Need advice on periodic maintenance

So, I've had my current rig for about 7 months, and it's beginning to seem like it's slowed down somewhat compared to when it was new. I was hoping that B.M. and others could tell me what I should be doing to clean up and tune it, to restore it close to as-new condition. I was also looking for help in finding the best software or procedures for efficiently cleaning up the drives. Thanks!

Depending on what you already know about computer maintenance (or not) consider a fresh install of your operating system and then keeping it clean with something like WinOptimizer 2019 which is free.

I have fallen out of the practice for a variety of reasons but I do still believe in an a periodic nuke and reinstall of all software as a beneficial practice. This is also why I never store any significant data on my system drive.

With Win10 you can factory reset windows at any point using the advanced shutdown command. Hold Shift while clicking "restart" and you get a few options to choose from. You can restore the computer to a fresh install windows and wipe all your drives or choose to keep a few things.. i usually back up things I want to keep on my 4TB HDD before hand, windows is installed on a 250GB nvme drive and most games I play are on my two additional ssd drives.

Check your motherboard manufacturer's website for driver updates like once a month as the motherboard is made of many different components that each have their own driver control set, also doesn't hurt to force windows update to check for new updates from time to time. For any given peripheral you have, it may have its own driver package as well, provided by manufacturer.

If you're going to do a factory reset of windows, I'd advise downloading the latest version of all drivers for your system and peripherals and backing them up somewhere first just in case win10 generic drivers don't play nice for the initial install. The chipset, sata, and network drivers at the very least, so your system at least works well enough to download any other drivers after you're up and running.

Happy Easter ;)

Since MS squirks forces vendors like Asus, Intel, AMD, etc. to redo their driver structure again and again during the last half year or more, it is no bad idea to wipe C drive and redo the system as said above. It is a culprit to deinstall all those drivers that a clean install is actually unavoidable if you come a long way from 17xx builds. That is my personal view at it, others may do it differently.

I would go to Asus, check their DL page and closely read the driver section, IME, BIOS, Chipset, Sound, LAN, WLAN, BT..that should be it. If you use their software, get AiSuite in it's latest edition as well and also Aura Sync.

Install all those with a right-click: "As Administrator" !!! It has never been so important to do this with Asus Software than with recent releases.

To keep it somehow clean once reinstalled, use DiskCleanup from within Win10, delete older Builds, delete Update garbage, etc... that saves 20-40GB after each new Build.

I like macecraft's jv16PowerTools to keep my PC clean. Like with any of those tools, you should know what you are doing as they can potentially destroy it too, yep !

I have seen 7's running for almost a decade without any squirks, I doubt 10 can achieve this.

Thanks, guys! Happy Easter to you too, B.M!

I do have a bunch of different drives, including two M2 NVMe drives, but the M2 drives are both 1TB, and I didn't put the OS alone on it's own C-drive. I guess this means I've got to take my time and plan this out carefully. I guess I could unplug the other drives after transferring files from C to other drives, and re-download the program files on it?

Also, I bought Windows 10 online from MS, so I'm guessing that I'll need to figure out what my password is for that?

It's painful being this computer-illiterate!

some info:

you can only clean out the system drive ( usually C ) with the built-in disk cleanup function. It does NOT work on data drives, only your sys-drive.

you can match your 10-lic to a hotmail account. Make an account, log into 10 with this account a few times ( via Control Panel, set it to use MS account for 10 ), then you can revert to a local account. That will make your 10-lic available even AFTER you change hardware.

If you just reinstall 10 NOW, with the SAME components, it will activate itself as your HW-hash is the same. Once you change parts this may NOT be the case anymore and you either need a key, or a hotmail account with the lic tied to it.

Format your 1 NVMe drive, i.e. 256GB for sys andthe rest for data. That way you can wipe it anytime ;)

Easier would be a dedicated C drive, no doubt.