PCWorld March 2016

A WINDOWS 7 PC running Skylake: If this is your dream, you’ll have over 100 systems to choose from in the list of PCs (go.pcworld.com/win7skylake) from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and NEC that Microsoft recently published. It’s all part of a plan (go.pcworld.com/upgradewin10) Microsoft outlined to push customers to Windows 10 through a list of modern PCs that can be configured with either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. But there’s a catch: OS support for the new systems runs out on July 17, 2017, when the systems must be migrated over to Windows 10. Meanwhile, customers who buy PCs using last-generation silicon, such as Intel’s Broadwell chips, will receive a longer leash: support until 2020 for Windows 7 and 2023 for Windows 8.1. This staggered support plan has irritated a vocal customer segment,…

THE COMPUTING INDUSTRY’ betting big on the coming virtual reality revolution, but pushing headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive out to the masses isn’t as easy as you may think. Running them requires some pretty beefy PC rigs, and diving into nitty-gritty CPU and GPU specs—sadly—isn’t most people’s forte. That’s where VR certification programs that guarantee VR compatibility come into play. Oculus revealed the first batch of “Oculus Ready” PCs from Asus, Alienware, and Dell, complete with discounts if you buy them bundled with the Rift. The bundles start at $1,500—the exact price Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe suggested months ago (go.pcworld.com/oculuscost), not-so-coincidentally—and only go up from there, topping out at a whopping $3,150 for a blinged-out Alienware Area 51 (go.pcworld.com/alienwarea51) with an Intel Core i7-5820K, a GeForce GTX 980, 16GB of…

THE CHEAP OVERCLOCKING party is over. An upcoming microcode update from Intel will close the door on a loophole that let users goose Skylake CPUs that weren’t meant to be overclocked. The company recently confirmed to PCWorld that an update would “align” the CPUs in question. “Intel regularly issues updates for our processors which our partners voluntarily incorporate into their BIOS,” an Intel spokesman said. “The latest update provided to partners includes, among other things, code that aligns with the position that we do not recommend overclocking processors that have not been designed to do so. Additionally, Intel does not warranty the operation of the processor beyond its specifications.” That’s basically a kinder way of saying: “You shouldn’t be overclocking these CPUs, so stop it.” Why this matters: Since December (go.pcworld.com/overclockskylake), overclockers have been…

AFTER MONTHS OF testing, rumors, and general user anxiety, Twitter is now employing an algorithm that displays some Tweets out of chronological order. The feature, known as “Show me the best Tweets first” (go.pcworld.com/showbesttweets), gathers up older tweets that Twitter thinks you might have liked seeing, based on “engagement and other factors,” and pushes them to the top of the Timeline. Below this cluster of Tweets, users will still see their Timelines in reverse chronological order, and refreshing the Timeline will instantly make the algorithmic Tweets disappear. On some level, it’s a prioritized version of the “While you were away” (go.pcworld.com/awaytweets) feature that Twitter introduced a year ago. Twitter has been testing the algorithmic Timeline (go.pcworld.com/algorithmicttime) since December, and has been talking about it for much longer (go.pcworld.com/newtwittertime). In a blog post,…

In the U.S., the recall is only for tablets sold before March 2015. THE SURFACE PRO 4 may reign supreme but news about the original Surface Pro and its descendants is heating up. Microsoft recently announced a voluntary recall for the AC power cords sold with the Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, and Surface Pro 3. The cords can apparently overheat if they are “wound too tightly, twisted, or pinched for an extended period of time,” a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to ZDNet. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to ZDNet that in the U.S. the recall would only be for tablets sold before March 2015. The Surface Pro 4 was released in October and is not affected by the recall. It’s not clear how many people are affected by the recall. Microsoft claims it is only…

LOOK ON THE bright side! There’s one good thing that comes out of all those website breaches every year: Security researchers get to comb through all the lists of usernames and passwords to remind us just how bad most of our passwords are. We may be well into 2016, but it’s not too late to heed the lessons password-management company SplashData conveys through its list of the 25 worst passwords of 2015. SplashData’s annual roundup of the worst passwords of 2015 is based on more than 2 million passwords that leaked online during that year. One trend the company found in 2015 is that while users are coming up with longer passwords (that’s good), they are simple and not random (that’s bad). Two examples the company points to are 1234567890 and…