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Maybe a poem will help remember complicated power-saving settings for SSDs. Here goes. “ALPM for SATA, not N-V-M-e. The latter needs ASPM, and A-P-S-T”. Hallmark, here I come. And hey, while we’re on the topic of low power consumption…

Triple your computer’s idle power consumption by installing an AMD Radeon video card! And by “triple”, I might mean “quintuple”. After all, why should your computer sip 11 watts running Notepad.exe when it could be a 54 watt space heater running Notepad.exe?

Just when you were starting to worry about all the plastic GPU fans going to landfills, “big oil” swoops in to save the day!

Making sure the new router will work cool and reliably for years.

Trying to find an 8 port SATA card that ran on a PCIE x1 slot didn’t result in many options. Fortunately, the lowest-cost option seems to work pretty well!

It’s surprising how difficult it is to find a 5.25″ adapter that lets me jam four 15mm 2.5″ drives in it. Also surprising: how long it’s been since I intentionally melted plastic with a soldering iron.

Buying external hard drives is kind of like buying *internal* hard drives except you can often save upwards of $100. Also you get a free enclosure for your old hard drive.

Gone are the days of buying 10 printers on Black Friday, pulling the ink out, and leaving the printers themselves by the dumpster!

Putting together a NAS with low power draw, and thus low operating costs.

Usually I tape reset instructions for Brother printers to the printer. This one is a little more complex, so I took some pictures.

One of the reasons I want a printer to last a long time is that comparing printers *takes* a long time! This time I ended up with a Brother inkjet!

Intel integrated graphics is a “slow potato” you say? Fair enough. But let’s try to make this slow potato as fast as we can.

The Inspiron 5570 didn’t come with an IPS panel as an option. But can we put in an IPS panel for… another model…? (admittedly a bad teaser – obviously the answer is yes).

It used to be that *over-volting* was the way to get more performance. Then throttling came along. How times have changed…!

Opening this Dell up and checking out components. The fight I had getting it open. Hackintoshing. Linux. Undervolting. Bios modding. Compliments. Complaints. It’s all in here!

I like ASUS. I also like really low cost laptops. The X541 kind of marries those 2 things. Let’s see how this marriage worked out.

Low heat, power consumption, and price… what’s not to love!? Oh right, using sharp knives to get the thing out of the enclosure.

I wanted a computer that had low idle power consumption and could handle some casual gaming. Was I successful?

Been quite a while since my last case review, but while waiting on a motherboard to arrive, I figured it was time for another!

I decided to use my old Gigabyte H55M-UD2H motherboard in a NAS server I was putting together. While I was fine with using a video card to install the OS, I didn’t want the video card sucking up the extra watts while it was running. Turned out, getting this Gigabyte motherboard to boot headless wasn’t too terribly difficult. …