There are a myriad of products claiming to speed up your computer by defragmenting your hard drive or cleaning your registry.

They are a waste of time.

There is no evidence that cleaning your registry makes any noticeable difference at all and similarly defragmenting your hard drive will only make a very slight difference if it is extremely defragmented – both Vista and Windows 7 keep the disk in order by default.

If you want to keep your computer up to speed make sure you keep it clear of viruses and spyware and make sure that you don’t have unnecessary programs and services running in the background – you will need to know what you are doing to tweak these though.

Apart from that, making sure you have enough RAM is the single best thing you can do to speed up your PC, 1GB minimum for XP/SP3 and Windows 7, 2GB if you are still lumbered with Vista.