One of the questions I answered recently was about computer overheating. In this case, the individual wanted to know the “right” temperature for his processor — but he didn’t mention which processor he was using or its speed.

His underlying problem was that his computer would spontaneously turn off occasionally. This is usually an indication that the motherboard has shut down automatically to prevent overheating and damage to the CPU.

Many computers allow you to monitor the temperature of the processor, the power supply and perhaps other points, too. You may have to run a special program for your motherboard or computer to be able to see these.

The average temperature for the CPU depends on which processor you’re using. Each manufacturer has difference specifications. For that matter, each of their processor models and speeds has different specs.

Read more in Is Your Computer Overheating?

One of the easiest ways to back up your hard drive — whether you have one big C: drive or several partitions — is to use a program that does image backups.

For years, I used a program from PowerQuest called Drive Image. It saved me a lot of time, both in migrating from old hard drives to new hard drives and in recovering from massive problems. I remember that I could copy the backed-up image of a fresh Windows 95 installation, including WordPerfect, Netscape, network card drivers, video drivers and such, onto one CDROM. To restore the hard drive took less than 10 minutes — as opposed to the hours of Windows installation, looking for diskettes, installing programs, etc.

But, backing up my hard drive this way became much more of a bother as the drives became bigger and bigger.

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I bought a new 1 GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro flash drive recently.

When I got to the store that had advertised the drive, they were nowhere to be found. When I asked about it, they had some “in the back.” If the store had actually had the items on the shelf, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised by the U3 Launcher that tried to install software when I inserted the flash drive into my computer.

I had just been reading back issues of Brian Livingston’s Windows Secrets newsletter — where he had the exact same problem.

The Cruzer Micro was actually formatted internally into two “drives”: one non-writeable “CDROM” drive (that’s the icon that Windows showed for it) and one writeable flash drive. In other words, SanDisk had grabbed a chunk of my flash drive’s memory, written auto-running software to it, and then made that portion of the drive non-writeable.

Read more in U3 Flash Drives

Vistastic has a good tip about partitions under Windows Vista.

It seems that Microsoft has encroached on the 3rd party utilitites again — this time including the ability to resize partitions from within Vista. Of course, the 3rd party utilities handle all sorts of partition types, but Vista will probably only handle its own native formatting and NTFS.

Read How To: Resize Partitions in Windows Vista