Your Computer needs regular maintenance just like your car. Following these steps every two weeks will help keep your computer running its best.

UpDates
If you do not have your computer set up to do automatic updates, we recommend that you at least set the updater to notify you of impending updates. Please make sure to install them regularly, at least everyother week, to keep your computer up to date.

Clean up unneccesary files and folders

Please download CCleaner, you can try to keep up manually, but this is an excellent program, that can make the process of cleaning out garbage files so much easier.

Install and launch CCleaner. Under Cleaner Settings, make sure that everything is checked, including Advanced. Answer yes to all warnings. Then click on Options, Advanced, and deselect Only delete files in Windows Temp folders older than 48 hours. Choose Cleaner again, Click Analyze, if you would like to check what is deleted before you delete it. When it has finished, or if you choose not to run the Analyser, click Run Cleaner, then OK. After the program has run through, run it again, until either you have no more files show up, or you have the same files show up, and they are logs, that will not allow themselves to be deleted. If you have any other files that cannot be deleted with CCleaner, contact PCHF and our techs can help you.


Disk Defragmenter

Overtime you may notice your PC become slower. This is because too many files become fragmented from installed programs. To improve the speed of your Hard disk you need to run a Disk Defragmenter. The following instructions are for the Disk Defragmenter included with Windows. This program has been known to be very slow. There is an alternative listed below the Windows instructions, which we consider to be equal if not better in function, and much faster.

NOTE: You may need to leave your PC on overnight depending on the size of your Hard Disk. Eg: for an 80GB hard disk, it could take from 8 to 24hrs.

For Windows 95/98/ME/2000 users

Click on? Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter

For Windows XP users

Click on? Start, All Programs, Accesories, System Tools, Disk Defrag

Note: Windows XP users can first analyze their drive to see if it needs defragmenting.

Auslogics Defragmeter For 7/Vista/XP/2000/ Sorry previous versions of Windows are not supported with this program.
Download and install the Defragmenter, It will identify the basic used and unused space on your harddrive, click Next and the defragmenter will start working. Try to let this work when you are not there, so you don't have any unnecessary programs running, this will considerably speed up the process.

Note Regarding Registry Cleaning

If you follow the above steps on a regular basis, you may still find after time that your computer becomes sluggish. That is most likely caused by the registry becoming bloated. Please contact PCHF regarding walking you through the best registry cleaner for your personal situation. Registry cleaning should not be done lightly, or regularly, as the registry is the main controller for Windows based OS'. Some are better than others, and they change quite a bit over time.

We look forward to seeing you at PCHF, happy computing.