Last week’s Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22557 was a reasonably significant release. Among its additions were new touch gestures for opening and closing the Start Menu. Users with touch screens can now swipe up on the taskbar to open the menu. They can swipe left or right in the menu to switch between pinned apps, all apps, and recommended apps. Swiping down closes the Start Menu, and the same gestures on the bottom right side of the taskbar will open and close the Quick Settings....

Released on January 25, Windows 11 KB5008353 “addresses a performance regression issue that occurs when you enable the update sequence number (USN) journal.” According to Windows Latest, which has been tracking the issue for months, the update does indeed appear to remedy the issue. One user from the Feedback Hub said that in addition to their NVMe, their SATA SSD is also faster. Windows 11 used to boot up slower than Windows 10, but that’s no longer the case after the new update, the user added....

Microsoft found itself in a bind after the launch of Windows 7. Struggling for relevance in the mobile sector, the company attempted to fill the void in its portfolio by adding a touch-friendly UI layer over the Windows desktop. However, Metro came with a myriad of issues and complaints, mostly because of poor choices in usability design – part of what we’ve been hoping Microsoft will fix in Windows 8....

Inevitably, with change comes good and bad – at least until you learn some tricks that get you back up to speed. I know I’ve been hitting my head against the wall when things don’t behave the way they used to. The Start menu’s absence is a perfect example of a radical change. Indeed, the duality of the OS may bring some trouble, but as skeptical as I was, I must admit Microsoft has done a pretty good job of easing many of my concerns....

As reported by Gizmodo, Bernard Arnault is the CEO of luxury brand LVMH and the world’s second-richest person with a fortune that puts him above Jeff Bezos and below leader Elon Musk on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. Like other members of the rich and famous club, Arnault prefers the comfort and privacy of taking a private jet. He’s also one of the many people whose planes are being tracked on Twitter using publicly accessible information and transponder signals....

There are a couple of interesting things to note from these benchmarks. Firstly, the Redmi Pro falls near the top of the charts in most situations, so this device is providing very good battery life. The handset is particularly efficient at web browsing on LTE, where the massive battery capacity helps to provide more than seven hours of stamina in our benchmark. On the other hand, while battery life is still excellent, efficiency is only average....

A video posted to Twitter allegedly shows Vietnamese cryptocurrency miners preparing used graphics cards for resale by washing them with a high-powered jet nozzle. Mining crypto with the power of multiple GPUs has become less profitable since “The Merge,” so cryptopreneurs are preparing to offload much of their equipment. Of course, some crypto-mining rigs have been running 24/7 for years, leaving little time for cleaning. Most casual users just clean their PC with a can of compressed air — maybe a soft brush and alcohol for heavy build up — and call it a day, but that could become impractical when dealing with racks and racks of GPUs....

The Intel DZ77GA-70K UEFI is extremely well organized and powerful. Above is the main menu where you’ll find processor and memory information along with the system time and date and the system log. Just about everything you might want to tinker with is easily adjustable, including the default BIOS start page, a feature the ECS Z77H2-AX would have benefited from. The Cooling menu lets you monitor fan speeds, temperatures and voltages....

Conversely in the second batch of results, which included Gaming and Video Editing tests, we saw the SH93 and Spinpoint M80 deliver very similar results while OCZ’s drive was significantly faster overall. Finally, we ran the A-DATA SH93 through SiSoftware Sandra 2009 using the physical disks benchmark. The results are not all that surprising as all three USB 2.0 devices delivered very similar performance.

The quantity vs. quality aspect of the Call of Duty franchise hasn’t really bothered Activision for nearly two decades, considering how every new annual release tops the sales chart and brings in tons of money to the publisher. However, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg reports that next year’s main entry is being pushed back into 2024. While it’s speculated that the delay could have to do with Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Schreier notes that isn’t the case....

Xilinx and AMD began the proceedings at the end of October 2020. It was simple from the outset; both Xilinx and AMD were publicly traded, and AMD wanted to exchange shares with Xilinx. A ratio of 1.7234 was set: for each share of Xilinx a shareholder owns, they will receive 1.7234 shares of the new AMD that has Xilinx under its umbrella. However, the deal took several months longer to complete than anticipated, possibly due to interference from the Chinese government....

Power consumption of the Phenom II X4 965 was in line with the what we had seen before from the 955. Given the performance you couldn’t ask more from the Phenom II X4 965 under load, plus the use of DDR3 memory helped shaving a few extra watts off. Under full load the Phenom II X4 965 used 6.5% less power than the Core i7 920 and 8% less than the Core 2 Quad Q9650....

The Radeon HD 6950 was only able to match the performance of the HD 5870 here, but it was also 12% faster than the HD 6870 and 21% faster than the GTX 470. In World in Conflict at 1920x1200 the Radeon HD 6950 was 12% slower than both the GeForce GTX 570 and Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards, but it was 13% faster than the Radeon HD 5870, HD 6870 and GTX 470....

The Radeon HD 6990 also performed well when testing with World in Conflict Soviet Assault averaging 77fps at 2560x1600. This meant that it was 48% faster than the Radeon HD 5970, 60% faster than the 6970 and 43% faster than the GeForce GTX 580.

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition showed no signs of improvement when testing with Just Cause 2 at 2560x1600, rendering the same 47fps as the standard 7970 making it just 2% slower than the GeForce GTX 680 and 2% faster than the GTX 670. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition averaged 49fps at 2560x1600 in Max Payne 3 making it just a single frame faster than the standard 7970. This meant that the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition was still 4% slower than the GeForce GTX 670 and 9% slower than the GTX 680....

Let’s start with the models AMD announced today. The flagship GPU is the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, packing some beefy specs: 48 workgroup processors (WGPs, for short), or 96 compute units if you want to use that language, with a total of 12,288 shader units. The 7900 XTX packs 20 percent more compute units than the 6950 XT, but AMD has moved to a dual-shader design within each compute unit, effectively doubling the shader unit count inside each CU....

The list of initial games supporting AMD FSR 2.0 is out and includes a dozen upcoming releases and already-available titles. Earlier this month, Asobo announced that it’s adding the technology to Microsoft Flight Simulator, though with no timeline for when we’ll see it. On Tuesday, Giants Software made Farming Simulator 22 the second game to employ the new upscaler. Two more games adding FSR 2.0 are Eve Online and Obsidian Entertainment’s Grounded....

Looking at the power consumption figures when running the Cinebench R15 multi-threaded test I have to say the Ryzen CPUs don’t look particularly fuel efficient. The 1600X pushed our total system consumption to 64% higher than that of the Core i5-7600K. However, we need a bit more context. Keep in mind that the 1600X was almost 100% faster in this test, so increasing total system consumption by just 64% to deliver twice the performance is actually impressive....

Out of the box, the 1700X consumes a similar amount of power as the 5960X while the 1800X is quite a bit hungrier. The total system consumption for the overclocked 1700X was 220 watts, or nearly a 30% increase in power draw for what was up to a 10% boost in performance. The overclocked 1800X pushed total system consumption up by almost 20% to 284 watts. For some reason, the Ryzen processors consume maximum power in Excel test whereas the Intel processors don’t....