Innehållsförteckning för April 2017 från PCWorld

RYZEN PERFORMANCE IS the mystery that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories, performing like a champ (go.pcworld.com/ryzenrev) in productivity and content creation tasks but occasionally delivering fewer frames than you’d expect in games. AMD debunked most of those conspiracy theories in a recent blog post (go.pcworld.com/ryzenblog). For starters, the company said Windows 10’s scheduler isn’t guilty. Internet hardware detectives had started to focus their blame on Windows 10 scheduler, the part of the operating system that doles out work to each individual core or thread in a chip. Many believe Windows 10 scheduler is throwing out work to the wrong cores or threads, hobbling performance. “We have investigated reports alleging incorrect thread scheduling on the AMD Ryzen processor,” AMD’s Robert Hallock wrote in the blog post. “Based on our findings,…

Make smart purchases, stay safe online. HAS THE CIA ever spied on you? That’s a key question swirling around the WikiLeaks document dump (go.pcworld.com/wlcia) that allegedly details the U.S. agency’s secret hacking tools. The documents themselves don’t reveal much about who the CIA might have snooped on. But the agency certainly has the power to spy on foreigners outside the U.S., said Paul Pillar, a former deputy counterterrorism chief with the CIA. That’s its job after all: to collect foreign intelligence. But even so, the CIA is pretty selective with its targets. The CIA’s spying powers Stopping terrorists and rival governments is the priority, Pillar said. And NSA-style (go.pcworld.com/nsaspy) mass surveillance doesn’t necessarily help in that mission; it can actually “overload” the investigations with unnecessary data, he said. “They’ve [the…

IF YOU’VE EVER been writing an email on your Android phone and wished there was a way to send or request money without switching to the Venmo, Square, or Google Wallet apps, your prayers have been answered. Rolling out today via a Play Store update, Google will now allow you to easily attach payments (go.pcworld.com/gmailpay) to Gmail messages. While the feature has been available in the Gmail web client for several years, it’s new to the Android app. And it’s not limited to your contacts that have a Gmail address, nor do they need to have the Google Wallet app. As Google explains, “Recipients are able to receive or request money right from the email itself—without having to install another payment app. They can even arrange for money they receive…

CONSIDERING THE BURGEONING popularity of soundbars in living room setups, it’s surprising they’re mostly missing in action on the PC side of things. By and large, the PC has stuck to 3.5mm input dual-speaker systems, occasionally with a subwoofer included. It’s strange for a few reasons: 1) Unlike TVs, monitors rarely ever come with built-in speakers. 2) Most dedicated PC speakers are terrible. 3) Desk space is often in short supply, and cable routing a pain. But for some reason the soundbar hasn’t made its way to desktop PCs, even as it’s become a hit with everyone else. Razer sort of made an attempt with its Leviathan a few years ago, but even that was more geared toward the living room. So Creative isn’t stretching the truth too far when…

NVIDIA’S MIGHTY TITAN has fallen, as it always does. Jaws dropped when the second-gen Titan X (go.pcworld.com/titanx2) stomped onto the scene in August, and for more reasons than one. The monster graphics card was the first to ever flirt with consistently hitting the hallowed 60-frames-per-second mark at 4K resolution with everything cranked to 11—but that privilege cost a cool $1,200. Fast-forward five months: Nvidia’s teasing the GTX 1080 Ti as the “ultimate GeForce” card (go.pcworld.com/ultgforce), with more performance than the Titan X for just—“just”—$700. That’s what the GTX 1080 Founders Edition (go.pcworld.com/1080fed) cost at launch, and Nvidia says the Ti stomps the base GTX 1080. Graphics-card lust truly is the cruelest obsession (go.pcworld.com/gclust). But does the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti live up to Nvidia’s hype? Is this the 4K-capable graphics…

ONE OF THE great horrors of Windows 10 is that Microsoft forces you to use Bing and Microsoft Edge with Cortana. When you search with Cortana, any web searches are automatically sent to Bing and displayed in the Edge browser, no matter what your default browser is. It wasn’t always this way. Before April 2016 you could use any browser you wanted, although Cortana still insisted on Bing for search. But then Microsoft put a stop to browser choice, and Cortana-loving Edge haters have been recoiling ever since, until now. Norway-based developer Daniel Aleksandersen recently created a program called EdgeDeflector (github.com/da2x/EdgeDeflector) that puts a stop to Cortana’s shenanigans. It forces Cortana’s searches to open in your default browser instead of Edge. It’s a really great little customization, but EdgeDeflector doesn’t…

ANSWER LINE WINDOWS EXPLORER IS great for finding and organizing files, but it’s sadly lacking in preview and thumbnail support for anything other than garden-variety JPEG and AVI files. FLV, OGG, APE, FLAC, PCI, and other less-common formats appear as generic application icons without a preview—not exactly optimal when trying to organize a varied multimedia collection. But where Microsoft has been remiss, Babelsoft has not. The company’s aptly named Media Preview (go.pcworld.com/mediapreview) integrates seamlessly into the Windows open preview architecture to provide thumbnails and previews of all those files I mentioned and more. Even better, Babelsoft charges the grand sum of… Nothing! Nada, zip, zilch, zero. That’s right, the spirit of Linux right here in Microsoft-land. Using Media Preview is simple: Download it, install it, then open the configuration…

NVIDIA JUST UNLEASHED what it calls the “ultimate GeForce card,” and the blisteringly fast GTX 1080 Ti (see our full review on page 49) indeed delivers unparalleled levels of gaming performance. But the version you can buy today isn’t truly the apex of graphics technology, even if the core graphics processor itself is. Customized graphics cards always push performance far past what reference cards offer, thanks to a mixture of beefy cooling solutions and mild-to-heavy overclocks. But while the initial salvo of GTX 1080 Tis are limited to $700 “Founders Edition” (go.pcworld.com/gtx foundersedexpl) reference cards, the likes of EVGA, Asus, Zotac, and other Nvidia partners haven’t been shy about showing off their plans for the new GeForce flagship… even if they haven’t been forthcoming about concrete price and release date…

INTEL IS NO longer satisfied just partnering with other companies to create self-driving cars: it wants to own the whole stack. Well, at least as far as the autonomous hardware and software go. The chip maker recently announced it is purchasing Jerusalem-based Mobileye for $15.3 billion. The two companies were already working together on various projects. The pair announced a partnership with BMW in July 2016 with the aim of putting an autonomous car on the streets by 2021. Then in November, the two companies partnered with auto parts maker Delphi to create the Automated Driving Group (go.pcworld.com/intelautocars), which will create a self-driving car system that can be sold to automakers. Mobileye is best known for supplying car maker Tesla with hardware for its semi-autonomous system, Autopilot. That relationship ended…

A CONTENTIOUS PIECE of U.S. law giving the National Security Agency broad authority to spy on people overseas expires at the end of the year. Expect heated debate about the scope of U.S. surveillance law leading up to Dec. 31. One major issue to watch involves the way the surveillance treats communications from U.S. residents. Critics say U.S. emails, texts, and chat logs—potentially millions of them—are caught up in surveillance authorized by Section 702 (go.pcworld.com/sec207) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). U.S. residents who communicate with foreign targets of the NSA surveillance have their data swept up in what the NSA calls “incidental” collection. The FBI can then search those communications, but it’s unclear how often that happens. A primer on Section 702: What is Section 702 surveillance? Section…

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS In this section, hardware & software go through rigorous testing. ADMIT IT. YOU LOVE UNDERDOG TALES. The Cleveland Cavaliers coming back from a 3-1 deficit against the Golden State Warriors. The New York Giants defeating the 18-0 New England Patriots, and the Average Joes beating the heavily favored Purple Cobras in the dodgeball finals. Well, you can now add AMD’s highly anticipated Ryzen CPU to that list of epic comebacks in history. Yes, disbeliever, AMD’s Ryzen almost—almost—lives up to the hype. What’s more, it delivers the goods at an unbeatable price: $499 (go.pcworld.com/ryzen71800x amz) for the highest-end Ryzen 7 1800X. That’s half the cost of its closest Intel competitor. But before AMD fanboys run off to rub it into Intel fanboys’ faces, there’s a very important…

ROOST STARTED OUT with a great battery (go.pcworld.com/roostrev) that makes any dumb smoke alarm smart. We weren’t quite as impressed with their second product, a smoke, fire, carbon monoxide, and natural gas detector (go.pcworld.com/rsa400rev) that uses that same battery for emergency backup power (the detector itself is designed to be hardwired to power). Now the company is expanding its offerings with a smart water leak detector, and it’s a winner. If the company follows through with its promise to offer an add-on accessory, it will be our top pick in this category. That accessory is a water-detecting extension cable that Roost (getroost.com/product-waterdetector) says will be available soon in three- and six-foot lengths priced at $13.99 and $19.99, respectively. As it stands, the Roost Smart Water Leak and Freeze Detector is…

How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear. RANSOMWARE DOESN’T SNEAK INTO your PC like ordinary malware. It bursts in, points a gun at your data, and screams for cash—or else. And if you don’t learn to defend yourself, it could happen again and again. Armed gangs of digital thieves roaming the information superhighway sounds like an overwrought action movie, but the numbers say it’s true: Ransomware attacks rose from 3.8 million in 2015 to 638 million in 2016, an increase of 167 times year over year, according to Sonicwall—even as the number of malware attacks declined. Why steal data when you can simply demand cash? For the first time ever, the RSA security conference in San Francisco held a comprehensive one-day seminar on ransomware, detailing who’s being attacked,…

A TINY BIOS chip lurks inside every computer, sitting on your motherboard to breathe life into your system when you press the power button. BIOS stands for basic input and output system, and the BIOS chip initializes all the other devices in your PC, like the CPU, GPU, and motherboard chipset. A few years ago, motherboard manufacturers—in partnership with Microsoft and Intel—introduced a replacement for traditional BIOS chips dubbed UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). Almost every motherboard shipping today has a UEFI chip rather than a BIOS chip, but they both share the same core purpose: preparing the system to boot into the operating system. That said, most people still call the UEFI the “BIOS” because of the familiarity of the term. Why you should (or shouldn’t) upgrade your BIOS…

WHILE MANY IT departments grapple with big data, IBM says it has the smallest data in the world: one bit on one atom. Researchers at IBM’s Almaden lab in San Jose, California, have written and read a bit of data on a single atom using magnetism, a feat they say is a world first. It could lead to storage that’s hundreds of times denser than anything available now, able to hold the entire Apple iTunes library of 35 million songs on a device the size of a credit card, the company says. Much denser storage could mean smaller phones, PCs, and even data centers in the future. Current hard-disk drives use about 100,000 atoms to store a bit. Other scientists have used single atoms for storage before, including in experimental…

AMONG THE MANY announcements at Google I/O in 2015 was one that seemed like a fantasy (go.pcworld.com/gglefabric): connected clothing that could control music and lights, and even interact with images on a nearby screen. Dubbed Project Jacquard (go.pcworld.com/jacquard), Google proved it was serious about the tech by partnering with Levis to make a denim jacket that it showed off at last year’s I/O, and now we finally know how much it’s going to cost. And it’s not horribly expensive. Although it is a couple hundred dollars more than the Commuter Trucker Jacket (go.pcworld.com/levisjacket) on which it is based, the $350 jacket is set to go on sale in the fall (pushed back from its original spring launch), and is presumably the first in a full line of smart clothes. Google…

SOON MICROSOFT WILL put Windows Vista to rest once and for all. If you’re one of the few people still using it, you don’t have long to find another option before time runs out. After April 11, 2017, Microsoft will no longer support Windows Vista: no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates, (go.pcworld.com/endvista) Microsoft says. (Mainstream Vista support expired in 2012.) Like it did for Windows XP, Microsoft has moved on to better things after a decade of supporting Vista. As Microsoft notes, however, running an older operating system means taking risks—and those risks will become far worse after the deadline. Vista’s Internet Explorer 9 has long since expired, and the lack of any further updates means that any existing…

DESPITE ITS PREMIUM price, the Blade Pro has arguably been Razer’s weakest laptop ever since 2014. That’s the year the 14-inch Blade (no surname) received a massive performance upgrade, bumping up to an Nvidia GTX 870M graphics card and a crisp 3200x1800 screen. Meanwhile the 17-inch Blade Pro stuck to the lower 860M-tier card and a 1080p screen—and at a higher price. Suffice it to say, it’s been a while since the Blade Pro felt like it deserved its lofty moniker. For a time I thought Razer had decided to abandon the Pro model entirely and stick to the 14-inch Blade, but instead Razer was apparently scheming a way to put the Blade Pro back on top. Successfully, I might add. The latest Blade Pro (go.pcworld.com/razerbladepro2016) is one hell of…

IF ONLY TORMENT: TIDES OF NUMENERA were twice as long. I don’t say that about many games—particularly RPGs. Even some of the genre’s best could afford to lose 10 to 15 hours of filler quests, cinch up the story’s sagging middle, and get on with it. Not so, here. What’s frustrating and yet also tantalizing about Tides of Numenera (go.pcworld.com/tidesn) is that it gives us a glimpse of infinite potential, then cuts it short. A new torment Despite being billed as a “spiritual successor” to Infinity Engine cult classic Planescape: Torment, it’s important to mention the two are officially unrelated. This is not a sequel. Unofficially, though? Well, in Tides of Numenera you play as “The Last Castoff,” a person with no name and no memory. Your first moments involve…

HASSLE-FREE PC SKYPE STARTED LIFE as an easy way for regular PC users to chat with their friends via text and voice chat. But underneath that user-friendly veneer, Skype has a few power moves ready and waiting for people who know about them. I’m talking about Skype’s slash commands. If you don’t know what those are, slash commands begin with a / and tell a program to carry out a specific action. Longtime chat users will recognize slash commands from the days of Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, one of the earliest ways to do live text chat online—and still widely used among technophiles. Controlling IRC clients typically requires the use of text commands preceded by a slash such as /AWAY or /JOIN. Many newer apps and services, such…