THere was a thread a few months back which had a link to an article in which they 'debunked' some of the defragging myths (ie, it won't do any harm, but most of the time, the difference is neglegible in Win XP).
I unfortunately can't find the link.
It had some nice tips to improve performance. Here are some of the ones that helped me a lot:
-Turn off Indexing service (I don't know if Home has this option. It is nice for servers or shared files in a LAN as it really speeds up searches, but for home desktop usage, it puts too much strain on the system to be worth it). Right click on a drive and select 'properties'. You can check if the Indexing Service is enabled in each drive's properties.
-Check your hard disk performance in the device manager. Sometimes an outdated BIOS, drivers or even an old / bad cable can cripple a HDD to less than half of its theoretical limit. I had this problem because of a bad cable and my Maxtor drive was giving me about 30% of what it's supposed to give in terms of read / write speeds. A new cable fixed this.
-Make sure you have no spyware / virus
🙂 I recommend
Shadenfroh's excellent
Consolidated Security Thread
-Use msconfig to turn off unnecessary processes that might be loading up during start up. If you don't know what a process does, google it before disabling them to avoid turning off some vital processes.
-Empty the prefetch folder every once in a while. What it does is to create a list of commonly used applications to load to the RAM so that you can access them faster when you need them. However, it will keep on pre-loading those apps even if you don't use them anymore. So it's a good idea to delete the files there every month or so. Don't worry, it'll reconstruct itself according to the programs you use.
-Let Windows manage pagefile size automatically
-If you are going to mess with the registry with some kind of registry optimizer / cleaner (usually not necessary NOR recommended), be sure to create backups!!!
If your PC feels sluggish, you also want to know what the source of the 'sluggishness' is. I usually monitor CPU, RAM and HDD usage for a couple of days to find the bottleneck
