Table of contents for Mar-13 in PCWorld

TOSHIBA IS PREPARING a 20-megapixel image sensor for point-and-shoot cameras that the company says will provide the highest resolution of its kind. The new chips will be able to support the capture of 30 frames per second at full resolution. They will also be able to shoot video at 60 fps at 1080p or 100 fps at 720p. Samples of the new CMOS chip should start shipping by the time you read this; mass production of the component will begin in August. Digital point-and-shoot cameras are steadily falling in price, squeezed by brutal competition among manufacturers as well as by the increasing threat of camera-equipped smartphones and mobile devices. While the number of pixels a camera can capture is not always a direct measure of the overall quality of its…

AS YOU ATTEMPT to make good on your New Year’s resolutions, consider pledging to upgrade the security of your digital life. Here are my top ten recommendations. I suggest tackling one of these precautions each month for the rest of 2013. Enable lock-screen protection on your mobile devices: Your smartphone and tablet are mini computers. If they get lost or stolen, others could access your email, social network, and other accounts, as well as browse your files. Consult your device’s settings to configure your lock screen to require a PIN or password. Use an antitheft feature on your mobile devices: An antitheft feature, whether from your mobile carrier or from a free app for your Android (go.pcworld.com/3103sa1) or iOS device (go.pcworld.com/3103sa2), helps you remotely locate a missing or stolen phone,…

EPSON’S Workforce WF-2540 color inkjet multifunction ($130) produces appealing results, but ink costs are high, and glossy photos print slowly. Setting up the WF-2540 is a breeze. USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi are all on board. The 2.5-inch LCD, buttons, and keypad are fine, but the implementation is a little off. For example, you have to press the OK button at times when the menu/home button would normally function. The standard 175-page black cartridge is $17, which works out to 7.4 cents per page; the 165-page cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges are $9, or 5.45 cents per page, apiece. A 23.75-cent four-color page is not a bargain. The 500-page XL black ($30) and 450-page color ($13) supplies work out to 6 cents per black page and 17.3 cents per four-color page,…

SAMSUNG’S ATIV Smart PC can’t seem to decide whether it’s a tablet or a laptop. Sure, it runs the full version of Windows 8, and it has a nearly full-size keyboard, so you can use it as a standard clamshell laptop. But the keyboard is a detachable accessory, and the processor is 32-bit only. The hardware mix resembles a tablet more closely than it does a laptop. The slim, 9.9mm tablet portion is just 3 ounces heavier than an iPad. The 11.6-inch screen has a resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels—more akin to the screen of Microsoft’s Surface RT than to the iPad’s Retina display. The touchscreen is responsive and quick. The system ships with 2GB of DDR2 memory along with 64GB of flash storage, and it performs on a…

THE 55-INCH Panasonic Smart Viera P55VT50 produces a very good-looking picture, but it isn’t as great as we’d hoped the flagship HDTV from a company that makes superb plasma sets would be. The P55VT50 offers a big screen, 3D playback, THX certification, and good built-in speakers. Its streaming and media playback options are solid but unexceptional by today’s standards. One unique feature is a built-in SD/SDHC/SDXC card slot. And like all decent HDTVs, the P55VT50 supports a wide range of streaming Internet services. We gauged the P55VT50’s picture quality twice. First we ran the set through our subjective image-quality test without calibrating it, using the TV’s scene presets and THX mode for each test clip. Then we calibrated the set’s picture and gave it a second pass. We advise you…

UNLESS YOU TAKE preventive action, the operators of any website you visit can figure out your general physical location, learn details about your connecting device, and install advertising cookies to track your online movements. If you don’t like the sound of that, read on for tools and tips to hide your IP address and surf the Web anonymously. Anonymizing proxies act as intermediaries between your PC and websites you want to access anonymously. Follow the steps correctly, and a target website will see only data from the anonymizing service; it won’t be able to identify your home IP address or other personal information. Though the websites you’re browsing won’t have any idea who you are, the man-in-the-middle proxy services will—and some such services keep server logs of user activity that…

How can I save a streaming video and burn it onto a DVD?—Paul Brandenburg MOST ONLINE CONTENT is copyrighted, and if the copyright holders sell DVDs of the same content—a strong sign that they don’t want you to burn your own copy—you should buy those, instead. But some videos actually are in the public domain, and there’s no reason why you can’t burn those to DVD. First you’ll need to download the video to your hard drive, and then you’ll need to burn the video to DVD. I recommend two free programs for downloading streaming video: iLivid (go.pcworld.com/ilivid) and FVD Suite (go.pcworld.com/fvd). Each can capture streams that the other can’t. For instance, iLivid failed with Vimeo, and FVD Suite couldn’t manage YouTube. When installing iLivid, you’ll need to be careful…

YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT... 1 Windows and More SmartGlass is not limited to Windows tablets or even the Windows Store; you can download a SmartGlass app optimized for smartphones on Android, iOS, and Windows phones. It also offers a tablet version for your iPad, but not yet for Android. And no matter how many devices you use SmartGlass on, our testing reveals you can have only one linked to your Xbox 360 at any given moment. On the bright side, this means your friends can’t mess with your game from across the room. 2 Enhanced Gaming SmartGlass is designed to enhance your Xbox 360 gaming experience, and already a decent crop of games support this app with extra features. If you are playing Halo 4, your SmartGlass app will show…

IF YOU’RE RELATIVELY new to programming the Arduino board (go.pcworld.com/arduino101), the Arduino team has something you might like: the Arduino Esplora. Somewhat related to the Arduino Leonardo, the Esplora (about $58 at store.arduino.cc/ww/) is designed to be relatively easy to work with. It comes ready to use out of the box; no need for a breadboard or soldering irons. The company says the Esplora gives you all the power of a typical Arduino microcontroller, but without the complicated setup. To make that idea work, the board includes all the parts you would usually add yourself. The Esplora has various sensors, an accelerometer, a joystick, a microphone, push buttons, an RGB LED, and a buzzer already strapped on. And as you might expect, given its physical design, it also comes preloaded…

BAD NEWS FOR EMPLOYEES: Your slacking days are over. Get back to work. GOOD NEWS FOR EMPLOYERS: Now you can quickly tell who’s earning their paycheck and who’s spending their days updating Facebook, courtesy of DeskTime, a time-tracking service for small businesses (available at desktime.com). DeskTime employs automated software that tracks and analyzes employees’ productivity in real time. It does this by sorting your company’s various applications into categories—“productive,” “unproductive,” and “neutral”—and monitoring who on staff is using what and for how long. All this happens quietly and unobtrusively, with no user input required. The DeskTime dashboard provides a wealth of data: the number of employees working, the number absent, who’s slacking, who’s late, and so on. On a more granular level, you can examine individual workers’ stats: time arrived,…

OFFICE 2013, the latest edition of Microsoft’s flagship productivity suite, is already available for business customers and should go on sale to consumers sometime in the first quarter of 2013. Both Office 2013 and the cloud-connected Office 365 provide online document storage and collaboration. But Office 365 is updated constantly, lets you run Office away from your main PC via an Office on Demand virtualization tool, and entitles users to extra online storage and (in some versions) add-ons such as shared calendars and HD videoconferencing. Aside from their cloud features, the new Office desktop apps look sleeker and have several useful improvements. Pricing Permutations Unfortunately, the suite also costs more. The $140 Office 2013 Home and Student version comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The $220 Home & Business…

THE NEW DESIGN and controls of the $199 Canon Pixma MG6320 color inkjet multifunction put those of its predecessors to shame in terms of ease of use. Setting up the MG6320 is simple on Windows and Mac, though you must add the MFP manually on the latter. The unit supports USB, Wi-Fi, and ethernet networking. Missing are the three confusing “action” buttons found on some older Canon models. The MG6320’s contextually lit controls and 3.5-inch touchscreen are far more efficient and intuitive. The MG6320 uses a six-ink system. With standard supplies, black pages cost a reasonable 5 cents per page, but four-color output costs a high 16.6 cents per page; adding photo black and photo gray elevates that to 19.2 cents. The high-yield inks offer some savings, at 4.6 cents…

AT FIRST GLANCE, the Acer Aspire V5 is a sleek-looking laptop with a fairly low price. At 15 by 10 inches and 1 inch thick, it resembles an Ultrabook. But don’t be fooled by the silky-smooth silver exterior: At 5.3 pounds, this laptop is weightier than it looks. And unfortunately, that heft doesn’t translate into heavyweight performance. In PCWorld Labs’ WorldBench 8 suite of benchmark tests, the Aspire V5 notched an overall score of just 42, on a baseline of 100—that’s 58 percent lower than our testing model. Our review unit came with an Intel Core i5-3317U mobile processor, integrated graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive, along with Wi-Fi 802.11a/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, and a DVD-RW optical drive. It runs Windows 8. The Aspire V5’s battery life is…

THERE’S MORE THAN one way to back up your inbox and email archive. But if you want to back up only your email messages, without downloading them to your computer, then Dropmyemail may be just what you need. This Web-based utility can back up any POP or IMAP email account, and it works especially well with Gmail. Once you log in, you grant it permission to go into your email archive, and it begins the download. The backup is conducted remotely, so it continues even if you shut down your PC. Dropmyemail enables you to browse your email, read entire threads, and search. Its most compelling feature is the file manager, which lets you browse attachments without having to struggle through email threads. You can see all of the images…

LOSING A USB flash drive full of valuable data can be a disaster. But Windows users can protect themselves by using the free BitLocker to Go utility to encrypt portable drives. Available in Windows 8 Professional and Enterprise editions, BitLocker to Go is the latest incarnation of an encryption tool that Microsoft has included with select versions of Windows since Vista in 2007. Like most encryption utilities, BitLocker protects your data by making it unreadable or inaccessible without a password or some other form of unique key. To secure the data, BitLocker uses an AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm with a 128bit key plus an Elephant diffuser, a data-mixing algorithmic function for additional disk-related security features. BitLocker lets users encrypt their OS volume to prevent access to a system and…

WINDOWS PHONE 8 lets you open and work on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents (in limited fashion) on a Windows Phone. OneNote Mobile and SharePoint Workspace Mobile are available, too. In the Office hub’s Recent tab, you can find documents you’ve recently worked on; and in its Places tab, you can find documents located on your phone, attachments opened from email, or documents saved on SkyDrive. After copying documents to your phone via Exchange, you can edit them on your handset. Open the document from either the Places tab or the Recent tab, and then use Word’s pencil icon or Excel’s function icon to edit away. To navigate the document, tap anywhere in it and press Outline. You can zoom in and out, copy and paste text into other files…

DELETING UNNEEDED DATA to make more room on your hard drive seems simple, but finding the files and folders that use the most space can be a pain. Disk-space analyzer WizTree (go.pcworld.com/wiztree) quickly scans your drive and shows you the names and locations of your largest files for quick trimming. Just download and install the tiny, free program (there’s also a portable version if you want to run it from, say, a flash drive), and click Scan. On my heavily used system with a mostly full, 750GB hard drive, WizTree completed its scan in a mere 12 seconds. You can see the scan results in a tree view or click the Top 1000 Largest Files tab. From there, right-click and choose Delete from the pop-up context menu to eradicate the…

TODAY’S SMARTPHONES are pretty good computers, but we’ve tried three computational powerhouses that make the slimmest phone look like ENIAC. The Cotton Candy, the MK802 II, and the Raspberry Pi are amazingly tiny, incredibly inexpensive, and eminently customizable. They’re terrific platforms for hobbyists fond of experimentation, and they’re ideal for students interested in learning how to program, but they can also serve as ordinary productivity machines. These miniature marvels eschew the power-hungry x86 processors found in desktop and laptop PCs in favor of mobile CPUs and GPUs, but each relies on an external monitor or HDTV (connected via HDMI) to display its video output. In fact, the Cotton Candy and the MK802 II are the same size as a USB memory stick, and plug directly into a TV. Thanks to…

IN JANUARY, CANONICAL launched a new mobile operating system interface, bringing its desktop Ubuntu Linux distribution to phones. The company is aiming it at “high-end superphones” and basic smartphones. Docking the phone turns it into a full PC. Among the features in the new interface is support for the use of thumb gestures from all four edges of the screen so as to help users find content and switch among apps more quickly than they can on other phones. Controls appear only when the user wants them, Canonical says, and both voice and text commands are available in any application. The software supports both native apps and Web/HTML5 apps. Built on the existing Android kernel and drivers but lacking a Java virtual machine, the new interface supports ARM and x86…

LG HAS REFINED its Magic Remote controller with language recognition so that you can talk to your smart TV remote in a way similar to how you interact with Siri, the voice-assistant feature on iOS mobile devices. The remote will be compatible with LG’s 2013 cohort of smart television sets, Blu-ray players, and cinema systems, and will come bundled with the company’s top-of-the-line TV models. A second, slightly larger version without backlit buttons will be included with the company’s standard array of TVs. The LG Magic Remote can do quite a few tricks, with the headline feature being language recognition. The remote has a microphone button; after pressing it, you just hold the remote a few inches from your mouth and tell it what you’re looking for. Previous versions of…

I’M A CHEAPSKATE. You won’t see me on Extreme Couponing, but when I buy something, I like to get the best deal. Smartphones make it easy to be a smart shopper. Here are some apps that can help you find deals on everything from a cup of coffee to a DVR, and stay organized. All are free, and almost all are available for iOS and Android (SnipSnap is coming soon for Android; Decide is for iPhones and iPads). Coupon Sherpa: This app offers coupons for discounts and deals at a variety of retailers, restaurants, service providers, and select grocery stores. Search for coupons (for in-store use only) by category or by retailer. Some can be scanned from your phone at checkout; others must be printed. Decide: This app offers information,…

IS YOUR BUSINESS still using Windows XP? If it is, you’re not alone. But you should seriously consider moving to a newer operating system. You could just step up to Windows 7, but a pretty strong case can be made for moving to Windows 8—particularly the Enterprise version. I’ll discuss certain of those reasons here. It’s a bit of a cliche at this point to talk about what a dramatic change Windows 8 is compared with previous versions of Windows. Microsoft gave the user interface a complete overhaul and reengineered the Windows operating system with tablets and touchscreens in mind. Beneath that veneer, though, it is still Windows, and once you get accustomed to navigating the new OS, Windows 8 is pretty slick. Assuming you do want to move to…

TO BUILD a state-of-the-art wireless network, you need equipment based on the IEEE 802.11ac standard. Asus’s RT-AC66U (go.pcworld.com/asusrtac66u) remains our favorite 802.11ac router, but Cisco and networking newcomer Western Digital have released strong contenders. On the client side, Western Digital has followed in Cisco’s footsteps (go.pcworld.com/wumc710) in making a strong 802.11ac bridge that lets you connect up to four hardwired clients, while Netgear has introduced a USB adapter that connects a single stationary or mobile PC to an 802.11ac network. Here’s our take on all four new products. (For more test-results charts, visit the go.pcworld.com URL provided for each product.) Cisco Linksys EA6500 Cisco’s EA6500 (don’t try to say the entire name—the Linksys Video Pro AC1750 Smart Wi-Fi Router EA6500—in a single breath) is a solid, easy-to-use dual-band router with…

PHRASEEXPRESS IS a powerful macro and text expansion tool that automates the typing of commonly used phrases, in addition to offering several other useful functions. With PhraseExpress, you can link commonly typed pieces of text to short keywords, and the program will automatically produce the full phrase whenever it detects the keyword. Version 9 adds support for Windows 8, as well as cloud drive support, which enables you to access the same phrase files from all of your computers. You can organize phrases into folders, grouping commonly used concepts, such as addresses, together. The macro function supports interactivity, so a user can fill in a specific value when the phrase is executed. In addition to the keyword activation system, PhraseExpress allows you to assign phrases to hotkeys. Particularly useful is…

CHART NOTES: Prices as of 1/8/13. Percentages rounded to the nearest tenth. 1 Test conducted at default settings. 2 Cleanup of active malware files. Does not include removal of Reggistry changes or inert files. 3 Time to scan 4500MB of data; lower is better. BEST OVERALL F-Secure Internet Security 2013 F-Secure’s 2013 suite kept our test system free of malware and did a great job of cleaning up infections that made it onto our PC. It’s speedy and well designed, too. BEST PROTECTION Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2013 This suite had the most well-rounded protection of all the suites we looked at. It proved effective both in keeping malware at bay and in cleaning up infected computers. BEST SPEED, BEST INTERFACE Norton Internet Security The days of Norton being…

WATCHING VIDEO streams at your desk is okay, but nothing beats your living room couch for comfort. The best way to move your digital viewing there, however, depends on your home-entertainment setup and available gear. If you have an HDMI-equipped laptop or desktop, you’re fine (some TVs also support VGA, which could work for older PCs): Just output the display of your PC to your HDTV as if it were a second monitor. If you have mostly Apple gear, you can use a Mac or iOS device and an Apple TV to mirror your PC display to your TV wirelessly, or you can buy an HDMI adapter to connect your device to your TV directly; see "How to Mirror Your iPad Display to Your HDTV" (go.pcworld.com/mirror). Likewise, if you have…