Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
A good externally powered USB hub — that is, one with its own separate power supply — is what you need. The external power is key because USB is fundamentally a data transfer standard, not a battery-charging standard. Charging takes a lot more power than data-transfer; a PC’s built-in USB sockets are simply not designed…
(Answer requested by Dawn Hassell) For most PCs, it doesn’t matter. Most external drives for PCs use standard USB connections, and will work with any PC that also uses standard USB connections. USB cables are inexpensive: a 3′ cable typically costs under $10. If the PC uses proprietary connectors — I’m looking at you, Apple…
Yes, if you’re careful. The main thing to remember is that a spinning hard drive acts like a gyroscope, and will resist any movement from its original plane. Move too much/too fast, and you’ll hear it in whining drive bearings or — worst case — the awful scraping sound of a head crash. But if…
(Answer requested by Ellie Williams) Yes, for ordinary use — office tasks, browsing, streaming media, etc. — 8GB is fine for a current-generation 64-bit PC. If you have occasional heavy use that bogs down an 8GB PC, or if you want to build in a little future-proofing, go for 12GB. If you edit hi-res videos, play…
Yes, absolutely, although the usual rule is 80/20. A li-ion battery is stressed the most during the top and bottom 20% of its charging range; and the closer to 100% or 0% you get, the greater the stress. In other words, charging from 99% to 100% is way harder on a battery than charging from…
(Answer requested by Joshua Sneed) Sure! In fact, you may be surprised how easy drive replacement really is. Often, the hardest part is figuring out how to open the case! <g> Once you’re inside, it’s a piece of cake. You can find appropriate instructions for your system by searching for something like “how to replace…
In “Smartphone cameras have come a long way,” you saw some early, warts-and-all test snapshots I took with a Galaxy S10’s three rear cameras. Since then, I found a very useful software setting buried in the camera menus: It reduces the barrel distortion that was evident in the wide-angle shots. And when I say the…
Sure! Although only one operating system can “own” the drive, it can share that same drive with one or more other OSes. Let’s say a Windows PC shares one of its drives to the local network; its permission can be adjusted as you like, but in general, any device on that network — Mac, Linux,…
You don’t need to wipe it. Simple re-partitioning and reformatting will make the drive fully available to you. And that’s a very good thing, because wiping a drive involves overwriting every spot on the disk — in your case, a trillion bytes’ worth. On an average system and HDD, that’d probably take something like two…
I recently got a new Samsung Galaxy S10, and have been playing with its three rear cameras. If you follow smartphones, or cameras, you probably have seen comparison and demo pix taken by professional reviewers to show the capabilities of the new crop of smartphone cameras. You’ve also probably seen the studio-quality promotional shots taken…