I'm a couple of months away from completing my B.S. in Computer Science, and I've seen my fair share of computer problems, ranging from an accidental spam attack against Hotmail's servers to a piece of faulty ram bursting into flames in a retrofitted server.

The most common problem that I've run into, however, is the "slowing down" issue that faces most computer users. This problem is most noticeable when it comes to using web-based services such as web browsing or online games.

Computers tend to slow down over time simply because everytime you install a piece of software, download a video, or browse a website, your computer is slowly accumulating files and consuming your computer resources. One other cause of slowing is simply that applications and software begin to demand more resources as computing technology improves; your computer may simply be "out of date" with the latest software or rich media content.

But now for the fun part, where I give you 5 easy tips to boost your computer's performance.

This is the most obvious place to begin, stripping out malicious software that consumes your system's resources without providing any benefits to you.

Viruses are mailicious software programs design to cause harm to you or to other users/organizations. They slow your computer down by consuming system resources to commit potentially harmful tasks. These need to go first. You can use a free web-based virus checker like TrendMicro HouseCall, which runs right out of your web browser window. HouseCall is a great tool for getting Viruses off of your system in the short run, but ultimately, you're going to want to buy some sort of Virus Proection software, like Norton, Macafee, or TrendMicro.

Spyware conists of parasitic software programs that data-mine your online activity in order to sell it to advertisers or other organizations. Spyware does not make your life any easier, and it consumes both your system resources (RAM, hard drive space, CPU) along with a portion of your Internet conneciton. To eliminate spyware you need to use a free scanning tool like LavaSoft's Ad-Aware or SpyBot: Search & Destroy.

One of important pieces of "Computer Hygeine" that users commonly forget is defragmenting the hard drive. When you download large files consistently, the operating system may not be able to place that hard drive in one contiguous "block" on your hard drive; it might distribute the file over a variety of open areas.

When you operating system splits up a file, it effectively "fragments" the file into smaller pieces, and when you attempt to use that file, the computer has to scan portions of the hard drive in physically separate areas, meaning that it will take the computer longer to retrieve all portions of the file in some cases.

The solution to a fragmented hard drive is to use your operating system's "defragmentation tool." This tool shifts around your hard drive's contents until all or most of the contents are in contiguous blocks, meaning that the computer doesn't need to scan multiple locations for a single file, thus improving the performance.

I have posted some guides for doing this on various operating systems:

• Mac OS X - Free defrag tool and short walkthrough
• Windows XP (see first video below)
• Windows Vista (see second video below)

If your hard drive is almost full, did you know that your computer will slow to a crawl? That's because your operating system depends on being able to use at least a portion of the hard drive for managing your computer's memory.

When you starve out the computer's memory system by filling up the hard drive, you reduce the amount of space available for performance. Go through your hard drive and delete large files that you're not using. Here are a few good examples:

• Movies that you don't watch.
• Out-of-date backups of your system.
• Large collections of music and images that you don't use.
• Programs that you don't use anymore.

Speaking of programs that you don't use...

Deleting programs that you don't use anymore is a good idea not only because it frees up hard drive space, but it can also kill a number of background processes that can consume up valuable resources on your computer.

For instance, a lot of applications have "updaters" that run in the background and check for the latest versions of the software; these processes are on ALL THE TIME and consume both bandwidth on your Internet connection and CPU/Memory resources.

Going through your computer and removing some of these programs can cut down the potential number of background "updater" processes and will free up hard drive space.

Do you really need your email client, instant messenger, web browser with 12 tabs open, media player, Skype, Word, PowerPoint, and PhotoShop all open at the same time? If the answer is "no," then you should close the number of windows you have open at any given time.

The reason is simple: the more programs you have running, the less overall resources you have for any given application. While computers are getting faster and faster, largely eliminating this kind of resource constraint, there are still some instances where it would be a good idea to shut down other applications.

For instance, if you're trying to play an online video game, it's probably a good idea to shut off all other applications before you begin as video games tend to consume a lot of resources. Another instance would be shutting down file sharing when you attempt to browse the web if you're running on a slow connection.

I hope these have been helpful!