The following monthly checklist of activities has helped maintain the performance of the three PCs that I use over the past few years. I have found that running these computer repair and maintenance tasks each month has lengthened the useful life of these machines (one has been running since 1998). All of these activities require no extra cost.
* Check there is at least 10% free disk space on all of your drives. Windows requires a large amount of free disk space for file swapping while running applications. If you are under 10% then the following checks/tasks will help.
* Uninstall applications that you do not use often to free up disk space. Run this via the Control Panel. Be ruthless about removing applications you use infrequently.
* Shut down any software application you use infrequently (the applications you see in the Task Bar). You probably are not using more than 3 applications at any one time so there is little point in keeping extra applications open that are hogging system resources.
* Shut down processes you are not using. This is different from shutting down software applications (visible on the task bar). Open the Task Manager ‘Processes’ tab and kill off any EXEs you don’t require. Only kill off those EXEs that you are familiar with (for example, Skype, etc). Another useful free tool for doing this is Sysinternal’s Process Explorer.
* Do a complete reboot. If you use Hibernate and Standby mode then be aware that this caches a lot of data that can become stale. In addition, a reboot clears out the RAM of any locked memory (some application faults can result in RAM memory not being set free when the applications close).
* Manually run the Microsoft Windows Update service (found in the Start Menu). Updates generally fix faults, some of which can be performance related so it is worthwhile to update regularly to get these benefits.
* Use a registry and file clean up tool such as Windows own Disk Cleanup application or CCleaner to remove the multitude of cached files and data residing on your PC that is no longer being used or required. If you are a frequent Internet user then you will discover that the web browser caches huge amounts of files.
* Defragment all your hard drives. You can do this using a free tool from Auslogic called Disk Defrag tool or Microsoft’s Defragmentation Tool (that comes installed with Windows operating systems). Over time, large files are split across partitions on your hard drives into many fragments which will slow down accessing the files. Processes and memory are used to locate and load each fragment. Defragmentation reassembles the files back into one chunk.
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