Restarting isn’t enough — you should always shut your PC down
Jasmine Mannan Mar 24, 2026, 8:01 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming…
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Your old laptop is too weak for Windows 11, but somehow strong enough for containers, VMs, and a homelab
…From increased minimum memory and storage requirements to hardware-level security elements like Secure Boot and TPM , it makes it a challenging installation for old machines. But that's not the end…
4 reasons I am still using Windows 10 on my old laptop
…Because troubleshooting an old laptop isn't as much fun. Windows 11 is a pain on older hardware And it's not just the installation part Running Windows 11 on an unsupported…
Your soundbar won't talk to your TV, and manufacturers act like that's normal
…He's written for Macworld , Tom's Hardware , groovyPost , The Mac Observer , and more before beginning here at XDA. Sign in to your XDA account HDMI eARC was supposed to be the…
I stopped paying Heroku for my app deployments after discovering this self-hosted alternative
…convenience by letting me focus on the coding and troubleshooting aspect. Well, there’s also the benefit of leaving the underlying hardware shenanigans to an external firm. But personally, I prefer self…
Local LLMs work best when you're not loyal to just one
Ayush Pande Apr 26, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with…
Someone merged SteamOS with NixOS, and the result is the strangest Linux distro I've ever loved
…This gets rid of the need to troubleshoot partially updated or inconsistent states and also provides a level of reliability you don’t typically get from conventional SteamOS deployments. Session management follows…
My motherboard’s default BIOS settings were secretly killing my gaming experience
…I was left deeply frustrated and questioning my expensive hardware investments. It turns out assembling the parts is only half the battle, because hidden BIOS settings can quietly hold back your hardware…
These 4 PC drivers will tank your performance if you skip them
…After spending years ignoring them, I now see targeted driver updates as one of the most effective troubleshooting steps for keeping both new and old hardware running exactly as intended. Related 6…
The worst gaming GPU in your drawer might be your best home server upgrade
…An old gaming GPU will be able to harness a hardware encoder to take on the brunt of the encoding work. Nvidia uses NVENC, and AMD uses VCE, but NVENC is the…