Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Karen: I have several old computers in my basement that I want to recycle.
I’ve always heard that you need to destroy a computer’s hard drive before you recycle it to prevent someone else from maybe getting your files.
My question is will removing the hard drive from a PC completely eliminate any possibility of someone finding my old files.
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Question from Bobby: Per your suggestion, I recently bought a dirt-cheap 250GB SSD to replace the hard drive in an older Acer laptop.
And you were right – the speed increase is astounding! Thanks for the info!
As I was installing the SSD I noticed how much larger it is than the 256GB SD card that’s inside my phone.
Why is the SSD so much larger than the SD card when they both hold roughly the same amount of data?
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Every week I receive hundreds of questions for the Tech Q&A section of my blog, and one question I get asked on a regular basis is “What’s the best upgrade I can make to speed up my computer?”
In times past my answer was always the same: add more RAM!
But I’m afraid that’s no longer true in most situations…
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Question from Wesley: Hi, Rick. I hope you’re doing well.
I recently read your post about speeding up a computer by replacing the hard drive with a much faster solid state drive (SSD).
I’m leaning towards doing this but I have one concern that’s holding me back.
I’m worried that an SSD might not be as reliable as a hard drive, and I really can’t afford to lose my files if it were to crash on me.
What’s your opinion on this? Are SSDs as reliable as hard drives? [Read more…]
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Question from Kendra: Hi, Rick. I really love your blog, especially the section where you answer questions from your readers.
If you don’t mind I’d like to ask a question of my own.
Back in March of 2020 the tech guy I used at the time installed a Crucial 500GB SSD in my Acer laptop and it really made it run a lot faster.
I recently read on another site that all SSDs wear out over time because they can only be written to a certain number of times.
That has me sort of worried because this drive is now about four years old and I have a lot of personal files on it that I don’t want to lose.
My question is do you think this drive is likely to fail at some time in the near future? [Read more…]