Table of contents for November 2017 in Maximum PC

THE WHEELS OF THE LAW may move slowly, but they get you in the end. In 2015, it emerged that Lenovo had been selling laptops that came pre-installed with adware called VisualDiscovery, from SuperFish. This pushed pop-up ads from Lenovo partners when you mouse over similar content. It also collected a lot of data without your consent. Most worryingly, it messed with Digital Certificates, replacing them with less secure versions. A fuss was made, and a removal tool offered. Lenovo claimed to be unaware of the security implications. The Federal Trade Commission has said the company must gain user permission for any future adware, as well as test its software for security flaws for the next 20 years. The company also took home a $3.5 million fine.…

Xbox One S vs. PS4 Pro vs. Nintendo Switch As we crawl toward the end of the eighth generation of games consoles, hardware revisions mean prices have come down and capabilities have gone up. Time to pick the best, with a couple of caveats. One: The imminent release of the Xbox One X may skew these results significantly, but we’re working with the hardware that’s actually on the market at press time. Two: We’ve not included the PC. Why? Because we know, and you know, that a properly upgraded PC will trounce any of these made-to-a-budget boxes in just about every test. ROUND 1 Gaming Each of these machines has its own software library, with worthy exclusives on each platform, although the Switch’s selection of Nintendo classics stands out the…

RUNNING AN OPERATING SYSTEM on real hardware is so passé. All those hours ensuring your hardware is set up and behaving correctly? Pah. Then so many more hours installing and configuring all the software, so everything’s just right, while risking what’s on the machine already? Ugh. It can seem like an awful lot of effort just to, say, try out a Linux distribution, or create a clean Windows install. And, what’s worse, it can present you with a whole lot of extra work if something goes wrong. Killing your day-to-day Windows installation, that one you’ve spent so long lovingly streamlining and customizing, the one you need for work, play, and everything else? It doesn’t bear thinking about. If you’re running a mission-critical system, you also need to figure out a…

IF YOU BEGIN TO RELY on virtual machines to a serious extent, enterprise-grade solutions are probably worth a look. The industry standard for virtualized servers is VMWare’s ESXi tech—available free in a package called vSphere Hypervisor—and Microsoft also offers up its Hyper-V Server 2016 without charge. Both solutions run a similar model: a complete hypervisor running at the OS level, and nothing else. In the terms we’ve used in this feature, they’re your host operating systems, but they do nothing more than host, giving their guests unprecedented access to system hardware, and giving you high-level access to the administrative tools you need to maintain a server full of temperamental yet critical systems. Typically, home users boot the likes of ESXi from a small local drive, such as a USB stick…

examining technology and putting it to use TIP OF THE MONTH MEASURING RYZEN TEMPS Fed up with Ryzen temperatures measuring 20 degrees higher than they actually are? We are. If you head to www.hwinfo.com and download the free hardware analysis tool, you can deduce accurate Ryzen temperatures without worrying about AMD’s ridiculous offset. On top of that, once you’ve installed HWInfo, it seems HWMonitor also accounts for that temperature offset, too. It’s just a shame it doesn’t work at the BIOS level. MAKE – USE – CREATE 60 Build your own darknet with Tor and OnionShare 68 Create a striking eclipse montage using Photoshop 70 Step-by-step guide to putting together a big Ripper rendering rig VIDEO ASPIRATIONS It’s been a crazy month, with a lot of ups and downs, reshuffles…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI Whichever model you have to hand will work. SD CARD Or MicroSD for later models. ETHERNET CABLE For a stable connection. WE’VE TALKED MANY TIMES about the Raspberry Pi, and in just about every one of our Pi explorations we’ve mentioned the possibility of running it headlessly. This means, as the word “headless” obliquely suggests, cutting off the machine’s face, and disabling most of its senses—disconnecting the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and running the Pi entirely as a network-attached device. This isn’t as mad as it may sound. The Pi can play many roles, from NAS to network administration to web hosting and beyond, that have no need for any attached peripherals. And, let’s face it, while the Raspbian desktop is functional, running graphical apps…

To no one’s surprise, Premiere Pro can handle this type of task very effectively and in a slightly more user-friendly manner. Warp Stabilizer launched within After Effects in CS5.5, but as of CS6, it’s built into Premiere Pro itself. Applying it is as simple as locating it in your effects panel and dragging it on to a clip—usually the default values are more than enough to give you the desired effect, but you can adjust the smoothness if it looks too jarring. It takes a moment for the software to analyze your footage, and then... well, that’s it. Done. Please return to your homes. There’s no denying it’s an easier way than using VirtualDub, and the results are impressive, but you’d expect that from a professional grade software suite carrying…

REMEMBER WHEN Asus more or less just made motherboards, or at least that’s how it seemed? No, us neither. Today, the Taiwanese megacorp has its fingers in so many pies, it’s hard to keep up. More to the point, just when you thought Asus’s product offerings couldn’t become more polished and consumer-friendly, along comes the Designo MX34VQ. It’s an awfully long way from those frills-free circuit boards of old. It’s also far more grown-up than Asus’s existing ROG Swift premium monitors, they of the projected logos and gamer-centric shtick. Instead, this Designo model feels like a carefully aimed headshot at the likes of Samsung’s CF791. As it happens, the MX34VQ shares several key specs with that Sammy screen. For starters, both are 34- inch super-wide monitors with 3440x1440 native resolutions.…

THERE’S A RENEWED push toward wireless from peripheral manufacturers lately, evidenced by SteelSeries’s great Arctis range, and more pertinently by Corsair’s cable-free Void Pro RGB Wireless. As consumers are responding to the word with fewer negative preconceptions, there’s a gap in the market to be occupied by the headset that gets it all right, at the most inviting price. But let’s be direct: That headset isn’t the Void Pro RGB Wireless. That’s not to say it’s an outright bad product. There’s plenty to like, much of it what we liked about the last round of Void headsets: decent, affordable sound, driven by 50mm drivers that don’t distort at higher volumes, sensible controls, and a comfortable, adjustable fit. Notable upgrades in this new model of Void are an improved microphone and…

A LONE WARRIOR MAKING a redemptive journey into a terrifying place is something we’ve all seen before. Add mythology, haunting structures, some really dark bits, basic shape-matching puzzles, and creepylooking guys who want to kill you, and the fantasy hack ’n’ slash game is complete. How do you make it fresh again? Ninja Theory, developer of PlayStation’s Heavenly Sword and multiplatform DmC, thinks it can do it with characterization. Senua is a Scottish tribeswoman who has seen her home overrun and lover killed by Scandinavian invaders. So, she carries his severed head into the Norse hell to avenge him. On its own, that would be easy to mock, but Ninja Theory has found a way to scatter uniqueness throughout the game: making Senua mentally ill. She hears voices and has…

TRY TO RUN GAMES or anything else that places any heavy graphical demands on a VirtualBox VM, and you won’t have much luck. VirtualBox’s 3D acceleration doesn’t really do anything for DirectX 10, 11, or 12 titles. There is a solution, but it’s one with some pretty heavy requirements. You need to run a Linux distribution as your host OS, and have two graphics cards in your physical machine, one of which you’ll use for your host—integrated graphics will do—and the other you’ll dedicate entirely to your VM. You also need to have a motherboard with an IOMMU unit, a CPU that supports it, and IOMMU enabled in the BIOS or UEFI. IOMMU is essentially a translation methodology, which maps physical memory addresses between guests and hosts—on AMD machines, you…

HOW DO YOU define “enthusiast”? It’s a question we ask a lot, because it’s challenging to keep ourselves on track. It’s all too easy to go with the expensive, like the Hellcats and the Ferraris of this world, as opposed to the affordable. The unattainable is often the most desired. And as brands push their halo products on to us to showcase to the world, in an effort to secure an engineering reputation for the rest of their lineups derived from higher up, it’s all too easy to become distracted by the glitter and the glam. For us, however, the term enthusiast means more than that. It’s more than whether you can afford whatever component you desire. It’s about how passionate you are for the work you produce, the content you…

It’s a little complicated. And it should be—it’s cryptography. Every requested transaction is packaged into a block with a timestamp, and broadcast to every machine on the network, the nodes, to be verified. Once it is, the transaction goes through, the block is added to the chain, and all nodes are updated with the new longer chain. This blockchain is essentially a list of transactions. To verify a transaction, the chain must be checked to ensure sufficient coins have been added to your account to cover the output. These are then not considered valid for future transactions. Coins are kept in a wallet application, protected by cryptographic keys—one public, one private. Your transaction is encrypted using your private key and the recipient’s public one, to ensure only they can receive it,…

THIS MONTH WE DISSECT... About iFixit iFixit is a global community of tinkerers dedicated to helping people fix things through free online repair manuals and teardowns. iFixit believes that everyone has the right to maintain and repair their own products. To learn more, visit www.ifixit.com. BACKGROUND Microsoft’s hardware is having an identity crisis. The company calls this new Surface Pro “the most versatile laptop,” which means that this apparent tablet is actually a laptop (that can transform into a Studio Surface). Tell ya what, Microsoft, we’re going to reach deep inside and see if we can help. MAJOR TECH SPECS • 12.3-inch IPS PixelSense display with 2736x1824 resolution (267 ppi) • Intel Kaby Lake Core m3 (4M Cache, 2.7GHz) up to Core i7 (4M Cache, 4.0GHz) CPU • 4GB/8GB/16GB 1,600MHz…

Can you really not spare a keyboard and monitor for a few minutes? No problem. As long as you’re OK with using Raspbian as your Pi’s OS, and you’re using a Raspberry Pi with an Ethernet port, there’s a quick workaround to enable SSH—and therefore headless operation—before you’ve even booted the Pi once. Write your SD card with the OS as usual, then open up the card in Windows’ file explorer. Right-click in the white space of the drive, and head to “New > Text Document.” Name this blank text file “ssh” with no file extension, then remove the SD card, insert it into your Pi, attach an Ethernet cable to connect it to the network, and power it up. Open a web browser on your main PC, and connect…

YOU’LL NEED THIS LIGHTROOM AND PHOTOSHOP Both come in Adobe’s Photographer’s Bundle (www.adobe.com). IMAGES Photographs you took of the eclipse in August. AUGUST’S ECLIPSE dragged a curved line of totality across the US, from northern Oregon on the west coast to the middle of South Carolina on the east. If you weren’t lucky enough to be on this line, which also took in parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, you will have seen a partial eclipse, which is still one of the greatest sights in the entire galaxy. The total eclipse relies on the coincidence that our moon appears the same size as the sun in our sky, despite one being very large and far away, and the other being small and close. No other planet in…

FUNNY HOW FAST things change. Eighteen months ago, eight cores was as good as it got for desktop PC processors. Not now. In this brave new post-AMD Ryzen world, it’s half as many cores as AMD now sells you in a single CPU. It’s not even half as many as Intel is planning by the end of 2017. The flip side goes something like this: If eight cores is no longer exotic, it should be affordable, right? When it comes to AMD’s Ryzen processors, that’s an affirmative. As we go to press, Newegg happens to have a sale on the entry-level AMD Ryzen 1700 eight-core chip, just squeezing it in under $300. That is simply awesome. It’s also where we’d hardly blame you for taking issue with the new Core…

YOU CAN PAY A LOT for a gaming mouse. Over 200 bucks, in fact. And PC gaming— indeed, PC building, too—is one of those hobbies where, if you’re using cheaper gear, you can feel like you’re being left behind. As though those people who buy the $200 mice, or the really expensive PSUs, or some colossal gold-plated case are having more fun than you are with some mid-range equipment. This is not the case. Sure, spending that much money on an input device might make you feel good—and mice are important; they’re the indispensable translator of your movements and wishes into the twitch of gunsights or the pixel-perfect swirl of a digital paintbrush—but you can feel good without splashing that kind of cash. Take the Rival as an example. Logitech…

WE’VE BEEN ALLUDING to this build for a while. The king of all systems— for the next month or so, at least. As processor core counts and clock speeds continue to advance ever onward, desktop performance has increased at an exponential rate this last year. We haven’t seen the likes of this since 2010, and it’s a joy to witness. Big blue and fiery red are at it again— CPU Ragnarök has arrived, and with it, a new wave of performance gains, while the battle of the processor gods for market share rages on. Threadripper brings the very best of server-grade processing prowess to the HEDT (high-end desktop) platform. We’re no longer limited by a meager 8 or 10 cores, or PCIe lanes stuck below the 40 mark. X399 represents…

WE’VE COVERED VIRTUALBOX in detail, primarily because it’s free to use and pretty comprehensive in its abilities. For most tasks, you’re unlikely to need anything more complex. If you want to take virtualization further, though, there are a few commercial tools that can make the process easier and (generally) run VMs more efficiently. VMWare Workstation Player, free with a limited set of features, is a solid option, and one that’s compatible with the same VHDs, though you need to pay a license fee if you want to use it commercially. Its level of support and development is, naturally, very good, it’s arguably more capable than VirtualBox, and it’s due a major version upgrade soon, which should add a little spice. Check it out at www.vmware.com. If you’re willing to create…

In January 3, 2009, a programer (or programers) working under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto launched something remarkable: a new form of money, a digital cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. The idea was that Bitcoin would be completely independent of outside forces—no banks, no governments. It would be a distributed method of wealth that required no trusted third party to verify transfers or hold money. Supply was limited, to combat inflation. A simple idea done with clever math. Cryptocurrencies run on a peer-to-peer system. Transactions take place between two parties without intermediaries, verified by horribly involved calculations. This math is based on public-key cryptography; put very simply, each transaction is verified by the completion of a series of cryptographic puzzles, and added to the blockchain. The blockchain is the ledger, which is distributed…

YOU’LL NEED THIS VIRTUALDUB Free, deceptively powerful, open-source video-editing software. Download it from www.virtualdub.org. DESHAKER PLUGIN Stabilizes videos within VirtualDub. Also free. Grab it from www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm. NOT ALL VIDEOS ARE CREATED EQUALLY. You only have to sit through Suicide Squad to figure that much out, but we’re not taking dire scripting to task now. Instead, we’re focusing on stabilizing shaky video files. We don’t carry tripods everywhere we go, and last time we looked around, nor does anyone else. As a result, much of the smartphone and GoPro video we create contains juddering images due to our shaky hands or uneven terrain, and that can be fairly unpleasant to watch for more than a few seconds, daughter’s first steps or not. Camera hardware itself can help with this problem to…

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? Or, why not more? That’s the question Acer’s Predator 21 X asks just by existing. An exercise in excess, the 21 X is a behemoth of a laptop—if you can call it one—that crams every possible bell, whistle, and kitchen sink you can think of inside its not-so-svelte frame. Except when it doesn’t. 21-inch curved ultrawide screen? Check. Full-size mechanical keyboard? Check. Top-end internals? Check. High-resolution panel? Nope. Before we get to that questionable design choice, let’s talk about what it’s like to use a laptop that’s upward of four times more expensive than a high-end desktop. Of course, laptop is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, it’s an all-in-one system with a mouse pad, keyboard, and screen that folds down in a clamshell—you know,…

WHEN AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURERS design a new car, they don’t just focus on the tiny explosion box under the hood. Every aspect of design is taken into consideration, every sense of the potential owner checked off. And while SteelSeries hasn’t imbued the Apex M750 with New Keyboard Smell (though, there’s an idea for future editions) it’s covered just about every other base. Visually, for example, it looks absolutely magnificent. Smooth curves have been panel-beaten out of its aircraft-grade aluminum base, though it’s so richly coated that only the weight and overall sturdiness really give away that this matt black slab is made of metal. There’s nothing superfluous or even slightly gamer-centric about its outward appearance; no harsh angles, no obnoxious media keys, just smooth lines, and a standard layout with readable,…

WE’RE BACK IN THE VOID after last month’s Lone Echo, but things are very different aboard abandoned space station Tacoma. There’s no VR for one thing, centrifugal force mostly preventing the free-floating that made the Kronos II so exciting. You do have AR, however—the station’s systems interface with your suit or implants to display a floating display in front of you. Tacoma is a space station but needn’t be. You could be exploring anywhere, and Fullbright has previous in this area, having produced 2013’s Gone Home. It’s not the larger environment that matters, but the detail. The contents of lockers are what you’ve come to see, not the austere beauty of nebulae and planetary rings. There’s a plot of sorts. You’ve come to download the station’s computer core, and that…

you write, we respond Advanced Networking Windows Wisdom Problem Pins Networking Perfection I’ve never written in before, but the July issue’s “Set Up the Perfect Network,” by Nick Peers, made me scratch my head and think, “Is this really Maximum?” Don’t get me wrong— he did a great job. His information is correct for small home networks, if you happen to have just a cable modem for your WAN, a wired desktop, a network attached printer, a laptop, and not much else on your network. If that’s the case, one of the good quality Port Address Translation (PAT) type devices mentioned in the article is a great choice. Unfortunately, something like that would never cut it in my home network and many others I have come across as we move…