System slowdowns
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10. File system issues
Some file systems work better than others for large disk partitions. If the machine runs Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, or Windows XP, you are comfortably familiar with the basic folder and file system on your computer, you should use the NTFS file system for best performance, if you are not familiar with the folder and file system, stick with the FAT32.
File system performance is closely related to cluster size and the number of clusters on the disk. NTFS file systems will bog down if you have a 60-GB hard disk configured with a cluster size of 512 bytes. This creates an enormous number of clusters, which the file system must track and seek. This becomes especially problematic when the drive is highly fragmented. One solution is to use larger cluster sizes. If you set the cluster size to 4K or larger, you will see noticeable improvement in file load times. Please note, however, that large clusters can significantly increase the amount of cluster slack space (if the file size is 1K the space on the disk will still be 4K) and lead to a lot of wasted disk space.
Always backup Registry before editing, if you're not familiar with the backup, don't edit ! 
You must also be familiar with restoring the registry file from the DOS prompt and starting your computer to a DOS prompt !!
Another trick to alleviate file system issues involves tweaking some Registry values (Start Menu|Run|Regedit):
- The first Registry value you can tweak is NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation, which can be found at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem. When you set this value to 1, it stops NTFS from generating the 8.3 file-naming convention used for backward compatibility. If you do not need these old filenames, you can improve performance by preventing NTFS from creating them.
- Another useful NTFS entry is the NtfsDisableLastAccess value, which can be found at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem. This is a REG_DWORD entry, and when it is set to 1, it will prevent NTFS from updating the date and time stamp of directories after they are browsed. However, this does not prevent an update to the file-access information when a file is opened or changed.
If you are not using the NTFS file system, you may be able to improve performance by moving files and folders out of the root directory. With FAT partitions, you may notice a big slowdown in system performance after running scandisk because a large number of .chk files are placed in the root directory. Users sometimes fill their root directories by making it the default file storage location. Move as many files and folders as possible out of the root directory, and performance should improve significantly.
Conclusion
I reviewed some of the common reasons behind a system slowdown. When troubleshooting a system slowdown, you should always look for potential hardware problems first. Then, investigate the common software problems. If you use a systematic troubleshooting plan, you should be able to improve the performance of most computers suffering from system slowdown.
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