Windows 10 turns one

Microsoft celebrates birthday with Anniversary Update

Welcome to the November issue of PC Advisor. It’s a year since Microsoft released Windows 10 to the world and during that time it has been installed on around 300 million PCs, laptops and tablets. The free upgrade offer has ended, and Microsoft has given upgraders a birthday present of sorts in the form of the Anniversary Update. This in itself isn’t going to persuade any Windows 7 diehards to upgrade, but it does add a variety of new features and improvements, which you can read all about in our review on page 18.

Buy any new PC or laptop today and it will come with Windows 10, and there are some fine examples, including the HP Spectre 13 (page 28). Not only does it look stunning but it’s fantastically thin and light without compromising performance. Okay, it’s also expensive, but if you want the best, you have to be prepared to pay for it.

Speaking of the best, Samsung has achieved a similar feat with the Galaxy Note7 (page 34). If you’re yet to try out a Note, and its companion – the built-in stylus – then I recommend that you do. This latest model improves on its predecessor in looks and performance, and it’s waterproof to boot. If it’s out of your price range, Xiaomi’s Redmi 3S (page 31) shows the incredible value you can get if you’re prepared to order a phone from China.

We’ve tested yet more of the new graphics cards from AMD- and Nvidia’s new ranges, including Asus’ overclocked GTX 1080 Strix (page 46), which is by far the fastest GPU we’ve ever seen. It’s far from cheap, but if you want to play games at 4K, it can handle that without breaking a sweat. At the bottom of the new range is the GTX 1060, which is much more affordable at well under £300, but is it a better buy than AMD’s flagship RX 480 at around the same price? Find out on page 48.

AMD is also poised to launch its brand new range of CPUs and on page 80 we explore the new chips and give 10 reasons why the Zen wants to be your next upgrade.

Cloud storage is great, but often you need some fast local storage to store and transfer files. On page 64 we’ve rounded up the best of the latest portable drives, which will suit no matter your budget or desired capacity. The latest pocketable SSDs offer blistering performance and aren’t fragile like traditional hard drives. It’s going to be a while before they’re as cheap as their mechanical cousins, but if you can live with under 500GB of storage space they are very tempting.

Finally, as it’s 35 years since IBM released the first PC, we take apart a PC 5150 (page 74) to see just how far things have come since 1981.