APC July 2022

It’s finally time – albeit with some caution in reserve – to declare the GPU crisis over. The team and I have been checking graphics card prices daily for many months, and at last it seems that sanity has returned to the market. You can now buy, as an example, an RTX 3080 in the $1,200-range, while just a few months ago they were $2,200 or more. We hope this is the end of those bad old days, though to be realistic, while the crypto demand for GPUs has all but vanished, the supply and logistics issues that also contributed to insane pricing are still very much present. So perhaps now is the time to buy. Prices are good and there’s stock for most items just waiting to be added to your…

1 ASCOMP PDF-COMPRESS Provides PDF compression so you can optimise your PDF files so they don’t take up much storage space. Ascomp PDF-compress provides PDF compression so you can optimise your PDF files so that they don’t take up more storage space than necessary. Depending on the structure and content of the PDF document, up to 95 percent compression can be achieved. In a test with more than 1,000 randomly selected PDF files from different sources, an average compression ratio of close to 50 percent was achieved. Ascomp PDF-compress uses different approaches to compression. For example, images contained in a document can be lossless compressed, special optimisation technology (MRC) can be applied, and blank pages and annotations can be removed from the PDF structure. Optionally, image quality may also degrade in stages,…

"Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage." APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know…

Microsoft announced that third party widgets will be enabled in Windows 11 beginning “later this year.” Widgets are a handy way to present bite-sized bits of information without hogging screen real estate. They’re easy to summon and dismiss, letting you quickly check some news or other real-time information and get back to your main task(s). At present, Microsoft is the sole provider and publisher of Windows 11 widgets. This obviously limits the scope of the offerings, but there are still some useful widgets designed to show snippets of news, to do lists, weather, traffic, your Outlook calendar, and stock prices. However, most if not all of the existing widgets won’t work if you use a local account to sign into Windows 11, rather than a Microsoft account.…

The Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the first quarter of 2022, and the results are somewhat dire – Dean McCarron from Mercury reports that aside from IoT/SoC, all segments of the x86 processor market declined during the quarter. Desktop PCs suffered the most as units declined by 30 percent, the largest quarterly drop in history. That’s an incredible reversal after two years of component shortages that kept many PC builders on the sidelines. Surprisingly, AMD managed to carve out significant wins during the tumultuous quarter and has now, once again, set a new record high x86 market share of 27.7 percent, an incredible increase of seven percentage points over last year.…

The release of Intel’s Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards could be postponed, according to a new report published by Igor Wallossek on his Igor’s Lab tech site. Multiple sources have contacted Wallossek, and all agree that these desktop GPUs will be late, but how late isn’t clearly defined, with the release window now expected to fall between the beginning of July to the end of August. Intel’s official position concerning the release of its Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards is that they will start to roll out in Q2 2022. However, we are now firmly into Q2, and Q3 begins at the beginning of July. So a hard launch at the beginning of July would be a little late, but the end of August is quite a severe delay. In May Intel…