Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

Security is another available screen that’s part of Phoenix BIOS and most others. Here you can set a User and Supervisor passwor ...

compartment or from a hotel room, you can at least hope that your private data is secure. The bad news is that if you forget a p ...

the company is very demandingof you to prove your proper ownership of a laptop, a hard drive, or an individual locked file, they ...

BIOS within your laptop and replacing it with an updated version (or, rarely, removing a corrupted version of the BIOS and repla ...

from the manufacturer or a third party; you may be able to buy a used motherboard from a repair shop. (Desktop computers general ...

110 Part II: Explaining What Could Possibly Go Wrong ...

Part III Laying Hands on the Major Parts 12_589598 pt03.qxd 9/29/05 2:49 PM Page 111 ...

In this part... I t’s sometimes easy to think of a computer as only elec- tronics: chips and circuits and wires. In fact, though ...

Chapter 7 Chapter 7: Easing In to Hard Disks ............................................................................... In ...

The drives spin at a very high rate of speed; a typical laptop hard drive rotates at least 4,200 times per second, compared to ...

today are half again as wide, at 0.85 inches; the first such devices have capaci- ties of as much as 4GB. Stop and think: That’s ...

Another effect of downsizing is a reduction in the data transfer rate. First of all, most laptop hard drives spin at a slower ra ...

At the moment, high-capacity flash memory devices are still considerably more expensive than a mini hard drive of equivalent siz ...

Most laptop hard drives spin their platters at 4,200 revolutions per minute, with some later models advancing to 5,400, 7,200, a ...

The laptop stores instructions and data in the form of 0s and 1s that are recorded on the surface of the platter as tiny magneti ...

But wait: Remember that the disk controller doesn’t fill up every possible cluster with data. The computer uses its own form of ...

lot more likely that the microprocessor will sit around waiting for data than it is that the hard drive will pump information fa ...

Serial in the box .................................................................................. Serial ATA represents anoth ...

When Good Disks Go Bad ........................................................................... Steel yourself for some bad n ...

creating pie-wedge sectors. Now get three dimensional. Every laptop hard drive has at least one two-sided platter, and some driv ...