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