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.

Hippocrates once said "art is long, life is short." It's a neat old proverb that, like many ancient Latin and Greek isms, has been re-observed and re-proven over and over again throughout history. And although I may not be the first to compare computer engineering to an art, I'm probably the first to use a Hippocrates quote to describe the RS-232 serial port.

When dealing with data corruption, you're much more likely to blame your SSD than anything else. And even if it's not your SSD, it'll be your OS or maybe even the CPU.

Although USB-A's color-coded cables and ports may be a nuisance to navigate, there's no replacing this tech, old as it may be. While USB-C is endlessly more convenient, convenience isn't everything, even in 2026.

Four RAM slots look like an invitation to fill every one. On modern DDR5 platforms, though, more sticks often means slower memory, longer boot times, and shakier stability. Here is how memory channels work, why four modules cause trouble, and what to buy instead.

I've been pretty transparent about the fact that the best PC upgrade is one that costs exactly zero dollars. But aside from that? The next-best thing is using stuff you might already have lying around to give your PC a bit of a boost. If you keep most of your old hardware, chances are you'll have one (or some) of these in a drawer somewhere, and they could come in handy when you least expect it.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 came at a time when little else was going on in the GPU world, and it shook its very foundations. People loved it, people hated it. It had several big problems, and the AI slop was not even the worst of it.

I've dedicated the better part of the last decade to covering graphics cards. New launches, new features, new capabilities. Disappointments and amazing developments. Ever-rising prices, worse in 2026 than we've ever seen them.

Got a spare M.2 slot in your PC? Instead of waiting for SSD prices to drop to finally be able to populate it, which could take a few years, you can use it for something else. As long as it’s an NVMe slot, which means it has PCIe connectivity, and not a SATA-only slot, you can use it for all kinds of purposes, such as hooking up an eGPU, equipping your PC with a local AI accelerator.

You'd think that having a discrete GPU gives you all the freedom in the world. Enjoy every game you like at any given time, provided your graphics card can actually handle it (and for those that can't, there's always DLSS 5 in its entire AI-slop-esque glory).