Computing Tips

Title : What are the advantages/disadvantages of using SCSI? Advantages: 1. SCSI can handle a wide variety of devices: hard drives, scanners, plotters, CD drives, and the list goes on. 2. A SCSI controller can communicate with up to 7 or 15 devices depending on the version. I am sure work is being done to [...]

What is EDO Memory? Extended Data-Out (EDO) is one of the newest DRAM chip technology which improves memory performance 10 to 15% over equivalent Fast Page Mode devices. Computer systems must be designed to take advantage of this performance increase EDO offers.

My Hard-Drive Is Getting Very Hot, What Can I Do? You can buy special fans for hard-drives, This will help extract the heat from the drive. You can also download special monitoring software to monitor the tempreature of the hard-drive

What is a SIMM? A Single In-line Memory Module or SIMM is a small printed circuit board containing memory chips (DRAMs). Most SIMMs have 30 or 72 pins (which are actually printed circuit contacts and not pins). 30-pin SIMMs come in 8-bit (non-parity) or 9-bit (parity). 72-pin SIMMs are generally available in 32-bit (non-parity) or [...]

What is a DIMM?A Dual In-line Memory Module or DIMM combines two 72-pin SIMMS into a 168-pin module with 64-bit (non-parity) or 72-bit (parity) data paths.

Is there any reason to use RAID on a home computer? Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks or RAID is used mostly in servers for their fault tolerance and performance. Unless you run a home-office where the data you keep in your computer is invaluable or irreplacable, you don’t need to use RAID. But [...]

Title : Troubleshooting Memory Failures using Award BIOS Beep Codes Award is the another popular BIOS developer and they use the fewest beep codes by far. Procedures – The normal procedure is to power up the PC system, watch for error message on the monitor screen and listen to the PC beep tone. A single [...]

Question : How much information can be stored on a DVD-R? More correctly would be to state that it can currently hold 4.7Billion bytes, or 4.38Gigabytes per layer, per side.Currently, most DVD-R’s and +R’s are single sided single layered. But there are some double sided media’s on the market

Title : My Motherboard has both Simms and Dimms Can I Use Them Both? Maybe, Depends if your motherboard supports this. Look in the manual that came with your motherboard. I would recomend to use just Dimms if you can as the memory will run at a faster speed.

Does a hard drive’s cache affect its speed? Yes. Hard drives usually come in either 2 mb or 8 mb caches. The drives with larger caches will perform better since they can temporarily store more and larger files in their memory for repeated access. While transfering large files, such as when editing large video files, [...]