Содержание выпуска: January 2023 — Tech Advisor

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…

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…

After a so-called ‘lost generation’ for graphics cards plagued by shortages and scalpers, things are finally looking up for PC gamers – and the battle for next-generation GPU supremacy has finally arrived. Nvidia launched its ferocious GeForce RTX 4090 mere weeks ago, but its monitor-melting lead isn’t going uncontested for long. This week, AMD revealed its next-gen RDNA 3 architecture and two GPUs serving as its paragon: the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. AMD is doing some radically different things with RDNA 3 and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and we’ve never seen a graphics card quite like this before. We’ve already covered the Radeon RX 7900 XTX’s technical notes in-depth in our announcement coverage, but if you don’t feel like sifting through a discussion of dual-issue wave…

Price: £849 from fave.co/3zBnAur Google Pixel phones have been released annually since 2016 and have usually had one close‑to-deal-breaking issue. For the Pixel 2 XL it was a bad display, for the 3 and 3 XL it was iffy memory management, for the Pixel 4 it was dismal battery life. Last year’s Pixel 6 and 6 Pro were much better fully formed products and ushered in a new era, which is probably why their successors the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro – the latter reviewed here – are iterative updates. The Pixel 7 Pro is the best Pixel yet and the one to buy if you want one of the best camera systems on a phone along with a top display and the most thoughtful interpretation of Android. Though…

Printers might be boring devices in the world of tech but we all need one at some point and even more so with the increase of working from home that’s now normal due to the pandemic. Printers can be quite hard to find in the current climate, but we have rounded up the best we’ve tested. You might want to print a calendar, gig tickets, a boarding pass or some photos you’ve taken on your phone. Many printers are multi-function and therefore also handy for scanning and copying, too. Whatever your needs, buying a new printer can be a confusing process. Not only do you have to worry about the upfront cost and whether it can print a good photo, but you’ve also got to consider print speeds, ongoing costs…

Windows is a complex and capable operating system, but this article concerns one of their most fundamental features: signing in with a password. For many years, this was the only way you could add a layer of security to the login process. Some devices now let you unlock with your fingerprint or face instead, and Microsoft even lets you remove the password from your Microsoft account now. But on older hardware, this simply isn’t possible. Unless you’re willing to accept using a local account instead, there’s no official way to remove the password entirely. However, there are workaround that allow you to do just that. Here’s everything you need to know. WINDOWS 10 In Windows 10, the User Accounts tool lets you remove the username and password requirement for any…

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…

Transparent plastic and tempered glass have been the standard for PC cases for over a decade now. So if you’re going to be constantly looking at your PC’s guts, why not just end the pretence and stick a whole-ass monitor in there? That’s the idea behind the Side Panel Kit (fave.co/3hmVwVx), a full 13.3‑inch, 1080p monitor that sits behind the transparent panel of your PC case and connects directly to your motherboard. The screen acts as a standard monitor in Windows, displaying whatever you want. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen massive screens mounted directly onto a desktop PC. In addition to novelties like smaller LCDs attached to CPU AIO pumps, RAM, graphics cards, and probably the backside of the motherboard by now, you might recall iBuyPower’s Project Snowblind.…

Price: £1,799 from fave.co/3TktMye Huawei has already updated its flagship MateBook X Pro once for 2022, but it’s back again with a second refresh to include more powerful 12th-gen Intel chips along with a new, lighter design. Not much else has changed, but since the last generation earned 4.5 stars and a coveted Editor’s Choice Award from us just six months ago, a lighter and faster version sounds like no bad thing. DESIGN In terms of its dimensions and details, Huawei hasn’t changed the MateBook X Pro at all since its last iteration. This is still a slim, sleek laptop with an expansive trackpad, thin bezel around the display, and premium design. It once again features four USB-C ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack, with no sign of USB-A, HDMI,…

Price: £649 from fave.co/3NukCxQ Motorola’s dominant days are long since over when it comes to smartphones, but the company has been building back with a series of quietly excellent phones over the past year or two. For the most part those have been limited to the mid-range or cheaper premium phones, but the Edge 30 Ultra is a true blue Android flagship, with camera specs, charging speeds, and performance to rival the best. I approached the Edge 30 Ultra with a touch of scepticism – Motorola phones don’t really feel very exciting, after all, and flagships usually need a little anticipation to them to thrill – but this is easily one of the best phones I’ve used all year, and an excellent Android option. DESIGN The Edge 30 Ultra impresses…

For many people, a laptop or desktop PC is an indispensable tool. Whether it’s getting work done, keeping in touch with family and friends or switching off at the end of a long day, a device running Windows can do it all. To help keep everything running smoothly, Windows automates many maintenance tasks in the background, including checking for updates and removing temporary files. These rely on the Task Scheduler, a tool which can also be customized with scripts of your own. At its most basic, this can be used to open certain apps when specific criteria are met. But you can get more advanced, with the ability to run almost any command you’d run in Windows PowerShell. We’re using a Windows 11 device for the purposes of this tutorial,…

A few keystrokes might not seem like a lot, but they add up over time. That’s why text expanders can be a major productivity boost, allowing you to create shortcuts for commonly used phrases across your computer. There are numerous programs that do this on Windows, some of which have been around since the 20th century, but Apple added its own text expander feature in macOS more than a decade ago. It’s long past time for Microsoft to add the same functionality to Windows. Anyone who spends a lot of time typing can benefit hugely from a text expander, sometimes called ‘text replacement’. Instead of typing the same long string of text over and over, you can use these programs to create a shortcut. For example, instead of typing out…

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…

Portable USB-based monitors are a fantastic way to expand your productivity on the road, but they have a few issues. First of all, finding space to sprawl out your laptop setup isn’t always easy, and second, having a second screen you need to hunch down to look at just amplifies the basic ergonomic problems of the laptop form factor. Nex is hoping to solve both of those problems with the NexPad (fave.co/3TkloyK), a portable monitor that sits above your laptop’s screen instead of beside it. In technical terms, there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about the NexPad screen (spotted by Digital Trends). It’s a 12-inch, 1080p touchscreen with an IPS panel, which seems pretty fair for its $249 (around £220) price tag. It attaches to your laptop via a USB-C cable, but…

Price: £2,249 from fave.co/3UpCzjF The HP Envy 16 is a big-screen, content-creation laptop that packs a punch. With a roomy 16- inch 16:10 display, media professionals and hobbyists have plenty of space on which to work. And our test system features an OLED panel that offers a dynamic image with a stellar contrast ratio. Powering the display on our test system is an Intel Core i9-12900H CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, a duo that puts our test system on the high end of the price scale. HP offers smart and wide-ranging configuration options for the Envy 16 and, while you can configure a model for your needs and budget, you’re stuck with a rather hefty travel companion. At just under 3kg, the laptop is heavy even among 16-inch…

Laptops have been around for decades, but until recently there was only really one option for budget buyers: Chromebooks. Devices running Chrome OS dominated the cheap laptop market for several years following their inception in 2011, but that’s begun to change. These days, there are plenty of great Windows laptops available for around £500 or lower, the rough criteria for inclusion here. Apple is still yet to make a cheap MacBook, and there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon. Plenty of unknown brands try to make their name in the budget laptop space, but there are lots of established companies too. The likes of Asus, Acer, Microsoft and Lenovo are all included in this list. If you’re concerned about performance, there’s usually no need. For basic tasks such as…

Windows has traditionally been designed for mouse and keyboard, but Microsoft has taken steps to change that in recent years. The tile-based interface of Windows 8 was easy to use on touchscreen devices, even if the design in general wasn’t popular. Windows 10 then introduced a dedicated tablet mode that was separate from the rest of the operating system. It was ditched with the introduction of Windows 11, but don’t let that make you think Microsoft has forgotten about tablets and touchscreen laptops – quite the opposite. The experience now is better than it’s ever been on Windows, provided you familiarize yourself with a few key features and settings. Here are six ways you can ensure the touch experience on Windows 11 is the best it can possibly be. 1.…