Table of contents for September 2024 in Maximum PC

IN MAY, Microsoft announced the Copilot + PC Program. AMD responded with the Ryzen AI 300 series. The 55-TOPS (Trillion Operations per Second) of Neural Processing Unit performance would place these chips above both the Snapdragon X Elite (45 TOPS), and Apple’s M4 chip in the iPad Pro (38 TOPS). HP has announced that the Omnibook Ultra 14 laptop will be the first to feature AMD’s chips. HP has stated that it won’t be released as a Copilot+PC device, but users will receive a free upgrade from Microsoft once it becomes available. The company has also confirmed that it will feature the AI 300 series processor with integrated AMD Radeon 800M graphics. The laptop is expected to be available at the start of August on HP.com and at Best Buy…

ON JUNE 21, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned 12 Kaspersky Lab executives, who were supposedly working in Russia’s technology sector. Then, the US Department of Commerce put AO Kaspersky Lab, OOO Kaspersky Group (Russia), and Kaspersky Labs Limited (UK) on its ‘Entity List’, meaning no US company could do business with them. Finally, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) banned the company from selling software or providing updates. As such, it wasn’t surprising that on July 15, Kaspersky announced it would be winding down its US operations from July 20. In 2017, Bloomsberg Newsweek ran the explosive headline, ‘Kaspersky Lab Has Been Working With Russian Intelligence’. The software security firm replied that they’d never received any requests for customer information from…

SSDS HAVE COME A LONG WAY in the last 12 months, and they’re now one of the most diverse product categories out there. Not only do you have the cutting-edge PCIe 5.0 drives pushing sequential performance to the max, but companies are increasingly advancing the PCIe 4.0 platform as well, which touts impeccable price-to-performance ratios and far higher capacities. No matter what your performance, generation, or form factor needs, though, these are the drives to keep an eye out for. 5 WESTERN DIGITAL SN770M 1TB It’s undoubtedly the year of the handheld gaming PC, so it wouldn’t be a just list without us including the best M.2-2230 drive we’ve tested to date. WD has paired a Sandisk A1 controller with 112-layer TLC NAND from Kioxia for this one, and although on…

“THE WARS of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots.” This prophecy by the military school commandant in the Season Eight finale of The Simpsons has yet to come true. ‘Kinetic’ warfare is very much the norm, with battles being decided by who has superior guns, missiles, and aircraft. Still, in recent decades, a very different type of war has emerged in cyberspace. Though nations don’t exclusively use small robots to attack others, they’re not above employing teams of hackers to try to steal proprietary information, sabotage enemy infrastructure, and carry out surveillance of foreign nationals.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS TWEAKING.COM’S WINDOWS REPAIR (www.tweaking.com) This comes in Free and Pro versions: we’re focusing on the free version in this tutorial IT DOESN’T MATTER how carefully you look after your Windows installation; things can—and do—go wrong. Whether it’s a flaky installer introducing gremlins into your system or you’re trying to recover from a malware infection, many fixes often involve complicated trips into the Registry, where the wrong tweak could risk even greater damage being done. Thankfully, there are tools that specialize in such fixes. The best by far is Tweaking.com’s Windows Repair tool. It may no longer be updated as frequently as it once was, but it remains an invaluable part of any user’s toolkit, whether you’re running Windows 10 or 11. In this tutorial, we’ll run through its…

Windows Repair offers fixes for many problems, but it’s not the only tool you need in your armory. Start with recovery media—something you can boot into should the worst happen and Windows refuses to boot. Check out our last issue’s guide to building the ultimate rescue disc, or at the very least, create a Lazesoft Recovery Suite disc (www.lazesoft.com) to give you access to a wide range of repairs for problems that prevent Windows from booting. Windows Repair Toolbox (https://windows-repair-toolbox.com) is a portable tool that serves as a front-end to other repair and maintenance tools. It opens to its Tools tab, where you’ll find a range of tools under various headings: click one and it’ll either open or be downloaded and added to the program. You’ll see a Repairs section…

I’VE WAXED LYRICAL about Geometric Future over the last few issues, but its take on chassis design has got me thinking about the PC marketplace as a whole. Let’s consider handhelds for a moment. In 2021, out of nowhere, Valve announced its first-edition Steam Deck. This new, potent, powerful, and reasonably priced handheld finally gave PC enthusiasts the opportunity to play their gargantuan Steam libraries anywhere in the world—albeit for a short time, before the battery dies. It sold like hot cakes, and boy, did people notice. Jump forward to today, and everyone is launching handheld gaming PCs left, right, and center; some good, some bad, some average, In fact, my colleague, Aleksha McLoughlin, published a fantastic article in PC Gamer about it. It’s well worth a read. That got me…

AT LAST, we’ve got MSI’s take on the new generation of 32-inch 4K OLED gaming monitors. Why have we been so keen to get our paws on the MSI MPG321URX? Simple: it’s by far the cheapest. It’s being offered for about $200 to $300 less than any other 32-inch 4K gaming OLED, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that it sells out as soon as each new batch is released. Still, you can’t blame MSI. It offers the same Samsung-sourced QD-OLED panel as numerous other more expensive monitors, including the $1,300 Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDM and $1,200 Alienware AW3225QF. It’s just a lot cheaper. It also has the same basic specs, including 240Hz refresh, claimed 0.03ms response and 250 nits full-screen brightness, plus 99 percent DCI-P3 coverage and similar key benefits. That’s…

SLEEKER, SHINIER, and now with the most recent AMD Ryzen mobile processors, give it up for the latest Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for 2024. Without wanting to give away too much, too soon, it looks, feels, and performs better than ever. The most immediately noticeable improvement with the new G14 is the all-aluminum chassis. Built from CNCmachined aluminum and covering the laptop from head to toe, it’s a big improvement in both look and feel over the previous model, which uses some plastic parts. The underside is now aluminum where it was once flexible plastic, which should strengthen it, though one downside is how hot it gets to the touch while gaming. The new G14 chassis also helps shed some thickness—the new model comes in at 0.62 inches, compared to…

A SURVIVAL MMO from NetEase, a developer that specializes in mobile-first games that keep you busy for about as long as it takes for your fast food order to arrive? No thanks. But wait. While Once Human is far from perfect, it is good. In fact, for a free-toplay game, it’s stunning. It’s like a less cartoony, more fully fleshed-out version of creature collector Palworld. And that’s no bad thing. Once you're done with the detailed character creation, you jump into the game as a 'meta-human', a new mutation of homo sapiens adapted to alien 'stardust' that has turned most of the planet into monsters. Blasting through an entire room of stardust monsters is satisfying, but not remotely difficult—at least during your first 'Novice' season. But almost immediately, you'll begin crafting…

DESPITE the popularity of NVIDIA chips, the company has had a contentious relationship with the open-source community. Linux developers were frustrated by NVIDIA’s refusal to provide code to develop open-source drivers for the OS. In a 2012 interview, Linus Torvalds described them as “the single worst company [we] ever worked with”. Even criminals got in the game. In 2022, Ransomware gang Lapsus$ threatened to leak NVIDIA GPU data files unless they agreed to open-source its GPU drivers for all operating systems forever. NVIDIA declined. But in the same year, it did begin open-sourcing GPU kernel modules. This was done for the R515 driver for data center GPUs, using dual MIT and GPL licensing. NVIDIA has announced that it plans to do the same for the R560 driver. This will be…

ON JULY 19, ITsecuritycompanyCrowdstrike unveiled a ‘sensor configuration update’ for Windows systems. This triggered a logic error, resulting in a system crash and blue screen for any customers running Falcon Sensor on Windows 7.11 or above. Microsoft released a statement to the effect that although this comprised less than one percent of devices running its OS, the outage affected 8.5 million devices. The effects were felt by virtually everyone in the developed world, given that systems operated by airlines, stock markets, and TV broadcasters were knocked offline. According to the UK’s Daily Telegraph, the company failed to issue any public statements or updates for a few hours. However, a workaround was developed and published on the company blog. Crowdstrike also collaborated with Microsoft to deliver updates. At the time of…

OKAY, we’ve got the build process wrapped up. What about the performance? What can a $4,821 machine do? Turns out quite a bit. Now, we do want to point out that we have limited this system somewhat. When we installed Windows, we always make a point of updating the BIOS on the motherboard to the latest version (along with installing all the most recent updates and new drivers, etc), to really get the most out of the rig. Interestingly, however, Intel has finally forced motherboard manufacturers to implement their default Intel settings as standard, and Asus has honored that request as well. If you go into the BIOS after the update, the option is there to enable Asus’s Auto AI Overclock mode, or Intel’s default settings mode. That means voltages,…

WINDOWS UPDATES “Windows Updates are great,” said no one, ever. Quite a lot of users complain about the updates that seem to plague every Windows 11 restart—it’s not just you. Users understand that they’re a necessity with a modern OS, but if Windows 12 is going to put a smile on users’ faces, then start with the top two things on the wishlist. First, bring back the option to exclude certain updates. Second, make it simpler to prevent Windows from updating the drivers for specific components. It’s possible to manage both through a complex combination of Registry hacks and goat sacrifices, but this is hardly something that’s user-friendly. Microsoft can score some simple brownie points by giving Windows 12 users much more control over their updates. ONEDRIVE Microsoft is trying…

During the Viasat attack, hundreds of wind turbines stopped functioning. Although they weren’t the intended target, such attacks reveal how cyberwarfare can badly disrupt a country’s energy supply. The Guardian demonstrated this in December 2023 after revealing that the UK’s most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, had been targeted by hackers. The paper claimed that senior officials at the plant tried to cover up the attack, as malware breaches were first detected in 2015. Although the implications for data theft are serious, Sellafield also has a large stockpile of plutonium and regularly disposes of nuclear waste, both of which could be devastating in the wrong hands. Additionally, the official investigation apparently revealed that the plant’s control systems were so vulnerable to attack that they should be replaced immediately. At the time of writing,…

YOU’LL NEED THIS CHATGPT-3.5 (free) CHATGPT-4.0 (from $20) chat.openai.com SHORT FOR ‘CHAT GENERATIVE PRE-TRAINED TRANSFORMER’, it’s no exaggeration to say that ChatGPT has changed the world. In this feature, we explain how it can transform your life in some very specific and practical ways. To get the most out of ChatGPT, you’ll have to pay. Developer OpenAI offers use of the GPT-3.5 engine for free, and limited access to GPT-4.0, but paying subscribers get full access to the more advanced model. Plans start at $20 per user per month for the personal tier, which also includes the DALL-E image creation tool. The simplest way to use ChatGPT is through a web browser, directly on the OpenAI website. But a huge number of third-party services have also been built on top…

1. PRESETS Windows Repair provides quick and easy ways to select multiple repairs depending on the type of fix you’re looking for, from targeted (malware cleanup) to broad (common). Switch presets from this dropdown menu. 2. REPAIR LIST A list of available repairs—most entries are a series of Registry fixes for known problems. Use the checkboxes to select and de-select entries, or ‘All Repairs…’ to select all or clear the selection. 3. LOGS After clicking the Start Repairs option, the view will then shift to this tab, where you’ll see a progress report detailing the repairs as they’re performed and whether they’re successful (or not). 4. REPAIR INFO Switch to this tab, then select your target repair from the drop-down menu that appears. Here, you’ll see a description of what…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 11 An up-to-date installation  ERASER GPARTED ISO READERS WHO FOLLOWED OUR TUTORIAL on recovering deleted files using PhotoRec and TestDisk (August 2024, page 68) will know that they can be easy to recover. The one exception is devices using an SSD with TRIM enabled. In this case, when data is deleted, it’s overwritten immediately, so is almost impossible to recover. If this isn’t true for your device, it’s possible that your sensitive personal files could be salvaged even after you empty the Recycle Bin. This has huge privacy implications if your machine falls into the wrong hands, or even if you just want to recycle your PC. Fortunately, there are specialist tools that can help to wipe files from your device securely. In this guide, you’ll…

I’VE TAKEN THE PLUNGE and invested in an EV. Car guys roam around my family a dime a dozen. Mom’s side is obsessed with classic American muscle, while my dad’s side rigidly stick with ‘67 Volkswagen split-screens, Beetles, and an armada of European sports cars. I’ve bitten the bullet, likely much to their chagrin (although I know my Dad’s going to geek out over the tech as much as I have). Here’s the thing, though: I’ve had 3.2L V6 Audis, silly turbo-charged 2.0L Golfs, and everything in between, even a hilarious Fiat 500 and a Mini Cooper during my time driving, and yet I’ve still finally ditched the lot and gone for the big switch. EV depreciation is insane, and although that’s less than ideal for new car buyers or used-car…

OKAY, THIS THING isn’t a cheap laptop. At near enough $4,100, it’s eye-wateringly expensive. MSI has flooded its Stealth 16 AI Studio A1V (seriously, who picks these names?) with as much hardware and toptier kit as it can find, and yet still, it leaves us wanting more. Top highlight features? Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, 64GB of DDR5 @ 5,600, RTX 4090 with 16GB of VRAM and a crisp, clean, 3840x2400 120 Hz Mini LED display (not OLED, yes this is the first faux pas), combined with a 2TB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 SSD (the second faux pas). That’s a lot of grade-A hardware, and it’s even got its own SteelSeries keyboard and trackpad, too. So why the glum face? Well, aside from a rear illuminated light strip with…

OLED DISPLAY TECH and 4K resolutions make a potent combination, and the Samsung QD-OLED panel that this Aorus monitor is built around has become a bit of a favorite among manufacturers. You’ll find it in screens from Samsung itself, as well as Asus, and Gigabyte has jumped on board, too, with the FO32U2. Luckily, it’s pretty good. With a 240Hz refresh rate, you’re going to need an ungodly GPU to drive it to its maximum at 4K, but this does at least add a degree of future-proofing, as an RTX 6080 will be making its way into your rig eventually. At 32 inches, the screen makes a definite statement when arranged on a desk—buy two for the ultimate power move!—its widely splayed foot giving it solid support without the wobble…

TRIUMPHS NO MAN’S SKY UPDATED V5.0 has improved sky, cloud, and water rendering, engine performance, and bug fixes. XBOX.COM TO STREAM GEFORCE NOW GAMES Microsoft has reaffirmed its commitment to PC gamers using NVIDIA’s streaming service. ‘PIVOTAL’ QUANTUM CHIP The new chip by Oxford Ionics controls ‘trapped ions’—a crucial step in building effective quantum computers. TRAGEDIES XBOX 360 MARKETPLACE CLOSED FROM JULY 29 For those who didn’t buy before then, digital-only releases like Mighty No. 9 are gone forever. DISNEY HACKED ‘Hacktivist’ group Nullbulge has stolen over 1TB of data from its Slack channels. INTEL FAULTY PROCESSORS ACCUSATION Alderon claims the 13th/14th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs have almost a 100 percent failure rate.…

DESPITE BEING THE PREFERRED BROWSER of two thirds of internet users, Google Chrome has had a fairly troubled relationship with user privacy. Earlier this year, the tech giant settled a lawsuit surrounding tracking the internet use of Chrome users, even when using the browser’s ‘Incognito’ mode. Luca Casonato, the developer of JavaScript Registry (JSR) and Deno, has now uncovered another privacy concern affecting Chrome. The discovery centres on an API provided by the preinstalled extension ‘hangout_services’, which only Google-related websites can access. This affects any *.google.com domain. According to Casonato, the data includes access to system/tab CPU, GPU and memory usage, and incorporates a back channel for logging purposes. Upon further inspection, Casanato found that this issue seems to affect all Chromium-based browsers. These are web browsers that, like Chrome, use…

Although AGI and true artificial consciousness is still a long way off, the threat AI could present is still no less tangible with generative ANIs. Disinformation in the digital age has become incredibly common in recent years, with bad actors taking advantage of ANIs and other such tools to besmirch, incite, or encourage outcomings that they find beneficial. Deep fakes have affected all manner of people, with politicians, sports club managers, celebrities, and even our own friends and family being spoofed and targeted with the technology. There have sadly been a number of reports of robocallers imitating loved ones’ voices, asking for money, simply through finding that person’s voice online and then mimicking it by utilizing AI over the phone to family and friends. On top of that, generative ANI has…

WHAT can we say about the Hyte Thicc Q60? At its core, you might be thinking that it’s just another CPU cooler. It’s not some grand graphics card capable of flinging thousands of frames a second to your monitor, and it’s not some wonderful OLED panel, crisp and complete with a low-enough latency to make your eyes bleed. It’s a cooler. It cools things. But the thing is, PC building has come a long way. When AIOs first debuted on the scene, you were lucky if your water block was illuminated with an LED. Today, LCD screens litter them a dime a dozen. It takes a lot to stand out from the crowd and make a name for yourself. And so too is the case for your own build. Why…

TIP OF THE MONTH TABLISS FOR CHROME Fed up with the generic new tab page on Chrome? Fortunately, there are a ton of extensions out there that’ll help throw a load of new features into it, including customizable backgrounds, lists, clocks, links, and more. Tabliss is our favorite at Maximum PC. It’s free, easy to tweak, and insanely helpful for anyone who struggles to keep on top of their daily tasks. https://tabliss.io MAKE – USE – CREATE DIVING INTO BENCHMARKING I’ve been dabbling with laptop benchmarking. Unlike on a desktop PC, you often don’t have clean-cut comparisons. Take gaming laptops—some have 16:9 displays, some 16:10, and others bizarre resolutions (2880x1800, anyone?). It makes testing a little haphazard. I think I’ve settled on a system. I perform one set of tests…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 11 An up to date installation VPN Subscription (Optional) THE ORIGINAL DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM (DNS) specifications were published by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 1983. This was a more innocent time, when most internet users were government employees and academics. As such, there was no provision for encrypting DNS queries. By default, they’re simply sent in plaintext over UDP. Anyone monitoring a user’s connection, such as an ISP, can see every site they visit. This lack of security and authentication also means that web users can be subjected to ‘DNS Poisoning’, whereby a device is sent the IP address for a malicious site, instead of one for a legitimate domain. There are several competing standards for securing DNS queries. In this guide, we’ll explore how…

THIS MIGHT BE ONE of the most exciting notebooks we’ve ever taken a look at. There’s something quite unique about it, and it’s all to do with processing. Don’t let the buzzwords and marketing hype get to you first; yes, it does have AI features baked in as standard, and a lot of those are unique software elements well worth talking about, but the key thing is what’s hidden away under the hood: the Snapdragon X Elite ARM processor. Yep, this is none other than Qualcomm’s 4nm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 CPU (catchy name). It packs in 12 cores, 42 MB of cache, a 3.4 GHz clock speed, and an Adreno GPU producing 3.8 TFLOPs of processing power, along with a dedicated NPU (neural processing unit, for AI operations) generating…

THE ONEXPLAYER X1 is definitely one of those ‘if only’ devices. If only the Meteor Lake silicon was efficient enough to deliver a game-changing level of handheld battery life. If only the Xe GPU architecture was more reliable in nailing consistent gaming frame rates across the board. If only those controllers weren’t so hollow, confidence-sapping, and didn’t get in the way. If only it wasn’t designed to work with a magnetic keyboard. In fact, this gaming tablet is a faintly ridiculous-looking device when you’ve got the keyboard and elephant-ear controllers attached. OneXPlayer is presenting the X1 as a three-in-one device: a tablet PC, a laptop, and a gaming handheld. Inevitably, it fails to excel in any of those form factors. Worse, it often isn’t actually good at all. Strangely, it’s…

DDR5 MEMORY is in a very peculiar place right now. When it launched, it really did suffer from some ridiculous pricing, with 4,200 MT/s kits featuring atrocious latencies that were actually slower than the average DDR4 kit, yet being way more expensive. Fortunately, over the last half year or so, memory pricing has fallen off a cliff, which is great news for us. Lexar’s Thor OC DDR5 is a prime example of what you can get on the cheap. It’s $100 for 32GB @ 6,000 MT/s, and similar to the Crucial Pro Overclocking kit that we’ve been effusive about lately, featuring both Intel XMP and AMD EXPO profiles. That’s brilliant news, as it keeps things simple. No longer do you have to find exactly the memory kit for your system—just…

TECH GIANTS Microsoft and Google each offer their own respective cloud storage services and web apps. OneDrive is built into Windows, so requires minimal setup. Windows 11 actually requires you to sign in via a Microsoft account during setup. This means, in theory, that every Windows user has at least a free OneDrive folder, so can automatically start backing up and syncing content. This plays well with Microsoft 365 users, as the free web versions of apps like Word and Excel can save files to your OneDrive folder. There may therefore seem little reason to use Google Drive. After all, it entails setting up a separate account and app. The 15GB of free cloud storage is more generous, but both Microsoft and OneDrive offer similar pricing plans for extra space,…