TechSpot Features

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.

Windows 10's April 2018 Update (version 1803) brought various new features and removed some others, but also introduced a bug to many systems that caused an extra drive to be listed under "This PC." Most annoying of all, the bug causes Windows to display an error prompt about the drive being nearly full.

Earlier this year we set out to address a question many of you were asking at the time: should you buy the Ryzen 5 2600X or the non-X 2600? Not for nothing these couple of AMD processors have been our picks for the best all-round value since they drop-in replaced the 1600 series. They're also among the best selling CPUs on Amazon.

If you've ever looked for software that can convert audio and video files on Windows, you might know how hard it can be to find dedicated solutions that are free and function as advertised. What you may ignore however is that VLC is capable of converting your files as well as performing other tasks like recording your desktop, and more.

Today we're addressing one of the most frequent discussion topics surrounding the new RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards. Is it worth buying the RTX 2080 for DLSS?, or is DLSS the killer feature for the RTX cards? As with ray tracing, we won't really know until we have more to test with, but today we're doing an early investigation into DLSS using the current DLSS demos we have within reach.

Although solid state drives have steadily increased in capacity, so too have the size of game installs. Today's triple-A titles commonly occupy upwards of 20GB with many approaching or exceeding 60GB, especially after accounting for downloadable content. Ironically, it's often these large releases that benefit the most from the improved load times.

Most recently Windows 10 introduced a default "3D Objects" File Explorer shortcut which takes up space if unused. In this article we'll cover how to remove that somewhat annoying shortcut on Windows 10, and along the way see how to remove other such shortcuts (Music, Videos, others), so you can tweak and personalize as you want.

Today we're going to be diving a little deeper into overclocking the new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080, covering how to overclock to higher typical clock speeds, test performance and power consumption. Also compare Nvidia's new Scanner API to manual overclocking.

We've already got our first official look at how the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti & 2080 performs and we were impressed with what the 2080 Ti offered at 4K, but ultimately let down by the fact that these new Turing GPUs cost way too much. It's now day two and we're hitting you with a mega 35 game benchmark to put all your doubts to rest.

Launched in 1970, Xerox's PARC has played an instrumental role in the engineering of laser printing and many of the technologies that compose the PC you're reading this on: the graphical user interface, ethernet, the mouse, among others. We'd like to take a few and give credit where credit's due.

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.