Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i PCWorld

HP’S SPECTRE X360 steps out with a major upgrade in its third generation. The latest version of the company’s flagship convertible laptop gets thinner, lighter, and faster, and adds a wealth of check-off features. The new Spectre x360 went on sale October 12 starting at $1,049. Still made of CNC-aluminum, the Spectre x360 slims down thanks to the use of a “micro-edge bezel” design. This eliminates the massive bezel of the previous version but still keeps the same 13.3-inch, touch-enabled screen. The only screen offered so far is a 1920x1080 IPS panel that uses direct bonding. These improvements shave down the width from 12.79 inches to 12.03 inches, and the thickness from 16mm to 13.7mm. Weight drops to 2.85 pounds from 3.17 pounds. HP has announced only one model so…

APPLE’S OFT-RUMORED (but never confirmed) car project (go.pcworld.com/applecarproj) is reportedly being scaled back. The effort, codenamed Project Titan, will now focus on creating an autonomous driving software platform as opposed to a full-blown car (go.pcworld.com/applecarrumor), according to Bloomberg (go.pcworld.com/bbapplecar). The latest report from Bloomberg basically confirms the news organization’s own suspicions back in July. At that time, Apple hired Dan Dodge (go.pcworld.com/dandodgehire), creator of BlackBerry-owned QNX automotive software platform, which Bloomberg believed signaled a stronger focus on software. However, Bloomberg said at the time that Apple was not abandoning car development, which no longer appears to be the case. Project Titan has been scaled back with “hundreds” of job cuts, and a declaration by project leader Bob Mansfield (go.pcworld.com/bobmansfieldac) that Apple was shifting to focus on the platform, Bloomberg reports.…

SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS HAS discontinued production of its Galaxy Note7 smartphone, which has been plagued since its introduction in August by battery problems that caused fires and even explosions. The company recently confirmed that it is discontinuing production, a day after it said that it had advised carriers and retail partners worldwide not to sell or exchange the replacement Note7 phones that were intended to solve an issue of overheating batteries in the previous version. U.S. carriers including Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile had announced that they would stop the exchange of the smartphone after reports of fires and explosions involving the replacement smartphones, including a report of a Note7 that caught fire on a Southwest Airlines flight. Samsung said it was investigating the reports. Samsung offered to give customers the replacement…

IN WHAT CAN only be called awfully suspicious timing, Yahoo has turned off automatic email forwarding—a crucial feature when changing email accounts (go.pcworld.com/newemailacct)—for Yahoo Mail users. Anyone who has already enabled the feature is not affected, but others cannot activate it. On its help pages, Yahoo says mail forwarding is currently under development. “While we work to improve it, we’ve temporarily disabled the ability to turn on Mail Forwarding for new forwarding addresses,” the help page (go.pcworld.com/yahoomailfwd) says. Mail forwarding was turned off in early October, as first reported by The Associated Press (go.pcworld.com/apyahoomail). It’s not clear if Yahoo turned off mail forwarding just before or just after news broke on October 4 of Yahoo’s compliance with U.S. spy agencies (go.pcworld.com/yahoo emailspy) to scan users’ mail. Yahoo later called those…

LENOVO’S YOGA BOOK is for people who have never been content with just a keyboard and mouse to express their ideas. People who prefer to scribble on notepads or napkins. Who draw pictures to illustrate ideas or create art. The $550 Yoga Book facilitates those practices by helping users produce and save that content digitally, taking fuller advantage of the stylus- and touch-friendly Windows 10 than any other device has. (There’s also an Android version with the same capabilities, but different pricing and apps.) Stylus computing is nothing new, but the Yoga Book’s full commitment to it is. Its defining feature is a large, touch-sensitive surface that converts easily from a keyboard to a digital sketchpad. A proprietary pen, and a special way to use real paper with the digital…

GOOD NEWS, PRIVACY enthusiasts: Facebook’s one-on-one encrypted messaging feature called Secret Conversations (go.pcworld.com/fbsecretconv) is now live for all Android and iOS users. Secret Conversations allows Messenger users to send end-to-end encrypted messages to their Facebook friends. There are a few caveats, however. First, it only works on a single device. Facebook says it doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to distribute encryption keys across your phone, tablet, and PCs. You also have to explicitly start a Secret Conversation in Messenger. Encryption isn’t the default mode, and encrypted messages are not integrated into the primary thread of your conversations with a given contact. In other words, if Alice and Bob have been chatting for years on Messenger, they’ll have to start a separate encrypted thread, and that encrypted thread will never…

JEFF WANTED TO know whether his SSD was “okay” or whether he should back it up, or if it’s somehow different from a hard drive. SSDs are fundamentally different from hard drives, and they can, in fact, die in one of two ways. In this column I’ll explain this difference, how SSDs can die, and how you can check yours to make sure it still has plenty of life. The main difference between hard drives and SSDs is this: The area of a hard drive that can hold data can be rewritten as many times as is needed, and will always be usable as long as the drive is functioning (bad sectors aside). This is not the case with SSDs: Each cell that holds data can only be written…

SALES OF WINDOWS PCS fared better than Apple Macs during the third quarter this year. Third-quarter PC shipments declined by 3.9 percent compared to the same quarter last year, but Mac shipments dropped by 13 percent. PC shipments totaled 68 million units, according to IDC. The declines weren’t as bad as expected, and were roughly 3.2 percent ahead of IDC’s initial projections, the research firm said. In the top five PC companies, fourth-placed Apple registered the largest decline, with the 13 percent drop in Mac shipments. Apple’s Mac sales totaled 5 million units during the quarter, declining from 5.76 million units in the same quarter a year ago. Many Mac laptops and desktops are due for an upgrade to Intel’s Skylake and Kaby Lake processors. That could grow Mac shipments.…

IT’S OFFICIAL: THE Galaxy Note7 is no more. The company already pulled out a miracle with its unprecedented recall (go.pcworld.com/galaxynote7recall) to address the phone’s defective battery, only to be scorched again when more units started igniting. Samsung has now stopped production (go.pcworld.com/galaxynote7stopped) and wants you to (again) power off your device for good. By now you’re probably tempted to leap to the dark side and get an iPhone 7 Plus. But don’t give up on Team Android just yet. There are several good phones that either share the Note7 screen size or come in close at 5.5 inches, which might help you forget you had to nearly walk through fire to get one. Google Pixel XL This very well could be the ultimate Google phone. The Pixel has the highest-ever…

GOOGLE HAS BEEN selling phones since the Nexus One landed almost seven years ago. In fact, there have been eight Nexus phones, one each year through 2014, and two last year. They have generally been good phones, especially in the last few years. But the Pixel is not a Nexus. It’s better. With the Pixel, Google did more than partner with a phone maker to slap Android on an already-designed handset. It created its own hardware and software innovations on top of stock Android. The result is a phone that may displease Android purists, but should delight everyone else. This is Google’s first real attempt to push a phone to the mass market, and the Pixel competes directly with the iPhone as well as pricey flagships from Samsung and LG.…

YOU CAN THINK of HP’s updated Omen 17 as that sleeper car that pulls up next to your tricked-out ride at a stoplight. When the light turns green and you lay rubber, expecting to leave that tan sedan breathing your exhaust, you’re instead shocked to see it hanging right next to you. That’s the HP Omen 17 in a nutshell. Sure, it carries the famous Omen brand and a couple of cues that it’s a gaming laptop, but next to just about all the other flashy gaming laptops, it’s downright bland. The good news for HP is that the flashing lights and oversize faux exhaust vents aren’t what make a gaming laptop go—it’s the parts inside. This is where HP makes huge strides. The last generation of Omen gaming laptops…

EVER SINCE MICROSOFT announced its Xbox Play Anywhere program—a fancy name for “We’re porting all our first-party titles to PC”—the game I’ve been looking forward to most is Forza Horizon 3. Bombing through the back-country of Australia at 144 frames per second, music thumping, tires squealing, reflections…reflecting. And after spending most of a night with the game, I can confirm it’s gorgeous. The Twelve Apostles look particularly lifelike, white sandstone set against the brilliant blue ocean. I must’ve taken a dozen screenshots of that area alone. You’re going to need one monster of a PC, though. My home machine is running on an Nvidia GTX 980 Ti (with the brand-new Game Ready drivers, go.pcworld.com/geforceGTX980Ti) and my jaw dropped when I booted up Forza Horizon 3 and it recommended I run…

I USUALLY START this column with “so and so needed something done to their PC,” but if I were to include the names of all the people who have written me about how unhappy they are with their Windows 10 “upgrade,” the file would be so large the server that hosts this page would need a new hard drive. I’ve been inundated with unhappy Windows 10 users for the past two months, and my heart goes out to these folks. A lot of them were upgraded unsuspectingly, and Microsoft deserves a ton of scorn for its malware-like Windows 10 upgrade tactics. That said, now that you have Windows 10 on your PC and you’re not happy, here’s what you can do about it. 1. Keep it, but make some changes…

SIMPLER AND FASTER is always better in Excel. We start with some of my favorite shortcuts, then move on to using Excel for everyday situations such as finding random numbers for passwords, or random numbers within a range, or discovering how much your monthly payments will be for a car or home loan. 1. Shortcut: Select the entire spreadsheet Everyone knows that Ctrl+A selects the entire spreadsheet, document, email, etc. In Excel, however, there’s an even faster way: Click the small green arrow in the square space between the row numbers and column letters. 2. Shortcut: Number formats Which is faster—the mouse or the keyboard? Those who use both work faster than either one or the other alone. Try these shortcuts: After you enter a number or column of numbers,…

WHILE AMD’S ENTHUSIAST-CLASS “Vega” Radeon graphics cards are still a far-away dream destined to launch next year, Nvidia’s putting the finishing touches on its killer GTX 10-series lineup with the release of a pair of new graphics cards: The GeForce GTX 1050 and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. These graphics cards are aimed toward giving prebuilt “big box” PCs enough oomph to game, with a mere 75-watt power draw that negates the need for extra power connectors. As such, they’re suitably budget-friendly. The GeForce GTX 1050 Ti will cost $139 when it launches on October 25, and the GTX 1050 a mere $109 at its November 8 release. Meet the GeForce GTX 1050 That puts the similarly priced Radeon RX 460 (go.pcworld.com/radeonrx480rv) dead in the GTX 1050’s sights, but the rivals…

ALIENWARE COFOUNDER FRANK Azor has fond memories of the company’s early days. It was a wild time of building kick-ass PCs, gaming, lots of sci-fi shows, and generally, having a good time. “It was four guys in a tiny little office, sending in a couple of review machines, magazines saying they were great, and the phone beginning to ring very, very slowly. We would sell about one computer every day, maybe,” Azor said. October 15 marked 20 years of Alienware’s existence. Now a part of Dell, Alienware has matured into a PC gaming powerhouse. It is also driving big changes for virtual and mixed reality, which Azor believes will drive PC growth in the coming decades. “We helped build the PC gaming industry to where it is today. By no…

COMCAST SAID BANDWIDTH caps would be back before 2019, and now the company’s living up to its promise. The cable provider recently announced that its 1 terabyte bandwidth cap for Xfinity Internet subscribers would start rolling out more broadly. Comcast’s data caps are currently in effect in 16 regions with another 18 regions getting the bandwidth cap on November 1. You’ll find the complete list of current and upcoming bandwidth cap regions at the end of this article. The company settled on the 1TB cap limit after experimenting with various caps for several years in select areas. During that time, Comcast appeared to be favoring a 300GB cap, but never rolled it out nationwide. Then in April, Comcast bumped up the cap in its test markets to 1 terabyte. Comcast…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/hpelite x3revvid HP’S ELITE x3 smartphone has achieved at least one thing: It has triumphantly realized Microsoft’s dream of phones that could eventually replace your PC. Microsoft’s vision was meaningless unless those phones could support the PC’s legacy apps. Microsoft’s Continuum feature already allows you to connect a mouse and keyboard, giving the phone the look and feel of a desktop PC. HP designed the Elite x3 to evolve that concept. Pick any Win32 app you’d like—Photoshop, AutoCAD, even Chrome—and HP’s new Workspace feature will allow it to be run via your phone. Combine that with stellar battery life, truly useful utilities, and an (almost) elite set of hardware specs, and you indeed have a PC in your pocket. It’s a pity, then, that all this…

TOSHIBA/OCZ HAS STRUCK again with its latest 2.5-inch SATA 6Gbps MLC SSD, the VX500. Released hot on heels of the RD400 (go.pcworld.com/oczrd400) (a fast M.2 NVMe drive), the mainstream VX500 delivers solid overall and sustained performance, and is featherlight—a boon for anyone looking to upgrade a laptop. Capacity and price The VX500 (ocz.com/us/ssd/vx500-ssd) is available in four capacities: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB, with prices ranging from approximately $70 up to $350 (for the 1TB version on Newegg go.pcworld.com/oczvx 500 1tbnwgg). You pay a slight premium for the 1TB drive, but it’s still just 35 cents per gigabyte. And we’re talking about MLC (Multi Level Cell/2-bit) NAND, not slower TLC (Triple Level Cell/3-bit), which requires cache to attain 6Gbps-like write performance. Drives using TLC write substantially slower when the cache…

MICROSOFT IS MAKING a really weird choice with Edge extensions (go.pcworld.com/edgeext) right now. The company is testing new additions within the Windows Insider program before releasing the extensions to mainstream Windows users. That means new extensions are slow to come to the Windows Store. Hopefully, this is only a short-term strategy for Microsoft as it figures out how make extensions work in Edge. Nevertheless, you can still install unreleased Edge extensions, as long as you can get them to open in the Store. Recently, I installed Tampermonkey and Turn off the Lights in Edge even though they’re not officially available in the Windows Store. If you’re not familiar with them, Tampermonkey is a popular user script extension that can add unofficial features or different looks to websites. You can use…

THERE’S A BUG going around that’s affecting some Windows 10 Anniversary Update users (including me), making it impossible to install update KB3194496 (go.pcworld.com/kb3194496) from September. Microsoft says it’s working on a fix that will roll out soon. Until then, I’m stuck as Windows will try and download and install the update every time I want to reboot or shut down my laptop. Luckily, there’s an easy way to hide that Windows update (go.pcworld.com/w10blockupdate) until Microsoft gets its act together. First download the Show or hide updates troubleshooter (go.pcworld.com/w10blockdriver) from Microsoft. Note there are special versions for Windows 10 pre- and post-Windows Update. The download is a DIAGACAB file, which Microsoft uses for its troubleshooting programs. Just click on the file as you would with any other program you’re trying…