HOW TO STEP-BY-STEP GUIDES TO IMPROVING YOUR PC
TIP OF THE MONTH
© MICROSOFT,
PI-HOLE.NET, GOOGLE
CLEAN DESKTOPS
One simple trick can help tidy up your desktop and change how you use your Windows PC forever: Search. The quickest way to find a program you need is the Search menu. Click the Star t menu and star t typing what program, setting, or file structure you want. Windows will list a number of items you might need. Click it, and you’re done. It’s time to get rid of all those desktop icons, and only use it for what you need.
MAKE – USE – CREATE
58How to use Copilot in Windows 11
62Ban intrusive ads from your network
66Supercharge Chrome (and Edge)
ZAK STOREY CONTRIBUTOR
INTEL’S GEN 14 DEPRESSES ME
Hello there! For those of you who are new to the mag, I used to be MaximumPC’s editor-in-chief. I could talk for days on what I did in the interim, but there’s something more pressing: the 14th gen Intel launch. More specifically, the frustration this has given me.
In isolation, these are good chips. If you grab the 14900K or 14600K and pop them in a machine today, they’re fantastically potent processors. In fact, I’d argue that they’re some of the best chips around right now. But compare them to last gen, and they’re just seriously dull.
From a hardware perspective, the biggest change is some tweaked clock speeds. For the 14900K, that’s 200 MHz boost clock increase, and APO. 14700K, 200 MHz boost clock increase, and some extra E-cores for better low-end performance. 14600K, 200 MHz extra boost clock speeds.
Intel has ensured that these chips have the same RRP as their predecessors had. With the 13 gen chips now out of stock practically everywhere, you’re left with a set of new chips that don’t change much, fixed in price for the foreseeable because they’re ‘new’.
I don’t know about you, but that’s utterly depressing. 14th gen might be the weakest launch I’ve seen from Team Blue. They’re still good chips, though.
↘ submit your How To project idea to: editor@maximumpc.com
How to use Copilot in Windows 11
YOU’LL NEED THIS
WINDOWS 11 23H2
An internet connection
COPILOT IS A NEW CHATBOT in Windows 11 that can do more than just search or crack jokes. It can launch apps, change settings, generate images, and talk to you in natural language. You can type or speak to it, and it will respond to your commands and queries. It is optional, and can be ignored like Cortana before it, but offers a new way to interact with your PC without using the mouse. You can find it on your Taskbar if you have the latest version of Windows 11.
Copilot is a version of the Bing chatbot, incorporating DALL-E 3 and based on ChatGPT, that lives on your Windows desktop. You can ask it to change settings on your PC, search the web, generate images from text, and more. There’s also voice input, so you can talk more naturally.