A little preventative maintenance can go a long way in keeping a machine running smooth and optimized. Here are some basic but vital steps to follow.
Article Content
- Maintaining a healthy operating system in a hostile environment
- Tips to maintain a healthy operating system
- Clean Temporary Internet Files
- clean registry
- Keep antivirus and antimalware definitions up to date
- defrag drives
- Run a disk check
- Tips to maintain a healthy operating system
Maintaining a healthy operating system in a hostile environment
There are so many ways to ensure a healthy system that your job might mainly consist of keeping machines healthy. So, let’s narrow down the methods to keep machines running smoothly and consider some of the most important ways to keep your system healthy and avoid the dreaded hack . Perhaps an idea could be to disconnect it from the network and never allow it to be online, but if we think logically, that is not a valid or possible option for most users, especially those whose business depends on a computer that must be connected to the network.
Tips to maintain a healthy operating system
Clean Temporary Internet Files
People are always surprised how much their browser saves. Between cached cookies, images, and other files, a web browser can really clog up a user’s C drive. Although the drives are cheap and huge, I have come across cases where there were more than 20 gigs of cached internet files (cross browsers). This can obviously cause problems when space becomes an issue and can cause significant web browser slowdowns. Keeping these cached files clean will help the machine run smoothly and allow for a better web browsing experience. The browser cache can be cleared from the user’s browser. In fact, some browsers can be set to automatically clear the cache on exit.
clean registry
The registry is a crucial component, and it can get corrupted, broken, or generally bummed out very easily. Removal programs, virus infections, rootkits, trojans, improper shutdown of the computer… there are so many possible ways to corrupt a registry. But luckily there are plenty of tools available to clean the operating system registry because doing the job manually would be next to impossible. Some tools allow for quick and easy cleaning of your operating system’s registry and there are many other tools that can handle this very task, so the choice will probably depend on your needs and tastes.
Keep antivirus and antimalware definitions up to date
It is always surprising when you are working with your PC and discover that the options offered to protect your operating system are outdated or outdated. This is just asking for trouble, as new viruses appear almost daily. If your virus definitions are not set to update automatically every night, change them to do so. If this is not an option, you should at least make sure that users are aware of the need to manually update those definitions every night. If this requires the need to set reminders for users, then so be it. But no matter how it is done, you must be sure that it is being done. Aside from keeping a computer off the network,
defrag drives
This point is especially important for Windows users. You’d think that Microsoft would have solved the fragmentation problem somewhere in the process of creating Vista and Windows 7 . But it didn’t and instead it set up Windows 7 with an automatically scheduled defragmentation. That’s all well and good, but there are some people still using Windows XP who don’t benefit from Microsoft hiding its inability to fix a problem that has plagued the platform for a long time. If you’re one of them and you’re still using Windows XP, you should make sure those machines are set to automatic defragmentation at least once a week.
Run a disk check
This one is not really for new users, but for administrators. Once in a while (maybe once a month), it’s good to run it.
operating system
It’s really not that difficult to maintain a computer with a healthy operating system, but it does take a bit of time and, in some cases, a bit of patience. Make sure you follow these five tips and those computers will live long, healthy, and productive lives without damage to worry about and take time to repair.
