Well, this might not be a sound you would want to hear from your hard drive, for it might be in it’s death throes. The screeching sound may be the bearings that make the platters spin breaking down or they have been in use for so long they have worn out the hard metal coatings on the teeny tiny bearings. The first thing you do is to copy as much data that you can to another hard drive to prevent total disaster. Most drives will continue to function for sometime before total failure of the drive. You’ll be glad to know that they have become more reliable than ever but that does not mean totally.

If you experience frequent CPU failures and get feedback from the store that the power supply has blown. Try to get a larger capacity or higher rated power supply. You might have too many devices hooked up to the power supply (internal and externally) both of which take power from the same power supply if they have no individual power adapter. Say if you have a 300 or 400 watt power supply, try getting hold of a 500 watt or higher model and try to get the bit pricy one so it would last. Repetitive power supply failures can cause damage to the internal parts of your CPU and even the board itself which has built in fuses to protect the Microprocessor unit itself from such damage. If the board has also failed, you would have to get another board to transfer the cpu onto.

If your PC boots up but doesn’t load windows, then it might have simply been shut down without using the shutdown facility provided. Or it may have had a catastrophic failure on the part of the hardware such as the IDE/SATA controller or even the hard drive itself. To fix the first scenario, simply press F7 and select safe mode from the command line menu and follow all in-screen instructions. Some files or system drivers get damaged by such events so have the driver cd’s at hand. Once the check disk facility finishes, you should be able to gain access to your PC normally. If it still won’t load properly, try shutting down and re-starting for there might be some corrupted programs that need to be restored. Try getting the windows installation CD’s and re-install windows to restore all the damaged system files.

A stern warning to laptop users, these mobile computers of today seldom have installation cd’s that used to ship with them, instead they use a separate partition on the hard drive itself to store all the necessary drivers, software and other files to support your specific computer. So take heed and do the recovery disk creation process described in your user’s manual, it’s sure to save you a ton in costs of having to re-order them and shipped just to bring your computer/laptop back to life!

Some boards may simply have a two-pin configuration which if shorted can remove the errant password. Others motherboards require a few minutes for the BIOS to re-set and some require you to power the system up, then shutdown in order to return the jumper block into its previous position. After this, you would have to re-configure the BIOS to it’s previous settings so it would be a nifty idea to have a copy of these in a safe place. You can always have the manual to get the best optimal settings which would work for your system should you have a need to. The automatic settings that are built into the BIOS are not always the best setting to use but it will get you up and running in no time. Take time to understand each and every setting that you encounter (having the manual by your side makes it easier) and some boards even have descriptors which tells you which does what and what the default settings are.

A manual would be great and better for it eliminates mistakes which could not solve the problem at all and worse send you off buying a new board due to a short you created when you hastily did the operation. Boards come in several versions from several manufacturers, and if you’re like me who sticks to a select group of manufacturers, chances are they will have the overall same labels that allow easy understanding of the board even without the manual. If the reset pins come in the form of a three pronged arrangement, then there should be a jumper that shorts out two of them which in it’s current state would be the normal setting, switch the pins using the jumper and short the pins labeled reset, wait for a few minutes for the bois to reset then return the pins to the normal position. Some boards have labes some don’t and have numbers that have to be referenced with the manual.

Ever been so overeager to install a new software or a new gadget that you end up having an unstable system? Ever been greeted by the blue-screen of death after a program or driver upgrade? Then first, DO NOT PANIC, for there are some steps you could do to remedy the situation and pulling out all your hair won’t do you any good for sure. If you are using Xp, then system restore would be a good thing to do and should you have a recent back-up or restore point, it would mostly revert the damage you may have inadvertently done to your computer system. But this XP feature has to be enabled first so to be sure you prevent catastrophe in the event of incompatibility issues, then do a restore point before you do anything (the situation presented earlier). Having a device that suddenly fails can be resolved by rolling back the driver for that specific device to restore proper operation. (more…)

The advent of the Terabyte hard drive has many techies drooling about the endless possibilities in terms of the amount of data they can hold. Though still quite expensive, there are certain situations where such a huge drive would be advantageous such as with use in video and animation which tends to be quite hard drive space hungry. Bigger is better, right? Not always, for consider this, you may have a terabyte of data stored into a compact drive but what would happen to that very terabyte of information should your hard drive suddenly fail? Having several drives is still better due to the redundancy that exists, and is the reason why servers have several hard rives in a RAID configuration that has the ability to either have several hard drives having the same information, ready for hot swapping should the primary hard drive fail without much problems. (more…)

That would be a question that you yourself would have to address for determining the feasibility of such a task depends mainly on cost. Consider these points, if you are upgrading your computer because it has considerably slowed down, then a total retrofit or even replacement would be in order. This would be more akin to older machines that may have already been serving you for a good couple of years, besides, you may not be able to find any compatible hardware anymore due to the fast pace at which technology advances. (more…)

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The first issue is simply that most businesses, particularly smaller ones, don’t fully appreciate the value of the information they have stored on their computers and believe that manually retrieving it (presumably by making a few phone calls and checking old paperwork) is a relatively trivial process.

Those that have recognized the need to protect their data are then faced with the challenge of knowing what the threats are and how to protect against them.

Data can vanished through hardware failure, software problems, malicious software such as viruses, theft of equipment, human error or major physical disasters such as fire and flood. Taking into consideration all these issues can be a major challenge in its own right.

The next issue is that backup solutions are notoriously tricky to run and manage dependably – no one wants to take day-to-day accountability for them and all too often they are left flawed for lingering periods.

Finally we have the old favorites: time and money. With all the other pressures placed on small businesses it is usual to put data backup on the “to do” list. Spending money on marketing and sales is seen as more important, so protecting the data will just have to wait… after all, it’s not likely to fail, is it?

Some motherboards are so sensitive to cooling that no fans connected to the on-board fan connectors would prevent power-up to avoid ruining the processor (this would be the case if you were using externally powered or special/exotic cooling systems) try plugging in a fan or two to see if it works. The worst case is to get the lights and fans working but still there are no beeps, display or other signs of life for it may be a signal of a dead board or power supply.
If your bare systems now functions, you can then add your components one at a time so you can continue to eliminate any problem device. The prices of computer parts have indeed gone down so much that they are affordable to most. If one does not want to spend all the time tinkering and wondering what is wrong then a trip to the computer repair shop would be an easier alternative.