Windows Illiteracy Filter. Help me help my mother via long-distance to understand the difference between memory and hard disk storage, and how to access information on her Windows XP machine that will tell her how much memory she has, if there are any empty slots, what type of memory her computer requires, and how large her hard drive is, including used/available space stats. [more inside]
posted by Devils Rancher on Nov 29, 2008 - 14 answers

Is Firefox churning my Powerbook? When I have more than a few tabs open, I hear (and see- on my little menubar app) heavy hard drive activity. It feels like it gets stuck in some kind of endless swap and the performance of the machine seems to suffer. More importantly, the noise drives me nuts. I suspect Firefox memory management issues. I know Firefox has a bad rep in this dept. Suggestions? Tweeks? Opera?
posted by Area Control on Nov 6, 2007 - 18 answers

How long can a hard drive store data ? [more inside]
posted by sgt.serenity on Sep 7, 2007 - 11 answers

I'd like to upgrade my 4 year old Dell Dimension 8200 computer, while hopefully getting components that I could use later, should I decide to build a whole new system in a few months. Sadly, I know nearly nothing about computer hardware. [more inside]
posted by Elpoca on Jan 5, 2006 - 23 answers