Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
Sometimes, Wi-Fi just won’t fly Steel-framed walls in my new apartment made Wi-Fi connections ludicrously slow and unusable in the home office. The router’s “SON” (self-organizing network) features didn’t help. But a hardware end-run got the office communicating again. That’s the subject of my column in this week’s AskWoody Plus. Also in this week’s AskWoody…
… but it can let you see some things in a new light. We Langas are midway through a major relocation. My column in this week’s AskWoody newsletter covers a few things I’ve learned from tearing down, moving, and rebuilding my office and home computer setups. Among them: another reason to love solid-state drives, and…
AskWoody subscriber John Mackin’s laptop was badly malfunctioning, and the problem remained unresolved even after some top-notch troubleshooting and maintenance. “Fred, I have a three-and-a-half-year-old laptop (Dell Inspiron 13”, i7, 12 GB RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD, Windows 10) that has recently begun to periodically shut down during use. “Suspecting CPU overheat, I downloaded the CoreTemp…
AskWoody subscriber John Mackin’s laptop was badly malfunctioning, and the problem remained unresolved even after some top-notch troubleshooting and maintenance. “Fred, I have a three-and-a-half-year-old laptop (Dell Inspiron 13”, i7, 12 GB RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD, Windows 10) that has recently begun to periodically shut down during use. “Suspecting CPU overheat, I downloaded the CoreTemp…
(Answer requested by Shreya Mehta) In sleep mode (sometimes called suspend), your PC goes into a low-power state, consuming just enough electricity to keep the RAM contents intact; to monitor for system events (such as a key- or mouse-click, or closing the lid on a laptop); and to run similar low-power processes. The major advantage of standard sleep…
Without explaining the no-doubt interesting context for his question, reader M.R. asked: “Will booting up from a USB drive leave any trace on the computer?” Yup. In fact, if you know where to look, every PC boot — even one that’s using an operating system installed on a USB flash drive — will normally leave at…
(Answer requested by Reese Horn) The batteries in PC aren’t just for the internal clock; that tiny trickle of power also helps the turned-off PC to “remember” some basic information about its hardware components, so it will know what to do right away, when the power comes on. If the PC “forgets” this information (such…
(Answer requested by Dreezy Mida) Well, sometimes they don’t. Here’s what’s going on: External (USB) storage is almost always slow storage compared to what’s inside a PC. As a result, PC’s using USB storage would typically buffer (temporarily store in RAM) data that was destined for an external device. This way, the app wouldn’t have…
(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 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…
