Taken from PC World Magazine, January 2010

You have lots of good ways to speed up your PC, but you’ll encounter plenty of bogus tips too.  Here are three tactics that don’t do the trick.

Cleaning the Registry… Hard-core Windows users love to tweak via the Registry Editor.  This, the thinking goes, improves efficiency, saves the OS energy at bootup, and makes it run faster.  But we have never need any significant increase in speed… plus you can do more harm than good, if you don’t know what you are doing.  If you want to do a bit of cleanup, but don’t want to use the Registry Editor, you can use CCleaner… read about it here… http://blog.icscomputers.ca/?p=85

Disabling System Restore… Many supposed Windows gurus say that disabling System Restore can speed up your PC by freeing hard-drive space and preventing it from kicking in while you work.  But since System Restore activates only when you install apps or when your PC is idle, and since it uses only a small fraction on your drive, turning it off robs you of a valuable safety measure without providing any benefit.

Defragging Your Drive… Back when drives were small and OSs were simpler, doing this was necessary.  But Windows XP, Vista and 7 all have automated disk optimization, and it’s rare for a drive to become so fragmented that it hampers performance.  While defragmenting isn’t harmful, it’s usually a waste of time.  We recommend running Defraggler once or twice a year to fix things that the automated optimization might have missed.  You can read about it here… http://blog.icscomputers.ca/?p=85

If your system is running sluggish, there are many possible causes.  The obvious culprit is usually a virus or a program running in the background.  A simple and inexpensive memory upgrade can also give your system a bit more zip. We recommend a yearly visit to our workbench for a tuneup.