You’ve got a PC! Great… now what?

One of the biggest problems I encountered in my former life as an IT professional was computer maintenance.  Most home computer users buy a new PC and assume that as long as they don’t get any viruses, they’ve done all they need to do in order to keep it running smoothly.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.  Since a majority of the world runs on PCs, a majority of people writing programs to harm computers focus their efforts on PCs and PC software.

Microsoft Windows is the single most targeted PC application out there; hackers have been designing methods of general annoyance for Windows users since the days of Windows 3.11.  As such, it is the responsibility of every PC owner to consistently do routine maintenance on their own computer in order to keep it running as smoothly as possible.

Last week, Lifehacker ran a post with five of the most effective tools for maintaining your own PC.  Some of these tools are overlapping, some of them are a little more advanced, but all five tools are extremely effective at keeping your computer clean and running as smoothly as possible.  Personally, I usually recommend running system checks like the ones outlined in the Lifehacker article at least every two weeks, depending on the amount of time you spend on your PC.  If you are on the computer at least an hour a day, every two weeks is a minimum.  For less than an hour a day on average, you can probably get away with system scans every month.  And many of these tools can be customized to simply run on a schedule; for example, Spybot S&D has a feature that will allow you to pre-program a scan to run when you first boot up your PC once a week, before you even get into Windows.

In the future, we here at technewsmadesimple.com will be running a series on computer maintenance as a follow-up to the “How to build a computer” posts by Kurt and I earlier this year.