Water Cooling 101

How and why to become a water-cooling master?

For much of recent history, water cooling has been shunned. Only a select few could afford to merrily dance with computing death, taking their chances with water-cooling hardware and components that weren’t even designed to work in the silicon environment. They’d ghetto-graft G1/4-inch plumbing fittings onto hardware and hand-mill various water blocks, all in the hope of creating a leak-proof, watertight system. A system that could efficiently and effectively transfer heat away from their component parts, to a far greater degree than traditional air coolers ever could.

Samsung U32E850R

A flawed masterpiece for lots of money

Call it Ultra HD. Call it 4K. Either way, it’s a metric tonne of pixels and simultaneously seductive and very silly. It’s seductive in a way that only really big numbers and cutting-edge tech can be. Eight millions pixels on a PC display? Extraordinary.

OCZ Trion 100

Getting a little TLC from Toshiba

In this brave new world of PCI Express storage, of M.2 drives, U.2 drives and fancy NVMe protocols, is there any space for ye olde 2.5-inch SATA drives and their piffling 6Gb/s of bandwidth and crusty AHCI interfaces?

Asus GeForce GTX 950 STRIX OC

All the grunt you need for everyday 1080p gaming

Let’s face facts. No matter what k ind of gamer you are, you can guarantee that 99 per cent of the time, you won’t be buried in the latest AAA title from [enter evil megalomaniac game publisher name here]. After all, the latest games from Ubisoft and EA, while featuring incredible levels of graphical fidelity, often have as much depth as any of Michael Bay’s recent Hollywood blockbusters.

My worthless year working for Google

Barry Collins becomes Google’s lowest paid employee, earning a pittance for his expertise

Forget the stories about Amazon warehouse workers labouring 68-hour shifts for minimum wage; I’ve just spent the past year working for Google for £10.28. Not £10.28 per hour, but £10.28 in total.

Get for FREE what other people pay for

Forget rubbish freebies that you’d never dream of paying for – it’s time to grab something of value for nothing. Robert Irvine reveals how to get the best no-catch deals

Install paid-for Android apps for free

Lots of so-called free apps have hidden costs, such as features that you have to pay to unlock and intrusive adverts that gobble up your data allowance and battery power, which is why we thoroughly approve of the ‘actually free’ apps and games offered by Amazon Underground (www.amazon.co.uk/underground). These are paid-for apps that the online giant is giving away for free, with no catches; by which we mean no time limits, no in-app purchases and no ads. They aren’t obscure or rubbish apps, either. At the time of writing, the ‘actually free’ selection includes the brilliant Goat Simulator (which costs £3.29 on Google Play), the full version of 3D body-exploring app Visual Anatomy (usual price £1.58) and the award-winning fitness app Easy Weight Loss (formerly £4.99). Underground appears to have replaced Amazon’s previous ‘App of the Day’ giveaway, with the bonus that hundreds of free apps are now available indefinitely.

Best free photo-editing apps

If you take photos on your phone, it’s handy to edit them before uploading to the web. Edward Munn tests six of the best free photo-editing apps for enhancing your snaps on the go

How Windows 10 Spies On You

Microsoft’s new operating system collects all sorts of personal data about you, including what you type and say. Wayne Williams reveals exactly what info Windows 10 is gathering and how to stop it snooping

Ask anyone what their biggest concern is about Windows 10 – whether they’ve upgraded yet or not – and it’s likely to be privacy. Most of the negative press the new OS has received has been about Microsoft’s increasingly intrusive methods of collecting, storing and sharing information about you, and recent stories suggest the company’s tracking tools may go even deeper than at first thought. Indeed, the Ars Technica blog (bit.ly/ars380) recently found that Windows 10 continues to report back to Microsoft even when you tell it not to.

Our guide to Youtube Gaming

If you don’t want to play a game yourself, you can watch someone else show you how it’s done. David Crookes finds out how YouTube has tapped into the growing trend for live gaming streams

What is it?

YouTube Gaming (gaming.youtube.com) is a new spin-off from Google’s popular video service that’s aimed specifically at gamers. Available through your browser and via Android and iOS apps, it lets gamers produce live streams of their gameplay for other people to watch. YouTube says the site will “bring the gaming community closer together”, but it will also allow the company to better target the lucrative video-game audience with adverts.