Windows Tools, Help & Guides

If you use your laptop or tablet on battery power, you’ll know how annoying it is to lose battery power at the “worst time”. While I can’t guarantee your PC will lose power at a more convenient time, I can offer 14 ways to improve your battery life. Learn, in this guide, how to save power when running on batteries.

Note: This guide is written for Windows 7 but most tips apply for Windows Vista

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You probably have a hard drive in your home that’s one terabyte or more. If you open Computer (Windows Key + E), you’ll see your terabyte hard drive might only show a capacity of around 930 GB. Where did all those extra gigabytes go? Aren’t there a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte? If you have questions like these, this guide answers them.

Terabyte vs. Tebibyte

Hard drive manufacturers use the International System of Units (SI) convention to when listing hard drive capacity. Kilo-, mega-, giga-, and tera- are some of the prefixes used in accordance with the SI and are base-10 (decimal.) “Tera” means trillion so a terabyte is one trillion, 1,000,000,000,000, or 10²⁰ bytes.

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Previously, we showed you how to download Windows 7 and Burn it to a disc/put it on a thumb drive.

Having the whole operating system on disc isn’t necessary if you just need to repair your Windows installation. Recovering or repairing your current installation of Windows is favorable because most recovery software that comes with brand name PCs will wipe your PC back to factory settings.You should have a repair disc on hand to deal with the following situations:

• You’ve made a change to your PC and it now won’t boot into Windows
• You get a message such as NTLDR is missing but your hard drive has not failed
• You get a virus on your PC and need command line access to fix the issue
• Windows starts to boot and then your PC power cycles

In this guide:

• How to make a Windows 7 repair disc yourself
• How to make a Windows 7 repair USB drive
• How to boot from a disc/USB drive and use it to repair your PC

Note: A repair disc cannot be used to install Windows and provides no functionality beyond that of a Windows installation disc. If you already have an installation disc, you can use that for system recovery.

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Over time, dust and dirt build up inside your laptop; thereby, restricting airflow, increasing heat, and putting a strain on your laptop’s fans. A hot laptop is not a happy laptop. In fact, most modern processors (CPUs) reduce their clock speed when temperatures get close to 80C (think of it as a “survival mode” for your CPU), which is generally accepted as the highest temperature you should let your CPU reach. The dirtier the airways in your laptop, the quicker your CPU’s temperature can jump to dangerous levels—especially when the airways are further restricted by a pillow, your jeans etc.

To help stop your laptop overheating, consider clearing the channels by which air is designed to flow through your hardware. This guide provides a few tips to help you keep your laptop’s airways free of dust and dirt.

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If you’re using an older computer or a computer that came without a dedicated graphics card (GPU – Graphics processing unit), you may have considered getting a more powerful GPU. An upgraded GPU will let you:

• Play games at higher resolution, detail, and frame rate
• Play HD video without stutter
• Use two or more monitors (helpful if you can only use one with your current setup)
• Speed up photo and video editing

In this guide, I’ll show you the basics of finding out what your upgrade options are and how to install a new graphics card.

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If you like to use shortcuts to get tasks done in the most efficient way, there is a large collection of commands you can run from the run dialog (XP/Vista/7/8) or the Start Menu (in Windows Vista/7/8.) In this guide, I’ll show you how to run the commands and what effect they have.
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