Articles

In Windows 7’s task manager, I can select different columns to show. There are a bunch that are related to memory and memory usage, but I’m not sure what it all means. I have a Dutch installation of Windows, so I’ll try to translate them; as I’m not sure of the English names. In order: […]

When I plug in my USB flash drive, it shows up on my computer as write-protected or read-only. I am unable to transfer data to it, nor can I modify or delete any files already stored on it. I also cannot repartition or reformat the drive using Windows Disk Management, DiskPart, GParted, or other tools.

What should I use for removing thermal paste: acetone or isopropyl alcohol? Some say acetone is the best thing for the task, others say it’s a no-no. Who should I believe? Solution: From many years of removing thermal paste I’ve found my favorite to be WD-40, and then isopropyl for cleaning up the oils left

When I first started using computers, law of the land in computer class was never bring magnets near anything computer related, lest you lose all your data or screw up your monitor. Now I am pretty sure magnets will still royally mess up a standard hard drive, and I know for a fact they screw

For the CPU cores, I think that blue means nice, green normal CPU use and red I/O.But I’m not sure and I haven’t found a definite answer. Then there are the colors for memory. What do green, blue and yellow mean there? Solution: Press h inside htop for quick help. CPU Blue      : Low-priority threadsGreen

In Windows 8 I can reset everything and reinstall Windows. I assume this will clear my drive and start from scratch? Is that right? Does this create a Windows.old folder? I see this dialog, but aren’t my settings and preferences saved in the cloud? If I screw up my settings and reset like this, are

I’m using Windows 10 and today I accidentally hit the key combination: Ctrl+Shift+Win+B. As a result, the screens went black for about a second and I heard a beep. This is reproduceable; every time I hit the aforementioned key combination, the same behavior occurs. Searching on the web I could find nothing about this except

In the Windows Resource Monitor’s CPU tab, there is a status box and graph for the “Maximum Frequency”, right next to the “CPU Usage” values. What does this mean? The value is sometimes over 100% on my system… what could that imply? By looking at CPU-z’s real-time report of the processor’s clock speed, it seems

I read http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/change-the-system-locale (windows 8 linked me to this help page) and I still can’t completely understand what that means. In which way is the system locale different than the display language? Solution: System Locale (Language for non-Unicode Programs): This setting has three major purposes: Specifies the default ANSI, OEM, MAC, and EBCDIC code pages

Windows 10 includes an option to Reset this PC which can be accessed in Settings → Update and Security → Recovery. When you choose to reset, you’re given some options: The “Keep my files” option says it “keeps your personal files”, but which files does it actually keep?  Personal files could mean files in my