Computer maintenance is a serious thing to do if you want to expand the life on your machine and make sure everything runs perfectly. There are a lot of things to do to make sure your PC is always working at its maximum performance. Computer maintenance is also very important for making your PC last longer.
Computer maintenance is very easy and all it takes is a couple of minutes of your time on weekly or monthly bases to make sure that your PC runs smoothly or make recovery if problem occurs.
In this article, we will go through some of the steps for properly maintaining your PC and find out how to make sure our machine is healthy.
- Dust Cleaning
Computers are considered to be the best dust collectors. If you open your PC you will be amazed how much dust it gathers on the inside part. This will lead to many different problems. For example, dusty computers will trap heat which reduces the PC performance and lifespan, allergy hazards, and hardware malfunction.
All you need to do is open the case, take it outside and blow it with compressed air. You should be extra cautious if you use household cleaners, just because you can easily damage circuit boards. For most computers, cleaning once or twice a year is ideal.
There are a few more things to do in order to get rid of all dust. Dust is often collecting inside the CPU and video card heatsinks, so you have to disassemble or blow it with compressed air if you can in order to get rid of the dust.
- Cabling
It is everyone’s nightmare. Most of our computers are a mess behind the case, where many different cables crisscross one another that can easily be damaged. This will not boost your PC performance or extend the lifespan of your PC but it will improve your peace of mind and avoid cable damaging which can cause circuits and damage some of the hardware.
- Antivirus and Spyware scans
You must install some sort of virus protection on your PC just to protect yourself from all the internet threats we see nowadays. It is your first line of defense, so you must make sure your antivirus software is always updated and running in the background. Some antivirus software offers all kinds of protection such as spyware and adware which provides an extra layer of security. Running daily scans is essential for expanding the lifespan of your PC and avoids getting it infected.
- Clean up your operating system
Most of us put or install all kinds of things on our computer and forget to remove it if we don’t use it. This means your computer is getting clogged up slowing your PC performance. In order to keep your operating system fresh and all unused data erased, you can use cleaning software like Disc Cleanup or CCleaner. This will free up space from your storage as well as minimize the use of RAM memory from background running ups which means that your PC performance will be improved.
- Update
Just like every top NBA team needs to update its rooster every Summer to be appealing to experts predictions, your computer also needs to be frequently refreshed. It is very important that you update everything constantly. From OS updates to driver updates, make sure all things are the latest version in order to avoid hardware or software issues. The best way is to set all updates to automatic, so you don’t have to worry about checking for an update.
- Defragment
Once you erased all kinds of things from your PC, there are many pieces of data spread across your hard drive leaving occupied free space between them which means it is time to defragment. Defragment will gather all pieces that are spread across the hard drive and puts them back together. This is essential for maintaining a healthy PC and you can also set it for automatic defragments so you don’t have to worry about defragmenting it.
These are some of the ways to do proper maintenance on your PC. All of the mentioned steps above are very easy and you can do them at home, so make sure to invest some time in PC maintenance just so you are more likely to improve your PC performance and increase its lifespan.
