I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog, and in the world of computing, nothing comes closer to the definition than a mini PC. Sure, they're littered around enterprise workstations and used as POS devices, but the average computer buyer still imagines a large mid-tower chassis when they think of a desktop. In the past decade, these diminutive boxes have become engineering marvels that shrank a computer down to the basics, eliminating excessive RGB lighting, wind-tunnel fan configurations, and the functionally unhelpful glass panels. This makes mini PCs great secondary mobile workstations that shuttle your workflow between a home setup and workplace without the leaden heft of a 16-inch laptop.

The holiday season is when many different sales on video games start to pop up. The Steam Winter Sale is one of the best ones for gamers looking to increase the number of titles in their library, especially when the deals are fantastic and too good to pass up. For PC players, there's an abundance of sales on classic and new Star Wars video games that have ridiculous discounts for those who may have missed playing them before. But the best one that Star Wars fans can get now is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor while it's on sale on the Steam Winter Sale.

The talk of the town right now is RAM. Thanks to memory shortages, DRR5 kits are at an all-time high price point and that's if you can get your hands on a set of sticks at all. If you're hoping to upgrade to 64GB of RAM or pick up a brand-new gaming rig or laptop with a whole load of 'future-proofed' memory, then let me stop you right there.

I've been using Unifi Protect for a while. It's the backbone of my home security system, and I opted into it because it seamlessly slots into my Unifi Wi-Fi set up as well. At this point, the entire set up is so well integrated into my home that it is effectively infrastructure, and I plan to stay within the ecosystem. And for the most part, it works great. It'll record 24/7, notify me when something moves within my selected frame, and keep my footage stored safely. Basically, everything a security system is supposed to do. Well, almost.

Docker is an invaluable tool in a self-hosted setup, and I spend a lot of time managing containers and monitoring their activity. I previously built a Docker Swarm cluster and could monitor the container activity to some extent. However, the one thing that I miss is hardware resource consumption, and there's no option for it in Portainer. I tried my luck with Uptime Kuma, which is a good way to monitor and get notifications about each container's status. Sadly, it doesn't include hardware resources monitoring.

Whether you're waiting for a product to get back in stock or for a sale, you've probably wanted a tool that lets you know when there are updates to a certain website. And that's just one of the more typical use cases; there could be many more reasons you might want to be notified of any changes to a website, whether it's because you're waiting for some news to drop or anything else.

Choosing a monitor in 2025 isn't easy. There are just way too many great options available, which is actually a really good problem to have. Of course, if you're focused on buying the best, there's only one true option in our opinion, and that comes in the form of Alienware's AW2725Q gaming monitor.

It's been five years since Capcom revealed Pragmata, their brand-new sci-fi game. The game was initially supposed to come out in 2022, and it's certainly seen its fair share of delays, but thankfully, we can finally get a taste of it through a rather fantastic demo that Capcom just put out exclusively on PC.

For all the genuine progress in PC hardware over the last decade in things like performance and reliability, one other attribute has quietly regressed, and that's how understandable failures are. Older systems tended to fail decisively, with diagnoses that were easy to come by. A bad stick of RAM meant no POST. A dying hard drive clicked itself into an early grave. Power issues shut the system off, full stop. Modern PCs, by contrast, are fantastic at almost working. And that makes troubleshooting far harder than it used to be.

A NAS has a lot of moving parts that come together to form a storage system that feels complete. With centralization of data, backups and redundancies in place, and cross-platform file availability set up, the NAS feels like a clear upgrade over having files scattered across laptops and external drives. Having done so much to get the setup in place, you start to think that once the NAS is up and running, the hard part is done.

One of the first steps after setting up a PC and optimizing the BIOS/UEFI is installing all the programs you need. This can include the browser, Steam, MSI Afterburner, VLC, and PowerToys, among others. While these programs are essential on any gaming PC, some users can get carried away and install performance-hungry bloatware that does little to help their PC. Whether they are first-party bundled programs or needless third-party apps, you're better off without them. After building PCs for almost 20 years, I've learned not to waste my time with 5 particular types of PC programs.

Do you miss the Windows Phone? If not, you really should. It's something that we here at XDA wonder about all the time. What if Microsoft didn't decide to throw in the towel with its mobile phone operating system and kept going? Given how Microsoft is adding new features to make Windows 11 a suitable console OS, it's not a stretch to imagine that, if Windows Phone had kept going, we'd see mobile variants of it too.