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Taking care of your computer is probably the last thing you ever thought if it is compared to taking care of your house, kids, pets or business. If you are a computer user and you often used your computer, then you should really consider of doing regular maintenance.

Starting by maintaining your computer hardware, maintaining your operating system then computer applications.
There are some important components in your computer that needs to be taking care of. In this article, we will discuss one of them and how to keep it clean.

One of the most important components in computer hardware is a fan. Fan is located in the computer’s CPU also known as processor, it responsible cooling down your computer’s processor. If you install a fan in your computer’s case than if will keep almost your entire components cool. When attach a cooling fan on your hard disk then it will keep your hard disk cool.

So, in short words, a cooling fan is important.
But, a cooling fan is also a trouble for your computer if you don’t clean it up. A dirty cooling fan contains dust and can make your cooling fan to stop working, if it stops working than your processor can overheat and stop working well.

Cleaning up your computer from a dust is important and you need to do that regularly. If you are not sure on what you’re doing, don’t take any risk because it will cause serious damage to your computer. In that case, taking it to the hands of the professional would be a better choice. Just take it to a computer technician for a complete maintenance.

Have you ever loss your important data ? Well, i have.
At that moment I really agree on what people say that prevention is always a better cure.
Here are some steps that I want to share with you in order to prevent data loss.

1. Use an updated Anti Virus software and always keep it up to date
Antivirus is a special software developed to protect your computer against malicious computer virus.
Some virus can remove or modify your data without you ever realize it and some virus can cause your computer to crash.
So make sure to keep your Antivirus software uptodate with the latest patch and signature files for maximum security.

2. Protect your computer against power surges with UPS
UPS is an Uninterruptible Power Supply. It protects your computer and data during a power surge or failure.
UPS is equiped with a spare battery that provides you some time to save your documents and shutting down Windows properly so that you don’t lose any files and avoiding your computer hardware components from the possibility of damages.

3. Make sure your machine is dry and keept in dust-free area
Place your computer far away from places that can be directly exposed to rain, sun or humidity.
These places have the tendency to cause rusting and can damage your hardware components.

4. Don’t try to repair or open up your computer without any assistance
If you have no experience in repairing computer hardware, you may accidentally damage the circuit boards,
hardware components or even worst, get an electric shock! Always consult with an expert.

5. Don’t over-tweak your system
Avoid modifying your windows registry or perform an overclock to your hardware in order to boost the performance unless if you are definitely sure on what you’re doing. I’m sure you don’t want to fry your computer.

6. Make a backup copy and keep them at an off-site location
This helps protecting your backup copy from damage, just in case if there is a natural disaster such as flood, fire or any kind of disaster.

7. Don’t move your computer while it still running/operating
I’m sure that you don’t want your power cord falling off and generates a data corruption or a physical damage to your hard disk such as a head crash while you still working on a project.

8. Avoid sharing access to your computer with strangers on the network
Your data can be stolen or modified if anyone on the network can have access to your files.

9. Perform hard disk maintenance
Delete temporary files, unnecessary files and defragment your hard disk regularly.
This can help you keeping up your hard disk on good condition.

10. Aware of failure symptoms
When you hard disk starts making noises and your systems are getting cranky, it is time to start making backups on all of your data files.

I hope this steps can help you to prevent from loosing your data files.

Uninstalling a Windows program leaves multiple traces like abandoned registry keys, setting files and shared subroutine libraries that are no longer used by any program. When you are seeking for a perfect solution to your problem, you are typically downloading and trying out lots of different applications distributed on the trial base. After you finish your explore, you’ll determine on just one application, and will want to get rid of the previous application you’ve tested. But do you realize how many garbage they leave behind even after being ‘completely’ uninstalled?

If you install a large suite made by a big-name company, you’re having the best quality software that certainly experiences how to behave and how to clean up by itself, right? Wrong! Many of them leave behind multiple traces that are probably getting your computer behave odd, or even lead to troubles that are impossible to predict and difficult to resolve.

Need an examples? How about a firewall that forgets to move out a system-level driver that filters IP packets? After uninstalling the product, the driver just sits there, performing nothing except slowing down the performance of your PC. Try another one of those firewalls and stack an extra system-level driver on top, and you’ll get connectivity problems that are very difficult to resolve if you’re not an experienced network administrator.

Did you use any tools to create backups of your CDs and DVDs? There’s a lot of tools on the market that shamelessly leave behind the drivers they use to access the discs directly. Each of these drivers slows down access to optical discs and makes reads and writes less stable.

Simple utilities produced by small companies and independent software sellers are very prospective to leave traces behind in many places on your computer. Simply because they are free trial and time limited, they try to hide info about their installation date and usage in obscure places, making it on purpose difficult to trace and clean up. There’s nothing wrong with protecting intellectual property, but what happens if you try out a lot of applications, and decide on a single application to do the job? Do you actually have to bring all the garbage in “the house” in order to buy just one tool?

If you start thinking that the only way to keep on your computer clean is by not installing anything on it, think twice! There’s a great solution to these kind of problems made by some trusty vendors. One of them, which i have personally tried, is Registry Mechanic.
Developed by PCTools, this a strong tools to optimize windows registry.
You can try out by downloading the trial version from the official web site, only there are limited features with the trial version.

There are numerous matters that cause a computer to perform slower than before.
It can be from software to hardware.
It can be the storage is too small or not enough RAM.
It can be your BIOS, Operating System Settings or software that are eating up your CPU and RAM.
Or perhaps it can be your network.

Here are numerous tips that can help maintaining your computer perform faster:

1. This is so classic I shouldn’t need to tell it, keep clean which ever email software you use.
I have customers who are constantly complaining, but who will resist dumping years of accumulated emails.

2. Make sure you have a great anti virus program, apply only one anti virus on each computer, make it up to date and auto monitoring.

3. Make sure you use a strong anti spyware program, utilize only one anti spyware along each computer, have it up to date and automatic monitoring.

4. Run Disk Clean Up Daily by following these steps : Start, Pograms, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Clean Up – a box opens – be certain all box is selected, click ‘OK’ – a box pops up – Click Yes).

5. Delete Cookies and Cached Files Periodically by following these steps :
Start, Control Panel, Internet Options, Delete Cookies, Click OK, Click Delete Files – select ‘Delete All Offline Content’ – Click OK, then set your clear history to no more than seven Days – Click OK.

6. A really essential measure almost everyone misses Clean The Prefetch Folder :
Start, My Computer, ‘C’ , Windows, Prefetch Folder, Edit, Select All, File, Delete – Click Yes, Close Windows.

7. Empty Recycle Bin. I believe everyone knows how to empty the recycle bin.

8. Scan drive ‘C’ :
Start, My Computer, Right Click ‘C’, Click Properties at the bottom, Click Tools, Click Check Now.
Be certain both ‘Automatically fix file system errors’ and ‘Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors’ are selected, Click Start.

9. Defrag Computer :
Start, software, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter, Select ‘C’ Drive, Click Defragment.

The last two steps, step 8 and 9, can take a while if they haven’t been done recently.
I complete this entire routine on my computer before I finish working for the day everyday and the total steps requires no longer than twenty minutes.

Doing a computer maintenance is something that is often overlooked by computer users. One of the easiest ways of doing computer maintenance is to perform defragmentation. This is one of the basic thing that not known by the owner of the computer.

Defragmentating your hard drive is one important thing if you don’t want your computer’s performance decrease along together with the increasing of your data on hard drive.
Windows operating system users should not be worry about this matter. As windows has been package with this handy features.
It’s as simple as clicking buttons because this feature is very user-friendly. This tools can present the exact evaluation for user whether the hard drive needs to be defragmented or not.

Eventhough the user interface is different between each windows versions, they all have the same function. You can simply click on the Start menu, choose Accessories, System Tools then click on Disk Defragmenter.
Once the interface is open, you may choose to analyze the hard drive that connects to your computer.
The analyzer will soon present an evaluation whether you need to perform disk defragmenting or not. If the analyzer recommend you to perform defragmentation, all you need to do is select the hard drive from the list and press Defragment button then this tool will do the rest.

Over time computers scattered data across the whole length of hard drive, this makes accessing data become slower and takes more time to accomplish.Disk defragmenter tool does an important task.
It’s “regrouping” all files that are scattered across your hard drive into one “block” of the hard drive which makes it easier to read and write on your hard drive.

Defragmenting a hard drive usually takes a long time depends on the size of your hard drive. The speed of your processor and the amount of RAM you have also plays a role. When performing disk defragment, it could take up almost all of the resource of your computer, so you won’t be able to do any operations until disk defragment process is completed.
So, i suggest you to do this operation while you are not using the computer.