Gadgets & Technology
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
External Hardrives
My laptop keeps telling me that it has very little memory left and it asks me to delete programs that I no longer use to make room. It's about 7 years old and right now we can't afford a new one. Is this what an external hardrive is for? It seems to be the answer to my problem right now, since they are more affordable...
Re: External Hardrives
First, your daughter is adorable!
Do you have a lot of documents and photos and other personal info on there? If so it would probably be a good idea to get an external hard drive or a decent size capacity thumb drive and store all of your info on it, now.... In case your laptop crashes.
Run some virus and spyware scans to see if you have any issues. If that doesn't help then i'd definitely take it somewhere to do a clean install of windows.
As mentioned above, if you have a lot of documents, photos, videos, etc. stored on your laptop, definitely consider moving them to an external drive to free up space on your machine.
For programs, it's a little trickier, because a lot of them aren't really designed to be installed on a separate drive. Even if they work, they might run uncomfortably slow. Since your machine is 7 years old, it's quite possible that you're filling the hard drive with software, since newer programs tend to be much larger, and a 7-year-old drive is likely to be quite small.
If this is the case, and you don't have a lot of files that you can move to an external drive, start by looking at the software on your machine to see what you really need and what you don't. Uninstall old programs that you don't use or wipe the drive and reinstall everything from scratch (including your operating system). Alternatively, if the drive you have is too small, you can see about having a larger drive installed. In some cases, you may even be able to copy everything from your old drive onto the new larger drive, but you would probably need some hardware tech support to do this.
Yup, back up documents, pics, videos, etc. onto discs or an external drive. Save the internal drive for running programs and the operating system.
Regarding replacing the hard drive: it can be done but you need to get a similar model of drive. A laptop hard drive of a decent size (bigger than what came on an older machine) will probably run you $60-$80 bucks.
I've done this -- my laptop was five or six years old when its hard drive died and I had to replace it. (Then I promptly got a new netbook, which was way more powerful than the six-year-old Thinkpad!)
It would involve backing up all the data from the old one that you wanted to save, reinstalling the operating system on the new drive, reinstalling all your programs, and then moving your backed-up data back in.
FH just reminded me that old computers with older operating systems may not even be able to use all of the memory on a big hard drive! This is the kind of thing you'd have to ask a technician about.
Then again, if it's a laptop you probably don't have the original operating system discs, which means you'd have to buy a new copy of it. That plus the new drive is going to cost you as much as a netbook, and that's not including labour to install the thing if you don't know how to do it.
I vote for getting an external DVD burner and a stack of blank DVDs, and moving all of your images and documents onto them. That would be the cheapest option to free up more space on the laptop.
Free up as much space as possible and go into your MS Dos prompt (not sure which version of Windows you are using. Just type in MSConfig. From there you can shut down programs that are not needed at startup. Examples would be Yahoo Messenger, AIM, AOL, and MSN Messenger. This will free up alot of virtual memory space as well.
From there you'll be asked to reboot to apply settings do that and boom your PC should be faster. Other than that about the only other way to increase memory would be memory upgrades but with a 7 year old computer it'd be hard to find the parts needed and be cheaper to fully upgrade to a newer PC.
Also to note. A computer generally run's at optimal speed when you have 50% or more space opened on the hard drive where your Operateing System is running off of.