Buying yourself a new computer or a new operating system is very easy. It is more 'difficult' to learn what to do so that you will have a pleasant and safe computing experience. In this article I will share with you a few tips that I have learned during my career. This tips are mostly for people who have just bought a new PC or have reinstalled their operating system. Following them will help you keep your system performance at good levels and have a lesser risk of losing your personal files and folders in case of system crashes. Also, you will be able to easily restore your system if any emergency happens.

There are times when your system fails for various reasons such as: a virus attack, bad drivers installation, power outage, disk corruption, etc. In these cases you might not be able to start your system normally so you will need to boot into the so called 'Safe Mode'.
When you boot Windows Vista into 'Safe Mode', the operating system will have reduced functionality, meaning that it will disable many non-core components and devices. This will keep your system stable while you diagnose and repair the cause of the malfunction.

In case you don't know how to boot in 'Safe Mode', click on the Read more link.

A few months ago I wrote a tutorial showing you how to backup your files in Windows Vista. In this article I will show you how to restore those backups using the Backup and Restore Center.

One of our readers asked us to create a tutorial about the Check Disk tool in Windows Vista. Even though nothing has changed about this tool since Windows XP, we decided to create such a tutorial and make sure all our readers understand what this tool does and how to use it.

Basically, Check Disk is a tool that verifies your disks for file system integrity, locates bad sectors and recovers readable information. This can be very helpful when you have some form of hardware failure which affects the integrity of your files. Unless you have some serious hardware problems, Check Disk can help you recover corrupted information from your hard disk, floppy disk or memory stick.

Disk Cleanup is one of the applications that did not change much in Windows Vista. It's functionality has remained the same and the interface was changed here and there. No additional features were added. Just like in the previous versions, Disk Cleanup scans your disks, finds unnecessary files and helps you remove them to cleanup some space and make your computer run a bit faster. In this article we will show you how to work with it and save some valuable space from your hard disk.

Many people lose data everyday due to various reasons: virus infections, accidental deletion, hardware & software failures, power failures and so on. To protect yourself from data losses, you can create a backup so that you will easily restore it when needed. Using Windows Vista’s Backup and Restore center, you can easily backup your personal files or the entire system. You can create a manual backup or schedule automated backups which will add the new files or the modified files into your original snapshot.

In this tutorial we will show you how to backup your data. In the following weeks we will also publish a tutorial about restoring your data.

Some of our readers asked us how they can manage their disks in Windows Vista. To answer their questions we created this tutorial where you can learn the following: how to change a drive letter, how to shrink an existing partition, how to create a new partition, how to format or delete a partition and how to extend a partition.

Everything is done using only one tool called Disk Management. As you will see, things are pretty simple. Just follow our instructions and you will finish in no time.

In our previous article we mentioned that the Disk Defragmenter has been simplified a lot. In this new version, the user interface doesn't allow users to select only one of their partitions for defragmentation. You can defragment all your partitions at once or none. However, this doesn't mean that users they cannot customize the Disk Defragmenter at all.

You can always start the Command Prompt and use the appropriate command line parameters to obtain the results you want.

Disk Defragmenter is another application that has been changed in Windows Vista compared to Windows XP. Unlike other applications that were modified, Disk Defragmenter was simplified to a bare minimum. You no longer have menus or the colored graphs showing you how the data is arranged on your hard drive. The application offers only two options: "Defragment now" and "Modify schedule". Even though some people will miss the old interface and the configuration features, others will welcome the change. One thing is for sure - working with the Disk Defragmenter is easier than ever.

In this article I will go through the new interface and the available options and you will see for yourselves how easy it is to use the new Disk Defragmenter.