Innehållsförteckning för September 2017 från PCWorld

When Consumer Reports stopped recommending the Microsoft Surface Laptop and latest Microsoft Surface Book, it did so based not on those specific products’ reliability. Rather, the company used reliability surveys of earlier Surface devices (including Surface 3, Surface Pro 3, and the early Surface Book), according to a report the publication released recently. Microsoft apparently privately confirmed this as well, via an internal memo obtained by Thurrott.com, which shows that while return rates of products like the Surface Pro 3 and Surface Book were initially atrocious, they improved substantially over time. Later Surfaces, like the Surface Hub, also never really suffered from the same issues. In addition to removing its “recommended” rating from four Microsoft Surface devices, Consumer Reports stated it wouldn’t recommend any Surface products at all. Devices receiving the…

Stand down, everyone: Microsoft Paint isn’t going away after all. Microsoft signaled an aboutface in a recent blog post by Megan Saunders, a general manager within the Windows Experiences group. Instead of deprecating Paint in Windows 10—which seemed to many to be the first step toward oblivion—Saunders said Microsoft would release MS Paint in the Windows Store as a free app. “MS Paint is here to stay, it will just have a new home soon, in the Windows Store where it will be available for free,” Saunders wrote. Saunders acknowledged the pleas of Paint fans who didn’t want this longtime app to go away. “Today, we’ve seen an incredible outpouring of support and nostalgia around MS Paint,” Saunders wrote. Her next words were almost sentimental, as she affirmed Paint’s continuing existence:…

AMD’s 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen Threadripper 1950X ($999 on Amazon) is an angry Godzilla stomping his way through downtown Tokyo. Those puny 8-core, 6-core, and 4-core CPUs? They’re just tanks and army trucks to be punted across the city. Yes, it’s that good. But before you buy, there’s a lot you need to know about what is arguably the most powerful consumer CPU ever unleashed upon mankind. WHAT IS THREADRIPPER? Ryzen Threadripper’s name tells you its lineage: the ground-breaking Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 3 CPUs that have made AMD a contender again, after years of watching Intel dominate. While Intel currently builds its CPUs around a monolithic piece of silicon for all of its cores, AMD has designed Ryzen to be modular at the chip level. The basic building block…

Ever get that text message out of the blue? You know: “Hey, I’m at Best Buy right now. What do you think of this Acer laptop versus this Dell laptop? One says it has four cores, while the other has 8GB of RAM. Help!” Yes, it’s that time of the year when friends and family hit you up for computer-buying advice. Their kids are going off to college, and they need your all-knowing tech help right now. Because with great computer knowledge comes great responsibility, I always wade into the specs, and provide quick-take buying recommendations based on what I can discern from the configurations and prices. So, in the spirit of offering you the same expert advice I’d give to my nearest and dearest, I’ve combed through the bestselling…

Three years ago, I switched from Google search to Bing. There, I said it. No longer do I Google something; I Bing it. And I haven’t looked back since. Maybe you’re considering doing the same, either over ire about the recent diversitymemo controversy, or some other aspect of the search giant that has rubbed you the wrong way. Here are some points to consider. The move away from Google wasn’t easy. Sometime in the late 1990s, I was invited to test out Google’s search engine. I moved from poring though filing cabinets to typing queries in a search box. If it was out there on the web, Google promised that it would find it. Over the years, Google became smarter and more responsive. Google Instant auto-suggested search results before I…

There’s no denying that Google Home and Amazon Echo (or the less-expensive Echo Dot, if you’re not using it for music) have changed the way we interact with our homes. Turning on the lights has never been easier, nor has it been simpler to field the latest traffic report or order delivery for dinner. The future is here, and we’re reveling in it! But the proliferation of these devices around our homes leaves room for error. Google’s and Amazon’s connected speakers must always listen for us to utter their magic “wake” words—OK Google or Alexa respectively—in order to perform their tasks. If you don’t configure them properly, you might see random purchases show up at your door. It happened in San Diego when a little girl asked Alexa to deliver her…

Get ready to facepalm, Intel fans. The company’s upcoming Coffee Lake CPUs apparently won’t work with existing stocks of motherboards, a manufacturer confirmed on Wednesday. In a Twitter post by Asrock last Saturday, the company flat-out said the new CPU won’t work with today’s motherboards. When asked by Evan Jensen “...will the Z270 Supercarrier get support for the upcoming @intel Coffee Lake CPU’s?” Asrock’s official twitter account, @ASRockInfo replied: “No, Coffee Lake CPU is not compatible with 200-series motherboards.” PCWorld reached out to Asrock for comment on the tweet but has not heard back. Intel officials declined to comment on the statement by Asrock, saying that it doesn’t comment on future products. So was the post just a rogue and uninformed social media post? A hack? Nope. According to at…

No Windows 10 Creators Update for you, Microsoft says—at least, not if you happen to be the unlucky owner of certain older Atom-based Windows devices, and other aging models in the future. After stories arose of failed attempts to upgrade such hardware to the Creators Update, Microsoft confirmed recently that any hardware device that falls out of the manufacturer’s support cycle may be ineligible for future Windows 10 updates. In the case of the four “Clover Trail” processors—part of the Cloverview platform—that have fallen into Intel’s End of Interactive Support phase, they will be ineligible for the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft confirmed. Instead, they’ll simply be offered the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, plus security updates through January 2023, the end of the original Windows 8.1 support period. The problem, however,…

The web browser is by far the most important piece of software on your PC—at least for most users. Unless you’re at a workstation crunching numbers or editing the next Star Wars you probably spend the majority of your computer time staring at a web app or a website. That’s why it’s important to make sure you’ve always got the best tool for the job, and in 2017 that does not include Internet Explorer. If you still want the built-in option for Windows that would be Edge, but it’s hard to stick strictly with Edge when you’ve got other choices including Google’s Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. Let’s take a look at the four major (and modern) browsers to see how they stack up in 2017. (If none of these…

Until WD’s My Passport SSD showed up on our doorstep, Samsung’s T3 USB 3.1 (Gen 1, 5Gbps) portable SSD was the last word in super-svelte, high-capacity storage. Now there’s at least a conversation. The My Passport SSD even adds a little spice to the debate by using a Type C USB 3.1 (10Gbps) interface. The extra bandwidth made no difference in performance, and the T3 is still a little faster. More on the why of that later. PRICE AND DESIGN Small and fast costs more. At the time of this writing, the My Passport SSD was available only from Best Buy, with the 256GB version costing $100, the 512GB version priced at $200, and the 1TB version we tested going for an even $400. That’s not cheap, but roughly on par…

Microsoft isn’t quite finished developing Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update after all: Four new features were added as part of Windows 10 Insider Build 16251, including new Cortana capabilities and more communication between Windows and your phone. If there’s a theme to the new build, it’s following up on promises that Microsoft made earlier. At its Build developer conference, Microsoft promised that phones and Windows would begin to communicate with one another, so tasks begun on the phone could be completed on the desktop. Voice commands to shut down and reboot your PC have also been enabled via Cortana—who now has greater freedom to provide answers without launching a browser. Finally, if you do need to reboot your PC, you can program your PC to skip the authentication process. Why this…

Adobe Flash, one of the most controversial elements of the web, will be phased out by 2020, Adobe said recently. Browser makers, including Microsoft and Google, simultaneously announced plans for a gradual phaseout over the next few years. Adobe said that enough progress had been made within open web standards like HTML5 that it was time to phase out Flash. “Adobe and Macromedia provided innovation to the web, through browser plug-ins, before the underlying web standards could support the interactivity and creativity our digital media publishers and consumers craved,” the company said in a blog post. “By the end of 2020, we firmly believe that all of these required media capabilities and standards will be widely deployed and natively available to customers within browsers.” Specifically, Adobe Flash Player will be…

If there’s any gaming laptop as recognizable year to year as Razer’s Blade line, it’s probably Alienware’s. Following a redesign a few years back, the humbly named Alienware 17 has stayed pretty much the same ever since, at least on the outside. And you know what that means: Time to hit the gym if you want to do anything with this laptop besides set it on a desk and forget about it. THE BUILD: BIGFOOT The Alienware 17 R4 (currently priced at $2,549 on Amazon) is still so big. Just staggeringly huge. With so many following Razer’s lead and slimming down to actual laptop size as opposed to so-called “desktop replacement” proportions, I keep expecting Alienware to do the same. But no. Year after year, Alienware’s laptops remain gigantic—the better…

It’s getting harder and harder to delineate between the busy spring and the busy fall. The game release lull that used to last from May through September is now more like “late June to early August,” and even July saw its fair share of new game releases. There are just so many upcoming PC games nowadays. You’ll never catch up on that backlog! So it’s worth being selective. We’ve looked ahead at the upcoming months and plucked out 15 new games, sorted by release date, that we’re looking forward to as 2017 enters its final stretch. This is far from an exhaustive list, and there are a few conspicuous absences since indie titles don’t usually announce a launch date months in advance. But still, we’ve covered the major tentpole releases…

Few things in life are as annoying as finding that your Android handset refuses to install any more app updates because it’s run out of storage. Unlike many of life’s little annoyances, though, this one’s easy to fix. You can quickly clear out hundreds of megabytes or even a gig or two by sweeping up stale downloads, rooting out offline maps and documents, clearing caches, and wiping unneeded music and video files. There’s even an easy way to find and nix space-hogging apps that you no longer use. 1. CLEAR OUT ALL CACHED APP DATA If you dig into the Apps storage setting screen and tap on an individual app, you’ll notice that each app has its own stash of “cached” data—anywhere from a few kilobytes to hundreds of megs,…