A computer can become sluggish over the years and this will definitely decrease the PC's performance. Here's a short tip on how you can boost your PC's performance.
1) Mailbox cleaning
Most people neglect the tremendous amount of emails in their local mailboxes for example, Outlook. Throwing out unneccessary mail and deleting junk mails will speed up search processes. This will avoid your PC from being filled with filing problems that will eat up lots of your time when you finally decide to do a major spring cleaning. |
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2) Cleaning up your temporary files
Windows automatically creates files known as scratchpads spaces to hold temporary files on your hard disk. These temporary files accumulate as you happily use your PC and slowly eats up your disk space especially with huge storage devices nowadays. Deleting these files wont cause your PC to malfunction as it being "temporary", you wouldn't be needing them anyway.

3) Updating of Antivirus and Anti-Spyware softwares
It is a mistake to ignore the importance of these softwares as they could be serious life-savers. As you know, virus can be a threat to your PC (especially those self-duplicating ones that can seriously cause a pain). Spywares are mostly hidden unlike virus that constantly annoy you. Spywares run in the background, eating up your resources and in a worst case scenario, feeding a 3rd party with your personal data and/or information.
4) Defrag your drives
Defragmenting helps to keep your files in a contiguous sequence on the hard drive thus able to speed up the process of accessing into the contents. Besides, this will be able to increase the chance of recovering your data easily even when it has broken down. Defrag at least your primary drive (in most cases, the C:) as you'll be accessing it all the time to run programs, etc.

However, defragmenting too often may shorten the lifespan of your hard disk. It is recommended to run deframentation at least once every month.
5) Run chkdsk or scandisk
This is a tool provided by Microsoft Windows itself to check the health of your hard disks. Bad sectors can be located and you'll be able to estimate the lifespan or reliability of your drives. Bad sectors can't be cleared by mere formatting your hard disk, so always check on it and be prepared!

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