Intel's N100 and similar ultra-low-power CPUs used to be the go-to recommendation for homelab beginners who wanted a PC that sips power while still seamlessly handling numerous basic self-hosted services.

Computers have improved drastically year over year. With these changes, we've also lost some things along the way. Many of them are just legacy connectors and features that we honestly don't have much use for in mainstream PCs in 2026, like bulky parallel ports or floppy disk drives.

So, you've finally caved and decided to buy an OLED.

When people think of homelabbing, they often picture endless racks of servers and tangled cables. In reality, a $50 refurbished office PC can be all you really need to start self-hosting apps on a home server. But before spending your money on one, run through this checklist to make sure you're actually getting a good deal rather than buying e-waste.

File systems are something we rarely think about anymore, but in the early days of Windows, they could make a surprisingly big difference in how much of your pricey hard drive you actually got to use. FAT16 had one incredibly frustrating quirk with how it handled cluster sizes. Its inefficiency effectively punished you for buying a bigger hard drive, as it could leave you wasting much of the storage you paid for.

Desktop upgrades are usually either expensive, underwhelming, or both. It’s easy to spend a fortune on some piece of equipment, only to realize later that it’s completely useless. However, with this particular gadget, the opposite is true—it’s both cheap and incredibly effective.

PC building has never been more popular, and one of the most common pieces of advice for first-time builders is to leave room for future upgrades. After all, there's no need to replace your entire PC when you can swap out a few key components and keep using it for years to come.

Countless Windows apps have come and gone over the years. As our computing needs changed, some were replaced by better alternatives, while others simply became obsolete as new technologies emerged. Here are some iconic Windows apps you probably used regularly but haven't thought about in years.