Windows Vista If you are unlucky enough to have this resource hungry, DRM (Digital Rights Management) infested O. S installed on your P. C then you have my sympathies, i installed it on one of my PC's at work and thought Microsoft were having a laugh! It ruined a perfectly good XP Pro P. C, and the bad news is that Service Pack 1 has not fixed all of its problems.

Windows 7 Microsoft have announced the imminent arrival of Windows 7 in December 2009 so downgrading to Vista is pointless, lets hope they have learnt their lesson!

Windows XP Tune Up Win XP getting a bit slow? its time for a tune-up, the first thing to do is to do a Disk Cleanup and Defarag your hard drive, just go to Start, Programs, Accessories,System Tools, and run these two utilities. The next step is to check the size of your swap file, Windows uses a file on your hard drive when it runs out of memory (the only problem with a large swap file is it increases the number of fragmented files)and should be set to double the size of your memory, so if you have 2GB of RAM you should have a 4GB swap file. Just right click on your My Computer, go to Properties, Advanced tab, then under the Performance heading click the Settings button, then click the Advanced tab, and under the Virtual Memory heading click the change button, make sure the Pageing file is correct.

Open Office 3 If you don't want to pay hundreds of pounds for Microsoft Office then why don't you try Open Office by Sun Microsystems? The suit contains all your favorite app's such has a Word Processor(Writer), Spread Sheets(Calc), presentations(Impress) and much more, its comparable with M. S Office documents so you can read your old Office documents and its FREE! Just go to the Open Office web site and down load it.

Dual Boot Your P. C Ever thought of trying another O. S on your P. C? or have you got an old P. C lying around doing nothing? Linux desktop is getting better all the time and you don't even need to install it to try, just boot form the C. D and see if you like it before installing. My favorite distribution for the desktop is Ubuntu 8.10, this has a predictable 6 monthly releases and it users very little resources, its not prone to viruses and its Free.

Their is also a server version if you fancy setting up your own mail or web server, and its a great way to introduce your self to Linux, just visit the Ubuntu website and download either the Desktop or Server version

AntiVirus its surprising how many people don't have an uptodate antivirus, I visited one customer (a multinational company) in Ireland a few weeks ago and they were running and internet facing P. C without any antivirus, I was not impressed! Immediately I installed an Antivirus and did a virus scan and found out why their P. C that was running a very expensive piece of equipment was "acting strangely", AVG free 8.0, is an exellent free antivirus that will protect your Windows P. C form all kinds of nasty threats.