If (when!) your hard drive crashes, you may need your license key information from the Windows Registry. Here's a free program to find them for you: Product Key Finder

In various windows you can set up scheduled tasks. In W7 is works very neat indeed. http://www.windows7update.com/Windows7-Task-Scheduler.html

edit: A step-by-step instruction

http://www.iopus.com/guides/winscheduler.htm

Just one of my own having just upgraded all devices to Windows 7 with bit size maximized to the hardware's capabilities. Look in TaskManager, hit the admin button so you can see all processes and sort them by time used. You'll discover some real time consumers that I'd consider better applied to crunching:

1. Sidebar (now known as free floating desktop gadgets). This thing ate 44 minutes in 24 hours. Gone. Will have to look for the registry entry that makes it load on each boot.

2. CPU-Z, sat in the system tray and ate 19 minutes in 24 hours... heck that's already 1 hour CPU time towards crunching.

3. BOINCMgr. Better keep is minized to system tray only, or closed all together. Ate 3 minutes in the last hour sitting expanded on screen. That's another 42 minutes in a day better used for crunching.

4. BOINC.scr... well that's hard to check because it will unload the moment you touch the mouse. You can set it to go blank after X-minutes after which it stops consuming any much time and with version 6, you can actually control via the Website Device Profile how much timeslices it gets.

5. Oops, Firefox sits on 24 minutes after only 2 hours loaded... better check what the portions are that eat time... maybe the 20 tabs that are active or one of the 45 extensions ;o)

6. The one I don't see is the SystemIdleProcess tracker... at least 100% of the CPU is put to use.

The message being, there are (rogue) utilities that may be eating your credits

Facebook safety and privacy in podcast and video

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