In an ideal situation, a small amount of lubricant will silence the fan and restore full speed. However, if you’ve let the fan rattle for years, it’s likely that the bearing will have worn itself out and requires replacem

However if you’re looking for sales, don’t expect to get exactly what you’re looking for (unless you happen to be extremely lucky). Rather, play a long game. Stay patient, purchase when the item you’re watching is at the right price and don’t rush into your upgr

Basically, there is little reason for your next computer upgrade to cost more than you can afford if you follow these concepts. Naturally you will need to set and keep to a budget, and you might allow yourself some wiggle room one way or another, but the idea really is to focus on what you really need, make good use of existing components and sell those that you don’t need, while keeping an eye on the price of your upgrades and searching out sales and rebate de

On the motherboard reviews|https://pcbuildinsight.com/ end, the socket looks like this. On my fairly modern motherboard, the cable is actually colour coded so you know which end plugs where - but more than likely your old PC won't be, so you'll need to figure which end of the cable is longest and plug that into the board. There is a notch on one side of the connector to prevent you plugging it in the wrong way, so make sure you align t

Your selected Steam server could be the cause of slow downloads. A massive amount of data is handled by Steams servers, so this shouldn't be a surprise. But the problem might be having the wrong server selec

After all, there may be times that you need to check your email or browse the web. You might want to use your Raspberry Pi to make notes of what you’re doing (perhaps keeping track of your progress using the programming tools, for instance), or use the web browser to carry out some brief resea

You can use this list as a guide to switch to a faster ISP. While a new ISP might still throttle data, if the upper speed limit is faster, and the bandwidth is available, throttling shouldn't impact gaming on St

In addition, lights, displays and fan controls can be considered unnecessary in most cases, as can towers/cases with an inordinate number of bays. Unless you’re planning on running a web hosting business with your PC, you should cut down on the unused space on your upgraded compu

Whatever the operating system, be sure that the software or process you're trying to close isn't vital. Run a web search to check what it is for and establish if it has any relevance to system stability or your game. If it is irrelevant, proceed to close

With your Raspberry Pi desktop computer up and running, you will no doubt want to use particular applications. Office, email and web browsing apps are all available for the Pi. Some are included – but would you want to use t

While early versions of the Raspberry Pi had trouble handling web pages with active content and video feeds, the most recent versions -- especially the Raspberry Pi 3 -- can make useful, and compact desktop PCs, when setup correc

For this particular exercise, I used a high-grade grease (non-conductive) rated for 2,000-3,000 RPMs. A thinner lubricant will suffer from separation at high speeds, which causes the grease to literally separate from the surface it coats. And, never, ever use WD

Another extremely wise tactic is to only upgrade what you need to upgrade. This means avoiding spending your hard earned funds on new keyboards, a mouse/trackball, new monitor or even a new tower, unless it is absolutely requi

This is probably the hardest step of all. Before securing the motherboard to the case, I made sure to write down a quick diagram of the jumper pins for the case switches and LEDs as they're difficult to see once the motherboard is in place. These can be found on the bottom left, if you were looking down into the machine, and they look like t

Having recently heard the woes of some family who are getting by with a tiny netbook and some kind of obscure Linux, I decided to build them a real computer for Christmas using components I have left over after various upgrades. I thought it would make for an interesting article to document the build process with photos, so here it

When buying, also look out for rebates (also known as "cashback"). This is an opportunity to purchase at the stated price while receiving a percentage of the price as a rebate. Remember, however, that these offers require you to jump through some administrative hoops in order to get the money, but if it proves a good saving then it is certainly worth do

Every two-to-three years I decide to upgrade my PC. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision as I plan my builds to run for around that length of time, choosing components such as RAM , CPU and graphics card so that the computer will be able to run the best games and applications (although not necessarily at maximum performan