- 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 TechToks,
that is to say TikToks with tech tips,
and we're gonna tell you guys if they check out.
Starting with this pile of broken cable boxes.
- [Alex] Yep.
- This is gonna be interesting.
Unlike our sponsor CableMod, they're just cables,
but they look fantastic.
CableMod 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.
(upbeat music)
One of the most fun things for me about this
is I haven't actually seen any of these TechToks,
and our first one is from Dylan.
- @dylan_844.
- Got it, there's a lot of Dylan's.
- [Alex] I had to go to the thrift store and pick up
these old DirectTV 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 Numi 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.
(saw revving)
- Okay just hold on there for a second.
That's not very safe.
You can hold that a bit better.
- [Linus] Oh yeah, not bad.
(saw cutting)
- Oh yeah.
- [Alex] You want some gloves?
I'm gonna get you some gloves.
- [Linus] Nah, I'm fine.
(saw cutting)
I am very covered in metal shards.
- [Alex] Can I suggest-
- [Linus] Nah, I'm good.
(Saw cutting)
(metal clanking)
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 dirtier and way grosser.
(metal clanking)
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?
(metal clanking)
Now for door number three
500 Gigs.
What is a 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've gonna 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. (metal clanking)
- [Alex] That'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 it's sled.
Then we pop this guy off a 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 units 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 omissions are gonna cost Dylan_844 a few points.
I give this TechTok a 7/10.
But if (metal falling) 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.
- [@hardwaresavvy] How to instantly free up gigabytes
of space from your PC.
And you'll be surprised to find a lot of apps
that are taking up a lot of space that you haven't used
in a long time like this one here.
- This is all fine.
- [@hardwaresavvy] 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.
- He shows WinDirStat briefly,
No video about it ever comes out.
(Alex laughing)
- 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 tech savvy showed us,
but then didn't demonstrate how to use is much more useful.
We're gonna go to Ninite.com, select WinDirStat,
get your Ninite,
and we're gonna install one of those tools
and show you guys how to use it.
Now that WinDirStat 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 TechTok a 10/10 for the idea.
The implementation where he doesn't actually
make the video he promised,
drags it down to about a three.
(upbeat music)
We have no idea why these videos are so big on TikToK.
This is not hacking.
It's the easiest cheapest content ever,
but for whatever reason, it racks up millions of likes.
So they're 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 TikTok hacks that are about as hacking
as what I just did was.
(keyboard clicking)
Our first hack from @dreaaaaas has three quarters
of a million likes and almost a 100,000 shares.
- [@dreaaaaas] You go up to this top bar
and you type in prnt.sc/ any two letter
and any four numbers,
and you press enter,
and it will give you a screen shot 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 picture.
- [Alex] Yeah, so I did this for about 20 minutes.
There were 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.
- [Alex] Oh, 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 in the room I am 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 other hacks,
you aren't 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, yep.
It allows you to edit the contents of a webpage.
But if you go to console and write document.designMode="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 (beeping) is this lol?
Joke or no?"
I am literally the worst friend.
I dropped everything and immediately changed the password
in the checking account.
Can I upgrade that one to a 10/10 time?
- [Alex] Yep.
- Time for our next hack?
- [Alex] 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, yep.
Hidden forever.
Hiding in plain sight.
It's not hacking, but I give it an 8.5/10.
- [Alex] 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 (beeping).
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.
- [@trueyt] So what you're first going to do
is you're gonna right click, hit inspect.
- Oh good, we're back to inspect element.
- [@trueyt] Click that you're gonna hit remove.
So after you y'all remove the page hide button,
all you gotta do is hit the refresh button.
Ooh, there y'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 1/10.
Why does it have 23,000 likes?
- One really popular type of TechTok
is people showing off their epic gaming rigs
and talking about just how affordably they can be obtained.
- [@1dktech] This is my gaming setup.
- Oh god, her 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?
- [@1dktech] I think the entire keyboard was around $350.
- You think?
- [@1dktech] 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.
- Well, you guys wouldn't believe how affordable
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 set by dbrand,
(beeping) you dbrand.
Obviously the best part though is this LTT Store,
Northern Lights Desk Pad, only 29.99 at 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 setup cost you less than $0.
Enjoy, hope it was helpful.
Fricking idiot.
(Alex laughing)
- [Linus] Watch what happens when I turn on
my epic gaming battle station.
(rock music playing)
Okay, rigging 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, do you want to come out from behind the table?
(Andy vocalizing)
- 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 gotta 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 awhile but (film reeling),
the point is if you really wanna 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 4/10.
It's definitely cool,
but they don't show you how to do it at all.
What else we got here?
Oh, good, @hardwaresavvy is back.
- [@hardwaresavvy] Here's how to make
your computer faster in 10 seconds.
- Ooh.
- [@hardwaresavvy] Restart your computer.
When you enter your bios,
find your bios, find your RAMs X.M.P. profile,
click on it, and choose it.
- Oh man, okay.
There's a few things here.
One, yes X.M.P. can be a way to get a little bit more speed
out of your computer,
but in many cases, the X.M.P. 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 6.5.
It's a valid tech tip,
but there's a lot of details missing.
Yeah @hardwaresavvy could have mentioned
that it's called D.O.C.P.on AMD systems.
That's, that's useful.
That's good to know.
(rock music)
- 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.
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+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.
(Linus vocalizing)
Good TechTok, 9.5/10.
I like it.
Our final TechTok from @dasavage1013,
has 59,000 hearts and 2,000 shares.
- [@dasavage1013] Push the FN Windows
and Shift key with B.
It's gonna reset slash fix your drivers
and your graphics card.
Okay, Ctrl+ Windows+Shift+B.
Okay, 9/10.
Could be a useful TechTok.
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/linus.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
but you're looking for something a bit more serious,
maybe check out our timecard video.
That's right.
It's a card designed to keep time in your PC.
It's actually really cool.