| Windows Tip Of The Month – October 2012 (Part 1) |
| If you need a quick way to shrink a PDF down to a more manageable file size, here’s something you can do with nothing more than the free Acrobat reader. Just open the file, start the Print dialogue, and under Printer, choose Adobe PDF to create a new file. You’ll get a smaller file that should still be totally legible. |
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| Windows Tip Of The Month – October 2012 (Part 2) |
| DrivePurge is a fantastic, free maintenance tool that will not only tidy up all the unwanted files that accumulate overtime, but can also help protect your privacy by cleaning up the data stored in your PC’s log files and registry. You’ll be amazed at how much useless data is filling up your hard drive! Try the tool out for yourself to see how much space you can save. |
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| Hide Files with Steganography (Part 2) |
| You may be wondering how it can be possible to store information within photos and music without changing it or being detected. It's because our eyes and our ears are not perfect and there's a limit to what they can detect. Very small changes are not noticeable, so a photo or audio file can be subtly changed without being noticed. |
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| Hide Files with Steganography (Part 1) |
| Take a moment to think about all the different activities you carry out on your computer. You send and receive emails, access online banks and pay bills, shop at various online stores, log in to countless websites and services online, store notes, financial information, personal details, and the list goes on. |
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| Zotac Z77-ITX Wi-Fi – A Fierce Competition |
| Zotac has been a stalwart mini-ITX supporter for years, producing many interesting and overclockable motherboards. In fact, its Z68- ITX WiFi practically had the overclockable Z68 mini-ITX motherboard market to itself, with just ASRock offering any competition. |
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| Fractal Design Node 304 |
| While Fractal Design's Define and Arc series of cases have consistently impressed over the last few years, the Node304 is the company's first mini-ITX chassis to support full ATX power supplies and large graphics cards. |
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| Lian Li PC-TU200 - Gorgeous And Well-Built |
| Lian Li was one of the first manufacturers to produce mini-ITX cases as part of its core I product line, matching its legendary aluminum construction and build quality with the emerging mini form factor. |
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| Miniature Marvels - Decent-Spec Mini-ITX Cases |
| Size isn’t everything, as the saying goes. In fact, more and more mini-ITX products are being released, enabling us to build small PCs without compromising on hardware choices, overclocking ability or cooling. |
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| Silverstone FT03-Mini - Stunning Design, But Limited To SFX PSUs |
| SilverStone's standard FT03 is one of the best micro-ATX chassis out there, combining a 90-degree-rotated layout with an ingenious layout that fits together like a game of component Tetris. The FT03-Mini looks to go one better, using a mini-ITX design to squeeze a full- power system into as small a container as possible. |
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| Windows 8: The Official Review (Part 4) |
| The new operating system ships with a Windows 8 app for the SkyDrive cloud-storage service. If you have a Microsoft account, you begin with 5GB of SkyDrive space. |
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| Windows 8: The Official Review (Part 3) |
| Since the Start screen consists of groups of tiles, moving your favorite or most commonly used tiles to the left side of the screen is pretty easy. You can also specify the tile size (normal or double-wide) and turn off live-tile updates if you find them distracting. In addition, you can group tiles by program type, such as business applications, games, and so on. |
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| Windows 8: The Official Review (Part 2) |
| Microsoft now partitions applications into “Windows 8” apps (formerly known as “Metro” apps) and desktop applications. The latter are those programs we all know and love from previous versions of Windows, including Microsoft Office. |
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| Windows 8: The Official Review (Part 1) |
| The new operating system improves substantially on Windows 7, but Microsoft’s efforts to woo mobile-device users may leave traditional desktop PC owners feeling abandoned. |
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| Window 8: Why You Should Upgrade |
| Microsoft’s new operating system may look like a radical departure from Windows 7, but it works, it makes sense – and it’s the future. |
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| Aerocool Strike-X Air - An Exotic-Looking Bench Table |
| There are a number of bench tables available at the moment, but Aerocool's Strike-X Air is certainly the most dramatic-looking. Its partly modular drive cages and cable-routing holes make it more of a case than a bench table, and it's much larger than an average stack-design table too. |
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| ASRock Z77E-ITX - Great-Looking And Very Overclockable |
| With its gun-metal grey color scheme, gold details and dark-brown PCB, ASRock's Z77E-ITX looks stunning. ASRock has opted for a 6+2 power phase design, while the PCB is surprisingly devoid of large heatsinks, with just a single chipset heatsink, and a small stack on the VRMs behind the I/O ports. |
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| ASUS Asus Maximus V Extreme vs EVGA Z77 FTW (Part 2) |
| While both CPUs were running at similar frequencies, the Extreme proved the faster board in our Media Benchmarks. An overall score of 2,865 was close to 100 points clear of the Z77 FTW’s 2,770, with the Extreme holding a 5 percent advantage in the video encoding test alone. InCrysis2, both were inseparable, though, with each producing an increased minimum frame rate of 32fps. |
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| ASUS Asus Maximus V Extreme vs EVGA Z77 FTW (Part 1) |
| While the vast majority of us plump for sensible hardware at sensible prices there are others whose ideal PC is a bank balance-destroying electricity bill-mangling giant of multi-GPU engineering. This review then is the latter, as we pi t two of the most premium Z77 boards against each other-the Asus Maximus V Extreme and EVGA Z77 FTW. |
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| BitFenix Prodigy - Undoubtedly The Best |
| BitFenix has clearly approached its new mini-ITX case, the Prodigy, with a focus on flexibility and capability, as opposed to getting everything into the smallest possible box. This means that it's the largest and heaviest case on test (it isn't far off Silverstone’s compact Micro-ATXTJ08-E in the volume stakes at 26 liters). |
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| Excel 2013 – The Smartest Spreadsheet Software |
| To make sense of the data in Excel 2013, you type in the first row's values and then start to repeat the job for the second row. Excel then instantly applies the lessons learnt to the rest of the data, with all the columns below filling with the correctly formatted data. It's the sort of problem 100-line macros have been written to solve in the past. |
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| How To Upgrade To Windows 8 (Part 1) |
| You’ll need to back up your critical data on some sort of external storage before you install Windows 8. We recommend using a large-capacity external hard drive, but a USB flash drive or even a DVD may do. For more information on how to properly back up your files, see our how-to at go.pcworld.com/backup. |
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| Let’s Go Shopping: Inside The Win 8 Store |
| Microsoft’s official Store app isn’t the only digital point-of-sale within Windows 8. A number of Metro apps essentially serve as marketplaces with scant features, instead of full-fledged apps that focus more on function than shopping . |
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| Sweet 660 Ti DrectCU II TCP |
| ASUS GTX 660 Ti DrectCU II TCP hits the spot with titanium-strong over docking, cooling, and stability in even the most demanding games. |
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| Thermaltake Water 2.0 pro |
| Water-cooling is an expensive business, and mostly belongs in the realm of overclocking enthusiasts. However, in the last few years there's been a surge in the availability of all-in-one single loop CPU water-cooling kits, largely thanks to the OEM manufacturers Cool IT and Asetek, which license their products out to hardware companies. |
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| Thunderbolt Arrives! |
| LGA2011 boards have always occupied the luxury side of town, whereas LGA1155 has been pretty blue collar. Not anymore. Asus’s new P8Z77-V Premium pretty much shatters the idea that LGA1155 boards are low rent. |
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| Systems for All Budgets (Part 3) - WS 1000, Silent 1000 |
| Workstation PCs are designed to be good all-rounders, and the WS 1000 is exactly that. At $1005, the price isn't outrageous, but it's still powerful enough that you won't find yourself collapsing in a rage because you're spending more time waiting for it to open an application than you planned to spend using it. |
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| Systems for All Budgets (Part 2) - GX3500, GX1000 3D |
| The system's gaming pedigree is clear, powered as it is by an unlocked, quad-core Intel Core i7 3770K at 3.5GHz. At base speeds, it's not substantially better than any of Intel's other high-end processors, but push it into overclock territory and watch it fly - particularly when you have Corsair's H60 liquid cooling system protecting it. You may even be able to get 5GHz out of it, if you know your stuff! |
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| Systems for All Budgets (Part 1) - GX250, GX2000 |
| Even at more than double the price of the GX250, Computer Planet's higher-end gaming PC can compete with current systems without being priced ridiculously. The GX2000 is the first pre-build system to feature an Intel chip, a choice we believe is essential to any modern gaming system. That is why we've chosen it as our high-end choice. |
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| OWC Mercury Accelsior 480GB |
| The Accelsior is a low-profile PCB, so it can be used in small form factor machines or 1U servers. Unlike the RevoDrive, the Accelsior doesn’t require special drivers. The x4 PCIe 2.0 board contains a Marvell RAID controller, as well as two long, skinny SSDs in RAID 0, each with an SF-2281 controller and, on this model, eight 256Gb Micron synchronous NAND modules for a total of 240GB of usable space per blade. |
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| Polywell H7700i-400B - Desktop Power In A Tiny Box |
| What's confusing about the Polywell H7700i-400B is its power curve. PCs in this class typically pack AMD's Fusion CPUs or Intel’s lower-voltage CPUs to balance price, thermals, acoustics, and the typically modest performance requirements of a mini PC. |
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| Windows Vista : Build Your Network (part 3) - Sniff Out WiFi Hotspots |
| If you used the Start this connection automatically option on the last page, Vista should be connecting as you read these words, and you can just click Close here. Otherwise, click Connect to to return to the "Connect to a network" window, select your new network, and click Connect. |
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