You’ll notice that the title of this article does not say format a hard drive but rather erase. Most people are under the assumption that formatting a hard drive erases everything on it. Not true. A formatted drive can have its data recovered easily with utilities like this one. Residual data that remains on a hard drive after it’s been formatted is...

Make no mistake, hard drives run hot. Granted, they’re not a hot as the processor or the RAM, but processors have big fat heat sinks and a fan cooling them down and you can get RAM with heat spreaders. So what can you do to cool off the hard drive? Attach a fan to it. How much do they cost? They can be as little a 3 bucks or as expensive as 30 bucks. The...

Periodically I am asked whether it’s “safe” to leave a computer on all the time. The answer is yes if it’s a desktop (meaning not a laptop). Chances are if you’ve been using computers long enough you’ve encountered at least one instance where some type of hardware failure occurred right as you turned on the box – and...