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Dan in Shreveport, Louisiana listens on 710 KEEL and asked:
I’m looking at getting two hard drives to download media, like digital photos to. What brand and what size should I get for that?
The brand doesn’t really matter all that much, just buy any reputable brand and they should all be equivalent and play nice with each other. Seagate, Western Digital, G-Technology, they’re all manufacturers that have been around and put out good products.
As for the capacity itself, you’re storing media files, they are not the largest media files, videos would definitely take up a lot more room, but if this is a library that you plan to grow, go as large as you can afford.
Go as large as you can afford
Desktop hard drives tend to be cheaper, you don’t need to bother with SSDs unless you really want the speed, HDDs will cost you less for large capacities, so you can get something in the terabyte range and store as many files as you want for less money.
Keep in mind that hard drives do fail, so the more backups you can do, the better, and if you don’t mind using cloud services, that may be a good way to backup off site without having to do much work on your end.
Roberta in Estill Springs, Tennessee listens on SuperTalk WTN 99.7 and asked:
I have a Dell laptop. When I try to input my password to sign on no letters show up in the log on box. So I can’t get in. Is there something I can do to fix that?
You may have a hardware problem. It’s possible that something happened to your keyboard that made it stop working. If that’s the case, plugging in an external keyboard and trying to type in your password may do the trick.
There are ways to check and see whether they keyboard is working outside of Windows or not, the easiest one would be to see if you can enter your computer’s BIOS setup via some key combination. You may get a prompt telling you what to hold down as the computer is turning on.
If you take it to a repair shop, they should be able to tell you what’s happening pretty quickly.
If it’s not a hardware issue, it may be harder to get around it
If it’s not a hardware issue, it may be harder to get around it, but it would be very rare for Windows to be failing on the login screen like that.
Before you do take it to a repair shop, though, make sure you’ve restarted the machine. We know, it’s hard to select a restart option when you can’t log in to it in the first place, so you’re going to have to do a “hard” shutdown.
Press and hold the power button until the machine shuts off. (It should take almost exactly five seconds.) Then wait ten seconds and power the machine on.
See if your keyboard works now. And, as we recommended earlier, try that external USB keyboard and see whether it works. All of these things will help you decide what might be at the root of your password entry issues.