December 24, 2020

How to Get Microsoft Office for Free 2020





Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiGz6payjNg

How to Get Microsoft Office for Free

 




Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuQyKM7_V-Y


What Are ARM CPUs, and Are They Going To Replace x86 (Intel)?

 ANTHONY HEDDINGS

Shutterstock/Gorodenkoff

Everyone is going ARM these days—Amazon and Apple are both shipping in-house CPUs with crazy performance increases, with Microsoft rumored to be developing their own. ARM has historically been used for low power mobile chips, so why exactly is ARM crushing x86 on the desktop and server space?

Everyone Is Going ARM These Days

The processor world is a complex industry, and only a few designs from a few companies are able to compete on the high end of performance. Usually, Intel or AMD holds the crown of performance, with both of them manufacturing x86 CPUs. But recently, CPUs from Apple and Amazon based on ARM have been giving Intel (and the x86 architecture) a run for their money.

Amazon has their Graviton2 CPU, which isn’t faster than Intel’s server counterparts, but is more cost effective and uses less power. With how much of an improvement it was over Graviton1, their next iteration will likely be fierce competition in the server space.

Apple hit it out of the park with their first non-mobile CPU, the Apple Silicon M1 processor, which runs faster than desktop Intel CPUs and nearly as fast as AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series, the current performance crown. It’s custom silicon which makes Apple Macbooks the current fastest laptops in the world, much to the chagrin of PC enthusiasts (myself included).

In fact, they’re so far ahead in the laptop space that Windows on the M1 Macbook runs faster than the Surface Pro X, despite Windows on ARM only running through an emulator. And as if that wasn’t humiliating enough, it absolutely crushes it with a Geekbench Single-Core score of 1,390 compared the Surface’s 802, which is laughably bad in comparison. The M1 is seriously fast.

Microsoft is also rumored to be developing their own in-house ARM processor, and though that rumor comes from the Azure server space, they’d likely use the same chip for the Surface if they can match Apple’s performance.

What’s The Difference Between ARM and x86?

At the end of the day, there isn’t too much of a difference between ARM and x86. You can still run Google Chrome and watch YouTube on either one. In fact, you may be doing so right now, as nearly all Androids and every iPhone uses an ARM-based processor.

The biggest difference for most people is that older applications meant for x86 will need to be recompiled to run on ARM as well. For some things this is easy, but not everything will be supported, especially legacy software. However, even that can usually run through x86 emulation, which Windows is starting to support.

For developers, there are a lot of differences in how applications get compiled, but these days, most compilers do a good job of supporting the major instruction sets, and you won’t really have to make many changes to get it compiling for multiple platforms.

But How is ARM Running Faster?

To answer this question, we’ll have to delve deeper into how CPUs work under the hood.

ARM and x86 are both instruction sets, also known as architectures, which basically are a list of micro-code “programs” that the CPU supports. This is why you don’t need to worry about running a Windows app on a specific AMD or Intel CPU; they’re both x86 CPUs, and while the exact designs are different (and perform differently), they both support the same instructions. This means any program compiled for x86 will, in general, support both CPUs.

CPUs basically execute operations sequentially, like a machine given a list of tasks to do. Each instruction is known as an opcode, and architectures like x86 have a lot of opcodes, especially considering they’ve been around for decades. Because of this complexity, x86 is known as a “Complex Instruction Set,” or CISC.

CISC architectures generally take the design approach of packing a lot of stuff into a single instruction. For example, an instruction for multiplication may move data from a memory bank to a register, then perform the steps for the multiplication, and shuffle the results around in memory. All in one instruction.

Under the hood though, this instruction gets unpacked into many “micro-ops,” which the CPU executes. The benefit of CISC is memory usage, and since back in the day it was at a premium, CISC used to be better.

However, that’s not the bottleneck anymore, and this is where RISC comes into play. RISC, or Reduced Instruction Set, basically does away with complex multi-part instructions. Each instruction mostly can execute in a single clock cycle, though many long operations will need to wait on results from other areas of the CPU or memory.

While this seems like going backwards, it has huge implications for CPU design. CPUs need to load all their instructions from RAM and execute them as fast as possible. It turns out it’s far easier to do that when you have many simple instructions versus a lot of complex ones. The CPU runs faster when the instruction buffer can be filled up, and that’s a lot easier to do when the instructions are smaller and easier to process.

RISC also has the benefit of something called Out-of-Order execution, or OoOE. Essentially, the CPU has a unit inside of it that reorders and optimizes instructions coming into it. For example, if an application needs to calculate two things, but they don’t depend on each other, the CPU can execute both in parallel. Usually, parallel code is very complicated for developers to write, but at the lowest levels of the CPU, it can make use of multi-tasking to speed things up. The Apple M1 chip uses OoOE to great effect.

If you’re interested in the inner workings, you should read this fantastic write-up by Erik Engheim on what makes the Apple M1 chip so fast. In short, it makes heavy usage of specialized silicon, Out-of-order execution, and having way more instruction decoders to support its speed.

Is ARM Going To Replace x86?

The honest answer is, probably. Intel has been feeling the end of Moore’s law for years now, and while AMD has been able to make performance leaps in recent years, they’re not far ahead.

This isn’t to say that x86 will die off anytime soon, but it’s clear that ARM has more potential than just being a mobile architecture—a stigma which is no longer valid given the current direction of the industry. The benefits of RISC architectures are clear, and with how much the Apple M1 chip has already improved, the future of the industry looks promising.

Plus, ARM isn’t the only RISC architecture out there. It’s still proprietary, though ARM licenses its designs to third-party designers, like Qualcomm, Samsung, and Apple. RISC-V is open source, and is similarly promising. It’s a standardized instruction set architecture, leaving the exact implementations up to the manufacturer. If the industry does move towards RISC in general, there will be open and closed source implementations available.


    Anthony HeddingsANTHONY HEDDINGS
    Anthony Heddings is the resident cloud engineer for LifeSavvy Media, a technical writer, programmer, and an expert at Amazon's AWS platform. He's written hundreds of articles for How-To Geek and CloudSavvy IT that have been read millions of times. READ FULL BIO »


    Source: 

    May 4, 2020

    Everything You Need to Know About USB 4

    USB 4—or USB4, as it’s officially branded—is on the tech horizon, and like WiFi 6E or mobile 5G, you probably have plenty of questions about what the new USB standard means for your many devices. So, let’s take a quick look at everything we know about the upcoming USB4.
    It’s a big speed and bandwidth upgrade

    USB4 is purported to be twice as fast as the current USB 3.2 standard (20Gbps), which means it’ll support up to 40Gbps speeds as a maximum in most instances. (Your actual speeds will obviously vary depending on what devices you’re using.)

    USB cables use two “lanes” to send and receive signals from connected devices. However, some devices will be able to change a USB4 cable’s to single-direction delivery. For example, DisplayPort 2.0's “Alt mode” will increase the available signal bandwidth to 80Gbps, high enough to support 8K HDR video monitors and other high-speed devices over USB4. The two-lane delivery also means some USB4 devices will support Apple’s Thunderbolt 3 standard, though it’s up to manufacturers on that one.

    Speaking of bigger bandwidth allocations, USB4 also supports the USB PD charging standard, which means your smartphones and other devices will be able to charge much faster over USB4—provided they’re built to support fast charging, that is.

    USB4 devices can support three maximum speeds: 10Gbps, 20Gbps, and 40Gbps. In other words, make sure you’re scanning a device’s specs to get a sense of its maximum supported speeds if that’s what is most important to you when you’re buying, say, a new laptop (or hub).

    And there’s one more speed-related feature that really puts the feather in USB4's cap, as Tom’s Hardware describes:


    A big part of the USB 4 spec is the ability to dynamically adjust the amount of resources that are available when you are sending both video and data over the same connection. So, let’s say that you have USB 4 with a 40 Gbps maximum and you’re outputting to a 4K monitor while copying a ton of files from an external SSD. And let’s stipulate that the video feed needs about 12.5 Gbps. In that case, USB 4 would allocate the remaining 27.5 Mbps to your backup drive.
    USB4 will be backward compatible

    USB4 cables will use Type-C connectors, which is the flat, rounded port found on most smartphones and laptops these days.

    You should be able to plug a USB4 cable into just about any USB Type-C port, but it won’t always function the same way. For example, a USB4 cable will experience a drop in speed when plugged into an older port, while older USB Type-C cables plugged in USB4B 4.0 port will use their highest-possible transfer speed by default (but can’t reach the same speeds as a USB4 cable).

    Similarly, you may need and an adapter to use USB4 cables with USB Type-A ports, which the kind you usually see on PCs.
    Why “USB4?”

    According to USB Promoter Group CEO Brad Saunders, the “USB4" branding was chosen to avoid confusion caused by the incremental upgrades of previous USB standards, i.e. “USB 3.1” and “USB 3.2.” It’s also possible that USB4 may be re-branded, or that further upgrades—what would’ve otherwise been “USB 4.1,” for example—will see more definitive naming differences despite still technically being “USB4.”
    When will USB4 show up?

    The first USB4 cables and devices are expected to arrive around late-2020, but 2021 is probably more likely at this point. Part of this is because USB4 will cost more than older types of USB to manufacture. And we’re kind of in the middle of a global manufacturing shutdown/slowness/Hell, which doesn’t help speed up USB4's launch at all.

    Source: https://lifehacker.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-usb-4-1843246620

    January 23, 2020

    Fix: The USB Disk Is Write Protected in Windows 10/8/7

    Receive error "the disk is write protected" when trying to format a removable disk (such as USB flash drive, SD card, CD, or pen drive)? The disk is write protected error in Windows 10/8/7 that stops operation of formatting, writing data, i.e. copy & paste files to the generic USB stick. It's imperative to remove write protection on the drive. Learn the how-to guide step by step to fix the "disk is write protected, remove the write-protection or use another disk, removable disk" now.
    the disk is write protected

    How to fix the write-protected error

    We use removable storage devices a lot on a Windows computer, and some of you may encounter the issue of the disk malfunction, which is mostly about "the disk is write protected". When Windows starts to write protect your disk, for example, a SanDisk 4GB USB flash drive, you can no longer use it anymore until you remove the write protection. The fixes are as follows.

    Method 1: Diskpart command

    Step 1: Open administrative Command Prompt.
    Step 2: Type these commands one by one and press Enter key after each:
    • diskpart
    • list disk
    • select disk # (# is the number of USB drive with which you're getting the write-protected error and is plugged in, see screenshot below)
    • attributes disk clear readonly
    use diskpart to remove write-protection usb
    Step 3: You may now close Command Prompt and re-plug the USB drive and check if the issue is resolved, by dragging a file to the drive or trying to format in Windows Disk Management or EaseUS Partition Master coming in the later part.

    Method 2: Regedit.exe

    Step 1: Press Windows Key + R keys simultaneously, type "regedit" in Run dialog box and hit Enter to open the Registry Editor.
    use regedit.exe to remove write protection usb
    Step 2: In the left pane, navigate here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
    Step 3: In the left pane of this location, right click Control key and select New -> Key. Name the new sub-key so created as StorageDevicePolicies. Now come to the right pane of this sub-key i.e. StorageDevicePolicies, right click and select New -> DWORD Value. Name the newly created DWORD as WriteProtect. In some cases, you might find that this DWORD under the sub-key already exists and the DWORD has a Value set to 1. Double-click on the DWORD to modify its Value data.
    set value data to remove write protection usb
    Step 4: In the above-shown box, change the Value data to 0 from 1. Click OK. Close the Registry Editor and check if the issue is resolved by dragging a file to the drive or trying to format in Windows Disk Management or EaseUS Partition Master coming in the later part.
    You can try those methods mentioned above and they may help you remove the Write Protected  error. Besides, if you have the need to  format a hard drive, memory card, sd card or external drive, we recommend you a reliable partition software -  EaseUS Partition  Master, which is a powerful yet user-friendly alternative for Windows 10/8/7 disk management program.

    Source: https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager-software/the-disk-is-write-protected-windows-10.html