Earlier this year two major vulnerabilities were discovered which affected the core processes of the computer. Named as Spectre and Meltdown, these “speculative execution” vulnerabilities meant hackers could steal data by simply visiting a website. Though there were no known incidents of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, the processor microcode patches could have up to a 30% impact on the performance of...
Hard drive manufacturers have been using helium to help boost hard drive storage capacity for several years. Now a team of Canadian researchers has made a major storage breakthrough thanks to another element. Scientists at the University of Alberta have successfully used hydrogen atoms to store data. The atoms were applied to a silicon chip roughly half the size of a fingernail. To write...
Intel has previously said its 10nm chips will arrive in 2019. But on Thursday, the company got more specific: the upcoming processors will land on store shelves at the end of 2019, during the holiday season. The first 10nm chips to launch will be for consumer PCs, with server-based chips to shortly follow, Intel executives said during an earnings call. Why the continued delays?...
Seagate displayed the world’s fastest hard drive today at the Open Compute summit and announced that it has surpassed industry reliability standards with its new HAMR HDDs. The new drives use Seagate’s Multi-Actuator technology, which we’ve covered in depth, to deliver twice the performance of a standard hard drive. Seagate has branded the new actuator technology as “Mach.2” and set a new record for...
Logitech has announced that it’s shutting down all services for the Harmony Link hub, a plastic puck the company released in 2011 that gave smartphones and tablets the ability to act as universal remotes for thousands of devices. Owners of the product have received an email from the company warning that the Link will completely stop working in March. “On March 16th, 2018, Logitech...
I recently noticed that something was writing a lot of data to my SSD so I started looking trough what could be causing it, and Spotify ended up being the culprit, it was writing close to 10GB an hour to my drive at one point. I checked the I/O write data with the S.M.A.R.T data on my drive and it wrote 28.305.469.806 Bytes of...
Chipset manufacturers have been boosting processing power by leaps and bounds in recent years. Now, Intel is going one better with the next-generation Broadwell-E chip family, its first ever 10-core desktop processor. You heard that right: Intel is going for “10-core” in its branding here, ditching the logical naming progression to “deca-core.” Apparently, we don’t need Latin with speeds like this chip promises. The...
It’s no secret that AMD has had a tough time over the last few years. While the company managed to post a profit at the start of 2014—largely thanks to its chips being used in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One—more often than not its reliance on a declining PC market has seen its profits plunge and turn into losses since the Athlon 64...
There has been a LOT of confusion around Windows, SSDs (hard drives), and whether or not they are getting automatically defragmented by automatic maintenance tasks in Windows. There’s a general rule of thumb or statement that “defragging an SSD is always a bad idea.” I think we can agree we’ve all heard this before. We’ve all been told that SSDs don’t last forever and...
Tomato is an excellent firmware to replace the default Linksys firmware. The Tomato firmware will work on the following routers: Linksys’ WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based routers. The GUI is very responsive in terms of speed and the firmware is quite stable. It works using AJAX and most commonly used browsers work just fine with the firmware. Tomato includes great features such as...
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