PC Pro

You may not realise that Charles Dickens wasn’t merely a prolific novelist, journalist and short story writer, but also a keen reader of PC Pro. And a time traveller. When he wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, he was referring to the incredible slew of AI-enabled laptops that would launch in the summer of 2024, knowing the lost weekends and evenings it would cause me in my desperate attempt to review them all. Although I’m still not entirely happy about his depiction of me in A Christmas Carol. This particular issue is a tale of two CPU architectures, with AMD the hero for x86 with its all-new Ryzen AI 300 series. I give my largely positive verdict on this launch from p48, and if…

PC buyers and vendors alike are troubled after Intel belatedly admitted to problems with its 13th and 14th generation desktop processors. There have long been reports of instability with Intel’s “Raptor Lake” processors, with systems crashing under heavy load, and even dead chips. Intel finally released a microcode patch for the processors in August, throttling back the voltage available to the chips to prevent systems hanging and permanent damage to the processor. That’s far from the end of the matter, though, with unhappy PC buyers worried their processors may already be irreparably damaged and PC vendors bearing the brunt from disgruntled customers. The long road to remediation Reports of problems with the Intel processors have been swirling since late 2022, particularly among the overclocking community, who are most likely to trigger the potentially damaging…

The UK’s burgeoning esports studies scene has been overclocked with a new lab opening at the University of Salford. Salford’s Business School is among a host of UK universities now offering esports courses, including Staffordshire University, the University of Chichester and Falmouth University. Salford’s course differs slightly from some others in that it focuses on esports business management, nurturing students’ ability to run esports events rather than compete in them directly. The Salford HND course is only in its second year of operation, but students will now benefit from the state-of-the-art lab, which course leaders say will let students learn on the same kind of equipment used at professional esports events. The new lab comprises 23 Yoyotech i9 RTX Esports Gaming PCs, fitted with high-end Intel processors (hopefully not those mentioned opposite) and…

CrowdStrike probably had a bigger impact than any IT outage in history, but it’s had strong competition, not least from McAfee almost 15 years ago. McAfee’s 2010 blunder bore a striking resemblance to CrowdStrike. The firm released an antivirus update that inadvertently flagged a critical Windows file (svchost.exe) as a malicious threat. Affected machines entered a reboot cycle, and its effect was felt in government agencies, hospitals and beyond. McAfee issued an emergency fix and instructions on how to manually restore affected systems. There’s another similarity between the two incidents. McAfee’s chief technology officer during the 2010 blunder, George Kurtz, is now the CEO of CrowdStrike. There is, of course, no suggestion that is anything other than a desperately unfortunate coincidence, but if you’re the man involved, well… that’s gotta Kurtz.…

Exclusive investigations into technology practices. Email probe@pcpro.co.uk if you have a story Was the CrowdStrike meltdown the worst IT failure in history? Probably, but nobody really cares about its level of notoriety. What they care about is their flight leaving on time, or their hospital appointment going ahead, or being able to log in to online banking. For a good few hours on 19 July 2024, none of those things was a given for millions of people around the world. The incident reports have been written, the lawsuits filed and in-depth articles about why it happened written (see the columns by Jon Honeyball and Davey Winder this month, p110 and p118). But will the lessons of the CrowdStrike failure be learned to minimise the possibility of a similar incident ever occurring again?…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in (2023) M3 power from £1,699 from apple.com The M3 chips give the already brilliant MacBook Pro series a boost in games with no sacrifices elsewhere, so power users who are happy with Apple must grapple with the big decisions: which M3 chip, which size of screen, and how much RAM and storage? REVIEW Issue 352, p46 NEW ENTRY Apple Mac Book Air 13in (M3) Both the 13in and 15in MacBook Airs impress for speed, styling and battery life, but the 1.2kg 13in Air wins out of the two for its sheer portability. From £1,299 from apple.com REVIEW Issue 356, p54 Huawei MateBook X Pro (2024) Despite weighing only 980g, this laptop packs a 14.2in OLED panel, 2TB of storage and an 11-hour battery life, as well as an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor. £2,100…