Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2018 i Computer Shopper

Several months ago, we received an email from one of our readers complaining about the many annoyances the Windows 10 April 2018 Update had caused him (Letters, Shopper 367). Of Angus Stewart’s five PCs, only one had updated trouble-free; the others had suffered everything from boot failure to automatic restore problems. Angus asked if we could go through the problems, and we asked other readers who’d been having issues with Windows Update to write in so we could investigate. And write in you did. It turns out the April Update caused widespread problems, the most common one being the damn thing just wouldn’t download, with various error messages reported. Our intrepid contributing editor David Ludlow has spent the past several weeks gathering up all the missives from the Shopper inbox,…

THANKS TO FAST, always-on internet connections, and cheaper, high-quality cameras and smart doorbells, keeping an eye on your home and recording what goes on has never been easier. But, until recently, if you recorded outside the boundary of your home you had to register with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), paying a yearly fee of £35. With the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into law in May 2018, that has changed. Consumers are now exempt from regulations, even if they have cameras that point out into the road. So is it now a free-for-all, where you can do what you want? I’m afraid not, as although you may not need to register, physical security still needs to be implemented carefully and thoughtfully. As the ICO told me,…

THE US DEPARTMENT of Justice has formally charged a North Korean government hacker with a series of major cyber attacks, including the Sony Pictures hack, the theft of $81m from the Bangladesh Bank and the WannaCry ransomware. The charges have been filed against Park Jin Hyok, who the US claims was working as part of a North Korean government-backed hacking operation known as Lazarus Group. Park, who was educated at a North Korean university, spent a number of years employed by Chosun Expo Joint Venture, a company that is used as a front by the North Korean government and is allegedly used to fund a cyber espionage division known as ‘Lab 110’. Through an elaborate network of dummy email addresses and social media accounts, network infrastructure paths and IP addresses,…

FORTNITE BATTLE ROYALE, Epic Games’ free-to-play game that went from obscurity into a global phenomenon in a matter of weeks, has been a contributing factor in 5% of UK divorces this year. That’s according to divorce service Divorce Online, which found that no fewer than 200 divorce petitions filed in the UK since the beginning of 2018 cite Fortnite as a reason for parting ways. The mass popularity of the multiplatform game, with its highly competitive multiplayer mode, has led to some people becoming almost addicted to it. Divorce Online didn’t shed any light on how exactly Fortnite was the cause of marriage breakdowns. That leads us to speculate that one half of a married couple could be spending too much time with the game rather than with their spouse.…

Jaguar Land Rover uses ‘virtual eyes’ to gauge human trust of driverless vehicles IF THE IDEA of driverless cars fills you with unease, you’re not alone: reports indicate that 63% of people worry about their safety when crossing streets populated with autonomous vehicles. This fear is something Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) aims to quash, with its ‘virtual eyes’. The eyes will be fitted on self-driving pods to interact with pedestrians, making (virtual) eye contact to display intent. It may sound like an ocular nightmare, but its objective is an appealing and necessary one: to better understand human trust of autonomous vehicles. The ‘trust trials’ are being undertaken in Coventry in the safe realms of a warehouse. Volunteer pedestrians’ behaviour is analysed as they prepare to cross the (fabricated) road. During…

£510 •From www.cclonline.com VERDICT It’s clear where the budget has gone on this PC: you get a speedy SSD, but limited performance elsewhere LET’S BE FRANK: £510 is not a lot of money to spend on a desktop. In fact, it’s about the very minimum you can expect to spend, at least from a reputable vendor, on a complete system that includes a dedicated GPU instead of integrated graphics. As such, the Delta X-CS’s key specs are very basic indeed. The 8GB of DDR4 could be worse, but processors don’t come much more entry-level than the AMD Athlon X4 950, even if it is a quad-core, and the 2GB GTX 1050 graphics card is the second-lowest-ranking card in the GeForce GTX 10-series line-up. SOLID GRASP There’s one exception to the…

£230 • From www.argos.co.uk VERDICT A decent mesh system, but the comparatively high price means you can get a better deal elsewhere THERE’S NO DOUBT in our minds that mesh wireless systems are the best way to go if you want to boost your wireless signal at home. With the low-cost BT Whole Home Wi-Fi (Shopper 351) proving to be a real winner, it’s no wonder that Netgear is aiming to replicate that success with the Orbi RBK20. A baby version of the big RBK50 (Shopper 348), the RBK20 ships with a router and satellite. There’s also the RBK23, which adds a second satellite to further boost coverage. ROUTE ONE Where the RBK20 differs from BT’s offering is two-fold. First, you get a router, so you can replace your existing…

£1,222 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT This security-laden laptop trips over some quality issues, even when it excels elsewhere RYZEN-BASED BUSINESS laptops remain surprisingly rare, given that AMD’s chips tend to be better multitaskers than their Intel counterparts. Perhaps the HP EliteBook 745 G5, with its quad-core Ryzen 7 2700U, can make a convincing argument for the platform. This silvery notebook looks a bit plain, but is well crafted nonetheless. The metal chassis has an expensive-feeling matt finish, and the whole thing is more solid than the average laptop. At 326x234x17.9mm, it’s middling in terms of thickness, and at 1.48kg it comes in pretty heavy for a 14-incher. Still, it’s easier to carry around than any 15.6in laptop, save the LG Gram (Shopper 369). DEFENCE POLICY Being an EliteBook, security is…

£2,330 • From www.razer.com VERDICT Razer successfully bolsters its slimline Blade with a 144Hz display and Nvidia Max-Q graphics THE ORIGINAL RAZER Blade (Shopper 356) was arguably the first must-have slim and light gaming laptop, but its Intel Skylake-era hardware meant it was doomed to be overshadowed by the Asus ROG Zephyrus (Shopper 368) and Gigabyte Aero 15X (Shopper 366). It’s therefore due a fresh lick of paint, and the new Blade 15 is exactly that. This is the middle child of Razer’s updated Blade family, nestled between the 13in Blade Stealth and the 17in Blade Pro. All the internals are up to date: you get a hexa-core Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16GB of RAM and a choice of Nvidia Max-Q graphics cards. This is where things get complicated, as…

£269 • From www.marshallheadphones.com VERDICT Sound quality has some kinks, but this amp-styled speaker is a real rock’n’roll hero LIKE THE FIRST Kilburn speaker, released in 2015, the Kilburn II is Marshall’s attempt at a wireless Bluetooth speaker that mimics – at least on looks – one of its larger amplifiers. It’s a successful attempt, too. The Kilburn II is nothing short of beautiful, with its leather exterior, wiry speaker grille and red-lined carrying strap, and it ditches the slightly over-lavish gold plating of the original Kilburn for a cooler, more composed look. Durability has also been improved, mainly through the addition of hard corner caps that help it withstand accidental knocks. It’s also IPX2-certified, which means it can cope with drops of water: some light drizzle, if not a…

£380 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The Mate 20 Lite is a respectable all-rounder, with cuts mostly in the right places HUAWEI IS NOTHING if not prolific: between the P20 series, the Nova series and various handsets from subsidiary Honor, the Mate 20 Lite is the 20th smartphone from the company in 2018 alone. It stands to reason that there’s more on the way, too. The Mate 20 itself hasn’t been formally announced at the time of writing, putting the Mate 20 Lite in the peculiar position of being a cheaper spin-off handset without an ‘original’ counterpart. It could instead be thought of as a taste of things to come – and a delicious taste it is, too. The Mate 20 Lite is a sleek-looking phone that could easily pass for…

£179 • From en-uk.ring.com VERDICT Effective, easy to set up and reasonably priced, the Ring Video Doorbell 2 is a great smart doorbell ONCE THE SOLE domain of the wealthy and paranoid, the ubiquity of internet connections and affordability of smart home technology has created a new and burgeoning market for video doorbells, such as the Nest Hello (Shopper 369) and the Ring Video Doorbell 2. The appeal of such products is manifold: they let you see and speak to who’s calling on you without having to actually open the door; they can monitor the outside of your house like a security camera and alert you when motion is detected; and they allow you to be in when you’re out. PEEP SHOW Like the Hello, the Ring Video Doorbell 2…

01 A smartphone’s operating system (OS) dictates its basic features and which third-party software you can install. There are three main contenders: Apple’s iOS, which is found on the iPhone, Google’s Android, which is used by various handset manufacturers, and Windows Phone, which has few options, especially since Microsoft has discontinued support for its OS. Apple iOS and Google Android both have thousands of apps available. 02 All smartphones have colour screens, but their resolutions vary. Basic models have 1,280x720 pixels, but text can be indistinct. Look for a display that has at least 1,920x1,080 pixels so it’s easier to read text and watch Full HD videos. Don’t worry too much about built-in media players or Office document editors; you can always install apps to replace these with better versions…

01 A basic 24in LCD monitor costs around £100. It will be fine for typical Windows work but is likely to have poor viewing angles, so you’ll need to sit straight on for the best picture quality. Its colour accuracy may not be very good, either. 02 A VGA input lets you use the monitor with any PC, but the quality may not be as good as it is over DVI or HDMI. Both are digital connections and require a compatible graphics card but they avoid the need for digital-to-analogue or analogue-todigital conversions, which can reduce image quality. A digital connection achieves the best picture automatically, so you won’t have to adjust clock or phase settings as you do with analogue connections. Many DVI and all HDMI connections support HDCP,…

01 Media streamers have come a long way from the hard disk-based set-top boxes of a few years ago. They now come in two main forms: flash drive-sized dongles that plug directly into the HDMI port in the back of your TV, and larger microconsoles that sit under it. Whichever model you choose, it will stream content from the internet rather than storing media files locally. 02 Most streamers use their own operating system, which you can navigate with a bundled remote control, but Google’s Chromecast dongle requires a paired smartphone, tablet or laptop to stream content on the big screen. If you’re looking to set up Netflix for someone who doesn’t have a smartphone, buy a standalone streamer such as a Roku or Amazon Fire TV device. 03 A…

01 Laser printers used to be much more expensive than inkjets and were typically restricted to offices. They are now much more affordable, however, and offer several benefits over inkjets, including lower per-page printing costs and faster print speeds. 02 A decent laser printer will typically cost around £80, and will happily print hundreds of black-and-white pages per hour. If documents are your priority, you’ll want a high minimum speed and low print costs. However, you’ll probably be limited to black-and-white printing at this price. 03 Although you can still buy single-function laser printers, multifunction peripherals (MFPs) are now far more common. These models can scan and photocopy documents as well as print them, and some of them also have fax capabilities. Laser MFPs start from around £200. 04 Heavy-duty…

01 It’s essential that you buy the right type of motherboard for your processor. For example, Intel’s Skylake, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake processors all use the same LGA 1151 socket, but because each CPU generation introduced new chipsets, you’ll need to get a Z370 motherboard for a Coffee Lake chip, a Z270 board for a Kaby Lake chip and so on. 02 All current Intel processors have built-in graphics chipsets, so if you want to use your chip’s built-in graphics, make sure the motherboard has the video outputs, such as DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. If you want to play the latest games, you’ll need to fit a dedicated graphics card in the motherboard’s PCI Express x16 slot, although this may block one of your other slots. 03 Normal tower…

UPDATED Evernote 6.14.5.7671 Store your notes, ideas and plans in the cloud, and synchronise them between computers. UPDATED Mailbird 2.5.14.0 A free desktop email client for Windows. Miranda IM 0.10.80 Chat with friends across multiple messaging platforms, including AIM, Facebook, IRC and MSN, all from one simple interface. UPDATED Skype for Windows 8.29.0.50 Make internet voice and video calls for free, and buy credit to make calls to mobiles and landlines. UPDATED Telegram 1.3.14 This free IM app synchronises your conversations across multiple devices, and can spruce up chats with stickers and GIFs. UPDATED WhatsApp Desktop 0.3.557 A free PC and Mac version of the popular messaging app, letting you chat from your desktop. Customisation iolo System Mechanic Free 17.0.1 Speed up your system with iolo’s PC optimisation suite. Rainmeter…

£221 • From www.pcworldbusiness.co.uk VERDICT Elegant looks and a 144Hz refresh rate can’t make up for poor colour accuracy and a low contrast ratio IF YOU’RE AN avid PC gamer, you’ll definitely want a 144Hz gaming monitor. A fast display provides a huge leap over a regular 60Hz screen, assuming your PC and graphics card can keep up. The smoother frame rate will make sim games more lifelike, help you see enemies faster, and allow you to make reactions a crucial millisecond sooner. What’s more, 144Hz just looks better in general, even just moving the cursor around. Best of all, you don’t have to spend a fortune, as the £221 AOC Gaming G2590PX shows. It’s not alone in providing 144Hz on a budget, however: the 24in Acer XF240H sells for…

£450 • From www.overclockers.co.uk VERDICT The EX3203R combines HDR, FreeSync 2 and a great set of features, but the competition is tough IT WAS AROUND a year ago that we saw the world’s first HDR gaming monitor, the Samsung CHG70. This particular monitor ticked all the right boxes, but was let down by one crucial shortcoming: Windows 10 just wasn’t ready for HDR. Much has changed in a year. Other manufacturers have leapt aboard the HDR bandwagon, and Microsoft also announced its commitment to making Windows 10 more HDR-friendly. Now, BenQ has its first HDR monitor, the EX3203R. Is this the one we’ve been waiting for? TILT TO LAST The EX3203R is an elegant looker. It’s far removed from the stereotypical look of a gaming monitor. There are no gaudy…

£184 • From www.uk.insight.com VERDICT Superbly built and with great colour quality, this is the best IPS monitor you can get on a tight budget UNTIL RECENTLY, IF you’d asked us to recommend a colour-accurate, 24in IPS monitor for less than £200, we would have directed you to the fairy dust aisle in Tesco. The Philips Brilliance 241B7QPJKEB, however, resets all the rules. It’s not unheard of to find excellent monitors at this price – take the £195 AOC Q3279VWF (Shopper 361), which has both a high 2,560x1,440 resolution and a 75Hz refresh rate. But that uses an MVA panel, which means narrower viewing angles and inferior colour reproduction to an IPS panel, as on the Brilliance 241B7QPJKEB. The Philips monitor also has the benefits of a fully adjustable stand,…

£60 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT On this slim M.2 drive, full-disk encryption is the consolation prize for underwhelming speeds FEW NAMES IN the tech world cover as many different products as ‘UV500’: it’s the umbrella brand for a full series of 2.5in, M.2 and mSATA SSDs, each offering different storage capacities at slightly different prices (fortunately, usually only by one or two pounds). Since we have the 240GB model of the M.2 line, let’s focus on the latter. There’s currently a choice of 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities, with a 960GB version announced but yet to appear on any UK retailer’s site even a few months after release. As these drives all use the SATA3 interface, quoted speeds are consistent across the entire UV500 range, including the 2.5in and mSATA…

Send your problems to businesshelp@computershopper.co.uk Call of the wildcard I’m struggling to do a find and replace in Word. It’s something I often need to do because of the documents I work on, where I need to swap the order of two words that have an unknown word in between them (don’t ask, it’s a nightmare). So if the set of words was: Peter Bewildered Charlton They should be replaced by: Charlton, Bewildered Peter This isn’t actually what I’m trying to find and replace, but it shows the sort of thing I’m trying to do. How do I put together a search string using a specific word, then any set of characters, then a specific word, then swap them over? Peter Charlton You need to make use of Word’s wildcard…

ben@computershopper.co.uk Audio synthesis Modern synths are a minefield of cryptic controls, but with a few basic principles under your belt you can unlock their full potential. Ben Pitt explains all THE SYNTHESISER IS a musical instrument with a chequered history. When they first began to catch on in the late 1960s, people were alarmed that these crass-sounding machines were a pale imitation of the acoustic instruments they attempted to emulate. They resembled telephone exchanges rather than instruments, and while a few early pioneers achieved great things, these synths were mostly seen as experimental curiosities. Analogue synths gradually caught on in the 1970s and 1980s, embraced by the New Romantics and various other musical scenes, but everything changed again with the arrival of digital synths in the 1980s. These used short…

letters@computershopper.co.uk Vital ramifications @ In your smartphone group test, you don’t recognise the importance of RAM (Shopper 369). You rate the Moto G6 and Samsung Galaxy A3 as equals, but the Moto has 3GB (4GB if you buy Amazon’s version, which doesn’t get a mention; and 64GB of storage instead of 32GB, too) while the Samsung has only 2GB of RAM. In my experience, the internal RAM is likely to get filled up and requires drastic surgery (which is beyond the average user) to clean up and get the phone working properly again. P Bradshaw • Despite having different RAM and storage capacities, both the Moto G6 and Samsung Galaxy A3 offer excellent performance and value, hence their Best Buy awards. Smartphone operating systems are designed to carefully manage RAM.…

MANY WERE WORRIED that Brexit would mean the end of free EU roaming when using your mobile across Europe, but one UK minister has promised it won’t come to that. Thanks to EU regulation that came into effect in 2017, you can use your mobile phone in any EU country without incurring additional charges. However, with Brexit now only months away, there had been no clarification on what that would mean to roaming charges. Some even feared prices would return to their exorbitant pre-June 2017 rates. According to Conservative MP and secretary of state for exiting the European Union Dominic Raab, this fear is unnecessary. Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Raab confirmed that, in any period between the UK exiting the EU and the data roaming regulation being added to…

Canada Airline cracks Air Canada had to alert its customers to the potential theft of their passport details and personal information after a data breach. The airline undertook an investigation into ‘unusual’ login behaviour on its app, used by 1.7 million people, which may have led to the improper access of 20,000 profiles. Air Canada said it took action to block dodgy attempts to log into accounts and stressed it has multi-layered security in place to stop cyber criminals from causing harm. But it still needed to warn its customers to keep an eye on credit card transactions and any unusual activity on their accounts. USA Net gains Net-neutrality campaigners have been given fresh hope by a bill that seeks to restore the regulatory protections that were stripped back by…

£103 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT Bigger and better equipped than its predecessor, the View 37 is a supremely practical EATX chassis THE VIEW 27 first caught our eye two years ago, when the Cyberpower Ultra Elite FX (Shopper 347) arrived within it. It was hard not be taken with that distinctive ‘gull-wing’ side panel, which wrapped a curved acrylic window around the top left of the PC so you could peer in from the top as well as from the side. The View 37 isn’t so much a refinement of this idea as an expansion of it. The entirety of the curvy panel is now acrylic, rather than being a partially metal panel with a window, so you can see all the way down to the PSU bay. It’s also…

£110 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT HP’s LaserJet Pro M28w is small and simple, but limited. We’d rather have an inkjet IF YOUR IDEA of a laser printer is something too big, hot and noisy to share a desk with, HP’s LaserJet Pro M28w might be a pleasant surprise. It’s a multifunction peripheral (MFP) built around a basic mono laser printer, and the end result is about as compact as a typical home office inkjet MFP. With no vents to spew hot air, and a slow-ish 18 pages per minute (ppm) print engine keeping the noise down, it’s as easy to live with as laser devices get. Politely, we’d suggest that ‘Pro’ is something of a misnomer for this strictly no-frills device. It has no automatic document feeder for multipage copies,…

£1,849 • From www.dell.com VERDICT It’s the most powerful Windows laptop we’ve ever tested, but the XPS 15 is cheaper than you might expect WE’VE ALREADY BEEN smitten with the convertible Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 (Shopper 368) this year, and now it’s the turn of the standard XPS 15. This clamshell laptop lacks a 360° hinge but is even more focused on performance than the 2-in-1 variant, with a hexa-core Intel Core i7-8750H CPU inside, potentially giving us a Windows-based rival to the latest MacBook Pro 15in (Shopper 369). The Core i7-8750H is a monster of a laptop processor; its six Hyper-Threaded cores run at a base clock speed of 2.2GHz, and can Turbo Boost all the way up to 4.1GHz per core. And this isn’t even the most powerful…

£399 • From store.google.com VERDICT The Google Home Max is a big beast of a smart speaker, but it’s just too pricey DESPITE BEING ANNOUNCED at the Google Pixel 2 launch last November, the Google Home Max – big brother to the Home (Shopper 353) and Home Mini (Shopper 360) – has only recently landed on UK shores. It’s a much more substantial smart speaker than the rest of the range, weighing 5.3kg, but it comes with the sort of build quality you’d expect from a top-quality speaker: give it a rap with your knuckles and it feels tight, solid and totally resonance-free. CLOTH CHIC Not everyone will love its slightly cutesy look, but the control scheme is a nice blend of minimalist design and straightforward functionality. Four circular LED…

£399 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The Beam is both the smartest soundbar ever and a capable multiroom speaker EVEN THE BEST soundbars can still be old-fashioned in how they handle control and setup. The Sonos Beam is different: besides being able to integrate seamlessly with the rest of the Sonos speaker range, including its smart speakers, this soundbar has its very own Amazon Alexa support. At £399 and lacking a dedicated subwoofer, it doesn’t appear to be very good value, and it’s somewhat lacking in connectivity, too. There’s an Ethernet port, as an alternative to Wi-Fi, but the only audio input you get is a single HDMI ARC socket. There’s no stereo phono or 3.5mm jack, or even Bluetooth. In fairness, there is an HDMI-to-optical adaptor in the box, which…

£439 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Motorola’s modular phone is back, but mediocre performance and a poor camera make it an uneasy reunion WE’VE ALWAYS LIKED the Moto Z Play series. Its attachable Moto Mods could have been a silly gimmick, but many of them are genuinely useful, and underneath this modular functionality has always been quality, reliable core hardware that would make each phone a good buy even if you couldn’t whack a magnetic power pack directly on the back. The Moto Z3 Play is the third in this line. It looks similar to the Moto Z2 Play (Shopper 357), and can equip all the same Moto Mods, but is a touch bigger at 157x77x6.8mm, thanks to the display growing an extra half an inch. It’s also 11g heavier, weighing…

01 A basic PC costing around £350 will be able to run everyday office, multimedia and education software and will easily cope with surfing the internet. It might even be able to run some modern games. Many PCs can be sold either with or without a monitor. If you don’t like the display the manufacturer is offering, you can always use your current one, or buy another one separately. 02 If you want to play games, you’ll have to upgrade the graphics card. Budget cards such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 will cope well with many 3D games, but to play the latest 3D games smoothly (and enjoy the best-quality graphics) it’s worth upgrading to a more powerful card such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. 03 All modern…

01 All tablets rely on an operating system (OS) to run apps. You have three main choices: Apple’s iOS, which runs on the iPad; Android, which Google licenses to various manufacturers; and Windows 10, which has become common in hybrid tablets and convertibles. If you own an Apple or Google smartphone, you can download your apps, music and so on to a tablet that runs the same OS, so it makes sense to stick with a compatible device. 02 It’s important to pick a tablet that has a good-quality, high-resolution screen. Many budget tablets have 1,280x800-resolution displays, but better tablets have Full HD 1,920x1,080 panels, and we’re starting to see tablets that have even higher screen resolutions. Some are as high as 2,560x1,600 or even 4K. Entry-level tablets typically use…

01 If you don’t have space in your home cinema setup for a set of surround-sound speakers, a soundbar is the next best thing. Whether you opt for a soundbar (which typically sits in front of your TV stand) or a soundplate (which sits underneath your TV), you’ll be getting significantly better audio than the weedy speakers today’s flatscreen TVs provide. 02 If you want to cut down on cable clutter, look for a soundbar with multiple HDMI inputs and outputs as well as Audio Return Channel (ARC). Not all soundbars use HDMI, with many making do with digital optical audio connections instead. This means you’ll have to connect Blu-ray players, games consoles and set-top boxes to your TV and run all audio through a single cable. Also look for…

01 Wearable tech can include anything from chest-strap heart-rate monitors to augmented reality glasses, but the two most common types are smartwatches and fitness trackers. Both are designed to sit unassumingly on your wrist, and are almost always meant to be used in tandem with a paired smartphone. 02 Smartwatches are typically more complex and expensive, though more closely resemble a traditional wristwatch. You can use them to receive and reply to text messages and emails, quickly check maps and even play games – like a smartphone, most smartwatches allow you to install your own choice of apps. 03 Fitness trackers are much more dedicated to healthy pursuits. Step counters, heart-rate monitors and even sleep tracking are all common, and the data collected is fed back to you so you…

01 A network-attached storage (NAS) device lets you store documents, media, and other files on its hard disks so you can share them with other devices on your network. Some have disks already installed, while others are empty enclosures into which you install your own disks. Buying an empty NAS can often be the more cost-effective option, as they’re usually less expensive and give you the freedom to add disks at a later date. You should buy one with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, as these provide the highest transfer speeds. To use a NAS device at these speeds, you’ll need computers with Gigabit Ethernet network adaptors and a Gigabit Ethernet switch or router. Computers with Fast Ethernet adaptors can still access the NAS device, but only at the much slower…

£215 • From www.uk.insight.com VERDICT This 16:10 X24P1 is a great office monitor, especially thanks to its adjustable stand and accurate IPS panel THERE ARE PLENTY of monitors that are aimed at the everyday consumer, but not many that are designed for businesses. AOC has a strong presence in the corporate world and is renowned for tailoring its products for that market, such as with the X24P1. This monitor has an an aspect ratio of 16:10, a step up from more common 16:9 monitors. If you’re an office worker, particularly if you work with spreadsheets, you’ll find that the squarer display of a 16:10 monitor can result in better productivity, simply because you can fit more windows or spreadsheet cells on a page without having to click or scroll between…

£707 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT Even though it’s not picture-perfect, this iMac-aping 5K monitor is a stunner THROUGHOUT ITS NUMEROUS incarnations, the iMac has always been a technology style icon – and design-wise, the Iiyama ProLite XB2779QQS monitor borrows a lot from the latest, most aspirational iMac, including the glorious 5K resolution. At £707, it’s also competitively priced, but is it any good? To be sure, it couldn’t be called cheap – it’s by far the priciest monitor in this round-up – but it does comfortably undercut its 5K competitors. The LG UltraFine 5K Display, for instance, comes in at a steep £1,179, and while the Philips 275P4VYKEB originally launched at £860 last year, the price has since rocketed to £1,245. By these standards, the XB2779QQS already looks a veritable…

£60 • From www.scan.co.uk VERDICT Faster and longer-lasting than the 850 Evo, yet still well priced, this is the new king of SATA SSDs EVEN IF SAMSUNG’S smartphones tend to play second fiddle to Apple’s ever-popular iPhone, the Korean firm looks an awful lot like the best in the world at consumer-grade storage. Besides the 960 Pro (Shopper 348) and 960 Evo (Shopper 349) setting the standard for NVMe drives, and the Portable SSD X5 (page 28) doing the same for external storage, there’s also the (much more affordable) SATA-based 850 Evo (Shopper 326). This had pride of place in our Best Buys for absolutely ages, and for good reason: its rapid read/write speeds were excellent in 2014, and they still hold up today. Perhaps that’s why it took so…

Send your problems to help@computershopper.co.uk Message ends I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S8 phone, and recently got a new car that supports Android Auto. It was all working brilliantly until a week or so ago, when it stopped reading me the content of new SMS or WhatsApp messages. Now if I tap the message, I get the four Google dots lined up at the top of the car’s touchscreen, but then nothing else happens. I can clear the dots and continue using other Android Auto features by just tapping anywhere else on the screen, but it would be nice to get the message-reading feature back. I’ve tried restarting the phone, uninstalling and re-installing Android Auto, and finally telling the app to forget my car then re-pairing it. Nothing seems to…

MEL CROUCHER Tech pioneer and all-round good egg letters@computershopper.co.uk I HAVE GIVEN birth to a monster. Which must mean that I too am a monster. First I will tell you about this monstrous birth. Then you will pity me for unleashing my monstrosity into the world. Finally you will despair for a world where so many people can willingly embrace such monsters and offer themselves as nourishment. The story begins in the 1960s, when it takes me six months to program a huge military computer, and force it to perform lewd acts that involve flashing lights and musical notes. It’s fun. Computers are fun. The story continues into the 1970s, when office computers escape into the wild and sneak into homes like cobras disguised as kittens. It is at this…

MAKING A KIRIN At the Berlin tech show, Huawei remained coy on its rumoured new flagship smartphone, the Mate 20 Pro, but did unveil the processor that will likely power it: the Kirin 980 (below). This, along with Apple’s A12 Bionic, is one of the world’s first 7nm mobile SoCs, and comes equipped with eight cores clocked between 1.85GHz and 2.6GHz – a step up from the Kirin 970, which tops out at 2.36GHz. The Kirin 980 also touts AI-based load prediction, so the chip has a better idea of when to activate the faster cores under demanding loads and when it’s safe to fall back on the slower cores to save power. Despite the Mate 20 Pro’s absence, the Mate 20 Lite made a surprise appearance. This mid-range phone…

THE ONCE MIGHTY AMD Athlon brand continues to tick along with the Athlon 200GE, an entry-level chip aimed at budget PC builders. Mixing AMD’s latest Zen processor architecture with Radeon 3 Vega graphics, the new Athlon chip aims to provide everything budget PC users need on a single slice of silicon. While it won’t dazzle people with PCs that sport Ryzen 5 and 7 CPUs, the Athlon 200GE has a dual-core processor capable of hitting 3.2GHz when running at full pelt. This is matched with a GPU that has a mere three compute units on offer. That’s not a lot of power, but then the Athlon 200GE comes in at just $55 (around £42), which undercuts pretty much anything Intel has to offer. The closest Intel equivalent is the Pentium…

£899 • From www.samsung.com/uk VERDICT High pricing and a conservative design take the sheen off Samsung’s stylus-equipped smartphone THE GALAXY NOTE 9 was an inevitability. Following the success of last year’s Galaxy Note 8 (Shopper 361), the Korean firm’s newest plus-sized phone was always going to make a stylish appearance at some point in 2018, and this new phablet is well placed to build on the luxurious Galaxy S9 (Shopper 364). Much like the Galaxy Note 8, the Note 9 is a high-end, plus-sized Android phablet, which comes equipped with Samsung’s own S Pen stylus for on-the-go note taking. It may look largely similar to last year’s model – something that could also be said of the Galaxy S9, compared to the S8 – but it’s the core specifications that…

£630 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT If you can find the cash, the pocket-sized X5 will reward you with record-breaking transfer speeds A LOOSE SUCCESSOR to the brilliant Samsung T5 (Shopper 358), the X5 isn’t just the Korean firm’s first NVMe-based external SSD; it’s one of the first NVMe-based external SSDs, full stop. As such, competition isn’t exactly fierce – the only big-name rival we know of is Dell’s Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD, which pipped the X5 to launch by a couple of months – but that hasn’t discouraged Samsung from aiming high. The combination of a NVMe M.2 drive and a 40Gbit/s Thunderbolt 3 interface supposedly enable sequential read speeds up to 2,800MB/s, as well as sequential write speeds up to 2,300MB/s – so even if the X5 falls short…

£1,879 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT This is a worthy ultrabook for business or pleasure, but you’ll have to put up with some kinks THIS YEAR SEES the ThinkPad X1 Carbon series, one of the most consistently brilliant laptops, enter its sixth generation. There have been no big changes to this latest version, other than the jump to 8th-gen Intel Kaby Lake Refresh chips. We tested the Core i7-8550U, non-touch Quad HD model, which sits in the upper-middle of the range. As with previous iterations, the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon is made from a mix of carbon fibre, glass fibre, plastic and magnesium alloy. As well as a pleasant soft-touch finish, this makes it impressively light, at only 1.13kg: it’s a 14in laptop with room for full-size USB and HDMI ports…

£3,599 • From www.apple.com/uk VERDICT Just like its 15in sibling, the smaller MacBook Pro is as powerful as it is expensive WHILE THE DELL XPS 15 (page 34) shows that Windows laptops have all but caught up, Apple’s MacBook Pro has long been able to get by on relatively minor updates; understandable, when they fell upon a design that was so superior to the alternatives at the time. This attitude was evident in the 15in MacBook Pro (Shopper 359), and it’s evident in the 13in model too. This smaller MacBook Pro is exactly the same size and shape as 2017’s MacBook Pro, has most of the same features, and it’s available in the same colours, too. Only a few important things have changed. BOLTED DOWN Before we get to those…

£49 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT It’s had some design improvements, but the Clip 3 is a step back from the Clip 2 AT FIRST GLANCE, the JBL Clip 3 doesn’t look too different to the old Clip 2. Its carabiner has been redesigned and the button arrangement tweaked, but beyond that, you’d be justified in wondering what’s new. For all intents and purposes, it’s still a small, waterproof Bluetooth speaker that you can clip to a backpack or belt loop to accompany you on your travels. The question, then, is should you buy the newer version or go for the cheaper Clip 2 instead? ON THE HOOK The biggest difference between the Clip 2 and Clip 3, at least in terms of appearance, is the clip itself. Where the older…

£549 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT HDR isn’t up to much, but Philips’ 4K TV is otherwise a superb all-rounder for the price PHILIPS’ OWNER, TP Vision, recently revealed its new flagship 903 Series OLED TVs, but it also has a slew of more affordable LED LCD models launching this year. The first of these to land in living rooms is the Philips 55PUS6753/12, a 55in 4K HDR screen priced at only £549. This TV uses direct-lit LED backlighting, and while it lacks the local dimming technology of pricier sets, that omission is easy to forgive at such a low price. It also lacks the excellent P5 processor and Android TV system found on higher-end models, but it still manages to find room for the three-sided Ambilight integrated bias lighting technology…

£501 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT The Galaxy Tab S4 is the most luxurious Android tablet, with innovative features, but the iPad Pro outperforms it THERE HAVE BEEN several attempts to make a viable Android laptop replacement, but none has been remotely as successful as the iPad Pro has for iOS. There are also plenty of Windows-based 2-in-1s to go up against, chiefly the Microsoft Surface Pro. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S4 isn’t just a hybrid tablet, then: it’s a plan to revive Android’s professional aspirations. It certainly looks and feels as if it could be used in an office, being covered in glass on the front and back, and at 482g it has a satisfying heft to it. Narrow bezels make the Galaxy Tab S4 slightly smaller than the 10.5in iPad…

01 A basic laptop costing around £300 will run everyday office, multimedia and education software, but it won’t be suitable for 3D gaming or processor-intensive tasks such as video editing. Many laptops at this price have a 15.6in screen and weigh over 2kg, so they’re best used around the house and for occasional journeys. 02 If you want to play modern games, you’ll need a laptop with a dedicated graphics chip such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060M. Good gaming laptops tend to have large 15.6 or 17in screens and weigh around 3kg, so they’re best suited to use at home. 03 If you want a laptop that you can take everywhere, look for a model that weighs less than 2kg. For the best portability, buy one that has a…

01 A basic digital camera will suit someone who wants to take pictures to view on their computer and create 7x5in prints. It should cost around £80, but there may be hidden downsides such as slow performance and very basic user controls. 02 Spend a little more and you’ll get a higher resolution. A 16-megapixel sensor has the potential to produce sharp prints up to A3 size, but only if it and the lens are of a suitably high quality. Very high resolutions in compact cameras tend to boost noise more than detail levels, so many of the best models strike a sensible balance by using a 12-megapixel sensor. Back-illuminated CMOS sensors tend to produce less noise than CCDs, but check our reviews to find out how a particular model…

01 Bluetooth speakers come in all shapes and sizes, so you’ll need to decide what you want to do with the speaker before you buy. If you don’t plan to take your music outdoors or around the house, look for a wired speaker. These are typically cheaper than speakers with built-in batteries. If you do want a portable speaker, however, pay particular attention to how much it weighs. Ruggedised models should be able to survive accidental drops, water spills and unexpected rain showers. 02 Many of the cheapest Bluetooth speakers use the lossy A2DP Bluetooth protocol, which is prone to compressing your music and discarding detail compared with the original recording. It’s hard to tell the difference when listening to pocket-sized speakers, but if you’re looking for a speaker to…

01 A smart thermostat can save you a lot of money by intelligently controlling your heating. Most smart heating devices are designed to be used with hot water central heating systems, with the boiler directly controlled by the system. These typically require a relay to be wired into your boiler, with a wireless thermostat giving you direct control. Smartphone apps then tie into the system to give you remote control. While it’s possible to fit controls yourself, you may want to pay an experienced plumber to do the job: expect to pay around £150 for a typical installation. If you have electric heating, there are very few choices, and the big names (Nest, Honeywell and so on) do not directly support these systems. 02 Want smart hot water control? If…

01 A basic 1TB internal hard disk should cost around £40. This will be fast enough for general use and will provide enough storage for most users. Make sure the hard disk you choose has the appropriate interface type for your PC. Most hard disks and solid-state drives (SSDs) use the SATA3 interface, which enables faster speeds than the older SATA2. Pretty much every motherboard released in recent years will have multiple SATA3 ports, allowing you to connect several storage drives at once. 02 SSDs can make the most of SATA3’s high bandwidth for fast file transfers. They use flash memory similar to that found in USB flash drives, and although they tend to provide less capacity than mechanical hard disks, they’re significantly faster. More expensive SSDs use the NVMe…

Auslogics BoostSpeed 10 AUSLOGICS BOOSTSPEED IS a comprehensive suite of tools that will improve performance in just about every area of your PC’s operations. If your system is slow to boot, for instance, the Startup Manager can locate and disable unnecessary Windows startup programs, Explorer extensions and more. BoostSpeed can highlight ‘dangerous’ items, programs it believes may be spyware, for an additional security benefit. BoostSpeed also makes it easy to speed up a sluggish hard disk. There are tools to remove junk and leftover files, clear your web, Windows and application histories, and explore your drive to see which folders are consuming the most space. The excellent Auslogics Disk Defrag will then rearrange your files to deliver the best possible performance. There are plenty of useful bonus functions, too. These…

£100 • From www.currys.co.uk VERDICT It’s a small TN monitor, but a surprisingly good one thanks to its decent contrast and FreeSync capability CONSIDERING HOW EXPENSIVE monitors can be, with 4K and ultrawide models tending to cost a small fortune, it’s refreshing to see something as affordable as the Acer KG221Q. At just £100, it’s immediately a tempting prospect if you’re on a tight budget. However, it does also mean compromises. Its 21.5in diagonal makes it a couple of inches smaller than many of its budget rivals, such as the 23in Asus VC239H (Shopper 349), and it doesn’t have DisplayPort or DVI inputs, just HDMI and VGA. It also has to make do with a basic TN panel, whereas the VC239H – which at £127 is a bit more expensive,…

£505 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT It’s not a true ultrawide, but the ROG Strix XG32VQ is a splendid monitor for competitive gaming WE’VE LONG BEEN fond of AOC’s huge 31.5in AG322QCX gaming monitor, but a few flaws have always niggled; notably, the somewhat sluggish response time and distracting inverse ghosting with Overdrive acceleration enabled. Now it has a competitor, in the shape of the Asus ROG Strix XG32VQ: a QHD display that’s similarly priced, and just as big, but promises a faster response time and some flashy ornamental touches. BEAM WEAPON The ROG Strix XG32VQ is a 31.5in widescreen gaming monitor with a native resolution of 2,560x1,440. Its curved VA panel delivers vivid colours with fast response times, and it supports refresh rates up to 144Hz, with Adaptive-Sync technology to…

£469 • From www.ebuyer.com VERDICT This well-built gaming monitor has smarter RGB lighting integration than most IN KEEPING WITH the PC hardware industry’s current obsession with RGB lighting, the MSI Optix MPG27CQ comes with fully customisable LEDs both on the back panel and along the bottom edge. It’s not just static lighting, either: the MPG27CQ is the first monitor to integrate SteelSeries’ GameSense technology, which can interface with certain games (including Minecraft, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) and use the lights to convey information, such as how much health or ammo you’ve got left. IN THE ROUND It may all sound a bit gimmicky, but at least it’s been tacked on to a serious gaming monitor, with a curved, Quad HD, 27in VA panel running at 144Hz. The Optix…

£62 • From www.lambda-tek.com VERDICT Nippy and affordable, the XPG SX950 is a sensible SATA SSD even if it isn’t the absolute best THE XPG SX950U is the newest SSD in this group test, and also the only one pitched as something of a PC gaming aid. Predictably, how exactly it suits games is explained in very general terms, with such phrases as ‘boost system performance’ and ‘provide higher reliability’. That’s because the type of storage drive you use has no bearing on things such as frame rates, the best measure of moment-to-moment performance, nor latency in online games. It won’t give you an advantage, in other words, but then there are game-specific quality of life improvements that come with switching from a hard disk to an SSD. Load times…

£80 • From www.amazon.co.uk VERDICT This SSD uses SLC trickery to keep write speeds high, but don’t expect industry-leading performance all the time THROUGHPUT LIMITS MEAN that it’s only going to get harder for a SATA-based SSD to innovate. The best drives in the business, particularly the Samsung 860 Evo, are already getting close to the maximum speeds allowed by the SATA3 interface. Today’s SSDs need ways to stand out, and while the Kingston UV500’s attempt – by introducing built-in encryption – is hamstrung by low speeds, this isn’t the only big idea to have been tried. CACHE IN HAND SanDisk’s favoured standout feature is its nCache 2.0 system, which works very similarly to the tiered SLC/TLC memory setup of certain Western Digital drives – unsurprising, considering WD acquired SanDisk…

One of the most annoying things about the most recent updates to Windows 10 is the way in which Microsoft handles default files. In many cases, you’ll try to perform a specific task only to find that an unexpected application, such as Edge, launches. Sadly, Microsoft has removed the old Control Panel tool that let you select an app and then choose to give it all its file permissions, replacing it with a more manual system inside the Settings app. This just makes it trickier to lock down your default applications, and is one way that Microsoft has actually made Windows 10 worse since launch. Here’s how to fix the issue. Launch the Settings app from the Start menu and select Apps, then click Default apps. From this screen you…

clive@computershopper.co.uk Add smart buttons to your home Smart lighting is useful, but for homes containing more than one person you’ll need smart buttons to make the most of them. Clive Webster shows you how AUTOMATING YOUR HOME is tricky; you can predict some of your activities, but not every situation. A smart light bulb might illuminate and change colour automatically, but sometimes you just need to turn the darn thing on or off. Without a smart button, that means reaching into your pocket, fishing out your phone, unlocking it, loading the app, finding the bulb and tapping its controls. And when you’ve got guests, are you going to hand them your phone every time they want to turn on the lights? Smart buttons are a vital component of home automation. THE…