AI was still prevalent at CES, and while a lot of companies continued to beat that drum, Dell was not one of them. During a Q&A period, Dell's head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, confirmed that this wasn't an accident. With regard to AI PCs, Terwilliger said, "What we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is [consumers] are not buying based on AI." This is a huge departure from the previous push to integrate AI into literally every aspect of the device experience, and honestly, it's a welcome one.

Everyone can relate to the desire for our computers to be faster and perform at the best of their capabilities all the time. We depend on these devices not only for work, but also for entertainment, and no one likes having to sit around waiting for something they want or need to do.

Backups are one of those things everyone knows they should do, but most people get wrong. The tools are either too complicated or too expensive. Cloud services want monthly subscriptions just to store your data on their servers. Time Machine works fine until the day you actually need to restore something and realize the backup got corrupted months ago. Manual backups never happen consistently because you forget, get busy, or both.

PCIe 5.0 SSDs have been around since 2023, and today, it seems like almost everybody wants to upgrade just to improve their loading times a little bit. It makes sense when you see that the advertised speeds are twice as fast as those of older Gen 4 drives. That kind of jump should translate into noticeably faster loading times and snappier performance in open-world games, but that's not how it actually plays out. In reality, the gains from raw throughput hit a wall much sooner than most people realize.

The Office Lens app launched in 2015. Microsoft is removing its Lens scanner app from iOS and Android in the coming months. Microsoft Lens, or Office Lens as it's known to most, will no longer be supported on February 9th, and the app won't be functional after March 9th.The portable scanner features of Lens are available in OneDrive instead, making a dedicated app redundant for Microsoft. You'll still be able to capture pictures of whiteboards, documents, and receipts and save and edit them digitally in OneDrive. Pictures can then be converted into Word or PDF documents and properly cropped and rotated.Microsoft first launched its Office Lens app for iOS and Android in 2015, …Read the full story at The Verge.

As of today, you can do almost everything on Linux through a graphical interface. You can install applications from an app center, change system settings, and search for files using a file manager, all without touching the terminal. For most users, this is more than enough.

For the last couple of years, GPU value has been framed almost entirely around what's new and novel in the market. The moment a new hardware cycle is completed, it is labeled "last-generation" regardless of how capable the silicon remains. And naturally, this phenomenon is doubly true for cards that have been moved into legacy support or are no longer supported by manufacturers.

When it comes to building a redundant array of independent disks (RAID), there's always the potential to choose the wrong RAID type. This shouldn't cause any issues with storing data, but it could leave you with fewer protections or a higher risk of data loss. For running larger drives, and I'm talking 20 TB or above, RAID 5 could be viewed as a viable choice, but I'm here to warn you about using this type and to instead go for RAIDZ-2.

In late December, notable SSD and memory brand Micron announced that its Crucial brand would be leaving the consumer memory industry by the end of January as the company shifted its focus to supplying memory to far more lucrative tech giant AI data centers. Given this leaves SK hynix and Samsung as the two remaining consumer DRAM makers, this move is expected to make the ongoing memory shortage even worse.

We've talked about just how vital a docking station can be when it comes to improving your current setup. And while there are plenty of great options, we think this one from Anker is going to offer something that you've never seen before.

The weird thing about putting Easter eggs in software is that the developers need to hit a very fine balance. If you make it too easy to find, then it's not really an Easter egg as much as it is a novelty. Make it too hard, and nobody will find it, but there's also the slim chance that someone will find it on a whim nearly three decades later, which is pretty cool. And while you can always nudge people to find it if it goes unnoticed, it feels very against the whole spirit of Easter eggs.

Getting online is simple, but if you want to surf using protection, the answer becomes slightly more complicated. There are a number of ways you can keep your data safe, like running your own VPN, but we think most people are going to opt in for some sort of subscription service.