Comments on: A Very Basic Guide to PC Care

By: Dale

Dale — Sun, 17 May 2009 04:12:08 +0000

If you defragment weekly/too often, you’re just going to give the hard disk unnecessary wear and tear. Use a program like Smart Defrag 1.11 to at least see what the fragmentation status is, and go from there.

By: mrrossi

mrrossi — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:56:53 +0000

Or, just get a mac.
None of the points above would improve your system on a mac because there is nothing that would slow down your Computer.(except the firewall, but who needs software firewalls anyway..)

Sorry, I did it again when I was a PC usere some years ago I hated thes guys who postet just to say how much better a mac is, until I said to myself lets give it a try. Now, I would never switch back.

By: Mark - PBM

Mark - PBM — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:14:45 +0000

Thank you, Skellie, for your advice on how to better care for my computer!

One place I go to when I have problems with my PC is called Geeks To Go. Those folks are very helpful and great to work with. You can find them at http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/

By: Simonne

Simonne — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 13:18:47 +0000

Hi Anthony, thank you for your input. I didn’t know how important is to use two firewalls. I’m using an external one only because my router has it, but I had no idea I needed it.

As of defrag, my tool almost always says I need to do it (probably I use some programs which fragment the files a lot).

By: Anthony Lawrence

Anthony Lawrence — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:50:31 +0000

Also: defragging? Hardly ever necessary nowadays, and the defrag tool it self will tell you that if you ask it to “analyze”. Almost always it will say you don’t need to defrag..

By: Anthony Lawrence

Anthony Lawrence — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:46:35 +0000

I need to comment about the firewall advice:

First, you should never, ever be relying 100% on a software firewall on your PC. You should always be using an external firewall that sits between your internet connection and your pc(s). Nothing wrong with using both, but the external is critical.

Second, mis-configured local firewalls can be the *source* of problems, so temporarily shutting them off is an important debugging too.

By: Walking The Talk: 12 Guest-Posts

Walking The Talk: 12 Guest-Posts — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 23:03:33 +0000

[...] A Very Basic Guide to PC Care @ All Tips And Tricks [...]

By: Dael

Dael — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 04:04:42 +0000

A little addition about Windows XP built-in firewall. It even can't filter any outobund traffic! So, in case of security, I prefer to use time-proved Agnitum Outpost Security Suite. With all its firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware I feel myself well secured while online on my laptop.

By: Simonne

Simonne — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:04:23 +0000

Hey, Apollo, thanks for the tips. I defragment weekly. As far as I’ve noticed, using WordPress leaves a lot of strange files in the computer.

By: Apollo

Apollo — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 16:38:49 +0000

Running disk cleanup and defragging regularly (~ per week or so) is good practice for maintaining your PC. If you are a power user, then maybe defrag every 2-3 days. These days I use Diskeeper Professional for defragmenting. It has an automatic mode that is very convenient – just switch it on and forget about it, diskeeper automatically analyzes and defragments my drives when fragmentation has crossed a critical threshold. Good software.