PCWorld的October 2020目录

Intel promised “dramatic” clock-speed increases in its 11th-gen “Tiger Lake” Intel Core CPU. It delivered. In August, Intel surprised us by promising that its new SuperFIN transistor would push Tiger Lake to a greater-than-generational improvement in CPU performance. While that claim will have to wait for actual testing, the numbers help bolster its case: The base clock speed of the top four-core, eight-thread Core i7-1185G7 reaches 3GHz—far above that of Intel’s flagship 10th-gen Ice Lake chips—with single-core turbo speeds hitting 4.8GHz. All told, Intel is launching nine new Tiger Lake processors for notebooks, five of which include the new Xe integrated graphics core. More than 150 designs based on the new 11th-gen Intel Core processors are expected from partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, Dynabook, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI, Razer, Samsung, and…

Pour one out, enthusiasts. Nvidia’s beastly new GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards just slammed the final nail into SLI’s coffin. Well, almost. A glaring fact jumped out at me while I was sifting through Nvidia’s product pages for our GeForce RTX 30-series vs. RTX 20-series spec comparison: Only the monstrous $1,500 GeForce RTX 3090 includes support for NVLink, the proprietary connector that enables SLI multi-GPU configurations. Even the $800 GeForce RTX 3080 lacks it, and Nvidia calls that graphics card the 30-series flagship. (The RTX 3090 is a “BFGPU” above and beyond the rest.) Given that Nvidia controls 80 percent of the graphics card market, it seems clear that the days of slapping multiple graphics cards into your PC to boost frame rates is effectively over. That said, it’s been effectively…

That blisteringly fast storage technology found in the next-gen consoles is coming to PCs too, debuting first with the RTX IO technology in Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards. Microsoft just pulled back the curtain a bit more on how it works. Yes, the creator of Windows is explaining how SSD technology works in a graphics card. No, it’s not as bizarre as it sounds. Both the Xbox Series X and Nvidia’s RTX IO tap into Microsoft’s DirectStorage, a new DirectX API. Microsoft teased that it would be coming to PCs after the Xbox Series X announcement. This week, the company revealed a bit more about how the technology helps your SSD and GPU work more closely together to reduce (and possibly eliminate) loading times—though you’ll need a speedy NVMe drive to…

Our Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra review found three clear reasons to make the jump to this new flagship phone: Mystic Bronze, laser autofocus, and the S Pen’s new 8ms latency. And if you’re looking for any reasons not to, well, there are plenty of those in this review too—namely, it’s gigantic, expensive, and not a huge upgrade over the S20 Ultra. But if you’re a Note fan, you know exactly what you’re getting and you know you want it: the biggest, fastest, and most powerful Android phone you can buy. For everyone else, it’s not so simple. Samsung’s flagships have gotten so good that reviews of them are all basically the same: Yes, they have the best specs, but they’re also the most expensive (although the Note 20 Ultra…

NortonLifeLock, formerly Symantec, has changed up its security suite lineup. Norton Security Premium, the suite we’ve reviewed several times, is no more. Now it’s all about the Norton 360 brand that combines Norton’s protection with services from identity-theft protection company LifeLock, which Symantec acquired in 2016. By our reckoning, the best choice in terms of value and capabilities in the current lineup is Norton 360 Deluxe. There are two other suites above that with extra LifeLock features, but for most people 360 Deluxe hits the sweet spot at $50 for the first year for new users and $100 for returning users, covering five devices. Norton 360 works with two primary apps. The first is My Norton, a launcher for the actual antivirus program known as Device Security. My Norton is…

If you’re the kind of person who looks at the milk carton expiration date or squeezes the bread before you buy it, then you probably don’t want to buy these 77 Chromebooks. That’s because after examining every single Chrome OS device listed in Google’s database, we’ve found a healthy amount of them that are about as fresh as a three-day old donut. Google publishes expiration dates for Chromebooks on its support site here. But rather than drill down into each Chrome OS device maker’s page to find out if just one particular Chromebook was expiring, we compiled a list of every single device and then sorted it by expiration date. We found 51 expired devices, another 35 with just one year left of support. Another 29 had two years of…

You can speed up your home Internet connection and Wi-Fi for cheaper than you’d think. It’s a need many homes are facing now, when the pandemic traps both students and parents under one roof, all trying to work online at the same time. Wi-Fi range becomes an especially painful issue. In our tiny home, spreading out meant we needed solid signal even in corners of the house, deck, or yard that never mattered before. While an Internet drop-out while surfing the web was no big deal a year ago, a drop-out during a Zoom call is about as embarrassing today as showing up to work with your shirt on inside-out. Here’s how I sped up our home Wi-Fi and even coaxed more speed out of our main Internet connection (with…

Laptops and notebook PCs using Intel’s first Tiger Lake chips will begin shipping in October, an Intel representative confirmed in early September. Up to that announcement, Intel had been cagey, stating that the first laptops using its new Tiger Lake chips would be available this fall in time for the holiday season. Its latest presentation also clarified a fact that was left out of its press release: Two of the nine new Tiger Lake chips, the Core i3-1125G4 and Core i3-1120G4, won’t be available until 2021. Some observers grumbled that Intel should have waited to launch Tiger Lake until PC makers were ready to ship. At the presentation, though, Intel somewhat nailed down the initial shipping date to October. That means we have to wait a little longer before reviewers…

The original Samsung Galaxy Fold never really got a chance to make a name for itself. While it launched to a ton of fanfare, by the time it landed on shelves following a months-long delay due to design and manufacturing deficiencies, the Galaxy Note 10+ and iPhone 11 Pro were stealing the limelight and the wow factor had long faded. But Samsung persisted and now the follow-up has arrived with a new name (Galaxy Z Fold 2), a new price, and a new lease on life. Unsurprisingly, Samsung is sticking with a very similar form factor as the one introduced with the original Fold, but every aspect of the Galaxy Z Fold 2 has gotten an upgrade, from the outside cover display to the inside screen ratio. But while the hardware is certainly…

A mere day after leaks forced the sudden reveal of the previously unrevealed $299 Xbox Series S, Microsoft has drawn the curtain fully back on its next-gen console. The company announced in early September that the flagship Xbox Series X console will cost $499 when it launches alongside the Series S on November 10. Preorders opened on September 22. That’s an insanely good price for a backward-compatible console that probably puts your PC to shame, but Microsoft’s optional payment plans make the price even more affordable in an uncertain world. In addition to the flat $299 and $499 sticker prices for the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X, respectively, Microsoft is offering both consoles via its Xbox All Access payment plans. These plans require no money down, and Microsoft’s offering the…

Like a prize fight weigh-in, the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U in Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 just flexed like no other ultrabook CPU we’ve ever seen. It’s almost as though the Ryzen 7 4800U snatched the mic from the podium and started hurling insults at Intel’s upcoming Tiger Lake CPU. If there was a folding chair, we’re sure it would’ve been thrown at Intel’s entourage while the flash bulbs popped. While we’re still in the process of finishing our testing, the early results we’re seeing are gobsmackingly impressive. How impressive? When we started hunting in our spreadsheet for how other laptops performed against the IdeaPad Slim 7’s results, we kept scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling to find something comparable. At that point, any hardware reviewer worth his or her salt questions…

It’s 8 a.m. on a clear, sunny day in Oakland, California. No, it’s a rainy afternoon in Hong Kong. Or is it evening in Paris? Microsoft Flight Simulator doesn’t care. At a time when gorgeous “open world” games are the norm, Flight Simulator helps set the bar even higher. Yes, it offers a stunning recreation of a virtual world, with weather and realistic landscapes, real-world traffic and ocean waves, and even, apparently, animals. But the virtual world is our world, our planet, and you can go anywhere in it. For me, that’s the whole point of Flight Simulator. Even if we weren’t severely limited in our movements by the current pandemic, most of us will never see the entirety of our planet. Travel to exotic locales also comes with…

Not everyone needs a computer with a full set of bells and whistles. A Chromebook’s simplified interface makes it popular with schools—and those of us who serve as IT support for less tech-savvy relatives. You don’t need to worry about managing irritating updates or avoiding malware on a Chromebook, like you do if you simply install Chrome on an old Windows laptop, and the lightweight operating system feels much snappier than Windows on modest hardware. Chromebooks can cost less than a budget PC, too. You might not even need to spend anything if you have an older laptop already lying about. Installing the equivalent of Chrome OS onto aged hardware takes less than an hour’s worth of elbow grease, and the final result often feels snappier than today’s dirt-cheap Chromebooks.…

The Blur Gallery in Adobe Photoshop is different from the Blur Filters we’ve covered previously (both are found in Photoshop’s Filter menu). When you select Blur Gallery, Photoshop displays another drop-down menu with five Blur options: Field, Iris, Tilt-Shift, Path, and Spin Blur. These filters are much more interactive than regular Blur Filters, with live previews and on-image controls, including options to create Bokeh effects. BLUR GALLERY TOOLS To use Blur Gallery features, open a file, then use the Lasso tool or the Magic Wand to select the area you want to smooth or soften. It works best if you cut out the selected area, paste it back in as a new layer, then ensure that this layer is active in the Layers panel. The blur will affect the entire selected…

AMD chief executive Lisa Su said recently that her company will be launching its next-generation Zen 3 microprocessors on October 8. “It’s going to be an exciting fall for gamers…time to start a new journey with @AMDRyzen Zen3 and @Radeon RDNA2,” Su tweeted, with a small promotional video that advertised the October 8 launch date. (AMD also confirmed the October 28 launch of its “Big Navi” Radeon RX 6000 series cards to take on Nvidia.) The announcement comes after some speculation that AMD would delay the launch of its next-generation Zen 3 cores, the basis of its Ryzen chips for desktop and mobile. Those desktop and mobile chips are expected to include the Cezanne APU, with mainstream and high-end desktop parts codenamed Vermeer. An enthusiast and workstation version is reportedly codenamed Genesis Peak.…

If you own a Pixel 2 or later, your phone can get some new features. After months of betas, Google has begun rolling out Android 11 to “select Pixel, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo and Realme phones,” but if you don’t own a Google phone, you won’t see the full version yet. OnePlus, Oppo, and Realme have announced that some customers will be getting access to public betas and previews while the full version is still being developed. That’s better than usual, but it’s still a far cry from iOS 14, which has already been made available on hundreds of millions of iPhones. Still, if your phone isn’t on that list, you’re not missing out on all that much. Android 11 is very much a maintenance release, and as such, it has…

Like Apple’s $400 iPhone SE, the $349 Google Pixel 4a isn’t a want phone, it’s a need phone. Apple made certain sacrifices with its budget iPhone to keep the price low, and Google has done the same with its own cut-rate Pixel, dropping features like wireless charging, 90Hz Smooth Display, Face Unlock, and a dual camera that pushed the Pixel 4 XL to $900. You might think you need those features, but you probably don’t. You only want them. With just 6GB of RAM and a 60Hz display, the Pixel 4a still delivers an Android experience that’s as smooth and speedy as any premium phone. Night Sight and Live HDR+ bring a high-end feel to photo-taking that rivals anything Apple brings with the iPhone 11 Pro. And while I’ll admit…

Choosing a VPN is a challenge when there are so many available—as our comprehensive roundup of VPN reviews demonstrates. Everywhere you look online, some service is offering to help obfuscate your location and protect your browsing habits from internet service providers (ISP) and anyone else lurking around the web. Before plunking down your cold hard credit card number, however, there are many questions to ask. Can you trust the company? What are the speeds like? Is there a desktop app and is it easy to use? How many country locations are there, and can you still watch Netflix while connected? Let’s take a look at two of the most popular VPN choices—Mullvad and NordVPN—the former is our current top pick for a VPN—to understand how they differ and figure out which…

While you can spend a thousand bucks or more on a phone if you want, you don’t actually need to anymore. In the past few months, Apple and Google have both released impressive midrange phones that cost less than $400 and bring many of the features usually reserved for premium handsets, including wireless charging, all-screen designs, and impressive battery life. But as with all things Apple and Google, the iPhone SE and Pixel 4a (see page 35) are not created equal. But I wanted to see just how different they are. I had been using the iPhone SE since receiving it in early June, so when the Pixel 4a arrived on my doorstep, I popped out the SIM and jumped back into the world of Android. Here’s what I learned: SPEED…

If your child is tired of endless Zoom calls and typing on screens, Microsoft’s Office app for iOS and Android offers a respite: kids can work on paper, and you can submit their work electronically. Microsoft launched its Office app for iOS and Android in February, a few weeks before the pandemic drove us all indoors. Who knew, as my family hunkered down to work and study from home, that the Office app would quickly turn into an indispensable tool for managing day-to-day document tasks for my kids as well as myself. Here, you’ll find a few quick tutorials on how to get things done with the Office app. But it’s amazing how much it can actually do! You can take a picture of a page of a book and use…