Home PC maintenance Guide #1 /Making your PC run faster/

Well, I'm not having much time on the computer at the moment, as you know.
So here's a little guide I made to Home PC maintenance.

See, I don't JUST know graphics

Okay, here it is.


Your PC is a complex, and sensitive peice of equipment. It needs regular attention to keep it ticking-over nice and smoothly. So here's how to keep your comp in great order.
(Before you try any of these tasks that involve deleting files, make sure you make a backup of whats on your computer. I will make another guide on how to do this when I have abit more time.

REMOVE SOFTWARE YOU DON'T USE

Take a regular note of which programs you never use. Having lots of unnecessary software takes up disk space, and slows down you PC, somtimes dramaticly, sometimes minor.

To remove software you don't use, go to Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs. You'll see a list of all the software on your PC.
Highlight the software that you want to uninstall, and click Change/Remove to launch the uninstall wizard - But don't uninstall anything you're unsure of (Like JDK or something) A wizard (A type of step-by-step program to doing several things, such as Unzipping, installing, uninstalling etc..) will guide you through the process.
You can remove more unused files from your computer with the Windows Disk Cleanup:Go to
Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and click Disk Cleanup from the list of utilities.

Disk Cleanup will run for a few moments, then present a list of files rhat could be removed, grouped by type. The ones with ticked boxes next to them are completley save to remove, while others can be removed if you choose them.

Click on the category name to see a description, and select View Fles to see it list of the files in each category. To remove any of the other categories of file, put a tick in the box next to it and click OK. You'll get a message asking you to confirm. Click yes.

In Disk Cleanup you can also compress old files so that they take up less room on your hard disk. You'll find this option if you run Disk Cleanup as described above and then scroll to the bottom of the list.

That took me ages to write up :S

I will write Home PC maintenance Guide #2 /Computer Organization/ next week, as I don't have much time on the computer this week.

If there's any mistakes, or something needs to be added, post here, because I'll pop in a few times to see how things are getting on.

Hope you found it useful,
Yours,
Nath