When you finally make the decision to start fresh with a new OS on a new hard drive, it can be nerve-wracking. If you’ve been following proper hard disk etiquette, most of your programs and data should be stored on different drives or partitions than your operating system, but somehow important data has a way of making its way onto your C: drive. And although you can do your best to make sure you back up all the data you want to keep (your My Documents folder, for instance), it’s hard not to feel like you’re forgetting something.

You don’t have to worry. Thanks to new tools from Microsoft in Windows 7, you can preserve your entire hard disk on another drive as a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). So don’t worry that you’ll forget important data on your old drive—just freeze it solid, like Han Solo in a block of carbonite, and rest easy knowing that if you suddenly recall that you left something important on your drive, you can simply run it as a virtual PC, or mount it to your new system.

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In the decade or so since the rise and fall of Napster, it’s become very hard to find a single person who doesn’t keep a super-size collection of MP3s on their hard drive. That’s all well and good, but what happens when you get a new roommate or move in with a significant other, and want to merge two music collections into one? Windows 7 and most popular music library managers, like Windows Media Center, iTunes, and WinAmp offer solutions for sharing your music library over a home network, but a big decentralized library (likely with lots of duplicate files) spread out over a network is inefficient, hard to manage, and hard to keep backed up. In this article, we’ll show you how you can use a free program to merge multiple libraries into a single, organized music archive.

With the arrival of the much-hyped iPad and the rest of tablet-mania, it seems like ebooks are about to have their “iPod moment,” when they’ll go from a favorite of early adopters and bibliophiles to a mainstream phenomenon. There’s one problem, though: Unlike MP3s, there’s not a single, near-universal standard for ebooks. Historically, this has made it difficult to organize your ebooks and transfer them between various reading devices.

Fortunately, there’s one program that can help you solve nearly all of your ebook-related problems: Calibre. A free, open-source project, Calibre is one part iTunes-esque library-management program, one part batch-conversion tool, and one part file-transfer manager. In this article, we’ll show you how to use Calibre to manage your ebooks and to get them working on any reader.

Continue reading after the jump.