Once you've spent $2,000 on a new graphics card or a high-end CPU, your first instinct is probably to download a suite of benchmarking tools. You want to see the numbers, compare your score with other systems, and make sure you got what you paid for.

A colleague recently went to see The Prodigy live, and it made me nostalgic about my old PlayStation. Wipeout 2097 was one of the first games I owned for the console, and the song Firestarter still makes me think of the futuristic racing game. I really want to play it again, but instead of setting up RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi, I used an old phone.

Back when I used the Steam Deck as my main PC handheld, I forgot the sudo password I'd created the first time around. Naturally, I started to panic and thought I'd need to reflash my Deck and lose all my data, but then I found a solution that let me reset my Steam Deck's sudo password in just a few minutes. All you need for this is a wired keyboard (or a wireless keyboard with a dongle and a USB dock) and some focus, because there's some typing involved.

Stop letting old devices rot in a drawer and bring them back to life with the help of an inexpensive microcontroller and some code. The ESP32 is perfect for this task.

ESP32 boards are incredibly versatile tools. You can use them for a huge range of purposes, and they can also be an extremely cheap way to help you get started in a new creative tech hobby.

I have a soft spot for old software Easter eggs, especially the ones that make you wonder what developers were doing when nobody was looking. Excel 97 has one of my favorites: a secret 3D flight simulator hidden inside a spreadsheet. And, yes, I went looking for a way to play it.

I've been a fan of Razer's gaming accessories for years, but it's admittedly not often that I think to myself "This is a good deal" when testing a new one. One of the biggest gaming hardware companies in the business has never been known for affordability, but the debut entry in a brand-new family of devices goes against the norm by being both cheap and good.

You have it way easier these days, but back in the day, when you wanted to play a game on your PC, you had to take a similar approach to consoles. Go to a physical store, get a disc, then pop it into your PC. Chances are, though, that nowadays your PC doesn't have a CD drive. So what do you do when you want to play your old games on your new PC?