Windows

Bit rot is the failure mode nobody plans for: a file that was fine last year won’t open today, no error, no warning, no dramatic failure to point to. One bit somewhere flipped from a 0 to a 1, and now something chokes on it. Everyone plans for the drive dying. Almost nobody plans for the drive quietly lying to them instead. There’s a tool built specifically for this, decades old, still actively maintained, and most people have never heard of it: PAR2. ...

The standard Windows installer refuses to install to a USB drive, and that’s on purpose. Microsoft blocks it outright, which is a problem if you want a portable, bootable Windows environment you can plug into any PC for troubleshooting or borrowed-hardware work, without installing anything on the machine’s internal drive. The fix: Rufus, a free tool for writing bootable ISOs to USB drives, has a mode built exactly for this, called “Windows To Go”. It writes a full, runnable OS straight onto an external drive, bypassing the installer’s block entirely, and it boots on basically anything with a USB 3.0 port. ...

If you use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), you may have noticed a large file on your system drive: C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Local\Packages\<YourDistroFolder>\LocalState\ext4.vhdx This is a virtual hard disk that stores the entire Linux filesystem. It expands automatically as you install packages and create files, but it does not shrink automatically when files are deleted. Over time, this can leave you with a multi-gigabyte file containing mostly unused space. Here’s how to safely compact it and reclaim that space. ...

Note: This build is from 2016. The i5-6500, GTX 970, and every price below are long obsolete. Same as the 2014 version of this guide, the budgeting logic still holds, just not this parts list. The goal of this guide is to build the best gaming PC possible for a $1,000 budget. Not only will this system handle modern games, it’ll also hold its own for streaming, video editing, and graphics work. ...

Note: This build is from 2014. The i5-4670, GTX 760, and every price below are long obsolete. The budget-allocation logic (spend on the GPU, don’t overpay for the motherboard) still applies to building a PC today, but don’t go looking for these exact parts. The goal of this guide is to build the best gaming PC possible for a $1,000 budget. Not only will this system handle modern games at this price point, it’ll also hold its own for everyday tasks. ...