FAQS

Q: Can I boot a machine from a USB flash drive?

A: Formatting a boot USB drive
http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusbstick.php

HP USB Key Utility

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=US&swItem=MTX-UNITY-I23839

How to boot from a flash drive

http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.html

Trinity Rescue Kit

http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=76&front_id=12

Ultimate BootCD – now comes with a USB setup utility

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

“virtual floppy driver”

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

Raw Write utility

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

Q: Can I run a second video card on my laptop?

A:
There is a USB 2.0 external video adaptor from Tritton

http://www.trittontechnologies.com/products/TRIUV100.html

Now of course the bandwidth of USB 2.0 is a problem, and these adaptors are NOT suitable for gaming. They are a solution for business use of a laptop where you have to have a second screen.

As far as accelerating your laptop graphics goes — unfortunately its shopping time for a new laptop. Laptops don’t have normal graphic card slots – 99.9 % of laptops have their graphics soldered onto the motherboard, and the very few machines that use Mini-PCIe cards for graphics, I have seen no aftermarket Mini-PCI-e cards available at all.

you have a new machine that has an ExpressCard/34 slot available. Asus has an external video card solution the XG Station http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=2&l2=162

Q: Can I upgrade the video on my computer to play the latest games?

A:
Make sure first that your motherboard supports a PCI-e x16 slot, and that your power supply can support the electrical requirements of a higher end card. You may have to restrict yourself to midrange cards that don’t need supplemental power.

Q: Can I use an ethernet switch to hook up several machines to the Internet?

A: A switch acts as a hub (a splitter), but it also can work more efficiently by isolating traffic between two ports from the other ports.
However what you need is a router, not a switch. Your broadband modem gives you one IP address — this cannot be used by multiple machines. A switch does nothing about the IP addresses.

However a router will distribute your one cable internet connection to 4 or 8 machines connected by Ethernet and it will issue a unique IP address to each machine.

(most routers have a 4 port switch built in, and some have wireless WiFi capability as well. If you need more than 4 ports, you can hook a switch up to one of the router’s ports.)

Linksys, D-Link and Netgear are three popular brands

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router

http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/dslcablerouters/g/bldef_bbrouter.html

Q: What is DDR5 memory and when can I use it?

A: DDR5 Memory is a new format

As of Oct 2021, DDR5 memory is starting to ship. It is a new standard for computer Random Access Memory (RAM). Compared to DDR4 memory, DDR5 offers higher speeds and wider bandwidth for a motherboard and CPU to access memory, and it runs at lower voltages.

Link to DDR5 memory that can be ordered from CanadaRAM

Q. Can I upgrade my existing machine?

A: No. DDR4 and DDR5 memory cannot be mixed in a system, and they are physically and electronically incompatible, so you cannot upgrade an existing DDR4 motherboard to DDR5.

Original photo courtesy of Kingston

You will need a new CPU and Motherboard

To use DDR5 memory, both your CPU and your motherboard have to support DDR5. Intel’s new Alder Lake CPUs are the first to ship with DDR5 memory controllers built in, and new motherboards with the Z690 chipset are starting to ship as well. Other CPUs and motherboard chipsets will come in the future.

NOT ALL Alder Lake motherboards support DDR5. The Intel Alder Lake CPU is capable of controlling both DDR4 memory and DDR5 memory, so the motherboard will determine whether it takes DDR4 or DDR5. There will be a transition period where motherboard manufacturers offer Alder Lake / DDR4 products until DDR5 is established in the market. Check first before purchasing.

Q: How is DDR5 faster? What about latency?

A: Faster Transfer speeds per clock and more efficient bandwidth

DDR5 memory starts with a DDR speed of 4800 MT/s and so far there are also 5200 MT/s modules on the market. Companies have announced 6400 MT/s and higher modules for future delivery. As we saw with the DDR4 market, the initial entry speeds (DDR4-2133) were surpassed within a year as products came to market and the prices came down and the current mainstream DDR4 speeds are 2666 MT/s up to 3600 MT/s.

The standard CAS Latency of DDR5-4800 modules is CL40, with some performance modules claiming CL38 so far. This is quite a bit higher than DDR4 latencies of 16 to 20. The increased latency mitigates some of the clock speed advantage of DDR5.

DDR5 modules can pack more memory onto a single module (up to 128 GB), so large memory installations will be easier to do.

DDR5 modules implement two memory channels per module instead of one on DDR4, so 4 channels can be implemented with a pair of modules. In addition DDR5 has a larger burst length, so it can transfer data more efficiently than DDR4. Micron quotes a 37% improvement in data bandwidth between DDR4 and DDR5 modules of the same speed, so with the increase in speed to 4800-6400 MT/s we would expect a larger bandwidth improvement in the 80% region depending on the speeds being compared.

DDR5 incorporates on-module Error correction, so it can maintain higher reliability at high speeds. Note that this is not the same as server-class ECC RAM that is implemented from the memory controller, because the on-module correction will not detect errors from outside of the memory chip, such as interference on the motherboard.

Although DDR5 runs at 1.1V (lower than DDR4 1.2V) the addition of onboard voltage regulation (PMIC) and ECC functions means that DDR5 may run hotter than DDR4 memory. Manufacturers are not saying the memory cooling fans will be necessary, but good general PC cooling will be important. The design also means that with additional circuitry on each module, the cost per module will be higher.

Q. How will prices work out?

A: We’ll see. As with any new memory introduction, the first shipments are at a premium price, and inventories will be short. We expect pricing and availability to improve over time with more competition and as more motherboards and machines start shipping with DDR5 chipsets.

Q. Who is selling DDR5 memory?

A: All of the major memory brands will be selling DDR5, both in standard and overclocked versions. As of Oct 2021 Kingston and Crucial have retail pricing in Canada and are on the CanadaRAM website here CanadaRAM DDR5 memory

Q: Difference between FAT32 and NTFS

A: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787653.aspx

http://www.theeldergeek.com/ntfs_or_fat32_file_system.html

FAT32 has a limit of 4 GB per individual file — this is a problem for videos, backup utilites, and large project files.

Windows artificially limits its ability to format FAT32 volumes to 32 GB or less — this is not a FAT32 issue, this is Microsoft forcing you to use NTFS. You can format a large FAT32 volume with a Mac or with third party formatting software.

FAT32 can be read and written by Macs no problem, NTFS cannot be written to, so for cross-platform, FAT32 is the choice (there is an opensource project for giving NTFS writing capability to Mac OSX http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/… and there are some commercial software solutions (Paragon)

Q: Does a new computer come with Office?

A: You need to buy your software on any computer. If you are a student you can get the Home and Student version of Microsoft Office. If you are in University or college, check with your uni bookstore or computing services, they may have even better deals on the software.

Don’t download pirated software — if you absolutely can’t afford Office even at the discounted student prices, then look at OpenOffice http://www.openoffice.org or NeoOffice http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php which are open source alternatives

Q: External hard drive won’t mount

A:

Try replugging the cables and connections first before concluding that it has failed.

There are 3 main possibilities if your external drive won’t mount:

1 is that the logical structure of the drive is damaged. The good news is that this can often be fixed with software, and although some files may be lost, there is a good chance of recovering most of them.

2 is that the enclosure (powersupply or bridge board or cable connections) is bad. In that case you are in luck because if you remove the drive mechanism from the case, and put it in a different external USB case, it will work.

(this will however void the manufacturer’s warranty)

3 is that the drive mechanism itself has failed. In that case you may be up a creek. If the motor isn’t spinning the drive, or if the drive’s controller board has burned out, then nothing short of repair by an expert is going to help. Data recovery firms will fix it, but for a fee of $400 – $ several thousand.

If your problem is logical (#1)

— that is the drive spins properly and shows up on the USB bus but there are no accessible partitions or data —

then you may be able to recover data from it, or repair the logical damage. Programs like SpinRite from GRC labs and Ontrack utilities might repair the damage, programs like DataRescue PC, Pandora and others might recover data even if the directories and file structure are damaged.

SpinRite http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

Diskinternals Partition Recovery http://www.diskinternals.com/products.shtml

OnTrack software http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/file-recovery-software/

Pandora Recovery http://www.pandorarecovery.com/

DataRescue PC http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_pc.php

Recovery Review – list of recovery software http://recovery-review.com/

There are some websites that have tools you can try, and then if it looks like it can recover some data, you have to pay to do the recovery

VirtualLab http://www.binarybiz.com/

If all else fails, you can send your drive to a data recovery service, it will cost hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on what the problem is.

If you are going to send it out for recovery, the less fooling around with software you do with the drive on your own, the better.

Seagate Data Recovery http://services.seagate.com/consumer_solutions.aspx

DriveSavers http://www.drivesavers.com/

ActionFront http://www.actionfront.com/

TotalRecall http://www.totalrecall.com/

Q: Flash memory lifespan

A:

All Flash memory has a finite number of writes it can do before the chip deteriorates. How long depends on what type of Flash chips the manufacturer uses and how they manage load-balancing over all of the memory sectors of the chips.

You can assume that every Flash device will fail sooner or later (as will every hard drive) and make sure that you always have backups of your data.

When using a flash drive or card, never work directly on the flash device. Copy your files to the hard drive, work on them on the hard drive, and then copy the finished files back to the flash device — this makes only one write operation instead of many .

Q: How can I get data off the hard drive in a broken computer

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