The Computer Maintenance Page

NOTE: Due to the high resolution images featured on this web site, you may have some images that may fail to load completely. To force these images to load again do the following: First locate each of the images that failed to load. This will look like a box with a small square in the upper left corner.  Right Click over this box and select "Show Image", the image will now attempt to load. If the image is missing it will immediately return to the box shape, if it finds an image allow it a few seconds to shoe up on your screen. You will have to repeat this step on all the images that failed to load. This problem is most prevalent on slower internet connections.

I have been working with personal computers since IBM introduced it's first PC in the 80s. Much of this experience is in computer's hardware. I have extensive experience with motherboards, hard drives, ram and video cards. I also have experience with various printers including maintenance. At one of my jobs I was responsible for keeping 300 computers running some of these were used by geologists working in the oil exploration field. These systems had dual 21" monitors connected to systems with special video cards and a lot of ram. My challenge was to keep these systems running with little or no system crashes. I developed lasting friendships with these geologists.

The following products are some of the computer maintenance software programs I use and highly recommend. I run this list of software often sometimes every other day. This list of programs keeps my computer running smoothly and crash free. The more junk and advertising programs and viruses you have on your computer the less disk space you have and the slower your system runs. And a virus can cause damage to your system files. I also recommend doing backups to CDR or DVD disks as often as possible. After working in the computer field for so many years the one thing that sticks out in my mind is backups. If my computer were to die today, I would loose only a few files, because I back up my important data files about once a week. And every day on the web site and programming files as they change daily. At one of my jobs I was responsible for setting up the companies disaster recovery plan, and guess what, backups are the number one most important item in disaster recovery, without backups you do not have recovery.

Privacy Guardian


This software cleans up your Document History, Search History, Run History, Temporary files and recycle Bin. It also cleans up your History files and cache files along with your cookies, downloaded programs no longer needed and a variety of other files and lists. Run this program every time you access the internet.
http://www.pctools.com/privacy-guardian/support.php?version=3.2.0.19

TuneUp Utilities 2004 (or its newer version)




I run several different programs as each program does different things. Some programs get certain things taken care while others get different things done in a different way. This program cleans up my junk data from the hard disk to recover some of my disk space. Then I run the TuneUp Registry Cleaner to take care of my all-important Registry. Your computer will not run if this file gets damaged. This program creates a backup of this important file with an option to recover it.

WinASO Registry Optimizer



This program repairs my registry errors and removes the junk form the registry. It can also adjust your registry and speed up your computer. It will restore more than 70 items from your Internet Explorer's settings. Some times my USB devices get hosed up and this program always fixes that for me.
www.winaso.com

Ad-Aware SE


I use this program to rid my computer of all the adware programs that advertising companies install on your computer. Every time I visit the internet I find several of these little adware programs installed on my computer taking up valuable resources and stealing my personal data. I have found as many as 50 of these programs running on my computer at one time, But usually only find a few. These programs log personal data about what you do on the internet, what you buy and where you've been surfing, then they send that information to the advertising companies who direct advertising to you based on these results.
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/

Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security 

And perhaps the most important program of all is your Antivirus protection. Without this your computer  will be dead in no time. Everyone has their own choice of Antivirus and most of them are just as good. I prefer Norton because I have been using it for so long and have fewer conflicts with other programs with it. You can purchase this as an all in one version or get the Anti Virus and Internet Security as separate programs. I prefer the all in one program because it takes less memory than running two programs.
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/download/pages/US-N95.html

AVG Anti-Virus

This is a free version of the AVG software. I'm not sure if you can find a copy of this online now or not. This version is still supported for it's Virus definition files. I use this one and scan periodically to see if Norton missed any viruses on my computer. This program found one nasty virus that Norton missed.

Disk Defragmenter

Use this program about once a month. It will defrayment your hard disk, drastically speeding up your computers disk access times which in tern speed up you computer. In day to day operation the disk in you computer becomes fragmented, meaning to access all of one file the disk has to go to several different locations on the physical disk surface to find all the parts of your file. When you defrayment the disk you put all the parts of all the files back together in one string of data. Thus the disk drive only has to go to one location to find the entire file and upload it to the system buss, thus speeding up your computer.

Remember every time you access the internet and go to certain web pages especially those that are support by advertising you will have these adware programs loaded onto your computer, and some times you can even snag a virus. Whenever I am on the internet I see several messages from Norton stating that an attempt to hijack my computer had been stopped. Don't forget to run a scan every once in a while to see if any viruses got past Norton and are now active.

All of these programs have been heavily tested in our Internet Cafe in Bogo Philippines and also My business partner's brother's Computer shop in Canada. We have found them to be reliable in daily use.

More later...