Tech Advisor January 2023

AMD’s Advantage series of laptops, built in cooperation with OEM laptop makers such as Dell, Lenovo and Asus, are a hit. Closely integrating Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs under the technical guidance of AMD itself makes some fan-favourite gaming laptop designs, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. Along with the announcement of the Radeon 7000 GPU series, AMD has decided to expand the programme to include desktops as well. AMD Advantage Desktops will be available soon. What qualifies a pre-built desktop for that Advantage label? To start with, nothing but the best from AMD’s chip offerings, the Ryzen 9 7950X CPU and the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card. On top of that, minimum specs for the other components include 2TB of NVMe storage, 32GB of DDR5 memory, liquid…

AMD’s Advantage series of laptops, built in cooperation with OEM laptop makers such as Dell, Lenovo and Asus, are a hit. Closely integrating Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs under the technical guidance of AMD itself makes some fan-favourite gaming laptop designs, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. Along with the announcement of the Radeon 7000 GPU series, AMD has decided to expand the programme to include desktops as well. AMD Advantage Desktops will be available soon. What qualifies a pre-built desktop for that Advantage label? To start with, nothing but the best from AMD’s chip offerings, the Ryzen 9 7950X CPU and the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card. On top of that, minimum specs for the other components include 2TB of NVMe storage, 32GB of DDR5 memory, liquid cooling…

You know that you need to be careful with what you install on your computer – or at least you should by now. But web browsers are getting so complex and powerful that they’re essentially little virtual machines that just happen to play YouTube videos. So let’s take yet another opportunity to remind ourselves: we need the same kind of care and caution when installing browser extensions, even from ostensibly ‘safe’ sources. Case in point, the latest widespread browser extension malware, which has been downloaded and installed over a million times. So reports security researcher Guardio Labs (fave.co/3Uc34sN), which spotted the latest batch of extensions that hijack search results to inject advertising into otherwise benign pages. The so-called ‘Dormant Colors’ adware is spread across an impressive 30 different individual extensions…

Microsoft has begun rolling out Image Creator from Microsoft Bing in a preview to select markets, preparing the AI art generator for a wider roll-out to Microsoft Edge in the coming few weeks. In a blog post (fave.co/3FTejC9) and related video, the company showed off how Image Creator will work and explained in more detail what limitations it will place upon prompts that users generate. Microsoft said recently that it would be bringing AI art to both Bing and Edge, using the more advanced DALL-E 2 algorithm to generate the art. It appears that Image Creator will be accessible from Bing.com and a related version will be available from Edge soon after. The company showed off Image Creator working within the Edge sidebar, which can carve out a small vertical…

You know that you need to be careful with what you install on your computer – or at least you should by now. But web browsers are getting so complex and powerful that they’re essentially little virtual machines that just happen to play YouTube videos. So let’s take yet another opportunity to remind ourselves: we need the same kind of care and caution when installing browser extensions, even from ostensibly ‘safe’ sources. Case in point, the latest widespread browser extension malware, which has been downloaded and installed over a million times. So reports security researcher Guardio Labs (fave.co/3Uc34sN), which spotted the latest batch of extensions that hijack search results to inject advertising into otherwise benign pages. The so-called ‘Dormant Colors’ adware is spread across an impressive 30 different individual extensions in…

ChromeOS has a reputation for running on lightweight, affordable Chromebooks, but that seems to be shifting as of late. With the rise of game streaming services (RIP Stadia), several manufacturers have now made ‘gaming’ Chromebooks with powerful processors and fast screens. So it’s appropriate that Steam, the de facto home of PC gaming, is expanding to more Chromebooks as it graduates from a very limited alpha. Starting with Chrome beta version 108 available at the time of writing, Steam for ChromeOS is also in beta. In addition to improved notifications and storage management, the program is expanding its list of compatible hardware to include Core i3 and Ryzen 3-based devices. Other notable updates include initial support for DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3 support, and a fix that makes games installing content…