Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Trevor: The integrated sound has gone out on my ancient, but beloved HP Pavilion Slimline s5680d PC’s motherboard (model # MSI MS-7613).
Can you recommend a cheap replacement motherboard that’ll fit inside this computer’s case and work with its power supply? [Read more…]
Question from Don: I have a 2TB external hard drive that I’ve used to back up my MacBook for a while. I just bought a 6TB drive to replace it.
I want to give the old drive to my nephew because he needs one and he can’t really afford to buy one.
How can I securely wipe that drive to make sure it’s completely empty before I give it to him? [Read more…]
Question from Travis: I have an HP desktop computer that got fried by lightning.
I also have an old Dell desktop that had a bad hard drive. Both PCs ran Windows 10.
My cousin connected the hard drive from the HP to his computer and it seemed to work fine, so I replaced the bad hard drive in my Dell with the one from the dead HP.
But now after switching the drives, when I turn the computer on Windows won’t boot up. All it does is display a blue screen with an error message on it.
What do I need to do to fix this? [Read more…]
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Question from Brad: I have a really old Dell Optiplex 745 desktop computer that I absolutely love.
This machine has an 80 Gig hard drive and it’s recently started giving me problems.
These past few days when I turn on the PC the hard drive makes clicking sounds for about 5-10 seconds, then it finally starts booting up.
I know it’s the hard drive that’s doing the clicking because I removed the cover and listened to it. [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Erica: I have a question about the cooling fan in my Dell laptop.
When I’m using the laptop I rarely hear the fan at all.
However, when my son is playing his games the fan speeds up for several seconds and then slows back down at random times.
It sounds really awful when it speeds up like that.
My question is do I need to have the fan replaced? [Read more…]