David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Officially, the maximum memory in the Dell Latitude E6420 laptop is 8 GB. That is the maximum stated Dell’s website, and the large memory vendors state the same thing. It’s hard for them to guarantee compatibility when the OEM states the maximum is 8 GB. Unofficially, numerous people, including yours truly, have upgraded them to 16 GB. Here’s how to install 16 GB in a Dell Latitude E6420 successfully.
PDF, or portable document format, is a somewhat problematic but very useful file format, especially for people who conduct a lot of historical research. But the problem with having megabytes or gigabytes of historical data on your computer is finding the information you are looking for. Here’s how to make PDFs searchable in Windows, because by default they are not.
The IBM 4863 matched the industrial design of the PCjr, but was functionally very similar. And it wasn’t really priced any lower than it counterpart for the IBM PC. It’s retail price was $680, and the RGB cable to connect it to a PCjr was an additional $20.
I was restoring an old Micron Clientpro 766Xi when I ran into a corrupt BIOS password, so I couldn’t do much with the system. Micron used a slightly modified Intel AL440LX motherboard in these systems. So here’s how to clear a CMOS password on an Intel AL440LX. Other P2-era Intel boards will be similar.
The Intel AL440LX has a jumper at the front of the board. Unlike some other systems, you have to change the position of the jumper and turn the power on.
The Marx Sinclair tanker was a refresh of the earlier and more common Marx 553 Middle States Oil tanker, a design that originated way back in 1935. The Sinclair tanker made the old design book newer, and perhaps more relevant for its era. It came in two major variants, one much easier to find than the other. It dates to 1956 and 1957.
Creating an IMG file of a DOS disk from individual files isn’t something you have to do often, but when you do, it’s a bit of a hassle. But it’s doable. Here’s how to write files to an img file in Windows, which you can then read with a Gotek floppy emulator running Flashfloppy.
There has been a recent spate of malvertising targeting popular downloads. These paid advertisements masquerade as legitimate download links for popular software packages. The files they serve up look legitimate, but they include software that you don’t want. Using a package manager is one way to avoid this problem. Chocolatey is the name of a good package manager for Windows. It sidesteps malvertising and solves other system maintenance problems for you too.
In February 2023, the Los Angeles Dodgers announced they were going to retire Fernando Valenzuela’s uniform number 34. Unofficially, the number has been retired since 1990, because they never issued it to anyone else. But they never made it official, because he wasn’t in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Here is why Fernando Valenzuela isn’t in the Hall of Fame.
In 1974, Marx introduced a diesel freight train set it called The Mohawk, catalog #41850, that ran on AC electric power and sold through catalog retailers. If you have a Marx 41850 train set today, it’s worth considerably more than its original retail price, even adjusted for inflation.
Marx’s Mohawk train set was part of the Great American Railroads series. It had catalog number 41850 and was manufactured only in 1974. Today it is one of the most valuable Marx train sets ever made.
When we think of Atari versus Commodore, the Commodore 64 generally comes to mind. But there is an argument that the Commodore VIC-20 did as much damage to Atari as the Commodore 64 did, and possibly more. Let’s compare and contrast the Atari 400 vs Commodore VIC-20, which is a classic case of winning the battle but losing the war.