When it comes to standard hard drives, how often you need to manually defrag will depend on how you use the computer.

Plenty of free defrag tools are available to do this, but another option is to use the one built-in to Windows. Related: How Often Should You Defrag Your Computer?

I ran across these two articles about optimizing your computer recently, and was surprised at the good tech advice from this PC World magazine article, and this mix of bad tech advice with several ...