I strongly advice you not to buy most OEM systems. Specially Dell and HP. I will explain why.

Custom components

Very often big stores like Dell or HP will build and put custom components in their PC. As result it is not possible to upgrade them. Imagine you bought Dell PC. After some time, you would like to upgrade your video card. But this video card requires more power, so you have to upgrade power supply. But they use custom power supply with different mounting, so it is simply not possible to unscrew old one and put new one. So, you will have to buy power supply from Dell and that will be much more expensive. And actually, in some

Imagine you are tough on money but would like to buy computer. And you see relatively cheap OEM system with say Intel Core i5-4690, 8GB DDR3-1600 memory. You think that i5 has specific specs and should work with same speed everywhere. But after you bought it you will be unpleasantly surprised.

Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ESkYHzT8LU

As you can see in this video, after they moved CPU and memory to different motherboard and power supply, performance of system increases a lot. Basically, Intel allow to fine tune power package and while it will be same Core i5-4690 it will work much slower in such OEM system with tuned down power package.

Firstly, I blame Intel for this situation. The

As I wrote before, finally I had to update to Skype 8. I was experiencing strange glitches and at the end I was forced to update. It still looks extremely bad but couple of most annoying issues was fixed.

But today I want to talk about Skype icon in notification area. After some time after I did upgrade on my home computer, I did notice strange empty space as shown on picture below:

After some time, I did realize that it is actually Skype that lost its icon. Strange but well and I did restart Skype. After some time, icon did disappear again. Then I did realize that icon did disappear

As everybody knows antiviruses are kind of programs that prevents to run unwanted software on your computer. I will talk only about bad unwanted software that can harm you one way or another. I will not talk about software that installs unwanted software or run some parts when you don’t want to.

Previously only viruses were kind of unwanted bad software but now there viruses probably small part of it and viruses are usually used just to breach defenses and then they run something else on your computer. It could be crypto currency mining, hackers can use your computer to hack other computers, sending spam and many other bad things that you obviously don’t want.

Someone could say: “I installed

This post is extraction of interface part from this post.

Why do you need SSD

SSD are much much faster that HDD because they don’t have moving parts. I will not explain it in detail, you can search internet if you need more details. As result Windows will load way faster. Any software, games will load much faster as well. If you play game that load parts of level dynamically without load screen, then there is much less chance to see micro freezes. If you work in some application and press Save button it will save much faster. In general experience are much better than with traditional HDD. It is really hard to explain until you actually experience it.

I found really nice spreadsheet that covers all AM4 socket compatible motherboards: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wmsTYK9Z3-jUX5LGRoFnsZYZiW1pfiDZnKCjaXyzd1o/edit#gid=2112472504

They have instruction on how to filter so you can easily filter out older chipsets or exclude form-factors you don’t want (for example ITX). There primary factors for motherboard like supported CPU, power quality etc. And very often you have at least few motherboards that are good by primary factors and then there a lot of small details that can help you choose right motherboard. For example:

  1. Diagnostic LEDs
  2. VRM phases
  3. Audio chip used and audio connectors.
  4. Network chip.
  5. Number of USB ports and their type and how many USB headers available and their type
  6. Count of fans you can connect to this motherboard
  7. Video connectors, if you are buying CPU with built-in GPU

Update April 22: Well today Skype won. I updated to latest version. I was getting strange issues like showing that person deleted me from their contacts and I need to send request. Then I was seeing strange order in chats where person answers me and they answer always appends to previous answer even if I did reply.And at the end Skype forced me to update anyway. After I updated all these issues were gone. But I have to state that all issues that I experienced are still there except that now it is possible to send message by pressing Ctr+Enter instead of just Enter. It still quite bad version of Skype. I'm still using it but many people moved to

Not many people aware that recently NVidia enable their video cards to work with FreeSync monitors. If you don’t know what is FreeSync then you can stop reading and search internet about it. But just to better understand what happens here there is short history.

Sometime ago NVidia introduced G-Sync that suppose to “reducing tearing and stuttering caused by misalignment with content's frame rate”. It does this very well, but it is proprietary, expensive and works only with NVidia video cards. Monitor vendors should pay royalty to NVidia and final products are quite expensive. Moreover, it requires to use specific proprietary hardware. And lastly NVidia will certify monitor before it will have badge “G-Sync”. All of these adds a lot

I have to admit that I’m quite technical person, I know how to hardware and software works together, I can find solutions for different technical problems. But I don’t really enjoy doing so for devices that should just work.

In my view huge success of Apple in mobile world based on following pillars: design, hardware, software and Store. Let’s see each of them in details.

Design

As you probably aware, most products are designed by engineers. They are quite practical people. They don’t need bells and whistles. I should work and do its job. Design will be absent or extremely basic. At the same time in many areas design is quite important. Nobody would like to drive car that looks