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HANDS-ON WITH DELL’S VISOR VR HEADSET

WINDOWS ISSUE: OCTOBER 17

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Windows 10 S: Microsoft’s streamlined OS for students

How to boost your PC’s performance

REVIEW: GamePad Digital Pocket

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CONTENTS

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NEWS

4

Fall Creators Update release date announced

REVIEWS

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Windows 10 S Jumper EZBook 3 Pro GamePad Digital Pocket Lenovo IdeaPad 320S

FEATURE

41

Hands-on with Dell’s gorgeous VR headset

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CONTENTS

49 ROUND-UP

Best Windows PC games of 2017 (so far)

49

HOW TO

80

Speed up Windows 10 on your PC Fix a computer that won’t boot Customize touchpad gestures Disable Cortana

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Fall Creators Update release date announced Microsoft reveals launch date at IFA. BRAD CHACOS reports

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he Windows 10 Fall Creators Update is launching on 17 October, with Windows Mixed Reality headsets in tow, Microsoft announced at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin. That’s a bit later than expected, as this past April Microsoft committed to twice-yearly Windows 10 updates in March and September, in perpetuity. Microsoft is missing its very first deadline under the new system – but not by much.

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No new features were announced by Windows chief Terry Myerson at the event, but that’s to be expected since Windows Insiders have been testing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update for months now. It won’t be quite as interesting as originally expected, as flagship crossdevice features teased at Microsoft’s Windows 10 Fall Creators Update unveiling in May – like an app Timeline and cloud clipboard – didn’t wind up making the final cut.

In fact, the Fall Creators Update’s highlight feature isn’t software at all – it’s hardware. The new version of Windows 10 finally brings Windows Mixed Reality headsets to the world, after it was originally teased for this spring’s Windows 10 update.

Headsets from HP, Dell (page 41), Lenovo, Asus, and Acer will launch on October 17 alongside the update.

Prices for Mixed Reality headsets start at $299 (£TBA) and go up from there. They won’t need complicated setup with external cameras, and all will work with Windows Mixed Reality controllers launching at the same time. Acer and Dell have holiday bundles planned that include both a headset and a set of controllers.

On the software front, Valve announced that Steam VR is be coming to Windows Mixed Reality as well.

Microsoft has been pushing mixed reality hard, introducing Paint 3D earlier this year, and the Fall Creators Update’s View 3D adds the ability to view mixed reality creations on your device’s screen if it’s equipped with a camera.

You’ll likely notice the new My People feature when you install the update, as it allows you to select your three best friends and add them as icons in the taskbar for quick and easy contact.

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Windows 10 S Free until March 2018

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icrosoft’s Windows 10 S is what happens when a once-easygoing operating system has children and turns into a helicopter parent. Windows 10 S, a locked-down version of Windows 10 found on the Surface Laptop and a small group of low-cost, third-party notebooks, keeps students safe and secure by restricting them to the Windows Store. But as our review shows, the lack of freedom chafes.

Locking your PC away from the big, bad, outside world makes sense when your children are going off

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to school or university, at least according to Microsoft.

But even the most dutiful parent will wonder why their child can’t use Chrome to beam YouTube videos to a Chromecast, print on some local printers, or protect their PC with anything other than Windows Defender.

There’s always an escape hatch: a simple upgrade to Windows 10 Pro. But otherwise, Windows 10 S can be an exercise in frustration.

Who’s it for?

Microsoft provides Windows 10 S free of charge to academic institutions, and it’s not hard to see why: it wants a school’s IT department (not you) to buy its associated Intune for Education management support software, as well as an Office 365 for Education subscription for the Office apps students will use.

Windows 10 S and its hardware are also chasing Chromebooks, the cheap clamshell notebooks powered

by Google’s free and manageable Chrome OS, which have taken the education market by storm. The resemblance is not an accident: In fact, as we were writing this review, Asus let us know that a version of its Chromebook C202 would be released in September as the W202NA, a Windows 10 S-powered machine.

As with Chromebooks, students can’t pick up a copy of Windows 10 S and load it onto their own machine.

Instead, Windows 10 S will come preloaded onto Microsoft’s Surface Laptop or a small cadre of third-party Windows 10 S laptops priced for modest school budgets and ruggedized to withstand classrooms full of kids.

So far, however, only the Surface Laptop is available.

As Microsoft revealed in August, the low-cost Windows

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10 S laptops won’t ship until at least September, possibly missing the back-to-school window for the 2017 school year.

For this review, we’re not considering how manageable Windows 10 S is, or whether it’s a better choice for securing an academic environment than Chrome OS. Instead, we’re looking at it from the user’s perspective – what it’s like to use compared to fullfledged Windows.

We tested a Microsoft-supplied Surface Laptop, which comes preloaded with Windows 10 S. We will note, however, that we upgraded the Laptop to Windows 10 Pro for benchmarking. To return the Surface Laptop to Windows 10 S, we downloaded a publicly available Surface recovery image, which is something you’d normally do only if your system were malfunctioning.

The process was pretty easy, though Microsoft says that you’ll need a USB stick of at least 16GB in size.

We found it took about an hour’s worth of time to download and install the image.

Microsoft also asked us to make this crystal-clear: If you revert from Windows 10 Pro to Windows 10 S, all apps, data and settings are reverted, and will be erased from your PC.

Hey, this is (only) Windows 10 If you’re comfortable working within the Windows 10 environment, Windows 10 S really is almost virtually identical to Windows 10. The so-called Out of the Box Experience is identical, with Cortana walking you though setup. Once inside the operating system, nearly all Windows functions like Windows Hello, File

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Microsoft tries to convince you that Windows 10 S is almost Windows 10 Pro Manager, Cortana, Windows Ink, and the various built-in Windows apps all work identically to their equivalents in Windows 10 Home or Pro. In fact, Microsoft’s own summary slide points out that Windows 10 S and Windows 10 Pro are nearly identical, but with two key differences: Windows S is restricted to apps in the Windows Store, and you can’t join a Windows 10 S machine to a company domain.

Otherwise, on both Windows 10 S and Windows 10 Pro you can use BitLocker, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the HyperV virtual machine manager, though you may need to enable features within the Windows Features control panel.

It’s when you become bored or dissatisfied with Windows that the troubles start.

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Sorry, no Win32 apps for you. Windows 10 S has strict protections in place For safety’s sake, Windows 10 S prohibits you from installing apps from anywhere but the Windows Store. You’ll be able to download the app, but when it comes time to install it, the Windows 10 S helicopter parent steps in (see opposite screenshot).

That means, for instance, you can’t download a game from the Steam gaming service. If you’d like to use Google’s Chrome browser, you can’t – only Edge.

Windows 10 S will allow you to download an executable file from a third-party source, or transfer it onto the

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PC from a USB stick. When it comes time to launch it, though, Windows 10 S will block it.

You likely have certain apps that you simply take for granted, whether they’re class requirements – like Photoshop (or GIMP), AutoCAD, or MatLab – or teaching aids for younger students, like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Silly little utilities that you may have tucked away in a folder simply won’t work. Remote support solutions like LogMeIn123 also require the user to download an executable before a remote technician can log in and help you solve an issue with your PC, so this solution’s out, too. Even tried-andtrue executable ‘apps’ within Windows, such as the Command Shell or Registry Editor, are off-limits.

If you try to download and install Google’s Chrome browser, a different warning pops up, encouraging you to open Edge instead

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This can’t be overstated: The lack of flexibility is the biggest reason not to invest in a Windows 10 S notebook – unless you plan to upgrade it to Windows 10 Pro. A larger issue, in my mind, is that Windows 10 S forces you to use Microsoft’s Edge browser. While the number of available Edge extensions has climbed to 48 at the time of this writing, with excellent choices including Ghostery and LastPass, Opera, Chrome, and Firefox have thousands of plug-ins and extensions from which to choose. Importing websites and stored passwords from platform to platform simply isn’t as convenient in Edge as it is in Chrome. Bottom line, it’s a change in behaviour that’s forced upon the user, which is sure to irritate some.

Finally, there’s Office. The Windows 10 S ‘private catalogue’ feature allows a school or university to create a sort of ‘store within the Store’ to carve out apps that a particular class might need. It won’t allow you to join the machine to a business or corporate network, though. This might not mean much, but if you had visions of saving a buck or two by connecting a business account of Office 365 to a Windows 10 S PC, it won’t work. The Surface Laptop we reviewed did come with a year’s subscription to Office 365 Personal, however, which is available in a beta form. I noticed no differences between Office 365 and the Windows 10 S versions of the apps.

Some parents will undoubtedly support removing the potential distraction of say, Overwatch, from their child’s PC. And if a school has a web-based curriculum set up for Chromebooks, a Windows 10 S machine should be able to step in without missing a beat.

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A number of Office apps are available under Windows 10 S, which appear to have the same functionality as they do under Office 365 But in my mind, the lack of freedom to obtain apps that students may need robs a lot of the value from Windows 10 S, especially as kids move higher in the educational system.

Unfortunately, the compatibility issues apply to third-party hardware, too. When I tried to connect the Surface Laptop to an older Dell all-in-one printer via a USB connection, the Laptop recognized the hardware, but wouldn’t load the driver – in other words, I couldn’t print, with no explanation why. Any driver or third-party

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application that contains scripts or executable files will be blocked by Windows 10 S, Microsoft’s support documentation reveals. But that’s a lot of gobbledygook to a consumer who buys a Surface Laptop for their student, then has to call Microsoft or a support tech to find out why their son or daughter can’t print a draft of their paper.

It’s worth digging though this Microsoft-compiled index of supported (and unsupported) devices on Windows 10 S to see if you’ll experience the same problems I did: The vast majority of older printers simply aren’t supported by Windows 10 S. To be fair, setting up Google Cloud Print for a Chromebook has its own issues, which is why Google is adding local printing as an experimental feature in Chrome OS. Still, doesn’t it seem slightly insane to be forced to ensure your devices are compatible before buying a Windows machine?

Security and speed You may recall that the ‘S’ in Windows 10 S supposedly stands for ‘simplicity’, ‘security’, and ‘speed’. We’ve already seen the downside of ‘simplicity’.

One of the selling points of Windows 10 S, according to Microsoft, is its resistance to ‘known ransomware’.

10 S is the company’s newest and most hardened OS, according to a company blog post. ZDNet almost immediately put that claim to the test, and found that Windows 10 S could be exploited via an old workaround: Word macros. We didn’t try to reproduce ZDNet’s results, but take Microsoft’s claim with a grain of salt.

Another thing to consider: don’t think that apps like Avast Antivirus Download Centre or Kaspersky Now –

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all apps that appear in the Store when you search for ‘antivirus’ – represent actual antivirus programs. They’re not. You’re dependent upon Windows Defender’s built-in firewall and antivirus – both competent, but probably not as secure as a third-party solution.

Finally, there’s speed. Microsoft claimed that Windows 10 S is faster to boot and resume than Windows 10 Pro. Originally, we found that Windows 10 S was slower than Windows 10 Pro. After retesting, we found it’s slightly quicker to boot, but also slightly slower to resume from a cold boot. Neither difference is especially significant.

A click away from Windows 10 Pro You can upgrade to Windows 10 Pro through one of two ways: either by a link at the bottom of the Windows 10 S pop-ups that appear when you try and run an executable file, or by simply typing Windows 10 S Pro into the search

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box of the Windows Store. Either way, clicking the Install button begins the process. It doesn’t appear that you’ll actually need to download the new operating system, as I was able to upgrade without being connected to a wireless network. Windows recommends that you save and close all your files and apps before you begin the process. Backing up to OneDrive or another location would be a good idea.

When I upgraded from Windows 10 S to Windows 10 Pro, Windows informed me it was ‘preparing to switch’, rebooted once, than completed some final preparations before it launched Windows 10 Pro. All told, the process took nine minutes.

As we noted above, the switch from Windows 10 S to Windows 10 Pro is assumed to be a one-way street.

That’s not necessarily true, as you can download and restore from a Windows 10 S disk image. But restoring Windows 10 S from that disk image will erase all files, apps, and settings.

Verdict It’s difficult to construct a scenario where a user would want Windows 10 S. Sure, an elementary-school student with a curriculum built around the Web might not care whether they use Edge or Chrome. A concerned parent trying to minimize distractions for a child away at school might buy a machine running an operating system that locked out most games. Part of the issue concerns how Microsoft has attempted to stretch Windows 10 S from elementary schools all the way through college, which have vastly different requirements in terms of hardware and software. Mark Hachman

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Jumper EZBook 3 Pro £192 inc VAT from fave.co/2werE3z

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f you’re looking for a decent-size yet portable Windows 10 laptop on a budget, the Jumper EZBook 3 Pro may impress.

Available from GearBest for just £192, you’d be hard pressed to find better value for money in a laptop of this size. You will need to additionally factor in import duty, however, which is calculated at 20 percent of the value on the shipping paperwork, plus an admin fee of around £11.

In return for your money you get a aluminium laptop with a 13.3in full-HD screen, running the Intel Apollo Lake N3450 quad-core processor with 6GB of RAM and

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64GB of storage (you can add more if required via an M.2 SSD or SD slot). There’s dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support, plus two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI output and a headphone jack.

This is a very similar spec to that offered by the Chuwi LapBook 14.1, another Chinese budget laptop with the same processor and storage setup, plus a slightly larger screen, but a plastic chassis and just 4GB of RAM. The two are currently available at exactly the same price from GearBest (the Chuwi is available at fave.co/2welJLX priced £189).

The EZBook’s keyboard and trackpad are of a good size and responsive, with software preinstalled that lets you block accidental taps while typing. The wellspaced Scrabble-tile keys are full-size and accurate in use, though there’s no room for a number pad or any hot keys, as you might expect. Neither is there any backlighting, but clear white labelling on jet black tiles helps the characters to stand out.

A drawback is that this is a US keyboard, and a UK version is not available as an option. It’s easy enough to configure Windows to use a UK layout, though you will need to remember that certain functions won’t tally up with their button legends.

At 1.4kg the EZBook 3 Pro is light enough for a life on the road, though its screen is not especially bright (we measured a maximum 154cd/m2) which could make outdoor working difficult in bright sunshine. It is a matt panel, though, which should help.

This is a 13.3in IPS display, which affords realistic colours and strong viewing angles. The screen can be laid back reasonably far, so using it on a lap shouldn’t

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present any problems. The full-HD resolution of 1920x1080 pixels makes for sharp text and images, too.

We like the reasonably thin screen bezels, with Jumper making the best use of the space available inside the chassis. Above the screen sits a 2Mp webcam, which is enough for video chat. This protrudes from the chassis, which doesn’t look great but prevents the screen coming into contact with the keys.

With the lid closed the laptop does little to betray its budget roots, with a silver metal chassis that has rounded corners and a chiselled chrome-effect edge.

We’re less keen on the plastic hinge, the rear speaker grilles that might fire sound into the desk or your lap, and the four oversized rubber feet, though they do at least hold it stable on a desk.

Our only real complaint with the design is that there is no obvious taper toward the front, and several times we found ourselves trying to open the EZBook’s lid from the rear. The Jumper logo printed atop the lid doesn’t really

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help here, given that it is the right way around when the lid is opened and not before.

Performance With an Apollo Lake N3450 processor and 6GB of DDR3 RAM inside, the Jumper is capable for daily computing tasks but it’s no powerhouse.

Performance is very much on par with the LapBook 14.1, with which it shares the same processor but has an additional 2GB of RAM. However, unlike that laptop, we weren’t impressed with the Jumper’s startup time.

While the LapBook 14.1 starts up in mere seconds, for this Jumper you’ll be waiting closer to a minute.

We ran the EZBook 3 Pro and the Chuwi through a series of benchmarks. In PCMark 8 we recorded 1440

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points (conventional), and in Geekbench 4 4305 points (1424 single-core). By comparison the LapBook turned in 1411 points in PCMark 8 and 3664 in Geekbench 4 (1327 single-core).

For graphics performance we use GFXBench, and the Jumper turned in playable frame rates not far off those of the Chuwi in T-Rex (32fps vs 28fps) and Manhattan (15fps vs 13fps). We also recorded 12fps in Manhattan 3.1 (10fps for the Chuwi) and 7fps in Car Chase (also 7fps for Chuwi).

Battery life isn’t outstanding, with the lithium-polymer non-removable battery enduring six hours 15 minutes of our testing, in which we continually loop a video at 120cd/m2. It won’t get you through a full working day, but it’s also not a huge shock at this price.

In common with the Chuwi a proprietary charger is required to refill the battery via a DC jack on the laptop’s right edge.

Verdict Available at the same price as the Chuwi LapBook 14.1 but with a metal shell and slightly faster performance (though significantly slower startup times) the EZBook 3 Pro is a great budget buy. It’s capable for day-to-day computing tasks and low-intensity gaming, and does a good job of balancing portability with a usable size screen. You get just 64GB of storage, though this can be expanded. Marie Black

Specifications

• 13.3in full-HD (1920x1080) 16:9 IPS display • Windows 10 Home 64-bit

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• 1.1- to 2.2GHz Intel Apollo Lake N3450 quad-core • Intel HD500 Graphics • 6GB DDR3 RAM • 64GB eMMC storage plus SD support up to 128GB (M.2 SSD expansion possible)

• Dual-band 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.0 • 2x USB 3.0 • 1x HDMI • 3.5mm headphone jack • 2Mp webcam • DC charging jack • 9,600mAh lithium-polymer battery • 315x209x15mm • 1.4kg

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GamePad Digital Pocket £379 inc VAT from fave.co/2werE3z

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hen we first set eyes on the Pocket we thought it was a gimmick. Who is really going to use a Windows 10 laptop with a 7in screen and a fiddly mouse button? Well I’ll tell you who would: me.

(And it’s not because I’m a woman, GPD.) Despite looking like a toy, the GPD Pocket is amazingly powerful – for a tiny laptop, that is. It’s on par with the other Chinese budget laptops we’ve reviewed, and no less impressive than any of the Chuwi or Jumper models, for example.

It’s a little bit more expensive than those devices, costing £379 from GearBest (also factor in import duty at 20 percent of the value on the shipping

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paperwork plus an admin fee of around £11), but we think deservedly so.

This miniature laptop comes with a 10-point touchscreen, an Intel Atom processor, 8GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 128GB of flash storage. A full-size USB 3.0 port lets you hook up a mouse or other peripherals, and you also get USB-C for charging, a 3.5mm headphone jack, Bluetooth 4.1 support and Micro-HDMI. The latter is important, meaning you can connect it to a large screen using an HDMI cable and use Windows 10 to its full potential. So this little laptop has some big ambitions.

Design This is perhaps the most portable laptop we’ve ever seen, yet its size doesn’t hamper usage as much as you might expect – provided you don’t want to use Skype. The GPD Pocket measures just 182x109x19.9mm, meaning it can easily squeeze itself into a handbag or jacket pocket.

You will notice its presence, tipping the scales at around 500g, but most ultraportables weigh in at double that. Part of this heft can be attributed to its battery, with a non-removable 7,000mAh lithium-polymer cell inside. In our tests it was good for seven hours and 39 minutes – that’s at 120cd/m2 (not far off its maximum 140cd/m2) with a video playing on continuous loop.

It’s not the 12 hours quoted by GPD, but it’s very reasonable. Better still, it will recharge in an hour and a half with a PD charger.

The GamePad Digital Pocket is well built, with an aluminium chassis and four small rubber feet to

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keep it stable on the desk. There’s a vent on the lefthand side and an interior copper radiator that keep it mostly cool, and a speaker that emits audio from below – we’d like to see this facing the user, though given the size constraints it’s difficult to grumble.

The 7in display is of good quality, though not amazingly bright. GPD says it’s stronger than sapphire glass with 8H hardness, and we love the fact it’s a touchscreen – the dimensions don’t allow for a physical trackpad. Instead you get a joystick-style mouse button, which is easy enough to use given the small area it needs to cover. It’s accompanied by dedicated left- and right-click buttons.

But while it isn’t the brightest display we’ve seen, it is crystal clear with a full-HD (1920x1080, 323ppi) resolution, and offers very realistic colours and excellent viewing angles.

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Our one complaint here is that the bezels to the left and right edges are much thicker than we’d have liked, and the extra space could have been used to make the display larger.

The keyboard itself could have been problematic, because cramped keys invariably make for inaccurate typing. We made more mistakes than we would with a full-size keyboard, sure, but not as many as we had expected.

So there’s no number pad or trackpad as you would expect, and the function keys are doubled up with the number and symbol buttons, but everything else is where you’d expect to find it and the majority of the buttons are of a decent size and generously spaced.

We say the majority because there are a few that are cramped together, such as the A button and half-size Caps Lock key, and the slimmed-down <, >, ? trio. The

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Alt, Ctrl and Fn buttons are also half their usual size, and the Spacebar very short and cut down the middle by the mouse button.

This doesn’t bother us so much in terms of usability as it does the messy look it creates. The inconsistent spacing and sizing, coupled with full-size legends, hurts our eyes somewhat. There’s no backlighting either, though the labels are bright enough to make use in a darkened room possible.

The chiclet keys are quiet in use, and you soon become familiar with their layout. Unfortunately, though, this is a US keyboard, and a UK version is not available.

You can configure Windows 10 to use a UK English layout, though you’ll have to remember some of your button legends will no longer tally.

Performance Performance is perhaps one of the most surprising aspects about the mini GamePad Pocket. We won’t pretend this is a workhorse, because it isn’t, but it is faster than we had assumed it would be. It’s also just as fast as any other budget Chinese laptop, so more than capable of your daily computing tasks.

The marketing materials for the Pocket laptop are mildly amusing, comparing it to the MacBook Air and pointing to its 128GB storage/8GB RAM as common ground (ignoring the difference between the Intel Atom used here and Intel Core i5 selected by Apple).

It also claims performance beyond the Microsoft Surface 3, which initially sounds like an outrageous claim until you realise we’re not talking about the Pro model here. Microsoft’s cheapest (and now discontinued)

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Surface is an Intel Atom-toting beast with similar performance in our benchmarks. (It also has a larger, brighter screen, a less cramped keyboard, front and rear cameras, stereo speakers and comes from a brand you know and trust.)

Powering the GPD Pocket is a 1.6GHz Intel Atom x7-Z8750 quad-core processor that can Turbo Boost to 2.56GHz, plus 8GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 128GB eMMC storage. Graphics are integrated to the processor, but capable for low-intensity games.

We ran the Pocket through our usual benchmarks and recorded 1342 points in PCMark 8 Home (1495 accelerated), and 3411 points in Geekbench 4 (1152 single-core). Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s decent performance for a budget laptop, and especially one of this size.

We use GFXBench to test on-screen graphics, and here the GPD Pocket turned in 31fps in T-Rex, 16fps in

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Manhattan, 13fps in Manhattan 3.1 and 9fps in Car Chase.

It’s worth pointing out there is no support for storage expansion, though you can plug in an external hard drive via USB or make use of the cloud.

The company claims this is the first 7in pocket laptop to support 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, though we tested it in its out-of-box configuration running Windows 10 Home.

Verdict The GPD Pocket laptop is more expensive than some Chinese budget laptops, but despite its small dimensions you get a lot for your money. No laptop is more portable than this device, and combined with an HDMI cable and a second screen it has big ambitions. The touchscreen eases handheld use, and performance is more than adequate for daily tasks. There are, of course, downsides though – no matter how well designed the keyboard is

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never going to be as usable as a full-size model, and there’s no trackpad. Cameras are also missing from this device, ruling out video chat without plugging in an external webcam. Marie Black

Specifications

• 7in full-HD (1920x1080, 323ppi) 10-point touchscreen • Windows 10 Home 64-bit • 8GB DDR3 RAM • 128GB eMMC storage • 1.6GHz Intel Atom X7-Z8750 quad-core processor • Intel HD graphics • 1x USB 3.0 • 1x USB-C • 1x Micro-HDMI • 3.5mm headphone jack • Mono speaker • 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.1 • 7,000mAh non-removable lithium-polymer battery • 182x109x19.9mm • 503g

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Lenovo IdeaPad 320S £349 inc VAT from fave.co/2gUE2AK

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he Lenovo IdeaPad 320S is an entry-level laptop that looks, from arm’s width at least, similar to ones costing £600 to £1,000. Sub-£400 models don’t have to be dumpy or ugly anymore.

Normally we struggle to recommend a laptop as low-power as the IdeaPad 320S. However, we’ve finally reached the point where Windows 10 and a low-end Pentium processor can get along. It’s time to celebrate.

The IdeaPad 320S is a great match for someone with a low budget and no truly CPU-crunching tasks to do. Don’t come expecting a great screen, though, as it’s glaringly worse than that of a laptop from the next tier.

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Design Design is a primary appeal of the Lenovo IdeaPad 320.

This is unusual for a laptop of this price. From a distance you could easily believe it costs £600-1000. It doesn’t have the thick frame or unsophisticated lines of the average budget laptop. Instead, The Lenovo IdeaPad 320S has an ultrabook-like shell, but one made mostly of plastic rather than aluminium.

The lid is aluminium, but Lenovo has sensibly chosen to favour a classy look instead of showing this off, using the same block colour for the entire shell.

It feels sturdy too. There’s minimal flex to the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S screen and only a small part of the keyboard flexes under pressure, and even then you have to be looking for faults to notice it.

Look closer and you’ll notice the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S isn’t quite as slim or as light as a premium slim laptop, though. At 19.2mm thick, it’s portable but thick enough to be a noticeable presence in your rucksack.

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That said, we’d be happy to use it as a laptop carried around daily. Lenovo also says the 320S weighs 1.7kg, but that must relate to the higher-spec version as this one is just 1.435kg according to our scales.

Until now we’ve been recommending the HP 250 G5 (£345 from fave.co/2gVCvKJ) as a top budget laptop buy.

While more powerful than the IdeaPad 320S, this Lenovo is certainly far better-looking and more portable.

It even offers the latest laptop design trend: very slim screen surrounds. While not as slim as those of, say, the Dell XPS 13 (£1,649 from tinyurl.com/yahadtma), the slimmed-down borders do give the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S a very sharp and modern look for a budget laptop.

Connections The Lenovo IdeaPad 320S has what is fast becoming the crowd-pleasing standard of connectivity. There’s one USB-C port, the new style of connector, and two older full-size USBs. As you might guess given the price, these are not all top-spec connectors. One of the USBs is a 2.0 socket rather than 3.0, and the USB-C does not support the ultra-high bandwidth Thunderbolt 3 standard.

None of this matter too much in a £350 laptop like the Lenovo IdeaPad 320, though.

The full-size HDMI and SD card slot are far more important. For the average buyer the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S has much more useful connectivity than a £1500 MacBook, even without truly high-end ports.

There’s no fingerprint scanner, an increasingly common feature in laptops. However, we don’t expect to see one in a machine this cheap.

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Keyboard and touchpad The Lenovo IdeaPad 320S keyboard and trackpad don’t feel radically worse than those of the much more expensive IdeaPad 720S. There are budget-related compromises, but none are too glaring in this area.

Like other slim laptops, the keys are a little shallow and their resistance a little lower than the IdeaPad 720S’s, but typing is comfortable. This is one of the benefits of getting a 14in laptop like this rather than a much smaller model: the keys feel well-spaced.

There is no backlight, though, meaning you need to touch type at night.

The trackpad below is a fairly standard plastic pad, with buttons built into the surface. Its click sound is a bit loud, and the surface not as smooth as a glass pad.

However, like the rest of the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S, it’s a fairly convincing impersonation of a much more expensive machine’s touchpad.

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Display The Lenovo IdeaPad 320S’s display is the one part that instantly marks this out as cheap laptop. It uses a TN-style screen rather than the IPS LCD kind seen in almost all more expensive laptops at this point.

When tilted back too far, the colours invert and the screen appears cast in shadow. Tilt it towards you and the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S looks washed-out. Vertical viewing angles are poor, making the screen look bad unless viewed dead-on.

Resolution is limited too at 1366x768 pixels.

However, this is currently the most common resolution at the price. And it doesn’t appear aggressively pixellated.

Colour performance is relatively poor, covering just 56 percent of sRGB, 39 percent of Adobe RGB and 40 percent of DCI P3. This is low enough to make undersaturation immediately apparent. Playing a movie on the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S right next to the IdeaPad 720S, the latter appears far richer.

Contrast is very poor too, another characteristic typical of a standard TN panel, at 205:1. Black levels are clearly imperfect even in a well-lit room. And finally, brightness isn’t very good either, with maximum intensity of 263cd/m2. We like to see levels over 300cd/m2.

The display is the IdeaPad 320S’s biggest disappointment, and perhaps the best reason to consider spending a little more on a laptop with an IPS screen. More expensive models in this range use IPS panels too. However, if your budget is limited to £350 you’ll likely have to put up with a lower-quality display like this unless you switch to a Chromebook or Android hybrid instead of a Windows 10 computer.

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Its matt finish is the display’s lone saving grace. This makes the screen easier to see outside, or when near reflection-causing windows.

Performance The Lenovo IdeaPad 320S is a low-end laptop. It uses the Intel Pentium 4415U CPU a dual-core with four threads and a base clock speed of 2.3GHz. We normally advise against buying a Windows 10 laptop with a Pentium or Intel Atom processor, as they are often a chore to use. Even system navigation can be slow to the point of annoyance.

However, the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S proves we’re back at a point where an Intel Pentium laptop can be a good buy. Windows 10 feels fast, there’s no waiting for basic elements of the OS to appear and general responsiveness is remarkably close to that of a Core i3 laptop. This is, in part, thanks to the use of a 128GB SSD rather than a slower hard drive.

Conscious that there’s still a question of how much an Intel Pentium CPU with 4GB of RAM can really hack, we tried opening a dozen browser windows, a few documents and running Minecraft in the background.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 320S still didn’t fall over, although looking at Windows 10 Task Manager’s CPU usage statistics it’s clear the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S is made for light tasks. Processor usage was fairly high with this kind of low-level multitasking.

If you want to do video editing, use Photoshop or music production software, we’d highly recommend a Core i-series laptop instead. That said, for the kind of work we tend to do: browsing, writing documents and

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relatively simply editing of photos, the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S fares surprisingly well.

Compared to our earlier reviews of older Pentium laptops, the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S performs fairly well in benchmarks. It scores 4,995 points in Geekbench 4, compared to the 3211 of the older-generation Pentium CPU Asus VivoBook Max X541SA and the 6,000-plus of a Core i5 system.

We’re rather impressed with the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S, and could happily use it as our main work machine. Until we needed to edit video or do some serious image editing, at any rate.

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Gaming performance is much worse than a Core i5 alternative, though. Where a Core i5 laptop like the Acer Swift 3 can play Alien: Isolation at 720p and manage an acceptable 30fps average, the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S averages an unplayable 16.7fps. At 1366p this slows to 11.6fps. We’d normally test at 1080p, but the Lenovo IdeaPad 320’s screen isn’t that high-res. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is unplayable no matter the setting. At 720p Low it shuffles along at 7.7fps, dropping to a painful 2.7fps at native resolution, Ultra settings.

The Lenovo can play Minecraft happily. We tried it.

But don’t expect too much more than that. One benefit of using such a low-end CPU is that while there is a fan, it’s never remotely loud. Even after a series of gaming tests, the Lenovo IdeaPad 320S was very quiet.

Battery life This laptop doesn’t get into the teens of hours of battery life like some low-power laptops. However, it does nudge its way towards all-day stamina when simply playing locally stored video, at 120cd/m2 brightness.

It lasts just over eight hours of 720p movie playback, which is a fairly light task even for an Intel Pentium CPU. You should see similar results when simply catching up on emails or writing documents, with seven to eight hours perfectly feasible at the sort of screen brightness level you might use indoors. Lenovo promises seven hours’ use, and delivers.

Verdict The Lenovo IdeaPad 320S proves cheap laptops don’t have to be undesirable. A portable frame and modern

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look make this a laptop you could be proud to take out at the local coffee shop.

We’re also glad to see a Pentium-based system run Windows 10 so well, with performance in basic tasks similar to that of an Intel Core machine, The screen is very poor, however, thanks to its use of a basic TN panel. If you’re looking for something that will double as a portable Netflix/iPlayer, you might want to save up for something with an IPS screen. You’re unlikely to find many Windows 10 laptops as attractive and slick at £350, though. Andrew Williams

Specifications

• 14in (1366x768, 282ppi) TN LCD anti-glare • Windows 10 Home 64-bit • 2.3GHz Intel Pentium 4450U 2 cores, 4 threads

• 4GB DDR3 RAM • 128GB SSD • 802.11b/g/n/ac singleband 1x1 MIMO

• Bluetooth 4.1 • 1x USB-C • 1x USB 3.0

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• 1x USB 2.0 • HDMI • Kensington Security Slot • SDXC card slot • Stereo speakers • HD webcam • Single mic • 3.5mm headset jack • UK tiled keyboard with numberpad • Two-button trackpad • 52Wh lithium-ion battery, removable • 327.4x236.5x19.3mm • 435g

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Hands-on with Dell’s gorgeous VR headset Dell’s Visor is a fantastic virtual reality headset, but Windows Mixed Reality still needs polish, writes HAYDEN DINGMAN

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or nearly three years now, virtual reality on the PC has been a two-company game. Oculus and HTC, the Rift and the Vive. Sure, we’ve had others come and go – Razer’s OSVR headset, for instance.

But in general, it’s been a two-headset market.

In October we’ll have seven. On 17 October Microsoft will preside over the largest VR roll-out in history, overseeing the release of Windows Mixed Reality headsets from Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, and

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HP, alongside the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

Microsoft’s goal is to bring its titular ‘Mixed Reality’ to the masses – theoretically a spectrum of augmented and virtual reality tech, though these initial headsets are just VR headsets, really.

So what’s it like? I went hands-on with the Dell Visor at PAX West recently, giving me a chance to draw conclusions not just about Dell’s product but this launch as a whole. In short: expect confusion.

Generation 1.5 Let’s talk about Dell’s Visor first. It’s a sleek headset.

Clad all in white, it definitely looks more ‘finished’ than the Vive, though I still think the Rift’s design has a slight edge. Dell also lifted some of the best ideas from Sony’s PlayStation VR headset or Microsoft’s own HoloLens, eschewing the bulky straps seen on the Rift and Vive

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in favour of a welding helmet-style ring. The Visor is beautifully balanced, resting effortlessly on your head and gently cinching in place.

The front also flips up out of the way like a welding helmet – again, similar to PlayStation VR. It’s a great feature, regardless of origin. If you want to take a drink, check your phone, use your mouse, or whatever, you simply lift the screen part of the Visor up out of the way. No need to take the whole headset off or awkwardly try to peep out the bottom edge.

The Visor’s ventilation is better than it is for both the Vive and Rift. Dell’s PAX demo had me playing through Superhot VR, which is a fairly active game. I was ducking, kneeling, squatting, leaning, and so on to evade enemy bullets, but the lenses never fogged up, nor was my face covered in sweat afterward. It gets hot, but air channels near the nose and in the centre of the forehead help keep you slightly cooler than the competition does.

At 1440x1440 resolution per eye, the Visor has a slight edge over the Vive and Rift’s 1080x1200 per eye, though in actual use the difference is harder to tell.

The Visor will also run at 90Hz, same as the Rift and Vive, though I’ve heard other Windows MR headsets will target 60 frames per second instead. What that experience will be like and how Microsoft will surface that information to potential buyers, I have no idea.

So far so good, though, right?

Achilles heel Which brings us to tracking. This is where Microsoft’s reference design (which all these headsets are based on) starts to fall apart.

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Both the Rift and Vive utilize external base stations of some sort for tracking. With Oculus, these are cameras that plug straight into your computer and analyse the position of the Rift and the accompanying Touch controllers. With HTC, Vive’s tracking is done by the headset and controllers themselves – the wallmounted base stations are just dumb boxes that blast lasers into the room.

Regardless of method, the results are the same: fast and highly accurate tracking. Base stations are vulnerable to occlusion (when all stations lose sight of an object at the same time) but it’s otherwise reliable.

Microsoft doesn’t use base stations. Instead, Microsoft claimed to have perfected markerless insideout tracking. You’ll notice there are two cameras on the front of the Dell Visor. That’s what does the tracking,

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and there are similar cameras on every Windows MR device. When you put on the Visor it asks you to look left, right, down, and up, then uses this information to track the world around you.

It works okay.

Let me start with the biggest issue: the controllers.

Because the Rift and Vive use external base stations, the controllers are tracked independently from the headset.

If you put your arms down at your sides, your arms don’t just cease to exist. You can hit that incoming tennis ball without looking at your racket. The racket’s still there.

Not in Microsoft’s world though. Turns out when your trackers are on the headset, everything you do needs to be in sight of the headset.

Okay, not quite. There’s some sort of software projection going on, so when your hands go out of sight

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of the headset they still ‘exist’. As Dell explained to me though, the longer they’re out of sight of the cameras the less accurate that estimate gets.

If you want to know why this is problematic, well, play Superhot VR. If you’re not familiar, Superhot VR is a game where enemies only move when you move. Thus when playing on the Vive or Rift you’ll often grab objects from outside your field of view, so as to keep an eye on the enemies shooting at you. On the Dell Visor and, presumably, other Windows MR headsets? Not so much.

In order to grab objects reliably I was always forced to look at what I was grabbing.

This isn’t a huge deal for many of the Windows Mixed Reality applications Microsoft is touting – day-to-day productivity, education, and so on. But it’s a total wash for gaming purposes.

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It’s prone to confusion, too. I’ve had my Vive set up for over a year with no major issues. Within 10 minutes of calibrating the Dell Visor, I’d started to creep slowly but surely into the air, until eventually my character was floating eight feet above the floor. The headset just had no idea where I was, and had somehow concluded we’d moved that far above our initial point on the PAX show floor. Needless to say, we hadn’t.

Now, the PAX show floor is hardly ideal conditions to demo inside-out tracking, and the more charitable side of me is willing to give some benefit of the doubt. In a quiet home environment, surrounded only by static furniture and the odd pet? Perhaps it works a lot better. Still, it was indicative of how far markerless inside-out tracking has to go before Microsoft can really say it’s ‘perfected’.

Open My final complaint, and it has nothing to do with the hardware: the Windows 10 store.

Microsoft has said that Steam VR support will come to these headsets sometime post-launch, but when they arrive in October your only option will be to grab software from the Windows 10 store. That’s going to be an extremely small cross-section of VR titles, and will require developers to add not just Windows Mixed Reality support but also (I assume) repackage their programs as universal Windows apps. It also requires you, as the end user, to use the not-so-great Windows 10 store.

When Steam VR support is added, this whole raft of Microsoft headsets might look more appealing.

At launch, though, I’m unconvinced. The price of the

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Dell Visor with controllers in the US is $449 (£TBA), which is surprisingly close to the Oculus Rift’s £499 (from oculus.com) price tag – and at that point, why not just buy a Rift? You’d get a stable platform with an existing library of software, plus built-in headphones, more accurate position tracking, and more ergonomic controllers.

Dell’s Visor isn’t even the most expensive model.

That honor will probably go to Asus. Wasn’t the whole point of these headsets to bring VR to the masses?

Because that’s not happening at these prices. To be fair, you’ll be able to buy Acer’s Windows Mixed Reality by itself – sans controllers – for $300. But controllers are such an integral part of the VR experience that you won’t want to skip them.

Verdict I’m sceptical. I think Dell has done a great job of adapting Microsoft’s reference design. The Dell Visor is attractive, well-balanced, and comfortable, coming in slightly below the current Oculus Rift price and providing 90 percent of the same experience.

That last 10 percent is important, though. I don’t have high hopes for the accuracy of Microsoft’s markerless tracking or the VR-hotspot prospects of the Windows 10 store. I hope I’m wrong – I hope this is the dawn of a new era in VR. But my gut tells me this raft of headsets is going the way of Steam Machines.

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Best Windows PC games of 2017 (so far) HAYDEN DINGMAN reveals our favourite games of the year

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sually these lists of the best PC games with “Can you believe it’s already September?” But I think I speak for everyone when I say, “wow, we’re only halfway through 2017? Seriously?” This has been one of the busiest release windows I’ve ever seen, with dozens of major PC games already released this year.

Yes, a few we were looking forward to turned out to be high-profile flops (cough Mass Effect: Andromeda cough), but there have also been some instant classics

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– Nier: Automata, Prey, Thimbleweed Park, and more.

Look for those and more inside, as we round up the best PC games of 2017 – so far, at least. This autumn is looking even more packed.

Prey Price: £24.95 from tinyurl.com/yanx24kk It’s not the story you tell, it’s how you tell it. You could easily look at Prey and dismiss it as same old, same old. Immersive sim on a space ship? Oh, so it’s System Shock 3. And indeed that’s the target Arkane aimed at when it started this whole project.

What it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in style, though. Dishonored’s take on the genre is always slow, plodding, and methodical. Creative, to a point – but restrained by the tools at your disposal.

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Prey has no such restraints. The fact that speed runners have beaten the game in seven minutes is testament to the freedom Prey gives you, as is the fact that your first ‘gun’ is good mostly for building platforms and accessing those hard-to-reach areas.

Is Prey a revolution? A reinvention of old ideas? Not in the slightest. But it takes much of what made System Shock 2 great, repackages it in a modern game with modern design and modern tech, and runs with it. It’s one hell of a space station and one hell of a game.

Nier: Automata Price: £TBA from tinyurl.com/y9zc7d2z I didn’t really understand Nier: Automata until the credits ran for the fifth time. It’s an RPG that breaks all genre conventions from the get-go, with lengthy bullet-hell

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sequences interspersed between the fast-paced and fluid combat Platinum’s games are known for. And it’s a game that features singing robots, villains named Adam and Eve, and all sorts of other oddities I’d hate to spoil.

But it only gets wilder the longer you play. There’s a lull in the middle as you go for the second ending – that section’s probably the weakest part. It’s worth it to push through though, as endings C and D bring the story to some wild places. As for ending EI can’t say anything at all, except that it’s worth the journey.

The PC port has some issues, and I might have abstained from putting Nier: Automata on this list if it were a lesser game. But the problems are at least easily fixed with a well-maintained fan patch. Grab it and you’re set.

Night in the Woods Price: £14.99 from tinyurl.com/yc7mey9u Night in the Woods looks maybe a bit too cutesy for its own good. I still don’t know why everyone’s an animal, except they just are. It doesn’t really matter though, because Night in the Woods features extraordinary character writing, with some of the best moment-tomoment dialogue I’ve seen in a game. Not in the ‘You’re the hero and you’re fighting evil’ way, but the muchharder-to-pull-off ‘You’re a normal person and this is a sketch of your life’ way. Chats with your parents. Chats with your friends. Chats with neighbours. It’s identifiable on a personal level that few games achieve.

And that’s great, but when I think back on Night in the Woods, it’s the town I remember. Underneath the

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twee story of a college-aged kid looking for somewhere to belong, there’s a deeper story about rural America – specifically, about an economically depressed mining town, the toll taken on the people who call it home, and the slow decay after the boom years are over.

It’s good. And timely.

Thimbleweed Park Price: £14.99 from tinyurl.com/yakvw846 The Kickstarter campaign promised a “long lost LucasArts adventure” and that’s exactly what Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick, and co. delivered with Thimbleweed Park. It’s a point-and-click the way point-and-clicks were made in their heyday, complete with the SCUMM-style graphics and the block of verbs in the bottom left corner.

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But it’s also 2017’s take on the ’90s adventure game. The Twin Peaks-esque story of a murder in a strange town filled with strange people is quickly usurped by meta-humour, in-jokes, and just all-around bizarre occurrences – some explained, some left to the imagination. Thimbleweed Park’s both a brilliant homage and a brilliant game in its own right.

Torment: Tides of Numenera Price: £18.95 from tinyurl.com/yapdhhef Torment: Tides of Numenera might not reach the same heights as its spiritual predecessor Planescape: Torment, nor will it perhaps last as long in people’s hearts. But that’s a bit of an “Aim for the moon, land among the stars” deal, because Torment: Tides of Numenera is still an excellent throwback CRPG.

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Why? Because it’s all so weird. Whether it’s a city contained within a dimension-spanning slug, an orphan from another time and place, a garden where only the person you’re talking with can hear you and vice versa – the game is just full of wondrous events and areas that make it a joy to explore. There are issues. Combat is superfluous, which doesn’t annoy me but may annoy some. The story wraps up too quickly and ties together a bit too neatly. There are definitely aspects I would’ve wanted to see fleshed out. But what’s here is still an excellent journey despite its flaws.

Everything Price: £6.59 from tinyurl.com/ma3v6nx Everything is a philosophical treatise. A game, sure, but also a way of looking at the universe, of understanding

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the world around us. One that will be innately familiar to lovers of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, for instance – a world interconnected, a simulation of everything.

And one where everything is related to every other, where we’re defined by our similarities more than our differences.

What this means for you, the player? You’re put in control of an object – a cow, a bear, a pencil, a street light, a cigarette end, a grain of pollen – and can, at will, scale up into a larger one or down into a smaller one. Maybe you’ll spend a few minutes as a cloud, or an island, or a single electron. There are over a thousand objects in Everything, and you can control each of them in some manner. Oh, and periodically you’ll stumble upon excerpts of talks by philosopher Alan Watts and listen to him discussing how all beings are related, and actually part of one huge organism.

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It’s a game that demands a particular mindset and a willingness to approach it on its own terms, but Everything is stunningly ambitious. There’s certainly nothing else quite like it.

Snake Pass Price: £15.99 from tinyurl.com/Lsetqav Snake Pass is a game built around a single idea: You’re a snake. Really. That’s it. It may look like a mid-’90s platformer, with its cartoon characters and that bright, colourful palette. You’re a snake, though, and thus have no legs with which to platform.

Instead you’re reduced to snaking around a level – coiling yourself around poles, wriggling across ledges, and clambering your way up cliffs like a sentient vine.

Which is basically what you are. It’s excellent, almost

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more of a puzzle game than a platformer, and despite being overshadowed by the release of Yooka-Laylee in the same window I think Snake Pass is probably the stronger throwback game.

Stories Untold Price: £6.99 from tinyurl.com/yac3xy5x Stories Untold is really good until it kind-of sort-of isn’t.

Which is to say: The last chapter is a letdown.

It’s mainly a letdown though because it tries to wrap a fat, ugly bow around what is, up until that moment, a fantastic and somewhat spooky anthology series like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. Stories Untold is a love-letter to analog technology, a fact that doesn’t surprise me a bit after learning that some of the Alien: Isolation crew worked on it. More specifically, it’s a

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game where you use analog technology to investigate the paranormal – say, by using medical equipment to experiment on a strange artifact, or typing coordinates into an elaborate radio system from your snowed-in lodge. Everything goes wrong, obviously.

As I said, the last chapter is a bit of a lark. What comes before is more than good enough to make up for it though. Stories Untold is immensely creative, and proof that we’re not done inventing great game mechanics yet – even if those mechanics are sometimes drawn from the past.

Cosmic Express Price: £6.99 from tinyurl.com/ycrqb6xd “It’s a puzzle game with trains.” Yeah, okay. But Cosmic Express is so much more. First of all, they’re space trains.

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All kidding aside, Cosmic Express is also the best puzzle game I’ve played this year. The concept is simple – just get the trains to the exit, picking up and depositing all the aliens in their homes along the way. Like last year’s Stephen’s Sausage Roll however, this simple setup disguises a fiendish puzzle game that will have you drawing and re-drawing tracks all the livelong day.

What Remains of Edith Finch Price: £14.99 tinyurl.com/k9gpqt2 What Remains of Edith Finch is one spectacular moment after another. You’re sent to the old Finch family home for what first seems like a fairly uninspired “walking simulator” type game, until suddenly it’s not that at all.

Instead you’re paraded through the dying moments of every member of the extended Finch family, a series

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of incredible vignettes each with its own aesthetic, its own moral (if we can call it that), and its own contribution to the greater family story.

To say much more would be to spoil the game, because so much of it is predicated on the surprise – on each five to 10-minute character sketch telling you all you need to know about the people involved, their hopes and dreams, and ultimately their fates. It’s one of the rare instances where game and storytelling are perfectly intertwined, and either without the other would suffer immensely. It’s my favourite game so far this year.

Planescape Torment Enhanced Edition Price: £14.99 from tinyurl.com/Lb49c5y It’s bit silly to nominate a game from 1999 for any sort of award in 2017 – especially one that’s already as

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well-decorated and acclaimed as Planescape: Torment.

That being said, Beamdog finally released Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition in April, making the game much more accessible for the average person with native widescreen support, 4K resolution, a remastered soundtrack, zooming, tab highlighting, and more. Sure, you could’ve managed all that with mods before – I did that exact thing back in January – but this is the game with minimal mucking about. If you’ve always heard great things about Planescape and never gotten around to it, there’s really no excuse anymore.

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds Price: £26.99 from tinyurl.com/kkcnf32 Two caveats about Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. First, it’s still in Early Access. Second, the name is just terrible.

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We’ll be calling it PUBG from here on out. We never really put Early Access titles on these sorts of lists, or even pay them much attention because, well, they’re not done. We’d be remiss if we didn’t include PUBG though.

Not only has the game sold a huge number of copies already, but it’s so damn fun. It’s a battle royal set on a massive island where your goal is to gather equipment, find the coolest clothes, and survive longer than everyone else. That last one is probably most important.

Sound familiar? Developer Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene authored a similar Arma mod back in the day and then helped develop H1Z1: King of the Kill.

PUBG is the best of the bunch though, managing to mimic Arma’s realism without Arma’s clunkiness and frustration. There’s no other feeling like outlasting 90-plus competitors, making it into the final ten, and waiting to die.

Pro-tip: Install it on an SSD. That alleviates some of the more egregious performance problems. And remember, it’s still in Early Access.

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How To: Speed up Windows 10 on your PC Is your Windows PC too slow? LINCOLN SPECTOR has eight tips to give your computer a performance boost

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our computer is slow. Annoyingly slow. You can add RAM, or buy a faster SSD, but that costs money. No, the first thing you should do is try to make Windows faster. Thus we present nine ways to speed up your PC without spending a penny.

Be warned: there’s always a trade-off. More speed may mean less battery life, or even giving up a beloved

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program. You’ll have to decide what sacrifices you’re willing to make in order to increase Windows’ speed.

Last spring, I bought a Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 310 as a second, smaller PC. I found it so slow it was painful. I used that machine for researching this article. The Miix still isn’t fast, but it’s a lot faster.

1. Give it the reboot If your PC is behaving horribly slow, try rebooting. Yes, it’s an obvious solution, but people tend to forget the obvious. The sleep or hibernate setting will save power, but only a full reboot clears out the cobwebs in Windows’ brain and gives it a fresh start. Do it every day if the PC is really slow.

2. Turn on High Performance Windows assumes that you want an energy-efficient computer. But you can trade electricity for speed. Use this tip only if you’re willing to increase your electric bill and decrease your battery performance.

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Right-click the Start button and in the resulting menu, select Power Options. In the resulting Control Panel window, pull down the Show additional plans option. Select High performance.

Some low-end PCs, including my Miix 310, don’t have those options.

3. Undo some appearance options You can speed up Windows by turning off some of its special effects. The OS works hard to make the screen easy on the eyes. If your PC is underpowered, you may want to sacrifice aesthetics and gain some speed.

Right-click Start, and select System. In the resulting Control Panel window’s left pane, select Advanced system settings.

This brings up the System Properties dialog box, already on the Advanced tab. Click the Settings button in the Performance box (the first of three ‘Settings’ buttons on this tab).

This brings up another dialog box. You can uncheck some of the options, or simply select Adjust for best performance.

4. Remove unneeded autoloaders A whole lot of programs want to load automatically every time you boot. Each one slows down the boot process, and some continue to slow down Windows afterwards. These are not all bad. Your antivirus program should load when you boot and keep running as long as your PC is on. Other programs that need to run in the background to work, such as OneDrive, should also autoload.

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But some programs – even good ones that you use frequently – don’t really need to run all the time. You don’t want to uninstall those, but you may want to stop them from autoloading.

To see how bad the situation is, right-click the taskbar and select Task Manager. Click the Startup tab. (If you don’t see any tabs at the top of the window, click More details in the lower-left corner.)

The Startup tab will show you all the autoloading programs. As you examine the list, think about what programs don’t really need to keep running at all times. To stop one from loading automatically, rightclick its entry on the Startup tab and select Disable.

If you don’t recognize the name of an autoloader,

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right-click it and select Search online to help you find more information.

5. Stop hog processes Your computer may be running a poorly written process that’s hogging a lot of resources. To find out, right-click the taskbar and select Task Manager. (Once again, if you don’t see any tabs at the top of the window, click More Details.)

On the Processes tab, click the CPU column header to sort by processor usage. The top items will be the ones hogging the CPU. (If the top processes are all using 0%, the processes are sorted in the wrong direction.

Click the column header again.)

Don’t assume that the top process is necessarily a hog. Some big applications are worth the CPU cycles.

One way to manage these programs is to close them when you’re done with them. Another is to switch to a smaller program. You can close a process from inside Task Manager. Select the process and click the End task button and confirm your decision. But this should be avoided. When you’re done, click the Memory column header and repeat.

6. Turn off search indexing When you search for a word across all the files in your Documents library, the results come up almost immediately. That’s wonderful, but it comes at a price.

When you’re not searching, the indexing needed to create those fast searches slows you down.

To turn off all indexing open Windows Explorer, right-click your C: drive, and select Properties. On the

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General tab, uncheck Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties. In the resulting warning box, select Apply changes to drive C:\, subfolders and files.

Windows may take some time turning off the indexing. Get up and take a walk; it’s good for you.

There’s another option that will let you turn off some indexing but not all of it.

Type indexing in the Cortana field. Select Indexing Options. Click the Modify button near the lower-left side of the resulting dialog box.

This brings up another dialog box, with two sections.

And yes, it’s confusing. Start in the bottom section of the dialog box, Summary of selected locations. Click any of these options, and it changes the contents of the top section, Change selected locations.

Unchecking items in that top section will stop indexing in those specific locations.

7. Turn off Windows tips Windows 10 occasionally gives you tips about how you can better use the operating system. The problem is that, in order to see what tips you need, it keeps an eye on how you’re using your PC. Yes, that sounds worrying from a privacy issue, but it also slows down your PC. To turn it off, click Start > Settings. Select System, then select Notifications & actions in the left pane.

At the bottom of the Notifications section, turn off Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows.

You might also want to explore the other notification options, and turn some of them off, as well. I don’t

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think any of the others slow down the PC, but they can get annoying.

8. Clean your internal drive If your internal storage is almost full – whether it’s a hard drive or an SSD – that could be slowing you down. But if your drive has plenty of free room, skip this section.

Start with Windows’ own Disk Cleanup tool. In the Cortana field, type disk and select Disk Cleanup.

Wait while Disk Cleanup examines your drive. Click the Clean up system files button (this time you’ll need an administrator password).

Then wait again for another examination. Examine the options. If you find one called Previous Windows installation(s), you’re in luck. By checking it and clicking OK, you’ll free up a lot of space. You can check other items to get rid of them, as well.

Something else you might want to consider: Uninstall programs you no longer use.

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How To: Fix a computer that won’t boot JIM MARTIN reveals what you should do if your PC won’t start

1. Check the power supply Laptops This is one of the most common problems. There are various things that can go wrong, from using the wrong laptop power supply (delivering the wrong voltate) to a blown fuse in the plug.

It might be that your power supply has simply failed. First, make sure the battery has some charge.

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If you’re not sure, and there’s no power indicator on the battery itself, then remove it entirely and just use the mains charger.

Double-check, too, that the charger is the right one for your laptop. Many laptops – especially from the same manufacturer – use the same size plug, and if you own more than one, it’s not too difficult to plug in the wrong power supply, which might provide a different voltage or not enough current.

Other gadgets may also use the same tips, such as a battery powered speaker, and are unlikely to use the same voltage as your laptop, which typically requires 16- to 20V. Secondly, check the fuse in the plug. Use a screwdriver to remove the fuse and install one that’s known to be good. If you have a spare power cable that will plug into your power supply, this is a much quicker swap to test that it isn’t the fuse at fault.

Check over the wire itself, as power supplies get beaten up, especially if you carry them everywhere.

Weak points are at the ends where it joins the black brick and at the plug which connects to the laptop. If you can see the coloured wires inside the black outer protection, it could be time to buy a new PSU.

PCs PC power supplies can also be problematic. Few people have a spare they can install and test, so the first check is the fuse in the plug. There’s also a fuse inside the PSU itself, but it will require you to remove it from your PC and then remove the metal case to check if that’s the problem.

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One of the most common PC power supply issues is that the PC will turn off unexpectedly rather than fail to boot up at all. If the LED is on showing that power is reaching it, make sure your power button is properly connected and working. You can short the appropriate motherboard pins together (check which ones in your motherboard manual) to eliminate the power button from the equation.

2. Check the screen Laptops Try disconnecting any external displays including projectors and monitors to make sure they’re not stopping your laptop from booting into Windows.

If your computer’s power LED lights up and you can hear the hard disk or fan(s) whirring, but there’s no image on the screen, then make the room dark and check that there isn’t a very faint image on the screen.

It’s easy to think a laptop isn’t booting when in fact, it’s the screen that’s the problem.

If there is a faint image – maybe the Windows logon screen – then it’s likely that your screen’s inverter has failed. This component changes the direct current (DC) coming from the battery or power supply to an alternating current required by the screen.

Replacing an inverter isn’t too difficult if you’re handy with a screwdriver, but it’s crucial you buy the right replacement part. As inverters aren’t exactly cheap, you can’t afford to get it wrong.

If your laptop appears to be booting fine, but there’s no image at all, the LCD panel could be at fault.

Replacing a laptop screen is possible, but difficult, and

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screens can also be costly. If it’s an older laptop, it’s worth considering buying a new one.

PCs There isn’t much you can do to fix a broken PC monitor, but it’s easy – or easier – to swap the power lead and video cable or even the whole monitor to see if that’s the reason your PC won’t boot.

3. Remove any USB drives or memory cards Assuming everything is okay with the power supply and screen, your computer may be getting stuck before it loads Windows. A classic culprit here is a USB drive or memory card left inserted into a USB port or card reader.

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Typically you’ll see an error message such as ‘Operating system not found’ which can lead to unnecessary panic.

For the majority of the time, it means the BIOS is set to try booting from removable storage drives (including cards) before the internal hard drive.

It could also be a disc left in the DVD or Blu-ray drive, so check those too.

4. Try a rescue disc If you’re seeing different error messages, or there aren’t any cards, external drives or discs causing the problem, try using a rescue disc.

If you have one, the Windows DVD can be used, but otherwise you can download (using another computer – obviously) a rescue disc image and either burn it to a CD or DVD, or extract it to a USB flash drive. You can then boot from this and attempt to fix the problem with

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Windows. If a virus is causing the problem, use a rescue disc from an anti-virus provider as this will include scanning tools which can find and remove the malware.

We’ve a full guide to making and using a rescue disc at tinyurl.com/y7ud6t2o.

5. Boot into safe mode Even if you can’t boot into Windows, you might be able to get into safe mode. Press F8 as your laptop is starting up and you’ll get a menu offering to boot into Safe Mode. Here’s how to enter Safe Mode.

If you can enter Safe Mode, you might be able to undo any changes that caused your laptop or PC to stop booting. You could try uninstalling any new programs that you recently installed, uninstall a driver that was recently updated, or create a new user account if the account is corrupt.

We’ve a more detailed guide on how to fix a corrupt user profile at tinyurl.com/ybwk3bhh.

If you see an option to repair your computer, try this, but you will almost certainly need your Windows CD for this to work.

6. Check for faulty or incompatible hardware If you’ve just installed some new memory or another piece of hardware, it might be preventing your computer from booting. Remove it (reinstalling the old memory if necessary) and try again.

If your motherboard has a LED readout showing POST codes, search the manual or online to find out what the code shown means. Often it can be tricky to get a newly built PC to boot. The best tip here is to

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disconnect everything except the bare minimum needed to boot to the BIOS:

• Motherboard • CPU (with heat sink attached) • Graphics card (if there’s a graphics output on the motherboard, remove any plug-in graphics cards) • One stick of memory (remove any others, and leave the single stick in slot 0 or whichever the manual recommends) • Power supply • Monitor All other hardware is unnecessary: you don’t need a hard drive, optical drive or any other components for the PC to start.

Common reasons why a new PC won’t boot are:

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• Power leads improperly attached to motherboard.

If your board has an extra 12V socket near the CPU, ensure the correct lead from the power supply is attached in addition to the large 24-pin ATX connector.

• Components not installed or seated properly.

Remove memory, graphics card and CPU and reinstall, checking for any bent pins on the CPU and CPU socket.

• Power button wires connected to wrong pins on motherboard.

• Power cables not attached to graphics card. Ensure PCI-E power leads are correctly connected if required by your GPU. • Hard drive connected to the wrong SATA port.

Ensure the primary drive is attached to a SATA port driven by the motherboard chipset, and not a separate controller.

Sometimes the reason a PC won’t boot is because hardware fails and there’s no easy fix. Hard drives are a common issue. If you can hear a regular clicking, or the drive spinning up and the powering down over and over, these are signs that it’s broken. Occasionally, people have found that removing the drive and putting it in the freezer for a couple of hours (in a freezer bag) does the trick. However, this is usually a temporary fix and you should have a second drive on hand to quickly back up or copy any files off the drive that you need.

If you can’t get the drive going again, it’s time to start afresh with a new hard drive. Let’s hope you have a recent backup of your important files.

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How To: Customize touchpad gestures MICHAEL ANSALDO explains how to configure multi-finger touchpad gestures on a Windows 10 device

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ne of the biggest improvements the Creators Update recently brought to Windows 10 was enhanced support for Precision Touchpads, the built-in mousepads on select laptops that support multi-touch gestures. As many a Mac user knows, the ability to use one-, two-, and three-finger gestures

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You can calibrate the sensitivity of your precision touchpad with four preset options to navigate apps, switch desktops, and perform various clicks and selections can really speed up your workflow. Here’s how to configure these settings on your Windows 10 device.

Open touchpad settings From the Start menu, go to Settings > Devices > Touchpad to access your touchpad options. You should see ‘Your PC has a precision touchpad’ at the top of this page. (If you don’t, your device doesn’t support a precision touchpad and you won’t see any of the associated options.)

You’ll also see a toggle button for activating/ deactivating the precision touchpad. If you’d rather it deactivate automatically when you connect an external

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mouse, uncheck the box next to Leave on when a mouse is connected.

Tweak your ‘taps’ In the Taps section, you can configure how to use finger taps for selecting and clicking. You’ll first see a drop-down menu for setting your precision touchpad’s sensitivity. There are four options: low sensitivity, medium sensitivity, high sensitivity, and most sensitive.

It’s best to leave it set to ‘medium sensitivity’ to begin with, then adjust up or down once you get a feel for how it responds. Beneath the sensitivity setting are four preset tap gestures for clicking and selecting. They’re all activated by default, so uncheck any you don’t want:

• Tap with a single finger to single-click • Tap with two fingers to right-click • Tap twice and drag to multi-select • Press the lower right corner of the touchpad to right-click

Set scroll and zoom options Under the Taps section, you have a couple of customization options for scrolling and zooming. You’ll probably want to leave the Drag two fingers to scroll and Pinch to zoom options checked. In the Scrolling direction drop-down menu, you can choose to have a downward swipe scroll the screen up or down.

Configure multi-finger gestures The Creators Update adds an additional slate of settings: three- and four-finger gestures and taps. These will have

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the biggest productivity impact by increasing the speed with which you can accomplish common and repetitive tasks when you’re working.

To configure three-finger gestures, click the Swipes drop-down menu. You’ll see four options:

1. Nothing This disables three-finger gestures altogether.

2. Switch apps and show desktop With this option enabled, a three-finger swipe up will open Task View, down will show you your desktop and all your open apps, and left and right will switch among running apps.

Three- and four-finger gestures can be set to perform common tasks like switching apps or desktops

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You can assign multi-finger gestures to a variety of actions in the advanced configuration settings

3. Switch desktop and show desktop Three-finger swipes up and down will do the same as above, but swipes left or right will switch between virtual desktops.

4. Change audio and volume Swipe up to increase the system volume, down to decrease it, and swipe left and right to jump to the previous or next song using your music app.

Three-finger taps can be customized to open Cortana search or the Action Centre, operate as a play/pause button, or function as a middle mouse button. You can also disable multi-finger taps. Directly beneath the three-fingers section are the settings for

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configuring four-finger gestures. They follow the same guidelines as above.

Dive into advanced gestures Just configuring and learning these preset options should lead to a big productivity boost. But if you’re feeling bold, you can venture into creating your own multi-finger gestures. Click ‘Advanced gesture configuration’ under ‘Related settings’. This opens a new screen where you can specify actions ranging from maximizing/minimizing window to performing custom shortcuts for your multi-finger taps and swipes.

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How To: Disable Cortana If you’re not a fan of Windows’ info-hungry digital assistant, MICHAEL ANSALDO reveals how to disable it

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illing Cortana isn’t as easy as it used to be. When Windows 10 first released, turning off Cortana was as simple as flipping a switch in the digital assistant’s settings, but Microsoft removed the option in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Now there’s no obvious way to disable Cortana – but it is possible using not-so-obvious methods.

Completely eradicating Cortana requires a quick registry edit, which we’ll detail here. If you don’t want Cortana spying on you but also detest the idea of mucking with your PC’s deepest software innards, our colleagues at PCWorld’s guide to privacy-boosting

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Cortana tweaks (at tinyurl.com/yaLya26t) can show you how to limit the personal information it sends Microsoft.

Cortana will still run in the background with limited functionality if you don’t perform the registry edit, though.

Turn off Cortana in Windows 10 As simple as this is, it’s always a good idea to create a system restore point before editing the Windows Registry – so go ahead and do that now. It only takes a minute. (Ironically, the easiest way to do so is to search for ‘restore point’ with Cortana.)

With that out of the way, let’s start registry hacking.

Press Windows Key + R simultaneously on your keyboard to bring up the Run interface, then type regedit into the box and press Enter. Depending on your security settings you may be prompted to give Windows permission to run the Registry Editor. If so, do so.

Once the Registry Editor is open, navigate to the following folder in the left-hand navigation pane: HKEY_

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LOCAL_MACHINE > Software > Policies > Microsoft > Windows > Windows Search.

Here’s the only potentially tricky part: you might not see a Windows Search folder. If it isn’t there, rightclick the Windows folder, select New > Key, and name it Windows Search.

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With the Windows Search folder selected in the lefthand navigation pane, right-click in the main portion of the window and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value.

A new listing will appear in the main pane, ready to be named; christen it AllowCortana. Afterward, double-click it and in the box that appears, ensure that the Value Data is set to ‘0’ – minus the quotation marks.

That’s it. Close the Registry Editor, then sign out of Windows 10. When you sign back in, Cortana will be long gone. The digital assistant’s former field remains in the Windows 10 task bar, but it now reads ‘Search Windows’ and tellingly lacks Cortana’s all-seeing eye icon.

You won’t be able to use any Cortana-enabled features in the dumbed-down search field, like setting reminders, getting personalized news, receiving up-todate travel info, or asking goofy questions. You will be able to search for files, system settings, and terms as before. That said, you won’t be able to tap Cortana’s smarts to perform natural language queries such as

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“Find pictures from June” either, so narrowing down file search results may take a bit more work.

Speaking of which, wiping Cortana’s previous memories of you from Microsoft’s servers takes an extra step. Head to Microsoft’s privacy dashboard website, sign into your Microsoft account, and clear whatever personal data you want Microsoft to forget.

Be warned: your choices may also affect other Microsoft services, like Bing, Edge, and Maps.

Cortana isn’t totally dead, though. You’ll still see the process lurking in Task Manager if you pay attention.

Kill it and it’ll immediately spring back to life. Your search queries nevertheless stay strictly local.

If you ever decide resummon Cortana, simply retrace your steps in the Registry Editor and either delete the AllowCortana value, or simply set it to ‘1’ instead of ‘0’.

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