| Every computer requires some general maintenance occasionally. If you use your computer heavily, store files on your local hard drive and browse the internet frequently, we recommend you perform these procedures approximately every month. If you store most files on your network filesever and don’t browse the internet all that often, then once every three months may be more appropriate for you. The issue that can effect the performance of your PC are: |
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| TEMPORARY FILES |
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The biggest issue with maintenance of a computer is to clear out temporary files. Your operating system and application use temporary files all the time. Those files are often left on your computer, even though they are no longer used
When you browse the internet. The images you see are copied to a folder called “Temporary internet files.” The advantage is that if you visit that site again, internet explorer may be able to retrieve the image from the temporary files inside of having to download it again. If you visit multiple pages of web site and every page has the company’s logo. That logo will only be downloaded once and then retrieve from the temporary files. Unfortunately, these file also take up space consume valuable resources from your computer. Occasionally, you will want to delete all the temporary files to keep things running smooth. In some circumstances, you may not be able to access a specific web site or download a program from the internet because there is conflict with your temporary internet files. After clearing out the temporary files, every things works well again. |
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| RECYCLE BIN |
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When you delete files from your local hard drive, they are not immediately remove from your computer. Just like when you through something in the Trashcan, you are still able to dig it out until emptied the trash can into the dumpster. Delete files are Placed in a recycle bin where they can be retrieved. If necessary. Also like your trash can whaever you put in it keeps accumulating until you empty it. Occasionally, when you’re confident there is nothing in the recycle bin.
To empty your recycle bin, right-click on the recycle bin and select “Empty the recycle bin.” If you need to recover an item still in the recycle bin. Just double click on the recycle bin and a list of recoverable items will be display, Just right click on the item(s) you want to recover and select restore.
Pleases note that only items delete from your local hard drive are placed in the recycle bin. Items delete from mapped drive ( the F drive pointing to your server is an example of a mapped drive) or from shares (everything under My network place is a share) are immediately deleted and are not recoverable. |
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| CLEANING UP YOUR HARD DISK |
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| If you would like to clean up all those temporary files at once, microsoft has proided a useful tool called disk Cleanup. We recommend you not select to Compress any files. |
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| DISK CLEANUP |
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| 1. |
Open my computer. |
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Right click on the C: drive and Select properties. |
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Click on the disk cleanup button. |
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Select to items to be removed. As a General rule. Select everything Except “compress old files” and “offline files” . |
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Click the OK button and confirm you want to remove these files. |
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| DRIVE FRAGMENTATION |
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Another Significant issue is the Fragmentation of your hard drive, we will use the analogy of a library to help you understand what fragmentation it just like a library’s card catalog. Your hard drive contains a file allocation table (FAT) with a list of your files and where they are located on your hard drive unlike library books that are static, your files continually change you edit word document or add transactions to your accounting programs. Just think if you were to add pages to a library book every day. the book is already sung between two other books on the self. You don’t have room to slip a few more pages in. it would take too long to rearrange all the books to make room, so you simply place a post-it in the back of the book with the location of those extra page on another library shelf.
That’s what your computer does. Rather then rearranging files every time one file changes. It places part of that file (a fragment) some where else on the hard drive and keep tracke of where it is located. Over month of working a single file may have hundred of fragments all over the hard drive. While a hard drive is very fast, fragmentation causes the hard drive to respond slower because it must jump to all those different location to open the file Microsoft provides a tool to called defragmentation (defrag for short) to help resolve this defrag simply of like taking all those extra pages and placing them in the back of the book because derag rearranges the contents if your hard drive, you want to make sure all other programs are closed when running it . |
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| To run Defrag: |
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Close all other programs. |
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Open My Computer. |
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Right-click on the C: drive and select Properties. |
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Click on the Tools tab. |
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Click on the Defragment Not button.
The Defrag program will open showing your local hard drives. |
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Close My Computer the C: Properties box. |
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Click on the Defragment button to start the Defrag. |
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Note: If you haven't performed a defrag in some time, the process could take
hours. However, if you perform a defrag on a regular basis, it should take only a
few minutes. It is safe to stop and exit Defrag before it finishes and start it up
again at a later time. |
