The Microsoft Surface Pro 8. (Photo: Microsoft) The reviews are in on Microsoft’s latest Surface devices, and they’re glowing—well, mostly. The release of the Surface Pro 8, Surface Laptop Studio, and Surface Go accompanies that of Windows 11, which is basically fine. Surface Pro 8 The fanciest of Microsoft’s newest…
It has been more than a decade since Microsoft unveiled the Kinect, a motion-sensing gaming peripheral for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Microsoft tried and tried to make Kinect happen, even going so far as to bundle it with the Xbox One, but it ultimately failed to capture gamers’…
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread economic disruption and forced changes to the way many of us work and learn, but it’s been a boon for Chromebook sales. A new report from TrendForce suggests the good times are coming to an end for those Google-powered laptops. Windows demand should be…
Chalk one up in the “Interesting if true” column. There are reports that MediaTek and AMD might form a joint venture combining 5G technology into future chipsets. As always, rumors like this should be taken with a grain of salt. The idea of an AMD-MediaTek partnership makes sense in some…
It’s currently Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and odds are you weren’t aware of that. Google has a self-congratulatory blog post up to highlight all the things it’s doing to make your account safer. One of Google’s initiatives is to get more people using two-factor authentication, or two-step verification (2SV) as Google…
Every version of Windows has emphasized different traits and ideas and, in that sense, could be said to have a personality. In several cases — Windows 7 and Windows 10, most notably — one could fairly argue that the dominant theme of the then-new OS was “All the under-the-hood improvements…
Now that the PlayStation 5 officially supports third-party storage devices, the review community has gotten to work evaluating performance and compatibility. Sony’s decision to support a wide range of storage products on the PS5 is something of an about-face for the company. In the past, Sony has often used its…
Microsoft has officially released Windows 11, not that you probably have it on your system yet. Unlike past years, Microsoft isn’t giving everyone the option of installing Windows 11 right away, but anyone buying prebuilt from this point forward is likely to encounter it. If you’re going to use that…
Kioxia recently presented at the China Flash Market Summit, where it shared data on what kind of performance to expect from its upcoming PCIe 5.0 drives. Just as PCIe 4.0 doubled bandwidth compared with PCIe 3.0, PCIe 5.0 doubles up compared with 4.0. An x1 PCIe 5.0 lane will deliver…
When AMD announced it had added Smart Access Memory support to its older RDNA GPUs, we weren’t sure how much benefit gamers could expect to get out of the feature. RDNA and RDNA2 are quite similar, microarchitecturally speaking, but there are some significant differences in memory latency, cache design, and…