Table of contents for Mar-14 in PCWorld

WHEN MICROSOFT ANNOUNCED that Satya Nadella, a longtime employee, would follow in the footsteps of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates as CEO—the third one in the company’s history—Nadella sent an email to the troops to introduce himself in more detail and to explain his plans for the future direction of Microsoft. Here is a copy of that email. Today is a very humbling day for me. It reminds me of my very first day at Microsoft, 22 years ago. Like you, I had a choice about where to come to work. I came here because I believed Microsoft was the best company in the world. I saw then how clearly we empower people to do magical things with our creations and ultimately make the world a be.er place. I knew…

FACEBOOK’S ATTEMPT AT REINVENTION has arrived: Paper, an iOS app that turns your News Feed into a newspaper, is now available for download. Announced last week, Paper (go.pcworld.com/fbpaper) is a radical departure for Facebook, which isn’t exactly known for its mobile design chops. The magazine-like app opens with a reimagined version of your News Feed—where it goes from there is up to you. Paper offers a range of sections: for example, the day’s headlines and stories about food. Facebook editors curate each section, drawing from wellknown publications and underground sources. The first effort from Facebook’s new Creative Labs team, the app indicates where the social network is going—away from stodgy features and functional but dull design, and toward a superior experience (as with Instagram). With Paper, Facebook is presenting its…

YOU PROBABLY KNOW all about your preferred social network’s privacy settings, enough to make sure that the whole world doesn’t know your business. But you can find additional ways to lock down your privacy that go above and beyond even two-factor authentication. Keep an eye on permissions Every time you download a smartphone app, you allow its developers to see some of your information. Sometimes it’s as basic as your name. Other times it’s your address book, your Facebook or Twitter account information, your location, or your photos. How do you know which apps are raiding your phone? iOS apps must ask you upon installation for permission to access your contacts, location, Facebook account, and microphone, and you can easily grant or revoke such access from the Privacy section in…

INTEL’S LATEST QUAD-CORE Atom processor, formerly code-named Bay Trail, seems to have what it takes to make Windows a worthy tablet operating system. The Dell Venue 8 Pro (go.pcworld.com/venue8pro), for example, is equipped with an Atom Z3740D CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage, and it runs the full version of Windows 8.1. The OS takes up quite a bit of the storage, leaving you with a little over 12GB of free space. Bumping up to the 64GB Venue 8 Pro adds $50 to the price, or you can insert a MicroSD card. The 8-inch touchscreen has a resolution of only 1280 by 800 pixels, but text and images look great on the bright IPS display (or at least the display can be bright, if you turn off Dell’s…

CAPABLE SMARTPHONES DON’ have to cost an arm and a leg. The Motorola Moto G (go.pcworld.com/motog), a midrange handset meant for emerging markets, has many of the features of its premium counterpart, the Moto X. The durable Moto G is a bit bulkier and denser than the Moto X, but it’s still easy to hold and use one-handed. Removing the back panel lets you access the Micro-SIM slot, but you can’t remove the battery. Inside the phone are a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and 1GB of RAM. Although that combination gets the job done, you will see longer load times for games and a slight lag when you’re scrolling through some apps. The Moto G lasted through 8 hours, 45 minutes of constant video streaming. The Moto G…

How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear. BACK WHEN MECHANICAL hard drives were the norm, you could hand an old hard drive to a relative or friend as an upgrade, and call it a day. It’s not so simple with today’s solid-state drives. The biggest issue in repurposing an SSD you’ve used for a long time stems from an inconvenient characteristic of NAND flash memory: Previously written cells must be erased before they can accept new data. If the SSD is forced to reuse cells rather than use new ones in storing data, performance plummets. To avoid this problem, modern SSDs use some tricks, such as maintaining extra capacity that users can’t touch, a technique known as overprovisioning. And the TRIM command tells an SSD when blocks of…

AT LONG LAST, after an exhaustive search, a flood of whispered rumors, and more than a little journalistic hand-wringing, Microsoft has found its new CEO: Satya Nadella. Unless you’re a die-hard Microsoft observer, however, the name probably doesn’t ring a bell. So who is the man who now becomes Microsoft’s guiding light for the foreseeable future? Here are the ten most important things you need to know about Satya Nadella. 1. He’s been with Microsoft a long time Nadella is as insider as Microsoft insiders get, which may disappoint pundits hoping for an outsider CEO capable of breathing fresh life into Microsoft’s complex business. The India-born Nadella is an electronics engineer who also holds a degree in business administration. He started his career at Sun Microsystems before joining Microsoft back…

ONE THING WE already know about Microsoft’s new chief executive, Satya Nadella: He doesn’t do Twitter. At least, not really. The last post on his Twitter account was in 2010. But Twitter sure does him, as everyone from partners to pundits opined about what Nadella would mean for Microsoft. The tech world turned to Twitter to weigh in. Nadella won an immediate endorsement from Jack Welch, the former head of GE, who clearly favored promoting from within. But others weren’t so sure. The tech industry has had its share of revolving-door CEOs.…

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS In this section, hardware & software goes through rigorous testing. THE FOLLOWING HEADPHONES can turn your smartphone into a powerful jukebox for enlivening your commutes and workouts, so long as you don’t insist on getting absolutely pristine audio quality. Beats Studio ($300) The Studio (go.pcworld.com/beatsstudio) is the latest in the highly successful (and visible) line of Beats headphones. Somewhat bulkier than earlier Beats products, the Studio set features faux leather pads, which I found to be quite comfortable and effective at blocking out ambient noise. The headband is composed of shiny plastic with a rubber pad on the underside. The detachable cable includes the familiar volume controller and microphone. The middle button pauses the music and turns on the small microphone for voice calls. Holding down…

THINKPADS HAVE BEEN a class act among business laptops for more than two decades. Though they remain pricey, they’re also extremely easy to carry and comfortable to use. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch (go.pcworld.com/x1carbontouch) stands out even from its excellent forebears. Fabricated from carbon fiber, it’s one of the thinnest and lightest 14-inch Ultrabooks around, and its low-glare touchscreen lets you view spreadsheets without stressing your wrists and fingertips while panning and scrolling. The display is easy to read in changing light. The X1 Carbon Touch comes with a perfectly tensioned screen panel that you can quickly flip open to the exact viewing angle you want; a quiet, cushy keyboard that’s a pure joy to type on; a large, smooth glass multitouch trackpad with excellent palm rejection to minimize fly-away…

Our security showdown evaluates the 2014 versions of 10 major antimalware suites. Most of them include social-network protection, scanning spammy-looking links before you click them. The new mobile security components in some suites can help you scan downloaded apps for security holes; locate your lost smartphone; and remotely lock, wipe, or ring it. The data presented in our roundup comes from performance testing by AV-Test, an independent security research institute based in Magdeburg, Germany. AV-Test assesses the protection capabilities and speed of each suite. PCWorld performed additional tests to cross-check AV’s results. We installed and used each of the ten security suites in order to rate its interface and its overall user-friendliness. Most of the suites we tested did a very good job in the key areas of protection, speed,…

WHEN THE LIBRARIES feature debuted with Windows 7, it took me a while to get used to them, but nowadays I love using libraries to keep all my far-flung folders and files in order. Beyond the standard libraries for documents, music, photos, and videos that I rely on all the time, I also use libraries to wrangle work projects and other important things. Over the years, Windows applications have become smarter about integrating with libraries, so a lot of your music files, videos, and pictures simply show up in the right place. Libraries aren’t perfect, however, and sometimes you have to add folders manually to stay organized. That happened to me recently after I downloaded some Google+ Auto Awesome shots. I wanted to keep the photos in SkyDrive, but I…

NEW MICROSOFT CHIEF executive Satya Nadella has promised a “mobile first, cloud first” strategy that will carry over the “devices and services” strategy of outgoing chief executive Steve Ballmer. Nadella, in a question-and-answer session with Susan Hauser, the head of Microsoft’s enterprise sales team, laid out his priorities while talking rather conservatively about how he plans to move Microsoft’s business forward. As many observers suspected, Nadella’s vision appears to be an extension of Ballmer’s, but with Nadella’s own strengths in data and services guiding Microsoft ahead. “We have sort of talked about how our strategy going forward is about devices and services,” Nadella told Hauser and the Webcast audience. “This business of ours is exciting, because we don’t really respect tradition and what we’ve done in the past; it’s really…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/fbat10. ON FEBRUARY 4, 2004, Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com, a way for college students to seek each other out for friendship, or, you know, whatever. Its design was as basic as its purpose—no News Feed, no Timeline, no photos save for your profile pic, and no status updates. There wasn’t even a Like button until 2009. Facebook wasn’t about sharing content back then. How times have changed. Facebook has a much more sophisticated look on its tenth birthday, not to mention a grander mission: to connect the world to the Internet. Zuckerberg was 19 when he created The Facebook, and he and his company have matured together. How Facebook succeeded in spite of itself The road from rudimentary online directory to billion-dollar ad…

WITH THE NASTY CryptoLocker malware making the rounds lately—encrypting victims’ files, and refusing to unlock them unless victims pay $300 via Bitcoin or a prepaid cash voucher—ransomware is in the spotlight. You can remove many kinds of ransomware without losing your files, but the process differs depending on the type of invader. The simplest type, sometimes called scareware, consists of bogus antivirus or clean-up tools that claim they’ve detected umpteen issues, and demand that you pay to fix them. Some specimens may bombard you with alerts and pop-ups, while others might prevent you from running programs. In contrast, lock-screen viruses don’t allow you to use your computer, and display a full-size window—usually with an FBI or Department of Justice logo—saying that you violated the law and that you must pay…

1 Amped Wireless RTA30 AC1900 Wi-Fi router This router will deliver throughput up to 1.3 gigabits per second on the 5GHz band and throughput up to 600 megabits per second on the 2.4GHz band. It will have four high-gain antennas, one USB 3.0 port, and a gigabit switch. Amped Wireless hasn’t released pricing information, but the device is slated to arrive on the market in mid-2014. 2 Amped Wireless PCI20E AC1200 Wi-Fi adapter Amped Wireless also announced an 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter that adds wireless-networking capabilities to a desktop PC. The adapter plugs into an internal PCIe slot on a PC’s motherboard. It links to an external module with dual antennas that you can put on top of your desk. It should sell for $80 when it ships later this quarter,…

HP’S SPECTRE 13 (go.pcworld.com/spectre13) runs Windows 8, but it doesn’t contort, flip, swivel, or do any other impractical tricks of so many hybrid notebook-tablet hybrids. It’s just a regular old Ultrabook—but a very good one. If what you really want is a thin-and-light notebook with a great keyboard, a high-resolution display, and the power to tackle nearly any workload, the Spectre 13 comes pretty darn close to delivering that ideal design. It also leverages one of Windows 8’s touch capabilities to deliver a great innovation in usability: an almost comically wide touchpad dubbed the Control Zone; more about that shortly. The Spectre 13 looks a lot like Apple’s MacBook Air. The Spectre 13’s aluminum unibody chassis feels sturdy without being especially heavy (it weighs in at 3.3 pounds). The shiny…

MANY CAPABLE SSDs are out there, but don’t overlook a relative newcomer: Toshiba’s Q Series Pro (go.pcworld.com/toshibaqpro). Toshiba’s drives are among the very fastest we’ve tested, and, unusually, we saw no drop in performance in its smaller capacities. Throw in big online discounts, and you have a stellar bargain in a top-performing drive. The Q Series Pro drives are only 7mm thick, so they’ll fit in just about any laptop that supports a 2.5-inch drive. The controller is Toshiba’s own TC358790XBG, and the drive also incorporates Toshiba’s 19nm Toggle-mode MLC NAND. In our tests reading and writing a single 10GB file (using a 16GB RAM drive on our test bed), each of the three capacities—128GB, 256GB, and 512GB—was an excellent performer. Until now, the rule has been that the smaller…

Whether you’re stocking a brand-new system with software or adding programs to your existing PC, the apps you choose to install can be an intensely personal decision. But even so, some programs are just so useful across the board that we heartily recommend them to everybody. Here are our 23 must-have tools: 1 A BROWSER 1A BROWSER Before you roll up your sleeves and start slinging software around, make sure to snag your Web browser of choice. Using Windows’ default Internet Explorer when you’re accustomed to a different browser feels a bit like wearing somebody else’s shoes. (Blech.) Firefox and IE 11 are each a tremendous option in their own right, but our money is on Chrome, which won PCWorld’s browser showdown (go.pcworld.com/showdown) late last year. But hey, they’re all…

Q: ROSE SAYS that her Internet service intermittently slows to a crawl, and that she wants to take steps to make sure that her neighbors haven’t hacked into her Wi-Fi network for free connectivity. A: A NUMBER OF issues can produce intermittently slow Internet access, and most of them don’t involve foul play. You could have faulty cables, a bad modem or router, or outdated firmware on either of those devices. The problem may be with your ISP, and therefore out of your hands. For more information about these possibilities, see my article on obscenely slow Internet connections (go.pcworld.com/slownet). Also, check out Nick Mediati’s primer on testing your connection speed (go.pcworld.com/netspeed). As much as we would like to think otherwise, however, your problem very well could be with a…