Troubleshooting articles

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Microsoft had a "Cart of Death" to intentionally crash and debug early Windows USB infrastructure

The crash cart: In a hospital a crash cart could save your life, but Microsoft had a different type of crash cart back in the day that usually spelled the death of a testing PC. In-house developers called it the "Cart of Death" – a repurposed mail cart carrying daisy-chained USB hubs and tons of connected USB devices to test plug-and-play support on Windows PCs.
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Mounting your PS5 vertically might lead to catastrophic failure from liquid metal leakage

PSA: Stop what you are doing and go turn your PlayStation 5 on its side. It's been discovered that the liquid metal used for cooling can potentially leak and fry the motherboard. There have only been a handful of cases reported, so should you take the chance, or is there not enough evidence for this to become a real problem?

How to Backup USB Drives and Restore Them, Bootable State and All

Do you keep a bootable USB drive handy? Since we only tend to keep a few USB drives available, we tend to overwrite the contents of Windows installation media and the like after a single use. Intending to save some time and effort on the next go-around, we sought methods to preserve an exact copy of bootable USB drives which could be restored from a backup file when needed.

Troubleshooting and Fixing Windows 8's Boot Configuration

Windows 8 received a decent amount of enhancements on the desktop side that I tend to appreciate versus running Windows 7. One such area of improvement is notification management and how it handles updates and system restarts. Running the final version of the OS for a few months now, it's been a painless affair until this past weekend.

Unable to boot all of sudden, after some troubleshooting I settled on the idea that it wasn't a hardware problem. With a long history of dual booting different versions of Windows over the years, finding a corrupt MBR, boot sector, or Boot Configuration Data (BCD) is nothing new, but it took me longer than usual to come to a solution.