Tips and recommendations for maintenance on your computer

System maintenance is an umbrella term that encompasses various forms of computer maintenance needed to keep a system running. The two main components of system maintenance are preventive and corrective maintenance. Preventive maintenance involves taking measures to help keep the system functioning, whereas corrective maintenance involves the replacement or repair of a system or its components after they have already failed.

Tips and tricks for successful preventive maintenance

If your computer performance seems to have become sluggish, or shuts down unexpectedly, it may be time to perform some basic computer maintenance. We suggest you perform these maintenance procedures periodically to help your computer's performance as well as being another IT security preventative measure. Here are some recommended basic computer maintenance topics:

•    Installing Current Operating System Updates
•    Clearing the Cache in your Internet Browser(s)
•    Maintaining Current Anti-Virus Software
•    Maintaining Current Malware Protection Software
•    (Windows) Running Disk Cleanup
•    MAC Maintenance Tips
•    Other Computer Maintenance and Security Recommendations

 

Installation of drivers or updates in the operating system

An important factor in keeping your computer performance its best, as well as maintaining latest security updates is to keep your operating system up-to-date with the developers’ latest patches.

• To check for updates, click on Start, select All Programs, and then select Windows Update. If there are any outstanding updates, click Install Updates button. This may require a restart after updates are finished installing.

• To check settings for Windows updates, you can click on Start, select All Programs, then select Windows Update. On the left-hand side select Change Settings and the option currently selected for installing Windows updates is listed under Important Updates.

 

 

Clearing your browser's cache(s)

Another maintenance suggestion is periodically clearing the cache (memory) and cookies from your Internet browser(s). We recommend doing this about every two weeks or so, for 2 reasons:

Clear cookies to fix

• Sign-in problems (not being able to sign-in, not being able to stay signed-in to Blackboard or MyCampus)
• Error messages about setting user cookies

Clear cache to fix

•     Pages that freeze or don't finish loading
•     Outdated pages with old content
•     Online applications that don't respond

 

Windows disk cleanup to delete files

The following procedure deletes files associated with your user account. You can also use Disk Cleanup to delete system files on your PC.
1. To open Disk Cleanup from the desktop, Click Start, point to All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and then Click Disk Cleanup.
2.  The Disk Cleanup dialog box should appear. It may take a while to detect which files can be deleted.
3.  In the Disk Cleanup dialog, select the checkboxes for the file types that you want to delete, Click OK, and then Click Delete files.
4.  The process may take a while to complete.

 

Tips and tricks for successful corrective maintenance

Hardware Corrective Maintenance is the process of making small repairs on our computer hardware, which might even include changing or replacing damaged parts with new ones. This stems from finding a failure on a part, causing our computer not to function properly and therefore not allowing us to work on it.

When buying a computer, besides from taking the model, brand, speed, storage capacity, etc. into account, we should know about the care it needs and requires.

There are two types of Hardware Corrective Maintenance:

• Planned: which refers to the maintenance given when we already know there is a flaw, but haven’t yet repaired it, and which is postponed for a certain time.

• Unplanned: this refers to the maintenance we have to do because a failure occurred, as specified in its name this is unplanned, but if we do not act we cannot work with the PC.

As with any maintenance procedure, there are certain steps we must follow to correctly replace or repair hardware, these are:

• Technical Intervention: the PC problems are analyzed; the problem is reviewed and possible solutions are sought.

•  Repair: the total replacement or repair of the component.

• Performance Testing: Once the component is replaced or repaired, tests are done with various special software to check if the piece repaired or replaced works properly.