ISSUE 23.25 • 2026-06-22 COMMENTARY By Will Fastie The past few years have witnessed a surge of Arm processors. Of course, the Arm architecture has been around in phones for a long time. But even though phones have cohesive ecosystems built around Arm, we tend to think of phones as nothing more than appliances, not […]

EDITORIAL By Will Fastie I’ve greatly enjoyed my forays into the wilds of computing over the four decades I’ve been engaging with the public and with vendors. I miss it, so I’m offering to do it again — virtually. And, exclusively for our valued AskWoody Plus members. Here’s how it will work. Read the full […]

AI By Matthew S. Smith This might be hard to believe, but we’re now at least four years into the era of AI large language models — and perhaps up to nine, depending on your definition. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in 2022, GPT-3 was released in 2020, and the paper that defined the transformer architecture […]

FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen When following a video or text tutorial while working in another program, did you ever have to constantly switch back and forth between windows? Maybe you’re watching the weather radar, like we do here in Tornado Alley while doing other work. Perhaps you need to keep your notes or reference […]

TAME YOUR TECH By Susan Bradley Data centers are in the headlines these days, from the number being built to the energy and water they consume and to the noise they produce. But because neither you nor I will ever own a data center, I’m going to discuss some of the extremes that impact our […]

ISSUE 23.24 • 2026-06-15 WINDOWS 11 By Martin Brinkmann Without a single warning, Microsoft may quietly hijack your local files and hold them hostage in the cloud to upsell you a OneDrive subscription. With a few steps, you can break the link and reclaim your data. Do a quick experiment right now. Open File Explorer, […]

PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston You may think you can make easy money by betting on sports and political events in so-called prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi. I’d bet that you’d lose your shirt. If bettors believe there’s a 75 percent chance that interest rates will rise, for instance, you can bet 75 […]

WINDOWS 11 By Lance Whitney Among all the VM programs I’ve tried, VMware Workstation Pro remains my favorite. Here’s why. As a freelance technology writer, I typically have to review or test different apps, settings, and features in Windows. And I need to be able to do this without impacting my main Windows environment. I […]

PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley We’re coming up to the Secure Boot certificate deadline. It’s June. Celebration season. Graduation. Weddings. And Secure Boot certificate expirations. Okay, maybe we’re not celebrating that last one. There are only a few weeks left before the Windows Secure Boot certificates expire. Let me remind you again that consumers should […]

ISSUE 23.23 • 2026-06-08 WINDOWS By Mary Branscombe It’s easy to build up a long list of old devices, but sometimes it’s the Microsoft Store that’s living in the past. When Windows 8.1 came out, the Windows team put in a tiny Easter egg. Besides being able to download apps from the Windows Store (as […]

SILICON By Matthew S. Smith After more than a year of rumors and, if those rumors are believed, some delays, NVIDIA’s new system on a chip for Windows PCs was revealed at Computex 2026. It’s called RTX Spark, and it’s coming to Windows PCs this fall. RTX Spark will launch with a single chip in […]

FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen I always tell myself that I am going to start organizing files as I download them. I mean, not right now — but the next time I download something. This is never going to happen, so I went in search of something to do it for me. After trying several […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley Normally, I like to give actionable information. This article won’t do that. Sure, I’ll give you a few tips here and there, but for the vast majority of this week’s column, I’ll be pointing out instances of vendor arrogance. I’m going to begin with Microsoft (of course, and deservedly so), […]

LEGAL BRIEF By Max Stul Oppenheimer, Esq. We seem to have entered a new era in machine learning. In addition to generative AI offering suggestions, it is now capable of carrying out those suggestions. It can write your emails, college-entrance personal essays, term papers, and legal briefs. (One would hope that you would at least […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie In last year’s Terabyte update, I mentioned chaotic pricing and the difficulty in stating future trends. This year, it’s far worse. To the extent I mentioned cause and effect, I was wrong. Tariffs bounced around and eventually settled down; they had little effect on the storage market. Inflation was a factor […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley Passwords. We’ve had them for a long time. They’ve served us well. But they are also subject to attacks — phishing and spoofing. Microsoft and many other vendors want us to move to passkeys. Unfortunately, the transition has not been easy or clear. Passwords are what we are used to. […]

ISSUE 23.21 • 2026-05-25 FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen Virtual sticky notes are so 2025. Back in the day, we would prop open the front and back doors of our computer store to let the fresh spring air blow through. This is how I sent most of my actual sticky notes out into the neighborhood. […]

SILICON By Matthew S. Smith Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 chips are mighty, but Windows on Arm can still be a mighty pain in the neck. In May 2024, I took the train up to Seattle for Microsoft’s Build developer conference. It’s usually a series of nerdy talks from passionate developers that end up overshadowed by hyper-corporate […]

BEN’S WORKSHOP By Ben Myers For nearly three decades, I have been recycling electronic components — mostly for the gold content they contain, but also for the rare earths and other elements inside. So, here is how electronics recycling works, how it fits into the ecology of the electronics biz, and what you might do […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley The “edge,” by which I mean the network hardware standing between the Internet and the PCs and devices on your network, is a first line of defense against attackers. What’s on your edge? At any point during the day, attackers are out to get someone. You may not be the […]