“Come with me, in the PCPro time machine, as we travel back ten years to the Toshiba boardroom”

Although many laptops pass through my hands, I rarely get to see the throbbing power-boxes dribbling with the latest tech, but that’s where PC Pro continues to be vital. A team of testers burn barrels of midnight oil while benchmarking, logging and agglomerating data so we can get a feel for everything from budget bargains to wallet-shrivelling workstations. I mention this so I can talk about Diane, who wasn’t happy with the new laptop we’d sold her. The unit itself wasn’t a problem and hit her criteria for cost, usability and functionality, but three months in, she fired up the webcam for the first time.

A few issues back, our editor bemoaned the fact that many laptop cameras are awful, and these were solacing words to read. As a small retailer we don’t have access to demo machines, so when we put a new line on the shelf we presume the spec matches real-world performance. Webcams are a shot in the dark as the information is buried. Lenovo’s website has no mechanism to filter a product search by camera spec,