TechSpot Features

Left unchecked, it doesn't take long for the Windows context menu to become cluttered, and we bet there's at least one program on your context menus that you never use. Conversely, managing the context menu to work in your advantage can be a rewarding tweak to your operating system.

You just bought a new laptop, built a new desktop PC, or are simply clean installing on a new SSD, good for you! Gotta love the taste of a fresh new machine, but now you have to get back to productivity zen by recovering your files and installing programs. Not sure which ones? Well, let us help.

Having a virtual machine on-hand can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as testing software or tweaks in a sandboxed environment that is separate from your primary operating system. A virtual machine can also help you to run older software that doesn't work with your new operating system, or simply exploring a new operating system altogether.

Once again, the tech industry descended on Berlin with an overwhelming number of gadgets. As hundreds of exhibitors were spread across thousands of square feet of space, finding the show's highlight products wasn't easy. But we spent days trawling through IFA to discover the best it had to offer.

By now every self-respecting PC enthusiast and gamer will be aware of Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards. It won't be long before we get performance numbers, too, which is exciting. But before these GPUs hit the desktop, I thought it would be an interesting thought experiment to discuss what the mobile line-up of these might look like.

Created in 1994 by Toyota subsidiary 'Denso Wave' to quickly track vehicles and parts through the company's automotive manufacturing process, QR codes are used more commonly today for logging into websites or Wi-Fi networks, sharing contact information, making mobile payments or storing data for plane and train tickets on your phone.

Amazon pioneered the idea of expedited shipping of online purchases with the launch of Amazon Prime in 2005. The buying club offered customers free two-day shipping on eligible purchases in exchange for a flat annual fee of $79. The program seemed unsustainable at first but over time, Amazon has proven its worth exponentially.

Recently two separate Reddit threads brought an interesting topic to discussion: if you hook up your FreeSync monitor to an AMD GPU display output, while your primary Nvidia GPU is still in your PC, it may be possible to use your Nvidia graphics card and take advantage of FreeSync.

Taking a page out of cooperative games such as Left 4 Dead and their own Zombie Army Trilogy, Rebellion is bringing us today 'Strange Brigade', a brand new co-op third-person shooter that is also part of AMD's "Raise The Game" bundle for those purchasing a Radeon RX Vega, RX 580 or RX 570 graphics card.

If you've been thinking about reinstalling Windows 10 because of stability issues, driver errors, malware infections, software bloat or any issues with your system, it may come as great news that Microsoft has built in a simple method of reinstalling the operating system without deleting your user settings or data.

We're well past the halfway point of 2018, which means it's a good time to take a look at the best PC games released this year so far. There's a mix of genres in this list, from the latest entries in long-running franchises to brand-new IPs, here are the best PC games that the last eight months have given us.

For a long time CCleaner has been the most popular system-cleaning tool for Windows, extending its reach to other platforms like macOS and Android phones. However since security giant Avast acquired it last year, it's been a stormy ride that's had many doubting how effective or trustworthy the tool really is.

Clipboard managers make it much easier to re-enter text or anything else that you've recently copied and pasted, adding an array of new capabilities to the default Windows clipboard. Although they differ in specific features, the typical clipboard manager automatically saves text, images and other items as they are copied to your clipboard, displaying them in a list-style GUI that makes it simple to re-copy or paste something later.

Today we're addressing one of the most frequently asked questions we see about PC gaming: how many frames per second do you need? Should you be running at the same refresh rate as your monitor's, say 60 FPS on a 60 Hz display, or is there a benefit to running games at a much higher frame rate than your monitor can display, like say, 500 FPS?

Today we're going to have a bit of benchmark fun as we test out a processor we reviewed in 2010. The Core i7-980X was a hexacore beast, but how does it stack up 8 years later? To find out I'm going to compare it with a whole heap of modern processors, including the dinky little $100 Ryzen 3 2200G.

While most students are enjoying their summer break right now, it's never too early to start planning for a return to the classroom. Studying can be stressful; thankfully, there's plenty of technology out there that can make school life a lot easier.

As what may be the most common way to store and share multiple files, the ZIP file format is used by essentially everyone online. With that said, there's a good chance you'll eventually come across one that has been corrupted, but everything's not lost.

It's time to talk about graphics card pricing once again. Today we're exploring cards you can actually buy right now and at what prices, how that compares to previous months, which ones are the best value for money, and whether you should even buy one at all.

The TechSpot PC Buying Guide offers a comprehensive analysis of today's best desktop PC hardware spanning five well differentiated budgets. Starting at ~$400 for an affordable PC, followed by two well-balanced enthusiast-oriented machines, a premium high-end build, and finally a dream machine packing the baddest hardware available, period.

The latest sports games are not always the best. There's an obsession with incremental changes and bullet-point features, one which challenges fan's ability to take a step back and assess each game as its own title. It's something I try to do and I'm taking to its logical conclusion here in this Quixotic attempt to pluck one game out of hundreds and call it the "best."

The third and final installment in our 'Needs to Fix' series is focused on Nvidia. Having previously discussed what we feel Intel and AMD can do with their upcoming products to become more consumer friendly, it's now time to look at the green team. As before, we're looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, at the product level.

You don't have to be a professional photographer to snap amazing pictures of fireworks. All you need is some basic equipment and know-how, the latter of which we offer up here.

This is the second part of our "Needs to Fix" series and it's now AMD's turn. As the underdog, AMD has far more reason to play nice and you could argue they've been forced into doing many of the things we want Intel to do because of their smaller market share. We don't believe AMD is a saint, it's still a big company trying to accomplish what most businesses should: make money.

We've covered many ways that you can save space on your storage drives over the years and deleting duplicate files on your system could easily result in a sizable clean out if only a few large files are found. Although Windows doesn't provide a direct solution, there are many apps that can help, so here's a quick look at them.

It's becoming common knowledge that exposure to blue light can prevent your body from winding down properly before bed and making it more difficult to sleep. If you often work at night or simply like to read on a screen before going to sleep, this can be a game changer.

Vcore, or core voltage, is the voltage that is supplied to power your CPU. The amount of power the CPU uses and the amount of heat generated are tied to the amount of voltage it draws. The voltage identification definition, or VID, determines the amount of voltage your CPU needs to maintain stability at the default clock speeds.

As the market leader and long time dominant force in the CPU space, Intel's been able to get away with a lot and this is partly because the competition has allowed them to. In this column we're looking at possible improvements from the consumers' perspective and specific to Intel's personal computing side of the business.

Have you ever been to a presentation, or worse, a high-profile company keynote, it gets started on an empty Windows desktop showing nothing but the Recycle Bin icon? Hideous. Preferring to keep our desktop clean, we remove the Recycle Bin icon from Windows 10 as one of the first tweaks to a fresh installation of the operating system.

Heat is an inevitable byproduct of work. Heat is also prevalent in electronics, and when it comes to graphics cards you can manage it using passive cooling, fans and even water. But when these solutions aren't working, your GPU has one more way to beat the heat: thermal throttling.

At one point or another, you're bound to run into this pesky issue: you can see an application open in the taskbar, but can't see the window on your desktop. A number of things can cause this, such as disconnecting your laptop from a secondary display before dragging the windows back to the primary desktop. It can also occur when you open a program that alters your resolution, among a few others.