The most neglected part of owning a computer is maintenance.
Very few people actually do maintenance on their computer.
It will help keep your computer running smooth and help keep it running fast.
Maintenance should be performed on desktops as well as all your servers.

As mentioned in the last article about
spyware/adware, you should run the cleaning tools
at least once a month. Also, you should make sure your virus definitions are
up to date, and you should run a full system scan at least once a month to
make sure a new virus didn’t sneak in before you got a new definition that
protected you from that virus.
Yes, you can still get a virus even if you have the auto protect running.

Another Maintenance task you should perform regularly is running Disk Cleanup.
This will scan your computer and find information that is clogging up your hard
drive and give you the ability to remove it.
It can remove cached web information which fills up your hard drive and slows
it down, and getting rid of this information can sometimes help keep you from
getting those annoying popup ads.
Disk Cleanup can also remove temp files as well as much more.

The next task that should be done is to run Scandisk. This utility will scan
your hard drive and detect any problems, and attempt to either repair them
or recover the data and move it to a safer place on the drive.
This is very good to do in case there are problems; once you know about them,
you can make a decision to replace the drive before the damage is too
much to effectively copy data from that drive to a new drive.
The sooner any problems are detected, the sooner you can make backups of
critical data — and the more prepared you will be if the drive finally fails.

Last in this series of maintenance is to Defrag your hard drive.
This is a time consuming step, but it will help your computer run faster by
compacting all the data on your hard drive. The more often this is done,
the faster the process will be.
You should probably start a defrag before you leave to go home at the end
of the day.

I have gone over many things in this article that will help keep your PC
running in tip top shape. There are other things that you can do,
but everyone can and should do the above things regularly.
So setup a schedule to do these steps at least once a month, and start
to enjoy the speed and reliability of your computer once again.