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gateway ta6 laptop
tomos:
I royally dread advance purchase agreements like that, especially compulsory ones, and most especially surprise compulsory ones. NEXT time, I will know what to expect, and I don't think I will be purchasing McAfee no matter how nice their product is. I do not like that kind of sales approach.
-holt (January 14, 2016, 05:52 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yeah, ironically, you need to be even more careful of the big names, than of the smaller ones...
holt:
I royally dread advance purchase agreements like that, especially compulsory ones, and most especially surprise compulsory ones. NEXT time, I will know what to expect, and I don't think I will be purchasing McAfee no matter how nice their product is. I do not like that kind of sales approach.
-holt (January 14, 2016, 05:52 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yeah, ironically, you need to be even more careful of the big names, than of the smaller ones...
-tomos (January 14, 2016, 06:32 PM)
--- End quote ---
I just finished reading every post and link in the Topic: Is Windows 10 a trojan? thread; and I thought I had problems.
tomos:
^ ;D
holt:
I like this external hard drive case. But I read somewhere, some cases will power down the drive when not in actual data transfer mode; is that something I should look for to prolong hard drive life, and can someone please comment, or even show me a link to one?
Shades:
Yes, HD's power down after a certain threshold of inactivity is reached. Using a portable HD case that comes with its own power supply, this threshold is larger than than with a portable HD that draws power from the USB port it is connected to.
And I don't think it is bad to assume the threshold for each type of portable HD varies when connected to a desktop or a laptop. In principle, a desktop has less problems sustaining the portable HD that draws power from USB than a laptop does. Mainly because the power supply in a desktop is much "beefier" than the power supply of a laptop.
If a portable HD with its own power supply is used with a laptop, it will put much less strain on the laptop and as a result the threshold could be increased.
One more thing to consider: the threshold will also be affected as well by the power saving settings of either the desktop or the laptop.
Prolonging life of a hard disk...that is an interesting subject, invoking much debate.
For me (running servers and desktops 24/7) it is important to keep hard disk in their "comfort zone", meaning: between 35 and 45 degrees Celsius operating temperature, dust free and using philosophies to reduce writing/reading wherever I can. Yes, trusting the NTFS file system to do that for you is...not smart. This is me, being politically correct here. In case you are interested, see other threads here in the forum how I really feel about this subject.
Just know that powering up any hard disk is quite taxing for that device. So you want to prevent that as much as possible. If you are going to turn it off, leave it of for a significant amount of time. If you continuously power down/power up a hard disk you will wear it out much quicker than have it running all the time. All of the above is valid for spinning hard disks...SSD hard disks are a completely different type of beast.
Come to think of it...if you are still running XP on your laptop, you should check with a tool such as Minitool Partition Wizard (free/commercial) to check if the partition(s) on your hard disk are aligned. If that is not the case, I suggest you let that software fix that for your laptop. That is a job that can take all day, depending on the size of your hard disk and the amount of data that is stored on it. It is also essential to keep your laptop connected to reliable power grid for as long as this procedure takes. Afterwards you will notice a 5 to 15% gain of general speed, because writing/reading to your hard disk has been reduced significantly.
Modern version of Windows already take care of aligning the partition(s), but XP and older didn't.
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