When you

install a program

to a clean

hard drive, the program files

will be laid out in a

contiguous order

. Over time, the files may be moved around and become noncontiguous, which is what you're fixing when you

defragment your hard drive

. We explain more about

file contiguity

in this tutorial.

When a

program or application

has problems or needs tweaking then you'll often hear of the software company releasing a

patch for that software

. You can

download patches

to

fix your software

and these patches are generally much smaller files than the actual software. We tell you more about patches in this episode.

To do more with your

MacBook Air

, you'll need to install programs on it. Of course, the MacBook Air doesn't have an

optical drive

, but there are other options available. In this episode, we show you

how to install programs onto your MacBook Air

using

USB keys, external hard drives

and Apple's own

Remote Disc

feature.

Those of you who are familiar with

computer components and hardware

know how important

Random Access Memory

(RAM) is. It's what determines

how well your programs run

on your computer and how many programs you can run simultaneously. We'll tell you more about

how RAM affects your computer

in this tutorial.

BlackBerry OS 6.0

makes multitasking much easier for the BlackBerry. Not only is the

application switcher

bigger and easier to use, it's also much simpler to

close your BlackBerry applications

for when you need to

free up some memory

and

speed up your BlackBerry

Torch.

Defragmenting is a common process used to keep

computers running efficiently

and is part of

routine computer maintenance

. That being said, you might not know

what defragmentation means

. In this tutorial, we'll tell you

what fragmentation is

and explain

how defragmenting helps computers

work faster.

Once you have

Ubuntu installed

, you'll probably want to get some software to try with it. By default, Ubuntu comes with several applications that you can use on a day to day basis, but there are many more

software packages

available for free. In this episode, we go over some

Ubuntu tips

and must-have apps.

On

Windows computers

, you may be told to look to the system tray to find a program or icon. In this episode, we tell you

what the system tray is

and explain some of the things you can find in the system tray, such as the

time and date

,

volume controls

and more.

If you've got an Android phone, you may have wondered if there is a way to

manually update your Android applications

. There is and it's fairly easy to do. In this tutorial we'll show you

how to update Android applications

and at the same time

how to see available updates

by program.

Not every program that runs on your

Android phone

is a program, so to speak. There are some that are called widgets and they work a bit differently. Unlike regular programs they don't just install themselves so you have to add them manually. Here's

how to install a widget

on your Android.

When you're working on a computer there are programs that you use over and over again. The same is true when

working with your Android phone

. You may not be aware of it, but your

Android phone has a quick launch feature

to make switching between programs even easier.

With some mobile devices you can't be certain exactly what's running and it can be difficult to stop programs. Not true on your Android device. You can easily look at running services and stop them if desired.

It happens. You download a piece of software to try it out and it turns out, you don't really use it. Whether you use the software or not, it still takes up space on your computer and can slow things down. Remove software you're not using. It's easy! We'll show you how.

If you hate hunting through your growing list of software shortcuts in your programs menu, there is an easy way to arrange them in alphabetical order to save you time and hassle.