What can I do to speed up my PC?

[Remah]

Before I explain the other items. If you try raising foreground boosting then do it little by little as too much can slow you down when all the stuff in the background doesn't get a fair go.
. If you have had a noticeable slowdown then are many possible reasons for this. Most of them are resolved by removing unneeded software and files.

The next level involves checking what your software is actually doing. You can check the Windows Event Viewer to see if any programs are causing problems. You can also use monitoring tools like ProcMon to see if there is a background task/service/device driver that is slowing everything down. Programs like ProcessTamer reduce the impact of software that uses a lot of of CPU but it doesn't help with software doing things that don't use a lot of CPU but do slow your system down. Registry polling is one of those activities. It is where a program keeps monitoring part of the registry, typically every second or two. It can have quite a high impact because polling can be a lot like opening a microwave to check whether the food is heating.

Tweaks are changes that improve the performance of your system. It means fine tuning your system. ProcessTamer is a kind of automatic tweaker because it makes the changes for you automatically.

Here's two examples that I chose because they also involve polling but for very different purposes:

• Windows XP checks/polls USB ports every millisecond. This can prevent low power modes being activated on some portables. So you can tweak the interval to increase it so power saving can activate. http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/1210/
• Another situations, is where you want your mouse to be more responsive giving a smoother movement then you can tweak the polling interval so the mouse is polled more than 125 times a second. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/200...ling-rate.html