It’s probably happened to every Windows user at some time or another: in the middle of using multiple programs or installing new software, your computer suddenly crashes or locks up. You reboot the computer but this time the desktop looks strange, and the words “Safe Mode” are written in all four corners of the screen. What exactly is this Safe Mode?

Since the internet first became widely used, we have all heard a lot about software programmed by hackers to compromise our computers and data; this software falls under the umbrella term “malware”. Short for “malicious software”, malware can be programmed to do anything from destroying data to gathering sensitive information and has caused billions of dollars’ worth of damaged over the years.

When a file has been “zipped”, this means that it has been put into an archive and compressed, making it smaller. It is possible to compress many files into the same archive at once, making it easy to store and transfer the files all at once. These archives can be easily recognised because they often carry the extension “.zip”.

To find out what w3wp.exe is doing on a computer, we must have a look at the hierarchy of managed entities in an Internet Information Services (IIS) web server and their relationship with each other.

You’ve deleted extra files from your crowded hard disk and you’ve uninstalled useless programs, but somehow your computer doesn’t seem to be running any faster. What’s going wrong, you might wonder? The answer is: absolutely nothing. Your personal files are not likely to be the cause of your slow computer.