PCWorld reports that the Windows 11 KB5121003 update is causing serious issues for HP and Lenovo laptop users, including broken printers, crashing games, and random power disconnects while charging. HP laptops may suffer from corrupted BIOS following the update, making this a potentially damaging problem for affected users. Rolling back the KB5121003 update appears to be the most effective solution to resolve these hardware stability issues. It's been over a month since Microsoft rolled out KB5121003 --known as the August Patch Tuesday update--and we're still feeling the effects of it. Wracked with issues like crashing games, broken printers and PDFs, and Teams and Outlook failures on Arm PCs, the very same update is also causing major instability on HP and Lenovo laptops.

Lenovo is really excited about the Chromebook Plus 14, as is its partner Google. In fact it was the only Chromebook Google showed me at its latest ChromeOS presentation in NYC, and Lenovo also sent a review unit to both PCWorld's laptop expert Ashley Biancuzzo and our video team leader Adam Patrick Murray. Now if you watch PCWorld's YouTube channel or our weekly podcast The Full Nerd, you know that Adam is a diehard Windows user. But like a lot of us, he's looking at some alternatives, and decided to use this opportunity to check out Chromebooks for the first time in years. The Chromebook Plus 14 is "premium," in the admittedly lower scale of Chromebooks versus Windows laptops, with a brand new Mediatek processor packing an NPU for AI-powered features.

Have an idle laptop sitting on your desk on a kitchen counter? Lenovo has a novel idea: Turn it into an Amazon Echo Show, complete with Alexa. Slated to debut on various Lenovo Yoga and IdeaPad laptops later this year, Lenovo's Show Mode brings the Echo Show interface to a Lenovo PC, complete with support for voice commands and smart home control. With Show Mode enabled, a Lenovo laptop or desktop system would essentially act as an Echo Show smart display. Just as with a standard Echo Show, you could ask Alexa questions, command her to turn your lights on and off, get weather reports, play music, read your schedule, or make calls to other Echo speakers.