Everything Digital

My brother asked me to install programs and cleanup his laptop today. While I was waiting for the installation to complete, I figured I’d make us of my time by taking down notes on how I maintain my computer so that he won’t ask me again next time (such noble motives, right?). I already confessed I’m not an expert in this field but I just thought it would be nice to show you guys the simple steps that I do to ensure the best performance of your PC.  So far, in my three years of maintaining my PC and three other laptops, I never had any problems so I guess what I’ve been doing were right. Here’s my list:

1. Run Windows Defender every week. Press the Vista Orb (Start) and type Defender in the search field. The Windows Defender program will come out. Click it and the program will open. Click Scan. This will usually take two to four hours, depending on how often you perform this operation. Leave the computer running.

2. Run your registry cleaner at least once a week. I’ve been using CCleaner for the past two years and so far it’s working fine for me. If you don’t have CCleaner yet, download this free program from here. Install the program and run it. Click Analyze and after that click Run. This will clean the registry of your machine, making it perform faster. Another great program that can do this is EasyCleaner but I had one bad experience with it in the past so I uninstalled it from my machine.

3. Defrag your system at least once a week. This is my advise to my brother who is a light PC user. For others who do lots of stuff on their computers everyday, you might want to do this twice a week. Just try what works for you. I’m using Auslogics Disk Defrag on the four computers that I regularly maintain. Like CCleaner, it’s also free and it’s been doing wonders on my machines for two years now. To defrag means to neatly arrange the files inside your system so that when you need them, retrieval would be easier and faster.

So there you go with my three simple steps. I know there’s still a lot of tricks out there but let’s settle with these three for now. Tomorrow I’ll post my fourth tip. It’s a bit longer than these three so I’ll make a separate post about it. It’s guaranteed to free 10-20Gig of your hard drive space. Sounds unbelievable? Stay tuned!