Thanks to both of you for replying. While I do not have a lot of items saved to my hard drive, I also questioned the size of my stored info and including the win7 app. I do use Acronis Home 2010 as my preferred backup to an external USB drive and I have a current backup on that drive. I strongly suspect that I will accept your suggestions and react accordingly.
Compaq Presario CQ5210F Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit Athlon II X2 215(2.7GHz) Nvidia GeForce 6150SE 22" Envision LCD Monitor Brother HL2040 Laser Printer 500GB SATA HDD 3GB DDR2 Ram and NVIDIA nForce MCP61 Chipset Motherboard