Annual Computer Maintenance
If you own a car, a moped, a bicycle …actually, if you own anything mechanical (Like the computer you are reading this with!!), then you should already be used to the art of maintenance. Whether it is occasionally sharpening the knife for the kitchen, greasing the chains on a bike, calibrating the pistons on the boat engine or even just rotating the tires on your car, these are all forms of maintenance. But how many of you do maintenance for your computer?
Next to the car sitting in the garage outside, there is a good chance that the computer you are using is the 2nd most used object in the house. Unlike a television, there are moving parts to a computer and it is also much more sensitive to heat, dust and like everyone else, viruses! So you can do what I have been practicing for the last few years and clean out your computer! I turn into the big 4-OH when you start reading this article so you KNOW I mean it when I say annual clean up and check ups are a good thing!
We work with a bunch of schools and one thing we do at the start of every school session is we go ahead and “blow away” the current operating system and reload a fresh copy of WINDOWS on there and reload all of the drivers for printers etc. It takes a bunch of time but it moves as fast as it did when they first bought it. And since the majority of information is already stored on the server anyways, it’s a great alternative to doing so. This is an ideal type of maintenance...but for now, lets not go there and keep things simple. We are going to focus on the great tools that WINDOWS has already loaded on your pc.
There are a lot of third party applications that can do a great job cleaning out your computer and doing a lot of these things just as good if not better. Just as fast, if not faster. But for the sake of this article, I don’t want to send you all over grabbing files, downloading them, installing them etc. Some of them install toolbars you don’t need and that’s just another can of worms.
But since the majority of us have at LEAST WINDOWS XP, there are a bunch of built in tools to making maintenance that much more manageable. Lets go through a few of the available solutions on XP. If you have VISTA or WIN7, you can go to START and in the run bar, type in name of the file we are discussing and it should also show up.
BACKING IT UP
It used to be that you had to find a server or some other place to go ahead and backup files but now, we can run to Costco and grab an external hard drive for under $100 bucks and back it up ourselves. Do you have an external hard drive? Then follow these simple and easy steps.
- Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Backup.
This way, if you REALLY screw something up, you can just go back to this option and instead of backup, you can click restore and you would be in good shape!
Eh, no fohget about me!
If you are like me, you might be someone who purchases things, throws it in the trunk and forget its there. Kind of like what happens with a computer. Some of our friends are so happy at finding free software applications that they forget its there and all it does is sit in the depth of your computer and take up system resources. Sometimes, this could be the reason your PC runs so slow. Here is what you have to do.
- Click Start, Control Panel, Add Remove Programs.
That’s it! Go down the list and take out what you forgot all about. You may have to reboot after every item you remove but you will feel MUCH better.
Don’t hunt for it. Let WINDOWS take care
One tool that gets neglected a lot and its actually not too bad is the DISK Cleanup tool. Did you know it existed? There is a great application we load on our customers computers called CCleaner and its very similar but this will save you the trouble of downloading etc. This is how you get to this.
- Open My Computer, right-click Local Disk, and then click Properties.
- On the General tab, click the Disk Cleanup button. Disk Cleanup will spend a few minutes examining your disk.
- The Disk Cleanup dialog box opens.
- Select the desired check boxes in the Files to Delete list, and then click OK. Disk Cleanup will spend several minutes clearing space.
- If you have more than one hard disk, repeat this process for each hard disk listed in My Computer.
This is fun since you can see how much of the disk gets cleaned up too. Not only cool but you would be surprised how much junk comes out of there!
Mumble jumble!
Everyone talks about defragging a computer like it’s the best thing in the world. Course it is! Would you read a magazine if the columns in the article went from left to right top to bottom and then some of the pages came out upside down? That’s what your hard drive is doing when it reads! So once in a while, you have to defrag your hard drive and organize it. This allows your computer to read the files “normally” the way it should.
- Open My Computer, right-click Local Disk, and then click Properties.
- On the Tools tab, click Defragment Now. The Disk Defragmenter opens.
- Click your first hard disk, and then click Defragment.
- If you have more than one hard disk, repeat this process for each hard disk
This one will take you a few hours so do your facebook updates BEFORE you start this. Tell the world you will NOT be using the computer for a while. Like the other processes, you do NOT want to be running any other applications while you do this one.
UPDATE
Everyone has their favorite browser now. Whether it is CHROME or Mozilla or whatever. But remember to still update your WINDOWS Operating System. The best way to do this is:
- Start – All Programs and then look towards the top and you should see WINDOWS UPDATE.
This will open your Internet Explorer and run. If you have pop up blockers and stuff it might ruin the experience so pay attention. It might try and load a DLL file but its from Microsoft so no worries. Just follow the process and you should be good. VERY important to do these updates. This should almost be done weekly or go ahead and assign this to happen every week at a scheduled time.
There are a few more you can try and do but it would involve touching on your registry and honestly, I don’t want to go there. That can lead to the wrong click of a certain tab and POOF your computer can do weird things.
But remember, like everything else, learn to back up your files. Your photos, music, emails, IE FAVORITES… you name it. You better go ahead and back it up. Do it on an external hard drive, or send it to a backup center online! Whatever! Just back it up. And then you clean it up. For good practice, you should always make sure other small maintenance needs are met too. Make sure your antivirus subscription is up to date. Make sure that your anti spyware subscriptions are up to date as well.
If you do all of this to your PC and you don’t notice any difference on internet browsing, or speed on applications popping up, then no doubt give us a call at 949-6888. We do free hardware diagnostics but it could mean you have other things going on as well! Until next month, Happy surfing!
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