When a person is on their computer as much as I am there are sometimes that you can tell when something just isn’t doing what it’s suppose to be doing or you catch yourself saying to yourself wonder why it did that – well I drop what I’m doing and get out my maintenance checklist.
In answering support tickets, I hear so many people having issues with a variety of things and there don’t seems to be any logical reason – well when that happens to me the first thing I do is stop everything that I’m doing and do what I call my maintenance. Now I know you don’t expect your vehicle to keep running smooth without after a certain amount of miles – you stop and do maintenance.
You computer is your vehicle and even tho you have an anti-virus system on board – it’s like the vehicle you drive – things happen. After all the miles you put on your vehicle, when you are using that vehicle everyday – you can just tell when something just isn’t right – well that is how I feel about my online vehicle – go by your gut – if it’s doing things that are just not normal and you are thinking why did it do that – do your maintenance.
Maintenance Checklist
1. Clean all your cookies
2. Clean your history, all temp files, caches
3. Run your anti-virus (I know you are thinking I have it on auto to run – well run it again)
4. Run Malewarebytes
5. Run Spybot
6. Reboot, test your computer again still not acting right
7. Do all of the above in the safe mode (when booting up hit F8 and that will get you to the safe mode)
8. Reboot, and test your computer again
Now when I get to this point and it still doesn’t seem to be right then I go and bring out the big guns lololol Run ESET online scanner. The last time I ran this after all the other security that I have this program found 2 Trojans and 6 other things that I had no clue what they were – after that cleaning – knock on wood – my computer has been lot faster, has been working great and don’t see those strange things happening.
So hope this helps you to at least know some things to try when things just don’t seem right with your computer. To keep this handy, I just opened notepad and copied all these things to do so this forgetful mind don’t miss a step and named it Maintenance Checklist.
I wish you had written this blog post 6 months ago!!!! LOL
Thanks for sharing this info with everyone, it is very sound advice that everyone should have and use.
And a personal thank you for sharing some of this info with me personally a few months back, you saved the day. Your the best Nancy.
Thanks Big JohnG – I know I should have gotten this out sooner – it’s been on the list of things to do and write about – I need another 24 hours in a day lol
Good points, though I wonder why not save time and use the big gun first?
Good question and the answer is you are only allowed so many times to use this for free before you have to pay for it – so I stretch it out as much as I can hehehe
Nancy this is some great information.
Thanks for sharing this checklist- it should come in handy for many- including me! 🙂
You welcome Cathy – with as much as we rely on our online vehicle – this is a must 🙂
Three very good tools for your computer toolbox, Nancy. Thanks for sharing.
You welcome Rick and hope they help you as much as they have me.
Computer maintenance is something usually overlooked by many until it’s too late, then you either get that dreaded blue screen of death or your pc just does its own thing no matter what you tell it to do.
I either run ccleaner ( http://www.piriform.com ) to clear out all the web and application toot before I shut down and then when I reboot I again go into ccleaner and run the registry scan OR I use ASC Ultimate (Advanced System Cleaner from http://www.iobit.com ) which does a full scan and repair of pretty much everything and also comes with Anti Virus and Real Time Protection. I purchased a full license but it does have a Free version which still cleans the basic stuff out just slightly less options. I usually set it to shut down the pc once cleaning is finished, then on reboot it carries out a disc scan and boot check before drivers are loaded up.
One thing that would be worth mentioning as part of the PC maintenance – defrag your hard drives. This will help keep things organised and more readily available when you click to open a file or start a program. There are some good free defrag programs out there that are far better than the standard windows one.
Smart Defrag 2.0 – From IOBit – http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.php
Or
Defraggler – From Piriform – http://www.piriform.com/defraggler
Also make sure that you delete all the useless or unused programs that you have on your pc and look to see if you have unwanted resources running in the background…do you really need to have auto updaters running? Beware of what you disable if you go down this route, I would recommend only if you’re a mid to advanced user. But a quick and safe way would be to look at the task bar and see what is running, if you don’t need it running then right click on it and see if there is an option to exit the program.
I’m sure there’s plenty more to think about but definately stick with Nancy’s check list and add defragging now and then.
Regards
Craig
Thanks Craig – glad to see you have a great maintenance checklist – thanks for sharing
Thanks Nancy, I can always use a new tool for my computer’s toolbox. This will definitely come in handy.
You welcome Sheila and I’m a techie person so need this kind of checklist.
Hi, I’m new in this site, and I was wondering what are square banners, if today is regular banners? Hope this is not a foolish question, bur kind of confused me. LOVE your site.
Hi Evelyn and thanks for the question and no it’s not foolish and glad that you asked – the Square Banners are usually 125×125 in size and the regular banners are 468×60 and here are samples of each
this is regular banner
this is square banner
Thanks Nancy, this will help me.
Lady V
You welcome as I know it has helped me to keep going
CC Cleaner should take care of the first couple of steps, and the Tools section will allow you to uninstall unwanted stuff. Also Process Explorer gives you a thorough list of all processes running, much better than Task Manager.
Thanks Howard and always love hearing what other people use