When you can buy something at a low price in one location, and sell it at a higher price somewhere else, you’re engaged in what economists call “arbitrage”. We’re not sure if desoldering DDR5 chips from laptop SO-DIMMs to populate a custom PCB to create much-more-expensive desktop memory counts as arbitrage, but it certainly counts […]
It’s fair to say that there are many people in our community who just love to dunk on Microsoft Windows. It’s an easy win, after all, the dominant player in the PC operating system market has a long history of dunking on free software, and let’s face it, today’s Windows doesn’t offer a good experience. […]
DDR3 seemed plenty fast when it first showed up 19 years ago. Who could say no to 6400 Mb/s transfer speeds? Of course compared to the modern DDR5 that’s glacially slow, but given that RAM is worth its weight in gold these days– with even DDR4 spiking in price– some people, like [Gheeotine], are asking […]
Self-hosting a few services on one’s own hardware is a great way to wrest some control over your online presence while learning a lot about computers, software, and networking. A common entry point is using an old computer or Raspberry Pi to get something like a small NAS, DNS-level adblocker, or home automation service online, […]
Whenever you buy used computers there is a risk that they come with unpleasant surprises that are not of the insect variant. From Apple hardware that is iCloud-locked with the original owner MIA to PCs that have BIOS passwords, some of these are more severe than others. In the case of BIOS passwords, these tend […]
These days, bootstrapping a computer is a pretty straight forward process, at least as far as the user is concerned. But in the olden days, one would have to manually flick switches entering binary code to get the computer to boot. While certainly not as painstaking as manually flipping bits, these games written for UEFI […]
[Codeolences] tells us about the FORBIDDEN Soviet Computer That Defied Binary Logic. The Setun, the world’s first ternary computer, was developed at Moscow State University in 1958. Its troubled and short-lived history is covered in the video. The machine itself uses “trits” (ternary digits) instead of “bits” (binary digits). When your digits have three discrete […]
Despite faster CPUs, RAM and storage, today’s Windows experience doesn’t feel noticeably different from back in the 2000s when XP and later Windows 7 ruled the roost. To quantify this feeling, [TrigrZolt] decided to run a series of benchmarks on a range of Windows versions. Covering Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, 10 and 11, the Pro […]
There are all kinds of fun, glowing PC cases on the market these days. However, if you want something that focuses on serviceability over flash while still looking stylish, you might like the Makeyo MK01. It’s a PC case that you can print yourself, and [Marst_art] has published a video on what it’s like to […]