A spate of toxic algae appearances in Southland has prompted warnings at rivers across the region. On Thursday, Environment Southland released an alert that harmful algae had been found at... Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros App gives you an incredible amount of detail about operating conditions Clarifying agent dispenser is available as an option Cons Very expensive for its performance and results No more effective at capturing debris than “dumb” skimmers Prone to getting stuck by running into the pool’s walls Our Verdict Beatbot’s smart skimmer comes with a sky-high price tag, but aside from its competently designed app, it doesn’t outperform one of its simpler and much less-expensive competitors. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Beatbot iSkimmer Ultra Retailer Price $1,499 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket While testing the Beatbot iSkim Ultra, it occurred to me that a pool-skimming robot probably just isn’t a very good idea. I’m not saying that the Beatbot iSkim Ultra is a bad product per se, just that, for most pool owners, robotic skimmers probably aren’t a worthwhile investment. If you have a pool pump with a thru-wall skimmer, you almost certainly don’t need a robot for the job—unless perhaps you live in such an extremely tree-laden environment that the wall skimmer can’t keep up. Even then, I can’t see how you would ever be fully satisfied with your investment in a pool skimmer which, to be frank, isn’t cheap. A ‘rocket’ button lets you double the Beatbot iSkim Ultra’s speed, which is about as much fun as you can have around the pool without getting in. The Beatbot iSkim Ultra is technically the better of the two skimmers I’ve tested to date for Techhive, and yes that is damning with the faintest of praise. At $1,199, it’s considerably more expensive than the Smonet SR5, but it did only a slightly better job at cleaning the surface of my pool. The iSkim Ultra has more features—including some wireless features—and fewer bugs; but like the Smonet, it left an awful lot of surface debris untouched at the end of the day. Paddles on each of the iSkim Ultra’s front corners are intended to push leave toward its larger front paddle. Christopher Null/Foundry All pool-skimmer robots have a similar overall design, although the iSkim Ultra does feature a few extras to spice things up. Two small propellers in the rear of the device guide it around the pool, while the entire top of the skimmer features a 24-watt solar panel that allows it to recharge and run semi-continuously. If you need extra juice, a magnetic AC adapter can attach to the back of the skimmer to more quickly recharge its 10,000mAh battery. That’s a lot of juice, but the iSkim Ultra needs it. At 17 pounds, sans debris, it takes a lot of energy to move this robot through the water. This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best robotic pool cleaners. The most unique feature on the iSkim Ultra are its two side brushes. These are horizontal spinners mounted on the front corners of the device. When the skimmer moves forward, these brushes spin inwardly to scoop debris that might otherwise hit the edge of the robot toward the filter basket, which rides underneath the device. (An additional paddlewheel is mounted on the front of the basket, further attempting to gobble up floating debris.) As with Beatbot’s underwater robot, the iSkim Ultra can also be used to dispense clarifying agent as it moves around. In theory, the iSkim Ultra is extremely basic. Push the power button, place it in the water, and it’s on its way. The only other hardware control is an “action button,” which sets the unit to dispense clarifier if you have one of Beatbot’s $37 clarifying agent pods installed. (These are sold separately.) If the iSkim Ultra’s solar panel doesn’t keep it charged, you can plug this magnetic charger into an AC outlet.Christopher Null/Foundry Once it’s running, the iSkim Ultra jets around the pool until the battery’s dead, meandering about in what Beatbot calls an “S Shape” pattern but bouncing off the walls instead of turning before it hits them. In the dead of summer, with strong overhead sunlight or a full charge from a wall socket, you can expect 14 hours or more of working time—essentially running from dawn to dusk. But if you’re starting the day with a dead battery, and you’re facing a cloudy winter day, you might only see 3 hours of running time. During my two weeks of nonstop testing, I had three consecutive days where the robot didn’t run at all because it didn’t have enough solar-powered charge. Your mileage will (literally) vary widely based on your location and weather conditions. Either way, once the battery capacity hits about 10 percent remaining, the unit will enter a “seeking light” mode and then park itself once it’s found some sun. If that doesn’t work, it will simply wait for the sun to find it. The iSkim Ultra touts “20 high-precision sensors” and an AI algorithm that is supposed to help it “tackle every corner and obstacle.” And while it makes good time cruising the surface of the pool, it certainly came as a surprise on more than one occasion to find it running full throttle directly into the wall of the pool, attempting to blindly plow forward with its face smooshed against the tile when it instead needed to turn around. The Beatbot iSkim Ultra’s app reveals a host of data about its activities. You can also use the app to remotely control the pool cleaner.Christopher Null/Foundry The bigger issue, however, is one that impacts both the skimmers I’ve tested so far: They just don’t pick up much debris. Even when leaves were lying directly in the path of the iSkim Ultra, I would often—most of the time, actually—observe a small leading wave that gently pushed the leaves to one or the other side of the robot instead of sucking them underneath its body and into the filter basket. The corner-mounted paddles are supposed to help with this, but they were minimally effective at best, as leaves were still get pushed to one side and dodge the blades. Larger leaves would often get stuck in the paddle blades or wedged beneath them. The iSkim Ultra did, however, have a particular appetite for our floating pool thermometer, which got stuck underneath the robot and lodged in the blades of the front-mounted paddlewheel on a regular basis, causing it to stop running until it was manually freed. (I eventually took the thermometer out of the pool entirely during testing.) After 10 full days of running the robot, I was shocked to find only a few small handfuls of leaves in the debris basket (see photo). And this was during a period in which leaves were falling regularly and heavily into the pool from a nearby pecan tree. As was my experience with the Smonet skimmer, most of the leaves were ultimately collected by the wall skimmer, or they would sink to the bottom of the pool before Beatbot’s skimmer could get to them. The Beatbot iSkim Ultra sucked up surprisingly few leaves after 10 days of operation, and it wasn’t for a paucity of the debris.Christopher Null/Foundry I also tried testing with synthetic leaves, turning off the pool pump so the thru-wall skimmer wouldn’t pull them in. My results were only marginally better than I got with the Smonet skimmer, with the Beatbot capturing 40 to 45 percent of the test material. The rest sunk to the bottom of the pool. Like the Beatbot AquaSense Pro, the iSkim Ultra is a smart device that can connect to your Wi-Fi network. And since the skimmer stays on the surface, it can remain in contact with the network the entire time it’s operating. There are some really cool parts of the Beatbot app, including daily charts of running time vs. idle time, a running graph of solar recharging activity, and a timer system that lets you specify when you want the device to idle, if you aren’t comfortable letting it set its own hours. The skimmer can also be manually operated via remote control buttons in the app, and this function works surprisingly well. A “rocket” button even lets you double the unit’s speed, which makes for as much fun as you can have around the pool without getting in. Christopher Null/Foundry But I don’t know what to make of Beatbot’s estimate of the ambient air temperature, which invariably showed that the balmy Texas air was well below freezing. And yes, I had it set to Fahrenheit, not Celsius. As near as I can tell, the problem is that the app doesn’t know exactly where the robot is, allowing you to set the time zone but not your actual location. Could the app really assume that my “Chicago” time zone meant I was literally in Chicago? Conversely and confusingly, Beatbot’s measurement of the water temperature looked to be correct. As mentioned, I’m finding it tough to love any pool skimmer, but the iSkim Ultra’s sky-high price tag of $1,199 makes that calculus even more difficult. If you have an incredibly filthy pool and no thru-wall skimmer, a robot might make some sense to reduce the amount of manual skimming you have to do with a net. My advice, however, would be to stick with a more basic and much cheaper device for this task, such as the Smonet SR5. The iSkim Ultra’s bells and whistles just don’t add enough convenience, performance, or time savings to merit spending more three times as much. Read...

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Microsoft is currently focusing all they can on Windows 11. Not only did the company recently dub 2025 as the “Year of the Windows 11 PC Refresh,” but this year’s CES has been all about Windows 11 and the new Copilot+ PCs that Microsoft has been trying to push. All of this might come as a surprise, with some industry insiders over the past couple of years assuming that a new version of Windows (christened “Windows 12”) could be released as early as 2024. But now, the signs look bleak. Clearly Microsoft has been pouring all of its attention on the development of Windows 11 24H2, which ended up being the massive update that arrived near year’s end. That’s why sites like Windows Latest no longer believe that Windows 12 is being planned, at least for now. Too much currently depends on Windows PC users switching over to Windows 11 by October, when support for Windows 10 ends — and I think that’s exactly right, for various reasons. Related: The best tech at CES 2025 Users are reluctant to switch over It’s notable that Windows 11 continues to struggle to be recognized as the one and only version of Windows. Many users still prefer Windows 10, partly because Windows 11 has prohibitive hardware requirements, partly because the Windows 11 experience is less than ideal, and partly because users just don’t like change. According to StatCounter, Windows 10 still claims over 62 percent of worldwide desktop market share while Windows 11 lags behind at just over 34 percent. If you haven’t been able to convince these users to switch to Windows 11 by now, what else can you do? If they aren’t amenable to Windows 11, why would Windows 12 be able different? Get Windows 11 Pro for cheap Windows 11 Pro For many, Windows 10 is simply familiar. It’s what they’re used to. They don’t want to deal with a new interface, missing functionality, and the trouble of relearning how to do the same things in another environment. And it’s so bad that many will likely stick with Windows 10 even after support ends and they stop getting security updates. Which spells a serious situation for Microsoft. The company needs to make Windows 11 more attractive so users will switch over, but those same users would be less likely to do so if they knew a “Windows 12” was right around the corner. So, the right move is to hold off and make sure not to announce it too early — or better still, keep it quiet. Windows 11 24H2 is a hot mess Another reason might be that Microsoft has had major problems with their massive Windows 11 24H2 update. In the weeks following its release in October 2024, new reports of bugs and crashes were popping up with alarming frequency, for users on all kinds of hardware. The developers at Microsoft have clearly had their hands full as they try to quash as many bugs as they can and rescue the unstable operating system for users. Those efforts continue to this day. But for those who aren’t yet on Windows 11, the problematic 24H2 update is a big red flag and microcosm of the greater Windows 11 experience. And for those who only recently switched over to Windows 11, this update is a hugely negative and staining experience. Announcing Windows 12 so soon after the Windows 11 24H2 debacle would surely be received poorly by users and critics alike. AI and Copilot+ PCs need more work We also can’t forget artificial intelligence, which has established itself as a major trend over the past few years — and Microsoft is certainly no stranger to that as it pushes for Copilot+ PCs even in 2025. At CES 2025, we saw that Microsoft wants to run Copilot locally on your PC, just one of the many steps the company is taking to embrace AI. But the truth is, Copilot+ PCs just aren’t good enough yet. And Windows 11 is, of course, closely linked to all of this. Users are still skeptical of flagship AI features like Windows Recall, and Microsoft still has a lot of work to do to make AI viable for users and also convince users that they can benefit from the company’s AI offerings. Until then, it seems unwise to split focus and push Windows 12 at the same time. Doing so would be like the company standing in its own way and botching its own chances at success. For all of these reasons, I think it’s highly unlikely we’ll see Windows 12 mentioned this year. Nor do I expect it in 2026, even if all remaining Windows users switch to Windows 11 by then. Right now, too much depends on the refinement and success of Windows 11 for it to be a good idea for Microsoft to pursue something as monumental as Windows 12. Further reading: How will NPUs and Windows AI grow in 2025? Read...

Katrina Gorry discusses her four-year battle with an eating disorder and how she hopes to create a more open environment for discussing body image. Read...

The KB5048239 update for Windows 10 — which released a while ago on November 12, 2024 to make some improvements to the Windows Recovery Environment — is apparently causing headaches for some users. Anyone who tries to install the patch ends up stuck in a loop. Born’s Tech and Windows World blog has been getting emails from readers about the update, which installs correctly at first, but when Windows Update is opened again later, the same exact update is offered for installation. This occurs over and over again. Other system tools, like the Windows Event Viewer and Norton 360, show the update as successfully installed despite the issue. Similar reports can be found on the official Microsoft forum, where users describe the same problem across multiple different systems, with the first report submitted on January 10, 2025. Is there a fix for the update loop? As of this writing, the specific cause of the issue currently remains unknown. Meanwhile, the usual strategies to fix these kinds of problems — like restarting your PC or reinstalling Windows — apparently seem to have no effect. A lack of storage space has also been ruled out. Microsoft has not yet commented on the issue. If you’re affected, the only real solution at this time is to ignore the update until a fix is released. Given that this is a security patch, however, ignoring the update is less than ideal. To stay informed on progress, you can subscribe to the relevant forum post. Why is the update important? According to the support page, update KB5048239 is for Windows 10 systems that have an active Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). WinRE is used to restore systems that can no longer be booted properly. KB5048239 is a security update for WinRE that provides some improvements and extra security. In addition, users need at least 250MB of free disk space to install the update. Further reading: How to create a Windows 10 recovery USB drive Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Excellent anti-glare OLED Wonderfully light Port variety and quantity for its size Cons Middling performance Average battery life in this class High price Our Verdict The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition has elegance and feels great to use. But Lenovo should have stepped up its game, as the system lags behind in performance and battery next to a bunch of cheaper competitors, and Lenovo’s not the only brand making great-feeling systems. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Lenovo carries the ThinkPad torch ever further with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. The name is a mouthful, but there’s plenty of meat to get excited about. The laptop is built around a new Intel Lunar Lake processor, features a snazzy OLED display with an effective anti-glare finish, and has the fit and finish of a high-end ThinkPad all built into a compact and lightweight laptop.  For the privilege of owning it, you’ll be looking at a steep $2519 price tag, and it’s not as though there aren’t a host of competing systems ready to undercut Lenovo. It’s a shame, too, as Lenovo could have made better use of the Lunar Lake processor inside. Instead, it falls behind systems running AMD and even Meteor Lake processors like the $1689 HP OmniBook Ultra 14 and $999 Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7440 (2024). Further reading: Best laptops 2024: Premium, budget, gaming, 2-in-1s, and more Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Specs and features Lenovo may introduce more models in the future, but for now, the Aura Edition appears to come in just two configurations with the only difference between them being storage. Our test sample shipped with 512GB of storage, but Lenovo now lists the base storage at 1TB. A 512GB base would feel rather stingy for a laptop with a starting price over $2,000. But on the plus side, Lenovo didn’t opt for low-quality storage. A quick run through CrystalDiskMark 8 showed the drive capable of hitting read speeds of 13,023MB/s and 6,991MB/s write speeds, clearly taking advantage of extra PCIe bandwidth.  CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Memory: 32GB LPDDR5x Graphics/GPU: Intel Arc 140V Display: 14-inch 2880×1800 OLED, 120Hz Storage: 512GB PCIe Gen5 SSD Webcam: 1080p+IR Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C, 2x USB-A 5Gbps, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 3.5mm combo audio, 1x Kensington Nano lock slot Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.3 Biometrics: Windows Hello fingerprint, facial recognition Battery capacity: 57 watt-hours Dimensions: 12.31 x 8.45 x 0.56 inches Weight: 2.15 pounds MSRP: $2,519 as-tested ($2,519 base) Lenovo’s had a knack for quality laptop keyboards for some time, and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition gets a good one. The keys are decently stabilized, though there’s still some room for improvement. They have a short but snappy travel, providing clear tactility and a quick reset, which helps for quick and accurate typing. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Design and build quality IDG / Mark Knapp Lenovo has a practiced hand at designing its ThinkPad laptops, and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition doesn’t fall short. It combines a premium bill of materials with carbon fiber, aluminum, and magnesium into a lightweight, thin, and sturdy chassis. That’s all coated with a finish that makes the laptop feel a little softer to the touch than its materials might otherwise let on. It may show fingerprints too readily, but that’s just a minor aesthetic drawback.  Lenovo squeezed in about as big a display as it could in a device this size with the 14-inch panel surrounded by thin bezels. Above the display is a little extra lip that houses the camera and IR sensor as well as a small privacy cover that can slide into place when you want the camera disabled. The display has a wide hinge that folds easily, holds its place readily, and can flip back flat.  The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition gets a classic ThinkPad keyboard complete with trackpoint nib in the middle and a specialized trackpad underneath. The limited space on the surface of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition made for a rather small trackpad, albeit a wide one. Even in a small laptop like this, Lenovo opted for the handy inverted-T arrow key arrangement and dedicated Page Up and Page Down buttons. The function row is also broken up into little clusters, so you can feel them out. Home, End, Insert, and Delete keys are also slipped into the top right corner. The keys get simple white backlighting to help you see them in the dark.  One thing you won’t spot on the keyboard deck is a power button. Lenovo curiously shifted this over to the right edge of the laptop. It’s a little tricky to feel out, and with the laptop sitting so close to whatever surface it’s on, it can be hard to press.  The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition doesn’t have much ventilation. The exhaust vents are hard to spot, as they’re tucked into the slot that the display hinge lives in. Two small fans on the underside of the system gather fresh air. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Keyboard, trackpad IDG / Mark Knapp Lenovo’s had a knack for quality laptop keyboards for some time, and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition gets a good one. The keys are decently stabilized, though there’s still some room for improvement. They have a short but snappy travel, providing clear tactility and a quick reset, which helps for quick and accurate typing. That said, they’re not quite the snappiest I’ve felt. I struggle to get much above 100 words per minute while typing (120WPM is about where I get with great keyboards), and it feels like a combination of the soft dome switches underneath and the not-quite-perfect stabilization is the culprit.  The trackpad seems to be quite touchy, and all the more so when the system is processing more. I frequently will be scrolling with a two-finger gesture, and the scrolling will stutter. Sometimes, the result is a mouse movement instead of a scrolling movement. Other times, the scrolling just stops and then skips down. That latter issue happens more often while scrolling down a busy webpage that’s loading in content. While the trackpad is plenty wide, Lenovo’s inclusion of physical buttons above the trackpad limits its vertical space, which can make scrolling long webpages more tedious.  Of course, with a ThinkPad the trackpad isn’t the only tool. The laptop still includes the little TrackPoint nib at the center of the keyboard, which works well with the three buttons at the top of the trackpad. Tapping into this, suddenly scrolling long webpages or documents doesn’t have to be such a pain. I don’t find the TrackPoint easy to use as accurately as the trackpad, but it’s an effective extra input device.  Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Display, audio IDG / Mark Knapp The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition has a gorgeous display. It’s of a sort I’ve seen plenty before, but Lenovo has added a convenient touch for utility: an anti-glare finish that’s highly effective. I don’t struggle to see the display as I often might at lower brightness settings on reflective OLED panels. It’s not matted, so visuals remain sharp, but any bright reflections it might have picked up are significantly subdued. Even in unfavorable conditions, the display has plenty of brightness to work with. Hitting a peak of 409 nits in my testing, and having wiggle room to go even higher for smaller HDR highlights. On a 14-inch panel, the 2880×1800 resolution is brilliantly sharp. The color is vibrant, readily achieving 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, and the contrast is naturally exceptional. With a 120Hz refresh rate, the display is also smooth, which makes scrolling content more visually pleasing and can even come in handy for gaming or media viewing (as 30fps and 24fps content can all be displayed without 3-2 pulldown). I checked the display with DataColor’s Spyder X2 Ultra colorimeter, and it even proved quite accurate, with a dE1976 average of 0.65 and a max dE of 1.3, well within the margins of error for professional use.  The speakers on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition pack a punch. They get plenty loud for use in a small room, and they have a surprising amount of bass. There’s the subtlest hint of them being boxed in, and that may come from the fact they’re tucked away out of sight, with much of the sound coming through the keyboard. They get a bit of stereo separation and have crisp mids, but there’s some harshness in the higher registers that can make louder music grating  Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Webcam, microphone, biometrics Above the display, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition features a webcam with Windows Hello facial recognition. The camera itself has a 1080p sensor that can capture a decently crisp image in bright lighting conditions. But the visuals get grainy quickly if the lighting is anything less than dazzling. The facial recognition works quickly at least. If you want a backup to facial recognition, there’s also a fingerprint sensor built into the keyboard right next to the Copilot key and the arrow keys. I found it about as quick as the facial recognition. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition’s microphones capture my voice loud and clear in a quiet room, albeit with some room echo. They provide decent fullness, as well. When they’re active, the system automatically kicks in a Dolby Voice Noise Suppression system. In a noisy environment, this proves effective at eliminating these extra sounds, but it makes my own voice sound more compressed and digitized. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Connectivity IDG / Mark Knapp Lenovo does good work when it comes to connectivity here. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition may be thin and light, but it’s not acting like other thin-and-lights when it comes to its port offerings. You’ll find two Thunderbolt 4 ports and two 5Gbps USB-A ports. There’s also a full-size HDMI 2.1 port good for 4K/60Hz output. Lenovo might have put the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition over the top with a SD or microSD card reader, but at least it didn’t decide that 3.5mm audio output was irrelevant and omit it. The laptop also benefits from Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, which works well with more common Wi-Fi 6 networks and will be ready for the expansion of Wi-Fi 7. It’s a bit surprising to see Bluetooth 5.3 and not a newer tier, but it does the job when connecting to headphones and peripherals.  Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Performance The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition may pack one of Intel’s newest processors, but it’s not one of the company’s most powerful options. The Intel Core Ultra 7 258V is a low-power processor that may benefit from strong single-core performance but doesn’t zoom through multi-core workloads like its competition. For the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, that’s not the end of the world. It musters solid performance for everyday computing, falling slightly shy of 7,000 points in the holistic PCMark 10 benchmark. This puts it largely in line with other thin-and-light laptop competitors with both Intel and AMD components. An ample helping of fast memory and exceptionally fast storage help the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: keep up in this test. When it comes to pure CPU performance, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition falls behind. Its diminutive size and tight cooling vents aren’t helping out here, nor are the overall capabilities of the CPU. Our Handbrake encoding benchmark takes some time to run on even very powerful CPUs, and that gives the system a chance to heat up and experience some throttling. Sure enough, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition slows down, lagging far behind even the Acer Swift 14 AI, which features the same processor. AMD processors also zip ahead and even the prior-generation Intel Core Ultra 7 155H proves more capable. Unsurprisingly, Cinebench also shows the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition struggling to keep up under large loads. In Cinebench R23, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition trailed these other laptops yet again, and by no small margin in some cases. AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 in the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 completely dominated the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, and the newer CPU was again bested by the older Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. Multi-core performance only shows part of the picture, though, and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition actually showed nearly the best single-core performance of these laptops in Cinebench R15, R20, and R23, only falling behind the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 in each. Single-threaded performance can be important, but heavier workloads are increasingly taking advantage of the extra cores that most PCs have nowadays, and that’s where the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition will lag behind.  Thankfully, Intel’s graphics solutions have improved dramatically in recent years, and even in the lower power Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, the integrated graphics keeps up. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition’s graphics performance breaks the pattern its CPU performance had set, with the system falling right into the middle of the pack. The irony here is that it could have been at the top of the pack if Lenovo had done more to optimize performance in this laptop, as the Acer Swift 14 AI uses that same Intel Arc 140V integrated graphics to lead the pack in both 3DMark Time Spy and Night Raid benchmarks Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Battery life Usually, when I see a system that has lackluster performance next to its competitors, I expect to see battery life help it regain some ground. But the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: doesn’t prove itself remarkable in this respect.  Make no mistake, it offers a solid runtime in our battery benchmark, coming up just shy of a 17-hour runtime playing video. But it’s rivaled by systems that manage to run just as long or even longer. I had really hoped to see Lenovo pull off another upset against the competition, as it did with the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 and its incredible 23:32 runtime, but it simply didn’t.  The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: settles for just being good. And of course, actual runtime will be less than what we saw in our video playback benchmark. Generally, I could get through an eight hour workday on battery power with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition:, though. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: Conclusion The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition’s key assets are its great looks and excellent feel. It’s a modestly capable system thanks to the new Lunar Lake processor inside, but it’s not the most reasonable system. At $2,519, it’s incredibly expensive for a system that will force you to settle for mediocre performance and you won’t even get extreme battery life in exchange. While the hardware has a lot to love, so do plenty of other laptops, and they can deliver both increased performance and a lower price. The ThinkPad tax is real on this one, and I can only hope Lenovo quickly applies the same kind of massive discounts I’ve seen it tack onto just about every other computer it makes, until then, this won’t be the most sensible choice Read...

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. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Easeus ToDo Backup 2025 Retailer Price EaseUS $39.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket 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...

If you’re working with high-resolution video like 4K or 8K, then there is one guarantee to your work: You’re going to produce a monstrous quantity of data. That in turn often means working with many inadequate memory cards. They’re not big enough to store all your data, and certainly not fast enough to get it off the card in a timely manner. But that’s just the price you pay for dealing with UHD video, right? Not necessarily. A new generation of memory cards using the PCIe 4 protocol is set to increase  memory card performance by 10-fold, ushering in a new era of high-performance, portable storage cards that will finally make dealing with 4K and 8K more viable. The Biwin Amber CB500 CFexpress 4.0 Type B delivers unmatched speed and durability for demanding work on the go. Reaching new heights Until recently, even the fastest cards could only manage a few hundred megabytes per second of sustained read and write performance, making mass transfers of files from your supporting devices to a PC or laptop a painfully slow experience. With this next-generation of CB500 CFexpress 4.0 Type B cards, though, there’s a whole new frontier of performance to unlock, which fundamentally changes how you’ll use them. The 1TB model of Biwin’s CB500 cards can deliver sustained read speeds up to 3,750 MBps, and sustained write speeds up to 3,500 MBps, leveraging the full power of its PCIexpress Gen 4 x2 interface to get data on and off the card faster than ever before. These are designed to work directly with the most high-resolution digital imaging and video cameras out there, with native support for 4K, 6K, and 8K raw recording. They’re ready for future 12K cameras with built in CFxexpress 4 Type B slots, too. Ultimately, all that means that your waiting days are over. With this next-generation of Biwin CB500 cards, you can get even a full terabyte of data off it and onto your PC or Mac in a matter of seconds, rather than minutes. That boosts productivity, and reduces the number of cards you need, since you can clean one out and get back to using it almost immediately. Worried about heat? All that added performance does come at a cost, so the Amber CB500 range is built with intelligent thermal control algorithms that help manage performance to modulate heat and prevent thermal throttling. The housing of these cards is made with aluminium and smart conductive layers to aid heat dissipation, too. Still, there’s no accounting for the environment you’re filming in, so these cards are built to withstand it all. Their operating temperatures range from -12 degrees C, all the way up to 72 degrees C, and you can store them at up to -20 or +85 degrees C, without difficulty. That aluminium shell doubles as a protective housing, too, making these cards almost entirely immune to shock and magnetic interference, as well as physical wear and tear. View BIWIN AMBER CB500 Want more? There’s more Biwin What UHD filmmaker couldn’t use additional storage? While the new Biwin CFexpress 4.0 Type B cards are a great fit for all your devices, they’re not the best solution for storing masses of footage on the go. For that, you want either a laptop, or a leaner portable SSD, like Biwin’s PR2000. These drives introduce a whole new generation of portable SSD performance, promising up to 2,050 MB/s of sustained read performance, and up to an 8 TB capacity, making it an all-in-one storage solution for all the data you’ll produce on the move. Alongside high performance, these drives are built to withstand the elements, too. With an integrated carry loop making transport easy, even in harsh environments, the two-shot, injection-molded design is tough and resilient, with an added silicon cover providing a secondary layer of impact and drop protection. This is a drive that’s ready for whatever you throw at it. View Biwin PR2000 Read...

After a controversial launch on the desktop, Intel is debuting its Arrow Lake processor for laptops here at CES 2025, hoping that the chip’s emphasis on low power has a more welcome reception. It’s the first time the Core Ultra branding has been rolled out for gaming laptops. And for those who have wondered when fanless chip cooling solutions will ever debut in the real world, Intel also has some news on that front. The company confirmed that it’s working with Ventiva’s silent cooling solution as well an undisclosed laptop maker as part of Intel’s “Evo” co-engineering program with its laptop partners. Intel unveiled new chips in three different processor families: the Core U for thin-and-light laptops; the Core H for high performance laptops; and the Core HX for similarly high performance laptops, but geared towards gaming. One Core Ultra Series 2 family, three CPU architectures That these latter two families are largely built around the Arrow Lake architecture isn’t unusual; Intel said to expect mobile Arrow Lake chips last year. But the Arrow Lake-U Core Ultra 2 chips are built around a refreshed version of the Meteor Lake architecture found in first-gen Core Ultra chips, complete with that architecture’s low-power efficiency cores. This summer, Intel debuted “Lunar Lake,” the Core Ultra Series 2 processor specifically designed for long battery life, powered by its own unique architecture. As our Lunar Lake tests proved, Intel’s chip kept up with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processor platform quite well, both in performance and all-day battery life. AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 mobile platform, however, took the overall performance crown. Put another way, Lunar Lake was a small step down in performance from the first Core Ultra chip, Meteor Lake. In our tests, an Asus ZenBook 14 OLED with a Core Ultra 7 155H chip inside outperformed an identical ZenBook with a Core 7 258V by 17 percent in a multithreaded test of Geekbench 6.3. The 155H outperformed Lunar Lake by about 39 percent on a single-threaded test. Intel hopes these “Arrow Lake” Core Ultra Series 2 H-series chips can change the narrative. Intel Core Ultra 200H, Intel’s chip for “performance” laptops Intel is launching five new Core Ultra 200H processors, with 14 to 16 cores and threads. (These chips lack hyperthreading, too.) The Core Ultra 5 225H, the slowest of the family, runs at 4.9GHz; the fastest, the 285H, runs at 5.4GHz. The power draw ranges from 28 to 45W base power, and either 60W or 115W when in turbo mode. Intel is saying the “next-gen” Lion Cove performance cores and Skymont efficiency cores inside this new family offer greater than 15 percent performance boosts in both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance compared to the Core Ultra 100H. It’s not clear whether they’ve received additional tuning, since Intel originally said that there was a 14 percent delta between Lion Cove and Meteor Lake’s performance core, known as Redwood Cove. These Core Ultra 200H chips do include the low-power efficiency cores of Meteor Lake, however. Intel They also include the updated second-gen Arc GPU that accompanied Arrow Lake, which delivers 15 percent better graphics performance than Meteor Lake, according to Intel vice president Josh Newman. Viewed from an AI perspective, that offers this latest collection of Core H chips up to 99 TOPS across the platform, including the GPU, NPU, and CPU. Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop chip consists of compute, GPU, SOC, and I/O tiles along with a “filler” and “base” tile for stability — all linked together using Intel’s Foveros technology inside a single package. Presumably, the mobile Core Ultra 200H chips will be the same, too. The H-series platform will offer a x8 PCI Express Gen 5 connection plus a pair of x4 PCI Express Gen 4 connections. Intel will provide four Thunderbolt 4 ports (double the typical two) and make discrete Thunderbolt 5 chips available to notebook manufacturers. Integrated Wi-Fi 6e is available, with Wi-Fi 7 as an option. Otherwise, Core Ultra 200H laptops will be able to connect to LPDDR5X-8400 memory, DDR5-6400 memory, and even LPDDR5/5X CAMM2 memory, for a total of 96GB (DDR5) and 64GB (LPDDR5). Intel’s Core H chips will ship to customers later in the first quarter. Intel Core Ultra 200HX: Intel’s gaming champion Architecturally, Intel executives have said they consider the Arrow Lake-S desktop chip and the mobile Arrow Lake-HX for laptops essentially two versions of the same chip for the enthusiast PC segment — there are differences in the packaging, the power which they draw, and a few other software tweaks. Otherwise, they’re identical, Greg Boots, Arrow Lake’s product marketing manager, said at the Lunar Lake launch. Intel Intel isn’t saying much about the Core Ultra 200HX’s performance, but the combination of eight Lion Cove P-cores and 16 Skymont cores should boost performance by 5 percent in a single-threaded environment and 20 percent in multithreaded performance versus the previous Core-HX part, based on Intel’s 13th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh. “Enthusiast-level performance at lower power” is how Intel is putting it. While desktop versions of Arrow Lake didn’t always ship alongside a discrete GPU, it’s much more common for a Core HX gaming notebook to include a discrete GPU. Those systems will be coming in “late Q1 2025,” Intel says, which probably means in March. You’ll have to wait until then for Intel to deliver its estimates of how well they’ll fare in gaming performance. Intel will ship six Core HX chips, Newman said, from the Core Ultra 9 285HX (8 P cores, 16 E-Cores/24 threads, 5.5GHz) down to the Ultra 5 235HX (6 P-Cores, 8 E-Cores, 14 threads; 5.1GHz). They range from a base power of 15W on up to turbo power of 57W. Compared to Intel’s 14th-gen Core HX parts, it’s not a clear win for Intel’s latest Core 200HX parts. The Core i9-14900HX, for example, offered the same 24 threads. That chip offered P-core turbo frequencies at up to 5.8GHz, versus the 5.5GHz on the Core Ultra 9 285HX. On the other hand, the 285HX runs the E-cores at up to 2.8GHz, significantly faster than the 2.2GHz minimum E-core speed of the i9-14900HX. (We expect more performance data soon, hopefully.) From a platform point of view, a Core Ultra 200HX part will address the same memory configurations as the Core Ultra 200H parts — up to 64GB or 96GB of DDR5 and LPDDR5x, respectively. Intel gives laptop makers a x4 PCIe Gen 5 connection and four PCIe Gen 4 lanes, however, and only two Thunderbolt 4 ports to work with. Discrete Thunderbolt 5 is also available. Intel is also disclosing that it will ship additional “Arrow Lake” S-series desktop products early in the first quarter, and deliver new laptops with new U-series chip for laptops, also based upon Arrow Lake. Intel’s Arrow Lake U series fuse both Core Ultra processors These U-series chips are interesting, as they represent an intriguing combination of Intel’s Core Ultra processors. Intel “The Intel Core Ultra 200U series processors utilize the Redwood Cove (P-core) architecture, which originally debuted in Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors and Crestmont (E-core) architecture that is found throughout the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 family of processors,” an Intel spokesman said in an email. “However, the Intel Core Ultra 200U series is built on the Intel 3 process node, rather than the Intel 4 process used for Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors, which helps improve performance of the processor overall.” The Intel Core Ultra 200U series also features increased clock speed on the NPU, along with integrated Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity, the Intel spokesman added. Intel also plans to ship commercial versions of the Core Ultra 200V series — the products that Intel rolled out as part of Arrow Lake “shortly after CES,” Intel’s Newman said. Finally, Newman said that the company’s Evo-certified program, which co-engineers laptops and PC peripherals with the device makers themselves, has now reached 24 vendors and over 70 devices. Read...