Table of contents for Feb-12 in PCWorld

FLIPIT This charger from Ideative Product Ventures turns one wall socket into two. A small plastic power tab slips over another device’s plug. The tab then sits between the wall outlet and the plug. The $16 Flipit can grab up to 1 amp of power from the outlet. INNERGIE The Innergie Magic Cable Trio has a standard USB connector on one end and an interlocking triple connection on the other (Micro-USB, Mini-USB, and a 30-pin Apple connector). It costs $20 and must be paired with an Innergie plug, such as the $25, 15W Dual USB Adapter. POWER2U Simply plug a USB cord directly into the $40 Power2U AC/USB wall outlet from Newer Technology. The product features two standard electrical wall sockets and two dual USB 2.0/3.0 ports; the ports deliver…

THE SkyDrive cloud storage service from Microsoft debuted for iPhones in December. It had been available to Windows users for several years and on Windows Phone 7 devices more recently. Microsoft’s SkyDrive has one big advantage over services like Box.net, Dropbox, and Apple’s iCloud that you may already use: It offers 25GB of free storage, versus just 2GB on Dropbox, and 5GB on iCloud and Box.net. You can also stream songs that you store on SkyDrive directly onto your iPhone. In a hands-on tour of SkyDrive for iOS, I found the service great for accessing files remotely. But SkyDrive lacks advanced functionality such as the ability to open a file in an external app.…

THE ONE ESSENTIAL element of a cell phone, you might well think, is phone service. But now that you have so many options—Skype, Google Voice, and various other Voice-over-IP apps—for talking on your cell phone, does it make sense to pay your wireless carrier $40 to $70 per month for your voice-calling minutes? To test the feasibility of dropping standard voice service, I went VoIP-only for a week, relying on a T-Mobile/Walmart prepaid plan that offers 5GB of 4G data on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ 14.4 network, plus 100 voice minutes, for just $30 per month. For my experiment, I used T-Mobile’s Exhibit II 4G, the flagship phone for this plan. The Android 2.3 Gingerbread handset sells for $200 with no contract—not a bad deal for a budget-minded buyer. Plenty of VoIP…

IF YOU ACCESS the Web through Verizon’s wireless or fiber-optic Internet network, the advertisements that pop up in your browser will soon get a little more personal. The company recently announced that it will allow advertisers to target its network’s customers based on their geographical location. Verizon will use a subscriber’s local address to determine whether the individual resides in an area that a particular advertiser is trying to reach. The carrier promises that it won’t share its customers’ home addresses with advertisers, so the advertisers won’t know precisely where subscribers live. In an email message to customers in November, the company announced its plans to “participate in a program that will improve the ability of advertisers to reach our Verizon Online customers based on your physical address.” Verizon is…

FIRST WE HAD laptops and PDAs. Then the iPhone led the way to ubiquitous smartphones, and the iPad ushered in the era of tablets. These days, wireless hotspots, printers, storage devices, and various other equipment are making their way onto your office network, possibly without managers’ knowledge. All of these devices have the potential to compromise your business’s security, whether by introducing malware onto other networked devices or by transporting company data outside the network. Fortunately, antivirus and encryption apps are available for all the major smartphone and tablet platforms, and most of them allow remote management. Here are some tips for dealing with staffers’ assorted mobile gear. 1 Create formal policies for mobile devices: You can’t ask users to abide by a security policy if you don’t have one…

HOW MUCH DOES it cost to crack Blu-ray encryption? Not much, apparently: Researchers at the Secure Hardware Group of Germany’s Ruhr University of Bochum have cracked Intel’s encryption protocol protecting Blu-ray Discs and other high-definition media, using a custom board that costs just $267. When you watch a Blu-ray movie on your TV or PC, Intel’s High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection protocol, which has been around for nearly a decade, encrypts and copy-protects the HD channel. Hackers cracked the HDCP master key in September 2010. At the time, Intel wrote it off as a minor threat—a person would have to “make a computer chip of their own” to use the code, according to Fox News. Well, the university researchers found another way. To crack Intel’s HDCP encryption, the researchers used a…

SOME PEOPLE WANT to buy a tablet—cheap. For those frugal shoppers, the main choices are the $200 Amazon Kindle Fire and the $250 Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet. To bring their models in at a relatively low price, Amazon and Barnes & Noble had to make sacrifices. So neither unit matches the versatility of the Apple iPad 2, or even of a well-appointed Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet. In my tests, neither had dramatically different performance, and both had glitches. READING: Trade and mass-market books, textbooks, magazines, newspapers, and children’s books all look and function better on the Nook than they do on the Kindle. The Nook Tablet is the clear winner at rendering text, and includes larger font sizes. Barnes & Noble seems to offer more periodicals than Amazon, and…

WITH ITS 4.3-INCH display, LTE connectivity, and dual-core processor, the Droid Razr ($300 with a two-year Verizon contract) is a far cry from the old flip-style Razr, though both phones have superthin, tough designs. The front of the phone is all Corning Gorilla Glass with a diamond-cut Motorola nameplate. The soft-touch back is made of Kevlar, which Motorola says is five times stronger than steel. The phone feels solid, but not bulky, at 5.5 by 2.71 by 0.28 inches and 4.48 ounces. That solid feel comes from the Droid Razr’s stainless-steel core. Splashguard technology protects the device from rain or spilled drinks. The Droid Razr’s 4.3-inch 960-by-540-pixel Super AMOLED display offers excellent viewing angles and visibility outdoors, with deep blacks and bright whites but slightly oversaturated colors. The Droid Razr…

Unless it’s brand-new, your PC probably doesn’t work as well as you’d like. That’s why we asked our crack team of hardened PC gurus for solutions to the most common problems. Read on to make your system boot faster, ditch pesky malware, solve networking nightmares, and repair Windows without reinstalling it—and to find the quick fixes for minor daily annoyances. Boot Faster | BY LOYD CASE | Want your PC to boot faster, but don’t feel like spending the cash for a solid-state drive? A few Windows tweaks can speed up your boot time. First, measure how long your system takes to start up before trying any tweaks. Create a text file containing the text “Stop the Stopwatch.” Drop this into the Windows startup applications folder at C:\Users\your username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup.…

YOUR WINDOWS PC may be running smoothly, but if Microsoft Office is acting up, that headache can still ruin your day. Here are a few popular Office fixes you should know. Q. Not a fan of 11-point Calibri? A. Change the default Microsoft Word font. You can change Word’s default font by adjusting the Normal template. On the Home tab, in the Styles section, click the small box with an arrow to bring up the Styles window; in that screen, right-click the Normal box, and select Modify. Select a new font from the drop-down menu, and then click New documents based on this template before clicking OK. Q. Is Excel running slowly? A. Turn off automatic calculations. If your workbooks are very complicated, simply changing one number can affect hundreds…

SINCE INTEL HAS trademarked the Ultrabook name, the company isn’t going to let PC makers slap the label on just any skinny laptop. A few requirements are involved. According to Intel, a laptop has to meet these five characteristics to qualify for the Ultrabook label. QUICK STARTUP Going from hibernate to keyboard interaction must take 7 seconds or less. Resume from sleep should be even faster than that. LONG BATTERY LIFE The minimum for a single charge of the battery is 5 hours, and some models promise up to 8 hours. THINNESS Ultrabooks need to be less than 21mm (0.82 inch) thick. Most models that have come out so far are much thinner. ENHANCED SECURITY The laptop firmware has to support Intel’s Anti-Theft and Identity Protection technology. POWERED BY INTEL…

WEB COOKIES OFTEN make browsing faster and more convenient, but they can threaten your privacy if an attacker tries to exploit them. To protect yourself, you can remove individual cookies, or delete them en masse. Here’s how to do the latter. In Chrome version 14 or higher, click the wrench at the upper right, and select Options. Next, choose Under the Hood. Below Privacy, click Content Settings. In the Cookies section, click All cookies and site data. Click Remove All when the list appears. For the latest version of Firefox, select the Firefox menu. Choose Options and then Options again. Click the Privacy tab. Under History, click Remove Individual Cookies. At the bottom of the Cookies window, click Remove All Cookies. In the latest Internet Explorer, select the Tools menu,…

Tech Revolutions I’d just like to note that optical drives, FireWire, brick-and-mortar music stores, phones with buttons, and netbooks all still exist. I’d also like to note that there will not be a post-PC era anytime soon. “PC” stands for “personal computer,” and people will probably have a PC (even in tablet form) for many, many generations to come. Yes, I know what Steve Jobs meant, but his choice of words was probably also deliberate, since most Windows machines are referred to as “PCs.” And how did the iPhone “[change] the nature of phones”? The original iPhone really wasn’t all that different from what already existed on the market. KLanD, PCWorld.com forums “Keyboard-and-mouse input may be on the way out”? Get real! While for select usages they do just fine,…

YOU MIGHT THINK that you don’t have to worry about security while playing games—after all, that activity is about as far from online banking as you can get—but as the PlayStation Network data breach (find.pcworld.com/72121) and the more recent hack into the servers of the Steam gaming platform (find.pcworld.com/72450) both show, you are vulnerable, even when you’re at play. However, just taking some basic steps can keep your data more secure, and let you focus on holding down the fort against The Horde. You still need to keep data security in mind when playing games online, as recent incidents have shown. To that end, here are some safeguards you can take. Use strong passwords: This one step seems obvious, but it bears repeating. Your password is your first line of…

IT’S EASY TO ignore the controversy surrounding copyright protection legislation such as the Stop Online Piracy Act or the Protect IP Act, both of which threaten to curtail free speech on the Internet by allowing the U.S. Department of Justice to blacklist and block access to websites suspected of copyright infringement (neither bill has passed as of this writing). But if your Internet service provider becomes legally obligated to prevent you from accessing restricted websites, it might use deep packet inspection tools to keep tabs on you. Your PC turns all the information you send and receive online into data packets. Internet routers read the labels on those packets to determine what they are, who they’re from, and where they’re going; this is how most Internet traffic works, and how…

THE HP TOPSHOT LaserJet Pro M275 is a color laser multifunction printer that prints, copies, and scans; it also comes with an elevated, 8-megapixel camera that makes taking images of small three-dimensional objects almost as easy as making a photocopy. Though this $400 machine is built on a rather slow color laser with costly toner, the camera feature should nevertheless appeal to people who take a lot of product shots for promotional or artistic purposes. All other color laser MFPs we’ve tested have a traditional, slow-moving scanner head with a flatbed platen. Only one other machine we’ve seen, Lexmark’s Genesis color inkjet MFP, uses a camera for taking images, but it still has a platen. 3D Imaging The camera sits on an arm that raises it about 8.5 inches…

THE WACOM INKLING is a device designed to record initial drawings, and quickly and easily transfer those images from the paper to your computer. It consists of a pen that transmits its position on the page (along with pressure data from readings at up to 1024 levels of sensitivity) and a receiver that clips to the top of the page and collects data from the pen via ultrasonic and infrared technology. The Inkling saves all data as vector drawings, which simplifies editing and minimizes the files’ storage requirements in the device’s 2GB of memory. Creating a drawing with the Inkling is much like creating one on a digital tablet: You simply draw. In practice, though, I ran into various problems with the pen—the most serious of which is its temperamental…

VERSION 5 OF the easy-to-use, but sometimes restrictive Carbonite Home online backup service ($59 a year, 15-day free trial) offers possibly useful enhancements in two new tiers of service. Carbonite Home gives unlimited storage, but no local backup—and by default, it won’t automatically select video files and some other files nested within a folder. The two new tiers of service are HomePlus ($99) and HomePremier ($149). HomePlus lets you back up external hard drives attached to your PC and create an image of your system to a local hard drive. HomePremier provides those features plus a courier service to overnight a physical copy of your data to you for quick restoration. Of course, if you have a recent local backup, restoring from that copy is even faster. Carbonite’s ability to…

OPEN APPS THE EASY WAY IN WINDOWS 7: Do you want to launch programs in Windows 7 without lifting your hands from the keyboard? You can open any application by pressing the <Windows> key and typing the first few letters of the application’s name (chr for Google Chrome, it for iTunes, and the like), and then pressing <Enter>. You can also press <Windows>-1 to open the first program pinned on your taskbar, <Windows>-2 to open the second app, and so on.—Rick Broida TWEAK WINDOWS’AUTOPLAY SETTINGS: Ever wonder why DVD movies automatically start playing from the moment you pop them into your PC? That’s Windows AutoPlay at work. Just go to Control Panel • AutoPlay, and use the drop-down menus to tell Windows exactly what you want it to do…

Case Corsair Obsidian 650D $190 CPU Intel Corei7-3960X $1100 (estimated) CPU Cooler Intel RTS2011LC Sealed Liquid Cooler $90 (estimated) Motherboard Asus P9X79 Deluxe $300 (estimated) Graphics Cards EVGA GTX 580 Classified 3GB $1220 (for two) RAM Corsair Dominator 2133MHz 16GB DDR3 RAM Kit $300 (estimated) Storage Drives Corsair Force GT 240GB solid-state drive $820 (for two) Power Supply Corsair AX1200 1200W $300 Optical Drive Asus BW-12B1LT Blu-ray burner $130 OS Windows 7 Ultimate OEM $185…

My home Wi-Fi connection uses WPA2 protection. Is it secure enough for online banking? —Darryl Boyett I CAN’T PROMISE that it is absolutely, 100 percent safe; but yes, it is secure enough. If you have a router (you should), and if you have not turned off its wireless capabilities, you really need to secure that Wi-Fi connection. Currently WPA2 is the safest way to accomplish that. An unsecured connection gives neighbors and strangers access to your Internet service, and possibly to your home network. They could stream video over your connection, slowing your Internet access. If they have the skills, they might search your hard drive for bank account numbers and other sensitive data. Even worse, they could download something illegal, such as child pornography, and it would look…

SHOW OF HANDS if this situation sounds familiar: You step away from the computer for a while, or even overnight, and when you come back to the PC, all your open applications and documents are gone. Why? Simple: Windows downloaded and installed some updates automatically, and then promptly rebooted itself without your permission. Gah! This happened to me again just recently, and I almost lost some in-progress work as a result. Thankfully, Word had automatically saved my open document beforehand, and Chrome was smart enough to reopen all of the tabs that I had been viewing. Even so, I think it’s ridiculous that Windows would ever reboot without receiving a go-ahead from me. I’m happy to report that Windows continues to offer an easy fix for this issue—if you remember…

Any Cause for Concern? Dan Elliott, of Calgary, Alberta, stumbled upon this spelling-and grammar-challenged error message while trying to load a driver for a LAN card. In accordance with the dialog box’s instructions, Elliott promptly began to worry. Get Back to Work, Slacker A COWORKER SENT Tim Kooima, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, this screenshot, showing his status on Trillian, an IM app. Notes Kooima, “Apparently I’m more of a slacker than I thought!” Spammer, Spam Thyself AFTER HE INSTALLED McAfee’s antispam software, Danny Griffis of Pleasant Grove, Alabama, was impressed when it immediately snagged its first piece of junk email. The offending item? An offer from McAfee. Have an idea for The Back Page? Send your suggestions to TheBackPage@pcworld.com.…

Facebook: Degrees of Separation? 4.74 Facebook has updated the “Six Degrees of Separation” theory, announcing that a study shows that any individual person on earth is a mere 4.74 steps away from being introduced to any other person, instead of the presumed 6. Facebook paired with the University of Milan to approximate the “number of hops,” or degrees of separation, between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. The study found that while 99.6 percent of all pairs of people on Facebook are a maximum of five degrees of separation (six hops) apart, 92 percent are a maximum of only four degrees (five hops) apart. AOL Revamps AIM With Facebook, Google Chat AIM, AOL’s seminal instant messenger app, just received a preview update to pull it out of obscurity…

WE BOUGHT AN LCD TV from a company called TCL last year. It came with a standard two-year manufacturer’s warranty. Five months in, vertical black and purple lines appeared in the center of the display, and got worse as time went on. We sent the TCL repair center the broken TV, but they sent back a refurbished RCA TV with the same specs. The remote accompanying the new TV was damaged and had corroded batteries; there was no power cord for the TV, and no paperwork whatsoever. A few weeks have passed since we called TCL asking for a power cord, remote, and paperwork. I know warranties may allow companies to send refurbished units as a replacement, but the repair center sent a totally different brand with nothing else in…

ADOBE AND MOZILLA both patched multiple memory corruption vulnerabilities in their widely used software products, some of which could have allowed potential openings for an attacker. Adobe’s patches apply to Flash Player, AIR, and Shockwave Player. Mozilla had advisories for Firefox and Thunderbird. Adobe Releases Flash and Shockwave Player Fixes Two security updates address critical flaws in Adobe Flash Player 11.0.1.152 and earlier for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris (and 11.0.1.153 and earlier for Android), and in Shockwave Player 11.6.1.629 and earlier for Windows and Mac. The company also found vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) that could lead to an application crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of your system. If you are on Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris, you should…

THE AVADIRECT X79 Silent Gaming PC is a bit of a bore on the outside, but its insides justify its $3000 price tag. The six-core Intel Core i7-3930K CPU sports a base clock speed of 3.2GHz, which AVADirect has comfortably overclocked to 4.5GHz. The system is as quiet as its name suggests, but it roared to a score of 215 on our WorldBench 6 test suite. AVADirect includes 16GB of RAM running at 2GHz, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 GPU, and a beefy 850-watt power supply. On our graphics benchmark tests, on the highest settings at the 2560 by 1600 resolution, both Dirt 2 and Far Cry 2 ran at 80 frames per second, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat came in at 36.8 fps. The system comes with a 120GB…

DUE TO REACH the United States in early 2012, the Lumia 800 is Nokia’s first Windows Phone 7 Mango OS handset. The phone’s matte polycarbonate unibody chassis is a bit chunky, but its slightly curved shape makes it comfortable to hold. At 4.58 by 2.40 by 0.47 inches, the Lumia 800 fits easily in a pocket or bag, and it weighs just 5 ounces. The left side of the phone is but-tonless; a volume rocker, a lock key, and a two-step camera shutter are on the right. The Lumia 800’s bottom edge holds a high-quality speaker. At the top are a headphone jack, a Micro-USB port for charging and syncing, and the micro-SIM card slot. The pop-out plastic panel covering the Micro-USB port needs to remain open vertically when you’re…

1 Recover your URL bar. So your cat jumped on your keyboard, and one assssssssddddffffff later you can’t seem to find the URL bar. If you’re using Internet Explorer, right-click on any toolbar and check Address bar to bring it back. In Firefox, go to View • Toolbars and check Navigation Toolbar. And in Safari, press <Ctrl>-<Shift>-\ (or <Command>-<Shift>-\, if you’re on a Mac). 2 Skip registering for everything. Sometimes, you just want to read a news article without having to register for yet another account. Enter BugMeNot (find.pcworld.com/72463), a database of legitimate usernames and passwords for sites that require you to register to access content. To use BugMeNot, you can download an extension for Firefox (find.pcworld.com/72464) or Chrome (find.pcworld.com/72465), or use the bookmarklet in the menu of the BugMeNot…

I WANT A PC that performs well in every regard. It needs to be a gaming rig capable of running Windows on at least two displays while handling Photoshop and Premiere Pro editing duties with aplomb. But I don’t want it to require constant tweaking, so it has to be “fire and forget.” That means avoiding multiple-power-supply setups, custom fans, and refill-hungry liquid-cooling products. If you want such a dream system, you can build it. The components are bleeding-edge and therefore pricey, but you can toss in a few alternatives to reduce the cost. An Extreme CPU Start with the best Intel CPU available, the Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition 3.3GHz Core i7-3960X. Until now, Intel’s top offering was the Core i7-990X, a six-core monster based on the Gulftown architecture. The…

RECENTLY, READER SPIDEROWYCH asked the Windows forum (find.pcworld.com/72436) why Microsoft gave its operating system such a simple, one-word name. Microsoft has inconsistently followed a strategy of using one-word names: Word, Money, Office. The Windows name fits that philosophy. When it debuted in 1985, most OSs were single-tasking, text-only, and based on a command line. The Mac, less than two years old then, was the only system with a graphical user interface enjoying commercial success. The word windows described the most obvious difference between a GUI and a command-line interface. Of course, the official name was Microsoft Windows, since you can’t trademark a common word like windows by itself. (They could have trademarked “Slow and Buggy Windows,” I guess, but that wouldn’t have pleased the marketing folks.)…

IT’S NOT UNCOMMON to have iOS and Android users living under the same roof. Or perhaps you’ve been an iPod owner for many years, but you recently decided to pick up an Android-powered smartphone or tablet. In either case, the big question is: How do you sync your iTunes music and playlists with your Android device? You can, of course, side-load your music—that is, copy it over manually—from your desktop system to your device. But that procedure isn’t nearly as easy or as convenient as true synchronization. It is, in a word, a pain. Enter iSyncr for PC (find.pcworld.com/72427), which combines a Windows utility and an Android app to keep your phone or tablet in sync with iTunes. It’s dirt-cheap, and it works like a charm. It even offers an…

WANT TO SAVE a few classic YouTube clips? The free YouTube Downloader HD (find.pcworld.com/72429) offers adware-free installation plus the ability to download multiple videos at once. Once you’ve launched the program, use the Download menu to select the quality of video you desire; higher-quality videos consume more hard-drive space and take longer to download. Check one of the optional boxes if you want to convert a video from FLV format to the more widely supported AVI or MP4 format. Next, insert the address of the YouTube video in the ‘Video URL’ field, following the given example. Finally, enter a ‘Save to’ location, and click Download. If you selected a quality higher than is available, the tool will prompt you to try the next-best setting. If you selected FLV conversion, that…

Follow us on Twitter @PCWPluggedIn. → Department of Justice seeks law against lying online. Notice to the entire U.S. population: You’re under arrest. → Survey: 22 million workers used social media to land their jobs. Most common job title: social media consultant. → Industry groups roll out a rating system for mobile games. New labels should help kids find inappropriate apps more easily. → Full-length movie, filmed with a smartphone, hopes to make it to the big screen. No truth to rumor that its working title is Stuck Inside a Purse and Left On by Accident. → Eye movements may soon control our smartphones. Eye-rolling teens’ handsets may spin uncontrollably.…