In my experience there are too few people who know regular computer maintaince.
I have assembled this guide to help everyone from the technophobic to the l33t gamers looking to sqeeze those few extra frames.
We'll start from the commonly known and get more obscure from there.
1. Anti-Virus: An infected pc is a slow pc. Pretty much everyone knows that they should be doing regular virus scans to keep bugs at bay.
But sometimes anti-virus software can do more harm than good when it comes to performance. Most gamers will turn off thier AV protection while gaming, but majority of the time this is not necessary, so long as you have a good program.
Programs to Avoid: Norton (all of them) McAfee and the default Windows protection.
Programs I like: Avast, AVG, Kaspersky. (Both AVG and Avast have free, non trial, versions)
2. Disk Defrags: Your hard-drive is like a smiling lab, just waiting on your every whim to go and fecth stuff for you. If everything is scattered around (fragmented) its going to take much longer to load programs, load textures and no one likes watching a loading screen for 2 minutes.
The built in app that comes with Windows will do just fine, But keep in mind it usualy takes a long time, especialy if you havn't done a defrag in a long time, I sujest you turn it on before you go to bed and let it run over night.
To access this utility go to. Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defrag.
3. Temp Files: Every webpage you visit gets stored in your cache or temp folders. This includes just about everything, from pictures to advertisments on the page. Eventualy this can accumulate to become a large amount of data, potentially gigs.
Now this proberly won't cause a huge jump in speed but it'll clear useless junk off your hard-drive, which is a good thing.
The program I use to clear my temp files is CCleaner (formaly known as Crap Cleaner) and is available for free download here: http://www.ccleaner.com/
Just keep in mind that this is going to remove your browsing history and your saved passwords on webpages by default. (there are settings you can change what it removes)
4. Registry Scans. Your registry stores most of the infomation about program settings and options. But there is alot of garbage in there too, and it's almost impossible for a human to pick through all of and decide whats good and whats not. This is where CCleaner comes in again.
If you click on the Registry tab, you'll see a button that says "Scan for Issues" this will go through you entire registry finding dead keys.
If you've never done this expect to see at least 200 issues which should bring your performance up again.
*Note do a registry scan after you've installed or uninstalled software*
5. Registry Defrag. If you had alot of issues in your registry chances are the files will be all over the place, and you need to bring them back into order. This is where a Registry Defragger comes into play.
I found a free Defrager that is extremely simple to use and can be downloaded for free
here: http://download.cnet.com/Free-Registry-Defrag/3000-2094_4-10553700.html
Now this is not something you'll have to do often, once or twice a month should suffice.
6. Check Disk. Now this is something you should not do unless experiencing major slowdowns and the other utilities have no helped. What a check disk does, it goes through your entire hard-drive scanning for bad sectors and corrupted files and attempts to repair them. If you have to do this its a sign that your drive is starting to die and you should back up your data and replace the drive fairly soon.
to do a check disk: Start>Run>CMD (If under Vista right click and select run as Admin) then once your in the command prompt type in "chkdsk /r" without the quotes and then press Y when prompted.
The check disk will run the next time Windows is started and will take a long time depending on the condition of your drive. So I sujest you run this at night while you're asleep.
That's about it for regular maintenance. If you know of any good apps for keeping you're pc running fast post them I'm always interested in new toys.
Ps. Let me know if this was useful at all and if I should do others.
I have assembled this guide to help everyone from the technophobic to the l33t gamers looking to sqeeze those few extra frames.
We'll start from the commonly known and get more obscure from there.
1. Anti-Virus: An infected pc is a slow pc. Pretty much everyone knows that they should be doing regular virus scans to keep bugs at bay.
But sometimes anti-virus software can do more harm than good when it comes to performance. Most gamers will turn off thier AV protection while gaming, but majority of the time this is not necessary, so long as you have a good program.
Programs to Avoid: Norton (all of them) McAfee and the default Windows protection.
Programs I like: Avast, AVG, Kaspersky. (Both AVG and Avast have free, non trial, versions)
2. Disk Defrags: Your hard-drive is like a smiling lab, just waiting on your every whim to go and fecth stuff for you. If everything is scattered around (fragmented) its going to take much longer to load programs, load textures and no one likes watching a loading screen for 2 minutes.
The built in app that comes with Windows will do just fine, But keep in mind it usualy takes a long time, especialy if you havn't done a defrag in a long time, I sujest you turn it on before you go to bed and let it run over night.
To access this utility go to. Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defrag.
3. Temp Files: Every webpage you visit gets stored in your cache or temp folders. This includes just about everything, from pictures to advertisments on the page. Eventualy this can accumulate to become a large amount of data, potentially gigs.
Now this proberly won't cause a huge jump in speed but it'll clear useless junk off your hard-drive, which is a good thing.
The program I use to clear my temp files is CCleaner (formaly known as Crap Cleaner) and is available for free download here: http://www.ccleaner.com/
Just keep in mind that this is going to remove your browsing history and your saved passwords on webpages by default. (there are settings you can change what it removes)
4. Registry Scans. Your registry stores most of the infomation about program settings and options. But there is alot of garbage in there too, and it's almost impossible for a human to pick through all of and decide whats good and whats not. This is where CCleaner comes in again.
If you click on the Registry tab, you'll see a button that says "Scan for Issues" this will go through you entire registry finding dead keys.
If you've never done this expect to see at least 200 issues which should bring your performance up again.
*Note do a registry scan after you've installed or uninstalled software*
5. Registry Defrag. If you had alot of issues in your registry chances are the files will be all over the place, and you need to bring them back into order. This is where a Registry Defragger comes into play.
I found a free Defrager that is extremely simple to use and can be downloaded for free
here: http://download.cnet.com/Free-Registry-Defrag/3000-2094_4-10553700.html
Now this is not something you'll have to do often, once or twice a month should suffice.
6. Check Disk. Now this is something you should not do unless experiencing major slowdowns and the other utilities have no helped. What a check disk does, it goes through your entire hard-drive scanning for bad sectors and corrupted files and attempts to repair them. If you have to do this its a sign that your drive is starting to die and you should back up your data and replace the drive fairly soon.
to do a check disk: Start>Run>CMD (If under Vista right click and select run as Admin) then once your in the command prompt type in "chkdsk /r" without the quotes and then press Y when prompted.
The check disk will run the next time Windows is started and will take a long time depending on the condition of your drive. So I sujest you run this at night while you're asleep.
That's about it for regular maintenance. If you know of any good apps for keeping you're pc running fast post them I'm always interested in new toys.
Ps. Let me know if this was useful at all and if I should do others.
