singleviking Loc: Lake Sebu Eco Park, Philippines

The US website is pretty complete and has all the downloads for restoring all the original drivers and BIOS upgrades. If things really get bad, the OP can even do a WINDOWS REPAIR after saving all his important files and then do a "SYSTEM RESTORE" to a point when his computer was running well, download the free version of AVG 2014 and make a fresh "RESTORE" point to use for future use. Also, cleaning up the HDD of junk and a DEFRAG would help things.

But first, he has to be able to read his machine's maker as "ASUS" instead of AZUS or he'll never get to correct website.

blackest Loc: Ireland

This might seem silly after doing all the work of copying to CD or DVD but now you want to copy these images to an external hard drive.

Originally CD's had a layer of gold leaf which the laser burnt a small hole or pit into, this was expensive , not to mention some of them at least the gold leaf was the top layer (i once made the mistake of taking off some tape that I had put on there and took off lots of the gold leaf).

then some bright spark had the idea of making a light sensitive dye layer to make the spots, this works initially but it degrades over time so after a few years if you try to read the CD you will get unreadable areas on the disk. If you don't burn slow enough you can get disks that fail to verify straight after burning! That has happened so many times to me over the years burning CD's to install linux and getting so far through the installation and getting stuck because a file can't be read from the CD.

So for peace of mind you would be better off to invest in an external drive (ideally two) write your images to there and put it somewhere safe. You will probably be ok with it for a good number of years (like a low mileage car that has spent most of its life in a garage). Keep your CD's thou and use them when you want to access them. But they will fail and you will want to attach that external drive and burn a fresh copy.

there have been 4 types of hard drive over the years mfm , scsi , ide/pata and sata. Mfm has been obsolete for decades , scsi is pretty rare , ide/pata drives are on the way out, most modern PC's don't have the connectors any more. What i'm trying to say is that even stored on hard drive the formats change and go obsolete. You would have to search for a scsi interface now, pata any 5 year old pc will do and sata is everywhere for now.

So what i'm saying really is even hard drives are not forever ever but currently seem to be the only real practical option for archiving.

spdmn54 Loc: Avon Lake, Ohio

Look for a program online called IOBit, , it's free, isused tovsweep your system and find and delete unused files, malware, multiple duplicate caches and such. Great program, should work forbyou. :lol:

joer Loc: Colorado/Illinois

Go to the utilities and do a disk clean up and then defrag. After defrag go back to disk clean and clean the system files to eliminate all but the latest restore point. You will be surprised in the amount of space gained.

Then go to system configuration, startup and disable everything but virus protection and monitor calibration (if you do it). It won't hurt anything and make the computer faster.

Do this once a month or so to keep the computer in top shape.

Mike D. Loc: Crowley County, CO.

On the upside, you have cmany flavors of external hard drives that plug into the USB port which isn't likely to disappear in the near future, some of which will hold huge amounts of data (my son has a 1.5tb that fits in his shirt pocket). Buy several, they seem to get cheaper all time...