Windows 7 Maintenance and Performance
Out-of-the-box, Windows 7 is the easiest version of Windows to maintain at peak performance, since many of the task that used to need to be manually handled are now automatically taken care of behind the scenes by Windows itself: this includes not only automatic Windows Updates (free patches and upgrades by Microsoft downloaded by your computer in the background), but also the maintenance of your hardware - no need to manually "defrag" a hard drive anymore: Windows 7 does it automatically, at a user-configurable date (something we'll explain how to do).
A few tutorials will be devoted to the topic of "scheduled tasks" - although it sounds a bit nerdy, these tasks can save you enormous amounts of time by automating pretty much anything you can think of (in fact, the automatic defragmentation of your hard drive mentioned earlier is also done through a pre-programmed task in the Task Scheduler). In fact, the program you use to create tasks in Windows 7 ("Task Scheduler"), includes a "beginner mode" that lets you automate something in under 2 minutes!
Running a program as administrator, running an old application in "compatibility mode" for Windows XP or other versions of the operating system, customizing your Windows Updates settings - these are just some of the current and upcoming Windows 7 tutorials you'll find in this section.
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