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

Can I get my WD external hard drive back to the way it was? [more inside]
posted by droplet on Aug 19, 2008 - 8 answers

short history: I started to get blue screens on my outdated laptop so I decided to just buy a new one. My new laptop came, I installed a fresh version of xp, rebooted, and plugged my old external in. I got the "Installing drivers for you new hardware" bubble in the task bar then after opening the external drive none of my files were there, but there was the four following: clean (Windows nt command script) install (folder ) windows (folder.. with a windows installation I didn't do!) $$ rename (text document) 230 gigs gone :( The only thing I can think of is the initial blue screens on my OLD laptop were caused by a virus that had infected my external drive? This had all my school notes, notes on books I've read, photos, backups of my old laptops partitions, all that kind of stuff from the past 3 years. I'm feeling kinda, sick, pissed off, and am wondering what the crap could have happened? Any help on this one would be VERY appreciated.
posted by debu on Jan 11, 2008 - 17 answers

my brother had a corrupt system file that causes windows XP media center ed. to not boot up. while in the recovery console, he accidentally clicked an option to restore the computer to factory settings. Is it possible to recover the data he lost?
posted by FireStyle on Jun 18, 2007 - 2 answers

Sony VAIO SZ shutdown - startup issues. [more inside]
posted by trinarian on Jul 31, 2006 - 1 answer

Can I dual boot from an XP drive that came from older (dead) computer? [more inside]
posted by DZ-015 on Jul 10, 2006 - 3 answers

Windows XP crashes whenever it accesses a specific file. The problem: I don't know what file it is. What would cause such a serious error and how do I fix it? [more inside]
posted by monsta coty scott on Feb 18, 2006 - 8 answers

Is there any Windows XP utility that will tell me what program is accessing my hard drive? [more inside]
posted by crazyray on Nov 23, 2005 - 10 answers

What should I do with my new hard drive? [more inside]
posted by jewishbuddha on Apr 21, 2005 - 11 answers

I've just bought a Lacie 160 gigabyte firewire drive. It's to be plugged into a Windows XP machine, but also to be written to and read by a Mac OSX machine. I want to format it with the FAT32 file system, but Windows won't let me. Is there a way to force the drive to format as FAT32? [More inside...] [more inside]
posted by skylar on Oct 28, 2004 - 5 answers