At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Intuitive web-based interface Robust security options Lots of business-ready capabilities Cons Business features won’t be needed by some users Requires annual commitment to get best value Our Verdict pdfFiller is an impressive PDF editor and document management solution with plenty to offer individuals and businesses. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today pdfFiller is a browser-based document management tool aimed at both individual and enterprise users. The end-to-end PDF solution allows you to do everything from editing to securing to sharing and storing your PDF files from its simple web interface. The app is designed like a desktop editor with a toolbar above the document pane and thumbnails down the left side that make it easy to manage multipage documents. Working with PDFs is impressively straightforward. Adding elements like text boxes, shapes, sticky notes, and even the date is as simple as clicking the appropriate icon and dragging that item to the page. Other tasks such as adding images and signatures require a few more steps, but typically employ a wizard to streamline the execution. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best PDF editors for comparison. Editing and annotation To open a PDF, you can drag-and-drop the file directly onto pdfFiller’s home page. Alternately, you can upload files from your hard drive or from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, a URL, or pdfFiller’s own online document library. You can also import a PDF from email by sending the file yourself or requesting it from a third party. You can simply drag elements like text boxes, shapes, and the date to your PDF. Michael Ansaldo/Foundry The editor enables you to work with PDFs much as you would with a Word document, allowing you to add, delete, and copy/paste text, change font style, size, and color; and so on. It also offers a standard set of markup tools. You can highlight, erase, or redact text; add sticky notes and comments; and scribble marginalia. A new “AI Replace” tool leverages ChatGPT to search across the PDF and automatically replace your target words or phrases while retaining original fonts, layout, and formatting. This makes batch updates — like changing company names, dates, or terms across a multi-page PDF — fast, accurate, and formatting-safe. Form hosting PDFs are often used to distribute contracts, questionnaires, and other types of forms. pdfFiller allows you to create, host, and edit these as easily as Word-style documents. You can also collect payments through PDF forms by linking a payment gateway. Document library One of pdfFiller’s most impressive features is its document library. If you can’t create the document you need from scratch, you can likely find it in this trove of government, legal, and business forms, any of which can be downloaded and customized to your needs. You can also save any document you create as a template for reuse. You can create PDFs from a library of government forms in pdfFiller’s document library. MIchael Ansaldo/Foundry One of pdfFiller’s most impressive features is its document library. Sharing Once your PDF is edited, you can securely share it with teammates through a link. You can also send it via email, text, fax, or USPS, or have it notarized directly from your pdfFiller account. Encryption and security pdfFiller offers robust encryption and security features for users that frequently handle sensitive data. Documents can be locked in an encrypted folder and require two-factor authentication for access. The editor offers dedicated HIPAA compliance settings to ensure patient healthcare information is protected according to standards outlined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It also helps keep track of your account activity with an Audit Trail feature that shows which forms you’ve opened and shared, what time you logged into and out of your pdfFiller account, and other user activity. How much is pdfFiller? The Basic plan is best suited to individuals. It provides standard PDF editing and annotation features, cloud storage for PDF files, and customer support within a day for $20 month-to-month or $8 a month with an annual commitment. The Plus plan adds the ability to create reusable templates; merge, rearrange, or add pages; and add basic fillable fields, plus support within an hour for $30 month-to-month or $12 a month with an annual commitment. The Premium plan includes all the features of the Basic and Plus plans and adds e-signature workflows, access to the U.S. Legal Forms Library, and other business-ready features, plus instant chat support. There’s a 30-day free trial period, which should plenty of time to determine which plan is right for you. Is pdfFiller worth it? pdfFiller is an incredibly versatile PDF editor with an uncommonly deep set of features. Not all of them will suit everyone, but fortunately, pdfFiller offers three subscription tiers that logically tailor features to different users. It’s a particularly good option for businesses, but anyone can benefit from pdfFiller’s comprehensive skill set. Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article. Read...

Unwanted email is a daily part of life. How you deal with it could put you at risk, though. Handling it the “right” way by clicking on an unsubscribe link or button could actually send you to a phishing or otherwise dangerous site. The reason: For years, the advice was to unsubscribe from email lists—even those you hadn’t signed up for. The thought was that your data got sold to a legitimate business, so they would heed the requests to get off their mailing lists. But more commonly now, scammers and would-be attackers are using email lists as a way to try to sneak data from you without you knowing. Some may just be verifying that the email address is valid—and if the recipient is willing to interact with spam. A hacker could then build a profile about you, in order to try to successfully scam you through tactics like social engineering. Other false unsubscribe links could aim to steal data from you, like through phishing sites designed to capture login information. (If a website ever wants your password to unsubscribe, stop immediately and close that tab!) Malware downloads are also a possibility, though less likely according to experts interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.  Still, the same WSJ article also notes that one in every 644 clicks on unsubscribe links sends individuals to shady sites. So what do you do, if unsubscribing from an email is a dangerous proposition? You have three options:  If the website is a known, legitimate site: Open a fresh tab in your browser, then use a search engine to find the site’s unsubscribe page. Or, if you have an account with the site, log in and look for a “Manage communications preferences” section in your account settings. Mark the message as spam. You can also block the sender if it’s obvious it’s a junk account. Create a filter for email with that subject line (or style of subject line) that sends such messages straight into the trash. (Example: “Get 50%off specislty items!” is something that flooded my work inbox for a while until I filtered by subject instead of sender.) In addition to being more careful about unsubscribe links, also keep your antivirus software up to date—for the times you accidentally forget, or you decide to trust an email that turns out to be malicious, it’ll help provide protection. Read...

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At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Very fast disk, partition, and file/folder backup Highly reliable backups Super-versatile backup configuration Mounts images as virtual machines Guards backups from accidental or mischievous alteration Cons Subscription-only makes it costly over time No online storage included or supported Our Verdict While we love Reflect X’s speed, interface, options, and reliability, $50 a year for a pure backup program without support for online storage is a rather bold ask. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Macrium Reflect X Home backup Retailer Price Macrium $49.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket As an imaging program, Macrium Reflect X is second to none. In fact, it currently stands alone as the only such beastie that’s never created a bad backup in my hands. (Sadly, former-favorite R-Drive is no longer a member of that club.) The problem is that Macrium’s new subscription-only pricing for Reflect X makes it prohibitively expensive over time. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best Windows backup software for comparison. What are Macrium Reflects features? At its core Reflect X is an imaging program, i.e., it creates byte-for-byte copies of drives and partitions — including “empty” sectors if you wish, which can be handy for recovering deleted or corrupted files. It can also create backups of files and folders you select to the same type of container file. Creating backups with Reflect X is a breeze — once you’re up to speed. Being a backup geek, I was truly taken with Macrium Reflect X’s incorporating full, incremental, and differential backup options into a single job with separate scheduling for each. Most software forces you to choose between incremental and differential. It’s brilliant. Now if the company would only do that with destinations. The vast majority of users have one set of data that they would like to keep backed up to multiple locations — for instance, to a local drive as well as cloud locations. Recreating a job for each is a pain. Reflect X’s interface is nicely laid out with three main tabs, for creating backups, existing backups (for testing or restore), and logs. Each has sub-tabs for related tasks — scripts, definitions, etc. I find them intuitively organized and easy to navigate. Full, incremental, and differential backup all in the same job with different schedules. Sweet. Creating a backup is done largely from two dialogs: a main/parent dialog with the major options and an advanced-options child dialog accessed by an icon in the lower-left corner of the parent. Perhaps not as easy as a wizard, but certainly a lot quicker once you know what’s where. Reflect X features a secure background monitor that watches over your backups for attempts to change or delete them, and also folds in Oracle VirtualBox functionality so you can mount your images as Virtual Machines. Both are very cool features. At least to this self-confessed backup geek. The VM mounter and a VM running in the VirtualBox add-in. There’s also a full-featured Windows PE-based recovery disc included for booting and recovering your system after a disaster. Mecrium’s Reflect X WinPE boot disc in all its glory. While Reflect X is aces at imaging, it’s not particularly versatile. For instance, there’s no sync or plain-file backup (simple copy with options), but most saliently — no support for online storage services, proprietary or otherwise. The company points out that many of its rivals (Acronis, Aomei, Easeus, etc.) are of possibly unfriendly foreign origins and that storing data with them might be a security risk. Sadly, that’s not beyond the realm of possibility, though last I heard the Swiss (Acronis) were allies. Note that there is zero proof of ill intent from any of them. Regardless, there are plenty of storage vendors within friendly territories they could use or at least allow access to. Offering support for known safe third-party services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc. would be a nice compromise. Note that you can still use Reflect X to back up to the cloud by employing a cloud storage manager. To this self-confessed backup geek, a background monitor for backups and VirtualBox support are cool features. What’s new in Macrium Reflect X? Macrium touts its new open source file/image container format. This, however, simply means that developers have access to the format, not that it’s a commonly supported one you can mount with Windows or other means. If you have programming chops, this might do you some good if your program futzes out. But until other utilities take advantage, it’s of little significance to the average user who will still need the program for restore chores. Jon L. Jacobi Also new is the ability to pause and resume backups. It can be handy if you need to free up some CPU for another task, but it’s limited to the current session. I.e., you can’t quit the program or Windows and still resume. Note that the previous version of Reflect was 8.x, the company skipped over 9.x for the sexier 10.x, aka X. How does Macrium Reflect X perform? Macrium claims a significant increase in performance over version 8 and that was evident in my testing. Reflect X blew through a 240GB internal SSD-to-SSD backup in 2 minutes, 30 seconds, which is cooking with gas. The 7 minutes it took backing up to an external 5Gbps SSD isn’t bad either. Both procedures maximized the potential bandwidth. The only other program I’ve seen that’s comparably fast is Easeus ToDo Backup, which is glitchier, albeit in non-fatal ways. I reinstalled version 8 to test the difference and it was far slower, taking just over 9 minutes for the first task, and just over 10 minutes for the second. Obviously, the 5Gbps SSD (the Samsung T5 Evo) was the limiting factor in the second test, but that’s a lot of minutes saved between the two test runs. If there are any issues in a Reflect X backup, you’ll find them in the extensive logs. Of course, backup performance isn’t something a lot of users worry about, as the task generally runs in the background. Macrium thoughtfully puts a throttle on the progress page so you can vary the CPU usage. Most modern systems with SSDs won’t require throttling. How much does Macrium Reflect X cost? Now we come to the conundrum with Reflect X. If you want to continue making backups with the program, you have to pony up $50 every year. Yup, Macrium has gone from a company that offered a free personal-use version of Reflect 8, to one that sells the latest version only on a subscription basis. The program remains functional for restores if you discontinue your subscription, so your data remains recoverable. The real problem with this policy is that Reflect X isn’t photo, video, or music software whose basic utility can evolve substantially. It’s backup software whose core capability — imaging — isn’t going to change appreciably. Yup. No perpetual license is offered for Reflect X. In CA-speak, that’s a bummer. There are features Macrium could definitely add such as sync, multiple destinations, and especially support for online storage services. But I’d rather pay an upgrade fee, or buy the program again rather than be essentially on the hook for $50 year after year. Rival Acronis True Image is also subscription-only, but at least it includes relatively affordable cloud storage — secure or not. Not to mention malware protection. Hence, I haven’t been as negative towards Acronis’s annual fee. Should you buy Macrium Reflect X? Reflect X is a very quick, competent, and historically reliable imaging program. However, $50 a year? If you find it worth it, and/or can write it off as a business expense, have at it. But I can’t recommend it for the average user when there are so many free, and cheaper options — including the older, slower, but gratis version of Macrium Reflect 8 which I just used to restore a system that Microsoft’s Recovery Drive trashed. Thus my 4.5-stars rating for the excellent software gets a half-star deducted for the ongoing cost. Read...

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Millions of laptops get tossed in the U.S. every year. Most still work, but they end up in landfills or collecting dust in drawers. Only about one in five gets properly recycled, according to Lifewire. That’s a problem, but also a chance to do better. You can make a real difference through the choices you make when buying, using, and disposing of your laptop. That’s where we come in (hi there!). We’ll show you how to make a smarter, greener choice next time you upgrade. What makes a laptop sustainable? A sustainable laptop is designed with longevity, reparability, and energy efficiency in mind. Some companies are already deep in the game. For example, Framework makes laptops with modular parts, so you can replace or upgrade just about anything without tossing the whole thing. It’s honestly just fun to jump in and start messing around. If you’re up for a little challenge, they’ve got a DIY version where you build the whole thing yourself. IDG / Mark Knapp And then there’s the materials. Dell uses ocean-bound plastics in some laptops and packaging to keep waste out of the oceans. Apple’s newer MacBooks are made from recycled aluminum, cutting down on mining. Acer and Lenovo also sneak recycled plastics into their devices, helping reduce the need for new raw materials. HP is also stepping up by offering programs that take back old devices to recycle them responsibly. All these efforts might seem small on their own, but together they really add up. Further reading: How 6 top laptop manufacturers are lowering their carbon footprints Okay, but does this stuff really matter? It sure does! If you end up springing for a laptop made from recycled aluminum (like a newer MacBook, for instance), you’re already one step ahead of the game. Great job lowering your carbon footprint! Plus, fixing or reusing old parts helps reduce digging up new materials from the earth. And there’s the energy side of things, too. A traditional laptop eats up about 25 kilowatt-hours of electricity every year. That’s like a keeping a light bulb on for two whole weeks. Over a four year period, you’re looking at around 100 kWh. But ENERGY STAR laptops? They use way less energy — 30 to 40 percent less. Are sustainable laptops more expensive? Some are, but it pays off over time. Lots of laptops let you upgrade stuff like RAM and SSD, not just the Framework ones. Plenty of mainstream models (especially in the business lines from brands like Dell, HP, and Lenovo) still give you access to those parts. That means you can start with a more affordable configuration and upgrade later if you need more storage. Just a heads up, though! Some super-thin models don’t let you upgrade because the parts are usually soldered in. So check reviews before you buy if upgrades matter to you and look for mentions of upgradeability in product listings, it can save you money and frustration down the road. Refurbished laptops are also a solid way to go because they’re cheaper and better for the planet, since you’re reusing something that’s already been created. Sustainability doesn’t have to mean dropping big bucks or only choosing niche models. Even small choices help like picking a model with longer battery life or better repairability. And even simple stuff like clearing out dust or replacing an old battery can keep your laptop going way longer than you’d expect. Taking a little extra time to look after your laptop can save you from having to drop cash on a new one any time soon. It’s a lot less waste, too. Check out pcworld`s top pick for best upgradeable laptop Framework Laptop 13 (2025) Read our review What should you look for in a sustainable laptop? If you’re ready to pick up a sustainable laptop, here are some key features to keep an eye out for. If you want even deeper info, check out PCWorld’s 5 factors to consider when shopping for an eco-friendly laptop. EPEAT Gold Rating EPEAT works like a medal system for how eco-friendly a product is. There’s Bronze, Silver, or Gold. Gold is the highest medal and it means the device is ultra-efficient and made with fewer toxic materials. ENERGY STAR certification ENERGY STAR certification means the device is energy-efficient and better for the environment. Modular or tool-less design This means you can swap parts like the battery or storage without tools or tech skills. Companies like Framework make laptops easy to upgrade or fix, so you don’t have to toss the whole thing if something breaks. Long software support (5+ years) Long software support mostly matters for Chromebooks. Some cheap models only get updates for a couple more years and then they’re basically useless. Fortunately, Google now offers up to 10 years of support on some models. This PCWorld article explains what to look for. Manufacturer take-back program Got an old laptop? Some companies will take it back and recycle it properly. It’s very easy and many companies even give you a free shipping label or drop-off spot. Brands like Apple, Dell, and HP do this to keep old tech out of landfills. Small habits, big difference Buying a sustainable laptop won’t save the planet overnight, but it’s a solid place to start. These little choices add up, especially when more of us start making them. And honestly, just keeping your laptop around a little longer makes a bigger difference than you might think. Just hanging onto your laptop a little longer makes a real difference. Less waste. Fewer new materials needed. Your wallet’s probably happier, too. So, next time you’re thinking about upgrading, hit the pause button for a second and ask yourself: Will I still be happy with this in three or four years? Can I fix it if something breaks? Will the company help me recycle it when I’m done? Saying yes to any one of those questions means you’re making a smarter, more sustainable choice. You’re already one step ahead of the game, kid. Further reading: 4 eco-friendly ways to get rid of a laptop Read...