How Long Will Your Hard Drive Last?

Macs have had hard drives for nearly as long as Macs have been available, as is true of PCs, and a lot of those very early hard drives didn’t have great life expectancies. In addition to higher capacity and lower cost per data unit, hard drives have become far more reliable than those from the […]

My Experiences with the Lenovo ThinkPad X120e

Back in February, my first generation 13″ MacBook Pro died of logic board failure, and I was forced to sell it due to the fact that I was starting dual credit courses at my local community college and needed a small, cheap, lightweight laptop that could follow me around and take a beating. I was […]

Microsoft Surface Is Destined to Be a Best Seller

2012 – According to Horace Dediu in The Evolution of the Computing Value Chain, Microsoft has had the dominant operating system almost since that day in 1981 when the first IBM PC shipped with PC-DOS, Big Blue’s version of MS-DOS. From DOS through Windows, Microsoft has held the top spot – until now.

Keep Your PC Cool by Replacing Its Thermal Compound

What does thermal compound do, and why should you be concerned about it? Call me simple, but I had no idea what thermal compound was until about a year ago when I decided to upgrade the factory-installed RAM on my iMac G4. Apparently there is a two-part heatsink in the good ol’ Luxo Mac that […]

ThinkPad X41 Revived

There’s just something about a ThinkPad. Whether it’s the solid build quality that gets you or the strange charm of that boring black case, the ThinkPad line manages to capture that feeling of portable, professional power like none other (well, unless you’re from our sister site, Low End Mac, where the PowerBook G3 Pismo reigns […]

Back with Linux Again

It has been a roller coaster of computing in my life recently. About 18 months ago, after 10 years of being a hard-core dedicated Mac user, I decided that I wanted to try something else. Linux.

Lenovo S10-2 Is a Great $300 Netbook

In the Mac world, netbooks exist on the Windows side of the fence. Until the recent unveiling of the iPad, Apple hadn’t throw its hat into the subnotebook arena. Even at that, the iPad is a tablet. For those of us who have become enamored with netbooks due to their size, real keyboards, and minimalistic functionality, […]

Protect Your PC

January 2006 – Welcome to the inaugural issue of Low End Living and my inaugural column. While the primary focus here is living smart, be it in terms of money, health, or relationships, all three of those things can be improved by taking other stress out of your life.

Building Up Buttercup: Building a Not-So-Bitty Box

While researching this series of articles on small form-factor PCs, I was not entirely altruistic in my motives. I was also looking at a way of putting together a small form-factor computer of my own. My goal was a computer that I could take places without breaking my back or my wallet.

Surfing with Sega: The Late, Great Dreamcast

In a lot of respects, the Dreamcast was ahead of its time. It was released in 1998 in Japan and 1999 in the rest of the world – a year before PlayStation 2 – and was the first 128-bit console gaming system ever. Sega, a Japanese company started by American expatriate David Rosen in the 1950s, seemed […]

Linux: The Tragic Flaw?

Last week I talked a bit about Linux and the low end. Linux offers some of the same modern foundations of Mac OS X, but it can run well on older computers. Last week I hinted that I would talk about the fatal flaw of Linux.

Low End Linux?

Last week I was reading an article [no longer online] about how one county was saving several million dollars a year by implementing Linux on all it’s desktops. It wasn’t only the Information Technology department – it was secretaries, receptionists, firefighters, police officers, and other county employees.