Take Care of Your Computers Performance
Give your computer a periodic checkup, just like you go to your doctor to get checked up. Run some diagnostic utilities to check for problems on Windows XP and fix them.
When you add and remove files on your computer, it sometimes leaves entries in your registry. This can make your computer slower at startup, and decrease the performance of your computer. So what do you do? Search on the internet for some registry utilities that are made to clean your Windows Registry. A good website to start at is downloads.com
Windows saves, or stores, files on our hard drive all the time in little segments, but after a while these segments can become scattered all over the place, and it can get messy. That is why the Disk Defragmenter program was made for Windows. You can find it by going to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> and click on Disk Defragmenter. Running the Disk Defragmenter can really boost the performance of a slow computer that hasn’t been defragmented in a while. This is why I recommend that people defragment their computers at least once a week, or at the max, once a month!
Just a tip when using the Disk Defragmenter, it can take hours to do, so before you even start it, disable your screen saver and other programs that run automatically at certain times. This can keep Disk Defragmenter from restarting every time something interrupts it.
Windows XP has a hard drive checkup utility that can check for errors on your hard drive. An easy way to get to this program is to go to ‘My Computer’ and right click on your ‘C:\’ drive, if that is the drive where your hard drive is located at. Then click on ‘Properties.’ From there, click on the ‘Tools’ tab and click on ‘Check Now.’ This will check for any errors on your hard drive and fix them if there is something that needs to be fixed. If there are only a few errors, fix them and it will be alright, but if it tells you that you have a lot of disk errors, you could be in some trouble, so be aware!
Many software and hardware programmers think that you will run their program all the time, so they have Windows load the program when your computer starts up. This can be bad because it can cause conflicts with your hardware, take up a lot of resources, and you could have some compatibility problems. How do I stop this? Have a faster startup.
To keep your computer lasting for a long time, keep it in an environment where it is smoke free, because tobacco smoke can damage the circuits inside the computer. 
Let your computer continue to run. Starting your computer when it is ‘cold,’ it can be very stressful on the components in and on your computer. If you don’t want your computer to continuously running, use the ‘Power Management’ in Windows to make settings that would put your computer into hibernation. Also, when your not using your monitor, turn it off, that way it can preserve the ‘display life’ of your monitor. And the last thing, is to avoid bumping or jolting your computer. If you need to move your computer, make sure you shut down Windows XP and unplug it from everything, including the power supply cord.