Hardware

How To Find And Remove Dead Pixels On Your LCD Monitor

How To Find And Remove Dead Pixels On Your LCD Monitor

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Dead pixel is an area on the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitor which is not performing as expected. Usually the problem that leads to dead pixels is that the liquid flowing through the display is not flowing through that pixel properly. In this article, we will take a look at how to identify the dead pixels and then try to make those pixels into working condition.

First of all, see this video about dead pixels on LCD monitors:

What is a dead pixel? (NCIX Tech Tips #55)

IsMyLcdOK is a nifty portable software which does what its name implies. It helps you find all the dead pixels on the LCD monitor. Although it’s just 25 KB in size but it checks the LCD quite effectively. Basically, it will make all the screen of one color so that you can spot the dead pixel.

IsMyLcdOK

Just run the utility and press the desired number for painting the screen with corresponding color. Make sure that you have gone through all the colors to confirm all the dead pixels.

Once you have identified the dead pixels, follow the steps below to remove the dead pixels.

  1. Turn off the computer or LCD and make sure there is no dust on the LCD monitor
  2. Take a damp cloth and apply a little pressure on the dead pixel. Just make sure that you are applying pressure only on the dead pixel spot
  3. Turn on the computer and remove the pressure after a little while

This should remove the dead pixel and the fluid will start flowing in all the pixels of the LCD screen. Run IsMyLcdOK again and check if the dead pixels are gone.

There are several alternatives to IsMyLcdOK which can be used for the same test. If you don’t want to download anything, you can simply visit this web page and follow the instructions there to check for dead pixels. Undead Pixel is another program that not only locates the dead pixels but tries to fix them too.

I hope these tips will help you keep your LCD in a good health. Please share your experiences with us in the comments below.

10 Actionable Steps To Increase Your Laptop Battery Life

10 Actionable Steps To Increase Your Laptop Battery Life

List, Tips/Troubleshooting 1 Comment

Laptop battery life depends upon several factors. The factors can be directly or indirectly related to the computer. We will discuss some of these factors and possible actions to make your battery life longer in this article.

1. Know your battery

Currently there are two types of batteries available in the market. Maintaining both types of batteries is different. The newer batteries are Lithium Ion based, and have no problems with partial recharging or discharging (this is called memory effect). This means you can recharge the newer Li-On batteries any time you want.

battery internals

The older batteries are Nickel Metal Hydride based, and have memory effect problems. This means that from time to time, you have to drain the battery completely and then recharge it to full, to minimize any losses in battery capacity.

Editor’s note: The latest research reveals that the new sulfur-based battery is a lot safer and more powerful than Li-On battery. It can save charge four times than that of Li-On battery as it has a lot more energy density. See more about Lithium sulphur battery here.

2. Know your Energy Profile

All major Operating Systems including Windows come with default energy consumption profiles for controlling PC performance while on battery. When you are not doing processor and graphics intensive work (such as gaming, photo/video editing), you can switch to battery saving profile for longer battery life.

This is especially easy in Windows 7, where you can tap Windows + X hotkey to bring up the Windows Mobility Center which enlists energy consumption profiles in an easy to select drop down menu.

Windows Mobility Center

Another way to do the same is to click on the battery icon in the notification area (bottom right of your screen in Windows), which brings up the last three used energy consumption profiles.

Editor’s note: In case of Windows 8, you will need to press Windows Key + X + B shortcut key to open the mobility center.

3. External Devices

Devices plugged into USB ports, such as external hard drives, external optical drives, iPods or cell phones are a huge drain of battery. The best way is to unplug or turn off the devices not currently in use. Also, avoid charging cell phones or other portable devices when laptop is running on battery.

Usually 500mA power is available for each USB port. You can save this power by turning off all the USB ports while running on a battery.

To automatically turn off USB ports when on battery do the following:

  1. Go to Device Manager (Windows Key + X + M)
  2. Expand Universal Serial Bus Controllers by click on the + button
  3. Right click Universal Root Hub and select Properties
    USB Root Hub properties
  4. Under Power Management tab, check “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power“

You will need to do this for each Universal Root Hub to make sure that all the USB ports are powered off.

4. Memory beats Hard Drive

Not having enough memory (RAM) in laptops can be a big energy drain. Operating systems use a procedure called Virtual Memory, which is when a part of hard disk is used as extension of memory, to run more applications in limited memory. This results in frequent use of hard drive, which is an energy intensive part of your laptop.

buy more memory

To avoid this, always have enough memory installed in your laptop.

5. Keep your laptop cool, your environment cooler

Heat is a waste of energy. The more your laptop heats up, the more power is drained from battery. So clean your laptop’s air vents regularly. Use air blowers to remove dust residuals. Use laptops in regulated temperature environments.

keep laptop cool

Also, don’t use laptop in open daylight. Laptops are not designed to radiate external heat, which means they can absorb sunlight and heat up much more quickly. This is a surefire way of killing your battery, and your laptop’s performance too.

6. Keep your drivers updated

Newer drivers are usually released to increase performance and decrease power consumption. While this may seem like an inept commentary, latest drivers can help your laptop increase the battery life.

Update Windows drivers

This is especially true for gaming laptops which have powerful GPUs. GPUs are leading contenders for energy consumption when it comes to gaming. So having latest drivers can help cut energy consumption.

7. Invest in cooling pads

If you use your laptop in bed or in sofa a lot, it can heat up quickly and cause load on battery. This is because clothes, and other such material decrease (or completely shut down) air flow to the heat vents, thus causing intense heating of the system which can not only drain the battery, but damage it (and other components also).

Laptop cooling pad

In order to avoid this, you can buy a portable USB stick connected cooling pad for your laptop. Pads come in cheap and have drastic effects at the temperature of your laptop. Always make sure that your laptop has a space to breathe, because no air flow means no cooling, which might decrease laptop performance.

8. Control screen brightness

Screen display requires lighting up multiple arrays of LED lights, which can put a lot of burden on the battery, decreasing its life. One way to control screen brightness in Windows 7 or Windows 8 is through the mobility center. Another way of controlling screen brightness is through the ‘function’ keys, which come in most of the newer laptops. Also, energy consumption profiles come with default settings for screen brightness.

Flux settings

Editor’s note: Flux is a wonderful utility which can automatically change the screen brightness according to the time of the day. For nights, it will decrease the brightness while at day time, the brightness will increase automatically making sure that your eyes stay safe as well as your battery performs better.

9. Prioritize the running programs

If you are working on a spreadsheet, listening to you MP3 collection, downloading your favorite TV Show, updating your software packages and installing a chunky program, all at the same time and without plugging in your power cord, the battery will drain before you can finish any work. Whenever using battery power, avoid overloading useless or otherwise uncritical programs. You can set the updates for night, when you would be watching your TV Show. You can install the program when listening to music during afternoon. Don’t expect more from your battery than it can offer.

Windows 8 power options

Editor’s note: The best way to do this is to change the Power management plan to Power Saver. This will force the processor and other PC components to run slower than normal.

10. Disable graphics accelerated display options

Windows Vista, 7 and 8 come with ‘Aero’ theme which uses the graphics resources for aesthetically pleasing display experience. But using graphics resources all the time can be a huge drain on the battery. High end graphics cards consume more power than hard disks and RAM combined, so be careful with what display settings you use.

In Windows 7, you can revert to a ‘basic’ theme which does not use graphics resources by going to Control Panel -> Appearance and Personalization -> Personalization and selecting any theme from the ‘Basic and High Contrast Themes’.

Performance options

You can also adjust performance settings by going to System Properties (Right Computer and select Properties) –> Advanced System Properties –> Adjust for best performance.

Hopefully these tips will help you to make better use of your laptop battery. If you have any suggestions or would like to share your experience, please leave a comment below.

Easily Backup And Recover Data From Corrupted Hard Drive

Easily Backup And Recover Data From Corrupted Hard Drive

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Any storage device such as a hard drive is the most important component of any computer. This is because all the data is stored on the storage device. All other hardware can be replaced but the data can’t be retrieved if the hard drive gets corrupted.

This is why we always say that backup is an essential part of our digital lives. I recently wrote an article about how to check and monitor hard drive health in Windows. This makes sure that we are aware of any future problems that may possibly occur.

Today we will go one step further and discuss how to recover our data even if the hard drive gets corrupted. Long time ago, we discussed about Unstoppable Copier which copies the contents of and CD/DVD even if it is unreadable and corrupt.

DataRescue DD (also known as DrDD) is a free software that can create an image of any hard drive even if it has been corrupted. You can always create an image and then copy the content to any other location.

DataRescue DD

DataRescue DD does not require any installation. Just unzip and run the executable. But you will need to run the executable with administrative privileges if you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8. Otherwise, the hard drive will not be detected. Each partition on the hard drive will be detected separately. You can select any drive as the source and then the destination where you want to save the data.

Unlike other backup and copy programs, DataRescue DD supports imaging the drive from both sides, from the start to the end and from the end to the start. The logic is very simple. Usually the hard drive gets corrupted contagiously. That means adjacent sectors will get damaged. Normal back programs will be stuck on those sectors and will not proceed forward.

Using DataRescue DD, you can easily skip those sectors which have been corrupted. All other data will be backed up.

Although there are many other data copying and imaging software available, DataRescue DD comes in handy when you have to skip the bad sectors from copying. The best feature of DataRescue DD is that it is portable and can be run from the USB flash drive.

How To Check And Monitor Hard Drive Health In Windows

How To Check And Monitor Hard Drive Health In Windows

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The hard drive is the most important component of a computer mainly because all the data is stored permanently in the hard drive. Like wise, hard drive failure is the worst case a person can encounter especially when no data has been backed up.

Modern hard drives make use of a technology called S.M.A.R.T. (Self monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) which monitors the hard drive for different reliability indicators and reports any possible failure before it occurs.

If you have a modern hard drive, the S.M.A.R.T. technology will already be monitoring the health of your hard drive and this is done in the background. The user doesn’t have any idea of what’s being monitored. S.M.A.R.T. monitors a huge number of parameters to make sure that it reports all possible indicators to the user and warn if any indicator goes wrong. Here are some of the parameters which S.M.A.R.T. monitors:

  • Read Error Rate
  • Throughput Performance
  • Spin-Up Time
  • Start/Stop Count
  • Reallocated Sectors Count
  • Read Channel Margin
  • Seek Error Rate
  • Seek Time Performance
  • Power-On Hours (POH)
  • Spin Retry Count

The article about S.M.A.R.T. on Wikipedia lists down all the 254 parameters.

Windows does not provide any monitoring statistics of S.M.A.R.T. by default but it provides some tools which can be helpful in checking the hard drive for errors. The most useful tool is Disk Checkup tool. If you are not comfortable with Windows Check Disk, you can install one of these third party chkdsk alternatives. I personally prefer to use Windows Check Disk utility.

You can open command prompt and run the following commands in order to start checking a particular drive for errors.

chkdsk c: /F

DiskCheckup is a free software from PassMark which can give detailed information about the health of your hard drive by reading the S.M.A.R.T. values.

DiskCheck

DiskCheckup gives detailed information about the hard drive. The user interface of DiskCheckup displays four tabs.

  1. Device Info – gives hardware related information about the hard drive including capacity, serial, model, firmware etc.
  2. SMART Info – gives information about the latest health check carried out by SMART.
  3. SMART History – keeps a history of SMART tests. It is not activated by default and can be activated in the configuration settings. Just make sure you cleanup the history regularly as keeps on taking more space with time.
  4. Disk Self Test – runs a self test on the hard drive and reports any errors.

Above these four tabs is a list of physical hard drives attached to the system. Clicking on a hard drive will fill information below in the tabs.

Although the SMART functionality will report errors automatically, you can run the Disk Self Test in order to make sure your hard drive is in good condition.

PassMark DiskCheckup

What do you do to keep your hard drive in a healthy condition? Does using DiskCheckup provide you with useful information about your hard drive?

What Is Physical Socket, Physical Core And Logical Processor?

What Is Physical Socket, Physical Core And Logical Processor?

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Intel microarchitecture history
(Image credit: Wikipedia)

Back in the old days, Intel and AMD used to have processors with a single core. This essentially meant that the processor would behave like a single processor allowing only sequential operations on the CPU.This was limiting the operations of heavy processor intensive applications. This is where the concept of hyper-threading came into being.

Intel released its first Pentium 4 processor with hyper-threading in 2002. Hyper-threading is a process of creating two logical processors on one physical processor. This is all done on a software level. These changes are visible to the Operating System which can make use of hyper-threading.

In 2005, AMD released its first dual core processor which included two physical cores on one CPU. Since these cores were implemented on a hardware level, it offered better performance than Intel’s hyper-threading model.

After AMD’s success of implementing physical cores, Intel introduced the dual core model first which was not efficient. Core Duo model was introduced specifically for laptops but it was also implemented on Desktop computers as well due to its efficiency and speed.

After the release of Core 2 Duo processors, both Intel and AMD are quickly introducing processors with more and more cores installed on the same physical processors. The main benefit of this is that the processor slot on each computer will essentially remain one. Having more than one core means that the Operating System will have a feel of more physical processors as opposed to a single one. This will increase the efficiency of all open applications.

The latest microarchitecture of AMD is called AMD Bulldozer Family 15th microarchitecture. This includes 8 physical cores on each processor. Each of these physical cores can have two logical cores which makes the total number of cores available to the Operating System to 16.

The latest microarchitecture of Intel is called Sandy Bridge which was released at the start of 2011. It was implemented in Core i7 series of computers, laptops and mobile devices. It also has 8 physical cores and can be extended up to 16 logical cores through hyper-threading which was re-introduced in this model.

The Sandy bridge and Ivy bridge are the same microarchitecture but the difference between the two is that Sandy bridge uses 32 nanometer manufacturing process while Ivy bridge uses 22 nanometer process. The main benefit of these microarchitectures is that they make the L2 and L3 cache available for all cores at the same time.

I hope, by now, you have understood the concept of physical socket, physical core and a logical core/processor. Before we end this article, let us go through the summary definition of each one of them.

Physical socket: It is the actual spot on which processor is fixed on the motherboard.

Physical core: It is the division of the actual processor on a hardware level.

Logical processor: It is the division of a physical core by using hyper-thread or other techniques.