How to add a massive internal 2TB Hard Disk with Windows 7 on an ACER computer for less than £85

If you are starting to run out of hard disk space on your computer then its time to think about adding a new internal hard disk. I'm going to show you how easy it is to add a 2TB hard disk to a computer running Windows 7. Hard disks are so cheap these days that its not worth getting a small capacity one unless you have to because your motherboard will not support it.

The Samsung 2TB SATA-II Hard Drive from Amazon for less than £85 :

My new Samsung HD204UI F4 EcoGreen 2TB 32MB 5400RPM 3.5 Inch SATA-II Internal Hard Drive and SATA II cable.

In my tutorial here I bought an absolutely massive hard disk of 2TB (yes that 2048 Gb or 2097,152 Mb!) and it was only £84 delivered for free from Amazon :


This hard disk is a Samsung F4 EcoGreen 2TB 32MB 5400RPM 3.5 Inch SATA-II Internal Hard Drive with 3 Year Warranty This hard disk comes with a 3 year warranty and the Amazon price is better than anywhere else. The same item from Ebuyer with 3YW would cost £115. It only took 4 days to come from Amazon.

Before you buy a hard disk you need to confirm that it will work on your system and that you have the correct cables and know how to install the drive into the computer. I'm not going to describe that bit as there are many other tutorials on how to fit the hard drive into the case. Something which I have done hundreds of times over the years.

How to add a massive internal 2TB Hard Disk to Windows 7 on an ACER computer.
My computer is a Acer Aspire M3800 system running Windows 7, I currently have two physical hard disks installed. A 750Gb split into two partitions and a 500Gb drive that I use for storage. This 500Gb drive has become so full with my photographs and videos that I only have a few gigabytes of space left.
So time to install the new one!

The motherboard in this computer is an Acer G45T/G43T-AM3 v1.1 so according to the motherboard specs it has SATAII 3Gb/s connectors that support HDDs, Internal Solid State Drive (SSD), (Raid 0/1 Support). The Samsung HD204UI 2TB drive is a SATA-II drive so is perfect for this system.

At this point I will assume that you have physically installed the drive in your PC Case, Connected the power plug and connected the SATAII cable between the hard disk and the motherboard and booted up Windows 7.

Before you can use your new hard disk you have to prepare the drive for the system so it knows how to use it. This consists of allocating the free space as a partition, allocating it a drive letter and formatting it. Don't worry this process is so quick and easy using Windows7, you don't need to know anything technical. I have done screen grabs of the various panels that show up during this process.

1) First goto the Start Button and click on Control Panel then click on System and Security to get to this screen. In the Administrative Tools section near the bottom click on Create and format hard disk partitions.

In the Administrative Tools section, click on Create and format hard disk partitions.

2) You should now see this screen, this means the system has detected that a new unformatted drive has been detected. Simply click on OK to create the MBR for your new 2TB  drive.

The Initialize Disk screen will show because its found a new hard drive.

3) You will now see the Disk Management screen which shows all of your drives. You should see a new drive space which has a black line across the top of it like this below.
In my system my 2TB drive shows as 1863.02Gb Unallocated.

Here we can see the new hard disk showing as Unallocated.

4) Right-click anywhere in the Unallocated bar and select New Simple Volume from the popup menu.
A New simple volume wizard will show up.

5) Now you can decide how you want to use all that storage. i.e. do you want the whole lot as one drive or do you want to partition it into several smaller drives.
In this example I'm going to make one single massive drive of  1907,727Mb. Click next to get to the next screen.

6) Now you can assign a drive letter to this new drive. It will default to the next free letter but you may prefer to use a different letter such as S for storage or V for Videos. Click Next.

Here you can select a different drive letter to give to your new drive.

7) In the Volume Label field type in a suitable name so you can recognise it in when you view it in "My Computer" or Windows Explorer. Click Next.

Here you can type in a suitable name for the new hard disk.

8) It will now format the drive with your settings. This will only take a few seconds (unless you have unticked quick format) You should now be returned to the Disk Management screen and your new drive should now show as Healthy (Primary Partition).

Here we can see that the new partition is now ready to use.

9) So if you now goto My computer you should see your new drive ready to use. As you can see here we have a Drive S: called 2TB Storage which has nothing used so far.

Here we can now see our new hard drive showing as one drive. Drive S:

10) Now all I have to do is move all of my data from drive F: which was my old storage drive onto my new 2TB drive. Once I've done that I will remove the 500Gb drive as that's far too small to bother with :)

That was easy wasn't it !

2TB Backup Drive
Did you know that you can get something called a USB Hard Drive Enclosure or HDD Caddy?
This is a box that you fit your 3.5" SATA hard disk into and it allows you to use it as a portable mass storage device which is great for backing up your data. They come with a USB 2 connection, some even have USB 3 or Firewire depending what you need :

Make sure you have the correct cables to connect your new hard disk to your motherboard, there is nothing worse than starting to install your hard disk only to find you did not have a spare SATA cable.
The cable I bought was a latching SATA II cable :



Here are the SATA-II connectors on my Acer motherboard.

Here my new 2TB hard drive is connected to my Acer G45T/G43T-AM3 v1.1motherboard.

I hope you found this blog post of use. Please comment if it helped you.
Thanks Andy

An important choice to make: your browser, New update from Microsoft KB976002 is not very user friendly

Today a new Windows Update has been installed (KB976002)  which after booting up your PC will show a screen with the title..

"An important choice to make: your browser".
The window has a title of "Information Regarding Web Browsers".

It has an OK button to click on, if you click that then it shows the screen I have pasted in here, it also shows this if you click on the close button.
It shows a random selection of 9 choices of browsers.
Below each one are two buttons labelled "Install" and "Tell me more".
Apparently this update is something to do with Microsoft having to make people aware that they do have a choice as regards which web browser they wish to use, so the “Web browser choice screen” has been added to Internet Explorer users in Europe, its required by the European Commission.
This windows update is being rolled out in March 2010. So if you have not seen this yet then you will very soon (unless you have turned off Windows updates).

I think this browser choice screen is very badly thought out because there is NO option to click "I am happy to stay with my current browser choice, Ignore and don't remind of this again".
On my PC I have the latest versions IE8, Firefox, Opera and Chrome already installed yet as you can see the screen that shows does not say "Already installed" below those browsers.
Surely this is a fundamental error in the layout of this screen as its not very obvious what you need to do to ignore this Browser Choice screen.

If you click on the "Select Later" button then this just hides the Browser Choice window until you reboot next time.

On my Windows 7 machine, when you reboot after this update has installed you will notice that the shortcut to IE on your Quick launch taskbar has gone! I bet lots of people are going to google "My Internet Explorer icon has vanished on Windows 7" after this windows update has gone on.
You will notice as well as the IE8 icon vanishing from your quick launch bar that you now have a new icon on the desktop called "Browser Choice", if you run that then you will get the browser choice window.
I guess the idea of this is to force you to choose IE over other available browsers.

On my XP SP3 machines , when you reboot after this update has been installed it actually runs the Browser choice window without any interaction.

So what do you need to do?
Windows XP:
Well if you are happy with what you already use and want to keep things as they were simply click OK on the first screen then close the second screen. Now delete the Browser Choice icon from your desktop.
Reboot and thats it back to normal. It won't bother asking you ever again.

Windows 7:
Well if you are happy with what you already use and want to keep things as they were simply click OK on the first screen.
If you want to keep Internet Explorer goto the task bar and right click on Internet explorer and select "Pin to Task bar" then close the second screen. Now delete the Browser Choice icon from your desktop.
Reboot and thats it back to normal.
I do not have Vista any more so not sure how that behaves, perhaps someone can post a comment to say if its the same as Windows 7.

Hope this helps those people out there who are not sure.

The screen that shows when you click the OK button on the first screen takes you to this page :
http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm

For information about this Windows update :
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=976002

There is also a shorcut icon on the desktop which runs :
C:\WINDOWS\system32\browserchoice.exe

If you goto Start - Run and type msconfig and then click on the startup tab you can see its set to run browserchoice every time your computer starts up.


One thing I also don't understand is the selection of browsers its has to offer, Everyone I'm sure will know all of the popular ones such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome but also listed are several browsers that I have never heard of, also some that have not been updated for ages such as Maxthon which seems to have been abandoned back in 2008.
As a web designer I have kept en eye on what browsers are popular as things change over the years. There is an upto date table month by month which shows which browsers are popular. See this here :
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
As you can see people KNOW they have a choice of web browser with Firefox being a clear winner these days.
People that only use Internet Explorer are most likely people that don't even know that there are different browsers available, so to suddenly offer a bewilldering range of browsers to these people is going to cause trouble.

I dare say in the days to follow this update will cause lots of chaos with PC users not knowing what to do.

Andy

Windows 7 Audio Driver for ASUS K8V-VM motherboard, Solution to missing sound.

Have you tried the new Microsoft Windows 7 operating System yet?
If you had stuck with Windows XP rather than going over to the rather unstable Vista then you may want to try the new Windows 7 OS. Its a lot better than Vista, not difficult I know!

The ASUS K8V-VM Motherboard.

 I have installed it on an older machine which has an Asus K8V-VM motherboard in it.
It found all the hardware and installed all the drivers but there was no sound at all.
The Volume icon on the system tray showed a red cross in it, hovering over it showed "You do not have speakers or headphone plugged in", even though it did have.
It took quite a while to sort this problem out so I thought I would share this with anyone else out there who has no sound on their ASUS motherboard after installing Windows 7.

The driver I found fixed the problem and I now have sound on Windows 7.
Normally you would visit the download section of the Motherboard manufacturer but the audio drivers offered on the ASUS website for the K8V-VM would not install on Windows 7, but not to worry as I have the solution for you here.

It may be time to think about getting a new PC, ready to go systems are very cheap these days and come with Windows 7 installed so you know all the hardware is going to be compatible with it :


Here are the specifics :

The motherboard (Mainboard) is a ASUS K8V-VM, This uses an Audio Codec "Realtek ALC660" which is a 6-Channel Codec.

To get the Audio Driver you need to visit the website for the actual manufacturer of the Audio Codec.

So visit :
http://www.realtek.com.tw/

Click The Downloads button at the top of the page.
Click the High Definition Audio Codecs (Software) link
Tick "I accept the above" then wait for the page to update then click Next.
You will now see a page of files available for download, at the top of this list is..

Vista, Windows7 Driver (32/64 bits) Driver only (ZIP file)R2.37 2009/11/20 38690k

Click on the first Go link for Site 1 and download the ZIP file.
Once complete, extract all the files from it and run the setup.exe file.
Run through the installation and it will ask you to reboot.
You now have sound !

This codec may fix the no audio problem on many Asus motherboards. I notice on the Realtek site there is a seperate section for downloading Windows 7 drivers for the following codecs..
RTL8100B(L)/RTL8100C(L)/RTL8101L/RTL8139C(L)RTL8139C(L)+/RTL8139D(L)/RTL8100(L)
RTL8130/RTL8139B(L)

Please leave comment if this fixed the no audio problem on Windows 7.

UPDATE: I have noticed over the last few days that sometimes the sound stops working, looking in the devices shows that the driver has gone which is rather strange. Reinstalling it again brings it back to life, I had to do this about 5 times but then it seemed to stay working for ever. Bare this in mind.

If this happens again then I have a permanent solution and that is to buy a USB External Sound Card.
The one I'm looking at is a Creative Soundblaster X-fi Go, this DOES work with Windows 7 and you dont even need to open up your pc to install it.