HARD DRIVE STUFF & MISC SETUP STUFF
Whenever you reinstall windows and format the drive the system is free of junk you plague it with, in the way of software and junkware. Its going to fly.
To improve the speed of 3d applications when you cant format starts with your video card. an upgrade to this will enhance your machines graphics processing unit and in turn increase your polys / pixels on screen etc..
Ram will help on windows at around 2 gig it starts to improve.
When you do partition your hard drive, think about getting another drive and raid card of similar speed and size, consider a raid set for speed or set it for safety with twin backup redundancy.
Consider more ram, give windows 2 gig if your a gamer and you will notice an improvement.
If RAID scares you boo!, then buy another drive and make windows use this extra drive as a partition formatted drive for virtual memory and applications scratch disk area.
IF this drive is quick then your virtual memory and 3d application scratch will improve, now you have two hard drive heads working for your system, one for the windows system and another complete drive for virtual memory. you dont have to use all of the other drive for virt mem. carve a small 6 gig partition and dont put anything in it except point your system to this space. partition the other part of this drive into two other blocks. this way you have 2 partitions dedicated to backing up, that are not touching your windows hard drive, if you stuff your windows hard drive, you can easily disconnect your back up drive until you fix windows and or reinstall it on the other drive and just copy the stuff from the 2nd drive back over after you re connect it.
There is another method where you make part of your ram a disk.
ramdisks take out the slowest part of your computer (HD) out of the loop.
However they are highly volatile as they store everything in / or most parts of in ram.
Lighting fast virtual memory would be awesome if it could work in a ram disk.
Definately set up the system with users.
Admin -administrator
You - user
gamer - only load your games here or prefered application for speed
Your Mum - user
Your snotty sister - user
New Malware targets machines user settings, if you run one user as admin, your asking for pain, yes pain.
At least you will have another layer of defense doing this when things go wrong.
Making a user solely for gaming may sound dumb, but its ubeh teh skillzorz,
effectively your only loading what your game needs to run, hence saving all that Junk you need when surfing the net etc.. and getting a better performance from your machine, this is akin to applications as well, you will see a better performance when you have less loaded into system memory.
Even to the point of pulling the Network ( the blue one! ) cord out of your machine, then deactivating your virus software while you work HEAVEN FORBID, offline. This will free up more resources for use on your 3d application.
Another gaming tip : Large games load faster from your drive then your CD /DVD player, hence you get the drop on someone who reads the new game data from a CD/DVD. Legally your allowed to make one copy of your game in australia, each country is different. Alcohol 120% and similar gaming programs will allow you to copy the whole game to the hard drive as if its a mounted cdrom etc...
Diablo II Lord of Destruction Players would benefit from getting through the portal first and this was a huge advantage over others.
Lateral thinking regarding streamlining your machine can go a long way.
Get a Yellow Sticky and write : " Set a Restore Point When Im Feeling Silly"
on your monitor, if your feeling dumb that day or when you try to skip ahead too fast, is when your going to do something to your computer. at least this way you will have a point to return from.
DONT dive right into your registry and throw stuff around with glee.
registry healer
registry cleaner
registry mechanic
are good programs for novices when starting to explore the registry and making life
easier when things go wrong.
remove as many programs you can live without, it just makes the whole system more streamlined.
eg: uninstall winzip and just use winrar, it can also do zips and is a sightly more geeky then winzip, reducing your software base makes a machine a LOT faster.
msn yahoo irc aim can all be bundled just using trillain or a third party app thats similar to trillain
quicktime / real player / Windows media scraper / I think you can replace wll these with something called VLC. you should keep one you prefer and install VLC.
Winamp will cover a lot above as well and give you
For the love of god install firefox as soon as possible
once you have that get SPybot search and destroy.
in spybot set to advanced and activate SD helper and Tea Timer
Also configure the hosts file in that program to block websites.
immunixe yourself. this way at least if using IE you wont suffer so many problems with malware.
Any time you load a program where you had to run an exe to crack it because you might have warez, you have just allowed anything to pass through your computer while blindfolded, in this essence your opening a possible backdoor to yourself. Dont load it if you cant purchase it, find an alternative or practise with the demo so much it hurts, then scrimp and save for the $ for it and then you will feel closer to the program then just getting it for free. I dont condone warez but it had to be said for optimization factors etc.
Anyway theres a huge search engine called google, and it will show you all this and more.
If no-one gives your an answer to a question you have asked, consider:- Is your question clear.- Did you ask nicely.- Are you showing any effort to solve the problem yourself 
