PCTips Box

If your PC is less than a year old there’s a fair chance it has SATA (Serial ATA) hard drives, which basically means they’re a bit faster than the old PATA (Parallel ATA) or IDE drives, that used those big clumsy ribbon cables. Anyway, Windows Vista has built-in support for SATA drives but it’s not enabled by default so you could be missing out on a small performance gain.

To put that right go to Device Manager and there’s a couple of quick ways to do that, (more…)

Do you have a SATA disk drive in your computer? If so, you can squeeze a little more performance out of your hard disk. This speeds up the performance of your hard disk by enhancing write caching. However, if your computer is not connected to a battery backup and you loose power you have a increased risk for data loss or corruption. If you have a laptop your chances are data loss or corruption are dramatically less since your laptop battery will kick on if your power source is lost. Let’s get started: (more…)

What’s the best way to backup your hard drive? Simple, clone it, and if the worst ever happens you can connect up your clone drive and continue working. Drive cloning is not as easy as it sounds, at least not without specialist or expensive software, but here’s a freebie program that promises to as good a job as its commercial rivals for one-off and occasional use.
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