Blade Watch

I had to fix a family friends’ the other day, and they asked for some top tips to help keep their pc healthy. I tend to rebuild my pc once a year just out of habit, but this is rather a drastic step, so let’s go over a few painless ones. They can be debated all day long and at this point I will issue the standard always have a backup, but nonetheless, I find they help:

1. Run a chkdsk, the easiest way to do this, is click, start, run, cmd then type chkdsk c: /f if it says drive is in use, press the y key and reboot the computer.  This will run a blue screen, which then checks your disk is ok, you will see it do three passes as it counts up to 100%. It will boot into windows once complete.
2. Reduce the size of your profile (your user settings), one simple way is to do the following:
   1. Move files off the desktop, to say c:\martins documents, then create a short cut – this reduces the icons and files it has to load before windows gets going, and if you’re doing a lot, it can cause the pc to grind to a halt whilst it re-loads everything on your desktop
   2. Run the disk clean up utility under start, programs accesssories, system tools – this can clear down temporary files, they’re typically stored in c:\documents and settings\your username\local settings\temp
3. Now run a defrag, right click c drive in my computer, click properties then tools. This can take some time and organizes the disk more effectively.
4. Reduce the number of applications that are running at start up, you can either go start, programs, start up or there are a few other ways – regedit software, microsoft, windows, run once, or run msconfig32. Windows Defender will do this for you and is easier to do.
5. Check your anti virus software, it might be scanning everything twice on read and write, also I sometimes exclude the pagefile.
6. Run task manager and see if there is anything running that you don’t recognize, I got caught out the other day, installing Vista on a Dell laptop which was rather slow, I then discovered that it was Windows update running in the background under a different name.

Hopefully I haven’t missed anything and that helps.

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