PC Pro Magazine

Email engulfs me. I have my personal email, my PC Pro email, my Future Publishing email, my own company email, and numerous others that I auto-forward to the most relevant address. That’s quite aside from all the other ways that people get in touch.

When Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine, the reaction around the world was swift: governments imposed sanctions, businesses cut ties, and citizens took to the streets to protest the war. And then there was the unique response by developer Brand

The European Union has announced plans for a new Digital Markets Act that could tighten the screws on the big tech “gatekeepers” and force them to make their messaging apps talk to each other. Though the full details are not yet clear, the EU’s plan

The decision on whether Three and Vodafone would be allowed to merge is not a straightforward, binary decision for the regulators to make. There are plenty of alternative models for how the mobile market could be restructured – and different restrict

Can there be such as thing as too much competition? The UK having four major mobile networks might be one too many, if Three CEO Robert Finnegan is to be believed. In a recent financial results announcement, he characterised the UK market as “dysfunc

Nicole Kobie is PC Pro’s Futures editor and she has deleted most of her tweets. It’s for the best. @njkobie Twelve years ago, Paul Chambers was frustrated by flight cancellations that threatened to keep him apart from his girlfriend. To vent, he post

Barry Collins is the co-editor of BigTechQuestion.com. He’d make a terrible hero in a ransom movie. @bazzacollins A message arrives from a pal. One of those regular messages we all get, when we’re the person in the WhatsApp contacts list who knows mo

Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. He has a picture of the Hindenburg disaster on his spare room wall. Email [email protected] I frequently write about energy in this column, mainly in the context of CPU efficiency or the foibles of m

@PCPRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO The cabinet-sized Alto may have stretched the definition of “personal computer” (only its portrait screen and keyboard are shown here), but it also defined many of the things we take for granted today. It ran the first GUI-b

A few days ago I was standing by the road when a van came past and snatched my phone out of my hands. (Okay, to be pedantic, the van didn’t snatch it, the driver did.) The phone is so locked-down that doing anything with it will be tough, but neverth

If we were Microsoft, we would be pleasantly surprised by these results: one in two users appear to be satisfied with Windows Update, which we’re pretty sure is a huge amount up from what it would have been a few years ago. However, there’s clearly a

Publishing a personal website was once a costly and complicated business. Not any longer. User-friendly platforms such as WordPress and Wix let you publish online for free, and you might not even need to pay for web hosting. They give you everything

PRICE £3,333 (£4,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk In recent years, Intel surrendered its long-held dominance in the workstation processor space to AMD. But now the regular Threadripper has been discontinued in favour of the feature-rich but more expensiv

Windows Update is surely the least loved part of Windows. Since automatic updates were introduced back in the XP days, they’ve doubtless been blamed for millions of postponed presentations and lost essays, as the OS has repeatedly chosen the worst po

Avast Ultimate 2022 is a one-stop collection of tools for protecting and optimising all your PCs, Android devices and Macs. It includes Avast Premium Security, SecureLine VPN, Cleanup Premium and AntiTrack – and your licence will protect ten devices

Enter now at bit.ly/techies22 As well as being a key part of the UK’s longest-running awards of its type, you’ll have a chance to win this superb home office upgrade… The best compact keyboard ever? We think it might be exactly that, with a hard-wear

PRICE As reviewed, £3,583 (£4,300 inc VAT) from razer.com/gb-en The Razer Blade series has long been recognised for its chameleon nature: sleek and professional enough to sit in a boardroom, while being packed with components geared towards both gami

SCORE PRICE £633 (£760 inc VAT) from philips.co.uk It’s no surprise that Philips is one of the first companies to produce a 32in 4K gaming monitor for a reasonable price. As a brand, it’s always strived to deliver value in areas where others struggle

Total value this month£ 183 Norton AntiVirus Plus 2022 provides on-demand and real-time malware scanning, with behavioural monitoring, browsing protection and more. This latest release features improvements to the suite’s behavioural protection engin

SCORE PRICE Xiaomi 12: 128GB, £624 (£749 inc VAT); Xiaomi 12 Pro: 256GB, £874 (£1,049 inc VAT) from mi.com/uk Xiaomi may not have the brand cachet of Apple or Samsung, but it’s a close competitor in terms of sales, and it knows how to make a decent s

SCORE PRICE £288 (£346 inc VAT) from nec-displays.com NEC has designed the MultiSync E273F for the new – or at least, new-ish – world of working. One filled with laptop-based workers who hustle between home, office and coffee shop on any given day, a

SCORE PRICE £874 (£1,049 inc VAT) from oppostore.co.uk Oppo aims to become one of the big names in smartphone photography, and for its latest phone it has worked with legendary camera brand Hasselblad. That’s not the only thing the Find X5 Pro phone

There’s no easy choice when it comes to buying a laptop for professional use. Not least because the division between work and home has converged to such a point that it’s sometimes impossible to see. To lay down some markers, we set clear criteria fo

Every laptop in this test is fast enough to run office tasks on Windows 11. Buy anything with a modern Intel Core or AMD Ryzen processor, then add 8GB of RAM and a 256GB of SSD and you have all the key bases covered. For eight out of ten users, you p

SCORE PRICE Range starts at £694 (£833 inc VAT) from box.co.uk Technically, the Acer TravelMate Spin P4 sits in the same genre as the HP Elite Dragonfly G2: they’re both 2-in-1 convertibles that target business buyers. In the hand, however, they coul

SCORE PRICE Range starts at £1,304 (£1,565 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk Of all the 2-in-1 convertibles in this group test, the Latitude 9420 2-in-1 is the Rolls-Royce. And we aren’t simply referring to its price: the all-metal chassis gives this laptop a

SCORE PRICE Tecra A40 range starts at £699 (£839 inc VAT) from misco.co.uk It wasn’t long ago that a business laptop costing under a grand was a lumpy object that brought gasps of dismay from anyone unfortunate enough to be saddled with it. Not so th

SCORE PRICE Range starts at £1,330 (£1,596 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk It’s impossible to review the Dell Latitude 7320 Detachable without referencing the Surface Pro 8. Each has advantages over the other, but they share so much of the same DNA that the

SCORE PRICE Range starts at £899 (£1,079 inc VAT) from hp.com As we mention in our review of the HP ProBook, the EliteBook is HP’s premium range of laptops. That means you can buy in the confidence of receiving the best components, a three-year busin

SCORE PRICE Range starts at £599 (£719 inc VAT) from box.co.uk HP’s naming strategy for its business laptops needs some explanation. What, for instance, is the difference between a ProBook and an EliteBook? That’s relatively easy to answer, with the

SCORE PRICE Range starts at £899 (£1,079 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/uk Microsoft describes the Surface Laptop 4 as “ultra-thin” and, much as we hate to approve the use of “ultra” in any sentence, we can’t argue here. On paper, a 14.5mm thickness sou

SCORE PRICE Range starts at £833 (£999 inc VAT) from microsoft.com/uk Normally Microsoft tweaks the Surface Pro’s design from one generation to another, often upgrading the innards alone. The shift from Pro 7 to Pro 8 is more noticeable, with Microso

SCORE PRICE Range starts at £1,259 (£1,511 inc VAT) from store.hp.com The Dragonfly is in that awkward period of gestation between G2 and G3. That means the G2 is coming to the end of its life – models can be found in the channel but not directly fro

SCORE PRICE Range starts from £367 (£440 inc VAT) from cclonline.com This is the second Geo laptop we’ve reviewed, with the 2-in-1 GeoFlex 340 (see issue 330, p83) surprising us with just how much quality hardware you could buy for £349. The GeoBook

SCORE PRICE £816 (£979 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews PCSpecialist is the only British manufacturer in this Labs, and that means it doesn’t have the billion-dollar R&D budget of a Dell or HP to design its laptops from scratch. Instead, the

The great British telephone switch-off has begun in earnest and the clock is ticking down for businesses still relying on their outdated public switched telephone network (PSTN) systems. OpenReach’s nationwide “stop sell” order comes into effect in S

SCORE PRICE 16SC Enterprise, £615 per year exc VAT from 3cx.com Businesses that want to host their own IP PBX should put 3CX’s Phone System 18 at the top of their list: it offers a stunning range of call-handling features at affordable prices. Licens

SCORE PRICE Wave 100: from £7.50 per user per month (exc VAT) from gradwell.com SMBs that want uncomplicated cloud-hosted VoIP services may find Gradwell’s Wave ideal. It’s designed from the ground up to be easy to manage and use, but this simplicity

SCORE PRICE From £8.50 per seat per month (exc VAT) from voip-unlimited.net SMBs that want a cloud telephony system they can rely on will find the Voip Exchange (VE) service from UK-based Voip Unlimited offers many compelling features. Unlike provide

SCORE PRICE £408 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com Fibre optic 10GbE networks are becoming affordable for SMBs, and TP-Link’s TL-SX3016F switch intends to make them even more appealing. This slimline 1U chassis offers 16 SFP+ 10GbE ports for a shade ov

SCORE PRICE Business S: from £9.95 per month (exc VAT) from sipgateteam.co.uk Small businesses looking for an affordable and flexible cloud VoIP service will love Sipgate Team. Monthly prices start as low as £9.95 per user and you have the option of

SCORE PRICE £358 exc VAT from broadbandbuyer.com As a member of Zyxel’s Extreme family of Wi-Fi 6 business access points (APs), the WAX610D has a sharp focus on wireless performance. It looks to have the right credentials: this AC3000 dual-band AP su

Just because you’re not a large enterprise or a household name, that doesn’t mean your business can blithely ignore security breaches. Indeed, it might surprise you to discover that the truth is actually quite the opposite: smaller businesses are the

What do you mean “hyperautomation”? Surely something’s either automated or it’s not? Technically, yes, you can say that. However, the term “automation” on its own doesn’t properly describe the state of the art in the early 2020s. It’s one thing to au

There’s a really neat feature in the new 12.3 version of macOS Monterey, which has just landed after a lengthy beta period. It’s called Universal Control, and it offers a host of useful features. The first is the use of one keyboard and trackpad acro

In previous columns I’ve written about Node-RED (although I often forget the silly capitals). Recently a reader reminded me that I’ve never actually mentioned what it is, what it does and how to use it. Oops – that was very remiss, let’s fix that now

It’s tricky writing articles about international data transfers. No sooner do you put down your figurative pen than someone goes and changes the rules. When I wrote my article on this topic last year (see issue 322, p116), there was a constant stream

It’s one thing relying on a swathe of browser extensions or add-ons to protect your privacy, block ads, add functionality to your browser and wishing the plain vanilla version did more. It’s quite another to jump ship from Chrome, Edge or Safari to a

The strangeness of the things I am being sent by manufacturers has, I sincerely hope, reached its peak. Item the first: a battery pack booster for shutterbug smartphoners, with a Bluetooth picture-taking button and a wireless charging pad up close to

Windows 11: your problems solved Any OS comes with its own helping of annoyances and bugs. We help you squash them in this in-depth guide. Who can you trust for tech repairs? If you need a computer or phone fixed, how do you know if the repairer is u

The news that Insteon, purveyors of IoT smart home products, has suddenly shut down will come as an unpleasant surprise to its erstwhile customers. The servers are gone, as are the website’s support pages. There is some hope that it will be possible