Automated bots now comprise 59% of all visits to travel sites, disrupting bookings and inflating prices during peak holiday seasons, says Thales report. Read...

If you’ve used your computer during an electrical storm, you know that it can be a tense experience as you sit tight for the storm to finish, all the while not knowing if your PC components will short circuit or zap you when components burn out. There’s nothing in a PC user manual about what to do in that situation. So, is it all a myth? Are fears about damage just irrational, or should you shut down your PC as you wait out an electrical storm? The straightforward answer to that question is, yes, you should shut down your PC. But you should also unplug it entirely when an electrical storm hits, since power can still travel through your cables and damage a system that’s been turned off. The main danger during an electrical storm is, of course, lighting flashes. These can cause sudden jolts of high-voltage electricity to surge through your power cables and therefore also your devices. Those power surges are not like the ones that come from your electrical grid when there’s no storm. In many cases they are a lot more powerful. Just one jolt is enough to do lasting damage to your PC and peripheral devices. Even if you don’t sustain damage — a power outage on the grid caused by an electrical storm can lead to data loss when your PC suddenly loses power. To give you an idea of the power in a lightning flash, the average flash contains around 300 million volts, or 30,000 amps electricity. Compare that to the 120 volts (15 amps) usually running through a household current and you start to see the kind of power your PC is up against. Admittedly, there’s only a small chance your home will be directly struck by lightning — around 1 in 200. But your house doesn’t necessarily need to get hit directly — the lightning can still send millions of volts surging through your local power transformer, which can make its way to your home. Pexels: Diana You don’t have to search hard to see what lighting has done to people’s PCs. The internet is awash with accounts of users who have sustained damage. The damage they report can vary and be quite different. But in every case, there’s been some kind of loss that has meant costly repairs or replacement parts. In some cases, the PC is a goner and needs to be replaced entirely. Most at risk are the parts of your PC with delicate electrical circuitry like your motherboard, RAM, and SSD storage. Now that you now know you need to shut down and unplug in an electrical storm, you should also always have a power strip with a surge protector in place as a first layer of defense against sudden electrical surges. It may not be 100 percent effective in an electrical storm though, which is why the experts recommend unplugging your PC completely. When you do unplug your PC, don’t forget to unplug your modem too, since modems are one of the most common devices to be fried in electrical storms. Read...

Netflix has thousands of videos in its mammoth streaming catalog. Yet, picking just the right show for a given night isn’t the chillaxing experience it should be. Indeed, the busy Netflix interface frequently pushes the same recommendations over and over, leaving the false impression that instead of having heaps of videos to choose from, you have just a dozen or so. But once you know what you’re doing, you can take a deep dive into Netflix’s collection of movies and TV episodes, slicing and dicing its categories to pinpoint the perfect video for the moment. You can also help Netflix make better guesses at what you’ll like. Finally, you can easily save your picks for later, making it easy to fire up a favorite flick with a minimum of fuss. Filter by genre We all know the feeling of scrolling aimlessly through one Netflix category after another, from “Reality TV” and “TV Dramas” to “Thrillers” and “Suspenseful Movies.” If you’d rather not just passively browse through the categories that Netflix chooses to serve up, try this. Click “Genres” to see a list of Netflix genres to browse.Ben Patterson/Foundry If you’re accessing Netflix on the web, click either TV Shows or Movies at the top of the Netflix homepage. Once you do, a Genres pull-down menu will appear. The process varies for other platforms; on iOS, for example, you can tap Categories on the Netflix home screen. Clicking or tapping the Genres or Categories button will reveal a selection of about 20 genres, from “Action” and “Documentaries” for movies and “Anime” and “Stand-Up & Talk Shows” on the TV side. Further reading: Don’t miss our in-depth reviews of the best media streamers. Browse more refined categories Browsing Netflix’s genres is a good first step toward finding the perfect video, but the categories listed in the genres menu are much more broad than the sliced-and-diced collections listed in the main Netflix interface. What if you’re in the mood for, say, a spy movie, a western, a classic musical, or a sports drama? There’s a way to pick and choose between dozens of niche Netflix categories, but it requires a little legwork. On your desktop, browse to Netflix-Codes.com. No, we’re not talking discount codes here; instead, the site lists scores of codes that you can paste into a Netflix URL. Just plug in the code (or, even easier, just right-click the code on the webpage) to jump any number of laser-focused Netflix categories, from “Comic book and superhero movies” and “Film noir” to “Deep sea horror movies” (seriously) and “Food & travel shows.” It’s a great way to uncover some of Netflix’s hidden gems. In the mood for a western? Netflix-Codes.com makes it easy to browse Netflix’s impressive collection of that and other niche categories.Ben Patterson/Foundry Filter by year The vast majority of shows and movies that appear on the Netflix homepage hail from the past five years or so. If you want to see something from the 1990s or earlier, you’ll need to dig. And while you can sort Netflix’s listings by year from the desktop Netflix interface (click TV Shows or Movies, click the grid icon in the upper-right corner, and then select Year Released from the drop-down), you’ll need to scroll and scroll to get past the 2010s—and no, you can’t reverse sort by year. Reelgood lets you filter Netflix search results by year, perfect for finding classic movies or TV shows.Ben Patterson/Foundry Luckily, there are plenty of third-party options to help you zero in on classic movies and TV shows. Reelgood, for example, boasts sliders that let you filter Netflix search results according to year. Just start browsing for movies or TV shows, click the Filter button, then adjust the “release year” slider. You can also filter by user and IMDb ratings while you’re at it. Reelgood isn’t the only service that will let you filter Netflix’s catalog by year; JustWatch is another option, as is Trakt. Rate as many videos as you can Netflix can have some strange ideas about the videos it thinks you’ll want to watch, but you can help nudge its algorithms in the right direction. You can review, change, or even wipe the ratings that you’ve assigned to Netflix videos.Ben Patterson/Foundry Whenever you can, be sure to click one of the thumbs–either thumbs down, thumbs up, or two thumbs up–on the title page of a Netflix video. The more movies and TV shows you rate, the better Netflix’s recommendations will become. Don’t be afraid to rate a video you haven’t seen; if, say, torture movies aren’t your bag, just click thumbs-down on sight. You can also review all your previous ratings, which is handy if you’ve changed your mind about a given title. In a web browser, hover your mouse over your profile icon in the top-right corner of the Netflix homepage, click Account, Profiles, select your own Netflix profile, then click Viewing Activity (don’t forget to click the Ratings tab at the top). Once there, you can click another thumb to change an old rating, or click the currently selected thumb to wipe the rating completely. Find related videos One of the easiest ways to find a movie or a TV show you’ll like is by checking the related videos of your favorites. Depending on your platform, however, Netflix does a spotty job of recommending movies and shows based on the videos you’re browsing. The “More Like This” section can be essential for finding your next Netflix video, provided you’re on the right platform.Ben Patterson/Foundry The Netflix on my Apple TV, for example, doesn’t show related videos at all, while the Netflix iOS app has a “More Like This” section prominently placed on the title page of a video. If your Netflix app of choice isn’t serving up related video, just visit Netflix on your desktop, hover over a title, click the down-arrow that appears on the bottom, and then click More Like This. Rediscover your queue So, you’ve found some Netflix videos you’re dying to watch. Now what? Well, those of us who were loyal Netflix-by-mail subscribers will remember the vaunted Netflix queue, a place where we carefully curated the list of scores or even hundreds of movies and shows we wanted to watch. As it began its slow shift away from DVDs and toward streaming, Netflix seemingly tired of the queue, eventually renaming it “My List” and shuffling it into a hard-to-find row in the main interface. Netflix only offers limited options for managing your queue.Ben Patterson/Foundry While the queue—er, My List—eventually found its way back to the main Netflix UI, it lost much of its functionality along the way. On a desktop browser, you can’t rearrange your queue at all, while on the iOS version of Netflix, you get some basic filters (TV shows, movies, “started,” and “haven’t watched”) and sorting options (like alphabetically, date added to list, release date, or “top matches” according to Netflix), and that’s it. If you really want to take charge of your Netflix queue, you’re probably better off ditching it in favor of one of the third-party services we mentioned previously, like Reelgood, JustWatch, or Trakt. Yes, it’s annoying to have to switch apps, but the sad truth is that Netflix’s My List just doesn’t cut it anymore. Read...

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It’s time to upgrade your at-home charging setup for all those devices you’ve accumulated, isn’t it? Throw away your outdated power strip and replace it with one of these amazing 8-in-1 Anker charging stations. It handles everything you need, and right now it’s discounted by 33% on Amazon so you can score one for just $100 (was $150). Why upgrade to this Anker Prime charging station? For starters, check out that sleek design that’s compact yet roomy enough to fit all kinds of plugs without issue. Say goodbye to bulky power strips. This one’s a flat rectangle, only 0.7 inches thick and 5.43 inches along its longest edge. It’s equally perfect for clutter-free workstations and side tables. Here’s what you get with this 8-in-1 charging station: two AC outlets on the flat face along with an LCD display that shows the current charging status and on/off buttons for each outlet, plus four USB-C ports along the bottom edge and two USB-A ports along the side edge. Those on/off buttons are a nice touch, letting you cut power without unplugging. All in all, that’s 8 devices you can charge (or supply power to) in a tiny little accessory. Each of the USB-C ports can provide up to 140W when used individually, and the whole charging station goes up to 240W across all the USB ports when multiple are being used. That’s a lot of power! Use it to power your laptop and a bunch of other devices, easy. And the cherry on top? A detachable cable, which is convenient whether you want to travel with it or stow it away for a while. Think of how much more efficiently you could be charging everything on your desk. Get this 8-in-1 Anker Prime charging station for just $100 while you can with this limited-time Amazon deal! Save 33% on this awesome Anker Prime charging stationBuy now at Amazon Read...

Ready for a laptop deal that’ll make you weak in the knees? Check out this Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 (oof, what a mouthful) that’s currently on sale for an incredible $1,000 off. Yup, you read that right. This productivity beast of a laptop is discounted by an entire GRAND, meaning its price has dropped down to a mere $900 at Best Buy. That’s a whopping 53% off and one of the best laptops you can get for this price. Once you’re done picking your jaw up off the floor, let’s talk specs. You’re looking at a fast Intel Core Ultra 7 155H that’s bolstered by 16GB of also-fast LPDDR5X RAM and a just-as-fast 1TB SSD. All of that means a speedy machine that effortlessly handles Windows 11, boots in a snap, loads apps in no time, and feels responsive day-to-day. The 360 in the model name indicates that this is a 2-in-1 laptop, so the hinge folds back all the way and you can use it like a tablet. The screen is a touch-enabled 16-incher OLED with gorgeous visuals, and the 2880×1800 resolution offers tons of screen real estate for productivity, plus it just feels so smooth thanks to its 120Hz refresh rate. When we reviewed the 14-inch non-360 version of this laptop, we found that the overall performance was excellent—so much so that we gave it 4.5 stars and our Editors’ Choice award. Not to mention how travel-friendly it is with its uber-light 3.6-pound build and 0.5-inch thickness. Other bits worth knowing about: aluminum body, backlit keyboard, 1080p webcam, dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, full-sized HDMI port, a fast USB-A port, and a 65-watt-hour battery with up to 21 hours on a charge. It’s an outright steal at this price, so snag the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 for just $900 before this amazing Best Buy deal disappears! Save $1,000 on Samsung`s fast and uber-portable 2-in-1 laptopBuy now at Best Buy Read...

If you’ve spent any amount of time using ChatGPT, you already know that it often requires lengthy explanations, prompt tweaks, and/or extra context to get it doing what you actually meant. Often, but not always. ChatGPT is capable of performing useful tasks with single, one-line prompts. When worded correctly, ChatGPT will perform the following tasks without hesitation, without extra context, and without issue. Further reading: 9 mundane chores ChatGPT can handle in seconds, saving you hours Get meal ideas from available ingredients Dave Parrack / Foundry Most of us endure busy working lives these days, which leaves little time for doing much of anything else—and that can include grocery shopping for the ingredients needed for home-cooked meals. Thankfully, if you ever find yourself with a small set of ingredients and no idea what to make with them, ChatGPT can help. Just list the staple (and otherwise) ingredients you have available and ask ChatGPT for some meal ideas using them. As an example, I asked, “What meals can I make with rice, eggs, and frozen mixed vegetables?” ChatGPT suggested egg fried rice, a vegetable rice omelet, and baked egg fried rice muffins, among others. Pretty nifty in a pinch. Troubleshoot your problems Dave Parrack / Foundry When something goes wrong, your first instinct might be to panic or shut down—but maybe it should be to ask ChatGPT for help instead. ChatGPT can provide troubleshooting help whenever you’re stuck dealing with an unknown or unexpected issue. Just ask ChatGPT to provide a list of troubleshooting steps for whatever has gone wrong. In my case, I’ve asked what I can do about a Windows laptop that has stopped working—my short prompt of “Please list some troubleshooting steps for a Windows laptop that has stopped working” resulted in a solid list of 10 things I could try. This is equally useful for all kinds of other problems, like if your toilet randomly flushes on its own every so often, if your car starts making a weird noise, or if your wireless router is on the fritz. Just make sure you never share sensitive personal data with ChatGPT! Create tailor-made workout routines Dave Parrack / Foundry While YouTube remains an option when looking for a workout routine, ChatGPT can provide you with ones that are as general or as specific as you need them to be. Want exercises for people your age? Or stretches for an aching lower back? Or simple workouts you can do at home without any equiment? Ones you can do at your desk? No worries! I personally asked ChatGPT, “Please create a short workout routine a 40-year-old can do in their lounge.” (I’m a bit older than 40, but what better way to stay young than to work out as a younger person would?) ChatGPT came through for me with a 20-minute low-impact workout routine that I found challenging but doable. It’s one of the many ways you can use ChatGPT to actually improve your life. Generate comprehensive checklists Dave Parrack / Foundry Checklists are so useful for when you absolutely don’t want to forget an important step, like when you’re packing for vacation, hosting a party, or spring cleaning your home. ChatGPT can help by creating checklists for lots of different scenarios—and for best results, you’ll want to include specific details to clue ChatGPT into your specific needs. I asked ChatGPT to “Please provide me with a checklist for packing for a vacation to Italy in September.” Note that I mentioned both the location and time of year I was visiting! The more context you can provide in your prompt, the more accurate and helpful the checklist will be. Explain concepts (like I’m 5) Dave Parrack / Foundry With a single, one-line prompt, ChatGPT can explain even the most complex concepts in a way that you can grasp. Want to understand nuclear fission? Or how EV batteries work? Or what kind of engineering goes into modern data centers? Just ask! But make sure to tack on the “like I’m 5” to your prompt—taken from the ELI5 trope on Reddit—so that ChatGPT dumbs down the subject enough to be digestible no matter your background. As an example, I asked ChatGPT to explain the concept of time travel like I’m 5. (Feel free to change the age or add any other qualifiers you want.) Summarize online articles Dave Parrack / Foundry Do you feel like you’re inundated with so much information that you just can’t keep up or absorb it all? You aren’t alone. There are billions of web pages out there—no one has the time or energy to read every single thing that catches their eye. Thankfully, ChatGPT can help by analyzing any online article and spitting out the most important bits. In the example above, I asked ChatGPT to summarize my own article about mundane tasks ChatGPT can handle for you—and it accurately broke it down, correctly citing PCWorld as the source throughout. In testing, I found that ChatGPT sometimes even pulls info from other sources to fill in details and provide more context. See what happened on a day in history Dave Parrack / Foundry It’s important to not only know what has happened in the past, but to understand why those things happened. You could work your way through encyclopedias and history books, spending years of your life absorbing facts and putting them together… or you could put ChatGPT to work and get it to do all the heavy lifting for you. With a simple prompt, ChatGPT can list all the major historical events that have happened on a particular day. You can ask about a specific day in a specific year, or the same particular day throughout the years. If the response stokes your interest, you can follow up with probing queries and learn more. But for many, the initial one-line prompt should suffice. Answer simple trivia questions Dave Parrack / Foundry If you’re anything like me, you frequently come across questions to which you don’t know their answers. Not to worry! You can just ask ChatGPT to answer those questions for you, pronto. I’m talking about questions with definitive answers, such as trivia. Who won a certain sports tournament in a given year? What year was a certain music album released? Which mountain is the tallest in the world? That sort of thing. Any question with an open-ended answer, or one with multiple potential answers, could complicate matters. Learn a new word every day Dave Parrack / Foundry I love learning something new every day, whether it’s practical and purposeful or gimmicky and trivial. One thing that blends both ends of the spectrum is the concept of a “word of the day”—and ChatGPT can provide you with a new word every day via a one-line prompt. Just input, “Please provide a word of the day for today.” ChatGPT will then provide a word along with its meaning, origin, and an example of it used in a sentence. It will then ask if you’d like a different word each day from then on, saving you from ever having to ask again. Combine tasks like this with ChatGPT’s nifty “scheduled tasks” feature to boost your productivity and save lots of time! Translate words or simple phrases Dave Parrack / Foundry If you’re traveling abroad, you should try to learn some of the local language. Sure, most people around the world speak enough English to get by, but that’s no excuse for being lazy! Pick a few choice words or phrases and learn how to say them in the language of the country you’re visiting—and that’s something ChatGPT can help you with. To be clear, ChatGPT is more than capable of translating longer phrases and even whole articles, documents, and publications. However, once you enter that kind of territory, you’re leaving the “one-line prompt” zone and will need to write prompts that are more complex. Convert units of measurement Dave Parrack / Foundry As a kid, I never imagined how often I would need to convert one type of unit into another—but as an adult, I’m doing it far too often. While Google and other tools do a decent job of converting all types of units, I’ve actually found ChatGPT more capable. In this example, I asked ChatGPT to “convert 100 centimeters into feet and inches.” It converted 100 centimeters into both feet and inches along with its reasoning. You’ll be pleased to know that the math checks out! Further reading: 9 mundane chores ChatGPT can handle in seconds, saving you hours Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Quiet operation Strong anti-glare display Great battery life Clean, lightweight design Charging on both sides Cons Middling specs and performance for the price Nebulous pricing Mics pick up too much Our Verdict The HP EliteBook X G1i is a solid laptop offering modest performance, strong battery life, and an easy-viewing display, but the premium for all the business features severely limits its audience, and HP’s chaotic pricing doesn’t help. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: HP EliteBook X G1i Retailer Price Check Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Following the AMD-powered HP EliteBook X G1a, HP has introduced a new business laptop for workers who crave a bit of class and efficiency from a thin-and-light laptop. The HP EliteBook X G1i trims more than half a pound from the G1a and opts for low-power Intel Lunar Lake hardware, giving it less power but more portability. This model is still pricey, with all the markups of a business laptop and some really wonky pricing from HP, but it might be a good choice if you really need the enterprise features and want a machine that’s easily going to last all day. HP EliteBook X G1i: Specs and features Model number: B85MSUT#ABA CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 268V Memory: 32GB LPDDR5x-8533 Graphics/GPU: Intel Arc Graphics 140V Display: 14-inch 1920×1200 IPS, Anti-glare Storage: 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD Webcam: 5MP + IR Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 2.1 Alternate Mode, 1x USB-C 10Gbps with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 Alternate Mode, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x USB-A 5Gbps, 1x 3.5mm combo audio Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Biometrics: Windows Hello fingerprint and facial recognition Battery capacity: 68 watt-hours Dimensions:12.36 x 8.66 x 0.72 inches Weight: 2.72 pounds measured MSRP: $2,283 as-tested ($2,399 base) The HP EliteBook X G1i has a base price of $2,399 for a configuration with an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V chip, 16GB of memory, and 512GB of storage. Our test unit isn’t available as a pre-configured system from HP, but the closest match offers the same Intel Core Ultra 7 268V, 32GB of memory, and 1TB of storage (instead of our unit’s 512GB) for $2,869. CDW does have our test configuration for $2,283.  Confusingly, despite being brand new, the HP EliteBook X G1i lineup saw huge discounts to the listed MSRP right away, cutting anywhere from 33 percent to 61 percent off the prices of pre-configured models. This lowered the base model to $1,599 (or a version that lengthens the warranty and Wolf Pro Security subscription for even less at $1,499), and the unit closest to our test model to $1,999. HP also offers pre-configured models with 5G modems and customization options with alternate displays, including higher resolutions, 120Hz (VRR) panels, privacy protection, and non-touch options. HP’s custom configurations come with a lower base specification than pre-configured models and a higher starting price of $2,680. What it lacks in raw performance it largely makes up for in efficiency, easily running all day. HP EliteBook X G1i: Design and build quality IDG / Mark Knapp The HP EliteBook X G1i embodies cleanliness. It uses smooth, tight curves all around its design to make for a tidy package. Nothing stands out, but nothing looks overly plain. Simple, but elegant. The dark blue color scheme also has a neat effect: when viewing the laptop at an angle (like you would when using it), the trackpad and keyboard reflect light differently than the chassis, making them appear to shift to a subtly lighter shade of blue.  The display has fairly thin bezels, though the top one is on the thick side. That space also houses the camera, which has a physical privacy shutter. The shutter is unfortunately situated right where a cutaway in the chassis guides you to open the laptop from. In my case, this has meant my thumb frequently touches the camera and shutter. Over time, all that finger grease will add up. And Windows Hello facial recognition isn’t as quick to unlock if I have to reactivate the camera every time.  The chassis isn’t super thin, measuring 0.72 inches at its thickest point, but it’s still pretty lightweight at 2.72 pounds. That’s likely thanks in part to the magnesium used in the casing, which has just a faint roughness to its texture. The laptop feels sturdy, with minimal flex in the keyboard deck or display, though the hinge does wiggle for a couple seconds after repositioning the screen.  The laptop sits on one wide rubber foot at the back edge and two small feet at the front. These keep it reasonably secure. When the display is open, its back edge ends up folding down low enough to touch the desk underneath it. This doesn’t raise the laptop much, but it does block off the exhaust. In this case, the wide foot smartly prevents the hot exhaust from heading right back into the intake fans. Instead, exhaust will head up over the hinge or out the sides of the channel created there.  HP has a simple keyboard here. It’s compact and backlit. Even with its space constraints, it gets Page Up and Page Down keys squished in with the arrow keys, and HP has included Home (on the F12 key) and dedicated End, Insert, and Delete keys in the top right corner of the keyboard.  On either side of the keyboard, two grilles actually house a pair of speakers, and those combine with a second pair of speakers inside slots along the front edge of the laptop. It’s not only surprising to see up-firing speakers on a laptop these days but also a surprise to see so many speakers on what’s plainly a productivity machine. To power the HP EliteBook X G1i, you get a small 65W charger that weighs under half a pound. This comes in three parts — AC cable, USB-C cable, and the transformer — providing some flexibility and the ability to replace parts if any break. HP EliteBook X G1i: Keyboard, trackpad IDG / Mark Knapp The keyboard feels decent and is easy to see with its white backlighting. It doesn’t have much contour to the keycaps, which can make it a little hard to keep centered on each key, but the stabilization is solid. The keys also have a decent resistance to them, which helps somewhat with tactility, though they don’t bottom out with a very noticeable feeling. That can make it more difficult to hit the same key multiple times while typing quickly. I found my accuracy quickly and consistently sank if I tried going much faster than about 110 words per minute. Meanwhile, I could reach 98 percent accuracy while typing at 108 words per minute in Monkeytype.  The trackpad is a good size, not terribly wide but reasonably tall. Its glass surface is smooth and feels great to swipe around on. And it clicks with a short travel and gentle thunk when it actuates.  HP EliteBook X G1i: Display, audio IDG / Mark Knapp You won’t get the most splendid display from the HP EliteBook X G1i, but you’ll get a very high-utility one. It’s only offering a 1200p resolution, which is fine but not impressive on a laptop these days. It also doesn’t get the fast refresh rate we’re seeing frequently. What the HP EliteBook X G1i has is a respectably colorful display able to hit 99 percent of the sRGB color space, strong contrast and brightness for an LCD at 1680:1 and 524.7 nits, and a wonderful anti-glare coating that makes it easy to see the display even with it set to lower brightness levels. The coating did a great job hiding the glare even from a brightly lit window.  The screen offers touch functionality, which can be useful. It might have felt smoother with a faster refresh rate, but it’s still acceptably responsive. And I enjoy the feel of my fingers gliding across the screen. The anti-glare coating also helps reduce visible smudges from skin oils. The HP EliteBook X G1i features a quad-speaker setup and can pump out a good deal of volume. Going much beyond 50 percent volume, the speakers can get too loud for comfort when listening at arm’s length. The speakers deliver surprisingly depth, hitting bass notes you can’t always count on from a laptop, and the sound is fairly clean. With the speakers cranked to full volume, they’re a bit too crisp, but without noticeable distortion. HP EliteBook X G1i: Webcam, microphone, biometrics The webcam on the HP EliteBook X G1i is decent, capturing sharp footage from its 5MP sensor. But it still requires good conditions to look its best. With overhead lighting, the camera likely will still struggle some. You’ll want some bright light source (like a window) shining onto you to avoid noise in the visuals.  The webcam comes paired with IR emitters, giving it Windows Hello facial recognition abilities. There are also a handful of presence-sensing options that can dim or lock the display if you’re not looking at the screen or sitting in front of the laptop. If you prefer fingerprint recognition, that’s also available with a scanner integrated into the power button. Either method offers quick and convenient way to sign in. The microphone array leaves room for improvement. It captures my voice with a decent fullness, but it really struggles with background noise. There’s a lot of room echo that makes me sound further off than I should, and the mics will pick up any extra noises in the room, like fans, air filters, or air conditioners. I was shocked at the poor performance here considering how effective the mics in the HP OmniBook X Flip 14 were at cancelling out just about any noise that wasn’t my voice. HP EliteBook X G1i: Connectivity IDG / Mark Knapp HP hasn’t done a ton for connectivity, but it’s done enough. You’ll get two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left side and a USB-C 10Gbps port on the right, with all three ports supporting DisplayPort output and charging, giving you some rare flexibility for which side you charge on. The left edge also includes HDMI 2.1 and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The right side rounds it all out with a 5Gbps USB-A port and, depending on the configuration, a SIM card slot.  When you want to tap into wireless connections, the system offers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connections. Both have been fast to connect and reconnect in my testing, and the Wi-Fi managed solid reception and throughput.  HP EliteBook X G1i: Performance The HP EliteBook X G1i is predictably a modest performer. The kind of low-power chips that you’ll often find in thin-and-light systems like this don’t tend to have the most muscle for heavy workloads, but the Intel Core Ultra 7 268V and other chips in this lineup tend to have very strong single-core performance and can zip through light tasks well while conserving energy. The 32GB of memory is a welcome feature for multitasking, though at upwards of $2,000, I’d have been more impressed with 64GB of memory on board as HP packed into the AMD-powered $2,750 HP Elitebook X G1a. The HP EliteBook X G1i also has an interesting rival in its flipping counterpart, the $2,899 HP EliteBook X Flip G1i, which offers almost all the same specs but in a more flexible design. There’s also stiff competition like the $2,336 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition, which comes very similarly equipped and priced. And if you don’t need all the professional, enterprise tech that comes with a system like this, the HP EliteBook X G1i has to face down much more affordable options like the $1,749 Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition, which also boasts similar internals but a more stylish exterior.  IDG / Mark Knapp As expected, the HP EliteBook X G1i offers respectable though not mind-blowing overall performance. PCMark 10 is a holistic test of a laptop’s ability to perform common office tasks, and it takes CPU, GPU, and storage performance into account. The HP EliteBook X G1i manages the test well, though has a notable shortcoming in the App Startup portion of the test. This is a shortcoming we see in the other two HP laptops as well, but both of Lenovo’s systems excel there, suggesting HP may be using lower-tier SSDs than Lenovo — a good reminder that capacity is only one factor to consider in a drive.  IDG / Mark Knapp As we can see, it wasn’t raw CPU performance that helped Lenovo get ahead in PCMark. Turning to Cinebench, which hits the CPU with a heavy rendering task, we can see the HP EliteBook X G1i perform very close to the Lenovo systems in single- and multicore performance, even coming out ahead in many cases, especially for single-core runs. Still there’s a wide gulf between the HP EliteBook X G1i and its AMD counterpart, showing a trend we’ve seen much this generation: AMD has a big multi-core performance advantage in its laptop CPUs. IDG / Mark Knapp Handbrake provides another demonstration of CPU performance, as we task the systems with a large encoding task shrinking down an entire movie. This not only hits the CPU hard but also takes enough time to really bring heat into the equation. The HP EliteBook X G1i isn’t incredibly fast, taking over 20 minutes to complete the task (gaming laptops can often complete it in half the time), but it sustained its speeds well and came out ahead of its flipping counterpart as well as Lenovo’s options, though it only beat the Yoga 9i by one second. We can see again that Intel’s performance here lags behind AMD’s as the HP EliteBook X G1a beats all the others by at least 5 minutes. IDG / Mark Knapp Graphics performance is where the recent Intel chips regain some ground on AMD, tending to make more of their Intel Arc graphics than AMD can with its integrated Radeon solutions. That’s the case here with the HP EliteBook X G1i offering respectable performance in 3DMark’s Time Spy test. This doesn’t make the HP EliteBook X G1i a very strong machine for graphics, as this performance still pales in comparison to even low-end discrete graphics like the RTX 4050, but it also doesn’t come with the extreme power draw that discrete graphics does. This graphics test is in keeping with the rest of the results, too, seeing the HP EliteBook X G1i narrowly lead the flipping model and the ThinkPad though slightly lagging behind the Yoga 9i.  HP EliteBook X G1i: Battery life The HP EliteBook X G1i has a solid combination of factors working for it when it comes to battery life. The Intel chip powering it may not be super fast, but it’s speedy enough for most everyday options and it’s very efficient. Then there’s the display, which doesn’t appear to take too much power to run. This let the HP EliteBook X G1i run for almost 21 hours in our offline video playback test, which loops a 4K video while the display is set between 250 and 260 nits.  IDG / Mark Knapp That’s a big advantage over the AMD version. That model fell shy of 11 hours and was in keeping with the kind of efficiency we’ve seen from other recent AMD laptops. Lenovo shows there’s still some room for improvement though. Its ThinkPad ran for over 24 hours. But perhaps more impressive is that the Yoga 9i, which had a number of performance wins, also beat the HP EliteBook X G1i on longevity by running almost a whole 3 hours longer.  While you can’t exactly count on video playback to tell you how long a laptop will work in everyday use, the HP EliteBook X G1i held up well when put to office tasks, browsing the web, researching, and writing up articles. In this use, it was regularly on pace to last for over 12 hours. And since the anti-glare display makes it easy to see the screen even when it’s set to lower brightness levels, it’s very possible to conserve even more power. HP EliteBook X G1i: Conclusion The HP EliteBook X G1i has potential. It’s not very powerful, but it has the horsepower it needs to tackle most people’s workdays and a little extra legroom for some more demanding tasks. What it lacks in raw performance it largely makes up for in efficiency, easily running all day. Paired with an easy-on-the-eyes display that you can run even at very dim levels and still see clearly, and you’ve got a machine that’s properly prepared for productivity. But the price stands in its way. Unless you really need HP’s business features like Wolf Pro Security, the extra cost just isn’t worth it, especially with consumer laptops like the Yoga 9i beating it in almost every way. Read...