Quick Tech Tip #3: how to replace case fan connectors.

In this Quick Tech Tip I will show you how to replace a case fan connector. Its a fairly simple thing to do and useful if the case fan you have has either a broken connector or if you just don't like the colour. you will only need one tool for this and as long as it is able to fit in the slots on the connector it should do fine, I used a metal nail file for this but again as long as it's hard and thin enough to fit in it should work.

Before we start it's a good idea to make a note of the order that the wires go into the connector as you don't want to put them in the wrong way round do you? If your looking at the side of the connector with the slots in and with the wires coming from the bottom then the colours go from left to right:

  | |        | |        | |            | |

black - red - yellow - orange.

Note if you have a 3 pin fan connector you won't have the orange wire, Thats for 4 pin fan connectors.

In this example I'm replace the white connector of a  3 pin fan extension cable with a black Phobya 3 pin connector.

The extension cable before.

So first up you need to hold the wire you are going to take out first, Then take your tool (what ever you decided on) and push it down into the slot at the bottom if the wires are coming from the bottom. Gently pull the wire while doing this and it should come out fairly easily. Don't pull to hard or you might break the pin. Once you have the first one out do the same for the other and you should have something like this:

Connector removed.

Now it's just a simple matter of getting you replacement connector and pushing the pins one by one into the connector. remember to get the wires in the right order. You will here a faint click once there all the way in. Once you have all of them in it should look something like this:

New connector put on.

And your all done. That wasn't that hard now was it? This should work for pretty much all fan connectors however some fans have different coloured wires so make sure you make a note of which order they go in.

And thats the end of this Quick Tech Tip, Thanks for reading and I hope you've learnt something.

Quick Tech Tip #2: Clean your fans.

Hello all. Today i'm going to talk about cleaning your fans. No matter what type of computer you have keeping it cool will help prolong the life of your computer and make it a bit quieter too. One way of doing this is to clean out your fans and heatsink.

All computers will be different but they all should have at least one fan (Mainly laptops) and one heatsink (some, mostly desktops have 2 or 3 fans, maybe more). both of these can get quite dusty and when they get dusty it makes them less efficient which in turn makes your computer hotter.

I had one laptop where the fan grate on the heatsink half blocked up with dust raised the temperature about 20C so maintaining clean fans and a clean heatsink will reduce the temperature and prolong the life of your computer. The way i do this is to just take a cotton bud/swab and wipe the fan blades as well as the grates on the heatsink. make sure you can see straight through the heatsink grates and that there is nothing blocking any of them. Also make sure that the air intakes on you computer are clean as well.

And thats it for this quick tech tip. I hope this post has helped you and i'll see you next time. Till then.

Quick Tech Tip #1: Defragmenting your hard drive.

Hello all. Today i'm going to talk about defragmenting your hard drive. If your using Windows it's a smart plan to defragment your hard drive. Basically a fragmented hard drive is where a file is in multiple places on the hard drive. This can happen to many files. defragmenting your hard drive is a process that puts all of one file together on the hard drive thus making it easier and quicker for Windows to find said file.

There are many programs out there that can defrag your hard drive. There is also a built in defragger in Windows. to use the one build into Windows just do this:

1: Right click on My Computer.

2: Click on Manage.

3: Then in the left hand side pane of the window that just popped up click on Disk Defragmenter.

4: Then either click on the Analyze button to analyze your hard drive to see if it needs defragmenting or click on the Defragment button to defragment your hard drive.

I use Auslogics Disk defrag at the moment and it seem very good however there are other ones out there too.

you should defragment your hard drive every month at least. I'd recommend every two weeks just to make sure it doesn't get that bad. Some programs offer a quick defrag option that takes a lot less time that you can do every week or two.

Remember: never pay for this sort of software as most of the time it really isn't any better than the free ones.

And thats the end of this Quick Tech Tip. I hope this post helped you and i'll see you next time. Till then.

Introducing Quick Tech Tips.

Hello all. Today i'm posting about a new series of posts called Quick Tech Tips. Every so often i will post a short "tech tip" that i've learnt through my years of trying to fix computers. These will be anything related to computers really.

also a quick bit of news i've just released V0.1.5 of my Simple Text Editor. (STE) You can download it from the SourceForge page here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/simpletxteditor/