PCWorld February 2025

PCWorld executive editor Gordon Mah Ung, a tireless journalist we once described as a founding father of hardcore tech journalism, passed away over the weekend after a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer. Gordon was 58, and leaves behind a loving wife, two children, older sister, and mother. With more than 25 years’ experience covering computer tech broadly and computer chips specifically, Gordon’s dogged reporting, one-of-a-kind personality, and commitment to journalistic standards touched many, many lives. He will be profoundly missed by co-workers, industry sources, and the PC enthusiasts who read his words and followed him as a video creator. Gordon studied journalism at San Francisco State University and then worked as a police reporter for the Contra Costa Times in the late 1990s. In 1997, he joined Computerworld (a PCWorld…

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is always a massive event that sees dozens of laptops announced, but CES 2025 was especially notable. Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm all made significant hardware announcements, and those announcements meant every laptop maker had a hoard of refreshed, upgraded laptops to show. But the show wasn’t just about the hardware. CES 2025 also saw Lenovo debut the world’s first rollable OLED laptop, a serious new MacBook Air competitor from Asus, and a flagship gaming laptop that seems a bit too obsessed with Skyrim. Much as we did with our roundup of the best monitors at the show, we’ve picked the best laptops of CES 2025 (see page 34). 1. ACER ASPIRE VERO 16 Acer found an unusual way to generate headlines at CES 2025:…

Microsoft really, really, really wants you to ditch Windows 10 and upgrade to Windows 11 already. (Better yet, just buy a new PC!) The company says that 2025 is “the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh”, and they’re trying their best to will that slogan into reality. Case in point: A new support page says that Microsoft Office 365 will lose support on Windows 10 in October, the same time the OS is shelved. “Microsoft 365 apps will no longer be supported on Windows 10 after it reaches end of support on October 14, 2025,” says the page. That doesn’t mean installed apps will suddenly cease to function on October 14th. They’ll simply be “unsupported.” Using the cloud-enhanced versions of the Office 365 apps and their many companion tools might…

At CES 2025, AMD revealed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D for desktop PCs, which the company is calling both the “world’s best gaming processor” and the “world’s best processor for content creation.” On paper, the comparison is brutal: AMD says its new chip is 20 percent faster in gaming than Intel’s Arrow Lake flagship, the Core Ultra 285K. AMD will ship the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and a second Ryzen 9 chip with v-cache, the Ryzen 9900X3D, to PC makers and customers beginning in the first quarter of 2025. Both of AMD’s new desktop chips outperform the existing Ryzen 9800X3D in terms of clock speed and core count—and give buyers additional choices to fill out their gaming systems. Remember, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D obliterated the competition in its review, then immediately sold…

CES 2025 was packed with all kinds of techie announcements, but for me the highlight was all the new graphics cards. Nvidia and AMD both played their hands with next-generation products, with some caveats. Nvidia certainly stole the show, with the GeForce RTX 50 Series announcement serving as the key opening message in CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech. AMD was much softer in its talk, with sparse details on its new RDNA 4 graphics cards, resulting in similarly sparse enthusiasm. Let’s go over what we learned from both companies about their GPUs and where your attention should be in 2025. THE GOOD AND THE ALMOST GOOD… Right off the bat, here’s the good news for us: We’re definitely getting some new GPUs, starting with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 Series. The top…

Ten years ago PC gamers were eagerly awaiting Steam Machines, console-style Linux boxes built from the ground up to play PC games. They flopped, due in no small part to Steam operator Valve’s lack of experience working with hardware partners. But in 2025, both Valve and its home-built gaming operating system are different beasts. And Microsoft should be afraid of them. THE STEAM DECK DOMINATES PC GAMING The big story in PC gaming for the last three years has been the Steam Deck. This low-power, portable, relatively inexpensive machine is clearly something the market has been waiting for, exciting gamers and energizing PC makers to pump out imitators, like the Asus ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go. But all of these machines lack a crucial component, despite copying…