Fixing Computers Archives - Complicated To Simple

When Should I Replace My Computer?

The question of when to retire a computer is a subjective one at best. It depends on many things. However, there are some basic rules of thumb you can use to help make the decision easier.

The first question to ask yourself when considering computer replacement is, “why do I want to replace my computer?” The answer to this question will be very helpful in deciding if it’s a good idea.

If your “why” is that you’re just tired of your old one and want something new, then by all means, indulge yourself. In this article I’m not addressing the question of affordability or if your spouse thinks it’s a good idea. You’ll have to decide those issues for yourself. The purpose of this article is to address the technical aspects of the decision.

If your “why” is that the old one doesn’t perform up to snuff or won’t run some of you programs, that’s a different story. Then you need to look at some other things before making your decision.

Very often, a computer’s performance problems are caused by things we can easily correct. If your hard drive is too full, you can clean it up. If too many programs are running at once, you can control which ones start and which ones don’t. The performance settings can also be tweaked to best fit the kind of work you do. I won’t go into how to do any of that here. I do however go into quite a bit of detail about it in my free “How to Turbo-Charge Your Computer” video e-course. You can get instant access to that course by clicking here.

If you’ve tuned up your computer and that hasn’t helped, there may still be a thing or two you can do before purchasing a new one.

One of the most common things to do is reload the operating system. This is not usually necessary on Macs (but sometimes it is!). It definitely applies to Windows computers though. The older your version of Windows, the more you will probably gain by doing this.

Windows XP especially benefits from an occasional reload. I like to compare Windows XP to the old Pac Man game. You remember…the one where the little yellow chomping faces eat up everything in their path. Well, that’s how Windows acts too.

Each time you start up Windows XP, the longer you go before restarting, the more the system performance degrades. It’s like the little Pac Men eat up more and more pieces of your system until it won’t run anymore and needs to restart. The problem is, it’s like that in the long run too. The more months and years you go without reloading, the more your system degrades.

So the question becomes, do you want to reload and have an OLD computer that works like it did when it was new? Or do you want a new computer that runs like new and will do so for a few years?

The most I’ve ever gotten out of a Windows XP installation was about 5 years. Admittedly, I probably run my computers far harder than most people do. If all you do is browse the internet and read email, yours may last much longer.

I knew it was time to reload when I could only start up QuickBooks one time. If I closed it and tried again, it would not start without restarting the computer. Also, if I wanted to change printer settings, it took nearly 10 minutes for the dialog box to come up. Normally, it should come up instantly.

I figured out that Windows was the problem and not the hardware with a novel test process that cost me nothing. I just reinstalled Windows on a new partition of my hard drive. Since it was on the very same hardware, the only difference was that the installation was new. It worked beautifully…just like new!

However, even though this worked, I decided to replace the computer anyway. As I said earlier, there are many reasons for replacing a computer. In this case, I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of reloading all my programs (many, many programs!) and still be on the same ancient hardware and operating system. This process takes over a day and I’d much rather have sometime more modern to show for my work.

On the other hand, if you have an abundance of time and don’t wish to spend the money on a new computer, you may want to give this a try. It’s quite easy to do.

Just back up your data to a USB drive and make sure you have installable copies of any programs you want to keep. You also will need a copy of Windows. You don’t necessarily need YOUR copy of Windows. As long as you record your license number before erasing everything, just about any copy of Windows will do. Just make sure it’s the same version of Windows as your license number is for. The one exception I’ve run into is if you have a copy of Windows that was made for a specific computer. Sometimes it will only allow installation on the computer it was made for.

Many computers have a recovery drive on them. If yours does, it should have a recovery program on it too. This program, when started, gives you the opportunity to change your computer back to the exact state as when it was new. You’ll be amazed at how well your old computer will work after you do this. Just like new!

If you have no copy of Windows and no recovery drive, you can often use a friend’s copy. You can also buy a copy on Craigslist or EBay without a license number since you already have your own. I recently purchased a copy of Vista this way for around $5. This is perfectly legal and can be installed as many times as you like as long as you have a unique serial/license number for each computer you put it on.

If you commonly use software that is upgraded regularly, you may not want to do this. As I said, you end up with an old computer that runs like it did when it was new. That may not be adequate if you’re trying to run software that was written years after that computer became out of date. That’s one reason I generally build a new computer instead of reloading Windows after years of use.

Just remember to tune up your computer before you make any decision to replace it. Not doing so is like selling your car because it needs an oil change or a tune up. Of course your car will run poorly if not maintained! The same goes for your computer.

So grab a copy of my free video e-course and make it run like new again. You should see significant improvements in speed, less locking up (or none), and no more blue screens of death. You’ll be able to spend your time on those important, fun things in life instead of constantly waiting for your computer to respond.

It will make your computer fun again and your computer will love you for it!

If you still don’t’ like your old computer after going through the course (and maybe reloading Windows), at least you’ll know that you did everything you could to get the best from it. You’ll also have the immense satisfaction of not having to pay anyone to check out an old computer! You can go shopping with a clear conscious and have fun finding a new computer!

If you enjoyed this article, please click the Facebook “like” button at the top left of this page. Feel free to share it with your friends too. If you have questions, please add them to the bottom of this page. I try to answer all your questions as soon as I can.

By the way, as an added bonus, if you get the free video e-course I mentioned, you’ll also get free access to our e-zine that’s packed with other tips and tricks to simplify your life!

Thanks for visiting and I look forward to seeing you back here soon!

About Robert Seth

Robert Seth is a CPA in the Clark County, Washington area who has been serving individual and small business clients for the last 25 years. His business includes a growing number of remotely serviced customers throughout the United States. He’s also a writer and technology expert. He has a passion for improving the lives of others by helping them simplify the complicated stuff in their lives.

How to Clean the Dust from the Inside of Your MacBook

Your MacBook laptop needs the dust cleaned out periodically to keep it in top working order. Here’s how to do it yourself and save some time and money!

Your MacBook laptop is much more sensitive to dust accumulation than a desktop. This is because desktops have more room and larger fans to dissipate the heat.

By comparison, your MacBook laptop has very small fans with even smaller heat exchangers that look like tiny car radiators. This is necessary because of the limited space inside of the MacBook.

With the introduction of the sleek and slim design of Apple’s newest MacBooks, getting rid of extra heat became an even bigger challenge. Apple created an engineering marvel, however, that does a great job of getting rid of most of the heat most of the time.

Trouble comes when the machinery that performs this marvel starts getting coated with dust. Dust acts like insulation inside the computer. It does not allow heat to be transferred from internal components to the outside air.

It also clogs up passageways that are designed for heat to escape through. As dust builds up, your MacBook has to work much harder to get rid of extra heat. You will start to notice more noise as the fans run faster and longer.

Your MacBook will also run hotter and may become quite uncomfortable to hold on your lap. You may also notice your battery running down much faster. Excessive fan speed drains battery power very quickly.

Cleaning the dust out is easily performed with a couple simple tools. All that is necessary is a screwdriver and a can of compressed air.

Be sure your MacBook is turned off before you begin. Flip it over so the bottom is facing up. Remove all the screws you see on the backside of the computer.

A number zero Phillips screw driver is the perfect size for this task. It is available at Radio Shack and most hardware stores. You will want to purchase one as this task should be performed on a regular basis.

If your home is on the dusty side because of pets or a wood stove, you’ll probably want to do it more frequently. Perhaps as often as every three months. Otherwise, every six months or longer may be appropriate.

After you remove the back, the fans and small metal fins near them should be clear to see. Watch the video to see what they look like.

Try not to touch any electrical connections with your fingers, tools or anything else while performing this maintenance. Technically, you should never touch electronically sensitive parts of your computer without first grounding yourself.

Since we won’t be touching any of that kind of stuff though, you should not have a problem. Just remember though that every electronic repair carries with it some risk of damage.

Even changing the batteries in a flashlight can cause damage to the bulb. So if you are unwilling to accept any risk, it may be best not to perform this operation. Ok, now that I’ve gotten the legal stuff out of the way, let’s move on.

Again, take a look at the video to see how to do this. You will need a can of compressed air for the next step. I recommend you do this outside. The clouds of dust that can come from a dirty computer can be surprisingly large. You don’t want to spend the rest of your day dusting your house to get rid of the fallout.

Aim the straw on the can into the metal fins that are next to the fan. Use the air in short bursts. If you keep blowing for too long at one time, the can will become too cold causing a pressure drop. You will then need to let it warm up again before continuing.

Next, blow off the fan blades themselves. Try to prevent very much spinning when you do this. You might want to hold the blades gently in one place while cleaning. According to a MAC tech I spoke to recently, the fans are quite delicately balanced and could be damaged by allowing them to spin too much. Continue shooting air into all the nooks and crannies until you no longer see any clouds of dust come out.

When spraying, try to keep the can as close to upright as possible. If it’s tipped too much or turned upside down, the coolant can be expelled as liquid instead of a gas. The coolant inside these cans is usually liquid carbon dioxide.

It is cold enough to cause instant frostbite if it contacts your skin. It can also cause damage to warm computer components due to the instant and extreme temperature change. So do your best to keep just gas coming out of the can and not liquid.

When you’re done, simply reattach the back of the computer in the same manner that you took it off. Be sure to get the right size screws back in the right holes.

When turning the screws back in, don’t tighten them too much. They should be snug but not overly tight. If you turn them too hard, they can strip out the threads in the holes they go into. If this happens, it will be nearly impossible for that hole to ever hold a screw again.

Another thing to be careful of is cross-threading. It’s very easy to get these tiny screws in crooked. If you feel the screw is difficult to turn in right from the beginning, back it out and try again.

Do this as many times as necessary to get the screws in straight. You’ll know it’s straight when it’s easy to turn in the whole way until tight.

That’s about it. This is a very easy repair and one that you can do at home for almost no cost. You’ll be glad you learned how to do this. Especially when the warranty on your MacBook runs out and you have to start paying for service.

By the way, this is an Apple approved user repair. That means you can do it yourself without risk of voiding your warranty.

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About Robert Seth

How to Fix or Tune up a CD or DVD Drive and Maintain it in Top Condition

CD and DVD drives are high precision devices that need occasional maintenance to stay in top shape. In this article we talk about how they work and what to do to keep yours at its best.

Have you ever slipped a CD or DVD into your computer or DVR drive only to get lots of noise but no action? I’m pretty sure this has happened to most of us. When it does happen it’s easy to assume the drive is broken. This is often not the case though. The problem is usually that the drive is just dirty. It takes a surprisingly small amount of dirt to cripple a CD or DVD drive. Before we look at how to clean one, let’s take a look at why it’s so easy to mess one up in the first place.

The photo on top is of a typical CD/DVD drive reading mechanism. The critical part that we’re concerned about is the little blue object inside the red circle. This is a tiny lens. The penny on the bottom is provided for a size comparison.

A laser beam is used to read the information on the disk. The beam is reflected off the disk and then passes through this lens when the drive is reading information. The lens is supposed to keep the beam in focus at all times by varying the distance between the disk surface and itself.

This laser beam and the information it must read are very small. Let me give you an idea of just how small. The data on a DVD is arranged in a spiral shaped track. The track has approximately 50,000 complete turns and is almost 39,000 feet long!

In order to fit that long of a track on a disk, the width of the track is only .4 microns. A micron is really, really small! A human hair is about 25 microns. That means it would take about 62 tracks to equal the width of a human hair. So you can see (actually you can’t because it’s so small) how small all this stuff is.

With the information on the disk being so tiny, the laser has to be controlled and focused very precisely. That’s where our dust and dirt comes in. It only takes a little bit of dust on the lens, in just the right place, to get in the way of the beam. This causes it to become out of focus making it much more difficult to read the information correctly.

If it becomes too out of focus, it will not be able to read the disk at all. The drive will just spin and make noise as it tries every way it can to read the data. So if your drive is working poorly, or not at all, there’s a good chance that it’s only dirty and not really broken.

Let’s look at a couple of different ways to clean the dust off and bring your drive to practically new condition.

The first method is fairly simple and straightforward. It’s also pleasantly inexpensive. It involves nothing more than a can of compressed air!

The little straw attached to the nozzle of these cans is perfect for getting into tight places. If your drive is a drawer type, make sure it’s open when you clean it. If it’s the kind that sucks the disk in through a slot, just insert the straw a little ways into the slot. Make sure there is no disk in the drive before doing this.

Move the straw back and forth, and in and out, as you press the trigger to blow in the air. Do this fairly quickly as the liquid in the can will soon become quite cold and lose its pressure. If this happens, you will need to let the can warm up again before continuing.

Be very careful to keep the can upright. If you turn it sideways or upside down you can blow pure liquid coolant into the drive or get it on yourself. This is not good for the computer or you. The liquid is usually carbon dioxide and is cold enough to cause instant frostbite. It can also cause electronic parts to malfunction or crack if their temperature goes from warm to freezing in an instant.

I find that this method works very well most of the time. How well it works for you will depend on how dirty the lens has become. Sometimes there’s just too much dirt to blow it all away. After using this method try playing a CD or DVD to see if the problem has been fixed.

If the blower method does not work, you can try the cleaner-disk method. A cleaner disk looks like a regular disk except it has little microfiber brushes on it that stick straight up off the surface of the disk. They look like a bunch of tiny little eyelashes.

Memorex CD/DVD-Player Laser-Lens Cleaner

(For more information, or to purchase this item, click on the image).

As the disk turns in the drive, these little brushes hit the lens surface and clean the dust off. Kind of like when you use a feather duster to dust the stuff in your house. Cleaner disks sometimes come with a little tube of cleaner that helps remove the dust and also neutralizes static so dust does not stick so easily.

To use the disk, simply insert it into the drive and follow the instructions on the screen. Even if your drive won’t read a disk, the brushes will begin to clean the lens as soon as the drive begins to spin. It may take a few minutes, but eventually the instructions should come up on the screen.

There will usually be several different cleaning cycles to choose from. In addition to instructions, it may also have music for you to enjoy while the disk is doing it’s job. The computer will tell you when the cleaning is done. Just remove the disk and hopefully your drive will be good as new.

In all the years I’ve been working on computers, I have rarely seen these two methods fail. Disk drives do wear out occasionally but not very often. It’s usually the ones inside hard-core gaming machines that fail on a regular basis. Regular business and home machines are more likely to fail from dust buildup because of disuse than from wearing out.

I have had many drives that I’ve moved from machine to machine as I’ve rebuilt them every couple of years. Usually if they are retired it’s because more advanced technology becomes available. Not because they break.

If these two methods don’t work, try checking the cables inside the computer. One of them may be loose.

Another thing to try before assuming the drive is dead is rebooting the computer.

Lastly, it’s possible that the disk you’re trying to use might be damaged. Try several different disks before giving up and replacing the drive.

If you do find that one of your disks is scratched, check this article that I wrote on removing scratches for an inexpensive and very easy way to repair it. This repair will only work for scratches though. If the disk is cracked, warped, or otherwise seriously damaged, it will need to be replaced.

There is one other thing I should mention here. There are other high precision parts inside a CD/DVD drive beside the lens. Another place that dust and dirt can cause a problem is in the tracking mechanism which moves the lens across the disk. This tracking mechanism is more robust than the lens so it can take more dirt and abuse before it fails.

The two things that will cause it to fail are a very large buildup of dust, or extreme physical abuse. If too much dust is allowed to build up, it can get packed into various places inside the drive. This can prevent the reading mechanism from being able to move to either the extreme beginning or ending point on the disk.

In cases like this, even though there is nothing really wrong with the drive, it is not usually financially practical to fix. It involves removing the drive, disassembling it, and removing the obstructing dust buildup. If you have a professional do this for you it will probably cost more than a new drive.

If you are a do-it-yourself type though you might want to give it a try. All you have to lose is an already dead drive. It’s also a great learning experience so you can see what’s involved for yourself. Besides, you might actually fix it and not need to spend the money for a new one after all.

The moral of the story is to maintain your equipment. It’s a good idea to get a can of air and a cleaner disk and use them once a week or so. By keeping the dust cleaned out on a regular basis, your drives should last many years and possibly longer than the computer.

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Now it’s your turn. If you have something to add or know of other good tips for keeping drives in top condition, I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment so everyone can benefit.

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