Everyday some of my customers say that an application does not work, or their monitor was not on, or their printer did not print. Many of these were operator trouble.

To help you get the most out of a Tech Support call, below are ten items that will benefit you and the tech person supporting you.

1. Reboot (turn off your computer and turn it back on).. Sometimes computers get confused and it tries to do something that resulted in an error. If you rebooted your computer and the error does not come back you just saved yourself a phone call.

2. Gather some information about your computer before calling for help. What type of operating system are you running, how much memory is installed, what applications were open when the problem occurred, what was the exact error message, and what were you trying to do.

Also if your computer is still under warranty, have all the warranty information available, including the date it was purchased, serial number, etc..

3. If the problem is with one of the hardware components in or attached to your computer, is it turned on? If it is your printer is the ready - online light on? Is there a light on the monitor? Did the keyboard come unattached while cleaning? Check all cables, making sure they are in the right slot and fit snug.

4. Is the error message reproducible? Every time you do ???x??? or ???y???…what happens. Is it consistent or does something different occur each time (that still causes some kind of problem.

5. Are you calling because you forgot your password? Forgetting a password is usually about 34% of all support calls tech centers receive daily. Use a program on your computer to remember your password and keep it safe. I you frequently forget your password, here's a simple method to remember passwords.

6. Check the vendor???s site for support forums or search their site (using the error message) for a solution. Many times the problem was reported before and the vendor???s site might have the answer.

7. Did you run anti-virus and spyware removal software to see if anything malicious was installed?

8. Try running disk cleanup and defrag your hard drive. Sometimes these programs will clear up common errors.

9. Go into Internet Explorer and delete the Internet temp files and history files.

10. If the problem is connecting to the cable or DSL modem, restart the modem and the computer it is attached to. If you also have a router you should restart that as well. There might have been noise on the line, or a fluctuation in signal or electric. Restarting all components may solve the problem.

Author - John Gontowicz - Your Computer Connection. If you need to learn how to do any of these things please visit my site where you will find many free tutorials ??? www.yourpcguide.com

But, if you ever shut down your computer and realized that you forgot to eject the CD or DVD from the drive, here's an old PC trick to open the disk drive without needing to power on your computer again.

This trick also works for anybody who installs Operating Systems and forgets to eject the CD or DVD after installation has completed (other wise the computer will restart and run the install program again).

• Find a small paperclip and unfold one end until it is straight.

• On your Computer, look at the front of your CD or DVD drive for a small pin-hole usually found under the drive bay door. Some models may have the pin-hole above the door.

• Insert the paperclip slowly into the pin-hole. After pushing the paperclip in about a couple of inches, you will feel some resistance.?? Keep pushing until the CD or DVD drive door pops open slightly.

NOTE: If needed, move the paperclip back then forward as often as needed until you feel the resistance that will open the door. Try to push the paperclip in as straight as possible.

• Once the drive door has opened (enough to grab hold of it) remove the paperclip from the pin-hole and manually pull the door open until it is fully retracted (be gentle, do not pull hard).

• Remove the CD or DVD from the drive.

• Gently push the drive door close.

If you are wondering how it works, think of the manual eject mechanism as a simple little gear that (when pushed or turned) rotates the door open.

Thankfully some person many years ago, either had a light bulb moment or a bad memory and always forgot to eject the CD, thought of this manual eject mechanism. And fortuanatly for us, you don't need to be a computer engineer to make this trick work like a charm.

Afterwards check out my "action plan" and what you can do to rid yourself of your spyware infestation.

1. Browser Hijacks - When I used to get a call from a customer saying that their homepage had suddenly changed, without them doing anything, I knew to bring my anti-spyware fighting software. Malicious programmers love to change your browser settings to transfer your homepage to their "client's" websites.

2. PC is Crashing - Without warning, your PC starts crashing, freezing or locking up, but you haven't added any new software or updated anything recently.

3. Pop-Ups - You open your browser to visit your favorite blog site then "WHAM!" You are suddenly drowning in pop-ups! Your screen is full of brightly colored lures to porn, gambling or gaming websites. You click on the "Close" or the "X" to shut it down…uh, oh something is downloading to your machine!

4. Strange Favorites - You notice that there is a strange looking icon in your favorites. You click on it out of curiosity. You are caught in a webring of girly webpages…drat it, you're at work!

5. Strange Icon on Desktop or in Systray - You know notice a "winking" red light on the bottom-right in your Systray display. It says you have been infected. You hurriedly click on it to see what is wrong. Then a pop-up appears that says it is downloading an "anti-virus killer"…uh, oh.

6. Strange New Files Appear - You are poking about in your files and you notice that some odd, spyware-killer software has a folder on your hard drive. Where did that one come from?

7. Strange Emails - While searching for a note you dropped to the boss, you notice that you have lots of strange emails in your "Send" folder. You didn't send them, especially the ones in a foreign language.

8. Strange Toolbars - You open up your browser and now you have 3 toolbars instead of just one. What gives? When you try to remove, or change the settings, they keep coming back no matter what you do.

9. PC runs sluggish or slow - Granted your computer may not be the newest kid on the block but lately it has been moving slower than the Street Dept fixing a pothole. It takes several minutes for it logon and go out on the web. And it takes forever for you do to the simplest things anymore.

10. Hard Drive is running all the time - You have noticed that your hard drive is running all the time now. Even when nobody is on the machine! You can see the activity light blinking away and you can also hear the drive being accessed. Huh?

Action Plan - What to do next…

• Download from the Net or buy a good anti-spyware software package. For free try Ad-Aware or SpyBot's S&D. Or use SpySweeper if you need an industrial strength cleaner.

• Scan your hard drive and follow any instructions on removing items.

• Install a good personal firewall program to slow down pop-ups and other nastiness.

Author - From Chancer Reese, your Small Office Tech Diva. For more free tips see http://www.fixcomputerproblemsguide.com Hard Drive Crashed? Repair or Rescue Any Hard Drive… visit http://www.fixcomputerproblemsguide.com/Hard-Drive-Crashed.html

Well if you use Google Maps for all your driving direction needs, you now have two options to send just the link in an email very easily.

Say you wanted to send directions to your friend who is visiting New York City and they want to go to the Statue Of Liberty after first visiting the Empire State Building.

After entering the two locations in Google Maps you will have the directions available. Just above the map you will see three links: Print , Send , and?? Link .

If you want to quickly email the link via Google Maps, click on the Send link and enter the To and From email addresses. If you want, you can also add more information in the Message box before sending. When finished, click the Send button to send the message.

If you just want to copy the link to the directions and map, click on the Link link and in the pop up window, click once in the top field to highlight the text and copy (by right clicking and select copy).

Now using your email program, you can just paste the link in the message and send it.

Using these two otions to send directions in an email will save you a lot of time while keeping your message sizes much smaller by not needing to send the entire directions with images via email anymore.

But is it really running out of memory?

Low memory does not necessarily mean that you need to add more memory. Instead it could mean that an application or program is using more memory than you expected, which could be caused by buggy software, memory leaks, or a virus.

And with those types of scenarios, fixing the problem will stop your System from running out of available memory, and save you some money because you thought you needed to add more memory (RAM).

The easiest way to see how much memory each process is using, is to use Task Manager. There are several ways to open Task Manager:

• Just right click on an empty space in the Taskbar and select Task Manager (below screen shot is from Vista).

• Using the keyboard, press CTRL + SHIFT + Esc (which will open Task Manager) or press CTRL + ALT + DEL, then select the Task Manager link.

• in Vista, open the Start Menu, type taskmgr or taskmgr.exe in the search box and press Enter.

Now that Task Manager is open, click on the Processes tab…

… and make sure the Memory column is visible. If it isn't, you can easily view more System information in Task Manager such as memory, by selecting View \ Select Columns… from the menu.

For XP computers,select the Memory Usage check box, and for Vista computers select the Memory - Private Working Set . Click OK to save the settings.

Now that you have added the proper memory counter to Task Manager, let's go back to the Processes tab and sort the Memory column by clicking on the word Memory , so it displays the process using the most memory to the least. You may need to click on the column twice if it does not first sort highest to lowest.

As you can see from my Vista computer, Firefox is using over 114megs of memory. Looking down the column I can see each process memory usage. At this point, I will take a screen shot of Task Manager so I have a base (or starting point) of how much memory each process is using.

Later in the day, I'll check Task Manager again and compare the memory usage with the screen shot and make notes. I'll do this for a week (depending on my computer usage), then look over the numbers. You will want to look for any increases in memory usage by a process.

If you notice a small increase in memory consumption by a process, this is probably normal and not a cause for concern. If you notice a steady increase over time, even to the point where memory usage has doubled,?? you will want to identify the process. Once you find out what the process is, check the software maker website and see if updates are available or if there is a support forum and search for your problem to see if other people have the same issue.

If you are having trouble identifying a process, there are several ways you can find out what the process is.

With VIsta's Task Manager, click on the Processes tab and look for the Image Path Name and Command Line columns. The Image Path Name will display the folder for the process executable and the Command Line column shows the the command that was used to launch the process. If these columns still do help with identifying the process, you can Google it.

With XP Task Manager, those two columns are not available. instead, you will want to download the excellent Process Explorer tool from Microsoft Sysinternals site. Or you can run Sysinternal tools directly from their website (which is what I do).

Once you have Process Explorer running, to identify processes, check out the article How To Identify Unknown Processes In Windows.

By monitoring memory over time, you will get a better picture of how memory is being used and if you really need to purchase more RAM. And if you find that you really do need more RAM, it'll be money well spent to really improve system performance.

Instead of sifting through a long list, and viewing them one by one, videos can be searched by playlists. Playlists are a great way to group related videos together, which can be later played one after another. Also, searching by playlists lets you find groups of videos that are more related to your search query.

To search YouTube videos by playlists, just enter your search word or phrase in the search box, then using the pull down arrow (next to the search box), select Playlists . Now, click on the Search button to enter your search.

One thing you will notice is that the search results returned are significantly less than if you just searched for videos instead of playlist.

But you can further target your search and narrow down the number of playlists returned in the search results, by specifying a specific category.

To do this, mouse over the word Categories (shown below) to display the drop down menu. From here you can select the best category in the list that relates to your search.

For my example, "ubuntu' search, if I select the category 'Science & Technologies', the search results are much less and more targeted, allowing me to find exactly what I want faster.

Now that we found exactly what were looking for, we can watch all the videos in the playlist by clicking on the 'Play all videos' link.

I found by searching for videos by playlist, seems to return better search results. I guess YouTube users are much better at organizing videos than what YouTube search can provide in their basic search.

Or maybe you use dual monitors with a laptop and undock it, only to forget to move the window (or windows) back to the primary desktop, but you can still see the application in the taskbar and can't do anything with it?

If so, there is an easy trick that will bail you out and let you bring windows back on screen with out giving up and rebooting your PC.

First, right click on the application tab in the taskbar and select Move . If right clicking and the Move option is greyed out, try using ALT+TAB to select it and bring it into focus on the taskbar.

After selecting Move, your cursor will change to the "Move" mode displaying four arrows as shown in the following screenshot:

Now using your keyboard, press once either Left, Right, Up or Top keys, then move your mouse until the Window appears on the Desktop. You can also continue to press one of the arrow keys to move the Window back on screen manually.

This trick works great for recovering off screen windows especially if you use remote control utilities that tend to cause display problems and resize windows to point where you can no longer grab it with the mouse to move or minimize.

Have you ever accessed a web page and notice that the content is the same on the page as a day or two ago? Or maybe you manage a website or are a blogger and need to test a change that you just made, but you don't want to go through the hassle of clearing Firefox's entire cache each time just to reload the page without accessing it in it's cache directory?

Instead, you can use one of Firefox's keyboard shortcut to to bypass checking the cache and force it to reload the page as if you never visited the site in the past.

Just press CTRL + F5 on your keyboard to have Firefox override the cache and reload the page.

By doing so you can quickly see any updates to a web page, but still benefit from having your cache contents available when browsing the Net.

And although you don't need a physical adapter, some software, such as VMWare adds virtual network adapters during installation for virtual machine access.

After a while, your System Tray becomes full of little Network icons that are identified as Wireless Network Connection or Local Area Connection of which you can't make heads or tails of the connection that is actually the primary adapter is use.

Not very informative.

Instead, why not rename them to something that you can easily identify which connection is for home, work or when you are traveling?

Rename Network Connections In XP

To rename a connection on your XP computer, just right click on any Network icon in the System Tray and select Open Network Connections.

Another way to access your Network connections is to click on Start \ Run and enter ncpa.cpl in the run box.

You should see all your Network adapters either as icons or in a list as shown in the screen shot below.

To rename a connection, just right and select Rename . You can name the connections anything you want. Just name it so you can easily identify which connection is which, when you mouse over it in the System Tray.

Don't forget to rename the remaining Network connections.

Rename Network Connections In Vista

For Vista owners, renaming your Network connections is done exactly the same way as XP. The only difference is how you open the Network Connections window.

Just right click on any Network icon in the System tray and select Network and Sharing Center.

Then select Manage network connections in the left menu.

Or for quick access, you can access your Network connections by clicking on?? on Start and in the search box enter ncpa.cpl then click on it in the search results.

Follow the same steps as shown under the XP section above to rename your connections.

Once you are finished, identifing which connction is which, will be much easy by just mousing over the icon in the System tray.

But since these drives are basically just an electro-mechanical devices, and like any other machine they will eventually breakdown and fail.

And then oops, without backups, all your family photos, legal documents and important emails are gone!

There are three levels of data or file recovery for a dying or broken hard drive:

1) Basic Level: The drive is working (your can hear it spin up but it will not boot to Windows)

This usually means that some essential Windows files have been comprised or damaged in some way. With the right software you can view your files and even copy them. You have to choices…

Use a Rescue CD: You can grab a bootable CD with hard drive utility software already installed on it. You can then make repairs or copy your files from your bad drive to a replacement. A good name brand rescue CD for Windows is the "Ultimate Boot CD"

Move the Drive: If you don't have a way of burning a rescue CD and don't want to wait for a copy to shipped to you; you can always move your bad drive and place it in another working desktop PC. Once installed you should be able to view all your files on the drive from a secondary slot (normally where the CD or DVD drive live.)

2) Intermediate Level: The drive works but you can't see the files you want using the methods above.

Okay, things are not going good. You at this point have to get out the big guns. You will have to download and run a data recovery program such as "Active UNDELTE", "Recover My Files", etc. Both of these programs are powerful, reliable, and easy to use and won't cost you an arm or a leg to buy.

With Active UNDELETE you can also make a bootable CD to run on a PC if you can't move the drive to another computer. Both have technical support options if you need further help.

3) Advanced Level: You have tried everything above but you still can't find that Last Will from Aunt Sue…

At this point you have probably spent several hours (if not days) without your PC and invested just over a $100 in software if you used all of the above products. Now, is the time for you to decide to either use a professional level recovery application or throw in the towel and take your drive to a recovery specialist.

If you have the time but not a lot of cash (understand that hard drive recovery services can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars) then you can ratchet it up a notch and buy a copy of the home version of EasyRecovery from Ontrack. Ontrack is one of the leading data recovery companies in the world.

But if time is more critical and money is no obstacle then bite the bullet and take your drive to a local computer shop that does recovery work. Or if that is not possible then contact a big service like Ontrack and ship your hard drive to them.

Data recovery can be expensive no matter who does it, so to be on the safe side and make file backups frequently and fully.

Author Chancer Reese - Sick of computer headaches? Tired of wasting money on that "computer repair guy"? To learn more fast and free fixes for your problem PC, visit http://www.fixcomputerproblemsguide.com

One of those features in Google Maps is searching locations by distance. By using distance, you can find locations that are several miles or even several feet from your location. Using this feature can be a real time saver, especially when traveling and your looking for a quick bite to eat, going shopping or sight seeing.

To use this feature, just go to Google Maps and and enter your search phrase. It's best to enter it with the area you are located. For example, say your were in the city of Philadelphia and wanted to find a place to eat pizza.

You would enter your search as: pizza center city philadelphia

In the left navigation, Google will list all the pizza places it knows about. To narrow down the locations and search by distance, click on the Distance link at the top of the list.

Google Maps will display the distance, based on the area that you provided, in reference to the closest pizza restaurant (2500 ft), to the furthest (90 miles).

Now that you narrow down the locations to your local area, click on the restaurant that you want to visit, then in the pop up window (on the map) you can map the directions to pin point the exact directions which will also give you the distance.

You can also search locations by distance using your current address. For example if you wanted to find pizza locations, just enter your search as: pizza 234 Main Street, Philadelphia Pa

Google Maps will then display the display the Distance link (as shown in above screen shot) and from there you can find a location that is easily accessible by walking or driving.

….not really.

Actually Google is pretty smart, especially when you give it a little help with finding exactly what you are searching for. But how do you tell it to find things with words or phrases that have multiple meanings?

Well, since Google is a computer (one big gigantic computer), it can accept commands with the words or phrases you are searching for, just like using a command prompt in Windows.

Here's an example. If you searched for the word batter , Google is going to return a whole slew of search results ranging from batter in terms of Baseball, to batter in terms of cooking and so on.

So, to tell Google that you just want search results for batter relating to Baseball, just use a hyphen (minus sign) and the category you want to exclude after the word you are searching for. For example to exclude cooking with the word batter use the following format:

batter -cooking

Google will return search results that are more relevant based on the query you enter and remove items that don't relate specifically to cooking.

Now, you will probably notice that even though you told Google to exclude a certain category, it still not perfect and other type of results will be mixed in. To get better search results, you should try to be more specific and use phrases.

So using the above example, if you used the phrase baseball batter -cooking the results return will be more specific and you will have less non-relevant items to sift through. To get better results, use two, three or even four word phrases.

As you can see, the Internet is huge, and Google does it;s best to find the possible combinations you are looking for, Sometimes it just needs a little help with understanding exactly what you are searching for.

But the key to doing the venting is to make it effective. In other words, just picking any site to vent probably won't get your message noticed. You need to carefully think out your strategy.

Take this Craiglist post as an example - "To The A$$hole On The Newtown ByPass This Afternoon near I95"

Not bad. In fact it's pretty good (and amazes me how creative people can be). But it needs wings to make it fly around the Internet to be seen. Here's some tips to make venting more effective with out being foul, rude, stupid or ignorant.

• Use Important Keywords In Your Post Title - As any website owner knows, getting your site content noticed on the Internet and searchable by Google, starts with keywords in the title of your post or page with an attention grabbing headline. In the Craigslist example above, the poster did a nice job and made sure to include known roads as keywords in the title. Make sure you also sprinkle those same keywords through out the body of the post (don't go overboard with them).

• Use A Highly Popular Site To Post - According to Hitwise, Craigslist is listed in the top 20 for most popular websites in terms of traffic. In the eyes of Google, this is a good thing. Posting on a site like Craiglist will help get your message get indexed by Google quickly.

• Give it Wings And Bookmark Your Post - No I don't mean in Firefox or IE. Bookmark it at known social bookmarking sites (where you have an account) such as StumbleUpon, delicious, Digg, etc. With a good attention grabbing title, you will be surprised how quickly things can become popular on these sites.

• Kick It Into Overdrive -?? What's the equalvant of spreading gossip on the Internet? Voting up bookmarks. Ever wonder how all those article stories and posts reached the top of Digg, delicious, and other social sites? By people voting in favor of the story which eventually makes it popular. Remember, the title needs to invoke emotions and grab your attention. Don't forget to tell your friends

• Don't Be Stupid - It's one thing to vent your anger, but nobody likes someone who is foul mouth, loud, obnoxious or just wants attention. Make sure you follow the rules, keep it clean, and DON'T stretch the truth. If you do, you'll quickly find yourself on the other end of your objective. Also if you don't want to get sued, consider not adding any identifying characteristics of the car (you know what I mean).

Now anybody who drives on the Newtown ByPass near I95 who wants to be a bone-head, will probably think twice the next time

Drive safely and keep your hands on the wheel (and not out the moon roof).

Instead you keep talking yourself out of doing what really are simple tasks because you don't have the time, keep making excuses, or your just too lazy. You wouldn't let your car run out of gas or never change the oil…right.

Well today is the day to do those computer chores. And to help out, below is a list of the most common items that potentially can ruin your day but are simple to achieve.

Stop using an ordinary power strip - buy and install a good quality surge protector

Electrical storms, lighting strikes, blackouts and car accidents involving power lines all can cause momentary power surges or voltage spikes. These uncontrolled spikes can adversely affect the smooth flow of power to your computer (i.e. fry the components!)

That's why you need to buy and install a good quality surge protector. A good protector should have at least the Underwriter's Lab standard rating of 1449. Look for a label with the words, "transient voltage surge suppressor" and UL 1449.

Stop "forgetting" to do at least a weekly backup

The next question I usually ask, is "Do you have any backups?" More hang-dog looks and shaking of the heads, no.

You can recover from 90% of major computer malfunctions if (and this is the big "IF") you have backup copies of your operating system and data files. Without backups, your dead PC becomes a very expensive metal door stop. Remember the richest man in the world (Bill Gates) made all his fortune with software…not hardware.

Buy a good backup program like Acronis True Image Home or an online service like Mozy.com. Okay… Let's be frank here…"THE" best thing you can do for yourself and your computer is to setup a backup system and stick to it!

Stop downloading, installing and uninstalling lots of and lots of programs; especially unknown freeware and beta applications.

I know this is toughie. The Internet is just full of cool, free and useful software products and utilities. Hey, I couldn't run my little home business without some of them. But folks, spammers and spyware kings have long since known that everyone loves a bargain. And they write up their "products" as freebies too!

Some the most persistent and difficult to remove spyware/viruses I have ever came across have been from me getting a case of download fever and clicking all over the net trying to save a penny here or there on "freeware". Sure I got some killer freeware but I also have gotten some killer adware too!

Then after I downloaded it I had to go through the pain and hassle of uninstalling it or running some anti-spyware to remove it. If the freeware isn't from an established source like Download.com or SourceForge.net then be very careful on what you click on.

Stop letting your hard drive get full of fragmented software files.

The other problem with downloading everything you see is that your hard drive quickly becomes full of used programs, misplaced snippets of code and dead end registry files (registry files are what Windows uses to keep track of what software is installed.)

Uninstalling a program does most of the heavy lifting but no program really is removed clean. So over time your hard drive becomes a cluttered minefield of bits of broken application coding.
So once a week if not more often depending on your download activities, you should defrag your hard disk. Now Windows has its own "Disk Defragmenter" utility built in. This utility works fine but can be horribly slow running. So do your defragging late at night while you are asleep or during the when you are away from home.

Stop picking and using weak passwords

Hey, we al do this one. We all know that a strong password should have a blend of lowercase letters, capitals, numbers and characters like this, "2Tech#Log!" But who the heck could remember some pass word like that?

So we all just plug in something like, "techlog" which a tech savvy 15 year old with a free code cracker off the internet can have broken it in under 30 seconds. And since we use the same password on everything from email to eBay to bank records, anyone who cracks your password now has access to your whole online financial life and identity.

Hackers, crackers and other online thieves are not the super-evil geniuses; they are portrayed to be in books and movies. Sure most are smarter than the average person but like everyone else that they love easy pickings. Why waste all that energy to hack into a bank, when you can easily hack the bank's vice president's home laptop because, she like us, uses the same personal password over and over?

So here's what to do. Create different passwords for different functions. Create really strong ones for your bank, eBay, PayPal accounts. Then use a completely different one for those, "please sign up to receive your free offer" websites.

Tired of losing money on unnecessary downtime and want to reduce your computer headaches? To see more practical and fast computer fixes, visit http://www.fixcomputerproblemsguide.com From Chancer Reese, your Small Business Tech Diva.

Whoa! You get inside and are dazzled and dazed by the sheer number of hard disks…you didn't think it would be this difficult.

All you want is something affordable and reliable but where to start?

Performance vs. Capacity

When you are out shopping for a new drive these are the two main factors you should take into consideration. Performance is based on a computer's drive controllers (connector types), the rotational speed and access times of the drive itself.

Capacity is basically a question of storage space and whether or not your current system can recognize and handle it or not.

Know your connector type

Modern computers can have several different styles of controller interfaces (connector types) and this will greatly determine what kind of drive you can fix into your machine.

The current standard is the IDE or ATA drive. ATA drives can have ATA/66, ATA/100 or ATA/133 connections. Every ATA slot can operate 2 separate devices (2 hard drives, 1 drive/CD or CD/DVD).

The newest drives have SATA (Serial ATA) connectors but can only run device per connector but at a much faster speed. Speaking of which…

"I feel the need for speed!"

The first thing you should find out when looking at a new hard drive is its rotational speed or RPMs (revolutions per minute). The higher the RPM rating a drive has, the faster it will work when in operation. Speed = better performance for both the Windows operating system and other software programs. The average RPM for a hard drive is either 5400 or 7200.

Seek Times. Occasionally you may hear some big time technical person mention the "seek times" for a drive. Seek times are measured in milliseconds and are basically a gauge of how rapidly a software program can locate the data it requires on a given hard drive.

Access times and seek times for our purposes are the same. Most modern home computers have a seek time of about 8ms. So a new drive with a seek time of 9ms is considered a bit slow.

So when looking at speed find the highest RPM matched with the lowest or average seek time.

Bigger is Better?

The next thing you should look at is a device's size or storage space. You ideally should get as big of a drive as you can afford. Hard drive capacity is measured in "megabytes" (million byte size: very old drives), "gigabytes" (billion byte size: current drives), and the very newest are "terabyte" drives (trillion byte size). Like in a house, you can never have "too much" storage room!

So now you know to get a drive with…

- 7200 RPM

- Seek times of 8ms or lower

- With as many Gigabytes as you can afford

- Check with your PC manufacturer to be sure your new drive can be handled by your old computer

Author Chancer Reese, "your Small Office Tech Diva" - Sick of computer headaches? Tired of wasting money on that "computer repair guy"? To learn more fast and free fixes for your problem PC, visit http://www.fixcomputerproblemsguide.com - Hard Drive Crashed?…Repair or Rescue Any Hard Drive today. From Chancer Reese, your Small Office Tech Diva.