Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2017 i PCWorld

Tech and trends that will affect you today and beyond. AMD'S RYZEN THREADRIPPER could very well be the most powerful consumer CPU ever introduced. With 16 cores and 32 threads, it gives the high-performance Intel products currently dominating the same space something to worry about. The CPU is so new, hard information is scant, but we've gathered the most solid stuff here. The specs we know Core count: 16 Thread count: 32 Release date: Summer of 2017 Yup, that's it. If you've read anything else on Threadripper or "Ryzen 9," it's nothing but rumor and speculation at this point. You may say the leaks look good, but we'll point out that they didn't even seem to get the name right, so you gotta wonder. What will it be called? AMD's…

IF YOU OWN a Windows XP or Windows 7 PC that's been hit by the WannaCry ransomware, there's good news: French researchers have created a software utility called wanawiki that can potentially unlock an infected PC. Matt Suiche, the founder of CloudVolumes and Comae, published a blog post (go.pcworld.com/wwikidem) that describes how Benjamin Delpy's wanawiki tool works: It sniffs out the prime numbers used by the ransomware to reconstruct the key used to encrypt your PC. Once the wanawiki tool (go.pcworld.com/wwiki) is run, the software can basically generate the key, and the tool will then unlock the encypted files. Experts have warned, however, that WannaCry itself isn’t that sophisticated, and further exploitswill spread using a vulnerability released by a group calling themselves the Shadow Brokers. There's a catch: To give…

NOPE, YOU’RE NOT being paranoid. From pickpockets to malware, your Android phone is under siege from all sides. Wily attackers are continually switching up their tactics in hopes of taking control of your device. Let’s acknowledge that there’s no foolproof way to protect your Android device from thieves and hackers. Indeed, as a wise technology guru once told me, if a sophisticated crook decides to target your phone, good luck trying to stop them. That said, there are plenty of ways to keep your Android handset safe from the most common security threats, all with a minimum of effort. Just as a dead bolt will thwart a casual thief, so will a passcode foil a pickpocket, while the right security settings can keep most malware-infected apps at bay. 1. Lock…

TESTED IN PCWORLD LABS In this section, hardware & software go through rigorous testing. EVER SINCE THE MONSTROUS $700 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (go.pcworld.com/gtx1080tirev) launched, the world’s been waiting to see what this beastly GPU was capable of in the hands of Nvidia’s hardware partners. The Founders Edition delivered damn near uncompromising 60-fps performance at 4K resolution with everything cranked to 11, and that was with a lowly reference cooler and stock clock speeds. How far can factory-overclocked versions with potent custom cooling solutions go? Well, for the first time ever, a graphics card is so damn fast that it managed to largely push a game’s bottleneck off of the GPU and onto the CPU in PCWorld’s ferocious testing PC—while running 15 degrees or more cooler than the Founders Edition.…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/ss8plsvid SAMSUNG HAS FINALLY beat Apple at its own game. While the Galaxy S has been regarded for years as the best Android phone money can buy (at least until the Pixel, go.pcworld.com/pixelrev, came around), it’s always existed in the iPhone’s lengthy shadow. Even with a higher market share, a dominant OS, and a years-long lead on features like screen size and water resistance, the Galaxy S has stayed just out of reach of the iPhone zeitgeist. No matter how much it tried to create its own end-to-end experience, Apple fans saw it as a copycat and Android enthusiasts lamented its aggressive TouchWiz interface overhaul. All that has changed with the Galaxy S8+ (go.pcworld.com/ss8pls). With a stunning design that absolutely needs to be seen and a…

How to build, maintain, and fix your tech gear. IF YOU THINK that overclocking is solely for performance-obsessed geeks armed with bottles of liquid nitrogen, it’s time to reconsider! Even a small bump in PC performance can delay the need to upgrade your CPU, keeping money in your pocket. I’ll walk you through simple overclocking steps that can boost processor speeds by 10 percent or more. If you’re a gamer, video artist, or media streamer, that’s a useful, no-cost upgrade. What is overclocking, anyway? Overclocking is a technique for tweaking various types of PC hardware, so that it runs faster than the manufacturer’s intended specification. Many processors, RAM modules, and graphics cards can be overclocked, usually by adjusting their settings via your motherboard’s UEFI BIOS. Operate in safe margins and…

WE STILL GET quite a few questions about when and how to optimize storage devices. Easy answer: The care and feeding of storage devices is either taken care of automatically by Windows, or it's simply unnecessary. Mostly. Defragging Defragging hard drives (not SSDs) has been of limited benefit since Microsoft switched to the NTFS file system. Why? Because to a large extent, NTFS is self-optimizing. Add Windows’ various tricks such as pre-fetch, better ordering of files, and hard-wiring important files to set locations, and there’s rarely any noticeable degradation in hard drive performance even after years of use. That said, many external drives come formatted to FAT16, FAT32, or exFAT. These might benefit from optimization after a lengthy period of heavy use. Whether the time you save during normal…

Make smart purchases, stay safe online. Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/wdcu MICROSOFT MADE SOME much needed changes to Windows Defender with the Creators Update (go.pcworld.com/cu). The built-in antivirus app is renamed the Windows Defender Security Center, and as that name suggests, it’s a more fleshed-out security suite. It’s not that Windows Defender has any new features. What Microsoft has done for the most part is bring together a number of security settings in Windows 10 that were scattered throughout the system. The old Defender was a very bare-bones utility. The Home tab showed a confirmation that it was active, whether virus and spyware definitions were up-to-date, and when the last scan was. There were also tabs to manually retrieve updates to spyware definitions and to view your Defender history. Other…

WE ARE OFTEN our own worst enemies when it comes to cluttering our inboxes with unwanted email, thanks to our zeal for email subscriptions. And in this time of heightened civil activity, many of us have added political emails to our already unwieldy collection of daily deals, news-letters, and alerts. The bulk of these messages languish in our inboxes unread and obscuring the really important ones that require our action. Fortunately, there are a few tools to help you prune these offenders without having to scroll message by message through your inbox. Give one of these a try. Unroll.me This free service uses a simple web interface to surface all your subscriptions and let you unsubscribe from each with a single click. Just go to Unroll.me (unroll.me/a/signup) and sign in…

THE MOST POPULAR games in the world don’t need a beefy graphics card. Yes, I’m talking about e-sports. The likes of League of Legends, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive dominate Twitch and Steam charts alike. There are a lot of reasons for their success, but the fact that they run on virtually any PC doesn’t hurt. Heck, you can even run e-sports games—including Overwatch—on an AMD APU’s integrated graphics (go.pcworld.com/amdapu) if you’re okay with modest frame rates at lower resolutions. AMD’s affordable new Radeon RX 550 is designed for folks who want more e-sports eye candy without breaking the bank, at $80 on Newegg (go.pcworld.com/rx550ne). Higher frame rates and resolutions mean you can see more, faster, and that extra performance can spell the difference between winning and losing in…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/ssdexvid2 IT’S AMAZING JUST how heavy an ultra-portable laptop becomes when you’re lugging it through airports, convention centers, and the streets of wherever the heck you’re doing business. Even a thin laptop can become a 2.5-pound problem, but now it’s a problem that could very well be solved by the DeX (go.pcworld.com/ssdex), Samsung’s desktop-PC-in-a-dock for the Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones. Drop your Galaxy phone into the DeX dock ($150 at Amazon, go. pcworld.com/dexdkamz, or the Samsung store, go.pcworld.com/ dexdkss), then connect the DeX to a desktop monitor or TV over HDMI. Boom: You now have a 1920x1080 PC desktop with resizable windows. Except all your programs are mobile apps. And, yeah, your desktop is Android, not Windows. But it works! I’ve already shared my first…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/w10cuprivid WINDOWS 10 PRIVACY is a contentious issue. This is in part because Windows 10 is integrated with cloud-based features like Cortana, and it has features influenced by mobile such as determining your location. Then there’s Microsoft’s more questionable goals, like scooping up diagnostic data and gathering information for better ad-targeting. In previous versions of Windows 10, managing privacy was, to put it mildly, an insane process. Settings were strewn all over the operating system and the web. Privacy isn’t much better in the recently released Creators Update (go.pcworld.com/w10curev), but Microsoft has consolidated its web-based privacy information related to a user’s Microsoft Account. In addition, privacy settings on the PC are a little more helpful. We’ve already covered the Creators Update privacy dashboard (go. pcworld.com/w10cupriv) that…

USERS OF OLD Windows systems can now download a patch to protect them from the May 12th massive ransomware attack. In a rare step, Microsoft published a patch for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 8—all of them operating systems for which it no longer provides mainstream support. Users can download and find more information about the patches in Microsoft’s blog post (go.pcworld.com/msrcwcrypt) about the recent attack from the WannaCry ransomware. The ransomware, which has spread globally (go.pcworld.com/rwareatk), has been infecting computers by exploiting a Windows vulnerability involving the Server Message Block protocol, a file-sharing feature. Computers infected with WannaCry will have their data encrypted, and display a ransom note demanding $300 or $600 in bitcoin to free the files. Fortunately, Windows 10 customers were not targeted in the…

WE’VE ALREADY LOOKED at how to turn off location services (go.pcworld.com/ls) in the Windows 10 Creators Update. But the operating system isn’t the only way your location gets used. Your browser can also serve up your location, though by default most browsers ask your permission before doing so. If you don’t wish to get those requests, here’s how to turn off location requests in the major browsers on Windows. Microsoft Edge Let’s start with the easy one. Because Edge is built on the Windows Store platform, stopping it from asking for your location is simple. Open the Settings app and go to Privacy > Location. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen until you see the heading Choose Apps That Can Use Your Precise Location. Now just turn the…

CONFESSION TIME: ALTHOUGH it’s my job to review and write about streaming channel bundles such as Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, and the new YouTube TV, I have little interest in using them personally. Most of my TV consumption comes from Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO, all of which are available without a traditional channel bundle. As such, I’ve established a viewing pattern that largely avoids advertisements, is highly flexible, and is much cheaper than cable. Eight years after cutting cable TV, I don’t feel compelled to tack on a big bundle of streaming TV channels. With so many new bundles emerging—including an upcoming Hulu bundle and rumored packages from Comcast and Verizon—it’s easy to assume you need one to cut the cord. (I’ve even defended these bundles (go.pcworld.com/bun) as a…

INEXPENSIVE GAMING LAPTOPS. They’re the order of the day, with component prices reaching new lows and non-gaming companies putting out quality products at a bargain. A few years back we were hyped about Lenovo’s selling its Y50 for $1,200. Now? You can pick up a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 (go.pcworld.com/insp157k) Gaming notebook for $850. That’s with a 1050 Ti thrown in. Sure, it might not be the most powerful gaming laptop, but getting a system with a dedicated graphics card at this price is crazy. And if it weren’t for one major caveat, the Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming would be an insane deal. Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming AT A GLANCE It’s not the most powerful gaming laptop ever made, but an i5 and a 1050 Ti for only $850?…

R ecently, Microsoft made the inscrutable decision to retire Wunderlist, the beloved to-do list app it acquired in 2015, and replace it with a new offering called Microsoft To-Do (go.pcworld.com/wun). Wunderlist isn’t going away yet, but it’s no longer getting feature updates, and its long-term fate is sealed. In a blog post (go.pcworld.com/msb), Microsoft said it will retire the app after incorporating “your valued feedback and the best elements of the Wunderlist experience into To-Do.” Microsoft has its work cut out. In its current “preview” state, Microsoft To-Do is a bare-bones task manager, with none of the powerful features that made Wunderlist great. Here’s the long list of features that Microsoft should consider bringing over if the company wants to offer a competent replacement: 1. COLLABORATION The biggest omission from…

NETFLIX IS FINALLY making it possible to watch shows offline on your Windows PC, but you won’t be using your browser to do it. The Netflix app in the Windows Store supports downloading select titles for offline viewing. This is great news for PC users who want to watch titles on a laptop-sized screen during their next flight or an LTE coverage gap somewhere on the Great Plains. Even better, it gives you a reason to actually use Netflix’s Windows 10 app since it offers something the web app doesn’t. If you haven’t fired up Netflix for Windows 10 in a while, make sure you’ve got the latest version by opening the Windows Store, clicking on your user profile picture, and selecting Downloads and Updates from the drop-down menu.…