laptop Archives - Page 2 of 18

How to prevent your laptop from getting stolen on campus (or anywhere else)

Posted on September 21, 2025

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These days, laptops are as common in our schools as backpacks, notebooks and pencils. In fact, most colleges (and many high schools) now require that every student own one.

Unfortunately, laptops also tend to disappear when you aren’t looking. In fact, many campus police departments receive more reports about stolen laptops than any other item.

Simply following just a few simple common-sense rules can help keep your laptop safe and sound regardless of where you might happen to be on campus. [Read more…]

Q&A: Can you recommend a really cheap, but reliable SSD for an older laptop?

Posted on September 8, 2025

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Question from Ari: The hard drive in my 6 year old Dell laptop died a few days ago. This has been a great machine and I don’t want to just trash it.

I’d like to replace the bad hard drive with an SSD, but I’d rather not spend a lot of money if I can help it.

After reading your post about replacing Windows with Linux, I’d like to install Linux Mint on this laptop and use it as my primary Internet computer. I won’t need a lot of storage space so a fairly small SSD should be ok.

What I’m looking for a really inexpensive SSD that’s large enough to hold the new Linux installation and maybe a few Chrome extensions. But I’d like the SSD to be as reliable as possible. [Read more…]

Q&A: Will using a laptop with the lid closed damage it?

Posted on August 30, 2025

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Question from Jane: I bought a monitor and connected it to my laptop and then changed the settings so I could close the lid while the laptop is running. It’s been working fine now for about four months.

The thing is one of my friends saw this setup and he told me running the laptop with the lid closed will eventually kill it due to excessive heat build-up.

Is that true? As always, thanks so much for your advice. [Read more…]

How to easily add an optical DVD drive to virtually any computer

Posted on August 21, 2025

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If you’ve been checking out the latest laptops and desktop computers you’ve probably noticed that most of them no longer come with an optical (DVD/CD) drive.

There are three primary reasons why computer manufacturers have started skipping the optical drives when designing new computers: [Read more…]

Q&A: Will the RAM in my old laptop work in a new one?

Posted on July 28, 2025

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Question from Mike: I know it’s time to buy a new laptop and I’m looking to save as much money as possible.

The machine I’m replacing is a Dell Inspiron 14 5000 that I bought back in January 2015.

Since the old Dell has 16GB of RAM in it I was wondering if it’s possible to buy a new laptop with just 4GB of RAM and then swap the RAM from the Dell into the new laptop?

[Read more…]