One of the most annoying things I have noticed with personal computers is the noticeable drop off in speed and performance as the system gets older. When I first buy the system or when I have freshly installed Windows the whole system seems to zip along, programs open faster the system starts up faster. A few months of hard use later and I get more and more frustrated, I am forced to wait for!!

Things to consider:

• Your hard drive fragments data over time. Make sure you periodically defrag your drive.
• Windows Registry is not the best solution to store data in. It easily gets corrupted because it's essentially a single database that stores all the settings for your computer (not really but it's similar). Not much you can really do here. You can try Registry fixing programs but they vary in effectiveness. Usually it's easier to just reformat and reload Windows.
• Your programs themselves leave orphaned files when you delete/remove them. Windows isn't as bad as it used to be but it still happens. These orphaned files clutter your hard drive and also remain in the Registry, which can lead to a system slow down.
• As code bloat occurs from faster processors and more RAM, programs simply run less effeciently than they used to. As you use more programs at the same time, they start to fight for system resources which can bog down the computer.

Get a program called CCleaner , this cleans up registrys, cookies, temp files etc, this is a free application. Also do a defranment everyday for a week and then just do it every once a week after that. Also turn off automatic updates as this kills ram on system startup.

Oh yeah, turn off auto-scan on any of your AV programs. It doesn't really help that much, especially if you practice safe computing, but it sucks up a lot of CPU time. Just manually run your AV program every week or two and it will do just as good.

I just installed this software (CCleaner) yesterday. It looks good, but too early to tell if it's really any good.

I like that it removes obsolete data off the TEMP and other such folders that Windows itself misses.

To add to the list of things to do: you should right click on your HDD(s) and click on Properties, and then click on the Disk Cleanup button (under the General tab) every once in a while. If you have CCleaner installed, you don't need to do this at all because like I said, CCleaner does it even better.

Yeah, its very good M8

How can one tell if a registry cleaner REALLY is any good? Without going manually through the registry.