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IT’S A CLASSIC physics question: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? In this case, the unstoppable force is the online advertising industry, which earns its bread by tracking consumers’ click-by-click behavior and using that data to display targeted ads. The immovable object is Microsoft, whose upcoming Internet Explorer 10 browser in Windows 8 makes tracking an option, not the default. Tracking is the latest battlefield in the privacy wars. (See Mark Sullivan’s sobering “Data Snatchers! The Booming Market for Your Online Identity” on page 77 for details on how your personal data is collected, shared, and sold.) In fact, tracking has become so troubling that the Obama administration ordered the ad industry to devise a plan to protect consumers. The Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry coalition,…

APPLE’S iOS 6 will continue to leapfrog with the competition, adding long-requested features as well as new surprises. But if you were hoping for big changes to the iPhone’s operating system, you’ll have to keep waiting. An iPhone with iOS 6 is still essentially a launcher for apps and services. It looks as dependable as ever, but it’s getting kind of dull. Admittedly, apps and services will get better in iOS 6. Maps will improve with turn-by-turn navigation. Mail will finally allow photo and video attachments. A “Do Not Disturb” mode will enhance notifications. Facetime will gain support for cellular networks and be able to answer phone calls as video chats. A new service called Passbook will let people store tickets, passes, gift cards, and other documents in digital form.…

MAKING VIDEOS is a way to connect with customers, market your wares, and increase your visibility to search engines. Frequently, Google places videos at the top of its search results. Videos can add real value—and potentially lots of it—to a business because users watch them. Consumers are interested in how corporate America works, and there are lots of ways to reveal, expound upon, or satirize it for entertainment gold. Dare to be funny: Humorous videos make the biggest overnight YouTube hits. For instance, a coffee shop could create a lowlight reel of awful open-mic performances, or a hoax cooking show. A jeweler could make a faux Home Shopping Network segment, complete with callers dialing in. A corporate branding expert could stage a product-name brainstorming skit in a conference room, Mad…

WHEN WINDOWS 8 comes out later this year, the new Start screen and Metro-style apps will likely be the first changes you’ll notice. But Microsoft is also making some serious security enhancements in the OS—and the result just may be the biggest improvement to Windows security yet. Antivirus Comes Preinstalled You’ll enjoy protection from viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, rootkits, and other malware from the first day you turn on your Windows 8 PC. The updated Windows Defender now includes traditional antivirus functions on top of the spyware safeguards and other security features that it has had since Windows Vista. As a result, it’s now similar in function (and in look and feel) to the free Microsoft Security Essentials optional download. Since Windows Defender will provide at least basic virus and…

PARAGON’S HARD DISK Manager 12 Professional ($100) is a comprehensive toolset for hard drives. Partition functions include creating, moving, formatting, deleting, backing up, burning to CD, converting the file system, and wiping. You can do the same operations with entire disks, and you can back up and restore individual files and folders. Support for virtual machines is included as well. See find.pcworld.com/73057 for a features comparison between the Pro edition and the $50 Suite version. I love the fairly straightforward, everything-under-one-roof interface; using it is more convenient than jumping between modules. I also like the fact that you define a series of actions, and then set them in motion with the Apply button. But I’d rather see standard Windows file dialog boxes, which are easier to use than Paragon’s boxes.…

IN DAYS GONE by, all you needed to make a website was a Geocities account and some basic knowledge of HTML. Times have changed, though, and now people build websites using at least one advanced coding language. To build apps and services for the Web, you need to learn one of these languages. (For links to the sites and services noted here, go to find.pcworld.com/73018.) Choosing a Language Your first decision is whether to learn front-end or back-end coding. Front-end coding relates to the appearance of your website. It concentrates on extending the basics established with HTML and CSS so you can customize your site even more. Back-end coding focuses on the work behind the scenes—server-side tasks such as setting up and manipulating databases that feed into the Web so…

TO SECURE THE connection between your email provider and your computer or other device, you need to set up Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption—the protection scheme you depend on when checking your bank account or buying online. If you check your email from a Web browser, make sure that SSL/TLS encryption is active; if it is, the website address, or URL, will begin with https instead of http. If you don’t see ‘https’, type an s at the end of ‘http’ and press <Enter>. Browse your account settings to see if you can activate encryption by default for future logins. If not, check with your provider—it may not support SSL/TLS. For much more on email encryption (including encryption with desktop clients), go to find.pcworld.com/72924.…

PUT A ROMANTIC glow in your portraits. Here’s how. Open the photo that you want to tweak in your favorite photo editor. Choose a portrait of a single person in which the overall exposure is about right, and the person fills a lot of the frame. Here I’ll use Corel’s PaintShop Pro X4, but you can easily apply the steps to Adobe Photoshop Elements, GIMP, or any editing program that supports layers. We want to stack two identical copies of the photo, so make a duplicate layer. In PaintShop Pro, choose Layers > Duplicate, and then click OK. You should see a second layer appear in the Layers palette on the right side of the screen. Confirm that the top layer is selected in this palette, and then choose Adjust…

RECENT SALES numbers for Windows Phone 7 aren’t looking good. According to the NPD Group, Windows Phone represented 2 percent of new smartphone sales in the United States during the first quarter of 2012. Nielsen reported still worse numbers for Windows Phone: a 1.7 percent market share among U.S. smartphone owners in the first quarter. Even Windows Mobile, Microsoft’s older mobile platform, has a 4.1 percent market share. Yikes. I praised Microsoft’s revamped mobile platform when it launched at Mobile World Congress in 2010. I was also quite enthusiastic about the Windows Phone 7.5 update, also known as “Mango.” But over the past year, I’ve become less confident that the platform will ever become a strong competitor to Android and iOS. With Windows 8 on the horizon, what’s next for…

THE ARDUINO MICROCONTROLLER can help you develop some awesome projects involving robotics, home automation, and the like. A huge community of Arduino users exists, and they’ve assembled tons of tutorials and code examples that are easy to modify and learn from (see find.pcworld.com/73064 for a brief overview). But other options may be as good as Arduino to work with, depending on your situation. BeagleBone: This microcontroller from Texas Instruments ($89, beagleboard.org/bone) has a powerful processor, an ethernet port built into the board, and a MicroSD card slot. These features make connecting to and programming the BeagleBone via USB or over your network a breeze. The included 4GB MicroSD card comes with the Angstrom Distribution of Linux (find.pcworld.com/73065) preinstalled, so your PC can recognize it as an external drive. Teensy/Teensy++: As…

AMONG THE BEST-KEPT secrets in the business world are email reminder services, which can turn overloaded inboxes into productivity powerhouses. I use my email inbox as a kind of to-do list, marking as unread any messages I don’t have time to answer now or need to act on later. But as my inbox fills up with other mail, those messages get pushed lower and lower, until they’re forced out of sight—and out of mind. A reminder service works kind of like an email snooze button. You forward a message to an email address that the service specifies; and at the designated time, the message will return to your inbox. For example, if a PR person emails me about a new product launch that’s happening next Monday, I may decide to…

HTML5 is the new markup language of the Web. Adobe’s HTML5-oriented Creative Suite 6, a collection of design tools for the Web and multimedia, comprises 14 applications grouped into four major bundles, some with enhanced versions: Design Standard ($1299), Design and Web Premium ($1899), Production Premium (also $1899), and Master Collection ($2599). You can also buy nearly all of the applications individually. Photoshop (image editing) runs for $699, Premiere Pro (video editing) is $799, and Dreamweaver (Web development) is $399. Creative Suite 6 is full of technological triumphs, from Photoshop CS6’s and Premiere Pro CS6’s use of GPU acceleration to Dreamweaver CS6’s ability to output smartphone apps for almost any mobile operating system by transferring their production to the cloud. We review those three major applications here. Dreamweaver CS6 In…

THE 14-MEGAPIXEL Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS20 ($350) is about as loaded as pocket-size cameras get. Sporting a 20X-optical-zoom (24mm to 480mm) lens, this reasonably priced pocket megazoom offers aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and full manual exposure controls. It shoots full 1080p video at 60 frames per second, too, and it boasts futuristic extras such as 3D still shooting, GPS with mapping, and continuous-shooting speeds that reach up to 10 fps at full 14-megapixel resolution and 60 fps at 2.5-megapixel resolution. In Intelligent Auto mode, the ZS20 captured understated photos that earned scores of Good in PCWorld Labs tests of exposure quality, color accuracy, and sharpness; in image distortion, we gave it only a Fair grade. The ZS20 had Good marks for video and audio. Its 1080p AVCHD clips shot at 60 fps in…

NVIDIA’S GTX 670 offers performance as good as or better than that of last year’s high-end GTX 580, while consuming less power. At roughly $399, it’s not a budget graphics card, but it is affordable for users looking for robust PC gaming on HD-resolution displays. In the 3DMark 2011 benchmark, it easily bested the GTX 580 as well as both current high-end GPUs from AMD, the Radeon HD 7950 and the Radeon HD 7970. Across our collection of five DirectX 11 test games, the GTX 670 averaged a frame rate of 62 frames per second, essentially finishing in a dead heat with the pricier Radeon HD 7970. Under full load—measured when running 3DMark 2011 at very high resolutions and with all features maxed—the GTX 670 ranked as the most power-efficient…

THE FREE CHROME extension Drag and Drop Search provides an elegant way to deal with a common hassle: searching for information on a particular engine or website. With Drag and Drop Search installed, you need only select a term and then drag and drop it onto the name of the search engine or site you wish to use. Drag and Drop Search overlays your window with a four-by-four grid. By default, the center of the grid is clear, and the shaded cells on the perimeter are each assigned to a different site or search engine, such as Delicious, Twitter, and Wiki-pedia. Select any word or term on the current page, start dragging, and the grid appears. When you drop the term on the cell for the site you want to…

CRAZY4LAPTOPS needs to extend a Wi-Fi network throughout a “rather long house.” He asked the Networking forum for advice. You can extend a connection in several ways. One approach is to build a better antenna. A parabolic reflector, for instance, will focus the beam in a particular direction (read more at find.pcworld.com/73019). Wireless repeaters provide another option. These are basically range extenders. You position them in the outer range of the router’s good signal, and they repeat the signals they receive. But I most prefer HomePlug technology (homeplug.org). Its standard sends network data over a building’s AC power at near-ethernet speeds, and it is the most easily plug-and-play. I’ve read about interference problems with ham radios and wireless mice. But I use such a mouse near a HomePlug adapter, and…

WHAT SHOULD YOU do if you can’t access a file, despite being logged in as an administrator? Taking ownership of the file or directory would help you gain access to it, and some strategic Registry editing can put such ownership a mere right-click away, by adding the option to the Context Menu. First, select and copy all of the text listed below (you can accomplish this task easily by going to find.pcworld.com/73023): Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas] @=”Take Ownership” “NoWorkingDirectory”=”” [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas\command] @=”cmd.exe/c takeown/f \”%1\” && icacls \”%1\”/grant administrators:F” “IsolatedCommand”=”cmd.exe/c takeown/f \”%1\” && icacls \”%1\”/grant administrators:F” [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas] @=”Take Ownership” “NoWorkingDirectory”=”” [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas\command] @=”cmd.exe/c takeown/f \”%1\”/r/d y && icacls \”%1\”/grant administrators:F/t” “IsolatedCommand”=”cmd.exe/c takeown/f \”%1\”/r/d y && icacls \”%1\”/grant administrators:F/t” Paste the text into a new Notepad document, and save it with a…

ENGINEERS HAVE BEEN working on developing flexible displays for years. But until this year, we’ve only seen prototypes of bendable screens. In 2008, HP and the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University unveiled a prototype of an affordable, flexible electronic display that used self-aligned imprint lithography technology. The paperlike computer displays are made almost entirely of plastic, which makes them durable, movable, and portable. And in 2010, Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute and AU Optronics teamed up to develop a manufacturing process for flexible e-reader displays using AMOLED technology. Then last fall, Nokia showed off a working prototype of a kinetic device that had a flexible OLED display. To interact with it, you had to hold the gadget in both hands, which allowed you to flex and bend it…

THREE RECENT Windows 7 tablets artfully balance performance, battery life, build quality, and overall features—in strikingly different ways. Here’s a closer look. For a full a comparison of Windows tablets, see find.pcworld.com/73081. Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 The Stylistic Q550 ($849 as reviewed) carries a 1.5GHz Intel Atom Z670 processor and 2GB of RAM, and comes crammed with business features such as a fingerprint scanner, a smart-card reader, and a removable battery. Storage options include either a 30GB or 62GB solid-state drive; and you can expand the available space via the tablet’s SD Card slot. Wireless connectivity includes Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. A rear-facing 1.3-megapixel camera and a front-facing VGA camera handle image-capture chores; image quality is passable for videoconferencing or snapping quick photos in the field, but not much…

COREL WORDPERFECT Office X6 continues a tradition of giving particular groups of users assorted features that they won’t find in Microsoft Office, while maintaining compatibility with Office’s formats. The added features in X6, including the ability to create ebooks in the Amazon Kindle .mobi format, aren’t jaw-dropping. But the suite has many tweaks that certain users will welcome. New Applications WinZip and WinZip Courier (for zipping large email attachments) are now in all editions, and Corel VideoStudio Essentials X4 is in the $250 Standard, $400 Professional, and $380 Legal editions (but not in the $100 Home & Student). Existing users are eligible for $160 and $260 upgrades of Standard and Pro, respectively. Along with WordPerfect (word processing), Quattro Pro (spreadsheets), and Presentations, Corel packs in an array of tools, such…

CYBERLINK MEDIASUITE 10 Ultra ($130 for new users and a $70 upgrade) is the latest flagship version of CyberLink’s multimedia editing, playback, and conversion suite. Its components consist of the biggest names in the company’s impressive portfolio, such as PowerDVD 12 and PowerDirector 10. Efficient Design MediaSuite 10’s new central launcher is far more slick than those of previous versions. The look is reminiscent of Microsoft’s Metro interface (which suggests that CyberLink will be all over Windows 8). You can access the modules via a list of the tasks they perform, or by their names. In general, the modules are simple to use, though not so easy to learn. CyberLink loves tiny icons, and curious interface choices appear throughout; however, compared with its two main rivals in the suite game—Nero…

$400 Camera Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 combines a fast F2.0 lens with lightning-quick focusing, and it tops the manual exposure controls that most advanced point-and-shoot cameras offer by adding shutter and aperture controls in video mode. Because the LX5 has been around for a while, you can snap it up for less than $400, a great price for one of the best manual-oriented compact cameras on the market. find.pcworld.com/72998 Plasma HDTV Panasonic VT Series NO TV MAKER takes plasma sets as seriously as Panasonic does. If you like the deep blacks and smooth motion that plasma TVs can provide, you will love the VT series (65-inch model, $3700; 55-inch model, $2500), which also features multitasking apps and a smaller energy footprint. find.pcworld.com/73015 Android Phone Samsung Galaxy S…

THOUGH LAPTOP manufacturers have made great strides over the past few years in increasing the efficiency (and thus the battery life) of their products, even the most efficient new models don’t last long enough for many users. You may not realize, however, that your portable system is probably loaded with integrated peripherals and bloatware that you’ll never use but that still consume resources and reduce battery life. Here, we’ll look at ways to improve that situation. Some of the steps may require venturing into the BIOS or UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of your notebook, while others are simpler software tweaks. Know What Kills Your Battery Before diving in, let’s review why notebook batteries die in the first place. From the CPU to the touchpad, every component in a laptop…

I’M GUESSING that JMDraft’s computer has too many autoloaders, programs that load automatically every time the machine boots. This is a common problem. Most PCs leave the factory with too many autoloaders from preinstalled software, and they gain more as users install new programs. I’m referring here to programs that you want and use, but that you don’t need to have running constantly. Which programs should be autoloaders? Just these: • Your antivirus program and firewall, or security suite • For a laptop, the battery-monitoring program (maybe) • Programs that you feel have a legitimate reason to be there all the time (some programs must autoload to work). First, find the autoloaders: Click Start, type msconfig, and press <Enter>. (If you use XP, click Start >Run before typing.) Once the…

MY ROKU SET-TOP box (roku.com) delivers everything I could possibly want to my TV—but it can’t stream my personal library of music, photos, and videos. Not without a little help, anyway. Plex is a free application for streaming media from your PC to your Roku box. It works like a charm, though it can be somewhat tricky to set up. Here’s how to get started with Plex: 1. Add the Plex channel to your Roku account. 2. Download and install the Plex Media Server utility for Windows (go to find.pcworld.com/ 73022 for the download). This is the software that will link your media library to your Roku box. 3. Right-click the Plex Media Server icon in your System Tray; then choose Media Manager. That should open a new tab in…