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What Is Intel Evo? Intel’s Evo branding essentially acts as a certification to ensure an Intel laptop, equipped with a recent Intel CPU, is performing to a series of standards mandated by Intel. The company calls it a “platform.” If you see a laptop with an Evo sticker, it simply just means that it meets a number of minimum requirements in addition to being powered by an Intel CPU. The requirements change with each generation of Intel CPUs....

Recently a demo from Epic, the makers of the Unreal game engine, raised eyebrows for its photo-realistic lighting effects. The technique is a big step forward for ray tracing. But what does that mean? What Ray Tracing Does Put simply, ray tracing is a method that a graphics engine uses to calculate how virtual light sources affect the items within their environment. The program literally traces the rays of light, using calculations developed by physicists who study the way real light behaves....

The Original Echo: Voice Control with a Beefy Speaker The Echo Dot: Small and Compact, but with Poor Audio Quality The Echo Dot ($50) is a tiny, inexpensive version of the original Echo—it can do everything a regular Echo can, but without taking up as much space (although it’s missing the nice, big speaker). However, to make up for the lack of speaker, it contains a line out port that lets you hook it up to your stereo or other big, high-quality speaker....

AWS has data centers located all over the world. To complicate their pricing further, each region has different prices for certain products. Which region is the cheapest? Which one should you build your network architecture in? US East Is Usually The Cheapest Taking a look at this pricing chart from Concurrency Labs, it’s clear that both US East regions, us-east-1 (Northern Virginia) and us-east-2 (Ohio), are priced very low compared to the others....

Red Dead Redemption 2: 105 GB of storage space required. Shadow of War: 98 GB. Final Fantasy 15: almost 150 GB. Why the hell are these games taking up so much room on your hard drive? There are a few different factors at play here. And to be specific, we’re talking about big, AAA 3D games, not the likes of Minecraft or Stardew Valley. But in the simplest possible terms, there are three primary reasons: game files are getting bigger, game worlds are getting bigger, and available storage space is getting cheaper....

You’ve heard the rhetoric: Google (or Facebook) knows too much about me! But it’s really not that big of a deal. Your data is safe, it’s not really about “you” anyway, and nothing is being sold. The current narrative is that tech companies knowing too much about you is bad. But why? Because when anyone that you don’t know personally knows a lot about you, it affects our sense of privacy....

Your Mac comes with a set amount of physical memory applications can use. Your running programs, open files, and other data your Mac is actively working with are stored in this physical memory. But that’s a simplification—applications can also use “virtual memory”, which your Mac can compress and temporarily store on disk. There’s no official way to disable virtual memory on a modern Mac, although this was possible in the days before Mac OS X—now named macOS—was released....

Today, security researchers published a paper detailing a serious vulnerability in WPA2, the protocol that keeps most modern Wi-FI networks secure—including the one in your home. Here’s how to protect yourself from attackers. What Is KRACK, and Should I Be Worried? Play Video KRACK is shorthand for key reinstallation attack. When you connect a new device to a Wi-Fi network, and type in the password, a 4-way handshake takes place that ensures the correct password is used....

It’s not a miracle, but these helpful tips can improve the quality of an image when enlarging from a low-resolution sample. It’s surprisingly simple and quite easy. Fire up Photoshop and check it out for yourself! At How-To Geek, we’ve written extensively about how it’s impossible to “enhance” images and reclaim detail that is lost or isn’t there to begin with. Are we changing our tune? Nope, there’s nothing magical about these tips, except for the improved results you’ll get when you improve your own low resolution images....

Adding Skins In Library view, click on View from the Menu and select Skin Chooser. By default, WMP 12 comes with only a couple of modest skins. When you select a skin from the left pane, a preview will be displayed to the right. To apply one of the skins, simply select it from the pane on the left and click Apply Skin. You can also switch to the currently selected skin in the Skin chooser by selecting Skin from the View menu, or by pressing Crtl + 2....

You might think that Retweets are public and Likes are private. This makes sense, in a way: anything you Retweet is instantly pushed to your followers, and Twitter doesn’t make it clear at all what happens when you Like a tweet. But your Likes are not private. Anyone who wants to can scroll through everything you’ve ever liked, and Twitter can decide to point them out to your followers. Let’s go over what happens when you Like a tweet....

Remember a few years ago, when online services were going to slay the anti-consumer demons of DirecTV, Time Warner, and Comcast? Here in 2017, the market for cord-cutting, streaming TV looks a lot more bleak. And thanks to confusing and expensive channel lineups, weird sports restrictions, and more and more exclusive content, the situation isn’t going to get better any time soon. “Packages” Are Alive and Well The bane of satellite and cable TV is the bundled channel package....

You may have noticed the addition of a new button occupying the upper-right corner of the Chrome web browser. This is the new avatar profile management system, which adds some cool functionality you might find useful. What is the profile management system? It lets you use different Chrome profiles simultaneously, thus enabling you to use different bookmarks, have separate extensions, plug-ins, and anything else you can assign to it....

The second-gen Apple Pencil is the newest stylus from Apple, designed to magnetically attach to a supported iPad. It also charges while it’s magnetically attached, so you don’t have to worry about occasionally plugging it in, like the original model. You can use the Pencil for drawing or handwriting notes, with some apps having special support for stylus input. Keep in mind that the second-gen Pencil is only compatible with the 6th-gen iPad Mini or later, 4th-gen iPad Air ot later, 3rd-gen iPad Pro 12....

People often call me a “techie.” I know the latest version of Android, how many cameras the new iPhone has, and I actually care about the taskbar in Windows 11. So how can a person like me use Bing on purpose? The popular opinion of Bing is…not good. I don’t know anyone—especially those in the tech community—who chooses to use Bing. Google is obviously the top choice, DuckDuckGo is probably the second place....

What do you do when a fan on your computer is loud enough to be disruptive to your work-flow, or is ruining the fun when doing other things? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post looks at the best way to catch the ‘guilty culprit’. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. Photo courtesy of el_finco (Flickr)....

Note: of course, this isn’t really news to most serious geeks, but we’re out to help everybody. Displaying Only Unread Emails in Gmail Like we were mentioning above, if you use the drop-down and choose “Unread” from the list, all it’s going to do is select the checkboxes next to the unread messages in the list—not that useful for cleaning out your inbox. Instead, all you need to do is type is: into the search box, and the search suggestions box will pop up and let you select the is:unread from the list—which, of course, you could also type into the box yourself....

You know you can use AirDrop to quickly share files between Macs and iOS devices, but on the Mac, Airdrop is kind of hidden. There’s an icon in the sidebar of the Finder, and that’s it. RELATED: AirDrop 101: Easily Send Content Between Nearby iPhones, iPads, and Macs If you want AirDrop to be a little more prominent, you can add an icon for it to your Dock, but it takes a little bit of work....

New to the Mac ecosystem? You might be wondering how to increase or decrease the computer’s volume. Just like Windows, you can use keyboard shortcuts. And to make this easier, you can add a volume slider to the menu bar as well. Use Function Keys on the Mac Keyboard The easiest way to adjust the volume on your Mac is by using the media keys on your keyboard. Similar to Windows, the Mac keyboard has a function row at the top....

Two-factor authentication secures your accounts with code in addition to your password. You can’t get in without the code sent to your phone. But what happens if you lose or reset your phone? If you don’t plan your recovery method ahead of time, you could permanently lose access to your accounts. Here’s what you should do right now to make sure you don’t get locked out in the future....