Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P48 docx

Using ReadyBoost 444 Finally, you’ve got to have the right type of flash memory key to enable ReadyBoost. When you plug an external memory block into a laptop running Windows Vista, the operating system runs a quick performance test; if the memory is too slow, a message informs you that it can only be used for data storage, and not as an extension of system memory. See Figure 1-7. It’s likely that ReadyBoost won’t accept older flash memory keys you already own. When you go shopping, look for devices labeled as “Vista Ready” or “ReadyBoost Ready.” Using ReadyBoost Vista notices anytime you plug a flash memory key into a laptop, and the operating system asks if you want to speed up your system using the memory or use the memory as a place to hold files. If you choose to speed up the system with ReadyBoost, the system displays a Properties screen for the memory and a new tab that supports ReadyBoost. Here you can adjust the amount of space you want to allow the system to use for cache; you can devote all the memory to that purpose or divide the memory between cache and file storage. The minimum amount of flash memory for ReadyBoost purposes is 256MB, and any amount beyond that offers improvements in performance. The maxi- mum is 4GB. Figure 1-7: My new laptop and my new flash memory key work well together, but the operating system determined that the memory was not fast enough to be used with ReadyBoost technology. 34 140925-bk07ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 444 Book VII Chapter 1 Adding RAM Using ReadyBoost 445 When this new technology was introduced, Microsoft recommended that the way to get the best ReadyBoost performance was to match the capacity of the flash memory device to the amount of installed system memory. Thus, if you have 2GB of RAM in the machine, you would get the best performance by installing 2GB of ReadyBoost-compatible flash memory. This may change with future updates and Service Packs for Windows Vista; keep posted on changes by visiting the Microsoft web site and searching for ReadyBoost. To be recognized as a ReadyBoost device, the flash memory has to be all in one device; if you install two flash memory keys in two different USB ports, Vista recognizes only one of them (the device with the earlier alphabetic drive identification) as available for ReadyBoost. 34 140925-bk07ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 445 Book VII: Upgrading Your Laptop 446 34 140925-bk07ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 446 Chapter 2: Adding or Replacing a Drive: Internal, External, CD, or DVD In This Chapter ߜ Reading the spinning library within your laptop ߜ Downsizing a drive, affecting design ߜ Protecting a drive from traveling insults ߜ Installing a replacement drive ߜ Going external for storage ߜ Changing optical specs: CD and DVD upgrades A hard disk drive or a CD or DVD drive is basically very large, very fast, revolving filing cabinets. Oh, and they’re served by an extremely efficient and quick librarian who knows where everything is at all times, can go and get your information in the blink of an eye, and never takes a coffee break. Disk drives record information by placing tiny electrical charges on a mag- netized surface. CD or DVD drives use optical recording methods, burning teensy pits or making dark marks on a reflective disc. Either way, your com- puter is recording the 0s and 1s of binary data on a circular medium. In gen- eral, the absence of a magnetic or optical mark at a particular location indicates a 0, and the presence of a mark is interpreted as 1. A magnetic hard disk drive uses a platter that is spelled with a k, a disk. A CD drive, which is a computer adaptation of a music-playing device devel- oped in Europe, uses a platter that is spelled with a c, a disc. DVD drives were developed simultaneously for computers and home-theater systems, and for my purpose I use the disc spelling. Do any of these distinctions really matter? Only to copy editors and others (like me) who are paid to obsess over tiny details . . . and get them right. Inside a hard disk drive one or more platters spin at a constant speed, while one or more heads move in from the outside (or back from the center) of the disk to read information recorded at a particular location or write new data. (That’s why we call them read/write heads.) Don’t do this (open your laptop, that is) at home; allow me to do it for you. In Figure 2-1 you can see the guts of a laptop from my collection. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 447 Going Tiny, Laptop Style 448 Depending on the hard disk drive’s density (how closely data is packed together) and the drive’s overall capacity, it may have only one platter or two or more platters. Most hard disk drives also record information on both top and bottom of each platter. To go along with the multiple platters, the drive has an equivalent number of read/write heads — one for each side of the platter. The drives spin at a very high rate of speed; a typical laptop hard drive rotates at least 4,200 times per second and, at today’s high end, as much as 7,200 or 10,000 revolutions per second. (Old-fashioned floppy disk drives, no longer common, spun at just 300 revolutions per minute in their final versions.) And finally, unlike floppy disk drives or optical drives (CDs and DVDs), hard disk drives are sealed units, with their platters and read/write heads protected from damage by dirt, dust, and sticky substances that could make them liter- ally grind to a halt. Going Tiny, Laptop Style While the basic design of a laptop’s hard disk drive is similar to a drive in a desktop PC, some very important differences exist. A laptop drive has to be Figure 2-1: Its protective cover removed, here is the interior of a basic hard disk drive. This model, from a desktop computer, has three platters and six read- write heads that move in from the outside to the core. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 448 Book VII Chapter 2 Adding or Replacing a Drive: Internal, External, CD, or DVD Going Tiny, Laptop Style 449 ✦ Much smaller and much lighter (because you’ll be stowing and carry- ing it) ✦ Much less demanding of electrical power (since it often runs on battery power) ✦ Built and installed to resist damage to its platters or to the information recorded on them (because a laptop is specifically intended to be moved around from one place to another) Making ‘em small Drives intended for a laptop have to be miniaturized, of course, because they need to fit within a notebook case; PC designers can use hard drives of almost any shape or weight. The standard PC drive is 3.5 inches wide, and about 1 inch thick. For a current laptop, a typical hard disk drive is about the size and weight of a pack of playing cards. Most laptops use drives that are 2 1 ⁄2 inches wide and a bit more than 1 ⁄3 inch thick (9.5mm); today’s tiniest are just 8.5mm thick, which is almost exactly 1 ⁄3 inch. The next step down is a 1.8-inch-wide device you can install within the laptop or as a plug-in PC Card or Express Card. And now you see tiny drives half again as wide, popping up at 0.85 inches: That’s less than an inch square. Smaller than a postage stamp. These tiny drives are in cell phones, digital audio players, PDAs, and digital cameras, but laptops are next. And we’ve begun seeing the first solid-state hard disk drives for laptops — essentially, permanently installed flash memory. They’re relatively fast and have no moving parts, which is a good thing. On the downside, they’re (cur- rently) very expensive when compared to “old-fashioned” mechanical hard disk drives, and for that reason the first models have relatively small capaci- ties of 64GB. The other part of the miniaturization equation is the push for a reduction in weight. To some designers and laptop users, weight is the equivalent of racing decals on a sports car; they want to brag about how their new laptop weighs just 27 ounces. (To others, the issue is more about practicality. A 5- pound laptop case can begin to feel like a 50-pound iron anvil at the end of a day of traveling from home to airport to hotel.) A typical modern 2 1 ⁄2-inch notebook hard drive weighs somewhere near 100 grams, or about 3 1 ⁄2 ounces, an amazing feat of productive shrinkage. And the newest 1.8-inch-wide drives are as light as 62 grams, or just over 2 ounces. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 449 Going Tiny, Laptop Style 450 Making ‘em efficient Reducing the drives’ power demands means longer batteries use while you travel. Two factors are at work here: ✦ Reduced draw of current with ultra-efficient motors and low-friction bearings. ✦ Lower power draw usually generates less heat within the closed case of a laptop and therefore requires less power demands by cooling fans. Making ‘em sturdy Although I’ve been known to occasionally gently kick the PC that sits beneath my desk when its internal fans start to vibrate like a 747 preparing for takeoff, in general a hard drive in a full-sized PC lives a pretty sheltered life. It doesn’t get moved very often, isn’t likely to fall, isn’t in a spilled coffee’s pathway, and it doesn’t have to go through X-ray machines. (And I also protect it against electrical surges or brownouts by plugging the machine into a capable uninter- ruptible power supply.) Downsizing and data transfer Although high-end laptops are now available with drives that spin at the same high speeds as the best desktop devices, most laptop hard drives spin slower to reduce power demands. One effect of a slower speed is a potential reduc- tion in the data transfer rate. It’s simply a matter of physics: The read/write head waits for a par- ticular spot on the disk to come beneath it. If one drive spins twice as fast as another, there could be a delay of as much as nearly 100 percent between grabbing bits of separated data. A second factor is that data transfer is fastest at a drive’s outer tracks — tracks with the largest circumference. More circumference means the capacity for more data in a particular track. ( Circumference is the actual distance around the circle.) At the same rotational speed, more data in a track means faster throughput. If you’re working with smaller platters on a laptop’s drive, the outer circumference is going to be less. A 3- inch circle has a circumference of about 9.4 inches, while a 2-inch circle is a mere 6.3 inches. In addition to possible differences in the rotation speed, the larger drive in this example has a cir- cumference about 50 percent larger. Other components that affect the speed of trans- fer of data include the motherboard design and the chipset used. If you purchase a current machine, it most likely uses a SATA (serial ATA) hard drive and disk controller hardware, which is as fast as a consumer-grade machine is going to function. Older laptops use PATA (parallel ATA, also called IDE) drives and standards, which are slightly slower in certain circumstances. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 450 Book VII Chapter 2 Adding or Replacing a Drive: Internal, External, CD, or DVD Replacing a Laptop Hard Drive 451 Alas, a laptop is nowhere nearly as pampered. It faces a hundred threats in the office and on the road. It can fall off the airport X-ray machine, be dropped off a desktop, suffer a sudden soaking, or even pick up a bit of sand or dirt. And so engineers have devoted themselves to building stronger and better protected disk drives for laptops. The first step: guarding against damage from a fall. Engineers have two ways to accomplish that: ✦ Passive design safeguards. These elements include cushioning the hard drive against damage — things that include stronger materials, tiny springs or rubber mounting, and the like. ✦ Active safeguards. A few companies make these, including Lenovo (suc- cessor to IBM) with its Active Protection System for some of its ThinkPad laptops. Like the sensor in a car airbag, the disk drive watches for sudden changes in motion that include acceleration (as a laptop tumbles off a desk) or deceleration (as it hits the floor). It reacts within half a second to park the drive’s read/write heads in a place where they won’t crash into the platters and then it stops the drive’s spin. Hiring, Firing, and Wiring Engineers have gone back to the wiring past. New technologies allow serial communication to operate at extremely fast speeds, without any of the com- plexities of parallelism. Serial ATA (SATA) requires only four thin wires in a casing similar to a tele- phone cable. The first specification for SATA requires only four 500 millivolt ( 1 ⁄2 volt) signals; future versions are expected to allow signal voltages half again as strong at 250 millivolts, or 1/4 volt. And within the next few years, SATA will break out of the box to offer some- thing quite logically called external SATA (eSATA). This allows high-speed communication with new drives and other devices. Think of it as USB on speed. Replacing a Laptop Hard Drive The first few generations of laptops came with hard disk drives deeply embed- ded within their sealed cases. Removing one to replace or upgrade it was a difficult, time-consuming, and expensive process that generally required the involvement of a professional repair shop. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 451 Replacing a Laptop Hard Drive 452 An R word is missing from this chapter. I speak only of replacing a hard disk drive, not repairing it. The fact is that a hardware failure (a crashed head, a damaged motor or platter) or a fried electronic circuit is almost never worth repairing. The only exception: for a price (a large one), some specialty labs can recover essential and irreplaceable data from some failed drives. Maintaining regular data backups is a lot less expensive. Today, nearly all current laptops have made the hard disk drive modular; the drive either slides into a bay on the side or latches into a compartment on the bottom. The drive is held in a special carrier that matches the laptop case, and exposed is a set of small connectors that deliver power to the device and send and receive data. In this design, you unplug an original drive and install a new one: plug and play. From serial to parallel and back Serial wiring is the original design for most communication within and outside a PC. This was the best engineers could come up with at the time: the eight bits of a computer byte (or word) were strung, one behind the other, and sent down a pair of wires, one in each direc- tion. (Other wires were in the cable for special signaling.) Serial communication works, although at first it was slow. First of all, each byte had to be sep- arated by code to show where it began and ended. And many designs also added error- checking or error-correcting codes that allowed the computer to figure out if all the received information was accurate. Finally, serial com- munication was simply slow because it was the equivalent of a two-lane highway; every bit had to follow one behind the other and there was no passing lane. The next development in personal computers was parallel communication. In this design, all eight bits of a computer word were sent at the same time along an 8-wire cable or a 16-wire cable for bidirectional exchange. This was adopted for most uses that required bunches of information transmission: Printers were among the first places these cables went. Parallel communication was also adopted for the transfer of data within a computer — from the microprocessor to the hard disk drive and back, as one example. Inside a computer— desktop or laptop—the motherboard and the drive had to be connected by an unwieldy 40- or 80-wire cable and a 40-pin connector. And 26 of the wires had to carry 5-volt signals. That worked for more than a decade as engi- neers pushed the speed of communication across the parallel superhighway faster and faster. But eventually they ran into problems of physics: minor imperfections in cables or the tiniest of variation in length might mean that one of the eight bits might arrive a millisecond before or after the others. The result: a traffic jam. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 452 Book VII Chapter 2 Adding or Replacing a Drive: Internal, External, CD, or DVD Replacing a Laptop Hard Drive 453 Installing a plug-in drive The best of the systems make changing a hard drive as easy as swapping a battery. In Figure 2-2 you can see one example of a laptop hard disk in a car- rier and the empty bay awaiting its installation. A reminder: Always remove both the AC adapter and the laptop’s battery before handling any of the machine’s internal parts. Don’t take the chance of having any electrical power in the laptop that could be shorted out by a tool, screw, or other conducting material. Follow these basic steps for working with a drive that’s already installed in a carrier designed for your laptop: 1. Turn off the laptop. 2. Unplug the AC adapter. 3. Prepare your work area. You want a clean, well-lit, and stable surface. Place a soft cloth or other cushioning material to protect the top of the laptop; you can use almost anything that isn’t metallic or packing an electric charge. 4. Remove the battery. 5. Ground yourself before touching the old drive, and again before opening the bag or box that holds the new drive. Figure 2-2: Turned on its back, you can see how this particular hard disk carrier design holds a drive in a cage; the data and power connectors plug into mating ports in the laptop. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 453 . Protection System for some of its ThinkPad laptops. Like the sensor in a car airbag, the disk drive watches for sudden changes in motion that include acceleration (as a laptop tumbles off a desk) or deceleration. phones, digital audio players, PDAs, and digital cameras, but laptops are next. And we’ve begun seeing the first solid-state hard disk drives for laptops — essentially, permanently installed flash memory dropped off a desktop, suffer a sudden soaking, or even pick up a bit of sand or dirt. And so engineers have devoted themselves to building stronger and better protected disk drives for laptops. The