Why our new PCs are bigger than our old ones...

I think most of us already know the answers to that, but for those who don't, or haven't thought much about it, you should get this freebie program shown above. It has all sorts of additional features, however, and many of them also involve downloading yet another program to be included in the main one.

But getting back to answering my own question, one reason we need so much more RAM and such larger hard-drives is to accommodate the latest trend towards making these new computers practically 'idiot-proof'. They do that by building in a recovery system which is hidden away in a special section of the drive, or in another partition of the drive, and that recovery system contains a duplicate copy of (A) itself; and (B) the computer's operating system which has been installed, and which you may need to replace if you've messed it up sufficiently to require such a drastic remedy.

This, in the case of Acer machines, usually means the hard-drive is partitioned into two separate partitions; the first (C:\ drive) having the boot sectors and operating system and your own files & folders, and the second partition, ( usually named Data, with another letter to identify it) which contains all this 'secret' or hidden recovery stuff. If and when you have to use that recovery, what happens is that it wipes out whatever was on that first or (C:\) drive section, and basically reformats that into a clean drive, and then it replaces everything from the other recovery section back onto the main (C:\) drive again. Your computer is now back to its factory condition, with its recovery and operating system just as it was when it left the factory - but minus all your own personal files and folders. You have to replace all those yourself, because the system doesn't save them for you. (That's to teach guys like me not to screw up the registry or anything else badly enough to need to re-install everything and lose hours (or days!) getting everything back that had been on there beforehand.)

All of which requires a system that's basically at least twice as big and powerful as those older ones which weren't capable of duplicating themselves to save you from yourself after you have really messed up big-time, and need serious help to get things back to normal. So today's computers need to have a lot more under the hood, because they have secrets that they aren't showing you until your computer needs resuscitation and a transfusion to revive it. And the good news is, it can do it by itself, if you know how to start that process. So make sure you know before you need to use it.