Be sure to take out both the memory and the hard drive. You can re-use the memory in other computers or sell it on ebay. By the way, when you are looking to upgrade the memory in your computer keep an eye on the price for at least a week or so to get the best deal; the prices go up and down on a daily basis.

Now, as for the old hard drive; if it still works you can buy a hard drive enclosure and use it as an external back up drive. If it no longer works, you should destroy it. You can do this by leaving it in a bucket of water for a few days or taking a hammer to it (wear eye protection). Unfortunately, there are people out there who pick up used computers just to see if they can retrieve someone's financial information from the hard drive!

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If you use Firefox, check out this page.

How many times do I have to say it? You need a firewall on your computer and not the standard Windows firewall either. My personal preference is Zone Alarm, but use whatever works for you. My choice in using Zone Alarm is due to it's ease of use and I have the security suite which means my firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware and privacy software is all rolled into one meaning no conflicts.

Whatever firewall you may choose to use, just make sure you have one, and if you ever have to disable it for upgrades or installing a picky software program disconnect from the net first.

Not having a firewall on a computer connected to the internet is like leaving your front door open for anyone to enter.

Take a look at My Other Drive. They offer 5gigs of free online storage and then higher levels for very reasonable prices. One of the things that make this online storage site different from others is they allow you to pick and choose which files or folders you want to share and which you want to keep private. A lot of others are all or none.

Please verify the email with the unbelievable story you are about to forward to everyone you know because odds are, it's not true.  www.snopes.com

Anytime you're in doubt on how to go about an action whether on the internet or in a program, try right clicking the object in question.

If you continually run into network interference from a neighbor or nearby business network, change the channel on your router.

If you've changed channels and nothing seems to work, try this Netgear adapter kit. It's plug and play right out of the box, nothing complicated here.

Set up your Office documents to "autosave" every few minutes and be sure to turn on the "embed fonts" option. Both of these can be found under Word, Tools, Options in 2003 and under the Word Start menu, Options in 2007..

Someone just asked me how to add a laptop to their wireless network and while the instructions are far too long to add here, it made me think of a few items to share. When setting up your wireless network for the first time, be sure to change the following settings:

             The name of your wireless network should be unique and not the default description and never use anything identifiable. Believe it or not, I've seen wireless networks that have been addresses and names!

             Hide your network, this means set to "do not broadcast". Just make sure when adding your wireless network to the laptop you click the little box for hidden networks.

             Use Mac address filters. This is where you find each computers Mac address and add it to your routers settings. I'm assuming here if you're setting up your own wireless network you are savvy enough to know where to find your Mac address. (hint... use ipconfig /all in the cmd prompt)

I'm not going to lie and tell you that this will make your network invincible because there is no such thing. However, anything you can do to make it difficult for a hacker you should do.