Hardware

Today you will be learning how to connect to the internet through your ADSL router or modem.

What you will need

ADSL Router
Internet connection and details from ISP(internet services provider)

Make sure that your internet provider has told you that the internet has been connected. Sometimes it can take a couple of weeks to happen.
So you have all the information from your ISP? On it there should be a user name and password, vpi and vpc, encapsulation and multplexing. All of this information is needed for your connection to be established if there is a typo your internet will not connect so make sure everything is typed in correctly.

Always remember to press the save button before navigating away from a page in the router console as routers will forget what has been put into them unless it has been saved.

Step 1

You will neet to connect your router/modem to a computer and into the phone line. make sure that the phone line is connected into the right port, the phone line port will be smaller then the computer port.

Step 2

Power on the router, make sure that the lights on it are lit up and that the light for line is also lit(that indicates it is connected to the phone line)

Step 3

Go on the computer/laptop that you have connected to the router bad make sure that it is configured to obtain an IP address automatically.
Go to command prompt and type in “ipconfig /all” this will give you your ip information. Find default gateway of local area connection. Note down the number.

Step 4

Open an internet browser and type in the default gateway address (the number that you noted down) and press enter. This will direct you to the router.

Step 5

Type in the username and password. If you dont know it it will most likely be the default username and password for your router, this will be on the paperwork that you recieved when you bought your router. If you do not have the paperwork then you can look them up on http://www.routerpasswords.com/.

Step 6

Now you will be inside your router console you need to enter all of the details into here in the fields that correspond with the details that you have got from your ISP. Then make sure you save your internet connection settings or you will lose them when you navigate away from the page.

Step 7

Find the test connection button and test your internet connection. If everything is set correctly then it will tell you it is s success.
If this returns a failure then ‘re-enter your internet settings and test again, if it still does work that’s when I would contact the internet service provider and get them to help you (don’t feel bad about ringing them that is what they are paid to do)

Step 8

Most modern routers will have settings by default to automatically dial the internet connection(or connect to internet automatically) but you still should look for this setting and set your router to automatically connect. Make sure you save your settings.

Now you are connected to the internet and you should be able to browse the internet through your browser, so go ahead and look up heresjaken and all of your other favorite websites.

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Hardware

What is a graphics card?

A graphics card or GPU(Graphics processing unit) is a card that will plug into an expansion slot on your mother-board. The GPU is an additional processor that takes care of the calculations that generate the picture you see on your screen. The GPU takes the load off of the CPU so it has more power to use for other functions. The graphics card will often have multiple cores on its processing unit and also have its own on board RAM. The use of a graphics card can increase speed of you system and is often needed for playing games with high intensity graphics.

How to choose your graphics card?

You need to know what you intend to do with your computer, if you just want to use it to do internet browsing and writing word documents and email than the card that is built into your motherboard should suffice. If you want to play games with high intensive graphics or do video editing this is when you would want to look into getting a GPU. All this being said how do you know which one to get? There are thousands on the market starting from as little as $40 all the way to $600+.

There are sites out there like Video Card Benchmark out there that have benchmark scores of many different GPU’s to compare, basically the higher the score the better the card.

But still how do you know how much power you need in your card. Well once you know what you intend to do with your computer and what you intend to run on there, do some research. Look up the requirements and recommended hardware for the software you want to use and then base your needs off that. I always go extra then what the site says because you want it to run smoothly and not put to much stress on your system. You can also check out forums, Yahoo answers has a lot of information, many people have asked questions about them. Don’t take anything as 100% correct, make sure you find more than one source for your information because somebody could just be trolling you and telling you to get a shit one just for a laugh.

 

Low end GPU
Gigabyte GeForce 210 1GB
High end GPU
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 690 4GB

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Hardware

So recently i have purchased a sandisk extreme solid state drive 120GB. I am actually installing windows on it as I write this post.

I have decided to upgrade my system by doing this because honestly I am sick of waiting five minutes for my PC to boot, it should not take that long it is a good computer. My computer is an i7 with 8GB of ram so it should be reasonably quick. Which it is just not at boot time when it needs to read a lot of data. To determine that it was my hard disk that was to slow for my system once my computer booted I quickly opened the resource monitor and it showed my hard drive working at 100% while every thing else was at 5 – 10%.

I chose the sandisk extreme SSD because of the price per GB I got it for $100AU which is less than $1 per GB and in my opinion that is an excellent price.

 

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Hardware

What is SSD?

An SSD is a solid state drive. This type of storage device has no moving parts and uses flash memory to store your data. This is the same principle as a USB memory stick but on steroids!!! The SSD can access random parts of its memory without having to move any parts to find it. This means that you can access/read and write your data quicker than a conventional hard drive. These drives are more expensive than a conventional hard drives and don’t have as much storage capabilities.

What is HDD?

HDD stands for Hard Drive Disk commonly referred to as a hard drive. Inside your hard drive you have a disk that spins around and it gets written on much the same way as a CD or DVD, though a hard drive is much more solid and durable than a CD/DVD. Hard drives can have multiple disks called platers and they are where the data is written to. To get information from your hard drive the disk needs to spin and the heads must move to the sector of the hard drive that the data is located. HDD can

 

 

Comparison

 

Attribute SSD HDD
Cost Expensive averaging around $1.30 a GB Cheap averaging around 10 cents a GB
Storage capacity Relitively small up to 512GB Large 4TB(same price)
Boot time Around 20 seconds around 40 seconds
Noise No sound Some sound and vibrations
Read/Write speeds 200-500MB per seconds 50-100MB per second
Speed to open file 30%+ faster than HDD Lower than SSD
Failure rate average of 2 million hours average of 1.5 million hours
Effects of magnets No effect can erase data

Conclusion

So in conclusion it all depends on what you need, how much your willing to spend and what you want, hope this information was helpful to you and if you have any suggestions or question feel free to comment.

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Hardware

So i recenty had an Asus f3jp laptop and i had to put a new image of windows 7 on it. So I went about this as I usually do installed the OS and it was all good. Then I downloaded all the drivers from the Asus support site and installed them. I checked device manager and there were still 8 devices missing.

If you do not know how to find drivers check out find missing drivers.

I checked the first devices hardware id and it was this: ACPI\IFX0102\4&305F7111&0
After alot of googling it told me that the device was an
Intel(R) 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Controller – 27B9
http://download.cnet.com/Chipset-Driver-Intel-Ver-8-3-0-1010-zip/3000-2122_4-162229.html

This did not fix the problem but it did resolve about five others, so i had made a dent at least.

Next was:

PCI\VEN_1180&DEV_0592&SUBSYS_13171043&REV_0A\4&3029DB9D&0&0BF0
Name: Ricoh Memory Stick Host Controller
http://download.cnet.com/Chip-Set-Ricoh-R5C832-R5C843-Driver-Version-A00/3000-2122_4-108138.html

USB\VID_0B05&PID_1712\0194E8-5B-0002
10. Bluetooth.
Appeared in Device Manager as

So this was fixed by downloading the file
Bluetooth_XP_080602.zip
http://support.asus.com/Download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=F8Sa&p=3&os=

 

After all this I still had the original device with instance id of: ACPI\IFX0102\4&305F7111&0

I could not find a suitable driver anywhere for this and ended up giving up on it. If you find out what the device is and where to find the driver for it please comment your solution on here.

 

How to find if you have missing drivers:

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Hardware

This will only work with a seagate HDD.
You will need Seatools by seagate to do this tutorial.

Seatools is a utility brought out by seagate specifically for seagate hard drive testing. This is a useful tool when you are diagnosing a fault in your PC because it not only has a version that will run inside of your OS(eg.Windows or Linux), but has a boot-able version that you can burn to a disk and run at start-up. So say your computer has totally died and it will turn on but will not get to your OS then you can boot to the Seatools boot-able disk and run the tests to see if your hard drive is your problem.
You can use Seatools for:

  • Writing zero’s
  • S.M.A.R.T Testing
  • Short drive self test
  • Get drive information
  • Updating firmware
  • Short/Long tests

Writing zeros

Writing zero’s means that zero’s will be written to every part of the HDD. This tool can be useful if you had sensitive or confidential information on your HDD and you did not want anybody to be able to recover this data. Just deleting files and folders leaves traces of the information behind and it can still be recoverable, so if you write all zero’s to the disk that will mean that all the old data has been written over and make it harder to recover.

S.M.A.R.T Test

S.M.A.R.T(Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is the technology used to monitor and detect hard drive defects and malfunctions and warn you that your HDD is getting worn out and you may need to replace your hard drive or risk losing your data if your hard drive fails. S.M.A.R.T test is good to do to predict possible hard drive failure in the near future.

Short Drive Self Test

The DST(Drive self test) is a test that is built into the hard drives firmware. Because it runs the built in test that is on the seagate hard drives firmware it may be outdated and not as effective as the tests that are part of the Seatools program. In most cases this will determine if there is a failure on the disk.

Get drive information

This option will output information on the seagate hard drive that is selected such as model number, serial number, cache size, current drive temperature and other useful information. This can come in very handy when the sticker off the hard drive has been damaged some how and you can no longer read the serial number and part number when applying for a warranty repair.

Update firmware

Updating firmware is updating the program that is on the HDD.

Short/Long tests

These are probably the most useful tools that are included in Seagate’s Seatools program. The short test will pick up any major failures in your hard drive. If after the short test comes back that there are no problems and you still suspect the hard  drive of being the problem then run the long test. The long test can take 4 hours plus to run though.

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