There is an observation to be made for Windows 10 on my laptop running with 24G memory available, and 2.5G used.  There is no ‘memory pressure’.  Other questions have looked at memory consumption (which isn’t the problem here).  In all the related questions here and elsewhere, I havn’t been able to find an adequate explanation…

Could anyone elaborate on the differences between BIOS and firmware please? Solution: As others already stated, BIOS is the specific name for the (motherboard) firmware in older PCs. New computers these days have a technically somewhat different kind of firmware which is called either EFI or UEFI.   Please note that any computer will contain,…

  What is the difference between SETX and SET? As per my understanding:Both are used to set  environment variables SETX is for user variables. SET is for shell variables. Solution: I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple. Environment variables are not limited by scope, as you suggest, but you are right that the lifetime of…

Now Windows 8 supports the UEFI bootloader and I have read that its different from the BIOS, but it’s unclear to me after many searches on the Google. Some points in mind are below:- As we all know, BIOS is an important part of accessing boot options. So UEFI will do that now? How?  …

I’ve seen programs in the past that were able to check the SMART status of a hard disk drive but it wasn’t easy for me to find. Also, I think I had to boot into the CD in order to check on it. What is your preferred method for getting this data to hopefully preempt…

In Linux, we can go to the user home by entering the tilde (~) character after cd: cd ~ How to do the same in Windows? Each time, I need to type: cd C:Document and Settingsfreewind That’s too boring. Solution: cd /d “%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%” would do it — but I ‘m not sure if you consider…

What lifetime can be expected of the typical hard disk? Or are there big differences between different types? And does it make a difference if it is used heavily instead of never being connected to system (for example serving as a backup medium)? Solution: What lifetime can be expected of the typical hard disk? The…

What is the relationship between Unix, Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian?   I suspect they are all Operating Systems that are based upon one another – similar to how Windows is based on DOS. Is my suspicion correct? Do these operating systems have the same type of relationship with each other as Windows has with DOS?…

I’m looking for a Windows program/script/command line function that works like Linux’s watch program. watch periodically calls another program/whatever and shows the result, which is great for refreshing an output file or similar every second: watch cat my-output.txt or, more powerfully: watch grep “fail” my-output.txt I’ve looked for it in cygwin’s library, but it doesn’t…

I was double checking my notes for ‘Virtual Memory’ and the definition in my text book is:   Process of allocating a section of secondary storage to act as part of the main memory Where as Wikipedia says:   Virtual memory is a computer system technique which gives an application program the impression that it…