First off, a little context. I'm a 30+ year Mac user and I just bought my first PC in decades. I'm no stranger to Windows and Linux, but haven't used them as a desktop OS for about 15 years. My ...

I have an older Dell Inspiron 1750 laptop. I replaced its original spinning HDD with a brand new Samsung SSD 850 EVO drive, that was advertised as supporting hardware encryption. So now I'm trying to ...

It doesn’t take a few minutes to boot up your computer anymore, but it’s also still far from instantaneous. Even with modern, super-fast electronics, there’s a delay before you can start doing ...

This will be my last foray into UEFI firmware for quite a while. For those who are already tired of my writing about it, I apologize in advance; for those who have asked for more, here it is. For the ...

Unless your computer is pretty old, it probably uses UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) to boot. The idea is that a bootloader picks up files from an EFI partition and uses them to start ...

These days, it's fairly easy to find a PCI Express-based SSD to transform one's desktop -- Angelbird, Fusion-io, Micron and ASUS will sell you one, just to name a few. That said, the last of those ...

When your PC boots up, the first thing that loads up is the UEFI Firmware or the BIOS. It does a lot of things, including the option of which hardware to use to boot Windows. If you want to boot from ...

We're in the home stretch now. In the first post of this series I looked at the general characteristics of Linux installations on systems with UEFI firmware - specifically how the disk is partitioned, ...