PCWorld Oct-13

Desktops, notebooks, tablets: Just five years ago, those three words defined three distinct classes of products. Now consumers are being asked to choose among all-inones, two-in-ones, convertibles, minitablets, ultraportables, and phablets. With Intel’s new “Bay Trail” Atom chip, due this fall, you can expect the market to diversify even more. Bay Trail supports both Windows and Android, so hardware manufacturers can build machines that boot into either OS—or both. System prices could drop as low as $150, Intel executives have claimed. To PC makers, the new chip may well prove to be an escape hatch for a market that’s on its way down: Bay Trail represents a chance to offer consumers the tablets that they overwhelmingly prefer plus the most popular mobile OS in Android, as well as an opportunity to expand…

MICROSOFT CEO Steve Ballmer is retiring sometime in the next year, after he completes the search for a successor. Ballmer’s retirement is a defining moment for Microsoft and Windows, one way or the other. With fresh blood comes fresh flexibility—and maybe, just maybe, a return to the Windows desktop we know and love. More mobile, more Metro Ballmer saw the writing on the wall in the wake of the iPad. Microsoft dove into the push for mobility and the cloud with gusto, rolling out rapid-fire releases instead of staid three-year development cycles, its own line of tablets, and a revamped org chart. It’s One Microsoft, all the time and across all devices, an ethos embodied by the divisive Windows 8. But Ballmer led Microsoft during the golden years of Windows XP, Windows 7, and…

MICROSOFT ALONE can’t improve what is truly the beating heart of Windows 8: The Windows Store. As the Windows Store goes, so goes the Windows 8 experience. The Windows Store shattered the 100,000-app barrier in early July. But that number is paltry compared to the 1 million apps in Google Play and 900,000 apps in Apple’s App Store. Are its offerings worthwhile? I spent days scouring the Windows Store and taking notes. Games: The number of apps has tripled since February. While the roughly 13,500 games don’t hold a candle to the vast Android and iOS libraries, you’ll find more than enough to keep you distracted for months to come. Still, the Windows Store has its omissions—no mobile Walking Dead games or Grand Theft Auto ports here. More troubling, the Games section…

WHEN THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union released a report in July describing widespread license-plate scanning of cars by police on America’s roadways, everyone from privacy advocates to Sunday drivers felt their basic rights of anonymity further slip away. But it’s easy to understand why police have adopted it. License plates are visible to the public at large, and law enforcement people say that scanning directly benefits anyone who owns a car and wants to keep it. Marc Hinch, who is part of a stolen car recovery task force in Oakland, California, uses license-plate scanning every day to hunt down hot cars. “We’ll get a report that says, ‘These stolen cars were seen in your area’ with a Google map linked,” Hinch explains. As Hinch drives around scanning plates in target areas, the scans…

A COMPELLING REASON to buy AMD graphics cards over the past few years has been its “Never Settle” program, where the company bundled some of the hottest games that took advantage of AMD’s graphics cards. Now AMD has changed that program, making game selection a bit of a game in itself. Under the new “Never Settle Forever” system, gamers who buy AMD’s cheaper cards can pick one game to download to their system, while those who select the higher-end cards will be able to pick three. Historically, AMD’s “Never Settle” bundle included up to four games with each card, and the “Reloaded” refresh preselected two to three of this year’s top games to ship with each card. With “Never Settle Forever,” those that fall into the “Bronze” tier—purchasing the Radeon HD 7790 or…

IN EARLY AUGUST, the SATA-IO group paved the way for SATA Express, putting PCI Express speeds over a SATA interface for the next generation of ultrafast solid-state discs, or SSDs. Specifically, the Serial ATA International Organization ratified revision 3.2, which includes support for the SATA Express feature that was originally announced in January. The revision includes a number of other useful improvements, such as better power management as well as support for so-called “micro” or embedded SSDs. SATA is the bus that’s traditionally associated with internal storage within a PC—an SSD or a disc drive. PCI Express, meanwhile, is used for high-bandwidth cards like graphics cards. (External hard drives use external SATA, FireWire, a Thunderbolt connection, or, most commonly, USB.) Speeding up the internal bus paves the way for faster drives, which…