There's one spec that unifies most laptop users: soldered RAM. Hate it or love it, it's present in many laptops, sometimes making them impossible to upgrade in any meaningful way.

A loud NAS is uniquely annoying, much more so than a regular PC or laptop, and that's simply because it's always on. When you have a sound machine that runs 24/7, you either learn to ignore it or grow to hate it, and a noisy NAS is essentially exactly that.

The graphics card market is a fickle beast. One year, it'll be teeming with options for every price range; the next, it'll be barren during a shortage. The ongoing RAM-pocalypse is definitely pushing us toward that latter state, but there are still GPUs left to buy—for now.

These days, SSDs are so durable that many people will never have to deal with SSD failure. But there's another side to that coin: when SSDs fail, they often do it quietly, and you may not notice until it's too late and your data's already lost.

The topic of the ongoing RAM-pocalypse has been done to death. Yes, we get it, RAM is expensive.

Times are tough for those of us who want to buy a new SSD. You don't have to aim for the fastest drives available—all SSDs are overpriced right now, and chances are that it'll only get worse. That makes it harder to replace or upgrade your existing drive, which is why it's time to get creative. This inexpensive gadget might be able to help if you're not happy with your current SSD, and even if you are, it can help it live longer.

Just when did USB ports become such a complete mess? They're easy to follow on the surface, with two relevant types to pay attention to. But if you look closer, they're all kinds of confusing.