As I have mentioned in the past, backing up your hard drive, even in the days when MBs and not GBs were the norm, could well involve long drawn out sessions with a propensity to raise frustration levels to great heights.  Nowadays you do not have that excuse for putting off the task of backing up your valuable data.  There are numerous products available that will carry out an automated backup on a user-defined schedule.  One such product is Drive Backup 9.0 from Paragon.

One way to help is to ensure that the drive is regularly defragmented so that files are stored contiguously rather than being scattered willy-nilly in different locations.  The situation of files being broken up and scattered to various locations on your drive occurs through the normal use of the operating system.  Rather than spend time looking for a space large enough to accommodate a file, the operating system will fill up spaces with portions of a file.

Based in , O&O Software has been in the business of developing tools for use with Windows since 1997.  Sold in over 50 countries, these tools cover various aspects of Windows operating system including cache management and the use of memory with its O&O CleverCache product which is now up to version 6.

Like going to the dentist, making a back-up of your valuable data is often a task that is put off until a later date or perhaps forgotten about altogether.  Even knowing that the results could have dire consequences seems to make no difference as many feel that disaster would never happen to them so why take the time and trouble to perform a backup.

Now up to version 8, System Suite Professional brings together a collection of utilities developed to maintain, protect and enhance your computer's performance.  Following the entry of a 29-character serial number, the product's installation process gives you a range of choices as you decide whether to include the Firewall and antivirus/spyware options or not.

Computers, like users (at least this one), tend to slow down with age.  This is as a result of the demands placed on computer resources by various peripherals and software.  As a result it could be to your advantage, and certainly benefit your computer's performance, to carry out various health checks and house-keeping tasks.  TuneUp Utilities 2008 is a product that offers to help in this respect.

When taking delivery of a new scanner or multi-function device you will often find that some bonus software will be provided and this will include OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functionality.  In many cases the OCR capability will be provided by a copy of FineReader Sprint.  This is a basic edition of ABBYY's flagship FineReader product which currently stands at version 9 in its Professional guise.

In this case the old friend is a software package entitled Diskeeper.  I have been using this software product over a number of years to ensure that the files on my hard disk are stored contiguously rather than being scattered in bits and pieces in the various locations that were available during the initial writing of the data.

While Windows and many of its applications have the facility to keep records of your activities either through a recent document list feature or presented in a History Log neither method allows easy access to the relevant data.  This is especially true when your current location is the desktop rather than the relevant application.  In this case you will be required to fire up the application to get at the data.

Partition Manager 8.5 Personal Edition Storing your data and applications in the same location could be a recipe for disaster when trouble strikes.  One possible solution could be implemented by this next product.

System Suite 7 has now been replaced by version 8, for about the same price. . Update : Click here to read our review of System Suite 8 Keeping your personal computer running smoothly, let alone at optimum capacity, can be a time consuming task.  In some cases you could spend so much time carrying out maintenance that you leave little time for more productive and entertaining past-times.

As always before installing any software it is wise to set a system restore point. This done I installed and when offered choices I went for a complete install. However should you want only a partial install (say two or three modules) it is possible. Eight minutes later and 264MB of hard disc used everything is installed.

"If it ain't broke then don't fix it" is a popular expression.  Yet for some their guiding principle takes the alternative premise that "a little prevention is better than the cure".  A third group might swing between these two stances depending upon circumstances.

Keeping your computer running smoothly, let alone performing at its optimum capacity, can be a time consuming task.  Dealing with the threat of viruses and spyware plus the general defragmentation of files and memory are just some of the elements you need to consider.  Fortunately tools are available to help with these tasks.

Having set up your computer to suit your own individual style of working before storing all those important documents, images, videos and audio tracks, it does make practical sense to take precautions, such as a backup, in the event of problems occurring.  While Windows has its own backup facility, it is not the most feature-rich utility currently available.  A well respected alternative is .

In the normal course of events, Windows writes data to the first available space it finds.  As a result files will be broken up into parts that will fit into whatever spaces there are.  This fragmentation of files can, over time, seriously affect the performance of your system as it will need to access the fragmented files from different locations before loading them into memory for your use.

comes on a CD in a DVD case, I installed it in three minutes and it used only a few megabytes of hard disc. I tend to Backup to an external USB drive and on the test machine that gets the drive letter of 'E'. When I first looked the choices were to the 'C' drive or to the 'D' drive and that is my DVD drive.

Think of disc burning software and one of the first names to pop into your mind will probably be Nero.  After all this software product has been around for a good many years and it is a popular choice for manufacturers to bundle with their rewritable drives.  Following its brief flirtation with the Matrix theme with Nero 6 Reloaded, the latest version of the software is entitled and arrives in a distinctive flip-top box.