Owning an old PC, takes a lot, as far as the maintenance part is concerned, you need to take good care of it. Here I am trying to offer few tips to maintain your old PC and Make It  Fast.

#1. Defragment your Hard Drives Regularly

Fragments are small chunks of free memory, spread all over the hard-drive, Defragmenting the drive, brings them together, to give you a bigger chunk of free consecutive memory locations. Running of several programs, creates several fragments in your drive. Though the fragments are created on all the drives, but the partition on which your windows is installed needs special care.

• It can be done using the windows utility,
• Diskeeper is another good option for defragmentation.

Defragmentation option in windows can be found under properties of partition, or under the System Tools.

#2. Keep your C:\ as Free as possible

Keeping more space on your C:\ (the partition in which windows is installed), allows you a smooth computing, Files other than installation, system files etc, should not be kept in this drive as they occupy more space.

Apart from the fact that more free space in this drive makes your computer faster, not keeping other files in this drive is safe, as at the time of installation, this drive generally gets formatted, so you can save yourself from backing up your data before every installation.

#3. Re-installing the Windows

So, when did you last re-install the windows on your system? If its been very long, like more than an year or so, I think. Re-installing the windows will be a great help.

#4. Try Using Light Weight Application

Prefer light weight applications, which need fewer resources to operate.

• Like for mp3 songs instead of Winamp try Foobar. AVG can be used as an antivirus.
• Use Pdfhammer instead of Acrobat reader. ( Read a review on this here )
• Google Docs can be a better choice for MS-office.
• For imaging, I find Picasa the best option.
• You can use light weight anti virus software ( Like AVG read review ) read about some free antivirus software her

Avoid using applications like wallpaper changer, desktop side panel etc., as these are the applications, which hamper the resources and slow down the other useful applications.

Here are the download links for above said preferred applications

#5. Install some Cleaning Application

Installation of softwares like Webroot Windows Washer, Ccleaner etc., keeps removing temporary files from the Temp folders, which keeps fetching the memory locations, for smoother working.

#6. Manage Startup

Startup can be managed for better performance, steps for this are given below,

Use Windows+R,

type MSCONFIG,

Uncheck unwanted programs under startup tab,

Reboot.

You can disable the loading of programs you don’t want to initialize at startup, initialization at startup, degrades the system performance dramatically

#7. Links for PC optimization

After reading this post, I would recommend reading following posts as well, as I think the following posts also need to be followed to achieve a better performance of your PC.

• How to tweak your XP performance By Ashish
• Ten tips to Optimize Windows XP ( You dont want to miss) By Ashish
• Xinorbis: Free Hard Disk Analyzer By Brown Baron