Innehållsförteckning för Apr-15 från PCWorld

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/winvid YOU KNOW THAT moment in spy thrillers when the hero suddenly realizes the scope of the evil genius’s nefarious plan? I had a moment like that at Mobile World Congress, when I sat down to talk with Greg Sullivan, Microsoft’s Windows Phone Director of Public Relations. Not that anything he said was evil. He just made me stop short and realize why Windows 10 really could change everything for Microsoft. The reason why is encapsulated in one number: 1.5 billion. That’s how many Windows users exist worldwide, according to Sullivan. “We expect many will upgrade,” Sullivan said. How many? “Very many,” he repeated, with a dastardly smile. Now’s the time when the hero puts together all the clues. A lot of people will upgrade to…

TWO YEARS IS eons in tech time, and that’s how long we’ve had to wait for a new Chromebook Pixel. Yes, this is a new version of the super-premium, high-priced flagship that debuted to oohs, ahhs, and whys in early 2013, when most Chromebooks were little cheap plastic things, and desktop applications dominated. Not everyone saw the potential of a high-priced browser box (go.pcworld.com/hmm). Fast-forward two years: Chromebook sales are strong, and we’re living more in the cloud than ever. As “Pixel 2” rumors (go.pcworld.com/p2) swirled in recent weeks, we honestly wondered how much more this machine could have than it already does. Now we have our answer. There’s no sign of tablet-like functionality as rumored, but this new Pixel is once again touting a vision of greater online things…

BLOATWARE, CRAPWARE: No matter what you call it, the junk that PC makers dump onto new PCs is nothing short of a mess. The situation was in the spotlight recently when it was reveal-ed that several Lenovo PCs were preloaded with “Superfish” adware (go.pcworld.com/superfish) that actively left users vulnerable to attack. The software compromised secure HTTPS web connections in a quest to inject ads on the sites you visit... and make Lenovo a few nickels. There’s no doubt about it: Even though the root vulnerability came from Superfish, Lenovo messed up. Hard. This shouldn’t have happened (go.pcworld.com/no), period. But Lenovo didn’t toss its users to the wolves out of malice—instead, the Superfish debacle is a natural extension of the entire bloatware epidemic. Dolla dolla bills y’all Bloatware exists because we’re…

WHEN APPLE’S MACBOOK Air made its debut in 2008, PC companies were caught utterly unprepared for what was arguably a ground-breaking moment in thin computing designs. With the world in financial ruin at the time, it would take years for competitors to catch up. Apple is headed into a significantly different world with the launch of the new 12-inch MacBook (go.pcworld.com/12inmba), however. If anything, Apple is the one playing catchup with PC makers this time. The Display For an Apple ultra-light notebook, one of the most noticeable changes is the high-resolution “Retina” panel. The 12-inch display features an odd-duck resolution of 2304x1440 with an aspect ratio of 16:10. That’s a big leap for Apple, especially coming from a MacBook Air lineup that still features 1440x900 panels at best and embarrassing…

WHAT GRAPHICS CARD within my budget gives me the best bang for my buck? That single sentence cuts to the core of what people on the hunt for a new graphics card are looking for: The most oomph they can afford. Sure, graphics cards are complicated pieces of technology, powered by billions of transistors and countless other types of intricate hardware, but people just want to crank the detail settings on Far Cry and just plain play. Answering the question can be a bit trickier than it seems. Raw performance is a big part of it, but factors like noise, the driver experience, and supplemental software all play a role in determining which graphics card to buy. I tested graphics cards of all shapes, sizes, and price points to nail…

WHILE THERE ARE plenty of web-based tools and productivity tricks to help you power through tasks in your browser, you can step up and speed up your capabilities even more by grabbing some smart Chrome extensions. These add-ons add more functionality to Chrome for Windows and Chromebook users alike, enabling you to quickly save items to Google Drive, clip articles, or keep tabs on all your social media shares. Google Calendar The Google Calendar extension (go.pcworld.com/gcal) simplifies several tasks, eliminating the need to launch the calendar in another browser tab. It gives you quick access to creating a new event or checking out the upcoming schedule, so you don’t miss that oh-so-riveting meeting. The extension also lets you add any date listed on a webpage as a calendar entry. For…

Ramanathan wants to stream video from his laptop to his HDTV. But his laptop doesn’t have an HDMI port. You can have an Internet-ready smart TV with a Roku plugged into it, and at some point you’ll want to watch something that neither of them support. (For me, it’s password-protected Vimeo streams.) That’s when you need to plug your laptop directly into your HDTV. If your laptop lacks an HDMI port, connecting it to a TV isn’t so easy. But it isn’t incredibly difficult either. It’s all a matter of figuring out which ports you do have and which adapters you need. If you have a very small laptop, you may have an HDMI port and not know it. Look for a micro HDMI port: It’s about the same…

EVERY MARCH, THE biggest hardware makers in the world converge in Barcelona, Spain, dragging their latest and greatest gadgets with them. The avalanche of new smartwatches, phones, and tablets stretches far and wide; just trying to see each device is difficult, much less touch them all. But a small handful of gadgets inevitably stand out from the crowd. This year was no different. These are the best smartphones, watches, and gadgets we saw at Mobile World Congress 2015. Samsung Galaxy S6 With the Galaxy S6 (go.pcworld.com/s6) it’s like Samsung is giving us almost everything we ever asked for—even if they’re taking away the removable battery and SD card slot in the process. It’s got a gorgeous metal and glass body, a touch fingerprint sensor you don’t have to swipe, an…

EVEN IF YOU’RE rocking the most open of open-source operating systems, chances are your laptop isn’t really that “free,” betrayed by closed firmware binaries lurking deep within the hardware itself. Modern UEFI firmware is a closed-source, proprietary blob of software baked into your PC’s hardware. This binary blob includes remote management and monitoring features, which make it a potential security and privacy threat (go.pcworld.com/threat). You might want to replace the UEFI firmware and get complete control over your PC’s hardware with Coreboot, a free software BIOS alternative—but you can’t in PCs with modern Intel processors, thanks to Intel’s Boot Guard and the “Verified Boot” mode PC manufacturers choose. Why Coreboot won’t support your new laptop Coreboot was originally known as LinuxBIOS. It’s a Free Software Foundation-endorsed project working on replacing…

IF YOU WANT to capture all the information from a meeting, class or lecture, there’s no better tool than Toshiba’s Encore 2 Write (go.pcworld.com/encore2). The Encore 2 Write features an active stylus for accurate scribbling, but the magic is in a unique set of bundled apps: TruNote mimics Microsoft’s OneNote but performs very accurate handwriting recognition on the entire documents,TruCapture OCRs images captured using the unit’s 5MP camera, and TruRecorder splits audio recordings into timelines for each orator to facilitate. Price and design The $349 10-inch, 1280x800 Encore 2 Write WT10PE-A that I looked at is a light (about 1.25 pounds), Atom Z3735F-based tablet with 2GB of memory and a 64GB eMMC SSD. The rear camera is 5MP and the Webcam 1.2MP. The Wi-Fiis 802.11 a/b/g/n and there’s Bluetooth 4.0…

OKAY, YOU’VE HEARD of this “Grim Fandango” game for years and everyone seems pretty excited it’s been re-released, but what is it? Any relation to the WWE wrestler? How about the excellent-but-also-underrated and canceled cartoon Frisky Dingo? No and no. Unfortunately. Grim Fandango is a classic adventure game from Tim Schafer and company released right before LucasArts stopped making classic adventure games. In other words, the long-distant past of 1998. You play the part of Manuel “Manny” Calavera, who looks a lot like the Grim Reaper until he takes off his cloak and takes off his stilts and folds up his scythe and reveals he’s...a travel agent. No, seriously. When you die, you end up in the Land of the Dead where you must embark on a four-year journey to…

ONE OF THE pitfalls of Gmail’s generous storage limits is the temptation to use it as a warehouse for all your email attachments. That seems like less of a good idea when you have to wade through your inbox for that report you need for the weekly all-hands in 15 minutes. But processing the daily influx of messages from clients, colleagues, and friends takes long enough without having to stop and manually save each attached file you receive. Fortunately, you can create an automated workflow to do it for you. We’re going to use If This, Then That, or IFTTT, to create a system that automatically sends any new Gmail attachment to your Dropbox account, where it can be more easily organized and accessed. If you’ve never used IFTTT before,…

ANALYSTS LIKE TO bemoan the PC industry’s penchant for “racing to the bottom,” but they always seem to forget the benefits of low-end competition: bargain prices for better hardware. Asus’ new ZenBook UX305F (go.pcworld.com/asusux305F) is proof that racing to the bottom doesn’t have to end in a duffel bag of com-promises and tears. In fact, the ZenBook UX305F is one those laptops that defies conventional wisdom on build quality, specs, and price. Here’s the big news up front: the ZenBook’s decidedly budget price of $699. For an ultrabook, that’s a big deal because most “ultrabooks” at this price really aren’t that ultra. They’re clunky and chunky bricks that pack 10rpm hard drives that load Windows so slowly you can practically watch the pixels fill in one by one. One look…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/venue8-7000vid I HAVE TO BE honest here. I’ve only ever really known Dell as a PC maker. The company’s laptops were once a staple on my college campus for those who couldn’t afford a fancy Apple Powerbook, and now some of my colleagues even use a Dell laptop as their daily driver. So you can imagine my surprise when a Dell-branded Android tablet showed up at my desk with some supreme specifications and Intel’s latest Atom processor. While the words “Dell” and “Intel” don’t exactly conjure up the image of an Android tablet, I’m open to trying out new things. Dell’s new Venue 8 7000 (the exact model number is 7840, go.pcworld.com/venue87000) scored high marks in its design and functionality. But some of the extra stuff…

NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE (NAS) is probably not the first thing you think about when you consider your home-entertainment system, but at least one company intends to change that: QNAP. They have offered HDMI output and a 10-foot user interface (so you can operate it from the comfort of your couch) for a year or two on their mainstream NAS boxes. Now it’s added quiet operation and style to attract less-technical users. It has mostly succeeded in that effort. Where the average NAS box is rather unhandsome and stands upright, the HS-251 (go.pcworld.com/qnaphs251) is sleek and horizontally oriented. It houses two 3.5-inch drive bays that lay flat and side by side, with metal drive trays that come in contact with the metal part of the case to act as heat sinks…

How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear. YOU KNOW THAT icy stab of panic when you suddenly realize your Android phone or iPhone isn’t safe in your pocket where it should be? Sure, features like “Find my iPhone” on iOS or the Android Device Manager can help. But if bad guys have snatched your phone or tablet, they can do a lot of damage before you zero in on its location. Read on for 9 easy ways to shore up your iOS or Android security, starting with a bonus tip. Bonus: Lock your phone with a passcode, pronto Here’s a tip that’s so obvious—well, to me, anyway—that I’m throwing it in as a bonus. Why mention it at all? Because I still run into far too many people…

ONE OF THE PAINS of owning a PC that’s getting towards the end of its life is dealing with the ever-shrinking amount of storage as your PC fills up with music, photos, and documents. In the end, the only way to battle the bloat is often to get a new PC or more storage—but until you do, there are a number of tricks you can employ to make space on your PC. A particularly handy one is to eliminate duplicate files and folders on your hard drive, getting rid of superfluous data you don’t need. You’d be surprised how much content ends up duplicated on your PC thanks to a sync gone wrong with iTunes or an errant click with the photo importer. Here are three tools that can…