I have an HP HDX18T laptop with an external drive that holds my old stock 250GB/5,400rpm 2.5-inch drive. The external case uses an internal SATA connection and has both a USB 2.0 and eSATA connection externally for my laptop. I’ve read that there is a theoretical transfer rate of 4GB/s with eSATA, but I’m lucky to get 40MB/s copying to or from. Can you tell me what I’m missing?
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I have a problem with my X-Fi Platinum setup. It worked fine on my old Dell 8200, but I recently upgraded my mobo to an EVGA nForce 780i and now the front ports don’t seem to work. What gives? I reinstalled the drivers several times and nothing. The main card works just fine, but the drive bay interface is the whole reason I bought the card in the first place. —Rocco Nicoletta Since the card works with the rear ports for both output and input, the Doctor is going to assume it’s something as simple as a loose connection or damaged cable that occurred during the motherboard move. You should power down and unplug your system.
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I just bought a used PC running Windows XP. It had been really fast loading and running programs and accessing the web, but suddenly it slowed down to a complete stop. I had to unplug it just to shut it down. So, I unplugged the Ethernet cable and it worked fine.
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I plan to install a second-generation Intel X-25 80GB SSD drive in my system. I have heard that SSDs suffer speed losses when they are written over compared to when they are new. How would a page file affect this? —Jon Coulter Yes, many SSDs suffer slowdowns when writing over memory blocks that have previously held data, which is why the TRIM command (see this month’s White Paper) was introduced. Windows 7 supports the TRIM command, which is basically a garbage-collection routine that prevents this type of slowdown during writes, and many drive manufacturers have released similar garbage-collecting programs—usually named wiper.exe or something similar—for you to run on your SSD periodically.
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I recently moved my Windows XP partition to a new hard drive using Partition Magic 8. After this, the computer hangs at the Boot from CD prompt. I then installed Windows 7 RC on another partition. It still hangs at the Boot from CD prompt unless I put a bootable disk in the drive and let the timer expire.
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I bought two laptops for my two granddaughters about a year and a half ago. Now both have missing keys. Is there a way to purchase replacement keys, or do I need to buy a whole new keyboard? These two laptops are both Compaqs sold by HP
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