"Laurie Forbes" wrote in message
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I do defrag occasionally but it doesn't seem to help all that much. I
also use MSCONFIG (XP)to disable a bunch of unnecessary startup items
(almost every program you add seems to want to load & run something at
boot time).

Another annoying (and ironic) problem I've always had is that repeated use
of hibernate or suspend really bogs things down after several days and the
only remedy I can find is to reboot.

Laurie Forbes

Same here, after hibernating for several days IE8 can't find the modem
dialer.

This is a Microsoft insider's personal improvement on Task Manager:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb896653

It shows the active processes and how much of the CPU and memory they tie
up. It puts a handy mini graph of CPU activity down by the clock. I still
use v.11 for its simpler display.

HijackThis is a powerful (and dangerous) tool for detecting and removing
unwanted parasite programs by their registry entries.
http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/

I wouldn't be as daring with it if I didn't make reloadable C: backups.

The dealer installed and recommended Advanced System Care on this
second-hand laptop:
http://www.iobit.com/advancedsystemcareper.html

I've slowly been enabling more and more of its mysterious automatic repair
functions and haven't lost anything valuable to it yet, but again I have
recent backups of C: and on desktops I have several copies of the system in
plug-in hard drive cartridges so I can experiment on a spare copy. Too bad
that isn't available for medical and dental procedures.

There are many other such utilities, some of which I've tried and liked
less. Those three have good provenance and are reasonably easy to learn for
occasional use.

jsw