Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
(Answer requested by Mark Mathews) Part of the reason RAM is fast is that it’s volatile — it *wants* to rapidly change state, and requires constant electrical refreshing to prevent it from doing so. This volatility makes RAM fast, but also means you can’t ever turn it off, or it will lose (“forget”) its contents….
AskWoody Plus subscriber Dave Huch’s Win10 PC has become unusable due to an astonishing malfunction: A wild system error is generating some 600 EVTX files per minute — 10 per second! —totally saturating his entire drive system. Not surprisingly, his PC is totally unusable — even at full-throttle, it simply can’t keep up! My AskWoody Plus column this…
(Answer requested by Benjamin Woods) Laptops and notebooks don’t have to travel at all to be useful. I use a laptop as my main PC, and it’s never been out of the house. I like a laptop because it’s smaller, quieter, and uses less energy than a desktop PC. I like that I can close…
(Answer requested by Gautam Naib) Because they did far less. Cellphones started as, well, phones. You used them to make voice calls or to exchange short-form (pager-style) texts. Period. With limited functions in intermittent use, the batteries on small-screen, low-power cellphones could and sometimes did last for days. But to do any of the myriad…
The working guts of Li-ion batteries start as flat sheets. For many heavier-duty and general purpose applications, these sheets are rolled into cylinders because a cylindrical battery can be safer than a flat one: Stacked cylinders allow spaces between them, which can be used to keep hard-working batteries safely cool and responsive. Tesla autos circulate…
(Answer requested by Gabriel Austria) Most Android phones use utterly-standard USB connections. Even if the phone’s screen is cracked or otherwise damaged, if you can still turn the phone on and log in (by any means — face, voice, fingerprint, pattern, password…), you usually can retrieve the phone’s user data via USB. Just plug the…
Two subscribers are having peculiar browser issues. In one case, Firefox is inexplicably slow on a very fast PC; in the second case, the mouse pointer disappears from time to time in Chrome and Firefox — and there’s no obvious pattern. Oddly, the solutions to both problems lie in totally opposite applications of the same…
(Answer requested by Brandon Dotson) There’s no master “off” switch. But there an often-overlooked, semi-stand-alone applet within Android’s Settings that comes close: Permissions Manager. This is not the app-by-app Permissions settings you may have already seen and used in Settings/Apps. Android’s Permissions Manager sorts all your apps at once by permission-type, letting you see, at…
You’ll get free news, tips, advice, and support for Windows and PCs, hardware and software guidance, tech help, and lots more — all with no bull. If you haven’t yet signed up for the AskWoody FREE Newsletter — the gussied up, re-thought and re-targeted reincarnation of the old Windows Secrets Free Newsletter — now’s the…
(Answer requested by Chandrakant Godhani) Assuming the battery is charged and OK, or the laptop is plugged in to a known-good power supply, the most common cause of “PC runs for a while and then stops” is heat buildup: Some component is running hot, and the PC is shutting itself down to prevent permanent damage…
