Microsoft’s intention to optimize the upcoming Windows 8 operating system for mobile devices like netbooks or tablets has the consequence that the Redmond company has to optimize the operating system’s power consumption. Laptop users with optical disk drives may benefit from the operating system’s support of a feature called Zero-Power Optical Disk Drive (Zero Power [...]

Categories: Windows

In a move that’s reminiscent of the famous Pentium floating point bug, Intel has issued a recall of all new Sandy Bridge PCs and laptops that run its latest generation of processor. The recall is to fix a problem with the Series 6 chipset, used in all Sandy Bridge systems.  The company says that  the [...]

Categories: Hardware

Microsoft has released a patch yesterday that is fixing a bug that some Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 users are experiencing after resuming their operating systems from hibernation or sleep state. These users experience stop error messages when resuming the system, to be precise one or multiple of the following stop error messages: [...]

Categories: Windows

Hot Swap, or hot swapping, describes the process of connecting or removing an SATA drive from a running computer system. This hot swap technology has to be supported by the SATA controller and by the hardware driver in the operating system to work. The device specifications should state if the device is how swap capable. [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Day 15 of the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. We got 10 more software products for you for which we will hand out licenses. Today’s software program is special as it is the first one that can will be handed out to everyone who wants to try it. USB Safely Remove is a USB device manager that [...]

Categories: Operating Systems, Software, Windows

I first thought about getting a SSD (Solid State Disk) drive for my new computer that I assembled at the beginning of this year. The SSD drives were rather expensive and only available with capacities of 16 or 32 Gigabytes which probably would have been enough. Far more pressing was the state of the performance [...]

Categories: Hardware

Dante send in this interesting story and I thought I share it the way he send it to me and ask everyone if they know of a way to install Windows Vista on a SATA Raid with difficulties. Let the story begin:

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

Ghacks got slashdotted yesterday and I had to enable caching to make the site run fluent as usual. I’am sorry if you experienced troubles connecting to my website, those should be solved by now. When I was installing Windows XP on my new computer that had only SATA drives I had to use a floppy disk to load the SATA drivers because Windows did not have them onboard at that time. I had to buy a floppy drive, floppy disks and create a bootdisk and load the drivers from that disk during setup.

Categories: Tools

Automatic Acoustic Management is a feature of most modern hard drives which reduces the seek noice at the cost of perfomance. Most hard drives have this feature disabled but it is possible to enable it using a tool like silent drive which runs on Windows Xp and 2000 only. Please note that silent drive is only working with IDE drives at the moment and that the gui is in german.

Categories: Hardware, Tools