Whether you're upgrading an existing rig or building a new one from scratch, there's nothing better than slotting in a shiny new GPU to your system. It's one of the most exciting times for any PC builder, but it's important not to get ahead of yourself. Before you speed through the checkout with a new card, there are some factors to consider that are of the utmost importance.

In our current age, it is challenging to download a game without installing a specific game launcher alongside it. This is understandable when you consider publishers need to pay 30% or more to list their titles on other platforms like Steam, Xbox, or PlayStation.

In a world dominated by Chrome and Edge, it’s easy to feel like all browsers are the same. While Arc browser tried to change the game, the company’s Windows offering is nowhere near its Mac counterpart. Here is where I came across Vivaldi, which felt like a breath of fresh air with the latest v7.0 update. From its unique, flexible UI and intuitive dashboard to built-in utilities like note-taking, email, and a calendar, Vivaldi puts you in control.

Welcome to The Drive, a new weekly column looking at some wacky, interesting, cool, and pivotal things within the tech space! I'll also highlight anything noteworthy from XDA reviews published in the week.

A slow-charging laptop can be incredibly frustrating, especially when your device is fully discharged and you urgently need to use it. While most modern laptops are designed to charge efficiently, several factors can slow down the process. Issues like using incompatible chargers, software glitches, background processes, outdated drivers, overheating, or even how you use your laptop while plugged in can all contribute to slow charging.

If you've ever been involved in the world of Windows customization, chances are, you've heard of live wallpaper applications like Wallpaper Engine. It's a paid application that you can install on Windows to get live, animated wallpapers that show on your desktop. It's a pretty cheap program with a lot of wallpapers on offer, but what if I told you that there's a free, open-source alternative that manages to achieve a lot of the same things that Wallpaper Engine does? It's called Lively Wallpaper.

Multiple graphics cards used to be sighted back in the day but there's not much use for them with regards to gaming. Home lab is a completely different matter with some setups allowing for truly wonderful experiences. Ever wanted to host 10 virtual gaming PCs from a single system? You can do that and much more with some networking and virtual know-how. Here are a few ways a multi-GPU setup may make sense for home lab use.

Have you given the Nvidia App a try yet? If you're unfamiliar, it's the new game optimization app designed to take the torch from GeForce Experience. Eyebrows began to rise when reports claimed that installing the Nvidia App caused worse framerates in-game than after it was uninstalled, but fortunately, there's an easy fix.

Many modern PC games are quite large, making storage management challenging for gamers. However, if you play your games on Steam, you're in luck. Steam allows you to move or store your games on an external hard drive, which helps free up space on your internal SSD or HDD. Transferring your Steam games to an external SSD offers several other benefits, including faster load times, portability, the ability to fix game launching issues, and the convenience of using the same library across multiple PCs. It's even more beneficial if your internal drive isn't an SSD.

It is no secret that we are well and truly in the age of DDR5 RAM. Prices are nowhere as prohibitive as they used to be, and the latest processors from both AMD and Intel have completely transitioned to the latest memory standard. Gamers have experienced the benefits of the blazing-fast transfer speeds of DDR5 RAM, and previous-gen DDR4 memory is gradually being phased out.

Fans of mechanical keyboards take them quite seriously. They fuss over form factors, customization, actuation distance, plates and foam, switch scratchiness, and many more considerations that might feel bizarre or unnecessary to other people. For a growing number of users, mechanical keyboards often represent the endgame in comfort, features, and typing feedback.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge In a series of Threads posts this afternoon, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says users shouldn’t trust images they see online because AI is “clearly producing” content that’s easily mistaken for reality. Because of that, he says users should consider the source, and social platforms should help with that.“Our role as internet platforms is to label content generated as AI as best we can,” Mosseri writes, but he admits “some content” will be missed by those labels. Because of that, platforms “must also provide context about who is sharing” so users can decide how much to trust their content.Just as it’s good to remember that chatbots will confidently lie to you before you trust an AI-powered search engine, checking whether posted claims or images come from a reputable account can help you consider their veracity. At the moment, Meta’s platforms don’t offer much of the sort of context Mosseri posted about today, although the company recently hinted at big coming changes to its content rules.What Mosseri describes sounds closer to user-led moderation like Community Notes on X and YouTube or Bluesky’s custom moderation filters. Whether Meta plans to introduce anything like those isn’t known, but then again, it has been known to take pages from Bluesky’s book.