Newbie Guides Beginners Corner Your PC A Spring Clean

Give your PC A Spring Clean

You may think your PC is a smooth-running, well oiled machine. However, Windows is a mess waiting for something to happen, with thousands of things that could go wrong and probably will do at the worst time. Like any complex machine your computer needs maintenance to keep it running in tip top condition.

What turns your machine into a slow clunking pain in the neck is, simply using it. If you are installing and uninstalling software or hardware, working with loads of documents or playing with demo software, several things are happening. Your hard drive is working hard, Windows is being inundated with little system files and loads of tiny background programs launch every time you start your machine. These little programs are usually harmless but are still busy eating up memory, which is one resource that there is never enough of. Getting rid of unwanted software is the first thing you should now how to do.

Go to the Add/Remove Programs Wizard in the Windows Control Panel and remove anything you know you don't need anymore. There are usually plenty of those handy system utilities you never use, such as screensavers, wallpapers and online services for example. Some programs you installed will not remove if you have deleted the folder yourself, manually. You could download and use TweakUI to remove the entry for you. (A really good guide to TweakUI can be found here).

Today's hard drives are bigger faster and more reliable but there is still plenty to go wrong. As the drive fills up and gets more packed with data, the disk gets fragmented. Instead of placing data in consecutive sectors of the disk, Windows is forced to put the data in clumps wherever it can find space, starting from the beginning of the drive. Your disk then has to work harder when reading and writing data, which makes the whole system run slower. Crashes, sudden shutdowns, and other problems will leave errors and lost chunks of data all over the drive.
Most uninstall programs leave a residue of system files and folders on the drive which can cause conflicts later on. Your hard drive needs particular attention. Windows comes with its own selection of house keeping tools, namely Scandisk, Defrag and Disk Cleanup, which can deal with most of the problems that a hard drive will suffer. If your hard disk dies completely, you will be glad if you used another Windows utility - backup.

There is also a Windows Maintenance Wizard, a quick and easy way to keep your system in peak condition by allowing you to run some of the housekeeping utilities automatically. Just follow the simple steps. Let it know which utilities you want to run and when and leave the rest to the wizard.

Make sure your drivers are up to date. The bits of software used automatically by parts of your system hardware, to communicate with each other. Manufacturers update and improve drivers and new versions are available for download from the web. New drivers should improve performance and add extra features, cure bugs and conflicts with other software. Some PC users make sure they are always using the latest drivers. Try drivershq, driverzone or winfiles for the most recent files for your own system hardware.

If you haven't done these things on a regular basis, or you do but your system regularly grinds to a halt. You can always reinstall Windows. This isn't so much as housekeeping but more like knocking the house down and starting again. Avoid reinstalls if possible, but sometimes it is the only cure for an ailing PC. If you decide to give it a go simply insert the Windows CD in the CD-ROM, run Setup and follow the on screen instructions. Make sure that you have the driver disks ready that came with you system and any extra devices that you have attached and back up all your important files before you begin. In theory anything that is broken before, should be replaced without losing other data, but it doesn't always work like that. If not call in a techie mate and start again from scratch. The preferred method of installing Windows is to copy the contents of the Windows folder from CD-ROM to a folder you set up on your hard drive and run Setup from the hard drive, not the CD-ROM.

If you get really into all this system cleaning and you want to get technical then you will need more than just the free utilities that came with Windows. There are a lot of suites of system utilities such as the McAfee Office or Norton Utilities.

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