Windows 95 introduced the Start menu and taskbar but also the Blue Screen of Death. A look back at its legendary launch 31 years ago.
Credit: Microsoft
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In summary:
PCWorld recalls how Windows 95, launched on August 24, 1995, became a cultural phenomenon, selling 7 million copies in just seven weeks.
The OS introduced the iconic Start menu…
I hate this, but buying a GPU now might actually make sense
August 24, 2026
A GPU vendor warns price hikes are coming later this year, and I can’t help wondering if that means now is the right time to pull the trigger.
Credit: Chris Hoffman / Foundry
Well okay, now might only be the second-best time to buy a GPU—the best…
USB connector types: The tier list
August 17, 2026
Adam and Alex let loose some magma-hot takes on the little metal bits that connect and power all our gadgets.
Credit: Foundry
I have a visceral hatred of MicroUSB. Back when I was writing about Android phones, there was a needlessly long transition from…
Zen 6 looks like a huge leap forward by AMD, from faster speeds to lower power draw to massive improvements to core counts and cache. And those same advancements should come to AMD’s next-gen Ryzen CPUs.
Credit: AMD
If history is any indication, AMD’s next-generation “Olympic Ridge” Ryzen CPUs could be absolutely baller — maybe even one of the more compelling PC…
China’s RAM boom is here. Your cheap PC is not
July 30, 2026
The hottest company on the planet right now is a memory supplier called CXMT, a name barely anyone outside of China had even heard a year ago. It’s making headlines in financial markets on a massive stock debut, predicated on the idea that it’s going to fill the hole in…
Back-to-school shopping for college students means more than just bundling them off with a backpack and a reminder to not mix white clothes with colors. Today, it’s all about tech.
My son heads off to college in roughly six weeks. But as a techie dad, I’ve already…
Perfect Backup review: Perfection? Close to it
July 29, 2026
Though Windows provides its own file backup facilities in Windows File History, the OS has continually made them less obvious and less intuitive to use. Why, is anyone’s guess. There are plenty of alternatives, but they can be hard to find and/or just as difficult to use. Enter Perfect Backup.
The free version of Perfect Backup, while just shy of “perfect,” has a far more straightforward and…
You thought a Sophie’s Choice between ruinously expensive or embarrassingly underpowered laptops was as bad as the RAM crunch would get? Nope. It looks like we’re about to go backwards for graphics cards, too. A brand new AMD Radeon card has just been announced and……
These 5 mini PCs make laptops look wildly overpriced
July 28, 2026
Laptops are great if you need portability, but they’re also expensive. You’re paying for a lot of hardware that may not matter if your computer never leaves your desk. Since laptops cram all of their components into a single device, they’re much more expensive to…
$1,823
You have to really want to buy the Framework Laptop 13 Pro DIY Edition.
Normally, you’d simply click an order button and have a new laptop delivered in just a few days. Framework’s process is its own sort of odyssey: pricing out your configuration, risking that it might increase in price while waiting literally months for it to arrive, then sitting down with a collection of parts to put…
