Howdy and Happy Independence Day to everyone in the US. The past week has seen more questions on drives and boot problems so I decided to take a good look at Windows Disk Management. Disk Management has always been a good utility, but starting with Vista and continuing into Windows 7, it has become a powerful and simple way to format and partition drives. You can manage the drive your booting from, or you can format and partition new drives for later installations and use.

Let's take a look at this weeks question and see where it takes us.

Welcome everyone to a new and very exciting part of PC Pitstop. Roughly a year ago, as part of the incredibly popular OverDrive test, we began collecting user input about PC satisfaction. We began asking the following three questions:

• * How satisfied are you with this PC?
• * Is this PC running slow?
• * Is this PC hanging or requiring frequent reboots?

By Steve Bass

Hard drives are about as dependable as a teenager promising to come home by midnight. The more you know about your drive--the brand-specific idiosyncrasies and the diagnostic sounds that drives produce--the better prepared you are for the inevitable crash.

Microsoft has released their pricing for Windows 7. For most users in the US, this breaks down to three important levels; retail, preorder promotion, and recent purchase upgrade.

The recent purchase upgrade is no real deal for consumers because without it, desktop and laptop sales would grind to a halt. It's not a consumer gift, it's a demand by systems manufacturers to insure survival.

Welcome to the official second edition of the PC Pitstop Free Software Report. I want to thank everyone for the tons of comments both positive and negative. We are listening. More importantly, many of our readers learned more from the comments than our Top Software List! In fact, I even learned a few things.

The sleuths over at Engadget have apparently uncovered an internal memo from Best Buy outlining plans for Windows 7 upgrades beginning in late June. This goes along with information from Microsoft describing the Technology Guarantee or Windows 7 Upgrade program, as it has been called lately.

Each month we select the best of the tips submitted by members of the PC Pitstop community.

*Open Task Manager in 2 Clicks

*8 Simple Steps to a Faster PC

*Better Firefox Privacy

*20 Free (Non Windows) OS Downloads

By Harry McCracken

The first few years of PC history were its stone age–the era when any signs of life whatsoever were history-making. The period from 1985 to the present, as amazing as it’s been, has been one of consistency and compatibility. Which is why I think of 1980-1985 as the most interesting half-decade in PC history. Almost every new system (including some that debuted in 1979) was still an experiment–and even flops could be fascinating. Herewith a gallery of notable examples, illustrated with evocative drawings from Google Patents.

By: John Dodge

You can have a netbook in any color you want as long as it’s black. While that timeworn notion thought to be coined by Henry Ford is changing, it would still seem to be the case (pun intended) from netbook leader Acer which dominates a third of market.