 I pride myself on high quality tech tips, but those take like 10, 15 minutes. You guys don't have time for that. Could they be distilled into more like 10 or 15 seconds? To find out, we took some of the best tech talks, that is to say, TikToks with tech tips. And we are gonna tell you guys if they check out. Starting with this pile of broken cable boxes. Yep, this is gonna be interesting. Unlike our sponsor Cable Mod, they're just cables, but they look fantastic. Cable Mod allows you to personalize the look of your PC with custom colored cables. Try out their configurator and get a realistic preview of your cables at the link down below. One of the most fun things for me about this is I haven't actually seen any of these tech talks. And our first one is from Dylan. Dylan844. Got it, there's a lot of Dylans. Dad asked to go to the thrift store and pick up these old DirecTV DVRs. This TikTok suggests that a great way to get a cheap hard drive is to go to the thrift store and buy one of these old DVRs for as little as five, or we paid $10, then strip it down to extract the nummy hard drive. Dylan suggests that you can find drives that are as large as one or even two terabytes inside these units, which would be one heck of a value. And we can actually already see in this one that Dylan might be onto something. One thing Dylan glossed over in his very concise guide though is that those are security screws. Okay, just hold on there for a second. That's not very safe. You can hold that a bit better. Oh yeah, not bad. Oh yeah. You want some gloves? I'm gonna get you some gloves. No, I'm fine. I am very covered in metal shards. Can I suggest a thing? No, I'm good. Now it's time to find out what I got for my $30, starting with the gray one that definitely has a hard drive inside. Wow, that is a dusty, disgusting machine. And sure enough, SATA hard drive. Got some hot glue on the connectors to make sure that they don't come out. I've seen that trick before. And oh, that's a disappointment. I don't even know what a DB 35.2 is, but I know 160 gigabytes when I see it. That's not worth the $5 Dylan promised, let alone the 10 that I paid. This is like those videos where you just open up Pokemon card packs or Kinder surprises, except nerdier and way grosser. There we go. Hey, 500 gigs this time. I mean, I actually don't know that I would pay $10 for a 500 gig drive, but that's a lot better than paying $10 for 160 gig drive. Am I right? Now for door number three, 500 gigs. What is that pipeline hard drive? Man, these OEM only models that I've never heard of. Very, very strange. Still, this is at least worth extracting. So we got to go ahead and take out two standard Phillips head screws right here and here. Then do a little bit of negotiating because the other side is actually held down by these little bent metal tabs. And a one. It's probably great for the hard drive. Oh no, that's probably fine. Honestly, actually the way they validate these things, it's like crazy. A few more screws to remove the hard drive from its sled. Then we pop this guy off. And voila, completely standard 500 gig drive. All in all, we salvaged 1.16 terabytes of hard drives for about 23 US dollars. Not the worst deal on earth, but Dylan failed to mention a few things. The tools required to actually extract the drives, the precautions that should be taken when working with equipment that has exposed power supply circuitry, like these DVRs, the incredibly important step of checking the model number of the unit so that you can find out how much hard drive space it has before you buy it. And of course, the minor detail that these hard drives have been in use for oftentimes a very long time under non-ideal conditions. And the odds of them actually working are less than 100%. In fact, only two of them spun up and were detected by our system. And only one of them, a 500 gig model, managed to pass a short drive self-test. So overall, a lot more creative than shucking external drives, but these emissions are gonna cost Dylan844 a few points. I give this tech talk a seven out of 10. But if adding sketchy hard drives to your system isn't the best idea, what can you do if your drive is full? Well, one idea is to just free up space on your existing machine. We watched countless TikToks, and this one by HardwareSavvy is definitely the best, but also the most infuriating because he almost got it right. How to instantly free up gigabytes of space from your PC. And you'll be surprised to find a lot of apps that have taken up a lot of space that you haven't used in a long time, like this one here. This is all fine. In the next video, I'm gonna show you a tool that's gonna allow you to free up tens of gigabytes of data that you never thought existed on your hard drive. It shows WindrStack briefly. No video about it ever comes out. Okay. Uninstalling unused programs and cleaning up temporary files are both a good start, but the truth is that four gigs isn't even enough to install many game patches these days, let alone the entire game. And that's where the type of tool that TechSavvy showed us, but then didn't demonstrate how to use, is much more useful. We're gonna go to ninite.com, select WindrStack, get your Ninite, and we're gonna install one of those tools and show you guys how to use it. Now that WindrStack is installed, all we need to do is wait for the analysis to run. You have 18 and a half gigs in your recycle bin, Alex. When the analysis is done, you get this great visualization that shows your entire drive as a mosaic of little squares and rectangles. Then if you select a particular folder, you can actually see an outline of every one of the individual files inside that folder. And that's what's really great about a tool like this, is instead of only targeting temporary files that the operating system itself created and knows are temporary, it can target files that you created temporarily and then totally forgot about. Overall, we were able to free up almost 30 gigabytes of unneeded data. So I give this tech talk a 10 out of 10 for the idea. The implementation, where he doesn't actually make the video he promised, drags it down to about a three. We have no idea why these videos are so big on tech talk. This is not hacking. It's the easiest, cheapest content ever, but for whatever reason, it racks up millions of likes. So there, fine, we tried it. But that wasn't really the point of this segment. The point of this segment is to try out some of the top tech talk hacks that are about as hacking as what I just did was. Our first hack from Dreas has three quarters of a million likes and almost a hundred thousand shares. You go up to this top bar and you type in prnt.sc forward slash any two letters and any four numbers. And you press enter and it will give you a screenshot from somebody's phone. Okay, so we're just going to an image uploading service, typing in random characters and hoping to creep someone's pictures. Yeah, so I did this for about 20 minutes. There are a couple that we can't show, but those were just stuff like full GPA breakdowns, English proficiency tests, and someone's onboarding for a job in India as a mechanical engineer, where they were making $3 an hour. Also lots of invoices and some Bitcoin wallets, all of which are not things you should be putting on here. Okay, so what's happening here is people are using more advanced screen capture software than what's included with their computer. Snipping tool, which comes with windows, will allow you to drag a window and then save that file, but it only saves it locally. Some of these other programs like ShareX for example, have features that allow you to automatically upload the image to an image sharing service. And then they will actually take that URL, automatically copy it to your clipboard and then allow you to paste it and share it with someone else. It's very convenient when the images you're capturing aren't confidential or private, but this goes to show you how easily people could stumble across them, whether by accident or in this case on purpose. Do you want the best one that I found? Not porn, is it? I'd be enjoying a glass of wine, sitting back in a black leather armchair, watching a fireplace while the walls of the room I'm in are covered in screaming and wailing faces. Yeah, definitely a way to kill an hour if you have nothing else to do. And unlike any of our other hacks, you are actually accessing compromised information someone didn't intend to share with you. I'm giving it a 10. Time for our next hack. Everyone knows about Inspect Element. Yup, it allows you to edit the contents of a webpage. But if you go to console and write document.designmode equals on, you can edit just about anything on the page by typing normally. It's still not a hack, but if you're into doctoring screenshots and causing mayhem within your social circle, I could see this one coming in handy. I give this one a nine. It's just so convenient. I can share this with Steve right now. Steve just got back to me. WTF, what the is this? Lol. Joke or no? I am literally the worst friend. I dropped everything and immediately changed the password and checked my account. Can I upgrade that one to a 10 out of 10? Yup. Time for our next hack. This one's my favorite. Oh God, okay. I see where this is going. Time to hide this homework folder. Customize, change icon, pick an icon no one could ever look for. Yup. Hidden forever. Hiding in plain sight? It's not hacking, but I give it an eight and a half out of 10. Really? Well, the thing about hiding a folder is that if whoever's looking for it knows how to show hidden folders, they will be able to find that one. So you can see it's as simple as changing my file explorer settings to show hidden folders and boom. Now MSN network shows up and you can see it's kind of grayed out. That's what hidden folders look like. So me, an intellectual, I'm gonna go, someone was trying to hide this. Oh my. A better way to hide it is to just leave it in plain sight then and encrypt it. So now our original MSN network, boom, is empty. And this new folder can only be accessed by me. Now that's a money shot. How to view any private Instagram post. So what you're first gonna do is you're gonna right click, hit inspect. Oh good, we're back to inspect element. Click that and you're gonna hit remove. So after you remove the page hide button, all you gotta do is hit the refresh button. Boom, there you all go, man. That is pathetic if that actually works. You reload the page. Maybe at some point it was this easy. Apparently it doesn't work anymore. I'm giving this a one out of 10. Why does it have 23,000 likes? One really popular type of tech talk is people showing off their epic gaming rigs and talking about just how affordably they can be obtained. Which was my gaming cell. Oh God, your voice is so annoying. First off with the PC, when I bought it, it was around $1,100. However, I made a few upgrades so far. So I think that price goes up to around 1,300. You think? You think? I think the entire keyboard was around $350. You think? The mic was free cause it got sent out to me. I paid for my boom arm. So the total for my gaming set up was around $2,560. By that logic. Wow, you guys wouldn't believe how affordably you can get this set up. I paid $0. EK sent this over to us so that we could put it in videos and have like a sick gaming rig. And wow, these two plants we got from IKEA for a total of, I think it was $10. I got these lightsabers. Maybe these were 20 bucks each at the Disney store. Who's counting anyway? These gold coins. These were sent by dbrand. F**k you dbrand. Obviously the best part though is this LTT store Northern lights desk pad. Only $29.99. Lttstore.com. Samsung sent us this monitor. They actually sponsored the video we made about it. So net, this cost negative dollars. So in total, this gaming set up costs you less than $0. Enjoy. Hope it was helpful. Freaking idiot. Watch what happens when I turn on my epic gaming battle station. Yeah. Okay. Clicking VLC to open a video file when you turn on your computer. Not exactly a hack, but I can see why the kids would be into this. Unfortunately what they didn't show you is how to do it. Step one is you'll need someone to control your RGB lighting. Andy, you want to come out from behind the table? Yeah. We had an iPad to do that, but the app was being complicated, so Andy pressed the button. Anyway, the point is all you got to do is go on SpiceWorks.com and there's this great topic called Windows 10 Play a Video Upon Login Before Loading the Desktop. It's a bit of doing, it will take a while, but the point is if you really want to do that, you can follow this guide or maybe there's a better one. I don't know, I don't care, it doesn't matter. I give this one a four out of 10. It's definitely cool, but they don't show you how to do it at all. What else we got here? Oh good, hardware savvy is back. Choose how to make your computer faster in 10 seconds. Restart your computer. When you enter your BIOS, find your RAM's XMP profile. Click on it and choose it. Oh man, okay, there's a few things here. One, yes, okay, XMP can be a way to get a little bit more speed out of your computer, but in many cases, the XMP rated speed of your RAM will not actually run stably with your motherboard and the integrated memory controller on your CPU. I give this tech tip a six and a half. It's a valid tech tip, but there's a lot of details missing. Yeah, hardware savvy could have mentioned that it's called DOCP on AMD systems. That's useful, that's good to know. Oh my God, shut up. Okay, so it shows you how to add multiple things to the Windows clipboard. All right, that's pretty handy. Let's try it. Control C, control C. Just make sure that you don't enable this feature on a shared computer if for whatever reason you are copying things that you wouldn't want anyone else to see. Boop, good tech talk. Nine and a half out of 10. I like it. Our final tech talk from the Savage 1013 has 59,000 hearts and 2000 shares. Push the FN, Windows and Shift key with B. This is going to reset slash fix your drivers for your graphics card. Okay, control Windows, Shift, B. Okay, nine out of 10. Could be a useful tech talk. Just like this could be a useful message from our sponsor, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the easy to use accounting software designed specifically with you in mind, the small business owner. It has built-in automation so you spend less time tracking projects and more time doing what matters most, growing your business. So whether you're a trades person, creative agency or a YouTuber, you can choose a plan that's right for you. They have award-winning Toronto-based customer support who's always ready to help you if you need it. And you don't have to take my word for any of this. You can try FreshBooks for free for 30 days today. No credit card required at freshbooks.com slash Linus. If you guys enjoyed this video, but you're looking for something a bit more serious, maybe check out our time card video. That's right. It's a card designed to keep time in your PC. It's actually really cool.