New Gadget – System Unstable

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…)

TeraByte Hard Drives – Bigger is always better ?!?

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…)

Hardware Upgrades – Are they still worth it?

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…)

XP’s Restore Points – Using them

The Restore point option of Windows XP has the operating system taking a snapshot of your overall system (mostly the system areas on the hard drive along with documents), saving compressed information about the hard drive’s contents at regular intervals allowing almost instant file restoration should the computer experience a system crash. These restore points can be set manually on when it is to take snapshots of the system for backup or as experienced XP users know, every time you opt to upgrade a critical part of your operating system that may have bearing on the overall stability of your computer. (more…)

Boosting your startup speed

Here are a few tips to help speed up your computer and / or laptops’ boot up speed:

1. Run disk defragmenter.

It helps compress and organize all the files in your disk, eliminating empty spaces on the disk that delays the computer when it starts up. it’s a long wait, but the benefits are worth it in the end. Try defragging your disk when going on an errand or before going to bed so you don’t have to suffer the long wait too much.

2. Eliminate any useless startup programs.
Simple type ‘msconfig’ in your Run box in the Start Menu, and go to the Startup tab. There you’ll see which programs Windows loads during start up. Look at the Command column and look at the programs which you can do without at startup, and uncheck the appropriate Startup Item.

Beep…Beeep…. Won’t Work

dusycpuErrors have been detected by the motherboard’s diagnostics and may be preventing the system from running to protect itself from damage due to faulty components. Turn off the power so you can visually check the internal parts of the CPU to check for possible fans that may be failing, turn on the power momentarily then off again if you spot problems like the CPU fan fails to run smoothly. Open the casing and remove any dust bunnies that may be blocking the fans from working properly. excessive dust can also prevent them from functioning properly hindering their movement.
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Listen Ma, No Sound!

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Now this is one annoying problem you may encounter occasionally when you’re on your computer. Sometime its hard to detect where the problem is coming from because the computers sounds is controlled by one major hardware and a driver to be able to work on that hardware. Firstly, what you will need is a little amount of patience to keep your cool while trying to figure out this tiny bit of a problem.

Check for Power. Make sure your electric cord is connected properly to the socket.
Make sure your speakers are turned ON. Sheesh, right, do that!
Have a headphone in hand and plug it in the headphone jack, if there is sound, you can be pretty sure the problem is with your speakers.
Also, check the Volume Controls on your Windows. Make sure the Mute button is unchecked.

Haunted PC

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What to do when your personal computer’s cursor grows big and grows small, some letters font appear and suddenly disappears on its own. Your graphics go crazy. Most of the time, when these strange things happen, the culprit is the graphics card driver. This is the program that allows the harwdware to work with the operating system. The first thing to do is make sure that the graphicsdriver is the reason behind this. You’ll need to install the Windows VGA driver. On the desktop, right click, click Properties, click Settings, click Advanced, click Adapter. Then select Change, the Update Wizard will open. Select Display a List, click on Show all Hardware. You’ll see Manufacturer’s, then select Standard display types and then install the VGA driver.

Windows Vista: The New Buzz


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The new buzz in the world of computers is the new operating system, Windows Vista.

This new operating system has some additional features. Vista’s minimal requirements to run on a computer are an 800 MHz processor and at least 512 MB of RAM.
If you want to get the most out of Windows Vista and utilize the graphical designs, you need some pc tips in order to benefit from them. Hardware requirements, i should say are what this is all about.

  • Windows Vista to be able to run in its full glory, your CPU should be about 3GHz and your RAM should be around 2GB.
  • In Vista, all the 32-bit versions cannot support more than 4GB of RAM, but some 64-bit versions can support up to 128 GB of RAM.
  • Your hard drive needs to be optimized by using disk management options.
  • Online, you can browse for more ways to boost the efficiency of Vista. You should try tweaking sometimes so you can utilize its maximum potential. Be sure to back up your files though. You’ll never know what might happen.

Why Business Computers need to be Information Protected?


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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?