Five Free Ways to Boost Your Pc's Speed and Performance

After about six months of regular usage, most pc's performance will start to deteriorate, boot speed will decrease, and programs will lag.

Here I will outline a few simple, free and easy-to-use programs that will help counteract this deterioration.

1. Defragment your hard-drive. It is said time and time again, and for good reason. Defragmenting your hard-drive will drastically improve your pc's speed. Defragmenting your hard-drive puts all your data back together, merging all the bits of each file scattered across the disk back together again. You don't even need to install an external program to do this. Go to >My Computer >Right-Click on your hard-drive (s) >management >defragment. This will take anywhere between 1 to 3 hours to complete, depending on the capacity of your hard-disk but is well worth the wait.
2. Download, and install "free registry defrag." This is a two-click use program. Once installed, run, and then select "analyze your registry." After two or three minutes, it will advise you as to what action to take, either that your registry is fine, and does not need defragging, or that it does. If it does, select the second button to compact your registry. By closing the various holes, and removing redundant data, your pc will be able to move through the registry faster, and consequently BE faster.
3. Download and install "Reg Cleaner." This allows you a greater level of control over how you deal with redundant data in the registry, and allows you to see exactly what programs have entries in your registry. Clean out any entries for programs that no longer exist on your system. You can either do this manually, or use a built in search function.
4. Reduce the number of programs that load up at system start-up. Use Spybot SnD to examine what programs are starting with your system. Clean out as many as possible for a faster boot time. It is advised to leave anti-virus and firewall software free to boot up at system start-up, otherwise you can expose your system to malicious programs and scripts.
5. Consider overclocking your system. If you are using an NForce system, try using NTune, otherwise look on the web. There are many applications which can do this safely and automatically, although some computers cannot be overclocked.