Sunday, October 28, 2007

#107 Maintenance is Essential

If you didn't ever change the oil on your car would you be surprised if the car engine seized? What about if you never painted your house would it be a shock if the wood became rotten? Well if you don't perform some minimum maintenance on your PC, you'll likely have some problems. The first maintenance is basic cleaning and keeping our PC in a place that won't cause problems.

I hate to see PC's sitting on the floor. Several reasons: 1. PCs get abused by kicks, vacuum cleaners and pets. 2. Being on the floor lets spiders and dust bunnies into the PC case. When I've done maintenance on PCs that have been on the floor they are filthy inside. This can lead to overheating and possible electrical short. Get those PCs off the floor!

You should clean your keyboard and mouse monthly. Use one of the air can blasters to blow out the dust from your keyboard. Use a damp cloth to clean your mouse. Use that same damp cloth to clean your monitor screen. Run your Printers cartridge cleaning utility every other month. This is usually found as a program in the All Programs listing.

Windows has a system utility called Disk Cleanup you need to run every month. Click on Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup. This will get rid of those files that you don't need. Every 4-6 months you need to run the disk defragmenter so keep your hard drive running smoothly (All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter). Once a year run a hard disk scan and fix any errors - Start, My Computer, right Click on C:, Properties, Tools Tab, Check Now, check Automatically fix errors.

After all that run your virus scanner and anti spyware program. That should complete your Fall maintenance! Happy Computing!

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