How to Keep Your PC Healthy
Just like you, your PC needs to be kept as healthy as possible. If you fail to give it the love and attention that it deserves then pretty soon you will have a computer that runs slow and sluggish. You may even find that files start to become corrupted, or you may even run out of space on your hard drive. In rare cases you may find that hardware stops working all together. Thankfully, keeping your PC healthy is not actually as difficult as you may think. Let us explain.
You have to remember that keeping your PC healthy is FAR better than actually having to deal with a problem. Just like medicine, prevention is so much better than a cure.
Update Your Software
We are willing to wager that every time you are asked to update a bit of software you click the button that says ‘maybe later’ to save time, right? Of course you do. Most people do. However, you have to realize that these updates were released for a reason. It is likely that the developer has discovered a bug in the system which really has to be dealt with. In some cases this bug could be a massive security hole and if you do not update the software you are opening yourself up to all sorts of problems (for example, your data may get stolen!) in other cases it may be because there is a small glitch in the software which causes it to run slowly. Both situations are something that you are going to want to deal with sooner as opposed to later.
It is not just the software that you installed yourself that you will need to update from time to time. Don’t forget, you are also going to want to update the drivers on your computer so that the hardware you have installed into the system runs perfectly.
Hard Drive Health
There are very few people out there who keep an eye on the amount of space they have left on their hard drive. They may pay attention when they install a piece of software from time to time, but apart from that they simply do not care. However, you really have to.
Hard Drives get cluttered with all sorts of ‘save files’, temporary files, corrupted files, and the like. As your hard drive starts to fill up you will find that your computer runs slower and slower. It therefore needs to be given a good clean from time to time to get it in perfect condition.
In addition to this you are also going to want to ‘defrag’ your hard drive. This is INCREDIBLY important and a lack of system defragmentation from time to time is the number one reason as to why computers run slow. This is because when you install a piece of software on your hard drive it will be slid into wherever is free. This often means that software will be installed in multiple locations at once. This means that every time it runs it has to find all of its pieces before it can even load up. You have a disk defragmentation option built directly into Windows.
Cleaning your Hardware
You can’t just pay attention to the ‘software’ side of your computer. You also have to think about its health physically. When you use your computer it is going to take in all sorts of dirt, dust, and grime. This is going to cause heat to accumulate in the computer and it could end up burning out your hardware. Thankfully, it is not too difficult to clean.
DO NOT touch the hardware directly if you are going to clean it yourself. Instead you need to get some canned compressed air and a cloth to wipe away the dirt (a microfiber cloth). It is suggested that you have your computer professionally cleaned if you do not know that you are doing. This is going to be much safer in the long run, trust me.
System Restore
There will be times where things go wrong with your computer. Perhaps you installed a dodgy piece of software, or you had a power outage which corrupted a file. Thankfully, Microsoft has built a special system into their system which will allow you to deal with this. They have a system called ‘System Restore’ which will allow you to restore your computer back to a point where it was working correctly. You should schedule your computer to make regular backups so you never have to worry too much about messing up your system.
Virus and Malware Scans
It is important that you scan your computer regularly for viruses and malware. No matter how hard you try to avoid them online, there will always be a few pieces of dodgy software which ‘slips through the net’. Thankfully there is plenty of software that will be able to help you out (do check reviews first to make sure you are going to be downloading something that works) once it is installed schedule a system scan once a week (don’t forget to update your scanner when it asks you!) and you can rest easy knowing that your computer is going to be in the best condition possible.
Apart from this, there is nothing else that you really need to do to keep your PC healthy. As long as you remember not to install things that you are unaware of the source (i.e. no installation of random programs online) then you should be fine for the most part. You will run into issues from time to time, but if you engage in proper healthcare for your computer they SHOULD be pretty easy to fix. If not, take your computer to a dedicated repair technician to make sure you don’t ‘mess’ it up yourself.
