by MalikTous, July 26, 2005
History of Storage Solutions
Feeding information The means for feeding digital information to a computer or other device designed for operating with such inputs has evolved over the last two centuries. While modern digital computers are the most frequent users of this mechanism of data input, the use of digital data predates computers. Card-based information An early use of digital data was a loom designed for pat...
by MalikTous, April 08, 2005
Changing clock speed on a mainboard
Changing the clock: Basic processor speed control This popular item is spoken of in every forum, but still mysterious to most users. Microprocessors are sold set to a rated speed as the result of testing done before they are encapsulated, as well as from the range designed into the chip at the production line. The resulting ‘rated speed’ is added to ID pins or auxiliary ROM space on the suppor...
by MalikTous, April 07, 2005
Replacing your mainboard
Mainboard changeout Most people never consider this subject, it isn’t the item of the day in the Dell and HP popular sales programs… often, though, an ailing system can be repaired by exchanging the mainboard vice the entire box. Problems ranging from total failure to boot, to inability to find hard drives, to simple audio device failure, may call for a new system but be cheaply resolved by ju...
by MalikTous, March 26, 2005
File Systems in Windows
File Allocation Table File Systems Windows 4 and earlier DOS-based versions use a hard drive partition system that relies on a portion of each partition, near the beginning (outside), to track the use of all clusters on the drive, called a File Allocation Table. Win95, 98, and Millennium use FAT32, which can handle the clusters in larger partitions (256Megabytes through 64Gigabytes) currently ...
by MalikTous, March 26, 2005
Printer technologies
Printer technologies We've come a long way from the beginnings of permanent user outputs on our computers. From early impact-printers to modern deposition devices, computer hard-copy equipment is evolving upwards. The earliest models were based on adding-machine printout modules, and could produce lower-ASCII text on 'ribbon' paper like on a cash register. The fancier versions of this incl...
by MalikTous, March 26, 2005
Emergency Backup Power Supplies
These come in various 'flavours': standby supplies, ferroresonant supplies, and true independent UPS units. Cheapest are the fast-switch standby supplies, which normally maintain a trickle charged battery at full charge and just heavily filter the power until it drops below or exceeds a predetermined level, at which it powers up its inboard sinewave inverter and replaces the line power completely ...
by MalikTous, August 10, 2004
Cooling, cleaning, and air flow
With the personal computer becoming more and more a 'standard' item among us, I have found poor or neglected cooling to be a major cause for complaints about performance problems in computers. In the beginning, mainframes and minis were often either equipped with heavily filtered intake fans or run in dedicated rooms where HEPA filters excluded dust and employees were even discouraged from using ...
by MalikTous, June 25, 2004
Hard Drive Partitioning
Hard drive partitioning is a poorly understood process that can give measurable improvements in some computer system performance and added convenience for those able to understand it. In Win9x (FAT32), it is extremely difficult in most systems to run the Defragment and ScanDisk utilities in the boot partition. If the size of the boot partition is limitted and most apps are run elsewhere, this p...
by Yuxi, June 22, 2004
Running Old DOS games in Windows XP
Have you ever wanted to run those old DOS games, but just get an error message or a blank screen after working so hard to get it on your computer? This article shows you how to run the old games on your new Windows XP computer. 1. First, you should try reducing the screen resolution to 640x480 at 256 color. Since Windows XP does not allow you to change the color down to 256, we have to go i...
by MalikTous, June 09, 2004
Power Supplies and Case Wiring
These components are often ignored by most users, because they aren't very entertaining. The power supply provided with most modern PCs is typically 200 to 280W, which is adequate for factory-box PCs but can often run short for those who like to add things. And cables are capable of affecting air flow in the case, a particular concern for those who like to use smaller cases. The best aftermarke...
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