Stop ignoring your spare PCIe x1 slot — it’s more useful than half the upgrades you buy

Most PC builders never use more than one PCIe slot in the entire lifecycle of their system. Besides the primary x16 slot, all the other PCIe slots on most motherboards remain vacant for years. You may think the smallest of them, the PCIe x1 slot, is next to worthless, but it’s one of the most powerful upgrade routes on your motherboard. Whether your rig is a bit dated or you want to enhance your motherboard’s feature set anyway, the humble PCIe x1 slot is capable of much more than you think. You could upgrade to 5GbE or 10GbE LAN without changing your motherboard, add extra USB or SATA ports instead of buying a subpar hub, and add Wi-Fi 6E or 7 capability to your motherboard if you wish. Despite having access to a single lane, a PCIe 3.0 x1 (8 Gbps) or PCIe 4.0 x1 (16 Gbps) slot is more than sufficient for many useful upgrades, and can transform your PC experience more than most upgrades that you usually consider.

William Garcia
Boston

PC gamers are leaving 20-30% performance on the table with this one setting

Let's say you spent months picking out parts or researching a pre-built PC. You made sure to get 16GB of fast dual-channel RAM, so your games would run smoothly, and your desktop wouldn't choke under heavy multitasking. But somehow your system feels strangely sluggish. You notice erratic 1% low frame...

Sophia Wilson
Atlanta

My favorite alternative to VS Code isn’t Cursor or Claude Code: it’s something way cooler and productive

Like most developers, I have spent the last few months hunting for the ultimate VS Code successor. I have jumped between the slick context-awareness of Cursor and the command-line power of Claude Code.

Olivia Miller
Seattle

I stopped forcing every coding job through Claude and started using this instead

I like Claude Code, but I don't like its limitations. You're largely restricted to Anthropic's models like Claude Sonnet and Opus. They're excellent models, but they can get expensive quickly, even for relatively simple tasks. Claude Code is also closed-source. Whether you're an enterprise concerned about data governance or an...

Olivia Miller
Seattle

Stop treating the Raspberry Pi 5 as a smart home hub — it’s actually built for something bigger

The Raspberry Pi has always been easy to recommend for home automation, but the Raspberry Pi 5 complicates that recommendation in a useful way. If all you need is a box to run Home Assistant, a few Zigbee devices, and some basic automations, it’s more machine than the job really...

Mathieu Garnier
France

Microsoft’s consumer marketing chief to leave next year

Yusuf Mehdi launching Copilot Plus PCs in 2024. | Image: Getty Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, is leaving the company after 35 years. Mehdi announced his departure in an internal memo on Thursday, noting that he will leave Microsoft next year. He will...

Jane Smith
Los Angeles

I tested TrueNAS, Unraid, and OpenMediaVault to the perfect NAS OS, and there’s a clear winner

If you’ve set your mind on putting together a NAS for your home lab, there are a bunch of factors you’ll want to consider. On the hardware front, the drive bays and Ethernet provisions are the most obvious factors you’ll want to keep an eye out for, with the RAM...

Marie Andersen
Denmark

AMD is giving older Radeon cards an unexpected upgrade, but it’s a bigger deal than it appears

AMD officially confirmed on Thursday last week that FSR 4.1 will be coming to RDNA 3 GPUs in July 2026, with RDNA 2 hardware following in early 2027. It's a game-changing feature expansion by itself, but it becomes considerably more significant than the announcement lets on.

Daniel Martinez
Dallas

Someone built a full Wayland compositor inside Minecraft, and it actually works

Wayland has been the center of a few big Linux stories this year. We've seen some distros adopt it, we've seen some drop X11 in favor of it, and we've seen people creating alternatives to X11 to stave off Wayland. But nobody asks, "What about adding Wayland to Minecraft?" mainly...

Hafsa Rikstad
Norway

Samsung’s memory chip employees negotiated $340,000 bonuses this year

48,000 Samsung workers had threatened to strike unless bonus caps were lifted. | Photo: Jung Yeon-je / AFP via Getty Images Details have emerged about a tentative deal struck between Samsung and semiconductor employees who had threatened to strike. The deal reportedly makes some workers eligible for average annual bonuses...

Bogoljub Divac
Serbia

Microsoft’s big Copilot rollback continues as Office now lets you move its b***on to the ribbon

Microsoft is in a little bit of a pickle. It spent the better part of 2025 getting excited over Copilot and rolling it out to every app it has. Now, in 2026, the company is clearing up the mess it made after people told Microsoft that they'd actually prefer not...

Olivia Miller
Seattle

Microsoft is letting Office users remove an annoying Copilot b***on

Microsoft is rolling out Office app updates next week that allow users to disable a floating Copilot button. The button appeared in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in recent weeks, and floats above the bottom right-hand section of spreadsheets or documents. It has angered many Excel users in particular, because it...

John Doe
New York

Someone built a Simpsons-style retro TV that plays NES games and 90-minute movies on a tiny display

We love the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) here at XDA. If you've never heard of it, it's basically an ESP32 hooked up to a display, and it's, well, cheap and yellow. We've crowned it one of the best additions you can make to a smart home, and we've even made...

Graciela de Jesús
Mexico

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Stop ignoring your spare PCIe x1 slot — it’s more useful than half the upgrades you buy

PC gamers are leaving 20-30% performance on the table with this one setting

My favorite alternative to VS Code isn’t Cursor or Claude Code: it’s something way cooler and productive

I stopped forcing every coding job through Claude and started using this instead

Stop treating the Raspberry Pi 5 as a smart home hub — it’s actually built for something bigger

Microsoft’s consumer marketing chief to leave next year

I tested TrueNAS, Unraid, and OpenMediaVault to the perfect NAS OS, and there’s a clear winner

AMD is giving older Radeon cards an unexpected upgrade, but it’s a bigger deal than it appears

Someone built a full Wayland compositor inside Minecraft, and it actually works

Samsung’s memory chip employees negotiated $340,000 bonuses this year

Microsoft’s big Copilot rollback continues as Office now lets you move its b***on to the ribbon

Microsoft is letting Office users remove an annoying Copilot b***on

Someone built a Simpsons-style retro TV that plays NES games and 90-minute movies on a tiny display

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