Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
Not a good idea. The protective circuitry (in the Li-ion battery or in the device that the battery powers) is designed to prevent dangerous over- and undercharging, which can cause the battery to overheat and catch fire. (Remember all those hoverboard fires a couple years ago? That’s what you get when you abuse a Li-ion…
I recently purchased a similar Optane-equipped PC, benchmarked the hell out of it, and used it in real life — before ripping Optane out of the PC. I documented the results in these three articles: Part 1, “Taking the plunge with a new PC” (AskWoody Plus newsletter 2019-06-03), gets the ball rolling. In Part 2,…
(Answer requested by Ahmed Belkhouja) Very easily! Here’s why: Files are stored on a hard drive in very small chunks called clusters. On a conventional NTFS-formatted drive, for example, the default cluster size is 4KB; large files are stored as a series of 4KB clusters. On a new, empty, spinning-platter drive, saved files will be stored…
(Answer requested by Victor Zamagni) You can use vodka. You can use almost any liquid you want — hamster pee, chicken soup, gasoline, melted ice cream, ketchup, unicorn tears, pickle juice, whatever — as long as you accept the attendant extra risks, costs, and engineering involved. Most PC cooling systems use plain air or distilled/stabilized…
(Answer requested by Jane Clark) The range is so wide there’s no useful “average” to quote. For example, the https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/ site lists current real-world SSD write times from 26MB/sec to 3366MB/sec — more than a two orders of magnitude difference! But by checking out that site, and others such as PassMark.com SSD ratings, you can…
Keyboards are mechanically complex, with *lots* of little parts —- usually its own multi-layer circuit board containing its own logic chips and firmware, plus wiring and connectors and over 100 separate electromechanical switches, each one itself a little multi-part precision subassembly with a spring, plunger, contact points, a base, stabilizers, a keycap…. (info). Laptop keyboards…
No drive — SSD, HDD, magnetic tape, wire spool, paper tape, whatever — no drive can make that guarantee! But the data on any kind of drive should survive the drive’s careful removal, proper storage, and re-installation. Mostly, it depends on how you handle the drive. SSDs should be handled the same as an HDD…
Sounds like driver trouble. Something in your regular Win7 drivers isn’t working with the new update; but when your PC falls back to generic drivers (as in Safe Mode), things apparently work OK again. Option 1) Go to your laptop maker’s support site; download (but don’t yet install) the correct Win7 drivers for your exact…
(Answer requested by Jack Swenson) Probably not. The 7200 RPM drive is designed for 7200 RPM. The 5400 RPM drive is designed for 5400 RPM. Both should deliver their statistically-normal full service life at their rated speeds. Now, if you somehow took a 5400 RPM drive up to 7200 RPM, and if it didn’t die…
If a PC is running slow despite having reasonably current and otherwise-healthy hardware, then too-little RAM is for sure a prime suspect — especially if the PC was originally configured at the low end of the OS’s RAM recommendations. Of course, if your PC is old, or has an underpowered CPU, or an old spinning-platter…