Been contemplating upgrading my old custom tower with a NVMe drive for awhile now, but always put it on the back burner. Finally bit the bullet, after loading certain apps seemed slower than usual. The system already had a Samsung EVO SATA SSD, so it's not a dinosaur in terms of speed, reaching 500 Mbps read. I thought this process would be fairly simple: clone drive, enable boot if necessary in bios, but I hit a roadblock right away. The drive wouldn't show up in the bios as a bootable ...

This repair was fairly straight-forward, the cable had been pulled and damaged the hdmi port. The connector was skewed and a couple pins were bent and exposed within the connector. Luckily after disassembly, the traces on the motherboard were intact and almost pristine. I decided to go with the least aggressive method using low melt. The port popped off fairly quickly. I cleaned the low melt and old solder, and added new leaded solder. Tacked a few pins of the new connector and followed...

If you're in the market for a new laptop, here are some specs to keep in mind. I always advise clients to aim for mid to high-end laptops, so that you will not need to upgrade for awhile and have a better overall experience. Processor (CPU) Intel Core i7-12800H AMD Ryzen 7 5800H Intel is the top of the line, running fast and staying cool. The Core i7 has hyper-threading so it's that much faster. AMD is competitive as far as casual users are concerned. There are i9 and Ryzen 9 processors als...

The new Windows OS, Windows 10, is already in Preview stage and is only a matter of time before its release. You can download the technical preview at Microsoft. There are some notable changes that i think will help reluctant users transition over. The biggest problem that users were complaining about was the new Start screen, referred to as the Metro UI, that replaced the traditional start menu. The revised start menu is a perfect combination of the old start menu and the new Start screen. Also...

Pop-ups can originate from several different sources - an installed program, virus, operating system, bundled software, websites. In general,  i am going to refer to pop-ups as any kind of window that opens without user interaction. Non-malicious pop-ups can any of the sources described. For websites, the pop-ups are usually ads for the site or to prompt you to look at something or sign-up for a newsletter or mailing group. Although these ads are annoying, generally they don't pose a threat t...

Many average users think computers do not require any maintenance in the physical world, but they do. In reality, it only requires a small amount of maintenance and just common sense. Below is a photo of a laptop I recently looked at, notice the large dust/lint ball that was lodged between the fan and the vents. Keep your case clean. The number one enemy of computers is heat. The parts are designed to withstand only so much heat. At high heat, the parts can only last half of what they co...