Only one of my speakers works
This could be because of a couple factors. The first thing to do is to try to replug the speakers into the sound card, as the connection may be poor. If this happens only when playing CDs, try turning the cable that connects your CDROM drive to the sound card around as you may have reversed it when installing the cable earlier.
How do I deal with IRQ conflicts
An IRQ conflict occurs when two internal cards are trying to access the same resources. If the cards in question are not Plug-n-Play, then you need to look at the card's documentation and change the jumpers that control the IRQ on the card. If the card is Plug-n-Play, you may be able to change the IRQ settings through the System applet of the Windows Control Panel if you are in Windows, or by configuring isapnptools if you are using a UNIX OS.
How do you partition a hard drive? What are the advantages or multiple partitions?
There are programs that partition hard drives, however most of them destroy the data that is on the hard drive. One of the few programs which does not destroy data when partitioning is PartitionMagic. The advantage of having multiple partitions comes usually when using a FAT16 (Win '95) or FAT12 (DOS 6.22 and below) file system. These file systems become more inefficient with size, as they provide a minimal file size. At the partition's maximum size, each file takes up a minimum of 32KB. This means that if you have a tiny text file, which is 1KB, it will still take up 32KB on the hard drive. The FAT16 file system also has a maximum partition size of 2GB, which is a bottleneck for today's hard drive capacities of 20GB. The FAT32 file system fixes this, providing a maximum file system size of thousands of GB. However you can only use this file system with Windows 95B and Windows 98.
How does RAM increase the speed of the computer?
To understand how RAM will increase the speed of your computer, you first need to understand what RAM will do. RAM provides temporary storage for data, which the CPU can access about a thousand times faster than the data on the hard drive. If, when using your computer, you run programs that are rather complex, or work with data which take up a lot of space, you will benefit from a RAM increase. The reason is that when the computer runs out of RAM to store data it, it stores the data on the hard drive, which is much slower.
What is the difference between IDE hard drives and SCSI hard drives?
SCSI is, in general, superior to IDE. However, it is considerably more expensive and is usually only used on high performance machines, such as servers. SCSI allows for hard drive transfers which are more than twice as fast as those of IDE hard drives. Most users, however, will not benefit much from this increase in speed.
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