Even the most sophisticated PC cannot keep itself in peak shape without a little help from you, the end user. There is little doubt that today's CPU's and super fast RAM provide computing power that wasn't even on the drawing board a decade ago, but even now, all of that power still needs someone to tell it what to do, and what not to do. There are a few simple maintenance tips that all computer users should be on top of.
Hard Drive Health
Your Hard Drive is the repository if all the information you save on your PC. From Emails and text documents to recently visited web pages, your Hard Drive stores it all. Your drive is made up of sectors, like the drawers of a file cabinet. Each sector is of a certain size and when it is full, the drive continues on to the next sector, or drawer.
If you open a file from last month, add some data to it and close it again, the new data you just added is actually saved in a different sector than the original file. Each time you open that file, the Hard Drive has to find all of those pieces or fragments in order to put the file back together for you.
Over time, this can slow down your drive's performance. To resolve this problem, you can run the Disk Defragmenter. |
It's built into windows and easy to use. Turn it on and let it do it's stuff. It may take some time depending on how many drives and files you have.
Crashes
Whenever you computer crashes, the Hard Drive records any errors that may result. For instance, sectors that were being written to or read from can be marked as unreadable. Over time these errors can accumulate and affect the performance of your drive. To check for these errors, you can run a utility called Check Disk. this will report any errors and attempt to fix them. More serious errors may require the machine to boot in safe mode to be repaired.
Files, Files Everywhere...
Clients are always surprised to learn how many actual files are on their machines. The fact is, we accumulate thousands of files from the internet, digital cameras, music players, all of the applications we use and the list goes on and on. Some of these files are just temporary and only used once during an installation or when visiting certain web sites. These temporary files can and should be deleted. Use the Disk Cleanup tool to do this.
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