Trouble with PC

For those of you who stop by this blog on a regular basis, thank you.  Thanks also to those who are following this blog.  I have been having some PC problems of late.  Namely my Dell Dimension desktop hard drive refuses to boot internally.  I suspect it's been on the way out for sometime.  Fortunately, having built a PC for my father I am able to blog and do other computer stuff using that one.

The main problem has been getting hold of a replacement hard drive for the Dell.  Easy, you may think, but no, nothing in life is easy!  Having removed the Dell's covers to get at and remove the existing hard drive I then go on eBay and find a reasonably priced replacement 250 GB drive - great, the seller assures me that it will fit inside the Dell.  Hooray, much excitement and anticipation awaiting it's arrival.  As per usual I'm left feeling flat as the Dell's hard drive requires SATA connections and the replacement drive is IDE - not a good start as I was planning to have two drives with two different operating systems on.  One that I could just use for internet purposes only.

After searching Google I found the Dimensions operating manual and also found that additional cables from Dell would cost GBP15.00.  Doing a web search I found a natty little device which converts SATA and IDE to USB.  Brilliant!  However, there is a catch, you cannot boot from a USB drive (or at least I do not know how to).  But thankfully the data on the existing Dell drive is safe, which is one good thing.

To cut a long story short, I found yet again on eBay a SATA drive for just under twenty pounds including shipping, which I'm waiting for at the moment.  Delayed due to the holiday weekend.

As for the IDE drive, well that's now in another desktop and running okay.  Words of wisdom - never think upgrading a PC is going to be an easy task!

Upgrading and Repairing PCs (19th Edition)

Unfortunately my Second Life project has been put on the back burner, hopefully all will be sorted next week, as we have not had any post at all for two days.

Computer keyboard Short cuts

Computer keyboard Short cuts

It never ceases to amaze me the number of people including some of my student's who do not know about keyboard short cuts on computers. The very first PC's never had a mouse to navigate the screen easily. For example the control key, located bottom left near the Microsoft key. My Dell keyboard is nicely designed and has two control or Ctrl keys, one at the left side and one at the right.

If you are using an application, say a word processor, then you can save time by pressing the Ctrl key and S together to either save your document to the hard drive or floppy disk. Other examples are Ctrl + P to print your document.

It is well worth checking out the keyboard short cuts, just in case your mouse fails, you will be surprised at what you can do.

Also when using word processors you can use the Home, End keys to get to the beginning of a line of text or the end of a paragraph. Likewise, the Page Up and Page Down keys to move the page, yes you guessed it up and or down.

I dare say that as with the touch screen mobile phones our PC screens will eventually go down that route and we will be able to touch icons to access the multitude of applications our computers are able to run. Unless voice recognition software gets to Star Trek perfection levels then there will be always a need for a computer keyboard.