Most computer users are routinely bombarded with messages about upgrading their software or their drivers. Windows usually prompts you every Tuesday to install at least one update. However, there may be an important part of your setup that you are neglecting – your BIOS. One word of caution before we proceed: this might be a more advanced tip, but it is still useful for anyone who knows the way around a motherboard and a boot screen.

As we create a larger presence for ourselves online, many people need ways to edit images. It may be for a blog, a photo sharing site, a Facebook page, even a LinkedIn profile. Since Photoshop costs over $200 dollars and even the stripped down version of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, is close to $100 dollars, there is a great need to discover a usable and useful alternative. If it didn’t cost nearly as much, that would be a great plus as well. Luckily, there’s a great free image editor called GIMP. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program.

SuperTalent has announced that it’s latest round of flash drives, known as Super Crypt,  will be able to take full advantage of the USB 3.0 interface. This means that you will be able to transfer your data at up to 240MB/s, if you have the proper hardware. Coming in sizes of 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, 128 GB and 256GB, these drives give you plenty of room to backup what ever you might need. Even better, they will support both 128-bit and 256-bit encryption, keeping your data safe in case you ever lose your drive – which I’m sure we all have at some point. Pricing for these drives hasn’t been announced yet, but they should be available at the end of March.

Don’t want to go the flash drive route? Check out a series of posts starting later this week about how to set up Dropbox and use it for a number of tasks, other than simply backing up.

If you are like me, you don’t like plain and boring backgrounds. Through one my YouTube subscriptions, I have been introduced to great piece of software to create customized backgrounds for your desktop. That software is called John’s Background Switcher (JBS) and it was written by a gentleman named John Connors.

JBS can be set up to change pictures periodically to as much as every hour. You can use pictures from your computer, Flicker, Facebook, and/or Picasa. Once you setup the credentials, it will pull the photos you select. This program launches on start up and sits in your system tray, it does very little to hurt your system’s performance so you have no worries about slowing your computer down.

This Monday, our first Mailbag Monday question comes not from a suggestion from a reader, but from my dad. He is pretty wary about upgrading to Windows 7.