Maintenance to Perform
Maintenance is one of those things that keeps the outsourced IT staff at your job site long after they aren't truly needed any more. And sometimes you really have to wonder why they are there scanning for viruses when they spent hours installing antivirus on every machine in the office. Shouldn't the software do that part without human intervention?
For some legitimate things you might consider computer maintenance, which are really very few, consider the following tasks:
Defragging: This process rearranges software and files on your hard drive for faster access times and less disk thrashing which can shorten the life of a hard drive. You can perform this task using software such as Diskeeper and letting it schedule a repeating task for times you are not in the office.
Cleaning up temporary internet files: Everytime a new utility is released that finds and erases all of these, somebody discovers Microsoft is dumping files in yet another invisible location. After all these years of updates to Windows XP and soon Vista, there are temporary files by the thousands hidden all over the computer, a lot of which identify your activities. Try a program like CCleaner to purge these useless files from your computer. A relative of mine ran this process recently and got back over 4GB of space!
Cleaning the registry: The windows registry can be an ugly thing after you've loaded Norton, AOL, and a host of other programs, then remove one or two, and add some new ones. Lot of programs leave behind dead-end entries or references to features that don't exist any more once they are uninstalled. A great way to auto-correct these issues and regain some stability is to try a registry cleaner. I enjoy using RegSupreme but there are a wide variety of great cleaners out there.
Physical cleaning: Hey sometimes we have to get our hands dirty and actually make sure the computer vents are not blocked, the fans are moving well and the heatsinks are not clogged with dust - and this goes double on a laptop where heat buildup can kill the unit. Compressed air will give you a great way to blow dust bunnies out without touching the internal components.
Things that may be "work I can charge you for" instead of real maintenance would be along the lines of doing a whole virus scan or running Windows Update, or even, running a test backup. All these processes are generally automated and their functions merely need to be confirmed to be working, not manually done once a week or month.
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