Indice dei contenuti per Jul-12 in PCWorld

WE HAVE A secret weapon. It’s called PCWorld Labs, and it’s where all of our product testing takes place. The facility is a technogeek’s paradise. Everywhere you look, the benches are brimming with hardware—desktops, laptops, printers, hard drives, HDTVs, and more, many with their hoods popped or in some other state of disassembly. Overseeing the bustling enterprise are Senior Lab Manager Jim Galbraith and Lab Manager Tony Leung. They work alongside development analysts Thomas Luong and William Wang, editorial assistant Alex Cocilova, and interns Kean Bartelman and Chris Southard to supply the benchmark data that fuels hundreds of PCWorld reviews each year. And now, the lab team has an exciting new weapon in its arsenal: WorldBench 7, the newest version of PCWorld’s very own Windows-based benchmark testing suite for desktops…

FOR NOVICES AND businesses that don’t have access to on-site tech support, services that use remote-control software to troubleshoot PCs at a distance have real appeal. But how well do such tech-support services work in the real world? To find out, we sought help from three remote-control tech-support services with three (self-inflicted) test problems, disabling System Restore to eliminate that quick-fix option. Driver test: We deleted the driver for our audio subsystem, and told the tech-support rep that we couldn’t hear anything during Skype calls. (The correct fix: Reinstall the driver.) Display test: We changed the resolution on our display so that icons and text looked radically stretched out. (The correct fix: Change the resolution in the Display control panel.) Folder test: We deleted the Users folder from the Windows…

WONDERSHARE’S PDF Converter Pro can convert PDF files to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, image, ePub, and text formats—but it can’t convert files from those formats to PDF, and it doesn’t let you open or edit PDFs. In my tests, the utility’s output was fairly undistinguished overall. To its credit, the application didn’t crash or balk in converting my test document, and it handled the page sizes correctly. I appreciated PDF Converter Pro’s ability to create multiple-page HTML files from lengthy PDFs. The program even creates linked bookmarks for each page. But the quality of its conversions from PDF into HTML wasn’t especially impressive. During installation, Wondershare didn’t warn me that I’d be receiving pop-up ads in my system tray. The first time I saw one (telling me that I could…

THE SAMSUNG OPTICAL Smart Hub ($130) represents an intriguing idea for using CDs and DVDs in a mobile world, but it falters in design and presentation. Hooked to a PC, it’s a DVD burner. Detached, it’s a DLNA-certified media streaming hub with its own Wi-Fi network. The MobileHub client app is available for iOS (4.3 or better) and Android. On a third-gen iPad, I could browse files on CDs and DVDs in the Optical Smart Hub’s internal drive and on attached USB drives, but an ‘unsupported device’ error prevented me from streaming. Samsung is working on a fix, and says older iPads are not affected. On Android, things worked as advertised, but the device took a while to catalog the media files first. On both PCs and Macs, the Optical…

Make Your Gmail Work for You Alex Gawley Gmail Product Manager Your time is valuable. On the Gmail team, we work hard to offer a user experience that won’t bog you down. But we also want to share some tips for being even more productive with Gmail. Focus on search, not folders: Google was built on search, and we’ve aimed to bring that same search experience to Gmail. Studies show that users save time when they search for an email instead of categorizing it into a folder. In Gmail, you can quickly find the exact message you want by typing keywords into the search box, or you can rely on the program’s search autocomplete to specify the attributes you want (try typing ‘from:[sender]’ or ‘has photos’). Let Gmail do your…

Laptops and tablets seem to get most of the attention these days— after all, they’re great for working on the run. But once you settle down at your desk, it’s nice to stretch out with the generous real estate that only a widescreen monitor can provide. And now is the perfect time to buy a monitor: They are cheaper, thinner, and less power-hungry than ever before. To take the pulse of the current LCD-monitor market, we rounded up nine 23-and 24-inch displays from six manufacturers, at prices ranging from just $160 to $425. If you’re willing to pay for the most expensive monitor we evaluated, the HP ZR2440w, you’ll find that it’s worth the investment: Our testers gave it top marks for image quality, and it offers lots of adjustment…

ONE WAY TO keep your laptop from being stolen (or from remaining stolen) is to install tracking software. Using several different elements, including IP address locations, Wi-Fi positioning, and even the ability to turn on the notebook’s webcam remotely, laptop-tracking software can help you get a lost or stolen system back. ActiveTrak’s GadgetTrak, Flipcode’s Hidden, and Absolute Software’s LoJack for Laptops are just a few examples of such software. GadgetTrak (find.pcworld.com/72909) works with both Windows and Mac machines, and costs $20 a year. It uses Wi-Fi positioning to locate your laptop within about 10 to 20 feet, and lets you take photos (remotely, via webcam) of the PC’s captor. The software is also tamper-proof (no one can modify it unless you deactivate it from the GadgetTrak website). A small Mac…

GAMERS, TECH ENTHUSIASTS, and early adopters were the first to benefit from the shift to HDTV, and now they’re reaping the rewards of jumping on the 3D train before everyone else. But as in the early years of HD technology, discerning how to get the most out of your cutting-edge tech is no simple task. We’re here to help. If you took the plunge and bought a 3D HDTV recently, spend a bit of time to implement the following simple trick to improve 3D viewing on your new set. Whether you’re playing games or watching Blu-ray movies, you’ll probably be using your HDTV in a darkened room to replicate the immersive theater experience—but marathon sessions in front of a bright screen can wreak havoc on your eyes. Most HDTVs with…

An End to Your Business Montreal’s Denis Lebel wanted an app to help him keep track of business cards with his Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone. And he found one: CamCard Business Card Reader from Intsig Information. The description of the app, though, gave him pause—until he clicked the down arrow to show more text, and realized that the app wanted him to “Pay Once, Scan Card and Say Goodbye to business card black hole.” This Is Only an Estimate WEB HOSTING SERVICE HostGator must take its customer service very seriously, reports Rhonda Eash of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. “I usually get ‘normal’ wait times,” she says, “but this was an odd one.” Odd indeed. Most places round off to the nearest trillionth of a minute. Can It Also Spell-Check? READER LOUIS GREGORY…

DRIVE, GOOGLE’S long-awaited challenger to Dropbox, has arrived, offering impressive search capabilities and good integration with other Google services including Docs and Google+. Here’s a look at the best and worst of Google Drive. When you add the service to your Google account, it automatically replaces Docs. If collaborative documents that you’re used to seeing in Docs are absent from Drive, click the More drop-down menu and then open the All items menu to see whether they are there (as is likely). Instead of downloading copies of your files that are saved online in Google’s Docs formats, Drive has a folder full of icons that link to the documents in your browser. If your PC is set up to access Docs offline with Google Chrome, you can open these files…

MIT SCIENTISTS HAVE found a new way of surfacing glass so as to eliminate its reflective properties—and that could mean glare-free screens. Beyond saving the eyes of people who use smartphones and laptops in the sun, the glass could have numerous applications. The glare-free properties of the glass could allow solar panels to absorb more solar radiation that would otherwise be reflected and lost. This “multifunctional” glass also resists fogging up, repels water, and can even clean itself. Imagine car windows that didn’t fog up in the winter, or ones that could whisk away rain and dirt without third-party intervention. The scientists at MIT anticipate that their glass modifications could be applied to all sorts of optical lenses for eyeglasses, cameras, televisions, devices with smaller screens, and windows for buildings.…

TO KEEP YOUR business costs low and your efficiency high, start with software. Instead of buying commercial programs for your business, why not use a capable free or open-source alternative? Here are five incredible—and free—utilities designed specifically for business operations. Microsoft Security Essentials Perfect for smaller shops, Microsoft’s free (and highly rated) antivirus utility can run on up to ten PCs. I’m using Security Essentials (find.pcworld.com/64078) on five machines, and it has performed quickly, quietly, and efficiently on all of them. OpenProj An alternative to Microsoft Project—which costs a thousand bucks—OpenProj (find.pcworld.com/72948) offers Gantt charts, network diagrams, WBS and RBS charts, earned value costing, and project-management features. Plus, it’s compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux; Project is Windows-only. OrangeHRM A complete human-resource management program for SMBs, OrangeHRM (find.pcworld.com/72949) includes modules…

If you’re like most folks, you can prepare a cup of coffee in the time it takes your computer to boot up and consume half of it while waiting for a program to load. While every-thing from your operating system to the number of files on your desktop can contribute to this bottleneck, one of the easiest ways to improve the performance of your computer is re-place your hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD). Why is an SSD so superior to tra-ditional mechanical hard drives? Hard drives consist of one or more spinning disks and moving magnetic read/write heads, making them susceptible to damage from both physical shocks and strong magnetic fields. An SSD stores your programs and files in ultra-fast flash memory instead of disks. They have…

LOOKING FOR AN inexpensive color laser printer for a small office? For $150, HP’s Officejet Pro 8100 ePrinter delivers fast, good-quality color printing. This color inkjet printer has Wi-Fi, USB, and ethernet, and it can handle 1250 pages of printing per month. Best of all, its inks cost less per page than the toner supplies for any similarly priced color laser. Output text looked sharp, despite tending toward charcoal gray instead of black. The slightly oversaturated palette in color photos made for warm and friendly nonhuman subjects, but made flesh tones look a bit ruddy. The printer’s standard-size cartridges cost 2.6 cents per black page and 11.3 cents for a four-color page. High-yield XL supplies run 1.6 cents per monochrome page and 7.3 cents for a four-color page. VERY GOOD…

COREL’S VIDEOSTUDIO Pro X5 ($80) video-editing software supplies everything you might require to produce videos that you can host yourself, and that play in any HTML 5Ðcompliant browser. But you need a computer with one of the latest CPUs to make cutting-edge video. HTML 5—The Latest in Web Video To make your videos play on a Web page—and on smartphones and tablets—you can upload them to YouTube and use its embed code, or host them on your own server. All of the major desktop browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) support Adobe Flash video, but Safari on the iPhone and iPad does not. Meanwhile, all of the latest browser versions recognize HTML 5 code, but they don’t all play the same video formats, so you must output video…

Shopping for a new smartphone can be overwhelming. So many good phones are available that upgraders may feel swamped with options. Never fear: I’ve picked the best ones on each of the four major carriers. And since the smartphone world moves incredibly fast, I’ll also tell you about phones not yet out. Worth noting are two upcoming phones I’m excited about but can’t yet recommend, because we don’t know enough about them. One, the Samsung Galaxy S III, will debut in Europe before arriving in the United States. Most carriers likely will get a version of the S III, though none of them have confirmed this. Another wild card is the fifth-generation iPhone, which hasn’t even been announced yet but is eagerly anticipated. In the meantime, here are the best…

WANT TO KICK your PC’s performance up a few notches? Try this: A good liquid cooling system moves heat from the CPU more efficiently than air cooling, and can run much more quietly. Many enthusiasts have used liquid cooling for years. In the past, though, installing such a system—aka plumbing—was not for the faint of heart. High-end liquid cooling involved connecting tubing, ensuring that the tubing was properly sealed, and then filling up the reservoir with coolant. If you didn’t achieve a proper seal, firing up the liquid cooler could lead to disaster. High-end customized cooling systems are still the only way to go if you want to cool all aspects of your PC, including graphics cards and even hard drives. But if you just want a better CPU cooler,…

BLOATWARE IS THE bane of every tech user, haunting many desktop PCs, laptops, and tablets. But to me, the uninstallable manufacturer-added apps found on smartphones represent the bottom of the barrel in bloatware. The worst offenders today are Android phones. And the three-headed monster of bloatware, cheaply made phones, and Google Play malware could prove toxic for the Android platform. Recently, I reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G, a T-Mobile-based Android phone. The phone scored well for its design, display, and performance; but the abundance of Samsung-and T-Mobile-added bloatware dragged the phone’s overall rating down. T-Mobile alone added 411, Game Base, Lookout, More for Me, Netflix, T-Mobile TV, T-Mobile Name ID, T-Mobile Video Chat...and the list goes on. Some of those “apps” are just links to app stores or…

HP Officejet 150 Mobile All-in-One If you work on the road, you know (or can imagine) how useful a mobile printer is. HP is making the mobile printer that much more helpful by adding a sheet-fed scanner and a touchscreen control panel to this $399 model. find.pcworld.com/72980 DealAngel.com By analyzing historical prices for various accommodation options, DealAngel identifies truly exceptional deals for travelers—for instance, five-star hotels whose rate for the night is a real steal. In addition, the site’s calendar will notify you if you happen to choose an especially expensive time to visit the destination of your choice. find.pcworld.com/72982 LG G2 LED TV Available in 47-and 55-inch sizes (for $1700 and $2300, respectively), this television boasts LED backlighting, passive 3D technology, and a remote that has a full QWERTY…

THE SHAKY ECONOMY has many of us thinking twice about parting with hard-earned dough. Maybe you’re bargain-hunting, cutting back on travel, or skipping the gym for home workouts. Another way to get the things you need—or just want—without spending a dime is by bartering. You know the basic principle from your grade school cafeteria: I’ll give you my peanut butter sandwich if you give me your chocolate chip cookies. The Internet is perfect for bartering. Dozens of websites can match you up with someone who has what you want—and vice versa. Better still, most of the sites are free. Before You Barter • Read the terms and conditions carefully before you initiate a transaction. Understand what kinds of things can’t be bartered, including anything illegal; porn, alcohol, and drugs (in…

IF YOU ARE physically transporting data you don’t want other people to see, you need secure media. Secure flash drives have security in their hardware. You’ll pay a premium for them, but you’ll get peace of mind. We took five hardware-encrypted drives for test spins. The results? For security, it’s all systems go. Three of the devices we tried—the CMS CE-Secure Vault FIPS, the Kanguru Defender 2000, and the Kingston DataTraveler 4000 Managed—are certified to Level 2 of the government’s FIPS 140-2 security standard. The Imation Defender F200 ratchets that up to Level 3. The Apricorn Aegis Secure Key is under review for Level 3 certification. Although Imation’s Defender F200 and Apricorn’s Aegis Secure Key are both device and operating-system agnostic, the other three drives in this group use client…

PDF CREATION and conversion applications are as common as rainbows in Hawaii. Lulu Software’s Soda PDF 2012 Pro + OCR promises big features for its modest price; but while it performs basic functions adequately, it does not deliver on the pot of gold. Like other PDF applications, Soda PDF 2012 Pro can convert documents from other formats into PDF files. And like most others, it produces good-looking PDFs from files saved in other file formats. But this $100 program did a middling job of converting from PDF to other formats—it was far less impressive than the much higher-priced ($449) Adobe Acrobat X Pro. Its form-creation tools are very basic, it has no redaction features for securely blacking out portions of a document to render them unreadable, and you can’t embed…

THOUGH SOME digital cameras provide a high-dynamic-range capture mode, ultimately you’ll want to capture the images and combine them yourself for greater creative control. Unified Color’s HDR Expose 2 image-editing application ($149) can combine multiple images of different exposures to create one properly exposed composition. Many applications, including Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 and Corel PaintShop Pro X4, support HDR image editing; even the iPhone 4 offers a form of it. But HDR Expose 2 provides much more control over HDR processing than either of those competitors. HDR Expose 2 sets no limit on the number of photos you can import, but I found little benefit in adding more than four or five shots. On a four-year-old dual-Xeon workstation, the application took about 30 seconds to process three source images and show…

INSTAGRAM IS a fantastic mobile photo-sharing service, but getting photos off the Instagram servers and onto your hard drive can be tricky. We dug up a few different methods to download Instagram images. You can email or delete individual photos by tapping the option menu in the lower-right corner. At this writing, however, Instagram offers no way to download all your photos in one neat package. You can download an image by opening it in your Web browser and saving it to your hard drive or by emailing it to yourself from the Instagram smartphone app, but that’s tremendously inefficient if you have more than a handful of images online. The good news: Some enterprising Web developers have created a few simple (and free) image transfer services that can download…

IN A PHOTO of a scene with lots of contrasty lighting, parts of the photo will likely be under-or overexposed. Here’s a trick to make such snapshots presentable for uploading to Facebook. Duplicate the photo: You can do this in almost any program that supports layers; here, I’ll use Adobe Photoshop Elements. In the image at right, a strong backlight cast important parts of the subjects in shadow. Open the photo in your editing program, and duplicate the photo in a new layer. In Photoshop Elements, do that by choosing Layer ▸ Duplicate Layer and clicking OK. You’ll now see two copies of the photo in the Layers palette on the right side of the screen. Invert the layer: Now you want to saturate the top layer a bit. With…