1. Back up your system! One day you will lose everything on your hard drive - everything. If you don't have a backup, it will be gone. You must have two copies of everything you consider important and the two copies have to be on different media. You can use floppies, zip disks, CD-R or CD-RW, an external hard drive, some other system on your network, etc. to store the second copy. But you must be prepared - or lose your data.

2. Think twice about installing ANY new software. Windows computers deteriorate over time - and they deteriorate faster the more software in installed.

3. Remove programs that are automatically run that you don't really need:

   • Look in the "system tray" (where the time is displayed) and see if you can get unwanted icons to go away. Try right clicking on these icons and see if you can find a way to not run these at startup.

   • Delete unused/unwanted shortcuts from Programs > Startup

   • Use msconfig to disable any unwanted startup program - see http://www.netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msconfig_win7.html for instructions.

   • If you are REALLY daring, Run REGEDIT (Programs > Run; type "regedit"; click OK) and delete lines under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run key that you KNOW are not desired.

4. Clean your Registry and Defrag your hard drive using these free products:

   Eusing Registry Cleaner	A clean registry is a fast registry. Backup your registry before cleaning!
   Auslogics Registry Defrag	After cleaning your registry, defrag it for even better proformance.
   Auslogics Disk Defrag	A far better disk defrager than comes with Windows.

5. Back up your system! You don't have to back up everything - just the data. You can reinstall your programs from their disks or CDs after a crash, but data is gone forever if not backed up.

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Leigh Brasington / / Revised 19 Oct 12