Jeremy Wright, of b5media fame, reminds us to clean up our computers of unnecessary applications, something I wholly support and do all the time. Jeremy is obviously running Windows (XP) on his laptop, so that makes it even more important as Windows has a habit of building up crap and slowing down your computer, but is by no means the only operating system that suffers from this.

Here are some tips on things you can do, no matter what OS is your poison, to speed up the performance of your computer:

• Remove applications you don’t use.
• Don’t autostart applications or features that you don’t need. Why have Winamp running if you’re an iTunes user?
• Remove all the crap you’ve got on your desktop. Storing files on your desktop will generally slow down the computer’s boot process.
• In fact, try and not autostart anything at all, unless it is something you need every day. The only thing it does is speed up the launch of some functionality, like Microsoft Office for instance. Better to have a slightly longer launch period for that particular application if you ask me.
• Clean out your hard drive. The more you’ve got on, the longer it takes for the computer to do stuff. Don’t have unnecessary data lying around, backup and store in a safe place.
• In particular, clean out your systems hard drive. If you’ve got several hard drives on your computer, try and have as little data as possible on the one containing your system, for the same reasons as above.
• Defrag your hard drive. If you’re running Windows, this is a no-brainer, just do it, it’ll speed things up. If you think you don’t have to do these things under OS X, then you’re wrong. Do it.
• Google for OS tweaks to speed up everything.

And while you’re at it, a backup is probably long overdue, right? Right.

Doesn’t it feel nice to remove all that virtual clutter on your computer? I always get that feeling of having done something good for my productivity after a massive cleanup action like this. Of course, it does take some time to go through all these steps, so you might want to do it when you’re not too busy, or have another workstation to play with.