Table of contents for Feb-13 in PCWorld

I CAN’T REMEMBER the last time I saw an email or article comment in which a PCWorld reader professed love—or any measure of affection—for Microsoft. In fact, I’ve been covering PCs as a journalist since 1995, and I can’t recall any reader ever sharing even the smallest bit of warmth for the company that has been most instrumental to the health and welfare of the PC platform. Sure, many Windows users are emotionally attached to their computers. And some even have a good word to say about Windows itself. But I have yet to meet a PC user who cops to even the slightest bit of fondness for Microsoft. This contrasts dramatically with the deification of Apple by so many Mac users. Have you ever met a Microsoft fanboy? They…

IN LATE 2013, consumers will be able to buy smartphones that either come with native hypervisor software or use an app allowing them to run two interfaces: one for personal use, and the other for work. The technology could help to address a growing issue as employees bring their personal mobile devices to work and use them to communicate with clients and access corporate data. Two software companies, Red Bend and VMware, have signed agreements with phone makers to create dual-identity devices from some of today’s most popular models. Smartphone virtualization, however, involves two different approaches, using either a Type 1 or a Type 2 hypervisor. Type 1 is hardware-based technology that creates a second copy of the OS and runs both instances in two distinct regions of a processor.…

MakerBot Store Offers a 3D Photo Booth IF YOU’RE THE type who lets a little fame go to your head, the 3D Photo Booth at the new MakerBot Store in New York might be what you need. Step into the 3D Photo Booth for a few minutes and get a 3D scan of your face, and the MakerBot folks will use their 3D printers to create a precise plastic model of a head with your face on it. The plastic heads go for $20, $40, or $60, depending on the size of the head (and your ego). The 3D Photo Booth, developed with ShapeShot technology from Baltimore-based Direct Dimensions, costs $5 per scan, and the resulting file can accept further edits before being submitted for head creation. At the opening…

SINCE GOOGLE IS ubiquitous in our everyday digital lives, it’s easy to overlook the many tools it offers that have a business slant. Here are three serious Google services that can boost your productivity, get your team on the same page, and market your company. For links to the services, and for a discussion of other business-related Google tools, visit go.pcworld.com/sb13-2google. Google Places for Business: With this service, you can add salient details about your business—not just name, address, and phone number, but also business category, hours of operation, types of payment accepted, and areas served—to Google’s database, for free. The information, including a small map, appears in relevant Google search results. Google Places previews what your listing will look like even as you provide the information in a questionnaire.…

ASUS’S VIVOTAB RT represents an evolution of the company’s Transformer Pad Infinity TF700. The VivoTab’s bundled dock adds only 1.3 pounds and has an extra battery and USB port. Regrettably, its keys are a bit shorter than those on the Infinity dock, and that made a big difference in my typing comfort and accuracy. Weighing 1.19 pounds and measuring 10.35 by 6.73 by 0.33 inches by itself, the tablet feels well balanced; holding it in portrait mode seems especially natural. The 10.1-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel Super IPS+ display offers pleasing colors. Carrying a 1.3GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core CPU (1.4GHz in single-core use) and 2GB of memory, the tablet was zippy and responsive, with a few instances of lag. On the SunSpider benchmark, it was the fastest tablet, taking 1.03 seconds to…

THE NEXUS 10, Google’s flagship tablet, enters the fray boasting strong specs and competitive pricing—$399 for 16GB of storage (the same price as for Apple’s 16GB iPad 2) and $499 for 32GB. It’s also the first Android 4.2 tablet. Despite a few weaknesses, it’s a worthy competitor to the latest iPad model (see our review, above). The superior display is evident the moment you turn on the tablet, as it offers an impressive 300 pixels per inch and 2560 by 1600 resolution. Text is smooth and sharp, and I found the display a pleasure to use for everything from viewing pictures to reading ebooks and webpages. My one gripe involves the tablet’s handling of colors: Skin tones, especially, seemed a bit off. At 10.39 by 6.99 by 0.35 inches,…

All-in-Ones and Desktop PCs Predictions about what will happen at the end of the PC era have been floating around for years now, and they become more dramatic and more inaccurate with each claim. Why would desktops die off now, when they are becoming so cool? Sure, drastic changes are afoot, and perhaps the desktops of the near future won’t look at all similar to the desktops of the present; but change and evolution are facts of life in the tech industry, and adjusting to the new is a necessity. All-in-one desktops were once seen as a luxury that couldn’t possibly support the needs of the average computer user. They lined the walls in sci-fi movies and boasted futuristic-looking programs that had no discernible purpose. Today, they have become centerpieces…

PERFORMING A WINDOWS 8 upgrade on an ancient Windows XP machine isn’t a good idea. But I wanted to see what was possible, and maybe gain some insight into the Windows 8 setup process along the way. Here’s what I learned. I built the (admittedly garish) test system back in 2004, not long after the Northwood variant of the Pentium 4 shipped. The components inside are geriatric by modern PC standards. To wit: • 3.4GHz Pentium 4 CPU (socket 478!) • Abit IC7-G motherboard with Intel 875P chipset • Two 1GB DDR-400 DRAM modules (2GB total) • ATI Radeon HD 9800XT AGP graphics card with 512MB frame buffer • 320GB Western Digital hard drive (IDE) • Two 250GB Western Digital hard drives (in RAID 1) • Sony DVD recorder (16X)…

YOU DON’T NEED an expensive kit to clean an LCD or LED screen. You can remove accumulated smudges with a few common household items. First, you’ll need a microfiber cloth. If you wear glasses, your optometrist probably gave you one with your last pair of spectacles—though you might want to use a bigger cloth to clean a large screen. You can purchase them for a few dollars from several websites, as well as from a photography store. Use the dry cloth to gently wipe away the grime. If dirt stubbornly adheres to the screen, you can apply some gentle pressure—but gentle is the operative word. If that approach doesn’t work, use a moist cloth. But how do you moisten it, and with what? You should definitely not use soap, a…

THINK YOU’RE SEEING it all? Not when it comes to current digital video technology, whose resolution still falls short of that of 35mm film. To get closer to film quality, equipment makers have to pack in more pixels. Roughly quadrupling the number of pixels found in current HDTVs, 4K technology gets its name from the width of the picture: approximately 4000 pixels. (Note that with 1080p, the “1080” refers to the vertical number of pixels; 4K video has about 2000 pixels vertically.) The 4K standards are still developing. One standard, also called Quad Full High Definition or 2160p, maintains the 16:9 aspect ratio of HDTVs at 3840 by 2160 pixels; another standard, which expands to 4096 by 2160, is intended for the cinema. Either way, 4K—or Ultra HD, as the…

Acer T232HL 23-Inch Touch IPS Display The $500 T232HL supports ten-point multitouch input to make the most of Windows 8’s touch-friendly interface. The IPS panel has a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels and promises 178-degree viewing angles. Edge-to-edge glass protects the screen. With a transparent base and an asymmetrical stand, this monitor also has nice eye appeal. go.pcworld.com/acert232hlsp ScanSnap iX500 ScanSnap’s newest document scanner comes packed with features to make going paperless as easy as possible. It can scan searchable PDFs and JPEGs to cloud services such as Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Docs, and it can scan files to iOS and Android devices with its mobile app. go.pcworld.com/scansnapsp Barnes & Noble Nook HD+ Barnes & Noble ups the tablet ante with the Nook HD+, which has a 9-inch high-def…

Get the Help You Need Without the Hold Time “YOUR CALL IS important to us. Please continue to hold.” Have ten more aggravating words ever been uttered? Take heart: Some startups are trying to take the cuss out of customer support by providing free online workarounds. Fast Customer: This sparsely designed site (fastcustomer.com) could not be simpler to use. Find a company in the list of more than 3000, click ‘Have them call me’, enter your phone number, and go about your business. A representative will call you back. The site lists a wait-time estimate. Fast Customer’s company list breaks out subcategories, such as “Dell: Tech Support” and “Dell: Customer Service,” so you can direct your call appropriately. It has a forum for user comments and feedback, as well, plus…

LYNC 2013 HAS a variety of benefits that businesses can take advantage of to make internal and external communications more effective and efficient. Lync—which comes bundled with Office 365 business subscriptions and was formerly called Office Communications Server—is Microsoft’s server platform for unified communications. Lync ties real-time presence information with instant messaging, videoconferencing, and voice communication, and it integrates with Exchange email and Microsoft Office applications. Here are five reasons businesses can benefit from adopting the new Lync 2013. 1. HD videoconferencing: Lync 2013 delivers support for 1080p HD resolution for videoconferencing, so participants have a sharp, clear display. Lync 2013 uses standard video codecs like H.264 SVC to provide compatibility across a broader range of platforms and devices, and greater flexibility in video delivery. 2. Mobile apps: Microsoft has…

SINCE USERS CAN control Windows 8 by touch as well as by mouse and keyboard, we’re bound to see innovative portable designs. For instance, you can rotate the 12.5-inch touchscreen of Dell’s XPS 12 Convertible Touch Ultrabook to face outward, turning it into a tablet. The display is covered with Gorilla Glass, the frame is aluminum, the base and top are carbon fiber, and the keyboard deck is magnesium. Despite its use of space-age materials, the XPS 12 would be overly thick and heavy for a pure tablet. Meanwhile, its 4-pound travel weight makes the unit considerably heavier than a normal 12.5-inch or even 13.3-inch laptop. You also pay for the XPS 12’s duality. Our low-end test unit, with a 128GB solid-state drive, a Core i5-3317U CPU, 4GB of…

VERSION 17 of WinZip, available in Pro ($50) and Standard ($30) editions, remains very much in tune with how people share files in today’s world. As in the previous version, the user interface divides Ribbon tabs according to functionality, with clear labels such as Unzip, Edit, Share, Tools, and Settings. Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive are deeply integrated into WinZip 17, and their familiar icons show up in several Ribbon tabs for different operations. The Unzip tab lets you extract files directly into any service without locally browsing for its folder (or even having its client installed). The Edit and Create tabs let you download files from any of the three services and add them to the current archive, and show how much free space you have in each…

ALTHOUGH SOCIETY HAS turned increasingly disposable, technology buyers still want their gear to work well, to look good, and to last for the long haul. In August PCWorld launched its annual survey of satisfaction, reliability, and service, polling more than 45,000 PCWorld readers. A New Approach This year’s approach represents a simplification of prior years’ methodology, in which we reported the results as below average, average, or above average. Now we provide actual satisfaction scores, usually on a scale of 1 to 10, which should make the results clearer and easier to compare. We investigated five categories: laptops, desktops, smartphones, tablets, and printers. And users seem to be fairly happy. Overall, the numbers are positive and seem to be improving from year to year. Measures of reliability, for example, have…

OLD The ATI Radeon 9800XT AGP graphics board once offered the acme of graphics performance. NEW AMD’s Radeon HD 6450 is an entry-level, DirectX 11.1-capable card that sells for around $45 and doesn’t require a power connection. Motherboards OLD This Abit IC7-G motherboard came with Intel’s 875P chipset and a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 CPU. Abit is now defunct. NEW Asus’s P5B Deluxe motherboard carries Intel’s P965 chipset and a dual-core Pentium D 965 processor.…

1 Syncing Across Devices When you save Office documents online, they’ll be available to you from any device via Office 2013 on a PC or a tablet, or through the Web Apps. Microsoft has upgraded the apps for Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint with the Modern look and Office application color coding. In addition, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will retain the last location where you were working before you saved —down to the letter, cell, or image. 2 SkyDrive Integration Your work now integrates with the cloud, by way of SkyDrive and SharePoint. If you use SkyDrive, the account details will appear in the corner of all the application screens, as well as on the start screens. You can click your account details to switch and manage accounts. When you…

THE SURFACE PRO is doomed—or so it would seem, given Microsoft’s prices of $899 (64GB) and $999 (128GB). But if you dig into the specs, it doesn’t sound like a tablet. With a Core i5 CPU, 4GB of RAM, a USB 3.0 port, a memory card slot, and a mini-DisplayPort connector, the Surface Pro (slated for January 2013, though rumors hint it could arrive even before then) sounds more like an Ultrabook with touch and pen, but without a built-in keyboard. How will buyers react to the Pro, considering that Microsoft’s own Surface RT has been out for a while? No one questions whether the Surface RT is a tablet. It’s priced like a high-end tablet, it’s thin and light, and it has competitive battery life. But since that Windows…

GOOGLE’S ANDROID 4.2 debuted in mid-November with the Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet, and is rolling out to other Nexus devices. (As of this writing, no word from non-Nexus phone and tablet manufacturers on a possible update.) The second “Jelly Bean” release, Android 4.2 is a relatively minor update to version 4.1, but it packs significant new features and plenty of subtle polish. Here are a few of the biggest changes. Multiuser support: Perhaps the most important addition is support for multiple users on tablets. Each user has a home screen, apps, wallpaper, and general settings that remain inaccessible to other users. Security: The new multilayered security system scans apps from third-party sources. If you opt in, it looks for malicious or potentially harmful code and alerts you…

EVERY NOW AND then, family members, friends, and casual acquaintances ask me for advice when they’re considering buying a new computer. “What should I get?” they inquire. “What do I need?” And these days, with increasing frequency, they wonder: “Should I buy a tablet instead of a laptop?” Those are important questions, to be sure, but not difficult ones. A tablet can take the place of a laptop if all you do is browse the Web and read email. However, if you need to get any serious work done, whether for school or business or just everyday life, a laptop is still the smarter choice. A laptop gives you a keyboard, a bigger screen, copious amounts of storage, and compatibility with all your favorite software. So what kind of laptop…

SKYPE IS SO popular that some people use its name as a verb. Yet most people use Skype only for making free voice calls, and for occasional video chats. That’s a shame, because Skype is a powerful business tool. A Skype-powered videoconference can take the place of a business trip, not to mention the free Skype-to-Skype calls you can make to overseas suppliers and clients. But you can also use the service to show someone a PowerPoint deck, or to dial in to conference calls without all the usual hassles. And you can even add a Skype button to your website to give your customers a free and easy way to contact you. Sound good? Let’s begin. Share Your Screen Skype lets you show not only yourself (on a video…

MICROSOFT’S hotly anticipated Surface RT tablet is here, and it’s a fresh, fun reinterpretation of the basic tablet experience. The build quality of the 0.37-inch-thick, 1.5-pound unit is sturdy and confident. While the 10.6-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display suffers from pixel blur, it’s still quite nice. The 1.4GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor and 2GB of memory handle their work without drama. In tests, the Surface RT more than held its own: With a frame rate of 6.9 frames per second, it topped the WebVizBench HTML5 test. In posting a time of 10.4 seconds in our webpage loading test, the tablet squeaked past the iPad. In battery-life tests, it came in second to the iPad, playing a looping HD video for more than 9 hours. Between the kickstand, the optional keyboard covers (I…

CHOCOLATEY IS A free command-line application that tries to make it easier for developers (especially) to obtain, install, and update software. Inspired by Linux’s apt-get, Chocolatey provides a simple, uniform command-line interface for installing many packages. Chocolatey’s Web-based package repository features over 400 packages, ranging from the obscure (Fantom, a programming language) to the mainstream (Skype, VLC, and more). Chocolatey also uses NuGet, an open-source package manager from Microsoft that has its own repository, called NuGet Gallery, and hosts 8300 unique packages aimed at developers. To see what packages are available without leaving the console, you can type chocolatey list for a long list of packages available from the official Chocolatey feed. To find out whether Dropbox is available, for example, type chocolatey list dropbox for the answer (it…

SmartGlass SmartGlass functions like a second screen for your Xbox 360. It keeps track of what you’re watching or playing and offers complementary information such as achievement charts and additional video content. You can also use your PC as a remote control for your 360, launching videos or games on your HDTV from within SmartGlass. Further, it allows you to track real-time stats while watching sports, queue up songs in a dance game, or check your in-game GPS while racing. Microsoft will update the app with a bevy of new features to accompany the Windows 8 launch. Microsoft Minesweeper Windows 8 is the first version of Windows since 3.1 (released way back in 1992!) that doesn’t come with Minesweeper preinstalled; but if you’re feeling nostalgic, you can download…

THE STANDARD version of Windows 8 lacks Windows Media Center and can’t play DVDs by default. All the more reason to try VideoLAN’s free VLC media player (go.pcworld.com/vlc)—a versatile and extremely capable app. VLC streams files to and from the Internet, plays DVDs and Blu-rays, manages podcasts, and captures webcam videos. It’s an outstanding media player for power users. Because VLC’s many options can be intimidating initially, I’ll explain what the buttons and menus do, show you how to watch movies and Internet streams, and tell how to get the most out of this player. Play whatever: VLC can play audio CDs, VCDs, SVCDs, and standard DVDs without a hitch. Experimental Blu-ray disc support was added early in 2012, but the Blu-ray encryption system can make playback more miss than…

CLASSIC SHELL MAY be the ultimate free tool for bypassing Windows 8’s controversial tile-based interface. Just download Classic Shell (go.pcworld.com/cshell) and let the utility install with all its default options enabled. You’ll see a new icon in the lower-left corner of Desktop Mode’s taskbar. Click it (or press the <Windows> key on your keyboard), and a Windows Start menu very like the one in Windows Vista or Windows 7 will appear. Alternatively, right-click the icon, select Settings, and click the Start Menu Style tab to transform it into a version that looks like classic Windows XP. To access the normal Windows 8 Start screen from Classic Shell, hold down the <Shift> key and click Classic Shell’s Start button (or press the <Windows> key). In the Settings window, toward the bottom…

MICROSOFT PLANS TO charge $10 for Windows Media Center. But if you have Windows 8 Pro, you can get Windows Media Center free for a limited time. Here’s how: 1. Head to go.pcworld.com/8pack, scroll down, and fill out the short form to request a free product key. 2. Once you’ve received the email with the key, press <Windows>-W to bring up the Settings menu, and then type add features. 3. Tap or click Add features to Windows 8, then tap/click I already have a product key. 4. Type or paste in your product key, click Next, read every last word of the licensing agreement (kidding!), and then click Add features. Presto! You have Windows Media Center—after a reboot, of course. This offer is good through January 31, 2013. If you…