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| PC World - 8 Jan (PC World)A day after launching the most hotly anticipated product in the PC world, the Nvidia GeForce 50-series family of graphics cards, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang appeared on stage at CES to answer reporters’ questions.
A key one: In a world where AI is increasingly used to generate or interpolate frames, is the end result a world in which PC graphics is entirely AI generated? No, Huang replied.
There’s a reason we asked Huang the question. Nvidia says that while DLSS 3 could inject AI-generated frames between every GPU-rendered frame, DLSS 4 can infer three full frames off of a single traditional frame, as Brad Chacos noted in our earlier report on the GeForce 50-series reveal.
A day earlier, rival AMD was essentially asked the same question. “Can I tell you that in the future, every pixel is going to be ML [machine learning]-generated? Yes, absolutely. It will be in the future,” AMD’s Frank Azor, its chief architect of gaming solutions, replied.
Huang disagreed. “No, he replied to the question, asked by PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray.
“The reason for that is because just remember when ChatGPT first came out, and we said, Oh, now let’s just generate the book. But nobody currently expects that.
“And the reason for that is because you need to give it credit,” Huang continued. “You need to give it — it’s called condition. We now condition the chat or the prompts with context. Before you can answer a question, you have to understand the process. The context could be PDF, the context could be a web search. The context could be you told it exactly what the context is, right?
“And so the same thing goes with video games. You have to give a context. And the context for video games has to not only be story-wise relevant, but it has to be spatial, world, spatially relevant. And so the way you condition, the way you give it context, is you give it some early pieces of geometry, or early pieces of textures, and it could generate, it could up the rest.”
In ChatGPT, the context is called Rapid Retrieval, Augmented Generations [RAG], the context which guides the textual output. “In the future, 3D graphics would be 3D grounded condition generation,” he said.
In DLSS 4, Nvidia’s GPU rasterization engine only renders one of out of the four forward-looking frames, Huang said. “And so out of four frames, 33 million pixels, we only rendered two [million]. Isn’t that a miracle?”
The key, Hunag said, is that they have to be rendered precisely: “precisely the right ones, and from that conditioning we can generate the others.”
“The same thing is going to happen in video games in the future I just described will be, will happen to not just the pixels that we render, but the geometry that we render, the animation that we render, you know, and the hair we render in future video games.”
Huang apologized if his explanation was poor, but concluded that there is still and will always be a role for artists and rendering in video games. “But it took that long for everybody to now realize that generative AI is really the future, but you need to condition, you need to ground with the author, the artists, [and the] intention.” Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 8 Jan (PC World)Why didn’t AMD talk about their upcoming GPUs in their CES 2025 keynote? Or their new Z-series processors for handheld PCs? What is the Ryzen AI Max? And when can I actually buy a Ryzen 9000X3D chip?
AMD executives only had 45 minutes for their CES 2025 keynote. Fortunately, they also tacked on an additional half-hour or so to field burning questions from a small handful of chip journalists, who crowded around David McAfee, AMD’s corporate vice president and general manager of its Client Channel Business, and Frank Azor, the chief architect of gaming solutions and gaming marketing at AMD.
Fire away, we were told — and we did.
Below, we’ve included a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity where necessary. Though I don’t identify each reporter by name, they included Paul Alcorn of Tom’s Hardware, Ryan Shrout of Signal65, Marco Chiappetta of Hot Hardware, and myself.
Editor’s Note: The opening of the conversation included “prepared remarks” by the AMD executives, basically explaining that they only had 45 minutes for their keynote and that the company passed over remarks on their RX 9070 graphics cards and RDNA 4 architecture to give a fuller, more comprehensive explanation at a later date.
David McAfee: From a timeline standpoint, it’ll be a little bit later this quarter that we actually begin to roll out RDNA 4 graphics cards. But you know, our focus as we get into this generation is to deliver a really, really compelling value to the end user, with great price-performance.
Lean into all aspects of design efficiency, which is about making it simpler, more cost-effective, more power-effective, to really optimize from silicon all the way through board design so that we can hit the key features that those gamers who are playing enthusiast-class games care about at a price point that they’re going to be really excited to see.
And so I think that we believed, as we built this press conference with the strict time limits, spending five minutes on RDNA 4 was not going to be enough to do it justice. We’ll move it to a separate set of content that comes a little bit later this quarter. Frank, anything to add?
AMD
Frank Azor: We covered everything… There were certain things that we adopted in the press release and we didn’t put into the press conference, like the Z2 [handheld gaming] processor, for example. We tried to include RDNA 4, we really did.
It was going to feed the narrative that we didn’t care about graphics, because we had 45 minutes and we had to rush through. You have to introduce the architecture, all the deltas, all the ray tracing performance, or machine learning performance. Do the positioning of the cards, do FSR [FidelityFX Super Resolution]. Give you a whole overview around FSR, the ISP partners, what’s different about FSR. Show you how FSR works normally. We’d spend 45 minutes to an hour doing that… We started with all this content, and then you’re like, getting it down to the five-minute budget that we had for this.
Journalist: Are you sure it wasn’t because Intel showed half their hand, the Nvidia stuff leaked. You didn’t see some of the competitive offerings and think, maybe it’s not time to talk about this yet?
Azor: All of the above. It isn’t any one thing… It’s not like, oh, we’re just gonna delay because of this. David’s not kidding when he says all the content was in the deck, and part of it is we weren’t doing it justice.
And then you’re like, okay, we’re not gonna do it justice, so the audience is gonna be disappointed. Okay, then you have your competitors making their announcements. Then you have other factors weighing in on this. Okay, so you start looking at all these things, and you put it together, and you say, is it smart or not to include this? It wasn’t smart.
When I say, when we say, later in [the first quarter] we’re going to give you more details, just keep in mind what we just said. We had all the content ready to go. It’s not going to be like March 31.
AMD
McAfee: I’ll also say that I think we also wanted to make sure that our partners at least had enough air cover from us to talk about their products. I think for our board partners, you know this, this is an incredibly important show for them to be able to talk about what they’re doing next gen. And I think they’re all super excited about what’s coming as well.
Journalist: Are you guys cool with partner leaks? Everyone’s going to know the specs just by seeing the cards.
McAfee: I think you’ll see static demos of cards. Everybody loves a good wall of boards. And I think you’ll see that from all of our partners in their spaces. I don’t think you’ll see any live demos, or you better not see any demos from partners — I’ll put it that way. But, you know, power connectors, things like that, TDPs, I think you’ll see a lot of that stuff out there.
Azor: By the way, if you do see demos out there, just know that they don’t have the production [software] driver.
McAfee: All these performance leaks, well, it is accurate for the way the driver performs on the card right now. It is nowhere near where the card will actually perform once we release the full performance driver.
Journalist: Did that also factor into your decision?
Azor: It’s not a readiness issue.
McAfee: We have in house the full performance driver. We intentionally chose to enable partners with a driver which exercises all of the, let’s call it, thermal-mechanical aspects of the card, without really running that risk of leaking performance on critical aspects of the of the product. That’s pretty standard practice.
Journalist: In the past, you’ve emphasized dedicated graphics units on those cards. Now it seems like you’re adopting AI, which is the approach that your competitors are taking. Can you explain that? Why now and what’s shifted in your thinking?
McAfee: I’ll start with that. I think both ray tracing and AI are great examples of that shift. Look a couple of years ago, when the first RTX cards came into the market, there were one or two ray tracing titles and the performance was pretty crummy.
It was more of a technology showcase than it was a real gaming experience. And I think you’ve seen ray tracing change dramatically over the past couple of years. It really has become a much more integral part of so many games today.
Nvidia
I think that ML super resolution is ramping up that same curve pretty quickly as well, where, you know, it’s not for everybody. The purists want every pixel, you know, just brute-force rendered and are not going to be excited about that technology. But it’s also what a lot of gamers are adopting, and I think that especially for those higher resolution gamers that are looking for the combination of high-res gameplay and high frame rates, there’s almost no other way to get there. And I think a lot of gamers are accepting that.
Journalist: And that’s the same approach you’re taking with FSR4?
McAfee: Maybe to talk a little bit about FSR specifically — FSR4 is ML super resolution, and it is built for… as we bring it to market, it will be built for our RDNA 4 architecture. RDNA 4 will bring a pretty massive increase in terms of ML [operations] and compute capability in the shader unit itself. So it is kind of fine-tuned for RDNA 4.
Bringing that to other product families is certainly a possibility for the future, but not something we’re talking about right now, nor committing to a timeline of when that will be available. But as we launch it, it’ll be RDNA 4-focused.
Journalist: My question is on the continuing shortages of 9800X3D parts. This is becoming crazy, and nobody can find these processors pretty much anywhere.
McAfee: What I can say is that we have been ramping our manufacturing capacity — the monthly, quarterly output of X3D parts. That’s 7000X3D as well as 9000X3D. It’s crazy how much we have increased over what we were planning. I will say that the demand that we have seen from 9800X3D and 7800X3D has been unprecedented.
Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
Azor: Put it this way, we knew we built a great part. We didn’t know the competitor had built such a horrible one. So the demand has been a little bit higher than we had originally forecasted.
McAfee: I think the thing you have to keep in mind is, unlike, you know, building a traditional semiconductor product, it’s basically, you know, 12 to 13 weeks from when you start a wafer to when you get a product out the other end of the machine, and the stacking process adds time to that.
And so it’s longer than a quarter to really ramp, you know, the output of those products, and so we’re working very, very hard to catch up with demand. I think as we go through the first half of this year, you’ll see us continue to increase output of X3D. You know there’s no secret, X3D has become a far more important part of our CPU portfolio than I think we, any of us, would have predicted a year ago.
And I think that trend will continue into the future, and we are ramping capacity to ensure we catch up with that demand as long as consumers want those X3D parts.
Journalist: Is there a gating issue? The silicon or the cache?
McAfee: It is really none of the above. It’s the problem of, you’ve got that lead time to build individually, the CCD wafer, the cache wafer, and then the stacking process that follows adds considerable amount of time as well. It’s a non-trivial timeline when you’re talking about building X3D products.
Journalist: Does the expansion into a broader number of desktop X3D products help or the mobile Fire Range X3D products help? Does it exacerbate the problem or spread the demand around?
McAfee: If I look historically at our 7000X3D products, the 7800X3D was dramatically the highest volume part in that product stack. I think that those 12- and 16-core parts, there are certain types of customers that buy those.
But, you know, I think the reality is, if you are truly a creator, you probably still buy the 9950X. The X3D doesn’t add much at all for creator workloads like, I think, in the data we’ve seen, and you guys will see it as well when you get the chance to review it — it’s like a percent of incremental performance by having the X3D there.
AMD
Because the truth is, X3D is great for games, because it’s all about improving effective memory latency. When it comes to creator apps, it’s about memory capacity or memory bandwidth. The X3D really doesn’t affect either of those parameters in a significant way. So my belief is, in the 9000 series, those higher core count products, there’ll be some demand there, but it’ll still be ten-to-one or more on the eight-core X3D parts because they’re just such a great gaming part. For a pure gamer, there’s nothing else like it.
Journalist: With your APUs, you traditionally have brought them over to a desktop socket eventually. What about the Ryzen AI Max?
McAfee: It would be a different socket, first and foremost. I guess we haven’t released all the details about Ryzen AI Max, so I better be careful what I say. It will not fit in an AM5 socket. I don’t think mechanically it fits in an AM5 socket.
Azor: But you will see one desktop, as we announced.
McAfee: Yeah, there’ll be small-form-factor desktops that are, you know, BGA, soldered-down versions of that product, socketed desktop. I think that’s a much harder problem to solve because there simply isn’t an infrastructure that it drops into. And I think as we disclose more about that product to you guys, you’ll kind of see why, but it’s a little bit tricky from that perspective.
Journalist: I’m getting a lot of questions about what type of memory it takes to support 256GB/s. Is that DDR5X?
McAfee: I’m going to stretch here a little bit. It is certainly an LP5, LPDDR5X product. What I can’t recall is whether that also supports other memory types. And I’m just kind of drawing [a blank], I think it’s the only one. I think it’s only an LP memory interface.
[PR person]: When you think of Strix [Point], it has the bank of 128 right on one side. Strix Halo has two of those banks. That’s one on each side, and that gives you the 256. So I think it’s 4-by-8 or 4-by-16 or however they do the DDR5 part, but it’s two banks now instead of one.
AMD
Journalist: I’d like to hear a bit more about the origins of the Strix Halo (AI Max) part. It seems a bit like Threadripper, where you just went for it with a massive core count, massive threads. Strix Halo seems to pull together the best parts of the CPU, GPU, and NPU in a part that’s optimized for AI.
McAfee: I think with Strix Halo, one of the things that we saw is the way that notebook products with discrete GPUs are built today is really suboptimized. And when you look at that from a performance-power curve across the entire spectrum versus a fully integrated APU design, the discrete design leaves a lot on the table. You’ve got two separate memory subsystems to maintain, just a lot of complexities, power management, all of those things.
Azor: Where’s the cost? Because you’re paying for two memories that don’t get along with one another.
McAfee: So now, by unifying that, it provides the opportunity to deliver a dramatically different notebook experience that scales into what a gaming notebook is capable of doing.
Like that proof point… That was Llama (LLM) performance versus a [GeForce] 4090. It’s a testament to the massive memory footprint that you can put close to the product. To effectively use a 96 MB frame buffer for a GPU is kind of groundbreaking. It opens up a lot of opportunity for our notebook partners and desktop partners, small-form-factor desktop partners, to innovate in ways that they haven’t been able to do in the past with a traditional APU plus dGPU.
In our minds, when it comes to building a great gaming notebook or mobile workstation or small-form-factor desktop — all that power management tech, all that power scalability — I think it points to what a great gaming notebook of the future could be.
I think that this is, this is AMD, kind of creating a category of product here that hasn’t existed in this way in the past. And we think it’s really a unique way to solve that problem that has a lot of benefits.
Journalist: So this is not a one off [one-time product]?
Azor: We are not ready to announce any product, so we are not ready to talk about the future.
Journalist: It would seem like having different GPUs and not needing a discrete GPU would free you from needing to worry about aggressive business practices from others in that space.
McAfee: What I would say about Strix Halo is, I would not expect Strix Halo to be a dominant volume product for us in 2025.
I think this will be a year where we see, you know, some of the initial designs from HP. We see other partners bring additional platforms on board later in in the year. Honestly, the world has been used to APUs plus dGPUs for a really long time. And changing that mindset, educating the consumer, getting the market adoption is going to take time. I don’t know that it changes anything in a massive way in the short term.
You’re totally right though, that by integrating the two together, it goes beyond, I think, even some of the original goals.
Journalist: I have a question out of left field. Nvidia’s GeForce 4090 is so powerful it’s banned from export to China. You guys haven’t put up performance specifications, but do you think it’s powerful enough to be banned from export to China, too?
Azor: I’m not going to address that. But keep in mind with the 4090 — it has 24 GB of memory, right? And you need the entire LLM loaded into memory. The advantage is the memory architecture.
Thiago Trevisan / IDG
McAfee: It has nothing to do with compute.
What I will say, though, is, I am not the expert on, you know, the regulations with the 4090, and its export control laws. I think that the truth, though, is Ryan’s point is right on that, you know. It is about total compute that drives a lot of those regulations, and this product does not match up, from a total compute standpoint, to what a 4090 can do.
Journalist: Do you have a sense in mind of, like, up to what class of GPU you think this displaces?
Azor: So there’s a pretty broad range, if you notice, it was 55 to 120 watts. So there’s a range. Do we? Are we ready to communicate that? … Sure? I don’t know if we’re ready.
[Edited for space.]
Azor: We’re going to scale better with the shared memory than others. It’s really hard to give you a blanket [statement like] “This is going to perform like this from Nvidia” because you’re going to see a lot of differences that you haven’t seen in the past. It’s not a discrete GPU and it’s not a dGPU one-to-one replacement. It’s a different beast, a different animal. So, yeah, it will perform like discrete graphics, but you’re going to see a broad range.
Journalist: So should an enthusiast say that “this crazy amount of memory is going to give me great performance in games?”
Azor: For some games, yeah, some games have large textures, and they load them into memory, and they’ll get a lot of advantage of that size and that speed. You know, it’s not one size fits all. Sports games are probably not going to scale that much.
Journalist: So you’ve put X3D in the gaming class category. You’ve put the AI Max in the gaming class category. Any characterization about which one would be better suited for gaming?
McAfee: I would say that if you are a pure gamer, the… Fire Range 9955HX3D is like that, without a doubt, going to give you the best gaming performance across the board, because of two reasons. Number one, it is a desktop product in a mobile platform, and you’re likely pairing that with a very, very high-end discrete GPU. The AI Max, Max Plus…
Journalist: What’s the difference between the AI Max and AI Max Plus?
McAfee: The Plus makes it better.
Journalist: I walked into that one.
McAfee: What I would say is that the [AI Max] product does not cover the full scale of gaming notebooks, right there. Gaming notebooks that today are built with desktop products in a mobile package with like a 4090, mobile dGPU, that is not the target of the AI Max family. The AI Max family is more mainstream gaming notebooks, mobile workstations. That class of product is the sweet spot that it’s really built for.
Azor: Today, you have to make a sacrifice: If you want a gaming laptop and you want to experiment with Copilot+ and get all the latest features you really don’t have, you get a Strix Halo plus a discrete GPU. What’s unique about Strix Halo is you get everything.
Mark Hachman / IDG
You get an NPU if you want to mess around with that, either as a developer or as a consumer. You get discrete graphics-level performance in an integrated package. And you get an amazing CPU. So it’s kind of like the best of everything, if you want to be at the cutting edge of everything. You don’t know how big that market is. We’ll see in time.
Journalist: Can you say anything about your price targets there?
Azor: That’s really for our OEMs to share. What I’ll say is, you’re going to have ultra small-form-factor desktops like the one that we announced that will probably be at more compelling price points relative to what their dGPU counterparts are going to be, and they’ll offer some unique value propositions like efficiency and size and weight that they can’t compare to on the laptop side.
This is not a value part. This is not a low-end part. This is an ultra-premium part, cutting edge, the most advanced x86 processor arguably out there. They’re not putting it in cheap notebooks. They’re putting them in their best, most premium laptops. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s driven by the part itself. It’s the whole decision that they’re making.
McAfee: I think you will see some application of this in a gaming notebook. I think you will see an equal amount in products that are positioned more as mobile workstation products, because it is really a killer part for that.
Journalist: The HX3D last time was very hard to obtain. If I’m right, there was an exclusivity agreement. Are you guys opening it up to a broader range of partners this time around?
McAfee: What I will say is, I don’t know anything about commercial agreements with that product and customers. It is similar to the prior generation in that it is drop in, pin-compatible, platform-compatible. So any system manufacturer today that’s building with the prior generation, the Zen 4 generation, has a really easy path to upgrade to a Zen 5-based notebook solution.
You know, it’s a pretty small segment of the market, but I don’t know of any reason that there’s any constraints around that particular product.
Journalist: How do you see GPU development moving forward at AMD? Do you see an equal amount of effort put into traditional raster versus AI? Do you see the AI and generated pixels being more important than rasterization for the future? What’s going to be your philosophy in terms of evolving AMD graphics?
McAfee: I think that there’s a pretty fundamental shift that’s happening in the graphics industry right now.
AMD
Moore’s Law is probably a bad analogy to use, but the amount of brute-force rasterization performance improvements that I think we see, and the competition as well, is a fairly muted curve, right? You’re reaching some of these boundaries around rasterization performance that require massive increases in silicon to provide meaningful uplift there.
And I think that you’re also seeing areas where using AI-generated pixels, or AI-enhanced or whatever you want to call it, provides much, much more rapid gains in terms of improving quality and frame rates and generational leaps in performance. I think the way we think about it is in the future, you know, yes, I think it’s absolutely true that you’re going to see more generated pixels, both from us as well as everybody that’s that’s in the graphic space, because it is the path forward in driving more performance and more immersion and better experiences for end users.
We haven’t talked about this a lot, but you know, the journey that we’re on at this moment with RDNA 4 is kind of a new starting point for us, right? Building a reputation for Radeon, just like we had for Ryzen in the early years, where it’s focused on delivering better value for the end user, giving consumers more for their money than what the other guys are delivering, focusing on the features and capabilities that gamers care about most, and being sort of responsive and focused on delivering for the community of enthusiasts that’s out there, is really what we believe we have to build with Radeon. And that’s kind of the focus of the roadmap going forward.
I think as you look beyond this generation, we want to continue to advance that. I think advancing that on all fronts for graphics is going to require — and be driven by — more inclusion of generated pixels to drive a better experience.
Azor: One of the hardest things that our product management teams have to do when it comes to defining our graphics cards is timing the hardware to the ISV ecosystem, and to what consumers are going to be demanding in that time frame in which the cards are going be coming out.
Had we been the first to lean into ray tracing even more than our competition, we would have been going out and asking a bunch of customers to spend a significant amount of money on a technology that they probably weren’t going to be able to capitalize on until two-to-three generations later. And just keep in mind, we’re not the dominant market share provider in the industry. The dominant market share provider in the industry did that, and you really didn’t start to see meaningful gain of ray-tracing games until this last generation, three generations after they first introduced it, and they’re the market share leaders.
So we have to be very careful on why. You see, sometimes people say, “Why are you always trailing?” Well, we’re trailing because we’re following the [Total Available Market] of where the market is, and we’re letting them create some of this market because they are the only ones that really can when you have the kind of position that they have in the industry. We have to time it.
We either have to give you less, somewhere else — so, compromises — or we’d have to raise the price points, which is something they are already doing. So why have two people do exactly the same thing, trying to build these leadership products out there? Which is part of what is different about our graphic strategy moving forward than maybe what we’ve tried to do in RDNA 2 and RDNA 3.
And what you’ll see with RDNA 4 is, it’s much more of a gamer-first design, all about efficiency, all about giving them the feature set for what’s going to matter in this next generation of games.
Can I tell you that in the future, every pixel is going to be ML [machine learning]-generated? Yes, absolutely. It will be in the future. But when that future is? And should we charge a gamer for that technology today so that they can be the seed for that in the future? Those are all the tough decisions we have to face.
Right now, we believe, is the right time for more prevalent ray tracing and to make that investment. And because FSR4 is looking as good as it does, and it is a very efficient way to generate a pixel that is arguably as good as a native pixel, we made the hardware investment to be able to enable that in RDNA 4.
Journalist: When you say you are targeting the sweet spot, not going after the ultra high end, what are we talking? Sub-$1,000? Sub-$700?
Azor: Sub-$1,000 for sure.
McAfee: Significantly below $2,000.
Azor: That’s the focus on RDNA 4. Focus on what gamers actually care about.
Journalist: So do you have one message that you want people coming out of this room to take away about RDNA 4 and Radeon and why it wasn’t in the keynote?
McAfee: I think the biggest thing that I would say is, graphics products and graphics launches are complicated, and there’s a lot that has to be explained to really do it justice. And we wanted to make sure as we launch our RDNA 4, we do it justice, and we cover the hardware improvements, the technology, the software, the FSR, the driver enhancements, like all of that needs to be covered to really satisfy what gaming enthusiasts care about.
Azor: There was a no-win scenario that, at the end of the day, we debated all these different options that our customers, the gamers, the market were going to walk away from today. Had we included it in there for four or five or eight minutes, would they be like, “Wow, that was amazing. I was blown away by it”? No. So why do that?
Let’s give it its proper time. Let’s give it time and let’s win. Let’s put together a recipe it’s going to win — positioning, performance, pricing, the time that it deserves — and show people that we actually do care about gaming and not feed the narrative that “Here’s five minutes in an AI PC keynote. They don’t care about gaming.” Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 8 Jan (PC World)At a glanceExpert`s Rating
Pros
Imaging, file backup, sync, and disaster recovery
Super-friendly interface
Disaster recovery media even with the free version
1TB of online storage for $40
Cons
A bit on the pricey side
Telemetry
Doesn’t support third-party cloud storage natively
A couple of minor non-fatal errors
Our Verdict
Slicker than ever, super capable, and super easy to use, ToDo Backup 2025 has become one of our favorite backup suites.
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Though it’s a slow burn with enhancements, Easeus ToDo Backup has gradually developed into one of the most capable backup suites on the market. It also features the most efficient workflow we’ve seen and is supremely fast. There’s even a surprisingly competent free version. A short-lister for sure, though I ran into a couple of non-fatal operational issues.
What are EaseUS ToDo Backup Home 2025’s features?
As mentioned, ToDo Backup is a suite featuring whole drive and partition imaging, file and folder backup, as well as one-way and two-way sync. It also offers the ability to clone disks, a pre-OS recovery environment (recover the system without a boot disc), and a secure (hidden) partition for safely storing backups.
Further reading: See our roundup of the best Windows backup software to learn about competing products.
EaseUS ToDo Backup 2025 offers a number of handy features including a hidden secure recovery partition.
There’s also a WinPE recovery disc featuring a full version of the program for restoring files, or even making new backups. You can even log on to your EaseUS account if you’re using the company’s online storage.
The ability to back up from the recovery disc can be handy if you’re looking to safeguard the data on a failing machine that you aren’t sure has been backed up recently. When I help friends recover data, I always create a full image of the drive in question before diving in with other recovery and repair utilities.
ToDo Backup 2025 running from the recovery disc.Foundry
ToDo Backup also sports one of the latest en vogue features — backup protection. As ToDo Backup (like others) features an agent running in the background, it monitors your backup files and warns you if there’s any attempt to delete them. This includes by you. My only issue with this feature is that when you select the drives to protect, the dialog doesn’t show you the name of the drives.
ToDo Backup allows you to protect your backups from accidental deletion.
Other features include granular scheduling, full support for network locations (read/write), compression, encryption, task priority, splitting of images, as well as pre-run and post-run commands. There’s also an offsite copy option, which allows you to create a second copy of any backup on an FTP site. Why this doesn’t extend to the cloud, or SMB, or even another local storage location I can’t say. That would be super handy.
Generally speaking, I found the ToDo Backup 2025 interface a joy. While all the options for backups are on the same page, there’s a list of general categories on the left that when chosen, scrolls quickly to the related options.
In particular I really enjoyed the way ToDo Backup 2025 handles the restore chore. If you’re using a full partition backup, you can of course restore it wholesale, overwriting the existing partition. However, there’s also a file mode button. If you hit that, the window morphs into an individual file and folder restore dialog.
While I love the ToDo Backup 2025 interface in general, I’d prefer not to be asked to “please wait patiently” while a backup is proceeding. “In progress” would do just fine. Also, not overwriting an existing file during a restore isn’t a “fail,” it’s merely skipping a file that doesn’t need to be restored.
Generally speaking, I found the ToDo Backup 2025 interface a joy.
The online cloud storage interface. I hadn’t tested it at this time.
Though I find the integrated EaseUS Cloud handy, and $40 for 1TB of capacity is an exceptional deal (OneDrive is $70, though it includes the full version of Office), it would still be nice if EaseUS supported some third-party repositories. That said, you can leverage those with any backup software by employing a cloud manager.
How much is EaseUS ToDo 2025 Backup?
ToDo Backup is available either by subscription or with a perpetual license, and there are some hefty (40%) educational discounts.
As noted, if you’re looking for cloud storage, $40 a year for 1TB is one of the better deals out there, even forgetting the included software. $60 gets you a perpetual ToDo Backup license, and an additional $20 gets you said perpetual license plus lifetime upgrades.
If you’re looking for cloud storage, $40 a year for 1TB is one of the better deals out there. And you get a highly competent backup suite as well.
You can save a bit of coin on ToDo Backup if you’re a student — 1TB of online storage for only $24 is a steal.
You can save a bit of coin on ToDo Backup if you’re a student, and 1TB of online storage for only $24 is a steal.
EaseUS hadn’t confirmed it, but generally speaking when a subscription runs out, you’ll have 30 days to retrieve your data from the cloud, and restore functionality remains intact. It’s unlikely the company could disable backup on the boot disc (especially without an internet connection), so this likely remains functional as well.
How does ToDo Backup 2025 perform?
In general, ToDo Backup worked very well, and exceptionally quickly. However, there were a couple of non-fatal oddities.
Both a two-way and a one-way sync of My Documents continually complained about the My Pictures, My Videos, and My Music folders not syncing when they’re not actually included in the original folder or mirror. See below.
The offending folders didn’t exist at either end of this two-way sync. Mystery errors.
Also, even though I added nearly a terabyte to my D: drive, subsequent imaging runs didn’t copy the additional data. A brand-new imaging job on the same drive failed similarly. The issue turned out to be that much of the data I copied there was an existing ToDo Backup image that the program decided to skip. Go figure. Other large files that I used copied off fine.
On the other hand, as mentioned, speed was exceptional and then some. It took the program only around 13 minutes to create a 700GB image file using the fast compression algorithm to a second internal NVMe SSD. It took R-Drive Image over a half hour to accomplish the same task.
ToDo Backup 2025 offers three clone modes, though the first two are essentially the same thing.
Cloning the 700GB system drive took a breezy 26 minutes, and ToDo Backup didn’t mind that I was cloning a 2TB SSD to a 1TB SSD. It simply resized the partitions without complaint or my instructions.
Restoring the full image was almost as fast as creating it; however, a complete restore of individual files and folders was estimated for 16 hours for the 600GB. Ahem. I bailed on that and highly recommend using File Mode only for small sets of files. Something it’s eminently handy for.
You can easily switch between full image and file/folder restore on the same page
One of the reasons I might favor ToDo Backup over, say, Acronis True Image, is that there’s only one process running in the background compared to True Image’s 12, although Acronis is doing a lot of malware checking. That said, neither program affected system response subjectively.
Something I consider a peccadillo is calling continuous backup “real time,” as does ToDo Backup. It’s very granular continuous backup, but the new files I created took a minute or two to propagate to the sync destination. Good enough for most scenarios, but not real time, which is immediate.
This entry in ToDo Backup 2025’s extensive logs show how fast it cloned a system disk.
In general, I was pleased with ToDo Backup’s performance, but as I’ve said many times: A low tolerance for failure is required when reviewing backup programs. This is users’ data we’re talking about and I don’t want to cause tears.
While neither of the issues I experienced was fatal, they diminished my trust in the programmers and EaseUS quality control. I’m assuming the errors will be fixed in short order, but they cost the program half a star.
Should you buy ToDo Backup 2025?
I must admit, ToDo Backup 2025 gives our favorite — R-Drive Image — more than a run for its money in terms of features and ease of use. Additionally, ToDo Backup 2025’s interface will be a better fit for many users.
So the answer is — yes, qualified by my not-quite-complete faith in all the operations. But 1TB of online storage for $40/$24 a year is appealing and then some. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 7 Jan (PC World)Feit Electic-owned LIFX impressed us last year with a smart ceiling light that glowed in multiple colors and worked with Matter. Now, the brand is using the same multi-zone color concept for its first smart lamp, unveiled Monday at CES.
Slated to ship in February, the LIFX Luna Smart Lamp boasts a squat, oval-shaped design, with a flat translucent face that glows in variety of gradient colors thanks to 26 discretely addressable color zones.
The 1,000-lumen Luna can sit upright on a desk, a bedside table, or another flat surface, or it can be mounted on a wall.
LIFX
Sitting on the top side of the Matter-enabled Luna are four customizable buttons that respond to different types of inputs, including single-presses, a double-press, or a press-and-hold. You can configure those buttons to control the Luna’s brightness, color scenes, or other settings, or the buttons can control other Matter devices in the room.
Even better, the buttons can take charge of other Matter products without the need of an internet connection, thanks to the device-to-device binding functionality in the Matter 1.3 specification.
For now, the Luna’s Matter connectivity only works via Wi-Fi. That said, the Luna ($69.99) has a Thread-capable chip, which LIFX plans to activate later this year.
Smart Oval SuperColor Ceiling Light
Meanwhile, LIFX is showing off a new version of its SuperColor ceiling light—and like the Luna, it’s oval-shaped, as opposed to the circular design of LIFX’s original ceiling fixture.
The 13 x 26-inch Smart Oval SuperColor Ceiling Light ($149.99, shipping in February) comes with 120 color zones, and Matter compatibility means you can use it with Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, or Samsung SmartThings.
The LIFX app features dozens of lighting scenes or you can create your own, from “stunning gradients” and “flickering flames” to “fluffy clouds” and “golden sunsets,” LIFX says.
LIFX
The original LIFX SuperColor Ceiling light came out last summer, and it snagged our Editors’ Choice award for its “extremely easy” installation, its “bevy” of lighting features, and its excellent light quality.
We’re expecting to get review samples for both the LIFX Luna Smart Lamp and the Smart Oval SuperColor Ceiling Light soon, so stay tuned for our full reviews. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 7 Jan (PC World)At a glanceExpert`s Rating
Pros
Big, beefy battery
No subscription required—or even needed
Sturdy, if industrial, Construction
Cons
Some physical installation problems
Rough around the edges, with numerous features either missing or not working well
Camera is of middling quality, and it doesn’t record much anyway
Tuya Smart Life app needs a forklift upgrade
Our Verdict
Too pricy and too buggy, this video doorbell-plus-smart lock feels rushed at best, a misfire at worst.
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Our first round with TCL’s line of smart locks revealed a capable if still evolving device, the TCL D1 Pro, which uses a camera to scan the vein patterns in your palm as a means of unlocking your front door. TCL also has a second product in the lock space, the TCL D1 Max, which uses its integrated camera in a more traditional way: as part of a video doorbell.
Like many locks that integrate a doorbell into a single piece of hardware, training visitors to push a button on the door instead of next to it is perhaps the most problematic challenge that awaits you. With the TCL D1 Max, that issue is amplified because it’s not immediately obvious to outsiders that the lock includes a doorbell at all, thanks to some odd and incomplete design decisions.
The exterior design is certainly weird: A large silver button embossed with an image of a bell appears at the base of the exterior escutcheon, but unlike on most doorbells, this icon only lights up after the doorbell button has been pressed. (This large button pops off, dangling by its cable, to reveal a physical keyhole.)
The TCL app’s video surveillance feature loads quickly and offers the same functions as if someone had pressed the doorbell button.
Above this section you’ll find the lock’s numeric keypad, split into two halves on either side of the camera lens (capturing video at 1536 x 2048 pixels with a 172-degree viewing angle) and an otherwise unmarked fingerprint sensor. The keypad is non-traditional, with odd numbers vertically lined up on the left, even numbers on the right. For users accustomed to a telephone-style arrangement, this change can take some getting used to. An emergency USB-C port can be found at the bottom of the escutcheon.
The TCL D1 Max’s doorbell button pops off and hangs by its cable to reveal a physical key hole.Christopher Null/Foundry
On the whole, the lock is not overly attractive: All black and angular, the design feels very industrial. The lock carries no ANSI or BHMA certifications, but its Amazon listing (there’s no official web presence) claims IP65 weatherproofing, which our IP code guide indicates should render it dustproof and capable of withstanding water jets from any direction. We explain ANSI and BHMA lock ratings in the article at the preceding link.
Inside the house, the escutcheon is more traditional, though large in size at 7 inches tall. The escutcheon is all black save for an odd touch of chrome that circles the thumb-turn. Strangely, you can also choose to lock or unlock the door by pressing a small button above the thumb-turn, saving you the trouble of needing to manually twist it. The lock is powered by a rechargeable 10,000mAh battery, but TCL doesn’t include a charging cable (USB-C) or a power adapter.
Installation and setup
As with the TCL D1 Pro, the D1 Max isn’t the easiest to install, though I’ve encountered a lot worse in the past. The first catch involves the latch component, the barrel of which, bizarrely, is just a little too big around to fit easily into the channel of a standard door. I had to hammer the latch into place with a mallet; other users may need to widen the latch channel in the door with a drill.
This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart locks.
The exterior escutcheon connects to an interior mounting plate with bolts, and as with the D1 Pro, you’ll need to know the width of your door in order to choose bolts of the correct length. Multiple components have sticky tape pre-installed which you can use to help keep the lock in place, though I found the lock sturdy enough and didn’t feel it needed the extra tape as support.
You’ll need to thread two cables through the door to connect the TCL D1 Max.Christopher Null/Foundry
Two cables snake through to the interior escutcheon, which mounts on the interior plate with four screws of two different sizes. Picking out the correct ones from the array of hardware in the TCL box can be confusing, so be patient and thorough. After all the screws are in place, a strip of plastic slips on top of the bottommost mounting screws to cover them up. Altogether, it makes for a non-traditional installation befitting a decidedly non-traditional product. Be sure to refer to the manual closely to avoid headaches during the physical setup process so you don’t miss anything and need to start over.
One final component in the box is an extra chime that sits inside the house. This is a simple device with an integrated USB-A plug. It’s up to you to figure out where and how to power it. This chime pairs simply to the lock once it’s been set up via a button-hold operation outlined in the manual. The chime includes four volume settings and more than 25 choices of chime tones; both are selectable via dedicated buttons on the side of the device.
Electronic setup is less well-documented than the physical setup of the lock, and I had trouble with this from the beginning. Like the D1 Pro, the D1 Max works with the Tuya Smart Life app, which is a low-grade, generic cloud service used by all kinds of imported smart devices. After I put the D1 Max into Wi-Fi configuration mode, I expected the Smart Life app to automatically discover the lock as it had the D1 Pro, but this wasn’t the case.
The doorbell chime is useful, but you’ll need to provide the AC adapter and cable needed to power it.Christopher Null/Foundry
In fact, I never got the standard Wi-Fi connection mode to work at all and had to switch to the QR Code-based configuration, which puts a code on your phone’s screen and has you display it to the lock’s integrated camera. This method fortunately worked fine, and soon I had the lock onboarded to my network (only 2.4GHz networks are supported).
From here you can set up users and access codes—including up to 100 PINs and 100 fingerprints—each tied to a user in the “Member management” section of the app. Each user can have multiple PINs and prints, and users can be assigned as permanent or restricted by time/day-of-week. (All codes for a single user are subject to the same restrictions, if you set them.) Separately, temporary passwords that are not assigned to a user can be designated as “Custom,” with a set ending time, or “dynamic,” which expire in 5 minutes. “Special passwords,” which can be used to indicate the user is in trouble, are also supported here as they are on the D1 Pro.
Using the TCL D1 Max
When the doorbell button is pressed, a push notification is delivered to your phone, which, when tapped, opens a live video stream of the lock’s camera. You can choose here to answer the ring like a video call, at which point you can click to talk to them, unlock the door, or capture a series of stills or a video clip. It’s important to note that video isn’t captured and stored when the doorbell is rung—only a single still shot is saved to the app’s photo album. Oddly, the lock does record video when it detects human motion, but this was very erratic in my testing. In one single day of heavy use, I only got the camera to detect motion twice.
“Video surveillance” is where you go to view live video on demand. This loads quickly and offers the same functions as if someone had pressed the doorbell button. “Album/Log” provides access to your stored clips/photos, as well as a robust but slightly confusing log of all lock and unlock activity, complete with the user ID of whoever opened the door. The two sections—photos/videos and lock activity—are wholly separate.
TCL’s app has all the features you’d expect to find in support of a smart lock with an integrated video doorbell, including a camera view, two-way audio, and detailed activity logs.Christopher Null/Foundry
Out of the box, the unit will store videos for 3 days and still images for 14 days, without requiring a subscription. You can upgrade this via a subscription to Tuya’s cloud service to get 7 days of rolling storage for $3.19/month or $32/year, or 30 days of storage for $7/month or $70/year. Neither seem like a particularly good investment for these short, erratic clips.
Additional features are limited to an auto-locking option (after 5 to 900 seconds), volume control, and the ability to disable the onboard doorbell chime (this does not disable the remote chime from sounding if the doorbell button is pressed). As with the D1 Pro, five failed attempts to open the door initiate a one-minute lockout (and will capture a video of whoever’s standing there); this behavior can’t be altered. Some support for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa is also included.
Probably the best thing I can say about the D1 Max is that the lock component works well. The fingerprint scanner—while not obvious in placement—never missed a beat in my testing, and the keypad—while awkwardly laid out—is large enough to make it easy to hit the digit you’re aiming for. It’s fast to respond to in-person or app commands, and I never suffered from any disconnects.
When powered up, the TCL D1 Max has a numeric keypad on either side of its its doorbell camera and fingerprint reader.Christopher Null/Foundry
Video is about what you’d expect at such a generally low resolution, it’s fine for casual use but nothing you’d want for securing the homestead in earnest. I couldn’t make out faces beyond a range of about 5 feet, and less than that when the infrared night vision kicked in.
Should you buy a TCL D1 Max?
The bottom line is that the D1 Max is a pretty clunky smart lock, feeling in just about every way like it’s a version 1.0 edition of hardware that will likely get significant refinements as time goes on. In its current state it’s difficult to recommend, particularly since the video function is largely useless, and any number of smart locks without a camera/doorbell built in would be much cheaper than the D1 Max’s $300 MSRP.
Ultimately, the good features of the D1 Max just don’t come close to making up for its failings. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 7 Jan (PC World)At a glanceExpert`s Rating
Pros
Clean, extremely simple interface
Alternative ID lets you mask your whole identity, not just an email address
VPN service is solid
Cons
Full scans hit PC performance hard
Very few settings to adjust
Not as many features as similarly priced rivals
Our Verdict
If VPN coverage is your first priority, and you’re already sold on Surfshark’s VPN, subscribing to Surfshark One will give access to seemingly adequate antivirus protection. However, if you’re primarily in the market for antivirus software, you’ll get more bang for your buck with a different suite—and a rival won’t hit your system performance nearly so hard.
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Surfshark is well-known for its VPN service, but if you subscribe to its higher tier plans, antivirus gets included as part of the package, too.
That can be a plus for those who already know and love Surfshark’s interface, as the app is extremely clean and simple. But while Surfshark offers adequate malware protection, a couple of caveats make it a harder sell, especially if you’re seeking lightweight, antivirus-focused security software.
Further reading: Do you really need a VPN as part of your antivirus software?
Surfshark One: What does it include?
Pricing for a 12-month term.PCWorld
Surfshark offers real-time scanning that hunts for malware, suspicious links, and dodgy email attachments; web protection that blocks dangerous links and remote access initiated by bad actors and unauthorized webcam access (currently a beta feature, but available to users). Additionally, system scans dig into vulnerable parts of your PC (like registry items) to look for oddities or changes.
The Surfshark One suite also includes access to the company’s VPN service (arguably the star of the show—more on that below), data breach monitoring, its “alternative ID” service that lets you create a profile with a fake email address, name, address, and birth date to feed to websites, and a private search engine.
Unlike many security suites, Surfshark does not include a firewall as part of its software.
If VPN coverage is your first priority (and you’re already sold on Surfshark’s VPN), subscribing to Surfshark One should expand your security protection to include seemingly adequate antivirus protection.
Surfshark One: How much does it cost?
Surfshark One supports up to five devices for antivirus and lets you install the software on Windows, macOS, and Android devices. For the VPN, you can install the software on unlimited devices and more platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Edge).
Surfshark One gets cheaper the more time you pay for upfront. If you buy a 12-month plan, it currently costs $55 for the first year, and includes four bonus months. If you buy a 24-month plan, it costs $70 for the first year and also includes four bonus months.
Afterward, Surfshark will charge $79 per year (or whatever renewal price is most current). Two-year plans will revert to one-year plans for renewal. Otherwise, a monthly subscription is $18 per month.
By default, users are enrolled in auto-renewal. Renewals are charged 30 days before the term refreshes. The company offers refunds if requested within the first 30 days of signup.
Surfshark One: Key features
Installation & account setup
To install the Surfshark app, you’ll first need to create an account and purchase a subscription—and the process can be slightly awkward. A standard passphrase from our password manager (e.g., correct-horse-battery-staple) wasn’t accepted. We had to add a special character to meet the requirements. Also, you only enter the password once, so you can easily type in something different than you think you entered.
Surfshark does allow password resets, but they can be quirky. After I performed one, trying the new password gave a “There have been too many attempts to log in” error message. I had to wait about five minutes before the new password worked.
Once you have an account, you’ll use your login for the app and the web interface.
User interface
Surfshark’s first screen (and tab in the left navigation bar) is for the VPN.PCWorld
Currently, Surfshark’s antivirus protection serves as an addition to its VPN—not the other way around, as with most antivirus suites.
The app’s layout puts the emphasis on the VPN: It’s the first item in the left navigation bar, which fully slides out when you hover your mouse on that side of the window. The second and third tabs are for the Alternative ID and Alert features, which link to the web interface. Then finally comes Antivirus… but you must first install the antivirus component of the software for your PC to be protected. If you’re expecting antivirus protection from the start, this extra step can feel cumbersome (and a little annoying).
Overall, the app is pared down and minimalist—not at all technical. Every screen is simple but clean and easy to understand. There’s no home screen or dashboard. For each feature, the window is divided into two sections, with a main center pane and a right-hand sidebar.
The main area shows information related to the feature (e.g., scan options for antivirus) while the sidebar shows the feature’s status (e.g., if scan is occurring and its progress). Surfshark puts all options in these screens, so you don’t have to dig elsewhere. Also, in a nice touch, you can resize the window to see more (or less) information at once.
Surfshark’s antivirus screen.PCWorld
Meanwhile, Surfshark’s settings are sparse, especially in the app. The only real adjustment you can make to scans are if they automatically include external drives, for example. Outside of the options within each feature screen, you can really only tinker with the VPN.
The companion web interface isn’t much more robust. Though it mirrors the look of the app, with a similar layout of left navigation bar, main screen, and right sidebar, you primarily use it to manage just two features: Alternative ID and Alert. If you also subscribe to Surfshark’s separate, optional “Incogni” data broker removal service (an additional $4 per month), you’ll control it via the web as well.
However, the web interface does have a few more extended settings for features—manual VPN settings live here, as well as device management for antivirus coverage. It can be confusing at first, but with how simple Surfshark is, adapting to the split interfaces comes pretty quick.
Virus, malware, and threat protection
Real-time protection
Like other antivirus software, Surfshark remains on alert for threats, both local and online. On your PC, it examines opened or added files, screens downloaded email for sketchy links and attachments (including .zip and other archive files), and watches for unusual behavior from apps.
When you’re online, the app stays on the lookout for malicious downloads, as well as suspicious links (including phishing attempts). It’ll also block unauthorized use of your webcam, so long as you enable webcam protection, which is still a beta feature.
Scheduled and manual scans
Among the few options you can tweak for Surfshark’s antivirus is the scheduled scan timing.PCWorld
By default, Surfshark scans your system on a daily basis. A quick scan runs on six of the days, while a full scan happens on the seventh. Both are set for the time you first install the app. You can also perform an on-demand scan—this defaults to just the installed drive on your PC, unless you’ve turned on scans of external storage drives. You can also choose a specific file or folder.
During both quick and full scans, Surfshark examines registry items, network settings, Windows’ boot sector, drivers (and affiliated areas), as well as often targeted folders (Downloads, Documents, Desktop). For a broader critical look at your files, run the full scan.
For quick and full scans, you can adjust schedule and timing, but not what is scanned. Settings are also extremely minimal—you can choose to turn on automatic scanning of external storage drives during quick and full scans, automatic scanning of external storage drives when first connected, and if quarantined items are automatically deleted.
VPN
Surfshark’s primary service is its virtual private network, which securely routes your traffic so that it registers as coming from a different location. (Useful if you want to remain anonymous, or look at content not available in your region.) Its antivirus is not available as an independent subscription—rather, malware protection is an add-on feature as you move up to more expensive plans.
You can read PCWorld’s full thoughts on Surfshark’s VPN in our review, but overall, the experience is mostly smooth and streamlined when it works. (More on that in just a moment.) You can use the VPN on an unlimited number of devices, and while active, the service automatically blocks ads and pop-ups, as well as cookie consent notifications.
You also have the option to do multi-hop connections, which sends your online traffic through two VPN services for greater anonymity. If you need to run an app or access a website independent of the VPN, you can specifically set them to bypass it.
For the VPN’s advanced settings, you must head to the web portal.PCWorld
I found that Surfshark didn’t work at all locations. While on a Hilton hotel’s public Wi-Fi network, the app struggled (and effectively failed) to connect, citing limited access through the hotel’s network. Meanwhile, rival ProtonVPN connected immediately. When asked, Surfshark cited possible firewall rules, DNS filtering, or port management that could have blocked access to the VPN servers.
For locations, you can choose dedicated servers in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Additional virtual servers are available as well, though they’re of most use to those who care about location rather than privacy. Surfshark also makes clear in the app which are the fastest servers.
Surfshark One: Additional features
Alternative ID
One of Surfshark’s more unique features is Alternative ID, which not only creates masked email addresses but a whole false identity to help preserve your identity online.
By default, these are randomly generated. For email masks, ten domains exist (the part that comes after “@”), with an oddly strong sea theme. Five of the domains are obviously based on fish names and the randomly generated usernames often use the name of an aquatic creature. Fortunately, you can manually edit the suggestions, in case you’re aiming for a different vibe.
Alternative ID is a unique feature that lets you mask your identity online, not just your email address.PCWorld
For the identity, you get assigned a full name and address. (I became Hector, a guy living in Tasmania, Australia.) Like the email masks, you can edit what the app spins together, in case you want a different name, gender, or general locale. You can’t choose a specific address, only the country and state/province, with just six countries as options—the US, Denmark, Australia, Germany, Portugal, and Brazil.
The suggested addresses are real—Surfshark says it uses a “publicly available address database provided by governmental institutions.” So if your home is part of a public database (and it very likely is), it could get used for someone else’s fake identity.
Surfshark also offers the ability to mask your phone number, but you must pay an additional subscription fee of $2.50 per month. Virtual phone numbers are limited to USA country codes, and can receive calls and text messages. You can reply to text messages through your virtual number but not return calls.
Surfshark Alert
Labeled simply Alert, this feature looks for appearances of your email addresses in data breaches—as well as any leaked passwords, personal information, or IP addresses tied to a particular email address. For the Surfshark One subscription, you can track an unlimited number of email addresses. You can also monitor unlimited credit card and ID numbers (e.g., social security number) through this feature.
Alerts are managed in the web interface, with several settings you can tweak related to data breach reports and data breach alerts.
Surfshark Search
Surfshark says its search feature relies on third-party APIs.PCWorld
Surfshark offers a search engine that it says allows private searching for “truly organic results.” The company does not maintain the engine itself; instead it says it relies on “third-party APIs.”
You can initiate a search from the web interface or the app, but ultimately, you’ll get pointed to https://search.surfshark.com/. You can just bookmark this address for use, though it’s only available if you’re logged into your Surfshark account on that browser.
Search results are generally streamlined, with a mix of sources that include Reddit posts and YouTube videos. You can choose between Web, Images, and Videos for result types, and also change the locale to a different country. If you’re used to the additional helpful answers and suggested links from search engines like Google and Bing, Surfshark’s results may feel a bit bare-bones.
Surfshark One: Customer support
You can access Surfshark’s support and help pages through the app (Settings > Get help). From there, you can jump directly to popular support pages. Alternatively, you can head to the company’s help and contact page. To get in touch with Surfshark, you’ll file a help request or use chat.
From these settings, you can also run Surfshark’s troubleshooting tools—Collect Diagnostics (which aids the Surfshark team in identifying issues), Reset network, and Restore original settings.
Surfshark One: Updates and maintenance
Virus database updates happen automatically in the background every three hours, as well as every time a scan starts. You can’t otherwise adjust the timing, though you can manually check for new virus definitions.
Surfshark One: Performance
Currently, Surfshark does not have data for the most recent tests from AV-Test and AV-Comparatives, two independent security organizations who evaluate antivirus software performance. However, in AV-Test’s zero-day exploit and malware tests for May and June 2024, Surfshark took home perfect scores. It caught 100 percent of the 225 zero-day attack samples and 14,498 widespread and prevalent malware samples.
(Note: Antivirus software companies voluntarily elect to participate in AV-Test’s benchmarks. When asked about its participation frequency, Surfshark said: “We don’t see the need to perform these every couple of months, as these tests are exactly the same month over month with just different malware samples. We normally perform these tests when we see a change in the malware landscape, or we want to test a new backend feature and verify the improved performance independently”).
Surfshark last elected to be evaluated by AV-Test in June 2024.PCWorld
When left to run in the background, Surfshark affects system performance fairly little. The real-time scanner only caused under a two percent decrease for the score in PCMark 10, which simulates video conferencing, web browsing, and editing in open-source document and image apps.
Similarly, in our Handbrake encode test, which involves crunching down a large video into a smaller 1080p30 file, the increase in time to complete the task was also under two percent. Surfshark’s screening does increase when editing documents in Microsoft Office programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—UL’s Procyon benchmark scores dropped by almost nine percent.
On the flip side, Surfshark can drag hard on your PC’s resources during full scans. On our budget laptop, running a continuous scan dropped PCMark 10 scores by a notable 36 percent—and that was the smallest impact. Procyon results decreased by a whopping 53 percent, and Handbrake encodes shot up in time needed by a painful 72 percent.
Of course, you can mitigate this effect by changing the schedule of system scans (especially full scans) to happen during off-hours. And with this much of an effect, you definitely want to steer clear of scan times—which could be a potential issue for those who are active on their PCs for most hours of a day.
Surfshark One: Is it worth it?
If VPN coverage is your first priority (and you’re already sold on Surfshark’s VPN), subscribing to Surfshark One should expand your security protection to include seemingly adequate antivirus protection. However, if you’re primarily in the market for antivirus software, you’ll get more bang for your buck with a different suite—and a rival won’t hit your system performance nearly so hard. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 7 Jan (PC World)Athom unveiled its newest smart home hub at CES 2025 Monday morning. Like its full-sized sibling, the Homey Pro Mini doesn’t rely on the cloud for operation, a feature that allows homeowners a truly local and private experience. With a price tag of $199, this compact yet powerful hub promises to bring privacy-first, highly compatible smart home management to a broader audience.
The Homey Pro Mini is not just another entry in the increasingly crowded smart home market. It stands apart by delivering full functionality without requiring an internet connection, ensuring faster performance, greater reliability, and a robust layer of privacy. Athom, now under LG’s wing following its acquisition in mid-2024, has doubled down on its commitment to creating solutions that empower users to control their homes locally.
This news is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart home systems.
The Homey Pro Mini operates entirely on-premises, leveraging a quad-core ARMv8 processor and 1GB of RAM to deliver smooth automation for up to 20 Homey apps. The average household installs only 14 apps, according to Homey, so this device promises to hit a sweet spot for performance and scalability.
Athom
Embedded Zigbee, Matter, and Thread radios ensure compatibility with over 50,000 smart devices from more than 1,000 brands. Athom’s proprietary Homey Flow and Advanced Flow automation systems allow users to create seamless routines, including energy management and custom notifications. For users who need additional compatibility with Z-Wave, Bluetooth LE, Infrared, or 433 MHz devices, the Mini pairs with the Homey Bridge ($69), extending its capabilities without compromising its local-first philosophy.
Athom delivers privacy without sacrificing features at a low cost
Most smart hubs require a constant internet connection to work, but the Homey Pro Mini’s local-first design ensures that all operations remain within the home. This eliminates the delays and vulnerabilities associated with cloud processing while delivering the speed and reliability users expect.
Despite its local focus, the Homey Pro Mini also includes optional cloud services including the Homey App Store, remote access, and voice assistant integrations with Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri. All these features are free of charge. This hybrid approach caters to users who value their privacy but still want the convenience of remote control and broader ecosystem integration.
The Homey Pro Mini’s $199 price promises to make it one of the most accessible, full-featured smart home hubs on the market. Easy setup and standalone functionality offers renters and homeowners alike an alternative to hubs that require complex installations or expensive subscriptions. Athom has also included local backup options with cloud backups available for a modest 99 cents per month, ensuring that users can maintain their automations effortlessly.
Available for pre-order in the U.S. and Canada, the Homey Pro Mini is set to ship in April 2025, with a European rollout planned shortly thereafter. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | Aardvark - 6 Jan (Aardvark)AI looks as if it could deal a deathly blow to the internet as we`ve known it
and that could happen as early as this year. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Aardvark |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 6 Jan (RadioNZ) Internet searches for `AI pet` have also increased since the end of 2022, according to Google Trends. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 6 Jan (RadioNZ) The report said the deal involves SpaceX supplying Italy with a full range of encryption for telephone and internet services used by the government. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
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