(This is the fourth in a series of posts covering information taken from my latest book, Upgrading and Fixing Computers Do-It-Yourself For Dummies.) Let your computer double as a TV set by adding a TV tuner — a gadget that pulls in a TV signal, letting you channel surf and watch shows on your monitor. [...]

A: When writing information to your hard drive, Windows usually breaks the files into pieces, stuffing them into whatever empty space it can find. When retrieving a file, Windows rummages for those scattered pieces, which takes a little time. To speed things up, Windows includes a disk defragmentation program: The program gathers up all those [...]

(This is the second in a series of posts covering information taken from my latest book, Upgrading and Fixing Computers Do-It-Yourself For Dummies.) What do you do with your old computer once you’ve bought your new one? With a little creativity, you can salvage a lot of it. That makes you a recycler in the [...]

(This is the first of a series of posts covering information taken from my latest book, Upgrading and Fixing Computers Do-It-Yourself For Dummies.) Windows 7’s Backup and Restore program lets you create a “System Image,” as well as a regular backup. Different from a regular backup, System Image contains everything on your computer’s C drive: [...]

Q: My 250 GB hard disk has two partitions: one-third of the drive is the C: partition, the other two-thirds is on the D: partition. I’d like to delete my empty D:  partition, and expand the C: partition to fill the entire 250 GB of space. How do I do this? Do I need a [...]