Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Gary M.: Rick, Microsoft is forcing me to get serious about upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 8 (or 8.1). I just finished reading your recommendation to install an SSD drive and convert my XP internal drive into an external USB drive.
I was thinking along similar lines, but figured I would make my existing XP drive into a drive D: after upgrading to Windows 8. Why would converting it to an external USB drive be better?
Thanks, Gary
Ricks answer: [Read more…]
Have you ever wished you could add a solid state drive (SSD) to your laptop and keep your internal hard drive too? As you probably know, that can be a bit impractical since most laptops come with just one 2.5 inch drive bay.
But now you can accomplish the same thing with an ingenious new combo drive from Western Digital. That’s right, you can now replace your laptop’s existing hard drive with both a 120GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive – and they’ll both fit into the same bay! [Read more…]
No other upgrade will speed up your computer as effectively as replacing the hard drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD). But there are a couple of caveats with such an upgrade:
1 – When comparing their relative costs per gigabyte, SSDs are considerably more expensive than traditional hard drives.
2 – Most affordable SSDs are quite limited in the amount of data they can store.
Right now you can get a great deal
Question from Michael: I have an HP Pavilion dv5t laptop with a 500GB hard drive which recently began making clicking and clunking sounds. After reading your article about hard drives making unusual sounds I realize that the drive is probably in the process of failing.
My question is can hard drives be repaired? This is a 7200RPM model which I understand to be one of the best. (By the way, I have backed everything up so I’m not worried about losing any programs or data.)
Rick‘s answer: [Read more…]
If you’ve been shopping around for a new laptop recently, chances are you’ve seen several models that come with both a small solid state drive (SSD) and a traditional hard drive. If so, you might be wondering if it’s worth paying extra to buy a model that has both. In my opinion, it is.
Although relatively small, the SSD in a dual drive laptop will hold the operating system at the very least, providing boot-up times that are up to three times faster than what you’re used to seeing, and any programs that are stored on the SSD will load at lightning speed. [Read more…]