Out of curiosity, I was wondering what other people did to take care of their machines. Putting it simply, I'm running Win 7 with an intel core i7-2720QM processor and 1 terabyte HDD with 8 gb of RAM. This laptop is big and keeping a big drive running at a great speed is tough, clutter infests and fragments drives and the processor has to work that much harder to pull up information.
In order to compensate, every day I run a system defragment. This is a daily thing and it takes a few passes so I try to have it running when I'm asleep with my girlfriend. (approx. 4am seems like a time I'm never awake at).
I also like to defrag and clean my registry and scan for malware, worms, trojans and viruses. Two programs I like to use for this are Wise Registry Cleaner and Malwarebytes anti-Malware. Since both these operations may ask for me to shut down my computer, the best time for me to do this is when I first get on the computer. Malwarebytes free version isn't a protection suite, so I also installed AVG 2012 free for added protection (however, 2011 is known to destroy windows 7 64bit OS... I found that out the hard way...)
Also daily, I like to do a disk cleanup - removing any junk files from my system, it feels good just to clean these extra bytes out. I also spend time with an aerosol can cleaning out dust and gunk from my fan and my keyboard.
Sort of my final monthly check, I go over to the Start orb and right click my C:/ drive, go into properties, tools, and error check my HDD then back everything up on my external. I know it seems like a lot, but my comp runs near flawlessly and I'm constantly looking for ways to improve performance.
So what do you do?
