Computer Repair Might Not be Necessary With Proper Maintenance

Most people do not realize that if you have a slow computer, repair can be avoided by constant maintenance. Maintenance does not have to take up all your time. Your PC simply needs a little bit of work once a month to remain a lean machine.

Defragmentation

A Windows PC, while it is functioning is going through a destructive process. Any move you make on a computer moves information around on your hard drive. Without getting into major technical details, your hard drive is always trying to grab things for you in an efficient manner to retrieve them as quickly as possible. Sometimes, however, when your hard drive puts a file back, it’s not near related files and it’s stored in a space on your hard disk that is too big for the file, which creates gaps. Eventually your hard drive performance is decreased by the fact that it takes longer to retrieve files. To prevent this defragment your computer monthly. On most Windows computers you can defragment by going to your hard drive’s properties, and clicking on tools.

Organize YOUR Files

If you defragment your computer regularly, your PC is doing its job by organizing its internal files. That means that you need to do your job by organizing your files. First of all, anything you delete is not deleted from your computer; it is just stored in your Recycling Bin. Every now and then you need to just delete the contents of your recycling bin.

There are also files that you have yet to delete but should be deleted. Go through your files and delete old stuff. If you’re a pack-rat and don’t want to get rid of that much stuff there is another strategy you can take. Organize your files in relevant folders within your My Documents folder.  Examples of this are Recipes, School Work, Financial Information, etc. If you have anything that you do not use frequently but want to save for the future, you can put it into a zip folder. To zip something download any zipping program. Zip files are compressed files, meaning they take up much less space and are good for storage.

Do Your Windows Updates Manually

Windows Updates are vital to your computer’s performance, but keeping them going automatically can slow down your computer performance. You should turn off updates and leave yourself a reminder to go to the Start menu, All Programs and then click Windows Update. Windows will automatically download and install updates to your software. The reason you want to do this is because there are a lot of errors that happen in your operating system. Over time these performance hindering errors are reported, fixes are made and that’s when the updates become available. Updates also include important security updates as well.

If you keep these three things in mind you will have a better computer and less need for computer repair in the future.