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The next few columns will cover some simple things that you can do to make a WinXP system run as well-or better-than Vista. That will save you the trouble of buying a new PC, or spending a lot of money to upgrade your existing box. I'm shooting to give WinXP the same feature improvements Microsoft lists at www.microsoft.com/windowsvista, which include security, search, Internet Explorer 7, the Sidebar, performance, and backup. With a little tweaking, tuning, and downloading — and a lot less hassle or cash outlay — you can get Vista-like benefits.

Safe, Not Sorry

You'll find that most of Microsoft's touted performance improvements don't even offset the performance decreases elsewhere in Vista. I doubt there is a system available today that runs Vista faster than WinXP. Yet the odds are also good that your current WinXP system is a lot slower than a brand new Vista system. Disk performance is often a major cause, and disks do get slower over time as they fill up and fragment. A little preventive maintenance can bring an old WinXP system up to nearly-new speed.

Before starting cleanup, though, you should back up all your valuable data. Just get it off your PC and onto some other safe storage device, be it a CD, DVD, USB flash drive, removable hard drive, Internet file backup site, or another computer in your house. It wouldn't hurt to make several copies, organized in different ways and different places, so you can find them in the future. All it takes is a disk failure or virus to completely destroy your digital music, photos, email, and other important files.

Most users keep their precious files in their My Documents folder, so that's one to save often. A free utility such as Cobian Backup can make it very easy to copy the files on a regular basis. To make sure you never lose a byte, buy a USB external hard drive and use an image backup program such as Acronis True Image on a regular basis...

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The Well-Tuned PC

Safe, Not Sorry

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