A new school year can be stressful for the kiddies heading back with books, backpacks, and probably some new laptops here and there. This is a great time to make sure their computer is ready for a new year. Give them a system clear of Virus and spyware. Clear out old temp files. Defrag the hard drive. You never know how much space is needed for taking notes frorm the new teacher.

Can you believe we're approaching the end of the summer, I can't? It just doesn't seem possible that we're in August already and getting ready for my favorite holiday, National Catfish Month. Grab some chicken livers, some treble hooks, and give momma something to fry up for Ask The Pros Snacks.

Sometimes, it's easy to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of a piece of software. Other times, you may have a lot of trouble. That's the fun of working with software. Microsoft rolls up a whole bunch of patches and bug fixes, and throw them out there. Those are called service packs, of course. Windows XP is on service pack 3 currently. Louis from the PCPitStop community wrote in to ask about a compatibility issue with XP SP3.

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.

Our good friend Chris Pirillo has stepped in to help us answer one of the numerous Ask the Pros questions that have come in. This week, Chris tackles a question from Candace who is wondering "how (she) can speed up her computer without adding memory".

Question
1. Agnes S. asks: what is Bing?

Answer
(A). The begining of the end for Google.
(B). An old dead Crosby
(C). A powerful search engine.
(D). Another "gotcha" from Mircosoft.
(E). All of the above.

Things have picked up in Ask The Pros this month. It makes me think that many of us are upgrading our systems as opposed to passing them along and replacing. I know I'm using the same system I had two years ago and for me that's a long time.

That brings us to a question from Mary. She's beating all around the edges of a problem I ran into last year. All I wanted was to upgrade to a newer, faster laptop drive. As usual, it didin't turn out to be that easy.

Another busy week for ASK THE PROS. Some interesting questions that cover a lot of ground so let's get to it.

Q. K. Woods asks: How do I make a bootable disk with an ISO file?

A. Thanks K. Woods, You are correct, an ISO image or file is used to make a bootable disk. It’s a CD image file that instructs your system to give a prompt to boot to CD when installing operating systems or anything that needs a bootable disk. They are also commonly used for Games.

Every week ASK THE PROS receives questions about drivers. They are not always the same but between looking for specific drivers and wanting to know how to find drivers, the questions mount up. A few weeks back I referenced our Drivers 101 offering. It comes with every DriverAlert subscription. It’s an excellent guide but there’s something missing. How do I save the drivers that are installed on my PC now? That’s the question to start this month’s ASK THE PROS.

Lots of new questions in the Ask The Pros box this week. This first, answered by Doug Bender, will help not only Dave, but anyone who might have a compromised system. Taking advantage of the talent on our forums is an area of PC Pitstop that many people miss. Help from our fourms is a big part of our fight to keep your system clear of malware and running in top form.

Q. Dave Asks: “Hi Pro's, Here’s my problem. Sometime after my daughter's last visit from college my computer stopped recognizing me as the "administrator" on my "network." Since then I have lost my control panel and can't make any changes to my system.