Twitter user Albacore posted screenshots showing ads and promos for Microsoft products appearing in the flyout screen above the Change Account Settings option in the latest Windows 11 Preview Build. One of the ads prompts users to back their files up to OneDrive, while another suggests users sign up for a Microsoft Account. Windows Insider Program Team Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc replied to the Tweet, emphasizing that Microsoft is only experimenting with some variations of this feature with Windows Insiders....

Sky News writes that Microsoft is set to announce the layoffs in a few days. It writes that the company’s global workforce of more than 221,000 people—122,000 of whom are full-time employees based in the United States—will be reduced by around 5%, or about 10,000 jobs, though the final figure could be even higher. The cuts are reportedly set to take place across a number of engineering divisions. Microsoft has made previous layoffs in the last 12 months, including cuts that impacted fewer than 1,000 employees in October, though they have been on a much smaller scale than those of fellow tech firms, affecting less than 1% of its total workforce....

A lot of gamers worry about the integration of NFTs or some form of blockchain technology into their favorite titles, potentially spoiling an experience they’ve enjoyed for years. Some of these people have been asking for clarification on Mojang’s stance toward non-fungible tokens, to which the company posted a lengthy response. The number of people playing Minecraft was estimated to be more than 141 million last August, and the game sits on top of the best-sellers-of-all-time list with over 238 million units sold....

The best aspect of the Moto G4 Plus’ hardware is the new 16-megapixel camera. It delivers great detail and fantastic color performance, providing a decent upgrade on Motorola’s past offerings at this price point. In fact you’ll be hard pressed to find a smartphone camera as good as the G4 Plus’ for $250: it’s better than past flagships that sit at a similar price point. The display on this phone is also very good....

In our legacy LTE browsing test the Moto X Style performs decently, sitting among a collection of current-generation flagships. However, in our new and much more intensive display-calibrated Wi-Fi browsing test, seen below, the Style falls to the back of the pack. The Style also disappointed in our new brightness-calibrated PCMark battery benchmark, although it did record a better score than the Galaxy S6. It appears as though the display is fairly power consuming, mostly due to its resolution, so these results are somewhat lower than expected....

The MSI X58 Pro-E delivered particularly good bandwidth in SiSoftware Sandra 2009, reaching 22GB/s when paired with DDR3-1333 memory. This made the X58 Pro-E ~2GB/s faster than the ASUS P6T Deluxe in our testing. Interestingly overclocking the Core i7 processor to 4GHz using the X58 Pro-E only had a slight impact on the SiSoft memory bandwidth performance. The EVEREST Ultimate Edition results were much the same, though here we see that the ASUS P6T Deluxe and MSI X58 Pro-E produced roughly the same write performance....

Around 98 percent of all new homes built in England must include access to gigabit internet according to a new law enacted the day after Christmas. Another law simultaneously went into effect giving tenants a new path to gigabit if landlords are unresponsive to requests. Ministers in England amended the Building Regulations 2010 to require builders to install gigabit-compatible infrastructure into new homes during construction. The law caps connection costs for developers at £2,000 per home....

The footage was uploaded to YouTube by Battlefront 3 archive channel The Vault to celebrate the Vault Project’s sixth anniversary. Star Wars 1313 boasted the talents of Amy Hennig, head writer and creative director for the Uncharted series—several sections of the third-person action-adventure resemble Naughty Dog’s classic games. Star Wars 1313 was still in early development, so a lot of what we see in the prototype footage is a little rough with a few missing textures, but it does show a lot of promise....

As confirmed by Google earlier this year, the company will reveal its new high-end smartphones, the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. Rumors indicate that the flagships feature an upgraded Tensor G2 chip with clock speed bumps for the CPU cores, a new GPU, a second-gen Tensor Processing Unit, and an improved 5G modem. The new SoC manufactured on Samsung’s 4LPE process provides minor efficiency gains compared to last year’s 5LPE node....

Sabrent’s new dock is just a few crucial components away from being a powerful mini PC. Save for a CPU/GPU combo and memory slots, the Thunderbolt 3 Dual NVMe SSD docking station, as spotted by TweakTown, offers plenty of connectivity options to supercharge ultrabooks via a single cable. The main highlight is the dock’s storage capability, currently available in configurations of 2TB/$500, 4TB/$650, 8TB/$1,300 and 16TB for an eye-watering $2,900....

With no A/V wires to contend with, it can help users realize a cleaner install and afford greater freedom when arranging your space. It is kind of like the One Connect box from Samsung, minus the one wire. It’s not 100 percent cord-free, however, as you still need to run a power cable to the set. LG said it developed an algorithm that instantly identifies the optimal signal transmission path from the box to the set....

As I can personally attest, most of the frustration with starting fresh comes from losing your installed programs and customized settings with them. Sure, you can create tweaked installation discs to automate the process and have all your drivers, programs and settings already in place. The problem is that most people won’t reinstall Windows more than once or twice a year. When the time comes to use your customized OS disc, new versions of your programs and drivers will have been released....

Windows Phone is an operating system that relies heavily on graphics processing to deliver a smooth, 60 frames per second experience and during my time with the 925 I never experienced OS slowdowns despite the underpowered CPU compared to current-gen high-end Android devices. With 1 GB of RAM, multitasking is also reasonably fast, as I only saw the dreaded “Resuming…” screen briefly when reloading applications. Performing basic tasks in applications is also very fast on the MSM8960, including scrolling lists and panning....

The bad news for Facebook came from a survey by Pew Research Center. It questioned 1,316 U.S. teens between the ages of 13 and 17 about their online habits and found that just 32% of them use the Facebook app. The results are a stark contrast to Pew Research Center’s survey in 2015, which found a massive 71% of teens used Facebook at that time. But the social network has seen this demographic decline yearly since then....

The GTX 1050 Ti delivered 18% more performance than the standard 1050 in Battlefield 1 using the DX11 API. We haven’t tested here using DX12 as we seem to suffer from constant frame drops using that method. Although the 1050 was a good bit slower than the Ti, it was still 9% faster than the RX 460, whereas the GTX 1050 Ti was 38% slower than its immediate rival, the RX 470....

While the GeForce GTX 590 was faster than the Radeon HD 6990 at 1920x1200, it was 9% slower at 2560x1600. Averaging 79fps, the GTX 590 was 61% faster than the HD 6970, just 16% faster than the old Radeon HD 5970, and 55% faster than the GeForce GTX 580. Splinter Cell: Conviction We relied on Fraps to measure in-game performance recording 60 seconds of the first level, “Merchant’s Street Market”....

The GTX 650 Ti consumed 14% more power under load than the HD 7770, while it used about the same amount as the 6870 and about 4% less than the GTX 660. Gigabyte’s WindForce 2X cooler worked extremely well on the GTX 650 Ti, keeping load temperatures at 47 degrees – lower than any other card we’ve tested.

The R7 265 enjoyed a 10% performance increase in Tomb Raider while the GTX 750 Ti became 17% faster or 12% faster than Gainward’s factory overclock. Whereas the GTX 750 Ti was previously 2% slower than the R7 265, it was 4% faster here. The GTX 750 Ti received an 18% performance bump from our overclock, taking the average frame rate from 40fps to 47fps, while the R7 265 hit 46fps once overclocked for a 12% increase....

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti trailed the Titan X by roughly 10% at both resolutions, while it was 17% faster than the GTX 980 at 2160p and 26% faster than the Radeon R9 290X. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti averaged a healthy 43fps at 2160p in Watch Dogs, making it 9% slower than the Titan X, while it was 23% faster than the GTX 980 and 48% faster than the Radeon R9 290X....