About the authors

Find out more about the team bringing you the PC Pro blogs below:

BARRY COLLINS is the editor of PC Pro. He started his career on Pro in 1998, before embarking on a seven-year tour of duty on Fleet Street, and returning to the Pro fold in 2006. He is morbidly fascinated with making his broadband connection go faster, determined to find a Wi-Fi radio that he likes and most likely to be found uttering “what’s the point?” in the PC Pro office.

DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH is PC Pro’s technical editor, and one of the magazine’s most flagrant self-publicists. Besides PC components he is particularly interested in relationships between ordinary people and the world of technology, including interface design, marketing and issues arising from DRM. He is also PC Pro’s resident security expert and produces the weekly podcast.

CHRISTINE HORTON is editor of PC Pro’s sister title, Channel Pro, the one-stop shop for the UK’s IT channel community. As well as being an experienced editor of business-to-business titles, her proudest moment came when judging the Fish & Chip Shop of the Year (not quite as bizarre as it sounds – she was editor of a fast food trade magazine at the time). History, sadly, does not remember exactly which shop won her vote.

DAVEY WINDER has been PC Pro contributing editor since the very first issue, and along the way have won awards for writing in the magazine, such as Technology Journalist of the Year and IT Security Journalist of the Year. His new book, Being Virtual, is part auto-biography and part virtual world interview and analysis nerd-fest.

DAVID BAYON is PC Pro’s deputy reviews editor. He spent his first two years down in the windowless PC Pro Labs, but he’s now up in a real office, with real daylight and actual people to talk to. He spends his days chasing around after the latest monitors, printers and anything else that plugs into a PC.

JONATHAN BRAY is PC Pro’s reviews editor and is in overall charge of (almost) every review that flows through the magazine. Like Barry, he’s another returnee, having begun his career at the magazine back in 1996, taking an eight year break to work in ‘New Media’ (hey, remember those days?), then pounding the freelance treadmill. Has an unhealthy obsession with hi-fi, large unwieldy smartphones that need a suitcase full of batteries to run, and everything and anything GPS-related; he’s always getting lost, y’see.

KEVIN PARTNER is a contributing editor to PC Pro, writing a bi-monthly column on web applications. Day-to-day he’s a PHP/MySQL developer and Flash Programmer for NlightN Multimedia Ltd, a Milton Keynes-based internet development and e-learning company. He’s also a Google Qualified Advertising Professional and is fascinated by marketing in all its forms.

MIKE JENNINGS is a senior staff writer who graduated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing, with a minor qualification in loafing around on the beach with a barbecue and plenty of alcohol. His interests stretch to plenty of technological wonders: high-performance PCs, interesting and innovative design and powerful, boundary-pushing components will always attract his attention. Then again, so will a healthy supply of cake or chocolate.

PAUL OCKENDEN wears several hats: He runs a successful new media agency called CST Group, he’s a director of the online survey company Demographix, and he’s also PC Pro’s mobile & wireless Real World columnist. His home and work lives tend to blend a bit because Paul is an avid collector of gadgets and ‘toys’, but also specialises in advising large companies how they can commercially exploit new technologies. For a gadget fan like Paul it’s a case of “living the dream”.

SASHA MULLER has spent the past ten years scything sideways through the ranks of Dennis Publishing’s glittering IT cognoscenti to finally arrive on PC Pro’s desks as laptops editor. Little flashing lights, touch sensitive buttons and evidence of fine, thoughtful design excite his finer instincts, while rubbish keyboards and hazy displays often court his journalistic wrath. Tipping the scales at 16 and a half stone, he is more desktop replacement than ultraportable, and to perform at his best, often requires a full eight-hour recharge.

SIMON JONES is an independent IT consultant specialising in office software, databases and user interface design. He writes the advanced office column for the Real Word Computing section of PC Pro, alternately praising and lambasting the makers of office software and helping users make the most of their investment. He lives up a mountain in West Wales with many animals, only some of whom are allowed in the house.

STEVE CASSIDY is PC Pro’s Networks Contributing Editor. He’s been doing this since before Oasis was either a drink or a rock band, and, like the other beardies, he does it alongside a day job: originally in a merchant bank, then inside a (financial!) modelling consultancy, and since 2000 as a freelancer. His clients include Patent attorneys, international property firms, two different 100,000-person Scottish banks in the same building, a wine importer, and some Brazilian drag queens in Covent Garden. But we don’t mention them.

TIM DANTON is editorial director of PC Pro, having joined the magazine in 1999 when manufacturers were still getting excited about brave new shades of beige. He suffers from a never-quite-satiated thirst for new laptops and smartphones, and a minor obsession with Outlook. His name first appeared in a computer magazine in 1978, when pictured alongside the MSI 6800 System One – hand-built by his dad, who reviewed it in the UK’s then leading computer magazine (for the record, PC Pro is now the UK’s number one monthly).