I am always amazed when people say they have loads of photos or music that they do not want to lose or cannot replace yet have never backed up these valuables. If your hard drive fails tomorrow you have a very real problem. You are not alone in this and I am not trying to be mean spirited but if you fail to look after you and your possessions then who will? For less than $50 you can buy a name brand DVD-RW and for under $20 you can buy 100 blank DVDs. You can buy a lesser amount of blanks of course, that is a choice you can make. The DVD will come with software you install to use it. Or if you already have blank CDs you could use those in the DVD burner. If you back some of that stuff up and remove it from this computer it may well run faster because you will have more free space on the hard drive for the swap file to work better. Does your activity light come on frequently and stay on for long periods? If so this is an indication the swap file is have a problem. Then if you really want to get carried away you can visit Big Lots where they have (or did recently in the Buffalo, NY store) CD or DVD labels and the software to create your own labels for $10 or $11. Another option would be to install this hard drive as a slave in the new computer you intend to buy. You would need to check that there are compatible data connections in the new computer. Older hard drives are IDE or ATA but the newer and faster technology is SATA.

I'm planning my high school reunion and I have emails saved from the previous two reunions with information in them that I need to have access to to read and reply to. All this reunion planning is clogging up my personal email for friends and family so I set up a new email address to use just for reunion planning. While I have that inbox open, I don't have access to folders that are associated with my personal address so I'd like to transfer them over somehow. If I have to, I'll forward everything but I'm thinking there is another way.

Try searching for 'Outlook Express Tutorials'. I don't have time right now to read it. Last summer my OE crashed and I lost EVERYTHING in it. Now I have a folder on my desktop labeled 'email'. I highlight whatever I want to save , go up to 'file', 'save as' and browse to the email folder and click 'save'. Time consuming and there may be a better way but I haven't found it yet.

Have an organized hierarchy of folders just for your photos. You will have to decide where you want them and make the folders. When you plug in your camera, I have to use a card reader, but many models that isn't needed, your computer will ding when it has recognized the camera as new hardware. Go to Windows Explorer (obviously if you are on another platform this won't work), and navigate to the new drive assigned to your camera, it will be under all your C:\ files somewhere showing as F, G, depending on what else is on your system. They may be in a series of folders on in just one folder, depends on the flash card. It might be a folder called DCIM, then when you open that or click on the plus beside it, it shows something about your camera name. Open the camera folder(s) (one at a time if there are more than one), and you should see thumbnails of your photos start to be generated. When all the thumbnails show, do an edit>select all. Then do an edit>copy to folder and navigate to the folder you want to put them in. Then click ok or some prompt. Windows will show your photos being copied unless there are just a few in which case it will go very fast. If you don't want to copy all the photos, select individual ones by holding down the ctrl key after highlighting the first one and select those you want. Don't let up the ctrl key until you've selected all the photos you want. If you want a block of files but not all of them in the folder, highlight the first one you want, hold down the shift key and highlight the last one. That will select every photo in that series. Copy to the folder you want as before. If you want all but the first several or so, highlight all of them, then do an edit>inverse selection and it will automatically select all the ones you didn't highlight. These are just little tricks to make things speedier once you get used to it. That's all there is to it. It gets to be second nature. Be sure to back up all your photos at least one place, preferably two, like an external portable hard drive, dvd, cd or something, and don't alter the originals in any way. If you edit them in Photoshop, save them in a new folder. It's good to open your photo, duplicate it, close the original. That way you can't accidentally overwrite your original unless you try very hard. The copy gives it the same name with copy # added. I have a Work File for each month where I keep photos I've worked on in Photoshop, sometimes a subfolder for a special event. Maybe Picasa requires you to use your desktop which is clumsy and dumbed-down way to archive your photos imo.