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SEPTEMBER 2013

TABLE OF

CONTENTS

» FEATURES

Windows 8.1 Android Apps

Media Streaming

» DEPARTMENTS

News

Consumer Watch

Reviews

Staff Picks

Tech Spotlight

Business Center

» COLUMNS

Answer Line

Bugs & Fixes

Hassle-Free PCHere’s How

COVER IMAGE BY JOSEPH FAGAN

BY JON PHILLIPS

PCWORLD has been publishing digital editions of the magazine for

about ten years, but none are packed with as many enhancements and

features as the issue you’re reading now. Many of you are first-time

readers of a PCWorld digital edition, so I’d like to

walk you through some important improve-

ments we’ve made to our digital magazines.

Larger text, more storiesStarting with this issue, PCWorld has been rede-

signed for easier navigation. Our new layout is

cleaner and simpler, and it puts a greater

emphasis on visuals. Our article text is larger

too—a user convenience that we couldn’t have

delivered in the print version without signifi-

cantly reducing the amount of content. In fact,

not only have we increased the size of our type,

we’ve also increased the number and length of

the articles. PCWorld readers are now getting

more content for their money than ever before

—another benefit of all-digital publishing.

Video, audio, and animations PCWorld offers two types of digital magazines:

Enhanced Editions for iPad, Android tablets, and Kindle Fire, and Replica

Editions for viewing the magazine on a traditional PC or smartphone. All

PCWorld: New design, new features

EDITOR’S DESK

Our digital editions now ofer rich multimedia features and more interactive content.

Multimedia Options Check out the

video segments that accompany many

of the articles in the Enhanced Editions.

editions benefit from our new design. And all editions are available to all

digital subscribers through our All-Access Pass. That said, if you read

PCWorld on a tablet, you’ll enjoy a more feature-packed experience.

For starters, each Enhanced Edition includes illustrated animations,

like the ones on this month’s cover and our feature on the Windows

8.1 upgrade guide. Enhanced Edition readers can also view slick, 360-

degree photos of notebooks from Dell, Vizio, and Micro Express in this

issue. Want even more visuals of hot hardware? The Enhanced Edition

includes video segments on the construction of a 3D printer, a Dell

wireless notebook docking station, the Razer Blade gaming notebook,

and a trio of behemoth tabletop tablets.

Rounding out the special features for our

Enhanced Edition this month, we have an

interactive slideshow on mastering to-do

lists; an audio segment on buying smart-

phone insurance; and a screencast on how

to upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1. Finally,

throughout the Enhanced Edition, you’ll

find linkable text (just like on a webpage) as well as pop-up features

that you can click for extra information and context.

Single subscription, multiple options Again, if you subscribe to one digital edition, you effectively subscribe

to all of them through the PCWorld All-Access Pass. So even if you

don’t own a compatible tablet today, if you buy one next month—or

any time during your subscription period—you’ll be able to enjoy the

enhancements I describe above.

There’s no denying that digital magazines allow publishers like

PCWorld to offer much more content for the price of a traditional

magazine subscription. And with all your issues archived in bits and

bytes, you won’t have to worry about recycling either.

As always, we invite your feedback. Please send us a note at

letters@pcworld.com and share your ideas on how we can improve

our digital editions.

“If you subscribe to one digital edition, you efectively sub-scribe to all of them.”

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

NEWS

What Microsoft’s unified vision means to you

Tech and trends that will afect you today and beyond.

Microsof has overhauled its organizational structure to focus on a vision of ubiquity. BY BRAD CHACOS

NE MICROSOFT, ALL THE TIME. They’re just five words,

but they hold a universe of importance to Microsoft. In

July, they prompted a sweeping revamp of the compa-

ny’s core organizational structure: Newly vertical divi-

sions were carved out, executives were shufled, and some senior-level

people lost their jobs.

One Microsoft, all the time. What could it mean for you? If everything

goes according to chief executive Steve Ballmer’s grand plan, no less

than a seamless computing experience across every device you

own—a truly unified OS experience across your phone, tablet, note-

book, desktop PC, and TV.

This vision could—could—become reality in a few years.

Islands in a rocky seaThe first hints are already in place with Windows 8. The controversial

modern UI spans desktop displays and tablet screens alike, shares a

plethora of design elements with Windows Phones and the Xbox 360,

and even rocks a common core with Windows Phone 8 and the

O

Xbox would share

more in its UI archi-

tecture with other

Microsoft products.

impending Xbox One, making it easier for developers to swim

between the various islands in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

Previously, the Windows Phone team worked on Windows Phone;

the Windows division worked on Windows proper; the Office team

worked on Office; the Interactive Entertainment Business presided

over Xbox; and so on. Microsoft has been shifting to a more unified

design structure in recent months, but having so many fiefdoms

with so many chiefs introduced cracks on the edges of Microsoft’s

grand vision.

Windows Phone’s core UI is just a wee bit different from Windows 8’s,

as is Xbox’s interface. No underlying design principles unite the Xbox,

the Surface tablets, and the average Windows Phone. Apps and servic-

es are updated as each department sees fit. No more.

One Microsof, all the timeMicrosoft’s reorganization slices the com-

pany into divisions aligned much more

closely with its “One Microsoft, all the

time” vision. All the company’s devices,

from Surface tablets to Xboxes, now fall

under one division. Another division cre-

ates the core operating system for every

Microsoft platform, while yet another

heads virtually all app development.

Each division controls the reins of a crucial

vertical slice of Microsoft, slices that tran-

scend specific platforms and services. Those

divisions will deliver a unified product across

the width and breadth of Microsoft’s plat-

forms—assuming all goes according to plan.

And each division depends upon communi-

Surface tablet chamfers

would look sweet on a

Surface Phone...or Xbox.

“...a seamless com-puting experience across every device you own.”

cating with the others. An app needs an OS to run on, and an OS is

mere bits on a disc without hardware.

Now, we won’t see major changes anytime soon, despite Microsoft’s

newfound rapid-release religion. Correcting the course of an organiza-

tion as large as Microsoft takes time. But when the fruits of these

changes do blossom, they could be mighty tasty.

Imagine this: It’s the future. Your Xbox One, Surface tablet, Surface

Watch, Surface Display, and Surface Phone all sport the same sleek

VaporMg styling on their cases, complete with the same physical con-

trols in the same general area.

More important, all those devices share the same basic experience: A

unified system design, with crucial elements in familiar locations

across devices. The same apps and services are available on all devices,

either from the Web or from the shared OS core; and thanks to the

touch-friendly modern UI that spans platforms, you can even run

most apps on your Surface Watch. Behind the scenes, SkyDrive syncs

your apps, settings, game saves, and DVR details. Shifting from device

to device would be utterly seamless.

Bumps in the roadIdealistic? Sure. But even if the grand vision doesn’t coalesce com-

pletely, everybody wins if Microsoft simply manages to rival Apple and

Google and build out a cohesive ecosystem of apps and services with a

NEWS

Surface’s touch-

friendly modern UI

will span platforms.

common look and feel.

Well, almost everybody wins. I have to

wonder: Where do the third-party device

manufacturers stand in all this? Windows

can run on a wide swath of hardware, but

“One Microsoft, all the time” carries some-

what ominous tidings for the likes of Acer,

HP, and Dell. Don’t be surprised to see more “experiments” with

Chrome OS or $200 Android laptops in the future.

Or could the grand vision result in an elegant, yet desultory same-

ness? And if that happens, is that where third-party hardware can

shine? The service and software roots of “One Microsoft, all the

time” would work just fine on hardware from any manufacturer,

after all.

The desktop is dead, long live...the Tile?The desktop is the past for Microsoft; the modern UI vision is the

future for the company. The desktop simply can’t carry over from

device to device and app to app in the same way that the modern

UI and its flexible architecture can. The die is cast.

As a devout lover of the keyboard and mouse, I’m grimacing, too.

But if Microsoft succeeds, I won’t cry for the desktop’s loss. Howev-

er, that’s a big if, as Microsoft’s ambitions have exceeded its ability

to execute in recent times. Nor has Microsoft been able to con-

vince consumers to jump aboard the Windows 8 Live-Tile bandwag-

on en masse. But if “One Microsoft, all the time” lives up to its

potential, the bedeviled Windows 8 UI could become much more

than just a tacked-on tablet interface.

“I have to wonder: Where do third- party device manu-facturers stand?”

NEWS

IF THE WINDOWS PC market is in big trouble, someone forgot to tell

Lenovo and Samsung. In June, within 24 hours of each other, the two

Asian tech giants unveiled broad, new product lines. A critical mass of

next-generation Windows 8 machines is coming down the pike.

The new arrivals cover every shape and form of portable PC, with

touchscreens galore, and even some daring dual-boot systems.

Crawford del Prete, chief research officer at tech market research

firm IDC, says the Lenovo and Samsung announcements show how

fundamentals are coming together for the PC market. “Haswell should

significantly improve battery performance,” del Prete says.

Haswell, the code name for Intel’s fourth-generation Core processor,

is finally starting to show up in new systems. Early tests of the Haswell-

powered Macbook Air indicate that the chips do, indeed, deliver on

their promise of maintaining great CPU performance along with much

New Windows 8 PCs innovate to capture attentionBY MELISSA RIOFRIO

longer battery life. Haswell also brings a new Ultrabook spec for PCs

that calls for touchscreens and that will play better with Windows 8.

And Windows 8.1 is just around the corner. “Windows 8.1 will be a

more familiar interface for customers that have objected to Windows

8,” del Prete says.

Touchscreens are cropping up in more systems, too. “Consumers are

looking for touch and alternative form factors like convertibles and

detachables,” says Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at

Moor Insights.

The just-announced Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus has no pricing or ship

date yet, but it’s an Ultrabook and then

some. Weighing only 3.06 pounds, its

13-inch touchscreen display sports a high

resolution of 3200 by 1800 pixels, and its

aluminum chassis is just over a half-inch

thick. Samsung says its battery could last

up to 12 hours.

Lenovo’s new IdeaPads will offer touch

capability at affordable prices. The IdeaPad

S210 Touch, for instance, will start at

$429 and include an 11.6-inch HD

touchscreen display.

The tablet/hybrid space remains fer-

tile ground for innovation. The Lenovo

Miix, as its name (not a typo) suggests, is

designed to be versatile. It uses an Intel

Atom dual-core processor and has a

10.1-inch screen with a 1366-by-

768-pixel resolution. You can buy a

detachable folio case with a

The Samsung Ativ

Book 9 has a very

high-res touch-

screen display.

“Touchscreens and high resolutions are cropping up in more systems.”

built-in keyboard. It’ll cost $500 to start and is supposed to last 10

hours on a full charge.

The Samsung Ativ Tab 3 is a Windows tablet designed to make iPad

users pause. It’s bigger, with a 10.1-inch display, versus the iPad’s 9.7-

inch one. It’s thinner, at just 0.32 inch thick versus the iPad’s 0.37 inch.

And it’s lighter, at 1.21 pounds—the iPad is about 1.45 pounds.

Finally, the Samsung Ativ Q is a 13-inch tablet-laptop hybrid with the

same superhigh resolution as the Ativ Book 9 Plus. Its screen can prop

up like a laptop and tilt back on a raised hinge. And it comes with both

Windows 8 and Android 4.2.

A device like the Ativ Q “indicates PC manufacturers are still in

exploration-mode, looking for that silver bullet to turn around PC

sales,” analyst Moorhead says. “For Windows 8, it indicates what most

in the industry already know: Windows 8 lacks the right apps.”

But for J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester

Research, the Ativ Q has inherent limitations. “Android is not going to

be a substitute for Windows,” Gownder says. “It has the same problem

as a Chromebook: How does it fit into your overall computing envi-

ronment?”

No one knows how many of these products will still be around in a

year, but their innovative spirit shows that

PC vendors aren’t giving up.

The Samsung Ativ Tab 3 is just 0.32

inch thick and weighs 1.21 pounds.

NEWS

NVIDIA WILL START licensing its graphics cores more widely in a bid

to cash in on the need for powerful graphics in smartphones, tablets,

and other devices.

Nvidia will start by licensing graphics cores based on the Kepler

architecture used in its latest graphics cards, the company says.

Kepler cores will also be used in Nvidia’s Tegra 5 mobile chip, code-

named Logan, shipping next year.

“The reality is that we’ve done this in the past,” says David Shannon,

Nvidia’s executive vice president and general counsel, in a blog entry.

But now, “the explosion of Android devices presents an unprecedent-

ed opportunity to accelerate this effort.”

Nvidia is taking a path similar to that of Imagination Technologies,

the main supplier of graphics cores to mobile chip makers. Imagina-

tion’s graphics cores are used in Apple’s iPad and iPhone, Samsung’s

Galaxy S4 smartphone, and other mobile devices.

Nvidia will also license its visual computing patents, Shannon says.

It has 5500 patents issued or pending.

Nvidia to license graphics coresBY AGAM SHAH

NEWS

THE WI-FI ALLIANCE is finally kicking off a certification program for

routers, adapters, and other wireless networking gear based on the

IEEE 802.11ac draft standard. The organization has a strong track

record when it comes to ensuring that networking products will be

interoperable even when the standards they’re based on have yet to

be finalized, so this is a positive development.

As it did with the 802.11n wireless networking standard, the IEEE is

taking its time to ratify the 802.11ac standard. In fact, the responsible

working group isn’t expected to be done until November, and final rat-

ification isn’t expected until February 2014. That lengthy timeline

hasn’t stopped manufacturers from shipping 802.11ac gear, of course;

products based on the draft standard have been on store shelves since

August 2012. But buyers haven’t had any assurances that those prod-

ucts will work together.

Wi-Fi Alliance to certify802.11ac equipmentBY MICHAEL BROWN

NEWS

So why is the certification program launching now? “We want to

ensure that the standard is substantially mature,” Wi-Fi Alliance senior

marketing manager Kevin Robinson explains. “There is work that we

have to go through to ensure interoperability, and [we’re] fielding a

test bed to certify that.”

The Wi-Fi Alliance launched a similar certification program back in

2007 for networking equipment based on the draft 802.11n standard.

Unlike that effort, however, the 802.11ac certification program will not

acknowledge the standard’s draft status and is being described as

simply “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ ac.”

“The Wi-Fi Alliance has a long track record of certifying products

ahead of IEEE ratification,” said Robinson says. “With the Wi-Fi Certified

N program, we found that in addition to the backward interoperability

[with products based on the 802.11b and g standards], final products

were backward-compatible with draft products. The core set of fea-

tures remained unchanged. The Wi-Fi Certified AC program will pre-

serve interoperability with every certified product from the past ten

years.” Robinson also says he expects that most manufacturers that

shipped 802.11ac products prior to the certification program will sub-

The 802.11ac-based

Asus RT-AC66U is one

of the fastest routers

we’ve ever tested.

mit their products for certification after the fact.

To gain the Alliance’s imprimatur, 802.11ac devices are expected to

be dual-band, meaning that they can operate on both the 2.4GHz and

5GHz frequency bands. If such a device can’t connect at 5GHz using

the 802.11ac protocol, it will attempt to

drop back to 2.4GHz and use the older

802.11n protocol (or even 802.11b or

802.11g, if necessary). Since dual-band

routers are capable of operating networks

on both frequencies simultaneously, con-

sumers will be able to use the 2.4GHz band

for basic needs and preserve bandwidth on

the less-crowded 5GHz band for media streaming and other high-per-

formance applications.

PCWorld tested five of the first 802.11ac routers last September (go.

pcworld.com/11acrouters). We were generally impressed with their

performance then, but we don’t know at this time whether those

products will be certified after the fact. The Wi-Fi Alliance did provide

a list of 802.11ac components that will be the first to receive 802.11ac

certification. These devices also form the test suite for the certifica-

tion program as a whole:

• Broadcom BCM4706 5G WiFi Communications Processor

• Broadcom BCM4360 5G WiFi Single Chip MAC/PHY/Radio

• Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260

• Marvell Avastar 88W8897 AP Reference Design

• Marvell Avastar 88W8897 STA Reference Design

• Mediatek Dual Band 802.11ac Reference Access Point

• Mediatek Dual Band 802.11ac Reference STA

• Qualcomm VIVE 802.11ac 3-stream Dual-band,

Dual-concurrent Router

• Qualcomm VIVE 802.11ac 3-stream, PCIe Client

• Realtek RTL8197D+RTL8188AR+RTL8192CE AP/Router

• Realtek RTL8812AE HMC card

“PCWorld tested five of the first 802.11ac routers last year, and we were impressed.”

NEWS

MICROSOFT IS PLANNING AN OVERHAUL of our Office documents,

weaving live data into the once-static fabric of our Word files and

Excel spreadsheets. It’s a bold experiment that could kill the very defi-

nition of an Office “document”—but it could also spell the rebirth of

Microsoft’s productivity suite in the age of cloud-driven collaboration.

Microsoft has been evangelizing tools that will enable app develop-

ers to automatically use Bing’s search capabilities in documents—for

example, they might enhance a travel guide with live demographic

information on Belize. And Microsoft’s new PowerBI tools can import

data from both public and private sources to provide more up-to-date

context in documents.

Both developments reveal a sea change in the way we’ll interact

with Microsoft Office in the future. Today, you create an Office doc-

How live data will redefine

the Office documentBY MARK HACHMAN

Microsoft sees

its Bing search

technology as

the foundation

for a number of

capabilities.

ument, save it, and then email it to a colleague, who quite likely

prints it out.

But all this can change once Office begins hooking into living data.

Office docs won’t simply document the past: They’ll also accurately

reflect the ever-changing present.

“In the past, people would send around a static spreadsheet or a

static PDF, with static data,” Kelly Waldher, director of Office 365

product management for Microsoft, said in an interview. “What Pow-

erBI offers with Office 365 are a couple of new elements: real-time

updates and real-time data.”

Microsoft has connected its SQL Azure cloud database to Share-

Point Online, creating shared PowerBI

workspaces that partners and coworkers

can access, Waldher said. With a live data

source powering the document, you can

be sure you’re getting the most up-to-

date information—and therefore the best

information to base decisions on. This

model assumes that documents will no

longer be printed out or archived in a dead, static format, since

doing so would rob them of the contextual intelligence that live

data offers.

Microsoft understands that its vision will first be enabled within

“Ofce docs won’t just record the past; they’ll reflect the changing present.”

Madonna ruled 1987 in this ‘king of the hill’ vizualization of pop-music artists.

“What we mean by ‘documents’ will move far beyond today’s definition.”

NEWS

business environments, where enterprise

tools can make sense of big data. But it’s

not hard to imagine a future where a col-

lege paper on climate change might fea-

ture an interactive map that plots aver-

age mean temperatures for various cities.

With consumers increasingly turning to

the cloud for data storage, people will place less value on older,

static documents, and more on up-to-date responses to changing

conditions.

If Microsoft’s vision takes hold, static documents loaded with static

data will seem increasingly irrelevant as time goes by. Which raises

the question, at what point will traditional Office “documents”—

spreadsheets, Word documents, and the like—begin to go away, vic-

tims of their own irrelevance?

If Microsoft’s vision of live, connected files becomes reality, the

document of tomorrow could evolve into a framework, a predefined

query. We may not know what the 100 highest-grossing movies of

Are natural-

language

queries the

future of data

interaction?

2010 through 2020 will be, but we can create a document that’s

preformatted to access that information.

If that happens, seemingly disparate technologies—Office, Bing,

and Azure—will become more closely tied to one another. And what

we mean by “documents” will move far beyond today’s traditional

definition.

NEWS

HAVE YOU HEARD the saying, “The best thing about standards is that

there are so many to choose from?” That saying popped into my mind

when I learned of the new nVoy brand and certification program for

products based on the IEEE 1905.1 standard. If you’re not familiar with

it, IEEE 1905.1 defines hybrid networks that combine Wi-Fi, ethernet-

over-powerline, MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance), and conven-

tional wired ethernet topologies.

And each of those technologies is defined by a standard of its own,

of course. And then there’s the ITU’s G.hn, a wholly separate standard

from a different international body that defines hybrid home net-

works that use powerline, coax, and phone line, but not wireless

Will nVoy become the one home networking standard?BY YARDENA ARAR

(although it can coexist with Wi-Fi).

So why does the world need a standard that

defines a collection of standards? For that

matter, why does the world need the Wi-Fi Alli-

ance’s 802.11ac certification program? If IEEE

1905.1 and IEEE 802.11ac are standards, why do we need marketing

consortiums to certify that products based on those standards will be

interoperable? Isn’t that the very definition of the word “standard”?

After all, I already operate a hybrid network at home: Some of my

devices connect via Wi-Fi, some use HomePlug AV powerline, and my

entertainment center runs on MoCA. Everything is connected to my

gigabit ethernet Wi-Fi router. And my hybrid network was running fine

long before someone thought to come up with a fancy logo for it.

In search of answers to these questions, I interviewed HomePlug Alli-

ance vice president and Broadcom senior technical director Stephen

Palm and consumer communications services analyst Mike Jude of

market research firm Frost & Sullivan.

Help with setup and troubleshootingSo, what does nVoy certification bring to the networking party? The

major benefits are simplified setup and diagnostic tools that can help

troubleshoot problems. A new nVoy component can get its configura-

tion info from existing ones at the push of a button, freeing consum-

ers from having to tediously input info such as SSIDs and passwords,

Palm explained. The diagnostics (information on link rates, network

topology, and so on) can be accessed locally by customers and

remotely by service providers.

Service providers especially stand to benefit from widespread

deployment of nVoy and its successors (as the IEEE 1905 working

group develops them). As more and more people use networks for

streaming media and are therefore more likely to notice performance

problems, service providers will want a way to see what’s going on

when a customer complains, without incurring the expense of dis-

patching a truck and a technician. “Keeping that network running is

nVoy is a new

certification

program for

hybrid home

networks.

absolutely essential to selling services that use it,” Jude says.

Both Jude and Palm say that while G.hn and nVoy both seek to make

network setup easier, they are fundamentally different technologies.

G.hn describes a chip technology (it’s a PHY, a physical spec) for gear

that would replace—and is incompatible with—equipment based on

existing wire-line standards. A G.hn component can’t talk to a Home-

Plug or MoCA device.

The nVoy spec, on the other hand, doesn’t work at the PHY layer of a

network chip. It’s part of the software overlay that talks to the hardware

of all supported network standards. At launch, these supported stan-

dards include HomePlug, MoCA, Wi-Fi, and

ethernet, but there’s no reason why nVoy

couldn’t be revised to support G.hn, too.

More important, nVoy-certified gear will

be backward-compatible with the popular

network technologies that it supports—

the underlying ethernet bridging doesn’t

change—so you don’t have to abandon the

equipment you already have. You can simply upgrade to nVoy-certified

gear as you replace older components that don’t enjoy the benefits of

the technology.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no place for G.hn in the home, Jude

notes. It might, for example, be useful for someone building a new

home entertainment center who wants to mix and match compo-

nents that use different network technologies. And having compo-

nents based on G.hn would greatly simplify setup.

Timetable for nVoyThose who follow networking standards may wonder how long IEEE

1905 has been in the works. The answer: not that long. The working

group was set up two and a half years ago, Palm says, and the draft

spec followed in December 2011. Having lived through the drama of

802.11n Wi-Fi development, which took many years, I wondered aloud

how the working group was able to produce the draft so quickly.

“nVoy’s major net-working benefits are simplified setup and diagnostic tools.”

NEWS

Palm explains that unlike the 802.11 work-

ing group, which has been composed of as

many individuals as cared to pay for IEEE

membership, 1905 is composed of only

entities (read: companies). Companies can’t

pack the group, as happened with 802.11,

by paying for more of their employees to join. That means the working

group had a lot fewer members, which tends to speed things up.

At Computex in Taiwan this year, the news release announcing the

nVoy branding and certification program (which will be managed by

the HomePlug Alliance) indicated that the first nVoy-certified prod-

ucts were expected to reach the market later this year. As with the

Wi-Fi Alliance, the certification program will test products that claim

to adhere to the IEEE 1905.1 standard to ensure that they will be

interoperable with other products making the same claim.

As Palm points out, however, the news release covered only certifica-

tion, so actual products will likely not ship until sometime later. It may

take a while for us to enjoy the benefits of nVoy, the standard that

could make home networking easier—even if it’s one more logo to be

on the lookout for.

“nVoy-certified gear will be backward-compatible.”

THE BATTLE FOR mobile video supremacy rages on: In July, Instagram

finally made it possible for users to easily embed photos and videos on

their own websites, as Twitter’s rival Vine app does.

Easily is the key word. Workarounds already existed for embedding

Instagram photos and videos, but they entailed too much effort for

content sharing.

Instagram is now offering an embed code on desktop browsers that

lets you share your photos and videos (look for the button under the

comments). The company in a recent blog post said it wants to ensure

that your content is clearly attached to your account, so the embed-

ded photo or video will display your Instagram username and link to

your account.

What if your account is private? Well, no one will be able to share

Instagram takes a swing at Vine with embed codesBY CAITLIN MCGARRY

NEWS

your photos or videos until you change your set-

tings. Instagram has an all-or-nothing approach

to privacy, so you can’t pick and choose which

photos you want to share with the world and

which you want to share only with friends.

Adding an embed code is a small change, but it

better positions Instagram to compete with the

popular mobile app, Vine, and its parent company, Twitter. Vine posts

(‘Vines’) were already easily shareable, not just within the app but

across the Internet, because of the Vine embed code. Twitter also

offers embed codes for tweets, while Facebook (which owns Insta-

gram) does not let users easily share their posts on third-party sites.

The new feature is especially useful for news organizations that

have already been embedding tweets and Vines but have had no

way to share Instagram photos and videos of breaking events.

Vine and Instagram have volleyed back and forth since Instagram

introduced its own social video product. Vine recently added a handful

of new features in the wake of Instagram’s 15-second-video launch,

with plans to add even more. If both companies continue to improve

their apps in an effort to woo users, well, no complaints here.

Instagram’s

new embed

code lets you

share photos

and videos as

easily as Vine.

“Vine and Instagram have volleyed back and forth by adding new features.”

IN JULY, HEADLINES screamed that global computer shipments

had plunged 11 percent year over year in the second quarter

after dropping 14 percent in the first (go.pcworld.com /pcsalesq2).

But wait! A closer look at the numbers shows that we may be

past the worst of the bleeding.

Yes, the first quarter’s year-over-year decline was the sharpest

ever, falling from 88.6 million PCs shipped in Q1 2012 to about

76.2 million PCs in Q1 2013, according to IDC. (Data from Gart-

ner, another research group, yields roughly the same numbers.)

From Q1 2013 to Q2 2013, however, the drop is not so devastat-

ing. According to IDC, 75.6 million PCs shipped in Q2 2013—a

decline of just 600,000 units from the first quarter.

NEWS

PC sales decline

slows downBY BRAD CHACOS

And in the United States, Gartner says, Q2

shipments declined by only 1.4 per-

cent year over year; IDC

says U.S. ship-

ments

dropped by

1.9 percent.

Why? We may be over

the tablet boom.

“The U.S. industry is definitely the most

advanced [in tablet adoption],” says Mikako

Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “So the U.S. market might

see some slowdown of tablets eating into the PC space.”

FULL DISCLOSURE: PCWORLD AND IDC ARE OWNED BY INTERNATIONAL DATA GROUP, BUT THEY

SHARE NO EDITORIAL AFFILIATION.

Tablets remain

very popular,

but Gartner

thinks their

effect on PC

sales in the U.S.

will diminish. Vendor

1Q13 Shipments

Vendor

2Q13 Shipments

1. HP 11,997 1. Lenovo 12,619

2. Lenovo 11,700 2. HP 12,378

3. Dell 9,010 3. Dell 9,230

4. Acer Group 6,150 4. Acer Group 6,226

5. ASUS 4,363 5. ASUS 4,590

Others 33,075 Others 30,589

Total 76,294 Total 75,632

According to IDC, the decline in PC sales in the United States is slowing—and a

few vendors even saw an uptick.

NEWS

IF GOOGLE GLASS isn’t enough to get you worried about technology,

how about a device that can see through walls?

MIT researchers are experimenting with a Wi-Fi–based system called

Wi-Vi, which they say can track moving objects through walls. The

technology could be built into a smartphone or a dedicated handheld

device and used in search-and-rescue and law enforcement, says Dina

Katabi, the MIT professor who developed Wi-Vi along with graduate

student Fadel Adib.

Katabi thinks consumers might use Wi-Vi, too. For example, someone

walking outdoors at night who fears being followed might use it to

detect a person sneaking behind a fence or around a corner, she says.

No need to worry about the person in the next hotel room watching

you dress—at least not yet. Currently the display offers very low resolu-

tion. However, Katabi notes that she and Adib are working on higher

resolution, and that Wi-Vi might someday show recognizable faces.

Society, she says, might want to develop policies around its use.

Wi-Vi sends Wi-Fi radio waves through a barrier and measures the

way they bounce back. When a Wi-Fi signal reflects off an object, the

shape and makeup of that object affect the signal that returns. But

when the signal hits a wall, most of it reflects off the wall, and only a

faint bit of it reflects off the people on the other side.

To get around that obstacle, Wi-Vi transmits two signals, one of

which is the inverse of the other. When one signal hits a stationary

object, the other cancels it out. But because of the signals’ encoding,

MIT researchers see through walls with ‘Wi-Vi’BY STEPHEN LAWSON

they don’t cancel each other out for moving objects, so reflections

from a moving person are visible despite the presence of the wall.

Wi-Vi translates those faint reflections into a real-time display of the

person’s movements.

Because of its low resolution, Wi-Vi could actually enhance people’s

privacy in some cases, Katabi suggests. For

example, someone could use it to remote-

ly monitor whether an elderly parent had

gotten out of bed, without installing

intrusive video cameras.

But whether in the hands of police offi-

cers or ordinary people, a tool to see

through walls raises questions that the law hasn’t answered, warns

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Your location is something that’s worthy of privacy,” Fakhoury says.

“Even within your house, where you go can reveal a lot about yourself.”

Wi-Vi now is like radar tracking a plane.

“Your location is something that’s worthy of privacy.”

NEWS

SAMSUNG IS EXPANDING its Ativ line with new systems and a touch of

Android. (As of this writing, the company has not yet announced pric-

ing or availability.)

Ativ Q: This tablet-laptop hybrid, driven by an Intel Core i5 (Haswell)

processor, has a 13-inch, 3200-by-1800-pixel display that can prop up

and tilt back on a raised hinge. It boots into Windows 8, but can switch

to Android 4.2. Users will be able to pin Android apps to the Windows 8

Start screen, and transfer files or folders between the OSs.

Ativ Tab 3: Samsung says the 0.32-inch Ativ Tab 3 is the world’s thin-

nest Windows 8 tablet. It offers a 10.1-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display,

runs an Intel Atom Z2760 processor, and comes with an S Pen stylus.

Ativ Book 9 Plus: The successor to Samsung’s Series 9 laptops sports

a 13-inch, 3200-by-1800-pixel touchscreen display, carries an Intel Core

i5 or i7 processor, and has up to 256GB of solid-state storage.

Samsung enhances Ativ lineBY JARED NEWMAN

Ativ Book 9 Lite: This laptop has a 1366-by-768-pixel display, up to

256GB of solid-state storage, and a quad-core processor. The non-

touch model weighs 3.17 pounds, while the touchscreen model

weighs 3.48 pounds.

Ativ One 5 Style: Behind the 21.5-inch, 1080p touchscreen display

of this all-in-one desktop sit an AMD A6 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a

hard drive with a capacity up to 1TB.

Samsung Ativ

One 5 Style.

NEWS

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I c��l�b�ra��

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S�� ��� ��� �X5�0 �i�� a�v�n�e� �I �i�r��ro�e�s�� f�� Ma�, PC, ��S & An�r�i�

© 2013 Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. All rights reserved. Fujitsu and the Fujitsu logo are registered trademarks of Fujitsu Ltd. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Why insuring a smartphone makes sense

Can you aford up to $700 to replace your phone?

CONSUMER WATCH

How to make smart purchases, and stay safe online.

A smartphone

in danger.

BY ANNE B. McDONALD

F YOU’RE SMART, you’ll consider insuring your brand-new

smartphone. Yes, we bristle at the thought of insuring any con-

sumer electronics—the result of too many sales clerks pitch-

ing us on extended warranties for TVs, DVD players, and audio

systems. But those devices aren’t nearly as vulnerable to damage or

theft as our delicate smartphones.

Consider: You probably dropped $200 to $300 on a Samsung Galaxy

S4, HTC One, or iPhone 5 after inking a two-year contract. The phones

are worth more than that, but carriers subsidize the retail prices to

lure new customers.

If you’re klutzy, wild, or just plain unlucky, however, you could tank

your cool new phone with one unfortunate encounter with a toilet.

Yes, this happens, and when it does, a replacement phone of the

Company Purchase window

Coverage Cost Replacement time

Protect Your

Bubble

(insurance)

12 months

after pur-

chase;

maker’s

warranty

must still

be in effect

Water damage, drops,

mechanical/electrical

failure, screen failure,

antenna/Wi-Fi failure,

broken connectors,

touchscreen failure,

won’t power on; loss

and theft covered

$8/month or

$144/two years;

$100 deductible;

can cancel

anytime

Replace-

ment in one

to three

business

days (may

be refur-

bished)

SquareTrade

(warranty)

New

smart-

phone

bought in

the last 30

days

Water damage, drops,

mechanical/electrical

failure, screen failure,

antenna/Wi-Fi failure,

broken connectors,

touchscreen failure,

won’t power on; loss

and theft not covered

$7/month or

$125/two years;

$6/month or $99

two years for

Samsung Galaxy

S4 only; $99

deductible;

can cancel

anytime

Fixed phone

or a check

for value

of phone

guaranteed

within five

days

I

Online insurance sites compared

Note: SquareTrade has different pricing for iPhone warranties (go.pcworld.com/iphonewarranty).

same model or caliber could cost you up to $600 to $700. That’s

some serious dough.

Check out these numbers: Asurion (go.pcworld.com/asurion) which

partners with nearly all the major wireless carriers to provide smart-

phone insurance, estimates that 80 million phones will be lost, stolen,

or damaged in the United States in 2013.

Smartphones are small, slippery, and highly portable. We extract

them from our pockets countless times a day, so it’s a wonder that

more don’t go skittering

across concrete sidewalks,

or get stolen from café

tables. Indeed, in 2012 the

Federal Communications

Commission reported that

between 30 to 40 percent

of all robberies in major cit-

ies involved cell phones.

Bottom line: If you live life

to the fullest—with your

phone at your side—insur-

ing it may be a good bet.

A big investment in a tiny packageDavid Anderson is the

director of product at

ProtectYourBubble.com

(go.pcworld.com/protect),

which has been selling

online insurance for smart-

phones and other gadgets

in the United States since

March 2012, and in the

United Kingdom for more

than four years.

How active

are you when

using your

smartphone?

“People tend to treat their smartphones like their car keys,” Ander-

son said. “If it was a bundle of $20 bills equivalent to the cost of the

phone, I’m sure they’d treat it differently.”

Jessica Hoffman, the director of corporate communications for Square-

Trade.com (go.pcworld.com/squaretrade), agreed. Her company has

been selling warranties for new smartphones and electronics since 1999.

“Our lifestyles are mobile,” Hoffman said. “We’re out on bikes, we’re

texting at supermarkets, we’re checking in at the airport.”

By the numbersI took a look at both Protect Your Bubble and SquareTrade, which are

two of the largest online companies specializing in insuring or war-

ranting tech gear, including smartphones. One advantage they offer is

that you can buy warranty or insurance coverage after you buy your

smartphone—historically, you’ve had to buy them at the same time.

Here’s how the two companies stack up:

It’s important to note that SquareTrade deals in warranties—con-

tracts that govern repair and replacement of an item due to damage

from ordinary use or faulty workmanship. Protect Your Bubble, mean-

while, offers insurance, which protects your item from hazards like

theft or water damage.

I found both sites fairly easy to use, but the topic is so complicated

that I wanted to speak with a human being in both cases to clearly

understand their policies.

The phone service for SquareTrade is more pleasant to interact with.

Its automated system clearly tells you how long you’ll have to wait to

reach a customer rep, and also offers the choice of leaving a number

to be called back when it’s your turn.

Protect Your Bubble plays bad music while you’re on hold, and its

automated system doesn’t tell you exactly how long you’ll have to

wait for a human. The customer service rep also didn’t seem to be as

informed when answering my questions.

Shawn DuBravac, chief economist and director of research at the

Consumer Electronics Association, follows companies like SquareTrade

and Protect Your Bubble. “One of the interesting things these compa-

CONSUMER WATCH

nies do is they let you buy the insurance or warranty after you buy the

product,” DuBravac said. “Historically, you bought them at the time

you bought the product.”

Alternative paths to protectionThere are many other ways to get smartphone coverage besides the

online providers.

You can check your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance to see if your

policy covers your phone if it’s lost or damaged. You also can buy insur-

ance from the carrier you got the phone from.

It’s also possible that your credit card provider or bank offers a war-

ranty or insurance for your mobile devices. Additionally, iOS device

owners are eligible for AppleCare (go.pcworld.com/applecare).

And don’t throw away or give away the phone you used before you

bought the sexy new model. You may need to activate the older

phone to get by until a replacement arrives, or to use until your con-

tract is up and you can buy a new, subsidized phone.

PHOTOGRAPHS: ROBERT CARDIN

Avoid a cracked

screen by using a

protective case.

YOU’VE PROBABLY READ at least one story with warnings about

using nonsecure public Wi-Fi hotspots, so you know that eaves-

droppers can capture information traveling over those networks.

But nothing gets the point across as effectively as seeing the

snooping in action. So I parked myself at my local coffee shop the

other day to soak up the airwaves and see what I could see. My

intent wasn’t to hack anyone’s computer or device—that would

be illegal—but just to listen.

What a snoop sees when you use a nonsecure Wi-Fi hotspotBY ERIC GEIER

CONSUMER

WATCH

As you’ll see, it’s relatively easy to capture sensitive communications

at the vast majority of public hotspots—locations like cafés, airports,

and hotels. Someone can snag emails, passwords, and unencrypted

instant messages, and hijack unsecured logins to popular websites.

Fortunately, you have a number of ways to protect your online activity

while you’re out and about.

Capturing webpagesI opened my laptop at the café and began capturing Wi-Fi signals, tech-

nically called 802.11 packets, with the help of a free trial version of a wire-

less network analyzer. I visited my own website on my smartphone. The

network analyzer I used reassembled the packets and displayed them in

a regular webpage view. The formatting was slightly off and some of the

images were missing, but plenty of information still came through.

I discovered test messages I’d sent and received via my smartphone

while it was connected to the hotspot. Since I use an app to connect

My own web-

site, captured

via the hotspot

packets and

reassembled

for viewing.

to my email service via POP3 without encryption, you could have seen

my login credentials along with the message. With that information,

someone could configure their email client to use my account and

start receiving, and perhaps even sending, emails from my account.

I also used Yahoo Messenger to send a message while I was cap-

turing Wi-Fi signals. Sure enough, the tool plucked that information

CONSUMER

WATCH

This is a copy of the email I sent (and subsequently received) when using my smartphone

connected to the hotspot.

out of the air, too. You should never use an

unencrypted instant-messaging service

with any expectation of privacy.

How to use Wi-Fi hotspots securelyEvery time you log in to a website, make

sure that your connection is encrypted. The URL address should start

with https instead of http.

Make sure that the connection stays encrypted for your entire

online session. Some sites, such as Facebook, encrypt your login and

then return you to an unsecured session. Many sites give you the

option of encrypting your entire session: On Facebook, for example,

enable Secure Browsing in the security settings.

When you check email, try to log in via the Web browser and ensure

that your connection is encrypted. If you use an email client, make

sure your POP3 or IMAP and SMTP accounts are configured with

encryption turned on.

To encrypt all your online activity, use a virtual private network (go.

pcworld.com/usevpn).

Private networks are also vulnerable to eavesdroppers. While

enabling WPA or WPA2 security will encrypt the Wi-Fi traffic, obscur-

ing the actual communications, anyone who also has that password

will be able to snoop on the packets traveling over the network. This is

particularly important for small businesses that don’t use the enter-

prise (802.1X) mode of WPA or WPA2 security that prevents user-to-

user eavesdropping.

“Some sites encrypt your login and then return you to an unsecured session.”

PHOTOGRAPH: MIKE HOMNICK

THE RECENT DISCLOSURE that the U.S. government has been spying

on Americans’ email and other electronic communications for the last

several years reignited concern about communications monitoring. So

what can you do to protect yourself from such surveillance? Here are

some tips to protect yourself.

Protect your PC from surveillanceBY MARK HACHMAN

CONSUMER

WATCH

Avoid using popular Web servicesIf you’re concerned about the government or any other entity watch-

ing your moves online, avoid using Microsoft Bing or Google as your

search engine; try DuckDuckGo (go.pcworld.com/duck) instead. The

site promises not to track or store your searches (although it does

store anonymized searches to improve results, executives said).

Naturally, this also means ditching a Gmail or Hotmail account, and

deleting your accounts from those sites. Instead, it’s time to think

about laying low and skipping around services that you might have

forgotten about: Mapquest for maps, for exam-

ple. You may as well stop social networking alto-

gether, unless it happens to be direct, person-to-

person communications.

And there’s no sense in surfing using Chrome,

Internet Explorer, or Safari, either. Sure, there’s

Firefox and Opera, but PCWorld’s review of the Tor

browser (go.pcworld.com/tor) shows it to be an

anonymous, if slow, way of browsing the Internet.

Ditch your smartphoneIf we assume that Apple, Google, and Microsoft

are being monitored, then the safest way to

avoid being tracked is to ditch your smartphone.

A number of services already ask for your location, in the name of pro-

viding better search results or services. And BlackBerry has already

acceded to requests to allow foreign governments access to its data.

Non-smartphones may be no better, but the amount of information

that can be captured from them is much smaller.

Use encryptionFirst, encrypt your hard drive and existing files (go.pcworld.com/how-

toencrypt). Next, protect your email by encrypting it (go.pcworld.

com/emailencrypt). You should encrypt three things: the connection

from your email provider; your actual email messages; and your

stored, cached, or archived email messages. If you want to take it even

If you’re concerned about the govern-ment or any other entity watching your moves online, avoid using Microsof Bing or Google as your search engine.

further, consider using a secure email service. Companies like Silent

Circle profess to offer secure voice and email, communications via

dedicated connections between subscribed devices.

Subscribe to a VPNConsider setting up a virtual private network (go.pcworld.com/

vpnsetup), which creates an encrypted “tunnel” to another server.

Note that the performance of your PC may suffer somewhat.

Watch those hotspotsWandering from coffee shop to library to free café may provide anoth-

er layer of security, as your client IP address will vary by location. But

you’ll still want to protect your privacy while on the go with these free

software solutions (go.pcworld.com/freesecsoft). For more informa-

tion about staying secure in public hotspots, read “What a Snoop Sees

When You Use an Unsecured Wi-Fi Hotspot” in this section.

Block that malwareOne of the most important things you can do to secure your PC is to

lock it down from malware. These antimalware solutions (go.pcworld.

com/antimalware) can help ensure that no Trojan horse or other worm

provides its own spying eyes on your online activities.

Use strong passwordsMake sure that all of your encrypted services are tied up neatly with a

unique, easy-to-remember-but-impossible-to-crack passphrase. Read

these tips on creating passwords and passphrases (go.pcworld.com/

passphrases). But the best practice right now seems to be to use a

good password manager like LastPass (go.pcworld.com/lastpass).

CONSUMER WATCH

BY JAMES MULROY

BUGS & FIXES

Mozilla and Google have each released new bug-killing ver-

sions of their Web browsers.

Firefox 22 squashes some bugs Mozilla patched a few known bugs in Firefox, squashing 17

vulnerabilities, and added some nifty little fea-

tures. Seven of the flaws were marked as “criti-

cal,” and many of the issues involved memory

corruption and vulnerabilities in the Mozilla

Maintenance Service (the feature that installs

Firefox updates for you).

Firefox 22 also added support for WebRTC

(Web Real-Time Communication), a Web applica-

tion that lets you use in-browser audio and video

communication services without having to install

plug-ins—take that, Adobe Flash! Read more

about the update (go.pcworld.com/3109bf1).

Google Chrome 28 enhances notificationsGoogle released a new stable version of Chrome out of beta

with version 28.

The biggest addition is an improved notification system

that shows important messages outside the browser win-

dow—useful in case you don’t want to miss that important

email. You can pick and choose which Chrome apps and plug-

ins show notifications, and developers can now implement

them to send notifications right to your desktop. Gmail has

Mozilla and Google update browsers

CONSUMER WATCH

» PLUS:Many companies lag in adopting Java security updates.

had this option since 2011, so it’s good to see that other Web apps

will be able to use this feature.

Google has plans to take features from its Chrome operating system

and implement them in a sort of mini-OS inside of your existing one

via the Chrome browser, so be on the lookout for other features simi-

lar to those in Chrome OS in the future. Read more about version 28

(go.pcworld.com/3109bf2).

Java makes businesses vulnerableOracle has done its best to patch all those holes in Java we’ve been

hearing about over the last six months. And luckily, many of those

bugs and vulnerabilities have been patched

up, and Java is at a secure point for now in

the recent update to Version 7, Update 25.

Unfortunately businesses haven’t been

quick to adapt.

Many businesses continue to use the out-

dated Java 6, Update 20, which is vulnerable

to 215 security issues. Despite the fact that

Oracle stopped supporting Java 6 back in April, it’s still the most preva-

lent version on about 80 percent of enterprise computers, according

to security firm Bit9.

Even when Java does get updated on the machines, old versions

can remain—on average there are 50 different versions of Java on

business machines, Bit9 reports. These older versions are still vul-

nerable to attack. Businesses need to take an enforcing stance on

Java and determine where it’s truly needed, and have only the

most recent versions installed. Read more about Java in the work-

place (go.pcworld.com/3109bf3).

“Many businesses continue to use the outdated Java 6, Update 20 version.”

ILLUSTRATION: GARY NEILL

Tips to keep small businesses productive.

ARANOIA—IN SMALL DOSES— is an excellent preventive

medicine. If you think your business is too small to be a

target for hackers, identity thieves, and similarly unsavory

characters, you’re dangerously underestimating the value

of your business.

Lock down your business: Security essentialsGuard your invaluable information assets. BY PAUL MAH

P

BUSINESS CENTER

IT security might seem to be a daunting prospect for a small busi-

ness without an expert staff, a large budget, or expensive consultants,

but you can take several easily implemented measures to lock down

the computers your business relies on.

Encrypt your hard drivesFirst, implement full-disk encryption on each PC. This step is crucial

because system passwords alone offer no defense against hackers’

accessing the hard drive from another computer, or against someone’s

attempts to clone its contents for off-site examination. In addition,

recovering previously deleted files from an unencrypted storage device

or disk image is a relatively trivial matter for an attacker or snoop.

Selectively encrypting sensitive folders or files works, too, but full-

disk encryption is the best means of ensuring that every file is pro-

tected. Microsoft’s BitLocker is the gold standard for this task, thanks

to its ease of use and the fact that it comes with the Ultimate and

Enterprise versions of Windows 7, and with the Ultimate and Profes-

sional versions of Windows 8.

You can also find no-cost encryption software such as DiskCryptor

(go.pcworld.com/diskcryptor) and TrueCrypt (go.pcworld.com/

truecrypthowto), though the latter is not compatible with Windows 8.

Microsoft’s

excellent Bit-

Locker disk-

encryption tool

can protect all

of the files

on a PC.

Take care, however, to configure these

programs properly. For details on how to

encrypt files the right way, read our hands-on

guide (go.pcworld.com/encrypt).

Enabling disk encryption automatically mandates

the use of passwords, but it does nothing to stop users

from choosing passwords that are easily cracked. Ensure

You can’t access

Apricorn’s Aegis Bio

1TB hard drive with-

out first verifying

your identity via its

fingerprint scanner.

that staffers select robust passwords that are

not too short and that are sufficiently complex.

Afterward, you can further harden security

by configuring Windows on each PC to

prompt for a password upon waking from

sleep. Set a reasonably short inactivity time-

out of no more than 10 to 15 minutes for the

PC to enter sleep mode.

Better yet, develop the habit of using the <Windows>-L keyboard

shortcut to lock your PC when you step away—even if you’ll be

gone for just a few minutes. This action not only prevents data from

being siphoned out during your absence but also keeps unscrupu-

lous insiders with physical access to your computer from install-

ing malware on it surreptitiously.

Use secure portable storage The excellent BitLocker to Go technology can prevent lost or

stolen portable storage devices from becoming liabilities.

Although you can enable BitLocker to Go on an external drive only

through one of the aforementioned BitLocker-equipped versions

of Windows, a BitLocker to Go–enabled device can be subsequent-

ly used on all supported Windows operating systems, meaning that

a small business can implement it companywide without having to

upgrade everyone to a Windows edition that includes BitLocker. Be

aware, however, that computers running Windows XP or Vista

won’t recognize USB drives encrypted with BitLocker to Go unless

you install the BitLocker to Go app (go.pcworld.com/btgreader).

Mac OS X computers won’t recognize such drives, either.

Alternatively, you might prefer to use specialized hardware-encrypted

storage devices, such as the Lok-It flash drive or the Apricorn Aegis Bio

portable hard drive. Be particularly careful with unbranded devices, as

not all such models implement hardware encryption correctly.

Use a password managerMost users opt for the convenience of using the same password across

BUSINESS CENTER

“Lock your PC when you step away—even if you’ll be gone for just a few minutes.”

multiple Web services, even though it leaves them open to severe

consequences—including identity theft and financial loss—should

hackers snag their password.

Instead of trying to memorize a dozen passwords, set up a tool to

manage passwords. Numerous apps are capable of this, including Sticky

Password Pro (go.pcworld.com/stickypass), LastPass (go.pcworld.com/

lastpass), and Roboform (go.pcworld.com/roboform). Many of these

tools can generate strong passwords and can even fill out login pages.

Don’t ignore security updatesFinally, ensure that your PC has the latest updates and patches. Con-

firm that Windows Update is configured to download updates auto-

matically, and then periodically check for errors or failed updates. The

same advice goes for common targets such as Oracle’s Java runtime

environment and software such as Adobe Reader and Apple Quick-

Time. One invaluable tool is Secunia Personal Software Inspector (go.

pcworld.com/secuniapsi), which tracks and installs updates to a large

number of third-party applications.

Using a pass-

word manager

is much easier

than trying to

remember doz-

ens of complex

passwords.

ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW HOLLISTER; PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF APRICORN

BUSINESS CENTER

Slideshow:

10 best to-do list appsMany task-tracking apps sync with email and calendars, and allow you to collaborate with colleagues. BY JASMINE FRANCE

Slideshow:

10 best to-do list apps

BUSINESS

CENTER

Slideshow:

10 best to-do list apps

BUSINESS

CENTER

Slideshow:

10 best to-do list apps

BUSINESS

CENTER

Slideshow:

10 best to-do list apps

BUSINESS

CENTER

Slideshow:

10 best to-do list apps

SOCIAL MEDIA HAS been a boon for businesses, but it’s also becoming

a minefield. Although tweets and Facebook posts can be deleted, evi-

dence of their existence is invariably captured for posterity within sec-

onds of their going live. Say something wrong on a social network, and

it will haunt you forever. Don’t believe me? Check out these examples.

BUSINESS

CENTER

BY CHRISTOPHER NULL

6 social media mistakes you must avoid

1. Hand the keys to

someone who is not ready to driveTending to Twitter and

Facebook pages is a high-

effort job, so handing off

the task can be tempting.

Big mistake.

The annals of business

will likely record thou-

sands of posts and tweets

gone wrong, courtesy of

ignorant contractors or staffers. The mixing of personal and corpo-

rate accounts is usually to blame. It’s how a “social media specialist”

posted about “gettng slizzerd” on Dogfish Head beer to the Red

Cross Twitter account.

Ensure that your authorized social media users are properly trained.

Tools such as HootSuite (go.pcworld.com/hootsuite) can make man-

aging multiple accounts easy, but they increase the risk of posting errors.

2. Commit rank insensitivityPiggybacking onto a trending hashtag is a popular tactic, but

it can backfire.

We’ve seen both American Apparel and Gap get raked over the coals

for suggesting that people shop during Hurricane #Sandy, and Ken-

neth Cole get beaten up for suggesting that riots in #Cairo were due

to his new spring collection. (Cole was back at it again later with a

#gunreform tweet related to selling shoes.)

Mentioning current events that involve human suffering or death

simply shouldn’t be part of any business’s social media strategy.

3. Fire the person in charge of social mediaHow you handle terminations is critical—particularly if one of

the people getting the axe runs your company’s social media accounts.

A round of layoffs at HMV, a global entertainment retailer, resulted in

a live-tweeting of the “mass execution” by its social media planner,

who was among the fallen. The tweets also included allegations that

the management had used illegal interns.

Sometimes layoffs are the only option. But confirm that you’ve

changed the passwords to key social media accounts before said

layoffs take place.

4. Fail to protect corporate confidentialityDon’t attend a private board meeting and then tweet

“Board meeting. Good numbers=Happy Board.” That’s what Gene

Morphis, CFO for clothing retailer Francesca’s, did last year, causing

the company’s stock price to spike 15 percent. Such behavior is

illegal, a practice known as selective disclosure, in which private

information is divulged to a few (in this case, Morphis’s 238 Twitter

BUSINESS CENTER

followers) instead of to the world at large.

Thinking about going public? Personally follow all of your financially

oriented employees on social networks and conduct audits to keep

tabs on what they’re telling the world.

5. Ask potentially hostile people to chime inIt sounds like a good idea to ask followers to write about your

company. Sadly, that concept often doesn’t work out.

Just ask McDonald’s, which created a hashtag (#McDStories) and

encouraged its use among McFanatics. Of course, the McTrolls got

there first, with a flood of tweets like “Ordered a McDouble, some-

thing in the damn thing chipped my molar. #McDStories.”

Once you unleash a hashtag, you can’t undo it. Make sure that senti-

ment is squarely in your favor before trying this trick (and perhaps

gaming the system a bit by offering a prize to your favorite tweeter).

6. Neglect social media securityAlthough a lot of terrible social media behavior can be

blamed on accidents or publicity stunts, some of this stuff really

is due to hacker involvement. Social media security is a serious

issue, and phishing attacks that attempt to abscond with your

Twitter and Facebook credentials are unbearably common. Lock

your business’s accounts up tight with strong passwords, and

ensure that the only people who have access to the accounts are

those who truly need it.

BUSINESS CENTER

PHOTOGRAPH: MIKE HOMNICK

REQUEST FOR INFORMATIONDuty Travel Management System (DTMS)

For further information contact:MFIN Office of the CIOTel: (+356) 25998 226Email: cio.mfin@gov.mt www.mfin.gov.mt

The Ministry for Finance in Malta is conductingmarket research on the availability of a TravelManagement System and invites interestedparties to submit information on such systems.

A soft copy of the document Duty TravelManagement System RFI (Ref: DTMS/01/2013)may be downloaded from MFIN website: http://mfin.gov.mt/en/Library/Pages/tenders.aspxat no charge. A hard copy may be obtainedfree of charge by sending an email request tocio.mfin@gov.mt.

Closing date for the submissions is noon (CET)of Friday, 8th November 2013.

INDOWS 8 HAS spurred a lot of unusual hardware

designs, but few are as intriguing as the tabletop

tablet. Imagine a full-fledged all-in-one PC that

lies flat on whatever surface you have handy. It’s

a design that offers all the screen real estate and CPU performance

of a touchscreen all-in-one system, along with the portability of

a battery-operated tablet.

If you use these PCs as their manufacturers intended, your hybrid

machine will be a family-room desktop computer by day and a

living-room gaming platform by night. But is this an experience

that consumers want or even need? Asus, Dell, Lenovo, and Sony

sure hope so.

None of these machines, however, pose a threat to Apple’s iPad or

Invasion of the tabletop tabletsAre these clever hybrids the ultimate family PCs? BY MICHAEL BROWN

W

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS

In this section, hardware & software goes through rigorous testing.

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

Thanks to their

massive touch-

screens, you can

operate these

giant hybrids

flat on a table or

propped up in

your lap.

any small tablet running Android or Windows 8. After all, these mon-

sters are too big to fit in a backpack. And three of the four reviewed

here lack a key feature common to the best all-in-ones: an HDMI

input, which allows you to plug in a gaming console or set-top box

and use just the display. Finally, none of these computers provide

enough GPU horsepower to fully support graphically intense games.

That said, they do deliver all the key features we’ve come to

expect from all-in-one PCs, including the ability to run all the same

software, and to connect to printers and other peripherals. And by

virtue of their large displays, the new hybrids deliver better Web

browsing and media streaming than any tablet I’ve used. Finally,

these machines could reinvent multiplayer gaming, with multiple

people gathering around a single, giant tablet to play electronic

versions of Monopoly or Risk.

Some of these hybrids are better than others, but all of them

are interesting. Find out how well each company executed on

the promise of marrying the all-in-one PC to the portable Win-

dows 8 tablet.

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF LENOVO

Asus took the most

daring design route,

but its remote-

desktop mode is

problematic.

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF ASUS

Asus Transformer All-in-One P1801While Dell, Lenovo, and Sony adopted the same essential design for

their respective all-in-ones, Asus took a completely different

approach. In fact, a better description of Asus’s machine might be “all-

in-two,” because the Transformer All-in-One P1801 (go.pcworld.com/

p1801) is essentially two discrete computers, each one with its own

CPU and operating system.

The Transformer P1801’s base houses one computer powered by a

quad-core 3.1GHz Intel Core i5-3450 CPU and 8GB of DDR3/1600

memory. When the 18.4-inch, ten-point-touch display is docked to the

base, the combination functions as a conventional desktop all-in-one.

Remove the display from the dock, and it becomes a giant tablet run-

ning Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). The display provides a native resolution

More: Tabletop Tablets

REVIEWS & RATINGS

of 1920 by 1080 pixels.

The base unit is a well-equipped

computer all its own. In addition to

the quad-core CPU, it has a discrete

graphics processor, a 1TB 7200-rpm

hard drive, wired and wireless net-

work adapters, a DVD burner, four USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port,

and a memory card reader.

The base also has built-in speakers, mic and headphone jacks, and

an HDMI output so it can connect to an external monitor. With a

second monitor attached to the system, one person can use the base

station as a regular Windows 8 computer while someone else uses

the display as an Android tablet.

That’s because the

tablet has its own

quad-core microproces-

sor—an Nvidia Tegra

3—with 32GB of flash

memory. You can access

the storage in both the

tablet and the base sta-

tion while you’re using

the system in Windows

mode, but the Android

side can see only the

tablet storage.

The tablet has its own

802.11n Wi-Fi network

adapter, so you can surf

the Web as well as

download, install, and

use Android apps and

games. While the dis-

play is docked and the

Transformer P1801 is

“The P1801 has a third mode that renders it unique in this group.”

Asus Transformer P1801

PROS:

• Two computers in one

• Desktop Core i7 CPU in the base unit

• 1TB, 7200 rpm hard drive

CONS:

• Mode switching can be clumsy

• Webcam not functional in Android mode

• No HDMI input on either the base or

the display

BOTTOM LINE:

The Transformer P1801 is a world apart

from the other portable all-in-ones we’ve

seen, but it’s not as sexy as Dell’s XPS 18

Touch.

PRICE:

$1,299

operating in Windows mode, you can initiate a download and undock

the display, and the download will continue uninterrupted.

The display has its own stereo speakers, a mic/headphone combo

jack, one USB 2.0 port, and a memory card reader, but its 1-megapixel

webcam operates only while it’s in PC mode. The display’s built-in

handle makes it easy to carry, and its fold-out stand lets

you use it on a table or desktop (reclining at up to a

100-degree angle). The Transformer P1801’s display is

only slightly heavier than that of Dell’s XPS 18 Touch,

weighing 5.29 pounds.

In addition, the Transformer P1801 has a third mode

that renders it truly unique in this group: It can switch

between running as an Android tablet and as a remote Win-

dows 8 desktop. This flexibility means you can remove

the display from its base and take it into another

room, where it will function as a wireless touch-

screen for the Windows 8 session running on the

docking station. You have limited range in this

mode, however, and response time can be laggy.

The Dell XPS 18 Touch scored better on our World-

Bench 8.1 Desktop benchmark suite—earning 171 to

the Transformer P1801’s 153—but we can attribute

that difference primarily to the presence of the SSD

cache drive on Dell’s machine. The P1801 performed

better with games and productivity apps. It delivers a

better price/performance ratio too., especially when you

consider that you can use its base unit as a PC while

someone else uses its display as an Android tablet.

The Windows

computer is in

the Transformer

P1801’s base.

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

More: Tabletop Tablets

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

Dell XPS 18 TouchThe Dell XPS 18 Touch (go.pcworld.com/xps18) is one of the best

all-in-one hybrids I’ve seen, but I hope Dell introduces a second, larger

model. While an 18.4-inch touchscreen is ginormous for a portable

computer, it’s just a little small for a desktop machine.

The screen boasts a high resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, however,

and photos, movies, and websites look great on it. And since the

device is outfitted with an Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230 Wi-Fi adapt-

er, you can stream its video output to a big-screen TV with a built-in

Wi-Di adapter or to a box that can connect to any TV. The XPS 18

Don’t buy the

XPS 18 Touch

without its

excellent stand.

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

Touch provided very good battery life of

4 hours while streaming HD video in our

tests, so it should last much longer if

you’re just surfing the Web.

Because the system relies on the

graphics processor integrated into the

CPU—a low-power 1.8GHz Intel Core

i5-3427U with hyperthreading support—you shouldn’t expect to play

hard-core games on it. While it did manage to run Dirt Showdown at

the display’s native resolution at a rate of 44.9 frames per second, it

turned Crysis 3 into a slideshow, with a frame rate of just 1.5 fps. Its all-

around performance was much better, achieving a WorldBench 8.1

Desktop score of 171

(compared to our refer-

ence all-in-one system,

an Acer Aspire U

A5600U-UB13, which

scored 100).

The XPS 18 Touch has

8GB of DDR3/1600

memory. And unlike

your typical tablet, it

comes with a 500GB

hard drive (supplement-

ed by a 32GB SSD acting

as cache), plus a Blue-

tooth keyboard and

mouse. The tablet has a

media card reader, two

USB 3.0 ports, and a

combo headphone/

microphone jack. A

720p webcam is built

into the top bezel,

alongside a dual-mic

“Dell’s XPS 18 Touch comes with a 500GB hard drive.”

Dell XPS 18 Touch

PROS:

• Very thin and light

• Supports Intel’s Wireless Display

technology

• 32GB SSD for fast boot times

CONS:

• No discrete GPU

• 5400 rpm hard drive

• Plastic feet feel flimsy

BOTTOM LINE:

It’s great to see such a solid execution of

a new form factor. The XPS 18 Touch

would be even more exciting if Dell took a

page out of Asus’ playbook and added a

more functional dock.

PRICE:

$1,350

More: Tabletop Tablets

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

array for Skype videoconferencing.

This device measures only 0.7 inch thick and weighs

less than 5 pounds. Two plastic feet flip out of the back

for use as a conventional all-in-one on a desk with the

mouse and keyboard. Alternatively, you can lay it

almost flat (completely flat if you fold the feet in)

or prop it up in your lap and use the touchscreen.

Dell bundles two games that take advantage of

the touchscreen display when it’s lying flat: the

music game Fingertapps Instruments and an air-

hockey simulator.

Dell also provides a sturdy stand (an optional

accessory on the less-expensive models) that

will charge the tablet’s battery on contact.

The XPS 18 Touch’s smaller dimensions

render it much more transportable than my

other favorite monster tablet, the Lenovo

IdeaCentre Horizon, and its ultrathin pro-

file and low weight beat the tar out of

the Asus Transformer All-in-One P1801

and the Sony Tap 20.

The Dell XPS 18

Touch is amazingly

thin and light.

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

Lenovo IdeaCentre HorizonLenovo’s IdeaCentre Horizon (go.pcworld.com/lenovohorizon) is the

boldest expression of the portable all-in-one concept to reach the

market. Asus, Dell, and Sony have giant tablets. Lenovo has a com-

puter the size of a tabletop—its display measures a full 27 inches.

Lenovo does bundle several other accessories for playing games on

the Horizon, including four joysticks, four strikers (for playing air hock-

ey), and one example of “e-dice” (a wireless die that informs the com-

puter which number is face up after a roll). The Horizon comes with a

variety of games, including Monopoly, air hockey, and roulette.

The large display renders the Horizon the best all-in-one PC in this

group, as well as the best casual gaming platform, but it has one

Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon’s

massive 27-inch screen.

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF LENOVO

More: Tabletop Tablets

drawback: Its resolution is limited to

1920 by 1080 pixels. If you’re a stick-

ler for detail when it comes to preci-

sion tasks such as photo editing, you

probably won’t like seeing the pixels

spread so far apart.

The other drawback to the Horizon’s massive screen is its consider-

able bulk: This monster tips the scales at 18.95 pounds. On the posi-

tive side, it has a discrete graphics processor, an Nvidia GeForce GT

620M with a 2GB frame buffer. The balance of the Horizon’s spec

sheet is equally tasty. You’ll find a low-power 2GHz Core i7-3537U, 8GB

of DDR3/1600 memory, and a 1TB hard drive (unfortunately, it’s a

5400-rpm model).

The slow hard drive

significantly depressed

the Horizon’s World-

Bench 8.1 Desktop

score, lowering it to

111. But the fast CPU

and the discrete GPU

gave this machine first-

place finishes on the

image-editing, audio-

and video-encoding,

and file-compression

tests that also make up

our benchmarking

suite. Battery life was

surprisingly good: It was

able to play an HD video

for 3 hours, 28 minutes.

The IdeaCentre Hori-

zon is the only portable

all-in-one in this round-

up to include an HDMI

“It’s the boldest ex- pression of the portable all-in-one concept.”

REVIEWS & RATINGS

Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon

PROS:

• 27-inch display

• Fast CPU and a discrete GPU

• HDMI input

CONS:

• 1920-by-1080 resolution (on a

27-inch display)

• Very heavy

• Expensive

BOTTOM LINE:

The Horizons’s size makes games and

everything else more enjoyable, even

though it also makes it more difficult to

move around the house.

PRICE:

$1849

More: Tabletop Tablets

input. It’s puzzling that no other manu-

facturer thought to include this feature.

The rest of the Horizon’s features

include a 720p webcam, a media card

reader, an 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, and a

wireless mouse and keyboard.

The Horizon’s humongous screen, fast CPU, discrete

graphics processor, and fun accessories drive its

price tag up to $1849. That’s higher than the rest

of the machines in this roundup. Dell’s XPS 18

Touch makes a better giant tablet, but Lenovo’s

IdeaCentre Horizon is the superior family-

gaming platform.

Lenovo was the only

manufacturer that

thought to include

an HDMI input on

its tablet.

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon Cart: Put your 27-inch tablet on wheelsI thought this cart (go.pcworld.com/horizoncart27) for Lenovo’s

27-inch IdeaCentre Horizon was pretty cool when I first laid eyes on

the prototype. But now that I’ve spent some time with the finished

product, I’m not nearly as jazzed.

Let me give you the upside, first. The tablet itself weighs nearly 19

pounds, so it’s not something you can just tuck under your arm and

move from room to room. Mount it to the cart, on the other hand, and

the combo can move effortlessly around the house. Brakes on all four

wheels keep the cart stationary when you arrive at your destination,

and the base is wide enough that you don’t need to worry about it tip-

ping over even if you push hard while the brakes are locked. Lay the

computer flat in table mode, and you can play air hockey, arcade and

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

board games.

However, you can’t pivot

the tablet into portrait mode,

which means it’s no good for

playing virtual pinball. And

while you can tilt the tablet

on its horizontal axis and use

it as an all-in-one PC, you’ll

need to hold the keyboard on

your lap. Also, the cart is not

height-adjustable—a big

ergonomic no-no.

On the bright side, you twist

just a single knob to remove

and reattach the tablet to the

cart. So it’s easy to use the Hori-

zon as an all-in-one PC most of

the time, and as a roll-away

arcade system on game nights.

—Michael Brown

The cart lets you

use the tablet as

a roll-around all-

in-one system.

More: Tabletop Tablets

Sony VAIO Tap 20Sony deserves credit for establishing the portable all-in-one market,

having introduced the VAIO Tap 20 (go.pcworld.com/tap20) last win-

ter. This model boasts a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of memory, and a 20-inch

ten-point touchscreen for just $1100. On the downside, its display res-

olution is disappointingly limited to 1600 by 900 pixels.

The Tap 20 also relies on the GPU integrated into its mobile 2GHz

Intel Core i7-3517U processor to drive that display, and its 750GB hard

drive spins its platters at only 5400 rpm. The Tap 20’s fast CPU helped

it deliver good performances on the content-creation elements of our

benchmarking suite (image editing and audio- and video-encoding

tasks), but the absence of a discrete GPU generated a goose egg in

our GPU-accelerated image-editing test. In the end, the Tap 20 earned

a WorldBench 8.1 Desktop score of 95 (our reference all-in-one, Acer’s

Aspire U A5600U-UB13, scored 100).

I found the Tap 20 only slightly less difficult to carry from room to

room than the 27-inch Lenovo Horizon. Sony suggests using the

Sony’s Tap 20 is the oldest model

we looked at in this group, but it’s

a good buy at $1100.

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF SONY

kickstand as a handle, but to do so you must tilt

the computer forward, grab the bottom of the

kickstand, and rotate the entire machine upside

down. The computer is then difficult to set up at a

new location because your most natural movement

is to first set it face down on the desk or tabletop—

not a good idea.

This computer is also almost twice as thick as

Dell’s XPS 18 Touch. I was surprised by the Tap

20’s relatively poor battery life: It played

our HD video for just 2 hours, 21 minutes

before it pooped out.

When we reviewed the VAIO Tap 20 back in October 2012 (go.

pcworld.com/vaiotap),

nothing comparable

was on the market. The

competition has res-

ponded aggressively

since then, and the Tap

20 has lost some of its

luster. Fortunately, Sony

has adjusted its pricing

accordingly, and the

current street price of

$1100 renders this

machine a good value.

Sony VAIO Tap 20

PROS:

• Intel Core i7 CPU

• 1TB hard drive

• Sony’s Bravia video technology

CONS:

• Thick and heavy for its size

• Short battery life

• 5400 rpm hard drive

BOTTOM LINE:

Sony essentially created this market,

which means the Tap 20 has been around

for a while. This computer is thicker and

heavier than it should be, but Sony has

priced it aggressively.

PRICE:

$1,100

The Tap 20 is thick

and much too

heavy for its size.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

ADOBE HAS ADDED some nice features to its new, subscription-

based, pro-level Photoshop Creative Cloud (go.pcworld.com/

adobephotosCC) and rolled all the features of Photoshop Extended

into the CC version. Photoshop CC has some good stuff, especially in

actions, filters, and enlargements. But Bridge CC, Photoshop’s file-

management sidekick, has had several useful features removed.

Photoshop CC improves, but leaves Bridge in limboBY LESA SNIDER

What’s newPhotoshop CC—which you download and

install on your hard drive—has a new 200 per-

cent option in the View menu (to see Web

graphics at the size they’ll appear in a brows-

er). And look for two tiny new icons at the

bottom left of document windows: one for syncing your settings to

the Creative Cloud for access on other machines, and one for upload-

ing artwork to the collaborative, online Behance community.

A useful new feature is for conditional actions; it lets you record an

action that chooses among previously recorded actions and runs the

one that matches criteria you set (to account for variables such as

document size, color modes, and so on). The Image Size dialog box is

simpler and includes a resizable image preview to see the results of

your settings before applying them. A new Preserve Details interpola-

tion method sharpens areas of fine detail to produce higher-

quality enlargements.

All interpolation meth-

ods have keyboard

shortcuts.

In CC, the Field Blur,

Iris Blur, and Tilt-Shift

filters work with Smart

Filters, so you can run

them nondestructive-

ly. They also take

advantage of OpenCL,

a technology in newer

graphics cards that lets

Photoshop tap into

the card’s processing

power whenever it

wants, so previewing

and applying these fil-

ters is faster.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

Photoshop CC

PROS:

• Retina-ready

• Can fix blurry images

• Has more filters

CONS:

• Bridge is a separate installation and has

some useful features missing.

BOTTOM LINE:

If you use Photoshop professionally, it’s

time to subscribe.

PRICE:

$50 per month for full Creative Cloud

subscription

“The new Shake Reduction filter does an incredible job.”

The Camera Raw plug-in can now be a Smart Filter inside Photoshop.

Camera Raw 8 also sports a Radial filter to apply adjustments in a cir-

cular fashion either from the inside of your image to its edges or vice-

versa. You can heal areas that aren’t round using Camera Raw’s Spot

Removal tool, and the Upright feature lets you correct perspective

problems.

The new Shake Reduction filter analyzes your image and traces the

pattern of blurry areas to eradicate them. It does an incredible job on

slightly blurry images. The redesigned Smart Sharpen filter sports a

new sharpening method that keeps halos from being introduced

around high-contrast edges, and a noise-reduction slider.

At the top of the Layers panel, a new Selective layer-filtering option

lets you view just the currently active (highlighted) layers in your Lay-

ers panel—handy when your Layers panel is long and you’re editing

layers that don’t necessarily match other layer-filtering criteria, or

overlapping vector-shape paths.

Once you’ve saved frequently used text formatting as character or

paragraph styles, you can use the new Save As Defaults option to make

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

The new Image Size dialog box includes both a preview and a new algorithm

named Preserve Details that creates higher-quality enlargements.

Photoshop automatically add them to new documents and to existing

documents that don’t contain styles.

If you’re a Web designer, a new Copy CSS command in the shortcut

menus of Type and Shape layers lets you copy color and formatting

information into your computer’s memory as fully functional CSS

code, for pasting into an HTML editor.

Photoshop CC has a slew of little changes, too. Among them: The

Crop tool gets a setting that brings back the resolution field in the

Options bar. You can save more than one Photoshop document at the

same time, and the Color Range command is better at detecting faces.

An antialiasing option makes text appear as it will in popular Web

browsers. The Migrate Presets feature copies over presets that aren’t

currently loaded in Photoshop, and it no longer requires a restart.

Adobe Bridge CCBridge CC is now a separate installation from Photoshop CC, making

it less discoverable. Also, to optimize Bridge CC for “modern operat-

ing systems and display resolutions,” Adobe removed some useful,

relatively new features. The most glaring omission is the Adobe

Output Module (AOM) for creating Web galleries and PDFs. The

Export panel—useful in converting multiple images from one for-

mat to another and quickly posting images on Flickr and Face-

book—is gone, too.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

The Shake

Reduction filter

automatically

analyzes your

image and traces

the blur pattern.

The Shake

Reduction filter

automatically

analyzes your

image and traces

the blur pattern.

You can have it

analyze multiple

areas by opening

the Advanced

section (circled).

If your workflow depends on the AOM, keep using Bridge CS6. But if

you are new to the program or have never used the omitted fea-

tures, you won’t miss them, and you’ll like the zippier performance of

Bridge CC.

Botom line

If you use Photoshop professionally, it’s time to subscribe—everyone

will benefit from having fewer new features released at one time, but

more frequently. If you use three Adobe programs, you’ll save money

by subscribing to the full Creative Cloud (the break-even point on cur-

rent pricing is at 2.5 programs). That lets you explore more programs

and diversify your skills.

If you use only Photoshop and Lightroom, you’ll save money by pur-

chasing a single-app subscription to Photoshop for $20 per month

and a stand-alone copy of Lightroom for $149. If you use only Photo-

shop, try Photoshop Elements (go.pcworld.com/adobepselements)

instead; it’s an incredibly powerful, user-friendly stand-alone image

editor.

But those using Bridge CS6’s AOM or its Export panel should avoid

Bridge CC.

The Smart

Sharpen filter’s

new and simpli-

fied dialog box.

The Fade

Amount fields

let you reduce

the sharpening

applied to your

image.

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

THE ORIGINAL NEXUS 7 was merely a bargain, a good-enough tablet

at a great price. The new Nexus 7 (go.pcworld.com/newnexus7) is a

downright steal. It’s the best 7-inch tablet, period. Google has rede-

fined budget tablet so that it no longer refers to cheap-feeling, sub-

$200 devices. You can now grab a svelte, premium 7-inch tablet with

a high-resolution screen, wireless charging, a quad-core processor,

The new Nexus 7 is the best 7-inch tablet available todayBY FLORENCE ION

Google redefines what

we can expect from a

budget tablet.

and 2GB of RAM for a measly $229.

The revamped Nexus 7 is more than just the next stock Android gad-

get offering from Google. It’s the company’s re-do of what it should

have done right the first time. The giant of search (and maps, and mail,

and…), with its ginormous, seemingly all-inclusive Android ecosystem,

has finally entered the premium tablet market.

Easier to hold, faster than everThe first thing I noticed about this Nexus 7 is that, despite sharing the

same name as its predecessor, it’s an entirely different product. Next to

this shiny new toy, the previous-generation Nexus 7 looks antiquated.

The new Nexus 7 is easier to hold—the bezel is 3mm thinner on

each side, so you can comfortably cradle it in one hand while using the

other to grip the handrail on your train ride to work. One-handed use

is much easier this time around—though I would have loved to see an

option to shift virtual buttons to the side of the screen where my

thumb naturally falls.

(LG’s Optimus UI has

such functionality in

the dialer app on the

company’s Optimus line

of Android phones.)

Google has ditched

the Nvidia Tegra 3 pro-

cessor found in the ear-

lier Nexus 7 in favor of

Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz

Snapdragon S4 Pro. If

the name sounds famil-

iar, that’s because this is

the same processor the

LG-manufactured

Nexus 4 handset con-

tains, essentially mak-

ing the new Nexus 7 a

Nexus 7

PROS:

• Vibrant, high-resolution screen

• It’s a Nexus device, so you’ll get most of

the software updates—for now

CONS:

• No expandable storage

BOTTOM LINE:

If you’re in the market for an Android tab-

let, the new Nexus 7 is the one to get.

And if you’re got the old one lying around,

considering trading it in for this one.

PRICE:

$229

slightly bigger Nexus 4. This Nexus 7 certainly feels much faster than

its predecessor. Games and apps launch quickly, and multitasking

between the Home screen and Google Now is a cinch. I noticed some

stuttering on simple tasks such as posting a photo to Facebook from

the image gallery—but that could be the fault of the apps themselves.

Google claims that its newly revamped Nexus 7 can support up to 9

hours of continuous use away from a charger.

In our own battery tests, the Nexus 7 lasted 8

hours, 47 minutes on a single charge while

repeatedly playing back a locally stored, high-

definition video. That’s a bit less than what

Google advertises, and much less than the 10

hours, 12 minutes that last year’s Nexus 7

managed. The difference may be due to the

bigger battery pack and lower-resolution

screen on last year’s model. Though the Nexus 7’s battery life is aver-

age for a tablet of its size, direct comparisons are difficult, as the iPad

mini and the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD don’t have high-resolution screens.

If you were a fan of the last Nexus 7, you probably wished that

Google had added a rear-facing camera to handle all of your Instagram-

posting needs. Well, it’s finally here—but while the 5-megapixel cam-

era is certainly capable, you won’t want to rely on it for vacation pho-

tos. Photos taken at the stock Android camera app’s low-light setting

came out too dark; better-lit photos are adequate for posting to the

Internet, but not for archiving the days of your life.

The Nexus 7 comes with a few other goodies, including an MHL

(Mobile High-Definition Link) port, support for wireless charging, and

NFC capabilities. The new stereo speakers are a dramatic improve-

ment, too. But if you have big hands and hold the device in landscape

orientation, you might mufle the sound—inconvenient when you’re

trying to play a game or watch a movie without headphones.

Annoyingly, the Nexus 7 doesn’t supply any expandable storage, so,

if you’re a media junkie, you’ll have to opt for the priciest version—and

probably buy into some cloud storage, too.

Whether it’s dark in your house or very bright on the train, the Nexus

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

“The giant of search has finally entered the premium tablet market.”

7’s new 1200-by-1980-pixel LCD display is quite a sight—literally. I was

stunned to see a display of this caliber on a device priced at under

$250. At 323 pixels per inch, the resolution makes for crisper text in

reading apps.

At full brightness, last year’s Nexus 7 display looked dimmer than

the new Nexus 7’s display, though the colors on the new model did

seem a little oversaturated, like a bag of Skittles.

In general, I enjoyed reading text more on this year’s Nexus 7 than on

last year’s, thanks to its slimmer body and brighter display.

Beter than all the rest

On the basis of specs alone, the rival iPad mini has some work to do.

The mini’s current processor is a bit more dated than the one that the

new Nexus 7 runs on, and it packs only 512MB of RAM. The mini’s dis-

play is bigger than the Nexus 7’s and features a different aspect ratio,

but it’s not a pricy Retina display, which, in my opinion, gives Google

the upper hand. And whereas Apple’s 16GB iPad mini sells for $329,

Google’s new Nexus 7 starts at $229, and its 32GB variant costs only

The new Nexus

7 tablet is thin-

ner and lighter.

$40 more. If you need that much space on an iPad mini, Apple asks you

to fork over an extra Benjamin. The only upside to Apple’s offering is

its superior collection of tablet-optimized apps. The Google Play store

is full of apps, but fewer of them are specifi-

cally made for tablets.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD is in

big trouble. The 7-inch Kindle Fire is cheaper

at $199 (for 16GB of storage) and $229 (for

32GB), but its screen resolution and pixel

density leave much to be desired. It’s also

about 2mm thicker than the new Nexus 7.

In addition, the Kindle Fire HD uses a cus-

tomized version of Android and doesn’t come with Google’s standard

apps—and they’re not available to download if you decide you want them.

First with Android 4.3The Nexus 7 is the first device in the Google Nexus family to use

Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, an incremental software update with features

such as support for OpenGL ES 3.0 (something that will make for

better-looking games), Bluetooth 4.0 LE support, and the ability to

restrict certain user accounts (a feature called Restricted Profiles that

you can bring into play when setting up multiple accounts). That last

capability might come in handy if you plan to buy this tablet for your-

self and your family. Not many tablet-optimized applications are avail-

able for Android yet, but Google is changing the way it showcases

those particular apps, to make them easier to find.

Beyond that, you’ll still have access to the Google applications that

come with every stock Android device, including Gmail, Hangouts, and

Google Maps. You’ll also have access to Google’s new stock camera

application, which debuted in the Google Play editions of the Sam-

sung Galaxy S4 and HTC One in June. Because it’s a Nexus device, this

Nexus 7 will receive the most timely Android software updates, so you

won’t have to worry about software fragmentation or getting left

behind with an older version of Android.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

“The Nexus 7’s 1200-by-1980-pixel display is quite a sight—literally.”

Botom line

I can’t help but feel a little trepidation. The previous-generation Nexus

7 had quite a few issues to contend with after its update to Android

4.2.2 Jelly Bean. If I let the battery die, the tablet wouldn’t turn on

without a hard reset, and the tablet became buggier and slower to

use over time. I hope this new Nexus 7 won’t suffer from those foibles

—because if history repeats itself, Google will have to do much more

next time around to rid us of our bad memories.

The second-generation Nexus 7 offers strong features at an afford-

able price. If you’re a seasoned tablet user, whether you should buy

this tablet will depend primarily on whether you are tied to Google’s

ecosystem. Still, this particular device can hold its own against any

other 7-inch tablet currently available. At the moment, it has some of

the best specs, a bright screen, and a few other little goodies—and it’s

hardly a splurge. If you’re in the market for a 7-inch Android device,

this is the one to get.

PHOTOGRAPHS: MIKE HOMNICK

BY ALEX WAWRO

REVIEWS & RATINGS

RAZER’S SECOND-GENERATION Blade (go.pcworld.com/razerblade) is

an ultraportable, high-performance Windows 8 laptop packed into a

slim body that any Apple engineer would envy. Better than the origi-

nal Blade, it’s sleeker, lighter, and more powerful, with a fourth-

generation Core processor. And it loses the Switchblade LCD touchpad

that made the old Blade—now the Blade Pro—so quirky.

Thinner, lighter, fasterThe Blade is two-thirds of an inch thick and weighs 4.25 pounds. With

its diminutive power adapter, the package tops out at just over 5

pounds. Although the Blade is 1.5 pounds heavier than the 13-inch

Razer’s Blade is a sleek, smart ultraportable gaming PC

MacBook Air, it is thinner than the Air by 0.02

inch at its thickest point. But Apple’s ultraport-

able feels skinnier because its unibody chassis

tapers down to such a knife edge.

A green-backlit keyboard sits atop a matte-

black aluminum chassis. Inside is a quad-core

Intel Core i7-4702MQ processor, an Nvidia

GeForce GTX 765M GPU, and 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory. The chas-

sis gets very warm when the GPU kicks in, despite an intake fan on

the bottom that exhausts heat through vents near the sturdy dis-

play hinges.

We applaud the inclusion of a 256GB SSD, an HDMI output, and three

USB 3.0 ports, but the absence of hardwired ethernet means you must

download all your software via Wi-Fi.

Price reflects performance, screen reflects glare. The Blade’s

cheap TN (twisted nematic) panel is disappointing, doubly so in

that the resolution of

the 14-inch display is

limited to 1600 by 900

pixels. The screen

looks decent enough

when viewed straight

on, but move your

head more than a few

inches in any direction,

and colors quickly fade

and bleed together.

Still, Razer deserves

credit for making good

on its promise to deliv-

er the world’s most

powerful ultraportable

gaming laptop. Among

the gaming-focused

features of the Blade:

Razer Blade

PROS:

• Sleek, attractive design

• Excellent performance

CONS:

• Disappointing screen quality

• Can get very hot during extended

game play

BOTTOM LINE:

Haswell-powered Blade panders to PC

gamers on the go, cramming pricey pre-

mium hardware into a petite chassis.

PRICE:

$1999

“Razer makes good on a promise to de-liver a truly powerful gaming laptop.”

You can crank the stereo speakers nice and loud, and the keyboard is

fully programmable through the included Razer Synapse 2.0 software.

The keyboard’s antighosting feature enables the Blade to recognize

multiple keypresses at the same time, so you don’t have to worry

quite as much about hitting the wrong key in the heat of a match.

The keys themselves are small and comfortable, with enough travel

that you can touch-type with confidence. You can dim or shut the

backlight off entirely, but the green glowing Razer logo on the lid can’t

be killed.

The Blade costs a cool $2000 as reviewed. Since it earned an excel-

lent score of 414 in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmarking

REVIEWS &

RATINGSThe Blade’s screen is

perfectly serviceable

for the lion’s share of

your computing

needs, but its poor

viewing angles

diminish the joy of

watching movies or

playing games.

PHOTOGRAPH: MIKE HOMNICK

suite, that’s not bad. That score

means it’s roughly four times

faster than our reference model,

the mainstream Asus Vivobook

S550CA, and very close to the

performance of the fastest note-

book we’ve tested to date, the

CyberPower FangBook EVO HX7-200 (go.pcworld.com/fangbook). The

FangBook, which sells for $1550, has a larger display, a faster CPU and

GPU, and more memory, but it also weighs more than 10 pounds.

Botom line

The Blade is the most practical laptop Razer has made. It functions

equally well as a gaming laptop or a high-powered Windows 8 work

machine, is compact, and has a battery life of more than 4.5 hours). And

while it doesn’t sport the touchscreen or the funky peripherals of the

Razer Edge Pro, it’s more powerful and far more comfortable to use.

The Razer Blade doesn’t sport a touchscreen,

but it’s powerful and comfortable to type on.

“The Blade is Razer’s most practical lap-top: It’s good for gaming and work.”

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

DELL IS OFFERING a docking station and a wireless network adapter

card based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard (WiGig). Plug all your cabled

devices into the Wireless Dock D5000 (go.pcworld.com/dockD5000),

and your laptop establishes a wireless connection (on the 60GHz fre-

quency band) to the dock.

But the internal adapter card (the $37.50 Dell Wireless 1601 WiGig

and 802.11n 2x2 Wi-Fi Half Mini Card) required for pairing a notebook

to the docking station is an option with only one laptop: the Latitude

6430u. You can’t buy the adapter card separately, and no third-party

adapter can let you use the D5000 with other notebooks. But a Dell

representative says the company “absolutely” expects to offer its

WiGig adapter “with additional products in the coming months.”

In my tests, Dell’s wireless docking station performed remarkably

well. The D5000 has two video outputs (DisplayPort 1.1—which means

no multistream transport—and HDMI 1.3), three USB 3.0 ports, one

Dell’s Wireless Dock D5000 frees your laptop from cablesBY MICHAEL BROWN

The D5000 has a single USB 3.0

port on its front panel, along with

a 1/8-inch stereo audio jack.

gigabit ethernet, and one 1/8-inch stereo audio jack.

Dell says the D5000 delivers up to 10 meters of range (almost 33

feet, with dock and laptop in the same room), but I lost connection

if the separation was more than 6 feet. Still, the ability to drive two

displays and transfer files between a host PC and a docked hard

drive wirelessly is impressive.

Transferring files over the wireless connection was significantly

slower than when we hardwired a USB 3.0 hard drive to the notebook.

When writing our single 10GB file to the drive using a hardwired USB

3.0 connection, for

example, we saw

throughput of 99.2

MBps. When we wrote

the same file to the

drive via the D5000, the

transfer occurred at

just 31.5 MBps.

Though the conve-

nience of the dock far

outweighs the sluggish

wireless file-transfer

speed, its usability with

only one notebook

today makes the dock a

problematic buy at

best.

Dell Wireless Dock D5000

PROS:

• Requires no physical connection

• Can drive two displays

• Three USB 3.0 ports

CONS:

• Currently compatible only with Latitude

6430u Ultrabook

• Limited range

• Doesn’t support HDCP

BOTTOM LINE:

Awesome product—as long as you don’t

mind being tied to Dell’s Latitude 6430u

Ultrabook.

PRICE:

$270 (as stand-alone purchase)

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

You’ll find two

more USB 3.0

ports, Display-

Port 1.1, HDMI

1.3, and gigabit

ethernet on the

rear panel.

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

ON THE DAY we reviewed Dell’s Latitude 3330 (go.pcworld.com/

latitude3330), the “starting price” online was $801, but the listed “Dell

price” was $561. On the day you look, those numbers could be differ-

ent. What won’t change, however, is the fact that this 13.3-inch note-

book with Windows 7 Pro is aimed at buyers working with very tight

budgets. Just remember that you get what you pay for.

In this case, you’re getting a sub-4-pound laptop with a slim profile

but skimpy specs that include an Intel Core i3-2375M CPU (part of

the Sandy Bridge family introduced back in early 2011), equally

Dell Latitude 3330: A no-frills laptopBY YARDENA ARAR

dated HD3000 integrated graphics that share

just 4GB of system memory, and an incommodi-

ous 320GB hard drive that spins its platters at

5400 rpm.

In real-world terms, the across-the-board low

scores it produced in our benchmark translate to

longer wait times for basic computing operations, such as installing

apps, editing digital photos, and decompressing zipped files. The lag

may not be too bothersome if you merely need to write letters and

term papers, run simple spreadsheets, check email, and catch up on

news in a browser.

Nevertheless, the Latitude 3330’s Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score

of 68 marks it as 32 percent slower than our reference laptop, the Asus

VivoBook S550CA. We’ve seen the VivoBook selling online for $650,

but that $90 bump

buys a lot, including an

Intel Core i5 CPU, a

15.6-inch touchscreen,

6GB of memory, and a

500GB hard drive with

an SSD cache.

In my tests, the Lati-

tude 3330 couldn’t

even stream YouTube

music videos over a

2.4GHz wireless net-

work without stutter-

ing or pixelating (it

does not support 5GHz

Wi-Fi). Video captures

with the integrated

720p webcam looked

washed out, and video

received on Skype calls

was blocky—and you

Dell Latitude 3330

PROS:

• Budget price

• Attractive design

CONS:

• Mushy keyboard

• Only 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networking

BOTTOM LINE:

Sleek and lightweight, the budget-priced

Dell Latitude 3330 makes a good first

impression. But it has difficulty running

even the most routine multimedia—

much less games—because of its bare-

bones infrastructure.

PRICE:

$561

“This laptop is aimed at buyers with very tight budgets.”

can forget even

trying any serious

gaming.

You do get a fairly

standard port array: two

USB 3.0, one USB 2.0 with

PowerShare support (for

charging devices even when the

laptop is powered down), gigabit

ethernet, HDMI- and VGA-out, a head-

phone/microphone jack, and an SD/

MMC card reader. Our review unit came

with a six-cell battery that lasted a respect-

able 5 hours, 13 minutes.

The Latitude 3330 looks handsome and sturdy

enough, with a pewter-colored brushed-metal exte-

rior trimmed with black plastic that repeats inside. The

island Chiclet-style keyboard keys are a bit mushy and flat,

but well spaced and adequate for touch-typing. The multitouch

touchpad is reasonably responsive, and the 1366-by-768-pixel display

looks bright and crisp. Stereo speakers embedded in the front edge

produce surprisingly robust audio.

Dell offers multiple customization options that can make the Lati-

tude 3330 less expensive—and even less powerful. This notebook will

fulfill a student’s or business traveler’s most basic needs, but buyers

should be prepared to accept subpar performance for even routine

Web multimedia.

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF DELL

The Latitude

3330’s 13.3-

inch display is

not a touch-

screen. Then

again, this

notebook ships

with Windows

7 Pro, not Win-

dows 8.

THE PATRIOT AERO Wireless Mobile Drive (go.pcworld.com/aero)

resembles a simple but fairly large 2.5-inch external USB 3.0 hard

drive. The only clue that it can also function as a wireless multimedia

streamer is its Wi-Fi indicator light. With suitable Android and iOS

apps, you can access the Aero’s content from most mobile devices.

When you plug the Aero into a USB port, its Wi-Fi shuts off so that

the unit can charge and can function as direct-attached storage (like

a normal USB hard drive). When you remove the drive from the USB

Patriot Aero streams media even without a power cableBY JON L. JACOBI

The Patriot Aero is a

wireless hard drive with

a USB 3.0 interface.

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

250 300

Reformatted

as NTFS, Patri-

ot’s Aero drive

performed

much faster

writes of our

10GB collec-

tion of test

files. (Patriot

ships the drive

formatted as

exFAT.)

Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive Performance1TB Drives Formatted as NTFS

Read a single 10GB file

Write a single 10GB file

Read 10GB mix of files & folders

0 50 100 150 200

Write 10GB mix of files & folders

101.5

Seagate Wireless Plus Corsair Voyager Air

(Megabytes per second)

93.0

102.4

210.5

208.3

215.9

109.2

106.4110.2

Patriot Aero

port, Wi-Fi automatically turns on. The Aero also

comes equipped with both an AC jack and a mini

power-to-USB cable, which you’ll need to use to

keep the unit streaming and charging from a USB

port. A battery meter on the Aero’s side lights up

when you press the accompanying button.

The Aero creates its own network (10.10.10.x),

and also connects to another wireless network to provide Internet

pass-through. Patriot says that everything should show up within 30

seconds. But in my tests, the device took nearly 5 minutes before it

was ready to access again. (Patriot says the lengthy wait could be

related to other hardware in my setup.)

“With suitable apps, you can access the Aero’s content from most mobile devices.”

REVIEWS & RATINGS

245.6

247.1

255.5

Patriot Aero Wireless

Mobile Drive

PROS:

• Wireless media streaming

• Apps for Android and iOS

• USB 3.0 interface

CONS:

• No onboard DLNA server

• 3-hour battery life

BOTTOM LINE:

The Patriot Aero creates a Wi-Fi hotspot

for multimedia streaming, and it works

well. In battery life and performance, how-

ever, it’s a step behind the competition.

PRICE:

$200

Patriot supplies client apps for Android and

iOS, but not for Windows Phone. It has no DLNA

server to feed Windows Media Player, iTunes,

XBMC, or the like, so instead you must use

Explorer to reach the drive at \\10.10.10.254

and treat it as direct-attached storage.

According to Patriot, the Aero can stream 720p

video to up to five devices at once. It effortlessly

streamed video to the three devices in my test setup at rates up to

about 2 MBps. It read our 10GB file and folder mix at 217.4 MBps, and

it wrote and read our single large file at 109.7 MBps and 247.9 MBps,

respectively. In writing our mixed batch of files, however, it operated

at 41.9 MBps, about half the USB 3.0 norm. After we reformatted the

drive from ExFAT to NTFS, the write speed on the 10GB collection

jumped to 102.4 MBps.

One significant draw-

back: At just shy of 3

hours, the Aero’s bat-

tery life was about an

hour shorter than that

of its rivals, the Seagate

Wireless Plus and the

Corsair Voyager Air (go.

pcworld.com/corsair).

“According to Patriot, the Aero can stream 720p video to up to five devices at once.”

REVIEWS & RATINGS

THE MAIN SELLING point of the Vizio CT15T-B1 Thin + Light Touch

(go.pcworld.com/ct15tb1), the latest iteration of the company’s 15.6-

inch Thin + Light laptop, is its glossy HD touchscreen. The laptop has

a smooth, gunmetal-gray metallic cover with neatly beveled edges, a

spacious keyboard deck, and an edge-to-edge glass screen.

Inside, the CT15T-B1 packs a quad-core Intel i7-3635QM processor

from the Ivy Bridge line, along with 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory and a

256GB SSD. That configuration helped it to a very peppy Notebook

WorldBench 8.1 score of 334. The laptop lacks a discrete graphics

Vizio’s CT15T-B1 adds an HD

touchscreen—and little moreBY SARAH JACOBSSON PUREWAL

card, however, and its graphics perfor-

mance is mediocre (or worse). In our

Bioshock Infinite test (low resolution/

low quality settings), it managed a

frame rate of just 24.2 frames per

second.

The CT15T-B1’s looks great. The

15.6-inch IPS display has a native reso-

lution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. Colors are

bright and accurate, text looks crisp and

clear, and the touchscreen responds well

to multitouch gestures.

Streaming HD video plays

smoothly, with mini-

mal artifacting and

noise; but audio from

the built-in speakers is

fuzzy, slightly distort-

ed (even at lower lev-

els), and generally diffi-

cult to listen to.

This laptop isn’t an

Ultrabook (it weighs

almost 5 pounds with-

out the power brick),

but it has few ports.

The left side houses a

USB 3.0 port and a

mic/headphone jack,

while the right side

accommodates

another USB 3.0 port

and an HDMI port.

There’s no ethernet

Vizio CT15T-B1 Thin + Light Touch

PROS:

• Bright, accurate touchscreen

• Good performance

• Attractive industrial design

CONS:

• Too few ports

• Minor design flaws

• Somewhat heavy

BOTTOM LINE:

A few design tweaks and a bit less

weight would have made this good

notebook great.

PRICE:

$1470

The Vizio CT15T-B1 is over

three times faster than our

reference notebook, the

Asus VivoBook S550CA.

jack, lock slot, or eSATA port.

Other design flaws include the keyboard, which looks pretty but

offers exceedingly light—indeed almost non existent—feedback. In

my tests, I managed a rate of around 85 words per minute, but usu-

ally I type 115 wpm. I found the laptop’s cover hard to open, even

with my slim fingers and nails, because the indentation on the lower

half is so shallow.

I was somewhat disappointed to discover that Vizio hadn’t fixed

some of the minor annoyances that cropped up on the CT15-A4 (go.

pcworld.com/ct15a4)—the predecessor to this model—but the

CT15T-B1 is a good laptop if you’re looking for a slim and reasonably

light high-performance machine. It’s speedy, even though it lacks a

Haswell processor; and it has a nice, bright touchscreen ready for all of

your hands-on Windows 8 activities.

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

PHOTOGRAPHS: ROBERT CARDIN

“It’s speedy, even though it lacks a Haswell processor.”

Vizio carried over most of the

design elements from its first

Thin + Light notebook.

IT’S NO ULTRABOOK, but the Micro Express NB5720 (go.pcworld.com/

nb5720) doesn’t look bad for a boxy, half-plastic laptop that carries a

respectable 15.6-inch screen. It comes with a smooth, slate-gray,

brushed-aluminum cover with tapered edges and a minimalist key-

board deck. However, it’s 1.68 inches thick and it weighs 5.75 pounds.

The NB5720 packs some high-performance components under its

hood: a 2.8GHz Core i7-4900MQ, 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory, a dis-

crete Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M graphics card, a 256GB solid-state

drive, and a 750GB, 7200-rpm hard drive. It roared to a Notebook

Micro Express NB5720: Plain looks, but high performanceBY SARAH JACOBSSON PUREWAL

WorldBench 8.1 score of 483, though all that power did

wear down the battery in just 3 hours, 37 minutes.

The system’s 15.6-inch, nonglare screen has a native

resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels

and looks great: It is very bright,

produces accurate colors and skin

tones, and renders sharp text. It’s not

a touchscreen, however, which can be a major

drawback if you’re using Windows 8. (You can order your unit

with whichever operating system you prefer.)

The NB5720’s keyboard deck looks simple and uncluttered despite

offering tons of func-

tionality. The deck

includes (in addition to

a full-size keyboard) a

ten-key numeric pad,

a trackpad with dis-

crete mouse buttons,

a fingerprint reader,

and two convenient

buttons: Airplane

Mode, which toggles

your Wi-Fi on and off;

and VGA, which toggles

between the discrete

graphics card (for bet-

ter performance) and

the integrated GPU

(for longer battery life).

The keyboard’s

matte-black island-

REVIEWS & RATINGS

Micro Express NB5720

PROS:

• Excellent performance

• Plenty of connectivity options

• Very good keyboard

CONS:

• Worst speakers ever

• No touchscreen

• Subpar battery life for its class

BOTTOM LINE:

Micro Express’s NB5720 gaming note-

book is short on looks, but very long on

performance.

PRICE:

$1599

The Micro

Express NB5720

produced the

highest Note-

book WorldBench

8.1 score we’ve

seen to date.

“The keyboard’s island-style keys are comfortable to type on.”

style keys are comfortable

and easy to type on. In my

tests, I managed 99 words

per minute, which is good

for a laptop keyboard (I

typically average around

115 wpm when typing on a full-size keyboard that I’m accustomed to

using). The medium-size trackpad is responsive, though a bit choppy.

The discrete mouse buttons are widely spaced and easy to press, but

they provide little tactile feedback.

The speakers, which are located above the keyboard, sound brassy,

tinny, and shrill—and the sound only gets worse when you play it at

higher volume. They’re awful.

Overall, the NB5720 is easily the fastest laptop we’ve tested. Though

it’s a bit clunky and heavy, you wouldn’t mistake it for a desktop

replacement—and yet it outperforms most of them.

PHOTOGRAPHS: ROBERT CARDIN

“The speakers sound brassy, tinny, and shrill. They’re awful.”

The NB5720 has a great collection of components,

but it’s more than twice as thick as the typical

Ultrabook and weighs nearly 6 pounds.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

FROM THE FRONT, the thin (0.27 inch thick), light (1.1 pounds) Sony

Xperia Tablet Z (go.pcworld.com/tabletz) looks likes a black glass slab.

The sides are featureless black, aside from a silver on/off button, and the

back is matte black. It’s pretty, but it picks up fingerprints in a hurry.

When its removable (with difficulty) port covers are in place over the

tablet’s Micro-USB port and MicroSD slot, the Tablet Z is waterproof—

within reason, anyway. The Micro-USB port also handles charging.

Sony’s display isn’t as high-resolution as those found in Apple’s Retina

iPad (go.pcworld.com/retinaipad4) or Google’s Nexus 10 (go.pcworld.

Sony’s bathtub-compatible Xperia Tablet Z BY JASON SNELL

PHOTOGRAPH: MIKE HOMNICK

You can’t go deep-sea diving

with the Tablet Z, but remov-

able port covers make this

Android 4.1 tablet waterproof.

com/nexus10), but its 1920-by-1200-pixel screen can display 1080p HD

movies at full resolution and crisp text at 224 pixels per inch.

Inside, the Xperia Tablet Z carries a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon

S4 quad-core processor and an Adreno 320 GPU. It has a 2.2-megapixel

front-facing camera and an 8-megapixel rear camera.

The Xperia Tablet Z runs a modified version of Android 4.1. You can

place commonly used apps, as well as a shortcut to the apps list, in a

nifty app dock at the top of the screen. The entire U.I. and app experi-

ence felt responsive, though performance can be spotty: Some apps

scroll smoothly while others lag and judder.

The Xperia Tablet Z comes with an infrared blaster on its top edge,

and the included Remote Control app lets you program it. Unfortu-

nately this software isn’t up to the job of enabling the tablet to func-

tion as your primary living-room control.

The Xperia Tablet Z’s setup procedure initially tried (and failed) to

connect to the Internet before asking me to connect to my local

Wi-Fi network—a pret-

ty basic mistake for a

setup routine to make.

But once I opened the

settings manually and

connected to my Wi-Fi

network, the remainder

of the setup process

proceeded apace.

The Sony Xperia Tab-

let Z certainly isn’t the

best 10-inch tablet

available on the market

today—not while the

outstanding Nexus 10

and iPad 4 roam the

land. But in the water,

the Xperia Tablet Z

reigns supreme.

Sony Xperia Tablet Z

PROS:

• Remarkably light

• Waterproof

CONS:

• Weak add-on software

• Image quality can’t match that of its

high-end rivals

BOTTOM LINE:

This waterproof, easy-to-carry tablet

rates as a serious contender in the

10-inch Android market.

PRICE:

$500

REVIEWS & RATINGS

ALTHOUGH THE $400 HP Officejet Pro 276dw (go.pcworld.com/

hpoj276dw) is expensive, it’s an excellent inkjet multifunction printer

that plays nice even in a corporate environment.

Installation is a breeze, despite quite a few dialog boxes. The 4.3-inch

touchscreen control panel has a well thought-out menu structure.

Text is near-laser-quality, and color graphics are nice. Plain-paper

photos appear slightly washed out, but look good in newsletters.

Color photos on glossy paper are excellent, though HP’s bent toward

HP’s Officejet Pro 276dw: Speedy, capableBY JON L. JACOBI

The 276dw is an inkjet

alternative to small-

office lasers.

PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT CARDIN

orangey skin tones remains. The greenish tint has vanished from its

PCL 5 monochrome graphics but is still apparent in monochrome

graphics printed via PostScript on the Mac. Scan quality is quite good.

Performance is smooth and quick. Our text pages (which included

simple monochrome graphics) printed at a rate of 10.8 pages per min-

ute on the PC and 13 ppm on the Mac. Our 4-by-6-inch photos printed

to plain paper at a bit over 4 ppm, and to glossy paper at about 1 ppm.

A full-page photo printed at best quality took 2 minutes, 15 seconds

on the Mac, and just over 2 minutes on the PC. At the default settings,

which look nearly as good, you can cut the time down to 75 seconds

or so. An informal test of printing a simple Excel spreadsheet took per-

haps 15 seconds on the PC, but slowed tremendously on the Mac. We

were unable to determine where the fault lay, but you should look for

driver updates if you’ll be sharing the 276dw with Mac users.

Ink costs are outstandingly low, especially for the high-capacity XL

supplies: 1.6 cents per

page for black and 5.6

cents per page for

cyan, magenta, and yel-

low. A total cost of 7.2

cents per four-color

page is a lot cheaper

than what you’d pay

with a similarly priced

laser printer. The stan-

dard supplies add up to

about 12 cents for a

four-color page.

Paper handling fea-

tures include automat-

ic duplex printing,

duplex scanning (auto-

matic refeed), and a

50-sheet automatic

document feeder.

HP Ofcejet Pro 276dw

PROS:

• Fast

• Great print quality

• Inexpensive ink

CONS:

• Steep purchase price

BOTTOM LINE:

The Officejet Pro 276dw is pricey, but it’s

a Cadillac among inkjet MFPs—speedy

and capable—and a bargain next to the

laser competition.

PRICE:

$400

REVIEWS &

RATINGS

CONSUMERS ARE POSTING online more and printing less—and losing

their patience with pricey ink cartridges. The $99 Epson Expression

Home XP-410 Small-in-One (go.pcworld.com/epsonxp410) certainly

does not solve that issue, but it does offer surprisingly good output

quality along with basic multifunction features.

The tiltable control panel is better than what you’ll see on most low-

cost printers. Included are a 2.5-inch color display and context-sensitive

touch controls. The panel works well and is intuitive and responsive.

One annoyance is the exile of the primary user guide and the Mac OS X

drivers to Epson’s website. The CD has plenty of room—why not put

them there? It’s a puzzler, but common on Epson’s lower-cost models.

Epson’s Expression Home XP-410: Good for light useBY MELISSA RIOFRIO

The XP-410’s control panel is surprisingly nice, with

a color display and responsive touch controls.

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF EPSON

Epson’s gently pink color palette works to the benefit of most images.

Test photos showed good color accuracy and realistic contours and

shadows. Flesh tones, though pinkish, looked okay. Photos printed on

plain paper were a little grainy, but had good brightness and accuracy. A

color copy on plain paper was gorgeous. The XP-410 also produced sur-

prisingly good text: Edges looked classically inkjet-soft, but not fuzzy.

Print speed is decent. Documents with plain, black text and small

monochrome graphics printed at an aggregate 6.6 pages per min-

ute on the PC and 6.4 ppm on the Mac. Color photos took consider-

ably longer—especially the full-page photo we print on the Mac,

which took 3 minutes at best settings. On the PC, a 3-by-5-inch

photo took 16 seconds at default settings on plain paper, and 70

seconds at the photo setting on Epson’s own photo stock. Scan

times were among the

slowest we’ve seen,

but the scans them-

selves were good.

Regrettably, the

XP-410’s ink is expen-

sive. The 500-page, $30

XL black works out to

6 cents per page, while

the $17, 450-page cyan,

magenta, and yellow XL

cartridges cost 3.8 cpp

each. That’s an above-

average 17.4 cents for a

four-color page. In the

standard capacities,

black is 7.4 cpp, and

each color is 5.4 cpp.

Spending 23.6 cents for

a four-color page is

pricey even for the

entry-level category.

Epson Expression Home XP-410 Small-in-One

PROS:

• Very good print quality overall

• Nice, responsive control panel

CONS:

• Expensive inks

• Slow scans

• Mac drivers and primary documentation

are online only

BOTTOM LINE:

The XP-410 will suffice for light home/

student use, but the pricey inks mean you

shouldn’t buy this MFP unless you don’t

print much.

PRICE:

$99

REVIEWS & RATINGS

CREDIT BUFFALO TECHNOLOGY for taking advantage of cheap memo-

ry prices to marry relatively affordable DDR memory cache with an

external hard drive to speed up the drive’s write performance.

The Buffalo DriveStation DDR (go.pcworld.com/drivestation)—a 3.5-

inch, USB 3.0 drive—easily surpasses the write performance of any

external hard drive we’ve tested. In fact, it rivals the speed of external

USB 3.0 solid-state drives, at a far lower cost per gigabyte.

External hard drives are relatively simple devices. The DriveStation

DriveStation DDR caches for superfast writesBY JON L. JACOBI

Buffalo’s DriveStation DDR

easily beats other external

hard drives we’ve tested.

PHOTOGRAPH: MIKE HOMNICK

DDR is an approximately 8-by-5-by-1.75-

inch black box sporting a tick of red on the

top front. Inside are a USB 3.0 type B port,

a Kensington lock port, an AC jack, power

and activity lights, and a cooling vent on

the back. It has no fan because Buffalo

believes that passive convection cooling is sufficient—and

that seemed to be the case during our subjective and official tests.

With both volatile memory and a hard drive on board, though, it’s no

surprise that the drive needs to operate on AC power.

The unit’s 1GB of

DDR3 cache helped

the DriveStation

DDR’s write perfor-

mance tremen-

dously. It wrote our

10GB mix of files

and folders at

140.8 megabytes

per second—that’s

at least 40 MBps

faster than the

next-speediest

external USB hard

drive we’ve tested.

But the DriveSta-

tion DDR really

Buffalo DriveStation DDR

PROS:

• Much faster write speed than normal

USB 3.0 hard drives

• Very good price per gigabyte

CONS:

• Requires AC power

• Pricier than a typical USB 3.0 drive

BOTTOM LINE:

A fast, capacious, not-too-expensive

direct-attached backup drive, the Drive-

Station DDR uses 1GB of DDR3 memory to

dramatically improve write performance.

PRICE:

$160 (2TB), $200 (3TB)

The one drawback to using DDR mem-

ory for caching is that the DriveStation

DDR requires an AC power supply.

PHOTOGRAPH:

ROBERT CARDIN

showed its mettle in writing our large 10GB file at a scintillating 201.8

MBps, nearly twice what the average USB 3.0 hard drive can manage.

The DriveStation performed on a par with most of the USB 3.0 SSDs

we’ve tested. It read the file and folder mix at 210.8 MBps and the

large file at 248.9 MBps. Each of those scores is close to what you’d get

with a typical USB 3.0 hard drive. Don’t expect such numbers in every-

day usage, however, as our tests write to and read from a RAM drive in

order to avoid the effects of any bottlenecks in our test platform.

Available in 2TB and 3TB versions, the DriveStation DDR isn’t the

lowest-cost external 3.5-inch hard drive on the market, but it is the

fastest we’ve seen by a long shot. And compared with the external

SSDs whose performance it matches, it’s dirt cheap.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

External USB 3.0 hard-drive performanceReviewed drive: Buffalo DriveStation DDR

Read a single 10GB file

Write a single 10GB file

Read 10GB collection of files and folders

0 50 100 150 200 250 300

Write 10GB collection of files and folders

Buffalo DriveStation DDR

LaCie Rugged SSD

WD My Passport Edge

Aegis Bio 3.0

(Megabytes per second)

Thanks to its

use of DDR3

memory as

cache, Buffalo’s

DriveStation

DDR achieves

near-SSD write

performance.

248.9

244.7

243.2243.2

201.8

194.580.8

107.5

210.8

211.4209.6

212.9

140.8

148.7

80.3

22.8

OFFERING A NICE blend of price and performance, SanDisk’s Extreme

II SSD (go.pcworld.com/sandiskext), in its bigger capacities, retails

for considerably less than a buck a gigabyte. It’s also one of the fast-

est drives with large files that we’ve tested. Its performance with

small files, on the other hand, is merely average, and the drop-off in

write performance from the 240GB and 480GB models to the 120GB

version is steep.

SanDisk has ditched the SandForce SF-2281 controller of the original

Extreme series, and equipped the 7mm-profile, 6Gb/s Extreme II with a

Marvell 88SS9187. The combination of the new controller and fast,

19nm toggle-mode NAND helped the Extreme II outpace the sustained

write performance of such capable drives as OCZ’s Vector and Corsair’s

Neutron. The 240GB version wrote our 10GB large file at 644.3 MBps

SanDisk’s Extreme II SSD is fast and affordableBY JON L. JACOBI

The Extreme II, which comes

in three capacities, handled

large test files quickly.

and read it at 479.8 MBps. With small files,

however, the 240GB Extreme II was mundane,

writing our 10GB mix of files and folders at

352.0 MBps and reading them at 373.6 MBps.

The 480GB version’s numbers were nearly

identical, but the 120GB drive wrote files

significantly slower. That’s the norm for SSDs with less than 240GB or

256GB capacity, as they have fewer chips and channels to write across

(although the drop-off can vary). The 120GB drive was actually the

fastest drive we’ve seen—with a rate of 485 MBps—when reading our

large file, but it wrote the file at only 465.6 MBps (nearly 200 MBps

slower than the two larger models). The 120GB model read our 10GB

mix of files and folders at 378.9 MBps, about the same performance as

the larger capacities turned in, but it wrote the data at 300.8 MBps.

The 120GB Extreme II retails for $130; the 240GB and 480GB models

cost $230 and $440, respectively. That’s nice pricing for SSDs with a

five-year warranty and top-notch performance. SanDisk rates the

drives for at least

80TBW (terabytes writ-

ten). If you can scrape

up the extra bucks for a

larger capacity, you’ll

get significantly better

write performance.

Note that no cloning

software is included

with the Extreme II, but

the downloadable

SanDisk Toolkit utility

provides S.M.A.R.T. info

and allows you to

update the drive firm-

ware as new versions

become available.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

SanDisk Extreme II

PROS:

• Excellent performance for the price

• Five-year warranty

CONS:

• Only average performance reading and

writing small files

BOTTOM LINE:

The Extreme II series carries an excellent

price/performance ratio and a strong

five-year warranty.

PRICE:

$130 (120GB), $230 (240GB), $440 (480GB)

“It’s one of the fastest drives with large files that we’ve tested.”

YOU MAY THINK that an Instagram app that doesn’t allow you to take

pictures would be kind of pointless, but Instagram Explorer (go.

pcworld.com/instexp)—a Windows 8 app for the modern user inter-

face—has plenty of potential. Using it is not unlike browsing through

the Instagram.com site.

Instagram Explorer’s default view displays your live feed, and it’s nice

to view some of Instagram’s gorgeous photos on a bigger screen. The

spacious real estate of a Windows 8 desktop or laptop makes it easier

to comment on photos, too—the comment field is more prominently

displayed here than it is on Instagram.com.

Similarly, Instagram Explorer’s profile view is superior to the view on

your smartphone, which simply displays square tiles of identically

Instagram ExplorerBY LIANE CASSAVOY

Instagram

Explorer for

Windows 8

displays your

friends’ profiles

almost exactly

the way you’d

see them on

Instagram.com.

sized recent photos. The Explorer profile view displays photos in a vari-

ety of sizes, which is far more visually appealing.

Instagram Explorer suggests “famous” users that you might want to

make your favorites, but I found this feature unnecessary. It suggested

a few folks I knew of, some I’d never heard of, and several I’d like to for-

get. Clicking any of the suggested names lets you visit that person’s

profile, though the app was a

bit slow to make the transi-

tion at times.

If you’re constantly snap-

ping photos and sharing

them with your Instagram

followers, you may find Insta-

gram Explorer a bit limited.

And if you’re not relying on

Windows 8’s modern UI, you

have no need for this app.

But if you’re looking for an

easy way to sit back and

browse photos on Instagram

while using Windows 8, this

free app is for you.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

Instagram Explorer

PROS:

• Attractive interface

• Free

CONS:

• Can’t take photos

BOTTOM LINE:

Instagram Explorer offers a free,

easy way to browse Instagram

when you’re using Windows 8.

PRICE:

Free

Pretty pictures

look even prettier

on a big screen.

WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER is dying a slow death. It’s not included with

Windows 8, and adding it to the new operating system will cost you a

hundred bucks. But third-party developers haven’t yet given up on the

concept of the home-theater PC, and Ceton’s InfiniTV 6 (go.pcworld.

com/infinitv6) is a good example of one.

This digital tuner lets you watch and record up to six digital cable TV

channels simultaneously. It works with a digital cable TV subscription

and requires a multistream CableCard (M-Card), which your cable com-

pany is required to provide (it might also provide an SDV tuning adapt-

er, which plugs in to the InfiniTV 6’s USB port). Unfortunately, there is

no equivalent option for satellite-TV subscribers.

The InfiniTV 6 plugs in to your router, so every PC on your network

that’s running Windows Media Center can access live TV. For a wire-

Ceton InfiniTV 6BY RICK BROIDA

The Ceton InfiniTV 6 can

replace the set-top box you

rent from your cable compa-

ny (if you have a CableCard).

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF CETON

less network setup, however, you’ll need an 802.11ac router.

I tested the box with several Windows 7 systems and a Comcast-

supplied M-Card. Setup was fairly straightforward: I installed the drivers,

ran through a few quick setup procedures, and—presto!—I had six HD

tuners at my disposal. Everything worked well from the start, and I never

encountered a problem viewing or recording shows on any PC I tried.

What’s more, although I rarely hit the tuner limit, Ceton’s software

has a feature called “dynamic tuner assignment” that helps reduce

conflicts when one PC tries to use a tuner that’s already in use else-

where. Instead of giving up and returning an error message, the

InfiniTV will look at all

six of its tuners to see

if one is available.

That’s valuable for

households with a lot

of TV watchers.

The InfiniTV 6 lacks

one notable feature:

DLNA certification,

which would guarantee

the ability to stream

media to other devices,

such as Blu-ray players

and the PlayStation 3.

If you want to bring

TV viewing and record-

ing capabilities to mul-

tiple PCs in your home,

this box has you cov-

ered. But you’ll have to

put up with the InfiniTV

6’s network infrastruc

ture requirements and

its dependence on Win-

dows Media Center.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

Ceton InfiniTV 6

PROS:

• Six digital tuners

• Supports premium and encrypted SD

and HD cable TV channels

• Dynamically assigns tuners to different

PCs as needed

CONS:

• No way to view or record shows on your

smartphone or tablet

• Requires Windows Media Center

• Requires high-end home network

infrastructure

BOTTOM LINE:

Provided you have the right network

infrastructure, Windows Media Center,

and digital cable TV service, Ceton’s

InfiniTV 6 is an excellent foundation for a

homewide TV-entertainment system.

PRICE:

$299

IT’S EASY TO make a thin solid-state drive for low-profile laptops and

other mobile computing devices, but the NAND flash memory used

for SSDs doesn’t come cheap. Designers must make a trade-off

between capacity and affordability. On the other hand, 2.5-inch hard

disk drives are about one-fifth the cost of SSDs, but their 7mm or

9mm profiles render them difficult to implement in ultraportables and

other smaller laptops. That’s why the Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDD

(go.pcworld.com/sgultrathin) is big news.

At 3.3 ounces and just 5mm thick, it provides 500GB of relatively

cheap storage that straddles the line between price and capacity.

The hard disk drive has a SATA 6-gigabits-per-second interface, but

its platter spins at only 5400 rpm, so you shouldn’t expect extreme-

ly high performance.

In our tests, the drive wrote our 10GB mix of files and folders at 73.8

megabytes per second (MBps), and it read them at 91.1 MBps. It wrote

Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDD BY JON L. JACOBI

Seagate’s Laptop

Ultrathin hard drive

may look delicate,

but it can handle

substantial shocks.

our single large 10GB file at 151.4 MBps and read it at 100.2 MBps.

That’s not bad given the spindle speed, but that performance is hardly

SSD-like. On a relatively speedy laptop, our Windows installation felt

decently responsive, but that has as much to do with Windows’

advanced caching as it does with the speed of the drive.

The Laptop Ultrathin HDD is rated to survive up to a 400G shock while

it’s operating, and 1000G when powered down. Those are pretty impres-

sive ratings. We didn’t perform any drop tests, but with the drive pow-

ered up and spinning outside the case, it survived several small shocks.

Another upside to the drive’s 5mm form factor is that you could poten-

tially install multiple hard drives in a standard-size laptop. Two Laptop

Ultrathin HDDs in a RAID

1 setup could provide

the redundancy most

laptops lack; in a RAID 0

array, they could com-

pensate for the slowish

performance of the

drive. The thin size also

allows for beefier shock-

mounting in devices

that have room for it.

Regardless of how it’s

employed, the odds are

that you’ll see the Lap-

top Ultrathin HDD in

laptops soon—and

we’re betting no one

will complain about

cheaper ultraportables.

REVIEWS & RATINGS

Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDD

PROS:

• Just 5mm thick

• Affordable compared to SSDs

• Lightweight

CONS:

• Platter spins at only 5400 rpm

• Only 500GB

• Middling performance

BOTTOM LINE:

This superthin hard drive could help PC

manufacturers build thinner models. It

could also bring a bigger storage capacity

to tablet designs.

PRICE:

$89 PHOTOGRAPHS:

ROBERT CARDIN

The Laptop

Ultrathin hard

drive is about

the same thick-

ness as four

credit cards

stacked.

“Windows 8.1 has tons of new features, both obvious and hidden.”

If you own Windows 8 and dis-

like it, you might consider giving

Windows 8.1—which is available

now in preview form and is

expected to be released to the

public October 18—a try. Not

only does it have tweaks intend-

ed to make Windows 8 friendlier,

but it also has tons of new fea-

tures, both obvious and hidden.

Just about a year after releasing

Windows 8, Microsoft is introducing the next itera-

tion of its controversial operating system. From a

marketing standpoint, Windows 8.1 represents a

do-over, a bid to simplify and personalize an OS

that, quite frankly, turned off a lot of people.

Snap

views

And Microsoft has updated many

of the OS’s built-in apps, too.

Improvements and changesDesktop diehards will find a pres-

ent waiting for them in Windows

8.1. A wonderful, horrible, oh-so-

teasing present. The Start button

is back—but the Start menu isn’t.

Instead, clicking the old familiar

button dumps you right into the

modern-UI Start screen. While

the new feature is notable for

adding a helpful visual cue to an

operating system rife

with hidden menus, it

isn’t exactly what peo-

ple were looking for.

That said, most of

Windows 8.1’s enhance-

ments bolster the mod-

ern environment, not

the desktop.

The most welcome

improvement is the

addition of customiz-

able snap views. No lon-

ger are you locked into

the two-app, quarter-

screen snap limitations

of Windows 8 vanilla. In

Windows 8.1 you can

resize snap apps to any

ratio, and you can snap

three apps side by side by side.

Microsoft also says that you

can have multiple instances of

an app open and snapped,

though we haven’t been espe-

cially successful in getting that

feature to function in the Win-

dows 8.1 Preview.

Internet Explorer 11 will pre-

miere in Windows 8.1, as well.

While most of the tweaks sound

fairly basic—faster page loads,

better touch performance —the

new version also adds a tab sync-

ing feature that allows you to

WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide

Shut down

from Start

open tabs across

multiple Windows

8.1 PCs and tablets.

And you can open

and snap multiple

instances of the

modern version

of IE 11.

Along those lines,

Windows 8.1 brings

the ability to sync

your settings and Start-screen

apps across multiple devices,

assuming that you sign in to

those devices using an online-

connected Microsoft account.

Hate Windows 8’s insistence on

plopping every newly installed

app onto your Start screen? Once

Windows 8.1 hits, that annoying

“feature” will go the way of the

dodo. Instead, any apps installed

from the Windows Store will appear

under a ‘New’ filter in the All Apps

view, from which you can choose to

pin apps to the Start screen.

The modern-style PC Settings

options are getting a boost, too.

One of the biggest complaints

about Windows 8 concerns the

way it constantly swaps between

the desktop and modern inter-

faces, a problem exacerbated by

the fact that you have to dive

into the desktop control panel

Taskbar

Properties

just to tinker with under-the-

hood stuff. No more.

Hidden new features

What hasn’t been talked about

much are the subtler changes—

the secrets tucked away in the

dark corners, waiting for their

turn to shine. These hidden gems

aren’t as flashy as some of Win-

dows’ other newfound abilities,

but they’re arguably just as con-

venient (if not more so).

Shut down from the Start

button: Although the Start but-

ton is back, you still need to

swipe through a multiclick pro-

cess involving the charm bar if

you want to shut down your PC—

if you don’t know about the Start

button’s secret menu, that is.

Just right-click the Start button

that appears when you hover the

mouse over the lower-left corner

of the screen to bring up a bevy

of powerful options. The menu

itself isn’t new to Windows 8.1.

What is new is the addition of a

Shut Down item. Hovering over it

for a second gives you the option

to shut down or restart your

machine right then and there,

no fiddling required.

Boot to desktop or All Apps,

and more: Taskbar Properties is

another old friend bearing a sub-

tle new look, and it conceals a

crucial new option for desktop

devotees—Windows 8.1 lets you

boot directly to the desktop on

startup. Microsoft, however,

clearly doesn’t want you to do so,

since the option is buried in this

obscure corner of the OS.

Head to the desktop, right-click

the taskbar, select Properties, and

open the brand-spankin’-new

Navigation tab. Some of the

options in this tab are also avail-

able in the modern-style PC Set-

tings utility, but many Start

screen options can be found only

here. And how handy-dandy they

are! Want to boot directly to the

desktop or to the All Apps

screen? Here’s your chance.

The great gigs in the

Sky(Drive): In Windows 8.1, Sky-

Drive takes on a much bigger

role, driving Microsoft’s vision of

a seamless, cloud-connected

world even further.

In fact, SkyDrive is so vital an

underpinning to Windows 8.1

that Microsoft dedicates a sec-

tion to it in the modern-style

PC Settings. A vast number of

settings now sync and follow

you from device to device by

default—including modern apps.

But if you really want to live in

the cloud, you’ll need to enable

some options buried three or

four levels down.

Open the charm bar and select

Settings u Change PC Settings.

From there, open the SkyDrive

WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide

SkyDrive

integration

options and select

Files in the left menu

bar. Here you can tog-

gle the ability to save

documents and Cam-

era Roll snapshots to

SkyDrive by default,

an awesome new

option if you want to

be able to sit down at

any Windows 8 com-

puter and have it feel

like your own.

Hush, my darling:

Relaxing ain’t easy if

your gadget blasts alarms

throughout the day. Fortunately,

Windows 8.1 lets you silence the

cacophony with its new Quiet

Hours setting.

Open the Settings charm, and

navigate to Change PC Settings u

Search & Apps u Notifications.

Scroll down to Quiet Hours. By

default, Windows 8.1 is set to go

silent from midnight to 6 a.m.,

but you can change the window

to any time frame.

Get a grip on your apps: In the

vanilla version of Windows 8,

modern-style apps are incredibly

pesky to manage from anywhere

except the Start screen. Modern

apps don’t show up in an obvious

way in the desktop File Explor-

er’s folder structure, and you

can’t eliminate them from the

Control Panel’s Programs &

Features interface.

Windows 8.1 changes that.

Navigate to the Search & Apps

section, and select App sizes in

the left menu. The screen dis-

plays a full listing of all your

installed modern apps, complete

with the file size of each app. If

you are looking to free up hard-

drive space, you can click an app

to bring up an uninstall option.

Wireless Miracast pairing:

Microsoft’s operating system

update includes full support for

the fledgling Miracast wireless

display standard, which is similar

to Apple’s AirPlay technology. It’s

your PC screen, beamed to your

Quiet Hours

TV or monitor as if by telecom-

munications magic!

Miracast is so new that you

might have trouble finding com-

patible television sets, but you

can pick up a Miracast receiver

dongle that will transform any

TV with an HDMI port into a

Miracast-compatible display.

Even better, when Microsoft’s

Xbox One console lands in time

for the holidays, it’ll be a fully

capable Miracast receiver, further

deepening the synergies be -

tween Windows 8 and Xbox.

If you want to connect your

Windows 8.1 device to a Miracast

receiver, you can dig deep into

the modern-style PC Settings.

But the easier option is to open

the Devices charm and select

Project u Add a display. If a Mira-

cast display is nearby, Windows

8.1 should find it.

There’s a whole lotta printing

going on: Windows 8.1 packs

3D-printer support in the form of

a driver and a native API. Here’s

hoping that the addition will make

the 3D printing process as simple

as the traditional 2D printing

process, rather than the compli-

cated export-filled mess that it

is now. The idea is to allow you

to kick 3D printers to life using

the Print option under the

Devices charm, so you can print

from directly within the modern

interface—assuming that the

printer’s software takes advan-

tage of Microsoft’s support.

Windows 8.1 also includes sup-

port for NFC printers. If both your

Windows device and your printer

are members of the (currently

rare) NFC-enabled breed, simply

tapping one against the other

automatically pairs the two

devices for hassle-free printing.

And if 3D and NFC printers are

WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide

Search &

Apps

just a bit too adventurous for

you, note that Windows 8.1 also

includes Wi-Fi Direct printing

capabilities. That means you

can connect to a Wi-Fi Direct–

enabled printer without having

to jump on a Wi-Fi network or

fuss with installing software.

The Start screen’s new, friendly faceMicrosoft has pulled some of the

best aspects of Windows Phone

into its revision of Windows 8’s

Start screen and modern UI. Pur-

ists may still dislike the fat, space-

sucking fonts and live tiles, but

new features such as the ability

to display pictures of loved ones

when the PC is not in use have

unquestionable appeal.

Jensen Harris of the Windows

User Experience team outlined

the new features in a video the

company posted to YouTube

(go.pcworld.com/win81start).

Some of the improvements are

especially notable.

Lock screen enhancements:

According to Harris, the new lock

screen automatically pulls photos

from your PC, your phone, and

SkyDrive. Granted, you could end

up showing the world (and your

coworkers) some Hangover-style

shots, but in general we’ve been

impressed by how the Facebook

app for Windows Phone already

All Apps

screen

does this. It’s a small touch, but

for people who are unfamiliar

with Windows 8, this feature

could be a real winner.

Different tile sizes: Microsoft

has resized the tiles that are

available in the Start screen to

include larger and smaller for-

mats. Those users who want to

pin more apps to the Start

screen (without having to scroll,

scroll, scroll) will probably find

this change useful. Harris also

notes that the larger format

could display several email mes-

sages or a whole day’s worth of

appointments.

All Apps screen: The revamped

All Apps screen is no match for

the Windows 7 Start menu; it

doesn’t seem to offer any way to

reorganize the apps in folders, for

example. However, you can pull

selected apps out of the All Apps

screen and pin them to the Start

menu in groups, which kind-of

sort-of re-creates the Windows 7

functionality. This is going to

strike some people as an artificial

limitation.

If you’re used to embedding

dozens of apps and games,

there’s still the possibility that

you’ll forget the name of one you

rarely use, and be forced to hunt

for it in the list of apps. The abili-

ty to add an “Other Utilities” fold-

er (one that wouldn’t necessarily

clutter the Start screen) would

be quite useful.

Desktop wallpaper and per-

sonalization options: In Win-

dows 8.1, you’ll be able to change

the background color of the Start

screen. Microsoft also says that it

will add a few quasi-interactive,

WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide

Different

tile sizes

moving backgrounds, such as a

dragon. And in a nice touch, the

Start screen will be able to share

the same background image

as the Desktop. Simply syncing

the background image of the

two interfaces goes a long way

toward implying that they’re two

parts of a cohesive whole. If we

were Microsoft, we’d be tempted

to make this the default option.

Search improvements: The

Search app now gives results a

more “app-like” feel, presenting

a flood of text, images, related

searches, and other content.

Frankly, if you’re used to the

Google text-based environ-

ment, the gush of multimedia

will feel a little overwhelming.

If you’re performing a topic

search on, say, a celebrity or a

band, however, the revamped

Search might offer a lot more

of what you’re looking for.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own

internal search better integrates

the Web with local results. Simply

inputting a few letters into the

search box will pull up internal

apps and settings as well as

external search results.

Improved

Search app

Apps: Additions and updatesWhile many of Windows 8.1’s

major changes focus on the user

interface, ultimately it comes

down to the apps. After all, the

modern-UI side of Windows 8 is

supposed to be all about getting

out of the way and letting you

enjoy those big-screen, touch-

friendly applications.

Microsoft has done a lot of

work on its existing apps, and

it has also come up with some

new offerings. Following are

some of the apps that are get-

ting an overhaul or are making

their debut in Windows 8.1.

Alarm: The new Alarm app is a

helpful addition if you want to

keep a Windows 8 tablet at your

bedside, but in its current state

it seems a bit sparse. All the

basics are intact, including a

timer and a stopwatch, as well

as the ability to set an alarm to

repeat any given day of the

week. The interface is slick, and

the circular dial for setting times

is cute. It would be nice to see

some advanced functions, such

as volume fade-in, wake to

music, and a dimmer for using

the app as a nighttime clock.

WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide

Alarm

Calculator: In Windows 8.1,

Microsoft has gone above and

beyond the basic desktop calcu-

lator. The standard math functions

are still present, but users can

also switch to a scientific calcula-

tor. With the unit converter, users

can calculate volume, length,

weight, temperature, energy, area,

speed, time, power, and data. The

new Calculator is especially use-

ful when snapped side by side

with the desktop, allowing you

to calculate without messing

around with window sizes.

Camera: If you enjoy taking

photos with tablets, you’ll find

lots of useful new features in the

Windows 8.1 Camera app. The

interface is now a little less con-

fusing, with quick-camera and

video-capture buttons on the

right side. The app menu includes

a Camera Roll button, exposure

settings, and the timer. Camera

options, including video stabiliza-

tion and aspect ratio, have moved

to the Settings section of the

charm bar.

Once you’ve taken a photo, the

app provides some new editing

options. You can also set a photo

as your lock screen, open it in

another app, or start a slideshow.

This app doesn’t offer drawing,

cut-and-paste, or precise crop-

Camera

ping and resizing tools, but it

looks like a fine choice for basic

photo editing on touch-based PCs.

Food & Drink: Microsoft’s

impressive new food app offers

recipes, tips, and articles about

food, wine, and cocktails, all gath-

ered by Bing. Users can select

from the app’s recipes or enter

their own—either by typing it in

or taking a picture of a paper rec-

ipe. The app also lets you create

shopping lists and meal plans,

which you can share with other

apps through the charm bar.

Less useful, at least in our

experience, is the “hands-free”

mode that’s supposed to allow

you to swipe through recipes

using your PC’s webcam. Getting

the app to respond to hand ges-

tures was unreliable for us, so it

might just be easier to swipe

with your elbows.

Health & Fitness: Packed with

features, Microsoft’s new Health

& Fitness app is a sprawling pro-

gram. The main page provides

links to fitness exercises, news

articles, nutrition tips, and medi-

cal news.

The app’s diet, health, and exer-

cise trackers have potential, but

right now they’re far too limited.

The diet tracker lets you record

what you’ve eaten, but its data-

base of items is lacking. (For

instance, it has information on

some Subway salads and sand-

wiches, but not others.) The exer-

cise tracker can’t sync with popu-

lar fitness services such as Fitbit

and Runkeeper. The health track-

er is fine if you have weight, cho-

lesterol, blood pressure, and vac-

cination details on hand, but it’s

basically just a record-keeping

app. For now, the Health & Fit-

WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide

Health and

+

Health &

Fitness

ness app is best for general

health tips, not for keeping tabs

on your own well-being.

Internet Explorer: Internet

Explorer 11 boasts some truly

useful changes in Windows 8.1.

Most helpful is the ability to open

up to three webpages side by side

in separate windows. Opening

multiple windows creates several

instances of IE 11 in the Windows

multitasking menu, so you can

return to any open pages even if

you drag them out of snap view.

Other tweaks include syncing

among all Windows 8.1 devices,

a “reopen closed tab” function,

saved passwords, and a built-in

download viewer. And for those

people who can’t stand modern-

style IE’s insistence on hiding

tabs and the address bar, IE 11

includes a setting to show them

at all times in a collapsed view.

Photos: Microsoft has changed

the interface for the Photos app

in Windows 8.1, bringing it clos-

er to the file picker that appears

in other apps. Strangely, the abil-

ity to view online photo sources

such as SkyDrive, Facebook, and

Flickr was missing in our tests.

That may be just a bug, however,

as online sources were available

through the file picker in other

apps. As for editing tools, the

Photos app mirrors the Camera

app, with a mode that includes

Reading

List

lighting tweaks, red-eye reduc-

tion, and other options.

Reading List: While it’s no

replacement for Pocket or other

true read-it-later apps, Reading

List offers a simple way to save

articles for another time. You don’t

have much to do in the app itself,

at least not until you’ve saved up

things to read by using the Share

charm in other apps, such as

Internet Explorer or News.

Keep in mind that this app

behaves a bit differently from

other readers. Instead of suck-

ing up the text into the app

itself, Reading List merely sends

you back to the original source.

The downside to this approach

is that the app doesn’t work as

an ofline reader.

SkyDrive: At last, SkyDrive’s

modern-style app functions more

like its desktop counterpart in

Windows 8.1. Users now have the

ability to cut, copy, paste, and

rename files, as well as to make

files available for ofline access.

You also have the option to make

all SkyDrive files available ofline.

Aside from those substantive

changes, the SkyDrive app’s inter-

face has been tweaked, with

smaller icons that allow for more

items on the screen at once.

Sound Recorder: Like the desk-

WINDOWS 8.1 Features Guide

Windows

Store

top Sound Recorder app, the new

modern-style version is dead-

simple. Just press the microphone

button and start recording. You

can trim an audio file, rename it,

or delete it.

Windows Store: The Windows

Store is now much more inviting

in Windows 8.1. The layout is

completely different, with a sin-

gle carousel of featured apps on

the left side, followed by several

rows of suggestions. These tiles

are less crowded than they were

in Windows, and they each

include a short written descrip-

tion. Individual app pages are

getting a makeover as well, with

everything laid out on a single,

scrollable page. Overall, the Win-

dows Store feels less sparse and

easier to browse than it did in

Windows 8.

Xbox Music: Microsoft’s Xbox

Music app is get-

ting a major

visual overhaul

in Windows 8.1.

The new design

is a departure

from the hori-

zontally scroll-

ing, modern-

style apps we’re

used to, with a

navigation col-

umn on the left side, and a verti-

cally scrolling list of artists on

the right. It’s definitely an

improvement, more conducive

to quickly accessing your music.

The app also does a better job

of explaining itself. Small dialog

boxes tell you when music has

been stored locally or in the

cloud, while buttons at the top

offer clear options for sorting

your collection.

MORE ONLINE:

Learn about Windows

8.1’s security enhance-

ments at go.pcworld.

com/win81security,

and find out what fea-

tures Windows 8.1 is

missing at go.pcworld.

com/win81missing.

It’s scorching out. Any housework

that needs doing is already done.

And with the weekend ahead, it’s

time for a simple computing proj-

ect. Here’s one: Install the Win-

dows 8.1 Preview.

Note that Windows 8.1 will be

available through the Windows

Store as a free upgrade for current

Windows 8 and Windows RT users

on October 17; the retail version

of the software will be released to

Install the Windows 8.1

PreviewGet a peek at the updated OS’s new features, and try them for yourself.BY MARK HACHMAN

WINDOWS 8.1 Upgrade Guide

The Start

screen’s

new look

“general availability” on October

18. The version that is download-

able right now is only a preview,

and so it may contain a bug or

two. If you have any critical apps

or data, make sure that you have

backup copies, or that your data

also resides on Microsoft’s Sky-

Drive. Although I haven’t encoun-

tered a single bug in the Windows

8.1 Preview, there’s no guarantee

you’ll have the same experience.

If you do run into problems, try

visiting the Microsoft Windows

8 Preview forums (go.pcworld.

com/win81forum). You’ll find

answers to questions that this

guide can’t cover, including how

to interpret the most frustrat-

ing error message, “Windows 8.1

Preview is not yet supported on

this PC.” (Have you already seen

this message? According to

Microsoft, your PC might be

running a 32-bit Intel Atom chip

that’s currently unsupported.)

What to know before you startBefore you download and install

Windows 8.1, consider where

you’ll be running it. Will you put

it on your main productivity

machine? On a spare PC? Or

within a virtual machine? Since

you’ll be installing a preview ver-

sion of the operating system, we

recommend digging up a spare

PC and installing 8.1 on top of an

existing Windows 8 installation.

Installing the Windows 8.1 Pre-

view is essentially a one-way trip:

Once you’ve installed the soft-

ware, there’s no going back. (And

be aware that if you begin instal-

lation and then get cold feet in

the middle, you’ll also have to

uninstall the associated Windows

Update. To do so, open Control

Panel, look for ‘View installed

updates’, and delete KB2849636.)

If you decide that you real-

ly can’t stand Windows 8.1 after

it’s installed, the only way out is

to restore your PC to its original

factory settings, using the

recovery media that came with

your PC or a backup. Windows 8

users might also be able to

“Before you download and install Windows 8.1, consider where you’ll be running it.”

restore their machines by per-

forming a refresh. It’s bad

news for Windows RT users,

however: Microsoft says you

have no way back. At all.

The other thing to remember

is that if you download and install

the Windows 8.1 Preview, you

may have to reinstall the apps

(go.pcworld.com/win81reinstall)

when the final Windows 8.1

version is released. That said,

if you choose to sit back, wait,

and upgrade only when the final

version of 8.1 arrives in October,

don’t worry—you shouldn’t have

to touch a thing.

The operating system you’re

upgrading from also determines

the amount of data you’ll need to

worry about. Basically, if you’re

upgrading from Windows 8 to

the Windows 8.1 Preview, Micro-

soft anticipates that all of your

data, with the exception of some

apps, will be preserved. (Micro-

soft isn’t saying which apps may

need reinstallation, however.)

Microsoft sums things up in a

convenient table on its FAQ page

(go.pcworld.com/win81faq).

Again, nothing should change

when you install the preview,

only when the preview expires.

Check out

the

Preview

WINDOWS 8.1 Upgrade Guide

Once again: We recommend that you back up your PC before you

start. Read “Dont Forget to Back

Up Your PC Before Trying Win-

dows 8.1” at go.pcworld.com/

win81backup to learn how to

safely perform such an operation.

We have already heard about

documented cases of Windows

8.1 installations going wrong,

and the last thing you want is to

lose everything.

One final note before we get

started on the installation specif-

ics: Some corporations don’t

allow you to log in with your

Microsoft account, and restrict

you to a “local” installation. In

these cases, you will not have the

full ability to sync your settings

across multiple PCs. Local instal-

lations won’t work with the Win-

dows 8.1 Preview, so be sure that

you have signed up for a Micro-

soft ID, and then log in with that

ID when the installation com-

pletes. (A Microsoft ID generally

Download

the update

“Windows 8.1’s requirements mirror those of current Windows 8 products.”

consists of your Hotmail or Out-

look.com account and password.)

Download and

installation

Windows 8.1’s system require-

ments mirror those of current

Windows 8 products. You need a

1GHz or faster processor, and a

DirectX 9 GPU with a WDDM driv-

er. A 32-bit system will need 1GB

of RAM and 16GB of storage

space, while 64-bit systems will

need 2GB of RAM and 20GB of

storage space. For the Windows

RT 8.1 Preview, you need a device

that’s already running Windows

RT and has 10GB of free storage

space, Microsoft says.

The installation process itself is

simple: Visit preview.windows.com

and follow the instructions. We

walked through an early version of

the download process (go.pcworld.

com/win81down); Tony Leung, lab

manager of PCWorld Labs, report-

ed that the total time necessary

to download and install the Win-

dows 8.1 Preview was about two

hours on a fast system with a solid-

WINDOWS 8.1 Upgrade Guide

state disk. (Note, however, that

this was during the first few hours

of the preview’s life, when Micro-

soft’s servers were slammed.)

Again, you’ll need to decide

whether to run an in-place instal-

lation or to install the preview

within a virtual machine—the lat-

ter option isolates Windows 8.1

from the rest of your system, but

sometimes incurs a performance

hit. If you decide on the virtual-

machine route, download the ISO

file at go.pcworld.com/win81iso.

If you need help with installing

Windows 8.1 in a virtual machine,

try the TechNorms guide at go.

pcworld.com/win81vm and a

related discussion forum at go.

pcworld.com/win81vm2.

If you do download the ISO,

you’ll also need the following

Microsoft product key: NTTX3-

RV7VB-T7X7F-WQYYY-9Y92F

After Windows begins installa-

tion, your PC may reboot a few

times. Once installation com-

pletes, congratulations! You’re

well on your way to enjoying

Windows 8.1.

To stream your movies, music, and photos anywhere, all you need is a PC and good media-server software.

BY RICK BROIDA

Photography by Robert Cardin

MACHINESTREAMING

TRANSFORM

YOUR SYSTEM INTO A

IF YOU’RE A DEDICATED FAN of music, images, and video, you’ve probably built an

impressive multimedia empire inside your PC, with

album after album of sweet jams, reams of cherished

photos, and a video collection whose holdings range

from smartphone gag reels to family movies to high-

resolution videos ripped from your DVD collection.

Unfortunately, they’re all

trapped in your PC. If you want

to watch one of the videos on

the big HDTV in your living room,

or listen to your complete music

collection on a storage-strapped

smartphone, what do you do?

The solution is simple: Turn

your PC into a media slinger—a

machine that can stream your

music, movies, and photos to

any destination device of your

choosing. It’s easier than you

might think, though deciding

which server arrangement to

use (and how much to spend)

can be somewhat tricky.

Pick the right PC for the jobThe first step is to make sure

that your computer is up to the

task. Server software can place a

heavy load on your PC, especially

when it first indexes your media

library, but also when it’s actively

streaming. And if you want your

media library to be available

around the clock, you’ll need to

leave your PC running 24/7.

You can configure any PC to sling media over the

Web, but it’s best to set up a dedicated machine that

can run 24/7 in a closet or basement.

Indeed, many users elect to

repurpose an older system as a

dedicated media server: one

that can sit quietly out of the

way in a closet or basement

until called upon to sling. If you

can afford to devote a PC solely

to media slinging, it doesn’t

have to be a screaming power-

house of a system, because it

will be free to direct all of its

resources to server duty.

The software I discuss here

won’t place huge demands on

your PC; but to be on the safe

side, you should probably use a

PC that runs Windows 7 or later,

packs at least 4GB of RAM, and

carries a discrete video card to

ensure smooth rendering when

you stream movies. Optimizing

Windows 8 to run on an older

machine is probably the best

way to go (see “How to optimize

Windows 8 on old hardware,” go.

pcworld.com/optwin8), but you

can also introduce a few no-cost

tweaks to improve performance

in Windows 7 (see “How to opti-

After setting up Pogoplug on your PC,

use free Android or iOS apps to access

your media library from anywhere.

To be on the safe

side, use a PC that

runs Windows 7 or

later, packs at least

4GB of RAM, and

carries a discrete

video card.

MEDIA

STREAMING

mize your Windows PC for free,”

go.pcworld.com/optwin8).

Choose the sofware that meets your needsTo handle the slinging, you’ll

need some reliable media server

software. This software’s capa-

bilities will determine not only

the kinds of media you can share,

but also where you can share it.

For example, Pogoplug PC (go.

pcworld.com/pogoplugpc) is a

fairly straightforward Windows

utility that makes your media

available on your mobile devices,

other PCs, and pretty much any-

thing with a Web browser. Just

choose the folders you want to

share, and then sign in to your

Services like Plex let

you view streaming

content anywhere.

account via one of Pogoplug’s

various free companion apps (go.

pcworld.com/pogoplugextras,

available for Android and iOS) or

any browser. From there, you can

open an individual photo, watch

a slideshow, stream a video, or

listen to music.

You’re not limited to media,

either. The software can also

“stream” files—convenient if,

for example, you need mobile

access to some Microsoft Office

documents while you’re travel-

ing for work. An integrated pre-

view feature supports Word,

Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and

other popular formats.

PlayOn makes

sharing your

PC’s media

folders with

smartphones,

set-top boxes,

and other

devices a cinch.

MEDIA

STREAMING

Pogoplug also lets you share

items with friends and family

members, generating links oth-

ers can use to view your content.

Plus, you can download files if

you’re working at another PC and

need to pop into your home serv-

er for some documents or music.

When you buy the full version

of Pogoplug PC for $30, you also

get 5GB of cloud storage that you

can use to store items in a loca-

tion where you have access to

them even if your PC is ofline.

If you want to be able to stream

your media to your TV, too, con-

sider PlayOn (www.playon.tv).

This media-streaming service

turns your PC into something

akin to a Roku box, giving you

access to channels such as ABC,

Food Network, Hulu, Netflix, and

TBS. But it can also stream your

personal media libraries (though

not your documents, regrettably).

What’s more, PlayOn works

with most game consoles, smart-

phones, tablets, and set-top

boxes (including Google TV and

Roku). It also supports DLNA, a

relatively new media-streaming

standard designed to simplify

home streaming. Plenty of new

smart HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and

the like support DLNA streaming,

so you may already have a DLNA-

certified device in your home. If

you want to be able to see your

media on your HDTV, PlayOn

probably has you covered.

The service and software cost

$40 per year (though you can

often find them on sale for less;

they’re currently priced at $25

as part of a spring sale). On the

other hand, if you just want to

stream content from your own

library and you don’t care about

the premium channels, PlayOn

Lite lets you do that for free.

The Dropbox app lets you view cloud-

stored files on a phone or tablet.

Finally, there’s Plex (plexapp.

com), a streaming media service

that is more powerful than either

Pogoplug PC or PlayOn, with such

features as automatic download-

ing of metadata for each item in

your library, and on-the-fly trans-

coding: If a particular video or

music file isn’t directly compati-

ble with the device you’re view-

ing it on, Plex will transcode it to

a compatible format.

Like the aforementioned Play-

On, Plex offers a number of sub-

scription channels, including CBS,

Hulu, and NBC. It even has a

browser bookmarklet that you

can use to add any Web video to

your queue. You also get a unique

email address for sending links to

your queue, which is very handy

when someone shows you an

awesome video on a smartphone.

Just borrow the phone, email the

link to yourself, and watch it on

your HDTV when you get home.

Unfortunately, Plex is a bit

obtuse. Setting up and using the

service can be confusing, and

several of the company’s support

pages are incomplete. But a very

active user forum offers general-

ly strong technical support.

Plex Media Server software (go.

pcworld.com/plexmediaserver) is

free for Windows and Linux, but

Plex (left) and PogoPlug work

with multiple mobile devices.

MEDIA

STREAMING

certain apps and features aren’t.

For example, if you want to

stream your stuff to another PC,

you’ll have to install the free Plex

desktop client on that PC. If you

prefer to stream from a Web

browser, you’ll have to pay a $4

monthly subscription to use the

Plex browser client. Plex also

offers decent apps for Android,

iOS, and Windows Phone 7, but

each of them costs $5.

Take advantage of your cloud storageIf you just want access to all your

media from your smartphone or

tablet, there’s one more option

to consider: cloud services.

The apps for both Dropbox (go.

pcworld.com/dropboxdown) and

SugarSync (go.pcworld.com/

sugarsyncdown), for example, let

you view your cloud-stored pho-

tos, documents, and videos on

your phone or tablet. They in -

clude rudimentary music players,

too—but if you want an even

better mobile jukebox experi-

ence, try Google Music (currently

available for Android only).

If you’re already syncing your

media to the cloud, you can

probably cut your PC out of the

equation and stream everything

to an app. Dropbox and Sugar-

Sync offer free accounts with

2GB and 5GB of storage, respec-

tively; but if you want more,

you’ll have to pay for the privi-

lege of streaming your media

from someone else’s servers. It’s

not a bad solution, but nothing

beats the convenience of setting

up a media-slinging machine

that can deliver your files to

you anywhere in the world on

almost any device you own.

Nothing beats the convenience of setting up a

media-slinging machine that can deliver your files

to you anywhere in the world on almost any device.

MEDIA

STREAMING

10HIDDEN

GEMS in the

GooglePlayStore

Move over Angry Birds. Sayonara, Spotify. Here are the apps you should have on your Android deviceright now. BY LIANE CASSAVOY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY FLORAFAUNA

10 HIDDEN GEMS

Finding high-quality Android apps in the Google Play Store can be challenging—what with 700,000 or so titles to choose from. Let us help.

Here are ten apps that you may not have stumbled across yet, all of which have impressed us in some way. While these gems may not change your life, they just might make your day a little easier or a little more fun.

AutomateIt

1Your smartphone is

pretty smart, but

apps like AutomateIt (go.

pcworld.com/automateit)

can make it even smarter.

The app lets you automate actions on

your phone, so that whenever certain

criteria are met, the action is triggered.

You can use AutomateIt for a variety of

tasks, including sending a reply with your

phone’s location whenever a person texts you

asking where you are. Or you can use it to

turn Wi-Fi on and off under certain condi-

tions to save battery life. You can even have

AutomateIt switch your phone to vibrate mode whenever a meeting saved

on your calendar starts.

If all of these settings seem a little too utilitarian, and just not fun

enough, consider this: You also can use AutomateIt to play audio that says

“Don’t Touch Me!” whenever anyone comes too close to the proximity sen-

sor on your phone. Add it for free.

8tracks radio

2 Finding new music can often be

even more challenging that

finding new apps. A lot of what’s

out there is junk, and what sounds

melodious to some may sound like dying

cats to you. That’s where 8tracks radio (go.

pcworld.com/8tracks) shines: This app boasts

almost 1 million playlists, each of which has been

created by “someone who knows and loves

music.” You can browse through music by genres,

artists, activity or mood tags, and more. Add it

for free.

GymPact

3Having trouble finding the

motivation to exercise? Maybe

a financial incentive would help.

That’s where GymPact (go.pcworld.

com/gympact) comes in. This app pushes you to

exercise by punishing you financially when you

miss a planned workout.

With GymPact, you create your own exercise

schedule—basically how many days a week you’re

planning to workout. Then, you create a financial stake—an amount that you’re willing

to pay if you don’t work out. If you miss a workout, GymPact pockets your dues. If you

work out as scheduled, GymPact pays you back, using the money it collects from all

those folks who missed their workouts. You won’t get rich using GymPact, but you will

get in shape and maybe earn enough to buy a pack of gum. Add it for free.

Super Swiss Army Knife

5Okay, so it can’t turn your smart-

phone into an actual knife, but short

of that, there’s not much Super Swiss

Army Knife (go.pcworld.com/super-

swiss) can’t do. You can use the app to

transform your phone into a flashlight

or ruler, or even a protractor (handy if

you have a geometry problem that needs solving).

Super Swiss Army Knife also allows you to measure the

distance between you and another object, as well as

the height of that object.

If you’re hanging artwork, you’ll appreciate the app’s

bubble-level tool, which helps you check whether objects are level, and the

cross-vertical-measure tool, which tells you whether an item is level and—if it’s

not—the angle of deviation. Add it for free.

10 HIDDEN GEMS

Car Locator

4 You may not want to admit it, but

chances are you’ve forgotten

where you parked your car at least

once—if not more. Instead of wander-

ing around the parking lot, install Car Locator (go.

pcworld.com/carlocator). This app lets you save the

location of your parked car, and then helps you find

your way back to it when it’s time to head home. Car

Locator also keeps track of how long your car has been

parked, which is helpful if you’re trying to avoid parking

tickets or steep garage fines. Just make sure you don’t

get caught feeding the meter. Add it for $4.

AutoRotate Switch

6Sometimes, the best ideas

are the simplest ones. Case

in point: AutoRotate Switch

(go.pcworld.com/autorotate).

This handy little app lets you

turn your phone’s automa-

tic screen rotation off and on. If

you’ve ever been annoyed by a screen

that rotates from landscape to portrait

view when you lie down in bed or flop down

on the couch, you’ll appreciate AutoRotate

Switch. Add it for free.

SnapPea

7 SnapPea (go.pcworld.com/

snappea) allows you to

transfer files—whether they’re

photos, songs, videos, or

more—between your desktop computer and

your phone. It also allows you to control your

Android phone from your computer, using

either a Web browser or a downloadable desk-

top application. It’s almost like iTunes for

Android, but without some of the restrictions

that Apple imposes. Add it for free.

10 HIDDEN GEMS

Snaptastic

8Smartphone cameras have

improved dramatically these

last few years, but their photo-

editing capabilities have lagged

behind. Snaptastic (go.pcworld.com/snaptastic)

helps rectify this problem by giving you easy-to-use

tools for cropping and editing your photos. With the

app installed, you’ll be able to adjust characteristics

of your photos, such as exposure and color satura-

tion, and easily post your customized creations to

your social networks. A free, ad-supported version of

the app is also available if you want to try out Snap-

tastic before spending your dough. Add it for $3.

SpellTower

9 If Bejeweled and

Words With Friends

had a love child, it might look like

SpellTower (go.pcworld.com/spelltower),

one of the most addictive word games

around. The object is to find words hidden

within a grid of letters. Once you swipe or

tap the letters to make the word, they dis-

appear and new ones take their place.

SpellTower includes a multiplayer option

and different game modes, almost ensur-

ing that you’ll never want to put it down.

Add it for $2.

Uber

10Here’s a little secret: You don’t have to

be fabulously wealthy or famous to

have your own private driver. Uber (go.

pcworld.com/uber) can hook you up with a

driver and make you feel like a VIP. This app, which works in

select cities in the United States and around the world, lets

you request a ride when you need one. You pinpoint your

location on a map, and a car is sent to pick you up. You can

choose between a sleek, black sedan or an SUV for larger

parties, and the fare—which is

comparable to cab fares in many

cities—is automatically charged

to your credit card, no tipping

needed. Business users will appre-

ciate that receipts are automa-

tically emailed to you, and every-

one will like the way Uber lets you

ride in style. Add it for free.

How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear.

HERE’S HOW

Build the ultimate Intel Haswell PC for under $1000

The new CPUs require a new motherboard, so why not build a new rig? BY MARCO CHIAPPETTA

INTEL’S FOURTH-GENERATION CORE

processors, code-named Haswell, have

arrived. And like the Sandy Bridge and Ivy

Bridge processors before them, Haswell

is a big step forward, maximizing CPU and GPU

performance while also consuming less power.

Unfortunately, Haswell-based processors use a

new socket—the LGA 1150—and thus require

motherboards built around Intel’s Series 8 chip-

sets. But that problem also presents an oppor-

tunity: Since you can’t just drop a Haswell CPU

into your current PC, now is the perfect time to

build a killer Haswell-based rig. And you can do

it for less than a grand.

Component huntingTypically, you get the best value in desktop

processors a bin or two below the top-of-the-

line products. For example, a Core i7-3770

costs about $40 (or 15 percent) less than a

Core i7-3770K ($289 vs. $329), but it delivers

roughly 98 percent of the lat-

ter’s performance. But with

Haswell-based CPUs, the

price delta is a bit smaller.

The top-of-the-line, fully

unlocked (and thus over-

clockable) Core i7-4770K

is $339. A

non-K Core

i7-4770 with

a 100MHz lower base clock costs

$309. The performance difference is

small, and you could easily spend the

$30 you’d save with the plain 4770 on

The complete parts list

PROCESSOR:

Intel Core i7-4770K ($339)

MOTHERBOARD:

Gigabyte Z87-UD3H ($180)

GPU:

Sapphire Radeon HD 7790

Dual-X ($135)

MEMORY:

8GB (4GB x 2) Kingston HyperX Black

DDR3-1600 Dual-Channel Kit ($49)

CASE:

NZXT Source 210 Mid-Tower ($35)

OS DRIVE:

AData SX900 128GB SSD ($119)

BULK STORAGE:

WD Caviar Blue 500GB, 7200RPM,

64MB Cache HDD ($59)

OPTICAL DRIVE:

Lite-On SATA DVD-R ($18)

PSU:

FSP Group Raider 450W

Haswell-ready power supply ($55)

Total cost for the hardware at the

time of this writing: $989

other components. But I wanted the best that Haswell had to offer, so

I sprang for the Intel Core i7-4770K (go.pcworld.com/corei74770k).

Choosing a new motherboard was the next step. I wanted a full

complement of enthusiast-class features, but I didn’t want to spend a

ton of money for extras. I settled on Gigabyte’s $180 Z87-UD3H (go.

pcworld.com/gigabytez87ud3h). This board features Intel’s Z87 Express

chipset, but Gigabyte doesn’t overload it with ports and third-party con-

trollers. Also, the board’s basic accessory bundle helps keep costs down.

Next up was the GPU. Haswell uses Intel’s most powerful and

feature-rich on-processor graphics engine, but with a $1000 bud-

get, I had some room to spice things up a bit. Even though I wasn’t

building a gaming PC, I wanted to be able to play the latest games.

I chose Sapphire’s $135 Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X (go.pcworld.com/

radeon7790). It supports the full DirectX 11 feature set and can run

Case

NZXT Source

210 Mid-Tower

PSU

FSP Group Raider 450W

Haswell-ready power supply

any game on the market today. Best of all, it comes with top-notch

games, including Crysis 3, BioShock: Infinite, and Far Cry 3. In fact,

the total value of the game bundle exceeds the cost of the card.

For the memory and storage, I wanted bang for the buck. Intel’s new

CPUs support a peak official memory speed of 1600MHz and work best

with a dual-channel memory configuration. I went with the most afford-

able dual-channel DDR3-1600 memory kit I could find: Kingston’s $49

HyperX Black (go.pcworld.com/hyperx). It contains two 4GB sticks, with

low-profile heat spreaders and official support for 1600MHz operation.

Dynamic storage duoPairing Intel’s fastest Haswell CPU with slow storage wouldn’t do it jus-

tice, so I opted for a mix of solid-state and traditional rotating media. I

chose a 128GB AData SX900 SSD (go.pcworld.com/sx900). The $119

HERE’S HOW

Motherboard

Gigabyte Z87-UD3H

Processor

Intel Core i7-4770K

AData SX900 has an LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller, read and write

speeds of 550MB per second and 520MB per second, respectively, and

room for the operating system and most commonly used applications.

To complement the SSD, I needed something that offered more capac-

ity but wouldn’t break the bank. I chose a 500GB Western Digital Caviar

Blue hard drive (go.pcworld.com/wdcaviar). It has 64MB of cache and a

fairly swift spindle speed of 7200 rpm, and I snapped it up for $59. I also

picked up a Lite-On DVD-R optical drive (go.pcworld.com/liteondvdr)—I

was willing to invest $18 to gain the ability to burn or access a disc.

Normally I would spring for a high-end case with plenty of cooling,

but luckily, Haswell isn’t particularly power-hungry, nor is the Radeon

HD 7790 GPU. So a mainstream midsize tower with a few fans and an

open floor plan would do just fine. I opted for NZXT’s Source 210 (go.

pcworld.com/source210), a great tower case for the price (about $35).

GPU

Sapphire Radeon HD

7790 Dual-X

Memory

8GB (4GB x 2) Kingston

HyperX Black DDR3-1600

Dual-Channel Kit

Last up: a power supply unit. A high-efficiency, Haswell-ready PSU is

critical, so I went with FSP’s Group Raider (go.pcworld.com/groupraider)

for three reasons: Its 450W capacity is plenty beefy, the unit is Haswell-

ready and 80-Plus Bronze certified, and the manufacturer is reputable.

Puting it all togetherAssembling the system is fairly easy. Start by installing the CPU on the

motherboard and affixing the cooler. The CPU fits into the socket in only

one way and requires no force. Simply lift the locking lever and the sock-

et lid, pop in the CPU, and lock the lid and lever down again. To install the

cooler, line up the mounting pegs with the correct holes around the CPU

socket on the motherboard and push down firmly on the four locking

pins that surround the heat sink. Next, snap the memory into DIMM slots

1 and 2 on the motherboard, and you’re ready to get things mounted.

HERE’S HOW

Bulk storage

WD Caviar Blue 500GB,

7200RPM, 64MB Cache HDD

Optical drive

Lite-On SATA

DVD-R

OS drive

AData SX900

128GB SSD

Mount the motherboard in the case, and install the drives in open bays

that line up with the SATA ports on the motherboard, to facilitate cable

routing. Next, install the graphics card and connect the case’s front-panel

wiring to the motherboard. Last, connect the drives’ data cables.

Now you’re ready to add the power supply. Secure the PSU in place

with the necessary screws, and try to route each power cable behind

the motherboard tray, to keep the area over the motherboard and

graphics card cable-free and to improve airflow.

Finally, install an operating system (I chose Windows 8 Pro x64).

For more help with assembling a system, read our PC building

best practices for both hardware (go.pcworld.com/hh3110hw)

and software (go.pcworld.com/ hh3110sw).

Here’s the way

everything

should look if

you’ve built your

PC correctly.

Note that the

cables are neatly

routed for easy

access and

maximum

efficiency.

INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS: ROBERT CARDIN

HERE’S HOW

When Malware Strikes:

How to clean an infected PCBY LINCOLN SPECTOR

YOU WORK HARD to protect your PC from malware, but against all

odds, your computer can still become infested with a virus. Here’s a

methodical approach that you can use to determine what exactly the

problem is and how to scan your system for infections.

1. Verify the infection Is the PC in question really infected? Or are you dealing with a

hardware or software problem, or is it user error?

If your PC is unusually slow, be suspicious. But before you decide that

a virus is responsible, launch the Windows Task Manager (right-click

the Windows taskbar, and select Task Manager from the pop-up menu).

Open the Processes tab, and check for any strange background applica-

tions—especially those with nonsensical names and no recognizable

authority listed in the description.

2. Check for sure signs of malware If your PC suddenly won’t load utilities—such as msconfig or

regedit—that might help you manually remove malware, be on guard.

If your antivirus program suddenly stops loading, that’s a huge red

flag. Or if a program you don’t recognize suddenly pops up and starts

displaying dire warnings and asks you to run an executable file or

requests your credit card number, your PC is definitely infected with

some nasty malware.

3. Check online for possible fixes

One benefit of those scary pop-ups, however, is that you might

be able to use them to find a cure. Do a Web search for phrases that

appear in the pop-up—you’ll probably find other people fighting the

same infection. Their experiences could help you identify your enemy

or explain how to remove the malware. Remember to perform a full

scan of your PC after you’ve followed any instructions, even ours.

4. Assume that your old virus scanner is compromised

You need a fresh malware scanner, and you need to run it in an envi-

ronment where the malware can’t load first. Linux is your best bet, but

first try booting into Windows Safe Mode (see next step).

5. Use a lightweight scanner inside Safe Mode Windows’ Safe Mode boots a minimal version of the operat-

ing system. It doesn’t load most startup applications, and likely

won’t load the malware.

To enter Safe Mode, boot your computer and press the <F8>

function key repeatedly from the moment the motherboard manu-

facturer’s logo appears until you get the boot menu.

In the boot menu, select Safe Mode with Networking. Then open

Internet Explorer (the best browser to use in Safe Mode) and run an

online virus scanner such as Bitdefender (go.pcworld.com/bitdef).

Another good choice is the ESET Online Scanner (go.pcworld.com/

eset), a Web-based virus-detection app. Before you start the scan,

click Advanced settings and enable as many levels of scrutiny as you

can, including scanning file archives and browser data.

Another good scanner is Trend Micro’s HouseCall (go.pcworld.com/

housecall). You can download HouseCall on another computer and copy

it to a flash drive, to create a portable PC virus scanner. (You’ll need an

Internet connection to get virus-definition updates.) Before you click

the big blue Scan Now button, click Settings and select Full system scan.

Be sure to select the slowest, most thorough scan. The process

will—and should—take hours. When that first scan is done, run

another scan with a different scanner, just to be safe.

HERE’S HOW

Use Windows’

boot menu to

access Safe

Mode.

6. Look to Linux as your last line of defense If you still have an infection after running multiple scans in

Safe Mode, bypass Windows and avoid booting from the hard drive.

To do that, use a bootable CD or flash drive running a Linux-based

antivirus utility. You don’t have to know Linux to take this step. But

you do need an Internet connection so that the scanner can update

its malware database.

First, download a bootable virus scanner as an .iso file. From that file,

create a bootable CD. In Windows 7, double-click the file and follow

the prompts. In Win-

dows 8, right-click the

file and select Burn disc

image. For earlier ver-

sions of Windows,

you’ll need a third-par-

ty program such as the

free ISO Recorder (go.

pcworld.com/isorec).

The Kaspersky

Rescue Disk has a

Windows-like inter-

face. But before using

it, you must update

the software’s malware

dictionary. Select the

Update Center tab and click Start update. Once the utility is updated,

return to the Objects Scan tab, click Settings, and set the security level

to the highest position. Make sure all of your hard drives are selected

before you start the scan.

7. Protect your newly disinfected PC When you’re satisfied that your drive is clean, reboot into

Windows and uninstall your old, now-compromised antivirus program.

Then either reinstall the program and update to the latest version, or

install different program.

When you boot

your PC with

the Kaspersky

Rescue Disk

utility, you’ll

find yourself in

a custom Linux

environment.

HERE’S HOW

How to back up your PC before trying Win 8.1BY BRAD CHACOS

RELEASE PREVIEWS ARE never for the faint of heart. Trial software is

prone to meting out all sorts of bumps and bruises, and if something

goes really, truly rotten, you could wind up with a complete (and inad-

vertent) system wipe on your hands.

Now, the Windows 8.1 preview seems remarkably stable as far as

these things go, but that doesn’t mean you should throw caution to

the wind before you install the software. In case you aren’t already

alarmed enough by Microsoft’s stern “This may go so badly that you

might want to contact your PC manufacturer” warnings when you try

to install the update, we’ve heard several reports of people running

into repeated Windows 8.1 installation problems. Heck, we’ve run into

installation failures on multiple machines ourselves.

None of them were disastrous, but why tempt fate? Much better to

get your proverbial ducks in a row before you take Windows 8.1 for a

test-drive. You know—just in case.

How to prepare for Windows 8.1You should always back up all your important data before you go pok-

ing around your PC at the operating system level. Rather than detailing

how to do that here, I’ll point you to this excellent primer on the myri-

ad ways to back up your files (go.pcworld.com/bufiles).

That’s not all you need to do, though. A recovery drive can help you

restore your Windows 8 installation if your Windows 8.1 adventure

somehow goes horribly wrong. Fortunately, Windows 8 makes it easy

to create just such a drive. Here’s how to do it.

You’ll need a USB drive with a bit of space on it; just how much space

depends on the size of your recovery partition, assuming you even

have one of your computer. Windows will let you know how much

space you need as part of the process of creating a recovery drive.

According to Microsoft’s FAQ (go.pcworld.com/msfaq), the standard

recovery partition requires 3GB to 6GB of space. If you don’t have a

dedicated recovery partition and just want to create a recovery image

A recovery

drive will help

you restore

your Windows 8

setup if things

go awry with

Windows 81.

to help you troubleshoot, refresh, and restore a

borked PC, that requires 256MB of space.

Once you’ve gotten your hands on an appropriate

drive, slap it in your PC. Be sure to save the data on

the drive to your PC or to another backup source;

the process of creating a recovery drive wipes all the

data on your memory stick.

Got it so far? Good. Open the charm bar, select

Search, and type Recovery. Then click the Settings fil-

ter in the right-hand charm menu. You’ll see a Create

a Recovery Drive option; select it.

A wizard pops up and from here, the process is pretty straightfor-

ward. Just be sure to select the right drive when you’re asked for a

location, because accidentally wiping the wrong storage device would

be a major headache.

Go forth and tinker

If you end up needing to restore your OS with the recovery drive,

you’ll need to have your Windows 8 installation disc or drive on

hand, so make sure you know where that’s at, too. With your data

stored in a safe place and a recovery image stored on a flash drive,

you’re ready to try all the goodies in Windows 8.1 with nary a thing

to sweat about. Check out our guide to installing the Windows 8.1

preview (go.pcworld.com/win81install), which outlines the system

requirements you need, the caveats you need to be aware of, and

walks you through the entire process.

HERE’S HOW

“Tales of installation woes drive home the point: Back up your system before you try Windows 8.1.”

HERE’S HOW

Fix pages that print too small

BY RICK BROIDA

HASSLE-FREE PC

READER TAMMY WROTE in to share this hassle:

“Whenever I try to print a page from the Internet, the

size of the print and the photos is extremely small and dif-

ficult to read. I do not have this problem with Microsoft

Word documents.”

Tammy said she runs Windows 8, but she neglected to

specify which Web browser she uses—so I’m going to

assume that it’s Internet Explorer.

Let me be the first to note that Internet Explorer can be

terrible when it comes to printing. On my Windows 8 system,

for example, I went to any number of pages on Microsoft’s

MSN (the default site for Internet Explorer) and then selected

Print Preview. The result I got every single time was several

Tweak IE’s set-

ting from ‘Shrink

to Fit’ to ‘100%’

to make webpag-

es you print out

more readable.

pages containing little more than links, with none of the actual text of

the story I was viewing.

So Tammy’s printing problem is not her fault. (It’s Microsoft’s. And

it’s ridiculous.) When webpages print out too small, the likely culprit is

the ‘Shrink to Fit’ option, which Internet Explorer uses by default to try

to squeeze all the elements of a webpage onto a single sheet of

paper—often at the expense of readability.

Thankfully, this problem is easy enough to fix. Here’s how:

1. Preview your page In Internet Explorer, while you’re viewing the webpage you want

to print, click the little gear icon in the upper-right corner and choose

Print Preview.

2. Shrink to fit In the preview window that appears, notice that in the tool-

bar’s print-size selector, the default setting is Shrink to Fit. Click that

pull-down menu and choose 100%.

3. Tweak it till it’s right Now you should see bigger text and photos. If everything

looks good, go ahead and click the printer icon to proceed with print-

ing. If you’re not happy with the way it all looks, click the selector

again and choose a different zoom setting.

It’s worth noting that your printer drivers could be a factor here as

well. If you press <Ctrl>-P and access the printer’s properties/set-

tings, you can look for a zoom setting that might be overriding the

browser’s settings.

You may also want to look for a Print or “printer-friendly” option on

the page you’re viewing, which will usually strip away the extraneous

graphics, ads, and whatnot that can fudge up the formatting (and

cause smaller-than-desirable print and graphics).

Finally, if you’re a Chrome user, check out the Print Friendly extension

(go.pcworld.com/printfriendly), which gives you much greater control

over all the webpages you print.

HERE’S

HOW

Wipe files—or your whole drive

» PLUS:

Make use of an old hard drive.

Q: How do I delete files off a hard drive so that they can

never be restored?” —Rommel

A: When you delete a file, it doesn’t actually go away—

even after you’ve emptied the Recycle Bin. The actual

bits remain written on the drive until some other disk activity

writes over them. Even after you reformat a drive, the files can

still be read by those who want—and know how—to read them.

To truly and securely delete a file, or the contents of an

entire drive, you need software that will overwrite the space

where the file(s) once resided. Fortunately, several free pro-

grams can do this.

First, I recommend Eraser (go.pcworld.com/3109hh1),

which integrates with Windows Explorer. Once you’ve

installed the utility, you can just right-click a file or folder and

select Eraser. From there, you can choose to erase the file

immediately or the next time you boot—handy if Windows

won’t let you erase it now.

BY LINCOLN SPECTOR

ANSWER LINE

Eraser lets you

securely delete

a sensitive file

or folder with a

single click.

Another option is to delete the files the conventional way—by

emptying the recycle bin—and then use CCleaner (go.pcworld.

com/3109hh2) to overwrite your drive’s free space. This extremely

useful tool can do all sorts of Windows scrubbing chores. You’ll find

CCleaner’s Drive Wiper tool in the Tools tab.

Both of these programs offer various wiping techniques that over-

write the drive space multiple times. The implication, of course, is that

overwriting a file 35 times is more secure than overwriting it only

once. But according to Russell Chozick of data-recovery firm Flashback

Data, one pass is enough with today’s drives. Chozick told me that it

“used to be possible to see what was overwritten, but now data is too

dense, [making] a single-pass overwrite sufficient.”

Something else to think about: If you have sensitive files that

you’ll eventually want to securely delete, you should encrypt them

now. For this task, I recommend the open-source Truecrypt (dona-

tion requested; go.pcworld.com/3109hh3).

CCleaner

removes all

traces of

deleted files by

overwriting

your drive’s

free space.

Q: I have an extra hard

drive. What can I do

with it? —Carol Hart

A: One useful thing you

can do with an old

drive is to give it away—to a

friend, a school, or a nonprofit,

for example.

Before you donate the drive,

however, you need to make sure

it contains no files that might

embarrass you or that might prove valuable to identity thieves. See

“Wipe Files—or Your Whole Drive,” above, for details.

You can also make use of the drive yourself. If your computer has an

extra drive bay (which is likely if you have a desktop PC), you can install

an old internal drive and gain a bit more storage. Assuming that the

drive connects via today’s standard SATA interface, this is a simple

operation. Older drives may use an IDE interface, which your PC’s

motherboard might not support.

Finally, you can turn an internal drive into an external one. All you

need is a USB enclosure. These generally cost about $20, but I’ve seen

them for as little as $10.

One more thing: If your PC doesn’t recognize the drive, read my

advice about how to fix this problem (go.pcworld.com/3109hh4).

And though my advice in that story focuses on internal drives, it

works for external drives, as well.

HERE’S HOW

Four ways to make Internet Explorer more secureBY ERIC GEIER

HOW WELL INTERNET Explorer—or any Web browser, for that mat-

ter—protects against attacks greatly depends on whether you keep it

up-to-date and have the right security settings. Here’s how to take

the proper security measures with Internet Explorer 9 and 10.

Keep IE Updated The latest versions of the browser often contain new security fea-

tures, so be sure you have the latest version installed, and that you

keep it updated. IE 10 is the most current version, and it comes bun-

dled with Windows 8. Microsoft also offers IE 10 for those running

Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 installed. But if you’re running Win-

dows Vista, you’re stuck with using IE 9. To determine whether you

have the latest version of IE installed, open IE, press the <Alt> key,

open the Help menu, and select About Internet Explorer.

Check to see

if you have the

latest version

of IE installed.

If needed, you can down-

load IE 10 for Windows 7

(go.pcworld.com/ie10win7)

or IE 9 for Windows Vista

(go.pcworld.com/ie9vista).

Once you have the latest

version installed, keep it up-

dated with the latest securi-

ty patches. To do this, open

IE, press the <Alt> key, select

the Tools menu, and choose

Windows Update. If you’re

using Windows 8, open IE in

the desktop interface.

In the Windows Update

window that appears, click

Check for updates, and install

IE or other updates. To en-

sure that you stay up-to-

date, consider having up-

dates installed automatically.

Check for Add-on Updates Many browser attacks exploit security vulnerabilities that affect popu-

lar add-ons like Adobe Flash Player or Java, so you should install

updates for those as soon as you get the update nag message. Also

consider periodically running a scan with free tools like Qualys

BrowserCheck (go.pcworld.com/hhqualsys) or Secunia Personal Soft-

ware Inspector (PSI) (go.pcworld.com/hhpsi).

Verify or Adjust Security Levels IE lets you set custom security settings for different zones: Internet,

Local Intranet, Trusted Sites, and Restricted Sites. When you visit a

website, IE automatically classifies it as in the Internet zone. The

exceptions are websites hosted by your local network (say, a site set

You can

customize

the security

settings for the

different types

of sites you

browse.

up for use on your company’s network)—then it’s Local Intranet—or

sites that you’ve added to the Trusted or Restricted lists beforehand.

Though IE sets each zone to an acceptable level by default, you may

want to double-check your settings for each zone and even turn them

up for greater protection. Open IE, press the Alt key, select the Tools

menu, and click Internet Options. If you’re using Windows 8, open IE

from the traditional desktop interface to get at these options.

From the Internet Options window, select the Security tab; you’ll

then see icons for each security zone, which you can click to change

their security level. The Internet zone is set to Medium-high by

default, Local Intranet is Medium-low, Trusted Sites is Medium, and

Restricted Sites is High. In addition, the Internet and Restricted Sites

zones both have Protected Mode enabled (which alerts you when web-

pages try to install or run programs). I recommend that you use these

default levels.

Use SmartScreen FilteringIn IE 8, Microsoft added the SmartScreen filter, which helps block dan-

gerous websites and downloads. It should be enabled by default, but

in case it’s not, open IE, press the <Alt> key, open the Tools menu, and

select SmartScreen Filter. If you see Turn On SmartScreen Filter, click it.

HERE’S HOW

Here’s what

you’ll see if

SmartScreen

filtering

encounters a

potentially

harmful site.

Four great, free Google Drive toolsBY MARK O’NEILL

THOUGH ONLY ABOUT a year old, Google Drive is already a popular

service, and its prices put Dropbox to shame. On Google Drive,

100GB costs $5 a month—half what Dropbox charges. But Google

Drive becomes even more useful when you take advantage of third-

party add-ons and services.

These five free, easy-to-use tools help you encrypt your data, play

music, collaborate on slides, back up automatically, share files, and

more. Some live on the desktop, some in Chrome, and some online.

HERE’S HOW

go.pcworld.com/ boxcryptor

BoxCryptor

1

go.pcworld.com/ drivetunes

DriveTunes

2

» You may be too security-conscious to leave files on a remote

server. Fair enough. But don’t let it keep you from using the

cloud. BoxCryptor is a Windows desktop app that creates an

encrypted folder that you can place in your Google Drive folder.

After you create the folder and assign a password, simply drag

and drop the files you want protected into that folder. BoxCryptor

instantly encrypts and protects them using the AES-256 encryp-

tion standard. To unlock the folder and view your files, run Box-

Cryptor, navigate to the encrypted folder, and enter your password.

» Cloud storage offers a simple way of ensuring that your music is

always available from anywhere you have an Internet connection.

Google Drive does not as yet provide a default music player, but the

DriveTunes app for the Chrome browser gives you another option.

DriveTunes places a music player inside your Google Drive folder.

It automatically detects all MP3 and M4A music files inside your

Drive and lists them in an easy-to-view interface. You simply

double-click a song to hear it. The player is bare-bones—no album

art, equalizers, or playlists. It plays your music and that’s it.

go.pcworld.com/googleslides

Google Slides

3

go.pcworld.com/ifttt2

IFTTT

4

» As long as there are

businesses, there will be

slideshows. But what if

you have to develop

a presentation with a

colleague who’s located

elsewhere? That’s where the collaborative power of Google Drive comes into

play. The Chrome app Google Slides lets you create slide presentations of any

size, with a variety of themes and rich animations, and then add your com-

ments right in the file—no more tedious email threads.

» Sending files and

backups to cloud stor-

age is a great idea, but

it’s a chore we all too

often forget or avoid.

The free Web service

IFTTT—which stands for If This Then That—makes the job easier by automat-

ing these tasks in the background, so you don’t have to even think about it.

HERE’S HOW

Maximize your laptop’s battery lifeBY PAUL MAHARAJA

YOU ADORE YOUR laptop—it’s the key to your competitive edge. That

is, until its battery croaks. To avoid that scenario, follow these tips to

maximize your laptop’s runtime.

1. Plug in whenever possible A common misconception about laptops is that leaving the sys-

tem plugged into AC power continuously will overcharge or shorten

the life of its battery. But lithium ion batteries in today’s laptops stop

charging once they reach full capacity. Keeping the battery charged

reduces wear and tear on the power source, lengthening its life span.

Never miss an

opportunity to plug

your laptop into an

AC outlet to top off

its battery.

2. Adjust the screen brightness A laptop’s display consumes a sizable chunk of the system’s

juice. Keeping the screen’s backlight low can increase your laptop’s

runtime noticeably.

Another way to reduce power consumption is to tweak the backlight

controls in Windows. Open Control Panel, choose Hardware and Sound u

Power Options, and click Change plan settings for the active power plan.

Choose an aggressive timeout of 1 to 3 minutes for the ‘Dim the

display’ and ‘Turn off the display’ options. You can also click Change

advanced power settings to set the level of brightness when the laptop

is in the dimmed state.

3. Track down errant apps Unnecessary utilities running in the background, or an app that

is hanging, can drain a battery prematurely. Web browsers are also com-

mon culprits. One clue to the existence of an errant app is if your laptop

fan frequently kicks into high gear when the machine should be idle.

Be aggressive

in conserving

power while

your laptop

is running on

battery power.

To identify such

apps, press

<Ctrl>-<Alt>-

<Delete>, launch

Windows Task

Manager, and use

it to identify pro-

cesses that are

showing unexplained

high utilization. If a

program won’t quit

normally, terminate

it by right-clicking it

and selecting Kill Pro-

cess. For Web brows-

ers, shutting off all

instances usually

works. As a last resort,

restart your system.

4. Disable intensive background apps: Errant apps aside, applications that make intensive use of the

processor or network—such as peer-to-peer software like BitTorrent cli-

ents—are out. You can also confirm that Windows Update and other

software updaters are not trying to download large software patches.

Disabling automatic Windows Update functions outright is too draconi-

an, but periodically check your network usage for unexplained spikes.

5. Disable unneeded devices: Start by disabling unneeded wireless capabilities, such as

built-in data modems and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios (many laptops

have hardware switches for this purpose). The optical drive is anoth-

er power guzzler, so don’t leave a disc in the drive if you aren’t using

it. Finally, you can save precious power by doing without keyboard

backlighting when you’re running on battery power.

HERE’S HOW

Use the tabs in

Windows Task

Manager to

identify and kill

errant programs

that are sucking

up battery life

unnecessarily.

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Correction

The August Issue’s review of Sony’s Xperia

ZL smartphone carried a photo of a

slightly different model, the Xperia Z.

PCWorld regrets the error.

Tech SpotlightA video showcase of

the latest trends

» 3D printing is becoming more

and more popular, with kits get-

ting cheaper and easier to

assemble—preassembled printers are increasingly avail-

able, too. They work by layering plastic less than a milli-

meter thick to create just about anything you can think

up: custom toys, household objects, and more. Watch

the video to see a 3D printer kit’s assembly, and learn a

bit about the process (go.pcworld.com/3Dvideo).

A look at

3D Printing