This blog won’t have any how-to documentation. I don’t even know for sure if everything I think I know about my new AMDGPU software setup is actually correct, and I certainly don’t know that I am doing anything in any...
Read the post →My plan was to write a single follow-up blog about upgrading my monitor, GPU, and processor. I made it most of the way through writing that post when I noticed that I was already over 3,000 words. I hadn’t even...
Read the post →I’ll tell you about everything I’ve learned so far, but let’s start with what you really want to know. Should you upgrade your Ryzen 1600 in your first-generation AM4 motherboard to a Ryzen 5700X? No. I am pretty sure that...
Read the post →This is hugely unexciting. I replaced my Nvidia GTX 970 with a lower end GPU that was launched two years ago. Isn’t that boring?
Read the post →I have been avoiding a monitor upgrade for as long as I could. I have been running a pair of QNIX QX2710 monitors at my desk for nearly a decade. These have served me well, and were a tremendous value....
Read the post →I probably wouldn’t have given this much thought if I didn’t have a stick of RAM fail on me last year. I don’t know that I can remember another time when a stick of RAM that passed a long Memtest86+...
Read the post →Do you want the easy answer? No! You almost definitely do not need the fastest NVMe available. Most of us probably won’t even notice the difference between the slowest and the fastest NVMe drives.
Read the post →I’ve been doing my best to post quality deals over at Butter, What?!, and several of those deals have been extremely cheap USB flash drives and microSD cards made by Silicon Power. After posting those deals, I noticed that a...
Read the post →In the past, I hadn’t given much thought to the quality of my USB cables. As long as they can pass data and charge my phone overnight, that was all I needed. That changed when I acquired my Chuwi Hi12...
Read the post →I’m getting impatient. I want to upgrade to a newer, bigger, 4k monitor, but there aren’t any available that interest me. I wouldn’t mind having a slightly higher pixel density than my 27” WQHD monitors, and more pixels and screen...
Read the post →I woke up last week, sat down at my computer, and one of my QNIX QX2710 monitors wouldn’t wake up. It was yet another in a series of small, unlucky happenings that have been occurring here for the last month...
Read the post →I don’t enjoy writing step-by-step guides. This will definitely not be that sort of guide, but this post should contain everything you need to get your QNIX QX2710 monitor running at 96 or 120 Hz under Linux with any relatively...
Read the post →I have been wanting to remove the bezels from my QNIX QX2710 monitors since they arrived at my door last year. I became even more interested when my dual-monitor mount arrived, because a piece of the base of the QX2710...
Read the post →I’ve been thinking about buying a new video card for a long time. I probably started seriously considering it the day my 1440p QNIX QX2710 monitors arrived. My old Nvidia GTX 460 card was fast enough to run most games...
Read the post →I didn’t really need to upgrade my solid-state drive. The Crucial M4 is a fast and reliable drive, and even at only 120 GB, I still had plenty of free space. We had another machine that needed a replacement drive,...
Read the post →Update: I’ve had this battery for over 18 months now, and it is still running like a champ.
Read the post →There’s a lot of speculation regarding Apple’s reasoning for using a 64-bit ARM processor in the iPhone 5s. Aside from the obvious fact that the 64-bit processor will allow Apple to include more RAM in future devices, there are all...
Read the post →Update: I got a bill from FedEx today for $37.20 to cover the customs fees. The invoice has no account number, so apparently I can’t pay it on their website. I sure wish they told me that before I spent...
Read the post →I recently built a new Linux workstation to replace my laptop, and that got me thinking that it was probably about time to upgrade Chris’s laptop as well. I did put an SSD in her very old Dell Inspiron 6400...
Read the post →I had one bad stick of DDR3-1333 among the parts I recently used to build my new Linux workstation. That bad stick of RAM had me running many, many passes of MemTest86. I was surprised to see that MemTest86 was...
Read the post →I just had the displeasure of ordering four SATA hard drives. They’re going to find a home in a 1U server that I’m planning to purchase in the next couple of weeks. I ordered the hard drives early because I...
Read the post →I’ve been playing quite a bit of Killing Floor the last few weeks on my aging HP DV8T laptop. The other night, I noticed that the frame rate was just horrible on a couple of maps. I adjusted all the...
Read the post →One of my friends recently upgraded his desktop computer, and he very nearly dragged me along with him. I was very close to joining him with a similar upgrade, but the performance increase just wasn’t going to be big enough....
Read the post →Back in June I decided that we should put an SSD in Chris’ laptop (a.k.a. my old laptop). I ended up buying a new solid state for myself and moving my Intel X25-M into her laptop.
Read the post →I created a problem for myself late last year. I drove almost nine hundred miles and left my laptop’s power supply at home. It seemed like I had three choices.
Read the post →Nearly every piece of hardware in my laptop has worked fine, more or less, with Linux since I bought it early in 2010. There is only one minor bug that I am aware of, and it has been a minor...
Read the post →My Intel 80 GB X25-M G2 in my laptop died recently. Everything was running smoothly when I shut down, but when I powered back up the BIOS couldn't see the drive any longer. Fortunately, I keep pretty good backups, and...
Read the post →I've been fairly unhappy with the battery life of my G1. With the stock 1150mAh battery, I am lucky to get 12 hours out of it most of the time. I was once able to use 49% of my battery...
Read the post →Update: I very much doubt that anyone should be using this anymore. The discard mount option has been working properly for years. In fact, you probably should use hdparm to manually TRIM your drive. You should be using fstrim. It...
Read the post →I updated the firmware on my X25-M today. It was a completely pain-free procedure. Just burn a CD, boot from the CD, say yes a few times, and reboot.
Read the post →There seem to be plenty of X25 performance benchmarks all over the Internet. Performance may have been one of the major reasons I upgraded my laptop to an X25, but it most certainly wasn't the only one.
Read the post →I thought it would be a good idea to run some quick benchmarks on my old mechanical drive before I wipe it and use it in another laptop. I have some pseudo-scientific charts and numbers here, but I also have...
Read the post →My shiny new 80 GB second-generation Intel X25-M has arrived. So far I am very happy with it, and it is very fast. I don't have many real numbers yet, just a couple of bonnie++ benchmarks:
Read the post →The BIOS in my Dell Inspiron 6400 does not allow me to set the ICH7 SATA controller to AHCI mode. I grabbed a fresh copy of the Linux 2.6.31 kernel source and applied this AHCI quirks patch to it. I...
Read the post →
