My Inspiron 17R has no RAID option in the BIOS. I believe to access the Intel RAID settings it is necessary to have a mSATA drive installed (which I do not have installed at this time). When a mSATA drive is installed it seems that the acceleration option (mSATA SSD caching) may be enabled in the BIOS, after which you can also do some RAID stuff. I ordered a nice mSATA drive to install in my 17R to see if
The Dell Inspiron 17R SE (‘special edition’) laptop is a lovely machine. One of my favorite features is the two 2.5″ drive bays which are easily accessible: So far RAID is not initially an option in the BIOS, but I think there is a workaround available and will be posting that soon…
If you have a nice ASUS N56VM or N56VZ series laptop you may be wondering how to upgrade it for maximum performance. So here is a photo tutorial on how to upgrade the RAM on these particular ASUS laptops. You can also see get a feel for how to remove the hard drive & upgrade to an SSD as well as seeing the location of the wifi card. NOTE: A number of people have asked what memory and SSD I
If you have the lovely little AO722 netbook you may be looking for some simple and cheap upgrades. Here are my top upgrades for the AO722: Upgrade the RAM to 4GB for $20 or even 8GB for less than $40! Upgrade the HDD to a high performance SSD for less than $100 Add bluetooth by upgrading the wifi card to a combo wifi + bluetooth card for about $20 Add a Huawei 3G data card in the extra mini pci-e slot The AMD
UPDATE 2: the 5th generation iPod touch shipped out on Oct 9th 2012 via FedEx and has an expected arrival date of Oct 15th Oct 12th! (FedEx is ahead of schedule!!!) UPDATE 1: Amazon now has the entire 5th gen iPod touch line available for pre-order. I am considering canceling my Apple pre-order and switch to Amazon because there would be no sales tax in my state. UPDATE 0: the ship times and arrivals mentioned in this article are based
The Lenovo X220 ThinkPad, as well as many Dell & HP laptops, ship with a form of anti-shock protection enabled by default. This is great if your laptop has a conventional hard drive that can be easily damaged by a fall or drop. The laptop is smart enough to pause disk activity and ‘park’ the head (or other similar techniques) to prevent disk damage. However, if your laptop is exclusively using a SSD (solid state drive) then that protection is
UPDATE 2012.05.30: added a list of 7mm SSD and 7mm HDD at the end of this post… The most-excellent Lenovo Thinkpad X220 laptop supports a rather odd thickness for its hard drive/SSD: 7mm This is unusual since most laptop drives are 9.5mm and some are fatties coming in at 12mm or 12.5mm. However, the 7mm thin drives are likely to become more and more common as Ultrabooks and other similar devices require thinner drives to maintain their low profile 🙂 So,
If you own one of the nice ASUS A53 laptops you may be wanting to maximize the amount of memory your lovely laptop have. Here is how a photo tutorial showing how to upgrade the RAM on an ASUS A53 notebook 🙂 UPDATE: Many readers have asked what memory I recommend for upgrading the A53 series. My recommendation is 8GB of Kingston memory because it offers a lifetime warranty, solid performance AND it is only about $37 with free shipping!