bios

The Terminator was defeated not by guerrilla resistance or a heroic last stand, but by something far more mundane: a tired motherboard battery that refused to hold the BIOS settings long enough for the apocalypse to boot. An image of a vintage Terminator Salvation arcade cabinet stuck on a...

Good day everyone, I have recently put together a brand new build using the following parts list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/d8gNdb - Motherboard = Gigabyte B850 Gaming X WiFi6E (link to MB manual) * CPU cable (4x4) and ATX cable (20 Pin) are plugged in * CPU Cooler Fan and ARGB cables...

I noticed my PC was taking longer to reach the desktop, and the culprit turned out not to be Windows at all but the firmware stage—what Task Manager calls the Last BIOS time—a small number that can add seconds (or more) to every cold boot and points to fixes that live inside your motherboard’s...

Microsoft has warned that the original Windows Secure Boot certificates issued in 2011 are set to expire beginning in June 2026, and that systems which do not receive replacement certificates before that date may stop receiving critical pre‑boot security updates — leaving them exposed to...

Microsoft’s Secure Boot update FAQ makes clear that a coordinated, multi-step transition is now live: Windows will roll new 2023 signing certificates into UEFI variables and update the Windows boot manager to preserve Secure Boot protection ahead of the 2011 CA expirations, but the rollout...

Microsoft’s choice to omit the x86 HLT (halt) instruction from Windows 95’s shipped idle path was not a bug or oversight — it was a deliberate, conservative engineering decision taken to avoid a catastrophic failure mode that, in lab and field tests, could leave some laptops effectively bricked...

Phison’s latest public testing and community forensics have reframed the mid‑August Windows 11 SSD scare: what began as frantic reports that the Windows 11 August cumulative updates (commonly tracked as KB5063878 and the related KB5062660) were “bricking” NVMe drives now appears to be a...

Phison has publicly acknowledged and replicated a key finding first raised by the PCDIY community: a wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs linked in timing to Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) appears to have been driven, in at least some test cases, by...

Windows 95 engineers walked away from a simple CPU instruction — the x86 HLT (halt) — not because the idea was exotic or useless, but because using it risked turning customers’ laptops into permanent bricks. What looks, in hindsight, like a small compatibility choice was in fact a high-stakes...

Microsoft and Phison have now all but closed the book on the late‑August panic: after weeks of community reports, lab reproductions and headlines warning that Windows 11 24H2’s August cumulative (KB5063878) was “bricking” SSDs, thorough vendor and Microsoft testing found no reproducible link...

Intel’s Application Optimization (APO) has received another round of support updates, expanding the number of game profiles and refining how hybrid Intel CPUs are used while gaming — a move that promises small-to-noticeable frame-rate and frame‑time improvements for certain titles, but that also...

Microsoft is pushing PC makers to stop treating USB Type-C as a cosmetic port and to implement the platform-level hooks Windows 11 needs to deliver consistent, useful notifications when Type‑C connections behave unexpectedly. The company’s guidance — now baked into Windows’ hardware requirements...

Modern PC shooters are raising the bar: several recent AAA titles now refuse to run on Windows 10 unless Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 are enabled, forcing many players to move from legacy BIOS/MBR setups to a UEFI/GPT configuration before they can even launch the game. Background / Overview The...

Create and Use a Bootable Windows 10/11 Recovery USB to Repair Startup Difficulty: Intermediate | Time Required: 20-30 minutes Introduction A bootable Windows recovery USB gives you the tools to fix startup problems, run offline repair utilities, restore system images, and — if needed —...

Microsoft says the recent reports that a Windows 11 cumulative update “bricked” consumer SSDs are not supported by its telemetry and lab findings, and vendor testing so far has failed to reproduce a fleet‑level failure tied to the August servicing wave tracked as KB5063878. Background The story...

A wave of community test results and vendor confirmations this week has put the latest Windows 11 cumulative update under a harsh spotlight: several SSDs can disappear from Windows during sustained, large write operations after installing the August 12, 2025 update (KB5063878), with a...

The Dell Precision 5550 spec sheet that appears in the teamduval.org listing — claiming a 10th‑generation Intel Core i7‑10850H, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe SSD, NVIDIA Quadro T1000 and Windows 11 Professional in a 15.6‑inch mobile workstation chassis — largely matches configurations Dell offered for...

Windows 11 promises a cleaner interface, deeper security and better performance — but not every PC qualifies. This guide gives a clear, practical pathway to find out whether your machine can run Windows 11, how to fix the common blockers (TPM and Secure Boot are the usual suspects), and what...

The VAN 9003 crash that left many Valorant players staring at the message “This build of Vanguard is out of compliance with current system settings” proved to be less a single bug and more a collision of modern Windows security posture, anti‑cheat kernel drivers, and inconsistent platform...

When Task Manager shows fewer cores than your CPU’s spec sheet promises, it triggers an immediate alarm: is Windows misreporting, is some software throttling the chip, or is the processor literally losing cores? The truth lives between these possibilities. In many cases the fix is a handful of...