My last major PC upgrade was back in 2018 when I went from AMD socket AM3+ to AM4 as detailed in this article, AMD Ryzen 2600X – An Essential Gaming Upgrade. During the intervening years, I’ve upgraded to the following: I’ve also taken advantage of storage availability by adding a 500GB NVMe drive into a PCIe card and moved the WD 500GB M.2 SATA drive into the second M.2 slot… Source ..read more

(A supplement for “Upgrading Your Computer) Random Access Memory (RAM) is the physical memory of your system. It is super-fast and helps your PC run smoothly. To give you an example of its speed, NVMe SSDs can achieve up to 7,000 MB/s (sequential) while DDR4 RAM can run up to 44,000 MB/s. Not having enough RAM will make your PC feel sluggish. Having more RAM than you require is wasted RAM. Source ..read more

(A Supplement to Upgrading Your Computer) Maybe the biggest room for improvement when trying to increase the speed of your PC is to upgrade your Hard Disk Drive (HDD) with an equal-sized or larger Solid State Drive (SSD). The process is very easy when upgrading desktops and most laptops. Some Laptops and All-In-One computers can require removing the back of the computer. Source ..read more

I wrote before about my Uncle’s old laptop. It powers on with lights showing on the wireless and CAPS lock keys. But it’s not booting up. Nothing on the screen. I tried all the troubleshooting tips found online with no success. Those include: My Uncle at this point decided to buy another computer so this one became mine. I’m where old tech comes in its final moments. ? I either get it… Source ..read more

I have no idea if this is a local (Australian) thing or a worldwide trend, but I am seeing refurbished older PCs running Windows 11 advertised at very reasonable prices. Now, here’s the problem: many of these refurbished machines are fitted with CPUs that do not meet Windows 11’s requirements, 6th generation Intel CPUs, and older. Furthermore, because of the age of these machines… Source ..read more

As a kid I used to think that everything in Australia was upside down – and then I came to live in Argentina and discovered that not only is everything upside down, but it’s back to front. For reasons that would be far too complicated to explain, used cars are now more expensive than new ones. In fact, the second-hand market is booming, not only because of import restrictions but also the need to... Source ..read more

Macrium Reflect is great backup software. So great that when they discontinued the free version in 2022 I decided to buy the paid version. Currently, the only free Macrium Reflect is the 30-day trial. I’ve had no problems with Macrium Reflect. However, I’ve had problems for a few months with disconnecting the hard drive where I save the backups. The problem was that this caused significant delays... Source ..read more

I came across this odd trackball mouse that I’ve used on and off over time. I started clicking around with all the buttons to see what they would do. That’s when I discovered this auto-scrolling thing. That is you click on the page and the page starts scrolling up or down on its own. This is using a “Fellowes Micro Trac Handheld Trackball – 99924” but will work with any mouse. It’s oval in shape... Source ..read more

For those of us who use a Windows laptop, one of our concerns is the battery. A laptop’s lithium-ion battery performance degrades over time and will not hold a charge for as long as it did when it was new. Getting good information on the state of the battery is important. But clicking on the battery system icon in the Window Taskbar only shows us the percentage of charge. Going into the Settings... Source ..read more

I was called by a guy who had problems printing a document. He was trying to print a document but the printer selection box was completely blank. It would give me a message about installing a printer first but when I clicked on the “Find Printer” button it couldn’t find anything. I went to “Settings” then “Devices” and clicked on “Printers and scanners” on the left side but the page kept crashing. Source ..read more