Got that, but just wondered if the offer has gone live yet from MS or not until nearer the end of support date? And, as mentioned, how you activate it.
Yeah, price to performance when it comes to miniaturisation is what it is, unfortunately. Believe me, I also own a gaming handheld, a high end one that costs £750 for performance at 1200p that basically matches an XBox Series S, a console that costs less than half the price but takes up double the space on my desk. (Per my earlier Cyberpunk reference, this handheld runs it at 60fps using equivalent settings to a Series S running the game in performance mode, though with higher pedestrian density as the CPU is a bit beefier) Exponentially less powerful than my laptop of course, but that's to be expected, since it fits in my handbag at a third of the size, meaning no space for a dedicated GPU or the cooling necessary for such. (The new handhelds coming this year are absolutely WILD with external clip-on GPUs that weigh as much again as the handheld itself and are a similar experience to plugging the old SEGA Game Gear TV tuner into one of those back in the day). Purely for gaming at home? Sure. But if I need to be on the go and need a high end system for that work, I may as well make it my gaming system and save another couple of grand on a dedicated gaming desktop. Good thing mine has 2x DP and 1xHDMI outputs then.
You might not be able to yet. The prompts are getting rolled out to users gradually. It should appear soon. Edit: Sorry, I've just noticed other people have answered your question.
After figuring out how to get out of local user and switch to my Windows account sign in, the option to subscribe isn’t shown on the Update page (yet). Hopefully it will go live soon.
It's a phased rollout, like many large services use. They roll it out in batches so as not to have a situation like the Half Life 2 launch where 2 million people were simultaneously trying to play it day one, overloading the Steam servers with more concurrent users than they were yet built to handle 20 years ago, resulting in the super fun experience I remember that day of having to wait in 45 minute queues any time I tried to fire up a single player game (I bet getting Offline Mode for Steam up and running reliably became a pretty swift priority for a team at Valve after that day). Rolling it out in phases means you can manage a smooth transition to everyone having it, which is kind of important when it's something 600 million people are likely to want to sign up for.
Got that! I managed to get logged on to the PC with my MS account, though couldn’t quite fathom why it insists you create a PIN when you have a perfectly good password, but the option to extend still not shown on the Windows Update page. I suspect next time the “Support for Windows 10 is ending…” screen pops up that might enable it. Also interesting thought last night, I have got £30 credit lurking on my MS/XBox Live store account so wondering if that can be used to pay the subscription.
Should do, I've been able to split it in the past between XBox and PC-based stuff like Onedrive, Live Gold, etc .
In my current PC there is still my first SSD from 2010 with SATA2. There is also an old SSD with SATA3 and a couple of HBM Gen3 and 4. And you know, I don’t feel any difference except in benchmarks. The speed of launching games is more or less the same on all storage devices.
You absolutely notice the difference when it comes to the kind of heavy usage I have for large writes and retreival. And a SATA SSD absolutely cannot match up remotely to NVMe, though absolutely, most games have only recently caught up to being optimised to stream vast amounts of data over modern PCIe interfaces, so there's not much difference there beyond them obviously being unable to run at all over older interfaces, like that time Digital Foundry installed Rift Apart on a custom system using the hard drive from the PS4 to predictably calamitous results.
If you compare HDD to SSD is a huge gap in performance. From SSD to NVMe is the step noticeable but not like the same from HDD to SSD. From HDD to NVMe is a bigger step and if you have in mind to change choose for NVMe above SSD... The price difference SSD/NVMe is not that big anymore.
I have two NVMe SSDs in my computer. Third and fourth generation, in addition to the old SATA SSDs that I'm trying to wear out to death out of sporting interest. Compared the download speed of Snowrunner I installed it on a SATA SSD and on an NVM - no visible difference in loading speed.
A better comparison if you are using install times as your metric, is to use a GOG offline installer for a sizeable game like CP77 and compare the time it takes to install to different drives (obviously ensuring that you are not installing from one with lower read speeds).
That's what I'm talking about. The speed potential of an SSD at home, especially in games, is extremely difficult to realize.
