BleepingComputer.com: Thank you Bleeping Computer-just comments from me

I had looked at the forum topic about Slow Computers and the tips to correct the problem...but was intimidated not knowing what would happen if I actually tried some of the tweaks in the list...anyway...after my post for help to see if my pc was infected...and received advice to re-install the o/s...I opted for the trying some of the tweaks first.

I do perform maintenance regularly..defrag, chkdisk utility, run virus scans from free online sources, (all of which never used to do much in terms of speed), and I tend to collect a lot of data on my hard drive, it's true. I have a 37 GB harddrive that was showing only 12 GB of free space left on it. No matter how many of my personal files I have eliminated in the past, that didn't really free up much space for me. I was confused about why my hard drive was so clogged up and after analyzing the size of MY files as opposed to Windows system files..I couldn't figure out why Windows was occupying most of my used space.

This is what I did today:
I turned off the indexing service, disabled the ctfmon.exe, installed the PageDeFrag program(which told me my system didn't need it right now), I created a new restore point, ran disk clean up utility to remove the old system restore points, and whaddaya know??? My computer is running much faster! I also eliminated the largest personal folder which only accounted for 1 GB of space..but after I removed the old restore points...that's what gave me back my hard drive. I now have 1/2 of my hard drive free as opposed to 1/4 of it. (approximately).
The computer is starting up very quickly and shutting down quicker than it used to.

So, thank you very much for that pinned forum topic on how to speed up the computer. It helped alot.

Thank you for the kind feedback...happy computing .

Louis