My P3 laptop had been working fine until recently when it started this really disappointing habit of shutting down unceremoniously--no blue screen, no dialog, nothing. Certainly, the problem was related to processor overheating. Easy to figure this out because on cool weather or in AC room the...

My c7280 all in one fax came with a 2 to 4 wire adapter for the phone connection. I think it is designed to adapt 4 wire phone wire to the 2 wire jack of the fax phone line. HP included their own 2 wire cable that seems to reverse the connections of tip and ring. What is the purpose of this...

I have a server running Windows Server 2003. 3 Disk, each 120 GB. I want to swap out disk for 1.5 TB disk. I've heard that you can swap out the drives one at a time while letting each rebuild before swapping the next. Is this true? If not, what is the best method of performing this?

The other day I bought an NAS Netgear SC101. I installed 1 HD, downloaded and installed the latest management software as mentioned in the doc (scm_3_0_6_setup.exe)from www.netgear.com. Leds on the device turn on normal (disk, power and network) No problem so far. One error: the management...

I just had occasion to experiment with a new Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2HP (AMD 780G/ AMD SB700) motherboard. To my surprise the board video would not come up with a VGA plugged into the onboard/internal video, and I had to insert an offboard/ external video card (ge7200gs) in order to get into BIOS...

Hi, I'm looking for a solution, on how to recover data from TYPE 44 partition (Norton GoBack) which was overwritten using Partition Magic to NTFS v3.1 for WinXP. I did try plenty of partition recovery software, but none of them worked. Please help, I'm really desperate !

Hi all, I remove the bezel from my dell inspiron 1720 to replace the keyboard, and I found 2 hidden buttons. The bezel has a home key and a power button, but there are two other buttons on the keyboard to the left of these that are not accessable with the bezel on. Is this because dell uses the...

My main computer is directly connected to the internet by cable. I have a combined router/modem unit. Have one computer upstairs connected wirelessly and a lap top, also connected to the router / modem unit. Have two fairly recent printers, but none of them are wireless. Other than buying a...

I have an HP laptop and use an older external LCD monitor. The monitor works fine... as long as the laptop lid is open but goes blank and says "mode not supported" if I close the lid. I have the laptop settings (Vista) to "do nothing " when I close the lid. Might I have another setting that...

Hi, There's no bios temperature monitoring on the Dell Dimension 4600. So I've used a digital thermometer and made contact with the black fanless heatsink on the motherboard's northbridge. I get 52 degree Celcius (126 Fahrenheit). Is this normal temperature for a North bridge? Should I install a...

Ran across this thread at Tom's Hardware Forum. Is the following advice true? "Get the 750w PC P&C its the same price but a better supply, after the mail in rebate its cheaper. There is no reason not to do this. It won't use more power just because its bigger, in fact it will probably use power...

Hi, I have a problem with my network adapter, after the tweaking with RightMark CPU Clock. It's disappeared! I was lowering the cpu voltage and after one usual crash of the system (for the too low value), the OS, nor other OSs (Linux, BSD, etc), can see the Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit...

I'm taking an floppy drive from my older Sony Vaio computer to install in a new Acer. (I have a very infrequent need to access some old disks.) I thought I could take the cable, complete with female sockets, and use it in the Acer, but the connectors are slightly different. On the Sony the...

I have my Vista laptop (HP) hooked up to an external monitor. The laptop is closed and on a shelf that is very hard to get to. I would like to shut it off at night. I can shut it off with the keyboard. Is there any way (physical or software controlled) that I can turn it back on without...

I have an ASUS AN8, AMD 3700+, 250gb HD, running XP Pro. I also have two external HDs, one 250gb and the other 500gb. The two externals have almost 600gb of files I do not want to lose. The total GBs of the two externals will increase over time. What are some viable options for storage and...

Building a new system to replace a Pentium 630 setup. Will be used for occasional rendering of video and have plans to learn AutoCad/Chief Architect. Hard Drives are missing from the list and will use a Velociraptor 150GB and two Western Digital 640GB drives that will be transferred from existing...

I posted this question in sci.electronics.repair but none of the well-meaning replies was of much help. I hope I have better luck here. It's about the two-terminal SMD protection device at the power supply inputs of hard disks. I assume that it's a zener diode or something similar in action...

Following on from Bob L's post and a few others. I have also bought a reported 16GB flash drive from ebay. I expected it to be a fake, but it looked like and actually is a very nice looking device - leather bound with an aluminium lid. It seems to hold about 3-4GB before corrupting further...

Hello everybody,this is my first post. Please try to help an oldtimer newcomer out. I have an E-MACHINE T1125 desktop. It has a 1.3 GHz processor and 256 MB DRAM. Machine has been slow lately so everybody says add some memory. So I look up specs on machine and it says it is expandable to 512 dram....

I want to be able to print the standard basic colors** exactly the same way that they appear on the screen. A specific instance of this is that cyan*** is printed as a much darker shade of blue than appears on the screen. I have found this exact same problem exists across several laser printer...