We all wish we could have the latest and most powerful laptops and PCs, but the reality is that they are costly, and we all have budgets to stick to. Luckily, I can often find great deals in the used market. Some power users and serious gamers upgrade to the latest models annually, often selling their capable older PCs at fantastic prices to offset costs.

Synology’s NAS lineup has long been the preferred choice amongst consumers looking to buy a new NAS drive. However, Synology's 2025-Plus Series NAS models now come with a catch — your drives need to be “compatible,” or DSM starts locking you out of core features like the ability to use your brand-new NAS. And as of today, the only drives on that list are Synology-branded drives. It’s frustrating, unnecessary, and very un-Synology. But here’s the good news. There are ways you can bypass it. In fact, there are two ways. Here's how.

Swimming in the frenzy of smart home gadgets and automation, I often forget the pain of managing them. Making smart home apps talk to each other seems like a fool's errand. All changed to sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns when I stumbled upon the Home Assistant. Its open-source project badge can be daunting to a layperson - it could involve a lot of work and a steep learning curve. Being a DIY enthusiast and perennial tinker, I thought it wouldn't faze me.

Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, surprised everyone last year by announcing that four Xbox-exclusive games, including Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded, would come to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. This was one of the company's key steps in its multi-platform strategy and was also used to test players' reactions. And it looks like the company liked the kind of response it received, so much so that it didn't stop introducing more Xbox-exclusives to rival platforms like PlayStation.

Nvidia in 2025 is behaving much like a celebrity who continues to bank on past laurels, but expects the same devotion from their followers that they once rightfully claimed. While AMD and Intel strive to deliver improved graphics cards every generation, Nvidia seems to be regressing. Whether it's generational gains, price-to-performance, or sufficient VRAM, Team Green is failing on all counts.

The Star Wars versus Star Trek debates have gone on for decades now, and while the former may have attracted more fans due to its recent entries, the latter still has its die-hard fans that will never swap sides. I play D&D with a guy who can rattle off the Starship Enterprise identification code at the drop of a hat, and I'm seriously impressed.

Windows 11 may be Microsoft's best operating system in many ways, but it's also a downgrade from previous versions in many others. There are numerous tools designed to help restore certain parts of the Windows experience to their former glory, and one that I find myself having to recommend is ExplorerPatcher.

With the release of the first commercial version of Photoshop in 1990, Adobe started its rise to stardom in the software industry. Over the last couple of years, Adobe has added a barrage of tools to its creativity-oriented suite, with each utility offering some unique features to aid your projects. Despite taking numerous anti-consumer steps, Adobe’s feature-rich application stack makes it hard for creative professionals to switch to other tools… assuming you’re on Windows and macOS.

With its release less than a month away, players will soon finally have their hands on Elden Ring Nightreign. Many of us played the network test and though we thought of a few ways to make the game better, it's the same Elden Ring goodness you're expecting. If you didn't take part in the test and were wondering if your PC can run it, chances are you can. The official Elden Ring X account recently released the minimum and recommended specs for PC users, and it's remarkably similar to the original Elden Ring's.

Like many people, I chose Portainer when I started self-hosting apps on my NAS. It was among the most widely recommended tools, and indeed, it proved to be a no-nonsense way to manage Docker containers. It has become one of the first tools I now install whenever I switch to a new NAS model for testing and reviews. However, over time, that convenience became a burden. I just wanted something that worked well while staying out of the way — the bells and whistles didn’t matter much.

Did you know that people transmit Morse code to one another to this day? Not even in a military setting, either; amateur radio fans have taken to the airwaves to send Morse code messages to one another, complete with identification signs and shorthand. It's really cool to see people breathe new life into the technology and prove that some of the best ideas will always stand the test of time in some form or another.

Using the same password on multiple apps and websites is always a bad idea. If one of your accounts gets compromised in a data leak, you may lose access to all the other accounts on which you have used the same password. Since it's 2025 and all of us have accounts on countless apps and services, it's humanly impossible to remember those many unique passwords. So, using a password manager is the best solution. While there are tons of password managers across various platforms, most people may end up using the default password manager integrated with browsers.