This one is for all the people who buy a router, set it up according to the default settings, and never look at it again. Unfortunately, default settings aren't really optimized to keep us safe and secure. Instead, they're designed to make the product work out-of-the-box for as many people as possible.

2026 has been a weird year for me. I'm one of the most "pro DIY PC" people you'll ever meet. I built my first PC around 20 years ago, and I've never touched a prebuilt since then, except for the purpose of reviewing them. And yet, this year, I bought a prebuilt—not for me, but still.

What's the easiest and cheapest way to build your own budget homelab? Arguably, a used Windows 10 PC is a safe bet (most of the time). But the reality is that mini PCs are slowly taking over this segment, and it's true that they have a lot of attributes that make them easy to recommend for that type of job.

If you have a multi-gig NAS, one of the most obvious (and yet, somehow, still easy to miss) network bottlenecks is plugging it into a gigabit network. So, naturally, you look at your router, hunt down the 2.5Gbps or 10Gbps Ethernet port, and go for the fastest option available on your hardware. Makes sense.

How careful are you when it comes to your PC's Ethernet ports? Because I gotta say, I've abused my fair share of both ports and connectors. I've yanked cables sideways, left them plugged in for years (even though they would've benefited from an upgrade), moved hardware around without disconnecting them first, and generally just taken them for granted. Most of the time, I got away with it.

The early days of people having internet in their homes were pretty wild. Viruses were pretty much everywhere, and unlike now, many users had no clue what to do with them. I was a tween in the early '00s, but I remember intervening when my mom's PC had what felt like hundreds of them, with pop-ups and ads covering up the entire desktop, impossible to remove.

If you want a fast, stable connection, and you want to do it properly, you go wired. We all know this, but just because wired is the right answer doesn't mean there's no wrong way to do it. If you traipse one long cable all around the house and out to the annex, you may hit a wall you didn't know existed. Ethernet has a hard distance ceiling, and once you pass it, things will start going wonky.

When Nvidia first announced DLSS 5 neural rendering, many were quick to label it "AI slop." And I get it. We're definitely getting some uncanny valley vibes.

These days, when you're buying an x86 CPU, you're buying Intel or AMD. (Probably AMD, actually, as even used Ryzen 5000 chips are a good deal right now.) That just wasn't the case in the mid-1990s, though. There used to be more players in the CPU market, and we had all the freedom of choice we could've ever asked for.

Let's face it, you probably don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about your motherboard. Fair enough; neither do I. But did you know that there's a battery on it that can cause a whole lot of problems when it eventually dies?

Is there a battle between HDMI and DisplayPort these days? Not really, not anymore. DisplayPort has traditionally been the easy recommendation for PC monitors, and modern DP 2.1 has beaten HDMI when it comes to bandwidth.