Some websites and many free fileshare programs will install useless, and mostly harmful software onto your system, most of the time without you even knowing about it. These can range from simple adverts to malware, which gather personal information from your computer.
I won't go into too much detail on how to remove these items, as there are already so many other sites that can be searched on google to help with this.
Although I would recommend that you use a couple of programs that I trust on a regular basis. These programs are Ad-Aware (Lavasoft site) and Spybot Search & Destroy (Spybot site). Both are free spyware removing programs, and both together provide more than adequate protection against spyware. Spybot also has other useful features that protect your system, to find out more at the Spybot site.
Increase Your Physical RAM To Epic Proportions
Most 3d games now can benefit highly from a hefty amount of RAM. 2GB of RAM is not an unreasonable amount, and seeing as RAM is fairly cheap now, it would not be impossible to get. Make sure you increase your paging file with your RAM increase.
If you're not sure what kind of RAM your system needs, and are thinking of buying some, try http://www.crucial.com. The website has a memory advisor find what RAM you need, their prices are very competitive, or so I'm told, and whatever RAM you do buy is guarenteed to work on your system.
Defragment Your Hard Drive Regularly
As files are created and deleted on your hard drive they may be written to non-contiguous clusters. This is know as hard disk fragmentation and it can have a significantly detrimental effect on your computer's overall performance. Fortunately it is quite easy to correct this.
Double click on the My Computer icon, right click on the drive you wish to defragment and select Properties. On the hard drive properties, select the Tools tab and then click on the Defragment Now button.
This will bring up the Disk Defragmenter window. Select the drive that you wish to defragment and click on the Defragment button. The disk defragmenter will analyze the drive and tell you that you don't need to defragment your hard drive. It's lying, tell it to defragement your hard drive anyway.
Depending on your hard drive size and the level of fragmentation, defragmentation may take several hours to complete. For most people it is probably best to leave the PC deframenting overnight.
Worth mentioning: You need at least 15% of your hard space free in order for the disk defragmenter to do it's thing. If you do not have 15% free, then you can turn off your paging file before defragmenting.
Alternatively if you are low on space you could always force defragmentation. Click start and select run. In the run dialogue type “cmd” without the quotations and click ok (or press enter).
In the command prompt window type “defrag c: -f” (c being the letter of the drive you want to defragment), without quotations, press enter and let it do it's stuff.
Turn Off Unnecessary Programs Running On Start Up
When people install programs, they are unaware that quite a few of them will run on startup. Things like Microsoft Office and Quick Time, are two of the meny. These programs run in the background, using up system resources, so they need to be disabled.
Click Start and select Run. In the run dialogue type in "msconfig" without quotations and click ok (or just press enter). This brings up the System Configuration utility. On the 'General' tab select the Selective Startup option. Click the 'Startup' tab, this shows all the programs that are set to run on startup. You should try to keep this list as short as possible.
To stop a program from running clear the checkbox next to it on the list. You will do no harm to your PC or system by doing this. If you disable a program by mistake you can always come back and turn it back on again.
When you are finished click ok to close the box and restart your system. After the restart Windows will display a dialogue box, which is absolutely useless:
Click the check box next to "don't show this message......" and click ok. If you don't do this then this annoying message will appear everytime you restart your system.
Change Your Paging File To Be Permenent & The Correct Size
Even if you have a huge amount of physical RAM, Windows XP needs a place to temporarily store excess data. That place is called the paging file. Setting up this file to be non-dynamic and unfragmented is another good way to increase your PC's performance.
If left as it was installed Windows XP creates a dynamic paging file, which allows Windows to expand and contract the paging file (virtual memory) when it needs it. The problem with this is that it can 1. fragment your hard drive and 2. can use up valuable system resources expanding and contracting, seeing as Windows is supposed to change the paging file when idle, but it doesn't always happen that way.
The first step in creating a unfragmented paging file is to delete the one currently on your system. You can get to the virtual memory settings by right clicking on My Computer and selecting properties. On the system properties dialogue select the Advanced tab. Under Performance click the settings button.
On the Performance Options dialogue click the Advnaced tab. Then click the Change button next to Virtual Memory.
On the Virtual Memory Dialogue turn off the paging file for each drive that may have one. For each drive select No Page File then click Set. Then click ok. You will get a warning for doing this, tell the warning to go away and restart your system.
NOTE: Your PC may run like crap without a paging file, but don't worry you'll be fixing that.
Now defragment the drive you are creating a paging file on. If you have more than one hard drive it is recommended to create the paging file on a drive that your system isn't on. After defragmentation work your way back to the Virtual Memory dialogue.
Select the drive that you just defragmented. Under "paging file for the selected drive" select the custom size option. Enter an initial size and maximum size that are IDENTICAL.
How big should big paging file be? That is dependent on how much RAM you have and how much hard drive space you are willing to give up. Microsoft generally recommends that you have a paging file that is 1.5 times as large as your RAM. Most experts tend to think this is a tad on the low side. My advice is to create paging file that at least twice as large as your system's RAM.
The numbers entered into the custom size files are in megabytes (MB) of hard drive space. The following table will help you convert from gigabytes (GB) to megabytes:
1 GB 1024 MB
1.5 GB 1536 MB
2 GB 2048 MB
2.5 GB 2560 MB
3 GB 3072 MB
3.5 GB 3584 MB
4 GB 4096 MB
EXAMPLE: If you have 1 GB of RAM, the minimum value you should enter into both boxes is 2048. This will give you a 2 GB permanent paging file.
One other note: The sizes entered into the custom size fields are usually a multiple of four (i.e. a number that can be divided by four evenly). I would not recommend using any values that are not a multiple of four.
After you have entered the minimum and maximum paging file sizes, click on the Set button and then click OK. Once you have rebooted you should have a non-dynamic paging file that won't get fragmented over time.
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