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. […]

On Wednesday, I mentioned my friend’s new Dell PC and the revised plan for storage. When I first studied this Dell Tower Pro model ECT1250, I looked at the service manual so I could learn about the inside. The manual showed how a hard disk drive (HDD) was mounted. I also noted that power to […]

Around Thanksgiving, I helped a friend configure a new Dell Desktop Tower Pro to replace her 10-year-old OptiPlex. We took a hard look at her usage, both current and planned. She had subscribed to the Windows 10 ESU and thus knew her reliable PC would last until October. She decided to go all new this […]