If the all too familiar hourglass is a permanent resident on your screen, it may be time to upgrade to a faster Central Processing Unit (CPU). Be wary though, there's more to upgrading your CPU than simply plugging in a new one. Know how to upgrade your processor. Find out here.

Know how - Installing a SCSI device

You have just bought a new scanner, CD Burner, Jaz drive or whatever and go to install it in your computer. You find that as well as the device itself, you are supplied with an interface card, some cables and a plug with instructions to set the SCSI (pronounced scuzzy) ID and terminate the cables properly. What is this SCSI thing and why do you need it in the first place? Read on and all will be revealed.

SCSI stands for Small Computer Systems Interface and was developed around 1984 to provide a 'universal' method of connecting computer devices. This was a revolutionary step since, prior to SCSI, each device (such as a scanner or tape backup device) was connected to the computer via its own proprietary interface card. Although initially not very popular for PCs, Apple embraced SCSI technologies for the Apple Macintosh. This allowed Macintosh computers to be 'plug and play' right from day one, since almost all peripherals could be plugged straight into the SCSI interface without having to install cards and load drivers.

On PCs, SCSI was at first mainly used on servers and high-end workstations because it was significantly more expensive than the IDE (integrated drive electronics) interface used for standard hard disks. Despite being more expensive, SCSI offers several major enhancements that made it and still makes it invaluable for high-end machines and servers. This is because SCSI is faster, more expandable and more versatile than IDE.

IDE was designed as an inexpensive method of connecting hard disks and later CD ROMs to computers. The controller was built onto the hard disk or CD-ROMS and could operate in either master or slave mode with a maximum of two devices per IDE channel. To overcome this limitation, two IDE channels are built into computers allowing a maximum of four devices however only two devices may be hard disks. Since IDE is still based upon the old WD1003 (ST506) interface only single commands can be executed at time. This means that faster devices must wait for slower devices to finish processing before executing their own commands, thus slowing the interface down significantly. This is particularly troublesome under multitasking operating environments where instructions to retrieve data may be banked up whilst previous instructions are carried out step by step.

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What to do when …you get a 'blue screen of death' in Windows NT.

Not ready for Windows 2000? Still have a copy of NT4 around? Well, if you have a relatively new machine, with components such as a Pentium III processor, AGP bus, and perhaps a Zip drive, you may run into trouble when installing Windows NT. This is because Windows NT may have problems correctly identifying some types of hardware, and consequently you may face a 'Stop Error', or 'blue screen of death', upon installation.

The 'Stop Error' occurs when Windows NT encounters a serious error that either corrupts the operating system or prevents it from operating properly. The designers of NT decided that rather than allowing the operating system to become unstable or freeze, they would display a very clear message that identifies what caused the operating system to fail. Unfortunately, most people find the messages unintelligible and simply refer to the screens as the 'blue screen of death' because the operating system dies when one of these screens appears.

If you search the Microsoft Support Site (support.microsoft.com) for document Q103059, you can obtain a list of all of the Stop Error codes. Whilst this may make fascinating reading (particularly if you cannot sleep at nights), you will find that most of the errors listed refer to faulty drivers, incorrect detection of hardware during install or faulty hardware.

If you experience the 'blue screen of death' while loading Windows NT, the chances are that you either have a problem with your hardware or detection of that hardware.

Windows NT 4.0 was released in 1996 and while there have been numerous enhancements to the operating system through service packs, the release CD is only patched up to Service Pack 1. This means that Windows NT 4.0 as per the release CD cannot handle drives larger than 8Gb, does not know what to do with Zip drives and may stumble over AGP video cards. It also means that it is quite likely to incorrectly detect hardware, confusing new devices with older devices.

If you experience Stop Errors while loading Windows NT, one of the first things you should do is check whether all components inside your computer are NT compatible. AGP video cards are notoriously bad in this regard and unless your AGP card is NT certified, you may have trouble. If in doubt, check which chipset your AGP graphic card uses and verify with the chipset vendor whether the card is NT certified. If it is not then take the machine back to the dealer and have the dealer replace the card with one that is!

Another potential troublemaker is the network card. As with video cards, you need to ensure that your network card is NT compliant otherwise you will experience problems. While brand name cards, such as Intel, 3Com, HP and Acton are more expensive than 'no-name' brands, cards from these manufactures are certified, higher quality and give less trouble under Windows NT. They are a good investment!

Since Windows NT is considerably more demanding on hardware than Windows 95 or 98 it is possible that memory and motherboards which are OK under Windows 9x will fail under Windows NT. Again, if you insist upon high quality brand name motherboards and memory you should experience fewer problems since the better quality components really do make a difference under NT.

Even if your hardware is all NT certified, there is no guarantee that Windows NT will correctly detect it. This is because Windows NT Service Pack 1 does not recognise hardware developed after 1996. This includes large IDE hard disks (greater than 8Gb), Zip drives, CD-RW, AGP video cards, USB, sound cards and many network cards.

Network cards are particularly prone to incorrect diagnosis since Windows NT may mistake a new card for the older model. Even if the card appears to work, the drivers are unlikely to be fully compatible causing the blue screen later in the installation process.

When you initially load Windows NT from the three boot disks, NT gives you the option of automatically detecting hardware or pressing 'S' to manually load the drivers. If you have a large IDE hard disk, you can obtain an updated driver from support.microsoft.com by doing a search for document Q197667 and following the links to the Microsoft FTP site. Once you have downloaded the updated driver, you expand it onto a floppy disk and use that driver rather than the driver that comes standard with Windows NT. Note that while this driver will allow your computer to correctly detect a large IDE hard disk, the first primary NTFS boot partition still cannot be larger than 8Gb.

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It is important for Windows to be able to shut itself down properly in order to run smoothly. If you are getting stuck on the 'Windows is shutting down' screen and having to either wait for a long time, or manually turn off the computer, then there are few things you can do to fix the problem. We'll show you what to do when your PC doesn't shut down.

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• How to use styles in Microsoft Word
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• Getting started with Outlook Express 5 and FrontPage98

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