TechSpot Features

While most people who enjoy music on the go these days are listening from their phones, there are still many reasons someone might want to own a standalone portable music player. Models range from around $1 to more than $3,000, for what is already a niche market, the world of dedicated MP3 players is fragmented into various sub-niches targeting wildly different shoppers.

Finding drivers online for old hardware can range from difficult to impossible. But we discovered that you can export drivers for third-party devices from one copy of Windows to another -- great news if you have a previous instance of Windows where your old device is installed and functional.

For a lot of gamers with demanding jobs, marriages and/or families, the excitement of reading good reviews for games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey is tempered by the sinking realization that they'll never have time to play them. How do you make time for a 60+ hour game when you have a busy life?

This a topic that's often raised when we do our CPU gaming benchmarks. As you know, we perform a ton of CPU and GPU benchmarks tests throughout the year, a big portion of which are dedicated to gaming. The goal is to work out which CPU will offer you the most bang for your buck at a given price point, now and hopefully in the future.

In the next weeks we'll dedicate a couple of articles to game streaming and provide you with a definitive answer on what sort of setup is the best, and what quality settings make the most sense to use. Today's investigation is focused on streaming quality settings.

Although the Start menu is supposed to be the fastest way to find local files, software and settings, Windows 10's search indexing service is far from the best. It is not uncommon that a simple query won't return any valid results, no matter how simple or precise your query is. Here's how you can turn things around.

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is about tech & geek brands. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalism, abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is minimalist wallpapers. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalist illustrations and designs, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

Microsoft has made Windows 10's login screen more visually pleasing than ever by displaying high-resolution images in the background. The pictures are of a good enough quality to be used as the wallpaper on your desktop background and if you've seen one recently that's worth adding to your collection, there's a chance the image is still stored locally.

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, theme is retro wallpapers. Whether you are into abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

It's only a matter of time before you'll want to change your Windows wallpaper, however applying your own customizations to a copy of Windows 10 that hasn't been activated may not be so straightforward since Microsoft blocks access to the software's personalization settings without a valid product license.

A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is nature photography and amazing scenes. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

A great background can start your day off on a good mood. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalism, abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

While tabs have been a core part of web browsers for more than a decade, Microsoft is finally in the process of introducing a tabbed interface to the File Explorer and other applications. But if you don't want to wait any longer, there are a few third-party tools that offer the feature by one means or another.

Do you think of the command line as an antiquated leftover from the past, or an old fashioned way of interacting with a computer? Think again. In Linux, it is the most flexible and powerful way to perform tasks. Let's jump into the basics of the Linux command line including directory navigation, file/directory operations, and more.

When historians look back at the 2010s, I suspect two tech trends will be readily apparent: the rise in popularity of the subscription-based model and the emergence of the gig economy. What may not be immediately evident is that these two movements helped solve a dilemma that has perplexed some of the world's brightest minds for decades.

We've compiled a list of things that you can do in the Windows Command Prompt, including some commands everyone should know for general usage, more advanced ones for tweaking or troubleshooting your PC, as well as lesser known Command Prompt features.

Having reviewed Intel's latest Core i9-9900K and Core i7-9700K processors, we saw very high stock temperatures using high-end coolers, basically killing their overclocking potential. We know that soldering CPUs works a lot better than the paste method Intel's been using to cut costs, so we wanted to know how much better is the solder method used by the 9900K than the paste of the 8700K/8086K?

Tweaking Windows settings that are not available in standard menus will commonly require modifications to be made from the registry or Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc). We regularly reference these throughout our tips, so we thought those of you on Windows Home will appreciate being able to use Gpedit like everyone else.

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.

Today, we're once again doing a deep dive on graphics card pricing to provide you with the best value buys on the market right now. This is the third report we have compiled this year. We're now in early Q4 and graphics card manufacturers are facing a different challenge that could affect pricing, at least in the United States: the import tariffs implemented by Donald Trump.

Later this week we'll finally be able to publish our benchmarks for Intel's new 8-core CPUs like the 9900K. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to check out how CPU pricing has changed over the last few months, see what products are the best value right now, and whether we'll continue to see changes throughout the rest of the year.

Microsoft slowly started to sneak advertisements into the Windows platform with Windows 8, and they've only crept up further in Windows 10. Thankfully it's easy to shut down most of these annoyances if you know where to look.

Is there anything so satisfying to watch as a well-played Mario speedrun? What makes an expert run of Super Mario Bros. so eminently watchable, and how do the players master their moves so perfectly? It turns out that the answer to both questions could be "music."

Do you keep a bootable USB drive handy? Since we only tend to keep a few USB drives available, we tend to overwrite the contents of Windows installation media and the like after a single use. Intending to save some time and effort on the next go-around, we sought methods to preserve an exact copy of bootable USB drives which could be restored from a backup file when needed.

The tech industry is known for its predictive pronouncements and verbal sparring as for its actual innovation. Many have felt compelled to follow Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame) in bringing their judgements and observations into the public eye... with varying degrees of success. Here's a taste of those now infamous quotes.

When a PC gaming site published early Core i9-9900K results today we were a little surprised. The title read "Intel's Core i9 9900K is up to 50% faster than AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X in games," right away many of the results looked very suspect to me, having spent countless hours benchmarking both the 2700X and 8700K, so we looked into it some more.

As a TechSpot reader you've surely opened software as an admin on Windows before -- maybe as recently as today -- so the function probably isn't foreign to you. However, we were curious to know more about what happens under the hood of Windows when you tell the operating system to run a program as an administrator, and why this process is necessary in the first place.

Gigabytes are cheaper than ever but they can also be the sort of thing where the more you have, the more you tend to consume, and it doesn't take long for the terabytes to fly by if you spend a lot of time on your computer. If you're wanting to clean up your drive, this guide will serve you regardless of your current storage solution.

Although 5G may seem like just another wireless generational upgrade, touting more speed and less latency, the years-long migration will require an expansion of cellular networks worldwide to include millions of new antennas that will become the backbone of IoT and its billions of sensor-laden devices, from smart dust to smart cars.