Technology

Builds & Upgrades — Part 2 (‘Rose’ has Plastic Surgery)

by

A lot has happened since Part 1 on 5/29/23 — mainly, the Intel® Core™ i9-13900K CPU started dropping in price ‘n then dropped again. After I saw the first big drop in price, I purchased it at $509.99, and a day later it dropped again to $499.99.

I don’t ever recall Intel dropping their price for their top Intel® Core™ i9 Processors this much–this early, e.g., best price for an i9-12900K right now is $402.27. It must be a good time to Build and/or Upgrade a desktop computer — the ASUS Dual NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC Edition I had just purchased for $364.00 (which was a bargain) is now at $319.99 from B&H.

‘To Make a Long Story Short‘ — after buying the CPU, I decided to go ahead ‘n purchase all the needed components to build a new computer inside the Apevia case (no longer available & mine doesn’t have all those LIGHTS!). I’ll get into the new components in Part 3 of this series.

Read more

Computer Builds & Upgrades – Part 1

by

I’ve been building my own desktop computers since 2004, and have gotten better at it over the years. Currently have a main PC – ‘Apevia‘ and two main Test/Secondary PCs – ‘Rose‘ & Frankenstein (AKA – ‘Frank‘). Their parts are listed at – Buy Low or BYOC – ‘Build Your Own Computer’.

Two more PCs are sitting in a shed – listed as not needed or retired, and a homemade Test Bench. 🙂 Parts can build up over time, e.g., a few years ago I finally threw away a gallon ziplock baggie full of old desktop memory. Now I try to better manage memory in new builds and/or upgrades, but eventually even that memory will become too old to use in a modern PC.

For about 7 years now, I have been using a case I like to build a new computer in – this time it’s a Apevia X-Qpack3-NW-BK, taking the MoBo from that case (left pretty much intact), and moving it to another case as an upgrade. Switching memory and other components around, upgrading an older case #2, and then building a ‘New‘ computer in case #1 from there.

Read more

PorteuX 0.3 – ‘The Next Experience’ — Part 2

by

PorteuX 0.3 – ‘The Next Experience’ — Part 1 covered ‘Setting up PorteuX 0.3‘ & ‘Post Setup‘ – and you’ll need to refer to it for some of the info on using GParted to prep the Target device ‘n etc. Part 1 also covered how to set up the different PorteuX 0.3 (github) desktop environments—KDE, GNOME, LXDE, LXQT, MATE, and XFCE in either stable or current options.

Part 2 will be on how to set up the porteux-v0.3-xfce-4.12-stable-x86_64.iso wid a Cinnamon DE. The Developer says: ‘Xfce 4.12 is the recommended version for the best balance between performance and flexibility. Many patches have been applied to this Xfce version to improve the user experience.‘ You can use another version, but the xfce 4.12 stable version had the Screenshot app in it ‘n not all versions had that app. PorteuX 0.3 is very new ‘n has some minor bugs and/or slight differences in app options of various DEs.

Read more

Reset this PC – “Factory Reset a Windows 11 PC”

by

Windows 10 Home & Pro reach end of support on 10/14/2025 so I won’t go into how to reset those PCs. Most Windows 10 PCs can be upgraded for free to Windows 11—those that can’t be upgraded still have almost 30-months left. Reset this PC is a little different for Windows 10, but basically the same ‘Steps‘ wid slight differences in some terminology.

This is the third part of ‘Sorta a series‘ on ways that Microsoft offers Windows users different options to refresh their PCs and/or recover from various PC issues that can happen—issues usually caused by the users and/or an OEM software/hardware issue.

I’ve built most of my own computers (‘BYOC‘) ‘n haven’t had any issues wid them; however, the SupportAssist on my Dell XPS 13 9310 recently started acting up after some updates—that also included BIOS & Firmware upgrades.

‘XPS13‘ is about 19-months old, but I still don’t want to do a lot of ‘Experimenting‘ on it just yet – hey, it’s my first purchased Dell lappie!!! 😊 After pondering the issue for a while, during which time I decided to write this ‘Sorta a series‘, a Reset this PC seemed the better solution:

Read more

System Restore, creating Restore Points, and restoring your Windows PC

by

Sometimes, PCs fail—for whatever reasons ‘n users want their PCs back in working order as quickly as possible. The problem may have been caused by the user, OEM, software, new or broke hardware, and in very rare cases—the Windows OS itself.

From my experience, PC OEMs have usually been the problem, especially wid their added OEM software, and a Lenovo desktop computer was the most troublesome computer I’ve ever owned. When Windows Vista came out (1/30/2007) one could find incredible bargain prices on new Vista PCs, and I purchased three different ones at that time—that troublesome Lenovo desktop was one. Finally got that Lenovo working right by just wiping out the OS drive and doing a completely new installation of Vista on it – without any of their OEM software.

Windows 10 & 11 provide at least three easy solutions to most of the PC problems that users come across, and I am on #2 wid this post – #1 was Backup and Restore (Windows 7) ‘n #3 will be Reset PC. I’ll be linking to each one in the future as I finish ‘n post them.

Truthfully, I have never had any issues wid either Windows 10 Pro or Windows 11 Pro, on the desktop computers I have built – ‘Build Your Own Computer’ (BYOC). I recently had an issue wid my Dell XPS 13 9310, the Dell SupportAssist wasn’t working right, and that is the reason I came up wid the idea for these three posts. 19-months without any issues, but then a SupportAssist issue the other day.

Read more

Translate »