1. When you buy a computer, many vendors place icons to selected products and services on your desktop, such as links to high-speed Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or add-on services vendors think you may need.

2. As you install software on your Windows machine, icons may appear, either to start application or link to manufacturer's website. Installing just one program could add three or more icons to your desktop!

3. It's easy to accidentally drag a Favorite, bookmark, text file, or other icon to your desktop, creating an icon.

Normally, it's easy to delete Windows desktop icons. Just place your mouse pointer on offending icon, then right-click it and choose "Delete", clicking "Yes" to confirm if prompted.

However, what if rogue icons are for adult websites, unfamiliar search engines, or other websites you don't recall visiting? You may try removing these icons but get an error, or after removal they still reappear again and again and again!

If so, then more than likely spyware, adware, or other malware has infected your machine. It may have been through file trading software, an inadvertent "yes" click when a popup window asked you to install software, 'freeware' that included adware, or other means. To remove rogue icons, you need to remove malware creating these icons.

Imagine that you start up your pc just to find yourself staring at a blue screen with white writing, termed "the blue screen of death" by those at Microsoft.

So you push power button to shut it down, and when you bring it back up it just crawls. Within a few minutes it goes back to blue screen of death.

This happened to a friend of mine. When she asked me what she could do, I asked her if she had ever defragmented her pc.

She got that "deer in headlight" look, so I knew she hadn't. Defragmenting her pc, after 3 years of never doing so, took about 14 hours to complete.

One of main reasons that computers slow down is poor maintenance practices.

Unfortunately, when you buy a new computer you don't usually get much instruction on how to maintain it. Poor or no maintenance allows your hard drive to become more and more fragmented which will slow it down over time.

To best explain hard drive fragmentation think of your hard drive as a file cabinet. In this cabinet there are folders with documents (files) in them.