Author: Dave Farquhar

What is a network interface card? What is a NIC? It’s a term you may not hear as much anymore as you once did. But a network interface card is the computer component that lets you plug it into an Ethernet network or connect to a wireless network to get LAN and/or Internet access.

Network interface cards can come with anywhere from one to four ports. One port is the most common. Multi-port cards allow you to bond more than one port together for greater speed. Or you can use them for failover, or to dedicate a port to a specific virtual machine in virtual environments.

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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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There are some questions you really don’t want to answer, because there’s no way you’re going to answer it without making enemies. I heard one of those questions the other day. Between a Dell or HP laptop: Which is better?

HP and Dell are two of the most popular computer brands, and both have endured. Both entered the business in the 1980s and survived the brutal 1990s, which was an achievement. There were several good companies that failed to survive the 90s or emerged from the 90s mortally wounded. Both companies did something right to make it this far.

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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

dfarq.homeip.net

If you want to start an argument, asking how to clean a circuit board is a good way to do it. At the risk of becoming the Internet’s hottest new place to argue, let’s talk about how to go about cleaning one.

Some people get obsessive about how their circuit boards look. While there’s something to the saying that if a board looks good, it works good, the main thing is keeping contaminants off the electrical contacts and preventing dust from causing heat buildup. Unless you have your computer in a translucent case, there’s no need to be overly concerned about how the board looks.

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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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