Indice dei contenuti per February 2020 in Maximum PC

AT THIS YEAR’S IEEE IEDM (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Electron Devices Meeting), TSMC presented a paper on its work on the 5nm process. It uses more layers—over 10, as opposed to five on 7nm. The data density rises from just short of 100 million per mm2 with 7nm, to over 177 million. Power consumption is down 30 percent, and speed up by 15 percent. TSMC has made a test 256Mb SRAM chip, with a yield of about 80 percent, although commercial production is expected to be lower. Volume production of commercial silicon is scheduled for the first half of this year, so we will see 5nm chips in hardware before the end of the year. The company has plans to increase its capital investment this year to…

BEST REVEALS FROM THE GAME AWARDS 2019 GODFALL “Looter-slasher” Godfall is a co-op thirdperson action title from Counterplay Games, Duelyst’s developer. Expect weighty combat and bulky armor. GEARS TACTICS Gears of War meets XCOM. It was announced a while ago, but gameplay footage and a release date—April 28, 2020—put it in the limelight. THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE: SKYRIM Todd Howard’s refusal to let Skyrim die is almost admirable, with a new ESO expansion coming in 2020. D&D: DARK ALLIANCE A GoPro-esque trailer saw four D&D types hacking, slashing, and casting spells in the wintery wasteland of this action-RPG. MAGIC: LEGENDS Magic: The Gathering is finally getting a game that isn’t card-based. It’s an open-world MMO with real-time combat. WEIRD WEST Two ex-Arkane bosses teamed up with Devolver Digital to bring…

DDR5: Where did it go? The original blueprints for the next stage of RAM were published by the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council way back in 2017, and while JEDEC had hoped to have the standard for DDR5 released for public use by 2018, as of the time of writing, the details are still being finalized. The potential performance increases offered by DDR5 are significant. Lower voltage requirements and increased memory speed are some of the improvements here, along with the addition of onboard voltage regulators within each DIMM stick. This would mean that motherboards would no longer require their own voltage regulators for the memory subsystem, although what this means for motherboard and RAM pricing is unclear right now. Some manufacturers have been eager to show off their early DDR5…

“YOU HAVE RUN OUT OF DISK SPACE.” There it is, unequivocal. It wasn’t that long ago that Windows started popping up “You are running out of disk space” messages, swiftly followed by “You are running very low on disk space.” No matter, the day has finally arrived. Your hard drive has finally run out of space, and now you have to do something about it. The question is: What? These days, running out of disk space should be impossible. With terabytes of storage available to you, how do you manage to fill it all up? One reason might be that you don’t actually have terabytes to start with—perhaps you’re using a laptop that only came with 128GB, or a two-in-one tablet whose 32GB is barely enough to fit Windows on,…

1 VIEW A SUMMARY You can choose to monitor all drives or focus on a specific drive. Make your choice and click “OK.” Wait for WinDirStat to finish its analysis and you’ll see a three-paned window. The bottom provides a color-coded “map” of your hard drive according to how it’s being used. 2 INVESTIGATE IN DETAIL Click an item on the map and its filename and path are revealed in the top-left pane, which shows a traditional folder view. Right-click and choose “Zoom in” to view a map of the next level down: either a specific drive or the folder containing your target file. 3 REMOVE LARGE FILES When you’ve identified a file you think is safe to remove, select it and open the “Clean Up” menu. You can delete…

1 SELECT HARD DRIVE Open AntiTwin. Click “Select folder” next to “Basic folder” to select the root of your drive if you’re looking to clear up space on one drive only. Check “2nd folder” to select another folder path or drive if you’re looking to clear space across two hard drives by weeding out duplicates. 2 FOCUS SEARCH Leave “Include subfolders” checked and click “File filter.” You can exclude smaller files from the search (and speed it up) by setting a minimum file size. Click the drop-down as shown to focus on specific file types, and check “Compare images (pixels)” to look for visually similar images. 3 PICK YOUR COMPARISON METHOD By default, files are compared according to their content only, but you can also compare by name and file…

1 SET UP NEW FOLDERS Open File Explorer and browse to your new drive. Create a new folder named after your username. Inside this, create more folders to match those shown under “Folders” in File Explorer’s “This PC” view: “Documents,” “Photos,” “Downloads,” and so on. 2 MOVE USER FOLDERS Browse back to “This PC.” Rightclick “Documents” and choose “Properties > Location tab.” Click “Move…” to browse to and select the “Documents” folder you just created. Click “Select Folder” followed by “Apply.” When prompted, click “Yes” to move your files and folders to your new drive. 3 RINSE, REPEAT Now repeat the process for all the other folders listed—be prepared for a long wait if you have large folders to move across to your new drive. The benefit of this approach…

TIP OF THE MONTH RECLAIM RAM WITH THE GREAT SUSPENDER If you’re the sort of Chrome user who keeps dozens of tabs open, you might want to check out The Great Suspender. An automated extension designed to keep Chrome’s memoryguzzling ways in check, TGS suspends tabs you aren’t currently using. You can tweak which tabs are suspended or not with a myriad of settings and a whitelist function, taking back control of your system’s memory from Chrome. MAKE – USE – CREATE 56 Introduction to open-source video editor, Kdenlive 68 Lay out your first pages with Serif’s Affinity Publisher 70 Step-by-step guide to putting together your first build CHRISTIAN GUYTON STAFF WRITER OOPS! ALL CORES The third-gen Threadripper CPUs are out and about now, and boy, do they pack a…

1. PROJECT BIN The placeholder for all files. Drag and drop files here first, not on the Timeline. 2. TIMELINE The chief editing field, where all of your tracks and clips go, ready to be edited. 3. PROJECT MONITOR Your preview window. Shows changes made to your video, such as splicing and effects, in real time. 4. ZOOM Pulling left zooms out (all the way, and you will be viewing things in hour, instead of seconds), and pulling right zooms in, where you can see one second at a time. You can also hold Ctrl and use the mouse wheel. 5. EFFECTS Choose from a list of effects, and drag and drop them on to clips in the Timeline. Note the separate tabs for “Effects” and “Compositions.” 6. PROPERTIES As…

YOU’LL NEED THIS MACHINE CAPABLE OF RUNNING DOCKER CONTAINERS Plus last month’s tutorial for domain configuration. LAST ISSUE, WE SHOWED YOU HOW TO SET UP a secure reverse proxy with a combination of nginx and Lets Encrypt, using a standard Linux or Windows PC. This time around, we’re going to deliver the same combination through a single Docker container from LinuxServer, which enables you to set up the reverse proxy without having to dedicate an entire physical or virtual machine to it. Because the most logical place for this container will be on a low-powered machine running 24-7, we’ve focused on the powerful QNAP range of NAS drives, using the company’s Container Station app to set things up—visit https://blog.linuxserver.io/2019/04/25/letsencrypt-nginx-starter-guide/ for a step-by-step guide to getting this running in Windows or…

Another rich source of audio is online video, and while it’s possible to download the video and then extract the audio using Pazera Free Audio Extractor, an even better approach is to install a dedicated tool for downloading and stripping out the audio track in one go. One such tool is 4K YouTube to MP3 (www.4kdownload.com/products/product-youtubetomp3). Despite the name, the program supports a wide range of online sources, including Soundcloud, Vimeo, Facebook, and Flickr, and can convert to OGG and M4A, as well as MP3. Once installed, launch the program and click “Preferences” to set your chosen format, quality (original by default), and output folder. Then locate the video clip containing the audio you want to extract in your browser, and copy the URL to the clipboard. Now switch back…

ROCKSTAR’S PAEAN to the final days of the Old West has been a long time coming to PC, but it’s been worth the wait. The launch was a bit bungled, but it’s no longer a problem. We fixed repeated quits to desktop by starting the game in Safe Mode, and re-enabling graphics options in a tiny 720p window. Thanks to patches, the game no longer quits, but we still love to play with the video settings, as the game rewards an understanding of how certain effects will affect your frame rate. Given enough processing power, the game looks incredible. The opening snowfields of the Grizzlies mountains are harder on the GPU than the green, open Heartlands that follow, probably because of all the particle effects being thrown around. Late-game city…

RUGGED HARDWARE isn’t for everybody, but if you like to take your music to the great outdoors, Braven has the speaker for you. The Zagg-owned brand offers a handful of different reinforced speakers, but for our money, the BRVMini is the best of the bunch—less than four inches tall, but still capable of pumping out awesome audio. Honestly, we were shocked by the volume this little cylinder can produce. Music fills rooms, able to hit the high notes as well as deeper bass, thanks to an internal passive radiator. There’s a mic for hands-free calls, too. The battery is impressive; Zagg claims that the speaker can play up to 12 hours of music, and we used it for a full day without having to charge it. Then there’s that sweet…

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is a return to form for the series. Built by the same developers behind MechWarrior Online, Piranha Games, but with a change to Unreal Engine 4 in place of MWO’s CryEngine, it’s a brave new world. Our review (http://bit.ly/395tcOW) covers the design, so we’re going to talk about performance and settings now. We played the hell out of the original MechWarrior back in the day, in glorious 16-color EVGA graphics, with sound effects coming from an internal PC speaker. When we upgraded from an 8086 to a 386 processor, the slow and ponderous battles became far more exciting. We’ve thankfully moved beyond the era of game speed being linked to your PC’s performance (mostly), but 30 years later, the core gameplay in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries isn’t radically…

SONOS HAS COME under fire thanks to its profligate upgrade tactics, which stop your speakers from working. Sonos started a trade-up program in October, where you can get a 30 percent discount if you promise to recycle your old speakers. All good so far. However, if you check to see if your speaker is eligible, and signal that you wish to trade up, it triggers Recycle Mode. This gives you 21 days before your speakers are rendered inoperable. Before then you have to redeem your discount, order a new system, and wipe your old one. You can’t sell it or give it away—it is dead. After that it’s up to you to dispose of it, preferably recycling it locally, although Sonos has said you can send speakers back to it…

If you have a pile of money burning a hole in your pocket, I want to let you in on a secret: Multi-GPU PCs are a dying breed, and have been for years. Even at the height of the multi-GPU craze, getting everything to run well was a crapshoot. Two-way SLI or CrossFire might improve performance in about half of the big games, three-way would help a few of those, and four-way was basically for 3DMark and a handful of games. Nvidia began downplaying anything beyond two-way SLI with its Pascal GPUs—there were ways to get three-way SLI support, but it wasn’t worth the hassle. With Turing, Nvidia officially killed off anything more than two-way SLI with its NVLink connector. AMD has likewise said little about CrossFire lately; it still…

GRAPHICS ARE DUE for an exciting year. AMD and Nvidia are squaring up against each other to deliver a new generation of powerful discrete GPUs, but there’s a newcomer: Intel, promising to make its GPU debut in 2020 with a new series of cards, currently named the Xe series. While we haven’t seen a full lineup announcement yet, at the time of writing, we have gathered a few scraps of information. The news of Xe’s existence was leaked all the way back in 2018, at which point the given code name was Arctic Sound. Intel was quick to do an official reveal, albeit one lacking any real information on the new GPUs. Since then, Intel has fed us little bits and pieces. At CES in early 2019, it was revealed…

2019 WAS A GREAT YEAR FOR DESKTOP PROCESSORS. That was mainly thanks to advances in AMD’s Ryzen line, not down to anything that Intel was up to, but to be fair, there were some headline-grabbing releases for Big Blue, too (we’ll come back to that shortly). The problem for Intel is that 2020 looks like more of the same, with the company playing catch-up to what AMD has already done. Can it compete? Let’s dig a little deeper to find out. Intel’s 10th-gen Comet Lake chips are the core of its desktop release strategy this year. These are expected to drop in April, essentially still based on the Skylake architecture, and using the 14nm++ production process. This means that we won’t be seeing any revolutionary performance increases due to reworked…

WHITHER Z-NAND AND OPTANE? This will be a key question in 2020 for solid-state storage. Z-NAND and Optane are respectively Samsung and Intel’s next-gen persistent memory technologies, intended to improve upon conventional flash memory. Both are already available, but they’re expensive, and arguably don’t quite deliver on the lofty expectations created by marketing pitches. Intel will release its second-gen Optane tech in 2020 and it looks like a zinger. Code-named Alder Stream when applied to SSDs, as opposed to memory DIMMs, where Optane is also implemented, Intel claims three times the IOPs performance for its secondgen Optane tech, and slightly lower latency. Arguably, it’s IOPs performance and latency, rather than peak data throughput, that make the biggest difference to how fast PCs feel on a day-to-day basis. So, improvements in…

THAT WARNING WE FLAGGED in the intro is unlikely to be the first indication you get that you’re running out of space. It’s not designed to appear until you have 200MB or less free—a drop in the ocean these days. Instead, Windows’ first warning is likely to appear when you open File Explorer to the “This PC” view to see your drive’s usage is represented by a red bar, rather than a blue one. This appears when your drive has less than 10 percent of its space left, although the seriousness of the warning does depend on the size of the drive. For example, a 64GB drive with under 6GB left is more worrying than a 2TB drive with 180GB free. MORE DRIVE ALERTS Windows Update also throws up an…

FREEING UP SPACE on your PC has never been easier, thanks to Windows 10’s new Storage Sense feature, which is designed to render third-party apps such as CCleaner redundant. Your first job, therefore, is to employ its services to free up additional space on your drive. Navigate to “Settings > System > Storage,” and click the “Configure Storage Sense or run it now” link. Flick the Storage Sense switch on and choose when to run the disk-cleaning tool—by default, it runs when you get low on disk space, but if you want to take a more preemptive approach, you can run it monthly, weekly, or even daily. Scroll down, and you can configure more options—for example, removing temporary files, emptying files from the Recycle Bin after a set period, and…

THE MARCH OF TECHNOLOGY leads to increased demands on your system, particularly if you’ve discovered a spacehungry hobby such as gaming or 4K video editing. If you’re simply looking to expand available storage for your files, you have two basic options. The first is to buy additional storage. Desktop users can check whether their PC case has room for a second internal hard drive—with 4TB drives at under $100, you can solve all but the most demanding needs with a single purchase. Before splashing out, power down your PC, open the case, and verify there’s a spare drive bay. Also, check your power supply has a spare SATA power socket (if not, Google “molex to sata power adapter” to find a cheap adapter) and a spare SATA slot on the…

WHY NOT TURN your problem of storage space—or lack of it—into an opportunity? If you’ve not done so already, now is the perfect time to investigate one of the most effective upgrades money can buy: a fast solid-state hard drive to run Windows and your programs on. Switching from a clunky old hard drive to an SSD is like leaving the Stone Age. Windows loads in under a minute, apps open in a matter of seconds, and your computing life is no longer held up by clicking and waiting for files to load. With SSD prices tumbling to put even relatively large amounts of storage space in your hands for a modest sum, there’s never been a better time to make the move. The upside? Your old drive can stay…

THE COMING YEAR will be interesting for gaming, due to the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The release of new consoles always shakes up the gaming landscape, as new capabilities are tested and developers take advantage of the increased processing power. But why should PC gamers care? Because the new consoles are based on AMD CPUs and GPUs, so it’s less effort for developers to port console games to PC. That doesn’t mean they’re going to, but with titles such as Halo Infinite and Death Stranding making their way to PC, along with every major multiplatform title, there’s no reason to believe the PC will miss out on anything but the most tightly held platform-exclusive titles. We’ve been in a golden age of PC gaming, with…

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 A beloved old feature returns to the MacBook Pro: It starts with M-a-g. If you guessed MagSafe, we have disappointing news, but if you said “Magic Keyboard,” we have the teardown for you. It’s the all-new, butterfly-less, 16-inch MacBook Pro, and we’re here to turn it inside-out. MAJOR TECH SPECS • 16-inch LED-backlit IPS Retina display with True Tone, 3072x1920 resolution (226 ppi) • 2.6GHz six-core Intel Core i7 and AMD Radeon Pro 5300M • 16GB of 2,666MHz DDR4 SDRAM, plus 512GB SSD • 100Wh battery, six-speaker sound…

Nginx is far more than a simple reverse proxy. As you’ll have seen when setting it up, it’s also a simple web server—just place your website inside the folder marked as root in the default configuration file (that’s /config/www in Docker) and you can serve a website directly from your own network. You can also use nginx as a load balancer—if you’re serving multiple simultaneous connections to one or more servers, or have multiple identical servers and wish to spread the load evenly across them, the {upstream} block is ideal: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/load-balancer. Another use for a reverse proxy is to provide a secure connection to insecure resources—that’s how the reverse proxy for Bitwarden_rs works. You can do something similar with your Booksonic audiobook server from the Holiday 2019 issue—adapt the airsonic…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 Instructions for accessing Timeline are below. YOU’VE PROBABLY MADE USE of the history feature in your web browser to track down a website you’ve visited previously, but now can’t remember the name of. The Windows Timeline is, essentially, a history function for all of your PC activity. Introduced with the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Timeline is part of the Task View feature of Windows. As well as enabling you to see a history of the files you’ve been working on and activities you’ve undertaken, Timeline can also sync this information between computers. Timeline provides a chronological overview of what you’ve been doing on your computer, and gives you a way to pick up from where you left off. It’s great to use on a…

YOU’LL NEED THIS AFFINITY PUBLISHER See https://affinity.serif.com to find out more. NOW THANKSGIVING AND CHRISTMAS ARE OVER, chances are there are a lot of copies of the Affinity apps freshly installed on hard drives across the nation. If that sounds like your situation, and you took advantage of the discounts offered in the end-of-year celebration of spending, you may be wondering just what to do next. Getting started in Affinity Publisher doesn’t have to be terrifying. To get the best results, it’s worth putting some time into the setup of your documents, but once that’s done, the hard work of placing image and text frames is rendered easy by the software. Here, we’ll cover creating a new document, setting up guides, and importing image and text files. We’ll split a…

PERFORMANCE-WISE, this build didn’t quite live up to our expectations. The Radeon RX 580 GPU is still functional, but AMD’s 2020 update to its Adrenalin software actually makes the gaming performance slightly worse. The Crucial P1 M.2 drive also failed to meet expectations, although it’s worth remembering that both components were fairly cheap—if you’ve got more cash, we advise replacing them with newer parts. The Ryzen 5 2600 CPU worked well, assuaging any concerns we had about using a second-gen Ryzen instead of a newer Ryzen 3000-series chip. Yes, this build might not be as future-proofed as it could be, but there’s no complicated BIOS meddling to be done. Using a third-gen processor would also have demanded use of an X570-chipset motherboard, which would have brought the price up further.…

DESKTOP REPLACEMENT laptops seem to be becoming more and more popular. That’s bad news for external GPU lovers, but it’s good news for everyone else. These laptops are big, powerful, and expensive, often gaming-oriented for maximum performance. The slimmer, slightly less powerful Max-Q variations of Nvidia’s GeForce graphics cards aren’t needed here; larger chassis and better cooling solutions mean that full-size desktop GPUs are viable in these machines. This laptop, from MSI’s GT76 Titan series, is one such machine. The Titan DT 9SG has a GeForce RTX 2080, an Intel Core i9-9900K, and 64GB of DDR4-2666 memory. It’s a monster, with all of those components plugged into a Z390 motherboard. That setup is actually one of the more conservative models of the Titan range, with the most expensive spin packing…

STADIA IS LIKE other cloud gaming platforms: great for single-player games, terrible for multiplayer if your Internet isn’t great. It’s a cool innovation, free from the hardware that a PC needs, but it’s only as good as an Internet package. When things go wrong, figuring out why can take even more technical savvy than building the best gaming PC. Added to that, Stadia’s launch is simply missing many of the features it needs to be a robust gaming platform. Setting up Stadia is a bit of a process on TV: Connect the Chromecast Ultra to the Google Home app on a smartphone; configure the user’s Stadia account; sync a controller; and start playing games. (On PC, just log into the Stadia site in Chrome.) Once you get into a game,…

ON THE FIRST DAY of the year, the California Consumer Privacy Act came into effect, and it looks as though almost nobody is ready. At least there is a six-month grace period before enforcement begins in earnest. The law applies to all companies serving California residents that have an annual revenue of $25 million or more, or have personal data on 50,000 people or more, or that earn more than half their revenue from the sale of personal data. Being based in California is not a requirement; it’s where your customers are. The law states that any consumer can request to see any information a company has collected on them, and a list of all third parties that this data has been passed on to. It also gives the right…

Playing with local network security and privacy tools is one of those weird hobbies that can eat up hours on weekends or late nights. There are plenty of open-source tools one can use to secure a home network. Using advanced firewall operating systems, such as pfSense or DD-WRT, enables you to create customized network and security policies. Domain name service (DNS) apps, such as Pi-Hole, allow the network to deny access to ad services and trackers at the DNS level. However, once you leave your home, those tools disappear. There are several tools you can employ while on the road to preserve privacy. The first is to use a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt the traffic from your device to the VPN server. While commercial VPN offerings may provide…

> Frame Rate Boosts > MDS Dangers > Storage Expansion Low WoW Frame Rates I built a PC based on one you had in one of your issues—an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9250X on an Asus ROG Zenith Extreme X399 mobo, with 32GB RAM, and a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti WindForce—and I can’t figure out why I’m getting low FPS while standing in town in World of Warcraft. I get around 30–40fps in town, yet in raids I hit around 90fps, which is weird. I’ve installed AMD Master and have switched it to eight cores, which delivers a few more FPS, believing that WofW’s last update, which supports multicore, would fix the issue. Any ideas on what is going on with my AMD build? I usually stick with Intel, but figured…

Where are we with laptop GPUs? The Max-Q variants of GTX and RTX cards mean that Nvidia has the market cornered for discrete laptop graphics, retooling existing GPUs with lower thermal power design and quieter operating volumes, typically in exchange for slightly lower clock speeds. Max-Q models of the newer Super GPUs are nowhere to be seen, although the technology is there. The Super GPUs use existing architecture, which means that adapting them for laptops should be straightforward, but they’ve yet to be ratified at the time or writing. There’s a small chance that Nvidia will skip the Super generation for laptops, going straight for Max-Q versions of its next-generation chips. There’s no news on Intel GPUs in compact formats for laptops, and we’re not prepared to speculate; news on…

WILL 2020 BE THE YEAR OLED TECH finally makes the leap from HDTVs to the PC? Save for one exception, very likely not. OLED technology is already becoming more available in laptops, and that trend will continue. But desktop PC monitors? Not so much. In fact, we’re not totally convinced that’s ever going to happen on a significant scale. Instead, we suspect the desktop PC monitor market may skip OLED and jump straight to micro LED, whose superior stability lends itself far better to PC apps, which tend to have persistent interface elements, like the Windows taskbar. Problem is, micro LED is still in the R&D and very early commercialization phase. It’s not coming to mainstream TVs in 2020, let alone monitors. What you can expect is improvement of LCD…

If you don’t like WinDirStat, and are looking for a different approach to viewing your drive’s make-up, try SpaceSniffer (www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer). It has a more modern user interface, but more importantly provides a visual view that helps you identify which folders contain the most files. Again, be sure to run it as an administrator. Unlike WinDirStat, you must focus a view on one drive at a time, but thanks to its labeling system, it’s easier to spot which folders contain the most data, as they’re clearly named, and their file size listed. Simply double-click one to zoom in to view its contents, or double-click its parent folder (displayed above it) to zoom back out. If you know which files are likely to take up most space, use the “Filter” box to…

Another way to save space is to move folders and files on to a secondary storage drive, such as a USB drive. If you don’t have this luxury, you can save space by zipping up these rarely used files and folders instead. Right-click the item(s) in question, and choose “Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder,” then wait for it to be combined into a single zip file. Right-click this and choose “Properties,” then compare its size to the original file. If there’s a significant saving, delete the original file or folder, then repeat to keep freeing up more space.…

Another storage location you can use is your cloud provider. We’ve seen how you can use OneDrive to free up space on your PC, and other providers offer similar features in their paid-for plans—Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) calls its equivalent Smart Sync. You need to navigate to a folder inside your Dropbox folder, right-click it, and choose “Smart Sync > Online-only,” or go to “Preferences > Sync,” select your account, and choose “Online-only” to make it the universal default. If you’d like to access Google Drive or Dropbox folders in this way without a paid account, for a one-off fee ($39) you can use a tool called Mountain Duck 3 (download a free trial from https://mountainduck.io). This can create a series of virtual drives connecting to a range of online storage services,…

1 PARTITION OLD DRIVE Desktop users planning to migrate Windows and apps to an SSD while leaving data behind should first use MiniTool Partition Wizard Free (www.partitionwizard.com): Choose “Split Partition” and drag the slider as far left as it can go. Click “OK” followed by “Apply.” Reboot when prompted. 2 MOVE DATA TO NEW PARTITION Once complete, you should follow the three-step guide on page 39 on moving data to your new drive, using your newly created partition as the target. Next, download and install Macrium Reflect Free from www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx if you have not already done so. 3 SELECT PARTITIONS TO CLONE Launch Macrium. Select your Windows drive and click “Clone this disk.” Make sure only the partitions you need will be copied across: System Reserved, the Windows partition, and…

MOBILE GAMING has hit a new high, with the release of the second model of Asus’s smartphone, the ROG Phone II. With full games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds migrating to mobile, phones need to be stronger, faster, and smarter than ever, which is what the ROG Phone II has been working toward. Described by Asus as “the next step in the evolution of mobile gaming,” the ROG Phone II was designed with gaming in mind: a massive 6,000mAh battery, up to 12GB of RAM, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Plus CPU. The Ultimate Edition even has a 1TB ROM for storage. The Adreno 640 GPU puts this phone among the most powerful on the market, with numerous features to make it ideal for gaming. High-speed 4G LTE for minimum…

YOU’LL NEED THIS KDENLIVE The open-source, multiplatform video editor is available for free from https://kdenlive.org. KDENLIVE HAS BEEN THE PRIMARY VIDEO EDITOR on Linux for several years now, but any videos on the topic consist either of torrents of loving adulation, or venom-infused rants about it being the worst thing since sliced Ebola. More recent versions have been ported to Windows, so it’s time we let all PC users in on the fun. Part of the reason some people may hate Kdenlive is that they can’t figure out its workflow, so let’s at least cover that, so you can hit the ground running. We can’t show you all of Kdenlive, but we can show enough for you to get comfortable. Along the way, we can show you what recent changes…

For fading audio tracks in or out, Kdenlive has a fade function similar to big audio editing suites. Obviously, a fade in is for the start of a track, and a fade out for the end. We’ll use a fade out for this explanation. This is slightly awkward to explain, but to fade out, you grab the top-right corner of a track, then drag it inward. However, in Kdenlive, the controls are already complicated by the edge controls moving the track around. Therefore, rather than the top corner, the fade control is in the top corner and slightly back along the top of the track. You’ll know it when you see it, because a red ball starts pulsating under your mouse cursor, or a green ball if you’re fading in.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PAZERA FREE AUDIO EXTRACTOR Get Pazera Free Audio Extractor, to convert video to audio-only, from www.pazera-software.com. To extract audio from a DVD or Blu-ray, you also need MakeMKV, from www.makemkv.com. HERE’S THE RUB: There’s a great piece of audio you’d like to be able to listen to, like music. Only problem? It’s currently embedded in a video, either on your PC, online, or encased in a shiny optical disc. The good news is, armed with the right set of tools, you can convert that audio into a bona fide audio track of your choosing—you get to pick the target format, from MP3 to lossless FLAC, plus add whatever tags you need to help your audio tools identify it correctly. At the heart of this operation is Pazera…

YOU’LL NEED THIS VICE (THE VERSATILE COMMODORE EMULATOR) Download from vice-emu.sourceforge.net for your Windows or Linux PC. WITH A MANUFACTURING LIFESPAN of 12 years, the Commodore 64 is one of the most popular computers in history, with an astonishing library of games, business apps, and multimedia demos. However, this is not simply an old games console. For most software, you can’t just press the On button and get started—there are machine quirks to contend with, command prompts to learn, and multiple storage formats to master. So, how do you even get started? We will show you how to emulate the machine and hit the ground running with the best choice of emulator, how to get your virtual Commodore optimized before gaming, how to load software, and where to find it.…

THERE ARE GAMING MONITORS. There are pro monitors. But pity the monitor maker that tries to combine both remits in a single screen, right? You’d think so, given the hugely diverging requirements for each market. After all, the pro market is all about accuracy, while gamers want speed, speed, and more speed. Acer’s ConceptD CP7 panel is pitched as a pro panel for content creators, and a high-end model at that, with a price north of $2,000. That’s a top-end sticker for a 27-inch screen, even one that combines 4K with a quality IPS panel. What you get for that money, from a pro perspective, begins with factory calibration with a claimed Delta E below one, which is impressive, plus Pantone Validation. Acer adds 99 percent coverage of the Adobe…

THERE IS NO framework in entertainment that you can’t stretch Star Wars over and make into a success. Just look at Episode 1 Racer or the Western tropes of The Mandalorian. Fallen Order chooses not to retread the Jedi Knight games, but goes after two more recent console stalwarts: Uncharted and Dark Souls. The latter of those has a reputation for difficulty, but how hard can chopping down stormtroopers be when you’re armed with a lightsaber from the start? The answer is “very.” Fallen Order balances this with a Story difficulty level that tones things down considerably for those who want to be in with a chance of seeing the credits. The Uncharted influence—all wall runs and leaps of which Luke Skywalker would be proud—fits so beautifully with the Jedi…

IT’S EASY TO get caught up in the excitement of extreme performance hardware. I do it all the time, and it can really skew your perspective if you’re not careful. I imagine it’s like someone who drives a Ferrari or some other exotic sports car taking a cruise in a typical sedan. No matter how good they might get, Honda, Toyota, or any other mainstream vehicle is never going to impress such a connoisseur. After testing a bunch of high-end graphics cards, AMD’s budget offering feels tame. The Radeon RX 5500 XT, with either 4GB or 8GB GDDR6, doesn’t look like much. But take a step back from the bleeding edge, and progress is still alive and well, even in budget land. The Navi 14 GPU in the RX 5500…