Category Archives: computer tips

DELETE a Recovery Partition when Disk Management won’t let you

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Today I was preparing a 2.5″ SATA laptop hard drive for use in my wife’s mini-PC. The hard drive I was attempting to use came from an old Acer laptop. I connected the hard drive via a USB enclosure and attempted to clear out the old partitions and reformat. Unfortunately I found that the Windows 7 Disk Management interface would not allow me to delete the “System Recovery” partition. Here is how I went about deleting that protected partition so I could

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Which Intel GMA does i945GTm-VHL have?

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Q. I just built a little mini-computer HTPC with a i945GTm-VHL motherboard from AOpen. When I go into device mananger under video/display adapters all I see is “mobile 945 express chipset family” but what I want to know is what version of Intel video GMA do I have? A. Your motherboard has Intel GMA 950 integrated video. You can find more details about your motherboard here:   AOpen Global – i945GTm-VHL specshttp://global.aopen.com/products_detail.aspx?Auno=2064Support Intel® Viiv™ Technology Integrated Gen 3.5 graphics controller in

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One Click or No Click DVD Ripping [HOWTO]

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Q. Helloz… ive been backing up my DVD collection b/c Im worried about scratching them. i like DVD shrink on Windoze but it takes a few clicks to do it. Is there a 1 click way to make it eazier and faster? thx n advanc –DVDFan91 A. Interesting spelling and good question. 😉 There are a few resources out there dedicated to the one click or even NO click dvdrips, so yes you can make it happen! NOTE: please make

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Better two-finger scrolling for Windows! (like 2011 MacBooks and MacBook Air)

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On Windows, missing the MacBook’s nice two finger scrolling… After returning a MacBook Air 11.6″ to Apple, I was surprised that I only really missed the very nice two finger scrolling. Some of the other Apple multitouch gestures were nice, but it was the really the smooth two finger scrolling on that nice trackpad that was so VERY handy and I missed the convenience! My Dell laptops have multitouch capable touchpads that support two finger scrolling. Unfortunately by default they

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Duke Nukem Forever game benchmarks (FPS)

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There are only two computer games that I play these days: StarCraft 2 and Duke Nukem Forever. Both of which are sequels to venerable classics. StarCraft 2 is widely considered a worthy successor to SC1. Duke Nukem Forever is generally not considered to be worthy compared to it’s older counterpart Duke Nukem 3D. However, they are both surprisingly fun to play in multiplayer for exactly the opposite reasons: StarCraft 2 – one of the ultimate games when it comes to skill, it

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Increase audio quality in Remote Desktop Connections

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I really dislike fuzzy/tinny audio. Sometimes RDP connections with RDC clients results in laggy and/or poor quality audio. A two step tip that you can use to try and solve these problem in Windows7: #1 on the server (the machine you are connecting to) Using the Group Policy editor, Go to Computer Configuration:Administrative Templates:Windows Components: Remote Desktop Session Host:Device and Resource Redirection. Set “Limit audio playback quality.”  to “Enabled,” and set “Audio Quality” option “to High”. #2 on the client

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Overclocking a Dell M4400 [success] [HOWTO]

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Last night I stably overclocked my Dell M4400 from 2.8GHz to 2.9Ghz using ThrottleStop and the dual IDA (Intel Dynamic Acceleration) mode. The laptop is still running coolly and the WEI score for the CPU even went up from 6.4 to 6.5 🙂 My understanding is that IDA is basically TurboBoost in an earlier form. So it is pretty darn cool to be using a precursor of TurboBoost on a laptop this old! PS I plan on posting step by

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M6500 hard drive caddy issue (three hard drives or SSDs)

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For a few months now I have been using my M6500 with a 120GB SSD for the boot drive and two 750GB 2.5″ hard drives in RAID1 for my data drive. Unfortunately, the hard drive caddy that replaces the optical drive has never quite fit right… only today did I get around to contacting the manufacturer: Hello, I am writing in reference to this caddy that I ordered: http://www.newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=269&zenid=a40e0509f6a549136fc1331174bebbea That 2nd hard drive caddy for my M6500 has never quite

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