PC Pro Magazine

Ever since I turned 18 I’ve had the sense that some God-like figure has been slowly pressing their foot upon the accelerator of my life to make time spin faster. In my head, I figure I’m 31, maybe 32 at a push, and even if I’m willing to concede that

The CEO of Openreach has urged Ofcom to give rivals open access to Virgin Media O2’s network, ahead of a major telecoms review. The regulator is currently in the process of conducting a Telecoms Access Review that will lay down the rules for telecoms

Facial recognition – whether running in real-time via CCTV at big events or on pre-recorded footage – is now commonly used by UK police forces. But the legal grounds for its use are much disputed. The Home Office website unequivocally states that “th

If you come back to a parking spot to find your car’s been towed away, you’ve had a bad day. If you come back to find your car’s been towed because it potentially witnessed a murder, you’ve had a really bad day. This is reportedly what’s happening in

I wanted to get in touch regarding PC Pro celebrating 30 years of publication. As a long-term subscriber I am sure I speak for many when I say congratulations and thanks for being such a reliable source of IT news. I’ve often found the magazine very

15% ANSWERING QUESTIONS 41% SMART HOME CONTROL 44% SETTING TIMERS We asked this poll on X, which annoyingly restricts the number of choices to three. This meant we couldn’t include listening to music and radio in our options, but it was soon clear fr

And that’s fine: let it do the dull stuff, add new skills and make you richer There’s a dismal tendency with every new technological development to regard it as a threat. Computers, the internet and now AI have all been heralded as a threat to our li

If you’re using AI tools such as ChatGPT for work, there are ways to increase the quality of results you’re getting back. Here’s how to prompt like a pro – and avoid mistakes that could cost you your job. If you want to avoid the generic, bland mush

We’re all familiar with the CPU and the GPU – they sit at the heart of almost every PC made in the past 40 years (albeit the GPU has sometimes been built into the CPU). Lately, though, they’ve been joined by a new friend: the neural processing unit,

If you’re eager to try out local AI, you might be wondering just what your own devices are capable of. There are a few AI-focused benchmarks available, but one of the most versatile and user-friendly is the brand-new Geekbench AI test. Launched just

All prices include VAT unless stated PRICE From €1,299 from acer.co.uk AVAILABILITY December 2024 Three out of the four Acer Swift AI laptops announced at IFA featured 14in panels, but it was the 16in version that stood out for us. The spec sheet say

We run a selection of benchmarks on all the PCs and laptops we test. Where possible, we use a cross-platform test so we can compare Windows and macOS machines, which is where both Geekbench and Cinebench come into play. Both push the CPU to its limit

SCORE PRICE 32GB, £1,458 (£1,750 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk To say Lunar Lake, the codename for Intel’s second-generation Core Ultra processors, is a big deal for Intel understates things in the same way that winning the presidency is a big deal for Do

(10 devices for two years) pcpro.link/norton360 We’ve negotiated a killer deal with Norton. No subscriptions, just a one-off bargain price of £19.99 compared to the regular £179.99 charge. That buys you two years of cover from the powerful Norton Sec

SCORE PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from asus.com Intel wasn’t alone in releasing a new processor at IFA this year (see p46), with Qualcomm unveiling two eight-core Snapdragon X Plus chips. This should help laptop makers build more affordable Copilot+

SCORE PRICE 1TB, £916 (£1,099 inc VAT) from hp.com Like almost every other laptop manufacturer, HP has taken a cautious approach to Copilot+ PCs based on Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. You have the choice of the OmniBook X, with either 512GB or 1TB of st

SCORE PRICE 256GB, £1,458 (£1,749 inc VAT) from store.google.com The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is Google’s second stab at a folding phone, but there’s enough here that’s new and improved over last year’s Pixel Fold (see issue 348, p44) that it feels like a fr

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £833 (£999 inc VAT) from store.google.com The Pixel 9 Pro represents a departure for Google’s premium smartphone, taking on a new size and several AI capabilities. The price hasn’t changed – it’s still £999 inc VAT, the same as las

SCORE PRICE 128GB, £666 (£799 inc VAT) from store.google.com Next to its Pro-branded siblings, the regular Pixel 9 might not seem like an exciting prospect. But Google has clearly put a lot of effort into updating its mainstream handset for 2024, int

SCORE PRICE 45mm, £339 (£399 inc VAT) from store.google.com While the new Pixel phones have attracted the most attention, Google’s third-generation Pixel Watch has introduced some big upgrades too. The most obvious is a new size option: you can still

SCORE PRICE £1,167 (£1,400 inc VAT) from honor.com (after discount) If you want a folding phone, as opposed to a flip design, you currently have four choices. There’s the new Pixel 9 Fold Pro (see p56), the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 (see issue 360, p72)

Total value this month £ 170 Auslogics Disk Defrag 11 Pro is a powerful tool that helps keep your system running at peak performance. It offers several different disk defragmentation algorithms, with options to optimise access according to file acces

SCORE PRICE £271 (£325 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk If you’re going to charge £325 for a keyboard, you’d better come armed with something special. In fact, you’d better get it hand-delivered by Taylor Swift, with Prince William manning the 24/7 support

SCORE PRICE Basic, $10 per month; Standard, $30 per month from midjourney.com In the world of AI image generation, Midjourney is a legend. Launched in July 2022, using its own home-baked diffusion model based on Stable Diffusion, it quickly establish

SCORE PRICE Free; Apprentice, $12 per month; Artisan Unlimited, $24 per month from leonardo.ai Like Midjourney, Leonardo is an established AI image creation platform, having launched in late 2022, and the fact it has survived this long is testament t

SCORE PRICE Free; Standard, $12 per month; Pro, $28 per month from app.runwayml.com The AI video battle is hotting up. While OpenAI’s Sora has not yet manifested, one of the AI video diehards – Runway, the New York pioneer that produced its first pro

SCORE PRICE Free; Standard, $10 per month; Pro, $30 per month from udio.com New AI music makers appear almost every month, but Udio sits at the top of the tree. Founded in 2023 by a team of former Google Deepmind researchers, it offers a sophisticate

SCORE PRICE Free; Pro, £15 (£18 inc VAT) per month from claude.ai Anthropic – founded in 2021 by ex-OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei – launched the Claude large language model in 2023, billing it as a “safe and reliable” model

Can we say that smart speakers are underappreciated? Arguably, they have done more than any other device to bring advanced technologies into the mainstream and into the home. Think AI assistants, home automation, streaming audio, Internet of Things;

SCORE PRICE £92 (£110 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The product that started the whole smart speaker ball rolling is still the best allrounder, and that’s not simply because of its spherical shape. With the judicious addition of features and impressive

SCORE PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk The second-generation Apple HomePod is exactly the smart speaker you’d expect from Apple: conscientiously premium, beautifully designed and packing innovative tech you won’t find elsewhere. It’s also

SCORE PRICE £74 (£89 inc VAT) from argos.co.uk Google’s Nest Audio was lauded on its launch in 2020 for the way in which it improved on the weird design and underwhelming sound of the outgoing Google Home. Four years on, though, availability is stall

SCORE PRICE £275 (£330 inc VAT) from uk.jbl.com Looking for a premium smart speaker with a dash of old-school style? The JBL Authentics 300 could be right up your street. It’s the largest and most expensive model in the classic audio brand’s Authenti

SCORE PRICE £314 (£377 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com The Sonos Era 300 is the premium model in the brand’s Era range, priced at a whopping £449 inc VAT if you buy direct from Sonos, although we found it for far less at John Lewis. There’s no mistaking

SCORE PRICE £75 (£90 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Echo Show has the role of the Echo Dot in the Echo Show lineup, providing a cheap and cheerful entry point into Amazon’s smart displays. This means making do with a 5.5in, 960 x 480 resolution scree

SCORE PRICE £125 (£150 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The third-generation Echo Show 8 is easily the best of the smaller Echo Shows, thanks to a faster processor, an upgraded camera, more powerful speakers and a slick design. Amazon has also integrated F

SCORE PRICE £183 (£219 inc VAT) from store.google.com The Nest Hub Max lacks the sleep-tracking features of the smaller Nest Hub, but there’s more to it than just a bigger screen. It looks like a tablet perched on a fabric-covered stand, with a 10in,

SCORE PRICE £46 (£55 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk It’s no longer the entry-level Echo, but the Echo Dot still makes a great low-cost alternative to the full-sized version, or simply as an addition to your Echo system. The fifth iteration looks like a s

SCORE PRICE £37 (£45 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk The Echo Pop creeps under the Echo Dot as Amazon’s entry-level smart speaker, giving you the bare essentials in an even smaller speaker. In fact, it looks a little like someone has sliced a Dot in half,

SCORE PRICE £83 (£99 inc VAT) from apple.com/uk Apple’s smaller HomePod is a fantastic piece of engineering, giving you most of the HomePod’s tech and features in a tiny package at a lower price. It’s a 98mm diameter sphere with the top and bottom ch

SCORE PRICE £41 (£49 inc VAT) from store.google.com The Nest Mini 2 plays the same role in Google’s ecosystem as the Echo Pop and Echo Dot in Amazon’s. It’s not the speaker you’ll want for serious music listening, but it’s a cheap entry point for peo

SCORE PRICE £166 (£199 inc VAT) from sonos.com If you’re more concerned with how your speaker sounds than its “smarts”, the Sonos Era 100 is as good as it gets for £200. Packed with three class-D amplifiers, two angled tweeters and a large mid-woofer

SCORE PRICE £25 (£30 inc VAT) from mi.com Xiaomi’s smart speaker is the cheapest here, yet it still packs in the Google Assistant and more features than the Google Nest Hub Mini 2 or Echo Pop. It’s a rectangular tower of plastic 14cm high, with a dig

I had my share of wow moments while testing the speakers in this month’s Labs. First the HomePod Mini baffled me by producing big sounds from a tiny sphere, to the point where I genuinely looked around for the “real” speaker. Then the biggest HomePod

Data backup is a fundamental part of a business protection and continuity strategy and SMBs that don’t implement such safeguards this are taking some dreadful risks. The value of data can’t be overestimated: it’s the only business asset that isn’t ex

SCORE PRICE Premium, 1 socket, £1,257 exc VAT from arcserve.com Arcserve UDP (unified data protection) is a versatile backup and recovery solution designed from the ground up to protect physical and virtualised environments. It will please businesses

SCORE PRICE Full perpetual licence, £256 exc VAT from iperiusbackup.com SMBs with limited IT budgets will love Iperius Backup as it offers an impressive range of data backup and recovery features at an affordable price. You can start with the free ve

SCORE PRICE Enterprise, 10 servers, perpetual, £1,118 exc VAT from nakivo.com SMBs are spoilt for backup software choices, but Nakivo’s Backup and Replication (NBR) rises to the top as it supports more host platforms than any other solution. Along wi

SCORE PRICE Simple Core Pack, 5 instances, £498 exc VAT per year from uk.insight.com SMBs seeking a complete on-premises data backup and recovery solution will find Veritas Backup Exec has lots of appeal. Licensing is easy to understand, too, with Ve

The convenience of wireless networking can’t be denied, but it’s almost always slower than an Ethernet connection – especially if, like many businesses, you’re still relying on last-generation standards. As high-speed Wi-Fi 6 hardware becomes ubiquit

As more and more services move into the cloud, and as mobile coverage gradually gets faster and more reliable, you might be wondering: do we need to provide our own Wi-Fi at all? Can’t we use 5G mobile connections for wireless working? It’s not a cra

I’ve heard this phrase before, but what exactly does it mean? Well, that’s the thing. It’s perfectly possible for two informed people to have a prolonged technical discussion on this subject, and both come away quite sure a consensus has been achieve

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I am almost one month into ownership of my Apple Vision Pro, and I remain hooked. I use it every day, if only to sit in wonderment at its ability to place things into the space around me where I want them to go. To have a proper Z-order, to marvel at

I hesitate to describe my default photo-editing machine, because I know it causes irritation, even offence, to a certain kind of leading-edge aficionado. But, without apologies, this is a 17in laptop with a 120GB disk. And it’s a lovely companion for

ON SALE Thursday 7 November 2024 Find out which brands are the most (and least) trustworthy in the UK’s most comprehensive survey of tech reliability and customer support. The world’s most popular hobbyist computer comes in dozens of versions and var

You work from home, at least a few days a week, keeping up to date with colleagues via Zoom and Slack. Meetings are recorded or transcribed so offline workers can catch up. Line managers engage with employees to avoid quiet quitting, rust out and bar

As autumn rolls in, and the weather gets colder and wetter, opportunities to go out for a long ride on one of my motorbikes get fewer. Not because I’m a sunny-day-only rider, but because the hassle of getting togged up for a short ride gets more anno

Ever since I turned 18 I’ve had the sense that some God-like figure has been slowly pressing their foot upon the accelerator of my life to make time spin faster. In my head, I figure I’m 31, maybe 32 at a push, and even if I’m willing to concede that

The CEO of Openreach has urged Ofcom to give rivals open access to Virgin Media O2’s network, ahead of a major telecoms review. The regulator is currently in the process of conducting a Telecoms Access Review that will lay down the rules for telecoms

If you come back to a parking spot to find your car’s been towed away, you’ve had a bad day. If you come back to find your car’s been towed because it potentially witnessed a murder, you’ve had a really bad day. This is reportedly what’s happening in

Facial recognition – whether running in real-time via CCTV at big events or on pre-recorded footage – is now commonly used by UK police forces. But the legal grounds for its use are much disputed. The Home Office website unequivocally states that “th

I wanted to get in touch regarding PC Pro celebrating 30 years of publication. As a long-term subscriber I am sure I speak for many when I say congratulations and thanks for being such a reliable source of IT news. I’ve often found the magazine very