Computer Rules of Thumb
Version 3.0 (11 February 2023)

I've been putting together computers and playing around with them seriously since about 1996, so I've got about 27 years of experience to distill down:

The Really Important Bits

Where possible, buy name brand hardware from reputable hardware vendors!

Avoid no-name ‘clone’ manufacturers like the plague. A large, well known manufacturer will have an actual quality control department, as well as a decent warranty/returns department. In a lot of cases, what you're paying for isn't just the name – but also for some semblance of quality control at the factory.

First adopters are Suckers. I repeat, first adopters are Suckers.

Do not rush out to buy the latest and greatest technology. Wait until it has proven itself a couple of months “in the wild”.

Example A:

Back in 2010, Intel's X-25M series of SSDs (solid state drives) had a pretty bad firmware problem.

Intel had been promising that when Windows 7 was released, they would release the TRIM firmware, which would greatly prolong the lifetime of the drives by enabling TRIM support, and significantly reducing the “slowdown” that occurs as the SSD's flash “wears down” from repeated use.

Sound all good and cheery? Well, it turns out that the TRIM firmware, when it was released a few days after Windows 7, when it was applied to already in-use SSDs, bricked the drives, rendering them useless. It took several more firmware updates to resolve that problem. After several months, you basically could buy X-25Ms that shipped with the fixed firmware that included working TRIM support out from the box; but the people who brought the drives before the TRIM support had been proven were the Suckers.

Example B:

When the first HDTV televisions/monitors first came out with HDMI connections, things were pretty good for a brief period of time until the standard for how copy-protected content would be played over HDMI changed. Suddenly, TVs or monitors which worked fine before now suddenly were unable to play back a protected content stream, such as watching a movie via PS3. This was kind of an issue as the first HDTV TVs with HDMI connectors were kind of expensive; there was a lot of “sunk costs” in them for many purchasers.

Example C:

The whole GeForce RTX 4090 “melt the connectors and set fire to your computer” problem in 2022-2023.

Example D:

Any Operating System Release. Software testing has become more systematic than it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s; so Operating Systems are now a lot more reliable at release than they used to be; but there's still a large gap between internal testing and “releasing it into the wild”.

Buying Computers/Building them in the 2020s

I guess it all depends on how much free time you have nowadays. Building your own gets you exactly what you want, but at the risk of delays of time and money from RMAs, especially if you don't live near a MicroCenter and have to have your components shipped to your address.

Honestly, my advice is to either:

A.) Custom order what you want from the MicroCenter (if local) or a local PC builder and have them build it for you and turn it over. You might have to spend a few hundred dollars more versus building your own; but you don't have as much stress – MicroCenter/the Builder is on the hook if they break it while assembling – it can be surprisingly easy to bend CPU pins while inserting into the socket if you don't know what you're doing or you just don't do it enough to have experience.

or

B.) Order a prebuilt based off what you want to do:

For light work, such as checking your email (Gmail/Outlook/etc), shopping or watching cat videos on YouTube, just get a Chromebook for $200 or so and call it a day; or just use a phone or tablet.

For moderate work, such as heavy office work (Excel/Word/Access), stand-alone light gaming, or miscellaneous scientific/technical work, get a moderately priced Windows PC or Macintosh around $700-800 or so.

For heavy work, such as A++ title gaming, 3D rendering, etc. your price point for a Windows PC or Mac will be around $1,500 to $2,000.

Anything past that price point increasingly becomes “not worth the squeeze for the juice” – i.e. not cost effective.

You'll still have to look up the specifications of each component in your prebuilt's system to make sure you're getting a good deal; but generally at this point in the Personal Computer's development cycle, we've reached a point where the difference between $800 and $1,500 in a PC is no longer easily apparent for the average user, unlike in past purchasing cycles.

Be Careful with BIOS/Firmware Updates!

Things have improved a lot since the “Bad Old Days”, but every time you do a BIOS/Firmware update, there is a small chance of the device in question getting bricked – even big ticket items such as engine control units (ECUs) in automobiles can get “bricked” by trained technicians using official manufacturer-provided software and hardware – it's simply the law of averages in play here.

I feel that BIOS/Firmware/Flash updates should only be done:

• On brand-new PCs with nothing important on them (yet).

• As a last ditch attempt to fix the Problem (after backing up your Really Important Stuff™ first)

Upgrading your computer every 6 months does not give you the best bang for your buck.

A four to five year refresh policy for your computer hardware ensues that you will have a substantive and qualitative improvement over your old hardware for your money, as shown by the table below.

Try this Before Anything Expensive!

Back in 2010, I had to troubleshoot a problem in which my brother's desktop stopped “seeing” the internet. We tried everything from resetting the router, plugging it directly into the cable modem, etc; but it would not see the internet.

We began to think that our only options left were these three choices:

1.) Buy a add on wireless-N USB receiver for $60

2.) Buy an internal PCI Ethernet card

3.) Replace Motherboard

Fortunately, I found the following advice online:

1.) Shut down your PC.

2.) Unplug the power cord.

3.) If you have a laptop, remove the battery as well.

4.) Walk away from the problem for at least 20-30 minutes.

5.) When you return, reconnect battery and power cord.

5.) Start as usual.

6.) If this solves the problem, take 20 minutes and post this to all of those message boards that you didn't find the solution to.

Following this advice; the computer following start up once again saw the internet. This seems like a good piece of advice to offer for any random glitch you are facing, before you do something really drastic, like nuke and reinstall, or replacing major system components like the motherboard.

A Word of Warning Regarding Internet Pop Ups

I once got hit by one of those “fake” anti virus scan programs which messed up my system among other “fun” things it did.

How did I get hit? Well, I was browsing one of my internet discussion forums back when it was being hosted on Yuku (the former eZboard).

A popup came up, asking me if I wanted to install blah blah blah.

I clicked on the windows close button (that “x” in the upper right corner of your window), and still got hit by the program.

What happened was that many of these programs (back in the day) managed to script their pop-up windows so that ALL the buttons on the window began the installation sequence. Even the “cancel” buttons.

To deal with those popups, the best way is:

• Push CTRL-ALT-DEL and start up the Windows Task Manager.

• Select the BROWSER in task manager, right click, and select END TASK.

• Keep trying until your browser closes.

Sure, you'll lose whatever internet pages you had open in that browser, but it beats a zombie system that forces a nuke-and-pave.

PS: I previously suggested using ALT-F4 to close the pop up window; but depreciated it, because some malware popups could recognize this and bring up an additional pop up window asking you if you wanted to navigate away.

Burning Optical Discs (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)

This is kind of depreciated, since these are no longer really useful in 2023 for storage, since storage needs have exploded against optical disc capacity remaining static; making external hard drives a more efficient backup option.

Rule #1: Buy only discs with reasonable prices (no buying a 50-CD spindle for only $4.99!) and check the labels for where they are manufactured. The problem is even the "name brand stuff" can be the same media as ultra-cheap; so paying attention to the manufacturing location is important.

2010: The good stuff is made in Japan or in Singapore. Made in China or Made in Taiwan usually is inferior quality.

2012: Certain brands are starting to carry ‘made in India’, while the majority are now ‘Made in Taiwan’.

2023: I have no idea what the “good vs bad” optical disc countries are now.

Rule #2: Burn discs somewhere in the middle of your drive’s write range.

For example, if you had a 16x maximum write (20~ MB/sec) DVD-R drive, I would recommend burning at about 8x (11~ MB/sec).

This results in a more reliable burn, especially if you are doing something really crazy like burning a huge directory that has 12,000 files in it. This also helps prevent a disc from failing silently, despite the program reporting a successful burn.

Rule #3: Keep your important optical disks (backups, the Great American Novel that you are writing) in a cool, dark space, like for example in a file cabinet in an air conditioned basement. This keeps them good for a long period of time, even if you didn't splurge for a premium archival brand of disc.

Rule #4: Figure out what is Really Important™ (The Great American Novel you are writing, etc) amongst your files and make double copies of it. Don’t burn just one CD/DVD. Burn two. Label them Copy 1 of 2, and Copy 2 of 2. That way, if one goes bad, you will have another. Additionally, keep one or two generations’ of backups for maximum assurance; e.g. when you burn Novel Work As of April 2012; you keep Novel Work As of December 2011, and Novel Work As of August 2011 in your storage place. Sure, they’re out of date, but in the event of your April 2012 backup being damaged or lost, you will have a fallback set and won’t lose 100% of your Really Important™ stuff.

Hardware

Warranties

Generally, the warranties offered by stores are a waste of money; since many of the parts you buy already have manufacturer's warranties.

There is one BIG exception though.

ALWAYS try to buy an accidental-damage warranty for:

1. Laptops since they tend to get jostled around quite a bit; and most of them lack a proper load-bearing frame which increases stress on key components inside as the outer shell is jostled/twisted around.

2. Tablets, as they will be handled a lot and propped up to act as media players in odd spaces, leaving them prone to falling over if the airplane hits turbulence, or the road gets bumpy. Additionally, their displays are very large for their overall size, increasing their susceptibility to damage.

The reason for an accidental damage warranty is that manufacturer’s warranties only cover manufacturing defects; they won’t cover you if you drop your laptop or spill coffee on it.

That said, don’t go overboard and get the multi-year warranties. One year’s extended warranty should be enough, as it will then cover the initial side of the bathtub curve and beyond a year, the item rapidly depreciates in value due to advances in technology, making a two or three year contract a nice way of giving your money to the retailer.

Overclocking

Don't do it. Just don't. Don't even THINK about doing it in any form.

Why? Your computer's components were designed to run at a certain specification, and exceeding those specifications greatly decreases the lifetime of your computer.

As a “bonus”, you greatly increase the probability of data errors creeping in and compromising the reliability of your data. There was a MSDN Article a while back on overclocking causing silent data errors (MSDN Article), leading to frequent software crashes.

Central Processing Units (CPUs)

Rule #1. For a PC; you pretty much now are left with just Intel and AMD as far as choices go. The only real difference is whether you want absolute compatibility with everything ever made (Intel), or if you’re more budget conscious (AMD).

Rule #2. When picking your desktop CPU; try for something in the upper bracket of that generation’s CPU offerings; but not the absolute top end.

Basically, instead of getting the #1 CPU; get the #2 or #3 ranked CPU. You get a CPU that's powerful enough to be a qualitative improvement over your previous computer, and one that’s good enough to last for several years, while not paying the bleeding edge tax that picking #1 gets you.

Exception for Rule #2: If you develop rather specialist applications or use said specialist applications, Intel is becoming rapidly infamous for stratifying their CPU lineup by features, rather than by speed/performance. E.g. VT-d (device I/O virtualization) is only available on certain CPU families.

Motherboards

Check the specifications of the motherboard very carefully.

Thing to Look for #1: Does it have enough slots/connectors/ports for your present and future needs? A certain model of motherboard with two SATA connectors may be fine for a simple media center (with a single optical drive and hard drive); but would not be acceptable for someone who uses more than one hard drive for storage.

The reason for paying close attention to the boards' specifications in your initial buy is while there are Expansion Cards which can add extra connectors/ports like more SATA connectors, they generally are not as reliable as a built in motherboard connector/controller.

Thing to Look for #2: How much memory can the motherboard handle? Can it handle modern-ish memory? You want to be a little ahead of the curve in regards to total memory capacity, so you don't have to replace your board that often.

Memory

Rule #1: Buy from known major manufacturers like Kingston, Corsair, or Crucial. Avoid ‘no-name’ manufacturers.

Rule #2: Buy memory within the same spec as the original memory; e.g. PC3200, if you are adding more memory to an existing installation. A sub-corollary is that if you want assured reliability, when you add more memory, replace the whole set with matched memory stick pairs from the same manufacturer.

Rule #3: Performance RAM isn't worth it – you only need it if you're planning to overlock, and you did read what we said earlier about overclocking, didn't you?

Graphics Card

Rule #1: There's only AMD (discrete or built in), or NVIDIA (discrete or built in). Everything else is kind of sucky. If you want to do AI tasks (upscaling, text to image, or text generation), your only choice is NVIDIA as every AI researcher uses NVIDIA for their papers.

Rule #2: Picking the #2 or #3 ranked Graphics card of that generation works nicely. You get a big improvement over your previous video card, and the card is powerful enough to last for several years before it needs to be replaced to keep up with newer games.

A good example of this theory is the cost/price/ratings of video cards as of 2020 (LINK). Tom's Hardware tested 40 cards and set the highest performing one to a rating of 100%, enabling comparison of performance over generations and within current generations:

You can also see how the mid/low level cards in manufacturer's lineups are not as powerful – for the last couple of generations of NVIDIA cards, the 960/1060/2060 series are the low end ones, though they have recently introduced the 1660 series as a even cheaper “budget” card.

Rule #3: Stay away from mid-level or low-level cards in the ATI/NIVIDIA card lineups. Generally, due to the very confusing methods of naming both manufacturers use, a newer mid-level card may actually be less powerful than your older existing card. They also will have to be replaced more often than a more powerful card. They are however acceptable if you are building a budget box that won't be used much for other than the internet, media center streaming and maybe some old game you really do like.

Generalized Storage Medium Notes

Rule #1: Stick with major, trusted medium manufacturers if your application will be mission critical, such as your desktop computer with irreplaceable data on it, or your digital camera that you use to shoot weddings with.

Due to the proliferation of the ‘cloud’, several online datacenters have begun to share their HDD reliability statistics; amongst them Backblaze. (Backblaze Q2 2015 Stats).

Effectively as of 2015, Western Digital (and it’s enterprise brand HGST) is the best hard drive manufacturer for consumer grade drives. Enterprise grade is a different beast, with little data available on failure rates.

Rule #2: Always have two (primary and secondary) drives in your PC!

Decades ago, during Windows 9x days, if things went bad, you had to format the hard drive to reinstall the OS as a fresh copy depressingly often. This happened enough to me as a teenager growing up, that I adopted the Rule of Two:

A Primary Drive for My Operating System and games
and
A Secondary Drive for my Data, Photos and Things I want to Save.

This rule has become a little bit less important with the increasing amount of multi-computer households, and the availability of USB adapters for every storage drive, enabling you to remove a drive and attempt to recover data off of it with your laptop.

However, there is a newer reason to keep doing this Rule of Two:

Solid State Drive Wear. NAND flash used in SSDs has a finite number of read/write cycles before it's no longer good. Samsung's drives are rated at:

QVO: 360 Terabyte Write Warranty
EVO: 600 Terabyte Write Warranty
PRO: 1,200 Terabyte Write Warranty

I've been using for about 5 or 6 years a pair of SSDs in my main computer, and after that much time, the write rates are:

Primary Drive: 512GB Samsung M.2 (18.94 TB Written)
Secondary Drive: 1 TB Samsung 2.5" (2.92 TB Written)

You can see how the Secondary drive has far less “wear” on it.

Rule #2: Never fill your storage medium up to virtually it’s full capacity (5% or less of free space remaining); as some programs may not have error checking that prevents them from doing a large write if there is less capacity on the drive than the program’s average write.

A good example of this phenomenon is filling up completely a digital camera’s memory card with that “one last shot”, and in the process the camera over-writes something important, messing up the card and causing you to lose all the previously taken shots on that card!

Keeping a buffer of free space at all times also provides a cushion for bad sectors or other items which will occur as your medium ages.

Solid State Drives

I previously recommended Samsung SSDs for data/system reliability; but as of 2023, their SSD drives are failing at a very fast rate, causing others to pull their recommendations as well. This is an object lesson in how things can change in only a few years!

Rule #1: Stick with “big name manufacturers” for data/system reliability. If you’re just assembling a toy to play with (e.g. an arcade emulator system) with no critical data to be stored on it; then you can go with a drive made by someone else to save money.

There’s a very good reason for this rule. In the “old days”, the late un-lamented OCZ was one of the first SSD manufacturers out there; and they got high performance at good prices via playing tricks. What they did was they sent special units with hand-picked high quality flash to reviewers; while everyone else got units made via flash ‘lotteries’. At first, these ‘lottery’ OCZ SSDs would be somewhat okay; but after a little bit of general use; they would start failing. It's a big reason OCZ no longer exists as a company.

Rule #2: Within most manufacturer's lineups, there are two (or three) basic versions of each SSD – the ‘consumer’ and ‘prosumer’ versions. Generally, the ‘prosumer’ version costs about $100-150 more than the equivalent ‘consumer’ version for the same amount of storage space.

The difference between them is generally that the more expensive one can handle heavy complex disk loads (thousands of files being written at the same time, etc); along with much better ratings for NAND endurance; which in 2020 for Samsung's drives were:

QVO: 360 Terabyte Write Warranty
EVO: 600 Terabyte Write Warranty
PRO: 1,200 Terabyte Write Warranty

For capacities below 500~ GB or for a “toy”, you can get by with the ‘consumer’ versions. Anything 1~ TB and above; go for the ‘prosumer’ version; because at those capacities, a serious drive failure can cause massive loss of data; and with that much data in play, making backups becomes onerous and time consuming for the average user.

Internal Hard Drives

Rule #1: Stay away from the bleeding edge in hard drive capacities. For most of the early 2010s, 1 TB and above hard drives suffered from an abnormally high amount of failures, due to the much higher data densities of those drives making a failure much more unforgiving. I have no idea if these problems have been solved or not; but sticking to a lower density drive for drives that will be heavily used will increase reliability.

Basically, if you only hook up a high capacity drive (multi-TB) externally once or twice a month to back up your data, you should not have problems with it; but if you thrash it every day as a primary OS drive...

Rule #2: Multiple partitions aren't really worth it anymore, due to the advances in file systems (NTFS is a vast improvement over FAT or FAT32). They also increase the probability that you may do something wrong when you tool around with your system's settings while installing the OS, and you end up nuking your data partition instead of the OS partition. Ooops.

External Hard Drives

These are only good for backup storage needs – e.g. you have 50 gigaterabytes of family photos or videos you need to backup, and you don't feel like burning 11 billion DVDs for backup purposes. They are NOT a mobile storage solution. That way lies the click of death after being put in a briefcase for a day of jostling. Likewise, they're a bit too erratic, even with the advances regarding device drivers and USB drivers for them to be used as a primary storage solution – for that, stick to Internal HDDs.

They cannot be as easily ejected/added to a system as a USB stick or Flash Card. Generally, disconnect them after your system has been turned off and the drive automatically turns off.

Cases

As before, get a case from a major manufacturer like Antec. They're put together a lot more sturdily than the cheap clone cases, are much, much easier to assemble; and tend to come with special thumb screws which sure beat using a screwdriver!

Power Supply Units (PSUs)

The power supply is the one component in your computer, if it fails, can take down just about everything, from the motherboard to your hard drives permanently via frying.

So do not skimp on it by getting cheapo-no name PSUs that are “bargains”. You won't feel like you've gotten a bargain after it bombs and takes the rest of your system with it.

So only buy power supplies from known big name manufacturers like Asus, Corsair, etc.

When you are choosing your power supply, keep three factors in mind:

1.) Add in a little bit of extra power than what you need. If you figure your system needs about 400 watts of power to run, put in a 500-550 watt power supply. The reasons for doing this are so that you have a buffer for possible future upgrades; i.e., you might want to upgrade to a more powerful video card in the future, or add more hard drives. Additionally, this provides an extra margin of durability. Power supplies designed for 500 watts when they pull only 400 watts run cooler, and because they're built for a hotter thermal environment, they last longer and have less critical failures.

2.) This does not mean that a 800 to 1,000 watt PSU will give you a ten times greater margin of durability. There's a limit of diminishing returns, and your electric bill will hate you. Plus, only a very few systems actually NEED such power.

3.) Take a close look at the output cables it offers. You want to have only the cables you need with a little overhead for expansions. Otherwise, the inside of your box will look like a spaghetti mass of wiring. which not only looks horrible through a transparent window (which a lot of cases have now); but it also cuts airflow inside the case, and reduces the effectiveness of your cooling system. A lot of mid-range and virtually all high-end PSUs are now “modular”, in that there are sockets on the PSU for the various rails, and you only plug in the cables that you need. I do not have any experience with those or their durability, so I cannot make any informed comments on them.

Computer Assembly

If you're doing major computer assembly work; e.g putting together an entire system from the boxes they came in; wear an ESD Wrist Strap. While computer parts are surprisingly durable (for example, I've had cards which have sat unprotected against other cards for nearly a decade boot up and run with no problems; but those are exceptions to the rule); you want to be sure that you haven't blown your investment in computer parts by shorting out a key component.

While you can RMA those components; it's annoying to wait for a new part to come in.

Minor assembly work; e.g. adding a new hard drive, or changing the memory in an existing system can be done safely by regularly touching unpainted metal parts of the case to ground yourself and dissipate any possible charge.

Do assembly in a relatively clean room or area. Do not do it in carpeted areas; and if you have any pets in the house, lock them out of the assembly area until the computer is assembled and sealed up, to avoid them transferring static charges from them to you via rubbing against you.