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Motherboard sales are sharply declining as AI demand drives shortages and price hikes for memory, storage, CPUs, and other PC components. "Because of this, users who don't have deep pockets are putting off upgrading their PCs and holding on to their current devices longer," reports Tom's Hardware. From the report: Asus, which sold 15 million motherboards in 2025, has only shipped a little more than 5 million in the first half of 2026. It's expected that the company will have to push hard for it to even move 10 million units by the end of the year, marking a 33% decrease in sales year-on-year. Gigabyte and MSI sold 11.5 million and 11 million motherboards last year, respectively. However, both companies have revised their internal forecasts for 2026 to 9 million (Gigabyte) and 8.4 million (MSI), a 22% drop for the former and a 24% contraction for the latter. ASRock will be hardest hit by the situation, with the company's shipments projected to fall by 37%, from 4.3 million in 2025 to just 2.7 million by the end of the year. This marks a contraction of 28% for the overall motherboard market, at least for the big four manufacturers. [...] Aside from this, AMD continues to use the AM5 socket for its latest processors, while Intel's Nova Lake, which will reportedly use LGA 1954, isn't available until later this year. The situation is further compounded by Nvidia not releasing a refreshed RTX 50 Super series this year, while rumors claim that the RTX 60 series will not debut until 2028. This confluence of factors is discouraging PC builders from upgrading their current systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are a number of car parks that remain at risk

A vehicle fire is causing delays for drivers on the A132 Rettendon turnpike overpass near Chelmsford.

Anne Hathaway has long been praised for her classic beauty, but now fans are accusing her of having a little extra help in the aesthetics department.

Happy World Password Day! Maybe it's finally time to kill this holiday in favor of World No-More-Passwords Day?

Just days after the feuding parties reached a settlement in Lively's two-year-long battle against her It Ends With Us co-star, the actress is still pursuing him for legal fees and damages.

Back in the dim and distant, when I was a young industrial correspondent, my old sparring partner Ron Todd, then leader of the TGWU, used to tell a story about what he was up against.

An unidentified tourist from Seattle, 37, was caught throwing a large rock at a monk seal off the coast of Maui on Tuesday.

One morning in my mid-forties, I woke up and realised something fundamental in my body had changed. I hadn't been attracted to anyone in a long time.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has officially traded the podium for the pacifier, giving birth to her second child, according to posts on her social media.

Seeing the look of confusion pass over my five-year-old son's face was heartbreaking. 'Mummy, why don't you want to play with me?' he asked. Noah didn't understand.

I recently started dating a new guy a few months ago and things have been going great. I really like him, and all his friends… except one.

Drivers have lost thousands of pounds in the scam that sees criminals stick fake QR codes over legitimate parking payment signs.

One of the things that keeps me awake at night is - ironically - something I used to take to help me sleep.

Michael Owen was joined by his children Gemma and James as he attended his second day at The Boodles Festival at Chester Races on Thursday.

A weekly training programme is helping staff at Woodend Farm School in Witham support the children who need them most.

Customers say services were down for at least 4 hours, while status page showed no issues

Sweeping changes in force since Tuesday mean Lidl loyalty scheme members now collect points rather than reward coupons.

by George Whittaker

Linus Torvalds has officially released Linux kernel 7.1-rc2, the second release candidate in the Linux 7.1 development cycle. While Torvalds described the update as a “fairly normal” RC release, the kernel includes a broad collection of driver fixes, subsystem cleanups, and stability improvements that continue shaping the next major Linux kernel release.

Although still an early testing version intended mainly for developers and enthusiasts, Linux 7.1-rc2 already delivers several notable fixes—especially for graphics hardware, networking, and gaming devices like the Steam Deck OLED.

A Strange-Looking Release—But for a Good Reason

One of the first things Torvalds mentioned in the release announcement was the unusually large patch statistics. At first glance, the release appears much larger than expected, but there’s an explanation behind the inflated numbers.

Much of the activity comes from a large cleanup effort in the KVM selftests subsystem, where developers renamed variables and types to better match Linux kernel coding conventions. Because thousands of lines were renamed rather than fundamentally rewritten, the patch count looks dramatic even though the underlying functional changes are relatively modest.

Torvalds specifically advised testers not to overreact to the “big and strange” diff statistics.

Graphics and Driver Fixes Take Center Stage

As is common during early release candidates, a large portion of the work in Linux 7.1-rc2 focuses on hardware drivers. GPU and networking drivers account for a significant share of the meaningful fixes in this release.

Notable improvements include:

• Additional fixes for AMD GPU support
• Intel Xe graphics driver adjustments and tuning
• Networking stability improvements
• Filesystem fixes, including NTFS driver updates
• Memory leak patches and race-condition corrections

These kinds of updates are critical during the RC phase because they help stabilize hardware compatibility before the final release reaches mainstream distributions.

Steam Deck OLED Audio Finally Gets Fixed

One of the more interesting fixes in Linux 7.1-rc2 addresses a long-standing issue affecting the Steam Deck OLED. According to reports, audio support for Valve’s handheld had been broken in the mainline Linux kernel for nearly two years, forcing Valve and some handheld-focused distributions to carry their own downstream patches and workarounds.

With Linux 7.1-rc2, an upstream fix for the audio issue has finally landed, potentially simplifying support for Linux gaming handhelds moving forward.

For Linux gamers and portable gaming enthusiasts, this is one of the more practical improvements included in the release candidate.

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I don’t really follow who does what locally, but today I voted to keep Reform out of Colchester.