Gnomie Will Fergus writes:

I heard you were looking for top 5 tips, so here you go.

1. When looking for a piece of software such as a screen capturing program, I end up downloading lots of different ones. I find one I like and continue using it, but forget to uninstall the others. Avoid this and you will save space and help your system run smoothly.
2. If you find your Internet to be slow, make sure programs such as Limewire and Utorrent are not running in the background. Even after properly exiting the program it could still be uploading your files and eating away at your bandwidth.
3. An extension of tip 2 — make sure programs such as QuickTime are not open when you don’t need them to be. I know that QuickTime starts itself on boot, and hides itself behind the little arrow in the bottom right corner of your screen.
4. Do not become too dependent on hibernation. After resuming Windows, it copies all the data you were using back to your RAM. I know that after running graphics intensive applications on my laptop, it’s good to shut down Windows. If I hibernate and resume, it runs very slowly, indeed.
5. The most important and obvious one: make sure you do regular checks for useless files, virus and spyware scans, disk defrags, etc. And delete your cookies once in a while, I know that watching hundreds of YouTube videos a week (mostly Chris Pirillo’s) can take up a lot of space!