On this week’s Compute This TV appearance on KMTV’s Morning Blend Thor talked about the identity theft dangers of selling your old technology on websites like Craigslist.

It is widely known that you should wipe a computer’s hard drive or remove it completely before donating or recycling your computer, but what about your solid-state devices like phones and tablets.

Before you sell, donate or recycle that outdated iPad first generation tablet, watch this video!

Recent heavy rainfall and severe flooding in Thailand has destroyed factories responsible for 40% of the world’s computer hard drive production and could spell disaster for retailers this holiday season.

Reports indicate major manufacturers will exhaust all available hard drives by the end of November, resulting in a shortage of desktop and laptop computers just when retailers were couning them to make their holiday season in a tough economy.

More than 40% of the world’s hard drives are produced in Thailand.  Flooding has destroyed component supplies and factory equipment and the impending shortage of hard drives his already started to hit the retail market.

Thor Schrock is the CEO of Schrock Innovations, a computer reseller with three locations in Nebraska and he believes the impending shortage will impact individual computer users.

“This shortage will be a major headache in December for anyone who wants to buy a computer or have a dying hard drive replaced,” he said.  “It is literally cheaper to buy a hard drive at retail than at wholesale right now.”

That upside-down market will likely continue through at least March of 2012 and possibly as long as December of 2012 according to analysts.

It has only taken a few days for supply shortages and price increases to work their way down to end-users.

Prices at online retailers have increased by 40-50% over the past week and Best Buy’s has none of the popular 1 TB hard drives available within a 300 mile radius of Omaha.  

Asustek, a major manufacturer of both laptops and desktops, reported yesterday that they have enough hard drives in their supply chain to last only through the end of November.  

Schrock Innovations is offering hard drive testing so customers can replace dying hard drives before it is too late.

“Christmas is going to be very tough this year if you were planning on buying a new computer,” Schrock said.  “The best advice I can provide is get your existing computer maintenanced now so you don’t get surprised by a hardware failure after it is too late.”

ZDNet is reporting this week that if you’re an Internet Explorer user, then a recent survey suggests that you will have a lower than average IQ, while Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Camino and Opera users have an above-average IQ, according to psychometric consulting firm AptiQuant.

The only exception to the rule of IE users having below-average IQ are users that make use of the Chrome Frame tool.

These results are based on 101,326 individuals over the age of 16.

So, what’s behind this trend? According to AptiQuant it’s that people with a lower IQ are more resistant to change and stick with what they know rather than upgrade.

The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser. From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. This hypothesis can be extended to any software in general, however more research is needed for that, which is a potential future work as an extension to this report.

One weakness of this report is that while Internet Explorer has been broken down into versions, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Camino and Opera aren’t. This doesn’t make sense to me. It’s just as easy to grab the version numbers for these browsers as it is for IE, so why not?

Another concern of mine is how the individuals chosen for the study came to find the IQ test:

Most of the subjects came to the website either by organic searches from search engines, or advertisements put on various search engines for keywords targeting users who were looking for a free online IQ test.

So the test is geared towards people who:

• Want to know their IQ (which in my mind is one of those ‘if you need to ask, you probably shouldn’t’ sort of thing)
• Click on ads for ‘free online IQ tests’ (again, not picking the cream of the crop here)
• Don’t use ad-blockers