Table of contents for January 2017 in Maximum PC

Maximum PC: Can you tell us what exactly prompted you to integrate a heart rate sensor into a mouse? Carl Silbersky: If I take a step back there for a moment, I would say that I didn’t come from the hardware industry— that’s the first thing. And my observation, when I first came to Mionix, which was two and a half years ago, was that I just laughed at the whole hardware industry. Like, Jesus, what’s happening here, you know? Where’s the innovation? What’s been happening in the last 10 years with gaming hardware? I mean nothing, basically nothing. I mean, what we’ve [peripheral manufacturers] done is we’ve put bears, and snakes, and things like that on the mice, and we call them gaming peripherals. And then, suddenly, we tried…

One of the most stomachchurning moments in any PC user’s life is when you switch on your computer to do some work or let off some steam, only to find Windows won’t boot. You may get lucky—Windows 10 is smarter than previous versions, and can resolve certain issues on its own, but in many cases, you’re left in an endless reboot loop. Assuming Windows even gets that far. If Windows can’t fix itself, what next? Do you have a recent backup of your data? What about Windows itself? Of course, it’s perfectly possible to reinstall Windows from scratch, but that’s the best part of a day lost to restoring your PC. And did we mention your data? The solution lies in creating a bootable recovery disc—one that gives you the…

Why plug in another USB drive, or download tools from the net, when you can embed any portable tool directly into your recovery drive? Once embedded, the tools can be directly accessed through Win10PESE’s Start menu, or via an icon in the Taskbar Notification area. To add apps to your drive, first expand the “Apps > Portable” section in Win10PESE’s left-hand pane, then check “PStart and Papps.” Next, click the “Open Source Folder” button to open the folder where your portable apps need to be collected, each one inside its own folder. Once you’ve copied them into here, return to Win10PESE, and carefully enter the folder name of each app under “Directory of Apps,” plus the name of the program’s executable file under “Name of exe.” To add a shortcut…

When it comes to inches-per-buck, TVs have usually looked cheap compared to dedicated PC monitors. But big-screen TVs haven’t always made great monitors, mainly due to the relatively low resolution of TVs. Even a full 1080p HDTV is low res compared to many PC monitors. Moreover, when you stretch that 1920x1080 pixel grid over a 40, 50, or 60-inch panel,the result is big, fat, ugly pixels. Yuck. With the advent of 4K resolutions, however, things changed. A 4K 40-inch TV makes for a similar pixel pitch as a 27-inch 2560x1440 resolution monitor. Ideal. But the first 4K TVs suffered from another historical TV shortcoming: low-fi display interfaces. Many couldn’t accept a 4K signal with a refresh rate above 30Hz. Finefor movies, no good for a PC monitor. However, with the…

WINDOWS TIP OF THE MONTH AMAZON “BARGAINS” We love bargains. And the best place to look nowadays seems to be Amazon. However, a deal might not be quite what it seems, with resellers artificially bumping prices up just so they can reduce them the next day. A good way to check is the nifty website at http://camelcamelcamel.com. Copy and paste the product URL into the top bar, and it gives you a breakdown of how the price has fluctuated over the last few months. ZAK STOREY REVIEWS EDITOR WATER DAMAGE This week, a work colleague of mine approached me with a slight conundrum. He’d managed to spill a half-drunk can of Coke into a system fan at top of his build, which proceeded to distribute the sugary liquid throughout the…

Resolve is not for the faint-hearted, and not for the faint-of-PC. It absolutely requires OpenCL support to operate, so forget about it if you’re looking to edit on a machine that doesn’t have a modern discrete graphics card. You’ll probably need to click through a couple of error messages when you load it, mainly due to Resolve looking for specialist editing hardware you probably don’t have— don’t worry about these, it’ll work just fine without. You may also find that it doesn’t play nicely with your monitor; we had some issues getting it to run on a 4K panel, and it needed a little convincing about our Windows scaling options. If you want to take Resolve further, you could consider an upgrade: The full version weighs in at an eye-watering…

THE POPULARITY of network attached storage is succinctly illustrated with this latest release from Western Digital: The WD My Cloud PR2100 is essentially an upgraded take on last year’s My Cloud Business DL2100—a device that was aimed squarely at small businesses. This new device uses the same chassis, with its austere and utilitarian drive bays, but updates the innards so that it can handle 4K streaming. It’s a device that’s serious about your data, but appreciates that you’re just as likely to use it in the home as you are in the office. The My Cloud PR2100 is a dual-drive unit, although the PR4100, a four-bay device, is also available. Both units boast the same core hardware of a quad-core Intel Pentium N3710, coupled with 4GB of DDR3. This CPU…

MAD CATZ HAS BEEN BAFFLING us with its RAT mice since 2010, and now has a full series of the things, from the plasticbodied RAT 1 to the magnesium RAT X Pro. The RAT 8 sits near the top of the range, with an aluminum frame hiding under the RAT’s strange, deconstructed body. It looks like some sort of advanced running shoe, maybe, or a kind of functional space ship, constructed in orbit, and never intended to fly in an atmosphere. That particularly goes for the black finish with red accents that our review model sports without its lights on. Oh yes, you get lighting. Mad Catz, hilariously, calls it Kameleon RGB, but the RAT will neither blend into your desktop nor express its emotional state through its hue. This…

“I KNEW YOU’D BE BACK, probably with your ass on fire.” Growled in a voice that could both dig up roads and re-lay them, it’s a line that’s appropriate for both the character it’s aimed at, and the Gears franchise itself. This isn’t a series that has traditionally made its home on the PC, with Gears of War 4 confusingly the fifth game in the lineup, but only the second title to be released outside of the Xbox 360. There is a Gears of War Ultimate Edition available on the Windows Store, though, if you’d like to catch up with the plot. It doesn’t matter if you don’t. This is a story about sacks of meat with chainsawguns going into battle against monsters from underground, who’ve brought giant crab-spiders with…

EVERY YEAR, Microsoft holds an “event” in New York, and talks up the hardware and software you’ll be seeing soon. The star of this year’s show was the luscious Surface Studio, a highend desktop all-in-one, aimed at artists. The Surface Studio is powered by a Skylake Core i5 or i7, coupled with an Nvidia GT965 or GT980. All the workings are neatly tucked into a slim base unit, making the screen wonderfully thin, at just half an inch thick. The hinged support enables the screen to go from vertical to almost horizontal (but, annoyingly, not quite— it still slopes at 20 degrees). There’s just one screen size at launch—a 28-inch PixelSense, boasting a resolution of 4500x 3000 pixels (that’s 192 dpi), with 10-bit color. Microsoft showed the Studio flipping between…

> All-In-One Upgrades > PSU Madness > Xeon vs. Core i7 Upgrade All-In-One? Hello Doc, I know that all-inones are difficult to modify, because of their size, thermal, and power constraints. But do you think it would be possible to upgrade my HP Envy 23 d038c, dropping in a new GPU, and maybe SSD? I want to play Battlefield 4 and 1 at 60fps on at least Medium quality. I discovered that the motherboard has two secondgen PCI Express mini-card slots, and a PCI Express MXM slot that supports a 16-lane graphics card. So, would it be possible for me to fit in a low-profile $100-250 GPU and an SSD, without needing to buy a new case/board? I should expect to need a new PSU though, right? –Charlie THE DOCTOR…

One of malware’s nastiest tricks is to cripple your PC so it’s virtually impossible to clean. The malware typically suppresses known security tools from running, plus locks down your system in various ways, such as restricting which websites you can visit, barring access to Registry Editor, and even crippling Safe mode, inside which most antimalware tools can at least attempt to clean up the mess. To be fair, Windows 10 makes it hard enough to access Safe mode these days, so we’re not sure why malware bothers, but we digress. The solution here lies in visiting your security vendor’s site to locate recovery media that includes a special version of your antimalware product that has network access to update itself, then focuses on detecting and cleaning malware. Depending on the…

THERE’S AN ART TO SYSTEM BUILDING. It starts with a thought, a concept, an idea. A conscious spark permeates the air as you home in on what, exactly, it is you want to construct. That first thought is often intrinsically connected to the next two decisions in any given system: What processor should you use, and which form factor? ATX, ITX? Micro? XL? Then, how many add-in cards will you be using? And among the myriad flexible, rotating questions, you arrive at one of the more important decisions: Which chassis? Surprisingly, many people forsake this decision, because it adds little, if any, obvious performance. It is, however, the backbone of any good rig—as crucial as the motherboard, as artistic as in-game graphical frame rates, and as vital to cooling as…

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... About iFixit iFixit is a g lobal community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people f ix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the r ight to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND Today marks our first ever teardown of a phone designed entirely by Google: the Pixel XL. What to expect? At first glance, it bears more than a passing resemblance to an iPhone—but it’s the innards in which we’re interested… MAJOR TECH SPECS • 5.5-inch AMOLED display, with QHD 1440x2560 resolution (534 ppi), and 2.5D Gorilla Glass 4 • Quad-core, 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor (2.15GHz + 1.6GHz), with 4GB LPDDR4 RAM • 12.3-megapixel, f/2.0 main camera, with phase detection autofocus, and…

Completed your video? Then it’s time to deliver it—or, at least, it’s time to use Resolve’s “Deliver” section to render it. It’s another portion of the program that’s intuitive once you get the hang of it, but utterly alien until you do. Head to the “Deliver” section by hitting Shift-8, and you’ll see your timeline, a preview of the complete video, and a few more controls. If you’re happy that you’ve edited your video to the point that it’s ready to go, choose your settings in the top-left panel—there are presets, usefully, for things such as YouTube—then click the “Browse” button to set where your video will be saved. Now click “Add To Render Queue,” and hit “Start Render” on the right-hand side. If you’re only using Resolve to process…

NVIDIA’S GEFORCE GTX 1050 TI is a rather curious concept. It follows a long line of prestigious graphics processors with its nomenclature—from the PCI powerless GTX 750 Ti, to the value-demolishing 950— yet this variant just doesn’t seem to have hit the same mark. It still requires that six-pin PCI power connector, and it doesn’t quite reach the heady heights of glorious framerate-to-dollar ratios that we want when it comes to price, either. So, where shall we begin? Let’s start with the spec. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1050 Ti comes with 768 CUDA cores, 48 texture units, and 32 ROPs. In contrast, the previous generation had 768 CUDA cores, 48 texture units, and 32 ROPs. “Well, of course, it’s a process shrink,” we hear you say, “So nothing else is bound…

ADOBE HAS VERY MUCH SETTLED on a look for Photoshop Elements, its stripped-down image-editing program. From version 11, each new release of the app has looked virtually the same, with perhaps a different color in the interface, and the changes and upgrades have focused on features. The application is still split into three “skill levels,” with Quick, Guided, and Expert workspaces giving progressively less help and more creative control. New in version 15 are some additional Guided Edits: the ability to add motion blur to images, collage creation, the adjustment of facial features, and the creation of cutout words from images. The big changes are in the Organizer, which gets a bit more love. Photoshop Elements comes in two halves: the Editor, which is where the editing work is carried…

Lazesoft Recovery Suite offers a number of handy tools for fixing problems with Windows, plus it can help you recover data, too. Once created, reboot your PC from the Lazesoft rescue media. You’ll eventually find yourself at the main Lazesoft Recovery Suite, with four recovery-based options: “Windows Recovery,” “Data Recovery,” “Disk Image & Clone,” and “Password Recovery.” All four options are largely self-explanatory. Before running any recovery tools, we recommend taking a drive image of your current setup, which ensures you can always roll things back should the cure prove worse than the malady. Select “Disk Image & Clone,” and choose “Drive to Image” to back up to a suitable external drive. Second, “Data Recovery” contains the full range of data recovery options, including simply pulling off regular files, as…

Forget curved panels, frame synching, 4K, and high refresh rates. There’s a new technology that might just blow them all away for sheer visual pop. It’s all about searing brightness and even deeper blacks. It’s about dramatically increasing the numbers of colors a monitor can display. And it’s coming soon to a PC near you. Get ready for HDR, people. The basic concept of HDR (high dynamic range) is simple. It means stretching out the extremes of display capability—delivering more, even when that means less. But it’s hard to point at any one feature and say, “This is HDR.” Nor is it easy to define in terms of numbers. There is no one metric that definitively determines what an HDR display is. Instead, there’s a number of standards that  are…

If there’s anything that proves what a nightmare technology HDR is to wrap one’s gray matter around, it’s surely gaming. After all, PC game developers and graphics hardware vendors have been talking about how great HDR gaming is for years. But if the first HDR displays are only just emerging now, how could PC games have been HDR foryears? The answer to that is actually fairly simple. Some games have been rendering to HDR targets for some time. It’s just the output from the game engine is compressed or tone-mapped down from HDR to SDR format before being sent to the display. So the HDR claims weren’t a lie in strict terms, but it’s questionable just how much benefit internal HDR rendering was when the output and the display technology was…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI Any model. RASPBIAN Available from www.raspberrypi.org/downloads. THIS MONTH, we’re serving up a selection of “phat beats” using nothing more than a Raspberry Pi [Image A] and Raspbian (which comes with Sonic Pi preinstalled). This is the personal project of Dr Sam Aaron, and the goal of Sonic Pi is to introduce creativity into programming via music, and reduce the friction that’s encountered by children learning to code – for example, the alignment and indentation of code, and syntax errors. Sonic Pi uses the Ruby programming language created in the mid 1990s by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, which was an easy-to-learn and syntax-friendly alternative to the languages of that time. Sonic Pi refines the Ruby language to provide a number of easy-to-use functions that enable learning. In…

YOU’LL NEED THIS BLACKMAGIC DAVINCI RESOLV E 12.5 Download it for free from www.blackmagicdesign.com. SOURCE VIDEOS Use your own, or grab some from Archive.org for testing. Video editing for free is the dream, isn’t it? Nobody really wants to invest in professional software just to stitch together a family video or a bit of gaming footage. But there’s a reason we call it a dream: Frankly, the majority of free video-editing software is terrible. Windows Movie Maker does a passable job, if you’re not looking for particularly presentable results; ShotCut, recently making its way over from Linux, has the instability and baffling UI typical of its original home. There’s a stack of other packages out there that can apparently do the trick, but they’re so obtuse and buggy that we…

YOU’LL NEE D THIS PHOTOSHOP Subscribe at www.adobe.com. LICENSE PLATE As an example to follow. Vehicle license plates were standardized as the familiar 6x12-inch rectangles in 1956, but they date back to around 1903 in North America, first being used in Massachusetts. Before ’56, it was a bit of a free-for-all between the states, with materials such as rubber and leather used to make plates. Most states emboss the lettering into the plates, so they’re slightly raised when viewed from the front, but there is a growing number of flat, digitally printed plates on the highway. If you purchase a vanity plate, you’ve got a limited number of characters to work with, depending on the state you live in, and there’s a list of banned words you need to avoid.…

IT’S NO SECRET that buying a custom-built system from a professional PC builder comes with a premium price. Normally, we are staunch advocates of building your own PC, but it’s worth considering a custom builder for small form factor systems. The Falcon Northwest Tiki is a perfect example. Measuring just 13.75 x 14.5 x 5 inches, including the base, the Tiki’s shiny bespoke chassis takes up a minimal amount of desk real estate, giving you reason to display its edges, rather than hide it away under your desk. But assembling parts inside such a small space can be quite the hassle, especially when you want to cram a full desktop’s worth of power inside. Removing the Tiki’s side panel feels a little like peering into a desktop-class laptop, where every…

OH, GOOD: With the MasterKeys Pro, Cooler Master has designed a keyboard for the “brightest possible” backlighting. As marketing points go, it’s up there with the bassiest subwoofers, which means there’s definitely a market for it. Outside of the lights—which, on the model we tested, are certainly bright, and a restrained plain white, rather than sporting millions of colors (although these are available, too)—there are some further pleasing touches. The USB cable is a removable micro-USB one, handy if you suddenly need to charge your phone but don’t need to type; while instead of plastering the thing with logos, Cooler Master has chosen to rebrand the Windows key as the Cooler Master key. Nice. The Pro L gives the impression of having a lot of keys but not much board.…

GETTING TO VERSION 15 of an app means it must be doing something right, and with Premiere Elements, that’s taking the hopelessly complex art of video editing, and making it appear simple. At least, making something you wouldn’t mind sharing on YouTube or Facebook look simple. It’s not, of course. Available as a bundle with Photoshop Elements, or as a standalone app, Premiere Elements makes use of the same Organizer as its photo-editing brother, a clever move that enables you to import both types of media together, and keeps it all in one place. This means it can analyze and tag your videos as it would photographs, detecting faces, and taking even longer about it than with still images. It’s unfair to complain about the slowness of this process, however—…

> Windows Update > TV Tuners > Website Merger Not an Upgrade I just got the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, and it feels like things are going backward. I now have a lock screen that I can’t get rid of (yet), the computer will no longer sleep, and I’ve read in your recent issue that my webcam might not work any longer. Things are going backward. I’ve dug out the old Windows 7 disc, and am waiting for some free time to “upgrade” to Windows 7 from Windows 10. –Steve G EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: We feel your pain, we really do. While Windows 10 works fine on plenty of our machines, there are just enough systems causing problems to make us think that Microsoft’s brave new world isn’t…