Innehållsförteckning för June 2024 från PCWorld

Windows 11 Moment 5 is the latest version of Windows 11, released on April’s Patch Tuesday. Moment 5 prepares for the update to Windows 11 version 24H2, which will be released later this year, and adds some new features intended to simplify and streamline everyday tasks in Windows. This is accompanied by the new update KB5036893, which activates the new features from Windows 11’s Moment 5 on compatible computers. In addition to the new features listed below, Microsoft also made some improvements under the hood with this new Windows 11 update. USB ports can now deliver up to 80Gbps, but the hardwired connections in your laptop or desktop must be technically capable of handling the higher specification. HOW TO GET WINDOWS 11 MOMENT 5 FASTER If Windows 11 Moment 5…

Microsoft is pushing advertising into every possible corner of Windows 11 that it can find, and the Start menu is definitely not a safe space. We reported a few weeks ago that Windows Insider builds were showing “Promoted” applications once again. In a shockingly short amount of time, that function has been pushed into the current Windows 11 wide release build. The Verge spotted the update as part of the documentation for build KB5036980, which is an optional update at the moment, but will be headed to all current builds as Windows Update propagates. The Recommended section of the Windows 11 Start menu, normally reserved for apps you’ve just downloaded or frequently accessed user files, will add oh-so-helpful links to the Microsoft Store. And by “helpful,” I mean they’re apps that…

If you’re in the market for a hard drive or SSD, act fast! Otherwise, you could be paying more than you’d like. According to Taiwan analyst company TrendForce, storage makers Western Digital and now Seagate have sent letters to customers warning them that the companies will be raising prices on hard drives. WD’s letter said that it would be raising prices on SSDs, too. “Demand recovery continues across several segments of our business and our reduced manufacturing capacity is limiting our ability to meet all of our customers’ demand and is resulting in longer lead times,” the letter says. It’s signed by BS Teh, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Seagate. “As a result, we will be implementing price increases effective immediately on new orders and for demand that…

Not everyone needs an antivirus plan with extra bells and whistles—sometimes a subscription covering the fundamentals is all you need. (Why pay for what you won’t use?) On paper, McAfee Total Protection fits that bill nicely. In addition to strong antivirus and firewall protection, this software package also throws in a VPN and a password manager, along with dark web monitoring and a couple security-oriented utilities for your PC. The problem is that not every feature is a winner, which diminishes Total Protection’s appeal. WHAT DOES MCAFEE TOTAL PROTECTION INCLUDE? Despite the low introductory pricing, McAfee’s entry-level plan is more comparable to rivals’ mid-tier offerings. The basics include malware, network, and online threat protection that scans continually for dangerous software and exploits on your PC, potential network intruders, and suspicious…

Our last look at Aomei Backupper’s imaging, file backup, and sync program was at version 6, and it was a tad buggy, but developing apace. Version 7 of Aomei Backupper Professional adds incredibly affordable Aomei Cloud online storage to mix, as well as targeted backups for email and Outlook for those who don’t know where that data resides. More importantly, Backupper seems more stable and reliable. FEATURES Backupper’s existing features run the gamut of backup functionality, including imaging of your files, folders, system, drives, and partitions; Linux and Windows PE disaster recovery boot media; system, disk, and partition cloning; and several flavors of folder sync. Backups and syncs may be saved anywhere, to any type of nonoptical media (optical is supported for boot discs), including network locations, which may also…

You may be asking yourself, “Logging in without any passwords, how’s that supposed to work?” After all, user names and passwords are so much a part of everyday life that it’s hard to imagine the world might work without them. Yes, you can log in without a password, and it’s even more convenient, faster, and more secure than before. This time it’s not just an advertising promise—a fundamental change is actually underway. That’s good, because the status quo is downright sobering: Billions of personal accounts have been hacked worldwide. In Germany, almost one in three people have had their online accounts spied on, according to a representative survey commissioned by the consumer advice center. There are many reasons for this, some due to the carelessness of users. After all, not…

Although it was already possible in the past to use smartphones as a webcam on a Windows PC, this was cumbersome, not very stable, and hardly useful. Now Windows 11 has been updated to allow Android smartphones to be used as a webcam wirelessly via Bluetooth much more easily and effectively. The Windows Smartphone Link app is used for this purpose. No third-party app or cable connection is required. This does not yet work with iPhones. However, iPhone owners can use the iOS app EpocCam in this case. This also turns iPhones into webcams under Windows and macOS. To use it, you need the app on your smartphone and a client under Windows or macOS. Here, the user also has the option of extensively customizing the image. Connecting Android to the Smartphone…

Let me tell you a quick story. I like Johnston & Murphy shoes. I’ve been trying to get this pair for weeks, but since it seems a lot of other people like it too, it’s been out of stock in my very common shoe size. So I did a Google search to see if I could find other stores that had it in stock. And wouldn’t you know it, there was another Johnston & Murphy site, with “USA” added to the URL. It looked similar to the other site, but it had every single size of that shoe in stock, ready to buy. And it was half off the original price, what a deal! It must be an overstock outlet for the brand. I put the shoes in my cart…

Microsoft is packing more and more advertising into its Windows operating system. In Windows 11, ads now even appear in the Start menu (though Microsoft calls ads for apps or Windows services “recommendations”)—see page 15—and you’ll see full-screen ads for the Edge browser. You can sift through Windows settings and find individual options to turn them all off, but the flood of ads has encouraged resourceful programmers to develop tools designed specifically to eradicate them. Meet OFGB (Oh Frick Go Back). After starting the small program, OFGB displays a selection menu (see the image above) that lets you select which Windows adverts you no longer want to see using checkboxes. For example, you can switch off ads in File Explorer or on the lock screen, and deactivate ads that appear…

After letting Windows apps like Paint and Photos languish, Microsoft has brought them back with a vengeance. And Windows Photos now has one of the better features you could ask for in any app: Generative Erase. I like features that don’t take a lot of explanation, tutorials, or anything else. They should be intuitive and just work. And you know what? Generative Erase does just that—about as well as Photoshop does, too, and for free. Microsoft is rolling it out to Windows 11 right now, and Windows 10 users should see it, too. You’ll want to use Generative Erase if you’ve ever taken a photo and want to remove those one or two objects that get in the way of a perfect shot. Maybe it was a photo of the…

SK Hynix is nothing if not creative with naming. Witness the previously reviewed scarab-shaped Beetle, and now the Tube T31. The Tube T31 is, in fact, a Type-A USB stick, aka a thumb or flash drive or “tube” if you will—at least in shape and design. Internally, the T31 features NVMe and 10Gbps USB and performs more like the cable-attached external 10Gbps USB SSDs we review—that is, it’s fast. Note that while we distinguish between what’s referred to as a thumb drive and external SSDs, the former is in fact a type of the latter. The major distinction is that a commodity thumb drive generally uses older, slower technology such as SATA and USB 5Gbps. FEATURES The Tube T31 is a Type-A USB 3.2, 10Gb/s SSD that weighs around 1.2 ounces…

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (Gen 9) is a well-executed 2-in-1 laptop that delivers a beautiful dual-screen monitor experience on the go. After PC fans spent years watching Microsoft cancel devices like the Courier tablet and dual-screen Surface Neo PC, it’s great to see Lenovo deliver year after year, upgrading last year’s successful experiment with the latest Intel hardware. If you want a lot of screen that you can take with you, this machine delivers a better experience than Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold—and it’s less expensive, too. SPECS The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i has a retail price of $1,999, and it includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 155U CPU, Intel integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB solid-state drive for storage. This PC’s Intel Core Ultra 7 155U is a little…

Good news, everyone: My bar mitzvah videos from the mid-1990s are now digitized for the ages. While I have no intention of actually watching them—oy, the embarrassment—I recently received the original tapes from my parents and felt like they were worth preserving in a more enduring form than VHS. I was able to do it for cheap thanks to my USB capture card, which I originally bought to take screenshots of streaming devices for my TechHive column on cord cutting, but which continues to have all kinds of other neat uses. Below, I’ll walk through how to digitize your own VHS tapes or camcorder footage using the same methods, plus a few extra tricks that might make a USB capture card worth considering. THE HARDWARE The USB capture card is…

One thing that always annoys me about Windows is that I never really feel like I know how long my laptop battery has before it runs out—and, conversely, how long it will be before it’s fully charged. An ancient utility holds both secrets. When a group of PCWorld editors were brainstorming new article ideas, I suddenly remembered NirSoft’s BatteryInfoView, a freeware utility I hadn’t honestly thought about since before the pandemic. A few years of working at home, plugged in, meant that I hadn’t any need for a battery utility. BatteryInfoView is about as basic as it comes. It was developed, according to the developer’s web page, in 2011, and hasn’t really been updated in the last three years. It’s an alternative—and some might argue a better one—to the Battery…

Passwords suck. If they’re easy to remember, they’re the simplest to guess. If they’re difficult to crack, they’re the hardest to recall. Even if you use the strongest passwords possible, they’re ineffective if they become known. Which is why I’ve stopped using them as much to log into my accounts. But I haven’t weakened my online security by doing so. In fact, I’ve improved it—and sped up my login times, too. How? I set up passkeys for my accounts. It takes just a few minutes, doesn’t cost anything, and can be done using your smartphone or PC. Using them is equally painless. When logging in, you choose the passkey option, then approve the login request with your thumbprint, face scan, or PIN. It’s fast. This authentication method is secure, too. A…

By now you’re probably on high alert every time you get an actual phone call from someone you don’t know. If it isn’t the usual “we’ve been trying to contact you about your car’s extended warranty” recording, then it’s probably someone from “Windows” trying to get you to install a remote access program. If they mix it up a bit and tell you they’re from LastPass, yeah, it’s the same old BS. Ars Technica reports that phishing scammers have expanded their operations to impersonate the password saving service LastPass. Calls alert users that their account has been accessed from a new location, and they need to press one or two to stop this presumably nefarious hacker. According to an alert from LastPass itself, follow-up calls from real, live humans will then…

The Acer Aspire Go 15 is the latest affordable laptop in the Aspire family, offering a simple computing platform for users who don’t make major demands on their machine. While this lands it with an approachable $300 starting price, it also comes with fairly limited hardware such as an older Alder Lake–based Intel processor that relies exclusively on lower-power E-cores and on UFS storage instead of an NVMe SSD. Despite all this, the system proves to be a fairly competent worker, keeping up with everyday browsing and work tasks well enough. SPECS AND FEATURES The Acer Aspire Go 15 has few configurations at the moment, though Acer has some blurred lines with 14-inch as well as AMD-based models occupying the same space. The Intel-based, 15-inch models, indicated by AG15-31P in the name,…

Logitech’s MX Brio webcam produces some startlingly good images, even though you’d expect this semi-premium 4K webcam—from industry icon Logitech, no less—to deliver. I’m less impressed with some of its other elements, however—namely the accompanying software and its noise filtering. Logitech’s MX Brio is essentially the Logitech Brio 4K webcam without Windows Hello, but with an enlarged sensor that promises improved low-light sensitivity. It’s a little puzzling that Logitech excluded Windows Hello, but that choice may have been made with cost in mind. DESIGN AND FEATURES The Logitech MX Brio is a 4K webcam, though it can only record up to 30fps at 4K resolution. If you’d like a more video-like 60fps, you can record in either 1080p or 1440p resolution. Out of the box, Logitech’s MX Brio feels surprisingly…

Antivirus software is an essential piece of protection on any Windows PC. On an internet where malware is only becoming more and more profitable for organized crime, you don’t want to be without a good antivirus program. But there are a lot of myths floating around out there about antivirus software. Let’s bust them. MYTH: YOU NEED TO INSTALL ANTIVIRUS ON WINDOWS You don’t have to install antivirus software on Windows because Windows already comes with antivirus software. In fact, Windows has had built-in antivirus software since Windows 8, and it’s still included in Windows 10 and Windows 11 today. The built-in Microsoft Defender antivirus is part of the Windows Security suite of tools. It’s as basic as it comes, but it’s completely free and runs automatically in the background,…

Cloud or online storage is practical for many reasons: Provided you have an internet connection, you can access your data from anywhere, regardless of the end device. Synchronization ensures that content is always up to date wherever you are. Photos, screenshots, and other files can be backed up automatically, files can be shared, browser settings and passwords can be synchronized, as can system and app settings, at least with Microsoft OneDrive. Unlike Dropbox or Google Drive, OneDrive is deeply integrated into the operating system and even runs on the computer with Windows 11. Here we present the Microsoft cloud in detail, provide tips, and explain the differences in functionality between the various Microsoft subscriptions. SET UP ONEDRIVE, EVEN WITH A LOCAL WINDOWS ACCOUNT You can use OneDrive cloud storage in…