I just doubled the RAM memory on my desktop computer. It is running SO much faster.

that's the way. Boost em up!

Fundy

I need to do the same. But I got several other things on the list ahead of it.

My computer is very slow when I start it.
It takes ages to load all things.
Maybe it's because my computer is old and the new one is not ready for use.

I've been keeping my old Dell on life support for the last couple years... mainly cuz I hate Vista and want to keep using XP. But we broke down and got a new tower (with Vista... ugh). However, I can't wait till it arrives cuz it's beefed up with the latest and greatest.
I should start a blog tracking how many days it takes for a new top-of-the-line PC to begin slowing down and getting errors and stuff.

I think you are right.

I avoid updating anything for that very reason. The first thing I do with a new comp is shut down all automatic updates.

But (speaking as an ignorant novice on this issue), aren't you supposed to do the updates for patches and security and stuff that's necessary ?
Or have I been duped into thinking these updates are as important as defragging and other maintenance ???

The security updates are supposed to be necessary. Defragging is good if you have a lot of stuff on your computer, but it doesn't have to be a once-a-month thing.

I still update but have it set to tell me when they are available and then choose the ones I want or don't want. I usually wait a while as well. I subscribe to a newsletter that would indicate if some update caused any serious issues (as SP3 did).

Defragging is good if you do lots of downloading, ripping or create and delete files frequently. It really makes no difference if you have a lot of stuff on your PC. What matters is how much that stuff expands and contracts and how that stuff was originally written to the disk. What it does is rearrange where portions of files are located on the disc so they are contiguous and can be read without moving the heads as far. IMHO, it's not quite as important on today's faster drives, CPUs and busses, but you'd still notice it if you have lots of fragmentation. For example, let's say you rip a new CD. In my case, I don't compress my files much (I use a lossless format) so each song will be 20-40 MB. Furthermore, it actually rips to WAV first and then converts to my chosen format, then deletes the WAV. I'm not sure of the algorithms used to choose where the OS starts writing, but for simplicity sake, we'll just assume it uses the first "free" block on your drive. Let's say this block is only 2 MB (we'll ignore sector boundaries and whatnot in this discussion also). Once it fills the block, it moves to the next free block. This repeats until the full file is ripped (or downloaded). Then the encoding starts and it does the same thing for this new file. While that's happening, the next WAVs are being ripped. So you end up with your files being broken into parts all over your drive (sort of filling in the holes in the swiss cheese) rather than being in one bigger location. Thus, when reading the file, the head has to move around much more. Defragging moves all these chunks so they are back to back. BTW, if you're simply moving a file from one drive to another, it picks a block that will fit the size (since it knows at this point how big the file actually is) so it doesn't fragment then unless there isn't a single block that will fit the file. That is why ripping CDs and DVDs are likely the worst for fragmentation. Downloading also doesn't know how big the whole file is sometimes so it just starts filling whatever free block it finds first. BTW, you can't defrag if you have less than 15% free space on the drive.