With a lot of us spending most of the winter inside playing on our computers, hoping for spring to come soon, our PCs could really use a good cleaning to help them run smoothly again. The most common problem is running slow. There are a number of factors that contribute to the overall speed of your machine, but following these steps can go a long way in making sure that your PC is running smoothly again.
Run Windows Update Weekly
Why is it important to run Windows Updates? Windows has security “holes” and “bugs” and for that reason, it’s important to make sure that you’ve installed the latest updates. At a minimum, you need to install the High Priority updates – I cannot stress this enough. If Windows Update tells you that you should install a High Priority update – install it! After you have applied any update, go back to Windows Update to make sure that there is not another patch that you need to download. I know it may sound silly; but often, there are patches for patches, so keep running Windows Update until it tells you that you have no more High Priority updates. I recommend that you turn on “Automatic Updates” – this way, you’re always up-to-date.
Install Antivirus Software & Keep it Updated
An out-of-date antivirus program does you no good. Open up your antivirus program and check to see if it is up-to-date: what is the last date you ran a scan on your hard drive? Most antivirus programs run a scan at night when your computer is not being used, but if you turn your computer off when not in use or have it set to go to sleep, it never gets the chance to run a full scan. Part of your Spring Cleaning should be to do a full scan on your hard drive and remove any threats it finds.
Back It Up!
After all this work keeping everything up-to-date and secure, you will also need to think about keeping your files safe. By this, I mean the pictures, documents, music files and other data you have saved. All this is stored on your hard drive and a hard drive could possibly fail. Consider another back-up to an external hard drive.
What Should I Back Up?
Anything you cannot live without. Your documents you worked so hard on, pictures you cannot replace. If the file is important, then make sure you have a back-up copy. If you only have one copy, then it is not backed up.
If you follow these steps, your PC will run better. If you are having problems that are over your head, have a professional take a look at it. They deal with these problems on a daily basis.
Happy Spring Cleaning!
David Mayers, DJ Mayers Computer Repair
