Tech Advisorの November 2021 の目次

Intel’s highly anticipated consumer GPU and software will arrive under the name Arc, the company announced recently. The first GPU will be based on its Xe HPG microarchitecture, which is expected to launch in the next few months. Future generations will use the code names ‘Battlemage’, ‘Celestial’ and ‘Druid’. It didn’t say what inspired the code names, but they may be an homage to Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games. Arc will span graphics hardware, software and services, and offer “frictionless gaming and content creation experiences to gamers and creators worldwide,” Intel said. “Today marks a key moment in the graphics journey we started just a few years ago. The launch of the Intel Arc brand and the reveal of future hardware generations signifies Intel’s deep and continued commitment to gamers and…

AMD’s chief executive has revealed she expects the supply of AMD’s chips to be “tight” throughout the remainder of the year, but are expected to ease up in 2022. Dr. Lisa Su, speaking during AMD’s second-quarter earnings call, also said that AMD is working with its own supply chain partners – makers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment – to allow for AMD “to grow substantially” as the company moves into the second half of 2021. Su’s comments were timely, given that rival Intel has warned of ongoing chip shortages as it begins navigating through to a transition to new EUV equipment. Su did not say that AMD expected the same, though she did predict the PC market would cool off. Specifically, Su called out how demand for PCs exploded during 2020…

Windows 10 will begin blocking ‘potentially unwanted applications’ – bundled apps that you probably don’t want – by default, Microsoft says, beginning in early August. The change was announced in a support document – fave.co/389zoWO. If you download a lot of third-party utilities, you may already have run into a potentially unwanted application (PUA), also called a potentially unwanted program (PUP). The terms most often describe a bundled piece of adware, or – worse – a small additional application that slowly mines cryptocurrency in the background. You might not even know where the PUA comes from. Sometimes it might be the developer itself that added the PUA for additional revenue, or a site that aggregates the utilities and provides them for download. Either way, the PUA is an app you…

We’ve all read the reports: Blue light can play a role in sleep issues. It’s also been mentioned as a factor in skin damage, too. Fortunately, not only can you enable a blue-light filter on your smartphone, you can do so in Windows 10, too. In fact, the process is incredibly easy – set-up takes just a few minutes. Here’s how to do it. STEP 1 Click on the Start menu (or tap the Windows key on your keyboard). Then type in ‘Night Light’ to bring up a direct link to that setting. Alternatively, you can go to Start > Settings > Display, then click on Night light settings under Color (see image above). If you take this route, you can turn Night Light on and off via a toggle…

Price: £899 (inc VAT) from fave.co/3jen2mA After a five-year hiatus, Samsung returned to laptops with a bang in 2020. Alongside Qualcomm and Intel versions of the Galaxy Book S, we also saw a new convertible in the Galaxy Book Flex and regular clamshell Galaxy Book Ion. The range has been significantly expanded in 2021, with the new Galaxy Book Pro and Flex 2. However, there’s also evidence that Samsung is catering more to affordable price points than ever before. The ARM-based Galaxy Book Go has been joined this year by an Intel-powered device known simply as the Samsung Galaxy Book. It offers a lot of what most people are looking for on paper, with the latest Intel chips, a full-size keyboard and a large display. But how well does it…

Price: £429 from fave.co/2UJTP9U The rapid rise of gaming phones has coincided with the emergence of Nubia’s Red Magic line as a real force. After 2017’s Razer Phone proved there was a market for dedicated gaming handsets, the first Red Magic phone arrived in April 2018. It’s gone on to maintain an aggressive six-month update cycle, but 2021 is proving to be Red Magic’s biggest year yet. The Red Magic 6 series saw a regular and Pro model for the first time, even if the latter is still exclusive to China. The brand’s first wearable arrived in the form of the Red Magic Watch, but it’s the other phone that launched alongside it that’s the focus here. The Red Magic 6R is a new, affordable alternative to the 6 and…

Samsung has a fever and more foldable phones are the only prescription. And thus today the biggest name in Android phones announced the third generation of its foldable Galaxy smartphones: the Galaxy Z Fold3, a flagship model that opens like a book, and the smaller Z Flip3, a less expensive model that opens vertically and harkens back to the flip phones of the early 2000s. Both phones include new features to improve durability, which may help mitigate public perception that foldable phones just can’t withstand the rigours of, well… repeated, incessant folding. And you’re going to want a sturdier phone, given Samsung’s price tags: £1,599/£1,699 for the Galaxy Z Fold3 and £949 for the Galaxy Z Flip3. GALAXY Z FOLD3 5G: FEATURES The Z Fold3 comes with S Pen support,…

A recent ‘hack’ involving a Razer mouse shows what can happen if a new piece of hardware automatically downloads the required utility software: it can allow an attacker to take over a PC. In August, security researcher ‘j0nh4t’ showed that the RazerInstaller utility could be used to elevate privileges on a PC, giving an attacker total control. Essentially, all a user would need to do is attach a Razer mouse, wait for Razer’s utility software to download, and then run PowerShell. Using the technique that jonh4t described in his tweet, a guest account on a PC could obtain administrator status and control the PC. To be fair, anytime an attacker has physical control of a PC, you’re at risk – that means the hacker is either seated at your desk…

Intel Arc will be the company’s first high-end gaming GPU. Will it succeed against the formidable competition from Nvidia and AMD? Start the debate with these fundamental ingredients for success that Intel should follow – starting with a good name. GET A BETTER NAME You need a good name to win, which Intel has already with the official branding of ‘Arc’ for the GPU and software around its consumer GPUs. That’s way better than Arc’s code name of ‘DG2 Xe-HPG’, which frankly looks like a cat ran across my keyboard. Arc is a whole lot easier to remember. Even better, it takes up only three characters, so there’s more room to argue on Twitter about it. FIX THE BORING CODE NAMES With GPUs, you’re nothing without cool-sounding code names. With…

Microsoft has released Windows 365 business pricing, telling us a little more about what its ‘PC in the cloud’ will cost. Right now, this cloud-based version of Windows is an enterprise product, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a version of Windows 365 will eventually land in consumer PCs. But what then? Windows 365’s business plans give us some hints. If nothing else, any curious Windows user should be looking at Windows 365 for glimpses of where Microsoft is taking the broad Windows platform and Cloud PCs. Microsoft isn’t afraid to migrate its products to and from the cloud, both for enterprise and consumer users. Exhibit A: Microsoft 365 (once called Microsoft Office) runs on your PC, the web, and mobile apps. Exhibit B: Microsoft has already…

We’ve all had that text or phone call, asking for help with a Windows computer. And sometimes an in-person tech support visit isn’t in the cards, making remote access to the PC the only viable option. Problem is, in most cases you won’t be able to use Remote Desktop (fave.co/2Wm3wMg), Windows’ built-in option, for this purpose. The PC being connected to (aka the person needing assistance) has to have a Windows 10 Pro license, and the vast majority of people tend to have Windows 10 Home on their machine. You could shell out £100 for an upgrade on the fly to unlock the feature, but it’s not necessary. Use one of these third-party services instead. Note: For all the software mentioned below, you’ll need to install it both on your…

Price: £299 (inc VAT) from fave.co/3kupwgi The Acer Aspire 1 (A114-33) is a budget laptop that rarely misses a beat with low-intensity tasks, from email and word processing to streaming the latest box set and surfing the web. But can it compete in an increasingly overstuffed sub-£300 field? With a price tag of £299, expectations should be realistically modest. At the same time, £50 less will get you the impressive Asus E410, while £50 more will stretch to the stylish Lenovo IdeaPad 3i 14. There’s competition everywhere you look. The Aspire 1 A114-33 is a new addition to the Aspire 1 series, lacking quite the same confusing array of spec options of the preceding Aspire 1 A114?32. At the time of writing, Acer UK is offering just a single model…

The excellent Pixel 5 is Google’s current flagship phone, but time stands still for no device, so we take a look forward at what to expect when its successors – the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro – arrive. In this article, we’ll explore the expected release date, price and the new specs suggested to appear on Google’s next flagship phones. RELEASE DATE Google officially announced the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro in a press release published in August – see fave.co/3grDv53. While it didn’t make mention of a specific release date, it repeatedly promised an autumn arrival, in line with past Pixel releases. PRICE Pricing is a bit less reliable when looking at past releases. Back in 2018, the Pixel 3 cost £739, but when the Pixel 4 came along,…

Launching alongside the Galaxy Z Fold3, Flip3 (page 93) and Buds 2 (page 103), the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Series offers up what looks like more choice than ever before, with two variants, each in two sizes and all available with optional LTE connectivity. The Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic serves up two distinct design styles while all delivering on performance (by way of a new Samsung-made mobile chipset) and user experience, by debuting the latest iteration of Wear OS, which the company has co-developed with Google. RELEASE DATE It’s available to buy now. PRICE Samsung’s Unpacked line-up arrived with markedly more affordable opening asking prices than their respective predecessors, with the smallest Watch 4 variant kicking things off at £249 and the Classic starting at £349. Here’s…

Cerebras Systems said today that it has achieved the computational equivalent of the human brain, or the equivalent of 100 trillion synapses. Cerebras manufactures what it calls the Wafer Scale Engine-1 and -2, a massive 46,225mm2 chip more like the size of a computer keyboard (see above image) than the CPU that goes inside of your PC. The company essentially mounts that chip inside of a standalone CS-2 system, about the size of a dorm refrigerator. Now, it says that it’s been able to surround the CS-2 with several different technologies to enable the brain-scale computational power to reach 120 trillion synapse equivalents, also called parameters. Cerebras isn’t alone in trying to model machine learning at the chip level, in an effort to duplicate how the human brain works. In…

Intel’s next PC microprocessor, Alder Lake, marks a radical change for Intel. Its first mainstream Core hybrid processor mixes ‘performance’ and ‘efficiency’ engines to deliver either performance or longer battery life when your PC needs it most. According to Intel, Alder Lake is due “later this fall”, most likely as a 12th-gen Core chip. Intel will manufacture three versions of Alder Lake – one for the desktop, and two more for laptops – with up to 16 cores and 24 threads. Alder Lake will also mark Intel’s introduction of PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory, executives said at last month’s Intel Architecture Day. Interestingly, Intel has co-designed with Microsoft a special thread scheduler, destined for Windows 11, that will optimize performance. Desktop and laptop PCs with Alder Lake inside them…

Windows 10 comes preloaded with a number of different font types (based on which language package you’re using), but you can also find a ton of different types of fonts (both free and paid) online. Installing these fonts on your Windows 10 PC is pretty simple. Here’s how. INSTALL FONTS USING THE SOURCE FILE You can quickly install a font using the font file’s context menu. When you download a font from the web, more often than not the files come in compressed ZIP folders. In this case, unzip the compressed files by right clicking the folder and then selecting Extract All from the context menu. Next, decide where you want to unzip the files. Click Browse in the window that appears to open File Explorer. Once File Explorer is…

Sometimes Windows updates can cause enough problems that you just want to turn the whole thing off. We’re going to show you how to do that, but first remember this: In general, pausing Windows Updates is a bad idea. The reason is that you can miss out on critical security patches that keep your PC safe from malicious actors. At the time of this writing, for example, Windows users were asked to update to avoid getting hit with the ‘PrintNightmare’ vulnerability – see Tech Advisor October 2021. Unfortunately the patch for ‘PrintNightmare’ caused some printers to stop working. Microsoft then advised users to roll back the update as one way to get their printers working again. About a week later, Microsoft released an update that was a fix to the…

Price: £1,199 from fave.co/3BSAEeK Ultra’ is slowly becoming the mobile industry’s preferred term for phones that are big, beautiful and have jam-packed spec lists up to and including the kitchen sink. The Mi 11 Ultra is no different. In Xiaomi’s case, although the Mi 11 Ultra packs a few advantages over the regular Mi 11 across the board, the brunt of the budget has clearly gone into the outrageous rear camera module, which despite including ‘only’ three lenses is in fact one of the most powerful camera set-ups around – so powerful that it earns its own special rear-facing display. That camera is both a blessing and a curse for the Ultra. It’s part of why the phone is such a powerhouse, but the blocky, heavy design makes it both…

Well, it looks like the brightly coloured cat is out of the metaphorical bag. The feline in question is none other than two Pixel 6 phones. Google pulled off its new trick and let the air out of the rapidly leaking balloon by announcing its Pixel 6 and 6 Pro months ahead of their actual debuts. And these new models are pretty different from Pixels past, too. As had been widely expected, they’re the first Google-made phones to feature a Google-made processor – a distinction we’ve been talking about for quite a while and one that could go a long way in separating the phones from the rest of the Android pack. We’ve already taken a look at the new phones design and specs (page 86). Here, I want to…

Possibly one of the most leaked Unpacked events ever revealed numerous new devices including the Galaxy Buds 2 wireless earbuds. Apart from a rumoured yellow colour, the vast majority of leaks turned out to be true, so we have a new standard pair of true wireless earbuds. This time around they have active noise cancelling and other premium features yet remain at an affordable price. RELEASE DATE The Buds 2 are available to buy now. PRICE £139. SPECIFICATIONS Although active noise cancelling was a little bit up in the air during the lead up to Unpacked, the Buds 2 offer it. Samsung says its system can cut out up to 98 per cent of background noise. Furthermore, they have an Ambient sound mode with three levels of volume, so you…