After several days of talking and educating people local about Computer Viruses I have realized it is a difficult topic for some to still understand. Computers are no different than yourself or your car. Many out there take very well care of themselves with daily doses of vitamins. Most people take their car in for a tune up, wash it, and go in for oil changes. However, when it computers to computers we turn them on and use them. Once done we shut the thing off and never give it a second thought to making sure the PC is happy or feeling well. We only react when it is being stubborn and won't do a thing.
The things that we should all be doing are very simple and can be setup to do them on a regular basis. Because when the Blue screen and the errors come it is often to late for the simple solution. Three main areas of maintenance that I like to use are: House Keeping, Preventive and just Necessary.
House Keeping
You should be cleaning up your temporary files as well as the files you are no longer using. If you need them at a later date they should be backed up to a removable media drive. CD-RWs and ZIP drives are extremely cheap these days and will for the most part hold the things that an average PC owner will need. You can also buy USB or Fire Wire drives that range from the size of your thumb to a external hard-drive. A good utility if you are using Windows XP (and I think Windows 2000) is the Disk Cleanup. This looks through several different directories and purges the contents. It is also a great time saving tool.
Once you have cleaned up your files it is always a good idea to run Disk Defragmenter as this will move sections of your hard-drive around to maximize the speed of your drive. There are also utilities out there that do registry cleanup as well, but I recommend staying away from them as much as possible as they can cause problems with some software applications like AutoCAD. AutoCAD is not the only software application either that has problems with such a software application.
Other things that are very useful are Spybot or internet Spyware removal programs. What this does it scans the registry for things like HotBar and Gator along with many others. These are programs that monitor where you are going on the internet. One of the best software that I have used for this is called Ad-Aware.
I will write up more on this topic in the up coming days. As I feel the best solution is not the phone call to the consultant or the local PC repair guy. Even though it helps my pockets I would rather be getting the call to help you make your company more profitable with building a partnership in software solutions and not disaster recovery.
Sincerely,
Lee Ambrosius
I am very much interested free maintenance software all in one
Posted by: C S Ananda Krishna | Sunday, September 12, 2004 at 06:25 PM