PC gurus, speak to me

[NeonSamurai]

I agree with the others here on what was said.

As for #2 like others said, about the only thing that will fix that is wiping the os partition and reinstalling. Windows pretty much slowly destroys itself over time and will eventually render itself completely inoperable (blue screen of death). Best solution for this I have found is to use a program like norton ghost or similar, do a clean install for that pc with all drivers and major programs you need installed (ie not games that shift on and off the computer, but stuff like winzip, office, etc), then ghost a backup of it. Then when the computer starts acting up again you can very rapidly do a clean reinstall using the ghosted image in a fraction of the time it would normaly take (as fast as 30 minutes). Keep in mind though that ghosted image is only good for that pc and when the hardware is changed a new image has to be made.

Also you should regularly defrag any drives which have alot of data being copyied around (such as where you install and uninstall games) using something other then windows defrag (i agree it sucks).