The Business Centre

Virtually all commercially-sold PCs come with some sort of recovery tool--an alternate way to boot your system (either a CD, a DVD, or a special key combination to press shortly after turning on your PC) that can return your hard drive to its factory condition. Thus, with just a few keystrokes, you can once again have a working copy of Windows, along with all the bundled junk you studiously removed, and none of your own files.

If you click Start, type cookies, and press ENTER, Vista tries to do what XP did: Take you to your Cookies folder, located at C:\Users\your logon\cookies. Except that the Cookies folder isn't there. What is there is a pointer that tells Vista where the real cookies folder can be found. Since Vista doesn't believe you should be privy to this information, it tells you it's not accessible.

Admit it: You've lusted after the giant 30-inch desktop monitors you've seen in stores. Imagine what you could do with all that screen real estate, and all those pixels! But hold on a minute--those giant displays aren't necessarily all they're cracked up to be.

Just ask anyone who's seen Spiderman 3: good ideas seldom survive bad execution.

It's great to have multiple computers. On the first of them, you can install a database or crunch spreadsheets. On another, you can simply browse the Web, listen to music, and check your e-mail. Yet another can have a supercharged configuration for playing games. Sure, you could have all of your programs on the same, single computer, but some applications -- such as games -- can't run concurrently with other programs.

My guess is most people don't use Google's new Chrome Web browser as their primary browser yet. Google still has a long way to go with the browser adding features and fixing problems. Nevertheless, I've collected what I think are some of the most useful tips and the most interesting tweaks for the Chrome browser.

Without an administrator-level account you can log onto, you can't install new software, edit the registry, or really maintain the PC in decent condition. Windows won't just tell you someone else's password, or let you change it to something you know, but there are ways.

I bought a new hard drive for my laptop recently, and set out to install it Tuesday morning. No big deal; I've updated hard drives before.

It usually goes like this: An ad in the paper (or online) catches your eye. It lists a few product specs and claims some special features, but that's about it. Still, the price seems okay. May as well pull out the wallet now, right? Wrong!

Has the new edition of AVG, your beloved free antivirus tool, slowed your system to a crawl? Is the sound missing from your favorite time-wasting YouTube videos?

Both Windows XP and Vista come with remote control programs called Remote Assistance, but they're too difficult for a novice to set up.