Microsoft has been working on some Windows 11 updates that it's starting to bring to all users after testing them with Windows Insiders. Among other things, the company said it made the operating system up to 20 percent more responsive, in part by improving memory efficiency and management. For instance, Windows 11 "can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage, helping your PC stay responsive as you open more apps or browser tabs," Navjot Virk, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Experiences, wrote in a blog post. Virk noted that PCs with 8GB of memory may see "an especially meaningful difference." That's welcome, given that it's increasingly expensive to upgrade RAM in a PC.

The Dell Laptop Buying Guide UK: Which Dell Laptop Should You Buy? When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Windows defaults to 4KB clusters, which wastes space on large file partitions. In an age of 4TB SSDs and massive NVMe drives, many users tend to leave the entire storage space as a single, huge system drive. While this is convenient, from an administrative point of view it is a risky move that amounts to flying blind.

The Dell Laptop Buying Guide UK: Which Dell Laptop Should You Buy? When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Nice, Samsung's speedy T9 portable SSD is $115 off for Prime Day This deal almost brings the Samsung T9 back to last year's pricing. I've been hoping for SSD prices to drop at least a little during holiday sales--and thankfully, Amazon delivered by slashing the price of the Samsung T9, one of our favorite portable SSDs, down to just $335 for the 2TB model. That's an all-time low since February, when the prices of SSDs began skyrocketing.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. These October Prime Day deals let you save on storage. PC upgrades cost more than they used to. At least, if you're looking to get more storage space. AI data center buildouts have obliterated affordable prices for SSDs and hard drives.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. SD cards cost way more now. Here's how to make yours last Memory card prices have jumped. Get the most out of yours by understanding how they die and what you can do to keep them going. Thanks to AI data centers, consumer SSDs, flash drives, and SD/microSD cards have doubled or even tripled in price.

There's no question that Apple's Mac Mini is a great desktop computer, offering a surprising amount of power in a shockingly small size. However, it tops out at an M5 Pro processor and 64GB of RAM, with 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth. That's enough for many demanding situations, but AI and content creation power users may need more. The "base" version (starting at 2,500) has an M5 Max processor with an 18-core GPU and 32-core GPU, and up to 128GB of unified memory, depending on the option chosen. That goes up to 5,899 for the 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU version with 128GB of RAM and 2TB storage.

The odd M4 Max and M3 Ultra offerings Apple had with the previous Mac Studio were due to Apple skipping a generation with its Ultra chips . This time around, Apple decided that the M5 series would have an Ultra chip, so you can get either an M5 Max or M5 Ultra. The $2,499 M5 Max Mac Studio comes standard with an 18-core CPU (6 super cores, 12 performance cores), a 32-core GPU, 36GB of unified memory, and a 512GB SSD. However, this CPU is essentially fixed at 36GB of RAM; if you want more, you must upgrade to the 18-core CPU/40-core GPU, which technically costs $300 but actually adds $600 to the price when the cost of the 48GB RAM upgrade is factored in. It can further be upgraded to 64GB ($400) or 128GB ($2,000). This review looks at the M5 Max option with an 18-core CPU, a 40-core GPU, 128GB of RAM, and a 4TB SSD, which adds $4,400 the price of the Mac Studio.

Kepler Computing claims a new approach to chip design--and a proprietary material--can help end the supply bottlenecks that have sent memory prices surging. An ambitious chip startup that has spent more than seven years quietly trying to redesign the architecture for computer memory has just come out of stealth mode and believes its new approach can help ease the global memory-chip shortage --provided it can produce its technology at scale. Kepler Computing, a San Jose, California-based startup founded in 2018 by a team of physicists and computer scientists, says it has developed a new architecture for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that directly addresses some of the chip supply bottlenecks that are constraining the computing market. While chipmakers typically rely on expensive extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) to shrink the transistors on a chip, thereby packing more technology into the same amount of space, Kepler claims that its "3D stacking" approach and a proprietary new material allow it to increase density without relying on EUV at all--and it can work with existing semiconductor fabrication plants. Kepler says it has made similar gains for the high-speed cache memory typically used in CPUs, GPUs, and XPUs.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This laptop combines the latest processor with a great screen and battery life, for about the same price you'd pay a year ago. I don't drink liquor when I look for deals in the morning. But for most of the last year, I've wanted to do so. It's getting really, really hard to find decent prices for what used to be considered mid-range laptops. This touchscreen OLED laptop from Lenovo would have been $800 about a year ago and today it's $800 at Best Buy, allegedly $500 off.

Acemagic is offering nearly half off the price of its Matrix Mini M5 with a 16-core i7 processor, 32GB of memory, and 1TB of storage. The state of PC prices right now sucks. But if you hunt around, you can still find decent prices, at least in the context of the worst market I've ever seen. Case in point: Acemagic is offering a mini PC with a Core i7 processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage for just $549 with a coupon -- use code at checkout! This Matrix Mini M5 is pretty typical of mini PC designs, with a 128mm (5-inch) square body that can be mounted to the back of a monitor, and it's using laptop parts.