Anyone who has ever bought a brand new car is very familiar with the phrase, "the moment you drive the car off the lot, it instantly loses 30% of its value". Is this true? For the most part, yes. And the auto industry will continue to do this as long as they can because they know people always need new cars. Electronics of just about any kind can lose...

The Secure Digital card, commonly abbreviated as SD (or SDSC, SDHC, SDHC, SDIO, microSD, etc.), is an old enough technology at this point where many of you have cards that are several years old. SD cards are used by a whole bunch of different devices, but the most common applications are in digital cameras/camcorders and mobile phones. Like with all memory...

Barbara writes: I’m running Win XP Professional with Office 2007, Windows Live Mail (version 2009, seems that’s the most current one) along with IE8. I have Cablevision as my provider for Internet/TV/phone services. Is there an open source (I take it that means "free", right?) fax program that’s easily installed/used with...

From the realm of the itty-bitty comes the ARTiGO A1150 from VIA. We’ve seen itty-bitty computers before, but the problem has always been that they’re so darned slow. Not this one. It does have a real-deal 1GHz 64-bit dual-core processor, can do HD video, has both VGA and HDMI, can support up to 4GB DDR3 RAM, has optional Wi-Fi and has 5 USB ports,...

One of the more annoying parts of putting a PC together is where to put an external USB hub. Many people use the smaller 4-port flavor, and of course whenever the cable connecting it in the back gets moved, it slides all over the place because it has barely any weight to it. Smaller 4-port hubs also have the very annoying habit of leaning because of cable...

There’s a fair amount of people (yours truly included) that don’t own a printer. My reason for not owning one is that since I print so infrequently, the ink would dry out resulting in wasted money. So how do you print when you don’t own a printer? Use someone else’s. Here are 5 ways to do that. 1. Print from work Lots of people do this,...

While assuming is never a good thing (how often have you heard "Assume makes an ass-out-of-u-and-me"?), there are certain things I can safely assume the PCMech audience knows without having to overly explain it. For example, if I say "USB device", you know that’s a piece of hardware that plugs into a USB port, and furthermore you know...

The biggest drawback to buying a wireless print server is price. At present, for a set-it-and-forget-it type of wireless print server that has reliable connectivity, you’re going to spend at least $70. That’s a deal-breaker for many because to spend 70 bucks on top of what you spent for your printer and ink/toner simply isn’t justified. Yes,...

There is the belief, particularly in the electronics industry, that absolutely nothing is made here in the USA. Not true, there is. But before I get into that, it’s sad that Americans actually have to search for USA-made electronics. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. Maybe we’ll get back to making more electronics here one day, but...

HP has a very good article on the replacement for BIOS, UEFI. It’s definitely a good and informative read, particularly the parts where it explains the existing shortcomings of BIOS, namely: ...BIOS is physically unable to boot from hard disks with more than 2.1 TB. The problem lies within the old MBR (Master Boot Record) system used by most BIOSes. The...

Recently I had to upgrade the BIOS on my PC to the latest version to enable support for something specific to GIGABYTE motherboards called On/Off Charge. This isn’t a big deal as I’ve flashed more than a few BIOSes over the years, however the way this one was done was, shall we say, a bit unique. 1. Motherboard software utility or bootable USB? Most...

This is an instance which has caused many a PC builder some serious frustration – only because they didn’t know the root cause of the problem. Situation: You upgrade a component of your PC, be it the processor, graphics card or what-have-you. After the upgrade, you start getting random BSODs and you have absolutely no idea why. You think it might be...

Lowballing when it comes to desktop PCs and laptops simply means purposely going with what’s known as "basic" or "entry level" (whatever that means) computers. It’s safe to say that these days there’s really no such thing as a slow computer anymore. Why? Windows 7. That OS will run quite well even on a single-core 1.6GHz CPU...

On my desktop PC I have absolutely no wireless peripherals connected mainly because I consider swapping/charging batteries for a desktop computer rather ridiculous. Until now. This peripheral will make an appearance in this week’s newsletter but it definitely deserves its own article because yeah, it’s that good. I give you the Logitech Wireless...

When it comes to certain audio hardware, NewEgg, a favorite among tech shoppers, doesn’t always fit the bill in this respect. In the video above I do a quick comparison to see which is the better site for finding a relatively simple piece of audio equipment – an audio...

In the tail end of this article I briefly touched upon that if you want to use a big external hard drive, USB 3.0 or eSATA would be the best choice because both run circles around USB 2.0 and both technologies are affordable to anyone who wants them. With either technology, both have their pros and cons, so I’ll cover a few of them. Drivers eSATA has more...

Media in the context of this article refers to file storage. I’ve covered this before but I have a few new things to add, plus it’s just a good refresher to know this stuff. Facts about hard drives and optical media Western Digital used to offer lifetime warranties on consumer PC hard drives There was a point where any WD HDD you bought had a...

I decided to do what I call a "mild" upgrade to my tower PC. I call it mild because I’m keeping my existing CPU for the time being, but the rest involves a new motherboard, 8GB of RAM, new 500GB hard drive and a few other items. What I essentially did is upgrade about 60% of my computer box. CPU and video card remained the same because...

Changing it up a bit, I would like to pose a question to our readers to see what you think. When building/purchasing a computer, there are 3 essential hardware components which determine overall how fast the computer runs:Processor Memory Hard Drive (platter based, not SSD since they are not yet standard)To address the “what about XXX” up front:...

Everyone at some point or another has bought computer hardware only to find out it wasn’t powerful enough, or that money could have been saved because too much was purchased. Sometimes it’s tough to find that happy medium where you get what you want without spending too much. This is a quick true-or-false list on some of the more common computer...