September 2015

Don’t call it Chromebook 3 Toshiba is adding new hardware to its Chromebook 2 laptop, though not so much that it would warrant calling it Chromebook 3. More specifically, the Chromebook 2 is getting 5th Generation Intel Core i3 and Celeron processor options, otherwise known as Broadwell, and an all-new LED backlit keyboard. The Chromebook…

Getting acclimated to a new Office In what could be the most important update ever to Microsoft’s popular productivity suite, Office 2016 for Windows is now available, Microsoft announced on Tuesday. The new Office suite puts a much bigger emphasis on collaboration than ever before. One of the key ways it does that is through…

Just how fast is that SSD? Every now and again, resetting the benchmark charts is necessary. Now is such a time, for several reasons. First, we have a new testbed (Skylake) that enables potentially higher performance, particularly for M.2 PCIe drives. Second, some of the benchmarks we were using have gotten a bit long in…

Top Deal: Now is a great time to build a PC. Just ask Mr. Foley. He lives in a van down by the river, which was the best he could do after spending his retirement on a 1TB solid state drive before NAND flash memory pricing plummeted to pedestrian levels. Mr. Foley should have waited….

Affordable hybrids Asus has a couple of new Transformer Book devices that might appeal to users who are interested in a cheaper Surface. Specifically, Asus today announced the Transformer Book T100HA and Flip TP200SA, both of which offer a laptop and tablet experience in a single device. The T100HA sports an Intel Atom x5 Z8500…

We may have already made contact The only way E.T. could have phoned home is he didn’t use encryption. Otherwise, any communication would have been indistinguishable from cosmic background radiation, assuming the encryption was done right. That’s essentially the theory posed by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked classified documents to the press…