Author: batteryforpc

Microsoft has officially ended the support for Windows 7 on January 14, 2020, and you can still upgrade to Windows 10 for free. The original free upgrade offer to Windows 10 officially expired years ago, but the loophole is still working in May 2020, according to our testing.

It means that if you own a valid license of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you can get Windows 10 without paying $120 for the upgrade. It also appears that Microsoft knows of the loophole and the company will not block users from upgrading to Windows 10 even if that means it wouldn’t make money from the upgrades.

To get Windows 10 for free, you need to download and run Windows Media Creation Tool on Windows 10. Once downloaded, you need to choose the upgrade path where you keep your files.

In the Windows Media Creation Tool, you just need to follow the prompts and complete the upgrade. When the upgrade is complete and the device is connected to the Internet, the digital license of Windows 10 would be activated.

You can verify the activation status by going to Settings > Update and Security > Activation.

We have also heard from users that a fresh install will work with the free Windows 10 upgrade, but you’ll be asked to enter your Windows 7. However, an alleged Microsoft employee said that you may lose the ability to upgrade to Windows 10 for free if you choose to do a fresh install.

Windows 10 is also available for free if you’re a student or you have an alumni email account. If you can prove it, you might be able to score a free copy of Windows 10 Education, which is very similar to Windows 10 Enterprise.

According to the latest market share report, Windows 10’s desktop share is 56%, down from 57.34% and Windows 7 market share is 25.59, which also dropped from 26.3%.

Intel was poised to be bravo six, going dark. Their covert GPU development program was confirmed. It took one burst for them to capture nearly a dozen industry specialists from other companies. They hunkered down. They went radio silent for a year. Then, they hired a marketing team.

That marketing team flipped the paradigm and introduced an unprecedented level of transparency into the development process. (I’m personally grateful to Intel’s marketing team for giving me so much to write about.) Their ploy has often worked. Early promises of ray tracing and a 10nm production node extinguished concerns based on Intel’s CPU strife. An early leak promising a GPU with 4096 cores quickly impressed; only last week photos of the largest GPU in development sparked a wave of new curiosity. But promises made years ago are quickly forgotten and intangible specifications raise concerns over accuracy.

It’s been five months since their last press event. In that period, we’ve seen only one Intel GPU make the rounds. Designed with software developers in mind, the Xe DG1 SDV won’t impress consumers. As the only visible product, however, and given that it has plenty of RGB, that role has fallen upon it. Yesterday’s SiSoftware leak dispelled rumors suggesting it would have 128 EUs, but rather 96 EUs (the difference was an error in counting the CPU’s integrated graphics as part of the discrete solution). That’s a mediocre 768 shaders/cores. The database entry also showed that it was operating at 1.5 GHz, and that it was paired with 3GB of memory.

That’s by no means an insufficient performance bracket for a device intended for developers. Released as the right consumer-oriented product, in laptops, say, as Intel demonstrated back in January, it may be perfectly competitive. But I will pose this question to Intel’s marketing team: why should anyone care?

A year ago, when this device was leaked alongside three Xe HP (high performance) GPUs with stunningly beautiful core counts, the leak as a whole was a good sign. That only the least impressive of the products has manifested is not a great sign. I’d almost say that last week’s photo of what turned out to be the largest of the previously leaked GPUs was an attempt to distract from that fact. What was very promising five months ago doesn’t look so rosy anymore.

Intel, choose: stop putting RGB on your developer cards and pretending gamers have something to look forward to soon, or outright give us something to be hopeful for.

Huawei’s Honor had surprised everyone with the Honor 9X. The premium mid-range smartphone has been of the greatest hits of the company and now it seems that the company is gearing up to launch a successor for this highly-succesful handset. Now, the company is gearing up to launch the Honor 9X Pro in India, three months after its global launch. This comes in a moment when the first news about the next entry in lineup dubbed Honor X10 is taking the headlines. But let’s keep our focus in the 9X Pro.

According to a tweet from Honor India, there is a new product coming for India with a Kirin 810 chipset. Moreover, the company is reported to have accidentally confirmed the name in a tweet that has since been deleted. Unfortunately, the company didn’t reveal the launch date. However, a report from IANS states that it will be launched on May 12 and will be available on Flipkart.

HONOR 9X PRO SPECIFICATIONS

The Honor 9X Pro is powered by the AI-driven Kirin 810 Octa-Core SoC. It comes paired with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Internal Storage. These specifications are built around a 6.59-inch IPS LCD display with FHD+ resolution. It has a triple-camera setup on the back comprising a 48MP main + 8MP Ultrawide + 2MP depth sensors. The handset is a truly bezel-less thanks to a motorized 16MP pop-up camera solution.

The phone draws power from a 4,000mAh battery and includes Honor’s Magic UI 3.0 based on Android 10. According to rumors, it will cost between Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 20,000 in India. In Europe, for instance, it retails at 249 Euros and you get the 6GB RAM + 256GB storage model.

YouTube celebrity Linus Sebastian recently reviewed a very peculiar Intel B150 motherboard from Chinese motherboard manufacturer Zeal-All. The ZA-SK1050 knits Intel’s LGA1511 socket with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1050 Ti onto the same PCB. The manufacturer has never made our best motherboards list, but Zeal-All has been offering this type of product for a while now and the ZA-SK1050 seems to be its latest creation.

The ZA-SK1050 measures 235 x 197.5mm so it doesn’t really belong to any established form factors. If we had to classify the motherboad, it would fit in between the FlexATX and microATX categories. The upper half of the ZA-SK1050 is everything you would expect from a pocket friendly motherboard from 2017.

Zeal-All built the motherboard around Intel’s budget B150 chipset and LGA1151 socket. Consequently, it can support both 6th and 7th Generation Core processors that belong to the Skylake and Kaby Lake families, respectively. The motherboard doesn’t have any power connectors though as all power comes through the single 19V DC port. Finally, a pair of SODIMM DDR4 memory slots are present to offer housing up to a maximum of 32GB of DDR4-2133 memory.

Instead of using expansion slots, Zeal-All has implemented an embedded approach. The manufacturer has slapped a discrete GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card onto the ZA-SK1050 by soldering the GPU and memory chips onto the motherboard’s PCB itself. A heatsink with an accompanying cooling fan actively keeps the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti’s operating temperatures in check.

The ZA-SK1050 comes with a pretty uncommon I/O interface design as well. The motherboard comes with four SATA III ports in total. Curiously, two of them are placed on the rear panel. There’s a mSATA interface for accommodating SSDs of the same nature. Additionally, the motherboard supplies a mPCIe port for adding a wireless module further down the line. The remaining cocktail of internal connectors includes two USB 2.0 headers, one USB 3.0 header, four 4-pin fan connectors, two LVDS headers, two SATA connectors, LPC port (which looks like an HDMI port) for factory debugging, speaker header and the usual front panel connector.

The motherboard’s rear panel is home to a clear CMOS button, one HDMI port that outputs images at a 2K resolution, four USB 3.0 ports and one JSATA connector. The Gigabit Ethernet port is based of Realtek’s RTL8111E Ethernet controller. The ALC662 audio codec is also from Realtek and powers the two 3.5mm audio jacks.

The ZA-SK1050 supports various types of hardware monitoring, such as temperature, voltage and system power management. The list of supported operating systems consists of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.

Zeal-All sells the ZA-SK1050 motherboard on Alibaba for between $345 and $365. Admittedly, B150 motherboards are very hard to come by nowadays. But when they were available, the motherboards generally costed around $50 to $150. The cheapest GeForce GTX 1050 Ti on the market starts at $150. A B150 motherboard and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti combo would set you back $200, which is way cheaper than rolling with Zeal-All’s offering. However, the ZA-SK1050’s real value would likely lie with some type of AIO PC, an embedded system or a PC for cyber cafes, which are extremely popular in China.