BRR-RING! The phone rings at midnight, interrupting your sleep—or worse, your late night Steam session with your gaming clan. Is someone sick? Did a car hit your dog? Is it your pal, calling to tell you he got the munchies and discovered that, joy of joys, the McRib is back? Perplexed (and maybe a bit hungry), you pick up your handset, and hear the ominous words:

Doubling as unofficial tech support for your family and friends comes as part of the territory when you're a PC geek—and those cries for help frequently come all too often or at inopportune times. Weekends! Holidays! Nights! All gone, consumed by the fight against malware and missing Internet Explorer icons.

It doesn't have to be like this.

Rather than running around and slapping Band-Aids on all the problems, get proactive! An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say, and taking the time to set your friends' and loved ones' computers up the right way can dramatically cut back on help-seeking headaches down the line. Not to sound too dramatic, but yes, these tips can help you reclaim your nights and weekends.

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Welcome to the wacky world of tech patents—a place where you’ll find not just the crazy-sounding ideas that inhabit any category of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), but some ideas that seem so minute or so obvious that you wonder how they ever qualified as patentworthy.

Once issued, however, a patent isn’t just a shield. It’s a weapon that companies and individuals can use against their competitors. “Patent trolls” are infamous for acquiring patents and then making the business of filing lawsuits against alleged infringers their core competency.

The technology sector is hardly alone in taking patent-holding to extreme levels of judicial enforcement. But some of the most bizarre tech patents we found suggest that we may need a new idea for protecting ideas—one that can more easily weed out the lawyers and the loonies.

The 'Interactive Web' patent

1998

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It's official: The Windows Blue update will be dubbed Windows 8.1, it'll be available for Windows 8 and Windows RT devices alike, and it will cost you the low, low price of zip, nada, zilch.

Interestingly, the free Windows 8.1 update will be available through the Windows Store, not the usual Windows Update method.

"Windows 8.1 ... continues the journey we first began with Windows 8 last fall," the confirmatory Windows Blog post commented this morning. "Windows 8.1 will help us to deliver the next generation of PCs and tablets with our OEM partners and to deliver the experiences customers—both consumers and businesses alike—need and will just expect moving forward."

What's that mean? Early leaks of Windows 8.1 gave us some tantalizing glimpses into the future, while we have some strong suggestions and logical guesses (hello again, desktop!) of our own.

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Retina who? Not to be outdone on the display front, Samsung is showing off a 13.3-inch LCD notebook panel with a whopping 3200-by-1800 resolution screen.

Samsung Display will showcase the high-resolution screen during Display Week 2013 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Samsung's panel has a pixel density of 276 pixels per inch. If Samsung or other PC makers bring this display to market, it would easily outshine Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina Display (227 ppi), Toshiba's Kirabook (221 ppi), and Google's Chromebook Pixel (239 ppi).

But that's a big “if” in the near term, considering that Samsung hasn't actually announced any products that use the display. Last August, the company showed off a prototype 13.3-inch laptop with a 2560-by-1440 resolution panel (pictured above), but that hasn't come to market yet, either.

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The Livescribe Sky pen marries old-school pen-and-ink with the cloud. If paper remains a core part of your workflow, this is the best pen of its kind on the market. You can save notes and audio recordings to your Evernote account via Wi-Fi, or you can plug in a Micro-USB cable and save your work to a PC or Mac.

The pen is fairly bulky, but it's pretty comfortable to hold. It would stick out from inside a pocket but it slips easily into a travel bag. The pen cap is easy to lose and hard to put on, so I usually left it off (and the tip didn't suffer from the exposure). Livescribe makes smart use of its tiny LCD screen, displaying Wi-Fi and battery indicators as well as the time and date. Dive deeper and you can play with the display: Use your handwriting and the interactive "buttons" in its supported paper notebooks to play simple games, run equations on a calculator, and translate words. There's even an ecosystem of apps, including dictionaries.

Other smart pens, such as the Adapx Capturx, let you write on any type of paper, but I've found those better for paper-form input versus freehand writing. Livescribe requires special (and pricey) paper, with tiny dots on the page that track your writing with precision.

The Livescribe Sky pen is designed to be paired with Evernote, so it won't be of much interest if you don't use that app. It's a plus, though, if you enjoy Evernote's productivity features (and you get an Evernote Premium account for a year). Use tidy penmanship with your Livescribe pen, and Evernote's optical character recognition can translate that into digital text.

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Each year, the list of "green" gadgets gets longer, from solar-powered coasters or networked light bulbs. But some are a lot more useful than others. If you're looking for more than a novelty item, we've spotted ten devices that can save your company money by improving its energy efficiency. Some of them offer nifty, time-saving automation features and mobile apps too. Whether you're working from home or in a high-rise headquarters, these tools can put some energy dollars back in your pocket.

Microsoft Flight is the current incarnation of a long and illustrious franchise of games, dating back to 1977. Unlike SimCity, you can start playing Microsoft Flight for free: Simply download the game and embark on a series of missions planned to both teach you the basics of flight, and hook you into buying later missions and additional aircraft. Microsoft Flight is the last of its kind: Microsoft permanently stopped work on the game in July 2012, just a few short months after releasing it.

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Beyond the Hotspot software that comprises the bulk of their business, Connectify Inc. makes another utility for laptop enthusiasts: Dispatch.

Connectify Dispatch works by simultaneously leveraging the multiple network adapters and high-speed USB ports available on modern systems to boost bandwidth and reliability. Each Internet connection you add to Dispatch's list of active adapters increases potential download speeds and provides automatic failover in the case one of the connections fails. For the most part, this works swimmingly. However, there's a bit of the devil in the details.

Setup is straightforward and largely automatic. Users are presented with a window that lists available adapters and indicates whether or not they are bound to Dispatch. A graph charts the combined bandwidth on tap, and settings allow for customized application routing, bandwidth caps for metered Internet feeds, and various routing strategies that maximize efficiency in marginal networking situations.

The first prerequisite is an obvious one: You need access to multiple, separate Internet connections for Dispatch to work as advertised. The hidden detail here is that combined bandwidth isn't directly additive. Two 20 Mbs connections won't yield a 40 Mbs single-socket download, for example, but they will allow for loads to be balanced and intelligently routed to an available adapter with the most suitable bandwidth. BitTorrents and other software that utilize multiple sockets will allow downloads to reach full combined speeds, however.

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Plenty of applications help you show off your photos, and plenty help you show off your videos. But too few tools exist that allows you to show them off together. Enter Fantashow Pro, a $50-per-year application allows you to combine still photos with videos to create a custom video slideshow.

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Toshiba's luxurious Kirabook is the first Windows laptop to feature a display rivaling Apple’s Retina technology. The Kirabook is also thinner and much lighter than Apple’s MacBook Pro, and it’s outfitted with a touchscreen. While I wish I could report that Toshiba has crafted a masterpiece that fully justifies its $2000 price tag, this machine suffers from a couple of significant flaws.

With a native resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, the Kirabook’s 13.3-inch display delivers a pixel density of 221 pixels per inch—just shy of the 227 ppi that Apple packs into the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s 2560-by-1600-pixel display. If you think Apple’s computers are overpriced, consider the fact that a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 3.0GHz Intel Core i7-3540M processor sells for $100 less than the Kirabook, which runs on a 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3537U CPU. Apple, however, doesn't currently offer any full-blown computers with touchscreens (the iPad doesn't count).

Clock speeds aren’t everything, of course. The processor that Toshiba picked boasts a TDP (thermal design power) of just 17 watts, versus the 35-watt TDP of the chip that Apple uses. (Thermal design power refers to the maximum amount of power that a computer’s cooling system must dissipate. A lower TDP is desirable for a mobile computer, because it improves battery life. In our test, the Kirabook’s battery lasted an impressive 5 hours, 14 minutes.) The Kirabook’s other key components include 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. I’ll get into the Kirabook’s performance in depth later.

Photos, movies, and documents look gorgeous on the Kirabook’s display. But when I compared the Kirabook to a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (Apple doesn’t offer its high-res display on its thinner, lighter MacBook Air line), I found that Apple’s product delivered far better contrast. Both machines rely on the Intel HD 4000 GPU core integrated into the CPU, so I don’t know whether the Kirabook’s problem is due to Toshiba’s choice of Corning Concore glass (which is specifically formulated for touchscreens) or due to the fingerprint-resistant coating on the glass. Whatever the reason, it was no contest: The Retina display produced much deeper blacks.

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I never thought a truck-driving simulator could be fun, but Euro Truck Simulator 2 proved me wrong. There is something soothing in watching the world go by from the high and mighty cockpit of a Volvo FH16 Globetrotter XL. If you are used to more traditional racing games, getting used to the way trucks handle in the game may take some time. They really do feel like trucks: Slow to accelerate, jarringly fast to brake thanks to air brakes, ungainly to maneuver, and immensely powerful.

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There's a lot to be said for software that just works. That isn't to say that Adobe Reader doesn't work, but it has a lot of baggage attached to it that Foxit Reader doesn't. As a result, Foxit is significantly smaller and faster.

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HTML is the lingua franca of the Web. If you publish anything online, that's the format your text will end up in. But while easy for browsers to render, HTML isn't always easy (or fun) to compose. Some content management systems, like Wordpress, solve this problem by offering a WYSIWYG editor that lets you edit visually. For those who prefer the simplicity and ubiquity of plain text, Markdown is the way to go—and MarkdownPad Pro is a simple editor that lets you compose Markdown and view your results instantly.

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Windows 8 was rebuilt from the ground up with a finger-friendly focus. That proved to be a problem during the operating system's early days. In the months immediately after launch, touchscreen Windows devices cost an arm and a leg, and that's if you could even find one; during the 2012 holiday season shoppers were hard-pressed to find a touch-based laptop.

Now, however, Microsoft’s touchy-feely thrust is starting to shake up the laptop market, according to a recent report. Nearly 10 percent of all laptops shipped worldwide during the first three months of 2013 were touch enabled, according to IHS DisplayBank (and as reported by DigiTimes).

Even though a push into Windows 8 touch devices was expected, DisplayBank’s numbers are surprising. Other research firms were expecting a much slower adoption rate.

For example, NPD’s DisplaySearch said in April that it expected touch-enabled touchscreen notebooks to surpass 12 percent by the end of 2013. If DisplayBank’s numbers are accurate, notebook touchscreen shipments could be on their way to beating early projections of 15 percent for all of 2013, IDC research director David Daoud told PCWorld. (IDC and PCWorld are both owned by International Data Group.)

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Mageia has long been what you might call a “best-kept secret” of the Linux world, consistently residing among the top five distributions in DistroWatch's page-hit rankings despite minimal marketing and hoopla.

The distro has only been around since it was forked from Mandriva Linux back in 2010, of course, but after several weeks' delay  the Mageia project on Sunday finally launched the third major version of the free and open source operating system.

Mageia Linux 2 made its debut just about a year ago. Now, Mageia 3 is here, “all grown up and ready to go dancing,” as it was put in the project's weekend announcement.

Mageia 3 is dedicated to the late “Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration,” the team added.

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The Pentagon's decision to grant Apple the security clearance required for iOS 6 devices to go head-to-head with BlackBerry 10 and certain Samsung Galaxy S4 devices on secure military networks could have with a cascading effect that spills over into the private sector.

BlackBerry 10 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 received security clearance from the Pentagon earlier this month. The Pentagon has not approved Android in general, or even the Samsung Galaxy S4 in its default state. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is authorized only as long as it uses Samsung’s Knox security software.

The Pentagon uses approximately 600,000 mobile devices. The vast majority of those are BlackBerry, because BlackBerry established itself early on as a secure, manageable mobile platform. Now, BlackBerry will have to fight with Apple and Samsung to maintain that dominance.

The United States Air Force is eager to jump on the iOS bandwagon. Following in the footsteps of many commercial airlines, the USAF plans to replace bulky flight manuals and flight plans with iPads.

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Hop on an Emirates flight in Dubai and get up to cruising altitude. You realize you forgot to tell your assistant to make some crucial plans when you arrive at your destination. No problem: Just take out your cell phone and make a quick phone call.

Say what? Emirates is one of just a handful of airlines that let passengers make calls in flight, not through a funky seat-back phone (though the airline offers those, too), but through a system that relays regular wireless phone calls through a satellite and back down to the ground. Provided by either OnAir or AeroMobile, the service is available on 300 Emirates flights every day.

And a single plane has yet to crash because of it.

The technology behind in-flight phone calls isn't all that complicated. Calls are handled by a picocell on the plane, which is basically the same technology behind Gogo Inflight Internet, which relays Wi-Fi signals to ground-based cell towers, and which is now included on 1,600 commercial aircraft.

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Well, that didn't take long. A mere five days after Brian Krzanich took the reins as the new CEO of Intel, he's shaking things up at an organizational level.

Krzanich has reorganized key business groups and created a new "New Devices" division destined for, well... we're not quite sure yet. Reuters first reported the changes after an anonymous source came forward with the information. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy confirmed to Reuters that Krzanich had sent out an internal email outlining the changes, but didn't elaborate on the shakeup.

We're reached out to Intel and will update this post when the company gets back to us.

New devices?

What, exactly, falls under the purview of the New Devices division? The very name is cloaked in ambiguity, and no details are currently available.

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With Bitcoin all the rage and startups popping up left and right, it's hard to know who's an expert in the virtual currency and who just has an opinion. Most people would put Jeff Garzik in the former camp.

A Bitcoin core developer for three years, he left his job at Red Hat on Friday to start work at Bitpay, the biggest Bitcoin payment processing service. IDG News Service caught up with him at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in Silicon Valley this weekend, where he talked about the state of Bitcoin today, the parallels with open source, and Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto. Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

IDGNS: What's on people's minds at Bitcoin 2013? It feels like the Wild West right now—the exchange rate's up and down, the government's starting to regulate, there are startups cropping up everywhere, where are we at?

Garzik: Bitcoin's growing up. It's been a hobbyist-grown organic piece of software, an organic community. I was one of the hobbyists. It grew up slowly, slowly, slowly over time, and now VCs are all over the place trying to write checks. As a developer, I've told several people, I don't want your check. I just started work for a startup called Bitpay, my first day is today.

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We may not have a new version of Android to drool over, but at least we've got more feature-filled, better-looking maps. At its Google I/O keynote Wednesday morning, Google announced an enhanced version of its popular Google Maps service. The demos shown on stage drew some applause out of the otherwise listless attendees, and I was itching for the chance to put this improved version of Maps through its paces.

After playing around with Maps and virtually visiting several locales around the world, I'm impressed with how much Google has improved its already great mapping tool—though I think the company might have oversold it a bit on stage.

The new desktop Maps version looks fantastic: Google has done away with the navigation bars on the top and left side of the screen, dedicating your entire browser window to your map. For the most part, menus are hidden out of sight, which makes the entire interface feel less cluttered. I know there are people who'll miss all the knobs and sliders of the older version, but if you only really use Google Maps to get around, this new layout will fit your needs perfectly.

Look up an address or city, and you'll immediately fly to that location with an incredibly smooth and fluid animation. Zooming in or panning around the map is much faster than it was previously, and doesn't require you to wait 30 seconds for all the elements of the map to refresh themselves. Switching between the standard and satellite views still isn't as fast as I'd like, but the 3D models that pop up when you zoom in close no longer look like deformed blobs, and you can actually tell buildings apart.

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Google I/O got most of the attention this week, but a conference at the other end of Silicon Valley showed there's plenty of innovation happening in the word of data centers, too.

On the exhibition floor at the Uptime Institute Symposium, I/O Data Centers showed software that lets a facilities manager navigate through a data center in virtual-reality fashion.

Using sensor readings from the equipment, staff can "fly" through aisles and in and out of server equipment, checking power and performance metrics along the way.

At another booth, 3M showed its Novec fire protection fluid, which is used in sprinkler systems and puts out fires by absorbing heat.

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John asked why one Web page "comes up right away, while another takes quite a long time to load."

You can't set a clock by your Internet download speed. A great many factors make one page faster than another. And a great many other factors can make the same page fast one day (or hour) and slow the next.

Most of these variables are completely out of your control. But it's still worthwhile to understand them.

[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]

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Social media has been a boon for businesses small and large, but it's also becoming a minefield for those unable to manage the increasing complexities of the run-and-gun nature of the beast. On a seemingly daily basis, we suffer through one “Twitter disaster” or another. It's becoming so commonplace that “Twitter disaster” really doesn't deserve to be in quotes.

Damage can occur with incredible swiftness. Although tweets and Facebook posts can be deleted, evidence of their existence is invariably captured and collected for posterity within seconds of their going live. Say something wrong on a social network, and it will haunt you for life.

Don't believe me? Check out these nine all-too-common reasons for failure, all of which involve real businesses being undone by a simple, wayward message on social media.

1. Hand the keys to someone not ready to drive

It's understandable that as a small-business owner you might not want to spend your days tending to the Twitter and Facebook pages. It's a high-effort job that often has minimal bottom-line impact, so it's very tempting to outsource the task to another company or hand it off to a low-level staffer.

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Your solid-state drive sits there in silence. It’s sleek. Elegant. More than a little mysterious. The hard drive it replaced was easy to understand: A soft hum assured you that its platters were spinning. A quiet mechanical click informed you of its read/write operations. You’d groom it with the occasional defrag. Times were good.

Now? Everything seems peaceful. But you keep hearing stories: An SSD’s performance deteriorates over time. They have disturbingly short life spans. If it fails, your precious data will be consigned to oblivion. Facts? Or fever-brained fiction?

A high-end SSD is the pinnacle of computer storage today. Ditching your hard drive for one of the latest SSD models is like dumping your go-kart and hopping into a Formula One car. I’m not exaggerating: SSDs can produce a four- or fivefold jump in speed. They have no mechanical parts to break, and they emit zero noise. SSDs are the perfect storage medium—until things go pear-shaped. Or until you seek hard information about the technologies involved.

A speedy drive with a few deep secrets

One reason you hear so much fuzzy information about SSDs is that the companies that design and build one of the key components—the memory controller—guard their technology secrets more carefully than Coca-Cola protects its soda formula. It's a very competitive and lucrative market, with just a few players.

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Ready for an unconventional upgrade? How about this: You can turn an old, pokey external hard drive into a blazingly fast one with about 10 minutes of your time and $15 of your money.

See, most modern computers have at least one USB 3.0 port. You can plug an older, USB 2.0 drive into one, but you won't get the faster throughput afforded by the newer technology.

Thankfully, you don't need to get a new drive just to enjoy speedier file transfers; you just need a new drive enclosure.

You can buy one for around $15, give or take $5, and from there it's a fairly simply matter to transplant your old drive. Just unscrew the old enclosure, remove whatever screws are holding the drive in place, then separate the drive. Now install it in the new enclosure using the provided instructions (if you even need them; it's a pretty self-explanatory procedure).

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Alloystory asked the Laptops forum about speeding up a PC by replacing the hard drive with something faster.

Hard drives are classic bottlenecks, and they definitely slow down computers. But whether you can significantly open up that bottleneck depends on the speed of your current drive, how many available drive bays you have, how much storage space you need, and how much money you're willing to spend.

You effectively have three options (four if you include leaving things as they are). You can buy an SSD, buy a faster hard drive, or set up a RAID. I've already discussed RAIDs in Multiple hard drives working together: All about RAID setups, so I won't cover that here.

[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]

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Recently, the conversation turned to POW movies, which inevitably got me talking about "Stalag 17," the classic that inspired the (inferior) TV series "Hogan's Heroes."

I hadn't seen the film in years, but now, with it at the forefront of my mind, I was dying for a screening. Indeed, I thought even my kids were old enough to enjoy it, what with its great blend of humor, mystery, and suspense.

Ah, but where could I find it? I needed to know if and when it might be showing on cable, or, failing that, where I could stream it.

First stop: The TV Guide Watchlist. After you sign up for a free account and specify your local TV provider, you can add any movie to immediately find out when and where it's available: TV, streaming, DVD, etc.

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A router is the heart of your network, so it deserves to be chosen carefully. Any router will share your Internet connection amongst your computers and other networkable devices (smartphones, tablets, and so on), but better models provide features that will enhance your network and its performance. Whether you're seeking a business- or consumer-class router, here are the eight most essential features to look for.

1. Wi-Fi access point

Most routers targeted at the consumer and SMB market have a built-in Wi-Fi access point (AP) to provide wireless network connections for PCs and other devices equipped with Wi-Fi adapters. You can purchase additional APs to extend the router’s range. A stand-alone AP can also add wireless capabilities to a wired router. There are several wireless standards in use, with IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g considered to be legacy standards. IEEE 802.11n is the latest ratified standard, and 802.11ac is in "draft" mode with final ratification expected late this year or early next. There is a remote chance that devices based on this standard won't be compatible with the final standard, but most people in the industry consider that event highly unlikely.

Wireless routers operate on one of two frequency bands: 2.4GHz or 5GHz. The 2.4GHz band provides only three non-overlapping channels, so it can become crowded very quickly. There are 23 non-overlapping channels available on the 5GHz frequency band, so you'll encounter much less interference when operating a network there. Routers and access points capable of operating on both the 2.4- and the 5GHz frequency bands are described as "dual-band" products. 

If you're buying a router today, pick a model that's based on either 802.11n or the draft version of 802.11ac.

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Running a household smoothly is like heading up a small business—even more so if you manage a home office on top of it all. You need to be detail-oriented, organized, and well equipped. Luckily, even if you lack those first two traits, the proper tools can go a long way toward filling the gap.

The following hardware, apps, and Web-based services are designed to help the chief technology officer of your family. These offerings can step in to assist with everything from syncing schedules and planning meals to securing your home and monitoring your kids’ content consumption.

Everyday organization

Sync schedules

An easy way to minimize the stress of running a household is to stay organized. The first step is for family members to share calendar access. Google Calendar is universally accessible online and simple to use, and it lets you add and view other people’s calendars while keeping some events private. (Read up on 21 Google Calendar tricks.) As for mobile devices, CalenMob for iOS or Chronos Calendar for Windows Phone both sync with Google. On Android, you can simply use the native app or try Touch Calendar.

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John asked why one Web page "comes up right away, while another takes quite a long time to load."

You can't set a clock by your Internet download speed. A great many factors make one page faster than another. And a great many other factors can make the same page fast one day (or hour) and slow the next.

Most of these variables are completely out of your control. But it's still worthwhile to understand them.

[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]

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A few days ago I showed you how to create a Windows 8 shutdown tile, the idea being to circumvent the ridiculous hoops Microsoft makes you jump through just to turn off your computer.

Some would argue that doing so is an antiquated idea. After all, Windows 7 and 8 don't need regular reboots to continue running smoothly the way earlier versions did. On most modern systems you can leverage sleep/hibernate modes almost indefinitely, enjoying the benefits of quick wake/standby without ever actually shutting down.

Ah, but sleep mode continues to draw a bit of power, so it's not always the best option--especially for battery-conscious laptop users. And, let's face it, some users are just accustomed to turning off their PCs at the end of the day.

It's long been one of the great ironies of Windows that you're supposed to click through a shut-down process rather than just pressing the power button. After all, isn't that the off switch?

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