I have been working in an IT environment since high school and so I have learned a few tricks. Below are steps that if you follow and maintain them your PC is guaranteed to stay at tip top shape and will never slow down. I never leave the house without the following small applications on my flash drive. All of the applications below work on all OS versions including Vista x64.
#1 – Download and run CCleaner from http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/. This small (2.51MB) freeware application works wonders. I run it multiple times per day, but that is just because I am obsessive. If ran once a week, you would be fine. After downloading and installing there are two things you will want to do. First, run the cleaner and second, scan for issues in the registry. Depending on how old your computer is and the amount of time since you have cleaned it up, CCleaner might take up to 20 minutes to finish. Normal scan and clean is around 30 seconds if preformed regularly. I have seen this little application remove up to 20GB, yes 20GB!!, which is just absolutely amazing.
#2 – Second, download this small (0.98MB) free application SmitFraud Fix from here http://siri.urz.free.fr/Fix/SmitfraudFix.exe. This program runs directly from the .exe and starts in DOS. Once running, select #2 for clean (safe mode). It will shut down all of the unneeded processes including the explorer. Also, a little weird thing is that it removes your wallpaper. Other than that, wait for it to scan and then select “Y” to clean the registry. After that your explorer will start back up and you can close SmitFraudFix. This tool has worked wonders for me. This is mainly used to remove any unwanted spyware. I have thrown Spysweeper, Spybot, etc. at certain spyware and this is the only tool that always works.
#3 – A classic and yet still useful tool. Go to your start menu, applications, system tools, and run the disk defragmenter.
#4 – Right click on “My Computer” icon and click the advanced tab. Go to the performance options “settings” tab and unselect every option except for the last two. These last two are the only two that you will notice and so you will want to leave them on.
If you run through these 4 steps, and keep repeating steps #1-3 at least once a week, your PC will keep running at its finest, I promise you.
