If you’ve noticed your computer getting slower over time you might need to defragment the files and folders on your hard drive. From Windows XP forward a basic defragmenter was included, but it was very poor. Microsoft did include a Windows defragmentation API that could be hooked into to provide better defragmentation.

The reason you might want to defragment your hard drive using something other than the included software would be to defrag files 64 MB and smaller, which are ordinarily ignored, but can still impact overall performance.

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This article will help computer users who have found their computer getting slower and slower over the years. It’s when a person’s computer starts to slow down that they notice ads, like the example below, asking if their computer has slowed down, and then tries to sell them software to remove worms, viruses, spyware, malware, and to optimize your computer, whatever that means, but most often the problem is just a bloated Windows index database.

As the years go by, and you add more and more files and programs to your computer, it slows down incrementally until one day you start considering purchasing a newer faster computer, or start to become concerned that the computer has become infected.

Before buying a new computer, adding RAM, buying a faster hard drive, or purchasing software to clean infections that can waste time and slow your computer down even further, turn off the indexing service first and see if that fixes the problem, and restores your computer back to its old fast self.

The indexing service is supposed to speed up a search for files on the hard drive, which is rarely done by most people, so it’s not like there’s much to lose by turning indexing off.

This tutorial will walk you through turning off the indexing service in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Window XP.

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Microsoft included a disk partition tool in Windows Vista, which can be handy when you want to create a partition to boot another operating system from.

To partition a hard drive click the Windows button → All Programs → Administrative Tools → Computer Management. If the User Account Control window pops up click Continue. Select the Volume to work with, then right click the Volume, and left click Shrink Volume.

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The Asus R50A is shipping and it’s quite expensive. The UMPC will cost an estimated $1,878. It may be worth it for some of you, as the portable unit will run Windows Vista and features a 1.33GHz Intel Atom processor. It also features a gig of RAM, a 32GB SSD hard drive, a 5.6"screen at 1024 x 600, three USB ports, a microSD slot, a wireless keyboard and an external DVD reader / writer. The R50A will also allow you to connect wirelessly via 802.11 b / g WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G. The unit is currently shipping if you have the money.

Alienware has released a budget-priced gaming desktop. The Area-51 750i is based on the NVIDIA nForce 750i SLI motherboard and can be equipped with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650. The unit can feature either twin ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 or twin GeForce GTX 280 graphics cards, depending on your preference. It also has 8GB of DDR2 RAM, Windows Vista 64-bit, an optional Blu-ray burner and an array of ports. The baseline price for the rig is $1,049 which is pretty good considering Alienware PCs used to clock in at nearly four grand.