Maintaining Your Computer

Andrew Brooke - Email: abrooke@primus.ca

Updated March 21, 2008

Introduction

If you're having problems with your computer, such as:

then you probably need to do some basic maintenance.

This document describes the steps you should take. It is mainly for novice users who are not very familiar or comfortable with cleaning up their computers.

I will be updating this document on a regular basis. Your feedback is welcome and appreciated - please email me!

IMPORTANT - PLEASE NOTE!!

Before You Begin: Determine the Number of Drives You Have

You may have more than one hard drive or your hard drive may be divided or "partitioned" into other drives. You need to maintain every hard drive on your system. Therefore, before you begin, you need to determine the number of hard drives/partitions you have:

  1. Double-click the My Computer icon on your desktop

  2. The My Computer window opens. This will display all of the drives on your system.

  3. Click View > Details.

    Make a note of the drives that have a Type of Local Disk. These are your hard drives. Your main hard drive is labeled C:. Your other drives will usually be labeled D:, E:, F: and so on.

Once you know the hard drives you have, you can now begin the maintenance.

Complete Maintenance and Cleanup Steps

  1. Perform a Disk Cleanup

    1. Exit any open programs.

    2. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup

    3. You'll be prompted to select a drive, usually C:. (If you have more than one hard drive, you can change the selected drive later.)

    4. Click OK.

    5. The Disk Cleanup utility will scan your system. This may take a few minutes, especially if you haven't run this utility in a while.

    6. After the scan has completed, a Disk Cleanup appears. There is a Files to Delete box with a list of items that you can check: make sure everything is checked except Compress old files. You'll need to scroll up and down to see the complete list.

    7. Click OK.

    8. You'll be asked if your sure you want to perform these actions - click Yes.

    9. The Disk Cleanup utility will clean up your files. This may take a few minutes.

  2. Delete Your Internet Explorer Files

    3. This is an optional step. Internet Explorer saves or "caches" files to speed up web browsing. If you're having problems with Internet Explorer, or you just want to clean out these old files, follow these steps. (Note that these steps are for Internet Explorer 6 - they are slightly different for Internet Explorer 7.)

    1. In Internet Explorer, click Tools > Internet Options.

    2. In the Temporary Internet Files section, click Delete Cookies, then click OK. Note that this will remove any IDs or other information that you entered on a website, so you'll have to reenter these IDs.

    3. Again, in the Temporary Internet Files section, click Delete Files.

    4. A Delete Files dialog box appears. Check Delete all offline content, then click OK.

  3. Delete Your Temporary Files

    4. Although the Disk Cleanup utility will get rid of many of your unneeded (or temporary) files, you still may have many left over in other areas. These files are created by Windows and are not permanently needed.

    To delete your temporary files:

    1. Exit any open programs.

    2. Press the F3 key.

    3. The Search Results screen opens.

    4. In the All or part of the file name field (in the upper left corner), enter *.TMP.

    5. In the Look in field, select Local Hard Drive(s) from the drop-down list.

    6. Click the Search button.

    7. Any files that end in ".tmp" will be displayed in the window. This could be a very long list! All of these files are temporary (tmp) files. You can safely delete them all, but you may not be able to delete ones that have today's date.

      To delete these files:

    8. Click the Date Modified column heading until the files are sorted by newest to oldest.

    9. In the Name column, single-click the name of the first file that has a Date Modified that is before today's date. After clicking the name, it will be highlighted.

    10. While holding down the Shift key, press and hold the Ctrl key and the End key. This will highlight all of the files below the one that you selected.

    11. Press the Delete key, then click Yes to delete these files.

  4. Delete the files in your TEMP folder

    5. At this point, you still may have other temporary files on your system in a folder called TEMP. To find and delete these files:

    1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Windows Explorer.

    2. On the left pane, click My Computer, then your C: drive, then your Windows folder. This is usually C:\Windows\ but can also be C:\WinNT

    3. Under you Windows folder, there should be a TEMP folder. Click this folder.

    4. Click the Date Modified column to sort the files by their date. Delete all the files that are older than today. Again, you can use Shift-Ctrl-End to highlight a block of files, then press the Delete key to delete them.

    5. If there's more than one user account on this system, you'll need to repeat this procedure for each one. Every user also has a TEMP folder located in: C:\Documents and Settings\[Name]\Local Settings\Temp. However, you can only see this folder if you have enabled hidden files to be shown. And if you don't know how to do that, then you should not be doing this step anyway!

  5. Delete Unneeded Personal Files

    1. Using Windows Explorer, thoroughly review all of the documents in your My Documents folder and its various subfolders. Delete anything you don't need, including documents, photos, audio and video files, and so on.

    2. Go through all of your emails and delete any you don't need.

  6. Run Scandisk (for Windows 95 and 98 only)

    7. Note: This step does not apply to Windows XP. This is because the scandisk function was removed and now runs in the background.

    1. Click Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools> Scandisk.

    2. Select to automatically fix errors.

  7. Check the Available Space

    1. Double-click the My Computer icon on your desktop

    2. Right-click your hard drive and select Properties.

    3. A properties dialog box for your hard drive will open. You'll see a pie chart and also numbers indicating how much used and free space you have. Make sure you have at least 10% free disk space - ideally, it should be 20%.

  8. Empty your Recycle Bin

  9. Run Windows Update

    10. Run Windows update to ensure you have the latest security fixes and updates. Install at least the critical updates.

  10. Defragment Your Hard Drive

    11. In the normal course of using Windows, your file will become spread out. You need to defragment these files to put them back closer to each other.

    1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter

      Click the hard drive listed under the Volume column to highlight it (if it is not already selected.)

    2. Click the Defragment button.

    3. The hard drive will defragment. This may take several minutes or even hours, depending on the last time you defragmented this drive.

  11. Repeat this Procedure

    12. Repeat this entire procedure for any other hard drives you have.

Tip: Create a Utility folder on your desktop add Disk Cleanup, Disk Defragmenter and any other cleanup programs or utilities you use.

General Recommendations

In addition to the regular maintenance that you should do, there are other general steps, you should take and guidelines you should follow:

  1. Remove Unneeded Programs

    2. If you have programs on your computer that you don't use, you should remove them.

    1. Click Start > Control Panel, then double-click Add/Remove Programs

    2. Uninstall any programs you are absolutely certain that you don't use. If you're not sure, do not remove it!

    3. Even after uninstalling, you may need to manually delete the subfolder under the C:\Program Files\ folder that the program was installed in.

  2. Clean Up Your Startup Programs

    3. You may have many programs automatically loading in your Startup folder that you don't really need. To check for this and remove these programs:

    1. Click Start > All Programs > Startup.

    2. Examine what's in your Startup folder. If you're sure you don't need any of these programs automatically starting up, right-click the item in this folder and select Delete.

  3. Avoid Excess Open Programs

    4. Don't have too many programs open at once. I would recommend no more than 4 or 5.

  4. Install and Use an Internet Security Package

    5. An Internet Security package or "suite" protects you from all the potential hazards from the Internet, or when receiving files from others. It includes a software firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, and an anti-spyware application combined together in one package. It Although you can buy all these things separately, it's usually simpler and cheaper to purchase them as one package, and it also ensures they're won't be any conflicts between the various programs.

    I recommend Kaspersky Internet Security. It's not as well known as some of the others (listed below), but in my opinion, is not only the best, but can be the cheapest! It's beats all of the other suites in terms of effectiveness, memory required, and frequency of updates. You can buy it in stores for about $60-$70, but I would avoid that and simply purchase a legal license from eBay. You download and install the software yourself, then using the product key sent to you by the eBay vendor, you will have a legal, licensed copy for one year for one computer for only about $10-$12! You don't get the fancy packaging and documentation, but you don't really need the package, and the user guide is available on the Kaspersky website.

    Here are some of the other, more common programs, in alphabetical order:

    All of these are usually available on eBay for much less than what you would pay in a store, but ensure you are buying the most current version. You can save even more if you download the software yourself, then just buy the product key, which "unlocks" the software that you have downloaded.

    Another solution which doesn't cost anything is to install the following free programs:

    Also ensure that Windows Firewall is turned on: see the instructions.

    Important: Ensure your package up to date: there is an annual subscription fee, but it's usually cheaper to buy the latest version when it's on sale or from eBay.

  5. Back up Your Data Files!

    6. I cannot stress this enough. A hard drive is a rapidly moving part. All moving parts have one thing in common - they will eventually fail. Locate and back up all of your documents, email data and address book, pictures and so on, onto a CD, memory key or some other object. Back up every day if possible - if not, once a week. I have seen many hard drives fail over the years. If your hard drive begins making strange noises, it could indicate that it's failing.

    See Backing Up Your Data for details.

  6. Advanced Tweaks

    7. If you're an advanced user, see my advanced Windows XP tweaks.