PCs or personal computers have become a very integral part of lives. We cannot imagine our lives without the computer or the Internet in our homes. As we all very well know an average life of a computer in our homes is around two to three years. However, the life of a computer mostly depends on how we maintain them and how we use them.
One of the best ways to keep our computer healthy is to defrag the hard drive, especially the partition which accommodates the operating system. Defragmenting and Disk Scanning the hard drive is a very good practice and needs to be done on a regular basis. What this does is that it collects all the fragmented and files and arranges them close together. This lessens the load on the operating system when it accesses the files. However, this practice does not reduce the load from the hard disk.
If you are an Internet user, there will be a lot of files which get stored in your computer when you access the Internet. You will not need these files once you close the websites unless you have stored the passwords in your cookies. The files which are stored on your computer are called as the temporary Internet files and the cookies. The temporary Internet files are also called as the cache. Therefore, you will need to make sure that you clear the cache the cookies regularly.
Your computer could have a lot of startup programs, these programs will slow down the booting of your computer. Therefore, you will need to check and find out if there are any programs which unnecessarily run during the startups. If you are unaware about how to remove the startup programs, you could find some good information on the Internet to guide you with few simple steps to remove the startup programs.
Your computer will have a lot of programs or applications which are not used by you and also the ones which are absolutely not required. You could uninstall these programs from the control panel. The option to remove the unwanted programs from the computer in the control panel is Add / Remove Programs icon. It is from this place where you can easily remove the unwanted programs which are installed on your computer. You computer will surely operate faster after this.
There will be a lot of files left on your computer even after uninstalling the unnecessary programs. These files could have been normally the files which were created by those programs. Since the software does not exist, these files cannot be run and hence they become the orphan files. If you have an alternative program to run these files, you could use the ‘open with’ option and assign them to be used by these programs in the future.
There are some applications like the Cleansweep which will automatically detect the unwanted files and prompt you to delete them. It is better to use these kinds of programs rather than trying to find the necessary files by yourself and deleting them. If you are not very sure about the files which are to be deleted, there are chances that you might end up deleting the files which might damage your operating system itself.
However, it would be a very good idea to take backups of the important files before running any deleting software on your computer.
You might want to consider the inputs mentioned in this article to ensure longevity and good performance of your computer.
By: Gregg Hall
Archive for the ‘Articles’ category
How To Fix Your Computer Freezing
April 24th, 2010
We have all been there: sitting at the computer, and typing up a report, or letter to someone. When all of a sudden, nothing! Mouse won’t move, keyboard won’t type, and yelling at the computer does not help either. And, oh yeah, you forgot to save this file when you started. So all of this hard work is gone, erased, and must be redone. This is very frustrating. This one small tip will show you how to fix your computer freezing.
The cause of the freezing, or locking up, of your computer, is due to some either corrupted or missing files. And more specifically, missing or corrupted registry files. These are the files which tell everything on your how it is suppose to work. Basically, they are configuration files. And if these files get corrupted, or messed up, it can wreck havoc.
Sometimes the registry files end up missing. This can happen when you uninstall software from your computer. The software being uninstalled may remove registry files also associated with another program. There should be a message asking you whether or not you want to delete the files as they are associated with another program. Your best bet is to say NO to this and leave the files. If the files end up missing, then the program which needs them will stall, hang, or freeze the next time it tries to run. But there is a simple way to fix this.
By just running registry scan software on your computer, you can find these problems and fix them right away. It will let you know which files are bad, and will fix them to its original state. And it is this simple step which will show you how to fix your computer freezing.
By: Michael Baker
Blue Screen of Death – 3 Steps to Fix Blue Screen Crash
April 23rd, 2010
The Blue Screen of Death causes your entire screen to freeze, a blue screen to appear that says your screen has froze. There will be DLL errors and you may be asked if you have installed any new programs or hard ware over the last few days.
Here are some quick fix “layman” solutions that have worked for me, especially if you’re the non techy type and just want simple solutions that remedy this problem.
1. Reboot and See
For some reason, the blue screen appears once and does not come back again. A quick reboot is all you need to get pass this blue screen crash. I remember having a laptop that because I bumped it against a table, went into blue screen mode. So if this should happen to you, just reboot your computer and see what happens. Hopefully it does not come back.
If the blue screen of death problem, is more intermittent and random. You may need to fix some things.
2. Change your RAM.
RAM stands for Random Access Memory. It is a hardware that is embedded on your mother board. It looks like a rectangular piece. The RAM stores information that your CPU will be able to call instructions from. When this hardware is faulty, your computer will crash into the blue screen when the sections are accessed by the CPU. So just changing your RAM is a possible solution.
3. Use a Registry Cleaner
A registry cleaner clears up errors in your computer’s registry. The registry contains all the information about drivers, games, software, applications that is stored in your computer. Over time, this area can get corrupted, there will be obsolete entries which can result in a Blue Screen of Death. Using a registry cleaner to fix these errors can help remove the blue screen of death and speed up your computer and application loading up time.
By: Sherman Choo
