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If I had to buy an off-the-shelf PC, what would it be?

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 13, 2011January 13, 20111990s, acer, amd, apple, compaq, dell, hp, IBM, lenovo, Packard Bell, toshiba

I got a question today. A someone who knows someone who knows someone kind of thing. Basically, wanting to know what to buy if, you know, they wanted to buy a computer rather than build something.

They’d had bad experience will Dell, so Dell wasn’t on their list. I did not argue.

Here’s an edited version of my response.
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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.

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The SSD Decoder Ring

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 12, 2011July 14, 2017cheatsheet, jmicron, kmart, ocz, podcast, thumb drive, XT

I occasionally get a question about an SSD, usually when one goes on sale somewhere. Inevitably, I’ll get an e-mail message with a URL and the words “any good?” with it. Often I’ll know off the top of my head, but depending on whose name is on the drive, I may not.

But here’s a cheatsheet with all the major drives on the market, and who makes the controller in them. http://www.pcper.com/ssd
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Dave Farquhar

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How to make HP and Compaq computers boot off USB

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 9, 2011March 13, 2021compaq, hp, toshiba, usb device, USB flash drive

Booting off USB is easy. You go into the BIOS, find the option that says USB boot, enable it, and then go into the boot order, select USB, and move it to the top. Well, not if you have an HP or a Compaq, you don’t. How do you make HP and Compaq computers boot off USB?

I’ll tell you.

Dave Farquhar

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Ways to speed up an aging laptop

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Software, Windows January 8, 2011December 19, 2015antivirus, bitdefender, ccleaner, firefox, intel, lifehacker, malware, McAfee, Microsoft Security Essentials, optimizing windows, samsung, symantec, visual effects, Western Digital

Yesterday Lifehacker did a feature on laptop tweaks and upgrades, that basically came down to reinstalling the OS, adding memory, and upgrading to an SSD. All of those are good things to do of course, but there’s more you can do. I posted a response there; I’ll elaborate a bit here, where I have more room to do so.

There are tons of links here to previous content I’ve written; optimizing aging machines is a recurring theme for me. I’ve been writing on that topic for 11 years now.

Dave Farquhar

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What the 2011 CES may mean

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 7, 2011adobe creative suite, amd, CES, intel, netbooks, nvidia, ocz, pcie, windows 8, windows nt, x86

This week was CES, where companies make a big splash and try to show what’s going to happen in the consumer electronics space in the coming year.

In the coverage of CES, I saw three things that seem interesting, but only one of those three was a surprise.
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Dave Farquhar

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Who made that power supply?

Dave Farquhar Hardware December 31, 2010April 16, 2017antec, apple, corsair, IBM, micro atx, seasonic

I found a cross-reference for power supply brands and OEM manufacturers. It’s a couple of years old, but still useful.

Way back when, I knew that Sparkle Power actually made PC Power & Cooling Silencer power supplies. Since Sparkle units were cheaper, I bought those, and got good, reliable power from them for years until they were obsolete. That information is obsolete now too; Sparkle was bought out by FSP many years ago.

This chart tells you a whole lot more than that. And it validates that my current practice of buying Seasonic power supplies whenever possible is probably good, since Seasonic is the actual maker for several premium brands of power supplies today.

Dave Farquhar

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A free SSD alignment tool

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Windows December 29, 2010April 29, 2017command prompt, ISO, MBR, ocz, Parted Magic, raid array, vista, windows 7, windows 9x, Windows XP

We’ve talked recently about the importance of aligning your partitions on your SSD or your RAID array. What if I told you you could align an SSD or RAID array for free? Here’s where to find a free SSD alignment tool–it’s just not normally billed as such.

Alignment helps performance, sometimes tremendously, and it also dramatically improves your SSD’s life expectancy. Newer versions of Windows automatically align their partitions, but only if you do a clean installation to an empty drive. Older versions of Windows created their partitions starting at sector 63, for tradition’s sake. Maybe moving off sector 63 made dual-booting with Windows 9x harder.

Two readers, Jim and Xrocode, suggested utilities to do the job. One costs $30 and seems fairly automatic. One is free and requires a small amount of work. Grab the freebie here. It’s a 274 MB download, so it doesn’t even take all that long.

Dave Farquhar

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Thrift-store PCs

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Saving money December 22, 2010October 11, 20191990s, capacitors, dell, estate sales, garage sale, garage sales, IBM, lionel, memory slots, micro atx, recycling, usb port, Windows XP

In the comments of a recent post I did, reader Glaurung Quena brought up a good topic: secondhand PCs, acquired cheaply, strictly as rebuild fodder.

I like the idea, of course, because I’ve been doing it for years. In the 1990s I built a lot of 486s and Pentiums into former IBM PC/ATs, basically until all the board makers relocated the memory slots into a position that wasn’t clear on the original PC/AT due to a beam that supported its drive bays. And of course the adoption of ATX and MicroATX killed that, at least for a while.

But now ATX has been around as long as the old AT architecture had been when ATX came along, and efforts to replace ATX haven’t been successful. So that trick makes more sense again. Buy a secondhand machine cheaply, intending to re-use the case, and regard anything else inside that happens to be reusable strictly as a bonus. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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The 15-second rule and other (non) myths

Dave Farquhar Hardware December 21, 2010October 17, 20171980s, commodore, IBM, power button, random data, video memory

Cnet investigated some computer wise tales, myths, conventional wisdom, or whatever else you want to call it. The one I take the most issue with is the 15-second rule. They asked Geek Squad, and, as a long, long-ago Best Buy employee, the answer they gave to the 15-second rule is, well, what I would expect. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Upgrading an HP Mini 110 with an Intel X25-V SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware December 19, 2010December 22, 2015firefox, hp, intel, netbooks, ocz, toshiba, Windows XP

I installed an Intel X25-V in an HP Mini 110 and found it to be an inexpensive way to hotrod an aging netbook. Any drive in my current SSD Roundup will work even better today. It’s an inexpensive way to hotrod an aging netbook. Any drive available today will be considerably larger than the stock 16 GB SSD, and also considerably faster. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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