DJ Dan Shaughnessy asked for advice on switching from CDs to MP3s.

Don Homan's hard drive crashed the day after his laptop's warranty expired. What should he do?

Besides curse the fates and the laptop manufacturer?

Hans Spring recently replaced his old CRT with an LCD. But text is too small in the new monitor's native resolution.

While it's true that LCDs, unlike CRTs, are hard-wired to a single resolution, they can display lower resolutions by upconverting them. The result won't look as good as a monitor with a native 800x600 resolution, but it won't look bad, either.

Joseph Mott wants to know if he can put applications, specifically Microsoft Office applications like Word and Excel, onto a flash drive.

There are applications you can put on a flash drive, but they must be designed with that in mind. And the Microsoft Office applications were not designed for such portability.

An 11-year-old boy is dead, and too much dependence on GPS may be partly to blame.

No reader question, this time. I just want to step onto my soapbox for a moment.

Rroberto18 asked the Answer Line forum about administrator, regular, and guest user accounts.

You definitely need at least one administrator account. Windows won't let you have less than that--and with good reason. Without an administrator account, you can't install software or change Windows' configuration

Judy Port wants to change the text color in desktop icon captions.

Microsoft doesn't provide that option, but there's a trick to turning the default white text to black. You can also turn off the drop shadows.

After reading Why Do HD broadcasts on an HDTV Still Have Sidebars?, Norm Ruddock asked if watching pillarboxed HD broadcasts could ruin his HDTV.

Pillarboxing--displaying a 4x3 image between vertical bars on the side of the screen--is the only way to present a pre-HD TV show or pre-1953 movie on a wide, 16x9 screen without either distorting or cropping the image.

Mike Bell asked the Answer Line forum what an image backup actually backs up. I offer more advise than he asked for.

An image backup is supposed to back up everything on the hard disk drive or a particular partition (depending on what options you used in creating the backup). That includes system files, hidden files, errors, and maybe even the boot sector. Restoring from one should restore Windows and your installed applications to their exact condition when the backup was made. The problem (assuming you don't have a separate data partition), is that your data will also be restored to what it was when you made the backup, losing every document and photo you created since. Therefore, you need a separate backup of your data, which doesn't have to be an image backup.

Carperl asked the Answer Line forum what size external hard drive he should buy for backup.

When people talk about the "size" of a hard drive, they generally mean it's capacity--how many gigabytes of data it holds. But you should also consider its literal, physical size.

Gordon Walter wants to know if an upscaling DVD player will improve the picture on his HDTV.

Probably, but there's no guarantee.

Marshall Alperin followed my advise in Create a Fast Boot Option and create a Fast Book user logon. Then he decided not to keep it. He deleted it in Control Panel, but it's still the default option when he boots.

Sorry that my tip did you no good. Without knowing what's slowing down your PC, I can't guarantee that removing user-specific autoloaders will fix it.