PC Magazine October 2015

Being First vs. Being Best Just a few weeks ago, I got the chance to attend one of Apple’s trademark launch events in San Francisco. I’ve been to more than a dozen of these over the years, and this one had all of the hallmarks: a line to get into the building, a line to get into the auditorium, a mad scrum to find a seat with power and decent line of sight for photography. At the end of the day, Apple refreshed a bunch of products: a new iPhone 6s, Apple TV, watchOS 2, tvOS, iOS 9, and a huge new iPad Pro. Dig into the details and a lot of these improvements are only incremental, which led a lot of journalists, including some on PC Magazine’s staff, to call…

Data-ing Game After finally upgrading to Windows 10, I feel like it is best for me to start backing up my laptop. What would be the best way for me to go about this? —Ethan Brown OUR ANSWER: The best way to back up your data is whatever way you’ll stick to, because a backup that isn’t current is that much better than no backup at all. Luckily, most backup methods today are easy to configure and almost entirely hands-off. One good free tool is part of Windows 10. File History (search for it either by asking Cortana, or typing it into the Search field in the taskbar) keeps a record of multiple versions of your files, so you’ll always have the one you need. Connect an external hard drive to your laptop, turn on…

Intel’s 6th Generation Core microarchitecture, also known by its development code name “Skylake,” made its official debut at Gamescom in August, with the release of the high-end Core i7-6700K and Core i7-6600K desktop chips. Now Intel has unveiled the full details of how chips using the Skylake design fit into its lineup as a whole, and told us more about what we can expect from this series of CPUs intended to work in everything from go-anywhere tablets to rooted-in-place desktops. Here’s what you need to know about Skylake. SKYLAKE MIXES UP THE FAMILIES The complete roadmap for Skylake begins in the Y-Series, which is intended for use in two-in-one convertible machines, tablets, and the Compute Stick. Next up the line is the U-Series, aimed at thin-and-light notebooks, portable all-in- one desktop systems,…

When we first kicked off the Fastest ISPs series in 2010, our winner, Verizon FiOS, had a “blazing” speed of 1.23Mbps. By 2012, that had risen to 29.4Mbps, and it’s only gone up since: 34.5Mbps in 2013 and almost 55Mbps in 2014. That’s some stellar improvement in five years (especially for a service that won’t expand its established customer footprint). Many other fiber and cable providers are keeping up when it comes to speed and attracting new customers, as local and giant megalithic corporations keep everyone competitive. (Not merging also helps.) For ISPs, that’s what it’s all about: growth in speed and footprint. There are more and more municipalities with ISPs providing Gigabit connections—that’s over 1,000Mbps down. At least one, Salisbury, North Carolina, claims the title of the country’s first 10Gb…

More than four decades after choppers lifted the last U.S. troops back across the world, Vietnam’s Da Nang Hi-Tech Park hums with activity. The park, one of several established as part of Vietnam’s 2020 IT Master Plan, houses offices and factories for a growing number of international IT and software companies, hardware manufacturers, and infrastructure plants powering the central Vietnamese city at the heart of a tech boom. Today’s Vietnam—with a population of over 93.5 million and a median ageof 30.3 years old—is defined by a growing population of young coders, engineers, entrepreneurs, and students driving economic growth and technological innovation. For them, the country’s war-torn past is a history lesson, not a memory. Vietnam barely had any IT companies 15 years ago, but now there are close to 14,000 IT businesses…

The Martian is both a post-disaster-scenario thriller and an homage to the international brotherhood of scientists, who look beyond rivalries and borders to forge interplanetary futures. PC Magazine went to the Toronto Film Festival for the gala premiere of the movie (which opens in the U.S. on October 2) and interviewed director Ridley Scott to find out more. Based on Andy Weir’s best-selling 2011 novel, and with a screenplay written by Drew Goddard (World War Z), The Martian features a starry cast led by Matt Damon as the brilliant, wisecracking botanist Mark Watney. Watney is left for dead on the Red Planet after a devastating storm forces his fellow crew members aboard the Hermes spacecraft to evacuate and abandon the third Mars mission, Ares III. Damon is ably supported by Jessica…