By Thomas McDonald
The first words of this column, written almost 10 years ago, were the undeniably childish (albeit accurate) “I hate Myst.” Myst was an anti-game, a desiccated husk of an imaginary world peppered with puzzles that only grew in tedium the further you traveled.

By Tom R. Halfhill
If two processor cores are better than one, can we evaluate multicore chips simply by counting cores? Unfortunately, we can’t.

By Will Smith
This year, Maximum PC reviewed 420 products. That’s a lot of reviews.

We’re selling two kick-ass Maximum PC-built and -blessed PCs on eBay to raise money for the Red Cross and the Salvation Army.

By Logan Decker
It’s not just a codec anymore. Maximum PC shows you how to make the most of new features in the new Divx Media file format!

Back when the entertainment industry was still trying to figure out what this em-pee-three business was all about, the Divx video compression codec was already becoming a de facto standard for “sharing” video on the Internet, and it remains popular today, despite challenges from freeware codecs like Xvid and OGG Video, as well as Microsoft’s Windows Media 9.

Don’t let the “bloatware” boogeyman scare you away. Even though the Nero 7 Ultra Edition suite now comes with no fewer than 18 applications, you’ll never even see the ones you don’t want or need.

When a USB key just won’t cut it, it’s time to bust out a handheld 40-gigger like the ABSmini.