One of the necessities of a multi-boot setup is partitioning, but the uses of partitioning go far beyond its application to multi-boot setups. The act of splitting a drive into multiple logical parts is known as partitioning; each part is … Continue reading
Category Archives: Hardware
Keyboard Annoyances
As with everything, increased computer usage tends to form certain habits. In most cases, there is nothing wrong with this, however, when things change, these habits can be significantly disrupted. Two such irregularities, and their solutions, are outlined below. The … Continue reading
A Procedural Methodology for Diagnosing (Home) Internet Issues
I recently had some internet problems, most pages wouldn’t load, my connections to servers (e.g. FTP, SSH) would quickly drop, but, yet, I was able to download a file at a reasonable rate. There are different approaches to narrowing down … Continue reading
Considerations When Shopping for Laptops
The Shortcut to Resolving an IRQ Conflict
During my hard drive adventures earlier in the day, I removed a PCI IDE-SATA card from an older computer, and replaced it with the PCI sound card that was previously in that slot. Computer started, and all was good – … Continue reading
Using a SATA hard drive through IDE – Part 2
Continued from: Using a SATA hard drive through IDE – Part 1 Finally got a functioning IDE-SATA card, and it was exceedingly easy to use. Took perhaps a minute to install – plug into IDE slot on motherboard, plug SATA … Continue reading
Using a SATA hard drive through IDE – Part 1
One of the older computers I have around is from before the SATA era – it only supports IDE. Unfortunately, most new hard-drives are SATA, especially those of reasonable sizes (250GB, 500GB, etc). This machine previously had only about 60GB, … Continue reading
Diagnosing a computer that won’t POST
Today, I was asked to diagnose a computer that wouldn’t POST over the phone. POST is the power-on self-test – it is self-check cycle that the computer goes through before ‘starting’ – it usually checks the motherboard (for short circuits), … Continue reading
Fixing Headphones
When the computer is on – there is music playing. Probably not an uncommon statement – I find, however, that it is frowned upon to be playing music at 2 am, or other such times. Headphones are the natural answer … Continue reading