General maintenance on winxp systems

[npoon]

i normally do disk cleanup and defrag but what about scandisk? i know that it is a vestige of dos era but is it a good idea to do it for winxp systems? if so, how often should one do it?...once a month?

[squall458]

scandisk is not really necessary anymore IMO. it was back in the day when hard drives had bad sectors and OS were not as stable. for maintenance, defrag and ccleaner is all you need to do. you can also do spyware/antivirus cleaning, registry cleaning and compression, prefetch folder cleaning, and use norton's windoctor.

[goofball]

I use CCleaner to clean the hard drive, then do a defrag. Depending on the usage of your PC, it will dictate how often you do a cleanup/defrag. I don't add many programs, I mainly work with the ones I have now and do a cleanup every 2 weeks, defrag every month.

At some point though, XP just seems like a slug no matter what you do, and a fresh reinstall just brings it back to life. Prepare for this.

[Keas]

i use disk keeper and when i do a boot defrag(once a month or 2) i check the box that makes it do chkdsk. since running xp i have found maybe 5 problems after running it through the years. i think it is worth it since those 5 errors -1 at a time could have brought my windows crashing if i never knew about it and did nothing.

being proactive in maintainance using all the tools available doesnt hurt and can save the day by catching problems early.

also people forget about the inside of the case. every 6 months or atleast every year you should open the case and buy a can of air to blow out the dust. get those fans whirling with the air and all those dust bunnies. i had to help a lady who kept her litter box about 5 feet away from the comp and that thing was so full of litter dust (perfumed litter) that i almost got sick cleaning it. make sure you do this on a patio or outside in dry spot so the dust just doesnt go all over the room and end up back in the comp.

[Gee]

I use CCleaner to clean the hard drive, then do a defrag. Depending on the usage of your PC, it will dictate how often you do a cleanup/defrag. I don't add many programs, I mainly work with the ones I have now and do a cleanup every 2 weeks, defrag every month.

At some point though, XP just seems like a slug no matter what you do, and a fresh reinstall just brings it back to life. Prepare for this.

I do a reformat every 6 months to a year. That is the only real way to do it. I suggest you do a fresh install, load all your applications and then ghost an image of the drive. Then once a year, back up the new data. Restore the ghost image and load data back again.

Then re-image.

[rabbit]

i normally do disk cleanup and defrag but what about scandisk? i know that it is a vestige of dos era but is it a good idea to do it for winxp systems? if so, how often should one do it?...once a month?

I only do it when I get bored and the computer isn't doing anything. Scandisk usually runs automatically after you've crashed.