PCWorld April 2023

If you’re interested in trying out the far future of Windows features—say, Windows 12?—the new Windows Insider “Canary” channel may just be right up your alley. Microsoft debuted the fourth new Windows Insider Channel on Monday morning. “Canary” joins the other Windows Insider channels as a way for you to try out new features before they arrive on Windows 11. Typically, the arrangement goes as follows: Release Preview is for code that’s just about to be released, while the Beta Channel is code that’s definitely scheduled, though a bit further out. The Dev Channel and the new Canary Channel are more experimental. Microsoft “relaunched” the Dev Channel on Monday, with an eye toward enthusiasts who want to try out new code that may never see the light of day. “Canary” is even…

HP’s “dynamic security” prevents you from using third-party ink with HP printers. While HP does this to “protect the quality of our customer experience,” being able to buy cheaper, non-HP ink can save you money. So how can you use third-party printer ink? We have a solution for at least some models. Unfortunately, HP’s dynamic security isn’t new. HP began the practice of banning unauthorized printer ink in 2016 with a firmware update that prevented the use of third-party ink. That hasn’t stopped consumers from being outraged that they can’t do what they want with printers they purchased and buy whatever third-party ink cartridges they want to use. Last week, the topic of HP dynamic security surfaced again when users on Reddit discovered—or rediscovered—the fact that HP uses what is essentially digital…

It seems like it’s taken forever for the latest and greatest storage standard to release an updated spec, but the wait is over. Gigabyte’s Aurous Gen5 SSDs, which appear to be the very first PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives to hit the market, are now available for purchase. You can get this super-fast drive, rated for read speeds up to 9,500 megabytes per second, right now…if you can find it in stock and you’ve been saving your pennies. The Aurous Gen5 10000 comes in both 1TB and 2TB capacities, with that massive passive cooler included in the package (you can install it in an 80mm M.2 slot with or without the cooler). According to Tom’s Hardware, the retail price of the 2TB capacity was briefly shown at $350 on Newegg…before it instantly…

Not sci-fi, but real life: Samsung introduced a voice-cloning feature for their new Galaxy S phones this week. Train the Bixby mobile assistant on your S23, S23+, or S23 Ultra phone, and it’ll successfully mimic you during calls. This duplication is sold as a way to answer calls whenever you’re unable to talk—you instead type answers and the phone reads them to the other party in your voice. But there’s a flip side to this stuff of sci-fi dreams. AI-trained voice imitation can be also used for nefarious purposes, as Motherboard demonstrated the very same day as Samsung’s news. Using AI-generated imitations of his voice, writer Joseph Cox breezed through his bank’s automated voice verification system. Experts have warned for years of voice authentication’s weaknesses; long before AI-based tools, they could be…

Great Value, Kirkland, Signature Select, Husky—house brands, copied or repackaged products sold under a store’s own label as cheap alternatives to name brands have a long and storied history at retail. But perhaps no company has embraced the idea as completely and ruthlessly as Amazon has in the digital age. The corporation’s Amazon Basics brand will sell you everything from diapers to dining sets, and now it’s expanding into desktop PC components. The first individual computer part to get the Amazon Basics label is a CPU cooler, a rather unassuming little number selling for $26.99 in the US. It boasts a relatively compact design for full-size desktops, with four heat pipes and a single RGB 2000RPM 100mm cooling fan. It’s compatible with the latest Intel and AMD CPU sockets: LGA 1700,…

Are you tired of hearing about AI features coming to your favorite apps and tools? Well too freakin’ bad—here’s Google jumping on the bandwagon. In a sprawling AI topic post this morning, the company announced artificial intelligence text generation going into some of its most commonly used productivity tools, including Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and Chat. If that sounds like “all the stuff Google makes to rival Microsoft Office,” it’s not a coincidence. Google is clearly trying to get ahead of its workspace rival, since Microsoft is set to announce new AI features at its Future of Work presentation just two days from now. Google recently showed off Bard, its conversational AI, quickly following Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT with the Bing search engine. To its credit, the AI features announced…