PCWorldSeptember 2025的目錄

Microsoft has made a big deal of the fact that Windows 10 moves out of support this October. Yet it continues to offer Windows 10 users more and more options to remain on the platform. The most recent addition is buried in a Microsoft support document, as unearthed by Windows Central: Signing up for Microsoft’s Windows 10 Consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program now nets you 10 licenses to continue using Windows 10, and not just one machine. Granted, not every user will own more than one PC. But the new expansion allows a family or extended family of Windows 10 users to keep using Windows 10 for another year. Otherwise, Windows 10 supports runs out this October. Buying into the ESU program will allow you to receive extended security…

Launched in 2001, Windows XP is still considered by many to be one of the best things Microsoft ever made, and it was a real loss when it was officially discontinued in 2014. Now, one project by Reddit user ducbao414 (spotted by Windows Central) lets you relive the glory of Windows XP directly in a web browser. It was released on July 13 in celebration of 25 years since Windows XP first began development, with the goal of allowing others to enjoy the nostalgic XP moments of their childhoods. To be clear, the project is not a full-blown running of Windows XP. Instead, it’s more of a web-based replica that merely re-creates the classic XP interface. You can’t browse via Internet Explorer, nor can you run any external apps, but you…

One of the most frustrating things about owning a Windows PC is when it crashes, refuses to boot, or simply doesn’t work. Microsoft is preparing to roll out a technology called “quick machine recovery” for consumers to help solve this, after testing it in an enterprise environment. Microsoft tests various features across different Windows Insider testing channels, before eventually pushing them to your PC. Quick machine recovery comes courtesy of Windows 11 Build 26100.4762, part of the Release Preview Channel. It’s the “closest” channel to the traditional Windows updates, so it’s likely to debut on your PC soon. In fact, this preview gathers several features, many of which you might find useful, including semantic search in Settings: the ability to describe a problem and let Settings understand what you’re talking…

The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is a 14-inch laptop that unrolls into a tall 16.7-inch display when you press a button on the keyboard. Lenovo proudly proclaims this is the world’s first rollable laptop. You have a bunch of extra screen real estate built into your laptop, and you can access it at the press of a button. I’m shocked how cool this is: Lenovo has taken the kind of product you’d see as a tech demo at CES and turned it into a real, solidly engineered laptop that anyone can buy. Yes, it’s expensive, but the fact that you can get this sort of one-of-a-kind experience at a few thousand bucks is just awesome. Lenovo has been delivering lots of wild laptop concepts, like the dual-display Yoga Book 9i.…

Best known for its inexpensive routers, TP-Link is rapidly growing its Tapo line of budget-priced smart home devices, and the Tapo DL100 smart lock is a fabulous home security value. You’ll find plenty of smart locks that look prettier, pack more whiz-bang features, and support more smart home ecosystems, but you won’t find a $70 lock that’s nearly as good as TP-Link’s Tapo DL100. DESIGN AND BUILD QUALITY The Tapo DL100 isn’t flashy, but it doesn’t look cheap. The black-and-silver finish blends well with most doors, and the keypad glows softly for nighttime visibility. While the battery housing is plastic, it doesn’t feel flimsy in the hand. The Tapo DL100 is BHMA certified as a commercial lock rated ANSI Grade 3, the lowest of the three ANSI commercial lock grades…

ChatGPT is rapidly changing the world. The process is already happening, and it’s only going to accelerate as the technology improves, as more people gain access to it, and as more learn how to use it. What’s shocking is just how many tasks ChatGPT is already capable of managing for you. While the naysayers may still look down their noses at the potential of AI assistants, I’ve been using it to handle all kinds of menial tasks for me. Here are my favorite examples. WRITE YOUR EMAILS FOR YOU We’ve all been faced with the tricky task of writing an email—whether personal or professional—but not knowing quite how to word it. ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting for you, penning the (hopefully) perfect email based on whatever information you feed…

Windows runs well—most of the time. But if the system suddenly starts acting up, important data disappears or programs no longer start properly, the cause is often not the technology itself, but the user. To be more precise: Small oversights that can have annoying consequences. Many problems are homemade and thus can easily be avoided. Anyone who forgets a backup, misplaces the BitLocker key, or blindly relies on Windows Defender sometimes risks more than they think. The good news is that you can easily avoid most problems. You just need to know where the typical pitfalls lurk. In this guide, we show you the five most common Windows errors and how you can avoid them with a few simple steps so that your system runs reliably, securely, and stress-free. 1.…

The U.S. is pushing for domestic manufacturing—and by pushing, I mean throwing markets into chaos with tariffs against specific countries and products decided seemingly at random. But how much will computer chips, probably the most complex and in-demand general production item on the planet, cost to make stateside? AMD’s CEO has an answer, or at least a guess. Dr. Lisa Su said that chips produced at the new fabrication facility in Arizona will be “more than 5 percent but less than 20 percent” more expensive compared to chips made in Taiwan. She was speaking to AI industry leaders, government officials, and press in Washington. Su elaborated that the extra expense is worth it to diversify the incredibly complex supply chain, reports Bloomberg. The Arizona plant is owned by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing…

Intel said Thursday that the company’s next big CPU bet, Panther Lake, remains on track to begin shipping this year, and the supporting 18A manufacturing process has already entered production. However, Intel plans to end 2025 with just 75,000 employees as it continues reducing its workforce. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan also characterized Intel’s move away from hyperthreading, begun with its Arrow Lake chip, as a mistake. As Intel reported earnings for the second quarter of 2025, the company’s message was that it continues to execute on a strategy to focus on customers and engineering. As part of that, Intel recorded $1.9 billion in restructuring charges, mostly to do with reorganizing manufacturing and assembly operations. “I know the past few months have not been easy,” Tan wrote in a memo to…

It should come as no surprise that students the world over are using ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots to cheat—on homework, on tests, and on anything else you care to mention. After all, why work something out yourself when there’s an AI chatbot waiting and willing to do the hard work for you? This is obviously a problem in need of fixing, and OpenAI’s answer is a Study Mode that’s now baked into ChatGPT. The idea is to stop students from simply asking ChatGPT to tell them the answer to a question, and to have ChatGPT teach them how to answer the question for themselves. Will this work? Possibly. Maybe. Probably not. Either way, I gave ChatGPT’s Study Mode a spin for myself to find out what it’s capable…

Of all the streaming devices Roku offers, the 2025 edition of the Roku Streaming Stick is—apologies in advance—the Rokuiest. The company prides itself on offering a smooth streaming experience on cheap hardware, and the Roku Streaming Stick (HD) is its least expensive model at $30. It addresses the biggest problems with Roku’s previous low-end offering, the Roku Express, by adding TV and voice controls to its remote and using a more portable design that you can plug directly into a TV’s HDMI port. Roku hasn’t sold an HD streaming dongle like this since 2018, and it’s nice to have one back in the lineup. While the $40 Roku Streaming Stick Plus gets you 4K HDR video support and slightly better performance—and there are other options from Roku’s rivals worth considering…

The Alienware 16X Aurora is a 16-inch gaming laptop with a screaming-fast Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, and a bright, beautiful, and smooth display. And $1,999 is a good price for these specs. With the Aurora 16X, Alienware is delivering real value. Alienware isn’t just a high-end premium brand anymore. SPECS The Alienware 16X Aurora is a 16-inch gaming laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU. This is a high-end laptop gaming CPU based on Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture, although Intel brands it an Intel Core (Series 2)—just like Lunar Lake and some Meteor Lake chips. Our $1,999 review unit had an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, although Alienware also offers this machine with RTX 5060 graphics. It had 32 GB of DDR5 RAM,…

For years, I never used the extra buttons on the side of my mouse, and I mostly just viewed them as a nuisance. Too often I’d click them by accident and trigger some unwanted action, like navigating back to the last page in my web browser. Lately, though, I’ve taken control of those extra mouse buttons and made them a big part of my workflow. All it took was an attitude adjustment and some free software for Windows and macOS. HOW I’M USING MY EXTRA MOUSE BUTTONS I use a Logitech MX Master 3S mouse, which has a clickable scroll wheel on top and two extra buttons under my thumb on the left side. Here’s how I’ve set them up now: Left side buttons: Move to the next or previous…

I like Windows 11 a lot less than I liked Windows 10—and that was before it started advertising to me incessantly and filling up every nook and cranny of the experience with “AI” I neither wanted nor asked for. But one of the oldest annoyances is that it still demands that I use Microsoft’s Edge browser and Bing search for everything, including the searches made in the otherwise very handy Start menu search. I’ve previously tried various remedies for this thorn in the side of my PC experience, but Microsoft has patched and updated Windows often enough that they’ve all stopped working. I eventually gave up and resolved to leave the Start menu hobbled by Microsoft’s overeager branding, even though I’d much rather use the tools I chose for myself (Vivaldi as my…

You shouldn’t use artificial intelligence queries or searches for anything personal. You know that, right? Anything powered by a large language model is generally fed right back into it for more training, so it’s even less secure than a regular search. Lots of ChatGPT users got a practical demonstration of this last night, when a huge number of their queries were found to be searchable via a simple Google prefix. This is a complicated situation, so let me break it down. ChatGPT has a share feature that lets you easily send information to another user with a link. But apparently the info in these semi-personal discussions with the AI chatbot was posted somewhere Google could crawl and index. And this allowed it to be easily searchable with the very basic…

Cord cutters have long wished for a way to stream local broadcast channels for less than the price of a full-pay TV package. Now it’s finally happening. DirecTV, which has leaned more into streaming than satellite TV of late, now offers a $40-a-month bundle with all four major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC—in five U.S. markets. It offers three of the big four networks in more than a dozen additional U.S. markets. The local channels are part of DirecTV’s MyNews genre pack, which it launched in February. Despite the focus on news in DirecTV’s marketing, MyNews is now the cheapest option for streaming local channels—including all their sports and entertainment programming—in certain markets. DIRECTV’S SNEAKY LOCAL CHANNEL BUNDLE When DirecTV launched MyNews in February, it was a pretty unusual…

The Framework Desktop DIY Edition is unique: a do-it-yourself desktop without the complexity of building from scratch, forming a compact, personalized AI workstation. If you’re nervous about buying a less-familiar brand, don’t be. Framework obsesses over details, from manuals to helpful hints etched into the materials themselves. Multiple photos show how to tighten a thumbscrew—that’s how comfortable they want you to be. I can point to a few things that I thought needed improvement: soldered memory, a beta driver bundle that should be finalized by the time you buy it, and a top panel that didn’t clip in as easily as I would have liked. Inserting the SSD stressed me out a bit, too. But Framework’s eye for customization (colored tiles you can design and install yourself, plus your choice of…

Want to buy a laptop for less than $200? If so, you’re in for a rough time. Laptops sold in the extreme budget category often struggle with slow performance, bad displays, and questionable build quality. Asus Chromebook CX15 doesn’t avoid the first problem (performance), but it does dodge the others. That makes it a fair choice if you want a just-the-basics laptop for the price of dinner, drinks, and a movie. SPECS AND FEATURES The Asus Chromebook CX15’s specifications are as basic as you’ll find in any new laptop. It has a dual-core Intel Celeron processor paired with just 4GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage. The display is 1080p, at least. Model number: CX1505CKA CPU: Intel Celeron N4500 (2 cores, 1.1GHz up to 2.8GHz) Memory: 4GB LPDDR5X Graphics/GPU:…

Google knows what we search for, where we go, who we email—and diligently stores it all as well. For many users, this has long been too much of a “good thing.” If you want to live a more digitally self-determined life, you can gradually turn your back on the data giant from Silicon Valley. But to do that means you’ll also need to find alternatives for services such as Google Search, Gmail, Maps, and so on. Sounds like a lot of effort? It doesn’t have to be. We show you how you can gain more privacy with just a few clicks—without sacrificing convenience. REPLACE GOOGLE SEARCH: NO MORE DATA SNOOPING Google search delivers brilliant results—but it lets them look deep into your personal life. If you don’t want to be…

There’s so much going on in Windows that it can be hard to know whether my apps are up to date all the time. I’ll get prompted to update some of them when I boot my PC––but the others? Gah! It’s anyone’s guess which versions they are. That haphazard updating has meant that in the past I’ve missed out on new features in some of my apps where the developers have gone ahead and upgraded them and I’ve been stuck using old versions. Conversely, there are times when I just want to start using an app but I have to sit through the laborious updating process, even when the outdated app is sufficient for my present need. Lucky for me, though, I’ve found a simple command to check if my…