3 Essentials to Keep Windows in Top Shape

All of the Windows Operating Systems, though great, usually require maintenance. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to keep your operating system in check with a few great tools and a little bit of tweaking. Today, I will be talking about this and how to have your operating system running as fast as ever. Let’s do it!

Disable Hibernation

Hibernation is, if you haven’t used it before, a method of “sleeping” your computer and have it stay on, but in a type of halfway on position, so that you can – especially with laptops – save battery and lower power consumption without turning off your computer.

Hibernation does, though, take a lot of disk space to run, because Hibernation simply saves the current state of the processes running, as well as the rest of your desktop, to be used when you use your computer again.

(Note: If you use a laptop primarily, then we do not suggest disabling Hibernation, because it can be quite useful in many cases when you need to simply close your laptop and/or put it to sleep quickly, etc.)

Ready?

    Step 1: Go to Control Panel (“Start,” “Control Panel”)

    Step 2: Click “Power Options”

    Step 3: Click the Hibernation tab. Uncheck the box labeled “Enable Hibernation.”

    Step 4: Click “Apply,” and you are done!

Defragment Your PC

Defragmenting your hard drive is a common way of keeping on top of your operating system. It consists of simply, analyzing your hard drive and finding fragments with files and drives, etc. (More information here.) There are many programs out there that are effective and efficient for defragmenting, and thus I will cover only a few here. If you would like an extended list of programs you can see an article by Mark (5 Programs to Defragment Your PC), as well as a MakeUseOf Poll on best disk defragmenter.

Here are just some of the top, free, defragmenting applications:

1. Auslogics

Auslogics Free Disk Defragmenter

Auslogics is one of the best disk defragmentation applications on the web. It includes numerous features not usually available on many similar applications, and is extremely fast. You can see a full review here.

2. JKDefrag

JKDefrag is an extremely fast and efficient defragmenting application. Particularily, the scanning. Many defragmentation applications take an extremely long amount of time to scan the hard drive, but JKDefrag took around 1 minute or so to scan approximately 70GB of data. It then – also quickly – runs more analyzing of the system and runs the defragmentation process itself. I highly recommend trying it out.

3. Defraggler

Defraggler Free Defragmenter

Defraggler is another incredible defragmentation application. It was created by Piriform Inc., who were also the creators of the popular application CCleaner. Defraggler is small (573kb) and lightweight, making it easily portable as well as easy to run. (For a more complete review you can see a previous article here.)

Clean Registry

The Registry, though a customizable and effective tweaking tool, can become rittled with unnecessary registry keys, etc. due to installed applications, and simply using the computer. By “cleaning” or fixing registry keys that contain errors, you can make sure your computer is in top shape.

There are many applications you can use as registry cleaners, but one of the best is CCleaner. CCleaner has been previously mentioned on MakeUseOf a few times due to it’s all around great use for speeding up your PC, but it definitely should be mentioned again due to it’s incredible ability to do numerous things that are extremely effective. There are other applications, such as Eusing Registry Cleaner, but I would still recommend CCleaner as one of the best.

Hope this helps some of you get closer to that nearly perfectly tweaked computer.

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Will Mueller

Will Mueller is a computer nerd and geek that has been using computers for far too long. With such I have worked in a large amount of web development as well as programming.

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  • eppyjerk

    Actually, Hibernation saves your memory to the hard drive and powers everything off and uses no power during this time. Although it does take a bunch of space on your hard drive (equal to your physical ram), it is quicker when rebooting and your apps are still up and ready to use.

  • MeToo

    Utter fail for having no clue how Hibernation works.

  • http://www.thewindowsfix.com The Windows Fix

    Ok list, but I’d like to see some benchmarks after doing just three things.

  • Transcontinental

    CCleaner is nice, very fashion, but far, very very far from being a reference concerning Registry cleanup. IMHO, I’d rather think Comodo, Argente, JV16 Power Tools, Uniblue, Wise Registry Cleaner … I mean, if you’re concerned with deep registry investigation, that is. For a superficial work, CCleaner will take the dust off, only the dust :)

  • XxDeepxX

    use tune up utilities !~

  • http://blur.icynemo.us Sasha

    Um, how does disabling hibernation keep windows in top shape?

  • Vlad

    Disabling hibernation won’t optimize your PC, you’ll just disable a very useful feature. Most defrag programs basically run off of windows’ built-in degrager, just use the one you already have. From a software engineer’s point of view, you don’t want to trust the contents of your registry to a program you download from somewhere, your best option is learning about how the registry works and tweaking it yourself. Even some of the most seasoned and veteran computer users are still afraid of the registry.

  • http://www.bestregistrycleanerreview.com TAIWO OLAYANJU

    Disabling hibernation will not optimise your pc, and tweakling your registry yourself is dangerous,instead i ll suggest you buy a registry cleaner rather than looking for a free one e.g regcure.check my profile for more details

    Thanks

    • http://makeuseof.com Aibek

      I’drather a free one. I doubt any of the commercial regstry cleaners can do better job then CCleaner. At least I never heard of one.

  • Missy

    If you liked Auslogics Disk Defrag try their new software called Auslogics Registry Cleaner – it’s also free (unlike many others) and it specializes in registry cleaning.

    http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/registry-cleaner

    I would recommend to use it together with other software though, so that you can have the following steps:

    1. clean registry
    2. defrag registry (auslogics registry defrag can do it)
    3. clean disks (ccleaner or other software)
    4. and finally defrag the disks (auslogics disk defrag, defraggler or iobit can do it)

    These 4 steps will do the magic !!