Ampere Computing, known for its Altra (Max) and upcoming AmpereOne families of AArch64 server processors tailored for data centers, has released a guide for enthusiasts on running Steam for Linux on these ARM64 processors. This includes using Steam Play (Proton) to play Windows games on these Linux-powered servers. Over the summer, Ampere Computing introduced a GitHub repository detailing the process of running Steam for Linux on their AArch64 platforms, including Steam Play/Proton. While the guide is primarily designed for Ampere Altra/Altra Max and AmpereOne hardware, it can be adapted for other 64-bit Arm platforms. However, a powerful processor is essential to appreciate the gaming experience truly. Additionally, for the 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics to function optimally, an Ampere workstation system is more suitable than a headless server.

The guide recommends the Ampere Altra Developer platform paired with an NVIDIA RTX A6000 series graphics card, which supports AArch64 proprietary drivers. The guide uses Box86 and Box64 to run Steam x86 binaries and other x86/x86-64 games for emulation. While there are other options like FEX-Emu and Hangover to enhance the Linux binary experience on AArch64, Box86/Box64 is the preferred choice for gaming on Ampere workstations, as indicated by its mention in Ampere Computing's Once the AArch64 Linux graphics drivers are accelerated and Box86/Box64 emulation is set up, users can install Steam for Linux. By activating Proton within Steam, it becomes feasible to play Windows-exclusive x86/x86-64 games on Ampere AArch64 workstations or server processors. However, the guide doesn't provide insights into the performance of such a configuration.

IBASE Technology Inc., a world leading manufacturer of digital signage media players, has launched a new compact fanless, outdoor signage player for three HDMI displays and designed with Intel Atom x6000/Celeron processors (formerly Elkhart Lake). Built for smart retail and drive-thru applications, not only does it provide eye-catching retail experience but also help increase foot traffic that leads to higher revenue. Like all other IBASE digital signage players, the latest SE-103-N boasts advanced functions including iSMART/iControl energy-saving and Observer remote monitoring technologies with power on/off scheduling and power recovery functions.

Measuring 260 mm x 181 mm x 25 mm, the compact SE-103-N comes with industrial-grade components and specifications, allowing it to operate reliably under harsh conditions with temperatures from -20°C to 70°C. Aside from an integrated TPM (2.0), it supports EDID (extended display identification data) that prevents screen convergence issues, display status monitoring and HDMI-CEC for display on/off control through HDMI ports. Standard features include 2x DDR4-3200 slot with the max. 32 GB capacity, 1x 2.5 GbE LAN, 1x M.2 E-Key for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth modules or capture cards, 1x M.2 B-key (3052) for 5G/LTE module, 1x UIM/SIM card slot and 3x USB ports.

NVIDIA's $40 billion takeover of Arm Holdings plc from SoftBank, got a shot in the arm, as three major licensees of the IP came out in support of the bid. These include Broadcom, MediaTek, and Marvell Technology Group. This development is key for NVIDIA to fight the perception built up by a rival faction, that the democratized nature of the Arm IP would get lost if a chipmaker like NVIDIA owns it. This rival faction is primarily led by Qualcomm.

It's interesting to note the individual backers of the NVIDIA takeover. There is nothing but love between Broadcom and Qualcomm, especially after the former's failed bid to acquire the latter. MediaTek is a major smartphone and IoT SoC maker, dominating the low-cost and mainstream smartphone segments. Marvell is big in datacenter and storage IP. Each of the three are results of huge IP consolidation over the past decade.

The idea of working and learning from home, which at one point felt temporary, has for many of us started to feel more permanent. Even as some people in cities around the world return to work and schools in person, many others have found themselves reorganizing homes to create makeshift offices and classrooms. Whether your commute is across the house or across town, the PC continues to play an integral role in keeping all of us connected to our work, school, and lives - and each person in the household needs one.

As we continue to expand our Surface family of devices with the new Surface Laptop Go and updates to Surface Pro X, our goal is to design a Surface for every person, work style and location. To give every person in your household or organization a laptop that's not just something you need to use, but something you want to use. A virtual office you want to be in, a virtual classroom that engages you to learn, a place you can play your favorite game or watch a movie - with a bright vibrant screen, a fluid and comfortable keyboard, high quality cameras and mics, and the versatility of touch screens.

Microsoft has announced that they will be pushing x64 app support on their Windows 10 on Arm operating system. This is part of a move by Microsoft to mainstream adoption of their OS (and related services) on Arm-based platforms, ensuring that the company has a foothold in that market - especially as competition between Arm and x86-x64 architectures increases further and reaches more and more areas. Whereas before, Arm was relegated to low-power, relatively low performance designs, recent years have seen Arm's design performance (and philosophy) looking for higher performance use-cases both in the consumer and server/supercomputing spaces. One needs not look further than NVIDIA's plans to acquire Arm to see how much stock is being placed in Arm's future,

The x64 application support for Windows 10 on Arm will first be enabled for Windows Insiders come November, and will support all Windows 10 on Arm system released in the last couple of years, no matter the processor. This support works through emulation, though, so it remains to be seen exactly how well - and at what performance - these applications run. Microsoft has already improved tools and SDKs for application porting efforts to its Windows 10 on Arm ecosystem, and the company will be releasing custom-tailored versions of the Edge Browser, Microsoft Teams, and Visual Studio that play on the platform's strengths. Interesting times lie ahead of us - and if NVIDIA is able to go through with its Arm acquisition (which is a long way from being a guarantee), we might be looking at NVIDIA-branded laptops that run Windows 10 on Arm alongside branded Arm CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.

Ubisoft released the PC system requirements lists of its upcoming open-world cyberpunk game, Watch Dogs: Legion. When it releases on October 29, 2020, "Legion" will be among the first to feature new NVIDIA technologies such as DLSS 8K, letting you take advantage of GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs to play the game at 8K. It also features support for NVIDIA RTX real-time raytracing, and DLSS 2.0 performance-enhancing image quality features. Other PC-specific technical features include an uncapped frame-rate, support for various ultra-widescreen display aspect-ratios, a selection of in-game graphics settings, and an internal benchmark that also tests NVIDIA RTX performance.

With raytracing off, Watch Dogs: Legion doesn't call for particularly exotic hardware. A 1080p "High" preset experience can be had with a sub-$150 processor such as the Ryzen 5 1600, GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB or Radeon RX 480 8 GB graphics; 8 GB of dual-channel main memory, and 45 GB of storage. 4K UHD without raytracing takes something like a Core i7-9700K or Ryzen 7 3700X processor, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti or Radeon VII graphics, 16 GB of dual-channel memory, and 65 GB of storage (45 GB base + 20 GB HD textures pack). For 1080p gameplay with raytracing, you'll need at least an RTX 2070 graphics card, and modern mid-range chips such as the i5-9600K or R5 3600. Want to truly max out the game with 4K + raytracing? Get ready with at least an i7-9700K or R7 3700X, and an RTX 2080 Ti.The complete system requirements lists follow.

Apple is planning to launch its own high-performance processors designed for Macs at the 2020 WWDC, held in the week of 22 June, 2020. This would be the the first step among many toward the replacement of Intel processors and the x86 machine architecture from the Apple Mac ecosystem, in the same fashion as the company replaced PowerPC with x86 last decade. Apple has codenamed the process of graduating to the new machine architecture "Kalamata," and besides detailing the new processor and its architecture, the company could announce a large-scale developer support initiative to help Mac software vendors to transition to the new architecture in time for the first Macs with the new processors to roll out in 2021.

A Bloomberg report on the new processors states that the chips will be based on the "same technology" as the company's A-series SoCs for iOS devices, meaning that Apple will leverage the Arm machine architecture, and has probably developed a high performance CPU core that can match Intel's x64 cores in IPC and efficiency. Macs based on the new processors, will however run MacOS and not iOS, which means much of the clean-break transition woes between PPC and x86 Macs are bound to return, but probably better managed by software vendors. It also remains to be seen how Apple handles graphics. The company could scale up the Metal-optimized iGPU found in its A-series SoCs on its new Mac processor, while also giving them the platform I/O capability to support discrete graphics from companies such as AMD.

Intel has today released the 43rd edition of its x86/x64 ISA developer manual designed to help developers see what's new in x86 world and make software optimizations for Intel's platform. In the latest edition of the manual, Intel has revealed the details of its low-power x86 "Tremont" architecture designed for 10 nm efficient, low-power computing. Announced last year in October, Intel promised to deliver a big IPC increase compared to the previous generation low-power CPU microarchitecture like the Goldmont Plus family. To achieve extra performance, Intel has implemented a lot of new solutions.

For starters, Tremont boasts better branch prediction unit, with increased capacity for instruction queue and better path-based conditional and indirect prediction. The front-end fetch and decode pipeline have been updated as well. Now the design is a 6-wide Out of Order Execution (OoOE) pipeline which can process 6 instructions per cycle. The Data cache is now upgraded to 32 KB. The load and store execution pipelines are now doubled and they are capable of two loads and two stores, or one load and one store, depending on the application. Tremont also updates on one important point and that is a dedicated store data port for integer and vector integer/floating-point data. Another big improvement is happening in the cryptography department. Tremont now features Galois-field instructions labeled as the GFNI family of instructions. There are two AES units for faster AES encryption and decryption. The already implemented SHA-NI cryptography standard was enhanced and it now is much faster as well. For mode in-depth report please check out Intel's x86/x64 manual.

If you haven't updated your AMD Radeon drivers in a while, here's one major reason to. The company secretly patched four major security vulnerabilities affecting Radeon GPUs, in its recent Adrenalin 20.1.1 drivers, with no mention of doing so in its changelog. Talos Intelligence reports four vulnerabilities, which are are chronicled under CVE-2019-5124, CVE-2019-5146, CVE-2019-5147 and CVE-2019-5183. This class of attacks exploits a vulnerability in the AMD Radeon driver file ATIDXX64.dll, which can lead to denial of service or even remote code execution. What makes things much more serious is that this attack vector can be used to exploit the host machine from a VM (tested with VMWare). It even seems possible to trigger the vulnerability from a web page, through WebGL (which allows running 3D applications on a remote website). The vulnerabilities were tested on Radeon RX 550 / 550 Series VMware Workstation 15 (15.5.0 build-14665864) with Windows 10 x64 as guest VM, but there is no reason to assume that the issue is limited to just RX 550 as the AMD shader compiler shares a common code basis for all recent DirectX 12 GPUs.

All vulnerabilities rely on a common attack vector: specially crafted shader code that exploits bugs in the shader compiler. Even though HLSL shader code looks similar to assembly, it actually is a relatively high-level language that gets optimized and compiled by the graphics driver. VMWare's graphics acceleration lets you run 3D graphics in virtual machines, by passing along rendering info to the host GPU and then funneling the output back into the VM. Since the shader code gets compiled using the graphics driver of the host OS, this creates interesting opportunities for attacks.

The "Zen 2" based Ryzen 4000-series mobile processors and Threadripper 3990X HEDT chip dominated headlines throughout AMD's CES 2020 event, but an important product announcement slipped past us: the mobile Athlon 3000 Gold and 3000 Silver families of entry-level mobile SoCs. These are 15-Watt SoCs targeting low-cost ultraportables, convertibles, and straight up Windows x64 tablets, competing against Intel's Pentium Gold 5000U "Whiskey Lake" and Pentium Silver "Gemini Lake Refresh" series. The family currently only consists of two SKUs, the Athlon Gold 3150U and Athlon Silver 3050U.

The two chips are based on the "Dali" silicon, and feature "Zen" CPU cores. The Athlon Gold 3150U features a 2-core/4-thread "Zen" CPU clocked at 2.40 GHz with 3.30 GHz boost. The Athlon Silver 3050U, on the other hand, is configured with a 2-core/2-thread CPU clocked at 2.30 GHz with 3.20 GHz boost. The CPUs on both models is configured with 4 MB of L3 cache, which takes their "total cache" (L2 + L3) figure up to 5 MB. The iGPU on the 3150U is a Radeon Vega 3 with 192 stream processors, clocked at 1.00 GHz. The one on the 3050U, is AMD's smallest, with just 2 compute units, working up to 128 stream processors, but the engine clock is set at 1.10 GHz.

According to the sources close to Neowin, Microsoft is expected to launch x86-64 (or x64 in short) emulation support for Windows on ARM (WoA) devices. Expected to arrive in Windows 10 21H1, or around 2020 for all the Windows Insiders, the new feature will enable a vast majority of apps made for Windows OS, currently built for x64 architecture, to run on ARM ISA and all Windows on ARM computers.

So far, only 32-bit x86 applications were able to be emulated, however, if these rumors are to be believed, many users of WoA devices should get a chance to run all of their favorite 64-bit software that was previously unavailable. The launch of this feature will boost the adoption of the WoA ecosystem with benefits reaching all existing laptop models, including Microsoft's newly launched Surface Pro X laptop that utilizes an ARM-based chip called SQ1 (customized Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx processor).

When reading through the Gen11 GT2 whitepaper by Intel, which describes their upcoming integrated graphics architecture, we may have found a groundbreaking piece of information that concerns the memory architecture of computers running 10 nm "Ice Lake" processors. The whitepaper mentions the chip to feature a 4x32-bit LPDDR4/DDR4 interface as opposed to the 2x64-bit LPDDR4/DDR4 interface of current-generation chips such as "Coffee Lake." This is strong evidence that Intel's new architecture will have unganged dual-channel memory controllers (2x 64-bit), as opposed to the monolithic 128-bit IMC found on current-generation chips.

An unganged dual-channel memory interface consists of two independent memory controllers, each handling a 64-bit wide memory channel. This approach lets the processor execute two operations in tandem, given the accesses go to distinct memory banks. On top of that it's now possible to read and write at the same time, something that's can't be done in 128-bit memory mode. From a processor's perspective DRAM is very slow, and what takes up most of the time (= latency), is opening the memory and preparing the read/write operation - the actual data transfer is fairly quick.

Yesterday, we covered how Ryzen's performance has seen a needed lift-up through an upcoming update to Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Performance improvements of up to 30% do wonders in bringing up the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 1800X's performance up to speed with its svelter gaming enemy, the 4-core, 8-thread i/ 7700K. And through a community update, AMD has now shed some light on the ongoing crusade for adapting an entire ecosystem to its Ryzen line of processors architecture features. Case in point: BIOS updates and game patches,

An AMD Ryzen 7-1800X powered machine was found to be crashing upon execution of a very specific set of FMA3 instructions by Flops version 2, a simple open-source CPU benchmark by Alexander "Mystical" Yee. An important point to note here is that this little known benchmark has been tailored by its developer to be highly specific to the CPU micro-architecture, with separate binaries for each major x64 architecture (eg: Bulldozer, Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Skylake, etc.), and as such the GitHub repository does not have a "Zen" specific binary.

Members of the HWBot forums found that Ryzen powered machines crash on running the Haswell-specific binary, at "Single-Precision - 128-bit FMA3 - Fused Multiply Add." The Haswell-specific binary (along with, we imagine, Skylake), adds support for the FMA3 instruction-set, which Ryzen supports, and which lends some importance to the discovery of this bug. What also makes this important is because a simple application, running at user privileges (i.e. lacking special super-user/admin privileges), has the ability to crash the machine. Such a code could even be executed through virtual machines, and poses a security issue, with implications for AMD's upcoming "Naples" enterprise processor launch.

If you are using a modded BIOS on your AMD Polaris card, and try to install AMD's excellent Crimson ReLive drivers, you might be in for a surprise. This is because AMD re-enabled their BIOS signature enforcement with these latest drivers. Basically, if you modded your card's BIOS in search of higher overclocking, more voltage or customized fan settings, the hash in your BIOS is no longer recognized by AMD the driver, since it differs from the factory values.

On detecting such a modded BIOS with an invalid checksum, the Crimson ReLive driver won't load, meaning that the system will run with the VGA fallback driver only, without 3D acceleration and Radeon Settings will not start. However, you can force your modded BIOS to load on Crimson ReLive if you're willing to jump through some hoops.

Synology today launched the new DiskStation DS2015xs and DS3615xs. Coming with built-in 10GbE SFP+ LAN ports, the 8-bay DS2015xs marks the advance of 10GbE solutions into small and medium-sized businesses. For large-scale businesses, the 12-bay DS3615xs offers the superior throughput and accuracy required for centralized data storage, management, and virtualization in distributed offices.

"Highly efficiency-minded companies are reaching beyond their limits every day, and their productivity simply should not be constrained by hardware infrastructure," said Michael Wang, product manager at Synology Inc. "We believe both SMBs and large businesses deserve storage solutions that can prepare them for a much more challenging - but rewarding - future, while carefully considering their different needs. That is how we designed DS2015xs and DS3615xs."

Powered by an all-new ARM Cortex-A15 quad-core CPU and a RAM module expandable to 8GB, DS2015xs delivers over 2,090 MB/s throughput at a cost little more than standard NAS storage for SMBs. Its two built-in 10GbE SFP+ ports as well as two 1GbE RJ-45 ports not only pave the way for businesses to transition to a 10GbE environment, but also provide support for Link Aggregation and failover. All these features, combined with the native SATA III 6Gb/s support, make DS2015xs capable of handling intensive multitasking with the kind of performance that used to be the privilege of costly enterprise-grade servers.

A little later this week, Unigine Corp. will be announcing two new GPU benchmark apps, the Valley 1.0, and Heaven 4.0. The two apps are cross-platform, in that they support both Windows and Linux (x86/x64). On Windows, the two can max out feature-sets of the latest DirectX 11.x APIs, while on Linux, the two take advantage of the latest OpenGL 4.x. Valley uses an entirely new test scene that's a beautiful springtime depiction of a valley. Distant snow-capped peaks, a treeline, and dense foliage, the scene's got it all, coupled with lighting, and depth of field effects. Definitely something we'd like our GPUs to trip on.

Moving on, Unigine's second benchmark suite for the season is Heaven 4.0, while builds on the current Heaven 3.0 benchmark. It adds SSDO (scene-space dimensional occlusion), improved lens flare, a rendered starscape at night time, GPU temperature and clock monitoring, improved multi-GPU detection, and various bug fixes. The two should be released some time around Thursday (14/02).

AMD today announced its collaboration with Microsoft Corp. for more than 125 Windows 8-based PC designs from leading OEMs including ASUS, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and more. With a hardware accelerated user interface, Microsoft and AMD have collaborated to design Windows 8 to unlock the high performance graphics capabilities found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs) and discrete AMD Radeon graphics processing units (GPUs) to deliver the best HD video, gaming and app experience consumers want with the always on, always connected, touch-driven interface with great battery life they need.

"There is a lot of exciting innovation happening in the marketplace today -- from the new Windows 8 graphics-accelerated user interface and apps, to ultraportable and sleek hardware designs -- and AMD's CPU, GPU and APU technology designed for Windows 8 helps enable a no-compromise solution," said Stefan Kinnestrand, director of Product Management, Windows Division at Microsoft.

For skeptics who refuse to believe randomly-sourced bar-graphs of the GeForce GTX 680 that are starved of pictures, here is the first set of benchmarks run by a third-party (neither NVIDIA nor one of its AIC partners). This [p]reviewer from HKEPC has pictures to back his benchmarks. The GeForce GTX 680 was pitted against a Radeon HD 7970, and a previous-generation GeForce GTX 580. The test-bed consisted of an extreme-cooled Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor (running at stock frequency), ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard, 8 GB (4x 2 GB) GeIL EVO 2 DDR3-2200 MHz quad-channel memory, Corsair AX1200W PSU, and Windows 7 x64.

Benchmarks included 3DMark 11 (performance preset), Battlefield 3, Batman: Arkham City, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Lost Planet 2, and Unigine Heaven (version not mentioned, could be 1). All tests were run at a constant resolution of 1920x1080, with 8x MSAA on some tests (mentioned in the graphs).More graphs follow.

Major Japanese OEM Mouse Computer announced a trio of high-end desktop PCs that are built specifically around Intel's SSD 520 solid-state drives, launched a little earlier this week. These include the MDV-ASG8310B-SSD, the MDV-ASG8250B, and the MDV-AGG9320S-SSD. The MDV-ASG8310B-SSD and MDV-ASG8250B are both driven by Intel Core i7-2700K processor, based on Intel Z68 motherboard, with 8 GB (2x 4 GB) memory; while the former features NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics, the latter has GeForce GTX 560. The MDV-AGG9320S-SSD is driven by six-core Intel Core i7-3930K processor, with 16 GB (4x 4 GB) memory, and GeForce GTX 570 graphics.

All three are built into the same chassis, featuring the same 23-inch full-HD display and peripherals. All three feature Intel's newly-launched SSD 520 solid-state drive with 120 GB capacity, the SSD is configured to hold the OS and program files, while all three further feature a slower 1 TB hard drive that handles documents and storage. DVD-RW, gigabit Ethernet, and Windows 7 Home Premium x64 make for the rest of the commonalities. The MDV-ASG8310B-SSD is priced at 99,750 JPY (US $1,300); the MDV-ASG8250B at 109,830 JPY ($1,432); and the MDV-AGG9320S-SSD at 159,600 JPY ($2,081).

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that its AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor family, based on the new "Bulldozer" architecture, was chosen as the winner of The Linley Group's first annual Analysts' Choice Awards. The awards recognize the top processor products of 2011 in several major categories including embedded, mobile, PC, server, design IP and related technology. To choose each winner, the Linley Group's team of technology analysts focused on merits of the leading products that began shipping between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011.

"Our analysts are deeply familiar with processor products and technology, having conducted extensive research in order to deliver the firm's popular publications and reports," said Linley Gwennap, founder and principal analyst at The Linley Group. "We chose the winners on the basis of their performance, power, features and cost as appropriate for their target applications."

In Japan, Epson does more than selling printing and imaging devices. It sells pre-built PCs. Its latest creation is the Endeavor Pro 750, a gaming PC based on Intel Sandy Bridge-E platform. The Endeavor Pro 750 is housed in an airy aluminum-built case. The case has two permanently-fixed handles on top, and its 3.5/2.5-inch drive bay stack can be access from the front-panel, to give it some hot-plugging capabilities. The front-panel also has two USB 3.0 ports next to audio I/O. It's the insides that are more interesting.

The Endeavor Pro 750 is driven by an Intel Core i7-3930K, though an i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor can be opted for, the CPU is cooled by a custom air-cooler. The processor sits on a custom OEM motherboard labelled Epson, but in all likelihood, it may have been built by any of the major motherboard ODMs, such as Foxconn. There are a variety of memory options, starting from 4 GB, all the way up to 32 GB, with DDR3-1600 MHz being the standard memory type. The base model ships with an AMD Radeon HD 6450 graphics card, but it can be configured all the way up to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580. Storage options, too, are configurable, with various HDD RAID and SSD (Intel 510 series) available.

Eurocom Corporation, the world's leading developer of highly personalized, high-performance notebook PCs and energy efficient All-in-Ones has been developing a dual CPU notebook solution for years. Eurocom technicians have been testing and verifying the systems performance and quality since the beginning of 2011 and now the system is ready for shipping.

The system is called the EUROCOM Phantom 4.0 and starts at $7999. The EUROCOM Phantom 4.0 can support up to two server class processors, 6 memory slots for 48 GB of RAM via 8 GB sticks, 6 storage drives with RAID 0/1/5/10/30. The Phantom 4.0 supports multiple operating systems (Microsoft Server 2003R2 x32 or x64, Server 2008R2 x64; VMware; Red Hat; LINUX; Solaris; Windows 7)and virtualization.

After giving its price-performance ratio a huge boost in late December, Dell introduced an even newer value variant of the Adamo ultra-slim ultra-portable notebook. The company's latest offer includes a 13.4-inch Adamo priced at US $799 ($100 less than the performance variant introduced last month), and driven by Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 (clocked at 1.40 GHz), and 2 GB of memory. The 13.4-inch screen offers 1366 x 768 pixels resolution, and the chipset embeds Intel GMA X4500 graphics. Storage is care of a 128 GB SSD. Connectivity includes WiFi and Bluetooth. Other features include a 1.3 megapixel webcam. Windows 7 Home Premium x64 comes preinstalled.

Yesterday an update to the popular antivirus suite AVG left many users computers unable to boot. After rebooting, as requested by the AVG updater, Windows crashes while trying to load certain AVG drivers. The error message reads "STOP: c0000135 The program cannot start because %hs is missing from your computer". Since the culprit drivers load even during safe mode there is no way to boot Windows. AVG recommends using the AVG rescue disc located here. After booting from the disc users should use midnight commander to rename their AVG folder, usually located at C:\program files (x86)\AVG, to any other name and then booting windows normally. However, any bootable flash drive or CD with an OS that can access NTFS file systems can be used to accomplish this task. I used a bootable Ubuntu flash drive.