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So one thing that needs to be increased is your hard drive. This will increase boot times and loading times of applications.
This can also be beneficial in gaming because playing games like Metro 2033 and Crysis on ultra high textures the part where your computer will bottleneck is going to be at the hard drive instead of the graphics card.
This is because in textures it has to take the data from your hard drive and then use your graphics card to display them in the game. So your card might be able to handle ultra high textures but if you cannot read the data fast enough the frame rate is going to drop.
Most people will increase their computer's hard drive not because of this but because of boot times.

Now that we know what the benefits are lets go on to what should be done.

~So one thing that people might consider is going to be switching to a SSD (Solid State Drive).

A solid state drive is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive. SSDs are distinguished from traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads. So what this means is that instead of your HDD there are no moving parts to it and thus the read and write times on it is going to be a lot faster. You can think of a SSD as a larger flash drive.
When it comes to SSDs you are going to be able to get significantly higher read and write times such as the new OCZ Vertex 3 240GB HDD has Max Read: up to 535MB/s and Max Write: up to 480MB/s .

~Another thing to consider is Raid 0.

A RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume) splits data evenly across two or more disks (striped) with no parity information for redundancy. RAID 0 was not one of the original RAID levels and provides no data redundancy. RAID 0 is normally used to increase performance, although it can also be used as a way to create a small number of large virtual disks out of a large number of small physical ones. So what this does is if you have two (or more) drives and you want to put them in Raid its going to make a larger virtual drive, split the data as it comes in and send half to each drive.



This makes read/write times faster because instead of one drive handling the entire work load its going to be split between multiple drives.
This is good when it comes to performance but at the same time is bad because it doesn't check for redundancy. That means that if it writes incorrectly it will not check for it and it will result in crashing. But when you have multiple drives in Raid 0 configuration and one drive fails then its going to cause the other to fail and all data is going to be lost.

So when we combine both of these and put SSDs in Raid this is the outcome:



Most people know what overclocking is but if you do not, Overclocking is the process of running a computer component at a higher clock rate (more clock cycles per second) than it was designed for or was specified by the manufacturer, usually practiced by enthusiasts seeking an increase in the performance of their computers. Some purchase low-end computer components which they then overclock to higher clock rates, or overclock high-end components to attain levels of performance beyond the specified values. Others overclock outdated components to keep pace with new system requirements, rather than purchasing new hardware.
One warning before going and doing this is that if you overclock too much you risk frying your processor or GPU if you do not have significant cooling. With that said the best thing to do before doing this is getting a better cooling kit. It can either be going to water cooling or going with a strong fan system. If you want to do water cooling but you don't want to run all the different tubes and buy lots of parts you may want to consider buying the Corsair H70 which is a closed loop kit that is very easy to install and you can get nice temperatures out of it. If you want to try a heat sink and fan then you might want to go with something stronger than stock like the SpinQ or Cooler Master V8. Just make sure that it fits your socket. Now that we have the hardware for overclocking ready we can proceed to download different applications to do this. Skip to Software overclocking.
So aside from the heavy stuff, you also need to do little things every once in a while.
~Dusting
The most important would be dusting out your computer. This should be done at least once a month but I recommend doing it twice a month or more if your house is dusty. If you do not do this it's not going to kill your computer but it will run a lot hotter and its just a better thing to do to prevent anything from happening. Plus getting the dust out keeps your rig looking nice.
~Fans
You can never have too many fans. If you want to make sure that your computer is going to run an overclock stable not only do you need a good CPU cooling kit, but you're also going to need case fans. This will pull the hot air from the computer out of the case and bring the cool air into the case. The best set up for this is to do a push and pull setup with two fans. Then for additional cooling have one in between the Hard Drives and one near the PCIe slots to keep the Graphics Cards cool.
~Wires
This doesn't really affect cooling but you want to make sure that the cords are not just throughout the case and instead wired in a good fashion that is out of the way. This can help to prevent air disruption but nothing significant.

~CPU Overclock
When most people thinking of increasing their computer's speed this is what they think of.
So I went over the different methods of preparing to overclock in the hardware section before, if you did not read that please go back and read that to make sure nothing bad happens.
Now then, there are two main applications that you are going to want to download for this. You are going to want a stress tester and another application for checking temperatures. For the stress tester I recommend Prime95 and for an application that checks temperatures I recommend either Motherboard Monitor or Core Temp. First run Core Temp to see what you are getting on idle before overclocking. It should be something around 30-50 degrees depending on your cooling setup and whether you are running AMD or Intel (I have found that Intel runs hotter on most of my tests).
Once you have that you are going to want to reboot into your bios to change the voltages and bus speeds. Now when you do this, you need to understand what to change and how much to change it by to get the overclock to be the most effective and prevent any damages to your CPU.
I am going to be writing this on the Core i7 but there are many other tutorials out there if you need to find one for your specific CPU.
So there are two things to consider, your FSB or bus speed and the voltage that the CPU is getting. There is also going to a multiplier applied to your CPU depending on how many threads and cores you have. This is what determines the final clock speed such as. If you are running the Core i7 920 stock, it has a bus speed of 133MHz and has a multiplier of 20, the final clock speed would be 2.66GHz.
With this considered if you wanted to overclock it to 3.1 GHz all you need to do is divide the final clock speed with the multiplier of 20. So theoretically if you set the bus speed to 155MHz you would achieve that clock speed.
If all things go well then you should be able to do this:



Another thing to do is increase the voltage of the CPU. With more juice going into the machine the higher the clock speed is going to be. This is something that you don't want to increase too much or else the chip will not last long. Again we are going to be working with the Core i7 920. The normal voltage for this is going to be around 1.1-1.2 Because it runs at that I would only say to run it somewhere near 1.3-1.4 if you put too much power into it, the CPU is not going to be able to handle it and like I said before its going to kill it. Someone may also want to consider undervolting their CPU is battery life is an issue and with that undervolt to around .8-1.0 to be safe.

Once you have done what you like, reboot and run stress tests. I would say run it for an hour to be safe, and watch the temperatures. If your CPU is running anything hotter than 70 I would say try going lower.
~GPU Overclock
This is something that should also only be done slightly, overclocking it too much like everything else is going to hurt it.
But when overclocking you need to figure out what it runs at stock and download the tools to overclock it. The tool depends on what card you are running. One tool that you can look at ATITool if your are running ATI. There is also Riva Tuner and depending on if you have a new ATI card, you could run Catalyst Control Center.



As you can see there are several different things to change, just make small changes and watch the temperature to make sure it doesn't go too high. Or you can run the auto tune function and let it run by itself.
If you are planning on overclocking your GPU you also might want to consider water cooling the GPU.
I am just going to say that I love CCleaner. It isn't going to speed up your system a lot but its going to make sure that it runs better with less errors and it has some cool features.
You can run the cleaner daily to delete extra unwanted files and just keep your system clean. You can also check for registry errors to make sure that you don't crash as often.
But the most important feature for speeding up your system on this application is going to be the startup section. You want to make sure that you have only the important applications running on startup to prevent unwanted process power to be used.



~Defrag
Defragging is something that should be done fairly often (about once or twice a week). In a nutshell defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contiguous regions (fragments). It also attempts to create larger regions of free space using compaction to impede the return of fragmentation. Some defragmention utilities try to keep smaller files within a single directory together, as they are often accessed in sequence. The amount of performance increase that you will gain from this is going to be minimal but then after you do all of these different small things, its going to add up and make a noticeable increase in speed. I would recommend you just make a schedule that makes this perform while your sleeping since it takes several minutes to an hour.
~Antivirus and Antimalware
Viruses, spyware, and malware are all going to slow down your computer so the best thing to do would be to download or buy some sort of antivirus program to defend against them. Although the program may use little process power its going to be better than getting a virus and allowing that to use even more power. There are several free programs out there such as Avast and AVG which is all you need.
~MSconfig
This is similar to CCleaner because this is the Microsoft application that comes installed on your computer that will list the applications that start automatically every time you reboot your computer. Limiting these applications are going to turn a computer with a couple minute long boot into a system with a 50 sec boot time or less.
~General Cleanup
Finally one should just keep up general cleanup to make sure that your computer is not bloated with applications and files that you no longer need. I would recommend that you have an exteral Storage Device that you can use to store all of the info and files that you don't need. Then once or twice a month go through the downloads folder and the documents folder and back up or delete files you no longer need.
Also go into control panel and delete the applications you may have installed for one time uses or something that no longer runs due to trials running out.