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

   • 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. Tweak your Windows/2000 or Windows/XP Services Configuration using Black Viper's Operating System Guides.

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.

Black Viper's Operating System Guides

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Leigh Brasington / / Revised 25 Mar 07