Adding a SATA Hard Drive to Your System, Part 2

Reader Rick Goodier wrote again to say: Hi, Terry. You were right. I finally had to download a driver, oddly called a Raid driver, from the soyo website, install it, and then the drive was recognized. But I made a bit of a mistake. In the xp pro disk management screen, I told the computer [...]

Adding a SATA Hard Drive to Your System

Reader Rick Goodier wrote me about the problems he was having adding a SATA hard drive to his new computer. Hi, Terry. I am a new subscriber just signed on. Perhaps I will have some suggestions for you as time goes on. I have been playing around with computers for more than a few years. [...]

Adding Memory to the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni

Adding more memory really helps – and not just in computers… One of the differences between inkjet printers and laser printers has to do with handling of the data to be printed. An inkjet printer gets its commands for each printed line, one at a time, from Windows. It prints the line and gets the [...]

Adding a Large SATA Drive to an Older Computer

A couple weeks ago, I bought a 1 TB SATA II hard drive to add to my home theater PC. I already had one SATA II drive (3.0 Gigabits/second) installed in the computer, on which I had the drive’s jumper set to SATA I (1.5 Gigabits/second). I "knew" the new drive wouldn’t be a problem [...]

Accessing The Computer’s BIOS Setup

Sometimes, we need to get into the BIOS Setup Utility that’s built into our computers. The BIOS, the Basic Input-Output System, is the chip that controls how your computer talks to many peripheral devices, like keyboards. It controls which drive attempts to boot first, second, and so forth. It even enables some users to do [...]

An Electronics Challenge

This has been a weekend of electronics experimentation at my house. I had the distinct pleasure of taking a day of vacation on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, I had the distinct displeasure of finding Christmas Eve morning that my Samsung LED DLP television decided it did not want to operate. This TV is connected to my [...]

Disadvantages of a Notebook Computer

I’ve mentioned many times that my main computer is my notebook computer. Sure, I have a desktop computer, too, I just don’t use it very much. I also have my home theater PC and a Linux-based file server for backup. But, my Dell Inspiron 8600 is the real workhorse. In this week’s online newsletter, my [...]