A former manager of mine had two sayings about saving your data, “Save often and frequently,” and ”Always have a backup of a backup of a backup.” Yes, it is redundant, but only to get the message across. There is nothing worse than the feeling of losing all of your pictures, music, documents, etc…  It is of the utmost importance to have either a second hard drive or a flash drive that you can back up your data on. Storage is becoming cheaper by the day. An internal 1 terabyte (~1000 GB) hard drive goes for $80 on www.newegg.com. I purchased a 2 GB flash drive from Microcenter for $7 a few weeks ago. There are many options to backing up your files. It will be way more expensive to pay someone to recover the data than it will be to purchase more disk space.

If you live in the areas of Dallas, Hiram, Villa Rica, or Douglasville then you should be able to find a back up hard drive at Wal Mart, Best Buy, or any local computer parts store with a store front.

Another way to help speed up your computer is to do a disk cleanup and a defragmentation of your HDD. The best time to do this is at night right before you go to bed. The way to do it is to click on the Start menu->Programs->Accessories->System tools. Before you defrag you should do a disk cleanup. This will take a little while depending on the size of your HDD. Mine takes about 10 total minutes with a 120GB HDD. Just accept the default settings of the cleanup and click OK. Once that finishes you are good to start the defrag. Go through the same steps to get to the disk cleanup system tool but this time click on Disk Defragmenter. Click Defragment and set it and forget it! In the morning reboot your machine and it should feel faster.

Need to free up some space on your computer? It is hard to tell where all your files go when you create or download them. A good way to find out where your largest files and folders are is using an application called Window Directory Statistics. Here is the website:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=91252&package_id=96219
Once there click on the link windirstat1_1_2_setup.exe and install the application and then run it after it finishes installing. Once it finishes the scan of your hard disc drive (HDD) it will have a graphical display of your HDD with the locations of your largest folders and files. Now you can easily go through and delete files you no longer need to free up space!

Computer seem to be running slow? Have you already checked for viruses and spyware? Try adjusting the visual properties. Click on the Start menu->Right click My Computer->Click Properties->Advanced tab->Under Performance click Settings->Select Adjust for best performance->Click Apply and then OK.

That may seem like a lot of steps, but don’t be discouraged! The end result could relieve some much unneeded stress.

For more on speeding up your machine visit this website!