Top 10 Tasks For The Ultimate Computer Maintenance
Here are the top 10 computer
maintenance tasks everyone should perform:
Computer
Maintenance Task #1: Scan For Viruses
Your virus scanner tries to catch
viruses before they infect your computer, but the people who make anti-virus software
can’t detect viruses until the viruses infect somebody’s computer—so even the
most secure computer in the world is vulnerable.
The people who make anti-virus
software know this, so they give your anti-virus software the ability to scan
your disk drive for virus infections. Get in the habit of running a “Full Disk
Scan” every month (or more frequently if you use your computer to manage
important information or financial accounts).
Also run a full-disk scan if your
computer starts acting strangely. Many viruses try to hide themselves in
legitimate programs, causing strange behavior. Only a full-disk scan can detect
these viruses.
Computer
Maintenance Task #2: Clean Your Registry
Programs store important information
in the Windows Registry—information like their license key or how many days
your free trial has left. But when you remove programs from your computer, this
information often gets left behind. That leaves you with a registry full of
useless information.
Since almost every program on your
computer uses the registry dozens or hundreds of times a day, purging your
registry of unneeded information can speed up how fast applications load. It
can also help prevent old registry entries from interfering with newer registry
entries and the programs that use them.
A quick search on Google for
“Registry Cleaner” turns up several registry cleaner programs for every budget.
Run one of these programs once a month or once a quarter as part of your
regular computer maintenance.
Find registry errors with
a free scan from PC
Matic
Computer
Maintenance Task #3: Create a “Disk Box”
Back when everything—including
Windows—came on floppy disks, I created a disk box to store all of my program
and driver disks. Keeping everything together saved me from tearing the house
apart looking for a lost disk when something went wrong.
Today my “disk box” is really an old
CD-R spindle that holds all of my driver and software CD-ROMs. It takes up
almost no space, and I haven’t touched the CDs on the bottom of the spindle in
years, but I still use it frequently to find some elusive driver or program
that can’t be downloaded from the Internet.
If you ever get in trouble on your
computer, you don’t want to have to search all over for your old discs. Start
keeping a “disk box” today so everything you need is in one place.
Computer
Maintenance Task #4: Clear Out Dust
It amazes me how many people who
can’t stand three days of dust on their furniture will never even think of
clearing out the dust from their computer. With their vents and fans, computers
are practically designed to be dust traps—but dust is really bad for computers.
Dust is a highly effective
insulator, so it traps heat inside your computer. That heat makes metal and
other parts on your computer expand, causing wear and tear on the moving
parts—like the tiny ball bearings inside your disk drive. The heat also
prevents electrical parts from working the way they were designed.
Cleaning the dust out of
your computer is easy, if a bit tedious. Buy a
can of compressed air from your local supermarket or office supply store, turn
off your computer, open your computer case, cover your eyes and mouth, and
spray until all the dust is gone. I suggest you “dust out” your computer once a
year, or twice a year if someone in your house smokes.
Computer
Maintenance Task #5: Defragment
Imagine you had only five minutes to
clean your house before guests arrived. You’d probably do a few quick “hacks”
that weren’t really cleaning—like throwing junk into the closet and sweeping
dust under the rug. Windows does the same thing every time you save a file—in
order to save the file quickly, it doesn’t pay close attention to putting it on
the disk drive in a nice, neat way.
That’s why you should defragment your disk drive about once a month.
This is one of the easiest computer maintenance tasks on this list: simply
start the Defragmentation program from the Windows Control Panel before you go
to bed one night and you’ll have a well-ordered disk drive when you wake up the
next morning.
Computer
Maintenance Task #6: Get S.M.A.R.T.
The Self-Monitoring Analysis and
Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) checks your disk drive for wear and tear so
that it can warn you before your disk drive fails. Not only can this tell you
when you need to buy a new disk drive, but it can let you know that you need to
make a through backup before it’s too late.
There are numerous programs on the
Web which will help you read and interpret S.M.A.R.T. data—just search Google
for “S.M.A.R.T. drive test”.
Computer
Maintenance Task #7: Trash Duplicate Files
I frequently forget to delete photos
from my camera before I take new photos, so when I download the new photos to
my computer, the camera also creates duplicate copies of the old photos. Other
processes on your computer also create duplicate files, and all of these
duplicate files waste your disk space.
Removing duplicate files is another
easy computer maintenance task. Search Google for software to “remove duplicate
files”. Almost all of this software works the same way: it reads every file on
your computer and compares a mathematical representation of each file (called a
checksum) to every other file on your computer. The process takes time, but
it’s highly accurate, and every duplicate file remover will let you choose
which files to remove.
There are some programs that will
perform computer maintenance, clean your registry, and remove duplicate files.
Find registry errors with
a free scan from PC
Matic
Computer
Maintenance Task #8: Install Upgrades
Most of the fastest-spreading viruses exploit a flaw in a specific program,
whether it’s Windows or an application. The programmers who write these
programs usually issue a “patch” for these security flaws as soon as they
discover them.
Programmers even issue patches for
flaws that haven’t been exploited by viruses yet, so installing the latest
patches can help protect your computer and your personal data.
How do you install these security
patches? Simply install the upgrades for the programs on your computer. Most
important are the programs on your computer that access the Internet or that
you use to open files from the Internet. For example: Internet Explorer, Google
Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org
or LibreOffice, and all multi-player games.
Most programs have an option in
Tools or Help to check for updates. I suggest you run the “Check For Updates”
option once a month or more frequently as part of your regular computer
maintenance.
Computer
Maintenance Task #9: Remove Startup Programs
Most new computers startup in 20 to
40 seconds. Most computers over a year old can take 2 minutes or more to
startup. What changed? It’s the startup programs.
Many programs today install a
startup program that will either make it easier to start the main program by
putting an icon in your taskbar or will make the main program start faster by
“pre-loading” it. Unfortunately, both of these things mean that your computer
will boot up much more slowly. For laptops in particular this can be quite
annoying.
In less time than it takes for your
computer to boot, you can disable these pesky and unnecessary startup programs.
See our previous article for instructions on how to disable startup programs.
Computer
Maintenance Task #10: Make A Backup
A backup isn’t strictly part of
computer maintenance. It won’t help your computer work better or live longer,
but it will absolutely help you survive computer failure with the minimum level
of stress.
We’ve written about backups
extensively before, so I won’t belabor the point. Please make a backup at least
once a month—although more frequently is recommended. See our articles about
making easy secure backups for great
backup options that won’t even prolong your normal computer maintenance.
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