Hardware

HP Compaq 6910p upgrades

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , ,
HP Compaq 6910p upgrades

I spent some time exploring HP Compaq 6910p upgrades because used HP Compaq 6910p laptops are dirt cheap these days. I picked one up for $75 as an alternative to a Black Friday cheapie.

If you look for one yourself, either look for one with a valid Windows 7 or Windows 10 license on it, or get one at a deep enough discount to make it worth your while.

Here’s what I did to turn an outmoded laptop from 2008 into something better than what I could have bought on Black Friday.

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SSD Roundup: December 2015

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I’ve been reviewing a lot of old content lately, and noticing that I recommended specific SSDs quite a bit in the past, and unfortunately, that information had a finite lifespan even though the rest of the advice might very well still be good. So I’m consolidating my SSD advice.

At this page, I present 10 SSDs that are selling well right now, with the most relevant stats (price, capacity, links, and worst-case performance) and anything else I might want to add about the particular drive. As the market changes, I’ll update the page, and post an update here in the blog.

What can you expect? Well, Samsung has some high-performance stuff out there right now; Sandisk and Kingston are fighting a battle for budget and upgrade dollars, and Crucial is delivering a lot of drives in between Sandisk and Samsung in both price and performance.

Even though SSDs don’t get the kind of attention they used to get, today’s drives perform better (even if ever so slightly better) than yesterday’s while delivering better value, and those are both good things.

Once again, here’s the link to this month’s roundup.

When will SSDs be cheaper than hard drives?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,
When will SSDs be cheaper than hard drives?

When will SSDs be cheaper than hard drives? Based on history, it’s possible to make an educated guess, and I’m going to do it.

Back in 2011, I noticed that historical hard drive pricing fell in line pretty nicely with Moore’s Law, and predicted that SSDs would do the same. I predicted that SSDs would reach 25 cents per gigabyte sometime in 2016, and was wrong. They hit that price in 2015. So I was late by a few months.

But I’m still willing to try to predict when SSDs will cost less than hard drives. I’ll predict when they’ll hit parity too. SSDs work differently from hard drives but their pricing trend is frighteningly similar.

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Here’s a better laptop than the typical Black Friday specials

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Saving money , , ,

If you want a better laptop than the typical Black Friday special, I found just the thing: this Dell Latitude E6420 laptop from Newegg, for $225 (the price is good through Sunday, Nov. 22). It has several things going for it: it comes with Windows 7 Professional, so you can upgrade to Windows 10 when you want and you’ll get the better, more-feature-filled, easier-to-secure Professional version; you can upgrade the memory to 8 GB of RAM, and it comes with a 128GB SATA SSD, so you can drop in a bigger, faster SSD at a later date.

Note: When Newegg sells out of these, which happens occasionally, they’re fairly easy to find on Ebay, though some come with conventional hard drives rather than SSDs.

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Lenovo and Best Buy team up for a $149 laptop for 2015

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cheap laptops are nothing new this time of year–they’ve been practically a holiday tradition since 2002 when Sotec released a decent laptop for $900, which was jaw-droppingly low for the time–but this year, Best Buy is selling a Lenovo Ideapad 100s for $149.99, which, while not jaw-droppingly low given the number of $199 laptops that were available last year, is still the cheapest name-brand laptop I’ve seen. Note: Best Buy has since raised the price to $199, but Ebay has limited stock of the same item for $129.

I’ve seen some reviews, but there is one thing I haven’t seen anyone bring up yet: This is a netbook in every way, except I think we’re supposed to call them cloudbooks now. So keep that in mind. The machine is probably worth $149.99, but it made some compromises to reach that price point.

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‘PC Does What?’ seems doomed to fail

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

A coalition of Dell, HP, Intel, Lenovo, and Microsoft are trying to figure out how to reverse the downward trend of PC sales, and what they came up with was a marketing campaign called “PC Does What?”

The problem is it’s not 1995 anymore, and it’s going to take more than a marketing campaign to change that.

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You might need a new router

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Servers and Networking , , , , , ,

Do you need a new router? If your Internet is slow after upgrading to a faster service, and if your wifi range and reception is poor, or your Internet connection just generally misbehaves a lot, you might need a new router.

Even the New York Times, of all places, has published articles extolling the virtues of new routers. If your wi-fi at home is bad, they say, think about picking up a TP-Link Archer C7 router. I like the Asus RT-AC66U myself,  but in my experience, and the experience of my colleagues, a new router makes a huge difference.

When one longtime friend upgraded to a TP-Link Archer, he told me his wi-fi improved so much his wired network was suddenly struggling to keep up with it. That’s fixable. He’s a candidate for Gigabit Ethernet.

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Having trouble installing Windows 7 from USB? Disable USB 3.0.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

I had trouble installing Windows 7 from USB on an Asrock Q1900M motherboard. It was the most difficult time I’ve had in years. Creating a bootable USB stick from my Win7 DVD went flawlessly, and the Asrock booted off it just fine by hitting F11 to pull up the boot menu, but then Windows prompted me for a driver, and when I navigated to the drivers directory that Asrock provided, none of the drivers would load. The mouse didn’t work either, and the only reason the keyboard worked was because I still use PS/2 keyboards.

The solution was to go into the UEFI, dive into the USB configuration, and disable USB 3.0. After I did that, Windows could see the USB drive and other USB devices just fine. This issue is likely to get more common as time goes on.

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CD won’t rip? Try a different drive.

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Music, War Stories , ,

A few weeks ago I uncovered a stash of CDs from my college and early bachelor days that, for one reason or another, I’d never ripped to MP3 format.

When I started ripping the discs, I got one clue as to why I never ripped some of them: Some of them made the DVD drive in my Dell laptop sound like a Commodore 1541. If you ever owned a Commodore, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t ever owned a Commodore, let’s just say my drive groaned in protest very loudly, and in exchange for putting up with the noise and insanely long rip times, I received a bunch of errors and a few MP3s that played really poorly.

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How to boot a Toshiba Satellite from USB

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,
How to boot a Toshiba Satellite from USB

Recently I needed to boot a Toshiba Satellite from USB (specifically an L505D-S5983). It didn’t automatically boot from a USB thumb drive when I plugged it in. That is often the case with name-brand PCs I’ve seen. You either have to pull up the boot menu or change the boot settings.

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