Has your computer become a little sluggish lately? Unless you have a virus/spyware/adware problem, there are other factors that can affect your system. When you move a large amount of data, disk fragmentation can occur. When you install and un-install a lot of programs, registry entries can be left behind and when you browse the internet, cookies and temporary web pages can be stored on your computer all without knowing that it is there. There are products out there that can clean all this up, but a lot of them either don’t do a very good job or require you to pay in order for them to actually clean-up the problems. Some even mess up your system instead of making it work better.

One program that can defragment up your harddrive and is better than the Windows utility is AusLogics Disk Defrag. This utility will ask which partition you want to clean up and show you how much it defragmented. The program recommends that you defragment your drive at least every month to prevent slow-downs and crashes.

To clean out you Registry and delete old files that take up space, CCleaner is the program to use. This program will clean out old Windows files, old Registry entries and goes even further by cleaning out Firefox cookies and cache. It even attaches to the context menu of the Recycle Bin to allow 2 clicks and it will clean out the system right then and there. While you are at it, AusLogics Registry Defrag will defrag the registry to prevent significant slow-downs and removing wasted space that is caused from un-installing programs.