HP warns of rising AI-driven cyber threats by 2026, including increased cookie theft and attacks on device and identity security in organisations. Read...

I did not have “Micron kills its consumer business” on my 2025 bingo card. The company announced the shuttering of its Crucial brand on Wednesday morning in unexpectedly simple, transparent language. The short version: Micron is concentrating on their business customers, where the demand has “surged” for memory and storage—thanks to data centers and their scaling up for AI. (Translation: ‘We can make way more money through enterprise customers, so we will.’) As noted in this same post, this decision ends 29 years of the Crucial brand. I can’t say I’m completely shocked. But I am surprised by what this move partially implies. Namely, enterprise’s hunger for memory and storage lasting for years and years. Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. Missed the surprising topics on our YouTube show or latest news from across the web? You’re in the right place.  Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website!  Am I nervous for consumers? Not just yet. But I am wondering if the somber estimate of RAM shortages lasting beyond this decade ends up proving true. I’m also wondering which other companies will back off consumer sales. And maybe more importantly, how such decisions will affect the development cycles and cost of new products. I don’t mean only RAM kits and SSD drives, though I could see any company producing memory or storage modules abandoning direct-to-consumer efforts. No, I mean anything that contains them, too—like graphics cards. For example, rumor has it that Nvidia may start expecting board partners to source their own memory. Individually, those smaller companies have less power to negotiate. That could then influence the pricing and quantities they get, which in turn would result in higher costs for consumers…and likely slower releases and fewer options, too. Similarly, I could see prebuilt PCs become less bleeding edge with their specs, either staying stagnant or even regressing. Sounds bad, right? So why am I not nervous? Let’s say consumers are faced with higher prices and sluggish innovation. Let’s assume too that everyday folk will push off tech upgrades for longer stretches. The market will have to adapt—and I am curious what that would look like. Chromebooks and GeForce Now have expanded what’s possible for people with low budgets or limited hardware. But I don’t want that approach to PCs to become the default.Matt Smith/Foundry To make up for lagging consumer hardware performance, does the shift to cloud computing accelerate faster? Or will software innovations make up for older, less performant consumer PCs and phones? Companies want everyone on a subscription model, but no one can afford all that exist.  I want the second scenario as our future, if we have to endure a hardware apocalypse. How can we make that happen? Consumers can vote with their dollars, and we must as things become bleaker. Local computing needs to remain a fundamental part of consumer technology. Chromebooks and GeForce Now are fantastic options, but the concepts they rely on—always online, fully dependent on remotely administered servers—cannot handle everyone’s needs. Plus, with online security devolving into a bigger and bigger dumpster fire, local computing is a defense against privacy and data leaks. When PCs first became mainstream, a basic model cost $1,500 to $2,500. Since then, consumer demand fueled the accessibility and openness of the PC—it’s a core reason for why I’m here writing these words and why you’re reading them. I don’t want to watch that die. So I’m choosing to believe we consumers can (and must) stave off such a regression. In this episode of The Full Nerd  In this episode of The Full Nerd, Adam Patrick Murray, Alaina Yee, and Will Smith dig into my annual list of the best DIY gaming PCs buildable with Black Friday deals, plus our predictions for CES 2026. As gloomy as we sound, it was a fun discussion—I enjoy sifting through all the deals and then jigsaw-puzzling them into build lists. Really cool to have crossed the 10-year mark with this tradition! As for CES, we have decided not to play a drinking game based on how often “AI” is mentioned in keynotes and press releases. We’re too old to weather the guaranteed massive hangover. I lived my best streamer-beanie life during this episode. (Gordon’s takes on life were so hilarious.)Willis Lai / Foundry Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd Network YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time! Don’t miss out on our NEW shows too—you can catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and The Full Nerd: Extra Edition now! And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds.  This week’s packed nerd news I came back from our holiday weekend feeling as if I hadn’t heard much news. But plenty still happened behind the noise of AI and its affect on hardware, even if it wasn’t particularly cheery. So on theme with Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to all the wonderfully crazy weirdos who do things like play Minecraft on a receipt printer—I find it great for morale as a hardware enthusiast. And a lover of doing dumb, harmless things for entertainment. That drive is pretty tiny.Mark Hachman / Foundry Long live emoticons: I’m in the minority of folks who still use emoticons, rather than emoji, for conversations. Reading up on emoticon history (as cataloged by former PCWorld contributor Benj Edwards) put a real smile on my face. It was simpler times then. Though humans were still very human. Am I old now? No, it’s the children who are wrong: I identified strongly with this rant from my colleague Mark Hachman, about the physical size of modern external SSDs. (I have too many things to track these days…) So…Year of Linux for real? According to the Zorin OS developers, the latest release of their distro hit an all-time high of 1 million downloads in just five weeks. Steve benchmarked a bunch of Linux games, btw: Our friend Steve Burke & team over at Gamers Nexus dove deep into Linux gaming performance. If you’ve been curious about how a switch off Windows would go, definitely check out this video. Microsoft’s new ugly holiday sweaters are kind of… cute? Except that Zune one. Burn it with fire. Also, it’s a no for me on the Copilot logo mixed in with ’90s nostalgia. And the Xbox one is okay only if you’re a huge brand fanatic. …Okay, yeah, let’s just skip all of these. An expensive slice of Pi: Sadly, RAM pricing affects our favorite budget single-board computer, too. Oh no: I don’t want Google Gemini on my phone. I also rely heavily on Google Assistant to set reminders for me. If this goes beyond just Android Auto, March 2026 may be the month where everyone finds out just how truly bad I am at keeping track of things on my own. ð?? Yep, that’s Minecraft on a receipt printout.smilly (YouTube) / Tom’s Hardware Playing Minecraft on a receipt printer is a thing? Well, it was for a YouTuber who decided to give a go. Very entertaining concept. Almost as good as playing games with bananas or pomegranates. Friends laughed at my living room PC. But who’s laughing now? I mean, really no one, because Netflix killing casting support is just a crappy bit of news. But I do feel vindicated about the little buddy attached to my TV. My kind of ethical hacking: Organizers at Kawaiicon in New Zealand built a system to monitor CO2 levels in the air, as a proxy for viral infection risk. Pretty dang neat bit of hacking. (It’s a hacker conference though, so I guess the digital kind went wild and free, for science and fun.) (Yes, a hacker con, not an anime con.) (No, I did not expect that either.) On the topic of privacy: Proton just released an Excel alternative for its users. In combination with its Word alternative (Proton Docs), it’s now a possible viable alternative to Google’s free webapps. Time to roll up my sleeves and give it a spin, for the sake of reporting. Japan invents ‘human washing machine’: But fails to consider what will not get washed if a human sits in a recliner the whole time while being (gently) hosed down. (Ew.) I expected more from the land that gave us high-tech bidets. Uh oh. Cherry is having big financial problems: To stay afloat, parts of their business will be sold—and production of their well-known switches will shift from Germany to China and Slovakia. Feels like the Cherry we knew will not be the one that survives. RAM is so expensive, Samsung won’t even sell it to Samsung: My colleague Mike Crider has a way with headlines—and this one’s so good I had to include it here, even though everyone’s saturated with memory-related news. It is quite the sign of the times.  I have a dilemma: As mentioned on the show, I have an insufficient quantity of holiday sweaters for our December episodes. Should go with a classy holiday sweater to round out my collection? Or should I lean even harder into the ugly holiday sweater theme? Decisions, decisions. Catch you all next week! ~Alaina This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld. Read...

One of the things that can be really frustrating is if one of your Windows apps won’t open or is corrupted for some reason. If that happens you don’t have to grin and bear it, there are a few steps you can take to resolve the issue. Here’s what to do. What to do: Type cmd into the Search bar and run as administrator. At the command prompt type FSC /SCANNOW and hit enter. This will begin a system scan and if there is any corruption or issues in the operating system, this is going to fix it. If you want to pinpoint a problem with an exact app however, you could do the following. Go to Settings and click on Apps > Installed Apps. Now on the list, find the app that’s not working. Click the three dots next to the app and select Advanced options. Scroll down until you see the Repair option. Click on it to repair the app. Alternatively, you could also reset the app by clicking Reset underneath the repair button. Dominic Bayley / Foundry If that doesn’t work you can try resetting the windows store cache. Here’s how to do that. Right click the Windows symbol on the taskbar and select Run. Then type wsreset and hit enter. Finally, if that doesn’t work, try this last step. On your search bar type cmd and run as an administrator. Now at the command prompt type this command: DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth. This command will repair and replace Windows operating system if there is any corruption or any missing files due to corruption. Once you’ve done that last step, you can restart your computer and try to open the corrupt apps again. That’s a wrap for this Try This. For more tips and tricks delivered to your inbox, be sure to subscribe to our PCWorld Try This newsletter. Read...

Orgvue launches Henshaw AI to automate workforce planning, cutting months of data work to minutes and aiding firms like Salesforce in redesign efforts. Read...

The European Commission says the social media site is opening its users up to scams and impersonations. Read...

Building a gaming PC is one of those activities where restraint can be difficult. Naturally, you want to get the best PC that your money can buy. But in the decision-making process it’s easy to overstretch and end up spending way more than you need to. Here I list five of the most common ways PC builders waste money when building a gaming rig. Don’t go too big with the power supply It’s easy to over-spec your power supply and go too big. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to upgrade when you need more power. For example, say you have a less powerful graphics card like an AMD 7600 XT running on a 500W power supply, but later on you find a good deal on an Nvidia RTX 3090 and want to swap that in. Because that card needs a lot more power than your power supply can support, you’ll need a bigger one. That’s a legitimate change that’s going to be worthwhile. But it’s easy to go too big. If you look at the difference in price between a 500W power supply and a 1,000W power supply, it can be substantial, so you should just use the power supply that matches your power needs at any time. Don’t over-spec the RAM Typically, you don’t need huge amounts of RAM in a gaming PC. Some games utilize more RAM than others, but for the most part you can get away with 16GB of DDR4 running at 3800MHz and be perfectly fine for years to come rather than splurging on the latest DDR5 RAM in a super-quick and large module. The price difference between the different speeds of RAM increases exponentially. If you take the difference between RAM running at 5,200MHz and RAM running at 7,200MHz, it can often be double the price. What you’ll often find, too, is that the RAM running at a higher transfer speed has a slower timing than the RAM with the slower transfer speed, so it doesn’t always make good sense to go for the RAM with the faster transfer speed and the higher price. Resist gaming editions or specialist hardware Manufacturers found out eons ago that if they put “gaming edition” or “founders’ edition” in front of a piece of hardware, it can be very tantalizing to buyers. That doesn’t mean the hardware is any better than the standard version, it’s usually just an aesthetic difference that gives that impression, like RGB for example. That said, gaming edition hardware usually costs a premium. So, if you’re shopping for anything and you see the words “gaming edition” or “founders’ edition” in the name, it doesn’t necessarily mean the item is bad, just don’t be fooled into thinking it’s going to give you an edge in performance — i.e., your cash can go further with a less expensive option. Avoid RGB components As well as buying expensive founders’ edition hardware, you may be tempted to buy gaming gear decked out with RGB. But if you really want to save money, you should avoid it. The truth is that your PC games are going to run the same regardless of whether you have RGB or not in your hardware, so buying more expensive RGB components isn’t a good idea. RGB truly is for show purposes unless it’s for keyboard backlighting, so carefully consider whether your money could be better spent on parts that deliver more bang for the buck. Pexels: Atahan Demir Don’t over-spec the storage If you look at two SSDs from different generations — PCIe Gen 3 and Gen 5 — you’ll notice a huge difference in price, in some cases upwards of $200. That would make you think there is going to be a significant performance difference between them, and under controlled conditions there is, but I guarantee you that you won’t notice the difference when you’re gaming and surfing the web and just using your PC for general computing. Even a high-MB transfer rate of 12,400MB/s is going to be hard to notice compared to a slower 3500MB/s transfer rate. To notice the difference, you’d need to be moving a large file from one location to the next, which unless you’re a professional that deals with large files, you’re not going to be doing. So, know that you can get away with a PCIe Gen 3 or PCIe Gen 4 SSD for gaming and don’t necessarily need a PCIe Gen 5 SSD. Related content Why PC gamers shouldn’t waste money on a PCIe 5.0 SSD 6 reasons to skip RGB lights in your PC Best SSDs: From SATA to PCIe 5.0, from budget to premium Read...

DE-CIX has elevated Epsilon Telecommunications to Premium Reseller Partner, expanding AI-focused interconnection services across Asia-Pacific`s booming market. Read...

Allied Telesis launches OneConnect, a cloud platform with AI-powered automation and unified management for wired and wireless networks. Read...

DataSapien launches AI platform letting mobile apps run AI models device-native, boosting privacy and cutting cloud costs for app publishers. Read...

Solace launches Agent Mesh Enterprise platform, enabling firms to securely scale agentic AI applications that integrate real-time enterprise data with robust governance. Read...