[stevem]

Another thing that I recommend people do, is to defragment their disks partitions. Depending on your disk activity, like how much you write and delete, then your partitions can become very defragmented quickly and this can slow your disk access.

When defragmenting, I always boot the PC into disganostic mode, so that there are a minimal set of drivers loaded and files opened. Open files cannot be moved and defragmented.

Click Start
Click run
Type msconfig
Click OK
Click Diagnostic Startup
Click OK
Click restart

Your system will then reboot, and there will be a window popup after booting, just click OK

Open windows explorer
Right click on the selected disk partition
Click Properties
Click Tools tab
Click Defragment Now

A window will open showing your disk partitions and some statistics. If a disk partition is less than about 20% free space, then the defragmentation process will not be too effective.

Make sure that the disk partition you want to defragment is selected, and then click on Defragment. In the lower window you want to see more blue than red. You can run as many defragmentation passes as you want.

After you are happy with the results, close the window.

Now you need to reboot back to normal mode

Click Start
Click Run
Enter msconfig
Click OK
Check Normal Startup
Click OK
Click Restart

You should see an improvement in performance.