Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2023 i PCWorld

The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday that it is filing suit in an attempt to block Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion acquisition of game developer Activision Blizzard, on the grounds that it would suppress competition. The FTC said that the proposed deal could possibly change Activision’s existing strategy of supplying games to rival consoles, harming competition. “With control over Activision’s blockbuster franchises, Microsoft would have both the means and motive to harm competition by manipulating Activision’s pricing, degrading Activision’s game quality or player experience on rival consoles and gaming services, changing the terms and timing of access to Activision’s content, or withholding content from competitors entirely, resulting in harm to consumers,” the FTC said. In an attempt to get out ahead of the FTC’s action, Microsoft president Brad Smith penned a Wall…

The Google Chrome browser now supports something new to secure your life: passkeys, a stronger, leak-proof version of a password that can use your phone as a token to authorize you to websites. Passkeys can and will be stored inside the Google Password Manager, or inside apps that support passkeys within future versions of Android, Google said. Passkeys are enabled in the latest version of Chrome in Windows 11, macOS, and Android. Passkeys are surprisingly easy to understand. You’re familiar with a username and password. The latter should be a complex series of letters and numbers—the longer the password, the more secure it is, in general. But once they’re exposed in a breach, they can be surprisingly easy to crack. It’s why a password manager, even a free password manager,…

Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 4080 Founders Edition hits stores recently, lightning-fast performance and a massive new price tag in tow. While last generation’s awesome RTX 3080 cost $700 at launch, delivering a monumental 60 to 80 percent performance uplift over its predecessor, this new model is releasing with a staggering $1,200 price tag. Yes, that’s right: a $500 (or 71 percent) increase over the cost of its predecessor. For roughly 30 percent more performance. Sheesh. We’ve been putting the GeForce RTX 4080 through its paces. While Nvidia’s new GPU is astonishingly fast, blowing past last gen’s RTX 3090 with ease while drawing much less power, that new price tag casts a long shadow over its release, to such an extent that we can’t even come close to recommending this card at…

Though Windows provides its own file backup facilities in Windows File Backup, the OS has continually made them less obvious and less intuitive. Why is anyone’s guess. There are plenty of alternatives, but they can be hard to find or just as hard to use. Enter Perfect Backup. It’s free and, while it’s just shy of perfect, Perfect Backup does grab the brass ring for being the most straightforward and user-friendly interface for the purpose. Add to that stable performance and a cornucopia of options, as well as network, FTP, and online services support, and you’ve got a winner on your hands. FEATURES Perfect Backup is file backup—that is, it doesn’t image entire partitions like our favorite R-Drive Image does. Instead, it merely copies files and folders to a new location.…

After years of shortages and product delays, the PC industry slammed on the gas pedal in 2022, unleashing bleeding-edge hardware at a truly frenetic pace. A wave of long-lasting, heavy-hitting laptops started the year with a bang. Then the battle turned to desktops, where Intel, Nvidia, and AMD rolled out new generations of processors and graphics cards alike, bolstered by delightful advances in SSDs and new monitors that push pixels harder than ever before. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. We tested some truly impressive hardware this year—but you’ll only find the absolute greatest on this list. And that’s not all: Our top picks include the best software available, because what you use all that computing power for is just as vital. For this list, we asked…

Whether you’re writing the next greatest novel or a simple grocery list, Microsoft Word is used for all types of things. Fortunately, if you’re looking to add check boxes to a personal survey or work checklist, it’s relatively easy to do. We’ll guide you every step of the way. Let’s dive right in. ADD CHECK BOXES TO WORD DOCUMENTS ON WINDOWS To add check boxes to your Word document on Windows, you’ll need to use the features in the Developer tab. This tab isn’t displayed by default. To show the Developer tab, right-click anywhere in the ribbon and click the “Customize the Ribbon” option in the context menu. In the Options window that appears, check the box next to Developer and then click OK. Now type out the list you’d…

If you don’t use Twitter often, you may be unaware of how the site has dissolved into organizational chaos. But it’s a mess right now—and dangerous as a result. Prior to the company’s sale to Elon Musk, Twitter had a verification process that confirmed the identity of account owners. If the program found that you were who you claimed to be, a blue checkmark (or gray for the dark mode theme) would appear next to your name. It helped reduce harassment of highly public figures, and allowed users to easily recognize official accounts held by government agencies, newspapers, medical professionals, airlines, large corporations, and other sources of vital information. But last week, a major (and hugely confusing) change rolled out to the system. The tweak? The verification part got dropped—but…

Most laptop and CPU makers encourage you to upgrade your PC because its performance can’t keep up with the latest hardware. But there’s another, more compelling reason that’s largely ignored: Your laptop’s battery life will become significantly worse as time goes by. How much battery life will diminish depends on a number of factors. But here’s my anecdotal report, based on my day-to-day use: In just a year’s time, my laptop’s battery capacity has dropped by a whopping 16 percent. That’s a real-life number, based on real-world use. Though I swap back and forth between a number of test laptops for various uses, I typically leave a Surface Laptop Studio plugged in during the day; it’s also the test bed for powering my evaluations of the best Thunderbolt docks. As…

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft confirmed what gamers suspected: The big 2022 update to Windows 11 was affecting the performance of high-end games. It said as much in an official bug tracker, and delayed the rollout of the big 2022 Update for quite a few users. According to the same change log, the issue isn’t fully resolved, but it’s now limited to only a “small subset of games and apps.” So the latest update is heading out to a lot more users. The Verge spotted the update, and I can confirm that my desktop with an Nvidia GPU got the Windows 11 2022 Update last night. Exactly what the problem was—is?—remains somewhat nebulous. Microsoft originally blamed the issue on games “inadvertently enabling GPU performance debugging features not meant to be…

The war for the next generation of graphics supremacy is finally on. AMD’s new RDNA 3–powered $999 Radeon RX 7900 XTX and $899 Radeon 7900 XT finally hit the streets on Tuesday, December 13, primed for battle with Nvidia’s monstrous GeForce RTX 4090. To cut right to the chase: In many ways, this launch is very reminiscent of the battle between the last generation of the Radeon RX 6900 XT and RTX 3090. Despite costing hundreds less, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX comes within spitting distance of the $1,600 RTX 4090 in many games, meeting or even beating it in some titles—just like last generation. Ray tracing is also no longer a weakness, with the 7900 XTX on par with the 3090’s formerly best-in-class performance but trailing behind Nvidia’s latest…

PC gamers looking for a big screen monitor have great options in 2022, including new 42-inch and 48-inch monitors with OLED panels. These have many benefits over the IPS and VA panel monitors that came before them, but also sell at a higher price. The Predator CG48 proves the premium is worth paying. It’s similar to LG’s alternative, though, so price may become the deciding factor. SPECS The Acer Predator CG48 is a 48-inch 4K monitor with an OLED panel. While Acer doesn’t detail the panel used by the monitor, it’s probably the same LG-produced OLED panel found in the LG Ultragear 48GQ900-B. Display size: 48-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio Native resolution: 3480×2160 Panel type: OLED Refresh rate: 138Hz HDR: Yes, HDR10 Adaptive sync: AMD FreeSync Premium Pro Ports: 1× HDMI…

The internet is getting weird again. Twitter’s recent stumbles under new ownership have surprisingly shined a quick light on the world of federated and decentralized social networking services, like Mastodon. These services are peer-to-peer or community-run networks, depending on the particulars. Federated services are services that are managed by individual organizations or “offices,” such as the post office, email, or self-hosted forums. If you were on the internet “back in the day,” you might remember when everyone connected through a variety of different forums or instant messaging client accounts while having their own personal pages on Geocities or Blogspot. The rise of federated services is reminiscent of that. If you’re used to “modern” social media from 2012 or so onward, all of this can be really confusing at first glance—which is…

If you ever need a textbook example of misleading marketing, just look at what some internet providers are saying about gigabit internet service. Cable companies would have you believe that speeds upward of 1 Gbps are essential for modern internet use. A gigabit connection “lets you multitask,” Cox’s website proclaims, suggesting that it’s important for “scrolling through your Instagram feed on your phone while simultaneously streaming Netflix and surfing Amazon Prime on your laptop.” Likewise, Comcast says to consider gigabit speeds if “your family loves to stream movies and TV while playing bandwidth-hungry games and downloading the latest apps on your smartphone.” For the sake of keeping this article family-friendly, the term I will use for these claims is “exaggeration.” Gigabit speeds are overkill for the vast majority of internet users,…

Google Chrome has long had a reputation of being fast, secure…and ravenous for memory like a starving teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet. But finally Chrome is going to slim down, right in time for the new year. Over the next few weeks, Chrome will be adding two new features, Memory Saver and Battery Saver, on Windows, Macs, and Chromebooks alike, Google said Tuesday. The company didn’t say when exactly when these new features will show up in your browser, just that they will. The features work pretty much as advertised. Google pitches Memory Saver as a “smoother-running browser experience,” promising to save up to 30 percent more memory when running Chrome by freeing up memory from tabs you aren’t actively using. If a tab is idling, it will essentially be…

Someone on the internet wrote that ChatGPT just made the first two years of high-school homework meaningless. That assessment is not far off the mark. OpenAI’s new AI text-generation tool currently offers sophisticated, lengthy, and even fun responses to textual prompts, currently all for free. ChatGPT is part Wikipedia, part researcher, part analyst, and part poet. It can write a short paper on the causes and outcomes of the French Revolution. It can write a seven-paragraph essay on why nihilism should be your personal philosophy. It can write an epic poem on the need to brush your teeth regularly. It can write a formal yet sarcastic letter to your neighbor on why he shouldn’t trim your trees without permission. It’s a breathtaking development. It’s also a scary one when you…

The latest high-profile heist of valuable digital currency has nothing to do with Bitcoin or Ethereum. Nope, this time thieves are stealing currency and assets from Roblox players. Roblox is a massively popular kid’s game platform that has a disturbing amount of real money trading hands, and it’s become the target of a series of Chrome extensions hiding malware. According to BleepingComputer, at least two extensions posted to the official Chrome Web Store were fronts for a backdoor program that gathers a Roblox player’s user info and potentially makes them a target for hacking, especially if they’re also a user of the third-party Rolimons.com currency trading system. The SearchBlox extensions claim to allow you to search quickly for other users, and were apparently legitimate at some point, but have been…

With the latest iteration of its premium Spectre x360 14, HP adds two new premium features not found on last year’s convertible alongside the requisite update to 12th-generation Intel silicon. The biggest addition is the high-resolution OLED panel that delivers exceptional image quality. The second addition is a high-resolution webcam, moving from an underwhelming 720p camera to a crisp and dynamic 1080p webcam. The Spectre x360’s overall design remains unchanged. The all-metal chassis with gold accents offers a solid feel and luxurious looks, while the display’s 3:2 aspect ratio is geared toward business use rather than entertainment pursuits that would benefit from a wider screen. It’s still a tad heavy for a 14-inch convertible, and the battery life is shorter than that of last year’s model, but the Spectre remains…

When Acer announced the new Chromebook Vero 514, I was thrilled to bits. I’m something of a Chromebook stan, as I dig its bare-bones nature. This is the first Chromebook in the manufacturer’s eco-friendly Vero line, which is exciting news for eco-conscious buyers. Not only are you reducing your e-waste with this machine, as it’s made of recycled materials, but you’re also getting pretty good hardware for the price. From strong CPU performance to a bright 1080p display, the Acer Chromebook Vero 514 has a lot to offer. Battery life is good and the unpainted exterior is totally unique. Even the packaging it comes in consists of mostly recycled paper and cardboard. However, audio quality is underwhelming and you’re stuck using ChromeOS. If you can live with those nitpicks, then…

Ready or not, two-factor authentication is something you’ll need to start thinking more about. This approach to online security, also known as two-step authentication, multi-factor authentication, or just 2FA for short, involves combining a regular password with a secondary numeric code, which you must enter on any device where you haven’t logged in before. This extra code typically gets sent to your phone, so someone who steals your password can’t get into your account unless they have physical access to your phone as well (and know how to unlock it). The added annoyance of 2FA is well worth the extra security it provides, which is why some tech companies have now started requiring it. Google and Amazon’s Ring both made 2FA mandatory last year, and it’s on by default for most Apple IDs.…

For me, the Steam Deck’s aha moment came when I figured out how to play the PC version of Stranglehold without a mouse and keyboard. The John Woo–produced, somewhat underappreciated third-person shooter didn’t include controller support when it launched on Windows in 2007, and neither did the re-release on GOG a few years ago. That and some other odd display issues kept me from ever giving it a try on my gaming PC. But after I sideloaded the game through Steam Deck’s desktop mode, Valve’s button remapping tool saved the day. This Steam Deck feature is so extensive that you can get practically any game to work well with the portable console’s thumbsticks, triggers, and buttons, and I’ve since used it to breathe new life into other old PC games…