As part of my little business buying and selling old graphics cards, I have been using a Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H motherboard as my testbed, on an open case, which has been very dependable. The Z77 chipset (LGA1155) is ideal for what I do as it was the last chipset to support… Continue reading
An actual blog post for once. Not that anyone reads blogs any more. I’ve read a lot of Science Fiction over the decades. I’ve read post-apocalyptic and post-collapse stories where people refer to the lost technology of the forerunners, how they had devices that were like magic (“Any sufficiently advanced… Continue reading
Lately I have been running a little hobby business of buying and selling old computer tech. Mainly graphics cards. I buy job lots of stuff that are sold “as is”, test and verify them, refurbish the ones that work and strip the ones that don’t work for parts. Often the cards… Continue reading
This post concerns enrolling in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10 especially if you prefer to use a Local Account. Up until 10-Oct-2025 it was possible to use the script at https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU to enrol without a Microsoft Account, but Microsoft closed the loophole that allowed it to… Continue reading
Earlier in the year my main PC failed. The board was dead and it wasn’t the PSU as I have a PSU tester and it tested out fine. The PC was long overdue an upgrade, so I went ahead with that. More on that in another post. The system was… Continue reading
I’ve been really lazy and remiss about posting, not least because I am not sure anyone reads my blog. However, in the interests of being a Data Hamster and recording stuff that I do, I guess I should. I have gotten into Retro Computing lately, buying stuff I literally threw… Continue reading
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, so the info here is a little out of date I suppose since the RTX 3080 Ti is quite an old card now. Back in November 2022 (blimey, was it really so long ago?) I bought a Zotac RTX 3080 Ti… Continue reading
I’ve had a weird issue recently when playing some games in Windowed fullscreen mode under Windows 10 Professional. Specifically the Epic Games Store version of The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition and also Robocop: Rogue City, although I’m sure it’s not limited to those. The issue is that after Alt-tabbing to… Continue reading
In a previous post I detailed building a dual Xeon workstation using a Supermicro X8DTL-3F salvaged from a used 1U server, and dual Xeon X5680 CPUs. That was 6 years ago now, and it’s time for some upgrades. I was finding that, with air cooling, CPU#1 was ingesting hot exhaust… Continue reading
In a previous post I detailed building a NAS from a Supermicro 1U server, using a X8DTL-3F motherboard and a Xeon E5645 CPU. I’ve made some big changes since then, so I decided that this warranted a new post rather than just an update to that post. Obviously, one change… Continue reading
I recently updated the motherboard on my NAS server from a Supermicro X8DTL-3F to a X8DTL-6F, which is a pretty much identical motherboard only with an onboard LSI SAS 2008 controller on it. During the course of that update, I needed to flash the SAS 2008 to IT mode, and… Continue reading
In the mid 1990’s Suncom Technologies released a series of serious flight sticks aimed to compete head-on with Thrustmaster and CH. Their F15e stick was modelled on the real joystick from the McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) F-15E Strike Eagle fighter aircraft, and consisted of four models. All four were 2-axis… Continue reading
I’ve been a bit lazy, I have to admit. When Bitbucket shuttered its support for Mercurial and then eventually deleted all Mercurial repositories, I just carried on using Mercurial locally as I am a sole developer. However, as I am now having to use git for client work, I have… Continue reading
I used to host the Corrado VR6 Information Site at corrado-vr6.info However, the increasingly onerous task of running a separate website, with GDPR compliance, security updates, and the escalating cost of the domain name, meant that it was becoming simply not worth the time and effort to maintain it. Plus,… Continue reading
I made passing reference in a previous post about being careful when upgrading the CPU on an existing motherboard, and I was recently reminded that I never got round to expanding on it. So here is a quick post about it, especially things to watch out for and gotchas you… Continue reading