What do you do to keep your PC running great?

[Faubio Alter]

Myself, I do temporary file folder (junk files) cleaning daily and do daily defragmentations. Every three days or so I clean out the browser. Weekly I do a check disk, disk check of my hard drive  Daily I do a quick scan for viruses and weekly a full scan for viruses and malware. I use McAfee site advisor to keep malware off my PC.  I am a heavy user (10+ hours per day) of the Net and SL.

This link is helpful for Windows OSs:

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/setup/optimize.aspx#1

[Ansariel Hiller]

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And still works perfect!

[Irene Muni]

If I have problems, I request the proper functioning of my PC to those that really knows about PCs.

As a simply user, I only have antivirus and sometimes defragment the hard disk (In English is used "defragment" the hard disk? lol).

[Daria Afterthought]

Not be a dumbarse. Seriously, best advice ever. I never had a virus on my own computer (shared family computers, oh god yes. Oh the viri) I stay away from Kazaa, AOL, russian/korean sites I don't know, use Ad Block Plus...OMG Ad Block Plus is better than the best antivirus/firewall.

[Faubio Alter]

I request the proper  functioning of my PC <<<<<<<<<< something must have been a miss in the translation. I have no idea what this means.

[Ansariel Hiller]

Irene asks someone with knowledge to fix her computer when it has issues.

[Faubio Alter]

Yep, I bet she does and often.

[Suzee Devin]

What a coincidence!

I have just formatted my laptop after 3 very heavy years of use. I stream tv and films, use SL and do tons of research. This machine has been put through it's paces mercilessly!

I thought it was time to have a clean up finally. After comparing my laptop with my brothers high-end Toshiba laptop (3 months old) I definately have the better machine. My laptop is an unknown brand (Max Data) it's the best machine I've eve used long term.

I could run 6 official SL viewers at once without too much of a slow down!

I run scan disk,virus protection (Kapersky) and clear caches once a week. Maybe defrag every 4 months. Format once every 3 years!

[Irene Muni]

No, no often. Usually I can solve my problems usin a great tip I learned from you:

" Try: http://slurl.com/ "

Some examples: https://blogs.secondlife.com/search.jspa?q=try%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fslurl.com%2F&resultTypes=BLOG_POST&resultTypes=DOCUMENT&resultTypes=MESSAGE&resultTypes=BLOG&resultTypes=COMMUNITY&resultTypes=COMMENT&peopleEnabled=true&dateRange=last90days&username=&numResults=15&rankBy=10001

[Irene Muni]

Faubio.Alter wrote:

 

I request the proper  functioning of my PC <<<<<<<<<< something must have been a miss in the translation. I have no idea what this means.

My apologies. My knowledge of English is very limited.

[Senkiya Zsun]

I reinstall everything every six months or so. I have it down to a fine art now, probably takes an hour at the most. There are probably better ways in this day and age but I got so used to doing it when Windows was REALLY bad I became something of an expert at it. Occasionally I might sneak a hardware upgrade in at the same time.

With Windows you are always going to have a lot of useless junk cluttering up your machine, especially that abortion Windows call the registry. A reinstall nukes all the bad stuff and gives you a rosy pink, nice smelling, fresh new platform.

Caveat: I know what I'm doing. Just because I do things this way, it doesn't mean I recommend it. I'm only answering the OQ!

[Eternus Soulstar]

i wear an anti-forum-knowledge-cop amulet, and sprinkle the dust of the ground bones of red headed virgins around my house walking backward counter clockwise under each full moon.

i really think it's mostly the amulet tho.

[Ansariel Hiller]

Tip of the day:

• Format PC and install all necessary stuff
• Create an image of your hard disk partitions
• If you ever feel the need to reinstall, just restore image - fast and easy!

Yay!

[Faubio Alter]

I'm looking for issues I might be missing in keeping the PC running great. I mean exactly that great, anything less will not do. I wait for no machine.

[Ansariel Hiller]

I have a few! But nah... You don't wanna hear them. I'm a computer retard. So I better hold them on my own.

[Eli Schlegal]

Is it really necessary or even beneficial to de-frag daily?

[Eternus Soulstar]

Eli.Schlegal wrote:

 

Is it really necessary or even beneficial to de-frag daily?

 

prediction: the answer you get to that is going to depend as much on levering as much feeling of intellectual superiority as possible from the ensuing debate as it is on actual technical information pro or con.

[Femke Peccable]

Hi,

I help a lot of ppl that have problems with there PC (windows and Linux).

Ofcourse keeping your virus and patch management up todate is important but does not help to solve bad performance.

What I often see is that a lot of unnecessary processes are running. It does not mean that they are bad but you have to ask your self what priority you give them.

Example a lot of ppl are using web updates for the browser nice to have but it eats from you network and cpu if you are on sl.

Look to all these processes and ask your self do you need it. For my self I have created 3 accounts on my windows pc.

One is pure gaming and there I have default only 31 processes running ( I am not interested then in fast search options for office for example)

One is for development and the other is for school its slow but fit for purpose.

Just look to your own machine perhaps are you one of the many who has a lot icons beside your clock and look how many processes are running.

You start more things on your pc then you think.

Femke.

[Faubio Alter]

Image information creates the greatest volume of fragmentation. SL is all image. For lack of a better phrase it is a "Fragfest". 5 hour of SL useage will create approximately 3000 fragments. I want peak performance from the PC so I do it "more" then daily. All users on the is PC (we have three user accounts) defrag before logging off. The third account is seldom used.

I will say I have gone through three hard drives in the last three year whether this is due to scans and defrags is not yet clear. We do use this PC heavily in a day it might receive 15 hours of use on the net and on SL. Most of that time is spent either in SL or with JAVA games.

[Faubio Alter]

From your post

"I have a few! But nah... You don't wanna hear them. I'm a computer  retard. So I better hold them on my own."

 

Hmm are you a retard, as you say? Well ................ I'm not sure but you are rude. By the way, some might take offense at the word "retard", it is rude slang but then that would require some sensitivity to other people a trait the rude lac.

[CPU Core]

I put an SSD in it.. I never really make any effort to make it run faster and seems to always work fine.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

My method of keeping my computer running great (which to me means fast and virus.mal-ware free) is not really complicated or even that envolved.  Being an almost exclusive Windows user from the beginning of my computer use I've learned that keeping the useless, resource robbing garbage at bay is the key to maintaining the speed and error free experience I need and want.  I turn off everything that serves no useful purpose for my normal activities while using my computer.  I can turn on Adobe Acrobat Reader when I need it......there's no reason for it to launch (or initialize at boot up).  The Aero features of Vista and Windows 7 may be pretty or "cool" but I can live without 99% of it........shut it down.  I watch what "bloatware" wants to install when I install programs......decline the offers  (do I need Google's toobar?  How about that RSS feed?).  I keep just the essentials...........I can launch the other stuff when I need or want them.  One spin off of my "lean and mean" strategy is the programs I keep in my machine......if I already have a program that does whatever the program does to my satisfaction I usually avoid having another that does the same thing (I'm not talking about having Windows Media Player and Quicktime.....those do not serve the same purpose.  But that nifty mp3 or mp4 player might fall into that bracket.....those functions are available already in both Media Play and Quicktime).

 

As to maintenance.  I do not defrag on a specified schedule.  I check about weekly (depends on my recent usage of my system) and defrag when the fragmentation gets above about 15% to 20% fragmented.......and defrag accordingly.  It usually winds up being about once every 2 weeks for me.  I manually update every security program I use on my computer (anti virus, mal-ware, Windows Update, etc).  None of those programs are set to auto update........though Windows Update and my anti virus (AVG) are set to check but not install upon boot up (but I usually beat that auto check with my manually checking).  Complete virus/mal-ware scans are done weekly (approximately.........those are not scheduled) or when I see something I don't like happening on my computer (those programs are two of the few background programs I keep running at all times).  My firewall is active all the time too......and manually updated daily.  One thing I have found that helps maintain performance is to reduce the size of my swap or paging file........Windows defaults to an reserved space that is about twice what I need.  With 3 gigs of RAM and Vista requiring about 700 megs of that my system RAM can deal with most of my usage......reducing that swap file makes accessing it faster when Windows needs it.  That is where most of fragmenting occurs under normal usage.......reduce the space where fragmentation happens any you reduce the fragmentation.  Clearing your system of accumulated garbage about every other day helps.........I use both Windows built in utility, Disk Cleanup and Piriform's CCleaner.  Which comes to one more major thing I do regularly.  When you do a Disk Cleanup using Windows there is a tab for freeing up more disk space after the cleaner finds the temp files and stuff that can safely removed.  You can delete old System Restore images of your hard drive.  I do that about once a month.  I see no reason to have a restore point beyond the most recent that allowed my computer to boot normally and correctly.........Windows create a new restore point every update..........that can add up to gigs of wasted space on your hard drive.  It's not unusual for me to free up 20 gigs of space by deleting those restore points (that gigs, not megs!!).

 

My method has kept my computer pretty darned fast and trouble free for years.  It's hard for me to judge if it's just as fast as the last time I reinstalled Windows because I now dual boot with Linux Ubuntu..........that boot loader takes up a lot of the boot time.  But once I reach the loader and choose Windows I'm booted and ready to go in about 15 seconds.  That seems about what this computer did when new and after I shut down all the glitzy Aero and bloat ware.  It all sounds complicated and a bother but my thinking is that it's my responsibility to maintain this machine..........not some software doing it all in the background or automatically.  Everything the software does takes resources from the machine..........everything I can do saves resources for the machine.  It ain't that hard either. 

[Ansariel Hiller]

Oh I'm rude because I call myself a retard?

/me moans

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Ain't nuttin' wrong with being rude..........I've been accused of that a few times.  Now obnoxious.........hehehehe.  Guilty of that too on occassions.

 

[Kat Messioptra]

While keeping up to date on software is great, I also pay attention to my hardware, and I blow out the inside of my tower on a weekly baisis.  If your fans are clogged, and full of dust your system cannot breathe.  Blow it down every now and again.

[Joshooah Lovenkraft]

Not sure if this was already mentioned but don't forget about physically cleaning your computer! http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial118.html

Be careful though as I messed up a computer by not being careful when getting rid of dust bunnies.