Performance Tips:

*NEW* 77 Windows 7 Tips

 C Cleaner. C Cleaner is a little program that will help you clean out extraneous entries that might have cropped up in your registry. Many times when you delete a program, registry keys could be left behind. Tracking them down manually can be tedious, this program scans your system and does it for you. It also does the same for your hard drive, potentially freeing up GBs worth of space.

Service Pack 3. One of the simplest ways to speed up your system is to install Service Pack 3. Some people report up to 10% performance improvements as a result.

Remove Spyware / Malware. This is the old standby. Adware, Malware and Spyware will slow down your computer and can cause all sorts of other problems besides. Take some time to download an Adware scanner like Spybot or AdAware and clean your system.

NTFS instead of FAT32. Make certain that your hard drive is using the NTFS file system.

Disable Indexing. Windows automatically indexes files to make searching faster. This can cause major slowdowns and is often unnecessary. If you don’t use search often, feel free to disable it by following these steps: 

• Go to Add/Remove
• Click on Add/Remove Component
• Uncheck Indexing

Optimize Display. If you are really trying to squeeze out the last drops of performance, you can cut down on some of XP’s visual flash by optimizing your display settings. Play around with the options, nothing you do here is going to damage the system, and disabling many of these settings will cause a noticeable improvement in speed. Here is how to access these settings.

• Control Panel
• System
• Advanced
• Performance

Spyware is computer software that is installed surreptitiously on a personal computer to intercept or take partial control over the user's interaction with the computer, without the user's informed consent.

While the term spyware suggests software that secretly monitors the user's behavior, the functions of spyware extend well beyond simple monitoring. Spyware programs can collect various types of personal information, such as Internet surfing habit, sites that have been visited, but can also interfere with user control of the computer in other ways, such as installing additional software, redirecting Web browser activity, accessing websites blindly that will cause more harmful viruses, or diverting advertising revenue to a third party. Spyware can even change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and loss of Internet or other programs. In an attempt to increase the understanding of spyware, a more formal classification of its included software types is captured under the term privacy-invasive software.

In response to the emergence of spyware, a small industry has sprung up dealing in anti-spyware software. Running anti-spyware software has become a widely recognized element of computer security best practices for Microsoft Windows desktop computers. A number of jurisdictions have passed anti-spyware laws, which usually target any software that is surreptitiously installed to control a user's computer.