Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Alan M.: I replaced the 320GB hard drive in my Acer Aspire desktop computer with a Crucial 512GB SSD.
I was able to clone the hard drive’s contents onto the SSD with no problem and everything works great, but when I view the drive in “Computer” it shows up as a 320GB drive instead of 512GB.
What do I need to do to make Windows 7 see the entire 512GB?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
By now you probably know how important it is to create regular backups of the data that’s stored on your computer’s hard drive.
You also probably know that it can take a good long while to create each of those backups.
Luckily, there’s a simple and easy way to greatly speed up the backup process (and the restore process as well, should it ever be needed)… [Read more…]
Question from Randy F.: My hard drive started making a combination of loud whining and clicking sounds last night.
I did some research (thanks Google!) and found a forum post that said to run chkdsk to see if the drive has any bad sectors. It then said if bad sectors are found to run chkdsk/r to fix them.
I ran chkdsk and it did find a bunch of bad sectors. I started to run chkdsk /r to fix the bad sectors but then I remembered reading a follow-up post that said running chkdsk /r can kill a hard drive outright.
What’s your advice on this? I’d like to fix the drive and not have to replace it if that’s possible, but I don’t want to lose my pictures and other files by killing the drive. I need some advice on how to proceed.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Modern MacBooks are awesome machines, but the limited amount of internal SSD flash storage in some recent models can be a real problem, especially if you have lots of programs, apps and data files stored on the SSD.
Well, now there’s a fast and easy way to double the amount of internal SSD flash storage space in your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. In fact, it’s so easy you won’t even have to open up your laptop’s case!
All you have to do is slide a fantastic TarDisk storage expansion card
Western Digital has been making outstanding hard drives for decades, and now they have released their very first line of WD branded solid state drives (SSDs). (#ad)
WD has actually sold SSDs under different brand names for some time now, but I believe the release of these new WD branded SSDs shows how confident they are in their SSD technology. [Read more…]