Newsletter Archives

• Decommissioning Outlier

  Posted on April 22, 2024 at 02:43 CDT by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  HARDWARE

  

  By Will Fastie

  After 25 years, I’m changing the way I work. Many hardware changes are on the horizon.

  You may recall my previous articles about building my Windows 11 PC, named Obsidian. After I put that PC into daily service, my desk remained cluttered with four desktop PCs. These PCs share the same keyboard, display, and mouse; this means I use a physical KVM switch to move between them.

  That’s been important to me. I help many family members and friends with their PCs. Having the KVM setup always allowed me to bring a “visiting” PC to my desk, where I could work on it conveniently. But the nature of that help has changed; I no longer need the physical infrastructure for that.

  Which means I needed a justification for keeping all those PCs around. A few things changed, which resulted in a completely new perspective about my desktop. Let me start with a reminder of how I used the four systems.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.17.0, 2024-04-22).

  Hardware Desktop PCs, DIY, Hardware, KVM, Newsletters, Recycling systems, Virtual Machines, Virtual PCs

• Making an old PC virtually immortal

  Posted on February 17, 2020 at 01:05 CST by Tracey Capen • Comment in the Forums

  VIRTUAL PCS

  By TB Capen

  If you’ve spent years building, repairing, and managing PCs, you’ve probably accumulated a veritable junkyard of old PCs and parts — some still working, some not so much.

  For most of my computing career, my standard practice for disposing of obsolete (at least to me) machines has been to remove the hard drive and donate or recycle everything else. Then, once I’ve gone through the drive and archived important information elsewhere, I’ll typically wipe it and add it to my pile of empty-but-still-functional drives.

  Occasionally, I’ll attach a spare drive to a PC via a USB-to-hard drive connector (more info) to archive files or move really big chunks of data from machine to machine.

  Sometimes, however, I prefer to keep a system as it was originally intended — with a working operation system, applications, and data. And the best way I know to do that without having a bunch of boxes sitting by my desk is to transfer the full setups into virtual machines.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.7.0 (2020-02-17).

  Virtual PCs AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Recycling systems, VirtualBox