How do you keep your machine happy?

[Jon von der Heyden]

Hello Board

There are a lot of forums and other topics on the web, but I would like to hear personal recommendations and experiences please.

I have always owned cheap laptops over the years. They have served me well. At the moment I have some or other Lenovo AMD A6 Win8 64bit. It works. Previously I owner an Asus i3.

I'm also very particular about the way I handle my laptop and I try and keep it clean. I do the defrag thing and I free up diskspace regularly. I was using TweakBit FixMyPC that ran some scan daily and reported back with problems in the registry. Click 'OK' and it shows some progress bar and then reports back that everything is fine. I haven't bothered to renew the subscription though, because I'm just not convinced it is necessary.

Are there maintenance tasks that I ought to be doing? Are there any maintenance programs I really ought to install?

Cheers
Jon

 

[mole999]

I get the impression (though may be wrong) that you are quite techy far beyond the reaches of Excel, and you possibly have a greater need for such high spec?

You mean like the fact that I'm stripping the radiator out of my motorbike at the moment for cleaning, and later I have to remove a wheel and do a vulcanised puncture repair

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

You mean like the fact that I'm stripping the radiator out of my motorbike at the moment for cleaning, and later I have to remove a wheel and do a vulcanised puncture repair

Yes that's exactly what I mean.

 

[Kyle123]

I do nothing as well

Though on my Windows machine, I do a completely clean install about every 6 months or so

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

Interesting that a couple of you don't see any upside doing anything.

I do a completely clean install about every 6 months or so

Why? What happens to all your docs? Sounds like a big chore.

 

[Kyle123]

Stick em on the network drive or move them to a usb drive if required.

Not really, takes maybe a day and most of it is checking for windows updates so I just leave it to it. I then have a core set of applications I install and only install others as required. Keeps the amount of crap I've installed in the past from gunking things up

 

[RoryA]

I do the same as Kyle. I have three drives in my computer so I keep all my files off the OS drive and don't need to worry about them when I reinstall.

 

[Ombir]

Hi Hayden,

Your Surname reminds me of Great Australian Opener batsmen Matthew Hayden :wink: .

Well, there are number of things which you can do to keep your machine Happy. Few are mentioned below:

1. Install a good antivirus. Most antivirus software make your system slow by doing irrelevant scanning all the time. I would suggest Kaspersky Internet Security for Personal use. I've tested many and its the best.

2. Remove unwanted programs from Startup. You can check it from Task Manager if you're running Windows10 or from msconfig run command for Windows 7. Startup programs often make your system slow.

3. Run chkdsk /r command every month to check and repair corrupt hard disk sectors. Few bad sectors can make your system very slow.

4. Refrain yourself from running registry repairing softwares or cleaners. Sometimes they remove registry entries which are used by system which also make system slow. You can do most of tasks manually without using these softwares.

5. Cleaning the Temp/Prefetch directory sometimes can help.

6. For system to work properly, ensure that there is enough free space in C drive (greater than 20-25Gb)

 

[RoryA]

1. Install a good antivirus. Most antivirus software make your system slow by doing irrelevant scanning all the time. I would suggest Kaspersky Internet Security for Personal use. I've tested many and its the best.

In your opinion, obviously. Personally I prefer ESET but again, that is my opinion.

 

[Ombir]

In your opinion, obviously. Personally I prefer ESET but again, that is my opinion.

May be you're saying this because you've not encountered with crypters yet. ESET Nod32 can be bypassed and is not good against zero day vulnerabilities. Performance wise it can be slightly better but Protection of Kaspersky against new threats is much better.

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

I do the same as Kyle. I have three drives in my computer so I keep all my files off the OS drive and don't need to worry about them when I reinstall.

Does this mean that you have partitions, or 3 HDD's?

I must say I like the sounds of this! I would feel much better for having an occasional master reset!