Author Archives: Dominic

Price Sweet Spot When Buying a Video Card

I enjoy a number of PC games. To play the latest and greatest games well, a solid video card is needed. After quite a bit of research and past experiences, I have found that the best price for performance is around the $200 mark when purchasing a new Graphics Card. I have found this to be true in the past, and when I revisited this today, I find that this same price point holds true.

Best Price for Performance

The main reason I look around the $200 price point is that I find that this is the price in which you will see the best price for performance. If you bought a $200 video card on a site like Amazon.com or Newegg today, you would be able to play the latest games at above average settings with no problems. This assumes that your CPU, RAM, etc can handle the latest games. Also, the video cards that are around the $200 mark should have no trouble playing games for a few years into the future. If you were to skimp and go for a card under $100, it would probably work fine right now. However, in a year, you may be looking to upgrade again. read more

Cache Memory: What is it and What does it do?

This might be on the more technical side for this blog, however, I often get asked by friends or family about cache memory. This discussion often comes up when the person is trying to purchase a new computer or possibly even a CPU. So, I figured it would would make for a good discussion topic on this blog.

Cache Memory: What is it?

Cache Memory is much like RAM. It is memory that the CPU uses to store information. However, the difference is that cache memory is closer to the processor core(s) and smaller in size. This makes cache memory much faster than RAM. read more

Windows ReadyBoost Versus Adding RAM

Windows ReadyBoost is a cool feature that is available in versions of Windows from Vista on. Basically, a USB flash drive is plugged in and then Windows can use the flash memory to increase its memory size. The reason this works is because the flash memory stick is slightly faster than your hard drive.

ReadyBoost with an SSD hard drive

One thing to keep in mind is that if you are using an SSD hard drive, using Windows Readyboost will not really help your PC’s speed. However, if you have an SSD drive as your main drive, I doubt that you will even need ReadyBoost since your PC will probably be pretty fast already. read more

Is Cyber Monday or Black Friday Worth it?

Being a tech blogger, I am usually all about and all over the latest tech products. I also like to find a good deal on these products as well. So, due to this, you would think I would get pretty excited about cyber Monday or even black Friday. However, I rarely get that excited about these 2 shopping events.

There are a few reasons I don’t get too excited. The first reason is that I find that many of the really good deals are on the older products. For example, I often see great deals on older or lower end laptops on cyber Monday. When it comes to these low end or older laptops, I would argue that with the right amount of research, you could find these deals all year round, or at least most of the year. read more

Restore a Dell to Factory Settings with Dell Datasafe Local Backup

A family member of mine just bought a new Dell 2 months ago and she was having some major problems with it. I am not sure what the problem was, but I knew it was software or Windows related. After realizing that she hadn’t installed a ton of programs, we figured it would be fine if we just wiped the computer and started fresh. Many new Dells come with a pretty handy tool for this, the Dell DataSafe Local Backup 2.0. Using this tool, you can restore the computer to the factory settings.

First things first, back it up

Before restoring the computer to factory settings, we grabbed all the documents from the “my documents” folder and backed them up to a flash drive. That way, we could easily load the documents back onto the computer after the restore was finished. If you have any music, video, or other files you need, I would recommend backing these up before restoring to the factory settings. The Dell DataSafe Local Backup allows you to preserve files, however, I find it safer and easier to create my own backup. read more