Paul Lilly
Paul is a seasoned geek who was first seduced into the world of computers and technology by the Commodore 64, and through the years he’s courted a number of OSes and platforms from DOS on up to the latest version of Windows. Having joined the HotHardware team in 2011, Paul is now a mainstay of the site covering the news beat and reviews, and resident wiseguy who keeps the mood light. He’s also an experienced freelance technology writer whose work has appeared in a number of online and print publications.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Apple ended 2023 with bragging rights over Samsung by boasting the biggest share of the global smartphone market, but turns out it was a short-lived victory. According to the latest shipment and market share figures shared by IDC Research, Samsung is back in the top spot after iPhone sales slumped by nearly 10% to...
Read more...
If you find yourself in need of a new laptop, we have good news—there are a whole bunch of models on sale right now (as is usually the case as of late), including an all-time low price for Apple's M2 MacBook Air. Yes, it's officially a last-gen product with the M3 roll out, but it's still a powerful and efficient...
Read more...
Several reviews of Humane's wearable Ai Pin are now live and, much to the dismay of Ken Kocienda, head of product engineering at Humane, they're collectively less than glowing. In response, Kocienda took to X (formerly Twitter) to address what he insinuated were a bunch of "hot takes," chalking up the negative...
Read more...
It's only taken Biostar a little over two years to launch an Intel Arc A750 graphics card, though depending on your perspective, it's a fashionably late entry into A750 territory—at this point in the game, Arc is far more mature than at launch, with Intel's driver team putting in a lot of work shoring up performance...
Read more...
A rather unusual looking motherboard is making the rounds after it was posted to X, formerly Twitter, which is turning heads because of its SO-DIMM memory slots. That's because it's a full-size ATX motherboard that should be flexing regular DIMM slots instead of their truncated SO-DIMM cousin, which is typically...
Read more...
Corsair is currently offering some chunky discounts on its Vengeance desktop gaming PCs, with several well-equipped models discounted by hundreds of dollars. Most of the models on sale pair Intel 14th Gen CPU hardware with NVIDIA's latest-generation GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, with options ranging from a GeForce RTX...
Read more...
Ubisoft has tapped Intel to be its exclusive CPU launch partner for its upcoming Star Wars Outlaws game that is due to release this summer. From a marketing standpoint, that means the two entities have been "hard at work behind the scenes" to make sure gamers will get the best experience on Intel's processors, though...
Read more...
Intel's next generation Arc Battlemage GPU architecture remains on the roadmap and may even show up in just a handful of months—in time for this year's holiday shopping season, if murmurs coming out of the Embedded World 2024 conference are any indication. The unofficial goal is to launch Battlemage "before Black...
Read more...
Acer today is introducing a handful of new and upgraded gaming laptops sporting the latest generation CPU hardware from AMD and Intel, all of which come paired with discrete graphics from NVIDIA's mobile GeForce RTX 40 series. There are four main laptop lines in all, which notably includes all-new 14-inch models...
Read more...
The US government recently tightened its restrictions on chip exports in an effort to make it more difficult for China to access artificial hardware and services, all in the interest of national security. However, the restrictions could prove "insignificant" in the short term, and even worse, could actually boost...
Read more...
It doesn't matter if your gaming platform of choice is a PC or a dedicated console. Either way, storage matters, as games are not exactly shrinking in size. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to upgrade the storage on your PC or console, and especially the PlayStation 5 when it comes to the latter, which lets you install...
Read more...
For a long time, the two main reasons to skip over OLED were prohibitively high prices and the risk of permanent image retention, otherwise known as burn-in. Over the past several years, however, TV makers and their retail partners have made strides to address both concerns—yes, the risk of burn-in still exists, but...
Read more...
Who doesn't like a free performance uplift? That's one of the ideas behind upscaling technologies, which render games at a lower, less demanding resolution and then upscales them. Intel's Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) is one such solution, and an upcoming version 1.3 update promises to boost performance even further...
Read more...
Before I even get started discussing the specs of Razer's upgraded Blade 18 gaming laptop, I implore everyone to clench their fingers and offer a fist-bump to Razer for helping to keep big and bad notebooks in style. Now take that same fist and punch your wallet or purse so it can get used to the pummeling that will...
Read more...
Contrary to what some may think, hackers can have scruples and, in some cases, honorable intentions—it's kind of the whole idea behind white hat hacking and events like Pwn2Own. But then there are the kind who wouldn't think twice about breaching a cancer center and swipe personal details of hundreds of thousands of...
Read more...
Is there anything worse than piecing together your PC build, pressing the power button, and then...nothing happens? Well yes, there are a myriad of things worse than a non-booting PC. But it's still highly frustrating, and also potentially stressful, especially if the root cause isn't immediately obvious. It's also...
Read more...
It's been over 60 years since The Jetsons introduced us to Rosey the Robot, a mechanical and artificially intelligent housekeeper on wheels. Now several decades later, full-fledged robot maids are still not a thing, but that could change if Apple decides that in-home robots are the "next big thing" that it's seeking...
Read more...
For a long while, gaming displays were mostly barren of OLED panels, but that's beginning to change. While still not as pervasive as LCD, we're seeing OLED announcements with some frequency these days, the latest of which comes from ViewSonic—its first OLED gaming monitor, the XG272-2K-OLED, just made its debut and is...
Read more...
As of right now, the fastest PCI Express protocol available on consumer motherboards is PCI Express 5.0, which offers up to 128GB/s of bi-directional x16 bandwidth. While certainly fast, PCI Express 7.0 blows the bandwidth roof off the building with a huge 4X increase to 512GB/s, with PCI-SIG releasing a full draft of...
Read more...
Not all processor launches are accompanied by tons of fanfare. The latest example of this is the addition of four Ryzen 7000 series mobile chip additions to AMD's product stack, none of which garnered a press release, blog post, or announcement of any kind. And interestingly, it really amounts to two new models, with...
Read more...
Artificial intelligence chatbots are coming to all the things, it seems, and evidently that includes your Xbox game console. While nothing has been announced, Microsoft revealed that it is indeed in the process of testing an AI chatbot for Xbox game consoles, with the focus so far on supporting gamers in a number of...
Read more...
Today is a day to be skeptical of everyone and everything (except HotHardware, of course!). It's also one of the most challenging days for technology journalists, as navigating legitimate news from April Fools' Day gags can sometimes be rather tricky. That said, we've rounded up some excellent gaming monitor bargains...
Read more...
