O C TO B E R 2013

Fix Your PCs

Worst Annoyances

Conquer poky
boot-ups,
undeletable
les, noisy
notications,
and more.

OCTOBER 2013

TABLE OF
CONTENTS

FEATURES

Budget Laptops

Fix Your PCs Biggest Annoyances

Win the Inbox War

DEPARTMENTS

News

Reviews

Heres How

COLUMNS
Answer Line
Sta
Picks

Consumer
Watch

Business
Center

Tech
Spotlight

Bugs & Fixes

Hassle-Free PC

COV E R I L LU ST R AT I O N BY PA P E RC U T.F R

NEWS
Intels Bay Trail Atom chip
How a new CEO could
breathe new life into
Windows
The state of the Windows
Store
License plate scanning: The
inside story
AMDs new gaming bundle
New SATA spec paves way
for faster SSDs
The rst driverless cars will
be trucks

CONTENTS

Lenovos surging mobile

sales shouldnt worry the
PC faithful
Netgear accuses Asus
of fraudulent test results
Samsung TV lets you
watch dierent shows
on one screen

Tech and trends that will afect you today and beyond.

NEWS

Intels Bay Trail Atom chip:

Will PCs, tablets converge?
Coming: versatile new machines. BY MARK HACHMAN

esktops, notebooks, tablets: Just ve years ago, those

three words dened three distinct classes of products.
Now consumers are being asked to choose among all-inones, two-in-ones, convertibles, minitablets, ultraportables, and phablets. With Intels 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 OSor 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 thats on its way down: Bay Trail represents a chance to oer
consumers the tablets that they overwhelmingly prefer plus the most
popular mobile OS in Android, as well as an opportunity to expand market share through a new tier of low-cost devices.
Bay Trail is the successor to Clover Trail, the Atom Z2760 processor
that Intel originally aimed at the Windows convertible market in September 2012. Intel promises that the Silvermont architecture underlying Bay Trail will improve upon Clover Trail by oering two to two and
a half times the performance, while providing a power reduction thats
about four and a half times that of the Clover Trail chip.
It seems almost inevitable that Intel will release several dierent versions of Bay Trail, simply because the chip straddles so many dierent
markets. When Bay Trail enters the ultraportable Windows 8 PC market, it will have very little competitionjust Intels own Core chips, and
a small showing from AMD.
In the tablet arena, however, Intel is battling Qualcomm and Nvidia,
says Tom Mainelli, an analyst for tech-market research rm IDC. And
youve also got dozens of small ARM-processor makers all ghting for a
share of the market.

Intels current Clover Trail Atom processor has struggled

somewhat, but the
next-generation Bay
Trail promises signicant improvements.

These conditions will create hypersegmentation, says John Wallace,

a business line manager within Intels Mobile Communications Group.
Bay Trail will play within a number of tiers, from smaller, 7-to-8-inch
minitablets all the way up to 11.6-inch tablets and two-in-ones that
do double duty as laptops.

The sizzle? Android. The steak? Bay Trails price

None of the top-tier tablet vendors we reached out toincluding
Asus, Lenovo, and Samsungwould provide on-the-record comments
regarding their Bay Trail plans.
But analysts and two OEM sources say that what interests them
most is Bay Trails pricing advantage, and how it could help push prices
downward into high-volume growth segments. NPD stated last
month, for example, that the sub-$300 PC market is expected to grow
more than 10 percent in 2013, while the overall PC market should
decline by about 7.8 percent. The overall tablet market, meanwhile,
grew 59.6 percent recently.

The Acer Iconia

W3 is one miniature Windows
tablet that
could use a
boost from
Bay Trail.

NEWS

My guess is that Windows 8.1 on Bay Trail,

at $149 and $199, is a pretty compelling
oering, says Nathan Brookwood, an analyst
for Insight64.
Publicly, hardware makers seem fascinated with Atoms new ability to support
Android apps within a traditional desktop
or laptop environment. At summers Computex show, Acer showed o
the N3-220, a pure Android 4.2 device in a desktop-PC form. And Acer
has plans for a line of dedicated Android PCs.
But the real surprise was the Samsung Ativ Q, a 13-inch tablet-laptop
hybrid that combines a 3200-by-1800-pixel display with a more traditional Core i5 processor. Users can switch between Android and Windows at the touch of a button, and the clamshell notebook folds back
into a more traditional tablet shape.
According to IDC, Android is the mobile OS leader, owning 79.3 percent of the worldwide smartphone market and 62.6 percent of the tablet market. Its also killing Windows in the apps battle: While over
800,000 Android apps are available, the Windows 8 ecosystem
claims just over 100,000. So dual-booting Bay Trail devices will allow
customers to combine the best of both worlds, supporting productivity software such as Microsoft Oce on Windows and more recreational
apps on Android. The Ativ Q can even share data between the operating systems.
That doesnt mean that all OEMs will pursue the same approach, however.
One thing Ive learned: Dual boot means something dierent to
every OEM, Intels Wallace replied when asked whether other products
would follow the Ativ Qs lead. It can mean app virtualization, or it can
mean dynamic switching between one OS and the other.
Designed for Android or Windows
Wallace declined to comment when asked whether Intel would sell
more Bay Trail chips to the traditional Android tablet market, or to the
Windows tablet/ultraportable segment. The fact that Intel can design
for both of them is a major statement of credibility, he says.
However, Bay Trail will be competing against ARM chips such as the

Dual-booting Bay
Trail devices could
mean a new level
of exibility.

Qualcomm Snapdragon
800, which has already
been benchmarked, in traditional Android tablets.
Several sources also
made the point that consumers have already
sampled cheap tablets,
were turned o by the
experience, and may be
reluctant to try such
models again.
If OEMs do choose the
dual-boot route, combining Android and Windows
in a single device, it could
create a new class of
device. Call it a converged tablet, for lack of a better name. But is the
market growing more flexible, or is it merely fragmenting?
Weve had this discussion internally as well, Intels Wallace says. Is
the market going to settle on just a few devices? My personal opinion
is, in the near term well see increased experimentation, and I mean
that in a good way.

Who wants to
run Android apps
on a big-screen
PC? some people ask.

NEWS

How a new Microsoft CEO can

breathe new life into Windows
BY BRAD CHACOS

MICROSOFT CEO Steve Ballmer is retiring sometime in the next year,

after he completes the search for a successor.

Ballmers retirement is a dening moment for Microsoft and Windows,
one way or the other. With fresh blood comes fresh flexibilityand
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-re releases instead of staid three-year development cycles, its own
line of tablets, and a revamped org chart. Its One Microsoft, all the time
and across all devices, an ethos embodied by the divisive Windows 8.

To view the
Ballmer video,
please visit
go.pcworld.
com/ballmer.

But Ballmer led Microsoft

Microsofts Surface
during the golden years of
Pro laptop PC.
Windows XP, Windows 7,
and Oce, and hes just too
tied to those golden
calves.
Right now, Microsoft
stands with one foot in the
past, and its crippling the
companys future potential.
Fresh CEO blood can come
in without baggage, pushing the company into a
wholly modern era.
Microsofts smartphone, tablet, and PC [endeavors] have been an
absolute disaster [in recent years], says Patrick Moorhead, founder and
principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. I would bet that
[Ballmers successor] is going to be an outsider. The image Microsoft
wants to share with investors is that theyre going to change, and
bringing someone from the inside doesnt show enough change.

Still more mobile, but also more desktop

Windows 8s shift towards mobile has actually deeply hurt its desktop experience, which is still a lot bigger and a lot more valuable
than people recognize, says Ben Bajarin, the director of consumer
technology at Creative Strategies. Even though the PC market isnt
growing, it still sells a lot, and will continue to regularly sell a lot.
And thats why Microsoft should protect the PC, rather than sacricing it. A new CEO can take a kinder, gentler approach to Windows and
try to soothe the bruised feelings of PC owners the world over by
gasp!following Apples lead. Apple has done a stellar job of slowly
merging gesture controls, UI elements, and even some apps from iOS
over to OS X to create a consistent experience across its platforms, but
it still lets a Mac be a Mac and an iPad be an iPad.
A new CEO could guide Microsoft down a similar path with Windows

NEWS

Vidit esc
iminctus. Em
culpa prerferum doluptat fugitasseque si

8. He could even bring back the Start menu. Meanwhile, the Charm
bar and hot corners could stay in place, ensuring UI consistency
across PCs and tablets.

But what about those Windows tablets?

Windows RT should dump the desktop completely and focus solely
on the modern UI. And full-fledged Windows 8 tablets should
mostly dump the desktop, too, and allow traditional software to be
run in Metro-style windows, then intelligently switch to the desktop mode when connected to an external monitor and keyboard.
Ballmer couldnt politically pull o that kind of change after setting the Windows 8 course, but a new CEO has ultimate flexibility.
Microsoft isnt dead. Far from it! But the old Microsoft is, and no
matter who takes the reins, that person will have the freedom to
remold the new-look Microsoft in ways that Ballmer never could.

Stardocks
ModernMix
app for Windows 8.

The Windows Store: How

useful are its 100,000 apps?
BY BRAD CHACOS

MICROSOFT ALONE cant 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 Apples App Store. Are its oerings 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 dont hold a candle to the vast Android and
iOS libraries, youll nd more than enough to keep you distracted for
months to come. Still, the Windows Store has its omissionsno
mobile Walking Dead games or Grand Theft Auto ports here. More
troubling, the Games section is lling with rip-o apps designed to
make you think theyre the real deal. Still, if youre careful, youll nd
much to like.

NEWS

Video apps: Most

people will be
able to nd all
they need.

Video apps: The Windows Stores selection

of video apps is not anywhere near as comprehensive as iOSs or Androids, but most people
will nd all they need. You still wont nd apps
for, say, HBO Go, Comcast, Verizon, or many
niche services. If you stick mostly to major
apps, the Windows Store gets two thumbsupespecially if you dont mind resorting to
IE 10 to ll in the blanks.
Music apps: The Windows Stores music app selection, on the
other hand, hits all the wrong notes. The center of Windows 8s
aural experience revolves around the baked-in Music app. Except for
Slacker, most of the major streaming music services arent in the
Windows Store.
Social apps: The Windows Store had zero big-name social apps at
launch. Nine months in, the situation is only marginally improved,

Even at 100,000, the

Windows Store is
still more than a few
apps short of a
Happy Meal.

though ocial Facebook and Foursquare apps are slated to arrive

sometime.
Other apps: The Windows Stores relative infancy is most obvious when it comes to the random, scattershot apps that ll ecosystem holes and niche needs. Once again, the Windows Store has
just enough to keep users appeased. Magazine-style newsreaders,
for example, abound, from Pulse to News Bento to Rockmelt and
the impending Flipboard. But most other categories dont have
more than one or two decent apps.
Even at 100,000 apps, the Windows Store is still more than a few
apps short of a Happy Meal.
O P E N I N G P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

Games selection is uneven,

but you can
still nd much
to like.

NEWS

License-plate scanning:
The inside story
BY MARK SULLIVAN

WHEN THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union released a report in July

describing widespread license-plate scanning of cars by police on
Americas roadways, everyone from privacy advocates to Sunday drivers felt their basic rights of anonymity further slip away.
But its 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 benets 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. Well 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 areas, the scans are
immediately matched against a database of known stolen vehicles. If
a match is detected, a little siren goes o. Any car that displays a stolen plate, we have more than enough PC [probable cause] to stop it,
Hinch says.

License-plate scanning cameras can be mounted on the roof or

trunk of a police car, or in the light bar on the cars roof. Police also
install stationary plate-scanning cameras at busy thoroughfares
and at state or national border crossings.
Mass license-plate scanning got its start in London during the
1980s and 1990s as a way to keep track of terrorists. Law enforcement around the world quickly saw its appeal, and adopted the technology to hunt down stolen vehicles; by 2002, police in the United
States were using it routinely, Hinch says.
The cameras mounted on police cruisers can scan up to 2000
license plates a minute and immediately store the image in the cloud,
according to Tripwire security researcher Ken Westin, who works with
law enforcement agencies.
And the plate scans yield more than just numbers. The images
can include part of a car surrounding the plate, with identifying
marks (dings, stickers, and so on), plus a GPS tag of the exact location of the scan, and a time stamp. This information can be sent
back to a database in milliseconds, Westin says.

Police use both

stationary and
car-mounted
cameras to scan
license plates.

NEWS

Bad for criminals, but at what cost freedom?

The vast majority of plates being scanned, though, are owned by
innocent, law-abiding people. The ACLU study shows that less
than 1 percent of the plates scanned are owned by criminals.
For the other 99 percent, the scan data can reveal things we
might expect to remain private.
With the time, date, and location data
it includes, you can learn a lot of sensitive
things about a person, says Electronic
Freedom Foundation sta attorney Jennifer Lynch. You can see where they live,
where they work, where they worship,
where their kids go to school, or where
their doctors oce is.
While most police departments have rules about how the scan
data can be used, theres no telling how the rules are enforced. And
these rules vary widely from department to department.
Law enforcement agencies in most parts of the country have
resisted laws regulating the use and storage of license-plate data,
preferring to manage it themselves.
But laws are what police are tasked with enforcing and protecting, not creating their own laws through internal policies regarding
how our personal data is used, Westin says.
Only time will tell if the ACLU report will revive eorts to get a
federal law passed.

Police scanning data

can reveal things
that we might expect
to remain private.

AMDs new
gaming bundle
is a game in itself
BY MARK HACHMAN

A COMPELLING REASON to buy AMD graphics cards over the past few

years has been its Never Settle program, where the company bundled
some of the hottest games that took advantage of AMDs graphics cards.
Now AMD has changed that program, making game selection a bit of
a game in itself.
Under the new Never Settle Forever system, gamers who buy
AMDs cheaper cards can pick one game to download to their system,
while those who select the higher-end cards will be able to pick three.
Historically, AMDs Never Settle bundle included up to four games
with each card, and the Reloaded refresh preselected two to three of
this years top games to ship with each card.
With Never Settle Forever, those that fall into the Bronze tier
purchasing the Radeon HD 7790 or the HD 7770 GHz editioncan pick
one game, while the Silver tierwho purchase the HD 7800 series

NEWS

AMDs list of games and tiers

Radeon Bronze
Reward Tier

Radeon Silver
Reward Tier

Radeon Gold
Reward Tier

AMD Radeon HD 7790

Graphics Card
AMD Radeon HD 7770
GHz Card

AMD Radeon HD 7800

Series

AMD Radeon HD 7970

GHz Card
AMD Radeon HD 7970
Graphics Card
AMD Radeon HD 7950
Graphics Card

Choose one:
Deus Ex Human Revolution
DIRT 3
DIRT Showdown
Far Cry 3
Far Cry Blood Dragon
Sleeping Dogs

Choose two:
Deus Ex Human
Revolution
DIRT 3
DIRT Showdown
DMC Devil May Cry
Far Cry 3
Far Cry Blood Dragon
Hitman Absolution
Sleeping Dogs

Choose three:
Deus Ex Human
Revolution
DIRT 3
DIRT Showdown
DMC Devil May Cry
Far Cry 3
Far Cry Blood Dragon
Hitman Absolution
Sleeping Dogs
Tomb Raider

can pick two games; users who fall into the Gold tierwho buy
either the HD 7970 GHz Edition, the HD 7970, or the HD 7950can
choose three games.
Each game must be digitally downloaded to a users hard drive,
AMD says.
But theres a catch: users must decide when to redeem the games,
and do so all at once.
That wouldnt be such a big deal if the games were a xed list. But
Robert Hallock, a gaming evangelist for AMD, says that AMD may be
adding more games in the future, suggestingbut not conrming
that Battleeld 4 and the new Thief game may be included.
The redeemable-game credits that each tier brings are good through
December 31, so theres some advantage in waiting to see if new
games are made available. If theyre not, youll have to buy them yourselfand potentially miss out on preorder deals or other benets.

New SATA spec paves

way for faster SSDs
BY MARK HACHMAN
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.
Specically, the Serial ATA International Organization ratied 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 thats traditionally associated with internal storage
within a PCan 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 drives,

NEWS

which in turn will improve the internal performance of PCs over time.
The marquee improvement in the new
revision is the support for PCI Express
throughput through a supported SATA
interface. Conventional SATA runs at
speeds up to 6 gigabits per second; allocating two lanes of PCI Express 3.0 bumps up
the speed to 2 gigabytes per second (8 gigabits equals 1 gigabyte).
Thats far more than todays conventional hard drives will need; [t]he
faster interface (SATA Express) is intended for SSDs and emerging
Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs), but the speed of the existing SATA
spec will be more than adequate for [hard drives] for the foreseeable
future, a spokeswoman for SATA-IO said in an email.
However, the device as well as the host controller must support the
new 3.2 specication to allow both devices to negotiate up to the
highest speed.
The new spec also supports the following:
MicroSSDs, a standard allowing single-chip SSDs for embedded
storage;
the Universal Storage Module, a removable storage module for
notebooks and ultrabooks, as well as the related M.2 form factor
for consumer-electronics devices;
DevSleep, a new low-power state where the drive is almost completely shut down;
better host communications, such as transitional energy reporting
and hybrid information, both of which can be used to improve performance and energy management;
and Rebuild Assist, which can speed the data reconstruction process within RAID congurations.
It will take some time for the revision to be supported by manufacturers, and SATA revisions arent customarily exposed to the consumer.
But if youre upgrading a notebook or desktopespecially if that
means swapping out a traditional hard drive for an SSDput the new
SATA revision on your checklist of things to look for.

The revision could

lead to both faster
drives and, in time,
improved PC
performance.

The rst driverless cars: trucks

BY EVAN DASHEVSKY

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 mit zguner, a professor with Ohio State Universitys 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, zguner 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 to fluctuate on a grand scale, keeping fuel
costs down is a major concern of any business that relies on overthe-road vehicles to function. However, the more immediate economic opportunity of connected caravans is in supplementing (or

NEWS

Among the legal

issues: Who pays if a
self-driving car
causes an accident?

completely replacing) human workers.

In the future, cars will be driving themselves through all sorts of environments,
but thats quite a ways o, says Dan
Flores, General Motors advancedtechnology spokesperson.
In addition, a number of legal issues have
yet to be sorted out. For example, who pays if a self-automated car
causes an accidentthe hardware manufacturer, the drivers insurance company, or the driver himself?
Driverless convoys are already being used in war zones, where supply trucks are subject to attack. Robotics rm ASI has devised a driverless convoy system that uses sensors in combination with a physical Kevlar leash. A single truck leads a small battalion of unmanned
vehicles behind it, eliminating the need for human drivers in a dangerous environment.
Similarly, mining operations in Chile and western Australia are using
driverless dump trucks to transport ore and other materials, allowing
machines to take over in remote locations.
So keep your eyes on the road, and mind the automated convoys.

Lenovo recently shipped more

mobile devices than regular PCs.

Lenovos surging mobile sales

shouldnt freak out PC faithful
BY IAN PAUL

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 didnt provide specic numbers on how many smartphones
and tablets it shipped, but Lenovos 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
Lenovos total revenues. Indeed, the companys Mobile Internet Digital

NEWS

Revenue by product
Notebooks and desktops still take lions share.
Others*
6.5%
(6.8%)

MIDH
13.7%
(7.3%)

Desktop
28.2%
(31.8%)

Notebook
51.6%
(54.1%)

Lenovo is the
only major PC
maker that is
also a big player
in smartphones
and tablets.

Home divisionresponsible for smartphones, tablets, and smart

TVsmade up just 13.7 percent of all money taken in by the company
between April and June.
Lenovo is the only major PC producer that is also big player in smartphones and tablets.
After Lenovo, the next biggest PC vendor is Hewlett-Packard, which
still remains a solidly notebook and desktop company. Dell hasnt done
much to excite buyers with its attempts at tablets and smartphones.
The Taiwan-based titans Acer and Asus both produce smartphones,
but are better known for their Android tablets. The two companies
shipped a combined 3.5 million tablets last quarter, according to IDC.
But look at the top 5 smartphone vendors in the world. Thats where
you start to see rms more like Lenovoparticularly Samsung and
Apple.
When you combine PCs, tablets, and smartphones all together into
one category, Apple and Samsung are dominant, says Bob ODonnell,
IDCs vice president for clients and displays.
But over the last two quarters, ODonnell says, Lenovo started breaking out to become the worlds third largest smart-connected device
company behind Apple and Samsung.

Netgear accuses Asus of

submitting false test results
BY MICHAEL BROWN

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 led both a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and a lawsuit seeking damages and injunctive relief.

NEWS

What makes Asuss

RT-AC66U such a
fast 802.11ac routergood engineering or unscrupulous
cheating?

In an interview, Sandeep Harpalani, Netgears director of product

marketing, core networking, told me that Netgear is accusing Asus of
knowingly shipping two productsthe RT-N65U 802.11n wireless router and the RT-AC66U 802.11ac wireless routerthat 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 lab, QuieTek Corp., to submit false test results to the FCC.
In my tests late last year, Asuss RT-AC66U delivered better range than
any 802.11ac router I had benchmarked to date (I havent tested the
RT-N65U, also named in Netgears complaint).
The FCC hasnt yet dealt with Netgears charges. But if the agency
determines that Asuss RT-AC66U breaks FCC regulations, I cant recommend the router to anyoneit may interfere with other radio communications and wireless devices.
Netgears Harpalani said that his company complained to Asus directly
about the matter, and that Asus failed to respond satisfactorily. According

to Harpalani, Netgear discovered that Asus was cheating when it acquired

sample Asus routers from retailers and conducted its own tests.
It will be up to the FCC and the courts to decide whether any laws
have been broken.
I contacted Asus for a response to Netgears charges. But its ocial
statement is, No comment while the case is in litigation.
If the FCC nds Netgears complaint to be valid, Asus is in for a world of
hurt. Conversely, if the FCC dismisses the complaint, Netgears lawsuit will
go up in smokeand Asus will very likely hit back with a lawsuit of its own.

Above: The
beginning of
Netgears complaint.

NEWS

Samsung calls
its split-screen
OLED TV the
marriage saver.

Samsung TV lets viewers

watch dierent HD programs
BY EVAN DASHEVSKY
SAMSUNGS CURVY NEW 55-inch OLED TV will allow two users to

watch dierent full-HD programs simultaneously on the same

screenwith 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.
Even under standard one-signal presentation, the KN55S9C TV
oers a stunning, bright display with rich colors and contrast.
The TV became available on Samsungs U.S. site in mid-August. The
cost? About $9000, a good $7000 less than originally rumored.

STAFF PICKS
New Products That Have
Our Editors Drooling

HP
SlateBook x2
go.pcworld.com/slatebookX2

HPs new SlateBook x2 looks like a laptop, with a detachable

keyboard and touchpad base. However, this sheep-in-wolfsclothing 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 its still a fascinating mid-tier device.

Mist
Shine
go.pcworld.com/mistshine

Razer
Tartarus
go.pcworld.com/rtartarus

The $80 Tartarus USB gaming

keypad, which sits on your desk,
is designed explicitly for macro
nerds and control freaks. It has
a bank of 15 programmable keys,
two buttons, and eight
thumbstick motionsall
customizable via Synapse, Razers device
management
software.

STAFF PICKS

Kwikset
Kevo Bluetooth
Electronic Lock
go.pcworld.com/kevolock

Heres a lock that

makes your home
untouchable to anyone
but you. The $219 Kevo
uses low Bluetooth energy to ping and authenticate your iPhone 4S or
iPhone 5 once its close to
the door. A quick tap with
your nger ensures that
you dont unlock it by
walking by. Dont have an
iPhone? Kwikset provides
one battery-powered key
fob; additional ones cost
$25 each.

How to make smart purchases

and stay safe online.

CONSUMER
WATCH

Are pricey products really

worth the money?
Check out some of the
worst deals in tech.
BY CHRISTOPHER NULL

S GADGET ENTHUSIASTS,

we accept the idea that products are worth what were

willing to pay for them, and
not what they cost in terms of product development, manufacturing, and
materials. Nonetheless, its time to name names. Here are some of the
most egregiously high prot 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 missives160 bytes in size, at mosttypically cost us 20 cents
each to send and receive. They cost essentially nothing to deliver,
however, making the markup for an SMS message essentially innite.
Heres the deal: Wireless carriers must send packets of signaling data
within the wireless network to set up calls and to signal the locations
of devices in relation to cell towers. The same signaling channel can be
used to send short messages during times when real signaling information isnt being sent. Because the carrier has to maintain the signaling
channel anyway, the text messages cost the carrier essentially nothing to convey. So the money the carrier
charges for them is pure prot.

Computer and
audio-video cables
Average cost: $45 (for a name-brand
8-foot HDMI cable)
Average cost to produce: about $3
(estimate based on market analysis and review
of nancial statements)
Theres no love lost between consumers
and the cabling industry. Just look at Monster
Cable, which has long been criticized for charging extreme pricesoften over $100.
Sure, generic cables from Monsters competitors may not bear the THX logo or boast hyper speed certication,
but it turns out that the vast majority of people wont need all that
stu. Repeated studies and tests have found no dierences between
brand-name and generic digital cables.
In the digital realm, a cable either works or it doesnt, and consumers
have long been advised to buy the cheapest cable that works for their

Brand-name cables are

pricey and most people
dont need them.

particular need. This means buying based on type, connector size, and
length, rather than brand name.

Smartphones
Average cost: $549 (for a 16GB iPhone 5, unlocked)
Average cost to produce: $200
Deep carrier discounts often blind consumers to the true prices of
smartphones. And subsidies that the carriers pay directly to all phone manufacturers muddy the picture, but you can get a clearer view of the real
cost of a phone if you buy an unlocked model that isnt tied to a contract.
At $549 unlocked, the iPhone 5 is emblematic of the dazzlingly high
cost of smartphones today. Based on iSuppli teardown estimates (go.
pcworld.com/isuppli), the actual cost of the components inside the
device amounts to just $200, or only about 36 percent of the nal
retail price of the phone.
Faced with prices like that, U.S. consumers have been driven to the
subsidy modeland it seems to be working. The worst part of this
scheme is that we get increasingly ripped o
the more features we add on: Apples 32GB
iPhone costs the company only an extra $10
in component costs, iSuppli says, but we pay
an additional $100 at retail for it.

Printer ink
Average cost: $80 per ounce
Average cost to produce: about
$10 per ounce
Are you ready to be outraged? On a
per-ounce basis, printer ink can be more
expensive than vintage champagne.
The vendors say that making ink (go.
pcworld.com/printerinkcost) is more
dicult than youd think.
Finding out how much prot printer
companies make on each cartridge sold

Printer companies sell

you cheap printers but
expensive ink rells.

CONSUMER
WATCH
is dicult. A QualityLogic study from 2012 found that the average cost
of a color ink cartridge is about $21. But the printer companies dont
report manufacturing costs specic to ink cartridges, and they obscure
the ink-specic prot margins on cartridges in nancial reports.
Nonetheless, for about $10 you can buy an injection-based rell kit
that includes all colors of ink you need for your specic printer, along
with special syringes for injecting the rell ink into the cartridge. Or
you can spend $80 to buy all new cartridges.
The price dierence between rells and new cartridges exposes
printer company markups. Just remember the business model at work
here: The printer companies will sell you a shiny new printer for cheap,
knowing they will recoup losses, plus make a whole bunch of money
selling you expensive ink during the life of your printer.

Wireless service
Average cost: $100 per month (Verizons unlimited talk/10GB data plan)
Average cost to provide: $37 per month
Considering the robustness and scale of the typical cell phone network, it really costs nothing to add one additional user to the system.
When you fork over your $80 or $100 to Verizon Wireless or AT&T, they
dont suddenly have to run out and build a tower to accommodate you.
But, yes, it costs money to run a mobile voice and data network. Cell
towers have to be built, switching stations have to be maintained, and
call centers have to be manned. All of this stu costs money, but less
than you might think: Verizon Wireless, for example, makes a 63 percent gross prot margin from wireless subscribers, according to nancial statements. That doesnt include its depreciation costs, but even
with that included, the companys price markups are high.

Microsof Ofce Professional 2013

Average cost: $400 (Windows 8 Professional Upgrade)
Average cost to produce: $136
Microsoft Oce, is still a cash cow. Before Microsofts reorganization,
the division that made Oce was by far the most successful of the
companys ve units, pulling in $24 billion of the companys $74 billion

in revenue last year.

The cost of creating the software that made that money? Just $8.2
billion, thus creating a 66 percent prot margin, according to Microsoft nancial statements. Considering that the current versions of
Oce borrow so much from earlier iterations, its understandable that
Microsoft would earn a lot of money on each unit sold. Consumers,
however, may be less understanding about footing so much of the bill.

Cloud storage
Average cost: $1.20 a gigabyte per year (Carbonite Pro Business Premier)
Average cost to provide: $0.10 per gigabyte
It has become a convenient rallying cry to assume that the cloud is
always a simple, cost-eective way to ditch old-school hardware while
getting all of its features, including physical access to storage space.
Nowhere is this more clearly untrue than in the realm of cloud-based
storage. To pick on just one company, Carbonites (carbonite.com)
highest-tier storage system costs $600 per year for 500GB of space.
So, you can buy into that, or you can pick up a solid 2TB NAS device for
all of $130.
Yes, Carbonite adds services like automatic backup of desktops and
servers, HIPAA compliance, and other high-end features. But the cost
to provide all of this largely comes down to the price of hardware, and
hard drives are cheap.
The cost of storage space on a server you buy yourself works out to
about $0.10 per gigabyte. Thats an order of magnitude lower than the
fee being charged by many cloud-storage companies to store your data
on their servers.
I L LU ST R AT I O N BY M I C H A E L J. MU R D O C K

CONSUMER
WATCH

What you really need to

protect your phone
BY BRAD CHACOS
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! Its enough to make you want to wrap your phone in tinfoil and cower in a corner somewherebut dont believe the hype.
While you may want to slap a security app on your phone, it probably
isnt for the reason you think.

Much ado about (slightly more than) nothing

Heres the thing about all those ominous-sounding reports: Most of
them originate from the very antivirus companies looking to sell you
security solutionsso theyre not exactly impartial.
Fortunately, I managed to track down honest, straightforward experts
from three noted security rms: Lookout (lookout.com), McAfee

Malicious apps
like Droid
Cleaner are a
rare (and quickly
scoured) sight
in Google Play.

(mcafee.com), and AV-Test (av-test.org).

And all of them sang the same tune when it came to malicious
mobile threats.
If you follow simple precautions such as sticking to the Google Play
Store, not downloading things from suspicious sites, and not clicking
suspicious links in emails you werent expecting, then youre pretty
safe, says Marc Rogers, the principal security analyst at Lookout.
Google has a very eective app vetting process in place.
Fear not, iOS lovers: Apples approval process is even more stringent.
Andreas Marx, the CEO of AV-Test, agrees with Rogers.
But all three organizations reported that theyve been seeing an
increase in targeted malware that skirt the precautions Google, Apple,
and other platform protectors have installedthink malicious websites, third-party app stores oering free versions of popular paid
apps, and phishing emails containing poisoned links or apps.
Android typically gets hammered as being the more vulnerable operating system, compared with iOS, but Marx says iOS is actually more
vulnerable to phishing attacks since Apples App Store has few viable
antimalware apps.
Whats more, the contents of our mobile devices all but ensure that
those unfriendly eorts will continue.

CONSUMER
WATCH
Think about it: Your phone is, for all intents and purposes, a computer, says Luis Blando, vice president of mobile product development
at McAfee. It has every single bit of corporate data that your company wants to protect. Much more worrisome, it has your calendar, your
Amazon account, God knows what else. As a target, phones are absolutely irresistible [to hackers].
Slightly hyperbolic? Maybe. But its also very true.
The situation is
changing, says Marx.
More and more
attacks are targeting
mobile users in the
U.S., so its getting
more risky. Therefore,
we recommend using
security software on
your Android. Last year,
we said Its an optional
component, but it will
get more essential in
the future. Now we
argue: Use it.

The real reason

you want a security app
Even if you barely surf the Web and rock impeccable security habits,
its still recommended that you pick up a security app.
Mobile security isnt all about malware.
One of the biggest mobile security risks is actually losing your
phone, Blando says. When you lose your phone, its not only the cost
of the device, but also the cost and hassle of losing its data.
Apples iPhones have robust features against phone loss that can be
set up with minimal hassle, including remote locking, wiping, and
phone-nding capabilities. Androids antitheft options arent quite as

Mobile security
apps are more
important for
their non-malware-related
tools.

beefy, prompting experts to recommend picking up a third-party

security solution.

The recommendation
If youre walking around with an iPhone in your pocket, theres no
pressing need to buy a mobile security solution. Not because iOS is
inherently safer than Androidif youre even the slightest bit cautious, all mobile operating systems are highly securebut because
Apple already oers phone-nding and back-up features, and because
none of the scant security options available in the app store can really
protect against the increasing risk of phishing attacks and other back
doortype malware.
The situations a bit dierent on Android. Youre going to want a
free security app at the very least, and we recommend paying extra
for a premium security app to gain access to those crucial remote
security features.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K

CONSUMER
WATCH

Simplify tech support

for friends and family
BY BRAD CHACOS
DOUBLING AS UNOFFICIAL tech support for your family and friends
comes as part of the territory when youre a PC geekand 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.

Baten down the hatches

Before you do anything else, lock that puppy down with a security suite.
If your friend or family memberhenceforth referred to as Grandma
for simplicitys sakeis willing to spring for a premium security suite,
our Security Software Showdown (go.pcworld.com/securityshowdown)

The Windows
rewall settings.

can point you to the best malware

protection money can buy. Not
everyone wants to pay for their PC
security, however, so lets walk
through a way to get simple, fairly
sturdy security for free.
First, ensure that the baked-in Windows rewall is enabled by heading to Control Panel u System and Security u Windows Firewall u Turn
Windows Firewall On or O. If its o, turn it on.
Once thats up, install a free antivirus program that allows you to
schedule scans at set timeswhich Windows Defender does not do.
We recommend AVG Free (go.pcworld.com/avg). Run a full scan to
ensure youre starting with a clean slate, then begin scheduling!
To schedule an automatic scan in AVG Free, open the program dashboard and select Computer u Settings u Schedules u Scheduled Scan. Set
up a repeating scan scheduleweekly is neand check the Enable
This Task box before clicking OK.
Make sure the software is set to update automatically, too.
Id also suggest installing Google Chrome and setting that as the
default browser, rather than Internet Explorer. For security specically,
its sandboxing feature is excellent.

Id also suggest installing

Google Chrome and seting
that as the default browser.

Keep up with the Joneses

Antivirus isnt the only thing youll want to keep updated, though.
Make sure all things Microsoft stay current by enabling automatic
Windows updates. Head to Control Panel u System and Security u Windows Update u Turn automatic updating on or o and select Install
updates automatically (recommended) from the drop-down box. Check
the boxes under Recommended updates and Microsoft Update as
well, and then click OK.
What about everything that isnt Microsoft-related? Secunia PSI
(go.pcworld.com/secunia_psi) will have you covered. This program
keeps tabs on all the software on your PC, watching for updates and
automatically installing them whenever possible.
Making sure Grandmas computer backups are up to date is almost

CONSUMER
WATCH

as important as keeping her computer updated. CrashPlan (go.

pcworld.com/crash_plan) oers a wonderfully simple backup service.

Simplify the desktop

Youll next want to simplify the user experience. Start by downloading
whatever browser plug-ins Grandma is likely to needFlash, Java, Windows Media Player, and so on.
Next, ask her which programs she uses, then plop em front and center on the desktop. You have two options, both found by right-clicking
the program in question: (1) Put a shortcut on the desktop (Send to u
Desktop) or (2) drop the program into the taskbar (Pin to Taskbar).
If Grandmas got Windows 8, you can pin programs to the modern UI
Start screen. Some apps have a right-click Pin to Start option. If you
nd one that doesnt, press the <Windows> key to open the Start
screen, right-click in an open space, and click All Apps in the options bar
that appears at the bottom. From there, you can right-click any app
and select Pin to Start in the lower options bar to do just that.

CrashPlan can
back up multiple
sets of your les
to the cloud.

A few tools for you

While youre busy idiot-proong the computer, you can install a
few programs that will take some of the hassle out of future (and
hopefully infrequent) tech support calls.
Soluto Lite (go.pcworld.com/soluto) can help you perform basic
tech support from afar. Its wonderful for the simple things, and the
free Soluto Lite plan lets you monitor up to three PCs with up to three
remote sessions per week.
Google+ also recently added Remote Desktop functionality to
its video Hangoutsgiving you the power to take full control of
Grandmas PC from the comfort of your home, and carrying on a
(digital) face-to-face conversation all the while.
Finally, something important to remember: Before you install any
remote services on Grandmas PCincluding a remote backup option
like CrashPlanmake sure you have her active consent to do so.

BUGS & FIXES

BY NICK MEDIATI

New Firefox means

better security for you
This months installment of Bugs and Fixes is brought to you
by the letters X and P, and by the number 23. That is, time is
running out on Windows XP as Microsoft will soon stop providing security updates for it, and Firefox 23 is
now available for your downloading pleasure.

Firefox 23 makes encrypted

webpages more secure
Mozillas Firefox 23 update includes a new feature that better protects you when you visit
encrypted webpages that feature unencrypted
elements (for example, the page itself may be
encryptedas indicated by the https in your
browsers address barbut it might have images or other on-page elements that are not
encrypted.) This could leave you vulnerable to
certain kinds of attacks where a hacker might
modify these insecure page elements to steal
your personal information.
The new Mixed Content Blocker will prevent
some of these page elementslike unencrypted JavaScript
codefrom loading by default, which will help prevent
data thieves from eavesdropping on you. In addition, Firefox
23 xes a number of security flaws, four of which are rated
Critical and could allow an attacker to install malware or
run code on your PC without your authorization.
The new version also includes a cadre of other tweaks and
new features (includinggaspa new icon!), and you

CONSUMER
WATCH

PLUS:
Time is
almost up for
Windows XP.

CONSUMER
WATCH
should consider downloading it if you use Firefox.
Visit go.pcworld.com/refoxnew to see
whats new.

Upgrade from Windows XP...or else

If youre still
using Windows
XP, the clock is
ticking.

If you still use Windows XP, heres another reminder

that youll want to upgrade very soon. Come April 8,
2014, Microsoft will discontinue providing security updates for the
long-lived operating system, which means that if you still use XP, any
new security hole will be left wide open for hackers and malware writers to exploitand you wont be able to do anything about it.
If youre still using Windows XP, the clock is ticking, and you
should upgrade to a newer version of Windows as soon as possible.
Visit go.pcworld.com/zeroday for additional details on what
to expect.
I L LU ST R AT I O N BY G A RY N E I L L

Tips to keep small businesses

productive.

BUSINESS
CENTER

Anything but PowerPoint

Seal the deal with ve alternative presentation tools that ofer new takes
on the same old slides. BY RICK BROIDA

LENTY OF PRESENTATION tools are cooler, faster, easier to

use, andin almost all casesless expensive than Microsofts PowerPoint. These ve alternatives will help you get
your point across a little dierently.

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 Commonslicensed 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, PowerPoint or Apples Keynote.
The app doesnt support sound, transitions, or animations, though,
and trying to make any major slide changes often causes you to lose
work; a save option is desperately needed.
That said, Haiku Deck is great for building short, simple, and attractive slide decks on the run.

Kingsof Presentation Free 2013

Kingsofts Presentation Free 2013 (go.pcworld.com/kingsoftpres)
Windows software is available separately or in the Oce Free 2013 suite.
Its default interface borrows heavily from Microsofts Ribbon

Haiku Deck
provides excellent tools for
nding free art
to illustrate
your business
presentations.

design, though it provides a second option that resembles older

versions of PowerPoint. The program is easy to learn either way.
Kingsoft supplies a generous library of templates, layouts, color
schemes, and animations. You can add everything from sounds and
background music to movies and Flash.
Presentation Free can open PowerPoint presentations, too, including those in .pptx format. It can save, however, only to the older .ppt
format, or to Kingsofts .dps format. You have the option to convert
your presentations to PDF, as well.

Pixxa Perspective
What is a presentation if not an audiovisual story? Thats the idea
behind Pixxas iPad app Perspective (go.pcworld.com/perspective).

Presentation
Free 2013
looks and
works much
like PowerPoint, but you
dont need to
buy an entire
suite to get it.

BUSINESS
CENTER
Although Perspective is initially free, you must upgrade to the $50
Perspective Pro to unlock all the features and create unlimited stories.
Each slide (known here as a scene) can consist of an image and
text, a diagram, a chart (bar, bubble, line), or a PDF. You can also
import items, including local Excel and CSV les or anything you
have stored on Google Drive.
The bar and bubble charts are motion charts, meaning that you
can animate the elements. Perspective also supports the creation
of Sankey diagrams (go.pcworld.com/sankey), though this feature
requires an in-app purchase ($100).
Alas, you cant embed videos or webpages, and you cant add music

Pixxa Perspective Pro costs at least $50, but it helps you create compelling presentations.

or sound eects, though you can record a voice-over. The Airshow

option lets you share stories with up to ten other iPads.

Prezi
Prezi (www.prezi.com) creates dazzling, eye-catching animations that
blow ordinary slide decks out of the water.
You assemble all of your text, graphics, and videos onto the virtual
equivalent of a giant, themed poster board. Instead of flipping
through ordinary pages, Prezi flies around, zooming in to one area for
viewing, then up, out, and onto the next.
Earlier this year, Prezi added sound support. Now you can include
background music, or add voice-overs or sound eects to path
steps (the transitions between areas of the scene). That might not
seem like a huge deal, but Prezi delivers such a smooth, cinematic
result that it begs for a soundtrack.
Prezi also oers a creator app for iPad and a viewer for iPhone; both
apps are free, as is Prezi Basic. Upgrade options start at $59 per year.

Prezi neatly
flips the slideshow concept
on its head.

BUSINESS
CENTER
SofMaker Presentations Mobile
SoftMakers $5 Presentations Mobile (go.pcworld.com/softmakerpres)
allows you to create slide decks on your Android device, as well as to
import and save existing .ppt and .pptx les.
This app is, at best, a rudimentary PowerPoint clone; even something
as simple as changing a slides background is elusive. It can, however,
import presentations from local storage and popular cloud services.
You can make basic edits to the imported les and then restore them
to their homes, or forward them via email. Depending on your Android
device, you may also be able to connect to an external display to deliver your presentationcomplete with embedded sounds, transitions,
and animations. (It doesnt support videos.)
In our tests, Presentations Mobile imported a 54-slide PowerPoint
le from a Google Drive account to a Barnes & Noble Nook HD. Downloading and opening the le went slowly, but the le played back perfectly, transitions and all.

With Presentations Mobile, all you need to make great presentations is an Android device.

On-the-fly oce
Transform your hotel room into a productive workspace with
nine essential tools. BY PAUL MAH

BUSINESS
CENTER

On-the-fly oce

BUSINESS
CENTER

On-the-fly oce

BUSINESS
CENTER

On-the-fly oce

BUSINESS
CENTER

BUSINESS
CENTER

On-the-fly oce

THIS IS DOUG
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COMPUTER.
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two free months with purchase.

BUSINESS
CENTER

Essential small-oce
networking tips
BY PAUL MAH
SO YOUVE TURNED your sluggish PC into a productivity powerhouse
with better, faster gear. Thats a great rst 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 oces network and storage.

Embrace the exibility of wireless

Though speed and reliability make ethernet a must-have for optimal
PC performance, Wi-Fi has its place, too. Without it, youd 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

Linksyss EA6200
ofers the 2.4GHz
band for most
data and 5GHz
for heavier loads.

router oers twice the bandwidth2.4GHz and 5GHzessentially

giving you two independent networks. You can connect frequently
used devices, such as your smartphone or tablet, to the 2.4GHz
band, and reserve the less-crowded 5GHz band for high-quality
voice and video streaming.
In addition, if your router oers a guest mode or a second SSID, you
can provide a wireless network for visitors. Setting a simple, memorable password for that network can save you from having to repeat
your 20-character passphrase for the umpteenth time.

Streamline your network

A cutting-edge router isnt worth much if the ethernet switch that
links your networked devices isnt equal to the job. Make sure the
switching capacity provides adequate bandwidth. Generally, an
eight-port gigabit ethernet switch should oer 16 gigabits per second of switching capacity (8 ports x 1 gbps x 2 for full-duplex). A
spec less than 16 gbps would indicate that the switch is incapable
of operating at full capacity on all ports simultaneously.
Many lower-end switches omit switching-capacity information
from their specications, which is why picking up a cheap one is a
bad idea. Similarly, chaining multiple small network switches to
work in tandem is a recipe for hard-to-diagnose problems and

performance bottlenecks. Instead, look for a single switch that has

enough network ports to meet your needs.

Double down on Internet access

Your Internet connection is crucial for communicating with clients and
accessing your companys website. If your ISP goes down, so does your
business. To reduce the risk, sign up with two Internet service providers.
Dual Internet access doesnt have to be costly or complicated. One
strategy is to sign up for a lower-tier plan and apply the resulting
savings to a second provider. If the technological challenge of managing multiple Internet connections seems daunting, consider
investing in an easy-to-use multi-WAN router such as the Peplink
Balance (www.peplink.com).

Create your own cloud

Cloud storage is a great way to access frequently used spreadsheets
and presentations, but its not optimal for large video les or data
backups. And attempting to rebuild a PC or server from backups
stored in the cloud can be trying, to say the least.
Network-attached storage oers a more flexible approach. The perfect
small-business replacement for the cumbersome le servers of yesteryear, a typical NAS, such as the Synology DS413j (go.pcworld.com/
synds413j), can accommodate two to eight hard drives. For even

A multi-WAN router such as Peplinks Balance

lets you manage both your primary Internet
service provider and your backup ISP.

BUSINESS
CENTER

The Synology
DS413j and other
network-atached
devices provide
spacious and
exible on-site
storage.

speedier le access, buy a NAS equipped with dual-gigabit ethernet

ports and link aggregation support.

Automate for peace of mind

When youre out of town, you dont want to worry about whats going
on back at your oce. Introducing a little automation can go a long
way toward easing your mind.
For instance, you might install a switch to power o your multiplemonitor rig automatically at the end of the workday, or add a smart
device to prevent your server from overheating. For the former situation, you can combine an mPower power strip and an mPort controller
with a Wall Mount Motion Sensor, all from Ubiquiti (www.ubnt.com).
For the latter, grab Ubiquitis Temperature Sensor.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
CONTENTS

Windows 8.1
Wi-Fi adapters
(Qualcomm Killer
Wireless-N vs. Intel
Centrino Advanced-N
6230)

Acer Gateway
DX4870-UB2C
Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S
Lenovo ThinkPad Helix
Motorola Moto X

Google Chromecast
PictureCode Photo Ninja
Dell XPS 27 Touch
QNAP TS-469 Pro
Maingear Shift Super
Stock Z87

Kingston MobileLite
Wireless

Asus ET2702
Canon PowerShot N
Digital Storm Virtue
HP Envy 120 e-All-in-One
HP Envy 700-030qe

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS

In this section, hardware & software
goes through rigorous testing.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Windows 8.1 review:

The great compromise
The modern UI features improvements, and plays beter
with the desktop. BY BRAD CHACOS

ICROSOFT IS poised to release Windows 8.1 (go.

pcworld.com/win81access), a deep and crucial

revamping of the Windows 8 ideal. The code is nal
(though Microsoft reserves the right to tweak it
further), and the time for speculation is over. Does Windows 8.1 atone
for Windows 8s 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 8s
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: Microsofts
everything and the kitchen sink approach to its new-look operating
system wound up, well, pretty darned compromised .
Rather than delivering a seamless experience, the modern UI and
the desktop interface gave Windows 8 a warring, Jekyll and Hyde
feel. To make matters worse, the operating system had a nasty habit of
ripping you away from one interface and unceremoniously dumping
you into the other. The modern UIwhile gorgeous
felt half-baked at best,
Windows 8.1
chock-full of byzantine interPROS:
faces and missing function Boot-to-desktop option eases use
ality. And in a bid to push
of Windows on non-touch displays
everyone into the modern
Better visual cues and tutorials
mobile age, Microsoft eradiCONS:
cated the Start button and
No obvious way to launch charm
made booting directly to the
bar, or to shut down or restart
desktop impossible.
BOTTOM LINE:
PC devotees felt jilted, and
Win 8.1 still wont win over fervent
complained about their perLive Tile haters, but numerous
ceived second-tier status.
tweaks make it a big improvement.
Computer sales plummeted
(go.pcworld.com/pcsales).
PRICE:
My colleague Mark
Free update (from Windows 8)
Hachman hit the nail on the
$120 (standalone) $200 (Pro)
head in his wrap-up for the

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
Windows 8.1 Preview
(go.pcworld.com/
win81preview): Windows users
skewered Windows 8 for various
sins, and Microsoft took the high
road by addressing a number of the
problems in 8.1.
That eort to meet in the middle
is embodied by Windows 8.1s new
boot-to-desktop option. Although
the feature is as simple as simple
could be, and buried deep in an
obscure submenu, its existence is a
boon to desktop diehards
who resorted to arcane workarounds to avoid Windows 8s manThe new shutdown options in the power menu.
datory Start screen. The boot-todesktop option makes using Windows 8 on non-touch devices far less
frustrating; ditto for the new shutdown options found in the Power
User menu, which you can open by pressing <Windows>-X or by rightclicking the lower-left corner of the desktop.
Ironically, while the tweaks stray from Windows 8s modern-rst
focus, they help Windows 8.1 inch closer to the no compromise
ethos by letting a PC be a PC.
Not all of Windows 8.1s desktop tweaks are quite as welcome. For
one thing, the File Explorer doesnt show libraries by default anymore
(though you can easily restore them by selecting View u Navigation
Pane u Show Libraries). More contentious is the much-ballyhooed
return of the Start buttonbut not the Start menu and its list of programs and shortcuts.
Clicking the Start button deposits you among the live tiles of the
modern Start screen. The jump is confusing at rst, but it makes sense
if you think of the Start screen as a modern Start menu. Whats more,
Windows 8.1 allows you to tweak the Start button to open the Start
screens All Apps list instead, which delivers a much more Start menu-

The new Help +

Tips app
ensures that
assistance for
novices is just a
click away.

esque experience while still enveloping you in the modern UI. The new
approach is a reasonable compromise, but it also demands compromise from you.

Flatening the learning curve

The Start buttons new functionality isnt there just to irritate you,
though: It provides a visual clue as to how to exit the desktop, and it
reinforces the notion that the Start screen replaces the old Start menu.
The hints dont stop there. While Windows 8 was lambasted for its
sink-or-swim approach to guiding users through the revamped UIit
was so bad that many manufacturers preinstalled their own tutorial
apps on their PCsWindows 8.1 is packed with helpful usability clues
and improvements. Big, bold boxes pop up after installation, identifying the various hot corners and explaining how to use them. A new,
Help + Tips app provides straightforward tutorials. Even the Windows
Store received an overhaul for easier browsing.
Its wonderful. Windows 8.1 will still be a shock to new users, but it
promises a far easier learning curve than Windows 8 required.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Usability calibrations
Once youve dispensed with the basics, Windows 8.1s ability to have
three or more apps snapped open at once, complete with the option
to adjust the size of each app dynamically, amps up the usability of the
modern UI. (Windows 8 proper allows only two apps on screen at once,
in a 75/25 split.) Also new, some appssuch as Internet Explorer 11
can open in multiple windows. The feature is no competition for the
variability of traditional desktop windows, but hey: compromise.
The free update also beefs up the modern-style PC Settings menu,
adding numerous options that previously required a jaunt into the
desktop Control Panel. Likewise, the SkyDrive app now lets you browse
through your local les, serving as a modern-style pseudo-File Explorer. Again, theyre small tweaks, but the xes make it easier to stay in
your interface of choice.
If you do decide to break down the interface walls, Microsoft made
the transition easier with some UI-spanning additions that really help
Windows 8.1 feel like a cohesive whole.
The new and superb Bing Smart Searchone of the top ve reasons
to upgrade to Windows 8.1 (go.pcworld.com/win81upgrade)pulls in

Two Internet
Explorer
windows, each
snapped to ll
half the screen.

Some of the
new options
available in PC
Settings.

information from modern apps, desktop les, and the Web alike, creating a comprehensive list of results.
Meanwhile, another new option lets you share your desktop wallpaper with the modern Start screen, imbuing the entire OS with a unied feel. Rough patches remain, but switching from the modern UI to
the desktop is mostly less jarring and more voluntary than before.
Microsoft has even enhanced the lock screen so that you can answer
Skype calls and snap camera shots without unlocking your device.
That isnt to say Windows 8.1 xes every flaw, though. Id still like to
see some sort of visual indicator for the hidden charm bar, and a more
obvious way to shut down or restart the machine. Many options
remain buried beneath superfluous clicks and menus, as well.

Iterating into the future

By and large, the Windows 8.1 RTM version (that is, the version shared
with manufacturers) largely mirrors the Windows 8.1 Previewits
packed with an abundance of new features, new hidden secrets, and
even a plethora of new apps.
Virtually all of Windows 8.1s baked-in modern apps have seen an
overhaul of some sort; the retooled Mail app shines especially brightly.
Rather than diving into the minutiae, lets take a minute to talk about
what these changes mean for Windows.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
The updated
Outlook.comstyle Mail app
in Windows 8.1.

More than any other operating system before it, Windows 8.1 wraps
itself snugly around a Web-centric core. The vast majority of Windows
8.1s native apps are inextricably linked to Microsoft services and
require a connected Microsoft Account to work. SkyDrive hums along
silently in the background, automatically saving your data and photos,
and syncing more settings across all your Windows 8.1 devices than
ever before. (Now included: apps!) Meanwhile, new default settings
automatically update all those apps in the background, keeping you
on the cusp of whats new.
Windows 8.1 embodies the One Microsoft, all the time creed in
some truly staggering ways. When everything is working smoothly,
the operating system creates a deeply personal experience that travels with you across devices. Theres no denying that Microsofts new
focus on rapid-re updatesrather than the multiyear development
cycles of the pasthas helped to whip Windows 8s originally dreadful
native apps into far better shape in comparatively short order.
In fact, Microsoft services are so intertwined with Windows 8.1 and
are being updated so briskly that the company has warned develop-

ers that the RTM release is only kinda-sorta nal code; Windows 8.1
and its apps could see further tweaks by the time the update is
released to the public.
All that said, some people may not appreciate being bound so tightly to the cloud, nor to Microsoft. Conversely, if youve been burned by
a rogue Windows update in the past, you might not like the idea of a
dozen-plus apps constantly updating without warning. Be aware of
your settings!

Botom line
In all the ways that matter, Windows 8.1 is the operating system Windows 8 should have been, and a glimpse into what the Microsoft of
the future could be.
Is it perfect? Nope. It doesnt even contain all the features wed like
to see (go.pcworld.com/win81miss). At its core, Windows 8.1 is still a
tablet interface mashed together with a desktop UI, a hybrid of old
and new. The modern UI is still around; compromise runs both ways.

SkyDrives
sync options
are far more
full-featured in
Windows 8.1.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
The Windows
8.1 Start
screen.

But Windows 8.1 makes Microsofts formula more palatableor at

least, less bitterfor those who choose to make the leap. Windows
8.1 eases the transition for desktop diehards, granting PC enthusiasts
the ability to shun most of the tablet-oriented bits. New tutorials and
UI hints will greatly help displaced adoptees. And if you do decide to
wade into the live tiles, youll nd that the modern UI environment in
Windows 8.1 improves vastly over that of Windows 8. As an update, an
apology, and a lesson in compromise, its stunningly successful.
Microsoft still oers little here to win over desktop diehards who
snarl at the merest mention of the word modern, but if you have
already made the switch, you have absolutely no reason to avoid
the free update when it hits the Windows Store (go.pcworld.com/
win81release).

Wi-Fi adapter
shootout:
Qualcomm vs.
Intel
BY MICHAEL BROWN
THE FOLKS AT Bigfoot Networks
now part of Qualcomm Atheroshave 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 Qualcomms Killer Wireless-N 1202 (go.pcworld.com/n1202) and the other with Intels 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:
Ive seen it selling online for as
little as $35 (Intels

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
We benchmarked two
otherwise identical
Alienware laptops: one
outtted with a Killer
Wireless-N 1202 NIC
(left) and the other with
Intels Centrino
Advanced-N 6230 (right).

card is street-priced at about $30).

The key selling point of Killer NIC technology is its ability to identify the
types of trac traveling over your network and to assign higher priority
to latency-sensitive trac, such as online games, HD video, and audio.
Latency is a measure
of time delay. When
Qualcomm Killer
applications such as
Wireless-N 1202
online games and
streaming media
PROS:
encounter too much
Very low latency and jitter
latency, youll have visi Very fast TCP throughput at long range
ble and/or audible
Handy collection of utilities
glitches and hiccups.
To evaluate each
CONS:
cards
ability to combat
Not compatible with newer, faster
network latency, Qual802.11ac standard
comm provided me
Supports only two spatial streams
with its Gaming NetBOTTOM LINE:
work Eciency (GaNE)
The Killer Wireless-N 1202 is a worthwhile
benchmark to measure
upgrade for gamers and others who require
ping (the time required
low-latency wireless network connectivity.
for a packet to make a
PRICE:
round trip on the net$35
work) and jitter (undesirable deviations in signal timing).

Measuring ping
and jiter
using GaNE

The GaNE benchmark, which measures latency

and jitter, shows the Killer NIC to be the superior Wi-Fi adapter for latency-sensitive applications such as online games.

Intel Centrino
Advanced-N 6230
PROS:
Very fast TCP throughput at close range
CONS:
Much higher latency and jitter than the
Killer Wireless-N 1202
Supports only two spatial streams
BOTTOM LINE:
Intel makes a high-quality wireless adapter, but if you require low latency, Qualcomms Killer NIC line of Wi-Fi adapters
are the better bet.
PRICE:
$30

GaNE measures real-time

performance from two wireless clients at once, recording the results on a third
computer hardwired to the
network. I used my longtime favorite 802.11n Wi-Fi
router, a dual-band Asus RTN66U, for these tests.
I set up the two wireless
clients about 9 feet from
the router in the same
room, and connected them
to the routers 2.4GHz network. I then performed six
runs of the GaNE benchmark. GaNE reported an
average ping time for the
Killer Wireless-N 1202 of
about 1.5 milliseconds, and
an average ping time of
nearly 4 milliseconds for the
Intel card. GaNE measured
one-and-a-half times more
jitter with Intels card than
with Qualcomms. The Killer
NIC delivered similar performance when I switched the
clients over to the routers
5GHz networkslightly less
than 2 millisecondsbut
Intels card registered a

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Qualcomm Killer Wireless-N 1202 vs.

Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230
802.11n Wi-Fi adapter performance,
2.4GHz network
I N T E L 6230

K I L L E R N I C 1202

Bedroom

91.5

(9 feet, no walls)

80.8
92.2
92.7

Kitchen

(20 feet, one wall)

65.9
69.9

Home theater

(35 feet, four walls)

78.1

Home oce

52.8

(65 feet, three walls)

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90 100

( M EG A B I T S P E R S ECO N D )

Qualcomms Killer Wireless-N 1202 and Intels Advanced-N 6230 had comparable performance on the 2.4GHz band, but the Killer NIC was much faster when
situated far from the router.

much higher average ping of nearly 8 milliseconds.

TCP throughput
When I tested each adapter on the 5GHz network, Intels NIC performed much betterat close range, at least. In the bedroom test,
the Centrino Advanced-N 6230 delivered TCP throughput of 196.0
mbps to the Killers 121.0 mbps. And when I moved the clients to the
kitchen, Intels component was more than twice as fast as Qualcomms. But when I tested each client at longer distances, the Killer
NIC delivered dramatically higher TCP throughput than Intels card. In
the home theater, the Killer delivered 81.1 mbps to the Centrinos
30.1 mbps; in the home oce, Qualcomms card produced a rate of

Qualcomm Killer Wireless-N 1202 vs.

Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230
802.11n Wi-Fi adapter performance,
5GHz network
I N T E L 6230

K I L L E R N I C 1202

Bedroom

121.0

(9 feet, no walls)

196.0
90.0

Kitchen

191.0

(20 feet, one wall)

81.1

Home theater

(35 feet, four walls)

30.1
63.8

Home oce

34.9

(65 feet, three walls)

0

50

100

150

200

250

( M EG A B I T S P E R S ECO N D )

On the 5GHz band, Intels adapter was much faster than the Killer NIC at close
range. But the Killer card turned the tables at long range.

63.8 mbps to Intels 34.9 mbps.

Upgrade to 802.11ac if you can

So Qualcomms Killer Wireless-N 1202 is a great Wi-Fi adapter. What
happens if youve upgradedor are planning to upgradeto a router
based on the new 802.11ac standard? Then I think the better bet is to
switch to an 802.11ac adapter.
You should also remember your other option: a hardwired ethernet
connection. If you dont mind stringing cable, a hardwired connection
will be faster than any wireless setup.
But if youre buying a new gaming notebook and the seller oers the
Killer NIC as a modestly priced upgrade (say, no more than $30), its
denitely worth the money.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Googles
Chromecast: The
Internet on your TV
BY SUSIE OCHS

GOOGLES 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 dont work the same
way. The Chromecasts rst advantage is priceits 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 its still easy: First, plug the Chromecast into a free HDMI port on
your TV. Most people will need to connect the included Micro-USB
cable to the Chromecast and then plug the other end into a USB port

on the TV or into the supplied power adapter to plug into the wall.
Then you visit a website on your Android device or in the Chrome
browser on your Mac or PC, where youre prompted to download
another small Chromecast app to complete the setup.

Controlling the Chromecast

The software to control the Chromecast consists of names you most
likely already have on your phone, tablet, or computer: Chrome, Netflix, YouTube, and Googles own iTunes Store-like Play Movies & TV and
Play Music. Casting a tab from the Chrome browser on your Mac or
PC requires a Chrome
extension called Google
Cast, which adds the
Google Chromecast
Chromecast button to
your toolbar. The idea is
PROS:
Low cost
that you control the
Chromecast using the
Works with Android, iOS, Chrome OS,
same apps that you
Mac, and Windows
already employ.
Lets you put nearly any online video on
Why does Google call
your TV
it casting instead of
CONS:
streaming? Once you
No iOS setup at launch, but Google says
tell the Chromecast
its coming
what you would like to
Youll get crashes and errors if your Wi-Fi
watch, it goes out on
network isnt fast enough
the Internet and retrieves that material
BOTTOM LINE:
your device isnt inIt needs more Android and iOS app supvolved in the streaming
port, but its a great value for YouTube
end at all.
junkies, Netflix acionados, and crossThe Chromecast can
platform households.
turn on your TV and
PRICE:
select the right input,
$35
without your going
anywhere near the TV

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
remote. It employs an HDMI
feature called CEC, or Consumer
Electronics Control, to turn on
your TV and choose the
appropriate HDMI input when
you tell your control device you
intend to use the Chromecast.
TV manufacturers all have
their own trade names for CEC.
You may need to go poking
around your TVs menus and
turn on all the link features that
you nd.
Every website I tried in Chrome
on my Mac played on the
Chromecast. You can even watch
locally stored videos by playing
them in the Chrome browser,
provided they dont use QuickTime or Silverlight.
The Chromecast doesnt have
security features of its own
you cant set a password for it.
That means you must handle any
security on the network side.
Right now the Chromecast
doesnt do anything the Apple TV cant do, but its implementation of
YouTube is better, and its support for content from the Google Play
store makes it a no-brainer if youre invested in that ecosystem. Its
cross-platform support also makes it ideal for households with a variety of devices. And nally, its price makes it almost an impulse buy.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K

You can start a

video from the
Netflix app on
one device, and
pick up control
from another
device.

Dell XPS 27 Touch:

Looks are everything
BY SARAH JACOBSSON PUREWAL

DELLS XPS 27 Touch all-in-one (go.pcworld.com/dellxps27touch)

packs a speedy new Haswell CPU under its hood. Specically, our
review unitabout $2100 at the time of writingsports a quad-core
Intel Core i7-4770S processor; 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory; a discrete
video card (Nvidias 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 its more than 2.5 times faster than our reference PC,

The dualarticulated
hinge enables
you to adjust
the displays
height as well
as its angle.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
Acers Aspire U. Its also signicantly faster than Vizios CA27T-B1. The
displays on those models are limited to 1920 by 1080 pixels (versus
the Touchs 2560-by-1440 resolution), but theyre also much less
expensive ($1000 and $1550, respectively).
The Dells score places the XPS 27 Touch solidly in the upper half
of all the desktop systems weve tested under WorldBench 8.1,
though its nowhere near the custom-built gaming rigs weve
evaluated (Primordial Computers over-the-top, quad-Titan
Medusa hit 385; Micro Expresss single-GPU MicroFlex 47B scored
421). And the XPS 27 will
satisfy the gamers in your
familyif their expectaDell XPS 27 Touch
tions arent too hard-core.
PROS:
In Dirt Showdown, with the
High-quality touchscreen
games resolution at 1024
2560 by 1440 resolution
by 768 pixels and image
mSATA
SSD
cache

quality set to low, the XPS

27 delivered a strong 125.7
Great
overall
performance

frames per second. (Our

Thunderbolt/Mini DisplayPort
reference PC ran Dirt Showdown at just 47.5 fps.)
CONS:
As bets a Windows 8era
Skin tones look oversaturated
AIO, the XPS 27 has a
No Blu-ray drive
10-point touchscreen
Unlabeled front-panel buttons
display, and its the best
touchscreen Ive seen from
BOTTOM LINE:
Dell. Its extremely bright,
Though we have a few minor quibbles
and images and text look
with the Dell XPS 27 Touchs design, we
fantastically crisp and clear.
think this is the best all-in-one on the
Multitouch gestures are
market today.
smooth and easy to perform. But colors, especially
PRICE:
skin tones, have a tendency
$2099
to look oversaturated.
While the media card

Dell XPS 27 Touch

Desktop Worldbench 8.1 score
Asus Aspire U

100

(Reference)

Dell XPS 27
Touch

262

Vizio
CA27T-B1

179

50

100

150

200

250

300

(Longer bars indicate higher performance)

The Dell XPS 27 Touch produced a high desktop Worldbench 8.1 score (for an allin-one, that is).

reader and two USB 3.0 ports are conveniently on the left side of the
bezel, other portsHDMI (in and out), Thunderbolt/Mini DisplayPort,
gigabit ethernet, and four additional USB 3.0 portsare on the back,
obscured by the stand, and hard to reach.
I also dislike the four touch-sensitive buttons on the front lower
left corner. A proximity sensor causes these unlabeled buttons to
light up when you hover your nger over them, though the only one
you might use regularly is the Eject button for the DVD burner.
Otherwise, the Dell XPS 27 Touch is an exquisite all-in-one.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Maingears Shift Super Stock

Z87: PC gaming decadence
BY ALEX WAWRO
THIS $8000 HIGH-PERFORMANCE hot rodMaingears Shift Super

Stock Z87 (go.pcworld.com/shiftssZ87)has a long list of ultrapremium components, all water-cooled and whisper-quiet.
Heading the components list is Intels Core i7-4770K CPUthe pinnacle of the new Haswell family of chipsoverclocked to an insane
4.7GHz. Youll also nd three video cards based on Nvidias best GPU,
the GeForce GTX Titan, each with 6GB of GDDR5 memory, plus 16GB of
DDR3/2400 system memory, and four of the best 256GB SSDs weve
testedSamsungs 840 Procongured as RAID 0 for blistering speed.

The Shift Z87s Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 435 means its
more than four times faster than our reference system, the modest
Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13. In fact, its the fastest desktop PC weve
ever encountered. Although that overall score is only modestly higher than the 421 of MicroFlexs signicantly cheaper MicroExpress
47B, the Shift Z87 blew the competition out of the water when we
played the latest games at very high resolution.
More: The PCWorld Lab team hooked the Shift Z87 up to three HD
monitors and played Crysis 3 at a resolution of 5760 by 1440 pixels,
all while achieving a consistent frame rate of 28 fps. That proves that
all this power can aord
you a real competitive
advantage when playing
Maingear Shif Super
games that challenge your
Stock Z87
situational awareness.
PROS:
This machine also placed
rst in nearly every one of
Triple Titan video cards
the productivity-oriented
Extreme performance
benchmarks that make up
Excellent case design
the WorldBench 8.1 suite,
including PCMark 7 ProducCONS:
tivity and each of the
Side panel can be dicult to remove
media editing and encod Extreme price tag
ing tests we run.
The Shift Z87s signature
BOTTOM LINE:
chassis orients the motherThis incredibly expensive performance
board 90 degrees to the
desktop packs premium components
right so that the ports and
and water-cools them to deliver
fans normally on the back
benchmark-destroying performance
of a PC are on top. This
while remaining whisper-quiet.
arrangement leaves heatgenerating components,
PRICE:
such as the video cards,
$8000
hanging from their brackets. It also reduces the

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
Maingear Shif Super Stock Z87
Desktop Worldbench 8.1 score
Asus Aspire U

100

(Reference)

Acer Predator
AG3620-UR12

227

Digital Storm
Virtue

399

Micro Express
MicroFlex 47B

421

Main Gear Shift

Super Stock Z87

435
0

100

200

300

400

500

(Longer bars indicate higher performance)

The Maingear Shift Super Stock Z87 turned in an exceptional desktop WorldBench 8.1 score.

stress that the very heavy Titan video cards place on the PCIe slots.
This design is complemented by a proprietary open-loop, liquidcooling system that chills not just the CPU but also the motherboards voltage regulators to allow for higher overclocking.
The Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 motherboard delivers pretty much every
connection option your heart could desire: a PS/2 jack, two USB 2.0
ports, six USB 3.0 ports, and two gigabit ethernet jacks. Each video
card has an array of outputs. We could go on...
Most of us cant drop eight grand on a PC, no matter how powerful.
But the Maingear Shift Z87 sits at the apex of personal computing.
P H OTO G R A P H Y RO B E RT C A R D I N

Asuss ET2702: A good,

midpriced all-in-one PC
BY SARAH JACOBSSON PUREWAL
ASUSS NEW ET2702 (go.pcworld.com/et2702) is the companys rst
27-inch all-in-one to sport a quad HD displaywith a resolution of
2560 by 1440 pixels, instead of the usual 1920 by 1080 pixels that full
HD oers. But theres more to the Asus ET2702 than just its screen.
Our review model came congured 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 (AMDs 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 its about $200 cheaper than the $2099 Dell

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
XPS 27 Touch (go.pcworld.com/xps27touch), which incorporates a
lower-voltage version of the Core i7 processor.
The ET2702 earned a good but not great mark of 174 in our Desktop
WorldBench 8.1 tests, 5 points less than the CA27T-B1, and 88 points
behind the XPS 27 Touch.
Still, the ET2702s superior graphicsdue in part to its AMD
Radeon HD 8890A cardmake it the best choice of the three for
playing games. In our Dirt Showdown test (at 1024 by 768 pixels,
with low visual-quality settings), the ET2702 turned in a frame
rate of 131.7 frames per second, versus the Dells 125.7 fps and
the Vizios 54.4 fps.

Asus ET2702
PROS:
2560-by-1440-pixel IPS display

Blu-ray player
802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter
CONS:
No SSD cache

Uncomfortable mouse and

keyboard

Confusing display controls

BOTTOM LINE:
Though the ET2702 has a very attractive display, its lack of an SSD cache
leaves it an also-ran in our benchmark
competition.
PRICE:
$ 1899

Show me the cache

The ET2702s most noticeable weakness is its storage
subsystem: Whereas Dell
and Vizio supplement their
machines hard drives with
a 32GB solid-state drive to
handle caching, the Asus
all-in-one does not. You can
obtain an SSD with a capacity of up to 128GB on other
versions of the ET2702,
however.
The ET2702s touchscreen
display delivers crisp, clear
text and images, and bright,
accurate colors. Touch is
especially nice on the
ET2702: The all-in-one handles multitouch gestures
smoothly and accurately,
and the systems bezel-free,
edge-to-edge glass design

Asus ET2702 All-in-One PC

Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score
Asus Aspire U A5
600U-UB13

100

(Reference)

Dell XPS 27
Touch

262

Vizio
CA27T-B1

179

Asus
ET2702

174

50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450

The ET2702s lack of an SSD cache for its main hard drive led to a poorer WorldBench score than its Dell and Vizio rivals earned.

makes performing Windows 8 gestures such as swiping from the side

or the top of the screen to access menus much easier. I also enjoyed
watching HD streaming video on the ET2702s screen, though I did
notice some visual artifacts and blurred details.
Four labels situated in the lower-right corner of the screen identify
touch-sensitive nubs below the screen for mode, volume up/down,
menu, and brightness up/downbut theyre inconsistently sensitive
and theyre not intuitive. Tapping the volume nub, for example,
changed the screens brightness.
The wireless mouse is too small and square, and the keyboard sports
soft, superslick keys. The adjustable stand barely tilts the screen 15
degrees, and the plastic door covering the side ports feels as if it will
break within the rst ve uses.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Digital
Storms
midsize
tower Virtue
delivers
superior
power
BY ALEX COCILOVA

THE PRICEY ($2200) Digital Storm Virtue (go.pcworld.com/virtue)

packs an unlocked Intel Core i7-4770K CPU from Intels new Haswell
processor family, 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and Nvidias GeForce
GTX 780 graphics card into a low-key steel-and-brushed-aluminum
case. The result is a compact gaming rig with a Desktop WorldBench
8.1 score of 399just shy of the 421 posted by the cheaper ($1599)
Micro Express MicroFlex 47B (go.pcworld.com/micro flex47b). How to
explain the performance dierence? Though neither manufacturer
overclocked its system, Micro Express splurged on a 512GB SSD,
whereas Digital Storm opted for a 120GB SSD. As a result, the MicroFlex performed much better on our productivity benchmarks.

Modesty
might have
been a better
name for this
PC, given its
unassuming
enclosure.

At a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, the Windows 8based Virtue

delivered a 3DMark Cloud Gate score of 26214 versus the MicroFlexs
24864. With real games (at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution and visual
quality set to Ultra), the Virtue ran Dirt Showdown at 57.3 frames per
second, versus the MicroFlex 47Bs 41.4 fps. On BioShock Innite at
the same settings, the Virtue sustained a frame rate of 55.4 fps as
against the 47Bs 46.9 fps.
Digital Storm achieves an impressive level of quietness, thanks to its
Corsair H100i liquid-cooling system, which consists of a CPU water
block and a 240mm radiator mounted to the top of the case.
Despite its unassuming dimensions (17.7 by 17.7 by 8.3 inches), the
Virtue has plenty of room for expansion inside. If you want higher
frame rates with games, throw in a second graphics card; the systems
1050-watt power supply provides more than
enough juice to support
Digital Storm Virtue
such a conguration.
Our test Virtue came
PROS:
with
a 1TB, 7200-rpm
Water- and fan-cooled interior stays cool
WD Caviar Black hard
Powerful components
drive and a 120GB Cor Plenty of room to add more components
sair Neutron GTX SSD,
leaving room for one
CONS:
additional 3.5-inch
Boring, plain case
drive and three more
Hefty price tag
SSDs. A Blu-ray player/
DVD burner occupies
BOTTOM LINE:
one of the 5.25-inch
Powerful components and room to grow
drive bays. The radiator
make the Virtue a great gaming desktop if
mounted on the top
the price tag doesnt scare you away.
of the case partially
blocks access to the
PRICE:
second bay.
$ 2200
Digital Storm provides two USB 3.0

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
The Virtue looks
much more
interesting on
the inside.

ports, along with microphone and headphone jacks, on the front of

the machine. On the back you get four more USB 3.0 ports, four USB
2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, S/PDIF out, and the usual analog audio
ports. The video cards mounting bracket has one port each for duallink DVI, single-link DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort.
The Virtues high-quality components enable it to achieve a level of
performance typical of machines twice its size. Its dimensions and
motherboard wont let you go beyond two video cards, but it delivers
solid performance on todays games with the one card it has now.
Gamers will love the Virtue, even if their wallets wont.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

HP Envy
700-030qe
has the
components
that matter
BY ALEX COCILOVA

YOUD 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 componentsincluding a powerful Intel Core
i7-4770 CPUto run with that crowd, despite its much lower price.
HP also gives this PC 12GB of DDR3/1600 memory, Nvidias 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.

HPs Envy 700030qe isnt the

sexiest rig youll
ever see. The
interior isnt
exactly
awe-inspiring.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
My enthusiasm for the Envy 700-030qe waned a bit on the gaming
front. Its Nvidia GeForce GTX 645 is a decidedly middle-of-the-road
video cardan OEM model that has slightly better specs than the
GeForce GTX 650 that youll nd at retail.
The GTX 645 doesnt support Nvidias SLI dual-GPU technology, and
its motherboard has just one PCIe x16 slot anyway. The Envy 700030qes dinky 460-watt power supply unit might get in the way of a
future video card upgrade; but for $70 more, you can opt for a 600watt PSU instead.
In Dirt Showdown, at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 and visual quality
at Ultra, the Envy turned in an unplayable frame rate of 21 frames per
second. Digital Storms Virtue, outtted with a top-of-the-line Nvidia
GeForce GTX 780 card,
churned out 86 fps at the
same settings. But when we
HP Envy 700-030qe
dialed the resolution down
to 1024 by 768 and reduced
PROS:
visual quality to Low, the HP
Powerful fourth-generation Intel
managed a creditable 134.5
processor
fps (we consider 60 fps to be
Quiet, sleek, and compact
the minimum playable frame
Comes with a Blu-ray burner
rate for games). The system is
pleasantly quiet, too.
CONS:
The Envy 700-030qe oers
One 256GB SSD for storage
both a Blu-ray drive and an
Middle-of-the-road video card
increasingly rare Blu-ray burn One PCIe x16 slot (occupied)
er. With its onboard 802.11n
Wi-Fi adapter, you wont have
BOTTOM LINE:
to hardwire the computer to
The HP Envy 700-030qe is an aboveyour router (or buy an adaptaverage, reasonably priced computer.
er to take advantage of a
superfast 802.11ac router).
PRICE:
The back has two USB 2.0
$ 1450
and two USB 3.0 ports; two
more of each appear in the

HP Envy 700-030qe
Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score
Asus Aspire U A5
600U-UB13

100

(Reference)

Gateway
DX4870-UB2C

153

Acer Predator
AG3620-UR12

227

Acer Predator
AG3620-UR12

399

HP Envy
700-030qe

352
0

50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450

Despite its modest price of $1450, the Envy 700-030qe delivered a very strong
Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 352.

front, along with a media-card reader and headphone and mic jacks.
The bundled USB mouse and keyboard (wireless options cost $40
more) are about what youd expect: The mouse has a nice curve to t
the hand, and the keyboard is a basic black unit with no backlighting.
The keyboard does include dedicated buttons for controlling mediaplayer software.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION

Duty Travel Management System (DTMS)

The Ministry for Finance in Malta is conducting

market research on the availability of a Travel
Management System and invites interested
parties to submit information on such systems.
A soft copy of the document Duty Travel
Management System RFI (Ref: DTMS/01/2013)
may be downloaded from MFIN website: http://
mfin.gov.mt/en/Library/Pages/tenders.aspx
at no charge. A hard copy may be obtained
free of charge by sending an email request to
cio.mfin@gov.mt.
Closing date for the submissions is noon (CET)
of Friday, 8th November 2013.

For further information contact:

MFIN Office of the CIO
Tel: (+356) 25998 226
Email: cio.mfin@gov.mt

www.mfin.gov.mt

The Gateway
DX4870-UB2C is
a solid value for
students, households,
or small and medium
businesses on tight
budgets.

Acers aordable workhorse

Gateway desktop
BY YARDENA ARAR
A MIDSIZE TOWER PC, Acers Gateway DX4870-UB2C (go.pcworld.
com/dx4870) delivers solidbut not spectacularproductivity performance and 1TB of hard disk storage for a modest $550; however,
you must provide a monitor, and headphones or speakers for audio.
That prole makes it a good candidate for a student or anyone else
on a budget who already has a display and audio gear left over from a
previous system. In fact, the DX4870-UB2C comes with an analog VGA
port to handle the older LCD or (gasp!) CRT, and an HDMI port to

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
accommodate a newer digital display (but not DVI or DisplayPort).
Outtted with an Intel Core i5-3330 quad-core CPU, 8GB of RAM
(expandable to 32GB), integrated Intel graphics, a 1TB (7200-rpm)
hard disk, and Windows 8, the DX4870-UB2C earned a respectable
mark of 153 on PC WorldBench 8.1.
The systems lack of both a discrete graphics card and a solid-state
drive probably accounts for its weak test results in le compression,
storage, GPU-accelerated image editing, and gaming. The DX4870UB2C nished in the middle of the pack on most other benchmarks,
and it should capably handle any routine student or small-business
tasks. Its power consumption was modest.
The DX4870-UB2C has a top that curves upward toward the front,
ending in a protruding
edge aording easy
access to microphone
Acer Gateway DX4870-UB2C
and headphone jacks,
a memory card reader,
PROS:
Aordable
price
tag
and a couple of USB

2.0 ports. The power

Respectable benchmark performance
toggle itself is adjacent
Expansion opportunities
in the center of the
top edge.
CONS:
Beneath this ledge,
Relies on integrated graphics
youll nd two covered
Poor gaming performance
baysone containing
Mediocre (and nonwireless) PS/2 mouse
a DVD burner that supand keyboard
ports multiple formats
(DVD-RAM/R/RW),
BOTTOM LINE:
and the other standing
This svelte, aordable desktop capably
empty and awaiting
handles everyday tasks.
expansion.
In the back are six
PRICE:
more USB ports (two
$ 550
USB 2.0 and two 3.0),
the aforementioned

Gateway DX4870-UB2C
Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score
Asus Aspire U
A5600U-UB13

100

(Reference)

Vizio
CA24T-B0

75

Acer Predator
AG3620-UR12

227

Gateway
DX4870-UB2C

153

50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450

The DX4870-UB2C earned a respectable but middling score of 153 on our

WorldBench 8.1 tests for desktop systems.

display connections, a gigabit ethernet port, and additional audio-in

and -out ports. The motherboard comes with four expansion slots:
three supporting older PCI Express x1 cards and one for the faster PCI
Express x16 add-ons. You also get Bluetooth support and 802.11n
Wi-Fi support on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.
The optical mouse and keyboard, which are wired, plug in to oldstyle dedicated PS2 ports located on the top of the back. Given the
choice, I would have preferred wireless peripherals or at least USB.
The keyboard felt cheesy, with somewhat wobbly action. But
streamed video looked ne on a high-def HDMI-attached monitor,
and the audio sounded great on a set of borrowed headphones.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Lenovos
Yoga 11S
strikes a
compelling
pose
BY BRAD CHACOS

COMING JUST A few months after the Windows RTbased 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 PCWorlds benchmarks. On the plus side, the Yoga 11Ss solid-state drive delivers
lickety-split boot and wake times.
Ivy Bridge wasnt designed with superthin hybrid systems in mind.
The underside of the Yoga 11S becomes noticeably warm when youre
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 stay alive for an extended period, giving up the ghost after

The Yoga 11S

oers enough
oomph to
get through
the average
workday.

4 hours, 33 minutes in our battery test.

The Yoga 11S is a winner in the design
department. Like its predecessor, it sports a
hinge that lets you flip the display 360
degrees. Aside from the tablet and laptop
congurations, this sturdy machine can work
in tent mode and in stand mode (in which the
form resembles a 90-degree clamshell, but
with the keys facing down).
The 11.6-inch IPS display impresses with vivid colors and deep
blacks. The 1366 by 768 resolution is a bummer in tablet mode, but it
holds up well during laptop usage on account of the small screen.
Weighing 2.7 pounds and measuring 0.67 inch at its thickest part,
this hybrid device falls rmly in the notebook rst class, but using it
as a tablet doesnt feel
awkwardexcept
when your ngers
Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S
bump the keyboard,
PROS:
which sits bare at the
Excellent all-around design
bottom of the portable
and ergonomics
when you put it in tab Vivid IPS display
let mode.
Full version of Windows 8
Speaking of the nonCONS:
backlit island-style
Mediocre battery life
keyboard, it provides
Middling performance
good spacing, a solid
Bulkier than a standard tablet
tactile feel, and a
decent amount of key
BOTTOM LINE:
travel. My only real
Oers a major improvement over the
qualm is that the keys
original ARM-powered Windows RT Yoga,
sit a little too shallow
but falls short of being the ultimate hybrid.
and close to the deck.
PRICE:
The buttonless click$999
pad and the ten-point
touchscreen both

The Yoga 11S

has a hinge that
lets you twist
the display in
several ways.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11s

Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score
Asus VivoBook
S550CA

100

(reference)

Dell Latitude
6430u

307

Lenovo IdeaPad
Yoga 11S

243

50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450

The 11S posted middling results in our test suite (baseline is 100, higher scores
are better).

support Windows 8 gesture controls and are wonderfully responsive.

No hybrid has ever come so close to marrying a laptops ergonomics and performance with a reasonably portable 11-inch design.
If Lenovo ever decides to update the IdeaPad Yoga 11S with one of
Intels power-sipping fourth-generation Core processors, the result
could be convertible perfection.

Lenovo Helix:
Versatile but expensive
BY YARDENA ARAR
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

Separate the
Helixs display
from its keyboard, and
you have a fully functional
Windows 8 tablet.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
WorldBench 8.1 score of 285. The Helix also earned a PCMark 7 storage
test score of 5308, one of the best results weve 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 Helixs longevity dropped to just 2 hours when operating as a tablet with a single battery.
Outtted with an Intel Core i5-3337U mobile CPU (based on 2012s
Ivy Bridge architecture) and 4GB of DDR3/1333 memory that it must
share with the Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics hardware, our review
unit suered most in gaming tests.
The keyboard boasts pleasing contours and snappy action. For pointing, you get a responsive touchpad with
multitouch support, a
Lenovo ThinkPad Helix
red eraserhead joystick
PROS:
button, and of course
Works as a touchscreen laptop or a
the digitizing touchWindows 8 tablet
screen. Separating the
SSD speeds up frequently performed
keyboard takes only a
operations
second or two and does
Dual-battery arrangement delivers up
not require a reboot. In
to 6.5 hours of life
our tests the touchCONS:
screen responded well
Subpar audio
to swipes.
High-res screen can make small type
The systems audio is
dicult to read
very disappointing:
Pricey considering its 11.6-inch display
Even when I turned it
all the way up, I could
BOTTOM LINE:
barely hear the voice of
Able to serve as a laptop or a Windows 8
Skype callers, and
tablet, the ThinkPad Helix is pleasingly
music on YouTube vidversatilebut its also very expensive.
eos was faint. And
PRICE:
although the Helix
$1427
maintains the sub-0.75inch thickness appro-

Lenovo ThinkPad Helix

Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score
Asus VivoBook
S550CA

100

(reference)

Dell Latitude
6430u

307

Lenovo ThinkPad
Helix

285

50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450

Lenovos Helix performed respectably in tests (baseline is 100, higher scores

are better).

priate for an ultraportable, its heavy for its display size, weighing 3.6
pounds with the keyboard and 1.8 pounds without it.
Lenovo provides a plastic stylus, but I didnt enjoy using it because it
was imprecisea real issue on the 1920-by-1080-pixel widescreen IPS
display. That resolution on an 11.6-inch display made for good-looking
videos on YouTube and Skype, but it also resulted in especially tiny
type on many websites.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Helix deserves kudos for its innovative design,
and a business user in search of a laptop-tablet convertible with good
performance might nd the high price tag palatable.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Moto X: Most convenient

Android phone ever
BY ARMANDO RODRIGUEZ
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: Notications 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 Googles voice-processing software understood my various

Motorola and Google

worked to optimize
Android for the Moto X,
and it feels faster than
many quad-core phones.

queries even in noisy environments.

The phone is available in white or
black in-store, but if youre on AT&T
you can customize it through the
Moto Maker website and have it
shipped to you. (Other carriers will follow shortly.) Note that the 32GB version is available only through Moto
Maker, so for now youll need to settle for the 16GB model or wait
until Moto Maker is ready for your carrier.
Hard-core Android fans will sco at the 4.7-inch, 1280-by-720
AMOLED display and the 1.7GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor.
Motorola and Google worked to optimize Android for this hardware,
however, and the Moto
X feels faster than
many of the quad-core
Motorola Moto X
phones Ive used in the
PROS:
past year. It ships with
Excellent design
Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean;
Active Display and Touchless Controls
Motorola promises a
are useful
timely update to 4.3.
Above-average battery life
Motorola rates the
CONS:
nonremovable battery
Ships with an older version of Android
at 24 hours of mixed
Camera is so-so
use. In four days, I had
Customization options available only on
to charge the phone
AT&T at launch
only twice. If youre
constantly on your
BOTTOM LINE:
Moto X playing games,
The Moto X proves that you dont need
however, I can see the
cutting-edge specs to make a great
battery running dry in
Android phone.
4 to 5 hours.
PRICE:
I tested the Verizon
$200
version of the phone
and was satised with

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

The Moto Xs curved back rests gently in your hand.

its download speeds and call quality. One person I called during my
tests told me that I sounded as if I were standing right next to them
even though I was 2903 miles away.
Although the Moto Xs 10-megapixel camera certainly surpasses
those available on Motorolas previous smartphones, its photos are
nothing to write home about.
I have my reservations about the Moto Xs older version of Android,
and I question how well the X8 system architecture will perform a
year from now, but Motorola and Google seem to have a winner with
their latest handset.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K

Photo Ninja is an
excellent Raw converter
BY WILLIAM PORTER
USED ALONE OR in conjunction with other photo editing and man-

agement tools, Photo Ninja is a capable program.

Although it can handle JPEGs and TIFFs, Photo Ninja is designed to
make the most of Raw les. Compared with renderings from Adobe
Camera Raw (Lightroom) and Aperture, Photo Ninjas default renderings in my tests typically had ner 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 Id occasionally
see in Lightroom or Aperture.
Sometimes, the Photo Ninja rendering exhibited ner detail but also
less visible noise than the Lightroom rendering, an impressive result.

Photo Ninja has a

minimalist look
and feel, plus a
range of processing options.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
In this regard, Photo Ninjas pedigree shows.
This application comes from PictureCode,
producer of Noise Ninja, the choice of many
photographers for removing digital noise.
In addition to oering basic conversion tools
(exposure, white balance, sharpening and noise
reduction, black-and-white conversion, cropping), Photo Ninja corrects chromatic aberration and adjusts for lens and/or perspective distortion.
Photo Ninja is only at version 1.1, however, and currently it lacks a
lot of features. It cant make spot corrections (removing blemishes
or red-eye) or local adjustments (brightening a brides dress or
deepening the blue of
the sky). It has no artsy
lters. Its browser
PictureCode Photo Ninja
allows you to nd
PROS:
images, but its organi Excellent Raw converter
zational tools are
Noise Ninja 3 noise reduction
primitive.
Smart lighting exposure does a
Some aspects of the
remarkable job
program work in novel
ways. For example,
CONS:
Rudimentary
le
browser
within the Exposure

and Detail tool group,

Cant upload images to popular social
and photo-sharing sites
the single Illumination
No clone, red-eye, or local
slider can do two very
adjustment tools
dierent things. In one
mode, the slider brightBOTTOM LINE:
ens the image; in the
Photo Ninja is a capable photo-processing
other mode, the same
app, alone or in conjunction with other
movement to the same
photo-management and editing tools.
slider does not apprePRICE:
ciably brighten the
$129
image. The arrangement works well, but I

In comparison,
Photo Ninjas default
renderings typically
had ner detail and
more vivid color.

Lightroom

Photo Ninja

found it dicult to grasp, and Im still not sure its a great idea.
Fortunately Photo Ninja can serve as an external editor alongside
Lightroom, Photoshop, or Aperture. You might want to let Photo
Ninja perform the initial conversion and then go elsewhere for detail
or local adjustments. I recommend using another program to manage images, as well. Note that version 1 of Photo Ninja also provides
no support for uploading to Facebook, Flickr, Google+, or other
favorite photo-sharing sites.
If youre a Raw shooter, give Photo Ninja a (free) trial run. This software isnt ready to replace Aperture as my go-to Raw converter, but I
have added it to my workflow. Its too good not to have around.

Photo Ninjas
default conversion of a
dicult exposure turned
out strikingly
better than
Lightroom
4.4s version.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Fast network-attached storage

for business and pleasure
BY JON L. JACOBI
IF YOURE AN acionado 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-denition 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 thats similar to Win-

The TS-469 Pro

has four drive
bays, which
may be overkill
for hometheater use.

dows Media Center. And for Web browsing, the QNAP uses Google
Chrome. Both apps are installed as part of QNAPs HD Station launch
application. You can also install a YouTube player within HD Station.
To use any of the HD Station apps, you attach an HDMI-capable TV
or display to the TS-469 Pros HDMI output, and add a USB keyboard
and mouse. XBMC will appear and let you browse all the content stored
on the TS-469 Pro and any other servers it nds on your network.
The TS-469 Pro consists of a four-bay box and an LCD screen
that lets you set up, monitor, and manage a basic array conguration. The NAS device packs a 2.13GHz dual-core Intel Atom CPU
and 1GB of on-board
memory (expandable to
3GB). Ports are plentiful,
QNAP TS-469 Pro
with one USB 2.0 port on
the front and four on the
PROS:
back, and two USB 3.0
Very fast
ports and two eSATA ports
Brick-house construction
on the back.
XBMC implementation for homeNetwork communications
theater applications
are courtesy of a pair of
gigabit ethernet ports that
CONS:
support both failover and
Some software components are
aggregation, and you can
overly complex
attach a USB Wi-Fi dongle
Very expensive
should you wish to use the
box wirelessly. In addition to
BOTTOM LINE:
the aforementioned HDMI
This fast, feature-loaded NAS box can
port, a VGA port lets you
function as a direct-attached multihook up older displays.
media playback system for your home
For some reason, QNAP
entertainment center.
populated our test model
with an oddball arrangePRICE:
ment of drives that
$800
resulted in a massive
waste of capacity, but

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

Ports on the TS-469 Pro are plentiful,

with a total of ve USB 2.0 ports, two
USB 3.0 ports, and two eSATA ports.

even so, it was still quite fast. The box wrote our 10GB mix of les
and folders at 69.9 megabytes per second and read them at 39.5
MBps. It wrote our single 10GB le at 92.9 MBps and read it at
110.8 MBps. That already-good performance would have undoubtedly increased with faster drives.
The QNAP TS-469 Pro is a best-of-breed NAS box for small
businesses and workgroups, though at $800 its certainly pricey.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

MobileLite Wireless streams

multimedia, charges devices

BY JON L. JACOBI

SMALL, LIGHT, AND versatile, Kingstons 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 MobileLites
Wi-Fi network, and use Kingstons Android or iOS app, or a DLNA client,
to stream any media available on attached drives or SD cards. Kingston
says that the unit doesnt 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

Kingstons MobileLite
streams most media
formats.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
MobileLite like any other network drive and access les that way, too.
The MobileLite can also connect to and pass through a Wi-Fi Internet connection. The unit continues to function when connected to
your PCs USB port, although you cant access the attached storage
directly via Windows Explorer unless you turn the MobileLite o.
Many devices turn o automatically when plugged in to a USB port. I
prefer having the choice.
The MobileLite will stream most common media formats (though not
MKV in my hands-on testing), but youll be limited by the operating system youre using. An Android or iOS smartphone, for instance, wont
have the large screen and speakers that a tablet running the same OS
will; and streaming to a Windows PC or a Mac should
deliver an even more enjoyKingston MobileLite
able experience. Streaming
Wireless
1080p video was smooth up
PROS:
to about 2 megabytes per
second, and battery life
Can charge the mobile device
its attached to
was a tad shy of 4 hours.
Can stream media from USB drives
CrystalDiskMark rated a USB
and flash-memory cards
flash drive attached to the
Supports SDHC cards
MobileLite at about 26 MBps
in sequential reading (par for
CONS:
the course with USB 2.0).
No internal storage of its own
Kingstons $55 MobileLite
is a great little Wi-Fi streamBOTTOM LINE:
er for the price. Its far less
As a lightweight device for sharing
expensive, if a bit less convemultimedia content on the go,
nient, than competitors such
Kingstons MobileLite delivers,
as the Seagate Wireless Pro
though it lacks internal storage.
or the Corsair Voyager Air,
which have internal hard
PRICE:
drives. That it can also
$ 55
charge or run your cell
phone or tablet is gravy.

The 3-inch-wide
Canon PowerShot N
oers unique
artistic options.

Canon PowerShot N is
a pint-size powerhouse
BY DERRICK STORY
THE DIMINUTIVE Canon PowerShot N (go.pcworld.com/powershotn)
will t 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 cameras features.
Canon packs a fair amount of horsepower in a tiny package. It focuses on areas where smartphones typically dont excel, such as optical
reach, an articulated touchscreen, and novel video options.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
The PowerShot Ns 8X optical zoom lens provides an equivalent focal
range of 28mm to 224mm. When you zoom out to maximum magnication, 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 oers three metering patterns,
exposure compensation, fast autofocusing, an LED flash, a self-timer, a
stereo microphone, and a mono speaker. It saves images and video to
a MicroSD card.
The 2.8-inch foldout LCD touchscreen has plenty of sensitivity,
allowing for easy operation via nger taps. The screen truly shines,
however, when youre
composing images at
odd angles: You can
Canon PowerShot N
hold the camera high
PROS:
over your head, place
8X optical zoom lens
it on the ground, or
extend your arm
Tilting screen for creative compositions
sideways.
Built-in Wi-Fi with mobile companion
When you put the
app available for free
PowerShot N in Creative
CONS:
Shot mode, the camera
$300 price tag makes it an investment,
shufles elements such
not an impulse buy
as the exposure, point
Small size can make it dicult to hold
of focus, tint, and white
securely
balance. You pick the
Very few buttonsLCD controls most
elements you like and
functions
discard the rest. Shoot
the scene again, and
BOTTOM LINE:
youll see a dierent set
Tiny but powerful point-and-shoot can
of images.
produce creative, unexpected images.
Of course, no camera
PRICE:
can compete with a
$300
smartphone if it cant
quickly post images

online. Once you pair the PowerShot N with a mobile device, such as
an iPad mini, via a free app, you connect it to the device by pushing a
button. Your pictures appear on the devices camera roll, and from
there you can share them. The camera automatically looks for Wi-Fi
networks; if none are available, it creates its own access point.
In addition to shooting 1080p video, the camera oers interesting
video options. Hybrid Auto mode, for example, captures video bits
during the course of a days shooting and then builds a digest movie
recapping it allwith impressive results.
Given the $300 price, casual shooters will probably stick with their
smartphones camera. But in the right hands, the PowerShot N can
breathe new life into everyday images.

The rear view

shows the
camera
connecting
to an iPad
mini.

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

HPs Envy 120 e-All-in-One

is a motorized luxury inkjet
BY JON L. JACOBI

CONNOISSEURS OF COOL tools will appreciate HPs $250 Envy 120 e-All-

in-One (go.pcworld.com/hpenvy120e) multifunction inkjet printer not

only for its style, but also for its gadgetry: The motorized control panel
automatically lifts and lowers, and the scanner platen is made of transparent glass. However, the MFPs capacity is limited, ink prices are hefty,
and the scanner lacks an automatic document feeder. That said, the
MFP handles the basics well and is a guaranteed conversation starter.
The flatbed scanner is one novelties: You lay a document faceup, and
the scanning element passes over it. And because the top of the unit
is made of transparent glass, you can watch the scanner head glide

across your document. Nearly everything on the Envy 120 is motorized: The control panel swings up to get out of the way when you
print, the output catch swings out, and even the paper-cassette injection is motorized.
Paper-handling features include an 80-sheet input tray. The
25-sheet output device is no typical tray, but rather an arm that
rotates out from underneath the control panel when you print. The
unit has automatic duplexingthat is, it prints on both sides of the
paper by pulling it back in and flipping it over.
The Envy 120 installs easily via either its Wi-Fi or its USB 2.0 interface, and it comes with photo-manipulation software, scanning tools,
and remote-printing software. The control panel is completely touchbased, right down to the
power switch.
The MFP pumps out
HP Envy 120 e-All-in-One
attractive output. Black
pages are dark and sharp,
PROS:
and even draft-mode docu Super-stylish design
ments look decent. Speed
Good performance and print quality
is so-so, but who cares with
Motorized components and transa printer thats so fun to
parent scanner are fun to watch
watch? Monochrome pages
(text and graphics) print at
CONS:
about 5 per minute (ppm)
Expensive black ink
on both the Mac and the
No automatic document feeder
PC; 4-by-6 photos print at
4 ppm on plain paper and 1
BOTTOM LINE:
ppm on glossy stock.
The HP Envy 120 is for those who do
Alas, printing is pricey. For
minimal printing and scanning but
black ink, the standard 60
want to do it in style.
cartridge costs almost 7.5
cents per page (cpp); the
PRICE:
economy cartridge is
$250
6.7 cpp; and the highcapacity 60XL works out to

REVIEWS
& RATINGS

The Envys control

panel automatically
lifts and lowers.

6.2 cpp. The single tricolor cartridge costs 12.7 cpp in standard size,
11 cpp in the economy size, and 9.8 cpp with the 60XL.
If your print load is light, the head-turning Envy 120 e-All-in-One
is a viable option.
P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

How to x
your PCs worst

annoyances

Slow startups. Endless

updates. Undeletable
les. Working with a balky,
uncooperative computer can
be a real headache. These tips
will give you some relief.
By Brad Chacos Illustration by Papercut.fr

Fix PC
annoyances
They say its 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 sweatbut none of
that maters if youre so annoyed
by interface quirks and litle
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 dont chuck
your monitor across
the room! By the
time youre done
reading this article,
your headaches
should be gone.

Fine-tune
UAC

Delete
les

Restore
Start

Disable
locks

Silence
sounds

Improve
boot time

Clean up
menus

Update
sofware

Erase the
new UI

Make User Account Control

less annoying
Microsofts User Account Controlthe box that pops up and
asks Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to
this computer? incessantlyhas noble roots, as its intended to
let you know when software is making administrator-level
tweaks to your operating system. That makes it handy for
thwarting malware, but the pop-ups are annoying, especially if you stick to safe corners of the Web and run
third-party security software.
If you feel condent enough to disable UAC,
doing so is pretty easy. First, open up the
Control Panel by going to Start u Control Panel in any version of Windows
that includes a Start button, or
by heading to Windows 8s
tiled Start screen, typing
Control Panel, and
clicking it.

Fix PC
annoyances

Next, head to User Accounts and Family Safety u User Accounts

u Change User Account Control settings. A new window pops up
with a slider that allows you to ne-tune just how often the
UAC dialog box will appear. Dont like the way the screen dims
when UAC activates? You can ditch that behavioror you can
just turn UAC o completely. (Amusingly, a UAC prompt pops up to
conrm that you approve of the UAC changes.)

This slider lets

you ne-tune
UAC notications.

Delete les that refuse to be deleted

Few things are more irritating than Windows refusing to delete a le or folder because some part of
that item is in use. The superb Unlocker (go.pcworld.
com/unlocker) lets you seize control and snu out
those stubborn locked les.
Now, when youre faced with a tenacious
le, simply right-click it and select Unlocker
from the context menu. If the le is locked
down, Unlocker opens a window that
details the active process (or processes)
and presents you with several options.
Unlocking a process removes the lock while
leaving the process itself active, whereas killing a process shuts it
down completely. Once youve unlocked or killed the pesky processes,
youre free to delete the le or folder in question.
Be careful, though: Killing critical processes and deleting les
willy-nilly is a good way to create an unstable system. Use Unlocker
only to delete those locked les that you know are safe to scrub.

Warning: Although Unlocker is excellent, its default

Quick settings install unwanted toolbars and muck
up your browsers homepage and search provider.
Be sure to pay attention! Select Advanced at the
appropriate screen and uncheck those options,
or youll have a whole new hassle.

Fix PC
annoyances
Bring back the Start buton
Windows 8 ditched the iconic Start button. The Windows
8.1 update, launching at retail on October 18, brings it back,
but that version of the button simply drops you onto the modern-UI
Start screenWindows 8.1 isnt bringing back the Start menu itself.
(Gee, thanks,
Microsoft.)
If youre having a
dicult time learning
to love live tiles, you
can nd a ton of
stellar Start-button
replacement programs, all of which
bring back the Start
button and restore
its full Windows 7
style functionality.
Our favorite options
include Classic Shell
(go.pcworld.com/
clshell), Pokki (go.
pcworld.com/pokki),
and Start8 (go.
pcworld.com/start8).

Heres Start8 in action

on a Windows 8 PC.

Disable password and lock screens

Passwords and lock screens make a lot of sense on laptops
and touchscreen tablets, but on your personal desktop
safe and secure in your hometheyre just speed bumps along the
road to computational bliss. I especially loathe Windows 8s introduction of a lock screen that you have to dismiss every time your
device wakes up, a function that simply doesnt belong on
non-touchscreen PCs (read: most of them).
You can disable
To ditch it, press <Windows>-R on your keyboard to bring up
Windows 8s
user-password
the Run command box. Next, type gpedit.msc and click OK to
protection easily.
bring up the Local Group Policy Editor. Journey to Computer

Fix PC
annoyances
Conguration u Administrative Templates u Control Panel u Personalization in the le tree located on the left side of the window, and then
double-click Do Not Display the Lock Screen. Finally, select the Enabled
radio button and then click OK.
If you want to disable your password, the method varies by OS version.

Remember: Removing your password means that anyone

can sit at your PC and start poking around.

In Windows 7, open the Control Panel and head to User Accounts and
Family Safety u User Accounts u Remove your password. Just input your
current password and click Remove Password, and youre good to go.
In Windows 8, open the right-side charm bar and then select Settings
u Change PC Settings u Users. Here, click Change under the Any user
who has a password must enter it when waking this PC option, and
click OK in the box that pops up. Boom! Done.

Banish
annoying
Windows
noises.

Enjoy the sound of silence

Windows constantly chirps, buzzing in with a cacophony of
noises ranging from the lowliest ding to the ber-annoying
sound of a User Account Control notication. Just leave me to my
Spotify playlists in peace, Windows!
To force it to do just that, right-click the volume indicator in the system tray (on the right side of the taskbar) and select Sounds from the
context menu. In the new window that opens, click the Sound Scheme
drop-down menu, select No Sounds, and click OK. Revel in the silence.
(Hey, no one ever said all PC annoyances had to be major!)

Fix PC
annoyances
Speed up boot times
Windows inevitably becomes bogged down as the months
go by. And as more and more software and services work
their tendrils into the startup process, your systems boot
time suers in particular. Preventing unnecessary software
from running at startup can drastically reduce how long
Windows 8s Task
your PC takes to get up and at em.
Manager shows a
First, you need to see exactly which programs start along
list of programs
with your computer. In Windows 7, press <Windows>-R,
set to launch at
startup.
type mscong, and press <Enter>. In the System Congura-

tion window that

opens, click the
Startup tab.
The procedure is
a bit easier in Windows 8. Press <Ctrl>-<Shift>-<Esc> to bring up the Windows Task
Manager, and open the Startup tab.
Here youll see a list of all the software that activates at your PCs
startup. Clear the logjamand speed up your PCs boot timeby disabling any entries that absolutely, positively dont need to launch with
Windows. In my case (see the screenshot above), Ive disabled the
startup launches for Microsofts OneNote note-taking software and
the Prime95 benchmarking program, among others, since I can simply
open those applications if I want to use them.
Dont prevent a process from starting during boot if you arent
certain that its superfluous, though. One time, I accidentally disabled startup activation for my laptops touchpad software, which
became a headache all its own.
Neutering rogue startup programs is the fastest way to boost your
machines boot times, but if youre feeling a need for even more
speed, check out PCWorlds nitty-gritty guide to making your PC boot
faster (go.pcworld.com/bootfast).

Fix PC
annoyances

Clean up the context menu

Nirsofts
ShellMenuView:
Ugly but

If youve installed enough software to slow down

powerful.
startup, chances are good that your computers
right-click context menu is overflowing with options, too. Nirsofts excellent ShellExView (go.pcworld.com/shellex) and
ShellMenuView (go.pcworld.com/shellmenu) tools display all the
menu items that appear in your context menu, and they allow you
to disable the ones you dont need.
Note that both utilities drill down to a really granular level, displaying even context-menu options that appear only for certain le extensions and programs. Start with ShellMenuView, and then hunt down
any stragglers with ShellExView. When you nd a menu option you
want to erase, select it in the list, and click the red dot in the Nirsoft
toolbar to disable it. The green dot reactivates a disabled menu
option. (Tip: Use <Ctrl>-F to quickly search for specic programs.)
Nirsofts utilities clean up the context menu by mucking around
with the Windows Registry, so you should be sure to back up the
Registry rst (go.pcworld.com/regbackup).

Ensure hassle-free sofware updates

Keeping your plethora of programs patched and up-to-date
is vital to plugging potential vulnerabilities in your system,
but desktop programs dont automatically update in applike fashion.
You must actively seek out updates for your softwareor worse, deal
with dozens of automatic-update helpers popping up in your face
and clogging up system resources. (Im looking at you, Java Update.)
Or you could simply install Secunia Personal Software Inspector (go.
pcworld.com/psirev). Secunia PSI inventories all the software on your
machine and then keeps an eye out for any updates. If an update
comes along for one of your programs, Secunia attempts to apply it
without bothering you. If Secunia PSI cant apply the
update automatically, it pings you to let you know that a
Secunia PSI helps
new version of the software is currently available, complete
you update your
with a handy-dandy download link.

installed programs.

Fix PC
annoyances

Wipe away Windows modern look

If youre using Windows 8, and the preceding tips arent
enough for youif you really, truly hate everything about
Microsofts modern UIfear not: You can bring a Windows 7 look
and feel to Windows 8. That, however, takes a bit more work than is
possible to t into a general-advice article such as this. Check out
our guide to banishing the modern UI from your Windows 8 PC (go.
pcworld.com/banish) for step-by-step instructions.

Wallet-friendly
laptops
We name
the best budget
models that
wont cost you
an arm and a leg.
BY MICHAEL
BROWN

P H OTO G R A P H Y BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

Acers Aspire E1-572-6870

sounds like a phone number;
but at $580, its a real bargain.

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

ith 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 aord are routinely ignored. Thats unfortunate, because
some awesome yet inexpensive models grace the market these days.
After all, Moores Law is still in play, so todays budget notebook is
yesterdays heavy-duty workhorse. Pretty much any modern laptop
can handle the gamut of productivity choresword processing,
number crunching, email, and the likebut 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 aordability,
I gathered the top ve notebooks I could nd priced at $650 or less.

Laptop CPU, memory, and storage

MODEL

CPU

Memory

Storage

Asus VivoBook S550CA

(Reference) $750

1.7GHz Intel Core

i5-3317U

6GB DDR3/1600

500GB 5400-rpm HD
(+24GB SSD cache)

Acer Aspire E1-572-6870

$580

1.6GHz Intel Core

i5-4200U

6GB DDR3/1600

500GB 5400-rpm HD
(+24GB SSD cache)

Dell Latitude 3330

$561

1.5GHz Intel Core

i3-2375m

4GB DDR3/1600

320GB 5400-rpm HD

HP Pavilion TouchSmart
11z-e000 $430

1.0GHz AMD A4-1250

4GB DDR3/1333

500GB 5400-rpm HD

Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch

$649

1.6GHz Intel Core

i5-3230M

6GB DDR3/1600

1TB 7200-rpm HD

Toshiba Satellite
L55Dt-A5253 $650

2.0GHz AMD A6-5200

6GB DDR3/1333

750GB 5400-rpm HD

Laptop graphics, display, and weight

MODEL

Graphics

Display

Weight

Asus VivoBook S550CA

(Reference)

Intel HD Graphics
4000

15.6 inches, 1366 by 768

native resolution, touch

5.7 pounds

Acer Aspire E1-572-6870

Intel HD Graphics
4400

15.6 inches, 1366 by 768

native resolution, nontouch

4.6 pounds

Dell Latitude 3330

Intel HD Graphics
3000

13.0 inches, 1366 by 768

native resolution, nontouch

3.9 pounds

HP Pavilion TouchSmart
11z-e000

AMD Radeon HD
8210

11.6 inches, 1366 by 768

native resolution, touch

3.4 pounds

Lenovo IdeaPad Z400

Touch

Intel HD Graphics
4000

14.0 inches, 1366 by 768

native resolution, touch

5.3 pounds

Toshiba Satellite
L55Dt-A5253

AMD Radeon HD
8400

15.6 inches, 1366 by 768

natibe resolution, touch

5.6 pounds

Benchmark busters theyre not, but they wont bust your budget, either.
In evaluating these laptops, I used several criteria, including benchmark performance, storage capacity, weight, battery life, and (of course)
price. Three of the laptops use Intel CPUs and two are AMD-based, but
no two machines use the same CPU. And though Intels Haswell family
has been justly lauded for its conservative power consumption, the
sole entry in this roundup that was equipped with a fourth-generation
Core processor nished third in our battery rundown test.
When youre shopping for a laptop in this price category, you can
expect to make some trade-os. If carry weight is your primary consideration, for example, youll have to sacrice display size. The lightest
notebook I looked at weighs 2 pounds less than the heaviest, but it
also has the smallest screen: 11.6 inches. On the other hand, all ve
models here deliver the same native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels,

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

Each of the ve
laptops has at
least one USB
3.0 port, and
all have 802.11n
Wi-Fi adapters
and hardwired
ethernet
connectors
for networking.

and each has an HDMI output for connecting to an

external display or a TV.
Four of the ve notebooks
come with Windows 8
installed, but only three of
themthe HP, the Lenovo,
and the Toshibahave
touchscreens.
If you need a lot of storage,
you should seriously consider relying on the cloud or on an external
hard drive, since most laptops in this price range have smallish hard
drives (and none of the ones I looked at for this story have a solidstate drive). The two models with drives bigger than 500GB are also
the heaviest and most expensive in the group.
You wont have to make too many compromises on connectivity,
however: Each of the ve laptops has at least one speedy USB 3.0
port, and all have both 802.11n Wi-Fi adapters and hardwired
ethernet connections for networking. Even so, some models had
better networking options than others.
Now all you have to do is determine which laptop meets your own
particular needs best.

Acer Aspire E1-572-6870

or general use, the $580 Acer Aspire E1-572-6870 (go.pcworld.

com/aspiree1) is the clear winner in this ve-model roundup.
Acer crams a lot of value into this laptop for the price, including
a Haswell-class CPU (Intels 1.6GHz Core i5-4200U) and a 15.6-inch
LED-backlit display that has native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels.
Though Acer uses quite a bit of plastic in the Aspire E1s design, you
wont be ashamed to pull the notebook out of your bag. The laptops
smooth nish and rich colorAcer calls it Clarinet Blackmake the
1-inch-thick unit very attractive.
The chassis and lid, on the other hand, exhibit quite a bit of flex, so you
wont want to subject this machine to rough handling. The upside to all

The Acer Aspire

E1-572-6870 is the
easy winner of this
laptop roundup.

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

the plastic is low weight: At 4.6 pounds, this laptop is about a pound
lighter than the other two 15.6-inch models I looked at, but it weighs
1.2 pounds more than the laptop with the smallest display.
Capitalizing on the displays generous size, Acer includes a full-size
keyboard and a numeric keypad on the Aspire E1s deck. I expected
the island-style keyboard to be somewhat flimsy, but I was pleasantly
surprised by its solid tactile feedback. Its not backlit and its a trifle
noisy, but I have no complaints about how it felt under my ngertips.
The Aspire E1s display is plenty bright, producing vivid photos and
videos, but o-axis viewing is merely adequate. Acer also shaved a few
bucks o the Aspire E1s asking price by not including a touchscreen,
but its highly responsive
trackpad supports several
Windows 8 gestures, includAcer Aspire E1-572-6870
ing two-nger scrolling,
zoom, rotate, and flip. You
PROS:
can also slide in from the
Haswell-class CPU
right to open the charm
Bright 15.6-inch display
bar, and slide in from the
Dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter
left to switch between
applications.
CONS:
The trackpad, which has
No touchscreen
a wide bar at its base that
Lots of flex in the chassis and lid
provides both right and left
Just one USB 3.0 port
mouse-button functions, is
o center in relation to the
BOTTOM LINE:
display, but dead center to
You wont get everything in a 15.6-inch
the keyboard. It looks a little
notebook priced below $600, but Acer
odd until you lay your hands
made nearly all the right compromises
on the keyboards home row.
to achieve the E1s budgt price.
The Aspire E1 has only
4GB of DDR3/1600 memory,
PRICE:
but you can open it up and
$580
pop in a second module to
double that amount to 8GB.

Storage takes the form of a 500GB, 5400-rpm hard drive. Theres no

SSD, to handle cache or anything else, and I noticed what appears to
be an empty bay where an optical drive might go.

Benchmark performance
Acers machine delivered a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 146,
the best of the group by a fair margin. It also outperformed our $750
reference platform, an Asus VivoBook S550CA, which has both an SSD
and a touchscreen (but costs more than any of the systems reviewed
here). Diving into the individual components in our test suite, the Acer
The Acer Aspire
E1-572-6870
outran its rival
budget laptops
on our WorldBench 8.1 test
suite.

Notebook WorldBench 8.1 scores

Asus VivoBook
S550CA

100

(Reference)

Acer Aspire
E1-572-6870

146

Dell Latitude
3330

64

HP Pavilion
TouchSmart
11z-eooo

64

Lenovo
IdeaPad
Z400 Touch

132

Toshiba
Satellite
L55Dt-A5253

130

20 40

60

80

100 120 140 160 180

(Longer bars indicate higher performance.)

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

performed better than the rest of the eld in the PCMark Productivity
suite, but Lenovos IdeaPad Z400, which has a larger and faster hard drive,
handled our collection of media editing and encoding tasks better.
All work and no play makes for a boring lifestyle, but youll want to
stick with casual games on this computer. We dialed down BioShock
Innites resolution to 1024 by 768 and its image quality to Low, and
Acers laptop still managed to render the game at no better than a
sluggish 25 frames per second. Intel has made some strides with its
integrated graphics, but its Intel HD Graphics 4400 still isnt up to
snu for hardcore gaming. Even so, its gaming score beat everything
else in the eld (aside from our $750 reference notebook).

The Aspire E1
oers ports for gigabit
ethernet, HDMI-out,
VGA-out, and USB.

Connectivity and conclusion

The Aspire E1-572-6870 oers a gigabit ethernet connection for
occasions when you can plug into a network, and a Qualcomm Atheros
AR956x dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter for times when you cant.
The laptop also has a Bluetooth
4.0 + HS adapter to support
theoretical data-transfer
speeds of up to 24 mbps,
though the only good application Ive ever found for
Bluetooth is streaming audio).
Acer provides an HDMI-out
for connecting the computer
to digital displays and TVs,
and a VGA output for older
monitors and video projectors
(the latter could come in very
handy in classrooms and conference rooms, which tend to
have vintage equipment).
The system also has three USB ports, but only one of them is USB 3.0.
The included memory card reader supports only SD Card.
I enjoyed using Acers Aspire E1-572-6870. The machine is blessedly
quiet, and it delivered a respectable 4 hours of battery life (middle-ofthe-pack performance in this roundup).

Acers machine
delivered a
Notebook
WorldBench 8.1
score of 146, the
best of the group
by a fair margin.

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

Dell Latitude 3330

f someone tells you Dude! Youre gettin a Dell! in reference to

the $561 Latitude 3330 (go.pcworld.com/dell3330), run away.
Dell makes plenty of good computers, but this isnt one of them.
Admittedly, the Latitude 3330 didnt burst into flames or poke anyones eye out during our testing. But you have many better choices in
the same price range. Though one of the ve budget notebooks in this
roundup (HPs Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000) delivered no better
performance than this one didprobably because it has an even less
powerful CPU than the Dells 1.5GHz Intel Core i3-2375mthe HP
also costs $131 less than the Latitude 3330 and has a ten-point touchscreen. The Dells 13.0-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display doesnt support

Dells Latitude
3330 doesnt
deliver the
performance
its price tag.
warrants.

touch, though its trackpad

does support simple gestures
Dell Latitude 3330
such as two-nger scrolling.
PROS:
The Latitude has only 4GB
Easily
upgradable
memory,
battery,

of DDR3/1600 memory, but

and hard drive
an open and readily accessible
Solid
construction
slot accommodates a second

module to double its memoCONS:

ry. Its puny 320GB, 5400-rpm
Lousy
benchmark
performance
hard drive is similarly easy to

access and upgrade. And this

No
touchscreen

is one of only two notebooks

Weak Wi-Fi adapter
in our roundup to include a
removable and upgradable
BOTTOM LINE:
battery (the other one again
Dells Latitude 3330 delivers very good
being the HP Pavilion).
battery lifebut the laptop has little
One component that wont
else to recommend it at this price.
be easy to swap out is the Dell
Wireless 1504 single-band
PRICE:
(2.4GHz), 1x1, 802.11n Wi-Fi
$561
adapter, which delivers a physical link rate of just 150 megabits per second. The laptop
doesnt provide Bluetooth
support, either. But it does have a gigabit ethernet interface.
Unlike most of the notebooks in this price range, the Latitude 3330s
chassis contains some aluminum elements that render it considerably
more rigid than the other machines we looked at. The lid, on the other
hand, is rather flimsy, and the display inside doesnt feature edge-toedge glass, as most of the others do. It weighs just 3.9 pounds.
The Latitude 3330s display isnt wide enough to accommodate a
deck with both a full-size keyboard and a numeric keypad, but the
systems arrow keys are full-size and not easily mistaken for anything
else. Apart from not being backlit, the island-style keyboard is well
designed and a joy to type on, delivering rm but springy tactile

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

feedback. The Function keys in the top row play their traditional roles,
so youll need to hold down the Fn key and tap them to access their
alternative assignments, such as controlling a media player.

Benchmark performance
The Latitude 3330 tied with HPs much less expensive Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 for dead last in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark. Its overall score of 64 means that it was more than 35 percent
slower than our reference Asus VivoBook S550CA. Drilling down into
some of the individual benchmarks from that suite, I note that the Dell

PCMark 7 Productivity Suite scores

Asus VivoBook
S550CA

1072

(Reference)

Acer Aspire
E1-572-6870

1635

Dell Latitude
3330

932

HP Pavilion
TouchSmart
11z-eooo

348

Lenovo
IdeaPad
Z400 Touch

1000

Toshiba
Satellite
L55Dt-A5253

1445

200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800

(Longer bars indicate higher performance.)

The Latitude
3330 handily
outpaced the
cheaper HP on
the PCMark 7
Productivity
tests of system
performance on
everyday oce
tasks.

nished next to last in the PCMark7 Productivity Suite benchmark and

the BioShock Innite test, beating out only the TouchSmart 11z-e000.

Connectivity and conclusion

Dell broke the pattern of Intel-powered laptops with a single USB 3.0
port. The Latitude 3330 has two, plus one USB 2.0 port that can charge
a device whether the computer is awake or asleep. It doesnt have an
optical drive, but its media card reader supports SD and MMC media.
Dell follows the crowd by providing HDMI and VGA video outputs.
Because the Latitudes Wi-Fi adapter isnt an Intel model, the system
doesnt support Intels WiDi wireless media-streaming. If your primary
concern is long battery life, though, be aware that this machine turned
in a rst-place nish, running for 5 hours, 13 minutes. You can quickly
pull out a run-down battery and snap in a fresh one to double the laptops useful life, too. But thats one of the systems few bright spots.

The Latitude
3330 has two
USB 3.0 ports,
one USB 2.0
port, and HDMI
and VGA video
outputs.

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

The HP Pavilion
TouchSmart
11z-e000 is a
very inexpensive
touchscreen
laptop.

HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000

Ps Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 (go.pcworld.com/hp11z)

is one the smallest, lightest, and least expensive notebooks
weve ever reviewed. Its also one of the slowest, nishing
dead last on nearly every criterion in our ve-system roundup except
two important ones: weight and battery life.
Despite carrying a price tag of only $430, this Pavilion has a touchscreen. It measures just 11.6 inches, but delivers ten-point touch and
the same 1366-by-768-pixel resolution as the other budget laptops
we looked at. Once you get over its diminutive size, you realize that
the display is actually pretty good. Though it has a minor issue with
vertical o-axis viewing, its much better than the screen on the Toshiba

Satellite L55Dt-A5253. Augmenting the Pavilions touchscreen is a trackpad that supports various Windows 8 gestures such as two-nger
scrolling, zoom, and rotate. Mechanical right and left mouse buttons
are situated beneath the pad.
Apart from its small size, the Pavilion doesnt look like a cheap PC. Though
its case is composed almost entirely of plastic, the nishes on the lid and
chassis are dead ringers for brushed aluminum, and the computer feels very
sturdy despite being just 0.86 inch thick. Although this laptop was one of the
lightest we considered for our
roundup, its 3.4-pound heft is
not especially impressive in
HP Pavilion TouchSmart
view of its diminutive size.
11z-e000
If you have large ngers,
you
wont like the reduced
PROS:
size of the Pavilions nonback Solid build
lit keyboard. The keys are only
Touchscreen
a little smaller than average,
Great battery life
but the dierence drove me
Very inexpensive
crazy during touch-typing
sessions. The laptop is too
CONS:
small to hold a numeric key Very, very slow
pad, tooand I loathe its
Chintzy network connectivity options
arrow keys design. Rather
Less-than-optimal keyboard
than laying them out in the
familiar inverted T formation,
BOTTOM LINE:
HP made the right and left
If you insist on getting a laptop with a
keys oversize, and the up and
touchscreen, the 11z-e000 delivers a
down keys half-sizeand
lot of computer for very little money.
bookended by the other two.
But youll need to be patient with this
The Fn keys have common
ones performance.
tasks (such as volume and
media player control)
PRICE:
assigned to them by default,
$430
so you dont have to hold
down a second key in order to

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

use the FN keys for those purposes. Speaking of media, the Pavilion
TouchSmart 11z-e000 has surprisingly good speakers, augmented by
DTS Sound+ audio-processing software.

Benchmark performance
Egad, is this computer ever slow! Much of the blame can be laid at the
door of its 1GHz AMD A4-1250 processor. This is paired with 4GB of
DDR3/1333 memory, which HP says is upgradable to 8GB. But since
the machine has only one DIMM slot, youll need to toss the existing
4GB DIMM to do so (unless you buy the 8GB version at the outset).
The 11z-e000s
serious lack of
processing
power translates
into a relatively
long battery life.

Batery life (in minutes)

Asus VivoBook
S550CA

202

(Reference)

Acer Aspire
E1-572-6870

240

Dell Latitude
3330

313

HP Pavilion
TouchSmart
11z-eooo

306

Lenovo
IdeaPad
Z400 Touch

217

Toshiba Satellite
L55Dt-A5253

274

50

100

150

(Longer bars indicate higher performance.)

200

250

300

350

Our review model came with a 500GB hard-drive upgrade (the stock
machine packs a smaller 320GB hard drive), but both drives spin their
platters at an unhurried 5400 rpm. There is no SSD option available for
the 11z-e000, and the only optical drive option is external.
The Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000s pitiful Notebook WorldBench

HPs Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is less than 1 inch

thick, but its not especially lightweight for its size.

Connectivity options
include USB 3.0 ports (two)
and a USB 2.0 port (one).

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

8.1 score of 64 matches that of

the $561 Dell Latitude 3330,
but its scores on most of the
other benchmarks are signi
cantly worse than the Dells.
For example, the Latitude
earned a PCMark 7 Produc
tivity Suite score of 932, versus
the Pavilions puny mark of
348. And on our media editing
and encoding tests, the HPs
scores were othechart bad.
On the plus side, the superior
graphics processor integrated
into the AMD A4 processor
helped level the playing eld on some of our gaming benchmarks.

Egad, is this
computer slow!
Much of the
blame can be
laid at the door
of the 1GHz
AMD A4-1250
processor.

Connectivity and conclusion

One of the ways that HP managed to keep this computers price so
low was by provisioning it with cheap networking capabilities. The
Realtek RTL8188EE WiFi adapter is a singleband 802.11n model that
supports a maximum physical link rate of just 150 mbps, and its hard
wired ethernet adapter maxes out at 100 mbps.
For better wireless networking performance, you can plug an adapter
into one of the Pavilions USB ports. It has two USB 3.0 ports and one
USB 2.0 port, plus a multiformat media card reader. HP provides both
HDMI and VGA video outputs.
The HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11ze000 is tough to beat on price: You
get a lot of computer for the money. Its closest rival in priceDells
Latitude 3330costs $131 more, doesnt have a touchscreen, and
comes with a smaller hard drive. The Dell is slightly faster and has a
larger display, but I think the 11ze000 is a better value in the long run.

Lenovos IdeaPad Z400

Touch is a strong contender.

Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch

his solidly built notebook features a great touchscreen display,

an even better keyboard, and a big, fast hard drive. But Lenovos
networking component choices are a bit disappointing.
Many corporate IT departments favor Lenovo laptops, and the company produces some very good consumer-oriented machines, too. The
IdeaPad Z400 Touch (go.pcworld.com/z400) is a case in point. You
wouldnt mistake it for a sleek Ultrabookits thick and heavy, and its
battery life is wretchedbut the Z400 did nish second on Notebook
WorldBench 8.1 test suite in our ve-laptop competition. And despite
Lenovos copious use of plastic, the Z400 is built like a brick outhouse.
Lenovo stuck with Intels third-generation Core processor for this

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

budget-priced machine,
pairing a 1.6GHz Core
Lenovo IdeaPad Z400
i5-3230M with 6GB of
Touch
DDR/1600 memory. At 14.0
PROS:
inches, its 1366-by-768pixel display is much smaller
Great backlit keyboard
than the Acer Aspire E1 Touchscreen
572-6870s 15.6-inch
Solid construction
display; but the IdeaPad
Z400 boasts a ten-point
CONS:
touchscreen, whereas the
Heavy
Acer does not.
Chintzy network connectivity options
The Z400 is an attractive
Poor battery life
PC, with a charcoal-colored
soft-touch paint exterior
BOTTOM LINE:
and a pretty carbon-ber
If you tend to be rough on your gear,
look on the inside. Lenovos
Lenovos IdeaPad Z400 is one of the
computer feels as rugged
best options available among laptops
as Acers feels fragile.
priced at $650 or less.
Though the display exhibits
a little flex, the lower
PRICE:
chassis is as rigid as some
$649
all-metal bodies Ive tried
to bend. The downside to
the solid construction is
weight gain: Despite its
smaller display, the Z400
outweighs the Acer by 0.7 pound. Still, it comes by most of that weight
honestly. Lenovo provides 6GB of memory (as against Acers 4GB); packs
a 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive (versus the Aspires 500GB drive); and
includes a DVD burner (Acer provides no optical drive at all).
The IdeaPad Z400 comes with the type of top-notch keyboard that
Lenovo is famous for building. The island-style keyboard is fully backlit
and feels great under the ngers. It lacks a dedicated numeric keypad, and
theres no provision for temporarily assigning letter keys on the right side

an alternative function to serve as one, but I was happy to see the fullsize arrow keys in the familiar inverted-T formation at the far edge.
Augmenting the IdeaPad Z400 Touchs touchscreen is a responsive
trackpad that supports various Windows 8 gestures, including twonger scrolling, swipe, zoom, and rotate. The trackpad doesnt have
distinct right and left mouse buttons, but clicking in the lower right
and left areas of the pad performs the same function. Unlike Lenovos
higher-end notebooks, the Z400 does not embed a trackpoint in its
keyboard; however, I found that the trackpad and the touchscreen
were all I really needed.
Like the other
inexpensive units
we tested, the
IdeaPad Z400
Touch performed
poorly on highlevel games like
BioShock Innite.

Bioshock Innite performance

(1024 by 768 resolution, low visual quality)

Asus VivoBook
S550CA

27.0

(Reference)

Acer Aspire
E1-572-6870

25.0

Dell Latitude
3330

14.4

HP Pavilion
TouchSmart
11z-eooo

13.3

Lenovo
IdeaPad
Z400 Touch

18.4

Toshiba
Satellite
L55Dt-A5253
Frames per
second

20.4
0

5.0

10.0

15.0

20.0

25.0

(Longer bars indicate higher performance.)

30.0

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS
VGA
The IdeaPad Z400 Touch
supports a modest array
of connection types.

Network RJ-45

HDMI
USB 3.0
SD Card slot

Benchmark performance
The IdeaPad Z400 took a solid second place in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark competition (behind the Acer Aspire E1-5726870), with a score of 132, marking it as 1.3 times faster than our reference Asus VivoBook S550CA, which comes outtted with a 24GB
SSD cache for its hard drive.
The Lenovo placed third in the PCMark 7 Productivity, despite having a 7200-rpm hard drive (both the Acer Aspire E1-572-6870 and the
Toshiba Satellite L55Dt-A5253 were much faster). But the IdeaPad
captured rst place on our media editing and encoding tests. On our
gaming tests, it nished in the middle of the pack, delivering a leisurely
frame rate on BioShock Innite of 18.4 frames per second, even with
resolution set to just 1024 by 768 and visual quality set to Low.

Connectivity and conclusion

The IdeaPad Z400s networking capabilities are a bit disappointing.
Though Lenovo selected a high-quality Wi-Fi adapter (Intels Centrino
Wireless-N 2230), its a single-band adapter that doesnt give you any
choice but to connect to crowded 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks. On the

bright side, its a 2x2 adapter,

meaning that it supports a maximum physical link rate of 300
mbps. It also provides Bluetooth
4.0 support, and is compatible
with Intels WiDi video-streaming
technology. The wired ethernet
adapter, meanwhile, is limited to
100 mbpsI thought those
adapters had gone the way of
the PS/2 port.
In addition to WiDi, you have
your choice of HDMI or VGA
video outputs for connecting to
external displays. And like the
Acer Aspire, the IdeaPad has three USB ports, but only one of them is
the speedy USB 3.0. Lenovo does provide a memory card reader that
supports both SD and MMC media, and the company includes Dolby
Home Theater technology and a set of decent speakers, so you wont
have to rely on headphones for an enjoyable audio experience.
The Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch is a heavy computer for its size, its
network connectivity is weak, and its battery life is very poor. But this
laptop is a very good performer, with a great keyboard, an optical
drive, and the largest, fastest hard drive in our group of ve. Its also
the machine Id recommend if you need a computer in this price range
thats rugged enough to tolerate a little rough handling. Overall it
nishes a solid second in our roundup.

This laptop is a
good performer,
with a great
keyboard, an
optical drive,
and the largest
hard drive in our
group of ve.

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

Toshibas Satellite L55Dt-A5253

uses AMDs A6-5200 processor,
which has an integrated Radeon
HD 8400 graphics processor.

Toshiba Satellite L55Dt-A5253

uyers that Toshiba targets with its luxury Kirabook wouldnt

touch a Satellite L55Dt-A5253 (go.pcworld.com/l55dt) if Neiman Marcus were giving them away. Thats too bad, because
this laptop actually oers a much better price-to-performance ratio.
Toshiba selected AMDs 2.0GHz A6-5200 APU to power this $650
notebook. That chip features an integrated AMD Radeon HD 8400
graphics processor, which helped Toshiba secure a second-place nish
in the games portion of our benchmark suite. But the machines 6GB
of DDR3 memory runs at only 1333MHz, which held its performance
back in comparison to some of the laptops equipped with Intel CPUs
and faster DDR3/1600 memory.

Like most notebooks in its price range, the Satellite is composed primarily of plastic, but Toshibas attractive material does a nice job of
resisting smudges and ngerprints. The computers lid and chassis also
feel more rigid than most, though it does weigh a full pound more than
the Acer Aspire E1a signicant consideration if youll be carrying your
laptop on your shoulder for extended periods every day.
The Satellite L55Dt features a 15.6-inch, LED-backlit touchscreen
display with a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. The display is
attractive enough, if you position it just so. Text appears most legibly
when the screen is tilted back; but bring it even slightly forwardas
you might have to do when using the computer on your airline tray
table, if the passenger in front of you decides to reclineand you may
not be able to read it at all.
If your arms get tired from
reaching out to stroke the SatToshiba Satellite
ellites screen, you can use its
L55Dt-A5253
touchpad, instead. The touchpad is centered beneath the
PROS:
keyboard, so its o center from
750GB hard drive
wrist rest, but thats where it
Rigid construction
should be. It supports all of the
usual Windows 8 gestures,
CONS:
including two-nger scrolling,
Poor o-axis viewing
zoom, rotate, and flip. And you
Weak networking features
can slide in from the right bor Uses 1333MHz memory
der to call up the charm bar, or
slide it from the left to switch
BOTTOM LINE:
between applications. The
Toshibas mainstream notebook
setup lacks distinct left and
wont launch you into orbit, but
right mouse buttons, but you
it is a solid value.
can click the lower area of the
pad to obtain the same actions.
PRICE:
Toshiba took advantage of
$650
the displays width to provide
a numeric keypad next to the

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

alphanumeric keyboard. The half-size function keys in the top row have
useful default actions mapped to themincluding controls for such
features as volume, brightness, and a media player.
The island-style keyboard has short-travel keys that nevertheless
provide a desirable amount of tactile feedback while remaining nearly
silent. I wouldnt have minded the half-size arrow keys if they hadnt
been located so close to the edge of the wrist rest. The entire keyboard is recessed in a well, making it nearly impossible to tell whether
your nger is tapping the up arrow or the down arrow without taking
your eyes o the screen to look.
The Toshibas
beeer components show up
when you put it
on the scales.

Laptop weight (in pounds)

Asus VivoBook
S550CA

5.7

(Reference)

Acer Aspire
E1-572-6870

4.6

Dell Latitude
3330

3.9

HP Pavilion
Touchsmart
11z-eooo

3.4

Lenovo
IdeaPad
Z400 Touch

5.3

Toshiba
Satellite
L55Dt-A5253
Pounds

5.6

(Shorter bars indicate lighter weight.)

The Toshiba Satellite

L55Dt-A5232 is one
of the more attractive
notebooks around.

Benchmark performance
The Satellite L55Dt-A5253 nished third in our Notebook WorldBench
8.1 benchmark suite, a scant 2 points behind Lenovos Intel Core i5
powered IdeaPad Z400 Touch, but 16 points behind the Intel Haswell
powered Acer Aspire E1-572-6870. The Toshibas 750GB, 5400-rpm
hard drive helped it grab secondplace in the PCMark7 Productivity
Suite component, but the faster CPU in the Acer Aspire more than
compensated for that computers smaller drive.
Given the amount of hay AMD has made over what it describes as its
superior GPU/CPU integration, I had expected to see this A6-powered
notebook clean up on the gaming benchmarks. It did reasonably well,
but fell 5 frames per second short of equaling the performance of the
Intel-powered Acer Aspire E1.

WALLET-FRIENDLY LAPTOPS

The Satellite
delivers good
performance,
but many of its
drawbacks dont
show up in its
test results.

Connectivity and
conclusion

Toshiba provides the usual three

USB ports on its Satellite: Two of
these are USB 3.0 and you can
use the one USB 2.0 port to
charge your smartphone (or
other USB device) even while
the computer is sleepinga
very handy feature. The media
card reader in the front of the
PC supports only SD media.
An HDMI-out supports digital
display connections, and VGA handles analog. I dont want to see HDMI
go away, but Id like to see laptop manufacturers include DisplayPort 1.2
ports on their consumer oerings. A DisplayPort 1.2 connection would
let you daisy-chain displays, and you could buy an adapter to handle just
about anything else, including VGA.
Like the Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch, the Toshiba Satellite L55DtA5253 provides a single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter that limits you to
accessing overcrowded 2.4GHz networks; worse, the Toshibas Realtek
RTL8188SU supports a maximum physical link rate of just 150 mbps,
whereas the Lenovos Intel adapter delivers a 300-mbps maximum link
rate and support for Intels WiDi media-streaming technology.
The Satellite bears a DTS Sound logo, but I found its audio capabilities
wanting. Music sounded thin and flat, with very little of the oomph I
crave from bass response. Stick with headphones, and you should be
ne. Finally, this may reflect my right-handed bias, but I found it odd to
access the Satellites DVD burner on the left side of the computer. The
hardwired ethernet port100 mbps maxis located here, too.
The Satellite L55Dt-A5253 is a well-built laptop that delivers good
performance, but many of its drawbacks dont show up in its test
results: Its weighs 5.6 pounds, its o-axis viewing is abysmal, and it has
third-rate wireless networking capabilities. Clearly, its not the best
notebook in this collection, but its still a decent value.

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Conquer your
inbox

Here are the utilities

you need to fight
the email onslaught.

BY RICK BROIDA
Illustration
by Frank Flthmann

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 youre not diligent about replying,
ling, and deleting your messages, it wont be
long before youre, well, terminated. Or at least
terminally depressed.
But guess what? You dont 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 restall without the
hassle of manually creating a complex system
of lters and folders.
Is such an attack plan really necessary? In these
days of thoroughly indexed inboxes and fast, easy
searches, the concept (and especially execution)
of inbox zero may seem like more trouble than
its worth. After all, when Gmail can locate any
message youve ever received with just a few keystrokes, who cares about organization?
Youll have to decide that one for yourself. But
once you see how easily and eectively some of
these solutions can whip your inbox into shape,
you may decide its better to be proactive about
mail management.

Alto

Ever wish you could hire an intern

just to sort your email, to separate the e-wheat
from the e-chaf? Thats the idea behind Alto, (go.
pcworld.com/alto) a free browser-based service
that organizes mail into virtual stacks, not unlike
the way you might sort physical junk mail into
piles on your desk.
Developed by AOL, Alto works with the most
popular email services, including Gmail, iCloud,
Yahoo, and, of course, AOL. And you can use it with
multiple accounts, making this a great way to
manage several inboxes under one roof.
Once you sign in, Alto sifts through your inbox
and sorts your messages into a handful of existing
stacks: Daily Deals, Social Notications, Photos,
Attachments, and so on. You can create additional
stacks as well, and once you direct an email to
it, all future messages from that source will automatically land there. Thus, you could have a

Alto can
temporarily
archive
messages.

Alto works with

the most popular
email services.

inbox

client stack, boss stack, widget project

stack, and the like.
Altos pretty interface features a scrolling inbox
on the left side that lets you preview each message without actually clicking it. If you mouse
over an individual email, youll see one-click icons
for Delete, Snooze, and Star. The Snooze option is
particularly great for business users: It lets you
temporarily archive an email until a later time,
thus getting it out of your inbox but returning
it to the top when its more convenient for you
to deal with it.
Alto rocks. But its currently a private beta,
meaning you need to request an invitation to try
it out. The good news is that your invitation
should arrive within about 24 hours, at least based
on my recent experience.

Inky

Unlike most of the inbox-relief

options in this roundup, Inky (inky.com) relies on
actual software: Its a desktop email client
stocked with tools for better email management.
However, that could be its downfall for some
users: If youre already vested in, say, Outlook,
switching might not be a convenient (or even
desirable) option.
It is compelling, though. Inky works with both
IMAP and POP mail accounts and gives you the
option of a unied inbox for as many accounts
as you want to connect. Even better, it automatically lters certain types of messages into a
variety of handy Smart View sub-inboxes: Daily
Deals, Personal, Social, Subscriptions, Maps, and
even Packages.
The Packages inbox could help business users
who constantly need to track package deliveries
via conrmation emails, while the Personal inbox

Inky lters
messages into
Smart View
sub-inboxes.

Inky looks almost

too elegant for
business use.

inbox

helps you zero in on important messages that

might otherwise get lost in the business shufle. I
especially like the Notes inbox, which is where the
email reminders you send to yourself get stored.
Inky looks almost too elegant for business use,
and its heavy reliance on icons (not all of which are
intuitive) steepens the learning curve. Thankfully,
theres an excellent guided tour that walks new
users through the interface, and you can mouse
over just about anything to get a pop-up descriptor. I found it much easier to navigate after
expanding the side dock, which displays text
labels alongside the icon for each section.
To help make sure the most important emails
get noticed, Inky attempts to guess which ones
are most relevant to you and tags them with a
blue drop. The darker the drop, the more relevant
the emailthough you can easily ne-tune the
results by clicking the icon. This should help
ensure that messages from clients, coworkers,
and other key people get immediate attention.

Mailstrom

Frustrated by
the roiling tornado that is your inbox? Mailstrom
(mailstrom.co) aims to help you regain control by
analyzing its contents, sorting the results, and
giving you some tools to reduce the flow of mail.
Admittedly, you can accomplish much the same
thing using lters and targeted searches, especially in Gmail, but Mailstrom saves you the trouble.
The service, which operates in your browser,
works exclusively with IMAP accounts, though for
the moment youre limited to three of them. I
added AOL and Gmail accounts, then waited a few
minutes to see the results.
Those results can be confusing at rst. The Mailstrom dashboard lets you sort messages by sender, subject, lists, time, size, shopping, and social.
When you click any of these view options, a middle pane lists the results from most to least. In the
sender view, for example, youll quickly identify

Mailstrom
analyzes
and sorts
your email.

Mailstrom doesnt
distinguish between
read or unread mail.

inbox

who sends you the most mail, because theyll

appear at the top of the list. You then click any
sender to see a list of the messages from that
person, which appears in a pane on the right.
Mailstrom gives you four key tools. For any given
selected batch of messages, you can archive,
delete, or mark as spam. You can also move them
to another folder (in other words, out of your
inbox), at the same time optionally creating a rule
so that future messages land in the same spot.
And if youre looking at the Lists view, which
shows any mailing lists you might be on (Groupon,
stores, message forums, and so on), theres an
Unsubscribe button.
However, Mailstrom doesnt distinguish
between read and unread mail, which I found a
serious limitation, and the color-coding it assigns
to each ltered list of messages seems to serve no
purpose. Plus, you cant view individual accounts;
the service lumps everything together.
I felt like I spent more time trying to gure out
how to use the tool eectively than I would have
simply processing my inbox the usual way. That
said, its denitely worth a try, and for now the
only cost is your time: Mailstrom is currently free.

SaneBox

Picture a bouncer
stationed at the door to your inbox. VIP messages
(like those from business contacts) get past the
red-velvet rope; all others must stand in line.
Thats SaneBox (sanebox.com) in a nutshell. The
service works with webmail clients like Gmail,
iCloud, and Yahoo, and also Exchange, Lotus
Notes, and Outlook, making it without question
the most business-savvy inbox attacker in the
group. I tried it with a Gmail account.
In a matter of seconds after I signed up (with
nothing to install, thankfully), SaneBox had analyzed some 1500 messages and relegated roughly
a third of themthose deemed unimportantto
a newly created SaneLater folder. So in one fell
swoop, the size of my inbox shrank by more than
30 percent. However, I was still looking at a mix of
business and personal mail in both locations;

SaneBox
has the ability
to train the
ltering
system.

inbox

SaneBox analyzes based on communication history, not content.

Over time, as you drag messages between folders to train the ltering system, SaneBox will
indeed keep the important stu in your inbox and
consign the rest to SaneLater. You can also add
SaneBlackHole (a trash bin for senders you never
want to see again), SaneTomorrow (which holds
emails until tomorrow), and SaneNextWeek
(which holds them until the following Monday).
Need a custom defer folder? SaneBox lets you
add those, too. The service even has a reminder
option similar to that oered by Followup.cc.,
along with loads of other customization options
to help steer mail to more desirable places. (Think:
attachments automatically saved to Dropbox.)
Now for the bad news: SaneBox isnt free, and
its not exactly cheap, either. The $6-per-month
Snack plan aords you just one email account, ve
of the aforementioned reminders, and ve
attachment routings. For $15 monthly, Lunch
buys you two accounts and 250 each of reminders
and attachments. And the $20-per-month Dinner
plan supports three accounts and unlimited
everything else. At least you can get price breaks
if you prepay annually or biannually.
Still, youll have to decide if SaneBoxs bouncer is
worth the expense. Gmail users in particular might
prefer to roll their own sane inboxes via lters
and labels, which cost a grand total of zero dollars.
But if money is no object, SaneBox is perhaps the
single best way to control email overload.

Inbox insanity no more

Some people can zero-out their inbox every day,
and some people just cant keep up. And then
they give up. Theres no need to suer alone,
though. Inbox-taming apps like SaneBox, Mailstrom, and others can sort, lter, and prioritize
emails, so you can spend less time scanning subject lines and more time responding to the messages that really matteror doing other important work.

inbox

News, tips, and reviews covering phones, tablets,

apps, and all the other tech in your life.

TechHive helps you find your

tech sweet spot.
We steer you to products youll love and show
you how to get the most out of them.
www.techhive.com | Follow us

HERES
HOW
Essential multimonitor
productivity tips
How to clean and secure
your browser
Listen to the PC noises that
could mean bad news
How to put your DVD
library in the cloud
Sync your data across
devices
Stretch the life of your
SSD storage

CONTENTS

Answer Line:
Find and watch free TV on
the Internet
Hassle-Free PC:
Even new PCs can have
problems
Make panoramas the
easy way

How to build, maintain,

and x your tech gear.

HERES
HOW

Essential tips for

multimonitor productivity
Heres how to set up multiple displays to create the most
efective viewing experience. BY PAUL MAH

WO IS DEFINITELY better than one when it comes to mon-

itors. A single display may suce for basic computing, but

multiple monitors make a big dierence when youre
doing heavily graphical work, intensive multitaskingand
of course, serious gaming. And as LCD prices continue to drop, multimonitor setups are more aordable than ever.
Before you start shopping, however, make sure that your computer
can support more than one display. This usually isnt a problem with
recent desktop models, but it can be with laptops. After conrming
that your system is multimonitor-ready, check out these tips for setting up the displays to maximize your productivity.

Gamers and
multitaskers
will benet
from multiple
monitors.

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 more than three large (23- to 27-inch) monitors side by
side. If youre short on space, consider buying a single extrawide display (go.pcworld.com/extrawide) instead.
Once youve decided how many monitors you need, try to buy them
all at the same time rather than piecemeal. The model you buy today
may not be available in two months, and pairing dierent models can
mean that you have to deal with variations in bezel thickness, screen
resolution, or even screen size. The result of those dierences, all too
often, is that monitors dont line up properly, navigating your displays
becomes needlessly dicult, and your productivity suers.
In addition, you can future-proof your purchases by getting monitors equipped with DisplayPort 1.2, which will allow you to daisy-chain
additional monitors down the line.

Arrange the monitors

When working with multiple monitors, its important to arrange them
so as to achieve the most comfortable viewing angles. Using monitor
arms like those from Ergotron (www.ergotron.com), and monitors with
VESA mounting support, you can pan, tilt, rotate, and lift the display to

Choose monitors
equipped with
DisplayPort 2.1
so that you can
daisy-chain
monitors easily.

HERES HOW

the optimal position. Higher-end monitors typically have their own

adjustable stands, but monitor arms are superior in most cases
especially because they can retract to the edge of the desk to maximize available desktop space.
Arranging monitors in portrait mode is one unorthodox option that
permits you to squeeze in more monitors. We recently reviewed a few
monitors that can pivot into portrait mode (go.pcworld.com/pivot). Portrait mode is excellent for rst-person-shooter games, but some desktop-application windows may feel cramped and awkward in that orientation. Using monitor arms to stack a second row of monitors above the
rst row may enable you to position more monitors comfortably.
Regardless of how you decide to arrange your monitors, take the
time to wire everything neatly, using either cable ties or a cable wrap.

Maximize input ports

Practically all monitors these days come with multiple input ports,
including DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, and VGA options. You can use one

With planning, you can ensure

that your multimonitor setup
isnt overrun with cables.

port for your primary computer, and the others to connect to a nearby
server or a test machine. Alternatively, you can connect an Xbox 360
or PlayStation 3 via the HDMI port. Obviously, a video switcher box
would let you do the same thing, but thats an additional piece of
hardware to purchase, and it also adds to the clutter on your desktop.

Get sofware help

Microsoft has steadily tweaked the Windows operating system to
work better with multimonitor systems by introducing a number of
noteworthy shortcuts. Pressing <Windows>-<Left Arrow> or
<Windows>-<Right Arrow>, for example, docks the active window
to the left or right side, respectively, of the current monitor.
Repeating either of those key combinations will move the docked
window to the left or right of the next monitor, while <Shift><Windows>-<Left Arrow> or <Shift>-<Windows>-<Right Arrow>
will immediately move the active window to the next monitor
instead of docking it to the current window.
But third-party window managers (go.pcworld.com/winmanagers)
can still help you navigate across multiple monitors even more easily.
These programs let you create a taskbar across monitors (for Windows
7 and earlier, since Windows 8 has this capability built in), save the

Use a monitor
manager to
make working
with your extra
screen real
estate easier.

HERES HOW

positions of app windows, assign

shortcuts keys for managing app
windows, and more.

Tweak your
mouse setings
Finally, you may want to enable
mouse acceleration on your multimonitor system. Mouse acceleration signicantly speeds up the
movement of the mouse cursor on
the screen whenever you swipe
the mouse quickly. Its especially
useful for moving quickly across
multiple monitors. Relying exclusively on a trackpad to navigate a
multimonitor system can be a
Finding the mouse cursor can be tricky when you have
pain, due to the excessive amount
multiple monitors to check.
of swiping required.
Other mouse-related congurations include changing your mouse
pointers size and color to make it stand out more. Finally, consider
selecting the Show location of pointer when I press CTRL key option under
Mouse Properties Pointer Options, as well as the Snap To option to
move the mouse cursor to a dialog boxs default option automatically.

Enjoy the view

Once youve worked with multiple monitors, youll have a hard
time going back to a solo display. Youll miss having all that space
and all those windows open at the same time. As the computing
world becomes increasingly graphical, expanding your view will
prove well worth the sacrice in desktop or wall space. And the
most recent port technologies and Windows enhancements make
upgrading easier than ever.
P H OTO G R A P H Y ( O P E N I N G ) BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

5 ways
to clean and secure
your browser like a pro
BY ERIC GEIER
THE INTERNET RUNS on ads, but the more questionable ones can also

load your browser with spyware. Legitimate websites do a decent job

of screening their advertisers to prevent this, but even a single
instance of malicious adware on your PC can change your homepage,
hijack your searches, and more.
Here are ve ways to deep-clean your PC to rid it of unwanted
browser toolbars, add-ons, and extensions, as well as homepage- and
search-hijacking malware.

HERES HOW

1.

Run virus and malware scans

The rst thing you should do if you think your PC has a malware
infection is to run a complete scan with an updated antimalware utility. Since no antivirus program can catch everything, use a secondary
scanner such as Ad-Aware (www.lavasoft.com) or Spybot Search &
Destroy (www.safer-networking.org).

2.

Disable browser toolbars

3.

Double-check extensions and add-ons

Eliminate every browser toolbar you dont use, as well as any

downloaded toolbars. To remove toolbars from Internet Explorer,
right-click the toolbar and deselect the unwanted toolbars listed in
the context menu. Firefox works much the same way, except that the
browser merely hides the toolbar instead of disabling it. And Googles
Chrome browser doesnt oer a right-click option at all. For disabling
toolbars in Firefox and Chrome, read on.

Adware networks can trick visitors into installing browser addons and extensions that inject ads, redirect searches, and force you to
use their site as your homepage. So disable any browser add-ons and
extensions you dont use or that look suspicious.

Right-clicking
your toolbar
menu allows
you to disable
any and all
unwanted
toolbars by
unchecking
them.

Internet
Explorer
makes it easy
to disable every
extension and
add-on you
dont recognize
or need.

In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu and select Manage add-ons.
In the menu that opens, select All add-ons. Review the list. To disable
an item, right-click it and select Disable.
In Firefox, click the orange menu button in the top-left corner of
your browser and select Add-ons from the list. Next, disable any suspicious items in the Extensions section and the Plug-ins section.
In Chrome, type chrome://extensions/ into the address bar. Alternatively, open the main menu by clicking the control button in the topright corner of the browser, and select Settings and click Extensions.
Uncheck every extension you wish to disable.
Chrome also supports another type of add-on called plug-ins. Type
chrome://plugins/address and disable anything you dont need or dont
recognize (but keep the Native Client and Google Update plug-ins).

4.

Eliminate homepage or search redirects

To restore a hijacked homepage, close your browser and then

relaunch it. In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu and select
Internet Options. In Chrome, open the main menu, select Settings,
and refer to the On startup settings. In Firefox, open the main menu
and select Options.
If your homepage is still being forced back to the adware site, you
need to conrm whether malware has edited your browser shortcut

HERES HOW

to override your homepage

setting. Right-click the shortcut you use to open the
browserits usually either
the browser icon on your
desktop or the executable
le in your browsers le
directoryand select Properties. If you open your browser
using a pinned icon on the
Windows taskbar, click the
Start button, type the browsers name, and right-click the
shortcut that appears. In the
shortcuts Properties dialog
box, remove any website
address thats listed after the
Check the browsers executable le to ensure no nefarious
Target locationfor example,
homepage redirects are lurking in the launch string.
you would eliminate the
http://www.malwarebytes.com portion shown in the screen above.

5.

Hit the Reset buton

If youre still having problems with your browser and adware, its
time to reset everything to factory default. Restoring your browser to
its default settings will wipe out all of your saved data and customization, but it can also eliminate the adverse changes that adware and
malware have made.
In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu, select Internet Options,
click the Advanced tab, and click the Reset button. In Firefox, open the
main menu, hover over Help, click Troubleshooting Information, and
then click the Reset Firefox button. Chrome doesnt have an easy way
to restore default settings, so uninstall it via the Programs and Features list and then download it again.

Heed the PC noises

that could signal trouble
BY ALEX COCILOVA
HAVE YOU LISTENED to your PC lately? If yours sounds like a helicop-

ter trying desperately to take o, you may have a problem. We explain

some of the noises you should pay attention to.

The hard-drive death ratle

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, its 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.

HERES HOW

Some fans, such as the

Antec True Cool, have
physical switches for
changing the speed
of the fan..

Fan uters
The usual hum and whir that most people associate with the sound of
a PC come from the case fans and coolers for vital components. Consider such sounds music to your ears. But if the noise persists, its time
to do some detective work.
Many fans have individual switches for changing their speed on the
fly. A lower setting will push less air through your system but will also
use less power and make less noise.
The next option is to install fan-controlling software, such as
SpeedFan (go.pcworld.com/speedfan). This utility regulates your PCs
fans, telling them when to run at full speed and when to slow down.
If you hear a loud, fast ticking noise, the fan is probably to blame
again. Check around all the fans in your PCs case for a stray wire that
may be in contact with the fan blades.

Optical drive whirs

Ordinarily, an optical drive makes a loud whirring sound when you
insert a disc, as the drive spins the disc up to speed. Leaving the disc in
the tray can cause the drive to spin up at random times. If you hear

this sound often, make sure the tray is empty. If its empty and its still
being noisy, you may have an optical drive with broken or loose parts.

BIOS beep codes

The BIOS communicates with users in the form of beeps that represent certain errors. Dont worry about a short, single beep at boot-up.
Assuming the PC passes its POST (power-on self-test) procedure,
everything is ne. But other combinations of beeps could indicate
problems with power, bad memory, or a dead motherboard. Check
your motherboard manual or the manufacturers website.

Speaker snap, crackle, and pop

When you power your computer on or o, your speakers might emit
a loud pop. No worries: It just means the speakers are amplied.
They make such a noise when they gain or lose power. Muting will
help ease that annoyance while youre using the system, but the
loud popping will persist.
If the speaker cord isnt entirely plugged into the jack, youre going
to hear feedback through the speakers. It sounds almost crunchy, like
a cell phone interfering with a radio. Make sure the cables that run
from the speakers or subwoofer to the PC are in the correct port (the
line-out port, usually green) and securely plugged in.
P H OTO G R A P H Y ( TO P ) BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K

HERES HOW

How to put
your DVD library
in the cloud
BY RICK BROIDA

DVDS ARE SO analog. With DVD drives

disappearing from PCs, its time to free

your lms from their shiny silver prisons so
theyll still be watchable in the player-free
future. Once youve converted your movie
library to digital les, you can store those
les in the cloud and then stream them
anytime, from anywhere. Heres how.

Get ripping
First, you have to rip the movie le from
the disc. For this you need a PC with a DVD
drive and DVD-ripping softwarethe app

I recommend is the free HandBrake (handbrake.fr). Launch HandBrake,

and insert one of your DVDs into the PC. Then click the Source button
and choose the location of your disc.
When HandBrake has completed its preliminary work, the Source
eld should display the name of the movie and the Title eld should
list something with a runtime that matches the movies length. Now
select Browse and choose a destination and lename.
Finally, choose a preset for the conversion. If you plan to watch the
movie mostly on mobile devices, select the formatting option that best
matches what you haveor choose Universal if you want something
that can play just about anywhere. Finally, click Start and then prepare
to wait: The ripping and conversion process can take some time.

Get streaming
Once youve liberated your movie library, you have a couple of options.
You can upload everything to a remote-storage cloud service like
Dropbox (dropbox.com) or SugarSync (sugarsync.com), or you can turn
your PC into a media server and eectively host your own cloud.
Using a cloud service aords you a built-in remote backup of your

HandBrake looks
a little austere,
but it oers
myriad options
for converting
and formatting
your movies for
smartphones,
tablets, HDTVs,
and more.

HERES HOW

movie library and lets you stream videos via the services mobile app
a nice option when youre traveling. Unfortunately, a free account on
Dropbox or SugarSync nets you only a few gigabytes of space, so plan
to pay a monthly fee for storage if you need lots of space. Whats more,
it takes time to upload a big batch of movies, and you wont be able
to stream them to set-top boxes. The limitations arent terrible, but I
think most people would be better o setting up a personal media
server with free streaming software.
A program like Plex oers the best of both worlds. It indexes all of
the media on your PC and then streams it to mobile and connected
devices alikeso you can watch movies on your smartphone or tablet
while youre on the go, or on a set-top box. To get started with Plex,
check out Meet Plex, the media streamer that will make you forget
Netflix and Hulu (go.pcworld.com/plex).

Plex is free
software that
gives you a
slick interface
for managing
your mediastreaming PC.

Eective syncing is crucial

as your devices multiply.

Seamlessly sync your data

across devices
BY PAUL MAH

WORK IS NO longer anchored to one device or location. So its critical

to be able to access les across devices, platforms, and apps. These

tips will let you keep your data in sync wherever your work takes you.

Bookmarks and browser setings

Browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox support automatic

HERES HOW

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 with the Firefox sync
server, go to the Sync tab of the Options dialog box. Click pair a device
to bring up a dialog box with three empty text elds. Do the same on
your other device, but select I have an account when prompted. Youll
see an easy setup key that you must put into the empty text boxes
to verify and link up the second device. You can read more about the
process on the Firefox support page (go.pcworld.com/support).

Documents and les

It used to be necessary to shuttle les between computers external
storage devices. Now we have cloud services such as Dropbox to store

Signing in to
Chrome allows
you to save all
of your browser
settings to
your Google
account.

our les for easy access from any Web-connected device. But a common mistake when using cloud storage is neglecting to save new les
in synchronized folders. Depending on your cloud service, you may be
able to synchronize the entire desktop or default folders to prevent
this. Alternatively, you can create all new documents in a synchronized
catchall folder, and then le them into subfolders later.

Email, contacts, and calendar

If your email system relies on POP (Post Oce Protocol), which downloads and erases email from the server, switch to a cloud-enabled
system or one with IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). Either
option lets you see messages and folders from multiple devices.

Firefox requires
you to pair each
of your devices
to a Firefox
Sync account
using an easy
setup key.

HERES HOW

Instant messaging
Most instant messaging services have clients available for all the major
platforms. Things get trickier, though, if you bounce between two or
more IM applications. A number of third-party chat clients oer support for multiple IM servicesDigsby (digsby.com), Trillian (trillian.im),
and Pidgin (pidgin.im) are popular options. Trillians continuous chat
feature syncs conversations across all your devices. This makes it possible to switch from a desktop to a smartphone without missing a word.

Notes
Finally, you can sync notes, ideas, and other scraps of digital information
with a text-only option such as SimpleNote (simplenote.com) or a
more-comprehensive alternative such as Evernote (evernote.com) or
Microsofts OneNote (go.pcworld.com/onenote).

Trillian syncs
chats across all
of your devices
so you can pick
up conversations where
you left o.

SSDs dier from

standard hard drives
in several ways.

Stretch the life of your SSD

BY ALEX COCILOVA

ONCE A COMPUTER enthusiasts 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 dier from a traditional hard drives 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 devices integrity starts to deteriorate. The higher-end, Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory chip can

HERES HOW

NAND flash drives

lack moving parts.

withstand up to
100,000 P/E cycles.
Youd have to work hard to
reach the P/E cycle limit for an MLCbased drive, let alone an SLC-based one.
Nevertheless, every time you write to the drive, you
bring it a little closer to its demise. Dont obsess over every
single write cycle, but do check out the following techniques for
minimizing unnecessary writes to your SSD.
Stop defragging: Thanks to the absence of a moving read-write
head, as well as the nature of flash memory and controllers, the traditional notion of fragmentation does not apply to SSDs. In fact, defragging makes numerous small, unnecessary, device-killing writes to an
SSDreason enough to eliminate it from your routine.
To turn o your PCs disk defragmenter, uncheck the Run on a
schedule box in the defragmenter program. If you have traditional
hard drives that would benet from a good defragging, you can run
the defragmenter on a schedule for those particular drives.
Disable search indexing: Windows search indexer makes searching
for les on a traditional hard drive speedier, but it doesnt do much
on an SSD except perform small writes. To disable it, rst search for
services.msc in the Start menu search box. Then, nd and right-click
Windows Search to open the properties. Stop the service and set the
Startup type drop-down menu to Disabled.
Use your SSD wisely: An SSD is great for operating systems, applications, and games, as it cuts down load times and launches programs at
lightning speed. Storing your music, photos, movies, and documents
on an SSD isnt wrong, but you dont need the drives speed for such

items, and you probably dont want to waste write cycles on constant
uploads and edits. A traditional hard drive would suce for these les.
Avoid hibernating: If you have an SSD-endowed laptop, note that
hibernation mode diers from sleep mode. Hibernation stores open
les and programs to the SSD and shuts the PC down. Sleep pauses
everything, but doesnt write to the drive. Sleep uses a bit more energy,
and if your battery runs down, sleeping les are toast. With an SSD,
however, it makes economic sense in the long run to use a little extra
power to avoid making unnecessary writes every time you step away, so
sleep mode is preferable. To disable hibernation, open the command
prompt. Then, type powercfg.exe /hibernate off and press <Enter>.
P H OTO G R A P H Y ( TO P ) BY M I C H A E L H OM N I C K

Dont defrag an
SSD; limit the
process to your
PCs traditional
hard drives.

ANSWER LINE

HERES
HOW

BY LINCOLN SPECTOR

Hulu has both

current and
classic shows.

Find and watch

free TV on the Internet

Q:
A:

WHERE CAN I go on the Web to nd television programs and

watch them for free?lucyer

GENERALLY, YOU have to pay for copyrighted material. The

people who create television shows expect to be paid for
their workjust as you and I do.
Some websites oer free, bootlegged copies of TV shows. I dont use
those sites and I dont recommend them. Theres a lot I dont like about
current U.S. copyright law; but without it, you wouldnt have any new
television shows, books, music, moviesor articles in PCWorld.

Nevertheless, its 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 sites for starters.
YouTube: Along with cat videos and regular folks spouting their
assorted personal philosophies, YouTube (www.youtube.com) hosts a
lot of professionally made television. And parent company Google is
pretty serious about keeping copy-protected material o the site
unless the copyright holders have given their blessing. Just search for
tv shows full episodes. Or search for a particular show, as in Mad Men
full episodes. Monty Python has its own channel, and youll nd a lot
of full Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes here.
Hulu: The free version of the extensive Hulu (www.hulu.com) service oers episodes from The Daily Show, Law & Order: Special Victims
Unit, The Simpsons, South Park, The Vampire Diaries, and other current
series, as well as classic ones. There are some limits, of course. As a
rule, the free Hulu provides only ve complete episodes per series,
but usually theyre ve recent episodes.
Your favorite TV network: Browse to the Comedy Central site

Monty Python
is among the
many dedicated
channels on
YouTube.

HERES HOW

You can get an

enormous amount
of entertainment
over the Internet for
a very low price.

(www.comedycentral.com), and youll nd a

smattering of full episodes. News/opinion
channels such as Fox News (www.foxnews.
com/on-air) and MSNBC (tv.msnbc.com) oer
everything from the previous days shows.
Broadcast networks such as ABC (watchabc.
go.com) and NBC (www.nbc.com) stream
selections of new episodes.
Speaking of broadcasts, remember that you can still buy an antenna
and enjoy free TV without even an Internet connection.
Finally, you can get an enormous amount of entertainment over the
Internet for a very low price. For only $8 a month, you can subscribe to
either Hulu Plus or Netflix. The shows these services carry arent
always brand-new, but the options are huge. For instance, rather than
just the ve recent episodes of Saturday Night Live you can get on free
Hulu, the Plus service oers all 743 episodes dating back to 1975.

HASSLE-FREE PC
BY RICK BROIDA

HERES
HOW

Even new PCs

can have
problems

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 couldnt 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 wasnt 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 modelcould
reliably connect to the Internet.
Turns out, no. After some Web searching, I learned that many Samsung Series 9 models suered from the same intermittent Wi-Fi problems. (I further determined that Wi-Fi was the culprit after connecting
the system directly to my router via ethernet. Problem solved.)

Connectivity
problems can
plague any PC.

I journeyed to Samsungs support site in search of updated Wi-Fi

drivers, but found nothing new: All of the drivers oered there dated
back to mid-2012. Luckily, someone on a user forum pointed me to
new drivers from Intel (makers of the Series 9s Wi-Fi chip). A quick
download, install, and reboot later, I was enjoying blazing broadband once again.
Alas, the story doesnt end there. Soon I
began to notice that certain websites wouldnt
load completelyit was as if the browser just
gave up halfway. If I refreshed the page, presto,
no more problems. That certainly wasnt a longterm solution, however.
What the heck? Another connectivity issue? Back to the user
forums. Youll never guess the cause this time: Samsungs Support
Center utility (which monitors the system for available updates and
whatnot) apparently doesnt get along with Google Chrome, my
browser of choice. Other users had encountered this very same pageloading oddity; uninstalling Support Center was a potential x.
Sure enough, that trick worked. But talk about two vexing hassles!
On a brand-new computer, no less.
By now Im sure youve sussed out the moral of the story: Even new
PCs can have problems. Annoying, yes. Frustrating, denitely. But its
the nature of the high-tech beast. The key is to keep calm and remember that you may be able to nd a (reasonably) simple solution.

Although the PC
booted with lightning
speed, its Internet
access seemed slow.

Apps can combine

photos to create a
sweeping vista.

Make panoramas
the easy way
BY DAVE JOHNSON
SOME SCENES ARE too epic to t 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 easyjust 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 dont like the sometimes jagged panoramas, or if you have an
older iPhone model, dont worry. One of the best panoramic-stitching
apps available for the iPhone is Pano (go.pcworld.com/pano). For $2,
you can capture sweeping vistas using up to 16 photos (and a nal
resolution of 24 megapixels). The image quality is excellent, with
superb alignment and blending.
Want to make a 360-degree panorama that connects end to end,
like a photographic cylinder? Check out 360 Panorama, (go.pcworld.
com/360pan), which, for $1, automates everything. Simply hold the
camera up and start to pan in a circle; the app snaps and stitches on
the fly, so by the time you make a complete spin, you have a panoramic

HERES HOW

photo that you can then swipe to see all 360 degrees of landscape.
Microsofts Photosynth (go.pcworld.com/photosynth) Web-based
panorama tool oers a similar free iPhone app. Like 360 Panorama,
Photosynth can create a 360-degree scene that includes the ground
down to your feet and the sky overhead, as if you had captured a
sphere around yourself.
If youre an Android lover, you have a wealth of options, though
Microsoft doesnt yet provide an Android version of Photosynth. You
can create high-resolution, high-quality vistas with the $2 PanoStitch
(go.pcworld.com/panostitch). To make a 360-degree panorama, check
out the free Panorama360 (go.pcworld.com/pan360).
By digital camera: Some digital cameras have built-in panorama
modes, but if your camera doesnt, you need an app.
A popular option is AutoStitch (go.pcworld.com/autostitch). It works
with any collection of imagesyou dont have to tell it what the right
order is, or drag and drop anything. Feed it a set of photos, and the
app arranges them automatically. AutoStitch is free as long as you use
the resulting panoramas according to the license agreement.
Or, try what might well be the best free panoramic-stitching program
for Windows: Microsoft Photo Gallery (go.pcworld.com/photogallery).
Hidden in this simple editor and organizer is a phenomenal automatic
stitcher; select a set of photos, and choose Panorama in the Create tab.
P H OTO G R A P H Y ( F I R ST ) BY RO B E RT C A R D I N

Computer-based
stitching apps
can generally
piece together
photos like a jigsaw, so you dont
have to specify
the right order.

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Tech Spotlight
A video showcase of
the latest trends

Intels vision for

home control

Most home-control
systems need a centralized controller and
a professional installer. Intel recently demonstrated a new concept: a peerto-peer network of embedded microcontrollers that
homeowners can program themselves, and where webcams that recognize hand gestures and faces can control everything from appliances to window coverings.
See go.pcworld.com/homecontrolvid for a video.