Have you noticed that your gaming performance hasn't been up to par on Windows 11 lately? If so, it may be because of the October 2025 update, which has apparently caused some issues with in-game performance if you own an Nvidia GPU.

Thanks to its support for cool accessories and different operating systems, the Raspberry Pi 5 is easily the most versatile device in my home lab. While it bears a pint-sized footprint and barely consumes any power, the Single-Board Computer can run a handful of cool projects – ranging from simple emulation platforms and NVR utilities to full-fledged container-hosting hubs and file sharing servers.

Google has been hard at work lately, rolling out NotebookLM feature after feature. Interestingly, these aren't minor tweaks (although there have been a bunch of small updates too). Instead, they’re additions that have clearly been carefully thought through, solving pain points NotebookLM users have been expressing for the longest time.

Last year Qualcomm promised that games would “just work” on its Snapdragon X Elite laptops, but in my testing I found that was far from the case. Now, a year on, Windows on Arm is a lot more ready for gaming, thanks to emulator improvements, driver updates, a new Snapdragon Control Panel, and Qualcomm’s work on anti-cheat compatibility.Qualcomm is releasing its Snapdragon Control Panel this week, which automatically detects games you’ve installed on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop and then optimizes them. It’s very similar to the apps that AMD and Nvidia use for their own GPUs, with settings for frame rate caps, anti-aliasing, texture filtering, and much more.The Snapdragon Control Panel also allows you to install the latest Adreno GPU drivers, which are optimized for the latest games to improve stability and performance. Qualcomm says it has made fixes and improvements for more than 100 games since launch last year, with continued bug fixes for stability and performance.Alongside the Snapdragon Control Panel release, both Microsoft and Qualcomm have also made some significant changes to help PC gaming on Windows on Arm. Microsoft’s Prism emulator now supports x86 Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), which are required by many games and creative apps. Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 Elite chips also support AVX2 emulation, and existing Snapdragon X series devices “will also receive the update in coming weeks.”Microsoft has also updated its Xbox app on Windows on Arm recently to add the ability to download ARM64 compatible games. When Copilot Plus PCs launched last year, the Xbox app was simply a portal to Xbox Cloud Gaming. It didn’t have library or store options, so you couldn’t use it to install games from PC Game Pass. That’s all changed now.Qualcomm has also been working with Epic Games to get Fortnite running on Windows on Arm, with full kernel-level anti-cheat support. You’ll need the latest Adreno GPU driver to get Fortnite running, and Qualcomm says it’s also working with other anti-cheat providers like Tencent’s Anti-Cheat Expert, Roblox’s Hyperion, Denuvo, InProtect GameGuard, Uncheater, and BattleEye to enable more multiplayer games on Windows on Arm.Fortnite’s arrival on Windows on Arm comes just as the game debuts on the Xbox PC store. It’s the first time Epic Games has released Fortnite on another PC store or launcher, and it’s part of a deal to bring Fortnite Crew to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.All of these improvements are a much better start for gaming on Windows on Arm than the launch last year, but performance and compatibility is still far from perfect. You can check to see if your favorite game runs natively, via emulation, or not at all right here.

It is not surprising that a major security vendor wants to tap into the growing Linux desktop market, especially as more people adopt Linux for both personal and professional use. Even so, the arrival of a new antivirus product from Kaspersky immediately raises concerns for anyone who follows security news or understands the geopolitical baggage associated with certain companies.

If you use Google's NotebookLM often, one of the reasons why you probably keep returning to it is because it lets you control your knowledge base and get answers grounded in your own sources. Since it only references sources you've fed it and creates an AI that essentially only has expertise in the materials you provide, you don't need to worry as much about hallucinations.

Earlier today, Microsoft held its latest Xbox Partner Preview livestream. Like Nintendo Direct Partner Showcases, this presentation is fully focused on third-party games coming to Xbox and PC over the next year or so. That means we didn't get a look at games like Halo: Campaign Evolved, but several known and new games showed up and impressed.

After trying a wide range of note-taking apps and project managers this year, I’ve naturally started drifting away from Notion. One of the tools that took its place is Microsoft Loop. I keep it in a pinned tab in my browser so it’s always there and ready for me to drop notes and tasks into. Although Notion has far more powerful features, I’m after convenience, and Loop just gives me way more of that. It requires less maintenance, is very minimal, and is beyond easy to navigate. Less really is more in this case, but that doesn’t mean Loop is lacking - it still gives me everything I need to keep my notes and projects organized and structured. And it’s replaced a big chunk of what I used Notion for…

It seems Microsoft is in a charitable mood right now. Just over a month ago, we saw the company make its own 80s operating system open-source, which was a huge boon for people interested in preserving information technology history. As it turns out, it wasn't done with just that.

If there's any type of laptop I prefer above almost all others, it's a thin, powerful gaming laptop. While I do love the portability of a good 14-inch gaming laptop, I'm almost equally fond of the 16-inch thin gaming machine. So naturally, the Maingear Super 16 immediately caught my attention.

Storage formats aren't short-lived in the way CPUs and GPUs are; they last for decades, not years. Yet, when you zoom out and look at the storage types that have become obsolete, irrelevant, or downright inconvenient in 2025, there are quite a few on the list. At the same time, some old storage types still have their uses, such as USB flash drives, external hard drives, microSD cards, eMMC storage, SATA SSDs, and Blu-ray discs. There are four storage types, however, that dropped out of the zeitgeist years ago.

It’s no secret that Elon Musk shapes the X social platform and X’s “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI chatbot to his preferences. But it’s possible Musk may have needed a bit of an extra ego boost this week, because Grok’s worship of its creator seems, shall we say, more noticeable than usual.As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk’s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.Elon Musk: fitter than LeBron James!Elon Musk: funnier than Jerry Seinfeld!Elon Musk: better at resurrection than Jesus Christ!Elon Musk: surpasses most historical figures in active paternal involvement despite scale!Elon Musk: could beat Mike Tyson by “deploying gadgets” in a boxing match! Elon Musk: would beat Superman too! Elon Musk: would “automate away the need for killers via sustainable tech” but be “unstoppable” at murder, if he tried!If pressed, Grok will also contend Musk would be the best at eating poop or drinking urine, but it would prefer to focus on how good he is at making rockets, please. At least some of these posts have been deleted in the past hour; X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the phenomenon from The Verge.This glazing appears to be exclusive to the X version of Grok; when I asked the private chatbot to compare Musk with James, it conceded, “LeBron James has a significantly better physique than Elon Musk.” The GitHub page for Grok’s system prompts indicates they were updated three days ago, with the additions including a prohibition on “snarky one-liners” and instructions not to base responses on “any beliefs stated in past Grok posts or by Elon Musk or xAI,” but there’s nothing that seems to clearly explain this new behavior — although system prompts are only one way to shape how AI systems work.Either way, this is far from the weirdest Grok has gotten, and it’s less disruptive than the bot’s brief obsession with “white genocide” or its intense antisemitism — which, incidentally, is still flaring up in the form of Holocaust denial. Grok has previously searched for Musk’s opinion to formulate its own answers, so even the preoccupation with Musk isn’t new. But it reminds us all what a weirdly intimate connection Grok — a product that’s been rolled out across the US government, among other places — has with its owner, and how randomly that connection is prone to appear.