I hear a lot of songs on the Web that are played using the RealAudio player. I want to store them in my computer. The only way I know to do this now is to record them to a cassette and then feed them back into the personal computer and convert them to MP3 files. Is there any way I can directly record the song?

If a Website allows you to actually download a RealAudio file in its complete and unrestricted form, then you can save it and play it back whenever you like using either RealPlayer or RealJukebox from RealNetworks. However, this situation is increasingly rare. Most Websites that feature music in the RealAudio format are merely "streaming" the songs, playing them as if you were listening to them on the radio, without leaving a copy of the song file on your PC. This is quite deliberate. They do this mainly to protect their intellectual property from the very sort of capturing and copying you're talking about.

Putting aside the legal issues, you could capture songs using a cassette recorder in the way you suggest, but that's not only tedious and cumbersome, it doesn't result in a perfect digital copy - which is really what the publishers fear most. I'm sure there is some software floating around the Web that allows listeners to grab these streamed songs in a direct way and with better quality, but I can't be in the business of promoting such a practice when the owners of the songs have explicitly restricted their use to streaming.

Recently I upgraded my Gateway laptop to Windows ME from Windows 98. Everything ran well with one exception-it seems to me that ME doesn't recognize my CD player. Now when I insert a CD into the player, I receive an error message stating "Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item." Do I need to upgrade the driver? If I do, how can I find it?

This kind of mess is precisely why I recommend against upgrading to Windows ME, which has few advantages anyway. One big problem is that it too often requires new drivers for hardware, like your CD-ROM drive. If I were you, I'd go to Gateway's Web site, or call the company and ask if there's a driver for Windows ME. Or, I'd try the manufacturer of the CD-ROM drive itself.

We have an H-P Pavilion, approximately three years old. Since getting it, we have had a continuous problem with its "system resources" decreasing to very low levels when we install utility programs - so much so that we have deleted virtually all those programs. We have just installed AOL 6.0 and are again experiencing problems with decreasing resources. Can you tell us what we can do to increase the computer's resources or to maintain them at a satisfactory level?

The two most common cures for low system resources are to install more memory, or run fewer programs at once. If your PC is three years old, you may have only 32 or 64 megabytes of memory. I'd consider boosting that to 128 megabytes. Sometimes you have to do both, since Windows can still show low system resources even with a lot of memory installed, if you are running a lot of programs at once.

I'd also try shutting off some of the small, invisible programs that run all the time in the background and often are launched whenever you boot up your PC. They suck up memory and system resources, and often do nothing productive. To do this, go to the Start Menu, click "Run," and then in the blank box that appears type in "msconfig." This hidden utility program will let you turn on and off these invisible utilities. Just go to the tab marked "Startup" and check off any that seem useless, such as AOL's system tray utility.