Intel didn't abandon 320-series users. When the problem was discovered they quickly released a critical firmware update that prevented the problem from happening.

When the update was released I distinctly remember rushing to update the firmware on around ~200 drives we were using at the time and I have never seen a drive with the firmware update fail in this way.

The only problem was you had to install the update before the drive failed. If the drive had already failed you had to send it to Intel to get it replaced - which shouldn't have been a problem for you since at that time all impacted drives would have still been under warranty.

In my case only 2 drives failed before the update and none failed after. I sent those 2 drives that failed to Intel and received replacements very quickly.

Most of the other drives ended up getting replaced with larger drives a couple of years ago but prior to that they were still working just fine.

I wonder how the power profile settings were configured on the machines. Edge and IE altar their behavior quite significantly depending on how those settings are configured. Last I checked, Chrome outright ignores most of those settings while Firefox at least attempts to respect some of them.

Settings such as minimum Javascript timer frequency, GPU power profile (impacts GPU compositing) can have a big impact on battery life.

Also important is whether or not the power profile was set to throttle the CPU when on battery power and how much to throttle. (Setting it up so that the system is passively cooled while on battery via CPU and GPU throttling can greatly increase battery life at the expense of peak performance.)

Generally while web browsing you don't need 100% CPU and GPU power - especially when operating off of a battery so throttling makes sense. However if the power plan was set to tell applications that it is OK to use 100% of CPU and GPU resources all of the time while on battery power then applications typically won't try to reduce usage and battery life will be significantly worse as a result.

That typically only occurs if the machine hasn't been updated in quite some time or is far behind on updates for some reason (such as a fresh install). There are updates to the Windows Update service that attempt to address most of these but the client still requires a large amount of memory and CPU time when processing a large number of pending updates.

The best thing to do when you encounter such a system is to manually download and install the latest convince rollup which includes most updates up to the date of the rollup in a single handy install package. After that, the machine should be able to get the few remaining updates via Windows Update and the problem shouldn't reoccur as long as the machine is updated fairly regularly.

High performance shared storage arrays based on SSDs typically need as many PCIe lanes as they can get. In fact, many use PCIe switches to allow more devices to be connected. See this article for an example of where high performance storage is going.

Also quite a few lanes need to be dedicated to high speed network adapters. Modern servers often have at least 2 NICs that run anywhere from 10 GBps up to 100 GBps each.

The other thing high numbers of lanes is used for is compute servers with large number of GPUs to provide high floating point performance (typically using GPUs optimized for floating point use - not quite the same as consumer GPUs used for graphics.)

Amazon is typically very good about issuing credit (usually $5 or so) if a prime package arrives later than the guaranteed delivery date shown when the order is placed. Also after requesting compensation a few times via their online support I notice that almost all of my Amazon packages now come UPS 2-day instead of via USPS.

I suspect the change was because of the multiple "Package arrived late" support requests I made.

What makes you think they are using a type 2 hypervisor for this? Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor and is included as an optional feature in most client versions of Windows starting with Windows 8.

When Hyper-V is enabled, the currently installed instance of Windows is moved into a VM that runs under the hypervisor and becomes a management VM that is automatically started on boot. The management VM does not have access to the RAM assigned to any other VMs. It can potentially ask the hypervisor to suspend or shutdown a VM and possibly tamper with the disks assigned to the VM but only if the ACLs governing access allow it.

I highly suspect the VM hosting Edge will in fact be a Hyper-V VM since most of framework is already there. However this may cause problems with the DRM included in some AAA game titles that currently refuse to run if Hyper-V is enabled.

The problem is, downloading or ripping the audio track from videos is a violation of the Youtube Terms of Service section 5B unless the video is one of the few that actually has a download link in the video description.

Like it or not, sites like YTMP3 are violating the current Terms of Service for Youtube. However Google is really the ones going after them, not the record companies. And, so far Google has put little effort into actually enforcing their Terms of Service beyond forcing the removal of a small handful of Youtube extensions available for Chrome in the past.

Secure Boot only protects against unexpected changes to the boot loader (which typically only changes legitimately when a new OS is installed.)

This protects against malware that relies on infecting boot media with a compromised boot loader but not against rootkits that use OS drivers or some other attack vector.

Apple sells SD card readers that work with almost all iOS devices including the iPhone 7.

Not quite as nice as having a slot built-in to the phone and application support is a bit limited due to the fact that only a few iOS applications support external storage devices but it does work.

Apple also sells a Lightning to USB host adapter which lets you use other USB devices such as keyboards, mice, flash drives, and external hard drives (as long as they don't attempt to pull too much power over USB)

The settings are saved in the registry - not the shortcut and are applied regardless of how the executable is launched once they are set.

If I remember correctly a hash of the excitable is used to identify which settings go with which executables so an update to an executable could reset the compatibility settings to defaults.

On the other hand, an update to an application or game could potentially fix any compatibility or DPI-related issues a previous version had, although game developers in particular appear to like ignoring DPI-related issues in my experience.

Unfortunately, Windows doesn't support UHD very well. You can use display scaling but it completely hoses windowed fullscreen mode in games because Windows cheerfully applies its scaling to those as well, telling them that your desktop resolution is something like 1706x960

This is primary the fault of lazy game developers and not Windows. Windows only lies about display resolution to applications if the application doesn't signal that it understands how to render to displays that are greater than 96 dpi. This allows older applications that always assume a display is running at 96 dpi to still be at least somewhat usable on a very high DPI display.
If an application (or game) signals it is DPI-aware then Windows will report the true resolution and DPI of the display so the application can render itself appropriately.
You can also manually disable the high DPI detection for an individual application or game by modifying the Compatibility properties on the shortcut for the application and checking the box labeled "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings". This causes Windows to treat the application as being high DPI-aware even if it isn't.

Apple doesn't even protect their OS, and only go after people trying to sell hackintoshes.

While Apple does push for DRM-free audio that does not extend to other forms of media. Most of the video content in the iTunes store is protected with DRM and apps for iOS devices are also protected with DRM,

It is also worth pointing out that OS X does attempt to identify the hardware it is running on and will halt during boot if it detects a non Apple motherboard. In fact, a bug in the hardware detecting routines of the initial releases of OX X 10.10 would cause certain models of Mac Mini to halt when booting the impacted versions via netboot because the hardware was detected as being non Apple.

The hackintosh community has found several ways to either bypass or fool the checks but the fact remains that Apple does actively try to prevent OS X from being run on non Apple hardware.

Performance depends on the speed of the USB device. Good quality USB 3 flash drives can be read at 300 MB/s or more making them much faster than the traditional hard drives installed in most consoles - not to mention optical drives.

Most print drivers do not run with Local System privileges by default on Windows but the driver installers do. This vulnerability involves replacing the real driver installer with a malicious one and exploiting systems that way.

Windows supports signature verification for print drivers - it is just disabled by default even though most current print drivers are signed. You can also configure Windows to only install print drivers served from specific print servers. Enabling either option would be pretty effective at making this vulnerability very hard if not impossible to exploit.

SD cards (and CF) are not going to be replaced in cameras any time soon so this new standard provides zero benefit to me,

Except that SD cards are not nearly fast enough for current high megapixel cameras when shooting using RAW. Many higher end cameras have abandoned CF and SD cards and have moved to using XQD due to needing continuous write speeds of 400 MBps or more.

A camera that shoots RAW files around 80 MB (which is what the current crop of high-resolution cameras do - such as the Nikon D800, Canon 5DS, and Sony a7rii) needs at least 400 MBps to maintain a 5 fps burst without needing a very large buffer. Some professional cameras can do up to 10 fps bursts which requires even higher speeds.