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Q&A: Can I add a second hard drive to my laptop?

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Question from Terry:  I bought an older Dell laptop after answering an ad on Craigslist. The guy I bought it from told me I’d be able to install a second hard drive in it if I wanted to.

I went to Best Buy and bought a 1TB laptop hard drive but when I went to install it I could only find a place for one hard drive (the drive that’s already in it).

There is only one plastic cover on the bottom for accessing a hard drive.

Could there maybe be a second drive bay somewhere else that isn’t accessible by simply removing a cover?  [Read more…]

Q&A: How do I reformat a hard drive that I replaced with an SSD?

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Question from Aaron L.:  A while back I replaced the hard drive in my HP laptop with an SSD, then installed Windows 7 from the DVD.

After I got all the Windows Updates installed I upgraded the system to Windows 10.

I bought one of the external USB drive enclosures for the old hard drive, then I plugged it into a USB port and copied all of my files onto another external drive.

The SSD is working great and so is the old hard drive (which is now being used as an external drive). The problem is the old drive still contains the original partitions for the operating system and the system recovery files.

How can I reformat the old drive as one single large partition? [Read more…]

Q&A: Will a new SSD work in an older computer?

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Question from Richard:  Hi, Rick. I hope you can answer a question for me.

I have an older Gateway desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux. The hard drive died and I want to replace it with a solid state drive (SSD).

My cousin is offering to sell me an unused 1TB SSD for about half what I’d have to pay for a new one. He bought it a while back but he no longer needs it because the computer he was going to put it in died.

My question is will this drive work in my computer? I’m asking because the old hard drive had a SATA II interface and the SSD I’m thinking about buying is SATA III.  [Read more…]

Q&A: Would it be worthwhile to double the amount of RAM in my PC?

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Question from Pete:  I have a Dell desktop computer that came with 8GB of RAM and Windows 7. I have since upgraded it to Windows 10.

Per your recommendation I went to Crucial.com and ran their System Scanner on this machine and it says it can use up to 16GB of RAM.

I know that adding more RAM to a computer makes it run faster. My question is would doubling the amount of RAM in this particular computer to 16GB make it run a LOT faster?

[Read more…]

Q&A: What’s the cheapest 2TB SSD I can buy?

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Question from Marshall P.:  I really want to buy a 2TB SSD to go in my Dell desktop computer that I use to run my landscaping business.

Can you help me find the cheapest 2TB SSD that I can buy that’s not a piece of junk?

[Read more…]

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