Table of contents for Jan-15 in PCWorld

AT THE END OF September, Microsoft unveiled Windows 10 with an eye toward the business market and productivity. In January, Microsoft said it would detail the “next chapter” of Windows 10, revealing new features for consumers. Microsoft announced that it would hold a Webcast and an in-person event in Redmond on Jan. 21, where chief executive Satya Nadella, plus senior executives in Microsoft’s Operating Systems division— Terry Myerson, Joe Belfiore and Phil Spencer—will discuss the new operating system. When Myerson, the executive vice president of the Operating System group, announced Windows 10 in September, he pitched it as an enterprise product with an interface that would be “familiar” for Windows 7 or Windows 8 users. “They will find all the tools they’re used to finding, with all the apps and…

IN ANY MODERN browser, you can highlight a word or phrase, right-click it, and choose to search for more information on those specific terms. Now you can do it in Microsoft Word, as you write. Microsoft’s Insights for Office is a new capability Microsoft added to Word Online—but not Office 365, Word 2013, or even the other Office Online apps. (Office Online (office.com/start) offers online versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, and Outlook, plus access to your calendar, People contacts, and OneDrive cloud storage.) When you right-click a word in Word Online, Microsoft gives you several options, including cut, copy, and paste, the ability to add a hyperlink, and more. With the new addition, choosing Insights will bring up a right-hand sidebar that Microsoft says will offer up information from…

STYLE: THAT’S ONE THING VOODOO PC had in spades before HP bought the boutique builder a few years back. In the shadow of a nationwide economic recession, consumers’ appetite for high-end gaming machines went on a long pause, and Voodoo soon vanished into the vastness of HP’s oceans. Now, rising from the depths like Venus on a half-shell, HP’s new Omen laptop offers good gaming performance in a svelte body with plenty of style. Let’s not trivialize the style part: Besides a few key standouts (you know who you are), most of the gaming laptops makers today would throw panache under the bus at 45mph and then stop to back over it, if it would save them the bus fare. That’s not so with the Omen, which grabs your attention…

MAKE IT BETTER and they will come. That’s a common vendor mantra, but rarely are the improvements as compelling as those on HP’s $800, 10.1-inch ElitePad 1000 (go.pcworld.com/ep1000) business tablet. The successor to the ElitePad 900 replaces the single-core Intel Atom Z2760 with a significantly faster quad-core Intel Atom Z3795 CPU, features a higher-resolution display (1920x1200 versus 1280x800), and has twice the memory at 4GB. Those adds alleviatejust about every complaint we had about the ElitePad 900—without killing what we liked about it. Even the battery life has improved. When you start to accessorize any tablet, ask yourself why you’re buying a tablet rather than a laptop.. Part of what we already appreciated are the rugged Gorilla Glass 3 covering the display and the milled aluminum edge and backplate. The…

SURE, YOU CAN do a lot on a smartphone, phablet, or slate, but there are times when only a laptop will do. Unfortunately, situations like this always seem to pop-up while I’m on the road with no obvious Internet access. But have no fear, weary traveler. This is no time to cave and start paying for Wi-Fi. Instead, put this three-step plan for finding free(ish) Wi-Fi into action before you even think of paying for that Boingo or Gogo day pass. Wi-Fi hotspots When you’re on the hunt for free Wi-Fi the first thing to do is ask yourself if you’ve got default access to free hotspots already. If you’re a Comcast (wifi.comcast.com) subscriber, for example, you’ve got access to millions of free Wi-Fi hotspots across the U.S. Verizon…

com/cpsc LENOVO IS ISSUING a recall for more than 500,000 computer AC power cords in the U.S. after receiving reports of the cord overheating, sparking, melting, and burning. All problematic cords were reported by users outside the U.S. The current recall also affects 44,000 devices sold in Canada, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (go.pcworld.com/cpsc). The recall could apply to anyone who purchased an IdeaPad laptop from the B-, G-, S-, U-, V- or Z-series between February 2011 and June 2012. Plain vanilla Lenovo laptops with no IdeaPad or ThinkPad branding are also affected if they are from the B-, G-, and V- series. You can find a complete list (go.pcworld.com/recall) of affected models on Lenovo’s website. The impact on you at home: If you’re affected by the…

INTEL’S WORKING HARD to establish a chiphold in the Internet of Things, as it emphasized in an "loT Insights" event. But it’s not going to go it alone. Just as Intel’s Xeon chips are built upon an ecosystem of partnerships, standards, and specifications, the company’s forging similar kinds of agreements in loT—a space dominated by embedded processors that already have a head start on Intel’s Quark (go.pcworld.com/quark) and Edison (go.pcworld.com/edison) chips. Intel would seem to be operating at a disadvantage. ARM dominates the smartphone business, which is defined by small but powerful processors, while Intel’s Atom chips have struggled to gain traction. In wearables, the challenge is tougher: Processors are smaller and consume even less power. Not surprisingly, then, the loT markets Intel chose to highlight put less of a…

AFTER MONTHS OF teasing, tweaking, and controversy, Firefox’s native ads have finally landed on the stable release’s New Tab page (go.pcworld.com/newtab)—and just like we said when we saw the ads in Firefox’s nightly preview builds, they’re actually not so bad (go.pcworld.com/notbad). They’re unobtrusive, clearly labeled, and only collect user information in "aggregate form, meaning no data is personally identifiable." And the ads reduce Mozilla’s overwhelming reliance on Google—which definitely does collect personally identifiable data—for revenue, which is nothing but a good thing for the future of the browser. Selecting Classic will force the New Tab page to only display sites from your browsing history. Even so, not everyone wants to see them. And continuing in Mozilla’s pro-choice, pro-privacy (go.pcworld.com/tradition) tradition, Firefox makes it easy to disable the New Tab page…

THE LENOVO YOGA Tablet 2 Pro is out of the ordinary. It’s not much bigger than most Android tablets at 13 inches, but it has a pico projector embedded in its hinge. That’s in addition to its neat kickstand that you can orient any way you like. At $500, The Yoga Tablet 2 Pro is much more affordable than buying both a tablet and a projector individually, but that’s little consolation if you have to deal with Lenovo’s horrid adjustments to the Android interface. This enormous, productivity-centric tablet has so many things going for it, but its shoddy Android customizations ultimately hold it back. It is a tablet or a laptop? Ignore its gargantuan size and the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 Pro is quite the stylin’ tablet. It features a…

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP IS more than most of us need—more features, more power, more financial outlay. Corel thinks its PaintShop Pro X7 is a better fit. Retailing at $100, PaintShop Pro X7’s Ultimate edition is bursting at the seams with features, and ships with a standalone portrait editor to boot. PaintShop Pro X7 wants to take care of all of your photo management and editing needs. That’s quite a lot of work, so the interface breaks it down into three tabs, laid out across the top of the window: Manage, Adjust, and Edit. The Manage tab is where you browse through your photo collection. You can look at image metadata, rate images, and browse through folders. You can also run a face recognition scan that then lets you browse photos by…

WITH MICROSOFT PROVIDING Sticky Notes for free, and multiple freeor low- cost options available, what does Notezilla 8 have to offer to justify its $30 price tag? As it turns out, a whole lot. Notezilla pushes the bounds of the sticky note category to their limits, edging close to freeform text database/outliner territory. New features and functionality One of my favorite Notezilla features is the ability to pin notes to specific windows or Web pages. When you bring the page or window to the front, the notes appear; when you change your focus, they go away. There’s a noticeable two-to-three-second delay between appearing and disappearing, which might be annoying if you go to a page or window primarily to see the note (as opposed to having the note appear to…

DESKTOP DIEHARDS AND the Reddit build-it crowd might scoff at the very concept of a portable PC gaming machine, but the gulf between gaming desktops and gaming laptops has narrowed considerably over the years. Today’s laptops can play modern games at 1080p and higher with few to no compromises in graphics settings. And that’s not bad. Sure, traditional desktop PCs offer more expansion options and easier upgrade paths, and can be significantly cheaper for the performance you get. But there’s no denying the appeal of a single, self-contained gaming machine that you can move from the living room to the dining room to even the back porch. You just need to pick your gaming laptop wisely. Your decisions will key into a series of component choices, so let’s dig into…

After reading about BadUSB (go.pcworld.com/badusb), Barbara asked if it was safe to share files through a flash drive. “Would we be safer using a cloud service?” A cloud service might be safer than a flash drive, although that has its own dangers—especially with privacy (go.pcworld.com/private). BadUSB shows us that malware can infect and reside in a flash drive’s firmware, which your antivirus program can’t scan the way it can scan the drive’s main storage. It’s like having the malware in your motherboard’s BIOS—except that this motherboard will likely get plugged into multiple computers. Better flash drives would fix the problem. As far as we know, as I write this, BadUSB is not yet malware. It’s an experiment intended to prove this sort of thing can happen and that we…

"ITALIAN MADE RAY Bay, Oakley sunglasses:)" reads the Emoji-" I riddled iMessage sitting in your iPhone’s Messages inbox. "Pick up Your New RayBan Sunglasses Here before they run out!" If you’re using iMessage on an iPhone or iPad, there’s a pretty decent chance one of these blaring spam messages has flashed on your screen, although I’m sure plenty of frustrated Android users have seen their fair share of SMS spam. The bad news is that mobile spam—either the iMessage variety or plain-old SMS spam—appears to be on the rise, and tracking down the spammers is about as easy as quelling a hive of hungry cockroaches. The good news, though, is that the latest iPhones and Android phones will let you block unwanted callers and texters—including mobile spammers—with a fair amount…

THE U.S. FEDERAL Trade Commission’s game of whack-a-mole with Windows tech support scammers (go.pcworld.com/scammers) continues. The FTC (go.pcworld.com/ftc) and the State of Florida recently announced the temporary shut down of several businesses in two new cases of Windows tech support scams. The two cases involved scams that bilked "tens of thousands" of Windows PC owners out of more than $120 million, the FTC says. For at least four years now, scam artists have been trying to pull one over on gullible computer users with phony tech support calls. The FTC said its latest operation was the third such case since 2011. More are sure to come since putting together a scam like this is relatively cheap compared to the potential million dollar windfall. PC users need to be wary of…

LOOKING TO FREE yourself or your employees from the painful logistics of traveling with a laptop? Liked the looks of Windows to Go, but wanted the peace of mind that hardware security brings? You need to check out the Imation IronKey W700 Workspace—a hardware-encrypted, FIPS 140-2 level-3 validated (go.pcworld.com/fips), USB 3.0 Windows to Go thumb drive that can be managed remotely. It’s the first of its breed and as secure a compute-on-any- PC solution as you’ll find. It’s also expensive. If you’re not familiar with Windows To Go (go.pcworld.com/togo), it’s a feature of Windows 8.x Enterprise that allows the operating system to run off of a USB flash drive. This allows you to use your personal Windows work environment on just about any computer, including Macs, Linux PCs, and computers…

HARDWARE HAS A SHELF LIFE like a gallon of milk. If it sits on the store shelf too long, it ends up getting poured down the drain. That’s ultimately the ugly story behind Alienware’s Alpha game console. The Alpha was always intended to run Valve’s much hyped Steam OS, but when the alternative OS didn’t show up last summer, Alienware decided it had to ship its Steam Machine sans Steam OS (go.pcworld.com/steam1) before the hardware turned sour. That’s a long way of saying the Alpha is, for the most part, a Hail-Mary move that has (at first glance) a lot going against it. It’s not as upgradeable as most gaming PCs, nor is it as powerful. It’s not even cheaper than its console competition, and without the Steam OS, why…

Apple has the iPhone; Google the Nexus line. Microsoft has a bunch of numbers that don’t mean much to anyone. It’s not that Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is heading in the wrong direction. It’s not really headed anywhere at all. Microsoft needs to figure out what Windows Phone stands for, fast— and capitalize upon it with a flagship phone that embodies all of those features. That’s the upshot of a report on Windows Phone, released December 4th, that paints a dim picture of the future as the company embraces the midrange and low-end phones. Anemic developer support compounds the problem, the report’s author added. And to a large degree, he’s right. In the report from Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research (jackdawresearch.com), Dawson recommends that Microsoft continue to identify differentiating features…

WITH BLACK FRIDAY and Cyber Monday past us, the holiday shopping season is now in full swing, and many people are pondering a new PC purchase. Whether you’re getting a new tower for gaming or an ultraportable to tote around at meetings, don’t throw out your old PC (go.pcworld.com/oldpc)! Sure, its glory days may lay in the past, but as long as the aging machine still runs, there are plenty of ways to put it to good use. Home theater PC 1 It always sounds like a good idea, but few people are willing to take the plunge and turn a PC into a media streaming and playback powerhouse (go.pcworld.com/powerhouse). Now that you’ve got an old PC kicking around, why not give it a try and plunk that PC in…