Computer Tips and Guides

Posts Tagged ‘Hard Drive’

WMP Plus Adds a Number of Customizable Tweaks to Windows Media Player

If you haven’t learned to love Windows Media Player yet, free plug-in Windows Media Player Plus might change your mind. adding tweaks like find as you type, disabling group headers, a new tag editor, and the Explorer context menu within your library.

We’ve already learned that Windows Media Player’s performance is pretty darn good, but there are still a few things in the program that many count as annoyances. Thankfully, ..read more

Top 10 Hard Drive Upgrades and Fixes

You should never feel like your hard drive is holding out on you. Anyone should be able to back up, recover files, boot multiple systems, upgrade, or otherwise improve their storage space. These tips explain the possibilities and procedures.

Over time, the moving parts and powered pieces that move your magnetic disks around at lightning speed will wear, age, and get noisy. In a desktop computer (a Windows PC, generally), you can ..read more

I have often ran across computers that I needed to gain access to for data recovery, but I didnt have the administrator password to access the hard drive. Since in many situations, there is just one administrator account I can’t log into another administrator account and change the password so I have to rely on other methods. I could put the hard drive into another computer as a slave and gain access (sometimes) or  I could try installing a second copy of ..read more

Do You Really Need More Than 4GB of RAM?

With the price of upgrading system RAM extremely low these days, people are always asking me whether it’s really worth it to upgrade beyond 4GB; today we’ll answer that question for everybody.

First, let’s take a moment to clarify what exactly more RAM can (and can’t) do for you. The biggest benefit of upgrading your PC’s memory is better multi-tasking, especially for those of us using RAM-hogging applications like ..read more

This scenario has probably happened many times. You sit down at your desk with a big cup of coffee and you spill it all over your laptop.

Before you give up hope, here are some steps to take to salvage your laptop from the perils of a liquid spill.

1. Unplug the power source and remove the battery.

2. Gently incline one side of the laptop and try to get out as much liquid as you can.

3. Clean up as much of the ..read more

Over time, Windows loses stability. If you keep a computer for more than two years, at some point you’re going to have to bite the bullet and reinstall Windows from scratch. But contrary to popular belief, you won’t have to reformat your hard drive (with one exception, discussed below). The bad stuff you need to get rid of is all in your Windows folder.

Before you begin, gather your Windows and application CD-ROMs. Back up your data files (just to be ..read more

Ok, I bought Windows Vista Business Upgrade the other day so I could start playing with it. Since I didnt want to mess up the configuration of my current computer, I thought I would install Vista on a blank hard drive.

Sounds easy enough, after all the previous versions of Windows required you to have a legitimate copy of an older Windows operating system and simply asked for that copy during the install so they could verify upgrade compliance.

Before installing Windows Vista, I ..read more

File Recovery for Mac

File Recovery for Mac is a powerful data recovery software that can recover data from deleted, formatted or corrupted hard drives and restore volumes on Apple Mac computers. It’s easy to use, and because it won’t write to the drive you are recovering from it’s safe and cannot harm your data.

Use File Recovery for Mac to recover lost data whether it has been accidentally deleted, the drive has been formatted or partitioned, or if it won’t mount ..read more