The objective of this article is to introduce you to a few simple computer maintenance tricks. The first task on any PC maintenance techniques list is to ensure that your computer is free from malware infections and is protected against malicious external intrusions. Two important tools that help you ensure this are antivirus and antispyware tools. You must keep these tools updated with the latest definitions released by their manufactures, turn-on their real-time protection feature, and run regular full system scans to ensure that your system is free from any malicious information. In addition, you may also use an anti-spam tool to prevent the download of junk and virus infected e-mails on the system. Lastly, because a lot of computers are connected to the Internet 24 hours a day through high-speed broadband Internet connections, it is a good idea to implement a reliable firewall to ensure that your computer is protected against malicious and sometimes quite hazardous external intrusions. Next, is the maintenance of the Windows registry. The registry is the database where all configuration information of your Windows computer is stored. Accumulation of junk information in the registry, over time, may unnecessarily harm and fragment its files, resulting in the generation of several computer errors and the deterioration of system performance. To counter registry problems, you may seek the help of a reliable Windows registry cleaner tool. Using this tool, you can perform a thorough and deep registry scan to weed out any unwanted, obsolete, and malicious information within it. You can also use the registry tool to repair several computer errors such as DLL errors, runtime errors, EXE errors, and ActiveX errors. Registry cleaner tools enable you to defrag the registry to reindex and compress its files. This helps in reducing the size of the registry. A small registry is easy to access and helps in speeding up your computer. Lastly, a good registry cleaner tool includes several registry backup and restore features that enable you to make full and selective backups of the registry that can be easily restored, in case an irreparable error occurs in the registry. One important activity that is commonly ignored by computers users is regularly updating their system. To counter security vulnerabilities and to incorporate new features in their products, operating system, software programs and device driver manufacturers release regular security updates and patches. To ensure that your system is up-to-date and at its best performance, it is important that you regularly check for and install these updates on your system. Several manufacturers, such as Microsoft, Symantec, and HP include an automatic update feature in their products. Therefore, you just need to enable this feature to ensure yourself a well-protected, updated, and high performance PC. Your operating system, software programs, and data is stored on the hard disk of your computer. This is the reason why, to have your PC running smoothly, you need to have an uncluttered hard disk with an ample amount of free space. You can achieve this goal easily with the help of Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter tools that are shipped with your Windows XP or Windows Vista computers. Disk Cleanup, as the name suggests, helps you search for and get rid of unnecessary junk information on the hard disk, and Disk Defragmenter helps you consolidate fragmented files on the disk and reduce the load on the head of your hard disk while reading data. This is a guest post written by James Ricketts
