So you’ve just installed your shiny new graphics card – congrats! But after booting into Windows, you soon notice a problem: the music and audio cuts out a lot, or it keeps going out of sync with the on-screen footage. While this is a frustrating side-effect of a GPU upgrade, it’s often easy enough to … Read more
Ah, Windows Updates. When they work, they seamlessly keep our computers up to date. But sometimes they are the bane of our tech lives: randomly failing, or causing our PCs to restart at the worst possible time. That’s why Windows rolled out the ‘active hours’ feature a few years ago. This was Microsoft’s attempt to … Read more
If you have an Asus motherboard, you will probably have the Armoury Crate (or Armory Crate) software on your PC. Unfortunately it’s a fairly buggy bit of software, and any non-admin users will keep getting an annoying UAC pop-up every time they login that says: Do you want to allow this app to make changes … Read more
PCs work well… most of the time. However in rare cases, Windows computers can have major problems after a power outage – even resulting in the PC failing to boot up. This is because modern PCs are actually quite complicated: a range of PC hardware, BIOS options and operating system layers all have to work … Read more
A computer’s BIOS is filled with loads of weird and scary sounding options, and you might have come across a settings like “Launch CSM” and “Secure Boot”. Sometimes you might come across an article online suggesting that you disable CSM, either to speed up boot times or resolve certain hardware bugs. Unfortunately disabling CSM has … Read more
Over the past few months, my Windows PC has developed an annoying issue. Sometimes when I boot up, I launch a game or video editing program… and get hit by lag and performance stutters. I might just about get 1 FPS in Rocket League if I’m lucky! I then check Task Manager, and I notice … Read more
Something that has always annoyed me on Windows is just how difficult it makes playing sound. It should be simple. If you plug in headphones, it should play on there. If no headphones are plugged in, it should play through the monitor’s speakers. Simple. But it’s often not the simple, unfortunately. Windows gives you random … Read more
Drivers are vital pieces of software in your PC. Essentially, every bit of hardware that plugs into your computer needs a driver of some kind to work properly. Everything from gaming controllers to drawing tablets need drivers, but does your CPU need its down driver? Your CPU is designed to work without a driver, but … Read more
Ultimate? Performance? Balance? Picking a power setting shouldn’t feel like deciding between the character stats of the latest RPG. What’s the difference between these Ryzen power plans anyway? Ryzen offers three basic power plans: Balanced, High Performance, and Ultimate. Balanced works on saving energy and lowering heat, High Performance opens up the clock speed for faster … Read more
The CPU handles all of the basic math that makes every program and process on your PC work. While it can handle some intensive tasks, it shouldn’t always be high, or near 100% usage. So when it is at this point for extended periods of time, is there an obvious reason for it? Your CPU … Read more