PCWorldJanuary 2018的目錄

Look out: Qualcomm is invading Intel’s turf, announcing Windows PCs that use the same Snapdragon chips as your phone, with battery life that can last well into a second day of use. At its recent Snapdragon Technology Forum, Qualcomm showed off its Snapdragon 835 Mobile PC Platform on an HP Envy x2 tablet and an Asus NovaGo ultrabook. (A third PC, from Lenovo, will be announced at CES in Las Vegas.) Both run on the company’s Snapdragon 835—yes, the same processor (and cellular modem) inside popular phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. Qualcomm uses its success with smartphones to justify its foray into PCs. You demand all-day performance from your phone, while it’s constantly connected to the Internet. Why shouldn’t your PC deliver the same? Let’s clear up one…

Google’s newest Android app might be its most useful of all. It’s called Datally, and it has one function: to stop apps from gobbling up your precious gigabytes of data. The simple, intuitive app is designed to help you get a handle on your mobile data usage and stop rogue apps from surreptitiously using it up. So, if you get a message from your carrier about using an abnormal amount of data, you can use Datally to pinpoint the app that’s doing the most damage and shut it down. There’s nothing necessarily new in Datally—data trackers have been built into Android for a while—but never has it been presented in such a user-friendly way. Many Android users don’t know to venture deep into the Settings app to see their mobile…

If you bought an HP laptop anytime in the last five years, it could be tracking your every keystroke. Over the weekend HP revealed that nearly 500 of its notebooks dating as far back as 2012 shipped with a secret keylogger installed. Alongside the announcement, HP released driver updates to eradicate the software on affected laptops. Security researcher Michael Myng discovered the keylogger when probing the Synaptics touchpad software on an HP laptop. HP’s security bulletin says the “potential security vulnerability” affects all laptops with “certain versions of Synaptics touchpad drivers”—not necessarily just HP models. The keylogger is disabled by default, however. “A party would need administrative privileges in order to take advantage of the vulnerability,” the bulletin states. “Neither Synaptics nor HP has access to customer data as a result…

How much does two inches matter? You wouldn’t think it wouldd be a huge factor, but when I reviewed the Alienware 17 I called it “staggeringly huge” and said it was “time to hit the gym” if you wanted to carry one around. Since then, I’ve spent a few weeks using the Alienware 15—a laptop with the potential to be just as powerful, but in a slightly lighter package. And it turns out that’s good enough. THIS ONE IS JUST RIGHT Don’t get me wrong: The Alienware 15 is still a massive laptop, especially if you put it up against competing 15-inchers. This isn’t a Razer Blade-style device, and portability suffers. Alienware could really use a lightweight line as an alternative—and maybe we’ll start seeing those soon, as the line between…

This weekend I finished Destiny 2’s campaign for the third time. I’ve hit the (soft) level cap with all three classes, collected around a dozen exotic weapons, completed most of the Strikes, played some player-versus-player Crucible matches, shot thousands of enemies, killed off Emperor Calus to complete the raid (twice), and even spent two hours running up and down a hallway to exploit some bad code on Bungie’s part. I’m still not sure why Destiny 2 keeps me coming back for more, the digital equivalent of an irresistible bag of chips. But I’ve officially run out of reasons to procrastinate writing this review—just in time for the first expansion to drop next week. STARTING OVER FROM ZERO Yes, next week. Despite Destiny 2 only releasing a month ago on PC,…

For the past 20 years, retrogaming enthusiasts have dreamed of building a “universal game console” capable of playing games from dozens of different systems. Their ideal was inexpensive, easy to control with a gamepad, and capable of hooking into a TV set. Thanks to the Raspberry Pi 3 hobbyist platform and the RetroPie software distribution, that dream is finally possible. For under $110, you can build a very nice emulation system that can play tens of thousands of retro games for systems such as the NES, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Super NES, Game Boy, and even the PlayStation. All you need to do is buy a handful of components, put them together, and configure some software. You’ll also have to provide the games, but we’ll talk about that later. THE…

Excel’s Text functions are a major time-saver if your job entails managing massive data, especially data that’s imported from other sources. Fortunately, all ASCII data is easily imported, but the format of that imported data can vary drastically from one source to another. For example, fields may be delimited, such as with tabs, spaces, commas, or periods. Any other characters are all preferable to spaces. That’s because spaces not only exist in between fields, they also separate words within the fields, which makes sorting out the fields a real challenge. That’s where the following Text functions are helpful. 1. USE THE SUBSTITUTE FUNCTION TO REPLACE ONE STRING OF TEXT WITH ANOTHER Function syntax: The syntax (or sentence structure) of the SUBSTITUTE function is this: =SUBSTITUTE(text, old text, new text, [Instance…

In early December, Qualcomm revealed its first concrete details of the Snapdragon 845, the next-generation mobile chip that stands a good chance of being in your next smartphone. The 845 will ship in early 2018, and appear in phones sometime after that. Qualcomm calls the Snapdragon 845 a chip to improve both artificial intelligence and immersion, blending the future of smart devices with the past. At its heart lies the Kryo 385, the semi-custom, upgraded CPU. It’s still an eight-core device, with four performance cores running at 2.8GHz and four energy-efficient cores running at 1.8GHz. That represents a 25- to 30-percent improvement on the existing Snapdragon 835 in the performance cores, and a 15-percent improvement in the smaller, energy-efficient cores. Phones that use the new Snapdragon 845 will be able…

Microsoft said recently that it plans to overhaul Windows 10 with a browser-like, tabbed application view dubbed “Sets” that groups apps and files by project. The changes will roll out over a period of months, if not years—but an upstart competitor already has a similar idea. Think of Sets as a mashup of existing and emerging Windows 10 technologies. Take Windows Explorer and the little-used Task View within Windows 10, mix in the newer “Pick up where you left off” and Timeline features, and wrap it all into a single-window experience. The idea is that every task requires a set of apps—Mail, a browser, PowerPoint, even Win32 apps like Photoshop— and those apps will be optionally organized as tabs along a single window. But that’s not all. Microsoft knows that…

Microsoft’s Surface Book 2 solves a big problem for Microsoft: How do you market the Surface Book as a performance notebook when it’s two years out of date? As our review shows, by making it bigger and faster, with longer battery life. Only a power problem slows it down. With the Surface Book 2, Microsoft brings 8th-generation Intel Core processors and powerful, discrete Nvidia GPUs with enough horsepower to start thinking of the Surface Book 2 as a graphics workstation. But Microsoft’s big October surprise was the debut of not one, but two Surface Book 2 devices: a 13.5-inch and a new 15-inch model (we reviewed the latter). Neither is a simple clamshell notebook, though calling them convertible 2-in-1s instead seems like we’re selling them short. As our review of the…

Smaller form-factor PCs typically go one of two ways: First, you can prioritize the small part of the equation. This leaves you with something beautifully tiny, but at the cost of future upgrades—space-saving comes with the caveat of proprietary and non-replaceable parts. (See: Alienware Alpha.) Or you can prioritize future upgrades, which typically means a larger and less aesthetically pleasing machine. The MSI Trident 3 is the rare machine that can do both—at least to some extent. MSI TRIDENT 3 VS. CONSOLES It really is tiny. Scale can be tough to judge in photographs, but at 13.6 by 9.2 by 2.8 inches, the Trident is so small it’s hard to believe there’s a full-size PC inside. It’s smaller than my launch-version Xbox One for instance, and quite nearly smaller than…

The “plus” in the Amazon Echo Plus is an integrated ZigBee smart-home hub. It’s a feature that boosts this smart speaker’s price tag by a third compared to the $100 second-generation Echo, and by a factor of three compared to the $50 second-generation Echo Dot. Having one smart appliance do the job of two sounds like a good idea, but most people will be happier with a more powerful smart-home hub that works in conjunction with Alexa, even if the combination costs more. Don’t get me wrong. Amazon is way out in front when it comes to enabling voice control of the smart home, thanks to partnerships with all the major players—DIY platforms like Samsung SmartThings and the Wink Hub 2 as well as big installers such as Vivint Smart Home and ADT…

Google is pushing Android 8.0 Oreo to Nexus and Pixel devices as device makers scramble to get their phones updated. Google’s devices will be the only ones running the new software, at least for a while. What’s this Oreo update all about, anyway? Everyone knows about the big stuff, like picture-in-picture and autofill apps, but a lot more is going on if you dig deeper. Here are six awesome hidden Oreo features to get you started. 1. WIDGETS VIA APP SHORTCUTS Google has changed the location and appearance of the home screen widget picker several times, and Oreo brings yet another alteration. This one might make using widgets much easier, though. All of an app’s widgets are accessible with a long-press on the app icon. This works in the app…

The Huawei Mate 10 Pro is the kind of flagship phone you’d expect from Samsung and Google, packed with premium features, and oozing power. While it will no doubt struggle to compete with the likes of the Galaxy Note 8 and Google Pixel 2 XL once it releases in the U.S. (mainly due to a lack of carrier support), Huawei has nonetheless proven that it’s worthy of its No. 2 position on the smartphone charts. You can watch the video here.…

Nvidia’s cutting-edge Volta GPU architecture has finally come to desktops. Recently, Nvidia launched the monstrous, golden Titan V, a $3,000 graphics card with 12GB of HBM2 memory and over a thousand more CUDA cores than the game-slaying Titan Xp. But this beast isn’t made for gaming—though it’d no doubt be very good at it. Instead, Nvidia says this card “transforms the PC into an AI supercomputer.” While the still-available Titan Xp was theoretically a compute card, but better suited as a best-in-class gaming card, the Titan V doubles down on data crunching. Nvidia is giving Titan V owners free access to AI, deep-learning, and high-performance computing software via the Nvidia GPU cloud. To boost the hardware’s machine learning capabilities, the card is equipped with the same “tensor cores” found in the Volta-packing…

The next generation of HDMI is here, and it holds some major benefits for PC gamers and media buffs alike. The HDMI 2.1 standard, released recently by the HDMI Forum after being announced at CES 2017, supports higher resolutions, new HDR features, and game-smoothing variable refresh rates, among other features. HDMI 2.1 delivers massively more bandwidth than HDMI 2.0—a whopping 48Gb/s compared to the 18Gb/s achieved by today’s technology. That allows HDMI 2.1 to hit much higher resolutions and refresh rates. The new spec supports 8K and even 10K resolutions, but those are better thought of as future-proofing or targeted toward commercial applications. Modern gamers will appreciate the introduction of 4K/120Hz display support, though. Today’s 4K monitors are limited to 60Hz and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and Titan XP graphics cards…

Forgive us if you’ve heard this one before but Dell’s latest XPS 13 is truly the best one yet. Seriously. Newly upgraded with Intel’s 8th-generation CPUs, the XPS 13 offers unheard-of performance in an ultra-portable laptop. By “unheard-of,” we mean the XPS 13 offers performance approaching and occasionally surpassing that of much larger and much heavier powerhouse laptops. Granted, it hasn’t changed much on the outside. As we go through the features and specs, though, you’ll see the significant changes happening on the inside. PRICES, SPECS AND FEATURES Prices: Our review unit currently sells for $1,300 from Dell’s website. Other SKUs from Dell’s site range from the lowest-end $800 version, with a 7th-generation Core i3-7100UCPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD; and the top-of-the-line $1,750 model with the same 8th-generation Core…

The WD Blue 3D SSD is a SATA SSD with a not-so-secret twin: Sandisk’s Ultra 3D SSD. They are in fact the same drive with different labels, WD owning Sandisk and all that. The ‘3D’ term means the drives use stacked (layered, vertical, etc.) NAND. Practically speaking, that means more storage in less horizontal space. The only real differences between the drives are the outward appearance, the marketing, and the fact that the WD Blue 3D ships in the M.2 form factor, while the Ultra 3D does not. Beyond that, they’re peas in a pod. Given their superior performance compared to other TLC NAND drives—that’s a really good thing. DESIGN AND CAPACITY Though available in the 2.5-inch form factor, WD sent us the M.2 2280 (22mm wide/80mm long) Blue 3D,…

It hasn’t been true for years now, but people still say AMD’s drivers suck. Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition definitively proves them wrong. The latest in a series of massive annual Radeon Software feature updates, Adrenalin builds on the success of Catalyst Omega, Crimson, ReLive, and ReLive 17.7.2 before it, polishing up existing tools like WattMan and Radeon Chill while adding in the most-requested features of Radeon users. But more notably, Adrenalin adds a new on-screen overlay and AMD Link mobile app to make it easier than ever to fine-tune your game settings or keep an eye on your PC’s performance. What you won’t find are gargantuan performance updates. Some reports written when AMD teased the Adrenalin name suggested this new Radeon Software could supercharge your frame rate. Nope. This doesn’t unlock any…

Wi-Fi is everywhere and built into everything. It’s like oxygen for Internet access, media streaming, gaming, and all types of networking. And it should just work all the time—right? If you’ve had an average experience with Wi-Fi on mobile devices, laptops, game systems, and more, you know that while a solid Wi-Fi connection might be the norm, those times when it’s not can leave you tearing your hair out. Here, I look at a number of common scenarios that cause Wi-Fi problems and how to solve them, whether you’re running your own network or trying to connect to someone else’s using any platform. WI-FI BASICS Before we get started, a very quick primer on a few Wi-Fi terms I’ll bring up repeatedly. 802.11: the name of the IEEE engineering trade…