Tag Archives: PCs

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Windows PCs prioritized over Chromebooks in components shortage

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In a tech world still hindered by component shortages, choices have to be made. And in the world of laptops, it seems that choice is Windows-based devices over those running Chrome OS.

IDC on Monday released early data from its latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. It pointed to a sharp 63.6 percent decline in Chromebook shipments, which the IDC defines as “shipments to distribution channels or end users, in Q4 2021 (4.8 million shipments) compared to Q4 2020 with (13.1 million shipments).”

In addition to market saturation, supply issues also hurt Chromebook shipments, as the industry still struggles with a deficit of PC components, from CPUs to integrated circuits for Wi-Fi modules and power management.

“Supply has also been unusually tight for Chromebooks as component shortages have led vendors to prioritize Windows machines due to their higher price tags, further suppressing Chromebook shipments on a global scale,” Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC’s Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers, said in a statement accompanying Monday’s announcement.

Ubrani told Ars Technica that IDC doesn’t know for sure if it’s specifically Windows 10 or Windows 11-based machines getting priority over Chrome OS devices. Windows 11 debuted in 2021, giving PC makers excuse to refresh lines with “Windows 11-ready” systems.

But with PC availability still scant, it’s likely that Windows 11 has had a smaller impact on PC sales.

“Generally, the launch of a new OS has driven demand, though this time around the demand is already quite high and supply is low, so buyers aren’t making their purchase decision based on the version of the OS,” Ubrani told Ars Technica. “As a result, we don’t believe Windows 11 specifically has had an impact on [Chrome OS device shipments] or the PC market in general.”

Ubrani also pointed to market saturation in the US and Europe, which were extra hungry for Chromebooks as remote learning and work grew, as slowing global growth. According to Ubrani, “Chromebook demand in emerging markets has seen continued growth in the past year.”

But Chromebooks were actually more popular in 2021 than in 2020, with 4.4 million more machines sold. Lenovo saw the biggest growth, moving from 6.7 million Chromebook sales in 2020 to 8.3 million in 2021.

At 10.2 million devices, HP sold more Chromebooks last year than any other vendor.

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Steam’s Dynamic Cloud Sync lets players easily play across PCs

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Steam is adding a new feature that will make it plenty easier for players to access video games “seamlessly” from different PCs. Valve announced the new feature, called Dynamic Cloud Sync, via a blog post. The feature was added as part of a series of updates to support its upcoming Steam Deck console, but will benefit any player that enables the option.

Valve said the feature will “automatically upload all modified save game data to the cloud prior to the device entering sleep mode.” That means that if you close your Steam Deck without exiting a game, it doesn’t matter: You can pick back up from wherever on any other PC device. When you move back to the Steam Deck, that progress will be uploaded before waking up the console.

“We anticipate that users will frequently suspend their Steam Deck without exiting the game, as is common with other hand-held gaming devices,” Valve said. “With Dynamic Cloud Sync, if they then choose to play on another device (whether a PC or another Steam Deck), their progress will be there waiting for them.”

Of course, for players to benefit, developers need to turn the option on for their games. If it’s not enabled, Valve said “Steam will still track when save game data is changed on the Steam Deck,” but will prompt players who’ve suspended their games on Steam Deck to return there and close the game before playing on a different device — else they’ll continue without save progress from the Steam Deck.

Valve’s Steam Deck was announced in July 2021. The handhold console is expected to ship in February after being delayed in November. Steam Deck devices range from $399 to $649, depending on storage capacity. Not all games will work on the console, but Valve has an easy rating system to determine what will work well.

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Google launches beta of Android games on Windows PCs

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Google is launching a limited beta of its app to bring Android games to Windows PCs. Google Play Games will be available in beta in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan today, allowing Windows PC owners to play popular Android games like Mobile Legends, Summoners War, State of Survival, and Three Kingdoms Tactics.

Players in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan will be able to sign up to access the beta and access Google’s standalone app on Windows PCs. Google is promising “seamless gameplay sessions between a phone, tablet, Chromebook, and Windows PC,” suggesting that you’ll be able to easily resume games between multiple devices.

“Players can easily browse, download, and play their favorite mobile games on their PCs while taking advantage of larger screens with mouse and keyboard inputs,” says Arjun Dayal, group product manager for Google Play Games. “No more losing your progress or achievements when switching between devices; it just works with your Google Play Games profile!”

Google Play Games syncs gameplay sessions across multiple devices.
Image: Google

Google Play Games will also include Play Points that can be earned while playing Android games on PCs. Google only announced its plans to bring Android games to PCs a month ago, but it’s still not clear what technology the company is using to get Android games running on Windows PCs. The Google Play Games app will be a native Windows app that won’t involve game streaming, though, and Google is opening up a developer site today that should start to provide more information for game developers.

Google’s announcement comes months after Microsoft started testing Android apps on Windows 11 PCs. Microsoft has built an underlying Windows Subsystem for Android, which is capable of running Android apps from a variety of sources. Microsoft uses it in partnership with Amazon to allow native installs of games and apps from the Amazon Appstore on Windows, but despite workarounds, Google Play isn’t officially supported yet.

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PCIe 5.0 is just beginning to come to new PCs, but version 6.0 is already here

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Enlarge / The PCIe 6.0 standard’s ability to interoperate with all older versions of the standard is a point of pride for the PCI-SIG.

PCI-SIG

The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has finalized version 6.0 of the PCI Express standard, the communication bus that lets all the stuff inside your computer communicate. The new version of the spec comes roughly three years after the PCI Express 5.0 spec was finalized, and version 6.0 once again doubles the bandwidth of a PCIe lane from 32GT/s (8GB/s in total, or 4GB/s in each direction) to 64GT/s (16GB/s, or 8GB/s in each direction). For a full 16-lane PCIe 6.0 connection, that’s as much as 256GB/s of total bandwidth, compared to the 32GB/s or 64GB/s of now-common PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 connections.

Like past PCIe versions, PCIe 6.0 will “interoperate and maintain backwards compatibility” with all existing PCIe versions, so your PCIe 4.0 GPU or SSD will continue to work in a PCIe 6.0 slot and vice-versa. The PCI-SIG bragged about the specification’s longevity in a blog post by PCI-SIG board member Debendra Das Sharma: “An interconnect technology is considered successful if it can sustain three generations of bandwidth improvement spanning a decade. PCIe architecture has far exceeded that mark.”

Enlarge / PCI Express speeds compared. Note that these bandwidth numbers are bidirectional—if you’re only sending or only receiving data, you’ll only have half as much bandwidth.

PCI-SIG

To boost its speeds, PCIe 6.0 uses a new kind of signaling called “Pulse Amplitude Modulation 4” (PAM4), which allows for faster data transfers than the previous Non-Return-To-Zero (NRZ) signaling at the expense of a higher error rate. To compensate, PCIe 6.0 includes technologies like Forward Error Correction (FEC) to correct errors and Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) to ask for packets to be retransmitted when errors can’t be corrected. The PCI-SIG says that this combination of technologies should catch all errors without adding latency to the connection.

Consumer systems are just beginning to support PCI Express 5.0—Intel’s 12th-generation Core processors provide 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and AMD plans to support PCIe 5.0 with its upcoming Zen 4 architecture and Ryzen 7000-series CPUs. For now, PCIe 4.0 remains the most-used version of the spec for high-end SSDs and current-generation GPUs, and most budget PCIe SSDs still use PCI Express 3.0, which is more widely supported by older systems and is still plenty fast for most things. The PCI-SIG recognizes in its PCIe 6.0 FAQ that the new spec’s bandwidth isn’t necessary for most consumer applications, pitching it instead as an upgrade for data centers and artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.

The PCI-SIG expects that PCIe 6.0 products will begin hitting the market within 12 to 18 months.

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Nvidia’s Matrix PCs can’t play The Matrix Awakens, but they look cool

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Nvidia has teamed up with Warner Bros. Pictures and professional PC builders to deliver three custom gaming rigs that embody The Matrix — and it’s giving them all away as part of the lead-up to The Matrix Resurrections’ release on December 22nd. You can find instructions on how to enter for a chance to win one on its site.

The first gaming computer, dubbed the Digital Storm Backup Operator, was made by artist Stefan Ulrich in partnership with Digital Storm. Small monitors and keyboards come mounted on the case, along with some crazy-looking wiring and fans, giving off the impression that you can actually slip into the Matrix with this machine. In terms of specs, it comes with none other than a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and a Ryzen 9 5950X.

The NZXT Nebuchadnezzar was made by PC customizer Dave Cathey. It’s inspired by the Nebuchadnezzar ship from the first two movies and features Sentinel arms that hug the outside of the case. Binary code is etched in on the front of the case, along with a cutout that says “Matrix Resurrections.” It also comes with the NZXT Z73 Kraken AIO cooler that’s outfitted with an LCD screen — the modder programmed it to show the symbolic white rabbit. Like the previous build, it has a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti but sports an AMD 5800X processor instead.

Lastly, PC modder Staszek “Tip” Wiertelak partnered with Nvidia to create The Breacher, which doesn’t even look like a PC. It trades in a typical, boxy computer case for a mock-broadcast station. Nvidia notes that the entire case is interactive; however, you can remove the case and use the PC as “a stand-alone machine.” This rig comes with a GeForce RTX 3090, along with a Ryzen 9 3950X.



  • Digital Storm Backup Operator built by Stefan Ulrich.


    Photo by Nvidia


  • NZXT Nebuchadnezzar built by Dave Cathey.


    Photo by Nvidia


  • “The Breacher” built by Staszek “Tips” Wiertelak.


    Photo by Nvidia


Of course, the only downside is that these computers can’t play The Matrix Awakens, considering that the demo isn’t even available for PC for whatever reason. If you don’t end up winning one of the custom computers, Nvidia says you’ll automatically be entered to win one of five custom Matrix-themed backplates that you can attach to a GeForce 3080 Ti. And no, the 3080 Ti card isn’t included.

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Technology

Microsoft starts rolling out Windows 11 to more PCs

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Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 to more PCs this week. After an initial launch to mostly new PCs earlier this month, Microsoft is gradually making the free Windows 11 upgrade available to more existing and eligible devices.

“The availability of Windows 11 has been increased and we are leveraging our latest generation machine learning model to offer the upgrade to an expanded set of eligible devices,” says Microsoft. “We will continue to train our machine learning model throughout the phased rollout to deliver a smooth upgrade experience.”

The Windows 11 upgrade prompt in Windows Update.

If you’ve been waiting for the Windows 11 upgrade to appear in Windows Update, you might find the above prompt this week. Anecdotally, we’ve been offered the upgrade on a variety of devices today, including a custom gaming PC.

Microsoft doesn’t provide a list of devices that are now being offered the Windows 11 upgrade, but you’ll only be able to obtain the update through Windows Update if your PC meets the minimum system requirements. If you still don’t see the prompt and want to skip the waiting line, Microsoft offers an easy way to upgrade early.

There are also ways to install Windows 11 on unsupported CPUs, too. Microsoft doesn’t recommend it and you might not receive security updates in the future, but the workaround is very easy without having to reinstall Windows.

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Windows 11 setup warns that you aren’t “entitled” to updates on unsupported PCs

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Enlarge / Microsoft will allow Windows 11 installs on some unsupported systems, but it really would prefer you not.

Officially, running Windows 11 will require a newer PC that meets all of the operating system’s performance and security requirements. Unofficially, running Windows 11 without meeting those requirements will be possible, but we still don’t know much about the details—how difficult it will be to install Windows 11 on those machines, how frequently they will remind you that you’re running on unsupported hardware, and even whether they’ll receive normal Windows security updates.

The Verge has spotted an apparently new warning message in the Windows 11 Setup app that explicitly warns users of the dangers of installing Windows 11 on unsupported hardware—you may run into “compatibility issues,” your PC “won’t be entitled to receive updates,” and that “damages to your PC due to lack of compatibility aren’t covered under the manufacturer warranty.” This is all stuff that we’ve heard from Microsoft before, but it’s the first time that this policy has appeared during the Windows 11 setup process rather than in media reports. Once you click through this foreboding warning message, the Windows 11 installation is apparently allowed to proceed.

I’ve tried and failed to recreate this screen on multiple unsupported Windows 10 systems of different vintages, both with builds downloaded through the Insider program and installs directly from a manually downloaded Windows 11 ISO file. I also haven’t seen any firsthand reports of it outside of the Verge report. This doesn’t mean it isn’t happening—Microsoft is always rolling out different updates to different groups of people at different times—just that I can only speculate as to when you will actually see this message and what it means.

My guess is that it is eventually intended to replace another screen currently shown when you attempt a manual install of Windows on an unsupported system, one that totally blocks the upgrade if you don’t meet Windows 11’s processor, TPM, or Secure Boot requirements. The only way to get around that screen and proceed with installation for current builds of Windows 11 is to implement some registry edits that disable the system checks. This new screen would keep the checks in place while allowing people to perform the kind of manual, officially unsupported installs that the company has begrudgingly decided to allow.

The setup screen that currently blocks Windows 11 installs on unsupported systems.

Andrew Cunningham

Officially supported or not, there are plenty of PCs released between 2015 and 2017 that should be able to run Windows 11 more-or-less as reliably as officially supported systems. The sixth- and seventh-generation Intel Core processors and first-generation AMD Ryzen processors still get modern driver updates from Intel and AMD, one of the key factors Microsoft cites when playing up Windows 11’s stability on newer computers. These PCs also remain perfectly capable of just about any modern PC workload short of high-end gaming or video editing, things that do actually benefit from newer CPUs and GPUs with more cores and higher clock speeds.

We’ll cover what it’s like to run Windows 11 on unsupported systems as part of our review coverage of the OS, so enthusiasts and testers at least have some idea of what they’re getting into. Windows 11 officially releases to the public on October 5. An updated version of Microsoft’s PC Health Check app that was recently released to the public can tell you more about whether your system meets the Windows 11 requirements and what (if anything) you can do to fix it.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham

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Microsoft is kicking unsupported PCs out of Windows 11 testing

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Microsoft is starting to drop PCs from its Windows Insider testing program that are ineligible to upgrade to Windows 11. If you’ve been helping Microsoft test Windows 11 on a machine that doesn’t meet the minimum hardware requirements, you’ll likely see a message in Windows Update warning that you’ll need to reinstall Windows 10.

“Your PC does not meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11,” says Microsoft’s warning. “Your device is not eligible to join the Windows Insider Program on Windows 11. Please install Windows 10 to participate in the Windows Insider Program in the Release Preview Channel.”

Windows 11 testers in both the Dev and Beta channels have started receiving the message on incompatible PCs this week, just as Microsoft has announced its October 5th release date for the upcoming OS. It’s something that Microsoft warned testers would happen at the beginning of the beta period of Windows 11, but it still highlights the often confusing minimum hardware requirements that Microsoft has set.

Windows 11 testers that have been running the OS on unsupported hardware will be able to use a workaround to install an ISO version of the final release. But Microsoft warns that devices in this unsupported state won’t be eligible for Windows Updates, and that could include security patches.

Microsoft recommends that Windows 11 testers that don’t meet the hardware minimums should install Windows 10, as this OS will be supported until 2025. Many Windows 11 testers, who are often loyal Microsoft enthusiasts, will still be left confused why their PC isn’t officially supported even though it has likely been running the OS just fine for months.

Microsoft has attempted to justify its Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements around a push for security and reliability, but it still leaves some PCs sold just a few years ago from being able to upgrade. Windows 11 raises the baseline of security to the CPU level, and Microsoft has been clear it wants to enforce or support Trusted Platform Module (TPM), UEFI Secure Boot, and virtualization-based security methods.

Windows 11 will now arrive on October 5th, and Microsoft will continue to release new Dev builds of the OS to testers. Android app integration isn’t arriving at launch but Windows Insider testers will get access in the coming months to the feature which relies heavily on modern hardware.

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Microsoft is booting ineligible Windows 11 PCs out of the Insider Program

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When Microsoft originally announced Windows 11, it was quickly discovered that Microsoft had made some drastic changes to the system requirements. Most importantly, there are some strict requirements on which CPUs are supported by the new OS. When it came down to testing in the Windows Insider Program, however, the Redmond firm wasn’t quite as strict.

Here’s how it worked. If you were in the Dev channel prior to the announcement, you’d be allowed to stay up until Windows 11 comes out. Once it’s out, you have to roll back to Windows 10 or you’ll be in an unsupported state, assuming your PC is ineligible (obviously, if your PC is eligible, you’re good to go). For Beta channel Insiders, they were kicked off of the Beta channel and placed into Release Preview for Windows 10 21H2 testing.

Now, Microsoft has started kicking unsupported PCs out of the Dev channel of the Windows Insider Program. If you’re in the Dev channel and your CPU isn’t on the supported list, you’ll likely find that you have to go back to Windows 10 in order to keep receiving updates.

The transition to the new system requirements hasn’t been an entirely smooth one, but there’s a good reason that things are the way they are. Windows 10 versions 20H2, 21H1, and 21H2 are all enablement packages that build on top of version 2004. But since the spring of 2020, Microsoft has still been releasing prerelease builds in the Dev channel, with none of those features actually shipping in Windows 10. Those prerelease builds eventually became Windows 11.

That means that when Microsoft decided on the new system requirements, it had to think of a solution for all of the Windows Insiders that wouldn’t qualify for Windows 11, but were already running prerelease builds. After all, you can’t deliver an OTA update from build 20xxx to build 19xxx. The general rule is that if the build number goes down, you have to do a factory reset.

Because of this, the Redmond company decided to let Insiders on the Dev channel tag along for Windows 11 testing. Obviously, those users were used for telemetry. When Microsoft said it would consider Intel seventh-gen and AMD Zen processors for Windows 11 support, it got to look at data from all of the Insiders that were still able to run Windows 11. That’s how the firm came up with stats saying that supported PCs had a 99.8% crash-free experience, while unsupported PCs has 52% more crashes (which really only means that it’s a 99.7% crash-free experience).

But now, that run of testing has come to an end. It’s never fun when you have to reset your PC, but that’s the risk of the Insider Program.



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Microsoft brings xCloud to Windows PCs with the Xbox app

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Microsoft is bringing xCloud to Windows PCs through its Xbox app today. Xbox Insiders will be able to access a new updated Xbox app with Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) built in. Much like how xCloud works through the web, you’ll just need a compatible controller connected via Bluetooth or USB to access Xbox games from a Windows 10 PC.

The updated Xbox app will include a new “cloud games” section, with access to all of the same games available on xCloud on the web. “We’ve also added some new features to help you get started, including easy-to-access information on controller and network status, social features to stay connected with friends, and the ability to invite people – even those also playing on cloud without the game installed – to join you in a game,” says Jason Beaumont, a partner director of Xbox experiences.

xCloud inside the new Xbox app on Windows 10.

Xbox Insider testers will be able to access the new Xbox app in 22 different countries through signing up to the “Windows Gaming” preview in the Xbox Insider Hub app. Cloud games will then be available in the Game Pass section of the app, allowing you to resume Xbox games that were started on a console or in the cloud.

This new Xbox app also includes the ability to stream games from a local Xbox, allowing you to power on and off a console and play your games streamed from your own Xbox.

If you’re not an Xbox tester, you can still access xCloud over at http://xbox.com/play, and Microsoft will likely bring this full experience to the Xbox app on Windows in the coming months.

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