You’re Highly Strung Electronic Thoroughbred

Or

Happiness is a serviceable computer

 

How many times has your desktop or laptop PC hiccupped leaving you wondering what is wrong? You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, when for no good reason it either stalls, or pops up a small screen, in totally incomprehensible computer-speak, telling you that to its electronic way of thinking, it has the equivalent of a stomach ache or headache of some kind.

Like all highly strung thoroughbreds (racing horses, yourself, your car/vehicle/automobile), your PC needs a certain amount of TLC. If you ignore the maintenance schedule due to your vehicle by just simply filling its fuel tank and driving it each day, eventually it will give up the ghost and expire on the side of the road. The same goes for your computer, no matter what breed it may be. Here for your edification is my daily maintenance routine for my laptop.

 

Each day I do the following to ensure my laptop is in tip top condition:

1.      I run the Windows Defender programme contained in my Windows 7 OS (other OS’s will have similar devices, you just have to look for them), looking for those pesky ‘malware’ and ‘spyware’ programmes that manage easily to get past my laptop’s own firewall as well as my proprietary antivirus programme’s firewall – (a word to the wise on this subject – always check your emails for viruses before opening).

2.      I then click on the ‘Computer’ heading and ‘right click’ my hard-drive’s icon.

3.      Next I click on the ‘Properties’ heading at the bottom of the drop down.

4.      Next I click on ‘Tools’.

5.      You will be taken to the ‘Check Now’ button in ‘Error Checking’, click on it and you will be taken to ‘Check local disk C’, or similar, depending on your PC’s configuration. Click the ‘Start button’ which automatically schedules a check the next time you start up.

6.      The final thing you need to do is to close down all your programmes and restart your PC. It will then begin the scheduled check on start up, in which it will re-set all of your software, check for and fix errors, before restarting your thoroughbred in tip top condition once more.

If you do all of the above on a daily basis as I do (it only takes a few minutes), it will help to avoid all of those stalls, software conflicts and ‘error’ drop downs that appear. The one thing it will not do however is to stop you from inadvertently downloading all of the mischievous ‘malware’ and ‘spyware’ out there. But at least armed with this knowledge gleaned by me from decades of using personal computers, you are now armed with a few good tips for keeping your thoroughbred content and in good working order…

PS – Set up your proprietary Anti-Virus system to do a daily check of all your software in addition to the above.

—
Jack Eason – author of "Onet's Tale" a science fiction novel, published by IFWG Publishing

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