just a sec ... just a sec ...

... a bit Suffolk

near th

e coast.com

SEO search nearthecoast on Googlenearthecoast on Facebooknearthecoast on Twitternearthecoast on Alamynearthecoast on flickrBuy us a coffee A to Z of villages and towns nearthecoast Our pix on that there Facebook
buy us a coffeesite map • pc tips •

hardware

tu 20 Oct
2020

PC TipsIf you inadvertently put the camera on the iPhone in your pocket into panorama mode it soon becomes a very acceptable hand warmer.

tu 24 Sep
2019

PC TipsTesco Groov-E Cassette/RadioOh poo, flickr have started putting adverts in when flicking through a free account photostream and in the Martlesham Tesco a couple of weeks back there was a £20 personal cassette/radio with built in speaker and mike ... cassettes eh?

th 5 Jul
2018

PC TipsRoy: Have you tried turning it off, counting to ten (gives your un/sub/conscious a chance to get your attention and point out where your getting it wrong), and turning it on again.

fr 9 Mar
2018

Eneloop v LADDA recycle testWe've banged on about rechargeable batteries before.  Recently we bought eight Eneloop AAsPC Tips for a sizeable £20 but boy they made our flashes fly, they recycle faster than we've ever seen before.  Then we found this YouTube vid proving that the half the price Ikea LADDAs were even faster, but do they hold a charge well when not in use?

fr 29 Dec
2017

S-VHS and USB video captureWe recently transferred a twenty year old S-VHSPC Tips tape to DVD using a nine quid USB capture adaptor from eBay and then made three copies of the DVD.  At nine pounds we didn't really expect the hardware and software to work, it did but it took some three days of fiddling about.  This video very much helped with the copying.

fr 8 Dec
2017

PC TipsWe upgraded one of the four hard discs in a Netgear NAS (Network Attached Storage) from 1Tbyte to 2.  The NAS did recreate the data on the new disc from the original three but it took nearly two days.

sa 4 Nov
2017

PC TipsWith our admittedly elderly iPhone 5s we've found that turning Bluetooth off reduces battery drain.  After a recent ios version 11 upgrade we found Bluetooth was on again, so we turned it off ... again.

su 22 Oct
2017

PC TipsPaper pickup roller on HP laser printerOur HP laser printer stopped picking up paper from the horizontal paper tray.  We cleaned the pickup roller with a micro-fibre cloth, no difference.  Oh poo, gonna have to buy a new printer.  An online H-P maintenance page said to clean the roller with water ... that did it!

th 14 Sep
2017

PC TipsAcronis softwareWhen upgrading a hard or solid state disc Acronis is really useful for cloning the old disc to new and these days the software doesn't even have to be on bootable media.  Unfortunately when we left it installed on a desktop after a SSD upgrade the pc kept freezing, uninstalling Acronis fixed the problem.

th 11 May
2017

PC TipsShould have ignored our own advice, connected two different (admittedly by the standards of flat screen elderly) tvs as a second monitor on a desktop, some the of the screen lost at top and bottom and an image sufficiently soft that though it didn't matter much with graphics it made reading text very hard going.

sa 13 Feb
2016

PC TipsWe had a desktop pc this week that would only repeatedly beep at start up nothing else.  On the basis it's usually the cpu we swapped the cpu but the beeping continued so then we pulled the ram from position 2 but still no change.  Now we replaced the ram in position 1 with the ram module pulled from position two and that fixed it ... should have done that first.

mo 21 Dec
2015

PC TipsWe use a Netgear ReadyNas (Network Attached Storage device) for backup.  It can recover your data if a hard disc fails or as lastNAS available week we upgraded one of the four hard drives from 1Tb to 2Tb but if in a moment of madness you remove two drives whilst powered up you lose everything.  Thankfully we still have the source but scary how easily we lost a backup.

we 11 Mar
2015

PC TipsA solid state disc (SSD) has to be faster than a hard disc as there's no read/write head that has to move.  A SSD also draws less power because it doesn't have to rotate a disc and for the same reason an SSD is effectively silent.

If you followed our suggestion below to move your data onto a second drive youCrucial SSD install kit may find that the first and system drive can be small enough capacity that a SSD substitute becomes affordable, we got away with a £100 256Gb SSD from Crucial plus £18 for the install kit.  It did speed things up but we found three gotchas:

1: the Acronis cloning software supplied with the install kit is in fact a download and it wasn't that straightforward registering it,

2: the SSD needs partitioning before formatting (obvious but it caught us out), and

3: the 2.5" to 3.5" adapter is too short to fit properly into some 3.5" cages.

sa 3 Jan
2015

PC TipsPerhaps obvious but if your wireless mouse/keyboard gobbles batteries get some rechargeable batteries and a charger.  Rechargeable batteries comeRechargeable AA batteries in different flavours determined by the mAh rating, that's milliampere-hour, the higher the mAh rating (2000 mAh for a AA is getting high) the longer the battery will last before it needs to be charged ... and the more it will cost.  There are also precharged  rechargeables that will hold a charge when not in use sometimes up to a year (allegedly), relevant when you want to hold ready to go spares.

5 Dec
2014

PC TipsIf your hard disc is starting to fill up with family photos you could replace it with a larger drive but perhaps a Disk Management better way is to install a second drive and move your photos on to that.  A second drive has the advantages you don't have to clone the original drive and if the system drive crashes you still have the family pix on the second drive.  A possible gotcha is you might seem to already have a second disc drive but it's actually two partitions on the same physical drive.  The way to be clear is to go Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management

tu 7 Oct
2014

PC TipsIf you've got a monitor leftover from an upgrade twenty quid odd willDual monitors buy a display adaptor with more than one output so your desktop can run two monitors.  Two gotchas; if your desktop is slimline/small form you'll need the display adaptor to fit (some come with slimline plates for you to fit), and the DVI to VGA adaptor you're likely to need is a couple of quid on ebay and thirteen quid at Currys/PC World.

th 25 Sep
2014

Like Roy's RTFM t-shirtHopefully you know about Have you tried turning it off and on again?  It should work with anything that has control programming ... washing machines, digital cameras, cars.  Here at ntc we prefer the more pro Have youPC Tips tried turning it off, counting to ten and turning it back on again?  The counting to ten is to give your unconscious a chance to point out that it's you not the device.

mo 14 Jul
2014

PC TipsSpent a good lump of time on remote assistance this week (remote assistance kept giving up) fixing a Samsung laptop with an HP all-in-one printer that wouldn't scan.  The problem was a universal Samsung printer driver had been installed on the laptop not an HP printer driver.  You install the driver for the device not the computer.

tu 11 Sep
2012

PC TipsOne of computing's general rules is cheap hardware comes with cheap software (and not necessarily only the cheap hardware).  A while back we bought a really cheap Targus wireless mouse and more recently a cheap Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse combo in Tesco.  They both work ok but neither seem to have any support software so the mouse wheel click and the keyboard's special keys can't be reassigned ... just saying.

fr 27 Apr
2012

PC TipsThe Sinclair ZX Speccy was 30 on Monday.  We never had one having already gone BBC but weSinclair ZX Spectrum ~ pic Contributed did have have a ZX81 which to save a few bob run off a car battery charger we'd dodged up.  Once when fiddling with the ZX81 a mature visitor advised us to get an outside aerial (you used your telly as the monitor).  'It's a computer Pete.'  'Oh, dirty videos.'  'No Pete, it's a computer.'  'Yes ... have you got an outside aerial?''

tu 6 Dec
2011

PC TipsIf you haven't defragmented your Windows XP hard disc for a bit it's a good idea even if defrag says you don't need to, hopefully it will speed up disc access.  You should be able to find Disk Defragmenter in Start/AllXP command window Programs/Accessories/System Tools but if it's gone missing you can run it from a command window by going Start/Run, enter cmd in the Open: text window and then dfrg.msc at the > prompt.

su 2 Oct
2011

USB external HDPC TipsUSB external hard discs that don't need a separate power supply (they get power from the USB socket) keep getting physically smaller, their storage capacity bigger and cheaper; fifty quid should get you a 500Gig one.  They are just such an easy way to back up or move data about you should have one ... and they don't have to come in black or dark grey.

tu 5 Jan
2010

PC TipsBefore you throw your dial up modem away do remember it's what Printers and Faxesyou use to send a fax, and even now we find occasionally we still have to (the police still use faxes for some things, why?)  If your pc came without a dial up modem the fax software will need to be installed from Printers and Faxes.

fr 21 Aug
2009

PC TipsLady KRJ's netbookThis is the netbook Lady KRJ bought herself, it's much smaller than a laptop and stunningly light implying the battery doesn't have a lot of clout, no cd/dvd drive so installing apps would need external stuff, it cost just over £300 and despite the seemingly tiny 10" screen you can do real stuff on it.  Nice one Lady K.

su 12 Jul
2009

PC TipsAlways dry your laptop naturallyWhen you've had your laptop a while and it starts to slow down it's because the hard disc needs cleaning up.  We do ours on the Delicates cycle, it's much safer to use a non-bio powder and of course never put it in the tumble dryer but dry naturally.

mo 22 Jun
2009

PC TipsWhen you come to throw a computer away it's the hardstack of hard discs disc that contains information you may not want fraudsters, blackmailers or your wife to know.  If your soon to be discarded pc is a desktop (not a laptop) then the hard disc will look like one of these.  Open the pc box (usually by removing phillips screws but sometimes by just pressing the correct bit) and there'll most probably be a grey ribbon hanging out of the hard disc to help identify it.  There'll probably be more phillips screws going into the side of the disc drive which when removed allow the drive to slide out.hard disk broken pcb   Now you need to seriously damage the green printed circuit board that controls the disc, break bits off with a screwdriver or pliers or beat it with a large object till they fall off.  The info is still on the disc inside the case but you'd have to be pretty devoted to repair the pcb to get at it.

A to Z of villages and towns nearthecoast mice • networks • email us • advertise

.


..
A to Z of villages and towns nearthecoastadvertiseget the digestemail uspc tips • micenetworks

Email: ntc@nearthecoast.com

Text: 07970 865730

Pester: 01728 723306