Innehållsförteckning för Jun-13 från PCWorld

MICROSOFT IS DITCHING the lethargic release schedule of past years in favor of continuous development. The move to smaller, more rapid updates has gigantic implications for the entire PC ecosystem. First, more frequent updates should cost less. Rather than dropping $100 to $200 on a whole new Windows operating system every three years, you may pay $30 to $50 annually for access to the latest tweaks and features. The change also means more frequent updates to Office and the company’s many other apps and services. The steady jog of updates required to keep pace with innovation should yield faster delivery of new features and design tweaks than before—without drastic overhauls that inspire cold-water shock in users of earlier-generation software. Changes in the Air Already, recent updates to Windows 8’s Mail,…

ATTACHING LARGE files to email messages used to be a major hassle, but email providers are tapping into cloud storage services to simplify it. Yahoo Mail is the latest service to get in on the action with Dropbox support. Yahoo Mail users can now add files directly from Dropbox, allowing attachments to exceed Yahoo’s 25MB size limit. Users can save attachments directly to their Dropbox accounts, too—a handy option if you’re using a public computer. Choice Options The built-in Dropbox file chooser has a couple of other useful features: It includes a quick link to the Photos folder, as well as a search option. Users can upload files to Dropbox without having to leave Yahoo Mail first. Yahoo Mail isn’t the first service to integrate cloud storage. Gmail now permits…

Tablets may be killing PCs right now, but Ultrabooks could be poised for a boost as more people abandon their almost-10-inch iPads in favor of 7-inch slates like the iPad Mini, the Nexus 7, and the Kindle Fire. After making the move from 10-inch tablets to models with smaller screens, people will need a device with a larger display and keyboard to do work on—and that’s where Ultrabooks come in. At any rate, it’s a popular prediction in PC circles these days, backed by an emerging trend in which manufacturers are eschewing larger slates in favor of pocket-friendly tablets.…

IF YOU ADVERTISE on social media sites, what will your return actually be? To test that question, I set up experimental ads across five services: Facebook, Google AdWords, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Twitter. I wanted to measure how these tools benefited my own content-creation and corporate-blogging business. For details about the tests I conducted on each service—and my results—see go.pcworld.com/socialads. The Takeaway From the Tests The results of this experiment are hardly scientific, given my small budget and the limited amount of time I had to work with. Furthermore, my ads targeted business buyers, not general consumers. A test of ads promoting a hangover remedy product or a novelty wristwatch would probably have yielded very different results. That said, here are some observations based on my experience. My Facebook ads seemed…

PC GAMING IS poised to break free of the desktop; it just needs a device that delivers fast frame rates and lush graphics in a portable package. Enter the Razer Edge Pro, a Windows 8 tablet built for playing PC games on the go. However, Razer also bills the Edge Pro as a replacement for your laptop, desktop, tablet, and even game console. After using it as my primary device for a week, I think it comes close to delivering on its promise—if you’re willing to make big compromises. Top Performance Our $1450 review model came fully loaded with a 1.9GHz Core i7 processor and discrete Nvidia graphics, plus an Intel HD 4000 graphics chip, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid-state drive. This go-for-broke hardware setup helped the tablet…

SAMSUNG’S SMALL, SLIM, and speedy Series 3 Chromebook looks like a laptop, but it performs more like a tablet. It runs the Web-based Chrome operating system, so if you mostly surf the Web and create content, this tablet with an integrated keyboard may well suit your needs. Our $250 review model came with a 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos 5 dual-core ARM processor, 2GB of memory, integrated graphics, and 16GB of hard drive space (though you get 100GB of cloud storage for two years). It also has built-in 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, two USB ports (one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0), a card reader, a headphone/microphone port, and an HDMI-out port. Because the Chromebook is technically a tablet, we tested it using our tablet benchmark tests, and it performed very well compared to…

A 30-INCH desktop giant, the Dell UltraSharp U3014 offers a resolution of 2460 by 1600 pixels on a matte IPS screen with LED backlighting. You may need help attaching the heavy monitor to its stand. But once that’s done, you can connect it to your computer using your choice of DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, or Mini DisplayPort. It also offers a host of USB 3.0 ports, along with a handy memory card reader. The unit doesn’t have built-in speakers, but you can attach Dell’s speaker bar to it. The U3014 is calibrated for color and brightness uniformity, but it also offers a comprehensive set of menus if you’d like to make your own tweaks. All LCDs are susceptible to image retention, and if you detect ghosting, you can just push a…

IT’S NOT OFTEN a game makes me wish I could travel back in time to experience it again for the first time. Bioshock Infinite does that. It’s 1912, and former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt arrives in Columbia, a city in the sky, to rescue Elizabeth, a girl trapped in a tower. You don’t know why she’s there (or if she needs rescuing), but, as Booker, you must stop at nothing to save her. That should be easy, right? Wrong. Elizabeth can open portals, called Tears, that break all conventions of time and space. It’s not immediately clear why she can do this, but it’s not important either. The relationship between Booker and Elizabeth is the important thing, as they learn to work together and escape Columbia, taking down the charismatic…

THE NIKON COOLPIX P7700 advanced compact camera has an f/2-4, 7.1X zoom lens with a reach of 28–200mm (35mm equivalent). The high-res (920,000-dot), 3-inch LCD is bright and clear, and fully articulated for easy shooting from any angle. Advanced options include the ability to select a color temperature instead of a preset. The P7700 also has a built-in neutral den sity filter. Raw shooting is available too, as are white balance and exposure bracketing. Startup is pretty snappy. Autofocus is most responsive when you have plenty of light and good contrast between subjects. The shot-to-shot time is average, but the camera seemed ready to shoot whenever I needed it to. Carrying a 12-megapixel CMOS sensor, the P7700 can take full HD video at 1920 by 1080 and 30 fps. Video…

Nail biting. Keeping a sloppy workspace. Habitually being late. We all have bad habits in real life. Why isn’t technology a cure for them? While tech should be a panacea for our bad habits, all too often it makes things worse instead of better. Rather than offering an easy way for us to correct something we’re doing wrong, tech gives us another venue in which to engage in poor behavior. Are you guilty of a bad tech habit? Here are 21 of the worst such technology-oriented habits, plus potential fixes for all of them. 1 Leaving Equipment in Plain Sight The typical gadget theft doesn’t happen with careful stakeouts and planning. It’s conceived and executed in seconds, and probably be cause you left the item unattended. That cozy window corner…

This ain’t your momma’s Internet. Update your browser. Ditch Java. Don’t click weird links from even weirder people. Ho-hum. The basic tenets of security are burned into the brains of most Web surfers by now, and the old malware tricks just don’t work as well anymore. Surprise! Bad guys are getting creative. (Never underestimate the powerful combination of greed, boredom, and cleverness.) Rather than targeting Internet Explorer, now these people are gunning for your virtual machine, your video games, and your Web-connected thermostat. “The more digital our lives become, the greater the number of potential nontraditional entry points for cybercriminals attempting to steal data and wreak havoc,” says McAfee Labs security strategist Toralv Dirro, who referred us to some of the wild exploits highlighted here. Grab your tinfoil hat, and…

THE LATEST VISUAL treat for stay-at-home globetrotters from Google Maps is its mountaintop Street Views. In March, Google released images taken at or near four of the world’s highest summits: Everest Base Camp in Nepal, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Russia’s Mount Elbrus, and Argentina’s Aconcagua, enabling armchair travelers to scale those famous peaks while comfortably seated. Google’s team painstakingly documented each ascent, using a tripod and a digital camera with a fish-eye lens and detailing the expedition’s ups and downs in a behind-the-scenes blog, Google Lat Long (go.pcworld.com/gll). Vertical Hold The blog makes for fascinating reading as you follow along in Google Maps and see the trails that the Googlers climbed to snap the Street Views. The team spent 12 days getting to Everest alone, slowed in their approach by mudslides…

A VIRTUAL PRIVATE network is a virtual version of a secure, physical network—a web of computers linked to share files and other resources. VPNs connect to the outside world over the Internet, and can secure general Internet traffic and corporate assets across en crypted tunnels for network connections and traffic. For details on selecting a VPN networking protocol, see “How (and Why) to Set Up a VPN Today” at go.pcworld.com/vpns. Set Up a Simple VPN With Windows Windows comes with a VPN client that supports two of the most common VPN protocols, PPTP and L2TP/IPsec. The setup process is simple: If you’re using Windows 8, just bring up the Search charm, type VPN, and then launch the VPN wizard by clicking Set up a virtual private network (VPN) connection. You…

YOU’LL FIND A LOT to like in Google Chrome’s security features, including unique sandboxing functions and privilege restrictions. As with all browsers, however, Chrome is imperfect. Here are some steps you can take to enhance its protection. The most notable Chrome privacy features are its malware-and phishing-protection schemes. Chrome warns you whenever you visit a site that Google has identified as potentially malicious. The browser also corrects misspelled URLs to help you avoid visiting the wrong site—and perhaps a nefarious site—by accident. (Yes, “typosquatting” is still a threat.) To use these features, open the Settings panel, scroll to the Privacy section (you may need to click Show advanced settings), and check the boxes labeled Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors and Use a web service to help…

IN A WORLD of cheap-feeling merchandise, the Latitude 6430u stands apart. It is sedately handsome, remarkably stable in your hand and on the table, and a tactile joy to use. It’s also fast and available with a variety of warranty and support options, as a corporate PC should be. Because it’s ruggedized, the 6430u weighs a hefty 4 pounds, but the flat battery pack that fills the lower front quarter of the unit gives the laptop a balance that makes it feel lighter than it is. The 6430u’s heft also makes it a very stable typing platform, which accentuates the already nice feel of the backlit, Chiclet-style keyboard. The keyboard response is a little lighter than a Lenovo’s, but the overall experience might be a wee bit better. The unit’s…

WHEN YOU’RE STANDING next to someone, pointing something out is as easy as lifting a finger or nodding. But on the Internet, this sort of fast visual communication is difficult. The free Skitch, from Evernote, can restore the visual element to remote communication. Skitch makes it easy to take screenshots and annotate them (or any image). Skitch keeps things simple and coherent. It starts quickly, and it has just seven traditional tools: an arrow, a text tool, a color picker with eight hues, a rectangle, a highlighter, a “pixelizer” for blurring details, and a crop tool. That’s it—no special effects, no filters, and nothing that will make your image look as if it were taken with a broken Polaroid in 1972. One interesting widget is a tab at the bottom…

MOBILE COMPUTING MAY be convenient, but it’s also risky. When you drag your laptop to the coffee shop or take it along on your travels, you risk making all your private data and an expensive device a big, fat target for thieves. The baddies just need to wait for you to turn your back, then grab it and run. Fortunately, you can minimize such perils by taking a few precautions and following some commonsense practices. Lock the Front Door When you go on a vacation, you don’t leave your front door unlocked. You shouldn’t leave your laptop completely defenseless, either. Lock your laptop’s proverbial front door by making sure your Windows user account is set up to require a password on log in. This will not protect against even a…

THE INTERNET IS kind of a cesspool. And as the parent of kids who are now old enough to operate a Web browser, I’m keen on checking their activities and filtering out the inappropriate content. Thankfully, Windows 8 offers some solid tools for doing just that. For example, you can limit your child’s Web browsing to age-appropriate sites and block or allow specific sites as needed. You can impose time limits, perhaps locking out the PC during hours when you’re at work and not able to supervise. And you can control what games and apps they can play or use. To get started, you’ll need to set up an account for your child. Here’s how you can do that in Windows 8: 1. Open the charms bar, then click Change…

IF YOU DON’T have the latest version of Chrome, take the preliminary steps to install it. Then open the Chrome Web Store, and you’ll see an overwhelming array of Chrome apps. The three that we’ll focus on here are designed to make Chrome leaner, meaner, and more efficient. FastestChrome: As its name suggests, this app adds useful time-saving tools to your Chrome browser. It consists mainly of surface-level stuff, such as displaying a pop-up bubble with an explanation of a word whenever you high light one, and providing the option to look up that word on any of four different search engines (Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, Surf Canyon, and of course Google.) The extension also lets you automatically transform written URL text into clickable links, and its Endless Pages feature automatically loads…

AS AN AVID reader, I thought subscribing to Amazon Prime seemed like a good idea. After all, the $79 per year membership lets you check out one ebook per month from the Kindle Lending Library, which is rapidly approaching 300,000 titles. But how do you find those titles? If you’ve ever gone searching for “Kindle Lending Library,” you know that there’s no such thing—not in your Web browser, anyway. Although Amazon lets you browse the collection on the Kindle, there’s no direct link to it anywhere on Amazon’s site. Fortunately, reader Danner discovered that you can indeed browse the Lending Library in your browser; it just takes a little doing. Here’s the process: 1. Point your browser to Amazon.com. 2. At the left edge of the search bar, click the…

MICROSOFT HAS altered its hardware certification program to lower the minimum allowable screen resolution for Windows 8 tablets from 1366 by 768 pixels to 1024 by 768 pixels. The change opens the door to officially approved Windows 8 tablets with displays smaller than 10 inches. But inviting resolutions lower than 1366 by 768 is only one issue Microsoft must address before 7-inch Windows 8 tablets become a reality. Adverse Side Effects Lowering the minimum resolution might kill Snap, a dual-pane feature of Windows 8 that allows you to display two modern UI apps (or one modern UI app and the traditional desktop) side by side. In current Windows 8 builds, Snap, which requires a minimum screen resolution of 1366 by 768, offers the only way to view two full-screen, modern…

AS MATTERS STAND now, fiber-optic cables provide the fastest broadband Internet to homes. I should know: I flipped out when a fiber-optic setup increased my regular Internet speeds by a factor of 15. Now researchers at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom are pushing the possibilities of fiber even farther—to the near-ridiculous limit of 99.7 percent of the speed of light. And if you think that’s fast, wait until you hear that the group’s fiber-optic cable can reach data transfer speeds of 10 terabytes per second. The scientists pulled off this trick by the simple expedient of hollowing out the inside of a regular fiberoptic cable and filling it with air. Hollow but Not Empty Scientists already knew that air-filled fiber cables can increase the speed of data…

YOU’LL FIND A lot to like about the new Office 2013. Heck, some people might argue that Outlook alone is worth the price of admission. One thing that bothers me about it, however, is the startup screen that appears when I launch Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. For some users, no doubt, it’s a nice addition, providing a quick way to access recent documents or to create a new one using a template—but that’s not the way I like to work. Cut to the Chase Fortunately, configuring Office to bypass that screen for the aforementioned three programs is a fairly easy task. Here’s how to do it, using Word as an example: 1. Run Word. Open an existing document, create a new one, or do whatever else gets you started in…

THE BENQ VW2430 and the HP Pavilion 27xi both have 1920-by-1080 displays. But aside from resolution, they have more differences than similarities, and making a choice between the two requires consideration of size, performance, and price. Display and Design The displays use the same number of pixels, but they are spread across differently sized screens. The BenQ VW2430 screen measures 23 inches diagonally, while the HP Pavilion 27xi measures 27 inches. Because of the roomier screen, the HP Pavilion 27xi displays larger text at its native resolution. This is an advantage for users who have trouble seeing small type, or if you plan to use the display from a distance. On the downside, the extra space between pixels can give icons and images a grainy appearance and make text look…

DELL HAS DELIVERED a very usable touchscreen all-in-one system in the OptiPlex 9010. And all the company had to do was put the touchscreen within easy reach. Dell worked this minor miracle by engineering a double-jointed stand that allows you to move the display up and down and slightly forward. Even better, it has a standard VESA mount point, so you can also use a fully articulated wall- or desk-mounted arm for truly versatile placement. In a market filled with AIOs that block the usable surface area behind them, the 9010’s minimal footprint leaves all the surrounding area accessible. Dell also ships it with a wireless mouse and keyboard. The 9010 comes with PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, but its omission of an HDMI input renders it less attractive as…

OUTFITTED WITH A superfast f/1.4, 3.3X (24–80mm) wide-angle zoom lens and built-in Wi-Fi, Samsung’s EX2F advanced compact camera should appeal to a wide range of photographers. The EX2F has no built-in viewfinder and no optional electronic viewfinder, but the camera’s 3-inch, fully articulated AMOLED screen excels in almost all lighting conditions. External controls in clude both a shooting-mode dial and a drive-mode dial. These dual dials are a great idea, but they’re a bit stiff; at least you have no chance of changing settings accidentally. Additional features include bracketing (exposure or white balance), scene modes, and creative modes. The Wi-Fi features, for image transfer, are generally easy to use. Overall performance is good, with fast startup and little shutter lag. Shot-to-shot time is respectable, even when you’re firing the flash.…

CCLEANER AND PC Decrapifier are among the best system cleaners available, but they aren’t entirely free to use in a professional setting. One interesting option is the open-source, cross-platform BleachBit. The interface lists items in categories such as Flash, Google Chrome, Microsoft Office, and System. A Deep Scan option tracks down junk strewn all over the disk. The program’s quick explanations assume prior knowledge; for example, under Firefox, you can clean DOM Storage, a process that BleachBit says will ‘Delete HTML5 cookies’. If you don’t know what that means, you’ll have to search the Web for answers. After you’ve decided what to clean, you click the Preview button to execute a dry run and output a log of planned operations. The output is mostly a text dump of paths for…

LINUX IS GETTING more user-friendly every year, and you might be wondering if Windows is still required to reliably use your PC as a modern gaming platform. The truth is that probably you don’t. It still depends a bit on your hardware, but for the most part Linux is a robust gaming platform. To prove it, we’re going to show you how to play modern PC games on a Linux PC. This guide will target the newest version of Ubuntu (12.10), but you can apply most of it to any other Debian-based Linux distribution. We’ll assume that you’ve gotten as far as installing Linux, but that’s it. Linux Cheat Sheet Here’s a rundown of important terms for a novice user: WINE: A compatibility layer used for running Windows programs on…

AFTER UPDATING YOUR system and removing any junk data and malware, run a disk defragmenter to minimize file fragmentation and improve the perceived performance of your hard drive. To defrag a drive, right-click it in File Explorer and then choose Properties from the menu. Click the Tools tab in the window that pops up, and click the Defragment now (Windows 7) or Optimize (Windows 8) button to launch Windows’ built-in defragmentation tool. Then, when the defragmentation tool has opened, highlight your hard drive and start the defragmentation process. Please note that you should never run a disk defragmentation tool on a solid-state drive. SSDs are not affected by file fragmentation in the same way as hard drives are and don’t need to be de fragged. (Defragging SSDs actually shortens their…

3D Printing Poised to take the tech world by storm, 3D printing is not only getting increasingly affordable, but it has more to offer than just funny-looking MakerBots; it may change the way we live, work, and play—in short, get ready for the DIY future. 1 It’s Additive A 3D printer extrudes tiny layers of a single material—plastic, typically—again and again, to build a 3D object. The process is known as additive manufacturing, and it can be much more efficient, and cheaper and faster, than traditional subtractive manufacturing, where engineers cut parts from larger pieces of material. Consumer-grade 3D printer costs are dropping so fast that, by 2016, analysts say, enterprise-class 3D printers may cost less than a new computer. 2 Digitize Objects If you have a cheap 3D printer,…