PC Health - Hints and Tips for a Faster Machine

The book has come about because for years I use to unofficially helped PC users at my old firm. It amazed me that users had no idea what their actions caused but did things because it was easy. Classic would be Desktops (your screen) a guy used to put all his attachments on there and then complained that his computer was slower than anyone else. I looked and was shocked how much was in his desktop. Look for yourself how many Icons have little diagonal arrows in the left hand bottom corner (there fine). This means it's a shortcut (1-2kb), system ones that windows have built in don't have them but anything you put should, if not it's a file and in some cases it's folder full of files, these should not be here instead of using a couple of kb they could be using Mb's of your memory! More about that in Desktop. If no one tells you how do you know, did anyone ever tell you to defrag your disk, if not each file you save get's split into small pieces you every time you access it it has to rebuild the file from lots of locations on the hard disk before it can run. Most the time these files are ones that run your computer so you don't know what it's doing except the disk is working hard and you're waiting for something to happen. So this book is to tell what you need to do and why.
This book has been written with XP in mind but most of the tips are common across systems.