Maximize your Laptop Battery

Battery of our laptop/Tablet Pc is a source of power beside the power outlet. Full or perfect charged battery is always our companion when we are out of town. Or attending meetings, seminars we always check our bullets before we go to war. Or charge our battery to full capacity as it can.

Lithium-Ion batteries have a finite life. they slowly degrade from the day they are first made. The life of the battery will depend upon how you charge and discharge the battery and the temperature at which the battery is kept. The truth about Li-ion batteries is that high temperatures are their worst enemy. Therefore, the following tips will help prevent laptop batteries from getting too warm.

•  Always use a laptop on a hard surface. Don’t put it on your lap (despite its name) or on thermal insulating materials such as cushions. If you like to work in bed with your laptop, I recommend using a laptop table.
• Try to avoid charging the battery while you are working with the laptop. Charging the batteries increases your laptop’s temperature. The problem is that the CPU, the graphics card and the hard disk also heat up your laptop, which adds to the temperature increase experienced when charging the battery. Many vendors deliver their laptops with software that allows you to disable charging. You also can remove the battery while you are working on AC current.
• Make sure the laptop’s ventilation can always work properly. Don’t place objects before the ventilation systems opening. Don’t run or charge the laptop while it is in its case.
• Don’t leave the laptop in the car or under the sun in summer. Use a bike. It keeps your laptop battery cool and your own battery healthy. And too much sun exposure causes only skin cancer anyway.
• Do Not - Charge your Notebook/Tablet PC inside a carry case - the battery may overheat.
• Condition a new battery by using it until it is fully discharged,  and then re-charge it fully.  Doing this once a month will help to accurately calibrate your battery.
• When you receive a new NoteBook or Tablet PC, leave the battery to fully charge overnight.

Note:
A manufacturer will rate a Notebook battery to the point where it holds 50% of its original capacity. At this point you should consider replacing the battery.

credits to rikki_ mortel

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How to Recover Deleted Partitions

 

If the partition is deleted, your vital and important data stored on those partitions may become inaccessible which may create many hardships to the persons who are depending on those data. Is there a way to recover deleted partition or recover data in the deleted partition?

The answer is Yes. If you accidentally deleted a partition, partition recovery software EASEUS Partition Recovery can recover deleted or lost partitions. If a partition is deleted, the program will analyze the disk and recover the deleted partitions.

EASEUS Partition Recovery is a free partition recovery software to recover deleted or lost partitions.

1. Download this software from here, install it.
2. After -installing Run EASEUS Partition Recovery, and then you will see the following window. Click "Next" to continue.

3. Please choose a disk where you want to recover lost partitions and click "Next" to continue.
4. Choose a specified area to search for the lost partitions and click "Next" to continue.
5. Please choose a search method to start partition recovery. (There are two search methods: Fast and Complete.)
6. EASEUS Partition Recovery starts searching the deleted or lost partitions.

7. After the search is completed, choose the deleted or lost partitions to recover.
8. Click "Proceed" to execute the operations. 

credits to Surbhi

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Think Before Using USB Flash Drives To Run Applications or OS: Advisory

I am writing this post on an advisory note. With the extensive use of USB flash driven in our day to day activities, now we have been aiming to make even our Operating System(OS) portable by installing it in a USB Flash Drive and carrying around in our pocket. Moreover we can run applications such as Mozilla, Anti Viruses etc. from a USB pen drives. Here I am going to explain, why you need to think twice before using your USB Flash Drive to run an Operating System from it.

Why you should think twice before using a USB Flash Drive to run an OS or applications for prolonged period?

All flash memory devices can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure. While running a normal OS or an Application from a Flash drive, the system will write and erase a huge number of files and data in the flash drive. With prolonged use, the write/erase cycles of your flash drive may come to an end and may eventually fail.

The write/erase cycle performed while running an Operating System(OS) such as Windows XP or 7 will be very much more than what we can perform manually, by copying and deleting data. So this should be a consideration as it may make your flash drive run out of Write/erase cycles much faster than expected.

Another usage of USB is Windows ReadyBoost. Windows 7 and Vista can make use of a USB flash drive as a cache memory to improve the performance.  In this case also the cycles are be used a high rate.

Points to be Noted:

• Flash memory devices have a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure
•  Running an OS or an Application from a Flash drive will write and erase a huge number of files or data in the flash drive per second.
• Running an Operating System(OS) will perform these cycles much more than what we can perform manually
• Prolonged use will make your flash drive run out of write/erase cycles and may eventually fail much before expected

How to address this issue?

To address this, as well as space limitations, some developers have produced special versions of operating systems such as Linux in Live USB or portable applications such as Mozilla Firefox designed to run from flash drives. These are typically optimized for size and configured to place temporary or intermediate files in the computer RAM rather than store them temporarily on the flash drive.

Compared to other portable storage devices such as external hard drives, USB flash drives still have a high price per unit of storage. But Hard drives have a higher minimum price.

Alternatives:

• Run applications or OS which are configured  for Flash Drive use only
• For Prolonged usage, try buying an external Hard Drive
•  If you are using your USB Drive as a Cache device to improve performance, why not upgrade your RAM size?

Notes:

1. Manual usage of your USB Drive will take years to use up the Write/erase cycles available, so no need to worry.
2. Most Failures in USB Memory Devices are due to wear and tear

credits to dennis

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Computer Technicians Guide To The Apple Mac Boot Shortcuts

 

In this article you will learn all the most important boot shortcuts on a Mac. We’ve all been there. The client is there, you boot their computer and the screen just hangs there. No OS. You sometimes see the grey apple logo, sometimes it’s all white and sometimes you see nothing at all. You absolutely need to know which key to press in order to repair the Mac. Enter the Apple Mac boot shortcuts.

First of all, you don’t have to use an Apple Keyboard to do these. Any regular USB PC keyboard will work as long as you keep in mind the following:
Option = ALT Key
Command = Windows Key

To make these boot shortcuts work, the computer needs to be shutdown and you need to press/hold these keys while booting the computer.

C

Sometimes, the Mac is not programmed to automatically boot from a CD. This allows you to boot directly from the CD.

Option

By far, the most useful shortcut that will tell if the computer has a hard drive failure or a motherboard corruption. When you hold option at start, it will detect all the bootable devices in the Mac such as the CD, Hard Drive, External USB and External FireWire. You can then choose which devices you want to boot from. This is perfect if you want to boot from an external USB/FireWire.

 

D

All Apple Computers come with an Hardware Test CD. When you hold D, the cd needs to be already inserted. It will boot Apple Hardware Test which is an incredible powerful tool that will make a precise diagnostic on your client’s computer about any form of hardware failure: RAM, hard drive, motherboard etc.

 

Option – Command – P – R

This combination will reset the NVRAM and PRAM of your client’s computer. What does it mean? It will reset all the default settings on the motherboard or built in features including: Serial Port Configuration, Clock, Volume, Double-Click time, Virtual Memory, RAM disk, Mouse Speed, Application Font, Alarm Clock, Monitor Color Depth, Startup Disk and Serial Printer location. This is often done if your client’s machine boots into a weird pink color. To do this NVRAM/PRAM reset, your need to hold the keys when you boot your client’s Mac. Hold down the keys until the computer restarts with the startup sound the second time.
Hold the mouse or trackpad button

This will eject all the removable media plugged to your Mac. (Cd, USB, Firewire etc.) This is perfect if the CD is stuck inside and the keyboard is not working or if the Mac tries to boot from an unknown external device.

Command-S

This will boot the machine in Single-User mode. It is a UNIX-like interface where you can enter many simple commands to troubleshoot the machine. This is mainly popular with the use of “fsck ” to check the computer disk permission.

Command-V

This starts the Mac in Verbose Mode. You will see all the descriptive text of all the boot steps, similar to Windows’s Safe Mode. If the computer freezes on startup, you can see where it will freeze.

T

This puts the Mac in Target Mode. It will transform the Mac into a giant Firewire external drive. You can access the files from another computer. Perfect if you need to repair a corrupted hard drive or backup files.

Shift

This will start the Mac on a safe boot. It will disable all the login items, all the non-default fonts, disable all the cache and it will force a directory check.

If you are still unable to enter the system or at least see the grey Apple logo at the beginning after using these shortcuts, the problem is most likely going to be a motherboard corruption.

Guest Post by Marco Rodi: Marco Rodi owns an IT Engineering university degree. He has his own computer repair business that mainly does Apple Support (OrdiRodi – http://www.ordirodi.com) located in Montreal. He works for Transat as an application support Engineer where he has to maintain all the software that makes the airplanes fly. He’s also an active bassist. (http://www.marcorodi.com)

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Autoruns

 

There are few things more frustrating that an unwanted program that launches every time you start your computer, especially when the normal means of preventing this from happening--like checking for it in the Startup folder--don't work. What's worse is when numerous unneeded and invisible processes launch, slowing down both start-up and your computer's performance as a whole. AutoRuns is a simple program that lets users view--and disable--everything that runs on startup, saving both time and irritation.

The program's interface is a little cluttered, with 17 tabs that display the various programs and processes that run on startup. These are separated into categories, such as Print Monitors, Codecs, Windows Explorer, and so on, and there's also a tab that shows everything. Disabling an unwanted process is as simple as unchecking the box next to it. AutoRuns lets users optionally hide Windows entries or Windows and Microsoft entries, helping to prevent users from disabling critical processes. For the most part the program was quite easy to use, but novices may feel a little nervous about messing around with unfamiliar processes. We had hoped that the program's Help file would provide some guidance on this front, but we were disappointed to find that although there is a built-in Help file, none of its contents would load. This is the only significant drawback to AutoRuns, and users who are already comfortable in this arena should find that AutoRuns meets their needs just fine. Beginners will likely want to do some research before they start making too many changes.

AutoRuns comes as a ZIP file and is accessible after extraction with no need for installation. We recommend this program to all users.

Download Link:

http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Autoruns.zip

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WebBrowserPassView – Recover Passwords from Web Browsers

WebBrowserPassView is a small, portable and freeware utility designed to recover passwords from:

•  Internet Explorer (Version 4.0 – 9.0)

• Mozilla Firefox (All Versions)

• Google Chrome

• Opera

Once WebBrowserPassView has gathered all the passwords from the various browsers, it displays them in a single table with the URL the password was saved for, what browser it was saved in and of course the username and password.

From there, you can save it as a TXT file, export the table as HTML and more. This product was created by Nirsoft and in true Nirsoft fashion, the application is very easy to incorporate into scripts due to its excellent command line support.

This utility works on any version of Windows, starting from Windows 2000, and up to Windows 7, including 64-bit systems.

Note: Due to the hacking/password revealing nature of this application. Some antivirus products will detect it as malware or a hacking tool. You can view the VirusTotal.com report here.

credits to Bryce Whitty

Download Link:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/web_browser_password.html

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