Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Maintaining your computer

Let’s hear it for the computer for a minute. It’s very clever (far cleverer than you – remember that) and it will sit there producing word documents, spreadsheets, databases and presentations until the cows come home.

It will also allow you to manage your photographs, your bank account and work life. It will send out thousands of emails so you don’t have to telephone anyone and gives you a portal onto the world of the Internet: where all knowledge is contained and you can satisfy any craving you might have.

So, that’s the computer. A box of tricks that should be showered with rewards on a daily basis. And just remember back to when it stops working. How empty life is when the little red light stops flashing and the gentle purr of the fans, and the excited whirl of the hard drive, is heard no more. The silence, oh the silence; it’s horrifying.

So what do most of us do. Nothing. We turn it on day after day, letting dust into its innards, and forever pushing in more and more information via memory sticks and shiny discs. In short, most computers are abused.

Okay, so what can we do about it; how can we give our computer a little TLC.

If you’re running Windows, there’s a number of things you can do straight away which help your computer enjoy a better life. Here’s a suggestion as to what to do, but just make sure your happy doing this and your have a little techno confidence.

Windows comes with it’s own tools for cleaning up your computer in the shape of the Disk Clean Up, Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter. But before you dash off and activate them, do a few bits of housekeeping first.

Get rid of all non-essential data as this is a great drain on space. Check as many directories as you can to see what’s hiding their. Also regularly clear your browser cache, history and empty email trash out.

Then switch off programmes that are running in the background; as many as you can. Ensure you’re offline, they you can also disable firewalls, anti-virus software etc. One of the quickest ways to do this is to press down the CTRL, ATL and DEL keys, which will bring up the Windows Task Manager box. Choose Processes, then close down everything (Close Process) apart from SYSTRAY and EXPLORER.

Running scan disk and disk defragmenter for the first time in a long time may take a very long time indeed, however, once done, the next time should not take nearly as long.
Right, now you’re ready to begin. Remember it’s Disk Clean Up, Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter, in that order.

To get started, hit Start, then All Programs, then Accessories and then finally System Tools. Click each one and do as they say. If you have a number of hard drives, make sure you do each one.

And as to how often you should perform these tasks, especially the defrag utility? Once a week is a good habit for the average user, but if you’re keeping your computer on most of the time, downloading some 2.5GB of data and trawling a large number of websites, then you might be better defrag-ing every fourth day. And you can also perform a defrag after installing a large application, or indeed, uninstalling one.

So there you are, give your computer a break and defrag as often as you can – it will thank you for it.

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