Computer Maintenance - The Daily Tasks Everyone Should Do

PCs or personal computers have become a very integral part of lives. We cannot imagine our lives without the computer or the Internet in our homes. As we all very well know an average life of a computer in our homes is around two to three years. However, the life of a computer mostly depends on how we maintain them and how we use them.

One of the best ways to keep our computer healthy is to defrag the hard drive, especially the partition which accommodates the operating system. Defragmenting and Disk Scanning the hard drive is a very good practice and needs to be done on a regular basis. What this does is that it collects all the fragmented and files and arranges them close together. This lessens the load on the operating system when it accesses the files. However, this practice does not reduce the load from the hard disk.

If you are an Internet user, there will be a lot of files which get stored in your computer when you access the Internet. You will not need these files once you close the websites unless you have stored the passwords in your cookies. The files which are stored on your computer are called as the temporary Internet files and the cookies. The temporary Internet files are also called as the cache. Therefore, you will need to make sure that you clear the cache the cookies regularly.

Your computer could have a lot of startup programs, these programs will slow down the booting of your computer. Therefore, you will need to check and find out if there are any programs which unnecessarily run during the startups. If you are unaware about how to remove the startup programs, you could find some good information on the Internet to guide you with few simple steps to remove the startup programs.

Your computer will have a lot of programs or applications which are not used by you and also the ones which are absolutely not required. You could uninstall these programs from the control panel. The option to remove the unwanted programs from the computer in the control panel is Add / Remove Programs icon. It is from this place where you can easily remove the unwanted programs which are installed on your computer. You computer will surely operate faster after this.

There will be a lot of files left on your computer even after uninstalling the unnecessary programs. These files could have been normally the files which were created by those programs. Since the software does not exist, these files cannot be run and hence they become the orphan files. If you have an alternative program to run these files, you could use the 'open with' option and assign them to be used by these programs in the future.

There are some applications like the Cleansweep which will automatically detect the unwanted files and prompt you to delete them. It is better to use these kinds of programs rather than trying to find the necessary files by yourself and deleting them. If you are not very sure about the files which are to be deleted, there are chances that you might end up deleting the files which might damage your operating system itself.

However, it would be a very good idea to take backups of the important files before running any deleting software on your computer.You might want to consider the inputs mentioned in this article to ensure longevity and good performance of your computer.