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The tradeoffs between AMD’s Phenom and FX CPUs

Dave Farquhar Hardware August 26, 2012April 15, 2018amd, intel, math coprocessor, Micro Center, phenom

Micro Center is dangling some dirt, dirt cheap AMD CPUs these days, which has me thinking. I have a couple of pokey machines hanging around that I don’t use very much, so what if I modernized one of them?

The current-generation FX processors are cheap, but previous-generation Phenom CPUs are even cheaper. What to do?
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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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SSDs are below $1 per gigabyte

Dave Farquhar Hardware June 24, 2012July 15, 2017intel, kingston, ocz, samsung

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting easier and easier to find SSDs priced at or below $1 per gigabyte. You’ll generally have to buy at least 120 GB of storage to hit that price point, but at this point in time, that’s about the smallest drive I would consider anyway.
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Dave Farquhar

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The Samsung SSD 830: A user review

Dave Farquhar Hardware May 26, 2012April 2, 2025dell, Dell Inspiron, firefox, intel, kingston, nvidia, ocz, ramdisk, samsung, toshiba

I didn’t need much convincing to purchase a Samsung 830 SSD; I was in the market for a bigger SSD, and my short list consisted of Samsung and Intel drives. So when I found a good price on a 128 GB Samsung 830, I bought two.

The laptops I put the drives in aren’t able to fully take advantage of what the 830 brings to the table, but it’s still a worthwhile upgrade. I thought that two months ago when I installed them, and two months of living with them hasn’t changed my mind. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Intel enters the budget Sandforce market

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 16, 2012data compression, intel, ocz, ramdisk

Intel announced a new low-end SSD today, the 330, based on a Sandforce 2281 controller. The popular 120 GB capacity will retail for $149. While not as cheap as OCZ’s entry-level SSDs, it’s within striking distance. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Remember Plextor? Now they’re making SSDs.

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 9, 2012April 3, 20251990s, anandtech, apple, intel, kingston, kodak, marvell, micron, ocz, plextor, samsung, Taiyo Yuden, toshiba

Those of you who’ve been around as long as I have–which is probably most of you–will remember Plextor as the maker of the very best SCSI CD-ROM drives back when there was a market for SCSI CD-ROM drives. I had one, and I haven’t used it in years, but I relied on it, especially when I was doing A/V work. And it never, ever let me down. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Speeding up an Acer Aspire One 722

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 8, 2012April 17, 2017acer, amd, American League, cable tv, dell, intel, Kansas City, kansas city royals, pcie, Western Digital, windows 7

I gave my out-of-box impression of the Acer Aspire One 722 last week. It’s completely unacceptable out of the box, and adequate when you do some basic cleanup on it.

Now I’ve installed an Intel SSD in one and clean-installed Windows, and I’m much more impressed with it. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Acer Aspire One 722 review

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 6, 2012November 22, 2016acer, amd, antivirus, intel, McAfee, Microsoft Security Essentials, netbooks, windows 7

I set up an Acer Aspire One 722 netbook this week. This is my Acer Aspire One 722 review. I imagine the return rates on these things is horrendous, because the out-of-box experience is pathetic.

This one won’t be going back though. Tune it up, and it’s an adequate performer. It’s still a netbook–all that talk of the AMD C-50 and C-60 chips delivering Celeron-like performance was just rumor–but it can match an Atom’s CPU performance and delivers better graphics performance than Intel. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Another questionable SSD bargain

Dave Farquhar Hardware March 29, 2012April 2, 2025amiga, amiga os, BSOD, intel, Micro Center, ocz, samsung

There’s a deal floating around on 90 GB OCZ Agility 3 drives for $80. But I’m not inclined to bite, for two reasons. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Umm, no, that’s not Commodore, and that’s not an Amiga

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing March 23, 20121950s, 1980s, amiga, amiga os, apple, commodore, commodore vic 20, IBM, intel, jack tramiel, kenmore, macintosh, sears, whirlpool

Some stories floating around are suggesting that Commodore is still around, and they just released a new, overpriced Amiga.

Well, there’s a company slapping “Commodore” and “Amiga” labels on PC cases that look kind of like Apple Mac Mini cases and stuffing off-the-shelf components in them, but they’re Commodore Amigas in name only. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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The old days of viruses

Dave Farquhar security, Viruses March 8, 2012March 26, 2025antivirus, CIO, CISM, cissp, computer security, firewall, intel, John Dominik, journalism, Love Letter, malware, Missouri, public internet, spam, symantec, university of missouri, VBS

Blogging pioneer John Dominik, inspired by my Michelangelo memories, wrote about his memories of viruses later in the decade. So now I’ll take inspiration of him and share my memories of some of those viruses. I searched my archives, and at the time it was going on, I didn’t write a lot. I was tired and angry, as you can tell from the terse posts I did write.

Dave Farquhar

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