Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
(Answer requested by Arnielyn Arellano) When a Li-ion battery bulges, it usually means a near-failure generated toxic, flammable gases. Your battery’s case did its job — it contained the gases so far — but at very high internal pressure (hence the swelling). In other words, your battery’s near-failure has turned it into a toxic firebomb,…
Meet the NASA team that’s using their home PCs to drive and operate the Curiosity rover on Mars. NASA/JPL article Spaceflight.com Article (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.) Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=5024
Without explaining the no-doubt interesting context for his question, reader M.R. asked: “Will booting up from a USB drive leave any trace on the computer?” Yup. In fact, if you know where to look, every PC boot — even one that’s using an operating system installed on a USB flash drive — will normally leave at…
(Answer requested by Roksana Parvin Yasmin) Sure, as long as both devices and their software (e.g. drivers) were manufactured to formal USB standards, they should work fine. USB is designed to be backwards (lower-numbered) compatible, meaning that a USB 3 port will work fine with USB 3, USB 2, and USB 1 devices. Likewise, a…
(Answer requested by Reese Horn) The batteries in PC aren’t just for the internal clock; that tiny trickle of power also helps the turned-off PC to “remember” some basic information about its hardware components, so it will know what to do right away, when the power comes on. If the PC “forgets” this information (such…
(Answer requested by Dreezy Mida) Well, sometimes they don’t. Here’s what’s going on: External (USB) storage is almost always slow storage compared to what’s inside a PC. As a result, PC’s using USB storage would typically buffer (temporarily store in RAM) data that was destined for an external device. This way, the app wouldn’t have…
Windows’ system-managed “Known Folders“ (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc.) rarely cause problems. But when they do, the fix can be messy, as longtime AskWoody subscriber Mark Guenin discovered: “I’ve been having trouble with my Dell laptop… intermittent app-lockup problems. For example, when using Chrome and downloading a PDF from a website, the browser will hang when…
Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=4974
(Answer requested by Sam Jones) The electrical contacts on batteries (and the cells that make up batteries) are metal; metal can oxidize or otherwise develop a thin layer of surface contamination that reduces the electrical conductivity. This layer may be invisible to the naked eye. Physically manipulating the battery scrapes away this layer, exposing clean…
(Answer requested by Katherine Quinn) My first guess is that it’s a purely physical issue with your laptop. For example, one of the reasons I use an external, plug-in keyboard on my laptop is because my thumbs used to occasionally brush the laptop’s touchpad as I typed on the built-in keyboard; I wouldn’t feel the…
