Table of contents for May-13 in PCWorld

YOUR ONLINE PRIVACY is threatened not so much by hackers and phishers, the perennial bogeymen of the Internet underground, as by people who work in big business. They want everyone’s on-line data. And they want it more than the bad guys who make headlines do. These companies aren’t evil agents of destruction who would steal our identities for profit or erase our family photos for kicks. They want our data so that they can track us and categorize us. They want to use what they know about us to sell us something, or to sell what they know about us to someone else, all without running afoul of privacy regulations. Trevor Hughes, president and CEO of the International Association for Privacy Professionals, put it to me succinctly: “Your data is…

WHEN WAS THE last time a broken DVD player led to a trip to the repair shop? Even if you can find a repair shop near you, the cost to fix the device will probably be more than the price of a new one. The reality is this: We don’t fix electronics anymore, we just replace them. Experts call this a growing throwaway-electronics culture. While tech companies benefit from shorter product life cycles, the by-product can harm household budgets and the planet. Barbara Kyle, national coordinator for the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, says the drive for smaller, thinner products with hard-to-replace components is partly to blame. Also, companies that make electronics with short warranty periods are pushing people to trash their gear and not fix it. The end result: Electronics containing…

THE CONTROVERSIAL WINDOWS 8 introduces a few great features, some of which guard against malware and other threats. One feature, however, presents concerns that you must address to keep your PC—and your data—as safe as possible. To take full advantage of the security functions built into Windows 8, your machine needs to run a new boot system called Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. UEFI, which replaces the archaic Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), adds a number of boot features and greatly speeds the startup process. Included in UEFI is the Secure Boot feature, which helps to prevent unauthorized operating systems and malware from running at startup. This arrangement makes it more difficult for data thieves to use bootable discs or flash drives to access your files. It also helps to keep hard-to-detect…

THE CHROMEBOOK PIXEL is an idea. It describes Google’s vision of a high-end laptop for citizens of a future world, one freed from the encumbrances of old-style computer operating systems, existing entirely on the Web. The Pixel is as solidly built and generously appointed as any laptop you’ll find, but it runs only Google’s Chrome Web browser, not Apple’s Mac OS X or Microsoft’s Windows. Until now, Chromebooks were cheap, plasticky econo-boxes, positioned as secondary machines. The Pixel is nothing like that. But it’s also hard to fathom how the Pixel works as a real-world product. Google’s Chrome OS is the brains behind the Pixel’s beauty—and therein lies the problem. Google’s Vision: Gorgeous The Pixel is a solid, aluminum-bodied laptop, weighing a fairly light 3.35 pounds. In many ways, it…

AT JUST 8.8 pounds sans accessories, Digital Storm’s x17 is one of the lightest gaming laptops we’ve seen. Our review model packs a third-generation Intel Core i7-3610QM processor, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon HD7970M graphics card. It also runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium. In our WorldBench 7 tests, it scored 99 out of 100. While that is an acceptable score for a desktop replacement, it’s a bit low for a gaming-oriented desktop replacement. The x17 managed 15.6 frames per second in our Web Performance tests, but it scored only 2006 in the PCMark 7 Office Productivity tests. Luckily, it offers gaming-laptop-level graphics. In our Crysis 2 graphics tests, it produced frame rates of between 44.4 (maximum-quality graphics, 1920-by-1080-pixel resolution) and 94.4 (low-quality graphics, 800-by-600-pixel…

THE $200 DELL C1660w makes color-laser-class printing (using LED technology) tantalizingly accessible. But since the toner is expensive, the C1660w is a good deal only if you don’t print much. The front panel flips out to make the bottom of the 150-sheet input tray. The output bin on the top holds 100 sheets. Duplexing is manual. You get 500-page starter cartridges with the unit. The 4.0 cents you’ll pay per black page is a bit higher than the average for entry-level inkjets. Adding color to the average page costs a steep 16.8 cents. Black toner comes in $50, 1250-page units; the 1000-page cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges cost $56 each. The C1660w’s output quality matches that of laser-class printers costing far more. Text is sharp, and black areas are smooth…

THE WEB CAN SEEM as infinite as space, and while it’s sometimes fun to explore on your own, prepare yourself to encounter plenty of emptiness between the worthwhile discoveries. Wouldn’t it be more fun to get straight to the good stuff? Let us help. We’ve scoured the Web for the most interesting, entertaining, and valuable gems and organized them into five categories for your surfing pleasure. A few sites aren’t so obscure, but we think they’re too good not to mention. Want to share some of your own favorites? Send the URLs and the reason you think they’re awesome to letters@pcworld.com. Entertainment These are the sites we visit to play games, listen to music, watch videos, be inspired, or just burn a few hours. Addicting Games: This gaming hub offers…

Why am I paying for 20-mbps Internet service but getting 0.7? —Interronator ALMOST NO ONE gets the Internet performance that their ISP advertises. Variables make speeds impossible to predict, and the providers advertise the best possible theoretical speed. But the difference between the advertised speed and the real speed should be reasonably close. If you’re regularly getting less than 70 percent of what you were promised, you have a serious bottleneck. (If you don’t know how to assess your Internet speed, visit www.speedtest.net.) The bottleneck may be on either the ISP’s end or yours. A few diagnostics may tell you who to blame. First, try another computer. If you’re getting acceptable performance on one computer but not on another, you can’t blame the ISP. Next, test the way your computer…

GET READY FOR a huge jump in wireless networking speed. Two camps are competing to deliver wireless components that are at least seven times faster than today’s gigabit (IEEE 802.11ac) routers. By harnessing spectrum in the unlicensed 60GHz frequency band, these devices may offer more bandwidth than hardwired USB 3.0 connections. The WirelessHD Consortium, led by chip maker Silicon Image, has been shipping products for more than a year. On the other side, the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), led by chip makers Marvell and Wilocity, won’t kick off its certification program until 2014, but one manufacturer is shipping an uncertified WiGig device early. In its early stages, however, 60GHz technology will appear only in point-to-point networks, such as hardware for streaming media from a PC to an HDTV, or wirelessly…

THE PRODUCTION line at Solidoodle’s Carroll Gardens factory in Brooklyn, New York, is surprisingly small. The workshop may be the size of a typical loft apartment, but the manufacturing occurs in a space 8 feet across and 12 feet high. There, 23 3D printers set up on two heavy-duty metal shelving units use hot, extruded plastic to create intricate objects. Solidoodle CEO Sam Cervantes told us that all of the printers are hooked up to one controller computer. These machines have been working non-stop for more than a year, printing parts to use as components for building additional Solidoodle machines. This is the sort of manufacturing future that Sam Cervantes imagines for the entire world. But the devices here aren’t necessarily replacing humans: The rest of the space is filled…

I SPENT A week living off the Chromebook Pixel as much as I could. I quickly realized that those who compare it to a full-fledged Windows laptop are missing the point—or the boat. Millions of people have already discarded PCs, using their tablets and even smartphones for many common computing tasks. Despite some limitations, Chromebooks offer a more functional alternative for living the increasingly typical online life. Roadblocks at Work I thought I could handle everything through Google Docs, but roadblocks arose on my first morning. I wanted to work on the train, but the Offline function was not enabled for my corporate Google account. I had to move my work to my personal Google account in a hurry. When I arrived at the office, our network didn’t recognize the…

THE EON17-SLX IS Origin’s latest extreme gaming laptop. It sports a third-generation Intel Core i7-3940XM Extreme Edition processor, 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 680M discrete graphics card. The laptop runs the 64-bit version of Windows 8, but it lacks a touchscreen. With a 17.3-inch display and weighing 9.2 pounds (without accessories), the EON17-SLX is a hulk of a laptop. But its size translates to power. In our WorldBench 8 tests, it earned an impressive score of 115, which means it’s 15 percent faster than our testing model. It’s also the fastest laptop we have tested. Needless to say, it whizzed through most of our performance tests. The EON17-SLX also scored 5324 in the PCMark 7 productivity test, finishing light-years ahead of the HP EliteBook 9470m (3903) and…

THE PLAYBAR IS the latest entry in Sonos’s lineup of streaming audio products. Some other soundbars are far superior single-cabinet home theater systems, but they also cost several times more. The Playbar is very simple to set up: All you have to do is connect an optical TosLink cable to your TV and plug the Playbar’s power cable into a receptacle. If you want to stream music from a computer, server, or NAS box on your network, or from an Internet service like Pandora, either plug an ethernet cable into the Playbar or add a Sonos Bridge to your wireless network and operate the speaker as a wireless component. The 35.43-inch-wide soundbar can lie flat at the base of your TV, or it can sit mounted below or above your…

WESTERN DIGITAL’S $200 My Net N900 Central is basically WD’s My Net N900 Wi-Fi router (go.pcworld.com/wdn900) with a 2.5-inch hard drive (I tried the 1TB model; a 2TB version is available). I assumed that the presence of this drive would help the Central outperform the other four routers in my test group on file reads and writes, but I was mistaken: This router, which communicates with the drive over a SATA-to-USB bridge, was slower than the standard My Net N900 on three of my four tests. The Central did manage to take second place when writing a single large file to its hard drive, though. In addition to the physical security of housing a hard drive, the Central offers two other benefits: You get Western Digital’s Smart Ware software for…

Fiber: Fiber-optic cable to the home, such as that used for Verizon’s FiOS network, is the best solution; it’s also rare and expensive. Some ISPs bring fiber to the curb and then use copper to connect to the home, while others—such as AT&T’s U-Verse—bring fiber to the network node and use copper for the last mile. Fiber to the home can deliver downlink speeds as fast as 300 megabits per second and uplink connections up to 65 mbps. But the further your home is from the end of the fiber, the slower your connection will be. The aforementioned U-Verse service, for instance, because it uses copper for the last mile, tops out at 24 mbps down and 3 mbps up. Cable: Cable TV service providers can piggyback Internet service on…

IF YOU WANT to be thoroughly prepared for a worst-case PC catastrophe, you can go one step further than simply creating an emergency-app thumb drive. By loading a second portable drive with a live install of the SystemRescueCD (www.sysresccd.org) operating system, you’ll be ready to undertake recovery operations even if your computer’s OS is so wrecked that you can’t log in. SystemRescueCD is a free live operating system, meaning you don’t have to install it on a hard drive. Just insert the SystemRescueCD USB drive into the troubled computer, restart the machine, and boot from the thumb drive. The Linux-based OS comes equipped with software that you can use to access the data on your hard drives and back it up across the network, along with various other handy-dandy utilities—basically,…

THE SIMPLEST WAY to make PC games look better is to buy a better graphics card. If you already have the best card, then the next step is to install a duplicate card and make them work together. Most savvy PC users have a machine with a discrete graphics card, but adding a second or third card and running them in concert can lead to a big performance boost in demanding PC games. This job can be a little tricky, though the process has gotten much easier in the past decade. You can pair up most modern GPUs from Nvidia and AMD to work together. The cards running in multi-GPU configurations typically render alternate frames or split a frame horizontally (or into tiles), with each GPU working on a particular…

WHEN YOU BUY an ebook from Amazon, it’s yours, right? Technically speaking, Amazon is merely licensing the ebook to you, and it can close your account and delete all your ebooks. This isn’t likely to happen, but it makes me want to back up the ones I paid for, just in case. What’s more, if I ever want to read those ebooks on another reader, I’d like the option of converting them to a different format. Both these actions require the removal of Amazon’s DRM—the digital lock that prevents unauthorized sharing. I have no intention of sharing. I simply want to exercise my fair-use rights. Luckily, you can remove the DRM (at your own risk). Here are the general steps: 1. Download and install the Kindle reader program for your…

RUMORS ARE RIFE of a mid-2013 update to Windows 8 dubbed “Windows Blue.” (See Briefs, page 15.) Microsoft declined to talk about how it might alter its OS, so we asked some experts to imagine possible ways forward. Kill the Desktop The desktop user interface is just one app among many on Windows 8’s “modern-style” Start screen. Windows 8’s two-OSs-in-one model has led to some interesting hybrid devices such as Surface Pro, but it has also drawn jeers from critics who find the desktop-versus-Start-screen dichotomy jarring and confusing. Tom Hobbs, creative director for Seattle-based design consultancy Teague, argues that Microsoft should ditch the desktop completely, leaving only the touch-friendly side of Windows, with its walled garden of apps. Committing to touch would create a clear path forward for users and…

THE LATEST EDITION of Windows is designed with touchscreens in mind, and includes features that make Windows easier to use on all devices. Windows 8 picture passwords, for example, are a new, alternative password system that lets you log in to your device using a picture—or rather, a sequence of gestures performed on top of a picture—instead of a string of alphanumeric characters. In a family photo, for example, you might sketch a line from one person’s nose to the next person’s nose. Such passwords aren’t inherently better than alphanumeric passwords; but they are easier to remember than a string of characters, and they offer roughly equivalent security. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania coined the term “smudge attack” in 2010 after successfully deducing gesture passwords for unlocking Android phones…

MICROSOFT PLANS to move current Hotmail users over to its Outlook.com interface by this summer. Users’ mail, contacts, and current account settings will come with them. A Positive Outlook Hotmail users will find a lot to love about the Outlook.com migration, starting with a clean, modern interface that’s easier on the eyes than the crowded ’90s-style appearance of Hotmail. Outlook.com also integrates with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn so you can see updates from contacts right in your email window. If you integrated these accounts with Windows Live, the settings should migrate with you. Outlook.com comes with such handy Hotmail tools as ‘Sweep’ and ‘categories’ for better message handling. The new service also integrates with other newly revamped online services from Microsoft, including SkyDrive and People, though not Calendar. Microsoft says…

Sony Xperia Tablet Z The Xperia Tablet Z is the thinnest and lightest 10-inch tablet on the market, Sony claims. The device is just over 0.25 inch thick, and it weighs slightly more than a pound. This slate runs the Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) OS, comes in black or white, and is waterproof for up to 30 minutes. Expect to pay $499 for a 16GB model and $599 for the 32GB version. go.pcworld.com/xperiaz Ouya The Android-based Ouya may be the future of home consoles. Though nowhere near as powerful as Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 4 or the next-gen Microsoft Xbox, the $100 Ouya costs only a fraction of the pricier game consoles. More good news: Ouya games will cost only a few bucks. A robust Android-gaming ecosystem is already in place,…

IF YOU’RE FED up with your cable company’s skyrocketing bills, nickel-and-dime fees, lousy customer service, and inflexible programming, you’re not alone. Video streaming services and set-top devices make it easier than ever to cut cable for good. One of the downfalls of ditching cable, however, is that it’s harder—and sometimes impossible—to find current content such as news, weather, and especially sports. In fact, access to live MLB, NBA, NFL, and other games is what keeps many fans tied to their cable. It can also mean sacrificing first runs of popular shows. Willing to be flexible? Start by making a “must-see” list, and decide how strongly you feel about staying current. Once you have a list of favorites, figure out where you can get the shows online. Most will probably be…

THE DELL INSPIRON 15z joins a growing group of Windows 8 laptops that offer a touchscreen display option. It’s a nice-looking package that boasts a built-in 8X DVD±RW drive and above-average audio and webcam hardware. But its performance, while certainly adequate, isn’t stellar. At nearly 5.5 pounds, the 15z is also on the heavy side for an Ultrabook, though it makes a fine first impression with a brushed-aluminum finish. The 15.6-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel screen is also very bright, but not as crisp. Its audio, however, is quite robust for a laptop. The Inspiron 15z didn’t quite shine on our performance tests—nor did we expect it to, given its configuration. Dell recently updated the 15z lineup with newer Intel CPUs, and the PC is now outfitted with an Intel Core i5-3337U with…

MICROSOFT OFFERS a few preset backgrounds for Windows 8’s Start screen and lock screen (which you see before Start). For no-holds-barred personalization, however, turn to Stardock’s $5 utility Decor8. The Background section lets you set what appears behind the tiles in your Start screen. Decor8’s list includes simple vector affairs as well as bold nature and macro photos that stand in stark contrast to the flat Windows 8 aesthetic and lend the Start screen some dramatic flair. If you prefer, you can use any image on your computer as your Start screen background. You can also rotate through several images each day or set the Start background to be the same as your desktop wallpaper. You can also fade or blur the image, and adjust tint and contrast. In the…

AS I SLOWLY learn my way around Windows 8, I continue to uncover features I didn’t know existed. One such hidden perk is File History, which archives copies of older versions of your files, and does so automatically and in the background, while you work. One caveat, though: It’s not a full-system backup tool like Windows Backup. By default, it preserves only the files in your Libraries—documents, music, photos, and other media. You can add folders if you wish, but only by adding them to your Libraries. File History also requires some kind of external storage: a USB flash drive, USB hard drive, or network drive. The more space you devote to File History, the deeper your backup will go. Here’s how to get started with it. 1. Bring up…

HAVING A DEAD key can be terribly frustrating. Luckily, you may be able to fix the problem with some cleaning. Shut down the PC. If it’s a laptop, unplug the machine as well, but leave it open. Now turn the keyboard—or the open laptop—over, and gently tap the back. If it’s a laptop, be very gentle. Concentrate, of course, on the dead key. Put the keyboard or laptop down, right-side-up. Use a can of compressed air to spray out any dust between the keys. You can buy these cans at any computer store; I’ve seen them on sale online for as little as $3. They always come with a thin straw. Use that to direct the airflow between the keys. If you have a desktop, you can also untwist a…

Outlook 2013—part of the new Microsoft Office suite—had plenty of PCWorld editors dubious about the upgrade. But what we got was a surprisingly streamlined and powerful email program. Here are some of the best new features. 1 More Info in Less Space Outlook 2013 has a cool new message preview feature (accessible in the View tab) that lets you preview one, two, or three lines of the message body right inside the inbox, so you don’t have to open each one individually. Long-time Outlook users may balk at the extra text in the inbox, but after using the preview for a few days, you’ll appreciate the speed boost that being able to skim your entire inbox gives. You can also reply to (or forward) an email right in the preview…