In a normal world, I would say “absolutely not for workstations” and “absolutely yes for servers.” But should I be rethinking that stance given our chip and hard drive situation? For consumer PCs, the question may be made for you. Some PC vendors do not offer warranties other than the initial year for consumer systems. […]

On Monday, NVIDIA shook up the processor market with its introduction of the NVIDIA RTX Spark chip at the opening of the COMPUTEX trade show in Taiwan. The stock market reacted quickly; NVIDIA up seven percent, Intel down two percent. This coming Monday, the newsletter will feature an article by our own Matthew S. Smith […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie In last year’s Terabyte update, I mentioned chaotic pricing and the difficulty in stating future trends. This year, it’s far worse. To the extent I mentioned cause and effect, I was wrong. Tariffs bounced around and eventually settled down; they had little effect on the storage market. Inflation was a factor […]

In my profession we have to attend continuing education and the topics can range from accounting to technology. Today was tech day, where Roman Kepczyk was discussing tech trends and planning. A couple of his comments made me go, “Hmmm, interesting.”  He indicated that he has seen several firms actually budget for, pay, and install […]

When Amazon announced that it would be sunsetting some Kindle devices, many people started pointing to workarounds. From jailbreaking Kindles to online library access, when someone says, “Sorry we no longer support that device,” I can guarantee you that someone will find a way around that block to make the hardware at least somewhat functional. […]

This year, I’m going to find some time to practice voice dictation for my writing. I’ve been typing for over 60 years and I’m still pretty good at it, but these old fingers aren’t what they used to be. In the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of typing errors and noticed something […]

SILICON By Matthew S. Smith Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 chips are mighty, but Windows on Arm can still be a mighty pain in the neck. In May 2024, I took the train up to Seattle for Microsoft’s Build developer conference. It’s usually a series of nerdy talks from passionate developers that end up overshadowed by hyper-corporate […]

ISSUE 23.18 • 2026-05-04 HARDWARE By Will Fastie Somewhere in the AskWoody archives, you’ll find an article stating my ultimate goal — to reduce the number of PCs on my desk from four to one. Hah. That didn’t happen. I did manage to cut it down to two, though. Then I bought a Mac mini. […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie Physically putting the NAS together is easy. Setup takes some time. You’d think somewhere along the line I’d have deployed network-attached storage for someone, client or friend. This is the first time. It’s different from putting together a RAID solution for a business’s server or creating a mirror for my own […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie With the NAS now up and running with an accessible storage volume, it’s time to make it useful. What’s useful? As stated in the previous articles, I want the contents of my D: drive out of my daily driver, Obsidian. But I still want all that data to be easily accessible. […]