Computer Maintenance

What is it?

If you just use your PC regularly, and have never done any maintenance, you will most likely run into many problems, computer slows down, you get a lot of freezes, files and programs take forever to open.  Windows comes with a set of utilities to aid in the maintenance of your computer.

or

In short and clear; Computer maintenance is the practice of keeping computers in a good state of repair.

Scan Disk

Your Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is used a lot during your computer sessions, a lot of use can result in physical damage to the HDD, as well as other damage such as file fragments becoming lost, unknown or unreadable.  Do a thorough scan disk at least once a month.  Before doing a scan disk, close all programs.

Defragmentation

Ideally, file sectors should be on continuous locations on your hard disk, this means to open a file, the Operating System does not have to do much file processing work.  But when you delete a program, or a file, it leaves a gap; a new file may replace some of this gap, and replace another gap somewhere else.  When this files needs to be opened, more processing, taking much more time is required.  Disk Defragmenter takes this sectors and puts them back together as best as it can, to make the process faster and more efficient.  Do this at least once every two weeks, close ALL programs, ALL internet connections down.  Turn off the screensaver, and don't interact with your pc until complete.   Perform a Scan Disk first.

Msconfig

This utility lets you do various things to check your pc's startup, process what starts up, and how the pc should start up next time, for purposes of tracing errors. 

Disk Cleanup

It's important to keep as much free disk space as possible, a full HDD will run slow, and it will take longer to do the above processes as there are more files to scan.  Virtual Memory requires large amounts of HDD space, if your HDD is full, the space is not available for Virtual Memory.

Temporary/old files
If you plan to do either of the above, do this first.  This looks in common folders were temporary files are stored, which are safe to delete, recycle bin, history, temporary files, temporary internet files etc.  It tells you how many MBs of space the files are taking.  1 GB (HDD are measured in GBs) is 1024MB.  So 500MB of temporary files is almost half a GB.

Utilities/Programs/Applications
You probably install many programs, photo programs, word processors, MP3 players, and games.  Young children are always installing games.  These programs take up huge spaces on HDD, large games can take from 0.5 GBs to 1GB alone.  If you don't use these programs anymore, its worth deleting them, so long as you have the CD, you can put them back at any time.

Document Files
Ever let a child, or have you ever played with paint brush and saved a file to the HDD.  Paint Brush saves files in Bitmap (.bmp) format, this format has NO compression, and creates very large files.  Look in your my documents folder often and delete files which are no longer required, they all free up hard drive space, and could aid in keeping your new computer working new!