Microsoft may have made great strides in recent years to improve the reliability and performance of Windows, and the company does include some useful tools to help users maintain their systems, but there is always room for improvement. Many free third-party applications are more comprehensive and offer additional features than Microsofts built-in tools and the adaptive nature of a few of Windows features consume resources and can affect the user experience on slower hardware. Because of this, its often beneficial to replace or augment some of the tools built into Windows 8 and manually specify some settings to prevent the OS from having to manage them on the fly.

If you have a hard drive, the first thing wed recommend is replacing Windows 8s built-in disk defragmenter (do use a disk defragmenter on a solid state drive). Windows 8s built-in defrag utility isnt bad, but there are a few free solutions out there that are much better. Defraggler, available for download at , is a free replacement for Windows integrated disk defragmenter, and (because it does a more thorough job analyzing and remedying file fragments) drives defragmented with Defraggler can theoretically offer better performance. The real-world performance differences will be miniscule, but on older hardware every little bit counts. Wed suggest downloading and installing Defraggler immediately after installing the OS. Do a Disk Cleanup to free up some space, update the OS, and then run Defraggler to ensure the majority of the OS files are contiguous and that they are placed on the fastest part of your hard drive.

Another free tool available at piriform.com, CCleaner, can also come in handy when optimizing a system. Not only does CCleaner do a good job of augmenting Windows built-in Disk Cleanup utility to better clean out junk files and reclaim disk space, but it has easy-to-use options for cleaning out startup items too. On a fresh installation of Windows 8, the removal of unnecessary startup items is less important, but if youre upgrading a system thats already running an older version of Windows, all of the junk thats polluted the original OS will migrate to the Windows 8 upgrade, so all of the unnecessary junk should be cleaned out.

Here's what we did for our aging Asus Eee PC: First, install Windows 8 to a freshly formatted drive. Next, update the OS and install any patches and drivers available from Microsoft Update. Check the websites of your major component manufacturers (your graphics card, monitor, etc.) and install the latest drivers, then download and install CCleaner from Piriform's website (mentioned earlier). If you're using a standard hard drive (not an SSD), you should also download and install Defraggler. Finally, run Windows built-in Disk Cleanup tool and CCleaner. If you have a hard drive  run Defraggler and defrag the disk for optimum performance; we didn't need to do this since our eeePC is now running an SSD.