The prime minister`s new call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs features in the papers. Read...

Genetec upgrades Security Center SaaS with new cloud features, boosting flexibility and enabling seamless hybrid or cloud-native physical security management. Read...

TL;DR: Save 92% on Windows 11 Pro keys for a very limited time—only the first 100 people will get this price. Gamers have recently discovered a goldmine in a simple PC upgrade: moving from Windows 10 to 11. Yeah, those annoying upgrade reminders had a point. Currently just $14.97, Windows 11 Pro packs a suite of serious PC gaming upgrades that can squeeze even more power out of your PC, old or new. The biggest win for gamers is DirectX 12 Ultimate support. This lets you take full advantage of modern GPU features like ray tracing, variable rate shading, and mesh shaders, unlocking visual effects that rival reality in the latest titles. Combined with Auto HDR and improved graphics optimization, Windows 11 Pro helps your hardware deliver the best possible experience. Beyond graphics, Windows 11 Pro gives gamers more tools to optimize system performance. Features like Hyper-V virtualization and Windows Sandbox allow you to test mods or beta builds in isolated environments without risking your main OS. And with BitLocker device encryption, you can secure your gaming rig against malware and ransomware, a growing concern for players who mod or run unofficial tools. Upgrade to Windows 11 Pro while keys are just $14.97—selling out fast (reg. $199). Microsoft Windows 11 ProSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

The Switch 2 is better in every way with more power, better controls and expanded platform features. But it’s a revision rather than a revolution. Read...

TL;DR: Save 84% on this refurbished Lenovo Chromebook and get free shipping while supplies last. When you just need a laptop that works—no bells, no whistles, no stress—this is it. Now you can get a Chromebook for only $75 with free shipping, making it a smart pick for anyone in need of an ultra-affordable device, a reliable backup computer, or something for their kiddo. At this price, you won’t feel nervous about tossing it in your backpack for a flight or giving it to your child with perpetually sticky fingers. The compact design is built for the basics: web browsing, emails, video calls, and streaming—and it runs Chrome OS for hassle-free setup and all-day battery life. The Lenovo Chromebook features an 11.6-inch anti-glare touchscreen for easy navigation, along with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage for day-to-day tasks and files. Because this is a refurbished grade “B” refurbished model, expect minor cosmetic wear (like light scuffs or small dents), but fully functional performance. That also means you don’t have to worry about adding more scuffs yourself—it’s a laptop that’s built for whatever you have in mind. Don’t miss this refurbished Chromebook deal, just $74.99 with free shipping before they sell out (reg. $475.99). Lenovo 11.6? 2-in-1 Chromebook 300e 2nd Gen (2018) 4GB RAM 32GB SSD (Refurbished)See Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

Roku streaming sticks are known for their easy of use; just plug the player in your TV’s rear HDMI port, connect the USB power cable, and start binging. But as plug-and-play as Roku devices can be, adjusting a few key settings will make your streaming experience less choppy.  For example, your video image might skip and stutter without one particular setting enabled, while your audio might get funky unless a couple of other options are set property. You can also tweak how the home screen looks, as well as keep “sponsored” screensavers at bay.  Read on for the eight most important Roku settings to check first, starting with…  Show or hide the recommendation row  When you first land on the home screen after booting up your Roku, you’ll see a row of menu items just above the grid of streaming apps. This auto-generated “Top Picks For You” row features streaming titles Roku thinks you might like; some will be from your installed streaming apps, and some won’t.  Now, you might like having that top row of suggestions at the top of the home screen, especially if you’re just randomly browsing. But if you find the “Top Picks For You” row to be bothersome, you can hide it.  See that “recommended” row at the top of the apps grid? There’s an easy way to hide it.Ben Patterson/Foundry Just navigate to Settings > Home Screen > Recommendation rows, and then select Hide.  Change the size of the home screen tiles  Now that you’ve dealt with the recommendation row, let’s tackle the main grid of apps. Besides being able to rearrange the apps, you can also change the size of the tiles themselves.   If you make the tiles larger, you’ll get a clearer view of your apps, but you’ll only be able to get three rows of tiles on the home screen at a time. Make the apps smaller, and the tiles might be tougher to read, but you’ll get four rows of apps.  You can make your Roku app tiles smaller or larger, depending on your preference.Ben Patterson/Foundry To make your selection, go to Settings > Home Screen > Tile size, then pick Smaller or Larger.  Turn off sponsored wallpapers  Roku offers a wide selection of wallpapers to decorate your screen while you browse, and occasionally, some of them will advertise TV shows, movies, events, or even brands. If you don’t want your Roku home screen covered with paid wallpapers, you can easily hide them.  Don’t want to deal with sponsored wallpapers? It’s an easy fix.Ben Patterson/Foundry Head for Settings > Theme > Sponsored wallpapers, and select Off.  Turn off personalized ads  Roku streaming players and TVs are inexpensive for a reason: The company sells information about the viewing habits of its users to advertisers.   Roku isn’t alone in this practice; Amazon, Google, and plenty of smart TV manufacturers do the same thing. But while your viewing history is anonymized before being sent to third parties, you’re nonetheless sacrificing some privacy in exchange for Roku’s ultra-low prices.  One privacy-protecting measure you can take is to set Roku to give you a non-persistent device identifier. Doing so means giving advertisers a much less clear view of your streaming habits, although Roku notes that you’ll still see the same number of ads, and they won’t be as tailored to your interests.  You can boost your privacy by disabling “personalized” ads on your Roku.Ben Patterson/Foundry To turn off personalized ads, select Settings > Advertising, then uncheck the Personalize ads option.  Turn off auto-playing videos  Speaking of ads, you’ll occasionally run into video ads that start playing automatically as you browse the Roku interface. These video ads can be tough to ignore, and they can also eat up your bandwidth.  Luckily, there’s an easy way to keep auto-playing videos from getting in your face.  Go to Settings > Accessibility > Auto-play video, and select the Off option.  Auto-adjust display refresh rate  Ever notice the streaming image on your TV to be stuttering? That can happen if there’s a mismatch between the frame rate of the source content and the frame rate that your Roku device is sending to your TV.   The good news is that there’s an easy fix for frame rate problems. You can—and should—set your Roku device to detect the frame rate of a given streaming title, allowing it to automatically match the content’s frame rate.  Navigate to Advanced display settings > Auto-adjust display refresh rate, and make sure it’s set to On.  Set display type automatically  You don’t want to your Roku player capping its video quality at HD for a 4K smart TV; by the same token, you don’t want your Roku stick sending Dolby Vision HDR images to a set that can only handle garden-variety HDR.   Rather than looking up the technical details of your TV or sleuthing out the quality of your HDMI connection, you can simply have your Roku player do the work for you.   Head for Settings > Display type, and ensure it’s set to Automatic.  Double-check your audio settings  Just as you can encounter video hiccups when streaming from your Roku, you may find your audio output sounds funky as well.   This feature is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best streaming media players. Under the hood, your TV might offer only certain audio decoders, such as Dolby Digital and DTS. If your Roku player sends the wrong audio signal to your set, you’ll hear some very strange noises coming from your speakers.  Once again, you can let your Roku player do the heavy lifting for you. Go to Settings > Audio > Preferred streaming format, and make sure it’s set to Auto, then go to the nearby Digital output format setting and choose Auto once more. Read...

The M3 iPad Air is easily one of our favorite tablets, and it’s going to get a lot better this fall once iPadOS 26 arrives. And now it has an all-time-low discount over at Amazon—you can now get the M3 iPad Air for $499, a savings of $100, matching the best price we’ve ever seen. The tablet features a gorgeous, super-light design built around an 11-inch Liquid Retina display with super slim bezels that’ll be great for iPadOS 26’s new multitasking. There’s 128GB of storage space available for all those apps you want to install and use, which isn’t a ton, and you’re going to have to pay quite a bit for storage upgrades, but you’ll still save $100 on other storage capacities if you want more. This iPad is ready for Apple Intelligence. You can already make use of all those cool features that are already available, as well as any that are coming with iPadOS 26. You’ll also get great battery life, a Center Stage camera, and a fantastic processor. All this adds up to the M3 iPad Air M3 being a fantastic tablet that’s about to get even better with iPadOS 26. And now that it’s only $499 at Amazon, it’s a great deal. Get this 11-inch iPad Air for $100 offBuy now at Amazon Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Good PCIe 4.0, host memory buffer performance Relatively affordable Beefier heat spreader, screwdriver, and mounting screw included Cons Slower-than-average random operations Pricier than some of its ilk Our Verdict Though not a standout performer, the Orico IG740-Pro is fast enough, decently affordable, and ships with some nice-to-have extras. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Oirco IG740-Pro SSD Retailer Price Orico $70.99 View Deal $79.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket I’ve long tracked and tested Orico’s drive enclosures to good effect, but this is my first encounter with an SSD from company. It proved to be a more-than-capable NVMe drive, and as affordable as the competition. All in all, it’s a welcome addition to the market. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best SSDs for comparison. What are the Orico IG740-Pro’s features? The IG740-Pro is a PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe M.2, 2280 (22mm wide, 80mm long) SSD. The controller is a Maxio MAP1602A and the NAND is 232–layer 3D TLC. Orico warrantees the IG740-Pro for the usual five years, and the usual 600TBW per 1TB of capacity. If you write more than 600TB within the five years, the drive could go read-only. Most vendors rate their SSDs’ TBW (terabytes that can be written) far more conservatively than they’re actually capable of lasting. It’s a liability thing. Orico thoughtfully includes a slightly beefier heat spreader with a thermal compound strip, as well as a screwdriver and even a retaining screw for installing the drive should you need them. These are very nice touches — the screw especially, as they are small and can be easy to lose. How much is the Orico IG740-Pro? The Orico IG740 Pro is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities for $71, $135, and $240, respectively. That’s roughly on par for a host memory buffer TLC SSD. How fast is the Orico IG740-Pro? The IG740-Pro is hardly a barn burner, but it’s not half-bad considering the price. That’s my laid-back way of saying it’s more than fast enough, but not near the top of the heap. It was the 5th fastest PCIe 4.0 host memory buffer drive overall, but 29th among all the NVMe SSDs we’ve tested. I stacked the IG740-Pro up against some pretty heady PCIe 4.0/HMB competition in the charts by way of the WD Black SN7100, Teamgroup MP44Q, and the uber-affordable Kingston NV3. You can see its CrystalDiskMark sequential performance numbers directly below. It largely held its own. Orico thoughtfully includes a slightly beefier heat spreader with a thermal compound strip, as well as a screwdriver and even a retaining screw… The Orico IG740-Pro did quite well in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential throughput tests. Host memory buffer SSDs tend to have significantly slower random operations, but the Orico IG740-Pro was particularly far off the pace. It’s not the optimal drive for running your operating system (which performs myriad small file ops). Host memory buffer SSDs tend to have significantly slower random operations, but the Orico IG740-Pro was particularly far off the pace. It’s not the optimal drive for running your operating system with its myriad small file ops. Two minutes, nine seconds is a good aggregate time for the Orico IG740-Pro, if not the fastest we’ve seen from an HMB design. Note that host memory buffer drives tend to do very well in our real-world transfers. Two minutes, nine seconds ifsa good aggregate time for the Orico IG740-Pro. The Orico IG740-Pro slowed from around 3GBps to 2GBps around the 75 percent point in the 450GB write, hence it lagged slightly behind the competition. The Orico IG740-Pro slowed from around 3GBps to 2GBps around the 75% point in the 450GB write. Note that the drop to 2GBps was not the drive writing natively. When that occurs (well beyond 450GB — which you’ll likely never see) the write rate actually hovers between 500MBps and 750MBps. The image below was a second consecutive 450GB write without giving the IG740-Pro time to reconstitute secondary cache. When the IG740-Pro writes natively the rate actually hovers between 500MBps and 750MBps. Note also that the Teamgroup MP44Q is a QLC (Quad-Level Cell/4-bit) drive, so when you exceed its secondary cache, the write rate drops off a cliff to around 100MBps. Should you buy the Orico IG740 Pro? While the Orico IG740’s performance performance is strictly median for its class, in truth all NVMe SSDs are really, really fast. Call this another “pick’-em based on what drives are cheaper at the moment.” A solid effort from Orico. How we test Our storage tests currently utilize Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on a Z790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel integrated graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the operating system. Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that as any drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, and other factors. The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive we were shipped as well as the capacity tested. SSD performance can vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to read/write across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report (systems being roughly equal), by all means — let us know. Read...

If you’ve been thinking about picking up a new laptop, this one’s worth a serious look. The HP OmniBook X Flip is a slick 16-inch 2-in-1 that does it all—work, play, doodling, browsing, you name it. The best part? It’s currently on sale for $750 at Best Buy (was $1,100) for a massive savings of $350. Not bad for a machine packed with this much power. Inside, it’s rocking an AMD Ryzen AI 7 chip, a beefy 24GB of RAM, and a roomy 1TB of SSD storage. It should be fast, responsive, and you’ve got plenty of storage for everything from big work files to your personal photo album. Plus, the 16-inch 1920×1200 touchscreen display is bright at 400 nits, and the 2-in-1 design means you can flip the screen around and use it like a tablet, which is great for note-taking or sketching.  This is also one of those new Copilot+ PCs that Microsoft has been pushing hard over the past year, so it’s geared up to handle all the latest AI tools and Windows 11 features. Copilot+ laptops tend to be on the pricier side, but this one’s now relatively affordable. All of this for under $800? That’s a steal! If you want a laptop that looks good and runs fast, scoop this one up while the deal’s still live. Save $350 on the HP OmniBook X Flip 2-in-1 laptopBuy now from Best Buy Read...

Hey, PCWorld readers! Windows 11 has a bunch of hidden features that I consider unrealized gems — utilities and tools that aren’t widely used, but when Windows users do discover them, most are duly impressed by what they find. One such gem is the Windows 11 Voice typing tool (a voice-to-text dictation tool). I’d known about it previously, but I only really realized its potential when I got a bad case of RSI in my mouse hand and thought I’d have a go at dictating an article sans keyboard to give it a rest. My impression after a few minutes of voice typing was that it’s surprisingly accurate, despite me giving it no training. I was outputting my laptop’s display to an external monitor at the time and wasn’t even directly speaking into the microphone, yet the tool managed to reproduce what I was saying with near-perfect accuracy in Notepad. I was also impressed by the fact it supports 36 different languages and multiple variants of some of the more widely spoken ones. Editing was a little hard at first, but after I memorized a few commands, I found I could insert punctuation without much fuss. Sign up for PCWorld’s Try This newsletter to get fast, handy tips like this delivered straight to your inbox twice a week! Here’s how to use it… Type Windows + H to open the Voice typing tool — it comes pre-installed with Windows 11 and is active by default. Also open the text app or program you’d like to use it with. For this demonstration I used the Notepad app, but it also works with Microsoft Word. Now dictate the words you’d like to be typed. You can find a list of commands and punctuation commands on the Microsoft Support website. Click on the microphone icon in the Voice typing box to stop. The Windows 11 Voice typing tool lets you dictate speech to text. Dominic Bayley / Foundry Take care, until next time! And, if you like this tip and want more like it, be sure to sign up to the PCWorld Try This newsletter. Read...