Computer maintenance is exactly the same as maintaining anything else, your car, your house, etc… everything is breaking down in time and we need to maintain them in order to keep them in shape.

Anyone who used computers with a Windows operating system for a while knows that eventually there is a time where the computer starts to work slowly or to do weird things like boot itself up, or get stuck, or just make noises from its hardware. You can maintain your computer with a couple of techniques and some additional tools, to keep it in good shape and for longer time periods.

Computer maintenance tips:

1. Purchasing a UPS unit – I have to recommend using a UPS for your computer + screen + your network equipment. The UPS unit will keep your computer from suffering from abrupt electric currents, electricity flickering,  or power down (which will enable you to shut down your computer properly before it shuts down immediately while your applications are open), those things I mentioned tend to shorten your hardware device’s life.

2. Backup – if you have very important information on your computer, the best way to keep it safe is to keep a copy of it elsewhere, on another computer or another device. If your data information is at large capacity, you can buy at a very reasonable price an external hard disk with 1TB (1000 GB), and backup your information to it, either by just copying it yourself from time to time (like every week or once a month, your choice) or you can install a sync program that will sync the information on an automatically scheduled time periods.

3. Those of you who use Windows operating systems, just schedule two tasks that preserve your hard disk (which keeps all of your important data) and tweak it’s performance thus keeping the computer perform at its best and those tasks are the “Scandisk” and the “De-fragmentation” tasks. Those tasks should run at least once a month. The “De-fragmentation” application is running through your hard disk bits and bytes and arrange the data so it will be grouped together (when you copy, move, delete etc… the data is being moved and kept separately on different areas of the hard disk and there are gaps in their location on the hard disk, so the De-fragmentation collects them and makes them sit together on the same space, and even though as a windows operator you can’t see the gaps between data, since your files seem to be ok, in the background the fact that they are being at the same space increases performance since the computer doesn’t need to jump the gap to reach the rest of the information (I hope this simple down to earth explanation was simple enough to understand without getting too technical). The “scan disk” application is scanning the hard disks for defects and problems and fixes them as it scans all of the hard disk, those bugs/defects on the hard disk can create a real delay when the hard disk is working and trying to read your data information.

4. When working with windows, it is highly recommended to keep at least 500MB of free space on your system hard disk (the one that contains your operating system) even though I would recommend keeping at least 1GB of free hard disk space. The reason for it is that the windows operating system uses the main system hard drive to conduct some actions, like writing temp files, or using space on the hard disk to be able to compensate on a low memory computer, so it does need some space to work on. If the capacity will be lower than 100MB your computer might not be able to load

at all, so keep an eye on the free space of your operating system disk.

5. There are programs that are being loaded on start-up (which means when the computer is starting and loading the operating system). If you don’t need those programs to load automatically when the computer boots, I would suggest to remove them from the startup (otherwise the computer will load very slowly) and it will take it a while before you will be able to start working with your applications and using your computer.

To remove applications from booting on startup, you can use two main techniques:
1. do start –> programs –> startup (checking if the programs you can remove are there, you can just delete them from there and they will not load on the next startup).
2. do start –> run, and on the run field type “MSConfig” this will open a window which will have a tab called “start-up”. By choosing the startup tab, you will see a list of programs that are all loading on boot (on start-up), removing the “v” from the check-box will prevent the program to boot on start-up. At the end of the change, when you press “OK” you will be asked to reboot your system since those changes affect the operating system.

WARNING: Only remove the tags from the check-boxes of the programs you are recognizing, and that you know that they are the ones

you do not want to load on the next startup, if you will remove a system application that windows need to operate properly, you will have a problem loading your operating system on the next time the computer will boot. So be careful (if you’re not sure, don’t touch anything).