I used to rely on Norton’s Speed Disk, then, eventually Perfect Disc and Diskeeper to optimize my HDD. Defragmenting is the idea- an antiquated process of reorganizing bytes on spinning platter so that each file is grouped into contiguous locations on the disk. Many still believe that defragmenting hard disk drives on a regular basis keeps PCs operating at peak performance. But that idea is behind the times.

Defragmenting served its purpose back when folks chugged along on 486DX4 PCs powered by 5400rpm drives. Now those where slooooow drives and extra spindle movements arising from defragmentation truly hobbled the system. But that’s no longer the case. Today, 7200-RPM hard-disk drives with monster seek and latency times are the bare minimum; most brag a 16-MB cache buffer. Couple that with Windows XP’s high speed NTFS and you’ll quickly discover that defragmenting no longer makes much improvement, if any, to system performance. I say this after thorough experimentation on my QuadCore running on a 10,000RPM Western Digital Raptor. To test, I clocked bootup, shutdown and photoshop load times of a fully defragged system versus a 70% fragmented system. The result? A measly 1 to 2 second difference. Obviously, defragmentation software have finally outlived their usefulness. So instead of spending cash on useless optimization software, try these updated tips to truly kick that PC into overdrive.

1) Toss out your old IDE hard disk and upgrade it to a SATA drive with minimum of 10,000 RPM and 16MB buffer. (or 32MB if you can find one)

2) Upgrade your RAM to 4GB, then eliminate the paging/swap file. This eliminates disc churning and speed up almost all load times. With this change, my XP machine boots up in 14 seconds and shuts down in 4 seconds. (not so stellar on Vista though)

3) Disable file indexing. This is a tiny service that uses a great deal of RAM and induces much disk thrashing. Your system instantly becomes more responsive. Here’s how: First, doubleclick the My Computer icon. Then, right-click on the C: Drive, then hit Properties. Uncheck “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching.” Next, apply changes to “C: subfolders and files,” and click OK.

4) Zap the Windows Prefetch folder every week. Windows XP can “prefetch” portions of data and applications that are frequently loaded. This allows processes appear to start faster when requested the user. Over time, the prefetch folder overwhelms with references to files and applications no longer in use. Guess what happens? Windows XP wastes time and grinds to a halt by pre-loading obsolete data.

5) Kill unnecessary animations, and nix active desktop. Here’s how to do it: First click on the System icon in the Control Panel. Then, click on the Advanced tab. Find the Settings button nestling under Performance. Feel free to play around with the options offered here, as nothing you can change will alter the stability of the computer - only its responsiveness.

6 ) Zap extra fonts fonts installed on their computer. The more fonts they have, the more lethargic the system will become. Anything over 300 fonts tax the system and slow down load times- especially graphic apps.

7) Disable unnecessary services. Windows XP loads services you will never need. To determine which services you can disable for your client, visit the Black Viper site for ideal Windows XP configurations. Here are a few services I booted off to streamline my PC:

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