Most of the time, the PC used market is a pretty good place to find reasonable hardware deals. I’ve bought a fair amount of used and refurbished hardware in my life and had few complaints about the experience overall. The modern cryptocurrency market, however, has changed things somewhat. Recent news…
When I wrote about Crucial’s decision to swap inferior NAND flash into its products without updating the reviewer community or announcing a separate SKU, I hoped the problem was a one-off. While this has happened before, it’s typically been the exception, not the norm. Guess that was too much to…
Steam has released new-and-improved versions of its downloads page and storage manager, and PC gamers everywhere are rejoicing. The release allows you to view multiple libraries at once, view all download speed details in one clean line, and reorder downloads, among other capabilities. For those with extensive game libraries, the…
There are a lot of practical reasons to set up an OS like Windows 10 in a VM rather than using it as a native installation. If you have to deal with files you can’t trust, need to test multiple OS installations on the same system, or need access to…
It’s been more than a decade since the first SSDs started to hit the consumer market, and about eight years since they began arriving at price points that could broadly be called “consumer-friendly.” It’s only been in the past few years that SSDs have gotten inexpensive enough that buying a…
One of the best and most cost-effective ways to improve the performance of an old PC is to put an SSD in it. Even a purpose-built legacy system running the highest-end components available in its era can be further improved by an SSD. Systems that don’t support the old SATA…
If you’re a Bitcoin (BTC) mining veteran, sulking over how zillion-dollar, ASIC-based data centers have stolen the spotlight, you’re probably already well into alternative coins. But maybe you’ve scored a cool-new GPU in the Newegg lottery or just happen to have one lying around. Or maybe you’re curious about whether…
When the PS5 and Xbox Series S|X were first unveiled, it was difficult to tell what the real-world differences between the platforms would be. In the seven months since launch, we’ve seen the PS5 generally offer faster performance, though it also offers a smaller amount of baseline storage (~804 GB…
Here at ExtremeTech, we’ve often discussed the difference between different types of NAND structures — vertical NAND versus planar, or multi-level cell (MLC) versus triple-level cells (TLC) and quad-level cells (QLC). Now, let’s talk about the more basic relevant question: How do SSDs work in the first place, and how do they…
Speeding up a slow PC can be a challenge, particularly when dealing with older hardware that may be on the cusp of needing an upgrade or replacement anyway. Sometimes, a system simply needs a fresh OS install or driver update to perform significantly better. In other cases, upgrade or wholesale…