12 tips for your laptop(Part 2)

7. Clean a dirty laptop

The first thing you need to do is shut it down and unplug the power lead. It may be wise to remove the battery as well. To clean the chassis, a damp, but not wet cloth should be enough to remove most dirt and grime. Read on for how to clean the keyboard and screen.

8. Clone your laptop’s drive

It certainly is possible to do what you are asking, but you will need a bit of extra equipment to do it. As well as your new drive, you will need a hard drive imaging program, such as Acronis True Image (£40 from www.acronis.co.uk) and a USB laptop hard drive caddy. A USB caddy for your new drive can be found on eBay for a few pounds. All you then need to do is clone the contents of your old hard drive, onto the drive in the USB caddy, then take out your old drive and put the new one in.

Step 1: Connect your USB drive caddy into a free USB Port on your laptop, and then download, install and start the Acronis True Image software. Once on the application’s Welcome screen, click on Disk Utilities and then click on the Clone Disk icon to start the Disk Cloning operation.

Step 2: On the next screen, select the Automatic option as your chosen Clone Method and then click Next. The next screen will be this one will allow you to select which drive to clone, so select your existing laptop’s hard drive as the source. It should be labelled as Disk 1.

Step 3: The next step is to choose the drive in the USB caddy as the destination for the cloned disk. Your laptop will then reboot and copy the data to the new drive. Once it has finished, swap the drives around and remove any data from your old drive if you wish.

9. How to upgrade your notebook’s memory

Your laptop manual will normally tell you how much memory you can fit, and what type and speed you need to use. However, if you don’t have that to hand, a very useful tool is Crucial’s memory advisor. Find out more about memory upgrading.

10. How to get spare laptop parts

Q. The DVD drive on my Asus laptop has stopped working and it no longer shows up in My Computer. It’s been troublesome for a while and I think it’s finally given up the ghost. Is there anyway to replace the drive, or do I need to get one from Asus? I’ve a feeling that a replacement from Asus would be horribly expensive.

A. It’s certainly possible to buy replacement laptop drives, but whether it would fit your particular model is another matter. What you need to do is remove the drive, usually by pressing a button or moving a slider on the bottom of the laptop, and have a look at the shape of the drive. This is important, because not all drives are the same shape. Y

11. Recover files from a damaged hard drive

Q. Earlier this week my laptop failed to boot up. On removing the hard drive and putting it in a USB carrier I listened to hear it spinning up. I am quite familiar to the various sounds they make as they spin up, and all did not sound quite right. My computer recognised that an external USB device had been connected, and looking in Device Manager, the hard drive was reported as working normally. However it does not get allocated a drive letter and so effectively it is unreadable. It also does not appear under Drive Management. Do you think the drive has totally failed? Is there anything else I can do to recover some of the data off it?

A. Hard drives can fail without warning, although you’ll normally receive some advanced notice, usually in the form or strange noises, or problems when reading or writing files. It sounds as if your drive is spinning, hence your computer is recognising it, but the read/write arm is not moving, because you’d hear that as a faint clicking noise. This corresponds with the drive not showing up in Drive Management. If this is the case, then the news isn’t good. Data recovery software will only work if the data can be accessed, which clearly isn’t happening here.

12. Use RAID drives in your laptop

Q. I have bought a new Acer Laptop, which has two 320GB hard drives. When I enter the BIOS and create a RAID set and set it to striping I see the two drives as 320GB each. However, when I then install Windows Vista, it shows only one drive with a capacity of about 700GB. Why don’t I see two drives, and can I use a partitioning program to split this large drive into two?

A. You have opted to create a RAID 0 set, which writes alternate blocks of data to each of your two drives. This is known as striping, and is designed for systems where you need very fast read and write speeds. A RAID 0 setup treats your two drives as one contiguous block of data, hence it only shows up as one drive. RAID 0 is not a good idea if you are worried about data integrity, because if one drive fails, then you will lose all of your data. Instead, choose a RAID 1 setup, otherwise known as mirroring.