Hate wading through your control panel to quickly adjust Windows 7's power settings? How To Geek has a quick and easy guide on switching power profiles on the fly with desktop shortcuts or a hotkey.
It takes the tiniest effort on your part (a couple of minutes, max) but the payoff is definitely worth it if your mindful of your laptop's or PC's power consumption. Geeky and delightful...
[via Lifehacker]
Hate wading through your control panel to quickly adjust Windows 7's power settings? How To Geek has a quick and easy guide on switching power profiles on the fly with desktop shortcuts or a hotkey.
It takes the tiniest effort on your part (a couple of minutes, max) but the payoff is definitely worth it if your mindful of your laptop's or PC's power consumption. Geeky and delightful...
[via Lifehacker]
Adding a hard drive to your Windows PC is an easy way to expand storage capacity if you find yourself running out of room for your files. But there are two problems with this approach.
First, it'll cost you money. There are bargain basement drives out there, but they're unlikely to be of the energy efficient variety. Which leads us to the second point, power savings. Installing another drive adds yet another component that you have to keep powered. And while heat-wise they pale in comparison to processors, they can contribute to your PC's thermal load making the fans work harder.
There is one super cheap option: delete files.
You're thinking, "Thank you, Captain Obvious!" What you may not have considered are the less obvious places to reclaim drive space, which can free up megabytes, if not gigabytes, of space.
Before you take a single step forward, an important reminder: backup your files!
Everyone needs a backup plan, no excuses. Things happen, no matter how well maintained your PC. There are tons of backup guides online and many external drives ship with software that makes it dead easy to make copies of your data. So, take this opportunity to backup (or ghost, even better) your PC and check the integrity of your backup files.
Got that? Good, then read on...
Adding a hard drive to your Windows PC is an easy way to expand storage capacity if you find yourself running out of room for your files. But there are two problems with this approach.
First, it'll cost you money. There are bargain basement drives out there, but they're unlikely to be of the energy efficient variety. Which leads us to the second point, power savings. Installing another drive adds yet another component that you have to keep powered. And while heat-wise they pale in comparison to processors, they can contribute to your PC's thermal load making the fans work harder.
There is one super cheap option: delete files.
You're thinking, "Thank you, Captain Obvious!" What you may not have considered are the less obvious places to reclaim drive space, which can free up megabytes, if not gigabytes, of space.
Before you take a single step forward, an important reminder: backup your files!
Everyone needs a backup plan, no excuses. Things happen, no matter how well maintained your PC. There are tons of backup guides online and many external drives ship with software that makes it dead easy to make copies of your data. So, take this opportunity to backup (or ghost, even better) your PC and check the integrity of your backup files.
Got that? Good, then read on...
