In case you missed it, Microsoft caused some outcry a little while ago after it announced that it would increase the cost of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription plan by 50%. People quickly learned that if you didn't purchase your Xbox Game Pass Ultimate through Microsoft and instead purchased gift cards at stores, you could still pick them up at the old price, something that GameStop even advertised it would do.

Windows power plans are probably something you don't think about until you have to, especially on a desktop PC. These settings control a lot of your PC's behavior when it comes to gaming performance, file access, and network connectivity. Many users never bother to change the default power plan on their Windows PC. While these settings might seem relevant only for laptops, even desktop behavior is likely to be affected if you're running the "wrong" power plan for your needs. It doesn't take long to understand the differences between the pre-configured Windows power plans or create a custom plan for yourself.

I've spent years paying for Adobe's tools, mostly because there are no real alternatives that can comprehensively match the feature set. And while several open-source alternatives have come close, there's one feature that still has me reaching for Photoshop. That's background removal. As a journalist on the internet, writing about tech, it's a feature I use all too often, and every time I've switched to an offline editor or a free service, I run into one of three problems. Either the output quality was bad, or the process was painfully slow, or the service wanted me to upload my personal photos to a remote, and frankly, dubious-looking server. None of those trade-offs worked for me, especially when privacy is critical. I didn't want my photos used for training an AI model or sold to data brokers. But lately, Adobe's hefty subscription fee has been weighing heavily on me, and I decided it was time to find an alternative solution.

What's better than an array of colorful lights on your wall? A smart array of colorful lights on your wall, that's what. While 'dumb' devices tend to follow only their preset patterns, hooking up the lights to a smart home system unlocks a ton of potential. Now you can make them react, signal, and notify based on conditions that you set, and it's half the fun of planning a smart home system.

The world of technology changes in strange ways, doesn't it? Once billed as the one OS you shouldn't game on, we're now seeing Linux act as the beating heart for powerful gaming systems such as SteamOS and Bazzite. Gaming on Linux is no longer a joke; in fact, some gamers discovered that Linux handheld gaming can sometimes beat Windows 11 now.

A messy workspace always starts the same way. It begins with a power strip on the floor, then a few dangling chargers, and before long, every cable in sight forms a nest you try to ignore. Many people convince themselves that this is fine because they will eventually get around to organizing things, yet that day rarely comes. When you reach the point where you cannot stand it anymore, consider 3D-printing a cable tray that mounts directly to the underside of your desk.

Windows is the operating system I grew up with. I’ve used XP in my school days, Windows 7 when I was in high school, and then every other version that arrived after that. I remember my initial days with a personal Windows 7 laptop when my friend gave me a USB packed with tools and themes. Those included official and unofficial Windows themepack files that would instantly change the wallpaper and other desktop elements’ appearance.

If you're a PC enthusiast with any amount of expendable income, you know how difficult it is to ignore the itch to upgrade, even if everything you have is already sufficient. 2025 was a year in which I probably didn't need to upgrade anything. My system ran most things quite well, and I had very little to complain about otherwise. I've made a lot of hardware moves over the years that have been pretty transformative for my PC experience, but I've also made a ton that could be considered a lateral move—maybe even a downgrade. Not every upgrade I made this year fell into the first category, but these 4 made a huge difference in my day-to-day work and play.

I threw random PDFs and notes at Recall.ai and expected chaos but it kept stitching meaning together like it understood my brain. For the past few months, NotebookLM has been my go-to for research workflows, offering AI-powered summaries and insights from uploaded documents.

Windows has been having a slew of weird bugs recently. We've seen the Windows Recovery Environment break, the Task Manager spawning more Task Managers when you close it, and pretty much all the core systems showing faults. But I'd argue that none of them is as strange as a bug that's causing people to play hide-and-seek with their login buttons.

I'm always on the lookout for the perfect note-taking tool. I've gone hands-on with practically every tool I hear people raving about, and the sad part is that there’s little variety. The tools are either overbloated with features that simply aren’t necessary, or they’re so barebones that you end up wishing for just a bit more.

Despite the impressive processing capabilities of the newer Raspberry Pi boards, certain demanding projects remain out of their reach. For instance, you wouldn’t expect a mere Raspberry Pi SBC to run dozens of virtual machines on Proxmox. Nor would you expect this pint-sized machine to run high-capacity HDDs in RAID 10 and share the storage pool at 10GbE speeds.