According to a report by The Radicati Group on May 9th, 2006, there about 171 billion e-mail messages sent daily, 1.1 billion e-mail users worldwide, and 1.4 billion active e-mail accounts. These numbers are staggering and truly reflect how e-mail has become such an important medium for communicating with friends, family, colleagues, and clients. Though so many of you use e-mail all the time, how many of you truly understand how e-mail works? This tutorial is designed to give an overview of how e-mail works as well as related e-mail features. Hopefully after reading this tutorial, you will be a more informed users and consumer of e-mail products or services. This is going to be a long and detailed tutorial so I suggest you print it out and read it casually so you can absorb it all.

Have you ever had an experience where you are using a lot of programs in Windows, or a really memory intensive one, and notice that your hard drive activity light is going nuts, there is lots of noise from the hard drive, and your computer is crawling? This is called disk thrashing and it is when you have run out of physical RAM and instead Windows is using a file on your hard drive to act as a virtual memory. Since writing and reading to a hard drive is much slower than reading from physical RAM, your computer's performance takes a huge hit.

The Snipping Tool is a program that is part of Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Window 8. Snipping Tool allows you to take selections of your windows or desktop and save them as snips, or screen shots, on your computer. In the past if you wanted a full featured screen shot program you needed to spend some money to purchase a commercial one. If you needed basic screen shot capability, past versions of Windows enabled you to take screen shots by pressing the the PrintScreen button to take a picture of your entire screen or Alt-Printscreen to take a screen shot of just the active window. This screen shot would be placed in your clipboard that you can then paste in another image program of your choice.

A Windows Vista feature is simply a set of programs or a particular capability of the operating system that can be enabled or disabled by an administrator. It is important to note that in Windows Vista, when you remove or disable a feature, you are not actually removing files from your hard drive, but rather just deactivating them. Therefore disabling a feature should not be used as a method of freeing up hard drive space. On the other hand, by disabling a feature you may gain an increase in performance due to memory and processor utilization no longer being allocated towards the particular feature.

In the past when you needed to resize a partition in Windows you had to use a 3rd party utility such as Partition Magic, Disk Director, or open source utilities such as Gparted and Ranish Partition Manager. These 3rd party programs, though, are no longer needed when using Windows as it has partition, or volume, resizing functionality built directly into the Windows Disk Management utility.

Some programs provide the ability to add arguments when executing it in order to change a particular behavior or modify how the program operates. As an example lets look at the command line argument for Firefox called safe-mode. If you start Firefox with the command line firefox.exe -safe-mode Firefox will start without any extensions or themes. As you can see adding a command line argument to the program's executable changed its default behavior.

One of the more frustrating experiences when using a computer is when you want to delete or rename a file or folder in Windows, but get an error stating that it is open, shared, in use, or locked by a program currently using it.

Windows Vista has made it a little harder to find the Folder Options settings than it had in previous versions. The easiest way is to use the Folder Options control panel to modify how folders, and the files in them, are displayed. You can still show the Folder Options menu item while browsing a folder, but you will need to hold the ALT key for a few seconds and then let go to see this menu.

A very common question we see here at Bleeping Computer involves people concerned that there are too many SVCHOST.EXE processes running on their computer. The confusion typically stems from a lack of knowledge about SVCHOST.EXE, its purpose, and Windows services in general. This tutorial will clear up this confusion and provide information as to what these processes are and how to find out more information about them. Before we continue learning about SVCHOST, lets get a small primer on Windows services

Though Firewalls are necessary when your computer is connected to the Internet, they can cause problems trying to get Internet aware programs working properly. For example, if you wanted to host a game server on your computer, unless you configure your firewall correctly, outside users would not be able to connect to your server. This is because by default a Firewall blocks all incoming traffic to your computer. This causes a problem, because programs that require incoming connections will now not be reachable. To fix this, we need to open the specific Internet port that the program expects to receive incoming connections on. This tutorial will cover how to open specific ports for programs, or to open these ports globally using Zone Alarm.