Innehållsförteckning för September 2021 från Maximum PC

I AM FASCINATED WITH AI. It’s one of those things that is simultaneously terrifying and exceedingly exciting from both a technological and philosophical point of view. We’ve all seen Terminator, I’m sure, and the idea of an advanced, hyper-intelligent, self-learning, self-replicating machine race certainly does have its own horrifying implications for humanity. But on the flip side, the advancements and jumps AI could potentially produce in the worlds of medicine, technology, astrophysics, and everything else in between mean it’s too enticing not to embark upon. And, let’s face it, these are still ultimately going to be machines that are confined by rules, physics, and properties that limit their capability. Nonetheless, AI is also something of a buzz-acronym. Similar to nuclear fusion, it’s one of those things that’s always been “just…

IN MAY, RESEARCHERS uncovered a vulnerability in Windows that could enable hackers to access people’s printers. Unfortunately, they put the proof of concept online, so a potential threat became a real one. Apparently, they assumed that Microsoft had fixed the problem. Two bugs had been merged into one Microsoft security indicator, but only one had been fixed. The flaw enables hackers to remotely execute code with system level access. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an emergency directive to federal agencies to disable the Windows Print Spooler or risk the compromise of the “entire identity infrastructure of a targeted organization.” Cue an emergency patch from Microsoft. The fix did cause a few printers to stop working, but it’s hardly unheard of for a patch to break something else. A…

MICROSOFT HAS LAUNCHED a new Cloud PC service: Windows 365. For a monthly fee, you’ll be able to access a virtual copy of Windows sitting on an Azure server. This is apparently a “new era of hybrid personal computing.” You’ll be able to run your Windows system on any suitable device wherever you are (including Mac, Linux, and Android systems, and via a browser), ideal for remote working. You can jump straight into a Windows session, with everything as you left it. All you need is a reasonable Internet connection. The thin client model means you won’t need a beefy machine to run intensive applications. There are multiple levels of service, with differing amounts of processing power, memory, and storage. For light office work, you can have a 2GB single-CPU…

>Malware Infections >Sleep Problems >Windows 7 issues Malware Begone! I hope the Doctor is in, as I have a very frustrating problem with some adware/malware. My pastor has an older PC running Win 10. It has the free versions of AVG and Malwarebytes installed, along with Windows Defender. A year or so ago, she started getting ads for Staples.com popping up, taking over the Chrome browser. We noticed that while she was working on a document, the Run command prompt would pop up in the lower-left of the screen and she would be taken to Staples.com. I checked the Run command history and found several variations of Staples.com in the list. Some were misspelled. I ran deep scans with AVG and Malwarebytes but found nothing. I erased the Run history,…

IN AN IDEAL WORLD, we would rather be running an 11th-gen CPU in our new build, with a later Z590i motherboard. This would have certainly made more sense for our SSD. Regardless, our rig is still a more-than-capable fighting machine. Being a Mini-ITX build, it certainly was more difficult and awkward than a typical ATX case. Fitting everything to the mobo was easy enough, but when it came to fitting parts inside the chassis, some niggling issues arose. The obvious lack of space meant that we had to take things more slowly. Every component we added decreased the available workspace, resulting in even more stress. This is where our long-necked magnetic screwdriver came in. Screwing down the mobo was not as daunting thanks to this tool. The cooler created most…

You’ve probably experienced the frustration of troubleshooting a problem that coincides with a recent installation or update, whether app, hardware, or Windows-related. Rather than waste time trying to track down a solution, why not roll your PC back to the moment before that problem started? This is where System Restore comes in; it’s Windows’ own snapshot-based backup system that only records system changes, enabling you to roll things back without affecting any other files. It’s not received much love in Win 10—and may even have been disabled on smaller hard drives—but can still do a good job of undoing most system changes (with the exception of major feature updates). You can verify it’s switched on and roll back your PC from the same dialog box. Type “restore” in the Search box…

GREAT REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE • Save over 74% when you subscribe. • Free PC Gamer Annual 2021 digital bookazine. • Never miss an issue. • Get every issue delivered direct to your door. FREE BOOKAZINE WHEN YOU BECOME A MAXIMUM PC SUBSCRIBER TO ORDER GO TO www.magazinesdirect.com/mpc/B1IMAG TERMS AND CONDITIONS Offer open to new US subscribers only. Pricing is guaranteed for the first 12 months and we will notify you in advance of any price changes. Please allow up to six weeks for delivery of your first subscription issue (up to eight weeks overseas). The full subscription rate is for 12 months (13 issues) and includes postage and packaging. If the magazine ordered changes frequency per annum, we will honor the number of issues paid for, not the term of…

Ask anyone for a real-world usable example of AI and they’ll probably pick one of the big three big digital assistants: Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, or Google Assistant. But are such services better run locally on a device or up in the cloud? Take Apple’s iPhone. You might be surprised just how much of the familiar iPhone functionality is driven or at least enhanced by AI. It’s used, for instance, to distinguish between intentional inputs and accidental brushes against the capacitive touchscreen. Machine learning algorithms are also used to schedule charging, to improve long-term battery health, and to sort images in the Photo app into ready-made galleries and identify people using facial recognition. Depending on the age of a given iPhone, it may also be able to use machine learning to…

BLUE-LIGHT FILTERING GLASSES for streamers and gamers (or anyone who spends over five hours a day staring at a monitor) aren’t new, but they’re surging in popularity. Companies such as Blux have released prescription blue-light blocking specs in partnership with esports teams; now Razer has entered the fray with a unique approach The Anzu smart glasses are a union of blue-light filtering lenses and smart assistant tech, which consists of built-in headphones, a microphone, and invisible touch controls. They connect to your device of choice via Bluetooth, linking automatically to a paired device when you unfold them. The Anzu specs were designed with gamers in mind, demonstrated by a gaming mode that triggers ultralow-latency audio and a game-oriented sound mix. Naturally, they’re well equipped to work with smart assistant tools…

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR CC 2020 To view compatibility visit: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/system-requirements.html. WE’VE RECENTLY FEATURED quite a few Photoshop tutorials, so we thought we’d switch it up a little and give its sister software a bit of love. Illustrator is an equally powerful tool in the Adobe ecosystem. At first glance, all the apps in the Adobe suite look pretty similar. Apart from the names and color schemes, you could easily be forgiven for getting them confused. This, though, is a good play from Adobe; with similar interfaces, it makes switching between the apps a bit easier. We will get on to Illustrator’s UI in more detail a little later. Essentially, the main difference between Photoshop and Illustrator is that Photoshop uses pixels and is raster-based, whereas Illustrator uses vector-based rastering. In simpler…

A RASPBERRY PI Fourth generation is best; plus you need a USB hard drive. RASPBERRY PI OS LITE Download from http://raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/. ETCHER Download from www.balena.io/etcher/. LET’S BEGIN WITH THE BAD NEWS, before you get all excited: The Raspberry Pi 4 is not the best choice as a NAS host. What is more, the Pis that came before it should probably be avoided at all costs. This isn’t some elitist sentiment, it’s a hardware issue. The earliest Pis top out at USB 2.0, have a limited controller that leans heavily on CPU power, and give their USB ports and Ethernet connection a shared bus, severely limiting bandwidth. The Pi 4 is built in a more sensible way, but it still shares each of its USB ports over a single PCIe lane…

I’VE SPOKEN in the past about my love for Ikea Skadis pegboards. I’ve got a few dotted around my office, holding everything from headphones, laptops, and PC hardware to a Nordic bearded axe (thanks, Pops!), my sports memorabilia, and even Warhammer paints, and it got me thinking: What if you could turn one into a PC case? We’ve seen plenty of wall-mounted PCs, and there’s a ton of cases, too. Thermaltake offers one, and there’s a few from other manufacturers, but they’re usually pricey, cumbersome, tricky to put together, and covered with chunky glass. Traditionally, wall-mounted PCs were made from purpose-cut acrylic or similar, but technically, you could get a Skadis pegboard and convert it into a chassis quite easily. At least, that’s what my brain is telling me. And…

AS YOU DON’T live under a rock, you’ll know we are to be graced with Windows 11 shortly. And as this is a Microsoft launch, you know that somewhere something didn’t go quite to plan. The shiny new OS may be just the job, but the hardware specifications you need to run it haven’t exactly been easy to follow, causing headaches and anger as it appeared that a lot of relatively new rigs weren’t going to make the cut. The first thing that caught people’s eye was the requirement for TPM 2.0. What is TPM? It’s a Trusted Platform Module, a chip (or integrated into the chipset or firmware) used to authenticate hardware devices. It includes a unique security key, and can generate encryption keys among other things. The Department…

INTEL ISSUES PRODUCT CHANGE notifications regularly, listing chips due to be discontinued. Its last list of 24 included some surprisingly recent silicon, including tenth-generation Comet Lake and Ice Lake chips, as well as 11th-gen Lakefield chips, which will all disappear by spring 2022. Losing Ice Lake so early has to be disappointing for Intel; it’s relatively new, but never performed that well. However, the real surprise is the dumping of Lakefield—it was only launched in June 2020. As Intel prosaically put it, “Market demand for the products listed has shifted to other Intel products.” Translation: People didn’t want to buy them. It added that “they demonstrated the potential of hybrid x86 CPU and new packaging technology.” Lakefield is Intel’s only hybrid design that mixes small and big CPU cores, in…

This isn’t the first time China has taken a negative stance toward bitcoin and its ilk, but in the most recent surge, things apparently got a bit out of hand. Now, the Chinese government is taking a dual-pronged approach to attacking crypto. First, China has tightened its restrictions on banking and payment companies dealing with cryptocurrencies. While the government already limited what banks could do with crypto since 2013, the latest directions from the People’s Bank of China, as an example, state that institutions must not accept virtual currencies in any form or provide the ability to exchange virtual currencies for the Chinese yuan or other foreign currencies. There are also restrictions on storing crypto for people looking to invest, and 2017’s ban on ICOs (initial coin offerings) remains in…

SMALL FORM FACTORS are one of our favorite things in the mysterious depths of the tech industry. Year after year, hardware is condensing and we’re getting more punch from smaller devices. Yes, we all dream of having a monster machine as part of our setup, capable of rinsing everything we throw in its direction and giving NASA a run for its money. However, there is something intriguing about Mini-ITX builds that we just can’t escape from. Having a smaller rig can give you a cleaner setup and more room (obviously), and they look pretty neat, too, in our professional opinion. It seems as though Mini-ITX systems are nothing but positive news, but that isn’t necessarily the case. GPUs such as the impossible-to-grab 3090 cards, for instance, are generally too big for…

HAVE YOU EVER suffered the crippling sensation of data loss? Found yourself having to reinstall Windows from scratch and realizing just how many apps and settings have been lost? The importance of backups cannot be overstated, but does your current backup plan cover all the bases? Is it comprehensive, frequently updated, and spread across multiple locations? In this feature, we reveal the best free tools for the job, from taking a fail-safe backup of entire hard drives to protecting multiple versions of your data files, so you can undo unwanted changes in addition to protecting the files themselves. We also recommend what to look for in backup devices, and how to safely store your files in the cloud without potentially exposing them to third parties. Crucially, we step you through…

As things stand, you’ve protected your entire PC and your key files and folders. You’ve created multiple backups of each. But if you’d like to go further, the following apps and services are all worth considering. First, want to back up your email? MailStore Home (www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home) enables you to not just back up the email you download to your PC through Thunderbird or Outlook, but also works with any online POP3/IMAP account, as well as popular Internet mailboxes such as Gmail and Yahoo! You can easily download all or a portion of your mailboxes, and are also able to browse and search your archive offline, enabling you to free up space elsewhere. We recommend installing it as a portable version, allowing you to keep everything in a single folder you can…

IT’S THE NEXT BIG WAVE of computing. So says Intel of artificial intelligence (AI). If anything, that’s underselling it. According to some evangelists, AI is the key to unlocking almost every major problem humanity faces, from a cure for cancer to limitless clean energy. Less optimistic observers, including philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris, see AI as one of the most pressing existential threats to the survival of mankind. Either way, as Dr.Emmett Brown would put it, it’s pretty heavy. Even a brief analysis of the implications of AI quickly takes on epic proportions. Back at the more pratcical end of the epistemological scale, getting a grasp on current commercial implementations of AI can be equally baffling. Machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, Tensor cores—keeping track of the processes and hardware, not…

THE LAST DECADE was something of a golden age for PC gaming. It saw the gap between consoles and gaming PCs widen even further, as the hardware we play on became more powerful and capable than ever before. But it also saw the emergence of the blockbuster game as a rival to the kind you see in theaters. In 2007, 14 years ago, Halo 3 took the largest launch-day sales of any media property at that time, with first-day sales of $170 million, overtaking the likes of Harry Potter and Spider-man at the movies. Since then, the numbers have only got bigger, and in 2017, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds took $900 million on its first day, toppling 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V ($815m). GTAV—a game that launched on Xbox 360 and has appeared…

We briefly touched on some of the uses of Adobe Illustrator earlier, but we have plenty of interesting tutorials lined up to help you get stuck into some imaginative projects in forthcoming issues. We keep comparing it to Photoshop, not necessarily in how similar it is, but how high it sits in the industry hierarchy. Illustrator is the industry standard for creative design work that uses shapes, colors, typography, logos, and so on. If you are creative and have a talent for art, Illustrator could be a great way for you to step up your skills to create something digitally. It’s a great tool for creating artwork exactly how you want it. We aren’t disparaging traditional art methods, but if you make a mistake on paper, you can’t exactly press…

RASPBERRY PI 4/400 Plus a microSD card or other compatible storage, a game controller, and some games you already own. THOSE OLD DOS GAMES gathering dust in a cupboard can be given a new lease of life through an emulator, but why stop there? Why not build a retrogaming box that’s got wireless controller support, connects to your TV through HDMI, and leaves your PC free to do other things? You can do just this with a Raspberry Pi. There’s a whole operating system, RetroPie, dedicated to the playing of retro games, and while emulating consoles means skirting around the edge of the law, playing the DOS games you already own is much more legally pleasing, and there’s the bonus of several very good games being made available as freeware,…

OH, KLEI Entertainment. Will you ever stop knocking it out of the park? Don’t Starve has long been a favorite game of mine, and Invisible, Inc. was a similarly engaging experience, despite the shift to turn-based strategy. Klei’s titles stand out with their engaging twists on established formulas, typically combined with a striking, unique art style. Griftlands is no different, taking the ace gameplay mechanics of card-based roguelike Slay the Spire and dressing it up in a cartoonish sci-fi post-post-apocalypse. From the get-go, it’s more narrative-driven than most roguelikes. Pick from a selection of three “heroes”—bounty hunter Sal, double agent Rook, or chaotic wastrel Smith—and embark on their own personal journey. Die, and it’s back to square one; succeed, and you unlock new challenges, perks, and cards. While the overall…

WHEN IT COMES to SSDs, i t’s all too easy to become obsessed with numbers. The latest PCIe Gen 4 drives knock out six or seven gigabytes per second of raw bandwidth. Not long ago, figures like that wouldn’t have looked too shabby for RAM or system memory, let alone storage. Thing is, there’s a lot more to storage performance than peak throughput. That’s good news for the new SK Hynix Gold P31, an M.2 NVMe SSD sampled here in its 1TB version. It makes do with a quad-lane PCIe Gen 3 interface, limiting peak theoretical performance to 4GB/s rather than the 8GB/s of Gen 4 drives. Of course, for a lot of legacy PCs, the very idea of PCIe Gen 4 is rather fanciful. Until the launch of the…

WHILE THE FORGOTTEN REALMS can be a very welcoming campaign setting—just see the sandy beaches of Baldur’s Gate III for more on that—there’s a part of it, Icewind Dale, that is inhospitable and practically repels adventurers. And yet they keep setting games there. Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance is a successor to the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games of the mid-’00s, rather than the Infinity Engine titles of a few years earlier. This means a hack-and-slash action-RPG rather than anything with too many dice-rolls behind the scenes, and a slip into a third-person viewpoint from the traditional top-down look. Powered by Unreal 4, this is a game built with co-op in mind. That’s not to say you can’t solo it, but playing it on your own feels as though something…

A RUSSIAN-BASED group of hackers known as REvil has broken into Kaseya, a Miami-based company that provides IT services, including VSA, a remote monitoring tool for networks. Modifications were made to VSA, which was unwittingly used by the victims, enabling the hackers to start encrypting files. As soon as the breach was noticed, Kaseya recommended that its customers shut down VSA, and it took all its data centers offline. A fix was in place three days later, but damage had been done. Part of VSA’s job is the automated distribution of software across networks, which makes it an ideal target for these attacks. It’s unclear how many companies have been compromised; Kaseya claims it’s 50. However, these companies have their own customers, and it’s estimated that 1,000 to 2,000 business…

Windows 11 is a good-looking OS on the surface (also on the Surface, if you’ve got the right model) with its excellent new desktop background images and, yes, even the rounded corners on its windows. There’s loads to like about it, such as the revamped Microsoft Store that seems to run at twice the speed of the Windows 10 version, even in a virtual machine, or the Widgets that slide effortlessly from the left of the screen, a much more elegant solution than a weather report embedded on the taskbar. But Windows 10 was supposed to be the end. Windows-as-a-service, updated for free, new tech patched in, and old features removed. Such as Live Tiles, which have been removed in 11 to make way for the new technology of static…

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 1 BARE BONES STRIPPING DOWN THE CASE is one of the best things to do at the start of a build. When all the panels are off, it helps you see what you are working with and gives you as much room as possible—a must for cramped ITX systems. Plus, it’s a good chance to see the case without all the hectic mess that’s about to unfold. Without any glass panels, this chassis looks pretty intimidating, considering its size. Right, let’s get into this mini beast. First, pull off the side panels using the concealed push pins. Easy-peasy. The same goes for the top panel. To get the front panel off, remove the plastic clasp pins that secure it before popping…

You can never have too many backup devices. A rule of thumb is to back up to a minimum of two physically separate drives or locations, and if you have cloud storage, store at least your most critical files online, too (ensuring they’re as secure as they can be). The cheapest backup option is a secondary hard drive—whether internal or connected via USB, it’s quick and convenient, but vulnerable to the same fire, damage, or theft as your main PC. With prices slowly tumbling, select the largest drive you can afford (4TB costs around $90) to meet your backup needs both now and going forward. Ideally, your second backup drive should be in a different room—if not off-site—to provide additional protection against physical threats. Look for a network (NAS) device that…

How do you restore data from Duplicati backups? If you’ve not had to reinstall Windows from scratch, simply open Duplicati in your browser, expand the relevant backup job, and click “Restore files” under “Operations.” If you’ve had to reinstall Duplicati from scratch on a new computer or install, and you backed up your configuration files, choose “Restore from configuration,” click “Next” to select your configuration file, and enter your password. On clicking “Next,” the backup job should be restored, and you can start the restoration process from there. If you didn’t back up the configuration file, choose “Restore > Direct restore from backup files” and click “Next.” This is a similar process to setting up your backup: Choose your provider, enter the destination path, and link to the account. You then…

Is there anybody involved in chip design with a better résumé than Jim Keller? He’s the brains behind not only AMD’s first CPU architecture to really sock it to Intel (that’ll be Hammer back in the 2000s), but also the driving force that led to Zen and AMD’s renaissance in the late 2010s. He sired Tesla’s Autopilot chip, set Apple on the path to building arguably the most efficient client CPUs available today, and more recently had a stint at Intel. Now Keller is heading a start-up, Tenstorrent, specializing in custom chips for accelerating AI workloads. That fact alone is enough to lend serious credibility to the field of AI and machine learning. According to Keller, there are now three kinds of computers. First there were CPUs. Then came GPUs.…

TIP OF THE MONTH WETRANSFER There are tons of ways to move files from machine to machine, but transferring them across the cloud is a particularly easy method (as long as your Internet connection is fast enough). WeTransfer (http://wetransfer.com) is a great site for this, with free file transfers of up to 2GB available. You can email files across or create a custom URL that lasts for a week—ideal for temporary sharing. A SMALL HURDLE I presumed after my first PC build that it would be plain sailing from then on. I couldn’t have been more wrong. But that’s all part of the fun, right? I challenged myself to put together a Mini-ITX build, as small form factors have always appealed to me. They’re just the natural trajectory of technology;…

A PC WITH THE CORRECT CPU See Step 1 for details. THERE’S A NEW OS IN TOWN, you can get it for free, and you’re going to want it. Windows 11 is a handsome beast, reminiscent of Windows 10, yet still its own thing, with more to recommend it than a centered taskbar and rounded corners on its windows. Anyone on the Windows Insider Dev Channel will already have had a build of 11 arrive through Windows Update. It is, at the time of writing, quite stable, but is not exactly what you’d call feature-complete. Still, it makes an interesting thing to have in a virtual machine or installed on a spare PC so you can bring it out at parties and impress your friends. There’s a snag, however. It’s…

WHIRLWIND FX’S flagship keyboard is the Element (currently the Element V2, to be precise), a full-scale mechanical keyboard that offers a unique form of reactive per-key RGB lighting. The Atom is essentially the same product trimmed down to a slender 60-percent form factor. As you are probably aware, that means no numpad, no arrow keys, and no dedicated function keys. This is a barebones keyboard, offering just enough buttons to do everything a standard gaming keyboard should be capable of. Function keys and media controls are printed on the front sides of some keys, activated via simultaneous keypresses with Fn; for example, Fn-Q plays or pauses music on the Atom. Whether or not a 60-percent keyboard is right for you comes down largely to personal preference, but there are some…

EVERYONE NEEDS a reliable backup tool, and as we outline on page 28, that should include a full drive image of your entire system, giving you the ability to restore your PC to working order with minimal disruption in the event of disaster. This issue, we’re pitting two drive-imaging tools against each other: Macrium Reflect 8 Home Edition is the paid-for version of our favorite free drive-imaging tool, while Acronis TrueImage 2021 is a long-established and trusted heavyweight. But do you even need to pay for a driveimaging tool? Macrium Reflect Free has protected our PCs for years, but there are some niggles that both the Home edition and Acronis resolve, the main one being support for incremental backups. These make daily (and even intra-daily) backups practical thanks to the…

> Maximum PDF Archive > Router Reliability > Data Scientist 2.0 Magazine Back Catalog Zak, Back before you were born, Maximum PC offered the “PDF Archive” as an alternative to maintaining a physical library. While I realize that a digital subscription is offered (and I am a subscriber to it, plus the print version), there’s no way to really “save” a copy other than take screenshots (ugh). I don’t know how much revenue is generated from sales of past issues, so perhaps Future could make older issues available? For example, maybe issues older than a year or two could be posted somewhere. Keep up the good work! –B. Brabson EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, ZAK STOREY, RESPONDS: Hey there! Firstly: rude. I’m not that young, ha-ha! Secondly, I absolutely 100-percent agree with you, we…