This guide is about how to maintain and tweak your pc and it's open for discussion so more content can be added later. It contains a lot of basic stuff that almost everyone knows and some more advanced tweaks. Some of the tips have been mentioned before in the other tutorials but the tips are clustered in several topics so this tutorial is made to collect them all in one.
1. Maintaining pc
1.1. Clean up the dust from inside your pc. The dust on your hardware can lead to a serious performance decrease due to overheating and heat can burn your hardware. When e.g. your processor overheats it will drop it's performance to prevent itself getting any hotter. You can fight the dust cleaning up your room every once in a while and using filters before your case's intake fans. If you don't have any intake fans in your case but only output fans your pc is most likely under pressured which means it sucks air and dust from all of it's holes.
1.2. Monitor temperatures. Heat is the number 1. killer of pc hardware. Every component inside your pc has a recommended maximum temperature below it should stay. It's important to check every once in a while how hot your hardware gets when you stress your computer with games. HWMonitor is a great tool for that purpose. You can just leave it open when you play a game and it records the maximum temperature of every piece of your hardware that has a temperature sensor. If you notice the max temperatures growing in long-term use the reason could be e.g. the dust inside your pc, thermal compound gone dry between cpu and it's cooler, increase in external temperature etc.
2. Maintaining Windows
2.1. Use a firewall. The Windows Firewall is lightweight and alright for preventing attacks from outside but it doesn't filter the traffic that comes from your computer. Outpost Firewall Free is a lightweight option for Windows Firewall and it can also filter the traffic that comes from your computer. I myself feel secure enough with the Windows Firewall since I only play games with W7 and I don't visit any shady sites nor open any files from unknown publishers.
2.2. Run a virus scanner. You probably don't remember to run it too often so it's a good idea to schedule it's scans e.g. for once a week. It's nice to have a background virus scanner that sniffs the files that you or your Windows opens but on the other hand it can slow down your pc quite a bit. If your pc has enough horsepower you probably don't notice any slowing down but with older machines this can be an issue. If you want lightweight real-time protection then PC Tools Antivirus Free will do fine. If you have secure online habits then an online scanner like F-Secure Online Scanner will do even though it doesn't offer you 24/7 protection. When you need to be really sure about some file you downloaded from the internet, upload it to VirusTotal and it will scan your file with multiple antivirus engines.
2.3. Scan for Spyware. Some virus scanners are able to remove spyware too but I trust more the dedicated spyware detectors like Spybot - Search & Destroy.
2.4. Defragment your HDDs. Windows file system fragments even if you just fart once. Especially if you move a lot of files back and forth. This means the files in a single folder can be physically clustered all around your harddrive and thus it's seek times are slower. Windows has it's own defragmenter but it's proven to be lacking. Luckily there are a lot of freeware alternatives that can do the job properly like Defraggler and MyDefrag. Defragmenting improves load times. Only defragment drives that are stored on a HDD (Hard Disk Drive). Defragmenting a SSD (Solid State Drive) isn't needed since the random access times are minimal due to there's no moving parts on a SSD. Also defragmenting a SSD might hurt it's life expectancy as there is a certain limit how many times a single data cell can be rewritten on a SSD. If you're not sure which one you have, install Speccy and verify it.
2.5. Clean up temporary files and registry. Registry is the main reason why Windows gets slower and slower by time and it should be cleaned every now and then. E.g when you uninstall a program it often leaves behind useless registry entries in your registry. CCleaner is an useful utility cleaning up both registry and temporary files.
2.6. Update Windows and it's hardware drivers.
2.7. Backup. Windows 7 has a tool of it's own for backing up and restoring. Here's a simple guide with screenshots for setting up a basic scheduled backup on W7 Windows 7 Backup Setup and Scheduling [Step By Step Guide]. It is recommended that you set the backup on another hard drive than the one you're backing up in case of a hard drive failure. It would be even better setting the backup on a disk that was in a different space or household than your pc e.g. in case your home happens to burn down.
3. Tweaking Windows
3.1. Disable unwanted startup programs. Some programs that you install add themselves in the startup programs that launch every time Windows starts up. That's cool if the program happens to be a necessary part of your operating system like a firewall but often that's not the case. Mostly they're just useless resource hogs that you never use. E.g when I installed my audio drivers I also had to install Realtek HD Audio Manager, a not-so-important audio panel, that always wanted to start when I put my pc on. Fortunately removing it from startup programs was quite easy. Just type "msconfig" in the search/run toolbar in bottom left corner and you're ready to start. Choose Selective startup and then go to the Startup tab. You should see a list of startup items that you can disable by unticking and pressing apply. Before unticking google the item and decide whether it's important to you or not. The changes are made when you reboot the system. Unticking unnecessary startup items can lead to better overall performance like faster system startup and less memory usage. I have unticked half of my startup items.
3.2. Disable the services you don't need. When you start up Windows it launches a variety of services but an average Demobaser doesn't need them all. Also disabling some services can make your system more secure. Just type services.msc in the bottom left corner and you should see all of your system's services. Black Viper has a great site where he offers service configurations that work well for him. That doesn't mean they would work 100% for you because for example in my case I needed to keep my bluetooth services on for my bt mouse and keyboard.
You should start from the "safe" version and read what the service does before you disable it. The Tweaked version works great for me except for the bluetooth thing. The pros should be same as with disabling startup programs + enhanced security.
4. Tweaking graphic drivers
4.1. Driver level tweaks. These are guides from Tweakguides.com. I have tried both of these and they can gain you a few extra fps in games.
I don't take any responsibility if you wreck your pc with this tutorial though all this should be safe if done right.
I will keep updating this guide when something new comes to my mind or is mentioned below.
