PCWorldの May 2017 の目次

MORE THAN FIVE months after its grand unveiling last October, the Windows 10 Creators Update is finally here—and the wait was worth it. Following in the footsteps of last August’s sweeping Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the Creators Update tweaks and tunes the core Windows 10 experience while heaping on a pile of handy all-new features. While PCWorld’s comprehensive Windows 10 Creators Update review (go.pcworld.com/w10updrev) contains detailed impressions of Microsoft’s refreshed operating system, here’s a higher-level look at what you need to know about the Creators Update. How do I get it? Just sit tight! The Windows 10 Creators Update started rolling out to the general public on April 11 via the standard Windows Update process, just like every other Windows 10 update. There’s no way for home users to opt…

ONE OF THE marquee features of the Galaxy S8 is Bixby, Samsung’s response to the Siris, Google Assistants, and Cortanas of the world. Billed as “a new way to interact with your phone,” Samsung has gone so far as to add a dedicated button on the side of the phone to summon its new assistant, and has integrated it deeply into the S8’s interface. There’s just one problem: You won’t be able to talk to Bixby at launch. In a statement released about a week before the April 21 launch of the S8, Samsung confirmed that its new AI assistant would be missing a key component. While it supported Vision, Home, and Reminder at launch, Bixby Voice won’t be included on U.S. models. Samsung says the feature will arrive “later…

INTEL’S REVOLUTIONARY NEW non-volatile Optane Memory wants to make hard drives as fast as SSDs, but apparently not if you bought a PC on the cheap. The superfast Optane Memory M.2 drives announced in late March not only require a Kaby Lake processor, but a Core one at that, as first spotted by The Tech Report. According to Intel’s ARK database and Optane website, Kaby Lake-based Celeron and Pentium processors aren’t supported. That’s puzzling because these new Optane Memory drives target mainstream PCs rather than enthusiast systems, supercharging the performance of a traditional hard drive. With an Optane M.2 drive installed, Intel promises speeds close to that of an SSD in some scenarios. The Optane Memory does this by caching your regular tasks, such as launching a particular program or…

WHILE SONY’S PLAYSTATION 4 Pro struggles to hit 4K resolution in many games, Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox is shaping up to be an utter beast of a console. Recently, Microsoft revealed the hardware specifications for its Xbox “Project Scorpio” console via Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry—some of the most demanding technical reviewers around. Significant upgrades abound in all areas, and AMD’s managed to achieve borderline wondrous results with Scorpio’s new APU. Project Scorpio’s graphics capabilities immediately leap out here. While the original Xbox One utilized a mere 12 Radeon graphics cores clocked at a woefully slow 853MHz, Project Scorpio squeezes in 40 Radeon cores clocked at a whopping 1,172MHz. To put that in proper perspective, AMD’s Radeon RX 480 contains 36 cores that hum along between 1,120MHz and 1,266MHz. It’s like AMD and…

MICROSOFT’S WINDOWS 10 CREATORS UPDATE offers the most significant upgrade to Windows 10 since its launch, splashing a bright, cheery coat of fun over Windows 10’s productivity foundation. Microsoft started rolling out the free upgrade to existing users as soon as April 11. New users will need to pay $120 for Windows 10 Home (go.pcworld.com/w10home) or $200 for Windows 10 Pro (go.pcworld.com/win10proamz)—remember, Windows 10 itself is no longer free. Insiders already have the Creators Update, as the company recently confirmed, and we used the Insider build to write this review. It’s worth the upgrade. The Creators Update adds numerous new capabilities (go.pcworld.com/w10up) that Windows previously lacked. Check out Microsoft’s renewed commitment to PC gaming. Try the new, creative twists on Windows Ink (no stylus required—a mouse or touchpad will do),…

AMD’S $250 RYZEN 5 1600X (go.pcworld.com/ryzen51600xamz) is here to challenge Intel’s quad-core, $250 Core i5-7600K for the honor of being “The People’s CPU.” Everyone likes to read about expensive, gold-plated, $1,000 parts, but in the real world, most people can’t or won’t spend that much and are looking for the best price-to-performance ratio. While Ryzen 5 1600X may not have clock speeds as high as the Core i5-7600K’s, it does offer additional cores and virtual cores. We’ve run a battery of benchmarks to see if those cores will make up the difference. Meet Ryzen 5 AMD actually announced four Ryzen 5 CPUs last month. Two of them are quad-cores with SMT (simultaneous multithreading): The $169 Ryzen 5 1400 and the $189 Ryzen 5 1500X. The last two are six-core chips…

LOGITECH’S ZEROTOUCH SMARTPHONE holder has been on the market for almost a year, but I’ve ignored it because my beat doesn’t include mobile devices. That changed about a month ago when Logitech integrated Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service into its ZeroTouch app. Now I can use voice commands to control my smart home while I’m in the car and my smartphone is connected to the ZeroTouch (logitech.com/zerotouch). I’ve encountered a few bumps in the road during my month-long review (pun intended), but I’ve concluded that the air-vent version of this holder fully justifies its lofty $60 price tag. I’ve encountered a few bumps in the road during my month-long review (pun intended), but I’ve concluded that the air-vent version (go.pcworld.com/0touchventamz) of this holder fully justifies its lofty $60 price tag (simpler…

ASK ANY LINUX enthusiast, and they’ll tell you how awesome an operating system Linux can be. (Well, except Bryan Lunduke, who will say it sucks before he says it’s awesome; go.pcworld.com/linuxsucks.) For the desktop user, the freedom from worry about most viruses is a big plus, and not spending $100 upgrading Windows is a big plus too. As awesome as Linux is for desktop use, Linux (and BSD for that matter) truly shines as a server. While providing web-based services is one of those server-y things Linux does really well, Linux can do a lot more than host a blog about family outings If you’re looking to host your own services instead of paying for or relying on those in the cloud, running your own home server is one of…

EILEEN W. WROTE to me expressing concerns about online privacy, and though we’ve written about it previously (go.pcworld.com/browserprivacy) I decided to add a few more tips and tricks for future readers. It is true you can never really be truly anonymous when browsing the web from any computer, but you can take several steps to make your browsing difficult to track and to make sure information you want to keep private isn’t being shared. 1. Use Tor If you want to make your online web browsing as difficult as humanly possible to track, use the Tor browser (go.pcworld.com/torbundle) or hardware (go.pcworld.com/anonabox) that connects you to the internet through Tor. Tor stands for The Onion Router, which is analogous to how it connects you to the internet (via several layers).…

AFTER A DECADE of fielding ho-hum FX-series processors, AMD’s finally released its highly disruptive Ryzen chips, throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Intel’s supremacy in high-end computing. AMD’s new Ryzen chips include several CPUs (and CPU families) of various levels of potency. What’s more, Ryzen introduces a completely new motherboard platform, and the processors require different memory and coolers than their predecessors. There’s a lot to sift through—so let’s sift! Here’s everything you need to know about AMD’s Ryzen. Meet AMD’s Ryzen CPUs Let’s begin with the stars of the show: the Ryzen chips themselves. AMD’s Ryzen chips will be split across three families. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 processors launched first, with 8 cores, 16 threads, and price points that undercut the comparable 8-core Intel Extreme Edition by a whopping…

THAT FANCY 4K display you just bought is already obsolete. After teasing it at CES, Dell put its monstrous 32-inch, 8K monitor up for sale for the whopping sum of $5,000 (go.pcworld.com/dell8kmon). At CES, Dell said the UP3218K monitor would start shipping on March 23, but in reality the display was just available for preorders. The company started shipping the monitor in mid-April. Dell’s 8K display offers four times as many pixels as a 4K monitor, packing 33.2 million of the tiny squares across its 7680 x 4320 resolution. (A 4K monitor, in turn, has four times as many pixels as a standard 1080p display.) The monitor also supports 100 percent AdobeRGB and 100 percent sRGB. It looks amazing, but this beastly monitor requires an equally powerful PC to power…

Make smart purchases, stay safe online. IT’S OFFICIAL: CONGRESS has sold you out to Internet service providers, passing a bill that dismantles Internet privacy rules and allows ISPs to sell your web history and other personal information without your permission. President Trump signed the bill into law, which means that anyone concerned about privacy will have to protect themselves against overzealous data collection from their ISP. Some privacy-conscious folks are already doing that—but many aren’t. If you want to keep your ISP from looking over your shoulder for data to sell to advertisers, here are three relatively simple actions you can take to get started. Use HTTPS Everywhere The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere (eff.org/https-everywhere) browser extension is one of the first things you should install. This extension requires that…

DEVELOPERS OF THE popular LastPass password manager rushed to push out a fix to solve a serious vulnerability that could have allowed attackers to steal users’ passwords or execute malicious code on their computers. The vulnerability was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy and was reported to LastPass. It affected the browser extensions installed by the service’s users for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. According to a description in the Google Project Zero bug tracker, the vulnerability could have given attackers access to internal commands inside the LastPass extension. Those are the commands used by the extension to copy passwords or fill in web forms using information stored in the user’s secure vault. If the extension’s binary component is installed, the openattach command can be used to…

THE PROMISE OF the new Game Mode lurking within the Windows 10 Creators Update is tantalizing indeed: better PC gaming performance, for free. The reality’s a bit more complicated, but there’s still a lot to be excited about—especially if you’re trying to game on a modestly appointed PC rather than a powerhouse. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. Windows 10 never explicitly calls Game Mode to your attention. So what—and where—is it? Meet Game Mode Game Mode is designed to improve the performance of your PC games, both raw frame-rate speeds and overall smoothness (which Microsoft calls consistency). It does so by dedicating a big chunk of your system’s resources to the game you’re playing, which prevents background processes from muscling in and potentially disrupting your experience. (Adios, unexpected…

IF YOU’RE SKEPTICAL whether “optimizations” can truly improve gaming performance on the disruptive new Ryzen CPU, AMD has a message for you: They really can. Recently, the company released benchmark results from a beta version of Ashes of the Singularity that showed a sizable increase in performance from just a few weeks of tuning for the company’s new CPU. Why this matters: When AMD’s Ryzen launched with bat-out-of-hell application performance but somewhat slower gaming performance than Intel’s rival CPUs, it spawned an Unsolved Mysteries-like search for the cause of such a puzzling disparity. Many theories later (including one that has absolved Microsoft), the only one that seems to be standing are the games themselves. AMD’s numbers show that patching Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation with Ryzen optimization could increase performance…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/tag45vid SOMEWHERE ON THE grand continuum of gadget nerdlery, there’s a consumer who will buy a very expensive—almost recklessly expensive—Android Wear watch. TAG Heuer had a surprise hit with its original TAG Heuer Connected, and now it’s embracing Android Wear 2.0 with the Connected Modular 45 (go.pcworld.com/thconmod45), an incredibly swank, finely machined, lusciously tactile smartwatch. No, make that a family. It’s a smartwatch family. No, scratch that. It’s a smartwatch system. Officially described as a Carrera model, the Connected Modular 45 comes in 11 essential designs, with 45 more looks available for special order. But because its lugs, straps, and buckles are all user-interchangeable, the Modular 45 is, well, whatever you want it to be—if you have the money to spend. Pricing starts at $1,650 and…

THE RYZEN 5 1600X is here, and AMD’s affordable processor is just as disruptive as the high-end Ryzen 7 CPUs. Hell, maybe even more so. While the 8-core-equipped Ryzen 7 series trades blows with Intel’s $1,000 Core i7-6900K for as little as a third of the price, it lags significantly behind the quad-core Core i7-7700K in many pure gaming workloads. The Ryzen 5 1600X’s value proposition is much clearer. With 6 overclockable cores and 12 threads, its competitor would be the $420 Core i7-6800K, in a vacuum—but we don’t live in a vacuum. Here in the real world, the 1600X’s $250 price tag puts it toe-to-toe with Intel’s Core i5-7600K, a ferocious gaming chip but one limited to just four cores without any hyperthreading. Sure, the 1600X still isn’t quite…

ONE QUESTION I often get from potential cord cutters is whether they can still watch the news without cable. These days, it’s easier to accomplish than ever, as more companies invest in streaming the news, and streaming channel bundles emerge with access to major cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. I first wrote about cable-free news options in 2015 (go.pcworld.com/ cordcut2015). Here’s an update that includes all the best services and apps to emerge since then; National broadcast news networks CBS News: Not to be confused with CBS’s nightly and weekly broadcasts, this round-the-clock streaming service provides anchored news coverage throughout the day and live broadcasts of major events. In a sense, it’s an antidote to cable news, with a heavy emphasis on reported stories instead…

SAMSUNG IS BACK. After the Note7 recall stripped us of our end-of-year Galaxy fix, Samsung has officially unveiled its flagship S8 and S8+ phones, and they should be enough to make you forget all about the phablet fiasco. Packed with a slew of high-end features and wrapped in a stunning, near-bezel-less enclosure, the Galaxy S8 and S8+ are sure to turn heads, dispensing of the home button and the somewhat stale S7 form factor, and putting Apple and its rumored iPhone 8 on notice. With the S8, Samsung has returned to the flagship market in a big way, and assuming it doesn’t have any recall-level issues, it should rocket the company back to the head of the class. Pricing varies by carrier: Verizon is selling the S8/S8+ for $30/$35 a…

INTEL’S OPTANE MEMORY could be the most revolutionary letdown in storage history. Announced in late March, these first consumer Optane-based devices should be available in late April in two M.2 trims: A 16GB model for $44 and a 32GB Optane Memory device for $77. Both are rated for crazy-fast read speeds of 1.2GBps and writes of 280MBps. If you’re wondering how you can install Windows 10 on one of these, you can’t. The first two Optane Memory devices instead are meant to be used primarily as cache drives for a traditional hard drive, using a technique similar to the Smart Response Technology (go.pcworld.com/intelsrt) Intel introduced in 2011. Why this matters: Optane Memory is a far cry from what we expected after Intel and Micron announced 3D XPoint (go.pcworld.com/micron3dxpt) in 2015.…

GETTING 8K DISPLAYS to work with Windows 10 PCs can be difficult, as Dell is finding out. But playing with 8K on PCs is a discovery process for Dell, which shipped the first-ever 8K display—the Dell 32 UltraSharp 8K Monitor—recently. The small initial stock of the $5,000 display sold out in a few days. The display won’t work on all PCs and needs specific hardware and display ports. But Dell is finding out that more hardware than it originally thought can handle 8K graphics, including AMD’s Radeon Pro WX 7100 workstation GPU (go.pcworld.com/amdwx7100). The 32-inch display shows images at a resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels. The monitor shows stunning colors and features 33.2 million pixels and more than a billion colors. But being first to market has its own…

THERE ARE ALL kinds of new features in the Windows 10 Creators Update that started rolling out on April 11, but one change really sticks out: greater transparency about the data that Microsoft collects from your PC. There are new dashboard screens that all Windows 10 users will see the first time they install or upgrade to the Creators Update. Perhaps more interestingly, for the first time Microsoft has detailed information about the user data it collects for diagnostics. Diagnostics collection Let’s start with the diagnostics collection, as Microsoft’s come under heavy fire from privacy advocates for refusing to allow users to disable it completely while simultaneously refusing to detail exactly what information Windows 10 collects from users. Microsoft published two Technet pages describing the data Microsoft collects from users…

MICROSOFT KEEPS TRYING to prove that Windows 10 may be the best thing that’s ever happened to desktop Linux. The company is yet again adding ads to Windows 10, but this time it’s in possibly the most egregious spot yet: File Explorer. Users have been complaining on Twitter and other online watering holes for a few days now. We haven’t seen the ads on our PCs yet, but Joel Hruska and Ryan Whitwam over at ExtremeTech (go.pcworld.com/etmsads) apparently did. Right now, the only ad reported is for an Office 365 subscription, hidden in an offer to expand your OneDrive cloud storage space. It appears in a large tile area at the top of the File Explorer window with two buttons to either Learn More or to dismiss it with Not…

DESPITE A REVAMP late last year, the dust hasn’t settled around HP’s 13.3-inch Spectre x360 just yet. A modest spring update of our favorite convertible gives it perks that first appeared in its revamped 15-inch sibling. Yep, that’s right. If you bought a Spectre x360 even a month ago, you may be slightly aggravated to learn that HP now ships it with active pen support. (A pen even comes in the box as an included accessory.) A 4K UHD option for the screen is available, too. With these additions, the x360 now has every major feature you could want from an ultraportable. The only thing keeping the Spectre x360 from rising even further above its peers is the small price you pay for these upgrades—partially in cold, hard cash, partially…

WELL, THE HALLOWED day has finally arrived. Assuming you’re willing to spend $600 on an Oculus Rift and its accompanying Touch controllers, then another $70-ish on a plastic guitar and a copy of the game, then you can finally—finally—play Rock Band on a PC. It’s really more like a Guitar Hero game of course, and lacking the huge DLC back catalog of its console counterparts, but still. Rock Band. On PC. Sort of. All the world’s a stage I’ve been messing with Rock Band VR (go.pcworld.com/rkbndvramz) off-and-on for the last two days. The first thing I’ll say: Much as I hate the idea of rebuying my entire song library piecemeal, this game desperately needs DLC. It’s been a while since I’ve been limited to only the pack-in soundtrack on a…

WE’RE BIG FANS of keyboard shortcuts. Memorizing key combinations takes some work, but once you have, shortcuts make using an operating system so much more efficient. Many people know the everyday keyboard shortcuts (go.pcworld.com/20w10keycuts), such as how to copy, cut, and paste text with the keyboard, how to close a window, and how to lock a PC. That’s a solid start—but there are even more powerful keyboard shortcuts lurking beyond the basics. Here are some of our favorite less commonly used shortcuts. We’ve grouped these by operating system to make it easier for users of Windows 7, 8.1, and 10 to see what’s available for their system. Windows 7 and up • F2: Prepare selected file for renaming—no more careful clicking. • Alt + Enter: Select a file and then…

SWITCHING BETWEEN MULTIPLE open windows of the same program is a problem we try to solve in several ways. Sometimes you have applications that use tabs to view multiple files in one window. For those that don’t, users often turn to Windows’ Snap function or multiple monitors. This tip uses a different solution by importing a longtime keyboard shortcut from the Mac, Alt + ` (backtick). (The Mac version uses Cmd instead of Alt.) This simple keyboard shortcut, which you can easily hit with the same hand, automatically switches between multiple windows in the same program. You can accomplish something similar with Windows’ tried-and-true Alt + Tab, but that shortcut switches between every open window on your desktop. There are several programs that offer the backtick solution, but the…