As many of you know, today's digital world comes with a lot of things that make our daily life easier. However, as time goes on you rely more and more on the information stored on your PC. No one is completely safe from power outages, corrupt hard disks, an infected system through a backdoor or Trojan, or even a fire. To make sure that a computer can easily be restored to a previous point, software developers created what is called backup software or imaging software.

Damn you Microsoft! I am a notepad addict. If you look at my taskbar at any time and you will see at least 5 notepads, usually a lot more running at one time. Why? Because it is fast and small I use it to keep notes, to do lists, phone numbers, write code, search and replace, etc. The reasons are endless....

As many of you know, Gmail is Google's free web mail service that gives you 2+ Gigs of free storage for your email and attachments. Now that is a lot of storage; actually more storage than most people really need. So what can we do with all that extra storage you may be wondering? What if I told you that we could use all this extra storage to act as an online hard drive for you to store files?

Rootkits are scary and becoming a larger and larger menace to our computers every day. In the past if our computers were infected with a piece of malware, we simply removed it and we were clean of the infection. Now that rootkits are commonly bundled with other malware, this cleaning process has become even harder to do. This tutorial will cover how to use F-Secure Blacklight to scan your computer for rootkits and help you to remove them.

HijackThis ne doit être utilisé que dans le cas où votre navigateur ou votre ordinateur continue à avoir des problèmes après l'exécution de Spybot-S&D ou d'un autre nettoyeur d'Espiogiciels (Spyware)/Pirates (Hijackers). HijackThis est un outil évolué, et par conséquent il requiert des connaissances approfondies sur Windows et les systèmes d'exploitation en général. Si vous supprimez des éléments qu'il affiche, sans savoir ce qu'ils sont, cela peut entraîner d'autres problèmes comme la perte de votre connexion Internet ou des problèmes dans le fonctionnement de Windows lui-même. Vous devriez aussi essayer de nettoyer les Spywares/Pirates/Trojans au moyen de toutes les autres méthodes avant d'utiliser HijackThis. Si vous autorisez HijackThis à supprimer des éléments avant qu'un autre outil de suppression ne balaie votre ordinateur, les fichiers créés par le Pirate/Spyware resteront sur votre ordinateur et ensuite les outils de suppression seront incapables de les trouver.

This tutorial is intended to explain what RAM is and give some background on different memory technologies in order to help you identify the RAM in your PC. It will also discuss RAM speed and timing parameters to help you understand the specifications often quoted on vendors' websites. Its final aim is to assist you in upgrading your system by suggesting some tools and strategies to help you choose new RAM. It is written from the standpoint of a desktop PC owner but most of the concepts apply to laptops and notebooks as well. Like all PC components, RAM has gone through a number of evolutionary changes (and some revolutionary changes) and only the RAM designed for your computer will work in your computer. There are literally hundreds of different RAM products on the market today so it is important to know the correct type for your system. I am attempting to write this for the non-technical user but the further I get the more I descend into techno-babble so you may need to learn a few terms along the way. I'll assume familiarity with common terms like Megabytes and Gigabytes etc. Finally I should say I'm not a memory expert, some of the information here I came across in the process of writing this tutorial, but I hope you will get as much out of this exploration of RAM as I have.

A driver is a program that is able to control a device that is connected to your computer. These drivers are used by the operating system to enable it to communicate with the particular device the driver was made for. Devices that you connect to your computer are often very specialized which makes it so Windows can not communicate directly with the device without a program telling it how to. This program, or device driver, acts as a translator between the installed device and the programs that utilize the device.

Most people think computers, being electronic devices, don't require any mechanical maintenance, but this is not so. Many computer faults are caused by components overheating due to poor airflow in the case because of a buildup of dirt and dust over time. It's worthwhile cleaning your computer annually or even more often if it is in a particularly dusty environment, on carpet or in a household with pets. This tutorial is designed to help you safely clean the interior of your tower or desktop PC so as to maximize its lifespan. No computer knowledge is assumed other than familiarity with component names. Cleaning the computer is not rocket-science and does not require any special skills or tools but you do need to know how to avoid possible damage to some of the more sensitive parts. That's what we will demonstrate here. Although the same principle applies to laptops and notebook PCs, because of the difficulty dismantling them these instructions do not apply to those types of computer.

The Recovery Console is a special boot up method that can be used to help fix problems that are preventing your Windows installation from properly booting up into Windows. This method allows you to access the files, format drives, disable and enable services, and other tasks from a console prompt while the operating system is not loaded. It is suggested that the Recovery Console is to only be used only after Safe mode and the other standard startup options do not work. I feel that the Recovery Console is also useful in other situations such as removing malware files that start in both Safe mode and Standard Mode and thus not allowing you to delete the infection.

In order to use a hard drive, or a portion of a hard drive, in Windows you need to first partition it and then format it. This process will then assign a drive letter to the partition allowing you to access it in order to use it to store and retrieve data.