Well its a bit like sex, one partner is good but two is obviously better (more complicated but definitely better) thats raid explained.

Now to the two main types of raid,

Raid0 is like sex without a condom, lot better and your finished quicker,

Raid1 sex with a condom, nowhere near as good but its a damn sight safer.

if you open a Run box and type in

manage-bde -lock E:

worked on the RC, doesn’t work on the full release it has to be run as administrator,  so search cmd, run as administrator, and paste  in the same command and press enter

it will re-lock the drive, change the drive letter if yours is different.

Enable / Activate Vista Aero Interface in Windows Vista Home Basic Edition – Tweaking with Vishal

So you want to know how to fix computers don’t we all, well the best place to start is with a computer that isn’t even broken yet, when it comes to learning about computers you can’t beat having a go at building your own, whether its building one with all shiny new parts, or collecting a pile of bits no one else wants and nailing them together to form something you can be proud of, even if nobody else in their right mind would give it houseroom, if everything goes to plan and it works straight out of the box you’ve obviously done something wrong so take it all apart and start again, the idea isn’t to get it right first time the idea is to learn.

If you do have problems look on the bright side, everyone else has got problems as well which is actually a good thing for you, most peoples homepage on their browser is google and if yours isn’t it should be, type in what your problem is and a few seconds later you will find there are hundreds if not thousands who have had the same problem, unless its something really weird like your computer has been possessed by the devil I guarantee its happened to someone else, and actually I googled that as well and apparently you wouldn’t be the first person to have their computer taken over by a demonic entity.

Another thing you will need is something called networking, not the networking that connects computers together the making contacts sort of networking, back in the old days it was known as finding someone daft enough to lend you something with absolutely no guarantee they would get it back in one piece, the simplest way to diagnose a fault is simply swapping out parts one at a time with a computer that’s working and preferably borrowed just in case you mess things up, this method not only saves money it also generates more work for the future, just deny all responsibility and whatever you do don’t offer to fix it on the cheap they will only get suspicious, you tend not to have many friends doing this, but what the hell you spend all your time on the computer anyway they’re not going to miss you, and remember your aspiring to be a computer repair technician and they’ve never got any friends.

When it comes to choosing CPU’s remember six months ago a core 2 quad was considered to be the dogs wotsits, now it’s a has been everyone wants a core i7 and in six months time that will have been bettered either by a new stepping version or the new octo-core i7’s, chasing the state of the art ideal becomes very expensive when the goal posts keep moving, a couple of years back a gaming computer without an athlon chip would have earned you nothing but mockery from fellow gamers, they are past their best for games but for day to day general computing they are excellent, and if they get any cheaper they will be paying us to take them out of the shop, in twelve months time the same will be true of core2 duo and quads, whatever chip you decide on, the good news is they are pretty much bullet proof as far as wear and tear, virus’s and even overclocking are concerned as long as you keep them cool, the one thing that can and will damage them is you, if you damage the pins the chances are it will never work again no matter how hard you try to straighten them so be careful, I’m a great believer in swapping suspect items for parts that are known to be working, the one exception is the chip put it in carefully lock it down and leave it alone.

As for choosing a motherboard don’t limit yourself, most sata boards have ide and floppy connections anyway, most have four slots for memory and considering the prices at this moment ddr2 would seem the obvious choice, a couple of 16x-pci-e slots will come in handy even if its got onboard graphics, and don’t forget the socket type, on most boards the socket type LGA775, Socket 939, Socket 478 etc are printed on the board and stamped into the socket itself, and if the heatsink has fallen off it’s a Socket AM2.

Graphics cards are like cpu’s if you want the best your gonna pay, go for a mid to low range card unless your planning on playing high end games you will never notice the difference.

Memory the more the better but ive run Vista on 512mb without problems, stick to the standard cheap memory unless your going to frame it and hang it on the wall.

The PSU has to be powerful enough to run everything so check on the link below, but unless you’re a gamer with multiple high end graphics cards and peltiers for cooling it doesn’t have to be all that big, forget the big numbers and look for quality go with a power supply with a more modest rating from the likes of Enermax or Seasonic etc., rather than buying a million watt power supply with a guarantee written in crayon.

Antec Power Supply Calculator

Hard drives for me the bigger the better, but I wouldn’t recommend you rush out and buy a 1Tb hard drive for two reasons, in my eyes hard drives seem to get more fragile the larger they get, better to get two 500gb drives if they are roughly the same price as a 1Tb drive, that way you can buy them one at a time and play around with raid arrays when you get the second, also if one dies on you you’ve still got 500 Gb to play with while you send the other for replacement, oh and remember to switch off the power before plugging molex connecters in, or just check their the right way round, the hard drive wont go BANG! but it wont make any other noises either if you don’t.

Optical drive’s is it worth getting anything less than a DVD/RW/DL Lightscribe.

Case yeah why not, as time goes by you will find most of the innards hard drive optical drives etc will actually be hanging out of the case messing up your desk as you keep swapping stuff around.

OS has got to be windows hasn’t it, hasn’t it, well for me Vista does just fine but i have tried Linux and didn’t find it any worse than reverting back to XP, then again cant think of many things that are worse, might even have another bash at it this weekend, as for windows 7 there are ways Vista could be made better but your not going to find them there, I personally wouldn’t have it given me it lasted a matter of weeks before I reinstalled Vista, the main decision you need to make is retail or oem, if you plan to keep the motherboard and not upgrade it oem is fine but if you plan to upgrade your board at any time consider the retail version, you could download a copy off sites like uTorrent or emule but be warned, it wouldn’t surprise me if most of them are uploaded by a certain Mr William Gates, you want to test your anti virus and anti spyware nows your chance.

Talking of anti virus and spyware, everybody seems to believe they have virus’s despite the fact they are running every anti virus and anti spyware known to man, and every registry cleaners, and every pc tune up they can find, they think their computer is infected because its running slow, duh what the hell do you expect with all that running in the background all the time.

If you’ve got any questions, ask someone else.

And remember If it ain’t broke – YOUR NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH.

http://www.beyourownit.com/forum/

http://www.filehippo.com/download_7-zip/

Best site ive come across for downloading films and music, yet to find a virus trojan or fake file, many of the files come in segments and need unzipping, right click on the last rar file (the one without a number) and extract using 7zip.

Tests ping download and upload speed.

http://loki10.mpi-sws.mpg.de/bb/bitt…es&duration=20

Tests if your isp is throttling your connection if you download lots of torrents p2p files.

Trinity Rescue Kit: Download

 Burn iso to disc and set computer to boot from cd at start up, let the program run untill you see welcome to trinity rescue kit version 3.3 in blue writing.
type in winpass and press enter, will come up with a list of windows installations, type 1 and press enter, a list of accounts will show up, for the admin account type in winpass -u Administrator and enter, type in 1 for the windows installation and enter, will come up with 5 options,
1 clear password
2 edit password
3 promote user
4 unlock
5 exit
type in 4 and enter, type in winpass -u Administrator and enter, type in 1 and enter to choose the windows installation, then type in 1 and enter to clear the password, and the password should be disabled when you reboot the computer, do the same for any other accounts winpass -u and the account name winpass -u Guest for example and enter, each account has to be done seperatly and you have to unlock first then clear the password.

if you type in y when asked if you want to backup you can restore, dont disable syskey unless you have to when given an option.

good reliable site nothing too exotic but their all free.

Homepage | Custom PC

good benchmark program mainly for overclockers run it, submit the results online, and cry yourself to sleep when you see what scores people are getting with liquid nitrogen

WD Support > Downloads > SATA Hard Drives > WD Caviar Blue / SE / SE16 (SATA II)

tests hard drives and fixes them to a certain degree, if your drive sounds like a cement mixer with a few bricks in it dont bother, but it will fix the odd error.

In europe smaller bore set ups using metric tubing is the norm where as in america larger bore imperial tubing is prefered, and of course britain being somwhere in between we have followers of both fashions, one thing you need to take into account is when you remove a conventional heat sink fan and replace it with a waterblock your cpu will be adequatly cooled but the rest of your motherboard may not be, waterblocks for northbridge, southbrige and the mosfets are available, as are blocks for memory, hard drives and graphics cards and the costs start to mount up the more you try to cool them, its far more sensible to watercool certain parts say the cpu and motherboard yet keep a good airflow going through your case to cool hard drives and any components not cooled by water, the fans can be set to run slower thus keeping noise down but eliminatting them completly isnt a good idea in my opinion.

Waterblocks come in a variety of shapes and suzes for differnent purposes, cpu blocks can normally be used on several different sockets and normally come with mountings for most popular socket types, n/b, s/b, vrm and graphics card blocks tend to be tailored to specific boards and cards, most are made of copper, brass, acetal or perspex, be very careful with blocks with perspex tops they look really fancy if you incororate lighting into your computer and its easy to spot air bubbles trapped in them but you can easily crack them if you overtighten them, virtually all blocks have threads cut into them so you can insert barbs or fittings of your choice, the block normally come with all the fittings you will need and are pretty much self explanatary, the links below are for aqua computer but most waterblocks will fit in a similar manner.

YouTube – Tutorial – Installation CPU Watercooling – english

YouTube – Tutorial – Installation Chipset Watercooling – english

Theres a whole series of vids but not all are in english.

YouTube – ModMyMachine’s Channel

Nickel plated brass/copper waterblock and a similar block with perspex top.

Barbs and fittings you will need to choose fitting that will suit the size of tubing you want to use in your set up, barbed fitting where the tubing is pushed over the barb and secured with jubilee clips or worm drive clips i believe they are called in america, compression fitting, and plug in fittings like those from alphacool and aqua where the tubing is much stiffer than normal tubing, a collar is pressed down, the tubing pushed in and a rubber o-ring creates a seal, most fitting have o-ring seals where they screw into the blocks but its well worth taking the time to use ptfe tape to ensure a water tight seal.

Fittings clockwise, alphacool push fit, compression fitting, std barb fitting.

Tubing must match the size ot the fitting you will be using, smaller bore metric tubing with an internal diameter of 8mm is much easier to route than larger tubing, there is little or no evidence to show either has a performance advantage over the other it tends to boil down to personal choice.

The more complicated the loop the harder it will be to bleed.

Pumps the two main pumps used in watercooling loops are the laing d5, a large powerful pump its probably the best there is if youve got the room, ddc again made by laing is available with a variety of perspex resevoirs that bolt to the pump, other pumps worth considering are the aqua computer which can be controlled via software, lcd displays t-balancers you name it, very good quality and a price to match, drive bay pumps work out cheaper than buying a res and a pump plus theyre quieter ideal if your pushed for space inside your case, thermaltake small, very cheap and pretty good quality, when planning your watercooling loop try and keep the pump as low down as possible so that when you start to fill the loop your pump will be primed with fluid.

Clockwise XSPC bay resevoir/pump, Laind D5, Laing DDC.

Resevoirs not strictly neccesary a fill port will do the job but i wouldnt advise you to leave it out of your loop, filling and bleeding a watercooling loop can be a pain with one never mind without.

Radiators probably the first thing you should consider when planning to watercool your computer, its no use buying the biggest and best if it wont fit in your case, normally copper or brass but check using an aluminium radiator with copper water blocks is a recipe for disaster, keep to metals that wont react with one another,set any fans you fit to the radiator to suck air rather than blow air through the radiator, there is little differece in performance but you will find it an awfull lot easier to keep dust from clogging up the fins of the radiator, and they will need cleaning on a regular basis.

The perfect loop, lot of people will argue what order the components should be placed in the loop, pump > block > rad > res , or pump > rad > block > res etc etc etc, bottom line is nobody has proved one method is better than another so if there all in there somwhere you wont go far wrong.
Fluid its called watercooling but the last thing you should use is tap water, you can use deionised water with a fungicide additive but personally i wouldn’t use anything other than feiser one.

When you;ve decided what components your going to use its a straight forward process fitting them as long as they all fit in the case, then you will need to fill and bleed the loop, the last thing you want is to be running a computer with watercooling that hasn;t got any fluid in it, you can’t put any power to the mother board till the loop has been bled and leak tested so you will have to run the pump while the computer is switched off, the easiest way to do this is if you’ve got a spare power supply put a jumper cable between the green power on and a black ground wire of the main 20/24 pin connector and plug your pump into one of the molexs, start to fill the loop trying to keep the pump filled with fluid if its pumping air it isnt pumping at all, as long as your loop isnt too complicated you should get most of the air out pretty quick, to get the remaining air out you will have to physically move the computer around to dislodge any air trapped inside the radiator and blocks, all the time you should be checking for leaks useing tissue paper, run it for at least a few hours to test for leaks, replace the power supply comnnebtions to the motherboard and its all done, if you do have any leaks don’t panic as long as there is no power to the motherboard it wont do any damage, if youve used feiser one its non conductive use tissue paper to mop it up fix the leak and continue, take your time, don’t try to force anything and you shouldn’t have any problems, untill that is you see a fancy new block for your graphics card and you start all over again.

http://www.beyourownit.com/forum/

CPUID
HwMonitor from the same people as cpu-z, more system info voltages temps, fan speeds all sorts of info.

ClockGen 1.0.5.3 Download – EXTREME Overclocking
Clockgen again from the same people as cpu-z, overclocks in windows without going into the bios.

Almico’s Home Page
Speedfan monitoring temps.

SiSoftware Zone
Sandra lite system info diagnostics.

Download GPU-Z 0.3.4 – FileHippo.com
Gpu-z, sort of cpu-z for graphics cards.

Lavalys – Comprehensive IT Security and Management
Everest sytem info, diagnostics.

Futuremark – Benchmarks
3D-mark06, or if your prepared to mess around getting a free trial or god forbid paying go for Vantage version.

Core Temp
Coretemp monitors cpu temps.

techPowerUp! :: Download Orthos Stress Prime 2004
Orthos prime, will stress single and dual cores, needs two instances to run if you have a quad core, lot of messing about thought to be a little easier on your computer than prime95.

.Free Software – GIMPS
Prime95, will stress all single, dual and quads.

Homepage | Custom PC
Custompc Benchmark, benchmark i normally run, download run it and post your scores on the scoreboard, that said the forum is moving over to bit tech.net, not too keen on the forum but they are planning to bring out a new benchmark program, in the meantime scores can be posted on the old custompc website.

bit-tech.net | The UK’s leading source for Hardware and Games reviews

RivaTuner
Riva tuner, for tuning graphics cards, read the instructions first you want to set up your computer to load overclock setting at startup, you dont want to update the graphics bios chip and overclock it permanently.

Posted links to the respective sites where possible to speed up downloads, any trouble downloading most are available fom filehippo and their all free.
http://www.filehippo.com/

http://www.beyourownit.com/forum/