You're wasting your time with these 5 outdated Windows maintenance tasks

Published Nov 8, 2026, 8:01 AM EST Ismar is a Senior Author at How-To Geek. He previously worked as a writer, editor, and general manager at a content agency before joining the team in 2023. He began his writing career in 2021 after completing a BA in English Language and Literature. Beyond How-To Geek, Ismar has contributed to Red Stag Fulfillment and Authority Hacker. He has also worked on various SEO projects to help clients improve their search visibility. Ismar has been around Windows PCs since the age of three, so friends and family naturally chose him as the resident tech support. His projects often involve tinkering, such as disassembling mechanical keyboards and gaming mice to mod his beloved gear. He also enjoys pushing hardware to the max through overclocking while staying on a reasonable budget. An avid gamer, Ismar has logged thousands of hours across various genres, including first-person shooters, RPGs, racing games, and roguelites. When he is not at his desk, he is probably exploring other people’s phones to discover their quirks and features or experimenting with the latest AI tools. In his free time, Ismar enjoys spending time with his wife, working out at the gym, playing guitar and bass, cooking gourmet meals, and traveling. Above all else, he’s a proud cat owner. Countless Windows habits have come and gone over the years. One of the most common ones, oddly enough, was reinstalling the entire operating system just to restore a PC's original performance. Looking back, it's strange just how often we'd wipe the entire OS whenever it slowed down, but thankfully, we don't have to do that anymore — and it's far from the only PC maintenance habit we've largely left behind, either. Reinstalling Windows every year to keep your PC feeling fresh The nuclear option is no longer your only solution Credit: Nick Lewis / How-To Geek Back in the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s, Windows wasn't nearly as mature as it is today. At the same time, the internet wasn't nearly as widespread, and information wasn't so readily available, which made it extremely difficult to troubleshoot and fix problems. Many of us were getting our very first PCs into our homes, and whether it was out of pure curiosity or just bad luck, we'd sometimes break the OS in a way that prompted us to do a complete Windows reinstall. But the main reason why people reinstalled Windows was to make it run fast again. This actually worked, and several different factors contributed to it. As you installed and uninstalled programs on your PC, the Windows registry accumulated leftover entries, while poorly behaved software and background processes could cause conflicts, software glitches, and high CPU usage. Another reason Windows slowed down over time had to do with hard drive fragmentation. PCs from the era ran the OS on a spinning hard drive, and as files became fragmented over time, the drive's head had to move more to piece together data required to run an app. Malware was another contributing factor to why we'd reinstall Windows so often. Windows' built-in defenses were pretty poor, and because viruses were rampant in the early 2000s, sometimes the only way to restore performance and make your PC fast again was a complete reinstall. Thankfully, Microsoft has resolved or significantly reduced the impact of many of these problems in modern versions of Windows. At the same time, its built-in troubleshooting and repair tools like DISM and SFC have become much more robust, effectively eliminating the need to reinstall Windows as part of regular maintenance. Manually defragmenting and optimizing your drives every month Leave the busywork to Windows Hard drive fragmentation is a fairly normal part of using a PC. Uninstalling programs and deleting files leaves gaps of different sizes across the hard drive, and a new file can't always fit into one of them. Windows then has to split the file into multiple pieces and store them in different locations on the drive. Some programs also accumulate data over time through regular use and updates, potentially forcing Windows to store new data elsewhere. The end result is that the hard drive has a much harder time reading fragmented files, as the read/write heads have to physically move across the spinning platters to locate all the data. This can also slow down writing new data. I already mentioned reinstalling Windows as one way to reduce drive fragmentation, but you didn't really need to go through that laborious process just to defragment your hard drive. Running Windows' built-in defragmentation tool was the easiest way to fix this problem, and it was probably one of the first PC maintenance tasks you were taught. While you can still defragment your drives manually today, it's largely unnecessary. Modern PCs often run on SSDs, and manually forcing a traditional defrag on them offers no real benefit. However, SSDs can benefit from TRIM, and thankfully, Windows automatically handles drive optimization, using TRIM for SSDs and defragmentation for mechanical hard drives, leaving no work for us to do. Using RAM cleaners to free up memory RAM is designed to be used Remember when we used to install RAM cleaners on every single device in the house because they promised to instantly boost performance? You didn't imagine it — this actually used to work, at least to some extent. Older versions of Windows and some apps weren't always great at managing RAM, which could sometimes leave the apps running in your foreground without enough memory. However, Windows has gotten much better at managing and releasing RAM these days, so unless a system or app glitch is causing problems, you don't need a RAM cleaner anymore. For some, this can be a little hard to trust. You've likely noticed that when you pull up Task Manager, even when your PC is at idle, Windows uses a lot of RAM (often north of 50%). This can happen regardless of how much RAM your system has. It doesn't matter if you've only got 8GB, 32GB, or even 96GB, Windows can still appear to gobble up a large chunk of it. This might prompt you to install a RAM cleaner, but you really shouldn't. Windows and most other operating systems now operate on the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" principle. Also, you really shouldn't judge RAM usage based on Task Manager's RAM numbers, as the memory can be easily reclaimed when a task calls for it. Just let Windows take care of your RAM, and if you notice that you're always running out, you probably just need more of it (or should consider switching to Linux). Cleaning the Windows registry to squeeze out more performance You can leave the registry alone Registry cleaners were yet another one of those apps that promised to enhance the performance and stability of your system. On paper, it made sense because these tools could remove orphaned entries and fix registry errors. However, in practice, they don't really do much. The registry barely takes up any space on your drive, so removing orphaned entries doesn't make any measurable difference, and Windows can generally ignore unused keys. In fact, overzealous registry cleaning can have the opposite effect, as a tool could remove entries that an app actually uses, potentially creating more problems than it solves. While you might sometimes need to dive into the registry to fix a specific issue, blindly running registry cleaners and expecting them to improve performance is best left in the past. Disabling or manually configuring the Windows pagefile Let Windows decide how much virtual memory it needs The Windows pagefile, also known as virtual memory, is a hidden system file that Windows uses to store data moved out of physical RAM. A common performance trick we used in the past was setting a fixed pagefile size, which was usually calculated by taking your amount of RAM in MB and multiplying it by somewhere between 1.5 and 2 (e.g., a 12,288MB pagefile for a system with 8GB of RAM). This trick actually had some merit, but it's not quite for the reason you think. Setting a fixed pagefile instead of letting Windows manage it dynamically could help prevent hard drive fragmentation. Some enthusiasts with high amounts of RAM would even disable the pagefile outright, believing this would speed up the system by stopping Windows from accessing it on a drastically slower hard drive. Now that many of us run our operating systems on blazing-fast NVMe SSDs, it's best to let Windows handle the pagefile automatically. Windows is much better at managing memory and adjusting the pagefile size as needed, and leaving it enabled can help prevent memory allocation errors. Modern PCs can take care of themselves These habits made sense in the past, but if you still carry them out on a modern PC out of pure habit, maybe it's time to leave them behind. Your PC can handle most Windows maintenance on its own, so save your energy for updating and fixing all the other things where Windows falls short, like your apps and graphics card drivers.