Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
(Answer requested by Evan Zanark) Sure. In fact, one of the oddities of lithium-ion cells and batteries is that they work best at the same temperatures where humans work best: Room temperature — 20C/68F — is great for both humans and Li-ion! But once you get up to around 40C/104F, both humans and Li-ion batteries…
(Answer requested by Vithush Gugan) Oh, come on. If “eventual failure” is disqualifying, you’ve just disqualified the entire known universe! Entropy is universal. Everything eventually fails. Rather than trying to find something that lasts forever (nothing does) look for things that are useful for reasonable amounts of time. For example, an external hard drive will…
Sometimes, Windows can’t or won’t delete old, no-longer-relevant log files. Worse, these files may be locked or still marked as in-use, preventing you from manually deleting them. There are several methods — including using Safe Mode — to rid your PC of old, hard-to-scrub log files, and to reclaim potentially large swathes of disk space. What’s involved,…
(Answer requested by Emm Riosa) OBB files — Opaque Binary Blobs — are files used to store extra data generated by some Android games and apps. This data is private and encrypted (hence “opaque”) so that only the app that generated an OBB can read it. The key thing is that these OBBs are usually…
(Answer requested by Cydonia Robb) You’re really asking about solder, right? Soldering is the application of drop of molten metal to permanently secure electrical components to each other. The most common traditional soldering material is lead because it’s cheap and has a low melting point. But it’s toxic as hell. In many parts of the…
(Answer requested by Daniel Dudgeon) When a phone is telling you it has moisture trouble, you’d probably do well to listen. 🙂 That’s because most newer smartphones are at least somewhat water resistant. For example, if your phone’s specs say it’s IP68-rated (a common current standard), it should be OK in up to 1.5 meters/5…
(Answer requested by Ram Binay Yadav) In a word, no. Even for systems using UEFI instead of a BIOS — and that’s almost all current PCs (see below) — the answer’s still no. BIOS: Old-school PCs used a BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) to handle the power-on startup sequence of a PC’s hardware, before the operating…
You may be able to extend the life and increase the speed of your SSD through overprovisioning — reassigning some of the drive’s file-storage capacity for internal use by the drive’s firmware. One significant gotcha: You may have to move or resize some hard drive partitions (but there are excellent tools available to make this…
Peter Norton was a subscriber to the original LangaList, way back when. We’ve exchanged occasional correspondence… but nothing like this. 🙂 Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=4838
The original Windows Secrets cast has joined forces to resurrect Windows Secrets, renovate it, and meld it into AskWoody.com. The FREE version of the AskWoody newsletter is open to all; no cost, no obligation. Plus, we don’t sell, give away, or trade our mailing list. Instead, we hope you’ll register on the AskWoody.com site (that’s free, too) —…
