A NEW ERA… AGAIN
REMEMBER WHEN Microsoft said that Windows 10 was going to be the last version of Windows you’d ever need? Yeah, I remember that. Good times, September 30th, 2014. I was there, watching the announcement, just some nerdy little kid, without a job, fresh out of college. I was so excited, I’d tried Windows 8 and 8.1 Home for some years, and put up with the awful tiles and lack of a start menu, before converting the thing to Start8 and basically turning it into exactly the same as Windows 7, but 10 seemed exciting. I immediately went out and bought myself a version of Windows 8.1 Pro ( with a student discount), and eagerly awaited the launch of the new operating system.
And it came, and it was great. It fixed all the flaws of Windows 8 and then some. Long gone was the ambitious “tablets are the future” OS. Finally, a practical return to form for the prestigious company.
How times have changed. When Windows 11 was first announced, it’s fair to say the tech press was fairly taken aback. There’s a lot to cover, a ton of new features in it, including stuff to amp up your PCs, and make them more secure, a super clean new design, and, of course, some seriously deluded security decisions (you can read more on my thoughts on that on page 11). So, I set Sam to task to give us the absolute low-down on this new plucky underdog from Microsoft, and to give you beautiful people a full-on guide on how to get Windows 11 running on your own machines as well. Is it all it’s cracked up to be? Or just a MacOS-looking reskin of a once prestigious OS environment?
Windows aside, in the last issue, I promised a deep-dive feature into the connectivity standards of tomorrow, it was something we briefly looked at in Jarred’s feature on Intel’s next processors, and something I wish we had spent more time on. So for this issue, Christian set out to find out everything he could on PCIe 5.0, DDR5, USB4, and everything else in between, for a stats-packed, eight-page goodie.
And for the more historically minded folk out there (or the doomsday preppers, which might also include me in their ranks after reading this), Ian went out and did his very best to investigate the Carrington Event back in 1859, the worst recorded solar storm in human history.
It was a moment in time that fried electrical cables, set telegram machines on fire globally, caused aurora to reach as far south as the Caribbean, and makes the Quebec blackout look like a pebble in comparison. In our hyper-interconnected world of today, what would a solar storm look like? What would it do, and are we prepared for it? With NASA and ESA on board, it’s one to check out.
Of course, we’ve got even more than all of that goodness, including a barrage of tutorials, reviews, columns, news, and more, from some of the best tech writers in the biz!
I do hope you enjoy this issue, it’s been a heck of a fun one. Until next time!
Zakis Maximum PC’s editor-in-chief and longtime staff member. He’ s been building PCs since he was 10, and is more than capable of butting heads with the biggest names in tech.