In the meantime, don’t get discouraged. Most DSL and cable internet connections won’t max out the speed of an 802.11g router, and the range is also usually sufficient if the router is strategically positioned. Try to position your router somewhere near the center of your house, and give the antennas clearance. Instead of putting your router underneath your computer desk, position it behind your monitor, or somewhere up high. The direction of the antennas can also make a difference, but straight up is usually best.

The Linksys WRT54GL is probably the most stable router of all time. On Newegg.com, it’s won 27 customer choice awards, the most reviews, and the best overall rating. If you want to plug in your router, and forget about it, this one is for you. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124190

Most netbooks use Intel’s dime-sized Atom processor– the Atom N270 processor’s performance is roughly equivalent to a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz.

Some of the leading netbooks of today would include Dell’s Mini Netbook, Acer’s Aspire One, and Asus’ Eee Pc.  Out of these, Asus’ Eee Pc was first to the field, and I think they still have an edge over the competition. I’ve been using an Eee Pc for about a year, and I love it.

My favorite netbook at the moment is the Eee Pc 1005HA with 10.5 hours of battery life! I doubt that the battery would actually perform quite that well outside of the lab, but that’s still quite impressive! When I got my earlier generation Eee Pc a year ago, they were advertising a 7 hour battery life, and I got about 5 hours of juice.

The various Eee PC models have a lot of variety– with different screen sizes, processor speeds, storage types, and battery life. Amazon.com carries a lot of the varieties and older models, so it’s a great website for comparisons of features and prices.

One thing that disappoints me is that netbooks typically only come with 1GB of memory, which is definitely a performance bottleneck. The good news is that it’s easy to upgrade to 2GB, and it only costs about $25. Changing the memory is as simple, and here are directions.

Another thing to keep in mind is that netbooks can be hard on your eyes if you use them a lot. If you’re going to want to use a netbook as your primary computer, you may want to consider getting a LCD monitor that you can plug into when you’re home.

Losing data is always a painful thing, but here are some tips that will help you know whether or not your file might be recoverable. My next article will explain some steps you can take to avoid data loss in the future.

Let me compare your hard drive to a book. Just like a book has a table of contents, a hard drive has a Master File Table (MFT). The MFT stores information like the names and locations of files on the disk.

When you delete a file, it’s usually still there, and has simply been removed from the MFT. It’s like having a book with a chapter that’s not listed in the table of contents. Files like that are easy to recover as long as they haven’t been overwritten by another file, so you’ll want to recover sooner rather than later if possible.

If you deleted your file a while back, it might be difficult to recover, because once a file is removed from the MFT a new file can be written on top of where the old one was. Similarly, if you save an old or bad version of a file that has the same name as a file you’ve been working on, you overwrite the file with bad data. In many programs, you can undo changes by clicking Undo (File->Undo), but once you close the file this option will probably be unavailable.

If your drive isn’t showing up in My Computer, you’ll want to make sure that everything is plugged in properly, and then check Disk Management (Go to the Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management) to see if it’s showing up there. You should also check and see if it shows up in your system BIOS (Usually you get there by pressing f2 or del on your keyboard during start up, but it varies). If it’s not showing up, your drive is probably dead.

If you have a drive that has suddenly stopped showing files that used to be there, they may have been deleted or possibly the MFT has simply become corrupt. Data recovery software can usually help in these sorts of situations.

Even without spending any money you can run free file recovery software, such as the free version of Handy Recovery I linked to above, which can recover data in most basic scenarios. If the free version won’t cut it, you can download a trial for the full fledged version to see if you’ll be able to recover the data you’ve lost. If the files are there, you can recover them by buying a license for $49. If you have a Mac, one option for data recovery software I’ve used with good success is Data Rescue.

Let me start by describing the main components of a computer by comparing them to your kitchen.  The CPU or processor is essentially the brain of the computer and does the “thinking” involved with everything you do on your computer.  You could compare the speed of the processor to the speed of a cook in preparing a meal.  One way to err, is to think that you can make accurate comparisons based on the Gigahertz (GHz) of a processor.  Regrettably, the GHz of a processor is not a reliable ‘real world’ indicator of performance.  We’ll talk about this more later on.

Your hard drive is like your kitchen cupboards.  If you run out of space to put things, you have to stop getting more dishes and tools for your kitchen, unless you can add more cabinets.  However, even though a kitchen’s pots and pans don’t grow, the number of files on your computer will continually grow as you use your computer.  If you enjoy music or photos, it’s better to err on the side of getting a drive that allows you some room for growth.

Your memory is like the counter top space in your kitchen.  Have you ever tried making a meal without enough counter space?  If you don’t have enough memory, the computer ends up moving data around a lot, and slows things down significantly.  If you’re planning on using your computer for more than simple web browsing and document editing, you’ll probably want to upgrade from the standard amount memory if you can.  Upgrading the memory is usually one of the least expensive and most effective ways to increase performance on an older computer.

When you evaluate a computer, one of the primary things to look at is the processor.  You can compare a processors performance to others at websites like cpubenchmark.net, but there are a number of other things to consider as well, such as: the amount of hard drive space and memory.  If you’re a computer gamer or if you work with a lot of media, the sound card, speakers, video card and screen will also be major considerations, but if you’re mainly just browsing the web and editing documents cutting back costs in these areas will save you money.

Next time you’re looking for parts for your computer, like a wireless router, LCD monitor, USB flash drive, or some extra memory, I’d recommend NewEgg.com.  They’re well known for low prices, great service, and speedy delivery.  They allow you to sort products by popularity and rating, and reading a few reviews can be a really helpful in making your decision if you’re not exactly sure what you want and need.