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KNOW YOUR PC is a site and list which most of you should find hard to resist. The basic idea here is to "Kiss your computer repair man goodbye!" as the editor, Mary Evans, says right on the homepage of the Web site. By subscribing to her weekly newsletter, Ms. Evans claims, you'll get the kind of information which reduces frustrating downtime and makes you a more knowledgeable consumer if you do need to take the old PC in for a serious repair. At the very least, she says, with this type of information you'll save money. Who doesn't want to save money?
Here's Ms. Evan's overview of some of the benefits of Know Your PC:
"* BECOME JARGON-PROOF! Know exactly what repairs are being proposed, and whether the charge is worth it!
"* Ask the kinds of questions that say 'SAVVY USER.'
" "* Get HONEST, COMPLETE answers to your most baffling questions. FREE.
"* BULLET PROOF your computer. Recover from downtime in hours instead of days.
"* ANTICIPATE PROBLEMS AND HEAD 'EM OFF AT THE PASS!
"* KNOW WHEN TO HOLD 'EM AND WHEN TO FOLD 'EM (Should you upgrade? When? How?)
"* SAVE $$$ on upgrade and repair costs"
I decided to go to the archive and see if Mary's advice was as good as her hype claimed. There was a guy in one of the threads asking for her help in installing a replacement drive. She had apparently sent him only partial instructions and he was asking for the remaining steps.
I have to say Ms. Evans fielded this one like a pro. Her response is step-by-step and very detailed, so I can't excerpt all of it here for you. I'll just give you a snippet. Besides, to the non-techies out there, this example will just be My-Eyes-Glaze-Over material.
"27. Because you're replacing the exact same drive, I don't believe you will need to go into the BIOS to change anything.
"When you bring up the computer, you should be at the 'A' prompt. See if you can access the new drive. Just type [d:] (without the brackets) and hit enter.
"If you are taken to the 'D:' drive, type 'dir'. You should get a message saying something like 'unable to read from drive d:' Don't worry about that.
"If you get a message saying "invalid drive specification," you'll need to go into Setup. Sometimes I have been taken into the Setup routine automatically when I've added something. When there, the computer has automatically entered the correct parameters.
"If this is not the case with you, you must enter the drive parameters yourself. I have a 560MB drive that has the following on the drive label:
"LBA, ATA-2 Set-up, 560MB. DOS Set-up 528MB ATA-2 Set-up Parameters: CYL 1086 HD 16 SEC 63 DOS Set-up Parameters: CYL 1024 HD 16 SEC 63
"If your BIOS supports LBA and the settings were NOT automatically entered, just cycle through the choices and search for your drive size.
"If you don't have LBA support, try entering the cylinders, heads, and sectors for each set above (ATA-2, and DOS). Pick the one that gives you the most space closest to the actual drive size...."
With this level of detail, I would think it would be hard to go wrong. Recommended.
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