Solutions to problems with hard disk drives, SSD and CD/DVD drives
Useful free PC diagnostic tools/utilities that provide useful information on a computer’s components, diagnostic tests or that monitor their activities There are several very useful free diagnostic and information and monitoring tools that are either provided as part of Windows XP/Vista/7/8.1/10 or by third-party developers. The following list of free tools can provide useful…
Hard disk drive problem: HDD slow boot/shutdown – showing nearly full but using only half its capacity My desktop PC – running Windows 7 Home Premium has 2GB of RAM memory and an AMD Phenom II quad-core processor – is taking a long time to boot and shut down. The hard disk drive has a…
Hard disk drive problem: External hard drive’s disk space shrunk from 500GB to only 50GB My desktop computer is running Windows 7 Home Premium. Its external drive’s disk space shrunk. I have an external USB hard disk drive that I store data on. It was working perfectly until I tried to use Paragon Partition Manager…
Hard-disk-drive problem: chkdsk runs repeatedly My desktop PC runs Windows XP SP3 [the last Service Pack for Windows XP, but the problem could apply to Windows Vista/ 7/8.1/10 using the NTFS file system] and it is giving me loads of disk error messages. As it starts up, the Windows XP logo with its animated…
Backups fail after Windows 7/8.1/10 changes drive letters for USB flash drives Often backups fail if Windows changes the drive letter of a USB flash drive that was used to create the backup. This makes subsequent backups fail. If you use USB flash drives to store backups, you might have discovered that Windows 7/8.1/10 can…
Hard Disk, SSD and USB flash drive Disk Management in Windows 7/8.1/10 In Windows 7/8.1/10, you can access all of the installed drives – hard disk, SSD, flash drive(s) and CD/DVD drives – via Computer and Disk Management. Both of those areas of Windows provide options that allow you to format (delete all of the…
When creating a system image using Backup and Restore, Windows 7/8.1/10 overwrites the previous system image When you use Windows Backup and Restore to create a system-image backup on an external hard disk drive, it creates a folder on the drive called WindowsImageBackup. However, when you create a new image on the same drive, Windows…
Using diagnostic flowcharts to diagnose and fix hardware problems with PC components As you can see from looking at any of the diagnostic flowcharts made available from the following link, there are no photo-illustrations or explanations of basic computer functions. The intended audience is the hobbyist or technician who already has some experience of repairing…
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are increasingly being used instead of hard disk drives, or in combination with them, on desktop and laptop PCs. Windows is usually installed on the much faster SSD that boots the system extremely quickly and a high-capacity, slower hard disk drive is used for storage. SSDs have no moving parts, making them…
If you have an old PC that still works perfectly well and you have a network, you can put it to good use by turning it into a network attached storage (NAS) device that can serve files to the network – free of charge. FreeNAS from http://www.freenas.org/ is an excellent network storage operating system that…
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