Maverick Ramblings

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TweetMany people enter bike-a-thons or help kids sell wrapping paper or Girl Scout cookies to raise funds for various not-for-profit organizations. At Maverick Solutions, we enjoy helping people come over to our side of the “digital divide.” A few times each year, we collect and deliver old computers to an organization that refurbishes them, teaches [...]

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Maybe now it’s finally time to upgrade your PC, but what should you upgrade? The whole system? Just some components? When faced with limited resources, we have to make decisions about the best ways to employ them. How can you tell what to do?

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Besides hard drive data storage, there is another area in which computer performance may become degraded, appearing to be due to age: increasing demands on the processor and memory. This may be resolvable without upgrading your computer.

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In the previous section, we discussed the concepts behind computer optimization and hard drive fragmentation. After fragmentation, the next issue to discuss about how hard drives slow down our computers is the increasing volume of data being stored on them.

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Many people are under the impression that a computer’s performance deteriorates with age. I’d like to disspell that myth: computers are mostly solid-state technology that is largely unaffected by age. I’m not saying that older computers don’t run more slowly, but once we correct the notion that the slow-down is caused by its unalterable age, the problem becomes one that can usually be remedied without buying a newer computer.

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TweetWould you like your school to be on the cutting edge of technology, inexpensively? After lackluster public opinion of Windows Vista, Microsoft went back to the drawing board and expedited development of their next operating system, Windows 7. It has not yet been released to the general public, but I’ve seen a demonstration of it. [...]

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TweetI think I’ve just found a cheap (if not free) way to upgrade an APC Back-UPS ES 350 to an ES 500, roughly doubling its power output or standby time. Inside the battery compartment is a plastic grid that limits the size of the battery that can be installed therein. If you go at the [...]

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