Tech Tip Tuesday - Hard Drive Installation For Playstation 3

Perhaps you want a larger hard drive for your Playstation 3, or maybe you bought a new one and want to swap out the new ones drive so you can use the older one. In this week's tech tip I'll show you how to do this.

Most of the time when one buys a new PS3 swapping the hard drives is not necessary because it is likely that the newer drive is bigger or has less wear and tear. In this case, simply backing up your old drive to an external hard drive and then restoring it to the new drive is sufficient. However, my old PS3 had a 500 GB drive, so a swap was called for in my case.

Regardless of why you need to swap your PS3's hard drive, you will need a few things before you start. Here is what you will need:

1. One SATA hard drive (preferably larger than the one your PS3 currently has)
2. One external hard drive large enough to store a back up of your current PS3 hard drive
3. One Phillips screwdriver
4. One USB thumb drive (250 MB should be sufficient)

Before getting started, back up your current PS3 hard drive to the external hard drive. If you do not know how to do this consult your PS3 User's Manual. Also, download a copy of the current PS3 firmware to the thumb drive. You can find a dowmload of the firmware here: http://bit.ly/NdoxNR. Be sure that you follow the instructions on that page EXACTLY or the installation of the firmware will fail.

Now you are ready to install the new (swap out the old) hard drive. 

Start by disconnecting all the cords and cables from your PS3. Place the PS3 on the table you are working on with the bottom facing up. You will see a small square on the bottom of the PS3 toward the front. It looks like this:

Carefully pry this little square up and swivel it to the side. You should be able to do this with your fingernail, but if you are having trouble, use a small flathead screwdriver. Just be careful not to break it in the process. Once swiveled away it will look like this:

This is the hard drive holding screw. Using your Phillips screwdriver, remove the holding screw.

Now turn your PS3 up so that the back (where the cables connect) is on the table and the front (where you slide in the discs) is facing up. Just under the power button you will see a panel with the logos for various components (HDMI, DVD, Blu-ray, etc.) 

Slide this panel to the right and then lift it off.

This will reveal the hard drive. On the front of it you will see a small wire handle. Lift this handle and pull out the hard drive. The hard drive will be connected to a drive tray. The two parts together look like this:

Tray bottom 

Drive top

The tray is part of the Playstation and will have to be removed from the old hard drive. To do this use the Phillips screwdriver to remove the four tray screws seen in the top picture (Tray bottom). With the screws removed flip it over as seen in the bottom picture (Drive top). Carefully lift the drive from the tray, holding bracket side first as shown below.

Drive separated from the drive tray

Now place the new drive in the tray and reverse the previous steps to install it in the PS3.

After you have the new hard drive installed in the drive bay, connect the cords and cables and fire up the PS3. If you were doing a swap AND if the old PS3 drive had a current firmware, all should be good and you should not have to do anything else. However, if this is a new hard drive OR if the old PS3 drive did not have a current firmware, you may get a message telling you such. Now, when this happens regardless of whether you are installing a fresh drive or the previous drive, you will be prompted to format the hard drive and install the firmware that you downloaded to the thumb drive. just follow the prompts and you will be up and running in no time.

If your old drive did not have the current firmware and you have to format and intall new firmware, you will have to restore the backup you saved to the external hard drive. Please note that often times when you do this you will lose installed games that you purchased through the Playstation Network (PSN). All your media such as music, videos, and so forth will be restored, but the games will likely have to be re-downloaded and installed. This will not cost you anything since PSN keeps track of all your purchases on their servers. This can be a hassle, but I have found that it is nice to have all the extra space that was taken up by games that I haven't played in ages. Those games are still there if you want to download them, but I find it only necessary to re-download those games that I really played often.

Also note that the above instructions are specific to the Playstation 3 Slim. For older models the instructions are the same except that the drive bay is located on the side of the unit (left side if you are looking at it from the front and the holding tray screws are located and screw into the sides of the hard drive, not the bottom. Other than that, it's pretty much the same procedure.

Once again, please post any questions regarding this tip in the comments and I will address them as soon as possible.

— Spinning Visits Globe – Speed Post — — Tech goodness in under 5 seconds! —

I've only had it up for a short time now, but I'm certain that most of you have noticed the little spinning globe in the left side bar. This is a cool little Java applet that tracks the visits to my blog. It basically works the same way as the counters that you see on most sites, except with this little gem you can also see where in the world those visitors are clicking in from.

The globe is controllable. You can grab the globe with the cursor and drag it to see different parts of the world. You can also use the little buttons at the bottom to change things up. Starting on the left, the plus (+) and minus (-) buttons zoom in and out. The left and right arrows control the horizontal rotation and the up and down arrows rotate the globe to the south and north poles. The button with the multidirectional arrows will take you to a larger version of the applet so that you can see the details even better.

This applet was created and is provided by Revolver Maps (http://www.revolvermaps.com/). There are a variety of globes and flat maps to chose from and all are available to put on your website or blog for free. Just go to the Revolver Maps website and click the Widget Gallery link to see the full selection of trackers available. Select the one that you want and follow the instructions.

I'm still playing with mine. I've got a pink one at the moment. I've been playing with colors and I'm also intrigued by the globe that changes with the seasons. I'll probably settle on one eventually, or maybe not. The more hit your site gets (and the more diverse location-wise) the cooler it looks.

Okay. This Speed Post was more than 5 seconds, but it was worth every second!

Tech Tip Tuesday - Browser Zooming

Browser Zoom

There are quite a few things that can throw off the look of a webpage. Screen size and resolution is one of the biggest factors and is probably the most unpredictable for a developer. Often developers design their websites to accommodate a very low resolution (usually 800 by 600) so as not to leave out those with the lower end computers (this practice is changing with some of the newer dynamic coding being used).

What this means for most of us is that a lot of the websites we visit look very small on our screens because we run our computers at much higher resolutions. You can tell if a website was designed for lower resolutions when you see a lot of un-utilized screen real estate. Not only do these sites just look plain inadequate, sometimes they can be hard to read because the font appears so small.

Now you could just adjust your screen resolution so that the site looks the way it should. In fact, I have not seen this much recently, but there was a time when you would venture upon a website that had a notice stating, "This site best viewed at 800 x 600 resolution using Internet Explorer". Very tacky then, and very lazy now since there are ways to accommodate every browser and resolution including mobile phones, but I digress. Changing your screen resolution is not convenient, and fortunately there is a better way.

Just about every browser out there now is capable of zooming in and out of a website, essentially changing the resolution of the site itself rather than changing the resolution of your screen. In most browsers this is accomplished by holding the Ctrl key (command on Macs) and then using the plus (+) and minus (-) keys to zoom in and out respectively.

Just to give you an idea of what this does: My Windows laptop has a 15" screen with an 8:5 aspect ratio and I have it set to a resolution of 1280 by 800. This blog viewed from that computer looks okay, but I prefer to have the browser zoom level set to 125%. This brings the edges of the side bars almost to the edge of the screen and makes the font much easier to read. Now, my iMac has a 27' screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio, running at a resolution of 2560 by 1440. This high resolution makes this blog page look almost tiny. In addition, the additional width of the aspect ratio makes the distance between the side bars and the edge of the screen even greater. Therefore, on my Mac I have the browser set to view this blog at 200% zoomed (250% brings the side bars all the way to the edge of the screen).

Most browsers will "remember" the zoom level for the pages that you visit, so once you set it you can, for the most part, forget it. Browsers vary and as such, so will your results. I prefer using Google Chrome and this works as advertised in this post. If you use a different browser and have a different experience using this tip with that browser, post you results in the comments so that others will know what to expect when using that browser.

Tech Tip Tuesday - Docked Mac Icons

I know that my blog posts are heavily weighted to Windows machines. Believe me when I say that this is not because of preference. I much prefer Linux over OS X and OS X over Windows. It's just that most of my readers run Windows machines and even most of my Mac users have at least one Windows machine or run Windows in Bootcamp. Therefore, I am more or less forced to post more Windows-centric posts. However, occasionally I like to throw my Mac users a bone. This is one of those days.

Even if you have only been using a Mac for a short period, you may have noticed that some of the dock icons change. These are known as dynamic icons as opposed to static icons which do not change. A perfect example of a dynamic icon is the icon for the calendar app iCal. You will surely have noticed that the icon for iCal shows the current date:

Another, yet more subtle example for dynamic icons are ones that are update-aware such as the AppStore, Yammer, and Facebook apps:

As you can see these icons display a number in a red circle to let you know there are new updates for that app. So what am I getting at you may ask?

What I'm getting at is that certain docked app icons can display useful information. This information can be useful without even opening the app as in the iCal example. You do not have to open iCal to see that the date is August 20^th. It's like having a mini stripped-down version of the app always there for handy reference. Well, now I want to show you one of the most useful dynamic icons I have discovered so far. It is the icon for the Activity Monitor.

Activity Monitor in OS X is very similar to the task manager in Windows, showing running apps and how much resources they consume. What is neat about it's icon is that when docked it can show various information such as CPU usage all at your command. Here are some of the icons that can be displayed with the activity monitor:

CPU Usage Icon

As you can see my iMac has dual processors and a realtime graphical representation of each is shown on the icon.

CPU History Icon

This icon shows CPU usage over time in realtime.

Network Usage Icon

This one shows traffic over the network, in realtime.

Disk Activity Icon

This one shows the activity of the hard drive over time, in realtime.

Memory Usage Icon

This one shows a pie chart representing the usage of the RAM. Red is wired usage, otherwise known as system usage (i.e. the operating system). Yellow is active programs. Blue is inactive programs. Green is free memory. Did I mention that this pie chart changes in realtime? Yes. All these icons display their information in realtime.

So here is how you do it:

1. Click the Applications icon
2. Click the Utilities icon
3. Click the Activity Monitor icon

At this point the Activity Monitor should be running and visible on the desktop, but more importantly the Activity Monitor icon should be in the dock. However, if you quit the activity monitor or if you log out or restart the computer the icon disappears and you have to repeat the above process to get it back. To prevent this:

1. Right-click (control-click) the Activity Monitor icon
2. Under options select Keep in Dock and Open at Login

Keep in Dock will keep the Activity Monitor on the dock, but if you quit the app or log out the icon reverts to the default Activity Monitor icon, which looks like this:

This icon is static. So to keep your dynamic icon displayed just check Open at Login and Activity Monitor will launch at startup so that your dynamic monitor icon will always be displayed. If you have been following along, you probably have noticed that you can change which icon is displayed by selecting it under the Dock Icon submenu after control-clicking.

Now that you know about the dynamic icons in OS X have fun with the activity Monitor and see if you can find some other cool dynamic icons that display useful information. If you find any, please share them in the comments so that the rest of us can enjoy them. 

——— Areo Shake – Speed Post ——— — Tech goodness in under 5 seconds! —

Aero Shake

This trick utilizes Window Aero, so if you are not using Windows 7, then this trick won't work for you.

If you grab (left-click and hold) the title bar of any window and shake it back and forth, all other open windows will minimize. Shake it again and you will call them all back. I haven't figured out a good use for this trick since grabbing a window's title bar brings it to the front of all other windows anyway. Nevertheless, this is still a pretty cool trick. Try it. If you can think of a good use for it post it in the comments.

Tech Tip Tuesday - Remote Computing

As a tech, one thing I do a lot of is remote computing. Let's face it, sometimes it's just easier and quicker to do things yourself than trying to explain how to do it to someone else. In those cases I simply take over their computer and perform the operations that need to be done in order to get them back in shape.

There are several software programs that allow you to do this. Even Windows has a built in remote desktop functionality. However, I prefer a small program called TeamViewer, so that is the method I will be referring to most here. Just know that most other good remote computing software has the same or similar functionality, but may have a different way of doing it.

Some of you are shouting at me, "I'm not a tech! Why are you ruining my Tech Tip Tuesday with something I have no use for?" Well, if you know me you know that I'm not going to tell you about something that you will not find useful and there are plenty of other uses for remote computing, so keep reading. I promise you will find some cool things that you can make use of.

If you are using two Windows computers you can use Remote Desktop for most of what I'm going to get into here. However, if you want to use Remote Desktop, you're on your own there. While I do know how to use it, this blog post is featuring TeamViewer since I use it more than I use Remote Desktop.

In order to use TeamViewer, it needs to be on both computers (download here: http://bit.ly/TCjHtG). Now the nice thing about TV is that it is not necessary to install it on your computer. When you start it up you will be asked if you want to run or install the program. You can choose Run if you wish. You will have almost all of the functionality of the installed program. I have it installed on all of my computers though because one feature that is a must have in my opinion is unattended access. If you install the program you can remotely log in to that computer without having someone accept the connection request. After you install the program, be sure you select "Run at start-up", then you just set it up with a static password. As long as the computer is on you can access it from any other computer that has the TV program (it does not have to be installed on the computer that is requesting access).

Okay, so now that you have TV running on both computers and have a connection what can you do? Well, it is important to understand that once connected you have full access to all of the resources of the accessed computer. Aside from just being cool, there are several things that you can do that may come in handy. When I was in college, I had a laptop that had all my school stuff on it. I also have an iMac. I was quite fond of remote accessing my laptop from my Mac to write papers and do other schoolwork. Aside from being more comfortable, the Mac's zoom function allowed me to study without wearing my glasses.

Another cool feature is file transfer. As most of you know I use Dropbox (download here: http://db.tt/RzQxDfP) for file sharing. However, now and then there is a file that I don't have in my Dropbox that is on a computer that I don't currently have access to. With TV I simply access the computer and then choose file transfer from the menu bar at the top of the window.  A window pops up that allows me to browse to the location of the file and save it to a location on the computer I'm accessing from. This feature works in both directions so I can also transfer a file from the computer I'm on to the remote computer as well. You can use this to print a file remotely. Let's say you are at the coffee shop and you download a form that you need printed out. Access your home computer using TV, transfer the file to your home computer, open it, then print it. The printed form will be waiting for you when you get home.

Another unique use that many people don't think of is usage monitoring. Even the most innocent searches can bring up results that you would not necessarily like your children to see. Even browsing YouTube can bring up videos that are inappropriate for younger viewers. With TV installed on your child's computer, you can keep an eye on them even from the other room. Since TV runs windowed there is no reason you can't keep an eye on what your child is doing while you are doing something else like visiting Facebook. Not only that, if they do in fact end up somewhere they should not be, you can quickly take over, closing the browser, or even shutting down the computer. Try this one. Tell your kid they can go play on their computer until it shuts off and then they have to go to bed. Pull up TV and when you want them to go to bed disable their mouse and keyboard, then shut them down. OR use TV's built-in chat box to tell them "it's time to go to bed" (or "get off that website" or "you're supposed to be studying, not playing games", etc.).

These are just a few uses for TeamViewer that I have actually implemented that have nothing to do with remote support. These are things that almost everybody can make use of and there are more if you are creative. Get started with TeamViewer and let me know what you use it for in the comments. I'd be interested in seeing what other uses people come up with. Also leave a comment if you try it for one of the uses I've described and let me know what you think. TeamViewer is pretty user friendly and you will be able to figure out all of the functionality by just exploring the program for a little bit. However, as always if you have any trouble or questions about it, please leave a comment and I'll answer all your questions or walk you through it.

DOWNLOAD TEAMVIEWER HERE: http://bit.ly/TCjHtG
DOWNLOAD DROPBOX HERE: http://db.tt/RzQxDfP

— Fast and Full Refresh – Speed Post — — Tech goodness in under 5 seconds! —

Fast Refresh

Tired of moving your cursor to the refresh button of your browser, or just want a quicker way to refresh a webpage? Hit F5 (or Ctrl+R) in Windows or Command+R in OS X.

Full Refresh

In the last Tech Tip Tuesday I taught you how to empty your cache, which comes in handy when websites are acting buggy for you. However, there is a shortcut you can use that will clear the cached data for just the website your are on. While on the website hold the shift key and click the refresh button on the browser OR Ctrl+F5 (or Ctrl+Shift+R) in Windows or Command+Shift+R OS X. This clears (actually overrides) the cached files for the website. This is faster than clearing the entire cache and should be done before using that method. I did not mention this before because I knew that I was going to be writing this post.