A motherboard typically has four or more Serial AT Attachment (SATA) bus ports. These are found on the bottom right-hand side of the printed circuit board (PCB) and can be used to connect SATA hard drives and SSDs to your system. What isn't so great about these ports is the limited number available, especially when working with larger game collections, big data, video editing, network-attached storage (NAS), and home lab deployments. You'll quickly find the limited number of SATA ports troublesome.

Over the past few years, smart TV operating systems have come a long way, whether it's Samsung's Tizen, LG's WebOS, or in my case, my Hisense U8H's Google TV-powered OS, most mid-range-to-high-end modern televisions feature silky smooth user interfaces and more than enough power to easily run any modern streaming app.

The PC building hobby is in shambles right now, with component pricing going sky-high. That puts OEM and SI PC builders in a good position, as they can get lower component prices via volume orders, and in some cases, it's actually better value to buy a prebuilt than go DIY.

When I first decided to give Windows 11 virtual desktops a try, I thought I would keep using them. I would use one for work and another for personal projects. It felt like one of those features I couldn’t live without. But it wasn’t long before I started finding reasons to stop using it.

At the start of 2025, Copilot was beginning to get its bearings in the AI world. Now we're looking at the start of 2026, and Copilot has become a part of every part of Microsoft's ecosystem. And now that the Redmond giant has added Copilot to pretty much every product it can think of (yes, even Notepad), it has decided that Copilot should be on other people's services, too.

Ed Murray has been in the solar business long enough to remember the bloodbath of 1985. That's when President Ronald Reagan ended Jimmy Carter-era solar tax credits meant to decrease US reliance on fossil fuels following the 1970s oil crisis."It was a sad time," says Murray, who is president of the trade group California Solar & Storage Association. Membership to the organization (which hadn't yet added "storage" to its name) fell from 670 companies to just 37 "almost overnight," Murray says, as hundreds of businesses went under without the tax credit. "I hope that that doesn't happen to us again." (Then-California Gov. George Deukmejian a …Read the full story at The Verge.

There is a distinct thrill in setting up your first home server or NAS. Unless you're treating it like a backup server, this becomes your haven for storing photos, running a media server like Plex, or hosting a personal website. The logical next step thereafter is to enable remote access to all these services even when you're disconnected from the home network, but therein lies a huge, unopened can of worms. You could forward a few ports on your router, maybe set up a dynamic DNS, and you're live. However, the internet is teeming with bots, scripts, and scanners like Shodan that are constantly rattling doorknobs. The moment you open a port, you are painting a target on your digital back.

PC gaming has never been more popular, but at the same time, it's also never been harder to enter as a complete newcomer. A large part of the recent difficulty is due to the recent DRAM shortage, which is said to be caused by manufacturers reallocating their supply towards more lucrative HBM memory for AI.

Most big blockbuster movies that are put into theaters often have video games that tie into their releases. As is the case with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which was directed by James Cameron and considered one of the greatest action movies ever made. I still remember the tons of games that were released around the movie, with a few action games that were hit or miss in quality. The best games based on the film were the arcade shooters that rendered the infamous T-800 in great detail. However, it's not often I see a new 2D game based on the legendary movie from over 33 years ago that looks superb.

The Windows versus Linux debate usually centers around performance, security, or, more often than not, ideology. Storage as a topic rarely gets the same kind of attention, and even when it does, it rarely has anything to do with the actual usability of the storage inside your rig.

What do you know about Doom WADs? If you're not sure what wads of anything have to do with Doom, then you're in luck, because you're about to learn something cool. Even back in the early days of Doom, people were creating and sharing maps via the game's proprietary WAD format. In the wild west days of level creation, where people were still learning the ropes, you had everything from bored students cooking up a deathmatch level to kids who were far too young to play Doom uploading their entries.

Adobe apps are powerful, but they’re also heavy and expensive. That’s why I dropped all my subscriptions this year and switched to free and open-source options. Most people don’t really need to pay for the Creative Cloud given how many viable alternatives there are. You just need tools that let you experiment freely, and that’s where non-destructive editing comes in.