Computer Maintenance Tips and Tricks to Backup, Scan and Clean

Computer maintenance is a part of everyone’s lives now, much like owning a car and getting it serviced, it just has to be done. Computers are the same, needing regular maintenance, as they get clogged up with truck loads of hidden files. I have published many articles about computer maintenance, however the most popular article is my computer maintenance checklist. This is the exact reason that the video below was made. I needed to show people what to do and what was involved in performing computer maintenance.

Most of the time the average computer user has no idea that they are actually messing up a computer just by using it. Do you surf the internet, read file attachments from your email, or simply write a Word document? Without even personally saving a file on your computer, there are hundreds of different files saved automatically each time you do anything on your computer. For example if you receive an email with a Word document attached to it and open it to read instead of saving it first, the document will be temporarily saved in the Windows Temp folder. Imagine after reading this Word document, you try to save it to your computer without looking where you are saving it. If you do not choose where to save this file it will be saved in a temporary folder. Eventually this temp folder becomes quite large in size without you even realizing.

In the video below I show you how I perform Computer maintenance on my computer.

Of course there are programs out there that can do all this for you, which I will mention in a later article.  Here are some steps I go through:

1. Move files I want to keep and store for later use.
2. Delete files I do not need.
3. Remove programs I do not need. (Ones I have installed)
4. Delete old emails.
5. Delete Temp files manually.
6. Delete junk files from the rubbish bin… Email programs have a junk and deleted folder to clean out also.
7. Perform disk Cleanup. (Getting what I missed)
8. Defrag with JKdefrag.

This is nuts. Al this can take forever to perform. No wonder most computer users neglect computer maintenance. 

What happens if you do not perform any computer maintenance?

Have you ever had a computer that just was so slow you wanted to smash it? Or maybe the computer is so full it will not do anything, not even open programs. Well this is what happens if you do not perform computer maintenance. You cannot just do this once either! You need to perform regular computer maintenance in order to keep your computer running smoothly. If you use your computer on a regular basis you will need to do computer maintenance task more often. When you become experienced you will be able to see the signs of your computer asking to be maintained.

Warning about computer maintenance:

The task of computer maintenance takes a while to do and therefore the video is rather long! This computer maintenance was performed on a computer that has really been neglected. If you perform maintenance regularly then it will not take this long.

I do not do all of this computer maintenance manually any longer as who has time for this? I now use PowerSuite Golden. It will do all of this for me, plus keep the registry clean as well and more! All I have to do is press on the scan button and this will do all the computer maintenance for you.