Believe it or not, just like our home, our computer needs cleaning, washing, painting, and all that goes with Our House Management. You must be shocked by that word “Washing” and “Painting” to an Electronic Device!! Don’t worry. Don’t just do it yet with a bucket of water, but rest, relax and read on. Here is one wonderful article every PC owner must read and do as it tells you do to.

Buying a PC is half the investment, the rest can be broken down into many factors; the software you purchase such as antivirus, spyware blocker, etc, replacing hard-disk after it went smooth running humming bird to wild rock heads in a disco, replacing your keyboard after kitties jumped and danced more than often, and not to forget -  your kids accidentally deleted your important files and now you are waiting  in line somewhere at the computer center for some help — All for your wallet!

Using some tips you can prolong the life of your computer, ultimately saving money for good. Windows VISTA calls this as “System and Maintenance” which is one of the most important part that often all us ignore much, or don’t have time for it look.

Your anti-virus will need to catch new viruses, so it must be updated regularly. Your VISTA wasnt’ fully secured when it was sold, so it will keep on asking you to update, your hard disk will be filled with bunches of temporary files as you install, uninstall programs, hard disk starts losing performance. What was once the fastest becomes slow day by day. It’s all because we never looked at the “Maintenance Issue”

We need to setup a schedule for our PCs.
A schedule to do the maintenance it requires.

• Backup of your Documents, Files, Photos, Videos, etc. - Do this as often as you like. An internal or external hard disk can be used for this purpose. Just copy paste the things you want to backup or use a backup utilities to make this task easier.
• Deleting Temporary Files - See image below [Click on the link Free Up Disk Space]
• Deleting System-Dump Error Files [ This is down by the above step ]
• De-fragging Hard Disk - [Click on the Link as shown in the image below]
• Updating Anti-virus and other Programs.
• Run Virus Scan
• Run Windows Defender Scan for Spyware, Malware etc.
• ************* All of the followings will follow as  continuation of this post and will be described in detailed ]
• Cleaning inside part of your CPU
• Cleaning your Mouse
• Cleaning your Keyboard
• Cleaning Other External Devices
• Those are some of the housekeeping works we all need to consider.

When we are on the computer, we just want to work, browse internet, but never want to do something boring do we ? Backup is Boaring. Defraging takes hours, it’s boring. Do something else while the computer does the maintenance work.  I like to goto bed leaving my computer ON once a week. Run the Maintenance  and Schedule works, goto bed.  Wake-up in the morning, smell the coffee and a PEACE of mind.

Here is a snap shot of VISTA’s Control Panel > System Maintenance. Note the two circles. I advice you to do those at least once a week. When doing Defrag, it’s best to turn off all programs that might be active. I stop my Apache Server, I stop my anti-virus, I stop my Windows Defender and all. I turn off the Modem So I am not connected to the Internet. I close everything. But Before I do all this, I do the first step, “Clean-up” Delete The Unwanted files which by the way is called as “Free up Disk Space”. There is no point running a defrag with all those files. Unwanted? What files could those be ? [

When you have bunches of software each requiring regular updates, it might worth using the “Schedule Tasks” see above. You can pretty much schedule any program to run, update etc at a given time provided that the computer is on but not on a sleep mode.

Having said all those,
Stick this banner on top part of your monitor case!

Another Image 4 U…….

How Does Disk Cleanup Work ?
Our Answer : It Simply Deletes Everything that VISTA assumes are unwanted.
And much of those files created by VISTA than by Programs.

Have a happy computing!

Ruben
p.s. See you again with Part 2 Soon.