Table of contents for April 2021 in APC

It’s a very rare and special time in the world of the PC. We’re witnessing above-average generational performance leaps with GPUs, a remarkable battle for the CPU space well into its third year, exciting new PCIe 4 SSDs, motherboards with loads of lanes, monitors with extreme specs, and RAM hitting ridiculous speeds. It’s wonderful. Well, it could be wonderful. But it’s not. Because you just can’t buy a lot of this stuff without a long wait, and/or some compromise on what you really wanted. You know the situation. You may well be on a waiting list for something. Odds are, you are. We’ve covered this from a few angles this month. Joel (page 17), Jared (page 19) and Mark (page 64) look at the issue, the immediate effects and the…

A federal jury in Waco, Texas, ruled on March 3rd that Intel must pay US$2.18 billion in damages to VLSI, a semiconductor design firm, for violating two of its patents. Damages for one patent violation weigh in at US$1.5 billion, while the other totals US$675 million. The broader case is still ongoing, though, as VLSI has sued Intel in several states, spanning California, Delaware, and Texas, for damages associated with six other alleged patent violations. Intel’s most recent 10K filing lists the VLSI lawsuits as ongoing litigation, noting that VLSI seeks a total of US$7.1 billion in damages from all eight alleged violations, along with future royalties, attorney’s fees, costs, and interest. Intel predicts that totals up to US$11 billion, collectively. Intel commented on today’s ruling, saying to Tom’s Hardware,…

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT comes in with the highest GPU clocks we’ve to date, 2,424MHz. The RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT both have 2,250MHz game clocks, though in actual benchmarks, we’ve seen speeds of more than 2500MHz already – the Game Clock is more of a conservative boost clock. Even with a drop down to 40 CUs (from 60 CUs on the RX 6800), the higher clock speeds should prove relatively potent. Raw theoretical performance sits at 12.4 TFLOPS, and assuming AMD uses 16Gbps GDDR6 again (which is likely), it will have 384GBps of bandwidth. Except, it still has a honking 96MB L3 Infinity Cache.…

Samsung Foundry, Infineon Technologies, and NXP Semiconductors have not yet restarted operating their fabs in Austin, Texas, as they need time to clean them up and configure them again. The idling fabs will further contribute to the ongoing global shortage of chips, which could affect the pricing of final products, such as SSDs. Due to power outages caused by unprecedentedly cold weather and a winter storm, the Austin Energy power grid asked its biggest consumers, such as Samsung Foundry and other makers of semiconductors, to temporarily shut down their fabs in a bid to ensure that enough power was supplied to homes in late February. While it is possible to briefly turn off a chip production facility, it is extremely hard to restart it.…

We finally put down our PS5 long enough to do a proper teardown. We really want this thing to work again when we’re done. We’re not going to hold back, though. Here we go. MAJOR TECH SPECS • AMD custom 8-core / 16-thread 3.5GHz Zen 2 CPU • AMD custom RDNA 2 GPU (2,230 MHz with 36 compute units) • 6GB RAM, 128GB storage (256 and 512GB configs available) • 16GB GDDR6 RAM • 825GB of SSD storage (plus an M.2 SSD expansion slot) • HDMI 2.1 connectivity, support for 8K video at 60Hz, or 4K at 120Hz KEY FINDINGS • The last fully fledged, whole-number PlayStation launch was back in 2013, so we’re pretty excited. You may have heard that the PS5 is big. This thing towers over its…

Synology has been synonymous with NAS for some twenty years but it’s never made the drives that actually go inside its devices. Now, it’s selling branded, NAS-optimised hard disks and locking some of its NAS buyers into using them. What’s going on? First up it’s worth examining the reasons for buying a dedicated NAS drive. The firmware is optimised for NAS workloads with error correction features helping avoid failures. Physical hardware vibration control is often included, they’re quieter, they’re rated to significantly higher failure tolerances, consume less power and come with longer warranties. Such technology naturally takes many years to perfect and so Synology is using third-party drives – from Toshiba – and adding its own firmware and branding. This firmware also communicates directly with Synology’s DSM operating system and…

It seems like it was just yesterday that we were wondering when traditional HDD manufacturers like Western Digital were going to enter the SSD market. And enter it did. After the acquisition of SanDisk, WD became one of undisputed leaders in the SSD space. Straight up, the SN850 is one of the fastest SSDs we’ve ever tested. Western Digital is one of a handful of manufacturers that has the capability to design and manufacture its SSDs in-house. This means it doesn’t have to rely on third-party manufacturers or generic firmware. We hope this leads to cost advantages that can be passed on to the consumer, though at the time of writing, the 1TB model we’re reviewing is priced at over $400. That’s too expensive, though we’re sure that will change…

A year ago, we reviewed our first Tenda Wi-Fi product and were impressed with how easy it was to get up and running. At that point Tenda was an established brand in China but only really known on these shores for being sold in OfficeWorks. Now, it’s more widely available and is offering this quasi-premium, three-node, last-gen Wi-Fi mesh pack for a not-insubstantial $366. In a mature, mesh market is that good value? Each Nova node is a white, 10cm cube with a subtle cross-weave pattern on the sides that will fit discreetly into most homes. Each has three Gigabit Ethernet ports (one doubles as WAN for plugging directly into your modem). A small LED light on the top glows green when operational or orange when there’s an issue. Setup…

With the ongoing advance of AMD into the laptop processor space and the loss of Apple processor manufacturing contracts, we’re not overly surprised that Intel is keen to start building more of its own devices. The XPG Xenia Xe is the second 15-inch NUC to come from Intel, but considering the processor manufacturer isn’t on top of its game in other areas, is it stretched too thin to make a successful laptop? The XPG Xenia Xe is a 15.6-inch Full HD professional ultrabook that has a simple, squarish silver shape and an inoffensive overall layout. The keyboard’s keys are a little smaller than they needed to be, with a large chassis area around them, but they offer enough resistance and travel to be fine for typing. If you’re keen on…

Razer is finally branching out into the ‘strictly business’ space with the new Book 13 line by ditching the discrete GPU and slashing the price. It’s a solid move, but with Apple and Dell both offering price cuts on its 2021 devices, the Book 13’s starting price of $2,199 isn’t as competitive as we’d hoped. For that starting price you’ll get a non-touch 13.4-inch 16-by-10 display at FullHD+ 60Hz, an Intel Core i5-1135G7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, which is a couple of hundred dollars less than Dell’s XPS 13, but a few hundred more than a similarly specced MacBook Air. If you want the more powerful Intel Core i7-1165G7 under the hood and touchscreen capabilities you’re looking at $2,999, while the top of the line UHD+…

How far are we away from doing pure ray tracing in a game? Theoretically, it could be done right now, but how would it perform? The best estimate we have of how a pure RT rendering solution would perform comes from 3DMark, with its DirectX Ray Tracing Feature Test. We ran the test on the latest AMD and Nvidia RT-capable GPUs, and it uses a relatively ambitious 2560x1440 resolution. Full ray tracing at 1440p? We could be in for a bumpy ride! OK, honestly that doesn’t even look that bad. The 3090 is already hitting nearly 60fps! Except, you have to see the test in action to understand what’s happening, and how it differs from a real game. The whole test uses a static scene, and the camera moves around,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS  Windows 10 You can use Windows’ own Task View option, or try a number of third-party apps. Tired of managing an unruly mess of a desktop, with tons of windows clogging up your view? There is a solution: Windows 10’s virtual desktop feature. This lets you create a new instance of your current desktop setup, enabling you to divide your tasks into separate desktops, all walled off from each other. You might have a desktop with your work documents and apps open, for example, with another used for unwinding during your lunch break. That way, everything is neatly ordered and in control, without becoming overwhelming. You can’t have different wallpapers or themes for your different desktops – instead, think of them as close copies of each other,…

When Apple launched iOS 14, it heralded a new era for the iPhone. One of the biggest new features was the introduction of widgets, which can display snippets of information from the app of your choice on your Home screen. Although Apple has opened the widget system to third-party developers, there’s not as much control as you might like. Apple’s apps allow for little visual customisation – if you do not like how they look, you are stuck. Widgetsmith does an excellent job at solving that. It has a wide range of widgets that can be tuned to your liking. What’s more, the app opens the way to Home screen customisation that simply was not possible before, letting you create a theme that matches your taste. The basic version of…

01 PRINT THE CURRENT METADATA We’ll be using the pdftk utility to alter the metadata of PDF files. Run the pdftk file.pdf dump_data output metadata. txt command. This will create a data dump in the metadata.txt file for the specified PDF file. 02 EDIT THE METADATA The data_dump command option of pdftk reads a single input file and reports its metadata including bookmarks, and page metrics such as media, page rotation, in addition to the title, author and so on. You can edit this file in any text editor of your choice. 03 UPDATE THE PDF FILE The information in the generated metadata.txt file contains key value pairs such as ‘InfoKey: Title’ followed by ‘InfoValue: This is the title’. After you’ve made the changes, update the PDF file with new…

01 CHOOSE YOUR OS Raspberry Pi OS with the full set of pre-installed software is the best option for a daily driver. It will save time later with all the productivity tools you’ll need. While lightweight alternatives are available, the Raspberry Pi OS also features a well-supported version of Chromium, which you’ll need for collaboration tools that are otherwise unavailable for the Raspberry Pi. 02 CONSIDER YOUR PERIPHERALS Unless you’re using the Pi 400, you’ll need a reliable, comfortable keyboard and mouse for your new PC. Without stating the obvious, a display is also vital – there’s no SSH-ing into your Raspberry Pi desktop replacement. For storage, consider an external hard disk drive for speed and convenience. Cloud storage is an option, although reliable sync tools for popular services are…

Fresh Grand Theft Auto trilogy remaster rumours surface on Rockstar’s forums Over on Rockstar’s official GTA forums, fans have been discussing the topic of future DLC. The topic was started in November 2020 but it’s still enjoying a healthy discourse to this day, and, more recently in January, one member who is listed as Mach1bud – and is known for having leaked credible information in the past – swung in and commented the word “Soon”. Metro Exodus is getting a PC Enhanced Edition as well as other additional upgrades Metro Exodus is getting a free Enhanced Edition upgrade which is set to release as soon as this Spring. According to a statement released on Steam, Metro Exodus’ 4A Engine will be receiving an overhaul which will result in various visual…

This is a wargamer’s wargame. There’s no nice music. The graphics are barebones. The UI is pretty basic. You’ll want to memorise hotkeys. What there is are 50+ hours of historical scenarios and campaigns. The famous battles give you a prearranged battlefield and let you pick a side, then customise it a bit. The campaigns give you good context on a fixed route while still letting you make decisions about your army’s composition. Multiplayer is handled in the same asynchronous style as past Field of Glory games, which is disappointing and frustrating if you want to finish a match in one sitting. It’s just functional enough if you can only sit down to play for 15 minutes at a time. Very unimpressive and underwhelming. FOG II: Medieval’s battles focus on…

Expanscape Aurora 7 Run a crypto bullpen on your local Starbucks Wi-Fi with this hepta-screen laptop. While adding a second screen to your setup is a sure way to improve efficiency and, for some, even a third screen is also a worthwhile addition, there’s generally a limit to the amount of screens you need. For the creators of the Aurora 7, that number seems to be seven. Even on a permanent desktop setup, seven screens seems excessive, but the team at Expanscape have taken it a step further by folding them all into a 12kg carbon fibre-encased laptop. Sure, it would be possible to fill those last four screens with your favourite sporting matches or a dank meme feed, but it’s a lot of weight for something you could keep…

LastPass is rolling out a change to its free plans that will affect users drastically. Specifically, it’ll limit the kind of devices users can run the app on from March 16th, 2021. Users will have to select their device type by logging into their account. Depending on which device you choose, you’ll automatically be opted into the mobile or computer type. and they’ll be offered three chances to switch before needing to choose or trade up to the premium plan. To clarify, you could use two types of devices on the previous plan, now you can use an unlimited number of devices, albeit limited to one type in pre-defined classes.…

The Raspberry Pi Pico is turning up in many imaginative projects, and the latest to the list is a long-range wireless chat “Doomsday Communicator” from Bobricius that features a simple QWERTY keyboard and a small IPS LCD display. Bobricius’ Raspberry Pi PICOmputer is the latest in their ARMACHAT long-range radio messenger boards. Powered by a single 18650 Lithium-Ion battery, ARMACHAT boards send messages over a radio connection, with frequencies and license requirements varying depending on where you are in the world. They can also be used in a mesh network with other users, handy if there’s ever an apocalypse. There isn’t much information right now, and it is early days to estimate a release date. Based on the previous models, we expect prices to be around $200.…

What do you do when you want to mine Ethereum and can’t buy any of the best graphics cards? For some users, the latest solution is to turn to laptop mining. We were skeptical the first time we heard people were using laptops to mine in bulk, but Weibo user BTCer has posted multiple images and even a video indicating this is the real deal. But given that these new farms use pricey laptops, how long would it take to break even, or turn a profit? There are varying results, but memory bandwidth is a major factor in overall hashing performance. All of the RTX 20-series GPUs with 8GB of GDDR6 memory end up right around 45MH/s after tuning, while the desktop RTX 3060 Ti and 3070 manage 60MH/s. The…

$10,999 | samsung.com Samsung The Terrace 4K QLED outdoor TV now in 75in full-sun edition. We’ve covered Samsung’s water and dust resistant The Terrace outdoor TVs before, but there’s a new bigger 75-inch model that’s suitable for full sun situations that’s worth mentioning. It gets the same 2,000nit brightness of its siblings, which is bright enough to compete with daytime background light, and has an anti-glare finish that cuts out bright reflections. Combine this with 4K quantum-dot technology and a HDR colour palette and you’ll get an unparalleled outdoor viewing experience. It also includes a water resistant remote and all the smartphone mirroring and smart TV features you get on today’s leading living room tellies. $2,099 | store.DJI.com DJI FPV Combo Really put yourself in the driver’s seat of your…

PCIe 4.0 SSDs are coming thick and fast. With Intel’s upcoming 11th Gen CPUs finally including support, PCIe 3.0 SSDs will rapidly fall by the wayside. Adata mightn’t have the manufacturing capabilities of the likes of Samsung or Western Digital, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t a serious player in the memory and SSD business. We’ve always loved the great blend of performance and affordable pricing. Can the 2TB Adata XPG Gammix S70 impress us once more? The S70 is a standard form factor M.2 2280 (80mm length) NVMe drive that makes use of a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. Its attention grabbing headline is its incredible sequential read and write speeds. At 7,400MB/s and 6,400MB/s, it’s the fastest rated drive we’ve seen to date. It makes use of Micron-sourced…

In a world where gaming monitors are competing to offer the most immersive game reproduction, best viewing angles, biggest curved screens, brightest colours and most jaw-dropping HDR contrast – all in an effort to make the latest games look pretty – BenQ’s latest Zowie XL2546K looks on from the wings with a pitiful disgust. This is a monitor that has been designed, first and foremost, to play the eight-year-old CS:GO FPS video game (and its derivatives) at a world championship-winning level. This 24.5-inch, 1080p monitor, with a matte, anti-glare coating, doesn’t just use the ancient TN panel technology to reduce the image ghosting and blur that’s inherent in LCD panels, it also has a 240Hz refresh rate to add an extra layer of motion smoothness and further reduce ghosting and…

Bitwarden needs (for desktop app): CPU: 64bit dual-core RAM: 4GB | Free for personal use | bitwarden.com LastPass runs on any PC that can run a supported browser | Free for personal use | lastpass.com Password managers are, we think, generally a good thing. Remembering adsofpjdp is one thing, but also committing 4256p4m2glm! and paLsdKfnk26& to memory is quite another. Keeping your passwords strong and changing them regularly is important these days, when you can check on a website whether or not you’ve been “pwned,” and Chrome harasses you with your unfeasibly large number of compromised passwords. Web browsers, the front line in the war between password and jailbird, have been able to remember your passwords for a while now, and can generate strong passwords that you’ll never be expected…

Intel’s Project Athena was announced back in 2019, as a program to encourage laptop vendors using 10th Gen Intel chips to optimise their devices along a few key lines that the company believed would be most critical to today’s consumers. After a year of extensive uptake across thin-and-light laptops, Intel says it’s learnt a lot from the program already and has expressed these findings in the next generation of Athena: Intel Evo. What is Evo? To make the cut, an Intel Evo Laptop needs to offer stable performance throughout its battery life, wake from sleep in less than a second, maintain over nine hours battery life on real-world use benchmarks, and offer four hours of battery life from a 30 minute fast-charge. The main other standout features you’ll see on…

The Asus ZenBook Flip 13’s 1080p screen is a 13.3-inch OLED panel with Full DCI-P3 colour compatibility, which is a pretty standout bonus in an otherwise tight race… especially when it’ll cost you nothing extra. The standard online price for the ZenBook Flip 13 with a Core i7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB PCIe SSD is $2,299, but we’ve seen it on sale for as little as $2,077 – which is on par with the best price for an i7 Evo we’ve seen. It also comes in an i5, 8GB, 512GB variation (still with the OLED panel) for $1,699 full-price or $1,598 on sale. The keyboard is a little elongated, but this doesn’t seem to affect the overall typing experience too much. The backlit trackpad, which is now super easy…

While there will be a couple of different variations on the Spectre X360 this year, the model we’re testing is only available at Harvey Norman for an RRP of $2,999. This might seem steep for a 13.3 inch laptop with just a 60Hz Full HD panel, but this screen is actually an OLED display, which makes it stand out in media playback and general colour reproduction in side-by-side comparisons. The Spectre x360 13t-aw2007tu also features an Intel Core i7-1165G7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and an integrated Intel Iris Xe GPU, which rounds out a nicely balanced spec sheet for a premium work productivity laptop. The 11th Gen processors offer predictable ten-percent-ish improvements over last year’s laptops, but the Spectre x360 13t-aw2007tu we tested generally netted below average performance results against…

Intel has done a lot of work to ensure laptop vendors are delivering outcomes that consumers actually want in 2021, which means you could pretty much pick any Evo laptop at random and you’re going to end up with a decent professional Ultrabook. While great for consumers, it makes it difficult for vendors to differentiate their products from the crowd and so price was a critical factor this year. Devices with long pedigrees continued to charge premiums, but with Intel performing quality control checks, it really opened the door for up-and-comers to undercut the more established competition. The Most Evo-lved The three winners in this roundup were all the most competitive on price but also managed to squeeze some value-add components into their setups without jettisoning anything critical. Asus’s ZenBook…

It’s easy to start thinking about graphics and ray-tracing GPUs as a two-pony show. There’s AMD on the one side and Nvidia on the other. But Intel doesn’t intend to be left out, or at least that’s what it claims. For the past few years, Intel has been working its way toward releasing dedicated graphics cards. Headed by Raja Koduri, formerly of AMD’s GPU division, 2021 is the year when we’ll finally see the fruits of Intel’s labors. There will be multiple products, ranging from low-power integrated graphics solutions to high-end gaming cards, and all the way up to data center-focused parts for supercomputers. Xe LP already exists in the latest 11th Gen Core mobile CPUs (AKA Tiger Lake), but the dedicated cards will be a different story. How different?…

1 Open apps All apps open on the current desktop are shown here. Hover over a different desktop and you instead see the apps that are open on that desktop. 2 Active desktops Your current virtual desktops are shown along the top. You can close them or add new ones as you wish. 3 Right-click options Right-click an app and you can move it to a different desktop, snap it to a side of your screen, close it, and more. 4 Account activity The Task View can also can be used to view your history and activity. If you are signed in with a Microsoft account on several devices, you can see their activity here, too.…

The Messages app in Big Sur is a major improvement on the version in Catalina. It’s now on a par with most of its rival messaging apps and has features that bring it much more into line with Messages on the iPhone and iPad. Among those new features are the ability to pin up to nine messages to the top of the messages list and the option to reply directly to a message in a group conversation, creating a separate thread. You can now also create a custom image for group conversations and ‘mention’ others by typing their name. Messages now allows you to configure notifications so you only get an alert when someone mentions you. If you love sharing GIFs (animated messages), you can now search for them within…

01 GET STARTED In Widgetsmith, choose your widget size. Here, we will choose Medium. Tap Default Widget, then decide what you want your widget to do. We have selected Clock, giving us a calendar and clock together in one widget. 02 CUSTOMISE THE DETAILS Each widget can be tweaked. For instance, the clock widget lets you change its overall style, theme, location, clock style, and min/sec hand type. Under Aesthetic/Theme, tap Customize Theme for more options. 03 CHOOSE A NAME AND SAVE When done with visual adjustments, tap the name of your widget in the top-left corner. Tap its name in the top-centre to rename it, then tap Save. The widget is now added to Widgetsmith’s library on your device. 04 PLACE YOUR WIDGET Tap and hold a blank area…

Much has been written about using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop replacement. When the Raspberry Pi launched in 2012, this seemed unfeasible. With the arrival of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4, it is eminently possible. Take the basic specification of a low-cost desktop PC from a well-known retail park supplier. The Lenovo IdeaCentre 3 is under $900 and features an i5 CPU, 5GB RAM, and a 1TB drive. Storage aside, there isn’t anything to set that computer apart from a quad-core 1.5GHz Raspberry Pi 4. In many ways this is comparing apples and oranges, but it seems like the Pi is ready for “the big time.” Of course, there’s only one way to find out, which is why we’ve spent a working week using the Raspberry Pi as our…

CPU temps: how hot is too hot? Ever since physicists William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the transistor in 1947, we’ve been making transistors bigger and smaller, faster and more efficient. Today, their form may be different but transistors still amplify the music in your phone, display the action of your movies and the games on your consoles. But no matter the application, the one thing every transistor does is dissipate excess power as heat and nowhere is this more crucial than in your PC. Pushed hard in gaming, encoding 8K video or mining cryptocurrency, the average PC CPU can dissipate enough power to drive six 15-watt LED light globes, so getting rid of that heat quickly enough to keep the billions of transistors inside your CPU happy…

Stumbling into the first boss after slashing through a riverside village beset by demons, I begin to chip away at a screen-dominating health bar with my looted purple ninja knife. Little falls off before it roars, plunging me into a dark world and then summarily killing me with its saw-bladed cleaver. “Yeah, yeah,” I nod, “I’ve played Dark Souls, I know you’re not meant to be able to beat the first boss. It’s just flavour.” Then I respawn, and realise this is just the start of the mountain to come after all. The large arsenal of possible weapons aren’t your only tools for spilling hot yokai blood. Your custom character is half-yokai themselves. Not only does this mean you can spend ameter to enter a powered-up state of demon-slapping fury,…

City planning has come on a long way since people fussed about with pencils and maps. Now it’s all done with Tetris blocks, meaning the constituent parts – land, castle pieces, houses etc – fall from the heavens, pre-constructed. All you need to do is pluck them out from the air and slot them down on the jigsaw earth. It’s incredibly stressful – but your settlement will be completed in record time. It’s a left-field idea, combining Tetris with a medieval kingdom builder, but they’re two concepts that blend together nicely. You’re trying to expand your tiny realm from an islet with a castle on it to a great big island with a sprawling castle, woodland, crops, and houses, although you have very little time to think about the layout.…

APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know most people aren’t wed to a single brand’s products and use a variety of devices. And, like you, APC’s journalists want…

The U.S. imposed new sanctions on SMIC, the largest semiconductor manufacturer in China, in September 2020 to prevent it from purchasing new chip-making equipment. Used chip-making equipment sellers in Japan aren’t subject to those same restrictions, however. Nikkei Asia said those sellers have struggled to keep their products in stock, which has led to significant price increases over the last year. The value of critical equipment such as lithography systems reportedly tripled in that timeframe. Nikkei Asia said that “nearly 90 percent of used machines appear to be headed to China,” per a source at Mitsubishi UFJ Lease & Finance, and that another anonymous source at an unidentified used equipment dealer claimed, “machines that were basically worthless several years ago are now selling for 100 million yen ($1,200,000}.”…

Google’s plans to phase out tracking cookies last year were met with skepticism. However, the company has once again reiterated its intentions to help protect user privacy. Tracking cookies were initially pitched as a means of creating a more personalised web experience. Over time, however, they were subverted for unscrupulous uses and these days are mostly seen as a threat to online privacy. “Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products,” said David Temkin, Google’s Director of Product Management for Ads Privacy and Trust. Back when Google, which was one of the pioneers of the tracking cookie, announced plans to slowly discontinue the use…

Once upon a time you’d have to actually leave the house to buy a videogame, and once you got to the store, you’d need to fork out around $100 for the latest blockbuster. Things have definitely changed of late, though: physical games seem increasingly antiquated, and digital storefronts are raking it in, with games industry analysis company Newzoo claiming a whopping 91 percent of the US industry’s 2020 revenue was made digitally. Not surprising really. What may surprise others is that people are buying games at all. Free game giveaways are hardly a new phenomenon – publishers and developers have done it on Steam for years, and uh, remember magazine covermounts? – but the Epic Games Store has made it a weekly institution. Since late 2018 it has given away…

Gigabyte has shifted the Aorus brand away from the ultra-premium gaming space into the high-end but better value arena, a trend clearly continuing in the Aorus 15p. Both new variations feature an Intel 10th generation Core i71087H CPU capable of boosting to 5GHz on all eight cores, and a fast 512GB PCIe SSD that hits 3,500/2,500MB per second read and write speeds. Then, depending on which model you choose, you’ll either get 16GB of RAM and a new Nvidia RTX 3060 Max-P GPU for $2,799 or 32GB of RAM and a Nvidia RTX 3070 Max-P GPU for a total of $3,099. While the Aorus 15p doesn’t offer a configuration featuring the most powerful GTX 3080, we reckon this is a smart move this year, considering the wide performance range you’ll…

PCIe 4.0 SSD’s are on track to take over the performance NVMe SSD market. It will take some time, but soon PCIe 4.0 drives will find their way into all but basic SATA-equipped systems. That trend will be accelerated by the likes of the Adata XPG Gammix S50 Lite. The name might be a mouthful but at $499 for the 2TB version, it offers a lot of value. In fact, it’s already competitive in both performance and price with PCIe 3.0 drives; at the time of writing it was some $200 cheaper than Adata’s own 2TB S70. The XPG Gammix S50 Lite is a standard form factor 2280 (80mm length) M.2 drive that connects via a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. It’s designed to be a budget-oriented drive but with sustained…

Against the backdrop of the mainstream Wi-Fi router and mesh markets, a new category has been developing: that of the powerful, two-node system which offers wired-like performance from one end of a premise to the other. The Deco X90 represents TP-Link’s first foray into this category but how will it fare in the face of impressive,rival offerings from Asus and Netgear? The two nodes are large, stylised cylinders that aren’t unobtrusive. Each sports only two ports: a Gigabit LAN and a 2.5Gbps WAN/LAN which will feel limiting to some buyers. Initial setup is simple via TP-Link’s Deco phone app. It shows which devices are connected and the bandwidth they’re using. You can re-label them, assign them to users and even blacklist them. Other settings include Guest Network, IP specification and…

Thanks to COVID, we’re all spending more nights at home, and that’s been truer than ever for the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. Still, for bookworms at least that means even more time for settling down and escaping with a good book. Here, we’ve chosen some apps to help you get the most out of your literary habits, from finding new books to discussing them with a like-minded community. You’ll notice that we haven’t chosen Apple Books or Amazon Kindle here – it seems like a waste of space since these are already the go-to ebook store/reading apps. In this selection, we’re looking at the less well-known options, giving book lovers new options and ideas for how to engage with one of the oldest and most comforting…

With an RRP of $2,399 the Swift 5 from Acer is the equal best value device here alongside the MSI Prestige 14 Evo, but we’ve seen it on Acer’s online store for $2,047. If you can get it at this price then the Swift 5 offers unbeatable value, but even at it’s RRP this is a solid offering. Not only is this device one of the thinnest of the roundup at 1.5cm thick, it was also the lightest (per square inch), weighing in at just over a kilogram. While it does feel a little less premium, using lightweight metals on the keyboard surround and top shell, Acer has actually done a great job maintaining continuity through to the plastic undercarriage, which means it doesn’t detract at all from the overall…

There was no human sacrifice. Dogs and cats did not live together. The only mass hysteria was in the media. And unlike Ghostbusters, the Millennium Bug, also known as the Y2K problem, was very real. It was only through a lot of hard work on the part of programmers and IT contractors across the world that bad things didn’t happen. And it’s not as if we weren’t warned about it years in advance. For those under the age of 40, here’s the condensed version: as the year 2000 approached, warnings increased in the press that, at one second past midnight on January 1, all computers would experience an integer overflow; planes would fall out of the sky, and nuclear reactors explode as a result of catastrophic computer failures linked to…

Update Windows Media In the February issue of APC, a story on virtual machines mentioned that we can get images for old Windows boot disks at www.allbootdisks.com – do these images contain the original Windows version, or do they include all the updates to these older versions that were supplied before MSFT support ended? It wasn’t clear in the article. PHIL WEST APC RESPONDS: These boot disk images aren’t suitable for installing Windows – they basically provide boot and repair functions only. If you read the article again, you’ll see that Neil has directed you to the website to obtain a boot floppy disk image for Windows 95, because the Windows 95 CD-ROM itself wasn’t bootable, and requires this to run. When it comes to updating older machines, you’ll find…

01 PIN A CONVERSATION Pinning a conversation displays that particular conversation at the top of the list of messages. Navigate to the conversation you want to pin in the list,control-click on it and choose Pin. You can unpin it in the same way. 02 REPLY INLINE Control-click on the conversation you want to reply to and choose ‘Reply…’. Your reply can be seen beneath the message, rather than as a new one. You can also Tapback a message with a quick reaction by control-clicking on it. 03 SET A GROUP PHOTO Locate the group in the messages list and select it. Click on the ‘i’ at the top right of the main window and choose ‘Change group name and photo’. Click the photo icon, scroll through the images from your…

According to the statistics released by Adobe as part of the 25th anniversary of PDF in 2018, more than 200 billion PDF files were accessed using Adobe products in 2017. In the years since, and taking into account non-Adobe products, the sheer number of PDF files accessed in a year, or even on a daily basis is practically incalculable. The trusted and popular document format started its journey as a proprietary format at Adobe in 1993, and was released as an open standard in 2008. Today, there are a large number of graphical and command-line utilities that you can use to not only read, but also manipulate PDF files. Here, we’ll discuss everything from splitting large PDF files into smaller ones, or merging multiple small files into a single PDF…

As useful as mobile scanning applications such as CamScanner are, the free versions of such programs often insert watermarks to the finished file. If you’re annoyed with watermarks such as “Scanned with CamScanner” or other such watermarks, there’s an easy fix to remove them. You’ll need the ocrmypdf, pdftk and the pdftops tools. The latter utility is available as part of the popper-utils package on Linux distributions. The first step is to OCR the PDF file with the ocrmypdf file.pdf ocr-file.pdf command. Next, we need to uncompress the PDF file so as to be able to edit it in text editors. This is done using the pdftk utility: $ pdftk ocr-file.pdf output uncompressed.pdf uncompress We’re finally ready to remove annoying watermarks. This process involves using the pdftops as well as…

This month’s computer is a little different. Rather than being a single system, MSX was actually a Microsoft specification for eight-bit microcomputers. Countless brands produced their own MSX machines, which dominated Eastern markets. The MSX era is a fascinating period of computing history often neglected in the West, which showcases an unusual stage of gaming evolution. Japan in the early 1980s was flooded with home computers. Despite most machines sharing Microsoft BASIC, these computers were usually incompatible with each other. In June 1983, Microsoft announced the MSX specification: an attempt to standardise eight-bit microcomputers into a unified architecture. Rather than being an invention of Bill Gates, the MSX standard was actually the brainchild of Kazuhiko Nishi, the vice-president of Microsoft Japan and director of ASCII Corporation. Inspired by the VHS…

This is not a game to wow somebody who happens to walk past while you’re playing. The character models have arrived fashionably late from 2010. Still, Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is re-freshingly keen to throw you straight into the action. The game starts off with a chat between you and a few members of your pack regarding your plan to sabotage a nearby fracking site. And twenty minutes or so later, you’ve inhabited all three of hero Cahal’s forms, most of the game mechanics have been introduced, and sufficient drama has taken place to kick off the next leg of the plot. The story jogs along like this until the end, which works very well. Whether gameplay itself hurtles along without pausing for breath is up to you. The…

The Medium plays like an old-school Resident Evil game, minus the gunplay. You navigate Marianne around crumbling, abandoned hotels and claustrophobic Cold War bunkers from fixed camera angles. It can be a bit cumbersome, but it’s a deliberate and effective design choice. The Medium is excellent at making you feel like you’re always being watched, and that danger could be lurking just out of view at any time. The added gimmick here is that Marianne can sometimes see into the spirit world, which is handled by splitting your screen in half, down the middle. All inputs will affect the real and spirit world versions of Marianne identically, but there are often small differences in the terrain or enemies that only exist in one world or the other to complicate things.…

DEVELOPER ID SOFTWARE PUBLISHER GT INTERACTIVE RELEASED JUNE 22, 2016 WEB IDSOFTWARE.COM A wizard lives here, supposedly. Either he’s out to lunch, or someone at id Software in 1996 came up with the name for Quake’s E2M5, ‘The Wizard’s Manse’, and decided it was too cool – sorry, too metal – to change, even when the wizard himself never makes an appearance. Forgivable, considering it’s one of the most tightly crafted levels in a game full of them. I’ve been on a classic first-person shooter tear recently, playing a mix of old-old and designed-to-feel-old shooters like Amid Evil, Dusk, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. With so many games today designed to keep you playing for a hundred hours, it’s refreshing to pick up a shooter that lets you ice skate…