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Showing posts from December, 2016

Laptop hard drive upgrade - moving to SSD

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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

HP printers, iMacs and WiFi

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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)  Select your printer (