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Tech News
IDC reports global PC shipments dropped 4.9% in the second quarter, yet HP, Dell and Lenovo all posted double-digit revenue gains in their PC segments by prioritizing pricier, AI-capable machines. Tight memory chip supplies driven by AI infrastructure demand have pushed component costs up, prompting manufacturers to shift production toward premium systems rather than budget models.
A comparison of the two leading retro emulators finds that Dolphin, which handles GameCube games, is generally considered more accurate and easier to run than PCSX2, the PS2 emulator, despite PCSX2 covering a slightly larger percentage of its console's library. Both are free, open-source tools available on Windows, macOS and Linux, with Dolphin also supporting Android, and neither requires top-end graphics hardware to run games at 4K/60fps.
At IFA 2026, Microsoft's Mark Linton said an internal Windows 11 build shows notable gains in boot speed and Windows Hello responsiveness, alongside earlier promises that the OS will run well on 8GB machines. No timeline for public rollout or performance data was shared, and the changes haven't yet reached testing channels.
Personal computer manufacturers are shipping fewer units but charging more per device, and the strategy is currently paying off financially. The shift is being driven by a shortage of memory chips, whose prices have surged due to massive demand from AI infrastructure buildouts.
Best Buy has launched a Labor Day sale offering steep price cuts across gaming laptops, desktop PCs, monitors and a MacBook. Highlights include hundreds of dollars off machines from Gigabyte, Acer, Lenovo and Asus, with savings reaching as high as $900 on select gaming laptops and $600 off gaming PCs.
Nvidia has released PAIR (Personal AI Router) in open beta on GitHub, a system that lets users split GPU-intensive AI agent workloads into parallel subtasks and offload them to other computers on the same local network. The software works across Windows, Mac and Linux, uses mDNS for device discovery and MTLS for security, and currently supports the Ollama and LM Studio model engines.
At IFA 2026, NVIDIA unveiled Personal AI Router (PAIR), a free, open-source beta tool that detects idle PCs on a home network and routes AI subagent tasks to them instead of overloading a single GPU. This lets multi-step AI agent jobs, like sorting an inbox, run faster by spreading the workload across multiple machines while the main PC stays free for gaming or work.
Nvidia showed the first working laptop built on its RTX Spark superchip, the Lenovo Yoga 9n, a 16-inch 2-in-1 with an OLED touch display, six speakers and a 9.2-megapixel webcam. The chip pairs an Arm-based Grace CPU with up to 20 cores and a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores in a single system-on-a-chip, letting the laptop measure just 0.69 inches thick, nearly matching the MacBook Pro. Nvidia also revealed mini desktop PCs using the same chip, aimed at running local AI workloads.
Microsoft has clarified that a mouse personalization reset bug tied to the August 2026 preview update KB5120998 only impacts Windows 11 devices set to non-English locales. The company found that certain code components fail to load correctly on these systems, causing cursor and animation settings to revert to defaults instead of user preferences. The update, which also brings Start menu and taskbar changes, is optional and only installs automatically if users have enabled the setting to receive updates as soon as they're available.
Microsoft says its August 11, 2026 security update (KB5121003) is causing Teams and New Outlook to fail to launch or crash unexpectedly on ARM-based Windows 11 24H2 devices like the Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7. The problem mostly hits new or freshly imaged machines that haven't yet grabbed Microsoft Store updates, while Classic Outlook, Word and Excel remain unaffected.
Reliance Jio has expanded its JioPC cloud computing service beyond its own broadband subscribers, making it available to anyone with an internet connection regardless of telecom provider. The service streams a virtual PC with up to eight virtual CPUs, 16GB RAM and 1TB storage, letting even computers up to eight years old run modern AI applications without hardware upgrades. Subscriptions range from about $11 for two months to roughly $53 for a full year of the higher-spec plan.
Microsoft confirmed that starting in October 2026, memory integrity protection built on Virtualization-based Security will be switched on by default for eligible Windows 11 PCs. The feature runs Windows as a guest OS under Hyper-V to isolate the kernel from tampering, but Microsoft has previously acknowledged it can hurt gaming performance. Organizations will retain the ability to disable it, though the default posture is shifting toward security-first.