Danny Allen, David Murphy, PCWorld

If you’re in the market for a new all-in-one PC, the Dell XPS One 27 is an appealing option. It’s fast, it handles Blu-ray discs, it delivers a great picture on its 27-inch PLS screen, and it costs all of $3500 less than the current category leader, HP’s Z1 Workstation. That’s no typo: Costing $1999 (as configured, price as of May 30, 2012), the XPS One 27 racks up an impressive series of wins and makes few blunders.

It should come as little surprise that much of the XPS One 27’s speed can be traced directly to its use of an Intel Ivy Bridge processor--namely, the 3.1GHz Core i7-3770S, the lower-power, 65W chip in the high-end Ivy Bridge lineup. The i7-3770S helped the XPS One 27 nail an overall score of 143 on our WorldBench 7 suite of tests. To put that score in perspective, note that the far pricier HP Z1 Workstation posted a mark of 159 equipped with a 3.5GHz Intel Xeon E31280 processor, double the memory (16GB), a 600GB solid-state drive (versus the 2TB hard drive in Dell’s AIO), and an Nvidia Quadro 4000M graphics card, which offers 336 GPU cores versus 384 cores for the integrated Kepler chip on the XPS One, the Nvidia GT 640M.

According to the universal law articulated by Edward Murphy(we're not closely related), anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And when the wrong thing happens to your desktop PC, it can plunge you into a nightmare of unknown but seemingly malevolent forces. It's pretty easy to tell that something has gone wrong with your system. What once was fast is now slow; what once worked is now blue-screening; what once smelled okay or sounded fine now imparts the odor of overheated plastic or the screech of grinding metal gears.

Often, you have no idea how to cure what ails your system--or how severe the damage might be to your data or your hardware.

Illustration by Neil StevensMake Your Gmail Work for You

Your time is valuable. On the Gmail team, we work hard to offer a user ex­­perience that won't bog you down. But we also want to share some tips for be­­ing even more productive with Gmail.

Alex Gawley, Gmail Product ManagerFocus on search, not folders: Google was built on search, and we've aimed to bring that same search experience to Gmail. Studies show that users save time when they search for an email instead of categorizing it into a folder. In Gmail, you can quickly find the exact message you want by typing keywords into the search box, or you can rely on the program's search autocomplete to specify the attributes you want (try typing 'from:[sender]' or 'has photos').

Your old desktop PC gave you years of reliable service, but eventually it couldn't keep up with modern tasks and applications; so you went out and bought something newer and faster. Now you need to decide what to do with the old clunker.

You could e-recycle it--hand it off to a responsible company that will dismantle it and recycle the parts--but what do you gain from that aside from feeling good about being environmentally responsible? Allow us to suggest another solution: Repurpose the old hulk as a local server. You can use it as a repository for automatic PC backups, or set it up as a file server that you and your employees can access while you're on the road. Those are just two of the roles that an older PC can perform that are of far more benefit to your business than having the machine collect dust or head for the dump.

If the results of a new PCWorld/Macworld survey are any guide, the forthcoming iPhone 5 with LTE is going to be a big hit.

Large numbers of people plan to buy or upgrade to the first 4G iPhone, many of them citing the new LTE wireless technology as a main reason, the survey suggests.

Origin already has one system on our performance desktop chart; consider its Genesis LGA 2011 X79-based rig to be an encore, as when your favorite band finally busts out your favorite song (and then some) after it’s bowed and exited.

This $4599 desktop (as configured) returns to the computing concert with a hex-core processor in tow. Origin has juiced up Intel’s Core i7-3930K from its stock-clock speed of 3.2GHz to a whopping 4.9GHz. Time to send in the water-cooler—Origin’s own “Frostbyte 360” cooling system, featuring a triple-bay radiator and three 120- millimeter fans—lest one’s desktop burst into flames.

Here comes Ivy Bridge. The Asus Essentio CM6870 is one of the first budget desktops hitting the PCWorld Labs to run one of Intel’s brand-new Ivy Bridge processors and receive testing under the brand-new WorldBench 7 benchmarking suite.

The good news? This $999 system is plenty speedy, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Gaming and upgrading are a hassle; however, these dull bits are balanced by the system’s Blu-ray support and impressive storage--two areas that tend to underwhelm on systems in the budget category. That said, you’re paying a premium for the perks.

PC owners know that every computer has a unique assortment of components, applications and peripherals. Nevertheless, certain things--including a host of common PC problems and mysteries--are part of the shared experience of computer ownership. The editors at PCWorld have seen and solved hundreds of PC mysteries, ranging from balky printers to diffident video players to persnickety file attachments. Most of the answers to these tech questions are simple and straightforward, so we've taken the liberty of compiling some of the most frequently encountered PC mysteries into a single list that we'll update regularly. Following each question we provide a short response that summarizes what we know. For a more detailed explanation and some helpful tips, click the links in each answer.

Why is [Program X] always running when I start my PC?

Windows maintains a list of programs that automatically run every time you boot up your computer. Some of these startup programs (such as antivirus utilities) are beneficial, but many of them are not necessary and can slow your PC as they run automatically in the background. Speed up your boot time by disabling Windows startup programs.

Two questions: What the heck is an Erebus? And how the heck is this system so fast?

According to Greek mythology, Erebus is the “personification of darkness.” We would have guessed that it was something related to Nike, given the crazy speeds of iBuyPower’s Erebus GT. The competition at the top of the performance PC chart is pretty tight in terms of general performance, but the Erebus GT shines in plenty of other areas, too: Killer gaming capabilities combine with a beautiful, easy-to-access, water-cooled interior and every modern connection type you might think to plug in.