You need to be more careful while using your laptop and avoid carrying your laptop everywhere. Your computer needs monthly maintenance to last longer and protect your personal data. The better you care, the more productive you will be with less downtime caused by computer issues. Here are some maintenance guidelines, you must follow on monthly basis:
Hard Drive Clean Up
Working professionals, students, and home users may easily accumulate a lot of unnecessary files on their laptop’s hard drive. Cleaning up laptop’s hard drive on monthly basis allows you to identify the unnecessary files you no longer need. You can save the important files somewhere else for future reference. Always take the backup of required files on an external hard drive. To make your laptop run faster, uninstall the software you have deleted.
Defragment Your Hard Drive
Now, that your hard drive is clean, it is a good time to run defragment program. This is a maintenance task that ensures your laptop to run as fast as possible. Defragging organizes all files in the drive whether they have been moved, modified or deleted. This puts all the data in an order and optimizes the drive space. A defragged laptop’s RAM leads to faster disk access time and upgrades the laptop efficiency.
We recommend you to perform the defragment process at least once a month. If you defrag your laptop regularly, you will notice that some software crashes or freezes due to which the application runs better. Please note that if you have a Solid State Drive (SSD), defragment is not required.
Keep Your Laptop Clean
Cleaning your laptop at least once a month is necessary to remove junk files, temporary files, old files, and unwanted software. You can use built-in disk cleanup tool to clear out your disk. Apart from this, the top most important things which ought to be cleaned are laptop keyboard, ports, cooling vents, screen, and laptop case. Doing this will remove the dust particles from settling inside the laptop fan and other internal areas that may cause freezing, overheating, eventually slowing down your laptop. Additionally, wipe the laptop screen for a clear vision.
But, before starting the cleaning process, ensure that your laptop is off, battery is removed and power cord is unplugged.
Data Backup
It is important to conduct a complete backup of your data on a monthly basis. You can also do it more frequently maybe once in a week or daily. It completely depends on how important the data is and how often you modify them. Instead of taking the data backup manually, simply schedule the automated backup. Numerous hardware and software choices are available and you can opt a method which is easy and hassle-free. Most importantly, you must have a secure location to store your backup.
Windows 10 has numerous native backup methods consisting of System Restore, Backup and Restore, Recovery Drive Creator, and more. Mac has Time Machine feature to back-up your data. You may also use Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, Data Backup 3, Get Backup Pro, or Crash plan etc.
Software Updates
Similarly, as you keep antivirus and firewall updated to secure your laptop from viruses, malware, ransomware and other online threats. Software upgrade is also necessary to safeguard your data. You can execute the updates whenever they are available. To avoid disruption, we recommend you to install all new updates once a month. An upgrade keeps your laptop secure from unauthorized threats. Additionally, you should keep a check on Windows update that you may have missed.
Apart from these tips, there are few more things you need to know such as avoid killing your laptop battery by keeping it plugged in all the time, bad laptop using posture etc.
Follow these laptop maintenance tips for your laptop devices and if you have any suggestion or tips that we missed. Share them with us in the comment section.