[Coolhand]

An IT techie at work was sorting out a problem for me. While he was here, he showed me three neat things that I thought I'd pass along:
Defragment the boot sector of your hard drive to speed up the boot process. This isn't normally done when you run the Windows disk defragmenter.

Here's how: Execute the Run command (start button>run or Windows Key+R), then type cmd in the window that pops up; at the command prompt, type this: defrag c: -b (note the spaces, they have to be there). That's it. It only takes a few seconds. When you regain control of your command prompt, type exit and go back to your normal Windows session.

Clean out your prefetch file, for faster loads of Windows from boot-up. This is a file of all the executables you run within Windows, and it pre-loads them into RAM every time you load Windows. The trouble is, Windows never cleans out seldom used executables, so it loads a bunch of programs into RAM every time you start it, even if you never use them anymore. My machine had several executables of programs that I'd uninstalled, and they were hanging my boot-ups for up to five minutes lately. You'll notice quite a difference in Windows load time once you do this, plus you'll have some free RAM from all those programs that you weren't even running. I don't know why Micro$oft doesn't tell us about this. The only slight problem you'll notice is that when you launch a program for the first time after you do this, it'll be slightly slower starting up. After that, it'll be as fast as ever.

Here's how: Open Explorer and navigate to your prefetch directory. On mine, it's located at C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch. On a Windows 2000 or 2003 machine, it may be at C:\WINNT\Prefetch. Go into the right pane (files) and select all of them (Ctrl+A) then hit the delete key. That's it.

Repair minor registry errors with a free utility from Micro$oft, called regclean.exe. It's tiny, and pretty goof-proof. Just download it, unzip it, and run it. It has an undo feature if you need it. I didn't really notice any changes after I ran it, but it's always good to keep the registry clean.

That's all. Hope you find them useful.