If you’re an avid user of either of these social networking sites, there’s good reason to want to back them up: You probably have lots of information there, and if your account were ever frozen or lost, you’d lose that data. Or you might simply lose track of what you want to find as the new information comes streaming in.

For Facebook, there’s an Archive Facebook plugin for Firefox that does a good job of saving your Facebook photos, messages, friends list, notes, and more to your hard drive.

Or you could turn to SocialSafe, which will back up both Facebook and Twitter. Another, similar tool is Backupify, which bills itself as an all-in-one archiving and restoration tool for Facebook, Twitter, Google Apps, and Picasa. The free personal backup option of Backupify gives you 2 gigabytes of storage and makes automatic, weekly backups.

Did I leave something out? Or do you have first-hand experience with one of these services? Leave a comment.

Part of what can make Windows 7–or any previous version of Windows–seem slow is the rate at which the cursor moves when you hold down a key. That’s why one of the first things you should do after a new installation of Windows 7 is to adjust the keyboard speed. Do that by opening the Start menu and typing “keyboard.” Click the Keyboard entry under the Control Panel section, and Windows 7 opens the Keyboard Properties dialog box. From there, make sure the Speed tab is selected, and move the Repeat Delay slider to “Short.” Click OK, and from that point forward, Windows will react much faster when you hold down a letter within any application.

Microsoft has no doubt heard plenty of complaints about the ribbon bar, especially since  the company provided no way for users to return to the menu interface of Office 2003 if they want to. So the company spent some time putting together a handy “interactive guide” to Word 2007 (and 2010) commands.

The guide is actually an virtual representation of the familiar Word 2003 interface, running inside of your browser. Just use the fake interface to select a command from the menus, and the guide will show you exactly how to find the same command in Word 2007–and, for the most part, Word 2010.

Another way you can pull up a quick reference to 2003 commands is by opening the Help menu (F1) in an Office 2007/2010 application and typing “2003 commands” in the search box.