Computer health check

Since it is the beginning of a new year why not start 2009 with a do it yourself service of your computer. Here is a list things that Wantok's with a Windows computer can do to service their computers:

Defragging your hard drive
I believe that it is important to defrag your hard drive every couple of months. So since it is the start of the year go through your hard drive and deleted files that you don't need or remove them to external storage like burning the files to a CD/DVD or putting them on an external hard drive. After doing this make sure that close all other programs. Then using the Windows defrag tool run a defragmentation of your hard drive. You can find the defrag tool in Accessories\System Tools\Disk Defragmenter. The reason why you defrag your hard drive is because over time your hard becomes disorganised with some files split into chucks and kept at different locations on the hard disk. Which means that when you try to access the file it takes you longer to access then if the file was stored in the same location on the disk. The whole defragmentation process takes a while so don't expect to be able to use your computer for a while when you start it.

Clean up your Cache
When ever a web page is loaded in your browser it will save ti to your hard drive. Which makes it faster to load the next time you visit that web page. But the Cache can become very large so you need to clean out your cache/temporary Internet files.

Run a Check Disk
I also suggest running a check disk to fix any corruptions that may have occur ed on your hard disk. To do this on a windows computer is quite simple. Click on your start menu and then click on run (to bring up the command prompt). Type in "cmd" and then click ok. Then a black command line screen will appear. Now type in the "chkdsk /f" and press enter. If a message comes up saying something like this volume is in use and chkdsk can not run.... would you like it to run on your next start up Y/N? type "y". What will happen is that the next time you start up your computer the check disk will run. So restart your computer and then a Windows message will appear saying that you schedule check disk to run if you don't want it to run press any key now. Leave it alone to run. I added in the "/f" option on these instructions so that it would fix any errors that are found during the check disk.

Run a Anti Virus Scan
It is also important to run a full system scan in safe mode to scan for any nasties that might have got into your computer over the last year, months, days, etc. There are a lot of great free anti virus software programs out there like AVG 8 - Free version which you can download and run for free. I recommend this free program I have being using it for the last 3 years and it has got rid of most of the nasties that I have encountered. There are a few that I have needed special removable tools for but that is a different story.

Run a Spyware Scan
Scan your computer for Spyware as well. Not only do these nasties collect information about you but they also take up valuable disk space and uses processing power. So you can run Windows Defender or another program like it that will remove Spyware from your computer.

Wantok's please note that I do not take any responsibility for any thing that you do to your computer.