Tag: Maintenance

To keep your PC running smoothly, some things should be done frequently:

• A regular virus scan (weekly)
• regular defragmentation (weekly to monthly depending on your usage)
• Clean up unnecessary files (weekly to monthly depending on your usage).

Clean up:

Some files that collect during installing new programs and browsing the Internet can be deleted after a while.
To do that click on My Computer, right — click on your local drive C.
It will open a context menu showing properties as the last item.
Opening the properties menu you will see several tabs, General being the first one.
Here you see how much your hard drive has filled up, generally any computer that has less than 25% of free space left will slow down noticeably.
If you click the clean up disk button, Windows will calculate how many files can safely be erased to free up space on your hard drive. You can review this offer and click OK.
Be aware that this can take a long time if you don’t do this regularly.

You will also notice that Windows offers you to compress old files. These are files that you have not accessed in a long time. It will take additional time to do this.

It will make sense to run a defragmentation afterwards.

Defragmentation

Defragmentation also takes care that files that are being used more frequently are easy accessible. We suggest performing this task regularly. There is software out there which does that automatically for you, Diskeeper being one of them.

With the stability of Windows XP, computer crashes have become pretty rare. I haven’t seen a crashed Vista machine so far. Still, when something happens, there are a few things you should know:

If your computer freezes and does not respond anymore, press the power button for a few seconds until the system switches off. Disadvantage: when your computer is shut down like this, some files often become corrupted.
Although we think that a restart does all that needs to be done, it is better to run and error checking or check disk [CHKDSK] .

Frequent crashes can even damage your hard drive.

To do that, go to ‘My Computer’, right-click on your local drive C, and on the opening context menu go to Properties and open it.
On the opening box click on the second tab called ‘Tools’, and press on Error-checking, Check Now. It will open another box with two check marks to be set. Once you click Start, Windows will ask you if you would like to schedule a disk check. You just confirm this, close all the windows and restart the computer. It will restart in a non-Windows mode with white letters on a blue screen (in Vista on a black screen), checking all details of your hard drive in five steps. This might take an hour or even longer, depending on the speed of your system and the size of your hard drives.

It makes sure that all files over your system in best shape. It increases the stability of your computer.

You only need to do this after crash or abrupt shut down.