When Microsoft launched its Surface Laptop, it also used the occasion to launch Windows 10 S, a more secure but significantly more locked-down version of its popular operating system. Windows 10 S will only run apps available from the Windows Store, which means many popular applications that you may run every day simply aren’t available… More
Apple has recently announced the availability of its first “smart” speaker, the Apple Homepod, set to go on sale on the 9th of February in Australia for $499, in the UK for £319 and in the US for $349 respectively. In the smart speaker space, that immediately marks the HomePod as a premium priced option,… More
Wi-Fi is nothing new, and for the most part, we just take it for granted, typically with the router supplied by our ISPs doing all the heavy lifting. The routers supplied by most ISPs really aren’t all that great if you crave high performance, but for the majority of consumers they’re suitable, if not exciting…. More
For decades now, if you were buying a PC, you essentially had two choices when it came to the processor that ran it. For the most part, Intel’s processors under various branding such as Pentium or Core were what you were most likely to hit, with rival AMD’s CPUs generally found in lower-cost machines, or… More
Usually when you hear about large scale security problems, it’s because there’s been an obscure exploit of some incredibly complicated code that somebody’s worked out a way around, leading to the need for software patches, or an entirely human error where access was pilfered via purely social means. Hardware flaws that affect computer security aren’t… More
2017 was a year of some very large security breaches across all sorts of companies, from smaller online merchants all the way up to bigger brands, such as the uber-leak that came out of, well, Uber, where a data leak saw the records of some 57 million users worldwide compromised. As such, you would think… More
The ambition behind Google’s Street View was (originally) to provide a little more human context to people’s map searches. It’s all very good to say that a journey will take so many minutes, or that you need to make this sequence of turns in order to get to your destination, but it’s long been a… More
Ever since the computer market shifted from desktop PCs to laptops, there’s been a significant balancing act going on between the needs of computer users for processing power to run programs, and the needs of those same users for battery power to keep their laptops going. At a simplified level, the harder you push a… More
For the longest time, the generally accepted knowledge was that Apple’s Mac computers didn’t get malware or viruses. Apple even went so far as to mock its PC opposition in the famous “Mac vs PC” ads for the issues they had around security and malware, to a fairly solid effect. While Apple’s Macs do still… More
Quite often these days when we hear about a major security flaw, it’s to do with the underlying software that we’re running on our PCs, whether it’s a dodgy browser exploit, some kind of flaw in productivity software or even “free” content sites that are awash with malware. It’s not quite so often that we… More
