If you have more than one computer, and the computers are networked, you probably want to share resources like files, folders, and printers over the network. As a rule of thumb it makes no difference if the network is wired, wireless, or both, or even if the computers connect through a router or access point, the computers only see network devices.

There are now printers that have an ethernet port, or a radio to wirelessly connect to an access point, but you may also have an old fashioned printer that connects directly to your computer through a USB or some other cable connection. Sharing a printer is simple.

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When upgrading your hard drive to a bigger faster hard drive the Norton Ghost utility called Copy My Hard Drive can make the upgrade quick, easy, and painless. Copy My Hard Drive used to be referred to as cloning the hard drive.

First we’ll need to prepare the new hard drive. Click the Windows Start button -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management.

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On my home network I have a Cisco Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router that has a built-in firewall, and I run McAfee Security Center that also includes a firewall for each machine it is installed on. I tried sharing files and folders, and printers, between a wired PC and a wireless PC, but was denied. It makes no difference on a network if the PCs are wired or wireless, because they all look the same on the network, and use the same protocols.

Since I could see the other PC on the network, but I could not see any printers, or shared files and folders, I suspected the McAfee firewall was blocking the ports needed to share.

Let’s setup sharing between these computers.

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Some installations of Windows Vista and Windows 7 hide the administrative tools so they don’t appear on the All Programs menu list, forcing you to go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools. There’s an easy way to unhide the administrative tools so they appear in your All Programs menu list.

First right click on the Windows Start button, and click Properties.

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This article will help computer users who have found their computer getting slower and slower over the years. It’s when a person’s computer starts to slow down that they notice ads, like the example below, asking if their computer has slowed down, and then tries to sell them software to remove worms, viruses, spyware, malware, and to optimize your computer, whatever that means, but most often the problem is just a bloated Windows index database.

As the years go by, and you add more and more files and programs to your computer, it slows down incrementally until one day you start considering purchasing a newer faster computer, or start to become concerned that the computer has become infected.

Before buying a new computer, adding RAM, buying a faster hard drive, or purchasing software to clean infections that can waste time and slow your computer down even further, turn off the indexing service first and see if that fixes the problem, and restores your computer back to its old fast self.

The indexing service is supposed to speed up a search for files on the hard drive, which is rarely done by most people, so it’s not like there’s much to lose by turning indexing off.

This tutorial will walk you through turning off the indexing service in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Window XP.

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