,599 or 16in from £2,499? And then how much do you upgrade, as Apple isn’t afraid of high prices. But whatever you choose should last for years, and look great while it’s doing it. REVIEW Issue 364, p50 Apple MacBook Air M4 If you don’t need the all-out power of the Pro, this is a brilliant, cheaper alternative despite the unchanged chassis and screen. 13in from £999, 15in from £1,199 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 368, p54 Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED Asus pairs a Core Ultra 9 288V with a 72Wh battery…

Barry Collins is not an economist, but if he scribbles that he is on a bit of paper, he’s wondering whether he’ll land a TED Talk. Email speaking invites to barry@mediabc.co.uk. @bazzacollins I’m a latecomer to Terry Pratchett, didn’t pick up a single book of his until after he died. So I’ve only recently polished off the excellent Making Money, which set my brain whirring on the nature of money. For those who haven’t ventured into Pratchett’s Discworld, Making Money is about how a conman-turned-bureaucrat revolutionises the economy. After introducing stamps while head of the Post Office and seeing how they quickly become a form of currency, he sets out to replace the coin-based economy with paper notes. The paper itself is practically worthless, unlike the gold or other metals…

The Windows 10 Extended Security Update program (ESU) should be available to most users by late August. The ESU runs from 15 October 2025 until 13 October 2026 keeping Windows 10 updated with security patches, but no new features. There are three ways to enrol. The simplest is to pay Microsoft $30 (or equivalent), but it’s also possible to cash in 1,000 Microsoft Reward Points. You may have already earned these by searching via Bing on a PC or a mobile, via Xbox gaming rewards or from buying apps, movies and TV shows from the Microsoft Store. The third method is more curious: Microsoft is giving the ESU to Windows Backup users for free. The app stores user settings, credentials, apps and folders safely in Microsoft OneDrive but, for the…

The CPU in your phone, tablet or computer processes billions of operations a second. On the microscopic scale, that means opening and closing billions of tiny electrical gates. This is done using electrical energy – and, as you may recall from physics class, no electrical process is 100% efficient. Every time a transistor is activated, a small amount of energy is lost as heat. Is this a big deal? In isolation, no. The heat generated by the operation of a single transistor is minuscule. No chip manufacturer publishes this figure; we suspect it would be difficult to even estimate on such a tiny scale. However, with billions of operations per second going on across billions of transistors, the heat can quickly build up, causing a significant proportion of the chip’s…

If you don’t want to invest in a specialist AI-powered editing service, ChatGPT can do a surprisingly good job with images, even for free users. For example, you can upload a photo and ask the engine to resize it to your desired dimensions for an AI-upscaled version. The results might look a little airbrushed, but generally it’s a lot better than just blowing up your low-resolution original. It can handle more advanced operations, too. We asked ChatGPT to replace the blue sky in an uploaded image with a thunderstorm (see below) – and the 4o model did a fairly good job. It wasn’t perfect: it didn’t change the blue sky reflected in the river or correct the lighting on the building, but it’s a good start. You might be able…

PRICE As reviewed, £2,000 (£2,400 inc VAT) from razer.com To misquote Austin Powers, 14in laptops are my jam. They’re the best form factor for gaming laptops, being an actually portable scale for a normal human, yet still delivering a large enough screen that you’re not perpetually squinting at your games. But Razer’s Blade 14 hasn’t been the best 14in gaming laptop in recent years. That accolade has belonged to Asus’ beautifully crafted ROG Zephyrus G14 (see issue 370, p72). This year is all about Razer fighting back with slimmer designs, however. We saw that with the Razer Blade 16 (see issue 369, p58) and again here, with Razer returning to the matte black MacBook aesthetic so beloved by its fans. That means the Blade 14 is almost exactly the same…

PRICE As reviewed, £708 (£850 inc VAT) from hp.com Be careful if you hunt for the HP OmniBook 5 laptop online: it comes in 14in and 16in guises with a selection of processors, ranging from previous-generation AMD processors and Intel Core Ultra variants to the version on test here: based around AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 Series chips, HP is declaring this a Next Generation AI device. Thus the NGAI horse-shoed into its name. We reviewed the base configuration with an AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 processor with Radeon 840M graphics, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and a 16in WUXGA (1,920 x 1,200) IPS non-touch display. Spend another £150 and that jumps to a Ryzen AI 7 350 with Radeon 860M graphics, a 1TB SSD and a touchscreen. As this…

PRICE $59 per year from zoner.com Zoner Studio is a Windows-only take on both Photoshop and Lightroom. It isn’t as powerful as either, although a slew of regular updates is changing that, but it’s a good entry-level/intermediate photo editor and organiser for a reasonable price. After a recent name change from Zoner Photo Studio X to Zoner Studio, I tested the latest version to see how it measures up against the best Adobe Photoshop alternatives. For me, the pricing is a big plus. There isn’t a free version available, only a free trial, but Zoner Studio’s $59 (around £44) per year cost is low when compared to the £20-per month Adobe demands for Photoshop and Lightroom. Your other option is a tool such as Affinity Photo 2, which has a…

When we set out on the month-long journey that is a Labs, we had one thing in mind: to provide a comprehensive overview of the monitor market so that you can buy with confidence. We’ve concentrated on the mainstream. There are a handful of truly premium monitors here, but most are aimed at so-called typical users: most of these monitors would be equally happy in a home office as a work office, several are ideal for students, and some will also appeal to creative professionals. We only drew the line at out-and-out gaming monitors. The end result is an exhaustive test of 22 current monitors varying from compact 24in displays (also worth considering as secondary screens) to 34in widescreen monsters. In the unlikely event that you can’t find exactly the right…

SCORE PRICE £241 (£289 inc VAT) from asus.com There’s one problem with most portable monitors: they’re just as small as the screen on the laptop they aim to complement. Asus solves that dilemma with a comparatively giant 24in monitor that you can stuff into a suitcase for travel as it only weighs 2.9kg. That doesn’t include the stand or any screen protection, however, and don’t forget to pack the compact 90W AC adapter. Spreading 1,920 x 1,080 pixels over a 23.8in diagonal results in a 93ppi pixel density so text isn’t ultra-sharp. However, it’s so much easier to work on two windows side by side with a monitor such as this than a 15.6in panel, so if you chuck in a keyboard and mouse you should be able to reach…

SCORE PRICE £224 (£269 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk We need to tackle this monitor’s great weakness from the start: it doesn’t include a USB-C input. You’re stuck with one DisplayPort and two HDMI ports, and no fancy luxuries such as USB hubs or RJ45 networking. All of which makes this sound like a bottom-of-the-pile, budget 27in monitor, but as soon as you switch it on you’ll discover that this is far from the case. First of all, let’s talk about the clarity of the Vero CB272K’s whites. Choose the sRGB mode and it locks down with near perfection, with 95% coverage with 95% of volume. That means every colour you see falls in the sRGB gamut. With strong colour accuracy to back this up, you can trust what you see.…

SCORE PRICE £666 (£799 inc VAT) from colorconfidence.com Eizo describes the EV2740X as “premium 4K for business”, and we can’t think of a better set of words to describe it. This monitor is designed to be rolled out en masse so that users can plug it in and enjoy top-quality images while admin teams can manage them from afar. That’s possible thanks to a built-in RJ45 connector and the Screen InStyle software, which gives IT control over energy usage – by forcing the monitor into Eco Mode – and colour profiles. That may seem draconian, but if this is a shared monitor you want everyone to plug into it and enjoy the image. And enjoy it they will. Anyone who spends most of their time in Excel or Word will…

SCORE PRICE £208 (£249 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The MSI brand springs to mind when thinking about graphics cards and motherboards, but it has a long history of producing displays, too. And not just gaming offerings: we’ve previously been impressed by its business-focused range and this is yet another solid performer. We say solid rather than outstanding because the 27in 2,560 x 1,440 panel has modest colour coverage, with 73% of the DCI-P3 gamut within its range. That means colours lack the pop of the HP Series 5 Pro 527pm, say, so anyone hoping to be entertained should look elsewhere. Instead, think of this as a work-focused panel. We suggest you play around with the colour temperature, however, with whites not looking their best in sRGB mode due to a…

SCORE PRICE £999 (£1,199 inc VAT) from visunext.co.uk If we gave awards on the basis of features alone, this display would walk away with a cabinet’s worth. The two Thunderbolt 4 ports mean you can daisy-chain two together and view a staggering number of pixels in a compact area: imagine having two 5,120 x 2,880 screens side by side. The second panel may require its own power supply, though, as the “down stream” port can only feed up to 15W. The VP2788-5K includes a separate power brick, and it’s meaty at 230W. Still, with up to 100W of that feeding a connected laptop and 15W going to a separate USB-C port, you can see how the power is used up. There are also HDMI and DisplayPort inputs at the rear,…

SCORE PRICE £190 (£230 inc VAT) from business.currys.co.uk Acer is a proven master of delivering great-value products, and that’s precisely what it achieves here: a 31.5in panel and USB-C connectivity for £230 is impossible to knock. And while others strip down the quality of the stand to achieve such a low price, the SH322QU provides a respectable 100mm of height adjustment and the ability to swivel 360°. The monitor even looks attractive, with slim bezels and housing. Some of this svelteness is achieved by relying on a power brick rather than integrating the PSU, with the DC input sitting next to a grand total of four ports: one apiece for the audio jack, USB-C, DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. There’s no USB hub, but you can at least charge a laptop…

SCORE PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk The MSI Modern MD342CQPW pulls off the neat trick of being the cheapest 34in curved monitor on test while looking like the most expensive. The next trick: to actually be a high-quality 3,440 x 1,440 panel, with an excellent set of results in our technical tests. Far more expensive panels failed to cover 87% of the DCI-P3 gamut, while its average Delta E of 0.52 puts it right up there with the best. Those who prefer to work in the sRGB gamut – where whites look a shade whiter – will also find much to love, as switching to that mode locked it to 95% of the space with only 1% overspill. Only its peak measured brightness of 261cd/m 2 (lower than…

SCORE PRICE £317 (£380 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk The Iiyama ProLite XCB3497WQSNPH is one of five monitors in this Labs to be based around a 34in curved panel with a 3,440 x 1,440 resolution, and we can understand why it’s so popular. It’s almost equivalent to having two monitors on your desk, with an extravagant 21:9 aspect ratio that provides ample room for four, even five, windows side by side. The ProLite is our pick of them all for the simple reason that Iiyama covers all the most important bases at a more competitive price than the feature-laden Philips 34B2U6603CH. So you don’t get Thunderbolt 4 or daisy chaining, but the USB-C connector can output up to 95W of power, and if you want to connect other computers you have…

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) need to get serious about network security if they want to prosper. Today’s threat landscape is constantly evolving, with attacks rising at an unprecedented rate, thanks in part to AI being used by cybercriminals to create more advanced and automated attacks. The numbers bear this out. The 2025 Cyber Report by ISP Beaming (tinyurl.com/372beaming) states that UK businesses experienced the highest number of Q1 cyberattacks in the nine years the company has been analysing this data. In the first four months of this year, UK businesses were subjected to an average of 183,221 cyberattacks each – that’s nearly one every 43 seconds. The financial fallout from a data breach shouldn’t be underestimated, either. The UK government’s 2025 Cyber Security Breaches Survey (tinyurl.com/372cybsec) states that the…

SCORE PRICE Appliance with 3yr TSS subscription, £4,284 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Stepping in at the top of WatchGuard’s desktop security appliance family, the Firebox T85-PoE is aimed at SMBs and remote offices with up to 50 users. It’s capable of handling high demand, with its 1.8GHz quad-core NXP CPU boasting a raw firewall throughput of nearly 5Gbits/sec and a respectable 943Mbits/sec with WatchGuard’s anti-virus (AV), intrusion prevention service (IPS) and application controls enabled. Port choices are plentiful: it offers eight gigabit ports and provides PoE+ services on the last two – handy for powering wireless access points. In addition, the rear expansion bay supports WatchGuard’s 10GbE SFP+ module (£183) or a 4G LTE module (£524), which presents a cellular WAN interface that can be used with the SD-WAN feature…

SCORE PRICE Diskless, £478 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com In keeping with Synology’s two-year product refresh cycle, the well-respected but ageing DS923+ four-bay desktop NAS has finally received its marching orders. In comes the DS925+, which targets the same home office and small business sectors and offers a number of welcome improvements, as well as a few not so welcome changes. The DS925+ is physically similar to its predecessor, with the main change being in the processing department, a quad-core 2.2GHz AMD Ryzen V1500B replacing the dual-core 2.6GHz AMD Ryzen R1600. Memory is unchanged, with the same base 4GB of ECC DDR4 expandable up to 32GB. Networking sees a modest boost, as this is one of Synology’s first desktop NAS appliances to come with dual 2.5GbE multi-gig ports. Alas, 10GbE support…

October is within touching distance, and it’s now possible to hear the rumble of shredding machines being readied for the mass culling of millions of machines. A conversation with customers about the end of Windows 10 is a daily occurrence, but some customers believe that Microsoft’s well publicised plans are not targeted at them. For example: “I paid three grand for this machine, it must be Windows 11 compatible.” It’s hard to support Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements for Windows 11. There are many well-equipped 7th gen Intel machines heading for the skip while plenty of low-spec devices, too awful to be given away as freebies in breakfast cereals, will survive. Hilary’s Acer Aspire 1 laptop was fuelled by an Intel Celeron N4500 processor and 4GB of RAM. Its smooth Windows…

Of all the classes of software we put our faith into, I believe the most misunderstood and often downright dangerous is the storage sync utility. With such a wide diversity of brands, the most important factor is the reputation of the sync software author. Looking at a market of at least 50-plus tools to move data at your request, the only way you can get an idea of the design limits and preferred deployment choices is by researching the dev team’s coding history and social media presence. My first reaction on seeing the number of apps available for file-synchronisation duties was simply, “who’s in charge here?” There cannot possibly be over 50 separate use-cases for running a file sync program. Can there?” To put this number into perspective, these days…

PRICE Around £150 from ebay.com Right now, one of those memory erasers from the Men in Black movies would be a godsend. It would allow me to wipe clean the computing knowledge I’ve accumulated over the past 40 years and approach the computer in front of me from the perspective of someone who has never so much as touched a keyboard. After all, the Amstrad PCW 8256 was squarely aimed at first-time computer users whether they were at home or in the office. How nice it would be to view it in the same way that so many others did following its release in 1985. Instead, I’m left wondering if this machine is going to be capable of igniting my curiosity and imagination. It was, to put it bluntly, never…

Microsoft has begun testing a new Windows recovery feature that will hopefully prevent a repeat of debilitating events such as the CrowdStrike outage. Quick machine recovery was announced last year, in response to the CrowdStrike failure that left millions of machines worldwide unable to boot without manual recovery. It’s now being tested in the Canary channel for Windows Insiders, suggesting it could be part of this autumn’s 25H2 update. Microsoft claims the new feature “automatically detects and fixes widespread issues on Windows 11 devices using the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE)”. Furthermore, “if a device experiences a widespread boot issue, it enters WinRE, connects to the internet, and Microsoft can deliver a targeted fix through Windows Update”. IT admins will be given the option to enable and customise quick machine recovery…

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He still occasionally dreams that he’s trapped inside the Windows Registry. dickpountain.co.uk I’ve been watching the rebellious mood that’s growing among Microsoft Windows 11 users with a degree of (not very nice) complacent amusement, as someone who dumped Windows in favour of a Chromebook more than eight years ago. My defection was as much an accident as an act of prescient wisdom. When Dennis Publishing moved to new offices, then-CEO James Tye took the quixotic decision to deploy Chromebooks to all; I took the opportunistic decision to borrow one and, being totally brassed-off with Windows 8.1, immediately became hooked. The Asus Chromebook I then bought for myself still works well and has been a source of great pleasure but for one problem…

Dead lifts Olivia Whitcroft’s article on unenforceable contract terms (see issue 371, p116) reminded me of an incident from many years ago that made me smile. I was negotiating the lease for the office accommodation for my fledgling business. The landlord was a well-known insurance company and the lease contained a term along the lines of “we shall not be responsible for death or injury caused by the lifts, even if this results from the negligence of the landlord”. I queried this with my solicitor, saying it surely couldn’t be legally enforceable. He agreed and contacted the landlord’s solicitor to have the clause removed. The response came back: “My client realises that the term is unenforceable but wishes to retain the comfort of the wording.” Brian Preece American bias I…

As Windows 10 nears the end of its support period, you may be planning to invest in a new laptop. Unfortunately, the excitement of getting a new computer is somewhat spoiled by the hassle of transferring all your personal files and settings across from your old machine. Windows unhelpfully scatters your documents and configuration files all over the file system, and even buries some settings in the Registry, so trying to copy everything across by hand is a tedious and indeed almost impossible endeavour. That’s why this month we’re giving PC Pro readers an exclusive licence for Laplink PCmover Express. This ingenious tool can transfer every bit of your personal content from an old PC to a new one in just a few clicks – including not just files, but…

PRICE 256GB, £1,499 (£1,799 inc VAT) from samsung.com/uk I’ve used many foldable phones over the past couple of years, but none has tempted me to buy one myself. Until now. For the Galaxy Z Fold7 is not just another iterative upgrade. Thanks to aggressive slimming down and re-engineering, Samsung’s latest folding design finally manages to feel like the best of both worlds, not a clunky trade-off between a phone and a tablet. It’s deliciously thin and light, yet offers masses of screen space, excellent cameras and no compromise in raw power. Now, let’s get the difficult part out of the way. At £1,799 inc VAT, this is one of the most expensive phones you can buy. And that price is for the base model with 256GB of storage and 12GB…

PRICE 256GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from nothing.tech Let’s get the painful bit out of the way: the Nothing Phone 3 costs £200 more than 2023’s Nothing Phone 2 (see issue 349, p72). That puts it head to head with the Samsung Galaxy S25 and Google Pixel 9, but as usual with Nothing it offers a specification, a design and, most of all, an attitude all of its own. The standard model comes with 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage – a good amount for a phone of this price – or you can go up to 16GB RAM and 512GB storage for another £100, which isn’t bad for twice the storage capacity and a third more RAM. Whether you choose the black or white finish, the Phone 3 makes…

PRICE £708 (£850 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk German manufacturer Medion loves to deliver value-packed products, and so it’s no surprise to see it sell an RTX 50 series gaming laptop for a mere £850. To hammer home that point: that price is buying you the latest generation of Nvidia technology, complete with support for AI frame generation. It’s an incredible feat. Naturally, it’s the bottom-end RTX 50 chip, the laptop version of the RTX 5050. That means roughly half the spec of the mobile RTX 5070 in the Razer Blade 14 (see p58): 2,560 CUDA cores versus 4,608, 440 AI cores rather than 798. But they do share the same memory specs, with 8GB of GDDR7 RAM and a 384GB/sec memory bandwidth. You can read the full comparison at tinyurl.com/372nvidia.…

PRICE Sapphire AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Pulse: 8GB £225 (£270 inc VAT); 16GB, £275 (£330 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk AMD has released two versions of the RX 9060 XT: one with 8GB of RAM, the other with 16GB. At current street prices, this pitches the cheaper version directly against Nvidia RTX 5060 cards and means the 16GB version sits alongside 8GB versions of the RTX 5060 Ti; if you want 16GB editions of that card, you’ll pay a minimum of around £400. Both versions of the RX 9060 XT have identical specs, aside from the 16GB version’s extra dollop of memory and slightly higher TGP (160W versus 150W). They use the same GPU die with identical clock speeds, with their main advantage over the RX 7600 and RX 7600…

PRICE Ryzen Z2 Go, £500 (£600 inc VAT) from lenovo.com I reviewed the Windows 11 version of the Legion Go S back in March (see issue 367, p76); now there’s an alternative model that ditches Windows in favour of the Linux-based, gamer-oriented SteamOS. The design is identical, with an 8in IPS touchscreen flanked on either side by familiar gaming controls. The most visible difference is that where the Windows version is white, the SteamOS model is a deep purplish colour, which Lenovo calls Nebula. I find this more appealing, especially as it does a better job of masking dirt and grime. The chassis is an all-plastic affair, but it feels sturdy. Its weight of 740g is reassuringly substantial but not burdensome, and the rounded grips sit comfortably in your hands.…

PRICE Free from adobe.com While Premiere Pro is Adobe’s high-end video editor, even regular Premiere Elements can feel too powerful and complicated to some. For those wanting a simple video editor that can work on both computers and mobile devices, Adobe offers Premiere Rush. As the name implies, it’s all about cutting content quickly, with an emphasis on creating simple social media or marketing videos. Perhaps most surprisingly, Premiere Rush is free. Set up an Adobe ID and you can download Rush for your computer via the Creative Cloud app and your mobile device via its app store. Whether you’re working on a computer, phone or tablet, the interface is similar – but not identical. For instance, options for graphics, effects, colour correction, speed adjustments, audio and cropping can be…

How big should you go? This question isn’t as easy to answer as it may seem. For example, if you’re on a tight budget, a 24in Full HD monitor may make perfect sense, not least because text will look sharper than the same resolution (1,920 x 1,080) on a 27in panel. However, rules of thumb apply. The first is that larger is generally better – but only if the number of pixels per square inch, the pixel density, remains above a certain level. For most people, that means around the 100ppi mark: you can get away with 92ppi (the pixel density of a 24in Full HD panel), but you’ll notice a jump in sharpness if you choose a 27in monitor with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution as that works out…

SCORE PRICE £231 (£278 inc VAT) from grooves-inc.co.uk The Eizo FlexScan EV2410R stands out from the 24in crowd – admittedly a thinning crowd due to the dominance of 27in screens – thanks to its 16:10 aspect ratio and array of ports. Eizo opts for old-style DVI-D and VGA connectors to keep the HDMI and DisplayPort inputs company, which is a calculated move: this monitor is designed for environments such as healthcare and education that rely on equipment using these old standards. There’s no USB-C input, but there is a USB-B port along with four USB-A ports: two sit at the back, the other two on the left-hand side for easy access. You’ll also find a 3.5mm headphone jack along with a line out, and although it’s always good to see…

SCORE PRICE £213 (£255 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk Unlike the glamorous BenQ DesignVue PD2730S (see p89), the BL2790QT is targeted at office users. That means a much less expansive colour gamut, one that’s essentially tied to the sRGB colour space – so don’t expect vivid imagery. The colours that you do see are accurate, however, with an excellent average Delta E of 0.41. It’s also sharp, with the 2,560 x 1,440 pixels an ideal fit for a 27in diagonal. BenQ’s intuitive OSD is easy to navigate using the joystick, with a selection of Color Modes to jump between: Standard, Coding, Care Mode, Movie, Game, ePaper (sepia) and User. Using the latter you can tweak the colour temperature, and we found doing this produced a cleaner white than default – it’s…

SCORE PRICE £320 (£384 inc VAT) from hp.com While it’s highly subjective, the HP Series 5 Pro 527pm earns our prize as the best-looking 27in display on test, with slim bezels matched to a minimalist matte silver stand. It’s maxi when it comes to movement, though, with pivot support, 150mm of height adjustment and the ability to swivel 45° both left and right. Cable management is easier than most as they plug in horizontally rather than vertically, which avoids cables dropping below the screen; it’s further helped by a neat cable tidy that sits hidden behind the slim rod of the stand. There’s no shortage of potential wires thanks to an RJ45 port, USB-B port and a trio of video inputs: USB-C (feeding up to 100W of power), HDMI and…

SCORE PRICE £271 (£325 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com The Philips 27B2G5601 has four direct competitors this month: BenQ, HP, Iiyama and MSI all submitted 27in IPS panels with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution and businessfriendly features. Here, that means a an RJ45 port for wired networking and a 90W feed to laptops over USB-C, which is ideal for workers who want to use their monitor as a docking station. There are also single video inputs for DisplayPort and HDMI. So far, so usual. Where Philips veers from this month’s playbook is by including two ways to daisychain a second monitor: there’s a DisplayPort output, as we see on its rivals, but also a second USB-C port dedicated to this purpose. This monitor also packs four speedy USB-A 3.2 Gen 2…

SCORE PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk The Asus ZenScreen MS27UC is part of a growing trend to inject streaming TV services into monitors, grouped under the hazy term “Smart Monitor”. It’s a boring name but a fascinating product category, because it appears to meet our changing habits: the office has moved to our homes, with different parts of people’s accommodation doubling as a place of work during the day and somewhere to play at night. You can see why a monitor that can essentially double as a TV appeals in such scenarios, not to mention for students who spend so much time in their rooms. Asus isn’t alone in producing Smart Monitors, with both LG and Samsung established vendors in this space. Where it differs is by using…

SCORE PRICE £417 (£500 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk We associate AOC with all-out value screens, but it ups the ante with this 4K IPS monitor aimed at graphic designers. And it really is a top-notch panel, as can be seen from a tabletopping set of figures in our tests for Adobe RGB coverage (79%) and DCI-P3 (90%). Colour accuracy isn’t up there with the very best professional screens, with an average Delta E of between 1 and 2, but it’s a brilliant performance for the price. AOC has also upgraded its on-screen display, with far more settings – including a choice of colour spaces – and a nippier response to commands. Navigation still isn’t as intuitive as pro rivals such as Eizo, but you’ll get there. There are also lots…

SCORE PRICE £466 (£559 inc VAT) from uk.insight.com This monitor packs in pretty much every feature available. You’ll enjoy 2.5GbE wired networking, a high-quality webcam, two excellent 5W speakers and, at the heart of it all, support for Thunderbolt 4. That means you can daisy-chain a second monitor over USB-C, although with a 34in panel packing 3,440 x 1,440 pixels there’s already plenty of space to work. Two monitors would make a killer gaming setup, though, complete with 120Hz refresh rates and adaptive sync support. It’s a solid panel that covers 82% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, with strong colours in default mode. Philips also provides an sRGB mode that locks to 88% of that space, but with a measured colour temperature of 7556K the whites aren’t as pure as…

As with all our testing, where possible we use a mix of real-world and technical tests to determine the quality of the products. Here, that means using each monitor as our daily work screen to see not just how enjoyable it is to look at but its usability: how intuitive is the on-screen display, how well engineered is the stand, how convenient are the ports? We also explore the OSD in depth to see what options it provides users. In particular, we will praise screens that allow people to switch between colour profiles – say from sRGB to DCI-P3. But only if that switch is effective, which is where our technical tests come in. These use an X-Rite i1 Display Pro HL colorimeter in tandem with the display calibration and…

SCORE PRICE VT100 appliance, starts from £576 exc VAT per year from barracuda.com Businesses that want total control over every aspect of their data access security will love Barracuda’s SecureEdge. This modular cloud-first platform is a secure access service edge (SASE) solution designed to protect users, devices and applications – anytime and anywhere. SecureEdge brings together on-site physical and virtual firewall appliances along with secure SD-WAN and ZTNA (zero trust network access) services. Security features are extensive: it provides SPI firewalling, advanced threat protection (APT) using Barracuda’s global threat intelligence network, intrusion detection and prevention (IDP), anti-malware, SSL inspection and web monitoring, content filtering and ad-blocking. SD-WAN features include application-based routing, the advanced TINA VPN service, adaptive session balancing and bandwidth protection, uplink optimisation and support for USB LTE modems…

SCORE PRICE Appliance with 1yr Gold licence, £316 exc VAT from store.zyxel.com Zyxel’s USG Flex security appliances have traditionally offered plenty of network protection measures at low prices, and the new “H” series range takes these features a stage further. Along with the new uOS firmware and an improved hardware specification, they introduce Zyxel’s Smart Sync, which allows them to be simultaneously managed onpremises and from the Nebula Control Center (NCC) cloud portal. Coming in as the entry point of the new family, the 50HP on review will appeal to small businesses as it costs only £316. Even better, this includes a one-year Gold Security Pack subscription, which enables a heap of features including antimalware, reputation and web content filtering, IPS, cloud sandboxing, the SecuReporter reporting service and an NCC…

In business, it can be easy to sleepwalk into a crisis. That’s especially true when it comes to your network. Just sticking with a system that works (for now) can be enough to get you into trouble. The lifetime of a business-grade network switch can be as short as a decade, so if you set up rock-solid infrastructure but don’t take another look until the day it gets shut down by a dirty power cut, lightning strike or whatever, you might find it takes more than a reboot to get your business operating again. Let’s look at some precautions and responses that can minimise the pain. ■ Don’t rely on software fixes Most network switches and routers run their own operating systems. You can usually manage them from a web…

I’m not a techie. I don’t code. I like my tools to come with clear, concise instructions. I don’t want to spend hours configuring a system, and if your product requires me to purchase a second product to function, it’s going straight into the bulging tech drawer of obsolescence. My role – as someone with three law degrees and a business-first mindset – is to cut through the noise. I translate the techno-babble, clarify the legal position, and give business leaders plainspoken, practical insight into the state of play. No fluff. No jargon. Just the law, as it stands, applied to the facts that matter to their business. Being sufficiently equipped in the legal arena, I’m well positioned to make sense of the intersection between law and technology. Not every…

Carbon dioxide is a bit of a problem, what with changing the climate and all. But what if we had batteries that could not only trap this problematic gas, but also store renewable energy? That is exactly what researchers at the University of Surrey are working to create: a lithium-carbon dioxide (Li-CO2) battery. If successful, such batteries could not only help suck carbon dioxide out of the air but also offer better solutions to power electric vehicles, the energy grid and even missions to Mars. But don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet: not only are these designs merely batteries in gas-filled jars in a lab, and at least a decade off in the future in terms of commercial viability, they also come with plenty of caveats. The question…

Features 10 Windows PowerToys you’ll use every day Discover the free add-ons that can speed up your workflow and make Windows behave the way you want. Features Colossus: the true story We provide the details on how and why Colossus was made, the computing breakthroughs it achieved and how it helped shorten World War II. Features What makes a great PC? Whether you’re looking to buy a new desktop PC or build one yourself, we turn to the experts in this field to discover what you need to consider before you spend a penny. Labs Creative workstations We put 11 professional workstations through their paces in demanding creative tasks so you can see which is the best choice for your workflow and your budget. Retro Commodore’s comeback David Crookes looks…