Julie R. from Etobicoke, Ont. Asks: “I liked your article on all the things you can do with BlackBerry Messenger, but I heard there was a way to back-up your contacts if you lose your phone. How do you do it?”

If scratching your CD, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs or video games is a concern – and anyone with small kids should be nodding right now – then you might want to consider the clever “d_skin” products that protect these discs like a, er, condom, of sorts.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: You’re typing away in a document or email, and then you suddenly realize you’ve been typing in ALL CAPS FOR THE PAST THREE SENTENCES (and the person you’re writing to will think you’re YELLING AT THEM). Here’s a simple fix for Windows users.

Do you know where your kids are going online? According to McAfee and Harris Interactive, nearly 93 percent of teens use the Internet — and 63 percent of them know how to hide what they’re doing online from their parents. As part of its back-to-school computer campaign, Dell has released a handful of suggestions to staying safe in cyberspace.

What happens if you get a new PC or Mac but you want to have the same playlists synched with your iPod, iPhone or iPad? iTunes doesn’t make it easy, but here’s a quick way to copy over the same playlists from your old iTunes to the new computer.

We all have CDs and DVDs, and perhaps video games and Blu-ray Discs. But what do you do if they get dirt, dust or sticky kid fingers underneath them and they don’t play the same? Clean them, you say? How? Here we ask an expert to explain.

From the mailbag: “I love my digital camera but printer ink is very costly. How do I preserve ink so that it’ll last longer?” Read on for some suggestions!

Want to get high-speed access at the cottage? Hate paying a hotel $15 for Internet connectivity? In this video, I look at the new Turbo Hub from Bell, a portable device that lets up to 15 Wi-Fi devices get online.

We here at Sync are thrilled with the comments and discussion generated by the “How to retrieve deleted files” post, so we hope you like this handy mini-tutorial just as much. This time around, we explain how to best back up your Microsoft Outlook email in case you need to refer to it at a later date.

You might remember creating a System Repair (or Restore) disk in Windows XP — perhaps on a floppy! — which let you boot up to your operating system in case of any issues. While you’re less likely to have problems with Windows 7, here’s how to create a system repair disk in Windows 7.