Table of contents for June 2019 in Maximum PC

MICROSOFT’S NEW Xbox One S All-Digital Edition has something missing: a disc drive. Other than that, it’s an Xbox One S. The $249 box comes with Minecraft, Forza Horizon 3, and Sea of Thieves pre-installed, but pretty much obliges you to pay full price for digital downloads (no more borrowing or buying used). An Xbox Games Pass at $9.99 a month will get you a decent library of games, and you’ll need another 10 bucks for an Xbox Live Gold subscription for the full multiplayer experience. The Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is due later this year at $14.99 a month, which includes both. Going disc-free isn’t a surprise—digital sales are now over 80 percent of all games sales. There isn’t the money in making the console hardware either; getting people…

AMAZON HAS BEEN employing thousands of people to listen to recordings of other people talking to Alexa. They review up to a thousand recordings a day, transcribing the intended commands of people all around the world as they try to get Alexa to do what they ask. Approximately 10 percent of the recordings have been made when Alexa has been accidentally activated. Workers have heard all sorts of private details, from the mundane to a suspected assault. Inevitably, some recordings get passed around, either for clarification or because they’re amusing. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Alexa’s translation service is powered by AI, which needs training, and the best way to do this is with a little help from humans. Understandably, Amazon has kept quiet about this “snooping.” It claims it only…

ALTHOUGH THERE ARE PLENTY of contenders, generally the entry that gets awarded without controversy is 1958’s Tennis for Two. An astonishing technical achievement, the title suggests something like Pong, but the reality is far grander. Designed by American physicist William Higinbotham, it was built over three weeks using a modified oscilloscope. Whereas Pong has a simple top-down viewpoint, Tennis for Two is viewed side-on, and has real-time physics, with gravity and inertia shaping the game’s dynamics. There is a simulation you can run on your PC, but don’t bother with that. Just search for it on YouTube, and watch it being played on an oscilloscope—it’s an exquisite piece of engineering that makes the likes of Atari look positively vulgar. However, these were one-off machines. The first known game to be…

THE 16-BIT COMP UTERS would be dominated by one man and one CPU. The CPU was the Motorola 68000, known in the business as the 68K—a multimedia powerhouse whose potential had not yet been tapped. The man was head of Commodore, Jack Tramiel. Tramiel was an aggressive man with even more aggressive business ideals—Commodore was sick of Jack, and Jack was sick of Commodore. Atari was old, bloated, and bleeding money, and parent company Warner wanted rid of it. Key Atari engineers wanted to make a new machine based on the 68K, but Atari wasn’t interested, so they left to create their own company, Amiga. Tramiel also left Commodore to go his own way, and bought Atari’s consumer division. Tramiel now had an established brand under which to sell new…

IT’S A FUNNY THING, streaming. For movies and TV, it’s no surprise that it’s taken off; services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video offer unlimited on-screen entertainment at subscription premiums, demanding only 5Mb/s to deliver HDquality movies to our televisions, office computers, and cell phones. Music is even less demanding—just ask Spotify to quote you its crisp $1.5 billion revenue from the last quarter of 2018. But gaming? That’s a whole different ballpark. In fact, we’re not even sure if it’s the same sport. Issues that make zero difference to the streaming of movies or music become huge complications when games enter the fray. Frame rate? Latency? Load times? All big concerns. Nobody cares (or even notices, really) if there’s two-tenths of a second between pressing the pause button…

A quick Google search for “failed game streaming services” rather damningly places OnLive at the top of the results list. It wasn’t the only one to fall in the face of traditional downloads and physical copies, though. Gaikai’s tech might have gone on to form a powerful baseline for PlayStation Now, but its original service failed to gain much momentum. Elsewhere, Square Enix’s ill-fated effort Shinra lasted less than two years before it admitted defeat and shut it down, resulting in a loss of more than $16 million. Others simply vanished into the ether. If you’ve heard of InstantAction or GameFly, congratulations—you’ve been paying more attention than most. GeForce Now, Nvidia’s attempt at a cloud gaming platform, has been in an open beta state for months now. It allows users…

WINDOWS AND BLOAT. Two words that, however much you might feel like Windows 10 has become a svelte and lithe OS, go together like peanut butter and jelly. Preparing a new PC usually means a new installation of Windows, and what follows—at least if you’re anything like us—is a painstaking pruning of autorunning applications, a violent excision of useless Metro programs, and the installation of all the stuff that actually makes Windows worth using. Now, we’ve looked at trimming Windows to shape, and scraping your disk clean of accrued files, and even silently installing a whole cache of favorite apps in the past. That’s not quite what we’re doing here: Arguably, the most efficient way to ensure a quick and painless Windows install is to customize the Windows installer itself.…

The alternative goes like this: Install Windows 10 as usual on a sacrificial machine (or a sacrificial drive), making sure everything stays on your C: drive. Configure it using the standard tools. Set up your favorite user accounts, your visual settings, install your software, and disable whatever you want disabled. Then turn it into something you can move elsewhere. There are a few ways to do this, but creating an ISO isn’t the most sensible. Nor is wrestling with DISM at the command prompt of a Windows installer, or creating some kind of Windows PE boot media. You’d be better off running something like Macrium Reflect or EaseUs ToDo Backup, both of which include bootable backup environments, and exporting the contents of your hard drive to a system image on…

ShareX can be programmed to use Auto Capture, meaning it takes a screenshot at periodic intervals—every 30 seconds, for instance. This can be useful if you’re actively using a program, such as a video game, so can’t stop every few seconds to take pictures of your progress. The Auto Capture feature can also record screenshots of ShareX itself, in case you want to share its features with other PC users. To get started with Auto Capture, click the “Capture” button on the left-hand side of the screen. Scroll down to “Auto Capture.” Click this to open the settings. From here, you can choose to auto capture either the full screen or a specified area of the desktop. Use “Repeat time” to alter the interval at which screenshots are automatically captured.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS GROUPY Download a free 30-day trial version from www.stardock.com/products/groupy, or pay $10 for the full app. IF YOU’VE EVER HAD TO JUGGLE multiple work or study assignments at once, you may have come to resent the concertina of open windows on your desktop. Groupy is a free-to-try utility that attempts to declutter your desktop by organizing your files and programs into tabs. This idea is hardly new, as web browsers have happily displayed dozens of webpages side by side for years. However, Groupy borrows this concept and extends it, by applying it to other programs, such as File Explorer. In this tutorial, you’ll discover how to install Groupy and set up your first group of tabs. After taking some time to flick between these effortlessly, you’ll also…

LAST ISSUE, WE ASKED a question in one of our features that seems to have been on the lips of PC users for the last 25 years: Do you need a soundcard? This issue, we ask simply: Do you need this one? Stylistically and on the spec sheet, EVGA’s high-end Nu Audio discrete soundcard is aimed squarely at gamers, but in truth, this is as much about enjoying better music as it is being able to hear Fortnite sound cues. Let’s start with the headline numbers: Playback and recording formats go up to 384kHz, 32-bit audio, signal-to-noise ratio is nice and high at 123dB, and there’s a generous array of ins and outs comprising stereo and headphone-outs, 3.5mm line and mic-ins, an optical-out, and front panel header. There’s also, rather…

NOCTUA’S LATEST COOLER is big. Yes, it’s 120mm standard, but with fans mounted on both sides of a beefy heatsink, it takes up a lot of space inside your case. It’s not too big to handle, though, with an asymmetric design that ensures it can fit alongside your RAM and GPU even if you’re filling every slot on an AM4 or LGA115x motherboard. Noctua fully redesigned its heatsink model for the NH-U12A, the new design featuring seven heat pipes (as opposed to the conventional six) and increased fin surface area. The heatsink is 6.2 inches (158mm) tall, meaning that it won’t fit in some smaller cases, but this size ensures its capability. The objective was to deliver a 120mm cooler that could perform at the same levels as 140mm ones,…

FOLLOWING THE RELEASE of the Resident Evil 2 remake, Capcom is on a roll, and is bringing its console games to PC in exactly the right way. The engine is a monster, and console ports that once would arrive with little or no customization options are now taking full advantage of PC graphics. Devil May Cry is a console-centric series of third-person brawlers, however, that has not always appealed to the PC faithful. It calls out for a controller, although mouse and keyboard controls have been given the same amount of thought as the rest of the game. It also deserves to be played at the highest frame rate you can manage—dropping down to 1080p is a small price to pay for smooth demon-killing. DMC games are a strange mix…

> Puzzling Packaging > Audio Clarity > Keyboard Issues Dodecahedron Fun It’s been too long and I’m upgrading. I bought an Intel Core i9-9900 CPU, and it arrived in the all-time strangest box I’ve ever seen. I confess that it took me a minute to figure out how to open it (look for the tape holding it together). If I’d been given a choice of saving $10 and getting a regular box, I would've gone that route. The rest will be easy. –Steve G Executive Editor, Alan De xter, Re sponds: While Intel is the latest to produce some frankly ridiculous packaging, you can’t lay all the blame at its door, as AMD’s Threadripper chips set the level that Intel felt it had to beat. It’s fairly obvious that this has…

MANUFACTURERS LOVE events, and last month it was the turn of Intel’s Enterprise team to get o ut o f t he o ffice a t t he Data-Centric Innovation Day, and show off what’s new for big data, which also tends to highlight where tech is going. The big launch was Intel’s second generation of Scalable Xeon chips, Cascade Lake. A 48-core design was expected, but we got up to 56 cores. They are still based on Skylake, but get improved core counts, clock speeds, and memory support. These are the chips to run those cloud and big data services. AMD’s rival, Rome, is due later this year, with up to 64 Zen 2 cores, providing some healthy competition. Optane DC Persistent memory also got its proper launch, now…

SAMSUNG’S NEW Galaxy Fold has a problem. The first batch, sent to reviewers, have seen screens fail at an alarming rate. Reviewers can be hamfisted, and some had removed a polymer layer from the screen that you aren’t supposed to touch. It looks like a screen protector, but isn’t. However, it soon emerged that they were not alone in finding the Fold to be fragile, as reports worldwide emerged of screen failures after days of use. It seems the polymer layer removal is a separate issue, and something more serious was happening. After investigation, Samsung has delayed the phone’s launch. Something has gone wrong between the design, production, and testing, despite building a robot that opened and closed the phone 200,000 times to test the hinge. This is embarrassing, and…

When it comes to transferring data and power, choice of bus is king. The battle between aging champion Universal Serial Bus and plucky new contender Thunderbolt has been an exciting one to watch, and now we’re here to put it to bed—for a little while, at least. USB might have had more time to integrate itself into as much technology as possible, but Thunderbolt from Apple and Intel is hot on its heels, and both have their advantages and failings. Which is truly superior, though? Let’s take a look…. ROUND 1 Value Our first showdown is easy: It’s USB, without a doubt. Even the more recent 3.1 and 3.2 iterations aren’t much more expensive than USB 3.0, affordable both for manufacturers to implement and for consumers to purchase—USB drives and…

OTHER THAN THE EM ULATOR, you usually need two things: some ROMs and a BIOS. “ROM” is a blanket term for programs you want to emulate. Although it should refer to an image of a system’s Read Only Memory chip, it is often used in the context of normal disk images that can be altered. Either way, you search for ROMs on specialist ROM sites. The BIOS is another blanket term for the program responsible for controlling the machine. Distributing ROMs is generally illegal, unless there’s a license that allows it—the exact legality varies between territories. Dumped copies of a system BIOS are legal under US law as long as the user owns the original machine. As you will see later, some emulators have their own substitute BIOS, which anyone…

TO SET THE SCENE for the rise of ’80s micro-computers, we need to start with 1977’s Apple II. It was available for the “cheap” price of $1,298 (around $5,370 in today’s money), which bought you a 6502 CPU, 4K of RAM, and six colors—or 16 at very low resolution. This was a great deal at the time, and was enough to seriously bloody IBM’s nose. Although the hardware wouldn’t change much in this period, costs had to come down drastically for home computing to really take off. Which they did—but the US and British approaches to this economic problem were vastly different. The ZX Spectrum resulted from the battle of the 8-bit micro scene in early ’80s Britain. Clive Sinclair would kick-start the British micro movement with the first home…

ATARI ST If you just want to boot into an ST, Aranym basically simulates an ST wholesale. It was in our repositories, but needed a system ROM to start. Enter EmuTOS, an open-source TOS replacement that even works on a real Atari ST. Grab the EmuTOS tarball from http://emutos.sourceforge.net, and then copy the contents into Aranym’s config folder in “~/.aranym.” That should sort it. Hatari is like most emulators (well optioned), rather than a straight simulation—you can find out more at https://hatari.tuxfamily.org. It’s probably in your repositories, but will need its own TOS image as well. Once again, EmuTOS can provide that. AMIGA The most popular emulator is FS-UAE, which should be in your repository, but make sure you install the launcher package as well. If you’re running without a…

Console gaming numbers have always fluctuated up and down, but home consoles do seem to be steadily trending downward as the costs associated with them increase. The peak of console gaming occurred around the turn of the millennium, with Sony’s PlayStation 2 smashing every record to sell a whopping 150 million units. By comparison, the PlayStation 4 has only sold around 95 million units in the five-plus years since its release, while the Xbox One barely managed a measly 39 million. Nintendo dominated the handheld console market, with the Nintendo DS managing to match PS2-tier sales figures, and the Game Boy and Game Boy Color before it both topping 100 million units sold. The rise of gaming-ready smartphones has hammered the handheld console market, though. The strange home-handheld hybrid Nintendo…

Much like PlayStation’s Remote Play, there are other ways to stream games yourself, without the aid of a hulking data center. Kids hogging the TV? Xbox One enables you to stream games to any Window 10 PC connected on the same network, using the computer’s monitor as a second screen, and connecting a standard Xbox controller. Because the game is effectively played in situ on the console, players can return directly to the big screen once the living room has been vacated. Steam users have this option, too, albeit in reverse; in November 2015, Valve launched Steam Link, which enabled anyone to stream their Steam library from their gaming PC to their smart TV or mobile device, over a local connection. Initially, Valve sold a piece of hardware that supported…

Not that we’re about to suggest that cutting down an ISO to its bare minimum is a complete waste of time, but there is an alternative (of sorts) officially sanctioned by Microsoft itself. It’s called, appropriately, Windows 10 Lean. Intended to be used on tablets with 16GB of storage, Windows 10 Lean cuts the installer size by a hefty 2GB over Windows 10 Pro, and takes up only 6.5GB of drive space when installed—around half the usual average Windows footprint. There’s not much in there beyond Windows itself (only around 200MB of the Lean install is taken up by apps), and it’s very much a modern-only OS; while you can install standard x86 applications, unlike the old Windows RT, basically every legacy component is gone. Control Panel, for example, is…

1 RTX Heart There’s a total of 68 ray-tracing cores buried inside here—22 more than the RTX 2080, and only four fewer than a Titan RTX. To give you some numbers, if this processor didn’t have ray-tracing cores, it should house around 15 billion transistors. It actually has 18.6 billion. That’s 20 percent of the hardware dedicated to ray tracing. 2 11GB GDDR6 To denote how similar this card is to the Titan RTX, there’s a single memory chip missing. Aside from that absent 1GB, there’s little else between the two, except a few disabled shader processors (down from 4,608 to 4,352), and slightly fewer ray-tracing cores. 3 POWER MANAGEMENT The standard Founders Edition card comes with some seriously impressive power management hardware. In fact, each eight-pin PCIe power is…

YOU’LL NEED THIS RASPBERRY PI 2 OR LATER With Raspbian Stretch, Pi Camera module, dual-state push button, breadboard, monitor, mouse and keyboard, and tripod/secure mount. SOMETHING TO ANIMATE Clay models, Lego, action figures, and so on. EVER SAT GUFFAWING AT TERRY GILLIAM’S BIZARRE SUBVERSION of Victorian-era greetings cards in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or egging on unlikely heroes Wallace and Gromit? Then chances are you’ve spent a few moments thinking about how those animations are made. There was a time when stop-motion photography was beyond the reach of most people. Overhead cameras mounted on rostrums were expensive, and unless your school or college had one, your best bet was to take some photos and make a flick-book instead. As with everything, time and technology have revolutionized the production of stop-motion…

1. CONNECT THE CAMERA MODULE Hooking up the Camera module requires the correct cable for your Raspberry Pi computer. For Model A and B boards, the standard cable that ships with the Camera module is adequate. However, for the Pi Zero, a narrower cable is needed. Slot the cable into the port with the shiny side facing away from the Ethernet port (or facing up on the Pi Zero). 2. ENABLE THE CAMERA MODULE When you boot your Pi, you need to enable the camera. On the desktop, do this via “Menu > Preferences > Raspberry Pi Configuration.” Select “Interfaces,” then select the “Enabled” button for the camera, then click “OK.” Alternatively, open a terminal and use the raspi-config app. Select “Interfacing Options,” then “Camera.” Choose “Enable,” then “OK.” Restart.…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WOX Find out more at www.wox.one, then follow a link to download the app. LOVERS OF A CERTAIN FRUITY BRAND of computers often cite the built-in “Spotlight” feature as one of their favorites. The deceptively simple search bar enables them to navigate every file, folder, and program on their system. The free and open-source utility Wox is an answer to the prayers of Windows users everywhere. On first launch, Wox displays its handy search bar, which you can use to display locations and applications effortlessly. You can also expand Wox’s features via downloadable plugins, which include Google searches, translation, and a powerful calculator, to name just a few. In this guide, you’ll learn how to hit the ground running with Wox. The easy setup process means you’ll…

As helpful as it can be to cluster your favorite programs and files into tabs, you may prefer to keep certain apps in a dedicated window. If you’re juggling with multiple programs, it’s hard to avoid moving one window accidentally over another, and snapping them together. Mercifully, the developers of Groupy anticipated this, and have designed the utility with some tabavoidance options. To get started, launch Groupy and find the “Settings” section in the main interface. Under “When should Groupy combine windows?” choose one of the four options listed, such as “Only group when Shift button is held down.” If, on the other hand, you’re totally taken with Groupy, you can automatically combine tabs for various applications. Find the section marked “Application grouping” under “Settings,” then work your way through…

YOU’LL NEED THIS WINDOWS 10 The OS comes with Storage Sense—you just have to make sure it’s enabled. ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS you can do to keep your PC running well is to ensure its storage drive isn’t full of files and programs you no longer need. Over time, you’ll find your drive can get clogged up with files as you install programs and download updates. The fuller a drive is, the slower it can perform, but thanks to Windows 10’s Storage Sense, it’s easier than ever to keep your PC clutter-free. Microsoft has designed Storage Sense to be “a silent assistant that works on your behalf without the need to configure it.” This means that you can let Storage Sense work in the background, without worrying about…

CASE DESIGN, cooling solution, noise, customer service—those are the features that make or break a modern, prebuilt gaming PC when all the hardware is top quality. Maingear lets you choose from one of four Vybe configurations or completely customize a PC based on your budget. Its top-of-the-line Vybe, the one reviewed here, is a near-perfect combination of hardware components, price, and customer service. Included with the Vybe is a red box with a message from Maingear’s CEO, a mouse pad, and a thick plastic zipper pouch filled with extra cables and other important stuff—all placed delicately under wrapping paper. Judging from this boutique-style attention to detail, Maingear cares just as much about its customers as it does its PCs. That good first impression continues with the Vybe itself. Inside the…

NOT INTO GAMING? Then i t’s e asy to get the feeling PC monitor makers aren’t interested in having you as a customer. After all, so much recent innovation centers around improving gaming performance. We’re talking high refresh, adaptive synching, even HDR up to a point. Of course, what makes for a great gaming panel can be beneficial in other areas. HDR is a case in point. But when it comes to productivity, stuff like adaptive sync and high refresh? Not so much. Instead, if you have a solid budget to play with, what you primarily want is a nice, big, high-quality panel with lots of pixels. What you want, on paper at least, is the Asus Designo Curve MX38VC. With a 38-inch IPS panel and 3,840x1,600 pixels, it checks…

FILLING THE SWEDISH countryside with robots and 1980s references looked like such a good idea from a distance. Avalanche’s game blends Fallout 76 with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Stranger Things, with nods to the art of Simon Stålenhag (look him up, thank us later), and the end result is one of the most beautiful recreations of a natural landscape we’ve seen in videogames. A co-op shooter for up to four that can be played solo, Generation Zero suffers most from its emptiness. It’s a slow starter, the lack of human NPCs beyond a few corpses contributing to a fantastically eerie atmosphere, but it’s also repetitive. The houses and outbuildings you search for the backpacks that contain anything from clothing to ammo to fireworks are depressingly similar, the same…

APPLE AND QUALCOMM were at each other’s throats mere weeks ago, embroiled in a huge legal battle over royalty payments. Apple challenged Qualcomm’s right to charge what it did, and Qualcomm wanted Apple to pay a proportion of its iPhone revenue it owed, which it claimed had reached over $7 billion. At the start of April, pundits still claimed the chance of any deal was minimal, and it looked set to follow the pattern of Apple’s seven-year legal war with Samsung over smartphone patents. The case even got as far as the opening statements. Then, in a move that almost nobody saw coming, the two firms signed an agreement to drop all outstanding legal actions. Apple is to pay Qualcomm an undisclosed sum (rumored to be around $6 billion), and…

> Display Dilemmas > Superb Solid State > Box-Fresh Windows Maximum PC(Ie) Hello Doc, I’m gearing up to build a workstation that will have dual use: 2560x1440 gaming and VR (on an Oculus Rift with three Oculus Sensors, which require USB 3.1), and for data science. I’m considering AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper and Intel’s Core i9-9900K. What are the real-world implications of the 64 PCIe lanes on Socket TR4-based motherboards versus the 24 lanes offered by the Z390 platform? In theory, Threadripper should be far superior. I can have a 16-lane graphics card, two M.2-attached SSDs in RAID, a four-lane 10Gb/s Ethernet controller, and a four-port USB add-in card, all fed by the host processor. With a Core i9, once I drop in the graphics card and one SSD, connectivity on…

ONE OF THE EARLIEST MACHINES to be accepted as an analog computer is the Antikythera Mechanism. Dated to around 100 BC, it was used in astronomy to determine the positions of celestial bodies decades in advance. Only fragments of it remain, but detailed imaging suggests it could even model the irregular orbit of the moon. You can find a simulation of the Antikythera Mechanism at www.etl.uom.gr/mr/index.php?mypage=antikythera_sim. It only has a Windows executable, but it runs under Wine. In the 13th century, we find Turkish inventor Ismail al-Jazari and his automata, laid out in his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Al-Jazari made complex mechanical musicians that ran via clockwork, and even had a programmable drum machine, coded by altering the movement of cams. However, documentaries usually start just before…

ZX SPECTRUM The Fuse emulator should be in your repositories; install the fuse-emulator-gtk package, as it’s much easier to run and configure. You’ll need a system ROM to get started—our repositories had one, with spectrum-roms being the package. http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net COMMODORE 64 The best emulator is VICE, though it’s not the most userfriendly. Chances are it’s in your repositories, but doesn’t have a “KERNAL” for licensing reasons. First install your distro binaries, then grab the source tarball. Open a file browser (with superuser privileges) to “/usr/lib/vice,” compare these files and folders with the data folder in the source tarball, and copy any that are missing. http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net COMMODORE 64 MUSIC Most 8-bit machines relied on the CPU for audio, making do with simple “bleep bloop” noises, but the Commodore was designed to…

Playing games over a stream is a tricky business, not least become some games stream better than others. One of the key benefits of cloud gaming is the fact that it enables games to be played at a high level of graphical quality (thanks to powerful data center GPUs) on even the most basic devices. In theory, if you’ve got a screen and an Internet connection, you should be able to instantly play games on ultra graphical settings. In practice, not every service has managed to deliver this. We’ve been banging on about latency a lot in this article, we know, but the fact is that it tends to tank a lot of fast-paced games. With that in mind, what are some good games to play over cloud gaming platforms?…

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What can you disable without risking the integrity of your system? Given the large number of Windows 10 services, the safe list is surprisingly short, but it can make a big difference to system efficiency. You can safely set Print Spooler to disabled if you don’t intend to use a printer, or IP Helper if you’ll be sticking to IPv4 and don’t mind dropping IPv6 compatibility. If you don’t use workgroups, TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper is safe to drop, and if you’re not networking at all, the Distributed Link Tracking Client can be disabled. Note that using NTLite for this (as an example) doesn’t remove these services, it just switches them off. You can perform the same actions on a running system through the Administrative Tools section of Control panel. Other…

One important element to keep in mind is stability: It’s all too easy to knock a camera, especially one mounted on a tripod. An overhead camera can also be subject to vibrations and wobbles. The result of these bumps can be a jarring distortion in your finished movie. While repeating the shot is one solution, it can be time-consuming to arrange. A better solution is to ensure that the camera is secured to a sturdy piece of gear. A tripod should have a heavy, reliable base with a low center of gravity to avoid topples. An overhead camera should be securely connected to the base, or whatever rigging is being used to support it. You also need to minimize any vibrations that might occur during the capturing of your stop-motion…

YOU’LL NEED THIS SHAREX Download this open-source tool from https://getsharex.com. WHILE THE WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM has built-in tools for taking s creenshots, they’re somewhat limited. For instance, there’s no quick and easy way to alter the image format and quality, nor automate screenshots by taking them at regular intervals. Fortunately, the free and open-source utility ShareX serves as a one-stop store for all your screenshot needs. The program can mimic Windows’ built-in screen capture utility, but can also capture specific areas of your desktop in high-quality image and video formats. You can access these features via ShareX’s intuitive drop-down menu or by mapping your own quick and easy hotkeys. If you ever find yourself writing a tutorial or walkthrough, the ShareX image editor contains a very satisfactory toolset to highlight…

The Wox search bar can also be accessed via a number of keyboard shortcuts. Some of these are built-in-for instance, you can launch Wox automatically by holding down Alt-Space. You can also configure new hotkeys to launch your favorite programs and files. To do this, first enter “Settings” in the Wox search bar, then press Enter. Click the “Hotkeys” tab. By default, the only assigned hotkey combination is the one that launches Wox. Click to highlight this with your mouse, then choose an alternate hotkey if you wish. Click the “Add” button to start creating a new hotkey. This opens a new window. First, click the “Hotkey” box, then hold down your desired key combination—for example, Ctrl-Alt-K. Next, type the name of your chosen file, folder, or application, such as…

YOU’LL NEED THIS PHOTOSHOP Subscribe to a suitable package at www.adobe.com. THE ART OF PROPAGANDA dates back to at least the Persian empire, which was a big thing in the Middle East 500 years BC. Evidence from further back is lost, mainly because of a lack of written records, but the idea of sending a simple message to as many people as possible is as old as mankind. Propaganda posters from the 20th century honed the idea, and frequently took simple messages and hammered them home, often using stereotypes, insults against enemies, and other low-down dirty tactics. We’re not going to try any of that here, but we can use the format of the propaganda poster to create a striking image, and we can use Photoshop to create it from…

THERE’S SOMETHING SPECIAL about reviewing an EVGA motherboard. The reason is straightforward enough—these boards are always unique in their approach to how they do things. If you take a look at any other manufacturer, every motherboard layout and design follows an almost formulaic pattern. There’s not a whole lot of variance between any of them. We used to muse over how all hardware followed a very similar development pattern. No manufacturer was willing to break the mold in an attempt to make something different—they were all effectively just minor tweaks to a variant that sells, regardless of what the marketing bods try to pitch to you. With motherboards, yeah the heatsinks change, and some connectivity differs here and there, but on the whole, year in year out, the only noticeable…

CORSAIR’S DOMINATOR LINE is nothing if not striking. In stark contrast to its small, slick Vengeance series, the Dominators are heavy metal sticks that stand tall in your motherboard’s RAM slots. The Dominator Platinum RGB has the addition of a dozen individually addressable LEDs along the top of each stick, enabling a variety of flashy RGB effects courtesy of Corsair’s iCue program. We’re reviewing the 32GB 3,600MHz CL16 model; a highpowered four-piece set that will set you back over 500 bucks. Do they look good? Without a doubt. iCue’s preloaded patterns make for some seriously funky options, making these perhaps the greatest choice for builders looking to show off their rig’s internals. Want a rainbow spiral revolving around your entire mobo? It’s got you covered. Color-coding to denote the temperature…

SOME WOULD HAVE YOU THINK that the appropriate place to use a PC is not hunched in front of a monitor at a battered desk scarred with the corpses of keyboards past. Increasingly, that notion is true: Nvidia’s BFG displays, to name one example, are bringing acceptable response times and minimal lag to our living rooms, meaning no-compromise pixel-pushing is putting its feet up on the couch and getting comfy. It follows that our control methods should evolve along with the games and media we’re moving out of the office, right? Hence this. Let’s make one thing clear, though: Corsair’s mini board is by no means alone in the space. Others are out there cooking up their own solutions for couch control, and Roccat’s Sova—a big plank of a keyboard,…

One of the biggest controversies of 2019 so far has been the Epic Games Store—and more specifically, EGS paying for timed exclusives. Formerly the home of Fortnite and Unreal Tournament, EGS is now looking to take on Steam. And after procuring Metro Exodus in February, EGS has added several more high-profile games to its list of timed exclusives: Borderlands 3, The Outer Worlds, Control, and Vampire the Masquerade—Bloodlines 2. Needless to say, there are more than a few unhappy gamers. I understand why people are upset. Steam is convenient, it works well, we have Steam friends lists, it supports cloud saves, you can easily transfer files between PCs, and more. But I also fully support Epic’s choice to compete, especially when it’s doing so not only with timed exclusives, but…

Whether you just want to back up your files or create an entire copy of Windows, we’ve got you covered. As our lives become increasingly integrated with digital technologies, keeping your most treasured memories and files backed up in one fashion or another is one of the most important things you can do. But keeping your Windows 10 installation backed up is a great idea, too, because if something major goes wrong, you can revert to it, and get back to work or play more quickly than a full reinstall. Just as there are many third-party backup utilities that offer all sorts of different features, though, there are also different ways that you can back up Windows 10. You might opt to protect the bare minimum, or create a complete…