PCWorld April 2025

Microsoft tips and tests new Windows 11 features throughout the year as part of its Windows Insider programs. But there’s an almost surefire way to tell what features will actually arrive on your PC in the near future: a new Windows 11 Release Preview build. And one recently dropped. Microsoft released Windows 11 Build 26100.3321 to the Release Preview Channel in February, with a list of new features, including a new battery icon, an improved File Explorer, and tweaks to the Windows Spotlight screensaver. Given that it’s a Release Preview, Microsoft should be releasing it relatively soon. This collection of new features isn’t as momentous as, say, a fall feature release. What’s important about it is the relative certainty that even if you don’t opt in for the Release Preview build,…

YouTube Premium ain’t cheap at $13.99 per month for ad-free streaming, especially since it seems like YouTube is intentionally making itself worse to get you to pay up. How does $7.99 sound instead? Starting today, YouTube is offering its Premium Lite paid tier to users in the U.S. after having tested it out in a handful of other countries. You pay less for fewer features, but you still get to block ads…mostly. According to the announcement, YouTube Premium Lite offers a mostly ad-free experience for watching videos on desktop and mobile apps, but there are a few provisos and quid pro quos. First, you don’t get to play videos in the background or download them for offline viewing—that’s a big kick in the teeth compared to the full-fat version of…

Ever feel like tech support systems are designed to frustrate you, perhaps in the hope that you’ll just give up and stop trying? For HP, that was literally the case. It’s been confirmed that the company had a mandatory 15-minute wait period for all support calls in the UK and other countries. The policy has since allegedly been removed. The Register reports that it saw an internal policy document for HP’s support team in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy, which said that everyone who called in for tech support for PCs and printers would have a minimum wait time of 15 minutes before getting through to a human operator. The idea was to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-serve,” essentially forcing people to interact with…

Some of my colleagues based on the West Coast have recently been commenting on how expensive hotels have become. Sure, they’ve become pricier for everyone, but now, they were saying, it’s getting ridiculous. At first, I just chalked it up to the post-pandemic tourism boom. But then articles started to pop up accusing popular hotel booking sites of a predatory technique called price discrimination. Residents of the notoriously affluent city San Francisco were charged higher rates for hotels online than those based in other places. A study by researchers at Northeastern University found that users of some sites were unwittingly placed into pricing buckets based on their stored cookies and steered toward more expensive hotels. The list goes on. So what does all of this mean, and can you use it to…

Could you fix your laptop if it breaks? And I mean physically fix it with tools, not just install some driver updates. According to an industry report, you might be okay if it’s an Asus or Acer model. But if you’re using a recent laptop from HP, Apple, or especially Lenovo, you’ll have some serious issues getting it up and running again. That’s according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund, which commissioned a report (spotted by Ars Technica) analyzing repairability for both smartphones and laptops available to U.S. buyers. While smartphones are getting easier to repair with better options for screen and battery replacement, the PIRG report says that improvements on the laptop side have been slow and inconsistent. The fiscal year 2025 edition gave Lenovo…

Okay, it’s time to stop pretending that the “retail price” of a graphics card means anything at all. AMD made a big press splash about launching its new Radeon RX 9070 cards at $550 and $600, sliding in well under Nvidia’s pricing for the same performance level. Surprise, surprise—it’s essentially impossible to find a new card at that price on launch day. It is, for all practical purposes, a lie. Without any real intent to pull the “complete order” trigger, I looked around for a $600 Radeon RX 9070 XT card this morning. Initial reports from retailers indicated that there were a lot more AMD cards available than there were for the recently launched RTX 50-series, for which Nvidia seems to have completely abandoned any pretense of delivering chips to PC gamers.…