Being a good servant to your computer will not only just protect your data, but can extend the life of the computer itself. Computers are work horses and when it comes to day to day use they take a pretty good beating. We count on our personal computers for everything from banking to personal images and everything in between. Maintenance on anything is a must, just as your car needs oil changes or replacing the filters in your furnace, it all makes an impact on performance, so computers react in the same fashion.

Your computer will require a certain level of attention to keep it running in tip top shape. Many thanks to Piriform Ltd. and their amazing library of software tools they have taken all of the hard work out of keeping your computer working at its best. I personally have a great deal of admiration for their company and it's approach to helping computer owners keep their machine running. Below will be a series of articles along with download links to the tools you will need to help your PC run better than it ever has before.

The home computer has a huge amount of memory scattered about it's components and it don't forget anything unless we tell it to. This is where human intervention comes into play. Part of helping your computer is by telling it to clear it's mind so that it can be more focused on it's tasks. By flushing all this unnecessary garbage from it's memory will speed the system up, so lets get started.

Piriform Ltd. has taken the time to do it right with the invent of straight forward software that takes the confusion out of repairing your system and  dealing with it's proper upkeep. We will start by cleaning all the junk off your PC and then follow up in the end with making sure everything is where it should be on your computer. Once again, many thanks to Piriform Ltd. and their awesome team for all their hard work. I do want to encourage you to visit their site and while there make a donation to help them continue to offer such amazing tools at no cost to the public. OK! Lets get started!!!

The first step is to download ccleaner from the Piriforms Ltd. website. Simply click on the cleaner image at the left to visit their download page. Once you have downloaded your copy of ccleaner and installed it, we will use it to clean up all of your unused programs on your system. Let’s go ahead and launch the program and you will find in the left hand column of its window is a series of options. Please click on the tools icon and the screen will display all of the programs that are installed on your machine. Evaluate the list of software and find the items that you want to delete, such as unused software, or programs that you simply did not mean to install in the first place. Please exercise caution while doing this; you certainly don’t want to uninstall anything that you use, or that is critical to your Operating system. Slowly go line for line through the list of software making sure what belongs and what needs to go. Uninstalling the software that you no longer use will free up space on your hard drive. Taking this step of clearing out the old software is very helpful to your system; it will help prevent your PC from searching through all the old program files to find what it’s really looking for, so in turn it will speed up your PC. This process may take some time so get something to drink.

START UP

Now let’s take a look at one more thing that can be very helpful. Do you ever turn your computer on and it takes forever to boot up? Some of the wait can be avoided. Once again we are going to utilize the ccleaner software to help us out. Under the tools option you will find a button near the top that says “Startup” Click that button… Now don’t be intimidated by what you see, this is simply a list of software that starts every time your PC is turned on. I want you to look at this list and if you see anything that resembles software that you recognize and don't want it to start up each time you turn your PC on. I simply want you to click the item and at the bottom of the screen click “Disable”, this will prevent it from booting up next time you start your PC.

FILE CLEANER

Our next step is easy. While leaving ccleaner open I want you to click on the "Cleaner" button in the left hand column near the top. Now we are going to clean up all of your old files from your PC. You will find several items that are already pre-checked in a series of boxes. You are welcome to change what is going to be cleaned but please use caution when doing so though, as I said before don't delete anything that your not sure of. You will find at the bottom ,a button titled "Analyze".. click that and let the software scan your PC, this step may take a while depending on how much you have used your system. Once it completes you then need to click the "Run Cleaner" button in the lower left hand corner, and once again let it do it's thing.

REGISTRY CLEANER

OK, with ccleaner still open, our next step will be the final one while using this software. You will find another button at the left, titled "registry". Lets go ahead and click that button. once the screen opens I want you to click the "Scan For Issues" button in the lower left hand corner, and now its off to the races. This scan will go rather quick. The registry of a computer is a very critical series of folders, scripts, and files that keep your system running. If the registry is left alone, over time it can become corrupt and you will begin to have serious problems with your system. After the scan has completed I want you to click the "Fix Selected Issues" button. you will be asked if you wish to save a copy of your registry and I insist that you do. By backing up the registry, you have just insured yourself that if something breaks after the cleaning you have the ability to roll it back to before the change.

Congratulations!! You have officially completed the cleaning process of your PC. You will be rather surprised the amount of space you just freed up. Here is a fun little fact for you. If you were to open up a computer hard drive you would find a series of very thin disks called platters that look allot like a music CD, with out the labels of course. The data on your computer is scattered amongst these disks, so now, considering that we have uninstalled several files there will be empty spots all over your hard drive. The term for this issue is called a fragmented drive.

DEFRAGMENTING

A fragmented hard drive can slow your PC down and in some cases cause the drive to lock up. The windows operating system offers a tool that allows you to defragment your drive but instead we will use another great tool from Piriform Ltd. called Defraggler. Once again the tool is very easy to use and real straight forward on what it does.

Simply click the image at the left to go and download Defraggler from the Piriform site, and install the software to your machine. Once installed, launch the application and follow the steps listed by the application. You will need to exercise patience while using this tool, depending on the size of your drive it may take a great deal of time to complete its job.

Defragging your hard drive is highly recommended. From a performance stand point you will find that your system will boot up and run so much smoother than before. The way I like to look at defragmentation of a hard drive is like picking up and organizing your house. Everything is so much easier to find and it just makes you feel better.  

FILE RECOVERY

Now this is mind blowing!!!! Have you ever deleted a file and wish you hadn't? I mean files such as audio, video, pictures, documents, you name it. One would think that once it is deleted it is truly gone. WRONG!!!  The file is not toast yet... Well in most cases anyway. Again like a genie granting you every wish you ever had, here comes the folks again from Piriform Ltd. giving us another awesome tool, you can now recover deleted files. Yes, you heard me, RECOVER DELETED FILES...  tell me that ain't awesome. I would download this one just for good measure, click the image at the left and there you go... Enjoy....

COMPUTER SPECS

Now I'm going to get real GEEKY on you. One last tool from Piriform Ltd. software to use. in my line of work this is a priceless addition to my arsenal of PC tools. One of the most difficult things to do sometimes is to determine what hardware I have under the hood. Take for example, you want to buy a better video card for your PC and the guy on the other end of the phone asks you what type of system you have and needs to know some of the specs. Well now you can dazzle them with your Geek knowledge by using the a tool called speccy, this program will query your entire computer and report back all of the internal components and the technical data that is related to them. Here is another cool aspect of the software. You can export that information to what is called an XML file and e-mail it to whom ever is helping you and as long as they have speccy also they can import the file and view all of your information... Can I get an Amen?