There comes a time in the life of each hard-drive when it just won’t access any of the data on the drive anymore. The same applies to CDs and DVDs which, due to their fragile nature, get scratched and scraped beyond readability. As Murphy’s law would often have it, it happens exactly to the files you need when you need them. In order to preserve your data (and your sanity in case data starts mysteriously disappearing), you need to know exactly what can be done to make sure you don’t find yourself losing important files.

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One can never have too much (free) RAM. As with quite a few short computer proverbs, this one holds almost too true. As years have passed from old operating systems, which used as little as 8 MB of RAM, something was bound to happen. Our dear Windows OS has turned from a resource hog by the standards of 486es to an even bigger resource hog of today’s P4s and A64s. Despite all the new components and large-sized memories that are already measured in gigabytes, something always decides to hog up the RAM. Poof - instead of 1 GB of free RAM, you are lucky if you have half of that available. And if you’re trying to run Windows XP on something as low as 256MB or even 128MB, even booting up becomes tedious.
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Something that most of us will do in our computing lives is accidentally deleting files. Sometimes people will empty the recycle bin without checking its contents, press SHIFT+DELETE on a file or folder (which deletes it without going to the recycle bin) or delete a file or folder from the command line. All of these methods will render the file or folder no longer visible to Windows XP and is seemingly lost forever. Luckily for us nothing is ever really deleted on your computer unless something else takes its place on the hard drive; Chances are your files are recoverable.
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The internet is not a safe place. I hope the sentence got your attention, because it’s completely and undeniably true. Although the Internet is a place to search for information and download just about anything, you can never just assume whoever is letting you download is friendly and helpful. Sometimes, whatever you download has an invisible, but potentially problematic component.
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These days with computer games requiring more resources than ever, many people are upgrading their own video cards. Most of the time the video card installtion goes without any troubles - but some of the time things dont go so well. Here is a guide to help you troubleshoot problems with your videocard.
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A common annoyance that people have with their computers is that their applications such as Internet Explorer don’t scroll smoothly down the page or when they move an application window around the desktop it is very jumpy. The cause of this problem is typically one of two things, a damaged/out-of-range wireless mouse or the video card driver hasn’t be installed or has been corrupted. Here is a tutorial on how to fix this problem.
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When you startup a Windows NT, 2000 or XP based machine (which are all based on a similar set of code), the computer is loading and juggling many files in order to load the operating system. This is a basic breakdown of the NT/2000/XP startup process which comes in handy for troubleshooting startup problems.
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MSCONFIG is a special tool built into your Windows called “Microsoft System Configuration Utility” or “MSCONFIG”. MSCONFIG is designed to help you troubleshoot problems with your computer such it being slow or frequently crashing. As many computer users know, running a lot of programs at once will slow down your computer. What a lot of users don’t know however is that Windows launches a lot of programs in the background that you never see, preventing some of these from loading at startup can greatly increase your computer performance.
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There will be times when the amount of hardware RAM you have will not provide your computer with all the memory it needs even if you have more than 1gig of RAM. This is where virtual memory comes into use and Windows XP will start to use your hard drive in some creative ways.
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A few weeks ago we transulated the Windows XP licence agreement from legal-jargon to english and have had readers ask specific questions about what they are allowed to do with their copies of Windows XP. Here are some answers to some frequently asked questions.
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