Computer Maintenance SchedulePosted on: May 11th, 2011 If you want your computer to run well you would need to do some actions on a regular basis. Over the years I’ve been asked many times how often should I do this or that? So I thought that I’d write down this information for everybody’s reference. These actions and their frequency are based on our experience while working on many, many computers. There are 3 basic maintenance software that I recommend everybody have: (They are all free software) - CCleaner: to clean out temporary files and cookies Weekly Actions Running the above trio would constitute the weekly actions. If you don’t use your computer intensively then it’s enough to do them every other week. The recommended procedure would be: 1. Check the status of your antivirus. Usually there’s a little icon on the bottom right corner of the screen that shows the status, or you might need to double-click it, or right-click it to get to the main page of the antivirus’ user interface. 1. Run Crystaldiskinfo. If has yellow or red indication then go no further! Unless it’s just overheating, in which case shut the computer down and do a little dusting inside the computer. 2. If, and only if, the hard drive status is good then run CCleaner to clean out temporary files and cookies. 3. After cleaning out the temp files and cookies, it’s recommended to run a defrag to prevent fragmentation. So run MyDefrag after CCleaner is finished. The “system disk daily” method on the C: drive is sufficient for this. The defrag will be able to do its best job if as few other programs are running as possible. So if you can, close all other windows and other programs that run in the background (such as Instant Messengers, Updaters, etc). If you do these actions on a regular basis then they should only take about half an hour, or less. Step 1 & 2 will only take a few moments and the defrag will take the most but it can be just started and the left running. Monthly Actions About once a month (or every other month if you don’t use the computer much) do the following steps: - Check for dust build-up. Turn off your computer for this!! - Check if the system restore is working correctly. You can read it how to do that in this article: Making Sure that the System Restore Works - Check if Windows updates are running and the computer has all high-priority updates installed. To do this just go to Microsoft’s Update site using Internet Explorer: http://update.microsoft.com/ and you’ll be redirected to the correct place. 6 Month’s Check This is like an oil change for your car. We recommend a professional checkup on computers about every six months. During this checkup we look “under the hood” and make sure everything is working as it should and we also tune up the machine to run at its top speed, and remove any unwanted or unneeded software that might have gotten on the computer. Summary The actions above, if done regularly, will help your computer to run well and most likely last longer than it would normally. This might be a bit too technical to many folks but the good news is that pretty much all of the above can be done via remote assistance (read more about it here) for very little money. We can also show you how to do it and then you can do them on your own. Did you find this information useful?
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