What to Do When Your Hard Drive Fails

Did You Know? In the 1960s, LEGO released a line of bricks specifically targeted at architects and designers called “Modulex”. The sets are now, as you would imagine, quite rare and highly collectible. Geek Trivia Which Of These Film Directors Planted 500 Acres Of Corn To Avoid Using CGI? Christoper Nolan → Peter Jackson → Quentin Tarantino → Michael Bay → Advertisement System Administration & Security - Salary & Skills Report This kit will tell you what you need to know to earn more in system administration and security. Diverse and rapidly changing, network administration and security is the backbone of the 21st century workplace. What are the essential skills of the modern sysadmin? Does it pay to specialize, or go polyglot? Which tech is the overwhelming top pick in the world of configuration management? Offer is only available for a limited time, download today! Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles How to Use, Customize, or Disable AutoComplete in LibreOffice Writer How to Buy and Listen to Google Play’s New Audiobooks How to Stop Your Facebook Page's Notifications Blowing Up Your Personal Profile What to Do When Your Hard Drive Fails The Best Ways to Stream Your Games on Twitch, YouTube, and Elsewhere Four Creative Ways You Can Mount Your Echo Dot How to Prevent Videos from Autoplaying in Firefox How to Manually Update Your Samsung Phone with Odin The Ultimate Guide to Changing Your DNS Server Are Location-Tagged Photos Really a Privacy Concern? How to Opt Out of Targeted Ads Around the Web Today's Review Geek Articles Facebook and Instagram Pictures on Your Pixel 2 Will Get a Lot Better Today Four Awesome Gadgets for Busy Dog Lovers 7 Gadgets Under $50 to Accessorize Your Coffee Experience If You Have a Google Home, You Might Have an Email For a Free Audiobook You Can Demo These Switch Games for Free Before Purchasing Rocketbook Wave Review: The Most Productive Way to Literally Cook the Books Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Docking Station A Docking Station is a unit that allows a user to “plug in” their portable computer so that it essentially becomes the equivalent of a normal desktop computer. This gives the portable computer physical access to full-size monitors, full-size keyboards, printers, connectors for other peripheral devices, bays for storage devices, ports, expansion slots, AC power, etc. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. Use Pixel 2 for better photos in Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat Google's Pixel 2 smartphone has a special chip inside called the Visual Core, which they've now enabled. It allows apps like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat to use the same HDR+ technology as the Pixel 2's camera app. [Google Blog] Grammarly's flawed Chrome extension exposed users' private documents Grammarly, a popular grammar-correcting extension used by about 22 million people, just fixed a bug that allowed any website to access private user data. [ZDNet] How to Use, Customize, or Disable AutoComplete in LibreOffice Writer LibreOffice Writer bundles in a free auto-complete system, similar to the one you’re probably familiar with on your smartphone’s keyboard. But LibreOffice’s is a lot more powerful, and a lot more customizable—you can more or less tell it exactly which words you want to auto-complete, and which ones you don’t. Read This Article → How to Buy and Listen to Google Play’s New Audiobooks Reading is cool, but we live in busy times and not everyone has time to sit back with a book—and even if you do, you may not have enough time to finish said book in a reasonable amount of time. That’s where audiobooks can be great. And now Google sells them in the Play Store! Read This Article → How to Stop Your Facebook Page's Notifications Blowing Up Your Personal Profile If you run a Facebook Page with more than a handful of followers, your Facebook notifications can get a little out of hand. By default, any time there's activity on your Page—likes, comments, new followers—you'll get a notification on your personal account. Here’s how to fix that. Read This Article → What to Do When Your Hard Drive Fails Like every piece of hardware, hard drives can fail. Mechanical hard drives in particular have moving parts that can (and eventually will) stop working. Even solid-state drives, which have no moving parts, can fail. Every drive has a limited lifespan before it kicks the bucket. Read This Article → The Best Ways to Stream Your Games on Twitch, YouTube, and Elsewhere There’s never been an easier time to get started with streaming your PC gameplay online. Whether you want to share your gameplay with some friends or start streaming on Twitch, streaming tools are now built into everything. Here’s how to find the best tool for the job. Read This Article → Four Creative Ways You Can Mount Your Echo Dot Amazon’s Echo Dot is one of the cheapest ways to get Alexa into your home, but if you have it just sitting on an end table without much fanfare, there are better, creative ways that you can mount it. Read This Article → How to Prevent Videos from Autoplaying in Firefox It seems like every news site starts playing video automatically these days. These are incredibly annoying, but thankfully, it’s easy to block in Firefox. Read This Article → How to Manually Update Your Samsung Phone with Odin Odin, all-father, rules the realm of Asgard as the supreme deity of the Norse pantheon. Odin, a piece of Windows software released internally by Samsung, is used to flash firmware images to Android-based phones and tablets. It’s important not to get them confused. Read This Article → The Ultimate Guide to Changing Your DNS Server There are many reasons you might want to use a third-party DNS server, from parental controls and security features to speed and reliability improvements. You can change the DNS server for your entire home network on your router, or set it individually on a PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android device, Chromebook, or many other devices. Read This Article → Are Location-Tagged Photos Really a Privacy Concern? When you take a photo with your smartphone (or a modern digital camera), it logs the photo’s GPS coordinates and embeds it in the image metadata, or EXIF. This is how your phone is able to show a map view of your photo library. Read This Article → How to Opt Out of Targeted Ads Around the Web You’ve spend some time researching a product on your phone, then you open your laptop and find ads for that product plastered all over the place. This has happened to everyone—it’s called targeted advertising, and there are steps you can take to reduce its effect on you. Read This Article → Advertisement System Administration & Security - Salary & Skills Report This kit will tell you what you need to know to earn more in system administration and security. Diverse and rapidly changing, network administration and security is the backbone of the 21st century workplace. What are the essential skills of the modern sysadmin? Does it pay to specialize, or go polyglot? Which tech is the overwhelming top pick in the world of configuration management? Offer is only available for a limited time, download today!