Monthly Archive: April 2016

The PC Builder Series

  What is the absolute minimum you can build a new PC for, and should you? This is a regular series that looks at the market for new PC parts. From May 2016, we’ll also look at what’s on the used market for the same price.July 2016May 2016March 2016January 2016 These are a series of one-off articles that look at different things to consider about the PCs and the PC market.Another way to do it: Buying 2nd hand PCs

Share

The cheapest PC – Another way

In the previous articles on building the cheapest PC, the premise has always been that it’d be nice to have an Intel machine, but they’re too expensive, so lets go for AMD instead. While it’s not a bad argument, the result is always going to be disappointing or underwhelming. Fortunately there is another way, and I actually put my money where my mouth is on this one. That is to buy a used PC from a site like eBay. Here we’ll talk about what to look for, how that fits into the wider scheme of building a new computer, and…
Read more

Share

Speaker Cable Sizing – By the numbers

During a recent reshuffle of all the rooms of the house, I found myself going through the laborious process of moving my office, and all the equipment therein. Part of this meant rewiring my monitor speakers. While I was doing this, I didn’t have enough speaker cable, it was too late to go out and get some, and I was too impatient to order some on the internet and wait for it to arrive. What to do? I went into my store cupboard and grabbed myself a length of 1.5mm2 flexible cable, and hooked the speaker up using it. Having plugged in…
Read more

Share

WordPress: Looking at the Activity Log

When I last wrote about the site at the end of January, I mentioned that I’d installed an activity monitor. Logging is not a standard feature of WordPress, so you’ll need a plugin. The one I chose is the Aryo Activity Log. It’s now been running for two months, and I have drawn a number of conclusions. The information below uses data gathered since January 31st 2016. The conclusions are: Updates are frequent, so don’t ignore them In two months there have been two core updates, and 16 plugin updates. If we extrapolate that out to cover a three year period,…
Read more

Share