Basic Computer Maintenance Guide

To increase the overall performance of your computer, regular and routine maintenance is necessary. However, taking your computer into a Technician to do this is not. You can maintain your system yourself with this easy to follow guide. Without regular cleaning and maintenance, your hard drive gets cluttered with data, your file system becomes fragmented, and overall performance can begin to slow. Without frequent backups and file updates, your data is more difficult to restore. For optimal performance, you should always check for updates, patches, and changes to your software drivers, subscriptions, and such. Even dust and grime on your machine and hardware itself can slow the performance of your system.

What You Can Do

Before you jump into hard-core maintenance, you should clean your files. Your computer has no idea what is current and needed and what you could delete. You have to do this by hand. The areas we tend to build the most clutter are the Desktop, My Documents, My Pictures, My Music and Shared Files. Clean up in these areas must be done manually, by you.

Starting with the Desktop, make sure your shortcuts are all valid, remove any that may have changed. Then sort the remaining items you may have scattered about to the destination they actually belong. For example, word files should be stored in MY Documents, mp3's should be stored in the My Music area. Next, take a look at your Task Manager, how many programs do you have set to launch at Start Up? Are they all necessary? Remove any programs from executing at Start Up that you can, for example, your music and media players - these can be started manually if and when you need them - they don't need to be executed each time your system turns on and off. Once the Desktop is cleaned, you can move deeper into your system.