The right monitor can turn any mid setup into one you love using day in and day out—and you don’t have to pay much for it. Whether you’re looking for an extra display for your multi-monitor workstation or just wanting to step up your cheap 1080p to 1440p on a budget, this Asus TUF gaming monitor is a solid pick. You can grab it now for $199 at Amazon, down from its usual $269 and only a few bucks more than its all-time lowest price.

The Asus TUF VG27AQM5A has a modest 27-inch diagonal with a crisp 2560×1440 resolution, which is a big improvement over the fuzzy 1080p displays of yesteryear. Even nicer is the 300Hz refresh rate, allowing you to experience up to 300 frames per second for ultra-fluid motion. And with the 0.3ms response time and Nvidia G-Sync compatibility, you end up with super low blurring and extra sharp gaming visuals.

Just note that you’ll need a machine capable of pumping out that many frames per second to take full advantage of the refresh rate. But even if you can only manage in the 100s, this monitor is still a solid choice—those frames will look great and you’ll have room if you ever upgrade.

Other trade-offs to consider with this monitor: the stock stand only supports basic tilting and swiveling with no height adjustments, so you’ll probably want to mount it on a VESA 100×100 arm; the built-in 2W speakers are tinny and terrible; the brightness is weak at 300 nits and color depth is unimpressive; and it’s slow to wake from sleep.

If none of that bothers you, this 1440p/300Hz monitor for just $199 is a great deal. If you aren’t fully sold on it, check out our picks for the best gaming monitors for more options.

Earlier this week, October’s Patch Tuesday dropped a record-breaking 1,400+ security fixes across Microsoft’s various products and services, as well as a fix for mouse jankiness while gaming.

But the benefits for Windows 11 don’t stop there. Here are some of the more interesting features and improvements that came with update KB5127648, available for Windows 11 24H2, 25H2, and 26H2.

What’s new in KB5127648?

File Explorer now once again offers a preview for files downloaded from the internet, such as PDF files. For HTML files, one extra click is required: you can view the preview using the new “Preview” button.

You can now remap the Copilot key on your keyboard—which many users find completely superfluous—and finally make it useful. However, by default, the Copilot key can only be remapped to the right Ctrl key, the context menu, or Windows Search. But if you install the free PowerToys suite, you can remap the Copilot key to anything you want.

Bluetooth is a vexing, long-standing issue in Windows. With the October 2026 update, Microsoft significantly improves Bluetooth and promises fixes for audio, microphones, LE Audio, and the Settings page.

According to Windows Latest, other improvements are also on the cards:

• Apps can now open in full-screen mode with a new setting in the Accessibility menu.
• The system emoji set is now Emoji 17.0, including a distorted face, a ballet dancer, an orca whale, and a hairy creature.
• One-finger scrolling on the touchpad and automatic scrolling.
• A Tips widget for the widget overview and lock screen.
• Backing up photos from your smartphone to OneDrive via Settings.
• Updates to the Magnifier toolbar.
• Desktop backgrounds now support DIB images.
• Microsoft has removed the PC-to-PC migration tool.
• Microsoft has fixed bugs with file version history and domain trust.

How to get the update

This Windows 11 update is available under Settings → Windows Update as soon as they become available for your PC. If necessary, click on “Check for updates” to download the updates.

After installing the October update, Windows 11 26H2 has build number 26300.9711, Windows 11 25H2 has build number 26200.9711, and Windows 11 24H2 (which is no longer supported) has build number 26100.9711.

As always with Patch Tuesday, not all new features and improvements are immediately available to all Windows users even after installing the update. Microsoft rolls them out gradually to more and more users over several weeks. The security fixes, however, are immediately ready on all computers straight away post-update.

If your screen suddenly displays strange glitches, freezes, or even goes completely black, often the problem lies with the graphics driver. Instead of restarting the whole PC, there’s a quick and easy solution for this issue: restarting the graphics driver.

To do this, press the key combination Windows key + Ctrl + Shift + B – that’s it!

By pressing these four keys simultaneously, you are, in a sense restarting the graphics driver. This action occurs by way of the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), which gets reset, and in turn resets the graphics driver.

The beauty of this fix is that you can perform it without having to close any applications. That being said, you should probably save any work in progress, as a failsafe, before you proceed.

Take note, this fix is only applicable to a software issue. If your monitor’s issues are hardware related — originating with the monitor itself or a failing GPU, or owing to some larger system crash — this hotkey won’t solve your problem.

You’ll know the driver has been restarted by a beep or a brief flicker on the screen. The display should now run smoothly again.

Related content

• These 13 tips will make you a Windows 11 master
• Windows survival skills: 8 things every PC user should know how to do
• I finally found a PC maintenance routine I can stick to. It takes 30 minutes

The GeForce RTX 5090 is an absolute monster.

It’s also becoming increasingly difficult to justify for gaming — and ironically, Nvidia’s own DLSS technology is a big reason why.

When the RTX 5090 launched almost two years ago, Nvidia slapped a staggering $1,999 price tag on its new flagship. I called it “the most brutally fast graphics card ever,” because it was (and still is). The RTX 5090 delivered a massive leap in raw performance, paired with a mammoth 32GB of cutting-edge GDDR7 memory and Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture.

It was overkill incarnate.

Now? Actually buying an RTX 5090 can cost vastly more than its already-staggering sticker price. In September, a brand-new RTX 5090 had climbed to at least $5,000 in North America. Current U.S. price tracking puts the average even higher.

Five. Thousand. Dollars.

And make no mistake: The RTX 5090 is vastly faster than cheaper graphics cards. This isn’t one of those situations where a $549 GeForce RTX 5070 suddenly matches Nvidia’s flagship if you flip on a magic setting, no matter what Nvidia’s marketing material might say.

It doesn’t.

But DLSS is fundamentally changing what all that extra GPU horsepower actually gets you — and that makes the reported discontinuation of the RTX 5090 (Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment) much less catastrophic for gamers.

Nvidia’s $549 GPU can make Cyberpunk look like it’s running at 240fps

The GeForce RTX 5070 was a disappointment when it launched, and part of that was because of how Nvidia marketed it at the time.

Nvidia famously claimed the $549 card could deliver “RTX 4090 performance” thanks to DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation, but in traditional rendering, the RTX 5070 barely moved the needle over its predecessor. It was essentially an RTX 4070 Super with newer technology strapped onto it.

That matters. Raw rendering performance is still the foundation everything else rests upon.

But Nvidia’s software has kept evolving since then, and what it can do with that relatively modest hardware is becoming increasingly wild.

In recent hands-on testing by Tom’s Hardware, a $549 GeForce RTX 5070 was able to make fully path-traced Cyberpunk 2077 look like a 240fps experience at 4K using DLSS 4.5 Ultra Performance and Nvidia’s new 6X Multi Frame Generation — a result I’ve experienced myself as well, but I didn’t document it.

Read that sentence again.

A GeForce RTX 5070. Path tracing. 4K. 240fps. It’s absurd!

The RTX 5070 absolutely cannot render fully path-traced Cyberpunk at anything approaching 240 frames per second. Instead, Nvidia is attacking the problem from several directions at once.

DLSS Super Resolution renders the game internally at a lower resolution, then uses AI to reconstruct the final image at your monitor’s resolution. Ray Reconstruction replaces traditional hand-tuned denoisers with an AI model. Multi Frame Generation inserts AI-generated frames between traditionally rendered ones.

And Nvidia’s newer Dynamic Multi Frame Generation technology can automatically increase or decrease the number of generated frames on the fly, attempting to keep a high-refresh-rate monitor fed.

The result can look spectacular.

And that distinction — looking spectacular — matters.

240fps isn’t really 240fps

The RTX 5070 Cyberpunk test relied on DLSS Ultra Performance mode and aggressive 6X frame generation to target 240fps. That’s important. Ultra Performance renders at a dramatically lower internal resolution before reconstructing the image, so this isn’t equivalent to running Cyberpunk natively at 4K.

Nor does a displayed 240fps mean the game suddenly responds like a game being rendered natively at 240fps.

Tom’s Hardware measured 52.6 milliseconds of PC latency with 6X MFG enabled, versus 35ms with frame generation disabled. Pushing from 4X to 6X MFG barely affected latency — 53.2ms versus 52.6ms — even as more generated frames were pumped out due to the way MFG works.

The underlying game is still running much slower. Generated frames don’t respond independently to your inputs. You’re looking at three increasingly separate things: how fast the GPU actually renders the game, how responsive the game feels to your inputs, and how smooth the final output looks on your monitor. (Though Nvidia’s frame-pacing “flip meter” hardware can sometimes make games feel smoother than native rendering, as I’ve experienced firsthand in Star Wars Outlaws.)

DLSS can now push that last number far beyond the first.

That distinction is critical in competitive games, where responsiveness matters far more than eye candy. I wouldn’t want to play Counter-Strike 2 or Marvel Rivals at a low native frame rate hidden beneath a mountain of generated frames.

But Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t Counter-Strike.

What are you actually buying with an RTX 5090?

For decades, buying the fastest GPU available was the straightforward way to get the smoothest possible gaming experience.

Want higher resolution? More ray tracing? Higher refresh rates? Throw more GPU at the problem.

But DLSS is breaking the direct relationship between brute-force rendering power and the visual experience you see on your monitor. Your monitor can now become the limit for visual smoothness long before your GPU stops mattering for responsiveness.

If a $549 graphics card can already keep a 4K 240Hz display visually saturated with frames in a brutally demanding path-traced game, what exactly does spending several thousand dollars more on an RTX 5090 buy you as a gamer?

Plenty.

The RTX 5090 gives you vastly more raw rendering horsepower. It lets you start from a much higher base frame rate before frame generation kicks in. That means lower latency, fewer reconstruction compromises, and more flexibility to crank image-quality settings without resorting to aggressive modes like DLSS Ultra Performance.

Same goes for the RTX 5090’s enormous 32GB pool of GDDR7 memory and tremendous memory bandwidth. For local AI workloads, professional applications, rendering, content creation, and other compute-heavy tasks, Nvidia’s RTX 5090 is an entirely different beast from the 5070.

But do gamers still need anything remotely so powerful to achieve the visual experience they’re chasing?

Increasingly, the answer is no.

Nvidia is disrupting its own flagship

That’s what makes Nvidia’s advances in DLSS so fascinating.

The company spent decades convincing enthusiasts that more rendering horsepower was the path to better gaming. Bigger GPU. More CUDA cores. More memory bandwidth. More frames.

Now Nvidia is getting extraordinarily good at using AI to sidestep brute-force rendering altogether. And the company deserves enormous credit for it.

Dynamic MFG pushes that idea even further. The GPU doesn’t necessarily need to brute-force every single frame your monitor displays anymore. Nvidia can dynamically adjust how aggressively it generates frames to target the display you’re actually using.

This stuff isn’t marketing fluff. It works, albeit imperfectly at times.

But technological success creates an awkward problem at the extreme high end: The better DLSS becomes at extracting spectacular visual results from modest hardware, the harder it becomes to explain why a gamer should spend several thousand dollars on the biggest GPU Nvidia can build.

Especially when that GPU now costs enough to buy an entire monster gaming PC several times over. ($5,000, seriously?!)

The RTX 5090 is still king. That’s not the point

None of this makes the RTX 5090 slow. It absolutely freakin’ isn’t.

The RTX 5090 remains the fastest gaming GPU on the planet. If you want maximum native rendering performance, minimum latency, giant pools of VRAM, or serious compute horsepower, nothing about DLSS makes those advantages disappear.

There’s a meaningful difference between a game genuinely rendering at a high frame rate and one displaying a high frame rate after AI-generated frames are inserted. But visual smoothness is no longer a clean proxy for rendering horsepower.

That’s the change DLSS 4 accelerated. It’s a momentous one.

And for visually demanding single-player games — exactly the sort of experiences that once justified buying a ludicrous flagship graphics card — Nvidia’s AI-powered DLSS technologies are increasingly capable of producing the visual experience people actually want without requiring anything close to flagship-class hardware.

That’s why I’d have an increasingly difficult time telling somebody to spend $5,000 on an RTX 5090 purely for gaming.

Almost two years ago, when Nvidia unveiled the RTX 5090 and the rest of the Blackwell generation, I said the graphics cards themselves weren’t the most exciting part.

I called DLSS 4 the real game changer.

I’d make the same call today. As for the RTX 5090? It was never truly meant for gamers anyway. As Ivan Drago famously said in Rocky IV: If it dies, it dies.

Googlebooks are here, promising productivity aplenty within the Google ecosystem. But how do Google’s new productivity features compare versus the more familiar Windows 11?

That’s the goal for Smart Mode this week: examining how you (and I) can use Googlebooks as productivity devices, specifically looking at several of the features both offer.

Unfortunately, two of the most novel platforms the PC has seen in years — the Googlebook and the Nvidia RTX Spark platform — have landed on the PC within a week or so of each other. I would have liked to have been part of the Googlebook launch, but it took place in my colleague Michael Crider’s backyard, and he already has an extensive professional history covering Android devices. My colleague Ashley Biancuzzo was first out of the gate with our review of the Acer Googlebook 14. (She did a terrific job. Read it! I definitely did.)

My own review is a work in progress…and you’re reading some of it right now.

I’m currently typing this on Lenovo’s Googlebook 15, which I’m crushed to find has an uncharacteristically crappy keyboard. So far, I have few complaints about the hardware, which wasn’t expected to be the star of the show, anyway. Instead, I’m focused on Google’s new Aluminium OS, driving the next evolutionary step of Chromebook devices. It really feels that Google set out to make AI-powered productivity the start of this show.

The phone problem

A key part of the productivity equation, however, is that your Googlebook demands an Android phone, and specifically an Android 17 phone at that. Only recently did Google allow rival Samsung phones to connect, but — my Samsung Galaxy S23 is up to date and supported, and it still runs just Android 16. Unexpectedly, that gives Windows a leg up here.

Phone Link (once called Your Phone) is Windows’ own version of “Better Together,” the corresponding Googlebook technology that connects an Android phone to a Windows PC. Interestingly, Windows only requires Android 10 as an OS requirement to connect the two devices; Googlebooks still have that pesky Android 17 requirement. Without it, phones and Googlebooks still live separate lives. Phone Link allows you to transfer photos from the phone to the PC, place calls and send messages (via Bluetooth) and even run Android phone apps within PC windows.

From what I’ve seen, Phone Link is Googlebook’s surprising equal in all ways except the app streaming. However, Windows can get fussy about which phones support this particular feature, while Googlebooks promise that all compatible phones will support it, with that Android 17 caveat of course.

But Android isn’t always the answer. Outlook works fine on a Windows PC; on my Googlebook, the Googlebook runs the Android app, which took forever to set up my work account. Even worse, it made me re-authenticate every time I logged on. It then crashed.

Windows, meanwhile, secures the entire OS with Windows Hello or a password, and leaves Outlook open to use. (The Lenovo Googlebook includes both face and fingerprint logins in front of an optional PIN, which I like.)

Are Googlebooks smarter? Maybe

Apps may be problematic, but I love how Google has moved widgets forward. On Windows PCs, they’re a distraction, so much that they’re relegated to a closed window in the corner of your screen. On Googlebooks, widgets live on the desktop, where you can create and modify widgets to show whatever information you’d like.

You can either select from a menu of pre-designed widgets (the screen time widget above is neat) or create your own. This is where AI is going to shine, eventually; you can ask Gemini to create a widget rather than hand-pick features. This doesn’t always work, however. I asked for a “up to the minute widget tracking the MLB playoffs” and received just the scores; I also asked for a widget highlighting all of my priority email and was informed that direct email access isn’t built in. Still, it’s a start.

Microsoft, to is credit, promises something similar with its new Copilot Code feature; I just haven’t played with it at length. Google will probably just make it simpler.

“Simple” also gives Google a slight edge in screen recognition. Magic Pointer and Copilot Vision fall in to the same category of AI assistance to highlight and explain what’s on your screen. Launching the Magic Pointer is more fun when you wiggle your mouse pointer instead of trying to remember another shortcut, for one. Magic Pointer launches a context-aware Gemini that highlights and “knows” what your mouse is pointing toward, and you can ask questions about it. Copilot Vision, hidden within Copilot, takes a different approach, always watching what you’re seeing once you turn it on.

Each has its flaws. Copilot Vision was relatively poor at identifying what it could see. Magic Pointer, though, took close to a full minute using its own “Flash-Lite” engine. Unacceptable!

I’d give Google a clear win for “Rambler,” its voice dictation system. Both Windows and Googlebooks have their own dictation system; Windows has one that’s shared across the platform as well as a dedicated dictation function in Word. Windows 11’s version, though, is pretty literal. Rambler, on the other hand, accommodates the user’s verbal fry (those “um,” “er,” “you know” placeholders we all use) and smooths them out.

One of the ways in which you can enable Rambler is by using the CAPS LOCK key, which Google has repurposed as sort of a shortcut for these little utilities. It’s incredibly useful. Most people don’t actually use the Caps Lock key, and in a situation like this, you can go ahead and cram a number of functions into a single key press. In fact, I dictated most of these last few paragraphs using Rambler, and it inserted punctuation, broke up the sentences, and applied the proper punctuation. That’s AI done right!

The Googlebook showed me a way to automatically apply AI to the search function within its Files app, promising to append (not rename) all of the files with an AI description. I haven’t seen this happen again, and I’m less concerned about what the AI thinks of how the file should be described than if I can find it, period. Window 11’s own semantic search and its recent changes to the Search function, period, seem just as promising or more so.

What I discovered while using the Googlebook, however, is that Windows is chock full of different ways to perform the same task, simply because it meets the user halfway. I felt like an idiot when I couldn’t find how to reboot the Googlebook (the power button did it). Why does the CAPS LOCK shortcut only work in certain scenarios, like Gmail, but not in others? I also felt a little nervous when absolutely nothing happened while right-clicking the desktop.

So what feels more productive? If I had to compare a Lenovo Windows machine (my demo Panther Lake laptop) versus the Googlebook, I’d definitely choose the Windows machine. The keyboard is far superior, and even with 16GB the Googlebook felt somewhat choppy and laggy. While I can use the Googlebook in the context I normally do — two displays, plus the Googlebook sitting beneath — running a few apps and Chrome tabs felt a lot choppier than I expected. And I still have no idea on the exact battery life, as there’s no great way to track it. Maybe a custom ROM will help?

In an earlier Smart Mode newsletter, I asked who the Googlebook is for? I’m still not entirely sure. I think some of the individual features of the Googlebook are smart, unquestionably. But as a cohesive whole, I still favor my Windows laptop nine times out of ten.

Productivity on camera

I complain about the Googlebook phone issues…but also show off some of the things on Googlebooks that work well, too.

Productivity in the news:

• As busy as I’ve been, the one thing I’ve missed having a chance to try out are the so-called Artcraft apps: AI-generated clones of Adobe’s popular Creative Suite (Photoshop, Premiere, etc.) released as open-source versions coded in Rust. The developer then moved on to the Microsoft 365 apps, pulling off the same trick. The advantages are obvious: no more subscriptions! The disadvantages (copyright infringement, bugs, and so on) have yet to be rooted out.
• Techtober is in full swing, and so we’re involved in trying to evaluate both Googlebooks (again, with Ashley’s terrific review, and mine and others to come) as well as the upcoming RTX Spark laptops — which will cost up to $7,000, yikes! Microsoft has allowed us to confirm that I have a Surface Laptop Ultra on hand, though I can’t say anything about its performance quite yet. I think I’m allowed to say that the keyboard feels a bit tighter than the Surface Laptop Studio, which I haven’t decided is a plus or not.
• If AI is being injected more and more into Windows…it’s going to arrive via Windows Search. I’m not sure who else picked up on this.
• Love is in the air…with laptop stands.
• I thought that the “learn more” Windows local account trick had been patched out years ago?
• It’s worth noting that the AMD Ryzen™ AI Max+ PRO 495 processor will be going up against the new Mediatek-Nvidia RTX Spark partnership for AI workstation notebooks, with up to 192GB (!!) of unified memory. More memory equals bigger AI models, and eventually the two may go head to head.

Productivity tip for the week:

If we’re going to be sticklers for the concept of “productivity,” the most productive days are days when you don’t have to deal with anything else at work… or be at work. Yes, I mean working weekends. I had to do so this weekend and I love the freedom of simply sitting down and fear without fear of someone pinging me for…something. Even my chat requests went unanswered — which they should have!

Just make sure you don’t make a habit of it, or find a manager who will give you compensatory time off in return.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for tuning in to this edition of Smart Mode, PCWorld’s newsletter devoted to helping you make the most of your life, smartly. Sign up and have it sent to your inbox every Thursday!

2026 is an especially weird year for watching the NBA.

With the demise of regional FanDuel Sports Networks, and the league’s long-planned national streaming service at least a year away, many teams were suddenly in need of temporary plans for this season. The result is a patchwork of standalone streaming services, free over-the-air broadcasts, and traditional TV options that vary based on where you live.

You might think the NBA would try to help, perhaps with a single page that helps fans sort through all the viewing options, but no. Its website offers “how to watch” pages for only a small handful of teams, and most of those pages carry incomplete information.

So once again, I will do what the league doesn’t, and put all your NBA viewing options in one place.

Watching your local NBA team

If you live in the same market as your favorite NBA team, and want to watch games that are not nationally televised, you have a few possible options:

• Subscribe to a standalone streaming service for local in-market games.
• Get local games through a pay TV package that carries them.
• Watch local games for free with an antenna, if your team is broadcasting them over the air.

Here’s a chart showing how those options shake out by market:

NBA Team	Local channel/RSN	Pay TV packages with local games	Standalone options
Atlanta Hawks	Peachtree Sports Network/WANF	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	Free over-the-air
Boston Celtics	NBC Sports Boston	YTTV, Hulu Live, Fubo, DTV Choice	Peacock sub required, plus $15/mo
Brooklyn Nets	YES Network	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	YES on DAZN: $20/mo, $120/season, or $200/yr MSG bundle: $35/mo or $300/yr
Charlotte Hornets	WSOC/TV 64	DTV Choice, Fubo, YTTV	DAZN Hornets: $20/mo or $120/season Free over-the-air
Chicago Bulls	Chicago Sports Network	DTV Choice, DTV MySports + MyHomeTeam, Fubo	CHSN: $20/mo Bulls/Blackhawks bundle: $30/mo or $350/yr
Cleveland Cavaliers	–	–	DAZN Cavs: $20/mo or $120/season 15 games free OTA and on DAZN
Dallas Mavericks	KFAA/WFAA	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	MavsTV+: $15/mo or $125/yr Free over-the-air
Denver Nuggets	Altitude Sports	DTV Choice, DTV MySports + MyHomeTeam, Fubo	Altitude+: $20/mo or $200/yr 20 games free OTA
Detroit Pistons	TV20	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	DAZN Pistons: $20/mo or $120/season Free over-the-air
Golden State Warriors	NBC Sports Bay Area	YTTV, Hulu Live, Fubo, DTV Choice	Peacock sub required plus $18/mo
Houston Rockets	Space City Home Network	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	SCHN+: $20/mo or $200/yr
Indiana Pacers	–	–	DAZN Pacers: $20/mo or $120/season 22 games free on DAZN, 15 free OTA
Los Angeles Clippers	ClipperVision	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	ClipperVision: $15/mo or $90/season 10 games free OTA
Los Angeles Lakers	Spectrum SportsNet	DTV Choice, DTV MySports + MyHomeTeam	Spectrum SportsNet+: $20/mo or $200/season
Memphis Grizzlies	–	–	DAZN Grizzlies: $20/mo or $120/season 15 games free OTA and on DAZN
Miami Heat	WPLG Local 10	–	Free on Local10+ Platinum app
Milwaukee Bucks	My24	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	Bucks+: $20/mo or $100/season
Minnesota Timberwolves	–	–	DAZN Timberwolves: $20/mo or $120/season 15 games free OTA and on DAZN
New Orleans Pelicans	Gulf Coast Sports & Entertainment Network	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	Pelicans+: $15/mo or $100/yr Free over-the-air
New York Knicks	MSG Network	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	MSG on DAZN: $30/mo or $280/yr MSG Bundle: $35/mo or $300/yr
Oklahoma City Thunder	Thunder Gameday Network	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	Thunder+: $20/mo or $109/season 10 games free over-the-air
Orlando Magic	MagicTV 27/WFTV	–	DAZN Magic: $20/mo or $120/season 15 games free OTA and on DAZN
Philadelphia 76ers	NBC Sports Philadelphia	YTTV, Hulu Live, Fubo	Peacock sub required, plus $25/mo
Phoenix Suns	Arizona’s Family	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	Suns+: $15/mo or $110/yr Free over-the-air
Portland Trail Blazers	Rip City TV Network	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	BlazerVision: $20/mo or $120/yr Free over-the-air
Sacramento Kings	NBC Sports California	YTTV, Hulu Live, Fubo, DTV Choice	Peacock sub required, plus $18/mo
San Antonio Spurs	–	–	DAZN Spurs: $20/mo or $120/season 15 games free on DAZN, 22 free OTA
Toronto Raptors	TSN	–	TSN: $25/mo or $250/yr
Utah Jazz	KJZZ14	DirecTV Choice, Fubo	Jazz+ ($20/mo or $125.50/yr) SEG+ (Utah HC bundle, $175/yr) Free over-the-air
Washington Wizards	Monumental	YTTV, Hulu Live, DTV Choice, DTV MySports + MyHomeTeam	Monumental+: $20/mo or $180/yr

Compared to previous seasons, the most notable new entrant in 2026-2027 is DAZN, which has swept in to replace FanDuel Sports Network for 10 NBA teams. If you already subscribe to DAZN for combat sports or international basketball, note that the NBA subscriptions are separate.

Some NBA teams are also turning to free, over-the-air TV for in-market games, either instead of or in addition to standalone streaming options. Consider using an antenna to watch these games instead of getting yet another streaming subscription.

One more note: Several teams still haven’t announced distribution through cable, satellite, or live TV streaming providers. We’ll likely see a few more announcements around the start of the season on October 20, and I’ll update this post accordingly.

Out-of-market NBA games

The situation is much simpler if your team plays in a different market. As in previous years, NBA League Pass lets you watch all out-of-market games for $17 per month or $110 for the season. (The ad-free “Premium” tier, which also supports up to three concurrent streams, costs $25 per month or $160 per season.)

Note that if your out-of-market team is playing against the local team in your area—whether at home or on the road—those games will be blacked out. League Pass also excludes nationally televised games, which I’ll cover below.

Nationally televised games

If you subscribe to a service for local or out-of-market NBA games, it still won’t carry games that air on national television. Those include 100 games across NBC and Peacock/NBCSN, 80 games on ESPN and ABC, and 66 games on Amazon Prime Video.

Figuring out the best way to get both local and nationally televised games is where things get tricky:

Standalone services with nationally televised NBA coverage:

• Peacock Premium is $13 per month on its own, though there are ways to pay less.
• ESPN Unlimited is $30 per month and also includes ABC’s sports coverage.
• Amazon Prime is $139 per year or $15 per month. You can also get just Prime Video for $9 per month.

Pay TV packages with nationally televised NBA coverage:

• YouTube TV carries ABC, ESPN, NBC, and NBCSN, both in its $83 per month base plan and $65 per month Sports plan.
• Fubo carries ABC, ESPN, NBC, and NBCSN, both in its base plan ($89 per month, plus regional sports fees) and Sports plan ($65 per month).
• Hulu + Live TV offers ABC, ESPN, NBC, and NBCSN in its $100 per month base plan.
• DirecTV carries ABC, ESPN, NBC in its Signature packages (starting at $95 per month) and MySports plan ($65 per month), but does not include NBCSN, so you miss Peacock’s Monday night games.
• Sling Essentials includes ESPN for $20 per month. It also carries local channels (including NBC) in certain markets at a higher price.

Ultimately, you’ll have to decide whether to piece together a few different streaming services or try to get most of your coverage through one pay TV bundle. The best option for you will depend on where you live, your willingness to hop between different apps, and how many games you’ll realistically end up watching. Hopefully, all this information will make those decisions a bit easier.

Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice.

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AdGuard removes banners, pop-ups, and video ads, so pages load without the clutter. Trackers and activity analyzers are blocked too, keeping your browsing data hidden from them. AdGuard also stops malware and phishing sites, and parents can turn on parental controls to restrict adult content on the kids’ devices.

One plan works across Windows 7 or later, macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 12 or later, and Android 7 or later, with updates included. AdGuard holds a 4.7 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot. This plan is for new AdGuard users only, and you have 30 days after purchase to redeem your code.

Clear the ads off every screen in the house with one payment.

Through 11:59 p.m. PT October 15, you can get a lifetime AdGuard Family Plan on sale for $14.97 (MSRP $169.99).

AdGuard Family Plan: Lifetime SubscriptionSee Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.

We’ve known since February that Grand Theft Auto VI is coming out this year on November 19th, but only for Xbox and PlayStation. In August, Rockstar released an exclusive sneak peek on Netflix with gameplay footage and narrative cutscenes. People are hyped, to say the least.

But what about the PC version? Last month, we ran a quick analysis and estimated a proper PC release for GTA 6 sometime in late 2027 or early 2028. Well, it seems we were off the mark by a tad. According to GamesBeat, the PC version of GTA 6 is slated for release in Q1 2027—much sooner than anyone realistically expected.

GamesBeat gathered the details from four industry insiders who are familiar with Rockstar’s plans and asked to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize their business relationships. A spokesperson for Rockstar Games did not respond to GamesBeat’s request for comment.

If GTA 6 actually does release a PC version in Q1 2027, that will represent an unusually short gap between the console and PC releases for a Rockstar title. For comparison, GTA 5 released on consoles in September 2013 and followed on PC in April 2015, nearly 18 months later.

Firefox 158 is out for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. This version brings improved PDF support, the ability to fill forms with the help of “AI,” as well as fixes for over 75 security vulnerabilities. Updates are also available for Firefox ESR versions.

Firefox 159’s release is scheduled for October 27th, 2026.

What’s new in Firefox 158?

Following the new Nova design introduced in Firefox 157, now a few technical boosts are being rolled out. The AI-based Smart Windows feature is designed to help users fill in forms more quickly. It’s being rolled out gradually, so it won’t be available to all users straight away.

Another improvement involves the saving of web pages as PDFs. Firefox now generates more accessible PDF files (i.e., fewer barriers), and a number of other shortcomings in PDF rendering have been fixed.

Firefox now supports the JPEG XL image format, which has been running as a Firefox Labs experiment since June. Image compression with JPEG XL is more efficient than with older formats like JPEG, PNG, and WebP, all while maintaining comparable image quality.

Security flaws fixed in Firefox 158

In the security advisory for Firefox 158, Mozilla lists 77 security flaws that have been fixed, 37 of which were discovered and reported by external security researchers (OpenAI’s Amy Burnett stands out with 9 reports).

Mozilla classifies 30 vulnerabilities as “high risk,” 33 as “medium risk,” and 14 as “low risk.” Among the fixed security vulnerabilities are 24 use-after-free (UAF) flaws, some of which can be exploited to run malicious code. Eight vulnerabilities can be exploited to escape the browser’s sandbox.

Firefox ESR updates

In addition to Firefox 158.0, ESR versions 153.5.0 and 115.43.0 are also now available. However, the latter is only available for Windows 7 and 8.1 and macOS 10.12 to 10.14, and will remain so until March 2027.

In the ESR versions, Mozilla has fixed the same aforementioned flaws that were also present in the code of these older browser generations. That amounts to 61 fixes in Firefox 153.5.0 and 17 in Firefox 115.43. (Firefox ESR 140 received its final update on September 29th.)

I always say it’s mandatory to have a power bank in your bag when you’re out and about—you never know when you’ll get caught in an unexpected situation as your phone battery inches towards zero. A tiny power bank like the Baseus Picogo AC22 is more than enough for that, and right now it’s on sale for $30 at Amazon (down from its original $40).

It’s tiny in size but don’t be fooled. Its 10,000mAh capacity is enough to refill your phone about two times, which should suffice for a day trip around town or an overnight hotel stay. And it is tiny, physically speaking, measuring just 2.8 x 2.4 x 1.0 inches and weighing just 6 ounces. You can slip it into a pocket, purse, or backpack and not feel burdened.

It doesn’t sacrifice performance for size, either. The Picogo AC22 comes with a built-in USB-C cable that delivers 45W of fast charging, which can restore up to 50% battery in half an hour on most phones. That cable doubles as a carrying strap when you aren’t using it. And if you need to charge a second device, you can use the extra USB-C port (with a separate cable, not included) and charge two things at the same time.

Is it good enough for a laptop? Only ultralight, low-power models—definitely not gaming or workstation laptops—and only if you charge while the laptop isn’t being used. Honestly, if you need a power bank for your laptop, you’re better off with a bigger, faster one like this Anker 165W Laptop Power Bank. But as a phone-only backup charger, the Baseus Picogo AC22 is both affordable and convenient.

If your mouse cursor jerks while gaming, suddenly panning the camera uncontrollably, or behaves unnaturally in other ways, the problem may not necessarily be in your mouse hardware. Microsoft recently confirmed a bug in Windows 11 that could affect mouse input in some games, and a fix was released via the October 2026 update (which also fixes dozens of security vulnerabilities, so you might as well install it).

Available as update KB5127648, you can scroll down to the “Gaming” section of the patch notes, where you’ll see Microsoft’s one-line note:

[Gaming] This update fixes an issue that could cause mouse input to stutter in some games.

This fix was not included in the September optional preview update.

The Windows 11 mouse input bug

Microsoft doesn’t provide details as to which specific games were affected, how many users experienced the problem, or what caused the bug. As such, it’s impossible to tell whether all reports of jerky mouse movements were attributable to the same bug. In recent months, many users reported issues after installing Windows updates, and some of those issues persisted even after replacing the mouse or adjusting mouse settings.

One example is a post on the Microsoft Q&A forum from June 2026. In it, a user described problems with camera control in Star Wars: The Old Republic and Final Fantasy XIV. The user tried out various settings for their Logitech G600 mouse, swapped input devices, and performed a clean system restart. According to their account, the problem persisted. There have been similar complaints in the past as well. For instance, in February 2025, other users on the Microsoft Q&A forum reported persistently laggy and jerky mouse movements on Windows 11 24H2.

Current discussions on Reddit also show similar reports, with gamers reporting jerky camera movements in The Division 2, even though the game itself runs smoothly. In posts here and here, they discuss possible causes like mouse polling rate, drivers, and other hardware components.

It hasn’t been confirmed whether these specific cases are linked to the Windows bug that has now been fixed. However, the entry in Microsoft’s release notes shows that at least one such issue was indeed caused by the operating system itself, not mouse hardware.

How to install the fix

The fix is included in security update KB5127648 dated October 13th, 2026. It’s available for Windows 11 24H2, 25H2, and 26H2. To install the update, follow these steps:

1. Open the Windows 11 Settings.
2. Go to Windows Update.
3. Click Check for updates.
4. Download and install the KB5127648 update if it’s available.
5. Restart your PC.

This update brings Windows 11 26H2 to Build 26300.9711, 25H2 to Build 26200.9711, and 24H2 to Build 26100.9711. If Windows Update does not offer the package, or the installation fails, you can also grab for it via the Microsoft Update Catalog.

If you’re experiencing problems with jerky mouse input while gaming, you should first check whether the update has already been installed.

What if your mouse continues to stutter?

Even after installing the update, problems with mouse input may still occur. Other possible causes can include out-of-date mouse, USB, or graphics card drivers; very high polling rates; radio interference with wireless mice; and issues with Nvidia G-Sync or Adaptive Sync affecting the display.

Another potential source of problems is USB docks and connected monitors. As early as 2025, a user on the Microsoft Q&A forum described how their mouse worked without any issues on a Dell laptop normally, but became jerky when connected to external monitors via a Kensington dock.

If the October update doesn’t resolve the issue, it’s therefore advisable to connect the mouse directly to the PC, try different USB ports, and check the drivers. For wireless models, you can also try switching the wireless connection or reducing the polling rate.

In an age of 4TB SSDs and massive NVMe drives, many users tend to leave the entire storage space as a single, huge system drive. While this is convenient, from an administrative point of view it is a risky move that amounts to flying blind. Instead, we recommend strategically partitioning your largest drives.

This brings tangible benefits for data security, system recovery, and backup efficiency. Think of partitions as digital firewalls within your hardware. If your operating system becomes corrupted by a faulty driver, a failed update, or even malware, a clean reinstallation is often the quickest way back to a stable system.

However, if you’ve stored everything on a single partition, you’ll have to laboriously back up terabytes of data before reinstalling, or risk losing it when formatting the drive.

By separating the operating system onto partition C: and your user data onto partition D:, you can completely wipe and reinstall Windows, while your game collections, video projects, and documents on the second partition remain completely untouched. This not only saves time but also spares you a lot of stress in crisis situations.

To implement this optimization, you must first analyze your current configuration. To do this, open the Command Prompt with administrator rights and enter the command fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo C:, then press the Enter key to confirm. Look for the value ‘Bytes per cluster’ in the results.

By default, Windows uses 4KB, which is ideal for the system partition to minimize fragmentation when dealing with many small system files. However, for data-only partitions where you mainly store large files such as 4K videos or backups, it makes sense to adjust the cluster size to 64KB.

Here’s how to do it: The neatest way to change the cluster size in Windows 11 is via Windows Settings. Press the Windows + I key combination to open Settings. In the left-hand menu, navigate to ‘System’ and then click on ‘Storage’ on the right. Scroll down to the ‘Storage management’ section.

Next, expand ‘Advanced storage settings’ and select ‘Disks and volumes.’ A list of all physical drives will appear. Click the arrow next to your hard drive to view the associated partitions (volumes). Select the desired data partition and click the ‘Properties’ button.

Next, click the ‘Format’ button. The crucial dialog box will now open. Here, under ‘Label,’ enter a name for your drive. Ensure that ‘NTFS’ is selected under ‘File system.’ In the ‘Allocation unit size’ drop-down menu, select ‘64KB’ explicitly instead of ‘Standard (4KB).’

Tick the box next to ‘Perform quick format’ and confirm the process by clicking ‘Format.’ Please note: This process will irrevocably delete all data on this partition. You should therefore only carry it out on newly created or empty data partitions.

This adjustment to 64KB is so effective because it reduces fragmentation in large files and minimizes the amount of metadata that needs to be managed in the Master File Table (MFT). Please bear in mind a technical limitation: With the standard cluster size of 4KB, an NTFS partition is limited to a maximum of 16TB.

If you upgrade to even larger drives in future, you must use larger clusters to be able to utilize the full capacity. On modern SSDs, you should also ensure that the partitions are aligned with the internal NAND memory.

Nowadays, Windows handles this correctly and automatically when creating partitions via Disk Management or the Settings app, in order to avoid unnecessary write cycles (write amplification).

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Yesterday was October Patch Tuesday, and Microsoft’s security updates addressed 1,416 new vulnerabilities. Not only is that another record broken, but it’s also the first time over 1,000 flaws were fixed in a single month. Indeed, October 2026 saw more security vulnerabilities fixed in the month than were fixed in any previous year.

Alongside flaws fixed in Windows and Office, we also saw a bunch of fixes in Exchange Server, SQL Server, Hyper-V, Skype for Business, Microsft Defender, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and Microsoft’s cloud services.

Microsoft classifies 85 of the 1,416 vulnerabilities as “critical,” including 67 remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities. The other vulnerabilities are classified as “high risk,” with one vulnerability already being exploited in the wild while two were publicly known in advance.

The next Patch Tuesday is scheduled for November 10th, 2026.

Windows security vulnerabilities

A large number of the vulnerabilities—over 1,000 this time—are spread across the various Windows versions (10, 11, Server) for which Microsoft still provides security updates, including Windows 10 via the Extended Security Updates program, which was extended until October 12th, 2027.

Note: If you’re still on Windows 11 24H2, this is your last Patch Tuesday. Computers running 24H2 will no longer receive security updates going forward. When prompted by Windows Update, you should upgrade to Windows 11 25H2 or 26H2. That’ll keep you secure and up to date.

Windows under attack

One Windows security vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild this month. CVE-2026-96951 in the Windows Shell allows attackers to bypass the system’s defenses by disguising the origin of an executable file from the internet (Mark of the Web, or MotW).

Critical Windows vulnerabilities

Microsoft has classified 42 Windows vulnerabilities as critical, including 30 RCE vulnerabilities. Via these flaws, an attacker could remotely execute injected code without authentication or user interaction. The malicious code could then spread further across the network.

Microsoft Edge security vulnerabilities

The latest security update to Microsoft Edge 155.0.4283.45 is dated October 8th and based on Chromium 155.0.8059.40. It addresses 247 Chromium vulnerabilities, which are not included in the sum of flaws fixed in Microsoft Edge this month.

Microsoft Office security vulnerabilities

Microsoft has fixed 194 vulnerabilities in its various Office products, including 25 RCE vulnerabilities classified as critical. With “critical” RCE vulnerabilities in Office, the preview pane is usually an attack vector—a user doesn’t need to open an infected file for an attack to succeed, but rather only needs to preview it in the preview pane. Meanwhile, “high risk” RCE vulnerabilities usually require a user to open an infected Office file in a vulnerable Office product (open-and-own).

Among the numerous vulnerabilities in SharePoint, CVE-2026-102866 is an elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerability that Microsoft classifies as critical. It is also the only SharePoint vulnerability that an attacker could exploit without a user login. They would need to obtain a valid user token, modify it, and impersonate that user on the server.

Exchange Server security vulnerabilities

Microsoft has fixed 7 vulnerabilities in Exchange Server this month. Six of these are classified as high risk, including five EoP vulnerabilities. CVE-2026-70571 is also included, an RCE vulnerability classified as critical.

Price When Reviewed

$350

Best Prices Today: AW2726DM

Alienware’s $350 AW2726DM OLED monitor is the ultimate PC upgrade for 2026 — and it’s exactly the sort of upgrade PC gamers need this year.

Memory and storage prices are ugly. Graphics cards remain painfully expensive, and whispers say they’re only going to get worse. Meaningful CPU upgrades often drag new motherboards and memory along for the ride. Building or substantially upgrading a gaming PC is harder to justify than usual, even if you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket.

So don’t. Upgrade the thing you’re staring at instead.

I’ve been testing Alienware’s AW2726DM, a 27-inch 1440p OLED monitor running at 240Hz, and it’s astounding for $350. We’ve watched OLED monitor prices tumble over the last couple of years, especially during sales, but Dell is planting a flag here with an everyday price that finally pushes OLED out of luxury territory and into the mainstream.

Alienware helped kick off the OLED gaming monitor revolution with the legendary AW3423DW, which launched for a whopping $1,400 just a few years ago (and still earned an Editors’ Choice award for its dominance). Now the company is selling a 27-inch, 1440p QD-OLED display with a 240Hz refresh rate for just $350. What a time to be alive!

The AW2726DM’s QD-OLED panel is the star

The AW2726DM’s QD-OLED panel delivers the stuff that makes OLED special: perfect blacks, phenomenal contrast, vibrant colors, and near-instantaneous pixel response. Combine that with a crisp 2560×1440 resolution and buttery 240Hz refresh rate and games simply look and feel fantastic. Dark scenes have actual depth instead of the gray haze you get from typical IPS panels, while motion stays razor-sharp when you’re whipping around in fast-paced games.

It’s the sort of upgrade you notice constantly rather than in benchmark charts. A faster graphics card might turn 90 fps into 115 fps. This monitor changes how every one of those frames looks — and they look oh-so-delicious. This is a wonderful gaming monitor.

What about when you’re not actively gaming? OLED’s infamous text fringing is still here if you look closely enough at fine lines on stark backgrounds. It’s not something that bothers me much while gaming, but I can see it around text during desktop use, and I’d think harder about this monitor if I spent eight hours a day staring at spreadsheets and Word documents on it. Mixed work-and-play users should know what they’re getting into.

Brightness is another weakness. The AW2726DM isn’t particularly bright in either SDR or HDR, especially compared to some pricier modern OLED monitors, so don’t buy it expecting retina-searing highlights or a display that can overpower a sun-drenched room. The OLED contrast still makes games look fantastic, but this isn’t an HDR showcase monitor. It works best in darker rooms than brightly lit environments — close the curtains during your midday gaming sessions if you can.

A $350 OLED monitor with smart compromises

Dell also stripped the connectivity down to the bone to hit this price. You get DisplayPort 1.4 and a pair of HDMI ports, but those HDMI connections top out at 120Hz rather than the panel’s full 240Hz refresh rate. You’ll want to use DisplayPort with a gaming PC. There’s no USB hub or USB connectivity whatsoever, either, and no built-in speakers.

Normally, I’d complain more about that stuff. At $350? Eh.

Give me the fantastic panel and cut the extras. I already use a gaming headset or dedicated speakers anyway — duh — and I’d happily trade a USB hub and fully featured HDMI ports for a meaningful reduction in the price of the glorious OLED panel I’m actually looking at. The brightness limitation is harder to shrug off, but even that doesn’t outweigh the quality of the overall gaming experience at this price.

The AW2726DM isn’t a $1,000 flagship OLED that Alienware somehow decided to sell for $350. Dell clearly made choices to get here. You can see those compromises in the brightness, connectivity, text rendering, and bare-bones feature set.

But Dell compromised in the right places.

The 1440p, 240Hz QD-OLED panel at the heart of this thing is tremendous, and $350 makes those compromises much easier to swallow. Rivals are already discounting their OLED monitors aggressively enough to chase Alienware into this territory, and that is exactly what I want to see. OLED is finally becoming something ordinary PC gamers can reasonably consider rather than a decadent display upgrade.

In a year where everything that has to do with the innards of your PC is brutally expensive, Alienware’s $350 OLED is the upgrade PC gamers need. If you’re more of a gamer than an all-day computer worker, don’t hesitate to snatch up this monitor — it’s fantastic and an exceptional value.

Laptops feel different this year. I mean, literally. Advances in laptop materials are changing the game. Forget plastic versus metal. PC makers are now competing on physical feel—and there’s a whole new world of different metals and alloys to choose from.

Laptop chassis materials are something else these days. I recently wrote about how plastic laptops are underrated—plastic isn’t a bad material for laptops these days, with well-made plastic laptops sporting a comfortable rubbery touch that doesn’t creak like they once did.

In a world where spec sheets have less and less to differentiate them, this is the next path for PC makers who want to stand out.

According to SteamDB, a staggering 21,252 games were released on Steam in 2025—roughly 58 new games every single day, and a 15 percent increase over 2024. With that kind of competition, how can smaller indie games possibly get noticed? You probably heard about Balatro and Dragon’s Dogma 2, but what about a mashup of old-school Zelda and a shoot-em-up?

It’s becoming impossible to parse all but the biggest triple-A releases (many of which aren’t exactly stellar) and the most virulent of social media hits. How do you search and find new games in a landscape where you simply can’t hope to see everything? That’s the problem that We Love Every Game (or We HEART Every Game as its logo goes) aims to solve.

A product of a teeny-tiny Boston startup called Totally Human Media, I fell in love with the tool during a recent Steam sale and wrote it up here on PCWorld. The company reached out to me to ask if I wanted to go deeper, and I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough. I wanted to find out the root problems of current game discoverability on the PC and other platforms, and what we as gamers can do about it, how developers can get their games out, and all that jazz.

Totally Human Media CEO Ichiro Lambe and head of marketing Matt Martindale joined me over a video call to chat.

Editor’s note (October 2026): We Love Every Game continues to expand its Steam discovery tools, with features including daily game spotlights, a game explorer, a news feed, and newsletters highlighting overlooked releases. The following interview was originally conducted in June 2025.

Michael Crider, PCWorld: Ichiro, on the website for Totally Human Media, it says that you have a background in game development. Can you tell me about that?

Ichiro Lambe: So I’ve been in the industry for about thirty years. I founded a couple of companies, one became Sony Online [Entertainment] Denver, the next was an indie studio called Dejobaan Games. We created award-winning stuff with a Guinness World Record for breaking Steam…and over the years I’ve consulted for a number of companies, and helped launch umpteen games. And in 2018 Valve approached me to help them with games discovery.

So I co-founded something called Steam Labs over at Valve. I was an external consultant, random moonlighting dude, and for a few years we just sort of did a bunch of stuff around games discovery. And early last year I closed down my indie studio, because it’s fashionable, right? And I founded Totally Human Media and We Love Every Game to solve the discovery problem.

PCWorld: And was it specifically your experience with that indie studio and over many years that told you, “This is a problem that we need to address?”

Lambe: Oh, absolutely. So I’ve been doing discovery-related stuff for about ten years. I had a Twitter bot back in the day called Microtrailers where every time a Steam game launched, it would cut a six-second micro-trailer and put that on Twitter. May Twitter rest in peace!

I knew the Valve/Steam team over the years and that’s part of why they brought me on to help them. But bluntly, the only reason why I had to close my indie studio was because the games launched there were generally, you know, thumbs up, but they sank without a trace.

https://bsky.app/profile/weloveeverygame.bsky.social/post/3lsbnv2ajb52a

PCWorld: So for We Love Every Game, what is your standard for what constitutes a good game, one that the tool can recommend, if you’re prepared to share that? From what I can tell it seems to require at least an 80 percent or higher positive review on Steam. Can you share any other parameters, green flags or red flags that developers should be aiming for?

Lambe: We’re trying a really simple heuristic right now, which is 80 percent are positive player reviews or higher, and I think it’s 30 reviews or more. And for something like the Steam Summer Sale, obviously a game has to be greater than $0 or it’s not really on sale. However, I think our greater mission is to make sure that every gamer finds their next favorite game, and also that every game is able to find an audience of people who would want it.

So there are lots of games out there that don’t fit a concrete criterion, but it has many people who love it. I don’t like it when recommendation engines try to be personalized, because algorithms get it wrong, but we don’t necessarily want a review score to stand in the way of [a game] finding you.

Matt Martindale: I think in the future we’ll be trying to find ways that people can say, you know, I like certain genres. I’m an RTS kid myself. But there are things within that genre, what is that thing that they enjoy about it, and how do we then link games together? For example, my classic line [to demonstrate this] is, like, Pokemon and Elden Ring are very similar. They have difficulty gates, you’ve got to train up and beat that.

So how do you serve that as a need? Unless there’s someone who’s written an article or a video on YouTube saying, “Is it that thing from that game,” there’s no way. And there’s so many misconnections for gamers, I find. Like, how many Fortnite players have the perfect game that they’ve just not migrated across to? So that’s the foundation, how to help people find those little connections and move across.

For example, I’m fairly certain that base building, which is what I enjoy in real-time strategies, is why I enjoy Factorio and Satisfactory. Platforms don’t really have the space or the time to be building that kind of interconnection.

PCWorld: Your “About” page on We Heart Every Game says you want to figure out a way to cover “every single bloody video game on the web” in videos, newsletters, and so forth. Tell me what that looks like for you.

Lambe: The way that people find and buy games typically follows the sales funnel model, where you have to first become aware of a game. I see it somewhere. Then they are in the interest phase where they learn about a game. It’s like your favorite journalist writes about it, “Ah, yes, I trust Michael.” And then you get to the bottom of the sales funnel, can I buy it, is it the right price?

I think the bottom of the funnel is solved. Steam, Nintendo eShop, you know, you can buy a game, you can play it, that’s no problem, perfect. The middle of the funnel, is hurting, but there’s a lot of good content. Once you know about a game, you can learn about it…what I think is missing for most games is that initial awareness. So if we can say, “Hey, here are games that, based on your Steam library or these categories [you selected], and you signed up for a newsletter, we can tell you sort of very lightly what might be interesting to you. Why might it be interesting. And here’s how you can find out about it more in a more substantial fashion.

PCWorld: I’m gonna be honest, the task that you’ve set for yourself seems overwhelming, dare I say impossible. How do you scale that up to, say, 20 or 30,000 new games to hit Steam in a year?

Lambe: So automation has gotten better over the years, and it’s gotten worse. So we have like generative AI can spit out a bunch of shit about everything. But I think that we can also use these tools to sort of summarize what’s interesting or relevant to you about a game. If we go to ChatGPT and we’re just like, look, encapsulate this game in a few sentences and then I’ll link to the Steam store page, or we’ll try to find articles and in-depth streams, so forth and so on, we can automate that at scale and use that existing information about the games, what’s largely out there already.

PCWorld: So you would trust generative AI to summarize human-generated content about games, and then present that to people as a way of informing them?

Lambe: I don’t trust it at all! I think it does a highly variable job of accuracy. Do I want glue on my pizza? No. However, I do think it’s currently good enough so that it can sort of tease you, and say, “Look, this game might be good for you. Here are a few reasons why.”

Martindale: We’re at the top of that [sales] funnel, we’re using it as a way to help people find little snippets of that game…we’re building sort of framework templates for the content that goes out there, so that there’s a structure in what we produce using it. If it makes a mistake, it’s more likely something we’ve done wrong with the template, not something in [the content]. These are smaller bite-sized bits of content, we’re not trying to eat an entire Wikipedia article and spit that out…So it’s always quite focused, and not like trying to matter too many things into a very small box that that when AI is going to trip over and, yeah, start inventing its own realities.

Lambe: What we have upcoming is, we try to convey what’s relevant to you about a game in multiple ways. So for instance, if you were looking at it [like], I play Deep Rock Galactic. How are these games like Deep Rock Galactic? And it might be able to pick out, like, it’s for four player, Co Op, PvE, right?

PCWorld: So if you’re building a tool from the ground up, based on all these goals, would you say that you are hoping to expose all of the buttons and all the levers that you can to a user to say, “This is why we’re making these recommendations. Please tweak these to your to your liking to make it better”?

Lambe: It’s sort of scary to give people all of the controls, because I think we can overwhelm them. But wouldn’t it be really neat if you you’re a casual user, and you can just say, “Algorithm, I’m going to surf with whatever you recommend.” Or maybe you’re a little bit more of a mid-core gamer, and you go in and you pull out genres and pull in genres. Or maybe you’re an incredible prosumer, and you can go in and say, “Look, I explicitly want only games that are hidden object, and cats,” tag, and and do that.

PCWorld: Do you think you can build that for all of those disparate users?

Lambe: The tech behind that part is pretty straightforward. Like you can go to SteamDB right now, and you can just say, it must have a hidden object tag and a cat tag. I think the tricky thing will be to figure out how to co-construct this with gamers, so as not to overwhelm them. We will tell you in a few months whether that works or not.

PCWorld: User interface is not easy.

Martindale: On user interface, like, TikTok. Have they got the best option for this? Or do we need something where it’s a bit more speedy and quicker to get through things? We’re still probably an early stage to share anything, but we are working on a single view where you would go as if you were to scroll, say, a Reddit or Twitter feed, and you can just work your way through in one view.

PCWorld: On the Totally Human page, you said you want to do something similar for all entertainment media. Yes. Do you think that’s possible?

Lambe: I think we’re doing it…on a Friday night when I’m sort of relaxing with my wife and we put the kids into their beds. Kind of want to be let’s just watch something and to enjoy it like right? And so I have a need for we have the need for just being able to scroll through a bunch of stuff and say, “ah, that let’s try it” without having to go through the Netflix interface and to play the first 15 minutes of an episode.

The way we’re approaching it, is to give users that top of funnel stuff where it’s just like you walk into a farmer’s market, and you see all these wonderful things, and you can just taste them really, really quickly. And we give you that sort of literally, you know, this one-second hint of what Veronica Mars is all about. And then you can make an informed decision as to whether you want to investigate that.

So, you know, can we do it? I don’t know. Talk to me in 2027 [when we’re] expanding to books, music, movies and television. But the how is, we’re learning a bunch of lessons from games.

PCWorld: This is a very broad question, and I would understand if you would just decline it. Can this be profitable? And is that a goal for you?

Lambe: The answer is that we are investor-backed, and therefore it has to be. I think there are a number of platforms that demonstrate how you can do something like that. Any consumer-facing platform has the ability to monetize, and hopefully in a not-enshittified way.

PCWorld: That’s very gratifying to hear!

Lambe: Oh my gosh. It breaks my heart every time something wonderful that I use turns into this weird dystopian thing.

Martindale: I guess for the developers, the option to be able to target people based on their interests has never been really bad. Even platforms like Steam, they don’t necessarily do that themselves as part of their system, but they’re not necessarily set up for “I’m after people who play this very specific pattern.”

And I think when we’ve talked to a lot of marketing teams and studios in the space, the problem is they have to use very generic tools to target a very sort of a niche audience. Google doesn’t tell if you’re a real-time strategy player, like that’s not an option…Not necessarily like a long-term campaign, but just have that loud thunder clap moment on their launch, focus it around a specific time. And it instead of it being this invisible space where they put their money in and then they just hope that they see the fallout. We’ll just make it visible, because we’re hopefully bringing joy to the users through this as well.

Lambe: I think that if we do it [monetization] by saying, “Look, this user has said specifically that they want, gladiatorial management RPGs, and your game is a gladiatorial management RPG. We don’t have to guess. We don’t have to do any weird fingerprinting, nothing invasive. Just put a sponsorship thing in the feed! And that seems harmonious rather than weird.

---

We Love Every Game does plenty to spread awareness for games outside of its primary tool, from social media profiles to YouTube videos, to newsletters, to dedicated sub-sites for Steam sales.

Sure, we all use AI in our everyday lives now, but what about taking a crack at training your own? Google Labs has a really cool project called Teachable Machine, which allows you to create and train your own basic AI model. The best part? You don’t need to know a thing about coding to do it.

Right now it’s limited to making models that recognize images, sounds, and body poses. More capabilities may arrive in the future. Teach it the difference between a ripe banana and a green one, how to recognize a clap instead of a whistle, or even to tell whether you’re sitting or standing. Those are just ideas off the top of my head. You can let your imagination run wild.

On the Teachable Machine website, click Get Started and choose whether you want to work with images, audio, or poses. Now it’s time to train the model by giving it examples to learn from. So, for example, if you’re training it to recognize images, you can upload photos or just use your webcam to show it different objects—the more examples the better. It’ll ask you to give each group of examples a name. Now click Train Model and watch it get to work.

Once training is complete, you can show it new photos or use your webcam to see how well it recognizes different objects in real time. If it isn’t getting things right, then it’s time to get back to training. Add more examples, train it again, and see if it improves. It’s a great way to get a feel for why the data you feed an AI model is so important.

If you want to take things a step further, you can even export your trained model and use it in your own website or app, although you’ll probably need some coding know-how for that. Otherwise, Teachable Machine is a fascinating afternoon project and an easy way to dip your toes into AI development.

For more fun and helpful tips, tricks, website and app recommendations, be sure to subscribe to our PCWorld Try This newsletter.

TL;DR: Get a lifetime subscription to GhostShield, a VPN with an AI threat analyzer, for $49.99 (MSRP $399).

Most VPNs encrypt your traffic and hide your IP address, but they won’t warn you when a domain you’re about to load is malicious. GhostShield VPN adds an AI Threat Analyzer that inspects traffic in real time and flags suspicious connections before they reach you, and a lifetime subscription is on sale for $49.99 (MSRP $399).

Instead of relying only on static blocklists, the analyzer watches traffic behavior, so risky domains get flagged as they appear. Every connection runs over WireGuard with ChaCha20 encryption. GhostShield’s servers run in RAM only and wipe on every reboot, so no disk holds a record of your activity, and a strict no-logs policy applies on top of that. DNS leak protection keeps lookups inside the tunnel, and a kill switch cuts your internet if the VPN drops.

One account supports 10 devices simultaneously across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, with Linux supported via standard WireGuard tools. Split tunneling lets banking apps or local devices connect directly.

You also get an ad and tracker blocker, Family Mode for filtering gambling and adult content, and 20 server locations in 16 countries with no bandwidth caps. Just remember that GhostShield’s AI layer doesn’t replace antivirus software, so keep that running too.

Pay once for a VPN that watches for threats instead of only hiding your traffic. A GhostShield AI-Powered VPN Premium Plan lifetime subscription is on sale for $49.99 (MSRP $399).

GhostShield AI-Powered VPN Premium Plan: Lifetime SubscriptionSee Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.

Calendar invites have long been an avenue for scams, but there’s been a surge in these kinds of attacks recently. Whereas people are starting to catch onto fake phishing emails, many aren’t suspicious of unsolicited calendar invites—and cybercriminals are taking advantage.

According to Business Insider, data from security firm Sublime shows that calendar-based phishing attacks increased more than 10x between July and August 2026. Microsoft also reported a sharp rise in such attacks.

Calendar invite attacks are dangerous because you aren’t expecting them and your curiosity gets the better of you. Scammers may send invites to fake meetings and/or insert messages about missed calls, unpaid invoices, or subscriptions that need renewing. The invites can also have malicious links embedded in them, just begging to be clicked.

And that’s the whole point. Scammers want you to open links, call numbers, visit websites. In doing so, you may end up entering your passwords or payment details on imitation sites, or download files laced with malware, or give up personal information to a faker on the other end.

In some cases, fake Google Drive links and AI-generated voices have also been involved to make scam invites seem more credible.

What you should do

One reason this method works is because calendar invites are typically perceived as more legitimate than mere emails. Furthermore, some calendar apps automatically display invites that haven’t been accepted yet.

To minimize your risk of becoming a victim, security experts recommend scrutinizing all unexpected calendar events as carefully as you would unexpected emails. Avoid opening links or calling telephone numbers contained in calendar invites from unknown senders.

It may also be wise to review your calendar app’s settings and change any automatic behaviors for incoming invites.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your online privacy and security. Whether you’re protecting yourself on public Wi-Fi, hiding your IP address from trackers, or accessing region-locked content while traveling, a VPN adds an important layer of protection by encrypting your internet traffic. The problem is that there are hundreds of VPNs competing for your attention, and separating the genuinely good services from the mediocre ones can be overwhelming.

Let us save you the time and effort. We’ve tested and reviewed a wide range of VPNs to narrow down the field to the very best options available today—whether you’re looking for the best overall VPN, the fastest service, the best free option, or the best choice for privacy, streaming, or travel.

When looking for the best VPN, you’ll want to look for a few things: trustworthy privacy practices, strong connection speeds, reliable streaming access, and a large, well-distributed server network. Every VPN featured below delivers on those essentials and adds something extra to help it stand out from the competition.

Why you should trust PCWorld for VPN reviews and buying advice: Here at PCWorld we’ve been testing computer hardware, software, and services since the 1980s. As reviewers and users of PC hardware and software, we put every product through its paces using rigorous benchmarking and hands-on evaluation. We’d never recommend something we wouldn’t want for ourselves.

Other VPNs we liked

With the large number of VPNs out there, it’s good to know that there are several that rise above the fray. Not all of them can make our list of the best VPNs, but the following are strong options in their own right.

• PrivadoVPN: A strong overall service, but the free version of the VPN really stands out and is second only to Proton VPN. The server network is smaller and it doesn’t come with quite as many extra features though.
• Windscribe Pro: Great security, with both a Windows client and browser extension that work in tandem to block ads while keeping your browsing private. It also has a decent free version, but a wonky interface and small server network hold it back.
• Hide.me: A well-rounded service that ticks almost every box and the fantastic array of configurable settings make it a power-user’s dream. My latest tests showed inconsistent speed results and the Windows app is a bit tricky to use if you’re not used to VPN settings.
• IPVanish: This U.S.-based VPN nails all of the basics: decent speeds, a large global server network, and privacy promises backed up with independent audits. However, it stumbles a bit with unblocking streaming services and the monthly price is steep.
• Norton VPN: This simple and effective VPN from trusted security giant Norton is quickly becoming hard to ignore. It has a dead-simple-to-use interface and it’s recently seen big upgrades to its feature set and privacy commitments, but it only offers yearly pricing and the server network is still on the smaller side.

Can I get a better VPN deal?

The VPN prices on this page are the latest daily tracked baselines, but they do not always account for the lowest promo price. In shopping, it pays to compare long-term discounts against renewal pricing.

See PCWorld’s compilation of the best VPN deals for the best pricing on our favorite VPN services. Special deals are offered frequently throughout the year, so you should have a few chances to snag your favorite VPN at a steep discount if you can time it right.

Additionally, sales events such as Amazon Prime Day in mid-July and Black Friday at the end of November provide excellent opportunities to find even cheaper VPN deals.

How to choose the best VPN

One of the first things you should look for when shopping around for a VPN is the number of servers and locations. It’s difficult to judge any VPN by just one feature, but a semi-reliable way to tell if a VPN is even worth your time is to look at the server network. Anything with 1,000 or more servers and 30 or more country locations will do.

Speed

The next thing to consider is a VPN’s speed. This may be tricky to do since you aren’t likely to be able to test connection speeds without paying to use the service. Reading reviews online will give you a general estimate. Look for reviews, like ours, that give you a relative average of connection speeds rather than direct Mbps speed comparisons, for a more accurate picture. Consistency across time and servers provides you with a better idea of how the VPN connections will be during real-world use.

Privacy

You’ll also want to read up on a VPN’s privacy protections. Does it have a no-logs policy? Has it undergone any independent audits of its servers? Where is the VPN company located? Look for a clear no-logs policy, strong encryption, and trusted protocols like WireGuard or OpenVPN. Independent audits can help verify that a VPN actually follows through on its privacy claims. Useful extras like a kill switch, DNS leak protection, and RAM-only servers can provide additional protection. Knowing where the VPN is based, who owns it, and how open the company is about its data practices can give you good insight as well.

Price

When choosing a VPN based on price, don’t automatically go for the cheapest option. Look at the long-term subscription cost, renewal price, money-back guarantee, and what you actually get for your money. Many VPNs advertise tempting discounts on one- or two-year plans, but the price can jump sharply when it’s time to renew. In most cases, the best value comes from a VPN that combines a reasonable long-term price with the speeds, features, and privacy protections you need—even if that means paying a bit more to ensure you’re getting the best of these features.

The VPN features you should care about

Don’t let a large number of extra features that a VPN offers seduce you. Chances are, you’ll only find real value from a handful of VPN extras. Among those, be on the lookout for the following:

Kill switch

Say your VPN disconnects for some unexpected reason, the kill switch will automatically activate and block access to the internet, thereby keeping your online activities from accidentally being revealed. 

Split tunneling

This feature allows you to designate certain types of traffic to be encrypted and sent through the VPN, while other content, such as games, remains unhindered by the extra security. In other words, it’s a way to avoid any potential bottlenecks that could affect performance.

Multi-hop

When you want to be extra private, or a situation seems to warrant added measures — such as public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop — multi-hop lets you send your traffic through two or more VPN servers, as opposed to just one, where it is re-encrypted at each pass.

Protocols

A VPN’s protocol is the set of rules that governs how online traffic moves from a device, through a VPN server, and to the web. There are several popular options, such as OpenVPN, WireGuard, IKEv2, PPTP, and others, and each has its own advantages. Our preference is WireGuard. It’s the best choice for most people, and is open source, so it’s continually being refined and checked for security weaknesses.

To learn more, see PCWorld’s “5 VPN features you need to start using today.”

This year, Windows users had to deal with Microsoft’s shaky rollout of Secure Boot certificate updates, which were needed to keep PCs protected against rootkits and other threats that could compromise a system at startup. Now, users are facing a different kind of certificate update, and it’s slated to arrive less than a year from now.

The next big certificate update concerns Windows Update. Starting May 2027, current Windows Update certificates will expire, which Microsoft explains on this support page:

Prepare for Windows Update certificate rotation in 2027

Certificates used to establish trusted connections to Windows Update will expire on May 17, 2027 and June 19, 2027. Devices must contain the replacement certificates to continue receiving updates after the applicable expiration date.

In short, if your PC doesn’t get updated Windows Update certificates, you’ll lose access to Windows updates.

Microsoft is rolling out the new certificates via an update, and the good news is that all actively supported versions of Windows 11 will receive said updates. That means if you’re running Windows 11 26H2 or 25H2 and you stay on top of Windows updates, you have nothing to worry about—Microsoft already distributed the updated Windows Update certificates as part of the security updates released in July 2026.

What happens if your Windows PC does not get updated certificates?

According to Microsoft:

Devices without the replacement certificates will lose access to Windows Update after the applicable expiration date. This change does not apply to devices receiving updates from Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).

However, if you’re still on an older, unsupported version of Windows 11, you might run into trouble. Your Windows PC will no longer be able to download updates from Microsoft’s servers without the proper certificates.

To ensure that doesn’t happen to you, here are the relevant updates you should install depending on your version of Windows:

Windows 11, version 24H2 and Windows Server 2025: Install the September 2025 security update or later before June 19, 2027.

Other in-support versions of Windows 11, Windows Server 2022, and in-support versions of Windows 10: Install the July 2026 security update or later before June 19, 2027.

Windows 10 Enterprise 2019 LTSC, Windows Server 2019, and Windows Server 2016: Install the July 2026 security update or later before May 17, 2027.

Other Windows versions: Upgrade to a supported version of Windows client or Windows Server.

Further reading: Still on Windows 11 24H2? You have one week to upgrade

You have a fast charger and you have a power bank. But what if you could consolidate both into one tiny device that keeps you charged whether you’re at home or out and about? The Lisen 603 Mini does that, and it’s now on sale for $33 at Amazon—just a few bucks more than its all-time low. The cherry on top? It has a built-in charging cable.

The Lisen 603 Mini is an all-in-one charging solution. Plug it into a wall outlet and use it as a 35W charger, able to juice a modern iPhone by 50% in about half an hour. Unplug it, fold the prongs down, and use it while on the go as a 30W power bank that’s almost as fast as when plugged in. With its 6,800mAh capacity, it can fully charge a phone plus a little bit extra; when drained, it takes about 2 hours to top back up.

But maybe the coolest thing about it is the built-in USB-C cable. It measures 3.3 feet, so it’s long enough to allow comfortable use of your phone even while it’s charging. The only downside is, the cable is NOT retractable. You’ll have to coil it up, which isn’t ideal for pockets but perfect fine for a laptop, backpack, or handbag. There’s also an extra USB-C port to charge a second device, though you’ll need a separate cable and you’ll drain the capacity much faster when two devices are involved.

All-in-one portable chargers like this are still pretty rare. If you’re intrigued, the $33 price tag is good—though the capacity is only big enough for one day for one phone, you’re getting fast charging and a built-in cable.

Well, it was bound to happen. Last month, someone discovered a simple trick for skipping the mandatory Microsoft account when setting up a new Windows 11 PC or reinstalling the operating system. Now, Microsoft has blocked the trick, making Microsoft accounts truly mandatory once again.

The trick was unbelievably easy. During Windows 11 setup, there was a page that prompted you to sign in with your Microsoft account. But if you clicked on “Learn more,” Windows 11 allowed you to create a local account with administrator rights, bypassing the Microsoft account requirement altogether. Unfortunately, this workaround no longer works.

According to Windows Latest, the most recently updated Windows 11 26H2 ISO file has changed up the setup process. Now when you click the “Learn more” link, you’re taken to the usual page that tells you how Microsoft manages your data. The only button on that page takes you back to the sign-in screen that demands a Microsoft account login.

UPDATE: This mandatory Microsoft account requirement workaround by clicking on the tiny "Learn more" hyperlink in the Microosft account sign in page during the Windows 11 OOBE has been recently quietly patched server side. 🥀 https://t.co/vVV7DPrDfa pic.twitter.com/AfOadeY0gj

— Bob Pony (@TheBobPony) October 9, 2026

On social media, user @TheBobPony (who originally discovered the trick) posted an update that talks about the workaround being patched server-side by Microsoft. This likely means Windows 11 is unable to bypass the Microsoft account requirement anymore, although Microsoft hasn’t mentioned this blocking measure in any of its changelogs.

If two monitors aren’t cutting it for productivity, you gotta throw in a third one—but don’t keep them on individual stands. What you want is a triple-arm mount that lets you position and adjust each display to your exact ergonomic needs. Right now, you can grab this one by Huanuo for $120 on Amazon, down from its original $150. That’s only a few bucks more than its all-time lowest price over the last three years.

This triple monitor mount attaches to your desk with a single clamp (both C-clamp and grommet mounts are provided). It has a primary central arm for the middle monitor, then two articulating arms on left and right for the side monitors. All three are height-adjustable, with the side mounts using a gas spring system and the main mount using a retaining collar that’s tightened and loosened with an Allen wrench.

You’ll be able to use monitors measuring between 17 and 32 inches and weighing between 4.4 and 17.6 pounds. Each arm has full swivel, tilt, and rotation capabilities, so if you want to use your center display in landscape but your side screens in portrait, you can do that. Angle them however you want for best eye comfort, too.

Some caveats before you jump in. It only supports VESA-compatible monitors, so make sure you have three displays that each have either 75×75 or 100×100 VESA mounting holes. And even though it technically supports up to 32-inch monitors, using three 32-inchers together may be tight. You’ll need a very sturdy desk too, otherwise this mount will cause some imbalance and shaking. Frequent ergonomic adjustments are a pain, so expect to find your ideal setup and leave it like that.

If you’re okay with all of that, then you won’t regret this triple-arm mount for your triple monitor setup. If you’d rather stick to a single- or double-monitor workstation, check out the best single and double monitor arm stands.

Price When Reviewed

$60 for 1 PC license

Best Prices Today: NTI Backup Pro 7

NTI Backup Pro 7 is what one might refer to as the whole enchilada. It offers file backup, imaging/drive backup, continuous backup as well online backup to NTI Cloud (powered by Microsoft Azure). It backs up to and from networks, and is one of the rare backup programs that supports optical discs.

I was psyched at the feature list and assumed that in the 10 years since I last visited NTI’s flagship backup program, it would be finely honed and bullet-proof. However, first in 2024, and now in 2026, there are still numerous glitches of various types. In the end everything works, but with this much time on the market, it should be rock-solid in all aspects.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best backup software for Windows for comparison.

What are NTI Backup Pro 7’s features?

As I mentioned, NTI Backup Now Pro 7 offers file and folder backup, drive and partition image backup, continuous backup, and cloud backup. Continuous backup is file and folder backup where changes are backed up as they occur. Cloud backup is also file and folder backup, but to NTI’s own, extremely pricey online storage.

The plain file/folder, image, and online backups are stored in proprietary container files (single large files with all the data contained inside), while the continuous backup is a browsable plain file backup — i.e., files are copied as you would using Windows Explorer. Older revisions of files are kept in a separate folder.

The Backup Now Pro 7 interface is very straightforward, though unlike the EZ version, there’s no hand-holding when it comes to selecting data to back up. No biggie, but it could be just a tad friendlier.

The just-mentioned NTI EZ Backup Now 7.5 (which is $10 less per license) has a slightly more intuitive workflow, though the interface is not one of the prettiest. It lacks the Pro version’s continuous backup, but is otherwise roughly feature equivalent.

Back to Pro…. There’s granular scheduling (in addition to the continuous, of course) available, as well incremental backups to save space, and automatic maintenance of destination storage by purging older files when necessary. Encryption and password protection are also provided.

An NTI Backup Now Pro 7 feature that I absolutely love is the ability to choose multiple local destinations (a secondary internal drive plus external drive, etc.) for a backup job. It would be nice if you could combine local with network locations and the NTI Cloud, but hey, it’s a start

And yes, the program will back up both to and from network locations. As well as to FTP. And, as mentioned up top, Backup Now Pro 7 even supports optical discs.

How much does NTI Backup Pro 7 cost?

At the time of this writing, NTI Backup Now Pro 7 was on sale for $50 (it was $40 two years ago), down from the normal $60 retail price. The EZ version without the continuous backup was $35, $15 off of full list. The continuous backup-only NTI Shadow program is also $30 on sale.

An NTI Backup Now Pro 7 feature that I absolutely love is the ability to choose multiple local destinations (a secondary internal drive plus external drive, etc.) for a backup job.

NTI Cloud (required for cloud backup) is free for one-month of 16GB, $5 a month for 32GB, $10 monthly for 64GB, $20 a month for 128GB, $40 per month for 256GB, $100 a month for 640GB, and $200 a month for 2TB.

Google Drive offers 15GB for free. No matter which way you cut it, the NTI Cloud is extremely expensive. As it’s the only online storage service supported, Backup Now’s online backup is not well suited to the average user.

Note that you can use just about any backup program, with nearly any online storage service, by employing a cloud storage manager.

How well does NTI Backup Pro 7 perform?

The interface scaling issues I experienced during my last look two years ago were gone on one test bed, but I still had to override High DPI settings on another to get Backup Now Pro to render properly. It’s still very slow to enumerate the storage tree and the program in general is less than sprightly — aka, slow. Given that our test bed is quite fast, there’s no excuse

Seemingly, it doesn’t query the file system pre-emptively as is common practice. While all these idiosyncrasies may seem picayune, they add up, and do nothing to reassure me that the actual backup functionality will be bullet proof. As it turned out….

While file/folder and continuous backups to local media went off without unusual glitches, imaging proved an issue — as it turns out, because we remote control the test beds using Microsoft Remote Desktop. Backup Now Pro 7 didn’t like this, cancelling every image job before it was five seconds old.

After over a week of back and forth, and hours of troubleshooting, NTI explained this as a security “feature.” However, the logic behind it escapes me, and it’s hard to consider it a feature when no other program exhibits the same behavior. R-Drive Image, Acronis Cyber Security Home Office, Aomei Backupper, and Macrium Reflect Home all backed up without a fuss.

I checked NTI’s EZ Backup Now 7.5 (see above) to see if it suffered the same ‘feature,” and while it failed initially, on the the second try it imaged a partition correctly. Apparently, a partial implementation of said “feature.”

Another annoyance was that choosing to stop a 7GB cloud backup job at 30 percent didn’t stop the backup. I waited a full 10 minutes, then killed the process to cancel the job. Perhaps I was impatient, or perhaps the stop request wouldn’t have been processed until the current 7GB container file was completed — i.e., at 100 percent.

A smaller online backup of the documents, desktop, and downloads folders proceeded without incident, as I’m sure the larger one would have too, if I hadn’t needed to cancel.

On another positive note, creating a recovery disc went without a hitch and booted on both test beds. The image that I was eventually able to create was restored successful as well.

Should you buy NTI Backup Pro 7?

In the end, NTI Backup Pro 7 worked as advertised, but the unfixed annoyances I encountered and the super-high cost of the cloud storage leave me less than enthusiastic. You can give it a spin and see if it’s right for you, but EZ Backup Now 7.5 is likely a better fit for most users

Also, there’s a whole lot of feature-equivalent, less buggy competition out there in the form of Easeus ToDo Backup and Aomei Backupper, not to mention the free version of Macrium Reflect and Windows own File history, which is integrated into operating system.

Note that NTI hinted at big changes for the next version, including porting to a better development platform. Here’s hoping.

How I test software

All software is installed on an AMD Ryzen 3700X system utilizing an MSI MEG X570 motherboard with 64GB of Kingston DDR4 memory, and several PCIe 4 NVMe SSDs. The operating system is Windows 11 21H2, to which only security updates are applied to maintain a level playing field over time. The test bed is largely kept off the Internet unless testing the software demands it. All pertinent features are tested and the program rated for stability, suitability to task, ease of use, and feature set.

Should issues arise, all possibly conflicting applications are uninstalled, and if that doesn’t fix the problem, Windows is reinstalled. And as off this writing, controlling the test bed remotely will be checked.

Whether you’re buying a laptop or building your own PC, you’re going to want an SSD as the main storage drive — and you’re also going to want to make sure it’s the right size for your needs.

Sure, you might be able to crack open that laptop and swap out the main drive for a bigger one, or even install a second drive alongside it for additional storage. And yes, you can definitely do that with a desktop PC.

But if you have zero affinity for computer tinkering, then it’s just way more convenient to buy the right amount of storage from the get-go. Working on a computer with a too-small-for-your-needs SSD can be miserable, but you also don’t want to overspend on unused capacity — especially in these shortage-plagued times, when SSDs are going for more than double their previous asking prices.

Here’s everything you need to know about how much SSD storage space you should have in 2026, as well as how big you can reasonably go without wasting your hard-earned money.

64GB storage is too little

Officially, Microsoft’s system requirements for Windows 11 say that 64GB of storage is the absolute minimum for the operating system.

Yet while you might be able to cram Windows 11 onto such a small drive, it won’t be comfortable. You won’t have much — if any — room to install third-party applications, download files, or manage PC games.

That said, a computer with a 64GB SSD can technically run Windows 11 as long as you’re willing to forego lots of applications and store all of your files on the cloud, on an SD card, on a USB drive, or a separate SSD. If you do that, it might be usable. But I don’t recommend it.

128GB is the true bare minimum

In 2026, 64GB of SSD storage simply isn’t realistic for most users. To me, a 128GB SSD is the actual bare minimum.

If you aren’t doing a lot of demanding stuff — meaning as long as you stick to lightweight applications, avoid downloading huge files, and don’t store everything on your primary drive — then you could get away with an SSD that has a 128GB capacity.

But 128GB really isn’t a lot these days, especially if you’re a gamer. Plenty of modern PC games take up between 20GB to 30GB each, and then you have games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and God of War Ragnarök that are each larger than 150GB and wouldn’t even fit on an SSD of that size.

On top of that, SSDs that are too full and near capacity begin to slow down and lose performance, so you can’t truly utilize the full 128GB of space on your drive without consequences. Do you really want to be micromanaging your files and storage space all the time?

Related: Buying a budget laptop? Don’t go below these specs

256GB is enough to get by

A 256GB SSD is a much more reasonable size and adequate for most typical users. With 256GB of space, you can install some large applications, store many gigabytes of data, and still have room to spare. You don’t have to think about your storage limit as often.

256GB also happens to be the minimum SSD size requirement for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs. More and more PCs will likely settle on this as a “new minimum” as Copilot+ PCs become more mainstream. That makes this a good minimum capacity to hit if you care about future proofing — though most people would be better off snagging a 512GB laptop if possible. This is enough to get by, but you may have to make rough decisions in a few years.

512GB (or more) for avid gamers, downloaders, and power users

When you move beyond 256GB, it really starts to become about your specific needs. For basic web browsing, office work, and streaming media, 256GB is more than enough — but if you plan on storing lots of big video files or installing PC games, you’ll want more.

For PC gaming, the more storage the better. As mentioned before, PC games are massive and only getting bigger, so you’ll likely want at least 1TB of SSD capacity if you’re a heavy gamer who digs AAA titles. But it really depends on the types of games you play. You could get by with just 512GB if your Steam library is mostly small, niche, indie games.

Likewise, for content creation and media editing, files are usually quite large. Depending on bitrate, an hour of 4K video footage could reach 50GB or even double that. (Then again, if you create and edit content, you probably already have some idea of how much space you need for the type of files you work with.)

If you’re a data hoarder, the situation is a little different. You’d likely be better off with a moderately sized SSD and storing your big data files on external drives connected over Thunderbolt. In fact, for long-term storage that’s infrequently accessed, HDDs still prevail over SSDs. (Unfortunately, hard drive prices have also skyrocketed in 2026.)

Related: The best external drives for backups and storage

How big should your SSD be? In a nutshell

When in doubt, shoot to have at least 256GB of SSD storage if possible. While you could get by with 128GB in a pinch, it’ll be a lot less comfortable. And don’t even consider dropping down to 64GB — it may be technically possible, but it won’t be fun at all.

If you plan on playing modern PC games, you’ll want at least 512GB of storage, but aim for 1TB or more if your budget allows. If you work with large files, you should have a good idea of what you need. It isn’t unusual for power users to want 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, or more.

How much does SSD storage cost?

The only real downside to a bigger SSD storage size is the cost. Bigger capacities can be cheaper per gigabyte, but they still cost more overall and you don’t want to overspend for unused space.

Here’s a rough ballpark of prices for internal SSDs these days, though premium models can charge premium prices:

• 256GB: $30 to $65
• 512GB: $60 to $110
• 1TB: $130 to $250
• 2TB: $250 to $400+

If you’re buying a laptop or a pre-built desktop PC, upgraded configurations with larger SSDs may be more expensive than opting for a cheaper configuration with a smaller drive and upgrading the drive yourself. If you can buy the drive on sale, even better.

Further reading: Ways to repurpose an SSD you no longer use

I turned 39 a few weeks ago. And using Samsung’s high-end monitor makes me feel it, right in my eyeballs. 

The Samsung Odyssey G80HF is a 27-inch, 5K2K gaming monitor. If that sounds a little weird to you, yeah, I think it is — 27 inches is pretty small for the stunning resolution, 5120×2880 at its highest. And frankly, I can’t see details at that size and resolution. Not at just 27 inches, not even from a couple of feet away. 

But wait, this monitor doesn’t have to be just sharp. At its native resolution it pushes 180Hz, which is impressive — more than the somewhat meager Steam Machine can push in most 3D games, for example. But this is also Samsung’s latest dual-mode panel. If you need speed more than you need resolution, you can bump it down to 2560×1440 and go for 360Hz. 

That’s great — a more usable resolution that my hardware can definitely hit. Here’s the problem: I can’t actually tell the difference between 240Hz on my primary, personal monitor (at a similar density, 34-inch, 1440p) and 360Hz on the Samsung in its faster mode. My eyes, which have never been very good, just cannot see anything but a barely perceptible increase in speed on the Samsung. 

This isn’t Samsung’s fault. It’s not my fault, either — there’s nothing I can do about my crappy eyesight except make sure my prescription is up to date. But it does mean that $950 for this monitor, or even the more reasonable $700 it goes for more frequently, just doesn’t make sense to me. It might work for someone younger, or just blessed with better eyeballs. But for me, a $300 QHD monitor at around 240Hz is fine. 

Playing Fortnite in Old Man Mode

This isn’t the first time I’ve had my techy interest intersect with the way my deterioration is proceeding apace. I first picked up Fortnite during the pandemic. I enjoyed it a lot, good movement mechanics, fun weapons. The setup for the Battle Royale mode was wholly unoriginal, of course, but combining it with the building mechanics was novel. There’s just one problem: I can’t build for shit. 

There’s something about the two very different feelings of shooting in a 3D multiplayer game, and building massive, amorphous towers at lightning speed at the same time, that makes Fortnite break my brain. I’ve seen people — younger people, I assume — switch between building and fighting seamlessly. It’s like they’ve been doing it all their lives. But I simply can’t. I’m either building or shooting, not both. 

For the first year or so I’d look for weapons and tools to counter building, like the Star Wars lightsaber to rapidly demolish structures, or Spider-Man web-shooters to quickly gain height, and I’d do okay. But when Epic made no-build mode a permanent fixture to the game, I hopped on it. In my head I call it “Old Man mode,” with no shade intended. 

(Incidentally, I haven’t played Fortnite in over a year. There are too many good games made by real people coming out to waste time with slop.)

It’s possible that this is why I don’t care about adjustable actuation keyboards, which allow for some dazzling moves in online multiplayer shooters. I lack the reaction time and dexterity to actually use “snap tap,” or bind multiple keys or macros to a single button and hit them effectively. And that’s too bad, because these keyboards are all the rage at the moment…to the point where it’s getting harder to find a new, nice keyboard that uses standard MX-style switches. 

I don’t need 8000Hz polling in my keyboard or mouse, either. I suppose it’s possible that a human could tell the difference between a mouse that refreshes its connection to the PC eight thousand times a second versus four thousand times a second, but that human isn’t me. To my knowledge, it never was, not even when I was a teenager who could count frames in Smash Bros. Melee. 

Gaming gerontology

I realize that this may come off as a bit “old man yells at cloud.” And that at least a few of you are thinking that 39 isn’t that old, shut up, kid. Fair. But I have to assume that everybody has to face these sorts of things eventually with their hobbies. The average age of a professional e-sports player is 20-25, with 30 being considered well past retirement age — reflexes and intense schedules give these competitors a shorter peak time than most Olympians. 

So if you’re old enough to rent a car without a co-signer, it might be time to give up any dreams you have of being a professional video game champion. 

Whether or not you can actually utilize the tech you buy is always a good thing to consider. I could drop the price of a pretty good used car on a new PC setup, and feel really good about it for a few weeks. But would it actually enhance the experience beyond my merely “pretty good” Ryzen 7800X3D + 5070 Ti setup? Probably not. Considering my experience with this Samsung monitor, I question whether I’d even be able to tell the difference most of the time. And since any hardware on the inside of a gaming PC is becoming wildly expensive, it’s worth thinking about.

People played video games before I was born, of course. My parents played games while they were dating. But the people who were 5 when video game arcades first started getting popular around 1980 are now looking at retirement. (Or perhaps hoping that retirement will still be a realistic goal in ten years.) By the time my generation is old enough to theoretically retire, we’ll have lived our entire lives with games, even if they weren’t the driving medium for all that time. 

What will a world of greying, wrinkled gamers look like? Will I be huddled around a TV in a retirement home, struggling to pull off a Falcon Punch on my fellow residents? That seems optimistic, for a lot of reasons. But my grandma — almost 90 — got really into Balatro a couple of years ago. So anything’s possible.

Cool stuff from around the web

• Don’t bully your Steam Controller, it’ll scream: The new Steam Controller has a little speaker inside. If you drop it, it might just let out a very familiar-sounding scream. I’ve tested this (yes, I’m a monster), it works.
• A full-sized revival of the Atari 800XL from 1983 is on its way: You get a real mechanical keyboard, a cartridge slot that can play the original games, and 25 built-in titles, including Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command, as well as a modern HDMI port. It costs $220, coming out in April.

• AMD-powered handhelds are getting access to FSR 4: The newest in upscaling tech is coming to at least some of the popular, pricey handhelds on the market. Previously it was limited to discrete GPUs from the last couple of generations.
• This case can move its intake fans to point cool air where it’s needed: A neat idea, especially if you’re absolutely obsessive about your internal temps.
• An update to File Explorer will make the tilde key useful: The newest update will let you hit the ~ key to get instant access to your user folder.

Game pick of the week: Wildermyth

Maybe it’s just because my D&D group broke up, but I’ve been craving some turn-based role-playing…and I’ve abandoned too many Baldur’s Gate III runs. If you want something a little more manageable, then you absolutely need to check out Wildermyth. It’s a turn-based fantasy RPG, but the procedural generation randomizes pretty much everything. You won’t ever get the same run twice.

Wildermyth’s combat and other systems are simplified, more of a bite-sized snack of tactical RPG stuff than a full meal. The real treat comes from the way that your party members grow and interact with each other in unpredictable ways. If you play through multiple stories — each an hour or so long — you might find intergenerational threads, or old heroes from previous campaigns coming back in surprising ways.

The game does have a limit to its bag of tricks, so the stories aren’t literally infinite. But for a smaller game that you can play on almost anything, and in shorter chunks, it hits the spot. It’s $25 on Steam.

That’s all for this week. To get my editorials, news picks, and game recommendations delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up for Boost Mode on the PCWorld Newsletter hub. Also check out The Full Nerd for more enthusiast-focused goodies, Prompt Mode for AI tips, Safe Mode to keep your PC and gadgets secure, and Smart Mode to boost your productivity.

Price When Reviewed

$3,799.99

Best Prices Today: GMKtec EVO-X3

Calling the EVO-X3 a “mini PC” is almost an understatement. GMKtec has packed AMD’s Ryzen AI Max 395, complete with 128GB of LPDDR5X, into a slim, console-style metal chassis. The combined memory is primarily designed for local AI and large media projects. The integrated Radeon 8060S also makes the computer suitable for gaming. However, with a current price of $3,799.99, it is priced on a par with high-performance desktop PCs. Expectations regarding speed, cooling, and features are correspondingly high.

Design and build quality

The EVO-X3 is more reminiscent of a compact games console than a typical mini PC. Its dark gray metal casing stands upright on a wide base and measures 13.89 × 7.32 × 1.61 inches without it. With the stand, the computer is 14.17 inches high. Thanks to its vertical orientation, it takes up little floor space, but is significantly taller than flat mini PCs.

Weighing around 5 pounds and with a base secured by two screws, it stands firmly. The build quality lives up to the high price. The metal surfaces show hardly any give when pressed, and the gaps are uniform. The base is also secure with no play, and we found no sharp edges anywhere.

The green lid with its perforated grille and the matching power button provide an eye-catching splash of color. The design therefore really stands out in a plain office.

Large ventilation openings on the sides and top ensure the necessary airflow. Space should therefore be left around the case. The ports are distributed across the narrow front edge and the rear. This keeps the cables out of sight, but makes frequently used sockets on the rear less accessible.

The case can be opened for maintenance work. Both M.2 slots are accessible. The LPDDR5X memory, on the other hand, is soldered directly onto the circuit board, as is standard for this platform. This means that upgrading at a later date or simply replacing a faulty module is not possible. However, at 128GB, the capacity is generously sized.

The only visual drawback is the external 230-watt power supply, which is rather bulky and doesn’t quite fit in with the slim design.

Specifications

At the heart of the system is AMD’s Ryzen AI Max 395. The Zen 5 CPU has 16 cores and 32 threads, reaches up to 5.1GHz and shares memory with the Radeon 8060S. Its 40 compute units are based on RDNA 3.5. Added to this is an XDNA 2 NPU with 50 TOPS. GMKtec quotes a combined figure of up to 126 TOPS for the CPU, GPU, and NPU. This aggregated manufacturer’s figure is not equivalent to the NPU’s performance and is of limited use for comparisons.

Our test unit reserved 64GB of the 128GB pool as graphics memory. The CPU and GPU access the same memory chips, so data does not first need to be copied between system memory and separate graphics memory. In suitable Vulkan applications, the GPU can utilize up to 96GB of the shared memory. The LPDDR5X memory, running at 8,000 MT/s, is fast but not replaceable.

A 2TB Crucial CT2000E100 with PCIe 4.0 x4 serves as the system drive. Both M.2-2280 slots on the EVO-X3 support PCIe 4.0 x4; one remains free. According to GMKtec, a total of up to 16TB can be installed.

Given its size and price, there are surprisingly few ports. At the front are a USB-A port with 5Gbit/s, a USB 2.0 socket and the combined audio jack. At the rear are a USB-A port with 10Gbit/s, HDMI 2.1, and USB4 with 40Gbit/s. USB4 transmits data and a video signal and supports USB-C accessories. A second USB-C port, a separate DisplayPort, and a card reader are missing. It is particularly inconvenient that there is no USB-C port on the front.

An external graphics card with four PCIe 4.0 lanes can be connected via OCuLink. This causes less protocol overhead than USB4 and is suitable for a stationary eGPU. The port does not support hot-plugging: The PC and eGPU must be switched off before plugging in or unplugging.

The EVO-X3 connects to the network via 2.5-Gigabit LAN or Wi-Fi 7. Bluetooth 5.4 is also on board. The wireless technology is up to date, but a second LAN port or 10-Gigabit Ethernet would have been more in keeping with this price range.

The test unit is running Windows 11 Pro 25H2 (Build 26200). During testing, Windows Update offered the optional September Preview Update KB5124010, which updates to Build 26200.9550. We installed the AMD Adrenalin Edition 26.8.1 software, including GPU and chipset drivers. Windows Update often only provides basic drivers without the Adrenalin interface.

Computing performance

The Ryzen AI Max 395 delivers very high performance in everyday use. PCMark 10 scored 9,104 points. The sub-scores of 11,507 points for basic functions and 10,373 points for productivity indicate plenty of headroom for web browsing, Office applications, and video conferencing. In the Digital Content Creation category, it scored 17,157 points. This test includes, among other things, photo and video editing as well as rendering. This is where the 16 CPU cores and the large amount of memory really pay off.

In the 3DMark CPU Profile, the test device achieved 8,154 points with eight threads, but only 6,395 points with all threads. A second run confirmed this unusual ratio with 8,122 to 6,200 points. Normally, the score with all threads should be higher. The repeatable result suggests an anomaly in the performance profile, firmware, or thread allocation. This does not mean, however, that real-world applications will run more slowly with 32 threads. In this configuration, the sub-test is therefore of limited use for assessing maximum multi-core performance.

In terms of graphics performance, the EVO-X3 clearly stands out from standard mini PCs with small integrated GPUs. 3DMark Time Spy recorded 10,859 points, while Fire Strike recorded 25,136 points. In the more demanding Steel Nomad test, it scored 2,129 points, and in the Solar Bay ray-tracing test, 48,471 points. Many games therefore run smoothly in Full HD. WQHD is also possible, but requires adjusted settings or upscaling for demanding titles.

Cyberpunk 2077 highlights the limitations of the integrated graphics. At 3,440 × 1,440 pixels, with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset and FSR 2.1 in automatic mode, the system achieved an average of 29 frames per second. Frame Generation was disabled. This particularly demanding profile is therefore not playable at a smooth frame rate. To achieve higher frame rates, you’ll need to reduce ray tracing, lower the resolution, or opt for more aggressive upscaling. Anyone who expects maximum detail in the latest games will need an external graphics card via OCuLink.

Geekbench AI 1 .7 recorded 6,398 points for single-precision calculations, 2,401 points for half-precision calculations and 11,301 points for quantized calculations. The AVX2 backend used runs the test on the CPU and therefore does not measure the XDNA-2 NPU.

CrystalDiskMark recorded sequential read speeds of 4,961MB/s and write speeds of 4,677MB/s on the SSD. Crucial specifies the 2TB E100 as delivering up to 5,000- and 4,500MB/s respectively. The measured values are therefore consistent with the SSD’s specifications and do not indicate any limitation imposed by the PCIe 4.0 x4 slot. At 30 degrees Celsius, the drive status indicator reported that the drive was in perfect working order. Anyone storing a large number of local AI models or extensive media archives may wish to add a second SSD.

The EVO-X3 really comes into its own with local language models. Here, graphics memory is particularly important, as a model must fit entirely within it; otherwise, performance drops sharply. Standard consumer graphics cards often offer 8- to 12GB and a maximum of 32GB of graphics memory. In suitable Vulkan applications, the Radeon 8060S can utilize up to 96GB of shared memory. This means the EVO-X3 offers space for models that do not fit into the graphics memory on standard gaming PCs. A 70-billion-parameter model occupies around 40GB with 4-bit quantization and therefore theoretically fits within the available space. We have not measured how quickly such models run in practice.

The NPU has so far played hardly any role in this regard. While it meets the specifications for Copilot functions on Windows 11, common programs for language models perform their calculations on the GPU. Image generators such as Stable Diffusion or Flux can, in principle, utilize the Radeon 8060S. However, as the software for AMD graphics is less mature than that for Nvidia, setting it up requires more effort.

Power consumption

GMKtec offers three performance profiles. Quiet mode limits the APU to 54 watts, while balanced mode limits it to 85 watts. In performance mode, the manufacturer specifies 115 watts and, for short periods, up to 140 watts. The included power supply delivers around 230 watts, providing sufficient reserve for the rest of the system and to account for conversion losses.

We measured 14 watts at the socket while idle. During the gaming test with Cyberpunk 2077, the meter showed a peak of 139.9 watts. That’s a lot for a compact PC, but plausible given the CPU and graphics performance on offer. Performance mode significantly increases power consumption and fan speed. Just how much of a performance boost it delivers depends on the application.

Compared to a desktop with a separate high-performance graphics card, the integrated chip and memory design can save energy. However, the EVO-X3 cannot compete with energy-efficient office mini-PCs. The high power consumption is only worthwhile if applications actually make use of the 16 cores, the powerful integrated GPU, or the large amount of memory. As a machine for browsing and word processing, the system would be significantly over-spec’d.

Cooling and noise level

The tall chassis provides space for large heatsinks and several fans. Fresh air flows in through the side vents, while the heated air escapes upwards. During normal Windows operation, the EVO-X3 runs pleasantly quietly. In a quiet room, you’ll only notice a steady hum. In brief test runs, the sound level meter recorded readings of between 33 and 39 dB(A), depending on the load. Under prolonged full load, the noise level may be higher.

The SoC temperature reading remained at around 68 degrees Celsius even under prolonged computational load. This sensor reading is a good indicator, but does not necessarily correspond to the exact temperature of the CPU cores. There were no indications of significant thermal throttling. The case heats up mainly at the top exhaust vent; the sides remain at a safe temperature. For sustained high loads, a few centimeters of space should be left free around the ventilation grilles.

Repeated runs of the CPU profile varied by only a few percent across the individual sub-tests. This suggests there are no significant thermal fluctuations. The low score in the Max Threads run is therefore more likely to be related to the benchmark itself or the system settings.

The EVO-X3 is not silent. Passive cooling would be unrealistic for this performance class. The larger case dissipates heat more effectively than many slimline mini PCs. Nevertheless, the computer should not be placed directly next to the microphone when recording audio.

Should you buy the GMKtec EVO-X3?

The EVO-X3 is one of the fastest compact pre-built systems featuring the Ryzen AI Max 395. Its large shared memory is well-suited to local AI and large-scale media projects. Games also run surprisingly well for an integrated GPU. The cooling system kept performance stable throughout the test. Two M.2 slots and OCuLink allow for future upgrades.

The price prevents us from making a broad recommendation. The premium for the EVO-X3 is primarily due to the larger metal chassis, greater cooling capacity, and a built-in OCuLink port. If you don’t need OCuLink or the larger chassis, the previous EVO-X2 model offers similar baseline performance for less money.

The EVO-X3 is worth it for users who really make full use of the 128GB of shared memory and prefer a compact system without a separate graphics card. It is too expensive for office use and traditional gaming. The single USB-C port and the permanently soldered memory configuration also do not quite fit the price range. Technically, the computer is impressive; economically, it remains a specialist device.

Technical specifications

• Processor: AMD Ryzen AI Max 395, 16 cores, 32 threads, up to 5.1 GHz
• Graphics: AMD Radeon 8060S, 40 compute units, RDNA 3.5, up to 2.9 GHz
• NPU: AMD XDNA 2, 50 TOPS; combined AI performance, according to the manufacturer, up to 126 TOPS
• RAM: 128 GB LPDDR5X-8000, soldered, shared memory for CPU and GPU
• Storage: 2 TB Crucial E100, M.2 2280, PCIe 4.0 x4; second M.2 slot free
• Video outputs: HDMI 2.1 and USB4 with DisplayPort functionality
• USB: 1 × USB4 at 40 Gbit/s, 1 × USB-A at 10 Gbit/s, 1 × USB-A at 5 Gbit/s, 1 × USB-A 2.0
• Expansion: OCuLink via PCIe 4.0 x4, not hot-pluggable
• Network: 2.5 Gigabit LAN, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
• Audio: 3.5 mm combo jack
• Operating system: Windows 11 Pro
• Dimensions: 353 × 186 × 41 mm without stand
• Weight: Approx. 2.3 kg
• Power supply: 230 watts, 19.5 volts and 11.8 amps
• Manufacturer’s warranty: 24 months when purchased via the German GMKtec shop

TL;DR: You can get Windows 11 Pro for life for just $14.99.

Windows 10 is over 10 years old, and it really starts to show when you look at some of the security features or just basic usability. Upgrading used to be expensive, but right now, you can get Windows 11 Pro for just $14.99(reg. $199).

Windows 11 Pro is Microsoft’s best current operating system. If you’ve been hesitant to upgrade to Windows 11 Home, Pro gives you quite a few good reasons. BitLocker encrypts your whole drive, so nobody can read your files if your laptop is lost or stolen. Hyper-V lets you run virtual machines, and Windows Sandbox lets you test new apps in a separate space that can’t affect the rest of your PC. Azure AD support connects work PCs to business networks and manages sign-ins.

You also get everything that’s included with Windows 11 Home. Snap layouts put windows side by side on your screen, and DirectX 12 Ultimate helps new games run at your hardware’s full power. You can sign in with your face or fingerprint, and TPM 2.0 adds hardware-level security to that sign-in. Copilot sits in the taskbar and answers questions, summarizes pages, and writes content when you ask.

Upgrade your old Windows 10 PC with one payment and no subscription.

Get Windows 11 Pro on sale for $14.99.

Microsoft Windows 11 ProSee Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.

TL;DR: UPDF is a full PDF editor with a lifetime subscription on sale for $69.99 (reg. $149.99).

Most good PDF editors charge a monthly fee, even popular ones like Adobe Acrobat. UPDF is a PDF editor for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android that replaces the constant cost of software subscriptions with a single one-time payment, and it’s on sale now for $69.99 (reg. $149.99).

With UPDF, you can change the font, size, and color of text in a PDF. You can also crop, rotate, or replace images on the page. Markup tools include highlights, sticky notes, shapes, drawing, stamps, and signatures. When you need a different file type, UPDF converts PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, image files, and several text formats.

UPDF uses OCR to turn scanned documents into text you can search and edit, and it reads 38 languages. Note that the Mac App Store version doesn’t include OCR. You can also make fillable forms, add digital signatures, black out private information, and lock files with a password. Batch tools convert, merge, compress, and watermark many PDFs at once, so you don’t have to open each file one by one.

Your lifetime plan also includes 2GB of UPDF Cloud storage for syncing files between devices.

Get a UPDF lifetime subscription on sale for $69.99.

UPDF – Edit & Convert PDF: Lifetime SubscriptionSee Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.

When choosing a VPN, privacy should always come first—but speed is a close second. After all, even the most secure VPN can become frustrating to use if it slows your connection to a crawl. Faster VPN speeds mean smoother streaming, quicker downloads, lower gaming latency, and less waiting around for websites to load.

To find the fastest VPNs available today, I tested dozens of services and ran extensive speed benchmarks across their server networks. The VPNs below stood out for delivering consistently strong performance, whether that’s blazing-fast download speeds, low latency, or reliable upload performance. If speed is your top priority, these are the services worth considering.

And if you want to explore beyond just raw speed performance, be sure to check out my full roundup of the best VPNs in all categories. You can also browse our list of the best VPN deals to see if you can score any of these top picks on discount.

Why you should trust PCWorld for VPN reviews and buying advice: Here at PCWorld we’ve been testing computer hardware, software, and services since the 1980s. As reviewers and users of PC hardware and software, we put every product through its paces using rigorous benchmarking and hands-on evaluation. We’d never recommend something we wouldn’t want for ourselves.

Other VPNs we liked

• Hotspot Shield: The former long-time fastest VPN, is another solid service with great average speeds that just narrowly missed out on this list.
• Norton VPN: This simple and effective VPN from trusted security giant Norton is quickly becoming hard to ignore. It has a dead-simple-to-use interface and it’s recently seen big upgrades to its feature set and privacy commitments, but it only offers yearly pricing and the server network is still on the smaller side.
• Hide.me: A well-rounded service that ticks almost every box and the fantastic array of configurable settings make it a power-user’s dream.
• IPVanish: U.S.-based, this another good service that nails all of the basics: good speeds, a large server network, and privacy promises backed up with multiple independent audits.
• Proton VPN: An outstanding VPN service that prioritizes privacy, but also comes with solid speeds and a good feature set. It also provides the best free VPN on the market.

I’m continuously evaluating new VPNs and reevaluating services I’ve already tested on a regular basis, so be sure to come back for more recommendations and to see what else we’ve put through their paces.

Can I get a better VPN deal?

Here at PCWorld, we are regularly hunting down the best VPN deals to help you get the most bang for your buck. VPN services are frequently running deals throughout the year, so you should have a few chances to snag your favorite VPN on a steep discount if you can time it right.

While the prices for all VPNs on this list are updated daily, they do not account for special deals or offers. It’s best to keep checking our deals article to see what new limited-time discounts are on offer each week. Additionally, sales events such as Amazon Prime Day in mid-July and Black Friday at the end of November provide excellent opportunities to find even cheaper VPN deals.

How to choose the best VPN

The number of servers and locations that a VPN service offers is important. Indeed, server count alone can be a semi-reliable way to tell if a VPN is even worth your time. Anything with 1,000 or more servers and 30 or more country locations will do.

Speed

Next you want to consider a VPN’s speed. This may be tricky to do since you aren’t likely to be able to test connection speeds without paying for the service. Reading reviews online will give you a general estimate. Look for reviews, like ours, that give you a relative average of connection speeds rather than direct Mbps speed comparisons, for a more accurate picture.

Privacy

Take into account a VPN’s privacy protections. Does it have a no-logs policy? Has it undergone any independent audits of its servers? Where is the VPN company located? These answers will give you an idea of whether a VPN is transparent with its data collection policies and if it’s subject to government data sharing requirements.

Price

As with all subscription services, you’ll want to review the price of a VPN service. Do you want a monthly or yearly subscription? Some top VPNs might be pricey month-to-month, but actually become quite affordable with long-term plans.

Additional features

Other factors you’ll want to take into consideration are the overall ease-of-use, user experience, and any additional features. Some of these features, such as split-tunneling and kill switches, can be extremely useful for certain purposes and might sway your subscription decision one way or the other.

If you buy an external SSD or a USB stick today that’s being offered at a bargain price with astronomical storage capacities, you should be rather skeptical. The reason: The market is currently being flooded with sophisticated counterfeit storage devices.

Manipulated controller firmware can trick the operating system into believing the device has more capacity than physically exists. Here’s an example: Imagine you’ve bought a supposed 4TB SSD on a well-known online platform and your Windows Explorer also displays this capacity.

In reality, however, the drive contains only a comparatively tiny 64GB chip. The insidious thing about this manipulation is that the controller has been programmed to appear to acknowledge write operations successfully, even when the physical storage has long since been exhausted.

As soon as the actual capacity is exceeded, the drive either starts overwriting the oldest data at the beginning of the storage or simply dumps new data packets into a digital black hole, while the file system continues to report an intact structure.

The rude awakening usually only sets in weeks later, when you try to open your supposedly backed-up holiday photos or documents. Instead of the content, you’ll only get error messages or find corrupted file fragments. We must make this absolutely clear: The operating system is not a reliable indicator of a drive’s integrity.

It merely retrieves the information provided by the controller. And in this case, the controller has been tampered with. To expose these deceptions, you need tools that scrutinize every single bit. You should therefore check every new drive immediately upon receipt using the Validrive tool: Launch the program with administrator rights and select ‘Check USB Drive.’

Now insert the storage device and allow the program to recognize it. Click on ‘Validate THIS drive’ to start the check. The tool carries out a quick, targeted check by writing to random sectors across the entire declared range and reading them back immediately.

As Validrive measures and analyzes access times during this process, it is able to determine very quickly whether there is actually a physical cell behind a logical address, or whether the controller is simply suppressing an error message.

Related content

• How to tell if your USB cable is hiding malicious hacker hardware
• Is your USB flash drive trustworthy? These tips will tell you
• Hard drive, SSD, or USB flash drive: Which portable storage is right for you?

The more leaks and hacks in the news, the more I find myself wondering—what’s the ideal password? 

For years, I’ve based my definition off expert advice. You want long, random, unique. But lately I’ve thought the answer is actually less specific than that. 

I’d say the ideal password is simple—while still strong, too. And what fits that definition can change depending on the context. Hear me out.

In some cases, the ideal password is actually a passkey. (So not a password at all.) They’re the epitome of simple and secure. No memorization and not reusable, with baked-in elements of two-factor authentication. For these reasons, I recommend their use first to most people.

Meanwhile for websites that lack passkey support, an ideal password is indeed something long, random, and unique—something easily generated and stored by a password manager. You’ll spend as little effort on a 32-character password as you would an 8-character version.

But what about when you actually have to memorize a password? My opinion has shifted most on the approach here. You should memorize at least a handful—at minimum two passwords, one for your password manager and the other for your email address. You don’t want to find yourself locked out of your email address or another important account (e.g., banking) because you lost access to your password manager.

Doing so shouldn’t feel hard, though. I used to equally suggest passphrases and pseudo-randomization (e.g., pulling the 2nd letter from song lyrics you know and interspersing numbers and special characters). Now I’m much more in the passphrase camp. The longer, the better. If you’re capable of memorizing a random mix of words, bonus points.

What changed my mind: Looking once again at password cracking charts.

Cybersecurity firms sometimes put out this info—one company, Hive Systems, does a whole set that looks at how easily consumer-grade PC hardware can crack passwords. This year’s data was a good reminder of not just the basics, but where the bar realistically sits, too.

(The basics: Your password instantly gets cracked for anything stolen in a breach, reused on multiple sites, or commonly used dictionary words.)

An eight-character password—the bare minimum requirement for websites now—takes 12 years for a fleet of 16 Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics cards to crack, if you use a mix of just upper and lowercase letters. Add in numbers, and that time rises to 50 years. Slap in special characters, and that collective of high-powered GPUs need 132 years.

So it is it strictly necessary to have a super long password? No. Is it still a good idea? Absolutely, because you don’t know what will happen to your password information if it ever leaks. But when you must memorize a password, prioritize one that’s good enough and will stick in your head. It’ll trump one that’s perfect but forgettable, especially if you pair it with two-factor authentication. 

Better to chop off a few characters from a password’s length and go for a double layer approach to account protection—you’ll have a better chance at resisting an account takeover attempt. You might not even have to choose between length and strength, if you choose a passphrase with more than four words. 

With how complicated cybersecurity is right now, I’m all about going the easier (yet still well-protected) route.

In the news

I wrote about Meta’s Muse personal agent at length last week, and how I didn’t trust it with access to my digital life. Turns out my mistrust was wise—yet another major privacy goof happened, with a Muse user realizing the agent had shared his home address with a stranger.

Just keep saying no, folks. (At least for now.)

The good

• Apple reacted quickly to reports that Meta’s Muse AI agent can access data on macOS that it wasn’t explicit permitted to see—the Cupertino company says it will change how full disk access works, to better curtail nosy AI agents.

The bad

• Certain AI agents can be manipulated into spreading malicious behavior to other agents in their network. The problem: Agents used for specific tasks have fewer restrictions and safeties applied to them. Poison one, possibly poison many others. All thanks to laxness in how these agents communicate with one another.

The ugly

• Meta Muse kept hitting the news for disappointing reasons—in this case, an uncomfortable scenario where the AI agent sent a stranger to a user’s home. Muse thought to help sell an item. The user got a nasty surprise when they realized the would-be buyer had shown up and left without them knowing.

Tip of the week

You may do a digital refresh of your phone and PC every so often—getting rid of photos and documents you don’t want to hog storage space—but have you also done a similar clean-up of your apps?

On your devices, periodically uninstall apps and browser extensions you no longer use daily. Why? Legitimate software no longer is a good protection against malware. Sometimes, that “good” app you have could turn dark, if the developer sells it to a shady person…or is just hacked by one.

When I was reaching out to companies in search of ridiculous standing desk accessories for a recent article I wrote, a laptop stand was on my list of must-gets. I don’t mean the desk converters that give you a standing desk-like experience, but the little ones that just seem to prop the laptop up a bit. As a perennial desktop user they always seemed like a waste of time to me. Just get a desktop, or another monitor, right?

Well consider me suitably chastised and with enough humble pie in my stomach that I won’t need to eat for a week, because these things aren’t as stupid as I thought. In fact, after a couple of months of playing around with one, they’re actually pretty great.

I’m an idiot. And to prove just how much, here are all the useful ways I’ve found to use my new laptop stand.

What’s in a laptop stand?

Just before we dive into what I like about my new laptop stand, let’s just define what we’re talking about. The one I have is this overblown, overpriced thing from Egonofis. Gorgeous as it is – it even matches the wood grain of my desk – it’s completely unnecessary.

Branch does one which is both sturdy and attractive, with similarly wood-grain inspired styling, and it’s well under $100. It also has near flawless reviews with close to 100 of them, which is rare to find on any product, let alone a laptop stand.

Rain Design’s all-metal one isn’t as easy to fold away, but it’s very strong and gives you most of what you need from a laptop stand for less than $50. There are also some capable Amazon Basics models too, which you can have for around $25.

Point being, you don’t need to spend over $200 on a laptop stand. You certainly can though, and there may be some quality of life reasons why you might.

Useful for third screen

Until I can afford that super, ultra-wide gaming and professional grade do-it-all monitor of my dreams, I’m a multi-screen guy. I have a big vertical 4K thing from Dell, and an older but still-good Asus high refresh rate display for gaming. But I could always use more screen space. That’s where the laptop stand comes in.

I don’t want a screen that’s flat down on the desk – it’ll ruin my posture staring at that thing. But with the Egonofis stand, I can have my gaming laptop propped up next to me with something useful on it. Maybe it’s my email, or the various chat apps I use through Rambox.

Whatever I want, it’s right there, and with the stand it’s easy to position it wherever it’s useful or not cluttering up the desk space.

Improving ergonomics and posture

I am an utter bore when it comes to posture during the work day, but when you’ve gone through months of crippling nerve pain, you’ll do almost anything to avoid it. Even using silly laptop stands that prove to be anything but.

I have my desk and monitors setup just how I like them for excellent posture. Proper eye height, proper distance, etc. That’s really hard to do with most laptops, as they’re either down on a desk surface, or you’re crunched up trying to get down to their level. Not so with a laptop stand.

It’s not quite a desk converter, but for getting the laptop up off of the desk and at a better, more neutral, posture-enhancing height, it works like a charm. It’s also easier to position the keyboard at a neutral height and angle for comfortable arm and wrist position. Alternatively, I can more easily attach an external keyboard and maintain the right distance from the screen by making the laptop more vertical.

Great for controller gaming

A laptop keyboard is an important component for day-to-day use, but if you’re gaming with a controller and trying to relax back to do it, I often find myself sitting too far from the laptop to see the screen as comfortably. The keyboard just ends up pushing the laptop further from me because there isn’t the physical space in my cramped office to put it where I want.

With a laptop stand, I can make the most of the space I have, while sitting as close as I like for maximum visual clarity.

Using a laptop like a Kindle

Proprietary Eponym aside (I’m a Kobo man, myself), I’ve found my laptop stand can also be particularly useful for turning my laptop into a multi-device… device. Either propped on its side, or flipped around in tablet mode, I can lift the laptop up into a comfortable, vertical position and prop it up somewhere within easy reach. Combine it with reader mode and a wireless mouse for easy scrolling, and it’s a great way to set yourself up for reading longform documents, website articles, or even an Ebook.

The same goes for watching movies and TV shows, too. With a laptop stand you just have so much more control over how you look at your laptop. That makes it the perfect tool for building out a little media station for watching your favorites. Much better than slouching down and watching it on your lap. My back hurts even writing that.

Better thermals

This one is more important for gaming laptops, but most laptop stands can also act like a basic cooling pad. They don’t (usually) have fans built in, so they aren’t going to increase airflow dramatically, but by lifting your laptop up off of whatever surface it was on, it certainly increases its access to cooler air. Especially if it tends to pull that air in from the underside.

This is particularly useful if you want to use your laptop on a bed or otherwise flexible fabric surface that will almost completely block up any intake and exhaust vents your laptop has, causing it to swiftly overheat.

Using a laptop stand isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than trying to play games on a cushion.

Portability

I don’t know about you, but when I travel, I really miss my home office set up. The multiple monitors, the ergonomic display arms, the keyboard tray and standing desk set at just the right height.

While I can’t bring all that with me when I travel, I can bring my laptop stand. It’s not the same, and I still miss my usual set up when using it, but if I want to bring a little taste of ergonomic home comforts with me, I now can. It’s even the right wood grain.

Regardless of how it looks, though, a laptop stand is an ergonomic enhancer that you can bring with you. Considering the potential for worse posture and bad habits forming when working or living out of a hotel or airport lounge for a while, a laptop stand will now forever be on my travel inventory. It’s that important.

When it comes to flagship gaming laptops, the GIGABYTE AORUS MASTER 16 ticks about every box we can think of. It has the top-tier hardware options: Ryzen 9 9955HX3D 16 core CPU with 3D V-Cache, GeForce RTX 5090 mobile GPU at max 175W TGP, 2TB of NVMe storage, and 32GB of high-speed DDR5 memory, which is worth more than its weight in gold in 2026.

But most powerful gaming laptops have a mix of this kind of high-powered hardware, so what sets the GIGABYTE AORUS MASTER 16 apart? The way it’s looking to make the flagship gaming experience more approachable.

Too often, top-tier gaming laptops are hot and loud with limited battery life, and sure, if you run this thing unplugged and play AAA games at uncapped frame rates, you’re going to burn through the battery quickly and it’s going to be toasty and noisy while you do it. But GIGABYTE has put a lot of thought into the design of this laptop and the mix of management features could set it apart from the pack.

Effortless optimization

GiMATE is Gigabyte’s on-device AI agent that runs entirely locally and handles all your performance optimization and customization needs. Using voice commands, you can have it adjust system settings, tweak your graphics card and processor, fan curves, overclocking, CPU power limits, the works.  There are pre-configured OC profiles too, with several hundred megahertz on the CPU and GPU just waiting to be unlocked.

More interested in extending battery life than boosting performance? GiMATE is configured to help there too. It can dial down your CPU’s power draw and reduce heat and noise. It can even intelligently manage which GPU you’re using – the onboard integrated one, or the discrete GeForce RTX 5090 – to maximize efficiency.

The 99Wh battery is as big as you can get in a laptop like this, too, but it also supports fast charging, so even when it is drained you can get it back to 50% in just 30 minutes.

Looks as good as it plays

To make sure you get the most from your high-powered hardware, the GIGABYTE AORUS MASTER 16 comes complete with a 16:10, 2.5K OLED display, with a 240 Hz refresh rate. That makes games look buttery smooth at high frame rates – especially with the 0.02ms response time eliminating ghosting entirely.

This isn’t like older OLEDs that suffer in bright rooms, though. With TrueHDR 1000 certification, you can rest assured this display is ready to make your games pop off the screen, whether you’re playing in a dark bedroom, or bright front room.

Concerned about OLED burn-in? Don’t be. GIGABYTE’s OLED Protector and Pixel Shift technologies ensure that nothing stays static on your screen for long – though you probably won’t notice it. This ensures nothing becomes a permanent mark on your screen, even if you’re playing games with static HUD elements for hours at a time.

Sleek and surprisingly cool

High-end gaming laptops have a reputation for brick-like designs, but the GIGABYTE AORUS MASTER 16 is just 19mm at its thickest, which is 17% thinner than the previous year design, making it look and feel impressively lithe for such a powerful machine.

Despite that slim profile, GIGABYTE managed to pack huge heatsinks and smart fans inside the chassis, meaning that it has a gigantic 230W thermal headroom that really lets the CPU and GPU cook – at lower temperatures, too. If you don’t push the system too hard, it even keeps the fans still until you need them, so you can enjoy silent-operation office work and web browsing, only kicking in the high powered fans when it’s time to really game.

And everything else besides

There’s also Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support, a 1080p IR camera with Windows Hello, Copilot support, fancy RGB lighting, and a comfortable and accurate gaming keyboard.

The GIGABYTE AORUS MASTER 16 is available now in two configurations: The flagship GeForce RTX 5090 model, starting at $4,899, and the equally-game changing, GeForce RTX 5080 model, starting at $3,499.There’s also Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support, a 1080p IR camera with Windows Hello, Copilot support, fancy RGB lighting, and a comfortable and accurate gaming keyboard.

Windows’ built-in screenshot Snipping Tool gets the job done, but if you’re taking screenshots as often as I am, it starts to feel pretty limited. ShareX is a free, open-source tool that provides a more robust set of capture and editing tools without adding a bunch of unnecessary complexity.

It covers the basics you’d expect—full-screen captures, a single window, or a custom area—but it also handles scrolling captures, screen recording, and quick GIFs.

The real value, though, is in its advanced editing tools. ShareX’s editor lets you add useful markups to your images, like arrows, text, and highlights. Plus, if there’s anything sensitive in the shot, you can blur or pixelate directly in the app.

The feature I probably use the most is optical character recognition, or OCR. Essentially, OCR allows you to pull out text from an image and copy and paste it elsewhere. Sure, Snipping Tool has this as well, but I’ve found ShareX’s OCR to be more accurate, capturing less text noise from an image overall.

Yes, its advanced feature set does come with a deep settings menu, but don’t let that scare you off. Just start with basic screenshots, GIFs, and a couple of keyboard shortcuts, then maybe experiment from there.

For more fun and helpful tips, tricks, website and app recommendations, be sure to subscribe to our PCWorld Try This newsletter.

TL;DR: Get Microsoft Office 2019 and Windows 11 Pro together for life on sale for $18.97 (reg. $428). Sale ends October 11.

Setting up a new PC usually means paying for Windows and then paying again for productivity apps like Microsoft Office. This Microsoft bundle gives you both Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2019 and Windows 11 Pro together for life, and it’s only $18.97 (reg. $428).

Office 2019 comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. You pay once and install it on one Windows PC for home or work, and you never have to deal with any recurring fees like you would with Microsoft 365. This version of Office may be a few years old, but it still works great, and you don’t have to worry about clumsy AI integrations or other unasked for changes.

Windows 11 Pro adds tools that Windows 11 Home leaves out. BitLocker encrypts your whole drive, and Hyper-V lets you run virtual machines on the same PC. Windows Sandbox is useful for testing a sketchy app without risking your main system. Gamers also get DirectX 12 Ultimate, and Copilot opens right from the taskbar to answer questions and summarize pages.

Before buying, run Microsoft’s PC Health Check app to confirm your PC supports Windows 11, including TPM 2.0. A Windows 10 machine that can’t take the free upgrade through Windows Update won’t be able to run Windows 11 Pro.

Stop paying separately for your operating system and your office apps.

Get Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2019 and Windows 11 Pro on sale for $18.97.

Sale ends October 11 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

The All-in-One Microsoft Office Pro 2019 for Windows: Lifetime License + Windows 11 Pro BundleSee Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.

TL;DR: PDNob Pro edits, converts, and OCRs PDFs across Windows, Mac, and iPhone, with 6,000 lifetime AI credits included. Get it for $34.97 (reg. $349.95) and skip the monthly fee.

Still paying every month just to edit, sign, and convert PDFs? PDNob Pro handles it all for a single payment.

Get this PDNob Pro PDF Editor lifetime subscription for $34.97 (reg. $349.95) and drop the recurring fee.

PDNob runs on Windows, Mac, and iPhone. Edit text, fonts, images, and layouts directly in a PDF, then add headers, watermarks, or page numbers.

OCR and AI that actually save time

OCR turns scanned contracts, invoices, and receipts into editable, searchable documents, and batch OCR handles several files at once. Conversion works in both directions, from PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and image formats, while keeping the original layout intact.

The AI assistant summarizes long documents, answers questions about reports or manuals, and translates content. This plan includes 6,000 lifetime AI credits.

Merging, splitting, compression, form signing, and password protection are built in, and core editing works offline.

One purchase covers two users, simultaneous use on two devices, 20GB of cloud storage, lifetime updates, and tech support. Verified buyers rate PDNob 4.7 out of 5 stars.

If you handle paperwork every week, owning the editor outright is the smarter call.

Pick up PDNob Pro for $34.97 (reg. $349.95) while this deal lasts.

PDNob Pro PDF Editor: Lifetime SubscriptionSee Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.

TL;DR: This bundle pairs Windows 11 Pro with a lifetime Office Pro 2021 for Windows license. Get both for $34.97 (reg. $418.99) and skip the subscriptions.

Upgrading your operating system and your office suite usually means two big bills, or two subscriptions that never end.

Get this Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows and Windows 11 Pro Bundle for $34.97 (reg. $418.99) and take care of both in one purchase.

Two licenses that cover the whole PC

Windows 11 Pro adds the tools Home leaves out: BitLocker drive encryption, Hyper-V for virtual machines, Windows Sandbox for safely testing unfamiliar apps, and Azure AD support for business networks. Snap layouts, biometric sign-in, and Copilot in the taskbar round it out.

Office Professional 2021 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, and Teams, all installed on your PC instead of rented monthly.

Each license covers one PC and arrives by email right after purchase. Check compatibility with Microsoft’s PC Health Check app before buying.

The bundle has a 4.9/5 average from 131 verified reviews. For a new build or an aging PC, it handles the OS and Office in one move.

Get Windows 11 Pro and Office Pro 2021 together for $34.97 (reg. $418.99) before this pricing ends.

The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows: Lifetime License + Windows 11 Pro BundleSee Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.

“You f*cking idiot, I asked for…” might seem harmless if you’re saying it to an AI chatbot, and a lot of people are doing it. But if you’re one of them and your LLM of choice is Anthropic’s Claude, you might want to start keeping your frustration-driven interactions in check.

Anthropic recently updated its fine print regarding how users are allowed to interact with Claude. The changes come into effect on November 12th, 2026, and they’re part of a wider update to Anthropic’s terms of service.

According to this 2026 Usage Policy Update post, the goal is to address “extreme cases where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose.” The rule doesn’t apply to “common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.” (It’s unclear where the line sits between “frustration” and “cruel behavior.”)

The full relevant text:

Addressing abusive behavior toward our models

We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models. The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose. It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.

This addition aligns with a step we’ve already taken, allowing Claude models to end rare conversations with persistently abusive users on Claude.ai and Claude Code. Such abuse is the main focus of this update; Claude’s ability to end these interactions will remain the primary enforcement mechanism.

What happens if Claude is offended by your behavior? The main consequence is a terminated chat. Anthropic has already given its models the ability to end chats with users who persist in abusive behaviors on Claude.ai and Claude Code—this change enshrines that as an explicit prohibition in the company’s terms of use.

The update also includes clarifications on: political content and election interference, surveillance and law enforcement, weapons technology, and high-risk use cases involving health, legal rights, and finances.

If you’re tired of juggling multiple charging bricks and adapters, you should consolidate. This Ugreen Nexode 100W 4-port charger is down to $39.98 at Amazon (was $54.99), about 27% off its list price. That’s one charger doing the work of four, and that’s a solid price for a gadget that declutters and comes in handy day in and day out.

With its 100W of power delivery, it’s fast enough to handle charging for standard laptops like MacBooks and ultrabooks. Either of the top two USB-C ports hits that 100W throughput when used alone, and you can even use both upper USB-C ports to charge two laptop at once, with the first delivering 65W and the second 30W—the latter is only enough for low-power machines, though, like MacBook Airs and Chromebooks.

When all four ports (triple USB-C and a single USB-A) are in use, it splits up the charge: 45W / 30W / 10.5W / 10.5W. That means you could theoretically charge two low-power laptops and two smaller devices, like a phone and wireless earbuds. Or one laptop and three accessories. Or, again, use the top two only to fast-charge your laptop and phone.

GaN technology keeps it small, measuring just 2.7 x 2.7 x 1.3 inches, so it’s portable and a great replacement for whatever chunky laptop charger you’ve been using. The plug folds flat for travel—nothing will accidentally catch on it, and it won’t scratch anything.

If you want to shrink all your chargers down into a single point, get the Ugreen Nexode for 27% off. Amazon’s prices move without warning, so don’t sit on this for too long if you’re interested.

Graphics cards don’t simply die of old age — they usually suffocate due to neglect. The biggest enemy is dust, which settles on the cooling fins like an insulating layer and sabotages the cooling performance. However, before you take any action, you should carry out a professional diagnosis. Use the free tool Hwinfo for this.

Launch the program in ‘Sensors only’ mode and look for the ‘GPU Hotspot Temperature’ reading under your graphics card. This reading represents the hottest spot directly on the silicon chip. Compare it with the normal ‘GPU Temperature,’ which is the average reading. A difference (delta) of more than 20 degrees Celsius under full load is a clear warning sign.

It suggests that contact between the chip and the cooler is poor — for example, because the thermal paste has dried out or is unevenly distributed. If the delta is as high as 30 degrees Celsius or more, the card will already be significantly throttling its clock speed to prevent damage (thermal throttling).

The first step in maintenance is cleaning: To do this, first shut down the PC, press the power button, and unplug the power cable. Open the case and blow out the cooling fins with compressed air. Important: Make sure you hold the fan blades in place with your finger or a piece of adhesive tape.

If fans spin up uncontrollably due to the compressed air, they can act like a dynamo and send electrical voltages back into the motherboard or destroy their own bearings. If simply cleaning isn’t enough, it’s time to replace the thermal paste.

Note: Repasting a GPU could void the warranty for certain models and manufacturers. Check your documentation for details.

Conventional thermal paste is an option, but some users prefer phase-change material (PCM), such as the PTM7950 thermal pad. The name derives from the material’s physical property of being solid at room temperature (in a pad form) but liquefying at temperatures of around 45 to 55 degrees Celsius.

This phase change ensures that the material perfectly fills microscopic irregularities when warm, while it solidifies again when cooled. This prevents the dreaded “pump-out” effect, whereby traditional thermal pastes are gradually squeezed out of the gap due to the thermal expansion of the chip.

Applying PTM7950 requires care: Place the pad in the fridge or freezer for around 10 to 60 minutes before use. When cold, it is firmer and much easier to cut to size and remove the protective films. At room temperature, however, it is very sticky. Clean the graphics chip thoroughly with isopropyl alcohol (over 90 percent) and a lint-free cloth.

Cut the pad exactly to the size of the GPU chip, peel off the first protective film, position it centrally, and then carefully remove the second film. For the surrounding memory modules (VRAM) and voltage regulators, you should use thermal putty (thermal conductive putty). Unlike rigid thermal pads, putty is highly compressible.

This is crucial, as pads that are too thick can easily lift the cooler, thereby reducing the contact pressure on the main chip (GPU). This, in turn, leads to poorer temperature performance. Putty, on the other hand, adapts perfectly to any gap and guarantees maximum contact with the main processor.

By combining these proactive steps of cleaning and material optimization, you can transform your PC into a high-performance, long-lasting ecosystem that will serve you faithfully for many years to come.

Related content

• How GPU temperatures affect graphics card clock speeds
• How to check your PC’s CPU temperature
• Hot laptop? Do this to check for fan failure

Yesterday, Microsoft dropped the amount of OneDrive cloud storage included with Microsoft 365 Family, Premium, and Pro. The change only affects new customers right now, but existing customers will get hit with the reduction at their first subscription renewal on or after May 2nd, 2027.

Prior to this change, Microsoft 365 Family, Premium, and Pro provided 1TB of OneDrive storage per user, with all plans able to be shared with up to 5 other users (for a total of 6TB per account). After this change, both Family and Premium accounts are limited to a 2TB storage pool that’s shared by all users. Pro accounts get 5TB of cloud storage to share.

It’s a mixed bag. Solo users who were previously capped at 1TB now get twice the storage to play with, and anyone who was sharing with only one other person isn’t facing a huge difference. But if your account was split between three or more users, it’s a big downgrade.

What stings the most is that Microsoft isn’t adjusting the pricing on any of the plans. Microsoft 365 Family remains $12.99/month or $129.99/year, while Premium stays $19.99/month or $199.99/year. Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 Pro is a whopping $99.99/month with no annual option.

On this support page regarding the change, Microsoft makes it clear that it’s one shared storage amount: “The primary subscriber and up to five additional members draw from the same shared storage pool.” However, that doesn’t mean access is shared between all users: “While storage quotas are shared, files remain private.”

And you can expand the size of the storage pool with add-on purchases. It doesn’t sound like individual users can boost their own individual caps, but rather only contribute to the shared cap: “Storage add-ons purchased by subscription members are automatically added to the shared pool. Eligible family members’ free storage grants also contribute to the shared pool.”

The non-shareable plans remain unchanged: Microsoft 365 Basic gets 100GB of storage for $1.99/month or $19.99/year, while Microsoft 365 Personal gets 1TB of storage for $9.99/month or $99.99/year.

From treasured family photos to essential client footage, losing files can be devastating. Whether it’s down to a corrupted SD card, sudden power loss, or accidental deletion, recovering as much of that data as possible is critical. Wondershare Recoverit V15 is built to cover thousands of loss scenarios, across over a million different storage devices, giving you the best chance of salvaging that data.

With over 20 years of data recovery experience, Wondershare’s services combine robust and effective file recovery for photos, videos, and other data, with a streamlined process that helps you dig through even large file systems to recover and organize the most important files.

No SD Card Left Behind

For creators with hundreds or thousands of photos and videos on SD cards, an accidental deletion or sudden corruption event can feel catastrophic. That’s where Recoverit V15’s Profession SD Card Recovery can step in and help prevent disaster. It can identify the device and card information to use a bespoke scanning strategy to maximize file recovery and minimize data loss. You can track the recovery process the whole way, too, letting you preview photos and videos in real time, so you begin file recovery as soon as you confirm the footage is viable, without having to wait for the scan to finish. It has full support for the most popular video and image resolutions, too, including HDR and high-bitrate video.

After recovery it can organize the recovered files based on camera directory structures and the specific relationships between different files, making it easier to find the exact files you need to get back.

This works across other external storage solutions, too. If you’ve lost data on a corrupted flash drive, memory stick, or CF card, Recoverit V15’s Profession SD Card recovery tool is an excellent solution to the problem.

AI Advantage: Find Exactly What You Need

When recovering large quantities of lost media files, finding the most important photos and footage with traditional recovery tools isn’t easy; Recoverit V15’s smart search helps you narrow the results. It uses large language models to generate file tags and facilitate natural language search, helping you to find what you need.

Recoverit V15 groups scanned files for more focused recovery, linking related RAW and JPEG files, pairing videos with associated subtitles, and making it clear which files are ready to recover, and which ones may need further repair. In-built recovery quality evaluation ensures users have a clear picture of the state of the data. Quality checks show the condition of the scanned files, while automated repair tools attempt to fix any damage.

A Tool For Everyone

Recoverit V15 is compatible with Windows and macOS systems, allowing file and partition recovery on either operating system, with support for Apple Silicon, including the newer M5-based Macs and Mac Neo. Whether you’re running an older version of these operating systems or the latest Insider previews, Recoverit V15 is built to offer fast, effective file recovery with the same streamlined interface.

Give Wondershare Recoverit V15 a go today to help recover your lost files.

Price When Reviewed

$899.99

Best Prices Today: Acer Googlebook 14

The Acer Googlebook 14 impressed me, but not in the way I anticipated.

If you’re wondering what a Googlebook is, the short version is that it’s (in a way) the new Chromebook. Basically, it keeps much of the familiar Chromebook experience while adding deeper Android integration and new AI features. They’ve also got Intel and Qualcomm chips inside of them.

Going into this, I had a lot of questions, specifically about the new operating system (aka Googlebook OS) and its AI features. Is the new OS going to confuse me? What happens if I accidentally set off the Magic Pointer? Will it drive me bananas?

The answer, thankfully, was no — to a surprising degree.

Acer Googlebook 14: Under the hood

• Model: Acer Googlebook 14 (GP714-91N-50A0)
• OS: Googlebook OS
• Processor: Intel Core Ultra 5 325, 8-core, up to 4.5GHz
• Graphics: Intel Graphics, 4 Xe cores, up to 2.45GHz
• NPU: Intel AI Boost, up to 47 TOPS
• Memory: 16 GB
• Storage: 512GB SSD
• Display: 14-inch 2880×1800 OLED touchscreen, 120Hz
• Ports: 2× USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, 1× USB4/Thunderbolt 4, 1× 3.5mm headphone jack
• Wireless: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0+
• Weight: 2.51 lbs
• Price: $899.99

Acer Googlebook: Design-wise, it’s a step-up from Chromebook Plus models

The Googlebook arrived tucked inside what looked like a jewelry box–I got premium vibes from it right away. It also came with a laptop sleeve, which I appreciated. 

The design is a big part of why the price tag is higher than what you typically pay for a Chromebook Plus. (The other part is the hardware, which I’ll get to later.) You can feel the difference in the aluminum-magnesium chassis (most Chromebook Plus models are made of plastic). It feels very durable. The 360-hinge also lets you rotate the screen and use the laptop in tablet mode if that’s your thing. And, at 2.51 pounds and just 0.55 inches thick, it’s also surprisingly light and thin.

Acer Googlebook 14: The keyboard is comfortable, but the touchpad attracts fingerprints 

I generally prefer smaller laptops because I have smaller hands, so larger keyboards take me longer to get used to. Fortunately, I accustomed myself to this one pretty quickly since it’s still similar to the layout I use Once I adjusted, typing felt comfortable. 

The keyboard also has backlighting, which is nice — and something I’d expect at this price point. The power button doubles as the fingerprint sensor for logging in. 

The touchpad is centered and a good size, so I don’t have any complaints about how it feels to use. It’s also got a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass on it, so it feels smooth. 

The problem is that it started collecting fingerprints almost immediately. I don’t think something like that would deter me from purchasing a laptop (any laptops, really). But if you’re someone who likes keeping your laptop looking pristine, you’ll probably notice it.

Acer Googlebook 14: The webcam was fine, with one little hiccup

I used the 5MP webcam during a brief call and thought the video quality was perfectly fine. I didn’t look totally washed out, which is always a win as far as I’m concerned.

The call itself did drop me twice, although I was quickly reconnected both times. I don’t know if it was an issue with Microsoft Teams or the Googlebook itself, so I’m hesitant to blame the laptop for it. It didn’t feel great, though.

Acer Googlebook 14: The Glowbar is cute

There’s a little Glowbar on the lid, and I think it’s a cute feature.

Is it necessary? No.

But it’s unobtrusive, and it actually has a useful purpose: it tells you how much battery you have left, as well as the charging status. That’s handy when you only have a second to glance at the top of the laptop and want to know if you’re going to need to charge it soon.

It’s one of those little additions I wouldn’t necessarily ask for, but don’t mind having. I like that it’s small and subtle.

Acer Googlebook 14: This is a phone-first laptop

Acer sent me a Google Pixel 10 Pro XL to use with the Googlebook. I’m an iPhone user, though, so jumping to an Android phone felt a bit like landing on another planet. 

But this is where it got interesting for me. I could see why someone who already uses an Android phone would find this convenient. The Googlebook is designed to make your phone feel like an extension of it. The Continue On feature, for example, lets you continue whatever it is you’re doing on your phone on the Googlebook. I played around with it a little bit, but I’m not totally sold on the idea of connecting my phone to my laptop. I’d actually prefer to keep them separate–I don’t want all of my information in one place. But the deep Android integration is a clear selling point for Googlebooks.

Acer Googlebook 14: The interface feels surprisingly familiar

I expected the Googlebook to feel more different from a Chromebook, especially when navigating around the operating system.

It really doesn’t!

The biggest difference is what happens beyond the desktop. There is much more Android integration this time around. 

Still, I didn’t find myself fighting with the interface or wondering where everything had gone. 

Acer Googlebook 14: I kept forgetting about the Magic Pointer

The Magic Pointer is one of those features that I kept forgetting existed, despite being one of the darlings of the Googlebook’s marketing when it was first announced. 

That’s partly because you’ve got to wiggle the cursor in order to activate it, and that’s not something I naturally do when I’m using a laptop. If I’m wiggling the cursor around, it’s usually due to a moment of frustration. That said, you’ve got to really wiggle the cursor with intention in order to summon the Magic Pointer. It’s not easily triggered… but that might actually be a good thing.

Because I kept forgetting about it, the Magic Pointer wasn’t nearly as intrusive as I expected it to be.

I tried it out on a picture of a cool charcuterie board I saw on Reddit. The Magic Pointer came up with a couple of questions I could ask Gemini, including what kind of wine would pair well with it and how to recreate the board. When I asked to recreate it, Gemini popped up in the corner with a shopping list of ingredients and assembly steps.

It worked.

But I just don’t know if it’s something I’d actually use (or remember to use).

My instinct is to look up the ingredients and figure out assembly myself. And honestly, it’s probably easier for me to do that than to remember to wiggle the cursor first.

That’s the thing I noticed about the Googlebook’s AI features. They’re there. They work. They’re not particularly annoying. I just don’t always think to use them.

Acer Googlebook 14: As a laptop, it works really well

If you completely shelf the AI stuff/Android phone integration for a moment, the Googlebook is just a nice laptop. That’s a big compliment.

The particular Acer model I tested has an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, and that combination felt more than capable of handling my usual workload.

I had no problems throwing my usual workload at it: scrolling through Reddit, chatting with coworkers on Slack, writing articles in Google Docs, and generally bouncing between the things I normally do throughout the day.

I didn’t notice any slowdowns.

The web-based benchmarks I ran on the Googlebook backed up my experience:

• Basemark Web 3.0: 1,670
• Motion Mark: 4670.12 (@ 60 fps)
• WebXPRT 5: 95

Let’s take a closer look at Basemark 3.0, which measures browser performance–now let’s compare the Googlebook’s score (1,670) with the Acer Chromebook Plus 516’s score (901). The Acer Googlebook 14 was 85 percent faster than the Chromebook Plus model. As far as browser performance goes, the Googlebook has a meaningful advantage here. 

That comparison isn’t entirely apples-to-apples, though. Here’s why.

The Chromebook Plus 516 has the Core i3-1315U, which is a respectable budget CPU (2 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores). That said, the Googlebook’s Core Ultra 5 325 is much newer, with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, and is paired with 16GB of RAM rather than 8GB. No wonder it blew the Chromebook Plus out of the water!

In terms of hardware, the Acer Googlebook 14 is actually pretty close to the Dell XPS 14. They’ve both got an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 (“Panther Lake”) processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage. But the Googlebook has a much nicer display, and it’s also lighter and more versatile due to the 360-degree hinge. The Dell is considerably more expensive, too, at $1,409.99 (as tested). We didn’t run those web-based tests on the XPS 14, so I can’t make a direct performance comparison. 

The biggest hardware advantage, though, is the display. The Googlebook has a 14-inch OLED touchscreen, and it’s absolutely gorgeous.  

It has a 2880×1800 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage. It gets up to 500 nits, too, so it’s both sharp and bright.

I ended up putting it through one of my favorite unofficial laptop display tests: A Björk concert.

I watched Biophilia Live on this Googlebook, and it looked great. This is actually the second laptop I’ve tested where I’ve watched a Björk concert, which has become a pretty useful way for me to judge how colorful and sharp a display looks. Her concerts are full of incredibly colorful costumes and visuals, so a good screen has plenty to work with here.

My husband and I also watched a few episodes of Star Wars: Clone Wars, and the Googlebook handled those well, too. I never found myself wishing the display were brighter or more colorful.

Acer Googlebook 14: Battery life is a nice surprise

Battery life was another strong point for the Googlebook 14. In my everyday use, I got around 14 hours on a single charge. 

That was enough to get through a full workday and then some (without having to watch the battery percentage bar like a hawk). That’s an awesome result for a laptop with an especially bright OLED display.

I should note that it wasn’t a controlled battery test. Instead, I used the laptop unplugged until it ran out of juice and then calculated the time by using the data from the Battery Usage section in the Settings menu.

So, should you buy the Acer Googlebook 14?

I don’t think the answer is so simple here.

It depends.

The Acer Googlebook 14 costs $899.99 at the time of this writing. It’s pricier than a Chromebook Plus laptop, but you’re getting hardware that’s much closer to what I’d expect from a Windows laptop (like the Dell XPS 14). It’s not a powerhouse, but as a daily driver, it definitely delivers.

If you’re looking for a cheap Chromebook, this isn’t the laptop for you. But I don’t think that’s really who’s being targeted here.

A Googlebook makes sense if you want a premium, lightweight convertible laptop and you’re already well-acquainted with Google’s ecosystem. Doubly so if you’ve got an Android phone, as they’re deeply intertwined with one another.

Google made such a big deal about AI, but the most surprising thing was how… normal using a Googlebook feels. It wasn’t anywhere near as AI-forward as I thought it would be. 

Why in the world would you ever give ChatGPT access to your email? It’s a reasonable question, given everything we’re hearing about rogue AI agents, not to mention the privacy implications of unleashing AI in your inbox.

Then again, one of the best ways to appreciate the power of a personal AI assistant is to let it triage your unruly inbox, culling the spam and the marketing blasts while highlighting the messages that truly matter.

An agent with access to your messages can also give you a heads-up about impending meetings, warn you that your building’s elevator is out of service (that happened to me earlier this week), keep you current on that Jira ticket you filed, and perform other powerful workflows (like the one in this week’s prompt of the week, below).

To get access to your email, AI services like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Meta’s Muse agent need tools, and among the most common AI tools for email are those for Gmail. These tools allow AI models and agents to perform certain Gmail tasks, like “read message,” “add label,” “draft message,” or even — gulp — “send message.” 

They also come with sets of rules and permissions that (generally speaking) you can customize, allowing some actions to happen autonomously while others require a user’s approval, or are blocked altogether. Tweak these rules the right way, and you can minimize the chance of your agent, say, sending an email on its own when it shouldn’t. 

The key word, of course, is “minimize.” AI agents like ChatGPT Dots, Claude Cowork, Gemini Spark, and Meta Muse can act in unpredictable ways, and while you can prevent the agents from scooping up your Gmail messages for AI training data, sensitive details from your Gmail conversations could wind up in your AI chat threads, where they could be stored as memories.

So if you’re uncomfortable taking those risks — and hey, I get it — my advice is to leave the Gmail tools alone.

If you do choose to move ahead, know that enabling an AI’s Gmail integrations is just the first step. (ChatGPT has a Gmail “plugin,” while Claude and Muse call them “connectors,” and Gemini folds its Gmail integration under its “Personal Intelligence” umbrella.) Dig deeper, and you’ll find more granular controls for those Gmail tools, where you’ll be able to do things like set guardrails for when an agent can or can’t send email on its own. 

For Claude, click Settings > Connectors, then click on Gmail. From there, you’ll find a wide range of Gmail rules, from allowing Claude to peruse received and drafted messages to whether it can add labels to messages or even send them on its own. You can set entire groups of read-only and write/delete rules to “Always Allow,” “Needs Approval,” or “Blocked,” or you can set specific rules for each action. 

ChatGPT’s Gmail plugin rules (check Settings > Plugins) aren’t nearly as granular as Claude’s, giving you just four total options: “Always ask,” “Allow read actions,” “Allow low-risk actions,” or “Allow all actions.” The second setting — “Allow low-risk actions” — is the default, but personally I’d stick with “Allow read actions,” just to be sure ChatGPT asks before sending email on its own. 

Gemini is even more vague about the rules for its Gmail tool, essentially limiting you to turning its Gmail integration either on or off. According to a Google support page, Spark is “designed to ask for your review” before “sending communications,” which means it should stop and ask before sending a Gmail message on its own. But if Gemini’s lack of specific permission controls for Spark gives you pause (and that’s perfectly understandable), you might want to switch its Gmail connector off.

Finally, Meta Muse keeps its tool settings under Settings > Permissions > Connectors. Select the Gmail option, then start tweaking. As with Claude, Muse’s permission settings for Gmail allow you to fine-tune whether it can do things like access and search your email, draft messages, and send emails on its own, with your approval, or never. 

Aside from general Gmail permissions, you’ll want to block the use of your Gmail for AI model training. The best way is to ensure you have the overall “help improve our models” setting for ChatGPT, Claude, and Meta Muse turned off (check under Settings > Data Controls or Privacy). Google, for its part, says it won’t train its models “directly” on your Gmail messages, but may train on “limited info,” such as “specific prompts in Gemini or AI Mode and the model’s responses.”

Now that you’ve hardened permissions and checked your AI model-training settings, what can you do with your new Gmail AI superpowers? Check the prompt below for one example, and I’ll have more in the weeks ahead.

More in AI this week

• Google will now let anyone try its SynthID detector, a tool that lets you check images, videos, and audio files for AI watermarks. Just keep in mind that the detector can’t prove whether a suspicious-looking viral video is real. [PCWorld]
• ChatGPT is about to get its own digital wallet, which could allow ChatGPT Dot agents to make web purchases on its own. [PCWorld]
• Common Sense Media is sounding the alarm over ChatGPT for Teens, which “could give parents false confidence in guardrails and safety alerts that frequently don’t work.” [The Verge]
• Anthropic’s just filled out its 5.5 family of Claude models with the fast and cheap Haiku 5.5, which joins the mid-range Sonnet 5.5 and the top-end Opus 5.5. I plan on giving the new Haiku a test drive in the next few days, so I’ll report back on what it can and can’t do. [VentureBeat]
• AI is crushing it when it comes to solving math’s toughest riddles. But while their solutions check out, their reasoning is often indecipherable to human mathematicians, with some grimly predicting the “end of math as we know it.” [Quanta Magazine]

Prompt of the week: The “find my forgotten accounts” prompt

So, you took a deep breath and connected your Gmail to AI. Here’s an agentic “outcome”-oriented prompt to put that new ability to the test.

With this prompt, you’ll be directing an AI agent to scour your Gmail for messages about long-lost accounts you previously signed up for, with the AI doing a read-only search for “verify your email” and “confirm your account” messages.

When it’s done, you’ll get a spreadsheet detailing all the accounts the agent found, with the most dormant at the top, along with links (when available) for deleting the forgotten accounts you don’t want anymore.

That’s all for now!

Thanks for reading the latest issue of Prompt Mode.

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I’ve never bought a PC or component second-hand, but that may change if this RAM shortage doesn’t let up soon.

I started thinking about the issue after listening to this week’s episode of The Full Nerd, which features some smart conversation about the consequences of purchasing used components as well as the best way to safely find and buy them.

The prospect of buying a gently-used laptop or desktop is also starting to seem a lot more rosy these days, as prices for new models skyrocket. I know I’m not alone on this front, either; a recent UK-based market analysis survey shows sales of used PCs and components is rising across Europe, with the rate of secondhand PC sales nearly doubling year-over-year in the UK.

Here in the States I know I certainly wouldn’t want to try and buy a new gaming PC unless I absolutely had to, and I’d be even more scared of trying to build one myself since the cost of RAM and storage is beyond belief. I suspect that’s why this week’s episode of The Full Nerd ended up devoting so much time to the risks and benefits of buying used PC parts: more people than ever are interested in doing just that, and you want to know what you’re walking into before you take a risk on a used CPU or graphics card.

I really appreciated the hosts’ advice on how to find great deals on used PC hardware, and Adam’s insights have me second-guessing my aversion to Facebook Marketplace. Will the next PC I build be a hodgepodge of used components? Could be! I’d just better be careful when it comes to used CPUs, because it sounds like those can carry the sins of their former owners (read: bans in games like Fortnite and Valorant) more easily than other hardware.

In this week’s episode of The Full Nerd

This week it was a two-man show as regular host Adam Patrick Murray was joined by our own Michael Crider to chat about the latest Steam hardware survey, the risk of being banned from some online games if you have a used CPU and more.

Later in the show our dynamic duo made time to answer questions from the chat as well as the Full Nerd Discord on everything from the value of pre-built PCs in this economy to tips for buying used hardware.

Nerd news of the week

Here are a few of my favorite pieces of nerd news this week, touching on everything from the cutting edge of keyboard switches to the remarkable lengths some retailers are going to in order to stop folks from shipping their overpriced Nvidia graphics cards to China.

• Explaining Hall-effect, TMR, and other new types of “mechanical” switches: Love keyboards? This illuminative guide from Ars Technica helps explain the difference between optical switches, electrostatic capacitive switches and other intriguing types of keyboard switches, which can be a big help when you’re choosing which keyboard to buy.
• Researcher ports Doom to $8,000 Hasselblad X2D: If you ever wanted to see Doom running on a fancy camera worth nearly $10,000, here’s your chance!
• Buying an RTX 5090? You need to promise you won’t export it first: Recent increases in the price of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 have led Micro Center to start requiring buyers to show ID and fill out a form promising they won’t export the cards internationally, suggesting that these beefy graphics cards are more in demand than ever in foreign data centers.
• Memory executives expect RAM shortage to continue through 2028: Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Micron executives are saying most of their RAM supply for 2027 is already sold through and the prices were higher than in 2026, suggesting the RAM shortage will likely continue through at least 2028.

That’s it for your Full Nerd newsletter this week! Until next week, be sure to bookmark PCWorld and keep an eye on the YouTube channel for our latest videos out of the garage. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website!

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.

I don’t know about you, but there’ve been countless times that I go to bed exhausted only for my brain to suddenly decide it’s the perfect time to replay an awkward conversation from five years ago. If that sounds familiar, then I recommend giving the site Fall Asleep a try. It’s a free website with a small collection of exercises aimed at helping you quiet your thoughts so you can drift off to sleep.

Shutting your brain off at night can be easier said than done, especially when your whole life is full of awkward moments. The most successful method I’ve found is called “cognitive shuffling” and Fall Asleep has a really neat tool for this. Cognitive shuffling serves up random, unrelated words and images that you then visualize and focus on in your mind. The idea is to break up the connected, problem-solving thoughts that tend to keep your brain switched on when you should be sleeping.

Cognitive Shuffling works best for me, but Fall Asleep offers a few other tools like a simple guided breathing exercise and a tool called “Brain Dump” that encourages you to jot down your busy thoughts before bed. According to the site, nothing is shared and all data is stored locally on your web browser.

Unlike sleep tracking smart watches that overload you with anxiety-inducing data metrics, Fall Asleep keeps it low-key and that’s for the best. So the next time you’re lying awake at 1 a.m. staring at the ceiling, go ahead and fire up Fall Asleep and see if it helps. 

For more fun and helpful tips, tricks, website and app recommendations, be sure to subscribe to our PCWorld Try This newsletter.

The best way to protect yourself against online scammers and hackers is to remain vigilant. But even if you exercise best practices in password management and web browsing, there’s no stopping the masses of personal information data brokers can build up on you over time. From the adverts you see, to the websites you visit, to the devices you browse with, people search sites can generate detailed profiles on you and your family that only make the job of advertisers, scammers, and hackers easier.

It’s your data, so you can demand they remove it, but doing that manually with the hundreds of data brokers all over the world can be frustrating and extremely time consuming. RemoveMe is an affordable service that’s designed specifically to remove the data and the usual headaches of chasing it down.

What does RemoveMe do?

RemoveMe offers fast, effective removal of your personal data from over 400 different websites with no need for you to contact anyone. It automatically finds any mention of your personal information, and issues a takedown request on your behalf, jumping through all the hoops automatically so you don’t have to.

Every takedown is verified and confirmed and where possible, RemoveMe issues opt-out requests to those same services so they don’t scrape and aggregate your information again in the future. To make sure they stick to it, too, it maintains continuous monitoring. If the data reappears on broker sites, RemoveMe automatically has it removed again.

Rather stay on top of it? RemoveMe’s dashboard lets you track each removal in real time, and will deliver a notification any time new information is detected and removed.

Why Data Removal Matters

It’s easy to think that with everyone online being recorded as much as you, that removing your personal data from people search sites won’t do much. But that data can be used by just about anyone. Often, it’s not for good reasons.

• Spam callers and scammers use data-broker dossiers to target individuals with highly specialized scams. The more personal information they have on you, the more convincing they can sound.
• Doxxing is a major concern on the web and social media, with home addresses, workplaces, and school information all making it easier to harass you in person, or target you and your family with sophisticated social engineering attacks.
• Identity theft and account breaches are far easier if a hacker has your personal details. Data brokers can serve up the kind of identifying information that attackers can use to steal accounts and impersonate you online and over the phone.

Using RemoveMe makes the job of every bad actor harder, delivering continuous automated protection for you and your family’s personal privacy.

Try it Out

Wondering just how much information on you is out there? RemoveMe offers a free 30-second scan to see just how much data brokers know about you. It’s probably more than you think.

If you’d like to take the next step and have RemoveMe act on your behalf to take down that data and shore up your personal privacy, you can have full peace of mind for just $9.99 a month.

TL;DR: PDF Agile edits, converts, and signs PDFs, and a lifetime subscription is on sale for $29.97 (reg. $119) through October 11.

Most PDF editors charge a monthly subscription, even if you only use them a few times a year. PDF Agile Premium is an all-in-one PDF editor, converter, and viewer for Windows and Mac that doesn’t require a monthly fee. Instead, you can get a lifetime subscription on sale for just $29.97 (reg. $119).

PDF Agile works a lot like Adobe Acrobat. You can edit text inside a PDF directly, scanned pages included, without hunting down the original file. Conversions go both ways between PDF and Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and your fonts and formatting stay intact. For scanned receipts and screenshots, OCR pulls the text out so you can search, copy, or edit it.

Sharing sensitive files gets easier, too. You can lock a PDF behind a password, permanently redact text and images, and collect electronic signatures in three different ways. When a contract comes back with changes, a compare tool puts both versions side by side and highlights every difference. Compress, merge, split, and drag-and-drop page reordering are all included for everyday cleanup.

Your PDF Agile account works on two devices at once, so a Windows desktop and a MacBook can share one license. You’ll need Windows 7 or later, or macOS 10.15 Catalina or later. Updates are included, and both new and existing users can redeem within 30 days of purchase.

Stop paying every month just to edit a few PDFs.

Until 11:59 p.m. PT on October 11, you can get a PDF Agile Premium Lifetime Subscription on sale for $29.97.

PDF Agile Premium: All-in-One Lifetime Subscription (Windows & Mac)See Deal

StackSocial prices subject to change.