One of the ways that people attempt to improve their hard drive's speed is to defragment the hard drive. However, if you are using the program Windows offers it will miss a few part of the the computer such as the registry and pagefile.

To defragment these to aspects of you hard drive, you can use a free program called PageDefrag. PageDefrag can be downloaded here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx

Follow up:

Once the program is downloaded you can follow these steps.

1 - Unzip the program using Winzip or Winrar.

2 - Double click the file pagedfrg.exe and the program will open. Now it will activate Defragment at next boot. The program has to do this because it cannot defragment you computer while Windows is running.

3 - When you are ready to defragment your pagefile and registry of your computer, restart your computer. The program will soon start up and you will see a window that looks like the image below.

Once this is done the next thing you can do is clear your internet files and settings. If you use Internet explorer you can go to Tools >> Internet Options and find it there. If you use Firefox or Chrome you should consider going to the downloads directory and deleting all the files that you do not need. If you ever need to select individual files that need to be deleted or transfered somewhere you can hold the Ctrl key and click only the file that you want to select.

Part of getting your hard drive to be faster is to clean it up. If you are a hard drive that is more that two thirds full you should consider deleting some programs and files. You can delete programs by going into the Control Panel and clicking add/remove programs. If you know that you have files on your hard drive such as music, videos, or pictures that you no longer need you can click Start then Search for files. Type in things like "jpg" to file pictures, "mp3" to find music, and "mpg" or "avi" or "wmv" to find videos to delete. If you download a lot of files consider getting an external hard drive for your computer. I do this to free up the space on my hard drive that runs Windows and my programs.

There are other methods of just replacing the hard drive altogether with a faster one but there are a few things to consider. Is it really your hard drive that is being slow? A lot of times its that your computer does not have enough memory to run well. What happens is that the computer needs more memory (RAM) and your computer does not have it so it starts to use the hard drive as "virtual memory". To check if this is a problem you can press the Alt + Ctrl + Delete keys and click on Task Manager to see the amount of memory that is being used. If it is full then the problem is that you need more RAM.

So if the RAM is alright and you still think that it is you hard drive consider one question. Did you hard drive run better in the past? You should try one more thing before you buy a new hard drive. One is to back up all your important files and reformat your hard drive and install Windows or your choice of OS again. This is the surest and best way to clean up your computer mess that was developed over the years. Computers should be reformated at least once a year and at least six months if they are used a lot.

So if you are sure that you do not want to reformat your hard drive then you should consider trying out a Solid State Drive. These drives tend to read and load files a lot faster than traditional hard drives. They also have a better lifespan because they do not die as often as hard drives. This is because the solid state drives do not have any moving parts or heat output. It is all based on flash memory.

You can link these Solid State Drives together and make your computer even faster by what is called raiding or to raid drives. The downside to getting a new Solid State Drive is that they are more expensive than hard drives at the moment but many people say that it is worth the cost. Many people are pleased with Intel's Solid State Drive because to its great performance.

There are tweaks out there that can speed up your Operating System (Windows) but some should not be done because they could do some bad things to your registry. If you have some ideas on your success in speeding up your hard drive comment below.