Many people rightly believe that panicking about SSD lifespan is pointless, since most PCs will never write enough data to a drive to exhaust its endurance. If you check your SSD's health with CrystalDiskInfo or a first-party tool, you'll probably see "Good" or "Normal" under "Drive Health." You'll probably see the same status for years, irrespective of what's going on physically with the NAND flash on your drive. SSD health is just a percentage that tells you how much of the drive's rated lifespan has been exhausted. It doesn't account for serious read/write errors or physical degradation of the SSD's cells. Even an SSD with 99% or 95% health could have encountered uncorrectable errors, at which point it should not be trusted with your data anymore. A deeper look at your drive's S.M.A.R.T. data will tell you if you need to start preparing for the last rites.

It feels like every time I open a browser tab or boot up a casual game, my PC fan suddenly spins up to 100% like a jet engine taking off, only to drop to a whisper two seconds later. The constant acoustic revving is driving me insane, and it's more common than you think.

It explained the process of how it made these edits beautifully, I’m just not terribly impressed by the results. | Images by Jess Weatherbed / The Verge AI image tools rarely make me feel like I'm part of the creative process. They are, after all, mostly designed so that people with no design experience can type in a few words and get back a usable result. So I was pleasantly surprised by Adobe's latest take on an AI image assistant: It's a bot designed to take away some busywork, while still granting you creative control.Unlike AI generators that are specifically designed to make and edit images or video, Adobe's Firefly AI Assistant, which I've been testing in beta, is more like a multitasking middleman that can operate Adobe's design apps for you. On its website, Adobe says that you can …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft Defender has come a long way since its inception. When it first arrived on our PCs, it was full of holes, and people would always recommend downloading a third-party antivirus over using it. However, Microsoft stuck to its guns, and it eventually created something perfectly fine for regular internet use. Now, people of all walks of life had a mighty antivirus up and running the moment Windows booted, which was a huge win for cybersecurity.

Modern charging bricks are little computers of their own, packed with circuitry to protect your devices from issues while charging. If you stick to reputable brands, they should be of good enough quality, and that's partly why we haven't done any charger reviews for a while.

AI training startup Shift wants to clean your home for free. The catch - because, despite what its website says, there's always a catch - is that it will record cleaners as they scrub, vacuum, dust, tidy, and wash, and use that footage to train robots.Shift announced the unusual offer on social media on Thursday, explaining that the value of the training data generated from the cleanings is more than enough to fund the service. As its website puts it: "You get a spotless apartment. We get training data. Everyone wins."A promotional video shows a cleaner in a crisp white uniform and awkward-looking hat (more on that later) washing windows …Read the full story at The Verge.

Upon scrolling through a family friend's router client list one evening, I noticed something alarming. I was trying to track down connection issues with an unrelated device, and when I had to scroll multiple times to get through the laundry list of devices they had connected, I knew their network was becoming a bit absurd. Most of them weren't actual devices they used, like a PC, phone, or NAS, but instead, they were IoT devices that were installed and forgotten about: a camera, a doorbell, a TV, some smart plugs, and a handful of sensors. These cheap gadgets typically have the worst track record in terms of firmware security, so I moved all of them to the guest network. It took about ten minutes and solved other networking issues the household was having.

AI subscriptions are starting to pile up fast. One month it’s ChatGPT Plus, the next it’s Claude Pro, then Gemini Advanced looks tempting, and suddenly testing models feels less like curiosity and more like managing a tiny streaming bundle for robots. I don’t mind paying for software that earns its spot, but I do mind paying monthly just to find out whether something fits my workflow. That’s where OpenRouter feels refreshingly practical.

Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of trust on the internet. But last week, volunteer editors and contributors were alarmed to hear that a small but important team of engineers at the nonprofit that supports it had been laid off. The layoffs didn't just threaten to sever an important link between the Wikimedia Foundation and its community - they also raised concerns that the WMF was engaging in union-busting. After days of heated discussion, some Wikipedians are ready to support a strike. What that even looks like on a platform where creators mostly aren't being paid is a different question. On May 20th, the WMF said it was disbanding t …Read the full story at The Verge.

It may only be available in this “Void Purple” color option. | Image: MSI MSI has unveiled a new Claw 8 handheld gaming PC ahead of the Computex 2026 show, and this model swaps out its predecessors' Intel Lunar Lake mobile chip for a specialized handheld processor. MSI describes the Claw 8 EX AI Plus as being the "world's first" handheld to contain the recently announced Intel Arc G3 Extreme processor, which features an array of Xe3 GPU cores to run games.We should note that the Acer Predator Atlas 8 and OneXPlayer 3 gaming handhelds are also expected to launch with these chips, but MSI may be the first out of the gate. The Claw 8 EX AI Plus also has a single NVME M.2 SSD slot for gaming and data storage, and su …Read the full story at The Verge.

Design tooling has split into two camps over the last year or so. On one side are the manual editors I've always lived in - Figma, Affinity, Krita, Photopea, Penpot, etc. On the other are the prompt-first generators, which two years ago I would have written off as a gimmick, but they've proven me wrong. There's serious money behind them now, the tools genuinely seem to understand UI conventions, and the more time I spend with them the less obvious it is where the line between design tool and AI generator actually is.

New Glenn rocket explodes at Launch Complex 36 on Thursday night in Florida. | Image: Spaceflight Now While Blue Origin investigates the root cause behind last night's spectacular explosion of its New Glenn rocket, it's already clear that this will be a major setback for NASA's Moon base plans and Amazon's fledgling Leo space internet constellation.The incident occurred at about 9PM at Blue Origin's Florida launch site during a hot-fire test, where seven engines in the booster stage are lit while keeping the 322-foot-tall rocket fixed to the launchpad. The explosion and ensuing fireball severely damaged the only launchpad Blue Origin has for its New Glenn rocket. Here's our video of the explosion at Launch Complex 36. It happened about …Read the full story at The Verge.