hardware

sa 8 Mar 2025	Last century it was maybe a year before we realised our first mobile could text. Similarly we vaguely knew autofocus could be fine tuned but we didn't know two of our camera bodies had these presets. Tempted to dismiss as useful if all you snap is tennis but maybe we're just fearful of the new ...
mo 18 Mar 2024	As plugs have got smaller in this connected digital world (Apple's lightning and the increasingly ubiquitous USB type C) the tolerances of the physical dimensions must be more critical. Our experience is the cheaper varieties can be a sloppy fit and consequently less reliable.
tu 25 Apr 2023	There are at least two gotchas that might catch you out with a power bank a rechargeable battery that can be used to charge other devices. You need a less common USB lead to charge the power bank and on this one the green light means it's around a third charged not fully charged.
we 2 Nov 2022	The last time we can recall using a fax was for accreditation with Essex Police for Operation Utah and it seemed clunky then. Seems the fax is joining Betamax, the tamagotchi (though you can still buy them) and 8 track cartridges.
we 31 Aug 2022	Adobe Lightroom started telling us the driver for the Intel display adaptor on our HP workstation was out of date and could cause problems. Windows Update and HP Support Assistant didn't know about the update but not surprisingly Intel Driver & Support Assistant did ... just saying.
su 3 Apr 2022	The HP Support Assistant on our workstation is generally annoying; it nags, is slow and usually unhelpful though it did recently point out the security on our User Account Control wasn't high enough. Mind you it made a dog's breakfast of a recent BIOS upgrade.
tu 20 Oct 2020	If you inadvertently put the camera on the iPhone in your pocket into panorama mode it soon becomes a very acceptable hand warmer.
th 5 Jul 2018	Roy: 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	We've banged on about rechargeable batteries before. Recently we bought eight Eneloop AAs 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	We recently transferred a twenty year old S-VHS 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	We 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	With 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	Our 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	When 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	Should 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	We 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.
we 11 Mar 2015	A 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 you 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	Perhaps obvious but if your wireless mouse/keyboard gobbles batteries get some rechargeable batteries and a charger. Rechargeable batteries come 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	If your hard disc is starting to fill up with family photos you could replace it with a larger drive but perhaps a 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	If you've got a monitor leftover from an upgrade twenty quid odd will 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	Hopefully 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 you 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	Spent 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	One 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.
tu 6 Dec 2011	If 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/All 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 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	Before you throw your dial up modem away do remember it's what you 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.
su 12 Jul 2009	When 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	When you come to throw a computer away it's the hard 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. 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.

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