With Meshnet, the VPN service NordVPN offers a function for securely connecting multiple devices. If Meshnet is activated in the desktop app on the PC and on in the app on a mobile device, it works like a secure LAN connection. Up to 10 of your own devices or up to 50 other NordVPN users can be connected directly to each other. This makes Meshnet suitable for sharing files, teamwork, and multiplayer games, for example. With just a few taps, you can send a document, photo, or video from your smartphone to other users and devices — securely and encrypted directly. The action must be confirmed there and the file is saved locally moments later. Once set up, Meshnet works like a secure local area network (LAN): It connects PCs, smart phones, tablets, and other devices directly with each other via an app.NordVPN There are no restrictions on the size or type of file that can be transferred. On Windows computers, the Meshnet function is also available directly via the context menu from File Explorer. The function is part of all paid NordVPN subscriptions. NordVPN Read our review Best Prices Today: $3.39 at NordVPN (Monthly) Meshnet is also useful for online gamers. The gaming VPN can offer maximum speed with low latency. The lower the ping time, the better the gaming experience. If several gamers have connected to a multiplayer game via Meshnet, a secure, encrypted, and optimized connection is established between the computers. Further reading: I swore ExpressVPN was the best. Then I switched to NordVPN Read...

The Nintendo Switch 2 might be landing tomorrow—if not, then at least we should be getting details about pre-ordering and when to expect the handheld to arrive. If you plan on getting one, then it’s time to start preparing… and one thing you’ll want is extra storage space for games. That means you’re going to need a fast and spacious microSD card, and it just so happens that SanDisk’s special 256GB microSD card is only $21 at Amazon right now. This one’s licensed for the Nintendo Switch and themed with a Mario Super Star, plus performant enough to handle your games with aplomb. With a 22% discount, this is a fun and practical get. This SanDisk microSD card supports read speeds of up to 100 MB/s and write speeds of up to 90 MB/s, which is enough to move files and save data in a flash while reliably backing up all your game data. And even though rumors say that the Nintendo Switch 2 will feature a bit more storage space than the Switch, it’s way too easy to run out of space with how big modern games have gotten. One microSD card is the minimum! So take advantage of this timely deal and get yourself the 256GB SanDisk Nintendo Switch microSD card on sale before the Switch 2 launches. (Other themes are also on sale, but not at this price. The Pikachu version is $30 while the Fortnite Cuddle Team Leader version is $26. All of them have the exact same specs.) Add an extra 256GB to your Nintendo Switch 2 for just $21Buy now at Amazon Read...

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If you’re playing audio on a desktop replacement laptop with a six-speaker-strong configuration, something like the Razer Blade 18 with its four woofers, two tweeters, and additional three smart amps, then you’re probably not going to be lacking volume in your media. Then again, if you’re rocking a four-, or two-speaker system in a light and thin laptop, then even when Windows’ volume setting is 100 percent, your audio is likely to still be underwhelming at times. In that case you’re going to want to tune your volume past Windows’ 100 percent volume limit. Some guides recommend using Windows Volume Mixer to do this, but Windows Volume Mixer generally won’t give you the option to surpass 100 percent for each app or program. Changing the registry isn’t advisable either since it can cause system instability. You’re better off using the following methods… What to do… Method 1: Use VLC media player VLC media player is available for download on the Microsoft store so it’s readily available. Just a disclaimer: You may not want to raise the volume to VLC’s maximum 300 percent volume since this could damage your speakers. Here’s what to do: First download and install the VLC app from the Microsoft store. Select Tools from the top menu, then Preferences. Below Show Settings toggle All. From the left select Main Interfaces, then Qt. Scroll down on the right until you see the category Maximum Volume displayed. In the box, type the value of the volume setting above 100 percent you want. Now close the tab to save your new setting. Dominic Bayley / Foundry Method 2: Install a Chrome extension If it’s just a Chrome webpage you want to raise your volume in, then Volume Master will do the trick. This will work in YouTube too, so you can use it to view the channels you subscribe to. Search for Volume Master in the Chrome Web Store. Then click Add to Chrome to make it available in Chrome. Now click the Extension button (which looks like a puzzle piece) at the top of your screen to open the extension. Choose the tab for the media that you want to raise the volume in. Use the slider to boost the volume by a value up to 600 percent. Volume Master extension works in the Chrome browser.  Dominic Bayley / Foundry Method 3: Via an Equalizer tool Most equalizer apps have to be purchased, but Equalizer APO, is open source so it’s free to download. It’s not officially supported on Windows 11, but the Windows 10 version still works for most users. Here’s how best to use it. First download Equalizer APO. Extract the zip file and launch the installer. Follow the installation instructions until you see the window named Configurator. Select the playback device that you want the Equalizer APO device to use. This will be either your speakers or headphones. Once you’ve finished the installation restart your PC. Back in Windows open File Explorer and navigate to C:\Program Files\Equalizer APO\ and open the config folder. Open config.txt with the Notepad app and change the value displayed in dB. You can change this to a maximum 20dB, but you’ll probably find 10- or 15dB is an acceptable volume boost. Changing the preamp value in Equalizer APO’s config.txt. Dominic Bayley / Foundry Tip: For best results with each of these methods you’ll want to raise the volume in increments at first to find the maximum volume you can achieve before the sound gets distorted. Remember to listen to your media at safe levels that won’t damage your hearing or your device’s speakers. Further reading: Best budget computer speakers 2025: Solid PC audio for $100 or less Read...

There are so many benefits to a docking station for your laptop, especially if you feel like your laptop doesn’t have enough ports for all your peripherals and accessories. And if you don’t have one, today’s your lucky day because this super-fast Plugable Thunderbolt 4 dock is just $75 on Amazon right now. That’s a whopping 42% off! A Thunderbolt 4 port looks like a USB-C port, but it’s a magical all-in-solution that can connect everything from high-resolution displays and ultra-fast storage drives to power chargers, all through a single cable. And while Thunderbolt 4 ports have become increasingly popular on modern laptops, docks with such ports continue to be rather pricey. That’s why this deal is so dang hot. Plugable’s 3-in-1 model turns a single Thunderbolt 4 port into three, allowing you to connect even more devices to your laptop while delivering 60W laptop charging through the hub. (You will, of course, need a laptop with at least one built-in Thunderbolt 4 to take full advantage of this. If you only have a regular USB-C port, this dock may not perform optimally.) With this dock, you’ll be able to transfer files at 40Gbps and connect two 4K displays at 60Hz each (or one 8K display with a Windows device or two 6K@60Hz monitors with a MacBook). It also comes with a USB-C-to-HDMI-2.0 adapter, allowing you to hook up a 4K HDMI display through the dock despite it not having any HDMI ports. If you have a Thunderbolt 4 laptop and wish you had more ports, it doesn’t get better than this. Grab Plugable’s 3-in-1 Thunderbolt 4 dock for just $75 on Amazon (was $130) and come out a winner. Save 42% on this Thunderbolt 4 dock with HDMI adapter includedBuy now at Amazon Read...

In 2015, I saw the best demo that you’ll probably never see: the press-only demo of the Microsoft HoloLens. This week, Microsoft celebrates its 50th anniversary on April 4, 2025, and at PCWorld we’ll be spending some time looking back on how it got here. But PCWorld also celebrated something else even more important: the life of our colleague, Gordon Mah Ung. Gordon passed away from cancer last December, and over the weekend PCWorld staff both past and present gathered together to talk about what made Gordon special. For me, it was a time to reflect. My own career began about 30 years ago, about the same time that Gordon moved over from newspapering into technology journalism. Now that he’s gone, it’s made me realize something our society struggles with; asking Gordon about his life would be a tacit acknowledgement that it was ending. It’s a shame. I wish I asked him what PCs, products, and demos made the biggest impact on him over his decades of covering technology in magazines and on the web. What stood the out strongest to a person who saw almost everything tech had to offer this century? In honor of Gordon, and just in time for Microsoft’s 50th, I want to share the coolest tech demo I’ve ever seen: the closed-doors HoloLens hands-on that Microsoft showed off on Jan. 21, 2015. Microsoft The mother of all (Microsoft) demos Microsoft doesn’t often invite journalists to its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and for me this was my first time stepping foot on its campus. In 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave what’s known as the “mother of all demos,” showing off what became the computer mouse, hyperlinking, and more. For Microsoft, that day was pretty close! Microsoft showed off Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, the HoloLens, and related apps and services, such as the Windows Xbox app. I was there for the news, but most importantly for the demos: how everything looked, felt and worked. And at the end of the presentation, there was the HoloLens. Thurrott.com’s YouTube channel shows off what the journalists in the room saw: Microsoft made a number of computers, tablets and phones available for us to try out Windows 10 and the new Windows Phone OS, and I remember being pretty impressed with Windows 10 and especially Cortana, a cheery, responsive “AI” who could answer questions and perform a number of tasks. Microsoft’s operating systems usually swung back and forth between a professional business focus (Windows 2000, for example) and excessively consumer-y, such as Windows 8. Windows 10 felt like it took some of the best elements of both worlds. While my memory of that day is a little fuzzy, what I do recall is that the HoloLens wasn’t just available to try on. It was a curated experience, and required signing up for one of several groups. At a certain time, a small cohort of reporters was escorted downstairs into the basement to try out the HoloLens in a series of one-on-one demonstrations. The most important thing for a HoloLens viewer was getting the inter-pupillary distance correctly measured. Looking the HoloLens was a bit like looking through a porthole, as the field of view was limited. Naturally, it was important to get that aligned correctly with our eyes. The demo HoloLens that the world saw that day was the slick, Daft Punk-inspired headset that eventually shipped, but we were strapped into a two-piece visor and NUC-like device, tethered by a cord. This was it: Minecraft magic I chose to highlight a virtual walk on Mars as the highlight of the HoloLens launch event, but what still sticks with me, years later, is the Minecraft (“Holo Builder”) demo. We all know Minecraft. It’s a first-person game, where you walk about and, well, mine and craft weapons and tools and building materials. While the game is randomized, the interface isn’t. You’re just a blocky person with a sword or pickaxe, wandering about. The HoloLens changed all that. I walked into a standard living room: sofa, coffee table, a couple of chairs, maybe a plant or two. The HoloLens turned them into the game. This Microsoft concept art is as close as you’ll see to what I saw. I just remember it being less complex but much more vibrant.Microsoft That blew my mind. I’d never thought of actual physical surfaces as a game board, even for someone who had thought that the “battle chess” holographic setup in Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon was pretty cool. The HoloLens allowed me a godlike view, walking around Minecraft plateaus on the couch — even allowing me to peer through “holes” in the coffee table into the fiery Underworld of the game. Of course, there was TNT — and that blew up, too. Could you flick Creepers into the abyss? I don’t really recall if “I” as a player was represented, meaning that I’m not sure if the perspective allowed by the HoloLens really allowed a “game,” per se. It was a fantastic demo, certainly, but that’s all it ever was. But that was part of what made the HoloLens (for the time) so cool; its ability to “scan” your surroundings and apply virtual reality to it. Microsoft did this with several HoloLens apps you likely never saw: a murder mystery that put “clues” in your vision, and a surprisingly fun version of the Conker platforming franchise that allowed you to basically send your character bouncing off desks and stairs. When I had my own HoloLens I literally snuck into an office building and tried playing Conker in an empty room with a staircase and other furniture. Then some lady came out and threatened to call the cops on me, ending that little adventure. Little did she know how close she was to a piece of computing history. The HoloLens would have been a great assistant What sticks with me as the second best demo was the integration of Skype into the HoloLens. Microsoft asked us to rewire a light switch — a real one, with live current flowing through it. As someone who had almost spot-welded a socket wrench while changing a car battery, I had and still have a healthy respect for electricity. What Microsoft had us do was connect to someone who knew what they were doing via Skype, allowing me to share what I was seeing. The remote person then visually highlighted what I needed to do and how to do it. Sure, it was child’s play for someone who knew what they were doing, but it validated all of the “remote assistance” business cases that Microsoft would promote throughout the life of the HoloLens and beyond. Today, how-to YouTube videos have basically replaced this idea, unfortunately, and if you still don’t understand, a handyman or plumber is always on call for a substantial fee. But a decade ago, it seemed like if I could call a call center for assistance, why shouldn’t they be able to remotely help me via the HoloLens? Objects in space may be cooler than they appear One of the people I saw this past weekend was former PCWorld games guru Hayden Dingman, who wrote a superlative series of articles on gaming and the emerging VR space. He and I both loved Tilt Brush, the “painting in space” application that both Hayden and I originally saw in 2015. Microsoft had its own take on Tilt Brush, known as Holo Studio, which allowed you to create 3D objects on the fly, basically allowing you to create them and then pin them various places in virtual space, if I remember correctly. Again, it lacked the emotional resonance that characterized Tilt Brush, and served more as an introduction to showing how the HoloLens could preserve objects in 3D space, even when you weren’t looking at them. Looking back, I’m not really sure why I loved the final demo so much, a HoloLens excursions across the surface of Mars. To be fair, the HoloLens “painted” the ground, preserving the illusion that you were walking on another planet. But peering at virtual rocks and landmarks seems less momentous now than it did at the time. (I still say — as I do every time I think about the HoloLens — that there’s still a fantastic opportunity to recreate Dream Park, the 2017 novel by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes where players LARP an augmented-reality game overlaid over real actors and objects.) Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair A year later, I was in a hotel room in San Francisco, getting an exclusive look at the HoloLens days before Microsoft allowed other reporters to test it out. In 2019, I couldn’t help but bring it out again for a night of playing with it in a darkened office and a retro review. What strikes me, of course, is that the HoloLens ultimately failed, probably doomed by the same lack of applications that ultimately led to the Windows Phone’s demise. Microsoft did produce a HoloLens 2, only to get rid of it, too. Windows Mixed Reality, the offshoot marketed at PC makers, bombed even harder. So did the metaverse. Alex Kipman, the creator of HoloLens, departed Microsoft after allegations of harassment. Ultimately, the HoloLens is the iconic product representing an entire generation of VR failure. I’ve seen early versions of smartphones and computers and consumer electronics, and even prototypes that I agreed not to talk about. One of the only other products that left me dumbfounded was the ability to “pause” live TV during the launch of TiVo and ReplayTV. But really, that was simply because of the instant, transformative effect on culture. The iPhone? No, not even that. For me, the single most mind-blowing tech demo I’ve ever experienced was the ability to peer into a coffee table, light a fuse, and launch skeletons into the air via a virtual block of TNT. I’d love to see something as cool as that yet again. Read...

Want to talk with Copilot? If you do, Microsoft is testing an intuitive little tweak to allow you to do so. On March 10, Microsoft launched a new shortcut that is rolling out as part of the Copilot app on Windows: a “long press” combination of Alt+SPACE as a press-to-talk shortcut to open the Copilot app. But who would remember that? Now, Microsoft is testing a smarter alternative as part of the Windows Insider Beta Channel, launching a “press-to-talk” voice chat by holding down the Copilot key for two seconds instead. Of course, right? It’s a much more obvious way of interacting with Copilot, period. To end the conversation, all you need to do is press the Esc key or simply wait to end the conversation, which will turn off after several seconds. You should see this roll out via an update to the Copilot app soon, via Copilot version 1.25033.139.0 and higher. Long-press shortcuts aren’t actually used within Windows, so the Copilot shortcut would break new ground here. Some third-party software uses long-press shortcuts to trigger functions within Windows, and a right-click-and-hold might be considered a long-press command. But doing so with a keyboard? To my knowledge, that’s entirely new on Windows–it’s usually a function for mobile keyboards, instead. It’s probably unlikely that too many people will want to actually chat with Copilot right now, based on what I was told was a lack of use with Cortana on Windows. But with conversational modes springing up within Copilot, Gemini, and more, it’s much more likely that users will have an ongoing conversation with Copilot. That’s what Microsoft is betting on, clearly, and the new long-press shortcut seems like a smart addition. Read...

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While laptops have their advantages, your home office workstation might be better off with a mini PC. It takes up far less space while packing way more power at any given price. Seriously, if you want performance on a budget, you can’t do better than a mini PC. Especially when you find them on sale, like this Acemagic AM08 Pro for $399 on Amazon. Down from its usual $499, this thing is 20% off, making it a solid buy for what you get: an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX processor, a jaw-dropping 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage. That’s a three-year-old processor, but it’s still going strong as it delivers game-changing performance in such a tiny package. And 32GB of RAM? That’s quite solid in 2025. Not to mention the RAM and SSD are both easy to access and user-upgradeable, so you can bump the system up to 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD on your own at some point down the road. Note that the AM08 Pro is marketed as a “gaming mini PC,” but there’s no discrete graphics card here; instead, it’s equipped with AMD Radeon 680M integrated graphics. To be fair, that’s enough to run games on moderate settings with decent performance. (Just don’t expect to crank everything up to Ultra, you know?) It’s also powerful enough to run triple 4K displays via dual HDMI 2.0 and a USB-C video port. This is an excellent machine for the price, so don’t miss out. Take advantage of this sweet deal and snag the Acemagic AM08 Pro for $399 on Amazon while you still can! Save 20% on this triple 4K mini PC with fantastic specsBuy now at Amazon Read...