Keeping Your Computer Running Smooth

Easy Computer Maintenance

Ok, we’ve all been there. A computer that hasn’t been rebooted in about 2 months that is running slower than a fat man through peanut butter. All of a sudden the computer throws a blue screen and leaves you with a paperweight. Did you know that with just a few simple steps you can keep your computer running better and help prevent those horrible crashes? Of course you did, you just don’t want to admit it. Some of these suggestions are the same as from my “Tweak your XP” article, but this one will go into more depth for maintenance and have more suggestions.

First of all, rebooting your machine periodically is of vital importance on a Windows system. While Linux and Unix machines are capable of being up for months at a time, Windows machines need a bit of a rest every now and then. Shutting your machine down for a little while will clear everything from memory, flush the cache, and allow all the hardware to reset and start back from a clean point. When you reboot your machine you should notice that there are fewer processes running and that most of your programs are a little more responsive compared to before the reboot. Rebooting should also help if you are having problems with a couple of applications or things are just not behaving like they should. Computers aren’t the only things that benefit from being rebooted, printers and other peripherals need to be shut down from time to time to allow them to start with a clean slate. Heck, we do the same thing every night when we go to sleep.

Secondly, every time you surf the web or open files on your computer, random little files get saved all over your hard drive. These are cookies and other temporary files that can pile up over time. I would recommend that about once a month or at least a couple times a year you run a program that gets rid of them. The default Windows Disk Cleanup (open My Computer - right click on your C: drive and go to Properties – click the Disk Cleanup button on the General Tab) will delete most of these files and even has the added bonus of allowing you to compress files that you don’t use very often so that they take up less space on your hard drive. However, Disk Cleanup can take a long time to run (a few hours is normal for my machine) and unless you run it overnight it will seriously bog your computer down. I recommend CCleaner, a free download from www.ccleaner.com. While it does not have the compression option, it has options that allow you to find and delete a greater range of useless files to clean up more room, along with being able to mark certain files to be ignored. CCleaner also comes with a Registry cleaner that will scan your registry for items that are no longer relevant (broken fonts, files from uninstalled programs, icons, dlls, etc) and get rid of them in order to make your registry more efficient. The registry is what contains information about all the software and settings on your machine, so it is good to keep it cleaned up if you can. Of course, if you decide to run the registry cleaner you will want to allow it to create a backup of your registry first. I have never had it delete something important and crash my computer, but better safe than sorry.

Defragging is another bit of maintenance that a lot of people forget or ignore. When a file is saved to your hard drive, it is not always in one big chunk. Your computer will save the file wherever it has space available so it may get split up into multiple pieces and scattered over the drive with each piece containing a pointer for the rest of the file. After a while your computer has to spend so much time looking for the next piece of a file that it can take forever to load that picture that you were trying to pull up or to play that next mp3. Defragging takes all those pieces of files and tries to put them back into some semblance of order. While it will probably never get everything into a perfect sequence, defragging your hard drives will certainly speed up everyday operations like opening your browser (Firefox, right?) or playing your music and games. Again, Windows has a built in tool to defrag (My Computer – right-click C: - Properties – Tools tab – Defrag) that will get the job done. There are some free defrag programs that you can download out there, but not all of them work as well as advertised. If you don’t want to spend money on it, I would say that the Windows defrag will work for you. If you don’t mind spending a little money on a defrag program, then I would suggest Diskkeeper or PerfectDisk. I have used both of these at work and Diskkeeper on my home machine; they both get the job done faster than the default Windows program and generally do a better job of it. Another feature that they have over Windows defrag is an option to schedule automatic defrags so that you can set it and forget about it. Once a month should be ok for a defrag, but if your computer starts running too slow before the month is up it probably wouldn’t hurt to check and see if it needs a defrag. Of course, a defrag generally works better if you reboot the machine immediately before. That will clear the cache and keep your defrag program from trying to work all of the files that were being held in memory at the time. If you can, try to run your Disk Cleanup or CCleaner before a defrag as well; the temporary files and cookies usually make up a big portion of the fragmented files.

Scandisk is another Windows program, but it is a little more useful than some. Scandisk will perform a test on your hard drives while your computer is booting to make sure that they don’t have bad sectors or damaged areas that can cause slow performance or system crashes. If Scandisk finds a bad sector, it can try to repair it; I have found that it usually can do a pretty good job of repairing most of what it finds. If Scandisk finds some problems that it can’t fix, there might be other programs that can. If there are a lot of bad sectors that can’t be fixed, then it is probably time to buy a new hard drive and get everything transferred before your drive fails. This is another program that should probably be run every couple of months, just to make sure.

Regular virus and spyware scans should be part of your routine, either weekly or monthly. After all, what good is that software if you never run it to see if something has gotten by that impenetrable Windows firewall (which you probably turned off anyway)? If you start getting a bunch of random popups or your computer slows to a crawl, then a virus or a bunch of spyware may be part of the problem. As far as antivirus programs, I use Avast home version. It is a free download and has real-time protection in addition to the manual and scheduled scans. Avast does not take up near as much system resources as the expensive bigger names like Norton or McAfee and does not cause as many conflicts with other programs. For spyware, I generally use Ad-Aware, another free program. While it has a version that you can buy that offers real-time protection, the free version offers the regular scans and I have found it to work just fine if you run the scans regularly. Both of these programs can be downloaded from www.download.com.

Drivers control how your software communicates with your hardware. Companies are putting out new drivers all the time for hardware that you have installed on your machine, and updating the driver to a newer version may make it work better. When you install a new piece of hardware, Windows may use a default driver that is probably old and while it may work, you may not get all the functionality that you could with a new driver. If you know the manufacturer and part number of some of the parts in your computer (like video card, sound card, cd/dvd drive, etc) then you can go to the manufacturer’s website and look for the newest drivers for your hardware. If you bought your machine from Dell, then you can visit Dell’s website and either search by model number or service tag to find drivers for your machine. Now, on the off chance that a driver update causes problems, you can always roll back to a previous driver and try to fix it that way. For the more severe driver problems, this is where your backups can come in handy. Most driver updates shouldn’t cause any problems and very few should crash anything if they go badly, but again, better safe than sorry.

Another part of maintenance that a lot of people skip or ignore is to simply get rid of files you don’t need anymore. Do you have games installed that you are never going to play again? What about that AOL program that you used for the free 6 months of internet before you found out AOL was the spawn of Satan? Any programs that you haven’t used in over 3-4 months are likely candidates for uninstallation unless you have a specific need for that program. Cleaning this dead weight from your computer will not only free up more space for you to put stuff you will actually use, but once it is removed from the registry it may improve your boot time or general responsiveness or fix some random issues that you may not have even known about. In addition to uninstalling old programs you don’t use, you might want to consider archiving some files to CDs or DVDs if you have a bunch of music, videos or pictures on your machine. After all, do you really need to have the entire collection of Weird Al songs in your iTunes? Why not just take the songs you listen to and delete the rest, or burn them to a disc in case you want them in the future. Again, this will free up space on your machine and make it so that your defragger doesn’t have to go through quite as many files. Besides, you might want to just go ahead and burn all your important files to discs, not just the ones you don’t need on your machine anymore.

Backing up your data can turn a system crash from a total nightmare in the 7th circle of hell to just a minor inconvenience while you reinstall a couple programs and copy your files back. Take it from someone who has killed a couple of hard drives, if you have anything important on your machine such as pictures, music, saved games, homework, whatever, you want to back it up. For that, I would suggest an external hard drive or just a secondary hard drive in your machine. I prefer these methods to CDs or DVDs because unless you have the re-writable discs you can’t go back and add more data to them. Putting everything on another hard drive gives you more freedom as far as adding or moving files. With the prices of hard drives falling (heck, I saw an external 1TB hard drive from Newegg for $200) I feel that everyone should have one to put their most important files on. While some people may not really feel that backing up is part of computer maintenance, you can lump it all together with your other monthly cleaning schedule and make sure you have current copies of all your irreplaceable data.

As King Rat noticed recently, cleaning your fan vents can make a huge difference in the way your computer runs. Of course, you may want to skip this step if you don’t want to void your warranty by opening your computer case. When dirt, dust and hair builds up and blocks air flow in or out of your system, it can cause your machine to overheat and not function correctly. For those who are daring enough to undertake this cleaning operation, it’s really not that hard. Simply open your computer case (please unplug it first) and locate the vents. If you have a can of compressed air you can use it to blow any dust or dirt out (never in). If you do not have the compressed air, you can use a soft brush or lint-free cloth, but it is likely to take longer. Gently wipe the filter or vents until you can see through it again and then you can put the case back together and forget about it for another few months. It helps if you can keep your case off the floor or away from any obvious sources of dirt/dust/hair (pets, cigarettes, small children).

For those of you that are seriously hard-core about your computer maintenance, there is also the clean install. Of course, this is when a good backup is critical. Formatting your hard drive and re-installing everything will take everything back to square one and make your system run like new again. If you want to speed the process up a little, then all it takes is a little preparation and foresight. After you perform a fresh install for the first time and get everything tweaked just right, you can create a disk image using any number of tools available off the internet. That way, the next time you decide to re-install everything, you can just pop in the image and load it onto your system and get it back to that same point. Makes a hard, long process a lot easier and shorter.

Do you have a monthly maintenance routine? Let me know if I missed anything in the comments.