Table of contents for Sep-13 in PCWorld

NVIDIA WILL START licensing its graphics cores more widely in a bid to cash in on the need for powerful graphics in smartphones, tablets, and other devices. Nvidia will start by licensing graphics cores based on the Kepler architecture used in its latest graphics cards, the company says. Kepler cores will also be used in Nvidia’s Tegra 5 mobile chip, codenamed Logan, shipping next year. “The reality is that we’ve done this in the past,” says David Shannon, Nvidia’s executive vice president and general counsel, in a blog entry. But now, “the explosion of Android devices presents an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate this effort.” Nvidia is taking a path similar to that of Imagination Technologies, the main supplier of graphics cores to mobile chip makers. Imagination’s graphics cores are used…

IF GOOGLE GLASS isn’t enough to get you worried about technology, how about a device that can see through walls? MIT researchers are experimenting with a Wi-Fi–based system called Wi-Vi, which they say can track moving objects through walls. The technology could be built into a smartphone or a dedicated handheld device and used in search-and-rescue and law enforcement, says Dina Katabi, the MIT professor who developed Wi-Vi along with graduate student Fadel Adib. Katabi thinks consumers might use Wi-Vi, too. For example, someone walking outdoors at night who fears being followed might use it to detect a person sneaking behind a fence or around a corner, she says. No need to worry about the person in the next hotel room watching you dress—at least not yet. Currently the display…

SOCIAL MEDIA HAS been a boon for businesses, but it’s also becoming a minefield. Although tweets and Facebook posts can be deleted, evidence of their existence is invariably captured for posterity within seconds of their going live. Say something wrong on a social network, and it will haunt you forever. Don’t believe me? Check out these examples. 1. Hand the keys to someone who is not ready to drive Tending to Twitter and Facebook pages is a high-effort job, so handing off the task can be tempting. Big mistake. The annals of business will likely record thousands of posts and tweets gone wrong, courtesy of ignorant contractors or staffers. The mixing of personal and corporate accounts is usually to blame. It’s how a “social media specialist” posted about “gettng slizzerd”…

Sony deserves credit for establishing the portable all-in-one market, having introduced the VAIO Tap 20 (go.pcworld.com/tap20) last winter. This model boasts a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of memory, and a 20-inch ten-point touchscreen for just $1100. On the downside, its display resolution is disappointingly limited to 1600 by 900 pixels. The Tap 20 also relies on the GPU integrated into its mobile 2GHz Intel Core i7-3517U processor to drive that display, and its 750GB hard drive spins its platters at only 5400 rpm. The Tap 20’s fast CPU helped it deliver good performances on the content-creation elements of our benchmarking suite (image editing and audio-and video-encoding tasks), but the absence of a discrete GPU generated a goose egg in our GPU-accelerated image-editing test. In the end, the Tap 20 earned…

RAZER’S SECOND-GENERATION Blade (go.pcworld.com/razerblade) is an ultraportable, high-performance Windows 8 laptop packed into a slim body that any Apple engineer would envy. Better than the original Blade, it’s sleeker, lighter, and more powerful, with a fourth-generation Core processor. And it loses the Switchblade LCD touchpad that made the old Blade—now the Blade Pro—so quirky. Thinner, lighter, faster The Blade is two-thirds of an inch thick and weighs 4.25 pounds. With its diminutive power adapter, the package tops out at just over 5 pounds. Although the Blade is 1.5 pounds heavier than the 13-inch MacBook Air, it is thinner than the Air by 0.02 inch at its thickest point. But Apple’s ultraportable feels skinnier because its unibody chassis tapers down to such a knife edge. A green-backlit keyboard sits atop a…

THE PATRIOT AERO Wireless Mobile Drive (go.pcworld.com/aero) resembles a simple but fairly large 2.5-inch external USB 3.0 hard drive. The only clue that it can also function as a wireless multimedia streamer is its Wi-Fi indicator light. With suitable Android and iOS apps, you can access the Aero’s content from most mobile devices. When you plug the Aero into a USB port, its Wi-Fi shuts off so that the unit can charge and can function as direct-attached storage (like a normal USB hard drive). When you remove the drive from the USB port, Wi-Fi automatically turns on. The Aero also comes equipped with both an AC jack and a mini power-to-USB cable, which you’ll need to use to keep the unit streaming and charging from a USB port. A battery…

FROM THE FRONT, the thin (0.27 inch thick), light (1.1 pounds) Sony Xperia Tablet Z (go.pcworld.com/tabletz) looks likes a black glass slab. The sides are featureless black, aside from a silver on/off button, and the back is matte black. It’s pretty, but it picks up fingerprints in a hurry. When its removable (with difficulty) port covers are in place over the tablet’s Micro-USB port and MicroSD slot, the Tablet Z is waterproof—within reason, anyway. The Micro-USB port also handles charging. Sony’s display isn’t as high-resolution as those found in Apple’s Retina iPad (go.pcworld.com/retinaipad4) or Google’s Nexus 10 (go.pcworld.com/nexus10), but its 1920-by-1200-pixel screen can display 1080p HD movies at full resolution and crisp text at 224 pixels per inch. Inside, the Xperia Tablet Z carries a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 quad-core…

CREDIT BUFFALO TECHNOLOGY for taking advantage of cheap memory prices to marry relatively affordable DDR memory cache with an external hard drive to speed up the drive’s write performance. The Buffalo DriveStation DDR (go.pcworld.com/drivestation)—a 3.5-inch, USB 3.0 drive—easily surpasses the write performance of any external hard drive we’ve tested. In fact, it rivals the speed of external USB 3.0 solid-state drives, at a far lower cost per gigabyte. External hard drives are relatively simple devices. The DriveStation DDR is an approximately 8-by-5-by-1.75-inch black box sporting a tick of red on the top front. Inside are a USB 3.0 type B port, a Kensington lock port, an AC jack, power and activity lights, and a cooling vent on the back. It has no fan because Buffalo believes that passive convection cooling…

WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER is dying a slow death. It’s not included with Windows 8, and adding it to the new operating system will cost you a hundred bucks. But third-party developers haven’t yet given up on the concept of the home-theater PC, and Ceton’s InfiniTV 6 (go.pcworld.com/infinitv6) is a good example of one. This digital tuner lets you watch and record up to six digital cable TV channels simultaneously. It works with a digital cable TV subscription and requires a multistream CableCard (M-Card), which your cable company is required to provide (it might also provide an SDV tuning adapter, which plugs in to the InfiniTV 6’s USB port). Unfortunately, there is no equivalent option for satellite-TV subscribers. The InfiniTV 6 plugs in to your router, so every PC on your…

It’s scorching out. Any housework that needs doing is already done. And with the weekend ahead, it’s time for a simple computing project. Here’s one: Install the Windows 8.1 Preview. Note that Windows 8.1 will be available through the Windows Store as a free upgrade for current Windows 8 and Windows RT users on October 17; the retail version of the software will be released to “general availability” on October 18. The version that is downloadable right now is only a preview, and so it may contain a bug or two. If you have any critical apps or data, make sure that you have backup copies, or that your data also resides on Microsoft’s Sky-Drive. Although I haven’t encountered a single bug in the Windows 8.1 Preview, there’s no guarantee…

READER TAMMY WROTE in to share this hassle: “Whenever I try to print a page from the Internet, the size of the print and the photos is extremely small and difficult to read. I do not have this problem with Microsoft Word documents.” Tammy said she runs Windows 8, but she neglected to specify which Web browser she uses—so I’m going to assume that it’s Internet Explorer. Let me be the first to note that Internet Explorer can be terrible when it comes to printing. On my Windows 8 system, for example, I went to any number of pages on Microsoft’s MSN (the default site for Internet Explorer) and then selected Print Preview. The result I got every single time was several pages containing little more than links, with…

THOUGH ONLY ABOUT a year old, Google Drive is already a popular service, and its prices put Dropbox to shame. On Google Drive, 100GB costs $5 a month—half what Dropbox charges. But Google Drive becomes even more useful when you take advantage of thirdparty add-ons and services. These five free, easy-to-use tools help you encrypt your data, play music, collaborate on slides, back up automatically, share files, and more. Some live on the desktop, some in Chrome, and some online. 1 BoxCryptor go.pcworld.com/boxcryptor You may be too security-conscious to leave files on a remote server. Fair enough. But don’t let it keep you from using the cloud. BoxCryptor is a Windows desktop app that creates an encrypted folder that you can place in your Google Drive folder. After you create…

THE BATTLE FOR mobile video supremacy rages on: In July, Instagram finally made it possible for users to easily embed photos and videos on their own websites, as Twitter’s rival Vine app does. Easily is the key word. Workarounds already existed for embedding Instagram photos and videos, but they entailed too much effort for content sharing. Instagram is now offering an embed code on desktop browsers that lets you share your photos and videos (look for the button under the comments). The company in a recent blog post said it wants to ensure that your content is clearly attached to your account, so the embedded photo or video will display your Instagram username and link to your account. What if your account is private? Well, no one will be able…

SAMSUNG IS EXPANDING its Ativ line with new systems and a touch of Android. (As of this writing, the company has not yet announced pricing or availability.) Ativ Q: This tablet-laptop hybrid, driven by an Intel Core i5 (Haswell) processor, has a 13-inch, 3200-by-1800-pixel display that can prop up and tilt back on a raised hinge. It boots into Windows 8, but can switch to Android 4.2. Users will be able to pin Android apps to the Windows 8 Start screen, and transfer files or folders between the OSs. Ativ Tab 3: Samsung says the 0.32-inch Ativ Tab 3 is the world’s thinnest Windows 8 tablet. It offers a 10.1-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display, runs an Intel Atom Z2760 processor, and comes with an S Pen stylus. Ativ Book 9 Plus: The…

YOU’VE PROBABLY READ at least one story with warnings about using nonsecure public Wi-Fi hotspots, so you know that eavesdroppers can capture information traveling over those networks. But nothing gets the point across as effectively as seeing the snooping in action. So I parked myself at my local coffee shop the other day to soak up the airwaves and see what I could see. My intent wasn’t to hack anyone’s computer or device—that would be illegal—but just to listen. As you’ll see, it’s relatively easy to capture sensitive communications at the vast majority of public hotspots—locations like cafés, airports, and hotels. Someone can snag emails, passwords, and unencrypted instant messages, and hijack unsecured logins to popular websites. Fortunately, you have a number of ways to protect your online activity while…

PARANOIA—IN SMALL DOSES— is an excellent preventive medicine. If you think your business is too small to be a target for hackers, identity thieves, and similarly unsavory characters, you’re dangerously underestimating the value of your business. IT security might seem to be a daunting prospect for a small business without an expert staff, a large budget, or expensive consultants, but you can take several easily implemented measures to lock down the computers your business relies on. Encrypt your hard drives First, implement full-disk encryption on each PC. This step is crucial because system passwords alone offer no defense against hackers’ accessing the hard drive from another computer, or against someone’s attempts to clone its contents for off-site examination. In addition, recovering previously deleted files from an unencrypted storage device or…

WINDOWS 8 HAS spurred a lot of unusual hardware designs, but few are as intriguing as the tabletop tablet. Imagine a full-fledged all-in-one PC that lies flat on whatever surface you have handy. It’s a design that offers all the screen real estate and CPU performance of a touchscreen all-in-one system, along with the portability of a battery-operated tablet. If you use these PCs as their manufacturers intended, your hybrid machine will be a family-room desktop computer by day and a living-room gaming platform by night. But is this an experience that consumers want or even need? Asus, Dell, Lenovo, and Sony sure hope so. None of these machines, however, pose a threat to Apple’s iPad or any small tablet running Android or Windows 8. After all, these monsters are…

Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Horizon (go.pcworld.com/lenovohorizon) is the boldest expression of the portable all-in-one concept to reach the market. Asus, Dell, and Sony have giant tablets. Lenovo has a computer the size of a tabletop—its display measures a full 27 inches. Lenovo does bundle several other accessories for playing games on the Horizon, including four joysticks, four strikers (for playing air hockey), and one example of “e-dice” (a wireless die that informs the computer which number is face up after a roll). The Horizon comes with a variety of games, including Monopoly, air hockey, and roulette. The large display renders the Horizon the best all-in-one PC in this group, as well as the best casual gaming platform, but it has one drawback: Its resolution is limited to 1920 by 1080 pixels. If…

ADOBE HAS ADDED some nice features to its new, subscription-based, pro-level Photoshop Creative Cloud (go.pcworld.com/adobephotosCC) and rolled all the features of Photoshop Extended into the CC version. Photoshop CC has some good stuff, especially in actions, filters, and enlargements. But Bridge CC, Photoshop’s file-management sidekick, has had several useful features removed. “The new Shake Reduction filter does an incredible job.” What’s new Photoshop CC—which you download and install on your hard drive—has a new 200 percent option in the View menu (to see Web graphics at the size they’ll appear in a browser). And look for two tiny new icons at the bottom left of document windows: one for syncing your settings to the Creative Cloud for access on other machines, and one for uploading artwork to the collaborative, online…

DELL IS OFFERING a docking station and a wireless network adapter card based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard (WiGig). Plug all your cabled devices into the Wireless Dock D5000 (go.pcworld.com/dockD5000), and your laptop establishes a wireless connection (on the 60GHz frequency band) to the dock. But the internal adapter card (the $37.50 Dell Wireless 1601 WiGig and 802.11n 2x2 Wi-Fi Half Mini Card) required for pairing a notebook to the docking station is an option with only one laptop: the Latitude 6430u. You can’t buy the adapter card separately, and no third-party adapter can let you use the D5000 with other notebooks. But a Dell representative says the company “absolutely” expects to offer its WiGig adapter “with additional products in the coming months.” In my tests, Dell’s wireless docking station…

THE MAIN SELLING point of the Vizio CT15T-B1 Thin + Light Touch (go.pcworld.com/ct15tb1), the latest iteration of the company’s 15.6-inch Thin + Light laptop, is its glossy HD touchscreen. The laptop has a smooth, gunmetal-gray metallic cover with neatly beveled edges, a spacious keyboard deck, and an edge-to-edge glass screen. Inside, the CT15T-B1 packs a quad-core Intel i7-3635QM processor from the Ivy Bridge line, along with 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory and a 256GB SSD. That configuration helped it to a very peppy Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 334. The laptop lacks a discrete graphics card, however, and its graphics performance is mediocre (or worse). In our Bioshock Infinite test (low resolution/low quality settings), it managed a frame rate of just 24.2 frames per second. The CT15T-B1’s looks great. The 15.6-inch…

ALTHOUGH THE $400 HP Officejet Pro 276dw (go.pcworld.com/hpoj276dw) is expensive, it’s an excellent inkjet multifunction printer that plays nice even in a corporate environment. Installation is a breeze, despite quite a few dialog boxes. The 4.3-inch touchscreen control panel has a well thought-out menu structure. Text is near-laser-quality, and color graphics are nice. Plain-paper photos appear slightly washed out, but look good in newsletters. Color photos on glossy paper are excellent, though HP’s bent toward orangey skin tones remains. The greenish tint has vanished from its PCL 5 monochrome graphics but is still apparent in monochrome graphics printed via PostScript on the Mac. Scan quality is quite good. Performance is smooth and quick. Our text pages (which included simple monochrome graphics) printed at a rate of 10.8 pages per minute…

OFFERING A NICE blend of price and performance, SanDisk’s Extreme II SSD (go.pcworld.com/sandiskext), in its bigger capacities, retails for considerably less than a buck a gigabyte. It’s also one of the fastest drives with large files that we’ve tested. Its performance with small files, on the other hand, is merely average, and the drop-off in write performance from the 240GB and 480GB models to the 120GB version is steep. SanDisk has ditched the SandForce SF-2281 controller of the original Extreme series, and equipped the 7mm-profile, 6Gb/s Extreme II with a Marvell 88SS9187. The combination of the new controller and fast, 19nm toggle-mode NAND helped the Extreme II outpace the sustained write performance of such capable drives as OCZ’s Vector and Corsair’s Neutron. The 240GB version wrote our 10GB large file…

YOU WORK HARD to protect your PC from malware, but against all odds, your computer can still become infested with a virus. Here’s a methodical approach that you can use to determine what exactly the problem is and how to scan your system for infections. 1. Verify the infection Is the PC in question really infected? Or are you dealing with a hardware or software problem, or is it user error? If your PC is unusually slow, be suspicious. But before you decide that a virus is responsible, launch the Windows Task Manager (right-click the Windows taskbar, and select Task Manager from the pop-up menu). Open the Processes tab, and check for any strange background applications—especially those with nonsensical names and no recognizable authority listed in the description. 2. Check…

Q: How do I delete files off a hard drive so that they can never be restored?”—Rommel A: When you delete a file, it doesn’t actually go away—even after you’ve emptied the Recycle Bin. The actual bits remain written on the drive until some other disk activity writes over them. Even after you reformat a drive, the files can still be read by those who want—and know how—to read them. To truly and securely delete a file, or the contents of an entire drive, you need software that will overwrite the space where the file(s) once resided. Fortunately, several free programs can do this. First, I recommend Eraser (go.pcworld.com/3109hh1), which integrates with Windows Explorer. Once you’ve installed the utility, you can just right-click a file or folder and select Eraser.…

IF THE WINDOWS PC market is in big trouble, someone forgot to tell Lenovo and Samsung. In June, within 24 hours of each other, the two Asian tech giants unveiled broad, new product lines. A critical mass of next-generation Windows 8 machines is coming down the pike. The new arrivals cover every shape and form of portable PC, with touchscreens galore, and even some daring dual-boot systems. Crawford del Prete, chief research officer at tech market research firm IDC, says the Lenovo and Samsung announcements show how fundamentals are coming together for the PC market. “Haswell should significantly improve battery performance,” del Prete says. Haswell, the code name for Intel’s fourth-generation Core processor, is finally starting to show up in new systems. Early tests of the Haswell-powered Macbook Air indicate…

MICROSOFT IS PLANNING AN OVERHAUL of our Office documents, weaving live data into the once-static fabric of our Word files and Excel spreadsheets. It’s a bold experiment that could kill the very definition of an Office “document”—but it could also spell the rebirth of Microsoft’s productivity suite in the age of cloud-driven collaboration. Microsoft has been evangelizing tools that will enable app developers to automatically use Bing’s search capabilities in documents—for example, they might enhance a travel guide with live demographic information on Belize. And Microsoft’s new PowerBI tools can import data from both public and private sources to provide more up-to-date context in documents. Both developments reveal a sea change in the way we’ll interact with Microsoft Office in the future. Today, you create an Office document, save it,…

IN JULY, HEADLINES screamed that global computer shipments had plunged 11 percent year over year in the second quarter after dropping 14 percent in the first (go.pcworld.com/pcsalesq2). But wait! A closer look at the numbers shows that we may be past the worst of the bleeding. Yes, the first quarter’s year-over-year decline was the sharpest ever, falling from 88.6 million PCs shipped in Q1 2012 to about 76.2 million PCs in Q1 2013, according to IDC. (Data from Gartner, another research group, yields roughly the same numbers.) From Q1 2013 to Q2 2013, however, the drop is not so devastating. According to IDC, 75.6 million PCs shipped in Q2 2013—a decline of just 600,000 units from the first quarter. And in the United States, Gartner says, Q2 shipments declined by…

While Dell, Lenovo, and Sony adopted the same essential design for their respective all-in-ones, Asus took a completely different approach. In fact, a better description of Asus’s machine might be “all-in-two,” because the Transformer All-in-One P1801 (go.pcworld.com/p1801) is essentially two discrete computers, each one with its own CPU and operating system. The Transformer P1801’s base houses one computer powered by a quad-core 3.1GHz Intel Core i5-3450 CPU and 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory. When the 18.4-inch, ten-point-touch display is docked to the base, the combination functions as a conventional desktop all-in-one. Remove the display from the dock, and it becomes a giant tablet running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). The display provides a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. The base unit is a well-equipped computer all its own. In addition…

THE ORIGINAL NEXUS 7 was merely a bargain, a good-enough tablet at a great price. The new Nexus 7 (go.pcworld.com/newnexus7) is a downright steal. It’s the best 7-inch tablet, period. Google has redefined budget tablet so that it no longer refers to cheap-feeling, sub-$200 devices. You can now grab a svelte, premium 7-inch tablet with a high-resolution screen, wireless charging, a quad-core processor, and 2GB of RAM for a measly $229. The revamped Nexus 7 is more than just the next stock Android gadget offering from Google. It’s the company’s re-do of what it should have done right the first time. The giant of search (and maps, and mail, and…), with its ginormous, seemingly all-inclusive Android ecosystem, has finally entered the premium tablet market. Easier to hold, faster than ever…

ON THE DAY we reviewed Dell’s Latitude 3330 (go.pcworld.com/latitude3330), the “starting price” online was $801, but the listed “Dell price” was $561. On the day you look, those numbers could be different. What won’t change, however, is the fact that this 13.3-inch notebook with Windows 7 Pro is aimed at buyers working with very tight budgets. Just remember that you get what you pay for. In this case, you’re getting a sub-4-pound laptop with a slim profile but skimpy specs that include an Intel Core i3-2375M CPU (part of the Sandy Bridge family introduced back in early 2011), equally dated HD3000 integrated graphics that share just 4GB of system memory, and an incommodious 320GB hard drive that spins its platters at 5400 rpm. In real-world terms, the across-the-board low scores…

IT’S NO ULTRABOOK, but the Micro Express NB5720 (go.pcworld.com/nb5720) doesn’t look bad for a boxy, half-plastic laptop that carries a respectable 15.6-inch screen. It comes with a smooth, slate-gray, brushed-aluminum cover with tapered edges and a minimalist keyboard deck. However, it’s 1.68 inches thick and it weighs 5.75 pounds. The NB5720 packs some high-performance components under its hood: a 2.8GHz Core i7-4900MQ, 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory, a discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M graphics card, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a 750GB, 7200-rpm hard drive. It roared to a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 483, though all that power did wear down the battery in just 3 hours, 37 minutes. “The keyboard’s island-style keys are comfortable to type on.” The system’s 15.6-inch, nonglare screen has a native resolution of 1920 by…

CONSUMERS ARE POSTING online more and printing less—and losing their patience with pricey ink cartridges. The $99 Epson Expression Home XP-410 Small-in-One (go.pcworld.com/epsonxp410) certainly does not solve that issue, but it does offer surprisingly good output quality along with basic multifunction features. The tiltable control panel is better than what you’ll see on most low-cost printers. Included are a 2.5-inch color display and context-sensitive touch controls. The panel works well and is intuitive and responsive. One annoyance is the exile of the primary user guide and the Mac OS X drivers to Epson’s website. The CD has plenty of room—why not put them there? It’s a puzzler, but common on Epson’s lower-cost models. Epson’s gently pink color palette works to the benefit of most images. Test photos showed good color…

YOU MAY THINK that an Instagram app that doesn’t allow you to take pictures would be kind of pointless, but Instagram Explorer (go.pcworld.com/instexp)—a Windows 8 app for the modern user interface—has plenty of potential. Using it is not unlike browsing through the Instagram.com site. Instagram Explorer’s default view displays your live feed, and it’s nice to view some of Instagram’s gorgeous photos on a bigger screen. The spacious real estate of a Windows 8 desktop or laptop makes it easier to comment on photos, too—the comment field is more prominently displayed here than it is on Instagram.com. Similarly, Instagram Explorer’s profile view is superior to the view on your smartphone, which simply displays square tiles of identically sized recent photos. The Explorer profile view displays photos in a variety of…

RELEASE PREVIEWS ARE never for the faint of heart. Trial software is prone to meting out all sorts of bumps and bruises, and if something goes really, truly rotten, you could wind up with a complete (and inadvertent) system wipe on your hands. Now, the Windows 8.1 preview seems remarkably stable as far as these things go, but that doesn’t mean you should throw caution to the wind before you install the software. In case you aren’t already alarmed enough by Microsoft’s stern “This may go so badly that you might want to contact your PC manufacturer” warnings when you try to install the update, we’ve heard several reports of people running into repeated Windows 8.1 installation problems. Heck, we’ve run into installation failures on multiple machines ourselves. None of…

HOW WELL INTERNET Explorer—or any Web browser, for that matter—protects against attacks greatly depends on whether you keep it up-to-date and have the right security settings. Here’s how to take the proper security measures with Internet Explorer 9 and 10. Keep IE Updated The latest versions of the browser often contain new security features, so be sure you have the latest version installed, and that you keep it updated. IE 10 is the most current version, and it comes bundled with Windows 8. Microsoft also offers IE 10 for those running Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 installed. But if you’re running Windows Vista, you’re stuck with using IE 9. To determine whether you have the latest version of IE installed, open IE, press the <Alt> key, open the Help…

YOU ADORE YOUR laptop—it’s the key to your competitive edge. That is, until its battery croaks. To avoid that scenario, follow these tips to maximize your laptop’s runtime. 1. Plug in whenever possible A common misconception about laptops is that leaving the system plugged into AC power continuously will overcharge or shorten the life of its battery. But lithium ion batteries in today’s laptops stop charging once they reach full capacity. Keeping the battery charged reduces wear and tear on the power source, lengthening its life span. 2. Adjust the screen brightness A laptop’s display consumes a sizable chunk of the system’s juice. Keeping the screen’s backlight low can increase your laptop’s runtime noticeably. Another way to reduce power consumption is to tweak the backlight controls in Windows. Open Control…