Windows loads slower, programs take longer to launch, and, in general, your computer drags like it just came off a 2-night drinking binge.

If this sounds like your situation, these 5 tips should help you get some extra speed from your PC.

~ Disk Cleanup Utility ~

You may not realize it, but just because you finish with a file doesn't mean your computer does.

In many cases, if your computer's hard drive were a garage, you would have unused junk files piled 20 feet high and spilling out into street.

Everyone should use Windows "Disk Cleanup Utility" to delete old, unused, and temporary files that clog your hard drive.

Click Start, point at All Programs (or Programs), Accessories, System Tools, and click Disk Cleanup. Analyze your hard drive for files you can eliminate and it may shock you to see how much hard drive space (and speed) you can free up with a few clicks.

~ "Defrag" ~

Imagine a properly maintained hard drive as room size of Wal-Mart filled with filing cabinets.

Now imagine ripping open every drawer of every filing cabinet, slinging contents onto floor and trying to find one document -that's a fragmented hard drive.

Sometimes lack of speed simply results from your computer working too hard to find files it needs.

"Conceptually, a grid is quite simple. It is a collection of computing resources that perform tasks. In its simplest form, a grid appears to users as a large system that provides a single point of access to powerful distributed resources." - Sun

"[The Grid] lets people share computing power, databases, and other on-line tools securely across corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy." - Globus Alliance

"Grid computing is computing as a utility - you do not care where data resides, or what computer processes your requests. Analogous to way utilities work, clients request information or computation and have it delivered - as much as they want, and whenever they want." - Oracle

Grid computing has been so heavily hyped up in technology press this year that most major players in software arena have staked a claim in what they see as 'next big thing'. As you can see from definitions above, no-one seems to be quite sure what they are working towards. Indeed it could be said that there seems to be more activity in arguing over a definition than there is in developing technology.

So is Grid just marketing hype or can we expect to see some real benefits from these ideas?

To tackle this question, first of all it's necessary to look at types of application that businesses will be running on computing platforms of future.

Of particular interest is ratio between network usage, processing time and disk storage required for a particular task. The following example explains why this is case:

Currently, one pound will buy you 1 GB of internet traffic, 8 hours of CPU time or 10 million database accesses.1

The SETI@Home project has so far used 1,643,925 years of CPU time, donated by millions of computers around world, searching for patterns or signals in radio telescope data. Using above figures, to do this in a traditional manner would have cost about fourteen billion pounds.

However, due to nature of task at hand, SETI parcelled work into about a billion packages and sent them out to people volunteering their spare CPU cycles. As each task could be described in just 0.5MB of data this required a total network bandwidth of 500,000GB which cost them about a million pounds.

A fourteen billion pound calculation for one million is a pretty good saving!

However, this relies on one key factor about SETI calculation: work could be sent out in 0.5MB parcels and each parcel would represent about 14 hours of work. It is this ratio of CPU cost to network cost of 10,000:1 that made SETI@Home viable. It is worth noting that this is not a common feature of many tasks that businesses will want to perform.