Technology Associates Group

One of the most important actions you can take with you PC is to perform some type of monthly maintenance. If you’ve been following the “How to Crash Your PC” series, you already know some of the things you shouldn’t be doing. Now let’s talk about some that you should.

First, everything on this page should be done at least once a month. However, it may be necessary to perform these steps more often if you have problems with your PC often. Power outages should be mitigated through the use of a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) as not shutting down your PC correctly is a major cause of filesystem corruption.

Filesystem Check
Key to any Operating System (OS) is the underlying filesystem. A filesystem is the structure of how files are arranged in the media (hard disk, flash drive, CD, even floppy!). If the filesystem becomes corrupted the OS may not know where to retrieve files from or files may be destroyed.

Every OS has a way to check the filesystem. I’m concentrating on Windows because the vast majority of American businesses use this as their desktop OS. If you’re using XP, you’ll need to login as an Administrator (because you’re not using that account for daily activities, are you?). Vista users should be prompted to enter the Administrator password when necessary. Other than that, the procedure is the same.

Open “My Computer.” Most computers will have one hard drive usually labeled as “C:”. Right-click on the C: drive and choose “Properties”. Select the “Tools” tab and click the “Check Now” button. If you’re using Vista, the OS will prompt you for the Administrator password. On the “Check Local Disk Options” dialog, make sure “Automatically fix file system errors” is checked. Do not check “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” unless you suspect you have a hard drive problem and are willing to wait for the OS to scan every bit of the media – which can take a very long time. Windows will tell you that it can not check the drive at the current time and ask you if it may schedule the check the next time you start the computer. Obviously, you want to say yes. Then reboot the computer. Windows will check the drive on startup, usually giving you the option to abort the check by pressing a key – don’t.

The results of the check may scroll by quickly and they won’t mean a whole lot to most people. If you really want to see what Windows found, you can check in the Event Viewer. We get to the Event Viewer by clicking “My Computer” then “Control Panel” then “Administrative Tools” and finally “Event Viewer.” Once again, you will need to login as an Administrator under XP. Vista will not prompt you this time. Inside the Event Viewer, Choose “Application” (under Vista, choose “Windows Logs” first). We’re looking for the topmost entry with a source of “Winlogon” for XP, and “Wininit” for Vista. The contents of this entry is really outside the scope of this article and I couldn’t find a good resource to explain them, so maybe I’ll write a future article on them.

Clean Temporary Files

Thankfully, Windows has made it easier to cleanup unnecessary files on your drives. Under Windows XP and Vista the process is very similar. From “Start” choose “Accessories,” then “System Tools,” and “Disk Cleanup.” As usual, under XP, you need to run as an Administrator. Under Vista, you will be asked whether you want to clean up “My files only” or “Files from all users on this computer.” If you choose the latter, you’ll be prompted to enter the Administrator’s password. We’re only going to be concerned with the primary drive, choose “C:” from the drop down list if it is not already selected and click “OK.” The program will run for a minute or so, scanning for files that can safely be removed. Everything presented in the next list is safe to select, although “Compress Old Files” will cause those files to be accessed more slowly, which may cause performance issues, so I don’t recommend it. Click “OK” and reclaim some disk space.

Although Disk Cleanup does a fair job of cleaning up unnecessary files, I have found some files to be left behind. If you aren’t scared of looking into the internals of Windows, open “My Computer” and type “%TEMP%”, without the quotes, in the address bar, then press enter. You will be taken to your user account temporary files. Make sure you have no programs open when you delete these. Vista will give you the option to skip undeleteable files, whereas XP will fail the command. If it does, select the others and continue deleting.

Defragment

This is probably the easiest step of the exercise. Disk Defragmenter can be found under “Accessories”, “System Tools.” And you’re probably familiar with the fact that you need to run this as an Administrator or be prompted for a password. Once you’re in the application all you need to do is press “Defragment now” on Vista, or simply “Defragment” on XP. Vista will continue to defragment even if you close the application (unless you restart), whereas XP will not. Vista also gains the ability to schedule defragmentation, but I find most PCs are not on when it wants to run, and you shouldn’t defragment while you’re working.

I suggest that if this is your first time running the Disk Defragmenter, that you prepare to let it run all night. I also recommend not working while it is running as other applications you run will suffer a performance penalty and defragmentation will not be as complete as it could be. Successive runs should not take as long and PC performance should increase (though not necessarily enough to see). Either way, this is an important step in the health of your PC.

Conclusion

PC Maintenance is much much more than starting a few programs and pressing a few buttons. Its an important part of maintaining the value of your equipment purchase. If you are a home user, this guide will get you by well enough, but if you are a business user, make sure you seek the advice and assitance of a competant technology company in your area.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.