Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i PCWorld

Move over, Wi-Fi 6E! Chip vendors like Qualcomm are making plans for Wi-Fi 7, the next generation of Wi-Fi technology. Qualcomm said at Mobile World Congress 2022 that it plans to launch the world’s first Wi-Fi 7 chip, the FastConnect 7800, as part of its new premium Snapdragon Connect specification by the end of 2022. The Wi-Fi 7 specification, also known as 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (or just 802.11be), isn’t even close to being completed — the IEEE’s current paper on the current status of 802.11be calls for the standard’s ratification sometime in 2024. But as with previous Wi-Fi standards, that isn’t stopping vendors from developing silicon based upon draft releases, tweaking them via firmware or other updates as the specification moves through its final approval process. Yes, Wi-Fi 7 will…

Google has released Chrome OS Flex, a way to take older Windows and Mac hardware and replace the operating system, turning them into Chromebooks. It’s an interesting development given Windows 11’s strict hardware requirements, which could leave legions of older PCs stranded when Windows 10 goes end-of-life in 2025. Although Google is calling Chrome OS Flex an “early access” and “unstable” project, the concept is intriguing: Instead of disposing an old PC that’s nearing the end of its life, you can turn it into a Chromebook instead. Google has launched the new operating system on its dedicated Chrome OS Flex site, though you’ll have to sign up with an email to receive download instructions. Google appears to be positioning Chrome OS Flex for a dual purpose: a way for consumers…

Windows 11 has continued to tack away from its launch state, issuing new features that are mainly course corrections from its initial approach. Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22563 is a case in point, bringing fixes to the taskbar for tablets and an improved Widgets experience. It’s a theme we talked about in our recent video describing the Windows 11 spring 2022 “update”: Microsoft released its new Windows 11 OS, users complained, so Microsoft backtracked. For example, Microsoft released Windows 11 with minimal changes to the taskbar experience for tablets such as the Surface Pro 8. Specifically, while Windows 10 alters the taskbar when a tablet like the SP8 is undocked, Windows 11’s stable configuration leaves it largely unchanged. Build 22563 makes a welcome change. One of the concerns with a…

A lot of people looking for a solid VPN have one primary consideration: the need for speed. Privacy and anonymity are great, but if it means slow-as-molasses connections, most people will opt out in favor of a speed demon. Faster speeds mean a better streaming experience, faster file downloads, quicker website load times, and just a better all-around experience. Of course, when it comes to speeds there are actually two considerations. Download speeds are the primary concern because most people depend on getting data from remote servers as quickly as possible. For some, however, upload speeds for sending data to the internet are just as important. Gamers, for example, need what they’re doing to hit servers as quickly as possible. We tend not to publish upload speeds in our reviews…

Cloud storage is a big business, and it’s sold by the same corporations that make components of the laptops that are stocked on store shelves all over the world. So it makes sense that they’re giving away “free” cloud storage with the purchase of new PCs. But exercise a smidgen of caution before you load up a hundred gigs or so of cloud space with your essential documents or precious memories. Unlike the soupçon of free storage given away with new accounts at places like OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive, the larger freebies that are associated with a new laptop purchase come with a time limit. This concept will be familiar if you’ve ever accepted a free trial for, say, Norton Antivirus after booting up a new laptop. After a year…

New Fitbit owners often expect that manual tracking of a walk or run will count toward their daily steps. Unfortunately, the Fitbit dashboard doesn’t work that way. It’ll let you track the exercise, but it won’t count the activity toward your daily step count. Upon realizing this fact, most people assume they’re out of luck whenever they forget to wear their Fitbit. That’s not the case—you can get around this problem with Fitbit’s MobileTrack feature. HOW TO TURN ON FITBIT MOBILETRACK Fitbit MobileTrack treats your smartphone as a basic tracker. It pulls in the step data your phone collects and then calculates the distance you’ve covered and calories burned. As you’d expect, this solution works only when you turn MobileTrack on before the end of your walk or run. You can’t…

Valve’s Steam Deck is finally here. If you’re still on the fence or wondering what all the fuss is about, we’ve corralled just about everything you could possibly want to know about the hottest PC game machine of 2022. WHAT IS THE STEAM DECK? The Steam Deck is Valve’s foray into the world of portable gaming, a machine broadly modeled after Nintendo’s excellent Switch console design, but running on conventional PC hardware. That means it runs a full desktop operating system and in theory can play more games than any portable game machine ever built. This is far from the first portable game machine with full PC parts. But with Valve baking the incredibly popular Steam platform right into the hardware, and introducing it at an unprecedented low price, its introduction…

Apple’s new Mac Studio not only includes what could be the most powerful processor in the PC landscape, but also exposes (and solves) many of the weaknesses of its direct rival, Microsoft’s Surface Studio. If Microsoft takes these lessons to heart, however, imagine what a Surface Studio 3 could look like. Microsoft’s gorgeous all-in-one hasn’t been refreshed in years, but its iconic swiveling 28-inch PixelSense touch display captured both hearts and minds when the $4,100 Surface Studio first debuted in 2017. Now Apple’s Mac Studio, a $3,999 small-form-factor Mac, has stepped in to fill the void, with the $1,599 Apple Studio Display sitting alongside. Microsoft’s hardware division has held its head high throughout the last decade or so, shipping everything from tablets to laptops to unique combinations of the two. Apple, meanwhile,…

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has announced a new DisplayPort certification called Ultra-High Bit Rate (UHBR) for DisplayPort 2.0. It establishes two levels of certification, DP40 and DP80, that mark cables as capable of up to 40 and 80 gigabits of data, respectively. VESA intends this to clear up any confusion, but I’ll bet it has left you scratching your head. Here’s what UHBR means for you. WHAT IS DISPLAYPORT UHBR? DisplayPort Ultra-High Bit Rate (UHBR), a set of transmission modes included in the DisplayPort 2.0 standard, comes in three flavors. UHBR promises a certain minimum bandwidth per DisplayPort lane. DisplayPort 2.0 has four lanes, so effective bandwidth in use is four times what each UHBR transmission mode provides. Here’s the breakdown. • UHBR 10 (4×10 = 40Gbps) • UHBR…

McAfee is not the same company it was a few months ago. The longtime antivirus maker sold off its enterprise business in early 2021 to focus on serving the consumer market, including individuals and families. To that end the current suite is all about identity and privacy. As the company sees it, these are the issues that people care about most. Protection from viruses and malware is still important, of course, but from McAfee’s point of view the focus of new features is currently on identity and privacy, of which device security is inevitably one part. This philosophy is a continuation of where McAfee was already headed the last time we looked at Total Protection. For 2022, Total Protection has again adopted a new app design on Windows that builds…

Adobe Acrobat remains the gold standard for PDF editors—as well as the most expensive. Given the cost of upgrading from Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with the differences between the company’s two paid products for individuals: Adobe Acrobat Standard DC and Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (which cost $12.99 a month and $14.99 a month, respectively, with an annual commitment). While both versions will get you the desktop software, access to Adobe Document Cloud services for storing and sharing files, and an Adobe Sign subscription to sign and collect legal electronic and digital signatures on any device, there are some differences in features and capabilities that may make one or the other better suited to your needs. HOW THEY’RE SIMILAR It’s easiest to start with how Acrobat Standard…

I’m just going to come out and say it: Printers are the most unfairly maligned technology in modern history. Despite all the condescension they get, printers do a lot of things right, especially compared to other tech gear. They don’t scream for your attention so they can serve you targeted advertising. They’re not trotted out at press events where slick executives hawk barely improved versions of what you already have. They aren’t rendered obsolete by the march of annual software updates. Instead, printers keep a low profile, only whirring and churning into action to copy a document, scan a form, or—in my case at least—spew out an ever-growing pile of Pokémon coloring pages for the kids. When this happens, the delicate dance of machinery involved feels like a technological marvel, especially…

Keeping sensitive images or video on your Android smartphone? You should consider protecting them from prying eyes, whether your collection is comprised of makeshift scans of tax documentation, vaccination records, or personal videos. A secured folder requires additional verification—typically a PIN or biometric data like a fingerprint—to gain access. On Samsung phones, this feature is known as Secure Folder. On Pixels and select other Android phones, you can use Google Photos’ Locked Folder for the same purpose. Getting set up takes only a few minutes. HOW TO SET UP SAMSUNG’S SECURE FOLDER Secure Folder is available on higher-end Samsung phones dating back to the S6—you’ll know your phone doesn’t support the feature if you don’t see the option in Settings. To activate this feature, open the Settings app, then select…

If history is any guide, your next notebook’s new processor has now launched, as Intel recently unveiled a fresh lineup of 12th-gen Core CPUs for laptops—specifically speaking, the chips codenamed Alder Lake-P for mainstream notebooks, and Alder Lake-U for ultraportable PCs and tablets. Intel ships about 80 percent of all notebook PC processors each year, meaning that you’ll probably end up buying a notebook PC with one of these new chips inside. In January, Intel announced the Alder Lake-H, Alder Lake-P, and Alder Lake-U series as part of Intel’s notebook processor plans for 2022. Because of the way in which Intel rolls out its new chips, we already have our first review of the 12th-gen Core i9-12900HK, a fire-breathing, gaming-class processor that crushed the (older) laptop competition. It’s less likely,…

Last week Nvidia confirmed that it had been the victim of an internal hack, though it claimed no customer information was compromised. While the hackers have made some very strange demands, threatening to release sensitive corporate data if Nvidia doesn’t unlock some of its most powerful graphics cards for cryptocurrency mining, regular users didn’t need to worry much. Today we’re seeing one of the first effects of the hack on end users: Nvidia GPU driver packages with malware hidden inside. While it was always possible for malefactors to host links pretending to be drivers in the hopes of installing viruses, Trojans, and other nasty stuff on a user’s PC, this situation is more concerning. The hackers appear to have leaked Nvidia’s official code-signing certificates, a means by which users (and…

The original Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 turned the laptop world on its head with an unheard-of performance-to-weight ratio for its day. Two years later, Asus is back with a redesigned ROG Zephyrus G14 that again challenges your notion of just how much performance you can jam into a tiny gaming laptop. Much of this comes from its all-AMD design. Asus blends AMD’s ultra-efficient new Ryzen 9 6900HS processor and Radeon RX 6800S graphics into the revamped ROG Zephyrus G14. Because both CPU and GPU come from the same parent, they’re far more likely to shift power back and forth intelligently than, say, an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GPU. Asus helps this partnership by using a vapor chamber cooling design rather than conventional heat pipes. Vapor chambers share a larger surface cooling…

Are you in the market for Windows laptop? Don’t want to spend more than $500? Then an Acer Aspire laptop is likely near the top of your list. Aspire laptops routinely take the top slot in Amazon’s list of best-selling laptops with some models dipping as low as $369.99. The model we tested for this review is the best of both worlds. It’s reasonably priced and it delivers pretty good performance. Enter the Acer Aspire 5. This laptop packs an Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM, and is among the most expensive in the Aspire line. But that doesn’t mean it’s expensive. It has a suggested MSRP of $499.99 and sometimes retails for as little as $479.99. A Windows laptop with a recent Core i5 processor for less…

An Apple AirTag was used to stalk a Sports Illustrated model. Thieves are placing AirTags on cars to track them home, where they can later be stolen—or you could be tracked yourself. If you’re like me, you may have been freaked out by those headlines recently pushed your way. But since a lot of headlines can be overblown, I decided to experiment with an AirTag to see if they are justified—by tracking my wife and kids. Full disclosure: I’m an Android user and I’ve used Tile devices for some time. When the headlines started to accumulate recently, I heard Apple fans throw out whataboutisms, saying, “Tile does it too! And Samsung!” I dismissed Tile as being much of a threat since in my experience Tile didn’t work more often than it…

Cloud-based productivity apps are incredibly handy. They sync your info across all devices and, more important, they auto-save every change. (If you’ve never known the dark days of losing work because you forgot to click Ctrl+S periodically, count your lucky stars.) The nifty part about Google Docs, Google Sheets, and even Google Slides is that you can edit your files offline. When you’re not connected to the internet (or you’re on a limited or bad connection), you can continue what you’re doing. When you reconnect later, the changes will sync. Turning on the feature is quick, which is handy since you have to enable it per device. Once you do, you can then toggle it per document with a single click. Here’s how. ON A DESKTOP OR LAPTOP COMPUTER (WINDOWS,…