Índex per August 2018 a Maximum PC

Windows has been designed for maximum compatibility, so while it runs on a wide range of PCs, it’s not been optimized for any of them. This is where the apps in this part of the feature come into play. They give you the tools required to speed up your PC in several ways. As is usually the case with apps, less is more— there’s no point recommending 100 apps whose combined demands outweigh the benefits of using them in the first place, which is why we’ve pared them down to five. You’ll find our favorite tool for managing startup, enabling you to both monitor and improve the way Windows loads. If you’re frequently blighted by lockups, then Process Lasso can keep those runaway programs in check. There’s also a safe…

Reinstalling Windows from scratch—wiping your system drive clean to install a brand-new (and fresh) version of Windows on it—is the ultimate choice for anyone looking to revive a slow-running PC or resolve a major, non-hardware issue, such as those caused by malware or a clogged-up computer. In this section, we walk you through the entire process. Ideally, you should have a recent and full backup of your PC, created using either File History or the Windows Backup and Restore tool, before you begin. That way, you’ll lose the minimum of content. A full reinstall really is destructive—nothing left on your C drive will exist once you’ve finished. You should ensure you have the latest installation media for your target version of Windows—see our section on the Windows Media Creation Tool…

A NEW GENERATION of video encoders is upon us! Some sound familiar, such as H.265, some sound exotic and new, like VP9 or AV1, but no matter what, you’re likely be tripping over one or the other soon, and cursing that your CPU use has shot through the roof. Why do we need a raft of new encoders? Why has your hardware acceleration stopped working? Is that 4K file going to play on your 4K UHDTV? What about HDR on the PC? How can you encode your own video, and can you even enjoy some GPGPU acceleration, too? Can we make it all simple for your perplexed brain? We’re going to take a deep dive into the inner workings of video encoders to see how gigabytes of data can be compressed…

YOU’LL ALMOST CERTAINLY REMEMBER the late ’80s, when the eight-bit computing revolution gradually gave way to the rise of 16-bit machines. Atari and Commodore stood at the forefront of this revolution, with the Amiga eventually winning out. But for a while, during the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Atari ST ran it close. And thanks to the brilliant Hatari (http://hatari.tuxfamily.org), you can now resurrect the ST (and its successors) on your Raspberry Pi. 1 FIRST STEPS You need a desktop environment to run Hatari—we’re using Raspbian PIXEL. The latest version of Hatari uses SDL2 to render graphics, so you need to enable the OpenGL driver, noting that it’s still experimental, and may be slightly unstable. It also means Hatari requires a Pi 2 [Image A] or better to run…

1. COPY TOS FILES Open File Manager. Double-click the downloaded TOS zip file to open it in Archive Manager, then drag the .img file into your Downloads folder. Once done, press F4 to open a Terminal window pointing to the Downloads folder, and type the following (substitute tos102uk.img with the image file): $ sudo cp tos102uk.img /usr/share/hatari 2. SET SYSTEM TYPE Now open the Pi menu and select “Games > Hatari.” Click “OK” at the “Could not load TOS file” screen. When the main menu appears, click “System.” By default, Hatari is configured to emulate the STFM, but you can select a different Atari machine from the list. Check “Boot faster by patching TOS & sysvars,” regardless of which machine you choose, to speed up loading times slightly. 3. SELECT…

FANS OF THRILLERS will know that every conspiracy theorist gives over a huge section of their living room wall to pictures, newspaper clippings, and various crazy schemes. In the real world, project managers can also quickly become daunted when managing a large project, even with the help of computers. Whether you’re trying to find the second gunman or overseeing a complex construction project, Trello offers a crisp and elegant way to put your plans in motion. This free app helps you realize your goals through the use of simply laid-out “Boards,” on to which you can place any number of virtual “cards” and lists, to record tasks to do and the resources you need. The dedicated Trello app is also available for mobile and syncs automatically, so you and other…

SSD MAKERS across the globe: Prepare for a world of pain. The 970 Pro is part of Samsung’s third generation of high-end NVMe SSDs. Its previous efforts have been about as good as consumer SSDs got. So, if third time truly is lucky, and the 970 Pro is even better, well, Samsung just got scary. Of course, it’s over 18 months since the Samsung 960 Pro debuted. That’s an aeon in the ironically fast-moving world of solid-state storage. In that period, Intel has rebooted expectations when it comes to solid-state memory latency, with its revolutionary 3D Xpoint tech, sold in products under the Optane brand. Meanwhile, several other SSD manufacturers have upped their game, too. So, what does the 970 Pro, reviewed here in 512GB capacity, bring to the M.2-format…

TAKE A LOOK at Corsair’s arsenal of cases, and you’ll see there are over 25 different chassis in the mid-tower ATX sector alone. Compare that to the microATX segment, where there’s five. Yep, that’s it. So, when a new microATX case launches from the Californian giant, you can bet your backside we’re on the scene to review it first. The Crystal 280X is very much a revision of one of that small group. A much-needed update of the first and still impressive Carbide Air 240. Originally, the 240 was a shrunken variant of the Air 540 series, a compartmentalized cube, designed to allow for better temperature control and easier build access. From the outset, the 280X takes the best of Corsair’s Crystal series, and bakes it into a new variant…

WITH THE WARHAMMER GAMES, Creative Assembly has been making some of the best titles in the Total War series, but has also found itself on a punishing release schedule. This year sees two releases, with Total War: Three Kingdoms scheduled for the fall, so we wouldn’t blame the studio for taking its foot off the gas a bit. As the first Total War Saga, Thrones of Britannia is a stripped-back title focused on a small historical landmass—the British Isles of 878 AD—running on the historical engine that powered 2014’s Atilla. It’s had some polish applied, but is clearly not the particle-fest that’s behind the Warhammer games. Ultra settings should not be out of reach for most, especially at 1080p, as the relatively mild recommended specs show. Stripped-back it may be,…

The stunt grabbed world headlines for a day or so, which was the point. COMPUTEX IS the largest IT trade show in Asia. All the big players attend, and it generates a slew of announcements, launches, and headlines, from PC cases that double as fish tanks (no, really), to more serious matters. AMD and Intel always manage to grab the lion’s share of coverage, even if they have to be a little inventive in the process. AMD was there to show the world Threadripper 2, its new high-end desktop chip. Threadripper is essentially multiple Ryzen chips on a single die. The original packs two eight-core Zen chips, but the silicon was neatly quartered, and the EPYC server chips already sport 32 cores. So, we could guess what Threadripper 2 had…

> Cleaning Up > Spectre-Proofing > Upside-Down ATX Using Disk Cleanup Hey, Doc. It’s been years since I’ve written in. I have a question about an old utility that comes from previous versions of Windows. In the Administrator command prompt under Windows 10 version 1803, what are your recommended settings for the following Disk Cleanup commands: “cleanmgr /sageset:*” after which I run “cleanmgr /sagerun:*”? I know that a number between 1 and 99 replaces the * in both commands. –Keith Brooks THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The value replacing * can actually be anything from 0 to 65535. By specifying different numbers, you can create lots of preset combinations. This comes in useful for automating clean-up across large networks. There are 24 different items to choose between after typing in the first…

While there’s no substitute for hardware upgrades to deliver the ultimate performance fillip, the fact remains that it’s highly likely that various components within your machine aren’t being pushed to their absolute limits. By default, many components are configured in a conservative fashion, but if you’re armed with the right tools, you can start squeezing them that little bit further. It’s worth noting that overclocking your processor, RAM, and graphics can shorten the lifespan of those components, particularly if their core temperature rises. Thankfully, our recommended tools have built-in fail-safes and monitoring mechanisms, so you can check your tweaks aren’t going to bring your PC to its knees. You can also speed up other hardware areas—without introducing undue stress. Expect to deliver minor speed bumps to your SSDs and Internet…

EXCUSE US BEING a little excitable, but you want the best server. A server that can do it all. A single machine, ready to give you everything you need: media, ad blocking, file serving, the works. But man, what a drag it is to put something like that together—installing all the software, getting it all working with your hardware, balancing the load so that one thing doesn’t completely neuter another. Nobody in their right mind would choose to do that if there were a better alternative. And there is. So, while this is a look at creating the best server, we’ve skewed it as a look at the right way to go about it. Once you have the tools, adding something new to your server will take, literally, a couple of…

Eventually, you’re going to find your server lacking ports. Pihole, for example, really needs to take control of port 80, because your HTTP traffic is routed through it—but what if another container also needs to use port 80? It’s possible, as we’ve seen, to remap those ports in your docker-compose.yml, piping port 80 from the container to any other free port on the host, but that’s much more awkward than it needs to be when you’re connecting to your server from elsewhere. Combining a little DNS management with a reverse proxy (we’re partial to nginx-proxy) means all requests to your server are collected and rerouted to the appropriate container based on the hostname used; plex.maximumpc.local, for example, might take you to your Plex server without the need to remember which port…

THE REVELATIONS BY EDWARD SNOWDEN about NSA spying activities and the recent introduction of stringent data protection laws in the EU have left everyone, from privacy-minded individuals to big businesses, worried about data security. As any power user knows, any files that are nominally “deleted” by Windows usually remain on your hard drive. The OS simply changes a few bits in the file header to tell the system the data is no longer required. As useful as this is for legitimate users who may have deleted data by accident, bad actors, such as hackers, can use freely downloadable digital forensic tools to recover your files in seconds. Eraser, which comes to us courtesy of Heidi Computers in Wicklow, Ireland, seeks to restore the balance. This free utility works by repeatedly…

You can hugely enhance your Trello experience by using “Power-Ups.” These are software modules that improve the application’s performance in some way. The Calendar View, for instance, exists thanks to a cleverly coded Power-Up. Other useful Power-Ups include Slack, which enables you to communicate in real time with other Board members via the site’s messaging platform. There are also Dropbox and Google Drive Power-Ups, which offer a simple way to attach larger files to cards. The Custom Fields Power-Up enables you to add special fields to cards, such as dates, numbers, checkboxes, and drop-down menus. To start adding Power-Ups, click the corresponding button on the right-hand side of the window, and select the “Enable” button next to your chosen add-on. You can choose from a variety of categories, such as…

WIND YOUR MIND back to July 2013. That’s how long ago the first SSD with support for the hot new NVMe control protocol was launched. Four years later, Kingston finally turned up to the party. Admittedly, that was last summer, so we’re equally late to the KC1000’s own festivities. The point is, did the KC1000 swagger in fashionably late? Or has Kingston missed out on all the fun? The answer depends on what you’re looking for in an SSD. One of the KC1000’s major selling points involves endurance rather than speed. That may be surprising, given performance is the most obvious benefit of moving from an old-school SATA drive, based on the ancient AHCI control protocol, to an M.2 drive connected via PCIe, and leveraging the solid-state optimized NVMe protocol.…

When it comes time to build or upgrade your new gaming PC, deciding on the best graphics card is a big consideration—it’s the component that demands the biggest chunk of your budget. Sure, you’ll want a decent processor and enough RAM and storage, but the GPU is the beating heart that pushes pixels on to your display. Graphics cards consist of a dedicated graphics processor (GPU) coupled with high-speed video memory (VRAM). Most modern cards have at least 3–4GB VRAM, with high-end models including 8GB or more. Having enough memory is important, as is memory bandwidth, with GDDR5 cards typically providing over 100GB/s to keep your GPU fed. Read the full article at https://bit.ly/2vB6zSH…

TRIUMPHS ✓ FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER IBM’s Summit machine for the US Department of Energy manages over 200 petaflops, beating the 125 of its Chinese rival. ✓ SERIOUS WATER COOLING Microsoft dropped a data center of 864 servers into the sea off Scotland to see if cold seawater can save on power. ✓ LAPTOPS GO DUAL-SCREEN The next big thing in laptops? Computex saw dual screens, with a touch keyboard as required. TRAGEDIES ✗ APPLE LEGAL HEADACHE A class action against Apple has been launched, claiming that all Apple Watches are defective; the screens detach or crack readily. ✗ HUGE FINE FOR GOOGLE? Falling foul of European antitrust legislation, Android could be landed with a fine of billions. ✗ DNA PROFILES STOLEN DNA tester MyHeritage has had 92 million account details stolen;…

When it comes to outright speed, your PC never seems to have enough. Or to put it another way, it doesn’t matter how smoothly it’s running, your PC could always do with being that bit faster. Armed with the right know-how, you can fine-tune your PC to squeeze more performance from it, but the effort involved can be more than it’s worth. Which is where we come in. In this feature, we’ve dug out the finest free tools we know of that can help speed up your machine. We kick things off by revealing our favorite tools for fine-tuning your system. Your hardware could use some optimization, too, so we’ve collected the best overclocking and tuning apps for pushing it beyond its limits. And finally, when you next bite the bullet…

When you next come to reinstall Windows, it pays to take precautions in the form of various backups—File History is essential for personal data, but what about program settings, and how about a fail-safe backup in the event of a botched reinstall? The reinstall process is also a good excuse to make changes to the way you organize data on your PC’s main internal and external drives, while you’ll also want to make sure that you have the latest versions of the Windows installation files, to save you a lengthy post-install update process. All these potential problems are covered by our favorite reinstall tools. You’ll find the best drive backup tool in the business rubs shoulders with our free partition editor of choice and the Windows Media Creation Tool, which…

FOR DEDICATED DESK JOCKEYS forced to leave the house, there’s nothing quite as frustrating as abandoning a set of beautiful 4K screens and being forced to go caveman, working with a pathetic single built-in panel. In these modern times, it just ain’t right. Thankfully, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the mighty bandwidth and power delivery talents of USB-C are here to save us, in combination with AOC’s masterfully thin portable panel. It’s a plug in and go affair: As long as your laptop has a 3.1-capable USB-C socket (there’s no backward compatibility with USB 3.0), you can hook it up, prop it up, and get your multi-screen on wherever you may be, using a single slimline cable for power and data. Even with those…

If you’re at all interested in quality video encoding, then there’s a host of solutions offering their services out there. Handbrake.fr is often suggested as a good open-source option, but it appears to be looked down upon by many of those in the know. A better suggestion appears to be MeGUI [Image 1], which has been developed by the brainiacs on the ancient http://forum.doom9.org site. MeGUI is open-source licensed GPL v2, it’s still under active development, it supports x.264 and x.265 out of the box, and it automatically updates all the many required components as it ticks along—this means that the first time you encode something, there’s a number of additional waits while it downloads the necessary components. It’s all very slick. Plenty of handy documentation and guides can be…

BACKGROUND OnePlus adds one more to its arithmetic-themed line of smartphones. The OnePlus 6 looks pretty good on paper, but how will these fancy specs add up on the teardown table? MAJOR TECH SPECS 6.28-inch Samsung-made AMOLED display with 2280x1080 resolution (402 ppi), and 2.5D Gorilla Glass 5 Octa-core, 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor with 6 GB or 8 GB LPDDR4X RAM Dual main camera with 16MP (ƒ/1.7 with OIS) and 20MP (ƒ/1.7) modules; 16MP (ƒ/2.0) selfie camera 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB built-in storage USB Type-C and 3.5 mm audio ports OxygenOS based on Android Oreo 8.1 KEY FINDINGS An Android phone with a glass back? Thankfully, we’ve seen this before. The heat gun softens things up, and the iSclack and opening pick take care of the rest. The OnePlus…

LOGO DESIGN IS A REAL ART. There are agencies across the world that will charge you seven figures to design not just a logo itself, but a whole system of interlocking pieces for your corporate identity, including possibly a bespoke font. If you want something to be easily recognized while you’re heading up the esports world rankings, however, it’s perfectly possible to do it yourself. There are some rules, though—more like guidelines—such as making sure your logo has a memorable silhouette and is appropriate for the uses you have for it. Research other logos in the same market place to see what other people have come up with. Death metal band Party Cannon uses a friendly, colorful logo that couldn’t be more different from those of other heavy bands, which…

STOP THAT. It’s silly. This, we wager, is roughly what goes through your mind as you regard Samsung’s latest ubertron, the C49J89. It isn’t just physically huge in objective terms, measuring 49 inches across its outrageously ample diagonal. It’s also visually vast, thanks to its extreme 32:9 aspect ratio. Surely, this isn’t sensible? But hold on. When the first superwide 21:9 aspect monitors appeared, opinion was divided. Now they’re relatively mainstream and extremely popular. Could familiarity normalize the C49J89’s even wider proportions in a similar manner? Hold that thought as we run through the key speeds and feeds. Panel-wise, we’re talking 49 inches of VA shizzle with an 1800R curvature. It’s good for a static contrast ratio of 3,000:1, which is nice, and peak brightness of 300cd/m2, which is less…

THERE’S A SWEET SPOT on the hardware scattergraph that sits between flash and function, statement and understatement, reserved for only the most balanced gear. Most peripherals land nowhere near it, and that’s not a bad thing. Everyone’s tastes are different. Some like a brash keyboard that drives them on to greatness; others prefer a subtle typer that does its job, then gets out of the way without any fuss. Logitech’s G513 Carbon nearly lands on that theoretical midpoint, but—for reasons we’ll explain—it’s not quite dead on. Let’s start with the switches. Logitech’s Romer-G switches are, we think, some of the best in the world right now. We’re testing the linear version here (though there’s a tactile variety on offer, if that’s more your style), and it’s a super-smooth experience, with…

THE MECHWARRIOR GAMES—first-person, real-time explorations of driving a massive walking tank—feel like a long time ago, and BattleTech isn’t a MechWarrior game. It’s from the same universe, however, an adaptation of the 1984 board game that started it all, which has come via XCOM. You get the feuding interstellar empires and massive walking tanks, but it’s all played from above, as a turn-based strategy game. Following a coup in which a queen is deposed, you find yourself and your mech attached to a mercenary company; you work your passage on its mech carrier to pay off debts and avenge your former ruler. As leader of a lance of up to four mechs, which can be customized and swapped, depending on what you can scavenge or afford, you’ve got the firepower…