Table of contents for July 2018 in APC

Google is under investigation in Australia after software company Oracle produced evidence that the internet giant has been collecting user data from millions of Android smartphones without consent. According to the report submitted to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been illegally receiving detailed information on search histories and user locations of Australian Android owners, amounting to about a gigabyte of data per device each month. It has been alleged that the data collection began as part of Google’s Street View project, but is still ongoing, coming at the cost of the consumer. Oracle’s report claims that the transfer of information uses up part of a user’s data quota each month, alleging that Aussies are unwittingly paying their telcos to have their details sent…

“I hope you agree (and cover) the fact that just because these companies say they don’t retain your data, or that they protect it, doesn’t mean a person isn’t at risk.” TRUST NO ONE I’m happy to see  APC’s tackling the online privacy issue. I hope you agree (and cover) the fact that just because these companies say they don’t retain your data, or that they protect it, doesn’t mean a person isn’t at risk. I don’t trust ‘em. For example, in many cases, when it comes to your data, a company’s employees can get to it, government agencies can get to it, and (as history’s repeatedly shown) hackers can often get to it, too. They lie, and have been caught lying many times over the past decade or so.…

AMD PROCESSOR $425 | WWW.AMD.COM AMD’s greatest achievement with its first-gen Ryzen processors came from one tiny little CPU: the 1700. At first glance, amidst all the hype surrounding the 1800X and the hex-cored 5 series that followed soon after, we’d dismissed the lower-powered 1700 as nothing more than a lineup-filler designed for those on a budget, or power users looking for particularly good energy savings. The reality was different. In our tests, our sample shattered our expectations, at least when overclocked, and easily kept up with — and in some cases surpassed — the 1800X. All it took was a little elbow grease, some additional voltage and a bump up in the multiplier. 4.0GHz was a cakewalk. In short, it was enough to convince this overclockingobsessed reviewer…

SSD FROM $979 (1TB); $1,909 (2TB) AS TESTED | WWW.INTEL.COM.AU Over the past year or two, we’ve seen Intel roll out new SSDs built into conventional PCI Express cards and SATA enclosures, released in new formats such as M.2, supporting the latest NVMe control protocol in various guises, and even ditching tried and tested NAND flash memory in favour of the radical new 3D Xpoint tech. That’s just on the consumer side. Intel’s SSDs for servers are even more varied. And yet there’s still more. The ‘more’ in this case is the new Intel SSD DC P4510 Series. It’s available in configurations up to an HDD-besting 8TB, but this example rocks in at 2TB. Still a beefy drive by solid-state standards. Indeed, the smallest of the P4510 Series…

17-INCH GAMING LAPTOP $5,599 | WWW.AORUS.COM The Aorus range is already the moniker Gigabyte attaches to its most elite gaming laptops, so this top-of-the-range X9 really is the best of the best when it comes to no-compromise portable gaming. The 2018 Aorus X9 might not look markedly different from its 2017 predecessor, there’s been a pretty considerable change to the GPU architecture. The new X9 swaps out the 2017 model’s dual GeForce GTX 1070 configuration for a single GTX 1080, which is a concession in raw compute power, but allows the device to sidestep some well-established limitations with SLI GPUs. While the black aluminium exterior, full mechanical Brown-switch keyboard and the unique falcon vent design give the impression that this is a luxurious gaming laptop of the highest…

PC CASE $115 | WWW.COOLERMASTER.COM You couldn’t ask for more than what this budget-end case provides. Five years ago, a case with three RGB fans and a tempered glass panel would be considered wildly opulent, and priced accordingly. And now, here we are, in the age of flossing, Fortnite and Facebook scandals, staring a budget case in the face with those very features. It’s easier to put together a low-end gem when you’ve been putting in the design graft on higher-end models like the venerable HAF X, and iterating on those solid foundations for years, than it would be to devise a solid chassis from scratch. There’s not much HAF X DNA visible in the aesthetics of this MasterBox MB500, but the fundamentals of good airflow, easy access,…

$329 | WWW.ASUS.COM/AU At $60 or so more than the other motherboards in our roundup, we were very interested to see what ASUS would offer in return for the higher pricetag. It turns out that not only is this ‘board slightly faster when it comes to our benchmarks, but tweakers will find much to like if they want to get their hands dirty in the BIOS. We have to point out the BIOS as it is easily the most detailed of the lot when it comes to tweakability. ASUS backs this up with the fastest rated memory overclock speed of 3,600MHz, along with an arguably superior CPU power supply comprised of a 10+1 digital power phase control. And yet, this is one of the few boards that doesn’t…

CPU Bottlenecking is typically down to your processor. Your CPU processes everything from rendered in-game frames to memory storage requests, complex program processes and more. It’s an intricate part of the puzzle, and the easiest to become overwhelmed in any system. Most common bottlenecks, especially in games, are due to the processor not being fast enough to handle all the data and processes thrown at it at any given time. Six or seven years ago, most games required two to four high-powered cores to get the job done. Single-core was king, and the more instructions per clock your CPU could process, the better. Intel’s well-founded single-core legacy comes from its early Nehalem architecture, which has seen no fewer than seven iterations since then, each capitalising on improved single-core performance and…

CPU There are a few obvious bottlenecks we’re going to ignore, as they’re processor limitations. For instance, video editing benefits from more cores and higher single-core/IPC. But the biggy is in game. Go to www.cpuid.com and download HWMonitor (dodge the Pro version), run that, and minimise everything aside from the ‘Utilization’ section for your processor and graphics card. Here, you’ll see all your threads, and their current, minimum and maximum utilisation, along with your GPU utilisation. Load up the gaming benchmark of your choice (Unigine’s Superposition is a solid alternative at benchmark.unigine.com), then ‘Alt-Tab’ back to HWMonitor, select the View drop-down, hit ‘Clear Min/Max’, then go back to your benchmark and hit Run. You’re looking for whether your CPU load is at 100 percent across all threads while your GPU…

The process of installing Arch Linux is a command-line-driven affair that involves downloading the ISO, configuring the network and partitioning manually, installing the base OS and then carrying out a whole host of configuration tasks that can be daunting even for the experienced user. Installing Manjaro is the polar opposite experience: the ISO boots into a full live distro experience from where, after having a good try of the system, the user can launch a graphical installer. The installer itself has only a handful of self-explanatory steps that are required to get fully up and running.…

When Chromebooks first launched, many scoffed at their chances of making a significant impact on the computing world. After all, who would really want an OS that basically only runs a web browser? Well, as it turned out, quite a few people did. Chrome OS is still growing in popularity, particularly in the low-cost and educational markets, and its simplicity and Material Design visuals certainly appealed to more people than expected. Given this success, it’s no surprise that Linux developers have seen fit to follow suit with distributions that echo the Chrome OS approach. Of course, Chrome OS itself can be installed courtesy of Chromium open-source-based project releases such as the impressive Neverware CloudReady (www.neverware.com). Neverware also recently acquired the developers of Flint OS, a similar product which offers Chromium…

Every folder on the Mac looks like every other folder. Don’t you wish folders could be customised with your own designs? They can! It is actually quite easy to replace the boring blue folder icons with alternative ones and it takes just a couple of minutes with the Preview app. Folders could be coloured to make special ones stand out in Finder windows or on the desktop. Some text on the folders would be useful and it could describe the contents. Folders that contain fun stuff like photos, music and other items could have fun designs like emoji characters. You will not want to do it to every folder, but it is great to do it with a few special ones.…

There comes a time, during a stressful working day, when you just want to kick back and have a bit of fun. So what better way of doing this than firing up a fun game from yesteryear on your Mac? You may not know that you already have many titles at your fingertips thanks to Terminal. From Tetris to Pong and from Solitaire to Snake, you’re bound to love the nostalgia and instant pick-up-and-play experiences they provide. Here, we look at how you can not only access these free games but discover what you actually have to play. One of our favourites is the text adventure Dunnet — mainly because its interface makes it look like you’re working, when you’re actually typing commands such as ‘take shovel’ to see what…

Linux is a perfectly adequate replacement for Windows. In fact, for many tasks, it’s arguably actually superior, in almost every way. However, even we have to admit that sometimes, certain Linux users will have just-cause to run Windows applications. This might be because Karen from accounts has sent a Word document full of macros and tables and oddly named fonts that needs to be returned, along with accompanying TPS reports, by the end of the day. Some people want to play games not available on Linux, whether they’re classics from that have long been abandoned, or triple-A releases that may never make it to the penguin side. Many people have a dual-boot arrangement or a separate Windows machine altogether, but rebooting or moving to another room is a chore. Wine…

Most people use Google Search every day and accept the results that are presented. This is perfectly reasonable because the results are almost always accurate and fit the search term that has been inputted, but there are ways to improve your results. Google offers many tools that will let you search for images, locations and other non-text references with ease and even these can be expanded upon to let you find exact image sizes and the type of images you require. The Advanced Search option lets you specify more than one term and you can choose what to include and what to avoid, which should bring results that are as near to your requirements as possible. The simplistic search page also lets you compare the prices of products, find books…

THE CONCEPT The idea behind this build is a slight departure from the norm. We wanted to find out what AMD StoreMI was capable of. However, we also wanted to extend the ethos behind the tech to the rest of the system. StoreMI, in case you missed it, pairs a spinning hard drive with an SSD to potentially offer the best of both worlds — high-speed access with large capacities — something that would set you back a good chunk of cash if you were to simply buy a capacious SSD. So the general ethos is great value for money, but it’s more than simply focusing on the budget end of the spectrum — it’s the best balance between value and performance out there. To this end, we’ve set out…

In mid May this year, three developers claimed to have received emails from Valve, asking that they censor their games due to a violation of Steam’s guidelines on pornographic content, or face having them removed from the Steam platform. All of the games in question (namely, Mutiny!!, HuniePop and Tropical Liquor), while varying in genre, all share the same anime-style visuals, feature overtly sexual themes, nudity and suspiciously young-looking teenage girls. Naturally, fans of the games were dismayed and angered at this news, with some claiming that it has racist undertones, as all the developers were Japanese. Valve has since informed the developers in question that they could disregard the strongly-worded emails about their games’ impending removal from Steam. However, far from being let off the hook, Valve has added…

PC, PS4, XO | FROM $9.55 | TELLTALE.COM The idea that Batman and The Joker are more alike than the former will admit — “two threads in the same stitch”, as this game puts it — isn’t new, but it’s never been explored quite like this. The first season of Telltale’s take on Batman was hit and miss for us, but it laid solid foundations with its startlingly original take on the caped crusader and his enemies. This second go has built on them admirably, crafting a far more consistent and compelling story. The setup sees Batman facing off against super-villain group The Pact, with each member a fresh take on a classic villain — from Bane to Riddler to Mr Freeze. Particularly enthralling is Telltale’s Harley Quinn,…

PC | $50 | WWW. TOTALWAR.COM Being a king is simple, right? Wrong. Nobody ever mentions the betrayal, the demands or the crushing and constant requests for equitable wealth distribution. Thrones Of Britannia does something no Total War has done before — make you feel like an actual king. Instead of being an unquestionable, omnipotent monarch, you muddle through a febrile peace in one the most tumultuous periods in British history — 878 AD. The Vikings have been stopped but not defeated; Britain is still occupied; and various hungry powers tear at the flesh of a kingdom too small to share. And as the leader of one of the game’s 10 playable factions, it’s your job to carve yourself a healthy slice. Every success is shared. Every failure…

ISSUE 456, JULY 2018 Please note that these exclusive APC & TechLife magazine downloads will only be available for a limited time, from 25/06/2018 to 12/08/2018 SCRUB THE BARNACLES FROM YOUR PC GET THINGS BACK UP TO SPEED WITH ASHAMPOO REGISTRY CLEANER. FULL VERSION WORTH $15 With the Ashampoo Registry Cleaner, you can easily and safely delete redundant or damaged registry entries, thus freeing up resources and speeding up your PC. Faulty links in the registry are also repaired. The real-time backup in the Ashampoo Registry Cleaner offers a maximum of safety and enables the restoring of the Windows registry into its original status anytime. DOWNLOAD LINK: www.ashampoo.com/lpa/apc TAKE BACK YOUR SENSITIVE INFORMATION REMOVE ALL TRACES WITH ABELSSOFT GCLEAN. FULL VERSION WORTH $20. Many people no longer want,…

$100 million HOW MUCH THE DEVELOPER OF FORTNITE HAS PROMISED TO INVEST IN PRIZE MONEY Fortnite is already such a big gaming phenomenon that publisher Epic Games has announced its intentions of injecting US$1m into the game’s first year as a competitive esports title. The publisher has not yet explained exactly how this money will be distributed to winners, nor is it clear how successful in terms of profits the game has been so far across all available platforms — although analysts have suggested that microtransactions have raised more than US$50m on the iOS version of the game alone! 80% PORTION OF THE VIDEOS THAT YOUTUBE TOOK DOWN IN 2017 THAT WERE INITIALLY FLAGGED BY AI Of the 8.28 million videos that the Google-owned company took down during the fourth…

With the lightning pace of tech releases, it’s hard to believe nearly two years have passed since the first Vive was released. Today, HTC brings you the first headset in what’s bound to be VR’s v2.0 and we’re bringing you the pieces. MAJOR TECH SPECS ■ Two 1440p AMOLED displays for combined res of 2,880 x 1,600 ■ 90Hz refresh rate ■ Dual front-facing cameras, dual mics and headphones ■ Accelerometer, proximity, gyroscope and IPD sensors ■ 360° headset tracking via up to four Lighthouse 2.0 base station IR emitters ■ Wireless with the not-yet-released Vive Wireless Adapter KEY FINDINGS ■ We haven’t even started disassembly, and already we’re seeing some repair-friendly features. Spring contacts and standard Phillips screws connect the modular headphones to the headset, making for easy removal…

When Facebook became embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year, many were dismayed to find that their personal data was being used (indirectly or otherwise) as a tool in political manipulation. Major political campaigns, particularly in the United States but also in Australia, have long used metrics and data in order to both spread their messages and target the right people. And yet, the scale of Facebook and the ostensible use case of the site (read: to connect with friends) seemed completely at odds with the way it was being used by both data agencies and political parties. But what can we do, other than to publicly scold Facebook, usually on Facebook? According to two Mozilla executives we spoke to, the only way to act against social and…

MOTHERBOARD $419 | AU.MSI.COM Unlike buying a sports car or speed boat, when you spend more on a motherboard, you shouldn’t expect to see a substantial performance increase compared to more affordable offerings. Rather, think of it as buying a multi-storey luxury yacht compared to a tinny — while they both zip through the water at the same speed, the luxury yacht is decked out with all the trimmings. That’s why boards like this $400+ offering from MSI might not lap the ‘boards in this month’s X470 roundup (see page 36), when it comes to performance, but you do get quite a lot more for your money when it comes to features. For starters, these days and at this price range, integrated Wi-Fi is basically ubiquitous, and the…

2-IN-1 FROM $3,399 | WWW.DELL.COM/AU Dell has dominated the Windows ultrabook market with its Dell XPS 13 and 15 machines for the last few years, and last year, it debuted a 2-in-1 version of the smaller XPS 13. That 2-in-1 is now also widely admired as one of the better convertibles on the market, so Dell is now trying to take that success across to its bigger 15-inch XPS, with this new 2-in-1 variant using the same design as its 13-inch sibling, with a smooth 360º screen hinge that lets you fold it all the way around into tablet mode. 15-inches is still a bit big and unwieldy for a 2-in-1, but the designers are seemingly hoping to woo more buyers by also making this machine gaming-capable, thanks…

MESH NETWORKING KIT $449 (SET OF THREE) | WWW.DLINK.COM.AU As we’ve repeatedly seen in the last few big APC networking roundups, mesh router kits are a neat way to solve the problem of getting good Wi-Fi across a large space, although they do come at quite a cost. Kits that include three wireless ‘nodes’ can set you back upwards of $650, so D-Link is seriously undercutting that with its new ‘budget’ three-node offering at only $450. Of course, there’s a couple of catches associated with that — the set’s only rated for AC1200 speeds, for example, meaning connection speeds max out at 867Mbps on the 5GHz band and 300Mbps on the 2.4GHz band. Admittedly, that should still be enough for most households, even with a couple of dozen…

$279 | WWW.GIGABYTE.COM.AU We’ve long come to respect Gigabyte as a fantastic manufacturer of high-end ‘boards, with the company’s overclocking prowess proven time and again. But how do its more affordable models perform when they don’t have $700 or so to stack the PCB with exotic power phases, interesting extras and more bling than a Vegas strip? This is a standard ATXsized motherboard, and comes with a surprising amount of inclusions given the price. There are three full-sized PCIe x16 slots, though obviously, they don’t all run at PCIe 3.0 x16 speeds, with the numbers dropping as each slot is populated. The good news is that the X470 chipset allows for two PCIe x16 lanes to both run at PCIe 3.0 x8 speeds, allowing for Nvidia SLI support.…

If you haven’t found an answer to your problem here, that doesn’t mean it’s completely insurmountable. You can always ask our friendly support team — just email your problems to apcmag@futurenet.com — for help. Of course, a subscription to APC is highly recommended, since we’ll give you guides to fixes and tweaks every issue, such as this feature or our regular Windows Help Station section (on page 73). See page 61 for more details on how to subscribe. Once you’ve done that, check these sources to find out more about your problem. ANSWERS.MICROSOFT.COM Microsoft’s forums may not always have the answer you’re looking for — sometimes the response to your problem may be ‘there’s nothing we can do’ — but since it’s staffed by actual experts and a huge number…

Memory is an integral part of any system, and it interacts with the CPU in a very interesting way. It’s essentially a hyper-fast, volatile storage medium, designed to hold data that needs to be accessed more quickly than that found on non-volatile hard drives, yet using files that are larger than those that can be held locally on the internal CPU cache. When it comes to processors, outside of rendering tasks or simulations that operate off large data sets, it’s difficult for your memory to bottleneck your system. Most everyday tasks don’t process or shift enough data fast enough for the bus between the DDR and the CPU to ever become truly saturated, or for the memory to be under 100% load all the time. You can encounter bottlenecks when…

Memory and GPU cores are typically well paired. A GTX 1060, for example, combined with 3GB of VRAM, is more than enough for 80% of most modern triple-A 1080p titles, with 6GB of VRAM being enough to futureproof you for the next four years, or just enough to scrape by on for 1440p. The big problem, however, lies with the folk who drop the cash on a GTX 1080 Ti, only to then game at 1080p. Unless you’re absolutely obsessed with playing first-person shooters at 200Hz and above, with super-low latencies, such a purchase makes little sense from a consumer standpoint. Even if you roll with the notion of it being part of a smart futureproofing decision, the reality is that HD textures are highly unlikely to reach 11GB in…

INGREDIENTS THE ANCIENT GAMER There are two major problems here, the first of which is the dual GTX 970s running in SLI. This forces the GPUs to operate in PCIe x8 mode, as opposed to a full-fat x16. Couple that with the fact you’ve got just a dual-core processor, and most games are immediately going to throttle even at 1080p. The GPU solution is fine on its own for 1080p, but the problem lies with that processor. It would make sense to upgrade the motherboard and CPU to something with more cores and single-core grunt. The second and possibly more alarming problem is the 550W bronze-rated power supply. By default, you should be drawing around 450W from the wall — even with this dual SLI setup — but only having…

“Endless OS includes a core set of custom apps ideal for the average user.” While the ‘just works’ distros are gaining in popularity and look set to play a big part in the future of Linux, other distros are taking a different approach. These are going beyond a focus on core functionality and the initial setup process by looking at both the visual aspects of the distro and the simplicity of the experience for a specific type of user. The leading example of this today — and a distro that has dramatically increased in popularity — is elementary OS (elementary.io). Right from the off, elementary is touted as a “fast and open replacement for Windows and Mac OS”. Elementary is based on Ubuntu LTS and includes the Pantheon desktop environment.…

“You may not want to upgrade to 18.04, at least not right away. It uses the Gnome desktop which, coming from Unity in 14.04, will require some getting used to.” LINUX UBUNTU TWO-STEP I have a laptop that I use offline with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 on it. Besides those two OS partitions, I have two other NTFS ones (for data and VMs). My 14.04 install hasn’t been updated since 2016. Am I right in thinking I can’t apt upgrade my 14.04 install after 18.04 is released? How can I upgrade smoothly to 18.04? I’m a newbie and don’t really want to have to format the Linux partition and reinstall everything. My Wi-Fi seems to have stopped working with the captive portal at my library — could this be…

1 DRAW ON FOLDERS Show Preview’s markup toolbar and you can begin customising the folder design. Add shapes like lines, circles, rectangles and stars by clicking this icon and then size and colour them. 2 ADD EMOJI Wherever you can type text, you can insert emoji. Click the T in the markup toolbar and then press ‘Ctrl-Cmd-spacebar’ to open the emoji window. Double-click one to insert it. 3 FOLDER ICON Select a folder in Finder or the desktop and press ‘Cmd-I’ to open this window. Click this icon and press ‘Cmd-C’ to copy the image or press ‘Cmd-V’ to paste a new icon image. 4 COLOUR FOLDERS If you fancy a change of colour, open the ‘Adjust Colour’ panel in Preview and drag the sliders to change the colour. It…

If you’re using Ubuntu 18.04, you’ll find two versions of Wine in the Software application: the standard version and the development version. These refer to the packages wine-stable and wine-development if you’d rather install them with apt install . If you’re using an older version of Ubuntu, these will be much older, but newer versions are available from the winehq.org PPA, and you’ll find instructions for enabling it at wiki.winehq.org/Download. These packages provide three different branches: winehq-stable , winehq-devel and winehq-staging (in order of stability). The ever-so-handy Winetricks script is available in most repos, too, but users of Debian and older versions of Ubuntu may want to grab it directly from github.com/Winetricks/winetricks. Wine has a rapid fortnightly development release cycle. It’s worth noting that the WineHQ packages won’t have enjoyed…

SafeSearch Google Search is designed to offer all of the results possible, but there will be times when you need to limit them. SafeSearch is available via the cog on the right-hand side of the search page and will filter out adult content from your results. It cannot do this 100% of the time, but is useful if you let your children use Google. 1 POWERFUL IMAGE SEARCHING Image searching can be very precise. You can choose colours, exact sizes or even the style, such as faces or drawings. 2 TYPES OF RESULT You can also specify where you want to get your results from. Blogs, discussions, patents and news sites are available. 3 LOCATIONS AND TIMES Narrow down results by choosing when and where they are. Click ‘Search tools’…

There’s always plenty of friendly competition going on within APC, so when I saw Zak Storey’s sub-$800 budget Intel build (Issue 454, page 92), I couldn’t help but wonder if we could just tweak a little more out of it. Intel’s Core i3-8100 CPU is a cracking chip, no question, but wanting more horsepower, I was on a mission — to squeeze a six-core Intel chip into the same budget, without losing any of the major components. SPEND WHERE IT COUNTS There’s no doubt putting together a decent PC for under $800 is a tough ask and Zak’s build certainly ticks all the boxes. However, even with a budget this tight, you can squeeze more speed out of it by skimping on the ‘nice to haves’ and keeping a really…

Many Arduino-style development boards are well-suited to battery power, but how do you determine the best power option? Look around on the web and you’ll find plenty of boards powered by simple 9V smoke-alarm batteries, yet, in many cases, they’re a poor choice. They might be small and convenient, but 9V ‘PP3’ smoke-alarm batteries have comparatively low capacity, aren’t particularly cheap and usually can only power an Arduino board and a couple of LEDs. If you consider Internet of Things (IoT) and motorised projects that have to run without mains power, sourcing the right power for your project becomes paramount. So this month, we’re looking into the various power options — and none involve a 9V smoke-alarm battery! GET THE VOLTAGE RIGHT The first rule with supplying power to development…

In a rather unexpected announcement, Valve has reported that Apple has rejected — after first approving — the Steam Link app for iOS. The app would have made it possible for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV owners to stream their Steam library games to those Apple devices, a service “similar to numerous remote desktop applications already available on the App Store”. However, according to a Valve press release, “Apple revoked its approval citing business conflicts with app guidelines that had allegedly not been realized by the original review team”. Despite the fact that Valve’s Android Steam Link app is available (and free) to download from the Google Play store, Apple is, for now, digging in its heels. Valve hopes that Apple will reconsider its judgement, but in the meantime, it…

After wafting an orange-haired clown into America’s highchair and successfully convincing swathes of Brits that it was a ‘fit’ idea to Brexit the EU, the social media consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica is shutting up shop. Knowing intimately how much fake news propagates the pages of Facebook, the company took to its website and Twitter to post the official announcement that it would be filing for bankruptcy following the widespread exposure of its pivotal role in the Facebook data abuse scandal — and, well, that blatant video footage capturing the company’s commercialisation of political blackmail. Like all good racketeering business ventures, the company then attempted to rebrand as Emerdata Limited, an entirely different business that dealt with “data processing, hosting and related activities”, shared the same business address and featured an…

We as a species have a remarkable habit of getting ourselves into trouble, so it makes perfect sense that small chunk of our population (the smarter chunk, obviously) are working hard at the drawing board, trying to find ways of prolonging our lives in one way or another. Now, we’re not talking about the basics here — things like air bags, smoke alarms, life jackets, pedestrian crossings and so on — we’re talking about high-tech gadgets of the modern age! Like superheroes, many of these inventions had humble beginnings in the world of drones or fitness trackers, but were trained by a wise master (tweaked and redesigned by scientists and engineers) to become the bigbiceped, cape-wearing life savers that we know today. Westpac to the rescue with its lifesaver drone…

VR HEADSET $299 (32GB); $369 (64GB) | WWW.OCULUS.COM/GO Oculus Go is, in many ways, the dawn of a new era in virtual reality (VR). It’s a standalone device, meaning it has finally cut the cord from the PC, which was needed to run its older and more powerful brother, the Oculus Rift. It’s also, of course, done away with the smartphone. You won’t be slotting anything into the Oculus Go except your face when you slip on the plush headset. As a piece of VR hardware, the experience on hand with the Go is almost as good as the Oculus Rift. You won’t mistake one for the other out in the wild, but we have been continually impressed with how good Go’s VR is, especially considering everything needed…

35-INCH GAMING MONITOR $1,249 | AU.AOC.COM Picture the perfect gaming monitor: optimised for speed and response, but also practical for daily computing — not some mega-money trinket with features you’ll never use, but a screen that hits the sweet spot. You might imagine a 35-inch panel, with a super-wide 21:9 aspect, a gentle curve, high refresh and frame synching technology. You’d probably also split the difference between maximising pixel density for productivity and putting a cap on pixel count to maintain that crucial frame rate. You would, in short, end up with something that looks a lot like AOC’s Agon AG352UCG6. AOC was once known as a purveyor of budget-spec LCD panels. But that was then. Now, AOC’s Agon sub-brand is taking the fight to the likes of…

17-INCH GAMING LAPTOP $5,899 | AU.MSI.COM The Titan 8RG looks like it eats other gaming laptops for breakfast. In both specs and looks, this monster seems to have gorged on at least two other gaming laptops to make a massively overpowered rig that’s gunning for performance records and your bank account. At the head of this well fed snake is a new Intel Core i9 CPU, boasting an additional two cores over last year’s laptop CPU offering and has clock speeds that push it into the i9 bucket. These chips from Intel happen to also be unlocked, allowing you to overclock the devices to their limit — though with uniform cooling inside, this won’t add up to much of a performance boost. Marry this new CPU with an…

AIO COOLER $65 | WWW.ANTEC.COM There’s a lot going for the latest all-in-one from Antec. It looks good, it’s easy to install, it’s affordable, and it runs quietly, but this is balanced by its performance, which is... well, nothing too exciting, to be honest. It’ll keep your stock-clocked CPU off the ‘Tj Max’, but anyone interested in pushing their processor harder is going to want something a bit bigger. We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, though, and it’s worth dwelling on what Antec’s latest cooler does well, because it’s actually a great bit of gear. The problem with many AIO coolers is they need a lot of room. At least, that’s the perception. This can be the case in some older chassis, but every modern case we’ve looked…

$269 | WWW.ASROCK.COM We’re not sure when ASRock is going to stop using the ‘Fatal1ty’ brand given that most millennials probably have no idea who this pro-gamer once was, but in the meantime, they’re sticking with it when it comes to products focused on gamers. At an almost identical price to the Aorus ‘board (see over the page), ASRock has made a couple of slightly different decisions regarding features to help set it apart from the pack. Here, we see the standard ATX form factor in use, but ASRock has populated it with an interesting choice of PCIe slots. Rather than go for three full-length PCIe x16 slots found on most other motherboards, they’ve instead limited it to two, and we think this is a wise decision. By…

$239 | AU.MSI.COM It’s obvious from the moment you first open the box of the MSI X470 Gaming Plus that keeping costs down was a priority for the company. It’s definitely not a looker, with rather sparse cosmetic additions and lots of visible PCB traces, but for those who don’t have a Perspex window, does it really matter? At the end of the day, MSI has delivered an X470 motherboard that performs just as well as the rest, for a remarkably low price. Despite such a rock-bottom price tag, most of the basic features you’ll find elsewhere are all present and accounted for; it just doesn’t look as pretty. The ATX layout has allowed MSI to fit three full-length PCIe x16 lanes, though only one of these has…

The easiest way to fix a PC booting sluggishly is by reducing the number of apps that launch on startup, as having too many programs firing up when the computer starts makes the whole process much slower, especially when it comes to older hardware. To trim those apps, press ‘Ctrl-Shift-Esc’ to bring up Task Manager, then click the link that says ‘More Details’. From here, select the Startup tab. Look through the list of enabled apps and find any that you don’t need — you can turn an app off by right-clicking on it and selecting Disable. Disabled apps won’t automatically load on boot up. Be careful not to turn Microsoft services off, mind you, or important apps such as antiviruses. If you’re unsure whether it’s wise to disable a…

Computers are funny things: a complicated collection of components, each working in conjunction with the rest to produce on-demand output. But as with any team effort, there is always a weak link in the chain. As more and more people join the PC enthusiast community, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype, and upgrade a very basic system with high-end componentry. And while that’s not always a bad thing, it can lead to those weak links being stretched to breaking point, as top-end hardware makes its way into a system that wasn’t designed to host it. This can lead to bottlenecking, when one piece of hardware doesn’t perform as well as it should, due to another component in the system being ill-equipped to handle the potential performance levels.…

Storage solutions are the next biggy on our list of bottleneck conundrums, and the issue pretty much boils down to the introduction of the latest PCIe SSDs, from the likes of Samsung, causing problems for those interested in setting up multiple drives in RAID 0. Traditionally, when you wanted more speed from your system, the obvious way to do this was to take two hard drives — spinning platters or flash SSD — and set them into a redundant array of independent disks with striping. You’d take two drives, and force the data saved to be split in half and written to both simultaneously. Then you could read the original data from both drives at the same time, effectively doubling performance, in exchange for a little more vulnerability, because if…

“Solus ships with a well-rounded suite of apps for office users, devs, gamers and content creators.” One question that’s sure to polarise the opinion of Linux fans is ‘Does it matter if Linux is difficult to set up and use?’. Linux’s roots are obviously among users who can — and even choose to — get deep down and dirty with the internals of a system to get it up and working, and get it working well. While this is all well and good, it creates a barrier to entry — perceived by some as no bad thing, but by many others, this is a fundamental problem for Linux. Great strides have been made in this area in recent years, and improvements will continue for next-generation distros. Solus (solus-project.com) is a…

When you’re working on your computer, you expect your data to be safe. Even if you’re not someone who is specifically at risk, you expect your operating system to look out for you. Until now, this hasn’t really been a major focus — Linux has enjoyed something of a ‘security through obscurity’ resilience to attacks and together with the peer-reviewed security nature of open source, most mainstream distros haven’t trumpeted their security features. This is slowly changing, however, with the introduction of distros such as PureOS (pureos.net). PureOS is a Debian-based distro using the Gnome desktop environment which comes with leading privacy-protecting applications installed. Out of the box, you’ll find Tor support, the DuckDuckGo search engine, the EFF’s Privacy Badger and a custom web browser, PureBrowser, which includes built-in support…

Unfortunately, as our computers age, the slower they become. A machine that used to spring into life and load up Windows in a flash may now chug along, taking its sweet time to display your desktop, making you wait even longer before you can actually use the device. This can be particularly annoying, and is usually caused by filling up your computer with ever more demanding software. The good news is that, because these problems are usually software-based, it means you don’t need to shell out for new hardware just yet. Instead, by giving your PC a spring clean and removing any software you don’t need, and making sure Windows is up-to-date, virus-free and with the latest drivers installed, you’re able to give your machine a noticeable speed boost without…

1 QUITTING A GAME To leave a game, you must press Esc and X. This allows you to type the name of another game. You can also quit emacs on Terminal by holding the Ctrl key and pressing X, then C. 2 KEEPING SCORE Many of the arcade games let you keep score and this is displayed on the screen, usually just outside of the playing area itself. 3 SMALL SCREEN GAMING What these versions of age-old classics lack in size and graphical prowess, they make up for with immediate, addictive gameplay such as with Pong which dates back to 1972. 4 GOOD CONTROLS Depending on the game you are playing, typically you’ll be using the cursor keys and/or the space bar to control what is happening on the screen.…

You’ll almost certainly remember the late ‘80s when the 8-bit computing revolution gradually gave way to the rise of 16-bit machines. Atari and Commodore stood at the forefront of this revolution, with the Amiga eventually winning out. But for a while during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the Atari ST ran it close. And thanks to the brilliant Hatari (hatari.tuxfamily.org), you can now resurrect the ST (and its successors) on your Raspberry Pi. FIRST STEPS You’ll need a desktop environment to run Hatari — we’re using Raspbian PIXEL. The latest version of Hatari uses SDL2 to render graphics, so you’ll need to enable the OpenGL driver, noting that it’s still experimental and may be slightly unstable. It also means Hatari requires a Pi 2 or better to run optimally.…

1 COPY TOS FILES Open File Manager. Double-click the downloaded TOS zip file to open it in Archive Manager, then drag the .img file into your Downloads folder. Once done, press F4 to open a Terminal window pointing to the Downloads folder and type the following (substitute tos102uk.img with the image file): $ sudo cp tos102uk.img /usr/share/hatari 2 SET SYSTEM TYPE Now open the Pi menu and select ‘Games > Hatari’. Click OK at the ‘Could not load TOS file’ screen. When the main menu appears, click System. By default, Hatari is configured to emulate the STFM, but you can select a different Atari machine from the list. Tick ‘Boot faster by patching TOS & sysvars’ regardless of which machine you choose to speed loading times slightly. 3 SELECT ROM…

PC | FROM US$59.95 | ETERNITY.OBSIDIAN.NET Nostalgia is a powerful force in the entertainment landscape, but even given the sheer abundance of throwback media products on offer, it’s rare to see a revival that can truely match the source material. Pillars of Eternity II is, to its enormous credit, one of those “exceptions that make the rule”. A follow-up to the eponymous 2015 original, it’s again a game built largely in homage to Baldur’s Gate and the isometric PC RPGs that were popular throughout the 1990s. Pillars II, however, outdoes its predecessor in several key areas — and as a result, it feels like a true (and modern) heir to the throne. It gets the basics right. This is a game that’s as much about negotiating your way…

PC, XO | $49.95 | WWW.STATEOFDECAY.COM With news of the arrival of yet another zombie game, you’d be forgiven for immediately turning away. But wait: State of Decay 2 is probably the best zombie game of this generation (and in my opinion, of all time). Few major console titles dare ask as much from the player than this sequel, both on an emotional and cerebral level, and what results is a survival simulation that feels less like a grindhouse retread and more like a meditative, tense, existential journey. The format is barely changed from the first State of Decay: choosing from a few survivor archetypes, you’re set loose in a collapsed society, where you’re forced to gather resources and build a pathetic semblance of normality amid the ruins.…

Violent video games ruled not fit for Olympics But other, less-violent games could be in... Late last year, the International Olympic Committee announced that “competitive ‘esports’ could be considered as a sporting activity”, exciting some and confusing others. In the months since then, many have speculated as to which games would qualify, but the IOC has apparently made it quite clear (through correspondence with certain interested parties, including AliSports — a division of AliBaba) that the games under consideration would be non-violent in nature and involve sports somehow. While this is bad news for Overwatch, PUBG, COD and Counter-Strike fans, it might give other games their moments to shine on the international sporting stage, such as Rocket League, FIFA and NBA, or even Mario Kart and Rayman Legends’ Kung Foot…