How to Keep Your Computer Running Smoothly

Computers today are used in virtually every aspect of our daily lives. Aside from the obvious business and financial tasks computers are used for, we even turn to them for the latest news, recipes, education, and shopping. Oh and let's not forget how much we rely on them for our own entertainment like music, videos, games and gossip. We even socialize via the internet now too. The more we use our computers, the more information and data is stored on it. And no matter how hard we try, they will all slow down and you'll no longer be able to zip through simple tasks like you once did when your computer was new.

Many people have come to think that maintaining their home computers is far less important than their work computers, when in fact it is actually just as or even more important. Although your work computer may contain much more vital information about the company, employees, and customers, there are restrictions put in place to aid in the prevention of malicious attacks that are not readily available to the regular at home user. Now at home you may have information included on your work computer along with all of your private information, personal photos, and any number of other important documents and files. Everything that is saved on your computer increases the amount your computer slows down.

Here in comes the benefits of backing up your files. If you can bring yourself to store files and documents that are not regularly accessed on a daily basis to an external storage device, you will in fact greatly reduce its lag. Will this eliminate all lag? That is highly unlikely, but it will make quite a noticeable difference.

Then there may be times when your computer slows down suddenly. This may be due to a malicious attack of some sort. Do not think that just because you have the most expensive, updated anti-virus software that you are safe from ever being attacked or acquiring a virus. Unfortunately there are so many new malicious programs that eventually 95% of the users will get one no matter how well they are protected. You should always keep additional anti-virus and spyware protection on an external drive, just in case this ever happens to you.

The best way to keep your computer running smoothly is to keep it clean and free of unnecessary files. You should also need to be aware that even when you don't specifically save files to your computer, websites do and often times deleted programs leave files behind as well. It is important to regularly run a scan to find and delete these unnecessary files. When these files are deleted, they leave small gaps of unused space on your hard drive possibly causing your data to become fragmented. These too can slow down your system. Running your defragmenter, found in your system tools, will compress like files, fill the gaps, free up disc space and increase your speed.

A good adage to compute by is "If you don't need it, delete it." Plain and simple.