PCWorld

PC World, also known as PCWorld, is an international computer magazine that comes out every month and is published by IDG. Since 2013, it has transitioned to an exclusively online format. The magazine provides guidance on a wide range of topics related to PCs, the Internet, and personal technology products and services. Each issue includes reviews and evaluations of hardware and software from different manufacturers, along with assessments of other tech gadgets like still and video cameras, audio equipment, and televisions.

International

English

Online/Digital

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Global

#14502

United States

#4137

Computers Electronics and Technology/Computers Electronics and Technology

#145

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Articles

Microsoft extends Windows 10 support, but only for Microsoft 365 users

1 day ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

Microsoft is negotiating a more lenient approach for customers who are hesitant to abandon Windows 10. No, Microsoft isn’t extending the support deadline for Windows 10. That’s still October 14, 2025. Instead, Microsoft is saying that if you use the Microsoft 365 Apps platform — Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook — it will still issue security updates well past the Windows 10 expiration date or until October 10, 2028.
Devastating Spectre CPU bug returns to haunt Intel processors

1 day ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

Intel has spent much of its goodwill with customers chasing down bugs: the Spectre and Meltdown bugs it dealt with years ago, as well as the instability that plagued its Raptor Lake processors last year. Now there are additional chapters in each of those stories. You don’t have to do anything — just make sure your PC is patched and up to date. But there will be a price to pay in performance in fixing the latest issue, and one you can’t really do anything about.
I spent $27 to future-proof my home network forever

1 day ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

About a week ago, I decided I would never buy another Ethernet cable, ever. If you’re like me, you have a box or drawer with dozens of cables. And while some cables have specific connections, like USB-C, my wired network (such as it is) is just a random collection of colored Ethernet cables with tiny little markings telling me what they can or can’t do. How much data can that cable transfer? I had no idea. And that’s bad.
Microsoft shows off the cool Windows Start concepts we never got

2 days ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

The Windows 11 Start menu is a functional menu, but not much more. Does that mean that Microsoft never had any better ideas? Of course not! In fact, they recently shared the Start menus that could have been. Four years ago, in 2021, my review of Windows 11 called it “unnecessary,” in part because of the unappealing Start menu that carried over from Windows 10X.
Welp, Nvidia’s RTX 5090 can crack an 8-digit password in 3 hours

2 days ago | pcworld.com | Alaina Yee

I have bad news for everyone with weak passwords. A hacker can guess your laziest random passwords in the same amount of time it takes to watch a movie. It turns out when you put the most brutally fast consumer graphics card on the task of, uh, brute-forcing 8-character passwords, it can crack a numbers-only string in 3 hours. Such is the finding of Hive Systems, a cybersecurity firm based in Virginia, as part of the research that went into its 2025 password table.
A hacker is demanding money to keep your kids’ data safe. It won’t work

2 days ago | pcworld.com | Alaina Yee

Crime does pay. It’s the motivator behind ransomware and extortion scams and why the PowerSchool breach (in which data for millions of students was lost to a hacker) is now dragging out further. Late last week, affected school districts in locations like Toronto and North Carolina began sharing reports of new extortion demands. No one is spending money, and you should take the same approach to your kids’ data. Why? If you fork over cash once, you’ll likely have to keep shelling out.
I built a desktop PC specialized for AI and I seriously regret it

3 days ago | pcworld.com | Dominic Bayley

Since AI has diffused into every aspect of the technology sector, I’ve been more than a little tempted to try my hand at some of AI’s cooler applications. That growing temptation finally culminated in me building a desktop PC just for AI — to try my hand at vibe coding apps just for fun. My budget wasn’t that high, so for the build I landed on an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G CPU with a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, and an Nvidia RTX 3090 video card.
I thought Ethernet cables were all the same. I was very, very wrong

4 days ago | pcworld.com | Dominic Bayley

If you’ve been browsing Ethernet cables online you may have seen that they come with names like CAT 5, CAT 6, CAT 7, and CAT 8. And no, we’re not talking about the feline kind of CAT…meow!So, what does all that mean, and is there any difference between these varied Ethernet cables? The CAT label in Ethernet cables stands for “category,” which denotes its standard and specification. You can tell which category the cables belong to by the number suffix each one has.
Why 'DOOM: The Dark Ages' feels so buttery-smooth

5 days ago | pcworld.com | Michael Crider

DOOM 2016 is one of my favorite shooters, and a big part of that is how fast and smooth it feels, despite being no slouch in the visuals department. Its threequel, DOOM: The Dark Ages, is coming out next week, and Will Smith gets to play it early. And for that, I loathe him. But he’s taking a hard look at what makes these games feel so good. In short: DOOM doesn’t micro-stutter. In fact, it experiences micro-stuttering much less frequently than other visually intense games. What does that mean?
Intel's latest Core Ultra CPUs slow down high-end SSDs, tests find

5 days ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

In another blow for Intel’s “Arrow Lake” or Core Ultra 200S platform, testing has confirmed that SSDs inserted into an M.2 slot on a Intel X890 motherboard won’t achieve their full performance. The SSD Review (via Tom’s Hardware) found that SSDs inserted into an X890 motherboard achieved 12GB/s sequential read speeds, rather than the 14GB/s speeds the PCI Gen 5 SSDs care capable of. The site’s testing was confirmed by Intel, which said that the shortcoming was due to a longer die-to-die data path.