Techno Frustration

My daughter's 'not that old' HP Pavilion laptop has been running like a dog since upgrading to Windows 10. Windows 10 seems to rely heavily on disk I/O and the machine was permanently at 100% disk in task manager. Replacing the 500GB HDD with an SSD was going to cost <£100 so I thought I'd give it a go. Certainly cheaper than buying a new laptop. I ordered an MX300 from Crucial that also comes with a software licence for Acronis True Image. I also ordered a USB 3.0 to 2.5 Inch SATA hard drive adapter to allow me to clone the disk first. I wasn't about to reinstall Windows or go through some involved restore process. When everything had a arrived I set about cloning the hard disk using Acronis True Image software that Crucial provided a link/key to. Perhaps I misunderstood the documentation, but I couldn't get cloning to work. Acronis's software requires you to reboot in order to kick off the clone process but every time I rebooted it just came back u...

Do you have problems printing to an HP printer over WiFi from your OSX / Mac device? I've seen this a couple of times now: at home and also at my parents' house. Different machines, different printers but very similar symptoms (a year or so apart). In both cases the symptoms were slow/unusable printing as soon as documents were more than plain text and in some cases the print failing altogether. The problem seems to stem from the default airprint driver that your OSX device will helpfully install for you. You need to change this to the device specific driver as per the below instructions: Click the Apple icon on your Menu Bar.  Select System Preferences.  Select Printers and Scanners.  Select your printer and then press the (-) button at the bottom of the list to remove it.  Select the (+) and click Add Printers and Scanners. (NOTE: Do not select the printer from the list of Nearby printers as this will often automatically use the AirPrint driver)  Selec...

I love Sonos products, but if you want to get the full surround sound experience out of the Playbar, SUB and two Play:1 speakers you could be in for a frustrating experience. The reason being that the Playbar and associated speakers are driven by a single optical input which in most cases has to be connected to your TV's optical output. This works fine for the TV and it's built in apps but in many cases the TV will not pass through proper surround sound if you've selected an external HDMI input such as an XBox or a DVD player. Added to this if the device in question is outputting DTS audio then even if you could get this to the Playbar it would refuse to play it (See  this Sonos forum discussion  for an example). Sonos have summarised the situation in  Maximizing PLAYBAR Sound from your Television If your TV doesn't pass through surround sound then a commonly suggested solution is to add in a TOSLINK audio switch. In most cases these have to be switched (via a re...