Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
Speaking very generally: RAM is very fast, temporary data storage used only while the device is powered on. The data in RAM goes away when you turn off the device. Hard drives are for storing data longer term; they retain data even when powered off. But hard drives — even solid state drives! — are…
Reader Met Chin asks “Can I mount my hard drive sideways/upside down?” Sure! Unless the owner’s material states otherwise, most desktop/rack-mount/non-portable drives work fine flat (right side up or down), or on end, or on one of their sides. Everything else being equal, as long as the drive’s platters are parallel to the floor, or…
The older column reprinted below was originally published in the August 13, 2015 , Windows Secrets newsletter. This older content supplements brand-new content posted today (April 8, 2019) in the AskWoody Plus newsletter, available here. An upcoming column will update and refine the information below. (I’m reprinting selected Windows Secrets columns here to help ensure…
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…
The folks over at Arstechnica found a very short (just 61 sec!), never-before-seen-by-the-public, video of SpaceX’s most visually-spectacular moments from 2018. This is different from SpaceX’s live and streaming videos. They’re awfully good, but are usually shown at reduced resolution; and often show some artifacting. But this video is apparently direct from higher-resolution source files,…
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…
Seriously! Some scientists say that the advent of agriculture and the switch from tough, raw foods to easier-to-chew cooked and fermented foods actually changed the evolution of some human teeth, making it “easier for people to make ‘labiodental fricative’ sounds like ‘f’ and ‘v,’ which require the top teeth to press against the bottom lip.”…
Reader Steven Clifford Cohen asks: “I disabled the driver for the camera on my laptop. I also put tape over it. Is that enough?” Enough to prevent video-based snooping, sure. But opaque tape alone would do that; a camera can’t see through an opaque object, period. However, if you’re really worried about remote-snooping, consider the…
Reader Jenni Wieter asks; “What is your favorite laptop that you have ever had or used and why?” Hmmm. Two top contenders come to mind: Model 100: This was my first portable computer: a TRS-100. Back in the day when PC’s were usually bulky, desktop units with several separate components, this lightweight, all-in-one portable design…
A bad sector is a small area on the hard drive’s surface that’s unreliable or unreadable; and that the drive’s own software, or the PC’s operating system, has marked as off limits so no new data will be written there. By itself, it’s nothing to worry about. For example, one sector on a typical NTFS-formatted…