It doesn't take a genius to conclude that the PC hardware is going through a massive rough patch, well, for consumers, at least. The enterprise AI demand is being fulfilled, no questions asked, and PC builders are left to fight for scraps — grossly inflated scraps. It started with RAM selling at 4 times the regular price, then spiraled into SSD prices getting doubled, and finally took graphics cards down, too. PC builders with upgrade plans in 2026 have to wait at least two full years before even thinking about buying new hardware. If you still need to upgrade your gaming PC, the used market can be your savior, as long as you find a decent deal. You should also keep older-gen CPUs in the mix to further maximize your return on investment.

I've owned a lot of different hardware over the years, from ex-enterprise hardware to consumer parts, specialized industrial PCs, and off-the-shelf mini PCs. If it had a CPU and I could get my hands on it, I did, because I have insatiable curiosity and can't resist the allure of what looks like a good deal.

You've probably heard it a few times before, but Windows Search isn't good. Whether you're trying to find apps or files, the search bar on your taskbar and Start menu almost always falls short. It functions alright for some things, but I'd always recommend replacing it.

Operating systems are fairly complex pieces of software, and typically, they're the foundation of your computer experience. You don't usually expect to be able to run one operating system like Windows 11 inside another unless you get into virtual machines. But the idea of running an OS inside your browser still sounds like something of a dream.

Even though I’ve already built a pretty solid open-source graphics stack at this point, I’m always on the lookout for new tools or hidden gems. That’s exactly how I discovered some of my favorites, like Photopea and PhotoDemon. Recently, I came across a tool called miniPaint. It’s a free, open-source, lightweight image and graphics editor that runs in your browser, and it’s self-hostable too.

You can choose to download and install pretty much any browser on the internet right now, and I doubt you'd ever have a reason to complain about speed. For one, it's a metric that's not particularly easy to define in a time of gigabit internet. But even if you were to benchmark your browser of choice, differences are minimal at best. I remember a time when Chrome was notorious for using too much RAM, and you'd switch between Opera and Firefox for a faster way to access your favorite sites. But that's a vestige of the past, and the problem is pretty much gone.

Running multiple Proxmox nodes doesn't require clustering them together. While clusters offer high availability and live migration, they come with strict requirements. Corosync needs a latency under five milliseconds, making cross-site deployments nearly impossible. There are always split-brain scenarios that can corrupt data, and Quorum loss can render your infrastructure read-only.

It's 2026, and AI can do a lot for the average consumer, ranging from writing an email to summarizing a research article or planning a trip. So, the question has to be asked: can it provide similar utility to someone looking to build a gaming PC, specifically, a newbie with no real knowledge of PC parts? To answer that, I decided to use ChatGPT to help me scout for the best PC parts for a given budget.

Internet outages are an inconvenience, for sure, but sometimes they turn into real problems. Like the major AWS outage in October 2025, which took out a substantial amount of the internet as we know it, from social media apps to popular video games, and plenty of smart home devices.

I've always been interested in my data's privacy to some extent, but the continued overreach of Big Tech and the use of user data to train generative data has pushed this interest further.

SSD caching has become one of those features that NAS brands plaster everywhere in their marketing materials. The push is so strong that forums are full of people querying which NVMe drive to buy for caching these days. It has stopped being a niche optimization that only advanced users did if they needed it, and has become a sort of default upgrade that one must do when buying a new NAS.

If you haven't been keeping on top of all the Linux news going on lately, things have been pretty exciting on the "getting Photoshop running on it" front. Which doesn't sound like much of an exciting front, but given how long people have been waiting for Adobe products on Linux, any progress is definitely something to celebrate.