Top 10 hints to keep your Windows PC crunching.

Hard Disk Most people forget about it but your Hard Disk slows you down the most if it gets untidy. It is essential to defragment regularly. A regular weekly schedule is good and if you have the time do it in Safe Mode, the results are much better.

Memory Plenty of RAM. Try and have a min of 1GB installed, 2GB is better to run most applications and leads to a huge drop in application errors. 3.4 GB is the limit on all 32bit operating systems so any more will be wasted.

Security Programs Good anti-virus. It goes without saying that it is essential these days. However many AV products are blotted and inefficient. They try to do everything for you, take control of everything and keep telling you what they are doing. This eats up recourses and wastes your time. It should just do its job and tell you when there is a problem. Kaspersky is good but so are many of the free AV’s such as AVG. Best still is to have your AV, anti spyware etc running at your network gateway but that is not suitable for most.

Windows Operating system updates while a pain, are much more effective and keeping your system clean than any AV system. Get your updates early as the exploit will be only a few days behind.

Programs Clean out junk. If you have not used an installed program for over 6 months, chances are you don’t need it. Uninstall it. If it is installed it is slowing you down.

System Utility software. There are many packages that do a lot of the above for you and do it well. Tune-Up Utilities is one of my favourites’ and will be the best €25 you have spent on your system. Even get the 30 day trial to clean out your system.

Startup Programs. Many programs like to start when windows starts. Generally there is no good reason for them. Go to Start-> Run-> msconfig and select startup items. You can then mark the items you don’t want to start. You can always switch them back on if it causes a problem.

Registry. While most people don’t want to touch it, many of the most common issues arise there and are cured there. Remember that free shareware program you installed to try out but did not like. Well it left all its junk in the registry when you uninstalled it. Run a registry cleaner on your system monthly. CCleaner is good and free. Tune Up Utilities will also do the job.

Free Space Make sure you have at least 20% free space on your Windows drive. 10% is the min but 20% will really help. HD are cheap these days so there is no excuse.

Reinstall. Rarely done by most users but there is no doubt the huge benefit to be got by reinstalling your operating system and programs when things are crawling along. Hard to keep all the disks available but there are utilities to allow you to “Ghost” your clean install. This means that you can very quickly replace your well used install with the clean one. Very important that you plan ahead for this. Keep your data, music, movies on a separate HD or well backed up.