Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Ariel: I have an HP dv6000t laptop that originally had Windows XP on it.
While my son was in for a weekend visit he installed Linux Mint on it after reading your article about replacing Windows with Linux.
I mainly use this laptop for reading my cooking groups on Facebook and printing the recipes that interest me.
The Linux is working out great but I’m having a problem with the USB ports.
Question from Alan: I bought a new 4TB external hard drive to hold my photos.
I bought the new drive because the 1TB drive I’ve been using to store my photos is full and I have a lot more pictures to scan and store.
My plan is to give the 1TB drive to my niece so she can use it with her iMac, but I want to completely erase everything from the drive before I give it to her.
That way she can start fresh with a blank drive.
Can you tell me how to completely erase this drive with my MacBook?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Lawrence: Hi, Rick. I’m hoping you can answer a question for me about hard drives.
A while back I bought a Seagate STHN2000400 2TB external hard drive to use to transfer files back and forth between the personal Mac I keep at home and another Mac that I use at work.
This arrangement was working great until my home Mac bit the dust and I had to replace it.
The problem I’m having is the MacBook Pro I bought a few days ago won’t work with the Seagate drive. There’s no connector on the laptop that will accept the plug on the drive.
If at all possible I’d like to keep using this drive with the new MacBook Pro because it contains thousands of files that I use both at home and at work.
Is there some kind of adapter I can buy to make this particular Seagate drive work with my new laptop? [Read more…]
Are you frustrated by the lack of storage space on the typical external USB hard drive? Do you long for an external drive that’s super-fast, yet plugs into a standard USB 3.0 port?
Well look no further, because Seagate has both bases well-covered with their new Seagate Backup Plus 4TB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive. (#ad)
Most consumer-grade USB hard drives currently max out at around 2TB, but this Seagate Backup Plus doubles that to a massive 4TB.
Of course to take full advantage of all that storage space, the drive needs to transfer data at the fastest speeds possible – and this awesome drive is lightning fast! [Read more…]
These days no computer system is complete without an external USB hard drive. These handy gadgets are simply perfect for making local backups and for handling so many other handy mass storage tasks.
External hard drives used to be quite expensive, but their prices have now dropped to where they are easily affordable, even with today’s massive storage capacities.
I recently had a chance to check out the WD 1TB Black My Passport Portable USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (#ad), and it didn’t take long to figure out why it’s the best selling external USB hard drive on Amazon.
This awesome drive from Western Digital easily fits in my shirt pocket, yet it’s super fast and stores a full terabyte of data. Thanks to its speedy USB 3.0 interface, it made quick work of backing up both the 120GB SSD and 750GB hard drive on my Desktop PC. [Read more…]