Before we review this week a few words on next week: There may not be that many articles written next week as I have to travel to London and Bristol. In addition to that I’m having various home improvements installed, which will no doubt serve to disrupt my office for a while.

Unlike some bloggers I don’t find that I am able to sit down on a Sunday and churn out a week’s worth of articles in an afternoon. I normally progressively write throughout the week; and at times what you see is hot off the keyboard.

Having forewarned you of an impending week of low-output; let’s now review the posts published since the last newsletter of 17th April:

Picture is not of actual build.

On the weekend of 18th and 19th April I embarked upon a project that had been in the pipeline a while, and which I’d brought forward due to circumstances: I built a new computer incorporating an AMD Phenom x 3 2.3GHz CPU and installed Windows 7 beta on it. I decided that you might be interested in looking in on this, so I wrote about it on Monday, including a few pics I took during the build. There are more pics of this on my Flickr pages too: -

Impressions of Win 7 Beta on a New Box

Having had the misfortune to have senselessly taken out 2 extended warranties some years in the past on computers I bought before I began building my own, I thought it would be helpful to do a piece on my view of what amounts to a money-grabbing sales-gimmick: -

Extended Warranties: Are They Worth the Money?

Recently I’ve written a 2-part series about testing a computer power supply. The first part was on simply testing the output to make sure that something is coming out. The second part was on testing the PSU under load; and I told you how to build a simple circuit to load the unit without having to spend a small fortune on proper professional equipment.

Maybe I should have made this article the third part; but I didn’t: -

What Do I Do If My Power Supply’s Voltage Drops Under Load?

- Using some simple elementary calculus we discover exactly what’s going on in that situation, and how to remedy it.

Staying with the theme of supplying DC current; I showed you the very basics of principles of how a power supply turns the high AC mains voltage that it receives into the low-voltage DC current used to run electronic equipment, including your computer: -

How to Change Alternating Current into Direct Current and Supply DC Electronic Circuitry With Power.

- And that’s yer lot: Well, 4 technical articles is, to my mind, quite enough for a week on one site. I’m sure you have other blogs that you read in addition to this one, and I see no point in causing an information overload. – Added to which I do this on my tod and don’t have the time to write reams and reams of text in the form of gazillions of articles at this point in time.

Keep your eyes peeled though; as although content may be a bit scarce this coming week, that doesn’t mean that there’ll be nothing new: Watch this space; or better still, join the mailing list and have notifications of new content delivered to your inbox. – There’s a subscription form or two in the sidebar on the left on every page. – There’s also a bonus for joining too. Take a look for yourself: -

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Enjoy the weekend. Blessed Be.