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Monday, May 30, 2011

Eleven Tips to Keep your Com­puter Run­ning Smoothly





Here is the Tips:
1. Never, never, turn your com­puter off with the power switch until Win­dows has shut down. The one excep­tion to this rule is when your coumputer locks up and your hard drive is not
run­ning (hard drive light is not blink­ing). In this sit­u­a­tion, you can turn the power off with­out harm­ful effects to the hard drive. As cut­ting the power can also result in lost data or Win­dows files, you should only do this when you have to.
Fol­low­ing this rule will pre­vent per­ma­nent hard drive defects caused by the hard drive heads con­tact­ing the sur­face of the drive disc, and it will pre­vent a host of Win­dows prob­lems.
When­ever pos­si­ble, recover from crashes by press­ing the Ctrl + Alt + Delete keys at the same time. Press them again to reboot your computer.
2. I highly rec­om­mend that you pur­chase an UPS (unin­ter­rupt­ible power sup­ply) for your com­puter. This will keep your com­puter from crash­ing dur­ing power out­ages, and will pro­tect your com­puter from low and high volt­age occur­rences.
An UPS is far supe­rior to a surge pro­tec­tor and will save your com­puter from almost any type of power dis­as­ter. (See #1 above for what hap­pens when your com­puter crashes.)
3. Backup, backup, backup, any data you can­not afford to lose to at least two sep­a­rate phys­i­cal dri­ves. So backup data to exter­nal hard dri­ves, USB/thumb dri­ves, CD-RW’s etc.
The time to backup is when you cre­ate some­thing you can’t afford to lose. Don’t wait until tomorrow.
If you have mis­tak­enly deleted any files, doc­u­ments, pho­tos, or even crashed your hard drive, and you want to recover your data, please see our arti­cle,  “Best Data Recov­ery Pro­grams for Win­dows and Macs”.
4. Run Scan­disk and Defrag­ment at least once a month. This will keep your hard drive healthy and pre­vent crashes. Alter­na­tively, pur­chase a disk util­ity pro­gram and use it to keep your hard drive healthy. These pro­grams are part of Win­dows and can be found at Start/Computer then Right click on the drive you want to fix. Choose Scan­disk or Defrag­ment from the menu.
5. Never unplug periph­er­als from the com­puter when it is pow­ered up. Unplug­ging with the power on can short out the con­nec­tor socket or the moth­er­board. The only excep­tion to this rule is if you know a periph­eral is “hot plug­gable”. If you do not know what “hot plug­gable” means then ignore this exception.
6. Do keep at least 300 MBs of your C: drive free for Win­dows to use. If you use Win­dows XP, Vista, or WIn­dows 7 then you should have 400–600 MBs of free space on your C: drive.
If you do not have enough free space you will choke Win­dows and it will start dump­ing data to your hard drive (or des­ig­nated vir­tual drive), or it will just get really, really, slow (you will see your hard drive light on all the time and your com­puter will be locked up until the drive stops spin­ning).
Use the ADD/Delete tool in the Win­dows Control Panel to delete unneeded pro­grams from your drive. 
You can also use disk/utility clean­ing pro­grams and speed-up pro­grams to get rid of clut­ter on your hard drive and to speed up your sys­tem, we rec­om­mend using a PC speed up pro­gram like PC Cleaner.
7. Do not let a lot of pro­grams load up when you start your com­puter. They use valu­able mem­ory and Win­dows Resources (Win­dows inter­nal work­space).
All pro­grams in your Win­dows System Tray (in the lower left of your screen) are run­ning on your com­puter. Close them if you don’t need them or run them and con­fig­ure them not to load when you boot up.
Other pro­grams run­ning in the back­ground can be found by press­ing Ctrl + Alt + Delete at the same time.
8. Do use an antivirus checker reg­u­larly. Every­one should have an antivirus checker that boots up when their com­puter starts. The best type of pro­tec­tion is con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing from a ded­i­cated anti-virus pro­gram (for exam­ple Ad Aware ProPanda AntiVirus Pro, Bit­De­fender Total Secu­ritySpy­ware Doc­tor with AntiVirus). Also, make sure the anti-virus pro­gram is set to update auto­mat­i­cally. These pro­grams must reg­u­larly update their virus def­i­n­i­tions to pro­vide the best defense against new viruses and other malware..
9. If you have a high speed Inter­net con­nec­tion, you need a fire­wall pro­gram. A fire­wall pro­gram keeps those who want to hijack your com­puter from gain­ing access to your sys­tem. You really do not want some­one else run­ning your com­puter.
All cur­rent ver­sions of Win­dows come with a built in fire­wall pro­gram. You can access the windows firewall at Start/Control Panel/Internet Connections/Windows Fire­wall. This pro­gram should always be run­ning unless you choose to use a dif­fer­ent fire­wall pro­gram.
For addi­tional pro­tec­tion, you should con­sider Inter­net secu­rity soft­ware that has fire­wall pro­grams and other web secu­rity tools built-in e.g. PC Tools Inter­net Secu­rity, Panda AntiVirus Pro, and Bit­De­fender Total Secu­rity have fire­wall, antivirus, and other security programs  bun­dled together in one pack­age.
Case in point: When I am online 10 hours or more with my DSL con­nec­tion,my computer is usu­ally attacked by a hacker at least once.
Do not think you are safe from hack­ers!! Hack­ers use search pro­grams to seek out com­put­ers at ran­dom. Get a fire­wall pro­gram and use it.
10. Keep track of the soft­ware disks you receive with your com­puter and new periph­er­als. These disks con­tain valu­able soft­ware dri­vers and pro­grams for Win­dows and are needed when Win­dows must be reloaded. Keep these disks and your Win­dows soft­ware disks in a safe, dry, place — you never know when you will need them.
11. Make sure Win­dows Update is set to Auto­mat­i­cally Update your com­puter. Win­dows is fre­quently updated by Microsoft to pre­vent virus and mal­ware attacks, to improve Win­dows per­for­mance, and to pro­vide new fea­tures. Access Win­dows Update at Start/Control Panel/System/ Security/Windows Update.
Keep­ing these com­puter main­te­nance tips in mind will keep your PC in top shape and keep you from hav­ing an expen­sive repair bill.

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