Windows XP has enjoyed the longest run of any Windows OS ever. But it has a long, long way to go. According to StatCounter, Windows XP accounts for 1.74 percent of all Windows machines, which puts it ahead of Vista. If you expand the scope to include all desktop OSes and not just Windows, Netmarketshare has Windows XP accounting for 3.72 percent of all desktops in the world. RIP, Windows XP.

Even SATA SSDs are continuing to yield market share to NVMe alternatives, with a report from DigiTimes suggesting that NVMe SSD sales will equal SATA SSDs sales in 2019. Given the durability and reliability of modern HDDs, they’re still the single best solution for backing up your precious data. Results were similar when our own Jarred Walton compared one drive from each category (HDD, SATA SSD, and NVMe SSD) in Anthem load times back in February. The HDD loaded the game in between 78 and 85 sec

Clancyheads got a big dose of nostalgia last year when Ghost Recon Wildlands introduced ‘Special Operation 1,’ a free add-on mission that let you hang out with Splinter Cell badass Sam Fisher. In a new interview, Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot confirms that the company has plans for the Splinter Cell series—although it’s not clear what shape those plans might take. But buried in the discussion is a diversion on Splinter Cell and how that game changed Ubisoft. “Coming on that machine and not PlaySt

Discussion around crossplay in Borderlands 3 started because a now-edited listing on the Microsoft Store apparently mentioned it (here it is being discussed on Resetera last week). GameSpot then reached out to 2K Games on the subject, and got a short statement that was non-committal, but actually pretty far from a ‘no’. “Cross-play is something we’re looking at closely, but we don’t have anything to confirm or announce at this time,” said a representative. or don’t discuss things that aren’t pla

Brand sets vs gear sets in The Division 2The easiest way to explain gear sets is by comparing them to the gear brands found throughout the rest of the game. True Patriot gear set talentsThe first of the two most common gear sets is the True Patriot, and it’s also by far the most complex set currently available. Ongoing Directive gear set talentsThe second of the two gear sets found through normal methods is Ongoing Directive, a gear set focused on buffing any status effects you may inflict on an

Ambitious sandbox MMO Albion Online is now free to play. You can download the client from the Albion Online site and start your quest to not to get mugged in the first few hours. In a Q&A for the free to play launch, Sandbox Interactive outlines how the game will be divided between paying players and free to play players. “Albion Online’s business model has always been based on two pillars: Premium status, which can be bought with either real money or ingame currency, and a vanity-only ingame sh

If you sign up to the PC Gamer Club Legendary tier , you can get yourself a bunch of free digital goodies. One of the highlights is a Fire Lycan pet for Runescape, originally provided to us back in 2017. By popular demand, though, and in collaboration with Jagex, we decided to offer the pet as a bonus for anyone who signs up to the Club at the $5 level. Note that this pet will only work in Runescape, and not Old School Runescape. When you sign up, you’ll get instructions on exactly how to activa

Bloodlines 2, thrillingly, is a real thing that is happening, a fact that no doubt has caused many of you to reinstall the buggy but brilliant original game. When you’ve had your fill of Troika’s vampire RPG, you might want to give Santa Monica By Night a play. Yep, vampires are real, and many of them in fact do their skulking, trenchcoat-swishing, and of course blood-drinking in LA’s Santa Monica. As in the original Bloodlines, you wake up as a freshly minted vampire in Santa Monica By Night, b

Iron Harvest developer King Art Games has announced that the game now has a publisher: Deep Silver. “We agreed with Deep Silver that King Art will retain total creative control,” the developer explained. “Deep Silver have also committed themselves to help with things like production, first party relations e.g. Iron Harvest was successfully crowdfunded in early 2018, raising $1.2 million from over 16,000 backers. Check out this rad alpha gameplay trailer from last year:For more info on the game,

Sigil, the John Romero-authored “unofficial spiritual successor” to Ultimate Doom that was announced late last year, has been pushed back yet again. It was originally supposed to be out in February 2019, but was delayed into April because of problems with the planned physical release. The good news for fans is that the Sigil megawad is finished, and will still be free for everyone once it’s out. I can’t release the free version until the Beast Box ships. For any practical purposes, it doesn’t ma

A new Kotaku report on the history and current status of the next Dragon Age game reveals old plans for an ambitious and intriguing RPG, code-named Joplin, that would have prioritized “choice and consequence,” rather than simplistic fetch quests, in a game world smaller than Dragon Age: Inquisition, but deeper and more reactive. Alas, that vision of the game allegedly fell victim to the ol’ double-whammy of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. Bear in mind that Dragon Age 4, or whatever it ends up

Just a week after Kotaku’s explosive report on the troubled development of Anthem, it’s published a follow-up investigation on the next Dragon Age game. The original Dragon Age 4 was scuttled, and the sad thing is, it sounds amazing. In the Dragon Age fiction, it’s a country ruled by a council of mages, headed up by an Imperial Archon. It remains to be seen what kind of game Dragon Age 4 winds up looking like, and even Kotaku’s sources admit they aren’t sure. What the Dragon Age team originally

And that’s exactly what you get with CyberPowerPC’s Gamer Master 2787D, which is on sale today at Newegg. It’s outfitted with an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 2700 processor clocked at 3.2GHz to 4.1GHz, a GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card, and 8GB of DDR4 memory. Sure, it’s not the beefiest configuration on the block, but using promo code EMCSTYTD2, you can nab it for just $1,049.99. CyberPowerPC Desktop | RTX 2070 | $1,049.99 (save $250)This gaming PC pairs an 8-core processor with a GeForce RTX 2070,

Today marks the beginning of Arc Week in Destiny 2, which will see improvements made to many of the game’s pre-Forsaken Arc subclasses, adds an Arc Singe (a boost to all Arc damage), Arc-based bounties, and a return of the Thunderlord exotic machine gun quest, which can be started by visiting Amanda Holliday in the tower from April 9-23. There’s electricity in the air, you might say—and there are patch notes, too. Amidst all the buffing is a nerf of the weird and wild rocket launcher, cutting it

ViewSonic sells plenty of FreeSync monitors, like the XG240R we reviewed earlier this year. For the rest of today, the company’s ‘VX2458-MHD’ display with 144Hz FreeSync support is just $142.99 on Amazon. This specific model is 144Hz, with a 24-inch TN panel and a resolution of 1920×1080. There doesn’t appear to be many reviews of the monitor, and we haven’t tested it ourselves. All that being said, user reviews on Amazon are mostly positive, and 144Hz 1080p monitors aren’t common at this price

Windows Mixed Reality headsets are some of the best value VR devices around, and Samsung’s HMD Odyssey+ model is the best Mixed Reality headset currently available. The Odyssey+ was announced last year, and has two 90Hz 3.5-inch AMOLED screens, each with a resolution of 1440×1600. That’s a higher resolution than the original HTC Vive (1080×1200 per eye) and Oculus Rift (1080×1200 per eye). It’s the same resolution as the new HTC Vive Pro, which currently costs $800. If you’re not familiar with W

Hearthstone: Rise of Shadows, the new expansion set that sees some of the game’s most notorious bad guys getting up to no good as The League of E.V.I.L., is now live. has assembled, their target is set, and the plan is in motion – Hearthstone’s newest expansion, #RiseOfShadows, is now live! pic.twitter.com/VYSLpQbX5wApril 9, 2019Rise of Shadows will bring 135 new cards to the game, as well as a new type of “token” card called, appropriately, Lackeys. Tim went deeper into what it all means in our

Equally interesting, however, is how much former AMD talent Intel is scooping up along the way. Intel’s newest hire for its graphics team is Heather J. Lennon. She is now the manager of digital marketing for Intel’s graphics division. He’s in charge of Intel’s architecture group, and clearly has input on its growing discrete graphics team. Until then, the question remains: how many more AMD employees will land on Intel’s graphics team?

There’s a new patch out today for Fallout 76, and along with the usual bug fixes and adjustments comes a brand-new questline. The adventure begins in Lewisburg, where players can find posters put up by someone named Shelley van Lowe. As it turns out, the Sheepsquatch is a genuine local legend in certain counties of West Virginia, with a smattering of sightings reported in the mid-1990s. The other big ticket addition with Patch 8 is a new high-level dungeon called The Burrows, which will be avail

Since then, a batch of press renders have found their way to the web, and it looks like the GTX 1650 might not require a dedicated power cable from your PSU, just as we surmised. According to the box art, the GTX 1650 will indeed ship with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, as we had been hearing. The renders show the card from multiple angles, and none of them reveal a PCIe power connector on the card. However, the GTX 1650 images don’t even show a cutout. It wouldn’t be surprising if the GTX 1650 arrived wi