I usually take my breaks from work and school as a good time to run maintenance on my PC’s.  I don’t have time during the year to get to it, so I try to get everything done at once when I do have time.

My favorite utilities are CCleaner and Defraggler.  Both are freeware, clean - no viruses, spam, nothing.  They are both made by the same company and both provide the same excellent results.

CCleaner cleans out all the “junk” files on your PC - this would include temp files, and things of that nature.  I modify the settings not to dump my Firefox cache or history since I like having everything filled in for me.  It is really easy to use and great to clean up a few hundred MB’s.  You can also use it to turn off things that run and startup, uninstall programs, and clean up your registry - all of which will optimize your machine.

Defraggler is a fast efficient Defragmenting program.  It basically reorganizes your harddrive so that the files are not stored in a fragmented way.  This makes your machine run smoother and faster since programs can access files without jumping around on your drive.  I generally run this after I run CCleaner.

Let me know if you know of any other good optimization utilities!  I used to use TuneUp Utilities, but I just don’t have the budget to pay for optimization software anymore… especially when there is great free software out there.