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SEPTEMBER 2013
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Tech Spotlight
Hassle-Free PC
BY JON PHILLIPS
EDITOR’S DESK
PCWorld: New design, new features Our digital editions now ofer rich multimedia features and more interactive content. PCWORLD has been publishing digital editions of the magazine for about ten years, but none are packed with as many enhancements and features as the issue you’re reading now. Many of you are first-time readers of a PCWorld digital edition, so I’d like to walk you through some important improvements we’ve made to our digital magazines.
Larger text, more stories Starting with this issue, PCWorld has been redesigned for easier navigation. Our new layout is cleaner and simpler, and it puts a greater emphasis on visuals. Our article text is larger too—a user convenience that we couldn’t have delivered in the print version without significantly reducing the amount of content. In fact, not only have we increased the size of our type, we’ve also increased the number and length of the articles. PCWorld readers are now getting more content for their money than ever before —another benefit of all-digital publishing.
Video, audio, and animations
Multimedia Options Check out the video segments that accompany many of the articles in the Enhanced Editions.
PCWorld offers two types of digital magazines: Enhanced Editions for iPad, Android tablets, and Kindle Fire, and Replica Editions for viewing the magazine on a traditional PC or smartphone. All
editions benefit from our new design. And all editions are available to all digital subscribers through our All-Access Pass. That said, if you read PCWorld on a tablet, you’ll enjoy a more feature-packed experience. For starters, each Enhanced Edition includes illustrated animations, like the ones on this month’s cover and our feature on the Windows 8.1 upgrade guide. Enhanced Edition readers can also view slick, 360degree photos of notebooks from Dell, Vizio, and Micro Express in this issue. Want even more visuals of hot hardware? The Enhanced Edition includes video segments on the construction of a 3D printer, a Dell wireless notebook docking station, the Razer Blade gaming notebook, and a trio of behemoth tabletop tablets. Rounding out the special features for our Enhanced Edition this month, we have an interactive slideshow on mastering to-do lists; an audio segment on buying smartphone insurance; and a screencast on how to upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1. Finally, throughout the Enhanced Edition, you’ll find linkable text (just like on a webpage) as well as pop-up features that you can click for extra information and context.
“If you subscribe to one digital edition, you efectively subscribe to all of them.”
Single subscription, multiple options Again, if you subscribe to one digital edition, you effectively subscribe to all of them through the PCWorld All-Access Pass. So even if you don’t own a compatible tablet today, if you buy one next month—or any time during your subscription period—you’ll be able to enjoy the enhancements I describe above. There’s no denying that digital magazines allow publishers like PCWorld to offer much more content for the price of a traditional magazine subscription. And with all your issues archived in bits and bytes, you won’t have to worry about recycling either. As always, we invite your feedback. Please send us a note at
[email protected] and share your ideas on how we can improve our digital editions. P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
Tech and trends that will afect you today and beyond.
NEWS
What Microsoft’s unified vision means to you Microsof has overhauled its organizational structure to focus on a vision of ubiquity. BY BRAD CHACOS
O
NE MICROSOFT, ALL THE TIME. They’re just five words,
but they hold a universe of importance to Microsoft. In July, they prompted a sweeping revamp of the company’s core organizational structure: Newly vertical divisions were carved out, executives were shufled, and some senior-level people lost their jobs. One Microsoft, all the time. What could it mean for you? If everything goes according to chief executive Steve Ballmer’s grand plan, no less than a seamless computing experience across every device you own—a truly unified OS experience across your phone, tablet, notebook, desktop PC, and TV. This vision could—could—become reality in a few years.
Islands in a rocky sea The first hints are already in place with Windows 8. The controversial modern UI spans desktop displays and tablet screens alike, shares a plethora of design elements with Windows Phones and the Xbox 360, and even rocks a common core with Windows Phone 8 and the
Xbox would share more in its UI architecture with other Microsoft products.
impending Xbox One, making it easier for developers to swim between the various islands in Microsoft’s ecosystem. Previously, the Windows Phone team worked on Windows Phone; the Windows division worked on Windows proper; the Office team worked on Office; the Interactive Entertainment Business presided over Xbox; and so on. Microsoft has been shifting to a more unified design structure in recent months, but having so many fiefdoms with so many chiefs introduced cracks on the edges of Microsoft’s grand vision. Windows Phone’s core UI is just a wee bit different from Windows 8’s, as is Xbox’s interface. No underlying design principles unite the Xbox, the Surface tablets, and the average Windows Phone. Apps and services are updated as each department sees fit. No more.
One Microsof, all the time Microsoft’s reorganization slices the company into divisions aligned much more closely with its “One Microsoft, all the time” vision. All the company’s devices, from Surface tablets to Xboxes, now fall under one division. Another division creates the core operating system for every Microsoft platform, while yet another heads virtually all app development. Each division controls the reins of a crucial vertical slice of Microsoft, slices that transcend specific platforms and services. Those divisions will deliver a unified product across the width and breadth of Microsoft’s platforms—assuming all goes according to plan. And each division depends upon communi-
Surface tablet chamfers would look sweet on a Surface Phone...or Xbox.
“...a seamless computing experience across every device you own.”
NEWS
Surface’s touchfriendly modern UI will span platforms.
cating with the others. An app needs an OS to run on, and an OS is mere bits on a disc without hardware. Now, we won’t see major changes anytime soon, despite Microsoft’s newfound rapid-release religion. Correcting the course of an organization as large as Microsoft takes time. But when the fruits of these changes do blossom, they could be mighty tasty. Imagine this: It’s the future. Your Xbox One, Surface tablet, Surface Watch, Surface Display, and Surface Phone all sport the same sleek VaporMg styling on their cases, complete with the same physical controls in the same general area. More important, all those devices share the same basic experience: A unified system design, with crucial elements in familiar locations across devices. The same apps and services are available on all devices, either from the Web or from the shared OS core; and thanks to the touch-friendly modern UI that spans platforms, you can even run most apps on your Surface Watch. Behind the scenes, SkyDrive syncs your apps, settings, game saves, and DVR details. Shifting from device to device would be utterly seamless.
Bumps in the road Idealistic? Sure. But even if the grand vision doesn’t coalesce completely, everybody wins if Microsoft simply manages to rival Apple and Google and build out a cohesive ecosystem of apps and services with a
“I have to wonder: Where do thirdparty device manufacturers stand?”
common look and feel. Well, almost everybody wins. I have to wonder: Where do the third-party device manufacturers stand in all this? Windows can run on a wide swath of hardware, but “One Microsoft, all the time” carries somewhat ominous tidings for the likes of Acer, HP, and Dell. Don’t be surprised to see more “experiments” with Chrome OS or $200 Android laptops in the future. Or could the grand vision result in an elegant, yet desultory sameness? And if that happens, is that where third-party hardware can shine? The service and software roots of “One Microsoft, all the time” would work just fine on hardware from any manufacturer, after all.
The desktop is dead, long live...the Tile? The desktop is the past for Microsoft; the modern UI vision is the future for the company. The desktop simply can’t carry over from device to device and app to app in the same way that the modern UI and its flexible architecture can. The die is cast. As a devout lover of the keyboard and mouse, I’m grimacing, too. But if Microsoft succeeds, I won’t cry for the desktop’s loss. However, that’s a big if, as Microsoft’s ambitions have exceeded its ability to execute in recent times. Nor has Microsoft been able to convince consumers to jump aboard the Windows 8 Live-Tile bandwagon en masse. But if “One Microsoft, all the time” lives up to its potential, the bedeviled Windows 8 UI could become much more than just a tacked-on tablet interface.
NEWS
New Windows 8 PCs innovate to capture attention BY MELISSA RIOFRIO IF THE WINDOWS PC market is in big trouble, someone forgot to tell Lenovo and Samsung. In June, within 24 hours of each other, the two Asian tech giants unveiled broad, new product lines. A critical mass of next-generation Windows 8 machines is coming down the pike. The new arrivals cover every shape and form of portable PC, with touchscreens galore, and even some daring dual-boot systems. Crawford del Prete, chief research officer at tech market research firm IDC, says the Lenovo and Samsung announcements show how fundamentals are coming together for the PC market. “Haswell should significantly improve battery performance,” del Prete says. Haswell, the code name for Intel’s fourth-generation Core processor, is finally starting to show up in new systems. Early tests of the Haswellpowered Macbook Air indicate that the chips do, indeed, deliver on their promise of maintaining great CPU performance along with much
longer battery life. Haswell also brings a new Ultrabook spec for PCs that calls for touchscreens and that will play better with Windows 8. And Windows 8.1 is just around the corner. “Windows 8.1 will be a more familiar interface for customers that have objected to Windows 8,” del Prete says. Touchscreens are cropping up in more systems, too. “Consumers are looking for touch and alternative form factors like convertibles and detachables,” says Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights. The just-announced Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus has no pricing or ship date yet, but it’s an Ultrabook and then some. Weighing only 3.06 pounds, its 13-inch touchscreen display sports a high resolution of 3200 by 1800 pixels, and its aluminum chassis is just over a half-inch thick. Samsung says its battery could last up to 12 hours. Lenovo’s new IdeaPads will offer touch capability at affordable prices. The IdeaPad S210 Touch, for instance, will start at $429 and include an 11.6-inch HD touchscreen display. The tablet/hybrid space remains fertile ground for innovation. The Lenovo Miix, as its name (not a typo) suggests, is designed to be versatile. It uses an Intel Atom dual-core processor and has a 10.1-inch screen with a 1366-by768-pixel resolution. You can buy a detachable folio case with a
“Touchscreens and high resolutions are cropping up in more systems.”
The Samsung Ativ Book 9 has a very high-res touchscreen display.
NEWS
built-in keyboard. It’ll cost $500 to start and is supposed to last 10 hours on a full charge. The Samsung Ativ Tab 3 is a Windows tablet designed to make iPad users pause. It’s bigger, with a 10.1-inch display, versus the iPad’s 9.7inch one. It’s thinner, at just 0.32 inch thick versus the iPad’s 0.37 inch. And it’s lighter, at 1.21 pounds—the iPad is about 1.45 pounds. Finally, the Samsung Ativ Q is a 13-inch tablet-laptop hybrid with the same superhigh resolution as the Ativ Book 9 Plus. Its screen can prop up like a laptop and tilt back on a raised hinge. And it comes with both Windows 8 and Android 4.2. A device like the Ativ Q “indicates PC manufacturers are still in exploration-mode, looking for that silver bullet to turn around PC sales,” analyst Moorhead says. “For Windows 8, it indicates what most in the industry already know: Windows 8 lacks the right apps.” But for J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, the Ativ Q has inherent limitations. “Android is not going to be a substitute for Windows,” Gownder says. “It has the same problem as a Chromebook: How does it fit into your overall computing environment?” No one knows how many of these products will still be around in a year, but their innovative spirit shows that PC vendors aren’t giving up.
The Samsung Ativ Tab 3 is just 0.32 inch thick and weighs 1.21 pounds.
NEWS
Nvidia to license graphics cores BY AGAM SHAH
NVIDIA WILL START licensing its graphics cores more widely in a bid to cash in on the need for powerful graphics in smartphones, tablets, and other devices. Nvidia will start by licensing graphics cores based on the Kepler architecture used in its latest graphics cards, the company says. Kepler cores will also be used in Nvidia’s Tegra 5 mobile chip, codenamed Logan, shipping next year. “The reality is that we’ve done this in the past,” says David Shannon, Nvidia’s executive vice president and general counsel, in a blog entry. But now, “the explosion of Android devices presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate this effort.” Nvidia is taking a path similar to that of Imagination Technologies, the main supplier of graphics cores to mobile chip makers. Imagination’s graphics cores are used in Apple’s iPad and iPhone, Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone, and other mobile devices. Nvidia will also license its visual computing patents, Shannon says. It has 5500 patents issued or pending.
Wi-Fi Alliance to certify 802.11ac equipment BY MICHAEL BROWN
THE WI-FI ALLIANCE is finally kicking off a certification program for routers, adapters, and other wireless networking gear based on the IEEE 802.11ac draft standard. The organization has a strong track record when it comes to ensuring that networking products will be interoperable even when the standards they’re based on have yet to be finalized, so this is a positive development. As it did with the 802.11n wireless networking standard, the IEEE is taking its time to ratify the 802.11ac standard. In fact, the responsible working group isn’t expected to be done until November, and final ratification isn’t expected until February 2014. That lengthy timeline hasn’t stopped manufacturers from shipping 802.11ac gear, of course; products based on the draft standard have been on store shelves since August 2012. But buyers haven’t had any assurances that those products will work together.
NEWS
So why is the certification program launching now? “We want to ensure that the standard is substantially mature,” Wi-Fi Alliance senior marketing manager Kevin Robinson explains. “There is work that we have to go through to ensure interoperability, and [we’re] fielding a test bed to certify that.” The Wi-Fi Alliance launched a similar certification program back in 2007 for networking equipment based on the draft 802.11n standard. Unlike that effort, however, the 802.11ac certification program will not acknowledge the standard’s draft status and is being described as simply “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ ac.” “The Wi-Fi Alliance has a long track record of certifying products ahead of IEEE ratification,” said Robinson says. “With the Wi-Fi Certified N program, we found that in addition to the backward interoperability [with products based on the 802.11b and g standards], final products were backward-compatible with draft products. The core set of features remained unchanged. The Wi-Fi Certified AC program will preserve interoperability with every certified product from the past ten years.” Robinson also says he expects that most manufacturers that shipped 802.11ac products prior to the certification program will sub-
The 802.11ac-based Asus RT-AC66U is one of the fastest routers we’ve ever tested.
mit their products for certification after the fact. To gain the Alliance’s imprimatur, 802.11ac devices are expected to be dual-band, meaning that they can operate on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands. If such a device can’t connect at 5GHz using the 802.11ac protocol, it will attempt to drop back to 2.4GHz and use the older 802.11n protocol (or even 802.11b or 802.11g, if necessary). Since dual-band routers are capable of operating networks on both frequencies simultaneously, consumers will be able to use the 2.4GHz band for basic needs and preserve bandwidth on the less-crowded 5GHz band for media streaming and other high-performance applications. PCWorld tested five of the first 802.11ac routers last September (go. pcworld.com/11acrouters). We were generally impressed with their performance then, but we don’t know at this time whether those products will be certified after the fact. The Wi-Fi Alliance did provide a list of 802.11ac components that will be the first to receive 802.11ac certification. These devices also form the test suite for the certification program as a whole: • Broadcom BCM4706 5G WiFi Communications Processor • Broadcom BCM4360 5G WiFi Single Chip MAC/PHY/Radio • Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 • Marvell Avastar 88W8897 AP Reference Design • Marvell Avastar 88W8897 STA Reference Design • Mediatek Dual Band 802.11ac Reference Access Point • Mediatek Dual Band 802.11ac Reference STA • Qualcomm VIVE 802.11ac 3-stream Dual-band, Dual-concurrent Router • Qualcomm VIVE 802.11ac 3-stream, PCIe Client • Realtek RTL8197D+RTL8188AR+RTL8192CE AP/Router • Realtek RTL8812AE HMC card
“PCWorld tested five of the first 802.11ac routers last year, and we were impressed.”
NEWS
How live data will redefine the Office document BY MARK HACHMAN
MICROSOFT IS PLANNING AN OVERHAUL of our Office documents,
weaving live data into the once-static fabric of our Word files and Excel spreadsheets. It’s a bold experiment that could kill the very definition of an Office “document”—but it could also spell the rebirth of Microsoft’s productivity suite in the age of cloud-driven collaboration. Microsoft has been evangelizing tools that will enable app developers to automatically use Bing’s search capabilities in documents—for example, they might enhance a travel guide with live demographic information on Belize. And Microsoft’s new PowerBI tools can import data from both public and private sources to provide more up-to-date context in documents. Both developments reveal a sea change in the way we’ll interact with Microsoft Office in the future. Today, you create an Office doc-
ument, save it, and then email it to a colleague, who quite likely prints it out. But all this can change once Office begins hooking into living data. Office docs won’t simply document the past: They’ll also accurately reflect the ever-changing present. “In the past, people would send around a static spreadsheet or a static PDF, with static data,” Kelly Waldher, director of Office 365 product management for Microsoft, said in an interview. “What PowerBI offers with Office 365 are a couple of new elements: real-time updates and real-time data.” Microsoft has connected its SQL Azure cloud database to SharePoint Online, creating shared PowerBI workspaces that partners and coworkers can access, Waldher said. With a live data source powering the document, you can be sure you’re getting the most up-todate information—and therefore the best information to base decisions on. This model assumes that documents will no longer be printed out or archived in a dead, static format, since doing so would rob them of the contextual intelligence that live data offers. Microsoft understands that its vision will first be enabled within
Microsoft sees its Bing search technology as the foundation for a number of capabilities.
“Ofce docs won’t just record the past; they’ll reflect the changing present.”
NEWS
“What we mean by ‘documents’ will move far beyond today’s definition.”
business environments, where enterprise tools can make sense of big data. But it’s not hard to imagine a future where a college paper on climate change might feature an interactive map that plots average mean temperatures for various cities. With consumers increasingly turning to the cloud for data storage, people will place less value on older, static documents, and more on up-to-date responses to changing conditions. If Microsoft’s vision takes hold, static documents loaded with static data will seem increasingly irrelevant as time goes by. Which raises the question, at what point will traditional Office “documents”— spreadsheets, Word documents, and the like—begin to go away, victims of their own irrelevance? If Microsoft’s vision of live, connected files becomes reality, the document of tomorrow could evolve into a framework, a predefined query. We may not know what the 100 highest-grossing movies of
Madonna ruled 1987 in this ‘king of the hill’ vizualization of pop-music artists.
2010 through 2020 will be, but we can create a document that’s preformatted to access that information. If that happens, seemingly disparate technologies—Office, Bing, and Azure—will become more closely tied to one another. And what we mean by “documents” will move far beyond today’s traditional definition.
Are naturallanguage queries the future of data interaction?
NEWS
Will nVoy become the one home networking standard? BY YARDENA ARAR
HAVE YOU HEARD the saying, “The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from?” That saying popped into my mind when I learned of the new nVoy brand and certification program for products based on the IEEE 1905.1 standard. If you’re not familiar with it, IEEE 1905.1 defines hybrid networks that combine Wi-Fi, ethernetover-powerline, MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance), and conventional wired ethernet topologies. And each of those technologies is defined by a standard of its own, of course. And then there’s the ITU’s G.hn, a wholly separate standard from a different international body that defines hybrid home networks that use powerline, coax, and phone line, but not wireless
(although it can coexist with Wi-Fi). So why does the world need a standard that defines a collection of standards? For that matter, why does the world need the Wi-Fi Alliance’s 802.11ac certification program? If IEEE 1905.1 and IEEE 802.11ac are standards, why do we need marketing consortiums to certify that products based on those standards will be interoperable? Isn’t that the very definition of the word “standard”? After all, I already operate a hybrid network at home: Some of my devices connect via Wi-Fi, some use HomePlug AV powerline, and my entertainment center runs on MoCA. Everything is connected to my gigabit ethernet Wi-Fi router. And my hybrid network was running fine long before someone thought to come up with a fancy logo for it. In search of answers to these questions, I interviewed HomePlug Alliance vice president and Broadcom senior technical director Stephen Palm and consumer communications services analyst Mike Jude of market research firm Frost & Sullivan.
Help with setup and troubleshooting So, what does nVoy certification bring to the networking party? The major benefits are simplified setup and diagnostic tools that can help troubleshoot problems. A new nVoy component can get its configuration info from existing ones at the push of a button, freeing consumers from having to tediously input info such as SSIDs and passwords, Palm explained. The diagnostics (information on link rates, network topology, and so on) can be accessed locally by customers and remotely by service providers. Service providers especially stand to benefit from widespread deployment of nVoy and its successors (as the IEEE 1905 working group develops them). As more and more people use networks for streaming media and are therefore more likely to notice performance problems, service providers will want a way to see what’s going on when a customer complains, without incurring the expense of dispatching a truck and a technician. “Keeping that network running is
nVoy is a new certification program for hybrid home networks.
NEWS
absolutely essential to selling services that use it,” Jude says. Both Jude and Palm say that while G.hn and nVoy both seek to make network setup easier, they are fundamentally different technologies. G.hn describes a chip technology (it’s a PHY, a physical spec) for gear that would replace—and is incompatible with—equipment based on existing wire-line standards. A G.hn component can’t talk to a HomePlug or MoCA device. The nVoy spec, on the other hand, doesn’t work at the PHY layer of a network chip. It’s part of the software overlay that talks to the hardware of all supported network standards. At launch, these supported standards include HomePlug, MoCA, Wi-Fi, and ethernet, but there’s no reason why nVoy couldn’t be revised to support G.hn, too. More important, nVoy-certified gear will be backward-compatible with the popular network technologies that it supports— the underlying ethernet bridging doesn’t change—so you don’t have to abandon the equipment you already have. You can simply upgrade to nVoy-certified gear as you replace older components that don’t enjoy the benefits of the technology. This doesn’t mean that there’s no place for G.hn in the home, Jude notes. It might, for example, be useful for someone building a new home entertainment center who wants to mix and match components that use different network technologies. And having components based on G.hn would greatly simplify setup.
“nVoy’s major networking benefits are simplified setup and diagnostic tools.”
Timetable for nVoy Those who follow networking standards may wonder how long IEEE 1905 has been in the works. The answer: not that long. The working group was set up two and a half years ago, Palm says, and the draft spec followed in December 2011. Having lived through the drama of 802.11n Wi-Fi development, which took many years, I wondered aloud how the working group was able to produce the draft so quickly.
“nVoy-certified gear will be backwardcompatible.”
Palm explains that unlike the 802.11 working group, which has been composed of as many individuals as cared to pay for IEEE membership, 1905 is composed of only entities (read: companies). Companies can’t pack the group, as happened with 802.11, by paying for more of their employees to join. That means the working group had a lot fewer members, which tends to speed things up. At Computex in Taiwan this year, the news release announcing the nVoy branding and certification program (which will be managed by the HomePlug Alliance) indicated that the first nVoy-certified products were expected to reach the market later this year. As with the Wi-Fi Alliance, the certification program will test products that claim to adhere to the IEEE 1905.1 standard to ensure that they will be interoperable with other products making the same claim. As Palm points out, however, the news release covered only certification, so actual products will likely not ship until sometime later. It may take a while for us to enjoy the benefits of nVoy, the standard that could make home networking easier—even if it’s one more logo to be on the lookout for.
NEWS
Instagram takes a swing at Vine with embed codes BY CAITLIN MCGARRY
THE BATTLE FOR mobile video supremacy rages on: In July, Instagram
finally made it possible for users to easily embed photos and videos on their own websites, as Twitter’s rival Vine app does. Easily is the key word. Workarounds already existed for embedding Instagram photos and videos, but they entailed too much effort for content sharing. Instagram is now offering an embed code on desktop browsers that lets you share your photos and videos (look for the button under the comments). The company in a recent blog post said it wants to ensure that your content is clearly attached to your account, so the embedded photo or video will display your Instagram username and link to your account. What if your account is private? Well, no one will be able to share
Instagram’s new embed code lets you share photos and videos as easily as Vine.
“Vine and Instagram have volleyed back and forth by adding new features.”
your photos or videos until you change your settings. Instagram has an all-or-nothing approach to privacy, so you can’t pick and choose which photos you want to share with the world and which you want to share only with friends. Adding an embed code is a small change, but it better positions Instagram to compete with the popular mobile app, Vine, and its parent company, Twitter. Vine posts (‘Vines’) were already easily shareable, not just within the app but across the Internet, because of the Vine embed code. Twitter also offers embed codes for tweets, while Facebook (which owns Instagram) does not let users easily share their posts on third-party sites. The new feature is especially useful for news organizations that have already been embedding tweets and Vines but have had no way to share Instagram photos and videos of breaking events. Vine and Instagram have volleyed back and forth since Instagram introduced its own social video product. Vine recently added a handful of new features in the wake of Instagram’s 15-second-video launch, with plans to add even more. If both companies continue to improve their apps in an effort to woo users, well, no complaints here.
NEWS
PC sales decline slows down BY BRAD CHACOS
IN JULY, HEADLINES screamed that global computer shipments had plunged 11 percent year over year in the second quarter after dropping 14 percent in the first (go.pcworld.com /pcsalesq2). But wait! A closer look at the numbers shows that we may be past the worst of the bleeding. Yes, the first quarter’s year-over-year decline was the sharpest ever, falling from 88.6 million PCs shipped in Q1 2012 to about 76.2 million PCs in Q1 2013, according to IDC. (Data from Gartner, another research group, yields roughly the same numbers.) From Q1 2013 to Q2 2013, however, the drop is not so devastating. According to IDC, 75.6 million PCs shipped in Q2 2013—a decline of just 600,000 units from the first quarter.
And in the United States, Gartner says, Q2 shipments declined by only 1.4 percent year over year; IDC says U.S. shipments dropped by 1.9 percent. Why? We may be over the tablet boom. “The U.S. industry is definitely the most advanced [in tablet adoption],” says Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “So the U.S. market might see some slowdown of tablets eating into the PC space.”
Vendor
1Q13 Shipments
Vendor
2Q13 Shipments
1. HP
11,997
1. Lenovo
12,619
2. Lenovo
11,700
2. HP
12,378
3. Dell
9,010
3. Dell
9,230
4. Acer Group
6,150
4. Acer Group
6,226
5. ASUS
4,363
5. ASUS
4,590
Others
33,075
Others
30,589
Total
76,294
Total
75,632
According to IDC, the decline in PC sales in the United States is slowing—and a few vendors even saw an uptick. FULL DISCLOSURE: PCWORLD AND IDC ARE OWNED BY INTERNATIONAL DATA GROUP, BUT THEY SHARE NO EDITORIAL AFFILIATION.
Tablets remain very popular, but Gartner thinks their effect on PC sales in the U.S. will diminish.
NEWS
MIT researchers see through walls with ‘Wi-Vi’ BY STEPHEN LAWSON
IF GOOGLE GLASS isn’t enough to get you worried about technology,
how about a device that can see through walls? MIT researchers are experimenting with a Wi-Fi–based system called Wi-Vi, which they say can track moving objects through walls. The technology could be built into a smartphone or a dedicated handheld device and used in search-and-rescue and law enforcement, says Dina Katabi, the MIT professor who developed Wi-Vi along with graduate student Fadel Adib. Katabi thinks consumers might use Wi-Vi, too. For example, someone walking outdoors at night who fears being followed might use it to detect a person sneaking behind a fence or around a corner, she says. No need to worry about the person in the next hotel room watching you dress—at least not yet. Currently the display offers very low resolution. However, Katabi notes that she and Adib are working on higher resolution, and that Wi-Vi might someday show recognizable faces. Society, she says, might want to develop policies around its use. Wi-Vi sends Wi-Fi radio waves through a barrier and measures the way they bounce back. When a Wi-Fi signal reflects off an object, the shape and makeup of that object affect the signal that returns. But when the signal hits a wall, most of it reflects off the wall, and only a faint bit of it reflects off the people on the other side. To get around that obstacle, Wi-Vi transmits two signals, one of which is the inverse of the other. When one signal hits a stationary object, the other cancels it out. But because of the signals’ encoding,
Wi-Vi now is like radar tracking a plane.
they don’t cancel each other out for moving objects, so reflections from a moving person are visible despite the presence of the wall. Wi-Vi translates those faint reflections into a real-time display of the person’s movements. Because of its low resolution, Wi-Vi could actually enhance people’s privacy in some cases, Katabi suggests. For example, someone could use it to remotely monitor whether an elderly parent had gotten out of bed, without installing intrusive video cameras. But whether in the hands of police officers or ordinary people, a tool to see through walls raises questions that the law hasn’t answered, warns Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Your location is something that’s worthy of privacy,” Fakhoury says. “Even within your house, where you go can reveal a lot about yourself.”
“Your location is something that’s worthy of privacy.”
NEWS
Samsung enhances Ativ line BY JARED NEWMAN
SAMSUNG IS EXPANDING its Ativ line with new systems and a touch of Android. (As of this writing, the company has not yet announced pricing or availability.) Ativ Q: This tablet-laptop hybrid, driven by an Intel Core i5 (Haswell) processor, has a 13-inch, 3200-by-1800-pixel display that can prop up and tilt back on a raised hinge. It boots into Windows 8, but can switch to Android 4.2. Users will be able to pin Android apps to the Windows 8 Start screen, and transfer files or folders between the OSs. Ativ Tab 3: Samsung says the 0.32-inch Ativ Tab 3 is the world’s thinnest Windows 8 tablet. It offers a 10.1-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display, runs an Intel Atom Z2760 processor, and comes with an S Pen stylus. Ativ Book 9 Plus: The successor to Samsung’s Series 9 laptops sports a 13-inch, 3200-by-1800-pixel touchscreen display, carries an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, and has up to 256GB of solid-state storage.
NEWS
Samsung Ativ One 5 Style.
Ativ Book 9 Lite: This laptop has a 1366-by-768-pixel display, up to 256GB of solid-state storage, and a quad-core processor. The nontouch model weighs 3.17 pounds, while the touchscreen model weighs 3.48 pounds. Ativ One 5 Style: Behind the 21.5-inch, 1080p touchscreen display of this all-in-one desktop sit an AMD A6 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a hard drive with a capacity up to 1TB.
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STAFF PICKS New Products That Have Our Editors Drooling
1
Razer Hammerhead Pro
go.pcworld.com/razerhammer
»These bass-boosted, neon earbuds might not replace your over-the-ear cans, but they are a good alternative when you need something more portable. Featuring crisp, clean audio, the Hammerhead Pros are particularly useful for PC gamers—each pair comes with an adapter to transform it into a microphone/headphone combo.
2
Brother MFC-J870DW
go.pcworld.com/brotherj870dw
» Near-field communication is a technology waiting to take off—tap any two NFC-enabled devices together, and they can share data. Consumers, however, have been slow to adopt NFC. Perhaps the MFC-J870DW will change that. Simply tap your NFC-enabled phone to the printer, and you can print photos from the handset.
3
HTC HTC One Google Play Edition go.pcworld.com/htconeplay
» The HTC One easily ranks among our favorite phones this year: It has a great look, an impressive camera, and powerhouse specs. And now, if you like the stock Android OS more than HTC’s interface, Google’s got you covered. Both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4 are getting the “Google Play” treatment, combining customizable, transparent software with gorgeous hardware.
STAFF PICKS
4
Steelseries Apex Gaming Keyboard go.pcworld.com/steelapex
»The sleek Apex keyboard is a joy to type on, but it really shines in its lighting options. Each of the Apex’s five zones illuminates independently, displaying any of 16 million colors. The resulting effect is stunning, but also eminently useful: You’ll never lose your place during a frantic multiplayer match ever again.
How to make smart purchases, and stay safe online.
CONSUMER WATCH
Why insuring a smartphone makes sense Can you aford up to $700 to replace your phone? BY ANNE B. McDONALD
A smartphone in danger.
I
F YOU’RE SMART, you’ll consider insuring your brand-new
smartphone. Yes, we bristle at the thought of insuring any consumer electronics—the result of too many sales clerks pitching us on extended warranties for TVs, DVD players, and audio systems. But those devices aren’t nearly as vulnerable to damage or theft as our delicate smartphones. Consider: You probably dropped $200 to $300 on a Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One, or iPhone 5 after inking a two-year contract. The phones are worth more than that, but carriers subsidize the retail prices to lure new customers. If you’re klutzy, wild, or just plain unlucky, however, you could tank your cool new phone with one unfortunate encounter with a toilet. Yes, this happens, and when it does, a replacement phone of the
Online insurance sites compared Company
Protect Your Bubble (insurance)
SquareTrade (warranty)
Purchase window
Coverage
Cost
Replacement time
12 months after purchase; maker’s warranty must still be in effect
Water damage, drops, mechanical/electrical failure, screen failure, antenna/Wi-Fi failure, broken connectors, touchscreen failure, won’t power on; loss and theft covered
$8/month or $144/two years; $100 deductible; can cancel anytime
Replacement in one to three business days (may be refurbished)
New smartphone bought in the last 30 days
Water damage, drops, mechanical/electrical failure, screen failure, antenna/Wi-Fi failure, broken connectors, touchscreen failure, won’t power on; loss and theft not covered
$7/month or $125/two years; $6/month or $99 two years for Samsung Galaxy S4 only; $99 deductible; can cancel anytime
Fixed phone or a check for value of phone guaranteed within five days
Note: SquareTrade has different pricing for iPhone warranties (go.pcworld.com/iphonewarranty).
same model or caliber could cost you up to $600 to $700. That’s some serious dough. Check out these numbers: Asurion (go.pcworld.com/asurion) which partners with nearly all the major wireless carriers to provide smartphone insurance, estimates that 80 million phones will be lost, stolen, or damaged in the United States in 2013. Smartphones are small, slippery, and highly portable. We extract them from our pockets countless times a day, so it’s a wonder that more don’t go skittering across concrete sidewalks, or get stolen from café How active tables. Indeed, in 2012 the are you when Federal Communications using your smartphone? Commission reported that between 30 to 40 percent of all robberies in major cities involved cell phones. Bottom line: If you live life to the fullest—with your phone at your side—insuring it may be a good bet.
A big investment in a tiny package David Anderson is the director of product at ProtectYourBubble.com (go.pcworld.com/protect), which has been selling online insurance for smartphones and other gadgets in the United States since March 2012, and in the United Kingdom for more than four years.
CONSUMER WATCH “People tend to treat their smartphones like their car keys,” Anderson said. “If it was a bundle of $20 bills equivalent to the cost of the phone, I’m sure they’d treat it differently.” Jessica Hoffman, the director of corporate communications for SquareTrade.com (go.pcworld.com/squaretrade), agreed. Her company has been selling warranties for new smartphones and electronics since 1999. “Our lifestyles are mobile,” Hoffman said. “We’re out on bikes, we’re texting at supermarkets, we’re checking in at the airport.”
By the numbers I took a look at both Protect Your Bubble and SquareTrade, which are two of the largest online companies specializing in insuring or warranting tech gear, including smartphones. One advantage they offer is that you can buy warranty or insurance coverage after you buy your smartphone—historically, you’ve had to buy them at the same time. Here’s how the two companies stack up: It’s important to note that SquareTrade deals in warranties—contracts that govern repair and replacement of an item due to damage from ordinary use or faulty workmanship. Protect Your Bubble, meanwhile, offers insurance, which protects your item from hazards like theft or water damage. I found both sites fairly easy to use, but the topic is so complicated that I wanted to speak with a human being in both cases to clearly understand their policies. The phone service for SquareTrade is more pleasant to interact with. Its automated system clearly tells you how long you’ll have to wait to reach a customer rep, and also offers the choice of leaving a number to be called back when it’s your turn. Protect Your Bubble plays bad music while you’re on hold, and its automated system doesn’t tell you exactly how long you’ll have to wait for a human. The customer service rep also didn’t seem to be as informed when answering my questions. Shawn DuBravac, chief economist and director of research at the Consumer Electronics Association, follows companies like SquareTrade and Protect Your Bubble. “One of the interesting things these compa-
Avoid a cracked screen by using a protective case.
nies do is they let you buy the insurance or warranty after you buy the product,” DuBravac said. “Historically, you bought them at the time you bought the product.”
Alternative paths to protection There are many other ways to get smartphone coverage besides the online providers. You can check your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance to see if your policy covers your phone if it’s lost or damaged. You also can buy insurance from the carrier you got the phone from. It’s also possible that your credit card provider or bank offers a warranty or insurance for your mobile devices. Additionally, iOS device owners are eligible for AppleCare (go.pcworld.com/applecare). And don’t throw away or give away the phone you used before you bought the sexy new model. You may need to activate the older phone to get by until a replacement arrives, or to use until your contract is up and you can buy a new, subsidized phone. P H OTO G R A P H S : RO B E RT C A R D I N
CONSUMER WATCH
What a snoop sees when you use a nonsecure Wi-Fi hotspot BY ERIC GEIER YOU’VE PROBABLY READ at least one story with warnings about
using nonsecure public Wi-Fi hotspots, so you know that eavesdroppers can capture information traveling over those networks. But nothing gets the point across as effectively as seeing the snooping in action. So I parked myself at my local coffee shop the other day to soak up the airwaves and see what I could see. My intent wasn’t to hack anyone’s computer or device—that would be illegal—but just to listen.
As you’ll see, it’s relatively easy to capture sensitive communications at the vast majority of public hotspots—locations like cafés, airports, and hotels. Someone can snag emails, passwords, and unencrypted instant messages, and hijack unsecured logins to popular websites. Fortunately, you have a number of ways to protect your online activity while you’re out and about.
Capturing webpages I opened my laptop at the café and began capturing Wi-Fi signals, technically called 802.11 packets, with the help of a free trial version of a wireless network analyzer. I visited my own website on my smartphone. The network analyzer I used reassembled the packets and displayed them in a regular webpage view. The formatting was slightly off and some of the images were missing, but plenty of information still came through. I discovered test messages I’d sent and received via my smartphone while it was connected to the hotspot. Since I use an app to connect
My own website, captured via the hotspot packets and reassembled for viewing.
CONSUMER WATCH to my email service via POP3 without encryption, you could have seen my login credentials along with the message. With that information, someone could configure their email client to use my account and start receiving, and perhaps even sending, emails from my account. I also used Yahoo Messenger to send a message while I was capturing Wi-Fi signals. Sure enough, the tool plucked that information
This is a copy of the email I sent (and subsequently received) when using my smartphone connected to the hotspot.
out of the air, too. You should never use an unencrypted instant-messaging service with any expectation of privacy.
How to use Wi-Fi hotspots securely
“Some sites encrypt your login and then return you to an unsecured session.”
Every time you log in to a website, make sure that your connection is encrypted. The URL address should start with https instead of http. Make sure that the connection stays encrypted for your entire online session. Some sites, such as Facebook, encrypt your login and then return you to an unsecured session. Many sites give you the option of encrypting your entire session: On Facebook, for example, enable Secure Browsing in the security settings. When you check email, try to log in via the Web browser and ensure that your connection is encrypted. If you use an email client, make sure your POP3 or IMAP and SMTP accounts are configured with encryption turned on. To encrypt all your online activity, use a virtual private network (go. pcworld.com/usevpn). Private networks are also vulnerable to eavesdroppers. While enabling WPA or WPA2 security will encrypt the Wi-Fi traffic, obscuring the actual communications, anyone who also has that password will be able to snoop on the packets traveling over the network. This is particularly important for small businesses that don’t use the enterprise (802.1X) mode of WPA or WPA2 security that prevents user-touser eavesdropping. P H OTO G R A P H : M I K E H OM N I C K
CONSUMER WATCH
Protect your PC from surveillance BY MARK HACHMAN
THE RECENT DISCLOSURE that the U.S. government has been spying on Americans’ email and other electronic communications for the last several years reignited concern about communications monitoring. So what can you do to protect yourself from such surveillance? Here are some tips to protect yourself.
Avoid using popular Web services If you’re concerned about the government or any other entity watching your moves online, avoid using Microsoft Bing or Google as your search engine; try DuckDuckGo (go.pcworld.com/duck) instead. The site promises not to track or store your searches (although it does store anonymized searches to improve results, executives said). Naturally, this also means ditching a Gmail or Hotmail account, and deleting your accounts from those sites. Instead, it’s time to think about laying low and skipping around services that you might have forgotten about: Mapquest for maps, for example. You may as well stop social networking altogether, unless it happens to be direct, person-toperson communications. And there’s no sense in surfing using Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Safari, either. Sure, there’s Firefox and Opera, but PCWorld’s review of the Tor browser (go.pcworld.com/tor) shows it to be an anonymous, if slow, way of browsing the Internet.
Ditch your smartphone
If you’re concerned about the government or any other entity watching your moves online, avoid using Microsof Bing or Google as your search engine.
If we assume that Apple, Google, and Microsoft are being monitored, then the safest way to avoid being tracked is to ditch your smartphone. A number of services already ask for your location, in the name of providing better search results or services. And BlackBerry has already acceded to requests to allow foreign governments access to its data. Non-smartphones may be no better, but the amount of information that can be captured from them is much smaller.
Use encryption First, encrypt your hard drive and existing files (go.pcworld.com/howtoencrypt). Next, protect your email by encrypting it (go.pcworld. com/emailencrypt). You should encrypt three things: the connection from your email provider; your actual email messages; and your stored, cached, or archived email messages. If you want to take it even
CONSUMER WATCH further, consider using a secure email service. Companies like Silent Circle profess to offer secure voice and email, communications via dedicated connections between subscribed devices.
Subscribe to a VPN Consider setting up a virtual private network (go.pcworld.com/ vpnsetup), which creates an encrypted “tunnel” to another server. Note that the performance of your PC may suffer somewhat.
Watch those hotspots Wandering from coffee shop to library to free café may provide another layer of security, as your client IP address will vary by location. But you’ll still want to protect your privacy while on the go with these free software solutions (go.pcworld.com/freesecsoft). For more information about staying secure in public hotspots, read “What a Snoop Sees When You Use an Unsecured Wi-Fi Hotspot” in this section.
Block that malware One of the most important things you can do to secure your PC is to lock it down from malware. These antimalware solutions (go.pcworld. com/antimalware) can help ensure that no Trojan horse or other worm provides its own spying eyes on your online activities.
Use strong passwords Make sure that all of your encrypted services are tied up neatly with a unique, easy-to-remember-but-impossible-to-crack passphrase. Read these tips on creating passwords and passphrases (go.pcworld.com/ passphrases). But the best practice right now seems to be to use a good password manager like LastPass (go.pcworld.com/lastpass).
BUGS & FIXES BY JAMES MULROY
CONSUMER WATCH
Mozilla and Google update browsers Mozilla and Google have each released new bug-killing versions of their Web browsers.
Firefox 22 squashes some bugs Mozilla patched a few known bugs in Firefox, squashing 17 vulnerabilities, and added some nifty little features. Seven of the flaws were marked as “critical,” and many of the issues involved memory corruption and vulnerabilities in the Mozilla Maintenance Service (the feature that installs Firefox updates for you). Firefox 22 also added support for WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), a Web application that lets you use in-browser audio and video communication services without having to install plug-ins—take that, Adobe Flash! Read more about the update (go.pcworld.com/3109bf1).
Google Chrome 28 enhances notifications Google released a new stable version of Chrome out of beta with version 28. The biggest addition is an improved notification system that shows important messages outside the browser window—useful in case you don’t want to miss that important email. You can pick and choose which Chrome apps and plugins show notifications, and developers can now implement them to send notifications right to your desktop. Gmail has
» PLUS: Many companies lag in adopting Java security updates.
had this option since 2011, so it’s good to see that other Web apps will be able to use this feature. Google has plans to take features from its Chrome operating system and implement them in a sort of mini-OS inside of your existing one via the Chrome browser, so be on the lookout for other features similar to those in Chrome OS in the future. Read more about version 28 (go.pcworld.com/3109bf2).
Java makes businesses vulnerable Oracle has done its best to patch all those holes in Java we’ve been hearing about over the last six months. And luckily, many of those bugs and vulnerabilities have been patched up, and Java is at a secure point for now in the recent update to Version 7, Update 25. Unfortunately businesses haven’t been quick to adapt. Many businesses continue to use the outdated Java 6, Update 20, which is vulnerable to 215 security issues. Despite the fact that Oracle stopped supporting Java 6 back in April, it’s still the most prevalent version on about 80 percent of enterprise computers, according to security firm Bit9. Even when Java does get updated on the machines, old versions can remain—on average there are 50 different versions of Java on business machines, Bit9 reports. These older versions are still vulnerable to attack. Businesses need to take an enforcing stance on Java and determine where it’s truly needed, and have only the most recent versions installed. Read more about Java in the workplace (go.pcworld.com/3109bf3).
“Many businesses continue to use the outdated Java 6, Update 20 version.”
I L LU ST R AT I O N : G A RY N E I L L
Tips to keep small businesses productive.
BUSINESS CENTER
Lock down your business: Security essentials Guard your invaluable information assets.
P
BY PAUL MAH
ARANOIA—IN SMALL DOSES— is an excellent preventive medicine. If you think your business is too small to be a target for hackers, identity thieves, and similarly unsavory characters, you’re dangerously underestimating the value of your business.
IT security might seem to be a daunting prospect for a small business without an expert staff, a large budget, or expensive consultants, but you can take several easily implemented measures to lock down the computers your business relies on.
Encrypt your hard drives First, implement full-disk encryption on each PC. This step is crucial because system passwords alone offer no defense against hackers’ accessing the hard drive from another computer, or against someone’s attempts to clone its contents for off-site examination. In addition, recovering previously deleted files from an unencrypted storage device or disk image is a relatively trivial matter for an attacker or snoop. Selectively encrypting sensitive folders or files works, too, but fulldisk encryption is the best means of ensuring that every file is protected. Microsoft’s BitLocker is the gold standard for this task, thanks to its ease of use and the fact that it comes with the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows 7, and with the Ultimate and Professional versions of Windows 8. You can also find no-cost encryption software such as DiskCryptor (go.pcworld.com/diskcryptor) and TrueCrypt (go.pcworld.com/ truecrypthowto), though the latter is not compatible with Windows 8.
Microsoft’s excellent BitLocker diskencryption tool can protect all of the files on a PC.
Take care, however, to configure these programs properly. For details on how to encrypt files the right way, read our hands-on guide (go.pcworld.com/encrypt). Enabling disk encryption automatically mandates the use of passwords, but it does nothing to stop users from choosing passwords that are easily cracked. Ensure
You can’t access Apricorn’s Aegis Bio 1TB hard drive without first verifying your identity via its fingerprint scanner.
BUSINESS CENTER
“Lock your PC when you step away—even if you’ll be gone for just a few minutes.”
that staffers select robust passwords that are not too short and that are sufficiently complex. Afterward, you can further harden security by configuring Windows on each PC to prompt for a password upon waking from sleep. Set a reasonably short inactivity timeout of no more than 10 to 15 minutes for the PC to enter sleep mode. Better yet, develop the habit of using the -L keyboard shortcut to lock your PC when you step away—even if you’ll be gone for just a few minutes. This action not only prevents data from being siphoned out during your absence but also keeps unscrupulous insiders with physical access to your computer from installing malware on it surreptitiously.
Use secure portable storage The excellent BitLocker to Go technology can prevent lost or stolen portable storage devices from becoming liabilities. Although you can enable BitLocker to Go on an external drive only through one of the aforementioned BitLocker-equipped versions of Windows, a BitLocker to Go–enabled device can be subsequently used on all supported Windows operating systems, meaning that a small business can implement it companywide without having to upgrade everyone to a Windows edition that includes BitLocker. Be aware, however, that computers running Windows XP or Vista won’t recognize USB drives encrypted with BitLocker to Go unless you install the BitLocker to Go app (go.pcworld.com/btgreader). Mac OS X computers won’t recognize such drives, either. Alternatively, you might prefer to use specialized hardware-encrypted storage devices, such as the Lok-It flash drive or the Apricorn Aegis Bio portable hard drive. Be particularly careful with unbranded devices, as not all such models implement hardware encryption correctly.
Use a password manager Most users opt for the convenience of using the same password across
multiple Web services, even though it leaves them open to severe consequences—including identity theft and financial loss—should hackers snag their password. Instead of trying to memorize a dozen passwords, set up a tool to manage passwords. Numerous apps are capable of this, including Sticky Password Pro (go.pcworld.com/stickypass), LastPass (go.pcworld.com/ lastpass), and Roboform (go.pcworld.com/roboform). Many of these tools can generate strong passwords and can even fill out login pages.
Don’t ignore security updates Finally, ensure that your PC has the latest updates and patches. Confirm that Windows Update is configured to download updates automatically, and then periodically check for errors or failed updates. The same advice goes for common targets such as Oracle’s Java runtime environment and software such as Adobe Reader and Apple QuickTime. One invaluable tool is Secunia Personal Software Inspector (go. pcworld.com/secuniapsi), which tracks and installs updates to a large number of third-party applications. ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW HOLLISTER; PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF APRICORN
Using a password manager is much easier than trying to remember dozens of complex passwords.
BUSINESS CENTER
Slideshow: 10 best to-do list apps Many task-tracking apps sync with email and calendars, and allow you to collaborate with colleagues. BY JASMINE FRANCE
Slideshow:
10 best to-do list apps
BUSINESS CENTER
Slideshow:
10 best to-do list apps
BUSINESS CENTER
Slideshow:
10 best to-do list apps
BUSINESS CENTER
Slideshow:
10 best to-do list apps
BUSINESS CENTER
Slideshow:
10 best to-do list apps
BUSINESS CENTER
6 social media mistakes you must avoid BY CHRISTOPHER NULL SOCIAL MEDIA HAS been a boon for businesses, but it’s also becoming a minefield. Although tweets and Facebook posts can be deleted, evidence of their existence is invariably captured for posterity within seconds of their going live. Say something wrong on a social network, and it will haunt you forever. Don’t believe me? Check out these examples.
1.
Hand the keys to someone who is not ready to drive Tending to Twitter and Facebook pages is a higheffort job, so handing off the task can be tempting. Big mistake. The annals of business will likely record thousands of posts and tweets gone wrong, courtesy of ignorant contractors or staffers. The mixing of personal and corporate accounts is usually to blame. It’s how a “social media specialist” posted about “gettng slizzerd” on Dogfish Head beer to the Red Cross Twitter account. Ensure that your authorized social media users are properly trained. Tools such as HootSuite (go.pcworld.com/hootsuite) can make managing multiple accounts easy, but they increase the risk of posting errors.
2.
Commit rank insensitivity
3.
Fire the person in charge of social media
Piggybacking onto a trending hashtag is a popular tactic, but it can backfire. We’ve seen both American Apparel and Gap get raked over the coals for suggesting that people shop during Hurricane #Sandy, and Kenneth Cole get beaten up for suggesting that riots in #Cairo were due to his new spring collection. (Cole was back at it again later with a #gunreform tweet related to selling shoes.) Mentioning current events that involve human suffering or death simply shouldn’t be part of any business’s social media strategy.
How you handle terminations is critical—particularly if one of
BUSINESS CENTER the people getting the axe runs your company’s social media accounts. A round of layoffs at HMV, a global entertainment retailer, resulted in a live-tweeting of the “mass execution” by its social media planner, who was among the fallen. The tweets also included allegations that the management had used illegal interns.
Sometimes layoffs are the only option. But confirm that you’ve changed the passwords to key social media accounts before said layoffs take place.
4.
Fail to protect corporate confidentiality
Don’t attend a private board meeting and then tweet “Board meeting. Good numbers=Happy Board.” That’s what Gene Morphis, CFO for clothing retailer Francesca’s, did last year, causing the company’s stock price to spike 15 percent. Such behavior is illegal, a practice known as selective disclosure, in which private information is divulged to a few (in this case, Morphis’s 238 Twitter
BUSINESS CENTER followers) instead of to the world at large. Thinking about going public? Personally follow all of your financially oriented employees on social networks and conduct audits to keep tabs on what they’re telling the world.
5.
Ask potentially hostile people to chime in
6.
Neglect social media security
It sounds like a good idea to ask followers to write about your company. Sadly, that concept often doesn’t work out. Just ask McDonald’s, which created a hashtag (#McDStories) and encouraged its use among McFanatics. Of course, the McTrolls got there first, with a flood of tweets like “Ordered a McDouble, something in the damn thing chipped my molar. #McDStories.” Once you unleash a hashtag, you can’t undo it. Make sure that sentiment is squarely in your favor before trying this trick (and perhaps gaming the system a bit by offering a prize to your favorite tweeter).
Although a lot of terrible social media behavior can be blamed on accidents or publicity stunts, some of this stuff really is due to hacker involvement. Social media security is a serious issue, and phishing attacks that attempt to abscond with your Twitter and Facebook credentials are unbearably common. Lock your business’s accounts up tight with strong passwords, and ensure that the only people who have access to the accounts are those who truly need it. P H OTO G R A P H : M I K E H OM N I C K
REQUEST FOR INFORMATION Duty Travel Management System (DTMS)
The Ministry for Finance in Malta is conducting market research on the availability of a Travel Management System and invites interested parties to submit information on such systems. A soft copy of the document Duty Travel Management System RFI (Ref: DTMS/01/2013) may be downloaded from MFIN website: http:// mfin.gov.mt/en/Library/Pages/tenders.aspx at no charge. A hard copy may be obtained free of charge by sending an email request to
[email protected]. Closing date for the submissions is noon (CET) of Friday, 8th November 2013.
For further information contact: MFIN Office of the CIO Tel: (+356) 25998 226 Email:
[email protected]
www.mfin.gov.mt
TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS In this section, hardware & software goes through rigorous testing.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Invasion of the tabletop tablets Are these clever hybrids the ultimate family PCs? BY MICHAEL BROWN
W
INDOWS 8 HAS spurred a lot of unusual hardware designs, but few are as intriguing as the tabletop tablet. Imagine a full-fledged all-in-one PC that lies flat on whatever surface you have handy. It’s a design that offers all the screen real estate and CPU performance of a touchscreen all-in-one system, along with the portability of a battery-operated tablet. If you use these PCs as their manufacturers intended, your hybrid machine will be a family-room desktop computer by day and a living-room gaming platform by night. But is this an experience that consumers want or even need? Asus, Dell, Lenovo, and Sony sure hope so. None of these machines, however, pose a threat to Apple’s iPad or
Thanks to their massive touchscreens, you can operate these giant hybrids flat on a table or propped up in your lap.
any small tablet running Android or Windows 8. After all, these monsters are too big to fit in a backpack. And three of the four reviewed here lack a key feature common to the best all-in-ones: an HDMI input, which allows you to plug in a gaming console or set-top box and use just the display. Finally, none of these computers provide enough GPU horsepower to fully support graphically intense games. That said, they do deliver all the key features we’ve come to expect from all-in-one PCs, including the ability to run all the same software, and to connect to printers and other peripherals. And by virtue of their large displays, the new hybrids deliver better Web browsing and media streaming than any tablet I’ve used. Finally, these machines could reinvent multiplayer gaming, with multiple people gathering around a single, giant tablet to play electronic versions of Monopoly or Risk. Some of these hybrids are better than others, but all of them are interesting. Find out how well each company executed on the promise of marrying the all-in-one PC to the portable Windows 8 tablet. P H OTO G R A P H : CO U RT ESY O F L E N OVO
More: Tabletop Tablets
Asus took the most daring design route, but its remotedesktop mode is problematic.
Asus Transformer All-in-One P1801
While Dell, Lenovo, and Sony adopted the same essential design for their respective all-in-ones, Asus took a completely different approach. In fact, a better description of Asus’s machine might be “allin-two,” because the Transformer All-in-One P1801 (go.pcworld.com/ p1801) is essentially two discrete computers, each one with its own CPU and operating system. The Transformer P1801’s base houses one computer powered by a quad-core 3.1GHz Intel Core i5-3450 CPU and 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory. When the 18.4-inch, ten-point-touch display is docked to the base, the combination functions as a conventional desktop all-in-one. Remove the display from the dock, and it becomes a giant tablet running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). The display provides a native resolution P H OTO G R A P H : CO U RT ESY O F A S U S
REVIEWS & RATINGS
“The P1801 has a third mode that renders it unique in this group.”
of 1920 by 1080 pixels. The base unit is a well-equipped computer all its own. In addition to the quad-core CPU, it has a discrete graphics processor, a 1TB 7200-rpm hard drive, wired and wireless network adapters, a DVD burner, four USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, and a memory card reader. The base also has built-in speakers, mic and headphone jacks, and an HDMI output so it can connect to an external monitor. With a second monitor attached to the system, one person can use the base station as a regular Windows 8 computer while someone else uses the display as an Android tablet. That’s because the tablet has its own Asus Transformer P1801 quad-core microprocessor—an Nvidia Tegra PROS: 3—with 32GB of flash • Two computers in one memory. You can access • Desktop Core i7 CPU in the base unit the storage in both the • 1TB, 7200 rpm hard drive tablet and the base station while you’re using CONS: the system in Windows • Mode switching can be clumsy mode, but the Android • Webcam not functional in Android mode side can see only the • No HDMI input on either the base or tablet storage. the display The tablet has its own BOTTOM LINE: 802.11n Wi-Fi network The Transformer P1801 is a world apart adapter, so you can surf from the other portable all-in-ones we’ve the Web as well as seen, but it’s not as sexy as Dell’s XPS 18 download, install, and Touch. use Android apps and PRICE: games. While the dis$1,299 play is docked and the Transformer P1801 is
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operating in Windows mode, you can initiate a download and undock the display, and the download will continue uninterrupted. The display has its own stereo speakers, a mic/headphone combo jack, one USB 2.0 port, and a memory card reader, but its 1-megapixel webcam operates only while it’s in PC mode. The display’s built-in handle makes it easy to carry, and its fold-out stand lets you use it on a table or desktop (reclining at up to a 100-degree angle). The Transformer P1801’s display is only slightly heavier than that of Dell’s XPS 18 Touch, weighing 5.29 pounds. In addition, the Transformer P1801 has a third mode that renders it truly unique in this group: It can switch between running as an Android tablet and as a remote Windows 8 desktop. This flexibility means you can remove the display from its base and take it into another room, where it will function as a wireless touchscreen for the Windows 8 session running on the docking station. You have limited range in this mode, however, and response time can be laggy. The Dell XPS 18 Touch scored better on our WorldBench 8.1 Desktop benchmark suite—earning 171 to the Transformer P1801’s 153—but we can attribute that difference primarily to the presence of the SSD cache drive on Dell’s machine. The P1801 performed better with games and productivity apps. It delivers a better price/performance ratio too., especially when you consider that you can use its base unit as a PC while someone else uses its display as an Android tablet. P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
The Windows computer is in the Transformer P1801’s base.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Dell XPS 18 Touch
The Dell XPS 18 Touch (go.pcworld.com/xps18) is one of the best all-in-one hybrids I’ve seen, but I hope Dell introduces a second, larger model. While an 18.4-inch touchscreen is ginormous for a portable computer, it’s just a little small for a desktop machine. The screen boasts a high resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, however, and photos, movies, and websites look great on it. And since the device is outfitted with an Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230 Wi-Fi adapter, you can stream its video output to a big-screen TV with a built-in Wi-Di adapter or to a box that can connect to any TV. The XPS 18
Don’t buy the XPS 18 Touch without its excellent stand.
P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
More: Tabletop Tablets “Dell’s XPS 18 Touch comes with a 500GB hard drive.”
Touch provided very good battery life of 4 hours while streaming HD video in our tests, so it should last much longer if you’re just surfing the Web. Because the system relies on the graphics processor integrated into the CPU—a low-power 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3427U with hyperthreading support—you shouldn’t expect to play hard-core games on it. While it did manage to run Dirt Showdown at the display’s native resolution at a rate of 44.9 frames per second, it turned Crysis 3 into a slideshow, with a frame rate of just 1.5 fps. Its allaround performance was much better, achieving a WorldBench 8.1 Desktop score of 171 (compared to our reference all-in-one system, Dell XPS 18 Touch an Acer Aspire U PROS: A5600U-UB13, which • Very thin and light scored 100). • Supports Intel’s Wireless Display The XPS 18 Touch has technology 8GB of DDR3/1600 • 32GB SSD for fast boot times memory. And unlike your typical tablet, it CONS: comes with a 500GB • No discrete GPU hard drive (supplement5400 rpm hard drive • ed by a 32GB SSD acting • Plastic feet feel flimsy as cache), plus a BlueBOTTOM LINE: tooth keyboard and It’s great to see such a solid execution of mouse. The tablet has a a new form factor. The XPS 18 Touch media card reader, two would be even more exciting if Dell took a USB 3.0 ports, and a page out of Asus’ playbook and added a combo headphone/ more functional dock. microphone jack. A PRICE: 720p webcam is built $1,350 into the top bezel, alongside a dual-mic
REVIEWS & RATINGS array for Skype videoconferencing. This device measures only 0.7 inch thick and weighs less than 5 pounds. Two plastic feet flip out of the back for use as a conventional all-in-one on a desk with the mouse and keyboard. Alternatively, you can lay it almost flat (completely flat if you fold the feet in) or prop it up in your lap and use the touchscreen. Dell bundles two games that take advantage of the touchscreen display when it’s lying flat: the music game Fingertapps Instruments and an airhockey simulator. Dell also provides a sturdy stand (an optional accessory on the less-expensive models) that will charge the tablet’s battery on contact. The XPS 18 Touch’s smaller dimensions render it much more transportable than my other favorite monster tablet, the Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon, and its ultrathin profile and low weight beat the tar out of the Asus Transformer All-in-One P1801 and the Sony Tap 20. P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
The Dell XPS 18 Touch is amazingly thin and light.
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Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon’s massive 27-inch screen.
Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon
Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Horizon (go.pcworld.com/lenovohorizon) is the boldest expression of the portable all-in-one concept to reach the market. Asus, Dell, and Sony have giant tablets. Lenovo has a computer the size of a tabletop—its display measures a full 27 inches. Lenovo does bundle several other accessories for playing games on the Horizon, including four joysticks, four strikers (for playing air hockey), and one example of “e-dice” (a wireless die that informs the computer which number is face up after a roll). The Horizon comes with a variety of games, including Monopoly, air hockey, and roulette. The large display renders the Horizon the best all-in-one PC in this group, as well as the best casual gaming platform, but it has one P H OTO G R A P H : CO U RT ESY O F L E N OVO
REVIEWS & RATINGS drawback: Its resolution is limited to 1920 by 1080 pixels. If you’re a stickler for detail when it comes to precision tasks such as photo editing, you probably won’t like seeing the pixels spread so far apart. The other drawback to the Horizon’s massive screen is its considerable bulk: This monster tips the scales at 18.95 pounds. On the positive side, it has a discrete graphics processor, an Nvidia GeForce GT 620M with a 2GB frame buffer. The balance of the Horizon’s spec sheet is equally tasty. You’ll find a low-power 2GHz Core i7-3537U, 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory, and a 1TB hard drive (unfortunately, it’s a 5400-rpm model). The slow hard drive significantly depressed the Horizon’s WorldLenovo IdeaCentre Horizon Bench 8.1 Desktop score, lowering it to PROS: 111. But the fast CPU • 27-inch display and the discrete GPU • Fast CPU and a discrete GPU • HDMI input gave this machine firstplace finishes on the CONS: image-editing, audio• 1920-by-1080 resolution (on a and video-encoding, 27-inch display) and file-compression • Very heavy tests that also make up • Expensive our benchmarking BOTTOM LINE: suite. Battery life was The Horizons’s size makes games and surprisingly good: It was everything else more enjoyable, even able to play an HD video though it also makes it more difficult to for 3 hours, 28 minutes. move around the house. The IdeaCentre HoriPRICE: zon is the only portable $1849 all-in-one in this roundup to include an HDMI
“It’s the boldest expression of the portable all-in-one concept.”
More: Tabletop Tablets Lenovo was the only manufacturer that thought to include an HDMI input on its tablet.
input. It’s puzzling that no other manufacturer thought to include this feature. The rest of the Horizon’s features include a 720p webcam, a media card reader, an 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, and a wireless mouse and keyboard. The Horizon’s humongous screen, fast CPU, discrete graphics processor, and fun accessories drive its price tag up to $1849. That’s higher than the rest of the machines in this roundup. Dell’s XPS 18 Touch makes a better giant tablet, but Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Horizon is the superior familygaming platform. P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon Cart: Put your 27-inch tablet on wheels I thought this cart (go.pcworld.com/horizoncart27) for Lenovo’s 27-inch IdeaCentre Horizon was pretty cool when I first laid eyes on the prototype. But now that I’ve spent some time with the finished product, I’m not nearly as jazzed. Let me give you the upside, first. The tablet itself weighs nearly 19 pounds, so it’s not something you can just tuck under your arm and move from room to room. Mount it to the cart, on the other hand, and the combo can move effortlessly around the house. Brakes on all four wheels keep the cart stationary when you arrive at your destination, and the base is wide enough that you don’t need to worry about it tipping over even if you push hard while the brakes are locked. Lay the computer flat in table mode, and you can play air hockey, arcade and
REVIEWS & RATINGS
The cart lets you use the tablet as a roll-around allin-one system.
board games. However, you can’t pivot the tablet into portrait mode, which means it’s no good for playing virtual pinball. And while you can tilt the tablet on its horizontal axis and use it as an all-in-one PC, you’ll need to hold the keyboard on your lap. Also, the cart is not height-adjustable—a big ergonomic no-no. On the bright side, you twist just a single knob to remove and reattach the tablet to the cart. So it’s easy to use the Horizon as an all-in-one PC most of the time, and as a roll-away arcade system on game nights. —Michael Brown P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
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Sony’s Tap 20 is the oldest model we looked at in this group, but it’s a good buy at $1100.
Sony VAIO Tap 20 Sony deserves credit for establishing the portable all-in-one market, having introduced the VAIO Tap 20 (go.pcworld.com/tap20) last winter. This model boasts a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of memory, and a 20-inch ten-point touchscreen for just $1100. On the downside, its display resolution is disappointingly limited to 1600 by 900 pixels. The Tap 20 also relies on the GPU integrated into its mobile 2GHz Intel Core i7-3517U processor to drive that display, and its 750GB hard drive spins its platters at only 5400 rpm. The Tap 20’s fast CPU helped it deliver good performances on the content-creation elements of our benchmarking suite (image editing and audio- and video-encoding tasks), but the absence of a discrete GPU generated a goose egg in our GPU-accelerated image-editing test. In the end, the Tap 20 earned a WorldBench 8.1 Desktop score of 95 (our reference all-in-one, Acer’s Aspire U A5600U-UB13, scored 100). I found the Tap 20 only slightly less difficult to carry from room to room than the 27-inch Lenovo Horizon. Sony suggests using the P H OTO G R A P H : CO U RT ESY O F S O N Y
REVIEWS & RATINGS The Tap 20 is thick kickstand as a handle, but to do so you must tilt and much too the computer forward, grab the bottom of the heavy for its size. kickstand, and rotate the entire machine upside down. The computer is then difficult to set up at a new location because your most natural movement is to first set it face down on the desk or tabletop— not a good idea. This computer is also almost twice as thick as Dell’s XPS 18 Touch. I was surprised by the Tap 20’s relatively poor battery life: It played our HD video for just 2 hours, 21 minutes before it pooped out. When we reviewed the VAIO Tap 20 back in October 2012 (go. pcworld.com/vaiotap), nothing comparable was on the market. The Sony VAIO Tap 20 competition has responded aggressively PROS: since then, and the Tap • Intel Core i7 CPU 20 has lost some of its • 1TB hard drive luster. Fortunately, Sony • Sony’s Bravia video technology has adjusted its pricing CONS: accordingly, and the • Thick and heavy for its size current street price of • Short battery life $1100 renders this • 5400 rpm hard drive machine a good value. BOTTOM LINE: Sony essentially created this market, PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN which means the Tap 20 has been around for a while. This computer is thicker and heavier than it should be, but Sony has priced it aggressively.
PRICE: $1,100
Photoshop CC improves, but leaves Bridge in limbo BY LESA SNIDER ADOBE HAS ADDED some nice features to its new, subscriptionbased, pro-level Photoshop Creative Cloud (go.pcworld.com/ adobephotosCC) and rolled all the features of Photoshop Extended into the CC version. Photoshop CC has some good stuff, especially in actions, filters, and enlargements. But Bridge CC, Photoshop’s filemanagement sidekick, has had several useful features removed.
REVIEWS & RATINGS What’s new
“The new Shake Reduction filter does an incredible job.”
Photoshop CC—which you download and install on your hard drive—has a new 200 percent option in the View menu (to see Web graphics at the size they’ll appear in a browser). And look for two tiny new icons at the bottom left of document windows: one for syncing your settings to the Creative Cloud for access on other machines, and one for uploading artwork to the collaborative, online Behance community. A useful new feature is for conditional actions; it lets you record an action that chooses among previously recorded actions and runs the one that matches criteria you set (to account for variables such as document size, color modes, and so on). The Image Size dialog box is simpler and includes a resizable image preview to see the results of your settings before applying them. A new Preserve Details interpolation method sharpens areas of fine detail to produce higherquality enlargements. All interpolation methods have keyboard Photoshop CC shortcuts. PROS: In CC, the Field Blur, • Retina-ready Iris Blur, and Tilt-Shift • Can fix blurry images filters work with Smart • Has more filters Filters, so you can run CONS: them nondestructive• Bridge is a separate installation and has ly. They also take some useful features missing. advantage of OpenCL, a technology in newer BOTTOM LINE: graphics cards that lets If you use Photoshop professionally, it’s Photoshop tap into time to subscribe. the card’s processing PRICE: power whenever it $50 per month for full Creative Cloud wants, so previewing subscription and applying these filters is faster.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
The new Image Size dialog box includes both a preview and a new algorithm named Preserve Details that creates higher-quality enlargements.
The Camera Raw plug-in can now be a Smart Filter inside Photoshop. Camera Raw 8 also sports a Radial filter to apply adjustments in a circular fashion either from the inside of your image to its edges or viceversa. You can heal areas that aren’t round using Camera Raw’s Spot Removal tool, and the Upright feature lets you correct perspective problems. The new Shake Reduction filter analyzes your image and traces the pattern of blurry areas to eradicate them. It does an incredible job on slightly blurry images. The redesigned Smart Sharpen filter sports a new sharpening method that keeps halos from being introduced around high-contrast edges, and a noise-reduction slider. At the top of the Layers panel, a new Selective layer-filtering option lets you view just the currently active (highlighted) layers in your Layers panel—handy when your Layers panel is long and you’re editing layers that don’t necessarily match other layer-filtering criteria, or overlapping vector-shape paths. Once you’ve saved frequently used text formatting as character or paragraph styles, you can use the new Save As Defaults option to make
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Photoshop automatically add them to new documents and to existing documents that don’t contain styles. If you’re a Web designer, a new Copy CSS command in the shortcut menus of Type and Shape layers lets you copy color and formatting information into your computer’s memory as fully functional CSS code, for pasting into an HTML editor. Photoshop CC has a slew of little changes, too. Among them: The Crop tool gets a setting that brings back the resolution field in the Options bar. You can save more than one Photoshop document at the same time, and the Color Range command is better at detecting faces. An antialiasing option makes text appear as it will in popular Web browsers. The Migrate Presets feature copies over presets that aren’t currently loaded in Photoshop, and it no longer requires a restart.
Adobe Bridge CC Bridge CC is now a separate installation from Photoshop CC, making it less discoverable. Also, to optimize Bridge CC for “modern operating systems and display resolutions,” Adobe removed some useful, relatively new features. The most glaring omission is the Adobe Output Module (AOM) for creating Web galleries and PDFs. The Export panel—useful in converting multiple images from one format to another and quickly posting images on Flickr and Facebook—is gone, too.
The Shake Reduction filter automatically analyzes your image and traces the blur pattern. The Shake Reduction filter automatically analyzes your image and traces the blur pattern. You can have it analyze multiple areas by opening the Advanced section (circled).
If your workflow depends on the AOM, keep using Bridge CS6. But if you are new to the program or have never used the omitted features, you won’t miss them, and you’ll like the zippier performance of Bridge CC.
Botom line If you use Photoshop professionally, it’s time to subscribe—everyone will benefit from having fewer new features released at one time, but more frequently. If you use three Adobe programs, you’ll save money by subscribing to the full Creative Cloud (the break-even point on current pricing is at 2.5 programs). That lets you explore more programs and diversify your skills. If you use only Photoshop and Lightroom, you’ll save money by purchasing a single-app subscription to Photoshop for $20 per month and a stand-alone copy of Lightroom for $149. If you use only Photoshop, try Photoshop Elements (go.pcworld.com/adobepselements) instead; it’s an incredibly powerful, user-friendly stand-alone image editor. But those using Bridge CS6’s AOM or its Export panel should avoid Bridge CC.
The Smart Sharpen filter’s new and simplified dialog box. The Fade Amount fields let you reduce the sharpening applied to your image.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Google redefines what we can expect from a budget tablet.
The new Nexus 7 is the best 7-inch tablet available today BY FLORENCE ION THE ORIGINAL NEXUS 7 was merely a bargain, a good-enough tablet at a great price. The new Nexus 7 (go.pcworld.com/newnexus7) is a downright steal. It’s the best 7-inch tablet, period. Google has redefined budget tablet so that it no longer refers to cheap-feeling, sub$200 devices. You can now grab a svelte, premium 7-inch tablet with a high-resolution screen, wireless charging, a quad-core processor,
and 2GB of RAM for a measly $229. The revamped Nexus 7 is more than just the next stock Android gadget offering from Google. It’s the company’s re-do of what it should have done right the first time. The giant of search (and maps, and mail, and…), with its ginormous, seemingly all-inclusive Android ecosystem, has finally entered the premium tablet market.
Easier to hold, faster than ever The first thing I noticed about this Nexus 7 is that, despite sharing the same name as its predecessor, it’s an entirely different product. Next to this shiny new toy, the previous-generation Nexus 7 looks antiquated. The new Nexus 7 is easier to hold—the bezel is 3mm thinner on each side, so you can comfortably cradle it in one hand while using the other to grip the handrail on your train ride to work. One-handed use is much easier this time around—though I would have loved to see an option to shift virtual buttons to the side of the screen where my thumb naturally falls. (LG’s Optimus UI has such functionality in Nexus 7 the dialer app on the PROS: company’s Optimus line • Vibrant, high-resolution screen of Android phones.) • It’s a Nexus device, so you’ll get most of Google has ditched the software updates—for now the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor found in the earCONS: lier Nexus 7 in favor of • No expandable storage Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz BOTTOM LINE: Snapdragon S4 Pro. If If you’re in the market for an Android tabthe name sounds famillet, the new Nexus 7 is the one to get. iar, that’s because this is And if you’re got the old one lying around, the same processor the considering trading it in for this one. LG-manufactured PRICE: Nexus 4 handset con$229 tains, essentially making the new Nexus 7 a
REVIEWS & RATINGS slightly bigger Nexus 4. This Nexus 7 certainly feels much faster than its predecessor. Games and apps launch quickly, and multitasking between the Home screen and Google Now is a cinch. I noticed some stuttering on simple tasks such as posting a photo to Facebook from the image gallery—but that could be the fault of the apps themselves. Google claims that its newly revamped Nexus 7 can support up to 9 hours of continuous use away from a charger. In our own battery tests, the Nexus 7 lasted 8 hours, 47 minutes on a single charge while repeatedly playing back a locally stored, highdefinition video. That’s a bit less than what Google advertises, and much less than the 10 hours, 12 minutes that last year’s Nexus 7 managed. The difference may be due to the bigger battery pack and lower-resolution screen on last year’s model. Though the Nexus 7’s battery life is average for a tablet of its size, direct comparisons are difficult, as the iPad mini and the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD don’t have high-resolution screens. If you were a fan of the last Nexus 7, you probably wished that Google had added a rear-facing camera to handle all of your Instagramposting needs. Well, it’s finally here—but while the 5-megapixel camera is certainly capable, you won’t want to rely on it for vacation photos. Photos taken at the stock Android camera app’s low-light setting came out too dark; better-lit photos are adequate for posting to the Internet, but not for archiving the days of your life. The Nexus 7 comes with a few other goodies, including an MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link) port, support for wireless charging, and NFC capabilities. The new stereo speakers are a dramatic improvement, too. But if you have big hands and hold the device in landscape orientation, you might mufle the sound—inconvenient when you’re trying to play a game or watch a movie without headphones. Annoyingly, the Nexus 7 doesn’t supply any expandable storage, so, if you’re a media junkie, you’ll have to opt for the priciest version—and probably buy into some cloud storage, too. Whether it’s dark in your house or very bright on the train, the Nexus
“The giant of search has finally entered the premium tablet market.”
The new Nexus 7 tablet is thinner and lighter.
7’s new 1200-by-1980-pixel LCD display is quite a sight—literally. I was stunned to see a display of this caliber on a device priced at under $250. At 323 pixels per inch, the resolution makes for crisper text in reading apps. At full brightness, last year’s Nexus 7 display looked dimmer than the new Nexus 7’s display, though the colors on the new model did seem a little oversaturated, like a bag of Skittles. In general, I enjoyed reading text more on this year’s Nexus 7 than on last year’s, thanks to its slimmer body and brighter display.
Beter than all the rest On the basis of specs alone, the rival iPad mini has some work to do. The mini’s current processor is a bit more dated than the one that the new Nexus 7 runs on, and it packs only 512MB of RAM. The mini’s display is bigger than the Nexus 7’s and features a different aspect ratio, but it’s not a pricy Retina display, which, in my opinion, gives Google the upper hand. And whereas Apple’s 16GB iPad mini sells for $329, Google’s new Nexus 7 starts at $229, and its 32GB variant costs only
REVIEWS & RATINGS $40 more. If you need that much space on an iPad mini, Apple asks you to fork over an extra Benjamin. The only upside to Apple’s offering is its superior collection of tablet-optimized apps. The Google Play store is full of apps, but fewer of them are specifically made for tablets. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD is in big trouble. The 7-inch Kindle Fire is cheaper at $199 (for 16GB of storage) and $229 (for 32GB), but its screen resolution and pixel density leave much to be desired. It’s also about 2mm thicker than the new Nexus 7. In addition, the Kindle Fire HD uses a customized version of Android and doesn’t come with Google’s standard apps—and they’re not available to download if you decide you want them.
“The Nexus 7’s 1200-by-1980-pixel display is quite a sight—literally.”
First with Android 4.3 The Nexus 7 is the first device in the Google Nexus family to use Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, an incremental software update with features such as support for OpenGL ES 3.0 (something that will make for better-looking games), Bluetooth 4.0 LE support, and the ability to restrict certain user accounts (a feature called Restricted Profiles that you can bring into play when setting up multiple accounts). That last capability might come in handy if you plan to buy this tablet for yourself and your family. Not many tablet-optimized applications are available for Android yet, but Google is changing the way it showcases those particular apps, to make them easier to find. Beyond that, you’ll still have access to the Google applications that come with every stock Android device, including Gmail, Hangouts, and Google Maps. You’ll also have access to Google’s new stock camera application, which debuted in the Google Play editions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One in June. Because it’s a Nexus device, this Nexus 7 will receive the most timely Android software updates, so you won’t have to worry about software fragmentation or getting left behind with an older version of Android.
Botom line I can’t help but feel a little trepidation. The previous-generation Nexus 7 had quite a few issues to contend with after its update to Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. If I let the battery die, the tablet wouldn’t turn on without a hard reset, and the tablet became buggier and slower to use over time. I hope this new Nexus 7 won’t suffer from those foibles —because if history repeats itself, Google will have to do much more next time around to rid us of our bad memories. The second-generation Nexus 7 offers strong features at an affordable price. If you’re a seasoned tablet user, whether you should buy this tablet will depend primarily on whether you are tied to Google’s ecosystem. Still, this particular device can hold its own against any other 7-inch tablet currently available. At the moment, it has some of the best specs, a bright screen, and a few other little goodies—and it’s hardly a splurge. If you’re in the market for a 7-inch Android device, this is the one to get. P H OTO G R A P H S : M I K E H OM N I C K
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Razer’s Blade is a sleek, smart ultraportable gaming PC BY ALEX WAWRO RAZER’S SECOND-GENERATION Blade (go.pcworld.com/razerblade) is an ultraportable, high-performance Windows 8 laptop packed into a slim body that any Apple engineer would envy. Better than the original Blade, it’s sleeker, lighter, and more powerful, with a fourthgeneration Core processor. And it loses the Switchblade LCD touchpad that made the old Blade—now the Blade Pro—so quirky.
Thinner, lighter, faster The Blade is two-thirds of an inch thick and weighs 4.25 pounds. With its diminutive power adapter, the package tops out at just over 5 pounds. Although the Blade is 1.5 pounds heavier than the 13-inch
MacBook Air, it is thinner than the Air by 0.02 inch at its thickest point. But Apple’s ultraportable feels skinnier because its unibody chassis tapers down to such a knife edge. A green-backlit keyboard sits atop a matteblack aluminum chassis. Inside is a quad-core Intel Core i7-4702MQ processor, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M GPU, and 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory. The chassis gets very warm when the GPU kicks in, despite an intake fan on the bottom that exhausts heat through vents near the sturdy display hinges. We applaud the inclusion of a 256GB SSD, an HDMI output, and three USB 3.0 ports, but the absence of hardwired ethernet means you must download all your software via Wi-Fi. Price reflects performance, screen reflects glare. The Blade’s cheap TN (twisted nematic) panel is disappointing, doubly so in that the resolution of the 14-inch display is limited to 1600 by 900 Razer Blade pixels. The screen looks decent enough PROS: when viewed straight • Sleek, attractive design on, but move your • Excellent performance head more than a few CONS: inches in any direction, • Disappointing screen quality and colors quickly fade • Can get very hot during extended and bleed together. game play Still, Razer deserves BOTTOM LINE: credit for making good Haswell-powered Blade panders to PC on its promise to delivgamers on the go, cramming pricey preer the world’s most mium hardware into a petite chassis. powerful ultraportable gaming laptop. Among PRICE: the gaming-focused $1999 features of the Blade:
“Razer makes good on a promise to deliver a truly powerful gaming laptop.”
The Blade’s screen is perfectly serviceable for the lion’s share of your computing needs, but its poor viewing angles diminish the joy of watching movies or playing games.
You can crank the stereo speakers nice and loud, and the keyboard is fully programmable through the included Razer Synapse 2.0 software. The keyboard’s antighosting feature enables the Blade to recognize multiple keypresses at the same time, so you don’t have to worry quite as much about hitting the wrong key in the heat of a match. The keys themselves are small and comfortable, with enough travel that you can touch-type with confidence. You can dim or shut the backlight off entirely, but the green glowing Razer logo on the lid can’t be killed. The Blade costs a cool $2000 as reviewed. Since it earned an excellent score of 414 in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmarking P H OTO G R A P H : M I K E H OM N I C K
REVIEWS & RATINGS
“The Blade is Razer’s most practical laptop: It’s good for gaming and work.”
suite, that’s not bad. That score means it’s roughly four times faster than our reference model, the mainstream Asus Vivobook S550CA, and very close to the performance of the fastest notebook we’ve tested to date, the CyberPower FangBook EVO HX7-200 (go.pcworld.com/fangbook). The FangBook, which sells for $1550, has a larger display, a faster CPU and GPU, and more memory, but it also weighs more than 10 pounds.
Botom line The Blade is the most practical laptop Razer has made. It functions equally well as a gaming laptop or a high-powered Windows 8 work machine, is compact, and has a battery life of more than 4.5 hours). And while it doesn’t sport the touchscreen or the funky peripherals of the Razer Edge Pro, it’s more powerful and far more comfortable to use.
The Razer Blade doesn’t sport a touchscreen, but it’s powerful and comfortable to type on.
P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
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The D5000 has a single USB 3.0 port on its front panel, along with a 1/8-inch stereo audio jack.
Dell’s Wireless Dock D5000 frees your laptop from cables BY MICHAEL BROWN DELL IS OFFERING a docking station and a wireless network adapter card based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard (WiGig). Plug all your cabled devices into the Wireless Dock D5000 (go.pcworld.com/dockD5000), and your laptop establishes a wireless connection (on the 60GHz frequency band) to the dock. But the internal adapter card (the $37.50 Dell Wireless 1601 WiGig and 802.11n 2x2 Wi-Fi Half Mini Card) required for pairing a notebook to the docking station is an option with only one laptop: the Latitude 6430u. You can’t buy the adapter card separately, and no third-party adapter can let you use the D5000 with other notebooks. But a Dell representative says the company “absolutely” expects to offer its WiGig adapter “with additional products in the coming months.” In my tests, Dell’s wireless docking station performed remarkably well. The D5000 has two video outputs (DisplayPort 1.1—which means no multistream transport—and HDMI 1.3), three USB 3.0 ports, one
gigabit ethernet, and one 1/8-inch stereo audio jack. Dell says the D5000 delivers up to 10 meters of range (almost 33 feet, with dock and laptop in the same room), but I lost connection if the separation was more than 6 feet. Still, the ability to drive two displays and transfer files between a host PC and a docked hard drive wirelessly is impressive. Transferring files over the wireless connection was significantly slower than when we hardwired a USB 3.0 hard drive to the notebook. When writing our single 10GB file to the drive using a hardwired USB 3.0 connection, for example, we saw throughput of 99.2 Dell Wireless Dock D5000 MBps. When we wrote the same file to the PROS: drive via the D5000, the • Requires no physical connection transfer occurred at • Can drive two displays just 31.5 MBps. • Three USB 3.0 ports Though the conveCONS: nience of the dock far • Currently compatible only with Latitude outweighs the sluggish 6430u Ultrabook wireless file-transfer • Limited range speed, its usability with • Doesn’t support HDCP only one notebook BOTTOM LINE: today makes the dock a Awesome product—as long as you don’t problematic buy at mind being tied to Dell’s Latitude 6430u best. Ultrabook. PRICE: $270 (as stand-alone purchase)
P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
You’ll find two more USB 3.0 ports, DisplayPort 1.1, HDMI 1.3, and gigabit ethernet on the rear panel.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Dell Latitude 3330: A no-frills laptop BY YARDENA ARAR ON THE DAY we reviewed Dell’s Latitude 3330 (go.pcworld.com/ latitude3330), the “starting price” online was $801, but the listed “Dell price” was $561. On the day you look, those numbers could be different. What won’t change, however, is the fact that this 13.3-inch notebook with Windows 7 Pro is aimed at buyers working with very tight budgets. Just remember that you get what you pay for. In this case, you’re getting a sub-4-pound laptop with a slim profile but skimpy specs that include an Intel Core i3-2375M CPU (part of the Sandy Bridge family introduced back in early 2011), equally
dated HD3000 integrated graphics that share just 4GB of system memory, and an incommodious 320GB hard drive that spins its platters at 5400 rpm. In real-world terms, the across-the-board low scores it produced in our benchmark translate to longer wait times for basic computing operations, such as installing apps, editing digital photos, and decompressing zipped files. The lag may not be too bothersome if you merely need to write letters and term papers, run simple spreadsheets, check email, and catch up on news in a browser. Nevertheless, the Latitude 3330’s Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 68 marks it as 32 percent slower than our reference laptop, the Asus VivoBook S550CA. We’ve seen the VivoBook selling online for $650, but that $90 bump buys a lot, including an Intel Core i5 CPU, a Dell Latitude 3330 15.6-inch touchscreen, 6GB of memory, and a PROS: 500GB hard drive with • Budget price an SSD cache. • Attractive design In my tests, the LatiCONS: tude 3330 couldn’t • Mushy keyboard even stream YouTube • Only 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networking music videos over a BOTTOM LINE: 2.4GHz wireless netSleek and lightweight, the budget-priced work without stutterDell Latitude 3330 makes a good first ing or pixelating (it impression. But it has difficulty running does not support 5GHz even the most routine multimedia— Wi-Fi). Video captures much less games—because of its barewith the integrated bones infrastructure. 720p webcam looked washed out, and video PRICE: received on Skype calls $561 was blocky—and you
“This laptop is aimed at buyers with very tight budgets.”
REVIEWS & RATINGS
can forget even trying any serious gaming. You do get a fairly standard port array: two USB 3.0, one USB 2.0 with PowerShare support (for charging devices even when the laptop is powered down), gigabit ethernet, HDMI- and VGA-out, a headphone/microphone jack, and an SD/ MMC card reader. Our review unit came with a six-cell battery that lasted a respectable 5 hours, 13 minutes. The Latitude 3330 looks handsome and sturdy enough, with a pewter-colored brushed-metal exterior trimmed with black plastic that repeats inside. The island Chiclet-style keyboard keys are a bit mushy and flat, but well spaced and adequate for touch-typing. The multitouch touchpad is reasonably responsive, and the 1366-by-768-pixel display looks bright and crisp. Stereo speakers embedded in the front edge produce surprisingly robust audio. Dell offers multiple customization options that can make the Latitude 3330 less expensive—and even less powerful. This notebook will fulfill a student’s or business traveler’s most basic needs, but buyers should be prepared to accept subpar performance for even routine Web multimedia. P H OTO G R A P H : CO U RT ESY O F D E L L
The Latitude 3330’s 13.3inch display is not a touchscreen. Then again, this notebook ships with Windows 7 Pro, not Windows 8.
The Patriot Aero is a wireless hard drive with a USB 3.0 interface.
Patriot Aero streams media even without a power cable BY JON L. JACOBI THE PATRIOT AERO Wireless Mobile Drive (go.pcworld.com/aero) resembles a simple but fairly large 2.5-inch external USB 3.0 hard drive. The only clue that it can also function as a wireless multimedia streamer is its Wi-Fi indicator light. With suitable Android and iOS apps, you can access the Aero’s content from most mobile devices. When you plug the Aero into a USB port, its Wi-Fi shuts off so that the unit can charge and can function as direct-attached storage (like a normal USB hard drive). When you remove the drive from the USB P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive Performance 1TB Drives Formatted as NTFS 255.5 247.1 245.6
Read a single 10GB file Write a single 10GB file
110.2 106.4 109.2
Read 10GB mix of files & folders
215.9 208.3 210.5
Write 10GB mix of files & folders
102.4 93.0 101.5
0 Patriot Aero
50
100
150
Seagate Wireless Plus
200
250
300
Corsair Voyager Air
(Megabytes per second)
port, Wi-Fi automatically turns on. The Aero also comes equipped with both an AC jack and a mini power-to-USB cable, which you’ll need to use to keep the unit streaming and charging from a USB port. A battery meter on the Aero’s side lights up when you press the accompanying button. The Aero creates its own network (10.10.10.x), and also connects to another wireless network to provide Internet pass-through. Patriot says that everything should show up within 30 seconds. But in my tests, the device took nearly 5 minutes before it was ready to access again. (Patriot says the lengthy wait could be related to other hardware in my setup.)
Reformatted as NTFS, Patriot’s Aero drive performed much faster writes of our 10GB collection of test files. (Patriot ships the drive formatted as exFAT.)
“With suitable apps, you can access the Aero’s content from most mobile devices.”
“According to Patriot, the Aero can stream 720p video to up to five devices at once.”
Patriot supplies client apps for Android and iOS, but not for Windows Phone. It has no DLNA server to feed Windows Media Player, iTunes, XBMC, or the like, so instead you must use Explorer to reach the drive at \\10.10.10.254 and treat it as direct-attached storage. According to Patriot, the Aero can stream 720p video to up to five devices at once. It effortlessly streamed video to the three devices in my test setup at rates up to about 2 MBps. It read our 10GB file and folder mix at 217.4 MBps, and it wrote and read our single large file at 109.7 MBps and 247.9 MBps, respectively. In writing our mixed batch of files, however, it operated at 41.9 MBps, about half the USB 3.0 norm. After we reformatted the drive from ExFAT to NTFS, the write speed on the 10GB collection jumped to 102.4 MBps. One significant drawback: At just shy of 3 Patriot Aero Wireless hours, the Aero’s batMobile Drive tery life was about an PROS: hour shorter than that of its rivals, the Seagate • Wireless media streaming Wireless Plus and the • Apps for Android and iOS USB 3.0 interface Corsair Voyager Air (go. • pcworld.com/corsair). CONS: • No onboard DLNA server • 3-hour battery life BOTTOM LINE: The Patriot Aero creates a Wi-Fi hotspot for multimedia streaming, and it works well. In battery life and performance, however, it’s a step behind the competition. PRICE: $200
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Vizio’s CT15T-B1 adds an HD touchscreen—and little more BY SARAH JACOBSSON PUREWAL THE MAIN SELLING point of the Vizio CT15T-B1 Thin + Light Touch (go.pcworld.com/ct15tb1), the latest iteration of the company’s 15.6inch Thin + Light laptop, is its glossy HD touchscreen. The laptop has a smooth, gunmetal-gray metallic cover with neatly beveled edges, a spacious keyboard deck, and an edge-to-edge glass screen. Inside, the CT15T-B1 packs a quad-core Intel i7-3635QM processor from the Ivy Bridge line, along with 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory and a 256GB SSD. That configuration helped it to a very peppy Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 334. The laptop lacks a discrete graphics
The Vizio CT15T-B1 is over three times faster than our reference notebook, the Asus VivoBook S550CA.
card, however, and its graphics performance is mediocre (or worse). In our Bioshock Infinite test (low resolution/ low quality settings), it managed a frame rate of just 24.2 frames per second. The CT15T-B1’s looks great. The 15.6-inch IPS display has a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. Colors are bright and accurate, text looks crisp and clear, and the touchscreen responds well to multitouch gestures. Streaming HD video plays smoothly, with minimal artifacting and noise; but audio from Vizio CT15T-B1 the built-in speakers is Thin + Light Touch fuzzy, slightly distorted (even at lower levPROS: els), and generally diffi• Bright, accurate touchscreen cult to listen to. • Good performance This laptop isn’t an • Attractive industrial design Ultrabook (it weighs CONS: almost 5 pounds with• Too few ports out the power brick), • Minor design flaws but it has few ports. • Somewhat heavy The left side houses a BOTTOM LINE: USB 3.0 port and a A few design tweaks and a bit less mic/headphone jack, weight would have made this good while the right side notebook great. accommodates another USB 3.0 port PRICE: and an HDMI port. $1470 There’s no ethernet
REVIEWS & RATINGS
“It’s speedy, even though it lacks a Haswell processor.” Vizio carried over most of the design elements from its first Thin + Light notebook.
jack, lock slot, or eSATA port. Other design flaws include the keyboard, which looks pretty but offers exceedingly light—indeed almost nonexistent—feedback. In my tests, I managed a rate of around 85 words per minute, but usually I type 115 wpm. I found the laptop’s cover hard to open, even with my slim fingers and nails, because the indentation on the lower half is so shallow. I was somewhat disappointed to discover that Vizio hadn’t fixed some of the minor annoyances that cropped up on the CT15-A4 (go. pcworld.com/ct15a4)—the predecessor to this model—but the CT15T-B1 is a good laptop if you’re looking for a slim and reasonably light high-performance machine. It’s speedy, even though it lacks a Haswell processor; and it has a nice, bright touchscreen ready for all of your hands-on Windows 8 activities. P H OTO G R A P H S : RO B E RT C A R D I N
Micro Express NB5720: Plain looks, but high performance BY SARAH JACOBSSON PUREWAL IT’S NO ULTRABOOK, but the Micro Express NB5720 (go.pcworld.com/ nb5720) doesn’t look bad for a boxy, half-plastic laptop that carries a respectable 15.6-inch screen. It comes with a smooth, slate-gray, brushed-aluminum cover with tapered edges and a minimalist keyboard deck. However, it’s 1.68 inches thick and it weighs 5.75 pounds. The NB5720 packs some high-performance components under its hood: a 2.8GHz Core i7-4900MQ, 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory, a discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M graphics card, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a 750GB, 7200-rpm hard drive. It roared to a Notebook
REVIEWS & RATINGS
“The keyboard’s island-style keys are comfortable to type on.” WorldBench 8.1 score of 483, though all that power did wear down the battery in just 3 hours, 37 minutes. The system’s 15.6-inch, nonglare screen has a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels and looks great: It is very bright, produces accurate colors and skin tones, and renders sharp text. It’s not a touchscreen, however, which can be a major drawback if you’re using Windows 8. (You can order your unit with whichever operating system you prefer.) The NB5720’s keyboard deck looks simple and uncluttered despite offering tons of functionality. The deck includes (in addition to Micro Express NB5720 a full-size keyboard) a PROS: ten-key numeric pad, • Excellent performance a trackpad with dis• Plenty of connectivity options crete mouse buttons, • Very good keyboard a fingerprint reader, CONS: and two convenient • Worst speakers ever buttons: Airplane • No touchscreen Mode, which toggles • Subpar battery life for its class your Wi-Fi on and off; and VGA, which toggles BOTTOM LINE: between the discrete Micro Express’s NB5720 gaming notegraphics card (for betbook is short on looks, but very long on ter performance) and performance. the integrated GPU PRICE: (for longer battery life). $1599 The keyboard’s matte-black island-
The Micro Express NB5720 produced the highest Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score we’ve seen to date.
“The speakers sound brassy, tinny, and shrill. They’re awful.”
style keys are comfortable and easy to type on. In my tests, I managed 99 words per minute, which is good for a laptop keyboard (I typically average around 115 wpm when typing on a full-size keyboard that I’m accustomed to using). The medium-size trackpad is responsive, though a bit choppy. The discrete mouse buttons are widely spaced and easy to press, but they provide little tactile feedback. The speakers, which are located above the keyboard, sound brassy, tinny, and shrill—and the sound only gets worse when you play it at higher volume. They’re awful. Overall, the NB5720 is easily the fastest laptop we’ve tested. Though it’s a bit clunky and heavy, you wouldn’t mistake it for a desktop replacement—and yet it outperforms most of them.
The NB5720 has a great collection of components, but it’s more than twice as thick as the typical Ultrabook and weighs nearly 6 pounds.
P H OTO G R A P H S : RO B E RT C A R D I N
REVIEWS & RATINGS
You can’t go deep-sea diving with the Tablet Z, but removable port covers make this Android 4.1 tablet waterproof.
Sony’s bathtub-compatible Xperia Tablet Z BY JASON SNELL FROM THE FRONT, the thin (0.27 inch thick), light (1.1 pounds) Sony Xperia Tablet Z (go.pcworld.com/tabletz) looks likes a black glass slab. The sides are featureless black, aside from a silver on/off button, and the back is matte black. It’s pretty, but it picks up fingerprints in a hurry. When its removable (with difficulty) port covers are in place over the tablet’s Micro-USB port and MicroSD slot, the Tablet Z is waterproof— within reason, anyway. The Micro-USB port also handles charging. Sony’s display isn’t as high-resolution as those found in Apple’s Retina iPad (go.pcworld.com/retinaipad4) or Google’s Nexus 10 (go.pcworld. P H OTO G R A P H : M I K E H OM N I C K
com/nexus10), but its 1920-by-1200-pixel screen can display 1080p HD movies at full resolution and crisp text at 224 pixels per inch. Inside, the Xperia Tablet Z carries a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 quad-core processor and an Adreno 320 GPU. It has a 2.2-megapixel front-facing camera and an 8-megapixel rear camera. The Xperia Tablet Z runs a modified version of Android 4.1. You can place commonly used apps, as well as a shortcut to the apps list, in a nifty app dock at the top of the screen. The entire U.I. and app experience felt responsive, though performance can be spotty: Some apps scroll smoothly while others lag and judder. The Xperia Tablet Z comes with an infrared blaster on its top edge, and the included Remote Control app lets you program it. Unfortunately this software isn’t up to the job of enabling the tablet to function as your primary living-room control. The Xperia Tablet Z’s setup procedure initially tried (and failed) to connect to the Internet before asking me to connect to my local Wi-Fi network—a pretty basic mistake for a setup routine to make. Sony Xperia Tablet Z But once I opened the PROS: settings manually and • Remarkably light connected to my Wi-Fi • Waterproof network, the remainder CONS: of the setup process • Weak add-on software proceeded apace. • Image quality can’t match that of its The Sony Xperia Tabhigh-end rivals let Z certainly isn’t the best 10-inch tablet BOTTOM LINE: available on the market This waterproof, easy-to-carry tablet today—not while the rates as a serious contender in the outstanding Nexus 10 10-inch Android market. and iPad 4 roam the PRICE: land. But in the water, $500 the Xperia Tablet Z reigns supreme.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
The 276dw is an inkjet alternative to smalloffice lasers.
HP’s Officejet Pro 276dw: Speedy, capable BY JON L. JACOBI ALTHOUGH THE $400 HP Officejet Pro 276dw (go.pcworld.com/
hpoj276dw) is expensive, it’s an excellent inkjet multifunction printer that plays nice even in a corporate environment. Installation is a breeze, despite quite a few dialog boxes. The 4.3-inch touchscreen control panel has a well thought-out menu structure. Text is near-laser-quality, and color graphics are nice. Plain-paper photos appear slightly washed out, but look good in newsletters. Color photos on glossy paper are excellent, though HP’s bent toward P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
orangey skin tones remains. The greenish tint has vanished from its PCL 5 monochrome graphics but is still apparent in monochrome graphics printed via PostScript on the Mac. Scan quality is quite good. Performance is smooth and quick. Our text pages (which included simple monochrome graphics) printed at a rate of 10.8 pages per minute on the PC and 13 ppm on the Mac. Our 4-by-6-inch photos printed to plain paper at a bit over 4 ppm, and to glossy paper at about 1 ppm. A full-page photo printed at best quality took 2 minutes, 15 seconds on the Mac, and just over 2 minutes on the PC. At the default settings, which look nearly as good, you can cut the time down to 75 seconds or so. An informal test of printing a simple Excel spreadsheet took perhaps 15 seconds on the PC, but slowed tremendously on the Mac. We were unable to determine where the fault lay, but you should look for driver updates if you’ll be sharing the 276dw with Mac users. Ink costs are outstandingly low, especially for the high-capacity XL supplies: 1.6 cents per page for black and 5.6 cents per page for HP Ofcejet Pro 276dw cyan, magenta, and yelPROS: low. A total cost of 7.2 • Fast cents per four-color • Great print quality page is a lot cheaper • Inexpensive ink than what you’d pay with a similarly priced CONS: laser printer. The stan• Steep purchase price dard supplies add up to BOTTOM LINE: about 12 cents for a The Officejet Pro 276dw is pricey, but it’s four-color page. a Cadillac among inkjet MFPs—speedy Paper handling feaand capable—and a bargain next to the tures include automatlaser competition. ic duplex printing, duplex scanning (autoPRICE: matic refeed), and a $400 50-sheet automatic document feeder.
REVIEWS & RATINGS The XP-410’s control panel is surprisingly nice, with a color display and responsive touch controls.
Epson’s Expression Home XP-410: Good for light use BY MELISSA RIOFRIO CONSUMERS ARE POSTING online more and printing less—and losing
their patience with pricey ink cartridges. The $99 Epson Expression Home XP-410 Small-in-One (go.pcworld.com/epsonxp410) certainly does not solve that issue, but it does offer surprisingly good output quality along with basic multifunction features. The tiltable control panel is better than what you’ll see on most lowcost printers. Included are a 2.5-inch color display and context-sensitive touch controls. The panel works well and is intuitive and responsive. One annoyance is the exile of the primary user guide and the Mac OS X drivers to Epson’s website. The CD has plenty of room—why not put them there? It’s a puzzler, but common on Epson’s lower-cost models. P H OTO G R A P H : CO U RT ESY O F E P S O N
Epson’s gently pink color palette works to the benefit of most images. Test photos showed good color accuracy and realistic contours and shadows. Flesh tones, though pinkish, looked okay. Photos printed on plain paper were a little grainy, but had good brightness and accuracy. A color copy on plain paper was gorgeous. The XP-410 also produced surprisingly good text: Edges looked classically inkjet-soft, but not fuzzy. Print speed is decent. Documents with plain, black text and small monochrome graphics printed at an aggregate 6.6 pages per minute on the PC and 6.4 ppm on the Mac. Color photos took considerably longer—especially the full-page photo we print on the Mac, which took 3 minutes at best settings. On the PC, a 3-by-5-inch photo took 16 seconds at default settings on plain paper, and 70 seconds at the photo setting on Epson’s own photo stock. Scan times were among the slowest we’ve seen, Epson Expression Home but the scans themselves were good. XP-410 Small-in-One Regrettably, the PROS: XP-410’s ink is expen• Very good print quality overall sive. The 500-page, $30 • Nice, responsive control panel XL black works out to CONS: 6 cents per page, while • Expensive inks the $17, 450-page cyan, • Slow scans magenta, and yellow XL • Mac drivers and primary documentation cartridges cost 3.8 cpp are online only each. That’s an aboveaverage 17.4 cents for a BOTTOM LINE: four-color page. In the The XP-410 will suffice for light home/ standard capacities, student use, but the pricey inks mean you black is 7.4 cpp, and shouldn’t buy this MFP unless you don’t print much. each color is 5.4 cpp. Spending 23.6 cents for PRICE: a four-color page is $99 pricey even for the entry-level category.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Buffalo’s DriveStation DDR easily beats other external hard drives we’ve tested.
DriveStation DDR caches for superfast writes BY JON L. JACOBI CREDIT BUFFALO TECHNOLOGY for taking advantage of cheap memo-
ry prices to marry relatively affordable DDR memory cache with an external hard drive to speed up the drive’s write performance. The Buffalo DriveStation DDR (go.pcworld.com/drivestation)—a 3.5inch, USB 3.0 drive—easily surpasses the write performance of any external hard drive we’ve tested. In fact, it rivals the speed of external USB 3.0 solid-state drives, at a far lower cost per gigabyte. External hard drives are relatively simple devices. The DriveStation P H OTO G R A P H : M I K E H OM N I C K
The one drawback to using DDR memory for caching is that the DriveStation DDR requires an AC power supply.
DDR is an approximately 8-by-5-by-1.75inch black box sporting a tick of red on the top front. Inside are a USB 3.0 type B port, a Kensington lock port, an AC jack, power and activity lights, and a cooling vent on the back. It has no fan because Buffalo believes that passive convection cooling is sufficient—and that seemed to be the case during our subjective and official tests. With both volatile memory and a hard drive on board, though, it’s no surprise that the drive needs to operate on AC power. The unit’s 1GB of DDR3 cache helped the DriveStation Buffalo DriveStation DDR DDR’s write perforPROS: mance tremen• Much faster write speed than normal dously. It wrote our USB 3.0 hard drives 10GB mix of files • Very good price per gigabyte and folders at 140.8 megabytes CONS: per second—that’s • Requires AC power at least 40 MBps • Pricier than a typical USB 3.0 drive faster than the BOTTOM LINE: next-speediest A fast, capacious, not-too-expensive external USB hard direct-attached backup drive, the Drivedrive we’ve tested. Station DDR uses 1GB of DDR3 memory to But the DriveStadramatically improve write performance. tion DDR really PRICE: $160 (2TB), $200 (3TB) P H OTO G R A P H : RO B E RT C A R D I N
REVIEWS & RATINGS
External USB 3.0 hard-drive performance Reviewed drive: Buffalo DriveStation DDR 248.9 244.7 243.2 243.2
Read a single 10GB file 201.8 194.5
Write a single 10GB file
80.8 107.5
Read 10GB collection of files and folders
210.8 211.4 209.6 212.9 140.8 148.7
Write 10GB collection of files and folders
80.3 22.8
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
Buffalo DriveStation DDR
WD My Passport Edge
LaCie Rugged SSD
Aegis Bio 3.0
(Megabytes per second)
showed its mettle in writing our large 10GB file at a scintillating 201.8 MBps, nearly twice what the average USB 3.0 hard drive can manage. The DriveStation performed on a par with most of the USB 3.0 SSDs we’ve tested. It read the file and folder mix at 210.8 MBps and the large file at 248.9 MBps. Each of those scores is close to what you’d get with a typical USB 3.0 hard drive. Don’t expect such numbers in everyday usage, however, as our tests write to and read from a RAM drive in order to avoid the effects of any bottlenecks in our test platform. Available in 2TB and 3TB versions, the DriveStation DDR isn’t the lowest-cost external 3.5-inch hard drive on the market, but it is the fastest we’ve seen by a long shot. And compared with the external SSDs whose performance it matches, it’s dirt cheap.
Thanks to its use of DDR3 memory as cache, Buffalo’s DriveStation DDR achieves near-SSD write performance.
The Extreme II, which comes in three capacities, handled large test files quickly.
SanDisk’s Extreme II SSD is fast and affordable BY JON L. JACOBI OFFERING A NICE blend of price and performance, SanDisk’s Extreme II SSD (go.pcworld.com/sandiskext), in its bigger capacities, retails for considerably less than a buck a gigabyte. It’s also one of the fastest drives with large files that we’ve tested. Its performance with small files, on the other hand, is merely average, and the drop-off in write performance from the 240GB and 480GB models to the 120GB version is steep. SanDisk has ditched the SandForce SF-2281 controller of the original Extreme series, and equipped the 7mm-profile, 6Gb/s Extreme II with a Marvell 88SS9187. The combination of the new controller and fast, 19nm toggle-mode NAND helped the Extreme II outpace the sustained write performance of such capable drives as OCZ’s Vector and Corsair’s Neutron. The 240GB version wrote our 10GB large file at 644.3 MBps
REVIEWS & RATINGS
“It’s one of the fastest drives with large files that we’ve tested.”
and read it at 479.8 MBps. With small files, however, the 240GB Extreme II was mundane, writing our 10GB mix of files and folders at 352.0 MBps and reading them at 373.6 MBps. The 480GB version’s numbers were nearly identical, but the 120GB drive wrote files significantly slower. That’s the norm for SSDs with less than 240GB or 256GB capacity, as they have fewer chips and channels to write across (although the drop-off can vary). The 120GB drive was actually the fastest drive we’ve seen—with a rate of 485 MBps—when reading our large file, but it wrote the file at only 465.6 MBps (nearly 200 MBps slower than the two larger models). The 120GB model read our 10GB mix of files and folders at 378.9 MBps, about the same performance as the larger capacities turned in, but it wrote the data at 300.8 MBps. The 120GB Extreme II retails for $130; the 240GB and 480GB models cost $230 and $440, respectively. That’s nice pricing for SSDs with a five-year warranty and top-notch performance. SanDisk rates the drives for at least 80TBW (terabytes writSanDisk Extreme II ten). If you can scrape up the extra bucks for a PROS: larger capacity, you’ll • Excellent performance for the price get significantly better • Five-year warranty write performance. CONS: Note that no cloning • Only average performance reading and software is included writing small files with the Extreme II, but the downloadable BOTTOM LINE: SanDisk Toolkit utility The Extreme II series carries an excellent provides S.M.A.R.T. info price/performance ratio and a strong five-year warranty. and allows you to update the drive firmPRICE: ware as new versions $130 (120GB), $230 (240GB), $440 (480GB) become available.
Instagram Explorer BY LIANE CASSAVOY YOU MAY THINK that an Instagram app that doesn’t allow you to take
pictures would be kind of pointless, but Instagram Explorer (go. pcworld.com/instexp)—a Windows 8 app for the modern user interface—has plenty of potential. Using it is not unlike browsing through the Instagram.com site. Instagram Explorer’s default view displays your live feed, and it’s nice to view some of Instagram’s gorgeous photos on a bigger screen. The spacious real estate of a Windows 8 desktop or laptop makes it easier to comment on photos, too—the comment field is more prominently displayed here than it is on Instagram.com. Similarly, Instagram Explorer’s profile view is superior to the view on your smartphone, which simply displays square tiles of identically
Instagram Explorer for Windows 8 displays your friends’ profiles almost exactly the way you’d see them on Instagram.com.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Pretty pictures look even prettier on a big screen.
sized recent photos. The Explorer profile view displays photos in a variety of sizes, which is far more visually appealing. Instagram Explorer suggests “famous” users that you might want to make your favorites, but I found this feature unnecessary. It suggested a few folks I knew of, some I’d never heard of, and several I’d like to forget. Clicking any of the suggested names lets you visit that person’s profile, though the app was a bit slow to make the transiInstagram Explorer tion at times. If you’re constantly snapPROS: ping photos and sharing • Attractive interface them with your Instagram • Free followers, you may find InstaCONS: gram Explorer a bit limited. • Can’t take photos And if you’re not relying on Windows 8’s modern UI, you BOTTOM LINE: have no need for this app. Instagram Explorer offers a free, But if you’re looking for an easy way to browse Instagram easy way to sit back and when you’re using Windows 8. browse photos on Instagram PRICE: while using Windows 8, this Free free app is for you.
The Ceton InfiniTV 6 can replace the set-top box you rent from your cable company (if you have a CableCard).
Ceton InfiniTV 6 BY RICK BROIDA
WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER is dying a slow death. It’s not included with
Windows 8, and adding it to the new operating system will cost you a hundred bucks. But third-party developers haven’t yet given up on the concept of the home-theater PC, and Ceton’s InfiniTV 6 (go.pcworld. com/infinitv6) is a good example of one. This digital tuner lets you watch and record up to six digital cable TV channels simultaneously. It works with a digital cable TV subscription and requires a multistream CableCard (M-Card), which your cable company is required to provide (it might also provide an SDV tuning adapter, which plugs in to the InfiniTV 6’s USB port). Unfortunately, there is no equivalent option for satellite-TV subscribers. The InfiniTV 6 plugs in to your router, so every PC on your network that’s running Windows Media Center can access live TV. For a wireP H OTO G R A P H : CO U RT ESY O F C E TO N
REVIEWS & RATINGS less network setup, however, you’ll need an 802.11ac router. I tested the box with several Windows 7 systems and a Comcastsupplied M-Card. Setup was fairly straightforward: I installed the drivers, ran through a few quick setup procedures, and—presto!—I had six HD tuners at my disposal. Everything worked well from the start, and I never encountered a problem viewing or recording shows on any PC I tried. What’s more, although I rarely hit the tuner limit, Ceton’s software has a feature called “dynamic tuner assignment” that helps reduce conflicts when one PC tries to use a tuner that’s already in use elsewhere. Instead of giving up and returning an error message, the InfiniTV will look at all six of its tuners to see Ceton InfiniTV 6 if one is available. That’s valuable for PROS: households with a lot • Six digital tuners of TV watchers. • Supports premium and encrypted SD The InfiniTV 6 lacks and HD cable TV channels one notable feature: • Dynamically assigns tuners to different PCs as needed DLNA certification, which would guarantee CONS: the ability to stream • No way to view or record shows on your media to other devices, smartphone or tablet such as Blu-ray players • Requires Windows Media Center and the PlayStation 3. • Requires high-end home network If you want to bring infrastructure TV viewing and recordBOTTOM LINE: ing capabilities to mulProvided you have the right network tiple PCs in your home, infrastructure, Windows Media Center, this box has you covand digital cable TV service, Ceton’s ered. But you’ll have to InfiniTV 6 is an excellent foundation for a put up with the InfiniTV homewide TV-entertainment system. 6’s network infrastruc PRICE: ture requirements and $299 its dependence on Windows Media Center.
Seagate’s Laptop Ultrathin hard drive may look delicate, but it can handle substantial shocks.
Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDD BY JON L. JACOBI IT’S EASY TO make a thin solid-state drive for low-profile laptops and other mobile computing devices, but the NAND flash memory used for SSDs doesn’t come cheap. Designers must make a trade-off between capacity and affordability. On the other hand, 2.5-inch hard disk drives are about one-fifth the cost of SSDs, but their 7mm or 9mm profiles render them difficult to implement in ultraportables and other smaller laptops. That’s why the Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDD (go.pcworld.com/sgultrathin) is big news. At 3.3 ounces and just 5mm thick, it provides 500GB of relatively cheap storage that straddles the line between price and capacity. The hard disk drive has a SATA 6-gigabits-per-second interface, but its platter spins at only 5400 rpm, so you shouldn’t expect extremely high performance. In our tests, the drive wrote our 10GB mix of files and folders at 73.8 megabytes per second (MBps), and it read them at 91.1 MBps. It wrote
REVIEWS & RATINGS
our single large 10GB file at 151.4 MBps and read it at 100.2 MBps. That’s not bad given the spindle speed, but that performance is hardly SSD-like. On a relatively speedy laptop, our Windows installation felt decently responsive, but that has as much to do with Windows’ advanced caching as it does with the speed of the drive. The Laptop Ultrathin HDD is rated to survive up to a 400G shock while it’s operating, and 1000G when powered down. Those are pretty impressive ratings. We didn’t perform any drop tests, but with the drive powered up and spinning outside the case, it survived several small shocks. Another upside to the drive’s 5mm form factor is that you could potentially install multiple hard drives in a standard-size laptop. Two Laptop Ultrathin HDDs in a RAID 1 setup could provide the redundancy most Seagate Laptop Ultrathin laptops lack; in a RAID 0 HDD array, they could comPROS: pensate for the slowish • Just 5mm thick performance of the • Affordable compared to SSDs drive. The thin size also • Lightweight allows for beefier shockCONS: mounting in devices • Platter spins at only 5400 rpm that have room for it. • Only 500GB Regardless of how it’s • Middling performance employed, the odds are that you’ll see the LapBOTTOM LINE: top Ultrathin HDD in This superthin hard drive could help PC laptops soon—and manufacturers build thinner models. It we’re betting no one could also bring a bigger storage capacity will complain about to tablet designs. cheaper ultraportables. PRICE: $89 P H OTO G R A P H S : RO B E RT C A R D I N
The Laptop Ultrathin hard drive is about the same thickness as four credit cards stacked.
Just about a year after releasing Windows 8, Microsoft is introducing the next iteration of its controversial operating system. From a marketing standpoint, Windows 8.1 represents a do-over, a bid to simplify and personalize an OS that, quite frankly, turned off a lot of people.
“Windows 8.1 has tons of new features, both obvious and hidden.”
If you own Windows 8 and dislike it, you might consider giving Windows 8.1—which is available now in preview form and is expected to be released to the public October 18—a try. Not only does it have tweaks intended to make Windows 8 friendlier, but it also has tons of new features, both obvious and hidden.
Snap views
WINDOWS 8.1
Features Guide
And Microsoft has updated many of the OS’s built-in apps, too.
Improvements and changes Desktop diehards will find a present waiting for them in Windows 8.1. A wonderful, horrible, oh-soteasing present. The Start button is back—but the Start menu isn’t. Instead, clicking the old familiar button dumps you right into the modern-UI Start screen. While the new feature is notable for adding a helpful visual cue to an operating system rife with hidden menus, it isn’t exactly what people were looking for. That said, most of Windows 8.1’s enhancements bolster the modern environment, not the desktop. The most welcome improvement is the addition of customizable snap views. No longer are you locked into the two-app, quarterscreen snap limitations of Windows 8 vanilla. In Windows 8.1 you can resize snap apps to any ratio, and you can snap
three apps side by side by side. Microsoft also says that you can have multiple instances of an app open and snapped, though we haven’t been especially successful in getting that feature to function in the Windows 8.1 Preview. Internet Explorer 11 will premiere in Windows 8.1, as well. While most of the tweaks sound fairly basic—faster page loads, better touch performance —the new version also adds a tab syncing feature that allows you to
Shut down from Start
open tabs across multiple Windows 8.1 PCs and tablets. And you can open and snap multiple instances of the modern version of IE 11. Along those lines, Windows 8.1 brings the ability to sync your settings and Start-screen apps across multiple devices, assuming that you sign in to those devices using an onlineconnected Microsoft account. Hate Windows 8’s insistence on plopping every newly installed app onto your Start screen? Once Windows 8.1 hits, that annoying “feature” will go the way of the dodo. Instead, any apps installed from the Windows Store will appear under a ‘New’ filter in the All Apps view, from which you can choose to pin apps to the Start screen. The modern-style PC Settings options are getting a boost, too. One of the biggest complaints about Windows 8 concerns the way it constantly swaps between the desktop and modern interfaces, a problem exacerbated by the fact that you have to dive into the desktop control panel
just to tinker with under-thehood stuff. No more.
Hidden new features What hasn’t been talked about much are the subtler changes— the secrets tucked away in the dark corners, waiting for their turn to shine. These hidden gems aren’t as flashy as some of Windows’ other newfound abilities, but they’re arguably just as convenient (if not more so). Shut down from the Start button: Although the Start button is back, you still need to swipe through a multiclick process involving the charm bar if you want to shut down your PC— if you don’t know about the Start button’s secret menu, that is. Just right-click the Start button that appears when you hover the mouse over the lower-left corner of the screen to bring up a bevy
Taskbar Properties
WINDOWS 8.1
Features Guide
of powerful options. The menu itself isn’t new to Windows 8.1. What is new is the addition of a Shut Down item. Hovering over it for a second gives you the option to shut down or restart your machine right then and there, no fiddling required. Boot to desktop or All Apps, and more: Taskbar Properties is another old friend bearing a subtle new look, and it conceals a crucial new option for desktop devotees—Windows 8.1 lets you boot directly to the desktop on startup. Microsoft, however, clearly doesn’t want you to do so, since the option is buried in this obscure corner of the OS. Head to the desktop, right-click the taskbar, select Properties, and open the brand-spankin’-new Navigation tab. Some of the options in this tab are also available in the modern-style PC Settings utility, but many Start
screen options can be found only here. And how handy-dandy they are! Want to boot directly to the desktop or to the All Apps screen? Here’s your chance. The great gigs in the Sky(Drive): In Windows 8.1, SkyDrive takes on a much bigger role, driving Microsoft’s vision of a seamless, cloud-connected world even further. In fact, SkyDrive is so vital an underpinning to Windows 8.1 that Microsoft dedicates a section to it in the modern-style PC Settings. A vast number of settings now sync and follow you from device to device by default—including modern apps. But if you really want to live in the cloud, you’ll need to enable some options buried three or four levels down. Open the charm bar and select Settings u Change PC Settings. From there, open the SkyDrive
SkyDrive integration
options and select Files in the left menu bar. Here you can toggle the ability to save documents and Camera Roll snapshots to SkyDrive by default, an awesome new option if you want to be able to sit down at any Windows 8 computer and have it feel like your own. Hush, my darling: Relaxing ain’t easy if your gadget blasts alarms throughout the day. Fortunately, Windows 8.1 lets you silence the cacophony with its new Quiet Hours setting. Open the Settings charm, and navigate to Change PC Settings u Search & Apps u Notifications. Scroll down to Quiet Hours. By default, Windows 8.1 is set to go silent from midnight to 6 a.m., but you can change the window to any time frame. Get a grip on your apps: In the vanilla version of Windows 8, modern-style apps are incredibly pesky to manage from anywhere except the Start screen. Modern apps don’t show up in an obvious way in the desktop File Explor-
er’s folder structure, and you can’t eliminate them from the Control Panel’s Programs & Features interface. Windows 8.1 changes that. Navigate to the Search & Apps section, and select App sizes in the left menu. The screen displays a full listing of all your installed modern apps, complete with the file size of each app. If you are looking to free up harddrive space, you can click an app to bring up an uninstall option. Wireless Miracast pairing: Microsoft’s operating system update includes full support for the fledgling Miracast wireless display standard, which is similar to Apple’s AirPlay technology. It’s your PC screen, beamed to your
Quiet Hours
WINDOWS 8.1
Features Guide
TV or monitor as if by telecommunications magic! Miracast is so new that you might have trouble finding compatible television sets, but you can pick up a Miracast receiver dongle that will transform any TV with an HDMI port into a Miracast-compatible display. Even better, when Microsoft’s Xbox One console lands in time for the holidays, it’ll be a fully capable Miracast receiver, further deepening the synergies between Windows 8 and Xbox. If you want to connect your Windows 8.1 device to a Miracast receiver, you can dig deep into the modern-style PC Settings. But the easier option is to open the Devices charm and select Project u Add a display. If a Miracast display is nearby, Windows 8.1 should find it. There’s a whole lotta printing
going on: Windows 8.1 packs 3D-printer support in the form of a driver and a native API. Here’s hoping that the addition will make the 3D printing process as simple as the traditional 2D printing process, rather than the complicated export-filled mess that it is now. The idea is to allow you to kick 3D printers to life using the Print option under the Devices charm, so you can print from directly within the modern interface—assuming that the printer’s software takes advantage of Microsoft’s support. Windows 8.1 also includes support for NFC printers. If both your Windows device and your printer are members of the (currently rare) NFC-enabled breed, simply tapping one against the other automatically pairs the two devices for hassle-free printing. And if 3D and NFC printers are
Search & Apps
just a bit too adventurous for you, note that Windows 8.1 also includes Wi-Fi Direct printing capabilities. That means you can connect to a Wi-Fi Direct– enabled printer without having to jump on a Wi-Fi network or fuss with installing software.
The Start screen’s new, friendly face Microsoft has pulled some of the best aspects of Windows Phone into its revision of Windows 8’s Start screen and modern UI. Purists may still dislike the fat, spacesucking fonts and live tiles, but new features such as the ability to display pictures of loved ones
when the PC is not in use have unquestionable appeal. Jensen Harris of the Windows User Experience team outlined the new features in a video the company posted to YouTube (go.pcworld.com/win81start). Some of the improvements are especially notable. Lock screen enhancements: According to Harris, the new lock screen automatically pulls photos from your PC, your phone, and SkyDrive. Granted, you could end up showing the world (and your coworkers) some Hangover-style shots, but in general we’ve been impressed by how the Facebook app for Windows Phone already
All Apps screen
WINDOWS 8.1
Features Guide
Different tile sizes
does this. It’s a small touch, but for people who are unfamiliar with Windows 8, this feature could be a real winner. Different tile sizes: Microsoft has resized the tiles that are available in the Start screen to include larger and smaller formats. Those users who want to pin more apps to the Start screen (without having to scroll, scroll, scroll) will probably find this change useful. Harris also notes that the larger format could display several email messages or a whole day’s worth of appointments. All Apps screen: The revamped All Apps screen is no match for the Windows 7 Start menu; it doesn’t seem to offer any way to reorganize the apps in folders, for example. However, you can pull
selected apps out of the All Apps screen and pin them to the Start menu in groups, which kind-of sort-of re-creates the Windows 7 functionality. This is going to strike some people as an artificial limitation. If you’re used to embedding dozens of apps and games, there’s still the possibility that you’ll forget the name of one you rarely use, and be forced to hunt for it in the list of apps. The ability to add an “Other Utilities” folder (one that wouldn’t necessarily clutter the Start screen) would be quite useful. Desktop wallpaper and personalization options: In Windows 8.1, you’ll be able to change the background color of the Start screen. Microsoft also says that it will add a few quasi-interactive,
Improved Search app
moving backgrounds, such as a dragon. And in a nice touch, the Start screen will be able to share the same background image as the Desktop. Simply syncing the background image of the two interfaces goes a long way toward implying that they’re two parts of a cohesive whole. If we were Microsoft, we’d be tempted to make this the default option. Search improvements: The Search app now gives results a more “app-like” feel, presenting a flood of text, images, related searches, and other content.
Frankly, if you’re used to the Google text-based environment, the gush of multimedia will feel a little overwhelming. If you’re performing a topic search on, say, a celebrity or a band, however, the revamped Search might offer a lot more of what you’re looking for. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own internal search better integrates the Web with local results. Simply inputting a few letters into the search box will pull up internal apps and settings as well as external search results.
WINDOWS 8.1
Features Guide
Apps: Additions and updates While many of Windows 8.1’s major changes focus on the user interface, ultimately it comes down to the apps. After all, the modern-UI side of Windows 8 is supposed to be all about getting out of the way and letting you enjoy those big-screen, touchfriendly applications. Microsoft has done a lot of work on its existing apps, and it has also come up with some new offerings. Following are some of the apps that are getting an overhaul or are making
their debut in Windows 8.1. Alarm: The new Alarm app is a helpful addition if you want to keep a Windows 8 tablet at your bedside, but in its current state it seems a bit sparse. All the basics are intact, including a timer and a stopwatch, as well as the ability to set an alarm to repeat any given day of the week. The interface is slick, and the circular dial for setting times is cute. It would be nice to see some advanced functions, such as volume fade-in, wake to music, and a dimmer for using the app as a nighttime clock.
Alarm
Calculator: In Windows 8.1, Microsoft has gone above and beyond the basic desktop calculator. The standard math functions are still present, but users can also switch to a scientific calculator. With the unit converter, users can calculate volume, length, weight, temperature, energy, area, speed, time, power, and data. The new Calculator is especially useful when snapped side by side with the desktop, allowing you to calculate without messing around with window sizes. Camera: If you enjoy taking photos with tablets, you’ll find lots of useful new features in the
Windows 8.1 Camera app. The interface is now a little less confusing, with quick-camera and video-capture buttons on the right side. The app menu includes a Camera Roll button, exposure settings, and the timer. Camera options, including video stabilization and aspect ratio, have moved to the Settings section of the charm bar. Once you’ve taken a photo, the app provides some new editing options. You can also set a photo as your lock screen, open it in another app, or start a slideshow. This app doesn’t offer drawing, cut-and-paste, or precise crop-
Camera
WINDOWS 8.1
Features Guide
Health & and Fitness
+
ping and resizing tools, but it looks like a fine choice for basic photo editing on touch-based PCs. Food & Drink: Microsoft’s impressive new food app offers recipes, tips, and articles about food, wine, and cocktails, all gathered by Bing. Users can select from the app’s recipes or enter their own—either by typing it in or taking a picture of a paper recipe. The app also lets you create shopping lists and meal plans, which you can share with other apps through the charm bar. Less useful, at least in our experience, is the “hands-free” mode that’s supposed to allow you to swipe through recipes using your PC’s webcam. Getting the app to respond to hand gestures was unreliable for us, so it might just be easier to swipe with your elbows.
Health & Fitness: Packed with features, Microsoft’s new Health & Fitness app is a sprawling program. The main page provides links to fitness exercises, news articles, nutrition tips, and medical news. The app’s diet, health, and exercise trackers have potential, but right now they’re far too limited. The diet tracker lets you record what you’ve eaten, but its database of items is lacking. (For instance, it has information on some Subway salads and sandwiches, but not others.) The exercise tracker can’t sync with popular fitness services such as Fitbit and Runkeeper. The health tracker is fine if you have weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, and vaccination details on hand, but it’s basically just a record-keeping app. For now, the Health & Fit-
ness app is best for general health tips, not for keeping tabs on your own well-being. Internet Explorer: Internet Explorer 11 boasts some truly useful changes in Windows 8.1. Most helpful is the ability to open up to three webpages side by side in separate windows. Opening multiple windows creates several instances of IE 11 in the Windows multitasking menu, so you can return to any open pages even if you drag them out of snap view. Other tweaks include syncing among all Windows 8.1 devices, a “reopen closed tab” function, saved passwords, and a built-in download viewer. And for those
people who can’t stand modernstyle IE’s insistence on hiding tabs and the address bar, IE 11 includes a setting to show them at all times in a collapsed view. Photos: Microsoft has changed the interface for the Photos app in Windows 8.1, bringing it closer to the file picker that appears in other apps. Strangely, the ability to view online photo sources such as SkyDrive, Facebook, and Flickr was missing in our tests. That may be just a bug, however, as online sources were available through the file picker in other apps. As for editing tools, the Photos app mirrors the Camera app, with a mode that includes
Reading List
WINDOWS 8.1
Features Guide
lighting tweaks, red-eye reduction, and other options. Reading List: While it’s no replacement for Pocket or other true read-it-later apps, Reading List offers a simple way to save articles for another time. You don’t have much to do in the app itself, at least not until you’ve saved up things to read by using the Share charm in other apps, such as Internet Explorer or News. Keep in mind that this app behaves a bit differently from other readers. Instead of sucking up the text into the app itself, Reading List merely sends you back to the original source.
The downside to this approach is that the app doesn’t work as an ofline reader. SkyDrive: At last, SkyDrive’s modern-style app functions more like its desktop counterpart in Windows 8.1. Users now have the ability to cut, copy, paste, and rename files, as well as to make files available for ofline access. You also have the option to make all SkyDrive files available ofline. Aside from those substantive changes, the SkyDrive app’s interface has been tweaked, with smaller icons that allow for more items on the screen at once. Sound Recorder: Like the desk-
Windows Store
top Sound Recorder app, the new modern-style version is deadsimple. Just press the microphone button and start recording. You can trim an audio file, rename it, or delete it. Windows Store: The Windows Store is now much more inviting in Windows 8.1. The layout is completely different, with a single carousel of featured apps on the left side, followed by several rows of suggestions. These tiles are less crowded than they were in Windows, and they each include a short written description. Individual app pages are getting a makeover as well, with everything laid out on a single, scrollable page. Overall, the Windows Store feels less sparse and easier to browse than it did in Windows 8. Xbox Music: Microsoft’s Xbox
Music app is getting a major MORE ONLINE: visual overhaul Learn about Windows in Windows 8.1. 8.1’s security enhanceThe new design ments at go.pcworld. com/win81security, is a departure and find out what feafrom the horitures Windows 8.1 is zontally scrollmissing at go.pcworld. ing, moderncom/win81missing. style apps we’re used to, with a navigation column on the left side, and a vertically scrolling list of artists on the right. It’s definitely an improvement, more conducive to quickly accessing your music. The app also does a better job of explaining itself. Small dialog boxes tell you when music has been stored locally or in the cloud, while buttons at the top offer clear options for sorting your collection.
WINDOWS 8.1
Upgrade Guide
Install the Windows 8.1
Preview
Get a peek at the updated OS’s new features, and try them for yourself. BY MARK HACHMAN
It’s scorching out. Any housework that needs doing is already done. And with the weekend ahead, it’s time for a simple computing project. Here’s one: Install the Windows 8.1 Preview.
Note that Windows 8.1 will be available through the Windows Store as a free upgrade for current Windows 8 and Windows RT users on October 17; the retail version of the software will be released to
The Start screen’s new look
“general availability” on October 18. The version that is downloadable right now is only a preview, and so it may contain a bug or two. If you have any critical apps or data, make sure that you have backup copies, or that your data also resides on Microsoft’s SkyDrive. Although I haven’t encountered a single bug in the Windows 8.1 Preview, there’s no guarantee you’ll have the same experience. If you do run into problems, try visiting the Microsoft Windows 8 Preview forums (go.pcworld. com/win81forum). You’ll find answers to questions that this guide can’t cover, including how to interpret the most frustrating error message, “Windows 8.1 Preview is not yet supported on this PC.” (Have you already seen this message? According to Microsoft, your PC might be
“Before you download and install Windows 8.1, consider where you’ll be running it.”
running a 32-bit Intel Atom chip that’s currently unsupported.)
What to know before you start Before you download and install Windows 8.1, consider where you’ll be running it. Will you put it on your main productivity machine? On a spare PC? Or within a virtual machine? Since you’ll be installing a preview version of the operating system, we recommend digging up a spare PC and installing 8.1 on top of an existing Windows 8 installation. Installing the Windows 8.1 Preview is essentially a one-way trip: Once you’ve installed the software, there’s no going back. (And be aware that if you begin installation and then get cold feet in the middle, you’ll also have to uninstall the associated Windows Update. To do so, open Control Panel, look for ‘View installed updates’, and delete KB2849636.) If you decide that you really can’t stand Windows 8.1 after it’s installed, the only way out is to restore your PC to its original factory settings, using the recovery media that came with your PC or a backup. Windows 8 users might also be able to
WINDOWS 8.1
Upgrade Guide
restore their machines by performing a refresh. It’s bad news for Windows RT users, however: Microsoft says you have no way back. At all. The other thing to remember is that if you download and install the Windows 8.1 Preview, you may have to reinstall the apps (go.pcworld.com/win81reinstall) when the final Windows 8.1 version is released. That said, if you choose to sit back, wait, and upgrade only when the final version of 8.1 arrives in October, don’t worry—you shouldn’t have to touch a thing.
The operating system you’re upgrading from also determines the amount of data you’ll need to worry about. Basically, if you’re upgrading from Windows 8 to the Windows 8.1 Preview, Microsoft anticipates that all of your data, with the exception of some apps, will be preserved. (Microsoft isn’t saying which apps may need reinstallation, however.) Microsoft sums things up in a convenient table on its FAQ page (go.pcworld.com/win81faq). Again, nothing should change when you install the preview, only when the preview expires.
Check out the Preview
Once again: We recommend that you back up your PC before you start. Read “Dont Forget to Back Up Your PC Before Trying Windows 8.1” at go.pcworld.com/ win81backup to learn how to safely perform such an operation. We have already heard about
“Windows 8.1’s requirements mirror those of current Windows 8 products.”
documented cases of Windows 8.1 installations going wrong, and the last thing you want is to lose everything. One final note before we get started on the installation specifics: Some corporations don’t allow you to log in with your Microsoft account, and restrict you to a “local” installation. In these cases, you will not have the full ability to sync your settings across multiple PCs. Local installations won’t work with the Windows 8.1 Preview, so be sure that you have signed up for a Microsoft ID, and then log in with that ID when the installation completes. (A Microsoft ID generally
Download the update
WINDOWS 8.1
Upgrade Guide
consists of your Hotmail or Outlook.com account and password.)
Download and installation Windows 8.1’s system requirements mirror those of current Windows 8 products. You need a 1GHz or faster processor, and a DirectX 9 GPU with a WDDM driver. A 32-bit system will need 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage space, while 64-bit systems will need 2GB of RAM and 20GB of storage space. For the Windows RT 8.1 Preview, you need a device that’s already running Windows RT and has 10GB of free storage space, Microsoft says. The installation process itself is simple: Visit preview.windows.com and follow the instructions. We walked through an early version of the download process (go.pcworld. com/win81down); Tony Leung, lab manager of PCWorld Labs, reported that the total time necessary to download and install the Windows 8.1 Preview was about two hours on a fast system with a solid-
state disk. (Note, however, that this was during the first few hours of the preview’s life, when Microsoft’s servers were slammed.) Again, you’ll need to decide whether to run an in-place installation or to install the preview within a virtual machine—the latter option isolates Windows 8.1 from the rest of your system, but sometimes incurs a performance hit. If you decide on the virtualmachine route, download the ISO file at go.pcworld.com/win81iso. If you need help with installing Windows 8.1 in a virtual machine, try the TechNorms guide at go. pcworld.com/win81vm and a related discussion forum at go. pcworld.com/win81vm2. If you do download the ISO, you’ll also need the following Microsoft product key: NTTX3RV7VB-T7X7F-WQYYY-9Y92F After Windows begins installation, your PC may reboot a few times. Once installation completes, congratulations! You’re well on your way to enjoying Windows 8.1.
To stream your movies, music, and photos anywhere, all you need is a PC and good media-server software. BY RICK BROIDA Photography by Robert Cardin
TRANSFORM YOUR SYSTEM INTO A
STREAMING MACHINE
IF YOU’RE A DEDICATED FAN
of music, images, and video, you’ve probably built an impressive multimedia empire inside your PC, with album after album of sweet jams, reams of cherished photos, and a video collection whose holdings range from smartphone gag reels to family movies to highresolution videos ripped from your DVD collection. Unfortunately, they’re all trapped in your PC. If you want to watch one of the videos on the big HDTV in your living room, or listen to your complete music collection on a storage-strapped smartphone, what do you do? The solution is simple: Turn your PC into a media slinger—a machine that can stream your music, movies, and photos to any destination device of your choosing. It’s easier than you might think, though deciding which server arrangement to
use (and how much to spend) can be somewhat tricky.
Pick the right PC for the job The first step is to make sure that your computer is up to the task. Server software can place a heavy load on your PC, especially when it first indexes your media library, but also when it’s actively streaming. And if you want your media library to be available around the clock, you’ll need to leave your PC running 24/7.
You can configure any PC to sling media over the Web, but it’s best to set up a dedicated machine that can run 24/7 in a closet or basement.
MEDIA STREAMING
To be on the safe side, use a PC that runs Windows 7 or later, packs at least 4GB of RAM, and carries a discrete video card.
After setting up Pogoplug on your PC, use free Android or iOS apps to access your media library from anywhere.
Indeed, many users elect to repurpose an older system as a dedicated media server: one that can sit quietly out of the way in a closet or basement until called upon to sling. If you can afford to devote a PC solely to media slinging, it doesn’t have to be a screaming powerhouse of a system, because it will be free to direct all of its resources to server duty. The software I discuss here
won’t place huge demands on your PC; but to be on the safe side, you should probably use a PC that runs Windows 7 or later, packs at least 4GB of RAM, and carries a discrete video card to ensure smooth rendering when you stream movies. Optimizing Windows 8 to run on an older machine is probably the best way to go (see “How to optimize Windows 8 on old hardware,” go. pcworld.com/optwin8), but you can also introduce a few no-cost tweaks to improve performance in Windows 7 (see “How to opti-
mize your Windows PC for free,” go.pcworld.com/optwin8).
Choose the sofware that meets your needs To handle the slinging, you’ll need some reliable media server software. This software’s capabilities will determine not only the kinds of media you can share,
but also where you can share it. For example, Pogoplug PC (go. pcworld.com/pogoplugpc) is a fairly straightforward Windows utility that makes your media available on your mobile devices, other PCs, and pretty much anything with a Web browser. Just choose the folders you want to share, and then sign in to your
Services like Plex let you view streaming content anywhere.
MEDIA STREAMING
account via one of Pogoplug’s various free companion apps (go. pcworld.com/pogoplugextras, available for Android and iOS) or any browser. From there, you can open an individual photo, watch a slideshow, stream a video, or listen to music. You’re not limited to media,
either. The software can also “stream” files—convenient if, for example, you need mobile access to some Microsoft Office documents while you’re traveling for work. An integrated preview feature supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and other popular formats.
PlayOn makes sharing your PC’s media folders with smartphones, set-top boxes, and other devices a cinch.
Pogoplug also lets you share items with friends and family members, generating links others can use to view your content. Plus, you can download files if you’re working at another PC and need to pop into your home server for some documents or music. When you buy the full version of Pogoplug PC for $30, you also get 5GB of cloud storage that you can use to store items in a location where you have access to them even if your PC is ofline. If you want to be able to stream your media to your TV, too, consider PlayOn (www.playon.tv).
This media-streaming service turns your PC into something akin to a Roku box, giving you access to channels such as ABC, Food Network, Hulu, Netflix, and TBS. But it can also stream your personal media libraries (though not your documents, regrettably). What’s more, PlayOn works with most game consoles, smartphones, tablets, and set-top boxes (including Google TV and Roku). It also supports DLNA, a relatively new media-streaming standard designed to simplify home streaming. Plenty of new smart HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and the like support DLNA streaming, so you may already have a DLNAcertified device in your home. If you want to be able to see your media on your HDTV, PlayOn probably has you covered. The service and software cost $40 per year (though you can often find them on sale for less; they’re currently priced at $25 as part of a spring sale). On the other hand, if you just want to stream content from your own library and you don’t care about the premium channels, PlayOn Lite lets you do that for free. The Dropbox app lets you view cloudstored files on a phone or tablet.
MEDIA STREAMING
Plex (left) and PogoPlug work with multiple mobile devices.
Finally, there’s Plex (plexapp. com), a streaming media service that is more powerful than either Pogoplug PC or PlayOn, with such features as automatic downloading of metadata for each item in your library, and on-the-fly transcoding: If a particular video or music file isn’t directly compatible with the device you’re viewing it on, Plex will transcode it to a compatible format. Like the aforementioned PlayOn, Plex offers a number of subscription channels, including CBS, Hulu, and NBC. It even has a browser bookmarklet that you can use to add any Web video to
your queue. You also get a unique email address for sending links to your queue, which is very handy when someone shows you an awesome video on a smartphone. Just borrow the phone, email the link to yourself, and watch it on your HDTV when you get home. Unfortunately, Plex is a bit obtuse. Setting up and using the service can be confusing, and several of the company’s support pages are incomplete. But a very active user forum offers generally strong technical support. Plex Media Server software (go. pcworld.com/plexmediaserver) is free for Windows and Linux, but
MEDIA STREAMING
certain apps and features aren’t. For example, if you want to stream your stuff to another PC, you’ll have to install the free Plex desktop client on that PC. If you prefer to stream from a Web browser, you’ll have to pay a $4 monthly subscription to use the Plex browser client. Plex also offers decent apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7, but each of them costs $5.
Take advantage of your cloud storage If you just want access to all your media from your smartphone or tablet, there’s one more option to consider: cloud services. The apps for both Dropbox (go. pcworld.com/dropboxdown) and SugarSync (go.pcworld.com/ sugarsyncdown), for example, let you view your cloud-stored pho-
tos, documents, and videos on your phone or tablet. They include rudimentary music players, too—but if you want an even better mobile jukebox experience, try Google Music (currently available for Android only). If you’re already syncing your media to the cloud, you can probably cut your PC out of the equation and stream everything to an app. Dropbox and SugarSync offer free accounts with 2GB and 5GB of storage, respectively; but if you want more, you’ll have to pay for the privilege of streaming your media from someone else’s servers. It’s not a bad solution, but nothing beats the convenience of setting up a media-slinging machine that can deliver your files to you anywhere in the world on almost any device you own.
Nothing beats the convenience of setting up a media-slinging machine that can deliver your files to you anywhere in the world on almost any device.
10 HIDDEN GEMS in the
Google Play Store Move over Angry Birds. Sayonara, Spotify. Here are the apps you should have on your Android device right now. BY LIANE CASSAVOY ILLUSTRATIONS BY FLORAFAUNA
10 HIDDEN GEMS
F
inding high-quality Android apps in the Google Play Store can be challenging—what with 700,000 or so titles to choose from. Let us help. Here are ten apps that you may not have stumbled across yet, all of which have impressed us in some way. While these gems may not change your life, they just might make your day a little easier or a little more fun.
AutomateIt
1
Your smartphone is pretty smart, but apps like AutomateIt (go. pcworld.com/automateit) can make it even smarter. The app lets you automate actions on your phone, so that whenever certain criteria are met, the action is triggered. You can use AutomateIt for a variety of tasks, including sending a reply with your phone’s location whenever a person texts you asking where you are. Or you can use it to turn Wi-Fi on and off under certain conditions to save battery life. You can even have AutomateIt switch your phone to vibrate mode whenever a meeting saved on your calendar starts. If all of these settings seem a little too utilitarian, and just not fun enough, consider this: You also can use AutomateIt to play audio that says “Don’t Touch Me!” whenever anyone comes too close to the proximity sensor on your phone. Add it for free.
8tracks radio
2
Finding new music can often be even more challenging that finding new apps. A lot of what’s out there is junk, and what sounds melodious to some may sound like dying cats to you. That’s where 8tracks radio (go. pcworld.com/8tracks) shines: This app boasts almost 1 million playlists, each of which has been created by “someone who knows and loves music.” You can browse through music by genres, artists, activity or mood tags, and more. Add it
for free.
GymPact
3
Having trouble finding the motivation to exercise? Maybe a financial incentive would help. That’s where GymPact (go.pcworld. com/gympact) comes in. This app pushes you to exercise by punishing you financially when you miss a planned workout. With GymPact, you create your own exercise schedule—basically how many days a week you’re planning to workout. Then, you create a financial stake—an amount that you’re willing to pay if you don’t work out. If you miss a workout, GymPact pockets your dues. If you work out as scheduled, GymPact pays you back, using the money it collects from all those folks who missed their workouts. You won’t get rich using GymPact, but you will get in shape and maybe earn enough to buy a pack of gum. Add it for free.
10 HIDDEN GEMS
Car Locator
4
You may not want to admit it, but chances are you’ve forgotten where you parked your car at least once—if not more. Instead of wandering around the parking lot, install Car Locator (go. pcworld.com/carlocator). This app lets you save the location of your parked car, and then helps you find your way back to it when it’s time to head home. Car Locator also keeps track of how long your car has been parked, which is helpful if you’re trying to avoid parking tickets or steep garage fines. Just make sure you don’t get caught feeding the meter. Add it for $4.
Super Swiss Army Knife
5
Okay, so it can’t turn your smartphone into an actual knife, but short of that, there’s not much Super Swiss Army Knife (go.pcworld.com/superswiss) can’t do. You can use the app to transform your phone into a flashlight or ruler, or even a protractor (handy if you have a geometry problem that needs solving). Super Swiss Army Knife also allows you to measure the distance between you and another object, as well as the height of that object. If you’re hanging artwork, you’ll appreciate the app’s bubble-level tool, which helps you check whether objects are level, and the cross-vertical-measure tool, which tells you whether an item is level and—if it’s not—the angle of deviation. Add it for free.
AutoRotate Switch
6
Sometimes, the best ideas are the simplest ones. Case in point: AutoRotate Switch (go.pcworld.com/autorotate). This handy little app lets you turn your phone’s automatic screen rotation off and on. If you’ve ever been annoyed by a screen that rotates from landscape to portrait view when you lie down in bed or flop down on the couch, you’ll appreciate AutoRotate Switch. Add it for free.
SnapPea
7
SnapPea (go.pcworld.com/ snappea) allows you to transfer files—whether they’re photos, songs, videos, or more—between your desktop computer and your phone. It also allows you to control your Android phone from your computer, using either a Web browser or a downloadable desktop application. It’s almost like iTunes for Android, but without some of the restrictions that Apple imposes. Add it for free.
10 HIDDEN GEMS
Snaptastic
8
Smartphone cameras have improved dramatically these last few years, but their photoediting capabilities have lagged behind. Snaptastic (go.pcworld.com/snaptastic) helps rectify this problem by giving you easy-to-use tools for cropping and editing your photos. With the app installed, you’ll be able to adjust characteristics of your photos, such as exposure and color saturation, and easily post your customized creations to your social networks. A free, ad-supported version of the app is also available if you want to try out Snaptastic before spending your dough. Add it for $3.
SpellTower
9
If Bejeweled and Words With Friends had a love child, it might look like SpellTower (go.pcworld.com/spelltower), one of the most addictive word games around. The object is to find words hidden within a grid of letters. Once you swipe or tap the letters to make the word, they disappear and new ones take their place. SpellTower includes a multiplayer option and different game modes, almost ensuring that you’ll never want to put it down.
Add it for $2.
Uber
10
Here’s a little secret: You don’t have to be fabulously wealthy or famous to have your own private driver. Uber (go. pcworld.com/uber) can hook you up with a driver and make you feel like a VIP. This app, which works in select cities in the United States and around the world, lets you request a ride when you need one. You pinpoint your location on a map, and a car is sent to pick you up. You can choose between a sleek, black sedan or an SUV for larger parties, and the fare—which is comparable to cab fares in many cities—is automatically charged to your credit card, no tipping needed. Business users will appreciate that receipts are automatically emailed to you, and everyone will like the way Uber lets you ride in style. Add it for free.
How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear.
HERE’S HOW
Build the ultimate Intel Haswell PC for under $1000 The new CPUs require a new motherboard, so why not build a new rig? BY MARCO CHIAPPETTA
I
NTEL’S FOURTH-GENERATION CORE
processors, code-named Haswell, have arrived. And like the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors before them, Haswell is a big step forward, maximizing CPU and GPU performance while also consuming less power. Unfortunately, Haswell-based processors use a new socket—the LGA 1150—and thus require motherboards built around Intel’s Series 8 chipsets. But that problem also presents an opportunity: Since you can’t just drop a Haswell CPU into your current PC, now is the perfect time to build a killer Haswell-based rig. And you can do it for less than a grand.
Component hunting
The complete parts list PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-4770K ($339) MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte Z87-UD3H ($180) GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X ($135) MEMORY: 8GB (4GB x 2) Kingston HyperX Black DDR3-1600 Dual-Channel Kit ($49) CASE: NZXT Source 210 Mid-Tower ($35)
OS DRIVE: Typically, you get the best value in desktop AData SX900 128GB SSD ($119) processors a bin or two below the top-of-theline products. For example, a Core i7-3770 BULK STORAGE: costs about $40 (or 15 percent) less than a WD Caviar Blue 500GB, 7200RPM, Core i7-3770K ($289 vs. $329), but it delivers 64MB Cache HDD ($59) roughly 98 percent of the latOPTICAL DRIVE: ter’s performance. But with Lite-On SATA DVD-R ($18) Haswell-based CPUs, the PSU: price delta is a bit smaller. FSP Group Raider 450W The top-of-the-line, fully Haswell-ready power supply ($55) unlocked (and thus overclockable) Core i7-4770K Total cost for the hardware at the is $339. A time of this writing: $989 non-K Core i7-4770 with a 100MHz lower base clock costs $309. The performance difference is small, and you could easily spend the $30 you’d save with the plain 4770 on
Case NZXT Source 210 Mid-Tower
PSU FSP Group Raider 450W Haswell-ready power supply
other components. But I wanted the best that Haswell had to offer, so I sprang for the Intel Core i7-4770K (go.pcworld.com/corei74770k). Choosing a new motherboard was the next step. I wanted a full complement of enthusiast-class features, but I didn’t want to spend a ton of money for extras. I settled on Gigabyte’s $180 Z87-UD3H (go. pcworld.com/gigabytez87ud3h). This board features Intel’s Z87 Express chipset, but Gigabyte doesn’t overload it with ports and third-party controllers. Also, the board’s basic accessory bundle helps keep costs down. Next up was the GPU. Haswell uses Intel’s most powerful and feature-rich on-processor graphics engine, but with a $1000 budget, I had some room to spice things up a bit. Even though I wasn’t building a gaming PC, I wanted to be able to play the latest games. I chose Sapphire’s $135 Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X (go.pcworld.com/ radeon7790). It supports the full DirectX 11 feature set and can run
HERE’S HOW
Motherboard Gigabyte Z87-UD3H Processor Intel Core i7-4770K
any game on the market today. Best of all, it comes with top-notch games, including Crysis 3, BioShock: Infinite, and Far Cry 3. In fact, the total value of the game bundle exceeds the cost of the card. For the memory and storage, I wanted bang for the buck. Intel’s new CPUs support a peak official memory speed of 1600MHz and work best with a dual-channel memory configuration. I went with the most affordable dual-channel DDR3-1600 memory kit I could find: Kingston’s $49 HyperX Black (go.pcworld.com/hyperx). It contains two 4GB sticks, with low-profile heat spreaders and official support for 1600MHz operation.
Dynamic storage duo Pairing Intel’s fastest Haswell CPU with slow storage wouldn’t do it justice, so I opted for a mix of solid-state and traditional rotating media. I chose a 128GB AData SX900 SSD (go.pcworld.com/sx900). The $119
Memory 8GB (4GB x 2) Kingston HyperX Black DDR3-1600 Dual-Channel Kit
GPU Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X
AData SX900 has an LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller, read and write speeds of 550MB per second and 520MB per second, respectively, and room for the operating system and most commonly used applications. To complement the SSD, I needed something that offered more capacity but wouldn’t break the bank. I chose a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive (go.pcworld.com/wdcaviar). It has 64MB of cache and a fairly swift spindle speed of 7200 rpm, and I snapped it up for $59. I also picked up a Lite-On DVD-R optical drive (go.pcworld.com/liteondvdr)—I was willing to invest $18 to gain the ability to burn or access a disc. Normally I would spring for a high-end case with plenty of cooling, but luckily, Haswell isn’t particularly power-hungry, nor is the Radeon HD 7790 GPU. So a mainstream midsize tower with a few fans and an open floor plan would do just fine. I opted for NZXT’s Source 210 (go. pcworld.com/source210), a great tower case for the price (about $35).
HERE’S HOW
Optical drive Lite-On SATA DVD-R
OS drive AData SX900 128GB SSD
Bulk storage WD Caviar Blue 500GB, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache HDD
Last up: a power supply unit. A high-efficiency, Haswell-ready PSU is critical, so I went with FSP’s Group Raider (go.pcworld.com/groupraider) for three reasons: Its 450W capacity is plenty beefy, the unit is Haswellready and 80-Plus Bronze certified, and the manufacturer is reputable.
Puting it all together Assembling the system is fairly easy. Start by installing the CPU on the motherboard and affixing the cooler. The CPU fits into the socket in only one way and requires no force. Simply lift the locking lever and the socket lid, pop in the CPU, and lock the lid and lever down again. To install the cooler, line up the mounting pegs with the correct holes around the CPU socket on the motherboard and push down firmly on the four locking pins that surround the heat sink. Next, snap the memory into DIMM slots 1 and 2 on the motherboard, and you’re ready to get things mounted.
Mount the motherboard in the case, and install the drives in open bays that line up with the SATA ports on the motherboard, to facilitate cable routing. Next, install the graphics card and connect the case’s front-panel wiring to the motherboard. Last, connect the drives’ data cables. Now you’re ready to add the power supply. Secure the PSU in place with the necessary screws, and try to route each power cable behind the motherboard tray, to keep the area over the motherboard and graphics card cable-free and to improve airflow. Finally, install an operating system (I chose Windows 8 Pro x64). For more help with assembling a system, read our PC building best practices for both hardware (go.pcworld.com/hh3110hw) and software (go.pcworld.com/ hh3110sw). I N STA L L AT I O N P H OTO G R A P H S : RO B E RT C A R D I N
Here’s the way everything should look if you’ve built your PC correctly. Note that the cables are neatly routed for easy access and maximum efficiency.
HERE’S HOW
When Malware Strikes: How to clean an infected PC BY LINCOLN SPECTOR
YOU WORK HARD to protect your PC from malware, but against all odds, your computer can still become infested with a virus. Here’s a methodical approach that you can use to determine what exactly the problem is and how to scan your system for infections.
1.
Verify the infection
Is the PC in question really infected? Or are you dealing with a hardware or software problem, or is it user error?
If your PC is unusually slow, be suspicious. But before you decide that a virus is responsible, launch the Windows Task Manager (right-click the Windows taskbar, and select Task Manager from the pop-up menu). Open the Processes tab, and check for any strange background applications—especially those with nonsensical names and no recognizable authority listed in the description.
2.
Check for sure signs of malware
3.
Check online for possible fixes
4.
Assume that your old virus scanner is compromised
5.
Use a lightweight scanner inside Safe Mode
If your PC suddenly won’t load utilities—such as msconfig or regedit—that might help you manually remove malware, be on guard. If your antivirus program suddenly stops loading, that’s a huge red flag. Or if a program you don’t recognize suddenly pops up and starts displaying dire warnings and asks you to run an executable file or requests your credit card number, your PC is definitely infected with some nasty malware.
One benefit of those scary pop-ups, however, is that you might be able to use them to find a cure. Do a Web search for phrases that appear in the pop-up—you’ll probably find other people fighting the same infection. Their experiences could help you identify your enemy or explain how to remove the malware. Remember to perform a full scan of your PC after you’ve followed any instructions, even ours.
You need a fresh malware scanner, and you need to run it in an environment where the malware can’t load first. Linux is your best bet, but first try booting into Windows Safe Mode (see next step).
Windows’ Safe Mode boots a minimal version of the operating system. It doesn’t load most startup applications, and likely won’t load the malware.
HERE’S HOW Use Windows’ boot menu to access Safe Mode.
To enter Safe Mode, boot your computer and press the function key repeatedly from the moment the motherboard manufacturer’s logo appears until you get the boot menu. In the boot menu, select Safe Mode with Networking. Then open Internet Explorer (the best browser to use in Safe Mode) and run an online virus scanner such as Bitdefender (go.pcworld.com/bitdef). Another good choice is the ESET Online Scanner (go.pcworld.com/ eset), a Web-based virus-detection app. Before you start the scan, click Advanced settings and enable as many levels of scrutiny as you can, including scanning file archives and browser data. Another good scanner is Trend Micro’s HouseCall (go.pcworld.com/ housecall). You can download HouseCall on another computer and copy it to a flash drive, to create a portable PC virus scanner. (You’ll need an Internet connection to get virus-definition updates.) Before you click the big blue Scan Now button, click Settings and select Full system scan. Be sure to select the slowest, most thorough scan. The process will—and should—take hours. When that first scan is done, run another scan with a different scanner, just to be safe.
6.
Look to Linux as your last line of defense
If you still have an infection after running multiple scans in Safe Mode, bypass Windows and avoid booting from the hard drive. To do that, use a bootable CD or flash drive running a Linux-based antivirus utility. You don’t have to know Linux to take this step. But you do need an Internet connection so that the scanner can update its malware database. First, download a bootable virus scanner as an .iso file. From that file, create a bootable CD. In Windows 7, double-click the file and follow the prompts. In Windows 8, right-click the file and select Burn disc image. For earlier versions of Windows, you’ll need a third-party program such as the free ISO Recorder (go. pcworld.com/isorec). The Kaspersky Rescue Disk has a Windows-like interface. But before using it, you must update the software’s malware dictionary. Select the Update Center tab and click Start update. Once the utility is updated, return to the Objects Scan tab, click Settings, and set the security level to the highest position. Make sure all of your hard drives are selected before you start the scan.
7.
Protect your newly disinfected PC
When you’re satisfied that your drive is clean, reboot into Windows and uninstall your old, now-compromised antivirus program. Then either reinstall the program and update to the latest version, or install different program.
When you boot your PC with the Kaspersky Rescue Disk utility, you’ll find yourself in a custom Linux environment.
HERE’S HOW
How to back up your PC before trying Win 8.1 BY BRAD CHACOS RELEASE PREVIEWS ARE never for the faint of heart. Trial software is
prone to meting out all sorts of bumps and bruises, and if something goes really, truly rotten, you could wind up with a complete (and inadvertent) system wipe on your hands. Now, the Windows 8.1 preview seems remarkably stable as far as these things go, but that doesn’t mean you should throw caution to the wind before you install the software. In case you aren’t already alarmed enough by Microsoft’s stern “This may go so badly that you might want to contact your PC manufacturer” warnings when you try to install the update, we’ve heard several reports of people running into repeated Windows 8.1 installation problems. Heck, we’ve run into installation failures on multiple machines ourselves.
None of them were disastrous, but why tempt fate? Much better to get your proverbial ducks in a row before you take Windows 8.1 for a test-drive. You know—just in case.
How to prepare for Windows 8.1 You should always back up all your important data before you go poking around your PC at the operating system level. Rather than detailing how to do that here, I’ll point you to this excellent primer on the myriad ways to back up your files (go.pcworld.com/bufiles). That’s not all you need to do, though. A recovery drive can help you restore your Windows 8 installation if your Windows 8.1 adventure somehow goes horribly wrong. Fortunately, Windows 8 makes it easy to create just such a drive. Here’s how to do it. You’ll need a USB drive with a bit of space on it; just how much space depends on the size of your recovery partition, assuming you even have one of your computer. Windows will let you know how much space you need as part of the process of creating a recovery drive. According to Microsoft’s FAQ (go.pcworld.com/msfaq), the standard recovery partition requires 3GB to 6GB of space. If you don’t have a dedicated recovery partition and just want to create a recovery image
A recovery drive will help you restore your Windows 8 setup if things go awry with Windows 81.
HERE’S HOW
“ Tales of installation woes drive home the point: Back up your system before you try Windows 8.1.”
to help you troubleshoot, refresh, and restore a borked PC, that requires 256MB of space. Once you’ve gotten your hands on an appropriate drive, slap it in your PC. Be sure to save the data on the drive to your PC or to another backup source; the process of creating a recovery drive wipes all the data on your memory stick. Got it so far? Good. Open the charm bar, select Search, and type Recovery. Then click the Settings filter in the right-hand charm menu. You’ll see a Create a Recovery Drive option; select it. A wizard pops up and from here, the process is pretty straightforward. Just be sure to select the right drive when you’re asked for a location, because accidentally wiping the wrong storage device would be a major headache.
Go forth and tinker If you end up needing to restore your OS with the recovery drive, you’ll need to have your Windows 8 installation disc or drive on hand, so make sure you know where that’s at, too. With your data stored in a safe place and a recovery image stored on a flash drive, you’re ready to try all the goodies in Windows 8.1 with nary a thing to sweat about. Check out our guide to installing the Windows 8.1 preview (go.pcworld.com/win81install), which outlines the system requirements you need, the caveats you need to be aware of, and walks you through the entire process.
HASSLE-FREE PC BY RICK BROIDA
Fix pages that print too small READER TAMMY WROTE in to share this hassle:
“Whenever I try to print a page from the Internet, the size of the print and the photos is extremely small and difficult to read. I do not have this problem with Microsoft Word documents.” Tammy said she runs Windows 8, but she neglected to specify which Web browser she uses—so I’m going to assume that it’s Internet Explorer. Let me be the first to note that Internet Explorer can be terrible when it comes to printing. On my Windows 8 system, for example, I went to any number of pages on Microsoft’s MSN (the default site for Internet Explorer) and then selected Print Preview. The result I got every single time was several
HERE’S HOW
Tweak IE’s setting from ‘Shrink to Fit’ to ‘100%’ to make webpages you print out more readable.
pages containing little more than links, with none of the actual text of the story I was viewing. So Tammy’s printing problem is not her fault. (It’s Microsoft’s. And it’s ridiculous.) When webpages print out too small, the likely culprit is the ‘Shrink to Fit’ option, which Internet Explorer uses by default to try to squeeze all the elements of a webpage onto a single sheet of paper—often at the expense of readability. Thankfully, this problem is easy enough to fix. Here’s how:
1.
Preview your page
In Internet Explorer, while you’re viewing the webpage you want to print, click the little gear icon in the upper-right corner and choose Print Preview.
2.
Shrink to fit
In the preview window that appears, notice that in the toolbar’s print-size selector, the default setting is Shrink to Fit. Click that pull-down menu and choose 100%.
3.
Tweak it till it’s right
Now you should see bigger text and photos. If everything looks good, go ahead and click the printer icon to proceed with printing. If you’re not happy with the way it all looks, click the selector again and choose a different zoom setting. It’s worth noting that your printer drivers could be a factor here as well. If you press -P and access the printer’s properties/settings, you can look for a zoom setting that might be overriding the browser’s settings. You may also want to look for a Print or “printer-friendly” option on the page you’re viewing, which will usually strip away the extraneous graphics, ads, and whatnot that can fudge up the formatting (and cause smaller-than-desirable print and graphics). Finally, if you’re a Chrome user, check out the Print Friendly extension (go.pcworld.com/printfriendly), which gives you much greater control over all the webpages you print.
ANSWER LINE BY LINCOLN SPECTOR
HERE’S HOW
Wipe files—or your whole drive
Q: A:
How do I delete files off a hard drive so that they can
never be restored?” —Rommel
When you delete a file, it doesn’t actually go away— even after you’ve emptied the Recycle Bin. The actual bits remain written on the drive until some other disk activity writes over them. Even after you reformat a drive, the files can still be read by those who want—and know how—to read them. To truly and securely delete a file, or the contents of an entire drive, you need software that will overwrite the space where the file(s) once resided. Fortunately, several free programs can do this. First, I recommend Eraser (go.pcworld.com/3109hh1), which integrates with Windows Explorer. Once you’ve installed the utility, you can just right-click a file or folder and select Eraser. From there, you can choose to erase the file immediately or the next time you boot—handy if Windows won’t let you erase it now.
» PLUS: Make use of an old hard drive.
Eraser lets you securely delete a sensitive file or folder with a single click.
Another option is to delete the files the conventional way—by emptying the recycle bin—and then use CCleaner (go.pcworld. com/3109hh2) to overwrite your drive’s free space. This extremely useful tool can do all sorts of Windows scrubbing chores. You’ll find CCleaner’s Drive Wiper tool in the Tools tab. Both of these programs offer various wiping techniques that overwrite the drive space multiple times. The implication, of course, is that overwriting a file 35 times is more secure than overwriting it only once. But according to Russell Chozick of data-recovery firm Flashback Data, one pass is enough with today’s drives. Chozick told me that it “used to be possible to see what was overwritten, but now data is too dense, [making] a single-pass overwrite sufficient.” Something else to think about: If you have sensitive files that you’ll eventually want to securely delete, you should encrypt them now. For this task, I recommend the open-source Truecrypt (donation requested; go.pcworld.com/3109hh3).
CCleaner removes all traces of deleted files by overwriting your drive’s free space.
Q:
I have an extra hard drive. What can I do with it? —Carol Hart
A:
One useful thing you can do with an old drive is to give it away—to a friend, a school, or a nonprofit, for example. Before you donate the drive, however, you need to make sure it contains no files that might embarrass you or that might prove valuable to identity thieves. See “Wipe Files—or Your Whole Drive,” above, for details. You can also make use of the drive yourself. If your computer has an extra drive bay (which is likely if you have a desktop PC), you can install an old internal drive and gain a bit more storage. Assuming that the drive connects via today’s standard SATA interface, this is a simple operation. Older drives may use an IDE interface, which your PC’s motherboard might not support. Finally, you can turn an internal drive into an external one. All you need is a USB enclosure. These generally cost about $20, but I’ve seen them for as little as $10. One more thing: If your PC doesn’t recognize the drive, read my advice about how to fix this problem (go.pcworld.com/3109hh4). And though my advice in that story focuses on internal drives, it works for external drives, as well.
HERE’S HOW
Four ways to make Internet Explorer more secure BY ERIC GEIER HOW WELL INTERNET Explorer—or any Web browser, for that matter—protects against attacks greatly depends on whether you keep it up-to-date and have the right security settings. Here’s how to take the proper security measures with Internet Explorer 9 and 10.
Keep IE Updated The latest versions of the browser often contain new security features, so be sure you have the latest version installed, and that you keep it updated. IE 10 is the most current version, and it comes bundled with Windows 8. Microsoft also offers IE 10 for those running Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 installed. But if you’re running Windows Vista, you’re stuck with using IE 9. To determine whether you have the latest version of IE installed, open IE, press the key, open the Help menu, and select About Internet Explorer.
Check to see if you have the latest version of IE installed.
If needed, you can download IE 10 for Windows 7 (go.pcworld.com/ie10win7) or IE 9 for Windows Vista (go.pcworld.com/ie9vista). Once you have the latest version installed, keep it updated with the latest security patches. To do this, open IE, press the key, select the Tools menu, and choose Windows Update. If you’re using Windows 8, open IE in the desktop interface. In the Windows Update window that appears, click Check for updates, and install IE or other updates. To ensure that you stay up-todate, consider having updates installed automatically.
Check for Add-on Updates Many browser attacks exploit security vulnerabilities that affect popular add-ons like Adobe Flash Player or Java, so you should install updates for those as soon as you get the update nag message. Also consider periodically running a scan with free tools like Qualys BrowserCheck (go.pcworld.com/hhqualsys) or Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) (go.pcworld.com/hhpsi).
Verify or Adjust Security Levels IE lets you set custom security settings for different zones: Internet, Local Intranet, Trusted Sites, and Restricted Sites. When you visit a website, IE automatically classifies it as in the Internet zone. The exceptions are websites hosted by your local network (say, a site set
You can customize the security settings for the different types of sites you browse.
HERE’S HOW
up for use on your company’s network)—then it’s Local Intranet—or sites that you’ve added to the Trusted or Restricted lists beforehand. Though IE sets each zone to an acceptable level by default, you may want to double-check your settings for each zone and even turn them up for greater protection. Open IE, press the Alt key, select the Tools menu, and click Internet Options. If you’re using Windows 8, open IE from the traditional desktop interface to get at these options. From the Internet Options window, select the Security tab; you’ll then see icons for each security zone, which you can click to change their security level. The Internet zone is set to Medium-high by default, Local Intranet is Medium-low, Trusted Sites is Medium, and Restricted Sites is High. In addition, the Internet and Restricted Sites zones both have Protected Mode enabled (which alerts you when webpages try to install or run programs). I recommend that you use these default levels.
Use SmartScreen Filtering In IE 8, Microsoft added the SmartScreen filter, which helps block dangerous websites and downloads. It should be enabled by default, but in case it’s not, open IE, press the key, open the Tools menu, and select SmartScreen Filter. If you see Turn On SmartScreen Filter, click it.
Here’s what you’ll see if SmartScreen filtering encounters a potentially harmful site.
Four great, free Google Drive tools BY MARK O’NEILL
THOUGH ONLY ABOUT a year old, Google Drive is already a popular
service, and its prices put Dropbox to shame. On Google Drive, 100GB costs $5 a month—half what Dropbox charges. But Google Drive becomes even more useful when you take advantage of thirdparty add-ons and services. These five free, easy-to-use tools help you encrypt your data, play music, collaborate on slides, back up automatically, share files, and more. Some live on the desktop, some in Chrome, and some online.
HERE’S HOW
1 BoxCryptor go.pcworld.com/ boxcryptor
2 DriveTunes go.pcworld.com/ drivetunes
» You may be too security-conscious to leave files on a remote server. Fair enough. But don’t let it keep you from using the cloud. BoxCryptor is a Windows desktop app that creates an encrypted folder that you can place in your Google Drive folder. After you create the folder and assign a password, simply drag and drop the files you want protected into that folder. BoxCryptor instantly encrypts and protects them using the AES-256 encryption standard. To unlock the folder and view your files, run BoxCryptor, navigate to the encrypted folder, and enter your password.
» Cloud storage offers a simple way of ensuring that your music is always available from anywhere you have an Internet connection. Google Drive does not as yet provide a default music player, but the DriveTunes app for the Chrome browser gives you another option. DriveTunes places a music player inside your Google Drive folder. It automatically detects all MP3 and M4A music files inside your Drive and lists them in an easy-to-view interface. You simply double-click a song to hear it. The player is bare-bones—no album art, equalizers, or playlists. It plays your music and that’s it.
3 Google Slides go.pcworld.com/ googleslides
»
As long as there are businesses, there will be slideshows. But what if you have to develop a presentation with a colleague who’s located elsewhere? That’s where the collaborative power of Google Drive comes into play. The Chrome app Google Slides lets you create slide presentations of any size, with a variety of themes and rich animations, and then add your comments right in the file—no more tedious email threads.
4 IFTTT go.pcworld.com/ ifttt2
»
Sending files and backups to cloud storage is a great idea, but it’s a chore we all too often forget or avoid. The free Web service IFTTT—which stands for If This Then That—makes the job easier by automating these tasks in the background, so you don’t have to even think about it.
HERE’S HOW
Never miss an opportunity to plug your laptop into an AC outlet to top off its battery.
Maximize your laptop’s battery life BY PAUL MAHARAJA YOU ADORE YOUR laptop—it’s the key to your competitive edge. That is, until its battery croaks. To avoid that scenario, follow these tips to maximize your laptop’s runtime.
1.
Plug in whenever possible
A common misconception about laptops is that leaving the system plugged into AC power continuously will overcharge or shorten the life of its battery. But lithium ion batteries in today’s laptops stop charging once they reach full capacity. Keeping the battery charged reduces wear and tear on the power source, lengthening its life span.
2.
Adjust the screen brightness
3.
Track down errant apps
A laptop’s display consumes a sizable chunk of the system’s juice. Keeping the screen’s backlight low can increase your laptop’s runtime noticeably. Another way to reduce power consumption is to tweak the backlight controls in Windows. Open Control Panel, choose Hardware and Sound u Power Options, and click Change plan settings for the active power plan. Choose an aggressive timeout of 1 to 3 minutes for the ‘Dim the display’ and ‘Turn off the display’ options. You can also click Change advanced power settings to set the level of brightness when the laptop is in the dimmed state.
Unnecessary utilities running in the background, or an app that is hanging, can drain a battery prematurely. Web browsers are also common culprits. One clue to the existence of an errant app is if your laptop fan frequently kicks into high gear when the machine should be idle.
Be aggressive in conserving power while your laptop is running on battery power.
HERE’S HOW
To identify such apps, press -, launch Windows Task Manager, and use it to identify processes that are showing unexplained high utilization. If a program won’t quit normally, terminate it by right-clicking it and selecting Kill Process. For Web browsers, shutting off all instances usually works. As a last resort, restart your system.
4.
Disable intensive background apps:
5.
Disable unneeded devices:
Errant apps aside, applications that make intensive use of the processor or network—such as peer-to-peer software like BitTorrent clients—are out. You can also confirm that Windows Update and other software updaters are not trying to download large software patches. Disabling automatic Windows Update functions outright is too draconian, but periodically check your network usage for unexplained spikes.
Start by disabling unneeded wireless capabilities, such as built-in data modems and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios (many laptops have hardware switches for this purpose). The optical drive is another power guzzler, so don’t leave a disc in the drive if you aren’t using it. Finally, you can save precious power by doing without keyboard backlighting when you’re running on battery power.
Use the tabs in Windows Task Manager to identify and kill errant programs that are sucking up battery life unnecessarily.
n
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Tech Spotlight A video showcase of the latest trends
A look at 3D Printing
» 3D printing is becoming more and more popular, with kits getting cheaper and easier to assemble—preassembled printers are increasingly available, too. They work by layering plastic less than a millimeter thick to create just about anything you can think up: custom toys, household objects, and more. Watch the video to see a 3D printer kit’s assembly, and learn a bit about the process (go.pcworld.com/3Dvideo).
