Normally, automatic software updates are a good thing. They keep you running the latest versions of software, including essential security and stability updates, often necessary for everything from tiny apps to Windows. But there are some good reasons why you might want to avoid these, as exemplified by Windows updates. Now it appears Microsoft has removed automatic app updates from the Microsoft Store. Previously, you could disable automatic updates for Windows apps and games in the Microsoft store by diving into the Settings menu. But as German site Deskmodder (spotted by PCMag) notes, this menu now restricts you to a maximum delay of 5 weeks, after which Windows Update presumably installs updates again whether you want them or not. Security and stability are the obvious reasons for this mandatory change, but I can’t help but worry about some fairly obvious malicious applications here, if you’ll pardon the pun. We’ve seen companies buy up popular browser extensions only to fill them with adware, and apps have been hijacked to spread viruses, trojans, and other bad stuff before. Having an integration with the Microsoft Store and Windows Update (and by extension, Microsoft Defender) would seem to bring in a lot of extra security you don’t get from a manual download or an update system fully integrated into the app itself. But these integrated systems, while more secure in general, aren’t perfect either. The security of an “app store” setup has been circumvented many times. And beyond that… maybe you just don’t want an app to update because it’s changed in ways you don’t like, or it’s broken some particular feature. I’ve got plenty of installers for old, outdated versions of programs squirreled away on my PC for exactly that reason. Read...

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General Fiyah had been scheduled to perform at Polyfest in Washington. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Respectable 1080p performance Excellent OLED display Fans aren’t very loud Not wildly heavy Cons Lenovo’s pricing is all over the place Short battery life Our Verdict The Lenovo Legion 5i 15IRX10 pairs an excellent display with solid internals for a great gaming experience. With a $1,199 price tag on a configuration close to our test unit, the value looks good. Just avoid Lenovo’s unnavigable first-party pricing. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Lenovo Legion 5i Retailer Price $1,599.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Lenovo has a new generation of gaming laptops out, and Legion 5i 15IRX10 sits at the affordable end of the stack without cutting down too much. It features powerful processor options and a few RTX 50-series GPUs to power your games. Though Lenovo makes finding a good value hard with a chaotic pricing system, this Walmart configuration comes closest to our test unit and pegs the system at a solid bargain of $1,199. At that price, things look real peachy for the potent Legion 5i 15IRX10. Lenovo Legion 5i: Specs and features Model number: 15IRX10 CPU: Intel Core i7-14700HX Memory: 32GB DDR5 Graphics/GPU: Nvidia RTX 5060 (40-watt TGP) Display: 15.1-inch 1600p OLED,165Hz, Dolby Vision, VESA Trueblack 600 Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD Webcam: 5MP Connectivity: 1x USB-C 10Gbps with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 2.1, 1x USB-C 10Gbps with DisplayPort 1.4, 3x USB-A 5Gbps, 1x RJ45, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 3.5mm combo audio Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Biometrics: Windows facial recognition Battery capacity: 80 watt-hours Dimensions: 13.58 x 10.05 x 0.85 inches Weight: 4.3 pounds MSRP: Approximately $1,199 as-tested ($1,299 base) Though our test unit has the above configuration, Lenovo does not appear to offer this exact setup to consumers. There is plenty of customization available though. The Legion 5i 15IRX10 can come with 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processors in this configurator, or even bump up to 2nd Gen Intel Core Ultra processors in a separate configurator. At the low end, you can get an Intel Core i7-13650HX with 16GB of memory, 512GB of storage, and an RTX 5050 for an “Est Value” of $1,634 (but an actual price of $1,299 at the time of writing) using the custom configuration tool. Bumping up to a Core i7-14700HX or Core i9-14900HX is also possible, but entails a swap to the RTX 5070 as well. Arrow Lake configurations have the same memory and storage options, but they start out with an Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX and RTX 5060 for an “Est Value” of $1,704 and actual pricing at $1,309. This can be upgraded to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, which also comes with an RTX 5070 instead, and brings the price to $1,559 (though the “Est Value” shows as $1,954). One notable difference of the Core Ultra models is that they upgrade one of the USB-C ports to Thunderbolt 4.  Using Lenovo’s custom configurations, there’s not a huge delta between the Raptor Lake and Arrow Lake options, and the Core Ultra models are likely to have superior single-core performance and battery life. That said, the configurator tends to have significantly higher prices than pre-configured models and therefore doesn’t offer a great value.  For those seeking the best price, Walmart offers the closest configuration to what we’re testing here. It’s available for $1,199 at the time of writing, and includes all of the above specifications except only 16GB of memory. Thankfully, that DDR5 is user-upgradeable, so you can cheaply bump it up to this system’s 32GB if needed. The Lenovo Legion 5i has an excellent display for gaming and entertainment, a sturdy build, solid performance, and surprisingly quiet fans. Lenovo Legion 5i: Design and build quality IDG / Mark Knapp The Legion 5i 15IRX10 isn’t remarkable in its design, but it’s not disappointing either. The system is completely blacked out aside from its Legion logo power button, the white keyboard legend and their RGB lighting, and a little gray Lenovo branding on the rear thermal shelf. All that black looks fine briefly, but it starts to show finger oils quickly.  The looks are largely clean with rounded corners and chamfered edges around the base that may not be super ergonomic but are at least more comfortable than sharp 90-degree angles. The base is all plastic with a smooth polycarbonate upper and rougher ABS plastic bottom. The base is fairly sturdy, not exhibiting much flex. The display is surrounded by modest plastic bezels. The back of the display gets the one premium aspect: an aluminum lid with Lenovo’s Legion branding embossed with a smoky mirror finish. The construction is similar to many of Lenovo’s other Legion laptops. The top of the display has an extra-large section to both house the camera and provide a lip for opening the lid easily. The display attaches to the base with two hinges slightly shifted forward from the back edge of the laptop. This creates a little butt (thermal shelf) at the back with extra room for heat sinks. That back edge is largely occupied by exhaust vents. No exhaust goes out the sides.  Underneath, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 sits on three large rubber feet that hold it firmly in place and lift it up a good ways to provide airflow into the two bottom fans. There’s a large grille underneath, though only a small percentage of this is actually grille — mostly right under the fans. In this case, this at least allows sufficient air intake and doesn’t provide any extra opportunity for dust to get in.  All told, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 isn’t particularly inspired or exciting, but it feels decent and is a sturdily built laptop. The choice of a 15.1-inch display provides decent screen space while keeping the laptop small enough to fit into even some tight laptop sleeves. It’s not so heavy either at just 4.3 pounds. And thanks to the very thin display and modest base, the build isn’t very thick for a gaming laptop.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Keyboard, trackpad IDG / Mark Knapp My experience with the Legion 5i 15IRX10’s keyboard has been somewhat mixed. On one hand, the keys are surprisingly well stabilized, and they have a decent dish to help feel out the center and edges. But their travel is kind of rubbery, giving them a somewhat odd feel, like they also push my fingers back when resetting. With some adjustment, I could see this actually turning into a positive, as a quick-resetting key is ready to press that much sooner, but as it stands, it sort of throws my fingers into a funk. I was ultimately able to get up to a typing speed of 114 words-per-minute with a decent 97 percent accuracy, but this still isn’t quite exceptional.  I still love that Lenovo accommodates a full-size set of arrow keys on many of its gaming laptops. This makes navigation so much easier. There’s also a full number pad on the right side of the keyboard, though this has slim keys that end up feeling a little cramped.  Lenovo packed in 24 RGB lighting zones, which ultimately kind of feels like overkill for any system that’s not just going to buckle down and give you per-key lighting. The 24 zones do allow for a slightly smoother wave or lighting that responds to audio playing from the computer. But the zones are all vertical columns, not functionally useful zones. Customization options are rather limited. And the edges of zones blend together when displaying different colors, so you won’t get an impactful and precise customization no matter how you shake it. The keyboard will let you cycle through backlighting presets by pressing Fn+Space, but there’s no key for adjusting backlighting brightness. That must be done through Lenovo’s Legion Space software. On the bright side, the lighting effectively illuminates the key legends.  The trackpad is nothing special. It’s fairly small for a laptop this size, but still spacious enough for four-finger gestures and general navigation. It’s far over to the left side of the computer, though, which can make it awkward to use for right-handed users. It’s mylar surface is also not as smooth as it could be. Lenovo Legion 5i: Display, audio IDG / Mark Knapp The Legion 5i 15IRX10 offers an excellent display. Just about every aspect of it delivers quality, and that’s great to see from a gaming laptop that skews toward the budget side of things. The 2560×1600 panel is plenty sharp at the size. It has the perfect contrast of OLED, not to mention the ultra-fast pixel response times. And with a 165Hz refresh rate, you’ll get smooth visuals both in and out of games. OLEDs weren’t always very bright, but this panel happily hits 523 nits. And to top it off, the panel is accurate. I measured its color accuracy at an average dE1976 of 0.51 with a max dE1976 of just 1.33. If you’ve got to do serious color work or just want to see your games the way they’re meant to look, this screen is up to the task. The audio isn’t quite as impressive, but it’s not bad. The speakers rely on the Nahimic app to provide sufficient sound, and it thankfully helps deliver on that. Playing games and watching movies, it provides plenty of audio generally, though I did find some spoken videos surprisingly quiet while listening with the app set to its default Music mode. There’s not much stereo separation from the little bottom-firing speakers even though they sit at the outer edges of the laptop, so they don’t make for the most engrossing game audio.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Webcam, microphone, biometrics IDG / Mark Knapp You’ll get a decent camera from the Legion 5i 15IRX10. Even though it’s sharp, it will appear a bit soft in modestly lit spaces. Even with several lights on in my small office, footage appeared soft and grainy. That said, it managed a very natural exposure. Though the camera offers a high resolution, it doesn’t have the infrared tech to enable facial recognition. The laptop also lacks a fingerprint scanner, so you’re out of luck for biometrics. The mic array on the Legion 5i 15IRX10 fails to impress. In a busy environment, it struggles thoroughly to capture my voice clearly. It does successfully eliminate background noise to a degree, but fully at the expense of its ability to pick me up. As soon as I talk in that loud environment, the background noise merges with my voice and makes anything I say unintelligible. Even in a quiet environment, my voice sounds rather distant with some room echo noticeable.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Connectivity IDG / Mark Knapp There’s little to get excited about from the Legion 5i 15IRX10’s various connections. It’s not making the most of its size, offering just two USB-C ports on the left side along with a USB-A port and Ethernet. The right side includes two USB-A ports, a 3.5mm jack, and a camera kill switch. The laptop’s charging port is located on the rear along with an HDMI port. The ports on the sides are rather awkwardly spaced with gaps of varying sizes between them. For instance, the USB-A ports on the right have the entire height of the keyboard dividing them. None of the ports are terribly fast either, with the USB-A ports topping out at 5Gbps and the USB-C ports hitting just 10Gbps — no 20 or 40Gbps ports. At least the HDMI port is up to the 2.1 spec. Both USB-C ports can also handle video output with one offering DisplayPort 2.1 and the other DisplayPort 1.4. The wireless connections are managed by a MediaTek card that offers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. It’s been fast and reliable in my testing, though as with many MediaTek cards I’ve used over the years, there is often a small delay when waking up the laptop from sleep before it will reconnect to known networks.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Performance The Legion 5i 15IRX10 is built with high-performance in mind, even if it isn’t aiming for the highest levels possible on modern hardware. This kind of horsepower generally makes everyday operation and even light creative workloads a breeze. We can see that quite clearly in PCMark 10, which measures holistic performance of the system. The Legion 5i 15IRX10 performs wonderfully. It’s not exceptional in this category, though. Most gaming laptops have plenty to offer in this area, and the Legion 5i 15IRX10 actually ends up looking less impressive next to even older machines. The Dell G15 and Gigabyte G6X both ran on a lower-tier CPU and a prior-gen RTX 4060 GPU, and yet they came out ahead in this test. The previous generation Lenovo Legion 5i also came out well ahead thanks in part to a more potent CPU and faster storage.   IDG / Mark Knapp On the bright side, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 lagging behind those systems in PCMark isn’t the biggest deal, since all of the systems are offering smooth and responsive operation. And when it comes to raw horsepower, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 claws back some ground. Its processor offered substantially higher performance in Cinebench’s multi-core testing, dramatically outstripping all but the earlier Legion 5i’s Core i9-14900HX. This also helps us see why Lenovo opted for an older CPU. The newer Intel Core 7 240H falls well shy of the Core i7-14700HX’s performance, even failing to match its single-core speeds. It means little that the Core 7 240H is newer, though, as it’s actually a Raptor Lake CPU in disguise and not one of the newer Lunar Lake or Arrow Lake architectures.  IDG / Mark Knapp The combination of a potent CPU and newer RTX 5060 GPU works in the Legion 5i 15IRX10’s favor when it comes to graphics performance. Where it had fallen behind the prior-gen Legion in some cases, it turned the tides back into its favor in 3DMark’s Port Royal test, where it pulled well ahead of the Legion 5i. It also demonstrates how a strong CPU can avoid bottlenecks by thoroughly outpacing the Alienware 16 Aurora despite this machine running the same GPU. IDG / Mark Knapp Its performance in synthetic benchmarks translated well to actual games, too. It churned out an average of 153 fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Here again, it shows the difference a CPU can make, as the RTX 5060-powered Alienware fell behind all the RTX 4060-powered machines because its CPU was holding the GPU back. The Legion 5i 15IRX10 doesn’t have the same issue, and that lets its RTX 5060 show the generational uptick in performance it’s capable of.  IDG / Mark Knapp This performance checks out in Metro Exodus as well, where the Legion 5i 15IRX10 again leads the pack by a decent margin. The balance of a strong CPU and GPU help it stay ahead of these other systems, which appear largely held back by the limitations of the RTX 4060 (or Intel Core 7 240H in Alienware’s case). Of course, this does also highlight the limitations of the Legion 5i 15IRX10. In very demanding games, like Metro Exodus, it can struggle to meet the 60 fps threshold. That said, the system could hit an 82 fps average in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p Ultra.  IDG / Mark Knapp Performance is consistent, too. Running a string of Steel Nomad benchmarks, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 maintained nearly the same average framerate between runs. CPU and GPU temps also settled in and stopped increasing after just a couple minutes. The fans aren’t even terribly loud to manage the thermals.  Since the Legion 5i 15IRX10 has a 2560×1600 display, you might be tempted to play games at this resolution. In some lighter games, that will be readily doable. The Legion 5i 15IRX10 managed a 98 fps average in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at its native resolution. But in Cyberpunk 2077, it only hit 48 fps. For native resolution gaming, you’ll likely want to tap into DLSS and potentially frame generation technology.  Lenovo Legion 5i: Battery life As we see all too often, performance advantages tend to come at the peril of battery life. And sure enough, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 struggles to offer much longevity where runtime is concerned. In our local video playback test, it fell a little bit shy of four hours. That’s not only a bad result for a gaming PC, but it’s bad among this group, especially compared to the Alienware 16 Aurora’s surprisingly strong 10-hour runtime IDG / Mark Knapp In normal use, the battery life isn’t any better. I was able to stream a two-hour movie with the display at about 50 percent brightness and still have an hour of battery left. Web browsing, research, and writing consumed the battery at a similar rate, with it just scraping by at over three hours. Lenovo Legion 5i: Conclusion The Legion 5i 15IRX10 has plenty going for it as an affordable gaming laptop, assuming you steer clear of Lenovo’s inscrutable pricing and just go with the Walmart model closest to our test configuration. For $1,199, the Legion 5i 15IRX10 is offering a lot. It has an excellent display for gaming and entertainment, a sturdy build, solid performance, and surprisingly quiet fans. Though the design is decently portable, the battery doesn’t last long. So you’ll want to bring the charger if you plan to do much on the go. A lot of the value here hinges on the low price though. With upgraded internals, the price of different configurations can truly soar, and the quality of this laptop doesn’t quite feel like it stacks up against $2,000 systems. But as a low-cost option, it’s great. Read...

For many months, AMD offered a special treat to enthusiasts wishing to run AI chatbot LLMs on their PCs: configurable VRAM that significantly improved performance. Now Intel can say the same. Bob Duffy, who oversees Intel’s AI Playground application for running AI art and local chatbots on your PC, tweeted that the company’s latest Arc driver for its integrated GPUs now offers a “shared GPU memory override” that offers the ability to adjust your PC’s VRAM, provided that you have a supported processor. This is a big deal for AI and even some games, though not an obvious one. Until now, laptops with an Intel Core processor split the available memory down the middle, assigning half to the PC’s operating system and half to VRAM. If you owned an Intel Core laptop with 32GB of memory, 16GB of it would be assigned to AI and games. AMD took a different route: Although a Ryzen laptop would generally do the same by default, users could either use AMD’s Adrenalin software or the laptop’s BIOS to manually adjust the VRAM. In day-to-day office work, the split means little. But to an AI model, more VRAM theoretically means more performance. In my tests with AMD’s Ryzen AI Max in March, for example, simply reallocating 24GB of the Asus ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet’s available system memory to VRAM boosted performance by as much as 64 percent in some AI benchmarks. A similar test with 64GB of memory inside the Framework Desktop significantly boosted performance in AI art, chatbots, and some games. To an AI model, VRAM is basically system memory. More VRAM means that you can run a larger AI chatbot with a greater number of parameters. In general, the AI with the largest number of parameters gives you the most insightful responses; more VRAM also allows for a greater number of tokens to be processed, both as input and as the response the AI chatbot provides. Bigger numbers are better, basically. Placing the Shared GPU Memory Override feature inside the Intel Graphics Software package means that you’ll be able to reassign free RAM to serve as VRAM before you load up an AI chatbot. Although I haven’t tested the new software myself, I would assume that the default behavior is to leave a minimal amount of RAM (8GB is typical) for Windows, and assign the rest to VRAM. For now, this is a manual procedure, although it seems likely that Intel’s AI Playground and Intel’s Graphics Software package would work together to reassign memory when the latter package is booted. The only problem is that reallocating memory typically requires you to reboot your PC. Note that this only works with laptops with an integrated Arc GPU, not discrete cards. You’ll still need to buy a laptop with a substantial amount of memory to be able to take advantage of the new capabilities, and users are reporting (via VideoCardz) that it only works with Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 processors, not the “Meteor Lake” chips inside the Intel Core Ultra Series 1 lineup. However, this is a big boost for Intel laptops that’s long overdue. Read...

Ever since Microsoft killed WordPad in 2024, the much-simpler Notepad app has been receiving several new features—almost as if it’s evolving into a better, more modern version of WordPad. Meanwhile, Microsoft is introducing an even simpler text editor called Edit. Some of the recent additions to Notepad include spell check, AI-generated text, and Markdown formatting—and the improvements aren’t done yet. The latest news is that Notepad will soon have updated context menus in Windows 11, reports Neowin. In Notepad version 11.2507.26.0, which is currently rolling out to Windows Insiders, the updated context menu now matches the look of Windows 11 24H2’s context menus, with quick actions for Copy, Cut, Paste, Select all, and Delete, plus other actions like Write, Rewrite, Summarize, Define with Bing, and more. You can technically get this new version of Notepad on non-Insider versions of Windows 11, but the steps are somewhat complex. It’s likely that this new version of Notepad will be rolled out to the general public in September or October. Read...

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