Table of contents for Oct-13 in PCWorld

Desktops, notebooks, tablets: Just five years ago, those three words defined three distinct classes of products. Now consumers are being asked to choose among all-inones, two-in-ones, convertibles, minitablets, ultraportables, and phablets. With Intel’s new “Bay Trail” Atom chip, due this fall, you can expect the market to diversify even more. Bay Trail supports both Windows and Android, so hardware manufacturers can build machines that boot into either OS—or both. System prices could drop as low as $150, Intel executives have claimed. To PC makers, the new chip may well prove to be an escape hatch for a market that’s on its way down: Bay Trail represents a chance to offer consumers the tablets that they overwhelmingly prefer plus the most popular mobile OS in Android, as well as an opportunity…

WHEN THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union released a report in July describing widespread license-plate scanning of cars by police on America’s roadways, everyone from privacy advocates to Sunday drivers felt their basic rights of anonymity further slip away. But it’s easy to understand why police have adopted it. License plates are visible to the public at large, and law enforcement people say that scanning directly benefits anyone who owns a car and wants to keep it. Marc Hinch, who is part of a stolen car recovery task force in Oakland, California, uses license-plate scanning every day to hunt down hot cars. “We’ll get a report that says, ‘These stolen cars were seen in your area’ with a Google map linked,” Hinch explains. As Hinch drives around scanning plates in target…

MOST PEOPLE ASSOCIATE automated, driverless vehicles with the cute, self-driving Google car. But the future of driverless driving is all about trucks. Experts such as Ümit Özguner, a professor with Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research, predict that the first wave of operational autonomous vehicles will be devoted to long-haul deliveries. “The trucking industry is very interested in going from single trucks to convoys of trucks. One human driver with perhaps three other [unmanned] trucks behind it,” Özguner told us. In late May, the U.S. Department of Transportation opened the door for road-testing of self-driving trucks by publishing policies for the three states that currently allow driverless vehicles: California, Nevada, and Florida. Overseas, meanwhile, experiments with driverless truck convoys have been under way for years. As gas prices continue…

SAMSUNG’S CURVY NEW 55-inch OLED TV will allow two users to watch different full-HD programs simultaneously on the same screen—with the help of special glasses. Its “MultiView” technology will give each viewer a look at standard HD streams, and also let either or both watch a full-HD 3D presentation. Each pair of “3D Active” glasses comes with speakers to let viewers hear the corresponding audio stream. Viewers can adjust the volume or toggle between sources with controls on the glasses’ side. The TV became available on Samsung’s U.S. site in mid-August. The cost? About $9000, a good $7000 less than originally rumored.…

TO HEAR THE headlines scream it, mobile security is already a lost cause. Android is the king of mobile malware! Umpteen gazillion rogue apps found! It’s enough to make you want to wrap your phone in tinfoil and cower in a corner somewhere—but don’t believe the hype. While you may want to slap a security app on your phone, it probably isn’t for the reason you think. Much ado about (slightly more than) nothing Here’s the thing about all those ominous-sounding reports: Most of them originate from the very antivirus companies looking to sell you security solutions—so they’re not exactly impartial. Fortunately, I managed to track down honest, straightforward experts from three noted security firms: Lookout (lookout.com), McAfee (mcafee.com), and AV-Test (av-test.org). And all of them sang the same tune…

PLENTY OF PRESENTATION tools are cooler, faster, easier to use, and—in almost all cases—less expensive than Microsoft’s PowerPoint. These five alternatives will help you get your point across a little differently. Haiku Deck The free Haiku Deck (www.haikudeck.com) iPad app allows you to add your own art, but it is also capable of searching millions of free, Creative Commons–licensed images based on the words in the slide. Alternatively, you can choose a solid background color or insert a bar, pie, or numeric chart. You can share your deck, and grab embed code for your blog or website. You also can export your presentation for tweaking in, say, Power-Point or Apple’s Keynote. The app doesn’t support sound, transitions, or animations, though, and trying to make any major slide changes often causes…

MICROSOFT IS poised to release Windows 8.1 (go.pcworld.com/win81access), a deep and crucial revamping of the Windows 8 ideal. The code is final (though Microsoft reserves the right to tweak it further), and the time for speculation is over. Does Windows 8.1 atone for Windows 8’s sins? Yes and no, and that answer is utterly appropriate. More than being just another update, Windows 8.1 is a lesson in true compromise—for Microsoft, and for us. Compromises For Microsoft, the “no compromises” mantra guided Windows 8’s development. PC or tablet, modern apps or traditional desktop software, glittering aesthetics or buckle-down productivity, Windows 8 was the operating system that was supposed to deliver it all. But a funny thing happened on the way to ubiquity: Microsoft’s “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to its…

DELL’S XPS 27 Touch all-in-one (go.pcworld.com/dellxps27touch) packs a speedy new Haswell CPU under its hood. Specifically, our review unit—about $2100 at the time of writing—sports a quad-core Intel Core i7-4770S processor; 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory; a discrete video card (Nvidia’s GeForce GT 750M); and a roomy 2TB, 7200-rpm hard drive augmented by a 32GB mSATA SSD cache. Beyond that, the XPS 27 Touch delivered a Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 262—meaning that it’s more than 2.5 times faster than our reference PC, Acer’s Aspire U. It’s also significantly faster than Vizio’s CA27T-B1. The displays on those models are limited to 1920 by 1080 pixels (versus the Touch’s 2560-by-1440 resolution), but they’re also much less expensive ($1000 and $1550, respectively). The Dell’s score places the XPS 27 Touch solidly in the…

COMING JUST A few months after the Windows RT–based IdeaPad Yoga 11, the $999 Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S (go.pcworld.com/yoga11s) introduces a few compromises of its own. The convertible machine chugged through our graphics tests, and the 1.5GHz Intel Core i5-3339Y Ivy Bridge processor kept the Yoga 11S in the middle of the pack (at best) in the rest of PCWorld’s benchmarks. On the plus side, the Yoga 11S’s solid-state drive delivers lickety-split boot and wake times. Ivy Bridge wasn’t designed with superthin hybrid systems in mind. The underside of the Yoga 11S becomes noticeably warm when you’re doing anything but basic Web browsing. The machine is whispersilent; a heftier fan may have been a smart compromise. Also, like virtually all Ivy Bridge laptops with touchscreens, the Yoga 11S struggles to…

USED ALONE OR in conjunction with other photo editing and management tools, Photo Ninja is a capable program. Although it can handle JPEGs and TIFFs, Photo Ninja is designed to make the most of Raw files. Compared with renderings from Adobe Camera Raw (Lightroom) and Aperture, Photo Ninja’s default renderings in my tests typically had finer detail and more vivid color. Images with a wide exposure range (shadowy woods and sunny sky) often opened in Photo Ninja without the blown highlights I’d occasionally see in Lightroom or Aperture. Sometimes, the Photo Ninja rendering exhibited finer detail but also less visible noise than the Lightroom rendering, an impressive result. In this regard, Photo Ninja’s pedigree shows. This application comes from PictureCode, producer of Noise Ninja, the choice of many photographers for…

THE DIMINUTIVE Canon PowerShot N (go.pcworld.com/powershotn) will fit in just about any pocket. But so will an iPhone. So why would you capture your next Facebook posting with the PowerShot N instead? The answer may lie with the camera’s features. Canon packs a fair amount of horsepower in a tiny package. It focuses on areas where smartphones typically don’t excel, such as optical reach, an articulated touchscreen, and novel video options. The PowerShot N’s 8X optical zoom lens provides an equivalent focal range of 28mm to 224mm. When you zoom out to maximum magnification, you can capture distant objects better than you can with an iPhone. Image noise is well controlled up to ISO 1600, which is surprisingly good for a compact camera. The 12-megapixel point-and-shoot offers three metering patterns,…

With laptops, as in life, the celebrities get all the attention. The thin, sexy, superfast, way-expensive models get all the ink, while the models that most of us can afford are routinely ignored. That’s unfortunate, because some awesome yet inexpensive models grace the market these days. After all, Moore’s Law is still in play, so today’s budget notebook is yesterday’s heavy-duty workhorse. Pretty much any modern laptop can handle the gamut of productivity chores—word processing, number crunching, email, and the like—but the machines in this roundup can also tackle media editing and encoding sessions, and deliver a respectable entertainment experience. To strike the best balance between performance and affordability, I gathered the top five notebooks I could find priced at $650 or less. Benchmark busters they’re not, but they won’t…

WORK IS NO longer anchored to one device or location. So it’s critical to be able to access files across devices, platforms, and apps. These tips will let you keep your data in sync wherever your work takes you. Bookmarks and browser settings Browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox support automatic syncing of bookmarks, history, open tabs, and even passwords. When you sign in to Chrome, your browser settings save to your Google account for use by the Chrome browser on any other PC or device. To choose settings for syncing, sign in to Chrome and follow the prompts to “sync everything” or to select individual items. In Firefox, click Tools in the Firefox menu bar on your main computer, and select Set Up Sync. After creating an account…

MICROSOFT CEO Steve Ballmer is retiring sometime in the next year, after he completes the search for a successor. Ballmer’s retirement is a defining moment for Microsoft and Windows, one way or the other. With fresh blood comes fresh flexibility—and maybe, just maybe, a return to the Windows desktop we know and love. More mobile, more Metro Ballmer saw the writing on the wall in the wake of the iPad. Microsoft dove into the push for mobility and the cloud with gusto, rolling out rapid-fire releases instead of staid three-year development cycles, its own line of tablets, and a revamped org chart. It’s One Microsoft, all the time and across all devices, an ethos embodied by the divisive Windows 8. But Ballmer led Microsoft during the golden years of Windows…

IN AUGUST, LENOVO quietly announced that it had shipped more mobile devices than desktops and laptops in the second quarter. Since Lenovo sells more computers than any other company, is this yet another sign of the impending demise of the PC? Are we entering an era dominated exclusively by smartphones and tablets? No: The PC is just not the blazing solo star it used to be. Lenovo didn’t provide specific numbers on how many smartphones and tablets it shipped, but “Lenovo’s PC shipments were still pretty strong,” says analyst Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies. And desktops and laptops still make up a whopping 79.8 percent of Lenovo’s total revenues. Indeed, the company’s Mobile Internet Digital Home division—responsible for smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs—made up just 13.7 percent of all…

1 HP SlateBook x2 go.pcworld.com/slatebookX2 » HP’s new SlateBook x2 looks like a laptop, with a detachable keyboard and touchpad base. However, this sheep-in-wolf’sclothing hybrid PC runs on Android 4.2, with a Tegra 4 processor and 64GB of onboard storage. The price is a bit steep at $480, but it’s still a fascinating mid-tier device. 2 Misfit Shine go.pcworld.com/misfitshine » While most activity trackers seem more concerned with function over form, the Misfit Shine is a gorgeous work of art. No numbers, no screens–only a series of lights around the edge to indicate your fitness progress each day. The aluminum-cased device is also waterproof and pairs with iPhones through an equally elegant app. 3 Razer Tartarus go.pcworld.com/rtartarus » The $80 Tartarus USB gaming keypad, which sits on your desk, is…

DOUBLING AS UNOFFICIAL tech support for your family and friends comes as part of the territory when you’re a PC geek—and those cries for help frequently come all too often or at inopportune times. But taking the time to set your loved ones’ computers up the right way can dramatically cut back on help-seeking headaches down the line. Batten down the hatches Before you do anything else, lock that puppy down with a security suite. If your friend or family member—henceforth referred to as “Grandma” for simplicity’s sake—is willing to spring for a premium security suite, our Security Software Showdown (go.pcworld.com/securityshowdown) can point you to the best malware protection money can buy. Not everyone wants to pay for their PC security, however, so let’s walk through a way to get…

1 Lenovo Think Vision USB Monitor $170 » If you’re a multimonitor user in the office, and you’re concerned about the limitations of working on the road, take heart: You don’t have to sacrifice all that screen real estate when you travel. Pair your laptop with the Lenovo ThinkVision LT1421, a lightweight 14-inch LCD monitor that offers a reasonable resolution of 1366 by 768. Designed for portability, it’s powered by the same USB 2.0 cable that drives the display. 2 Compass Mobile Stand for iPad $40 » The Compass Mobile Stand for iPad by Twelve South is a stylish, compact folding easel that can hold your iPad in landscape or portrait mode, making it ideal for conducting hands-free FaceTime meetings and working with presentations and your favorite apps. Flip down…

THE FOLKS AT Bigfoot Networks—now part of Qualcomm Atheros—have long promised to deliver network interface cards (NICs) that perform better with online games and other latency-sensitive applications. To demonstrate its prowess in this area, the company sent me two identical Alienware notebooks, one with Qualcomm’s Killer Wireless-N 1202 (go.pcworld.com/n1202) and the other with Intel’s Centrino Advanced-N 6230 (go.pcworld.com/n6230). Both NICs are dual-band adapters that can connect to an 802.11n router on either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequency band. Both also support two spatial streams for a maximum physical link rate of 300 megabits per second. The Killer Wireless-N 1202 is certainly inexpensive enough: I’ve seen it selling online for as little as $35 (Intel’s card is street-priced at about $30). The key selling point of Killer NIC technology is its…

YOU’D NEVER MISTAKE cookie-cutter design of the HP Envy 700-030qe (go.pcworld.com/envy700) for a custom-built rig from a boutique PC builder; but it has the components—including a powerful Intel Core i7-4770 CPU—to run with that crowd, despite its much lower price. HP also gives this PC 12GB of DDR3/1600 memory, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 645 video card, and a 256GB solid-state drive. Its cooling system, however, is negligible: The chassis is equipped with just a single fan. The Envy tore through our demanding Desktop WorldBench 8.1 benchmark suite, posting a very good score of 352. In contrast, the considerably more expensive Digital Storm Virtue (reviewed in this issue) earned a WorldBench 8.1 score of 399. My enthusiasm for the Envy 700-030qe waned a bit on the gaming front. Its Nvidia GeForce GTX…

BASED ON WINDOWS 8 Pro and equipped with an 11.6-inch touchscreen display, the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix (go.pcworld.com/helix) is nothing if not versatile. This system can operate as a tablet, dock to a razor-thin keyboard to become a dual-battery laptop, and then flip with acrobatic ease to become a desktop presenter. The ThinkPad Helix boasts a 128GB solidstate drive, which played no small part in helping the machine achieve a respectable Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 285. The Helix also earned a PCMark 7 storage test score of 5308, one of the best results we’ve seen. With the tablet portion and the keyboard joined, we saw impressive battery life of 6.5 hours thanks to the presence of a battery in each component. The Helix’s longevity dropped to just 2 hours when…

IF YOU’RE AN aficionado of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, you already know that the QNAP TS-469 Pro (go.pcworld.com/qnap469) is both fast and very capable. What might surprise you is that you can attach this small-business-class network-attached storage box to an HDTV or other high-definition display to play movies and music, or browse the Web. At the same time, IT types will appreciate the on-board display, which allows you to administer the box locally without a monitor. To deliver multimedia content, the QNAP TS-469 uses free, opensource, cross-platform software called XBMC that’s similar to Win-dows Media Center. And for Web browsing, the QNAP uses Google Chrome. Both apps are installed as part of QNAP’s HD Station launch application. You can also install a YouTube player within HD Station. To use any…

Managing your inbox can feel like a full-time job, which is problematic given that you need all your time for your actual job. Like some crazed productivity Terminator, the email just keeps coming, all day, every day. If you’re not diligent about replying, filing, and deleting your messages, it won’t be long before you’re, well, terminated. Or at least terminally depressed. But guess what? You don’t have to let your inbox win. New tools and services can help you tame that ever-expanding beast, making it easier to weed out the junk, highlight the important, and organize the rest—all without the hassle of manually creating a complex system of filters and folders. Is such an attack plan really necessary? In these days of thoroughly indexed inboxes and fast, easy searches, the…

HAVE YOU LISTENED to your PC lately? If yours sounds like a helicopter trying desperately to take off, you may have a problem. We explain some of the noises you should pay attention to. The hard-drive death rattle Whenever you access or save to a hard drive, the platters inside spin fast and the tiny magnetic head that reads and writes to the disk jumps all over the place. If you hear clicking noises, it’s time to be concerned. The head may have gone bad, and the drive could be about to fail. Back up your data immediately and start shopping for a new drive. Fan flutters The usual hum and whir that most people associate with the sound of a PC come from the case fans and coolers for…

ONCE A COMPUTER enthusiast’s dream storage device, the solid-state drive is becoming commonplace. Basic care and feeding of an SSD takes a little education, as it involves new ways of managing storage that differ from a traditional hard drive’s maintenance routine. An SSD is flash storage and has no moving parts, so nothing can break. Instead, SSD wear and tear relates to write cycles. With flash storage, when data is written to a block, the entire block must be erased before it can be written to again. The life span of an SSD is measured in these program-erase (P/E) cycles. Modern, consumergrade, Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND memory can endure about 3000 to 5000 P/E cycles before the storage device’s integrity starts to deteriorate. The higher-end, Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory…

RECENTLY I SPLURGED on a new laptop, a 13.3-inch Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook. Incredibly thin, light, and fast, the machine delighted me from the moment I unpacked it. Before long, though, my joy turned to frustration. Although the PC booted with lightning speed, Internet access seemed slow. In fact, sometimes I couldn’t load webpages at all. As usual when dealing with a mystery like this, I used the invaluable SpeedTest (go.pcworld.com/speedtest) to pin down the problem. Sure enough, the PC was having intermittent connectivity slowdowns and outages. My router wasn’t to blame, and for once neither was Comcast. But what exactly was going on? Surely a brand-new computer—especially a system as advanced and expensive as this model—could reliably connect to the Internet. Turns out, no. After some Web searching,…

MICROSOFT ALONE can’t improve what is truly the beating heart of Windows 8: The Windows Store. As the Windows Store goes, so goes the Windows 8 experience. The Windows Store shattered the 100,000-app barrier in early July. But that number is paltry compared to the 1 million apps in Google Play and 900,000 apps in Apple’s App Store. Are its offerings worthwhile? I spent days scouring the Windows Store and taking notes. Games: The number of apps has tripled since February. While the roughly 13,500 games don’t hold a candle to the vast Android and iOS libraries, you’ll find more than enough to keep you distracted for months to come. Still, the Windows Store has its omissions—no mobile Walking Dead games or Grand Theft Auto ports here. More troubling, the…

IN EARLY AUGUST, the SATA-IO group paved the way for SATA Express, putting PCI Express speeds over a SATA interface for the next generation of ultrafast solid-state discs, or SSDs. Specifically, the Serial ATA International Organization ratified revision 3.2, which includes support for the SATA Express feature that was originally announced in January. The revision includes a number of other useful improvements, such as better power management as well as support for so-called “micro” or embedded SSDs. SATA is the bus that’s traditionally associated with internal storage within a PC—an SSD or a disc drive. PCI Express, meanwhile, is used for high-bandwidth cards like graphics cards. (External hard drives use external SATA, FireWire, a Thunderbolt connection, or, most commonly, USB.) Speeding up the internal bus paves the way for faster…

WHEN IT CREATES a new product, a company can follow all the rules and regulations and craft the best product its engineers can design, or it can cheat its way to market dominance. Netgear is accusing Asus of taking that low road in the Wi-Fi router market: The company has filed both a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and a lawsuit seeking damages and injunctive relief. In an interview, Sandeep Harpalani, Netgear’s director of product marketing, core networking, told me that Netgear is accusing Asus of knowingly shipping two products—the RT-N65U 802.11n wireless router and the RT-AC66U 802.11ac wireless router—that do not comply with FCC regulations. Netgear claims that these Asus routers deliver higher wireless output levels than the FCC allows, and that Asus conspired with a third-party testing…

AS GADGET ENTHUSIASTS, we accept the idea that products are worth what we’re willing to pay for them, and not what they cost in terms of product development, manufacturing, and materials. Nonetheless, it’s time to name names. Here are some of the most egregiously high profit margins in the world of consumer tech. Text Messages Average cost: $0.20 per text Average cost to provide: virtually nothing The cost of text messages often gets a bad rap, and for good reason. Our tiny missives—160 bytes in size, at most—typically cost us 20 cents each to send and receive. They cost essentially nothing to deliver, however, making the markup for an SMS message essentially infinite. Here’s the deal: Wireless carriers must send packets of signaling data within the wireless network to set…

SO YOU’VE TURNED your sluggish PC into a productivity powerhouse with better, faster gear. That’s a great first step. But putting together a state-of-the-art PC workstation without having a fast, reliable network to help it run at its best is like leaving your souped-up new ride on blocks in your garage. Check out the following tips for several easy ways to upgrade your small office’s network and storage. Embrace the flexibility of wireless Though speed and reliability make ethernet a must-have for optimal PC performance, Wi-Fi has its place, too. Without it, you’d never enjoy the work-anywhere flexibility of your laptop or mobile devices. Go for a router with a little more oomph. A simultaneous dual-band router offers twice the bandwidth—2.4GHz and 5GHz—essentially giving you two independent networks. You can…

GOOGLE’S NEW TV device, the Chromecast (go.pcworld.com/chromecast) is a thumb-size dongle that plugs into an HDMI port, receives power from USB, and acts like a Chrome browser, which lets it play movies, TV shows, music, and photos on your HDTV. You control it using any Android or iOS device, a Mac or Windows PC, or a Chromebook. Although I hit a couple of snags, this little device is a pretty big deal. The Chromecast has plenty of competitors: The Apple TV and Roku set-top boxes deliver similar results, though they don’t work the same way. The Chromecast’s first advantage is price—it’s only $35, versus $99 for an Apple TV. (Roku boxes start at $50.) Setup takes a couple more steps than for an Apple TV or Roku box, but it’s…

ASUS’S NEW ET2702 (go.pcworld.com/et2702) is the company’s first 27-inch all-in-one to sport a quad HD display—with a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, instead of the usual 1920 by 1080 pixels that full HD offers. But there’s more to the Asus ET2702 than just its screen. Our review model came configured with a quad-core Intel Core i7-4770 processor (a member of the new Haswell family), 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory, a discrete graphics card (AMD’s Radeon HD 8890A), a Blu-ray player, and a 2TB, 7200-rpm hard drive. At $1899, the ET2702 is more expensive than the $1440 Vizio CA27T-B1 (go.pcworld.com/ca27tb1), which has a slower processor and a lowerresolution display, but it’s about $200 cheaper than the $2099 Dell XPS 27 Touch (go.pcworld.com/xps27touch), which incorporates a lower-voltage version of the Core i7…

THE PHILOSOPHY BEHIND the Motorola Moto X Android smartphone (go.pcworld.com/motox) is a laudable one: Your phone should work with you to make life more convenient. For instance, the Moto X automatically displays the time when you slide it out of your pocket or pick it up. Another interesting feature is Active Display: Notifications show up on the lock screen, and you can easily see which apps want your attention. The headlining feature is Touchless Control, through which you can speak commands without interacting with the phone physically. The feature worked extremely well when I used it from a few feet away, and Google’s voice-processing software understood my various queries even in noisy environments. Motorola and Google worked to optimize Android for the Moto X, and it feels faster than many…

SMALL, LIGHT, AND versatile, Kingston’s MobileLite Wireless (go.pcworld.com/mobilelite) serves as both a Wi-Fi multimedia streamer and a reserve power source for other mobile devices, such as your smartphone or tablet. The MobileLite has no storage of its own, but it provides a USB 2.0 port and an SDHC memory card slot so you can attach your own. Using the MobileLite is easy: Turn it on, connect to the MobileLite’s Wi-Fi network, and use Kingston’s Android or iOS app, or a DLNA client, to stream any media available on attached drives or SD cards. Kingston says that the unit doesn’t support DLNA, but the MobileLite showed up as that kind of device in Windows Media Player and XBMC (an opensource media-player application). You can, of course, treat the MobileLite like any…

They say it’s the litle things that count, and that goes doubly so for PCs. Modern-day computers have enough processing power to cure diseases and crunch your monthly budget numbers without breaking a sweat—but none of that maters if you’re so annoyed by interface quirks and little irritations that merely sending email is an exercise in frustration. Windows oozes with all sorts of hackle-raising “features” that interfere with just plain using your PC. But don’t chuck your monitor across the room! By the time you’re done reading this article, your headaches should be gone. Make User Account Control less annoying Microsoft’s User Account Control—the box that pops up and asks “Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?” incessantly—has noble roots, as it’s intended…

TWO IS DEFINITELY better than one when it comes to monitors. A single display may suffice for basic computing, but multiple monitors make a big difference when you’re doing heavily graphical work, intensive multitasking—and of course, serious gaming. And as LCD prices continue to drop, multimonitor setups are more affordable than ever. Before you start shopping, however, make sure that your computer can support more than one display. This usually isn’t a problem with recent desktop models, but it can be with laptops. After confirming that your system is multimonitor-ready, check out these tips for setting up the displays to maximize your productivity. Prepare before you purchase More monitors take up more desk space, obviously, so start by measuring your work area. The average-size desk is unlikely to comfortably accommodate…

Q: WHERE CAN I go on the Web to find television programs and watch them for free?—lucyer A: GENERALLY, YOU have to pay for copyrighted material. The people who create television shows expect to be paid for their work—just as you and I do. Some websites offer free, bootlegged copies of TV shows. I don’t use those sites and I don’t recommend them. There’s a lot I don’t like about current U.S. copyright law; but without it, you wouldn’t have any new television shows, books, music, movies…or articles in PCWorld. Nevertheless, it’s frequently in the copyright holders’ interests to give away some of their shows for free. You may not get exactly what you want, but you will certainly get more entertainment than you paid for. Try the following…

SOME SCENES ARE too epic to fit into an ordinary picture frame. In the old days, people sometimes made panoramas by combining multiple photos using a razor and tape. Now, with just a few clicks, you can capture a large vista in an impressive panoramic photo. By phone: Most iPhone owners have it easy—just turn on panorama mode (under the Options button at the top of the Camera screen), and then make a panorama in a single fluid, sweeping motion after tapping the shutter release icon. (Tip: You can change the panning direction by tapping the panorama bar in the middle of the screen.) If you don’t like the sometimes jagged panoramas, or if you have an older iPhone model, don’t worry. One of the best panoramic-stitching apps available for…