Bob Engel asked the Answer Line Forum how he could copy and paste text without pasting the font and other formatting along with the actual words.

I use a free little program by Steve Miller called PureText. This is one of the few programs I'm actually delighted to have running in my system tray.

Don Dalton installed Vista's SP1 update, encountered "a multitude of problems," and uninstalled it. Can he safely go on indefinitely without it?

Windows service packs can be the stuff of nightmares. Do you let Microsoft do a major, remote-control overhaul of your operating system that might break something that was working just fine? Or do you ignore a service pack that plugs some serious security holes and is more likely to fix something that's already broken than to break something new?

An anonymous reader wants to erase tracks that show he's visited certain web sites, but without erasing his entire surfing history.

Whether this will be easy, difficult, or impossible depends on what browser you use.

ImAWhat asked the Answer Line forum why, when he has two USB devices plugged into his "really cheap laptop," he can't run a third.

The first thing you should do is make sure the ports are working. Unplug all of your USB devices, then pick a dependable one and try it out in each port. If it fails to work in one of them, the problem isn't the number of ports, but that particular one.

An anonymous reader's ex-boyfriend has been posting sexually-explicit personal ads on Craigslist, using her name. How can she stop him?

The first thing you should do is contact the web site with the illicit postings. In this case that's Craigslist, which maintains an abuse page in their Help section. A spokesperson assured me that "In most cases, we're able to resolve issues within a very short period of time, often less than an hour."

Kevin Germino wants to know if he can reinstall Microsoft Office onto a reformatted hard drive without losing one of the licenses to use it.

I checked with a Microsoft contact (that's one of the perks of my job, and it's a lot easier than trying to decipher an End User Licensing Agreement). The answer is yes. You're allowed to move a license (how many licenses you have depends on your version of Office) from one computer to another. You can also reinstall it onto the same computer.

After reading my tip about creating a shutdown shortcut, Dan Sweet asked for one that will hibernate his PC.

12/20: Reader g.swett and Venkatesan Sundaram caught errors in the commands below. I have altered my instructions accordingly, underlining the new text. My thanks for the corrections.

Update, December 23: I have corrected the URL for the PC-Decrapifier. My thanks to Jason York for bringing this to my attention.

C17SSgt asked the Forum for the steps in getting a new PC ready for use.

Dreamweever66 needs to reinstall Windows. He asked the Answer Line forum where he can find that 20-digit number that tells Microsoft he bought Windows.

The fact that you have a Windows CD handy doesn't prove to Microsoft that you've paid for the right to use it. That's why you're required to enter your Product ID (PID, also sometimes called the Registration Key) when you reinstall Windows. But where do you find it?

kckrug1994 asked the Answer Line Forum if a game or application would will work if installed onto an external drive.

It would probably work in most cases, but expect problems. Obviously the application won't be there when the drive isn't plugged in. With some programs, that could give you grief even if you don't intend to run the program. Also, USB is slower than EISA and SATA, so the program won't perform as well as it should.

I answer my own question: Is the information in your Gmail messages and other Google apps safe from data disasters?

Regular Answer Line readers know that I'm a fanatic about backing up. My first rule of computing: Never have only one copy of anything.

Arcticsid asked the Answer Line Forum how he could find out what's using up so much of his PC's physical memory.

Short answer: Windows.