PC Maintenance tips and advice

[Zero Serenity]

Would have been great to know how to do some four years ago. Anyway, I do want to contest something about the dust. For those of us with open air cases, regular cleaning is good to do. This goes double if anyone in your household smokes. I've opened cases caked in brown dust I can best describe as tobacco smoke.

 

[Digitaldreamer7]

One thing worth mentioning: If you're using one of those crazy-high end, stupid expensive "gaming rigs" that has SSD instead of hard drives, then for the love of all that's holy, DON'T DEFRAG IT. If your using a modern filesystem (NTFS, Ext3, etc..) you really don't need to do it anyway, but the wear it causes per sector of data... wow.

This. Also turn off indexing. For some reason.. in all the shit windows 7 does when it recognizes a SSD, the one thing it DOESN'T do is turn off indexing and the page file.

I just want to point out to people that believes ssd will break if you rewrite more then 1gb a day.

I've used my ssd for about a year, and all my steam and other downloads goes through it and considering I download around 0.5tb on a normal month( at least) and it's still at 100% health so no it will not break from a pagefile.

and I have an estimated lifetime: 8 years 5 months 17 days.

It might not break, but it will extend that life by a big margin. Also, if you have the ram to spare it's a performance increase to run things through ram as opposed to your SSD. SSD run's on 3 or 6 gbps sata as opposed to ram itself running on the system bus. If you have a high end rig the system bus will be more capable of higher speeds then your sata ports

 

[octafish]

I bought two SSDs, both 120Gbs. One I use in my Desktop for my boot drive, it makes very little difference in reducing boot times over my old WD Black drive maybe knocking a second or two off startup time. However I have my Adobe suite installed to that drive and it knocks about four seconds off the boot-up time for Photoshop (there are a lot of Plug-ins it has to run through). It is fucking magic! Don't buy a SSD to decrease boot times, do buy one to make applications more responsive. The other SSD I bought is a much cheaper one, I put it in my netbook so that I can walk around using it without the inertial disk saver pausing the platter. Hell, even mild turbulence on a 727 would cause my old HDD to pause and splutter in an extremely annoying fashion.

I store a lot of data and redundancy is my friend. I have copies on DVD, two copies on different drives in my desktop, copies in my NAS (which runs RAID 1) and a system backup on two e-SATA drives that I run monthly and swap between my parents house and home.

I clean my filters six monthly and internal components only every 12 months or so, I really don't get much dust anymore despite my computer room being a pretty dusty room. I think positive pressure combined with good filtration contributes to this (more fans blowing in than blowing out). The biggest difference I have found though is getting the case off the ground, cut so much dust just being on a foot high riser

 

[Saulkar]

Yup, got all those points covered, except the backup. I will be buying a couple of new HDrive soon to hold all my backup information.

 

[player3141]

NEVER move your photos from your hard drive, onto CDs/DVDs, especially if that is your only copy of them.
You could
1. Move them to a cloud service (google picasa)
2. Put them on an external Hard Drive (as you suggested)

DVDs/CDs weren't designed for long term storage, and are generally unreliable compared to a Hard Drive.

 

[evilneko]

defragging is still required to get top performance, even in 2012. When I was at lionhead, we did tests rebooting, loading the game, then rebooting, defragging, rebooting again and loading the game. there was a BIG differenc in load speed. We tested it! That was under XP.

Microsoft will kid you Windows 7 doesn't need defragging. i remember the first time they made that claim, with windows New technology (now known as windows NT, before XP, before 2000, before vista, before 7).
It was bullshit then, and it has been ever since. People arrogantly claim it makes no difference, but they haven't tested it.
Games files are big, they are often scattered, defragging helps.

Is there any way I could see some hard numbers on this? I've never been a big believer in defrag, as I've never actually observed any improvement in my systems. Whenever I go looking for data supporting the idea of defrag, all I ever find is stuff put out by individuals and companies with a vested interest in getting you to buy a product.

NEVER move your photos from your hard drive, onto CDs/DVDs, especially if that is your only copy of them.
You could
1. Move them to a cloud service (google picasa)
2. Put them on an external Hard Drive (as you suggested)

DVDs/CDs weren't designed for long term storage, and are generally unreliable compared to a Hard Drive.

Your average Cyanine-dye DVDR/CDR will have a shelf life of about ten years, longer if properly stored. The main thing is to label your optical media with the year and keep them in a cool, dark place.

Media using other dyes generally last much, much longer.

External hard drives are prone to heat death, and hard drives left powered down for long periods of time...may not survive when powered back up.

 

[JesterRaiin]

Great Jester. You can do that yourself. Now can you instruct somebody with no backups to do that over the phone with somebody not as technologically savy as you? Seven hours isn't my record call (it's 8) but even so. You have to realize I worked in tech support with some of the dumbest people out there.

Sure, sure Mr. There's ME. It's them who are wrong. You're awesome and everything you say is nothing but words of pure wisdom. At least in the wonderful place you call your own inner world.
Your story is bullsh*t, you're inefficient technician that knows sh*t about tech support, and on top of that - you're a liar.

I'm done with you. G'day.

--------------------------------

External hard drives are prone to heat death, and hard drives left powered down for long periods of time...may not survive when powered back up.

I am sure i saw some article about this in CHIP, PC WORLD or similar magazine. The conclusion was like you said (a little surprising) : data storage devices like HDDs are better working 24/7 than safely stored in the vault.

OT :
Some time ago i've found some on-line tool that allowed to select applications from the list and create single installer that both downloads newest versions and installs them. There were useful tools like said RECUVA, Firefox, REVO, CCLeaner and similar.

Unfortunately the site is down (i believe it was reinstall.com). Does anyone knows similar site ? I think it could be very useful tool for everyone trying to format and re install OS...

 

[evilneko]

OT :
Some time ago i've found some on-line tool that allowed to select applications from the list and create single installer that both downloads newest versions and installs them. There were useful tools like said RECUVA, Firefox, REVO, CCLeaner and similar.

Unfortunately the site is down (i believe it was reinstall.com). Does anyone knows similar site ? I think it could be very useful tool for everyone trying to format and re install OS...

I don't know the site, but I think my latest idea for how to get up and running after a reinstall is better than that. Portable versions of everything. Keep 'em on a separate partition from the OS and they're ready to go the instant you're done reinstalling.

 

[JesterRaiin]

Unfortunately the site is down (i believe it was reinstall.com). Does anyone knows similar site ? I think it could be very useful tool for everyone trying to format and re install OS...

I don't know the site, but I think my latest idea for how to get up and running after a reinstall is better than that. Portable versions of everything. Keep 'em on a separate partition from the OS and they're ready to go the instant you're done reinstalling.

Ummm, please excuse me my fellow Escapist, but are you mocking me ?
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.337836.13662812

Of course i'm talking about first part of this post - the rest is, ah, you know... irrelevant.

 

[esperandote]

This is what i use (All free):

Avast!: Good antivirus, allows boot scanning before the viruses load.
EliStarA: Just run app to remove malware infections and enable whatever option or menu the malware disabled (like task manager or internet options).
CCleaner: To delete temp files, cookies, browsing history, recycle bin and clean the registry.
Defragler: To defrag the drive once i know i've deleted and writen lots of files.
Panda Usb Vaccine: Disables your pc from executing autoruns thus avoiding any infection caused by that. it also injects a read only autorun to any removable media you plug (optionally) so it won't get inffected in other computers.
Recuva: In case i want to recover delete files even after the drive was formated or the partion was lost (I believe).

I clean computers with a vaccum cleaner that blows too. Just clear the fans and heatsinks and use a brush for sticked dirt.
I uninstall all toolbars (google being the only exception) and all registry "boosters".
I personaly like to set the browsers home pages to blank to reduce loading times.

And for the love of God update IE to the higher version possible (v8 for xp, v9 for vista and 7). But that might already be covered in OP enable windows updates part.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Just a little aside - I'm using Avira, and I'm really considering swapping for Avast! or AVG. If anyone else uses Avira, I'd like to know if they can back me up on this; but I'm getting a ridiculous amount of false positives. The AV keeps targeting files and drivers I know to be a hundred percent legit and uninfected and designates them as malware and/or viruses.

Even on its lightest settings, Avira's detection engine seems to be a tad paranoid, overall.

 

[Laughing Man]

Nice. I also like how it didn't spend three pages yammering on about Windows Update, which as far as I can tell breaks as much as it fixes. I've found the only people who need the 'security' patches Microsoft puts out are the ones who download shit like Banzai Buddy and wonder why Norton is shitting itself. Anyone remotely competent regarding not downloading and/or installing stupid shit and running an anti-virus that isn't Norton or McAffee does not need those updates bloating up their OS.

Total and utter non sense, MS stick the updates out there for a reason and in all the years I have used a computers I have always left the system to do auto updates and then number of times an update has left my computer in any state that was worse than before the update can be counted on the fingers of a man with no hands.

As for McAfee and Norton the hate is rubbish as well, their general security is on par with most of the free stuff and whilst they may be 'bloated' on a system with quad core and 4gig if your AV is causing any level of noticeable performance degradation then you got issues beyond what kind of AV you are using.

Recent Virus Bulletin tests

http://www.virusbtn.com/news/2008/09_02

Norton and Mcafee both score comparably to other AV products both free and paid for.

I am not saying buy Mcafee or Norton because their are free versions out there that do the job and are... well... free. I am just saying the hate for them is outdated and mostly ill informed.

 

[evilneko]

-snip-

While I agree with you the McAfee/Norton hate is outdated and no longer reflects reality--their products have been much improved for some time now--I'll have to absolutely disagree with you about an antivirus package's ability to make a noticeable impact on system performance.

A few months back I decided to try out each of the three best-known freebies, Avira, AVG, and Avast. AVG was an absolute dog on my system, which incidentally...is a quad core. I'm talking about general responsiveness and load times here. Once an application was running it was ok, but starting programs and even opening the start menu were slowed down significantly. (For anyone who's curious: Avast won out and Avira was squarely in the middle)

When suggesting an antivirus I always recommend people take advantage of free trial versions, because every system is different and what sucks for one person might be fine for another. As (presumably) a gamer, you should know that quite well. After all, how many people had a hell of a time with, say, Fallout 3 and how many had no problems at all? (Lucky for me, I fall pretty much in the middle, all my problems were caused by mods rather than the game itself) Heck, there's a guy on this very forum having a problem with Skyrim that flabbergasts me, since Skyrim's been about the most stable and least glitchy Bethesda game I've ever played on my system.

 

[JesterRaiin]

I'd like to know if they can back me up on this; but I'm getting a ridiculous amount of false positives.

Yeah. Lots of false positives in both free and premium version.
I'm also not fond of Kaspersky because i think that it's both shi**y product and i disagree with the way their boss perceives future of the Internet.
Around here Avast antivirus is very popular. While it's not the worst software, there are problems with its uninstallation. I witnessed more than a few cases of serious problems thanks to this piece of sh*t.

I encourage people to try COMODO security pack.
It's not the best product available, but it's without any doubt best that "money can buy".

Total and utter non sense
(snip)

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-windows_update/blue-screen-error-0x0000007b-in-windows-xp-after/73cea559-ebbd-4274-96bc-e292b69f2fd1

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vista-system/laptop-hangsfreezes-after-auto-update-and-reboot/ea9783d9-4f08-4148-8acf-a8b4c0cd789c

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_other-windows_update/problems-after-security-update-for-windows-7/5a88185a-10df-46d7-b64d-3ebbcd5887d1

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_install/windows-live-mail-not-responding-after-update/ef0f9e3a-1b4b-4923-9dda-1b27191300f3

Further searching :
"Auto updates crash Windows"

The amount of answers suggest that there is indeed some risk involved in letting your windows auto-update itself.

Sir, you don't know what you're talking about. It seems that in fact you're treating your own, subjective experience as one, universal truth. That's called "projection" if i'm not mistaking. There's no guarantee that everyone out there will be as lucky as you were.
Please, DO remember that some people out there aren't just gamers or geeks. Some use computers for serious job and they CAN NOT RISK sudden death of their computer.

 

[keideki]

I've had friends loose multiple PCs to internal dust fires. I cannot stress enough that people need to get inside the computer from time to time and clean it out.

@OP: Thank you for taking the time to post this sort of info.

 

[ohnoitsabear]

The amount of answers suggest that there is indeed some risk involved in letting your windows auto-update itself.

Sir, you don't know what you're talking about. It seems that in fact you're treating your own, subjective experience as one, universal truth. That's called "projection" if i'm not mistaking. There's no guarantee that everyone out there will be as lucky as you were.
Please, DO remember that some people out there aren't just gamers or geeks. Some use computers for serious job and they CAN NOT RISK sudden death of their computer.

Yes, it is possible for Windows updates to cause computer problems. However, the risk of an update destroying your computer is probably much lower than if you didn't update.

The thing is, a vast majority of updates for operating systems (and web browsers, which you should also always update) are security updates. It is fairly easy to see what an update does, and people who write malicious software will look at this information and use it to write software to exploit the security flaws of the unupdated version. This puts unupdated operating systems at much higher risk than updated ones.

In addition, if an update does cause problems for a computer, it is always possible to roll back to a previous version, provided the computer can boot into safe mode. Even if it can't, it is still possible to boot into the last successful boot configuration, so an update will never cause irreversible damage to a computer.

And computers that absolutely cannot under any circumstances go down probably don't need to be connected to the internet, and therefore shouldn't be. Therefore, the computer not only can't update, but shouldn't need to.

tldr: UPDATES GOOD.

 

[JesterRaiin]

The amount of answers suggest that there is indeed some risk involved in letting your windows auto-update itself.

Sir, you don't know what you're talking about. It seems that in fact you're treating your own, subjective experience as one, universal truth. That's called "projection" if i'm not mistaking. There's no guarantee that everyone out there will be as lucky as you were.
Please, DO remember that some people out there aren't just gamers or geeks. Some use computers for serious job and they CAN NOT RISK sudden death of their computer.

Yes, it is possible for Windows updates to cause computer problems. However, the risk of an update destroying your computer is probably much lower than if you didn't update.

Proof.

I'm not against updating system, however i think it's better to download and install service packs instead of auto updates. Please disprove that statement. I'm open to discussion as long as serious arguments are involved.

 

[Knusper]

I was going to make a thread asking about this, but I may as well just use your advice (please). My computer occasionally has a problem where when it turns on during the Windows loading screen or before, it restarts again and again. If I turn off the power and come back alter it's usually fine. I noticed it's my graphics card which is restarting each time, as its fan starts up spinning again and some LEDs flash like it's booting up.

The issue is it doesn't appear that dusty. I checked the ATI website and I found a list of power supplies that work well with ATI products, and I was wondering how far that is just marketing with partnered companies, because my one is 750W so it should be fine.

I've only got 2 GB of RAM (for shame) so that might be the issue, but it took a couple of years for it to start doing it so I doubt it. My processor's heat sink is quite dusty so maybe it's affecting the graphics card I don't know. Which, if any, of these do you think is the issue?

Thanks for making this thread, good reminder to defrag.

 

[Wintermoot]

And don't jam your penis into any sockets or gaps, as fun as it may seem.

do you talk from experience?
OT
this should be stickied.