Not all modern people are keeping pace with the technology progress. And it causes appearance a lot of questions that give birth to the numerous myths. We gathered biggest technology myths and explained whether they are fiction or not.

1. 64-bit OS calculates twice faster than 32-bit OS

In fact, you need a 64-bit software running on 64-bit OS. In this case you can use all advantages of 64-bit platform. Using 32-bit software on a 64-bit OS does not give any benefits in performance.

2. You can damage your PC when switching off power without shutting down computer.

This is old myth, that you can damage your hard drive when shutting down computer by pressing power button. The only damage you can make is loosing your unsaved data. This is a common truth – save your changes often. And in that case don’t be paranoid, press reset button if your PC hangs.

3. Use ‘Safely Remove hardware’ drill every time you want to unplug USB device

This is a myth with little exceptions. The general idea is to be sure that you will not unplug USB device during data transfer. In this case you can suffer data loss. But if the device is idle there is no any need to use ‘Safely Remove hardware’ feature. Regarding about exceptions above, if you have set USB Flash as a Ready Boost device in Windows Vista, you have to safely stop it before unplugging. For other devices like mouse, keyboard, scanner, printer you can just unplug them if you are sure they are not in use.

4. Formatting and partitioning can cause physical wear of the hard drive.

Firstly, let us look into the formatting process. When you format the hard drive special software writes data in multiple patterns and then fills the entire partition with ‘0’s. This sequence of actions does not differ from a usual write operations, like copying files. During the partitioning process, the starting sectors of the hard drive are also modified to make changes in partition table. But for the hard drive this just another write operation. “Quick format” option is even less strained, because only file table is modified.

5. Remove files from recycle bin for permanently deletion.

This is absolutely not true. Deleting files from the recycle bin is not actually erasing them from PC. Operating system just marked them as empty. And it means another data can be written above them. However, while these ‘empty’ files are not overwritten, special software can easily recover them. Recovering even possible if data are overwritten, but it is much harder and more expensive.