A good tip is a product made by Microsoft called Process Explorer. A company named Sysinternals made it and they got purchased by Microsoft some years ago. It's available on Microsoft's Technet website. Google for it and grab it from the technet dot microsoft website. You'll find it will monitor resources and can be super helpful for diagnosing problems (much better than the built in resource monitor). Later versions of the resource monitor (shipped with other versions of the OS) incorporate many of Process Explorer's features. It's also a great way to keep track of items and possibly catch when something bad is happening.  As soon I start my pc I start and run Process Explorer all the time.

Another tip is a program called Autoruns (by Sysinternals and hosted on the same Microsoft website). It's a way of looking and editing the registry without actually diving into the registry by hand. Instead of deleting registry keys, you can use Autoruns to turn off and on many keys (things normally under start up and delete missing key files).  Spybot Search and Destroy, and Malwarebytes use similar tools but Autoruns is a fantastic low resource addition.

VLC is fantastic :)

The dust settled, thinking "what a fine home, at least for now" not realizing that doom would soon be coming in the form of a vacuum cleaner.