Force Your Computer to Shutdown

Just this morning my mother-in-law called to tell me that her laptop wouldn’t turn off. She had tried the obvious stuff: initiating a shutdown through the Start Menu, pressing the power button. Nothing seemed to work. Her laptop was effectively locked up.

There’s a trick to solving this problem and I forget how few people know about it. I’ve yet to see it fail and, if it doesn’t work for you, you’re either being too impatient or something is seriously wrong with your hardware.
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Unreadable Disc Error – Xbox 360 DVD Drive

Last Wednesday, I decided I would play some GTA IV before the wife got home. So turned on the Xbox, popped in the disc, and got to it. About 20 minutes into my session, I began to hear a horrible noise coming from the DVD drive. After a few seconds of growling, a Xbox blade came across the screen saying the disc was unreadable.

Cursing under my breath, I got up from the couch to give the Xbox and game a close look. Of course, the disc was fine. I put in another game just to be sure, and got the “unreadable disc” error once again. I inserted a movie we had watched over the weekend. No dice. Read more

Battery Backup Power

Battery backup units, known as UPS (uninterruptible power supplies) can save you both time and money. Retyping a report or replacing expensive computer hardware (due to power outages) can be a thing of the past with one of these units. And the best part? Battery backup units are comparably quite inexpensive, usually costing less than $100. Read more

Comcast DVR – A Disappointment

I’m on my second Comcast DVR (digital video recorder) and, sadly, I’m probably about to go swap it for a third.

Most of my Saturday mornings are spent checking out the week’s recordings and watching a few things… usually Battlestar Galactica if I had missed it during the week. Well, this past Saturday morning when I turned on the dvr everything seemed normal. However, when I went to “My Recordings” the display showed “0% Full” and “No listings Available” (which was also shown under the Scheduled Recordings menu).
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Midweek Geek Links for 06-05-2008

It’s time for this week’s geek links!

• Love to read? Learn how to get away with reading at work. I was blown away when I first saw this website.
• The latest release candidate for Firefox 3 hit the web yesterday. Head over to the Mozilla site to learn what’s new and how to check it out for yourself.
• Steve Bass over at PC World posted an article explaining a few ways to make Vista and XP work the way you want them to. Some handy tips are presented there.
• Want to build your own machine on the cheap? Wired.com has an article on how to build a $150 linux machine (minus the keyboard, mouse, and monitor). They’ve even listed and linked to all the places they found their bargain-priced parts.
• And finally, be a green geek and help out your local farmers by heading over to the Farmer’s Market Search hosted by the USDA. There you will find a current listing of farmers markets throughout the United States.

Hard Drive Failures

A hard drive is the most important piece of hardware in your computer. Sure, without all the other pieces your computer would not work. However, I feel that it is the most important because of the valuable data we store on them. Without hard drives, you cannot store the hundreds of family photos, the hours of homework, or the deal-making presentation on your computer. You may argue that we could store these things on removable media, but this is far less cost effective and convenient. Hard drives will continue to be the #1 choice for storage for many years.

Companies spend tens of thousands of dollars each year to employ competent technical personnel who ensure that their data is not in danger of being destroyed. Why? Because it is not a question of if a hard drive will fail. It is a question of when a hard drive will fail! Read more

USB – Universal Connections

USB (universal serial bus) is a standard serial bus that is used to connect devices together. The most popular application being connecting an enormous amount of peripherals to your computer. It’s not uncommon to use three or four USB devices in any given day (keyboard, mouse, USB Flash Drive, blackberry). What’s that? You’re still stuck at “serial bus”? Please, allow me to explain! Read more

All About Computer Parts

Whether you are interested in building your own computer or just have a genuine curiosity about how they work, you should have a basic understanding of all the different pieces of computer hardware. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but should get you well on the path towards computer enlightenment.

I spent several years working at Dell, putting these things together. Surprisingly, I was one of the few people who knew how these parts worked together. So, after reading through this post, you’ll probably have a better understanding of computer hardware than most of the folks out at Dell. ;) Read on!

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