In the photo above, the ESA combined data from the James Webb telescope and the Hubble telescope to provide a comprehensive illustration of Messier 74. This large spiral galaxy, more commonly known as the Phantom Galaxy, is about 32 million light-years from Earth in the equatorial constellation Pisces and was first discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1780. It measures 95,000 light-years in diameter and is estimated to host around 100 billion stars....

When one of my best friends unexpectedly died last year, his family turned to me for photos to use in the slideshow that would play during the visitation. Camera-equipped smartphones are the norm these days and as such, there was no shortage of pictures to choose from. Inevitably, this also meant his loved ones were left with a collection of mostly low-quality cell phone photos to remember him by. I learned at a very early age that photographs are often all you have to remember someone by....

Four years after the initial release, the compatibility layer known as Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has become an integral part of Windows. As announced by Microsoft Program Manager Craig Loewen, the Microsoft Store version of WSL is dropping its “Preview” label and becoming generally available to the public. Users of Windows 10 and Windows 11 will both have access to the latest WSL release in the Store, which is now the default version of the software....

Finishing Halo 2 on Legendary difficult is no simple task, especially if you’re trying to do it without ever dying. Once you add the challenge of turning on virtually all the skull modifiers, the run moves from incredibly hard to nigh-on impossible. Secret skulls have been part of the Halo games for most of the franchise’s long history. They contain modifiers designed to make the game harder, such as turning off the radar/entire HUD, increasing enemy difficulty, and halving the amount of dropped ammo....

YouTube Vanced has been around for a few years, swelling in popularity as an alternative to Google’s official YouTube app, once the latter started sprinkling more, longer ads and sponsored sections in videos. As with browser extensions on the web, Vanced even resurrected the dislike counter on mobile, a feature that YouTube controversially removed from the platform in November last year. The modded client also gave users free access to YouTube Premium features, including background playback and picture-in-picture mode, as well as added customizations and a dark theme....

Created and managed by Slovak company ACROS Security, 0patch is a platform designed to deliver, apply and remove “microscopic” security updates to unsupported software products. The service is particularly interesting for consumers and companies still working on legacy Windows versions, as it offers a third-party alternative to keep the OS secure where Microsoft’s official support is no longer available. Patches released through the ACROS service belong to the “micropatch” category....

TechSpot Wallpaper Week - 3rd edition This is the third edition of Wallpaper Week on TechSpot which we’ve broken down in five categories. We’re refreshing all content, keeping the best high-resolution wallpapers from previous editions and adding a ton of new content, one category per day Monday thru Friday. The idea is to share astonishing wallpapers gathered from around the web by members of the TechSpot staff. Most of these are good to use with your 4K desktop, laptop display or smartphone....

The SPECviewperf results were no surprise with all seven P55 motherboards delivering very similar results in both the Maya and 3dsMax tests. This further proves that even for heavy duty work a budget P55 motherboard is every bit as good as a high-end model, at least in terms of performance. CINEBENCH R10 is yet another tool that shows us how little performance difference there is between these P55 motherboards.

Besides the model we tested today the SH93 also comes in 320GB and 640GB capacities, priced at around $80 and $150 respectively, and your choice between bright yellow and red colors. The SH93 incorporates a rubber-plastic mix for its housing which acts as a cushion protection against bumps and falls. It fully meets the “MIL-STD-810F 516.5 procedure IV” military standard for transit drop tests, allowing the drive to endure 1....

AI systems like GitHub Copilot promise to make programmers’ lives easier by creating entire chunks of “new” code based on natural-language textual inputs and pre-existing context. But code-generating algorithms can also bring an insecurity factor to the table, as a new study involving several developers has recently found. Looking specifically at Codex, the AI platform developed by OpenAI, which is also the code-making engine of the aforementioned GitHub Copilot, the study recruited 47 different developers....

Folks who aren’t picky could get away with playing at an average of just 30fps, though we recommend shooting for at least 40fps and ideally you want 60fps. Given the quality settings we used, the old GTX 550 Ti offered a surprisingly good result at 26fps, while the R7 250, which is typically only good for low to medium quality settings, delivered 28fps. Getting over the 30fps bump was the age old GTX 460 with 35fps, while the GTX 560 Ti and 650 Ti both managed 44fps....

A skeleton crew will be retained in hopes of finding a new use for the bots, but otherwise it sounds like the project is dead.

During AMD’s recent “together we advance_gaming” presentation, the tech giant announced the expansion of the already existing AMD Advantage program. The company created the initiative to let less tech-savvy users know they were getting top-of-the-line performance from their new pre-built desktop. The service set strict requirements on what parts a laptop required to earn the AMD Advantage badge, such as a Ryzen 9 processor, the best mobile GPU currently available, and a 144 Hz or better display....

While the Phenom II X6 1055T operates at 2.80GHz and the 1090T Black Edition at 3.20GHz the new 1075T slots in-between them with an operating frequency of 3.0GHz. Along with this new hexa-core processor we also have the Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition, Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition, Athlon II X4 645 and Athlon II X2 265. The Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition is coming in at the current price point of the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition ($185), which will have the latter model dropping to $165 where the 955 is right now....

With the launch of the Ryzen 5 5600, it feels like we’ve been talking about this lower cost 6-core Zen 3 processor since the launch of Ryzen 5000 back in late 2020. At the time we thought it might only be a few months away, and then gave up all hope when it didn’t launch at all in 2021. But then again, here we are. Supply has improved for AMD’s desktop CPUs, and we’re getting this and two more budget-oriented AMD CPUs, all of which use Zen 3 technology in differing ways....

For the first time during our testing, the Radeon HD 6870 overpowered the Radeon HD 5870. At 1920x1200, the Radeon HD 6870 was 10% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 and 32% faster than the Radeon HD 5850. The Radeon HD 6870 also led the GeForce GTX 470 by 6%, while it was 10% faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (1GB). Splinter Cell Conviction Splinter Cell Conviction requires Fraps to measure in-game performance and we recorded 60 seconds of the first level, “Merchant’s Street Market”....

Whereas the GeForce GTX 480 was the fastest single-GPU graphics cards during its era, the GTX 580 retains the crown as it is simply too much for the Radeon HD 6970 to handle. The HD 6970 will be priced to tackle Nvidia’s second in command, the GeForce GTX 570, while the HD 6950 fills a price bracket of its own. It won’t be until early next year when AMD gets the chance to reclaim the performance crown, with the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990, code-named Antilles....

In terms of performance, we had a rough idea of what to expect based on the specifications AMD had sent to us with weeks of anticipation. What we have here is a pair of slightly diluted Radeon HD 6970 GPUs squeezed onto a single PCB. With core clock speeds reduced by 6% and the memory frequency lowered by 9%, on average the Radeon HD 6990 was 6% slower than two Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire graphics cards....

Ideally we suggest gamers try to get their hands on either a GeForce GTX 660 Ti or Radeon HD 7870. There’s an invisible threshold between those and lower-end graphics cards that translate into the possibility of enjoying all of today’s PC games in their full visual glory at reasonable resolutions. So then, at $150 we weren’t expecting to be blown away with the 7790, and we weren’t. The GPU does what everyone expected it to, it fills the gap between the 7770 and 7850 in terms of price and performance....

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition closed the gap on the GeForce GTX 680 in Battlefield 3 at 2560x1600, as it was just 2% slower getting within 1fps thanks to a 5% boost over the standard 7970. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition was 5% faster than the standard 7970 in Modern Warfare 3, allowing it to match the performance of the GeForce GTX 680 with 81fps.