Computer Maintenance Tips

 

Most of us depend on our computers heavily to help complete daily business and personal chores. In fact most of us depend on our computers in much the same way we depend on our cars. Because they are important to us, we must pay close attention to computer maintenance to ensure that same reliability that we demand from our cars. In today’s fast paced world, we can ill afford to have computer downtime or for that matter a sick computer that doesn’t run very well.

 

Five steps to keeping you computer humming!

 

1)      Keep your Virus protection current

2)      Run a complete Virus Scan weekly, you can schedule it for Friday at midnight if you like!

3)      Clean Up Your Hard Drive (Remove unneeded files)

4)      Defragment your hard drive every couple of months

5)    If you have added new software packages or a new printer, consider going to 1 Gig Meg of Ram to speed things up! If your virus checker is not finding problems and yet your computer still runs slow, this is a very good indication that you may need a memory upgrade.

Maintenance Diagnostic Tool

It doesn’t necessarily cost you a lot of money to keep you computer running well and you have a very good diagnostic tool to help you determine the health of your computer. The Windows Task Manager provides good and real-time insight into your computers’ operation.

 

You get to the task manager by holding down the ctrl, alt and delete keys simultaneously. The Display shown below is the Windows Task Manager.

 

 

The task manager has (5) tabs, Application, Process, Performance, Networking, Users. Interpreted properly, the information behind these tabs gives the user much insight into the health of the computer. They also provide information on programs running on you computer that you don’t necessarily know about.  The task manager as shown below is available on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The Application, Process and Performance tabs tell what’s running on your computer and how much memory and CPU time is being expended.
 

 

Now, lets’ take a look at the performance tab. Click on the performance tab as you read this article.

The top panel shows CPU utilization, that is, how hard is the computer working. This computer has about 25 windows open and it has 512 Meg of RAM. It is not working very hard. If you look at this screen and the line across the top panel is very high and you don’t have very many windows open, it’s an indication that there is a problem.

 

 

You can check into this a little further by viewing the processes tab. This tab shows that there are 61 processes (programs) running and the CPU is averaging around 15% utilization, this is good. The same number of processes and a utilization of let say %70 percent would indicate a problem.

Actual utilization varies with the kind of programs running and the amount of memory available on your computer.  You are also able to tell from the CPU column which process is using the most CPU (computer running time). Go on the web to Google (www.google.com) to determine if this process is a valid activity or if it is a virus. Just insert the name into the Google search box and click go. Google will return links that define the function of specific processes. Using the task manager, you have the ability to kill these tasks temporarily. Removing them permanently may require uninstalling the offending program or running a virus scan. Sometimes these programs can only be removed manually. That is, find out where the program lives on the computer and delete it.
 

 

Additionally, you can click on the link below and and hear a short tutorial on additional techniques to help diagnose your computers’ problems and keep it “humming.” www.hiltronics.com/Tutorial_Introduction.html

 

 

Happy Computing!