Newsletter Archives

• Desktop computers: Scrap, repair, upgrade, or replace?

  Posted on June 6, 2022 at 02:42 CDT by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  ---

  HARDWARE

  

  By Ben Myers

  Here is a practical guide to care for a computer and to help you decide what to do with one that is not brand-new.

  Computers show up on my doorstep, their owners asking whether their trusty and beloved box full of circuit boards needs to be scrapped, repaired, upgraded, or replaced. The desktop computer category includes PCs that are neither laptops nor servers, two very different projects indeed.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.23.0, 2022-06-06).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, hardware, Hardware Upgrades, Repairs

• Solid-state drives — from bespoke to commodity

  Posted on May 23, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  HARDWARE

  

  By Ben Myers

  Solid-state drives (SSDs) have a surprisingly long history, leading up to the types commonly in use today.

  It takes some planning and analysis to make best use of them, but significant improvements in speed and reliability over electromechanical hard drives make SSD investments worthwhile.

  For this article, let’s stick with name brands such as Crucial, SK hynix, Kioxia, Samsung, SanDisk, and Western Digital — all with comparable performance levels. Note that SK hynix acquired Intel’s SSD business, SanDisk is now a subsidiary of Western Digital, and Kioxia is a spinoff of Toshiba.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.21.0, 2022-05-23).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware Adapters, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, hardware, Solid-state drives, SSDs

• Making connections between computers and monitors

  Posted on April 18, 2022 at 02:45 CDT by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.16 • 2022-04-18

  HARDWARE

  

  By Ben Myers

  With four different standards for video ports and cables, as well as some “mini” ports, it can be downright confusing to come up with the right cables to connect your computer to a monitor.

  In the best of all possible worlds, we would all want to buy a computer and a monitor at the same time, ensuring that they connect to one another and work well together with the right cabling. In our real world, a computer meets an untimely demise and an upscale monitor is still exactly what we need. Or maybe the monitor fails to light up, it becomes too dim, you punch out the screen in anger, or it is simply time for a larger monitor. Possibly you want to attach a monitor to your laptop, duplicating the laptop screen on a larger viewing area or using dual screens to see more information.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.16.0, 2022-04-18).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, DisplayPort, Displays, DVI, hardware, HDMI, Standards, Thunderbolt, VGA

• BitLocker and the dead: The story of a successful transplant

  Posted on March 21, 2022 at 02:42 CDT by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  HARDWARE

  

  By Ben Myers

  The CPU is the heart of a laptop, but we do the brain transplants here. BWA! HA! HA! HA!

  Recently, a long-time client who had moved several towns away called me in a panic. A two-year-old Lenovo Yoga laptop had failed.

  When I got my hands on the computer, I surmised that the probable cause was the third-party charger, which had blown out a circuit inside the laptop when the charger itself had failed. The charger did not function when plugged into another laptop, confirming my suspicions.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.12.0, 2022-03-21).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Bitlocker, hardware, Repairs, SSD

• Our world is not very S.M.A.R.T. about SSDs

  Posted on February 7, 2022 at 02:45 CST by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  ISSUE 19.06 • 2022-02-07

  HARDWARE

  

  By Ben Myers

  With solid-state drives (SSDs), the SMART ante is raised because an SSD can fail catastrophically — CLUNK! — without warning and with no possibility of recovering data.

  In my recent article “Hard drives — still pretty S.M.A.R.T.” (AskWoody, 2021-12-27), I was hardly overwhelmed by the treatment of the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data kept on traditional spinning hard drives by Microsoft Windows and the rest of the industry. But at least, if your computer started to hiccup, you could almost always look at the SMART data to find a possible cause.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 19.06.0 (2022-02-07).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 19.06.F (2022-02-07).

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, hardware, SMART, SSDs

• ‘Fake’ HDMI 2.1: The standard that isn’t

  Posted on January 24, 2022 at 02:43 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  If you’re interested in buying new monitors for your business or home that support the latest HDMI 2.1 standard — such as many displays that were demonstrated at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) earlier this month — you may be surprised to learn that HDMI 2.1–certified monitors may not necessarily support the enhanced features that have been heavily promoted.

  The shocking truth is that the HDMI Licensing Administrator (HDMI LA) — an organization in San Jose, California, that has authority over the trademarked term HDMI — is certifying as “HDMI LA compliant” monitors that support as few as one of the at least seven new features that HDMI 2.1 offers over 2.0.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 19.04.0 (2022-01-24).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, hardware, HDMI, Public Defender, Standards

• Special Edition: Building Opal

  Posted on January 3, 2022 at 02:45 CST by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  ISSUE 19.01 • 2022-01-03

  EDITORIAL

  

  By Will Fastie

  Our writers have the week off.

  The AskWoody newsletters are published 48 times per year, leaving four Mondays on which we would have no issue. Last year we tried an experiment on one of those off Mondays, reprinting a few articles that we thought you would like to see in one place.

  That experiment went well; your feedback was positive. We ended up doing it twice last year and now we’re doing it again.

  This time, we’re bringing you the four published articles about Opal, my new Windows 11 PC DIY build. That is complemented with a brief new piece in which I describe my lack of progress.

  We hope you like it!

  Read the full AskWoody Plus Newsletter 19.01.0 (2022-01-03).
  Read the full AskWoody Free Newsletter 19.01.F (2022-01-03).

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, DIY, hardware

• Opal: The Update

  Posted on January 3, 2022 at 02:44 CST by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  HARDWARE DIY

  

  By Will Fastie

  It hasn’t gone as smoothly as I had hoped.

  Maybe I’ve just been lucky. Maybe I’m getting older and slower. Or dumber. Whatever it is, I’ve run into some problems getting Opal up and running.

  I’ve done the basic configuration steps and I’ve installed Windows 10 Pro. The computer is running fine. The UEFI BIOS sees all the hardware and I think I’ve done the RAID 1 configuration correctly. So what’s the problem?

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 19.01.0 (2022-01-03).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 19.01.F (2022-01-03).

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, ASUS, DIY, hardware, Motherboards

• Hard drives – still pretty S.M.A.R.T.

  Posted on December 27, 2021 at 02:44 CST by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  HARDWARE

  

  By Ben Myers

  In my last article, Breaking and entering with Linux: What you see (AskWoody 2021-09-27), I said that there were issues with the S.M.A.R.T. system built into the firmware of both old-time spinning hard drives and solid-state drives (SSDs).

  S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, hereinafter referred to simply as “SMART”) provides real-time recordkeeping about the health of your hard drive. It is all about system reliability, of which drives are a major element and a significant point of failure.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.50.0 (2021-12-27).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hard-disk health, hardware, HDD diagnostics, SMART

• Most corporate PCs can’t install Windows 11, study says

  Posted on November 1, 2021 at 02:45 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  ISSUE 18.42 • 2021-11-01

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Microsoft has issued many, shall we say, evolving requirements for Windows 11 — confusing people about which devices actually qualify — but now a study of 30 million machines worldwide reveals the answer: at least 55% of PCs used by businesses don’t meet Win11’s upgrade requirements.

  Surprisingly, the incompatibility is not due mainly to Microsoft’s insistence that version 2 of a motherboard-based device called a Trusted Platform Module be installed and enabled before a machine can upgrade to Win11.

  Instead, more than 55% of PCs lack a new-enough CPU to meet the requirements, according to Esben Dochy, technical product evangelist for Lansweeper, the Belgium-based tech-management firm that conducted the study.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.42.0 (2021-11-01).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 18.42.F (2021-11-01).

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, hardware, Public Defender, Windows 11

• What’s a NAS, and do I need one?

  Posted on October 25, 2021 at 02:45 CDT by Richard Hay • Comment in the Forums

  ISSUE 18.41 • 2021-10-25

  HARDWARE

  

  By Richard Hay

  If I were writing this to a group of aviators in the United States Navy, they would immediately respond by saying a NAS is a Naval Air Station. However, this article is not about a location where planes and helicopters take off and land.

  For this article, NAS stands for network-attached storage.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.41.0 (2021-10-25).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 18.41.F (2021-10-25).

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, hardware, Network, storage

• Opal: Physical assembly – the case

  Posted on October 25, 2021 at 02:43 CDT by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  HARDWARE DIY

  

  By Will Fastie

  Obviously, everything ends up going into the case.

  Last week, I discussed the assembly steps necessary to prepare Opal’s new motherboard. That process included installing the processor, the cooler’s mount, the RAM, and the SSD. Now it’s time to talk about getting the motherboard into the case, along with all the other components that make up the system.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.41.0 (2021-10-25).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware AskWoody Plus Newsletter, DIY, hardware, Motherboards
• « Older Entries

  Newer Entries »