This website was born to collect and share my experiences in tuning and repairing computers to help preserve the enviroment; personal computers have a much shorter lifespan than most goods, often because we are not able to properly service and improve them.
Many are trashed only because of a slow/failing hard drive, where a new SSD and some HW and SW maintenance – undervolting, overclock, OS debloating – could make it perform even better than a brand new off-the-shelf untweaked machine.
Sometimes, easy and cheap repairs can be obtained with unorthodox methods, like iMacs and Macbooks with failing GPUs that can actually be disabled or swapped for a better model and undervolted to last much longer.
While cost saving is surely a key driver – a core2duo from 2008 with a 50€ SSD and tuning will perform better than a brand 300€ brand new Atom/Celeron – repairing of old computers like iMacs is a very time-consuming process wich could be considered cost ineffective. But there are more factors to consider; the most important is ecology. While new HW is usually more efficient to run because of improving architectures and processing nodes, tuning of voltage/frequency curves can make up for a lot of that, and the total energy cost of a given item is mostly resulting of materials extraction and their disposal, manufacturing and shipping rather than operating energy; thus, saving older HW is always good for the enviroment, expecially for machines that are not stressed and running 24/7 .
The creation of this website was greatly motivated by the work of Louis Rossman; in his videos he advocates for right to repair – as Apple and many other companies are tryn to make repair of older HW much harder than necessary – and also reported on the terrible working conditions of Apple employees.
PizzaUndervolt is based on the work done as Mir Computers in our lab in Milano, Italy – mostly Gabriele (me), Orbee, Mr Omari and Mr Zander – and as part of Hybris Audio with the music composer Filippo Beretta
Our email address is mircomputersdesign@gmail.com