Short Answer: usually. Most of the time an extended warranty on IT gear (and many household appliances) is a waste of money. Here’s why: Bathtub Failure Curve IT equipment has a “bathtub” failure curve. High initial failure rate, followed by years of no issues, and then a growing failure rate as the gear wears out. … Read more
I wanted a small wireless keyboard to use on my media PC in the lounge room, so I bought one of these mini keyboards (with touchpad) on ebay. It cost about $10. Although the item said it was in Sydney, it took two weeks to arrive and I’m sure it came from China. However the … Read more
When your computer is switched on, the first thing the motherboard does is run a Power On Self Test, or POST. This is run by the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) on the motherboard, not by Windows – Windows hasn’t even started to load yet. If there is a problem with say faulty RAM or … Read more
SSD = Telsa Model S. Normal HDD = furniture truck. My Windows 10 PC was running unreasonably slow in February 2017. It was only a year old, so usually I would do a format reinstall, but instead I bought a 1Tb Intel SSD hard drive and did a fresh install of Windows 10 onto the … Read more
The Problem: You add an additional hard drive to your Windows 10 PC. You can see the hard drive in the BIOS (when you press DEL as the computer first boots up). You go into “Disk Management” (Right click Windows Start Icon – Disk Management) and drive does not appear in Disk Management. You go … Read more
BYOD = Bring Your Own Device BYOD is being rolled out in high schools in Australia, and parents ask me which computer to buy. There are a lot of factors to consider, and budget. Personally I don’t like to over invest in any computers as they are quickly obsolete and have a tendency to die … Read more