For the 3 people who don’t know anything about spyware – these are programs that hide in your computer and monitor everything you do or type. And then they send all that information to the company behind the spyware. Don’t be surprised next time your credit card is charged by a shop in Romania even though you live in London.

How do you get spyware? You might have visited a naughty web site, or downloaded a program that had spyware inside it, or opened an infected e-mail attachment. Either way, here it is, hiding in your computer, spying on you and consuming CPU and Internet traffic you pay for. Some spyware can really slow down your PC.

Getting rid of spyware can be as easy as running a spyware scan, or it can be a real challenge and you will spend days reading computer forums and might end up re-installing Windows.
UPGRADE Memory

If your computer has too little memory, then all the tweaks or disk and registry defragmentation won’t have a significant effect on the performance of your PC.

At the time of writing, 512 MB RAM is barely enough to run Windows Vista. Of course, modern software wants to take advantage of the modern computers and underpowered computers simply won’t cut it anymore.

Therefore, if no amount of tweaking helped improve your PC, simply upgrade memory to at least 2GB. Your computer will thank you.
CLEAN UP Startup Programs

Do you have an antivirus, antispyware, firewall and a bunch of other programs running at the same time? Here’s an advice. Disable Windows Defender. Install just one good antivirus / antispyware. Windows Firewall is enough for most of us, so don't buy another Firewall.

Remove that “Acrobat Quick Launch” from your startup programs. Yes, it allows you to launch Acrobat faster. But it slows down everything else! If you have iPod, make sure Real Player or iTunes do not run on startup. How do you do that? You can use Startup Manager from BoostSpeed, or msconfig from Microsoft if you are technical enough.
MAINTAIN Disk and Registry

Most people know that they need to clean up and defragment disks and the Registry in order to speed up their computer. But I learnt that not many of them know that the order in which you do it is important.

   1. Start with cleaning the disks. Remove all the junk files you don’t need. Boost Speed or any other disk cleaner will be able to help.
   2. Clean the Registry. Just like the disks, the Registry accumulates hundreds or even thousands of junk registry keys.
   3. After you clean the Registry, the keys are not physically removed, still slowing down your PC. Defragment the Registry to completely remove the junk keys.
   4. Finally, defragment the disk. Defragmentation puts fragments of each file together so that each file can be read instantaneously in one go.

DISABLE Services

Services are programs that run whenever you power on your PC. That means they are always loaded in memory, taking space and CPU time. Microsoft did their best and your PC runs services to print documents, to browse Internet, to run Windows Messenger or to allow remote connections to your PC.

But more likely than not, you just don’t need all of them! To really speed up your PC you need to disable many of the services. Here’s the list of the services you are pretty safe to disable. Note that you can always turn them back on.

    * Application Management: Set it to manual.
    * Cryptographic Services: Most likely you don’t need it; set it to manual.
    * Distributed Transaction Service: Set it to manual.
    * Error Reporting Service: Remember annoying “Send the Error Report to Microsoft” pop ups? Disable this service and you won’t see them again. You will also save your bandwidth.
    * Fast User Switching Compatibility: Are you the only one using this computer? If yes, then you can safely disable it.
    * FTP Publishing:Set it to manual.
    * HTTP SSL: Set it to manual.
    * Indexing Service: This is a very costly service for your PC. Disable it if you do not use Windows Search extensively.
    * IPSEC Services: Set this service to manual.
    * Windows Messenger: this service is useless for most users. It is security threat to your computer and a resource hog. Disable it.
    * MS Software Shadow Copy Provider: Disable or set this service to manual.
    * NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing: Most likely you are not using Remote Desktop feature; disable this service.
    * Remote Desktop Help Session Manager: If you do not call Microsoft support often; disable this service.
    * Remote Procedure Call Locator: You don’t need this service, set it to manual.
    * Remote Registry: This is a security threat to your PC, disable it immediately.
    * Secondary Logon: Set it to manual.
    * Terminal Services: Set it to manual or disable it.
    * Wireless Zero Configuration: You can safely disable it if you don’t have wireless network.
    * WMI Performance Adapters: Only experienced users need to keep this service running.

Apart from these top 5 solutions, there are of course other things you can do to speed up your computer. Look at disabling extra visual effects, enabling DMA for disks, optimizing your Internet browsers, turning off NTFS indexing and other tweaks. All of these can save you a couple of thousand dollars spent on a new computer.