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.
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.
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.
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
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 is physically much smaller than the RTX 5090 despite sharing the same design language. That’s because it’s a lot weaker in native rendering!
Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
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
Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founders Edition.
Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
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.
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.
Welcome to PCWorld’s newsletter, Smart Mode! The focus of this newsletter is productivity: from software to hardware to peripherals, all with the idea to get what you need to get done, efficiently.
I’m your host, Mark Hachman, covering the productivity tips, tools, and trends that you need to know about, both from within PCWorld and beyond. If you want the latest issue in your inbox each week, just sign up right here.
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.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
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.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
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!
Mark Hachman / Foundry
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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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.
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