Brainstorm Tech Community

You installed a brand new DVD drive, or hard drive and the thing didn’t work. You returned it and got another one, it didn’t work either. What is going on here? It very likely could be the master slave setting. You see computers aren’t that smart they can’t even tell which drive should go first in line. If you have a SATA system it doesn’t matter for you because each  [ Read More ]

How can you speed up your computer? ReadyBoost is a Windows feature perfected with Windows 7. It makes it possible for you to use USB flash drives to speed up your computer. You can use SD memory cards, flash drives pretty much any kind of flash memory card. Windows 7 can use ReadyBoost on up to 8 devices at the same time, giving you a maximum of 256GB of extra  [ Read More ]

Use the webcam on your home computer to protect yourself! The service at www.gotocamera.com has software that analyzes your webcam images for movement, then emails or texts you pictures if someone enters your house ( to make sure it is not your cat jumping around ). It’s a cheap way to monitor your house and can work with up to 4 webcams. A simple cheap way for a little peace  [ Read More ]

The first thing to do is consider the age of the computer. If your system is getting close to 4 or 5 years old it might not make much sense economically to repair the computer. If you want to save the data on the computer that is easy enough to do but that is for a future post. Let’s say that your computer is newer, just after the warranty expired,  [ Read More ]

What can you do if you have a printer that no longer picks up paper from the paper tray? If you have an inexpensive inkjet printer most folks would say through it away and get a new one. However that is not always what you need to do. If you have a can of compressed air you can blow out all of the paper lint that collects in the rollers.  [ Read More ]

I was just in a store we shell leave unnamed talking about the latest netbook offerings they had. As usual I knew more about the technology than the sales clerk. He was talking about the slow speed and I mentioned adding a stick of RAM. That is when he told me the computer wouldn’t handle another stick of RAM it would probably nuke the whole system. Now I know that  [ Read More ]

One of the biggest problems I run into when reformatting a computer harddrive is finding the right drivers for all the components afterward. Maybe you have had that problem. System drivers can be elusive and search engines can’t always help you find them. I will tell you one of my sources for good system device drivers. Try Driverguide.com they provide a comprehensive list of legacy drivers and current drivers. It  [ Read More ]

I have a friend who just got a netbook and he likes it except for one thing. It is very slow! I have noticed that most netbooks only have 1 gigabyte of memory, and they run Vista or Windows 7. The problem is, that is the minimum memory for that OS. It runs much better with more. So if you are getting a netbook make sure it has a least  [ Read More ]