Many people are unaware, but you can reduce the amount of memory being used by your computer by simply lowering your window manager’s visual effects (eye candy). Your Start Menu may not fade in and out anymore, but your memories of how badly that State Menu lagged sure will!

One of the best ways to increase the performance of your older computer is to simply increase the RAM that is installed. Installing as much RAM as your computer can handle is never a bad investment, and you will be pleasantly surprised with the overall improvement in your computing experience.

As time goes by your device drivers can slowly degrade and corrupt themselves. By upgrading them you will not only be ensuring they continue to work correctly, but you will also be running updated versions which will likely be more efficient.

When was the last time you used that greeting card maker you installed five years ago? Many people will install all kinds of programs and forget about them. By going through and removing these programs you will free up more hard drive space which will in turn allow for better all around computing experience. After you remove all of those programs don’t forget to Defrag, Defrag, Defrag!

The internet can be a wonderful resource, but for every useful tool there is another one designed to exploit you. By setting up a weekly schedule for scanning you will be amazed at the performance increase you will see!

Two of the industry leading tools for spyware are Lavasoft’s Adaware and Safer Networking’s Spybot Search and Destroy . These tools are incredibly useful, not to mention free!

Do you remember when the last time you scanned your computer was? If not, and even if you do, it’s probably about time to scan again. Computer viruses not only slow down your computers overall performance, but they can also be incredibly destructive by deleting and corrupting valuable data.

If you do not already have a virus scanner then a great one, which is also free, is AVG Anti-Virus.

Quite a few programs that get installed take it upon themselves to load when Windows is starting up. By checking to see what programs are loading, and then disabling them, you will likely free up a significant amount of RAM that would have otherwise been used by all seventeen of your instant messaging programs.

On a side note, if you are running three or four different instant messaging applications you might want to consider using just one program that takes all of the applications out there and rolls them into just one. Several good ones are Pidgin and Trillian.

Do you have any fun little programs installed that animate your cursor? These little programs are neat, and if you really like them then by all means keep right on using them. However, each one of these takes up a certain amount of RAM that can not be slotted for something more useful. Often times these programs are written poorly, and will suffer from memory leaks. These memory leaks will slowly consume all of the available memory your computer has, forcing you to reboot and start the cycle all over.

While entertaining, themes can consume quite a lot of your systems resources. If you can stand a less exciting graphical user interface you will enjoy a much more responsive computer!