Category Archives: computer tips

Windows 10 printing to old/offline printer instead of new one [SOLVED]

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TL;DR: Replaced a printer but Windows 10 keeps sending jobs to the old one? Cancel the stuck jobs in the old printer’s queue, then set your new printer as the default. Two minutes and you’re back in business. 👍 So I got a message from a client’s office today. “The printer won’t print.” Classic. We had just set up a brand new Brother DCP-L5510DN to replace their old DCP-L5500DN. The new printer was confirmed working via USB the day before.

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Claude AI Custom Instructions: A Real Example That Actually Works

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Disclaimer: I used Claude to help me write this post.  I’ve been using Claude pretty heavily for a while now – coding (notice that dash, lol), project planning, research, general “help me figure this out” and perhaps most surprisingly as an evaluator of ideas and for grading performance on various tasks. I’ve tested it with friends in a variety of industries and it is almost always of some value. Despite that, “out of the box” it has a few issues. Primarily not

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The Ultimate Claude Code Workstation

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A Hardware Guide for People Who Actually Work With AI With regards to AI and Claude, here’s what most people are not writing about yet: the hardware side of working with Claude, and more importantly, the human side. A lot of AI blog and Reddit posts out there fall into one of two camps. Camp A is obsessing over local LLM rigs, how many NVIDIA H100s you can cram into a tower, how much VRAM you need to run a

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RTX 5080 vs. RTX 3090: Is It Time to Upgrade in 2026?

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Is the Upgrade Actually Worth It? The internet loves a clean upgrade narrative: Old card bad, new card good, spend money. But the reality of the NVIDIA RTX 5080 era is messier and more interesting. If you are currently rocking an RTX 3090, you’re still packing serious heat. That card remains a 24GB monster. The big question: Is the 5080 a meaningful leap forward, or just high-end hardware FOMO? Let’s break down the data. Raw Gaming Performance: Faster, but is

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Alienware / RTX 5090 Laptop — Quick Spec Dump (Reference)

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I lucked into a super deal on this laptop (in-store only) about three months before RAM prices started getting crazy, and my wife was awesome enough to pick it up for me at Micro Center while she was in the city. 🙌 So far it’s been an absolute beast: coding, compiling, LLMs, image generation, and basically anything else I’ve thrown at it without breaking a sweat. It lives on my desk most of the time, but it’s pretty great being

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AMD APU (CPU+GPU) Review: From 7840U to the Monster “Strix Halo” 395 AI Max+

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I’ve been getting some comments lately about the current state of AMD’s mobile processors. It’s a bit of a jungle out there with the naming schemes (looking at you, AMD marketing department 😉), so I wanted to put together a guide as I regularly use these CPUs/APUs in my daily work. Specifically, we are looking at the evolution from the popular “Thin & Light” 7840U (like in my trusty T14) all the way up to the beast, the Ryzen AI

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ThinkPad P14s AI 9 XH PRO 370 w/96GB RAM & LLM benchmarks

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Running Big LLMs on a Little Workstation: My Adventures with the ThinkPad P14s Gen 6 AMD I’ve been experimenting with large language models (LLMs) lately, and I wanted to see how far I could push things using a (relatively) inexpensive laptop. Enter the ThinkPad P14s Gen 6 AMD—a slim mobile workstation that set me back about $1,600. On paper it’s not exactly a “supercomputer,” but with the right configuration (and my go-to tool, LM Studio), it turns out this little

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Etekcity Infrared Thermometer [REVIEW]

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Etekcity Infrared Thermometer – A Practical Everyday Tool That Just Works 🌡️ You ever need to check the temp of something quickly—whether it’s your grill, oven, HVAC vents, or even your gaming PC? The Etekcity Infrared Thermometer is one of those tools you don’t realize you need until you have one. Then, suddenly, you’ve got three—one for the kitchen, garage, and shop (ask me how I know). It’s simple, affordable, and reliable for checking surface temperatures without making contact—which is

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