Free ways to keep your PC happy

Many a times users reported their PC is slow after months of usage. It is true that hardware plays a part etc, enough RAM (Min usage of XP is 512MB while Vista will need 2GB) hard disk is at least 5,400rpms and beyond but what i realize is some basic house keeping needs to be done as well

After all a house do not 'clean' itself unless the owner/s do some housekeeping like mopping, sweeping the floor etc. In the computing world there are some tips to keep the PC mumming at near tip top condition

1) Remove unnecessary services and programs. The PC is as good as the software installed but installing too much and the machine will slow down so simply go to start, control panel, add and remove programs and uninstall the programs not needed

2) Use a third party program to do point 1 and clean registry. One such FOC software is ccleaner (www.ccleaner.com). It will clean up our internet caches, tmp files and other files. There is also the reliable registry cleaner where the program will search for orphan registry keys and remove them.

3) Run a defrag software like MS disk defragmenter (found in start, accessories, system tools). It tidy up patches of gaps on the hard disk when PC is in use for a while. A free alternative called jkDefrag (http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/index.html) offers a auto defrag of files without the need to install any software.

4) Run a defrag on the page files. Ok. This is the fun part. Page files is used by windows for its daily operation by increasing performance using the hard disk space. For how page files really works, you may wish to explore its definition on the wiki. However unlike step 3, we cannot defrag a page file since it is always used by windows. So we used a software called pagedefrag by sysinternals (a branch under Microsoft). It defrag the page either once machine reboot or every time machine reboot. It can be download @ technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx

The above steps can be easily done using commercial software like diskeeper but if we can do it the same way the free way, we can put our hard earned $ to better use