PC Maintenance

One of the services that my PC clients most often request is the "tune up". There's actually not a whole lot to PC maintenance, and anyone can do it if they have the inclination and a bit of time to spare.

The first thing I do is open up the computer management console. The easiest way to do this is to right click on the My Computer icon (either on your desktop or on the Start button) and choose "Manage" from the menu. The management console gives you access to all kinds of information about your computer, and at the moment we are interested in the Event Viewer. The viewer lets you look at your computer logs. I usually give the logs a brief glance and make sure that there aren't any glaring issues that need to be addressed. The logs may show a lot of informational alerts, and these are generally fine, we're more concerned about errors (red) and warnings (yellow). If you see a lot of these they could be an indicator that there's a problem, most of the time, if your machine is set up correctly, there will not be many. If you do have a lot of errors or warnings, you may want to look at those and resolve them prior to doing any maintenance.

Once this is done, update your anti-virus and anti-malware scanners and then use them to run a full scan on the system. The next thing to do is to run Microsoft Update and make sure that you have all the patches to date.

Now that your system is patched and clean, reboot it (if it hasn't already been rebooted in the patching process), and then open up the My Computer icon by double clicking on it then right-click on your first hard drive and choose "Properties". Click on the disk cleanup button and check off all the boxes except the compress files box. Unless your hard drive is close to full and you are in dire need of space, compression is just going to slow things down.

This next paragraph is for users running XP and earlier versions of Windows, Vista takes care of defragmenting on its own.

Once you've cleaned out all the junk, click on the "Tools" tab and then choose "Defragment Now". One of the most common misconceptions people have about PCs running XP is that they should be defragmented on a regular basis. In reality, you really only need to defragment your drive when the computer tells you to, and defragmenting more often than that causes unnecessary wear and tear on your hard drive. To find out if your disk needs to be defragmented, have the computer analyze the drive, it will tell you if it requires defragmenting. If it does, remember that you should have at least 25% free space on your hard drive, otherwise it will take a long time to defragment it and it's likely that some files will be too large to successfully defrag.

With the above maintenance performed monthly, you can keep your PC humming along!