One excellent piece of software that’s worth having on your PC is Diskeeper, an automatic disk defragmenter. It’s not an exciting branch of the software world, but disk defragmentation — your files ending up in little bits and pieces all over your hard drive — “cripples system performance while also causing needless wear and tear on disk drives”. For once they’re not exaggerating.
Diskeeper is now into version 8, out today. I haven’t checked it out yet, but it’s the kind of software you install and then just forget about. Indeed, it has a feature called “Set it and Forget It” which does all the defragmenting you need on the fly. Well worth checking out.