Table of contents for May 2021 in PCWorld

Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop 4 on Tuesday with some bold performance claims: The Surface Laptop 4 should surpass the performance of the Surface Laptop 3 by 70 percent or so, or even offer twice the performance under certain scenarios. Does it live up to the hype? Does it ever. Although the difference between the two generations of Surface Laptops narrows during everyday activities, our early tests show the Surface Laptop 4 winning any CPU-intensive tasks by a mile. Microsoft is shipping the Surface Laptop 4 in both of its traditional display sizes: 13.5 inches and 15 inches. Under the hood you’ll have a choice of two microprocessors: either the 11th-gen (Tiger Lake) Core chip from Intel, or the Surface Edition processor codesigned by Microsoft and AMD, and based on AMD’s…

One of the biggest innovators in Android is bowing out. LG recently revealed that it is exiting the phone business to focus on other “growth areas” such as smart home devices, robotics, and electric vehicles. Existing phones will remain available until the stock is sold through, and the company says, “LG will provide service support and software updates for customers of existing mobile products for a period of time which will vary by region.” Don’t expect to see the nifty rollable phone that LG showed off at CES. And an OS update to Android 12 in the fall probably isn’t in the cards either, since many of LG’s phones haven’t gotten Android 11 yet. The shutdown comes as no surprise—LG’s phone division posted massive losses over the last several years, and rumors…

The Oculus Rift is dead, slain by the majestic Oculus Quest and its self-contained virtual reality, but that doesn’t mean the PC VR dream is dead too. Oculus just announced an upcoming v28 update that aims to supercharge the VR chops of the Quest 2 with faster 120Hz refresh speeds, Air Link wireless PC connectivity, and a better way to bring your physical desktop into your virtual world. That refresh rate increase will be a game changer—it’s much faster than the 90Hz that the Quest 2 currently runs at by default, and faster screen speeds provide a much smoother (and thus less puke-tastic) VR experience—but Air Link probably matters more to PC VR enthusiasts. Until now, you’ve needed the high-speed Oculus Link cable or a luxurious USB-C cord to connect your Quest headset…

Laptops like the HP Envy 14 fall into the category of content creation: notebook PCs with a modestly powerful discrete GPU that can play some games, edit video, or simply serve as a solid all-around PC. This $1,200 14-inch laptop satisfies all three. While some laptops outperformed the Envy 14 in our tests, many couldn’t do so for the same money. At its price point, the Envy 14 offers top-notch battery life, support for powerful external Thunderbolt hardware, and a pleasing everyday typing experience. We’ve awarded it an Editor’s Choice—you’ll see why. BASIC FEATURES HP says it ships its Envy 14 in one of three configurations. The model we tested is the midrange configuration (14-eb0010nr), which includes a Core i5-1135G7, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q, 16GB of RAM, and…

Mechanical gaming keyboards are the way to go if you’re looking for a superior typing or gaming experience, and size doesn’t always matter. Corsair’s K65 RGB Mini is a 60 percent mechanical keyboard—meaning it trims off some of the keys and focuses on offering a smaller footprint compared to a full-size keyboard with a dedicated function-key row and number pad. It straddles the line between form and function, but it packs in quite a few features for its price tag ($110 on Amazon). The K65 RGB Mini comes with more durable PBT double-shot keycaps that don’t wear down over time as much as traditional ABS plastic. Per-key RGB lighting is controllable inside Corsair’s iCue software, and an all-white tray underneath provides a radiant glow across the whole board. A whole…

It’s a bleak time to be a PC gamer. Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 30–series and AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000–series graphics cards blaze new performance trails compared to last generation’s disappointing offerings—but most people have no chance of getting their hands on either, especially not at a sane price. New graphics card stock drops disappear in minutes, if not seconds, at online retailers, often at crazily high prices. Many of those cards reappear shortly thereafter on resale sites like Ebay and Craiglist for twice their suggested price, or more. Here’s a very tangible recent example. AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT launched at $480 in mid-March. We said that in a sane GPU market, the price was about $100 too high for the performance offered. Sapphire said it would charge $580—an additional $100…

In what was either a revelation or a sign of getting older, I recently experienced a sudden urge to make my Windows 10 cursor bigger. Squinting at the teeny default cursor in Windows 10, I wondered why I was punishing myself. A quick trip to Windows settings, and I was in business with a larger pointer. Life’s too short to feel ashamed at making screen elements larger than the default. Making this switch got me thinking about all the other little tweaks I’ve done to make using Windows a little more pleasant. A short list is below: 1. CHANGE YOUR WINDOWS 10 CURSOR SIZE AND COLOR In Windows, you can make the cursor larger by heading to Settings > Ease of Access > Mouse Pointer, or by typing “mouse size”…

AMD’s modern Ryzen APUs with integrated Radeon graphics have been a big hit with budget PC builders since their arrival, and they should be in hot demand given the untenable state of today’s graphics card market. But there hasn’t been a fresh DIY offering since the Ryzen 3 3200G’s release in 2019—until now, that is. In April, AMD quietly announced a new generation of Ryzen 5000G desktop processors, including models that have significantly more cores than they did before. You might still be waiting a while to get your hands on one, though. The Ryzen 5000G series—built around the “Cezanne” architecture that debuted in AMD’s excellent Ryzen 5000 Mobile chips—will debut first in prebuilt computers by the likes of Dell and HP before rolling out in DIY retail form later…

Don’t expect a new generation of Nvidia graphics cards anytime soon. As part of his GTC 2021 keynote, CEO Jensen Huang revealed “Grace,” the company’s new Arm-based data-center CPU—yes, Nvidia is making CPUs now!—and in a slide showing Nvidia’s revamped data center chip stack, the next-gen “Ampere Next” graphics architecture was listed as coming in 2022, with “Ampere Next Next” scheduled for 2024. Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference largely focuses on developer, business, and data-center announcements, and the slide showing a 2022 release for Ampere Next relates to that context—not consumer-oriented GeForce graphics cards. Nonetheless, Nvidia’s latest and greatest architectures usually debut in the form of ultra-expensive data-center GPUs before trickling down to PC gamers as GeForce products. That happened for this first Ampere generation, for example. So the 2022 arrival…

For the past few months, carmakers have been struggling with a chip shortage due to pandemic-related demand for consumer electronics. A recent report suggests the shortage could hit smartphones, too. According to Reuters’ sources at Samsung and other phone makers, the chip shortage affecting the industry has reached all levels of smartphone processors, including Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888 flagship, which powers Samsung’s Galaxy S21 and other high-end phones. The report notes the shortfall has mainly affected middle- and low-end phones, but smartphone makers are “facing a shortage of a range of components from Qualcomm and would cut handset shipments this year.” Qualcomm makes processors and components for nearly every phone sold today, including the 5G modem and other parts for Apple’s iPhone. It’s unclear whether the shortage extends to other components…

The OnePlus 9 Pro arrives with a major focus on camera performance, an improved display, and the newest Qualcomm processor, the Snapdragon 888. Over the years, OnePlus has been aiming at the flagship end of the market, hoping to gain a foothold in that exclusive smartphone tier. But do these latest improvements—and particularly those in the camera—put OnePlus in a position to challenge Samsung’s Galaxy S21 or Apple’s iPhone 12? Let’s dive in and take a look. There are four different phone configurations for the OnePlus 9, each with its own color and combination of specifications. The lowest-end model comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and costs $729. The top-end configuration (which is the model that I review here) costs $1,069, and features 12GB of RAM and…

As laptop performance improves over time, you may be excited to discover that the PC you reserved exclusively for Excel and Zoom calls now can serve as a gaming PC, too. But beware: Leaving a game store app like the Epic Games Store open may significantly slice into your laptop’s battery life. Consider Intel’s latest Tiger Lake H35 announcement. The new CPUs enable a class of ultraportable laptops that wield office apps and Zoom calls by day, then play Destiny 2 or Valorant by night. The problem is that if you buy a game via, say, the Epic Game Store, the EGS app must be running while you play the game. The app remains active once you quit the game, too. As we found, simply leaving the store app in place…

In early April, security experts made public the details of yet another Facebook data breach, this one affecting over half a billion users. As originally reported by Business Insider, in this incident personal information on 533 million Facebook users spanning 106 countries surfaced in a hacking forum, with records including email addresses, phone numbers, full names, locations, birthdays, and relationship statuses. This data traces back to a vulnerability fixed by Facebook in 2019, which allowed the scraping of profiles. If that data set includes you, you’ll want to protect yourself in the future. The first step is to check whether you’re part of the breach. One of the best known sites tracking major data breaches is Have I Been Pwned, which has the trust of many security experts and government…

Microsoft’s Find My Device feature is so much more than a simple device locator that it’s like calling a “car” nothing more than just four tires and a steering wheel. The online service is a powerful PC manager in its own right, and it’s arguably more effective in that regard than Windows itself. We originally covered Find My Device when it debuted about six years ago as a service to, obviously, find a lost or stolen device. It has changed so little in the interim that you can still use the instructions in the original article to enable it. The feature made far more sense when Microsoft actually sold devices that could be lost—Windows phones. Once Microsoft discontinued Windows 10 Mobile, you might think much of that value went away. Over…

One of the handiest Google Photos features just landed on the desktop—via your browser—where it could be even more valuable. The mobile version of Photos supports a technology called Google Lens. In 2018, Lens introduced optical character recognition (OCR) technology that can automatically copy any text found in an image, allowing you to paste it elsewhere for easy saving. As 9to5Google spotted over the weekend, that Lens OCR feature is now rolling out to desktop browsers, and that rocks. Enabling OCR in Google Photos makes it easy-peasy to take a picture of a document, book, or anything else on your phone, open it in your browser, and quickly copy its contents into an Office file. It’s already active on my account and it works scarily well on the handful of…

Dell’s beloved XPS 13 premium laptop will get the infinite black treatment, thanks to a new OLED panel option. The OLED is the fanciest of four screen options Dell will offer for the XPS 13, all of them in the same taller and more useful 16:10 aspect ratio. The OLED option will add $300 extra over the basic display option. Full pricing should be available when the new SKUs come online. Here are all the display options for the XPS 13: Base (touch or non-touch): 1920x1200 (FHD+), 500-nit touch with Eyesafe technology. OLED: 3456x2160 (3.5K), 400-nit touch with DisplayHDR 500, 100 percent DCI-P3. 4K: 3840x2400 (4K UHD+), 500-nit touch with DisplayHDR 400, 90 percent DCI-P3. If you haven’t seen an OLED display, prepare to be impressed. Unlike traditional backlit screens,…

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano is just the kind of powerful, light, and long-lasting laptop you’ll want to take with you on post-pandemic business trips—and it’s handy even now just because it’s so easy to take all over the house. It also performs right there in the ballpark with other 11th-gen Tiger Lake competitors, and at a hair under two pounds, it weighs less than almost all of them. Equipped with an IR camera for facial recognition, a presence-detecting radar, a 2K display with Dolby Vision HDR, and a premium keyboard, the X1 Nano covers the most bases for corporate users, and we haven’t mentioned the superlative battery life yet. But with only two available ports (Thunderbolt 4, at least), you’ll need to invest in a USB-C hub to connect…

Crucial’s X6 is square to be hip—or placed in your hip pocket, at any rate. In a sea of portable SSDs whose shape makes them a literal pain when pocketed, the thin, rounded-edge X6 is a sigh of relief. It’s not state-of-the-art fast, but it’s fast enough for most users and extremely affordable. DESIGN AND FEATURES The X6 is squarish, approximately 2.4 inches tall by 2.6 inches wide. It’s extremely thin for the breed at about 0.35 inches, and the aforementioned rounded edges and corners snag on nothing. I just pulled it from my back pocket, where it had been for over a day. Yup—it’s so comfortable to carry that I forgot it was there. The drive is rendered in shades of dark gray and black, which are too subtle—it’s…

You can build a PC with just a screwdriver or two on hand, but you’ll have an easier time of it if you have all the essentials on hand. That includes tools to get you out of sticky spots, which always occur when you assume they won’t. Keep these 10 items on hand for builds and they’ll keep your assembly woes to a minimum. We’ve divided the list into the absolute essentials (for the minimalists out there) as well as our recommended additions for a well-rounded kit. But really, there’s no need to scrimp. All of these tools are very affordable. BARE ESSENTIAL TOOLS FOR PC BUILDING Screwdriver (Phillips #2) Nearly all screws in a computer case require this cross-head screwdriver. Any Phillips #2 screwdriver will do—be it the plain,…

Managing broadband data caps can be aggravating, frustrating, and—if you go over and incur a penalty—expensive. But there’s hope: With a little knowledge and a bit of patience, you can learn to avoid going over your data cap. Two of the largest broadband ISPs, Comcast Xfinity and Cox Communications, still impose data caps—though many other service providers are phasing them out. If you exceed the limits (1.2TB/month for Xfinity, 1.25TB/month for Cox), you’ll pay $10 for every additional 50GB. AT&T still charges a data cap, too, though only for its legacy DSL service, according to the data-cap registry at Highspeedinternet. All of these providers allow you to pay extra for unlimited data, but who wants to do that? Minimizing your data usage to stay under the cap requires three things:…