A right, you've made a scene, you've animated it, and done your fast test renders. You're ready for a final render.
The first thing to do when you are ready to render is open up your file manager, and make sure you have room on your computer to do it. I can't tell you how much room you'll need for a given project, and the rule of thumb is clear off as much space as you possibly can. It's a good time to save copies of all those projects you are no longer working on and then delete them from your hard drive. Back them up to:
Data sticks, flash drives
An external hard drive
A CD or DVD
Your storage on the Web
You may also want to use a program like CCleaner to clean up your computer's file registry and remove temporary files from browsers. Go into your Internet browser as well and manually delete the history if you don't have a program like that.
Use a defragmenting program to make sure that all your disk is as neat as possible and...