TechQueries

I’m using an old HP laptop and the hard drive has now crashed. I need to get a new drive, but can’t seem to find a replacement drive in the local markets. Is it possible to use an external 4 or 8GB USB pen drive as a hard disk?

— Vishesh Rai

While it is possible to load up a Live version of an operating system on a USB flash drive and boot your computer from it, this doesn’t work well as a long term solution. Plus, you have no additional storage.

The reason you’re probably not getting a replacement drive is that your laptop uses the older type of IDE hard drives, rather than the newer SATA type.

While difficult to find, it’s not impossible. You can buy a 2.5-inch (laptop size) internal IDE drive online. Check here: http://goo.gl/kdkiu. The only disadvantage of IDE is that they are rare to find, and therefore quite a bit more expensive than SATA hard drives. For example, Rs 3,000 will get you an internal 500GB laptop SATA drive or a 160GB laptop IDE drive.


I have a Dell laptop with Windows XP and Outlook Express. For the last few days, I keep getting a message that says ‘To free up disc space, Outlook Express can compact messages. This may take up to a few minutes.’ If I let it continue, it starts compacting all folders of Outlook express. However the message reappears again.

What is the significance of this message? Is it harmful to the laptop? Can I ignore it? How can I stop the message from reappearing?

— Abhay Ghosarwadkar

You can let Outlook Express do the compacting - this is nothing but a cleanup of old or deleted emails that happens periodically. It is not harmful to the laptop, but depending on the size of your Outlook Express email folder, it may take a while. You may also find that the program stops responding while the compacting is taking place. Once you complete the compacting of messages a few times (and it is successfully completed) — the message will go away. It’s important that you don’t interrupt the process though.

Also note that the speed of Outlook Express is impacted by the size of the PST (data) file. Over time, with all your mails and attachments, collected over years, the file can become very heavy. Do a complete maintenance of your Outlook email folder by deleting old mails (and clearing deleted items folde too).