Pc General Care
General care for a Pc system comes down to a matter of knowing a few common sense
maintenance tips.
A Clean Desktop
While the philosophical debate of a clean desktop rages on far beyond the virtual world, here
in the realm of Pcs it's simply a technical fact. Too much junk on your computer's
desktop will cause it to slow down, and it can prevent you from loading your
desktop.
The name and basic information of every file on your computer desktop is sitting in
system memory. An inventory of everything on your desktop is constantly in the
back of your computers mind.
Think of it this way, the more you put on the desktop, or in folders on the
desktop, the more system resources that are required to keep a tally of it all.
I've seen people accidentally unzip a stack of photos straight onto their
desktop. They couldn't open that desktop properly after that. It was
simply too much for the system to handle, and it ran so slow it was futile to
try and fix it directly.
The only cure at this point was to use the administrator's desktop to cut and
paste all the photos to a folder not on anyone's desktop. It caused a bit of a
pain, but there was no real harm done.
Sometimes the operating system (OS) will crash completely; file and file system damage can
occur. Right there we have a legitimate risk of data loss.
So keep your real desktop as you like, your Pc won't care. Unless you block its
cooling vents that is! But keep your virtual desktop neat and tidy. Keep your
files elsewhere on the hard drive, or on a USB key, and just put 'shortcuts' to them
on your desktop.
Please, take out the trash. More precisely, empty the recycle bin! It'
not nearly as bad as having an overloaded desktop, but it can and does cause
slowdowns.
Not to mention, your drives won't report the correct amount of free space.
Remember, that stuff in the recycle bin is still on the hard drive, and it
takes up just as much space.
General browser Care
The big thing with browsers is the temporary or cache files.
While these files do make it faster to load sites we visit often, and indeed a
browser without a cache could be terribly slow, too much is still a bad thing.
With too many files in our cache, the web browser can start to become much
slower, especially on initial start up. The browser's history cache can also
become a cumbersome beast that needs to be cleaned out as well.
While the tools used to clear the cache do vary from browser to browser, and to
a lesser degree, between browser versions, I will provide you with quick click-through for Internet
Explorer 7 & 8. There may be some differences between these
versions. For specific information, consult your browser's help documentation.
Internet Explorer click-through:
- Click 'Start', or the little round Windows icon at the bottom left of your screen
- Right click the icon for 'Internet Explorer'
- Click 'Internet Properties'
- Click 'Delete'
- Make sure 'Temporary Internet Files' is checked
- Click 'Delete'
- Then click 'Ok' or 'Cancel' (it doesn't matter, the clean up is already done)
Browser Cookies
As for the cookies, well, those usually aren't such a big deal.
If
you are using a computer where security is that serious an issue, you shouldn't
really be surfing on it anyway, right? For the most part, cookies are not only
harmless, they are helpful.
About all cookies are is digital sitcky notes used by websites for your
convenience. Have you ever found it helpful when you set your preferences at a
website, and it remembers? What about how on your favourite sites, it automatically fills
in your email address for you?
Some of this is handled by browser cookies. This is most often the case with
public sites that allow you to set preferences without logging in with a username
and password. Their only way to save your preferences for you is by using a
cookie.
There are very legitimate uses for cookies, though not all cookies are not quite
so innocent. A good anti-spyware program will take care of this for you. Most half way decent anti-virus packages take care of these problems for you.