Innehållsförteckning för Nov-15 från PCWorld

WOW. JUST…WOW. Going into Microsoft’s massive device launch event, everyone knew that the focus would squarely fall on the intersection of physical and digital—new Microsoft devices that showcase everything possible with Windows 10. What we didn’t expect was just how convincingly Microsoft would manage to push its vision for convergence between hardware and software, or how damn sleek and sexy Microsoft’s in-house hardware would look. From a Surface-powered MacBook rival to Lumias that appear well worth the wait, here are the seven biggest reveals from Microsoft’s hardware blitz. Surface Book The surprise star of the show, the 13.5-inch Surface Book is the result of the Surface team’s wondering “what if we can do for laptops what we did for tablets?” The answer: something awfully compelling. The sleek, sexy Surface Book…

MICROSOFT HAS CLEARED up the mystery about what processors are inside the new Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, and here’s the answer: The high-end Surface Pro 4 contains a dual-core Core i7 Skylake chip, while the Surface Book uses a faster, also dual-core, version. Specifically, the high-end “clipboard” tablet portion of the Surface Book uses a dual-core Intel Core i7-6600U chip with Intel’s HD Graphics 520 integrated GPU inside, Microsoft confirmed. The premium version of the Surface Pro 4 uses a Core i7-6650U with Intel’s premium graphics, the Intel Iris 540. Microsoft also confirmed some details of the GPU inside the base of the Surface Book. “[The] Surface Book with the optional discrete GPU uses a custom Nvidia GeForce GPU designed for Surface Book and based on the Maxwell…

AN INTEL EXECUTIVE has admitted that the chipmaker goofed up by passing over the tower desktop PC market with its 5th-generation Broadwell processors. With Broadwell, Intel focused mainly on laptops, miniature desktops, and all-in-ones. This left traditional desktop users with no new socketed CPU options beyond 4th-generation Haswell, which first arrived in 2013. Although Intel finally coughed up a pair of Broadwell desktop chips this past summer, the company launched its high-end 6th-generation Skylake CPUs very shortly thereafter. At a recent industry conference, Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Client Computing Group, admitted that skipping desktops with Broadwell was a poor decision. Between the end of life for Windows XP in 2014 and the lack of new desktop chips, Intel hasn’t given tower PC users any…

WINDOWS USERS WHO rely on TrueCrypt to encrypt their hard drives have a serious security problem: a researcher has discovered two critical flaws in the program. TrueCrypt may have been abandoned by its original developers, but it remains one of the few encryption options for Windows. That keeps researchers interested in finding holes in the program and its spin-offs. James Forshaw, a member of Google’s Project Zero team that regularly finds vulnerabilities in widely used software, has recently discovered two vulnerabilities in the driver that TrueCrypt installs on Windows systems. The flaws, which were apparently missed in an earlier independent audit of the TrueCrypt source code, could allow attackers to obtain elevated privileges on a system if they have access to a limited user account. The original authors of TrueCrypt,…

IT’S OFFICIAL: FIREFOX is serving you targeted ads on the browser’s New Tab page now. But before you grab your torch and pitchfork, it’s not that bad. Mozilla quietly rolled out its Suggested Tiles feature in early August, Content Services VP Darren Herman announced (go.pcworld.com/fftilespartners) via Mozilla’s blog. While the Directory Tile ads that appeared in Firefox (go.pcworld.com/ffads) in late 2014 are mere dumb display ads, Suggested Tiles tap your browsing history to show advertising that (theoretically) appeals to you. Suggested Tiles aren’t a new Big Brother moment. They’re clearly labeled, and Mozilla doesn’t retain or share your individual user data—all Suggested Tile performance data is delivered to advertisers in aggregate, and all potential Tiles are downloaded from Mozilla’s servers in bulk based on your country and language. The decision…

THE iPAD PRO will offer “desktop-class performance” and have a CPU faster than 80 percent of portable PCs shipped. If you just fell off your chair, it’s understandable. Those claims made by Apple about its newest tablet are truly bold. They’re also pretty hard to believe for anyone who believes in the inarguable performance supremacy of the PC and x86 over tablets and ARM. Let’s take a closer look at exactly what Apple’s VP of marketing Phil Schiller said about the iPad Pro (go.pcworld.com/ipadprofaq) during the company’s big unveil September 9. During his talk, Schiller said the new 64-bit A9X SoC doubled memory bandwidth, doubled storage read and storage, and offered 1.9X the performance of the iPad Air 2. ”This is desktop-class performance,” Schiller boasted. ”It is faster than 80…

NarsiReddy Cheruku wants a way to encrypt files that are stored on a flash drive or external hard drive. Flash drives are easy to lose. And anything lost can fall into the wrong hands. So if you’re carrying around sensitive information in your pocket, you need to make sure those files are encrypted. Here are three possible solutions: Buy an encrypted drive You can buy a flash drive with built-in encryption, such as the DataTraveler Locker+ G3 (go.pcworld.com/dtlpg3). When you plug the Locker+ in, it comes up as a 13MB, read-only drive. But once you launch the program file on that drive and enter the password that you previously setup, another drive opens up with all the storage space you paid for. That drive, of course, is inaccessible without…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/surface bookvid MICROSOFT CALLS THE new Surface Book two-in-one the “ultimate laptop.” As a 2-in-1, it’s more than that. Undocked, the Surface Book is a massive 13.5-inch 3K tablet. Dock it to its base and it becomes a notebook capable of gaming, complete with its own discrete Nvidia GPU. And it’s twice as powerful as Apple’s MacBook Pro. The secret? A flexible, articulated hinge that stabilizes the entire laptop, allowing it to recline and fold forward like a regular laptop, and fold backward to a comfortable angle. In terms of flexibility, the Surface Book doesn’t quite match up to the Surface Pro 3. But that’s forgivable, given its other advantages. All told, the Surface Book reminds me of the Chromebook Pixel: the premier example of what…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/lumia950xlvid I HELD THE Lumia 950 XL in my hands. This is the Windows Phone flagship we’ve been waiting for, the phone that will lead its ecosystem. But where’s Windows Phone going? Logic tells me there’s no way Microsoft can resuscitate the market. Simply gaining a little ground won’t be enough—it can’t survive unless it can sit respectably near to Android and iOS in market share. After spending a little time with the Lumia 950 XL, I can consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, not all is lost. A solid CPU and camera make the new Lumia A nonstop trickle of rumors slowly revealed the specs of the Lumia 950 XL (as well as the 950 and 550) before Microsoft showed it off at its…

YOU CAN SEE WHY Microsoft’s Surface Book is ticking off other PC vendors (go.pcworld.com/pchostility). Microsoft’s stunning laptop, gives you everything you want—showing up all the vendors who said it couldn’t be done. Our review bears that out. Want a true laptop experience that doesn’t compromise? The Surface Book (go.pcworld.com/surfacebook) does it in an attention-catching fashion. Want to detach your monitor and use it as a gorgeous, perfectly proportioned tablet with pen support so beautiful it’ll have you sobbing? The Surface Book does that, too. Stupid-long battery life? Yup. And if you want a real graphics chip in an ultrathin chassis—something every other computer maker says couldn’t be done—yeah, Surface Book’s got that too. In a word, dayum. For this review, we had access to two Surface Books. The first featured…

I HAVEN’T BEEN much of a gamer in recent years, but I’ve always liked the idea of being one. That feeling intensified when I got my first glimpse of the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront. Then when I saw the Fallout 4 trailer, I knew I had tostart gaming again. But I quickly stumbled across a major problem: The only PC I have is a 2011 ThinkPad X220 with Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics. That just wasn’t going to cut it for proper PC gaming. Sure, I could make it work for titles like Diablo III with only small moments of stuttering on my laptop’s 12.5-inch, 1366-by-728-resolution display, but forget about more graphics-intensive games on an external 1080p display. That’s when it hit me: “Hey, you can have an external hard…

WINDOWS’ SAFE MODE provides a simple, stripped-down version of the operating system. The programs that usually load automatically when you boot Windows don’t do that here. And Safe Mode only uses the most generic drivers. Thus, Safe Mode can be a big help for diagnosing certain problems. For instance, it’s a great place to scan for malware. But the old-fashioned way to get into Safe Mode—booting the PC and pressing F8 at the exact right moment—seldom works on PCs running Windows 10. These techniques will: If you can successfully boot into Windows, booting into Safe Mode is relatively easy—if you know the trick. 1. Click or tap the Start button, and then the Power button. Hold down the Shift key when you select Restart. 2. In the resulting, full-screen menu…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/surface pro4vid A MONTH BACK, and we’d likely be trumpeting Microsoft’s new Surface Pro 4 as the next-generation of Surface. And it is. It’s just that, compared to its newly announced, mic-dropping rockstar cousin—the Surface Book—the Surface Pro 4 loses a bit of its luster. Shade your eyes from the Surface Book’s dazzle, and the Surface Pro 4 has a lot to offer. Bumping up its processor to a sixth-generation Core, or Skylake, has boosted the performance by 30 percent over the Surface Pro 3 and 50 percent over the Apple MacBook Air, according to Microsoft. At a starting price of just $899 (and available for pre order on Oct. 7, with availability on the 26th) the Surface Pro 4 is priced right, too. Externally, the…

MICROSOFT’S AUDACIOUS VISION for Windows devices that seamlessly blend hardware with software in a unified, holistic experience is finally bearing fruit, after being stuck in a morass for years. The company’s been inching toward this experience ever since it revealed Windows 8, with its touchscreen support and Metro interface. Just last year, the Surface Pro 3 finally became the first piece of kit that truly delivered on Surface’s core ideals, one-upping its flaw-ridden predecessors by delivering no-compromise hardware built around key Windows features; witness how pressing the Surface Pro 3’s pen summoned OneNote, for example. But the Surface Pro 3 still wasn’t immaculate. The reason: Windows 8. The hardware may have matured to match Microsoft’s vision, but Windows itself still hadn’t. Everything’s different with Microsoft’s just-revealed hardware lineup, from the…

JUMPING FROM WINDOWS 7 directly to Windows 10 has to be something like a farmer visiting Times Square. Live Tiles flash and move. A nice assistant named Cortana always hovers nearby. Click on the wrong spot and you could be whisked away elsewhere on the Web. And there are always people asking who you are, where you live, what you like... Because the latest version of Windows is always asking for information in the guise of being helpful, it’s easy to think that Microsoft’s the poster child for the collective attack on your digital privacy. But it’s not. This is the price of free: free email, free operating systems, free connecting with friends, free search. In fact, there are plenty of other companies who feel perfectly entitled to require you…

THE FABLED, LONG-REQUESTED Facebook “Dislike” button may finally become reality, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a recent Q&A session. But instead of being a catch-all “This sucks” identifier used to brand clickbait and racist memes from Uncle Homer with a scarlet letter, the social network’s considering rolling out the Dislike button for a more nuanced use: Empathy. Facebook wants to limit use of the Dislike button to situations where the standard “Like” interaction feels crass, such as posts about deaths or divorces. “What they really want is the ability to express empathy. Not every moment is a good moment,” Zuckerberg said, according to Time. Zuckerberg says Facebook’s “working on [a Dislike button] and shipping it,” with plans to start testing its implementation in the future. The story behind the story:…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/surfacepro4vidrv THE MICROSOFT SURFACE Pro 4 (SP4) has satisfied one expectation: It’s taken the proven success of the Surface Pro 3 (SP3) and gone even further, offering a substantial performance boost and other improvements. Now comes the harder part. The tablet ecosystem has dramatically evolved since the launch of the Surface Pro 3. New Surface clones like the Lenovo Miix 700 (go.pcworld.com/ miix700) and the Vaio Canvas (go.pcworld.com/ vaiozcanvas) will ship soon. Then there’s the Surface Pro 4’s flashy new family member: the Surface Book, a two-in-one boasting incredible battery life and a pricey external GPU option. Suddenly the Surface Pro 4 is simply machina sapiena, and the Book is machina maxima. The Surface Pro 4 (go.pcworld.com/surfacepro4) may have to resign itself to living in the…

WHEN MICROSOFT ROLLED out Office 2013, the productivity suite promised to be deeply integrated with the cloud. And as long as you were invested in Microsoft services such as OneDrive, it was. But other services you may use to stash your documents in the cloud, such as Dropbox and Google Drive? Well, not so integrated. Google aimed to improve the situation in July, when it rolled out its own plug-in for Office (go.pcworld.com/googledriveoffice) that works with every version of the suite released since Office 2007—including the Office 2016. The new plug-in lets you open items stored in Google Drive directly in Office, similarly to how Office’s OneDrive integration works. Here’s how Google’s plug-in works in Office 2013. Install the plug-in Click Download on the dedicated site for Google Drive…