FireDaemon

Chapter 2: PC Maintenace

Computers, over time slow down. This is due to the installation of software, fragmented hard drive, temporary files, etc. With constant maintenance you can eliminate or decrease these slow downs.

One of the thing’s that slow down a computer is the accumulation of temporary files. Temporary files can be files that are left over after the installation of software, browser caches, etc. I recommend you clean out your temporary files at least once per week. Aside from slowing down your computer, they can also take massive amounts of hard disk space. So if you’ve noticed you’re running low, chances are you can recover a few MB to GB of space. I am not kidding. Once many years ago i noticed that my hard drive was low. I cleaned out my Temporary files and recovered 2 GB!!!

Windows has its own temporary files cleaner, but it isin’t very complete. I recommend you use a freeware software product called CCleaner. CCleaner can clean out your browser caches (from most browsers), as well as recent file lists for a variety of applications. It also has a registry function that repairs inconsistencies and errors in your windows registry.

Before continuing with the next part of this chapter, run the Cleaner and Registry modes of CCleaner.

Now that your hard drive has the useless clutter removed we can go onto the real bottleneck. Your hard drive.

Hard drive’s store data where there is free space and when you delete a file, that sector on the hard drive is marked as free. So after a period of time your hard drive has random places all over that are free and files can be spread all over the hard drive platter. What this means is that your file might actually be in pieces on your hard drive. It takes a few extra seconds to read your file when this happens and it puts stress on the hard drive read head and thus reduces the lifetime of your hard drive. The only way to combat this is to regularly defragment your hard drive. Defragging moves the data of your files into one continuous section. So your files will be read faster. To give you an example of how efficient defragging is. Many years ago, when i first learned about defragging i hadn’t defragged for several years. After i defragged, there was around a 60% increase in file read time. My operating system was running fast again.

Windows has its own defragmenter, but the problem with it is that it cannot be scheduled and its not very comprehensive. For this reason, i recommend you use MyDefrag. MyDefrag is the successor to JKDefrag and its a freeware disk defragmenter. What’s really good about it is that it can be scheduled (with windows scheduler) plus its defragmentation is a lot stronger than window’s built-in deframenter.

Depending on how often you use your computer, i suggest you defrag once per week to once per month at most.

Go to: Part 1 | Part 1.1 | Part 1.2 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

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