Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P49 pdf

Replacing a Laptop Hard Drive 454 Ground yourself by touching the middle screw on an electrical wall outlet, or by touching a metal pipe. 6. Locate the hard disk drive compartment or bay. Your laptop instruction manual should include a chart showing its position. 7. Unscrew any locking screws that may be holding the drive in place, or unlatch any catches. Set aside the screws in a safe place; make notes on any unusual steps you had to take. 8. Slide or lift the hard drive out of its bay or compartment. 9. Reverse the steps to install, latch, and power up the new drive. Using a generic drive Depending on your laptop’s design or market popularity, you may be able to purchase a “bare” mobile hard disk drive from a computer parts supplier and make it work. A bare drive is sold as a simple spare part, without all the fancy packaging and extra cost of an item sold in a retail store. You may install the new drive into the original carrier by carefully disassembling it, or you may purchase a carrier from another source. (It may come indirectly from the same source as the one your laptop maker used, or it may be a con- coction from a third party.) Installing a new drive in the original carrier Follow along to reinstall a new drive: 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. You can ground yourself by touching the middle screw on an electrical wall outlet, or by touching a metal pipe. 6. Locate the hard disk drive compartment or bay. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 454 Book VII Chapter 2 Adding or Replacing a Drive: Internal, External, CD, or DVD Replacing a Laptop Hard Drive 455 Your laptop instruction manual should include a chart showing its position. 7. Unscrew any locking screws that may be holding the drive in place, or unlatch any catches. Set aside the screws in a safe place; make notes on any unusual steps you had to take. 8. Carefully open the carrier that holds the drive and disconnect the mechanism. You need to remove some screws or other holding devices; place the screws in a safe place and make notes about anything unusual you have to do on the reinstallation. 9. Take the old drive out of the carrier and set it aside on a non-static surface. Handle both the old and the new drive with care, holding them only by their sides. Don’t touch the circuit board, and be careful not to damage the connectors for data and power at the back. Avoid putting weight on the top or bottom of the drive. And finally, make sure that you don’t cover the drive’s vent or “breather” hole with tape, a cable, or plastic parts. 10. Unplug internal connectors that run from the drive to the external connectors on the outside of the carrier. 11. Install the new drive in the carrier. The new drive has to match the original in size and location of attach- ment points and connectors. Installing a new drive in a new carrier If your machine and particular model is from a major manufacturer, third- party computer-parts suppliers may offer conversion kits that let you put together your own carrier and drive. If you’re lucky, the company that sells the carrier may provide a good set of instructions. If you buy both the car- rier and the new drive, it may provide very specific instructions . . . or even do the assembly for you. If you’re not lucky, you’ll have to figure it out for yourself . . . or spend a few hours on the phone with a support technician in a place far, far away. Taking a quick leap into jumpers Today’s current laptops are most likely to use internal SATA controllers and drives. Each SATA drive is a system unto itself, and there’s no need to iden- tify it to the computer — the cabling does that. If you’re working on a SATA drive (check your laptop’s specs) you can skip to the next section of this chapter. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 455 Configuring the BIOS and the Drive 456 Okay, the rest of you must have an older machine that uses a laptop version of a standard ATA/IDE drive. In that situation, each drive must be identified to the computer as either the master or slave drive on a particular cable and controller. In most setups, the drives are identified when you place a jumper (a little plastic-cased metal clip) across a specific set of pins. The jumper serves the same purpose as a switch; when it connects two pins, that partic- ular circuit is completed and a particular message is sent to the computer. Now, all that said: Very few laptops have more than one internal hard drive and the drive bays are directly connected to the motherboard’s hard drive controller by a cable that makes no provision for a second device on the same link. Most hard drive manufacturers ship their equipment with a default setting as the master device. But spend a moment looking at the drive and any instruction manual that comes with it to see if you need to make any changes to jumpers. Configuring the BIOS and the Drive Depending on your laptop and the hard disk drive you install, putting a new drive into place may be as easy as plug and play: The laptop discovers the new drive and automatically changes its BIOS setup menu — the built-in circuitry that sets up the computer before Windows or any other operating system is loaded, and then serves as an intermediary for all actions from then on. However, and though less common with modern machines, in some situa- tions, you might have to perform more feats of strength: ✦ Install a special utility, provided by the hard drive maker, to instruct the BIOS. ✦ Manually make settings before the drive is recognized. Read carefully the instructions that come with the drive. ✦ Partition the drive (divide it into a boot sector and one or more data sec- tors). This may happen if you’re putting into place a completely empty hard drive. Again, follow any instructions provided by the drive maker. And finally, you have to install Windows or another operating system on the drive to allow it to boot the computer. Follow the instructions provided with the operating system to install it from the machine’s DVD or CD drive. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 456 Book VII Chapter 2 Adding or Replacing a Drive: Internal, External, CD, or DVD Super-sizing Simply with External Drives 457 Super-sizing Simply with External Drives For most users, a laptop is an extension of the desktop computer at home or in the office. You should keep your archives (every word-processing file you’ve written), your full collection of photo and music files, or your extra software (you may not need to travel with advanced graphics and audio-editing software) on your desktop. Prune away anything that needn’t occupy space on your laptop’s hard drive and keep it on your desktop. What if your laptop’s internal hard drive is working properly and is packed with just the essential software and data, but you’re still running short on space? One solution that doesn’t require changing the internal hard drive: adding a small, light external drive. Several years ago, external hard drives were about the size and weight of the book you’re reading and cost several hun- dred dollars. Today, you can buy a new device not much bigger than a deck of cards at a cost that provides change from a hundred-dollar bill. You buy a drive in a box and then connect the data cable to the laptop. The upgrade is as easy as you could want. Every modern laptop today includes at least two (and often four or more) USB ports that deliver both data and power connections. And the most advanced of today’s machines and those on the drawing boards have at least two External SATA (eSATA) ports, which are similar but faster ways to com- municate with devices. Using an external hard disk drive has a few disadvantages, though: ✦ They draw power from the laptop and thus reduce battery life when the computer is away from an AC outlet. You can also purchase an external drive that takes its own power from an AC adapter rather than from the laptop. That’s fine if you’re working at a desk in a hotel room or an office; it’s not a good solution if you’re computing at 35,000 feet above Omaha. ✦ They add about half a pound to the amount of weight you need to drag around with you and also take a bit of space in your laptop bag or on your seatback tray table. The two fastest data-exchange standards for most laptops are USB 2.0 or eSATA. If your older laptop is capable only of working at USB 1.1 speeds, you can purchase a PC Card or Express Card adapter that upgrades its speed. You also need to be running a current version of Windows to use USB 2.0: Windows Vista, Windows XP, or Windows 98SE. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 457 Giving Your Optical Drive a New Look 458 Giving Your Optical Drive a New Look This section is short and simple. Repairing or replacing a built-in CD or DVD drive on most current laptops isn’t a project I recommend to most end users. Heck, even for guys like me who have taken apart (and put back together) nearly every piece of mechanical or electronic equipment in my home and office, this job isn’t undertaken easily. ✦ The main reason I hesitate to advise you to undertake this sort of job is that it, first of all, generally requires you to open your laptop’s sealed case. It often also demands removing a number of other parts that get in the way. If you send your laptop to a repair shop, they can do this sort of work for you, but expect that the labor cost (not the part itself) may leave you stunned. ✦ The second reason: Purchasing an external CD or DVD drive that attaches to your laptop through its USB port is easy and inexpensive. (Future models will connect to an eSATA port.) Coming attraction: Drive-sized flash memory As this book goes to press, the largest flash memory keys available at reasonable prices have a capacity of 16GB. You can add a bit of extra storage this way; in fact, you could plug two or perhaps four keys into your machine. The laptop treats each as a separate “drive.” However, Samsung has already introduced the first “solid state” hard drive for laptops. The ini- tial device has 64GB of storage. Larger drives from Samsung and other manufacturers are sure to be on the way. 35 140925-bk07ch02.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 458 Chapter 3: Changing Your Input and Output Options In This Chapter ߜ Getting USB out of an old machine ߜ Boosting the speed of an older USB port ߜ Bringing back the missing serial or parallel port ߜ Breaking SATA out of the box and onto your desk F or much of America’s economic history — especially the automobile industry — the working philosophy for design and marketing was “bigger, better, faster.” Think tail fins, lots of chrome, and gas-guzzling, turbo-charged engines. When it came to computers, though, the mantra was downsized: It became “smaller, better, faster.” That was the thinking that led to the evolution from the first room-sized computers to the personal computer, and then once again when the personal computer became portable. Today, laptops are better and faster . . . and getting smaller in most compo- nents. (One exception to the trend: widescreen laptops, which are lighter and faster than ever before but growing wider and taller as people use them as multimedia powerhouses. They’re still pretty small, though.) Survival of the Fittest: USB Adaptations You can add more than one high-tech adjective to the mix: adaptable. One of the beauties of a modern laptop is the pathways that allow them to be upgraded to the latest and greatest — the best and the fastest. Got an old machine that still uses serial and parallel ports? Or a machine with USB ports but a printer that needs an old-style parallel connection? Have a machine with an original USB 1.1 port? How about a current machine with USB 2.0 but no FireWire outlets? Does your laptop offer no PS/2 ports for an old-school external mouse or keyboard? You can solve all of these problems, and others, with one or another form of adaptation. You need a way into your laptop’s internal bus (its data highway), and often you can easily accomplish that. 36 140925-bk07ch03.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 459 Survival of the Fittest: USB Adaptations 460 Adding USB 2.0 ports Older-model laptops without USB ports can usually sprout them almost instantly if you install an adapter in a PC Card or Express Card slot. PC Card technology was common in laptops from about 1990 until 2006; a smaller, faster, and better technology called Express Card was introduced in 2005 and is present on most current machines. PC Card to USB adapters are plug-and-play solutions. They tap into the laptop’s data bus and power supply at one end and offer at least two USB 2.0 ports at the other. (One word of caution: The USB ports are often rather dangerously exposed to damage. Take care not to snap them off when you place your laptop in its case, or anytime you move the laptop around on a desktop.) On the software side, you must be running a current or very recent version of Windows that supports USB. These include Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows 98SE. In some situations you will need to add a driver, supplied by the adapter maker or already present within Windows. If your machine is so old that it doesn’t have a PC Card slot, you’re out of luck when it comes to quick-and-easy solutions. You’ve no other access to the bus of the laptop’s motherboard and no way to convert a standard serial port to USB. However, try taking your serial printer or modem and attaching it to a more-adaptable machine that can communicate with your older laptop over a network. Changing a USB 1.0 port to 2.0 To be accurate about it, you don’t really upgrade a USB 1.0 or USB 1.1 port to a better and faster USB 2.0 port. Instead, you work around the older technol- ogy (barely adequate for use with hard drives and probably unacceptable with CD and DVD drives) by installing a newer set of ports. The solution is to use a PC Card or Express Card adapter. Devices designed for USB 2.0 are downwardly compatible with the earlier USB 1.1 specification, working at the slower speed. Cables designed for USB 1.1 should perform at USB 2.0 speeds with an advanced port; however, you need a USB 2.0 hub to extend high-speed communication. Adding a USB hub When I write about adding a USB hub, I’m not suggesting you put your laptop on wheels . . . although way back in the early days of personal com- puting there was a class of suitcase-sized “transportable” machines that had rollers beneath their 50-pound cases. 36 140925-bk07ch03.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 460 Book VII Chapter 3 Changing Your Input and Output Options Survival of the Fittest: USB Adaptations 461 A hub is a way to extend and expand your USB circuit to allow a single laptop to work with dozens of peripherals. The hub splits the data signal and also divides the power that comes from the laptop to run many external devices. All the elements of a USB chain have to adhere to the same standard to receive high-speed performance. If you have a USB 2.0 port and USB 2.0 devices, a hub that you install to stand between them must also meet USB 2.0 specifications. If you use a hub that meets only the 1.1 specification, devices attached to that hub operate at the original standard’s slower speed. Hubs are available in two types: ✦ Unpowered. Merely splits the signals and power. For laptop users, an unpowered hub works fine for low-draw devices like an external mouse or a simple webcam. But you may find that using an unpowered hub for a network adapter or a hard disk drive may result in poor performance, or may draw too much power from your laptop’s battery. ✦ Powered. Connects to an electrical outlet and boosts the current avail- able to devices. Hubs without their own power source, or those with insufficient power, can restrict the number of peripherals you can use on a USB channel or can cause intermittent failures. The halfway solution is to carry a powered hub in your suitcase or computer bag and use it whenever an AC outlet is available — in a hotel or office or an Internet café — and avoid using high-demand peripherals when your machine is running on its own batteries. Converting from one USB to serial or parallel Say that your laptop is thoroughly modern but some of your peripherals aren’t. For example, I still have a few special-purpose devices, including a perfectly capable laser printer that accepts only an old-fashioned parallel connection. The solution is to purchase a USB converter. You can find devices that plug into a USB port on your laptop and provide either an old-fashioned serial port or an old-school parallel port . . . or both. At my office, I use a two-in-one converter from Keyspan that works flawlessly in the background; my desktop computer and my laptop computer (when it is attached to the office network by wire or by a WiFi connection) can use the laser printer without problem, despite the fact that none of my current computers have a parallel port any more. 36 140925-bk07ch03.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 461 Playing with FireWire 462 Using older mice and keyboards The oldest of mice and keyboards were built to connect to serial ports on early computers. If you’re still using one of these as a peripheral to your laptop, you need a USB-to-serial converter; see the preceding section in this chapter. The second generation of external mice and keyboards adopted a standard developed by IBM for a particular line of personal computers; the hardware used a small round connector called a PS/2 port. If your peripheral is looking for that kind of link, the solution is to buy a small conversion plug that accepts the cable from the mouse or keyboard at one end and plugs into a standard USB connector at the other. Similarly, if you have an older laptop that actually does have a PS/2 port and you need to use a current keyboard that expects to find a USB connector, the cable can be adapted from one standard and shape to another with a simple converter. Playing with FireWire USB is still the most common high-speed flexible communications standard for laptops, although some machines also offer a competitive technology called IEEE 1394, which is also known as FireWire on Apple products and i.Link on some Sony video products. If you’re deeply involved with video products, you may consider a FireWire connection a necessity instead of a luxury. IEEE 1394’s speed is very close to USB 2.0, delivering 400 Mbps; an advanced specification called 1394b moves data at twice that speed. Future plans call for optical fiber versions at 1,600 and 3,200 Mbps. Cutting the cord to USB Sometime in the next few years you should be seeing the next step in the evolution of the Universal Serial Bus: Wireless USB. The wire- less system is expected to allow communica- tion between a PC and a device at 480 Mbps at a distance of 3 meters (just under 10 feet) and 110 Mbps at 10 meters (about 32 feet). And, of course, you can purchase an adapter that plugs into a standard USB port to broadcast wirelessly. 36 140925-bk07ch03.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 462 Book VII Chapter 3 Changing Your Input and Output Options Pushing SATA out of the Box 463 This specification uses a six-wire cable for computer devices: a pair of wires for data, a second pair for clock signals, and a third pair delivering electrical power. A four-wire version of the cable is for self-powered devices such as camcorders. You can buy a laptop (including all Apple models) with FireWire built in, or you can add IEEE 1394 to a Windows machine by plugging in a PC Card or Express Card that adds a pair of ports. As with USB, you must be running Windows 98SE or later versions (Windows 2000, ME, XP, or Vista). Pushing SATA out of the Box Within most current laptops, the connection between the motherboard and disk drives and CD or DVD drives has switched over from IDE (now renamed Parallel ATA) to the extremely flexible Serial ATA (SATA) specification. This specification replaces a cumbersome 40- or 80-wire ribbon with a two-wire cable. The next step, soon to arrive on laptops and desktops, is External SATA (eSATA). In theory, eSATA is much faster than USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394b (FireWire) and can work with a slightly longer external cable (as much as 6 meters [+19 feet] in length). As with the other standards, devices are hot swappable, meaning you can install, turn on, turn off, or disconnect them while the machine is running. New laptops will have a set of eSATA ports as well as USB ports. But in the meantime, manufacturers are already offering converters. You guessed it: a device that plugs into a USB port to convert it to work with eSATA devices. 36 140925-bk07ch03.qxp 4/8/08 12:50 PM Page 463 . six-wire cable for computer devices: a pair of wires for data, a second pair for clock signals, and a third pair delivering electrical power. A four-wire version of the cable is for self-powered. signals and power. For laptop users, an unpowered hub works fine for low-draw devices like an external mouse or a simple webcam. But you may find that using an unpowered hub for a network adapter. portable. Today, laptops are better and faster . . . and getting smaller in most compo- nents. (One exception to the trend: widescreen laptops, which are lighter and faster than ever before but growing