hardware
Due to fallout from a recent computer catastrophe at work, I had the opportunity to salvage 2 GB of memory. I installed the memory in my work box, which brings it up to 4 gigabytes of RAM-- 4,096 megabytes in total. But that's not what I saw
hardware
I don't go out of my way to recommend building your own computer. I do it, but I'm an OCD-addled, pain-loving masochist. You're usually better off buying whatever cut-rate OEM box Dell is hawking at the moment, particularly now that Intel has finally abandoned
software development concepts
As I recently discovered, playback of high definition video is very demanding. You'll need a beefy PC to achieve the holy grail of maximum 1080p (1920x1080) resolution playback. Here are the minimum system requirements according to Cyberlink: * Very fast single core CPU (3.2+ GHz Pentium 4, 2.
hardware
I recently had a noisy fan failure in my ASUS Vento 3600 case. The particular fan that failed was the 80mm fan in the front panel, which is responsible for circulating air by the hard drives in the front of the case. I disconnected it while I considered my options.
hardware
There are two popular formulations of Moore's Law [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Formulations_of_Moore.27s_Law]: > The most popular formulation [of Moore's Law] is the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits every 18 months. At the
hardware
Intel's latest quad-core CPU, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, consists of 582 million transistors. That's a lot. But it pales in comparison to the 680 million transistors of nVidia's latest video card, the 8800 GTX. Here's a small chart of transistor counts
hardware
It's been over a year since I built my last PC, and all those killer Core 2 Duo benchmark and overclocking results were making me anxious. I just pulled the trigger on the following Core 2 Duo upgrade: * ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard, $195 * A-DATA 2GB DDR2 667 memory,
hardware
I noticed when I was burning the Vista RC1 DVD that .. 1. It took forever, eg, nearly an hour 2. My PC was very sluggish during the burn I began to suspect something was awry with the IDE controller that the DVD-R drive is connected to. I navigated to Device
hardware
Now that Vista Release Candidate 1 is available, it's time to start playing with it. I'm tired of using my current legacy operating system. Testing Vista probably means I'll probably be booting from an external hard drive. External drives have been available in Firewire
hardware
When the first version of Windows Media Center [http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/default.mspx] was released in summer 2003, I decided it was time to build my first home theater PC. After I placed it in the living room, I realized I had made a terrible mistake: I
hardware
With the release of Intel's Core Duo and Core Duo 2 chips, it's finally happened-- mainstream video card GPUs are about to overtake CPUs as the largest consumers of power inside your PC. Witness this chart, derived from XBit labs' latest roundup [http://www.xbitlabs.
hardware
One of our best servers at work was inherited from a previous engagement for x64 testing: it's a dual Opteron 250 with 8 gigabytes of RAM. Even after a year of service, those are still decent specs. And it has a nice upgrade path, too: the Tyan Thunder