Keeping your computer healthy

Posted on: August 13th, 2008

Computers need some TLC (Tender Loving Care) just like humans, animals and plants do. They can be extremely useful when they work right and very frustrating when they break down.

There are actually some simple things that you can do to keep your computer in good shape. Unfortunately your computer’s manual (if you got one at all) won’t talk much about these.

Here we are going to give you some advices distilled from years of experience.

Just as with living things the basis of health is hygiene. In case of computers it means both hardware and software.

Hardware

Hardware-wise the most important thing is to keep the computer free of dust. Dust causes damage by clogging the airways that would keep the components at normal operating temperature. So it causes overheating and thus an early retirement of the computer. Dirt also causes problem with electrical connections and creates some strange, random effects.

The most often failing component in computers is the hard drive. The reason for this is not hard to explain. Hard drives are one of the most sophisticated, precision built machines man ever created. They have hard, metallic disks spinning at 6, 7 or in some cases at 10,000 RPM. The head is moving closer to the spinning disk than the diameter of a dust speck! One of my teachers gave me a good analogy to the feat these devices accomplish:
Imagine that you are flying a supersonic jet 3 feet above the ground and you are counting the grass leaves !
So you can see that the slightest misalignment could easily case failure. Moving things do wear out faster than stationary ones. Since a hard drive does an awful lot of motion it is the number one failing component in a computer.

To protect the hard drive first of all you need to prevent mechanical shocks to it. Place the computer on a place where nobody is likely to bump into it. If you have a laptop always place it where it’s not likely to fall down.
The next thing to make sure is proper cooling. Hard drives can create a lot of heat and if it’s not dissipated it can cause failure.

Software

Keep it simple!

The first and foremost thing you can do to keep your computer running is to keep it un-junky. Don’t install things that you don’t use. Unfortunately today software and hardware vendors have tendency to “bloat” their softwares, they take up several times more space than they should, mainly because of installing useless features. Do you know that you don’t need any software to have DSL, or cable connection. But both DSL and cable companies have their own install CDs that load the computer up software that is not needed to access the internet at all. The most laughable example is those programs that are supposed to diagnose and fix connection problems. I’ve not seen any of these help anybody to fix a problem. But they are installed to run all the time.

Also computers tend to come preloaded with all kinds of junk. I bought an HP laptop that I love but it had so much stuff on it that it took me 2 hours to clean it up so that the computer would run at its max performance. A good place to start with the cleanup is the Add/Remove Program in the Control Panel. Uninstall all the things that you don’t use. Then use the MSCONFIG utility (Start->Run->type in ‘msconfig’ and click OK) to disable all the unnecessary things that start up. The truth is that the computer runs just fine without anything listed in the startup (because these are just the extra things). Only very few things that actually need to be there, such as Antivirus, touchpad software on laptops, wireless configuration utility (if you use that one instead of Windows’ built-in). If you do this you will see a faster start-up and faster operation afterwards.

Don’t use filesharing softwares (such as BearShare, LimeWire, eMule, Shareaze, etc) these aside from encourage illegal activity (sharing of copyrighted materials without the owner’s consent) are an “excellent” sources of viruses and other malware.

Do not install toolbars unless you really need them. Toolbars are rarely useful, they take up space on the screen and many times they mess with the way webpages are displayed thus causing problems. An Internet Explorer, or other browser without toolbars is the best to view webpages.

Do cleanups and optimizations about once a month. There’s an excellent, and free tool called ccleaner that you can download from ccleaner.com. This can clean up temporary files, also has a very good registry cleaner that so far has no caused any problems with any application. Clean up your temporary files and your registry and then do a defragmantation on your hard drive (I recommend doing the defragmentation process in safe mode — you can get to safe mode by pressing F8 just before Windows would start.

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