Your computer is getting old, you feel that your PC performance is lowering, but you don't want to buy the latest technology or invest in some RAM, I can give you some tips to get your computer back on track.

Unfortunately our technological environment is working towards making computers obsolete very quickly, you download this and that, and some more of this and a couple of more that's ... and after a few months you feel that your computer is a little slow.

Well a few routines you should do once in a while may help you delay your harware upgrade:

1. Optimizing your disk can be your first task. Why? Well the hard drive is probably the slowest component in a computer.

a) defragmenting your hard drive: a fragmented disk will really kill your computers performance. You will have installed a Windows tool to defrag your hard drive, but my suggestion is to download this free software called Auslogic Disk Defrag at www.auslogics.com In my opinion a much better tools than the one you'll have installed with Windows.

b) cleaning your temporary files: get rid of those useless files that hang around your computer. Press your windows start icon and run the following %temp% this will show you all the temporary files you'll have on your disk. View them and erase the ones you don't need. If you have difficulty analyzing them, organize them by dates.

c) improving your hard disks response: go to your hardware manager, click on the hard drive with the right button of the mouse, and choose the cache option. What does this do? Well it'll speed up your computers response as it'll be using drive space to help process the information much quicker, less waiting periods. However if you have a power shortage and your computer doesn't have a UPS attached you may lose information.

2. Improving start up

When you start up your computer does it take a little long? Well go to the BIOS of your computer. Press delete when you restart, or look at the screens instructions on how to get to the BIOS file. In the BIOS file you'll have a part dedicated to boot sequence, exclude all an include only one your hard drive. This way when you start your computer it'll boot directly from your hard drive. Don't forget that you have set this boot sequence, if you need to boot from a CD or DVD you'll have to include them in the sequence.

3. Managing start-up software

Try to limit the start up software to the essential, it'll conume RAM memory and slow down your computer.

4. Unnecessary software

Uninstall all unnecessary software. Why have it installed if you don't use it. Give you computer a break and spend some time evaluating if all that junk you have installed is really necessary.

This software may help you with some of these tasks, it's called Advanced SystemCare and it's free, you can download it at: www.iobit.com

These are some of the things you should do once in a while, obviously much more can be done.