Get your hard drive back in the fast lane

The first few steps haven't done much to improve performance, but they have prepared your hard drive for the defragmentation procedure. As you create, delete, and modify files on your computer, over time the files become divided into pieces scattered around the disk. This slows things down because your hard drive has to search the disk to find the parts of a single file. The defragmentation procedure gathers all the pieces of a file and rewrites its data into contiguous, sequential sectors. As a result, the read/write head doesn't need to waste time scooting all over the drive to find each piece of a file.

Keep in mind, the defragmentation process could take hours, so it's best to let it run overnight. Select Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. With a drive highlighted, click Analyze to see how badly fragmented your files are. The blue lines represent contiguous files. If you see a lot of thin blue lines scattered throughout the display field, you could benefit from a defrag. (You should also see a dialog that says "You should defragment this volume.") Just click Defragment to get started. Once that drive is done, try another drive letter. If the operation isn't necessary, you'll get a message reading, "You do not need to defragment this volume." (Volume is Microsoft-speak for the drive partition that was just analyzed.)

For a no-holds-barred way to speed up your system, consider a fresh install of Windows. Just make sure you create a thorough backup of everything first.