A Few Tips on Recovering Data from a Really Old Laptop

Apr 24, 2014

As you dig through your old belongings in the attic, you come across something unexpected. Dusty, square, and much heavier than it looks, it’s your old IBM laptop from 1995. The battery is dead, you don’t know if any of the connection ports work, and the power cable is nowhere to be seen, but you’re […]

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Dave's Computers

What to Do When Your Laptop Overheats

Apr 20, 2014

Modern laptops are real miracles of engineering, packing huge amounts of processing power into a tiny amount of space. While the technology to increase power and decrease size continues to improve, fitting that many complex components into a small laptop does occasionally cause some problems, the most common of which is overheating. The small size […]

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Dave's Computers

Recovering Your Data After a Fire

Apr 18, 2014

You’ve had a house fire. You, your family and your pets are all safe and unharmed, but your possessions have been badly damaged by heat and smoke. As you sort through your charred belongings trying to figure out what you can fix and what’s beyond repair, you come across your laptop, badly damaged but not […]

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Dave's Computers

Bad Sectors? Learn More about them.

Apr 17, 2014

A bad sector is a small section of the hard drive that becomes damaged and can no longer have data written to it. In most cases a bad sector is a relatively minor problem: while it can affect both traditional magnetic and newer solid state drives, both types of drive are designed with a certain […]

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Dave's Computers

Cryptovirus Attack : What to do next!

Apr 16, 2014

Computer viruses have been around for decades, and they range from fun-but-annoying pranks all the way to devastating destruction of your computer system. No kind of virus is enjoyable to have on your computer, but by far one of the worst viruses ever to affect personal computers is CryptoLocker. A particularly insidious virus that combines […]

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Dave's Computers

Learn How to Back Up Your Computer

Apr 15, 2014

The more we rely on computers, the more valuable the data on them becomes — and the more painful it is when something goes wrong. While data recovery is possible after a crash, it’s far better to back up regularly before disaster strikes. Here’s how. Use an External Hard Drive External drives offer a lot […]

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Dave's Computers

Hard Drive Making Noise? Clicking?

Apr 14, 2014

Computers are prone to making all sorts of unusual noises – whirrs, beeps and musical tones – but one sound you never want to hear is the sound of your hard drive clicking. Often called the “click of death”, the sound of a clicking hard drive is usually caused by one of the drive heads […]

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Dave's Computers

How to Recover Data from a RAID Array

Apr 13, 2014

A RAID is a storage technology that allows you to store large amounts of data with built-in security against data loss. It does this by spreading the workload across multiple disk drives, so that if one fails, another can pick up the task. Like most external storage solutions, RAIDs are available at multiple levels of […]

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Dave's Computers

Dead Laptop? Learn how to recover data from it.

Apr 11, 2014

Modern laptops are miracles of engineering: they are able to host files, run programs, enable us to play games, stream videos and hundreds of other things as well. Unfortunately, the more functions a piece of machinery has, the more things there are that can go wrong. A catastrophic laptop failure is fairly rare, but it […]

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Dave's Computers

5 Things to Consider when Choosing an External Hard Drive

Apr 9, 2014

Having an external hard drive is practically essential in today’s data-driven world. Keeping all your files on a single computer is inconvenient, unwieldy and risks losing everything if your computer fails, so keeping your files backed up on an external hard drive adds an extra level of security to your data, ensuring that if one […]

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