After seeing how popular Blifaloo's guide to virus removal and prevention has become, I decided to write some more articles about taking care of your computer.

The following is a list of easy tweaks you can do to speed up the overall performance of your PC with Windows XP. Last updated May. 27th. 2010
1. Disable File Indexing

file indexing
Huh? This indexing service gets info from files on the hard drive and creates a "searchable keyword index."

If you don't use the XP search feature often to look for documents, you can turn this feature off, and the difference you'll notice is a slight increase in the time it takes for your computer to find a file, but an overall increase in general speed for everything else.

How to : From My Computer > right-click on the C: Drive > select Properties.
Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching." Apply changes to "C: sub folders and files," and click OK.
2. Clean Up Prefetch, temp, and cache files

clean up hard drive
Huh? Windows stores a lot of temporary files that can be safely cleaned out once a month or so. This is also good to do before running virus or spyware scans, as it clears many things out of your system that would need to be scanned.

How to : Download CleanUp!
How to use CleanUp! : Download, Install, and Run.

(I've gotten a lot of recommendations that cleaning the Prefetch is unnessary. Keep this in mind, but I still think CleanUp! is a useful program.)
3. Install some RAM

install ram
Huh? If you are running 128mb or 256mb of Ram, it's pretty cheap an