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At HP Amplify 2025, the company’s big annual conference for showcasing its latest products and services, HP unveiled nearly the entire set of its new PCs for the year. I lost count at some point, but HP claims over 60 new models of laptops and PCs. While technically true, it’s a bit fudged—the company counts some variants of the same computer as separate. For example, if the same laptop comes in Intel, AMD, and Snapdragon options, then each one is a distinct “model” even if everything else is the same. That also goes for screen sizes, 2-in-1 variants, and so on. The calm before the storm, just before HP Amplify 2025 kicked off.Mattias Inghe / Foundry Even so, there were a lot of computers. I was there in person, wandering around the showroom with everything on display, along with plenty of other innovations (especially for business customers), such as management systems, security and printing solutions, etc. But I was there for the computers, from neat little desktop PCs to mighty workstations to laptops of all kinds. There were so, so many laptops. OmniBook takes over the laptops It was hard to tell them apart, but HP aims to make them easier to distinguish than before. The older, confusing sub-brands—Pavilion, Envy, and Spectre—have been scrapped and replaced by OmniBook. HP ushered in that line with a few OmniBook laptops last year, but now everything will be OmniBook going forward. These OmniBooks are then divided by suffixes. For example, the OmniBook 3 is cheap and simple, the OmniBook 5 more “normal” and mid-range, the OmniBook 7 more luxurious and lighter, and the OmniBook X supposedly at the top… except for the OmniBook Ultra, which is really the high-performance tier. Lots of new business laptops being shown off at HP Amplify 2025.Mattias Inghe / Foundry Are HP’s laptops now easier to parse? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll have to come back in a year or two when all the older models have disappeared and OmniBook reigns alone. But to make matters a bit more confusing, there’s also the new OmniDesk line of desktop PCs and OmniStudio line of all-in-one machines. HP’s gaming PCs retain the names Omen and Victus (with only a single model launched in the latter). Business laptops are still called ProBook and EliteBook, but specialized model names are apparently being phased out here as well. (I didn’t see any new “Dragonfly” ultra-light business laptops, for example, but some EliteBooks were really slim.) I saw all kinds of consumer PCs, like these stylish desktop OmniDesk models.Mattias Inghe / Foundry Finally, there’s the Z series of powerful workstations for professionals, which get to keep their names. Plenty of new ZBook laptops and Z desktop PCs were also on show. AI is creeping into everything It’s no secret that HP is making a major investment in AI. Expect all new releases, starting with the OmniBook 5 and up, to be equipped with an NPU that can run local AI features. What about the budget-focused OmniBook 3? It’s unclear whether that one will also come with AI capabilities. I didn’t see any, but maybe with time. And even more computers! It just never ended.Mattias Inghe / Foundry I couldn’t quite figure out if there was Copilot+ certification across the board, but HP has added several of its own AI features to its machines, right down to the cheapest models. For example, there are Poly Studio (which adds webcam effects and controls, plus noise reduction for microphones) and AI Companion (HP’s own AI app that indexes local documents and lets you do semantic searches via a chat interface). All of this happens locally on your computer’s NPU to keep your data private and secure. My 5 favorites from all the ones I saw Mattias Inghe / Foundry HP Omen 16 Slim. The new gaming laptop that’s barely 0.89 inches thick and only weighs 5.29 pounds but has a fast 16-inch display, massive cooling elements, and heavy performance under the hood with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 graphics. Learn more about it in PCWorld’s hands-on experience of it. Mattias Inghe / Foundry HP OmniBook 7 Aero. A very stylish 13-inch laptop that weighs about 2 pounds and packs plenty of performance thanks to its AMD Ryzen AI 300 processor. It has decent graphics performance, 50 TOPS for AI, and low-power operation. I’m really looking forward to trying this one. Mattias Inghe / Foundry HP OmniBook 5. This one comes in sizes from 14 to 16 inches and feels very stable, comfortable, and well-built for something that starts around $800. That’s a great price for a quality laptop with AI performance, and it could be many people’s first AI PC. Mattias Inghe / Foundry HP Z2 G1a. When I tested Asus’ monster ROG Flow Z13 tablet, I wondered what a compact desktop PC with the same processor (Ryzen AI Max Pro 395) could do with more cooling and higher power. The answer is here. HP has put it in a compact mini PC format and is selling it as an HP Z workstation. It really does go fast—and it costs. The AMD rep I spoke to said it would be released globally, but couldn’t say for sure if it was for all markets. I hope so because I want to test it. Mattias Inghe / Foundry HP EliteStudio 8. This all-in-one computer seriously lives up to its “all in one” epithet. With a large, built-in Poly webcam that pops up, speakers built for clear voices, and AI-powered microphone management, along with Poly Studio software, this machine is perfect as a video conferencing workstation. With its last-gen Intel Core Ultra processor, AI performance isn’t quite up to scratch, but it’s good enough for most tasks. KVM functionality means you can also use it to dock your laptop. It certainly seems complete and very all-in-one. There could of course be more highlights in the deluge of computer news. If I were to ask HP, they’d say every single one was a highlight, so I was none the wiser. But these made my tester fingers itch and I hope all of them can be found and reviewed during the year. Read...

Before the internet, phonebooks let you look up the names, addresses, and phone numbers of just about anyone. But you had to be local to find that information. Nowadays that’s no longer the case. Anyone in the world can see where you live and what your phone number is plus your age, birthdate, email address, and other personal information—and it only takes a simple, fast Google search. Google doesn’t share the details directly. Rather, it lists results from data broker sites that collect your data, then sell it. Sometimes you can even see select details in the search result teasers. While you may never share your personal information online, you could still be easily found. It’s all available on the regular web—a person hunting for you wouldn’t need to access the dark web. Fortunately, Google now understands the security and privacy hazards of this scenario. Back in 2023, it rolled out a free tool called Results About You to help automate restoring your privacy. Through this feature, you can see if any Google search results exist for the phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, nicknames, and maiden names you’ve asked it to track. Recently, the company refreshed Results About You to simplify the sign-up process—making now an ideal time to get started with this proactive monitoring service. PCWorld To get started, head to Results About You on a desktop or mobile browser. Alternatively, you can open the Google app on your phone, click on your profile icon, then choose Results About You. For the best experience, choose to activate notifications. Whenever Google finds results with your details, you’ll receive an alert through email or the Google mobile app. You can now also directly request the removal of search results more easily. When you click on the three-dot menu next to a result, you’ll see Google’s updated interface. This lets users more quickly select the reason for removal and ask for a refresh of the engine so your info disappears faster. Still, even when your personal details disappear from Google’s search results, they’re not actually gone from the web. You just make it harder for people to find them in bare seconds. To truly wipe the info, you must reach out to the data broker sites directly. Don’t bother with their internal search features to find your record. They’re often slow as molasses. Instead, look for a Do Not Sell My Info or Opt Out link on a site. You’ll then either search for your record through the opt-out form, select it, then submit the request for deletion; or you’ll have to enter the URL to your record. Google’s Results About You findings come in handy here, as they often link directly to the specific URL for your info. PCWorld Requests can take several business days to complete, so you must check to verify that your data was removed. However, you can reappear on these data broker sites even after you first remove yourself. In the U.S., these businesses collect details from public records, social media, online activity, businesses you do business with, and other sources. You cannot fully control this flow of data, and a major event could cause you to reappear in listings. But you can stay wary of who you share information with—if it is ever sold or stolen, you have less to clean up and monitor. You can also enlist help to wipe your data from hundreds of data broker sites. Dedicated businesses have sprung up to help with removal requests. Some have dubious reputations (e.g., OneRep was outed as being run by an owner of multiple data broker sites), but more trustworthy companies exist. For example, security software companies like McAfee and Norton offer such a service as a feature, either as part of an antivirus subscription or a standalone product. California residents also have some relief coming in the form of the Delete Act, which requires data broker companies to comply with a simple opt-out process. By August 2026, a single request should restore your privacy and eliminate the need to play continual whack-a-mole. Read...

A planned dawn raid to confiscate the possessions of rough sleepers lining New Plymouth’s central business district was called off at the eleventh hour on Friday. Read...

Many Windows users look down on OneDrive and Copilot alike, so the combination of the two might seem like the worst of all worlds. Expect the new Copilot for OneDrive to be equally polarizing. Microsoft is launching Copilot for OneDrive for the Web, which has been exclusively a feature for business users until now. Today, Microsoft begins rolling it out to consumers — on the cloud, and not on your PC. Many PC users detest Windows’ OneDrive function, which launches, slurps up your data, and begins sending it to the cloud — taking up CPU cycles and broadband bandwidth. Copilot is really just a glorified app at this point, and not overwhelmingly useful even in the cloud. Anything that Microsoft deems a productivity boost for Copilot is often hidden behind a subscription. (In this case, it is as well: Copilot for OneDrive is only available with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family, and only by the person who pays that bill.) Microsoft said Thursday that if you meet those criteria, it’s going to be turning on Copilot for OneDrive automatically for users over the next several months, through June. A related FAQ doesn’t seem to indicate that you’ll have any choice in the matter, either, although Microsoft claims that it will only work on the files you specify: Microsoft’s Copilot for OneDrive for the Web.Microsoft “Copilot uses your files and files that you have permission for to provide you with insights on your content,” the FAQ says. “Copilot can only be activated on the files that you select in OneDrive.” Microsoft is pitching Copilot as a tool to enable certain features, some of which do appear to be useful. There’s the ubiquitous summarization, for one, which would allow you to upload a copy of a lease agreement and have Copilot summarize it. Copilot can also compare documents using AI — deduplication programs can also do the same to tell you which file is larger or more recent, but Copilot will do this analytically, examining the contents of a document. Naturally, you can also query a document, to “ask” some healthcare paperwork what would happen if you couldn’t pay your bill on time. There are some limitations: you can only compare five documents at a time, and they have to be documents (Office files like .DOC and .PPT file formats, Web pages, or M365 formats like .LOOP files) and not pictures or encrypted files. Beig able to intelligently compare documents via Copilot for OneDrive for the Web seems rather useful.Microsoft Microsoft will also charge you for using Copilot, via its “AI credits.” Each use of Copilot deducts one AI credit, and Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers receive 60 AI credits per month. It sounds like Microsoft intends for Copilot to not have access to specific files until you authorize it. But that probably won’t satisfy privacy-conscious users who are concerned about Microsoft going through their digital closet. Read...

If you try out Intel’s AI Playground, which incorporates everything from AI art to an LLM chatbot to even text-to-video in a single app, you might think: Wow! OK! An all-in-one local AI app that does everything is worth trying out! And it is… except that it’s made for just a small slice of Intel’s own products. Quite simply, no single AI app has emerged as the “Amazon” of AI, doing everything you’d want in a single service or site. You can use a tool like Adobe Photoshop or Firefly to perform sophisticated image generations and editing, but chatting is out. ChatGPT or Google Gemini can converse with you, even generating images, but to a limited extent. Most of these services require you to hopscotch back and forth between sites, however, and can cost money for a subscription. Intel’s AI Playground merges all of these inside a single, well-organized app that runs locally (and entirely privately) on your PC and it’s all for free. Should I let you in on the catch? I suppose I have to. AI Playground is a showcase for Intel’s Core Ultra processors, including its CPUs and GPUs–the Core Ultra 100 (Meteor Lake) and Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) chips, specifically. But it could be so, so much better if everyone could use it. Mark Hachman / Foundry Yes, I realize that some users are quite suspicious of AI. (There are even AI-generated news stories!) Others, however, have found that certain tasks in their daily life such as business email can be handed off to ChatGPT. AI is a tool, even if it can be used in ways we disagree with. What’s in AI Playground? AI Playground has three main areas, all designated by tabs on the top of the screen: Create: An AI image generator, which operates in either a default text-to-image mode, or in a “workflow” mode that uses a more sophisticated back end for higher-quality images Enhance: Here, you can edit your images, either upscaling them or altering them through generative AI Answer: A conventional AI chatbot, either as a standalone or with the ability to upload your own text documents Each of those sections is what you might call self-sufficient, usable by itself. But in the upper right-hand corner is a settings or “gear” icon, which contains a terrific number of additional options, which are absolutely worth examining. How to set up and install AI Playground AI Playground’s strength is in its thoughtfulness, ease of use, and simplicity. If you’ve ever used a local AI application, you know that it can be rough. Some functions are content with just a command-line interface, which may require you to have a working knowledge of Python or GitHub. AI Playground was designed around the premise that it will take care of everything with just a single click. Documentation and explanations might be a little lacking in places, but AI Playground’s ease of use is unparalleled. AI Playground can be downloaded from Intel’s AI Playground page. At press time, AI Playground was on version 2.2.1 beta. AI Playground’s Setup is pretty easy. Just download what you want. If you choose not to, and need access later, the app will just prompt you to download it at a future time,Mark Hachman / Foundry Note that the app and its back-end code require support for either a Core Ultra H (a “Meteor Lake” chip, the Core Ultra 200V) or either of the Intel Arc discrete GPUs, including the Alchemist and Battlemage parts. If you own a massive gaming laptop with a 14th-gen Intel Core chip or an Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU, you’re out of luck. Same with the Core Ultra 200H or “Arrow Lake.” Since this is an “AI Playground,” you might think that the chip’s NPU would be used? Nope. All of these applications tap just the chip’s integrated GPU and I didn’t see the NPU being accessed once via Windows Task Manager. Also, keep in mind that the GPU’s UMA frame buffer, the memory pool that’s shared between system memory and the integrated GPU, is what these AI models depend on. Intel’s integrated graphics shares half the available system memory with the system memory, as a unified memory architecture or UMA. Discrete GPUs have their own dedicated VRAM memory to pull from. The bottom line? You may not have enough video memory available to run every model. Downloading the initial AI Playground application took about 680 megabytes on my machine. But that’s only the shell application. The models require an additional download, which will either be handled by the AI Installer application itself or may require you to click the “download” button itself. The nice thing is that you don’t have to manage any of this. If AI Playground needs a model, it will tell you which one it requires and how much space on your hard drive it requires. None of the models I saw used more than 12GB of storage space and many much less. But if you want to try out a number of models, be prepared to download a couple dozen gigabytes or more. Playing with AI Playground I’ve called Fooocus the easiest way to generate AI art on your PC. For its time, it was! And it works with just about any GPU, too. But AI Playground may be even easier. The tab opens with just the space for a prompt and nothing else. Like most AI art, the prompt defines the image and you can get really detailed. Here’s an example: “Award winning photo of a high speed purple sports car, hyper-realism, racing fast over wet track at night. The license plate number is “B580?, motion blur, expansive glowing cityscape, neon lights…” The Settings gear in the upper right-hand corner opens up this options menu, with numerous tweaks. My advice is to experiment.Mark Hachman / Foundry Enter a prompt and AI Playground will draw four small images, which appear in a vertical column to the left. Each image progresses in a series of steps with 20 as the default. After the image is completed, some small icons will appear next to it with additional options, including importing it into the “Enhance” tab. The Settings gear is where you can begin tweaking your output. You can select from either “Standard” or “HD” resolution, which adjusts the “Image Size” field. You can adjust image size and resolution, and tweak the format. The “HD” option requires you to download a different model, as does the ‘Workflow” option to the upper right, which adds workflows based on ComfyUI. Essentially, they’re just better looking images with the option to guide the output with a reference image or other workflow. Some of the models are trained on public figures and celebrities. But the quality falls to the level of “AI slop” in places.Mark Hachman / Foundry For now, the default model can be adjusted via the “Manual” tab, which opens up two additional options. You’ll see a “negative prompt,” which excludes things that you put in, and a “Safe Check” to turn off gore and other disturbing images. By default, “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work) is added to the negative prompt. Both the Safe Check and NSFW negative prompt only appear as options in the Default image generator and seem to be on by default elsewhere. It’s up to you whether or not to remove them. The Default model (Lykon/dreamshaper-8) has apparently been trained on nudity and celebrities, though I stuck to public figures for testing purposes. Note that all of your AI-generated art stays local to your PC, though Intel (obviously) warns you not to use a person’s likeness without their permission. There’s also a jaw-droppingly obvious bug that I can’t believe Intel didn’t catch. Creating an HD image often begins its images with “UPLOAD” projected over the image, and sometimes renders the final image with it on, too. Why? Because there’s a field to add a reference image and UPLOAD is right in the middle of it. Somehow, AI Playground used the UPLOAD font as part of the image. Mark Hachman / Foundry Though my test machine was a Core Ultra 258V (Lunar Lake) with 32GB of RAM, an 896×576 image took 29 seconds to generate, with 25 rendering steps on the Default Mode. Using the Workflow (Line2-Image-HD-Quality) model at 1280×832 resolution and 20 steps, one image took two minutes 12 seconds to render. There’s also a Fast mode which should lower the rendering time, though I didn’t really like the output quality. If you find an image you like, you can use the Enhance tab to upscale it. (Upscaling is being added to the Windows Photos app, which will eventually be made available to Copilot+ PCs using Intel Core Ultra 200 chips, too.) You can also use “inpainting,” which allows you to re-generate a portion of the screen, and “outpainting,” the technique which was used to “expand” the boundaries of the Mona Lisa painting, for example. You can also ask AI to tweak the image itself, though I had problems trying to generate a satisfactory result. The Enhance tab of Intel’s AI Playground, where you can upscale images and make adjustments. I’ve had more luck with inpainting and outpainting then tweaking the entire image with an image prompt.Mark Hachman / Foundry The “Workflow” tab also hides some interesting utilities such as a “face swap” app and a way to “colorize” black-and-white photos. I was disappointed to see that a “text to video” model didn’t work, presumably because my PC was running on integrated graphics. The “Answer” or chatbot portion of the AI Playground seems to be the weakest option. The default model, by Microsoft (Phi-3-mini-4K-instruct) refused to answer the dumb comic-book-nerd question, “Who would win in a fight, Wonder Woman or Iron Man?” It’s not shown here, but you can turn on performance metrics to track how many tokens per second the model runs. There’s also a RAG option that can be used to upload documents, but it doesn’t work on the current release.Mark Hachman / Foundry It continued. “What is the best car for an old man? Sorry, I can’t help with that.” “What’s better, celery or potatoes? I’m sorry, I can’t assist with that. As an AI, I don’t have personal preferences.” And so on. Switching to a different model which used the OpenVINO programming language, though, helped. There, the OpenVINO/Phi-3.5-mini-instruct-int4 model took 1.21 seconds to generate a response token, producing tokens to the tune of about 20 tokens per second. (A token isn’t quite the length of a word, but it’s a good rule of thumb.) I was also able to do some “vibe coding” — generating code via AI without the faintest clue what you’re doing. By default, the output is just a few hundred tokens, but that can be adjusted via a slider. You can also just import your own model, too, by dropping a GGUF file (the file format for inference engines) into the appropriate folder. Adapt AI Playground to AMD and Nvidia, please! For all that, I really like AI Playground. Some people are notably (justifiably?) skeptical of AI, especially how AI can make mistakes and replace the authentic output of human artists. I’m not here to argue either side. What Intel has done, however, is create a surprisingly good general-purpose and enthusiast application for exploring AI, that receives frequent updates and seems to be consistently improving. The best thing about AI Playground? It’s open source, meaning that someone could probably come up with a fork that allows for more GPUs and CPUs to be implemented. From what I can see, it just hasn’t happened yet. If it did, it could be the single unified local AI app I’ve been waiting for. Read...

AI isn’t going away, but it is getting cheaper. Instead of paying monthly just to use the good versions of ChatGPT or Midjourney, now you can get access to the same models for life. 1min.AI is a full AI platform that gives you access to GPT-4, Gemini, Meta AI, and a lot more. And instead of paying monthly, it’s only $79.97 for life (reg. $540).  No need to learn to use a new AI. This all-in-one platform includes everything from ChatGPT (GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-3.5) to image creation models like DALL-E, and even Google’s Gemini Pro. You can generate text and images, conduct SEO research, or even transcribe audio.  1min doesn’t stop at creating new content. You can also edit existing text, images, and video. Want to edit videos or improve images? It’s all here, with advanced tools like background removers and image upscaling. Plus, you’ll get regular updates, keeping your AI toolkit fresh and ready for whatever comes next. March 30 at 11:59 p.m. PT is the cutoff to get a 1min.AI lifetime subscription for $79.97.    1min.AI Advanced Business Plan Lifetime Subscription – $79.97 See Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

Company chief executive Nick Hammond said the investors are agri-business people from New Zealand and the US, as well as two Chinese investors to boost in-country marketing. Read...