Monthly Archives: October 2011

Summer starts in the northern hemisphere in June, so it seems like a particularly good time to talk about cooling and how it affects your personal computer system. Even those of you in the southern hemisphere will want to pay attention to this one. After all, cooling your CPU is a year-round concern! Electricity generates…

They say that memory is the first thing to go with age. So I sure want to make sure my PC stays young. After all, it’s going to have to remember all the stuff I’m going to be forgetting! Okay, truth be told, I can’t keep my PC from aging and neither can you. But…

Back when I first started working with computers, the PC manager used to blame odd glitches on techs or users wearing nylon underwear. She was joking, of course, about the underwear, but not about the damage that can be done to a computer by a technician who does not pay attention to proper electrical procedures…

Preparations and Precautions: Troubleshooting some hard drive problems requires removal of the PC case. It is important to follow standard anti-static precautions when your work requires getting under the hood. In addition, it will be most helpful to you to be prepared with the following items when troubleshooting hard drive problems: An emergency boot CD…

If you want to replace an existing drive, you will need to have both drives installed for a time in order to copy files from the old drive to the newer drive. To do this, try first installing your new drive as a slave to the existing drive. Some newer drives handle this automatically. However,…

How long would it take you to recreate the data you add to your hard drive each day? Each week? Each month? Are the documents you create worth money? Each of these considerations add pain to the possibility of losing your data. If you are like me, you use your PC every day and add…

Uh oh! It’s the middle of the night. Tech support closed hours ago. There’s no disk in the floppy drive. Could it be your faithful hard drive has given up the ghost? Data on dead hard drives can sometimes be recovered. But you’ll probably rest easier if you know that you have a good backup…