Speed up Windows

PC feeling sluggish? Getting frustrated waiting for things to happen? Discover how to quickly and effortlessly speed it up with our fuss-free, simple guide

Remember the days when your PC effortlessly booted, sped through tasks and rarely kept you waiting? Well, the good news is if your PC used to be that fast, it can be again.

Over time, a PC can become bogged down under the weight of new programs, files cluttering up its hard drive and inefficient system settings. As programs are added, many grab resources, even if they’re rarely used or don’t need them. Even after removal, some applications linger, leaving traces behind to clog up your PC.

Windows’ Big Gamble

The future of Windows may be changing, as Microsoft could move to a subscription-based model. Aaron Birch investigates...

Despite many years of competition and various large-scale bouts of user dissatisfaction, Windows remains the most popular and commonly used OS in the world. Linux may have its place in the hearts of many, and there’s a definite movement for those wishing to abstain from Microsoft’s products, but the Redmond OS still reigns supreme. At least, it does for now, but with some possible major changes on the horizon, could Windows’ success take a turn for the worst?

RAID: Is It Worth It?

Mark Pickavance looks at RAID and what you can do to make this technology work for you

I’ve written numerous features on RAID over the years, as it progressed from being an exotic technology that was only used in servers to something that is available to almo st every desktop PC owner.

Early solutions used SCSI, but eventually IDE and then SATA and SAS became the chosen connection technologies. The advent of SATA drives (and later SAS) made for much slicker cabling systems and better hot-swap drive trays, which can be useful in RAID. Even cheap boards now have some simple RAID options, even if they’re just variations of striping (RAID 0) or mirror (RAID 1) functionality. The latest Intel platforms also offer parity plans (RAID 5) that combine performance advantages with resilience.

Boss Rush

This is the tale of men on a mission: the soldier with revenge in his heart and the game director out to rewrite the stealth rulebook. We spends two days with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the most ambitious action game of the year

“Kept you waiting, huh?” (Big Boss)

Things go very wrong for Big Boss in 1984. Things went pretty wrong for him in 1975 where, in Ground Zeroes, he saw his blossoming PMC sunk into the ocean and a human bomb send him into a nine-year coma. Even with his arm torn off and his flesh shredded by 108 foreign bodies - a mix of shrapnel and human teeth, explains the doctor - this is a mere scratch compared to the transformation he is to undergo in The Phantom Pain. Somewhere between his decade-long nap and the end of the game he is destined to become the villain, the man Solid Snake will one day be dispatched to assassinate. How does a good man go bad? For us, it involves a surprising amount of cardboard toboggans.

Batman: Arkham Knight

How Batman is going out with a bang, a paff and a wallop

The streets of Gotham are empty, the population cleared out by feartoxin bioterrorism. Emergency service workers are left to their own devices against supervillain Firefly’s well-armed cronies. Drone tanks lie in wait for anyone foolish enough to try disarming them. And Batman careens through the streets in his shiny new Batmobile, causing delightful chaos between bouts of restoring order.