Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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Question from Robert: About a year ago I built a new gaming PC and installed Windows 11 on it.
A few days ago I installed this Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD thinking it would be a LOT faster than the hard drive.
Well, it isn’t. It actually takes forever for some games to load. [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
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Question from Kristen: The hard drive in my laptop has stopped working and I need to take it somewhere to have it fixed.
I’ve been taking your advice about creating regular System Image backups and I have a fairly recent backup they can use to restore everything once the bad hard drive is replaced.
What worries me is I have a lot of really personal photos that were backed up along with everything else. Will a tech be able to see them? [Read more…]
Question from Bill: I recently read an article about using hard drives or SSDs in a RAID configuration.
The article said RAID 1 copies all data to every drive in the array at the same time, essentially creating a clone of the primary drive in real time.
In the comments on the article someone suggested that using two drives in RAID 1 will automatically create a backup, eliminating the need to back up the hard drive in the usual way.
That made sense to me but then someone else commented and said that’s a really bad idea. But he didn’t explain why.
What’s your opinion on using RAID 1 to create automatic backups? Is it a good idea or not?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Marvin: I read your article about upgrading a computer by adding an SSD to make it run faster.
The following weekend I went to Best Buy and bought a 1TB SSD and cloned the contents of the existing 500GB hard disk onto it.
I then wiped the hard drive and installed the SSD in the computer, leaving the now-blank hard drive in place to store my data files on.
Everything works perfectly but something has me baffled. When I look in the BIOS it says the hard drive is set as the boot drive.
How is this machine booting into Windows when the boot drive is blank?
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Question from Ethan: I was reading an article last night that discussed using part of a computer’s unused RAM as a RAM Disk, and it got me to thinking.
I have a pretty old desktop computer that’s running Windows 7. It has 2GB of RAM and a 200GB hard drive.
This machine runs really slow, coming almost to a crawl at times. After doing some research I’ve determined that it’s likely sluggish because it’s doing a ton of swapping back and forth with the page file.
Do you think moving the Windows Page File to a RAM Disk would help speed it up? [Read more…]