Table of contents for Jul-15 in PCWorld

“SO…WHEN’S THE CONSUMER VERSION of the Rift coming?” I’ve been asking Oculus that question since the first time I strapped one over my eyes, and every time cofounder Nate Mitchell would give me a rueful shake of the head. “We don’t know. It’s coming.” But we know: It’s Q1 2016. And thus it’s high time for Oculus to discuss what consumers will actually get their hands on next year and bring to an end this long and winding road. It’s a road that’s seen VR turn from a novelty into an arms race, that’s seen Oculus go from “easy frontrunner” to jockeying for position with Valve, that’s seen the fledgling company bought by Facebook of all things. It’s been weird. At an Oculus press conference in San Francisco, we got…

SCOTTY ZIFKA WAS looking for a sales job. He started one in late May at a company called EZ Tech Support, a small inbound call center in an older building in northeast Portland, Oregon. The first day of Zifka’s unpaid training involved listening in on sales calls. But within three hours, Zifka felt something wasn’t quite right. “Everything about it was so weird,” he recalled. The company’s 15 agents answer calls from people who’ve seen a pop-up message saying their computer may be having problems, and advising them to call a number, which rings at the offices of EZ Tech Support (eztech.support). The agents are instructed to stick to a 13-page script. They ask callers whether they have an antivirus program installed. If they do, Zifka said, callers are usually…

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS In this section, hardware & software go through rigorous testing. YOU KNOW HOW YOUR sandal-wearing, tablet-toting partner insists on organically grown, free-range, glutenfree water? Gamers are the same way about their rigs and their need for industry-standard parts. Proprietary? Might as well be a genetically modified flesh-eating tomato. Sure, proprietary gets you designs such as Apple’s Mac Pro, but you’re left high and dry when it’s time to upgrade. That won’t happen with CyberPower’s new Trinity Xtreme (go.pcworld.com/trinityxtreme), which gives you a truly exotic look without the penalties. What’s inside CyberPower sells several different versions of the Trinity. Its Trinity 100 runs on AMD APUs and rings in around the $1,000 mark. The Trinity 200 is the midrange part with Intel’s Haswell quad-core inside, while the…

LAST YEAR I CALLED the HyperX Cloud “one of the best sub-$100 gaming headsets I’ve ever used.” Apparently not content with that, Kingston went ahead and released the HyperX Cloud II (kingston.com/hyperx/cloud) this year—a little pricier, a little more refined. “Little” being the operative word here. Not much changed between the HyperX Cloud and its successor, but the two do differ in some key ways. Namely, the addition of a built-in USB sound card. Lateral moves In terms of the headset itself, the HyperX Cloud II is (as far as I can tell) identical to its predecessor. The colors have changed a bit, but it’s otherwise the same premium-feeling metal-and-“leather” I loved from the first iteration. In my original HyperX Cloud review I said, “The solid metal construction gives this…

I LOVE ANDROID, I love cars, and I love driving, so I was pretty excited when Google announced Android Auto (android.com/auto). And after using it for several weeks and giving the test vehicles back to their owners, I kind of miss it. Android Auto is still very much in its early stages. Unlike a smartphone, which you can easily trade in for a newer model, Android Auto requires more commitment. You have to either buy a car with an in-dash infotainment system that’s compatible with the software or pay to have it installed in an aftermarket setup. It isn’t cheap, and it’s not easy to swap out for something else. Once you have it in your car, you’ll soon realize it’s lacking some of the features it really needs to…

IN 2014, COMPANIES announced a security breach nearly every day (go.pcworld.com/threatreport), exposing an average of 1.1. million identities per breach. For consumers, the news appears grim. From ads on major websites infecting consumers’ systems to ransomware that can hold data hostage, criminals continue to successfully steal money and data from half a world away. If companies can’t protect themselves from the bad guys, what chance do individual users have? Even the police are falling prey (go.pcworld.com/policeransomware) to criminals. 1 IN 4 USERS ADMITTED THEY DID NOT KNOW WHAT THEY AGREED TO GIVE ACCESS TO ON THEIR PHONE WHEN DOWNLOADING AN APPLICATION. SOURCE: SYMANTEC In reality, consumers have a better chance than most companies. Yes, home users are overwhelmingly targets of opportunity, but they can protect themselves by making their systems…

I USUALLY ADVISE readers, but this time a reader gave me advice. Joe Rubenstein told me that “There is a Start Menu in Windows 8.1,” then explained how to make it work. Yes, it’s true. You can add a Start menu—of sorts—to the Windows 8.1 taskbar without installing a thirdparty program. All of the code is built into Windows itself. Three caveats: First, it’s too small for touchscreens; you’ll need a mouse. Second, Metro/Modern apps can’t launch from this menu. And finally, it doesn’t work with Windows 8.0. (Oddly, it works in Windows 7, where it’s completely redundant.) To make the menu appear, you must first unhide hidden files. Open File Explorer. Click the View tab, and check Hidden Items in the Show/Hide section. Right-click the taskbar and select…

CORTANA WILL BE ONE OF THE major features (go.pcworld.com/new10) to come to Windows 10, and at least one PC vendor plans to treat her especially well. Toshiba’s Windows 10 laptops will feature a dedicated Cortana button, for launching Microsoft’s digital assistant from your keyboard. The Cortana key will be on all of Toshiba’s Windows 10 PCs—“across the board, top to bottom,” according to Jeff Barney, the general manager and vice president in charge of Toshiba America’s PC business. The key will sit in the upper left area, near the function keys, he said. Triggering it will launch Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant. Cortana was first introduced as part of the Windows Phone platform as a way for users to interact with the operating system without using a keyboard. Tapping and holding…

THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS Commission plans to fine AT&T $100 million for misleading customers by throttling speeds on the lines of millions of customers who had “unlimited” data plans. The FCC alleges (go.pcworld.com/violation) that AT&T did not adequately disclose to its customers on 4G “unlimited” data plans that their speed would slow drastically after they had reached a monthly data allowance of 5GBs. The policy began in 2011. Data speeds were significantly slowed to 512kbps from the advertised 5Mbps to 12Mbps under something AT&T called its maximum bit rate policy. That very name is clearly at odds with an unlimited plan, a senior FCC official told reporters on a conference call. By not clearly informing consumers of this policy, AT&T was in violation of the Open Internet Transparency Rule of 2010,…

OUNCES COUNT IN CAVIAR, precious metals, and the laptop that’s carving a divot into your shoulder while you’re standing in line for the plane. It’s these folks Lenovo is hoping to snag with its new LaVie Z (go.pcworld.com/lenovo-laviez), which claims the title of being the lightest 13-inch laptop in the world. I can confirm after receiving our unit for testing that yes, the LaVie Z is so incredibly light, at 1.94 pounds, you’ll initially wonder if it has any components in it at all. Hell, I wondered if Lenovo had shipped us one of those fake display laptops they use at the furniture stores. But Nerd’s Honor, this is a fully functional machine. Even more surprisingly, it’s fast—though you’d expect nothing less with a Core i7-5500U, 8GB of LPDDR3, and…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/main gearepicvid WHEN YOU THROW down a fat roll of Benjamins for a top-end gaming PC, you’re going to want to feel like you got what you paid for it. While the cheap—er, frugal—crowd will never agree on the cost, it’s hard to believe anyone could disagree that Maingear’s Epic Force X99 (go.pcworld.com/maingearepic) isn’t one hell of an impressive rig. One glance at the specs will have any hardware aficionado swooning: First, there’s the Intel top-shelf Core i7-5960X chip overclocked to 4.5GHz, then there’s the 16GB of DDR4 running at 2800MHz, and finally there’s four GeForce Titan X cards. The liquid cooling really ties the room together That’s usually enough hardware to get anyone to agree that yes, this is bad-assery at its best. The real…

EVEN IF YOU RETIRED YOUR FITBIT or Fuelband to a desk drawer long ago, you may still find room in your heart for another activity-tracking wearable. No, not for you—for your dog. The Voyce health and wellness monitor (go.pcworld.com/voyce) bypasses human biology entirely, and sets its sights on Canis familiaris, a species with much less capricious technology habits. Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/voycevid Yeah, it’s another canine wearable. But instead of merely recording pawsteps, the Voyce band also tracks resting heart and respiratory rates, two biometrics that can provide deep insights into a dog’s health. My border collie mix, Whiskey, has been wearing Voyce for just over a month, and I’ve gathered a wealth of interesting data about just how much activity and sleep she’s really getting—along with reports on…

How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear. STUDIES HAVE SHOWN that dual monitors can increase productivity (go.pcworld.com/productivity), but the jury’s still out on whether adding even more monitors means even more productivity. That aside, having multiple monitors (and I’m talking three, four, five, or even six) is just… awesome, and something you totally need in your life. Right now, my main PC has a triple-monitor setup: my main 27-inch central monitor and my two 24-inch side monitors. I use my extra monitors for a number of things, such as comparing spreadsheets side-by-side, writing articles while also doing research, keeping tabs on my social media feeds, and, of course, watching Netflix. A vertically oriented monitor can save you a lot of scrolling trouble in long documents. If you’re a…

GOOGLE RECENTLY ADDED another option to its Takeout service that lets you export data from your Google account, and the latest addition is one of the most important: Your Google search history. Next to email, there’s nothing in your Google account that’s more revealing than your search history. Your personal collection of keywords can reveal the status of your personal relationship, the last time you were sick, if you’re looking for a career change, and where you’re planning to go on vacation. There isn’t much you’ll be able to do with your search history unless you’re a developer, as the archive is just a collection of JSON files (file.org/extension/json). Over time, however, other search services may let you import your Google search history. Here’s how to get exporting. Where to…

AMD’S FORMAL UNVEILING of the beastly new Radeon R9 Fury X (go.pcworld.com/r9) at E3 this year revealed a lot about the graphics card, but several technical details were left glaringly undetailed. Now, AMD’s taking the wraps off the rest of the information, giving us a full profile of its impressive new $650 flagship—a flagship where just as much care was spent on aesthetics as on raw technological firepower. For information about the rest of AMD’s new Radeon R300 series cards, which have been released, go here: go.pcworld.com/r300. We’ll go through it all in detail, but let’s kick things off with the premier feature: The Fury X’s revolutionary high-bandwidth memory. Traditional dies for GDDR5 DRAM need to be arrayed on the board around the graphics processor, which sucks up a ton…

Make smart purchases, stay safe online. IF YOU’RE IN a panic because the Internet told you that your shiny new SSD may lose data in “just a few days” when stored in a hot room, take a chill pill—it’s apparently all a huge misunderstanding. In a conversation with Kent Smith of Seagate and Alvin Cox, the Seagate engineer who wrote the presentation that set the Internet abuzz, PCWorld was told we’re all just reading it wrong. Misunderstanding “People have misunderstood the data,” Smith said. Cox agreed, saying there’s no reason to fret. “I wouldn’t worry about [losing data],” Cox told PCWorld. “This all pertains to end of life. As a consumer, an SSD product or even a flash product is never going to get to the point where it’s temperaturedependent…

AMAZON IS DRAMATICALLY expanding its same-day delivery service to cover millions of Americans. Called Prime Free Same-Day, the beefed-up offering is now available in 14 of the country’s major metropolitan areas. The service covers more than one million items in Amazon’s store to let you get that GoPro camera or Amazon Kindle before bedtime. Amazon is also unifying its same-day delivery policies by applying the same rules across the country. If you order by noon in an eligible area, you’ll get your items by 9 PM. Order between noon and midnight, and your order arrives the next day. Check out the company’s dedicated webpage (go.pcworld.com/sameday) for a complete list of Amazon same-day delivery areas. You can also search by zip code to see if your home is covered by the…

I’LL ADMIT: When Samsung first announced it was creating its own virtual reality headset, I rolled my eyes. “Oh great, another me-too product from Samsung,” I thought, envisioning a future where people’s first taste of virtual reality came from some half-baked piece of garbage Samsung pushed out the door to capitalize on the VR craze. The irony? I now use Samsung’s GearVR (go.pcworld.com/gearvr) almost exclusively to introduce someone to the world of virtual reality. It’s perfect for that purpose, even if it lacks the specs and depth to be a true enthusiast device. Untethered from reality GearVR is the best thing to happen to virtual reality so far, but not—I think—for the reasons Samsung intended. See, Samsung is selling GearVR as a consumer device. If you have a Note 4…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/lumia640vid MICROSOFT’S LUMIA 640 (go.pcworld.com/lumia640) is the tract home most Americans pretend to shun but end up buying anyway: friendly, unpretentious, with an exterior that cheerfully advertises something different in just a few stock colors. Inside, it’s the same home as the rest of the block, with a few upgrades. Think of the new Windows Phone 8.1 Update 2 that powers it as the granite countertops and track lighting of Microsoft’s suburbia. And it’s cheap: just $130, according to Cricket, the first carrier to offer the phone. There’s even a move-in special, a free year’s subscription to Office 365 Personal worth $70 if you buy the phone before June 30. Once you’re settled, though, chances are you’re going to feel a bit cramped. Neighbors in the…

ADD-ONS ARE A great way to give Google Drive’s productivity suite a little more horsepower. These four offer creative solutions for collaborating, automating document workflow, and mapping data and ideas. Give them a try, and push your productivity to new levels. Uberconference By its nature, Google Docs is a collaboration tool. The Uberconference add-on extends its power by getting all a document’s contributors together on a conference call right within the doc itself. Once you launch the add-on, click to invite participants and a list of the document’s viewers and editors will appear in its right sidebar. You can edit the list of participants before you invite them. Once they join, you’ll all be able to hear and see each other as you work on your document and even record…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/picobrewvid PicoBrew Zymatic: Craft beer in a cloud-connected appliance The Zymatic is not like an espresso machine or Sodastream for beer, so if you’re looking for instant gratification (let alone an instant buzz), just buy a six-pack instead. Beer brewing is typically a one- to threeweek operation that involves big pots and buckets, precision temperature control, and strict respect for sanitization and other best practices. The Zymatic streamlines much of this rigmarole, but it’s not a miracle worker, so you’ll still need to wait quite a while for your beer.…