Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
Reader Janet Ybarra wrote: “I have a laptop which intermittently shuts down on its own, apparently from overheating. What would be the problem and what can I do?” For conventional, fan-cooled laptops: Visually check the fan blades for encrusted dust and debris; use a cotton swab and a blast of dry, compressed air from a can (examples) to…
Reader Ron Ashrovy wonders if frequent factory resets are dangerous. No: PCs, phones, TVs, or whatever, should not be damaged by frequent factory resets, beyond the measure of extra wear and tear that such resets cause. (A system undergoing reset typically works very hard for a while as it sets itself back up; but this isn’t…
A 5-year-old hard drive is probably near the end of its safe service life. I wouldn’t recommend reusing it for anything essential or irreplaceable. But using it as a secondary scratchpad drive, or as redundant or tertiary storage, you might be able to squeeze a bit more life out of the old drive. The rest…
Maybe — but probably not. It depends on how you set things up. Most web/cloud-based email services (not just Yahoo) live almost entirely on their host servers, not on your PC. In a typical default setup, your browser accesses your web/cloud-based email and displays it locally (on your PC); but at most, only temporary scratchpad…
I had same question when Win10 first appeared, so I carefully benchmarked Win10 vs Win8.1 and Win7, on identical systems, in both upgrade and clean-install versions. I wrote a full feature article about it. You can read it here: https://langa.com/?p=2366 Want the short form? In these real-life tests with identical hardware, Win10 was actually slightly…
You usually can delete them, carefully. Sometimes, leftover files are just sloppy programming — the app’s uninstall routine doesn’t target and remove everything that the app added to the system. D’oh! Sometimes, the files are left in anticipation of future need. For example, if an app requires a somewhat uncommon Windows component, that component may…
Formatting and backing up are two separate things. Formatting comes first: it sets the drive up to be able to record and deliver data. Formatting uses a little of the drive’s capacity for itself; what’s left is the amount of data you can actually put on that drive. For example, an 8GB flash drive will…
Reader Raleigh K. is wondering about the longevity of solid state hard drives (SSDs). Early SSDs did have some problems, not least because the operating systems of the day treated SSDs as if they were standard spinning-platter hard drives. SSDs are fundamentally different, so trouble cropped up: Mismanaged by the OSes, SSD performance would seriously…
If the actual laptop is broken — destroyed screen, liquid on the keyboard, or some such — there’s a good chance the drive itself is OK. If that’s the case, you can physically salvage the drive and use another PC to recover the drive’s data. First, unplug the laptop and remove the battery. Flip the…
In general, “older laptops” were mostly 32-bit systems, which mathematically max out at 4GB of RAM. If the laptop has less RAM than that, I’d consider starting there, to bring the laptop to its full memory complement. Because it’s an “older system,” you probably can buy RAM for cheap. If the laptop is already maxed…