PCWorld March 2018

It crushes my soul to say this, but if you need a new gaming PC, don’t build your own. Buy a prebuilt computer instead. That’s not permanent advice. I’m a die-hard DIYer. Few things in life are more satisfying than seeing your handmade rig POST the first time you boot it up. The deck is stacked against home-brew PC builders in today’s market, though, as hardware shortages and the cryptocurrency boom have sent the cost of crucial components sky-high. Current graphics card prices are ludicrous unless you’re targeting entry-level GPUs, with most models selling for at least twice their suggested price. The Radeon RX 570 is supposed to start at $170, for example, but the cheapest I can find on Newegg right now costs $509, and the vast majority go for…

The best free media player is getting even better. After three years of development, VLC 3.0 “Ventari” is rolling out to all platforms, and it’s packed full of goodies such as Chromecast support. The new version is available from Videolan.org’s dedicated page for VLC 3.0 and is rolling out to your device’s respective app store. The latest version of VLC contains a lot of great additions, as well as a tweaked UI. Chromecast discovery tops the list. It’s only available on Windows desktop and Android right now, but Videolan says the feature’s coming to VLC’s iOS and the Windows Store apps in the future. VideoLAN designed VLC’s Chromecast support as a workaround for any media formats Chromecast can’t natively support. VLC can re-encode video on the fly to make it work with…

Microsoft appears to be gearing up for the next big Windows 10 update, after releasing Windows 10 Insider Build 17083. Codenamed “Redstone 4,” the next release is expected in the spring. Microsoft has made several tweaks to the operating system with this build, including a revamp of font management and how a user’s history is treated within the Timeline feature. Conspicuously absent is the Sets feature, an intriguing tabbed UI that essentially replaces separate windows with a browser-like interface. Microsoft had warned previously that Sets would take months to deploy—a final release is expected at the end of 2018, or even later—so the removal of Sets was planned. “If you have been testing Sets, you will no longer see it—however, Sets will return soon in a post-RS4 [Redstone 4] flight!” Dona Sarkar,…

Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich told investors recently that the firm plans to release silicon with built-in mitigations to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities later this year, a statement that raises more questions than it answers. For Intel, it really has been a Tale of Two Cities scenario: Intel reported the best quarter in its history, as fourth-quarter 2017 revenue grew 4 percent year-over-year to $17.1 billion. But Intel has also been the face of Spectre and Meltdown, two critical vulnerabilities built into basically every processor it ships into the PC and server markets. Why this matters: Intel has been busy working with PC makers and OS vendors like Microsoft to release microcode that includes so-called mitigations, microcode updates that patch the vulnerabilities. But even that hasn’t gone so well: Intel advised…

After years of reporting loss after loss, AMD marked a second straight profitable quarter, standing upon the shoulders of its successful Ryzen CPUs and Vega chips. Company executives also said they plan to implement mitigations for the Spectre vulnerabilities in the upcoming Zen 2 architecture, and warned of memory shortages. The Wall Street analysts on the call were focused on what impact this would all have on AMD’s future earnings, and by extension, its stock price. But as always, it was possible to distill a few drops of information that could affect users directly. Here they are. 1. SPECTRE MITIGATIONS WILL BE BUILT INTO ZEN 2 If you’ve been following the ongoing Spectre and Meltdown saga, you know that Intel has been the vendor most affected by the two chip vulnerabilities. Lisa Su,…

Beginning in February, Microsoft started offering a new feature for young students called Immersive Reader dictation within Office 365 apps for Windows and the Mac. As a parent of two elementary school students, though, I’m concerned that this feature—>which brings smartphone-style voice dictation to traditional desktop apps—will be an unwelcome crutch. It’s not just on Windows, either. Microsoft is pushing dictation onto Word for Mac, iPhone, Outlook Desktop, OneNote iPad, and OneNote Mac. Even though I write about technology for a living, I’m sort of feeling my way through applying it toward parenting. Is a smart speaker an annoyance or a learning aid? Do I need to place hardwired parental controls on my kids’ screen time, or can I just check up on them? And when do I need to have “the…