Computer maintenance doesn’t need to be hard if you use the right types of software. Here are three key types which will save you from hours of hassle and manual computer maintenance.
5 Reasons To Use software For Computer Maintenance
- My main reason for using software to clean my computer is to save TIME. I simply do not have time to perform computer maintenance manually as any time spent on my computer needs to be productive.
- Lack of knowledge is one reason why people use software for computer maintenance and if this is the case then I highly recommend this path. Computer maintenance is easy for someone who has the time and knowledge but for those that are technically challenged it can risk your computers health. One wrong move and you could delete a file that is needed to run your computer.
- Lazy. Some people have the knowledge to perform computer maintenance without the use of software, however since software can do the job without any effort, they will always choose the easier option.
- Software is the way we maintain our computers now. Yep that is true. Young people just roll their eyes when I tell them to maintain their computers manually. Their simple response is “Why would I do that?” When I first started out with computers there was no software to clean up your computer so we had no choice but to it ourselves.
- Too many devices to maintain. In the old days one household was lucky to have a computer in their house, but now people have one computer in each room and possibly a few smaller devices too. There is no time to maintain that many computers.
Computer Maintenance Type #1—-Diagnostic Software
You turn to diagnostic software when there’s something wrong with your computer, but diagnostic software can also help give your computer a regular check up.
For example, one of the best types of preventative computer maintenance you can perform is checking the Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology (SMART) system on your hard drive.
SMART tracks key indicators of wear on your hard drive and can make a rough prediction of how many hours remain until your hard drive will fail. Using computer maintenance software to monitor your SMART data once a month really is smart.
There are other ways to maintain your hard drive as this is the device that is storing all of the important files.
Computer Maintenance Type #2—Identification And Removal
The more you use your computer, the more crud builds up on it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use your computer, but it does mean that you periodically need to go in and remove the crud. There are three ways to do this:
- Reinstall everything by formatting your harddrive. This is enormously effective, but also a pain (especially if you don’t already have a good backup system).
- Try to manually remove the cruft. This can work pretty well also, but only if you’re an expert and know which programs to remove and which directories to clean. I have a long and boring video showing how I perform manual computer maintenance. This video comes with a warning that you might fall asleep.
- Use an automated tool which walks you through the process.
There are two useful types of tools in this category: tools which help you identify and remove unnecessary programs and tools which help you clean out unnecessary files.
Unnecessary programs can start in the background when your computer boots and consume valuable computer resources. Unnecessary files, such as web browser cache files, can slow down programs which need to read through them.
Computer Maintenance Types #3—Backup Software
The most important computer maintenance software in my opinion is backup software. If you have good backups, all of the other types of computer maintenance software are just time savers. But if you don’t have backup software, the other types of maintenance software are essential to protect your computer from crashes and errors—which may happen anyway.
Backup software usually takes some time to setup—between five minutes and one hour—so many people neglect to use it. Windows even has built in backup software to help keep your data safe. But the time it takes to recover your computer from a hard drive crash when you don’t have a backup will use up several hours at least, so backup software saves you time. It also lets you sleep better at night if you store important documents on your computer.
Backup software has an additional benefit—it scans your whole computer for files to backup and so can detect hard drive problems when they’re still minor problems. That’s another reason backup software is one of the best types of computer maintenance software.
