What is a UPS?

I have discussed topics such as backing up your data and securing your computer to protect your personal information on your computer. The one topic I have not discussed is protecting your actual computer hardware. This is just as important as backing up your data as leaving your physical computer unprotected can cause you to not only lose data, but also replace your system.

In this post I will talk about an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), what it is and how it can protect your computer from harm.

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Connecting an Older Printer to USB in Windows XP

I recently published a post titled What is USB? where I briefly mentioned the problem of new computers only have USB ports. For many this may not seem like a problem, but for those that have devices that don’t use USB, this can be a problem.

For those with older printers that connect only to the parallel port, and you would still like to use that printer, I will provide instructions on how you can connect that old printer to the USB port in this post.

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What is USB?

Last year, someone I know updated his desktop PC. Once we begin to connect all the peripherals such as the keyboard and mouse we noticed something was missing: the serial ports. The only ports included in the desktop were USB ports.

In this post I will provide a brief overview of USB, provide a brief history and discuss what exactly a USB port is used for.

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What is ATA?

I recently had to install a new hard drive in a computer that was about 2 years old. Before purchasing the new hard drive I needed to determine the interface the hard drive uses. There are currently two interfaces in existence today: PATA (IDE or EIDE) and SATA.

For newer computers, you will probably find SATA, while in my particular instance it was PATA. In this post I discuss both PATA and SATA by provided a brief background, the different ATA specifications and how devices are connected to each interface.

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What is RAID?

Recently I noticed a 1TB (terabyte) external hard drive on sale, and thought it would be great for storing my digital photos and digital videos. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes so it is quite large, at least by today’s standards. When I looked closely at the box for the hard drive I noticed that it mentioned RAID 0. I have been noticing desktop hard drives taking advantage of RAID, which was traditionally reserved for servers.

In this post I will provide a brief overview of RAID, how it started and the various levels of RAID.

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How to Reset the D-Link DI-524 Wireless Router

D-Link DI-524

Some time ago I wrote a post titled Securing D-Link DI-524 Wireless Router. In that post I outlined the steps needed to secure that particular wireless router. More recently I wrote another post title How to Reset the Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router and decided to write a similar post on reseting the DI-524 router. Reset … Read more

How to Reset the Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router

How to Reset the Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router

One of the most popular pages on Technically Easy is the post titled Securing Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router. In that post I outlined the steps needed to secure these particular wireless broadband routers to maintain your wireless network security. The one problem I didn’t mention is how to reset the router back to the factory … Read more

DNS Issue when Accessing a Web Page

I recently experienced a problem that looked like a DNS error. The error appeared in the web browser after trying to load a Web page. I have never seen the error message before, but after reading the message it was easy to determine it had to do with domain name servers.

After doing some testing, and then research, I was able to find a solution to the problem.

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