While I am not a Tech Geek by any means. Several people ( no names used) have ask me about Keeping their PC, clean and running in top notch condition. That being the case, what knowledge I have about the subject I will gladly share. We'll start with step one.
For cleaning my personal PC. I use Ccleaner by Pierform, it's a free download and easy enough to find. I have this on all five of my PC's, two desktops and three laptops. On to step two.
Find and run the (disk cleanup utility) built into windows. Delete anything it finds. on to step three.
I have tried and use several different defrag tools. Windows has one built in (useless as it is) So I use Auslogic (free) disk defrag. It's fast, can be set to run when your not at your PC, and you can run it manually once a week or so to optimize file placement and help speed up your (seek time)
(A note to the win7 and vista users) If you have Quick launch icons or other programs attached to, or by the start menu. These are using memory all the time, if you have a low memory system you might want to consider closing them or unpin from the task bar, and then close them.
Last but not least on the clean up and free up list, Glary Utilities, (Also a free download) run the one step cleanup module at the start. Then click on Modules tab, and then start up, You should get a list of all the things your computer loads up on the boot. Anything that has red in it, you might want to disable. Read them carefully before you turn them off.
The reason your PC, ran so great when it was new, was that it was clean and the files were defragmented. The steps will help restore it to that condition. More tips and tricks to follow. Have a great day and happy computing.
Comments
A few other suggestions
CCleaner is probably one of the few Registry cleaners that I'd dare use. Just make sure you back up your registry before you use it (CCleaner will prompt you to do this)
Besides those tips above I'd like to add a few suggestions.
Run a quick or partial virus and spyware scan at least once a week. You should do a full scan at least once a month.
On clearing up disk space you can do the following things:
Also
Find and run Error Checking utility which will check the integrity of files on your drive.
If you have an old computer your computer's components are obviously going to show some wear. The insides of your hard drive are basically spinning platters which are written to with a little needle. Over time those platters get worn out and it reduces the speed of the drive. They can last for years if taken care of properly, but sometimes it may be necessary to replace your hard drive if it becomes too worn.'
If you still want more speed and you've performed the above steps there are a number of routes you can take:
Have a delightfully devious day,
And upon achieving a clean system...
Put measures in place to KEEP it that way.
I personally use and recommend a hardware firewall combined with a RECENT software firewall (Win7's Windows Firewall is adequate, but older Windows versions were not.)
I also use and recommend Avira Free AV as your AV. It's spammy as heck, but it IS the best...
Spybot S&D and SpywareBlaster for anti-malware double-team.
and an Adblock for your browser of choice with up-to-date subscriptions.
I also recommend installing, if your hardware firewall allows it, and using a subscriptions-based hosts blocker. If not, there's a program I've heard of that does it in software, but I don't recall it's name since I run a linux hardware firewall with the feature I've described loaded.
Schedule defragging and temp file wipes and updates for when you won't be using your computer and, if you can, just always leave your computer running.
Seriously. Prevention is the REAL cure. I NEVER get infections. Ever. And yes, I do occasionally visit some fairly risky sites.
Abigail Drew.
Yes, yes
All good suggestions. I personally run a dual boot of Win7 and Linux Mint 14. I rarely boot into Windows these days, but Linux does have a number of excellent solutions for Firewalls and defrag as well as other maintenance and security related utilities.
If you have a router you do in a sense already have a hardware firewall since the router performs NAT and many home routers perform other firewall functions as well. Some folks claim that if you do have a router or hardware firewall it's not necessary to have a software firewall, but I've always found that where the security of your network is concerned it's never bad to have redundancies.
One thing I forgot to mention. Sandbox your browser and email client with sandboxie or a similar application. You won't regret it, Sandboxie basically runs your browser (or just about any software you chose) within a contained environment so even if you do accidentally download malware from the interwebs the virus won't infect your system.
Have a delightfully devious day,
About redundancies.
It's actually not a true redundancy since they're guarding different things and in different ways. Same thing with the AV and the TWO different anti-malwares that I recommend. There are clueless idjits who like to pretend you should only need one single monolithic anti-everything suite. Which is just plain stupid. Once a program tries to do everything it is no longer effective at any of them.
Avira's AV is great - the other programs in their anti-everything suite suck. Spybot doesn't even pretend to do anything except anti-spy. And SpywareBlaster targets a different breed of malware than Spybot.
I used to run a dual boot with a custom Gentoo build, but find that too many things I do still pretty much require Windows, so I've let the Gentoo build lapse horridly. You don't need as heavily militant of protection for Linux, since it sandboxes everything by default behavior. A good hardware and software firewall and away you go. Just make sure your firewalls are heterogenous and not homogenous. If they're homogenous they might be worse than redundant but actually interfere with each other causing some very severe issues. At best it'll be merely redundant.
EDIT: And of course the hosts blocking is still essential...
Abigail Drew.
Dual boots
I'm in complete agreement in all accounts. I guess if you want to get technical it isn't truly speaking redundant, but I meant redundant in the sense that you have multiple avenues of protection and of course host blocking is always a good idea. ;)
The main thing that was holding me back from a complete switch over was no netflix support for linux, but a recent unofficial solution has made that pretty well a worry of the past. These days my primary OS is Linux. I managed to get both Photoshop CS2 and my my word processor working under linux with WINE so I'm pretty well covered as far as proprietary applications go. I'm kind of an open source junkie and most of the apps I use already had Linux versions.
I love linux for the reasons you mention and for many more, but really my advise was more geared toward Windows users.
Have a delightfully devious day,