CS7

Routine Maintenance of Your Hard Disk

Your hard disk needs to have routine maintenance regularly. How often depends on how much you use it. Once a month is a good place to start.

If your computer has slowed down and starts having random errors, or if some programs suddenly won't start, that's a good sign you need to give it a good checkup.

Our normal routine involves several steps, and they should be done in order.

First, check your free space and write it down. Open My Computer, right click on your hard disk icon, select Properties, and write down the amount of total disk space and free space.

Second, do a search. Find all files ending in *.tmp located anywhere on your hard drive. (Start/ Find / *.tmp). Select these files and delete them. If the computer says some are read only, it's okay to leave those.

Third, empty your recycle bin.

Fourth, run Scandisk thorough and tell it to fix errors. This will take a while. If on Windows NT you can run chkdsk. (Start / Run / chkdsk /f).

Fifth, search for files ending in *.chk. Delete them and empty the recycle bin. If you have used Norton SystemWorks the files to be deleted may end in _dd.

Sixth, and this is optional, clean up your internet cache. You can do this in Windows by opening Internet Explorer / Tools / Internet Options. Under Temporary Internet Files, delete cookies, delete files. Under History, clear history. There are other ways to do the same thing using different programs, such as Norton SystemWorks.

Seventh, run Windows Defrag or Norton Speed Disk. This also will take a while. As you use your computer, putting on and taking off files, the files become scattered all over the hard disk. The computer has to search through millions of fragments to find what it needs. Defragmenting your hard disk puts those files in contiguous order, that is, everything that goes together is stored together, thereby reducing search time required of the computer.

Eighth, open My Computer again, right click on your hard disk icon, go to Properties, and write down the amount of free space. Compare it to how much you had to start. This will tell you how much you've cleaned off.

If your computer hard disk is more than 75% full, it's time to plan on getting a larger hard disk or uninstalling some programs or deleting some data. Seldom-used data can be stored on CDs or floppy disks. The text of one entire book will fit on a floppy disk (1.44 MB). A CD holds at least 600 MB.

While you're in My Computer, look and see if you have a second hard disk. You may have a C AND a D hard disk. This may be actually only one drive partitioned into two partitions, or it could be two separate drives. If you have a D hard disk, right click on the icon, go to Properties, and write down the total drive space and the amount of free space. Some people don't know they have a second partition, or don't know how to use it, and it may be completely empty. If you have extra space on a D drive, you can use it by telling your programs to install on D instead of the default C, and saving your data on D instead of C.

If you are using a second hard drive, do the same maintenance steps on it as you did on your primary drive.

Remember, after you uninstall programs or delete data, empty your recycle bin and do Windows defrag or Norton Speed Disk again.

If you are still having problems, remove spyware. (See our previous column.) If you still have problems with random errors and slowdown, it's could be faulty RAM or motherboard. In that case, you need to have it looked at by a computer service technician.