Here's an easy-to-follow program for maintaining your operating system for Windows XP. Don't wait until a virus sneaks in. Or slowness in startup, accessing files and starting programs occurs. It may be much more expensive and time consuming to fix the problem. If you take the time to follow these steps every month, you will save time and money and increase efficiency and effectiveness over the long run.The author draws from 20 years of hands-on experience installing, maintaining and troubleshooting microcomputers. In this book, he outlines a simple 10-step program - complete with screen shots - you can follow to: scan and remove viruses from your hard drive; use disk cleanup to remove unwanted files from your hard drive; clean out temporary Internet files and offline files in Internet Explorer for faster Internet startup; use spyware software to find and remove spyware programs; use disk defragmenter to reorganize your file structure on the hard drive; update Windows XP with the latest security updates from Microsoft; check Windows XP startup list for unnecessary startup programs; remove unnecessary desktop icons you haven't used recently; activate Windows XP firewall to keep computer hackers from accessing your computer; and, turn system restore back on to recover from computer problems.