Sommaire pour April 2021 de PCWorld

Intel’s 11th-gen Rocket Lake chip won’t hit shelves until the end of March, but an unexpectedly early review of a retail Core i7-11700K labels the chip as power-hungry and unable to surpass AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X in many tests. The review, written by respected CPU expert Dr. Ian Cutress of Anandtech.com, was based on a Core i7-11700K that is presumably one of the hundreds of CPUs accidentally sold a month before launch by a German retailer. Benchmarks of the chip have been making the rounds ever since, but Cutress is the first experienced journalist to publish a review. Cutress stepped carefully in his story, avoiding mention of any information he had already been given by Intel under embargo during regular briefings for the chip. He said he informed Intel that he…

Microsoft announced the next feature release of Windows 10, Windows 10 21H1, with—just one feature. Okay, maybe two. No one quite expected Microsoft to release a major Windows 10 feature update in the spring of 2021, given the work Microsoft has been putting into the forthcoming Windows 10X. Still, probably no one expected this: just two consumer-facing features, with only one of them addressing something a typical user might do. The rest is bug fixes. In a blog post on February 17, John Cable, Microsoft’s vice president of program management, listed the new features contained inside Windows 10 21H1: • Windows Hello multicamera support will allow users to choose an external camera priority when using high-end displays with integrated cameras. • Improvements to Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG) performance include…

With so many companies working remotely during this pandemic, and so many think pieces talking about how work life will never be the same, Corel’s Draw Graphics suite is rising to the occasion. The company announced its 2021 update for the powerful illustration and design suite on Tuesday, and this year’s enhancements have a renewed focus on the particular demands of remote work. CorelDraw Graphics Suite 2021 includes the usual apps, including CorelDraw and Corel Photo-Paint, Font Manager, PowerTrace, and AfterShot 3 HDR. There’s also the CorelDraw.app browser-based version, and there’s a new app for the iPad. The graphics suite costs $499 for a one-time purchase, or you can sign up for the annual subscription at $249 per year or $20.75 per month. Corel also offers a 15-day free trial. Some…

The luxurious HP Spectre x360 14 is back with some new bling—Intel’s Tiger Lake CPU. The results are as impressive as we’d hoped, with some of the fastest multicore benchmark scores we’ve ever seen. The features spoil you as much as the speed. With its roomy display, powerful graphics, and exceptional battery life, the Spectre x360 14 will please productivity mavens and content creators alike. Facial and fingerprint recognition, a physical camera shutter, and a Thunderbolt 4 port round out the perks. SPECIFICATIONS Let’s take a look under the hood of the HP Spectre x360 model (1Q881AV) we reviewed, currently $1,590 on HP.com: CPU: Quad-core Intel Core i7-1165G7 Memory: 16GB Graphics: Intel Iris Xe Storage: 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD Display: 13.5-inch, 1920x1280 IPS touch Webcam: 720p with physical camera…

It’s glad tidings that the Intel 670p SSD finally makes 4-bit QLC NAND perform well enough to compete with TLC NVMe drives. The drive had no issues with synthetic benchmarks and even managed a livable pace when it ran out of secondary cache—about three times what its predecessor, the 660p, managed. Now if the company could just explain the unusually low TBW ratings, we’d be all good. PRICING, DESIGN, AND FEATURES The 670p ships in three flavors: 512GB ($89 MSRP), 1TB ($154 MSRP), and 2TB ($329 MSRP)—aggressive pricing for Intel, but hardly at the low end of the market. The drive uses a Silicon Motion SM265G controller, and there’s DRAM for primary cache. Intel didn’t provide the DRAM amount in the press material, but It appeared to be 2 gigabits’…

At a time when version updates are becoming less of an issue and major phone makers are finally beginning to guarantee years of updates, Google might have found a way to end Android fragmentation once and for all: by turning it into a service. The signs are there. On February 11, Google announced that several “Pixel-first” features in Google Photos—Portrait Blur, Portrait Light, and Color Pop—won’t actually be coming to all Android phones as expected. Instead, Google is offering them as a benefit to Google One subscribers, effectively putting them behind a paywall along with what Google calls “other new machine learning–powered effects.” Granted, these aren’t huge features, and most people probably won’t even care whether they have them. Google Photos is a few steps removed from Android. But Google’s…

Everybody wants to know how well their laptop performs, but usually for different reasons. Was that high-end processor you optioned worth the extra money? Can your inexpensive clamshell run the latest, hottest PC games? Is it time to give up on that old laptop for something with a little more capability? A good way to find out is to run a few benchmarks. Benchmarks put your machine through a set of fixed, predetermined tasks, and then provide scores that can be compared to the results of other PCs. Comparison is the key here, as a benchmark lacking context tells you very little. Indeed, no matter how high the score, if it can’t be contextualized against the scores of other PCs (or compared to a minimum performance requirement), then the benchmark…

Are Ryzen 5000 chips failing? We looked into the original story and the issues around quality control at system vendors, and the problem may not be as bad as it initially appeared. The kerfuffle kicked off on Sunday, when system builder PowerGPU tweeted to its 222,000 followers: “The failure on the new AMD CPUs are still too high.” The company said that of the 320 Ryzen 5000 series CPUs it had received, 19 were “DOA” (dead on arrival), an eyebrow-raising 6 percent failure rate. The company also said it had seen three to five failing B550- and X570-based motherboards a week. HotHardware’s Paul Lilly initially covered the tweet, which became even more controversial when PowerGPU deleted it on Monday. PowerGPU then tweeted, “We just had a chat with AMD. We…

Google has pledged for over a year to crack down on third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, taking progressive steps to weed out the code that collects data about you and shares it with the site you’re visiting. Cookies can be helpful in storing your user name and password or saving your shopping cart, but they can also be used to serve up ads as you browse, making it feel creepily like someone is keeping track of what you’re looking for. On Wednesday the company made a further commitment to privacy by saying it won’t replace cookies with alternative methods of tracking users in Chrome. “We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t…

Browser privacy is a big deal, as Google and other companies use your search data to serve you advertisements while you surf the web. While most users will accept that trade-off, others who believe strongly in maintaining their own data privacy will raise objections. If you’re one of these, Brave Software can help. On Wednesday the company said it’s launching a search engine to compete with Google and Bing, with privacy as its first priority. Brave is buying Tailcat, an open search engine, and will add it to its forthcoming Brave Search. The difference between Google, Bing, and Brave Search is twofold: The Brave search engine won’t collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information to improve search results, and it will collect its own, independent search index. It’s the…

Gigabyte’s Aorus 17G gaming laptop, with its high-end parts and sharp-angled design, looks like it should be loud, but it’s not. It’s amazingly quiet, actually. How quiet? On its default fan profile we registered the laptop at barely 38 dB. That’s barely louder than the background noise of our office in the daytime. Cars driving by on the street registered more noise than the Aorus 17G looping a graphically intense stress test. We’ve heard ultraportable laptops produce more noise under a load than the Aorus 17G does while gaming. It may spoil your fun a bit to know that Gigabyte achieved this feat by taking the RTX 3080 mobile GPU down a notch in performance. If you always want to have the ultimate gaming machine, you’ll invest in a good…

It’s pretty amazing how far dash cams have come in just a few short years. Aukey’s DRS1 4K UHD offers great 4K UHD/WDR day and night video captures, is easy to use, is easy to install, and costs $120. Not long ago, a dash cam at that price would have delivered undersaturated day captures and weak night captures prone to headlight flare. Good riddance to the bad old days. DESIGN AND SPECS I used the optional GM-32 GPS module ($20 on Amazon) in my testing of the DRS1. I recommend GPS for a number of reasons, including instant proof that the accident occurred where you say it occurred. Let’s consider the whole deal a $140 camera. Or I will, at any rate. The DRS1’s external design is typical for the category.…

Create stronger, more secure passwords: We are nagged to do it all the time, but few of us actually make the effort to do so. Meanwhile, passwords continue to get stolen, leaked, and cracked on a regular basis. So this time we’re hoping to get your attention by looking at it from the attacker’s side of the equation. We’ll show you how passwords are cracked and even how to do it yourself, so you can see exactly why a strong password matters. As our brief foray with a cracking tool will show you, your only protection against a determined password cracker is—you guessed it—a long, complex string of 10 or more characters. Anything shorter, let alone simpler, is too easy to crack. Know that, and suddenly using a password manager looks…

Installing an M.2 or SATA SSD in your desktop is an essential part of every PC build, and it’s an easy upgrade to make your PC feel faster. Luckily, installing an SSD is easier than finding the best one (we have a roundup for that) or even understanding how they work. I’m not going to cover any of that here, but I’ll walk through installing both kinds. The steps below should apply to almost any model. I’ll start with the M.2 SSD because it’s a bit more tricky to install, and there are some things to research before you do it. HOW TO INSTALL AN M.2 SSD IN A DESKTOP PC An M.2 SSD looks like a stick of chewing gum with chips on one side, a label on…

Microsoft has announced plans to release a consumer version of Office 2021, a standalone version of Microsoft 365 that will have some but not all of the features of Microsoft’s perpetually updating cloud productivity service. This may be the first standalone version of Office to ship with Microsoft Teams as a standard feature. The company will release Office 2021 for personal and small business users “later this year,” Microsoft said in a blog post. It said it did not plan to change the prices for this new release, meaning that the cheapest version of Office 2021 will be $150, the price Microsoft charges for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2019. (That version doesn’t include Microsoft Outlook; just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.) There will be versions for both the Mac and…

PCs have no expiration date. Chromebooks do. However, executives at Google said Tuesday that they’re working with Chromebook makers to ensure you won’t end up buying a Chromebook that will go out of support anytime soon. During a recent press briefing to mark the 10th anniversary of Chrome OS and Chromebooks, a reporter asked the Google executives on the call about a typical Chromebook experience: Once a Chromebook’s support window expires, it won’t receive updates. If a website or service requires an up-to-date browser to access it, does that mean the unsupported Chromebook is now worthless to the user? One of the distinctions between a PC and a Chromebook is that support window. Microsoft stops supporting Windows versions at some point, but it doesn’t stop supporting the PC surrounding it. Assuming…

By naming this Windows tablet the Surface Pro 7+, Microsoft mistakenly implies that it’s some sort of minor upgrade from the Surface Pro 7. Nothing could be further from the truth: We rarely see such massive upgrades in CPU and GPU horsepower, as well as battery life. It also offers an LTE option and an absolutely dead-silent, fanless chassis. Sure, a few decisions made us scratch our heads. Why do we have to choose between an integrated microSD slot or the LTE option? Thunderbolt still isn’t here, either. But even these flaws really can’t mar an exciting leap in performance. This is the best Surface Pro of several generations, and for the moment the best Windows tablet on the market, too. SPECS AND FEATURES As we look at the Surface…

The Galaxy S21 Ultra is a new kind of value proposition from Samsung. It’s not just bigger than the lower-end models with a better camera, like last year’s Ultra. You’re also getting a much better screen, Wi-Fi 6E, S Pen support, and way more RAM. Whether you need those things is still up for debate, but if you want them, the S21 Ultra is well worth the upgrade from the S20 Ultra or the $200 step-up from the S21+. That’s mainly because the Ultra’s premium price comes at less of a premium this year. Where last year’s price tag put the S20 Ultra firmly in the upper end of the stratosphere, the S21 Ultra starts at $1,199. You can max it out with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage…

An upgradeable laptop has long been the holy grail of laptop features. And much like the famed grail, it has never been found. Many have tried and all have failed. The most recent attempt was Alienware’s Area 51m R1, which launched with lofty goals but ultimately never offered meaningful upgrades. Enter Framework, which pledges to finally bring the Holy Grail home to Camelot with a modular, do-it-yourself, upgradeable laptop. Having borne witness to all of the prior quest failures, we have our doubts. Many of them. But after talking at length with Framework founder Nirav Patel, we found our hope rekindled. Maybe, just maybe, this time someone will succeed. Patel seems to have answers for most of the problems that brought down everyone else, including TDP limits and consumers simply…

If you have too much email in your Gmail account, it may finally be time to clean it out. This is not simply to reach the Zen-like nirvana of “inbox zero,” but to address a looming threat: As of June 1, 2021, Google will change its storage policy. By default, Gmail users receive 15GB of storage, shared across Gmail, Drive, and Photos. Some data, like Photos, is currently exempted—but that goes away in June. If your total data exceeds your free allotment, you’ll either have to delete data, pay Google for more storage, or risk losing whatever “extra” data Google chooses to delete. Don’t let that happen! Here are some tactics for deleting lots of email, pronto. HOW TO QUICKLY DELETE OLD EMAIL IN GMAIL About the only requirement for…