So here’s the deal, you buy a new PC and it’s running pretty fast, as time goes on, you wonder why it’s getting slower, truth is, it’s not, it’s just doing more work, yes, your experience may be slower, but your PC is pretty much as fast as you got it.

I bet you are thinking, yeah yeah, enough with trying to be clever, but in all honesty I’m not trying to be, I’m just trying to help you understand the problem, not just give you the solution.

Perhaps in a future log, I’ll write a post helping you make your PC faster than you got it, however this post is more about unclogging your no-longer-new PC. This is more about basic upkeep.

One more note before the helpful stuff, you won’t get your PC back to as-new with this post, the best way to do that would be to Start Again and follow the direction of a future post ( I know, feeling I should have done that post first now myself ), however this is more of a way to get it faster than it currently is, if you get it as fast as-new, good for you.

Very Basic Stuff… Do every couple days.

Make sure there’s always 20% free space on your boot hard drive ( the Hard Drive your Windows is installed on ). – Windows needs free space to play with files it’s working with and it’s page file. You may think, ah 20% of my 1TB Hard Drive is 200GB, well, either you should make your boot hard drive smaller, or sacrifice the 200GB. I know it sounds silly, but I kind of think Microsoft has it coded in that if you have less than 15% free space > run PC slower. ( I know I said 20% before, the extra 5% is rather-be-safe-than-sorry ).
Use ccleaner to keep the drive clutter free. ( google ccleaner ). This is one program I am 100% confident has no spyware / malware. I am also confident it has no other agenda other than de-cluttering your PC. ( at the time of writing this post at least ).

Weekly / Fortnightly

Do a drive check about once a week. ( open cmd by holding down the windows key and pressing R at the same time, typing in cmd and pressing enter, then type “chkdsk /f” without “”‘s. It will ask you if you want drive checked on restart, say yes ( y ), then restart and allow the check to go through ). You may go weeks without it finding an error, then one week it finds it, it’s simple and at times has even helped me fix problems that have deemed the PC unusable.
Drive defragging, do it about every 2 weeks, it helps a bit but not massively like it did in the old days since newer versions of windows reduce file fragmentation.
Go into your program add / remover and look for any programs that have ‘toolbar’ in the name, or if you know it’s a toolbar, honestly, you don’t need any of them, even the Google toolbar.

Take Note
Make sure you don’t have programs such as Anti-Virus’s that take up allot of resources, I use AVG Free and it’s works perfectly, just install it and make sure Windows Firewall is enabled and to be honest that’s all you need. The programs to watch out for are those that are constantly running ( mostly programs that run as a Service ).
I mentioned uninstalling toolbars before, but don’t let them get there in the first place. When you install new programs, it may ask you during the process if you wish to install the toolbars, don’t, and if it also asks if you want to set your homepage, don’t let it.
Set your browsers ( the program you use to access the Internet ) homepage to a site that doesn’t load up loads of code, such as Google, or I normally set it to about:blank , it’s a blank page with no code. I also use Mozilla Firefox as my browser. Make sure your browser isn’t set to open the last page you visited every time you open it.

Well, this is all the basic stuff I’m giving you now, I am looking at putting up a post to improve your new PC and maybe some more advanced fixes to make your PC faster. Don’t go installing loads of programs that can fix your PC, because all you are doing is cluttering up your PC more, and different programs have different idea’s of the right state your PC should be in ( mainly Defrag methods ), so they may end up clashing. Don’t let anyone tell you maintenance for your PC is not simple, they probably just trying to make out as if they are cleverer than they want you to believe.