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You’ve probably heard by now that Microsoft was going to stop supplying updates of any kind for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, and that includes the all-important security updates.
Well, that infamous day has arrived.
How this change will affect you will depend on the type of PC that you own right now, your personally acceptable level of risk and how you typically use your computer. [Read more…]
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Question from Ari: The hard drive in my 6 year old Dell laptop died a few days ago. This has been a great machine and I don’t want to just trash it.
I’d like to replace the bad hard drive with an SSD, but I’d rather not spend a lot of money if I can help it.
After reading your post about replacing Windows with Linux, I’d like to install Linux Mint on this laptop and use it as my primary Internet computer. I won’t need a lot of storage space so a fairly small SSD should be ok.
What I’m looking for a really inexpensive SSD that’s large enough to hold the new Linux installation and maybe a few Chrome extensions. But I’d like the SSD to be as reliable as possible. [Read more…]
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When most people think of computer hardware they think in terms of CPU type, memory and storage space.
But when it comes right down to it, the components we use to repeatedly interact with our computers are just as important. [Read more…]
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Question from Ethan: I was reading an article last night that discussed using part of a computer’s unused RAM as a RAM Disk, and it got me to thinking.
I have a 6 year old desktop computer that’s running Windows 10. It has 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive.
This machine runs really slow, coming almost to a crawl at times. After doing some research I’ve determined that it’s likely sluggish because it’s doing a ton of swapping back and forth with the page file.
Do you think moving the Windows Page File to a RAM Disk would help speed it up? [Read more…]
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Question from Carl: I have 2 year old laptop that had Windows 10 on it before the hard drive died.
I bought a new Windows 11 desktop machine but I’d like to replace the bad hard drive in the old laptop and experiment with a different operating system.
I read your post about installing Linux in place of Windows but I’ve been reading a lot about Chromebooks lately. I stopped by Best Buy yesterday and tried one out, and I really like it.
My question is can I install ChromeOS on that laptop and use it as a Chromebook (after I replace the hard drive of course)?