PCWorld Jul-15

Tech and trends that will affect you today and beyond. Microsoft recently reorganized with a bang. It ousted big-name executives Stephen Elop and Mark Penn. It gave Windows leader Terry Myerson the Devices group that Elop once led. Driving these and other dramatic changes are a fundamental corporate shift that wasn’t explicitly stated: At the modern Microsoft, hardware is now a very big deal. The reorganization encompasses most aspects of Microsoft’s business, tossing out some of Microsoft’s most noteworthy executives in the process. Stephen Elop, who led Nokia and oversaw its integration with Microsoft, is out. Ditto for Mark Penn, the controversial political operative who was instrumental in Microsoft’s “Scroogled” campaign. Instead, Microsoft now sees its “mobile first, cloud first” vision from chief executive Satya Nadella organized around three initiatives: to reinvent productivity…

CORTANA WILL BE ONE OF THE major features (go.pcworld.com/new10) to come to Windows 10, and at least one PC vendor plans to treat her especially well. Toshiba’s Windows 10 laptops will feature a dedicated Cortana button, for launching Microsoft’s digital assistant from your keyboard. The Cortana key will be on all of Toshiba’s Windows 10 PCs—“across the board, top to bottom,” according to Jeff Barney, the general manager and vice president in charge of Toshiba America’s PC business. The key will sit in the upper left area, near the function keys, he said. Triggering it will launch Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant. Cortana was first introduced as part of the Windows Phone platform as a way for users to interact with the operating system without using a keyboard. Tapping and holding the phone’s…

AMD’S FORMAL UNVEILING of the beastly new Radeon R9 Fury X (go.pcworld.com/r9) at E3 this year revealed a lot about the graphics card, but several technical details were left glaringly undetailed. Now, AMD’s taking the wraps off the rest of the information, giving us a full profile of its impressive new $650 flagship—a flagship where just as much care was spent on aesthetics as on raw technological firepower. For information about the rest of AMD’s new Radeon R300 series cards, which have been released, go here: go.pcworld.com/r300. We’ll go through it all in detail, but let’s kick things off with the premier feature: The Fury X’s revolutionary high-bandwidth memory. Traditional dies for GDDR5 DRAM need to be arrayed on the board around the graphics processor, which sucks up a ton of space on…

“SO…WHEN’S THE CONSUMER VERSION of the Rift coming?” I’ve been asking Oculus that question since the first time I strapped one over my eyes, and every time cofounder Nate Mitchell would give me a rueful shake of the head. “We don’t know. It’s coming.” But we know: It’s Q1 2016. And thus it’s high time for Oculus to discuss what consumers will actually get their hands on next year and bring to an end this long and winding road. It’s a road that’s seen VR turn from a novelty into an arms race, that’s seen Oculus go from “easy frontrunner” to jockeying for position with Valve, that’s seen the fledgling company bought by Facebook of all things. It’s been weird. At an Oculus press conference in San Francisco, we got our first real…

NEST LABS RECENTLY launched two products: its first security camera, a slimmed-down version of the popular Dropcam Pro called the Nest Cam, and a secondgeneration Nest Protect smoke and carbon-monoxide detector. The company also announced a software update for its Nest Learning Thermostat that adds at least one new feature: notifications when temperatures in the home drop low enough to freeze pipes. And for the first time, consumers who have all three devices in their homes will be able to access each device from a single app. Like the highly rated Dropcam Pro (go.pcworld.com/dcp) it replaces (Nest acquired Dropcam in a $555 million deal in 2014), the Nest Cam records video at 30 frames per second in 1080p resolution, and it delivers the same wide-angle, 130-degree field of view. Sound and…

Make smart purchases, stay safe online. IF YOU’RE IN a panic because the Internet told you that your shiny new SSD may lose data in “just a few days” when stored in a hot room, take a chill pill—it’s apparently all a huge misunderstanding. In a conversation with Kent Smith of Seagate and Alvin Cox, the Seagate engineer who wrote the presentation that set the Internet abuzz, PCWorld was told we’re all just reading it wrong. Misunderstanding “People have misunderstood the data,” Smith said. Cox agreed, saying there’s no reason to fret. “I wouldn’t worry about [losing data],” Cox told PCWorld. “This all pertains to end of life. As a consumer, an SSD product or even a flash product is never going to get to the point where it’s temperaturedependent on retaining the data.” Why…