Taking some of the pain out of a reformat and reinstall

What's the most annoying thing about reinstalling your operating system? Hunting down, downloading and reinstalling all those applications, right? You probably have the discs for your commercial programs, but if you're like most of us, there may be dozens of freeware apps that you use and they're scattered all over the web. Well, here's at least a partial solution to that problem: it's called Ninite and it contains a catalog of popular free software programs. You simply check the boxes for the ones you want and it will automatically install them all without any help from you (choosing default settings and refusing add-ons). Find out more about it in Aric Annear's blog post here: Click Here

Installing Windows 7 on a netbook without a DVD drive

Remember that you can't do an in-place upgrade from XP to Windows 7; you need to do a clean installation. With that in mind, the good news is that you don't have to go out and buy a DVD drive to install Windows 7 on your netbook. Microsoft has released a USB/DVD Download Tool that you can use to easily create a bootable disk image of Windows 7 on a USB thumb drive. You'll need a USB stick that's at least 4 GB in size and you'll need to set the netbook's BIOS boot order to boot from the USB drive. You can find out more here: Click Here

How To Optimize Your Windows 7 Pc

Here are some good tips and tricks on how to speed up your Window 7 impelmentation: Click Here

Create a shortcut to back up user and system files

We all know that we need to back up our systems frequently, and with the Windows 7 Backup utility, you can set a schedule - but sometimes you might need to create a backup when one isn't scheduled. If you find that happening often, you can save some clicks by creating a shortcut that you can put on the taskbar or Start menu. This site gives you instructions for creating the shortcut and even provides a download for those who don't want to do it themselves. Click Here

How to back up or copy Windows 7 sticky notes file

I like the little Sticky Notes feature in Windows 7. There were third party programs you could install to get the same thing in previous operating systems but they were often flaky. The Windows 7 Sticky Notes feature is built-in, simple and just works. However, my immediate question was "how can I back up my notes?" That involved finding the file where the sticky notes data is actually saved. Here's how you do it:
Navigate to Users\ \ AppData \ Roaming \ Microsoft \ Sticky Notes \ Stickynotes.snt
If you don't find it there, or just want to go to the file the easier way, click Start and type stickynotes.snt in the Search box.

Copy the file to another location to back it up, or set up a program like SecondCopy to automatically copy it on a set schedule.

If you have a second Windows 7 computer and want to transfer your notes to it, you can copy this file to a USB stick and then copy it into the same location on the second computer.