HOW TO

Ever needed to get rid of your fixed desktop icons, or add them back in? Did you download Minibin because you just hate that Recycling Bin icon on your desktop? Click the Start menu, type

- ZAK STOREY

TIP OF THE MONTH

DESKTOP ICONS 

‘Themes and Related Settings’, then click ‘Desktop icon settings’. From there, you can enable or disable whichever desktop icons you want.

MAKE – USE – CREATE

KEEPING PACE

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we use our hardware, and how certain categories of components are becoming almost superfluous in their performance improvements.

Even if you 3D render, edit videos, or do anything related to data analysis, the majority of your time is still going to be spent not doing those heavy-load things. For the bulk of our operations, the current speed and performance we have with the best SSDs and DDR is fairly superfluous.

A SATA SSD or DDR4 will—at least day-to-day—perform fairly identically to the best PCIe 5.0 M.2 and 8,000 MHz DDR5. Even in gaming, we’re starting to see this power creep—CPU, DDR, and SSDs don’t affect much. I do benchmarks of SSDs that utilize game load times, and differentiate between a good or bad SSD via millisecond load times. How ridiculous is that?

We’re getting to a point where technology is so fast, it’s hard to see any benefit. Okay, you will see time saved and better results, but outside of fps with GPUs, there’s really no single component that can alter our engagement with the PC. It’s like owning a supercar; yeah, you can go fast, but most of the time you still have to deal with the speed limit, and the person in the Toyota can still get from A to B in the same amount of time.