David

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.

The Razer 2012 Naga Expert MMO mouse is the latest edition in their gaming peripheral line geared to meet the unique needs of MMO players. After testing the new Razer Naga for a few days and seeing what it can do, we think it's worth the $80 price tag for gamers who are serious about MMOs or any other keyboard-heavy PC gaming.

Another Friday means another collection of free games, and this week we've got two original twists on platformers and one of the best-looking games you've ever played in your browser.

Recursion

Double Fine, the game studio that brought you games such as Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, have announced a new adventure game called The Cave that the company plans to release early next year for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. The Cave is the brainchild of Ron Gilbert, the man behind seminal adventure games like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. We visited Double Fine HQ yesterday to get an early look at the game, and after watching Gilbert guide us through some basic gameplay it's clear that The Cave draws inspiration from Gilbert's earlier work on PC adventure games.

Like Maniac Mansion, Double Fine's The Cave will allow you to pick several characters from a roster of archetypes looking to explore a mysterious cave for their own personal quests. These characters include traditional protagonists like a knight and a scientist, but the roster is rounded out by stranger characters like a time traveler, a hillbilly, and a fairly creepy pair of twins.

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.

Since the launch of Double Fine Adventure, a gaming Kickstarter campaign which raised over $3 million earlier this year, game designers and gamers have quickly embraced the possibilities of crowd-funding to finance original and unusual games. Swift Kick is PCWorld's attempt to highlight gaming Kickstarters we think are worthy of your attention.

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.

Increasingly, online services act like roach motels: They make it easy to check in, but nearly impossible to check out. By hiding their opt-out pages deep within their settings menus, by using deliberately confusing graphic design, and by presenting emotional appeals that declare how much the site will "miss you," these services make the simple process of deactivating your account a complicated trial.

To give you a sense of the hurdles you can expect to face the next time an online service doesn't want you to leave, we've picked out five services that make quitting needlessly difficult.

Diablo III is finally here and if pre-orders are any indication, many of you are probably already playing it. With five separate classes that each have their own unique playstyle, you may be having trouble picking which one to play first. Luckily we've got a guide to choosing which class is right for you so you can start facing Hell's most powerful demons as fast as possible.

Almost everyone uses Facebook, but almost everyone agrees that the social network has quite a few problems. Chances are, most Facebook users have encountered some feature or flaw--from overarching privacy concerns to assorted interface annoyances--that made them reconsider their membership in the social network. Nevertheless, Facebook users tend to stick around because they believe that the benefits outweigh the costs--and because they don't know how to leave the service without losing a few valuable features, such as games or public photo albums.

Luckily, you can export or replicate many of Facebook's most useful features with ease, so you can quit Facebook without losing what you love about it. If Facebook is your all-in-one stop for socializing online, you're probably better off staying with the service and hoping that the company fixes a few issues in the next redesign. But if you're hanging on for the sake of just one or two features even though you'd rather quit, take a look at the following tips and tricks. With some help, you'll be able to enjoy the best parts of the most popular social network without all of that Facebook anxiety.

This week's Free Friday has two new browser games with interesting twists on some old gaming formulas along with a game that's two decades old and now free to play right inside your browser.

Mirror Rays

Facebook's privacy settings are confusing by design, often hiding similar settings in totally different menus and defaulting to unnerving levels of public sharing. Ensuring that you share the right information with the right people can be difficult, and Facebook even has a few specialized settings that will override your other privacy settings if you aren't careful. Luckily you can take control of your privacy on Facebook fairly quickly once you know what you're looking for.

To that end we've assembled this quick guide to each part of Facebook's Privacy Settings page (accessible via the menu that drops down when you select the downward arrow at the top right of your Facebook page). Following it should help you get your Facebook information locked down on the double. For each section of Facebook's privacy settings, we provide a brief description of what to look for, along with notable settings that you'll probably want to adjust. Click on any screenshot to zoom in for a close look at the different privacy settings on display.