PCWorld January 2023

PCWorld made its debut in early 1983, hitting the streets as a 310-page magazine brimming with essential information about IBM PCs, the long-forgotten CP/M operating system, and a 5MB hard disk that cost a cool $1,995 (or nearly $6,000 in today’s dollars). It was truly a different era. Things changed. PCWorld was there to guide you through it. We covered the clunky debut of Windows 1.0. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML in 1989, followed by the World Wide Web a year later, we explained why it mattered. PCWorld chronicled the introduction of graphical browsers, of Dell, of video cards, of the iPhone, of USB—and several hysterical hype cycles proclaiming the death of the PC at the hand of whatever the new hotness of the time was. Ha. The PC didn’t…

If you don’t use Twitter often, you may be unaware of how the site has dissolved into organizational chaos. But it’s a mess right now—and dangerous as a result. Prior to the company’s sale to Elon Musk, Twitter had a verification process that confirmed the identity of account owners. If the program found that you were who you claimed to be, a blue checkmark (or gray for the dark mode theme) would appear next to your name. It helped reduce harassment of highly public figures, and allowed users to easily recognize official accounts held by government agencies, newspapers, medical professionals, airlines, large corporations, and other sources of vital information. But last week, a major (and hugely confusing) change rolled out to the system. The tweak? The verification part got dropped—but…

Google Chrome has long had a reputation of being fast, secure…and ravenous for memory like a starving teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet. But finally Chrome is going to slim down, right in time for the new year. Over the next few weeks, Chrome will be adding two new features, Memory Saver and Battery Saver, on Windows, Macs, and Chromebooks alike, Google said Tuesday. The company didn’t say when exactly when these new features will show up in your browser, just that they will. The features work pretty much as advertised. Google pitches Memory Saver as a “smoother-running browser experience,” promising to save up to 30 percent more memory when running Chrome by freeing up memory from tabs you aren’t actively using. If a tab is idling, it will essentially be…

The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday that it is filing suit in an attempt to block Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion acquisition of game developer Activision Blizzard, on the grounds that it would suppress competition. The FTC said that the proposed deal could possibly change Activision’s existing strategy of supplying games to rival consoles, harming competition. “With control over Activision’s blockbuster franchises, Microsoft would have both the means and motive to harm competition by manipulating Activision’s pricing, degrading Activision’s game quality or player experience on rival consoles and gaming services, changing the terms and timing of access to Activision’s content, or withholding content from competitors entirely, resulting in harm to consumers,” the FTC said. In an attempt to get out ahead of the FTC’s action, Microsoft president Brad Smith penned a Wall…

Most laptop and CPU makers encourage you to upgrade your PC because its performance can’t keep up with the latest hardware. But there’s another, more compelling reason that’s largely ignored: Your laptop’s battery life will become significantly worse as time goes by. How much battery life will diminish depends on a number of factors. But here’s my anecdotal report, based on my day-to-day use: In just a year’s time, my laptop’s battery capacity has dropped by a whopping 16 percent. That’s a real-life number, based on real-world use. Though I swap back and forth between a number of test laptops for various uses, I typically leave a Surface Laptop Studio plugged in during the day; it’s also the test bed for powering my evaluations of the best Thunderbolt docks. As…

Someone on the internet wrote that ChatGPT just made the first two years of high-school homework meaningless. That assessment is not far off the mark. OpenAI’s new AI text-generation tool currently offers sophisticated, lengthy, and even fun responses to textual prompts, currently all for free. ChatGPT is part Wikipedia, part researcher, part analyst, and part poet. It can write a short paper on the causes and outcomes of the French Revolution. It can write a seven-paragraph essay on why nihilism should be your personal philosophy. It can write an epic poem on the need to brush your teeth regularly. It can write a formal yet sarcastic letter to your neighbor on why he shouldn’t trim your trees without permission. It’s a breathtaking development. It’s also a scary one when you…