Elmo Krebs

OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) sell a large chunk of their inventory in bulk to suppliers, and to keep costs down they’re not packaged for retail – there are no boxes, no drivers, etc. (although of course drivers and manuals can be downloaded from the manufacturer’s websi

Once you have a fan of the correct size you need to open your case and line up the fan with the mounting area. It will have four screw holes, as will the fan, so you just need to line up the screw holes on e

Basically, there is little reason for your next computer upgrade to cost more than you can afford if you follow these concepts. Naturally you will need to set and keep to a budget, and you might allow yourself some wiggle room one way or another, but the idea really is to focus on what you really need, make good use of existing components and sell those that you don’t need, while keeping an eye on the price of your upgrades and searching out sales and rebate de

Overall power draw can sometimes be an issue, as well. Video cards are the primary troublemaker. Be sure to check the power requirements specified by the manufacturer before buying a new video card. If your current supply is below the requirements you should upgrade it before installing new hardw

A few months back I showed you how to install a second SATA drive , appropriate if your computer was bought sometime in the last 5 years or so. We also taught you all about partitions and formatting drives, and to completely replace your old drive with a new one - but I skipped over the subject of physically installing IDE hard drives as I considered them to be too old to warrant a tutor

In addition, lights, displays and fan controls can be considered unnecessary in most cases, as can towers/cases with an inordinate number of bays. Unless you’re planning on running a web hosting business with your PC Build guide|https://pcbuildinsight.com/, you should cut down on the unused space on your upgraded compu

Having recently heard the woes of some family who are getting by with a tiny netbook and some kind of obscure Linux, I decided to build them a real computer for Christmas using components I have left over after various upgrades. I thought it would make for an interesting article to document the build process with photos, so here it

A desktop computer consists of various components, each of which needs power. The power supply is responsible for managing and distributing power. It needs to have the right plugs and it needs to be able to handle the overall power demand of your desktop at l

Power for system components will come from either a regular molex 4 pin, or SATA style plug for SATA devices. Case fans will often come with daisy chain connectors for regular molex power plugs, like t

You should check the specifications of the hardware you’re buying to see what operating systems it is officially compatible with. If you are using a Linux distro, you should check its help forums. You’ll often find lists of fully and partially compatible hardw

Selling your old and unused equipment on eBay might be something you do after paying for the upgrade, but it can prove a useful option, especially if you take the trouble to look after your hardware, keep it clean and dust free and – importantly – keep the boxes and instructions. Listing boxed items on eBay yields far better results than simply listing the item with a photo of it taken as it is removed from your

The difficult part is the jumper settings, which will vary according to your device. Basically, you're looking for something that mentions CS or Cable Select, as well as Master, and Slave. There will be a diagram somewhere. The digrams indicate which pins a jumper should connect. You should be able to remove a jumper with your finger nails, if not then use a pair of very small needle nose pliers and don't bend the p

For those of us experiencing issues with dust or fan noise, fixing either of these issues doesn't require much effort or money at all. Using the two methods outlined in this article, adding a dust filter and lubricating a rattling fan, will improve long-term cooling, ease of maintenance and acoustic qualit

This is probably the hardest step of all. Before securing the motherboard to the case, I made sure to write down a quick diagram of the jumper pins for the case switches and LEDs as they're difficult to see once the motherboard is in place. These can be found on the bottom left, if you were looking down into the machine, and they look like t

Similarly, you may get away with reusing old storage devices (such as a hard disk drive used as a data store rather than for installing games or applications), power supplies (as long as they’re suitable for new motherboards, drives and graphics cards), card readers or case-mounted USB h

Another extremely wise tactic is to only upgrade what you need to upgrade. This means avoiding spending your hard earned funds on new keyboards, a mouse/trackball, new monitor or even a new tower, unless it is absolutely requi