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.

First, if you can get hold of nifty utilities from trusted sites of the internet, then that would be easier but it can sometimes corrupt the bios of the system as it forces a program to open the said part of your computer system so be cautious and read all recommendations and instructions in the readme file so you don’t cause further problems.
If you’re in a hurry and don’t have a second computer to do a search, you can always consult the motherboard’s manual or simply look at the board for any pins that are labeled BIOS reset/normal. This is a failsafe mechanism which is built in by manufacturers into their boards to allow use of a locked system as yours.

If you by chance got yourself a good deal on a second-hand computer that works just right and is affordable enough o allow you to upgrade some parts then you indeed got a good deal. As you get home, you setup your prize and power-up only to find that the system is locked down by a password. A boot password or worse a system password can prevent access to the contents of the hard drive or the system itself leaving you stranded in the boot-up menu. Don’t fret, for there are ways to get around the problem and these work almost all of the time in getting you up and running in no time at all.

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…)

Commercial polishing compounds in liquid form can be used to polish off lightly scratched disks but do it only in the affected area to see if it works. Use alcohol to remove the glare caused by the cleaner before sticking it into the drive. If that still doesn’t work, the scratch is so deep that there is no turning back and you’d have to go to a friend’s house or buy another copy for your purposes. Good luck and remember, keep all important disks stored in a safe place where they would be easily accessible for future use. If you need drivers, you could search for the in the manufacturer’s site or in the many driver sites such as driversguide.com and others.

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…)

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…)

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.

Errors 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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