With 500GB or 1TB disks being the norm, defragging is hardly necessary anymore. Generally, by the time a defrag would do any good, you may as well wipe and reinstall Windows itself. Happily, even that is not necessary like was up through the XP days.

If you're running 64-bit, memory is so dirt cheap you may as well get at least 8GB. When I upgraded my work PC from 4GB to 8GB a week or so ago, the 4GB cost $28. Shove in another 4GB and turn the page file off - Windows has gotten better, but it still likes paging way more than is necessary. If you're feeling ambitious, get 16GB, use a utility like ImDisk to create an 8GB startup RAM drive and point programs to that for temp/caching. I had a SQLite db I would load into my RAM drive and queries that would take nearly a minute from HDD would take 10 seconds from RAM.

Avoiding multiple A/V packages is solid advice - I recently cleaned up a C2D desktop running Vista that took nearly 15 minutes to fully boot. Once it did, I discovered the problem was not spyware or viruses...it was 4 different A/V programs and two more anti-spy/'tuner' programs that would all start up on boot.

All that said, this article seems a little mis-aimed. This might be good advice to post up on MSN or Yahoo, not TR.