Preventative maintenance
We're often asked to run maintenance courses, by which people usually mean that they want to learn about hardware repair. Unfortunately there's not much can done if a piece of hardware has failed mechanically - it either needs to be repaired by professionals or replaced with new. Even fixing software problems requires a good understanding of how a computer works and how drivers and other software interact with the hardware. So now we tend to concentrate on teaching preventative maintenance, or how not to screw up your computer in the first place! And we also teach people how to be prepared for the worst...
Preparation
If you are properly prepared, when the inevitable disaster strikes it won't be the end of the world - just an inconvenience. Whilst big commercial concerns such as banks and insurance companies use huge tape drives, duplicate data centres etc., individuals and small organisations can easily get by with a CD writer, a Zip drive, or even a box of floppy disks. All it takes is a little effort. You need to:
- partition your hard drive - buy a copy of Partition Magic and use that if your hard drive is already full of data or you don't want to have to reinstall everything
- drag My Documents to the second partition and move all your data there
- make a ghost image of C:\ drive once you have installed and configured all your software, internet accounts etc, so that you can restore it quickly if Windows gets corrupted and won't run
- back up your data regularly to removable media; back up critical data in two places and consider using a storage area on the Internet e.g. Yahoo!Briefcase
- remember to back up things like your address book which aren't stored in My Documents
- do a trial run occasionally to make sure you can restore from your back-ups
General housekeeping
There are a number of things that can be done to keep your computers running well. Since the component that gets the most hammer is the hard drive, it is here that you should concentrate your efforts. Once every month do the following:
- tidy up your documents and delete anything old or unwanted
- run scandisk (thorough) on both partitions
- run regclean and allow it to fix any problems it finds
- run System Mechanic
and set it to:
- find and remove junk and obsolete files
- find and fix broken shortcuts
- clean system registry
- empty the recycle bin
- run disk defragmenter and defrag both partitions
Other considerations
- Do not install lots of programs just for fun. Eventually the registry or system files get corrupted and you have to completely wipe the hard drive and reinstall all the software afresh. Remember the motto "lean and mean". Uninstall any programs you never use - always do this from Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.
- Many programs add an entry in the Startup folder or the registry when they are installed so that they run automatically every time you start Windows. All these programs take up processing power and memory and therefore slow down your computer. You will see many of them running as icons in the System Tray and you can sometimes configure them not to start automatically from there. Others you must delete from the Startup folder, whilst others you need to disable by running <msconfig> from the Run menu (Win 98 onwards) and unticking them in the Startup tab. Some third party utilities such as System Mechanic also let you control which programs start up automatically.