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  • dabs.com Customer Service

    dabs.com Customer Service

    After a mere 8 months of usage one of the my desktop PC’s SSD drives has failed. As I use it as the OS drive this meant my PC was, well, unusable. Not being very old I wasn’t particularly concerned – I’d just get it swapped out by the retailer.

    I bought it from dabs.com – a company which, in the past, has had a good reputation for customer service. I visited their site to arrange a return but was met with the following message…

    Please make arrangements to return your item directly to the manufacturer. You’ll find information to help you do this in the warranty documentation that was supplied with your item, or on the relevant manufacturer’s website.

    Really? How many retailers won’t allow an obviously faulty product to be returned? The thing is, the Kingston website (who manufacturer the SSD) states…

    [A] product purchased outside the USA must be returned through the company from which it was purchased.

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  • How to fix “Default Gateway Not Available” in Windows 8

    How to fix “Default Gateway Not Available” in Windows 8

    My daughter has a Lenovo Z580 laptop running Windows 8.1. For a number of weeks she’s struggled with some WiFi connections. Sometimes she gets DNS issues, otherwise it’s Default Gateway Not Available. However, after looking at anything and everything I finally found that the issue was with the driver. Or, more precisely, the Broadcom 802.11n driver for Windows 8.1.

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  • How to install 2 SSDs as RAID in Windows

    How to install 2 SSDs as RAID in Windows

    When I built my desktop PC last year, I installed the OS on a 120GB SSD and then created a RAID for 2 x 1TB mechanical drives as a secondary drive for photos, music, videos, etc.

    All was well but my OS and program installations quickly used up that SSD. I made some temporary changes but they weren’t enough. The answer was to buy a bigger SSD or, possibly, extend the current one. And identical drive, also of 120GB capacity, was now just £55 so adding in another was a relatively cheap option. But how could it be done? There are two potential options under RAID – RAID 0 (striping) and JBOD. Sadly my motherboard doesn’t support JBOD so RAID 0 was my only remaining choice.

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  • Replacing the hard drive in the original model PlayStation 4

    Replacing the hard drive in the original model PlayStation 4

    The PS4 comes with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. On paper that sounds quite generous but with individual games often taking up 10% or more of this a time, it doesn’t take the avid gamer long to fill this.

    Ideally, the best time to replace the drive is before you start using it (i.e. when you first buy the PS4) as all games have to be downloaded and/or re-installed. But that’s the only hard bit of the whole process – Sony have made the procedure very, very simple.

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  • How to remove the drive from a Seagate Expansion Portable

    How to remove the drive from a Seagate Expansion Portable

    The Seagate Expansion Portable is an excellent value-for-money external storage device but it also contains some rather tasty 2.5″ drives that, if purchased separately, actually cost more. As a result, many people buy the Expansion to get to their contents. I’ve done just that and thought I’d document the process.

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