Things that boost computer performance

[Black_Hawk]

I have a fresh install of winxp pro w/ sp2 and I haven't finished installing all the applications I had before format and before I had all kinds of stuff that was supposed to boost my pc performance. But now I want to hear what you think about these applications and if you could recommend me some of them?

Previously I was using Tweak UI powertoy, FreeRam XP and a whole bunch of registry cleaners and similar optimizers (can't remember the names anymore :D).
Which of them really improve the performance of pc?
And what tweaks do you recommend? I disabled the indexing and compression on my harddrive (thanks Stealth! :)) and I set the kernel or whatever thingy to be executed in ram and not on hdd to speed things up a little.
What else?

[Stealth]

The only ones I'd really recommend is CCleaner (CrapCleaner) and DriverCleaner - one because it's a good general utility and the other because it helps when updating GFX card drivers. Other than that, no "computer optimizer" is worth its salt.

[Bryce W]

Avoid registry cleaners like the plague. They cause more trouble than what they fix.

As for some good ways to speed things up.

MSConfig is a sure fire way of speeding things up by stopping non-essential programs from loading when the PC starts:
http://www.technibble.com/how-to-use-msconfig/

Also, you can tweak your virtual memory if you need to:
http://www.technibble.com/virtual-memory/

[TechPro]

As well as tweaking your pagefile you can defrag it using a lil sysinternals program:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html

I put it on the root of the c: drive of the computer im working on and choose to defragment at next boot.

I do like ccleaner and its features.

I would also recommend using msconfig and stop non essentials programs from loading at startup.

Hope that helps

[Black_Hawk]

As for defraging applications, I use PerfectDisk 7.0, it can also defragment page file and other system files during bootup.