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Keeping Your PC Clean
(Article Contributed By Dino - Posted on July 24th, 2008)
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Every Sunday for years I’ve always done a little bit of cleaning – not of my house, that is every day and it never seems to end. I’m talking about computer cleaning, and you’re probably about to back out of this page right now and go read something else, thinking I’m some kind of nutter.
Honestly, it’s probably the number one reason why my built machines last as long as they do – I am a stickler for preventative maintenance. That goes for anything expensive I own – I tend to over clean it, but that way it lasts a heck of a lot longer than it should do. I do the same thing with my paintball gear and everyone I know cannot believe how well my gun shoots.
It’s not hard and only takes about half an hour, depending on the speed of your machine, the tools you have to hand and how familiar you are with the internals of your PC. I’ll give you a little list of the things I do, in order, every Sunday:
- Clean out inside of case, making sure all intakes, fans and exhausts are clear and obstruction-free for good airflow.
- Check seating of all PCI-E, AGP or PCI cards by pushing down on them gently to reseat if needed. Tighten screws on backplane of case holding them down if needed.
- Clean out CPU fan with Vacuum attachment (don’t remove it from the CPU).
- Check connections on all hard drives and all DVD drives.
- Boot up, run a backup of critical data to a DVD-Rewritable or separate partition.
- Ghost main bootable partition to a burnable file (My bootable C: partition is only 10Gb on my HD)
- Defrag all drives.
It sounds like a lot, but the cleaning literally takes about two minutes tops when you have it down. The rest of the time is spend backing everything up, writing the backups and defragging. I also sometimes check with the Windows Update site during a defrag to make sure I’m up to date with all the patches out there and to check if there are any security problems.
If this all sounds a little over the top for a PC, consider this – your PC is your business, and without it you’re screwed. Following this regiment a PC I built five years ago is still going strong today! While you can never predict or prevent major component failure, keeping the case and fans clean will minimize the risk from heat and dust and backing up everything you need on a regular basis is never a bad idea.
It takes 30 minutes every week and it’s well worth it.
Till tomorrow, pimps!
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