Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Andy S.: My Dell Inspiron 1300 has only 512 Megs of RAM. The machine is now very slow, I suspect that it’s due to lot of paging.
Would it make sense if I buy an Expresscard to USB 3.0 adapter so then I can add a USB 3.0 SSD, Flash Finger or M.2 to the machine? Would it improve the performance?
Thank you very much.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Chuck H.: A while back I bought a Windows 8.1 retail package (#ad) that contains two discs, one for Windows 8.1/64 bit and the other for Windows 8.1/32 bit.
I installed the 32 bit disc on my old HP laptop after Microsoft abandoned Windows XP. I have never used the 64 bit disc.
My question is can I install Windows 8.1 from the 64 bit disc onto my desktop computer? I had to replace the hard drive and I don’t have a set of recovery discs.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Hello again everyone. I hope you all had a great week!
I write about Windows 10 fairly often, and while I happen to like it a lot, I realize that many of my readers don’t really care for it.
If you have installed the Windows 10 update on your PC (or Windows Update installed it for you) and you simply don’t like it, you have several options for getting rid of it: [Read more…]
Question from Eddie V.: The county I live in had a massive auction of surplus items and I ended up buying 168 Dell OptiPlex 755/SDT desktop computers. They all appear to be identically configured with these specs:
I know that older computers aren’t worth a lot these days, but I thought these were worth a bid simply because there were so many of them. I ended up winning the auction and paying $216 for the lot.
My big concern is they might not be worth anything at all since Microsoft has officially killed off Windows XP. What do you think I could do with these computers to make a little bit of money from this deal?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Glenn W.: I have an old, but awesome 2008 era Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop that came with Windows Vista. It still works great except for the hard drive which just died on me with no warning.
I found out that I can buy a brand spanking new replacement hard drive for less than $50, but I don’t have a set of Windows Vista restore discs.
If I replace the hard drive can I also install Windows 8.1 in place of Vista? (I would actually prefer Windows 7 but they don’t sell it anymore.)
Or is this machine so old that only Windows Vista will work, which would mean I’m out of luck either way?
Sorry for the multiple questions, but this is all very confusing to me. I hate to throw away a perfectly good laptop just because the hard drive died.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]