Maintaining a computer is an important part of ensuring that your system is constantly running at its optimal performance. Without regular maintenance you are bound to experience slow response times, errors and worse case scenario – system crashes that could lead to data loss. You don’t have to be a computer guru to perform basic maintenance and by following the tips below you can make sure that you’re taking care of your computer and keeping it running smooth and error free.

Data maintenance – Your data is everything that resides on your hard drive(s). This includes your files (media, documents etc) and also your programs. A very full hard drive will not run at its best performance. This is for two reasons, firstly the fragmentation level will be high, this means that files will be scattered around the hard drive and seek times will be slower. This can be improved somewhat through regular defragmentation, however, when a hard drive becomes very full the data is stored on the outer heads of the hard drive, these take longer to seek to than the inner heads and by keeping your hard drive less full you can improve read times.

Consider this – Google use custom hardware for their server farm and were reported to only fill their hard drives up by a small amount to ensure that data is kept in the inner heads and is therefore quicker to read from. So by deleting old files that you no longer need and removing old programs you no longer use you can ensure that your hard drive is running at optimal level.

Whilst on the subject of hard drives it’s a good idea to regularly fragment it, especially if there is a lot of activity on the drive. If you are constantly writing to and deleting from the drive then heavy fragmentation can occur which can result in slow read times, by defragmenting regularly you can ensure that this doesn’t happen.

It’s also a good idea to run a regular check disk. This can be done with the chkdsk /r command In a dos prompt, or by right clicking on your hard drive in my computer, choosing properties, then tools and click on the ‘error checking’ or ‘scandisk’ button. Make sure you tick the ‘check for bad sectors’ box (You may well have to restart the computer to allow Windows to properly run the scan). If you regularly check the drive for bad sectors you are ensuring that it is error free and functioning properly. If there do happen to be bad sectors on there then Windows will mark them as bad and they will not be used. If this doesn’t happen then data could potentially be written to them and this can cause data loss or unresponsive loading of programs and files.

System Maintenance – Windows is perhaps not well known for its error free operation and there can be times well you get spontaneous crashes or very bizarre behaviour. Windows 7 is a definite improvement in this department but you might still find yourself dealing with crashes and errors from time to time. To help prevent this it is best to stay on top of Windows updates, a lot of updates will probably never affect you but there are always some that will fix instability issues that the Microsoft team is aware of so its good practice to keep Windows update on.

Another very important part of maintaining your computer is frequent malware and virus scans. Make sure you’ve got a decent anti virus suite (avira, avast or Kaspersky are my recommendations) and also a good anti spyware and malware solution (malwarebytes or Stopzilla are both very good). Spyware and malware can wreak havoc on your computer; they can slow things down by running extra background processes and by hijacking search engine results. Of course these are just two of the potential issues caused by them so it’s definitely something you want to keep off your computer!

Finally another good place to look is the msconfig tool. This comes built in to all versions of Windows (after 2000) and can be used by clicking on start > run and then typing in msconfig (vista and 7 users can type this into the search box). The tab were interested in is the start-up tab. Here you can disable programs that start up on your computer. Not only will this improve your computer start-up time but it will also free up some valuable virtual memory that will ensure the legitimate programs you do use have more available memory.