For years, Adobe Acrobat, Foxit PDF, and Nitro PDF have been the go-to solutions for many. However, unless you manipulate large PDF files frequently, these paid PDF editors feel overkill. What if I told you there's a powerful, versatile, and completely free way to handle all your PDF tasks, right on your own terms? After trying out dozens of free tools, I came across Stirling PDF, which ticks all the right boxes for me.

You try and build a PC to play the most demanding game you have in your library, but that's not the case for me. I built a system costing around $2,000 over a couple of years, and it's primarily used to play a game that barely scratches the surface of the available performance. That game is OldSchool RuneScape, and I've been playing (on and off) for approximately 18 years, though I've been a fan of the MMORPG for almost 30 years, since starting as a wee lad with friends at high school (that's sixth-grade to many of you).

I’ve spent years tweaking my home lab setup, and while my main server handles the heavy lifting, I’ve come to appreciate how useful the Raspberry Pi can be for running specific services. Offloading tasks to a Pi reduces the load on my main server, helps isolate potentially risky software, and makes it easier to recover from crashes. It's also been a great way to experiment without messing up anything critical.

Windows 11 may not be a perfect operating system out of the box, but one of the things that makes it great is the ability to use third-party programs to change its looks and behaviors to fit your needs and preferences. Among those tweaks, I personally find taskbar customization to be one of the most interesting things you can do, because it's something that's on screen at all times (usually).

If you're looking for storage, portable SSDs are the way to go, providing a compact solution that offers tons of performance. We've seen some great deals on SSDs over the past few months, and we think this 2TB model from SK Hynix is going to be a good one to pick up, especially at its newly discounted price that comes in well below retail. For a limited time, save $50 off this drive, as it falls to its best price yet.

Meta has filed a motion for judgment on the antitrust case it’s currently fighting in court. The motion argues that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has failed to produce any evidence that Meta unlawfully monopolized part of the social networking market, something the government argues it did through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.The filing was submitted this evening, shortly after the FTC rested its case in a protracted trial before DC District Court Judge James Boasberg. “After five weeks of trial, it is clear that the FTC has failed to meet the legal standard required under antitrust law,” said Meta spokesperson Christopher Sgro. “Regardless, we will present our case to show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram competes with TikTok (and YouTube and X and many other apps). The FTC spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars bringing a weak case with a market definition that ignores reality.”A judgment on partial findings asks a judge to consider a case’s merits before it has been fully argued in court, attempting to speed its resolution. The trial is still currently scheduled to proceed, with Meta launching into its defense against the FTC’s allegations, but the filing offers a preview of its case.As Meta’s lawyers have done in cross-examination, it takes aim at the agency’s description of Meta monopolizing a “personal social networking services” market that people use to share information with family and friends. It argues that the FTC has failed to demonstrate Meta reduced the quality of its services (a key sign that a company lacks competition) or that it bought Instagram to neutralize a potential rival.The FTC has made its case with testimony from several high-profile players in Meta’s businesses, including Instagram’s co-founder Kevin Systrom — who aired complaints about Meta’s handling of his company — and its current head, Adam Mosseri, who offered a more optimistic take. Meta has countered by emphasizing the company’s persistent struggles against social networks that the FTC doesn’t consider full competitors, particularly TikTok, which, in the war for those aforementioned 17-year-olds’ attention, Meta portrays as a constant scourge.

Dipping my feet in the self-hosting trend is great. But when a browser pops the "not secure" error, I worry about running my humble stack over HTTP, even though it's on my local network. Since I share some of them with my family, it's hard to discourage them from clicking on suspicious links while my apps run on plain HTTP. I tried enabling HTTPS with self-signed certificates for my self-hosted apps and services, but I kept hitting the wall.

If you're looking to get the most out of your CPU and need the best cooling solution, an AIO is the way to go. Luckily, the one that we love, the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB, is not all that expensive right now, thanks to a sweet deal from Amazon that brings the price down to just $100. If you're quick, you can save 31% off retail. So get it while you still can.

Water cooling is a great way to keep your components cool, but there are a few key components that need to work in tandem to keep everything running smoothly. One of them is a pump that cycles the water through the system, so that the cold water can reach the components that need cooling down, and the hot water can be directed to a radiator to be cooled back down.

In the early 1990s, internet engineers sounded the alarm: the pool of numeric addresses that identify every device online was not infinite. IPv4, the fourth version of the Internet Protocol, used 32-bit addresses, about 4.3 billion unique numbers, which, at the dawn of the internet, seemed unimaginably large. Yet as the internet exploded in the 1990s and 2000s, experts predicted those addresses would soon run out. A new protocol, IPv6, was devised and hailed as the solution, with exhaustion of IPv4 addresses leading many to expect IPv4's replacement within a decade. Fast-forward to today, fourteen years after IANA exhausted its unassigned pool of IPv4 addresses, and IPv4 is still very much alive, while IPv6 adoption has been a slow uphill climb.

A universally agreed-upon concept is that PC gaming is a great thing for everyone. The diversity of experiences and the level of quality in video games that a PC can provide are unlike anything else. The games' industry as we know it today owes its existence to the advancements made on PCs decades ago. But as good as gaming on a PC can be for everyone with access to a computer, there's one growing problem that won't ever go away. It can be very expensive to enjoy the fruits of playing PC games.

At the time of writing, there are two graphics cards in existence that support FSR 4. That's been the case for two months, and although we may get another GPU that supports FSR 4 soon, the lineup still looks slim. It looks even slimmer when you consider how difficult it has been to find AMD's latest GPUs in stock.