Annual pc maintenance: tricks and steps to follow

The maintenance tasks of our PC are essential to ensure proper operation. Among them we find cleaning and optimization tasks at the software level, as well as cleaning tasks at the physical level of accumulated dust, change of thermal paste and others. In this annual PC maintenance post we will review all the most important points that you must take into account so that your PC remains in perfect condition.

Annual PC maintenance, removes dust and changes thermal paste

Physical cleaning of the computer is the only thing you can do on a regular basis to keep it dust-free, allowing the computer to literally breathe easier and, in turn, prolong the life of the system. The fans, the CPU heatsink and the graphics card are the elements that usually accumulate the most dust, although this also reaches the motherboard, hard drives and the rest of the elements. If we do not take a little care, it is easy for our computer to end up dusty, which affects air flow and cooling, decreasing performance and damaging the health of the components. You don't want your PC to end up like the one in the following image, do you?

Thus, the physical cleaning of dust is the first thing we must do in the annual maintenance of our PC, it would even be highly recommended to do it every few months, if we live in an area with a lot of dust, or we do not have anti-dust filters installed. The best way to eliminate accumulated dust is to use a can of compressed air, since it does not contain humidity and will help us clean even the least accessible areas. For fans and heatsinks, we can use a brush to help us remove as much dust as possible before using compressed air.

If you notice that any fan sounds, check what it is… Also check if any cable collides with any of its blades, and in case it is in bad condition, replace it with a new one.

Once the dust has been cleaned, the next step would be to change the thermal paste of the processor, as it degrades over time and loses its properties. Manufacturers claim that their thermal compounds last several years in perfect condition, but if we disassemble the heatsink to clean it every year, there will be no other option than to put new thermal paste.

Depending on the age of our graphics card, it may also be convenient to change the thermal paste to reduce its operating temperature, if it is three years old or older it will be almost mandatory and certainly highly recommended.

Software also matters, cleans your hard drive and avoids unnecessary programs

The second part of this annual PC maintenance post will be the most extensive and is related to the tasks that we can do at the software level. These actions do not require prior training or knowledge, in fact, many Windows users should already be familiar with many of these steps. In this section, we'll dig into system cleanup, including all annoying startup items, temporary file deletion, and uninstalling old unused apps. From there, we move on to disk maintenance, a task that has become considerably easier in recent versions of Windows, but understanding your options remains important.

One of the best ways to quickly download your PC and free up resources is to disable items that start automatically when Windows starts. These startup items not only suck up system resources, but also cause it to boot more slowly. In the " Task Manager " utility, we can find the " Start " tab. Here we will find a long list of programs that start automatically with Windows slowing down the system, we just have to be careful not to disable useful services, such as Dropbox or others that we need to use.

This section also includes a gauge of the impact each service in question has on the system, according to Microsoft, the impact is based on the amount of CPU and disk usage at startup:

High Impact: Applications that use more than 1 second of CPU time or more than 3 MB of disk I / O at startup Medium Impact: Applications that use 300 ms - 1000 ms of CPU time or 300 KB - 3 MB of E Disk I / O Low Impact: Applications that use less than 300 ms of CPU time and less than 300 KB of disk I / O

A second may seem little, but when a large number of applications accumulates, it can be back in a minute or even more, so it is one of the aspects that we must watch over time.

Microsoft breaks down startup applications and provides guidance on various categories, including utilities that sync your PC or for backup and recovery, updaters, notifiers, and more. It's safe to say that you can disable most, if not all of the startup items and it won't negatively affect your system.

We continue annual PC maintenance with the " Disk Cleanup " utility is a very simple tool that allows you to quickly delete cache and temporary files to free up space on your hard drives. In case we have multiple storage units, it will ask us which one we want to clean. This tool will allow you to move around and see what takes up the most amount of space on the disk, it also offers us a brief description of what you would be deleting, as well as the possibility of seeing the files before deleting them to ensure that we do not delete anything important.

If you have administrator access, you can click on " Clean System Files " to restart the tool in administrator mode. This tool also allows us to remove system restore points, always leaving the most recent so that we do not have problems in case we need to do any restoration. If you have been using the PC for a long time and have never cleaned its restore points, this option can free several tens of gigabytes of space.

Uninstalling applications is another important step in the annual maintenance of the PC. With the passing of the months it is quite normal to accumulate installed programs that we do not use, which reduces the available space on the hard disk, and increases the number of services running, consuming memory and processor resources. In that case, why not just uninstall it?

To uninstall the programs that we do not use we just have to go to the "Programs and Features" section of the control panel, there we will see a long list of everything that we have installed on our PC.

To finish annual PC maintenance, we highlight the disk defragmenter, although this should not be used with SSDs. This tool reorganizes the data on our hard disk so that it is much more contiguous, which reduces the work that the head has to do to read it and improves performance. This operation can take several hours, depending on the size of the hard drive, so it is best to do it when we are not in a hurry.