The death of Intel Arc A770, millions of shredded HDDs, and back alley GPU deals.

Big tech is really on one this week. There's Microsoft potentially breaking things with Windows Kernel fixes while also plotting to dumb down the folder options in Windows 11. All while Intel is on a nice little spending spree in Germany and Israel, and Google does a swift u-turn over its .zip web domain plans.

Let's take solace in the fact there are yet more Steam Deck rivals moving into the market, so we can drown out the megacorps being megacorps with some lovely portable gaming.

Intel has officially confirmed to us it is only discontinuing the Intel branded Arc A770 LE card, and that it is "still producing silicon for AIBs."

The RX 6700 XT is still our favorite mid-range gaming GPU, competing with Nvidia's regularly more expensive RTX 3060 Ti. This is the cheapest version we've yet found and comes with a solid, dual-fan cooler and a decent price tag. Use promo code VGAEXCAA766 to get the final $20 off.

The Gigabyte G5 is our favorite affordable gaming laptop around right now, with the RTX 4060 powering some serious 1080p gaming performance in a budget package. It's a smart spec that combines an older CPU with the new Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics chip. The 512GB SSD is a bit miserly, but that is upgradeable, as is the 8GB of DDR4 memory. Those fixable drawbacks let you buy into an otherwise great gaming laptop for the money.

This DRAM-less drive may not offer the absolute fastest throughput, but it is close, and in terms of value for money, it's in a class of its own. 1TB for just $51 is worth picking up.

People are murdering innocent old hard drives. Millions of them, lost to the unfounded credence that churning them up actually protects data left on them from being recovered and stolen. Spoiler alert: It doesn't. So why are 90% of all retired datacenter HDDs still being shredded every year?

There's reportedly a bubbling back alley market for imported Nvidia graphics cards in China. These are sought after chips globally, since the rise of large language models like ChatGPT, but in China there's a different challenge. That's because the US banned Nvidia from exporting its most powerful AI accelerators last year.