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APRIL 2014 » DEPARTMENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
» FEATURES
5 News
83 12 PC upgrades for under $300 43 Reviews & Ratings 99 Laptops for work and play
113 Here’s How
» COLUMNS 122 Hassle-Free PC 125 Answer Line 28 Consumer Watch
132 Farewell, Pat McGovern 3
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NEWS 6
Windows 8.1’s spring update
16
UI designer: Forcing Metro on all is great for power users
19
22
Intel wants its new mobile chips in all your devices
25
Three big trends ruled the Mobile World Congress
Microsoft to use a pop-up to push users off XP
5
Tech and trends that will afect you today and beyond.
NEWS
Windows 8.1’s spring update Due in early April, the OS’s third refresh might be the charm. BY BRAD CHACOS
Boot to desktop by default » By far the most welcome change in the Windows 8.1 update is one that many users may not even notice. If Windows 8.1 does not detect a touchscreen input on your device, it’ll boot directly to the desktop to keep its finger-friendly live tiles away from keyboard-and-mouse users. The operating system then tosses up a new tutorial prompt to tell you how to find the modern Start screen. 6
Modern apps on the desktop taskbar » Microsoft’s modern Windows 8 apps now appear in the taskbar, mimicking the functionality of traditional desktop software. The Windows Store app is pinned in the taskbar by default in the Windows 8.1 update, to serve as a guidepost and to drive users to Microsoft’s marketplace. Modern apps still appear full screen when maximized; windowed modern apps are reportedly in store for the 8.2 update (“Threshold”) in 2015. 7
Inside Windows 8.1’s spring update
The taskbar is everywhere » In modern apps, you now can find the taskbar by moving your cursor to the bottom of the screen. The taskbar spans the screen’s length even when multiple modern apps are snapped side by side. As a result, bouncing between standard desktop programs and modern apps is much less of a burden (though still not seamless). Unfortunately, the taskbar sometimes covers interface elements in modern apps since they weren’t designed with it in mind.
8
NEWS
Mouse-friendly title-bar menus
» Previously, closing modern apps or snapping them side by side required moving your cursor to the top of the screen, clicking and holding, and dragging the app to one of the edges—a gesture designed for touch displays. In the new update, a title bar appears at the top of modern apps. Clicking the upper left corner reveals a mouse-ready context menu with sizing options, while minimize and close buttons appear at the upper right. 9
Inside Windows 8.1’s spring update
Start screen changes » On the Windows 8.1 Start screen, if you’re using a mouse, rightclicking an app now pops up an options menu for that live tile. In contrast, if you’re using a touch input, the familiar modern-style options bar pops up at the bottom of the screen. And the Start screen now includes discrete power and search buttons at the upper right. Before, you could find those crucial functions only via the hidden charm bar. 10
NEWS
New apps installed notification » Windows 8 dumped tiles on the Start screen for every modern app you installed. Windows 8.1 required you to add tiles manually, which reduced clutter but made it easy to forget you’d installed an app unless you added it to the Start screen immediately. The update finds a happy medium: Next to the arrow that moves you from the Start screen to All Apps, a notification appears if any newly installed apps are available. 11
Inside Windows 8.1’s spring update
Show more apps in Apps view » The All Apps screen that displays installed programs has received a slight rejiggering. The Tiles menu under the Settings charm now has a ‘Show more apps in Apps view’ option, which does what you’d expect by reducing the size of each app’s icon. The condensed view should come in handy for traditional-PC users who configured their Windows 8.1 desktop Start button to launch the All Apps screen as an ad hoc Start menu. 12
NEWS
Internet Explorer tweaks » The Windows 8 and 8.1 versions of the modern Internet Explorer hide the open tabs and address bar behind an interface that you must manually summon. The incoming update leaves that interface visible by default. A helpful Options button in the Tools menu now negates the need to go messing around in the Settings charm, and the button to launch IE’s awesome Reading Mode is now more clearly labeled. 13
Inside Windows 8.1’s spring update
Disk Space menu in PC Setings » Windows 8.1 added a slew of granular options to the modern version of PC Settings in a bid to keep lovers of Microsoft’s touchcentric interface ensconced in it. The update continues the shift by including a new ‘Disk space’ menu under the ‘PC and devices’ options, which provides tools for you to view and manage the gigabyte gobblers on your hard drive. A button to purge the Recycle Bin is a particularly convenient touch.
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NEWS
Reduced system requirements
» Finally, an under-the-hood change: Microsoft has said that the coming Windows 8.1 update will be usable on devices outfitted with just 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage space, a change that essentially halves the previous system requirements. Why move backward? Sick of losing customers to Android tablets and Chromebooks, Microsoft seems to be gearing up for a price war with Google. 15
UI designer: Forcing Metro on all is great for power users BY BRAD CHACOS WINDOWS 8’S MODERN interface didn’t go over well out of the gate. Although the live tiles and touch-friendliness offered a lot to like, usability experts panned many of the design choices, and power users felt abandoned. But beyond bridging the gap between PC and tablet, Windows’ immersion in the interface formerly known as Metro may have had another purpose: separating novice and power users. This move could preserve the best of Windows while making it more palatable to the casual computing public. “Before Windows 8 and Metro came along, power users and casual users—the content creators and the content consumers—had to share the same space,” Windows interface designer Jacob Miller wrote 16
NEWS
on Reddit in February (go.pcworld.com/ millerreddit). (A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed his employment.) Any new feature had to be simple enough for newcomers but practical enough for power users. Miller claims that many features, such as virtual desktops, fell by the wayside.
Displaced Windows desktop aficionados can start to feel optimistic again.
All work, no play, and vice versa Enter Windows 8. Yes, the modern interface is simple and better suited for content consumption than content creation, but Miller— who clarified that he was speaking as an employee sharing his viewpoint rather than in an official capacity—claimed that was the point. Our hands were bound, and our users were annoyed. So what did we do? We separated the users into two groups. Casual and power. We made two separate playgrounds for them. So if Windows 8 was designed to herd casual and power users into separate corners, why does the OS default to the modern interface? Casual users don’t go exploring. If we made desktop the default as it has always been, and included a nice little start menu that felt like home, the casual users would never have migrated to their land of milk and honey… So we forced it upon them. Now that Microsoft has fenced casual users inside the land of live tiles, Miller says it can work on making the modern interface better for casual users while filling the desktop with power features. Once [the modern interface is] purring along smoothly, we’ll start making the desktop more advanced. We’ll add things that we couldn’t before. Things will be faster, more advanced, and craftier. 17
Peering into the future If Miller’s claims prove to be true, the results could be enticing. Windows 8.1 started the migration, adding an optional boot-todesktop feature and numerous tweaks that improve the modern interface: more control settings, more flexible snap functionality, and Bing Smart Search. Microsoft’s modern apps are constantly adapting, too, as the company shifts toward rapid-fire updates. Leaked versions of the impending Windows 8.1 update 1 (see “Windows 8.1’s spring update,” page 6) show that even more improvements are inbound. But its new features—such as the ability to boot to either the desktop or the Start screen, depending on whether your setup has a touchscreen—seem like a Ballmer-esque “refinement of the blend” (go.pcworld.com/ballmerblend) to make the desktop and modern interfaces play more nicely together, rather
than a doubling down on the strengths of both. It’s unclear whether Microsoft always intended to smooth the edges or if it became more of a priority after Windows 8’s hard landing. But considering the new update’s changes, Satya Nadella’s appointment as Microsoft’s CEO, and Miller’s comments, displaced Windows desktop aficionados can start to feel optimistic again.
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Windows 8.1 update 1 offers mousefriendly Metro options.
NEWS
Microsoft to use a pop-up to push users off XP BY MARK HACHMAN NORMALLY, AN UNEXPECTED pop-up is a reason to worry: Is your PC infected with a virus? Is this pop-up an ad? With one particular pop-up from Microsoft, you’re supposed to worry—but the message is legit. In its ongoing bid to encourage Windows XP users to move to Windows 7 or Windows 8, Microsoft began pushing a pop-up window to users’ machines in March. The company is also partnering with LapLink to offer a free migration tool to assist with the transition. 19
Pop-ups generally raise suspicion, but this one’s legitimate.
By now, PCWorld readers and other people who keep up with tech news should know that the expiration date for Windows XP is April 8, 2014. Support for XP is ending, meaning that any vulnerabilities Microsoft hasn’t patched by now will remain open for malware writers to exploit. A few contingency plans (see “Keep Windows XP secure after Microsoft ends support,” page 37) can mitigate that threat somewhat; Google will support Chrome for Windows XP through 2015, for example. And although Microsoft has ditched support for Internet Explorer 8 (the last browser for XP), Microsoft Security Essentials will support Windows XP until July 14, 2015. Still, that’s like wrapping duct tape around the Titanic. So the challenge for Microsoft is to find a way to move users off XP. The company’s answer? The tried-and-true pop-up notification. According to Brandon Leblanc, the chief blogger for Microsoft, the pop-up displays only for users who have elected to receive updates via Windows Update. It includes a link to the Windows XP End of Support website (go.pcworld.com/xpend), where XP users can learn how to stay protected against security risks and viruses after April 8. The notification is set to recur on the 8th of every month unless the user disables it, Leblanc says.
Son, am I supposed to click this? The problem, however, is that the pop-up looks like every other popup, complete with a link, that decades of computer use have taught 20
NEWS
Microsof’s solution for moving users of XP: the tried-andtrue pop-up.
us not to click. Every tech-savvy son or daughter has told their parents to avoid such pop-ups, too. The alternative now, of course, is for those kids to step in and to encourage their parents to buy a new PC. Or a Mac. Or a Chromebook. For those people who want to provide such family tech support, Microsoft is offering a free copy of PCmover Express for Windows XP, which will copy files, music, videos, email, and user profiles and settings from the old PC to the new system, including across a network. The utility also allows Windows XP users to customize exactly what to bring over to their new machine. The free software is available from WindowsXP.com. If users want to transfer applications from Windows XP, they can do so, but they’ll need PCmover Professional (go.pcworld.com/ pcmover). Normally the price for that version is $60, but after a Microsoft-sponsored discount it’s just $24.
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Watch the video at go.pcworld. com/merri
Intel wants its new mobile chips in all your devices BY MELISSA RIOFRIO
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M E L I SS A R I O F R I O
DESKTOP WHO? WINDOWS what? The classic Windows-based PC
remains Intel’s bread and butter, but it has needed to diversify its diet for a long time. At an event at the Mobile World Congress in February, the company announced two new Atom chips, code-named Merrifield and Moorefield, that could be its first truly competitive mobile solutions—and they arrive not a product cycle too soon. In case you didn’t know how high the stakes were, Intel President Renée James laid it out in her remarks at the event. “About 50 billion connected-computing somethings”—yes, that’s what she called them—“will be online by the year 2020.” Getting even a small slice of that pie would be pretty sweet. But competitors like Qualcomm and Samsung have enjoyed a long head start, so Intel has a lot to prove to prospective customers. 22
NEWS
The new chips have two big selling points: Their 64-bit architecture enables faster performance. At the same time, Intel wrings more battery life out of the chips by designing them to power down quickly after executing a task. They’re also designed to work with operating systems beyond good ol’ Windows. Hermann Eul, Intel vice president and general manager of its Mobile and Communications Group, called the chips “complete platforms…that can support multiple operating systems and multiple segments in the market.” The company is particularly eager to associate itself with Android, if the green robots strutting around Intel’s booth on the show floor were any indication—hardly surprising, as Android could provide the entry to a much bigger market. In a small, sterile room tucked discreetly into its booth, Intel demonstrated a bank of reference Android mobile phones in action. Using the Battery Xprt app for Android, the phones can last as long as 19 or 20 hours on a full charge, according to Intel. The tests simulate real-world cell-phone use, which is sporadic, as opposed to
Intel showed its Merrifield and Moorefield chips running in reference designs at the Mobile World Congress. 23
the rundown tests traditionally conducted for PCs. The demo also included two identical Windows tablets, one running Windows at 32 bits and the other at 64 bits, “just to show we could do it,” said a spokesperson. But the real test of these chips lies ahead: Which device makers will include them in their phone and tablet designs? Eul named several at the event—Asus, Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung—and promised there would be more partners to come. We’ll see. The lack of on-board LTE in Intel’s chips has long been a sticking point, for instance, and the new chips are also LTE free (go.pcworld.com/ nolte), though Intel does sell a separate LTE solution. Eul aimed some trash talk at Qualcomm, whose 64-bit ARM chip isn’t due until the end of the year (go. pcworld.com/ qualchip). Intel got there first, Eul emphasized: “We ship. That is the difference.”
The real test lies ahead: Which device makers will design with Intel’s chips?
The new chips have tested with up to 19 or 20 hours’ battery life. 24
NEWS Watch the video at go.pcworld. com/mwc2014
Three big trends ruled the Mobile World Congress BY FLORENCE ION, SUSIE OCHS, AND MELISSA RIOFRIO WE SPENT A WEEK IN BARCELONA at the Mobile World Congress, wading through wearables (go.pcworld.com/wearables), sampling many smartphones (go.pcworld.com/tensp), and trying out a tablet or two. While the Galaxy S5 (go.pcworld.com/galaxys5) was the biggest product to debut—with wearables from Sony (go.pcworld.com/sonywear) and Huawei (go.pcworld.com/talkband) also garnering attention—it’s not a revolutionary release for Samsung, despite some impressive software additions (go.pcworld.com/s5features). We noticed three trends. Low-end phones: Flagship models like the S5 aside, most phone makers were touting low-cost handsets. Mozilla showed off phones running the Firefox OS that could sell for the low, low price of $25. Even when phone makers had a big handset to announce—say, Sony’s Xperia 25
Z2 (go.pcworld.com/xperiaz2)—usually a lower-priced model (like the Xperia M2) came along for the ride. Phone makers are looking beyond users who want the latest and greatest smartphone technology to people with more basic needs and budgets—in particular consumers in emerging markets. Nokia is getting into the Android arena with a trio of phones built on the Android Open Source Project (go. pcworld.com/nokiatrio). That’s allowed Nokia to give the X, X+, and XL a Windows Phone–style tiled interface, which it can sell to users in growth markets. And if those users get accustomed to that Windows Phone feel by the time they’re ready to upgrade, Nokia reasons, so much the better. Top tablets: A pair of tablets caught our eye. Lenovo’s Yoga Tablet 10 HD+ (go.pcworld.com/lenovoyoga10) is a sleek-looking tablet with a crisp display—a definite improvement over previous Yoga models. The promised 18-hour battery life is welcome, too. And HP’s Pavilion x360 (go. pcworld.com/hppavilion)—priced to entice at $399—takes a page out of the Yoga’s book, with a hinge that lets you use this laptop as either a conventional notebook or a tablet. Better audio: Manufacturers see audio improvements as a way to make their mobile devices stand out. Sony built noise-canceling technology into its Xperia Z2. HTC’s midrange Desire 816 (go.pcworld.com/htcdesire) offers dual front-facing speakers. Find more show coverage on our Mobile World Congress page (go. Intel has its pcworld.com/mwc). eye on the For Android news, Android market. visit Greenbot.com.
Flagship models aside, most phone makers were touting low-cost handsets.
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Welcome to Greenbot, a new website for Android enthusiasts.
We’ve got the ’droid info you’re looking for. Helpful tips, critical reviews, and expert analysis for passionate Android users of every experience level. www.greenbot.com
CONSUMER WATCH
Make smart purchases, stay safe online.
Pay by hashtag I L LU ST R AT I O N BY JU D E B U F F U M
Twiter and other social networks aspire to become the go-to spot for shopping. BY CAITLIN McGARRY
T
WITTER IS REPORTEDLY working on an e-commerce project powered by Stripe (go.pcworld.com/twitterstripe), a company that processes payments for sharing-economy startups such as Lyft, Postmates, and Sidecar. What this social-shopping initiative will look like is still unclear right now, but this isn’t the first time social networks have set their sights on retail. 28
Cashtags and gifs Late last year, for instance, Facebook worked with Stripe to allow Facebook users to store their credit card information with the social network. When users then enter their Facebook login on partnering retailers’ apps, their info fills in the payment fields automatically. In February 2013, Twitter teamed up with American Express to launch an experiment in which AmEx cardholders can sync their credit cards (go.pcworld.com/amexsync) with their Twitter accounts and then take advantage of discounts or buy physical goods by using an AmExapproved hashtag. Major brands such as Amazon, Best Buy, J. Crew, McDonald’s, and Whole Foods have since signed on with American Express to offer deals on Twitter, and American Express claims that its social-network offers attract users who are ten years younger than the average AmEx customer and spend about 30 percent more. Twitter also partnered with Starbucks last fall. Instead of hashtags, however, Starbucks required users to include a specific phrase— ”@tweetacoffee to @insertnamehere”—to trigger the sending of a $5 gift card to the recipient of their choice. Keyhole, a company that tracks social conversations, estimated that the promotion generated $180,000 in sales for Starbucks (go.pcworld.com/twitterstarbucks). The coffee chain has long offered gift cards on Facebook Gifts, too. Gifts took a hit last summer, though, when Facebook determined that physical goods weren’t selling well and decided to focus on digital gift cards, which amounted to 80 percent of all gifts on the platform. Sync your AmEx card with your Twitter account to get access to special deals.
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Pinterest is currently the only social network that inspires people to buy.
Pinterest drives purchases Although Pinterest gets little attention for its ability to turn inspiring images into sales, it’s cleaning up as far as social shopping goes. On largely text-driven social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, it’s difficult for companies to organically turn brand messages into sales because those messages stick out like a sore thumb. Pinterest, in contrast, drives purchases more naturally: Users can conceivably click through any image from any board on the site to reach a product link. Some numbers confirm the online bulletin board’s influence: Pinterest captures the bulk of product sharing on social networks with 44 percent of shares (go.pcworld.com/pincommerce), while Facebook and Twitter lag behind at 37 percent and 12 percent, respectively. One pin translates to 78 cents in sales, according to research from Piquora. People use pinned images and hashtag deals in vastly different ways, though. Pins have a longer shelf life than hashtags, which are all about 30
CONSUMER WATCH immediacy and serve to promote limited-time offers or flash sales. A pin continues to push as much traffic to a site three and a half months after it’s posted as it does when initially pinned, according to Piquora.
Twiter has to convince users that shopping on a social network is secure.
The retail challenge Making a purchase directly from a product page feels safer than using a hashtag as shorthand for “buy now.” If Twitter wants people to buy stuff from a tweet, it has to convince users that shopping on a social network is truly secure—and it has to present sales messages in a way that doesn’t annoy users. Social-conversion platform Chirpify is helping companies meet the latter challenge. A recent campaign involving Lady Gaga let Twitter users hashtag their tweets to get a package with the pop star’s latest album. In Chirpify’s promotions, users aren’t storing their financial information with Twitter—Chirpify’s team sees the promotional hashtag and directs the user to a payment page. “You don’t want to carpet bomb,” says Chirpify CEO Kevin Tate. “You Chirpify helps big brands turn hashtags into purchases.
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want to let the conversation be about other things. It lets customers who are interested raise their hand and continue the conversation from there.” And that conversation could begin outside of Twitter. If a brand includes a hashtag in a print ad or TV commercial, for example, Twitter users could enter that hashtag to take advantage of deals. In the end, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and the retailers who want to translate eyeballs into sales are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks—and to see what helps them get into your wallet.
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Routers: More vulnerable than ever BY JON L. JACOBI AND MICHAEL BROWN
ROUTERS AND OTHER connected devices are leaving home networks open to attack. The worst-case scenario? Strangers can access your files, slip malware into your network, or use your own security cameras to spy on you—all without laying a finger on your hardware. For example, some older Linksys E-Series routers and Wireless-N routers and access points are vulnerable to a malware infection that deposits a self-replicating worm (go.pcworld.com/linksysworm). And recent reports indicate that the default settings of Asus routers leave USB storage devices wide open (go.pcworld.com/routerflaw). If you’re running an Asus router with a USB storage drive attached, download and install the latest firmware from Asus’s website (www. service.asus.com). Don’t depend on the router’s Web interface to get the update, as it might not download the most recent version. As for Linksys routers, “customers who have enabled the Remote Management Access feature can prevent further vulnerability to their 33
CONSUMER WATCH
network by disabling the Remote Management Access feature and rebooting their router to remove the installed malware,” company spokesperson Karen Sohl wrote in an email. “Linksys will be working on the affected products with a firmware fix that is planned to be posted on our website in the coming weeks.” Asus and Linksys are hardly alone, however: Recent reports noted similar flaws in Netgear’s ReadyNAS line (go.pcworld.com/netgearflaw).
How atackers get in Your public IP address is as well defined as your street address. In most cases this public address leads straight to your router. If someone gains control of your router, that person can open connections and redirect traffic anywhere. The havoc the intruder wreaks can also ruin the day for a lot of other people, depending on what the attacker relays through your equipment. A router directs traffic in and out of thousands of numbered ports. Port 80, for starters, handles HTTP traffic (Web access). Port 21 sends and receives files over FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Port 443 takes care of HTTPS (encrypted Web traffic, such as banking or shopping transactions), and port 3369 is for Remote Desktop. If a port is open—normally all of them are—the router simply shufles data to and from whatever IP device each port is directed to. So you must password-protect not only your router but also every Using the Shodan search engine, we easily found an FTP server filled with pirated TV shows, wide open.
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CONSUMER WATCH You can learn more about network ports on Wikipedia.
device that communicates with the Web, even if it’s a refrigerator, to prevent outsiders from gaining access via the ports. Most routers and many NAS (network-attached storage) devices have well-documented default login IDs and passwords, such as “admin” and “password,” and their installation wizards encourage users to change these defaults. If you neglect to do so, you leave your network vulnerable. Note, though, that even if you create a secure, complex password, any hard reset you might later perform on your router for troubleshooting purposes can restore the old, weak password without your knowledge. You must also keep your router’s configuration firmware updated and secure all the services running on it. For example, enabling UPnP on older firmware—an action that most router manufacturers recommend, because doing so simplifies configuration—can expose any FTP and SMB servers you have running on the router, enabling Internet snoops to access every file on your attached storage devices.
A complete action plan Want to assess your network’s vulnerability? First browse to What’s My IP Address (www.whatsmyip.org). At the top is your public IP address. To the left, select the Port Scanners option, and then run the tests to see which ports are open. Some Internet gateways won’t let you run such tests locally; you’ll have to note your public IP address and then try these tests from a coffee shop or a friend’s house. 35
At Wikipedia you can find a list of all available ports (go.pcworld.com/ports), but the critical ones are those that allow remote access to your files or remote control of your network devices, such as FTP, HTTP, and RDP. Checking to see if your network is passwordprotected is easy enough. Open a browser and type in your public IP address preceded by the proper header (ftp://, http://, and so on). If you connect, you should see a screen asking for a password. If instead you go immediately to the homepage for your router, NAS, or IP camera, your network isn’t protected—and anyone else with an Internet connection can access those resources just as easily. In addition, confirm whether the FTP service on your router or NAS box is enabled, and whether it allows anonymous access—unless you’re sharing files with the world, you should disable anonymous access. You can find FTP in your router’s HTML configuration pages, which you can access from your browser locally at 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.254, or a similar address. (Check your user manual for the default address of your router.) For maximum security, you can put your router or router/modem into pin-hole mode, in which every port is blocked by default and you open only the services you need. It takes a bit of work, but it’s very secure.
Unless you’re sharing files with the world, you should disable anonymous access to your FTP service.
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CONSUMER WATCH
Keep Windows XP secure after Microsoft ends support BY CHRIS HOFFMAN
THE WINDOWS XPOCALYPSE is upon us: Microsoft is no longer providing security patches for Windows XP as of April 8, 2014. Nearly 30 percent of Internet-connected PCs still run XP. They’ll continue operating normally, but they’ll be rotting inside, suffering from increasingly numerous security holes. If you’re using Windows XP, and you can’t upgrade your machine immediately, you can protect yourself. Make no mistake, however: The following tricks are like sticking your finger into a leaking dam. They’ll help a bit, but the dam is crumbling.
Choose your sofware wisely If you use Internet Explorer, let it go—IE 8, the most recent version available for XP, is no longer receiving patches. In contrast, Google Chrome will continue supporting Windows XP until at least April 2015, while Mozilla Firefox has no announced plans to stop supporting XP. 37
Most antivirus utilities will continue supporting XP; even Microsoft Security Essentials will do so until July 14, 2015. Antivirus-testing company AV-Test asked 30 antivirus companies (go.pcworld.com/ avsupport) about their intentions, and all of them committed to supporting XP until at least April 8, 2015. Most committed to an even longer period, into at least 2016. Be sure you’re using an antivirus program that’s receiving updates, though. And as Microsoft warns (go.pcworld.com/xpav), remember that “the effectiveness of antimalware solutions on out-of-support operating systems is limited.” If you’re still using the defunct Outlook Express, switch to the full version of Outlook in Microsoft Office. If you want an alternative, Mozilla is still supporting Thunderbird with patches, though it’s unclear how long Thunderbird support on older operating systems will continue. Or you can use a Web-based email service in Chrome or Firefox. Office 2003 is losing its support just as XP is. If you’re using that suite—or, even worse, Office XP—update to a newer, supported version. (Yes, this means a Ribbon-bedecked version. Sorry.)
Remove insecure sofware The Java browser plug-in is exploit-prone on any OS. Unless you need Java for a specific purpose, uninstall it. If you need it, disable the Mozilla’s Plugin Check ensures that your browser extras are fully patched.
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CONSUMER WATCH
browser plug-in (go.pcworld.com/ditchplugins) and keep it up-to-date. Attackers frequently target other browser plug-ins, too; Adobe Flash and Adobe Reader are crucial. Modern versions of Flash and Reader update themselves automatically, but older versions didn’t even check for updates. If you don’t need these applications, uninstall them. Scan for unpatched software on your computer with Secunia PSI (go.pcworld.com/secunia_psi). You can also visit Mozilla’s Plugin Check page (go.pcworld.com/plugincheck) to see if outdated browser plugins are installed. Don’t let the page’s name fool you: The check works in other browsers, too, not just Firefox. Risky behavior will be magnified in a post-patch world. For tips, check out our complete guides to staying safe in the Web’s worst neighborhoods (go.pcworld.com/websworst) and guarding against devious security traps (go.pcworld.com/devious).
Take drastic measures Now let’s dig into the more radical but totally appropriate tactics. Go ofline: Say you need Windows XP only to run a crucial business 39
Windows 7’s XP Mode lets you run XP in a virtual machine.
application, or to interact with hardware that doesn’t function with newer versions of Windows. In this case, disconnect that Windows XP system from the network if possible. This action is the easiest, most foolproof way to keep a Windows XP computer secure. Use a limited account: If your machine is blasted by malware, the invader can do only as much damage as the account it infects. Administrator accounts (go.pcworld.com/ adminrisk) give baddies the keys to your computing kingdom. Stick to using a limited account for your day-to-day activities. Use an admin account to create the locked-down login and fill it with the software you need, and afterward don’t stray from limited land unless you need to install or update software. (And even then, use the admin account only for as long as is necessary to finish the installation.) Confine XP to a virtual machine: Virtual machines let you run Windows XP in an isolated container (go.pcworld.com/vminternet), placing it in a window on your desktop. Windows 7 Professional includes Windows XP Mode for just this reason, offering businesses and other professional users the ability to set up such a virtual machine without buying an additional Windows XP license. If you’re upgrading to Windows 8 or Windows 7 Home, however, Windows XP Mode is not included. In this situation you’ll have to get a boxed copy of Windows XP—an old one will work—and then install it inside a virtual machine. Fortunately, you don’t have to buy virtual machine software: The free VirtualBox (go.pcworld.com/virtualbox43) or VMware Player (go.pcworld.com/vmwarepl) will work fine. Inside a virtual machine, you can run most Windows XP applications. Note, however, that if a program needs direct access to a piece of hardware, it may not work. Remember, too, that the cessation of Microsoft support extends to Windows XP Mode and Windows XP in virtual machines. However, running XP in a virtual machine on a modern version of Windows is much more secure than running XP as your primary OS.
Stick to using a limited account for your day-to-day activities in XP.
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CONSUMER WATCH Move on Suppose you have a trusty old XP system that works for Web browsing and you don’t want to invest in a new computer or a new Windows. To stay secure, you might try installing Ubuntu Linux (go.pcworld.com/ ubuntuguide) and tweaking its appearance (go.pcworld.com/ tweakubuntu), or perhaps installing the more lightweight Lubuntu (go.pcworld.com/lubuntu). These completely free OSs work well on older hardware, and will be supported with patches for years to come. If Windows 8 puts you off, you can still upgrade to Windows 7, which Microsoft will support until 2020. New copies of Windows 7 or 8 cost nearly $100, though, and they might not run on XP-era hardware, so you may be better off buying a whole new computer. Sure, Microsoft wants to sell you a new Windows license, but it’s been 12 years. Make plans to move on. You don’t have to go to Windows 8, but you can’t stay here—not for long, anyway.
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Join The Nature Conservancy to plant a billion trees, one tree at a time, in the fght to end climate change at plantabillion.org
REVIEWS & RATINGS 44
We push six 802.11ac Wi-Fi USB adapters to the limit
63
Samsung Galaxy Note Pro: Android challenges Windows in the office
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Lenovo ThinkPad X240: A no-nonsense business laptop
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Intel 730 Series SSD (480GB): Good performance and a strong warranty
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Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook hits the sweet spot
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Lenovo Miix 2 8: A fast tablet that’s short on features
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Reveal 11 Business automates professional videography
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Pro document shredders offer total destruction
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REVIEWS & RATINGS
TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS In this section, hardware & software goes through rigorous testing.
We push six 802.11ac Wi-Fi USB adapters to the limit The competing devices we tested had significant diferences in performance and price. BY MICHAEL BROWN
D-Link DWA-182 Asus USB-AC56 Wireless AC1200 Dual-band Dual Band USB Wireless-AC1200 Adapter Adapter Netgear A6200 Linksys WUSB6300 WiFi USB Wi-Fi Wireless AC Adapter Trendnet TEWDual-Band AC1200 805UB AC1200 USB Adapter Dual Band Wireless USB Adapter
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N
Buffalo Technology AirStation WI-U2-866D
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O
NCE YOU’VE PURCHASED a new 802.11ac router (see go.pcworld.com/routers2013), you have to decide on a wireless adapter to connect it to your client PC. If the client doesn’t incorporate an 802.11ac adapter—and few machines do—you won’t get the maximum benefit from the router. I benchmarked six of the newest 802.11ac Wi-Fi USB adapters and found striking differences in their performance. The 802.11ac draft standard delivers a physical link rate of up to 1300 megabits per second (with a router that supports three spatial streams for sending and three for receiving). Products in the current
I tested each adapter in four spots inside my 2800-square-foot single-story home, using only the 802.11ac protocol.
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More: Wi-Fi USB Adapters batch of 802.11ac Wi-Fi USB adapters, however, support only two spatial streams and deliver a maximum physical link rate of 867 mbps. To find the top-performing adapter, I tested each adapter in four spots inside my 2800square-foot single-story home, using only the 802.11ac protocol. I sequentially installed each product in an AVADirect gaming notebook powered by an Intel Core i5-3210M processor and 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory. Then I used an Asus RT-AC68U802.11ac Wi-Fi router (go.pcworld.com/asusrtac68u) to create a wireless network. Using the JPERF benchmarking utility, I measured TCP throughput between the wireless laptop client and a server that was hardwired to the router. Some adapters come with a tethered USB cradle, increasing your range of placement options. If the adapter had such a cradle, that’s how I evaluated it. Other models plug directly into the client’s USB port, and that’s how I tested those. A couple of models have articulated USB connectors that allow you to orient the adapters either straight out from or at a 90-degree angle to the client. In those cases I selected the angled option if it was available—unless the vendor also provided a cradle.
I measured TCP throughput between the wireless laptop client and a server.
USB surprise The type of USB interface had no detectable impact on the adapter’s performance. The Asus USB-AC56, which has a USB 3.0 interface, turned in the highest throughput overall, but the Netgear A6200 placed second, despite its USB 2.0 interface. And the Trendnet TEW-805UB, which has a USB 3.0 interface, was the slowest overall performer by a wide margin. The Asus USB-AC56 took first place in tests with the client located in the bedroom (9 feet from the router) and in the kitchen (20 feet away). Though the Asus didn’t perform quite as well at longer distances, it came out on top overall when I averaged the routers’ performance in all four locations. Netgear’s A6200 finished a strong second overall, just 2 mbps behind the Asus, and did especially well at longer distances. The D-Link DWA-182 finished third overall, with Buffalo’s AirStation WI-U2-866D close behind it. 46
REVIEWS & RATINGS The Asus USBAC56 was the top performer overall, but Netgear’s A6200 finished right on its heels. The Netgear is also much easier to travel with.
802.11ac Wi-Fi Client Adapter Using an Asus RT-Ac68U Router 404.0 347.0
Asus USB-AC56
163.0 213.0 240.0 251.0 227.0 248.0
Buffalo WI-U2-866D
290.0 288.0
D-Link DWA-182
175.0 244.0 230.0 232.0 190.0 143.0
Linksys WUSB6300
310.0 312.0
Netgear A6200
233.0 264.0 256.0 199.0
Trendnet TEW-805UB
104.0 79.1 0
100
200
300
400
MEGABYTES PER SECOND. (LONGER BARS INDICATE HIGHER PERFORMANCE.) Bedroom (client 9 feet from router) Kitchen (client 20 feet from router)
Home theater (client 35 feet from router) Home office (client 65 feet from router)
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500
More: Wi-Fi USB Adapters The Asus USB-AC56 has internal antennas, too, so you can leave the cap covering the thread mount on, if you don’t want to use the long antenna.
Asus USB-AC56 Dual-band Wireless-AC1200 Adapter The USB-AC56 ($70; ; go.pcworld.com/ac56) comes with a tethered USB stand and a hinged, detachable antenna. I thought the latter would give the adapter an edge at longer distances, but it didn’t. Designed with a USB 3.0 interface, it had the fastest TCP throughput when the client was close to the router, reaching 404 megabits per second when the client was in the bedroom, 9 feet from the router. With the client in the kitchen and the router 20 feet away, the USBAC56 achieved a roundup-best TCP throughput of 347 mbps. Given the size of the USB-AC56’s antenna, I was surprised when it landed in fifth place on my test with the client inside the double-thick walls of my home theater. Also unexpected was its fourth-place finish on my test with the client in my home office, 65 feet from the router. Even so, with data rates of 163 mbps and 213 mbps respectively on those tests, the Asus adapter should have no trouble streaming highdef video to any location inside a typical house. The USB-AC56 is a bit unwieldy, whether you use its external antenna or not (it also has an internal antenna, so the external one isn’t essential). Without the antenna, the adapter protrudes almost 4 inches from your computer’s USB port. Remove the cap protecting the threaded antenna connection and attach the antenna, and the device’s length extends to nearly 4.5 inches. When I averaged each adapter’s throughput at all four test locations, the USB-AC56 had the highest mark—though by less than 1 percent. 48
REVIEWS & RATINGS Bufalo Technology AirStation WI-U2-866D In our roundup of 802.11ac Wi-Fi client USB adapters, Buffalo Technology’s AirStation WI-U2-866D ($40; ; go.pcworld. com/wiu2866d) earned two second-place finishes, and it ended up in fourth place overall. Its $40 street price makes it an attractive value. The WI-U2-866D’s antennas are mounted internally. Though Buffalo doesn’t provide a cradle, you’ll find a bendable (but disappointingly weak) USB 2.0 stub cable in the box. The adapter’s hinged interface allows you to position the adapter vertically or horizontally. The adapter is a bit over 3.5 inches long; but when vertically oriented, it protrudes less than an inch from the PC. Buffalo’s model was the only adapter in my test group that lacked a WPS button. If you choose this model, you’ll have to remember your router’s passphrase in order to establish a wireless connection. Like Asus, Buffalo provides a software utility that reports connection status, signal strength, and other details. You can use the utility with either Buffalo’s adapter or your laptop’s built-in adapter. The Buffalo adapter delivered TCP throughputs of 248 mbps from 65 feet away from the router (good for the second place in the roundup), 227 mbps from 35 feet away (again, second), 251 mbps from 20 feet away (fourth), and 240 mbps from 9 feet away (fifth).
The WI-U2-866D’s hinged USB interface folds into a recess on the adapter’s back to protect it.
The WI-U2-866D’s hinged USB interface folds into a recess on the adapter’s back to protect it.
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More: Wi-Fi USB Adapters The ‘C’ rev of the D-Link DWA-182 has a USB 3.0 interface, but the USB 2.0 interface on the model reviewed here didn’t present a performance bottleneck.
D-Link DWA-182 Wireless AC1200 Dual Band USB Adapter In our latest roundup of 802.11ac client adapters, D-Link’s DWA-182 ($50; ; go.pcworld.com/wusb6300) finished in third place overall, without achieving any first- or second-place finishes on any of the individual tests. The compact adapter measures about 3 inches long, not including its USB interface, and D-Link provides a USB cradle that gives you some welcome flexibility in positioning it. D-Link switched to a USB 3.0 interface with hardware revision C1. I had an older version that uses a USB 2.0 interface, but I don’t think it makes a big difference. The adapter itself isn’t hinged, so your only orientation choices are horizontal or vertical. My benchmark numbers came from using the adapter in the cradle. The adapter has a WPS button, which simplifies connecting the client to the router. The antennas are inside the device. D-Link offers a simple utility for establishing a connection to your wireless router: The utility reports the status of your connection, notes the channel it’s using, and shows a graphical representation of the signal strength. The DWA-182’s $50 street price is $20 lower than that of the topperforming Asus USB-AC56, but at the same time it’s $10 higher than that of the fourth-place Buffalo AirStation WI-U2-866D. 50
REVIEWS & RATINGS Linksys WUSB6300 Wi-Fi Wireless AC Dual-Band AC1200 USB Adapter Despite its USB 3.0 interface, Linksys’s WUSB6300 802.11ac Wi-Fi client USB adapter ($70; ; go.pcworld.com/wusb6300) was slower than average at three of my four test locations. The compact adapter protrudes from a PC by just 3 inches. It hides its two antennas inside its plastic shell, and its WPS button makes connecting to your router easy. But there’s no USB cradle, and the adapter isn’t hinged, so you don’t have much flexibility in positioning the adapter for optimal reception. Aside from its third-place finish on my home theater test, 35 feet from the router, the WUSB6300 was a mediocre performer. The Linksys adapter finished dead last when the client was 9 feet away from the router in the same room, with TCP throughput of 230 megabits per second, versus 404 mbps for the Asus USB-AC56 at this location, and 310 mbps for the Netgear A6200. The WUSB6300 did slightly better when I moved the client into the kitchen, registering TCP throughput of 232 mbps, but that rate is nowhere near the 347 mbps that the Asus adapter delivered. The Linksys WUSB6300 finished third, fifth, or last in my individual tests, and placed fifth overall. Combine that undistinguished performance with a $70 street price, and you have little reason to favor this adapter over any rival except the Trendnet TEW-805UB.
Though Linksys was one of the first manufacturers to ship an 802.11ac Wi-Fi client USB adapter, the WUSB6300 is far from a standout model.
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The hinged USB interface enables you to fine-tune the adapter to your router. Netgear also provides a USB cradle.
Netgear’s Genie utility provides useful information such as site polling, physical link rate, and the client’s current IP address.
Netgear A6200 WiFi USB Adapter The Netgear A6200 ($50; ; go.pcworld.com/a6200) has a USB 2 interface and a hinged connector. Its antenna lies inside a thin rectangular bar that you can pivot to fine-tune its reception. Netgear’s antenna design is much less fragile than the Asus USB-AC56’s screw-on antenna (unless you remove the Asus model’s antenna every time you pack it). Tested with its USB cradle and its antenna in a vertical orientation, the Netgear adapter almost matched that of the first-place Asus USB-AC56 overall, falling short by just 2 megabits per second. But the performance gap was far larger when the client was 9 feet away from the router: 310 mbps for the Netgear’s TCP throughput versus 404 mbps for the Asus’s. The A6200 placed second when the client was in the kitchen, too, with throughput of 312 mbps as opposed to the USB-AC56’s 347 mbps. The Netgear adapter beat the Asus at longer ranges, however, with TCP throughput of 233 mbps versus 163 mbps when the client was in my home theater, 35 feet from the router; and 264 mbps versus 213 mbps when the client was in my home office, 65 feet from the router. The A6200 measures nearly 5 inches long with its antenna extended (not including its USB interface), and slightly less than 3.5 inches long with its antenna folded down for travel. The USB interface pivots, but it doesn’t fold away completely as the Buffalo WI-U2-866D’s interface does. If long-range performance is crucial in your network setup, this adapter is a great choice. But if not, the Asus USB-AC56 is a better bet. 52
REVIEWS & RATINGS Trendnet TEW-805UB AC1200 Dual Band Wireless USB Adapter The Trendnet TEW-805UB ($40; ; go.pcworld.com/ tew805ub) is small (protruding from a PC’s USB port by about 2.625 inches) and inexpensive. ($40 street). But it brings up the rear on most performance metrics, and It has no special features. The adapter is short and has a nonhinged USB 3.0 interface; it also lacks a USB cradle, giving you little placement flexibility. The TEW805UB’s close-range performance was merely adequate. Whereas the top-performing Asus USB-AC56 delivered TCP throughput of 404 megabits per second when situated 9 feet from the router, the Trendnet managed just 256 mbps, good for fourth place. In the other three test locations, Trendnet’s adapter finished last by wide margins. It couldn’t muster triple-digit performance when the client was at its farthest point from the router—65 feet away—and it only barely achieved that mark when the client was in my home theater, 35 feet away. When the client was in the kitchen, the TEW805UB was 33 mbps slower than the fifth-place Linksys WUSB6300. If your 802.11ac Wi-Fi budget is limited to $40, Buffalo’s WI-U2866D is a far better buy. If you can stretch it just $10 more, D-Link’s DWA-182 will deliver even higher performance. There’s very little reason to opt for Trendnet’s TEW-805UB.
Nonhinged and cradleless, the Trendnet TEW-805UB gives you minimal placement flexibility.
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Lenovo ThinkPad X240: A no-nonsense business laptop
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N
BY MICHELLE MASTIN
IF LENOVO’S SPENDY ThinkPad X1 Carbon is the laptop every worker bee craves, Lenovo’s thrifty ThinkPad X240 (go.pcworld.com / thinkpadx240) is the one an employer is more apt to spring for. You might think the ThinkPad X240 is too big to qualify for the Ultrabook designation, but it’s only 0.79 inches thick and weighs just 3 pounds. It has two batteries and a battery bridge that allows hot swapping. The X240’s WorldBench score of 282 leaves it slightly behind Dell’s XPS 12 Ultrabook Convertible (with the same dual-core CPU) and Samsung’s Ativ Book 7 (with a third-generation Core i5-3337U)—surprising given that the ThinkPad has twice as much DDR3/1600 memory: 8GB versus 4GB. 54
Lenovo’s ThinkPad X240 may look big next to wafer-thin notebooks—but it’s only 0.79 inches thick.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Lenovo ThinkPad X240 Batery life Lenovo ThinkPad X240
6:26
Dell XSP 12 Ultrabook Convertible
6:49
Samsung Ativ Book 7 model NP740USEK01UB)
6:03
Asus VivoBook S550CA
3:22
(reference)
0:00
1:00
2:00
3:00
4:00
5:00
6:00
7:00
8:00
LONGER BARS ARE BETTER.
The X240 packs a fourth-generation Intel Core processor, so you can expect long battery life. Our test unit came with a Core i5-4200U, but there are other choices. The three-cell battery ran for 6 hours, 26 minutes. The X240 has a number of I/O ports absent on the X1 Carbon, including a gigabit ethernet port, a smart card reader, a 34mm Express card socket, a VGA port, an always-on USB 2.0 port, and a docking port. Like the X1 Carbon, it has two USB 3.0 ports, a Mini DisplayPort, an SD card reader, and a fingerprint reader. The keyboard still has a nubby red dot in the center, but the dedicated buttons are gone. You must press the whole trackpad with your finger in the correct click zone. The roomy size lets you make the most of Windows 8’s multitouch gestures, but at times the trackpad registered 55
If you don’t mind toting an extra battery, the ThinkPad X240’s hotswap feature will keep you productive for hours.
The 1366 by 768 display lacks definition.
Lenovo ThinkPad X240 PROS: • Durable carbon-fiber chassis • Hot-swappable battery • All the I/O ports you could ask for CONS: • Disappointing 1366 by 768 display • Keyboard not up to ThinkPad standards • Weak speakers BOTTOM LINE: Has fourth-gen Intel Core CPUs and hot-swappable batteries. But its display resolution is a letdown. $1555
two-finger scrolling when I only used one finger. But it was smooth and responsive overall. The keyboard still has a nubby red dot in the center, but the dedicated buttons are gone. You must press the whole trackpad with your finger in the correct click zone. At times the trackpad registered two-finger scrolling when I only used one finger. But it was smooth and responsive overall. If you’re looking for a workhorse laptop with great battery life, Lenovo’s X240 is a solid choice. 56
REVIEWS & RATINGS
A top-down view shows the roomy clickpad and island-style keyboard.
Toshiba Chromebook hits the sweet spot P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K
BY MELISSA RIOFRIO THE CHROMEBOOK HAS found its sweet spot, and it’s around the
$279 range, where the Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook resides (go.pcworld.com/toshibacb35). It sure isn’t down with the $200-or-so cheapies, with their clackety plastics and sorry little screens. Nor is it in the 1-percenter fantasyland of the gorgeous and expensive Chromebook Pixel. The $250 Samsung Chromebook 3 is nice, and for $300 you could get an 11-inch touchscreen in the Acer C270P, or a 14-inch (non-touch) display in the HP Chromebook 14. But the 57
The right side has an audio jack, two USB 3.0 ports, and an HDMI-out port.
Toshiba CB35-A3120 is nearly as good as those higher-priced competitors, and it’s a notch better than the similarly priced HP Chromebook 11. What the Toshiba CB35-A3120 has over the HP Chromebook 11 is a much larger 13.3-inch LED backlit display; a mobilefriendly Intel Celeron 2955U (Haswell) processor; and a 52Wh, four-cell lithium Toshiba CB35-A3120 ion battery. The Toshiba performed well, Chromebook scoring 2910 in Peacekeeper. The PROS: battery lasted almost 7 hours in our • Long battery life tests—noticeably longer than what the • USB 3.0 ports HP Chromebook 11 achieved with its • Decent-size display ARM processor and 30Wh battery. The CB35-A3120 also trumps the CONS: Chromebook 11 in connectivity, sporting • Display feels a little bendy two USB 3.0 ports (the HP has just USB • Just adequate video playback 2.0), an SD card slot, a headphone jack, BOTTOM LINE: and an HDMI-out port. It has built-in The Toshiba CB35-A3120 Wi-Fi 802.11a/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0, Chromebook strikes a nice balance and a webcam and microphone sit atop with its good-size display, long the display. Built-in stereo speakers battery life, and compact design. deliver tolerable though tinny sound. The screen’s wide, 16:9 aspect ratio $279 keeps this system compact, at 8.9 by 12.9 by 0.80 inches; the HP Chromebook 58
REVIEWS & RATINGS
The CB35-A3120 is slender, small, and light.
The CB35-A3120’s island-style keys ofer sofer travel than most low-end Chromebooks do—a pleasant surprise.
14 is decidedly bulkier. The 1366-by-768pixel resolution is nothing special, nor is the occasionally choppy video playback, but that’s typical for this price range. The Sunray Silver plastic chassis has an attractive, easy-to-grip surface. The display lid feels slightly bendy, but the bottom half is nicely stiff. At 3.3 pounds, the CB35-A3120 is easy to tote. Most low-end Chromebooks have crummy keyboards with hard plastic keys and hard travel. The CB35-A3120’s islandstyle keys offer softer travel—a pleasant surprise. The top-row function keys and lower-right cursor keys are half-size but usable, and the clickpad is roomy and pretty responsive. The Chromebook’s other features include 2GB of DDR3L 1600MHz memory and a 16GB SSD. Chromebooks are hitting their stride. My current favorite in this price range is the HP Chromebook 14, but the CB35-A3120 is a tempting alternative for a bit less cash.
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Reveal 11 Business automates videography BY JON L. JACOBI MOST PEOPLE DON’T think of video-production software as a business
tool. In today’s video-centric advertising, training, and communications environment, however, they should. Muvee Technologies seems to share that opinion, judging from its simple-to-use but effective Reveal 11 Business (go.pcworld.com/reveal11). You provide the pictures, video, and text, after which you arrange their sequence and pick a style template; then you simply let the program process everything into a complete production. The number 60
REVIEWS & RATINGS of style templates—which contain background music, effects, and transitions melded into a consistent look and feel—is what differentiates the regular $80 version of Reveal 11 and the $500 Business edition. The regular version has only a few, while the business version has more than 40, plus 2000 musical renditions that you may use royalty-free. Functionally, the versions are identical. My only complaint is that Reveal 11 Business could stand to look more, well, businesslike. The styles offered in the Business pack are nice, but they’re named in artistic terms. If you’re looking for something like “Target: 27-year-old to 32-year-old food-centrics,” forget it—you’re getting “Reflections,” “Soar,” and “Turn Back Time.” Reveal 11 Business is supremely easy to use. A content row sits at the top, Muvee Reveal 11 and style-selection and Business preview panes appear PROS: beneath that. But the • Easy to use program offers more control over video • Produces professional-quality video production than is apparent at first glance. • More affordable than a Click Personalize in the videographer bottom-left corner, and CONS: you can insert your logo, • Styles content not organized in adjust the scene timing, a businesslike fashion define the titling and BOTTOM LINE: credits, or record a voiceReveal 11 Business could be just over. You’ll find a small the software you need to create audio-mix console, too. high-quality promotional or Click any picture or video training videos. in the media bay, and the program presents slick and $500 simple editing controls such as a zoom-effect 61
control for photos and a highly accurate scene detector and slicer for videos. Attached to each style are controls for color profiles, scenechange speed, camera wonkiness, and more. Even better, labels and messages are concise yet not overly terse: They actually tell you what to do. Additionally, there’s not one cluttered area, overcrowded toolbar, or cryptic icon in sight. Interfaces don’t get any better than this. I never once cracked open the help file. I’m not trying to step on the toes of professional videographers— good ones are worth their weight in gold. But many people don’t have the gold, and Reveal 11 Business largely meets the need, if not for a professional advertising campaign, then for just about everything else. If you’re strapped for cash, you could buy the regular version of the software and then shop in the Muvee store for a $10 or $15 style that suits you. The company also offers a music store with affordable licensing fees based on your intended usage.
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In Reveal 11’s Personalize section, you can record a voice-over for your video.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Samsung Galaxy Note Pro: Android moves into the office P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K
BY MARK HACHMAN
IN THE CURRENT market, paying $750 for a 12-inch Android tablet seems exorbitant. But if now isn’t the time for consumers to start thinking of large Android tablets as legitimate Windows laptop replacements, that day isn’t far off. The massive Samsung Galaxy Note Pro (go.pcworld.com/ galaxynotepro), like the Microsoft Surface, functions best on a desk. Offering a 12.2-inch screen and weighing 1.65 pounds, it’s virtually identical to the Galaxy Tab Pro save for the addition of an S Pen stylus. According to Samsung, the Wi-Fi version of the tablet houses a 63
Samsung’s Galaxy Note Pro makes Android an attractive option for business use.
1.9GHz quad-core ARM Cortex A15 chip and runs Android 4.4 (KitKat). On our performance tests it produced a Sunspider score of 0.97 second (hitting the upper echelons among tablets), and a PeaceKeeper score of 815. For the sake of comparison, the third-generation iPad managed 516 in PeaceKeeper (higher scores are better). You can configure the optional ($70) foldable cover so that it wakes and unlocks the tablet when you flip it back. The cover also doubles as a flimsy stand. To use the tablet as a laptop replacement, however, you’ll need to buy a Bluetooth keyboard and Samsung Galaxy Note Pro possibly a mouse. Charging takes three to (SM-P900) four hours, but battery life PROS: is excellent: You’ll see two, • Large, vivid screen possibly even three days • Excellent battery life and of casual use from its performance integrated 9500-mAh • Office and videoconferencing battery. In our looping apps built in video test, the battery lasted 8 hours, 37 minutes. CONS: The 12.2-inch display • No wired display connection boasts a resolution of • Flip cover doubles as a flimsy stand 2560 by 1600 and a pixel BOTTOM LINE: density of 247 ppi. You This capable tablet offers a generous can hook up an external screen, excellent battery life, and monitor via an optional access to plenty of productivity apps. ($40) HDMI dongle. Pulling out the S Pen $750 (32GB), $850 (64GB) triggers several options, including my favorite, the 64
Judging from the home button’s position, the tablet’s preferred orientation is landscape.
REVIEWS & RATINGS Pen Window. This mode lets you run a second app inside a window, providing Android with a desktop-like multitasking environment. Even better is Multi Window mode: To trigger this mode, you swipe in from the right side, using a list of supported apps. Dragging one app to the main screen fills it. Dragging a second one “snaps” the screen into two halves—and so on, up to four screens. Productivity apps such as Cisco’s WebEx and Samsung Remote PC (an alternative to Microsoft Remote Desktop) are included. On Google Play, Hancom’s Hanword word processor costs more than $17, but on the Note Pro, it’s free, as are similar apps to view and edit PowerPoint and Excel files. Aside from some possible font-compatibility issues, the Hancom apps work surprisingly well. Google’s own Quickoffice is also installed. Android versions of virtually every productivity app you could want are available from either the Samsung app store or
You’ll see two, possibly three days of casual use from its integrated batery.
65
You can have up to four apps open at once in Multi Window mode.
Google Play, adding up to a PC-like experience on an Android tablet. Considering the sum of its parts, the Galaxy Note Pro is not only a viable choice for a tablet enthusiast but also an option for an adventuresome road warrior eager to leave the Windows world. If only Samsung could knock another $150 or so off the price.
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The tablet gives access to a host of productivity apps.
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Intel 730 Series SSD offers good performance BY JON L. JACOBI INTEL’S NEW 730 Series of enthusiast-class SSDs come emblazoned with the image of a skull, but they don’t fully live up to a killer image. The company shipped a pair of 480GB drives to us so we could benchmark them striped as a single volume in RAID 0, which is how a PC enthusiast might deploy them. Theoretically, you should get close to double the performance this way; but because we haven’t tested any other SSDs in tandem, we stuck with one drive for our full benchmarking regimen and ran CrystalDiskMark for the RAID 0 setup.
Plenty of room SSDs in the 730 Series use 20nm MLC (multilevel cell) NAND. Since the SSD is just 7mm high, it will fit in most laptops and even in an 67
The 480GB model performed well, ranking tenth among 19 drives tested.
all-in-one (if the machine is upgradable), as well as in a conventional desktop rig. It relies on Intel’s PC29AS21CA0 controller, which the company also uses to power its 3500- and 3700 Series SSDs for data-center operators. Intel says that it overclocks the controller by 50 percent and the NAND bus by 20 percent to increase overall performance substantially. Though Intel suggested at its 2013 developers’ conference that it might allow end users to overclock the controller, in the end it decided against doing so. The drives are available in 240GB and 480GB flavors, priced at $250 and $490, respectively. We tested the 480GB model and it performed well, but not superbly, ranking tenth among the 19 drives we’ve tested to date. That said, this SSD does smoke the Intel 335 Series; and the Intel 730 Series SSD difference between the (480GB) first and tenth-place PROS: drives is statistically • Strong 5-year warranty insignificant once you • Enterprise-class controller exclude Plextor’s new PCIe • 7mm height drive and Samsung’s EVO using its Rapid caching CONS: software. • Midrange performance The 480GB Series 730 • High-end price tag wrote our 10GB mix of BOTTOM LINE: files and folders at 469.1 Intel’s 730 Series SSD ought to last a megabytes per second good long while, but you shouldn’t and a single 10GB file at imagine that the drive’s skull logo 461.9 MBps. It also read portends killer performance. the files and folders at 384.4 MBps and the single $490 large file at 454.2 MBps. I noticed a significant 68
REVIEWS & RATINGS performance jump when testing two of these drives striped in RAID 0, using Intel Rapid Storage Technology. The uptick approaches the 100 percent improvement that Intel claims for it. CrystalDiskMark’s sequential write number jumped from about 460MBps to 800 MBps, and its read number went from 470 MBps to just over 900 MBps. But the performance gains will vary depending on which RAID technology you use. When I repeated the tests on my own system—a motherboard with an Intel Z77 chipset, an Intel Core i7-3770 CPU, and 8GB DDR3/1600 memory—the performance increase topped out at about 50 MBps.
Intel 730 Series SSD (480GB) Read/Write Performance With 10GB of Small Files/Folders 384.4
Intel 730 Series 480GB
469.1
Intel 335 Series 240GB
376.7 342.7
OCZ Vertex 460 480GB
361.3 494.1
Samsung 840 EVO 500GB, w/o RAPID
394.9 465.2
Samsung 840 EVO 500GB, w/RAPID
414.6 443.3
Toshiba Q Series Pro 512GB
411.9
Files and Folders (Read) Files and Folders (Write)
493.7 0
100
200
300
400
500
600
MEGABYTES PER SECOND. (LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE.)
The Intel 730 Series finished in the middle of the pack on this test involving reading and writing a 10GB collection of small files and folders. 69
Performance is only part of the 730 Series story: Intel backs the SSD with a healthy five-year warranty. You can tell from the capacities— 240GB and 480GB, versus 256GB and 512GB—that much of NAND is devoted to housekeeping and overprovisioning (memory cells set aside to replace bad blocks, or to swap with deleted-but-not-erased memory in certain situations). Intel rates both drives at 1.2 million hours mean time between failure, which works out to about 13 years. The claimed 50GB of writes per day (on the 240GB model) and 70GB of writes per day (on the 480GB model) amount to roughly 90 and 125 terabytes written under warranty. Those are decent numbers.
Summing up To judge from our tests of the 480GB model, Intel’s 730 Series SSDs aren’t the fastest solid-state drives you can buy, but they’re very solid. The enterprise-class heritage and five-year warranty are reassuring; and in pairs—coupled with Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology—they make for a very fast storage subsystem. About our test environment: We benchmark hard drives and SSDs using an Asus Z98 Expert motherboard (Intel Z87 chipset) with an Intel Core i7-4770K CPU, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1600 memory, and a 512GB Toshiba Q Series Pro SSD. The operating system is Windows 8.1 Pro.
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REVIEWS & RATINGS
When can a display be too bright? When you’re using it to read it in a darkened room.
Watch the video at go.pcworld. com/miix28.
Speedy Miix 2 8 tablet is short on features P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K
BY MICHELLE MASTIN INTEL’S BAY TRAIL–CLASS Atom processors allow PC manufacturers to build powerful tablets with a key feature that competitors like Google’s Nexus 7 and Apple’s iPad mini can’t deliver: the ability to run Windows 8.1 and all the apps available for that operating system. For its Miix 2 8, Lenovo paired Intel’s quad-core Atom Z3740 with 2GB of low-power DDR3/1066 memory and 32GB of storage. In our WorldBench 8.1 test results, the Miix 2 8 outperformed Dell’s Venue Pro 8 (go.pcworld.com/venuepro8) by a margin of 12 percent— earning a mark of 164, versus the Venue Pro 8’s 146—even though Dell’s tablet carries a very similar Atom processor (the Atom Z3740D) and faster memory (low-power DDR3/1333 RAM). 71
The processors in both tablets have the same base clock speed—1.33GHz—but the one in the Miix 2 8 has a slightly speedier higher burst frequency (1.86GHz) than the one in the Venue Pro 8 (1.83GHz). More responsible, I suspect, are the dual memory channels in the Lenovo’s processor; the Dell’s processor has a single memory channel. The Miix 2 outperformed the Venue Pro 8 in terms of battery life, too, lasting more than 10 hours, compared to 7 hours, 44 minutes for the Dell. Here again, much of the credit goes to the Atom Z3740 in the Miix 2 8, which has a scenario design power of 2 watts while the Atom Z3740D in the Venue Pro 8 has an SDP of 2.2 watts. Intel devised its SDP formula to measure the Lenovo Miix 2 8 heat generated by CPUs in “thin, thermally PROS: constrained designs.” As • Very thin and light with desktop and laptop • Great benchmark performance and CPUs and their associated battery life thermal design power • Touch-sensitive Windows button (TDP) numbers, a mobile CONS: CPU with a higher SDP will generally consume more • Speakers distort at high volume power than one with a Too few I/O ports • lower SDP. • Screen too bright for nighttime The Miix 2 8 has all the reading horsepower it needs to run BOTTOM LINE: Windows 8.1, and its battery Lenovo’s Miix 2 8 delivers great delivers enough juice to performance and battery life, but support more than a full day few extra features. of productivity away from an AC outlet. But you should $300 seriously consider spending $50 more to move up to the
Its batery delivers enough juice to support more than a day of productivity.
72
REVIEWS & RATINGS model with 64GB of storage, because the 32GB model we tested leaves only about 7GB of space for your apps and data. You also have the option of slipping a memory card into the MicroSD slot in either model to expand its capacity.
Adequate resolution The Miix 2 8’s touchscreen display delivers resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels. That resolution isn’t as high as the 1080p screen on the $269 Nexus 7 or the 2048-by-1536-pixel screen of the $499 iPad mini with Retina display, but it’s enough to ensure that text, graphics, and video look crisp and clear. On the other hand, an 8-inch screen doesn’t offer a lot of viewing real estate at any moment, so you may find that you’re still scrolling around quite a bit once you zoom text to a readable size. Reading books is a great application for mini tablets like this one. I have tried several dedicated e-readers and dozens of tablets in pursuit
Lenovo Miix 2 8 Laptop WorldBench 8.1 score Lenovo Miix 2 8 (Intel Atom Z3740)
164
Dell Venue 8 Pro (Intel Atom Z3740)
146
Lenovo Miix 10 (Intel Atom Z2760)
121
0
50
100
150
200
(LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE.)
Lenovo’s Miix 2 8 outperformed its 8-inch rival, the Dell Venue Pro 8, and its larger (10.1-inch) sibling, the Lenovo Miix 10, on WorldBench 8.1. 73
A svelte profile is one of the thin and light Miix 2 8’s most appealing aspects.
of the perfect balance between that activity and everything else a tablet can do—but achieving that balance is difficult. In the past, my biggest complaint was that the screen seemed dim or that the touch layer ruined the clarity. Neither of those flaws is present here. The Miix 2 8’s IPS panel is bright and clear. In fact, I found it a bit too bright for reading comfortably in a darkened room, even when I adjusted it to its dimmest setting. My eyes grew tired much sooner than my wrist did—a credit to the tablet’s thin profile (it measures 0.3 inch thick) and light weight (just 0.77 pound). Video enthusiasts will have reason to cheer. The built-in stereo speakers are loud enough to fill my home office with the sounds of a Netflix binge, but they begin to distort if you crank them up to their maximum level. Lenovo’s optional Flip Cover with Stylus ($30) protects the Miix 2 8’s display and can fold into a handy stand while the tablet is in landscape mode. Years of using Android phones and iPads have taught me to press something at the center bottom of the device to get to the home screen, and the Miix 2 8 didn’t leave me hanging: It provides a capacitive Windows button on the bottom bezel.
Tablet-optimized apps work well Any Windows tablet can run any program that doesn’t require 2GB or more of memory, but you’ll be happiest with apps that are optimized to run on a tablet. The Windows store offers a generous array of apps, and 74
REVIEWS & RATINGS
You can watch Hulu videos that aren’t available on purely mobile platforms.
the ecosystem is growing. And since the Miix 2 8 runs Windows, you can watch Hulu videos that aren’t available on purely mobile platforms—when you’re not being productive with the preinstalled copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2013. Can this device replace a laptop? Its only input/ output is a Micro-USB 2.0 port that’s also used for charging, so I wouldn’t recommend going Miix 2 8 only. You could pair it with a Bluetooth keyboard, but there’s no way to connect an external display, hardwired ethernet, or other peripherals. The Miix 2 8 is an excellent tablet, but this is a tough market and details matter. For me, the more dimmable screen on Dell’s Venue Pro 8 makes it a better nighttime reader. For other users, the Micro HDMI port on Toshiba’s Encore 8 (go.pcworld.com/encore8) or the active Wacom digitizer included in the Asus VivoTab Note 8 (go.pcworld. com/vivotabnote8) is a must-have feature. Ultimately the Miix 2 8’s top-notch performance isn’t enough to overwhelm comparably priced competitors that have more features.
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Watch the video at go.pcworld. com/shred
Pro document shredders offer total destruction BY CHRISTOPHER NULL
DESTROY IT, ALL of it: Obliterate the old bills and tax documents you
don’t want to store. Eliminate your expired credit cards and aging CD backups. Do that, and you’ll keep your data out of the wrong hands.
Shredding specialists You need a good shredder to rip everything into bits small enough to confound even the most obsessive-compulsive puzzle master. To find the best models, we tested the pulverizing potential of five professional cross-cut shredders intended for small offices. These machines can feed more sheets and shred for longer periods than the typical, lowvolume home shredder available at your local big-box store.
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REVIEWS & RATINGS
Ativa (Ofce Depot) V141C
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K
Street price: $480 Weight: 28 pounds Bin capacity: 8.7 gallons
Office Depot’s Ativa V141C (go.pcworld.com/ativav141c) has a traditional, vertical top-feeding system. A flap covers the slot as a sort of safety catch. The unit is quiet and unobtrusively small despite its sizable waste bin. In contrast to most shredders, which require cooldown intervals (usually after only minutes of sustained operation), the V141C is rated for continuous use: Theoretically it can run forever without a break. The machine’s 14-sheet feeding-capacity rating is on the low side—and worse, it didn’t bear out in my testing. The actual limit for the very narrow feeding slot seemed to be 8 to 10 sheets. Fat envelopes jammed the unit regularly. It can shred credit cards, but not optical discs. I spent more time trying to wedge material into the slot and wrestling with jams than I did shredding. I’d give this machine a pass. 77
Fellowes Powershred 99Ci Street price: $300 Weight: 38 pounds Bin capacity: 9.0 gallons
Although the design of the Fellowes Powershred 99Ci (go.pcworld.com/ fellowes99ci) is largely typical of top-feeding shredders, the slot is positioned so that pages go in aligned side to side instead of the usual front to back. As a result the unit is narrower but deeper than the average setup. To guide optical discs and credit cards into the waiting jaws, you move a slightly odd flap over the slot. The 99Ci is rated to chew up 17 pages per pass, and that proved to be about accurate in my testing. If the sensors detect an overload, the unit refuses to start the motor, preventing jams before they start. Once the 99Ci is running, it’s fairly jam-free, though not quite “100% jam proof” as promised on the box. Clearing jams that do occur can be arduous. The unit’s big bin, its 25-minute cycle time, and its preinstalled casters are all helpful features, but it’s louder than other shredders here. And the bin’s strange shape makes it difficult to empty without spilling confetti. All in all, the Powershred 99Ci is a serviceable shredder, though bargain hunters should consider the Staples SPL-TXC24A first. 78
REVIEWS & RATINGS
GoEcolife GXC205Pi Platinum Series Street price: $500 Weight: 44 pounds Bin capacity: 7.8 gallons
The GoEcolife GXC205Pi Platinum Series (go.pcworld.com/goecolife20) sets the pace for destructive potential. While surprisingly quiet, it plows through most anything, including CDs and credit cards, and up to 20 sheets of paper per pass. I was rarely able to jam it, even with junk-mail envelopes and misfed sheets, and creating a jam took far more than 20 sheets of paper. A front LCD gives you status updates (a rare feature for shredders), and the 20 minutes of continuous run time is plenty for most operations. The slot is on the side instead of on top. To feed the beast, you slide papers in parallel to the floor. It sounds like a small thing, but in many environments this design will free up some space by letting you keep the shredder under your desk instead of beside it. Casters make this hulking device (the largest in this roundup) easy to maneuver. The unit includes a dust cover, too, and its built-in compartment can hold odds and ends. It’s also certified CarbonFree by Carbonfund.org. 79
Staples 24-Sheet Cross-Cut Shredder SPL-TXC24A Street price: $300 Weight: 44 pounds Bin capacity: 8.0 gallons
The Staples SPL-TXC24A (go.pcworld.com/staplestxc24a) is a Death Star of a shredder: What it lacks in sophistication it makes up for in raw power. It’s standard in design, with a vertical slot for feeding paper, credit cards, or CDs. The slot is thin and barely wide enough to accommodate a regular sheet of paper, but no matter. You can shove just about anything into this shredder, and it chews the material up without complaint. It’s also a particularly tough unit to jam: It can easily handle two junk-mail envelopes, provided that you can wedge them into the slot. Other nice features include (user-installed) casters and a lighted waste-bin area that makes it easier to see how full the unit is, which sounds silly but turns out to be surprisingly useful. The 20-minute duty cycle is acceptable. One minor complaint: This shredder is slightly louder than the others here, though it’s hardly deafening. Incredibly, this model is significantly less expensive than most of the other tested shredders. You may want to get his and hers units. 80
REVIEWS & RATINGS
Swingline Stack-and-Shred 100X Street price: $500 Weight: 27 pounds Bin capacity: 7.0 gallons
The pint-size Swingline Stack-and-Shred 100X (go.pcworld.com/ swingline100x) has a killer feature: You can fill the autofeed tray with up to 100 sheets of shreddables and let ’er rip. If you have a large amount of relatively standard sheets of 8.5-by-11-inch paper to shred (no piles of mail or stacks of CDs, alas), this is one of the easiest ways to get rid of it. Otherwise, the 100X is a simple, quiet shredder that’s best reserved for light use. If you’re not using the autofeed tray, the additional manual feed slot can handle only six sheets of paper at a time, and it chokes if you try to push past that. Jamming it is easy to do with even a small junk mailer, which means you’ll have to open envelopes and shred their contents piecemeal. The feed slot (which has a conduit just for credit cards) is difficult to work with, owing to its narrow opening and odd alignment. The smaller bin and short duty cycle (a barely acceptable 5 minutes) aren’t deal-breakers—in fact, the compact bin makes this shredder the easiest to empty among those tested—but the manual feed slot’s measly capacity is the Stack-and-Shred 100X’s biggest drawback. 81
HELP KEEP THESE KIDS IN PLAY. 175,000 KIDS WILL BE DIAGNOSED WITH
CANCER THIS YEAR.
Children are our greatest hope for the future. Let’s be their greatest hope too. Cancer strikes infants and children. For teens and young adults, survival can depend on treatment by a pediatric oncologist, designed specifically for them. The St. Baldrick’s Foundation and Stand Up To Cancer are funding groundbreaking collaborative research to bring the most effective therapies to kids fighting cancer. To learn how you can help keep these kids in play, go to stbaldricks.org/inplay and standup2cancer.org/pediatrics.
Samuel L. Jackson Stand Up To Cancer and St. Baldrick’s Ambassador
St. Baldrick’s Foundation is a charitable 501(c)(3) organization funding childhood cancer research. Stand Up To Cancer is a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a 501(c )(3) charitable organization.
Photo by Nigel Parry
Julia Hernandez Diagnosed at 16, in remission.
12 PC UPGRADES F O R U N D E R $300
ADD SOME ZIP TO YOUR DESKTOP WITH NEW STORAGE, NETWORKING, OR ACCESSORIES. BY JO N L. JACO B I
A N I M AT I O N BY JO H N U E L A N D
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IS IT TIME FOR A PC UPGRADE? Maybe your old desktop is struggling to keep up with the demands of modern, high-resolution games and media. Or perhaps someone in your family has a computer that needs rejuvenating. We have PC upgrades to fit every budget. We set an upper limit of $300, but we did so just to cover some of our pricier recommendations. Most of these upgrades cost far less. Presented in order of how much of a transformative effect they’re likely to have, from greatest to least, here are our 12 favorites.
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A SOLID-STATE DRIVE OUR NUMBER ONE UPGRADE RECOMMENDATION
is a solid-state drive. Why? No upgrade provides a more noticeable, practical increase in performance than a fast SSD. Getting one is almost as good as buying a brand-new PC. About a year ago, a top model would have run you approximately a buck per gigabyte. This year the cost is 80 cents per gigabyte, and sometimes even less. You’ll wonder how you ever got along without one of these drives. With most drives, more capacity equals faster performance, due to the presence of more chips and channels. Also, if your motherboard doesn’t have a SATA 6-gbps connection (all good SSDs are of this type), pick up a good PCIe 2X SATA 6-gbps controller—it makes a huge difference in system speed. Toshiba’s Q Series Pro 256GB (go. pcworld.com/toshibaqpro) is almost as fast as Samsung’s top-dog 840 Pro (go.pcworld. com/samsung840); we found the 256GB version of the Toshiba drive online for only $200. It’s the only drive we’ve tested whose performance doesn’t drop off at lower capacities, too. In fact, the 128GB version tested slightly faster than the 256GB model.
85
1
A FASTER CPU
2 WHEN IT COMES TO CPUS, what once was state-ofthe-art now won’t pull the cart. And if installing an SSD doesn’t completely satisfy your need for speed, maybe adding a new CPU will. Your choice of CPU depends on what motherboard your computer is packing under the hood. If your PC has a Socket 1155 motherboard, for instance, your best choice is the Intel Core i7-3770K (go.pcworld.com/intel3770k), whose price slips in just under our $300 ceiling and whose hardware supports overclocking (running faster than spec) for even better performance. If you have an AMD AM3+ motherboard, make your target an AMD FX-9370 (go. pcworld.com/amdfx), priced at around $200. If you already own a Socket 1150 Haswell system, but went the cheapskate route originally with an Intel Core i3 or Core i5, opt for a fourth-generation Intel Core i7-4770K (go.pcworld.com/ intel4770k).
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THIS UPGRADE IS FOR GAMERS AND FOR PHOTO
and video geeks only, as even the lowliest integrated GPU is fast enough to handle the 2D graphics found in everyday applications. For playing games at a decent resolution, however, you need a discrete graphics card from AMD or Nvidia. Combined with built-in Avivo or CUDA codec acceleration, a discrete graphics card can also speed the processing of video files—and with 4K video rearing its extremely bandwidth-hungry head, that’s not a bad thing. OpenCL support helps accelerate photo rendering. You’re not going to get a state-of-the-art board for anywhere near $300, but the Nvidia GTX 760 (go. pcworld.com/nvidgtx) is a great all-around card that will bring you most of the way there for about $250. If you’re an AMD diehard or if you want to save ten fivers, the Radeon R9-270X (go.pcworld.com/radr9) offers comparable performance for only $200.
87
A FASTER VIDEO CARD
3
4 A NEW MOTHERBOARD MAYBE WHAT’S BUGGING YOU is your motherboard’s lack of USB 3.0, PCIe 3.0, SATA 6-Gbps, SLI/CrossFire (for multiple graphics cards), or Thunderbolt. If your CPU is reasonably young, a new motherboard will provide some or all of those faster technologies. Another reason to upgrade the motherboard is downsizing. A micro-ATX or mini-ITX motherboard takes up less room and fits in a smaller case. Finally, Intel’s Haswell platform really does use a lot less energy—which is always a good thing, and an even better reason to upgrade your motherboard. (The upgrade requires a new Socket 1150 CPU, too.) You can find scads of motherboards out there, and it has been a while since we ran across a lemon from any manufacturer, but you should probably stick with a well-known brand name. We have a fondness for anything from Asus (asus.com/us), Gigabyte (gigabyte.us), or MSI (us.msi.com), as we’ve rarely encountered a problem with their products. 88
5
THOUGH IT DOESN’T OFFER THE OBVIOUS
performance boost of an SSD or a faster CPU, more and better memory lets your operating system spend less time swapping stuff to disk and lets you keep more apps and larger files open. And if you love video, you can’t have enough memory. Most users will be fine with memory that matches the fastest frequency their motherboard’s chipset supports, which is generally DDR3/1600 these days. As for the amount—2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB— the more, the merrier; but 8GB should be plenty unless you need extreme speed. You’ll pay about $7.50 a gigabyte for on-spec, brand-name, non-ECC (error-correcting code) memory, and about $12 per gigabyte for the ECC kind. If you took our advice and bought a CPU with overclocking capabilities, you’ll want memory that supports the same feature. A lot of high-quality enthusiast-level memory is available, but we’ve had good luck with the Kingston 2400MHz HyperX Predator, which costs about $12.50 a gigabyte. Kingston also sells 2800MHz of memory for about $32 a gigabyte if you really want to push the limits— and your budget.
SPEEDIER MEMORY 89
AND MORE OF IT
A FASTER, VASTER HARD DRIVE
HARD-DRIVE PRICES STILL
haven’t returned to their alltime low level of a couple of years ago, but they’re no longer the premium item they became immediately after the 2011 floods in Thailand. You can now get 4GB in a single drive—just in time to hold all those 1080p movies you’ve been downloading. Hybrid drives didn’t live up to the hype, so you’re best off sticking with the traditional kind. Our pick of the litter is the Western Digital Black 4TB (go.pcworld.com/ wdblack) . The successor to the Caviar Black, the WD Black 4TB costs a pretty penny (about $220 at the time of this writing), but it spins at a dizzying 7200 rpm, has a whopping 64MB cache, and carries a reassuring five-year warranty. It has tested faster than just about everything else in its class, too. You might, of course, opt for a cheaper drive— especially if the newcomer will be playing second fiddle to an SSD in your system. If you’re feeling adventurous or you’re worried about losing your data, consider buying two drives and running them in RAID 0 (for more speed) or in RAID 1 (for safety).
6
90
AN 802.11AC WI-FI SETUP NO WIRELESS SETUP WILL BE AS FAST
7
as wired gigabit ethernet, but you might find that the latest generation, 802.11ac, is fast enough to let you embrace a life without wires and switches. Under the right circumstances (802.11ac at both ends), the technology gets you about two-thirds of what you get with gigabit ethernet. For this upgrade, you’ll have to purchase both an 802.11ac router and an 802.11ac adapter for your PC. On the router side, Asus’s RT-AC68U (go.pcworld.com/asusrta) bested all competitors in our recent tests. At $220, it’s pricey—but it’s also very fast. As for an adapter, you can’t go wrong with the $70 Netgear A6200 USB 3.0 (go.pcworld. com/netgearusb).
91
A LIQUID COOLER LIQUID-BASED SYSTEMS COOL BETTER THAN
traditional air-only systems do—and that advantage can be a significant boon if we’ve talked you into overclocking, with its high thermal overhead. Although a liquid-cooling system’s radiator has a fan, chances are good that it’s replacing an existing case fan and is a whisper-quiet, top-of-the-line model. You might consider ornamental liquidcooling systems with clear tubing and colored or UV-reactive fluid, if you’re into such things. You can pay a lot of money for liquid cooling—but most users will be fine with something modest, such as Corsair’s $85 Hydro Series H75 (go.pcworld.com/ corsair75), which consists of a copper water block, a radiator, and a single 120mm cooling fan, or with the same company’s $120 Hydro Series H100i (go. pcworld.com/corsair100), which has a dual radiator and two 120mm fans. 92
8
HAVE RETINA OR 4K ENVY? Want to reach out and
drag things around on your Windows home screen with your bare hands? A new display may be the upgrade you’re looking for. Alas, even the least-expensive 24-inch touchscreen display currently exceeds our $300 limit; however, you can find a 23-, 24-, or 27-inch 1080p model without touch capabilities for less than that. A multitude of good displays are available, but we’ve had particularly good results over the years with Dell models. You can pick up the company’s 23-inch E2314H (go.pcworld.com/dell2314) for just $200.
A LARGER DISPLAY 93
9
A BETTER KEYBOARD AND MOUSE
10
DESPITE SOME USERS’ UNBRIDLED PASSION
for touch, the fastest way to navigate and to input information on a PC remains the humble mouse and venerable keyboard. Moving up to models with more heft and a better feel opens a world of luxurious tactile sensations. Wireless models reduce cable clutter. Sold yet? Logitech makes many worthy keyboards, and some people swear by the Microsoft ergonomic models. Nevertheless, if you can find an old IBM Model M, you’re typing on the best keyboard ever made. The $129 Das Keyboard Professional Model S Mechanical Keyboard (go.pcworld.com/daskey) is much the same thing, sans the Model M’s rather high decibel level. Me? I live for the clack. Among mice, consider the svelte, wireless $70 Logitech Ultrathin Touch Mouse T630 (go.pcworld. com/logi630). Although it’s designed for Ultrabooks, it’s a pleasantly self-indulgent pairing for any system. 94
A NEW CASE
11
I RECENTLY UPGRADED MY PC CASE—to make it
smaller. For $50, I snagged a Cooler Master HD 120, which is about the size of a breadbox but has room for a full-size graphics card. Alas, going small means switching to a smaller motherboard as well—and before you know it, you’re sliding down the slippery (but not altogether unpleasant) upgrade slope. Tastes vary when it comes to case aesthetics, but the $100-and-up Corsair Obsidian series (go.pcworld.com/ corsairob) for all the flavors of ATX, the $70 BitFenix Prodigy (go. pcworld.com/ bitfen) and $50 Cooler Master Elite 130 (go. pcworld.com/ elite130) for miniITX are good places to start looking. You can save a few bucks by reusing your old power supply, if it’s up-to-date enough. 95
A BACKUP PRODUCT OR SERVICE
WE CONSIDERED MAKING
backup the number one item on the list because its presence will forestall so many problems. If you want a local backup, choose a hard drive with the fastest interface technology your system supports: Thunderbolt, eSATA, USB 3.0, FireWire (which is fading from the scene), or USB 2.0, in that order. Speed is essential—if backups take too long to make, you’ll give up on the process. LaCie (go.pcworld.com/laci), Seagate (go.pcworld.com/seagate), and WD (go. pcworld.com/wd) all manufacture capable external drives, and all of them include backup software, though Windows itself provides everything you need. You might even consider opting for a NAS (network-attached storage) box, which can also back up multiple PCs and devices without your having to drag it around. You can also opt for online backup, by itself or in addition to a local option; figure on paying $50 a year for such a service. If that seems expensive, think about the minimum $700 it costs these days to recover data from a corrupted hard drive—if recovery is possible at all.
12
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Joshua
You might know . He loves video games, and he owns enough to know they’re not all meant for kids. That’s why he reminds his friends (at least the ones that have kids) that they all have big black letters on the box to help parents find the ones that are best for their families. You can learn about those ratings at ESRB.org
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LAPTOPS WORK & PLAY THE DIFFERENCES THAT MATTER 99
Which is right for you, a business or consumer laptop? We’ll help you figure it out. aptops come in many flavors— thin-and-light, convertible, desktop replacement, portable workstation—but all of them fall into one of two main categories: consumer and business models. Laptop manufacturers label some systems for consumers and others for business. While both incorporate similar components and run the same operating system, business laptops can cost twice as much. Why the high price tag? Primarily it’s because businesses demand computers that are built to last and easy to maintain. Once you understand the differentiators, you can decide what best fits your computing needs—and your budget. BY JO N L. JA CO B I / I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY C H I B I R M I N G H A M
100
Business systems like Dell’s Latitude 6430u are made of rugged materials.
P H OTO G R A P H BY RO B E RT C A R D I N
durability and life cycle
ompanies expect business laptops to remain in service much longer than a typical consumer notebook does, and to withstand at least a little rough handling. As such, business laptops normally rely on especially strong materials—aluminum or magnesium, for instance—and rugged design specifications. Consumer laptops—especially budget models— make copious use of plastic. Most businesses standardize on one or a few laptop models, and they keep the machines in service for at least three years. This stability reduces the tech-support burden on the company’s IT department. When a manufacturer introduces a new business laptop, it often commits to keeping that model available for between 18 months and five years, so its corporate customers can supplement their fleets down the road.
durability and life cycle
Business buyers also expect replacement parts to be available over the laptop’s entire service life. That means the manufacturer must maintain an inventory of parts it might never actually sell. The price of the notebook reimburses the manufacturer for some of that cost. Consumer laptops tend to have much shorter shelf lives. A given model might be available for a year or even less before a newer model replaces it. Toshiba initially manufactured a limited number of its luxurious Kirabooks, for example, and switched to Intel’s fourth-generation Core processor when it produced the next batch.
Businesses can’t change models on a whim, as each switch incurs costs beyond buying a new machine. Consumers are more apt than businesses to replace rather than repair a failing laptop. Sometimes this decision represents the most sensible strategy—or even the only strategy, as manufacturers may run out of crucial replacement parts for models in their consumer product lines. Other times, this approach gives consumers an excuse to buy a new model with all the latest fripperies. Businesses can’t afford to change models on a whim, as each switch incurs costs beyond acquiring a new machine: testing, training, software licenses, and more.
maintenance and repair
usiness laptops are generally easier to maintain and fix than consumer models. You won’t find Torx screws or Apple’s ridiculous new Pentalobe fasteners on a business machine (unless it’s a MacBook Pro). With many business laptop models, a common Phillips screwdriver should be the only tool you need. And with a machine like HP’s ZBook 15 (go. pcworld.com/hpzb15) mobile workstation, you won’t even need that. Slide open two friction locks, and you can remove its bottom panel to reach its memory, storage, Wi-Fi adapter, battery, and more. User-serviceable components are increasingly rare in consumer-oriented notebooks, as they have become disposable commodities.
With many business models, the only tool you’ll need is a Phillips screwdriver. Only Apple uses these screws on business systems.
ports and connectivity
he port selection on consumer laptops usually depends on the price tag: High-end machines sport the newest technologies early, while budget machines lag behind. These days, many I/O technologies—such as USB 3.0 and HDMI—are ubiquitous on consumer laptops. Very advanced technologies, such as Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2, have caught on more slowly. Business laptops usually lag in offering the latest
If you spend a lot of time at a desk, but still need laptop mobility, a docking station can be a godsend. connection technologies because corporate nickelnursers don’t want to pay for something that isn’t yet—and may never be—mainstream. And legacy technologies like VGA hang around on business laptops because users need to connect their systems to aging video projectors. Today, wireless networking is de rigueur in both classes of laptops. An integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter is your best choice, but 802.11n adapters are cheaper and more common. Some business laptops also permit cellular connectivity via a SIM
HP’s ZBook 15 has almost every I/O port you can think of.
ports and connectivity
No Wi-Fi hotspot around? That’s no problem if your laptop can handle a SIM card.
card that users can install inside the laptop or plug into an external port. Smart card and ExpressCard slots appear exclusively on business laptops. Smart cards prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to the computer while it is powered up but unattended. ExpressCard is a legacy interface that replaced the even older PC Card and PCMCIA technologies. Many business laptops come with docking ports; consumer laptops almost never do. If you spend a lot of time at a desk, but still need the mobility of a laptop, a docking station or port replicator can be a godsend. You hard-wire your peripherals to the docking station, and then physically connect the laptop to the docking station. Push one button (or disconnect one cable), grab your laptop, and go. You don’t have to buy a business laptop to use a docking port. Third-party devices such as the Targus Universal USB 3.0 DV (go.pcworld.com/ uniusb3) deliver similar functionality via USB and DisplayLink technologies. And the WiGig wireless technology eliminates the need for a physical connection between laptop and dock. WiGig has been slow to catch on, but Dell jumped on it early with the Wireless Dock D5000 (go.pcworld.com/ dockd5000), which is now compatible with a number of its laptops.
display technology
he graphics processors integrated into modern CPUs are all you need for surfing the Web, watching movies, and performing most other common tasks. For computationally intense applications, you need a discrete graphics processor. If a consumer laptop has one of these, the system is designed to run games. A business laptop with a discrete GPU is designed to handle computer-aided design (CAD), 3D modeling, scientific or medical imaging, content creation, and the like; look for machines outfitted with AMD FirePro Mobile Graphics or Nvidia Quadro Mobile Workstation cards. Most HDTVs have HDMI ports, and consumer laptops often use that interface, too. But DisplayPort, which business-oriented laptops and displays tend to use, is a superior video interface for business users; see “HDMI vs. DisplayPort: Which display interface reigns supreme?” (go. pcworld.com/hdmivsdp). A single DisplayPort 1.2 interface can support four monitors at 1920-by-1200-pixel resolution each, or two monitors at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution each. In either case, each display can receive independent audio and video streams. Both DisplayPort and HDMI can support a single 4K monitor (defined as having a resolution of 3840 by 2160 pixels).
Surprisingly, Toshiba’s business-oriented Tecra offers an HDMI video port.
management and security
orporate IT departments that oversee hundreds or even thousands of laptops need to be able to manage these devices remotely. Though most small businesses don’t have IT departments, many pay consultants to manage their IT resources. Buying a laptop equipped with a CPU- or BIOS-level technology such as Intel’s vPro, DASH (Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware), or HP’s SureStart can save time and money. These tools enable IT specialists to monitor, manage, remotely access, and even repair laptop software installations in the field. The user doesn’t need to be present, and the laptop may be so compromised—by a malware infection, a borked software installation, or a corrupted file—that it can’t boot to its operating system.
Business laptops ofen integrate security features into their hardware to protect sensitive data. Remotely reimaging (that is, copying all the software, including the OS, back to the laptop’s hard drive over a network connection) saves time and avoids the expense of travel or shipping. Furthermore, vPro can prevent certain types of malware and attacks that occur below the operating system level, and SureStart
management and security
The Toshiba Tecra incorporates a fingerprint scanner.
(available only on HP machines) can quickly restore a previous version of the computer’s BIOS if the current version suffers is attacked or becomes corrupted. To protect sensitive information they may contain, business laptops often have special security features integrated into their hardware. A biometric device such as a fingerprint scanner can verify an authorized user’s identity, for instance, while encryption tools such as a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip and Windows BitLocker can scramble data as the user writes it to the laptop’s hard drive. Data encryption prevents interlopers from reading data in coherent form unless they have the proper keys for decoding it. If you consider vPro or DASH must-have features for your laptop, make sure that the model you buy has those features. Not every business laptop does. For models with Intel CPUs, check Intel’s ARK site (ark.intel.com) to see whether the chip has vPro support. Any laptop that has both an AMD CPU and a TPM chip will support DASH. SureStart is strictly an HP technology, so check the specs for the model you’re interested in buying to see whether it has that feature.
Next Up: Preinstalled software
preinstalled sofware
npack a consumer laptop and you’ll find lots of junk consuming storage space already: games, demos, trialware, links to websites, and more. Software companies pay laptop manufacturers to preinstall this glop, which can reduce the price of the finished product. You don’t have to leave any of it in place, of course, but removing it is a hassle, even with the aid of free software like Piriform’s CCleaner (go.pcworld.com/ ccleaner). The tech-support desk at your local bigbox store will happily handle the removal process— but not for free.
Businesses that buy systems in bulk can specify the exact sofware footprint they want. Businesses don’t want to waste time and money removing bloatware, so manufacturers reduce or eliminate such add-ons from their business laptops. Businesses that buy systems in bulk can specify the exact software footprint they want. Because most corporations are keen to keep all employees on the same platform (to simplify and reduce the cost of tech support), they often stick with an operating system long after a new version is released. When you buy a consumer laptop, it will most likely come with Windows 8.1 installed. Business laptops often come with the rights to downgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 7, or with the option to have a flavor of Linux.
service and tech support
Dell’s Latitude 7440 offers easy access for upgrades or repairs.
ypically the manufacturer’s warranty for a consumer laptop promises to correct any defects that may arise in the machine within the first year of ownership, at no charge. Low-ball units might be protected for just 90 days. Such brief warranties keep prices low and allow retailers to pitch third-party extended warranties. Any business laptop worthy of the name will come with a three-year warranty, and the buyer may be able to extend the period of coverage to five or even six years. When a consumer laptop fails, the owner usually must ship or carry the unit to a service depot for diagnostics and repair. Such depots rarely offer a guaranteed turnaround time, and if a component needs replacing, they may not have the part in stock. In a worst-case scenario, a laptop submitted for repair could be missing in action for weeks. Businesses can’t afford to have their employees sitting around twiddling their thumbs as they wait for their laptops to be fixed. An enterprise IT department will have loaner units on hand, and
Next Up: Preinstalled software
service and tech support
they’ll often perform the repairs in-house or deal with the vendor directly. Small businesses can avoid lost productivity by taking advantage of a business-laptop manufacturer’s guarantees of on-site service and a short turnaround (typically 24 hours, not including transit time if the unit must go back to the factory).
When a consumer laptop fails, the owner usually must ship or carry it to a service depot for repair. Consumer tech support varies in quality and efficiency, but it’s generally a hit-or-miss proposition that may occur only via email or online chat. The toll-free support number, if it exists, is unlikely to be available 24/7, and callers commonly have to endure long hold times. The tech support offered may not cover software issues at all. Business travelers trying to finish their work before a big meeting need their hardware and software problems solved right away, so manufacturers’ support policies for business laptops are far more robust. Telephone tech support is nearly always available, and it includes software support.
Next Up: Preinstalled software
business or consumer?
A consumeroriented system like the Toshiba Kirabook may fit the bill just fine.
fter reading this article, you may wonder whether I think business laptops are the better choice for all potential buyers. I don’t. They tend to be more expensive at the outset, and their higher cost of ownership doesn’t make sense for nonbusiness buyers, especially those with DIY skills. If you’re not purchasing a fleet of laptops and you don’t rely completely on your laptop for your livelihood (smartphones and tablets can serve as tolerable stopgaps these days), a consumer laptop should fill your needs. But if time is money in your world, a business laptop’s better support, longer warranty, extended life cycle, and enhanced security features will save you some cash over the long haul—even if your “fleet” consists of a single laptop. Consumers should, for the most part, stick with consumer products. A higher-end model will provide many of the features you’d find in a business laptop, for less money—though you’re unlikely to find a consumer model that offers Intel’s vPro or HP’s SureStart.
HERE’S HOW 114
Your backup drive needs a backup plan
118
Master texting with these 9 basic tips
122
Hassle-Free PC: Supercharge Gmail with Labs features
125
Answer Line: Reinstall Windows when you’ve lost your disc or partition
HERE’S HOW
How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear.
Your backup drive needs a backup plan P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K
Files on your backup drive may be vulnerable to disaster unless you take precautions. BY TONY BRADLEY
I
f you’ve gotten into the habit of backing up your PC (go. pcworld.com/simplebackup), congratulations—but you aren’t as safe as you may think you are. Files on your backup drive can be just as vulnerable to disaster as files on your system can be. Most recently CryptoLocker (go.pcworld.com/cryptolocker) demonstrated that an external drive connected to a PC—such as an
external USB hard drive used for backup purposes—could fall victim to ransomware just as easily as the computer itself. “A lot of people got burned by CryptoLocker because their attached backup drives were also encrypted by the Trojan,” explains Dwayne Melancon, chief technology officer of enterprise security company Tripwire. “CryptoLocker encrypts local data files, but it also looks for attached storage devices, network shares, and other storage locations connected to your computer.” Don’t let such a catastrophe befall you. Here are a few options for protecting your backup drive.
Disconnect your backup media
Marc Maiffret, CTO of security software firm BeyondTrust, sums up the most commonsense solution: “Make sure to back up to media that can be removed physically from your system and stored offline.” This approach is not especially convenient, of course, but it’s a good tactic for a couple of reasons. First, it moves your backup data out of harm’s way if ransomware ever infects your computer. Second, if you store the backup media in a fireproof safe—or better still, off-site in a safe deposit box—the backup may survive even if a natural (or unnatural) physical disaster destroys the original data. One option is to back up your data to less-volatile media such as recordable CDs or DVDs. Once the recording session is finalized, the data should be safe from malware threats even if the disc remains in the drive. The downside of using optical discs is the media’s much smaller storage capacity compared with a modern hard drive: Performing a full backup may require multiple discs.
HERE’S HOW Using a cloud backup service such as Backblaze helps to secure your data.
Back up to the cloud
Consider using the cloud to hold your backups rather than storing the files locally. Cloud backup applications generally run as a background service that the system doesn’t view as an attached or networked drive. As a result, malware threats are unlikely to spread directly to your cloud backups. Most modern backup systems use a proprietary storage format for further protection. “This makes the backed-up files unable to be read or written to by common malware,” says Paul Lipman, CEO of Total Defense, which sells online backup services as well as antivirus and security software. “It doesn’t mean it’s impossible—it’s just highly unlikely. Malware generally works by attaching to existing files on the system; and in cases of proprietary storage formats, the malware would not be able to infect the backup directly.” Note, however, that most cloud backup services automatically sync and update data. If your local PC becomes compromised, you’ll want to disable the service to prevent the compromised data from overwriting your good backup data.
HERE’S HOW Back up multiple versions
The most effective way to safeguard your backup is to maintain more than one copy. You have two methods to accomplish this. First, most security experts suggest backing up important data to more than one location: For example, back up to an external USB drive that you then disconnect, and also use cloud backup. If infection or disaster compromises either backup, you’ll still have a good copy. The second approach is to maintain version histories of your files: Save multiple backups from different points in time, and choose a cloud backup service that holds more than just the most recent backup, so you can restore data from a time before the compromise occurred. “I also create several generations of local and off-site image backups of my computer, so I can quickly restore one of them if my system is lost, compromised, or otherwise unusable,” Tripwire’s Melancon says. Without a backup plan for your backup drive, you’re not much better off than if you’d never backed up. Follow one of the methods here to ensure that your backup will be available when you need it most. Redundancy is the strongest protection for your backed-up data. CrashPlan can back up to multiple locations.
Master texting with these 9 basic tips BY NICK MEDIATI
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K
TEXTING IS THE NEW CALLING, and with so many texts flying back and forth, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re getting your message across as clearly as possible. Here are some suggestions.
Use text shortcuts
Save time with text shortcuts—shorthand blurbs that you enter and that expand to a longer word or phrase when you tap the spacebar. For instance, you can have “brb” turn into “be right back.” On iOS, open Settings, tap General, and then tap Keyboard. In the Shortcuts section, tap Add New Shortcut, enter the phrase you want ready access to, and enter the shortcut you want to assign. Tap Save. On Android, go to Settings, select Language & input under the
HERE’S HOW
Keyboard shortcuts make it easier to express your rage in text messages.
Personal subheading, and tap Personal dictionary. Press the plus (+) button at the upper right, and then enter the phrase and its shortcut. Tap the Back button, and Android will save your shortcut.
Switch your keyboard
If you have an Android phone, try a new keyboard on for size. A different keyboard can offer extra features—or even different layouts. Check out the recommendations at our sister site TechHive (go. pcworld.com/andkeyboards), and then head to the Google Play store.
Use emoji or emoticons
Emoji and emoticons are more than just cute—they can convey meaning and subtext. If you own an iPhone, or are one of the lucky few to have Android 4.4 KitKat, check out the emoji keyboard. On iOS, open Settings, tap General, and then tap Keyboard. On the Keyboard settings screen, tap Keyboards u Add New Keyboard, and
To add a keyboard shortcut on Android, create a new dictionary entry. (Mmmmm, cheesecake.)
select Emoji from the list. The next time you tap out a text in the Messages app, you’ll notice a globe icon next to the spacebar. Tap it, and then insert a few faces. (Just don’t go too crazy with it.) On Android, things are a little more involved. KitKat has built-in emoji support (learn more at go.pcworld.com/kitkatemoji), but earlier versions don’t make emoji entry easy. Although not all smartphone models support emoji, remember that you don’t need anything special to use traditional emoticons such as “:P” and “:/” (so those are always an option).
If in doubt, be direct
Not everyone is great at picking up on subtext, not everyone is skilled at using emoticons, and not every situation lends itself well to sarcasm, irony, or humor. And even though your friends might appreciate your quirky sense of humor, other people might find it to be an acquired taste. If you’re exchanging messages with someone you don’t know well, keep your text direct and to the point, and avoid unintentional miscommunication.
HERE’S HOW Avoid autocorrect mishaps
We’ve all been there: You make a typo and autocorrect misinterprets it. You hastily try to correct it, which then begets a cascading autocorrect nightmare, and your mangled text ends up on Damn You Auto Correct (www.damnyouautocorrect.com). Before tapping Send, take a deep breath and count to three. Review the message for unfortunate typos or autocorrect errors. Confirm that your text makes sense and that you’re using something approaching proper grammar, too.
Don’t text while angry
Taking a moment to think can also come in handy if you’re upset. If someone’s text puts you in a foul mood, stop, put the phone away, and resist the urge to reply until you’ve calmed down. Showing a little restraint now can save you from headaches and heartache later.
Don’t text while inebriated
Nothing says “bad judgment” like running off your virtual mouth while you aren’t in control of your mental faculties. If you’re at the bar, hand over your car keys—and your phone—to your group’s designated driver. Just make sure to log out of Facebook or Twitter beforehand, lest they post embarrassing things under your name.
Don’t text while walking
Few things in modern life are as annoying as that person who insists on tapping out a text message while shuffling along slowly on a crowded sidewalk. Other pedestrians just want to get on with their day. For everyone’s sake, step to the side and tap out your message. Once you’re done, tuck your phone into your pocket and go on your way.
Don’t text while driving
Although drunken texting will embarrass you, texting while driving can injure or kill you—or other people. Research shows the practice to be at least as dangerous as driving drunk, and it’s already against the law in many states. If you’re driving, stow your phone. It can wait.
HASSLE-FREE PC
HERE’S HOW
BY IAN PAUL
Supercharge Gmail with Labs features GOOGLE’S GMAIL PACKS a slew of features for staying
productive and organized. But one big advantage is the extra stuff you can add through Gmail Labs. To enable Labs features, first click the settings cog in the upper-right corner of the Gmail interface and select Settings from the drop-down menu. Click the Labs tab to see a list of items. (Any Labs features you’ve already enabled will appear first.) Click Enable to the right of any item you desire, and then scroll down and click Save Changes. Note that a small dose of daring is required: Labs’ experimental tools sometimes become full-fledged Gmail features, but they can also break or vanish without warning. That said, some Labs experiments can streamline your email management. Here are three of my favorites.
‘Mark as read’ buton
Having trouble adhering to the Inbox Zero system? Here’s what I do: At the end of every day, I click the select-all
Click the Labs settings tab to find useful Gmail add-ons.
checkbox at the top of the Inbox and then mark all messages as read. Okay, maybe that’s cheating, but it works for me. Of course, life would be easier if Gmail didn’t require users to right-click or to dig into the More menu just to find the ‘Mark as read’ option. Thank goodness for the Mark as Read Button item in Labs. As the item’s name suggests, enabling it creates a discrete, convenient ‘Mark as read’ button at the top of the Inbox window once you have selected one or more messages.
Undo Send
Whether it’s a wisecrack delivered to an unintended recipient, an incomplete and incoherent message, or an incorrect address, sending a message by accident is bad news. Labs has a remedy: Undo Send gives you up to 30 seconds after you’ve clicked the Send button to call your message back—no harm, no foul. Enabling this experiment takes a bit of work, however. Once you’ve enabled Undo Send in Labs, open the Settings options again. Scroll
‘Mark as read’ in action.
down under the General tab to the Undo Send section. Click the checkbox for Enable Undo Send if the setting isn’t enabled already. Click the drop-down menu that appears underneath and then select the amount of time you’d like for your undo grace period. Finally, scroll down and click Save Changes.
Green Robot
The Undo Send item gives you up to 30 seconds to call your email message back.
Green Robot lets you know, with a little robot icon, when your Gmail chat contacts are currently on a mobile device, clueing you in to expect shorter or delayed responses. Note that this Labs item works only if you are using Gmail’s old chat interface rather than the new Hangouts format. Google, however, has yet to force all Gmail users over to Hangouts, so this tweak still works for now. If you’d like to switch back to Gmail chat from Hangouts (PC only), click your name at the top of the Hangouts/chat window in Gmail. At the bottom of the drop-down menu, click Revert to old chat.
ANSWER LINE
HERE’S HOW
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY S I N I S A B OTA S/S H U T T E R STO C K
BY LINCOLN SPECTOR
Reinstall Windows when you’ve lost your disc or partition
Q:
WAYNE KLAWUHN USED the Darik’s Boot and Nuke utility (www.dban.org) to securely wipe his hard drive. Unfortunately, the erasing procedure also wiped the tools necessary for reinstalling Windows.
A:
EVERY COMPUTER THAT’S sold with Windows preinstalled must come with a tool for reinstalling the operating system. The most common approach puts the restoration tool on a specially designated partition on the
HERE’S HOW
When it comes time to activate Windows, use the activation number on your PC.
hard drive. Some computers, particularly from small manufacturers, come instead with an OEM Windows DVD. But what do you do if that partition has been lost—either through a hard-drive crash or user error? Or what if you’ve misplaced that DVD? If you purchased the PC from a major vendor, contact the vendor and ask if the company can provide a replacement. Such copies usually come on a DVD or on a flash drive. I know for a fact that Dell, HP, and Lenovo offer this service. Dell charges about $90; I don’t know what the other companies charge. Another option that might work: See if you can borrow a Windows DVD from someone. It must be the exact version of Windows your PC had—for instance, Windows 7 Home Premium. It also must be a complete version of the operating system, not an upgrade disc. After the installation, when it comes time to activate Windows, use the activation number on your PC. You should find it on a plate, probably mounted on the back of your desktop system or on the bottom of your laptop. Do not use the activation number printed on the package the disc came in. If you do, it will either fail or severely inconvenience the friend who lent you the disc. If all of the above tactics fail, you may have to buy a whole new retail or OEM copy of Windows. Or switch to Linux.
News, tips, and reviews covering phones, tablets, apps, and all the other tech in your life.
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[email protected]. PUBLICATION INFORMATION Volume 32, number 4. PCWorld™ (ISSN 0737-8939) is published monthly at $24.95 for one year (12 issues) by IDG Consumer & SMB, Inc. Copyright 2014, IDG Consumer & SMB, Inc. All rights reserved. PC World and Consumer Watch are registered trademarks of International Data Group, Inc., and used under license by IDG Consumer & SMB, Inc. Published in the United States.
Remembering Pat McGovern, the technology media tycoon you never knew P H OTO G R A P H Y BY JA S O N G ROW
PCWorld is here today because Pat shared our founders’ passion for technology and educating people about it. Longtime PCWorlders remember his vision and his boundless energy. BY MELISSA RIOFRIO
IN MEMORIAM
Pat had already founded trade IT publications, including IDG’s Computerworld, when in 1982 he invested in the fledgling PC World. HE WAS THE media tycoon who flew beneath your radar. And yet Patrick J.
McGovern, who died March 19 at the age of 76, is the reason PCWorld— along with hundreds of other technology-oriented websites, publications, and events—is here today. We’re here because Pat believed in the power of technology and the need to educate people about what it meant, and how to use it. On one recent day, for example, PCWorld.com posted breaking stories about new Intel chips and Microsoft DirectX 12 graphics. We reviewed Toshiba’s Kirabook and six mechanical gaming keyboards. And we produced a feature on Excel tips and tricks. If you’ve read and liked any of our stories, then we’ve fulfilled what Pat wanted from the start.
An independent editorial voice
It was always all about the technology for Pat, who started following the industry in 1964 when he founded International Data Corporation, a research firm that remains a leader in its field and is now a subsidiary of our parent company, International Data Group. Pat had already founded trade IT publications, including IDG’s flagship Computerworld, when in 1982 he invested in the fledgling personal computer magazine PC World. Founded by David Bunnell and Cheryl Woodard, PC World quickly became a leader in covering PCs and everything connected to them. Now called PCWorld (we dropped the space), we celebrated our 30th anniversary in 2013. From the beginning, Pat McGovern championed an independent editorial voice. Robert Luhn, who joined PC World’s staff shortly after the magazine’s launch, recalls, “We were given the freedom to report and write, and say what was what. I think that’s why people ultimately ended up trusting PC World more than its competitors.” “I always felt that he had my back in terms of editorial matters,” says former editor-in-chief Harry McCracken, who abruptly left PC World in
Pat believed that high-quality publications started with hiring and training the best people and keeping them happy. 2007 over an editorial dispute with our then-publisher. “When I chose to quit PC World, he called me directly and said I could publish any story I wanted to.” (IDG swiftly resolved the dispute, and Harry returned to PC World for another year.) Steve Fox, who was PCWorld’s editorial director until 2012, says, “In the same way everyone talks about Steve Jobs being Apple, for those of us who were at IDG, we understood that Pat McGovern was IDG.” Pat McGovern built a culture at IDG that had two centers: technology and people. He believed that high-quality publications started with hiring and training the best people and keeping them as happy as possible. This was a tall order in the hard-charging, high-pressure world of journalism, but Pat persisted. Whether it was the signed memos he sent to individuals whose work he had noticed, or his yearly tradition of handing out the holiday bonuses in person, we couldn’t fault his friendly touch. “In my short time at IDG, I got only a single chance to meet Pat,” says PCWorld editor-in-chief Jon Phillips, “but his legend preceded him. I’ve heard ‘Pat stories’ at company meetings and in training sessions, and even from employees who’ve left the IDG fold. He was basically a founding father of tech media, and the magazines he established in the ’80s created a blueprint for so much of the tech journalism we still read today. The fact that IDG is a three-pronged effort of tech media, tech research, and tech-focused venture capital says so much about his ambition level. And his fascination with brain research, via all his work with MIT, tells us that this guy’s sense of wonder and intellect ran really, really deep.” So when we say good-bye to Pat today, we’re not saying good-bye to your standard-issue CEO, who has to be smart, and good at building businesses and making hard decisions, all while maintaining a company’s public face. Pat could do all of that. But he also brought a specific passion for technology to his job, which drove his ambitions for all of IDG’s
IN MEMORIAM
Pat brought a specific passion for technology to his job, which drove his ambitions for all of IDG’s businesses. businesses. And he had a warm and humane approach, which made him “Uncle Pat” to many of us, even on our hardest and longest days. We still can’t believe he’s gone. He always seemed to have boundless energy and enthusiasm, despite a work and travel schedule that would have exhausted any normal person. “He had the vigor that comes from loving what you do and loving your life,” Steve Fox told me, and may we all be so lucky. Thanks for everything, Pat.
