 Number 207 - August 2000 |
| Your PC Tune-Up Schedule | ||
| by Dick Suetterlin, PC News, Polk Computer UG, August 1999 | ||
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Things to do Every Day
Scan your Disk Quickly. Use Norton Utilities' Disk Doctor, Nuts & Bolts Disk Minder, or Windows' ScanDisk to check for cross-linked files and other problems. For a quicker scan, turn off the surface scan option. Put the program Shortcut in your Startup folder so your disk gets scanned every time you load Windows. Do an Incremental Backup. At the end of the day, back up only those files that have changed since the last backup. In a hurry? Do an incremental backup of only your data folder and its subfolders. Things to do Every Two Weeks Back up your entire hard drive. A recent, full copy of your hard drive's contents is the best insurance you've got against data-loss disaster. Put In a fresh backup tape, close all running applications, and launch your backup program. Start a full backup, turn off the monitor, and leave the system alone, even if it means overnight. Defrag your hard drive. Set your defragging software (Norton Utilities' SpeedDisk, Nuts & Bolts' Disk Tune, or Windows' Disk Defragmenter) to its slowest and most complete setting, get it started, then turn off your monitor and walk away. A long lunch break will probably be enough time. If not, do it overnight. Scan your drive. Use Norton's Disk Doctor, Nuts & Bolts' Disk Tune, or Windows ScanDisk to check the condition of your hard drive. This time, make sure the surface scan option is turned on. Things to do Every Month Test your backup. Backup drives and tapes aren't always dependable. About once a month try to restore a few files from various folders, preferably files that expendable. If you can't restore them, contact the tape drive manufacturer . Update your Virus definitions. Your antivirus program vendor regularly posts updates that help the software s~t the latest in malevolent engineering. Grab the updates off the vendor's Web sIte, or use the program's built-in update tool. |
Things to do When Installing Software
Make room on your hard drive. To find out how much room you have on your drive, double-click My Computer, right-click the drive, and select Properties. You'll want enough space to load the entire program, plus 10 percent of your drive's total space. If you don't have enough space, empty the Recycle Bin, look for files you can delete or archive, and tminstall applications you no longer use. Both Norton Utilities and Nuts & Bolts have tools that can help you determine which files are unworthy of disk space. Backup the registry. Installations programs do all sorts of horrible things to user.dat and system.dat, the two huge and complex Registry files where Windows stores your configurations. You can't back up the Registry with Explorer or with DOS's copy command, but there's a program buried on the Windows 95 CD-ROM that lets you do it. Go to the disk's other\misc\cfgback folder, and copy cfgback.exe to your Windows folder and cfgback.hlp, launch the cfgback.exe program and follow the directions. Take a snapshot of Windows. From a DOS prompt, enter the commands dir c:windows>before.dir and dir c:windows/system>>before.dir: note that the second command uses two greater-than signs (>>). This creates a text file listing all files in those directories--a great help if you decide later to restore your settings. Take another snapshot. This time the DOS commands are dir c:\windows>after.dir and dir c:windows\system>> after.dir. Once you've created the before and after files, use a word processor or Norton Utilities' file comparison program to look at the changes. Tell the new app about your data folder. Find out where your new program saves its data files, and change the default to data (or whatever you call your data folder.) [Thanks to PC WORLD OCTOBER 1999 for the above.] ed.note: Scandisk and Defrag will stop mid-program if the power saving feature is on.
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Number 206 - July 2000
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