With the passing of the holiday season recently, many of us are assessing our finances and vowing to be more efficient in the New Year. Making money stretch is an important financial skill as well as maintaining our expensive assets, which is a big component in any responsible budget. Your new computer is one of those assets that need to be properly serviced and kept in order to last for many years. Neglected machines need to be replaced every year, or else they become unbearable slow and miserable to use. Fortunately, there are simple steps that can be taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen on your computer.

Keep Away from the Window

When setting up your new computer, please avoid positioning it near a window. Sometimes it looks like an ideal set-up, since a desk facing a window provides a soothing view of your property, but windows cause a special danger to the computer, which could significantly reduce their age. From our experience, windows attract the most moisture and dust of any area in a room.

The difference in temperature between the inside of your home and the outside world causes the moisture in the air to collect in and around the window. Therefore, having a computer right against it can draw moisture, dust, and mold into the hardware. Needless to say, introducing such unwanted material into your machine can slowly vanquish it over time.

Vacuum Out the Dust inside Your Computer Case

Even if you avoid placing your computer near a window, all machines slowly collect dirt and dust inside of their case. The cooling fans inside of the case are always spinning when the computer is on, drawing in air from around the room. This happens even faster when the computer sitting on or very close to the floor, as carpets and rugs are natural collectors of lint and dust. Left unaddressed, this material can be gathered in huge quantities, contributing to computer crashes and hardware breakdown.

Never allow dirt to attack your computer and destroying it from the inside out. Instead, take a small shop vacuum with hose attachments for cleaning small, fragile areas. Every six months, undo the screws on your computer case and vacuum out the dust that have accumulated on the hardware. This will help ensure the longevity of your hardware and keep your machine operating like a brand new stuff for a long time.

Defrag Your Hard Drive Regularly

The longer a computer is used, the more “fragmented” its hard drive becomes. This means that related files get scattered around and the system should take longer time to find them when you use the programs. This contributes to lagging, freezing, and general system slowness. To overcome this problem, you need to defrag it, as you have noticed, your computer comes with a defrag utility known as “Disk Defragmenter” in the Microsoft Windows operating system that moves and sorts those files in your hard drive together and dramatically speeds up the whole user experience.

A complete system defrag usually takes a good bit of time, sometimes an hour or more depending on the size of your drive and the amount of stuffs you have stored on it. Schedule a time to defrag your machine once a month, and set it to run when you are going to use it (for example, before you go to sleep or go to work in the morning). Routine maintenance of your hard drive will make your programs loading and running as smooth as the first day you brought it home.

Install a Registry Maintenance Tool

The Windows Registry is a heart of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It is an often neglected part of your operating system that requires sound maintenance to run at optimal performance. The Registry is the part of your system where every program stores its settings, and each setting is known as a key. The problem is that as you installing and delete software over and over, many registry keys get left behind from old programs you no longer use. These junk keys clog up the registry and cause the system to become slower and slower.

To maintain optimal system performance, you should install a registry maintenance tool and run scheduled, monthly cleanings. By doing this, you will keep your system’s registry running at peak performance for the life of your computer.

Real-Time Virus Scanners

Real-time virus scanners are your first line of defense against the malicious/dangerous programs that threaten to destroy your new computer. Viruses almost always come from online activities, and are usually installed on your computer from an infected download. Unfortunately, the reality is that you can never be sure which download is safe, and which could be dangerous. You might think you’re downloading a brand new game, and before you know it your computer is under siege from a virus infection.

This is why a real-time scanner is required for responsible computing. If you rely on a manual scanner (i.e., one that you have to run every time you use it) you will only catch viruses that have already infected your computer and broken pieces of the operating system. Real-time scanner is always running and will prevent infections before they take over your computer.

Install an Anti-Spyware Tool

Although spyware is not quite as prevalent as it was in the early-mid 2000’s, it is still a threat that demands your proactive attention. Spyware behaves much like a virus, installing itself through non-consensual and hidden download tactics and spreading through the computer’s operating system once there. Spyware keep displaying unwanted advertising, editing system settings without your permission, installing other software, and moreover, it can slow your computer to a halt at its worst. Some of the really malicious Spyware-variants even harvest personal data, such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc, and send them back to their inventor for purposes of identity theft.

Most of the virus scanners come with anti-spyware software as well, but it is always a safe bet to keep a separate anti-spyware tool installed as well for extra protection. In addition, Anti-spyware tool is much like anti-virus software, you will need to keep your program’s definitions up to date to remain protected against the latest infections to hit the web.

Set a Stand-by Timer

Leaving your computer running for days on end can wear down your hardware components and contribute to system crashes. However, constant shutting down and start up of the computer forces it to heat up and cool down several times per day, which is also hazardous for the computer. The best way to handle it when you aren’t using your computer is to set a stand-by timer. This is an easy system setting that puts your computer into sleep mode when you don’t use it for a certain amount of time (usually around 20-30 minutes).

Sleep mode powers down most of your moving components (such as the hard drive) and screen, keeping only the least settings on so that your desktop can be recalled quickly when you return to the keyboard. This is not only protects the integrity of the system, it also saves electricity, thus saving the settings to activate. Of course, a good system restart is good for the machine every couple of days, so be sure to reboot it several times each week.