Maintenance for O/S

[Dosdamt]

Hello all,

I have recently placed an order with the lovely people at PCS. I am determined to make sure I keep it in shape. I have ordered Windows 7 Home 64bit Edition, and want to make sure that I keep it in shape.

I appreciate that PCS are primarily hardware boys and girls, but I'd appreciate any advice on setting up a largely automated maintenance routine on the PC to ensure it stays healthy!

Thanks

-Ben

 

[Gishank]

There are many things that you can do to keep your system running well software wise. For example setup Windows Update to automatic and scheduel your hard drives to be defragged when you're not using your system, you can find out how to do these by using google if you do not know how to do so already. You would also be wise to setup a schedueled backup of your data and files using Windows 7's tool, in the unfortuent case that something does go wrong.

 

[Gorman]

Maintaining Windows 7 is really quite easy.

1. Set updates to automatic and install them
2. Keep your antivirus (MSE is great) updated.
3. Uninstall programs you dont use.
4. Only allow programs to run on startup if absolutely necessary.
5. Defrag every now and again, rarely necessary with NTFS drives.
6. Run regular backups to an external drive.
7. Subscribe to the driver newsletter for your GPU make and keep it updated.
8. Run regular backups to an external drive.

Most of these tasks are already automatic, in windows 7 its very easy to schedule maintenance such as backups etc.

 

[Dosdamt]

Cheers guys, that's very useful. I'm guessing that I can find instructions online to make sure that things don't go nuts on startup, and to edit the startup schedule as well?

 

[PCS]

Most questions can be answered by searching Google, but you do not need to worry about maintaining your PC or OS too much, computers can have their moody days, but in general they work quite well maintenance free. Here's a nice tutorial on using msconfig to control what programs launch on startup:

http://netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msconfig_win7.html