Ever since AMD's AM4 showed how long a socket could last, platform longevity has been a key consideration for PC builders. After all, if you get to keep your motherboard when upgrading your CPU, you save a lot of money and effort. While AMD's AM4 and AM5 platforms have championed socket longevity, Intel has severely lagged in this regard, a gap that might disappear with Nova Lake. That said, a long-lasting socket is only as good as the motherboard quality. An entry-level or cheap motherboard might become the bottleneck long before the socket gets outdated. You don't just need CPU compatibility to make a PC last; you also need future-ready connectivity, expansion, and I/O features. And your VRMs might only prove adequate for your existing CPU, nothing more. The socket decides which CPU upgrades are possible, but the motherboard decides which upgrades are viable.

If you're someone who was on the internet a lot during the turn of the century, you likely used MSN Messenger to chat with your friends. If you're a bit too young for it, MSN Messenger was an old messaging service that was pretty bare-bones compared to something like Discord, but at the time, it was a staple app that kept people connected.

I used to treat YouTube videos as part of my research, which I would usually forget about. They were useful, but having to open another tab, after already having too many open, and trying to remember where I saw a part with the info I wanted to review, started to feel like too much. However, once I started adding YouTube videos to my NotebookLM notebooks, they became a single place to ask questions about them, reducing my tab chaos. It didn’t replace watching the videos, especially when visuals are important, but I can say that it made my research process feel less scattered.

When spinning up a VPS or a local LXC, reaching for Ubuntu has almost become reflexive for me. It's what most tutorials assume, the server images are tuned for it, and it's what many of the internet's Linux instances already run, but you hardly see it land on an enthusiast's daily-driver desktop anymore. The preferred distros for desktop use have firmly shifted toward Arch-based flavors, Fedora, and Mint. If you've been paying attention, you'd know that this is hardly an accident, and one particular design decision explains a lot of it: Canonical's all-in bet on snap packages.

If you look at the historical Nvidia vs. AMD market share in the discrete desktop GPU space, you'll see a healthy 64–36 split back in 2018. This was before the launch of the RTX 20 series, and Nvidia was still the leader, but AMD had a very respectable 36% share of the market. Since then, AMD's share has steadily declined, standing at a mere 5% at the end of 2025. While there are many reasons people keep buying Nvidia over AMD despite the latter offering more VRAM and value per dollar, my focus here is on the objective compromises you make when going with AMD. Lower ray tracing performance is probably the first thing that gamers think about, even after the vastly improved results of the RX 90 series. However, only a handful of ray-traced titles are truly transformative, and most people prefer more FPS to better lighting, reflections, and shadows. The more visible compromises associated with an AMD GPU are linked to software maturity, ecosystem play, and compatibility with productivity programs. A gamer might not care about these factors, but it matters to consumers who value the entire infrastructure around their graphics cards.

I spend an unhealthy amount of time defending Google's ecosystem's utility to individuals, even when the company seems determined to lock down previously open platforms and abandon perfectly functional software at will. However, I'll give credit where it's due, and Google AI tools like Gemini and NotebookLM justify the immense hype surrounding them. Instead of treating a random conspiracy theorist from 2012 as gospel, NotebookLM sticks to the sources you've fed it, making it powerful and well-controlled for targeted research and understanding complex subjects from sources you trust.

Your network is only as fast as the equipment and hardware will support. Moving up to 10Gb for Ethernet and only having Gigabit ports on clients will restrict all your connection handshakes to 100MB/s. That's not slow by any means, transferring an OS ISO file in under a minute, but there will be a time when you start adding faster devices to the LAN. That's where an uprated network switch can make a world of difference. That's precisely what I did with my own LAN, creating 10Gb trunks between the garage, office, and house. All I required was three managed switches, costing around $50 a piece.

Long before UEFI came along, PCs used to use a BIOS to get everything set up. It took quite a bit longer to get the job done, but seeing the old BIOS screens brings back memories of diving into an older PC and tweaking settings to better control the hardware. If you long for those days, someone has managed to design a BIOS for the ESP32-C6 chip, and while it's not entirely feature-complete just yet, it's still really cool.

As a fan of retro gaming in general and PlayStation handhelds in particular, my PlayStation Vita still gets a lot of use, but lately it's not for the reason Sony probably imagined. While a lot of my gaming happens on my PlayStation 5, my Vita still gets use for retro titles, especially PlayStation 1 games. Lately, I have added one more use case to it, which might surprise you. Yes, I am talking about media consumption.

You can’t always get what you want. | Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Variety via Getty Images Bob Iger's tenure as CEO of Disney came to an end a few months ago, after two decades of leading the entertainment giant through some of its most pivotal transformations and acquisitions. Iger, in an exit interview with The Financial Times, has now confirmed some significant efforts that didn't pan out, such as walking away from buying Twitter, being snubbed by Apple, and losing out on the James Bond franchise.According to Iger, Disney came close to buying Twitter from cofounder Jack Dorsey "at a very attractive price," sometime prior to Elon Musk buying the social media platform in 2022 and changing its name to X. Iger had plans to turn T …Read the full story at The Verge.

You can't go wrong by adding a security camera to your home or office space. An extra set of eyes brings peace of mind, and it can be had for dirt cheap if you know where to look. You can always try to build your own, but we think going with an off-the-shelf solution is better for beginners.

So, the Steam Machine made its grand debut in the gaming market, and it ended up costing at least $1,049. It's a far cry from the $750 price tag Valve initially wanted to sell the Steam Machine for, but given how the RAM market is, the company felt it had to bump the price up to cover for the volatile market.