In Pictures: 10 (harrowing) tales of outdated tech used way past its prime
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it breaks, buy a replacement part on eBay and stubbornly refuse to upgrade.
PC prices are going up due to a shortage of a number of components, and the situation isn't expected to change in the coming quarters.
The rivalry between AMD and Intel peaked during the first decade of the 2000s, when the companies consistently challenged each other with a stream of chip innovations.
The PC market has been in trouble for ages, but last year took the biscuit. Shipments dropped below 300 million for the first time since 2008, and IDC declared it the worst year in history. That explains a lot about what happened at Intel this week.
Intel's rise and fall in tablets are starting to resemble the company's misadventures in netbooks less than a decade ago.
Intel is cutting 12,000 jobs worldwide as the company restructures operations to diversify from PCs into growth areas of IoT and servers.
Building a computer is a great way to get a custom configuration, save some money and have fun. In a how-to video, we'll show you how to build one in less than two minutes.
In case you haven't noticed, memory prices have dropped through the floor. As such, I've been busily upgrading every computer I can get my hands on. For example, my 2009 MacBook Pro has been maxed-out to 8GB, which involved buying two 4GB SODIMM modules. The cost? Just US$97. I dare say I could have got them even cheaper if I'd shopped around.
QUESTION: My Windows 7 Home Premium computer has a quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM. I've not found any advantage to using four cores. How can I use the processor more effectively and allocate different processes to the individual cores?
Even accomplished geeks shy away from motherboard upgrades on their main PCs. Years ago, I would often upgrade gaming and test systems in my own basement lab, but keep chugging along with a production machine using a two-year-old motherboard and CPU.
Overclocking refers to pushing your computer components harder and faster than the manufacturer designed them to go. The initial pitch is seductive: Buy a slower, lower-cost CPU; juice up the clock speed; and presto! You have a cheap, high-end processor.
Microsoft's Windows, which in 2015 fell to third place among the world's operating systems, will continue to lose share this year to Android and Apple's combined OS X and iOS.
The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend has been around for years now, and even though it's become a fixture at many companies, some IT shops are still grappling with how to make it work.
Microsoft has created a $43 billion business, a potential Apple-and-OEM-esque company-within-a-company, that could be used to take up the slack if some of its computer-making partners falter.
When you're strapping on the latest smart watch or ogling an iPhone, you probably aren't thinking of Moore's Law, which for 50 years has been used as a blueprint to make computers smaller, cheaper and faster.
It came out in 1974 and was the basis of the MITS Altair 8800, for which two guys named Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote BASIC, and millions of people began to realize that they, too, could have their very own, personal, computer.