Aoife McEvoy, Edward N. Albro

Dedicated mobile hotspots have been around for a few years now, but they've gotten progressively easier to use. And with the advent of 4G service, they’ve become notably faster, capable of connecting to more devices, and just a lot more useful.

We decided to compare the latest and greatest mobile hotspots from the two national 4G LTE providers in the United States, AT&T and Verizon. We lined up Verizon’s new MiFi 4620L Jetpack LTE hotspot against AT&T’s Mobile Hotspot Elevate 4G (by Sierra Wireless) to see which one worked better.

Hotel rooms have a lot in common with pork bellies and Louisiana sweet crude: their prices bounce around from day to day, driven by the vagaries of the market. A room that costs $350 on Saturday might be available for $175 on Tuesday.

But is that $175 room really a good deal? New site DealAngel, launching tonight, aims to let you know. The site examines the pricing history of all the hotels in the area you're planning to visit and analyzes whether that $175 price tag is above or below the typical cost of that room for a Tuesday. When you search for a hotel on DealAngel, it doesn't arrange your choices by price, but by how good the deals are.

Finally! After years of confusing consumers with multiple, slightly different versions of the same operating system, Microsoft announced today that Windows 8 will come in only four versions: One for home use, one for business, one for devices running ARM chips, and one for large enterprises that buy in bulk.

For most people buying an operating system for a traditional desktop or laptop, the choice will be between just two versions. The version called simply "Windows 8" is designed for home users. "Windows 8 Pro" is for business users and includes features for encrypting a file system, virtualization, and domain management.

People who have installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview praise its speed and the changes to Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer, but most readers who answered a PCWorld survey aren't satisfied with the new Metro interface--and half indicate that they would be unlikely to recommend the new operating system to a friend.

Microsoft made the Consumer Preview available for a free download last week, and more than 2900 people who had installed the OS answered our survey.

As everybody knows, the most striking thing about Windows 8 is its Metro interface--those brightly colored tiles that serve as both shortcuts to programs and live widgets reporting data from those programs.

The interface has been widely praised around the Web, and for good reason. It's a bold innovation (especially coming from a company that's normally so timid), it looks great, and it makes getting around Windows a lot more fun.

The top tech story of the last week has been Microsoft's release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The company radically redesigned the new operating system from Windows 7, with a controversial new Metro interface borrowed from Windows Phone 7 smartphones.

The changes have prompted generally positive reactions from tech journalists, including our own Jason Cross and Nate Ralph. But the broader public seems less convinced that Windows 8 is something to embrace. A highly unscientific survey of followers of the @PCWorld Twitter feed found few people who were eager to try the new OS.

Whenever a new version of Windows comes out, I’m always ambivalent. The idea of a new operating system with cool, new features sounds great. Going through the long, sometimes mystifying upgrade process doesn’t. But the Windows 8 Consumer Preview seemed so compelling that I threw caution to the wind and put it on an older Dell desktop I use at work.

The good news is that the process was a little shorter than I remember from previous versions of Windows--and much clearer. I was able to get the Windows 8 preview up and running on my system in less than 2 hours.

This is an intervention.

Your friends in the tech industry are concerned about your health. They're worried about how much (or little) exercise you get, what you weigh, and how well you sleep. In fact, they're a little obsessed with the question of how well you sleep. Ultimately, they just want to help you get healthy (well, and maybe make a little money, too).

Really serious bicyclists measure their performance not in speed, but in watts, with power meters integrated with their bikes. The problem is, those power meters come with really serious price tags. The soon-to-be-released iBike Powerhouse makes it possible to measure your power output much more cheaply.

The Powerhouse, which will cost $269 when it's released later this spring, consists of a special case for your iPhone that attaches to your handlebars, along with the company's own app. As you ride along, the Powerhouse not only measures your speed (through standard sensors attached to your bike and wheel), it also measures the forces you're contending with: wind, hills, etc.

Many new PCs come with solid state drives because SSDs make booting up your PC and accessing data faster. But adding an SSD to an existing computer can be a problem. Most of us can't afford an SSD big enough to carry all our data. And combining an SSD with a traditional hard drive means lots of futzing to get all your most frequently accessed data onto the SSD drive.

New solid state cache drives due from Corsair later this month should give upgraders a significant SSD speed boost without draining their wallets.

Young people tend to be on the cutting edge of change and most new tech products are marketed to them. But to really understand Empower glasses, you need to be at least middle-aged. That's because these digital lenses solve a real problem for people with bifocals or progressive lenses.

The way progressive lenses work, for those of you whippersnappers who don't need to use them, is that the lens is divided into three sections. The top is focused for long distance vision, helpful for driving or seeing a landscape. The middle is for middle distance work, like on a computer screen. And the bottom is for looking at close up objects like books.

There are lots of ways to produce electricity. We don't generally think about that fact because we're seldom very far from a power outlet. But when you're lost in the woods and your GPS device runs out of juice, an alternative to a power outlet sounds really attractive. And that seems to be what Signa Chemistry has created.

The company, working with partners, has developed a recharge system that requires just a tablespoon of water, a small metal tin the size of a snuff container and a plastic container about the size of an eyeglass case. Put all the pieces together and in about 15 seconds, you can start recharging your GPS device, phone or camera.