Desire Athow

Desire Athow

Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

Then followed a weekly tech column in a local business magazine in Mauritius, a late night tech radio programme called Clicplus and a freelancing gig at the now-defunct, Theinquirer, with the late Mike Magee as mentor. After an eight-year stint at ITProPortal.com, where he discovered the joys of global techfests and transformed the publication into one of the biggest tech B2B independent publishers, Désiré moved to TechRadar Pro where he has been the editor for nine years.

He has an affinity for anything hardware and staunchly refuses to stop writing reviews of obscure products or cover niche B2B software-as-a-service providers. He is an avid deal hunter and can be found lurking around on various deals forums.

Articles by: Desire Athow

A man using a tablet in a tunnel that's being engineered
Getac: Rugged mobile technology is stronger than ever, but we're sticking to computing devices for now

By Desire Athow Published

Paul Waddilove, Managing Director, UK & Nordics at Getac reveals what to look for when buying a rugged device and why we won't see a Getac rugged phone any time soon

hide IP with a VPN
How to hide your IP address with a VPN

By Desire Athow Last updated

VPN Your IP address reveals a lot about your online activity to nosy ISPs, advertisers, and even the government. With a VPN, however, you can hide it.

Honor MagicBook Pro
One of China’s largest phone makers launched a laptop that will turn heads — Honor’s MagicBook Pro 16 has 32GB RAM by default and an Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 GPU

By Desire Athow Published

There’s another player wanting to grab a share of the premium laptop market

The landing page of Google Answers
Could Google be using Reddit to revive an ancient, failed project — 60,000+ Redditors may well be mTurk’ing for Google Answers 2.0

By Desire Athow Published

Reddit over-indexing on Google, then the $60 million Google AI deal: Is something else brewing?

An photo of the Lenovo ThinkPad T15 Gen 5 opened by an opened Gen 4 model
World’s largest laptop vendor wants you to buy fewer notebooks by allowing users to change batteries and other parts — but a tiny tweak could be a deal breaker

By Desire Athow Published

Lenovo is partnering with iFixit to deliver ThinkPad laptops with user-replaceable parts

A canon printer against a two-tone TechRadar background
The cheapest printer to run or own in 2024

By Desire Athow Last updated

We spend hours every month looking at the cheapest printers to own and the cheapest printers to print

The MSI Titan GT77, one of the best 128gb ram laptops, against a two tone techradar background
The best 128GB RAM laptop in 2024: memory for even the most resource-intensive tasks

By Desire Athow Last updated

Updated Check out the laptops we’ve found boasting an epic 128GB of system memory.

A Razer Blade 14, one of the most powerful laptops, against a two tone techradar background
The most powerful laptop in 2026: the fastest, speediest notebooks in the world

By Desire Athow Last updated

Updated Great for creative pros with the need for speeds, CFD, traders and everyone in between.

GMKTec K8
First Ryzen 8000 mini PC goes on sale with an affordable price tag for an AI PC - and it is surprisingly good value for money

By Desire Athow Published

GMK NucBox K8 comes with a Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU but no PCI 5.0 SSD.

A close-up of of a hard drive.
Controversial hard drive vendor breaks new record with cheapest HDD yet

By Desire Athow Last updated

12TB for under $90 with full three year warranty? What’s the trick?

A Yubico YubiKey 5 NFC, the best security key of 2024, against a techradar background
The best security key of 2024: hardware keys for top online protection

By John Loeffler Last updated

Updated Secure your online accounts with our picks for the best security keys.

Best Secure Router
Best secure router of 2024

By Collin Probst Last updated

Looking for the best secure router? These are our top picks.

Dell UltraSharp 32 8K Monitor
We’ve got $10 10K HDMI video cables already on sale — so where are these cheap 8K monitors?

By Desire Athow Published

After an initial promising start, it seems that 8K, at least on desktop, is just a fad.

Seagate
Exclusive: Seagate explains why it didn’t sell a 60TB SSD in 2016 — and when it plans to finally release a 60TB HDD to the world

By Desire Athow Published

You see, it’s all about priorities and expectations.

AMD
Forget about AMD’s fantastic 96-core Threadripper Pro 7995WX — Dollar for dollar, its little-known 192-thread sibling is a far, far better deal

By Desire Athow Published

AMD slashed the price of the EPYC 9654 by almost 67 percent and nobody really knows why

Adata UE800 1TB SSD on a window sill during our test and review process
Adata Elite UE800 1TB USB flash drive review: Move over traditional external SSDs, there’s a new kid on the storage block

By Desire Athow Published

We put the Adata Elite UE800 1TB portable SSD to the test.

Samsung PM9C1a SSD
Exclusive: Samsung to launch Petabyte SSD subscription — PBSSD-as-a-service is definitely not your usual cloud storage service, at least not for now

By Desire Athow Published

Samsung embracing storage-as-a-service in a big way - but what will its customers think?

Isometric server-side processing concept
‘Future servers could have a shared DPU’: Could the next decade see a rise in socket heterogeneity?

By Desire Athow Published

Dual-socket servers may no longer be the 'be all and end all', with single-socket and quad-socket servers more viable than we thought.

A Samsung 990 Pro on a wooden table in front of its retail packaging
Could this be the Samsung 1000 Pro SSD in disguise — details of the PM9E1, the company’s first PCIe 5.0 end-user SSD emerge and the numbers look good

By Desire Athow Last updated

Almost four years after launching a PCIe 5.0 for hyperscalers, Samsung finally launches an end user version

Seagate
Seagate launches biggest hard drive ever — 30TB Exos Mozaic 3+ HDD can store more than 1,000 Blu-ray movies and, yes, everyone will be able to buy them

By Desire Athow Published

Seagate is first to reach 30TB barrier, just over three years after the first 20TB hard drives appeared.

A representative abstraction of artificial intelligence
If you want to run AI training and inference on almost any GPU, then this startup may be the answer

By Desire Athow Published

Akash augments existing IT infrastructure to optimize it for the AI age.

AGI 2TB microSD card
Exclusive: First 2TB MicroSD card is now on sale and no, it is not expensive at all — Taiwanese company makes my dream of building a petabyte-in-a-shoebox project become true

By Desire Athow Published

In a surprising twist, AGI becomes first manufacturer to launch a 2TB microSD card.

The Razer 18 2024 laptop
The new Razer Blade 18 could well be the fastest mobile workstation ever — with Thunderbolt 5, a rumored desktop GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, 8TB SSD, 96GB RAM and a massive 18-inch display

By Desire Athow Published

Gamers, professionals and content creators of the world will envy this fascinating laptop.

A person working in a home office.
I have been writing about tech for 25 years: these are 5 affordable productivity gadgets I’m looking to buy in 2024

By Desire Athow Published

This year, my goal is to be as productive as possible while being comfortable and happy

VPN Tunnel
I held the future of data storage in my hands and it couldn't look weirder - 2024 could be the year DNA storage goes mainstream and it couldn't come sooner

By Desire Athow Published

A €1,000 DNA card drive with a 1KB capacity is not what you’d expect the future of storage to look like, and yet...

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