Trials, Tribulations and Temper Bursts
I keep tinkering with computers, be it Servers, Desktops, Laptops or Single Board Computers like the Raspberry Pi. Of keen interest to me is the thermal performance of these devices. Most new devices implement...
If like me you have a bunch of external HDDs connected to your system, you are probably facing a similar irritant. External HDDs are configured in firmware to switch to low-power mode within a few minutes if idle. In this mode, the disk spins down and eventually stops. Accessing the disk causes a slight delay as the HDD must spin up again to full-speed and locate the sector on which your data is located.
Apart from the delay, the spinning up of the HDD spindle and raising of the head from it’s parking position to the data area of the disk causes significant clatter and mechanical wear and tear. The S.M.A.R.T. values also get incremented it appears that the HDD was being abused with repeated unplugging and plugging.
It is a long running bug in VirtualBox that if “Guest Additions” are installed in Windows Guest OS, after a while the OS seems to hand with extremely sluggish behaviour. The task-manager shows VBoxTray.exe as the culprit with 100% CPU usage. A work-around exists that allows continuing usage of the VirtualBox without giving up on it.
Review of the Canon PowerShot SX20IS Superzoom camera based on 6 moths of hands-on experience.
Article contains tips on how to login to Beam Cable Internet without user intervention.
MS Word can take ages to start if HP m1522nf is set as the default printer. Luckily a work-around exists that preserves your sanity as you attempt to type & print your resume at current work-place.
Calculate Cost per GB for Hard Disc Drives for a smart purchase. Don’t pay premium prices for absolutely new or horribly old technologies.
