If you’ve been noticing lately that your system seems to be slowing down, it could be an indication that it’s time to cleanup and defragment your hard drives as well as your computer’s registry.  A lot of people spend money on expensive software to help keep their computers running healthy.  While some software is almost necessary to purchase, I prefer freeware over shareware whenever possible.  I use three pieces of freeware once a month that do just that.

The first program I run is called CCleaner by Piriform. CCleaner is great for cleaning up accumulated junk on your hard drives.  It also includes a registry cleaner.  You can check out all CCleaner’s features here.

The second program I use is called Disk Defrag by Auslogics. With this you can defragment each hard drive installed inside your computer.  It also supports USB hard drives (you’ll have to enable this option in settings) and has a built-in scheduler.

After I run Disk Defrag, I run a third free program from Lars Hederer called NTREGOPT. This small program will defrag your registry on your Windows machine. Once you run this program, it will ask you to reboot to complete the registry optimization process.  However, if you are running Windows Vista, you will need to run NTREGOPT with administrator privileges, otherwise you will receive an error message.

While there can be many more processes to run through when cleaning up and optimizing your computer, this is a good place to start.