How to care for your desktop computer

1. Don't put your tower case on the floor, it will act as a vacuum cleaner sucking in all the dust onto it's processor and other components

2. Run a regular disk cleanup and defrag to keep your machine clear of unwanted files and have the hard drive running at top performance, the longer you put of defraging, the slower your computer gets

3. Invest in a good system maintenance program such as System Mechanic from www.iolo.com it's well worth the money and works better than any of the cleanup tools in XP also if you buy the "Professional" version you get an anti-virus program and a firewall

4. Don't clutter your hard drive with music files and video files in the 'My Documents' folder, it sounds silly but if you create your own folder in the C drive and put them in there it stops your computer from slowing down.  Better still if you have another partition such as a 'D' drive, or another hard drive then move the files over to that.  You could even burn them to DVD or CD.  After all you don't need 10GB of music cluttering up your hard drive when you can burn it all to 3 DVD's

5. Invest in some good quality OEM programs, do a search for them on www.kelkoo.co.uk a good one is Mcafee Internet security suite 2007, expect to pay around £15 inc postage, much better than paying £45-£50 for a boxed version with a manual (it's on the disc in PDF format anyway!) or even better I can supply and install Mcafee for you for £30. Another is Nero 7 and yet another is Power DVD.  Try Microsoft works OEM, you will pay around £3-£8 for this including postage, far cheeper than Microsoft office, and almost as good. It just does not come with the powerpoint or publisher programs.

6. Free programs are cool and there are plenty about if you know where to look, be carefull to read everything properly though, you don't want to be downloading spyware.  zonelabs has a free firewall for XP and Vista (if you have Windows 98 you can download an old version here) or use the ashampoo one. grisoft has a free antivirus (which is quite good but if you are on broadband then I would recomend you to give me a call and I will put something more bullet proof on your machine) and openoffice has a free fully functional office suite which includes a spreadsheet, word processor and a presentation program similar to MS powerpoint.