PCWorld August 2022

Windows releases have a lot in common with Star Trek movies: They seem to alternate between positive and negative in terms of reception. Windows 7 was generally well regarded at launch back in 2009, as was Windows 10 in 2015. Windows 8, the awkward middle child that tried some huge user interface changes in 2012, was not. Windows 8.1, the last major update to the OS, will officially end support early next year. And Microsoft can’t wait to tell you about it. As The Verge reports, anyone still using Windows 8.1 will get notifications about the end of software updates sometime next month. They’ll have until January 10 to find a new operating system or face the web without any backup in the way of security updates. It might be an…

Brave is probably best known among hardcore geeks as one of Chrome’s challengers. But for a while now, the company has offered more than just a privacy-minded browser. A year ago, it launched the beta for a search engine, too—and recently, on its first anniversary, Brave Search hit a milestone of 2.5 billion queries, with a peak of 14.1 million queries in one day. For a nascent search engine, these numbers are big. As Brave claims in a blog post, it’s won this achievement faster than Google (who took over a year to meet the same goal), plus run circles around DuckDuckGo. Its privacy-oriented rival took four years to cross the same threshold. Brave Search is now the default search engine for the company’s Brave browser. In addition to exiting its beta…

Google recently strengthened its ambitions to become your only password manager with several security updates across the Chrome and mobile, including iOS. Google said it will administer site logins on Android, create new passwords for those that may have been compromised, and more. Google declined to offer a timetable for these changes to be implemented, saying that they would roll out over the next couple of months. Interestingly, Google said it would step in to manage passwords on iPhones. You can already authorize Google to manage and store passwords on Android devices, of course, but Google said it will offer iPhones the same capability. With Apple’s tendency to strictly manage apps and their implementation on iOS, Google seems to be sidestepping Apple by moving some of this functionality to its browser. Android,…

Since the introduction of the AM4 socket, AMD’s Threadripper ultra-high-end CPUs have been coveted as the very top of the consumer chip market. But AMD skipped Threadripper releases beyond the Ryzen 3000-based series released in early 2020, and as Ryzen 5000 bows out of the marketplace, the company is only releasing Pro variants of Threadripper 59XX chips. With pricing announced for these industrial-grade chips, and with AMD confirming that non-Pro Threadripper chips are going the way of the dodo, that leaves consumers wanting to build high-powered machines in a lurch. The cheapest of the confirmed Threadrippers, the 24-core, 48-thread Threadripper Pro 5965 WX, will cost an incredible $2,399 when it’s made available to end users. That’s $1,000 more than the cheapest high-end desktop Threadripper of the previous generation, the 3960X. Other…

All the talk right now is about hardware capable of faster and faster speeds. PCIe 5.0 in particular has gotten a lot of attention with Intel’s 12th-generation Alder Lake and AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 7000 processors often in the news as of late. These next-gen CPUs bring support for the cutting-edge specification to mainstream PCs. Such widespread adoption can put pressure on to get the fastest model possible when buying an SSD, especially in the wake of recent announcements of consumer PCIe 5.0 drives that are face-meltingly fast. But as exciting as new tech is, you can still live a very speedy digital life with a less cutting-edge SSD, without giving up too much responsiveness in the process. In fact, waiting for high-end specs to trickle down to a mid-range budget can…

The rise of game streaming is a godsend for PC gamers who prefer Linux to Windows, since the systems generally work just fine in any modern browser and don’t require custom development for the operating system. But gamers on Linux who embraced Xbox Game Pass and its streaming component aren’t satisfied with the image quality they’re getting. It’s now been verified that streaming Game Pass games to Linux results in poorer quality than Windows. The difference isn’t extreme, but it’s noticeable enough that it caught the attention of Reddit users on the XCloud sub. The Reddit user performed a few tests, which Ars Technica verified, by manually changing browser user agent strings to imitate running Linux on identical machines. Indeed, the resolution and sharpness for the “Linux” test was shown to…