Get your hard drive back in the fast lane

Once the defrag is complete, your system should run a little faster. If you want to eke just a little more speed out of the ol' beige mare, consider moving your swap, or paging, file to another partition. Also known as virtual memory, the swap file extends your PC's memory, holding information from real RAM on your hard drive as you work. By default, this file is written to drive C:, but you can improve performance and increase free space by moving it to a different partition. Right-click My Computer and select Properties > Advanced. In the Performance section, click Settings > Advanced and in the Virtual Memory section, click Change. Next to drive C:, the two numbers in the Paging File Size (MB) column indicate the minimum and maximum size limits of the current file.

To set up a new paging file on a different drive, highlight that drive letter and click either the Custom Size or System Managed Size radio button. The Custom Size button lets you specify the desired size. (Two to three times the size of your RAM is a good starting point.) If space is plentiful, set the initial and maximum sizes to the same value so that Windows doesn't have to dynamically adjust the file size. Or choose System Managed Size to let Windows do the job on its own.

Once you've configured the new swap file, click Set, then highlight drive C:. Click No Paging File to delete the old file on that drive and click Set again.