Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
In just a few hours, on New Year’s Day, the New Horizons spacecraft will buzz past “Ultima Thule,” a Kuiper Belt Object; a relic of the early solar system, and the most distant object ever visited by human craft. This post isn’t actually about the flyby — there’s tons of information already available about that….
Recall that early computers used tape as memory — paper tape at first and later, magnetic tape. Tape-based memory is serial: If you want a byte of memory in the middle of the tape, you have to start at one end of the tape and spool through to the location you want. That’s clumsy and…
That depends on exactly what broke. Pick up the drive and gently shake it. Is there loose stuff inside the housing? If you hear pieces rattling around, you may have broken one or more of the disc platters (disc platters are often made of glass, coated with a metallic layer). And if platters are broken,…
Laptop noise usually comes from four components: the cooling fans; any spinning-media data-storage device (e.g. hard drive or DVD); the keyboard; and the speakers. We’ll discuss those in reverse order, and immediately discount the speakers: I seriously doubt that’s the kind of noise you were referring to! You can just turn down the volume, or…
Not much. In fact, probably less than a penny! You can roughly guesstimate it for yourself this way: Note that electricity is usually sold by the kiloWatt hour (kWh) — 1000 Watts delivered for one hour. If you know the Wattage of your phone charger, and how long it runs, you can very easily calculate…
Meh. You’ll either see no gain at all; or so little that you won’t notice. Here’s why: The circuits that RAM plugs into are controlled by a clock that sets the pacing for all memory-related operations in that part of the PC. In the vast majority of PCs, the RAM clock speed is set at…
Nope — not if you’re smart about how you set it up! Older, slower drives are great for medium-to-long-term data storage — files that you want to have handy and accessible, but that are not in constant use. Think of things like music, photo, or video collections; backup copies; system images; ISOs; and so on….
A reader asks: “Is 32 GB RAM too much?” Fred says yes, even for future-proofing. Here’s why.
You can safely transport a hard drive if you avoid the three main classes of “things that can kill a hard drive:” Avoid physical shocks: make sure the drive won’t be dropped, stepped on, knocked, or otherwise banged about. Avoid temperature/humidity extremes: Keep the drive dry, at human-comfortable temperatures, and in non-condensing humidity levels. Avoid…
A reader wonders where to seek higher ground in and around Boston.