Elite Speak

We sit down with one of gaming’s most influential developers, David Braben, to discuss the future of space travel and Elite’s long-awaited PlayStation debut

Elite Dangerous: Horizons changed forever on 5 January. Before then, the PC and Xbox One sci-fi simulator was a deep-space adventure filled with inter-player wranglings, political flashpoints and only small hints at there being something larger at play. But on 5 January a major event occurred: Commander DP Sayre was ripped out of a hyperspace jump and his ship was temporarily stripped of power as a massive alien Thargoids ship made first contact.

Speed Up Windows 10

Give Windows a shot in the arm by cleaning up and optimizing your PC

Spring is in the air, so it’s the perfect time to take a virtual vacuum to your computer. Every year, it’s the same old story: Despite your best intentions, you rapidly lose control of what goes on to your PC, as programs are installed and forgotten, while gigabytes of files — from documents to photos and videos — are copied multiple times to a myriad locations, clogging up your hard drives. The result? A computer that’s slow to start, performs sluggishly, and is approaching the limits of your storage capacity.

Recover Your Data

Nothing is lost until you’ve looked for it

IMAGINE WITH US: The worst has happened. Everything you held dear is gone. You ignored the clicking of the hard drive, those error messages, that suspicious-looking file for too long. You clicked the thing you shouldn’t have clicked. You emptied the Recycle Bin out of habit after letting your kids near your PC. And now? Now your photos are gone, your documents are dust, those precious family videos cast to the wind. Windows has gasped its last breath. All is lost.

Intel Core i7-7700K

Here we have it, the premier consumer enthusiast chip from Intel’s seventh generation of processors: Kaby Lake. The Core i7-7700K is the replacement for the Skylake family’s Core i7-6700K, and is a fully unlocked quad-core CPU with each core running at 4.2GHz with a 4.5GHz Turbo Boost clock.

It’s important to appreciate the extent of Skylake’s success since launching a couple of years ago and, in turn, the weight of expectation that Kaby Lake chips such as the Core i7-7700K carry on their pin-freckled shoulders. Architectural improvements to the Broadwell generation’s 14nm manufacturing process made for even more power-efficient processors, which both paved the way for a host of long-lasting yet reasonably powerful laptops and 2-in-1s, and enabled enhanced performance for desktops.

Skylake thus became the only kind of CPU worth bothering with, except for the occasional budget PC build. For portability, gaming or getting serious work done, however, Intel dominated, and will likely continue to do so until AMD finally launches its much-anticipated Ryzen chips.

What your browser LEAKS about you

Every time you go online, you reveal more personal info than you realise. Robert Irvine explains how to identify and plug these leaks