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

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

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

No known connection there I'm afraid. My family are still very much largely based in Germany and the US. My name is very incomplete without the 'von der' prefix (royalty, you know).

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.

I'm using Avira. I don't think it's quick to scan, but I'm happy to leave it to do it's thing once a week. I used to use AVG but they p1ssed me off with some stupid upgrade reminder.

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.

Done that, thanks.

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

I used to do this, although I have no clue what it's actually doing. I admit I'm not happy doing stuff I don't understand.

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.

Good to know. No more TweakBit for me then.

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

Isn't this what the Disk Cleanup thingy does?

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

No problem here. I have heaps of space! Used = 117GB. Free = 775GB.

 

[RoryA]

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.

Personally I don't believe you can ever make statements like that. Performance of security programs seems to vary month to month and depending on who is doing the testing. Nothing works for everything, which is why I also run things like Malwarebytes anti-exploit, and why I backup. Like I said, ESET is my preference but I do not believe it is possible to simply say one program is the best. In the last tests I saw it outperformed Kaspersky in every aspect but, again, that changes.

 

[RoryA]

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!

3 HDDs. Plus external drives and cloud for backup.

 

[Ombir]

I'm using Avira

Precaution is better than cure. I strongly advice you to install Kaspersky. It might be possible your PC is infected and avira isn't able to catch that.

although I have no clue what it's actually doing

Chkdsk is used to repair bad sectors. To understand this you've to go though the basics. Check this link Bad Sectors Explained: Why Hard Drives Get Bad Sectors and What You Can Do About It

Isn't this what the Disk Cleanup thingy does?

Yeah Disk clean up does the same thing.

I have heaps of space! Used = 117GB. Free = 775GB.

Its looks like that there is only partition on your hard drive and and you're storing personal data on same partition. This will certainly cause problem when next time you want to install fresh windows because you won't be able to format the drive. Divide your hard disk space into 2-3 partitions. One for system C drive and others for your personal data. By doing this you can safely format the C drive during fresh windows install without worrying about backup your personal data on portable drive. Also suggest you to install new antivirus after installing fresh windows.

Now if you're deciding to install windows in near future, suggest you to hard format your drive so that everything will be replaced by zeroes (00000) in hard disk sectors. By doing this hard disk behaves like a new one.

Hope that helps.

 

[mole999]

most will take a second plus drive if you had a 20 to 30GB drive SSD for the master drive and then had a 1Tb drive for docs etc, yoi can even keep a mirrored reinstall partition on the backup should you need to refersh, systems used to run at the slowest component, that may not be as true nowadays (i.e harddrives that share the CD/DVR channel would be slow in comparison. There is an art to getting a stable fast system

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

Lots of tips... So I will look into buying an extra HDD. I already have external. I confess I don't back-up to Cloud. At some point, when I have time, I will move files to the new HDD and then go down that route of hard format and fresh set-up.

 

[RoryA]

With the price of SSDs these days, it's well worth getting one if you haven't already for your OS drive.

 

[B___P]

Hi Jon,
One hard disk for OS and another for data.
An image of OS with important software and customization (email servers, add ins…) to restore in case of crash. It is a pain to reinstall all from scratch.

I use ccleaner to clean temp files, browser cache and check registry. Use a software to handle apps running at startup, there are many you do not need at all. To increase security use a sandbox when testing new software or surfing the web.
At the end you can tweak system a bit but there are strange things: the more RAM is installed the greater becomes the swap file…