Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 94, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, did you hydrate today, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I'm visiting LinkedIn way too much because of Mini Sudoku, looking at the fake texts in Apple's marketing materials, marveling at tiny doodles on microchips, listening to Taylor Swift's New Heights podcast episode, learning about model railroad power debates, reading about the death of expertise, catching up on my favorite HGTV home renovation show, and watching a very good drumline.I also have for you some …Read the full story at The Verge.

Windows is becoming challenging to run on old hardware due to its focus on robust security mechanisms and demanding UI. Linux becomes the obvious pick in such cases. It’s the perfect candidate to revive an old laptop or PC that is struggling or not supported by Windows. However, not all Linux distros are created equal; some focus on performance, some want to be a visual spectacle, and some try to strike a perfect balance.

Artificial Intelligence software is more popular than ever, and cloud-based AI systems feature the most powerful models. OpenAI's GPT-5, X's Grok 4, Anthropic's Claude 4, Meta's Llama 3, and Google's Gemini 2.5 are all massive large language models used for a variety of purposes, including text and image generation, document summaries, and conversation partners.

My gaming PC isn't exactly up-to-date, considering I have a 5-year-old graphics card and an AM4 processor. The temptation to upgrade my hardware has been there since the RTX 40 series launched, but I've managed to keep it at bay. Strictly speaking, my PC doesn't need hardware upgrades — it's just that it doesn't feel as high-end as it used to three years ago. To address that complaint, however, I've been using some performance-boosting techniques to extend my PC's lifespan. Hardware upgrades will come eventually, but they'll be my last resort.

Power consumption can be a major concern when it comes to home labbing, and for a few reasons. Not only does higher power draw typically correlate with higher temperatures (and thus, either more throttling or louder fans), but it incurs a cost, too. Adding a new server to your home can actually have a noticeable impact on your energy usage, and whether it's for environmental reasons or purely cost-saving reasons, chances are, you would see an increase in power draw as a negative thing. I found a neat way to reduce energy usage, and it cut down my usage by about 25%.

Intel is making its XeSS GPU tech hardware-agnostic, similar to AMD's FSR. This will bring Intel's XeSS super sampling, frame gen, and Xe low latency to AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Intel has made its GPU tech available in the XeSS 2.1 SDK, which brings the Xe Framework to any GPU that supports Shader Model 6.4 or newer, meaning the Nvidia GeForce GTX 10-series and AMD Radeon RX 5000 series onward. Intel does recommend a GeForce RTX 30-series or Radeon RX 6000-series GPU or newer for a better experience.

Have you tried disabling Windows Updates? If you have, you'll know that you can't keep them down for long. Microsoft will allow you to turn them off for a limited time, but once your period is up, the OS will download and install the newest updates whether you want them or not. It wasn't always like that, but it became the norm once Microsoft wanted people to update their operating systems and get the newest fixes.

By now, it's well-established that AI has become an incredibly important part of education. Some use it to cheat, some use it to make studying a little easier, and some use it to learn faster and smarter. Admittedly, I’ve done both at some point, but I lean more toward using it to actually improve how I study and retain information.

When Microsoft first started rolling out Copilot, it felt like the AI assistant was everywhere. However, as time goes on, the Redmond giant finds new and inventive ways to show us Copilot in the hopes that we'll use it. For a while, the Start menu was a safe haven away from Microsoft's LLM; unfortunately, it seems that an upcoming update will change that.

Using a popular app or service is a double-edged sword. On one side, you have all the nice benefits and features that the service provides; there's a reason why it's the most popular offering on the market, after all. However, whenever an app gains traction, scammers and hackers are always close behind to leverage its popularity to spread their wares as far as they can. After all, what good is trying to spread viruses and scams on a service nobody uses?

Before the time when Nintendo dominated the console space in the 80s, and long before the console wars of the 90s took over the world, video games had a different industry leader. Atari was the company that captured the attention and minds of young people who played games at home or in the arcades, and it was a force to be reckoned with. The Atari 2600 is one of the most important video game consoles of all-time, and is still beloved to this day by people who did and didn't grow up during its heyday. The console itself was released at a point when video games as a medium were young and still evolving, with titles that were at the starting point of creativity with limited technology that pushed people's imaginations. You couldn't go anywhere in the late 70s or early 80s and not see a fan of Atari's home video game system.

As a perpetually absent-minded person, I've always loved the thought of a smart home that could automate the tasks I always forget. It's a nice thought, but the state of the smart home means that several large companies control the bulk of it, and no one company makes enough devices to use those in your home exclusively. I've got Home Assistant set up to fill the gaps between functionality and control.