Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
(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…
(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…
(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…
(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….
(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…
